The Contemporary Witch, the Historical Witch and the Witch Myth: The Witch, Subject of the Appropriation

of Nature and Object of the Domination of Nature Author(s): Silvia Bovenschen, Jeannine Blackwell, Johanna Moore, Beth Weckmueller Source: New German Critique, No. 15 (Autumn, 1978), pp. 82-119 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/487908 Accessed: 16/08/2010 15:45
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The Contemporary Witch, the Historical Witch and the Witch Myth: The Witch, Subject of the Appropriation of Nature

and Object of the Domination of Nature

by Silvia Bovenschen
I. The Contemporary Witch The Witch Returns

The topic of "witches" has become fashionable, has indeed already acquired a fatal glamour. It has even achieved scholarly legitimacy. The fact that researchers are once again concerned with the historical phenomenon of witch persecution is by no means the origin of the vital interest in the subject today: that would be the vain assumption of ivory tower scholars, researchers who, imagining their scholarship to be autonomous, have failed to notice that they are merely the rearguardof a movement. In a demonstration against the Italian abortion laws in Rome, 100,000 women shouted, "La Gioia, la gioia, la si inventa, donne si nasce, le streghe si diventa!"(*) and "Tremate. tremate, le streghe son tornate!"(**) Is the image of the witch a wish projection resulting from unrealized female potential? Are witches for feminism what Spartacus, the rebellious peasants, the French revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks are for the socialists? During the protest against a trial in Itzehoe, Germany, which was sensationally blown up by the press because the accused women were having a lesbian relationship - and the sentence was an unusually severe one women called the proceedings a witch hunt. In many feminist demonstrations the participants dress up as witches. Women's bars have names such as Blocksberg, (***) books have titles such as Hexengefliister (Witches' Whispering), a women's rock band proclaims the return of the witch ... the rumor spreads and an image crystallizes. But apparently without the explicit intention of constructing, a posteriori, the revolutionary, historical continuity of feminism. The assimilation of the witch into feminist visual and linguistic parlance happened spontaneously, not as the result of a plan. The revival of the word, the image, the motif doubtless has something to do with
(*) "Joy, joy, joy, is invented, born as a woman, made into a witch!" (**) "Tremble, tremble, the witches have returned!" (***) site of witches' rites

83

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the new women's movement (though in the old movement it hardly played a role), but not in the sense that learned women turned thoughtfully and scientifically to feminist historical archaeology, dug through several layers of history and finally discovered in the witch pogroms of the late Middle Ages proof of the oppression of women (there is, after all, enough oppression in the present). It was not the flood of theoretical historical works which initiated the frequent and exemplary use of the word and image, and brought about the astonishing renaissance of the witch. The empirical witches of today - those women who apply this term to themselves - have, at first glance, little in common with the historical witches who were burned at the stake. Until recently they did not even have a clear picture of witches' existence in the past (there was usually nothing about them mentioned in school). Since it cannot be assumed that those 100,000 women in Rome who threateningly shouted the word "witch" had appropriated that almost inaccessible historical knowledge, there must be a more direct preconceptual relationship - possibly in connection with a diffuse historical idea - between the word on the one hand and the personal .experiences of today's women on the other. The word, the image, touched a sensitive nerve, they resonated in a moment of experience far beyond their former historical significance. The true pictureof the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instantwhen it can be recognizedand is neverseen again.1 This experiential appropriation of the past differs qualitatively from that of the scholar in the archive - at least with respect to its everyday manifestation. It deals with something other than what traditional sources, data and commentary have to offer. In it are incorporated elements of historical and social fantasy which are sensitive to the underground existence of forbidden images; it is anarchical and rebellious in its rejection of chronology and historical accuracy. The past carrieswith it a temporalindexby whichit is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreementbetweenpast generations and the presentone.2 It is as if the empirical witches perceived this secret agreement Benjamin describes; as if those directly affected by the present are closer to the past than historical reflection, which can only name the desire for "redemption," would allow them to be. A theoretical interest in the prevalence of the witch image today canot, of course, be accused of trying to claim for itself autonomous historical objectivity.

1. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations (New York, 1968), p. 257. 2. Ibid., p. 256.

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it 'thewayit was.' does not meanto recognize To articulatethe pasthistorically It means to seize hold of a memoryas it flashesup at a momentof danger.3 In the interaction of phylo- and ontogenetical constituents of consciousness - in which "the individual still stands in archaic identity with its species"4 - that which male historiography omitted, suppressed, or tabooed did not simply disappear; even experiential action is at certain moments historically aware, to the extent that it elicits the collective 'return of the repressed.' This re-recollection is neither reflective, nor simply intuitive - it is possible given a continual and consistently unfulfilled longing for liberation, measured in comparison to the most blatant examples of those things which still cause suffering. The past can still seem so close only because the structures of gender-specific suppression appear to have remained so constant - even if for the moment we are relatively safe from being burned at the stake. The rediscoveredpast yields critical standardswhich are tabooed by the present. Moreover, the restoration of memory is accompaniedby the restorationof the cognitivecontentof fantasy.5 Witch mythology mediates between the historical and the empirical witch, at the juncture between the femininity syndrome and aggressive selfrepresentation. In popular myth, witches stand side by side with the ancient mother goddesses. For a long time women were afraid of being called witches, since this term belonged to the internalized repertoire of masculine invective. They succumbed to the illusion of being able to escape the fate of the witch - but those Roman demonstrators shouted "women have been made into witches." As we learned from childhood fairy tales, anyone old and a little bit eccentric could be called a witch. We all get old, and are all considered eccentric if we do not voluntarily bow to our prescribed feminine fate. When women began to deliberately assume the witch role, they were in no way behaving as spontaneously and arbitrarily as it may appear. Will-Erich Peuckert (a long time witch-hunter), for example, was always instantly reminded of witches whenever he came across any groups of rowdy women. fromvacation.He hadsomehowlandedin a one morning My assistantreturned train compartmentwhich a women's group was using for an afternoon excursion.Apparentlytheywereannoyedto havea maletraveling companion. They loudly told risquejokes, obscenitiesflew backandforth,then the whole group sang a bawdysong and verballyabusedthe man, askinghimif he could possibly give a renditionof the uncutversionof anotherraucoustune. They

3. Ibid., p. 257. 4. cf. HerbertMarcuse,Eros and Civilization (New York, 1962). 5. Ibid., p. 18.

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Bovenschen womenof the urbanuppermiddleclass,whoin thislarge were . .. upstanding group on a festive occasion got excited and whose commentsthen became extremelydaring.

And a further example: I experiencedsuch womenon anotheroccasiontoo .... It was in late spring - the womenwereout in the fieldsplanting and the birdswere chirping crops. And they outdid themselveswith obscenities.They outdid themselveswith the younger lewd and undisciplined actions;I only knowthat they undressed skirts all took their and danced half-naked.6 that off they girls, I find it to be not so much the women's actions as the way in which they are described that leaves the impression of obscenity. Inferred is the presumably eternal aspect of witchery: "I believe," says Peuckert, "that witches were already convening in earlier times - when they came together and lusted together - as women of their era and their (presumably matriarchal) culture used to do."7 Such a view would be no more than ideological and disgusting, if it did not simultaneously attest to the durability of the witch image, in this case in its masculine projection. Peuckert looks for the reason for the persistence of this image where it is usually sought, namely in female sexuality, in a "sexual compulsiveness" which stems from a "natural tendency," or better, an "innate characteristic." This reactionary antifeminist schema, based on the supposedly extremely dangerous hypertrophy of female sexuality, was already the basic tenet of the earlier witch-hunters' writings; here it is only being liberalized and presented in a watered down version. Up until recently the word witch did not have a pleasant ring to it. It evoked childhood fears - we often called old teachers whom we could not stand and whom we feared by that name. The word "witch" experienced the same transformation as the word "queer" or "proletarian": it was adopted by the person affected and used against the enemy who had introduced it. At this point, if not before, it became apparent to women that, by labelling other women "witches" (the term "bluestocking" has a similar function), they were doing the same thing as the assimilated homosexual who fingers a "pansy" in the hope that the pressure would be on the other rather than on himself. Thus, we wanted to use the expression to turn attention away from ourselves, towards others. Sartre tells a story about the young Genet who once stole something. People said, "He is a thief," and he then became a thief. In the case of Genet it was an individual act. But to the extent that women have appropriated the frightening apparition and collectively taken over the myth, the individual is freed from it.

Baroja, Die Hexe und ihre Welt (Stuttgart, 1967), p. 291. 7. Ibid., p. 295.

