Daughters of the Inquisition
Medieval Madness: Origins and Aftermath
Christina Crawford
DEDICATION
As women, we are all daughters. Some of us may not have chosen to be mothers, wives, aunties or sisters … but we are all daughters.
This book is dedicated to all the daughters who have gone before us, those present with us today and those yet to be born into the future.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
The Search for WomanSpirit
PART ONE
THE GODDESS: HERSTORY
WomanSpirit – Free
PART TWO
TRANSITION TIMES
WomanSpirit – Challenged Threatened
PART THREE
THE INQUISITION
WomanSpirit – Demonized Burnt to Ashes
PART FOUR
AFTERMATH
WomanSpirit – Rising
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INTRODUCTION
THE SEARCH FOR WOMANSPIRIT
This book is the fulfillment of a promise made twenty years ago during an illness which nearly took my life and from which recovery was both physically tedious and psychologically challenging. That promise was to connect with Spirit as first priority in my life and to find the WomanSpirit with which to align myself. Since then, a personal journey toward my soul’s unification with Spirit has immersed me.
My own world originally began with chaos and was steeped in terror. I have had a very long way to come in the rebirth of my own spirit, and to recover from my own early years of near annihilation and shame before I could personally reconnect with a greater truth. And you as reader may ask quite naturally how I traveled from Mommie Dearest written in the late 70’s to this present work on the Inquisition. Assuredly it has been a long and bumpy road. Since my teenage years I have been immersed in issues of social justice, first trying to right the wrongs in my personal life and then looking outward to become proactive in society. The Inquisition is one of the most enormous instances of social injustice ever endured, yet no one seemed to connect it in any meaningful way as an influence on women today. In fact it had nearly disappeared from the radar screen of current perspective. I decided to change that equation, never imagining that it would take so many years of my life, require such tenacity or become so daunting a task. For me it would not be enough to know the details and bring the travesty into present consciousness. I needed to know what women’s lives were like before the Inquisition in order to fully appreciate what was lost. Then I wanted to know how and why such a phenomenon ever occurred in the first place. For instance, why were secular men continuously exhorted by churchmen to degrade women? Why did the Inquisitors resort to barbarous violence against individual females, stalking them for fifty years, driving them to insanity through torture and imprisonment, even cutting off a woman’s breasts as a public spectacle when the condemned was being hauled in cart through the streets on her way to being burned alive at the stake?
The first question turned out to be: Where was it, this WomanSpirit? To my dismay, wherever my initial journey took me, Spirit bore no resemblance to Woman. Spirit had distinctly male characteristics. In my heart, I knew that could not be the truth. Because Woman represented more than half of the human race, it seemed clear to me that Spirit must also have a female face. What sense does the universe make otherwise?
The next question was what to look for? What was uncovered and is described in the following pages of this book evolved as though following many threads of different colors gathered on a loom that appear from various directions and chronologies, slowly being woven together. If one only sees the threads, although some are fascinatingly beautiful in themselves, one does not appreciate the pattern as it slowly emerges on the loom to create a final portrait. And if one hurries to see the finished product, full appreciation of the excitement of seeing a pattern revealed from a thousand seemingly separate threads is diminished.
The process has been to discover an authentic threshold of knowing one’s own womanhood first, through accumulation of accurate information about our ancient past. Why? Because truth from the past is of great value, learning what our predecessors knew, uncovering an unfolding mystery from physical evidence, taking charge of our existence and in this instance, gaining new insight into the place of Woman in the universal system. Archeology, the unearthing of the physical past, is an exciting challenge to mitigate misconceptions about our own past, particularly the past of Woman. And from there it is to become knowledgeable about the spiritual legacy of Western womanhood: what happened to us, why it occurred, how it changed all of us. Then having lived through this journey together, this is now the question: How do we use the information to become stronger and wiser?
There is no painless or gentle way to say what needs to be said, or write what needs to be written or, for you the reader, to see what needs to be seen. How do I know? Because it has been neither painless nor gentle for me, the author and woman, as the years spent working on this project became all-consuming. When I began this project, the idea was to write a women’s history of the European Inquisition because such a work did not seem to exist, or at least none that I could find. But to my dismay, after spending some time on both research and writing, I realized that taken as a stand- alone construct, the Inquisition did not make sense. My task then was to fit these centuries into a context that was comprehensible. Eventually, the only way I could see was to walk backwards in time until I found what was missing. Where I landed was in the Goddess cultures of the Neolithic (8000–3500 BCE) having to learn new terminology and envision a vastly different world from the one in which we live today. In that world women governed, were self-sovereign and revered a female Creatrix. But how did the Western world transition from a world where women were endowed with inalienable rights to one of the Inquisition where they were being exterminated? Without map or guide, at first it was a matter of trudging doggedly and stubbornly, from dead end to blind canyon, finding only an obscurely worded reference here and there until I found the crossroads at which the two diametrically opposite concepts met and clashed. Unraveling the details meant searching out ancient reference sources with archaic language, some of which are included in this book, and additionally pouring over biblical text. Persistence meant taxing every last bit of experience as writer and woman, engaging my intuition, perseverance, education and life skills to continue forward progress. That process has become the focus of this work.
