The Witch's Cradle

The Turcas

The Oven at Neisse

The oven at Neisse, in Silesia, was a forerunner of the ovens used in Nazi concentration camps. The difference was that in the concentration camps, the victims were killed before they were roasted. In mid-17^th-century Silesia, more than two thousand girls and women were cooked during a nine-year period. This tally includes two babies

The Collar

The torture of the collar was implemented in the Netherlands. The collar was furnished with spikes and was held fast by cords stretching to the four corners of the room.

Psychochemical Torture

The following in excerpted from pp. 208-211 of H. Sidky's Witchcraft, Lycanthropy, Drugs and Disease.

Drugs administered by torturers and exorcists to produce desired states of mind among their victims and patients, respectively, may prove to be more significant than any opiate of narcotic used by alleged witches. In his Cautio Criminalis (1632), Spee wrote that torture technicians who were unable to extract a confession from their victims forced them to drink a potion which produced disorders of the brain, thus leading to bizarre confessions. Similarly, Weyer, in his treatise De Lamiis (1577), pointed out that confessions to impossible crimes were "elicited by administering potions causing drunkenness or mental disturbance." In Rottenburg, Germany, in 1530, authorities obtained confessions from three women suspected of witchcraft, who had resisted 186 applications of the strappado, through the administration of a special potion. A similar concoction was employed for the same purpose in the German town of Esslingen in 1562. Likewise, an accused werewolf from Westphalia, who resisted twenty applications of torture, finally confessed after being forced to imbibe an intoxicating draught. A comparable incident occurred in Denham, England (1585-1586), when an intoxicating potion was used to exorcists to induce their patient into believing that she really was possessed.

European torture technicians, we have already seen, had a wide assortment of tools and techniques at their disposal for extracting confessions, ranging from mechanical devices designed to inflict gross tissue damage, to psychological and physiological techniques, such as solitary confinement and sleep deprivation. Hallucinogenic drugs appear to have been part of this arsenal of weapons at the disposal of the interrogators. Although drugs have not proven to be effective tools for "brainwashing," i.e., radically and permanently altering the personality, drug-induced psychosis can be an extremely unnerving experience, and chemical torture can thus be a formidable tool.

Atropine and scopolamine, for instance, often produce frightening and disagreeable symptoms, and subjects who have experienced such effects rarely use these drugs a second time. This may explain why the witches' ointments were applied topically: injection (introducing a drug into the body through the skin) is often used when it is necessary to maintain low levels of a drug in the blood stream.

A person under the influence of Atropine, according to Schenk, "may easily be subordinated to another's will, for he is completely open to influence and will do whatever he is told. If he has swallowed a great deal of the poison, this state of confusion and sensory derangement leads to a temporary, but acute, mental disorder exactly resembling a symptomatic psychosis. Sudden outbursts of delirium and increasingly intense periods of mania create a terrifying and uncanny clinical picture, which finally ends in convulsions similar to those of epilepsy." Similarly, hyoscyamine, when given even in moderate doses causes, among other symptoms, delirium, near blindness, and unbearable pain. Mixtures containing both these drugs, as well as those containing extracts of mandrake and datura, which would have had similar effects, were administered to suspected witches prior to torture.

Such drugs, used to induce debility, would, by disrupting the perceptual and conceptual processes, confuse and weaken the victim. The result of such psychochemical torture would be a mixture of fantasy, delusional and hallucinatory memories, interspersed with random real ones, precisely the kinds of confession magistrates and torture technicians sought and obtained. Again, according to Lewin: "We find these plants [the Solanaceae species discussed] associated with incomprehensible acts on the part of fanatics, raging with the flames of frenzy and fury and persecuting not only witches and sorcerers but also mankind as a whole. Garbed in the cowl, the judge's robe, and the physician's gown, superstitious folly instituted diabolical proceedings in a trial of the devil and hurled its victims into the flames or drowned them in blood." Given the propaganda value of confessions and cases of demonic possession, it is very likely that hallucinogenic drugs, administered to produce dramatic effects, may have been used more extensively for this objective than here to suspected.

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Information and photographs in this virtual exhibition proceed from the book Torture instruments; a bilingual guide to the exhibition Torture Instruments form the Middle Ages to the Industrial Era presented in various cities in the world in 1983-2000.