For the exorcisms of the Church are for this very purpose, and are entirely efficacious remedies for preserving oneself from the injuries of witches.19
The Malleus is militantly – indeed, psychopathically – misogynistic. Intrepid though they might be in contending with invisible powers, the authors of the text were terrified of women to a degree verging on dementia. Women are regarded as inherently weak and, almost by definition, ‘fallen’. A woman ‘is an imperfect animal, she always deceives’.20 She is ‘quicker to waver’ in religious faith. She is ‘a liar by nature’. She is ‘beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch and deadly to keep’.21 She is to blame, in effect, for virtually everything: ‘All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.’22
If beautiful women were particularly suspect, so, too, were midwives, with their intimate knowledge and experience of what the Inquisitors perceived as feminine mysteries. Stillborn children were routinely believed to have been murdered by a midwife as an offering to the devil. Deformed, disfigured, sickly or even badly behaved children were similarly ascribed to the midwife's witchcraft. By virtue of the confidence she inspired in other women, and the competition for authority she entailed for the priest, the midwife was an ideal target. On the midwife, the Inquisitor could practise, hone and refine his warped skills with impunity.
The Malleus is merciless in its treatment of girls who had been seduced and then jilted:
For when girls have been corrupted, and have been scorned by their lovers after they have immodestly copulated with them in the hope and promise of marriage with them, and have found themselves disappointed in all their hopes and everywhere despised, they turn to the help and protection of devils.23
But no stigma whatever is attached to the seducer himself – who, if anything, the Malleus implies, is likely to become a victim.
The Malleus is quick to interpret as witchcraft any behaviour its clerical authors cannot explain – behaviour that might entail nothing more sinister than the effects of drugs, such as ergot or ‘magic mushrooms’, or female masturbation, or simple sensual sunbathing:
the witches themselves have often been seen lying on their backs in the fields or in the woods, naked up to the very navel, and it has been apparent from the disposition of those limbs and members which pertain to the venereal and orgasm, as also from the agitation of their legs and thighs, that, all invisibly to the bystanders, they have been copulating with Incubus devils.24
And the book offers, too, a rationalisation that must have assuaged the bruised pride of many a cuckolded husband:
It is certain also that the following has happened. Husbands have actually seen Incubus devils swiving their wives, although they have thought that they were not devils but men. And when they have taken up a weapon and tried to run them through, the devil has suddenly disappeared, making himself invisible.25
The Malleus addresses itself to sundry other manifestations and practices of witchcraft as well. It deals with the alleged killing, cooking and eating of children. It describes the various ways in which witches bind themselves to demonic forces. It discusses the sticking of pins into wax images. Again and again, however, with the obsessive single-mindedness of a guided missile, it returns to matters of sexuality. Not infrequently, the book's sexual obsessions take wing into fevered fantasy. It speaks, for instance, of
witches who… collect male organs in great numbers, 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.26
Such images as this are ascribed to demonic illusion, caused ‘by confusing the organ of vision by transmuting the mental images in the imaginative faculty’.27 But one cannot help wondering whether the work's authors, simply to conceive of such things, have not partaken of some psychotropic substance themselves, or possessed imaginations more tortured and twisted even than Bosch's.
The Malleus is particularly obsessed by copulation with disincarnate demonic entities – with incubi (male) and succubi (female). Such sexual relations with incorporeal beings might often entail nothing more than a wet dream. In consequence, the book's authors are much preoccupied with semen. In clinical detail, they explore the question of precisely how demons consummate the sexual act. They consider whether it is ‘always accompanied by the injection of semen’.28 If so, they query where the semen comes from – whether, for example, it is intrinsically demonic, or whether it has been stolen from mortal men. The quality of the semen is then subjected to minute scrutiny. By what criteria do demons choose men from whom to pilfer seed? Can semen ejaculated during ‘innocent’ wet dreams be collected by demons and, so to speak, recycled? No possibility is left unstudied.
For the authors of the Malleus, copulation with a disincarnate entity was an especially grievous and heinous transgression. It represented for them a blasphemous parody of the Virgin Birth, the process whereby Jesus himself was conceived by the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost. Four centuries later, the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans was to speculate about the mysterious, supposedly unmentionable and ultimately unpardonable ‘Sin against the Holy Ghost’ – the one sin for which there was reportedly no forgiveness. Huysmans identified this sin – the nature of which was kept scrupulously secret by the Church – as precisely the blasphemous parody of the Virgin Birth entailed by sexual relations with a disincarnate entity. He may well have been right, and the portentous secret may not have been quite as secret as it purported to be. In Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, for instance – composed when the Malleus, first published a century before, was still widely in use – Faustus employs demonic agencies to conjure up the incorporeal shade of Helen of Troy. By definition, Helen's shade would be classified as a species of succubus. And it is only after his sexual union with her that his ultimate fate is sealed, and he is irrevocably and irretrievably damned.
