After the dancing, the witches ate. Often they
brought their own food, rather in the tradition of picnic lunches, and sometimes the coven leader provided a real feast. The Christians alleged that the witches were
cannibals and that their dinner was an orgy of human
flesh, cooked and garnished as only the Devil knew how.
Actually, the supper common to all sabbats was a simple
meal of pedestrian food.
The whole notion of cannibalism and sacrifice has
been stubbornly, persistently, and purposely misunderstood. There is no evidence that any living child was killed to be eaten, or that any living child was sacrificed. There is evidence that sometimes dead infants were ritually eaten, or used in ritual. Cannibalism,
and its not so symbolic substitute, animal sacrifice, was
a vital part of the ritual of all early religions, including the Jewish one. The witches participated in this tradition rather modestly: they generally sacrificed a
goat or a hen. It was the Christians who developed and
extended the Old World system of sacrifice and cannibalism to almost surreal ends: Christ, the sacrificial lamb, who died an agonizing death on the cross to
ensure forgiveness of men’s sins and whose followers
symbolically, even today, eat of his flesh and drink of
his blood — what is the Eucharist if not fossilized cannibalism?
The final activity of the sabbat was a phallic orgy —
heathen, drug-abetted, communal sex. The sex of the
sabbat is distinguished by descriptions of pain. It was
said that intercourse was painful, that the phallus of the
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masked coven leader was cold and oversized, that no
woman ever conceived. It would seem that the horned
figure used an artificial phallus and could service all
the celebrants. T h e Old Religion, as opposed to the
Christian religion, celebrated sexuality, fertility, nature
and woman's place in it, and communal sex was a logical
and most sacral rite.
T h e worship o f animals is also indigenous to nature-
based religious systems. Early people existed among
animals, scarcely distinct from them. Through religious
ritual, people differentiated themselves from animals
and gave honor to them —they were food, sustenance.
There was a respect for the natural world — people were
hunter and hunted simultaneously. T heir perspective
was acute. T hey worshiped the spirit and power they
saw manifest in the carnivore world o f which they were
an integral part. When man began to be “civilized, ” to
separate himself out o f nature, to place himself over
and above woman (he became Mind, she became Carnality) and other animals, he began to seek power over nature, magical control. The witch cults still had a
strong sense o f people as part o f nature, and animals
maintained a prime place in both ritual and consciousness for the witches. The Christians, who had a profound and compulsive hatred for the natural world, thought
that the witches, through malice and a lust for power
(pure projection, no doubt), had mobilized nature/animals into a robotlike anti-Christian army. T h e witch hunters were convinced that toads, rats, dogs, cats,
mice, etc., took orders from witches, carried curses from
one farm to another, caused death, hysteria, and disease. They thought that nature was one massive, crawl
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ing conspiracy against them, and that the conspiracy
was organized and controlled by the wicked women.
They can in fact be credited with pioneering the politics
of total paranoia —they developed the classic model for
that particular pathology which has, as its logical consequence, genocide. Their methods of dealing with the witch menace were developed empirically— they had a
great respect for what worked. For instance, when they
suspected a woman of witchcraft, they would lock her
in an empty room for several days or weeks and if any
living creature, any insect or spider, entered that room,
that creature was identified as the woman's familiar,
and she was proved guilty of witchcraft. Naturally,
given the fact that bugs are everywhere, particularly
in the woodwork, this test of guilt always worked.
Cats were particularly associated with witches. That
association is based on the ancient totemic significance
of the cat:
sacred. They were regarded as incarnations of Isis
and there was also a cat deity.. . . Through Osiris
(Ra) they were associated with the sun; the rays of the
“solar cat, ” who was portrayed as killing the “serpent
of darkness” at each dawn, were believed to produce
fecundity in Nature, and thus cats were figures of
fertility.. . . Cats were also associated with Hathor,
a cow-headed goddess, and hence with crops and
rain.. . .
Still stronger, however, was the association of the
cat with the moon, and thus she was a virgin goddess —
a virgin-mother incarnation. In her character as moon-
goddess she was inviolate and self-renewing. . . the
circle she forms in a curled-up position [is seen as] the
symbol for eternity, an unending re-creation. 29
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T h e Christians not only converted the horned god into
Satan, but also the sacred cat into a demonic incarnation. T h e witches, in accepting familiars and particularly in their special feeling for cats, only participated in an
ancient tradition which had as its substance love and
respect for the natural world.
