Astral Codex Ten

Inquisition

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Inquisition

Article

Inquisition is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 08, 2024 and August 01, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “from reporting someone to Inquisition”; “the Inquisition interviewed every single person in an Occitan village”. It most often appears alongside Agamemnon, Europe, God.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: August 08, 2024
  • Last seen: August 01, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
August 08, 2024 · Original source
I guess you can say that while there was no "official" slave morality in USSR, the rules were set up in such way to actually encourage it, e.g. by writing a letter to NKVD/KGB about your more talented peer to cut them down. While I agree that this is true to some degree, I think all societies in all times had something like that - from reporting someone to Inquisition, to reporting to him to Un-American Activities, to reporting to HR for harassment, an individual talented at "office games" can always make life of someone more talented at actual work miserable. I guess it was easier in USSR for most of its existence, compared to contemporary Western countries, and it was detrimental to nation, but to call all of USSR "slave culture" because of that is an overreach.
Your Review: Joan of Arc
August 01, 2025 · Original source
The English and their French subordinates, who had been desperately writing letters begging the Burgundians to give them Joan so they could BURN THE WITCH were, as you would expect, absolutely overjoyed.65 No woman could possibly have won Joan's victories, so either she's a saint or a witch, but if Joan was a saint, clearly the English government was in the wrong and any Frenchman working with them is a traitor. Since the English government was clearly in the right and they were not traitors, therefore she was a witch and had to be burned. They got the local inquisition (which they controlled) to set up a trial immediately, known to history as the Trial of Condemnation after its inevitable result.
Inline links: 65
It was going to be a kangaroo court, of course. Now, you might think that inquisitions are just naturally kangaroo courts, but by the standards of the Inquisition, this was a kangaroo court; there were rules in place, and the English intended to follow them only insofar as these rules would not interfere with the result they intended. She was supposed to be judged by the bishop of her diocese; since the bishop of her diocese was pro-Armagnac, that was out, so they had her tried by the bishop of the place where she was taken - only the bishop of the place she was taken wasn't on their side, either, so they misrecorded where she was taken so that she could be tried by the Burgundian bishop of the neighboring diocese, Pierre Cauchon. She was legally allowed a defense attorney,66 which she didn't get; she was spied on during the confessional, two of the judges vanish halfway through and at the Trial of Rehabilitation the witnesses report they were fired for being too sympathetic to the defendant, she was guarded in a military prison by English men-at-arms instead of by churchmen or respectable women, and the list just goes on and on and on. They were supposed to have her tried in her home territory so everyone who knew her could give testimony, but they couldn't do that because it was held by the other side, so they declared that the room she was being tried in was legally speaking part of the diocese in which she was captured and pretended that was good enough. They were supposed to interview everyone in her home province to see if she had a good reputation, but somehow they never recorded their results; twenty years later at the Trial of Rehabilitation a Lorraine merchant recounted that one of his countrymen in Rouen came to him full of bitterness that Cauchon hired him and then refused to pay him because “in the course of his inquiries he had learned nothing about Joan that he would not have liked to hear about his own sister.”
Inline links: 66
Basilica: As part of the Albigensian Crusade, the Inquisition interviewed every single person in an Occitan village about what they believed.