Daughters of the Inquisition

by Christina Crawford

  Every village and every town had their share of those others who employed magic: the charmers and conjurors, the dowsers, treasure finders, exorcists and spell casters. All were to become suspect and accused. Barstow says that rural areas were more of a women’s world in the sixteenth century because few university trained and licensed doctors visited the countryside until nearly three centuries later, in the 1900’s. People depended on the technical skills of the wise women, and they continued to provide day to day health services.486

  And, this was exactly the power that the all-male Church was determined to eliminate. Many men used the services of the wise women healers, but they still saw the women as a threat. The next step for men so threatened was to take on the belief that the power women possessed was actually directed at male sexuality and toward their potency or lack thereof. “Some segments of society began to carry out a terrible revenge on the magic workers (healers, midwives, etc.) whom they suspected of having this control.”487 But because most people made no distinction between the natural or the supernatural, and because the Church did not distinguish between either black or white magic, or between women practicing the blessing way or the dark side, all were stained with the same taint. Even with the initial trials against women in the 1500’s,

  The common people of Europe clung to their folk healers, in preference to priests and doctors until the nineteenth century. They saw priests could not help during birth and that many patients of doctors died. The effect on the healer-diviners on their communities cannot be underestimated. One English healer had forty customers a week … and one measure of success was the considerable wealth that some earned … not only were the common people loyal to these healers, but kings, princes and archbishops sought them out. In Protestant as well as Catholic lands, in city as well as country, the cunning people held sway.488

  Most of those cunning people were women. But that combination of power, talent, respect and increasing wealth was also an unfortunately powerful magnet drawing to them resentment, fear and repression. The Church of Rome insisted that their priests were in sole possession of the power to heal. The universities demanded the sole privilege of licensing professionals, and the Reformation taught belief in the passages of the Bible which degraded the status of women. And then “as the Churches’ campaigns against folk healing (labeled ‘superstition’) progresses during the Reformation, this double gift (respect vs. fear) became more dangerous to possess, more likely to be identified with Satan’s power and the work of his demons.”489 This transition and the conflicting attitudes of the men who orchestrated all of society set the stage for the trials and the murders of women healer-diviners for the next two hundred years.

  But, how to find these culprits? For several centuries the inquisitors had used a network of familiars as spies to track down suspected heretics, moving from village to village and through the city streets with significant success. The familiars had the advantage of carrying weapons which were prohibited for ordinary people, and of having the assistance of local authorities to arrest and detain suspects. From the beginning they had aroused hatred among the citizens. Their often criminal behavior was detested and aroused civil unrest. But familiars alone could not solve the problem inquisitors now faced as they proposed to track down women on a massive scale – old women, young women, married women, single women, women of whom they were afraid because they supposedly carried the power of the supernatural.

  A new profession was created to help solve this problem and a new form of suspicion created to condemn the women. The new suspicion was in the form of a “devil’s mark” which could be something as simple as a small, common skin tab, or a vaginal tear from a difficult birth, or a mole, birthmark or any anomaly which could be construed as a “teat” even a minimal one, from which either the “devil” or one of his minions could suck. (This so called “devil’s teat” is a sick parody on the female function of providing breast milk.) The new profession was politely called a searcher. In fact they were known as “prickers” and were always male. After humiliating the female suspect by requiring her to remove her clothes in front of a man she had never met before, these searcher/prickers then used a needle to prick at the women, trying to find the “devil’s mark,” probing the woman’s naked body as well as their genitals. It was publicized that a true “devil’s mark” would produce neither pain nor blood when stabbed. Dr. Achterberg writes that these searcher/prickers “were well remunerated. In every country, finding a ‘witches mark’ was sufficient evidence to convict a person. Needles still in existence show that many were fake and simply retracted under pressure. The women were stripped (naked) and shaved, and genitals probed for any peculiarity, any tab of skin that demons might suck upon. When the witches mark was found (as, of course, it inevitably was), the proceedings against the woman were validated.”490

  As one might imagine,

  These widespread practices terrorized women. When in 1649 the people of Newcastle-upon-Tyne hired a well-known Scottish pricker … promising him 20 shillings for every woman he condemned, they set a trap for all the women of the town … they sent the bell ringer through town, (asking) for any complaint against women. Thirty women were brought into the Town Hall and stripped, then openly had pins thrust into their bodies. Most of them were found guilty.491

  But searching and pricking were also inflicted on women already incarcerated who were helpless victims subjected to physical and psychological torture as a result. Female prisoners were regularly tortured and raped by their captors. Sex was always in evidence, beginning with the sexual fears of men about their penis and progressing to the projection by churchmen of a fear that the devil was having sexual intercourse with women. In Northern France, judges at a trial forced the accused woman to admit that she gave the devil one of her pubic hairs.492 Judges in Luxembourg asked female suspects about their sexual activity not only with the devil but also with their husbands or lovers. Priests took perverted interest in the bodies of women they were called upon to exorcise. Barstow says,” These men took advantage of positions of authority to indulge in pornography sessions, thus revealing that they wanted more from witch hunting than the conviction … namely, unchallenged sexual power over women.”493

