Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell by Brian Hodge Page A

good an explanation as any. On an entirely different level, the same thing happened during the Crusades when the armies of Western Europe encountered a level of civilization they hadn't expected: 'These Saracens may be infidels, but they're way ahead of us in science and medicine.' "
    Hellboy finished for him: " 'So even though we're here to kill them, let's not let all that go to waste.' "
    "And thus the exchange of ideas and technologies proceeds. There was a time when war was good for promoting that kind of cross-pollination." Burke waved at the grim relics on the walls. "Now, most of the poor unfortunates these things were used on hundreds of years ago truly were innocents. They simply had different beliefs, or had basically the right beliefs but expressed them in the wrong way...or, as it sometimes happened, they did everything right but had the misfortune to run afoul of a neighbor in a secular matter...and the good neighbor decided that Inquisitors were more likely than impartial judges to bring about the preferred outcome. A lot of land got stolen that way."
    But sometimes, according to Burke, in their prosecution of those who deviated from acceptable beliefs, these long-ago defenders of the faith encountered practices that existed on an entirely different plane from folk remedies and other pagan traditions. Trafficking in spirits of the dead and entities that had never been cloaked in flesh at all...these, along with denial of the faith, deserved the most savage punishments of the body and cleansings of the soul. Yet, over time, the lesson was too stark to have been lost on even the most fiercely intolerant men: Here were techniques and methodologies that were working . Perhaps not enough to save the heretics from an agonizing fate at sanctified hands, but working nonetheless.
    The dead could be interrogated, demons forced to reveal their secrets...
    For a certain mindset, the temptations must have been insidiously subtle at first, and ultimately overpowering. After all, what did sorcerers desire that such zealous churchmen did not? Knowledge, power, the carrying out of their will...
    "So they thought they could justify its use on their own terms," Hellboy said. "Adopting the enemy's ways to stamp him out, except in their own hands, it becomes something pure, right?"
    "Right. The ends justify the means. It's not like we have signed confessions and records of their meetings, but from the bits and pieces we've put together, a picture emerges. They'd interrogate the dead for some of the same reasons the Inquisition would interrogate the living...to get them to incriminate other people. Or just reveal things they could use as leverage one way or another. And if they came upon a genuine adept of sorcery, or just an unconventional healer who understood herbs, they might summon demons and turn them loose on the person and his family. Their version of poetic justice, and probably an object lesson to the victim's neighbors on the perils of straying from the true path. They saw themselves as fighting a war against the forces of darkness, and I imagine they regarded what they did as no different than a soldier picking up an enemy's weapon on the battlefield and killing him with it. And God be praised." For a prelate, Burke could do snide awfully well. "Remember, though, we're talking about only a select few, who banded together into their own society that could never have gained sanction by the Church."
    "If they turned into heretics themselves," Hellboy said, "why didn't they ever get stamped out along with the rest?"
    "Two theories, and the reality was probably a combination of both." Burke fumbled in his pockets; seemed to have gone without a cigarette long enough. "One holds that even though the Inquisition had no reservations about going after rank-and-file priests thought to be bewitching nuns and female parishioners, they were less eager to purge their own ranks. Because to do that, they'd have to admit they were