Satan and Sex Manias - Moral Panics and the Mob Mind ~Part One
Lila Rajiva
Greed, fear, envy, anger -- the mob is usually driven mad by the vices. But almost as often, it can go out of its mind from fits of virtue as well. It seems as though even morality, when it is taken up by a mass of unthinking human beings, becomes corrupt.
Why this should be so is not hard to figure out. The man way-laid on the road in the Gospels was not picked up and cared for by a mob of Good Samaritans, but by one.
There was only one widow who dropped her mite into the collection plate at the synagogue. Only one leper out of a dozen came back to thank Jesus for healing him. Goodness, gratitude, or generosity needs effort. It needs a man to rise to his best, not sink to his worst. But the mob is nothing more than a group of men sinking to their worst.
And nothing makes it easier for men to sink to their worst than the newspapers, because everyone, everywhere reads them. They are ubiquitous. You could as soon avoid them as you could put a halt to your breathing. And they crawl with every half-baked idea and claptrap sentiment around in the same way a hospital teems with germs. You are bound to catch something just by putting your nose into one.
Newspapers, you see, do not simply give you the news, as they are said to, in the way that you are given a bunch of apples at the grocer?s or fresh fish at the market. You would recognize a granny smith or a slab of hake no matter where you found them. But how do you tell news from anything else? News is simply what the newspapers tell you it is.
If, tomorrow, the Times of London decides to write about the employment rate among teenagers in Birmingham, then that is news. Teenagers have always been around in Birmingham, but until they got into the Times, they were not news. That is to say, they were not considered worthy of being served up with breakfast to half the population of Britain. Why they should now be served up is an entirely arbitrary matter. The Times might as well have served up Icelandic folk dancing or the Pope?s views on transubstantiation or the contents of the yellow pages for all it really matters to you.
But once something shows up in the papers, it immediately becomes of the greatest importance to every literate adult in the area ? and most of the illiterate ones as well. They forget their own private affairs ? the loan that must be repaid, the garden that must be mowed, the friend who must be visited ? and instead they give themselves over to earnest cogitation over matters about which they know nothing. Then, they come to believe whatever humbug is being dished out by the guardians of public morals in the press. And before you know it, there is a full blown moral panic in swing, with every good citizen looking for devils in his closet and under his bed.
We turn to a moral panic of the past ? those who write the stories of yesteryear have no more of a grip on it than those who keep us up to date with pending business. In history, we encounter a genre of fiction so bizarre that we would wince if we found it within the covers of a book.
Such was the case of witchcraft in 17th century Europe as told by novelist Aldous Huxley.
The Devils of Loudon
Urban Grandier, priest of the parish of Loudon in France is a handsome, proud man. With a secret. He is a successful seducer of women, who has already gotten one woman, a local nobleman?s daughter, pregnant. It is a time of trouble: France is being laid waste by plague and war; Catholics and Protestants are fighting each other, and the walled Protestant strong hold of Loudon had just managed to make a tentative peace with the rest of Catholic France. At the court of Louis XIII, the power-mad Cardinal Richelieu is using the situation to consolidate his control over the country. Richelieu tries to force Loudon to tear down its walls, so that he can claim the city for the Catholics and wipe out its Protestant population. Only an old agreement and the defiant Grandier stand between Richelieu and Loudon.
As Huxley tells the tale, in the feverish atmosphere in the town, sexual tension builds up. Almost all the parish nuns are in love with the handsome priest. One, Sister Jeane, is even given to bouts of self-mutilation to keep her feelings in check, since her deformed back makes her passion twice as futile. Then, the priest finds his true love in a devoutly religious woman and marries her in a secret ceremony he conducts in his own church. Sister Jeane goes completely mad, spreading accusations that Grandier is a sorcerer. She accuses him of raping her, in league with Satan. An exorcist is called in, but things grow worse. Soon, Jeane?s hysteria has spread to the whole convent and all the nuns now claim to be victims of Satanic molestations. Grandier is tried, tortured, and burnt at the stake as a sorcerer, although he protests his innocence to the end. Four years later, the nuns are still being subjected to exorcisms to get rid of their demons and the city has fallen to the Catholics.1
Loudon is thought to be the worst case of mass possession and sexual hysteria in the western world. But there were hundreds of cases like it, as the modern world emerged from the old feudal one, the Salem witch trials in 1692 in colonial America, being the most notorious today. All told, the European witch hunts - the worst of which began around 1450 and continued until the mid-18th century - killed between 40,000 ? 100,000 witches at the least, with many more accused but not executed. 2
The persecution of witches - the Great Burning, it was called ? had all the hall marks of an episode of mass mania. There was popular hysteria and unpopular victims; there were sensational pamphlets, misbegotten theories?.sex, lies, and?. devils. It could have been mistaken for a session of Congress?..
