Very significant and influential even down to the present day are the relations between religion and sexual sentiments exhibited in the belief in witchcraft.[62] This belief, extending backwards to the most remote age, is the principal source of all misogyny and contempt for women—of which fact we cannot too often remind our modern misogynists, in order to make clear to them the utter stupidity, the primitiveness, and the atavistic character of their views.
Here, again, we must first show the falsity of the view that the belief in witches is a specifically Christian experience. To the diffusion of this error the celebrated work of J. Michelet, “La Sorcière,” has especially contributed, for in this book the witch is represented as a Christian medieval discovery. But the Christian religion, as such, is as little blameworthy for this belief as are all the other confessions of faith. The belief in witches, with its religio-sexual basis, is a primitive general anthropological phenomenon, a fixture, a part of primitive human history arising from the primeval relations between religious magic and the sexual life.
“When we look deeply into the province of psychology,” says G. H. von Schubert, “we not only suspect, but recognize with great certainty, that there exists a secret combination between the activities of the animal carnal sexual impulse and the receptivity of human nature for magical manifestations.
“We stand here in the depths of the abyss in which the lust of the flesh becomes inflamed to the lust of hell, and in which the flesh, with all its indwelling forces of sin and death, celebrated its greatest triumph over the spirit appointed by God to command the flesh.”[63]
The animism of primitive man, and of savage man at the present day, sees in all frightful natural phenomena shaking his innermost being to its foundation the manifestation and action of demons and sorcerers. The rutting impulse also, which attracts primitive man to woman, appears to him to be due to the influence of a demon, and soon woman herself came to seem to man something uncanny, something magical. Thus, in its origin the belief in witchcraft arises from the sexual impulse, and throughout its history sorcery in all its forms remained associated with the sexual impulse.
This sexual origin of the belief in witches and in magic has been carefully described by the celebrated ethnologist K. Fr. Ph. von Martius, on the basis of his observations amongst the indigens of Central Brazil. “All sorcery arises from rutting,” said an old Indian to him.
Magic propagates itself by means of sexual desire, and, according to Martius, will predominate among primitive peoples as long as these remain unchaste.[64] Secret arts, voluptuousness, and unnatural vice are inseparable one from another. This is proved by the entire history of human civilization and morals. Among the indigens of Brazil, the “pajé” or “piache,” the sorcerer or medicine-man, plays the same part as the medieval or Christian witch.
Sorcerers and witches are, above all, experienced in the sexual province; popular belief always turns first to this subject. The witches of ancient Rome resemble those of the middle ages in respect of their evil practices in sexual relations. According to J. Frank, the word “hexe” (witch) is derived from “hagat”—that is, “vagabond woman.” The ascetic view of the middle ages, formulated principally by men, saw in woman one who seduced man to sensual, sinful lust, the personification of the Evil One, the “janua diaboli,” and, ultimately, a female demon and a witch, whose very being is an impersonation of the obscene and the sexual. The doctrines of Original Sin and of the Immaculate Conception had unquestionably an important share in this conception of woman.
The idea of woman as a witch turned almost exclusively on the sexual, and the witch was for the most part represented as a “mistress of the devil” (cf. W. G. Soldan, “History of Witch-Trials,” pp. 147-159; Stuttgart, 1843), in which sexual perversion plays the principal part, since, instead of simple sexual intercourse, the most horrible unnatural vice was assumed to occur.
Holzinger, in his valuable lecture on the “Natural History of Witches,” characterized the spiritual and moral condition of the time, which brought forth such an idea, in a few apt words: