Some people have called The Malleus Maleficarum the wickedest book ever written. I’m not convinced it has maintained that status over the years. For historical reasons, I’ll say it doesn’t deserve to be exonerated, however. Certainly the German Inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger who wrote it don’t deserve any praise either. These were some seriously evil medieval Catholic bureaucrats. As a work of literature in our time, it can, however, serve as an important historical document and a reference point for where we have come from intellectually since the beginning of the Renaissance.
The Malleus Maleficarum is essentially a legal document, written by the Catholic Inquisition for the purpose of punishing heretics, in this case most specifically Satanists and practitioners of witchcraft. It is written as three separate books. The first lays out a legal definition of heresy and witchcraft. The second part is an explication of what witches do, how to protect yourself from witches, and how to remove curses that have afflicted an individual. The third book is a set of guidelines for conducting trials related to the crime of heresy and the practice of witchcraft.
The first section, in which witchcraft is defined and explained, is moderately interesting as the most intellectually rigorous part of the book. In part, the authors try to explain what they believe to be motivating factors in human behavior. People can be pushed and pulled in all directions yet they still have freedom of choice because the forces that move them are sometimes not strong enough to do anything more than exert an influence over people. Free will makes it possible to resist these compulsions. The supposed power that acts on people comes from the influence of the stars. Despite this belief, regarded as a fact in medieval society, astrology is considered a forbidden practice, punishable by law. Witches attempt to seize control over these occult forces to do harm or create good fortune for the people the try to effect. Behind all this is Satan who sends his devils out to convince people to practice witchcraft so he can wreck God’s creation. Sexuality plays a strong role in this theory because the authors claim that demons called incubi and succubi transmit tainted semen to women since such semen will cause the children who grow out of it to become witches when they grow up. Or maybe the real reason is that the authors were uptight old men who were overcome by sexual frustration and anxiety so they blamed women for their own psychological problems.
This first section is not a thrilling read unless you are a highly disciplined reader. It is full of theological and philosophical arguments that mostly rely on textual antecedents, circular logic, and reference to authority figures for support. There are heavy doses of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas, for example, and if they said something is true than it must be true because they are canonized saints and by theological definition, they can not be wrong. Plato and Aristotle are also heavily referenced since this was the dawning of the Renaissance, after all, when those guys were getting rediscovered in Europe right at the time the Arabs were abandoning them thanks to narrow minded dolts like Al Ghazali. On a more bizarre note, Homer’s The Odyssey is used as proof of witchcraft because it says Circe turned Odysseus’s men into pigs; this is proof of what witches are capable of doing. The thought that this could be imaginary never crossed the authors’ minds. There is some modicum of challenge to adapting your way of thinking to this lunacy, but at times it gets interesting because they try to explain the human psychology of motivations. There are some passages that read like a crude version of empirical philosophers like Locke and Hume, and others that are like a rudimentary version of Immanuel Kant. The passages about astrology address some of the same issues of influence and will that geneticists question in the effect of genes on our behavior, only without the scientific discipline to back up the claims.
The second section is the most interesting as it describes what witches supposedly do. While sometimes they remove curses or cure illnesses, the bulk of their activities include malevolent curses and spells. There is a lot of copulating with devils, spells cast on children by evil midwives, the raising of hailstorms, the drying up of cows’ milk, and the ultimate evil: causing male impotence. This seems to be a major preoccupation for these Catholic Inquisitors because they bring it up over and over again. They even make the strange claim that witches can cause a man’s one-eyed wonder worm to completely disappear. The most interesting part of this sections is when a man approaches a witch and asks her to restore his trouser snake; the witch tells him to climb a tree where she keeps a bunch of dicks sitting in a bird’s nest just waiting to be taken away. Instead of taking his own third leg, the guy takes the biggest one instead, but he is unable to attach it to himself because it does not rightfully belong to him. It is easy to see how the people in this pre-scientific society scapegoated witches for things they did not understand like bad weather or cow diseases, but I might offer an alternate explanation for the disappearing dork syndrome that so preoccupied the officials of the church. There is such a thing as shrinkage and if you can imagine being a middle-aged man in freezing cold Germany during the middle of a harsh winter, trying to shag a peasant girl with hairy legs, crooked brown teeth, and rancid sauerkraut on her breath while she lays with her legs spread in a barn thick with the odor of horse manure, you might understand why your best friend might not be eager to come out and play. But when these crusty old Catholics can’t get it up, they blame the witches and a bunch of them have to get burned at the stake in retaliation. The drama of human stupidity never ends. So it goes.