A Mythology of Witches
The witch hunts soon sprouted a rain forest of explanations and theories by historians ?and, as always in a public spectacle, they were the most entertaining part of the whole business. For, just as it is a fib that news papers deliver the news as immaculately as the virgin birth, it is as much a fib that history brings back the past as accurately as a truth serum.
Instead, the preferences, passions, and politics of today creep into yesterday?s old story and distort it until it is unrecognizable.
So too for the witch hunts. For a long time, one popular theory was that they were simply a campaign run by the Catholic Church against heretics and pagans. We were told that the whole thing was sanctioned and propelled by that monstrous medieval creation, the Inquisition. We were supposed to think of the Great Burning as a kind of Catholic Final Solution, the sort of thing we could expect from a covey of irrational and superstitious old fogies in colorful drag, in the days before Progress showered her blessings on the planet.
But the closer that historians have looked at what happened, the more this fraud ? so flattering to modern minds - has fallen apart. In fact, (although Loudon itself was not a typical case), the prosecuting officials at most witch trials were usually secular. And politics, rather than religion, was what drove most prosecutions. Almost all the witchcraft trials took place in areas where there was a loosening of central authority, where there were frequent border disputes, and where Protestant-Catholic tensions were at a height.
Then, too, very often it was the secular courts that dealt the most extreme punishments to those who were convicted, not the church courts. Indeed, from the earliest times, Christian kingdoms were urged to protect men and women from charges of witchcraft, which were felt to be un-Christian. Of course, the Church did forbid the practice of magick, but it usually assigned relatively mild penalties to those convicted of it. The witches were seen as deluded more than wicked.
For instance, this is what the Confessional of Egbert (England, 950-1000 A.D.) recommends - "If a woman works witchcraft and enchantment and [uses] magical philters, she shall fast [on bread and water] for twelve months.... If she kills anyone by her philters, she shall fast for seven years." 3
Now, admittedly, there were always laws allowing the aristocracy to persecute witches all through Western Europe, right from the early middle ages. Under the barbarian codes (such as the Salic laws and the Norse codes), witches who committed magical harm paid a fine. This was very similar to the fine imposed on people who committed any sort of physical attack. And later, when Europe was Christianized, the stakes ? in a manner of speaking - did get higher. Roman law brought in the burning of witches; then, along came punishment by drowning and the use of red hot irons. Even so, during this earlier period of persecution, actual trials of witches were less widespread; and when witches were tried, they were tried as heretics, as Joan of Arc was. They were treated as erring believers and given the chance to recant and repent. Only if they did not were they put to death. The civil courts were in the business of ?protecting? society by punishing and killing convicted criminals, but the Church's court system, at least in theory, was supposed to "save" them. It was meant to rehabilitate them into good Christians. Execution was only for the most hardened sinners.
The result was that large-scale witch hunts only really became common later, during the Renaissance. The very fiercest hunts took place in the 1620s and 1630s, in German-speaking areas, not in the strongholds of the Inquisition, in Italy and Spain, as you would otherwise think. In fact, it was only where the central authority of the church or the state had broken down because of religious war that witch hunting was popular.4
Where does that leave us? Instead of a neat fable about progress, modernity, and the spread of reason and light, we get an unsettling paradox: The worst frenzies of witch-hunting took place not in the Dark Ages, not in a murky fog of superstition and irrationality?but in the clear dawn of Enlightenment, in the Century of Genius, in the days of Descartes, Locke, and Pascal.
