Saturday, October 30, 2004

Witches Pardoned

Scotland is pardoning witches a few hundred years too late.

Salem gets a lot of press but nowhere in what is now the U.S. (even the Southwest which was under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition) were witch hunts as brutal, long, and plentiful as they were in contemporary Europe. Some towns in Scotland would engage in extensive, murderous witch trials while towns a few miles away would ignore the whole issue.

On the other hand, European witch hunts were far more rational and scientific (for their time) than the Satanic daycare panics of the 1980s. Not to mention the West Memphis Three.

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