formed from a bent rib, that is, rib of the breast, which
is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And
since through this defect she is an imperfect animal,
she always deceives.. . . And all this is indicated by
the etymology of the word; for Femina comes from Fe
and Minus, since she is ever weaker to hold and preserve
the Faith. And this as regards faith is of her very nature.... 16
. . . This is so even among holy women, so what must it
be among others? 17
In addition, “Women also have weak memories, ” “woman will follow her own impulse even to her own destruction, ” “nearly all the kingdoms of the world have been overthrown by women, ” “the world now suffers through
the malice of women, ” “a woman is beautiful to look
upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep, ”
Gynocide: The Witches
133
“she is a liar by nature, ” “her gait, posture, and habit
. . . is vanity o f vanities. ” 18
Women are most vividly described as being “more
bitter than death” :
And I have found a woman more bitter than death,
who is the hunter’s snare, and her heart is a net, and
her hands are bands. He that pleaseth God shall escape from her; but he that is a sinner shall be caught by her. More bitter than death, that is, than the
devil.. . .
More bitter than death, again, because that is
natural and destroys only the body; but the sin which
arose from woman destroys the soul by depriving it
of grace, and delivers the body up to the punishment
for sin.
More bitter than death, again, because bodily death
is an open and terrible enemy, but woman is a wheedling
and secret enemy. 19
and also:
And that she is more perilous than a snare does not
speak of the snare of hunters, but of devils. For men
are caught not only through their carnal desires, when
they see and hear women: for S. Bernard says: Their
face is a burning wind, and their voice the hissing of
serpents.. . . And when it is said that her heart is a
net, it speaks of the inscrutable malice which reigns
in their hearts.. . .
To conclude: All witchcraft comes from carnal lust,
which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs xxx: there
are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth
thing which says not, it is enough; that is, the mouth
of the womb. 20
134
Woman Hating
Here the definition of woman, in common with the
pornographic definition, is her carnality; the essence
of her character, in common with the fairy-tale definition, is her malice and avarice. The words flow almost too easily in our psychoanalytic age: we are dealing
with an existential terror of women, of the “mouth of
the womb, ” stemming from a primal anxiety about male
potency, tied to a desire for self (phallic) control; men
have deep-rooted castration fears which are expressed
as a horror of the womb. These terrors form the substrata of a myth of feminine evil which in turn justified several centuries of gynocide.
The evidence, provided by the Malleus and the executions which blackened those centuries, is almost without limit. One particular concern was that devils
stole semen (vitality) from innocent, sleeping men —
seductive witches visited men in their sleep, and did the
evil stealing. As Ernest Jones wrote:
The explanation for these fantasies is surely not hard.
A nightly visit from a beautiful or frightful being who
first exhausts the sleeper with passionate embraces and
withdraws from him a vital fluid: all this can point
only to a natural and common process, namely to
nocturnal emissions accompanied by dreams of a more
or less erotic nature. In the unconscious mind blood is
commonly an equivalent for semen. 21
To be dreamed of often ended in slow burning on the
stake.
The most blatant proof of the explicitly sexual nature of the persecutions, however, had to do with one of the witches' most frequent crimes: they cast “glamours”
Gynocide: The Witches
135
over the male organ so that it disappeared entirely.
Sprenger and Kramer go to great lengths to prove that
witches do not actually remove the genital, only render
it invisible. If such a glamour lasts for under 3 years,
a marriage cannot be annulled; if it lasts for 3 years or
longer, it is considered a permanent fact and does annul
any marriage. Catholics now seeking grounds for divorce should perhaps consider using that one.
Men lost their genitals quite frequently. Most often,
the woman responsible for the loss was a cast-off mistress, maliciously turned to witchcraft. I f the bewitched man could identify the woman who had afflicted him, he
could demand reinstatement o f his genitals:
A young man who had lost his member and suspected
a certain woman, tied a towel about her neck, choked
her and demanded to be cured. “The witch touched
him with her hand between the thighs, saying, ‘Now
you have your desire. ’ ” His member was immediately
restored. 22
Often the witches, greedy by virtue o f womanhood,
were not content with the theft o f one genitaclass="underline"
And what then is to be thought of those witches who in
this way sometimes collect male organs, as many as
twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a
bird’s nest or shut them up in a box, where they move
themselves like living members and eat oats and corn, as
has been seen by many as is a matter of common report? 23
How can we understand that millions o f people for
centuries believed as literal truth these seemingly idi
136
Woman Hating
otic allegations? How can we begin to comprehend that
these beliefs functioned as the basis of a system of ju risprudence that condemned 9 million persons, mostly women, to being burned alive? The literal text of the
Malleus Malef icarum, with its frenzied and psychotic
woman-hating and the fact of the 9 million deaths,
demonstrates the power of the myth of feminine evil,
reveals how it dominated the dynamics of a culture,
shows the absolute primal terror that women, as carnal
beings, hold for men.
We see in the text of the Malleus not only the fear of
loss of potency or virility, but of the genitals themselves — a dread of the loss of cock and balls. The reason for this fear can perhaps be located in the nature of
the sex act per se: men enter the vagina hard, erect;
men emerge drained of vitality, the cock flaccid. The