The Hammer of Witches and the Birth of Reproductive Control in the Christian West
Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum
For the last few weeks, I’ve been asserting that, with the rise and consolidation of Christianity, the monstrosity of women that had so preoccupied the Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, and Jews kind of drained away. I’ve said that part of the reason that happened was that Christian theorists of evil in Late Antiquity generally wanted to assign all evil to demons or to The Devil, and to say that all evil-acting people or monsters were derivative—kind of animated by those core, prior evils. You occasionally get an atavistic monster woman—like Grendel’s mother from last week—who draws upon earlier, Abrahamic ideas (being the kin of Cain, for instance.) But there’s a large trend toward making evil women the playthings and pawns of Bigger, More Evil, Demonic Agents.
Indeed, in the very early 10th century (right around the time Beowulf was probably written), the Church wrote the Canon Episcopi, which asserted that witchcraft was a delusion, born of people being seduced by the Devil. When dealing with a purported witch, the best course of action was to perform some kind of purgation or exorcism; the belief, clearly, was that the witch wasn’t truly evil, but was possessed or almost infected by some greater, invariably male, demonic power.
Between about the 10th and early 14th centuries, the Christian west was relatively quiet on the subject of witches. There aren’t witchcraft trials, for instance, and there isn’t extensive effort toward the persecution of demon-possessed individuals. But between the 14th and 15th centuries, a kind of witch fever started to creep through the Christian west. And that fever called for a diagnostic and treatment manual. Couldn’t someone, please, help bring order to the chaos of witch hunting and witch purging, by writing an encyclopedic work on witchcraft, in all its manifestations?
Answer: Yes.
So, today, I’m going to have us spend some quality time with the Malleus Maleficarum (c. 1486), aka: The Hammer of Witches. This fifteenth-century text is a work of horror, but it presents itself as non-fiction, indeed, as a handbook or treatise about the rising threat of witchcraft. It is written by the “reputable” German clergyman Heinrich Kramer, who obsessively lays out all the things a person needs to know about witches and witchcraft, in order to detect, capture, and ultimately destroy witches and witchcraft in all forms.
I say “reputable” because Kramer was expelled from the town of Innsbruck in 1484 by the local bishop, for alleged illegal behavior, and also for his fixation on witches’ sexual habits (more on that shortly to come.) The bishop called him demented, as indeed he was. Suffice it to say for now: Kramer was a grade-A, certified weirdo about human sexuality. And especially about women’s sexuality. I mention this not from prurient interest, but because his sex obsession is going to be central to our analysis of his book of witchy horrors.
Kramer responded to his blacklisting in Innsbruck by seeking more official approval for his anti-witchcraft efforts. And he got that approval: he received the papal OK for his inquisitions on witches. Once he had the Pope’s imprimatur, Kramer could help his book become the go-to manual for witchcraft trials. With its increasing popularity, the Malleus changed the way people responded to alleged witchcraft, so that punishments evolved from being relatively minor sanctions against “witches” (like putting a woman in the stocks for a day) to things like burning women at the stake. Kramer took something that was effectively seen as a misdemeanor, and made it a dangerous felony, requiring capital punishment in many cases.
This man, and his text, nearly forgotten nowadays in popular culture, thus triggered a cultural practice that resulted in the needless execution of untold numbers of women, both in Europe and in the Americas.
So what exactly did the Malleus say about this pervasive, menacing, sneaky horror that was witchcraft?
It said that witches (almost always women) enter into a pact with Satan, who then confers certain powers on the witches; Satan, in effect, makes use of women to create havoc and to cause the perdition of the women themselves. Given this, Kramer notes that it might be tempting not to hold women responsible, since their evil powers do not originate with them, but instead with Satan. He cautions, however, that since women enter willingly into their compacts with the Devil, they must be blamed for everything they do, even if they only end up doing it under compulsion from the devil. (We have a precedent for this idea that women should be blamed even when acting under coercion, of course, and it’s Eve.)
So, women have no innate power, only deriving it from Satan. Nevertheless, since they willingly take on his power, they must be held fully accountable for their actions. No real power, but full responsibility. Neat trick.
Kramer goes on to say that women who suffer from lust, ambition, and infidelity are especially prone to seduction by devils, and that, therefore, adulteresses and concubines should fall under especial suspicion of witchcraft. Sexual women are more likely to take on the evil powers of the Devil. So, these ideas about witchcraft rhyme with what we know of the lilin, namely, that their powers originate somehow in sexual desire. But, unlike the lilin, these witches have no evil powers of their own, borrowing everything from Satan.
But otherwise, the comparison with lilin is highly instructive.
Like the lilin, witches, according to Kramer, often act by interfering with pregnancy and with human infants. Witches provide abortions, or cause miscarriages; this is very common. They also often offer up newborn babies to the Devil, resulting not only in the baby’s death but also its eternal damnation. When they don’t do that, they very frequently eat the newborn babies that they find. They also drain the blood of infants and use that blood to anoint their magical objects, conferring power on them. They especially likely to drain infant blood before the child has been baptized. Witches are basically lilin, but with a Christian twist: like lilin, Kramer’s witches do a lot of reproductive harm to women, and they love to kill and eat babies. But unlike lilin, who are operating in a theological universe without baptism and without hell, witches are able to consign the baby to eternal suffering. Not good. Be very, very afraid of witches, all you young mothers out there! And be very afraid of witches, too, all you children, because witches, although they may prefer to kill and eat newborns who are unbaptized, are perfectly delighted to slay older children as well.
