Eros and Evil: The Sexual Psychopathology of Witchcraft

By R. E. L. Masters

Eros and Evil is the first systematic modern study of the sexual behavior of witches (and of witch hunters) and, as such, is an important contribution to psychological literature. Emphasizing the period between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries (the witch era, when sexual licentiousness in fact and fantasy was rampant), R. E. L. Masters contends that intercourse with devils and demons was the central fact of witchcraft. His discussion ranges over such subjects as the anatomy of the devil, the sexual psychology of demons, and erotic cannibalism, and he shows how hysteria, mental disorders, and drugs may explain some of demonic sexuality’s strangest aspects. Most significantly, Eros and Evil throws light on the origins and development of Western sexual (or antisexual) morals. No other work makes so clear the superstitious and often diseased foundation of the sexual code by which we are still attempting to live.

This edition of Eros and Evil, first published in 1962, contains the complete text of Ludovico Maria Sinistrari’s Demoniality, one of the great classics of demonology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789125191

R. E. L. Masters

Robert E. L. Masters (1927-2008), known as “Papa Bob”, was an American author of more than 30 books and 100 papers and articles describing his researches into the varieties of human behavior and potentials. He also published poetry, fiction, essays, literary and art criticism, book reviews, anthology contributions, and forewords and introductions to books by authors in many different disciplines. His books in the field of sexology and natural history became classics in their field. His works have been translated into many languages, and he has taught and done research in Europe, Africa and Asia as well as the Americas. Born on January 4, 1927, Dr. Masters is recognized as a leading pioneer in consciousness research and the human potentials field. In addition to on-going work in psychophysical re-education, altered states of consciousness and other areas long worked with in the context of human potentials (research, educational and other applications), Dr. Masters initiated experimental approaches to esoteric psychologies and spiritual disciplines and was particularly knowledgeable about Ancient Egyptian psychospiritual practices. With his wife of 43 years, Jean Houston, Dr. Masters co-founded and directed The Foundation for Mind Research. The couples’ shared passion for charting, understanding, developing and teaching of human and extended human capacities, fueled their life long adventure towards improving the quality of life for peoples of all ages, cultures and geographic locations. Together, they were among the principal founders of the human potential movement. Dr. Masters passed away in Ashland, Jackson County, Oregon on July 27, 2008, aged 81.

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Text originally published in 1962 under the same title.

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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EROS AND EVIL

THE SEXUAL PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF WITCHCRAFT

BY

R. E. L. MASTERS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

Hymn to Pan 5

Introduction 8

1. Origins of incubi and succubi 18

2. The anatomy of the devil 24

3. Problems of demonic substance 37

4. The semen and the demon 41

5. Offspring of demoniality 46

6. Sexual psychology of demons 51

7. Demoniality: forms of the union 57

The Devil as rapist 61

The Devil as child-molester 64

Incest 67

Procuring and prostitution 68

Homosexuality 70

Bestiality 71

8. The witches’ Sabbat 76

9. Murder and cannibalism 80

10. Scatology 83

11. Cruelties and cuckoldries 87

12. Devils in the convents 91

13. Defense and counterattack 96

14. Points of law and order 100

15. Sexual magic 106

16. Sources of the witch belief 114

17. Drugs and the witches 120

18. Disordered minds 124

19. Eros and evil 132

APPENDIX A—Celebrities of demonology 136

Erotic celebrities of Hell 137

Sexual deities 140

Strange sexual beings 143

APPENDIX B—Demoniality by Ludovico Maria Sinistrari 151

INTRODUCTION 151

DEMONIALITY 157

Note by Isidore Liseux 203

Proof of demoniality—Summary 204

Penalties 207

Selected bibliography of English language works 208

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 215

DEDICATION

TO MY FRIEND, JACK KINDRED

(Raconteur and Bon Vivant)

Hymn to Pan

Thrill with lissom lust of the light,

O man! My man!

