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mask131 · 2 years

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Demonic hierarchies: The Seven Princes of Hell (updated!)

Given the Helluva Boss finale is upon us and people are yet again going cuckoo for demon hierarchies, I thought I’d make a quick series of explanatory posts about the different demonic hierarchies that were formed through time, for you lazies that don’t want to dig up stuff for themselves :p

[NOTE THAT ALL HERE IS COVERED WITHIN CHRISTIAN CONTEXT! And this is just a quick over-view, not an in-depths analysis of the theological arguments. ]

So… let’s start with a simple idea – people tend to know that there are seven typical demons associated with the seven deadly sins. But where does this idea comes from? Well, very simply, from a little piece of text called “The Lanterne of Light”.

The Lanterne of Light was written and printed around 1409-1410. It was not a proper book but rather a religious tract that went around England at the time. It was a Lollard text, and if you don’t know, the Lollard movement (or Lollardy) was a Christian and English religious/intellectual movement that started in the mid-14th century and that criticized the Roman Catholic Church, demanding a whole reform of Catholic Christianity – as a result the Lollardy was seen as a proto-Protestant movement (and they shared similar beliefs and concerns).

Nobody knows exactly who wrote the Lanterne of Light (though John Wycliffe is often accused), but it is in this text that we find for the first time the association of the seven deadly sins with individual demons. Each of those seven demons was supposed to tempt humanity with one of the seven deadly sins. In order you have Lucifer, who is the first in malice among the rulers of Hell, and who patrons all the prideful ones ; second is Belzebub, who rules over the envious ; third is Sathanas, who rules over wrath ; fourth is Abadon, the demon of sloth ; fifth is Mammon who makes men avaricious ; sixth is Belphegor “the god of the gluttonous”, and seventh is Asmodeus who rules over the lecherous.

This list was influential enough that the English poet John Taylor (one of the most popular poets of the Stuart England) reused it in his works.

However the list we know and often bring up today is a “modernization” of this initial list – it is the “Binsfeld list” as people remember it. Peter Binsfeld was a bishop and theologian of the 16th century Germany, a fervent anti-Protestant, but also a famous German with hunter (he was behind the Trier witch trials for example). His most popular work was in fact a book about his experience as a witch-hunter and witch-judge: “De confessionibus maleficorum et sagarum”, which could be translated as “Of the confessions of warlock and witches”, or “Treatise on the confessions of evildoers and witches”. In this 1589, Binsfeld mentions a list of demons, which seems strongly inspired by the one from “The Lanterne of Light”, but while The Lanterne had success only in England, Binsfeld’s work was translated in several European languages and became very popular.

Binsfeld claimed that those seven demons that were responsible for the seven deadly sins, patrons of the cardinal vices, were commonly known as the “seven Princes of Hell”, the seven masters of the infernal world. The order was slightly changed and the names were different, but we find back Lucifer as the Prince of Pride and the first of the seven Princes, ruling over the others, Mammon as the Prince of Greed, Asmodeus as the Prince of Lust, Leviathan as the Prince of Envy (instead of Beelzebub), Beelzebub as the Prince of Gluttony (instead of Belphegor), Satan (modernization of the old Sathanas/Sathanus) as the Prince of Wrath and Belphegor as the Prince of Sloth (instead of Abaddon).

But of course, this is just one of the several hellish hierarchies that were created through the centuries…

EDIT:

A few more informations to add.

# I see a few websites mentionning that the list of the seven Princes of Hell according to Binsfeld can be found in a book called “Classification of Demons”, a follow-up of his “Of the confessions of warlock and witches”. However other sources do not mention this so-called book and rather say the list can be found in the “Of the confessions of warlock and witches”. I do not know which record is true.

#demon hierarchy #demonic hierarchy #princes of hell #demonology #hell #demons #hierarchy #helluva boss #seven deadly sins

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pp-research · 3 years

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BIG IDEAS

1. self-Making

Tools vs. weapons.

