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 genital:
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
