That was `merely' the physical aspect of the torture. Mental torture included the build-up of terror or being forced to witness the rape or torture of close family members, perhaps children under ten (categorized as `infants'). Usually children were tortured without much preamble because of their susceptibility to the torment of the whole experience, not the least having been wrenched for reasons they could never understand from their families. Usually, though, they were fair game, and soon persuaded, one way or another, to incriminate many others, including their own mothers and fathers. Being tortured on the testimony of your eight-year-old, knowing that this child had suffered abominably, must have added enormously to the victims' agony. Such testimony was acceptable in a witch trial, but in no other kind of court, even at that time.
The records of the infamous Spanish Inquisition, based at Toledo, reveal that
some victims were prevented from confessing until the lust of their tormentors had been gratified. Their torture went on for days or weeks beyond the point where they had wholly broken down, and pleaded to be told what to say, so they could say it 86
As the European Inquisitors tended to use the more obviously brutal forms of torture compared to the methods of interrogation utilized in Britain, it might be thought that the English and Scottish witch-finders were generally more compassionate. In fact, this was hardly the case: in Britain tortures such as dunking in water ('swimming the witch'), binding tightly with ropes, sleep deprivation ('walking the witch') and so on were the order of the day. Sometimes the mob devised more hideous means of dealing with the accused. In Catton, Suffolk in 1603, an eighty-year-old woman was set upon by a gang of violent men, who punched and threw her about, flashed gunpowder in her face, and then hurled her with force on a specially constructed seat `in the which they had stuck daggers and knives with sharp points upwards, [and] they often times struck her down upon the same stool whereby she was sore pricked and grievously hurt.'x' The vivid mental picture conjured by this terse report summons the not dissimilar image of Nazi bullyboys setting fire to old Jews' beards, or dragging naked middleaged women through the streets by their hair - images that haunt long after the photograph or film footage has been removed from sight. It comes as a shock, however, to realize that intensely horrible though those particular Nazi atrocities were - and remain in the mind's eye - even they were not quite so disgusting as what happened to that anonymous eighty-year-old woman in the quiet English countryside of the 1600s.
The sheer inventiveness and sadism of the tortures and the fact that most of the accused were women reveals the real agenda of the Inquisition, as expressed by the truly demonic double act, Kramer and Sprenger. Their Hammer of the Witches makes it conclusively clear that to them, at least, witchcraft was a gender-specific crime. They write of the evils of women in openly hostile terms, speaking of them being `so beautiful to look at' but `contaminating to the touch', with sweet voices that `entice passersby and kill them .. . by emptying their purses, consuming their strength and causing them to forsake God'. To the authors of the Inquisitorial handbook, a woman is a vampire, and a `curse worse than the devil'.
The Hammer of the Witches was designed to appear authoritative, being accompanied by a papal bull from Innocent VIII, supporting the book in its campaign - virtually a crusade in itself - to eradicate witches, root and branch. There is also a supportive letter from a group of theologians from the University of Cologne, but recent scholarship has suggested it was partly forged x8 And other inconsistences indicate that the wider picture of witch-hunting was at least a little different from the accepted view. For example, Kramer claimed to have tried nearly a hundred women in the Tyrol in the early 1480s, half of whom died by fire. But the surviving records tell a different story: Kramer arrived and began inciting the populace to implicate their neighbours. Eight women were convicted and burnt, but both the local archduke and the bishop remained sceptical - the latter calling Kramer a `senile old fool' and expelling him from the town.
The reason for the bishop's hostility was that Kramer had rarely accused the women of actual diabolism: on the whole they stood trial for using love spells. In the case of Helen Scheuberin, he attacked her on the basis of her promiscuity, the details of which he seemed particularly anxious to hear until the bishop's representative ordered him to stop. The townspeople were so horrified by his blatantly salacious and perverted raison d'etre that they complained to the authorities, who threw him out. Kramer then took to composing the handbook for more successful witch-hunters, infecting thousands, for generations, with his own brand of sexist sado-masochism. It found a ready audience, however, among Catholics who had always been encouraged to `offer up their suffering to God' but not their joy, and whose every visit to Church provided yet another encounter with the images of Christ's bloody and terrible death by torture. The implacable wrath and blood lust of the patriarchal God was surely nowhere more evident than in his demand for the crucifixion of his own son.
