The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual by Jonathan Kirsch

Author:Jonathan Kirsch
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2009-10-06T05:00:00+00:00

A standard set of outrages came to be ascribed to the women who were persecuted during the Witch Craze, which continued to flare up in fits and starts from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. They were said to have entered into a pact with the Devil by which they put themselves in his service, sexually and otherwise, in exchange for the power to afflict the good Christians among whom they lived. Thus recruited and initiated, they were imagined to be members of a vast conspiracy of Devil worshippers and magic-workers far worse than the original victims of the Inquisition.

The sign of the pact was a mark on the flesh, the so-called Devil’s mark, which was supposedly insensitive to pain, and the witch was provided with demonic servants known as familiars, who often took the form of black cats or other black-furred beasts. It was believed that the witches flew by night to some forest clearing or forgotten cemetery or ruined castle where they worshipped the Devil in a ceremony strikingly similar in every detail to the rituals attributed by pagan Rome to the first Christians and by the Inquisition to the Cathars and Waldensians—an “obscene kiss” on the anus or penis, a wild sexual orgy, a feast that featured the tender flesh of murdered babies. From these raw materials emerged the standard iconography of witchcraft that is found today only in Halloween costumes and decorations—and only in an expurgated version that has been rendered safe for children.

Witches were believed to possess both the ability and the desire to work all kinds of deadly mischief on their adversaries and enemies, all with the active assistance of the Devil and his demons—sterility or impotence, miscarriages and stillbirths, illness or madness, or death. They were believed to be able to change the natural order of things, causing rain out of season or no rain at all, the sickening of cattle, and the blighting of crops. Above all, they were thought to seek the flesh of unbaptized babies for use in making their potions and brews, including one that supposedly enabled the witch to fly and another that empowered her to remain silent under torture. The Latin word commonly used for witchcraft—maleficium—literally means “wrongdoing” and carried the implication that the power to inflict harm on others was derived from the Devil and achieved by resort to black magic.

The gathering of witches for a worship service—at first called a synagogue, then a sabbat, and only much later a black Sabbath—was portrayed in detail by the inquisitors and their fellow witch-hunters, who seemed to delight to piling atrocity upon atrocity and describing every revolting detail. According to the febrile imaginations of the witch-hunters, the Devil manifested as an outsized monster, black in color and crowned with horns, part man, part goat, part bird. The witches kissed him on the left foot, or the anus, or the penis; if the anus was the site of the “obscene kiss,” then the Devil “acknowledged their attentions in a peculiarly noxious manner,” that is, he defecated on their faces and into their mouths.

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