The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code

CHAPTER FOUR Synagogues of Satan

After Constantine's Edict of Milan effectively anathematized all forms of Christianity other than the new Roman Church, heretics such as the Carpocratians persisted in following their consciences with either enormous courage or foolhardiness amounting to insanity, depending upon the extent of one's sympathy for martyrdom. Most of them were wiped out swiftly and mercilessly, but as the years progressed, certain heterodox beliefs succeeded in simmering away, by their very existence nibbling at the security and complacency of Rome. Perhaps it is no coincidence that these `evils' usually involved some reverence for the Feminine, provoking Peter's organization to a wrath that echoes in infamy to this day. In particular, one area was to prove a persistent headache for the Pope - the south of France, the area largely encompassed by the Languedoc and Provence.

Pockmarked with caves, its high blue skies riven by the sharp peaks of snow-topped mountains, it is a beautiful but unforgiving landscape, which in the Middle Ages provided a safe haven for many with less than orthodox religious views, such as the Cathars, whose meetings were known to the Church as `Synagogues of Satan'. As Jean Markale comments in his Montsegur and the Mystery of the Cathars (1986), in the caves `there are devils that hold their Sabbaths there in the company of witches. These are the only beings who have no fear of entering such places. Caves represent the forbidden world. And consequently it is also an alluring world." Whether there really were witches in those caves is beside the point: the land as a whole already had a reputation for paganism and heresy even before the terrible events of the thirteenth century, but after that time it was nothing less than the land of Satan to the Church.

This was where, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there arose a Christian cult whose members although known as les bonshommes ('good men', or `good people') to the locals, were in the eyes of Rome `Luciferans'. The successors to the Gnostic Bogomils of Bulgaria, the Cathars2 (meaning `pure'), attempted to reinvent what they perceived to be the simple lifestyle and worship instigated by Christ, renouncing the Church as the corrupt `whore of Babylon', together with all its panoply and hierarchy. They eschewed the use of specially dedicated church buildings, choosing to worship in the open or in private houses - after all, Christ neither built churches nor exhorted his followers to do so - and adopted an ascetic lifestyle, eating a simple, `fishertarian'3 diet, and even sparingly of that. They aimed to become perfecti or parfaits ('perfects'), men and women who had renounced all earthly pleasures, including sex - procreation being especially abominable to them because it prolonged the soul's contact with the hated material world.

As Gnostics, the Cathars truly abominated the physical realm, and this is where most modern readers will part company with them (except for woolly-minded New Agers who tend to venerate them as a species of cosy fellow travellers). High-minded and essentially decent though the heretics undoubtedly were in a society riddled with the most heinous corruption and hypocrisy, they took their hatred for earthly existence to ultimately distasteful extremes. Basically they institutionalized anorexia in the form of the endura, a slow fast to the death, which they believed was almost as `good' a death as martyrdom - although very soon they were to have ample opportunity to indulge their longing for the latter mode of transition to the spiritual realm. (Without a `good' death, the Cathars believed they were condemned to be reborn until they could be martyred and then escape finally to the realms of pure spirit and Light.)

Of course relatively few Cathars made the grade as `Perfects': their rank and file, the credenti ('believers'), developed their own peculiar version of righteousness. Some preferred sex outside marriage, for example, because then they were only committing the single sin of intercourse rather than the two sins of intercourse and (probably) procreation. As Markale notes:

To the Cathar ... to sin was to submit to the world. There was no distinction between venal and mortal sins; all sins were mortal.

... Every sexual union involved the flesh and ran the risk of prolonging Satan's work indefinitely ... They made no distinction between legitimate and illegal unions, free love, homosexuality, adultery, incest or even bestiality.'

Rumours abounded about the credenti's sexual abuses - after all, if one was damned equally for the usual heterosexual coupling and a gay encounter or even a fling with a goat, why not indulge all appetites? They might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb (or a goat). And if creating babies was so evil, then why not use sodomy as the means of contraception? While wild stories always circulate about any self-contained and heterodox sect, whether justified or not, human nature being what it is, almost certainly there would have been some truth in these rumours.

Because anything material was anathema to them, the Cathars even had their own version of the Lord's Prayer, substituting `Give us this day bread beyond substance' for `Give us this day our daily bread's Tinkering with the words of the only prayer believed to be given to us by Jesus himself was beyond the pale to orthodox Christianity (even though there is evidence that the Lord's Prayer actually originated with John the Baptist, not Christ at all.)'

Clearly, this was bad enough as far as the all-powerful Church was concerned - vegetarianism itself was known as `the Devil's banquet',' and of course their rejection of the Church hierarchy marked them out as heretics anyway - but the Cathars' beliefs and lifestyle went considerably further than that.

As Gnostics, they believed that Jesus was the Son of Light, not the Son of God. He and Satan were both the sons of God the Father, the two manifestations of a divinity that is both good and evil. There had been two Jesuses: one of matter, who was the lover of Mary Magdalene,' and one of pure spirit who could never have been crucified - which is why the Cathars refused to accept the traditional symbol of the crucifix, although they had their own form of the cross, the rosace, `signifying the solar Christ'.' In fact, according to Jean Markale, there is evidence that the Cathars built their citadels dizzyingly high on the very top of needle-like mountains because they sought to be close to the sun and stars - a worrying association with ancient pagan rites to the Church. They also rejected the concept of an eternal Hell, the threat of which had long been the Vatican's most powerful weapon in keeping its flock in line: the Cathars believed that even the Devil could be saved.

However, above and beyond all that, for many of the clergy the heretics' days must be numbered because they possessed a secret Gospel of John, which they claimed contained Christ's initiatory teachings. The existence of such a book spelt extreme danger for an organization that had long thought itself safe from the influences of the Gnostic gospels. But, equal to all of the above in degrees of horror for a majority of the Pope's men was surely the fact that the Cathars had female preachers - worse, they ranged about the very land where, according to legend, none other than Mary Magdalene herself had taught.10

Only too predictably, the fanatical Reverend Montague Summers rails against the `Cathari', claiming `They openly worshipped Satan, repudiating Holy Mass and the Passion, rejecting Holy Baptism for some foul ceremony of their own'," quoting an anonymous Inquisitor as evidence of their Devil worship. Clearly, Summers is useless as an objective source, but even in the twentieth century he did provide an insight into the mindset of those who sought to exterminate the Cathars. (He also denounces them as `incendiaries' and `terrorists', which is startlingly at odds with the view of even most ordinary non-Cathars of the time, who admired and even supported them even in the face of terrible danger to themselves. Besides, the Cathars were sworn pacifists.) However, was Summers' accusation based on a garbled version of the truth? Were the Cathars not Satanists but actually Luciferans?

A major problem in assessing the truth about the heresy is that few records survive other than the accounts of their enemies, but dedicated researchers have been able to piece together beliefs that would certainly not have won the Cathars many favours with orthodoxy. As Yuri Stoyanov notes in his classic The Hidden Tradition in Europe (1994):

In the Catholic records descriptions appear of `Luciferan' sects in whose belief the traditional ... Cathar dualism of the evil demiurge of the material world and the transcendent good God appeared in reversed form, and where Lucifer was revered and expected to be restored to heaven, while Michael and the archangels would duly be deposed to hell."

However, Stoyanov is careful to add, `Whether such dualism "of the left hand really existed as a derivation from decadent forms of Catharism or was formulated in the inquisitorial imagination is still being debated."'" And, of course, Lucifer equates with Satan here.

One researcher to whom there was no debate - and a very different undestanding of `Lucifer' - was the mysterious Otto Rahn, who became obsessed with the last Cathar stronghold of Montsegur, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, where approximately 200 Perfecti met a fiery death in 1244 after holding out against the Crusaders for ten months. Rahn spent many months in the 1950s combing the area for clues that might link the Cathars with the Holy Grail, making friends with the locals - although certainly not impressing all of them14 - and perhaps crow-barring in the facts to fit his own hypotheses.'s

In his 1937 book Lucifer's Court16 Rahn argues that what are seen as interrelated groups - Cathars, Knights Templar," the Troubadour movement and so on - were all part of a Gnostic religion centred on Lucifer, also known to them as `Lucibel', or his European equivalent such as Apollo, the solar deity. Rahn also linked the medieval blossoming of `Lucifer's Court' to Nordic myths, attempting to create a religion derived from European, rather than Middle Eastern, roots.'R In Rahn's hypothesis, what links all these groups together is the Holy Grail, since it has been associated separately with both the Cathars and the Knights Templar.

Rahn's university thesis was on the subject of the thirteenthcentury poet, Wolfram von Eschenbach, author of Parzival. Although the major German poet of the Grail romances, he claimed he used sources from southern Europe - the Languedoc and Spain. His Grail is not a recognizably Christian symbol, such as a great chalice filled with Christ's blood as in later tales, but a stone linked, if not with Lucifer directly, then at least with fallen angels, although Wolfram himself is not explicit on this point.

In the early 1930s Rahn became friendly with Maurice Magre,19 a member of the mysterious secret society, the Fraternity of the Polaires, an occult group keen to be associated with an ancient Nordic tradition. They claimed to be in contact with unknown `masters' in Agartha, `the invisible initiatory centre',20 but Magre was to resign from the group dramatically. Some believe Rahn was a Polaire, which may have been the case as, initially, he heroworshipped Magre, who originally urged him to carry out extensive research `on the ground' in the Languedoc, rather than burying his head in the Bibliotheque Nationale.

Magre introduced his German friend to many local people, one of whom, Arthur Cassou -'an old Ariege sage"' - told him the legend of the aristocratic Cathar heroine Esclarmonde, claiming that she had hidden the Grail in some safe location before the fall of Montsegur.

Rahn believed that Eschenbach was inspired to write his Grail romance by the Cathar story, citing the similarities between his hero Parzival, whose name means `pierce well' and the heroic Viscount of Carcassonne, Trencavel - `cut well'. Other characters were matched with real people from that time and place, including the Fisher King Anfortas22 with Ramon-Roger de Foix. And of course what else could the fictitious `Montsalvage' ('Mount Haven' or `secure mountain') be other than Montsegur? Moreover, Montsalvage is protected by a `Fountain Salvage', which Rahn linked to the fountain of Fontesorbes, while the forest surrounding Montsalvage, `Briciljan' in the tale, must be the wood known as Priscillien. Rahn noted triumphantly: `Yes: only the Cathar fortress of Montsegur, in the Ariegois Pyrenees, could have been the inviolable temple of the Grail.'23

To Rahn, the Grail was one of several stone tablets inscribed with runic writing, although he elaborated `The Grail is triple: it is a book of knowledge, a symbolic cup containing that knowledge and a stone ...' He believed it was a green stone, similar to the legendary emerald stone of the Hermetic master Hermes Trismegistus on which the greatest occult secrets are engraved. Rahn saw it as an emerald of 144 facets (twelve times twelve, the number of perfection), or 144 smaller stones inscribed in emerald. This stone had fallen from Lucifer's crown when he fell to earth - onto Montsegur.

