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destroy all witches. But how to destroy them? It was not a question of killing one woman but thousands of women. So a special court was created for enquiry, to find out who was a witch.
Any woman said by Christians to have had an influence on people and who people respected was caught and tortured -- so much so, that she had to confess. They wouldn't stop torturing her until she confessed that she was a witch. And according to the Christian mind, to Christian theology, the meaning of witch was changed: a witch is one who is having a sexual relationship with the devil.
You don't hear any more of any devil having a relationship with any woman. Either the devil has become a Christian monk, a celibate, or... what has happened to the devil? Who was it that was having sexual relationships with thousands of women? And these women were mostly old women. It doesn't seem to be rational. When young and beautiful women were available, why should the devil go to the old, the very old women?
But to become a witch, it was a long training, a long discipline, a long experience. So by the time a woman was a witch -- a wise woman -- she was old; she had sacrificed everything to attain that wisdom, that alchemy.
They forced these poor old women into saying that they were having sexual intercourse with the devil. Many of them tried hard... but the torture was too much.
When my back had gone bad, Devaraj and other sannyasins trained in bodywork started traction on me. And I enquired, "What is traction? How was it invented?" They had no idea.
It was invented in the Middle Ages by Christians to torture the witches -- to pull their bodies from both ends and to go on pulling to a point where it became unbearable. Many became unconscious; many died on their traction machine. But, by the way, it was found that many old women who were put into traction had had a back problem; when they got out of it, the back problem had disappeared. So now Christians don't use it, but doctors do. Now it is part of the medical world.
They tortured these women in many ugly ways, just for one thing: they should confess. The women continued to try to say that they
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