Sons of Cain

by Peter Vronsky

  We are all familiar from childhood with the sanitized kiddie version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” but not with the depraved, paraphilic, cannibalistic version that was being told by people at the time of its origin: a brutal time, a time of fear and loathing, torture, rape and murder, heresy and witchcraft, and bloodsucking vampires and fierce cannibal werewolves lurking at the door. Our vistas of the past are fragmentary and obscured. It’s like gazing out into the past across an arctic sea of moving icebergs without seeing the menacing mass of ice below the surface. Monsters like Peter Stubbe or Jack the Ripper occasionally clamber out on the surface for us to glimpse the horror, but most of it lurks all around us, out of view in the dark, below the surface. In the past as today, occasional episodes of serial-killer werewolves horrified us with their monstrousness, and I am not the only historian to suggest that the subjects of these sporadically reported cases of werewolves and cannibal killers are the precursors of our modern serial killers.53 And the question, of course, is, why are there not more cases from that era, and why, considering the echoes of the “less-dead” labeling of prostitutes in stories like “Little Red Riding Hood,” are there no recorded cases where prostitutes are primarily targeted in the way Jack the Ripper or even the Green River Killer or dozens of other modern serial killers targeted prostitutes?

  One answer to that might be that while prostitution itself was frowned upon or tolerated as a “necessary evil,” and despite proscriptions against “fornication,” and “deviant” practices like oral or anal sex, by the Church, sexuality in general in the distant past was more open and accepted and much less repressed than it was to become in the nineteenth century.54 There was less anxiety about sexuality; there were fewer “hang-ups.” Moreover, female sexuality was defined by the notion of women as property, belonging first to their father and then after marriage to their husband. Female propriety was more of an issue to the property-owning upper classes than to the impoverished masses, by whom an unmarried daughter might be regarded as a burden rather than a family asset (as in many Third World societies today). Until relatively recently, rape was perceived first as an offense against a father’s or husband’s honor and property interests, and only second as a crime against the victimized woman.

  Rape and serial homicide today are intrinsically tied to a cultural psychopathology of anger and hate of woman bred in some men from childhood. In childhood males find themselves at the mercy of their mothers, and growing up is a process of negotiating degrees of independence from the maternal female figure, gradually turning toward the female sexual figure. But women as mothers are not infallibly perfect, and many mad things can go wrong in that alchemy of raising a boy child, threatening a male’s self-esteem, leaving behind deeply seated frustrations, resentments, traumas and angers and a sense of lack of control in the face of female sexual power. Historically male-dominated society is marked by the male aspiration to somehow tame and control that daunting female sexual power. Lest they find themselves once again infantilized by the power of “Mother” (as serial killers sometimes say, instead of “my mother”). Religious and moral proscriptions on female sexuality divide women into “good,” obedient and virtuous wives, mothers, sisters and daughters and “bad,” uncontrollable harlots who refuse to surrender their sexual power to the authority and possession of one male. The ultimate offender is the prostitute, who commercializes the one precious thing that virtuous women offer only to one “best man,” their lover or husband. This madonna/whore dichotomy between “saintly love” and “profane lust,” described by John Money in his theory of paraphilias, is seated not only in religious thinking but in social and political discourse, law and popular culture to this day.

  While lycanthrope serial killers pathologically murdered and mutilated women and children criminally in private, in the next chapter I look at the public realm, where the Church and state will sanction a judicial mass serial rape, torture and killing of women in the name of the suppression of witchcraft.

  SIX

  Malleus Maleficarum: The Great Witch Hunt as a Serial-Killing-Woman Hunt

  Signs of a diabolic pact were always to be found in the victims’ genitals.

  —MAX DASHU, REIGN OF THE DEMONOLOGISTS: THE DIABOLIST LOGIC OF TORTURE TRIALS

  Parallel to the werewolf epidemic, there was an even larger witch epidemic that triggered a sustained organized campaign of torturing, raping and killing women. It is not an exaggeration to characterize this pathological systemic serial killing of women as a form of Church- and state-sponsored serial murder.

  In the previous chapter, I argued that witch hunts occur when a society finds itself divided and that they are a way of unifying the elites by creating the illusion of a threat more urgent than the actual one dividing the society. In 1484, the pope called upon ecclesiastical and civil authorities everywhere to cooperate with Church inquisitors and demonologists in their war on witches, werewolves, monsters and heretics. The Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer published the notoriously misogynistic manual for witch-hunting Malleus Maleficarum (The Witches’ Hammer), in which, for pathological reasons we can now only guess at, he proclaimed that women have a propensity to enter sexual pacts with Satan, transforming into dangerous, superpowered creatures capable of flight and black magic. He declared that witches were not mortals practicing magic, but supernatural monsters, cannibalizing children and gathering in secret cells (covens) for meetings (witches’ sabbaths).

  The Great Witch Hunt of this era is like one of those icebergs floating by us in the dark of history. What was on the surface a religious hunt for witches actually disguised something more sinister: institutionalized, systematic paraphilic sadistic sexual torture murders of tens of thousands of women.

