Javier Rodrigo |
Pamplona (EFE).- The Spanish Inquisition is often compared to modern social networks due to its tendency towards the public “execution” of those who express heterodox points of view, but the reality is the opposite, since the Holy Office acted precisely against these “unjustified lynchings”, has affirmed the writer Elvira Roca Barea, author of the novel “The witches and the inquisitor”.
Roca, winner of the Primavera 2023 Prize with this work, highlighted in an interview with EFE that reality “has the bad habit of not responding to archetypes” and in cases such as that of the Navarre town of Zugarramurdi in 1609, the reality is that the The Holy Office “acted against those beliefs that led people to accuse their neighbors of terrible things.”
In an interview inside the Zugarramurdi cave, where the witch covens were supposedly held, Roca defended the priest and inquisitor Alonso de Salazar, a lawyer who in this case abided by the law and the evidence and rejected the nonsensical accusations and fraud.
Question – What was your motivation to write a novel about witchcraft?
Answer – This matter I had been with him for a long time. It is that I have very long digestions of the topics. Many years ago I stumbled upon the Zugarramurdi matter, then I stumbled upon the inquisitor, Alonso de Salazar, who seemed to me a great character, and really if I continued with the Zugarramurdi matter it was because of him, more than because of witchcraft.
There was a moment when I really thought that after the publication of (Gustav) Henningsen’s book “The Witch’s Advocate” there wasn’t much to say about him historically, but that hadn’t meant that he was better known or recognized, and I thought that it was worth attempting a novel that would explain the importance of his intervention in the Zugarramurdi case and how much was owed to him in terms of changing the laws, to defuse an episode of collective hysteria that could have been very dangerous.
Q – How can you define Salazar?
R – Alonso Salazar is above all a lawyer and, as such a lawyer, a lover of the law and, therefore, of evidence and reason in the sense that anything that is said in front of him cannot be taken for granted. of a judge. Proof is needed, in that sense he is a skeptic.
Q – Why a skeptic?
R – He is a man who is faced with a situation in which he understands that all that is around him are thousands of words, thousands of testimonies, but he has few facts to hold on to. Nobody can prove the things that he is affirming and so he clings to that thread of reason that is the one that really had to be followed, and the extraordinary thing is that he does not collapse at any time and achieves a change in legislation that in Europe will take almost a century in being general.
Q – Were you ahead of your time?
R – Men like him are always ahead of their time. (…) Finally, the Inquisition followed its criteria, which is also very remarkable, but people like that are always rare everywhere. It’s not that he was rare at that time, it’s that he would have been rare three centuries before or three centuries later.
Q – Salazar remembers Guillermo de Baskerville from “El Nombre de la Rosa”.
R – He is much better than Guillermo de Baskerville because Alonso de Salazar is real.
Q – Is there realism in that film?
A – The film has some major slips, such as an episode of witchcraft at a time when the persecution of witchcraft had not yet begun. This started earlier probably because of the cinema, but it projects a medieval idea of the witch hunt, when it is an episode of modernity.
Q – What really happened in Zugarramurdi?
A – Almost all witchcraft episodes unfold in a repeating pattern. Zugarramurdi or Salem, in Massachusetts (USA), are small communities and they always start with very young people or children, and from there a phenomenon of chain accusations against each other is unleashed and all the neighborhood rancor, the quarrels between relatives.
Q – Are social networks the modern Inquisition?
A – No, in this case the Inquisition really acted against that, it acted against those unjustified lynchings, it acted against those beliefs that led people to accuse their neighbors of terrible things or to lynch. It is that there were several lynchings in the surrounding towns of people who were accused by their neighbors and at a certain moment their neighbors took the law into their own hands.
Q – Do you know that you are going against the current of existing stereotypes about the Inquisition?
R – I know, but what are we going to do… It is that reality has a bad habit of not responding to archetypes and in this case it is like that. There is no other choice. Contrary to popular belief, innovation is very hard. Most people prefer to go after archetypes because it’s the well-trodden path, and innovators generally have a hard time.