We Have Always Lived with Fearmongers
But we always seem to forget this fact, too
One of the cruellest parts of ageing must surely be how many cycles of ignorance we’re compelled to live through, without being able to bring past experience to bear meaningfully on the present.
Oh, sure, our technologies might change, and material signs all around us might readily attest to species-wide improvements in worldly knowledge…
But individual human behaviour doesn’t progress much, does it?
We keep playing out the same anxieties in different eras, different clothes.
Now, most of today’s piece involves a text written over 500 years ago—but it’s almost too easy to go to our distant past to show how little we’ve changed. We might even find it charming, to be reminded of ideological similarities from many centuries past.
Sometimes the most unsettling examples of our lack of growth are much more recent.
Last week, for instance, a death in March finally made its way to The New York Times obituaries, where it served as an unpleasant reminder of superstitious nonsense gripping our culture in a very real and disruptive way, just a few decades prior.
Bennett Braun was a psychiatrist who played a significant role in the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s, by preying on patients who had come to him and his colleagues in states of extreme mental distress. His well-established class of shrink pushed their patients to perform increasingly elaborate confessions of participation in ritual behaviours involving rape, murder, cannibalism, and suppressed-memory cult programming. These were patients from everyday US families, and the sensational contrast of the banal and this so-called seedy underbelly of society was in some ways the whole point of the exercise, because the possibility of extreme violence in your own neighbourhood was a thrill unto itself: not just the possibility of “satanism” as a concept, but that “satanism” could happen right here, right under our noses!
In other words, what made the panic so exciting was that it allowed people to point at the quotidian, the seemingly civil and domestic in modern life, and call it all a lie.
And after all, it was a lie, wasn’t it? People in the late 20th century, despite driving in cars and flying in planes, watching shows on colour TV, cheering and grieving for astronauts, and reaping the benefits of new medical technology, also lived with an acute understanding of how much awfulness persisted, and how many fights for basic rights were still underway in so many places.
There were massive fundraising campaigns for famines in Africa. Protests against nuclear arms. Fears about gas prices and war in the Middle East. Racial equality clashes abroad and at home. A whole new, confusing and frightening disease initially dismissed as a “gay” problem. Economic downturns, and massive changes in relationships to the church, in lockstep with the passage of secular laws allowing financial freedom, no-fault divorce, and bodily autonomy to women.
Yes, the material conditions of some people had changed, but violence and decay was always possible—in geopolitics at large, in protest movements close to home, and of course in domestic spheres. We were playing dress-up in new manifestations of the middle-class dream, but what did that do for us, as individual critters? How did all the new material trappings of our age change the suggestible animals we always are?
Then, as now, we were susceptible to the power of a good story: something that might explain the strange tension we felt between the whole modern veneer of consumerist triumph, of neat and tidy products and the more friction-less futures they promised, and a mess of sorrows, fears, and dissociative pressures within ourselves.
And the more theatrical the story of rupture, the better.
Who wants a mundane explanation for why everything feels so wrong?
From a Frontline documentary in 1995, with one of Braun’s victims:
Narrator: Mary was 38 by then. Her life had not been easy. Growing up, she had a learning disability. When she was 19, she was brutally date-raped, became pregnant, and gave the child up for adoption. After her marriage and the birth of her son, she underwent a hysterectomy and developed seizures. Her husband was a recovering alcoholic. Finally, shortly before the onset of her depression, she was attacked in a hallway at the school where she taught.
Still, Mary says, her therapist, who had attended a seminar on Satanic cult abuse, thought that that might be another explanation for her depression.
Mary wondered. She went to church.
Church Preacher: It is my opinion that history will mark April of 1989 as the month when Americans were forced to pull their heads out of the sand…
Meredith Shriner (close friend of Mary): There’s a very large church in our area, and during the time that Mary was trying to find herself through counselling and find out why she was having anxiety attacks, they were having a series on cults in this church—a series meaning eight, nine weeks of sermons on it…
Church Preacher: In April of 1989, Satanism came out of the closet for everyone to see it in all of its ugliness. The Satan-worshippers that pose the greatest threat to our society are the secret splinter groups. Hordes of clandestine groups are meeting right here in our neighbourhood, and the amount of activity is on the rapid increase…
October 24, 1995, “The Search for Satan”, Frontline
Today, fearmongering about grand satanic organizations has hardly subsided—and yet it has changed form, with claims of blood and demon cults still trading on old and strongly antisemitic mythologies, but through fresh faces, and on even fancier technology than the equipment we had in the 1980s.
Still, it’s difficult to look back at the versions of this nonsense spewed even just a few decades prior, because it only takes a little temporal distance to see how cruel and absurd this storytelling is and always was. How small and superstitiously tribal our species appears, even at just a few years’ remove!
Our stories are different, we might say to reassure ourselves now, in the throes of our own era’s superstitions. They got it wrong, but now we have the real answer!
Whenever I dive into deeper histories, though, I have to remind myself not to make the same mistake in reverse. The text we’re looking at today is a doozy—but it was also not universally endorsed. Then, as now, there were probably people who had also lived long enough—surviving infant fever, adolescent childbirth, tooth decay and sepsis to make it to their 30s—looking wearily upon what the latest cycle of mystic fearmongering in their communities had wrought.