Come careering out of the night

Of Pan! Io Pan!

Io Pan! Io Pan! Come over the sea

From Sicily and from Arcady!

Roaming as Bacchus, with fauns and pards

And nymphs and satyrs for thy guards,

On a milk-white ass, come over the sea

To me, to me,

Come with Apollo in bridal dress

(Shepherdess and pythoness)

Come with Artemis, silken shod,

And wash thy white thigh, beautiful God,

In the moon of the woods, on the marble mount,

The dimpled dawn of the amber fount!

Dip the purple of passionate prayer

In the crimson shrine, the scarlet snare,

The soul that startles in eyes of blue

To watch thy wantonness weeping through

The tangled grove, the gnarléd bole

Of the living tree that is spirit and soul

And body and brain—come over the sea,

(Io Pan! Io Pan!)

Devil or god, to me, to me,

My man! my man!

Come with trumpets sounding shrill

Over the hill!

Come with drums low muttering

From the spring!

Come with flute and come with pipe!

Am I not ripe?

I, who wait and writhe and wrestle

With air that hath no boughs to nestle

My body, weary of empty clasp,

Strong as a lion and sharp as an asp—

Come, O Come!

I am numb

With the lonely lust of devildom.

Thrust the sword through the galling fetter,

All-devourer, all-begetter;

Give me the sign of the Open Eye,

And the token erect of thorny thigh,

And the word of madness and mystery,

O Pan! Io Pan!

Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan Pan! Pan,

I am a man:

Do as thou wilt, as a great god can,

O Pan! Io Pan!

Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! I am awake

In the grip of the snake.

The eagle slashes with beak and claw;

The gods withdraw:

The great beasts come, Io Pan! I am borne

To death on the horn

Of the Unicorn.

I am Pan! Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan!

I am thy mate, I am thy man,

Goat of thy flock, I am gold, I am god,

Flesh to thy bone, flower to thy rod.

With hoofs of steel I race on the rocks

Through solstice stubborn to equinox.

And I rave; and I rape and I rip and I rend

Everlasting, world without end,

Mannikin, maiden, maenad, man,

In the might of Pan.

Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan! Io Pan!

ALEISTER CROWLEY

Introduction

This book is divided into two main parts. The first explores the sexual relations of humans with demons (incubi and succubi) as reported in the writings of witch-era scholars and those concerned with the apprehension and punishment of witches. Considered too are the works of earlier authors who laid the foundation for the theoretical and practical development of the witch persecution as it evolved in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

The second part briefly inquires into the nature and meaning of the strange phenomena presented in detail in the first. The sexual pathology of witchcraft is examined in the light of medical and psychological and other knowledge of the present day. The examination is necessarily speculative in the main. Obviously, we will never know what actually took place in the minds of the men and women of those not very remote days. What is not speculative is the knowledge that what occurred then was evil, or diabolic, if you will: a ferocious blood-letting that passed, and a sexual trauma that still endures. The Devil was in fact abroad during those terrible centuries; but His proper garb was clerical.

The main period of what has come to be known as the Witch Mania or Witch Delusion lasted from roughly the middle of the fifteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century. However, consideration of data should not be rigidly limited to that interval. The first witch to be executed for copulating with a demon was put to death in 1275, one year after the death of Saint Thomas Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church, whose contribution to the witch-incubus belief was considerable. Moreover, witches were executed in the last half of the eighteenth century in Bavaria, in Spain, in Switzerland and in Poland. (Unofficial executions of witches—lynchings—were continuing up into the nineteenth century: in Germany, 1836; in France, 1850; in England, 1863. From 1860 to 1877 an epidemic of witchcraft raged in Latin America and many alleged witches were burned. A witch was consigned to the flames in Peru as recently as 1888; and in Milan a witch was mobbed and almost lynched in 1891.)