6. Will-ErichPeuckert, "Ergainzendes Kapitel fiber das deutscheHexenwesen,"in Julio

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The fact that women are dressing up as witches for their demonstrations and festivals also points to this mimetic approach to their own personal history through the medium of mythological suggestion. They are, to a certain extent, practicing witchcraft. The antifeminist metaphysics of sex kept conjuring up the magical demonic potential of femininity until this potential finally turned against it. Magic approaches reality via images, visions; "Like science, magic pursues aims, but seeks to achieve them by mimesis - not by progressively distancing itself from the object."8 The mimetic moment in the demonstrations exemplifies on the one hand a critique of and ironic approach to the male mystification of the female, and on the other, a relationship to history and nature which actually is unique. In the image of the witch, elements of the past and of myth oscillate, but along with them, elements of a real and present dilemma as well. In the surviving myth, nature and fleeting history are preserved. In turning to an historical image, women do not address the historical phenomenon but rather its symbolic potential: in the Thus utopianfunctionoften has a doublefoundation,thatof immersion workhasbeen performed on hope within middleof hope. Thatis, preliminary More specifically: withinthose archetypes whichstill the archaicframework. strike a chord, which are left over from the era of a mythicalconsciousness providing categories for fantasy, and contain an undevelopednonmythical surplus.9 The fantastic qualities of imagination go far beyond what theoretical discourse, hostile towards images as it is, can transmit. Fantasyis cognitive. . . in so far as it protects,againstall reason,the aspirations for the integralfulfillmentof man and naturewhich are repressedby reason. In the realmof fantasy,the unresonable imagesof freedombecome rational.10 To elevate the historical witch post festum to an archetypcal image of female freedom and vigor would be unimaginably cynical, considering the magnitude of her suffering. On the other hand, the revival of the witch's image today makes possible a resistance which was denied to historical witches. This moment of resistance is, however, contemporary and political. It is not based in mythology even though it occasionally makes use of mythological imagery. However, I find the reference to myth dangerous when it is used as proof of the eternal recurrence of the same, thereby obscuring the difference between myth, history and reality.

8. M. Horkheimer and Th. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, 1972), p. 11. 9. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, I (Frankfurt am Main, 1959), p. 181. 10. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 145.

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Bovenschen

Of course the rediscovery of the historical existence of matrifocal societies was first made possible by the myth and symbol research of Bachofen (later anthropologists, ethnologists and cultural historians confirmed his findings), but any immediate and unreflected recollection of past female power that is supposed to lead us back to our roots via witches back to Gaja, Demeter, Aphrodite, etc. - ought to remain suspect. Any such attempt, in all its ambivalence, requires careful interpretation at the very least. This antihistorical, primeval mythological method fed the reactionary ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries, contributing to attempts to ontologize sexual opposites and biologize femininity. What I am referring to here is "the geneological conjuring up of primeval powers, which was and still is useful as a powerful political tool in profane history since it activates a primeval-mythical psychology."11 This conjuring up pits myth against history. Such theories are still attractive today because their hostility to civilization operates with an uncritical concept of alienation. Precisely in this age of ecological crisis, invocation of the earth goddesses may seem to point to an alternative. Sooner or later women will be accused of appropriating that theoretical tradition which in the history of ideas is best represented by Bachofen, Klages and Jung, since they refer back to the historical and mythological signals of women's neglected and suppressed history. I believe this accusation to be unfounded. It would apply only if we attempted to construct a contiguous synthesis of geneology linking primeval powers to the present day fate of women, as did Esther Harding, the disciple of Jung. The mythsand customswhichwe haveobserveddimlyreflectthe feelingsand reactionsof men and womennot only towardsa womanin particular but also towardswomen per se, towardsthe principleof femininity which,despiteall the masculinations of the modernwoman,remainsthe sourceof womanhood and dominatesher physicallife as wel as the essence of her soul.12 This recourse to an ontological substance of femininity initially implies greatness. It is based upon recourse to past significance and its still existent, however hidden validity. It is, therefore,most important thatwe tryto establisha betterrelationship to the feminineprinciple,or, as the ancientsexpressedit, to the GreatMother, the MagnaDea. 13 Ignoring the social structures on which the former power of the Gaja rested, she is again called upon to defend her old dominion. This fascination

11. Klaus Heinrich, Parmenides und Jona: Vier Studien iiber das Verhiiltnisvon Philosophie und Mythologie (Frankfurt am Main, 1966), p. 25. 12. Esther Harding, Frauen-Mysterien einst und jetzt, with an introduction by C.G. Jung (Zurich, 1949), p. 247. 13. Ibid., p. 248.

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is probably based upon the fabrication of an "ancient tie" to an "ultimate cause," a construction which serves as a metaphysical safety valve for everyday life and which is supposed to give illusory meaning to even the bleakest female existence. Esther Harding is a good example of where such an approach may lead. She performs a balancing act: on the one hand she wants to help the principle of femininity achieve recognition and gain effectiveness - particularly since masculine rationality has failed to improve the world - but on the other hand, the feminine powers of destruction cannot be allowed to be fully unleashed. When this feminine principle, or, expressed naively, this goddess, works through nature, she reveals herself to be a blind power, cruel and terrible,
simultaneously life-giving and destructive. . . . This is the principle of femininity in its demonicform.14. . .a womancognizantof her own higherlevel of

refrains fromactionswhich developmentrecognizesthis dangerand carefully have such potentiallydisastrousconsequences,because only by disciplining betweenthe sexes be achieved.15 desires can love and spiritualrelationships The politics and ideology which reduce women to this archetypal categorization have turned the Great Mother into the exploited recipient of the fascist motherhood medal. The ideology of motherhood, specifically in its reference to matriarchal roots, reduces woman to her biological functions. Compared to the full range of powers which women actually held in matristic times at the beginning of agrarian societies, only the ability to bear children survives in such projections of motherhood in the highly industrialized society of the 20th century - as if this reduction did not in fact correspond to an older misogynous ideology of femininity. These ideas produce unpolitical results such as an escapist hostility towards civilization (flight from the cities, sectarianism, etc.) as typified by the eco-freaks in the United States, from whom only health food stores profit. Theories like Esther Harding's will not exactly advance the women's movement. Neither are such theories the source of the revival of interest in witches today. What Ernst Bloch said of the Jungian archetypes applies to these theories as well: for Jung and .. .everythingnew is eo ipso worthless,even worth-negating; of the instincts,the Klages the only thing new is the presentday destruction decompositionof the primevalinstinctualbase by the intellect. .. Psychosynthesis- fleeingthe present,hatingthe future,seekingthe primeval-... ranksabove Enlightenment then the most barrensuperstition thought;for of than flowswithmoreimportin witchcraft courseJung'scollectiveunconscious in pure reason.16

14. Ibid., p. 255. 15. Ibid., p. 290.

16. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, I, p. 67.

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Of interest here, although for other reasons, is the "important fantasy component of these archetypes" (Ernst Bloch) which both Jung and Esther Harding discovered, namely that process by which blocked experience becomes animated and conscious by means of myths, images and symbols (particularly important in this context are the works of Kerenyi). If, as in the example of the women's demonstration in Rome, this process is a moment of resistance, of struggle, then it itself becomes history. Myth loses that rigid form which so interests philologists. It is not simply renewed, it rather loses its characteristic as "depoliticized statement,"17 and is "released from its genealogical bonds to primeval, mythological psychology ... It is therefore not a contradiction to have even a demythologized protest... be carried out in mythological images."18 Only the demythification within militant activity allows the association between witches and the ancient feminine myths of the past to become something relevant not only to the past, but primarily to the present and future: liberation from enforced role behavior and diffuse anxiety, which in part also consists of dismantling the evaluation and mythification of femininity built up during the centuries of patriarchal domination. Women establish their own autonomy by invoking the feminine "witch" myth, and it only looks like a new myth has been created. whichis brought to bear Mythcan always,as a lastresort,signifythe resistance it in to mythify againstit. Truthto tell, the bestweaponagainst mythis perhaps 19 its turn, and to producean artifical myth. A further investigation of the reason for the mobilization of old and new myths and feminine symbols within the women's movement points to the unique durablity and consistency of different mythological schemata throughout history. The threatening film vamp is still equipped with the same attributes Esther Harding ascribes to her Earth Mother; witches are accused of crimes similar to those which made the femme fatale of 19thcentury novels and dramas such a menacing literary persona. Woman as sphinx, as demon, as unbridled sensual creature, at the extreme even in possession of the infamous vagina dentata, wafts through the annals of cultural history. In reality - as the cultural historian Egon Friedell maintained - there is no great difference between the defamation of women as so manifest in the Witches' Hammer, and antifeminism as shown, for example, in Strindberg's female characters. "There is a long but nonetheless direct line from the witch hunts of the reformation to Strindberg."20 Central to almost all theoretical sexual treatises since the Witches' Hammer - both those which coerce women into the bourgeois code of behavior and those which see woman as barely controlled sensuality per se
17. 18. 19. 20. cf. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York, 1972). Klaus Heinrich, Parmenides und Jona, p. 27. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, p. 135. Egon Friedell, Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (Munich, 1931), p. 332.

