The Enemy Within by John Demos Page A

cradles or even when they are sleeping by their parents’ sides. . . . Then we secretly take them from their graves and cook them in a cauldron, until the whole flesh comes away from the bones to make a soup which may easily be drunk. Of the more solid matter we make an unguent which is to help us in our arts and pleasures and our transportations; and with the liquids we fill a flask or skin—whoever drinks from which, with the addition of a few other ceremonies, immediately acquires much knowledge and becomes a leader in our sect.”
    A third story, from the German town of Regensburg, where Kramer’s inquisition had just recently been active, expressed another theme very prominent in the Malleus: sexual dysfunction, supposedly caused by witchcraft. A young man, having broken off “an intrigue with a girl,” suddenly “lost his member . . . so that he could see or touch nothing but his smooth body.” During a visit to a local tavern, he lamented his loss to a fellow patron, who urged that he confront his former sweetheart and demand her to “restore to you your health.” He did just that, but the girl protested her innocence; whereupon “he fell upon her, and . . . choked her,” threatening her very life. At this, “She . . . with her face already swelling and growing black, said ‘Let me go, and I will heal you.’ ” And she “touched him with her hand between the thighs, saying ‘Now you have what you desire.’ And the young man . . . plainly felt . . . that his member had been restored to him by the mere touch of this witch.”
    This last belonged to a much larger discussion—of witches, devils, and sex. The key questions included: “How in Modern Times Witches perform the Carnal Act with Incubus Devils”; “How, as it were, they Deprive Man of his Virile Member”; and “Whether the Relations of an Incubus Devil with a Witch are always accompanied by the Injection of Semen.” Some of the answers were ingenious and mystifying (as perhaps befits such a literally Satanic subject). For instance: in order to effect their “abominable coitus,” devils would assume bodily form “through condensation by means of gross vapors raised from the earth.” Devils, and witches too, might then create “an illusion of glamor . . . to collect male organs in great numbers, 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 . . . as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report.” Indeed, the questions went on and on. Where did the semen used on these occasions come from? (Perhaps the Devil would collect what he needed from “nocturnal pollutions in sleep.” Or possibly he got it by taking the form of a woman and seducing concupiscent men.) Did intercourse between devils and witches afford “venereal pleasure”? (In some cases, yes; but a devil’s penis was often uncomfortably cold.) And might such connection lead to pregnancy—and thus to devil-spawned children? (When certain necessary “causes concur,” the result could well be “progeny that are . . . [uncommonly] powerful and big in body.”) In one way or another, the sex act was crucial to the spread of witchcraft, not only because of its “natural nastiness,” but also because it had “caused the corruption of our first parents and, by its contagion, brought the inheritance of original sin on the whole human race.”
    Child-murder and sex are recurrent preoccupations in the Malleus . But what seems most striking of all, as viewed from half a millennium later, is something else again: the flat-out, unblinking misogyny in which the entire work is drenched. Right at the start, the authors asked: “Why it is that women are chiefly addicted to evil superstitions?” Then, at great length and