VIII

THE SOCIAL USE OF THE POST-GRADUATE MOTHER

Of all the dark pages of human history, none is quite so black as that which records the treatment of "witches." A few of these victims of superstition were men, but the great majority were women; so that the very word witch has come to have a feminine suggestion. As Lecky truly says: "It is probable that no class of victims endured suffering so unalloyed and so intense" as that of those condemned to torture and to death as sorcerers and sorceresses. The martyrs for religious belief died rejoicing in the faith of a compensating and eternal heaven. The victims of popular ignorance, who suffered because freer in thought and more intelligent in action than their contemporaries, were sustained by the dignity of conscious rectitude and a superior perception of truth. The sufferers from political oppression, and from racial prejudice and the cruelty it has engendered, have generally possessed some relief in the loyalty of comrades and in the affections of family life. But witches were usually persuaded by the terrible ordeals to which they were subjected that they deserved their fate. The disordered condition of the public mind reacted upon their own consciousness to make them feel accursed of God

and bound slaves to Satan, and horribly sure that they must go from the tortures of court and of church on earth to the everlasting torment of hell.

Why were middle-aged and old women, with a few young maidens, singled out as the special victims of that terrible mania of superstition which for fifteen hundred years lighted lurid flames of burning humanity on innumerable hilltops and inspired a malignity and ingenuity of torture unmatched in the whole realm of cruelty? There were two reasons. One, and the chief reason, was that hatred of women which asceticism developed. When Cato declared that "if the world. were only free from women, men would not be without converse of gods," he but expressed the general if rather good-natured contempt for women which the masculine classic civilization engendered. But when the early Fathers of the Christian Church denounced women as active centres of evil influence, they added hatred to contempt, and fear to indifference, and hence placed themselves in the realm of maniacal delusion respecting women. In Chrysostom's famous saying, "Women are a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination and a painted ill," he softened by oratorical phrase that horror of women felt by the ascetic monk. To that unclean and morbid creature, who inflicted torments upon himself in a nightmare of inverted morality, "woman was the door of hell" and the "source of human ills." To that ascetic monk who believed that to be most miserable was to be most holy, all the charm and joy of womanhood was a delusion and a

snare. So far did this hatred of woman extend that in the sixth century at least one provincial Council of the Church forbade women to receive the Eucharist into their naked hands on account of their impurity! By reason of this strange perversion of religious doctrine the beneficent ideal of woman's spiritual freedom, as attested by the early Christian Church, was later on almost nullified. Woman escaped from the bondage of ethnic faiths, by which her heirship to spiritual responsibility and spiritual advantage was made to depend upon her family relationship, when Christianity made Jew and Gentile, patrician and plebeian, master and slave, man and woman, alike equal at the Altar of the Church. This Magna Charta of spiritual liberty which gave woman a soul of her own promised a new freedom and privilege all around the circle of human rights and powers. But when asceticism began to dominate the ideals of holiness, woman again passed under the yoke of bondage and became subject to a new and more terrible form of restraint. It was this feeling against womanhood in general, only softened by the attitude of the Christian Church toward the women who served its own interests outside the family life in Religious Houses, that made possible the torture and execution of so many helpless old women during the dark and middle ages. Feeble, often seriously diseased, generally past the time when they could demonstrate their usefulness to the common sense, these old women were peculiarly susceptible to the suggestion of hysteria and morbid fear which marked the witchcraft delusion. We read that over seven thousand victims

were burned at Trèves; and that a single bishop of Germany, in a single year, ordered the execution of more than eight hundred poor creatures. In France in one execution four hundred witches suffered death; and in Italy a thousand were thus murdered judicially in one province. The Reformation did not end this form of persecution; in many cases it increased its violence. In Geneva five hundred victims perished during three months; and Luther declared he would "have no compassion upon these witches, he would burn them all." In Scotland, mystical and theology-mad, the persecutions were peculiarly atrocious; and it is common knowledge how the superstition crossed the seas and gave the shame of Protestantism to New England. Even the reformer Wesley believed both in witchcraft and in its severe punishment by the saints of the Church declaring that "the giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving up of the Bible." Not until the first quarter of the eighteenth century did the rational sense of mankind do away with this monstrous inhumanity. So great and wise a man as Sir Matthew Hale hung two witches in 1664, and the last execution in England occurred in 1712, thus linking bigotry to the age of reason.1

The belief in magic, however, dates far back of Christianity and belongs to an almost universal tendency of the human mind to ascribe to supernatural causes both personal and social calamities. In this tendency to supernaturalism women have had their share not only as believers, but as active agents of 1See W. E. H. Lecky, History of Rationalism.

supernal powers. Among undeveloped peoples, although there may be no women priests, there are women prophetesses, and sorceresses divide fearful honors with sorcerers. The proportion of witches to wizards is indeed far more equal in primitive life than is the balance between the sexes in the later period of witchcraft. As Otis T. Mason well says, in ancient times 2 "women were thought to be more persuasive, acute and dangerous than men for lobby work between worlds." Hence, in the early days, witches were spoken fair and honorably entreated to use their powers for the benefit of mankind. Dr. Mason adds: "Women hear better, see better, are better talkers than men, and can therefore become successful conjurers of fate." Inasmuch also as "they cook better," or more frequently, than men, their witch's cauldron may contain, beside "toil and trouble," some special concoction for the aid of faithful friends. The Zuni Indian sings:

"The Sun is the father of all,

The Earth is the mother of men,
The Water is their grandfather,
The Fire is their grandmother."

And the picturesque personalizing of nature by the child-mind of the race gave to women a place among the gods equal to that of men. Hestia, the sister of Zeus, was the special protector of the domestic hearth and worshipped with most sacred rites. The Roman Venus, the Greek Aphrodite, the Phoenician Astarte,

'Otis T. Mason, Woman's Share in Primitive Culture, chapter The Patron of Religion.