Witch Hunts: Map Contradicts Spain's Low Execution Rate

Witches: The Country That Didn't Burn Them and the Map That Denies It

Did witches exist? Asked bluntly, this question yields three incompatible answers. They were herbalists. They were victims of collective hysteria with credulous judges. Or there was something darker behind the figure than rural folk medicine. The debate starts with a provocative thesis: if Spain never had a proper witch hunt, perhaps it paid for that leniency with centuries of misunderstood feminism. The hypothesis is tempting. And, like most temptations, it collapses when you look at the numbers.

The Self-Contradictory Map

The most damning data circulating is a regional persecution map. According to it, Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa, and northern Navarre are marked as "high persecution" zones, yet only one execution is documented there. Conversely, divine France appears as a low-persecution area… with 1,663 executions counted. The instrument refutes itself. You don't need to be a statistician to see the scale is inverted.

Some argue the problem isn't the map, but the narrative accompanying it. Searching for "famous witch hunters" returns lists where the second most important hunter in history would be Alonso de Salazar y Frías, the inquisitor who precisely ruled that witches didn't exist and that the Zugarramurdi affair was a hoax. Placing the skeptic on the executioners' podium is a symptom: the Black Legend works in both directions.

Why Did Spain Execute So Few and France So Many?

Short answer: method. The Spanish Inquisition operated with procedural guarantees inherited from Roman law, scholastic logic, and evidentiary requirements. The famous nihil obstat and prior censorship coexisted with a system where the accused could rebut. In Protestant territories, religious authority was the local community, and the local community didn't need files to light a torch.

This doesn't turn the Holy Office into a debating club. It was, above all, an instrument of power. Swap a tip-off for witchcraft for one for suspected crypto-Judaism, and the machinery started with full paraphernalia. The difference is procedural, not sarracena. But procedure kills less.

Witchcraft as the Business of Eternal Youth

The most repeated thesis in contemporary analysis is that historical witchcraft was essentially rudimentary pharmacology: drugs, hallucinogens, ointments used to try the same old thing. Defeat the wall. Eternal youth. Today masses of consumers try with potions and plastic surgery. Witchcraft has been democratized. Welcome to modernity.

That thread leads to an uncomfortable observation: magical thinking has gender. Seers, tarot readers, those buying creams with impossible promises are mostly women. Not due to intellectual incapacity—there are female judicial exam candidates—but because of something else. Cosmetic advertising works like potions did: selling hope for money.

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The Inquisitor Who Invented Modern Analysis

Alonso de Salazar y Frías deserves a separate paragraph. He laid the foundations for modern analysis of collective hysteria before social psychology existed. Julio Caro Baroja, H.C. Lea, Carl Sagan, Thomas Szasz, Marvin Harris, Gustav Henningsen, Menéndez Pelayo, and Joseph Pérez cite him honorably. Eight first-rate authors. And he doesn't even have a street named after him. The paradox is perfect: the man who dismantled the witch hunt is less known than the witches he dismantled.

His method was simple: demand proof against accusations. Do you say this woman flew? Show me the record. A pact? Show me the document. Without proof, no case. That, in the 17th century, was revolutionary. And still is.

What If the Problem Wasn't Witches, But What Came After?

The thesis that Spanish feminism stems from a nonexistent witch hunt is debunked by chronology. Until the 90s, no special degree of hysteria was observed in Spanish women compared to their European neighbors. The phenomenon starts later, with three concurrent factors: accelerated economic development, massive labor market entry, and a legal framework rewarding complaints. Nothing to do with Zugarramurdi.

The fundamental question remains, the one nobody closes: if witchcraft was just superstition, why does the figure persist? Why do some practice rituals today, invoke forces, or seek contact with the unseen? The easy answer is that stupidity is eternal. The difficult one is that there are atavistic antiestéticars that no era of science fully dissolves. And about that, statistics say nothing.