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“Witches Can Do Marvellous Things”: 
Witch Powers as Rhetorical Device in the 
Texts of Witch Hunters

Malleus Maleficarum I.9 

Tonight I want to speak about specific language and claims in texts by early modern witch hunters, and to portray them as rhetorical devices that contribute to a certain construction of femininity.  Moreover, I want to suggest that although the age of witch hunts had a distinct beginning and end, the rhetoric of witch hunters belongs to a  discursive pattern with substantial continuities stretching at least from the time of Christian origins into the present day. 

Trials of individual witches in early modern Europe always began with specific accusations brought against a supposed witch by one or more of her neighbors.  That is, they arose in concrete circumstances.  But the possibility of such trials began with a rhetorical movement, for in important respects the great witch hunts began with the invention of a novel figure—the witch—in texts by professional demonologists.  Prior to the publication of these texts, there was already widespread belief in magic both benign and maleficent.  But not until the practice of magic was situated in a dualistic religious cosmology of warfare between God and his arch-enemy the devil did community concerns about the practice of magic evolve into the desperate, sadistic trials that occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries. 

The first and most influential of the witch hunting manuals was the notorious Malleus Maleficarum authored by the Dominican monks and inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger.  It was followed by other texts that described, often in lurid detail, the alleged practices of witches, or that outlined the procedures for conducting a trial of a witch.  These texts established the principle elements in the fantastic structure of witch beliefs that permeated Europe for two centuries: that witches indulged in abominably deviant sex with one another and with the devil, that they interfered in natural reproduction, that they caused death and disease, that they renounced their Christian faith—in short that they threatened every form of religious and secular order. 

These texts present a challenge to a modern interpreter, because their descriptions of witches’ magical feats are quite simply incredible.  Alongside accusations that arise from the attribution of observable misfortunes like miscarriages, injuries, pains, storms, and the like to diabolical causes, they also raise accusations regarding unobservable and plainly impossible events.  The frequent charge that witches flew through the air on broomsticks to join the devil at his blasphemous sabbath belongs in this category.  So, too, does the accusation that will concern me for the rest of this time: namely Kramer and Sprenger’s assertion in the Malleus Maleficarum (an assertion made famous by Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology) that witches could and did sometimes make a man’s penis—the “male member”—seem to disappear. 

Since it is impossible to know whether they really believed that such a thing was ever accomplished, I construe the mere discussion of this supposed power as a rhetorical device.  Regardless of whether it was intended or credited as factual, it served to sway the minds of readers, and to establish the probability of witch beliefs in general.  Disconnected from empirical verification, discourse about women’s power over the male member drew its meaning, and its persuasive force, from the way it was coordinated with other assertions and assumptions about femininity.  And these in turn drew their meaning from their position in a long-standing tradition of Christian discourse about gender. 

Long before Kramer and Sprenger asserted their strange claim, woman was already firmly associated in Christian discourse with themes of sin, danger, sensuality, and transgression.  To cite just two examples, the Hebrew Prophets liken idolatry to “whoring,” thus linking femininity to false worship and illicit sex; and the early church father Tertullian assimilates all women to Eve as “the devil’s gateway,” thus linking femininity to transgression and death. 

In her marvelous book, Carnal Knowing (1989), Margaret Miles explores how a web of meanings that contextualizes “woman” emerges in conventions of Christian painting.   Focusing on the process of representation, she shows how depictions of women’s nakedness in Christian art have served to signify a very specific set of Christian themes.  “Female nakedness,” she says, is “a cipher for sin, sex, and death” (12).  Representation, of course, is never merely a mirror of social or physical realities, but a selection of characteristics meant to stand for something else, and “to stabilize assumptions and expectations relating to the objects or persons represented” (10).  Through a semiotic process of mutual definition, the artistic employment of female figures to stand for sexual lust and dangerous evil establishes the meaning of “woman” by reference to the meanings of lust and evil. 

