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This is probably also a part of the explanation, I agree.
There was a prohibition on the clergy shedding blood, hence the use of non-ordained inquisitors to get around this.
Christ's soldier, I'm afraid that i don't quite know the answer to your question although I have been wanting to read that book. I've been concerned that reading it might cause me to become fearful by plating images in my mind. Whats your verdict on the book?
Was burning ever used by EO churches, like the Greek or Russian, or has it always been more of a western "Gallic Christian" tradition ?
They used to burn witches in Russia too, with a bias towards male witches there as opposed to female, if I recall. Never a formal process though. Not aware of Greek ones, but wouldn't be surprised. The Greeks are as much, if not more, the heirs of Rome, as they and Orthodoxy in general, was long influenced by the [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] Eastern Roman Empire. A lot of Roman Law entered mediaeval Western Europe via the code of Justinian, which was the Byzantine standard.
so you are confident that immolation derives from imperial Roman traditions, imputed to the Christian Roman world both east & west, and does not derive from prior (perhaps parallel) western European traditions (cp. Bello Gallico) ?
Quite confidant. The Romans suppressed human sacrifice in the Gaulish peoples, and there is no further report thereof after the 1st century BC. Late Mediaeval and Renaissance witch trials only started much later, and was always a judicial function. There is no clear connection between pagan wicker men and Christian witchtrials.
"Much later" as in around the time of the Protestant Reformation, and Renaissance of pre-Christian pagan motifs ?
Witch trials only really started then yes, for the Mediaeval Church largely thought it a fantasy. It has to do with the breakdown of the spiritual world, the Church rent asunder, that people thought Satan more active.
isn't the whole point of the Renaissance to modern Germanic Asatru & Celtic Burning Man rituals the "resurrection" and revival of pre-Christian paganry ?
Those are modern phenomena, and is more an attempted revival than a renaissance. The Renaissance was a return to classical models, not a repudiation of the Christian world as these more modern ones are. People like Erasmus or Cola di Rienzi or Pius II weren't just aping the ancients - besides, to Renaissance man the Gauls and Teutons were barbarians, not models to emulate. This story of calling them their own 'civilisation' is a modern affair, a child of the Romantic movement of the 19th century. To those of the Renaissance, the barbarians were truly thus, savages, not something of worth; and the fall of Rome the supreme tragedy.
