Burn the Witch: Difference between revisions

[[File:rsz witch-stake 8804.jpg|frame|A [[A Worldwide Punomenon|match]] made in heaven.]]

 

 

{{quote|''"[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v{{=}}VYeqDD96gLg Yeah, but she's our witch. So cut her the hell down.]"''|'''Captain Mal Reynolds''', ''[[Firefly]]''.}}

** [[Troubling Unchildlike Behavior|As a child]], Lady Farnese often took [[Pyromaniac|great joy]] in assisting her town's burning of heretics.

* In ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series|Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series]]'', said word-for-word multiple times by Tristan, who [[Running Gag|remains convinced]] that Duke Devlin is a witch.

** And if a priest gets to burn enough people he/she becomes a saint with [[Stock Super Powers|super powers]]. So the only people in the setting who have anything to do with magic are [[Corrupt Church|the church]].

* Evangeline in ''[[Mahou Sensei Negima]]'' says that despite being a [[Our Vampires Are Different|vampire]], she often had to escape such burnings during the middle ages, occasionally getting caught. She laughs about it as something highly amusing these days (the listeners were understandably horrified).

* Vincent narrowly escapes getting hung for witchcraft in ''[[Bizenghast]]''. Later, we get Maphohetka, who definitely had some kind of supernatural ability, as evidenced by her surviving being stabbed in the chest, and is an antagonist to Dinah. In her defence, Maphohetka may be innocent of whatever she was accussed of (since the exact nature of Bizenghast's misfortune is never revealed) and the townspeople do actually verge on the "evil and bigoted" side (keeping up their witch lynching traditions well into the late 19th-early 20th century).

* [[Dark Magical Girl]] Sally Schumars almost went through this in the ''[[Weiss Kreuz]]'' CD dramas.

* In [[Neil Gaiman]]'s ''[[The Graveyard Book]]'', one of the ghosts Bod befriends was killed as a witch for tormenting the town. They were partly right: she ''was'' a witch, but she hadn't hurt anybody. . . [[Thanatos Gambit|until they killed her, that is.]]

* [[Diana Wynne Jones]] uses this trope in her book ''[[Chrestomanci|Witch Week]]''. The main characters are all afraid of being outed as witches, and one even goes to the lengths of burning himself with a candle to remind himself to be careful not to use magic.

* Agnes Nutter was burned at the stake in ''[[Good Omens]]'' but, in a twist, [[Thanatos Gambit|filled her underwear with as much gunpowder and nails as she could]], [[Taking You with Me|causing an explosion which destroyed the whole village]].

** Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell is asked by the angel Aziraphale if he has ever read [[The Bible]]. The only part Shadwell has read is the above verse.

** That's not quite true—he started to read the next verse, about laying down with beasts, but decided that wasn't in his jurisdiction.

{{quote|'''Oats:''' Well... your colleagues keep telling me the Omnians used to burn witches...

'''Granny:''' They never did.

'''Oats:''' I'm afraid I have to admit that the records show --

'''Granny:''' They never burned witches. Probably they burned some old ladies who spoke up or couldn't run away. I wouldn't look for witches bein' burned. I might look for witches doin' the burning, though. We ain't all nice. }}

** According to other Tiffany Aching books, this also used to happen in some parts of the Chalk. The suspected witch in the barony was just kicked out of her cottage and left to starve. It may bear mentioning was that this incident inspired Tiffany to become a witch herself to make sure nobody dared try that again.

** In some other areas they follow the advice in the ''Maganevatio Obtusis'' (''Witch-hunting for Dumb People'') and drown them ... after supplying them with soup, a good night's sleep, and a cup of tea and a biscuit. The book was written by traveling witch (and strong swimmer) Miss Tick.

** It's also worth noting that when Jenny is "found guilty" of being a witch, Mr Pool says "you can pretend we hanged her" instead of burning. He was with the history teacher after all.

* In ''[[Highlander the Series]]'', Duncan MacLeod escaped being burned. His also-immortal buddy was not so lucky. Apparently, when you can regenerate, being burned continually for hours is enough to drive you [[Ax Crazy]].

* An episode of the first season of ''[[The Dead Zone]]'' television show had Smith going through a small town where a murder with satanic vibes had been committed, since he displays knowledge of the crimes via his powers they think he did the murder, they put him on trial for witchcraft so he can't leave the town while they search for evidence to pin him with, an angry mob ends up carrying him out of the court room to burn him at the stake for the murder because a child and her mother was involved, and another girl was missing.

* There was a whole episode of ''[[Midsomer Murders]]'' about burning witches; at the end Barnaby comments that they never actually burned witches, they just hanged them. Hanged, hanged, hanged.

** Well they didn't do much of that in England in any case. In some countries witches weren't always even killed upon conviction. Some places were worse than others of course.

** Anya, a former vengeance demon who was alive during the actual Salem witch trials, notes that real witches could use their powers to escape. "So, really, it was only bad for the falsely accused - and, well, they never have a good time."

** The same mistake is made in the second or third episode, in a documentary that Piper watches on TV.

** Another episode, "Morality Bites", had the Halliwells traveling forward in time to keep Phoebe from being burned at the stake after they did something that would have led to massive witch hunts in the future.

* On ''[[True Blood]]'', the villainess Antonia is the ghost of a witch burned at the stake during the [[Spanish Inquisition]] thanks to vampires within the Catholic Church.

* When someone starts murdering members of a coven in the ''[[Rizzoli and Isles]]'' episode "Bloodlines", the first victim is burnt at the stake.

