Woman Hating (14 page)

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; and 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 wonder then that women remained faithful adherents of the older totemic cults of Western Europe which honored female sexuality, deified the sexual organs and reproductive capacity, and recognized woman as embodying the regenerative power of nature. The rituals of these cults, centering as they did on sexual potency, birth, and phenomena connected to fertility, had been developed by women. Magic was the substance of ritual, the content of belief. The magic of the witches was an imposing catalogue of medical skills concerning reproductive and psychological processes, a sophisticated knowledge of telepathy, auto- and hetero-suggestion, hypnotism, and mood-controlling drugs. Women knew the medicinal nature of herbs and developed formulae for using them. The women who were faithful to the pagan cults developed the science of organic medicine, using vegetation, before there was any notion of the
profession
of medicine. Paracelsus, the most famous physician of 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 of analgesics. They performed abortions, provided all medical help for births, were consulted in cases of impotence which they treated with herbs and hypnotism, and were the first practitioners of euthanasia. Since the Church enforced the curse of Eve by refusing to permit 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 wrongly saw their whole culture as an expression of the demonic. There 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.

There were, then, three separate, though interrelated, phenomena: the fairy race with its matriarchal social organization, its knowledge of esoteric magic and medicine; the woman-oriented fertility cults, also practitioners of esoteric magic and medicine; and later, the diluted witchcraft cults, degenerate parodies of Christianity. There is particular confusion when one tries to distinguish between the last two phenomena. Many of the women condemned by the Inquisition were true devotees of the Old Religion. Many were confused by Christian militancy and aggression, not to mention torture and threat of burning, and saw themselves as diabolical, damned witches.

An understanding of what the Old Religion really was, how it functioned, is crucial if we want to understand the precise nature of the witch hunt, the amount and kind of distortion that the myth of feminine evil made possible, who the women were who were being burned, and what they had really done. The information available comes primarily from the confessions of accused witches, recorded and distorted by the Inquisitors, and from the work of anthropologists like Margaret Murray and C. L'Estrange Ewen. The scenario of the witchcraft cults is pieced together from those sources, but many pieces are missing. A lot of knowledge disappears with 9 million people.

The religion was organized with geographic integrity. 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 of the bargain. And, needless to say, it was the Church, not the Devil, which took her life.

Once the neophyte made the decision for 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 of the coven who represented the horned god. She was then marked with some kind of tattoo which was called the witches’ mark. The inflicting of 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 of witchcraft. Also, the existence of any supernumerary nipple, common in all mammals, was proof of guilt.

The 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. The Inquisition was as ruthless with children as it was with adults. There are stories of children being whipped as their mothers were being burned —prevention, it was called.

The religious ceremony, which was the main content of the sabbat, included dancing, eating, and fucking. The worshipers paid homage to the horned god by kissing his representative, the master of the coven, anywhere he indicated. The 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. The disguise conjures up the ancient, two-faced Janus.

The witches danced ring dances in a direction opposite to the path of the sun, an ancient, symbolic rite. The Lutherans and Puritans forbade dancing because it evoked for them the spectacle of pagan worship.

After the dancing, the witches ate. Often they brought their own food, rather in the tradition of picnic lunches, and sometimes the coven leader provided a real feast. The Christians alleged that the witches were cannibals and that their dinner was an orgy of human flesh, cooked and garnished as only the Devil knew how. Actually, the supper common to all sabbats was a simple meal of pedestrian food.

The whole notion of cannibalism and sacrifice has been stubbornly, persistently, and purposely misunderstood. There is no evidence that any living child was killed to be eaten, or that any living child was sacrificed. There is evidence that sometimes dead infants were ritually eaten, or used in ritual. Cannibalism, and its not so symbolic substitute, animal sacrifice, was a vital part of the ritual of all early religions, including the Jewish one. The witches participated in this tradition rather modestly: they generally sacrificed a goat or a hen. It was the Christians who developed and extended the Old World system of sacrifice and cannibalism to almost surreal ends: Christ, the sacrificial lamb, who died an agonizing death on the cross to ensure forgiveness of men’s sins and whose followers symbolically, even today, eat of his flesh and drink of his blood — what is the Eucharist if not fossilized cannibalism?

The final activity of the sabbat was a phallic orgy — heathen, drug-abetted, communal sex. The sex of the sabbat is distinguished by descriptions of pain. It was said that intercourse was painful, that the phallus of the masked coven leader was cold and oversized, that no woman ever conceived. It would seem that the horned figure used an artificial phallus and could service all the celebrants. The Old Religion, as opposed to the Christian religion, celebrated sexuality, fertility, nature and woman's place in it, and communal sex was a logical and most sacral rite.

The worship of animals is also indigenous to nature-based religious systems. Early people existed among animals, scarcely distinct from them. Through religious ritual, people differentiated themselves from animals and gave honor to them —they were food, sustenance. There was a respect for the natural world — people were hunter and hunted simultaneously. Their perspective was acute. They worshiped the spirit and power they saw manifest in the carnivore world of which they were an integral part. When man began to be “civilized, ” to separate himself out of nature, to place himself over and above woman (he became Mind, she became Carnality) and other animals, he began to seek power over nature, magical control. The witch cults still had a strong sense of people as part of nature, and animals maintained a prime place in both ritual and consciousness for the witches. The Christians, who had a profound and compulsive hatred for the natural world, thought that the witches, through malice and a lust for power (pure projection, no doubt), had mobilized nature/animals into a robotlike anti-Christian army. The witch hunters were convinced that toads, rats, dogs, cats, mice, etc., took orders from witches, carried curses from one farm to another, caused death, hysteria, and disease. They thought that nature was one massive, crawling conspiracy against them, and that the conspiracy was organized and controlled by the wicked women. They can in fact be credited with pioneering the politics of total paranoia —they developed the classic model for that particular pathology which has, as its logical consequence, genocide. Their methods of dealing with the witch menace were developed empirically— they had a great respect for what worked. For instance, when they suspected a woman of witchcraft, they would lock her in an empty room for several days or weeks and if any living creature, any insect or spider, entered that room, that creature was identified as the woman's familiar, and she was proved guilty of witchcraft. Naturally, given the fact that bugs are everywhere, particularly in the woodwork, this test of guilt always worked.

Cats were particularly associated with witches. That association is based on the ancient totemic significance of the cat:

It is well known that to the Egyptians cats were sacred. They were regarded as incarnations of Isis and there was also a cat deity.... Through Osiris (Ra) they were associated with the sun; the rays of the “solar cat, ” who was portrayed as killing the “serpent of darkness” at each dawn, were believed to produce fecundity in Nature, and thus cats were figures of fertility.... Cats were also associated with Hathor, a cow-headed goddess, and hence with crops and rain....

Still stronger, however, was the association of the cat with the moon, and thus she was a virgin goddess — a virgin-mother incarnation. In her character as moon-goddess she was inviolate and self-renewing... the circle she forms in a curled-up position [is seen as] the symbol for eternity, an unending re-creation.
²⁹

The Christians not only converted the horned god into Satan, but also the sacred cat into a demonic incarnation. The witches, in accepting familiars and particularly in their special feeling for cats, only participated in an ancient tradition which had as its substance love and respect for the natural world.

It was also believed that the witch could transform herself into a cat or other animal. This notion, called lycanthropy, is twofold:

... either the belief that a witch or devil-ridden person temporarily assumes an animal form, to ravage or destroy; or, that they create an animal “double” in which, leaving the lifeless human body at home, he or she can wander, terrorize, or batten on mankind.
³⁰