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- is the implicit assumption - often an emphatic one - that the danger which woman exudes and the sole power which she can in fact exert are rooted in her destructive sensuality. This desire to dominate, projected on to women, is repeatedly conjured forth. As early as Rousseau's recommendations for Sophie's education, more distinctly in Schopenhauer or Weininger, less speculatively and presumably more scientifically in sexologists like Kraft-Ebbing, we find the scandalous image of the courtesan who wields political power, of the all-consuming sensual woman who through the liberalization of sexual relationships could come to recall her innate potential: in essence, the fear of the return of the witch. From this perspective, there is a bit of the witch in every woman, a bit of Hetaera in even the most upstanding housewife. This motif can be found in transfigured form in the works of various authors of the Decadence and Black Romantic periods, authors for whom the ancient world of powerful mythological figures represented a realm in which everything was allowed, in which sexuality could still find its expression in society before the inception of Christian dogma with its canon of sexual sanctions. In every form - in this transfiguration as wellthis mythologizing corresponds to the wishful thinking of men. The guidelines handed down from spiritual leaders to their fellow men were however, as a rule (though more or less camouflaged), those of constant and unrelenting domestication of woman. The uniformity (or at best limited variations) projected by these substantializations of the feminine in the history of ideology make it simple to anthropologize the phenomenon, and in the process it often happens that the formation of ideology is no longer thoroughly investigated in its appropriate historical substrata, but rather the uniform opinions about facts concerning femininity are treated as if they themselves were real facts. The realms of myth, history and present day reality merge into an impressive but undifferentiated fog. Psychological explanations seem quite plausible in that tracts of scandal and defamation depict without exception the threat of feminine sexuality the Witches' Hammer is an example par excellence. They are for the most part rooted in the presumed masculine fear syndrome: fear of castration, fear of the all consuming mother. But in response to the question of how this fear reached such extreme proportions precisely at the time of the witch trials, these theories can only make vague reference to the church's hostility towards sex (the question remains, why did this particular fear accelerate in the late Middle Ages?) and to an array of historical variables which are never quite spelled out. It almostappearsas if thatmasculine primalfear,whosetracescanbe followed in some mysterious way. Of course throughouthumanhistory,is reactivated there are many historicalvariables,so that it can only be surmisedto what extent the uneasinesscaused by civilizationitself increasinglyaffected the tension of the male psyche.21
21. Hoffman R. Hays, Diimon Frau (Diisseldorf, 1969), p. 300.

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When the problem is viewed in this light, the only thing we women who fear for our lives can do is to bide our time and watch out for any sign of a new increase in tension in the male psyche. We would be grateful, therefore, for any hints as to what we should be on the lookout for. E. Jones postulates a psycho-sexual fear syndrome not only in men, but in women as well. He is of the opinion "that the fear which is hidden behind the belief in this Maleficium was the fear of inadequacy or of the failure of sexual functions which lies deep in the human soul. (For men, the 'castration complex', for women, 'fear of sterility')."22 He views the "witch epidemic" (even this term suggests an historical malaise) as not so much a masculine as a feminine projection. It was the fears, dreams and desires of women which provided the basis for this claim. The thesis presented here states that the belief in witches is essentiallya thosewhich sexualwishesof the woman,particularly projectionof suppressed relate to the femininecounterpart of the Oedipuscomplex,thatis the love of the father and jealousy and enmity towardsthe mother. Just as the child separatesthe imageof the fatherinto his benevolentandmalicioustraitsand thereby makes possible the belief in God and the devil, it also separatesthe motherinto two halves,out of whichstemsthe beliefin bothgoddesses(Mater Dei) and female devils.23 According to this theory, women themselves provided (projected) this image, upon which model their systematic elimination was then based. Only the fact that it was not women who tortured, inhumanely tried and finally murdered millions of witches cannot be retroactively reinterpreted in favor of the executioners. Any analysis of the inclinations towards belief in God and the devil, in good and evil women, that does not take into account an examination of the real conditions for the psycho-sexual development of children in the 15th century seems to me problematic, to say the least. The one-sided application of psychoanalytical categories to the phenomenon of witch-burning has had the objective function of rationalizing it and making it appear less threatening. E. Jones, who sees the witchhunt as the epidemic spread of a neurotic syndrome, above all among women, makes tautological use of the equally unexplained hysterical hatred of sexuality in medieval theology to explain this phenomenon. An attempt to interpret an historical mass phenomenon by means of individual psychological categories does not get beyond characterizingwitch persecution as an historical period of regression. (I am referring here only to those psychoanalytically oriented texts which deal with witch persecution, whereas Jones' work is earlier - and thus does not operate on the level of
22. Ernest Jones, Der Alptraum in seiner Beziehung zu gewissen Formen des mittelalterlichen Aberglaubens (Leipzig and Wien, 1912), p. 106. 23. Ibid., p. 105.

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today's theoretical psychoanalytical discussion.) The allusion to the eternally recurring forms of the Oedipal situation can to some extent explain the longevity of the mythifications of femininity, but not the difference between "normal," latent, more or less violent suppression and the mass annihilation of women in the late Middle Ages. A suspicion which Marcuse once expressed comes to the fore in the Jonesian hypothesis: holdsswayoverthe psychoanalytic The patriarchal realityprinciple interpretation. It is only beyondthis realityprinciplethat the "maternal images"of the - imagesof a freefuture superego conveypromisesratherthanmemorytraces ratherthan of a darkpast.24 It is not to be denied that masculine sexual fantasy and fears manifest themselves in images, myths and popular literature- that would be foolish in face of the material proof of the last 500 years. Indeed, the contradiction between the norm and instinctual drives was projected onto both sexes. as Marcuse shows with the example of Prometheus. of the performance Prometheusis the archetype-hero principle.And in the world of Prometheus,Pandora,the femaleprinciple,sexualityand pleasure, appear as curse - disruptive,destructive."Whyare women such a curse?" in Hesiod) The denunciationof the sex withwhichthe section(on Prometheus .. The concludes emphasizesabove all else their economicunproductivity. beauty of the woman, and the happinessshe promisesare fatal in the workworld of civlization.25 In literature the Pandora motif was constantly revived, leading in an almost unbroken line to the Wedekind version. One thing is important: by referring to the predominant social implications of the sexual division of labor, Marcuse hints at an interpretation of the proven longevity of the mythological schemata of femininity and of male anxiety which transcends the psychological model. The actual basis of antifeminist sexual metaphysics should then be sought not only in an allegedly static aspect of the human psyche, but rather in the inherent contradiction between work norms and expectations of happiness - in its historically specific effects on the sexesthus, in the forms of the domination of internal and external nature. Woman is not a being in her own right, a subject. . . . The divisionof labor She became imposedupon her by man broughther little thatwasworthwhile. the embodimentof the biologicalfunction,the imageof naturethe subjugation of which constituted that civilization'stitle to fame. For millennia men dreamedof acquiring absolutemasteryover nature,of converting the cosmos into one immensehunting-ground.26

24. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 211.

25. Ibid., p. 146.

26. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 247f.

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Bovenschen The Fall of the Witch

II. The Historical Witch -

Woman has always represented nature, and this is also true of the early forms of appropriation of nature. An unholy alliance - thus thought the church; a regressive alliance - thus it might have seemed to the rationalists, the "demythologizers of the world."27 In later periods, when man hoped to have permanently banned the magical-divine power of women and burned at the stake the chthonian Mana along with female magical power, domination and utilization of nature always implied domination of human beings by human beings - that is a thesis of Critical Theory. All practical and theoretical effort was geared solely toward this functional relationship of calculation, discipline and exploitation of internal and external nature - thus it can be roughly summarized in retrospect. of humans.Everysubjectmustnot Dominationof natureincludesdomination of externalnature,humanand non-human, only take partin the subjugation in orderto achieveit. . . Because the naturein himself but also mustsubjugate of internalandexternalnaturetakesplaceforno good reason, the subjugation or reconciled,but is simplysuppressed.28 natureis not reallytranscended The new rationality established itself at the expense of an increased distance between humans and nature, and thereby between parts of humans themselves. "Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power."29 This ambivalence, which lies at the heart of progress made towards the domination of nature, still determines the image of woman today; she shares in part the fate of enslaved nature. The loss of unity of ego and nature is of course much older than the persecution of witches, it has been a topic of philosophical reflection for a long time, but it took a new, radical final form with the rise of non-agrarian means of production and the destruction of selfsufficient agrarian culture. This separation took place in all individuals, but with different results for the sexes. As early as feudal society, after woman had been effectively removed from relevant positions of power and ideologically excluded from participation in ideas in general, she was reduced to being a representative of the diffuse, non-identical world. The bloody annihilation of magically gifted women (and magic was considered by the henchmen not a profession but female potency - and thus all women could be accused of it) was the culmination of a long process of transformation which influenced all spheres of society. This process culminated in the subsumption of all work to capital, the subsumption of the concept of the individual to that of the general - and because of this, the emancipation of the species from a direct relationship to nature took on a new quality.
27. cf. ibid., p. 3. 28. Max Horkheimer, Zur Kritikder instrumentellenVernunft(Frankfurtam Main, 1964), p. 94. 29. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 9.

