Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (31 page)

In the Swiss canton of Vaud in 1595, a peasant was so moved by a sermon he heard on the subject of sin that he sought out the pastor to confess his sexual abuse of a cow thirty years earlier. The pastor promised to pray for the peasant, but went one step further and reported him as a criminal. The peasant was thrown in jail. With no need for torture, the repentant man confessed to bestiality as well as adultery, perjury, gambling, and, most importantly, witchcraft. The devil, he said, had appeared to him recently and told him that his carnal knowledge of the cow had ruined his soul. Now, Satan evidently had told the peasant, the man was obliged to carry out infernal deeds. The peasant’s pious resolve to defy Satan’s command and tell all may have saved his soul, but it also got him and his family killed. A jury condemned him to burn at the stake along with his wife and twelve-year-old son, both of whom had also confessed to witchcraft. In nearby Fribourg, where cows outnumbered people, bestiality had long been linked with witchcraft. More than a century before the Vaud case, a man there confessed that the devil had appeared to him to demand loyalty after the fellow had enjoyed the company of a cow, a goat, and a deer.
¹¹

THE WITCH HUNTS

The link between bestiality and witchcraft went deeper than Satan popping up to demand obeisance from people who had copulated with animals. In the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when more than seven thousand witchcraft prosecutions took place in Europe and the North American colonies, animals were often characterized as incarnations of Satan himself. Bestial sex was seen as one of many elements of devil worship. Sorcery and witchcraft had been prohibited since at least the Babylonian era, but prior to the Early Modern period, few people were formally charged with the offense. That changed in the late 1400s, when a fever dream began to take hold in legal and religious circles, in which witches were reconceived: No longer were they simply magicians and mischief-makers. The new, much scarier witches were perverse devil worshippers working in league with each other and with Satan to destroy the world. Witches were almost always believed to be female, middle-aged or older, poor, and sexually deviant in the extreme. Accurate figures are impossible to pin down, but there is good reason to believe that more than sixty thousand people were executed for the crime of witchcraft between 1450 and 1750. At least 80 percent of them were women.

The crime of witchcraft hinged on the contract between a given witch and Satan, by which the witch renounced God and agreed to do Satan’s work. These pacts, often believed to be written in blood and signed in hell, formally enlisted the witch in the devil’s vast army. When the witch caused famine, killed a child, or wrecked crops with hail, she did it in fulfillment of this bargain. When she spat on the Cross, pissed on the Host, and ate children, she was merely keeping up her end of the deal. The law made the contract the most critical aspect of the crime. For example, the influential Saxon criminal code of the 1570s mandated death by fire for people having dealings with the devil, regardless of whether or not they actually hurt anyone. Scottish law went in the same direction. England redefined the crime in 1604 to include communication with evil spirits, even in the absence of an identifiable victim.

The mythology underlying these contracts was complex, but for our purposes they had one common aspect: the devil’s demand for sex as part of the deal. Forcing the accused witch to admit she had sex with Satan (or one of his minions) was proof enough that a pact had been made, and was enough to send the witch to death. The seventeenth-century Italian friar and demonologist Francesco-Maria Guazzo told the story of a twelve-year-old girl accosted in the road by Satan in the form of a strange man: “The girl was made to swear an oath to this man, and he marked her brow with his nail as a sign of her new allegiance, and then he lay with her in the sight of her mother.” Rather than being appalled at the sight of her daughter being so ravished, the mother became aroused and “offered herself to be defiled by him in the daughter’s presence.” From that point on, the priest declared, both mother and daughter were Satan’s slaves. Other times, the contract was said to be sealed when the devil, in the form of a well-endowed male animal, demanded that the witch-initiate kiss his anus or have sexual intercourse with him. The scenarios were as varied as human nightmares.

In the case of Johannes Junius, burgomaster of the German town of Bamberg, the pact involved sex with a creature of both human and animal form. Under torture, Junius confessed to being in his orchard when a “grass maid” approached him. With “seductive speeches,” she convinced him to “yield to her will.” Immediately afterward, she revealed herself as a bleating goat that taunted Junius and demanded delivery of his soul: “Now you see with whom you have had to do. You must be mine or I will forthwith break your neck.”

