Sex in Witchcraft

Sorcery is a recurrent phenomenon in human history, as its contemporary manifestations attest, and always it is found to be amalgamated with sex. The universality of this age-old relationship explains the fascination it has exerted on theologians, historians, jurists, anthropologists, and psychologists, who have applied their combined energies to the study of the subject. In western culture, the classic eruption of witchcraft lasted from around the 13th century to the end of the 18th, and also involved important religious and political elements. That these factors were all cemented together by superstition, hypocrisy, and viciousness is just a testimony to the basic nature of the human animal.

The old fairytale version of the witch as an old hag living in a cluttered hut in the forest is not sheer fiction. There were many such women who were witches not as members of a coven, and not out of choice, but out of absolute necessity. Medieval times were little brighter than the Dark Ages as far as the poor were concerned. Living at the bottom of the social scale in a feudal system, the poor were de facto slaves. Women (usually premature widows), forced while they were still young and attractive to surrender their bodies to the barons who legally ruled their lives, were liable to be left to fend for themselves if they lived to grow old and ugly. Those who were disfigured by disease early in life faced a similar dismal future. If they established themselves as witches, they were at least able to earn a pittance by concocting love potions, simple medications, and harmless spells. Sometimes, when they were not totally lacking in physical charm (and there are numerous accounts of young, pretty witches), they earned additional incomes by prostitution or by dealing in commodities, not unlike modern moonshine or drugs, to help their wretched neighbors ease the pain of everyday life.

Witches in Early Times

During the 11th, 12th, and early 13th centuries, the Church recognized that witchcraft of sorts existed, but usually dealt with it leniently. During this period, however, the doctrine of Manicheism began to spread, and this was a heresy that could not be overlooked. Coming to Europe from the Middle East and North Africa via Bulgaria, it inspired a number of sects such as the Albigensians, and also the Cathars of whom anthropologist Arne Runeberg wrote: "The visible world was to them created by Satan, the apostate son of God, while the souls of mankind were regarded as belonging to the Kingdom of Heaven, from which they had descended to earth..."

The Cathars and other Manichean sects taught that the Pope was the Antichrist and the Catholic Church a center of blasphemy. Although they appealed to the disillusioned and gained many followers, they were no match for the power of the Church, as was soon found by 13 noted Bulgars living in the diocese of Orleans. In the year 1022, this group, whose lifestyle could be compared to hippie communes, was accused of sodomy and heresy. After a rapid one-sided trial, all were burned at the stake as heretics. In time, the French word for Bulgar, Bougre, came to be used as a synonym for heretic in general. Gradually, that meaning fell out of popular usage and the secondary meaning, sodomite, replaced it. Eventually, the English picked it up and mispronounced it as bugger, an example of the familiar process of using a foreign term to disguise native frailties.

When heretical sects were not slaughtered during local European crusades aimed at them, they went underground. In doing so, they assimilated pre-Christian superstitious beliefs and practices, and in time came to be regarded by the Church as out-and-out Satanists. By the middle of the 13th century the Vatican was ready for total war. Since the visible world was at once the battleground and the eventual prize, it boiled down to a mortal struggle between the opposing forces of God and Satan—at least, in the eyes of the Church. The tragic twist was that many of the alleged opponents were innocent victims of error, ignorance, and sometimes deliberate viciousness.

In 1458, a French theologian, Nicolaus Jaquier, wrote one of the most significant early treatises on witchcraft. He traced its expansion to followers of sects hostile to Christianity, claiming that they gathered together on special occasions for what he called a synagoga diabolica. They would then venerate Satan in the form of a buck, copulating with him and with one another. Afterwards, declared Jaquier, they would also receive from their diabolical deity magic enabling them to cause insanity, disease, and death, not to mention impotence in men, and barrenness in women.