In the year 900 A.D., the Church had denied the possibility of sexual intercourse between humans and supernatural beings—although many early Christian writers, even including Saint Augustine, had declared such intercourse to be a fact. The tide seems to have turned again in the thirteenth century, under the impact of the writings of Aquinas and Gervasius of Tilbury, and the belief that humans copulated with demons began to exert a fatal fascination upon the minds of theologians. But trials for the offense did not begin in earnest until the fifteenth century. (Hansen, however, says that Christian belief in incubi began somewhere around the year 1100, and that previous to the twelfth century the demons said to have intercourse with humans were only beings derived from mythology and poetry, and were not taken seriously by theologians. George Lyman Kittredge, another important witchcraft scholar, writes in his Witchcraft in Old and New England: By the year 1100—to take a safe date—the Incubus Dogma was solidly established as an article of learned faith throughout Western Europe.)

Reginald Scot (The Discoverie of Witchcraft) took note of the shift of theological dogma that gained general acceptance after 1400. According to this revised position, the Church had been correct in its early teaching that incubi and succubi exist and have intercourse with humans. However, the demons of the early Christian period forced their attentions upon humans—in other words, committed rapes. But after 1400, the intercourse of demons with humans took a new and sinister turn. Witches appeared in great numbers, and for the first time the intercourse with demons was voluntary on the part of the humans engaging in that gravest of sins. (Soldan, in his Geschichte der Hexenprozesse, suggests that the idea of humans voluntarily engaging in coition with demons was brought back to Europe by the Crusaders, who had learned about Oriental beliefs on the subject.)

Lastly, as to the chronology of the witch-incubus belief, I will quote the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones (On the Nightmare), who observed: "The belief in lustful indulgence between Witch and Devil is again a relatively late constituent of the Witch delusion. The idea of such intercourse between human and supernatural beings was of course always present among the people...but it was for long strenuously denied by the Church, e.g., in 900 by Burkhard. Until the twelfth century it was quite distinct from sorcery, and became connected with it only through the linking of the Sabbath idea with heresy, about 1250."

There is of course no way to determine just when it was that men first began to believe in supernatural beings and the sexual relations of humans with them. We are certain only that such beliefs are prehistoric, their origins lost in depths of time that no degree of scholarship suffices to fathom. The gods of the oldest known religions copulated with mortals. A prehistoric bowl records the existence of belief in a vampire-succubus. The earliest literatures of many peoples are acquainted with such beings.

In ancient Egypt it was believed that there existed demons who were sexually attracted to human females—a belief Plutarch, taking note of its existence among the Egyptians, sought to refute. Beauty incites lust in the interest of propagating the species, he said, while demons, being of fixed number and having no need to propagate, would therefore not respond to feminine charms.

Demonic possession—later to drive the nuns of the witch era to erotic frenzies—was also known in ancient Egypt. One of the most famous cases of possession was that of the Mesopotamian beauty Bent-ent-resht, sister-in-law of the Egyptian king Rameses II. His father-in-law, the Prince of Bekhten, sought Rameses’ aid when Bent-ent-resht became possessed by a demon, and Rameses sent the statue of the god Khonsu Nefer-hetep, along with five boats of lesser gods, to Mesopotamia to terminate the possession. Arriving, the god Khonsu was at once taken to the princess, magical ceremonies were conducted, and the demon was successfully exorcised.

Alphonseus Joseph-Mary Montague Summers, in general one of the most excellent of authorities on matters of witchcraft and demonology, declares that once the ceremonies had been performed the demon incontinently departed. Such, however, was not precisely the case—as Summers assuredly well knew.

The statement is a kind of half-truth, since it would be accurate to say that the demon incontinently departed the mind and body of Princess Bent-ent-resht. But once that had occurred, the demon acknowledged his submissiveness only to Khonsu and called for a feast to be staged in his (the demons) honor. It was only after a great celebration that the demon departed from Bekhten.

