Episode 230: Malleus Maleficarum, the Witch Hunting Manual About Stolen Dicks

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• • • Intro: “When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a witch…or something to that effect. Here to nail down the pointed truth about the most infamous witch hunter’s manual of all time with us, we’re joined by Grant.”
    • Intro Grant
    • From The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown, 2003: The Church had a deceitful and violent history. Their brutal crusade to reeducate the pagan and feminine-worshipping religions spanned three centuries, employing methods as inspired as they were horrific. The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. Malleus Maleficarum – or The Witches’Hammer – indoctrinated the world to “the dangers of freethinking women” and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them. Those deemed witches by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women “suspiciously attuned to the natural world.” Midwives also were killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth – a suffering, the Church claimed, that was God’s rightful punishment for Eve’s partaking of the Apple of Knowledge, thus giving birth to the idea of Original Sin. During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women. Women, once celebrated as an essential half of spiritual enlightenment, had been banished from the temples of the world. There were no female rabbis, priests, or clerics. The natural sexual union between man and woman, through which each became spiritually whole, had been recast as a shameful act, their natural sexual urges as the work of the devil, collaborating with his favorite accomplice, woman. 
    • From The Enemy Within, John Demos, 2008: In 1484, a dedicated and experienced Inquisitor named Heinrich Kramer embarked to prepare a book about his inquisitorial activities. Written in Latin, titled the Malleus Maleficarum, and published in 1486, this work will come to be seen as the epitome of witch hunting. The Malleus was not the first work of its kind, but it would become far and away the most famous. Part Bible, part encyclopedia, part operational guide, it is some 400 pages long in a mid 20th century reprinting. It establishes that disbelief in witches is rank heresy, describes the leading forms of witchcraft, and provides an exhaustive account of the legal steps to be taken against witches, through abundant reference to scriptures and to Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and other demonologists, as well as classical writers and philosophers such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Cato. Child murder and sex are recurrent preoccupations in the Malleus, as is flat-out misogyny. Women are declared more credulous, more impressionable, and feebler in body and mind than men. These qualities naturally invite the attentions of the devil. A woman “has a slippery tongue,” is “a liar by nature,” and is more carnal than a man as is clear from her many carnal abominations. It even holds that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, as she was formed from a bent rib in a contrary direction to a man. “Thus she is an imperfect animal.” The invention of movable type by a German Goldsmith had already begun to reshape the contours of European culture, and the Malleus moved quickly into the vanguard of best-sellers. By 1523 there were no fewer than 13 different Latin editions. Only in the 18th and 19th centuries did the Malleus begin to fade from sight, but against all odds it underwent something of a Revival in the 20th century when an eccentric Catholic intellectual named Montague Summers stepped forward to defend witch hunting. In 1928 he put the Malleus s back into circulation and described it as one of the world’s few books written “of eternal significance.” Like witch hunting as a whole, the book has traveled a long journey, and it travels still.
    • From a History of Witchcraft, Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1980: Malleus Malleficarum derives its title from one often bestowed upon inquisitors: “Hammer of Heretics.” Staunch defender of papal privilege and a persuasive speaker, Kramer had influential friends among the Dominicans in Rome and eventually obtained the patronage of the papacy. He was named Inquisitor for southern Germany in 1474 and became involved in witch trials as early as 1476. An arrogant, aggressive, and ambitious man who made many enemies in and out of his own order (he was accused in 1482 and embezzling Dominican monies), and opposition to his activities in the mountainous regions of Germany on the part of the local Episcopal and secular authorities was considerable. Eventually Kramer was condemned by the Dominican order in 1490 for the irregularity of his procedures, but Pope Alexander VI still sent him in 1500 to fight heresy in Bohemia and Moravia. The Malleus contributed little original to the witch phenomena, but its careful organization and argumentation, combined with papal approval, set a system of witch beliefs firmly in the mind of inquisitors and society in general. Whereas witchcraft had heretofore been considered but an aspect of the broader problem of heresy, now it became the center of attention. 
