“It is argued that a firm belief in witches is not a Catholic doctrine,” begins Heinrich Kramer in the Malleus Maleficarum, or The Witch Hammer. This defensive crouch reflects the fact that his contemporaries were hardly 100% sold on his vision of witchcraft in the world. (I say Kramer, although the book is attributed to two men, as scholars generally seem to agree that his was the driving creative force). Kramer’s is the hand behind “[this] infamous book, one of the wickedest books ever printed.”1 It would be easy to attribute the genesis of the Malleus to a kind of gelling of a malignant climate, the apotheosis of hatreds and prejudices already in existence. But rather the opposite appears to be true: one man’s paranoia created a new way to explain and cope with common frights, sorrows, and discontents. “It is blood which moves the wheels of history,” said Mussolini (and later, Dwight Schrute).2 It’s often entirely peaceful when someone gives the wheel a shove. A man writes in silence, alone. The wheel starts spinning, then the blood starts flowing.
It’s a strange irony that though Kramer himself was frequently met with skepticism, disbelief, and, (at least once, in Innsbruck), strongly-worded suggestions from the local bishops that he leave town, his magnum opus remained fatally influential for hundreds of years. “While Kramer certainly did not invent hatred of women, it was thanks to his work that witchcraft became a gendered crime,” says Moira Smith in “The Flying Phallus and the Laughing Inquisitor: Penis Theft in the Malleus Maleficarum.”3 The title of her article references one of the most notorious passages of the Malleus, Question IX in Part 1, which asks, “Whether Witches may work some Prestidigatory Illusion so that the Male Organ appears to be entirely removed and separate from the Body.”
Yes, one of the preoccupations of a book used in legal prosecutions was whether or not a dick could be made to disappear. The concern itself is puzzling enough, made stranger still by how far Kramer had to reach for evidence that this had actually occurred. Witches stealing your junk was not, apparently, a widespread fear at the time, but Kramer pursued the possibility just the same.
It is meditations like this, and their gleeful, popular reference in scholarship on the Malleus that prompted at least one writer to wonder, “Would the Malleus have become so widely reproduced if it had been less spicy?”4 It is a valid question, since the book endured long past its expected shelf life. Like The Starr Report, the Malleus is frequently titillating. It explains why women are overwhelmingly more receptive to the temptations of witchcraft: “the natural reason is that she is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations.” Part of the making of a witch is copulation with the devil and/or an incubus, which is often described in graphic, albeit speculative, detail.
So is it just the sex stuff that made the Malleus so enduring? Walter Stephens suggested that “witchcraft theorists were obsessed with demonic copulation because this act made witches who engaged in it ‘expert witnesses’ to the corporeal reality of demons…one finds an almost desperate desire to use witches as proof of the real existence of demons in the face of terrible doubt.”5 It is hard now to imagine a time in Europe when witches were not seen as universally feminine, but in fact it was The Witch Hammer that forced this shift, and for its own strange reasons. A literate person backed into a corner with something he desperately wanted to prove; that’s what it took to entrench the notion that women’s libido made them into witches, that any woman with a sex drive could be worthy of death. That’s the chaos of history.
How could such a thing be believed, even in such believing times? Plenty of readers have pointed out that the The Witch Hammer is “irrational”6 and “idiosyncratic,”7 and even that Kramer’s contemporaries possibly considered him senile. Smith points out that “The historical record shows that it is men, not women, who collect phalluses–usually by removing them from the bodies of enemies during warfare. But in the Malleus…male castration fears are projected onto women.”8 Men often actually did have reasons to fear castration, particularly during times of war (and there were always times of war). The passage in the Malleus is more of a misdirect than a wholesale invention. So the book continues walking the reader through why and how witches are behind what might otherwise look like mere accidents or sad twists of misfortune. Then Kramer turns up the heat:
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: 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 of nature, painted with fair colours! Therefore if it be a sin to divorce her when she ought to be kept, it is indeed a necessary torture; for either we commit adultery by divorcing her, or we must endure daily strife. Cicero in his second book of The Rhetorics says: The many lusts of men lead them into one sin, but the lust of women leads them into all sins; for the root of all woman’s vices is avarice. And Seneca says in his Tragedies: A woman either loves or hates; there is no third grade. And the tears of woman are a deception, for they may spring from true grief, or they may be a snare. When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.