As the Egyptologist Sir Wallis Budge (Egyptian Magic) validly remarks, The demon who possessed the princess recognized in Khonsu a being who was mightier than himself, and, like a vanquished King, he wished to make the best terms he could with his conqueror, and to be on good terms with him. This is a far cry from the relationship of a demon to a Christian exorcist—the Christian (especially Catholic) style being to hold the demon to be an altogether damnable and depraved spirit, and to have no friendly commerce with him of any kind. One surmises that it was Summers’ wish to suppress this difference of status, suggesting that Egyptian religion held the evil spirits in loathing equally as great as did the Christian. I will mention at least one other instance in which Summers is guilty of suppressing and distorting evidence, although I could cite many.

It is a matter of fact that pre-Christian demons were often considered to be neither necessarily good nor evil. The word demon means merely replete with wisdom. If an individual demon was good, the word for him was eudemon; if evil, cacodemon.

That the gods and goddesses of the Greeks and the Romans had sexual relationships with mortals is known to everyone. Semi-divine beings, such as Satyrs and Centaurs, also copulated with humans in the Greek and Roman mythology. Many early representations of devils were no more than Christianized Satyrs, or Pans. The derivation is discernible even up to the present time.

It is an axiom of demonology that the gods of the old religion become the devils of the new. Christianity, gaining ascendancy, consigned to the roles of devils not only the gods of all the pagan religions, but also the whole host of supernatural beings with which the world had been populated by legend, myth, and the beliefs of the people, Paul, Justin Martyr, and the Church Fathers declared as one that all non-Christian gods were devils.

Demons not only fornicated with men and women, they possessed humans and caused them to engage in all manner of venereal excesses. By urgings from without, too, they led mortals into carnal sin. Daniel Defoe, in his Political History of the Devil, expresses long-standing and general belief when he credits the Devil with inspiring three of the major erotic events of the Old Testament: the incest of Lot with his daughters; the homosexual incest of Noah with his son Ham (or grandson Canaan); and Eve’s corruption of Adam, acquainting him with his nakedness and inducing in him a sense of shame and of sinfulness.

Demons no less than gods reflect in the behavior assigned to them the desires and phantasies of their human creators. The Greek gods were lascivious but essentially healthy. The demons of the Hebrews (in general) experienced a natural sexual desire and indulged it. But as the Christian demonology evolved, it reflected the morbidity of the Christian, and in particular the Catholic, view of human sexuality. Demons did not seek sexual intercourse with humans in order to gratify erotic appetites. Rather, their aim was to corrupt and degrade men and women and lead them into eternal damnation by way of irremediable sin. The intercourse with the Christian demons was painful and sometimes repulsive, and the perversions were extreme—corpses and human waste products playing a prominent role in the sexual aspects of witchcraft.

Various terms were applied to the intercourse of supernatural with human beings. Some authorities classed it as sodomy, and others (Aquinas, Cajetanus and Bonacina, for example) as bestiality. John Caramuel, in his Fundamental Theology, proposed the term demoniality, which was later taken over and given a rather special application by Ludovico Maria Sinistrari of Ameno, a professor of theology at Pavia.

Nietzsche has written that Christianity poisoned Eros. It is probably the conviction of most students of human sexuality in the West that Nietzsche spoke the truth. We are accustomed to charge Saint Paul in particular with having administered the fatal draught. It may well be that he is the arch-villain, but the potion he provided was slow in taking maximum effect. It was not until the fifteenth century that man truly began to writhe in full agony as a consequence of the poison. Then that terrible neurotogenic brew ravaged mankind for three centuries before the effects began, all too slowly, to diminish. We are poisoned still; but science and other branches of truth-seeking are providing at long last the only effective antidote—knowledge.

Christianity, Catholicism especially, equated sex with evil. Even within marriage sexual pleasure was to be held to the unavoidable minimum. The sexual organs and the sexual act of coition were for procreation only. To use them as instruments of voluptuous delight was to court the awful wrath of a vengeful God.

