1. to deny it and be burned at the stake
2. admit it, implicate others and be put to death in a gentler way
I admire the ones who stood for reason and were brave enough to endure the consequences.
To me the risk seems to be when something becomes so popular to hate that nobody is willing to defend the accused. And this is made even worse due to an opposite bias in the other direction. Demonize and call for even more draconian treatment of the accused and you can signal your own incredible virtue. As his execution, Burroughs had turned the crowd to his side with a moving speech, as well as a recital of The Lord's Prayer, which a witch was not supposed to be able to do. But fear not, along came some power seeking pompous posturing poser who offered his own counter-speech, an event recounted in a book he'd release the following year.
And this is a pattern that has repeated endlessly throughout history. All that changes is whatever one needs to label somebody.
I think the people in charge used it to their advantage while harnessing the religious masses to enforce their agenda.
It made me suspect that maybe Burroughs was one of those people who was notorious for being awful and breaking the law, but which could never be proved legally. So when witchcraft fever started going around...there was a way to get rid of him.
The issue of witchcraft is not unchecked beliefs, but the combustible mixture of politics and economics.
Early witches weren't old women performing secret rituals in dense forests. They were the bourgeoisie, who found themselves newly rich during a time of political and economic uncertainty.
The "Malleus Maleficarum" never caught on among the religious elite. Why would they care about the imagined threat of witches when Protestants were out in the open and gaining ground amongst all levels of society?
Where the book did catch on was amongst secular courts. The book provided a convenient justification for condemning political and economic opponents. There it was used to great effect.
That's not to justify the Inquisition, but rather, it isn't as if how we do things now is all that much better.
a lot of countries don't have capital punishment and people are usually assumed innocent until proven guilty rather than the opposite, as it was back then. It seems a lot better to me.
We humans are not currently punishing the wrong answers with death (most of the time). But we have not progressed much beyond that.
3. Ask to see if you weighed the same as a duck