The Burning Times: How Many Witches Actually Died

The number appears on social-media captions, in ritual manuals, in published feminist manifestos, and in the opening paragraphs of more introductory witchcraft books than can be easily counted. Nine million witches burned. Sometimes it arrives with a qualifier — nine million women, or nine million women and healers — but the core figure holds. It is stated, received, and repeated as historical fact.

It is not historical fact. It is not within a factor of one hundred of historical fact.

Modern scholarship, working from trial records assembled across Europe over the past half-century, puts the execution toll of the European witch hunts at somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 people. That is not a rounding error or a matter of interpretation. It is a discrepancy of a factor of 150 to 200. The mechanisms by which the inflated number was invented, laundered through successive publications, and finally embedded in contemporary witchcraft culture are worth tracing in detail — not to minimize the real scale of the persecution, but because practitioners working with historical tradition deserve to work with historical truth.

What the Records Actually Show

The European witch-hunt ran from approximately 1450 to 1750. Over those three centuries, roughly 100,000 people were tried for the crime of witchcraft; approximately half were convicted and executed.

The most widely cited synthesis is Brian Levack’s The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, first published in 1987 and now in its fourth edition (2016). Levack’s initial figure was approximately 60,000 executions. In the third edition he revised this downward to approximately 45,000, accounting for better-sampled regional data and the realization that some early estimates had been insufficiently adjusted for missing records. Ronald Hutton, working from the same base of regional studies, argues for approximately 40,000. William Monter’s regional research converges around 35,000 to 40,000. James Sharpe, reviewing the state of the field, offered the bluntest summary: “The current consensus is that 40,000 people were executed as witches in the period of the witch persecutions, between about 1450 and 1750.”

These are not identical numbers. Historians disagree about how to weight regions with poor archival survival, how to handle cascading confessions obtained under torture, and how to classify executions during mass panics where documentation is fragmentary. The scholarly range — roughly 35,000 to 60,000 — reflects honest disagreement on those methodological questions. No serious scholar of the period places the toll above 100,000, and that upper bound applies to trial numbers, not executions.

None of this makes the persecution small. Forty thousand people executed, in concentrated waves, in specific communities, with cascading effects on everyone who was accused but acquitted, or who watched neighbors denounce one another — that is a genuine catastrophe. The correction is not “it wasn’t bad.” The correction is: here is the number the records support.

Anatomy of a Number — Voigt, 1784

The nine million figure has a precise origin. It was invented by Gottfried Christian Voigt, a German Enlightenment writer, in a 1784 article. The history of the estimate’s transmission was documented by Behringer in 1998.

The context matters: Voigt was criticizing Voltaire’s estimate of “several hundred thousand” as too low, writing to emphasize the importance of education in preventing a return to the witch-craze that had subsided barely a generation before him. His impulse was reforming and rational. His method was catastrophic.

Voigt found records of twenty executions over fifty years in the archives of Quedlinburg, a small German ecclesiastical territory. He extrapolated from the 29-year period 1569 to 1589, estimating roughly 40 executions in that span and from that approximately 133 executions per century for Quedlinburg. He then extrapolated that rate to the entire population of Europe, and from there across an assumed 11 centuries of witch-hunting, arriving at a figure of 9,442,994 total victims.

Every step of this calculation is wrong. Quedlinburg sat in one of the most severely afflicted regions of the entire European hunt — German ecclesiastical principalities were the epicenter, not the average. Witch trials were not uniformly distributed across time: peak persecution fell roughly between 1560 and 1660, not spread over eleven centuries. Systematic witch-hunting as a legal phenomenon did not exist before the mid-fifteenth century. And the extrapolation applies one jurisdiction’s rate to all of Europe as if prosecutions were equally distributed, which regional records flatly contradict — Spain, Italy, and England saw a small fraction of the trials that German-speaking territories saw.

What Voigt produced was a rhetorical number, useful for making a rhetorical point. It did its rhetorical work. The problem is that it then escaped its rhetorical context.

The Transmission Chain

From Voigt’s article, the figure traveled a route now well-documented.

Gustav Roskoff rounded it to nine million in his 1869 Geschichte des Teufels (“History of the Devil”), the form in which it became most portable. Matilda Joslyn Gage, the American suffragist and early feminist theorist, incorporated it into Woman, Church, and the State (1893): “It is computed from historical records that nine millions of persons were put to death for witchcraft. The greater number of this incredible number were women.” Gage gave the number its lasting gendered charge. In her framing, it became not only a toll but an accusation — evidence of an organized assault on women — and feminist organizing found it indispensable.

