Sunday, November 27, 2011

Federici on witches and animals

This is taken from Silvia Federici's "The Great Witch Hunt", a variation of this is also printed in Caliban and the Witch, p. 194.

Regardless of age (but not class), in the witch trials
there is a constant identification between female sexuality and bestiality. This is
suggested by copulation with the goat-god (one of the representations of the Devil),
the infamous kiss sub cauda, and the charge that the witches kept a variety of
animals, called "imps" or "familiars," with whom they entertained a particularly
intimate relation. These were cats, dogs, hares, frogs the witch cared for, presumably
suckling them from special teats; other animals, too, played a crucial part in her life
as instruments of the Devil: goats and (night)mares flew her to the Sabbath, toads
provided her with poisons for her concoctions – such was the presence of animals in
the witches’ world that one must conclude they too were being put on trial.35

This was possibly a response to the indiscriminating, "bestial" practices that
characterized the sexual life of rural Europe, which remained a capital offense long
after the witch-hunt was over. In an era that was beginning to worship reason and
draw a rigid divide between the physical and the spiritual, animals too were subject to
a drastic devaluation, and reduced to mere brute matter, the perennial symbol of the
worse human instincts. No crime, then, would inspire more horror than copulation
with a beast, a true attack on the ontological foundations of a human nature that
increasingly was identified with its most immaterial aspects.

But the continuity between female sexuality and animality postulated by the
imagery of the hunt also insinuated that women are at a (slippery) crossroad between
man and animals; for what in men appeared as a temporary fall, an eclipse of reason
produced by the orgasmic effects of the sexual act, in the case of women was
elevated to an inherent condition, as it was agreed that women are especially carnal
and weakminded. Thus the alter ego of the witch was the toad, the most frequently
cited familiar, which being a symbol of the vagina, perfectly synthesizes sex, bestiality, femaleness, and evil.