WARNING:This section contains very disturbing images and descriptions, possibly apt to cause nightmares and depression. Please go back now if you aren't feeling really strong. This is not a joke.

The Church seeks to hide this history, but Jesus said:

"For there is nothing hid, except to be made manifest, nor is anything secret, except to come to light." Mark 4:22

A Heretic's Final Journey

During the Spanish Inquisition, accused heretics were imprisoned without hearing the charges against them, and kept in stinking dungeons, dark and vermin infested, alone with their excrement. Moldy bread and stale water helped to supplement the cockroaches and spiders.
"Or again, a prisoner who refused to confess his heresies would be left in solitude and darkness for weeks, months or even years, for time was no object with the Inquisition and it could well afford to wait if by so waiting it saved another erring soul.
If a few weeks or even months did not bring the accused heretic to terms the time might lengthen into years, the years into decades, and the prisoner might remain in his horrible cell though unconvicted. There are many cases where three, five or even ten years elapsed between the first hearing and the final conviction of a prisoner, during all of which time the accused rotted in his dungeon; and even greater periods are reported." 1

Once convicted, the prisoner then faced the real terrors.
"Both the inquisitor and the bishop were to be present. The prisoner was to be shown the instruments of torture and urged to confess. Upon refusing he was to be stripped and bound and again entreated to confess and to be promised mercy if he did. He/she would stand bound and naked in the presence of grim, implacable friars and watch the irons heated, the pulleys of the rack tested, the bearings of the wheel greased in preparation for their use on his own bones and body. 2

Instruments and Methods of Torture

The Oral, Rectal, and Vaginal Pear.
"They are forced into the mouth, rectum or vagina of the victim and there expanded by force of the screw to the maximum aperture of their segments. The inside of the cavity in question is irremediably mutilated, nearly always fatally so. The pointed prongs at the end of the seqments serve better to rip into the throat, the intestines or the cervix."
(This instrument is Venetian, late 1500's, and consists of bronze segments and key, iron screw. Notice the etched face of Satan in the picture on the left.) ³

A common early part of the torture was the 'strappado'- the method used on Savonarola.
"In 1497 Girolamo Savonarola was put to the tratti di fune or strappado, which consisted of tying the prisoner's hands behind his back, hoisting him by the wrists, letting him drop for several feet and stopping him with a jerk before he reached the ground. This proving ineffectual, weights were attached to Savonarola's feet and he was dropped fourteen times." Weeks later, he was tied to a stake and burned alive in the Plaza della Signoria.... 1

"During the regime of the later Inquisition in France, torture became systematized and reduced to a most simplified formula. Only two forms were recognized: ordinary and extraordinary. The former consisted of lashing the victim's wrists to an iron ring in the wall and securing his feet to a second ring in the floor. Then, by hauling on the ropes, the unfortunate wretch could be effectively racked until his joints were dislocated. Extraordinary torture consisted of the 'water cure', thirty pints of water being forcibly administered to the victim. The mode of execution was also fixed. The heretic sentenced to death was lashed to a wooden cross. Then the executioner broke the bones of each leg and each arm in two places by blows with an iron bar and the victim was left to die. As a rule, however, death was too slow to satisfy the public, so the victim was burned." (Executions were often held in public, the better seats commanding higher ticket prices.) 1

On the right is a Dutch engraving of about 1590, one in a series of 53 showing the massacre of the Protestant citizens of Antwerp by Spanish Catholics on November 5, 1576.

Another custom was to take the living, broken body of the victim and 'braid' it to a ladder or wheel. These wheels were perched atop long poles, so the sinners would die high in the air, with hungry crows as their last companions. These were called 'Catherine Wheels', after Saint Catherine of Alexandria, an early Christian martyr presumably from the early 4th century during the rule of the Roman emperor Maxentius (although her historicity has been questioned).

Variations in cruelty know no bounds. Another way of ending the lives of the condemned was to put them in cages and hang them in public places where passersby could observe the slow death of the victim. The image on the left is of a two legged cage that still houses its last occupant, at St. Anselm Castle, in Hungary.

Pressing, or crushing under boards with weights on them (also called the 'turtle'), was another way of dispatching condemned prisoners. In this English woodcut from the late 1500's, we see the added feature of a wooden wedge or 'scale' placed under the victim's back. In the upper part of the picture, another 'criminal' is bound with legs in 'stocks', probably awaiting some more painful fate.

