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. 21
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”
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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. I f the bewitched man could identify the woman who had afflicted him, he
could demand reinstatement o f 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. 22
Often the witches, greedy by virtue o f womanhood,
were not content with the theft o f 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? 23
How can we understand that millions o f people for
centuries believed as literal truth these seemingly idi
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otic allegations? How can we begin to comprehend that
these beliefs functioned as the basis of a system of ju risprudence that condemned 9 million persons, mostly women, to being burned alive? The literal text of the
Malleus Malef icarum, 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 Malleus not only the fear of
loss of potency or virility, but of the genitals themselves — a dread of the loss of cock and balls. The reason for this fear can perhaps be located in the nature of
the sex act per se: men enter the vagina hard, erect;
men emerge drained of vitality, the cock flaccid. The
loss of semen, and the feeling of weakness which is its
biological conjunct, has extraordinary significance to
men. Hindu tradition, for instance, postulates that men
must either expel the semen and then vacuum it back
up into the cock, or not ejaculate at all. For those Western men for whom orgasm is simultaneous with ejaculation, sex must be a most literal death, with
the mysterious, muscled, pulling vagina the death-
dealer.
To locate the origins of the myth of feminine evil
in male castration and potency fears is not so much to
participate in the Freudian world view as it is to accept
and apply the anthropologist's method and link up
Western Judeo-Christian man with Australian, African,
or Trobriand primitives. To do so is to challenge the
egotism which informs our historical attitude toward
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ourselves and which would separate us from the rest o f
the species. T here is nothing to indicate that “civilization, ” “culture, ” and/or Christianity have in any way moderated the primal male dread o f castration. Quite
the contrary, history might even be defined as the study
o f the concrete expression o f that dread.
T h e Christians in their manifold variety were continuing the highly developed Jewish tradition o f misogyny, patriarchy, and sexist suppression, alternatively
known as the Garden-of-Eden-Hype. T h e Adam and
Eve creation myth is the basic myth o f man and woman,
creation, death, and sex. T here is another Jewish legend, namely that o f Adam-Lilith, which never assumed that place because it implies other, nonsexist, nonpatri-archal values. T h e Genesis account o f Adam and Eve in
Eden involves, according to Hays, three themes: “the
transition from primitive life to civilization, the coming
o f death, and the acquisition o f knowledge. ” 24 As Hays
points out, Adam has been told by God the Father that
if he eats from the T ree o f Knowledge he will die. T h e
serpent tells Eve that she and Adam will not die. T h e
serpent, it turns out, told the immediate truth: Adam
and Eve do not keel over dead; rather, they know each
other carnally.
Sex is, biblically speaking, the sole source o f civilization, death, and knowledge. As punishment, Adam must go to work and Eve must bear children. We have
here the beginning o f the human family and the work
ethic, both tied to guilt and sexual repression by virtue
o f their origins. One could posit, with all the assurance
o f a Monday-morning quarterback, that Adam and Eve
always were mortal and carnal and that through eating
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the forbidden fruit only became aware of what their
condition had always been. God has never been very
straightforward with people.
Whether the precise moral of the story is that death
is a direct punishment for carnal knowledge (which
might make guilt an epistemological corollary) or that
awareness of sex and death are coterminous, the fact of
man knowing and feeling guilt is rooted in the Oedipal
content of the legend. In a patriarchy, one does not
disobey the father.
Adam’s legacy post-Eden is sexual knowledge, mortality, guilt, toil, and the fear of castration. Adam became a human male, the head of a family. His sin was lesser than Eve’s, seemingly by definition again. Even
in Paradise, wantonness, infidelity, carnality, lust, greed,
intellectual inferiority, and a metaphysical stupidity
earmark her character. Yet her sin was greater than
Adam’s. 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; a
nd thy desire
shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. ’ ” 25
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 Christians, of course, like Avis, trying harder,
seeing in woman the root of all evil, limited her to
breeding more sinners for the Church to save. No won
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der then that women remained faithful adherents o f the
older totemic cults o f Western Europe which honored
female sexuality, deified the sexual organs and reproductive capacity, and recognized woman as embodying the regenerative power o f nature. T h e rituals o f these
cults, centering as they did on sexual potency, birth,
and phenomena connected to fertility, had been developed by women. Magic was the substance o f ritual, the content o f belief. T h e magic o f the witches was an
imposing catalogue o f medical skills concerning reproductive and psychological processes, a sophisticated knowledge o f telepathy, auto- and hetero-suggestion,
hypnotism, and mood-controlling drugs. Women knew
the medicinal nature o f herbs and developed formulae
for using them. T he women who were faithful to the
pagan cults developed the science o f organic medicine,
using vegetation, before there was any notion o f the
profession o f medicine. Paracelsus, the most famous
physician o f the Middle Ages, claimed that everything
he knew he had learned from “the good women. ” 26
Experimenting with herbs, women learned that those
which would kill when administered in large doses
had curative powers when administered in smaller
amounts. Unfortunately, it is as poisoners that the
witches are remembered. The witches used drugs like
belladonna and aconite, organic amphetamines, and
hallucinogenics. They also pioneered the development
o f analgesics. They performed abortions, provided all
medical help for births, were consulted in cases o f impotence which they treated with herbs and hypnotism, and were the first practitioners o f euthanasia. Since the
Church enforced the curse o f Eve by refusing to permit
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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 mid wives. ” 27 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 origins of the magical content of the pagan cults
can be traced back to the fairies, who were a real, neolithic people, smaller in stature than the natives of northern Europe or England. They were a pastoral
people who had no knowledge of agriculture. They
fled before stronger, technologically more advanced
murderers and missionaries who had contempt for
their culture. They set up communities in the inlands and concealed their dwellings in mounds half hidden in the ground. The fairies developed those
magical skills for which the witches, centuries later,
were burned.