Since my rather solitary journey has now taken me through this learning and truth-telling process, it is clear to me that my life will never be the same again. There were many moments when, temporarily overwhelmed by the enormity of what faced me, there were thoughts that this was too difficult and too enormous a task. And then there were other times when the work flowed magically, and help or information arrived right on time!
So, it may be that reading this book will bring up in your own life many hidden aspects now asking to be addressed. Together we are seeking a 21st century WomanSpirit, founded in knowledge, assisted by choices of many different role models and guided by that Spirit of Woman who, as you will see, successfully led the people of the Western world in health, peace and prosperity for thousands of years, but, until recently, we knew almost nothing at all about Her.
Previously, I had seen other women embark on spiritual journeys only to become frightened and turn back. Become frightened of what, I needed to ask. Today I believe that it was the collective remembrance of being historically, systematically, and culturally shamed, which was accompanied by the real annihilation that followed. A
t least in part, I believe it was actually the long-forgotten memory residing in the collective unconscious of what happened to women during the 700 years of the Inquisition, a memory which tells us that strong-willed, independent women seeking alternatives are still never very far from “the stake.”
Most of Western history, throughout the past two thousands years and particularly during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has been written by men about the male experience. Men, therefore, are accustomed to having their history fully available to them. Women, on the other hand, have been systematically denied access to herstory. In fact, past versions of history cannot be considered entirely the truth when they omit reference to one half of the human population, concentrating solely on the feats of the male.
Then, there is another facet to consider: when a person is presented with information containing an emotional component which appears to contradict what they have been previously taught by sources or persons they believe to be correct, they are faced with cognitive dissonance. In order to accommodate this information, which is causing immediate discomfort and does not fit into their existing belief system, the person is faced with at least three choices: ignore it, deny it, or find ways to assimilate it. The first two are chosen as a result of fear of the new or unknown. The third choice is the ultimate goal of this work.
Now that I know where the journey of this book goes, let me share a brief overview. We begin with a glimpse of women and their lives as our ancestors in the Western world in the ancient past based on relatively recent discoveries in archeology. How they conceptualized energy, religion, sex, healing, family, birth, death and related to men was quite different from ours in the present. In each section of the book, these ideas will be revisited to see how they change. Over time these women built cities, invented agriculture, pottery and weaving, evolved a high level of art, architecture and commerce, and reigned over stable communities for long periods. They achieved through their ability to innovate and through a process they evolved for living in peace. But nothing lasts forever, and when the transition times do come they bring with them enormous changes through weather, warriors and the introduction of a new male deity. The women assimilated these people and the changes until all out war was declared upon them, their institutions and their Goddess Creatrix. This was the process which would result in the Inquisition of the Middle Ages and persist until after both the American and French Revolutions.
I invite you to come with me now on the discovery of Herstory. Assuredly, we are not alone.
PART ONE
THE GODDESS: HERSTORY
WomanSpirit – Free
THE ANCIENT NEOLITHIC WESTERN WORLD 8000 to 2500 BCE
I wish we could sit together around the fire and tell one another the story of WOMAN, recounting the ceremonies of reverence for our deity and us in Her Image.
I wish we could collectively hear the seasoned voices of our aunties, our grand-mothers and their grand-mothers through them, telling the age-old story of the love of woman, the love of life, the love our connection to the great mother Earth, from whence we come and into whose loving womb we will return when this journey is over, to be reborn again.
Herstory begins with birth and the mystery of initiation into the life of a devotee of the Goddess, the woman who became priestess: sacred incarnation of the Goddess; sacred sexuality; giver of law, grantor of justice; provider of abundance, creator of music and dance; sweet strands of harmony on winged strings; diviner, teller of the future, holder of fate; snake goddess of transformation; knower of secrets beyond time; foreteller of fortune, queen of death and rebirth; keeper of the eternal circle of life death and renewal. We would say that She is Silence, Wisdom, Ecstasy, Joy, Terror, Sun, Moon and Starlight, Holy Blood, Sacred Earth. We would tell the daughters legends of the mystery of all the plants and animals, also the beloved creatures of the Goddess. They would come to know that She is also the Huntress, the mighty Serpent, the Honey, the Bees who made it, and great Auroch Bull. She is the Cow Mother, the Daylight, and the Dark. She is forever who ever was and who will ever be.
