Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (32 page)

Kramer did not trouble long on the need to exterminate witches; to disbelieve witchcraft was itself heresy, after all. What the
Malleus
did dwell on was how witchcraft operated, and on this subject it and the other witch-hunting manuals were relentlessly misogynistic. “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust,” Kramer wrote, “which is in women insatiable.” Women’s natural inferiority and alleged sexual weakness made them prime victims for the temptations of Satan. “The Devil uses [women] so because he knows that women love carnal pleasures,” agreed French witch prosecutor Henri Bouget. “[T]here is nothing which makes a woman more subject and loyal to a man than that he should abuse her body.” For his part, Rémy found it “not unreasonable that this scum of humanity [i.e., witches] should be drawn from the feminine sex.” Even women who were not yet possessed were to be distrusted: “All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman.”

The fact that women would themselves be harmed by the devil’s sexual abuse was of no concern to the law. Rémy and his contemporaries’ endless descriptions of women experiencing agonizing pain upon being pierced by Satan’s massive phallus are never sympathetic in tone. The prosecutors seem, if anything, envious of Satan. The real threat of witchcraft was to the sexual pride of men. The vast literature of witch hunting is filled with nightmares of castration and lost virility. Most famously, the
Malleus
told of witches who collected severed penises, twenty or thirty at a time, and kept them hidden while the afflicted men wandered the earth looking for their lost members. It was of “common report,” the
Malleus
assured the reader, that witches kept their penis collections in birds’ nests, where they wiggled by themselves and ate oats and corn. Perhaps inadvertently revealing too much, the experienced churchman Kramer added that in one case the “big” penis in the nest belonged to a priest.

As the
Malleus
emphasized, mainstream Christianity viewed women as “the Devil’s gateway” and their bodies as “white sepulchres.” Drawing on ancient Christian wisdom and adding a big dollop of paranoid fantasy, the book (and others like it) turned witchcraft into a female sex crime. Before 1400, about half the people charged as witches were women. By the time the witch craze hit high gear in the seventeenth century, that figure came to nearly eight out of ten. In Switzerland, England, and what is now Belgium, the proportion was even higher.

It was during this period that the cliché of the witch as a hag was crystallized. She was “an old, weather-beaten crone, having the chin and her knees meeting for age . . . hollow-eyed, untoothed, furrowed on her face, having her limbs trembling with palsy, going mumbling in the streets.” A beggar woman angry after being refused alms, a midwife presiding over a stillbirth, an isolated widow: These were the types of women most likely to be accused.

Suspects were plentiful. Under torture, accused witches were routinely forced to name both their accomplices and anyone they were meant to have witnessed participating in sabbats. In 1611, Barbara Rüfin of the German town of Ellwangen was accused of witchcraft after objecting to her son’s marriage. Her family denounced her for trying to poison her son, and also for killing animals. Officials arrested the seventy-one-year-old and had her stretched on the rack no fewer than seven times. She confessed to copulating and signing a pact with the devil, as well as attempting to kill her son, poisoning livestock, and destroying crops. She also named other witches, who presumably named still more people. The witch hunt in Ellwangen consumed about four hundred souls before cooling off. Among the dead was the wife of a town judge. When the jurist argued that she had been wrongly convicted, he was arrested himself, forced to confess, and executed as well.

The
Malleus
encouraged officials to take whatever steps necessary to neutralize their prisoners’ magic powers. The women’s houses were to be searched “in all holes and corners and chests, top and bottom . . . [for] various instruments of witchcraft.” Kramer also counseled authorities to remove witches from their houses immediately, giving them no opportunity to return, “for they are wont to secure in this way, and bring away with them, some object or power of witchcraft which procures them the faculty of keeping silent under examination.”