    • From The Lecherous Witch, Asa Bergenheim, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2018: Malleus Maleficarum is usually said to be written by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, two Dominican monks who were inquisitors in Germany. However, the authorship is highly disputed. Kramer was the archbishop of Salzburg’s right hand but his reputation in theological circles was questionable. Sprenger, on the other hand, was a highly reputed theologian, dean of the Faculty of Theology at Cologne University and the Inquisitor General in Germany. Some researchers believe that Kramer is the sole author, and that he, in order to increase the legitimacy of the text and strengthen his own position, added Sprenger’s name later – with or without his consent. In fact, Sprenger was not named as author until years after his death. Kramer was greatly disturbed by the public’s lack of understanding for their work, and skepticism about the accusations and methods of the Church and the Inquisition. Local church authorities were often also not convinced of the necessity of the witch hunt. However, the inquisition was directly subject to Rome, which meant that inquisitors could perform their work without answering to anyone but the Pope. In 1487, Kramer approached the University of Cologne to obtain the approbation of its Faculty of Theology. The text, however, contained some ideas about witchcraft that had not yet been accepted, and it was perceived to be too extreme. Hence, it was impossible to get more than weak approvals from four professors. Despite this, an appropriation document was included in the first edition, in which eight named professors recommend the work as a witch-hunting manual. There are many indications that this document is at least in part a forgery. In fact, it is doubtful whether the Pope or the Faculty of Theology ever had read the text. It has been argued that the Catholic Church banned Malleus in 1490, as it was included in the List of Forbidden Books. However, the first index did not come until 1559 and it does not include Malleus, nor is it included among banned writings in later editions of the Index. But Kramer was condemned by the Inquisition in 1490 for recommending unethical and illegal methods, and for not following the doctrines of the church regarding demonology. 
    • From Witchcraft & Magic In Europe, Jolly, Raudvere, and Peters, 2002: The Malleus was not all-inclusive of the features of witchcraft. It makes ‘no mention of familiar spirits, of the obscene kiss, or even of the feasting and orgies of the sabbat. Nor is there any reference to the Devil’s mark. The Malleus defined witchcraft as the most abominable of all heresies, its four essential characteristics being the renunciation of the Christian faith, the sacrifice of unbaptized infants to Satan, the devotion of body and soul to evil, and sexual relationships with incubi. Nor was the Malleus immediately regarded as a definitive work: Its appearance triggered no prosecutions in areas where there had been none earlier, and in some cases its claims encountered substantial scepticism. In 1538 the Spanish Inquisition cautioned its members not to believe everything the Malleus said. The Malleus was the subject of considerable debate among both clerics and lay thinkers. An attack on some of the central arguments of the Malleus was made by the Franciscan Samuel de Cassini in 1505 and answered in favour of the Malleus by the Dominican Vincente Dodo in 1507. Ulrich Molitor, doctor of laws and advocate of Archduke Archduke Sigismund of Austria, published his own treatise 1489. The territories of the archduke were contiguous with those in which the trials for diabolical sorcery and witchcraft had begun in the mid-fifteenth century and included lands in which Kramer had worked as an inquisitor. The archduke had every reason to discover whether these crimes occurred in his territories and evidently – like many others – had considerable doubts about the Malleus. Molitor’s treatise was intended to dispel those archducal doubts. 
    • From Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici, 2004: Women, the Malleus Maleficarum preached, are lovely to look at but contaminating to touch. They attract men only to undermine them, and do everything to please them but the pleasure they give is more bitter than death, as their vices cost men the loss of their souls and perhaps their sexual organs. A witch could castrate men or make them impotent by freezing their generative forces or causing their penis to come out and draw back as she wished. Some stole male penises in great numbers until under duress they were forced to return them to their owners. In a village or small town of a few thousand people, at the peak of the witch hunt dozens of women were accused in the space of a few years, so no man could feel safe and sure that he did not live with a witch. Some men made a business of denouncing women, while other men took advantage of the climate of suspicion to free themselves of unwanted wives and lovers. Undoubtedly, some men’s failure to act against these atrocities were motivated by fear of being implicated in the charges, as the majority of men tried for this crime were relatives of suspected or convicted witches themselves. But there is no doubt that the atmosphere of propaganda and terrorism laid the seeds of a deep psychological alienation from the women in their lives, broke class solidarity, and undermined their own collective power. In the Malleus witches were accused simultaneously of rendering men impotent and arousing excessive sexual passion in them, since there could be no difference between a man who was castrated and one who is helpless to a woman, and demonologists looked with suspicion on both of these conditions. As Montaigne lamented, a man can preserve his decorum in everything except the sexual act. A sexually active woman, then, is a public danger to the social order.