2. The Master-Gardener

Cultivate your mind’s garden.

3. Hidden Justice

Learn from mistakes.

4. Aimlessness

It’s a vice.

5. Supreme Duty

What’s yours?

1. Self-making

“Man is made or unmade by himself; in the armoury of thought he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself; he also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peace. By the right choice and true application of thought, man ascends to the Divine Perfection; by the abuse and wrong application of thought, he descends below the level of the beast. Between these two extremes are all the grades of character, and man is their maker and master.”

- JAMES ALLEN

Man is made or unmade by himself.

James Allen describes how you and I chisel our own character.

He strains the point that our character is not the result of “luck” or “chance”:

“A noble and Godlike character is not a thing of favour or chance, but is the natural result of continued effort in right thinking, the effect of long-cherished association with Godlike thoughts. An ignoble and bestial character, by the same process, is the result of the continued harbouring of groveling thoughts.”

JAMES ALLEN

The thoughts we regularly think can either make us Godlike, or bestial.

“Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results; bad thoughts and actions can never produce good results.”

2. The Master-gardener

“Just as a gardener cultivates his plot, keeping it free from weeds, and growing the flowers and fruits which he requires, so may a man tend the garden of his mind, weeding out all the wrong, useless, and impure thoughts, and cultivating toward perfection the flowers and fruits of right, useful, and pure thoughts.

By pursuing this process, a man sooner or later discovers that he is the master-gardener of his soul, the director of his life. He also reveals, within himself, the laws of thought, and understands, with ever-increasing accuracy, how the thought-forces and mind elements operate in the shaping of his character, circumstances, and destiny.”

What happens if we don’t actively cultivate our mind’s garden?:

“Man’s mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed-seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.”

Whether we actively cultivate our mind’s garden with pure thoughts, or let impure thoughts run wild, the garden WILL bring forth results.

“Your mind is like an empty glass; it’ll hold anything you put into it. You put in sensational news, salacious headlines, talk-show rants, and you’re pouring dirty water into your glass. If you’ve got dark, dismal, worrisome water in your glass, everything you create will be filtered through that muddy mess, because that’s what you’ll be thinking about. Garbage in, garbage out. …

But just like a dirty glass, if you flush it with clean, clear water under the faucet long enough, eventually you’ll end up with a glass of pure, clear water.”

And how can we pour clean water/useful seeds into our minds? We read inspirational and instructional books, listen to good audio programs, and spend less time watching TV, news, or any other media that doesn’t contribute to our goals, or our minds.

3 . Hidden Justice (Learn From Mistakes)

“A man only begins to be a man when he ceases to whine and revile, and commences to search for the hidden justice which regulates his life. And as he adapts his mind to that regulating factor, he ceases to

accuse others as the cause of his condition, and builds himself up in strong and noble thoughts; ceases to kick against circumstances, but begins to use them as aids to his more rapid progress, and as a means of discovering the hidden powers and possibilities within himself.”

and that searching for that hidden justice means learning from our mistakes.

4. Aimlessness (It’s A Vice)

“Until thought is linked with purpose there is no intelligent accomplishment. With the majority the bark of thought is allowed to ‘drift’ upon the ocean of life. Aimlessness is a vice, and such drifting must not continue for him who would steer clear of catastrophe and destruction.

They who have no central purpose in their life fall an easy prey to petty worries, fears, troubles, and self-pityings, all of which are indications of weakness, which lead, just as surely as deliberately planned sins (though by a different route), to failure, unhappiness, and loss, for weakness cannot persist in a power evolving universe.”

When someone has a central purpose in their life – they know what they’re here to do – they are able to concentrate all of their thoughts and actions toward living true to that purpose.