  As historian Angus McLaren observed, serial murders are “determined largely by the society that produced them,” and a serial killer was “best understood not so much as an ‘outlaw’ as an ‘oversocialized’ individual who saw himself simply carrying out sentences that society at large leveled.”1 Criminologist Mark Seltzer argues that serial killers take their cues from society and respond with their own homicidal contributions in a process he calls mimetic compulsion.2

  If we want to look at rape culture or serial-murder culture at its worst, we must recognize the Great Witch Hunt of 1450 to 1650 as a serial-killing epidemic.

  THE REAL SERIAL-KILLING EPIDEMIC: WITCH-HUNTING OR WOMAN KILLING?

  Historians are still baffled by the orgy of executions for witchcraft in Renaissance-era Europe, with its peak coming roughly between 1450 and 1650, a period known as the Great Witch Hunt or the Great Hunt. The witch hunt has been portrayed by feminist historians as a femicide or gynocide—a deliberate systematic murder of women by men. It has been alleged that as many as nine million women were tortured and put to death by witch-hunters in a pogrom or “female holocaust.” Some argued that this was a conspiracy of patriarchal quack physicians against rival female midwife health knowledge, a claim now discounted as historians have discovered that midwives gleefully collaborated in the prosecution and torture of witches.3

  This is not the place to go into detail about the witchcraft trials other than to say that recent scholarship confirms that women were predominantly targeted in most regions but that the total numbers executed are much lower than the “hundreds of thousands to millions of women killed” as alleged by some historians in the 1980s and 1990s. The latest studies indicate that from 40 thousand to 100 thousand people were tortured and executed, of whom approximately 75 percent were women.4 Not quite millions, but an extraordinary number just the same. (Incidentally, a comparative 75.4 percent of serial-killer victims today are women according to the recent FBI studies.)5

  Assuming the lowest figure of forty thousand executed witches, over a period of two hundred years, one woman was killed this way every few days throughout this period. The witch hunt was a woman-hunting industry, institutionalized in a partnership between the Church and the
state with the collaboration of a motley crew of lay subcontractors, demonologists, academics, pundits, self-appointed witch-hunters, torture “experts,” notaries, dungeon keepers, and so on. And these women were not just killed; they were first degraded, horrifically tortured and mutilated, and frequently raped. It was state- and Church-licensed sadistic serial murder. There is no other appropriate way of describing it. This really was a serial-killing gynocide, as many feminist historians have termed it.

  THE “DIABOLIST LOGIC OF TORTURE TRIALS”

  Women accused of witchcraft were forced to confess to having sex with the Devil according to perverse, pathologically twisted sexual scenarios composed by the Church inquisitors presiding over the interrogations. The process of questioning and extracting a confession from women accused of witchcraft as specified in the Malleus Maleficarum is straight out of a serial killer’s fantasy playbook.

  The demented Kramer instructs that upon being taken into custody suspected witches are to be stripped naked and all their hair shaved, and that they are then to be searched, especially in their “most secret places that cannot be named.” Once bound and restrained by the inquisitor and his assistants, their bodies would be pricked with needles, scraped and probed with instruments for the supposed “Devil’s mark.” Long needles were driven into moles and birthmarks, which were said to be immune to bleeding and to pain in a witch. If the victim reacted with pain, however, it was assumed she was faking it; if she bled, it was the Devil’s illusion or excess “witches’ milk” accumulated while the witch was imprisoned and separated from her familiars, who normally suckled blood from her third “witches’ nipple” (usually a mole).

  Bizarre gynecological probes and torture implements were applied to female genitals. The “pear” was an iron, pear-shaped dildo with a screw mechanism that when turned opened like jagged flower petals. It was heated and inserted into the vagina, anus or mouth and slowly screwed open. Red-hot pincers were used to tear off flesh, and the “spider,” a sharp, iron forklike clamp, was specially designed to tear away females’ breasts. Burning feathers were placed to the armpits and groin, fingers immersed in boiling water or oil and alcohol poured on the head and set alight. Boiling water or boiling oil enemas and douches “cleansed” the suspected witch of her lies. The use of the rack was popular in France, where an accused witch was pulled apart with ratcheted pulleys until loud popping and cracking was heard from the tearing and snapping of cartilage, ligaments and bones. Whipping was common; red-hot iron rods were inserted into the vagina or anus or used to burn out eyes. The “witches’ chair” was an iron chair that had beneath its toiletlike seat a furnace that would be heated to slowly roast the genitals of the victim restrained in it. The turcos, a viselike instrument with protruding spikes, was used to rip out fingernails and toenails. Thumbscrews crushed fingers and toes at the base until blood squirted out. Cashielaws were a system of measured wedges inserted between planks fitted from ankles to knees, then driven in with a heavy hammer to slowly crush and break the bones.

