Punishment for malevolent magic is addressed in the earliest law codes which were preserved,
in both ancient Egypt and Babylonia. No laws concerning magic survive from Classical Athens.
However, cases concerning the harmful effects of pharmaka – an ambiguous term that might
mean "poison", "medicine", or "magical drug" – do survive, especially those where the drug
caused injury or death. The most detailed account of a trial for witchcraft in Classical Greece is
the story of Theoris of Lemnos, who was executed along with her children some time before
338 BC, supposedly for casting incantations and using harmful drugs. In 451 BC, the Twelve
Tables of Roman law had provisions against evil incantations and spells intended to damage
cereal crops. In 331 BC, 170 women were executed as witches in the context of an epidemic
illness. This was an act without precedent. Persecution of witches continued in the Roman
Empire until the late 4th century AD and abated only after the introduction of Christianity as
the Roman state religion. The Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficiis promulgated by Lucius
Cornelius Sulla in 81 BC became an important source of late medieval and early modern
European law on witchcraft. This law banned the trading and possession of harmful drugs and
poisons, possession of magical books and other occult paraphernalia. Some say that the
philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, murdered by a mob in 415 CE for threatening the
influence of Cyril of Alexandria, may have been, in effect, the first famous "witch" to be
punished by Christian authorities. The general desire of the Catholic Church's clergy to check
fanaticism about witchcraft and necromancy is shown in the decrees condemning people as
witches and condemning to death anyone who burnt a witch. In some prosecutions for
witchcraft, torture (permitted by the Roman civil law) apparently took place. Under
Charlemagne, for example, Christians who practiced witchcraft were enslaved by the Church,
while those who worshiped the Devil (Germanic gods) were killed outright. Although there was
sometimes an overlap between accusations of heresy and of witchcraft, particularly when, in
the 13th century, the newly formed Inquisition was commissioned to deal with the Cathars of
Southern France, whose teachings were charged with including witchcraft and magic. Perhaps
the most notorious witch trial in history was the trial of Joan of Arc. Although the trial was
politically motivated, and the verdict later overturned, the position of Joan as a woman and an
accused witch became significant factors in her execution. Joan's punishment of being burned
alive (victims were usually strangled before burning) was reserved solely for witches and
heretics, the implication being that a burned body could not be resurrected on Judgment Day.
There were trials in the 15th and early 16th centuries, but then the witch scare went into
decline, before becoming a major issue again and peaking in the 17th century; particularly
during the Thirty Years War. To justify the killings, Protestant Christianity and its proxy secular
institutions deemed witchcraft as being associated to wild Satanic ritual parties in which there
was naked dancing and cannibalistic infanticide. The first major persecution in Europe, when
witches were caught, tried, convicted, and burned in the imperial lordship of Wiesensteig in
southwestern Germany, is recorded in 1563 in a pamphlet called "True and Horrifying Deeds of
63 Witches". Hopkins wrote a book on his methods, describing his fortuitous beginnings as a
witch-hunter, the methods used to extract confessions, and the tests he employed to test the
accused: stripping them naked to find the Witches' mark, the "swimming" test, and pricking the
skin. In 1645, forty-six years before the notorious Salem witch trials, Springfield, Massachusetts
experienced America's first accusations of witchcraft when husband and wife Hugh and Mary
Parsons accused each other of witchcraft. In America's first witch trial, Hugh was found
innocent, while Mary was acquitted of witchcraft but she was still sentenced to be hanged as
punishment for the death of her child. She died in prison. The Salem witch trials followed in
1692–1693. In November 2001, years after the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the
trials, the Massachusetts legislature passed an act exonerating all who had been convicted and
naming each of the innocent, with the exception of Elizabeth Johnson, who was cleared by the
Massachusetts Senate on 26 May 2022.