Then there is Myth Number Two. Many modern pagans like to argue that the Great Hunt was intended to stamp out pre-Christian religions. Satan was really one of the old horned gods who had been, literally, demonized by the Church, they claim
Here, too, the facts trip us up. For most of the Middle Ages, the Church saw witchcraft not as a separate religion, pre-Christian or anything else, but simply as a heresy. It saw witchcraft as a mistake made by people who were otherwise believing Christians. The names of pagan deities did crop up in the language of the witches, but by the time of the mass hunts, witchcraft had become associated with the devil, not with natural forces. Witches were pitiful tools of Satan, not powerful magicians casting spells with nature.
It looks much more likely that the churchmen were not really attacking pagans so much as defending Christianity. They wanted to make sure that people didn?t think they could really conjure and cast spells on their own; otherwise, they might stop believing that the Christian God was all powerful. That may have been the real reason why Satan got dragged into the whole business - to make it black and white: one powerful devil and one even more powerful God. If you let planets, stars, faeries, hexagrams and wee green men into the thing, people would get confused and simply stop believing altogether. So, the priests had to ?black?-wash magic. They had to make sure people saw that it was diabolical?.serious business? not simply long haired women in mumus playing ring-a-roses in the moonlight. And, since it was during the Renaissance that people were most fascinated with things like astrology and fortune telling, that may be why the first mass trials of witches in Europe took place then ? when Christianity had begun to fade out -- and not in the Middle Ages, when it was powerful.
Mind you, what is interesting in all this is not the exact details of who struck John when?..half a millennium ago. What is puzzling, instead, is how intelligent people should have overlooked the possibility that historians might have their own reasons for rewriting history too. No one seems to have thought to ask if anyone stands to gain anything today by depicting the church back then as the eternal foe of sweetness and light.
It is not as if we have a dog in this fight. We have no particular reason to believe that the churchmen were any better than they have been painted. They might even be worse. But if we are unwilling to take the church in the 17th century at its face value, we wonder why we should be expected to take feminist historians in the 20th at theirs.
Especially when it comes to the war of the sexes, where they might have an axe to grind.
Take Myth Number Three, that the witchcraft craze was an attack on women healers and midwives by a male hierarchy that was threatened by their skill.5 We are inclined to think that that theory, too, can be put to rest. The record seems to show, to the contrary, that whenever suspected witches were found to have had healing powers or to have been midwives, they were actually less likely to have been brought to trial. And though the majority of witches were older women, we also now know that some of those who were tried, like Father Grandier, were males.6 And that, like Sister Jeane, the accusers were often females.
If it was misogyny that drove the trials as some historians like to argue, then a good number of the worst misogynists seem to have been women. Which is what we have always suspected?.
In any case, although there was plenty of misogyny on display at the trials, a much bigger reason for what went on was that that there were all too many witches eager to blame their rivals for whatever calamities visited their community. In short, there was professional rivalry. Inter-witch office politics. Not to put too fine a point on it, some of this boiled down to cat-fighting.
How can one be sure? Well, of course, one can?t. One can hardly be sure what happened a day ago under one?s own roof, much less five hundred years ago in a remote village in France. No, one can?t not sure. But the problem is, practically everyone else writing history seems to be. And that is what creates public spectacles in the first place ? the delightful certainty with which ordinary people read history or the front pages of their newspapers., convinced they know about fifteenth century Wurzberg what no one could possibly know about twenty- first century Washington. Which is how it has been possible for some feminists to create?and maintain? the dogma that the witch hunts were nothing more or less than a gender holocaust of women.
But, the truth - if one can ever come up with a fixed truth in such matters - is that a significant number of witches killed in the Great Hunt were men, up to 95% in one country, Iceland. And, there never was a time or a place where the majority of witches killed were healers. In most places, only around 20% of accused witches were even healers or mid-wives. And, often, it was the presence of the church that checked the persecution.
It was not Spanish chivalry, for instance, that was behind the low level of dead witches in Spain. Instead, it was the presence of the Spanish Inquisition, which tended to take a lighter and more circumspect approach to conviction than the secular courts. In fact, when the Inquisition lost control, Spanish men killed several hundred witches. So much for Don Quixote. Nor did the Germans kill more witches because of an innate Germanic tendency to mass slaughter. 7 The real reason seems to have been a good deal less exciting. Unlike the rest of Europe, Germany was made up almost completely of local courts ? and since local courts killed 90% of all accused witches (versus 30% in the national courts), German witches suffered more than most (26,000 deaths).