Even after the search, there remained the risk that witches would work magic on the judges. The
Malleus
warned that physical contact with suspects was to be avoided. If it did occur, then only a concoction of consecrated salt and blessed herbs could protect them. Even a glance from a witch could weaken a judge’s resolve. “[B]y so getting the first sight of the Judge [witches] have been able so to alter the minds of the Judge . . . that they have lost all their anger against them and have not presumed to molest them in any way, but have allowed them to go free.” To stop witches from using the evil eye to their advantage, they were made to walk backward into a judge’s presence.

Once an accused witch was in custody, her allegiance to Satan could be proved by a number of methods. One process, called “swimming the witch,” resembled ancient Babylonian practices: The suspect was stripped and her hands and feet bound together. Then she was flung repeatedly into a river or pond. If she floated, she was guilty and put to death; if she sank, she was declared innocent and allowed to live—that is, so long as she was rescued in time. King James himself believed the method infallible:

So it appears that God hath appointed, for a supernatural sign of the monstrous impiety of the witches, that the water shall refuse to receive them in her bosom, that have shaken off them the sacred water of baptism and wilfully refused the benefit thereof.

Far more common than swimming witches was sexual mistreatment on dry land. Sometimes it was relatively mild, as when the American Puritan minister Cotton Mather publicly groped a girl’s breasts while she writhed in demonic possession. More often, though, the abuse was brutal, as when women were searched for “devil’s marks.” Demonology held that Satan branded witches with telltale signs as people commonly did with slaves or livestock. The marks could be warts, moles, or extra nipples on which baby demons were thought to suckle. Such marks were taken as proof of a witch’s infernal pact. The readily apparent ones were found by visual inspection. Others, which were believed to be below the skin and resistant to pain, were discovered by “pricking” the witch with pins and nails. As the devil’s relationship with a witch would be sexual, officials would customarily search first for the obliging marks on or around the genitalia.

Prosecutors and professional witch examiners made displays of their searches for devil’s marks. The witch’s head and genitals were shaven, often in public. Then, while the crowd got worked up, the witches were poked and prodded by their accusers. The
Malleus
and other manuals mandated “diligent and careful” inspections of accused witches’ “secret parts.” The “witch’s tit” was actually, in many cases, the clitoris, upon which inspectors lingered and on which they used metal tools. Even when other parts of the body were scrutinized, such as the legs, arms, or neck, the use of blades to puncture the flesh was itself a form of sexual violence.
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Hundreds of inspections for devil’s marks took place in the Swiss Confederacy, Scotland, and England. In some cases, accused witches were saved from the stake when no suitable mark was discovered. But prosecutors and probers, who were paid by the conviction, often found what they were looking for. Scottish witch hunter Matthew Hopkins had to hire four assistants to staff his growing business. He believed that devil’s marks were a food source for demons, so he held them to attract hungry animal spirits. He stripped his victims naked and tied them to chairs, deprived them of food, and waited. Any animal that walked in the interim constituted proof that the witch was calling a dark spirit to feed off her. If no animal happened by, after a few days Hopkins would have them put there. In other cases, simply leaving accused witches in their cells got the job done. Anne Foster, of Northamptonshire, was reported to have suckled her “familiar” in her prison cell, but what were taken to be the sounds of a witch giving nourishment to a demon were actually her frightened cries as she fought back hordes of rats attacking her in the cell. She was sentenced to hang in 1674.

Once the suspect was identified as a witch, it was necessary to obtain her confession. The law required witches to acknowledge their crimes before they were executed. The
Malleus
advised that torture, deception, and terror be used to extract confessions. The rack, scourging, burning, eye-gouging—all of it was sanctioned. “Whoever comes into the witch prison must become a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his head,” wrote Johannes Junius. Interrogations under torture often followed a standard set of questions, although the “right” answer was sometimes elusive. Walpurga Hausmannin first admitted that she had sex with the devil himself. Later, she was forced to confess that she had given herself to a lesser demon in the form of her human lover.