 

== Music ==

* The [[Vocaloid]] song "Witch", sung by Megurine Luka and a few other Vocaloids, has this happening to Luka's character.

* [[Creature Feature]] feature has a song called ''Here There Be Witches'' that goes over how to deal with witches. Unsurprisingly, burning is mentioned.

 

== Tabletop Games ==

** Though there's probably still a lot of wastage. Even in the ''comparatively'' [[Lighter and Softer]] ''[[Warhammer Fantasy Battle]]'' one inquisitor's position is: "The question is not how to separate the innocent from the guilty. The question is how many I can burn."

** Another inquisitor offered a nice quick death from his sword (practically considered a wonderful gift in this [[Crapsack World]]) to a host of accused already bound on their pyres if any one of them would confess—unfortunately none did, or even could, as he had drugged every single one beforehand. They burned to death, and the inquisitor just made a passing thought about how he was saving their souls. Bastard.

** All this being said, it ought be noted that in 40k at least, human psykers are in all cases a total liability. Most groups that use psykers, and most psykers, accept they'll eventually get caught out by something on the other side of the reality rip their minds create and have to be put down. The only ones with a chance in the long run, really, are the Space Marine Librarians - and all the worse for it, since they can do incalculable damage on the rare occasions they do fall, become possessed, or get corrupted.

* The ''[[Ravenloft]]'' module ''Servants of Darkness'' gives PCs the opportunity to derail this [[Trope]], proving an accused woman's innocence by exposing the evil fey creature which is truly to blame for the misfortunes plaguing a Tepestani village.

* This is the core concept of the party game ''Werewolf''. There are monsters hiding in the village and killing people at night, but you can't tell them from the innocent villagers by looking at them. What's the solution? Grab a pitchfork or a torch, form a lynch mob, and tie a rope to the old hanging tree.

 

* In ''[[No Rest for The Wicked (webcomic)|No Rest for The Wicked]]'', the villagers [http://www.forthewicked.net/archive/03-05.html blame Clare] for their disappearing children and intend to burn her.

** On the other hand, Perrault [http://www.forthewicked.net/archive/03-63.html reminds] November of this after they found [[Losing Your Head|cutting the witch's head off didn't work]].

** And yet he fails to mention that no witches were actually burned in Salem...

*** This particular omission is likely because that would have required an entire extra panel, especially since most places burned witches—alive or merely as corpse disposal—because they were wary of what might come of burying a witch. (See the Lovecraft example in the Literary section.)

*** Second panel. "Not about witchcraft at all!" That says it quite plainly.

* In ''[[Girl Genius]]'', it is stated that minor Sparks in rural areas were often treated as witches and burned. Then again, considering the fact that a Sparky "witch" could probably make those herbal concoctions work, and that Sparkyness equals insanity, they were probably on the money as often as not.

* In ''[[Our Little Adventure]]'', [http://danielscreations.com/ola/comics/ep0097.html Angelo's Kids do this to their opponents.]

* ''[[Magick Chicks]]'' is about Artemis Academy - quoth Melissa, "Did you know they teach a class in burning witches there? I ''never'' wanted to know my own burning point!" Later she had a vivid [[Imagine Spot]] about consequences of her new schoolmates learning her origin.

 

== Web Original ==

* The hunting and burning of witches is the one of the main themes of the online roleplaying game ''[[The Inquisition Legacy]]''.

 

 

== Real Life ==

* In [[Real Life]] the methods for dealing with suspected witches varied greatly between areas and eras. During [[The High Middle Ages|the Middle Ages proper]] witchcraft wasn't a major crime—malevolent magic was treated essentially as subsection of poisoning, and punished accordingly, death-leading "magic" with death, though not burning one, while lesser offenses could only lead to a fine. Only with [[The Late Middle Ages]] and the publication of the infamous ''[[Malleus Maleficarum|Malleus]] [[wikipedia:Malleus Maleficarum|Maleficarum]]'' did the mass witch hunts begin, and after the Reformation they gained rapid popularity on both sides of the fence, as religious paranoia rose to ridiculous degrees. In England and America witches were usually simply hanged, and sometimes burned ''[[Rasputinian Death|post mortem]]'' to prevent them from coming [[The Undead|back as undead]], but in the continental Europe burning alive was a very popular method of execution for witches and heretics alike—the distinction between the two was often narrow to say the least. The Spanish Inquisition was better than its reputation as far as those accused of witchcraft were concerned—the Grand Inquisitor himself pronouncing the tales of mass "sabbats" unlikely and unsupported by any evidence—and most accused survived with "minor" torture and fairly small official punishment, as the Inquisition was more concerned about Moors (Spain having only regained control of the last Outpost of Granada in 1492 with various rebellions by Muslims in Southern Spain occurring on and off for the next hundred years) than peasant superstitions. Most of the witch-trials were performed by secular courts or minor clergy with little idea how to perform any actual investigation, though in Protestant countries even higher levels of clergy sometimes got themselves involved. Martin Luther was recorded saying something to the effect of: "I would gladly burn them myself". Interestingly enough, getting convicted of witchcraft didn't mean an automatic death sentence. In England and Wales, the vast majority of those accused of witchcraft were pardoned. Apparently people liked a good trial, but couldn't be bothered to actually carry out the sentence. Thank you, [[Stephen Fry]].

* Sadly, the practice continues today in various African countries.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Death Tropes]]

[[Category:Did Not Do the Research]]

[[Category:The Only Righteous Index of Fanatics]]

[[Category:Wizards and Witches]]