When Kramer and Sprenger assert that certain women--witches--can take away the male member, their claim derives both meaning and persuasive force from the constellation of meanings they inherit from mainstream Christian discourse.  To properly appreciate the meaning of their speculation on this subject, we need to consider the context in which they published it.  Published in 1486, the Malleus was accompanied by a Papal Bull exhorting secular authorities to extend all necessary aid to the authors’ efforts to crush the threat of witchcraft.  The text is divided into three parts that define witchcraft, describe what witches do, and instruct judges in the conduct of a witch’s trial.   Reprinted continually during the age of witch hunting, the work profoundly influenced the course of the hunts.  It takes the form of a scholastic “Summa,” or a compendium of settled knowledge about its subject.  It addresses pressing questions about witchcraft (including infamous questions like whether and how witches copulate with devils, whether belief in witchcraft is “essential” to Catholic faith, and so on) in light of previous authoritative arguments.  It answers each question according to the best knowledge available to the authors.  The monks' theory of witchcraft is thus coordinated with the authority of scripture and tradition--that is, with the totality of official Christian discourse as the monks have received it.  (Put another way, it is a thoroughly semiotic exercise where the meaning of each term is derived entirely from the way it is related to other terms within the text itself, and within the discourse of official Christianity.)  Their theories continue and elaborate expert knowledge about their primary topics: war between God and devils, sin, women, and witchcraft.  The terrain of received tradition preconditions what the monks are able to think about these topics.  At the same time, by their contribution, they add detail and depth to that terrain. 

Part I, Question 9 states, “Here is declared the truth about diabolic operations with regard to the male organ.  And to make plain the facts in this matter, it is asked whether witches can with the help of devils really and actually remove the member, or whether they only do so apparently by some glamour or illusion”  (Kramer and Sprenger 1486 I.9, 58). 

The monks describe the power to “remove the member” as a matter of common knowledge that "agrees with what has been seen and heard by many, and with the general account of what has been known concerning that member through the senses of sight and touch” (58).  In evidence of this power, they recount a tale of a penis lost and reclaimed: “In the town of Ratisbon a certain young man who had an intrigue with a girl, wishing to leave her, lost his member; that is to say, some glamour was cast over it so that he could see or touch nothing but his smooth body.”  On the advice of an “astute” woman, the young man demanded that the girl “restore to him the health of his body.” 

And when she maintained that she was innocent and knew nothing about it, he fell upon her, and winding a towel tightly round her neck, choked her, saying: “Unless you give me back my health, you shall die at my hands.”  Then she, being unable to cry out, and with her face already swelling and growing black, said: “let me go, and I will heal you.” . . . And the young man . . . plainly felt . . . that his member had been restored to him by the mere touch of the witch. 

 (II.1.7, 119)

The monks also recount cases where witches “sometimes 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, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report” (121). 

They raise numerous questions about this phenomenon: Whether witches, or only devils themselves, can accomplish the feat of taking away the member.  Whether witches and devils accomplish this feat by their own power, or only by God's power (which he permits them to exercise in the fulfillment of His justice).  Whether witches and devils really take away male organs "or whether they only do so apparently by some glamour or illusion" (I.9, 58).  But their patient, scholastic inquiry never leads them to doubt that, one way or another, a witch has this power over “the member.” 

Historiographic difficulties for the interpretation of witch beliefs reach a kind of high point in the monks' discourse.  Did some men really experience the apparent loss of their penises?  Did some witches actually intend to cause the illusion of a missing member?  Did they think they could actually bring this illusion about?  Did the monks themselves really credit the accounts of such “glamours” and “prestiges” as could seemingly steal away the member?  And why this particular fascination? 

Issues like these may be undecidable.  Nevertheless, by observing the position of this alleged power of witches relative to other signs deployed by the monks, we can better grasp the system of meanings operating in the their work.  Whatever else we can say about their discourse on the disappearing member, whether we judge it cynical or genuine, that discourse is clearly part of a construction of femininity wherein the monks unfold the meaning of woman by situating her in specific relation to other signs.  And by declaring what a witch is capable of, they amplify a particular meaning of woman that precedes the age of witch hunts, and that continues today.  Thus investing the penis with such extraordinary significance turns out to be a way of defining something about “woman.” 

