Sex In History. Part 6: Sex and Heresy

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, Pope Innocent VIII issued the Bull Summa desiderantes. This is almost invariably described as a Bull against witchcraft, but a glance at the text suggests that this is hardly an adequate description.

It has indeed lately come to Our ears . . . that in some parts of Northern Germany. . . many persons of both sexes . . . have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells and conjurations . . . have slain infants yet in their mother`s womb, as also the off-spring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruit of trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burden, herd beasts, as well as animals of all kinds.... These wretches further afflict and torment men and women, beasts of burthen . . . with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases . . .; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives, nor wives receive their husbands....
It is evident that Innocent is not here concerned with magical practices in general-he says nothing of the use of magic for travelling great distances, speaking foreign tongues or averting disasters-he is concerned solely with certain pathological sexual phenomena, of just the sort which we have been discussing; namely, fantasies of sexual congress, failures of fertility and, more particularly, psychic impotence and frigidity He believes that this impotence has been caused by charms and conjurations; he is not attacking the attempt to use charms for this purpose as a crude superstition, although he is writing at the very close of the Middle Ages; on the contrary his objection is that these charms have been only too effective.
Nor need we dismiss his fears as unreal. Placing severe taboos on sexual activity, associating it as strongly as possibly with feelings of guilt, is a course well calculated to produce certain amount of psychic impotence. In view of the fact that psychoanalysts still have to deal with a great deal of this kind of impotence today, when the taboos are much weaker than they were in the Middle Ages, it is just possible that psychic impotence may have been growing so widespread as to become a real threat to human fertility. But Innocent also feels that there is a threat to the fertility of beasts and crops too, so that some further explanation is called for. We can see in it a projection of the unconscious hopes and fears of the principal actors: purely on theoretical grounds one would be inclined to diagnose the existence of unconscious fears of impotence on the part of those who drew up the Bull, but, still more, strong resentments of those who were able to have satisfactory intercourse. No doubt, on the sour grapes principle, they were determined to deny to others what they could not enjoy themselves: their conscious concern with a decline in fertility covers a real unconscious desire to destroy fertility. Only by some such analysis can one explain the apparent paradox of the Church, which had laboured so long to restrict the performance of the sexual act, becoming so agitated by a development which threatened to do its work for it.

But we are not, as a matter of fact, obliged to base our speculations solely on the Bull. Innocent drew up this document at the request of two German members of what we should nowadays call the Papal secret police. (i.e. the Dominicans named Sprenger and Kramer. These men, having been appointed Inquisitors, began to accuse and condemn persons for witchcraft in certain German cities with such ferocity and obvious injustice that not only was there a popular outcry but even the local bishops and clergy refused their support. As a result of this, Sprenger and Kramer now went to the Pope and induced him to draw up the Bull I have just quoted: it ends with a declaration that Sprenger and Kramer have been appointed to go into these matters, that they have plenary powers, and that they must be given every help. It therefore reflects Papal credulity rather than Papal policy.

Soon after, Sprenger and Kramer prepared the famous handbook, the "Malleus Malleficarum", and browbeat the Senate of the University of Cologne, to its shame, into endorsing it. The immense popularity of this work, which ran through ten editions in a few years, shows that it reflects the unconscious preoccupations not merely of its authors but of many people in northern Europe: it was followed during the next century by a spate of similar works from other Inquisitors, such as De Lancre, Delrio, Bodin, Torreblanca and others. It is, in many respects, a casebook of sexual psychopathy, and is concerned principally with three subjects: impotence, sexual fantasies and conversion hysterias. It also discusses the causing of storms, but, as these are treated simply as a method of destroying crops, the topic only represents a variation on the general theme of preoccupation with sex and fertility. It prescribes the questions which investigators of witchcraft are to ask, gives excellent clinical descriptions of the phenomena to be looked for, supported by case-histories; and it discusses the aetiology.

In fact, it is clear that by this date the activities which we normally call witch-hunting had ceased to be concerned with magical acts, as such, but revolved round certain sexual phenomena and represented a psychotic preoccupation with sex on the part of the instigators. To understand what was happening, it is essential to realize that the circumstance which at this date normally gave rise to a witch-trial was not the existence of a specific individual, supposedly a witch, but the existence of certain phenomena, usually sexual in character. From the occurrence of these phenomena, the existence of a witch was inferred as a necessary cause. It then remained to find the witch, and for this purpose the sufferer was invited to make a denunciation, or, failing this, the public at large might do so. Naturally, those with scores to pay off, and those with insane resentments, obliged. The victim was then arrested tortured for a confession, and burnt.

