In the early 1990s, I spent several years working on an (unfinished) doctoral thesis on witch trials in formerly Austrian territories in Germany, France and Switzerland, and published several essays on the subject. Even back then, I was also active as a shaman, straddling both worlds, although I was definitely a beginner at shamanism at the time and was not yet sure whether shamanic journeying – which undoubtedly worked – really led into “real” worlds or just to one's own subconscious.
The reason for writing the text published here (and, strictly speaking, for creating this website) was originally a side note at the beginning of a shamanic ceremony around the end of 2011, about European shamanic knowledge that had been destroyed by the witch hunts ... I could not let this remark go uncommented, much to the amusement of the other participants.

It is definitely not the case that the witch trials were deliberately used to take action against bearers of “ancient knowledge” of any kind. In a few exceptional cases, however, something shines through in the trial records that could be considered a distant echo of earlier shamanic traditions. More on this in in the text.

In any case, this topic has been with me for almost 35 years. There are certainly personal, very deep reasons for this, but let's leave that aside for now. However, in all these years, I have very regularly encountered false knowledge about witches in personal conversations and, today, especially on social media. Assumptions which are simply completely wrong from a historical point of view. It is truly astonishing what consequences a single book can have, namely “The Destruction of Wise Women” by Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger, published in the early 1980s. I still struggle with these consequences today, time and again. A classic scene, back when I was working on my doctoral thesis: small talk, the usual question, “What do you do?” “I'm writing a thesis on witch trials.” “Oh, how fascinating ...” And then, without fail, my conversation partner would mention the keywords: Middle Ages, Church, Inquisition, wise women. Every time, I would take a deep breath and launch into a spontaneous lecture, just like the one I gave on the Surberg at the end of 2011, as described above.

And because in my comments I occasionally refer to a specific case that I found in a file at the State Archives in Karlsruhe, I am now also linking to the lecture I gave on this case in Freiburg around 1994. The story is a prime example of how suspicions among the population could escalate and, above all, that pretty much everyone resorted to witchcraft at that time.

(2012, update Winter 2023)