It was also believed that the witch could transform
herself into a cat or other animal. This notion, called
lycanthropy, is twofold:
. . . either the belief that a witch or devil-ridden person
temporarily assumes an animal form, to ravage or
destroy; or, that they create an animal “double” in
which, leaving the lifeless human body at home, he or
she can wander, terrorize, or batten on mankind. 30
T h e origins o f the belief in lycanthropy can be traced
to group rituals in which celebrants, costumed as animals, recreated animal movements, sounds, even hunting patterns. As group ritual, those celebrations would be prehistorical. The witches themselves, through the
use o f belladonna, aconite, and other drugs, felt that
they did become animals. * The effect o f the belief in
lycanthropy on the general population was electric: a
stray dog, a wild cat, a rat, a toad —all were witches,
agents o f Satan, bringing with them drought, disease,
death. Any animal in the environment was dangerous,
demonic. The legend o f the werewolf (popularized in
the Red Riding Hood fable) caused terror. At Labout,
*
For a contem porary account o f lycanthropy, I would suggest The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), pp. 170-84.
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two hundred people were burned as werewolves. There
were endless stories of farmers shooting animals who
were plaguing them in the night, only to discover the
; next morning that a respectable town matron had been
wounded in precisely the same way.
Witches, of course, could also fly on broomsticks,
and often did. Before going to the sabbat, they an-
nointed their bodies with a mixture of belladonna and
aconite, which caused delirium, hallucination, and gave
the sensation of flying. The broomstick was an almost
archetypal symbol of womanhood, as the pitchfork was
of manhood. Levitation was considered a rare but
genuine fact:
As for its history, it is one of the earliest convictions, common to almost all peoples, that not only do supernatural beings, angels or devils, fly or float in the
air at will, but so can those humans who invoke their
assistance. Levitation among the saints was, and by the
devout is, accepted as an objective fact. The most famous instance is that of St. Joseph of Cupertino, whose ecstatic flights (and he perched in trees) caused embarrassment in the seventeenth century. Yet the appearance of flight, in celestial trance, has been claimed all through the history of the Church, and not only for
such outstanding figures as St. Francis, St. Ignatius
Loyola, or St. Teresa.. . . In the Middle Ages it was
regarded as a marvel, but a firmly established one.
. . . It is not, therefore, at all remarkable that witches
were believed to fly. . . [though] the Church expressly
forbade, during the reign of Charlemagne, any belief
that witches flew. 31
With typical consistency then, the Church said that
saints could fly but witches could not. As far as the
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witches were concerned, they trusted their experience,
they knew that they flew. Here they aligned themselves
with Christian saints, yogis, mystics from all traditions,
in the realization o f a phenomenon so ancient that it
would seem to extend almost to the origins o f the religious impulse in people.
We now know most o f what can be known about
the witches: who they were, what they believed, what
they did, the Church's vision o f them. We have seen the
historical dimensions o f a myth o f feminine evil which
resulted in the slaughter o f 9 million persons, nearly
all women, over 300 years. T he actual evidence o f that
slaughter, the remembrance o f it, has been suppressed
for centuries so that the myth o f woman as the Original
Criminal, the gaping, insatiable womb, could endure.
Annihilated with the 9 million was a whole culture,
woman-centered, nature-centered —all o f their knowledge is gone, all o f their knowing is destroyed. Historians (white, male, and utterly without credibility for women, Indians, Blacks, and other oppressed peoples as they begin to search the ashes o f their own pasts) found the massacre o f the witches too unimportant to
include in the chronicles o f those centuries except as a
footnote, too unimportant to be seen as the substance
o f those centuries —they did not recognize the centuries o f gynocide, they did not register the anguish o f those deaths.
Our study o f pornography, our living o f life, tells
us that the myth o f feminine evil lived out so resolutely
by the Christians o f the Dark Ages, is alive and well,
here and now. Our study o f pornography, our living
o f life, tells us that though the witches are dead, burned
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alive at the stake, the belief in female evil is not, the
hatred of female carnality is not. The Church has not
changed its premises; the culture has not refuted those
premises. It is left to us, the inheritors of that myth,
to destroy it and the institutions based on it.