"At times those condemned to death were slowly roasted in a huge metal oven made in the form of a bull. At other times they were lashed to revolving rods or spits and grilled alive over fires, their sizzling bodies being basted with the drippings from their own flesh." 1

il Potro
the Rack

Perhaps the rack is so familiar because it was so commonly employed, variations existing as far back as Egypt and Babylonia. This one is Italian, 1500. 2 It is equipped with spiked rollers on which the stretched victim would lay, feet tied at one end, hands at the other.

Tied to the rack and stretched gradually (or quickly) for days, elongation of bodies was reported by various sources to cases of twelve inches, a result of systematic dislocation of every joint in the body, loud popping sounds mixing with shrieks of agony, futile cries for pity. With the prisoner tied to this horrific device, the inquisitor would then employ a variety of more subtle tortures. Red hot pincers would tear off nipples, tongues, ears, noses, and genitals. Intestines were slowly wound onto pulleys before the dying victim's eyes. Crosses branded into the flesh of the shrieking wretch brought him/her closer to God and his Infinite Mercy.

A garroting chair. Italian, 1500's2 On the left, a close up of the restraint for the victim's neck. On the right, the death of the condemned as the point is slowly driven into the back of the neck.

A Torture Chamber 2

This short look at these abuses is only a drop in the bucket. Since prehistory, skinning alive, starvation, burning, any infliction imaginable has been used. Apologists argue that 'life was harder then, people were used to pain', but their arguments fall flat at the shrieks of unreasoning agony that echo throughout history.
Descriptions of this clarity and extent are rare to find in one place. Pious historians have downplayed the colorful details of this epoch, hoping to sanitize the image of the church. Being by its very nature lurid, examination of the subject is dismissed as being the stuff of sensational sideshows.
Rest assured however, that the gruesome, shabby deaths of the tens of thousands of people who were killed by the Church's Inquisition, and deaths of Catholics at the hands of Lutherans, were no sideshow to the victims.

The scariest part is the fundamentalist mind that could justify such cruelty, for any cause, most ironically, a 'spiritual' one.

Fundamentalist ignorance and superstition reached a peak in the 1600's, instigated by the church, who taught that the Devil was everywhere, and that any undesireable manifestation could be and probably was the result of witchcraft and devils. Hail, wind, lice, sour milk, or a difficult mule could all be blamed on the woman next door. Expressing doubt about the existence of witches was tantamount to being a witch, and anyone voicing opposing opinions was suspect, to be watched, and targeted.

The Christian obsession with the Devil and witchcraft actually fostered and propagated what they tried so hard to repress; and as it was then, it is today.

"In order to justify their behavior, they turn their theories into dogmas, their bylaws into First Principles, their political bosses into Gods and all those who disagree with them into incarnate devils. This idolatrous transformation of the relative into the Absolute and the all too human into the Divine, makes it possible for them to indulge their ugliest passions with a clear conscience and in the certainty that they are working for the Highest Good. And when the current beliefs come, in their turn, to look silly, a new set will be invented, so that the immemorial madness may continue to wear its customary mask of legality, idealism, and true religion."
(Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun, 1952, Harper and Brothers, NY, NY.)

SOURCES FOR THIS PAGE:

1from:"The Inquisition" by A. Hyatt Verrill, D. Appleton and Company, New York, London, 1931), pp. 138-148

2From:"Inquisition- A Bilingual Guide to the exhibition of Torture Instruments presented in various European Cities-by Robert Held- Qua d'Arno, Publisers/Editorial, Florence, Italy, 1985

Some people can't get enough of this stuff. Now there's more, HERE.
and Here:The Gulags, Footbinding, Aztec Sacrifice, and CIA Sponsored Lobotomy

Bloodshed for the Prince of Peace

The Flat Earth

Bible Contradictions

Borgia Popes/ Vatican Orgies/ The Black Plague

The Founding Fathers were NOT Christians.

666

Shortcuts

Isaiah 34:
"6:The sword of the Lord is filled with blood, it is made fat with fatness, and with the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of kidneys of rams: for the Lord hath a sacrifice in Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of Idumea.
"7: And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with the bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness.

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