Real Vampires, Night Stalkers and Creatures from the Darkside. Brad Steiger

      The sons and daughters of Lilith began a monstrous campaign against their human foes that lasted for nearly 800 years. Evil whispers provoked the very Church that preached the message that Christ had performed the final blood sacrifice to launch an Inquisition that shed the blood of thousands of innocent men and women (illustration by Bill Oliver).

      In 1257, the Church officially sanctioned torture as a means of forcing heretics, sorcerers, and shape-shifters to confess their alliance with Satan. The Inquisition became a hideous kind of self-supporting industry. It employed judges, jailers, torturers, exorcists, wood-choppers, and experts to ferret out the evil ones who were threatening the ruling powers.

      “Witch persecutors … were craftsmen with a professional pride,” Kurt Seligmann writes in The History of Magic (1948). “A hangman grew melancholic when a witch resisted him unduly. That was akin to a personal offense. In order to save face he let the accused die under the torture, and thus his honor was not impaired, for the blame for the killing would then rest on the devil….The business became so prosperous that the hangmen’s wives arrayed themselves in silk robes….For every witch burned, the hangman received an honorarium. He was not allowed to follow any other profession, therefore he had to make the best of his craft.”

      The torturers soon discovered a foolproof method for perpetuating their gory profession. Under torture, nearly any heretic could be forced to name a long string of his or her fellow demon worshippers, thereby making one trial give birth to a hundred. Inquisitors boasted that if the judges gave them a sanctimonious bishop, they could soon have him confessing to being a wizard! Cynical clergymen declared that the Holy Inquisition was the only alchemy that really worked, for the inquisitors had found the secret of transmuting human blood into gold.

      In 1305, the Knights Templar, who had for centuries been the defense of Christianity against those who would destroy it, were themselves accused of invoking Satan, consorting with female demons, worshipping large black cats, and conducting human sacrifices. While many clergy, including the Pope himself, were reluctant to believe such charges against the Knights Templar, it soon became apparent that the order had become too wealthy and powerful to fit suitably into the emerging political structure of France and the aspirations of its king, Philip the Fair.

      After years of persecution, many knights scattered and went into hiding throughout Europe and England. Those Templars who insisted upon presenting a defense were finally brought to trial in 1312; and in spite of 573 witnesses for their defense, at least 54 knights were tortured en masse, burned at the stake, and their order disbanded by Pope Clement V.

      In 1313, as he was being burned to death on a scaffold especially erected for the occasion in front of Notre Dame, the Templar’s Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, recanted the confession that was forced from him by torture and reaffirmed his innocence to both the Pope and the King. With his last breath, de Molay invited his two former friends and allies to join him at Heaven’s gate. When both dignitaries died soon after de Molay’s public execution, it seemed to the public and a good number of political and religious figures that the Grand Master had truly been innocent of the charges of heresy and Satanism.

       The Black Death Decimates the European Population but Increases the Number of Witchcraft Trials

      In the fourteenth century, the Christian Establishment of Europe was forced to deal with an onset of social, economic, and religious changes. It was also during this time (1347–1349) that the Black Death, the bubonic plague, decimated the populations of the European nations and greatly encouraged rumors of devil-worshippers who conspired with other heretics, such as Jews and Muslims, to invoke Satan to bring about a pestilence that would destroy Christianity and the West. During most of the Middle Ages, those who practiced the Old Religion and worked with herbs and charms were largely ignored by the Church and the Inquisition. After the scourge of the Black Death, witchcraft trials began to increase steadily throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

      In 1407, men and women suspected of being werewolves were tortured and burned at Basel. The first major witch-hunt occurred in Switzerland in 1427; and in 1428, in Valais, there was a mass burning of 100 witches.

       The Spanish Inquisition Fashions Its Own Rules

      In 1478, at the request of King Ferdinand V and Queen Isabella I, papal permission was granted to establish the Spanish Inquisition and to maintain it separate from the Inquisition that extended its jurisdiction over all the rest of Europe. The Spanish Inquisition was always more interested in persecuting heretics than those suspected of witchcraft. It has been estimated that of the 5,000 men and women accused of being witches, less than one percent were condemned to death. The Spanish Inquisition was concerned with trying the Marranos or conversos, those Jews suspected of insincerely converting to Christianity; the converts from Islam, similarly thought to be insincere in practicing the Christian faith; and, in the 1520s, those individuals who were believed to have converted to Protestantism.