1.3 The Church

When there were enough people blaming and enough momentum through gossiping developed, they went to the authorities. These fitted their complaints into their more sophisticated theory of witchcraft ('Demonic pact') and carried out tests on the accused. In the pricking test one searched with needles for an insensitive spot, the Devil's mark. In the 'swimming test' the suspect was thrown into the water with weights attached to her body. If she kept floating, she had a pact with the Devil. If she sank she was innocent and she would be pulled out of the water, hopefully in time.... In Scotland the confession was generally enough evidence to clinch a conviction. The fact that it was extorted under sleep deprivation and generally included rationally impossible scenarios or that people were known to be mentally ill, was often seen as an irrelevance. Consequence of these moral practices: millions of irritating but innocent, mostly female people have been tried and killed in cruel ways.

Moral authority
By its inherent nature moral authority has the knowledge of what is good and what is bad, wrong or evil. Was it in the past the Church legitimised by God who knows best, nowadays it is the state - legitimised by democracy, dummycraty, tyranny or God -, corporate organisations - legitimised by profits and markets -, and the professional organisations - legitimised by their 'professional experience' -.

It is this moral authority that enables blamers and witch-hunters to frame facts and people into judgements. "She cursed me yesterday and today my sheep died" (True facts) The moral authority 'orders' then to believe that the two facts proves that the cursing person is a witch.

There is a more sinister side to this moral superiority as well. It justifies the application of very cruel things to happen to the accused (burning, drowning, defamation, bombing, collateral damage) for the 'best' of reasons: keeping up the higher, superior moral good, its world order and especially protecting the weak and the vulnerable. Like an American soldier noted after the eradication of a Vietnamese village "We liberated this village for democracy. It is pity though that there is nobody left to vote for it."

The Power aspect 1.
Here we touch an important power aspect. Crucial in a witch-hunt is the power to overpower the suspects. In a witch-craze the power of the mob to select a suspect and to lynch that person. Or in the more official form the power to subject the suspects to a trial, to impose judgements and to carry out the sentences. In the time of the witch-hunts this was concentrated in the hands of the Church, backed up by the state.

In communities were people don't have access to such institutional power - like in Co-Counselling -, they have often still another form of power: trying the suspect and delivering a judgement by absence, and passing sentence by using gossiping to actively destroy somebody's reputation.

The Power aspect 2.
There is another crucial power aspect that needs to be mentioned here. The church or any authority needs people to keep believing their beliefs, otherwise they would lose their authority. That means they will use all the power they have to keep or make people believe their beliefs and values.