However, the Cathars were relatively soon despatched, as we have seen, culminating in the conflagration of 210 Perfecti beneath the citadel of Montsegur in 1244. Although pockets of Catharism survived - and may, in some form or another, continue to survive to this day - the Inquisition had done its worst and triumphed. But even so, it had hardly hit its stride. Dominic's men had a much older and more widespread enemy in its sights, a more virulently hated opponent of truly primeval standing - women.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the priests of Peter's Church should campaign tirelessly and fanatically against females - after all, the Magdalene had complained to Jesus that he `hates me and all the race of women' - but the ferocity and insanity involved still have the power to rock both heart and soul.
Their excuse was, of course, witchcraft, not only evil-doing and heresy, but also Devil-worship - the deliberate act of aligning oneself with Satan, often, allegedly, by actually signing a pact with the Prince of Darkness himself.
The story of how the Inquisitors dealt with the accused is not for the squeamish, but must be faced if the nature of persecution and the dire potential of bigotry and hatred is ever to be fully understood. Although despicable in the extreme, the Nazis' reign of terror against the Jews and Stalin's atrocities against 20 million of his own people48 only present part of the picture of man's inhumanity to man. The depredations of the medieval Church provide the missing link in the history of sadism - man's inhumanity to woman.
It is here that the Reverend Alphonse Joseph-Mary August Montague Summers enters the story proper - as, if nothing else, a cautionary tale about the limitless capacity of even an educated and intelligent bigot for believing the most arrant and dangerous nonsense. Yet he is no fire-and-brimstone character from the pages of the medieval Inquisition, although no doubt he would have loved to be: Summers died as recently as 1948, a pitiless and fanatical opponent of anything or anyone that smacked of heresy or challenged the smallest detail of Catholic belief. He will be quoted extensively, for although well-balanced modern readers may be tempted to dissolve into giggles simply because of his ,over the top' pompous and self-satisfied style, in fact he is a profoundly serious object lesson. The twentieth-century Summers possessed the same thought-processes and emotional responses as his brothers-in-spirit, the monks and priests of the medieval Inquisition, with hardly an iota of difference. Chillingly, even the jacket blurb of the 1960s reprint of his infamous book The History of Witchcraft (1925), states:
He was not ashamed of the great excesses committed in the 17th and 18th centuries, on the contrary, he vigorously defends everything the church ever did to extirpate witchcraft and heresy.
Interestingly, Summers notes: `All the heresies, and the Secret Societies of heretics, which infested Europe during the Middle Ages were Gnostic ...'49 Just like Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist. Just like Jesus himself, in fact.
It is no accident that the first `witches' accused of attending the diabolical Sabbat to fall foul of the Inquisition were in fact Cathars and their maidservants from the Toulouse and Carcassonne area. In 1335 sixty-three people were tortured to extract confessions: chief among them was Anne-Marie de Georgel, who declared - apparently also speaking for the others - that they understood this world to be a battleground between the god of Heaven and the Lord of this world, and as they considered that the latter would triumph, they supported him. This may have seemed like Satanism to the accusing clerics, but it was, of course, simply Gnosticism - although as far as they, and the later Summers, were concerned, there was no great difference between the two. Another young woman admitted to the crime and sin of serving `the Cathari at supper' so
Inherently unclean
Excavating beneath the story of the original witchfinders and the thoughts of Summers, the full horror of a world gone mad is revealed. But it is more even than that: it is a living nightmare where the torturers and killers do so in the name of the highest good, and the `evil' accused are, for the most part, utterly innocent of all great wrong. This was truly a time when Satan walked the earth - in the guise of the God of Love.