The figure also entered a darker archive. Nazi propaganda in the 1930s repurposed it: the 1935 pamphlet Der christliche Hexenwahn (“The Christian Witch Craze”) argued that the witch-hunts were a Christian, and therefore ultimately Semitic, attempt to exterminate “Aryan womanhood.” The same number served opposite political masters in the same decade, which says something about the nature of very large, unverified claims.

In the twentieth century’s neopagan revival, the number found its longest home. Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) had already supplied the theoretical scaffolding: she argued that the persecuted were practitioners of an ancient pre-Christian goddess religion, a thesis that has since been comprehensively refuted but that shaped a generation of practitioners. Gerald Gardner, whose writing in the early 1950s founded Wicca, coined the term “the Burning Times” and carried large victim counts as part of the founding mythology. Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance (1979) and Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon (1979) carried the Murray thesis and the large numbers into the generation that built contemporary American Wicca and eclectic paganism. The 1990 National Film Board of Canada documentary The Burning Times brought “nine million” claims to a general audience.

By the time internet witchcraft communities formed in the 1990s and 2000s, the number had long lost its transmission history and become a received fact. It circulates today largely detached from any named source.

Where the Hunts Actually Happened

The regional distribution of witch trials is as important as the total toll, and it demolishes the image of a uniform darkness sweeping across Europe.

The Holy Roman Empire — primarily German-speaking territories — was the epicenter. At least a third of all accused witches in Europe came from these lands. The worst single panics concentrated in German ecclesiastical principalities, Alpine territories, and Scottish lowlands; the Swiss cantons and parts of Lorraine saw significant regional episodes. In the German territories, the fragmentation of political authority into small, competing states meant that there was no central brake on local courts. Secular authorities actively prosecuted witchcraft in these weak states, with no skeptical institutional check comparable to the Roman or Spanish Inquisitions.

Elsewhere, the picture is different. Spain and Italy saw proportionally few executions: the Spanish Inquisition and the Roman Inquisition were, paradoxically, more skeptical of witchcraft accusations than secular courts, and their procedural standards worked as a check. England prosecuted witches under secular law, without judicial torture, which meant that confessions could not compound into the cascading chains of accusation that drove the worst continental panics. Jury trials with the right of the accused to speak were a material restraint. England hanged its convicted witches; it did not burn them at all.

The chronology is specific and concentrated. The majority of executions fall roughly between 1560 and 1660 — a century shaped by confessional warfare following the Reformation, recurring harvest failures associated with the Little Ice Age, economic instability, and epidemic disease. Before 1500 and after 1700, trials are sparse. “Three hundred years of burning” compresses a phenomenon that was itself a series of concentrated local episodes, not a continuous continental campaign.

Method of Execution — Not Only Burning

“Burning times” is accurate for parts of the continental record and misleading as a blanket description.

On the European continent, burning was the standard judicial execution for convicted witches, but the records show that it was commonly preceded by strangulation or hanging, so that the body rather than the living person was burned. This was a legal provision acknowledged in contemporaneous court records as an act of mercy within the law. In England, as noted, hanging was the standard method — burning was the English punishment for heresy, a distinct charge. Levack documents execution by both hanging and burning in his pan-European synthesis, noting that method depended almost entirely on local legal tradition.

The image of masses of women burned alive in public fires is not fictitious — it occurred in specific places during specific panics, particularly in German territories at the height of mass trials. But it is not the universal picture that “Burning Times” implies when the phrase is treated as a description of method rather than a period name.

Who Was Accused

Approximately 75 to 80 percent of those accused across Europe were women. This is the finding of Levack, Behringer, Hutton, and the regional studies they synthesize. It is a significant and real gender asymmetry. But the figure also means that 20 to 25 percent of the accused were men — a population that disappears entirely in “nine million women” framings.

Regional variation is substantial. In Iceland, Finland, Estonia, and Russia, men made up the majority of those accused; in some Finnish trial series, almost all of the accused were male. In Salzburg and Carinthia within the Empire, men accounted for 59 and 68 percent of the accused respectively. The gendering of witch accusations was not a fixed feature of the persecution but a cultural variable that shifted significantly across geography and time.

