#explains most aspects of biology/ sexology/ medicine & weather in terms of demonic

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

The Witches

To deal with the increasing tide of witchcraft and in conformity with the Pope ’s orders, Inquisitors Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer collaborated on the Malleus Maleficarum. [From Wikipedia] This document is the best known and the most important treatise on witchcraft. It endorses extermination of witches and for this purpose develops a detailed legal and theological theory. The Malleus elevates sorcery to the criminal status of heresy and prescribes inquisitorial practices for secular courts in order to extirpate witches. The recommended procedures include torture to effectively obtain confessions and the death penalty as the only sure remedy against the evils of witchcraft. At that time, it was typical to burn heretics alive at the stake and the Malleus encouraged the same treatment of witches. […] 

The Malleus also describes the ritual and content of witchcraft per se, though in the tradition of paternalism indigenous to the Church, Sprenger and Kramer are careful not to give formulae for charms or other dangerous information. […] They document how witches injure cattle, cause hailstorms and tempests, illnesses in people and animals, bewitch men, change themselves into animals, change animals into people, commit acts of cannibalism and murder. The main concern of the Malleus is with natural events, nature, the real dynamic world which refused to conform to Catholic doctrine — the Malleus, with tragic wrong-headedness, explains most aspects of biology, sexology, medicine, and weather in terms of the demonic. Before we approach the place of women in this most Christian piece of Western history, the importance of the Malleus itself must be understood. In the Dark Ages, few people read and books were hard to come by. Yet the Malleus was printed in numerous editions. It was found in every courtroom. It had been read by every judge, each of whom would know it chapter and verse. It was a bestseller, second only to the Bible in terms of sales for almost 200 years. It was theology, it was law. To disregard it, to challenge its authority was to commit heresy, a capital crime.

Although statistical information on the witchcraft persecutions is very incomplete, there are judicial records extant for particular towns and areas which are accurate:

In almost every province of Germany the persecution raged with increasing intensity. Six hundred were said to have been burned by a single bishop in Bamberg, where the special witch jail was kept fully packed. Nine hundred were destroyed in a single year in the bishopric of Wurzburg, and in Nuremberg and other great cities there were one or two hundred burnings a year. So there were in France and in Switzerland. A thousand people were put to death in one year in the district of Como. Remigius, one of the Inquisitors, who was author of Daemonolatvia, and a judge at Nancy boasted of having personally caused the burning of nine hundred persons in the course of fifteen years. Delrio says that five hundred were executed in Geneva in three terrified months in 1515. The Inquisition at Toulouse destroyed four hundred persons in a single execution, and there were fifty at Douai in a single year. In Paris, executions were continuous. In the Pyrenees, a wolf country, the popular form was that of the loup-garou, and De L’Ancre at Labout burned two hundred.

It is estimated that at least 1, 000 were executed in England, and the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish were even fiercer in their purges. It is hard to arrive at a figure for the whole of the Continent and the British Isles, but the most responsible estimate would seem to be 9 million. It may well, some authorities contend, have been more. Nine million seems almost moderate when one realizes that The Blessed Reichhelm of Schongan at the end of the 13th century computed the number of the Devil-driven to be 1,758,064,176. A conservative, Jean Weir, physician to the Duke of Cleves, estimated the number to be only 7,409,127. The ratio of women to men executed has been variously estimated at 20 to 1 and 100 to 1. Witchcraft was a woman’s crime.

Men were, not surprisingly, most often the bewitched. Subject to women’s evil designs, they were terrified victims. Those men who were convicted of witchcraft were often family of convicted women witches, or were in positions of civil power, or had political ambitions which conflicted with those of the Church, a monarch, or a local dignitary. Men were protected from becoming witches not only by virtue of superior intellect and faith, but because Jesus Christ, phallic divinity, died “to preserve the male sex from so great a crime: since He was willing to be born and to die for us, therefore He has granted to men this privilege.” Christ died literally for men and left women to fend with the Devil themselves. Without the personal intercession of Christ, women remained what they had always been in Judeo-Christian culture:

Now the wickedness of women is spoken of in Ecclesiasticus xxv: There is no head above the head of a serpent: and there is no wrath above the wrath of a woman. I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon than to keep house with a wicked woman. And among much which in that place precedes and follows about a wicked woman, he concludes: All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman. Wherefore S. John Chrysostom says on the text. It is not good to marry (S.Matthew  xix): What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a  natural temptation,  a desirable calamity,  a  domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colours!… Cicero in his second book of The Rhetorics says:  The many lusts of men lead them into one sin, but the one lust of women leads them into all sins;  for the root of all woman ’s vices is avarice… When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.  

