Adelphiasophism
Treatment of Women and their Religion
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Wednesday, March 15, 2000
Women in Antiquity
At one time, primitive people had sex because they enjoyed it. Out of their enjoyment sometimes came children. In prehistoric times, the evidence suggests that women were respected as equals if not held in special esteem and the deity arguably was univesally a goddess. Women had virtually equality with men under the code of Hammurabi of Babylon as late as 1750 BC. Among the legal provisions in respect of married women were these.
- Marriage was monogamous, though allowance was made for childless women.
- A husband had to support a sick wife unless she preferred to return to her father in which case she took her dowry.
- A husband was responsible for his wife’s debts.
- A husband could freely divorce his wife but had to return the dowry and the wife had custody of the children who had to be maintained out of the husband’s estate.
- A husband could avoid paying back the dowry or reduce his wife to a slave if the she had been a bad wife, but she could challenge him in court, if she were innocent, on the grounds of cruelty. If she wasted the court’s time because she was not innocent, she was drowned.
- If a husband was away and sent no money to support his wife, she could cohabit with another man, but had to return to the husband, if he returned. Any children of the cohabitation remained with the father.
- A widow took the husbands place and property but held it in trust for the children even if she remarried. If she did not remarry, she had an equal portion with the cchildren when they were adults together with the return of her dowry.
- Adultery was punished by drowning both parties unless the woman’s husband forgave her when the lover might also be forgiven by the king.
- Women were judges, elders, witnesses and scribes. Women under Christianity have only just aspired to such positions after 1700 years. Remember, Hammurabi was 1700 years before that.
In Egypt, into Ptolemaic times, households were the legal property of the wife according to the marriage contract, and she had to be respected within the home. Her husband was effectively a lodger. A conscienscious wife was described as “a field profitable to its owner,” a demeaning expression to our ears but one which might be colloquially translated as “worth her weight in gold,” a field being a valuable resource. Egyptian matrilineal inheritance is reflected also in the Pharaonic habit of sister marriage, which not only passed on the throne but also the family property back into the hands of the family.
From then on it was largely downhill. In Homer, women were free and were treated dignity, but a few hundred years later, in the “golden age” of Pericles, women were enslaved in the kitchen and nursery. The women in Athens who were free were foreign women who were often educated—as John Langdon-Davies (“A Short History of Women,” NY, 1927) puts it: “Just as a mongrel dog is allowed more freedom than a thoroughbred!” These were the Hetairai, the geishas of the time, like Phryne and Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles himself.
In the greatest civilisation we have known, where reason was invented, women were shut off in the kitchen and the bedroom as fit only to look after the home, yield sons as future warriors, eat sweets and comb their hair. Greek democracy was the democracy of Greek noblemen.
The Greek playwright, Euripides, is unusual in giving women decent roles, roles fought for among female actors nowadays when his plays are produced, but he was mocked for it. In “Alcestis,” the king is doomed to die but is allowed off by the gods if he can find a substitute. As any Athenian of the time would, he took it for granted that his wife would offer her worthless life for his valuable one, and so she does. To an Athenian, this was scarcely a plot. It was all that any dutiful wife would do! The novelty introduced by Euripides is that he exposes the smug self-righteousness of the king, whose dishonourable attitude reveals the nobility the woman’s dutiful sacrifice.
The situation in Sparta, the great rival to Athens was different. The Athenians said the Spartans were ruled by their women. While Athenians, like Moslems, kept their wives in purdah while they paid attention to educating young men, the Spartans encouraged their women to strip off and take communal exercise in the agora. All girls were taught gymnastics, wrestling and how to throw a javelin. Free love was permitted, if they had the energy still after all the exercise and cold baths, but everyone was expected to marry at a certain age and have children, and adultery was unknown. Those who did not marry were treated with blows by the athletic young women and mocked as weaklings. A Spartan woman’s greatest joy was said to have been to have given birth to a heroic son that died for his country, but Sparta produced no philosophers, playwrights or poets, only soldiers.