As Arnaud d'Apremont writes in the Introduction to the French edition of Lucifer's Court:

Now, if for common mortals, Lucifer is synonymous with the devil, with Satan, it was not the same for Rahn. For the latter, Lucifer was Lucibel, the light bearer, Abellio, Belenos, Baldur, Apollo . . . A highly pure and luminous figure. Rahn . . . wanted to see himself recognized as a 'Light-bearer', a Lucifer .14

He adds: `There is nothing there that couldn't be written by Rahn the Cathar or Rahn the pagan.' Rahn himself claimed that as the stone that fell from Lucifer's diadem, the Church claimed it, `in order to christianize it'.25 The stone is believed to bestow nearimmortality: perhaps the literal-minded Rahn was seeking it as a gift for his Fiihrer - in which case we must be very grateful for the fact that apparently he failed to find it.

Rahn believed that:

the Old and New Testaments, even if they speak of different `anti-gods', have a single and unique knowledge. The Old Testament curses the `fair star of the morning'; the New Testament reveals to us in the [apocryphal] Apocalypse of John, that a certain `king and angel of the abyss' bears `in Greek the name of Apollyon'.

He explains: `Apollyon, angel of the abyss and prince of this world, is the luminous Apollo.' He links the two by citing the fact that the Greek for morning star is Phosphorus (or `Light-bearer'), which `passed for the faithful companion, the announcer and representative of Apollo, seemingly the sun,26 the greatest light bearer, and that Apollo himself was confused with the fair "Star of the Morning", the sun.' Of course the Church would consider an ancient solar god to be synonymous with Satan in any case.

Rahn believed that the crusade against the Cathars represented the war between `the Cross and the Grail', and that the Perfecti held the power of Lucifer in the form of the green stone. This is presumably the product of an over-heated romantic imagination, but there is reason to believe that the Cathars did possess a `Grail', although it may have been neither a stone nor a cup .. .

What is (or was) the Holy Grail, according to the medieval accounts? The earliest of the stories is Chretien de Troyes' unfinished Perceval (or Le conte del Graal), written in the 1180s, but whether he died or simply gave up with it is not known. It concerns a grail (or graal), introduced in this scene: `Two more youths appeared carrying candelabras followed by a fair maiden who held a bejewelled, golden grail in both her hands.' It only becomes the Grail as the story develops, and the only significance of the definite article is that it is this particular Grail that is at the centre of events. And neither is it a holy grail: although the story is set against a Christian background (how could it be otherwise?), Chretien's graal is given no religious significance, and certainly makes no connection with Jesus. It is simply an object with magical properties.

There is little mystery about the nature of Chretien's graal. Although later writers seem to have been unaware of the meaning of the term, Chretien clearly felt he had no need to elaborate because he assumed his audience would be familiar with a graal. Unromantically, the word is probably a variant of the Old French gradal, meaning a type of serving dish. He describes it specifically as scutella lata et aliquantulum profunda - `a wide and slightly deep dish' - in other words, something like a platter or salver, a conclusion supported by the fact that it magically produces food (in this version only for the Fisher King, but in later versions for the whole court). Its magical or mystical properties make it important, not the fact that it is a grail. (Just as the significance of a story about a magic teapot would lie in the fact that it was magic, not that it was a teapot.)

Chretien's tale was both popular and unfinished, presenting an irresistible challenge to other poets to compose their own versions, so the story - and the Grail - underwent a rapid process of evolution. The focus shifted away from Perceval, the hero of the Grail quest becoming Gawain (probably because Chretien's story breaks off in the middle of a subplot in which he features) and then Galahad, a newly invented, annoyingly perfect character who basically seems like a thinly-disguised Jesus.

The development of the Grail into the Cup of Christ happened quickly. In an anonymous continuation of Perceval, written within a decade or so of Chretien's original, the author fused it with quite separate legends - which, according to British author Andrew Collins ,27 date back to the eighth or ninth centuries - of Joseph of Arimathea bringing a cup containing Jesus' blood to Britain. Presumably this was inspired by the concept of the Grail as a vessel, the author casting around for something similar to link it with Jesus.

This line was followed by Robert de Boron in Joseph d'Arimathie, written in the 1190s or very early 1200s. This is when it becomes the Holy Grail - sangreal: Robert was aware of the pun of `San greal' and `Sang real' '21 although in his version the latter meant `true blood'. A major, influential telling of this version of the Grail story was the Queste del San Graal, part of a vast Arthurian cycle composed by Cistercian monks between 1215 and 1235 (in which Galahad makes his first appearance).

Clearly all this represents the Christianization of the Grail, and the development of the Grail story into a Christian morality tale. Whether this was a deliberate attempt to undermine the heretical elements of the original, or simply the result of the permeation of Christian thought throughout all medieval art and literature, is impossible to tell. (The legends of Joseph of Arimathea were not entirely devoid of the whiff of heresy, since the legend also claimed that Joseph carried secret teachings of Jesus, which he passed on to his family. Besides, the Grail quest never really lost its Gnostic flavour, with the hero finding his way to the divine through his own endeavours; but perhaps this was damage limitation by the Church.) It was this line that went on to influence Mallory's La Morte d'Arthur and even the Steven Speilberg/Harrison Ford classic, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

However, this was quite different from the line taken in the other major retelling of the Grail story, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, written between 1200 and 1210, therefore in parallel with the `Christ's Cup' concept. It would be interesting to know whether Wolfram was aware of, and deliberately ignored, the Christianized continuations of Chretien's tale.

A slight ripple was created by the anonymous Perlesvaus, written between the 1190s and 1220s, as the author - a cleric of some kind - claimed that he found the story in a book at Glastonbury Abbey, though most scholars believe this was just an attempt to gain credibility. Sitting between the Christianized version and Wolfram's, it is clearly based on Robert de Boron's version of the fused Grail/Joseph of Arimathea tale and, on the surface, follows the same Christian morality tale, but it has some very interesting heretical elements - an emphasis on severed heads, alchemical references and Gawain's parallel quest for the sword that beheaded John the Baptist.

In Parzival, the Gral is described as a stone. Why Wolfram transformed Chrdtien's dish or salver in this way is unknown - it has been suggested that he simply misunderstood the French word (he made other mistakes in translation, for example rendering `carving dish' as `carving knives'). However, his Grail does have the property of miraculously producing food and drink, so there is still the connection with a serving dish. Wolfram gives the Grail many other magical abilities - those who see it cannot die for a certain length of time, and instructions from Heaven appear on it.

However, if Wolfram's reason for making the Grail a stone remains unknown, at least we know where his idea originated: the medieval German poem Alexander, itself derived from popular legends of the Emperor Alexander, many variants of which circulated in the Middle Ages. Wolfram is known to have been familiar with Alexander and several elements of Parzival are clearly inspired by it. Most importantly, Alexander receives a miraculous stone - it changes weight and in some versions has rejuvenating properties - which is even described in some Latin copies as lapis exilis ('small stone'), which presumably became corrupted into Wolfram's term for the Grail, lapsit exillis. So Wolfram, too, has merged Chretien's Grail story with a separate legend.

Wolfram links the origins of the Grail - its being brought to earth - with the `neutral angels', i.e. those who took neither side in the war between God and Lucifer, although there is some ambiguity about whether the neutral angels or another group were responsible for bringing it down to earth (see below). In any case, since the angels departed it has been protected by an order of knighthood, explicitly described as Templars, and a bloodline of Grail kings.

Wolfram claimed not only to know the proper ending to the story, but also to have had access to a more authentic version than even Chretien - although if Chretien based his story on Peredur, then this claim is clearly false. Wolfram states that his version derived from the works of the `heathen' Flegetanis, via Kyot of Provens:

There was a heathen named Flegetanis who was highly renowned for his acquirements. This same physicus was descended from Solomon, begotten of Israelitish kin all the way down from ancient times till the Baptism became our shield against hellfire. He wrote of the marvels of the Gral. Flegetanis, who worshipped a calf as though it were his god, was a heathen by his father. How can the Devil make such mock of such knowledgeable people, in that He Whose power is greatest and to Whom all marvels are known neither does nor did not part them from their folly? For the infidel Flegetanis was able to define for us the recession of each planet and its return, and how long each revolves in its orbit before it stands at its mark again. All human kind are affected by the revolutions of the planets. With his own eyes the heathen Flegetanis saw - and he spoke of it reverentially - hidden secrets in the constellations. He declared there was a thing called the Gral, whose name he read in the stars without more ado. `A troop left it on earth and then rose high above the stars, if their innocence drew them back again. Afterwards a Christian progeny bred to a pure life had the duty of keeping it. Those humans who are summoned to the Gral are ever worthy.' Thus did Flegetanis write on this theme.

The wise Master Kyot embarked on a search for this tale in Latin books in order to discover where there may have been a people suited to keep the Gral and follow a disciplined life. He read the chronicles of various lands in Britain and elsewhere, in France and Ireland; but it was in Anjou that he found the tale 29

As we have seen, the original Grail was a large dish or salver, but what inspired Chretien with that idea?

Perceval is modelled on the Celtic folk tale Peredur, Son of Efrawg, part of the celebrated collection of Welsh tales known as the Mabinogion. The Grail itself is derived from the severed male head carried on a platter that features in that tale.

Peredur is entertained by the lord of a castle, a lame knight, who turns out to be his uncle:

Thereupon he could see two youths coming into the hall, and from the hall proceeding to a chamber, and with them a spear of exceeding great size, and three streams of blood along it, running from the socket to the floor. And when they all saw the youths coming after that fashion, every one set up a crying and a lamentation, so that it was not easy for any to bear with them. The man did not, for all that, interrupt his conversation with Peredur. The man did not tell Peredur what that was, nor did he ask it of him. After silence for a short while, thereupon, lo, two maidens coming in, and a great salver between them, and a man's head on the salver, and blood in profusion around the head. And then all shrieked and cried out, so that it was hard for any to be in the same house as they. At last they desisted therefrom, and sat as long as they pleased, and drank."

The fact that Chretien's tale lacks an ending reveals that the writers of the continuations were not familiar with Peredur, as both the Christianizing writers and Wolfram add endings that are quite different from the Celtic original. In fact much of the traditional mystique of the Grail romances derives from trying to provide explanations for the miraculous elements that, in the original Welsh tale, are entirely unnecessary. In particular, there is the mystery of the nature of the Grail, and of the Question that will lift the enchantment on the Fisher King.

The serpent - taken to be the embodiment of wickedness - successfully tempts Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. Yet in discovering evil, they also discovered good, and their Luciferan spirit of enquiry was ignited, which led to all human progress.

William Blake's Glad Dav encompasses the joy of being human, acknowledging the endless challenges in which the real Lucifer revels.

The ancient Egyptian god Set, destroyer and avenger - but was he also the model for the Israelites' Yahweh?

The Egyptians' magical child-god Horus, defier of the evil Set, Horus is the nearest Egyptian equivalent to the bright `Son of the Morning', Lucifer, who challenged Yahweh and lost - or so we are told ...

The Roman goddess Diana Lucifera - the illuminator or enlightener. The church hated and feared pagan goddesses for their power and the inspiration they offered to ordinary women.

Pan, the beautiful god of nature, caressing the sacred snake of wisdom. In his mature guise of horns and hooves he became the Christians' model for the Devil.