And the monks do invest the penis with extraordinary significance.  Even though it is a mark of men’s privilege and superior status in domestic and spiritual orders, the penis is also the mark of man’s first sin and subsequent vulnerability to continuing temptation.  The monks declare it fitting, for example, that God permits witches special power over the penis, because it was through the generative act that sin first spread throughout the world.  In a section on "How Witches Impede and Prevent the Power of Procreation" (II.1.6, 118), they affirm that “God allows [witches] more power over [the generative] act, by which the first sin was disseminated, than over other human actions.”  To explain God's justice in allowing witches special powers over the male organ and its role in “the generative act,” the monks appeal to a commonplace Christian theory about how lust entered the world in consequence of Adam's sin.  St. Augustine, the theologian whose thought largely defined Christian orthodoxy, summarizes the theory through a specific account of original sin and its punishment: 

after their disobedience to God’s instructions, the first human beings were deprived of God’s favour and immediately they were embarrassed by the nakedness of their bodies. . . . [Their] organs were the same as they were before, but previously there was no shame attaching to them.  Thus they felt a novel disturbance in their disobedient flesh, as a punishment which answered to their own disobedience. . . . At its own pleasure the soul deserted its superior and master; and so it no longer retained its inferior and servant obedient to its will.  It did not keep its own flesh subject to it in all respects, as it could have kept it for ever if it had itself continued in subjection to God. 

Like Augustine, the monks express nostalgic longing for a state when the male body was in utter subjection to the masculine will; for them, that was the original state that mirrors the first humans’ utter subjection to God.  The unruliness of the organ whose “novel disturbance” is itself the punishment for sin, incites resentment about the circumstances that disturb it.  Thus although the penis is the pretext for men’s privilege, it also the source of anxiety and shame, insofar as its persistent “disobedience” continually reminds men that their stake in a heavenly kingdom is no sure thing (since it is threatened every time a woman arouses lust).  If we carry this reflection one step further, the penis is like a presence of woman in man’s very being: its sinfulness came about initially by woman’s (Eve’s) action, and its “novel disturbance” is still occasioned by the thought or reality of women (Eve’s daughters) inciting lust.  Eve was the vehicle of the first sin; she and all her daughters reduplicate constantly its cause and its effect.  As the one who occasions (or even invites) the virile member's transgression, woman is the permanent sign of that first sin.  The penis’ “disobedient” tendency to overthrow its “superior and master” suggests sin’s ever-present capacity to disrupt proper, spiritual, androcentric order--indeed it points to woman’s ever-present disruptive capacity.  In the monks’ discourse, it also gives rise to hyperbolic expressions of the threat for, exaggerated in the figure of the witch, woman’s mastery over that unruly organ is so complete she can make it disappear.  An unregulated woman occasions sin, not only by prompting unwanted movements in the member but, in the extreme, by apparently taking it away--possessing it--entirely. 

Moved by fear of sin’s feminine, disruptive power, Christian theology proposed social restraints on the disposition to sin.  The estate of marriage, for example, serves in Christian theology to channel the lust occasioned by sin toward a divine good.  It subjects the unruly member safely to the regime of generation; and it subjects the woman safely to the headship of the husband.  The monks’ extreme magnification of the feminine threat leads them to the mechanism of trials to combat witch magic. The witch who steals the virile organ signifies a terrifying inversion of domestic submission and hence, by opposition, defines the sign of a docile wife.  So too the witch who steals the virile organ signifies a terrible threat to the prohibitions that keep the consequence of sin in check; she merges with, and hence defines the sign of feminine danger. 

To entertain in thought the sign of a kind of woman--the witch--who has the power to make a man’s member (seem to?) disappear, positions woman in a discourse about transgression and obedience, pleasure and restraint, power and powerlessness.  It correlates the sign woman with the sign of a power to interfere with bodily integrity; a power to strip off manly power and authority; a power to cause unwanted effects in the organ, ranging from unbidden arousal to outright theft; a power to escape subjection to masculine power and indeed to render that power null and void.  Such power is simultaneously construed as a threat to the specific bodily integrity of men, a threat to the social prescriptions that keep desire in check, and a threat to the rationality of the cosmos, for each of these signifies the others. 
 

