Woman Hating (13 page)
Men were, not surprisingly, most often the bewitched. Subject to women’s evil designs, they were terrified victims. Those men who were convicted of witchcraft were often family of convicted women witches, or were in positions of civil power, or had political ambitions which conflicted with those of the Church, a monarch, or a local dignitary. Men were protected from becoming witches not only by virtue of superior intellect and faith, but because Jesus Christ, phallic divinity, died “to preserve the male sex from so great a crime: since He was willing to be born and to die for us, therefore He has granted to men this privilege. ”
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Christ died literally for
men
and left women to fend with the Devil themselves. Without the personal intercession of Christ, women remained what they had always been in Judeo-Christian culture:
Now the wickedness of women is spoken of in Ecclesiasticus
xxv: There is no head above the head of a serpent: and there is no wrath above the wrath of a woman. I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon than to keep house with a wicked woman. And among much which in that place precedes and follows about a wicked woman, he concludes: All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman. Wherefore S. John Chrysostom says on the text. It is not good to marry (S. Matthew xix): What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colours!... Cicero in his second book of
The Rhetorics
says: The many lusts of men lead them into one sin, but the one lust of women leads them into all sins; for the root of all woman’s vices is avarice.... When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.
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The word “woman” means “the lust of the flesh. As it is said: I have found a woman more bitter than death, and a good woman subject to carnal lust. ”
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Other characteristics of women made them amenable to sin and to partnership with Satan:
And the first is, that they are more credulous.... The second reason is, that women are naturally more impressionable, and more ready to receive the influence of a disembodied spirit....
The third reason is that they have slippery tongues, and are unable to conceal from their fellow-women those things which by evil arts they know; and since they are weak, they find an easy and secret manner of vindicating themselves by witchcraft....
... because in these times this perfidy is more often found in women than in men, as we learn by actual experience, if anyone is curious as to the reason, we may add to what has already been said the following:
that since they are feebler both in mind and body, it is not surprising that they should come more under the spell of witchcraft.
For as regards intellect, or the understanding of spiritual things, they seem to be of a different nature from men; a fact which is vouched for by the logic of the authorities, backed by various examples from the Scriptures. Terence says: Women are intellectually like children.
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Women are by nature instruments of Satan —they are by nature carnal, a structural defect rooted in the original creation:
But the natural reason is that she is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations. And it should be noted that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives.... And all this is indicated by the etymology of the word; for
Femina
comes from
Fe
and
Minus, since she is ever weaker to hold and preserve the Faith. And this as regards faith is of her very nature....
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... This is so even among holy women, so what must it be among others?
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In addition, “Women also have weak memories, ” “woman will follow her own impulse even to her own destruction, ” “nearly all the kingdoms of the world have been overthrown by women, ” “the world now suffers through the malice of women, ” “a woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep, ” “she is a liar by nature, ” “her gait, posture, and habit ... is vanity of vanities. ”
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Women are most vividly described as being “more bitter than death”:
And I have found a woman more bitter than death, who is the hunter’s snare, and her heart is a net, and her hands are bands. He that pleaseth God shall escape from her; but he that is a sinner shall be caught by her. More bitter than death, that is, than the devil....
More bitter than death, again, because that is natural and destroys only the body; but the sin which arose from woman destroys the soul by depriving it of grace, and delivers the body up to the punishment for sin.
More bitter than death, again, because bodily death is an open and terrible enemy, but woman is a wheedling and secret enemy.
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and also:
And that she is more perilous than a snare does not speak of the snare of hunters, but of devils. For men are caught not only through their carnal desires, when they see and hear women: for S. Bernard says: Their face is a burning wind, and their voice the hissing of serpents.... And when it is said that her heart is a net, it speaks of the inscrutable malice which reigns in their hearts....
To conclude: All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs xxx: there are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing which says not, it is enough; that is, the mouth of the womb.
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Here the definition of woman, in common with the pornographic definition, is her carnality; the essence of her character, in common with the fairy-tale definition, is her malice and avarice. The words flow almost too easily in our psychoanalytic age: we are dealing with an existential terror of women, of the “mouth of the womb, ” stemming from a primal anxiety about male potency, tied to a desire for self (phallic) control; men have deep-rooted castration fears which are expressed as a horror of the womb. These terrors form the substrata of a myth of feminine evil which in turn justified several centuries of gynocide.
The evidence, provided by the
Malleus
and the executions which blackened those centuries, is almost without limit. One particular concern was that devils stole semen (vitality) from innocent, sleeping men — seductive witches visited men in their sleep, and did the evil stealing. As Ernest Jones wrote:
The explanation for these fantasies is surely not hard. 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.
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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” 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. If the bewitched man could identify the woman who had afflicted him, he could demand reinstatement of 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.
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Often the witches, greedy by virtue of womanhood, were not content with the theft of 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?
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How can we understand that millions of people for centuries believed as literal truth these seemingly idiotic allegations? How can we begin to comprehend that these beliefs functioned as the basis of a system of jurisprudence that condemned 9 million persons, mostly women, to being burned alive? The literal text of the
Malleus Maleficarum,
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 ourselves and which would separate us from the rest of the species. There is nothing to indicate that “civilization, ” “culture, ” and/or Christianity have in any way moderated the primal male dread of castration. Quite the contrary,
history
might even be defined as the study of the concrete expression of that dread.
The Christians in their manifold variety were continuing the highly developed Jewish tradition of misogyny, patriarchy, and sexist suppression, alternatively known as the Garden-of-Eden-Hype. The Adam and Eve creation myth is
the
basic myth of man and woman, creation, death, and sex. There is another Jewish legend, namely that of Adam-Lilith, which never assumed that place because it implies other, nonsexist, nonpatriarchal values. The Genesis account of Adam and Eve in Eden involves, according to Hays, three themes: “the transition from primitive life to civilization, the coming of death, and the acquisition of knowledge. ”
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As Hays points out, Adam has been told by God the Father that if he eats from the Tree of Knowledge he will die. The serpent tells Eve that she and Adam will not die. The 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 of civilization, death, and knowledge. As punishment, Adam must go to work and Eve must bear children. We have here the beginning of the human family and the work ethic, both tied to guilt and sexual repression by virtue of their origins. One could posit, with all the assurance of a Monday-morning quarterback, that Adam and Eve always were mortal and carnal and that through eating 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.