Other characteristics of women made them amenable to sin and to partnership with Satan:

And the first is, that they are more credulous… The second reason is, that women are naturally more impressionable,  and more ready to receive the influence of a disembodied spirit… The third reason is that they have slippery tongues, and are unable to conceal from their fellow-women those things which by evil arts they know; and since they are weak, they find an easy and secret manner of vindicating themselves  by  witchcraft… because in these times this perfidy is more often found in women than in men, as we learn by actual experience, if anyone is curious as to the reason, we may add to what has already been said the following: that since they are feebler both in mind and body, it is not surprising that they should come more under the spell of witchcraft. For as regards intellect, or the understanding of spiritual things, they seem to be of a different nature from men; a fact which is vouched for by the logic of the authorities,  backed by various examples from the Scriptures. Terence says: Women are intellectually like children.

Women are by nature instruments of Satan — they are by nature carnal, a structural defect rooted in the original creation:

But the natural reason is that she is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations.  And it should be noted that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman,  since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives… And all this is indicated by the etymology of the word;  for  Femina comes from Feand Minus, since she is ever weaker to hold and preserve the  Faith.  And this as regards faith is of her very nature… This is so even among holy women, so what must it be among others?

In addition, “Women also have weak memories,” “woman will follow her own impulse even to her own destruction,” “nearly all the kingdoms of the world have been overthrown by women,” “the world now suffers through the malice of women,” “a woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep,” “she is a liar by nature,” “her gait, posture, and habit… is vanity of vanities.” Women are most vividly described as being “more bitter than death”

And I have found a woman more bitter than death, who is the hunter’s snare, and her heart is a  net, and her hands are bands.  He that pleaseth God shall escape from her; but he that is a sinner shall be caught by her. More bitter than death, that is, than the devil… More bitter than death, again, because that is natural and destroys only the body, but the sin which arose from woman destroys the soul by depriving it of grace and delivers the body up to the punishment for sin. More bitter than death, again, because bodily death is an open and terrible enemy, but woman is a wheedling and secret enemy.

and  also:

And that she is more perilous than a snare does not speak of the snare of hunters, but of devils. For men are caught not only through their carnal desires, when they see and hear women:  for S.Bernard says: Their face is a burning wind,  and their voice the hissing of serpents… And when it is said that her heart is a net, it speaks of the inscrutable malice which reigns in their hearts… To conclude:  All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs xxx: there are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing which says not,  it is enough;  that is, the mouth of the womb.

[…] The words flow almost too easily in our psychoanalytic age: we are dealing with an existential terror of women, of the “mouth of the womb,” stemming from a primal anxiety about male potency, tied to a desire for self (phallic) control; men have deep-rooted  castration fears which are expressed as a horror of the womb.These terrors form the substrata of a myth of feminine evil which in turn justified several centuries of gynocide. The evidence, provided by the Malleus and the executions which blackened those centuries, is almost without limit. One particular concern was that devils stole semen (vitality) from innocent, sleeping men — seductive witches visited men in their sleep, and did the evil stealing. As Ernest Jones wrote:

The explanation for these fantasies is surely not hard. A nightly visit from a beautiful or frightful being who first exhausts the sleeper with passionate embraces and withdraws from him a vital fluid: all this can point only to a natural and common process, namely to nocturnal emissions accompanied by dreams of a more or less erotic nature. In the unconscious mind blood is commonly an equivalent for semen.

To be dreamed of often ended in slow burning on the stake. The most blatant proof of the explicitly sexual nature of the persecutions, however, had to do with one of the witches’ most frequent crimes: they cast “glamours” over the male organ so that it disappeared entirely. Sprenger and Kramer go to great lengths to prove that witches do not actually remove the genital, only render it invisible. If such a glamour lasts for under 3 years, a marriage cannot be annulled; if it lasts for 3 years or longer, it is considered a permanent fact and does annul any marriage. Catholics now seeking grounds for divorce should perhaps consider using that one. Men lost their genitals quite frequently. Most often, the woman responsible for the loss was a cast-off mistress, maliciously turned to witchcraft. If the bewitched man could identify the woman who had afflicted him, he could demand reinstatement of his genitals:

A young man who had lost his member and suspected a certain woman, tied a towel about her neck, choked her and demanded to be cured. “The witch touched him with her hand between the thighs,  saying,  ‘Now you have your desire.” His member was immediately restored.