By the time Junius was arrested, in 1628, Bamberg was in the grip of a full-scale witch panic in which several hundred persons—including Junius’s wife—were condemned and burned. Junius refused to confess despite enduring repeated torture sessions involving thumbscrews, leg vises, and the strappado (a device that suspended victims on a rope with their hands tied behind their back). “Eight times did they draw me up [on the strappado] and let me fall again,” he later wrote from jail, “so that I suffered terrible agony.” Finally, in “wretched” despair, he broke down and confessed to his seduction by a goat, his later baptism by the devil, and Satan’s commands to kill his children.

Junius’s tale of Satanic initiation with a woman-goat made perfect sense to his interrogators, but it was not enough to satisfy them. The torture continued until he named other Bamberg residents who purportedly joined him in orgiastic witches’ assemblies called sabbats. Each of the innocents Junius identified was most likely also prosecuted and executed. In any event, the good burgomaster’s cooperation won him no mercy. After paying a guard to sneak a letter out to his daughter recounting his sufferings, he was burned at the stake.

THE CLERICS AND civil judges (often the prosecutors themselves) who presided over witch trials inevitably pushed accused witches to describe their sexual romps with the devil. The interrogators knew what they wanted and, using torture, usually got it. The image of old beggar women or midwives being pulled to pieces while their interrogators prodded them to “confess” to perverse sexual adventures is impossibly tragic, but it happened time and again. Nothing was too far-fetched, especially for prosecutors who spent their careers layering on the details of their own sadistic fantasies. Said historian Walter Stephens: “Like some forms of drug use and sexual experimentation, fantasies about witches required their addicts to increase the dosage constantly; otherwise, the fantasies lost their ability to satisfy the underlying compulsion, even temporarily.”

As the witch trials wore on, the idea of Satan as a sexual supercreature was refined. The prominent French prosecutor Pierre de Lancre, who boasted of sending more than six hundred witches to the stake, told of a seventeen-year-old Basque girl he examined who testified that, whether the devil appeared as a man or a goat,

[h]e always had a member like a mule’s, having chosen to imitate that animal as being best endowed by nature . . . it was as long and as thick as an arm . . . he always exposed his instrument, of such beautiful shape and measurements.

The beast’s gargantuan sexual organs could be made of scaly flesh, iron, flax, horn, or something else entirely. Some Spanish and Italian witches confessed that these phallic tools satisfied them like nothing on earth, but most others said they caused pain. In his memoirs, the French witch hunter Nicolas Rémy wrote with breathless excitement that “all female witches maintain that the so-called genital organs of their Demons are so huge and so excessively rigid that they cannot be admitted without the greatest pain.” One of Rémy’s victims, Didatia of Miremont, confessed that the devil’s penis caused her to hemorrhage blood.

It must have been a challenge for the accused witches to infer the kind of information their accusers were seeking. One can only imagine the time and effort it took to get one poor girl, tried by the Parlement de Paris in 1616, to describe the devil’s horselike member: “[O]n insertion it was as cold as ice and ejected ice-cold semen, and on his withdrawing it burned her as if in fire.” Another girl, tried before the Parlement d’Aquitaine in 1594, said she attended an orgy where she was presented to a goat:

The goat led her apart as his bride into a neighboring wood, and pressing her against the ground, penetrated her. But the girl said she found this operation quite lacking in any sensation of pleasure, for she rather experienced a very keen pain and sense of horror of the goat’s semen, which was cold as ice.

Satan could apparently turn himself into any animal or insect, but most demonologists agreed he was partial to the goat. “[T]he obscene lasciviousness of goats is proverbial,” wrote Rémy, “and it is the Demon’s chief care to urge his followers to the greatest venereal excesses.” Yet the goat was more than just an animal well “adapted” to seducing people into “revolting obscenities.” The association of the devil with goats also tapped into an inexhaustible vein of hatred that ran through the core of European society : The animal evoked the horned Jew as well.
¹²

The medieval slander and massacres of Jews as Christ-killers and well-poisoners constituted a kind of basic training for the witch hunts of the Early Modern period. The example of the Jew as a scapegoat for the world’s ills was well established by the time the witch craze began. Popular wisdom held, for example, that Jewish rituals involved the blood of Christian children, and that Jews caused outbreaks of plague. Illustrations of the time depicted Jews with goatlike horns, scraggly beards, and tails. Though Jews were not always represented as goats, they were typically depicted as riding them, often sitting backward. In Vienna, Jews were forced to appear in public wearing goatlike horned hats; in thirteenth-century France, Philip III had required Jews to add a horned figure to the customary Jewish badge. Both the Jew and the goat were said to share the same stench of the devil—and goats and Jews were “known” sexual predators.

