Holocaust of Witches: Christianity’s Blood-Soaked War on Women
An Unholy History
History is written in the blood of the conquered—and few chapters are soaked as deeply in it as the era of the witch hunts. Christians call it the Inquisition. Historians often reduce it to a footnote. Apologists minimize it with sanitized death counts and excuses of “the times.” But Witchcraze, Holy Horrors, and The Great Cosmic Mother shatter the illusion: this was not a cultural anomaly. It was a genocide. A sustained, methodical erasure of the feminine, of the earth, of autonomy, and of dissent—by fire, by torture, and by sword.
This wasn’t just religious madness. It was a campaign of domination—a holy war against the old ways, the wise women, the midwives, the herbalists, the mystics. It was the scorched-earth policy of a jealous god determined to remake the world in his image, and his Church—the enforcers.
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The Witch Hunts Were a Gendered Genocide
In Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts, Anne Llewellyn Barstow documents that as many as 100,000 women were officially executed for witchcraft between 1450 and 1750—while acknowledging the true number could be far higher. She estimates that 85% of the accused and executed were women, primarily healers, midwives, and older women who stood outside patriarchal control. Their crime? Embodying independence, wisdom, and sacred knowledge—things the emerging Christian orthodoxy could not tolerate.
🔥DEATH TOLL DATA: Death Tolls of the Inquisition Christians Don't Want You to Know
Barstow lays bare the pattern: torture to extract confessions, trials stacked with impossible odds, and public executions used as spectacle to terrify the rest into submission. These were not random acts of hysteria. These were systematic acts of terror to dismantle a matriarchal heritage that predated Christianity by millennia.
And these killings weren’t confined to Europe. Witch hunts occurred across colonies—North America, Africa, and Latin America—often imported by missionaries and Christian rulers seeking to “cleanse” indigenous beliefs. The Church didn't just murder bodies. It exterminated entire ways of life.
Holy Horrors: The Theology of Butchery
James Haught’s Holy Horrors reinforces this bloody pattern. He chronicles how the Church killed not only witches but also heretics, pagans, Muslims, Jews, and “deviants” of every kind. Saint Pius V ordered the massacre of Waldensians and the slaughter of Protestants. Inquisitors tortured people into confessing to imaginary crimes, then burned them alive. Entire regions lived under fear of denunciation and execution.
One of the most infamous manuals of terror, the Malleus Maleficarum—sanctioned by the Catholic Church—encouraged the use of brutal torture to elicit confessions and painted women as inherently sinful, sexual, and spiritually weak. It legitimized a war against the feminine under the guise of purging evil.
In truth, it was not a war on evil. It was a war on women.
The Biblical Blueprint for Genocide
The blueprint for this atrocity lies in the Bible itself. Jehovah—the god of Abraham—set the tone from the beginning: destroy the unbeliever. Kill the heretic. Slaughter the Canaanites, the Amalekites, the Midianites. Rip open pregnant bellies. Dash infants on rocks. Massacre by divine command.
This genocidal theology seeped into the foundation of Christianity and found its most fervent expression in the Inquisition. But it didn’t stop there. Because in Christian doctrine, the ultimate genocide happens after death.
Those who do not convert—pagans, witches, atheists, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ+ people, freethinkers—will be thrown into eternal torment. Billions of souls, according to orthodoxy, are destined to suffer forever for the crime of being born into the wrong culture, the wrong belief, or the wrong body.
Hell is not just punishment. It’s mass extermination made metaphysical.
Erasure of the Goddess and the Earth
Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor’s The Great Cosmic Mother traces the deeper roots of this horror. They argue that the witch hunts were the culmination of a patriarchal campaign to erase Goddess-centered, Earth-honoring religions that once spanned the globe. These religions revered the womb, the moon, the cycles of nature, and the sacred role of women as life-givers and wisdom keepers.
The rise of Christianity was not just the rise of a new faith—it was a hostile takeover of spiritual sovereignty. The Earth was desacralized. The female body became shameful. Ecstatic rites were demonized. And the women who still carried the memory of the old ways were hunted down and destroyed.
In their place, the Church installed male priests, hierarchies of control, and a sky-god whose only demand was obedience. The fire that once warmed the hearth now consumed the women who lit it.
A Forgotten Holocaust
The Church downplays these atrocities as unfortunate but isolated events. They point to “bad apples,” or blame the secular authorities. But the historical record is clear: the Inquisition was Church-sanctioned. The Crusades were Pope-ordered. The witch hunts were sermon-fueled. The colonization of indigenous lands was blessed in Christ’s name.
Christianity has always thrived not by compassion, but by conquest.
In Europe: Hundreds of thousands tortured, hanged, and burned for witchcraft.
In the Americas: Over 100 million indigenous people killed or displaced in what David Stannard called the American Holocaust.
Globally: Centuries of war, slavery, cultural annihilation, and spiritual terrorism—all with biblical justification.
And if we count the damned souls in hell—according to Church theology—the death toll of Jehovah stretches into the billions.
The Unfinished Reckoning
The death toll of the witches is unknown because it was meant to be unknown. Records were burned. Confessions were coerced. Bodies were buried in shame. It wasn’t just physical death—it was cultural deletion. And the Church has never fully reckoned with its crimes.
We remember the Holocaust, and we should. But we must also remember the forgotten holocausts: the witches, the pagans, the goddesses, the heretics, the medicine women, the lovers of the Earth.
We must speak their names.
Because until we reckon with the blood-soaked legacy of Christianity’s rise to power, we will never understand the world it built—or the liberation that must come to undo it.
—Zzenn
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