Gay King James: Accessory to the Witch-Burnings

Michael Phillip Wright
Norman, Oklahoma USA
Copyright 2002
All Rights Reserved
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"The more women, the more witches." -- King James I of England

The Catholic priesthood's woman-hating tradition set in motion by the homosexual St. Augustine (354-430 AD), ¹ reached its zenith with the unspeakable horrors inflicted upon women condemned as witches during the Inquisition. During the period lasting from 1450 until 1700, a half million victims were executed and many were burned at the stake. Most of them were women.

Not all participants in the persecution of witches were Catholic. A prominent Protestant responsible for assisting in stirring up the atmosphere of anti-witch hysteria was none other than England's King James I, whose rule lasted from 1603 to 1625, and who is proudly reported to have been homosexual by gay writer Michael Hattersley. ² Hattersley's essay about James was another typically glowing account of a gay historical figure. He writes:

James may well have been the most serious intellectual ever to sit on the English throne. He presided over the magnificent translation of the Bible that bears his name; he wrote important books on everything from tobacco to statecraft; and he preserved the cultural liberalism of the Elizabethan era against a rising tide of Puritanism.

As the homosexual movement strives to increase its power in America, I shudder to think of the consequences if King James' example is the gay idea of "cultural liberalism." Writing for The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, Hattersley also credits James for having written "the authoritative book on witchcraft , which both reflected and contributed to the increasing paranoia and divisiveness of the era." That's all he had to say on the subject of witchcraft. Hattersley neglected to deal with the fact that half a million people, mostly women, were burned at the stake in Europe after being accused of witchcraft, and that these atrocities were under way during James' reign. He overlooked the fact that many were brutally tortured into "confessing" and later burned alive unless they repented at the last minute and claimed to have accepted Christianity.

Hattersley also neglected to inform his readers that in their own communities many of these women were called midwives or "wise women," were healers in the herbal tradition, and supported the sexual freedom of other women by providing birth control and remedies to induce early miscarriage for unwanted pregnancies. He never assessed the degree of responsibility born by the jolly gay king for the horrible atrocities committed against these women. ³ University of Wyoming historian Paul Flesher writes about a group of alleged witches from Lancashire who were captured, tried, and hanged in 1612. "That episode," he says, " resulted directly from the beliefs and the laws enacted by King James." Exposing the purposes of the work which Hattersley called the "authoritative book on witchcraft," he continues:

In 1597, James published a book called Daemonology, in which he described how to find evidence of a person practicing witchcraft, while in 1603, James passed a law that ordered the death of anyone who acted "to consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit, or to utter spells."

It was this law that was first used in the trial of the Pendle witches. The defendants were members of two poor families who had a long history of rivalry. Once one family member was accused, the matter quickly deteriorated in each family accusing the other (and ultimately themselves as well) of casting spells to injure people and goods, using "voodoo" dolls to cause sickness and death, and associating with the devil. Nine people were convicted and hanged as witches at the trial’s end. This trial initiated several decades of witch hunts in England and the deaths of hundreds of "convicted" witches.

Witchcraft researcher Shantell Powell writes that it was James who changed the translation of Exodus 22:18 from "Thou must not suffer a poisoner to live" to "Thou must not suffer a witch to live."

See also Abuse of Boys and Slaves by the Homosexual Patriarchs of Ancient Greece and Rome .

REFERENCES

1. St. Augustine was reported to be homosexual by gay author Paul Russell, English professor at Vassar, in his book The Gay 100, (New York: Citadel,1995).

2. Michael Hattersley, "The Queere Kingship of James I," The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review," Fall 1999, pp. 20-22.

3. I made these criticisms of Hattersley in a letter published in the Winter 2000 issue of the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, (formerly The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review ).

4. Burkhard Bilger, "The Secret Garden," The Sciences, Jan/Feb 1998.