Kramer drew on several earlier sources, particularly Johannes Dominicus' Lectiones super Ecclesiastes (1380), which blames the `natural' vices of women for their openness to the Devil's influence - greed, carnality and so on. Like Eve, women are light-hearted and therefore easily swayed by demons. Dominicus, however, had never mentioned witchcraft.
On the other hand, another of Kramer's sources, Johannes Nider's Formaricus (1435), does associate outright diabolism with women's alleged natural sins - particularly that of insubordination, as evidenced in the rare occasions of their dressing in male clothing or carrying weapons. Pretending to be close to God was particularly singled out for male opprobrium. `It is presumption, deception and rebellion that are his targets.'89 In Kramer's hands, however, Nider is misquoted: women themselves become inherently evil, especially their propensity for carnality.
In a lather of the most embarrassingly obvious Freudian fear, Kramer emphasizes the anti-male crimes of women, such as their ability to make penises disappear (if only by means of illusion, the witches' glamour - an interesting addendum, rendering such an accusation open to an entirely subjective interpretation). Perhaps this primitive terror of impotence was behind the handbook's stress on the Inquisitors taking precautions against the witch's `evil eye', such as erecting a screen between themselves and the miscreant in the courtroom. (Although the authorities were assured many times that they alone had the power to withstand the witches deadly glance, few of the accusers felt particularly confident of this.) Another mode of protection was to wear a bag of salt consecrated on Palm Sunday; to avoid making eye contact with the witch, and to cross oneself as much as possible when in their jail. One Peter of Berne was careless, and plummeted down a flight of stone steps - clearly the result of a witch's enchantments, for he tortured her until she admitted it 90
Women who nag or usurp male authority were top of the Hammer's hit list, for it was assumed that they must be witches. At the same time, husbands had long been actively encouraged to abuse their wives to the last degree. Friar Cherubino's fifteenthcentury Rules of Marriage said to husbands:
Scold her sharply, bully and terrify her. And if this still doesn't work ... take up a stick and beat her soundly, for it is better to punish the body and correct the soul than to damage the soul and spare the body ... Then readily beat her, not in rage but out of charity and concern for her soul, so that beating will redound to your merit.9'
Saint Thomas Aquinas remarked that a wife is lower than a slave, for at least a slave can be freed, but `Woman is in subjection according to the law of nature, but a slave is not.'92 Presumably the `law of nature' means that as women are generally physically weaker than men, they should and must be bullied. Up until the late nineteenth-century it was legal for a British man to beat his wife as long as the instrument he used - a whip, cane or rod - was not thicker than his thumb, the original `rule of thumb'. As Walker says, `Wives had little help from the law; they were legally classified with minors and idiots, and were consigned to the custody of their husbands.'93 They
were femmes couvertes, women whose personalities were legally `covered' by their husbands'. It was in this context that female rebels, children of Lucifer but not of Satan - however mild their actions might seem today - were hounded as witches.
Cunning harm
But another group were perceived as undermining the very fabric of godly society, and were therefore singled out for the harshest of treatment - midwives. Unfortunately, the very word comes from the Anglo-Saxon med-wyf, meaning `wise-woman' or `witch'. The Church's line on midwives was neatly summed up by Kramer and Sprenger: `No one does more cunning harm to the Catholic faith than midwives', explaining that they seize the newborn child and baptize him in the name of the Devil with a magical rite by the kitchen hearth." Unsurprisingly, Montague Summers agrees, but he is merely voicing a view that is alive and well, especially in twentyfirst-century American fundamentalist circles, for midwives were always associated not only with the mysteries of birth, but also procuring abortion. Kramer and Sprenger's statement, if modified to read: `No one does more harm to the Christian faith than abortionists', possesses a remarkably modem resonance.