Athenians equated slaves and women as being unsuited to anything so demanding as thought. Plato, in the fifth century BC equates children, women and servants, the latter being slaves. The Greek word for a child and a slave is the same, “pais.” In the Hebrew and Christian “Ten Commandments,” a wife is equally classed as a man’s property on a par with his slaves and his farm animals:
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s (Ex 20:17).
For most of the next 2500 years women’s reputation for frivolity and irrationality was maintained in the west by mainly Christian men, and so women were kept away from books depriving them of the learning that would allow them to exercise their reason, and thus upholding male suspicions. Women were denied the right to be educated and the need to be able to think. Roman women were allowed to plead ignorance of the law because of their “imbecility.” Matrons, from Rome onwards, were good housewives, intellectually stunted but producing good citizens. Meanwhile the frustrations of men had to be quenched by courtesans and less professional woman, all derided by matrons and males alike but at least independent.
Women in Rome
Roman matrons, despite their handicaps were described as “formidable women,” an expression used today to imply some sort of female ogre, but rightly meaning women that can hold their own among the men. The Lex Oppia, that had, in 215 BC, regulated even what women could wear, was opposed by a concerted movement similar to that of the suffragettes. Roman women thus gradually achieved more and more liberty, a better legal status and the rudiments of power. They were just getting emancipated when Christianity arrived.
The Christians depict the freedom of women in Roman times as the basest promiscuity and licentiousness. But Christian propagandists from the earliest times, conditioned by the Essene ideal of chastity, saw any sort of sexual affection or display as immoral. Later, Christian historians were happy to maintain the pretence to provide a suitably contrasting background for their shiningly moral religion. Of course, they also did the reverse, hiding or ignoring the promiscuity and criminality of Christians throughout the ages.
Ammianus Marcellinus proves to us that the lives of the Roman nobility after the triumph of Christianity, in 353 BC to 378 BC, was in no way improved over the lives described by Tacitus or satized by Juvenal beforehand. Ammianus Rufus tells an even less flattering story, and Salvian, writing to defend the record of the Christian God against those of the Pagan deities, describes the morals and manners of Christians as disgusting.
Women never had such legal rights under the Christians as they had under Paganism. Last century, Sir henry Maine declared that no Christian society “is likely to restore to married women the personal liberty conferred on them by the middle Roman law.”
The truth is that women were in the main better off under Pagan Rome than under Christian Rome. Stoic morality and social thought was higher than that of the Christians. Musonius Rufus, in the reign of Nero, argued that neither sex had a monopoly of virtues—what was wrong in a woman was wrong in a man—and that while heavy work should often be men’s and lighter work women’s “neither was appointed exclusively for either.” Misonius was however a sexual puritan and suggested an argument eagerly adopted by the Church when he claimed sexual relations ought not to be practiced except for propagation.
Christian Women
When Christianity was invented, the bishops not only maintained the inferiority of women but they told people explicity not to enjoy sex and not to have it unless they had decided in advance to have children because it was a sacred act of procreation. Even the apparently eccentric habit of Catholics not to eat fish on a Friday was because fish were holier than meat—they did not copulate, as was supposed.
One might have been inclined to support the new Christian morality on the grounds that they were trying to make people have less children or at least children that they would love, but the Christian Church told people to have as many people as they could, for the glory of God and His Church, but they were not to enjoy sex and they were not to take measures to prevent conception.
Nowadays contraceptives are cheap and effective, yet the world is overflowing with so many souls it is hard to imagine how God continues to find them, and the world is being flogged more and more to yield up more food for these masses of humanity, but the Catholic Pope will not allow his flock to make use of them.
There are several reasons why these peculiar rules arose. The order to procreate was the inheritance of Christianity from Judaism whose priests set up by Cyrus the Persian wanted more punters to bring in the sacrifices. Christian priests are no less mercenary but they soon forgot the real reason and came to think there was some astonishing God given principle behind it, and so it has survived.