As Jews and witches were in league with the devil, witch hunters were often on the lookout for Jews as well, even when there weren’t many Jews around to hunt. Moreover, medieval laws criminalized sexual relations between Jews and Christians. (In England, sex with Jews was put into the same accursed category as heresy, homosexuality, and bestiality.) Centuries after the expulsion of the Jews from France, de Lancre accused them of doing evil under Satanic protection: “They deserve every execration, and as destroyers of all divine and human majesty, they merit punishment and indeed the greatest tortures. Slow fire, melted lead, boiling oil, pitch, wax, and sulfur fused together would not make torments fitting, sharp and cruel enough.” And when, starting in about 1400, the myth developed that witches gathered together to eat children, cook up poisons, and have bizarre sex, it was no accident that those unholy orgies were called “sabbats,” after the Hebrew word for the seventh day, or even more directly, “synagogues.”

THE EARLY MODERN period saw the development of elaborate legal machinery to root out and execute witches. For lawyers, judges, priests, and inquisitors enterprising enough to make a career out of witch hunting, there was no shortage of work. De Lancre, whose descriptions of sabbats are among the most lurid, claimed that thirty thousand people in the Basque region of southwestern France were taking part in such rituals. The only question for de Lancre and his contemporaries was how to use the law to find and kill as many of them as possible. In France, de Lancre sent more than eighty women to the stake in 1609 alone; Rémy bragged of executing nine hundred witches over fifteen years.

Theories as to the causes of the witch craze are legion: religious intolerance during the Reformation, the chaos of the era’s many wars, the state centralization of the legal process, and so on. While almost any event during this tumultuous period could be thrown into the analytical stew, no one in the witch-prosecuting industry was thinking along such lines. Both professional witch hunters and the crowds who gathered to watch the witches burn were focused on the supernatural, evidence of which they saw all around them. People at all levels of society believed unreservedly in the occult. Fighting the devil and his servants was a serious and practical undertaking well within the job description of the learned classes. As they cleared their regions of the devil’s accomplices, witch hunters were doing their part for the health of the Christian world.

The main challenge facing witch prosecutors stemmed from this same belief in the supernatural: If witches were using magic to cause trouble, wouldn’t they also use it to cover their tracks? They did, replied demonologists, so there should be no reason to expect any eyewitnesses to a witch’s activity. Proving witchcraft therefore centered on extracting confessions from accused witches, for which torture was usually required. Persuading elderly women and midwives to confess to the particulars of baby barbecuing, goat copulation, and broom travel was hard work, complained a prominent witch hunter: “[I]t is difficult, or more difficult, to compel a witch to tell the truth as it is to exorcise a person possessed of the devil.” Torture was a last resort in other kinds of criminal cases, but when investigating witchcraft, it was employed as the main method of inquiry.

The most important of many handbooks used by witch prosecutors was the
Malleus Maleficarum
(
Hammer of Witches
), written by the German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, ostensibly in collaboration with his fellow inquisitor of the Dominican order, Jakob Sprengler. (Sprengler is named as coauthor in later editions of the book, but experts now doubt that he had much to do with it.) First published in 1486 and running to about thirty editions by 1669, it provided comprehensive guidance on the fine points of charging, torturing, and executing witches. The book was indispensable for lawyers and judges, but its sexually graphic passages and illustrations also drove sales to a readership outside legal-profession circles. With chapter titles such as “Here follows the Way Whereby Witches Copulate with Those Devils known as Incubi,” the
Malleus
and other such books allowed readers to titillate themselves with cruel sexual fantasies and feel pious at the same time.