Women were regarded by the ideologists of the Church as more lustful, more inclined to depravity than men. Because of this belief, female witches greatly outnumbered male ones: by ten-to-one, by one-hundred-to-one, by ten-thousand-to-one; it depended upon the authority.

The inquisitors Kramer and Sprenger, authors of the Malleus Maleficarum (first edition c. 1486), most influential of all books on witchcraft and responsible for the deaths of thousands of persons, expressed the prevailing view of the nature of women:

"Now the wickedness of women is spoken of in Ecclesiasticus XXV: There is no head above the head of a serpent: and there is no wrath above the wrath of a woman. I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon than to keep house with a wicked woman. And among much which in that place precedes and follows about a wicked woman, he concludes: All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman. Wherefore Saint John Chrysostom says on the text, It is not good to marry (St. Matthew XIX): What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors! Therefore if it be a sin to divorce her when she ought to be kept, it is indeed a necessary torture; for either we commit adultery by divorcing her, or we must endure daily strife. Cicero in his second book of The Rhetorics says: The many lusts of men lead them into one sin, but the one lust of women leads them into all sins; for the root of all woman’s vices is avarice. And Seneca says in his Tragedies: A woman either loves or hates; there is no third grade. And the tears of a woman are a deception, for they may spring from true grief, or they may be a snare. When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil."

After grudgingly allowing for the possibility of a good woman, the authors add: Wherefore in many vituperations that we read against women, the word woman is used to mean lust of the flesh. As it is said: I have a woman more bitter than death, and a good woman subject to carnal lust.

All this was used to explain why it is that women are more prone to witchcraft than males. Woman’s frailty, both of body and intellect, are important factors, Kramer and Sprenger said, but the main explanation for her frequent alliance with the evil forces lies in the fact that "she is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations. And it should be noted that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, a rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives....To conclude. All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs XXX: There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing which says not, It is enough; that is, the mouth of the womb. Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils."

The hatred of the flesh which by the time of the witch mania had assumed near-psychotic proportions did not come from the founder of the Christian religion, and was alien to him. A rigidly antisexual Christianity could be justified only by perverting the teachings and example of Christ. Marcus Bach (Strange Sects and Curious Cults) notes that the Church Fathers much preferred Christ’s teaching, namely, He who look-eth upon a woman with lust hath committed adultery with her already in his heart to his other (and seemingly much more liberal) one, that there is nothing unclean of itself, but to him who esteemeth anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean. The religionists then proceeded to transform (harshen and mutilate) the image of Christ:

There ...emerged the image of an intolerant Christ, a Prophet who, born without sin, condemned in others a passion he had never felt. And with this unyielding approach began the first real estrangement between the institutionalized Christ and mortal men. No longer was Jesus recognized as a man of peculiar tenderness, of sensitive understanding, and of divine capacity for love and tolerance. Gone was the gentle Galilean who, hating sin, had dined with sinners, had forgiven a prostitute, and had pardoned a woman taken in adultery. He had now become instead a judge to be feared and a moralist to be avoided, a preacher who uncompromisingly proclaimed, ‘If thine eye offend thee by bringing lust into your heart, pluck it out!’

Predictably, those who hated the flesh became obsessed by the flesh. Inquisitors and others who dealt with witches doted upon every erotic detail of the confessions and testimony, encouraged the morbid and the sensational, examined naked witches for the Devil’s Mark (shaving their bodies the better to find it), and in all displayed such shameless avidity in matters erotic as to provoke public criticism.

The Devils Mark, which often resembled the foot of a hare or of a toad, was believed placed by Him on the flesh of each witch so that the witch could not later attempt to deny that a pact had been made. It was often concealed in the female genitals and in the rectum, and was anesthetic. To make certain that some blemish was in fact the Devil’s Mark, long pins would be inserted into the flesh of the witch. One may well imagine that sadists were attracted to the work of driving pins into the breasts and genitalia and other sensitive body parts of witches.