    • From Malleus Maleficarum Talking Points, George Burroughs, Black Flame Temple of Oklahoma, 2026: This book is arguably why modern Satanism needs to exist at all. Nobody in 1487 set out to make that true, but the machinery this book built, “different is dangerous, dangerous people deserve what happens to them, here’s the paperwork,” is the same machinery that centuries later makes a religion built around bodily autonomy and empathy and intellectual honesty feel necessary instead of optional. Salem’s [witch scare] ran about fourteen months in 1692 and 1693: Roughly 200 people accused, 30 convicted, 19 hanged, one pressed to death, and at least five more died in jail waiting. That’s the whole event Americans picture when they hear “witch trial.” Fourteen months, one town. The Malleus went through at least 36 editions between 1487 and 1669. Two centuries in print. I won’t hand you a made-up number of “trials that cited this exact book,” because that number doesn’t actually exist and the honest history is messier than that. It was secular courts, not church courts, that kept reaching for it, because it was the most detailed, most available procedural manual on the shelf. So the credit isn’t “the Vatican used this to run the witch hunts.” It’s closer to: one man wrote something so thorough and so easy to grab that town magistrates who weren’t theologians, who just wanted a rulebook, used it for two hundred years. The witch trials wound down by the mid-1700s. The logic didn’t. Find a group that doesn’t conform, reframe the nonconformity as danger, build a procedure (legal, medical, religious, whatever’s on hand) that makes persecuting them feel orderly instead of cruel. Same four ingredients every time: a scared population, someone willing to name the threat, an institution willing to lend its authority, and a mechanism for turning accusation into consequence.
    • From Malleus Maleficarum, Heinrich Kramer, 1486 (Translated Montague Summers, 1928): 
      • It is argued that belief in witches is not a Catholic doctrine and whoever believes that any creature can be  transformed into another kind or likeness, except by the Creator of all things, is worse than a pagan and a heretic. There are others who acknowledge indeed that witches exist, but they declare that the influence of magic and the effects of charms are purely imaginary and phantasmical. But the authority of the Holy Scriptures says that devils have power over the bodies and over the minds of men when God allows them to exercise this power, as is plain from very many passages. Therefore, they err who say that there is no such thing as witchcraft or that it is purely imaginary. The truth gospel teaches us that certain angels fell from heaven and are now devils, and we are bound to acknowledge that by their very nature they can do many things which we cannot do. And those who try to induce others to perform such evil wonders are called witches. For the divine law in many places commands that witches are not only to be avoided, but also they are to be put to death, and it would not impose the extreme penalty of this kind if witches did not really and truly make a compact with devils in order to bring about real and true hurts and harms. In the 18th chapter of Deuteronomy it is commanded that all wizards and charmers are to be destroyed, and also the 19th chapter of Leviticus says “the soul which goeth to wizards and soothsayers to commit fornication with them, I will set my face against that soul, and destroy it out of the midst of my people.” Very many other doctors advance the same opinion, and it would be the height of folly for any man to contradict all these, and he could not be held to be clear of the guilt of heresy. For any man who gravely errs in an exposition of Holy Scripture is rightly considered to be a heretic. And whosoever thinks otherwise concerning these matters which touch the faith that the Holy Roman Church holds is a heretic. To deny the existence of witches is contrary to the obvious sense of the Canon is shown by ecclesiastical law. There are those writers who speak of men impotent and bewitched, and therefore by this impediment brought about by witchcraft they are unable to copulate, and so the contract of marriage is rendered void and matrimony in their cases has become impossible. So they say, and St. Thomas agrees with them.
  • Here is declared the truth about diabolic operations with regard to the male organ. And to make plain the facts in this matter, it is asked whether witches can with the help of devils really and actually remove the member, or whether they only do so apparently by some glamour or illusion. And that they can actually do so is argued, for since devils can do greater things than this, as was shown above in the cases of Job and Tobias — therefore they can also truly and actually remove men’s members. Bad angels often punish the People of Israel with various diseases, truly and actually visited upon their bodies. Therefore, the member is equally subject to such visitations. It may be said that this is done with the Divine permission. And in that case, as it has already been said that God allows more power of witchcraft over the genital functions, on account of the first corruption of sin which came to us from the act of generation, so also he allows greater power over the actual genital organ, even to its total removal. It was a greater thing to turn Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt than it is to take away the male organ. There is no doubt that certain witches can do marvelous things with regard to male organs, for this agrees with what has been seen and heard by many.