Part Four
ANDROGYNY
When the sexual energy of the people is
liberated they will break the chains.
The struggle to break the form is
paramount. Because we are otherwise contained in forms that deny us the possibility
of realizing a form (a technique) to escape
the fire in which we are being consumed.
The journey to love is not romantic.
Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre
We want to destroy sexism, that is, polar role definitions o f male and female, man and woman. We want to destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family; in
its most hideous form, the nation-state. We want to
destroy the structure o f culture as we know it, its art,
its churches, its laws: all o f the images, institutions, and
structural mental sets which define women as hot wet
fuck tubes, hot slits.
Androgynous mythology provides us with a model
which does not use polar role definitions, where the
definitions are not, implicitly or explicitly, male = good,
female = bad, man = human, woman = other. A ndrogyny myths are multisexual mythological models. T hey go well beyond bisexuality as we know it in the scenarios
they suggest for building community, for realizing the
fullest expression o f human sexual possibility and
creativity.
Androgyny as a concept has no notion o f sexual
repression built into it. W here woman is carnality, and
carnality is evil, it stands to reason (hail reason! ) that
woman must be chained, whipped, punished, purged;
that fucking is shameful, forbidden, fearful, guilt-
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ridden. Androgyny as the basis of sexual identity and
community life provides no such imperatives. Sexual
freedom and freedom for biological women, or all persons “female, ” are not separable. That they are different, and that sexual freedom has priority, is the worst of sexist hypes. Androgyny can show the way to both.
It may be the one road to freedom open to women,
men, and that emerging majority, the rest of us.
C H A P T E R 8
Androgyny:
The Mythological Model
It is a question o f finding the right model. We are bo rn
into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed: Cinderella, Snow-white, Sleeping Beauty; O, Claire, Anne; romantic love and marriage;
Adam and Eve, the Virgin Mary. These models are the
substantive message o f this culture —they define psychological sets and patterns o f social interaction which, in our adult personae, we live out. We function inside
the socioreligious scenario o f right and wrong, good
and bad, licit and illicit, legal and illegal, all saturated
with shame and guilt. We are programmed by the culture
as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous
way through the scientist’s maze, and that programming
operates on every level o f choice and action. For example, we have seen how the romantic ethos is related to the way women dress and cosmeticize their bodies and
how that behavior regulates the literal physical mobility
o f women. Take any aspect o f behavior and one can
find the source o f the programmed response in the cultural structure. Western man’s obsessive concern with metaphysical and political freedom is almost laughable
in this context.
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Depth psychologists consider man the center of his
world —his psyche is the primary universe which governs, very directly, the secondar
y universe, distinct from him, of nature; philosophers consider man, in
the fragmented, highly overrated part called intellect,
the center of the natural world, indeed its only significant member; artists consider man, isolated in his creative function, the center of the creative process, of the canvas, of the poem, an engineer of the culture; politicians consider man, represented by his sociopolitical organization and its armies, the center of whatever
planetary power might be relevant and meaningful;
religionists consider God a surrogate man, created
precisely in man’s image, only more so, to be father
to the human family. The notion of man as a part of the
natural world, integrated into it, in form as distinct
(no more so) as the tarantula, in function as important
(no more so) as the honey bee or tree, is in eclipse, and
that eclipse extends not over a decade, or over a century, but over the whole of written history. The arrogance which informs man’s relation with nature (simply, he is superior to it) is precisely the same arrogance which informs his relationship with woman (simply,
he is superior to her). Here we see the full equation:
woman = carnality = nature. The separation of man
from nature, man placing himself over and above it, is
directly responsible for the current ecological situation
which may lead to the extinction of many forms of life,
including human life. Man has treated nature much as
he has treated woman: with rape, plunder, violence.
The phenomenological world is characterized by its
diversity, the complexity and mutuality of its interac-
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tions, and man’s only chance for survival in that world
consists o f finding the proper relationship to it.
In terms o f interhuman relationship, the problem is
similar. As individuals, we experience ourselves as the
center o f whatever social world we inhabit. We think
that we are free and refuse to see that we are functions
of our particular culture. That culture no longer organically reflects us, it is not our sum total, it is not the collective phenomenology o f our creative possibilities —it possesses and rules us, reduces us, obstructs the flow o f