It’s kind of sickeningly thrilling to see a little thing, a manuscript could have been lost on the way to the printers, or destroyed in a fire, or printed only once and forgotten, instead be grow stronger and more authoritative as time passes. Maybe it’s more like seeing an evolutionary fluke, the development of a new, unnecessary mutation that gets passed down unexpectedly through the generations. The Witch Hammer developed a renewed authority during its second, even more popular run a hundred years after its original publication.
So what were the crimes of witches, besides disappearing dudes’ junk? Halting boners, facilitating abortions, preventing conception, enchanting men into adultery. Messing with cattle and with the weather, the kind of ordinary yet crushing disappointments anyone could experience in everyday life. It’s human to look for someone to blame for your misfortunes even when there isn’t anyone. Maybe providing that outlet was the simple genius that preserved The Witch Hammer.
It’s easy, from a modern perspective, to mock or dismiss something as obviously of its time as The Witch Hammer, but it’s more than a little disingenuous to do so. Plenty of people, women and men alike, are still persecuted for facilitating abortions, for preventing conception, for “enchanting” men into adultery.
The blame-shifting in the Malleus essentially sanctions all manner of shit to roll downhill where perhaps it wouldn’t have before. Horsley and Horsley write about how systems that had formerly protected the weak and the unusual in Kramer’s Germany, in which society protected the strange and helpless, were turned inside out by The Witch Hammer. “[T]he most frequently recurring dynamic of the recorded accusations shows how the belief in the uncanny power of such persons [outcasts, the suspected witches] to defend their own interests could be turned against them when circumstances shifted and fostered the persecution of witches…”9 The powerless suddenly became the dangerously powerful. Normal people, good people, were under attack and had to protect themselves with violence. This is still a popular sleight of hand.
In the end, “witchcraft theory offered an astonishingly powerful set of proofs constructed of nothing more than words.” Kramer’s worldview needed witches to exist, so he insisted that they did. He got lucky, and his need found legs and walked across the centuries.10 Mallory sent me the following C.S. Lewis quote after I proposed the Malleus as a topic:
Surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did–if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there.
It’s not difficult to come up with instances in which the outcome of a trial has little to no relation to what actually happened. It’s a common pattern that’s repeating still.
[Image via Wikimedia Commons]
- Sarton, George. Review of The Medical Man and the Witch during the Renaissance by Gregory Zilboorg, Isis, Vol. 25, No. 1 (May, 1936), pp. 147-152. ↩
- Ed. and tr. Barone Bernardo Quaranta di San Severino. Mussolini: As Revealed in HIs Political Speeches, November 1914 – August 1923. ↩
- Smith, Moira. “The Flying Phallus and the Laughing Inquisitor: Penis Theft in the Malleus Maleficarum.” Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Jan. – Apr., 2002), pp. 85-117. ↩
- Davidson, Jane P. Review of The “Malleus Maleficarum” and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief by Hans Peter Broedel. The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 586-588. ↩
- Bailey, Michael D. Review of Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief by Walter Stephens. Speculum, Vol. 80, No. 1 (Jan., 2005), pp. 334-335. ↩
- Sarton, George. Review of The Medical Man and the Witch during the Renaissance by Gregory Zilboorg, Isis, Vol. 25, No. 1 (May, 1936), pp. 147-152. ↩
- Broedel, Hans Peter. The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft. ↩
- Smith, Moira. “The Flying Phallus and the Laughing Inquisitor: Penis Theft in the Malleus Maleficarum.” Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Jan. – Apr., 2002), pp. 85-117. ↩
- Horsley, Ritta Jo and Horsley, Richard A. “On the Trail of the “Witches:” Wise Women, Midwives and the European Witch Hunts.” Women in German Yearbook, Vol. 3, (1987), pp. 1-28. ↩
- Crawford, Katherine. “Privilege, Possibility, and Perversion: Rethinking the Study of Early Modern Sexuality.” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 78, No. 2 (June 2006), pp. 412-433. ↩
Tags: books, catherine nicholas, mythology, witches
Women Thinking Alone With Evil?