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Although woman did also not fit into the great design, with which the scholastics wanted to once again subjugate all phenomena to ecclesiastical power, the forms and methods with which women (allegedly, and to a certain extent actually) evoked the powers of nature for the good of humans (or according to clerical interpretation, to their detriment) were in even more direct conflict with the new system of appropriation of nature under the tutelage of formalized reason. Thus, witches were caught between the two mighty power structures, the old forces and the new. "Waning faith and flourishing reason disagreed: in between these two, someone took control of the human being."30 This "qualitative leap," which Critical Theory systematically describes and which Michelet calls ideal-typical, has as its historical counterpart a long period of intense struggle, crises and contradictions (which could not all be taken into account in this interpretation). Witches were only one phenomenon among these many crises. When the witch pogroms began, Europe was already in turmoil: religious wars, Reformation and Counterreformation, peasants' revolts, the persecution and execution of heretics, inflation, famine, the dissolution of the guilds, the development of new means and techniques of production, an increasingly monetary economy, population growth, a huge surplus of women, the pauperization and brutalization of large segments of society the list could go on and on. All this resulted in the highly explosive combination of circumstances in which, to the amazement of many historians, the campaign against the female sex became possible. This summarizing list of social changes and structural alterations is not intended to introduce an historical model; it merely serves to give an idea of the situation of the individual in the late Middle Ages. (The full extent of human misery can best be traced in various gloomy artistic depictions - something the mere reiteration of dull facts and structural changes can hardly convey.) The reference to the subjective perception of social upheavals is significant because the seed of persecution planted by the papacy did in fact take root; and if correlating tendencies towards fear, panic and hatred had not already existed in the populace, then such mass fury and fear could not have been mobilized in such a ghastly aggrandizement of the battle between the sexes. The Church's legitimation crisis, a reflection of the threat posed to its economic and political power, had been theorized about much earlier: the beginning of the debate about Universals in the 11th century was the first jolt to the system of metaphysical dogma. Nominalism and mysticism represented, although in a very different way, an immanent threat not only to theological premises, but also, indirectly, to the religious-political power system: they considered it possible for individuals to have direct access to God without the mediation of the ecclesiastical institution or its representatives, and they anticipated
30. Jules Michelet, Die Hexe (Munich, 1974), p. 84.

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the split between faith and knowledge which later found programmatic expression in the works of the Reformers. The theological discourses of Nominalist critics - the negation of the ontological a priori of Universals is indicative of a decisive historical process: the necessary development of a subjective belief, of subjective forms of interpretation for overcoming social struggle. With Nominalism,the reductionof objectivitywas limitedto the sensations and perceptionsof the subject;the old order,previously considered objective, and thus the orientationof the individual had disintegrated; subjecttowarda the universallyrecognizedobjectivitywas renderedimpossible.If previously seemed guaranteed by that of the objectivestructures identity of subjectivity which individualsubjects brought into direct relationshipwith each other (since they had originallybeen related), then the Nominalistcritique of of being, the universally UniversalRealismnegated,alongwith the hierarchy accepted idea that subjectivelogicalformswere validand binding.31 Following the decline of the Ordo Mundi, even objects in nature seemed to be out of place. In this respect, philosophical doubt may have corresponded to everyday human existence. Of course, by this medieval Ordo Mundi we are referring only to an heuristic ideal-typical construct, because this universe was not really all that orderly; nevertheless it was static, stratified, and lacked social mobility. It is fairly typical that as a result of social upheavals individuals saw themselves at the mercy of the chaotic proliferation of phenomena - a fragmentary reality with infinite constellations. Even though the medieval social order did arbitrarilyassign individuals to a position in this hierarchy, real life of the late 15th and 16th centuries no longer reflected this static order. The rigid religious world view of the Middle Ages was no longer equal to the taks of dealing with the new chaotic situation. No doubt the fear and horror that the program of persecution and annihilation of heretics and witches unleashed in the populace served to restore the Church's power, at a time when its internal institutional and legitimatory core was empty and fetid. Yet the witch hunt was not simply the consequence of a grand design, like the one later recommended by Machiavelli, who advised clerical and secular authorities to consciously disseminate fear and terror in order to insure their domination. The common root of the demands for bloodshed and executions, of accusations and hasty denunciations may be sought in the anarchic/chaotic character of those social structural changes which had beset humans at the beginning of civilization in their work and life relationships. The crisis of the waning Middle Ages forced individuals to rely on themselves once again. Their social position no longer fit into the static, integrating scheme of the formerly divine order of
31. Peter Bulthaupt, Zur gesellschaftlichen Funktion der Naturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main, 1973), p. 84.

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humans, nature and society. Spirited out of their traditional framework, people sought new meaning and assistance in interpreting and dealing with their fate. And then the old demons, only superficially exorcised by the Church, crept back out of their hiding places. But why was their power and intrigue crystallized in the image of the witch? In attempting to summarize what witches were accused of and what their alleged detrimental effects consisted of (including even their roles in folk tales), we tend to see as their most significant characteristic the power to defy the laws of nature (levitation, psychokinesis, influencing the weather and other natural phenomena; the hexing of illness, accident or death; metamorphosis into animals; exerting magical influence over the processes of sex, birth, etc.). Of course, there is a dilemma posed by such a characterization, namely the hermeneutic problem of retrospection. To be sure, the past can only be unraveled by knowledge of what has historically emerged from it (in this case the formulation of the laws of nature), but such knowledge obstructs to a certain extent the ability to imagine the real state of affairs back then, the thought and action patterns of the people of that time. People in the Middle Ages were no doubt incapable of differentiating between healing a disease by the laying on of hands on the one hand, and by administering a pharmaceutically effective herbal drink on the other. The criterion for such a differentiation was itself merely the result of the social change which freed human beings from the immediacy of the natural process and which had the witch as its victim. The ruptures in the social fabric which this change brought about appeared "natural" to the individuals involved: nature appeared to be populated with (female) demonic beings with extraordinary abilities. The Church had of course tried to unseat these old gods and demons to whom people could directly turn with the assistance of the magician, the shaman or the witch, substituting for them their patron saints, who likewise had proven spheres of competence. But these latter were rather colorless and bland in comparison. Miracles were also ascribed to them; they too "defied the laws of nature." What made the Church so uncomfortable was not the belief in magic and miracles per se (it is still today a component of any religiosity), but rather the practice of such magicalanimistic miracles by laypeople, especially by women who, according to long tradition, seemed predestined to it ever since antiquity. The miracle - in this case healing - had to take place in the name of God. The pressing problem at the time in which the Witches'Hammer was wrought was that the Church, which had for centuries defined any belief in demons as heresy, now had no choice but to make use of the surviving remnants of old heathen beliefs to shore up its crumbling edifice. Witches were acknowledged as evil, but even in evil, masculine supremacy had to be guaranteed: Satan was enthroned. The difference inferred above between the two methods of healing presupposes - from our perspective - the separation of scientific thought

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from obscurantism; but the magic activities of the shaman, the wise woman, the magician were neither obscurantist nor scientific (though they were later to become the basis of both): As long as knowledge of nature was prescientific,the consistencyof the materialunderinvestigation was not yet guaranteed work;one could through in orderto only try to force the materialinto compliancethroughwitchcraft achievethe desiredgoal. The exhortation of the natural was powerin materials not limitedto the materialitself, the processexpandedto includehumanity's virtualpower over the forcesof nature.32 Only then did science as we know it come to the fore. Not until the philosophy of the Renaissance did the understanding of natural processes, with their own established laws, become the object of systematic reflection, with the goal of controlling these processes by means of rational thought. To draw a corollary from the formulation above: it was the charge of complicity with the secret powers of nature (which seemed to the populace identical to those powers which were exploding society's framework), which was the basis for suspecting witches. The sympathetic relationship of women to nature, the magic-mimetic forms of appropriating nature, its successes (using herbal drinks), its failures (the laying on of hands), being as they were secular attempts at controlling life, threatened the Church; but they simultaneously stood in the way of the triumph of instrumental reason. The latter fact explains why the representatives of the new science of natural law, the protagonists of modern rationality, were of so little help to witches. Even Kepler, who barely saved his mother from suspicion of witchcraft, believed in witches! Enlightenment, according to Adorno, is "mythic fear turned radical"33 - and therein lay the irrationality of the new rationality. Moreover, in order to deny its origins in magic, science had to obliterate all its telltale remains. But what was the basis of this assumption that women had an extremely intimate and authoritative relationship to nature? "Above all it is believed that they deal with magic, whether as a means of realizing it or as the actual bearers of its powers. Old women are witches, virgins are considered valuable helpers."34 Marcel Mauss, in his Theory of Magic, conclusively establishes this function of women in the magical rituals of various cultural spheres. All aspects of hexing, which the Witches' Hammer presents in concentrated antifemale form, are, together with the belief in the positive effects of witchcraft, present in the heathen belief in magic. In earlier times, the Church had repudiated such belief structures. (Thus in the 9th and 10th centuries the Church tried to appropriate the pagan incantations for Christianity.)
32. Marcel Mauss, Soziologie und Anthropologie I. Theorie der Magie (Munich, 1974), p. 43. 33. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 16. 34. Marcel Mauss, Theorie der Magie, p. 62.