So, mainstream, orthodox Christianity may not acknowledge Lilith per se, but the lilin sure do have a certain kind of cultural presence in the 15th century sex-based persecution of witches. Witches, for Kramer, are infanticidal maniacs who tamper with reproduction, just like lilin.
Also like lilin, witches are notorious for their interference with male sexuality and reproduction. But, whereas the lilin often have sex with men in order to reproduce with them, thereby disturbing the male line of inheritance, witches have sex with men because they want to have sex (remember: promiscuous women are most likely to be witches) and because they want to permanently impair the man’s reproductive capacity going forward. Indeed, Kramer says that witches are typically used by the Devil to tamper with men’s erotic lives. How? Witches can remove penises, or permanently injure them.
Sometimes, a witch may even collect a group of removed penises, build a nest for them, and them reanimate them and train them to eat oats. (Because who doesn’t want a nest of rotting pet dicks?) Witches also have the power to make men impotent, even without removing their penises. They also have the power to block a man’s procreative capacity: no babies for that guy. Witches aren’t trying to insinuiate themselves into the patriarchal line, like lilin are; they’re trying to end that line altogether.
Kramer’s witches are sexual predators. Kramer’s witches are baby-killers. Kramer’s witches are abortion providers and miscarriage-makers. And they are prvodiers of male-organ based birth control. Kramer hates them so much for these crimes that he says their evils “exceed all others” and that witches “deserve the worst punishments of all the sinners in the world.”
So, I’m going to come right out and say it: Kramer was obviously an incel.
Too bad nobody in the fifteenth-century had that concept to work with. Except, apparently, the bishop at Innsbruck, who was like, “Hey, man, maybe you could chill a little bit about women’s sexuality?” You know how people like to ask, “Who from history would like to have dinner with?” My answer? That bishop.
But I digress.
Interestingly, incel Kramer says that, although the most common witches are the sexy, adulterous, promiscuous ones, the most dangerous witches are midwives. Midwives, he says, kill the most babies and children. And they are everywhere, he says, unchecked by any social mechanism of control. They just, like, wander around towns, providing medical care to women! Unimpeded!! The horror of it. Midwives, says Kramer, should be forbidden to practice their crafts until they have sworn an oath to Catholicism in all its particulars.
Now. Kramer was a delusional, incel maniac. Punkt, as the Germans say. But he wasn’t wrong about everything.
Because, of course, part of midwives’ social function was to help women plan their reproductive lives. Medieval midwives helped deliver babies, sure, of course they did. And they had, by all accounts, a remarkably high success and survival rate. (If you’re interested in the history of midwifery, I recommend Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s phenomenal and highly readable book A Midwife’s Tale, which details the life of a midwife living the Maine territories of the American colonies in the 18th century. In a lifetime of midwifery practice, this midwife appears to have lost one patient. This is without surgery, without antibiotics, without any single thing that we think of as “modern medicine.”) Midwives knew how to deliver babies that had shoulder dystocia—an immediate C-section situation in modern, hospital birth. They knew how to deliver breach babies. They knew how to stop hemorrhages. They were very, very skilled medical practitioners, and they brought untold hundreds of thousands of babies into the world. Millions. Because, of course, there were no obstetricians at this time. Maternal and fetal medicine was in the hands of women. Punkt.
But part of what that means is that, if a woman needed an abortion, it would be a midwife who helped her. So, Kramer’s claim that midwives killed babies in the womb…not wrong. His claim that witches might prevent a man from having babies, and that a midwife was a prime candidate for that kind of witchcraft? Not crazy: if there was birth control happening (and there was; it just didn’t come in the form of tiny white pills), it was happening with the help of an older woman, probably a midwife. Midwives knew about herbs and plants that could bring on menses (which is to say, cause a miscarriage to end an unwanted pregnancy), like feverfew, asarum, hellebore, tansy, oleaster, and many others. That’s what medieval birth control looked like. And midwives were the primary people who provided it.
Yikes: women helping women take control of their reproductive lives? Sounds like fucking witchcraft to me, sayeth Heinrich Kramer. I bet the even collect dicks as pets!
So, starting toward the end of the 15th century, “witches” were being socially reimagined in the Christian west not just as nuisances, deserving of a day in the stocks, but as dangers to the patriarchal, reproductive order. Maybe they would break your dick. Maybe they would make your wife have loads of miscarriages. Maybe they would kill your newborns. Whatever the mechanism, the problem was clear: you can’t let witch-bitches have control over human reproduction or sexual activity, at any scale or in any way. Whatever the mechanism, for Kramer, the remedy was clear: persecute, prosecute, execute.
To sum up, this emergent ideology of witchcraft worked in several ways that reflect the atrocious status of women in this period.
1. Women weren’t even granted the respect accorded to Roman witches, Greek Furies, Jewish lilin, or Babylonian goddesses. They didn’t have innate power. They had borrowed power. So, the doctrine of witchcraft implicitly passivated women.
2. The “evil” that witches did, with Satan’s blessing and support, was primarily reproductive in nature. As was the case with lilin, witches threatened the patriarchy by undermining patrilinear descent and inheritance.
3. Witches were understood to have public “covers”, like being a midwife. To combat witchcraft, fully, then, Western Christendom would have to decide to demonize female medical practitinoers, and with them, the idea of women having reproductive control over their own lives.
4. The originator of witch persecution in the Latin west was a goddamn incel. His name is was Heinrich Kramer, and I hope his name is printed in bold in the Book of the Damned.
Speaking of the Damned: tune in next week for more sexy, bloodsucking she-demons, as we turn to Carmilla, sexpot vampire extraordinaire.