In the ancient world, midwives were highly regarded: in Egypt they were ruled by Isis Hathor in her Sevenfold manifestation, who gave every child its seven souls. `An earthly midwife is a sort of fairy godmother, with a spiritual tie to each child she brings into the world'95 - the polar opposite of the demonized Christian midwife. In ancient Rome there were three types of midwife, all associated with the women's temple and linked to the Greek Horae, temple servants on earth, but midwives to the gods in heaven. The obstetrix assisted at the birth; the nutrix or `nurturer' taught the mysteries of nursing and encouraged the milk to flow, while the priestesses of Ceres, the ceraria, took charge of the religious rituals surrounding the birth. All were honoured members of society.
In Christendom, because women were deemed to be sacer or untouchable after giving birth, they were not allowed to enter church for forty days afterwards. Being unclean, only other women could deal with their physical and emotional needs at this time, so female midwives were essential to the wellbeing of both mother and child. But medieval clerics hated them, mainly because they echoed the era of goddess-worship, when women had power over their own lives. The detestation of midwives procuring abortions was not out of compassion for the unborn child, but because it implied a sort of empowered feminine freemasonry.
Women in general were always suspected of using enchantments in everyday life. The Dominican friar Johann Herolt thundered:
Most women belie their Catholic faith with charms and spells, after the fashion of Eve their first mother, who believed the devil speaking through the serpent rather than God himself ... Any woman by herself knows more of such superstitions and charms than a hundred men 96
Spells and potions were the only known cures before the sixteenth century - indeed, the clergy believed that the only way to heal the sick was through exorcism. Yet the great pioneering doctor Paracelsus admitted that witches had taught him everything he 17 However, whereas a male conjuror was knew about healing. permitted to heal by the use of the magical arts, women were put to death for doing the same.
Besides abortion, any form of contraception and the easing of birth-pangs was deemed anathema. In 1559 the Parliamentary Articles of Enquiry commanded local church officials to report the use of `charms, sorcery, enchantments, invocations, witchcrafts, soothsaying' or similar `especially in the time of women's travails.' (My emphasis). Unbelievably, in 1591, the Scottish noblewoman Eufame Macalyne was committed to the stake simply for seeking palliatives for the agonies of childbirth from a midwife. In 1554 midwives were expressly forbidden to use any means to alleviate childbed suffering other than prayers that `may stand with the laws and ordinances of the Catholic Church'. 8
Up until the twentieth century the view of the Christian patriarchy was that God had cursed Eve so that she and all women throughout history would give birth in pain, so anything that eased the agony went expressly against the will of God. When women died in their travails, the Church took this to be an example of God's `continuing judgement on the sex' 99
When the nineteenth-century James Simpson initiated the use of ether and chloroform in childbirth, there was a massive outcry across the Christian world. Clergymen denounced it as a `sinful denial of God's wishes',10° while Scottish ministers asserted that such pain-control would be `vitiating against the primal curse against woman'.101
Barbara Walker notes the words of a New England minister: `Chloroform is a decoy of Satan, apparently offering itself to bless women; but in the end it will harden society and rob God of the deep earnest cries which arise in time of trouble, for help.' 102 Walker comments briskly: `With the usual half-concealed sadism of patriarchal morality, he was really saying that female screams of pain gave God pleasure, and men must see to it that God was not deprived of this.' 103 (As we have seen, it was none other than Queen Victoria who set the seal of approval on the use of chloroform in childbirth, effectively silencing at least the British clergy once and for all.)
In this context it is particularly interesting that Kramer and Sprenger emphasized the importance of making a witch shed tears. Her screams were not enough, she must be seen by the Inquisitor to weep copiously. If a witch failed to shed tears during torture she was guilty, being urged to cry `by the loving tears shed by Christ on the cross'. She was guilty if she did, of course, because it proved that the devil `gave her the gift of tears to mislead the judges" 104 round and round in a sickening Kafkaesque whirl of mad logic. Across Europe `taciturnity' was a crime punishable by burning, although so was virtually everything else a witch was accused of, and in England by peine forte et dure - being crushed under a board loaded with heavy weights.
Witches lost everything. Their money and property was instantly forfeit to the Church, which grew fat on the profits of human misery on an unheard-of scale. The accused even had to rely on `Christian charity' for the bits of mouldy bread that passed for meals in jail and it was usual for the Inquisition to demand payment for the services of the torturer, even for the wood on which the condemned were to burn. If the condemned refused to agree to parting with their money or were in no fit state to do so, their families would have to pay up.