The face of the man on the Shroud, seen in an extraordinarily detailed photographic negative. Does the image behave like a photograph because that is what it is?

Portrait of the man on the Shroud. But is this really Jesus Christ, or the face of the great Luciferan artist and illusionist, Leonardo da Vinci as depicted below?

Da Vinci's preliminary sketch for The Virgin and Child with St Anne. Is the baby Jesus blessing John, or is he steadying his head to take a blow? Leonardo the Luciferan imbued many of his works with profoundly heretical messages about the superiority of the Baptist. Note the severed head hidden in the landscape at the top right-hand corner.

D. G. Rossetti's depiction of Mary Magdalene shows a flame-haired passive beauty. Known to her devotees in France as `Mary Lucifer' - the light-bringer - her red hair signified sexual energy, perhaps the main reason that red-haired women were believed to be witches.

Goya's famous The Witches' Sabbath superbly evokes the sinister horror of a coven's worship of the goat-like Devil. Unfortunately most of the more lurid accounts of the Sabbath came from the imagination of `witches' under torture.

No one knows exactly how many so-called `witches' were tortured and burned in Europe over at least 300 years. Estimates vary wildly between 5 million and a hundred thousand! But most of the accused were completely innocent of trafficking with the Devil.

Dr Dee's maverick assistant Edward Kelley and an accomplice seek to learn the future from a magically-reanimated corpse. Luciferan daring can often lead to dangerous or distasteful activities - the price we pay for being enthralled by extreme possibilities.

Sir Isaac Newton, alchemist and pioneering scientist, embodiment of the Age of Enlightenment, when the light of Lucifer finally began to sweep away the darkness of superstition.

In Peredur these are coherent parts of the overall plot. On that first occasion in his uncle's hall, Peredur fails to ask the identity of the severed head and what the procession is all about, and therefore misses (temporarily) his destined path. After going on to have many more, unrelated adventures (the basis of the perils encountered in the Grail quests), he is visited at Arthur's court by a hideous blackskinned woman - the original of the `loathly damsel' of the Grail stories - who upbraids him:

Peredur, I greet thee not, for thou dost not merit it. Blind was fate when she bestowed favour and fame upon thee. When thou camest to the court of the Lame King, and when thou sawest thou there the squire bearing the sharpened spear, and from the tip of the spear a drop of blood, and that running as it were a torrent as far as the squire's grip - and other marvels besides thou sawest there, but thou did not ask after their meaning nor the cause of them. And had thou so asked, the king would have had health and his kingdom in peace. But henceforth strife and battle, and the loss of knights, and women left widowed, and maidens without succour, and all that because of thee3'

In Peredur, the `meaning and cause' that the hero fails to establish has a much more direct significance than in the Grail romances: the dead man whose head is borne on the salver is Peredur's cousin, slain by the witches of Caer Loyw, who have also cast a spell on the kingdom. Peredur's task is to avenge him. Indeed, it has been prophesied that he will do so, but because he failed to find out that the man was a kinsman the fulfilment of the prophecy has been thrown into doubt. When he does find out, and slays the witches, their enchantment is lifted. In the story's own terms all this makes perfect sense.

However, in the Grail stories these elements have become detached from the plot and taken on a transcendental character. The `unasked question' becomes a mystical quest in its own right, and the mere speaking of it lifts the enchantment. (In Perceval the question is, `Whom does the Grail serve?' - because this tale is unfinished we never find out what the answer is - and in Parzival it is, `Dear Uncle, what ails you?')

The object in Peredur on which Chretien de Troyes based his graal is the severed head on a salver. This is supported by the conclusion that his graal was some kind of shallow serving dish. However, Chretien has chosen to omit the more significant part of the `prototype Grail' - the head - and highlight the mundane part, the dish. Clearly, Chretien has deliberately chosen to change or obscure this aspect of the Grail, but why?

The severed head motif was common enough in Celtic mythology and folklore, so it is hardly significant to find it in Peredur. However, in a Christian context, the severed head on the platter makes an obvious association with John the Baptist, and it seems to have been this association that appealed to Chretien. But then it is odd that he should obscure the very aspect of the tale that seems to have attracted him in the first place and would make sense of the platter.

If Chretien deliberately sought to obscure the severed head, the connection with the Baptist and the existence of the historical Johannite heresy might provide an explanation for this. (If Chretien were a Johannite, and modelled Perceval on Peredur specifically to produce a Johannite work, the question remains about where he learnt about the heretical cult of John. Chretien originated, as his name suggests, from the northern French town of Troyes, which was not only a centre of learning, but also the court of the Count of Champagne, who `sponsored' the founding of the Templars. Troyes was the site of the first Templar preceptory in Europe.)

The military order of the Poor Knights of Christ, or the Knights Templar, became enormously rich, powerful and arrogant, especially in France, and were consequently ruthlessly suppressed in the early fourteenth century, amid accusations and confessions - admittedly extracted from them by the application of hideous torture - of blasphemy. It was said that they worshipped, among other idols, a bearded severed head called Baphomet, and that they spit and trampled on the cross. In The Templar Revelation we investigated these claims and were astonished to discover that there might indeed have been some basis in fact. For the Templars, it seems, encountered `the Church of John in the East' - the Baptist's followers, or the Mandaeans, whom we have already discussed. According to the likes of Summers, they `infected' the Christian knights with their heresy, although it would appear that only the inner circle was so contaminated. The rank and file - the vast majority of the Templars - were simply Christian warrior-monks with little or no idea of what the upper hierarchy believed or practised. In the context of the Mandaean `contamination', the rumours of spitting and trampling on the cross, not to mention revering a bearded severed head, suddenly make perfect sense, tortured confessions or not.

When seen in Johannite terms, Chretien's choice of Peredur as his model becomes even more significant. The `secret' of the Grail lies in the identity of the beheaded man, and it is his death that has brought ruin and sterility to the kingdom, which recognizing his true identity and avenging his death will reverse. (Perhaps there is even significance in the fact that the dead man is a cousin of the main protagonist: John and Jesus were said to be cousins.)

None of this chain of reasoning would have been obvious to Chretien's audience unless they knew his source, so it becomes a neat way of passing on the Johannite message in `coded' form. Perhaps this is why Chretien failed to finish the story, or perhaps, having removed the all-important head, he was stuck for an ending. In Peredur it centres on working out whose head it is.

All this Johannite heresy is lost in the Christian `branch': the Grail becomes an explicitly Christian symbol, and the quest a Christian spiritual process. It was this branch that became the most familiar version. Wolfram, however, remained largely true to the Johannite line.

However, although there are specific references to Jesus as Christ, and to conventional Christian teaching and doctrines, in Wolfram's story, by the standards of the time and culture they are noticeably few - perhaps just the bare minimum to avoid raising suspicion. It has been noted by many scholars that Wolfram has deliberately minimized the role of the Church and clergy, to the point of removing certain characters and situations that appear in Perceval. Conventionally, this is explained by the idea that it was Wolfram's intention to write a morality tale aimed specifically at the knightly caste (to which he himself belonged), encouraging them to a greater spirituality. He therefore tried to show how they could change their ways without necessarily having recourse to the clergy. But while this may or may not be correct, the significant point is that Wolfram's marginalization of the Church is so conspicuous that scholars feel a need to explain it (although, of course, they have no reason to suspect that Wolfram was trying to deliver a heretical message).

On the other hand, there are many references that appear to be Christian, but which make more sense in Johannite terms: the frequent use of the term `baptized men' to describe the keepers of the Grail (although they are very occasionally called 'Christians', as in the above quotation concerning Flegetanis); a somewhat evasive appeal to `He whom painters still depict as the Lamb, with the Cross between His hooves', and so on.

Tobias Churton has argued for a Sabian `Arabic' influence on Wolfram's work32 - the name of one of the great Sabian scientists, Thabit ibn Qurra, even crops up, out of the blue, in Parzival. Such an influence would have come via Moorish Spain, so Wolfram's invocation of Flegetanis and Toledo makes sense. If equating the Sabians of that period with the Mandaeans is accepted (a link Churton would reject), then the source of the Johannite elements becomes clear.

But if Wolfram was aware of the hidden Johannitism of the Grail story, why did he change the Grail itself from a salver into a stone (although, as noted above, he kept the connection with the provision of food)? Is this, too, open to a Johannite interpretation?

Wolfram has Trevrizent explain the origins of the Grail to Parzival:

When Lucifer and the Trinity began to war with each other, those who did not take sides, worthy, noble angels, had to descend to earth to that Stone which is for ever incorruptible. I do not know whether God forgave them or damned them in the end: if it was His due He took them back. Since that time the Stone has been in the care of those whom God appointed to it and to whom He sent his angels.33

But then, at the end of the story Trevrizent admits:

I lied as a means of distracting you from the Gral and how things stood concerning it. Let me atone for my error [ ...]. You heard from me that the banished angels were at the Gral with God's full support till they should be received back into His Grace. But God is constant in such matters: He never ceased to war against those whom I named to you here as forgiven. Whoever desires to have reward from God must be in feud with those angels. For they are eternally damned and chose their own perdition.

So it has gone from `God forgave them' to `I don't know what happened to them' to `God damned them'. It has been suggested that this reversal was the result of Wolfram being censured by his local priesthood for the earlier comments. (Parzival is thought to have been composed in parts, which were circulated as they were completed, so a correction would have to be issued for any `doctrinal error' spotted in an early part.)

Whatever the reason, the twist makes the Grail an object belonging to condemned and damned angels, who God-fearing folk `must be in feud with' - maybe not as bad as Lucifer and his hordes, but nearly so.

So, although Wolfram fails to link the Grail and Lucifer directly, it could be argued that he does so indirectly, by association with the fallen angels (who, if God did damn them, must have ended up in Hell and therefore be subject to Lucifer in his Satanic mode anyway).

Undoubtedly, in medieval symbolism, John the Baptist was associated with the Morning Star, although the thinking behind this is obvious and conventional - the Morning Star heralds the coming of the sun as the Baptist heralded the coming of Christ. In the thirteenth century Jacob de Voragine would write in his Golden Legend (in Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger's translation) concerning John the Baptist:

For the Father calls him an angel, and says of him: `Behold I send my angel, and he shall prepare the way before my face.' But angel is the name of an office and not of a nature; and therefore he is called an angel by reason of his office, because he exercised the office of all the angels. First, of the Seraphim. Seraphim is usually interpreted fiery because the Seraphim set us afire, and they themselves burn more ardently with the love of God; and in Ecclesiasticus it is said of John: `Elias the prophet stoodup,as afire,andhis wordburnt like a torch'; for he came in the spirit and power of Elias. Second of the Cherubim. Cherubim is interpreted the fulness of knowledge; and John is called the morning star, because he put an end to the night of ignorance and made a beginning of the light of grace. [It goes on to compare John to various groups of angels ...]34

So there is a tenuous association of ideas that links John and Lucifer, via the Morning Star, but this stops far short of actually equating the two, as some did in the Middle Ages. However, in his book on the Templars, Michel Lamy quotes Jacob de Voragine's last sentence as: `John is called Lucifer or the morning star ...'