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Despite the triumph of men over women, the acknowledgement of women's special magical capabilities survived in heathen patriarchy as well as in patriarchal Christian times. or wereconsidered Thuswomen,whoserolein magicis so significant, magicians bearersof powerssolely becausethey had a specialsocialposition.Theywere considered qualitativelydifferent from men and were gifted with special werebutproofof secretsexualprocessesandpregnancy powers;menstruation, the qualities attributed to them. Society - that of men - had a very towardwomen. .... Fromthisspecialfeeling pronouncedsocialresponsibility resulted the legal and particularlythe disparateor subordinatereligious position of women.35 Marcel Mauss not only sees the special status of women (for him women are even a social "class") as being a result of their biological organization, he also investigates the importance of biological difference in the context of the sexual division of labor - thus in its social manifestation and function. The presupposition that women possess magical capabilities corresponds to their actual social power in pre-patriarchal times, when humans had not yet established the causal relationship between copulation and birth... The earth was equated to the woman in matriarchal times, since life sprang continued.In woman, the from both bodies; throughboth, new generations andNature of nature wereincarnated, seed andthe fertility powerto germinate seemed woman.Childrenandharvests analogouslygives life to the life-giving to be supernatural gifts, productsof a magicalforce.36 This belief in magical forces was retained in patriarchal times, above all in connection with the agrarian struggle for existence. Masculine gods, or goddesses who acted on behalf of masculine principles, eclipsed the old matriarchal mother goddesses and usurped the heavens, only to later relinquish their hold to the one Christian God. The representatives of female power remained behind on earth; in their representation as second class deities, as demons of nature, they were closer to humans than the olympic gods or the unapproachable God of the Christians. The sorceress was often replaced by the sorcerer. Thus "there was the strange phenomenon that the man was a magician, whereas the woman was accused of exercising magic."37 Because the child-bearing function of women had once been understood in the context of its social significance, after this causality was broken down the physical characteristics of women became the basis of a very ambivalent standard of assessment. The associative link between the concepts woman and nature still holds today. Thus, for example, in the 19th century the Romantic Johann Wilhelm Ritter called woman "the continua-

35. Ibid., p. 152. 36. Karl-Heinz Deschner, Das Kreuz mit der Kirche (Dilsseldorf-Vienna, 1974), p. 25. 37. Marcel Mauss, Theorie der Magie, p. 62.

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tion of the earth," and the philosopher Max Scheler defined her at the beginning of this century as a quasi plant-like being: "With the beautiful and quiet reserve of a tree she stands there, at the core of being;"38 even love metaphors (right down to banal lyrics of popular songs) describe women in botanical terms such as "budding," "blooming," "maturing"and "wilting." In all so-called primitive societies, analogous fear syndromes and taboos relating to the sensations of the female body can be found. Women were very often isolated during menstruation, were not to be touched because supposedly during those days secret powers emanated from them; they made nature capricious, so that it played dirty tricks: milk went sour, wine turned to vinegar, people died unexpectedly, battles were lost, etc. In the Middle Ages women were often forbidden to enter the church or to receive communion during menstruation. In the words of St. Jerome, there is nothing more impure than a menstruating woman; everything that she touches becomes likewise impure. Even in the 19th century it was still taboo to operate on women during those days. Similar ideas about all kinds of natural catastrophes were often associated with the birth process (e.g., miscarriages as the cause of drought, etc.). In the Old Testament, in the third book of Moses, in which the masculine Jehovah cult finally triumphs over the female deities, we find such a list of prohibitions and purification rites. These cult laws applied not only to pregnant or menstruating women, but the plethora of rules regarding these particular phenomena reveal the basis of this fear. The supposed relationship between the lunar month and the menstrual cycle implies that the function of woman is that of mediator between the natural elements and human beings (an association which also appeals to Michelet). Despite the fact that women were so far removed from all actual and political power, they still played an important role in the still intact agrarian culture within the realm of magic. The old goddesses had of course been demoted, but they had not been totally expunged from the consciousness of the populace. Selene, Aphrodite and Hecate, the first divine triad39- also Isis and Diana, to name only a few - became interchangeable figures, although they had originated in different cultures; and as goddesses of fertility and healing, but also of night and darkness, they continued to remain symbols of female power. In the Canon episcopi of 900 A.D. (which still vehemently denies the actual existence of demons) the image of Diana appears, the goddess who, according to popular belief, flies through the air followed by a horde of women. Later, during the period of witch persecution, clerics were busy warning people about the threat of a return of matristic power (for example, Aventin and the witch persecutor Boguet). Theologians (foremost among them the Dominicans Institoris and Sprenger) had just accomplished some
38. Max Scheler, Vom Umsturz der Werte, I (Leipzig, 1923), p. 308. 39. cf. Robert von Ranke-Graves, Griechische Mythologie, I (Reinbeck, 1960), p. 13ff.

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truly tricky moralistic hairsplitting to disprove demons, when they faced the new problem of proving not only that demons do exist, but also that their powers here on earth were constantly increasing. This warning appears again, indirectly, in the writings of many bourgeois theoreticians - in Schopenhauer, for example, and in Weininger; even Bachofen suspects Michelet of longing for a return to the old Isis principle. The reference educated clerics made to the old female deities is not in itself proof of the after-effect of heathen magic beliefs about women: these clerics had of course read the writings of the "ancients." The whole arsenal of witchcraft can already be found in the works of Horace, Ovid, Apuleius, Seneca and Theocritus, to name a few. Even the Old Testament and the Talmud (Lilith) make mention of this magic power. The illiterate majority, however, knew nothing of these writings, and the number of intellectuals who constructed the network for legitimizing power was negligible. People in general were however, as Freud once put it, "badly christened." Only scholars concerned themselves with the form and content of scholastic logic. Therefore the hypothesis that there is indeed a relationship between the heathen fertility and earth cults, and the belief in witches seems quite plausible (Jacob Grimm had already recognized the traces of cult processes in the witches' sabbath, even though the former existence of matristic cultures could not have been known to him at that time). The links between witchcraft,planting,fertilitymagic and the belief in the of all Earth Motherbecome most apparentwhenwe examinethe documents witch to how often and of actual see field those trials, very periods,particularly fruit charms- love and fertilitycharmsbelong in this categorytoo - are mentioned; they representa continuumbetween the most distantpast and today.40 More difficult to confirm is the thesis - as Margaret Murray41states it that it was not merely a question of residual cult practice and rituals, but that at this time secret female organizations and sects actually existed. It is a very touchy question of historical interpretation because there are no primary sources from the women in question. All the statements and descriptions are transmitted by their judges and executioners (confessions and preprogrammed statements obtained through torture), their persecutors (procedures for hunting witches and legal documents) and their few defenders - with the result that the sources reveal only the ideas and fantasies of these men. Therefore, research in this area must resort to speculation, unfounded text exegesis and rash cultural historical constructs. For the persecutors who had been whipped into fanatic frenzy, however - this much can be gleaned from the sources - every woman was a potential witch. The hypothesis of "organized witches" is interesting, but also serves to provide a post festum
40. Anton Mayer, Erdmutter und Hexe (Munich, 1936), p. 46. 41. cf. M. A. Murray, The Witch Cult in Western Europe (Oxford, 1921).

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legitimation to mass annihilation. The persecution of social fringe groups is relatively easy to explain; but the persecution of a whole sex - and women were at that time quite a bit more than half the population - calls for a more thorough attempt at explanation. It can be assumed that under the veneer of Christian belief, ancient heathen cult forms and ideas of magic lived on (Peuckert repeatedly attempted to prove that these could still be found in modern times in isolated regions). According to Michelet, the ancient demons of nature survived in the heart of the oak and at the hearth of the serf. This was the hearth at which the tradition of healing was presumably handed down from mother to daughter. The simple and touchingbeginningsof religionand the sciences!Later on everythingwould be divided; man would become charlatan,astrologistor prophet, blackmagician,priest,doctor, but in the beginning,the womanwas all of these things.42 Folk medicine, before reaching professional status and being subsumed under the control of men, was practiced almost exclusively by women (Ingrid Strobl calls the witches' sabbath the first convention of women doctors.)43 Thus women with knowledge of herbs were presumably able to offer people their favorite potions, which in the Middle Ages often served as the daily bread of the poor. Some theoreticians attibute descriptions of the sabbath, witches' rides through the air, etc. to hallucinatory sensations brought about by stimulants. (E. Jones mentions the inability, which he finds characteristic of magic thought, to distinguish between dream and reality, so that individuals considered their nightmares to be actual events. )44 In folk medicine, both black and white magic had their place: here both the wise and the evil woman had her social function. This polarity did not yet correspond to the moral duality of good and evil, a duality whose function was changed by Christianity. It corresponded to the ambivalence of nature's effects on agrarian life: the good harvest and the destructive drought, the healing herbs and the lethal mushroom. In going back to pagan demonology in order to discredit women, the Church at that time made women responsible for only the evil effects of nature. In reality, their intent was to dissolve the bond between woman and nature and to destory the aura of feminine magic for once and for all. In the course of the individualistic liberalization of medievalcult practice the undercurrent of witchcraft surfaced between subjective rejectedby the Church the antinomiesof Gothic piety and infiltrated the objectivereligious worldof the MiddleAges while its patronstheologyandchurchstood helplessly by; as the principles of witchcraft turnedmoreandmorefromthe natural demonicto
42. Jules Michelet, Die Hexe, p. 19. 43. cf. Ingrid Strobl, "Wir Hexen," Neues Forum, 269/270 (May-June, 1976). 44. cf. Ernest Jones, Der Alptraum.