Even the average Christian was contaminated by the Church's perversion of the truth. Although it was once widely accepted that witchcraft was a delusion, after Pope Innocent's reign, it became a heresy not to believe in its reality. Anyone who claimed witchcraft was not real must also be ranked as a witch. Inquisitor Heinrich von Schultheis declared: `He that opposes the extermination of the witches with one single word cannot expect to remain unscathed.' 105
The flames of hell
Whether a witch confessed or held out, wept or remained taciturn, implicated others or refused to accuse her neighbours, there was usually only one way her torments would end - with yet more torture, on the stake, in front of a baying crowd.
Many of the condemned had been so badly injured during the `Question' that they had to be carried or pulled in a cart to the pyre: Father Urbain Grandier (whose case will be examined later), who had suffered terribly in the `Boot', was conveyed to his grisly fate on a hurdle and had to crawl with his shattered legs to the pyre.
Some, especially women, had their tongues ripped out before they were forced on the walk of shame to their deaths to prevent them from shouting out accusations against their jailers. It seemed few cared whether they had been racked or whipped, but the same folk would be horrified if they learnt of sexual abuse.
Although under other circumstances, occasionally miscreants were afforded the mercy of being strangled before being committed to the flames, few received this solace when convicted of witchcraft. As nothing could be worse than trafficking with the Devil, so the death penalty had to take the most hideous form imaginable, affording the mob - whose hysteria effectively blanked out the uniquely abominable stench of roasting flesh - the ultimate delight of witnessing the living hell of an
other human being. Some witches were disembowelled before being tied to the stake, and, incredibly, even then they sometimes survived long enough to suffer an hour or so of the flames.
Many children died in the fires, being `imps of Satan', and one woman was burnt because she had given birth to the Devil's child. A French woman gave birth while writhing in the flames, and somehow managed to throw the living baby clear of the inferno. The crowd threw it back.
As the madness swallowed whole swathes of Europe (before being transplanted across the Atlantic to the New World), the accusations became more surreal. A cockerel was immolated for crowing at an inappropriate time (although in fact cocks do crow at all hours of the day, as the accusers must have known full well) - obviously a tool of Satan - and a horse met a fiery end for having been taught how to count by pawing the ground, which was clearly sorcery. But it was on the whole stinking human fat that coated the walls of dwellings in many a village.
In England the preferred method of despatching witches was hanging, in itself something of a craze as the over-zealous Protestant `Witchfinder General' Matthew Hopkins took command in the seventeenth century. In Scotland, though, witches were usually burnt, the last one to meet such an end being in 1727, although unofficially there were later examples. Even the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, declared `The giving up of [belief in] witchcraft is in effect the giving up of the Bible."-`-
Wesley would be pleased - a belief in witchcraft is still alive and well, especially among fundamentalists who view liberals, freethinkers, most other religions and, of course, all pagans as no better than outright Satanists. Legally, however, the situation has changed, although the end of the mass persecution of witches was signalled by the execution of Alice Molland at Exeter in 1684, and the conviction of Jane Walhern in Herefordshire in 1712. However, an interesting potential postscript was suggested by a letter in the Daily Mail of 9 December 2004 in response to a reader's query about the meaning of an inscription on a tombstone in the old churchyard at Pitsea Mount, near Basildon in Essex, which reads: `Ann Freeman, died 20th March 1879. Here lies a weak and sinful worm, the vilest of her race, saved through God's electing love, his free and sovereign grace.' Essex man Neil Fisher responded: `.. . local legend has it that the damning inscription ... reflects the fact that Ann Freeman was the last witch to be tried and put to death in England ...' He adds: `For such poignant and powerful words to be put upon a person's place of rest must have been testimony to some alleged evil commitment.' Perhaps the key is the simple word `alleged'. In any case, she seems to have repented and been `saved', presumably at the last moment, which is doubtless why she is buried in holy ground. But this poses the question: how many more `last witches' were there, recorded or unrecorded? How many more are still to suffer? If the firebombing of a pagan bookshop - which also stocked works on Christian mysticism - in the north of England by fundamentalists in the 1980s had resulted in deaths, would they have been the last witches to be `executed' in Britain?
The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code Page 19