5. Supreme Duty (Purpose → Character)

“A man should conceive of a legitimate purpose in his heart, and set out to accomplish it. He should make this purpose the centralizing point of his thoughts. It may take the form of a spiritual ideal, or it

may be a worldly object, according to his nature at the time being; but whichever it is, he should steadily focus his thought-forces upon the object, which he has set before him. He should make this purpose his supreme duty, and should devote himself to its attainment, not allowing his thoughts to wander away into ephemeral fancies, longings, and imaginings. This is the royal road to self-control and true concentration of thought. Even if he fails again and again to accomplish his purpose (as he necessarily must until weakness is overcome), the strength of character gained will be the measure of his true success, and this will form a new starting-point for future power and triumph.”

When we DON’T have a purpose, it’s easy to get sidetracked by distractions like TV, overeating, excessive drinking, gossiping, complaining… and all such things.

Another point I want to stress, is that when you commit to a purpose, and work strenuously on it, your character strengthens. When you constantly overcome fear, resistance, mistakes, and failures, you eventually become an entirely new person.

As James says:

“Thought allied fearlessly to purpose becomes creative force: he who knows this is ready to become something higher and stronger than a mere bundle of wavering thoughts and fluctuating sensations; he who does this has become the conscious and intelligent wielder of his mental powers.”

“This little volume (the result of meditation and experience) is not intended as an exhaustive treatise on the much-written-upon subject of the power of thought. It is suggestive rather than explanatory, its object being to stimulate men and women to the discovery and perception of the truth that"

"They themselves are makers of themselves.

by virtue of the thoughts, which they choose and encourage; that mind is the master-weaver, both of the inner garment of character and the outer garment of circumstance, and that, as they may have hitherto woven in ignorance and pain they may now wave in enlightenment and happiness.”

~ James Allen from As A Man Thinketh

#self healing #selfmade #motivation #inspiring quotes #inspiration #positive psychology #positivity #book review #book #best seller books #as a man thinketh #james allen #goal setting #self maintenance #planning

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dwellordream · 3 years

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“Medieval men were distinguished from one another primarily by social status and occupation, but the most salient piece of a medieval woman’s identity, beyond that of her gender, was her marital status. While medieval people acknowledged differences among peasant women, townswomen, and women of the aristocratic classes, the category of ‘woman’ was most commonly divided into virgins, wives, and widows. A young single woman of the peasantry or townsfolk was expected to marry. Women were thus classified primarily in terms of their marital relationships with men: premarried, married, and postmarried.

Their relationship to legitimate speech - as construed both in literature and art and in courts - also varied according to their marital status. Indeed, relationship to legitimate speech was one of several factors that helped define marital status for some commentators: a garrulous single woman was not a ‘true’ virgin, according to some, no matter whether or not she had engaged in sexual activity, whereas an old woman, especially a widow, was expected to be gossipy and querulous.

...During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the very definition of virginity was often cast as chastity in speech as well as deeds, with some commentators even arguing that refraining from sexual intercourse was not sufficient qualification for the status of ‘true’ virginity. ...One fifteenth century treatise on maidenhood, for instance, identified three degrees of maidens. First were those who had not committed any evil deeds, but were disposed to foul speech and evil touching. These maidens were guilty of sin because, by their evil speech and touch, they caused others to desire them. The second group kept their bodies and hearts pure but would have preferred to be married. Because they were wedded in their souls, they earned no rewards of maidenhood. But the final group - pure maidens - was undefiled in word, deed, and desire and hence deserved to be spouses of Christ.

...Young women were urged to avoid foul language and chattering. They were to refrain from swearing, chiding, and wearing fine clothes, since these vices promoted lechery. Virginity was thus about more than just sex: it included close attention to the chastity of the tongue. ...Both loose tongues and loose morals could, according to contemporary associations, end in shame and disaster for young women. Yet for all that they were warned against evil speech, unmarried women were seldom stereotyped as gossips or nags in the same way as wives and widows were. Transgression of verbal norms cast doubt in maidens’ morality, but verbal sins were ultimately less constitutive of identity than sexual sins. An unmarried woman who had sex became a whore; an unmarried woman who talked too much risked being viewed as a whore.