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the escatological-demonic, fromthe secretpowersof the earthanditsrepresentatives to the devil and his malice, . . the ties to the old earthreligionandits influence had to gradually be weakened.45 The "black" principle was from then on the witch in the service of Satan, the apostate angel; the "white" principle was Mary, handmaiden of the Lord, the denatured, desensualized woman, the woman of the immaculate conception. Classical gnosticism and Manichaeism - which were not acquainted with the Mary cult - as well as the heretical sects, assigned to women a position of equality (in the heretical movement this is true only in part, and only of the earliest period). The period of Mary worship corresponds to the most horrible phase of persecution and contempt for women. The attemptof Christianity to compensatethe oppression of the ideologically one sex by meansof reverencefor woman,and thusto cultivateratherthanto suppress the memory of an archaicage, is redeemedby resentmentof the ennobled woman. . . The emotion which correspondsto the practiceof oppression is contempt, not reverence,and in the centuriesof Christianity, love for one's neighborhas alwaysconcealeda lurking,forbidden thoughnow to recall compulsive,hatredfor woman- the objectwhichservedrepeatedly the fact of futileexertion.Thishatredmadeupforthe cultof theMadonna with the persecutionof witches- a formof vengeanceon the memoryof thosepreChristian prophetesses, the lasting after-imagewhich implicitlycalled in order of domination.Womanarousesthe question the sacrilizedpatriarchal of the half-converted man. . .46 primitiveanger Rather grotesquely, it was precisely the madonna cult which later generations considered proof of the glorification of woman by the Christian Church. The ambivalence towards appraisingwoman's status - at an earlier time the evaluation fluctuated between magical awe and fear - now appears ideologically displaced in the two distinct images of virgin and witch. Woman was "divided": based on the dogma of the duality of body and soul (in which the body stands for the evil, worldly/natural principle, the soul for the good, spiritual principle), the witch became the incarnation of the sins of the flesh, of female sexual functions, of tota mulier sexus. (This division dated a long way back. The cleric Ambrosius had initiated it: Adam = soul, Eve = body; and for a long time the church fathers could not agree whether woman even had a soul.) Mary, on the other hand, who did not really come into her own theologically until the Middle Ages, was the ideal of purity, the desexualized woman of the spirit (mysticism, to be sure, restored woman's sensuality, but even here she was merely the object of man's adulation). Since the feat of the immaculate conception could not be repeated by the empirical woman, and since women nevertheless had to guarantee the reproduction of the species, the ideal of Mary was utterly unobtainable
45. Anton Mayer, Erdmutter und Hexe, p. 62f. 46. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 110f.

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whereas real women could be called witches at any time. The errant man, in these times of animosity towards passion and sensuality, could hypocritically deny his sexuality, the demands of his inner nature, and outwardly condemn them. Although the witch, the sorceress, woman per se, had once been the knowing accomplice of nature, already in pre-Christiantimes the patriarchal principle succeeded in taking over this realm by subordinating her to the male magician, the conjurer; in a similar manner, the medieval Church succeeded in subordinating her evil powers to those of Satan; and therefore science, because it developed partially under the patronage of black magic, had to assert its masculine authority as well. Techniques with complex purposesand uncertaineffects, such as pharmacology, medicine, surgery,metallurgy,.... could not have survivedif magic had not supportedand even protectedthem, lendingthemstability.47 The emancipation of science from its magic origins also took place at the expense of women. The magic abilities credited to women went hand in hand with actual skills which helped humanity (midwifery and herbal medicine were not valued by men; medieval medicine was not at all empirical). Although Paracelsus, swaying precariously in the balance between magic and science, burned the ancient writings and announced that everything he knew came from witches and shepherds, most scientists "whose science sprang from the empiricism of common people, which they call witchcraft," denied this their heritage; they were, as Michelet says, "ungrateful to the witches who had trained them. "48 The changes in the conceptual horizon for which the notion of Enlightenment serves as a global and intellectual focal point illustrate the overcoming of the magical world view. The formal synthesis of identity and non-identity, which gives the appearance of reconciliation, explains in a universal system of deduction (which culminates in the Kantian reduction of empirical phenomenon to mere appearances) that essential dimensions of social life are mere accidents, hoping thereby to be able to make nature commensurable. In this abstract framework of ideas, magic had no place. The mimetic ability of women, which approached nature via the mechanisms of double image, empathetic assimilation and repetition, was subsumed under the notion of the unique, the capricious and the accidental, and ceased to be a component of those natural relationships which were now subjected to rational control. The new subject had to be constituted in contrast to natural relationships, not in harmony with them. ... for them (the magicians, Magic thinkingcannot live from abstractions; the wholespectrum of emoS.B.) naturewas not a pureidea whichembraced
47. M. Mauss, Theorie der Magie, p. 173. 48. J. Michelet, Die Hexe, p. 181.

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tions and affinities,but was a clearlyoutlinedconceptof certaincharacterisof abstract tics. ... Magicritesareless easilyexplained laws by the application of characteristics whose effects and countereffects than as the transferral are known in advance.49 When the process of metabolic exchange between humans and nature entered its new phase (and this is precisely where the factual substratum for the new forms and contents of philosophical reflection can be found), it became necessary to destroy the old relationships to nature, particularlythe intimate bond between nature and woman. Individuals had to be brought into line with the new time and work norms. If, as Mauss writes, it was a significant characteristic of the earlier magical appropriation of nature that there was no separation between the wish and its fulfillment, then measureable work output, the price of progress, now came between the need and the goal. The magical world view, which in the final analysis has matristic origins and which maintained an undergroundexistence duringcenturiesof Christianization, was eliminated at the beginning of the manufacturing era, the triumph of modern science over theology. However, it was the Church itself (which paid for the same process with the loss of its economic and political power) which in reality brought about the demise of the magical world view - and in respect to the murder of women, the Church acted as executioner in the literal sense of the word. During the period in which women were being driven en masse into the torture chambers, the Church was still trying to suppress the new forces which labeled Ptolemy's geocentric world system obsolete and which, in the wake of Copernicus, wanted to uncover "the form of the world and the symmetry of its parts;" but indirectly (precisely in respect to the persecution of witches) the later division of labor can already be discerned: the Catholic Church was already clearly acting in the interest of future secular power. At least their interests were consistent, even though it fell to the "Protestant ethic" to create the religious superego appropriate to the new conditions. Meanwhile of course, Protestants too viewed witches with murder in their hearts. Of course the powerful restructuring processes, as Marx describes them for the economically advanced England of the 16th century in his analysis of "The So-called Primitive Accumulation," are not universally applicable to all of Europe. Yet similar structures for the pauperization of the lower classes can be found in all areas where witch hysteria raged. and The proletariat createdby the breaking up of the bondsof feudalretainers of the people fromthe soil, this 'free'proletariat by the forcibleexpropriation as fast as it was could not possiblybe absorbedby the nascentmanufacturer from thrownupon the world.On the otherhand,thesemen, suddenly dragged to the discitheirwantedmode of life, couldnot as suddenlyadaptthemselves

