This seems as good a time as any to admit to a possibly controversial personal belief: of those accused of witchcraft over the ages, especially in Europe and its colonies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and put to death, I am certain a dreadful percentage were innocents, but, by the same token, I am equally certain some percentage were guilty of actual witchcraft and trafficking with fiends.
It's actually not much of a controversy to suggest that a significant number of those executed by the Inquisition were in fact practitioners of some sort of esoteric spiritual or magical system regarded as heretical by the Church. I can think of one for sure off the top of my head - Giordano Bruno.
While none of the tests in the "Malleus Maleficarum" actually work to identify magicians and the activities that many of the accused confessed to under torture bear no resemblance to the practices of any real school of magick, some of the accusations themselves were probably rooted in fact. I mean, I'm sure that at least a few people were using the grimoires that were available at that time, which would probably qualify as "trafficking with fiends" in eyes of Inquisitors. As far as the numbers go, if you include the Cathars who were practically wiped out during the Albigensian crusade it could perhaps be the case that half of those executed were "guilty" in the eyes of the Church.
The thing is, though, that what was wrong about the Inquisition was not that it executed people who were falsely accused of practicing magick, but rather that it executed people for exploring alternative spiritual practices - whether or not they had actually done so. Even if every single person who was tried and found guilty by the "witchfinders" had actually practiced some form of magick the whole thing still would have been brutal, barbaric, and inexcusable. The fact that innocent people were persecuted merely adds incompetence to the already extensive list of crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Inquisitors.
Angels and devils are as real as the Risen Christ, and devils live to ensnare mortal souls by enticing them into heresy and sin. So, why not witchcraft?
While I agree that spirits fitting the description of angels and devils exist, the Manichean univalence of Christian theology isn't the best way to classify them. The basic Christian model seems to be that any minion of the Christian God is an angel and all other spiritual entities that exist across the whole universe, even entities from different religious pantheons who otherwise fit the Christian idea of goodness, are devils. That strikes me as kind of silly, in that it assumes a "with us or against us" mindset that is not particularly enlightened.
I'm not talking about magic or somesuch superstitious nonsense, I am talking about the select use of the profane power still present in devils from their time as angels before the Rebellion and War in Heaven.
So would working with a grimoire constitute "superstitious nonsense" even though the author clearly believes that it is possible to summon "devils?" Maybe the author is contrasting magic (stage magic) with magick (the spiritual arts) here, because otherwise it's kind of a confusing sentence.
Old Scratch is real, his legions of devils are real, and I find no reason to believe that there are not sons of Adam and daughters of Eve so debased as to have surrendered themselves in service to the Archfiend's infernal will, to the peril of their immortal souls.
There are demons in world, yes. I've summoned them and I know that they exist. I can say the same for angels. However, if you surrender your will to a demon that's called possession, not magick. The angels and demons that I work with are directed by my will, not the other way around.
I understand that as the author appears to be a conservative Christian he or she probably disagrees with that statement and just about any other that I'm likely to make about the nature of magick. Nonetheless, I would hope it should be obvious that torturing and killing me over those disagreements would be fundamentally wrong, and that it was fundamentally wrong in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well.
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