...While medieval literature continually lamented wives’ nagging of their mates, wives were not prosecuted for scolding their husbands. Wives were legally subject to the wills of their husbands and, while a husband might claim that his wife’s verbal misbehavior was legitimate grounds for desertion, he would certainly be seen as a cuckold if his wife were charged in court with scolding him. Rather, scolding wives were most often prosecuted in court for scolding other women.

...Widows, on the other hand, were very seldom charged with scolding, despite the bad press they received in contemporary art, literature, and popular culture. The legal position of medieval English widows was theoretically more advantageous than that of unmarried women or wives, since widows controlled their own dowries, were responsible for their own debts, could use town or manor courts to pursue those who owed them money, and were often named as executors of their husbands’ wills, taking care of property until children were old enough to inherit. The status of widow also carried a degree of social and religious esteem. Following patristic traditions, widows in religious texts were regarded as more spiritual than wives. The removal of their husbands allowed widows a ‘second virginity’ and closer access to God, uncompromised by spousal demands.

But while widows seemed better off in some ways, they were also often among the most economically vulnerable and the most morally suspect. Widows were overrepresented among the poor, in both town and countryside. Even in guilds, where they were often able to continue their husbands’ workshops and memberships, their rights were fragile - they could not vote or hold office and their positions were curtailed if they remarried. In the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this economic vulnerability and dependence on the goodwill of their neighbors was to play a role in widows’ liability to be charged with witchcraft. In the late Middle Ages, widows were not yet accused as witches, but they were often represented as lustful and wanton, lacking in sexual morality and verbal propriety.”

- Sandy Bardsley, “Who Was a Scold?” in Venomous Tongues: Speech and Gender in Late Medieval England

#sandy bardsley #venomous tongues #history #late middle ages #medieval #marriage #widows

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and-then-there-were-n0ne · 4 years

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The Witches

To deal with the increasing tide of witchcraft and in conformity with the Pope ’s orders, Inquisitors Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer collaborated on the Malleus Maleficarum. [From Wikipedia] This document is the best known and the most important treatise on witchcraft. It endorses extermination of witches and for this purpose develops a detailed legal and theological theory. The Malleus elevates sorcery to the criminal status of heresy and prescribes inquisitorial practices for secular courts in order to extirpate witches. The recommended procedures include torture to effectively obtain confessions and the death penalty as the only sure remedy against the evils of witchcraft. At that time, it was typical to burn heretics alive at the stake and the Malleus encouraged the same treatment of witches. […]

The Malleus also describes the ritual and content of witchcraft per se, though in the tradition of paternalism indigenous to the Church, Sprenger and Kramer are careful not to give formulae for charms or other dangerous information. […] They document how witches injure cattle, cause hailstorms and tempests, illnesses in people and animals, bewitch men, change themselves into animals, change animals into people, commit acts of cannibalism and murder. The main concern of the Malleus is with natural events, nature, the real dynamic world which refused to conform to Catholic doctrine — the Malleus, with tragic wrong-headedness, explains most aspects of biology, sexology, medicine, and weather in terms of the demonic. Before we approach the place of women in this most Christian piece of Western history, the importance of the Malleus itself must be understood. In the Dark Ages, few people read and books were hard to come by. Yet the Malleus was printed in numerous editions. It was found in every courtroom. It had been read by every judge, each of whom would know it chapter and verse. It was a bestseller, second only to the Bible in terms of sales for almost 200 years. It was theology, it was law. To disregard it, to challenge its authority was to commit heresy, a capital crime.

