Listen guys witch hunts were bad but they weren’t a universal phenomenon in the past. Western Europeans and colonists just had a collective freak out for about a hundred years around the 17th and 18th centuries and then they mostly calmed down.
At the time Eastern Europe was also freaking out about vampires. Everybody was just having a rough century.
For most of its history the church’s (general) official stance on witches has been that they’re not real.
There was a hundred years or so there where people died and that was bad. Let me be clear. But it’s not a universal truth of living in a Christian region that somebody is gonna be burned for being a witch.
For one, a lot of people were hanged. Not burned. For two, most of the time people were shrimply not worried about them except for that time when they were.
And in our modern age we must remember the real enemy. McCarthyism.
Also a lot of people were accused and then just...not a lot happened. They were put on a ducking stool, or put in the stockade for a few hours, or driven through town on a cart and mocked (yes, the first half of that Monty Python scene is reasonably accurate. None of those are pleasant, mind you, but they're not death by a long shot. Sometimes the accused would be in court and be like "I pinky swear I didn't know I was doing a witchcraft, I'm sorry" and they'd be told "okay fine but you better go home and pray, like, a lot."
Also the throwing witches into a well thing is just fake. That is not a thing that happened. Most of the torture devices you've seen were invented by the Victorians to make the past seem more barbaric than it was. There was torture, but we're talking about the rack or the ducking stool. Even breaking on the wheel was a form of execution, not torture. (It was a pretty torturous execution, but you wouldn't do it expecting it to not be lethal, is what I mean.) Stuff like the iron maiden and the pear of anguish and chastity belts were all just...made up.
The Spanish Inquisition was, however, real.
It was just looking for suspected secret Jews and Muslims with terrifying murderous fervor, rather than witches as a lot of people seem to think.
Oh yeah the Spanish Inquisition was absolutely real. They even hunted down people with Jewish ancestors who had been Catholic for generations at that point. Horrifying point in history.