In context, Lamy's version makes sense. Jacob is comparing John to angels, and without a reference to an angel the connection between the Cherubim and the Morning Star is a non sequitur. And there is the other, albeit tantalisingly circumstantial association of ideas mentioned earlier: the Morning and Evening Stars are, of course, really the same - more accurately, the planet, Venus. The Morning Star was linked with Lucifer and the Evening Star with the planet Venus, which the heretics associated with Mary Magdalene.35 So if we accept Lamy's curious translation of John being Lucifer, then perhaps the story of the stone falling from Lucifer's head is not so far off the mark.

In any case, according to the Inquisition, the Cathars owned the head of John the Baptist ... Surely of all possible types of `Grail', that is the one that the Church would have really loved to have seized from the heretics.

The Cathars' own view of John was somewhat confused: they took the idea from their precursors the Bogomils that the Baptist was `a demon', surreally, `forerunner of the AntiChrist'.36 And in the Cathars' holy book, the Book of John (Liber Secretum or Secret Book) Jesus announces that John the Baptist is an emissary of Satan, the lord of the physical world, despatched to earth to sabotage his mission. But of course this is merely an exaggerated version of what is already in the standard New Testament: as we have seen, Jesus appears to have roundly insulted the Baptist at least twice. Clearly the Cathars realized that the two men were bitter enemies, but assumed - as indeed most Christians would - that Jesus must unequivocally and eternally be on the side of right.

Whatever their beliefs about the Baptist, perhaps they still inherited his head from some other Gnostic group, keeping it to maintain its magical enslavement. Perhaps, too, it was part of the fabled `Cathar treasure' that four Perfecti allegedly carried away the night before the others gave themselves up to the Crusaders. If so, they had also removed the Johannites' most sacred `Grail': perhaps that is why so many Templars were so friendly towards them, despite papal urgings to the contrary.

With the martyrdoms of the Cathars of Montsegur the scene was set for a shift in papal thought: now heresy was intimately linked with Devil-worship, with the horrors of witchcraft. There was no need for the newly-formed Inquisition to kick its heels in idleness now the field was wide open for an even greater crusade.

Colin Wilson comments in his book, The Occult (1973): `Christianity was an epidemic rather than a religion. It appealed to fear, hysteria and ignorance.'' However, this definition largely depends on the particular manifestation of Christianity in question. The calm, probity and intellectual capacity of the itinerant Cathar preachers was notably at odds with the decadent lifestyle of the higher Catholic clergy, and the often staggering ignorance of the parish priests, equipped to do little more than say the Mass and preside over the usual offices such as burying the dead. But then came Dominic de Guzman, a fanatical Spanish cleric who aimed to use the Cathars' own methods against them - and in doing so, he unleashed a virtual apocalypse upon at least 100,000 poor wretches, and caused suffering and hardship to many millions more ordinary people for generations. Under the flag of his new order, the Dominicans, he created the Holy Office, otherwise known as the Inquisition, a word that should - but these days rarely does - evoke the same concentrated shudder in the minds of all decent people as does the terrible term `Gestapo'. They are not dissimilar, except the latter was a very brief manifestation of evil compared to the lengthy reign of the Inquisition - in fact, it still operates today, but under the less emotive name of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.'x

This speech of Dominic's to the people of the Cathar country, dating from the 1200s, reveals a hint of the horrors to come:

I have sung words of sweetness to you for many years now, preaching, imploring, weeping. But as the people of my country say, where blessing is to no avail, the stick will prevail. Now we shall call forth against you leaders and prelates who, alas, will gather together against this country . . . and will cause many people to die by the sword, will ruin your towers, overthrow and destroy your walls and reduce you all to servitude ... the force of the stick will prevail where sweetness and blessing have been able to accomplish nothing 39

Despite the unflinching harshness of this warning, `dying by the sword' would no doubt come to seem like an outright luxury compared to the atrocious methods of death meted out to thousands by his henchmen.

Deeply involved with Simon de Montfort, Dominic finally settled his headquarters at Toulouse (Carcassonne proving too hostile), where he founded the Order of the Preaching Friars, or the Dominican Order, in December 1216. Three years later he and his monks were on the move again: Toulouse had proved too hot to hold them. Giving the Languedoc up as a very bad job, the Dominicans spread to various locations, including Paris and, of course, Spain. By the time of Dominic's death in 1221, his movement was riding high, with a hundred houses - and its success was assured when the Dominican-friendly pope, Gregory IX, began his reign in 1233.

A year later two Inquisitors were officially appointed at Toulouse, centre of Cathar country - previously too hostile for the Dominicans to make their base. Now they were back, and they were in charge, with new and terrible powers from the pope himself. However, the Inquisitors by no means enjoyed unmitigated success, as Guillaume Pelhisson discovered after having several living heretics burnt, and, for good measure, also `certain deceased persons ... dragged away and burnt' 40 The people rebelled and set upon the Inquisitor, beating him badly. Outraged, Guillaume remarks apopleptically: `They beat, wounded and killed those who pursued them ... many wicked things were done in the land to the church and to faithful persons.'41

An unedifying story illustrates the fanaticism and dehumanization of the new masters of bodies, if not souls. In 1234 Dominic was canonized - as Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh remark in their 1999 book The Inquisition: `Few saints can have had so much blood on their hands'42 - and while the Dominicans at Toulouse were preparing to celebrate the event, news arrived of a dying woman's heresy. As she lay on her deathbed, apparently she had received the Cathar version of the last rites, the Consolamentum. The Inquisitors, including the Bishop of Toulouse, rushed to her bedside, where they found her steeped in Catharism and obdurate in her heresy. `Forthwith, the bishop . . . by virtue of Jesus Christ condemned her as a heretic. Moreover, the vicar had her carried on the bed in which she lay to the count's meadow and burned at once.'4' As Baigent and Leigh remark dryly, `Thus did the Dominicans of Toulouse crown their celebration of the newly sainted Dominic's feast day with a human sacrifice.'44

Shortly afterwards, the Dominicans were expelled from Toulouse by an outraged populace, but their revenge on that city, and on the neighbouring countryside, was so atrocious that its fallout reverberates to this day in an impoverished land still suspicious of the Church of Rome. First, to establish that their power transcended even the safe haven of the grave, the Inquisition had the bones and putrescent bodies of prominent heretics dragged from their graves and burnt `to the honour of God and the Blessed Virgin, His Mother, and the Blessed Dominic, His Servant [who] ... most happily brought about this work of the Lord.'45

One of the most zealous (and therefore most vicious) of the early Inquisitors was himself a former Cathar, the Dominican friar Robert `le bougre' ('the Bulgar'), also known as `the hammer of the heretics'. He sent many thousands to the stake in both Flanders and France, in 1239 consigning 183 of his former co-religionists to the flames in Mont-Aims en masse as `a fiery propitiation of God'. (But perhaps even Yahweh at his sourest would stop short of demanding such an offering. And there is no record of the Devil doing so, either.) That particular horror is notable for the fact that the local bishop offered them the solace of the Consolamentum before they died 46

Although there had been isolated cases of the execution (or exile) of heretics in the past, now the Inquisition proved a well-oiled, highly dedicated machine, a conveyor belt for tipping whole communities into Hell. However, because of a long-standing ecclesiastical tradition of not actually causing heretical blood to be shed, more or less ingenious ways of torturing and despatching the accused were devised that would keep bloodshed to a minimum, such as the thumbscrew and the rack. As Baigent and Leigh put it succinctly: `Devices of this kind would seem to have been contrived mess."Fire minimum was the answer to the Inquisitors' prayers. From the and pain maximum cause to point of view of the Church it has several major advantages. It is relatively bloodless. It has a unique capacity to evoke terror: the very thought of flames near one's vulnerable flesh induces an immediate atavistic fear, and the real thing is satisfyingly excruciating - particularly if produced by lighting slow-burning green wood, or setting the fire a fair distance beneath the heretics. And, ultimately, it is very cleansing, a purgation of the filth of heresy. As an afterthought, it could be argued that fire cleanses the heretic's soul, although mostly they were led to believe their only possible destiny was eternal hell fire. Suffering beyond imagining in life was to be followed by considerably worse - including the prospect of the spiritual desolation of being for ever removed from the love of Christ. Even the Nazis or the henchmen of Pol Pot contented themselves with mere mortal agonies.

However, the Cathars were relatively soon despatched, as we have seen, culminating in the conflagration of 210 Perfecti beneath the citadel of Montsegur in 1244. Although pockets of Catharism survived - and may, in some form or another, continue to survive to this day - the Inquisition had done its worst and triumphed. But even so, it had hardly hit its stride. Dominic's men had a much older and more widespread enemy in its sights, a more virulently hated opponent of truly primeval standing - women.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the priests of Peter's Church should campaign tirelessly and fanatically against females - after all, the Magdalene had complained to Jesus that he `hates me and all the race of women' - but the ferocity and insanity involved still have the power to rock both heart and soul.

Their excuse was, of course, witchcraft, not only evil-doing and heresy, but also Devil-worship - the deliberate act of aligning oneself with Satan, often, allegedly, by actually signing a pact with the Prince of Darkness himself.

The story of how the Inquisitors dealt with the accused is not for the squeamish, but must be faced if the nature of persecution and the dire potential of bigotry and hatred is ever to be fully understood. Although despicable in the extreme, the Nazis' reign of terror against the Jews and Stalin's atrocities against 20 million of his own people48 only present part of the picture of man's inhumanity to man. The depredations of the medieval Church provide the missing link in the history of sadism - man's inhumanity to woman.

It is here that the Reverend Alphonse Joseph-Mary August Montague Summers enters the story proper - as, if nothing else, a cautionary tale about the limitless capacity of even an educated and intelligent bigot for believing the most arrant and dangerous nonsense. Yet he is no fire-and-brimstone character from the pages of the medieval Inquisition, although no doubt he would have loved to be: Summers died as recently as 1948, a pitiless and fanatical opponent of anything or anyone that smacked of heresy or challenged the smallest detail of Catholic belief. He will be quoted extensively, for although well-balanced modern readers may be tempted to dissolve into giggles simply because of his ,over the top' pompous and self-satisfied style, in fact he is a profoundly serious object lesson. The twentieth-century Summers possessed the same thought-processes and emotional responses as his brothers-in-spirit, the monks and priests of the medieval Inquisition, with hardly an iota of difference. Chillingly, even the jacket blurb of the 1960s reprint of his infamous book The History of Witchcraft (1925), states:

He was not ashamed of the great excesses committed in the 17th and 18th centuries, on the contrary, he vigorously defends everything the church ever did to extirpate witchcraft and heresy.

Interestingly, Summers notes: `All the heresies, and the Secret Societies of heretics, which infested Europe during the Middle Ages were Gnostic ...'49 Just like Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist. Just like Jesus himself, in fact.