Although statistical information on the witchcraft persecutions is very incomplete, there are judicial records extant for particular towns and areas which are accurate:

In almost every province of Germany the persecution raged with increasing intensity. Six hundred were said to have been burned by a single bishop in Bamberg, where the special witch jail was kept fully packed. Nine hundred were destroyed in a single year in the bishopric of Wurzburg, and in Nuremberg and other great cities there were one or two hundred burnings a year. So there were in France and in Switzerland. A thousand people were put to death in one year in the district of Como. Remigius, one of the Inquisitors, who was author of Daemonolatvia, and a judge at Nancy boasted of having personally caused the burning of nine hundred persons in the course of fifteen years. Delrio says that five hundred were executed in Geneva in three terrified months in 1515. The Inquisition at Toulouse destroyed four hundred persons in a single execution, and there were fifty at Douai in a single year. In Paris, executions were continuous. In the Pyrenees, a wolf country, the popular form was that of the loup-garou, and De L’Ancre at Labout burned two hundred.

It is estimated that at least 1, 000 were executed in England, and the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish were even fiercer in their purges. It is hard to arrive at a figure for the whole of the Continent and the British Isles, but the most responsible estimate would seem to be 9 million. It may well, some authorities contend, have been more. Nine million seems almost moderate when one realizes that The Blessed Reichhelm of Schongan at the end of the 13th century computed the number of the Devil-driven to be 1,758,064,176. A conservative, Jean Weir, physician to the Duke of Cleves, estimated the number to be only 7,409,127. The ratio of women to men executed has been variously estimated at 20 to 1 and 100 to 1. Witchcraft was a woman’s crime.

Men were, not surprisingly, most often the bewitched. Subject to women’s evil designs, they were terrified victims. Those men who were convicted of witchcraft were often family of convicted women witches, or were in positions of civil power, or had political ambitions which conflicted with those of the Church, a monarch, or a local dignitary. Men were protected from becoming witches not only by virtue of superior intellect and faith, but because Jesus Christ, phallic divinity, died “to preserve the male sex from so great a crime: since He was willing to be born and to die for us, therefore He has granted to men this privilege.” Christ died literally for men and left women to fend with the Devil themselves. Without the personal intercession of Christ, women remained what they had always been in Judeo-Christian culture:

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 S. John Chrysostom says on the text. It is not good to marry (S.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 nature, painted with fair colours!… 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… When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.

Other characteristics of women made them amenable to sin and to partnership with Satan:

And the first is, that they are more credulous… The second reason is, that women are naturally more impressionable, and more ready to receive the influence of a disembodied spirit… The third reason is that they have slippery tongues, and are unable to conceal from their fellow-women those things which by evil arts they know; and since they are weak, they find an easy and secret manner of vindicating themselves by witchcraft… because in these times this perfidy is more often found in women than in men, as we learn by actual experience, if anyone is curious as to the reason, we may add to what has already been said the following: that since they are feebler both in mind and body, it is not surprising that they should come more under the spell of witchcraft. For as regards intellect, or the understanding of spiritual things, they seem to be of a different nature from men; a fact which is vouched for by the logic of the authorities, backed by various examples from the Scriptures. Terence says: Women are intellectually like children.

Women are by nature instruments of Satan — they are by nature carnal, a structural defect rooted in the original creation:

But the natural reason is 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, 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… And all this is indicated by the etymology of the word; for Femina comes from Feand Minus, since she is ever weaker to hold and preserve the Faith. And this as regards faith is of her very nature… This is so even among holy women, so what must it be among others?

In addition, “Women also have weak memories,” “woman will follow her own impulse even to her own destruction,” “nearly all the kingdoms of the world have been overthrown by women,” “the world now suffers through the malice of women,” “a woman is beautiful to look upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep,” “she is a liar by nature,” “her gait, posture, and habit… is vanity of vanities.” Women are most vividly described as being “more bitter than death”

And I have found a woman more bitter than death, who is the hunter’s snare, and her heart is a net, and her hands are bands. He that pleaseth God shall escape from her; but he that is a sinner shall be caught by her. More bitter than death, that is, than the devil… More bitter than death, again, because that is natural and destroys only the body, but the sin which arose from woman destroys the soul by depriving it of grace and delivers the body up to the punishment for sin. More bitter than death, again, because bodily death is an open and terrible enemy, but woman is a wheedling and secret enemy.

and also:

And that she is more perilous than a snare does not speak of the snare of hunters, but of devils. For men are caught not only through their carnal desires, when they see and hear women: for S.Bernard says: Their face is a burning wind, and their voice the hissing of serpents… And when it is said that her heart is a net, it speaks of the inscrutable malice which reigns in their hearts… 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.