We would arise from the fire and take our daughters into the mystery as our mothers before had done with us. Taking our daughters deep into the caves, washing them in the sacred springs, adorning their precious heads with wreaths of flowers and herbs, painting their lovely skin with blood-hued Goddess signs, recounting to them the age-old story that life is a transit, therefore, ecstasy is precious – a life-affirming tribute to the great Goddess who is all life.
Women fasted and sang as they walked deeper and deeper into the great womb, the source, the life spring, the pulse, the blood, the beginning of all. Hand-in-hand they walked with their precious lifeblood daughters who were as beautiful as they were strong and loving, filled with joy and trust.
When they returned once again to daylight, these daughters were initiated. They belonged forevermore to the Mother Goddess, following in the footsteps of their own earthly mother and the mothers who came before they did. In full honor and glory, they took their places in the sacred temples. They became the young hearthfire keepers, graduated to being diviners with the help of the sacred snakes always held close. These new temple daughters divined for the people as countless others had done over the ages, imbibing of the sacred serpent nectar and achieved untold powers, needing no ramparts, no battlements, no weapons of sharp metal. The great Mother had given more than mortal minds could have ever conjured and provided eons of natural defense, because no one dared risk the vengeance of the diviners who knew about life, death, and the future forces across all time. In sacred SILENCE, the Wisdom of Sophia ruled supreme.
Who were these people? Where did they come from?
The people worshiping a female deity lived in Persia, Turkey (Anatolia), throughout the Middle East, the Mediterranean coastal areas and the Balkans (Old Europe), and into the islands beyond, now called Ireland and England.
They built houses, established permanent villages, and developed agriculture to ensure a stable food supply. Their trade routes flourished; they raised and domesticated animals, hunted and fished but were primarily vegetarians.
A new picture emerges of villages housing women, children, and the elderly with the men elsewhere tending herds, working fields or hunting and fishing. This would have been close to the model in nature which the people witness involving animals, particularly herd animals. Among grazers, leaders were females. Young males were permitted until puberty. Adult males were accepted only at mating time.
Adult women and men may not have lived together on a year-round basis. Perhaps this kept the peace. Perhaps this was the best model for delegation of responsibilities. But, as a result, women developed very different concepts about the cosmology of the world than did men.
The woman who lived in agricultural villages, which later became cities, developed a stable, communal, circular sense of time and social order with space for artistic endeavor because she had no need of self-defense. She was attuned to a natural cycle of birth, death and rebirth within the circular, lunar, cyclical sense of a time-space continuum which she chose as her attunement with the workings of the cosmos. She is earth centered, nurturing and believed in a personal attachment with the lunar planet.
These people who worshipped the female principle as deity believe She was the divine creatrix, the great mother, the goddess of all beginnings, the mother earth. Although she was called by a variety of different names, she was essentially the Goddess of all – all people, plants, animals, heavens, water, earth. She was Life, Death, Regeneration. She was the basic organizing principle around which all life, culture, religion, and art revolved, evolved, and nurtured the people of her communities.
The man is nomadic, constantly changing territory. He is a herder, but he is also a fighter, a killer, a follower of men stronger than he, even accustomed to being seasonally homeless. His loyalty is to his leader, his horses, dogs, weapons, and probably to his male lover, because often he has no acce
ss to women. He is attuned to the light of day wherein he is relatively safe because the ever present danger is more visible to him. He views life as having a definite beginning and end, with a sense of finality. He is born of woman and often dies at the hands of other men. He is steeled to hardship and taught to overcome weakness. The sun is his best friend, even when harsh. It awakens his sense of being nurtured by the light, which warms him and lights his way as he tracks across the land with his herds. He comes to revere and depend on this solar light, which guides him in the cold, frightening vastlands.
The man knows death firsthand. He has hunted animals for food and clothing, killed his enemies to ensure his own survival. He understands the finality of killing and being killed. He has a natural sense of this linear path of life, a linear sense of time. Start to finish, life for him is a line of time, from birth to death, and death is the end. Because within his physical being he has no power of regeneration, no power of giving birth, no power of creating life, his linear view of the life process will translate into a linear conception of the spiritual process when he becomes the one in charge of developing religious systems. The two – female and male – develop very different outlooks on natural life.
Much of what we know about the civilizations of the Neolithic in Europe has been unearthed recently: within approximately the last forty years. Even the archeologists have been astonished by what they discovered. Much work and research still is being done, but the basic facts have been established. However, because it is so recent, many are not yet aware that the information has now changed perspective on these ancient peoples, particularly on ancient women. Two people are credited with major finds in this area. They are James Mellart and Marija Gimbutas. Both have written extensively: Mellart on the city of Catal Huyuk in Turkey and Gimbutas on what she calls Old Europe. Even with these extensive studies, what emerges are tantalizing fragments: glimpses into a world completely different from our own. We know a lot more about all of it than we ever did before, but it is still not a complete picture. Therefore, what proceeds in the following pages are snapshots of life from those ancient times, which are to be used as guides while Herstory unfolds.
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