The order not to enjoy sex also came from the Jews, in particular the immediate predecessors of the Christians, the Essenes, who considered women as temptresses, distracting godly men from their normal pursuits—sitting praising God all day.
Underlying it all is the male suspician that they are really dispensible. After all, women bring new life into the world, they have the wherewithal to do it and men do not, and God could easily, being omnipotent, decide that he could make women pregnant by sending a north wind or a serpent, and men would have no purpose or value in the least in this world. The males therefore decided they had better spend their time sucking up to God, and the Judaeo-Christian attitude to sex was born.
Of course, it was not that easy. These males, try as they might to sing the glories of their maker twenty four hours a day, kept noticing a shapely ankle or bosom, lost their concentration and had to start their praising again to get it right—it never did to get these praises wrong otherwise God might think the men were dolts. So, these women were distracting the men from their God-ordained purpose in life.
Worse for men was the need to marry women to have children. These women seemed to enjoy it sometimes, so they might enjoy it more with some other man—wayward creatures! So, if they had to marry them for the future of mankind and the profits of the priesthood, they had better be locked away and allowed out only if well wrapped in blankets. Meanwhile, the men would do their utmost not to enjoy their sacred duty so that their various fathers upstairs would not get any wrong ideas about what they were up to.
So, it was that for 2000 years, bar occasional lapses, Christendom has been totally miserable in respect of one of Nature’s most exciting and pleasurable joys. Men’s fear of women and their own inadequacies set up a monstrous unnatural regime for this 2000 years. Clement of Alexandria, an early theologian of the Church, said:
Every woman ought to be filled with shame at the thought that she is a woman.
The male God—a convenient figment of the tortured male mind—set man as lord over Nature and also as lord over women, as Eve acknowledges freely to Adam in “Paradise Lost,” according to our God-loving poet, John Milton:
To whom thus Eve with perfect beauty adorn’d:
My Author and Disposer, what thou bidst
Unargued I obey; so God ordains;
God is they law, thou mine: to know no more
Is woman’s happiest knowledge, and her praise.
Since then, Christian men have ravaged both women and Nature whenever their frustration and greed got the better of them. Perhaps there are signs that women are slowly emerging from this Christian slavery but Nature continues to suffer. Women will not emancipate themselves unless they emancipate Nature too. Nature is not a goddess for nothing.
Not that women can be totally absolved of any resposibility for male behaviour. In primitive times, it doubtless seemed quite rational to a woman to secure an aggressive male to keep her and her children safe from other aggressive males. By selecting the men who had honed their skills as warriors and were brave and warlike, women used sexual selection to change the nature of men. The consequence was their keening over dead sons. Choosing the warlike and brave perpetuated aggressive qualities in men, so that when we arrive at more civilized times, men are badly adapted, and not just civilization but the continuation of the human species is endangered.
In our society, women might not be so inclined, except perhaps in some sub-cultures, to select aggressive men, but they are very likely to select rich men or men seeking riches. These men care least about how they achieve their ambitions, and will willingly plough up a unique beauty spot if they think they will find gold or oil. Women are doing the selecting. When they select greedy men, they should think about what their children are losing so that they can live comfortably.
Isis
In Phrygia and elsewhere in Anatolia,for over 200 years before the Christian era, the Great Mother, Cybele, and her worshippers mourned the loss of her son, Attis. Before then, in Babylonia Ishtar nmourned the death of her lover, Tammuz, every year, and she followed him:
…to the land from which there is no returning, to the house of darkness, where dust lies on door and bolt.
In the absence of the Goddess, the land died, the fields were barren and love ceased. Women shared the grief of the Goddess, wailing and rending their hair. Each year the people were saved when the son or lover returned from the dead. Christians quibble that this return was not a resurrection, but resurrection seems to be a perfectly good way of describing a return from death.