In some places it was the practice for the judges themselves to shave and singe all of the hair from the bodies of persons accused of witchcraft, and then to probe vagina and rectum for concealed amulets and drugs as well as for the Devils Mark. No doubt the search was regarded as much too important to be entrusted to others. But the judges so obviously relished the assignment that objections arose, probably from women. The task was turned over to guards and executioners and others, who not only performed their work with great brutality, but who often raped any woman or child who took their fancy. Still later, the job of searching the witches was turned over to women especially trained for it, and who were brutal enough, but it was not believed that they took sexual pleasure in their efforts.

Witches were so seldom acquitted, or given less than the death penalty, that those who abused them had little cause to fear subsequent retribution. Confessions were certain to be obtained, and if repudiated, to be obtained a second or a third time—the tortures inflicted by good Christians equalling any to which the martyrs of the Church had been subjected by the Romans—and in any case the entire legal procedure was a travesty. Friedrich von Spee, in the early seventeenth century, wrote bitterly of the injustice of the proceedings, especially denouncing the fact that defense attorneys either were not allowed or could not be obtained by an accused. No lawyer would defend a witch, he pointed out, because by so doing the attorney himself became suspect of being a witch or else was denounced as a patron of witches. Few even dared to voice such criticism as Spee’s.

(Today a somewhat similar situation all too widely prevails. Our more literate and humane attorneys and legislators recognize the desperate need for sex reform legislation and for abolishing obsolete and unrealistic laws. But very few dare to introduce such legislation or to work in its behalf lest they be accused of seeking to legitimize vice. Those who defend the much-abused civil rights of such persons as homosexuals are likely to find themselves accused of that deviation—just as those who defended witches were accused of themselves practicing witchcraft.)

The judge and witch-burner De Lancre placed the trials beyond all criticism. In one of his several books on witchcraft he set forth the sockdolager that if anyone said the confessions of witches were merely the result of torture, or based on illusions, then that person would be guilty of accusing the Church of criminal error in executing witches. To thus impute criminal error to the Church would be not only a misstatement of fact but also a grievous sin—and a sin likely, as some discovered, to have serious and even fatal consequences for the skeptic.

Who actually were the witches and what was witchcraft? One theory has it that the accused were prostitutes and women of loose morals, persons dabbling in the occult arts, persons who had made themselves obnoxious in various ways, etc. The basic phenomena were all invented by the witch-burners, with the victims—who were eager to oblige and so avoid further torture—elaborating upon the stereotypes and fantastically fleshing the grim skeleton. But this, I think, is an extremist view and one which the facts do not support. The same may be said of the belief—in fact, a shaky and hollow hypothesis—that the witches were members of a surviving pagan cult or religion. This last-mentioned theory, usually associated with the British anthropologist Margaret Murray, although she did not originate it, has attracted a wide and influential following. I will not pass up an opportunity to say that it is very strange that the views of Dr. Murray, repudiated by almost every significant contemporary scholar in the field, continue to prevail so far as the Encyclopaedia Britannica is concerned. H. C. Lea’s findings, and those of George Lincoln Burr, contradict Murray’s fanciful maunderings; Montague Summers directly challenged her theory and proved it wanting; Ernest Jones stated his opposition. So did H. T. F. Rhodes, in a recent and scholarly work on the satanic mass. So untenable is the Murray position that it is a marvel she should have even a single disciple among those who have studied witchcraft and demonology with any degree of care.