[…] The words flow almost too easily in our psychoanalytic age: we are dealing with an existential terror of women, of the “mouth of the womb,” stemming from a primal anxiety about male potency, tied to a desire for self (phallic) control; men have deep-rooted castration fears which are expressed as a horror of the womb.These terrors form the substrata of a myth of feminine evil which in turn justified several centuries of gynocide. The evidence, provided by the Malleus and the executions which blackened those centuries, is almost without limit. One particular concern was that devils stole semen (vitality) from innocent, sleeping men — seductive witches visited men in their sleep, and did the evil stealing. As Ernest Jones wrote:

The explanation for these fantasies is surely not hard. 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.

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” 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. If the bewitched man could identify the woman who had afflicted him, he could demand reinstatement of 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.

Often the witches, greedy by virtue of womanhood, were not content with the theft of 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?

How can we understand that millions of people for centuries believed as literal truth these seemingly idiotic allegations? How can we begin to comprehend that these beliefs functioned as the basis of a system of jurisprudence that condemned 9 million persons, mostly women, to being burned alive? The literal text of the Malleus Maleficarum, with its frenzied and psychotic woman-hating and the fact of the 9 million deaths, demonstrates the power of the myth of feminine evil, reveals how it dominated the dynamics of a culture, shows the absolute primal terror that women, as carnal beings, hold for men. We see in the text of the Malleusnot only the fear of loss of potency or virility, but of the genitals themselves — a dread of the loss of cock and balls. […]

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.” 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 witches used drugs like belladonna and aconite, organic amphetamines, and hallucinogenics. They also pioneered the development of analgesics. They performed abortions, provided all medical help for births, were consulted in cases of impotence which they treated with herbs and hypnotism, and were the first practitioners of euthanasia. Since the Church enforced the curse of Eve by refusing to permit any alleviation of the pain of childbirth, it was left to the witches to lessen pain and mortality as best they could. It was especially as midwives that these learned women offended the Church, for, as Sprenger and Kramer wrote, “No one does more harm to the Catholic Faith than midwives.” The Catholic objection to abortion centered specifically on the biblical curse which made childbearing a painful punishment — it did not have to do with the “right to life” of the unborn fetus. It was also said that midwives were able to remove labor pains from the woman and transfer those pains to her husband—clearly in violation of divine injunction and intention both. […]

The Christians, who had a profound and compulsive hatred for the natural world, thought that the witches, through malice and a lust for power (pure projection, no doubt), had mobilized nature/ animals into a robotlike anti-Christian army. The witch hunters were convinced that toads, rats, dogs, cats, mice, etc., took orders from witches, carried curses from one farm to another, caused death, hysteria, and disease. They thought that nature was one massive, crawling conspiracy against them, and that the conspiracy was organized and controlled by the wicked women. They can in fact be credited with pioneering the politics of total paranoia — they developed the classic model for that particular pathology which has, as its logical consequence, genocide. Their methods of dealing with the witch menace were developed empirically — they had a great respect for what worked. For instance, when they suspected a woman of witchcraft, they would lock her in an empty room for several days or weeks and if any living creature, any insect or spider, entered that room, that creature was identified as the woman’s familiar, and she was proved guilty of witchcraft. Naturally, given the fact that bugs are everywhere, particularly in the woodwork, this test of guilt always worked. Cats were particularly associated with witches. That association is based on the ancient totemic significance of the cat:

It is well known that to the Egyptians cats were sacred. They were regarded as incarnations of Isis and there was also a cat deity… Through Osiris (Ra) they were associated with the sun; the rays of the “solar cat,” who was portrayed as killing the “serpent of darkness” at each dawn, were believed to produce fecundity in Nature, and thus cats were figures of fertility… Cats were also associated with Hathor, a cow-headed goddess, and hence with crops and rain … Still stronger, however, was the association of the cat with the moon, and thus she was a virgin goddess — a virgin-mother incarnation. In her character as moon- goddess, she was inviolate and self-renewing… the circle she forms in a curled-up position [is seen as] the symbol for eternity, an unending re-creation.

[…] It was also believed that the witch could transform herself into a cat or other animal. This notion, called lycanthropy, is twofold:

… either the belief that a witch or devil-ridden person temporarily assumes an animal form, to ravage or destroy; or, that they create an animal “double” in which, leaving the lifeless human body at home, he or she can wander, terrorize or batten on mankind.

The effect of the belief in lycanthropy on the general population was electric: a stray dog, a wildcat, a rat, a toad — all were witches, agents of Satan, bringing with them drought, disease, death. Any animal in the environment was dangerous, demonic. The legend of the werewolf (popularized in the Red Riding Hood fable) caused terror. At Labout, two hundred people were burned as werewolves. There were endless stories of farmers shooting animals who were plaguing them in the night, only to discover the next morning that a respectable town matron had been wounded in precisely the same way. Witches, of course, could also fly on broomsticks, and often did. Before going to the sabbat, they annointed their bodies with a mixture of belladonna and aconite, which caused delirium, hallucination, and gave the sensation of flying. The broomstick was an almost archetypal symbol of womanhood, as the pitchfork was of manhood. Levitation was considered a rare but genuine fact:

As for its history, it is one of the earliest convictions, common to almost all peoples, that not only do supernatural beings, angels or devils, fly or float in the air at will, but so can those humans who invoke their assistance. Levitation among the saints was, and by the devout is, accepted as an objective fact. The most famous instance is that of St. Joseph of Cupertino, whose ecstatic flights (and he perched in trees) caused embarrassment in the seventeenth century. Yet the appearance of flight, in celestial trance, has been claimed all through the history of the Church, and not only for such outstanding figures as St. Francis, St. Ignatius Loyola, or St.Teresa… In the Middle Ages it was regarded as a marvel, but a firmly established one… It is not, therefore, at all remarkable that witches were believed to fly… [though] the Church expressly forbade, during the reign of Charlemagne, any belief that witches flew.

We now know most of what can be known about the witches: who they were, what they believed, what they did, the Church’s vision of them. We have seen the historical dimensions of a myth of feminine evil which resulted in the slaughter of 9 million persons, nearly all women, over 300 years. The actual evidence of that slaughter, the remembrance of it, has been suppressed for centuries so that the myth of woman as the Original Criminal, the gaping, insatiable womb, could endure. Annihilated with the 9 million was a whole culture, woman-centered, nature-centered — all of their knowledge is gone, all of their knowing is destroyed. Historians (white, male, and utterly without credibility for women, Indians, Blacks, and other oppressed peoples as they begin to search the ashes of their own pasts) found the massacre of the witches too unimportant to include in the chronicles of those centuries except as a footnote, too unimportant to be seen as the substance of those centuries — they did not recognize the centuries of gynocide, they did not register the anguish of those deaths. Our study of pornography, our living of life, tells us that the myth of feminine evil lived out so resolutely by the Christians of the Dark Ages, is alive and well, here and now. Our study of pornography, our living of life, tells us that though the witches are dead, burned alive at the stake, the belief in female evil is not, the hatred of female carnality is not. The Church has not changed its premises; the culture has not refuted those premises. It is left to us, the inheritors of that myth, to destroy it and the institutions based on it.

- Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating

#andrea dworkin #woman hating #radical feminism #feminism #intersectional feminism #witches

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