paint and girdles and all varieties of crap. Women must stop mutilating their bodies and start living in them. Perhaps the notion of beauty which will then organically emerge will be truly democratic and demonstrate a respect for human life in its infinite, and most honorable, variety.
BEAUTY HURTS
CHAPTER 7
----
Gynocide: The Witches
It has never yet been known that an innocent person has been punished on suspicion of witchcraft, and there is no doubt that God will never permit such a thing to happen.
Malleus Maleficarum
It would be hard to give an idea of how dark the Dark Ages actually were. “Dark” barely serves to describe the social and intellectual gloom of those centuries. The learning of the classical world was in a state of eclipse. The wealth of that same world fell into the hands of the Catholic Church and assorted monarchs, and the only democracy the landless masses of serfs knew was a democratic distribution of poverty. Disease was an even crueler exacter than the Lord of the Manor. The medieval Church did not believe that cleanliness was next to godliness. On the contrary, between the temptations of the flesh and the Kingdom of Heaven, a layer of dirt, lice, and vermin was supposed to afford protection and to ensure virtue. Since the flesh was by definition sinful, it was not to be uncovered, washed, or treated for those diseases which were God’s punishment in the first place — hence the Church’s hostility to the practice of medicine and to the search for medical knowledge. Abetted by this medieval predilection for filth and shame, successive epidemics of leprosy, epileptic convulsions, and plague decimated the population of Europe regularly. The Black Death is thought to have killed25percent of the entire population of Europe; two-thirds to one-half of the population of France died; in some towns every living person died; in London it is estimated that one person in ten survived:
On Sundays, after Mass, the sick came in scores, crying for help and words were all they got: You have sinned, and God is afflicting you. Thank Him: you will suffer so much the less torment in the life to come. Endure, suffer, die. Has not the Church its prayers for the dead. 1
Hunger and misery, the serf’s constant companions, may well have induced the kinds of hallucinations and hysteria which profound ignorance translated as demonic possession. Disease, social chaos, peasant insurrections, outbreaks of dancing mania (tarantism) with its accompanying mass flagellation — the Church had to explain these obvious evils. What kind of Shepherd was this whose flock was so cruelly and regularly set upon? Surely the hell-fires and eternal damnation which were vivid in the Christian imagination were modeled on daily experience, on real earth-lived life.
The Christian notion of the nature of the Devil underwent as many transformations as the snake has skins. In this evolution, natural selection played a determining role as the Church bred into its conception those deities best suited to its particular brand of dualistic theology. It is a cultural constant that the gods of one religion become the devils of the next, and the Church, intolerant of deviation in this as in all other areas, vilified the gods of those pagan religions which threatened Catholic supremacy in Europe until at least the 15th century. The pagan religions were not monotheistic and their pantheons were scarcely conservative in number. The Church had a slew of deities to dispatch and would have done so speedily had not the old gods their faithful adherents who clung to the old practices, who had local power, who had to be pacified. Accordingly, the Church did a kind of roulette and sent some gods to heaven (canonizing them) and others to hell (damning them). Especially in southern Europe the local deities, formerly housed on Olympus, were allowed to continue their traditional vocations of healing the sick and protecting the traveler. The Church
BEAUTY HURTS
CHAPTER 7
----
Gynocide: The Witches
It has never yet been known that an innocent person has been punished on suspicion of witchcraft, and there is no doubt that God will never permit such a thing to happen.
Malleus Maleficarum
It would be hard to give an idea of how dark the Dark Ages actually were. “Dark” barely serves to describe the social and intellectual gloom of those centuries. The learning of the classical world was in a state of eclipse. The wealth of that same world fell into the hands of the Catholic Church and assorted monarchs, and the only democracy the landless masses of serfs knew was a democratic distribution of poverty. Disease was an even crueler exacter than the Lord of the Manor. The medieval Church did not believe that cleanliness was next to godliness. On the contrary, between the temptations of the flesh and the Kingdom of Heaven, a layer of dirt, lice, and vermin was supposed to afford protection and to ensure virtue. Since the flesh was by definition sinful, it was not to be uncovered, washed, or treated for those diseases which were God’s punishment in the first place — hence the Church’s hostility to the practice of medicine and to the search for medical knowledge. Abetted by this medieval predilection for filth and shame, successive epidemics of leprosy, epileptic convulsions, and plague decimated the population of Europe regularly. The Black Death is thought to have killed25percent of the entire population of Europe; two-thirds to one-half of the population of France died; in some towns every living person died; in London it is estimated that one person in ten survived:
On Sundays, after Mass, the sick came in scores, crying for help and words were all they got: You have sinned, and God is afflicting you. Thank Him: you will suffer so much the less torment in the life to come. Endure, suffer, die. Has not the Church its prayers for the dead. 1
Hunger and misery, the serf’s constant companions, may well have induced the kinds of hallucinations and hysteria which profound ignorance translated as demonic possession. Disease, social chaos, peasant insurrections, outbreaks of dancing mania (tarantism) with its accompanying mass flagellation — the Church had to explain these obvious evils. What kind of Shepherd was this whose flock was so cruelly and regularly set upon? Surely the hell-fires and eternal damnation which were vivid in the Christian imagination were modeled on daily experience, on real earth-lived life.
The Christian notion of the nature of the Devil underwent as many transformations as the snake has skins. In this evolution, natural selection played a determining role as the Church bred into its conception those deities best suited to its particular brand of dualistic theology. It is a cultural constant that the gods of one religion become the devils of the next, and the Church, intolerant of deviation in this as in all other areas, vilified the gods of those pagan religions which threatened Catholic supremacy in Europe until at least the 15th century. The pagan religions were not monotheistic and their pantheons were scarcely conservative in number. The Church had a slew of deities to dispatch and would have done so speedily had not the old gods their faithful adherents who clung to the old practices, who had local power, who had to be pacified. Accordingly, the Church did a kind of roulette and sent some gods to heaven (canonizing them) and others to hell (damning them). Especially in southern Europe the local deities, formerly housed on Olympus, were allowed to continue their traditional vocations of healing the sick and protecting the traveler. The Church
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