CRS Knowledge Box

The Hammer of Witches: What a Medieval Witch-Hunting Manual Tells Us About Religion, Fear, and Power

In 1486, a German Catholic priest named Heinrich Kramer wrote a book called Malleus Maleficarum, which means "The Hammer of Witches" in Latin. At first glance, it reads like a instruction manual for hunting witches — describing who they are, what they do, and how to catch and punish them. But for anyone studying religion and history, this book reveals something far more important: how powerful institutions use fear to control people.
A Book Born from Anxiety
Kramer did not write this book simply because he believed in witches. He wrote it because the Catholic Church was anxious. In the late 1400s, religious leaders felt their authority was being questioned. Popular beliefs, folk practices, and alternative spiritualities were spreading across Europe. The Malleus was, in many ways, the Church's attempt to draw a hard line between "true" religion and everything it considered dangerous or deviant. It shows us that religious institutions, like all institutions, sometimes respond to uncertainty with fear — and sometimes with violence.
Why Women?
One of the most striking features of the book is its obsession with women. Kramer argued that women were weaker in mind and spirit than men, and therefore more easily seduced by the Devil. This was not just personal opinion — he backed it up with Bible verses and philosophical arguments, making it sound like established truth. The result was devastating. The vast majority of people accused, tortured, and executed as witches across Europe were women. The Malleus did not invent misogyny, but it gave misogyny a theological stamp of approval. It is a powerful reminder that harmful ideas become far more dangerous when religious authority stands behind them.
The Power of the Printed Word
The Malleus appeared at almost exactly the same moment as the printing press. This was no small coincidence in its impact. Within decades, the book had been printed and distributed across Europe, read by judges, priests, and local officials. It shaped how ordinary people thought about evil, gender, and justice for over two hundred years. It is an early and sobering example of how media and religion together can spread ideas — good or harmful — at a scale never seen before.
A Trail of Destruction
The consequences of the Malleus Maleficarum were catastrophic and long-lasting. Between the late 1400s and the early 1700s, an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people were executed across Europe and colonial America in witch trials directly shaped by the ideas in this book. Entire communities were torn apart by accusations, fear, and suspicion. Neighbors turned against neighbors. Families were destroyed. Women who lived alone, practiced herbal medicine, or simply did not conform to social expectations became targets. The book did not cause all of this alone — but it gave witch-hunting a legal framework, a theological justification, and a sense of official authority that made mass persecution possible on a scale the world had rarely seen before.
What It Still Teaches Us
Today, scholars of religion and history study the Malleus Maleficarum not because its ideas are correct, but because it shows how belief systems can be used to justify terrible things. It teaches us to ask difficult questions: Who decides what counts as dangerous? Who gets accused when a society is afraid? Whose voices are silenced in the name of order and tradition?

Tens of thousands of people — most of them women — lost their lives in witch trials influenced by this book. Reading it seriously, and critically, is one way we honor their memory and make sure history does not quietly repeat itself.