Often the witches, greedy by virtue of womanhood, were not content with the theft of one  genital:

And what then is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect  male  organs, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many as is a matter of common  report?

How can we understand that millions of people for centuries believed as literal truth these seemingly idiotic allegations? How can we begin to comprehend that these beliefs functioned as the basis of a system of jurisprudence that condemned 9 million persons, mostly women, to being burned alive? The literal text of the Malleus Maleficarum, with its frenzied and psychotic woman-hating and the fact of the 9 million deaths, demonstrates the power of the myth of feminine evil, reveals how it dominated the dynamics of a culture, shows the absolute primal terror that women, as carnal beings, hold for men. We see in the text of the Malleusnot only the fear of loss of potency or virility, but of the genitals themselves — a dread of the loss of cock and balls. […] 

God had, in his oft-noted wisdom, created her in a way which left her defenseless against the wiles of the snake — the snake approached her for that very reason. Yet she bears responsibility for the fall. Double­double think is clearly biblical in its origins. Eve ’s legacy was a twofold curse: “Unto the woman He said:  ‘I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail; in pain thou shalt bring forth children;  and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Thus, the menstrual cycle and the traditional agony of childbirth do not comprise the full punishment — patriarchy is the other half of that ancient curse. […] 

The witches used drugs like belladonna and aconite, organic amphetamines, and hallucinogenics. They also pioneered the development of analgesics. They performed abortions, provided all medical help for births, were consulted in cases of impotence which they treated with herbs and hypnotism, and were the first practitioners of euthanasia. Since the Church enforced the curse of Eve by refusing to permit any alleviation of the pain of childbirth, it was left to the witches to lessen pain and mortality as best they could. It was especially as midwives that these learned women offended the Church, for, as Sprenger and Kramer wrote, “No one does more harm to the Catholic Faith than midwives.” The Catholic objection to abortion centered specifically on the biblical curse which made childbearing a painful punishment — it did not have to do with the “right to life” of the unborn fetus. It was also said that midwives were able to remove labor pains from the woman and transfer those pains to her husband—clearly in violation of divine injunction and intention both. […] 

The Christians, who had a profound and compulsive hatred for the natural world, thought that the witches, through malice and a lust for power (pure projection,  no doubt), had mobilized nature/ animals into a robotlike anti-Christian army. The witch hunters were convinced that toads, rats, dogs, cats, mice, etc., took orders from witches, carried curses from one farm to another, caused death, hysteria, and disease. They thought that nature was one massive, crawling conspiracy against them, and that the conspiracy was organized and controlled by the wicked women. They can in fact be credited with pioneering the politics of total paranoia — they developed the classic model for that particular pathology which has,  as its logical consequence, genocide. Their methods of dealing with the witch menace were developed empirically — they had a great respect for what worked.  For instance, when they suspected a woman of witchcraft,  they would lock her in an empty room for several days or weeks and if any living creature, any insect or spider, entered that room, that creature was identified as the woman’s familiar, and she was proved guilty of witchcraft. Naturally, given the fact that bugs are everywhere,  particularly in the woodwork, this test of guilt always worked. Cats were particularly associated with witches. That association is based on the ancient totemic significance of the cat:

It is well known that to the Egyptians cats were sacred. They were regarded as incarnations of Isis and there was also a cat deity… Through Osiris (Ra) they were associated with the sun; the rays of the “solar cat,” who was portrayed as killing the “serpent of darkness” at each dawn, were believed to produce fecundity in Nature, and thus cats were figures of fertility… Cats were also associated with Hathor, a cow-headed goddess, and hence with crops and rain … Still stronger, however, was the association of the cat with the moon, and thus she was a virgin goddess — a virgin-mother incarnation. In her character as moon- goddess, she was inviolate and self-renewing… the circle she forms in a curled-up position [is seen as] the symbol for eternity, an unending re-creation.

[…] It was also believed that the witch could transform herself into a cat or other animal. This notion, called lycanthropy, is twofold:

… either the belief that a witch or devil-ridden person temporarily assumes an animal form, to ravage or destroy; or, that they create an animal “double”  in which,  leaving the lifeless human body at home, he or she can wander, terrorize or batten on mankind.