They just didn’t have a website on which to gripe about it, like I do.
So, hey—that’s progress, right?
The Hammer of Witches
The Church has always struggled with the complex tension between banning and believing in witchcraft. Is a concept forbidden to Christians because it’s not true, or forbidden because it is true, and thus represents a power outside divine sanction?
Put another way: if one of the ten commandments states that you shall have no other gods before [YHWH], is that because there are no other gods—a factual error, to claim otherwise—or because other pantheon gods do exist, but worshipping them first would be in violation of the covenant made with the god of one’s own land?
This philosophical tension between banning what is false and banning what is dangerous gets to the heart of many people’s fascination with the occult in the first place. Does believing in something make it real? Can we conjure powers for ourselves simply by devoting our attention to whatever is not allowed?
Around 906 A.D., a Benedictine monk strove to organize church doctrine on matters of divination and demonology. This was a delicate turning point in European history—before the Holy Roman Empire, when tendrils of pagan and folk beliefs yet persisted in populations only recently Christianized by Anglo-Saxon missionaries across the mainland and islands. Sure enough, then, those pagan and folklore specifics made their way into stories of locals afflicted by grand dreams of cult activity in the night.
The resulting Canon Episcopi was striking, however, because it was an exceedingly pragmatic text when it came to the nature of such dreams, however outlandish and pagan their elements. The pragmatism of this book would also be upheld in Corpus juris canonici, a collection of Canon law from 1140 that would stand until 1917 in Church doctrine—so it certainly wasn’t an outlier in this way.
Together, these early medieval texts advanced the idea that an act of heresy does not begin with having visions and sordid dreams, but with believing that what has happened in the mind has also happened in the body. No magic had actually occurred, our author argued—but when one believes magic to have occurred through one’s dreams, one has lost one’s faith in the Christian god and given over to Satan.
The core charge, then, was heresy, not witchcraft—even if some “ordeals”, in practice, were applied to suspected heretics that would only make sense if one believed magic were possible. On paper, witchcraft could not be a core charge, because that would be conceding that humans can access a power that the Church held they could not.
But this nuanced approach to demonology all changed with one hateful man in the late 15th century, whose sexualized loathing of women and its impact on job performance drove him deep into reactive territory—and the pope who had his back.
Heinrich Kramer was an inquisitor at a time when clergy and laity alike were still hashing out what was acceptable in heresy trials for witchcraft, which had only started to surge in that century. Kramer in particular ran afoul of a local bishop for getting too caught up in the sexual details of a woman who held him and his office in great contempt. After being kicked out for impropriety that disrupted the whole trial, Kramer poured himself into furious theological writing to vindicate himself and to justify his more aggressive mission against the mostly female cohort of witches.
Now, again, for centuries the Church’s teachings on demonology had been more moderate on paper, and canon law even counselled against blaming so-called witches for crop failures and weather events (much as this still certainly happened on a local level). But then Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull that strongly echoed Kramer’s beliefs, and which gave him renewed license to conduct brutal witch trials. In contravention with centuries of Church canon law, Summis desiderantes claimed that
many persons of both sexes, heedless of their own salvation and forsaking the catholic faith, give themselves over to devils male and female, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurings, and by other abominable superstitions and sortileges, offences, crimes, and misdeeds, ruin and cause to perish the offspring of women, the foal of animals, the products of the earth, the grapes of vines, and the fruits of trees, as well as men and women, cattle and flocks and herds and animals of every kind, vineyards also and orchards, meadows, pastures, harvests, grains and other fruits of the earth; that they afflict and torture with dire pains and anguish, both internal and external, these men, women, cattle, flocks, herds, and animals, and hinder men from begetting and women from conceiving, and prevent all consummation of marriage.
To this papal bull, which explicitly outlines claims of active witchcraft, instead of mere heretical belief in its existence, Kramer added his own hateful nonsense, stoked in no small part by his ill-fated sparring match with a woman on trial in Innsbruck, and a general loathing of women for his own lust.
It might be hard for many folks to grasp this today, but throughout history women have occupied very different cultural stereotypes with respect to sexuality—which is why Kramer could claim that “[a]ll witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable”, whereas many male persons will with a straight face today claim that women just aren’t as interested in sex, which is why obviously men are more likely to cheat. (Listen: until men find themselves written about for centuries as incapable of walking through a forest without boning Satan, let’s at least call it a draw, shall we?)
In 1486, Kramer published Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches, which claimed great knowledge about witchcraft as it was practised in his day, and which advocated for brutal torture, trial, and punishment to identify and weed out the scourge.
One of the most ridiculous anecdotes in the collection—and one of the plainest signs that this most influential text for centuries of witch trials was little more than a sex fantasy with a vengeance component—is of course the story of the stolen penises.
