Atheist Memes

My point more that hundreds of years of killing witches starting around the time of the burning of Petronilla in 1324 in a largely catholic europe was not inconsequential. St Thomas' statement on the matter, his Summa, is a deeply misogynistic and profoundly influential work covering all women from Eve onwards in painful detail. Papal Bulls were quite important in western europe in the period after the great schism, prior to the new world conquests and with the smell of burnt Waldensian & Cathar flesh in the air and the unstoppable rise of ancient heresies, and science, in the Arabic script.

Many were burnt as heretics under the banners of the vatican in the 1200's just before the witch thing got underway in the 1300's but I would be wary of largely disregarding hundreds of people being burned alive as witches by a power in control of most of western europe for hundreds of years. The machine was burning witches via papal power long before Luther wrote "On the Jews and Their Lies" that would fuel much more recent burnings at scale in the Germanic traditions.

This gives some context of what I would consider a rather important part of untangling this phenomenon:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/27644923?seq=1

St Thomas was a big cheese, from his wiki: "Thomas has been described as "the most influential thinker of the medieval period"[12]"

The Witch Hammer is made of Aquinas, he's cited hundreds of times to the point it's stupid. It is worth reading to get a feel for things and is perhaps the worst book I've ever read, was the bible for this stuff and still is to some degree. Built on the back of papal bulls and even opens with one so you know it's legit. Pushed by the RCC, written by a Dominican no less. It was viral all over Europe when little Martin Luther was getting a good Catholic education, reading The Witch Hammer and saying it's cool so John Calvin didn't need to fact check stuff, or learn Ge'ez, before making war on women and the mother of god herself instead of cutting down shit popes like St Hildegarde was doing before things got silly.

I'm not sure it's possible to understate the impact of St Thomas, especially in the realms of misogyny, theology, philosophy, power structures, animal abuse & sexuality which isn't really picked apart until Jeffrey Bentham's "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” as no one was reading St Gregory of Nyssa after the big schism.

It's not St Irenaeus of Lyons, it's not Charlemange, it's not Geoffrey of Monmouth, it's not St Hildegarde, it's not Albertus Magus: it's around the time of St Thomas and the scholastics I think.....with room for Alex Jones + ergot parties.