Witch Trials
Armed with the Malleus Maleficarum, the Inquisition embarked on a reign of terror across the whole of Europe. In its investigations and interrogations, the rule of evidence was simple. Anything to which two or three witnesses testified on oath was accepted as wholly true and definitively proven. Much use was made of trick questions calculated to trap both suspect and witness. One might be asked, for instance,
whether he believes that there are such things as witches, and that… tempests could be raised or men or animals bewitched. Note that for the most part witches deny this at first.29
If, witch or not, one does deny belief in witchcraft, the next question follows with the impact of a trap snapping shut: ‘Then are they innocently condemned when they are burned? And he or she must answer.’ No matter what the victim replies, he or she is already doomed, since disbelief in witchcraft is itself a heresy.
When a witch was captured, elaborate precautions were taken to neutralise her powers. In order to deny her contact with the earth, and through it with the infernal regions, she would be carried aloft on a plank or in a basket. She would be presented to her judge with her back turned, to prevent any attempt to bewitch him with her gaze. Judges and all other personnel involved in a trial ‘must not allow themselves to be touched physically by the witch, especially in any contact of their bare arms or hands’. Judges were also advised to wear – sealed in specially blessed wax and hanging from a thong or chain about their necks – some blessed herbs and a quantity of salt consecrated on Palm Sunday. Despite the reiterated reassurances of immunity enjoyed by Inquisitors and judges, no chances were to be taken.
The trial would proceed with a fairly sophisticated understanding of psychology. The techniques employed reflect considerable experience in the process of extracting or extorting information. Inquisitors recognised that the mind can often be its own worst enemy – that fear can breed in solitude and isolation, and can often produce results as satisfying as physical brutality. Fear of torture, to cite the most obvious example, would thus be generated, stoked and fuelled to a pitch of panic that
precluded the need for torture itself. If the accused did not confess promptly, she would be told that examination by torture would follow. It would not follow immediately, however. Instead, the Malleus advises,
let the accused be stripped, or if she is a woman, let her first be led to the penal cells and there stripped by honest women of good reputation.30
Her judges might then ‘question her lightly, without shedding blood’, but only
after keeping the accused in a state of suspense, and continually postponing the day of examination, and frequently using verbal persuasions.31
The Inquisitor is encouraged to utilise such now familiar techniques as that of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ policemen:
let him order the officers to bind her with cords, and apply her to some engine of torture; and then let them obey at once but not joyfully, rather appearing to be disturbed by their duty. Then let her be released again at someone's earnest request, and taken on one side, and let her again be persuaded; and in persuading her, let her be told that she can escape the death penalty.32
The Malleus advocates flagrant duplicity. A witch might be promised her life, but the life would be life in prison, on bread and water.
And she is not to be told, when she is promised her life, that she is to be imprisoned in this way; but should be led to suppose that some other penance, such as exile, will be imposed.33
And even to obtain this dubious dispensation, she must denounce and reveal the identities of other witches. Nor, the Malleus hastens to qualify, need the original promise of life actually be kept. There is no obligation to treat a witch with honour, and many Inquisitors
think that, after she has been consigned to prison in this way, the promise to spare her life should be kept for a time, but that after a certain period she should be burned.34
Alternatively,
the Judge may safely promise the accused her life, but in such a way that he should afterwards disclaim the duty of passing sentence on her, deputing another Judge in his place.35
When a witch is returned to her cell following a torture session,
the Judge should also take care that during that interval there should always be guards with her, so that she is never left alone, for fear lest the devil will cause her to kill herself.36
In other words, a suicide or attempted suicide produced by agony and despair is also to be interpreted as demonically inspired, and therefore a further proof of guilt. Thus did the Inquisitors exculpate themselves. When women attempted suicide by stabbing themselves in the head with the pins fastening their headcloths, ‘so they were found by us when we had risen, as if they had wished to stick them into our own heads’. Even such acts of frenzied desperation would be ascribed to malevolent intent and twisted to serve as evidence.