It is no accident that the first `witches' accused of attending the diabolical Sabbat to fall foul of the Inquisition were in fact Cathars and their maidservants from the Toulouse and Carcassonne area. In 1335 sixty-three people were tortured to extract confessions: chief among them was Anne-Marie de Georgel, who declared - apparently also speaking for the others - that they understood this world to be a battleground between the god of Heaven and the Lord of this world, and as they considered that the latter would triumph, they supported him. This may have seemed like Satanism to the accusing clerics, but it was, of course, simply Gnosticism - although as far as they, and the later Summers, were concerned, there was no great difference between the two. Another young woman admitted to the crime and sin of serving `the Cathari at supper' so

Excavating beneath the story of the original witchfinders and the thoughts of Summers, the full horror of a world gone mad is revealed. But it is more even than that: it is a living nightmare where the torturers and killers do so in the name of the highest good, and the `evil' accused are, for the most part, utterly innocent of all great wrong. This was truly a time when Satan walked the earth - in the guise of the God of Love.

While there will undoubtedly be many who object to the witch trials being depicted as primarily a sustained outrage against women, there is no doubt whatever that the witch hysteria `provided a focus for sexist hatred in male-dominated society'.51 It had not escaped the notice of the Inquisition that the hated Cathars practised an almost unique form of spiritual egalitarianism of the sexes, and that their influence had helped foster a great flowering of secular arts in the south of France, including the artful songs of the Troubadours, and the cult of the Lady - clearly a resurrection of ancient goddess worship. (The Troubadour's insistence of loving individual women was quite new to most people - nothing in the classical world was remotely similar.) Everywhere they looked in the Languedoc and Provence, the men of the Church must have blanched at the unavoidable echoes of the unacceptable `Apostle of the Apostles' - Mary Magdalene, whose memory they were so eager to malign, and whose cult they were intent on destroying.

It must not be forgotten that women, whether accused of witchcraft or not, were widely believed - certainly by the Church patriarchy - to be naturally polluted and unclean. In this, they accepted the Rabbinical tradition that claimed Eve first menstruated only after she had fornicated with the snake - her firstborn, Cain, being widely seen as the child of the serpent, not Adam. Today orthodox Jews refuse to shake hands with a woman in case she is menstruating, while rural communities across Europe still hold that a woman with her period will turn milk or wine sour and blunt knives. Saint Jerome thundered `Nothing is so unclean as a woman in her periods; what she touches she causes to become unclean.' In the seventh century, Bishop Theodore of Canterbury forbade menstruating women to take communion or even enter a church - as did the French synod of Meaux. Even in the twentieth century a Scottish medical textbook quoted the old rhyme: `Oh! Menstruating woman, thou'rt a fiend/From which all nature should be closely screened.'S2 As Barbara Walker points out, religious women especially were ordered to detest their own bodies, citing the Rule for Anchoresses: `Art thou not formed of foul slime? Art thou not always full of uncleanness?"'

The association between the vileness of `witchcraft' and menstruation was reinforced as far as the Montague Summers of this world were concerned by the - admittedly extreme - rites of Gnostic groups such as the Ophites and the Carpocratians (whom we have discussed previously). When reading the following passage by Epiphanius, it is instructive to recall that the Carpocratians claimed to have received sexual secrets (akin to those of the Ophites) from Salome, Martha and Mary Magdalene - and that Saint Clement confessed that he knew this to be true.

... the wretches mingle with each other ... after they have consorted together in a passionate debauch ... The woman and the man take the man's ejaculation into their hands, stand up ... offering to the Father, the Primal Being of All Nature, what is on their hands, with the words, `We bring to Thee this oblation, which is the very Body of Christ'.

... They consume it, take housel of their shame and say: `This is the Body of Christ, the Paschal Sacrifice through which our bodies suffer and are forced to confess the sufferings of Christ.' And when the woman is in her period, they do likewise with her menstruation. The unclean flow of blood, which they garner, they take up in the same way and eat together. And that, they say, is Christ's Blood. For when they read in Revelation, `I saw the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month,54 they interpret this as an allusion to the monthly incidence of the female period.55

Clearly Evensong was once rather more colourful than it is today. However, as we shall see, devotees of the Black Mass revived the sacrament of the semen and menstrual blood, although they may not actually have realized that they were reinstating an original Christian ritual (if, indeed, the Carpocratians, Simon Magus and Clement of Alexandria were right). Perhaps they merely wanted to shock. In any case, this sort of rite is also found in Tantrism, where consuming the living substances of sex and reproduction were believed to be of a higher kind of spirituality than eating the dead god, even when transubstantiated into, or represented by, the bread and wine - `although the colour symbolism was the same' .56 (Interestingly, both Catholics and the later Protestants denounced witches as cannibals.)

To the Tantrics, the officiating priestesses, who were expected to menstruate in order to benefit from the extra flow of lunar power, were symbolized by the colour red. Is this why Mary Magdalene was traditionally portrayed as boasting a thick red mane of hair, despite the fact that as an Egyptian or Ethiopian - or even, as widely supposed, a Judaean - her hair would have been extremely dark? And one must not forget that in the Middle Ages women with the symbolic red hair were believed to be witches, and often burnt as such.

It was long believed that demons were born of menstrual blood - including the legendary basilisk with the fatal look. However, not all cultures despised the monthly flux: `the very word taboo, from Polynesian tupua, "sacred, magical", applied specifically to menstrual blood.'57 And even some European peasants believed it had curative powers - stained rags scattered on fields were believed to bless them with greater fertility. But in general the western view was - and to a large extent, still is, one of abhorrence.

Both the Catholic and Anglican hierarchies of the late twentieth century argued against the ordination of women on the grounds that a menstruating woman would `pollute' the altar. Walker notes wryly: `This would not preclude ordination of post-menopausal women, but different excuses are found for those.' She adds: `The holy "blood of life" used to be feminine and real; now it is masculine and symbolic."'

In the Middle Ages certain areas associated with the Feminine were proscribed by the Church, including wells, groves and caves, all of which had become indelibly linked with goddess worship and which - unsurprisingly - became denounced as the haunt of witches and demons. Any similar place was categorized as cunnus diaboli, `devilish cunt', and was therefore avoided by all God-fearing folk.

After the Cathars and associated heretics were effectively erased from the map, the Inquisition's feeding frenzy needed more fuel, and what worse or more disgusting heretics were there than witches, actual self-confessed worshippers of Satan? How convenient, too, that most of the accused were women! As Mary Daly writes in her Beyond God the Father (1973):

The spirit of the Church in its contempt for women, as shown in the Scriptures, in Paul's epistles and the Pentateuch, the hatred of the fathers, manifested in their ecclesiastical canons, and in the doctrines of asceticism, celibacy, and witchcraft, destroyed man's respect for woman and legalized the burning, drowning, and torturing of women ...

Women and their duties became objects of hatred to the Christian missionaries and of alternate scorn and fear to pious ascetics and monks. The priestess mother became something impure, associated with the devil, and her lore an infernal incantation, her very cooking a brewing of poison, nay, her very existence a source of sin to man. Thus woman, as mother and priestess, became woman as witch ...59

Citing the biblical authority of Exodus 22:18 `Thou shall not suffer a witch to live' - although the kasaph of the original text actually means `seer' or clairvoyant, ironically in the same paranormal category as the exclusively male prophets - the Holy Office waded into the bloody fray, arresting, interrogating and murdering countless people.60 But of what were they accused?

Many were simply ugly old women, no doubt senile and unpleasant, or who those had fallen foul of their neighbours. Their constant mumbling was taken as the invocation of devilish spells - or even a direct prayer to Old Nick himself. Conversely, a particularly pretty girl was often accused of witchcraft, often by jealous peers or a thwarted would-be lover, especially if he was a priest. Denunciations of witchcraft represented the ultimate in harassment and bullying: human nature being what it is, the temptation was tragically too great to pass up an opportunity of settling old scores when the Inquisitors came to town.

One woman was arrested because she quarrelled with her neighbour, who then saw a snake in her garden. If horses bolted, crops failed, butter stubbornly remained milk, children sickened, women miscarried, there was always a handy witch to blame. Another woman was convicted and burnt because she had rowed with a drunk at a tavern, who - how strange! - found himself up all night vomiting. Yet another poor wretch found herself facing the flames because she had been seen pulling off her stockings - and shortly afterwards her neighbour became lame. Two Scottish `witches' were hanged because they had treated, and cured an ailing child. As Barbara Walker notes:

Joan Cason of Kent went to the gallows in 1586 for having dry thatch on her roof. Her neighbour, whose child was sick, was told ... that the child was bewitched, and it could be proved by stealing a bit of thatch from the witch's roof and throwing it on the fire. If it crackled and sparked, witchcraft was assured. The test came out positive . . 61

Women with dissimilar eyes or red hair were instantly recognizable as devil worshippers: apart from the symbolism discussed previously, perhaps this was because redheads usually have freckles, and these were often taken as `witch marks'. The Inquisitors made it known as a fact that witches bore certain special marks on their bodies, where the devil had touched them as an affirmation of their unholy pact, and which remained impervious to pain. Part of the torturers' job was to strip and search the accused for the `Devil's teat', jabbing a large bodkin into their flesh, which - although it caused great suffering - was not even categorized as torture. Then, with swift sleight of hand, the `witch pricker' substituted a retractable bodkin and, lo and behold, the mark was found! Of course witch pricking offered the perfect opportunity for all manner of violent sexual abuse, but again, this was deemed the torturer's perk and not part of being `put to the Question', or torture proper.

At a witch trial in 1593, as the jailer searched a female `witch' - which of course he did thoroughly - he discovered `a little lump of flesh, in manner sticking out as if it had been a teat, to the length of half an inch', which he `perceiving at the first sight thereof, meant not to disclose, because it was adjoining to so secret a place which was not decent to be seen; yet in the end, not willing to conceal so strange a matter"' he did show it to others. They all agreed - married men and all - that this was new in their experience, and almost certainly demonic. The woman was convicted and burnt. This `devil's teat' was, of course, a clitoris. Even physicians believed that no virtuous woman would possess such a thing633 - an interesting application of the theory of predestination.

At Lille in 1661, the pupils of alleged witch Antoinette Bourignon confessed:

The Devil gives them a Mark, which Marks they renew as often as those Persons have any desire to quit him. The devil reproves them the more severely, and obligeth them to new Promises, making them also new Marks for assurance or Pledge, that those Persons should continue faithful to him.'

The twentieth-century's own would-be Inquisitor, the Reverend Summers, expounds without so much as a flicker of irony on this, `the most important point in the identification of a witch ... the very sign and seal of Satan . . .'6' Nevertheless, in his eagerness to prove his case, Summers is nothing if not thorough in providing a wide spread of sources, which possess a quaint horror for those of more balanced minds. He cites Robert Hink, `minister at Aberfoill', in his Secret Commonwealth (1691), who noted:

A spot that I have seen, as a small mole, horny, and browncoloured; throw [sic] which mark, when a large pin was thrust (both in buttock, nose and rooff of mouth), till it bowed and became crooked, the witches both men and women, nather felt a pain nor did bleed, nor knew the precise time when this was doing to them ...

Summers informs us breathlessly that, `This mark was sometimes the complete figure of a toad or a bat; or ... the slot of a hare, the foot of a frog, a spider, a deformed whelp, a mouse' .66 Note the `foot of a frog' - a vague description if ever there was one - or that `deformed whelp', which might be almost any shape or size: indeed, as many people would have borne some kind of birthmark or blemish on their person, who should emerge blameless?