  • • Here is set forth the truth concerning four horrible crimes which devils commit against infants, both in the mother’s womb and afterwards. And since the devils do these things through the medium of women, and not men, this form of homicide is associated rather with women than with men. And the following are the methods by which it is done: It is witchcraft not only when anyone is unable to perform the carnal act but also when a woman is prevented from conceiving, or is made to miscarry after she has conceived. A third and fourth method of witchcraft is when they have failed to procure an abortion, and then either devour the child or offer it to a devil. Certain witches, against the instinct of human nature, and indeed against the nature of all beasts, with the possible exception of wolves, are in the habit of devouring and eating infant children. And concerning this, the Inquisitor of Como, who has been mentioned before, has told us the following : that he was summoned by the inhabitants of the County of Barby to hold an inquisition, because a certain man had missed his child from its cradle, and finding a congress of women in the night-time, swore that he saw them kill his child and drink its blood and devour it. We must add that in all these matters, witch midwives cause yet greater injuries, as penitent witches have often told to us and to others, saying: No one does more harm to the Catholic Faith than midwives. For when they do not kill children, then, as if for some other purpose, they take them out of the room and, raising them up in the air, offer them to devils. For it was said at the beginning that three things are necessary for the effecting of witchcraft : the devil, a witch, and the Divine permission.
    • The method of examination is as follows: First strip the prisoner (if it be a woman, she has already been stripped by other women, upright and of good report). This stripping is lest some means of witchcraft may have been sewed into the clothing such as often, taught by the Devil, they prepare from the bodies of unbaptized infants. The implements of torture have been prepared, the judge tries to persuade the prisoner to confess the truth freely, but, if she will not confess, he bid attendants make the prisoner fast to the implement of torture. The attendants obey forthwith, yet with feigned agitation. Then, at the prayer of some of those present, the prisoner is loosed again and once more persuaded to confess, being led to believe that she will in that case not be put to death. Some hold that even a witch of ill repute who is the ringleader of the witches may give sure and convincing testimony against other witches. Doubtless such notorious witches would be peculiarly suited to be thus preserved, were it not that their accusations cannot be trusted, since the Devil is a liar. For a time the promise made to the witch sentenced to imprisonment is to be kept, but after a time she should be burned. The judge may safely promise witches to spare their lives, if only he will later excuse himself from pronouncing the sentence and will let another do this in his place.
    • At first it may truly seem that it is not in accordance with the Catholic Faith to maintain that children can be begotten by devils, that is to say, by Incubi and Succubi: for god Himself, before sin came into the world, instituted human procreation. But through the wantonness of the flesh they have much power over men; with regard to the bewitchment of human beings by means of Incubus and Succubus devils, it can happen when women voluntarily prostitute themselves to devils or when men have willful connexion with Succubus (yet men, being by nature intellectually stronger, are more apt to abhor such practises). There is in the town of Coblenz a poor man who is bewitched in this way: In the presence of his wife he is in the habit of practising coition, and after he has fornicated thus two or three times there is actually no person visible to mortal sight lying with him. After an incredible number of such bouts, the poor man at last sinks to the floor exhausted. When he has recovered nd is asked how this happened, he answers that he saw nothing, but his mind is in some way possessed so that he can by no means refrain. As for instances where young maidens are molested by Incubus devils in this way, there are very many well-attested stories of such bewitchments, as can be illustrated from a story told by Thomas of Brabant in his Book on Bees: I saw, he writes, and heard the confession of a virgin in a religious habit, who said at first that she had never been a consenting party to fornication, but at the same time have been known in this way, and that though she had afterwards grieved almost to death, and had daily confessed with tears, by no means could she be delivered from an Incubus devil, nor yet by the sign of the Cross, nor by Holy Water. The Incubus devil should be regarded rather in the light of a punishment for sin than as a sin in itself. 
    • Heretical diviners’ art involves some worship of or subjection to devils, and essay by divination to predict the future, which manifestly savours of heresy.This then is the reason why the Canonists have so carefully drawn up a table of the various differing penalties, making a distinction between the private and open practice of witchcraft, or rather of divination, so that anyone who is notoriously given to it must be refused Communion. If it be secretly practiced, the culprit must do penance for forty days. And if he be a cleric, he is to be suspended and confined in a monastery. If he be a layman he shall be excommunicated, wherefore all such infamous persons must be punished, together with all those who resort to them, and no excuse at all is to be allowed. It is unlawful for any man to practice divination; and if he does so his reward shall be death. There are others too who by their magic charms endeavour to take the lives of innocent people, who turn the passions of women to lusts of every kind, and these criminals are to be thrown to the wild beasts. There are three kinds of this superstition:—Necromancy, Astromancy, and Oneiromancy. Whosoever observes any divinations or gives credit to such by following after their works, or goes into their houses, or introduces them into his own house, or asks questions of them, let him know that he has perverted his baptism and is a pagan enemy of god. Let the Judge not fail always to use the lawful remedies.