King James argued that only “the extreme pain of the engines of torture could loosen the devil’s grip over his servants.” If torture didn’t work, it was because Satan was at work right there in the chamber, fortifying suspects against pain. The
Malleus
told of a witch from the town of Hagenau who gave herself the “gift of silence” by killing and cooking a baby boy, thereafter grinding the remains into a powder that she was somehow able to retain during her torture. The Hagenau woman may well have remained silent—if so, it was more likely the result of shock.

IT IS A challenge for anyone today to accept that this kind of superstition and savagery took place under the authority of law. It is too unjust, too perverse, too ridiculous. Yet most of what occurred was done with the active involvement or encouragement of legitimate state governments. Antiwitchcraft statutes were in force everywhere because those at the highest levels of leadership truly believed it existed. According to King James, who personally supervised at least one torture-laced witch trial and also wrote his own book of demonology, witches were everywhere: “The fearful abounding at this time in this country of these detestable slaves of the devil, the Witches or enchanters, who are never so rife in these parts as they are now.” Under James’s authority, and with instructions to use torture when necessary, a special commission took over witch prosecutions and presided over at least three hundred trials from 1591 to 1597.

On the Continent, Pierre de Lancre’s sweep of the Basque country was done under the authority of Henry IV. Nicolas Rémy, who worked for Duke Charles III of Lorraine, had the power to override local magistrates whom he believed too lenient toward the alleged witches. In the German states, where more witches were executed than anywhere else, the process of hunting witches could resemble an official traveling road show. Special judicial witch finders came to towns ready to override any local law or custom standing in the way of convictions. The witch-hunting craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was imposed from above, not below.

Following the pronunciation of a death sentence for a witch came the spectacle of her execution. In Europe, that usually meant a fire show. Burning witches alive (or sometimes after strangling) was endorsed by Jean Bodin, a respected French philosopher and member of the Parlement de Paris, who regarded the practice as a kind of preparation for an eternity in hell:

Whatever punishment one can order against witches by roasting and cooking them over a slow fire is not really very much, and not as bad as the torment which Satan has made for them in this world, to say nothing of the eternal agonies that are prepared for them in Hell, for the fire here cannot last more than an hour or so until the witches have died.

Typically the witches’ misdeeds were announced in detail to the assembled onlookers before the flame was lit. In one Spanish auto-da-fé, whereby twenty-nine witches were set afire (among fifty-nine heretics), the process took two grisly days to complete. The witches had admitted to attending twenty-two sabbats. Said the historian Henry Lea: “All the grotesque obscenities which the foul imaginations of the accused could invent to satisfy their prosecutors, were given at length, and doubtless impressed the gaping multitudes with the horror and detestation desired.” In addition to the witches’ sexual adventures, their feasts on corpses were detailed, as well as their destruction of harvests and poisonings of their own children. What Michel Foucault called “the spectacle of the scaffold” was a trance-inducing affair.

The imagined sex lives of convicted witches were also retold in cheap illustrated pamphlets peddled to spectators at executions. These early tabloids offered lurid narratives of seductions by the devil, generously illustrated with woodcuts. As so many of the witches’ alleged crimes followed set patterns, the printers were able to reuse the woodcuts for multiple executions, changing only the names of the accused in the captions. Armed with images of the witches’ crimes, the purchaser/spectator could then listen to the women’s screams, experiencing both moral shock and sadistic titillation. When the execution was over, of course, the pamphlets remained, to be reviewed in private again and again.

The witch craze slowed down at the end of the seventeenth century. Why this fury ended is as mystifying as why it began, but one thing is clear: The use of torture to generate new suspects was starting to produce the wrong kind of people for prosecution. In Würzburg, for example, more than 160 people were tried and convicted of witchcraft from 1627 to 1629. The majority of these victims were lower-class women, but soon there were people from all classes in the torture chambers, including clerics, city officials, doctors, and children. The fervor slowed down when the elite began to fear for their own hides.