The Hammer of Witches
A best-selling book authorised by the Vatican incited the capture, torture and burning of some 50,000 innocent women. I dedicate this essay to their memory.
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Coming up: Socrates and the first ‘self’; Digiselves versus Bioselves; Theocracy versus Democracy
ONE MORNING, while out for a walk, Helena Scheuberin passed the visiting inquisitor, a Dominican monk called Heinrich Kramer, whose sermons had disgusted her.
She spat at his feet and cried, ‘Fie on you, you bad monk, may the falling evil take you.’
Earlier, Scheuberin had stood during one of Kramer’s sermons and denounced him as a bad man in league with the Devil, who nourished an unholy obsession with witches. She refused to attend his church services and urged others to join her boycott.
We’re in Innsbruck, in 1485. Scheuberin, while married to a wealthy local burger, appears to have squandered her bourgeois respectability o…