(Summers also argues that heretics had a particularly loathsome smell, as indeed they probably did - terror does generate a markedly acrid sort of sweat. Besides, even a single night in the Inquisition's jails would render the most fragrant somewhat malodorous. However, of course, to Summers Catholic priests often exuded the odour of sanctity, as evidence for which he remarks in utter seriousness `I myself have known a priest of fervent faith who at times diffused the odour of incense' 67 Surely it would be a very odd thing if most priests did not `at times' smell of incense! One may laugh, but this sort of infantilism - nice people smell nice but nasty people smell nasty - smacks too much of Dr Goebbels' anti-Semitic propaganda, lapped up by millions of ordinary intelligent Germans, to be anything other than chilling.)

Summers quotes `that same authority' on the site of such `Witch Marks': `In men it may often be seen under the eyelids, under the lips, under the armpits, on the shoulders, on the fundament; in women, moreover, on the breast or the pudenda. 161 Ah. But remember that wherever these marks were `found' they were located by having a skewer-like bodkin, usually about three inches long, rammed into the near-locality `till it bowed and became crooked'. And this still was not officially classed as torture.

Summers explains that the `Little Teat or Pap' so found on the body of a wizard or witch, and said to secrete milk that nourished the `familiar' - a demon-possessed creature such as a cat or toad - must be carefully distinguished from the insensible devil-mark. This, for some reason, was a phenomenon more or less exclusive to England and New England, in the days when witch hysteria had moved seamlessly from the Inquisition to the dour Protestant Fathers. (Of course Montague Summers dismisses cases of Protestant exorcism as merely the fantasies of poor afflicted country folk, whereas the Catholic version is always a genuine spiritual feat.)

In 1597 Elizabeth Wright of Burton-on-Trent

the old woman they stript, and found behind her right sholder a thing much like the vdder of an ewe that giuth sucke with two teates, like vnto two great wartes, the one behind vnder her arme-hole, the other a hand off towardes the top of her shoulder. Being demanded how long she had those teates, she answered she was borne S0.69

The poor old woman's birthmark or defect effectively signed her death warrant.

If an obvious witch's mark was neither found nor fabricated through the use of the retractable bodkin, there was still no likelihood of the accused escaping. When Bavarian witch-hunter Jorg Abriel failed to find the incriminating mark, he simply announced that the woman looked like a witch and then tortured her until she confessed.70

(The Devil's mark can be seen - and no doubt was by Summers and his like - as the satanic mockery of the stigmata, the marks of Jesus' crucifixion that have been witnessed to appear on the side, head, feet and hands of the Catholic devout, and are often associated with sainthood. For example, the Franciscan Capuchin monk Padre Pio of Pietrelcina [d. 1968, aged eighty-one], who was said to have bled from his miraculously wounded hands every day for fifty years and worked many miracles, was canonized by Pope John Paul II on 16 June 2002. However, the phenomenon of stigmata raises some interesting questions: as it is impossible to crucify a man by hammering nails through his palms, as depicted in most religious works of art - the skin would tear and he would fall to the ground - why do stigmatics usually bleed from their palms?)

However, to the Inquisition, the Devil's marks were proof of the greatest sin of all, visiting the Sabbat where they made a pact with the Devil himself. According to received wisdom about such matters, the individual members of a local coven would slip out at night - perhaps leaving their spouses asleep in the marital bed, all innocent of the enormity of their actions, a broom now lying in their place. One by one the witches sloped off to a remote or hidden place, a clearing deep in a forest or a cave (preferably one originally dedicated to a pagan goddess), where they met, feasted, drank and revelled on occasions that were not even saints' days. According to a contemporary French writer, `Mere clowning and japery are mixed up with circumstances of extremest horror; childishness and folly with loathsome abominations'." Here, too, they were supposed to encounter the terrifying figure of Satan himself, rearing up from the shadows in the guise of a great horned goat, usually with a giant phallus which was sometimes even admitted to be artificial, a dildo orfascinum. The new witch, no doubt in a pitiful state of fear and excitement, had to affirm his or her dedication to the Devil by kissing his backside, and/or perhaps signing the official pact with their blood. They might then receive the distinguishing satanic mark - although clearly some already had them, having borne them since birth - and the entertainment might then consist of orgiastic coupling before the bedraggled and exhausted coven slunk home and slid once again between the marital sheets. But the evil deed had been done, and their soul was literally no longer their own.

Sometimes, if the Sabbat - and even Summers is careful to state that it was `wholly unconnected with the Jewish festival' '12 although in the eyes of many medieval people it almost certainly was linked, as anti-Semitism was rife - was far away, the witches would ride on broomsticks. Summers admits the illusion of flying was frequently brought on by the use of hallucinogenic ointment, rubbed on the legs before sitting astride the broomstick. The witch may have gone nowhere except in her imagination, but that was good enough for her accusers. In others cases she was said to ride `upon certain beasts along with the pagan goddess Diana',73 which rather says it all.

The satanic pact (of which more later) was always, we are led to believe, a triumph of hope over experience - other witches' experience, that is. For the Devil might hold out any glittering promise, but it was as well to realize he is also `the Father of Lies' and will always fail even his most stalwart devotees - in the end, when it matters most.

In that, however, the Devil was not alone. Many of the accused witches were promised by the Inquisition that if they confessed they would be released with a fine. When they were condemned to the pyre they shrieked that they had been tricked. Once again there was not much to choose between the Church and Satan himself.

It is impossible to know how many of the accused were Luciferan challengers of the status quo or real Satanists: clearly some were merely `wise women' or `cunning men', local herbalists and casters of spells, while others were probably adherents to a form of the old goddess or fertility god religion: indeed, the descriptions of a typical Sabbat, as outlined above, seem to echo the ancients' celebrations of Diana or Pan. Perhaps some of the `Sabbats' were simply the equivalent of the modern swingers' party - merry-making, boozing and wife-swapping - or even more innocently, just a spot of dancing and feasting away from the prying eyes of the clergy, or so they hoped. Life was grim, short and brutish enough in those days, in any case, so why not let off steam deep in the forest at night?

However, common sense dictates that some of the accused were Satanists, were involved in casting spells to harm others, if for no better reason than that such people always exist, everywhere. Spite and superstition together will always produce 'witches', although not necessarily at an organized level. And ironically, as the witch craze deepened and spread, no doubt there was an exponential increase in the number of genuine Devil worshippers. After all, how could even Old Nick himself be any worse than the Inquisition? Who wouldn't be tempted to side with the opposition as the madness circled ever closer and you could almost feel the sparks of the great fires on your skin? Despite rumours to the contrary, Satan might, just might, prove a loyal master, rewarding the faithful with material support - and even the all-important magical release from jail, rack and pyre.

No one will ever know exactly how many of the recentlyestimated 100,000 accused were genuine witches and who was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time - although the records of individual cases make it horribly, pitifully clear that most were just victims. Their own confessions to even the most heinous and blatant Devil worship meant absolutely nothing.

One eyewitness, Weyer, wrote that the condemned `were slaughtered with the most refined tortures that tyrants could invent, beyond human endurance. And this cruelty is continued until the most innocent are forced to confess themselves guilty.'74 At Eichstatt in 1637 a woman who was arrested on charges of dealings with the Devil initially `laughed heartily', declaring she had rather die than admit to any such nonsense, and that she had lived a decent life with her husband and eight children for over twenty years. `Three weeks later she died under torture, confessing that she was in love with the devil, that she killed one of her children at his bidding, and that at least 45 of her neighbours were fellow Satanists' 75

Usually the poorer heretics were killed off first, while - as ever - the rich accused could usually buy their way out of trouble, as the following contemporary account of the persecution in France in 1459 makes clear:

In this year, in the town of Arras and country of Artois, arose, through a terrible and melancholy chance, an opinion called, I know not why, the Religion of Vaudoise. This sect consisted, it is said, of certain persons, both men and women, who, under cloud of night, by the power of the devil, repaired to some solitary spot, amid woods and deserts, where the devil appeared before them in human form - save that his visage is never perfectly visible to them - read to the assembly a book of his ordinances, informing them how he could be obeyed; distributed a very little money and a plentiful meal, which was concluded by a scene of general profligacy; after which each one of the party was conveyed home to her or his own habitation.

On accusations of access to such acts of madness, several creditable persons of the town of Arras were seized and imprisoned along with some foolish women and persons of little consequence. These were so horribly tortured that some of them admitted the truth of the whole accusation, and said, besides, that they had seen and recognized in their nocturnal assembly many persons of rank, prelates, seigneurs, and governors of bailliages and cities, being such names as the examiners had suggested to the persons examined, while they constrained them by torture to impeach the persons to whom they belonged. Several of those who had been thus informed against were arrested, thrown into prison, and tortured for so long a time that they also were obliged to confess what was charged against them. After this those of mean condition were executed and inhumanly burnt, while the richer and more powerful of the accused ransomed themselves by sums of money, to avoid the punishment and the shame attending to it. Many even of those also confessed being persuaded to take that course by the interrogators, who promised them indemnity for life and fortune. Some there were, of a truth, who suffered with marvellous patience and constancy the torments inflicted on them, and would confess nothing imputed to their charge; but they, too, had to give large sums to the judges, who exacted that such of them as, notwithstanding their mishandling, were still able to move, should banish themselves from that part of the country ... It ought not to be concealed that the whole accusation was a strategem of wicked men for their own covetous purposes, and in order, by these false accusations and forced confessions, to destroy the life, fame [good reputation], and fortune of wealthy persons .76

The possibilities for blackmail must have been particularly tempting when the Inquisitors arrived in one's neighbourhood. To demand money rather than make a formal charge of witchcraft would no doubt have occurred to a great many during the witch craze - although it is unlikely that such transactions were recorded.

According to the Inquisitors' handbook, the Hammer of the Witches by one of the most nightmarish partnerships of all time, Heinrich Kramer (1430-1505) and Jakob Sprenger (1436-95) - of whom Summers, their only English translator to date," heartily approves as `erudite' - torture was to be known as `the Question'. It was to be used `lightly' at first to extract a confession - sometimes, indeed, merely showing the accused the instruments of torture succeeded in this - although what the Inquisitors meant by `light torture' is not what the victims would have understood. A woman from Constance admitted to causing storms by pouring water into a hole after she `had first been exposed to the very gentlest questions, being suspended hardly clear of the ground by her thumbs.'78

Records often claimed that confessions were given freely, without recourse to torture - sine tortura et extra locum torturae - 'without torture and even out of sight of the instruments of torture'. But what this meant in practice was that the victims were simply taken into another room and given the choice of confessing there and then or being returned to the torture chamber and put to `the Question' without mercy.