The socioreligious organization of the fairy culture
was matriarchal and probably polyandrous. The fairy
culture was still extant in England as late as the 17th
century when even the pagan beliefs of the early witches
had degenerated into the Christian parody which we
associate with Satanism. The Christians rightly recognized the fairies as ancient, original sorcerers, but
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wrongly saw their whole culture as an expression o f the
demonic. T here was communication between the fairies
and the pagan women, and any evidence that a woman
had visited the fairies was considered sure proof that
she was a witch.
T here were, then, three separate, though interrelated, phenomena: the fairy race with its matriarchal social organization, its knowledge o f esoteric magic
and medicine; the woman-oriented fertility cults, also
practitioners o f esoteric magic and medicine; and later,
the diluted witchcraft cults, degenerate parodies o f
Christianity. T here is particular confusion when one
tries to distinguish between the last two phenomena.
Many o f the women condemned by the Inquisition were
true devotees o f the Old Religion. Many were confused by Christian militancy and aggression, not to mention torture and threat o f burning, and saw themselves as diabolical, damned witches.
An understanding o f what the Old Religion really
was, how it functioned, is crucial if we want to understand the precise nature o f the witch hunt, the amount and kind o f distortion that the myth o f feminine evil
made possible, who the women were who were being
burned, and what they had really done. T he information available comes primarily from the confessions o f accused witches, recorded and distorted by the Inquisitors, and from the work o f anthropologists like Margaret Murray and C. L'Estrange Ewen. T h e scenario o f the witchcraft cults is pieced together from those sources, but many pieces are missing. A lot o f
knowledge disappears with 9 million people.
T h e religion was organized with geographic integ
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rity. Communities had their own organizations, mainly
structured in covens, with local citizens as administrators. There were weekly meetings which took care of business —they were called esbats. Then there were
larger gatherings, called sabbats, where many covens
met together for totemic festivities. There may have
been an actual continental organization with one all-
powerful head, but evidence on this point is ambiguous.
It was a proselytizing religion in that nonmembers were
approached by local officials and asked to join. Conditions of membership in a coven were the free consent of the individual, abjuration of all other beliefs and
loyalties (particularly renunciation of any loyalty to the
new Catholic Faith), and an avowal of allegiance to the
horned god. Membership was contractual, that is, a
member signed an actual contract which limited her
obligations to the cult to a specific number of years,
at the end of which she was free to terminate allegiance.
Most often the Devil “promised her Mony, and that she
would live gallantly and have the pleasure of the
World. . . ” 28 The neophyte’s debts probably were paid
and she no doubt also learned the secrets of medicine,
drugs, telepathy, and simple sanitation, which would
have considerably improved all aspects of her earthly
existence. It was only according to the Church that she
lost her soul as part o f the bargain. And, needless to
say, it was the Church, not the Devil, which took her life.
Once the neophyte made the decision f
or the
horned god, she went through a formal initiation, often
conducted at the sabbat. The ceremony was simple.
The initiate declared that she was joining the coven
of her own free will and swore devotion to the master
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o f the coven who represented the horned god. She was
then marked with some kind o f tattoo which was called
the witches’ mark. T h e inflicting o f the tattoo was painful, and the healing process was long. When healed, the scar was red or blue and indelible. One method particularly favored by the witch hunters when hunting was to take a suspected woman, shave her pubic and other
bodily hair (including head hair, eyebrows, etc. ) and,
upon finding any scar, find her guilty o f witchcraft.
Also, the existence o f any supernumerary nipple, common in all mammals, was proof o f guilt.
T he initiate was often given a new name, especially
if she had a Christian name like Mary or Faith. Children, when they reached puberty, were initiated into the coven — parents naturally wanted their children to
share the family religion. T he Inquisition was as ruthless with children as it was with adults. T here are stories o f children being whipped as their mothers
were being burned —prevention, it was called.
T he religious ceremony, which was the main content o f the sabbat, included dancing, eating, and fucking. T he worshipers paid homage to the horned
god by kissing his representative, the master o f the
coven, anywhere he indicated. T he kiss was generally
on the master’s ass —designed, some say, to provoke the
antisodomy Christians. That ritual kiss was possibly
placed on a mask which the costumed figure —masked,
horned, wearing animal skins, and probably an artificial
phallus —wore under his tail. T h e disguise conjures up
the ancient, two-faced Janus.
T he witches danced ring dances in a direction opposite to the path o f the sun, an ancient, symbolic
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rite. The Lutherans and Puritans forbade dancing because it evoked for them the spectacle of pagan worship.
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