Simon Raven on a witch hunt
Mallet's Male ficarumn Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, translated from the Latin by Montague Summers (Arrow Books 50p)
Malleus Maleficarutn, otherwise Hexen. hammer or The Hammer of Witches, was first published in 1484, the work of Jakob Sprenger, the Dominican Inquisitor of Cologne, and Heinrich Kramer, Prior of Cologne. It was, or goon became, the para-c mount authority on every element of witch- craft as seen from the Catholic point of view. It comprehended the powers and cere- monies of witches, their dependence on the Devil and their relation to God, their methods of travel and recruitment, their use of spells and poisons, their breeding habits, even the quality of the orgasms which they achieved in copulation with -incubi. It also gave detailed instruction for their detection, apprehension and trial, from the degrees of torture to which they might be subjected down to the exact procedure for passing sentence upon them. Its prestige, whether as a work of scholarship or a guide to action, was such that it was finally held in almost as much respect by Protestant clergy and judges as it was by agents of the In
In his blithe little introduction to this present edition, Dennis Wheatley explains that witchcraft was merely a survival of the worship of the horned god, Pan, in whose honour the peasants continued to turn out for priapic jollities under the moon long after Christianity was established throughout Europe. For some centuries society and the Church quietly tolerated this amiable back- sliding: but the failure of the Crusades turned orthodox tempers sour; and the Church, looking around for an enemy on whom to vent its spite and an easy 'victory by which to give a new and needed boost to its pretensions, picked on the residual pagans and anathematised their genial Pan as Satan. From that time on the Sabbats were abandoned by all save thieves, outlaws and psychopaths; gaiety was changed into obscenity, songs into spells and incantations, former idylls into frenzies of perversion and butchery. One more flower of human joy had been blasted by the breath of the Galilean, only to persist most horribly, a black and writhing mutant, clinging with its scabby roots to the diseased mediaeval. soil.
For such, it seemed, was God's will. He permitted the existence and activities of witches, he permitted the Devil to endow them with certain attributes and privileges, he permitted proselytisation to proceed more or less unchecked . . . until, that is, Sprenger and Kramer appeared on the scene. These two knew very well why God had been so lenient; it was to provide the Holy Church with a challenge, or, in modern terms, to give it the opportunity to mount a crash programme of self-advertisement, in order (as aforesaid) to wipe out from the public consciousness the damning memory of the Crusades. So now all of a sudden witches, the new enemy, were proclaimed to be lurking under every bed; and your only hope of escaping their runes or their blandishments, your only hope of getting whole to heaven, was to aid the Church in seeking out and burning them. Only the Church could combat the terrible menace; join the Holy Church in its glorious work . . or else.
But before you could hunt down witches, you had to be able to recognise them; and hence this carefully documented and ex- haustive handbook. It is, I must now ob- serve, one huge, grinding, crushing bore— and for that very reason I suppose, it may have been the more plausible in its day. The laborious syntax, the insufferable logic- chopping, the interminable hair-splitting— surely any authors so dull, so dedicated, so implacable, must be telling the trutli. So, at any rate, their readers were quick to believe, and plied the Witches' Hammer with a will for the next 250 years.
And of course much of the book might well be true. We, with benefit of science, know that there is no Devil and that there- fore he cannot assist witches; but someone who believed that there really was a Devil, and went through the prescribed motions of worshipping him, may surely be ranked, even nowadays, as a witch by intent, and so as something of a social problem. This is where Sprenger and Kriimer might have helped us —by giving us the social facts. Granted their theology and demonology were rubbish, their descriptions of activities could still be accurate.
But alas, even in this respect they are too credulous to deserve our credence. 'A cer- tain man who had lost his member . . . approached a known witch to ask her to restore it. She told him to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said, "You must not take that one", adding, "because it belonged to a parish priest".'
Well, at least it's one of the very few laughs in the book; but the tale is told, analysed and accepted with such deadly, seriousness that one can have little confi- dence thereafter even in the author's more moderate assertions. Did witches really broil the bones of unbaptisexl infants, for ex- ample? Or lie about in crowds in the woods with their skirts pulled up to their navels, having sexual fits? Both pastimes are entirely feasible, if you think it over, and how dearly one would like to believe in them; but this one cannot readily do when they are vouched for by authors who also give their imprima- tur to the story of the sailor, on shore leave in Cyprian Salamis, who sucked magic eggs and was turned into a donkey.
In so far, then, as this book deals with the supernatural, it is obvious nonsense; and in so far as it deals with practices which might have been correctly ascertained, it is highly suspect. The fact remains that its very respectable authors believed, or strongly purported to believe, and certainly made millions of other people believe, in every word of it. So what can one conclude? Only. I suppose, that people were as ignorant and gullible in 1484 as they are in 1971, with the saving grace that in 1484 all they did was burn a few witches, whereas in 1971 they are about to burn up the entire globe in the name of a newer superstition called progress.
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