Taboo and Genetics Part 10

As a result of this belief in the diabolic power of woman, judicial murder of helpless women became an inst.i.tution, which is thus characterized by Sumner: "After the refined torture of the body and nameless mental sufferings, women were executed in the most cruel manner. These facts are so monstrous that all other aberrations of the human race are small in comparison.... He who studies the witch trials believes himself transferred into the midst of a race which has smothered all its own n.o.bler instincts, reason, justice, benevolence and sympathy."[24]

Any woman was suspect. Michelet, after a thirty years' study, wrote: "Witches they are by nature. It is a gift peculiar to woman and her temperament. By birth a fay, by the regular recurrence of her ecstasy she becomes a sibyl. By her love she grows into an enchantress. By her subtlety ... she becomes a witch and works her spells."[29]

Just how many victims there were of the belief in the power of women as witches will never be known. Scherr thinks that the persecutions cost 100,000 lives in Germany alone.[30] Lord Avebury quotes the estimate of the inquisitor Sprenger, joint author of the "Witch Hammer," that during the Christian period some 9,000,000 persons, mostly women, were burned as witches.[31] Seven thousand victims are said to have been burned at Treves, 600 by a single bishop of Bamburg, 800 in a single year in the bishopric of Wurtzburg. At Toulouse 400 persons perished at a single burning.[29: ch.1] [20: v.1. ch.1] One witch judge boasted that he executed 900 witches in fifteen years. The last ma.s.s burning in Germany was said to have taken place in 1678, when 97 persons were burned together. The earliest recorded burning of a witch in England is in Walter Mapes' _De Nugis Curialium_, in the reign of Henry II. An old black letter tract gloats over the execution at Northampton, 1612, of a number of persons convicted of witchcraft.[32] The last judicial sentence was in 1736, when one Jane Wenham was found guilty of conversing familiarly with the devil in the form of a cat.[33]

The connection between the witchcraft delusion and the att.i.tude toward all women has already been implied.[34] The dualistic teaching of the early church fathers, with its severance of matter and spirit and its insistence on the ascetic ideal of life, had focussed on s.e.xuality as the outstanding manifestation of fleshly desires. The contact of the s.e.xes came to be looked upon as the supreme sin. Celibacy taught that through the observance of the taboo on woman the man of G.o.d was to be saved from pollution. Woman was the arch temptress who by the natural forces of s.e.x attraction, reinforced by her evil charms and incantations, made it so difficult to attain the celibate ideal. From her ancestress Eve woman was believed to inherit the natural propensity to lure man to his undoing. Thus the old belief in the uncleanness of woman was renewed in the minds of men with even greater intensity than ever before, and in addition to a dangerous adventure, even within the sanction of wedlock the s.e.x act became a deed of shame. The following quotations from the church fathers will ill.u.s.trate this view:

Jerome said, "Marriage is always a vice; all we can do is to excuse and cleanse it. ... In Paradise Eve was a virgin. Virginity is natural while wedlock only follows guilt."[35]

Tertullian addressed women in these words: "Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of G.o.d on this s.e.x of yours lives in this age.

... You are the devil's gateway. ... You destroy G.o.d's image, Man."[35: Bk.1.]

Thus woman became degraded beyond all previous thought in the teaching of the early church. The child was looked upon as the result of an act of sin, and came into the world tainted through its mother with sin. At best marriage was a vice. All the church could do was to cleanse it as much as possible by sacred rites, an attempt which harked back to the origin of marriage as the ceremonial breaking of taboo. Peter Lombard's Sentences affirmed marriage a sacrament. This was reaffirmed at Florence in 1439. In 1565, the Council of Trent made the final declaration. But not even this could wholly purify woman, and intercourse with her was still regarded as a necessary evil, a concession that had to be unwillingly made to the l.u.s.ts of the flesh.

Such accounts as we have of the lives of holy women indicate that they shared in the beliefs of their times. In the account of the life of a saint known as the Blessed Eugenia preserved in an old palimpsest[36] we read that she adopted the costume of a monk,--"Being a woman by nature in order that I might gain everlasting life." The same account tells of another holy woman who pa.s.sed as a eunuch, because she had been warned that it was easier for the devil to tempt a woman. In another collection of lives of saints is the story[37] of a holy woman who never allowed herself to see the face of a man, even that of her own brother, lest through her he might go in among women. Another holy virgin shut herself up in a tomb because she did not wish to cause the spiritual downfall of a young man who loved her.

This long period of religious hatred of and contempt for woman included the Crusades, the Age of Chivalry,[38] and lasted well into the Renaissance.[39] Students of the first thousand years of the Christian era like Donaldson,[22] McCabe,[40] and Benecke argue that the social and intellectual position of women was probably lower than at any time since the creation of the world. It was while the position of woman as wife and mother was thus descending into the slough which has been termed the Dark Age of Woman that the Apotheosis of the Blessed Virgin was accomplished. The att.i.tude toward human love, generation, the relation of the earthly mother to the human child because of Eve's sin, all made the Immaculate Conception a logical necessity. The doctrine of the virgin birth disposed of sin through the paternal line. But if Mary was conceived in sin or was not purified from sin, even that of the first parent, how could she conceive in her body him who was without sin? The controversy over the Immaculate Conception which began as early as the seventh century lasted until Pius IX declared it to be an article of Catholic belief in 1854. Thus not only Christ, but also his mother became purged of the sin of conception by natural biological processes, and the same immaculacy and freedom from contamination was accorded to both. In this way the final step in the differentiation between earthly motherhood and divine motherhood was completed.

