The year was 1593. Maria Holl, an innkeeper from the German town of Nordlingen found herself faced with a mad accusation.

“You’re a witch!” she was told, which the poor woman obviously denied. She proved to have an iron will as after 62 rounds of torture, her accusers finally give up and let her off. The scars however, both physical and mental, would stay with her forever.

She was lucky.

A few years earlier, a fellow townswoman, Rebekka Lemp underwent the same ordeal and the terrified woman broke under torture and gave a false confession.

The same woman who had written to her husband about her fear of this happening was then burnt at the stake before her family’s eyes.

The two women were victims of witch hunts that ran rampant through the Western world for much of the early modern period.

These witch hunts were not a coordinated effort by a single party but happened randomly anywhere from time to time.

To most Malaysians, witches are supposedly people who have made ungodly dealings with the supernatural realm and have powers of some form.

To the Europeans of the period, a witch was simply a person who worshipped the Devil instead of God.

This particular definition gained traction in Western European churches before the dawn of the 16th century.

It was cemented in 1485 after the Pope gave a clergyman named Heinrich Kraemer the authority to establish witch-hunting bodies called inquisitions.

His first inquisition in Innsbruck comically fell flat when the local council did not take kindly to his brash accusations against their rich citizens.

Less funny was his subsequent act of writing a book called the “Malleus Maleficarum” (Hammer of Witches) which argued that witches existed, and listed ways to hunt and punish them.

Akin to modern-day misogynists, he said that the Devil found women easier targets to corrupt than men, though men could indeed be sorcerers.

Other wannabe witch-hunters were inspired to write their own books and go about ranting about dangerous witches.

These writings were just as facetious as you might expect; as witch rituals apparently included kissing the Devil’s anus.

Despite the lack of any evidence that witchcraft even exists, belief in it certainly became commonplace.

Witch-hunts followed a common pattern: First, a misfortune like a miscarriage, a bad harvest or a natural disaster takes place in a village or town.

Then, the citizens claim a witch is to blame and start accusing one of their own as responsible for their misfortune.

Quite tellingly, the accused tended to be social outcasts who lacked the means or influence to defend themselves.

It was rare to have fingers pointed at rich, influential people. But for the poor, the elderly, the outsiders and especially single women, it was open season.

Without the financial means or social status to mount a legal defence, these vulnerable members of society stood little chance against the agonising torture that they would be subjected to.

Even children could sometimes be subjected to harsh questioning and even harsher punishments.

The methods which witch-hunters used to prove that the victims were indeed witches were downright idiotic at times, with one famous method being an ordeal by water.

The victim would be thrown into a body of water and if they floated, they were a witch because the “pure” water had rejected them.

And if they sank, they were innocent…but they quite likely stood a good chance to have drowned by then.

While it was the religious authorities who egged on witch hunts, it was the local government that normally handled the judicial process through which supposed witches were subjected to.

As you might have thought, these suspects were thus tortured mercilessly, sometimes for days on end, to admit to a crime they knew nothing about.

For some, however, the pain was too much and they would just cry out anything to stop the torture.

Because of the sheer range of time in which these witch hunts took place, the details differed based on location and time period.

Some towns killed those found guilty of witchcraft by burning them alive, others just charged a small fine.

Some witch-hunts could last years, such as the one that killed Lemp and tortured Holl, while others could last for a few months.

The victim count could range from one to hundreds.

Rather shockingly, the witch-hunters sometimes were not looking for a convenient scapegoat, but rather, they genuinely believed what they were saying about witchcraft and thought they were doing their communities a favour.

Given the support of the state and the church, many lives were ruined and even lost due to misplaced superstition and a misguided sense of justice.

However, even back then, there were people who were horrified by and opposed to the insanity, with lawyers, academicians and scientists rightfully calling out the books on witchcraft as shams.

Forcing victims to confess through torture and the witch-hunts themselves were denounced as acts of cruelty, and the lack of evidence of witch-craft in the first place was particularly damning.

By the Age of Enlightenment, secular governments and stronger legal practices sealed the fate of witch-hunting, in the West, that is.

It is rather unfortunate to note that witch-hunts still take place today in some developing regions in South Asia, Africa, Papua New Guinea and the Middle East.

Superstition still holds strong in some communities and with law enforcement and education lacking, people have lost their lives as result of nonsensical accusations laid against them.

And as it was back then, most of these victims tend to be the more vulnerable members of society and are generally women.

Some things never change, do they?