BEAUTY HURTS
C H A P T E R 7
Gynocide: The Witches
It has never yet been known that an innocent person has been punished on suspicion
of witchcraft, and there is no doubt that
God will never permit such a thing to
happen.
It would be hard to give an idea of how dark the Dark
Ages actually were. “Dark” barely serves to describe the
social and intellectual gloom of those centuries. The
learning of the classical world was in a state of eclipse.
The wealth of that same world fell into the hands of the
Catholic Church and assorted monarchs, and the only
democracy the landless masses of serfs knew was a
democratic distribution of poverty. Disease was an even
crueler exacter than the Lord of the Manor. The medieval Church did not believe that cleanliness was next to godliness. On the contrary, between the temptations
of the flesh and the Kingdom o f Heaven, a layer o f dirt,
lice, and vermin was supposed to afford protection and
to ensure virtue. Since the flesh was by definition sinful,
it was not to be uncovered, washed, or treated for those
diseases which were God’s punishment in the first place
— hence the Church’s hostility to the practice of medicine and to the search for medical knowledge. Abetted by this medieval predilection for filth and shame, successive epidemics o f leprosy, epileptic convulsions, 118
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and plague decimated the population o f Europe regularly. T he Black Death is thought to have killed 25
percent o f the entire population o f Europe; two-thirds
to one-half o f the population o f France died; in some
towns every living person died; in London it is estimated that one person in ten survived: On Sundays, after Mass, the sick came in scores,
crying for help and words were all they got: You have
sinned, and God is afflicting you. Thank Him: you will
suffer so much the less torment in the life to come.
Endure, suffer, die. Has not the Church its prayers
for the dead. 1
H unger and misery, the serf’s constant companions,
may well have induced the kinds o f hallucinations and
hysteria which profound ignorance translated as demonic possession. Disease, social chaos, peasant insurrections, outbreaks o f dancing mania (tarantism) with its accompanying mass flagellation — the Church
had to explain these obvious evils. What kind o f Shepherd was this whose flock was so cruelly and regularly set upon? Surely the hell-fires and eternal damnation
which were vivid in the Christian imagination were
modeled on daily experience, on real earth-lived life.
T he Christian notion o f the nature o f the Devil