While there will undoubtedly be many who object to the witch trials being depicted as primarily a sustained outrage against women, there is no doubt whatever that the witch hysteria `provided a focus for sexist hatred in male-dominated society'.51 It had not escaped the notice of the Inquisition that the hated Cathars practised an almost unique form of spiritual egalitarianism of the sexes, and that their influence had helped foster a great flowering of secular arts in the south of France, including the artful songs of the Troubadours, and the cult of the Lady - clearly a resurrection of ancient goddess worship. (The Troubadour's insistence of loving individual women was quite new to most people - nothing in the classical world was remotely similar.) Everywhere they looked in the Languedoc and Provence, the men of the Church must have blanched at the unavoidable echoes of the unacceptable `Apostle of the Apostles' - Mary Magdalene, whose memory they were so eager to malign, and whose cult they were intent on destroying.
It must not be forgotten that women, whether accused of witchcraft or not, were widely believed - certainly by the Church patriarchy - to be naturally polluted and unclean. In this, they accepted the Rabbinical tradition that claimed Eve first menstruated only after she had fornicated with the snake - her firstborn, Cain, being widely seen as the child of the serpent, not Adam. Today orthodox Jews refuse to shake hands with a woman in case she is menstruating, while rural communities across Europe still hold that a woman with her period will turn milk or wine sour and blunt knives. Saint Jerome thundered `Nothing is so unclean as a woman in her periods; what she touches she causes to become unclean.' In the seventh century, Bishop Theodore of Canterbury forbade menstruating women to take communion or even enter a church - as did the French synod of Meaux. Even in the twentieth century a Scottish medical textbook quoted the old rhyme: `Oh! Menstruating woman, thou'rt a fiend/From which all nature should be closely screened.'S2 As Barbara Walker points out, religious women especially were ordered to detest their own bodies, citing the Rule for Anchoresses: `Art thou not formed of foul slime? Art thou not always full of uncleanness?"'
The association between the vileness of `witchcraft' and menstruation was reinforced as far as the Montague Summers of this world were concerned by the - admittedly extreme - rites of Gnostic groups such as the Ophites and the Carpocratians (whom we have discussed previously). When reading the following passage by Epiphanius, it is instructive to recall that the Carpocratians claimed to have received sexual secrets (akin to those of the Ophites) from Salome, Martha and Mary Magdalene - and that Saint Clement confessed that he knew this to be true.
... the wretches mingle with each other ... after they have consorted together in a passionate debauch ... The woman and the man take the man's ejaculation into their hands, stand up ... offering to the Father, the Primal Being of All Nature, what is on their hands, with the words, `We bring to Thee this oblation, which is the very Body of Christ'.
... They consume it, take housel of their shame and say: `This is the Body of Christ, the Paschal Sacrifice through which our bodies suffer and are forced to confess the sufferings of Christ.' And when the woman is in her period, they do likewise with her menstruation. The unclean flow of blood, which they garner, they take up in the same way and eat together. And that, they say, is Christ's Blood. For when they read in Revelation, `I saw the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month,54 they interpret this as an allusion to the monthly incidence of the female period.55
Clearly Evensong was once rather more colourful than it is today. However, as we shall see, devotees of the Black Mass revived the sacrament of the semen and menstrual blood, although they may not actually have realized that they were reinstating an original Christian ritual (if, indeed, the Carpocratians, Simon Magus and Clement of Alexandria were right). Perhaps they merely wanted to shock. In any case, this sort of rite is also found in Tantrism, where consumi
ng the living substances of sex and reproduction were believed to be of a higher kind of spirituality than eating the dead god, even when transubstantiated into, or represented by, the bread and wine - `although the colour symbolism was the same' .56 (Interestingly, both Catholics and the later Protestants denounced witches as cannibals.)
To the Tantrics, the officiating priestesses, who were expected to menstruate in order to benefit from the extra flow of lunar power, were symbolized by the colour red. Is this why Mary Magdalene was traditionally portrayed as boasting a thick red mane of hair, despite the fact that as an Egyptian or Ethiopian - or even, as widely supposed, a Judaean - her hair would have been extremely dark? And one must not forget that in the Middle Ages women with the symbolic red hair were believed to be witches, and often burnt as such.
