loss of semen, and the feeling of weakness which is its
biological conjunct, has extraordinary significance to
men. Hindu tradition, for instance, postulates that men
must either expel the semen and then vacuum it back
up into the cock, or not ejaculate at all. For those Western men for whom orgasm is simultaneous with ejaculation, sex must be a most literal death, with
the mysterious, muscled, pulling vagina the death-
dealer.
To locate the origins of the myth of feminine evil
in male castration and potency fears is not so much to
participate in the Freudian world view as it is to accept
and apply the anthropologist's method and link up
Western Judeo-Christian man with Australian, African,
or Trobriand primitives. To do so is to challenge the
egotism which informs our historical attitude toward
Gynocide: The Witches
137
ourselves and which would separate us from the rest o f
the species. T here is nothing to indicate that “civilization, ” “culture, ” and/or Christianity have in any way moderated the primal male dread o f castration. Quite
the contrary, history might even be defined as the study
o f the concrete expression o f that dread.
T h e Christians in their manifold variety were continuing the highly developed Jewish tradition o f misogyny, patriarchy, and sexist suppression, alternatively
known as the Garden-of-Eden-Hype. T h e Adam and
Eve creation myth is the basic myth o f man and woman,
creation, death, and sex. T here is another Jewish legend, namely that o f Adam-Lilith, which never assumed that place because it implies other, nonsexist, nonpatri-archal values. T h e Genesis account o f Adam and Eve in
Eden involves, according to Hays, three themes: “the
transition from primitive life to civilization, the coming
o f death, and the acquisition o f knowledge. ” 24 As Hays
points out, Adam has been told by God the Father that
if he eats from the T ree o f Knowledge he will die. T h e
serpent tells Eve that she and Adam will not die. T h e
serpent, it turns out, told the immediate truth: Adam
and Eve do not keel over dead; rather, they know each
other carnally.
Sex is, biblically speaking, the sole source o f civilization, death, and knowledge. As punishment, Adam must go to work and Eve must bear children. We have
here the beginning o f the human family and the work
ethic, both tied to guilt and sexual repression by virtue
o f their origins. One could posit, with all the assurance
o f a Monday-morning quarterback, that Adam and Eve
always were mortal and carnal and that through eating
138
Woman Hating
the forbidden fruit only became aware of what their
condition had always been. God has never been very
straightforward with people.
Whether the precise moral of the story is that death
is a direct punishment for carnal knowledge (which
might make guilt an epistemological corollary) or that
awareness of sex and death are coterminous, the fact of
man knowing and feeling guilt is rooted in the Oedipal
content of the legend. In a patriarchy, one does not
disobey the father.
Adam’s legacy post-Eden is sexual knowledge, mortality, guilt, toil, and the fear of castration. Adam became a human male, the head of a family. His sin was lesser than Eve’s, seemingly by definition again. Even
in Paradise, wantonness, infidelity, carnality, lust, greed,
intellectual inferiority, and a metaphysical stupidity
earmark her character. Yet her sin was greater than
Adam’s. God had, in his oft-noted wisdom, created her
in a way which left her defenseless against the wiles of
the snake —the snake approached her for that very
reason. Yet she bears responsibility for the fall. Doubledouble think is clearly biblical in its origins.
Eve’s legacy was a twofold curse: “Unto the woman
He said: ‘I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail;
in pain thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire
shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. ’ ” 25
Thus, the menstrual cycle and the traditional agony of
childbirth do not comprise the full punishment —patriarchy is the other half of that ancient curse.
The Christians, of course, like Avis, trying harder,
seeing in woman the root of all evil, limited her to
breeding more sinners for the Church to save. No won
Gynocide: The Witches
139
der then that women remained faithful adherents o f the
older totemic cults o f Western Europe which honored
female sexuality, deified the sexual organs and reproductive capacity, and recognized woman as embodying the regenerative power o f nature. T h e rituals o f these
cults, centering as they did on sexual potency, birth,
and phenomena connected to fertility, had been developed by women. Magic was the substance o f ritual, the content o f belief. T h e magic o f the witches was an
imposing catalogue o f medical skills concerning reproductive and psychological processes, a sophisticated knowledge o f telepathy, auto- and hetero-suggestion,
hypnotism, and mood-controlling drugs. Women knew
the medicinal nature o f herbs and developed formulae
for using them. T he women who were faithful to the
pagan cults developed the science o f organic medicine,
using vegetation, before there was any notion o f the
profession o f medicine. Paracelsus, the most famous
physician o f the Middle Ages, claimed that everything
he knew he had learned from “the good women. ” 26
Experimenting with herbs, women learned that those
which would kill when administered in large doses
had curative powers when administered in smaller
amounts. Unfortunately, it is as poisoners that the
witches are remembered. The witches used drugs like
belladonna and aconite, organic amphetamines, and
hallucinogenics. They also pioneered the development
o f analgesics. They performed abortions, provided all
medical help for births, were consulted in cases o f impotence which they treated with herbs and hypnotism, and were the first practitioners o f euthanasia. Since the
Church enforced the curse o f Eve by refusing to permit
140
Woman Hating
any alleviation of the pain of childbirth, it was left to
the witches to lessen pain and mortality as best they
could. It was especially as midwives that these learned
women offended the Church, for, as Sprenger and
Kramer wrote, “No one does more harm to the Catholic
Faith than mid wives. ” 27 The Catholic objection to abortion centered specifically on the biblical curse which made childbearing a painful punishment —it did not