Godless Children!!! (and Mass Alegations of Satanist Child Abuse)

s old women started to be less of a threat, many young children and adolescents started to call themselves witches, which sparked a fascination with children and their fantasies.  I think it is very interesting that two of the major groups that were accused of with craft because they were thought to be harmful were also two of the least physically threatening groups.  I would be more afraid of a large man then a little old lady of a young child, but they had very different fears back then.  Despite the shift is who was considered a threat, both women and children were closely tied to the home and to the nursery, which was, were a lot of witch craft occurred. 

In the case of children though, they were most often the ones claiming to be witches, unlike older accused witches who were accused mostly by others.  Also, often the odd behavior of the children was much more visible than adult witches.  In the case of Regina, she ate her own excrement, which I think anyone from most times would find quite disturbing.  However, if this event ad happened today and children started to claim that they were witches and that they were flying off to magical Sabbaths than most people and parents would just think that they had an over active imagination.  The fact that so many people truly believed these children’s stories shows that these people still lived in an enchanted world. 

I think it is extremely interesting that parents treated children they thought to be witches like a disease.  They thought that one child could infect their other children and that’s why they sent them away.  Although they also might have unloaded them on the authorities because they thought that they were attacking the marriage bed and the parents sexual union, which as Roper has stated on many occasions, was a very sacred and extremely important place.  I can understand parents not knowing what to do with their children, especially if they did not understand what was happening to them, but the corporal punishment that some parents handed out was extreme.  In one case a father ended up cutting off one of his sons fingers and one mother starved her daughter to death.  Even the town Council, who was simply a father figure before this time, because actively involved in punishing these children believing it would help them. 

Roper ends the chapter talking about how these children were released, but it seems odd that these parents and this society that were so ready to have their children in prison would be pushing for them to be let out.  Although this makes more sense when you take into account that the parents thought that their children had been “cured” of their witchcraft.  Although to me it just seems like the children grew up and out of their fantasies, but this is a modern and jaded view. 
The second reading that was done on these godless children was done from a psychiatric and modren view of the topic, which are both good and bad things.  The thing that I found most interesting from this article, was that the children who claimed to have flown to a witches sabbath then testified against other children.  These other children did not even know that they had been to these sabbaths until they were picked out and had their parents threaten and bribe them until they said they had been there.  All of this just shows how much children's imaginatiosn and fantasies played a role in the idea of beleif in these diobolical children.  I also was surprised to read that many people believe that some of these children were actually kidnapped by cannibalistic satanic sects.  They said that the reason they thought this was because no one could come up with these stories from no where.  Although I think this is false.  I used to be able to imagine anything and everything when I was younger so I don't undertand why children several hundred years ago could not do the same.  Especially when they grew up hearing stories of witches and the devil.