It was long believed that demons were born of menstrual blood - including the legendary basilisk with the fatal look. However, not all cultures despised the monthly flux: `the very word taboo, from Polynesian tupua, "sacred, magical", applied specifically to menstrual blood.'57 And even some European peasants believed it had curative powers - stained rags scattered on fields were believed to bless them with greater fertility. But in general the western view was - and to a large extent, still is, one of abhorrence.
Both the Catholic and Anglican hierarchies of the late twentieth century argued against the ordination of women on the grounds that a menstruating woman would `pollute' the altar. Walker notes wryly: `This would not preclude ordination of post-menopausal women, but different excuses are found for those.' She adds: `The holy "blood of life" used to be feminine and real; now it is masculine and symbolic."'
In the Middle Ages certain areas associated with the Feminine were proscribed by the Church, including wells, groves and caves, all of which had become indelibly linked with goddess worship and which - unsurprisingly - became denounced as the haunt of witches and demons. Any similar place was categorized as cunnus diaboli, `devilish cunt', and was therefore avoided by all God-fearing folk.
After the Cathars and associated heretics were effectively erased from the map, the Inquisition's feeding frenzy needed more fuel, and what worse or more disgusting heretics were there than witches, actual self-confessed worshippers of Satan? How convenient, too, that most of the accused were women! As Mary Daly writes in her Beyond God the Father (1973):
The spirit of the Church in its contempt for women, as shown in the Scriptures, in Paul's epistles and the Pentateuch, the hatred of the fathers, manifested in their ecclesiastical canons, and in the doctrines of asceticism, celibacy, and witchcraft, destroyed man's respect for woman and legalized the burning, drowning, and torturing of women ...
Women and their duties became objects of hatred to the Christian missionaries and of alternate scorn and fear to pious ascetics and monks. The priestess mother became something impure, associated with the devil, and her lore an infernal incantation, her very cooking a brewing of poison, nay, her very existence a source of sin to man. Thus woman, as mother and priestess, became woman as witch ...59
Abandon hope, all ye ...
Citing the biblical authority of Exodus 22:18 `Thou shall not suffer a witch to live' - although the kasaph of the original text actually means `seer' or clairvoyant, ironically in the same paranormal category as the exclusively male prophets - the Holy Office waded into the bloody fray, arresting, interrogating and murdering countless people.60 But of what were they accused?
Many were simply ugly old women, no doubt senile and unpleasant, or who those had fallen foul of their neighbours. Their constant mumbling was taken as the invocation of devilish spells - or even a direct prayer to Old Nick himself. Conversely, a particularly pretty girl was often accused of witchcraft, often by jealous peers or a thwarted would-be lover, especially if he was a priest. Denunciations of witchcraft represented the ultimate in harassment and bullying: human nature being what it is, the temptation was tragically too great to pass up an opportunity of settling old scores when the Inquisitors came to town.
One woman was arrested because she quarrelled with her neighbour, who then saw a snake in her garden. If horses bolted, crops failed, butter stubbornly remained milk, children sickened, women miscarried, there was always a handy witch to blame. Another woman was convicted and burnt because she had rowed with a drunk at a tavern, who - how strange! - found himself up all night vomiting. Yet another poor wretch found herself facing the flames because she had been seen pulling off her stockings - and shortly afterwards her neighbour became lame. Two Scottish `witches' were hanged because they had treated, and cured an ailing child. As Barbara Walker notes:
Joan Cason of Kent went to the gallows in 1586 for having dry thatch on her roof. Her neighbour, whose child was sick, was told ... that the child was bewitched, and it could be proved by stealing a bit of thatch from the witch's roof and throwing it on the fire. If it crackled and sparked, witchcraft was assured. The test came out positive . . 61
Women with dissimilar eyes or red hair were instantly recognizable as devil worshippers: apart from the symbolism discussed previously, perhaps this was because redheads usually have freckles, and these were often taken as `witch marks'. The Inquisitors made it known as a fact that witches bore certain special marks on their bodies, where the devil had touched them as an affirmation of their unholy pact, and which remained impervious to pain. Part of the torturers' job was to strip and search the accused for the `Devil's teat', jabbing a large bodkin into their flesh, which - although it caused great suffering - was not even categorized as torture. Then, with swift sleight of hand, the `witch pricker' substituted a retractable bodkin and, lo and behold, the mark was found! Of course witch pricking offered the perfect opportunity for all manner of violent sexual abuse, but again, this was deemed the torturer's perk and not part of being `put to the Question', or torture proper.