Naturally, persons of all ages, from eight to eighty, and of both sexes, were accused, though the biggest group consists of young girls from fourteen up. The idea that the persecutions were confined to a number of half-crazed old women is completely false, and the victims included many persons of prominence in public life. To take but a single instance, in the mass persecutions in Bamberg between 1609 and 1633, when 900 persons were burnt, one of those killed was Johannes Junius, a burgomaster of the city. Under torture, he confessed to witchcraft; asked to name accomplices, he denied having any, but, tortured again, named some. Afterwards, before his execution, he was allowed to write to his daughter. He told her not to believe what he had confessed - "It is all falsehood and invention.... They never cease the torture until one says something."

In short, every case of impotence or sexual fantasy which came to the attention of the Inquisitors was bound, if pursued, to lead to a burning; hence the number of executions provides no index of the number of persons actually believing in witchcraft: if it is an index of anything, it is of the number of cases of sexual psychopathy occurring. The expression "witchcraft trials" is, in fact, quite misleading as to the aims and motives` involved. The Church wished to suppress certain sexual, phenomena, and, just as we do today, it chose to make use of the existing machinery for the purpose-in this case, the machinery of the Inquisition.

Sprenger and Kramer, though their own observations were often accurate and describe phenomena which we can readily recognize as forms of sexual pathology, were always ready to accept, at second hand, wild stories which supported their preconceptions, however extraordinary. Thus, though they quite accurately distinguish loss of potency due to lack of semen from that due to inability to obtain an erection, they also describe a third form in which the penis becomes invisible and intangible-caused by a woman casting a "glamour" (it is to this power of bewitching that we refer today when we speak of the glamour of film stars).

Sprenger and Kramer illustrate the casting of a glamour with the following story:

A certain young man had had an intrigue with a girl. Wishing to leave her, he lost his member: that is to say, some glamour was cast over it so that he could see or touch nothing but his smooth body. In his worry over this he went to a tavern to drink wine; and after he had sat there for a while he got into conversation with another woman who was there, and told her the cause of his sadness, explaining everything and demonstrating in his body that it was so. The woman was shrewd and asked if he suspected anybody. The young man named a certain person. The woman advised him to persuade this person to restore to him his integrity, by violence if need be. He took this advice and stopped the woman in question in a lonely place, demanding that she withdraw the spell. When she protested that she was innocent and knew nothing about it, he fell upon her, and, winding a towel tightly round her neck, choked her, saying; "Unless you give me back my health you shall die at my hands." Then she, being unable to cry out, and with her face already swelling and growing black, said: "Let me go, and I will heal you." The young man then relaxed the pressure of the towel, and the witch touched him with her hand between the thighs, saying: "Now you have what you desire." And the young man, as he afterwards said, plainly felt, before he had verified it by looking or touching, that his member had been restored to him. If we treat the optical verification as an ingenious invention designed to give characteristic verisimilitude to the narrative, we can explain this as an hysterical manifestation. We note that the delusion began when he wished to stop sleeping with his mistress. Can we suppose that the young man deluded himself that he had lost his member in the same way as psychotics sometimes suppose their pelvis to be made of glass, and that the girl, finding herself in danger of strangulation, had the wit to try the effect of a little counter suggestion by the most obvious method? Sprenger and Kramer themselves end the story by warning us: But it must in no way be believed that such members are really torn right away from the body but that they are hidden by the devil through some prestidigitatory art, so that they can be neither seen nor felt. In the case of hysterical and schizophrenic manifestations, of the sort then referred to as "possession", it was obviously insufficient to burn the person alleged to have caused them; in view of the erotic symptoms displayed by the persons possessed, it was necessary to find some way of showing them to be guilty also. This was managed by employing the argument that the devil cannot enter a person unless he be destitute of all holy thoughts. Accordingly, all deluded or possessed persons were presumed to be in deadly sin, which is as much as to say that lunacy was made a capital crime, the only admissible defence being that one was possessed by God and not by the devil. The Church`s attempt to impose this principle came up against the strong medieval belief that lunacy varies with the phases of the moon. Against this it was argued, rather as in a modern libel action, that the devil deliberately caused the manifestations to vary with the phases of the moon in order to bring one of God`s creatures (meaning the moon) into disrepute; or if he did not, then the devil was himself affected by the moon; or if he was not, men were more susceptible to diabolic influence at full moon. The frightful casuistry of such arguments does not seem to have worried anyone. With the fantasies of intercourse with incubi and succubi we need not deal, as these have been discussed in a previous chapter. Concerning the purely sexual character of the phenomena which the Inquisitors were attacking under the rubric of "witchcraft" the Malleus is quite explicit: "All witchcraft comes from carnal lust," it says, Which in women is insatiable." With perfect realism, it adds that the most prolific source of witchcraft is quarrelling between unmarried women and their lovers.