Anti Witchcraft Bill

Such pressures prompted Pope Innocent VIII to issue his famous bill against witchcraft, Summis desiderantes affectibus, on December 9, 1484, which said in part: "...many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offenses, have slain infants yet in the mother's womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burden, herd beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards, orchards, meadows, pasturelands, corn, wheat, and all other cereals. These wretches furthermore inflict… terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external. They hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives, nor wives receive their husbands. Over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthy excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls, whereby they outrage the Divine Majesty and are a cause of scandal and danger to very many."

The Pope also announced in his bill his appointment of two inquisitors of the German Dominican order, James Sprenger and Henry Kramer. Obediently putting their talents together, this fearsome pair wrote the Malleus Malficarum, or Hammer against Witches, an appalling handbook combining sexual fantasy, sadism, and legal-theological mumbo-jumbo. One of the most towering monuments to ignorance ever written, it was nevertheless destined to be wielded by Catholic and Protestant alike, until common sense swept superstition away and began replacing it with reason.

Reflecting the author's pathological hatred of women and utter repugnance to sexuality, the book reads like a fanatical misogynists Krafft-Ebing. Broken into three parts, it first defines and describes witches, secondly tells how witchcraft functions and how to deal with it, and finally, how to conduct witch trials.

Like the unforgettable general in Dr. Strangelove, Sprenger and Kramer asserted in all seriousness that witches "prevent the flow of vital essences to the members" by somehow closing the seminal ducts and impeding ejaculation. They go on to explain how witches deprive men of their penes.

They cited the example of a young man from Ratisbon (today known as Regensburg, Bavaria), who terminated a love affair with a young woman, unaware that she was a witch. Soon afterwards he was horrified to discover that by means of "some glamour" he had been deprived of his genitals. Heading for the nearest tavern, he began to drown his sorrows in wine and poured out his tale to a sympathetic female drinking companion. After he demonstrated the effectiveness of his emasculation by enchantment, the woman recommended that he approach the suspected witch directly and try to reason with her, but failing that, to employ violence. When after a few minutes talking to the "witch," he realized that this approach was getting him nowhere. He whipped out a towel, looped it around her neck, and began to strangle her, threatening that she would die if she didn't restore his penis and testicles at once. As her face began to turn black, she conceded defeat, and thrust her hand between his thighs. As for the young man, the learned inquisitors related that afterwards he "plainly felt, before he had verified it by looking or touching, that his member had been restored to him by the mere touch of the witch."

The most fantastic "case" offered by the Malleus Malificarum, however, concerns a youth who had been similarly deprived of his penis through the machinations of the neighborhood witch. This one was apparently perfectly willing to return it without a struggle, for when he asked her for it, she merely told him to climb a certain tree where he would find it in the midst of a rather large collection of such organs temporarily housed in a bird's nest. Delighted with what he saw when he got there, he reached out for the largest one in sight, but was restrained by the honorable witch, who regretfully told him he could not have it because it belonged to the parish priest. Sprenger and Kramer explained this extraordinary occurrence by revealing that witches "sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as 20 or 30 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."

With ideas such as these firmly implanted in the minds of those who wielded power, a new dark age descended on Europe. Not only did it place deadly weapons in the hands of madmen and fools, it enabled ruthless despots and power-hungry politicians to use them for their own selfish purposes.

Incubi and Succubi

One of the most ludicrous aspects of witchcraft was the ecclesiastical controversy over incubi and succubi. An incubus was said by some to be a demon in male form whose chief activity was to come in the night to sleeping women and force them into copulation. A succubus was merely the female manifestation of the same demon, who chose as "victims" members of the male sex. Fantastic as it may seem, theologians and scholars of the highest repute entered into the debate. Part of the problem stemmed from St. Augustine, who had written that "they have corporeal immortality and passions like human beings." In 1494, Bartolomeo de Spina asserted that "some are formed from the odor and sperm of men and women in intercourse." And a contemporary, one William the Good, wrote: "That there exist such beings as are commonly called incubi and succubi, and that they indulge in their burning lusts, and that children, as it is freely acknowledged, can be born from them, is attested by the unimpeachable and unshakeable witness of many men and women, who have been filled with foul imaginings by them, and endured their lecherous assaults and lewdness."