49. M. Mauss, Theorie der Magie, p. 108.

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pline of theirnew condition.Theywereturnedenmasseintobeggars,robbers, vagabonds.50 The new techniques of production in large parts of Europe - for example those of manufacture, but also the incipient commercialization of agriculture51 - demanded different attitudes from individuals. But any attempt to describe this process leads unavoidably to broad generalizations, if only because of the unavailability of theories of socialization applicable to, for example, 15th- or 16th-century people. With the growing alienation from primal nature, the fear of its effects on social life increased - and thereby fear of women, whose biological functions reminded men of their animalistic origins. In accord with the patriarchal perspective, otherwise divergent powers mobilized brute force in order to free themselves from this memory. They were unsuccessful, despite the deaths of millions of women. Even though the annihilation of women was rooted in archaic and barbaric ideas, it was at the same time a very rationally planned and precisely executed campaign of persecution which, supported by the gestapo-like scheming of the Dominicans, had horrifying and systematic impact. The witchcrafttrialswhichthe associatedfeudalracketeers used to terrorize the masseswhen they felt themselvesthreatened,servedat once to celebrate and to confirmthe triumphof male society over prehistoric matriarchal and mimetic stages of development.The auto-da-f6was the Church'sheathen of naturein the formof self-preserving bonfire, a triumph reason,to celebrate the glory of the masteryof nature.52 Even in matristic times women had not "ruled" over men - if we give credence here to the research of, for example, Bachofen, Morgan and, more recently, Ernest Bornemann. Even in later times they did not use their power and knowledge to dominate. Thus they were to a large extent hopelessly abandoned to the demands of male domination. The witch pogroms can be seen as the second phase of thepatriarchalseizure of power at the beginning of the bourgeois era. The "new man" of the industrial era was indeed a man. The magical-mythical image of woman continued in the bourgeois period, but she was no longer a subject who appropriated nature. She was instead an object of the male domination of nature: as a component of exploited nature, men's fear of nature's revenge was centered on her, as was their longing for harmony and reconciliation with nature. Women had no part in the suppression of nature: they were instead cast into this network of oppression. The witch stands at that juncture of histori50. Karl Marx, Capital (New York, 1906), p. 805f. 51. cf. Barrington Moore, Soziale Urspriinge von Diktatur und Demokratie (Frankfurt am Main, 1969). 52. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 248f.

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cal development where the exploitation of nature became systematic in character. She became the victim of the relentlessly advancing domination of nature, and consequently the victim of the triumph of abstract reason, the formal synthesis of identity and non-identity. She got lost in the conceptual generalities with which modern thought organizes nature. In reality, this development corresponded to the brutal annihilation of millions of women. In the course of this process the last instances of a coincidence between ego and nature, which had been inherent in the magical practices of the witches, were destroyed. Rousseau's misunderstood precept of "retoura la nature" (which is constantly being revived under the guise of new ideology) expresses the impact which this separation has even today. Every critique of Enlightenment since then has had difficulty coming to terms with the forcible subsumption of the non-identical under the concept, and has emphasized the dialectic of historical development as opposed to an optimistic belief in progress on the one hand, and as opposed to a cultural pessimism hostile to civilization on the other. Whetherpeople couldhavedevelopedinto spiritual beingwithoutpittingspirit against naturecannot be surmisedretrospectively.53 Art is supposed to keep alive the memory of "paradise lost"; people sought time and again to re-discover the old unity in the realm of the erotic. At any rate: speculation about a possible alternative to the course of history and about the viability of substitute worlds should not limit our indignation at the past. The survival of the witch in myth warns women of something more timely, namely the necessity of resistance today. III. Witch Mythology Metamorphoses of the Witch

"Man's expulsion from nature has a counterpart in the exile of the witch from the inhabited world," writes Roland Barthes in the foreword to Michelet's book The Witch.54But where is this exile, where can the witch survive? "Traversing time in the manner of a rather occult essence, the witch appears only in the theophanic moments of history: in Joan of Arc (a sublimated form of the witch) and in the French Revolution."55 The wise and the evil woman no longer had a place in the ruling social structure of the late Middle Ages. Fear of the return of past matristic power, whose faint afterglow was still discernible in witches' knowledge of nature's healing power, appeared to have been wiped out with the campaign of annihilation directed against the female sex. Nevertheless, the dualism of body and spirit, of witch and saint, continued to prevail in the bourgeois world. In the typifications of mother and prostitute this dualism took its
53. Karl-Heinz Haag, Philosophischer Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1967), p. 16. 54. Roland Barthes, Preface to: J. Michelet, Die Hexe, p. 7. 55. Ibid., p. 8.

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institutionalized form. The mother and the prostitute were embedded in a stable social structure; external force was no longer needed to subdue them. Mary, the saint, was secularized into the housewife and mother (who was given the duty of mastering a large repertoire of virtues), the witch became the prostitute, the assertive woman. (According to Ivan Bloch it was the prostitute who carried on this tradition,56for Thomas Szasz the insane57and for Michelet the intellectuals.58) Both the mother and the prostitute were definitely of this world and under the control of men. But towering above these bourgeois typifications there hovered the ideological feminine ideal. The witch and the saint became myth. The idolatry and demonification of femininity - flip sides of the same coin - were cut off and distinct from the empirical woman, yet there always remained the suspicion that woman's tie to the old demonic powers had not yet been totally severed. This fear still lurked in the background. of the cosmeticsand grooming of the Italiancourtesans The description would not be completewithoutconsideration of the realrolethatquackery andwitchcraftplayed therein. .... It was almostexclusively and old formerprostitutes in the magicartsof the eroticandwho madamswho instructed the courtesans gave them medicaladviceof an often exotic kind.59 With the vast gulf between the witch's image and that of real women, the modern myth of femininity distanced itself further and further from reality. The exile of the witch that Barthes mentions-- one which she sought even in mythological form - was far removed from the day-to-day misery of women. The preferred realms were those of poetry, dreams, the gray areas of forbidden eroticism and bridled fantasy. The domestication of the inner nature did not succeed in this realm; here, the witch and her sisters could survive. The awesome figures of former times which were revived in bourgeois literature - Dalilah, Judith, Salome, Medea - appear, from this perspective, to be the avengers of the witches' bloody past. We are talking about figures invented by men, about production of myths in which women took no part, though they are integral to women's own history. If women wantto take it uponthemselvesto tell thisstorytheirown way, they - thatis howhistorical will replacemen as myth-makers andcultural development works. If the question is one of reinterpreting these mythsusing the example of the most 'feminine'of the men (Flaubert,Michelet),then new historicalperspectiveswill of necessityresult, a new canon of historywhich takes into accountboth the realand the imaginary . . . we feel it is a question of showingthe lost historyof the oral tradition,legends,myths. . . 60

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

cf. Iwan Bloch, Die Prostituierte, II (Berlin, 1912). cf. Thomas Szasz, Die Fabrikation des Wahnsinns (Olten, 1974). cf. J. Michelet, Die Hexe. Iwan Bloch, Die Prostituierte, II, p. I11. Catherine Cl6ment, "Hexe und Hysterikerin," Alternative, 108-109 (1976), 151.

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The witchhunt was temporarily called off; since women were housebound, their sphere of influence was very limited. In literature and art however, in its sublime as well as its popular forms, these archetypes of femininity became favorite themes. These archetypes appear in the forms of the myth, the allegory, the manifold symbol. Ernst Bloch calls them "experiential condensation categories which exist in the realm of poeticmimetic fantasy."61 Female figures repeatedly served as symbolic embodiments of bourgeois power, the revolutionary as well as, later, the restorative: Marianne, Germania, Britannia, etc. The contradiction between the power represented by these figures and the utterly impotent existence of women in reality is jarring. It should be viewed in the context of the dual manifestation of women, in whom both rebellious and dominated nature may be seen. The feminine allegory shows itself to be just as ambivalent as the myth of femininity: on the one hand "the fullness of poetically effective archetypes appears in the allegory," on the other, they are historical relics casting backward glances to the past.62 This ambivalence is reflected in the fate of the 'Natura' allegory. "From the perspective of antiquity, she represented an extremely beautiful woman, seated and holding to her breast the globe which she showered with milk."63 Wolfgang Kemp, who investigated the pervasiveness and stability of this allegory, finds that in the 15th century the mythology and allegory of Natura had become part of the popular culture.64 Some of the miniatures of the Roman de la Rose depict a Natura figure who is forging a homunculus on an anvil. In Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, she appears with a vulture, since according to ancient superstition this animal exists only in female form and does not need the male for reproduction. The Natura figure blends with those of the Isis and the Diana Ephesia; she is often equipped with the attributes of the Sphinx. Isis was considered the inventor of agriculture, medicine and writing. Natura represented the principle of fertility, the domination of nature, and appeared as the nurturer of the earth. She was often accompanied by the serpent; but in contrast to the Garden of Eden scene, in which the serpent is portrayed as the accomplice of evil, it is here the symbol of the spirit of human endeavor, reminiscent of a passage in Virgil's Aeneis. The Sphinx symbolizes inaccessible wisdom; Bacon made her the allegory of science. (Naturally, Enlightenment thinkers considered her riddles solvable, yet the figure remains a disconcerting iconographic element and a favored theme ever since.)
61. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, I, p. 184. 62. cf. Walter Benjamin, "Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels," Gesammelte Schriften I.1 (Frankfurt am Main, 1974). einer Allegorie, 63. Wolfgang Kemp, Ikonographische Studien zur Geschichte und Verbreitung Diss. (Tiibingen, 1973), p. 18. 64. Ibid., p. 15.

