1577: Soulmother of Kussnacht
Add comment November 18th, 2007 Headsman
On an uncertain date in November of 1577, a popular medium whose given name is lost to history was burned to death in a lakeside town for claiming to speak with the dead.
The Soulmother of Kussnacht ran a successful enterprise channeling spirits for those who survived them. Though her persecution by a Church ill-disposed to “wise women” seems a given in retrospect, she evidently ran this business openly for well over a decade, and was at least once before brought to the attention of authorities who found her harmless.
Historian Carlo Ginzburg locates Die Seelenmutter within the cosmos of pre-Christian “shamanism” that persisted in Christendom under varying degrees of toleration. In Ginzburg’s Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century, which chronicles the Inquisition’s crackdown on a sect of northern Italian occultists, the contemporaneous execution of the Soulmother is both barometer and precedent for Rome’s rising intolerance of heresy.
Also On This Date
Possibly Related Executions
- 1596: Francisca Nunez de Carvajal, her children, and four other crypto-Jews of her family
- 1706: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, the Kongolese Saint Anthony
- 1546: Anne Askew, the only woman tortured in the Tower
Entry Filed under: 16th Century, Burned, Capital Punishment, Death Penalty, Execution, God, Heresy, History, Known But To God, Public Executions, The Supernatural, Uncertain Dates, Witchcraft, Women
Tags: 1570s, 1577, benandanti, carlo ginzburg, die seelenmutter, gender, inquisition, kussnacht, shaman, soulmother of kussnacht, witch hunt
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