Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

by Andrea Dworkin

  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.