I look back at the century and see a deep, striking paradox. On one side, early modern witch trials reached a bloody climax. On the other side, modern philosophy began, led by René Descartes’ famous line, Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"), and by Francis Baconian empiricism. In that time, the story of the witch and the rise of modernity ran side by side.
People who read Descartes in the bright morning light could also smell the scent of a burned body nearby or watch the bodies of convicted witches hanging from the gallows. For dark decades, both the witch and the rationalist felt like haunted creatures.
I wonder what these early modern philosophers—the minds that gave us science and thinking—thought about witchcraft, demonology, and the mass killings around them. Their answers show that even the greatest thinkers struggled to balance the religious rules of the time with the new light of reason.
Constructing the Witch: A Historical Conspiracy Theory
To understand the philosophers’ reactions, I must first understand what a witch was in the modern period. The witch craze was not an old story from folklore; it was a legal and religious idea that formed over many years in the late medieval era.
Through books like the Malleus Maleficarum ("The Hammer of Witches") published in 1486 by the strange inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, magic was turned from a sin into a serious heresy. A widespread European conspiracy story emerged: a supposed group in agreement with the devil planning the fall of Christendom through sabbaths, blasphemy, crop destruction, and the breaking of human procreation.
Historically, there was no proof that these witches ever existed. Who were the targets? The statistics are sad: the main factor for being executed as a witch was often being an unmarried old woman, with dementia or other mental illnesses.
While crowds and inquisitors cheered around the bonfires, a few philosophers, jurists and physicians stared at the madness. Dared to speak the truth.
The Early Critics: Occultists, Physicians and Skeptics
Among those who studied the occult, early criticism began to take shape. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, the author of the known Three Books of Occult Philosophy, stood up for a woman accused of witchcraft in Metz in 1519. He did not just defend her rights and expose the corruption of the inquisitor but also challenged the ideas in the Malleus Maleficarum. He said a woman could not be a witch just because her mother was one. That was a claim in a time when fear ruled everything.
Then came Johannes Wier, a physician and student of Agrippa. In his book De praestigiis daemonum, published in 1563, he argued that demons could only trick the mind. They could cause illusions and delusions. They could not change the physical world. This was a shift.
Wier saw accused women in his medical practice. He noticed something. They all had symptoms—delusions, memory problems, false memories, and behaviors that looked like psychosis. He called this condition melancholia. His observations were clear: these women were not in league with the devil. They were suffering from an illness.
His work was ahead of its time; Sigmund Freud later called De praestigiis daemonum one of the ten most important books ever written in human history.
Then in 1584 an Englishman named Reginald Scot published The Discovery of Witchcraft. This book was an attack on the witch hunters. He mocked their reasoning, pointed out their flaws, and showed how poverty and social rejection made women easy targets. He revealed that the accusations were often about power, fear, and the need to blame someone for problems that had no answers.
These early critics did not just question the witch hunts. They gave voice to the voiceless. They looked at the cruelty. Said, "This is not justice. This is not truth." They did it when few others dared.
The Great Philosophers: Blind Spots and Sharp Insights of Rationality
How did the classical 17th‑century philosophers view witchcraft? Their stances ranged from skepticism to pragmatic social control.
We see how they approached witchcraft.
Francis Bacon, widely regarded as the father of the method, said that claims about witchcraft must be proven with clear evidence. If a person said they could fly to a sabbath, that claim needed proof. Yet Bacon did not reject all magic. He studied flying ointments. Joked that he could make his own special mix. In the end, Bacon saw witchcraft as a mistake of thinking that worships gods. He believed that punishment for witchcraft should be imprisonment and shaming, not execution.
Thomas Hobbes, a materialist, denied that spirits, angels, and demons exist. He thought they were confusing thoughts, dreams, or visions. In his book Leviathan, Hobbes made a point: even though witches have no real powers, they must still be punished. This is because witches think they can cause trouble and want to do which breaks the social order. For Hobbes, the power of the state and peace in society were most important.
Baruch Spinoza, a pantheist who said that God and nature are the same, left no space for ghosts, angels, demons, or witchcraft. For Spinoza, the idea of a devil goes against divinity and love. The usual belief that a devil tricks people, who are then punished while the devil escapes, is both morally cruel and logically impossible.
René Descartes stayed silent about witchcraft in his books probably because he was careful after the fate of Galileo. Still, Descartes’ idea that mind and body are separate broke the theory that magic, demonic possession, and witchcraft are real. It turned the persecution of witches into a kind of murder that was built on superstition.
The Detective Who Stopped the Madness
One of the remarkable stories in the battle against the craze happened during the Basque witch trials (1609–1614). A young canon lawyer and inquisitor named Alonso de Salazar Frías was sent to examine the panic.
Instead of using torture, Salazar acted like a real detective. In his reports, he said a surprising conclusion: none of the confessions were true. They came from children’s imagination, from beliefs, and from people confessing in panic to avoid torture and the stake. Salazar never said that the devil or witchcraft did not exist. His calm study of evidence that was collected, kindly not by torture, ended witch hunting by the Spanish Inquisition.
Lessons from the Darkness
Towards the end of the century, the final nails were driven into the coffin of the witch trials. The minister and theologian Balthazar Becker’s big book, The World Bewitched (1695), made the devil just a symbol of evil.
Philosophical and scientific modernity grew at the time of the early modern witch hunts. Most early modern philosophers were skeptics, but it required real moral and intellectual courage to speak out against a terrible injustice that was happening everywhere.
History reminds us that intellectuals and philosophers can still be pulled by a panic. Knowing how the early modern world fell into frenzies is not only a study of the past; it is a strong reminder to keep faith in reason when new moral panics threaten our own time.
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