is “more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal
abominations. ”1 This excess of carnality originated in Eve’s
very creation: she was formed from a bent rib. Because of this
defect, women always deceive. Third, women are, by definition, wicked, malicious, vain, stupid, and irredeemably evil: “I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon than to keep house
with a wicked woman.. . . All wickedness is but little to the
wickedness of a woman. . . When a woman thinks alone, she
thinks evil. ”2 Fourth, women are weaker than men in both
mind and body and are intellectually like children. Fifth,
women are “more bitter than death” because all sin originates
in and on account of women, and because women are “wheedling and secret” enemies. 3 Finally, witchcraft was a woman’s crime because “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is
in women insatiable. ”4
I want you to remember that these are not the polemics of
aberrants; these are the convictions of scholars, lawmakers,
judges. I want you to remember that nine million women were
burned alive.
Witches were accused of flying, having carnal relations with
Satan, injuring cattle, causing hailstorms and tempests, causing illnesses and epidemics, bewitching men, changing men and themselves into animals, changing animals into people,
committing acts of cannibalism and murder, stealing male
genitals, causing male genitals to disappear. In fact, this last—
causing male genitals to disappear—was grounds under Catholic law for divorce. If a man’s genitals were invisible for more than three years, his spouse was entitled to a divorce.
It would be hard to locate in Sprenger and Kramer’s gargantuan mass of woman-hating the most odious charge, the most incredible charge, the most ridiculous charge, but I do
think that I have done it. Sprenger and Kramer wrote:
And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who. . . collect
male organs in great numbers, 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 com, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report? 5
What indeed? What are we to think? What are those of us
who grew up Catholics, for instance, to think? When we see
that priests are performing exorcisms in Amerikan suburbs,
that the belief in witchcraft is still a fundament of Catholic
theology, what are we to think? When we discover that Luther
energized this gynocide through his many confrontations with
Satan, what are we to think? When we discover that Calvin
himself burned witches, and that he personally supervised the
witch hunts in Zurich, what are we to think? When we discover that the fear and loathing of female carnality are codified in Jewish law, what are we to think?
Some of us have a very personal view of the world. We say
that what happens to us in our lives as women happens to us
as individuals. We even say that any violence we have experienced in our lives as women— for instance, rape or assault by a husband, lover, or stranger—happened between two individuals. Some of us even apologize for the aggressor—we feel
sorry for him; we say that he is personally disturbed, or that he
was provoked in a particular way, at a particular time, by a
particular woman.
Men tell us that they too are “oppressed. ” They tell us that