One Rebecca Lemp wrote heartrending letters to her husband both before and after torture, revealing that even in extremis she had fears for her soul. At first, as she languished in the dungeons, she seemed confident, writing

My dearly beloved Husband, be not troubled. Were I to be charged by thousands of accusations, I am innocent, else may all the demons in hell come and tear me to pieces. Were they to pulverize me, cut me in a thousand pieces, I could not confess anything. Therefore do not be alarmed; before my conscience and before my soul I am innocent. Will I be tortured? I don't believe it, since I am not guilty of anything.79

She was tortured, five times, after which she wrote,

O thou, chosen of my heart, must I be parted from thee, though entirely innocent? If so, may God be followed throughout eternity by my reproaches. They force one and make one confess, they have so tortured me ... Husband, send me something that I may die, or I must expire under the torture ... Send me something, else I may peril even my soul x0

Note that to this poor soul the greater sin would be to confess to crimes of witchcraft, though wholly innocent, than to commit suicide. We do not know her fate, but almost certainly we can guess what happened to her, unless somehow her husband did manage to smuggle her the means with which to end her agonies.

Prisoners of the Inquisition who did kill themselves, died of their injuries or of being eaten alive by rats in the dungeons - which happened often, as their suppurating wounds attracted vermin - were said to have been killed by the Devil, `for so did Divine justice dispose'." For their part, the Inquisitors were absolved from all sin and culpability: when a victim died under torture, Pope Urban IV urged the Inquisitors to absolve each other. He declared they were innocent in the sight of God.82

Although on the whole most `witches' were women, and poor women at that, some rich men were arraigned, especially in areas where the Inquisition rapidly spiralled out of control, with each successive confession implicating another dozen or so people, and so on.

Elsewhere the richer you were the more likely you were to escape. However, the following extract is from the letter of Burgomaster Johannes Junius, a wealthy man whose property was seized. The note, which was smuggled out of Bamberg prison in 1628, while familiar enough to researchers, never fails to be heartrendingly poignant:

Many hundred thousand good-nights, dearly beloved daughter Veronica. Innocent have I come into prison, innocent have I been tortured, innocent I must die. For whoever comes into the witch prison must become a witch or be tortured until he invents something out of his head and - God pity him - bethinks himself of something. I will tell you how it has gone with me ... The executioner put the thumb screw on me, both hands bound together, so that the blood ran out at the nails and everywhere, so that for four weeks I could not use my hands, as you can see from the writing ... Thereafter they first stripped me, bound my hands behind me, and drew me up in the torture [strappadol. Then I thought heaven and earth were at an end; eight times did they draw me up and let me fall again, so that I suffered terrible agony. The executioner said, `Sir, I beg of you, for God's sake confess something, whether it be true or not. Invent something, for you cannot endure the torture which you will be put to, and even if you bear it all, yet you will not escape' . . . Now, dear child, here you have all my confession, for which I must die. And they are sheer lies and made-up things, so help me God. For all this I was forced to say through the fear of the torture which was threatened beyond what I had already endured. For they never leave off with the torture till one confesses something; be he never so good, he must be a witch. Nobody escapes ... Dear child, keep this letter secret so that people do not find it, else I shall be tortured most piteously and the jailers beheaded. So strictly is it forbidden ... I have taken several days to write this; my hands are both lame. I am in a sad plight. Good night, for your father Johannes Junius will never see you more ... Dear child, six have confessed against me at once ... all false, through compulsion, as they told me, and begged my forgiveness in God's name before they were executed.83

Note that the `executioner' seemed to have retained a modicum of decency as he begged the old man to invent some confession, although it was made clear that escape was hopeless in any case. And even in his agonies, this good man remarks not only about the danger to himself, should his letter fall into Inquisitorial hands, but also to his jailers, who would be beheaded.

The usual plan was to torture the victims until they confessed to trafficking with the Devil, then torture them further to elicit a list of accomplices, who were then pulled in for questioning, and so the process began again - until whole districts fell to the hysteria. One woman said to her interrogator:

I never dreamed that by means of the torture a person could be brought to the point of telling such lies as I have told. I am not a witch, and I have never seen the devil, and still I had to plead guilty to myself and denounce others.'84

When a cleric urged another woman to retract her accusations of innocent villagers, she answered forcibly:

Father, look at my legs! They are like fire - ready to burn up - so excruciating is the pain. I could not stand to have so much as a fly touch them, to say nothing of submitting again to the torture. I would a hundred times rather die than endure such frightful agony again. I cannot describe to any human being how terrific the pain actually is 85

The whole procedure was deliberately calculated to exacerbate the maximum of both terror and pain. No doubt some accused chained up in their cells could hear the shrieks and pleadings of those writhing in the torture chamber - but in any case it is likely that the prisoners would suffer the trauma of witnessing their cell-mates' post-torture distress when they rejoined them in the dungeons. Next the accused would be roughly dragged into the torture chamber and shown the instruments that might at any moment be put into use, and then finally face the Question itself, which might take the form of the strappado (as in the case of Herr Junius, above), which involved hauling the accused into the air by the arms, pinioned behind the back, then suddenly letting them drop to a foot or so above the ground. Shoulders and arms were routinely dislocated. Otherwise, flesh was torn from the body with pincers, feet and legs were smashed to pulp in `the Boot', limbs were broken and sinews torn on the rack, feet and hands were roasted over braziers, besides whippings and beatings administered routinely. One woman had flaming brimstone held to her genitals as she hung in the strappado. Most women suffered rape and worse even before they even reached the torture chamber.

That was `merely' the physical aspect of the torture. Mental torture included the build-up of terror or being forced to witness the rape or torture of close family members, perhaps children under ten (categorized as `infants'). Usually children were tortured without much preamble because of their susceptibility to the torment of the whole experience, not the least having been wrenched for reasons they could never understand from their families. Usually, though, they were fair game, and soon persuaded, one way or another, to incriminate many others, including their own mothers and fathers. Being tortured on the testimony of your eight-year-old, knowing that this child had suffered abominably, must have added enormously to the victims' agony. Such testimony was acceptable in a witch trial, but in no other kind of court, even at that time.

The records of the infamous Spanish Inquisition, based at Toledo, reveal that

some victims were prevented from confessing until the lust of their tormentors had been gratified. Their torture went on for days or weeks beyond the point where they had wholly broken down, and pleaded to be told what to say, so they could say it 86

As the European Inquisitors tended to use the more obviously brutal forms of torture compared to the methods of interrogation utilized in Britain, it might be thought that the English and Scottish witchfinders were generally more compassionate. In fact, this was hardly the case: in Britain tortures such as dunking in water ('swimming the witch'), binding tightly with ropes, sleep deprivation ('walking the witch') and so on were the order of the day. Sometimes the mob devised more hideous means of dealing with the accused. In Catton, Suffolk in 1603, an eighty-year-old woman was set upon by a gang of violent men, who punched and threw her about, flashed gunpowder in her face, and then hurled her with force on a specially constructed seat `in the which they had stuck daggers and knives with sharp points upwards, [and] they often times struck her down upon the same stool whereby she was sore pricked and grievously hurt.'x' The vivid mental picture conjured by this terse report summons the not dissimilar image of Nazi bullyboys setting fire to old Jews' beards, or dragging naked middleaged women through the streets by their hair - images that haunt long after the photograph or film footage has been removed from sight. It comes as a shock, however, to realize that intensely horrible though those particular Nazi atrocities were - and remain in the mind's eye - even they were not quite so disgusting as what happened to that anonymous eighty-year-old woman in the quiet English countryside of the 1600s.

The sheer inventiveness and sadism of the tortures and the fact that most of the accused were women reveals the real agenda of the Inquisition, as expressed by the truly demonic double act, Kramer and Sprenger. Their Hammer of the Witches makes it conclusively clear that to them, at least, witchcraft was a gender-specific crime. They write of the evils of women in openly hostile terms, speaking of them being `so beautiful to look at' but `contaminating to the touch', with sweet voices that `entice passersby and kill them .. . by emptying their purses, consuming their strength and causing them to forsake God'. To the authors of the Inquisitorial handbook, a woman is a vampire, and a `curse worse than the devil'.

The Hammer of the Witches was designed to appear authoritative, being accompanied by a papal bull from Innocent VIII, supporting the book in its campaign - virtually a crusade in itself - to eradicate witches, root and branch. There is also a supportive letter from a group of theologians from the University of Cologne, but recent scholarship has suggested it was partly forged x8 And other inconsistences indicate that the wider picture of witch-hunting was at least a little different from the accepted view. For example, Kramer claimed to have tried nearly a hundred women in the Tyrol in the early 1480s, half of whom died by fire. But the surviving records tell a different story: Kramer arrived and began inciting the populace to implicate their neighbours. Eight women were convicted and burnt, but both the local archduke and the bishop remained sceptical - the latter calling Kramer a `senile old fool' and expelling him from the town.

The reason for the bishop's hostility was that Kramer had rarely accused the women of actual diabolism: on the whole they stood trial for using love spells. In the case of Helen Scheuberin, he attacked her on the basis of her promiscuity, the details of which he seemed particularly anxious to hear until the bishop's representative ordered him to stop. The townspeople were so horrified by his blatantly salacious and perverted raison d'etre that they complained to the authorities, who threw him out. Kramer then took to composing the handbook for more successful witch-hunters, infecting thousands, for generations, with his own brand of sexist sado-masochism. It found a ready audience, however, among Catholics who had always been encouraged to `offer up their suffering to God' but not their joy, and whose every visit to Church provided yet another encounter with the images of Christ's bloody and terrible death by torture. The implacable wrath and blood lust of the patriarchal God was surely nowhere more evident than in his demand for the crucifixion of his own son.

Kramer drew on several earlier sources, particularly Johannes Dominicus' Lectiones super Ecclesiastes (1380), which blames the `natural' vices of women for their openness to the Devil's influence - greed, carnality and so on. Like Eve, women are light-hearted and therefore easily swayed by demons. Dominicus, however, had never mentioned witchcraft.

On the other hand, another of Kramer's sources, Johannes Nider's Formaricus (1435), does associate outright diabolism with women's alleged natural sins - particularly that of insubordination, as evidenced in the rare occasions of their dressing in male clothing or carrying weapons. Pretending to be close to God was particularly singled out for male opprobrium. `It is presumption, deception and rebellion that are his targets.'89 In Kramer's hands, however, Nider is misquoted: women themselves become inherently evil, especially their propensity for carnality.

In a lather of the most embarrassingly obvious Freudian fear, Kramer emphasizes the anti-male crimes of women, such as their ability to make penises disappear (if only by means of illusion, the witches' glamour - an interesting addendum, rendering such an accusation open to an entirely subjective interpretation). Perhaps this primitive terror of impotence was behind the handbook's stress on the Inquisitors taking precautions against the witch's `evil eye', such as erecting a screen between themselves and the miscreant in the courtroom. (Although the authorities were assured many times that they alone had the power to withstand the witches deadly glance, few of the accusers felt particularly confident of this.) Another mode of protection was to wear a bag of salt consecrated on Palm Sunday; to avoid making eye contact with the witch, and to cross oneself as much as possible when in their jail. One Peter of Berne was careless, and plummeted down a flight of stone steps - clearly the result of a witch's enchantments, for he tortured her until she admitted it 90

Women who nag or usurp male authority were top of the Hammer's hit list, for it was assumed that they must be witches. At the same time, husbands had long been actively encouraged to abuse their wives to the last degree. Friar Cherubino's fifteenthcentury Rules of Marriage said to husbands:

Scold her sharply, bully and terrify her. And if this still doesn't work ... take up a stick and beat her soundly, for it is better to punish the body and correct the soul than to damage the soul and spare the body ... Then readily beat her, not in rage but out of charity and concern for her soul, so that beating will redound to your merit.9'

Saint Thomas Aquinas remarked that a wife is lower than a slave, for at least a slave can be freed, but `Woman is in subjection according to the law of nature, but a slave is not.'92 Presumably the `law of nature' means that as women are generally physically weaker than men, they should and must be bullied. Up until the late nineteenth-century it was legal for a British man to beat his wife as long as the instrument he used - a whip, cane or rod - was not thicker than his thumb, the original `rule of thumb'. As Walker says, `Wives had little help from the law; they were legally classified with minors and idiots, and were consigned to the custody of their husbands.'93 They were femmes couvertes, women whose personalities were legally `covered' by their husbands'. It was in this context that female rebels, children of Lucifer but not of Satan - however mild their actions might seem today - were hounded as witches.

