About this deal
Francesco Maria Guazzo, aka Guaccio, aka Guaccius (1570 [1]–16??) was an Italian priest. He is most well known for authoring the Compendium Maleficarum. In his famous 1486 treatise on witchcraft, Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer (c. 1430-1505) enlightened his readers on the many ways in which to identify a witch. The Salem story began in 1692 when a few girls, who had become friendly with a slave woman named Tituba, began acting very strangely -- hysterical screaming, falling into convulsions, barking like dogs, etc. Soon other girls began acting in a similar manner and they all must have been possessed by demons. Three woman, including Tituba, were promptly accused of witchcraft. The result was much like the European experience, with a chain-reaction of confessions, denouncements, and more arrests. The creation of the concept of devil-worship, followed by its persecution, allowed the church to more easily subordinate people to authoritarian control and openly denigrate women. Most of what was passed off as witchcraft were simply fictional creations of the church, but some of it was genuine or almost-genuine practices of pagans and Wiccans. This helps demonstrate the level of threat which the Church made out of witches and witchcraft. Witches couldn't be allowed to live no matter what -- not even if they were willing to admit all that they were accused of and fully repent. Their evil was too much of an existential threat to Christian society and they had to be completely excised, not unlike cancer which has to be cut out lest it kill the entire body. There was simply no tolerance or patience for the witches -- they had to be eliminated, whatever the cost.
By pattern: a cluster of moles may form a pattern with a magical meaning. For instance, 3 moles side by side might look like the triple moon symbol for the goddess.One example was that witches couldn’t cry, so Kramer advised interrogators to do what they could to make the accused cry. The inability of the accused to weep in court was thus accepted as evidence of guilt. So too was the inability to recite the Lord’s Prayer.
The brief dual timeline was a nice touch, though. It did not flow well between chapters but it kind of worked for me. Evidently, they were not entirely stingy with their collections -- there is the story of a man who went to a witch to have his lost penis restored: "She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he like out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belonged to a parish priest."The whole premise to the novel felt like deja-vu, and I'm sure I've read a novel with the same plot, but I still liked it nonetheless. While I wasn't much of a fan of the main character, Leo and Gran were amazing. Loved their personas and presence in the novel. The infamous witch trials at Bamberg, Germany, between 1626 and 1632, were so deadly that a special prison was constructed for the purpose of processing the accused.