The wors.h.i.+p of the virgin by men and women who looked upon the celibate life as the perfect life, and upon the relations.h.i.+p of earthly fatherhood and motherhood as contaminating, gave the world an ideal of woman as "superhuman, immaculate, bowing in frightened awe before the angel with the lily, standing mute and with downcast eyes before her Divine Son."[41] With all its admitted beauty, this ideal represented not the inst.i.tution of the family, but the inst.i.tution of the church.

Chivalry carried over from the church to the castle this concept of womanhood and set it to the shaping of The Lady,[42] who was finally given a rank in the ideals of knighthood only a little below that to which Mary had been elevated by the ecclesiastical authorities. This concept of the lady was the result of the necessity for a new social standardization which must combine beauty, purity, meekness and angelic goodness. Only by such a combination could religion and family life be finally reconciled. By such a combination, earthly motherhood could be made to approximate the divine motherhood.

With the decline of the influence of chivalry, probably as the result of industrial changes, The Lady was replaced by a feminine ideal which may well be termed the "Model Woman." Although less ethereal than her predecessor, The Lady, the Model Woman is quite as much an attempt to reconcile the dualistic att.i.tude, with its Divine Mother cult on the one hand, and its belief in the essential evil of the procreative process and the uncleanness of woman on the other, to human needs. The characteristics of the Model Woman must approximate those of the Holy Virgin as closely as possible. Her chast.i.ty before marriage is imperative. Her calling must be the high art of motherhood. She must be the incarnation of the maternal spirit of womanhood, but her purity must remain unsullied by any trace of erotic pa.s.sion.

A voluminous literature which stated the virtues and duties of the Model Woman blossomed out in the latter part of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century.[43] The Puritan ideals also embodied this concept. It was by this attempt to make woman conform to a standardized ideal that man sought to solve the conflict between his natural human instincts and desires and the early Christian teaching concerning the s.e.x life and womanhood.

BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR CHAPTER II

1. Frazer, J.G. The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion. Part I.

The Magic Art. 2 vols. Macmillan. London, 1911. Part V. Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild. 2 vols. London, 1912.

2. Farnell, L.R. Evolution of Religion. 235 pp. Williams and Norgate.

London, 1905. Crown Theological Library, Vol 12.

3. Frazer, J.G. Part IV. of The Golden Bough; Adonis, Attis, and Osiris.

Chaps. III and IV. Macmillan. London, 1907.

---- Sumner, W.G. Folkways. 692 pp. Ginn & Co. Boston, 1907. Chap. XVI, Sacral Harlotry.

---- Lombroso, Cesare, and Lombroso-Ferrero, G. La donna delinquente. 508 pp. Fratelli Bocca. Milano, 1915.

4. Farnell, L.R. Sociological Hypotheses Concerning the Position of Woman in Ancient Religion. Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft. Siebenter Band, 1904.

5. Fowler, W. Warde. The Religious Experiences of the Roman People. 504 pp. Macmillan. London, 1911.

6. For a description of these sibyls with a list of the works in which they are mentioned, see:

---- Fullom, Steven Watson. The History of Woman. Third Ed. London, 1855.

---- Rohmer, Sax. (Ward, A.S.) The Romance of Sorcery. 320 pp. E.P.

Dutton & Co., New York, 1914.

7. Maury, L.F. La Magie et L'Astrologie dans l'Antiquite et au Moyen Age. Quatrieme ed. 484 pp. Paris, 1877.

8. Lombroso, Cesare. Priests and Women's Clothes. North American Review.

Vol. 192, 1910.

9. For an extensive compilation of facts from ancient literature and history concerning sacred women, see:

---- Alexander, W. History of Women from the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time. 2 vols. W. Strahan. London, 1779.

10. Mason, Otis T. Woman's Share in Primitive Culture. 295 pp. Appleton.

New York, 1894.

---- Dyer, T.F.S. Plants in Witchcraft. Popular Science Monthly. Vol. 34, 1889, pp. 826-833.

---- Donaldson, Rev. James. Woman, Her Position and Influence in Ancient Greece and Rome. 278 pp. Longmans, Green. London, 1907.

11. Spencer, Herbert. Study of Sociology. 431 pp. Appleton. N.Y., 1880.

12. Schirmacher, Kathe. Das Ratsel: Weib. 160 pp. A Duncker. Weimar, 1911.

13. Ward, Lester F. Psychic Factors in Civilization. 369 pp. Ginn & Co., Boston and New York, 1906. Chap. XXVI.

---- Pure Sociology. 607 pp. Macmillan. N.Y., 1903.

14. Schreiner, Olive. Woman and Labour. 299 pp. Frederick A. Stokes Co.

N.Y., 1911.

15. Hall, G. Stanley. Adolescence. 2 vols. Appleton. N.Y., 1904.

---- Dupouy, Edmund. Psychologie morbide. Librairie des Sciences Psychiques, 1907.

16. The Ante-Nicene Fathers. Translation by the Rev. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, LL.D., and others. American Reprint of the Edinburgh Edition. Buffalo, 1889.

17. Hatch, Edwin. Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church. Ed. by A.M. Fairbairn. 4th ed. London, 1892. Hibbert Lectures, 1888.

18. Gilbert, George Holley. The Greek Strain in Our Oldest Gospels.

North American Review. Vol. 192, 1910.

19. Hirn, Yrjo. The Sacred Shrine. 574 pp. Macmillan. London, 1912.

20. Lecky, W.E.H. Rationalism in Europe. 2 vols. Appleton. N.Y. and London, 1910. Vol. II, pp. 220 f.

21. Wright, Thomas. Narratives of Sorcery and Magic. 2 vols. R. Bentley.

London, 1851.

22. Donaldson, Rev. James. The Position of Woman Among the Early Christians. Contemporary Review. Vol. 56, 1889.