Why local courts? Because, witchcraft cases were rife with panic and public hysteria, so the courts closer to the ground tended to be more infected by mob psychology. National courts were simply more insulated.
Witness for the Persecution
But, then we are left with another problem. If the witchcraft trials of early modern Europe were not a purge of women healers and moon-worshipers by patriarchal, Catholic inquisitors, how did they ever come about? What made whole villages turn on elderly women ? most witches were over the age of fifty, which in those days was a fairly advanced age - and accuse them of the most bizarre behavior?
In Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay describes a typical manifestation of witches in the south of France:
?In 1619, Pierre de l?Ancre, member of the parliament of Bourdeaux, came to the town of Labourt at the foot of the Pyrenees to inquire why there were so many witches there. The number of persons brought to trial was about forty a day and the acquittals did not average even five percent.?8
The numbers themselves indicate a kind of contagion of feeling. And Mackay?s description of the lurid confessions proves this:
?All the witches confessed that they had been present at the great Domdaniel, or Sabbath. At these Saturnalia, the devil sat upon a large gilded throne, sometimes in the form of a goat; sometimes as a gentleman, dressed all in black, with boots, spurs, and sword; and very often as a shapeless mass, resembling the trunk of a blasted tree, seen indistinctly among the darkness. They generally proceeded to the Domdaniel, riding on spits, pitchforks, or broomsticks, and on their arrival indulged with the fiends in every species of debauchery?
But how could all the witches have concurred in such extraordinary detail? Isn?t that more than a little strange? Why, at a traffic accident, one can hardly get three witnesses to agree to what happened. One swears he saw nothing, the other two will tell you tales as far apart as the innards of their wrecked cars are scattered. But here, all involved seem to have undergone the same experience down to the finest detail.
Common sense tells us they could not have?and, indeed, they did not. What the witches are repeating, Mackay tells us, is simply what they have heard from somewhere else. But where did they hear it? Not from the local superstitions of peasants in the Pyrenees, as one might think:
No, quite the contrary. As Mackay writes:
?Several who were arrested confessed, without being tortured, that they were weir-wolves, and that at night they rushed out among the flocks and herds killing and devouring?. Such criminals were thought to be too atrocious to be hanged first and then burned; they were generally sentenced to be burned alive, and their ashes to be scattered to the winds. Grave and learned doctors of divinity openly sustained the possibility of these transformations, relying mainly upon the history of Nebuchadnazzar. They could not understand why, if he had been an ox, modern man could not become wolves by Divine permission and the power of the devil.?9
And there it is. The grotesque details had filtered down to the witches not from ignoramuses and illiterates but from intellectuals and doctors of divinity, from pointy heads of the pointiest headed variety?..who were themselves going by no more than what they had read in the story of Nebuchadnazzar in the Bible. Talk about ?blowing in the wind?!
Then, the most gullible, impressionable minds picked up the rumors and repeated them ad nauseum till the craze had spread like a typhus epidemic through the breadth and length of the continent.
