Text Box: Text Box: . . . The changing superstitions about sorcery were transformed into doctrine at the end of the thirteenth century when a Dominican monk named Thomas Aquinas subjected demons – along with the rest of creation – to detailed analysis. The scholar, concerned to establish a rational basis for God’s existence at a time when proof was becoming the sine qua non of medieval thought, would establish an orthodoxy that would hold for three more centuries, and his examination of the spiritual world generated some particularly alarming conclusions. While recognizing that some people thought demons were illusory, he scrutinized the evidence and showed that they were in fact ubiquitous – and dangerous. Incubi and succubi, for example, were not just cruising whores, but diabolical transsexuals who reaped sperm from men and sowed them in women, generating giants in the process. Although that specific hazard was something from which Aquinas claimed a miraculous immunity [footnote omitted], less sanctified individuals faced serious risks. Demons were so malicious that they sought pleasure not for its own sake but only to lead humans to perdition.  Magicians were especially liable to be outsmarted by creatures of the netherworld. Indeed, the mere act of invoking a demon meant that a sorcerer was making a deal with death and a pact with hell.            The stock of ritual magic, once the preserve of only the wisest Christians, was plummeting, and a series of events that occurred south of Paris in 1323 offered a vivid indication of how far it was to fall. They began when shepherds driving their flocks past a crossroads noticed two long straws sticking out of the ground and heard a distant miaow. Local inquisitors, summoned to the scene, began digging. It was not long before their spades hit a chest containing a coal-black cat and several vials of consecrated oil and holy water.  Inquiries among local carpenters led to the arrest of one Jean Prévost, who explained that he had been trying to assist a group of Cistercian monks from the nearby abbey. They had hired him, along with a magician called Jean Persant, to help recover the abbot’s stolen treasury and the plan had been to disinter the cat after three days, skin it alive, make three thongs from its hide, and consume the contents of its stomach. Prévost and Persant anticipated that a demon called Berich would then point them in the direction of the thief. The scheme would have raised few eyebrows just a century earlier, but by the 1320s it was looking distinctly outré. The monks were collectively degraded and condemned to lifetime incarceration, while the defendants were burned to ashes. Persant suffered the additional discomfort of having the cat tied around his neck at the stake.

The witch trials

 
Text Box: . . . The witch-hunting manual that Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger produced was a Mein Kampf of misogyny, teeming with sluts who would copulate with any passing demon and fall pregnant for the pure pleasure of aborting their fetuses in Satan’s honour. It told of midwives who rammed thorn-bushes into wombs and killed infants to procure the fat that, smeared onto chairs and broomsticks, allowed them to fly. Most startling of all was the revelation that female sorcerers could not only magically rob men of their erections – as had been suspected since Roman times – but also steal their penises. “And what,” asked Kramer and Sprenger, “is to be thought of those witches who collect . . . as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members and eat oats and corn?” It is not a question that admits of an easy answer, but the authors had no doubt that it demanded one. They knew someone who claimed to have seen such a nest with his own eyes, after his tormentor had repented of her theft and agreed to give him back his penis. She had sent him to the top of a tree with instructions to take whichever one he liked – though “when he tried to take a big one, the witch said, “You must not take that one . . . because it belongs to a parish priest.’” The anecdote suggests that not everyone furnishing information to Kramer and Sprenger was quite as humourless as they were, but the monks’ conclusion on the subject of lost genitalia, like those on every other topic they covered, was no laughing matter. The best way to make a witch return her prize was to strangle her until her face turned black.