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.
On this day..
- 1872: Joseph Garcia, for the Llangibby Massacre - 2019
- 1936: The Seven Martyrs of Madrid - 2018
- 1784: Richard Barrick and John Sullivan - 2017
- 1441: Roger Bolingbroke, "hanged, hedyd, and quartered" - 2016
- 1813: Ezra Hutchinson, teen rapist - 2015
- 1329: Alberghettino II Manfredi, upstart condottiero - 2014
- 1427: Johann Bantzkow, Mayor of Wismar - 2013
- 1646: Twelve at an Evora auto da fe - 2012
- 1961: Four for the assassination of Rafael Trujillo - 2011
- 2009: Danielle Simpson, "If I can't be free - Kill me!!" - 2010
- 1864: Hong Tianguifu, in the Taiping Rebellion - 2009
- 2005: Elias Syriani, a family affair - 2008