Isis of Egypt was another such Goddess, mouring the death of her brother and lover, Osiris and then bringing him back from a worse death than “death,” the death of a god! Osiris returns to a godly life to father Isis’s son, Horus, but he remains the god of the dead in the underworld. This idea of a death beyond death reminds us of the Essene idea of an eternal death that differs from physical death. People might die but only the wicked die an eternal death—Osiris sees to it that the righteous live with him in eternity.
Isis eventually dominated the religions of the known world of the west, being identified with the Queen of Heaven, the Great Mother, Demeter, Astarte, Aphrodite and Anath, as well as the multiplicity of lesser ancient goddesses from Selene to Nemesis. As certain Greeks thought and inscribed on stone:
I am Isis, the mistress of every land.
I am she who is divine among women.
I am she who rules Sirius, the Dog Star.
I revealed the paths of the stars.
I prescribed the paths of the sun and moon.
I divided earth from heaven.
I found out the labours of the sea.
I brought together man and woman.
I made women be loved by men.
I burdened woman with child in the tenth month.
I ruled that parents should be loved by their children.
I ended cannibalism.
I laid down laws for mankind.
I overthrew the rule of tyrants.
I made justice mightier than gold and silver.
I made virtue known from vice by intuition.
I ordained things that no one may change.
In the “Golden Ass” or “Metamorphoses” of Lucius Apuleius, the hero, Lucius, has found himself with an ass’s head and seeks assistance from Isis to remove it. He prays to her and she replies:
Lo, Lucius, I am come, I, Nature’s mother, mistress of all the elements, the first begotten offspring of all ages, od deities, the mightiest, the queen of the dead, the first admitted to heaven, whose aspect belends all the gods. With my rod I rule the shining heights of heaven, the healthy breezes of the sea, the mournful silence of the underword. All earth worships me, severally and collectively under many a guise with varied rites and many names. There the phrygians, first born of men, call me Mother of the Gods that dwell at Pessinus. There Athenians seeded from the soil they till, know me as Cecropian Minerva. There the wave beaten Cyprians style me as Venus of Pahos. The archer Cretans call me Diana of the hunter’s net. The Sicilians with their three fold speech call me Stygian Proserpina. The Eleusianians call me the ancient Goddess, Ceres. Others call me Juno, others, Bellona, others hecate, others the Rhamnusian. But those on whom shine the first rays of the sun god as each day he springs to new birth, the Avii and the Ethiopians, mighty in ancient lore, honour me with my singular rites and call me by my true name, Isis the Queen.
The growth of this universal power of Isis in Greek and Roman times was accompanying the return of respect for women, removed by the waves of patriarchal invaders, but the emergence of Christianity put paid to this embryonic liberation of women. Apuleius lived in the middle of the second century and had travelled extensively in the east studying religions. The book is a commentary on the popularity of the eastern mysteries. Apuleius could hardly have not included Christianity among them. Christians were mocked as worshippers of a crucified ass and Apuleius will be alluding to Christianity in this work.
Apuleius’s contemporary, Lucian the Blasphemer definitely knew about Christianity, having been born in Syria, travelled in the east at the same time, and attacked it in his “Life of Pergrinus,” where he dares to blaspheme Christ (”that crucified sophist”)! He had already written a work on the same theme called “Lucius, or the Ass” that Apuleius drew upon, and Lucius of Patrae in the previous century also wrote a similar work also called “Metamorphoses” but now “lost,” the fate of works critical of Christianity.
When the Christian bishops achieved power and set about destroying the cult of Isis among others, she was to her votaries the “unselfish, true, tender loving and eternal earth Mother and world Mother.” Or as “Æ” put it:
Who is that Goddess to whom men should pray,
But her from whom their hearts have turned away,
Out of whose virgin being they were born,
Whose mother, Nature, they have named with scorn
Calling her holy substance common clay?
