In 1233, a papal bull (sort of like a Tweet for the Middle Ages) by Gregory IX established a new branch of the inquisition in Toulouse, France, to be led by the Dominicans. It was intended to prosecute Christian groups considered heretical, such as the Cathars and the Waldensians. The Dominicans eventually evolved into the most zealous prosecutors of persons accused of witchcraft in the years leading up to the Reformation.
This led to the Church organizing bands to ferret out those who were practicing heretics, and within a century the Spanish Inquisition is roaming the hillsides, looking for people behaving badly. In the area near Lyon, for instance, the Spanish Inquisition visited a shrine to St. Guniefort, the holy greyhound who was known to cure sick children. The Inquisitors questioned the community who all spoke of the intercessionary powers of the spirit of the dog, who had been mistakenly slain by the lord after protecting the lord's infant son from a snake. The Inquisitors explained how this was heresy, and waved their fingers admonishingly, and said they would be back in a year's time and that they expected improvement, or there would be dire consequences. When they came back a year later, the townspeople all said "of course, no, there is no Saint Guniefort, what a silly idea," and the Inquisitors wrote their report, satisfied that the Holy Church was back in charge of canonization. The Inquisition succeeded when common people acknowledged and followed the Authority of the Church. While the Inquisition is notorious for torture, to the point of being synonymous in modern times, the point of the Inquisition was not to kill those who disagreed, but to induce them to agreement with Authority, to toe the line.
In the fourteenth century, Pope John XXII issued a papal bull (sort of like a Tweet for the Middle Ages) declaring heresy an act and not just an intellectual crime, and in the late fifteenth century, the oft-heralded
Malleus Mallificarum was published, delineating three degrees of criminality of witchcraft--slight, great, and very great--and witchcraft generally came to be seen not just as evil but as demonic.
By the time Martin Luther nailed a bunch of posts to a Church door (sort of like a Tweet Thread) and ushered in the Protestant Reformation (1517), the idea of heresy in the was deeply interwoven with the idea of evil, specifically the demonic practice of witchcraft. It had transformed from a tool of conformity to Papal authority into a tool of neighborly popularity. In the seventeenth century, neighbors condemned each other, and the traveling Star Court would hear the charges. While charges flew widely, the countercharge of slander proved a powerful foil, not only to getting the charge of witchcraft thrown out, but in finding the accuser guilty of harm. Those who could afford an attorney to bring countersuit were summarily successful, while those against whom witchcraft charges proceeded were often tortuered for confession and put to death. The countercharge of slander positions one's identity and one's standing in the community as a material possession which can be damaged. For widows and those of little means, there was no possibility of securing representation, let alone being able to afford a countersuit. Therefore the poor, ederly, and widowed were most likely to face the charges and suffer punishments of the Star Court, up to and including being burned at the stake, a sentence that has come to be synonmous with the witch trials and with neighbors killing those who don't conform or are otherwise unpopular, troublesome, defiant of authority, or outspoken.
One hesitates to think that neighbors believed the accused were, in fact, powerful witches, warlocks, or sorcerers. They were treated in demeaning and physcially rough ways that would have induced a person to marshal whatever power they had to stop the abuse, supernatural or otherwise. It's a bold colonial who would lash a genuine witch to a post and then stand nearby lecturing her if they believed she could command the forces of hell. By contrast, in Ireland, there is no witch craze during the early modern period. No charges of witchcraft were leveled, and no countercharges of slander were filed. It's almost as though those in the area most known for both a genuine belief in magic and with a long history of defiance of authority (both papal and regal) had little use for making either into a crime, let alone making the latter a crime in the guise of the former.
Enter pragmatism.
Pragmatism comes to us from William James, the father of American psychology, and James Dewey, follwing from Pierce's writings. Essentially, the Pragmatist holds that we know a concept by the way people treat it. The common example is that we know a flag is a flag if you run it up a pole and people salute it. Thus, if we were to lash a teatowel to a pole and people saluted it, it seems that the pragmatist would say "it's a flag" and that it became a flag when it was saluted. By extension, it seems to me, that, for a Pragmatist, a person becomes a witch when, once lashed to a pole, people set her on fire. Pragmatism seems to be the philosophy of identity through conformity, and I'm not sure I dig that.
This sort of walking-the-maze backward level of understanding conceptualization and identity unerpins a lot of cultural problems, including the Social Gospel (a person is righteous because they are well off, and the more wealthy they are the more righteousness they possess) and the Protestant Work Ethic (that labor is proof of personal goodness and that personal industriousness is the key to a prosperous life) both of which problematize poverty as evidence of personal moral failure.
