What Research: A Veritable Take-down of Kingdom Come: Deliverance's Claim to Historical Accuracy
Looking past the abysmal UI, poor acting and overly complex game play of Kingdom Come: Deliverance (2018), there are several causes to be alarmed by the supposed ‘historically accurate content.’. One quest in particular caught my attention, if for no other reason than the fact that your main character uses the Lock Picking mechanic to commit psychedelic bestiality. In the quest Playing with the Devil, you hear from a priest that an herbalist in the nearby area is rumored to be a witch. Like any good Medieval Christian, it is your duty to check it out. From the get-go, you exclaim loudly that you detest witchcraft and that all witches should be burned at the stake; yet all of your dealings with the witches are rather blasé, in spite of the odd circumstances surrounding your quests. You speak to the herbalist, who admits then and there to being a witch, who recently sold some hallucinogenic ointment to three women in the town. However, she is worried that she may have done the wrong thing this time and asks the player to stop them. To gather more Intel, you meet with one of the customers, who both admits to buying the drugs to perform witchcraft in the woods, but also says that they are not a witch. The task then is to spy on and follow them. When the women inevitably see you outside their bonfire, they begin touching the player, after administering the ointment to their genitals. This results in the player hallucinating the three women as animals. From there, you are given the option to have your way with whichever animal lady you want, by means of going around the backside of the animal and using your lock-picking skills on them. Afterwards, you are all set upon by visions of terrible (read: dark skinned) individuals who you can either team up with or kill. Either way, by the end of the quest, three people will be dead on the ground and you get berated for the bloodshed by the priest and the woman who sold the ointment in the first place.
This whole scenario was confounding to say the least. For a game that professes to be extensively historically accurate, they did very little research into the development of this plot-line. First of all, this game is set in 1403, and the terminology to refer to magic users would have been someone who practices sorcery, not a “witch”. Moreover, the first inklings that witches were tools of the devil (a part of satanic cults) wouldn’t be propagated until at least 1430 in a manuscript called Invectives Against the Sect of Waldensians by Johannes Tinctor. In it, he describes the satanic cults of Waldensians having orgies, eating babies, and committing bestiality with an animalistic devil. While this is possibly the source used by the game for having the protagonist seeing the women as animals, this is still out of line with the proposed time period.
Tinctor’s manuscript, regardless, did not have the widespread effect necessary to incite a witch panic. It would not be until after the advent of the printing press where the more influential Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer would be disseminated across Europe and declare witchcraft as serious as heresy. The book was published in 1484, over 80 years after the game is set. Prior to these works, witchcraft was treated as a minor level grievance, one where those accused of the practice were often given penance or had to pay fines. In fact, prior to Kramer’s piece, magical arts did not have such a gendered connotation.
Not even Kramer was initially successful in his attempts to bring about witch hysteria. Before writing Malleus Maleficarum, Kramer accused 14 people of witchcraft in Innsbruck, including a woman named Helena Scheuberin. Helena is described as an independent woman unafraid to speak her mind. She discouraged members of the community from attending Kramer’s sermons on witchcraft, spitting on him in the street and on at least one occasion publicly interrupting one of his sermons to say that he was the one consorting with the devil as an evil man. It is during her trial where Kramer found the archetypal witch that he would later condemn in his treatise, for although he was eventually driven out by the local Bishop for being obsessed with Helena’s sexual life, the image of a brash, hyper-sexualized witch persisted.
It was around this time that Pope Innocent VIII released a Papal Bull in 1484 decrying witchcraft. Although the goal of the Bull was to legitimize the inquisition in the eyes of protestants, Kramer printed it in the preface to Malleus Maleficarum to give an air of legitimacy to the work. Despite the Church denouncing the book 3 years later, the damage was done, and witchcraft found legitimacy later in the 16th and 17th centuries where the book sold hundreds of copies throughout Europe.
As for the use of hallucinogens, the only source I could find supporting that they could be mistaken for real magic is in a highly suspect article from 1999 on a site called Straightdope.com. The main source that it gives is from a 1970s book called Flesh of the Gods by Peter Furst, which discusses how some cultures in the “Oriental and Aboriginal New World” use hallucinogens to initiate the same type of psychedelic experiences that Western cultures were going through at the time. All scholarly articles I found on the subject were much more concerned with the politics present at the time which would have looked to stifle the loud or freethinking woman, not a paltry misconception of magic. Yet the game chose to go with the former narrative.
Either way, Kingdom Come takes place much earlier than these later writings and figures. The witchcraft found in the game is simply used as an excuse to further denigrate the status of its female characters. Now they are not just subservient but sexually subservient. They are not only cast as submissive mothers, but also submissive prostitutes. They are not people, but animals. While there are precedents in works like Malleus Maleficarum that cast all women as potential witches, slave to sexual desire and evil works, it is not only historically inaccurate to the time period but also degrading and inaccurate to the thousands of women who were murdered later under the guise of witches. Some were outspoken, some had a proclivity towards sexuality, some were afraid of torture. To cast these women in the light that Kramer wanted is to stand beside him as the pyre is lit and watch them burn.
Works Cited
Adams, Cecil. “What's the Deal with Witches and Broomsticks?” The Straight Dope, The Straight Dope, 3 Sept.
1999, www.straightdope.com/21342492/what-s-the-deal-with-witches-and-broomsticks.
Bailey , Michael D. “The Invention of Satanic Witchcraft by Medieval Authorities Was Initially Met with
Skepticism.” The Conversation, 20 Oct. 2020, theconversation.com/the-invention-of-satanic-witchcraft-by-
medieval-authorities-was-initially-met-with-skepticism-140809.
History.com Editors. “History of Witches.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 12 Sept. 2017,
www.history.com/topics/folklore/history-of-witches.
“Introduction: Contested Categories.” The "Malleus Maleficarum" and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology
and Popular Belief, by HANS PETER BROEDEL, Manchester University Press, 2003, pp. 1–9. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt155jgrj.5. Accessed 15 Feb. 2021.
Hoffman, Whitney, and Stephanie Bortis. Malleus Maleficarum, 1999, www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart
/hist257/stephwhit/final/malleus.html.
Paula Simons, Edmonton Journal. “The Witch-Burner's Mein Kampf: Excerpts of Evil.” Edmontonjournal,
Edmonton Journal, 27 Oct. 2012, edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/the-witch-burners-mein-kampf-
excerpts-of-evil.
Smith, Moira. “The Flying Phallus and the Laughing Inquisitor: Penis Theft in the ‘Malleus Maleficarum.’”
Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 39, no. 1, 2002, pp. 85–117. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3814832.
Accessed 15 Feb. 2021.
“Summis Desiderantes Affectibus.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 31 Dec. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki
/Summis_desiderantes_affectibus..