More substantively, this is fascinating! And reminds me of the time I tried to read “A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis” for funsies, only to find that the cultural history of the penis involves a depressing amount of castration, rape and female suffering because WITCHES BE STEALING YOUR JUNK. There was a story in there about witches keeping trees full of stolen penises, like little penis-birds.
Holy shit.
I’m mainly fascinated that I am capable of so much evil just by being. That is some serious… weirdness there.
On to the second – who here supports changing my display name to ‘desirable calamity’ or possib;e ‘delectable detriment’?
On a more intelligent note – it is clear to me that despite our supposed advancement that this vile book is still influencing the way that women are being treated. It didn;t come out of nowhere – the desire to hate and blame women, especially strange ones, for misfortune had to already exist.
But people today still claim that women are naturally more prone to irrationality, maliciousness, manipulativeness and ‘crazyness’. We just don’te believe that women can magically trap a man into adultery any more. No, she does it just by being a woman. It’s the same shit, just without the demons.
Honestly, if I could consort with demons for power, I wouldn’t try to get men to fall in love with me. I’d try for world power.
RIGHT?! Men, if we had otherworldly powers we would spend CONSIDERABLY less time than you think focusing them on your junk.
Your junk is really not as important to us as you think.
I have other plans that could be achieved by demon-granted otherworldly powers. At the very least, getting my book published would no longer be so difficult.
Given the power to change the weather, control animals, and magic other people’s minds, collecting sad flacid disembodied penises would appear approximately no where on my list of things to do in a day.
Uh, we totally do believe that women can trap men into adultery. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen/heard a single woman blamed for “homewrecking” when she has an affair with a married man, for example. There’s all this anger on the woman – and the man, who is the one who actually, you know, BROKE HIS MARRIAGE VOWS – is somehow in the moral clear. Because she must have tempted him, and of course men just can’t help themselves when they see boobs.
Yeah, we just think she uses demons to do it any more
. . . okay now I kind of wish we did believe that because I have this image of a regular lady with a demon perched on her shoulder that she, like, sends out for fresh orange juice and toilet paper when she’s not using it to seduce men into adultery.
Demon butler is the new monkey butler.
And men still think everyone must be fascinated by their penis. IT’S REALLY NOT THAT INTERESTING.
This is really interesting. I was just reading a book about various witch-hunts and trials in Western Europe and the US up to the present, and the author noted that Malleus Maleficarum was a bona fide bestseller in its time (and it’s still being printed in new editions now, so…). The printing press’s invention and Pope Innocent III basically licensing Kramer and Sprenger to witch-hunt seem like the perfect confluence of events for a book like this to be born and thrive and have the impact it did.
I really wish witchcraft existed whenever I hear about a bunch of medieval assholes burning a woman for knowing what herbs are or whatever. Those people need to get fucking smote. I’m reading Year of Wonders right now and the witch scene made me so mad. You all deserve the plague!
I have a feeling “Get fuckin’ smote” is about to enter my everyday lexicon.
YES
“There is no doubt that certain witches can do marvellous things with regard to male organs, for this agrees with what has been seen and heard by many, and with the general account of what has been known concerning that member through the senses of sight and touch.”
😉 😉 😉
In this book I was reading recently there was a bit about a dude who claimed that a witch had stolen his junk and then when he demanded she restore it, she apparently did so by “laying her hand between his thighs.”