What was extraordinary also was that no outside evidence was needed. So powerfully had the old stories about the devil put down roots in the minds of the mob that what the witches confessed was alone enough to convict, even if the confession came only after bouts of torture:
Writes Mackay:
?They also contended that, if men should confess, it was evidence enough, if there had been no other. Delrio mentions that one gentleman accused on lycanthropy was put to the torture no less than twenty times; but still he would not confess. An intoxicating draught was then given him, and under its influence he confessed that he was a weir-wolf. Delrio cites this to shew the extreme equity of the commissioners. They never burned any body till he confessed; and if one course of torture would not suffice, their patience was not exhausted , and they tried him again and again, even to the twentieth time!?10
What?s more, even when it was well known that an innocent person was being tried and that his accusers were only motivated by the desire to ruin him, the trials were allowed to run their course?.like some kind of incurable fever. It seemed that the troublemakers knew their audience well. They knew that the very absurdity of some of the hysterical charges made it easy to believe they were the work of the devil:
Here is Mackay again on what he calls, ?The trial of the unhappy Urbain Grandier? for ?an accusation resorted to by his enemies to ruin one against whom no other charge could be brought so readily?:
?This noted affair, which kept France in commotion for months, and the true character of which was known even at that time, merits no more than a passing notice in this place. It did not spring from the epidemic dread of sorcery then so prevalent, but was carried on by wretched intriguers, who had sworn to have the life of their foe. Such a charge could not be refuted in 1634; the accused could not, as Bodinus expresses it, ?make the malice of the prosecutors more clear than the sun;? and his own denial, however intelligible, honest, and straightforward, was held as nothing in refutation of the testimony of the crazy women who imagined themselves bewitched. The more absurd and contradictory their assertions, the stronger the argument employed by his enemies that the devil was in them. He was burned alive under circumstances of great cruelty.?11
Which only goes to show that mob stupidity is never the sole force behind moral panics or manias??..It takes much more than a credulous peasant to start things going, to give the little shove that sets the snowball of accusations avalanching down the slope to general panic. What you really need is a credulous pedant, a half-baked professor, armed with damp formulas and moldy evidence out of a dog-eared textbook; what you need are dusty manuals that no one has read but that everyone knows by heart; you need catchy phrases that spray around and lodge themselves like bird-shot in the fuzzy neo-cortexes of the masses.
It was only because clever chaps in Paris already believed in a cloven-footed fiend dressed in black that dunces in the Pyrenees who thought they spotted something funny going on could do a double-take and find the devil. ?literally?.in the details. And then, after that, it only took rumor and mimicry before the panic took over.
As Jenny Gibbons, a revisionist historian of the Great Hunt, writes:
?It was the combination of learned thought with real factors on the ground (as there really were heretics and people claiming magical powers) that turned deadly.?12
And this was true even earlier in the Middle Ages, when the accusations were of heresy. It was not illiterate fools who drove the persecution of the witches. It was the bigger, literate, fools . Once more, it was not what people did not know that proved their undoing, it was what they thought they knew?.that wasn?t so. And what the devil did was one of those things that wasn?t so.
So we end up with a conundrum: the rise of the Enlightenment, far from destroying belief in the devil, might actually have strengthened it in the beginning, because as we have seen, if you didn?t have a devil to kick around, whom could you blame magic on? Blaming magic on magicians would undermine belief in the omnipotence of god. And even those who accepted the new science -- people like Thomas More ? still wanted to believe in God. Why, even free thinkers like the atheistic political theorist, Thomas Hobbes, felt witches needed to be tried for the intent to commit maleficia (malevolent acts), even though he didn?t really believe they were really capable of doing much of anything. ?Reason? - with a capital R - amounted to just one more reason ? small r- to try witches.
Meanwhile, as with all public spectacles, the details of what people imagined the devil to be up to increased in inverse proportion to their actual encounters with him. Precisely because no one had actually run into Satan, he proved to be a convenient nail on which to hang every twisted fantasy, repressed desire, and foul imagining that ever swirled in bookish, anemic heads.
The Hammer of Witches
But there was one more way in which misbegotten words managed to fan the flames of mob madness. And that was through the book that, rightly or wrongly, came to symbolize the Great Hunt, The Malleus Maleficorum (The Hammer of the Witches).
All wickedness," runs this little gem, "is but little to the wickedness of a woman. ... What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colours. ... Women are by nature instruments of Satan -- they are by nature carnal, a structural defect rooted in the original creation."13
Not a lady?s man, the author. It turns out that this one book not only affected the trials but changed the way historians for the next several centuries would see them.
The Malleus was largely written by Heinrich Kramer (along with Jacob Sprenger), two German inquisitors. Kramer?s views on witchcraft were actually outre and extreme by the standards of most of clerics. In fact, at one of Kramer?s trials, in 1485, the local bishop was so outraged with the inquisitor?s lurid fascination with the sex life of the witches that he ended the proceedings, claiming that the only devil around was inside Kramer.
