Momentarily obsessed with Max Dashu

From her site Suppressed Histories (see last few posts...lol), I was lead to an interview she participated in, and found this passage about European witch hunts telling, especially the last paragraph.


Q. Can you address the historic connections between pornography and the witch hunts?

A. There are several angles to this. One is that new printing techniques made it possible for pornographic engravings of gatherings of nude witches to become best-sellers from about 1500 through the height of the witch hunt Terror. This art drew on the repressive sexual fantasies of the demonologists, inquisitors, and learned professors, who were obsessed with the notion of witches having sex with devils, and with punishing women. They developed a whole story about the painfulness of this sex, the devil’s member being ice-cold, and its involuntary nature, the witches being nothing more than slaves of the demon. The demonologists also drew on ancient stereotypes of heretics holding orgies which involved ritual humiliation, especially kissing the devil’s anus. This they claimed was the confirmation rite of a satanic cult. It was all purely the invention of elite men.

This highly sexualized diabolist ideology drove the witch hunts. The old witch persecutions which had gone on for centuries at a lower rate were escalated by a papal decree in 1256 allowing the Inquisition to use judicial torture. This then spread to secular courts. It was this practice of torture that fueled the witch craze, and slashed the ability of accused witches to resist totalitarian force. A key feature of torture-trials was compelling the accused witches to parrot back the diabolist ideology with all its violent sexual fantasies. The torture would not stop until they did. The trials are full of interrogators barking, “Say it! Tell the truth! Tell how you went to the witches’ assembly and had sex with devils!” Most resisted at first and eventually gave in to stop the terrible pain, although some held out unto death.

The torture quickly went beyond the rack and strappado and water torture to torments of iron and fire directed at the sexual parts. Since the judges and torturers assumed witches were guilty of apostasy and whoring with the devil, they were beyond any protection and could be subjected to anything their captors pleased. This certainly included rape and verbal abuse, but new mechanical refinements were devised, such as the Pear, a pointed metal implement which the torturers heated, thrust into a vagina or rectum, and then screwed open inside the victim’s body. Breast-rippers were another form of torture, often carried out in public, just before the burning of a convicted “witch.”

By the late 1500s a new doctrine of devil’s marks provided a pretext for “searching” women’s bodies, especially their female parts, for marks which were taken as “evidence” of a diabolical pact. Sometimes the witch-finders stabbed suspected witches with needles or bodkins. Or they called a flap of the inner labia, or skin tags which are common on older women, to be a “witch’s teat” suckled by the devil. Unofficial forms of torture would of course include rape by jailors, torturers and officials.

The woman-hatred of all this is obvious. What we have to remember is that this history of dungeons, chains, sexualized torture, ritualized rape and coerced submission had a massive impact on European civilization (and then on its colonies and slave-states) over centuries. Why should we be surprised to find that this deeply violent sexual conditioning has burrowed deep into the cultural unconscious? More recently, it has been claimed as a natural quality of human sexuality—without ever having examined these legacies of horror ---or those of slavery---much less attempting to account for their impact.