HMMM.
Perhaps it was just really really cold that day
“Why was her hand down my pants? Uhh…she was just…restoring my penis…which she STOLE…because SHE’S A WITCH! BURN HER!”
Oh Professor Lewis nooooooooooo …. ;_;
Oh, he’s totally right, though! I mean, I do not care for him, but if people actually had the ability to cast evil spells and destroy people, we should at least make sure they can’t float.
I suppose I see where you’re coming from. I guess I’m just kind of shocked to see pro-death-penalty things coming from Mr. Christian.
I mean, I don’t think his point was that we SHOULD burn witches, just that we shouldn’t feel so smug and superior to medieval peasants.
Yes, exactly! That the only reason we don’t do it is because we stopped believing in the existence of witches as people who had given their lives to the pursuit of evil, not because we decided it was mean.
They’re just afraid of us. We bleed 5 days a month without dying. Babies grow inside our bodies. Food comes out of our boobs. In order to have sex with us, they have to stick their vulnerable organs inside our bodies. And we have multiple orgasms. Can you blame them? We’re pretty amazing.
We quite literally have the power of life and death.
It’s no wonder they’re constantly trying to take that power from us. It’s a pretty sweet power.
That quote, by the way, is from C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Whatthefuck.
A-yep!
No, see, it's The Hammer Of Witches, not The Witch Hammer, because "maleficarum" is the genetive plural form, and "malleus" is the nominative, keep your cases straight everyone *runs away waving Latin dictionary*
Yesss, I'm glad someone else noticed that! Not to mention that it's in the plural not the singular.
That bit about the actual scene of penis-stealing being on the battlefield was also attributed to women. In 1 Henry IV, Westmoreland reports on those horrible, barbaric Welsh:
But yesternight: when all athwart there came
A post from Wales loaden with heavy news;
Whose worst was, that the noble Mortimer,
Leading the men of Herefordshire to fight
Against the irregular and wild Glendower,
Was by the rude hands of that Welshman taken,
A thousand of his people butchered;
Upon whose dead corpse there was such misuse,
Such beastly shameless transformation,
By those Welshwomen done as may not be
Without much shame retold or spoken of. (I.i.37-47)
The “beastly shameless transformation” of the Welshwomen was cutting off the genitals of the dead and stuffing them in the dead men’s mouths. So even standard-level, non-magical desecrations were attributed to women. (There’s also so much to be said here about genitals and mouths and gender and speech–Mortimer’s wife is Welsh, and in the play she speaks no English and just makes fake Welsh sounds.)
This is fascinating. And yes, I’m so interested in how things the powerful do are attributed to the powerless, working unseen somehow.
That bit about the actual scene of penis-stealing being on the battlefield was also attributed to women. In 1 Henry IV, Westmoreland reports on those horrible, barbaric Welsh:
But yesternight: when all athwart there came
A post from Wales loaden with heavy news;
Whose worst was, that the noble Mortimer,
Leading the men of Herefordshire to fight
Against the irregular and wild Glendower,
Was by the rude hands of that Welshman taken,
A thousand of his people butchered;
Upon whose dead corpse there was such misuse,
Such beastly shameless transformation,
By those Welshwomen done as may not be
Without much shame retold or spoken of. (I.i.37-47)
The "beastly shameless transformation" of the Welshwomen was cutting off the genitals of the dead and stuffing them in the dead men's mouths. So even standard-level, non-magical desecrations were attributed to women. (There's also so much to be said here about genitals and mouths and gender and speech–Mortimer's wife is Welsh, and in the play she speaks no English and just makes fake Welsh sounds.)
Also, can this be the start of a series on weird texts of the past? Can we do Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy next? The big section on women’s ailments and all the things a pregnant woman should not look at or eat?
Also, can this be the start of a series on weird texts of the past? Can we do Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy next? The big section on women's ailments and all the things a pregnant woman should not look at or eat?