We have considerable information about, and the names of, a goodly number of even quite obscure cults and sects of the witch period and much earlier. If there was a religion of the witches that continued the worship of the Horned God or whatever, dating back to paganism and with many thousands of members, why is there any question as to its name and the very fact of its existence? The answer undoubtedly is that there was no such surviving pagan cult to which more than a few of those persons called witches belonged. In the beginning, witches must have been members of a variety of heretical sects, all lumped together by the Church as devil-worshipers. Later, of course, when the madness was raging in full frenzy, accusations of witchcraft were levelled without any factual basis of any kind: Against those who were old and ugly, or young and beautiful, those whose property or position was coveted, and especially those whose names some witch happened to think of as she was being pressed to incriminate others while her nipples were being pulled off with hot pincers or her vagina poked with a glowing and razor-edged sword. There must also have been large numbers of the mentally ill who responded to the expectations of the witch-hunters by supposing themselves to copulate with demons.

It was said that the witches gathered on mountaintops, in deserted churches, at crossroads and elsewhere to worship the Devil. Their meetings were usually called Sabbats (or Sabbaths—and Synagogues, by the anti-Semitic). Some writers distinguish between Esbats, small meetings of individual covens held at frequent intervals, and Sabbats, held less often and where whole congregations were present. At these meetings, it was said, there occurred eating, drinking, dancing, and probably promiscuous intercourse, or orgies. To that plausible list the demonologists added human sacrifice and cannibalism, especially the slaughter and eating of infants, a great variety of perverted and scatologic practices, and copulations with devils. Almost identical descriptions had been given centuries earlier of the meetings of the Manichaeans and other heretics. It is probable that meetings of some groups of persons declared witches by the Church did in fact take place, and it would not be surprising if sexual orgies were staged. As I will show later, such behavior would not have been unusual at the time.

Some held that witchcraft was not only a plot to overthrow Christianity and the Church, but also a political conspiracy to launch popular revolutions, assassinate monarchs, and engage in other terrorist activities. A number of specific plots were attributed to witches—in part, it would seem, in the interest of persuading secular authorities to join with the Church in the suppression of the heretics.

Many of the charges most often made against witches are set forth in the Bull of Innocent VIII, issued at Rome in December of 1484, which unleashed the inquisitors Sprenger and Kramer and empowered them to put down all heretical pravities. The document had far-reaching effects and is one of the most important in the history of witchcraft. I will quote a portion of it:

It has indeed lately come to Our ears, not without afflicting Us with bitter sorrow, that in some parts of Northern Germany, as well as in the provinces, townships, territories, districts and dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Trèves, Salzburg, and Bremen, many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offenses, have slain infants yet in the mother’s womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burden, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards, orchards, meadows, pastureland, corn, wheat, and all other cereals; these wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women, beasts of burden, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls, whereby they outrage the Divine Majesty and are a cause of scandal and danger to very many. (This Bull is given in its entirety by Summers in his edition of the Malleus Maleficarum.)

It seems to have been the case that the extreme licentiousness of the times, in combination with the antisexual doctrines of the Church and the near-panic brought about by very widespread torture and execution of alleged witches, resulted in epidemic mental illness, especially hysteria. Possession and obsession, demonomania and demonophobia, spontaneous trances and hallucinations were all commonplace. Potent deranging drugs and alcoholic beverages were freely used, often worsening the mental disturbances.

Demons copulated with men and women in phantasies, in nightmares and other dreams, and in hallucinations. The guilt resulting was severely destructive and sometimes deadly. The intercourse was usually reported to be extremely painful—testimony to anguish and anxiety, with dread of terrible punishment both in this world and throughout eternity. The Church did not succeed in suppressing sexual acts, which flourished and even multiplied in both fancy and fact; but it succeeded in creating guilt and terror so intense that the authority of the Church, which alone could grant absolution, survived well beyond the time when otherwise it would have sunk into decline.

It is true that Protestants, too, burned witches. However, they did not contribute much of importance to the theory and trappings of witchcraft, merely taking over in the main the ideas and practices of the Inquisition. Almost the entire blame for the hideous nightmare that was the witch mania, and the greatest part of the blame for poisoning the sexual life of the West, rests squarely upon the Roman Catholic Church. About this, and about the