  There is an old saying about the corruption of power when it is unrestricted: Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Exactly this outcome is now the historical case. Susan Brownmiller then asks, “Whether sadistic torture leads by its own logic to the infliction of sexual pain, or whether the motive of eliciting information is merely a pretext for the commission of hostile sexual acts?”494 Sadism, pornography, perversion were everyday occurrences in the inquisitional process by now. Hundreds of years of the denigration of women by the churchmen (in writing and by deeds) were finally culminating in this round-up and slaughter of females across Europe.

  In the past, women as a specific group had never been targeted for extermination. “Because women had never before been prisoners in large numbers, men for the first time now had unrestricted access to them; given the low opinion of women in European society, there was little social pressure to restrain court officials from taking their pleasure with the victims.”495 And, worst of all adding insult to injury, the women had to pay to endure the torture, sadism and rape because the confiscation of their own possessions were used to provide the bread and water on which they were forced to survive. If they had no possessions, their families were required to pay for their miserable upkeep. The height of this tragic irony may be The heavy sexual content of witchcraft prosecution in the sixteenth century parallels the well-documented rise in laws which restrained sexual conduct. Among the legal charges on which a person could be brought up, adultery, bearing illegitimate children, abortion, infanticide and incest figured large, increasingly so as the two Reformations (Lutheran and Catholic) progressed. Women were more often and more severely punished than men for these crimes.496

  The only exception to this was that men were more often accused and convicted of s
odomy. There are only five known cases in Europe of the death sentence for female sodomites.497

  Women in control of their bodies, their sexuality, and their fertility had until recently been a natural partnership which had developed over millennia between the individual woman and the female healer-diviner herbalist or midwife. Now this partnership was under ferocious attack. The midwife was accused of killing newborns, of performing abortions or causing infertility. “In the early modern period, married women were almost continuously pregnant or nursing – and it was hard on them. Furthermore, almost half their children died before they were five.”498 When a woman chose not to favor a man with sexual intercourse, a wise woman healer was accused of creating impotence. When infants died, the midwife was accused of infanticide. When crops failed or cows gave no milk, local women were accused of bewitching. Among the majority peasant population “premarital sex was the norm and premarital pregnancy was not condemned until the seventeenth century; young women and men were freer to learn about themselves sexually, to experiment sexually and to try out partners.”499 Among the peasants, virginity was not required as eligibility for marriage. Women arranged their daughters’ first sexual encounter and often did the same for their sons. Folk stories coming from France, Scotland and England about these initiations as well as Inquisition court records all indicate that children’s first encounters were arranged by their mothers. These sexual initiations were commonplace throughout the peasant class and may well have been a tradition carried forward from matriarchal antiquity until the duel Reformations prohibited the practices.

  At first the accusations against women were based on a twisted perception of women’s normal activities regarding sexuality and procreation.

  An even more dangerous projection onto women, however, came from fantasy, not fact, from the sexual fantasies of inquisitors and secular judges about what went on at the “sabbat.” In trial records everywhere in Europe, except England and Russia, we learn that women were believed to have an erotic propensity for devil worship.500

  Men also were made to believe that women were hyper-sexed, insatiable, weak willed, given to melancholy and lacking character. Demonologists, who were mostly churchmen, stressed the dangers to men from women who could make a man impotent and even cause his penis to disappear.501 But historian Lea says that “the rapid development of witchcraft (prosecutions) toward the end of the century was due to the Counter-Reformation, which after 1570, not only checked the progress of Protestantism, and organized a ruthless persecution, largely due to the Jesuits, who magnified the influence of the demon and connected sorcery with heresy.”502 After 1570 there were organized witch hunts casting terror over the territory of Mainz, Germany, as well as in many other German areas. “The protocols do not give the names of the victims or the verdicts, for almost every trial ended in conviction.”503 And women were burned in Protestant states also: Brandenburg in 1551 to 1554, Wuttemberg in 1562, Baden-Durlach in 1562, 1570, 1579 and Hesse in 1564.