One of those unimpeachable witnesses was St. Thomas Aquinas, who had written that incubi took semen from men and deposited it in the bodies of women. Another, Caesarius of Heisterbach, believed that they collected semen emitted during masturbation or erotic dreams, and from it manufactured bodies for themselves. Two 16th century experts, one of whom was a physician, emphasized that incubi always went out of their way to obtain the best semen available, explaining that they only dealt with robust, ardent young men, who produced semen that was "abundant, very thick, very warm, rich in spirits, and free from serosity."

Then, in the words of Ludovico Maria Sinistrari, who summed up their assertions: "The incubus copulates with women of a like constitution, taking care that both shall enjoy a more than normal orgasm, for the greater the venereal excitement, the more abundant the semen."

Sinistrari, Professor of Philosophy at Pavia, and consultant to the Supreme Tribunal of the Holy Inquisition, had ideas of his own as to the true nature of incubi and succubi—unique ones, it must be said, that differed from all the other authorities. He believed them to be only mildly evil spirits who were basically lustful, but of a higher order of life than human beings. They were, he said, not even beyond the reach of Christian redemption, because unlike true demons, they could not be exorcised.

Regardless of the arguments about their true nature, incubi and succubi were believed to attend witch's sabbats, and to copulate freely with both male and female participants. Merlin, King Arthur's legendary magician, was said to have been the result of a union between an incubus and a witch. Indeed, rumors circulated that incubi figured prominently in the ancestry of William the Conqueror and Martin Luther. About Luther, the church made no comment.

These lascivious creatures of the night were a particular threat to convents and monasteries, who were relentlessly plagued with nocturnal assaults on their inmates. Virtuous widows and wives, especially those whose husbands were away on long journeys, were also vulnerable to incubus attacks, and single young men with pretty fiancées were far from immune. To complicate matters, these troublesome spirits had the habit of assuming the appearances of individuals well known to the victims. Often they appeared in the guise of men with spotless reputations. What was a woman to do when an incubus looking exactly like her confessor crept into her bed; worse yet, one who bore an uncanny resemblance to her father, best friend's husband, or favorite uncle? Sinistrari's theories notwithstanding, such things, including otherwise embarrassing pregnancies, were understood and accepted as the work of the Devil (with God's permission, of course). For, as it was written in the Malleus Malificarum, such sufferers were, at best, victims of supernatural rape. After all, only witches and their ilk voluntarily entered into sexual relations with such "unclean spirits."

Probably no other aspect of witchcraft has caused more controversy than the sabbat. Judging by early writings it began as little more than an after-dark picnic, attended by Manichean-like cultists possibly along with a sprinkling of left-over pagans. To carry the theory a little further, the proceedings were little more sinister than an extension of Christian rites, because all the celebrants were doing was paying homage to Satan as lord of the visible world. As a cheerful gathering, with a certain amount of ritual thrown in, there was plenty of eating and drinking—especially drinking and it is likely that some of those attending sneaked off to the bushes for more private rites of their own.

In some parts of Europe, the celebration was probably a carry over from the old Roman Saturnalia, with open phallic rites observed. We are told of huge French sabbats in the early part of the 15th century where participants drank drugged wine and danced nude around a gigantic phallus representing the potency of God.

Virtually every narrative describing a sabbat tells how the Devil himself attended, sometimes disguised as some animal, but eventually in a more or less human form, so that he might have sexual relations with his followers. This indicates that someone had to perform the Satanic role. But was it a man or a woman? The question arises out of a curious similarity that occurs in virtually every contemporary narrative. Invariably, the women confessing their sexual relations with Satan complain that his penis was ice cold, and that penetration was extremely painful. We read confession after confession (each separated from the other by time, distance, and language) in which the common denominator is this outsized penis, sometimes "about a yard and a half long," "long and thick as one's arm," or something similar, but always causing great pain to the female.