But another group were perceived as undermining the very fabric of godly society, and were therefore singled out for the harshest of treatment - midwives. Unfortunately, the very word comes from the Anglo-Saxon med-wyf, meaning `wise-woman' or `witch'. The Church's line on midwives was neatly summed up by Kramer and Sprenger: `No one does more cunning harm to the Catholic faith than midwives', explaining that they seize the newborn child and baptize him in the name of the Devil with a magical rite by the kitchen hearth." Unsurprisingly, Montague Summers agrees, but he is merely voicing a view that is alive and well, especially in twentyfirst-century American fundamentalist circles, for midwives were always associated not only with the mysteries of birth, but also procuring abortion. Kramer and Sprenger's statement, if modified to read: `No one does more harm to the Christian faith than abortionists', possesses a remarkably modem resonance.

In the ancient world, midwives were highly regarded: in Egypt they were ruled by Isis Hathor in her Sevenfold manifestation, who gave every child its seven souls. `An earthly midwife is a sort of fairy godmother, with a spiritual tie to each child she brings into the world'95 - the polar opposite of the demonized Christian midwife. In ancient Rome there were three types of midwife, all associated with the women's temple and linked to the Greek Horae, temple servants on earth, but midwives to the gods in heaven. The obstetrix assisted at the birth; the nutrix or `nurturer' taught the mysteries of nursing and encouraged the milk to flow, while the priestesses of Ceres, the ceraria, took charge of the religious rituals surrounding the birth. All were honoured members of society.

In Christendom, because women were deemed to be sacer or untouchable after giving birth, they were not allowed to enter church for forty days afterwards. Being unclean, only other women could deal with their physical and emotional needs at this time, so female midwives were essential to the wellbeing of both mother and child. But medieval clerics hated them, mainly because they echoed the era of goddess-worship, when women had power over their own lives. The detestation of midwives procuring abortions was not out of compassion for the unborn child, but because it implied a sort of empowered feminine freemasonry.

Women in general were always suspected of using enchantments in everyday life. The Dominican friar Johann Herolt thundered:

Most women belie their Catholic faith with charms and spells, after the fashion of Eve their first mother, who believed the devil speaking through the serpent rather than God himself ... Any woman by herself knows more of such superstitions and charms than a hundred men 96

Spells and potions were the only known cures before the sixteenth century - indeed, the clergy believed that the only way to heal the sick was through exorcism. Yet the great pioneering doctor Paracelsus admitted that witches had taught him everything he 17 However, whereas a male conjuror was knew about healing. permitted to heal by the use of the magical arts, women were put to death for doing the same.

Besides abortion, any form of contraception and the easing of birth-pangs was deemed anathema. In 1559 the Parliamentary Articles of Enquiry commanded local church officials to report the use of `charms, sorcery, enchantments, invocations, witchcrafts, soothsaying' or similar `especially in the time of women's travails.' (My emphasis). Unbelievably, in 1591, the Scottish noblewoman Eufame Macalyne was committed to the stake simply for seeking palliatives for the agonies of childbirth from a midwife. In 1554 midwives were expressly forbidden to use any means to alleviate childbed suffering other than prayers that `may stand with the laws and ordinances of the Catholic Church'. 8

Up until the twentieth century the view of the Christian patriarchy was that God had cursed Eve so that she and all women throughout history would give birth in pain, so anything that eased the agony went expressly against the will of God. When women died in their travails, the Church took this to be an example of God's `continuing judgement on the sex' 99

When the nineteenth-century James Simpson initiated the use of ether and chloroform in childbirth, there was a massive outcry across the Christian world. Clergymen denounced it as a `sinful denial of God's wishes',10° while Scottish ministers asserted that such pain-control would be `vitiating against the primal curse against woman'.101

Barbara Walker notes the words of a New England minister: `Chloroform is a decoy of Satan, apparently offering itself to bless women; but in the end it will harden society and rob God of the deep earnest cries which arise in time of trouble, for help.' 102 Walker comments briskly: `With the usual half-concealed sadism of patriarchal morality, he was really saying that female screams of pain gave God pleasure, and men must see to it that God was not deprived of this.' 103 (As we have seen, it was none other than Queen Victoria who set the seal of approval on the use of chloroform in childbirth, effectively silencing at least the British clergy once and for all.)

In this context it is particularly interesting that Kramer and Sprenger emphasized the importance of making a witch shed tears. Her screams were not enough, she must be seen by the Inquisitor to weep copiously. If a witch failed to shed tears during torture she was guilty, being urged to cry `by the loving tears shed by Christ on the cross'. She was guilty if she did, of course, because it proved that the devil `gave her the gift of tears to mislead the judges" 104 round and round in a sickening Kafkaesque whirl of mad logic. Across Europe `taciturnity' was a crime punishable by burning, although so was virtually everything else a witch was accused of, and in England by peine forte et dure - being crushed under a board loaded with heavy weights.

Witches lost everything. Their money and property was instantly forfeit to the Church, which grew fat on the profits of human misery on an unheard-of scale. The accused even had to rely on `Christian charity' for the bits of mouldy bread that passed for meals in jail and it was usual for the Inquisition to demand payment for the services of the torturer, even for the wood on which the condemned were to burn. If the condemned refused to agree to parting with their money or were in no fit state to do so, their families would have to pay up.

Even the average Christian was contaminated by the Church's perversion of the truth. Although it was once widely accepted that witchcraft was a delusion, after Pope Innocent's reign, it became a heresy not to believe in its reality. Anyone who claimed witchcraft was not real must also be ranked as a witch. Inquisitor Heinrich von Schultheis declared: `He that opposes the extermination of the witches with one single word cannot expect to remain unscathed.' 105

Whether a witch confessed or held out, wept or remained taciturn, implicated others or refused to accuse her neighbours, there was usually only one way her torments would end - with yet more torture, on the stake, in front of a baying crowd.

Many of the condemned had been so badly injured during the `Question' that they had to be carried or pulled in a cart to the pyre: Father Urbain Grandier (whose case will be examined later), who had suffered terribly in the `Boot', was conveyed to his grisly fate on a hurdle and had to crawl with his shattered legs to the pyre.

Some, especially women, had their tongues ripped out before they were forced on the walk of shame to their deaths to prevent them from shouting out accusations against their jailers. It seemed few cared whether they had been racked or whipped, but the same folk would be horrified if they learnt of sexual abuse.

Although under other circumstances, occasionally miscreants were afforded the mercy of being strangled before being committed to the flames, few received this solace when convicted of witchcraft. As nothing could be worse than trafficking with the Devil, so the death penalty had to take the most hideous form imaginable, affording the mob - whose hysteria effectively blanked out the uniquely abominable stench of roasting flesh - the ultimate delight of witnessing the living hell of another human being. Some witches were disembowelled before being tied to the stake, and, incredibly, even then they sometimes survived long enough to suffer an hour or so of the flames.

Many children died in the fires, being `imps of Satan', and one woman was burnt because she had given birth to the Devil's child. A French woman gave birth while writhing in the flames, and somehow managed to throw the living baby clear of the inferno. The crowd threw it back.

As the madness swallowed whole swathes of Europe (before being transplanted across the Atlantic to the New World), the accusations became more surreal. A cockerel was immolated for crowing at an inappropriate time (although in fact cocks do crow at all hours of the day, as the accusers must have known full well) - obviously a tool of Satan - and a horse met a fiery end for having been taught how to count by pawing the ground, which was clearly sorcery. But it was on the whole stinking human fat that coated the walls of dwellings in many a village.

In England the preferred method of despatching witches was hanging, in itself something of a craze as the over-zealous Protestant `Witchfinder General' Matthew Hopkins took command in the seventeenth century. In Scotland, though, witches were usually burnt, the last one to meet such an end being in 1727, although unofficially there were later examples. Even the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, declared `The giving up of [belief in] witchcraft is in effect the giving up of the Bible."-`-

Wesley would be pleased - a belief in witchcraft is still alive and well, especially among fundamentalists who view liberals, freethinkers, most other religions and, of course, all pagans as no better than outright Satanists. Legally, however, the situation has changed, although the end of the mass persecution of witches was signalled by the execution of Alice Molland at Exeter in 1684, and the conviction of Jane Walhern in Herefordshire in 1712. However, an interesting potential postscript was suggested by a letter in the Daily Mail of 9 December 2004 in response to a reader's query about the meaning of an inscription on a tombstone in the old churchyard at Pitsea Mount, near Basildon in Essex, which reads: `Ann Freeman, died 20th March 1879. Here lies a weak and sinful worm, the vilest of her race, saved through God's electing love, his free and sovereign grace.' Essex man Neil Fisher responded: `.. . local legend has it that the damning inscription ... reflects the fact that Ann Freeman was the last witch to be tried and put to death in England ...' He adds: `For such poignant and powerful words to be put upon a person's place of rest must have been testimony to some alleged evil commitment.' Perhaps the key is the simple word `alleged'. In any case, she seems to have repented and been `saved', presumably at the last moment, which is doubtless why she is buried in holy ground. But this poses the question: how many more `last witches' were there, recorded or unrecorded? How many more are still to suffer? If the firebombing of a pagan bookshop - which also stocked works on Christian mysticism - in the north of England by fundamentalists in the 1980s had resulted in deaths, would they have been the last witches to be `executed' in Britain?

In fact, the last woman to be arrested under the 1735 Witchcraft Act in Britain was Spiritualist medium Helen Duncan in 1944. Summers spoke for many churchmen (even in the twentyfirst century) when he declared: `Camouflage it how you will, Spiritualism and its kindred superstition ... [is not a] "new religion" . . . but the old Witchcraft' .117 The case of Mrs Duncan, which is complicated by evidence of the involvement of British Intelligence, unfortunately lies outside this investigation 1`8 but suffice it to say that Summers' righteous fulmination about the `superstition' and `charlatanism' of Spiritualism sits uncomfortably with one who accepts without question the authenticity of religious relics and the miracles of the saints.

Having examined the Church's genocide of the Cathars, and its three-century gender-genocide of the witches, it is time to turn to the men who are believed to have made a pact with the Devil, to have sold their souls for material gain and power. But, like the vast majority of the witches, are these also merely misunderstood and maligned?