The real reason The Malleus ever became popular was because Kramer managed to talk Pope Innocent ? who had never read it - into writing a bull endorsing it. The pope was inordinately scared of witches and eager to oblige. Kramer then forged a recommendation from the Inquisition?s theologians, even though the Inquisition actually condemned him a few years after The Malleus was published. They thought his theology was all wrong and that he knew nothing about demons.. to boot. Because of the condemnation, most of the church courts actually ignored the book. But the civil courts were fooled. They took up The Malleus with so much glee that when witch burning hit full-stride in the middle of the 16th century, it was the one manual witch hunters automatically reached for. It became one of the hottest items off the new printing presses, and it skewed historians? views the trials forever.
How? Because The Malleus was so drenched with Kramer's sexual obsessions and misogyny that it made generations of readers believe that the witches and their prosecutors were also steeped in perversion. And it fed the imaginations of the prosecutors and the witches ? many of whom simply regurgitated the book?s obscene drivel in their coerced confessions. And drivel it was. Kramer apparently suffered from the delusion that his private parts were capable of midnight perambulations. He even devoted seven chapters to the grotesque things he thought witches were liable to do to them.
Nonetheless, while The Malleus might tell you precious little about what went on inside 16th century witches? heads, you get a panoramic tour of the demented interior of one inquisitor?s skull.
Like most books since, The Malleus turns out to be more about its author than about its subject matter.
But there?s another sense in which the witch trials really do turn out to be about sex, after all. How could they not have been when they were such a popular mania for so long? For, isn?t it the case that much of what happens in life is about reproductive fitness? The male at the head of the pack gets the female, we said earlier. Daily life seems to be all about strutting one?s stuff, butting one?s antlers up against someone else?s, sending out pheromones, looking buff and flashing gaudier colors?..more seductive scents?. than the next fellow. A public spectacle is no different, only grander, with more people, and played out on a bigger stage.
But what complicates things in a public spectacle is that the mating rituals, the cock-fights, the testosterone displays are all obscured by soothing rationalizations. They get smothered in a thick layer of verbiage. So, instead of seeing the spectacle for what it is, we get misled by the blather of the popular press or the preenings of would-be intellectuals? deluded by the ravings of ideologues. No much of what any of these soothsayers have to say has much substance in it, of course. Most of it is mere hot air, the wordy palaver of the neo-cortex, busy rationalizing and justifying the preferences of the libido. But the problem is that confronted with clever words, we start to think we really do know what is going on in public or in the papers, as though it were all a little ruckus on our front lawn or a squabble between first cousins. We begin to think we understand what the problem is, and before long, we even start to think we know how to set it straight. And then, of course, we shoot ourselves in the foot.
The witch hunts certainly fit into the general scheme of a mass mania; they, too, are a variation of the reproductive game. But in their case, the game is not about winners ? the tall CEOs, comely models, and flashy Hummers of the modern world. It is about the losers of the late medieval world.
Who, after all, were the victims? Not the well-endowed, the rich, the intelligent, or the educated. No ? the witches were mostly losers in the mating game. Older women, who were unmarried and poor. Women made single by choice or need. Childless. Dependent on the charity of contemptuous relatives. The kind of people it would be easy to pick on, to poke fun at and to blame if anything did go wrong somewhere. Most witches were also alienated from ordinary family life; there were seen as "different" by their neighbors; they were disliked and feared. They did not fit easily into any part of society but moved freely outside them. It was easy for a happy housewife to imagine that the barren crone in the shack outside her home was eaten up inside with envy and only waiting to cast an evil eye on her more prosperous neighbors.14
After the horrible ravages of the Black Death (1347-1349), especially, rumors of this sort multiplied. Stories about malign outsiders conspiring against the Christian kingdom quickly become popular?..growing in intensity especially toward pariah groups like Jews and lepers, Moslems and witches.15
Witches were feared as plague-spreaders, as poisoners, as workers of black magic on the community. They were the losers in the reproductive game.
Then at the heights of the Reformation, when central authority broke down, it was natural that the rumors would grow thicker, spread and burst into wild, cyclical panics.
And that is the problem with the glib little neo-cortex. It can always find plausible, reasons?.cunning justifications?impeccable logic?to do what it means to do anyway, and means to do for the most senseless of reasons. There would be nothing wrong with any of that, of course, if we could only see through the rationalization.
But then, we would not have a public spectacle on our hands, would we?
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