Preparing for the Sabbat

Obviously, for such a momentous occasion as the sabbat, certain preparations were necessary. Over and over we read of the unguents, or sorcerer's grease, which had to be compounded from a hair-raising pharmacopia, then smeared over the naked body. This lubricant, which might have doubled for sexual assistance later on, was a vital aid to transvection, or flying through the air. Powerful potions were concocted and swallowed, most of which are recognized today as containing drugs guaranteed to produce delirium or hallucinations. Some witches who confessed to having flown to the sabbat may well have been thoroughly convinced that they were telling the truth. The expression "fly by night" stems back to these times.

This would indicate an artificial phallus, possibly carved out of marble, bone, or something equally retentive of the cold. Judging from some descriptions, it might even have been a large animal horn. A woman in disguise could easily have wielded it. It stands to reason that no man could maintain an erection long enough to copulate with scores of frenzied followers. And even if by some superhuman means he could, his partners would not experience such sensations as pain and extreme cold.

Every manner of sexual excess emerges from these narratives against surreal backgrounds of smoking cauldrons, frenzied dancing, cacophonous music, agonized shrieks, howls and screams. Writing of the confession of a young witch, Jeanette d'Abaide, Thomas Wright says: "She had seen at the sabbat men and women in promiscuous intercourse, and how the devil arranged them in couples, in the most unusual conjugations—the daughter with the father, the daughter-in-law with the father-in-law, the penitent and the confessor, without distinction of age, quality or relationship, so that she confessed to having been known an infinity of times by a cousin of her mother, and by an infinite number of others." He goes on to explain that the girl claimed to have been deflowered by the Devil at the age of 13. He goes on to report that Jeanette and the other witches "suffered extremely when he (the Devil) had intercourse with them. in consequence of his member being covered with scales like those of a fish. that when extended it was a yard long, but that it was usually twisted."

Whether witch's sabbats actually took place as orgiastic convocations of Satanists and their fellow travelers or they were mere figments of the twisted imaginations of inquisitors and other witch-hunters is difficult to say with absolute certainty in retrospect. Certainly, the methods of torture these humorless zealots employed were effective enough to extract any confessions they chose from their victims. Knowing what we do today about the pathology of sex, we can unequivocally state that the majority of witch-hunters, Catholic and Protestant alike, were merely expressing their own warped sexuality as they tormented and systematically destroyed their hapless victims.

Although the Rosemary's Baby variety of witchcraft is virtually nonexistent now, it cannot be dismissed altogether. The bloody Moors killings in Great Britain and the Sharon Tate murders in California offer grisly testimony to that. Certainly there is nothing surprising about the current manifestation of witchcraft. Not only is there a general occult fad, but we have a growing relaxation of sexual rigidity, a youthful drug culture, and, unfortunately, the increasing awareness of a bleak future for mankind in general. Since homo sapiens has traditionally called on supernatural and magical forces to help in the past, we are presently following an old predisposition hopefully to help us cope with the future.

The witchcraft enjoying a renaissance today is certainly inspired to some extent by the brand that flourished in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. But the modern elements of sex and drugs are more sophisticated, and the concept of demons is nonexistent. For every true believer there are two or more skeptics who go along with the others for sexual, social, or other reasons, not unlike what happens within the more conventional religious, or cultural movements. Many modern witches do, indeed, draw on the spells, potions, and recipes of their predecessors. Love potions and sexual concoctions, such as those presented in How to Become a Sensuous Witch, are a prime example.

Abragail and Valaria, considered two of New York's most successful witches, share their secrets in How to Become a Sensuous Witch: Spells, Rituals, and Recipes for a Livelier Love Life. The volume gives advice on both finding new loves and getting rid of old ones. It includes spells to attract men and money, arouse passion, assure fidelity, and separate your lover from you. It also includes a series of recipes, which range from elegant dinners to restorative breakfasts.