Lover, your heart, the heart on which it lies,
Your eyes that gaze, and those alluring eyes,
Your lips, the lips they kiss, alike had birth
Within that dark divinity of earth,
Within the Mother being you despise.
Yet from this despised earth was made
The milky whiteness of those queens who swayed
Their generations with a light caress,
And from some image of their loveliness
The heart built up high heaven when it prayed.
The Great Pan
The model of the physical appearance of the Christian devil but not his nature is the old horned and goat-footed, sunny-smiling Pan, the Great God.
When populations were smaller and the phenomena of Nature inexplicable, people took comfort from the thought that most places were the home of a spirit, mostly friendly ones. Wild and desolate countryside, murky caves, deserted hilltops, treacherous swamps, silent dells could seem frightening and lonely, causing “panic,” but our ancestors took as much if not more comfort from the thoughts of local spirits protecting them as clappies do today fronm the thought of their buddy Jesus at their shoulder. You can see rocks, streams, wells and trees, but nobody who is not psychotic has seen Jesus, or heard God telling them what to do.
These Nature gods were often mischievous, but rarely malicious, being responsible for bad dreams that are scary at the time but do no harm, and what they took they usually gave back. Chief of the nature gods was Pan. His mischief was responsible for the panic felt in lonely places, but Pan was a human god despite his pranks and appearance. He hunted. He fished. He chased the nymphs and Naiads and especially the girls. Above all, he made love. His activites kept the flocks fertile, and gave the shepherds their reputation. He was not a lofty and pompous god, but a cheeky, homely fellow, like Puck. Before Christianity, Pan was known everywhere in the west as the god of love.
According to legend, when Christ died on the cross and the temple veil was torn asunder, a schoolmaster called Epitherses sailing from Greece to Italy heard a call from the Island of Paxos:
Thamus, Thamus, Thamus. When you are come to Palodes, tell the people that the Great Pan is dead.
At Palodes, the crew related the story to the crowd, whereupon many of them burst into tears of weeping at the death of the god. The schoolmaster reported the story in Rome and soon the rumour had spread everywhere. ”The god of fertility, to whom every woman was a priestess, was dead.”
It seems the schoolmaster misunderstood a local ritual in honour of the god Adonis or Attis, who died and was revivified at Easter, and certainly under Christianity, Pan himself was resurrected as the Devil in an altogether more sinister role. But the story has been perpetuated as a good tale under Christianity. Inasmuch as Pan represents the countryside, his death is gravely symbolic of the subsequent progressive destruction of the natural world under Christianity. And, along with Nature, the growing emancipation of women was also halted. Christianity was to fill women with despair, degrade them and empty their lives, in a way never seen before under Greek or Roman. Along with the Christian saviour, a half of humanity was crucified.
Sterility Blows In
The Christian churches attacked Paganism with such vigour as much for the honour it paid to women as to the honour it paid to non-Christian deities. For the Church Fathers, the crucified Christ offered them useful nails to hang out their own tortured misogyny. Tertullian wrote:
The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age. You are the devil’s gateway. You destroy God’s image, Man.
Nothing disgraceful is improper for a man who is endowed with reason; much less for woman, to whom it brings shame even to reflect of what nature she is.
500 years later, the founder of another patriarchal religion that blew in from the same desert, Mohammed, could write:
I have not left any calamity more hateful to man than woman. O assembly of women give alms, though it be of your gold and silver and ornaments, for verily, ye are mostly of Hell on the Day of Resurrection.
Fa-Hsien, writing about the Gobi about 400 AD, set down:
There are many evil spirits and hot winds in this desert, and those who meet them perish. There are neither birds above nor beasts below No guidance is to be obtained save from the bleached bones of dead men. They point the way.
But the “Arabia Deserta” is no less unforgiving, and from Christian or Moslem, the same sick rejection of Nature is heard—born out of the same baking, thankless, loveless wastelands.