The rest of the second section details the ways that witchcraft can be prevented or how damage from such magic can be cured. You don’t have to think too hard to figure out that getting baptized, praying, and going to confession are the only ways to officially and effectively combat the works of Satan. These Catholic rituals draw a strict line of demarcation between those inside the church and those outside of it. In a sociological sense, Catholic ritual is a means of dominating and controlling those within the church while those outside the lines of demarcation are subject to persecution because they are outside the limits of control. Thereby the witches must be destroyed because they represent a threat to the order and power of the church by not complying with their practices. This scapegoating solidifies the autocracy of the religious institution, causing a tightly controlled community bond by giving the members a visible and tangible target to destroy. If witches did not exist, it would be necessary for the church to invent them. Every religion needs enemies in order to survive.
The third section is a horrible bore. It explains the way witches are brought to trial, how their crimes are categorized, the legal ways in which they are interrogated, and their ultimate punishment which is, in the vast majority of cases, the death penalty. The witch’s confession is the whole meat of the matter. If the accused does not confess to practicing witchcraft, they are threatened with torture. If that doesn’t work, they are tortured. If that doesn’t work, they are executed for lying. If they do confess, they are strangled before being burned at the stake so they don’t have to feel the pain of the fire. There is no way to win for anyone charged with this crime. Even the torture is a catch 22; if a person is to be tortured with hot irons, Satan will prevent them from getting burned badly enough to confess. Therefore, if being tortured with hot irons doesn’t force them to confess, it is proof that they are in the employ of the devil. Heads I win, tails you lose. If they confess, so much the better. For the most part, this section is an excruciatingly dull and repetitive recital of legal protocols and procedures that makes the rambling abstractions of modern legal tomes exciting by comparison.
Thanks to the rigorous intellectual ignorance, and sexual frustrations, of Kramer and Sprenger masses of people were burned in medieval Europe for the innocuous crime of practicing witchcraft. Probably most of the accused never did anything more occult than wish on a star or mutter a curse under their breath when they were annoyed. Aside from the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansings of the modern world, the only other comparison to our times might be the draconian laws that put millions of people in jail, most of them from minority populations, for the victimless crime of smoking dope. The powerful people of the world always seem to exert their power over others through the arbitrary and often pointless practice of penology. It makes me wonder if government and religion are forms of human sickness. But there is a twisted logic to the war on drugs; nobody denies that heroin, cocaine, or methamphetamine are inherently dangerous after all and trafficking them is a bad business. But why did the German Inquisition persecute witches to such a degree? My personal thought is that the church at that time was in crisis. The dispute between the papacies in Rome and Avignon was weakening the Catholic church. At the cusp of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, scientific inquiry was gaining a foothold that challenged church dogmas. Heretical sects were springing up all over Europe. The greed, the money grubbing, and promiscuity of priests was making Christian officials look hypocritical. Germany was on the brink of the Protestant Reformation. Religion was ineffective in stopping the Black Death. My idea is that the church was in decline and needed something to reinvigorate itself to reassert its power over the European peoples. An Inquisition against the heresy of witchcraft and Satanism might have been what they thought they needed to retake control. Witches were typically old impoverished women of the uneducated peasantry who lived alone. They were the most marginalized and most defenseless members of society. That made them easy scapegoats. Hard working farmers whose crops were destroyed by hail storms and whose cows no longer gave milk needed someone to vent their anger on, and the church manipulated theses superstitious people into believing witches were the cause of all their problems.
Ultimately, I don’t think The Malleus Maleficarum fits the bill for being the wickedest book ever written. That is unless part of the meaning of wickedness involves boring the reader into a coma. If you take the text as it is and try to apply it in the modern world, it is nothing but irrelevant and dated unless you are some kind of religious fanatic or conspiracy theory crank. It probably won’t appeal much to most readers except for students of medieval, theological, intellectual, or legal history. The antithesis is that if you relate it to the context of medieval society and the resulting effects it had, meaning the burning of thousands of innocent people under the guise of witches, then there are certainly elements of evil within these pages. It wasn’t the witches who were evil, it was the Inquisitors who mass murdered them. Atrocities are so often done in the name of the good. While the Catholic church has matured some and spoken out in the name of world peace, I daresay other institutions of power in our times aren’t much different in their intent than the medieval Inquisitors were. With the current rise of fundamentalist Christianity and Christian nationalism in America, we need to be on your guard. Human nature has not changed as much as its outward appearances have.
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