At a witch trial in 1593, as the jailer searched a female `witch' - which of course he did thoroughly - he discovered `a little lump of flesh, in manner sticking out as if it had been a teat, to the length of half an inch', which he `perceiving at the first sight thereof, meant not to disclose, because it was adjoining to so secret a place which was not decent to be seen; yet in the end, not willing to conceal so strange a matter"' he did show it to others. They all agreed - married men and all - that this was new in their experience, and almost certainly demonic. The woman was convicted and burnt. This `devil's teat' was, of course, a clitoris. Even physicians believed that no virtuous woman would possess such a thing633 - an interesting application of the theory of predestination.
At Lille in 1661, the pupils of alleged witch Antoinette Bourignon confessed:
The Devil gives them a Mark, which Marks they renew as often as those Persons have any desire to quit him. The devil reproves them the more severely, and obligeth them to new Promises, making them also new Marks for assurance or Pledge, that those Persons should continue faithful to him.'
The twentieth-century's own would-be Inquisitor, the Reverend Summers, expounds without so much as a flicker of irony on this, `the most important point in the identification of a witch ... the very sign and seal of Satan . . .'6' Nevertheless, in his eagerness to prove his case, Summers is nothing if not thorough in providing a wide spread of sources, which possess a quaint horror for those of more balanced minds. He cites Robert Hink, `minister at Aberfoill', in his Secret Commonwealth (1691), who noted:
A spot that I have seen, as a small mole, horny, and browncoloured; throw [sic] which mark, when a large pin was thrust (both in buttock, nose and rooff of mouth), till it bowed and became crooked, the witches both men and women, nather felt a pain nor did bleed, nor knew the precise time when this was doing to them ...
Summers informs us breathlessly that, `This mark was sometimes the complete figure of a toad or a bat; or ... the slot of a hare, the foot of a frog, a spider, a deformed whelp, a mouse' .66 Note the `foot of a frog' - a vague description if ever there was one - or that `deformed whelp', which might be almos
t any shape or size: indeed, as many people would have borne some kind of birthmark or blemish on their person, who should emerge blameless?
(Summers also argues that heretics had a particularly loathsome smell, as indeed they probably did - terror does generate a markedly acrid sort of sweat. Besides, even a single night in the Inquisition's jails would render the most fragrant somewhat malodorous. However, of course, to Summers Catholic priests often exuded the odour of sanctity, as evidence for which he remarks in utter seriousness `I myself have known a priest of fervent faith who at times diffused the odour of incense' 67 Surely it would be a very odd thing if most priests did not `at times' smell of incense! One may laugh, but this sort of infantilism - nice people smell nice but nasty people smell nasty - smacks too much of Dr Goebbels' anti-Semitic propaganda, lapped up by millions of ordinary intelligent Germans, to be anything other than chilling.)
Summers quotes `that same authority' on the site of such `Witch Marks': `In men it may often be seen under the eyelids, under the lips, under the armpits, on the shoulders, on the fundament; in women, moreover, on the breast or the pudenda. 161 Ah. But remember that wherever these marks were `found' they were located by having a skewer-like bodkin, usually about three inches long, rammed into the near-locality `till it bowed and became crooked'. And this still was not officially classed as torture.
The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code Page 17
