The Church, a Witch, Sex and Satan
Oppressing Witches: Symbolic of Oppressing Women's Sexuality?
The Christian concept of "evil" has for long been synonymous with sexual desire and the rejection of women in general and women's sexuality in particular.
The witches of Christian mythology have been made famous for their fondness for sex with Satan and for using magic to do evil. These ideas were generally not taken as the evidence of a serious mental illness. Instead, they were considered truth by millions of pious Christians.
I'm sure Freud would have had a thing or two to say about these persisting myths of sexual activities with satanic creatures with horns, big red tails and insatiable sexual appetites or about erotic stories of women who put long sticks between their legs, rub on a magic unguent and fly off to have sex with an evil spirited male goat (Robert Todd Carroll, 2005).
These erotically coloured stories about witchcraft and sorcery might just have been the result of Christian sexual repression. These stories justified erotic art and literature. It was, one might say, pornography that was produced, sanctified and glorified by Church authorities themselves. Yet it was more than that.
The stories were, much like the bulk of contemporary porn (some things never change), particularly nasty when it came to women in general and women's sexuality in particular. Women were seen as a hindrance when it came to true spirituality and union with God. Not surprisingly, witch-hunts targeted mostly women. The Church's long-standing prejudice against them was channeled into erotic stories of sex with the devil and into the attempt to destroy that "desirous witch." These attempts themselves were sexually coloured. Following standard Inquisition procedure of questioning suspects, women suspects were stripped naked, shaved of all body hair, and 'pricked.' If the body search failed the torture began. Fingernails were pulled out, and, not surprisingly, women's sex organs were particularly fascinating for the male torturer. Nancy van Vuuren gives an example: red-hot tongs were applied to women's breasts and genitalia.
The Church used a very particular conception of evil (namely as sexual and female) in pornographic art and literature, and subsequently used the concept of evil to approve and justify the persecution of women scapegoats, particularly of heretics and witches. This legacy of terror left by the men of God was aimed mainly at women and its cruelty, one could say, might just evidence the existence of Satan.
Witch-hunts are not a thing of the past. Hundreds of people continue to die in witch-burning episodes each year.
References
Robert Todd Carroll (2005). Witches. Available online at hhht://skeptic.com/witches.html
