Woman Hating (12 page)

This was a serious business, for the end of the world was believed to be imminent. For good Christians, preparations to depart this earthly abode included renunciation of all hedonistic activities (eating, dancing, fucking, etc. ). St. Simon Stylites, in his attempt to avoid the crime of being human, fled to the desert where he erected a pillar on which he mortified his flesh for most of his 72 years. He was tempted throughout by visions of lascivious women. Indeed, it required starvation, incessant prayer, and flagellation to be visited by lascivious women in those days and still lead the perfect Christian life.

The extremeness of the Church's ascetic imperatives invited a reciprocal debauchery. The nobility, when not out butchering, enforced that most curious of customs, the
jus primae noctis,
which legitimated the rape of newly wed peasant women. The Crusaders brought back spices and syphilis from the East —that summing up their knowledge of Arab culture. The clergy was so openly corrupt and sensual that successive popes were forced to acknowledge it. “By 1102 a church council had to state specifically that priests should be degraded for sodomy and anathematized for 'obstinate sodomy. ' ”
²
Bishops and cardinals were also known to fuck around: “A typical example is that Bishop of Toul ... whose favorite concubine was his own daughter by a nun of Epinal."
³
The monasteries and cloisters were rampant with homosexuality, but nuns and monks did occasionally get together for heterosexual fucking.

Until the 12th century, there were basically three kinds of relationship to the Church. There were the ascetics who fled the cities to roam like beasts in the wilderness and emulated St. Simon, who made a pig-sty his home when not on the pillar. The ascetics mortified the flesh while awaiting cataclysmic destruction and eternal resurrection. There were the nobility, the clergy, and the soldiers, who delighted in carnal excesses of every sort, and the serfs who went on breeding because it was their only outlet and because the nobles encouraged increases in the number of tenants. The last group, crucial to this period, were the heretics. In the 12th century various groups, viewing the abominations of Christianity with increasing horror, began to voice openly and even loudly their skepticism. These sects played a prominent role in shaping the Church’s idea of the Devil.

The Waldenses, Manicheans, and Cathari were the principal heretical sects. It is said that “the Waldenses were burnt for the practices for which the Franciscans were later canonized. ”
⁴
Their crime was to expose and to mock the clergy as frauds. For their piety they suffered the fate of all heretics, which was burning. More influential and more dangerous were the Manicheans, who traced their origins to the Persian Mani who had been crucified in
a. d.
276. The Manicheans worshiped one God, who incorporated both good and evil, the ancient Zoroastrian idea. The Cathari, who were equally maligned by the Christians, also worshiped the dual principle:

... the chief outstanding quality of the Cathari was their piety and charity. They were divided into two sections: the ordinary lay believers and the Perfecti, who believed in complete abstinence and even the logical end of all asceticism — the Endura —a passionate disavowal of physical humanity which led them to starvation and even apparently to mass suicide. They adopted most of the Christian teaching and dogma of the New Testament, mixed with Gnostic ritual, using asceticism as an end to visions and other-consciousness. They were so loyal to their beliefs that a John of Toulouse was able to plead before his judges in 1230... “Lords: hear me. I am no heretic; for I have a wife and lie with her, and have children; and I eat flesh and lie and swear, and am a faithful Christian. ” Many of them seem, indeed, to have lived with the barren piety of the saints. They were accordingly accused of sexual orgies and sacrilege, and burned, and scourged, and harried. Nevertheless the heresy flourished, and Cathari were able to hold conferences on equal terms with orthodox bishops.
⁵

The Holy Inquisition, in its infancy, exterminated the Cathari, tried to exterminate the Jews, and then went on to exterminate the Knights Templars, the Christian organization of knighthood and conquest which had become too powerful and wealthy. It had become independent of clergy and kings, and had thereby incurred the wrath of both. With these experiences under its expanding belt, the Inquisition in the 15th century turned to the persecution of those most heinous of all heretics, the witches, that is, to all of those who still clung to the old cult beliefs of pagan Europe.

The Manicheans and Cathari had, in order to account for the existence of good and evil (the thorniest of theological problems), worshiped good and evil both. The Catholics, not able to accept that solution, developed a complex theology concerning the relationship between God and the Devil, now called Satan, which rested on the weird idea that Satan was limited in some specific ways, but very marvelous, all of his machinations, curses, and damnations being “by God’s permission” and a testimony to God’s divine majesty. Here we have the Catholic version of double-double think. Through the processes of Aristotle’s famous logic, as adapted by St. Thomas Aquinas, which was the basis of Catholic theology, it now became clear that not to believe in the literal existence of Satan was tantamount to atheism. The evil principle, articulated by the Manicheans and Cathari, was absorbed into Catholicism, along with the horned figure of the old pagan cults, to produce the horned, clawed, sulphurous, black, fire and brimstone Satan of the medieval Christian iconographers.

Later Calvin and Luther also made their contributions. Luther had more personal contact with Satan than any man before or since. He proclaimed Satan “Prince” of this earthly realm and considered all earthly experiences under his domination. Luther and Calvin agreed that good works no longer counted —only divine grace for the elect was sufficient to ensure entrance into the Kingdom of God. Thus Reformation Protestantism obliterated the small measure of hope that even Catholicism offered. Calvin himself was a voracious witch hunter and burner.

Although the Protestants contributed without modesty and with great enthusiasm to the witch terror, we find the origins of the actual, organized persecutions, not unexpectedly, in the Bull of Innocent VIII, issued December 9, 1484. The Pope named Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger as Inquisitors and asked them to define witchcraft, describe the
modus operandi
of witches, and standardize trial procedures and sentencing. The papal Bull reversed the Church’s previous position, which had been formulated by a synod in
A. D.
785:

... if somebody, deceived by the devil, following the custom of the heathen, believes that some man or woman, is a striga who eats men, and for that reason burns her or gives her flesh to eat, or eats it, he is to be punished by death.
⁶

The Church had accordingly for 7 centuries considered the belief in witchcraft a heathen belief and the burning of alleged witches a capital crime. Pope Innocent, however, secure in papal infallibility and demonstrating a true political sensibility (leading to the consolidation of power), described the extent of his concern:

It has indeed lately come to Our ears, not without afflicting Us with bitter sorrow, that in some parts of Northern Germany, as well as in the provinces, townships, territories, districts, and dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Treves, Saltzburg, and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi
[male] and
succubi
[female], and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offenses, have slain infants yet in the mother's womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruit of the trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burthen, herd beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards, orchards, meadows, pastureland, corn, wheat, and all other cereals; these wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women, beasts of burthen, herd beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls, whereby they outrage Divine Majesty and are a cause of scandal and danger to very many.
⁷

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 Presti-digitatory 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)
⁸

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, ”
⁹
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.

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. The
Malleus
had more currency than the Bible. It was theology, it was law. To disregard it, to challenge its authority (“seemingly inexhaustible wells of wisdom,”
¹⁰
wrote Montague Summers in
1946, the year I was born) 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.
¹¹

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.