Where the gender skew does apply, the profile that emerges from multiple regional studies converges on similar characteristics: older women, typically over 40 or 50 by contemporary standards, economically marginal or widowed, with histories of neighborhood conflict. Accusations typically arose not from professional witch-finders dispatched by church or state but from neighbors — a dying cow, a sick child, a spoiled harvest, a longstanding quarrel over land or grazing rights. Behringer documents extensively how local community dynamics drove the machinery of persecution, with women frequently among the accusers as well as the accused.

The Accused Were Not Practicing Pre-Christian Religion

Murray’s thesis — that those persecuted were practitioners of an organized pre-Christian goddess religion, direct ancestors of modern Wicca — has been comprehensively refuted. Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon (1999) is the authoritative account of this demolition in English, tracing both the scholarly collapse of Murray’s argument and the reasons it retained popular authority in neopagan communities long after historians had abandoned it.

The accused were not old-religion witches in any recoverable sense. They were people charged with maleficia — harmful magic against neighbors, livestock, crops, children — and, in the framework that drove the major hunts, with a specifically Christian theological crime: making a pact with the Devil.

The diabolism concept that powered the worst persecutions was a learned elite construction, built and elaborated by theologians and jurists. It required the accused to have attended nocturnal sabbaths, worshipped a figure of the Devil in animal form, formally renounced their baptism, and harmed neighbors through supernatural power. This framework was codified in Krämer’s Malleus Maleficarum (1487), printed some thirty times between its first appearance and 1669, which systematically argued for the reality of the Devil’s pact and established procedures for identifying and prosecuting those who had entered it.

The sabbath, the pact, the night-flight, the malefic ointment — these are theological inventions, elaborated by educated men. When accused persons described them in confessions, those confessions were obtained under torture or extreme legal coercion, shaped by the very questions inquisitors put, which presupposed the framework as true. This is not a reason to disbelieve that real suffering occurred. It is a reason to doubt that confessions describe an actual practice or a continuous religious tradition.

No witch was executed for practicing pre-Christian religion. The charge did not exist. Hutton is unambiguous on this. The attempt to claim the persecuted as martyred ancestors of modern practice requires importing a genealogy that the documentary record does not support.

Why the Myth Persists

There are understandable reasons why the inflated number refuses to die alongside the refuted theories that carried it.

Large numbers carry immediate emotional authority. A toll of 40,000 to 60,000 — real, documented, and sourced in regional trial records — is a serious thing, but it requires historical context, regional qualification, and chronological framing to register properly. Nine million requires no context. It lands, it horrifies, it organizes. For communities built partly around a shared history of persecution, a catastrophic number cements solidarity and moral clarity in ways that a carefully calibrated range cannot easily match.

There is also the structural problem of source access. Levack, Behringer, and Hutton are paywalled, academically dense, or both. The nine million figure is one search away on a hundred sites and asks nothing of the reader. Bad numbers outrun good ones in every knowledge ecosystem; this one is no exception.

And there is the genuine danger of the correction being weaponized. The fact that the scholarly toll is lower than the popular myth does not make the persecution trivial or politically uninstructive. Tens of thousands of documented executions, concentrated in specific communities, producing waves of accusation and counter-accusation that destroyed families, expropriated property, and left permanent marks on local social fabric — that is not a small thing. The correction is not “the church was actually fine” or “feminist grievance is overblown.” The correction is: here is what the records show, which is still serious, and which is not improved by an invented number that makes the whole account easy to dismiss.

Practitioners who invoke the Burning Times as a source of tradition and solidarity are better served by the real history. It is stranger, more variable, and more human than the myth — neighbor against neighbor in small German villages, the Spanish Inquisition serving as an inadvertent check on hysteria, English witches going to the gallows rather than the pyre, an eighteenth-century German bureaucrat extrapolating wildly from a single town’s court records to produce a number that would run through suffragist pamphlets, Nazi ideology, and neopagan founding texts alike. That story is worth knowing. It does not need improvement.

Further Reading

The essential texts are Levack’s The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (4th ed., Routledge, 2016) and Behringer’s Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History (Polity, 2004). Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon (Oxford University Press, 1999) handles the specific question of modern paganism’s constructed relationship to the history it claims. Sharpe’s Instruments of Darkness (Penguin, 1996) provides the English case in detail. Krämer’s Malleus Maleficarum is available in a modern scholarly translation by Christopher Mackay (Cambridge University Press, 2006) for those who want the primary demonological text. Gage’s Woman, Church, and the State (1893) is in the public domain and readable as a primary document in the number’s transmission.

Forthcoming on this site — the Malleus Maleficarum in context; the Murray thesis and its scholarly collapse; the folk magic traditions the trials actually disrupted.