Yet their confidence is haunted at every turn by fear--a fear that, while it is articulated in accounts of specific witch-powers, is at root perhaps a fear about the ultimate insubstantiality of the "divine" order within which they place themselves.  All around them the threat of difference looms.  The Other might be as real as the One.  The Other unsettles the self-confidence and self-containment of the One.  Order is contingent and fragile.  "Woman" means that the virile organ with all it signifies may disappear. 

Taken thus as a rhetorical device, discourse about the disappearing member exaggerates a familiar Christian understanding of woman as a being located somewhere between the masculine impulse to spiritual purity and the menace of unregulated carnality.  It legitimizes strict social control over women’s lives so as to insure that “good women” will not succumb to their innate propensity to transgress.  And of course, it led to the prosecution of women judged to have transgressed. 

Like other signs (but more so than most), “woman” is a sign whose meanings are subject to continuing conflict, and always contested in social practice.  From the standpoint of any androcentric orthodoxy, “woman” is an underregulated sign.  Especially for Christian discourse, "woman" is richly (indeed disturbingly) polysemous, and Christian discourse has thus continually been the site of efforts to provide normative definitions of the being of woman, or "fix the floating chain."  Official exponents, like the hunters, seek to specify the meaning “woman” ever more precisely (and so to control social practice).  Asserting that witches exert demonic power over a man’s penis is one way of emphasizing some, and excluding other possible meanings in a representation of woman.  It emphasizes existing semiotic links between “woman” and transgression, perversion, self-will; it reshapes inherited constructions of femininity to create a caricature of unredeemable menace; in so doing it strengthens prohibitions meant to insure the correlation of  “woman” with submission, naturalness, self-abasement. 

As I suggested at the outset, the end of the witch hunts was not the end of witch discourse.  Quite the contrary, portraits of women as witches proliferate in contemporary culture, from fictional representations, to political demagoguery, to Wiccan ceremony.  Those portraits appear in the service of conflicting strategies, but most commonly they are part of strategies to pin women down socially by pinning “woman” down semiotically. 

For an interesting reappearance of the monk’s rhetorical ploy, consider a modern instance where the word witch was not employed, but the same semiotic links set in motion by the witch hunts were once again brought into play: the sorry case of John and Lorena Bobbitt.  In a culture tragically drenched in cases of domestic violence, this episode was singled out by the media for celebrity status, and (judging by the attention accorded it by pundits, talk radio, and late-night TV) it apparently fascinated the culture as a whole.  It gained additional force from the way it resonated with the weary, formulaic accusation that feminists are “castrating bitches.”  In its celebrity, the case manifested a constellation of meaning like that invoked by Kramer and Sprenger.  Lorena Bobbitt’s moment of retaliation became the living embodiment of the terror Kramer and Sprenger had expressed in their scholastic commentary on the “disappearing member.”  She “confirmed” the suspicion of many men when confronted by feminism, that the secret meaning of woman is the power (and the will!) to take away everything: privilege, order, tradition—the penis.  The singular case was offered up as if it revealed something basic in women’s nature. 

The celebrity of Lorena Bobbitt’s crime, with its implied statement about the basic relation of women and men, was never substantiated by ordinary statistics about domestic violence (which show, of course, that female violence against men is insignificant compared to the reverse, and that Lorena Bobbitt’s particular crime was nearly unique).  Nor was the truth of Kramer and Sprenger’s claims ever intended to be verified by ordinary empirical appeal.  In each case, claims and implications were validated by the positions they occupied in patterns of conventional discourse.  And quite apart from any claim to truth, they sought to establish dispositions, to reorient, to resituate—that is, to create discursive realities with social entailments.  It doesn’t matter that women do not generally castrate men.  Merely securing the prerogative of launching such a claim in language was a triumph of power both linguistic and political.  In the early modern period, as today, it consolidated a specific range of intelligible meanings of “woman” and excluded other possible meanings.