At all periods, of course, there were a few men honest enough, intelligent enough and courageous enough to stand out against this nonsense. Friedrich Spee and Father Kircher in the seventeenth century, Agrippa von Nettesheim and de Weier in the sixteenth, Paracelsus in the fifteenth, Bartholomeus Anglicus in the thirteenth, and others. De Weier succeeded in convincing a priest who thought himself troubled by a succubus that his trouble was imaginary, and managed to cure him. Du Laurens similarly cured two women. De Weier was able to insist on rational treatment in several cases of "possession", and subsequently in his "De praestigiis daemonum, without daring to deny the existence of witchcraft outright, he pressed for the use of medical methods until it was certain that the case was not a medical one. This book was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum-primae classis, which means that all other works by the same writer are automatically prohibited- and it remains there to this day.

The Inquisitors realized, naturally, that if they asserted that all such cases were due to witchcraft, they would be made ludicrous whenever a doctor managed to effect a cure. They therefore laid down rules for discriminating between the results of witchcraft and ordinary illness, the principal rule being that any disease which the doctors could not cure was due to witchcraft! Because of this, epilepsy, regarded as a form of possession, was often regarded as caused by sorcery.

Despite the dictum that all witchcraft originates in lust, however, it is clear that a proportion of witchcraft trials were concerned with attempts to commit murder, and a few with attempts, or alleged attempts, to cause illness or damage crop and cattle. It is entirely natural, during a period when witch-trials were so common that the subject was in everyone`s mind, that some people should be led to attempt to perform magical acts; and it is natural too, that malign individuals, having suffered some illness or loss, should seek the satisfaction of vengeance by accusing someone else; it was a convenient way to remove someone one disliked, or who stood in one`s way. The Inquisitors could not refuse to try such cases, even had they wished; actually, being convinced that any witch would have committed sexual crimes in addition to any others of which she might be accused, they were perfectly willing to administer the question. It was, indeed, a basic assumption that any witch had had intercourse with the devil. All Inquisitors worked with an interrogatory, or manual of questions, and as these questions were almost wholly sexual they usually succeeded in finding sexual guilt.

But while a great part of the time of the Inquisition was taken up, especially in Germany, with the examination of these clinical sexual phenomena, it is almost certainly true that some of those coming forward belonged to an entirely different category. Some thirty years ago, Margaret Murray brought forward detailed evidence in support of the view that a form of pagan worship, probably of very ancient totemic origin, had survived into medieval times, and had grown increasingly popular. This worship was devoted to a horned deity, one or whose names was Cernunnos, and an altar to him has beer found below the foundations of Notre Dame de Paris. The worship was of an ecstatic variety, and, like certain other pagan religions, such as the worship of Dionysos, culminated in the sexual act.

Though torture was frequently used to obtain confessions, and while many confessions are undoubtedly worthless, yet there is a residuum of cases where torture was not used, in which the persons accused confessed freely. Their God, they , said, had promised them that they would be happy in the after life, and they died without remorse or terror.

To the Church it was evident that this deity must be the devil, for it was axiomatic that all pagan deities were devils. At the very beginning of the Christian era, the author of Revelation had called the altar of Zeus at Pergamos "the throne of Satan". In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton makes the identification of pagan deities with Christian devils quite clear, and points to the tradition that they could have intercourse with human beings:

"Water devils are those naiads or water nymphs. Paracelsus hath several stories of them that hath lived and have married to mortal men.... Such a one was Egeria, with whom Numa was so familiar, Diana, Ceres, etc.... Terrestrial devils are Lares, Genii, Fauns, Satyrs, Wood-nymphs, Foliots, Fairies, Robin Goodfellows, Trulli...." In a Bull issued against a sect known as the Stedingers, in 1233, Gregory IV accused them of communion with devils, and of scorning sacraments, and added that the ceremony ended in "indiscriminate debauchery". In the same century, the minister of the Scottish parish of Inverkeithing was presented for leading a fertility dance in the churchyard. In 1282, Dame Alice Kyteler was tried for worshipping a deity other than Christ. Margaret Murray has brought forward numerous other indications of the survival of a pagan worship. It is also well established that the sabbat constituted a form of religious ceremony, including hymns, prayers, sermon, homage to the god and a ritual meal. Converts were required to make a public profession of faith and were then given a new name (baptized). The Church would naturally object to the existence of a rival religion, as it objected to Jewry and Mohammedanism, but we can imagine that the especial fury with which it attacked this religion was due to the fact that where the Christian Church despised and hated the sexual act, the worshippers of the Horned God elevated it to a sacrament .

It is clear, then, that the witchcraft trials covered at least four entirely different phenomena: (I) the worship of the Horned God; (II) sexually based hysterias and delusions; (III) other inexplicable illnesses, such as epilepsy; (IV) actual maleficium, or the performing of magic routines. The common feature in all these was supposedly the use of witchcraft. Actually however, it does not seem to be the case that the worshipper of Cernunnos were normally practitioners of witchcraft Since the Church christened them witches, a number of actual sorceresses may have drifted into their ranks, and there is some evidence of a gradual perversion of the original rite; but there are certainly many cases where maleficium was never in question, Joan of Arc being a well known instance.

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