Woman was represented by the Fathers “as the door of hell, as the mother
of all human ills. She should be ashamed at the very thought that she is
a woman; she should live in continual penance on account of the curses
she has brought upon the world. Women were even forbidden by a
provincial council in the sixth century, on account of their impurity,
to receive the Eucharist into their naked hands. Their essentially
subordinate position was continually maintained” (Lecky).
Not even the Koran took such a degrading view of woman as these early
“Christian Fathers.” For the current notion that the existence of a soul
in woman is denied by the Mahometan faith is contradicted by several
passages in the Koran.
The lowest depths of feminine degradation and the sublimest heights of
fanatical folly and crime, however, were not reached in this early
period, but some centuries later, when the incredible brutalities of the
witchcraft trials began. The vast majority of the victims were women;
and Professor Scherr, in his _Geschichte der Deutschen Frauenwelt_,
estimates that _in Germany alone_ at least one hundred thousand
“witches” were burnt at the stake. No one on reading the accounts of
these trials can help feeling that Shakspere made a mistake when he
wrote that
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.”
He should have said,
“All the world’s a madhouse,
And all the men are fools and demons.”
More demons than fools, however. Superstition was, indeed, epidemic
during the Middle Ages; but those who superintended the witches’
trials—the rulers and the clergy—were not the persons affected by it. If
they did execute 100,000 victims in Germany; if they did murder girls of
twelve, ten, eight, and even seven years, on the accusation of having
borne children whose father was Satan, or of having murdered persons who
in some cases were actually present at the trial—the reason of this was
not because the authorities believed this cruel nonsense. The real
reason is given by Scherr: “The circumstance that the property of those
who were burnt at the stake was confiscated, two-thirds of it getting
into the hands of the landowner (Grundherr), the other third into those
of the _judges, clergy, accusers, and executioners_, has beyond doubt
kindled countless witch-fires.... During the Thirty Years’ War,
especially, the trials for witchcraft became a greedily-utilised source
of profit to many a country nobleman in reduced circumstances, and no
less to bishops, abbots, and councillors, who were in financial straits.
Indeed, as early as the sixteenth century, one of the opponents of
witches’ trials, Cornelius Loos, justly observed that the whole
proceeding was simply ‘a newly-invented alchemy for converting human
blood into gold.’”
What difference is there between these civilised savages and the
Australian who eats his wife when he gets tired of her? Let those who
are fond of seeking needles in haystacks search for traces of Romantic
Love under such circumstances.