Meditation – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Like every cultural product, Buddhist meditation is not a single thing but a protean outcome of the interplay between multiple normative attempts and a host of historical contingencies, occurring within stabilizing psychological, political, and social frameworks. What do we know about the workings of Buddhist meditation, more than two millennia from its proclamation?
One of the earliest canonical descriptions of meditation is the “sāmañña-phala schema” (Gethin, 2004, p. 202), a sequence of four meditative absorptions (jhāna) followed by a “limitless” attainment (āyatana). As a practitioner's manual, this schema is parsimonious. As Gethin puts it: “… if one set off into the forest with only a copy of the Sāmaññaphala Sutta as one’s guide, it is doubtful that one would make very much progress in one’s meditation practice” (2004, p. 202). The “satipaṭṭāhna formula” (Gethin, 2004, p. 203), on the other hand, offers insight into actual practice, focusing on observing the body, feelings, mind, and “mind-objects.” Notably, this observation is unrestricted and includes physiological processes that the Buddha's contemporaries would deem inappropriate objects of meditation, such as defecation (Wynne 2009, p. 72). Systematizations of these accounts arose six to eight centuries later (Gethin 2004, p. 202). Over two millennia, a plethora of their reinterpretations, “recuperated” long-forgotten techniques, and discoveries of “fastest,” more “direct,” and otherwise “improved, adjusted techniques have been produced, to an extent under the impetus of the Western discovery of Buddhism. A depersonalization of the cluster of mental and personal phenomena is an underlying motive, expected to result from the insight into the actual impermanence, “no-I” and unsatisfactoriness of all phenomena, as declared by the “truth of the noble one (the Buddha)” (Norman, 1997, 16). All this is well known.
Given the linguistic, historical, conceptual, and methodological problems associated with the study of meditation, too numerous to list here, the empirical research on meditation may seem a mess. While a working definition of the object of research is more than desirable, “attempts to craft a precise definition of meditation threaten to limit the phenomena artificially and to obscure the subtlest nuances of its practice” (Andresen, 2002, p. 20). For instance, the simple term “mindfulness” (P. sati, S. smṛti), which carries the Western imagination of the Theravada meditation tradition, is conceptualized, predominantly within the modernist tradition, as “bare attention” to phenomena, decoupled from any judgment or emotional attachment. “The awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally,” in the words of Jon Kabat-Zinn, a leading figure behind the mindfulness movement (Booth, 2017). The more “classical” interpretation, however, involves recollection of aspects of the Dhamma and includes memory, metacognition, and discursivity. And indeed, the whole daily regimen, livelihood, dietary and other prescriptions, and cultural backdrop. They all contribute to the embodied experience. Isolating the universally transferable “vipassana” element can serve both Buddhist proselytizing and scientific abstraction, but it comes at a cost (see Thompson, 2020, Chapter Four).
Meditation, in its many forms, including mindfulness, Chi, Gtum mo yoga, Kundalini yoga, Transcendental meditation, and Ch’i Kung practices, has inspired a significant body of scientific research on its effects. Most reports on the positive effects of meditation include reduced anxiety, lower blood pressure, alleviation of chronic pain, and decreased substance abuse. However, there is a dark side to this. Many researchers are also practitioners with their own proselytizing agenda, and they do not report adverse effects and drawbacks of meditation (Andresen, 2000, p. 39). Indeed, Kabat-Zinn admits that no less than “90% of the research [into the positive impacts] is subpar” (Booth, 2017). When you include the academic file-drawer bias toward publishing confirming results, while null results are often “put in a drawer,” you see how easily the picture has been skewed throughout almost a century of scientific study of meditation.
The good news is that the tides are changing, and more balanced reports and methodologically rigorous studies are being produced. One example is the widely publicized findings on the negative aspects of meditation, summarized in Miguel Farias and Catherine Wilkholm's book “The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You?” (2015). For example, in a study of 27 people with different levels of meditation experience, “63 % of them had at least one negative effect and 7 % suffered profoundly adverse effects” (Farias & Wikholm, 2015, p. 145). These included anxiety, panic, depression, increased negativity, pain, feeling spaced out, confusion, and disorientation (Farias & Wikholm, 2015, p. 145; see also The Conversation, 2026). One of the book's revealing points is the researcher’s own realization that these effects are not just responses of specifically disposed individuals or elements already addressed in ancient meditation manuals, but rather diverse effects distributed across the studied population. Some researchers suggest that “Like tranquilizers, it [meditation] may have both good and bad effects – especially, the harmful result of encouraging people to look away from some of their central problems, and to refrain from actually disputing and surrendering their disturbance-creating beliefs. It may also be perniciously used to enhance self-rating or “ego-strength”, so that people end up by believing ‘I am a great meditator and therefore am a good and noble person!’ I therefore recommend meditation… as a palliative, a distraction method, and advise most of my clients to use it with discretion and not to take it too seriously or view it as a generally therapeutic method” (Farias & Wikholm, 2015, pp. 145-146).
It should be clear that the purpose of these short comments wasn’t to claim that meditation is nothing but dangerous, nor to single out a particular meditation practice and label it as harmful or as the only correct one. If they sparked any interest in the topic, I would call them a plea for a less enthusiastic, one-minded, and more serious and responsible approach to the study of, and indeed to the teaching and practice of, meditation.

Andresen, J. (2002). Meditation meets behavioural medicine: the story of experimental research on meditation. In Andresen, J. & Forman, R. K. C. (eds.). Cognitive models and spiritual maps: interdisciplinary explorations of religious experience. Imprint Academic.

‌Booth, R. (2017, October 22). Master of mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn: “People are losing their minds. That is what we need to wake up to.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/oct/22/mindfulness-jon-kabat-zinn-depression-trump-grenfell

‌Farias, M., & Wikholm, C. (2015). The Buddha pill: can meditation actually change you? Watkins.

‌Gethin, R. (2004). On the practice of Buddhist meditation: according to the Pali Nikāyas and exegetical sources. Buddhismus in Geschichte und Gegenwart 9 (2004), pp. 201–21.

‌Norman, K. R. (1997). A philological approach to Buddhism. School Of Oriental And African Studies, University of London.

Thompson, E. (2020). Why I am not a Buddhist. Yale University Press.

The Conversation. (2026, February 23). Meditation And Mindfulness Have a Dark Side We Rarely Talk About. ScienceAlert. https://www.sciencealert.com/meditation-and-mindfulness-have-a-dark-side-we-rarely-talk-about

‌‌Wynne, A. (2009). The Origin of Buddhist meditation. Routledge.