In any case, suicides or attempted suicides were obviously fairly common. The Malleus observes of witches that ‘after they have confessed their crimes under torture they always try to hang themselves’. And, ‘when the guards have been negligent, they have been found hanged with their shoe-laces or garments’.37
If, despite sustained torture, a witch still refuses to confess, the Malleus counsels more baroque deceptions. A witch might be taken to a castle, for example, whose owner might
pretend he is going on a long journey. And then let some of his household… visit her and promise that they will set her entirely at liberty if she will teach them how to conduct certain practices. And let the Judge note that by this means they have very often confessed and been convicted.38
As a last resort, the Malleus advocates the most blatant and breathtakingly shameless treachery:
And finally let the Judge come in and promise that he will be merciful, with the mental reservation that he means he will be merciful to himself or the State; for whatever is done for the safety of the State is merciful.39
The Spread of Mass Madness
In our own era, we have all experienced the way in which one or another public ‘scare’ can escalate, as if by some psychological contagion, and assume the proportions of mass hysteria. In the United States during the 1950s, there was Senator Joseph McCarthy's paranoically obsessive crusade to ferret out putative Communists. In The Crucible, the playwright Arthur Miller attacked McCarthy's campaign by analogy, through the metaphor of the Salem witch trials of the seventeenth century. As a result of Miller's work, the term ‘witch hunt’ has become an accepted modern idiom for any attempt to winkle out supposed enemies through the instillation and dissemination of collective fear. More recently, we have experienced other forms of mass panic as well. Following Ronald Reagan's bombing of Libya, we saw dramatic numbers of American tourists alter their travel plans and refrain in terror from international flights. We have seen whole communities in Britain swept by allegations of child abuse for satanic rituals, causing scores of parents to be forcibly separated from their children. Given these modern instances of public scares, it is easy to understand how the fear of witchcraft could assume proportions of panic on an epidemic scale, when promulgated by the supreme religious authority of the time – could become, in effect, the psychological equivalent of plague. According to one historian:
This witch-madness was essentially a disease of the imagination, created and stimulated by the persecution of witchcraft. Wherever the inquisitor or civil magistrate went to destroy it by fire, a harvest of witches sprang up around his footsteps.40
In speaking of the Church, the same historian observes:
Every inquisitor whom it commissioned to suppress witchcraft was an active missionary who scattered the seeds of the belief ever more widely.41
The frenzied persecution of witchcraft began under the auspices of the Inquisition, when the Church still exercised undisputed supremacy over Europe's public religious life. Indeed, so obsessed was the Inquisition with witchcraft that it was soon to be caught altogether off guard by the advent of a much more serious threat – in the form of an apostate monk named Martin Luther. Within thirty years of the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, however, the ‘witch-madness was to spread to the fledgling Protestant churches.
By the mid sixteenth century, both Protestants and Catholics alike were burning witches not by twos or threes, but by the hundreds; and this incendiary frenzy continued for more than a century, attaining a climax during the carnage of the Thirty Years War between 1618 and 1648. Between 1587 and 1593, the Archbishop-Elector of Trèves burned 368 witches, the equivalent of more than one a week. In 1585, two German villages were so decimated that only one woman was left alive in each. During a period of three months, 500 alleged witches were burned by the presiding Bishop of Geneva. Between 1623 and 1633, the Prince-Bishop of Bamberg burned more than 600. During the early 1600s, 900 were burned by the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg, including nineteen priests, one of his own nephews and a number of children accused of having sexual relations with demons. In Savoy during the same period, upwards of 800 were burned. In England during the Protectorate, Cromwell had his own ‘Witchfinder-General’, the notorious Matthew Hopkins. By the end of the seventeenth century, the hysteria had spread across the Atlantic to the Puritan colonies of New England, there engendering the infamous trials at Salem that provided the backdrop for Arthur Miller's play.
But not even the worst depredations of Protestantism could equal those of Rome. In this respect, the Inquisition's record was unrivalled. The Inquisition itself boasted that it had burned, at very least, some 30,000 witches during a period of 150 years. The Church had always been more than a little prone to misogyny. The campaign against witchcraft provided it with a mandate for a full-scale crusade against women, against all things feminine.
7
Fighting the Heresy of Protestantism
The crusade against witchcraft enabled the Church to indulge its propensity for misogyny – and to impose an authoritarian control over women that rendered them subordinate and kept them in what it deemed their appointed place. Ultimately, however, something of less immediately obvious consequence w
as involved as well. For the witch, as custodian of feminine mysteries and of the old pagan religion, was also an embodiment of the natural order, with which she enjoyed a much closer, much more intimate rapport, than did the priest. And the natural order – nature herself – was inherently ‘unregenerate’. Nature still existed in a ‘fallen’ state and had yet to be redeemed, had yet to be brought into docile accord with divine law – or at any rate with divine law as the male intellects of the Church sought to interpret it. Nature had yet to be tamed and ordered. Only then would it cease to provide a refuge, a sanctuary and a conduit for the demonic. Unfortunately for the Church the problem was not quite that simple.
From the very beginning – from the days when a recognisable and definable ‘Christian’ thought had emerged out of Judaism and paganism – Church theologians had had difficulty in delineating the demonic. In periods of social, cultural, political or intellectual anarchy, when the Church constituted a bastion of order and coherence, the demonic could safely be identified as any manifestation of disorder. During such periods, the devil was indeed the lineal descendant of goat-horned, goat-hoofed, goat-tailed Pan, lord of ‘unregenerate nature’ in all its unbridled and seemingly chaotic energy – which, of course, also included sexuality. During such periods, faith was yoked to rationality, and the demonic was its antithesis – the frenzied, the possessed, the orgiastic, the irrational. Thus the demonic was thought to manifest itself in witchcraft and especially in the Walpurgisnacht or ‘Witches’ Sabbath’. And it was thus in witchcraft, and in the irrational, often sexual rites of pagan religion, that the Inquisition sought to identify the traditional archetypal ‘adversary’ of Christianity.
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