  Waterboarding, so familiar in our own witch-hunting in the twenty-first century, back then involved a more brutal form where a long knotted cloth was forced down the throat along with great quantities of water, sometimes boiling, and then violently jerked out. Usually reserved until last was the infamous strappado, in which the woman was attached to a pulley by her hands, bound behind her back, then raised and dropped, dislocating the shoulders, hands and elbows. Weights between forty and one hundred pounds would be attached to her feet to increase the pain and dislocate the hips, feet and knees.6

  Sadistic sexual fantasies and impulses were blatantly fulfilled in these brutal acts of torture. It was always naïve to believe that because the Church was behind this madness, its functionaries would not rape or inflict any kind of sexual abuse on the female prisoners. They were, after all, on a mission for God. Did not the Malleus Maleficarum explicitly instruct that suspected witches are to “be stripped by respectable women of good reputation,” and that when questioning witches inquisitors “should not allow themselves to be touched by her physically, especially on the naked wrist”?7

  Similarly, it was believed until recently that during the Holocaust (another example of a state-sponsored epidemic of serial killing), Nazi perpetrators, because of draconian eugenic race laws prohibiting sex with Jews, did not rape their female victims. Recent scholarship has put that myth to the death it deserves.8 Hitler’s strict Nuremberg Race Laws had about as much effect inhibiting the sadistic lusts of Nazi genocidal serial killers as Malleus Maleficarum had on the sadistic lusts of gynocidal serial witch-hunters and their minions: none.

  It is no coincidence that contemporary BDSM (bondage, domination/discipline, submission/sadism, masochism) subculture of erotic role-playing features Medieval and Renaissance “dungeon play” as a prominent psychosexual theme, echoing two centuries of torture sessions perpetrated by the witch-hunters still imprinted on our sex fantasies like some sort of collective sexophonic cultural engram, another one of those buggy lines of code in the cultural DNA—one of those mimetic compulsions as a form of sociohistorical trauma manifesting as sadistic fantasy. Of course, unlike contemporary BDSM dungeon play there was nothing playfully consensual about what transpired in the witch-hunters’ dungeons during the Great Hunt.

  According to historian Mary Daly:

  It is clear that the witches were physically and mentally mutilated and dismembered by their persecutors. A witch was forced to relieve her torture by confessing that she acted out the sexual fantasies of her male judges as they described these to her. The judges achieved erotic gratification from her torture, from the sight of her being stripped and gang raped, from seeing her mangled body, from forcing her to “admit” acting out their erotic fantasies, from her spiritual and physical slow death. These disturbing and sadistic men were creating the delusion of devils other than themselves—projecting their own evil intent onto these “devils” which were mirror images of themselves . . .

  Daly points out:

  More likely, the woman, during her stripping, would be raped by the torturer’s assistants, as happened to Frau Peller, the wife of a court officer, in her trial at Rheinbach in 1631. She had, incidentally, been accused of witchcraft because her sister had refused to sleep with the witch judge, Franz Buirmann . . . So little regard was given this preliminary torture that many court records ignored it and simply stated, “The prisoner confessed without torture.”9

  Historian Anne L. Barstow writes:

  Performed on women by men, legal torture permitted sadistic experimentation and gratuitous sexual advances. When executioner Jehan Minart of Camvrai prepared Aldegonde de Rue for the stake, he examined her interior parts, mouth, and “parties honteuses” [“shameful parts”]. To try to force a confession from Catherine Boyraisonne, a priest applied hot fat repeatedly to her eyes, armpits, the pit of her stomach, thighs, elbows, and “dans da nature”—in her vagina. She died in prison, no doubt from injuries. And while a female was imprisoned, she might be raped—the young Lorrainer, Catharina Latomia, not yet pubescent, was raped twice in her cell and nearly died from it: these attacks were blamed on the Devil . . . Witch-hunting was woman-hunting. Jailers, prickers, and executioners all could take sadistic pleasure with female prisoners.10

  All those obscene gynecological instruments of torture—heated iron tongs, probes, scrapers, crushers, claws, pins and needles—were designed for pathologically crazed witch-hunters obsessed with the “evils” of female genitalia. In Reign of the Demonologists: The Diabolist Logic of Torture Trials in Early Modern Europe historian Max Dashu (Maxine Hammond) writes:

  Genital “searches” had become a routine part of the investigation of witchcraft, justified as a matter of duty by men of faith. In private, within the jail and torture-chamber, the perpetrators could boast and laugh with each other about their “Discoverie of Witchcraft.” Any physical marks or irregularities could be made to serve a
s a sign of pact with the devil, and if none were found, they could be produced through torture. Because of their “whoredom,” captors felt they could do anything to accused women, with total impunity.

  The witch-hunters saw the natural anatomy of the vulva and vagina as deviant and therefore suspect. Signs of a diabolic pact were always to be found in the victims’ genitals. The labia minora, especially, were interpreted as teats sucked by demonic familiars.11

  It literally was gynocide, as feminist historians call it.

  The reason that we might have only a few hundred serial-killer werewolves on the trial record in this period is probably because the “ordinary” organized sexual serial killers were gainfully employed in expressing their mimetic compulsions on thousands of available female victims in state- and Church-sponsored dungeons. The Great Hunt was as if all those surveyed college males who fantasize about raping a woman “if they could get away with it” now could get away with it. And more.