Scourge same period we meet with the private use of the "discipline" by such saintly persons as King Louis IX of France and Elisabeth of Hungary. Semi-literal usages such as "the scourge of God" for Attila the Hun (i.e. "God's whip with which to punish the nations") led to metaphoric uses to mean a severe affliction, e.g. "the scourge of drug abuse". The scourge is described as one of the tools used in Wicca, primarily in the Gardnerian Tradition. The purpose of using the scourge is not to cause pain or to torture, but for purification purposes, particularly for Initiates. The
Scourge of the Underworld with a villain resulted in the death of a civilian. When the second Age of Heroes came about decades later, Halloway vowed to eliminate the newer generation of supervillains through any means necessary to protect the people, and therefore established the Scourge organization. The mini-series also confirmed the existence of female Scourge of the Underworld agents, as one of the villain's previous kills (Titania by a Scourge impersonating fellow villain Gold Digger in a women's locker room) had left unanswered questions to whether or not the murder of Titania was done by a female Scourge, since the villain would not