Arguments For
The interesting thing about this timeline is that, when examined in more detail, there is a LOT of detail to go through. Early courts kept records – after all, they had to, if they were going to document who they questioned, what they asked, and the answers that were given. They also had to keep track of what property and possessions were seized, comments of accusers, etc.
When the professional witch hunters of the Inquisition emerged, it was certainly in their best interest to pad the numbers a bit. After all, if you wanted to keep the populace afraid of witches, it’s far more frightening to number the witches in the millions, rather than pointing out one or two non-threatening old women in a remote village.
Why It Doesn't Work
Before trial surveys were made available to scholars, the only way to guess how many witches were killed during the Burning Times was to... well, guess. Estimates were just that – estimates. Since most of the literature available was written by the witch hunters of the Inquisition, the numbers all seemed high. In fact, at one point scholars said that as many as nine million people could have died – which is simply a Really Big Guess.
When trial information was at last made available, historians first looked at all the trials in an area. Then they made allowances for missing records, inaccuracies, and lost court information. Finally, they examined literature from the Inquisitorial records, to see if any major witch-hunt cases took place at the time in that particular area. What they eventually ended up with was a collection of numbers far lower that originally suspected. In fact, modern scholars place the actual Burning Times death toll at between 40,000 and 200,000.
Resolution
Anyone who reads will eventually catch on to the fact that there’s a LOT of misinformation out there about our spiritual path. Some of it is propagated by people who know nothing of us, and others is perpetuated by those who would have us remain in the broom closet. So as we Pagans and Wiccans wear their Never Again the Burning Times t-shirts, we need to be cautious. There’s enough misinformation and falsehood out there – the last thing we need to be doing is promoting this misinformation ourselves.