The Great God Pan was dead, the god of groves, marshes and moors, of herds, fertility and love—everything real about us—was dead. The god, who came to be known as universal, from a pun on his name, was dead. And instead not even a brook or a tree, but something empty and unimaginable, a whistling stone cracking in the heat calling on its followers to look forward to death. This is the new god of the Christians and the Moslems. And before them, the Jews, who declared women unclean.
Whatever the Christian God’s attitude to women might have been, when He was incarnated on earth as the Son, does not matter because Christianity took all its authority for its attitude towards women from a Christian missionary, called Paul. Peculiarly, Paul has never been raised up as being of the same substance as the Father, like Jesus, but his word nevertheless counts for more that any words the Word is recorded to have said. And Paul gets his authority from Moses.
For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church (Eph 5:23).
But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God… For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man. (1 Cor 11:3,8-9).
Slaves for whom crucifixion was a prescribed punishment came to the new religion and so did women, saddened at the image of a dead son, keen to meet their own sons again in the afterlife and treated with total disdain by the misogynist bishops who allowed them minor duties as deaconesses and almoners, just as pious women today get on their hands and knees to scrub the church. All things are possible for the Christian God, but not all things are expedient—Christianity kept women in their rightful place. The relative freedom of women today has nothing to do with the church but everything to do with women insisting on being educated and participating.
What of the barbarian Germans. Tacitus seemed to have nothing but praise for their primitive but noble social system. They respected and esteemed their women and consulted them on all important matters. They were certain that women possessed a natural sanctity and wisdom and were willing to allow a woman to rule the tribe. While it would be wrong to think the position of barbarian women was idyllic, in many ways they were more equal than the matrons of civilized Rome and Greece.
Chivalry
Chivalry was an amalgam of idealised Christian morality and military discipline aimed at putting at the disposal of the God of love an army to defeat any infidel. Chivalric virtues were piety, loyalty, honour, valour, chastity and courtesy. Woman was idealised as the Virgin Mary, and so women (only noble women, of course) were placed on a pedestal, and the Christian Knight was supposed to confine himself to unrequited love of unsullied virgins and other men’s wives.
The rules of gentlemanly courtesy were worked out in the noble courts of France under the supervision of the Lady of the Castle and offered some benefits to women, but the basis of the platonic ralationships remained the Christian distaste for women and sex, and the real interest of the male was to be his horse, just as it was for the schoolboy heroes of the wild west.
Not that the system was ever anything other than corrupt, abounding in adultery and promiscuity, but at least notionally women were to be wooed and not battered. In practice things were different, as some of the “Chanson de Geste” show. The emperor, Pepin, strikes his wife Blanchflor and makes her nose bleed. She enjoinders:
Thanks be to thee. When thous wilt, give me another blow.
This seems to be the chivalrous reply for a woman because it is repeated as if a formula, and nor was the blow unusual. Eventually, the rule was accepted that the beating of a wife should not be more severe than is “reasonable!” Meanwhile the bishops kept up their barrage of contempt for women. Anselm of Canterbury in his poem “On Contempt for the World” wrote thus about women:
Woman has a clear face and a lovely form. She pleases you not a little, this milk white creature. But, ah! if her bowels were opened and all the other regions of her flesh, what foul tissues would this white skin be shown to contain.
Women’s lives remained pointless, though they were granted more education than their men who were trained in nothing else but soldiery from the age of seven. Lands were held in fief—in return for military service—so women could hold no land in their own right because the church wanted rulers who could train and proivide armies. Widows or young girls as young as five left with an estate could be forced to marry, to put the land back into the hands of a lord. Charlemagne returned from the wars in Spain and forced the widows of knights that had fallen in the wars to marry en masse so that the land returned into the hands of men.
And out of this much romanticised Chivalry of the thirteenth century came the Inquisition and the witchhunts. The Church had converted the Great Pan into the devil and made the women of the Middle Ages terrified of him, yet country people seem to have held him up in their estimation and periodically returned to his worship. They were hounded as witches.
