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
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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
