Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

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Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality Page 11

by Andrea Dworkin


  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

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  machinations, curses, and damnations being “by G od’s

  permission” and a testimony to G od’s divine majesty.

  Here we have the Catholic version o f double-double

  think. Through the processes o f Aristotle’s famous

  logic, as adapted by St. Thom as Aquinas, which was

  the basis o f Catholic theology, it now became clear

  that not to believe in the literal existence o f Satan was

  tantamount to atheism. T h e evil principle, articulated

  by the Manicheans and Cathari, was absorbed into

  Catholicism, along with the horned figure o f the old

  pagan cults, to produce the horned, clawed, sulphurous,

  black, fire and brimstone Satan o f 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” o f 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 o f God. Thus Reformation Protestantism

  obliterated the small measure o f 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 o f the actual, organized persecutions,

  not unexpectedly, in the Bull o f Innocent V III, issued

  December 9, 1484. The Pope named Heinrich Kramer

  and James Sprenger as Inquisitors and asked them to

  define witchcraft, describe the modus operandi o f

  witches, and standardize trial procedures and sen­

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  tencing. 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,

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  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

  T o deal with the increasing tide o f 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 o f 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

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  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

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  found in every courtroom. It had been read by every

  judge, each o f whom would know it chapter and verse.

  T h e Malleus had more currency than the Bible. It was

  theology, it was law. T o disregard it, to challenge its

  authority (“seemingly inexhaustible wells o f 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

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  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 o f women to

  men executed has been variously estimated at 20 to 1

  and 100 to 1. Witchcraft was a woman's crime.

  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. ” 12 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

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  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. 13

  T he word “woman” means “the lust o f the flesh. As it

  is said: I have found a woman more bitter than death,

  and a good woman subject to carnal lust. ” 14

  Other characteristics o f 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:

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  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. 15

  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.... 16

  . . . This is so even among holy women, so what must it

  be among others? 17

  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, ”

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  “she is a liar by nature, ” “her gait, posture, and habit

  . . . is vanity o f vanities. ” 18

  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. 19

  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. 20

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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.

 

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