Witchcraft
The rites associated with Pan as a fertility god seem to have been carried over from the rites of Dionysus. Strabo had said in the first century:
In an island close to Britain, Demeter and Persephone were venerated with rites similar to the orgies of Samothrace.
”Orgies” in Greek are simply secret rites, though the Christians have changed the meaning of the word because they deemed all the secret rites of Paganism to have been licentious revels. The celebrations at Samothrace seem to have been similar to the mysteries of Eleusis. Islands near Jersey and Guernsey were identified by Dionysius in the fourth century as places where Bacchus (Dionysus/Pan) was venerated by women crowned with leaves. Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury, in the seventh century, notes that feasts were held and food consecrated to idols consumed, while revellers dressed as stags and bulls on the first day of the year (the kalends of January). The punishment was to be penance for three years.
Devil worship was expressly forbidden:
- by Wihtred, king of Kent in 690;
- in the penitential of Ecgberht, Archbishop of York in the eighth century;
- in the Law of Northumbrian priests;
- in the laws of king Edgar of 959;
- by Cnut in the eleventh century.
The implication is that these ceremonies were taking place. There is no need of laws to forbid what does not happen. Other chronicles tell us a little more. In 1282, the priest of Inverkeithing was charged before his bishop of dancing in a fertility rite round the phallic figure of a god. In 1303, the level of the crime has escalated so that the bishop of Coventry has to appear before the Pope charged with worshipping the devil. Margaret Murray, documents all of this in her famous book, “The Witch Cult in Western Europe,” that is now denigrated by scholars, doubtless Christian ones.
In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII wrote:
It has come to our ears that numbers of both sexes do not avoid to have intercourse with demons, incubi and succubi, and that by their sorceries and by their incantations, charms and conjurations, they suffocate, extinguish and cause to perish the births of women, the increase of animals, the corn of the ground, the grapes of the vinyard and the fruit of the trees, as well as men, women, flocks and herds and other animals, vines and apple trees, grass, corn,and other fruits of the earth, making and procuring that men and women, flocks and herds and other animals suffered and tormented both from within and without, so that men begat not, nor women conceive, and they impede the conjugal action of men and women.
All of this only makes sense if it is the opposite of the truth. It is impossible to think that anyone wanted to cause famines but quite possible to think they wanted to preserve fertility, as people have done since they could think. At the rituals, a man, dressed in an animal skin, was the priest representing the god they called the devil, though who he really was is not clear since all gods other than the Hebrew god were devils to the Christians, and their clerks would not have wanted to honour any Pagan god with its proper name.
Witches themselves, in the tables of their evidence, declare that “witchcraft was the best religion,” “the witches’ Sabbath was the true paradise” and they had “much more pleasure and content out of it than going to Mass.” The devil made them believe he was the true god and the joy of witches at the Sabbath was the beginning of a greater glory.
How many women were murdered as witches? One of the Inquisitors put it down as several million but modern estimates, doubtless by Christians, have been as low as 100,000, as if that mitigated the monstrous crime. In the year 2000, the Pope has apologised! An apology for hundreds of thousands—or millions—of murdered innocents means nothing. Does he propose to offer compensation?
The intensity of the persecution varied from time to time and from place to place. In England and Scotland 511 witches were tried in the seventeenth century when witch finding was most severe. Elsewhere, a continental judge tortured 800 in sixteen years, the bishop of Wurtemburg birned 900 in one year and the burghers of Geneva burned 500 in three months.
Puritans were as fanatical as Catholics. It is not a question of sectarian differences within Christianity. It is Christianity itself that is at fault! Neither Nature nor women will be freed until the awful sterile religion of the wilderness is replaced by the religion of fertility, of forests, farms and diversity, the religion of the Goddess and her servant, the imp of panic and pleasure, of passing loss and amorous love—The Great Pan.
