What where the causes of witch-hunt?
A witch hunt is a search for witches or evidence of witchcraft, often involving moral panic, mass hysteria and mob lynching, but in historical instances also legally sanctioned and involving official witchcraft trials. The classical period of witchhunts in Europe falls into the Early Modern period or about 1480 to 1700, spanning the upheavals of the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, resulting in tens of thousands of executions. Many cultures throughout the world, both ancient and modern, have reacted to allegations of witchcraft with either superstitious fear and awe, and killed any alleged practitioners of witchcraft outright; or, shunned it as quackery, extortion or fraud. Witch-hunts still occur in the modern era in many communities where religious values condemn the practice of witchcraft and the occult. The term “witch-hunt” is often used to refer to similarly panic-induced searches for perceived wrong-doers other than witches. The best known example is probably the McCarthyi
The root causes of the early modern witch-hunts (Sometimes called the “burning times”) were a break down in civil and religious authority. They were not instigated in the main by religious authorities. Where the church retained authority, places like Spain and Italy, there were very few cases. In central Europe, where the reformation challenged that authority and civil powers got into all sorts of wars, witch hunts were a major problem. They were usually quite local, handled by local civil courts and blatantly unfair trials being used by people to settle scores. Hardly any of the so-called witches, except for a few deranged individuals, actually thought they were witches.