  In the last quarter of the sixteenth century the Protestant lands yielded to the tendencies of the times … displaying in some places the grossest cruelty. This was especially the case in Saxony, the leader. The new scholastic theology in which the devil figures largely, the ardor of persecution was a lesson in inhumanity … fitted to train the people to apply the same principles to witchcraft. The Old Testament came to be regarded as embodying laws dictated by God and still binding on lawgivers and law-dispensers so that it became an imprescriptable duty to God to exterminate the objects of ancient Hebrew superstition.504

  Now all-male thought by the educated was to be subordinated to theology. This meant that law, philosophy, politics, statesmanship, morals and religion throughout the seventeenth century were subjected to this ideology. At its zenith, the greatest jurist of his time was a man named Bernard Carpzov who in 1635 wrote his Practica nova rerum criminalium, which was reprinted nine times until 1723 and was regarded as the Protestant Malleus Maleficarum. During his extensive career, which lasted until 1666 in the court of Leipzig, Carpzov signed up to 20,000 death sentences on women accused of witchcraft.505 In his book Carpzov “always has a biblical text to justify any conclusion reached, whether the inquisition process is torture, the death penalty for adultery, bigamy, heresy, blasphemy, coining, theft or the most ferocious death-penalties with added hot pincers, cutting off of arms, the wheel and the stake.”506

  Other writers such as Langin show how completely Lutheranism and the new Protestantism were interpenetrated with the Inquisition. After all, these were men who had been indoctrinated and educated by the Church of Rome long before they became the first few generations of converts. Carpzov accepts all the rhetoric of the Catholic Malleus with regard to the devil, a pact with the devil, worshipping the devil and the witch mark. In his forceful opinion, those who protect women accused of witchcraft are “inspired by the devil and entangled in his nets,” and he is, therefore, severe on condemning them too, because “the existence of witches is proved by Holy Writ (the Bible).”507

  At the end of his productive life, nineteenth century historian Henry Charles Lea was compiling a three-volume History of Witchcraft which was published after his death in 1909. In this work, Lea tracks the trials of women region by region in Europe. Even though the names of the accused were often omitted in trial records, Lea has found some individuals and briefly recounted their stories.

  The Alpine Regions

  In the Tyrol, a papal bull was presented to the bishop of Brixen in 1485, but the behavior by churchmen in the subsequent inquisition so upset the bishop that he ordered the inquisitor out of the diocese because “it was feared that, if he remained longer, the husbands and kinsmen of the accused women would commit violence on him.”508 The crux of these problems had to do with the court and a dispute between Catherine of Saxony and her husband whom she was suspected of trying to poison. The men of the court, in an effort to get information on the attempted poisoning, hired a woman to hide herself in an oven and pretend that a demon was actually the one hidden. This imposter denounced innocents and many women who were then imprisoned and tortured. When the fraud was discovered, the townspeople were infuriated, causing the bishop to denounce the inquisitor and deport him.

  Toward the end of the sixteenth century, “proceedings against witches became frequent and sharper.”509 In 1540, Barbara Pachlerin confesses under torture that thirty years earlier she and her sister Angel were taught witchcraft by their mother. Accused of creating storms, ruining the health of cows, raising flood waters and intercourse with the devil “she is condemned to be burnt for Malefiz and delivered to the executioner to be led up the Ottenbach to the customary Richtstat, to be reduced to dust and ashes, together with her box of ointment and other things. Which judgement was executed.” In Geneva between 1542 and 1546 there were 800 to 900 arrests and executions. Executions in Vaud, the small region of Bern, between 1591 and 1600 numbered 311 women, an average of 31 each year. Lea writes that “the Alpine regions were the home and nursery of witch persecutions. At one end we have seen what was the slaughter in the Valtelline and Como in the early days. At the Western extremity is the continuance of a long series of judicial butchery.”510 The authorities of Bern in 1600 issued degrees limiting the use of torture and curtailing the profits of the Inquisition officials, but in the next ten years there were still 240 executions.

  Much of present day Switzerland was under the influence of Protestants. “Calvin’s stern morality and literal adherence to scripture led him to interpret and put in force the Mosaic (Old Testament) decrees against sorcery with ruthless vigor.”511 By 1545 the jails were filled with both women and men, “whose trials were conducted in the cruelest manner … tearing with red hot pincers and other newly invented forms of torture were used unsparingly and those who would not confess were walled up to perish.”512 Many died under torture, others committed suicide.

  The last known executions for witchcraft in Geneva took place in 1652. The first woman was M
ichea Chauderon, accused in April of sending demons to possess two people, of making a man sick by touching his arm and of sickening two children. During her first torture she denied the charges. At her second torture she confessed. This trial details the search for the witch mark, commonly sought but rarely recorded in detail. After her first torture and denial

  two surgeons, Noel and Thabuys, were called in, who reported that they had found the mark, the size of a lentil, under the right breast, into which they had thrust a needle a finger length without drawing blood or causing pain. The next day a third surgeon, Dentand, and two physicians, D’Abuvigne and Le Clere, joined the torture group. On pricking the spot a little blood followed and some pain.513

  This poor humiliated woman was stripped naked, tortured, stuck with long needles and ogled by eight strangers, five “medical men,” the inquisitor, the scribe and the executioner. Twelve days later, there was yet another hunt by three more men for a conclusive mark which succeeded in finding two more places into which were stuck needles to a depth of four or five inches. This was finally sufficient “proof.” Michea was condemned to be strangled and burnt.514