Did you know that witches steal men’s penises and keep them alive as pets, and in birds’ nests? That’s what Malleus Maleficarum teaches, when Kramer apparently takes a bit of common folklore far too seriously. Moira Smith, in “The Flying Phallus and the Laughing Inquisitor: Penis Theft in the ‘Malleus Maleficarum” (Journal of Folklore Research, 39.1, 2002), translates three cases that Kramer uses to support his claim that witches “can take away the male organ, not indeed by actually despoiling the human body of it, but by concealing it with some glamour”.
The first involves a young man who loses his penis upon leaving his dalliance with a girl, only to have the “witch” restore it to him on another encounter with a touch between the thighs.
The second involves a Dominican father receiving confession from a young man who’s lost his member, and counselling him to return to the woman who did this to him, to “soften her with gentle words and promises” until she removes the affliction.
Then we get to the penis nests:
Finally, what shall we think about those witches who somehow take members in large numbers (twenty or thirty) and shut them up together in a birds’ nest or some box, where they move about like living members, eating oats or other feed?
This has been seen by many and is a matter of common talk. One should say that it is all brought about by the devil’s work and illusion. The senses of the witnesses are deceived in the manner we have mentioned above.
A man reported that he had lost his member and approached a certain witch in order to restore his health. She told the sick man to climb a particular tree where there was a nest containing many members, and allowed him to take any one he liked. When he tried to take a big one, the witch said you may not take that one, adding, because it belonged to a parish priest.
This kind of sexual fantasy, as petty and obsessive as it is, would be laughable if it weren’t also tied to a text with such an horrific history.
But to be clear, even with the Pope’s backing, and even after having written this bestselling book to defend against charges against him, Kramer was still not supported by all theologians of his time. Scholars disagreed with his demonology, criticized his theology, and pushed back on his approach to heresy. This compelled him to spend most of his life lecturing to try to convince people of his views.
In his lifetime, it was therefore among the secular courts, the laity and the nobility, that Kramer’s work most flourished. The Inquisition initially wouldn’t touch it, until the surrounding culture acclimated more fully to this new demonology, and then “self-evident” Catholic and Protestant beliefs about material witchcraft followed suit.
Even then, though, it was only after Kramer had died—and after all the arguments against him had died with their advocates, as well—that the book gained its greatest power, as a relic from a “wiser” age trying to warn the good people of Europe about the scourge upon them now. Stripped of the complicating presence of the work’s original and highly problematic author, this “Hammer” was reforged in service to a new generation of leaders trying to secure power for themselves at any human cost.
Next to the Bible, Malleus Maleficarum was the most popular book of the era, and went through over two dozen editions in the coming century, especially for eager readers in Renaissance courts. In the mid-to-late 16th century, and well into the 17th century, it also served as the handbook for prosecutions sponsored by Catholic and Protestant governments alike—until, as suddenly as it had arisen, the mania started to wane, and it was again “self-evidently” good Christian thinking not to believe that witchcraft represented a real worldly power wielded by people who’d made pacts with the Devil.
(This, tangentially, is a story that folks don’t like to talk about in relation to the rise of the printing press: many are enamoured with the Gutenberg press as a technology that allowed for greater dissemination of the Bible, but it’s not anywhere near as easy to be charmed by this new tech when we acknowledge that it also allowed for the mass dissemination of this odious volume, Malleus Maleficarum, thirty years later.)
Where, then, does this little skip through half of a millennium bring us?
If I’ve done my job at all decently, hopefully to a few key takeaways:
First, that no era is monolith; for every group of lurid fantasists, there will always be others who disagree with the nonsense they’re peddling.
But also, second, that every era does have its own lurid fantasists, who for whatever reason need to imagine all kinds of menace lurking just beneath the veneer of everyday life. And these lurid fantasists can cause immense problems to our societies, even if they do not represent the fullness of human belief at any given time.
And thirdly, that one of the most painful facets of human experience comes not from how little we’ve changed over long sweeps of time—but from how little we change in the short run, too. A few brief decades out from the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, we might still have our own conspiracy theories to combat today, but we can also look back with great pain at how ridiculous our mania was, not so long ago.
In medieval eras, too, Western populations often stood on the cusp of mass panics. Kramer’s generation still had many who held to the old model of demonology—and after a period of intense madness in the wake of his terrible work, there would again come a time when people could look back just a few decades, and shudder to think what their cultures had been swept up in, for a while.
It might not be a great comfort, of course, to know that we’re going to endure many more cycles of ignorance and cruel panic if we’re fortunate to keep living at all.
But the histories of our panic—in the short and long run alike—at least allow us to brace ourselves for the next inane onslaught.
Tread gently in the forests of mass culture, then.
You never know what might be lurking in the trees.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML
Intense background to a subject that in no way "empowers" me. The worldwide "Satanic Panic" was a full-blown spectacle in my time that crushed the lives of many people in my area, and yet the perpetrators lived on facing no form of justice.
In my former state of Massachusetts, Martha Coakley, a woman who went to the same college that I unfortunately attended, persecuted the Amirault family as part of her evil and heinous legal career (though she also was on the right side of a few cases). And yet within my own birth family there are associations with an equally evil and heinous DA who assisted the Catholic Church in their real, non -panic sex abuse reign.