The effect of the belief in lycanthropy on the general population was electric: a stray dog, a wildcat, a rat, a toad — all were witches, agents of  Satan, bringing with them drought, disease, death. Any animal in the environment was dangerous, demonic. The legend of the werewolf  (popularized in the Red Riding  Hood fable) caused terror. At Labout, two hundred people were burned as werewolves. There were endless stories of farmers shooting animals who were plaguing them in the night, only to discover the next morning that a respectable town matron had been wounded in precisely the same way. Witches, of course,  could also fly on broomsticks, and often did. Before going to the sabbat,  they annointed their bodies with a mixture of belladonna and aconite, which caused delirium, hallucination, and gave the sensation of flying. The broomstick was an almost archetypal symbol of womanhood, as the pitchfork was of manhood. Levitation was considered a rare but genuine fact:

As for its history, it is one of the earliest convictions, common to almost all peoples, that not only do supernatural beings, angels or devils, fly or float in the air at will, but so can those humans who invoke their assistance.  Levitation among the saints was, and by the devout is, accepted as an objective fact. The most famous instance is that of St. Joseph of Cupertino, whose ecstatic flights (and he perched in trees) caused embarrassment in the seventeenth century.  Yet the appearance of flight, in celestial trance, has been claimed all through the history of the Church, and not only for such outstanding figures as St. Francis, St. Ignatius Loyola, or St.Teresa… In the Middle  Ages it was regarded as a marvel, but a firmly established one… It is not, therefore, at all remarkable that witches were believed to fly… [though] the Church expressly forbade, during the reign of Charlemagne, any belief that witches flew.

We now know most of what can be known about the witches: who they were, what they believed, what they did, the Church’s vision of them.  We have seen the historical dimensions of a myth of feminine evil which resulted in the slaughter of 9 million persons, nearly all women, over 300 years. The actual evidence of that slaughter, the remembrance of it, has been suppressed for centuries so that the myth of woman as the Original Criminal, the gaping, insatiable womb, could endure. Annihilated with the 9 million was a whole culture, woman-centered,  nature-centered — all of their knowledge is gone, all of their knowing is destroyed. Historians (white, male, and utterly without credibility for women, Indians, Blacks, and other oppressed peoples as they begin to search the ashes of their own pasts) found  the massacre of the witches too unimportant to include in the chronicles of those centuries except as a footnote, too unimportant to be seen as the substance of those centuries — they did not recognize the centuries of gynocide, they did not register the anguish  of those deaths. Our study of pornography, our living of life, tells us that the myth of feminine evil lived out so resolutely by the Christians of the Dark  Ages,  is alive and well, here and now.  Our study of pornography, our living of life,  tells us that though the witches are dead, burned alive at the stake, the belief in female evil is not,  the hatred of female carnality is not. The Church has not changed its premises;  the culture has not refuted those premises.  It is left to us, the inheritors of that myth, to destroy it and the institutions based on it.

- Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating

[medusanevertalks]

“To deal with the increasing tide of witchcraft and in conformity with the Pope’s orders, Sprenger and Kramer collaborated on the Malleus Maleficarum. This document, a monument to Aristode’s logic and academic methodology (quoting and footnoting “authorities”), catalogues the major concerns of 15th-century Catholic theology:

Question I. Whether the Belief that there are such Beings as Witches is so Essential a Part of the Catholic Faith that Obstinancy to maintain the Opposite Opinion manifestly savours of Heresy (Answer: Yes)

Question III. Whether Children can be Generated by Incubi and Succubi (Answer: Yes)

Question VIII. Whether Witches can Hebetate the Power of Generation or Obstruct the Venereal Act (Answer: Yes)

Question IX. Whether Witches may work some Prestidigitatory Illusion so that the Male Organ appears to be entirely removed and separate from the Body (Answer: Yes)

Question XL. That Witches who are Midwives in Various Ways Kill the Child Conceived in the Womb, and Procure Abortion; or if they do not do this, Offer New-born Children to the Devils (Answer: Yes)

The Malleus also describes the ritual and content of witchcraft per se, though in the tradition of paternalism indigenous to the Church, Sprenger and Kramer are careful not to give formulae for charms or other dangerous information. They write “of the several Methods by which Devils through Witches Entice and Allure the Innocent to the Increase of that Horrid Craft and company”; “of the Way whereby a Formal Pact with Evil is made”; “How they are Transported from Place to Place”; “Here follows the Way whereby Witches copulate with those Devils known as Incubi”, etc. They document how witches injure cattle, cause hailstorms and tempests, illnesses in people and animals, bewitch men, change themselves into animals, change animals into people, commit acts of cannibalism and murder. The main concern of the Malleus is with natural events, nature, the real dynamic world which refused to conform to Catholic doctrine — the Malleus, with tragic wrong-headedness, explains most aspects of biology, sexology, medicine, and weather in terms of the demonic.”

— Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating; 1974