A Charming Folktale

My ongoing study of the Malleus Maleficarum, or "Hammer of Witches" has surely hit its peak.

I thought I'd struck gold with "There is no doubt that certain witches can do marvelous things with regard to male organs" (Part I, Question 9, page 58 of the red-covered Dover edition which is so far as I can tell undated. I bought mine in Salem in 1994). Now, I have details.

( A charming folktale... )

As those who have read it must agree, it is a folktale. The kind that mostly didn't make it through the 19th century, at least intact.

That is one of the reasons I undertook this project to begin with. I posit the collation of the available Latin editions and their translation into English by the somewhat eccentric ex-clergyman Montague Summers in 1928 as the source of roughly half the witch and general folklore to be found in all those encyclopedias, histories and collections of such compiled since. The ones that don't credit their sources properly and are thus useless for research. Summer's credits and footnotes are exhaustive and provide much-needed background for those of us who are not sufficiently familiar with the works of St Thomas Aquinas, St Isidore of Seville and St Augustine of Hippo. These footnotes and his Forward also bear witness to the sympathy of his translation.

The Malleus Maleficarum was composed by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Springer in 1486. They were both Christian priests, members of the Dominican order and in 1484 were appointed papal Inquisitors for all the dioceses of metropolitan Germany; being Mainz, Cologne, Treves, Salzburg and Bremen. They were not some prototype Brothers Grimm, collecting their local folktales. They were writing for a specific purpose and a specific audience in a specific time and place. Tease out the painfully convoluted text and you find, as well as the collected mythology of a region, an actual history. A history that will raise the hairs on the neck of even the experienced witchcraft scholar. A history by far surpassing the Salem witch trials in brutality and scope. What happened "hardly three years ago in the dioceses of Strasburg and Constance, and in the towns of Hagenau and Ratisbon," was major, terrible, and all too grounded. When you read the austere descriptions of the accused witches driving pins into their heads and hanging themselves "with a trifling and flimsy garment", it all comes home.

Once the shock fades, it is this combination of history and mythology that startles the modern reader. Even one willing to credit the possibility that more was going on than people chowing down on ergot, finds herself stumbling over the apparent discrepancy that the passage above exemplifies. How could these men, who certainly supervised the methodical torture and execution of many people, place this amongst their evidence? How could they possibly not know it was funny? The possibility that they did, and that this was intended as light relief for their readers, appalls even more. But it does gradually become clear that part of Kramer's and Sprenger's project was indeed to bring all such pagan residuals, such as faeries and trolls, within the closed circuit of the Christian universe.

This text exists at the breaking point of the Christian religion. These men, amongst the best-educated in Europe at the time, were grappling with nothing less than the question of why, if the world is God's and man redeemed by Christ, such horrible things as disease, failed harvests and miscarriage routinely occur? The answer, as they saw it, was witches. And perhaps people were fucking shamelessly in the fields around Ratisbon: perhaps they were even invoking something. Not out of the question that someone was practicing abortion, or even that Ratisbon was afflicted by a serial killer, although the majority of the "crimes" recorded there are sexual in nature. But our two Inquisitors must make such sense of this as will support the system of which they are a part. The Book of Job is repeatedly invoked; never doubt this was a work of theology. But even more chilling, it was a legal text attempting in some cases to provide scientific tests, based on the works of Aristotle and Al-Gazali, which could then be applied in the field. Asides are addressed both to parish priests and to acting judges. The details of the wonderful things witches can do with the male organs are, they dictate, not to be preached to the general public. I also found piquant the warning that the truth about changelings should not be preached to woman, for the great distress this would cause them. That's Part II, Chapter III, page 105 of the Dover edition. As I read, I am taking substantial notes and compiling an index so that I will never have to go through this again.

In Berne, an unnamed husband and wife were separately interrogated. The man broke down and confessed much as to their coven and its rites, including the draught compounded of infant corpses that transferred to the drinker a knowledge of all black magic. He said he saw he ought to die and would embrace it if he could but be reconciled with God. His wife remained stubborn, refusing to confess "either under torture or in death itself; but when the fire had been prepared by the gaoler, cursed him in the most terrible words, and so was burned." Part II, Chapter II, Pg 101.