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Natura continued to be a thoroughly positive symbolic figure well into the 19th century; during the Enlightenment however, she became more and more detached from that which she had originally represented, so that she soon stood for the many forms of (male) domination of nature, and for rational thought itself. The goddess of reason, who played a major role in the French revolution, assumed Natura's form. She was central to the mass gatherings of the Revolution. In old engravings these giant statues corresponded in every detail to the description of Natura given above. The citizens of Strassbourg even sang a hymn to her. The figurines remained the same, but their meaning changed - whereas they had once stood for the forms of female appropriation of nature, for fertility, for the power of the old goddess and thereby the power of her sex, they now represented male domination. It seems that bourgeois society stockpiled feminine allegories as symbols for just about everything. Thus we find in the 19th century the allegory of the Machine, of Technology, of Electricity alongside political allegories such as Freedom, Revolution, etc. Cecilia Rentmeister, addressing the contradiction between the actual social position of women and the plethora of feminine allegories, cites E. Bornemann's argument that patriarchy honors the woman as a means of compensation, in order to avoid having to respect her as a real human being. I find more important, however, the idea that woman apparently was considered a particularly good symbol for totally different ideas because she had never been fully integrated into the mode of industrial production based upon differentiated division of labor. Industry,bound up in the dominantideology with the positive conceptsof progressandwealth(also personified by woman!),can andmustbe embodied by the feminine:by woman, viewed as empty, refillablevessel, passiveand malleable, as an embodyingbodywithoutanexistenceof itsown, as a vacuous form to be filled with any ideal whatsoever.65 Because the allegories of the Industrial Age, embodied by feminine figures, solidify the concepts they represent and lift them out of their historical context, technology can again appear as the threatening power of nature. Eduard Fuchs writes of an allegory for the machine which pictures a naked woman, evoking the maenadian past, straddling the giant piston of a huge machine which is spitting out tiny, mutilated men: secretpowerof themachine, whichdevours Symbolof the disconcerting everywhichcrossesthe path of its cranks,rods thing enteringits gears, everything and belts or foolishly dares to reach for its wheels - this is woman. But victimizes conversely:The insensateand brutalmachine,which incessantly countless men as if they were nought, itself symbolizes the rapacious Minotaurian of woman.66 character
65. Cecilia Rentmeister, "Berufsverbot fiir Musen," Asthetik und Kommunikation, 25 (September 1976). 66. Eduard Fuchs, Die Frauin der Karikatur (Munich, 1906), p. 174 (quoted fromC. Rentmeister).

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When technological progress continues unbeknownst to those who initiated it and makes itself independent of them, the threat is again embodied in woman, who from the beginning had no part in the process. Destructive technology appears to be a natural catastrophe, analogous to the supposedly tamed sensuality of woman. Allegory and myth assert nature while history resists it. It is amazing that feminine allegories survived from antiquity until the 19th century, and that the allegories of the Industrial Age which were included in the canon continued to be embodied by female figures even though these had only symbolic value and had little connection with women's everyday lives. This fact becomes somewhat less amazing, however, if one focuses on the form and function of allegory and myth rather than on their content and specific meaning. It is not so much that the allegorical content is related to the feminine syndromes, but rather that the relatedness, as Benjamin says, is to be found in "the turning from history to Nature which is the basis of allegory."67 Wherever history becomes a "petrified, primeval landscape" - in myth and allegory - powerful female figures populate the cultural landscape. Although at one time meaning and function were identical in the allegory of Natura, in the course of time the inner connectedness between form and content was lost - the "feminine" survived only in a formal sense. These statements are by no means intended as a continuation of the discussion in aesthetic theory regarding the function and value of allegory, symbol and myth, nor is it an historical analysis of motifs in the various female myths and allegories. It is, rather, only an attempt to explain the historical durability of the image of the fertile fearsome woman, in which the old Isis/Demeter myths merge with the witch myths and the modern myths of femininity, through the medium of a nature concept applied to the feminine. Even during the persecution and annihilation of the witches (which was constantly accompanied by references to the evil influence of women on natural occurrences), the allegory of Natura/Diana/Isis/Sphinx - the images of positive power over nature - were still widely accepted. This ambivalence continued even when the annihilation campaign had again been forgotten. The pedestal inscription on the Isis statue at Sais transmitted to us from Plutarch fascinated poets and philosophers for a long time: "I am everything that is, has been, and will be. No mortal has lifted my veil." The youth in Schiller's poem, "Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais" (1795), meets with trouble once he lifts her veil, thus breaking the divine commandment: he becomes melancholy. Goethe had a slightly mocking attitude toward this figure: "Bleibe das Geheimnis teuer!/Lass den Augen nicht geliisten/Sphinx Natur, ein Ungeheuer,/Schreckt sie dich mit hundert Briisten."68

67. Walter Benjamin, "Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels," p. 358. 68. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Werke, 4 (Weimar, 1910), p. 137.

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This monster was of course never real, and was not meant to correspond to reality: Women's equality was not even included in the bourgeoisie's list of revolutionary goals. Woman continued to be the object of domination of nature by man, reduced to her biological functions - to child bearing, an act which was both mystified and tabooed, viewed as both animalistic and archaic. Rousseau described the rules for training the empirical woman: Simply throughthe law of nature,women as well as childrenare defenseless before the judgmentof men. . . . Thusthe total upbringing of womenhas to take place withdue consideration givento men.To pleasethem,to be usefulto them, . . . to raise them while they are young, to care for them as men, ... these have been the dutiesof womenthrough the ages, thatis whattheyshould be taughtfromchildhoodon.69 The Romantics did not want to believe in this law of nature. For them, the woman who grows beyond the horizons of her restricting domestic role is closer than man to the sources of nature - and for the Romantics, these were also the sources of knowledge. "Nature" was for them not inferior to but was, rather, the principle of universal divinity. Only through the reconciliation of nature and society could the totality of the individual be reestablished, only then could the "Golden Age" dawn. The world of the bourgeoisie, of capitalist division of labor, for them implied the destruction of nature and individuality. The Romantics could not conceive of an active, productive domination of the world by means of calcuated exploitation of nature. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Romantic view of women did not follow the bourgeois tradition of defamation. In reality the women who belonged to this cultural movement actually did have a more important position than those in other artistic circles. Schlegel maintained "that only women who, even in the midst of human society, have remained beings of nature, still have that naive sensibility with which one can receive the blessing and gifts of the gods."70 This assertion is an affront to the Enlightenment, which had viewed the individual - meaning only the male - abstractly as an autonomous subject. That same Enlightenment had formulated for the male the imperatives of duty and achievement but had relegated the female to the realm of nature still to be appropriated. For Romanticism, too, the woman was a being of nature; this concept was resurrected and idealized. But not only she was to be a being of nature, man was to become one also. On this point, Romanticism ran counter to tradition. "One man accomplished it - he raised the veil of the goddess at Sais but what did he see? - wonder of wonders - he saw himself. A favorite of fortune longed to embrace unspeakable nature. He sought the secret abode of Isis."71 The youth in Novalis' philosophical fragment Die Lehrlinge zu
69. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile oder iiber die Erziehung (Stuttgart, 1970), p. 733. 70. Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde (Frankfurt am Main, 1964), p. 61. 71. Novalis, "Aufzeichnungen zu den Lehrlingen zu Sais" in Werke und Briefe (Munich, 1968), p. 139.

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Sais - who fared better than Schiller's character- can find Isis only with the assistance of a "strange woman from the forest" (!) who, like Paracelsus, had to first bum the scholarly books before being able to help him. It is not instrumental, analytical reason which shows him the way, but rather the reciprocal animation of inanimate nature which leads him to the goal (a process similar to the one on which witchcraft was once based). According to Novalis, love and poetry are the media of this magic, and therefore it is primarily lovers and poets (no longer women to such a great extent) who are allowed to live in harmony with the laws of nature, restore the old unity, overcome alienation, and - like the youth who raised the veil - find themselves. one foundfairytalesandpoemsfull explanations Long ago, insteadof scientific of strangeimages,people, gods andanimalsas commontaskmasters,andone heardthe worlddescribedin the mostnatural waypossible ... If thismethod witha frivolous mind,the newermethodtriesto dissect pursuesthe ephemeral the internal structureand elemental proportionwith the surgeon'sknife. Under their hands amiablenaturedied and only twitchingremainswere left behind; the poet, on the other hand, as if animatedby the spiritof the wine, 72 narratesthe most divineand happiestfantasies
....

The lamented loss of unity represented by the magical witch echoes through love and poetry, her age old haunts. Longing leads the poet to the mythological figures behind which she hides; to be sure, this happened without any recognition of real life women. Novalis' lament cannot be suspected of being an apologetic recourse to an historically fixated lost age, as was later characteristic of the late Romantic cult of the Middle Ages. holds Novalis' definition,accordingto whichall philosophyis homesickness, true only if this longing is not dissolvedinto the phantasmof a lost remote antiquity,but representsthe homeland,natureitself as wrestedfrommyth.73 This homesickness - which for Novalis was still bound up with the Goddess of Sais even though it had been disassociated from the empirical woman - is formulated metaphorically and was conceived of teleologically. (In Schlegel's and Schleiermacher's early works the notion of homesickness is indeed oriented towards empirical women.) Later - in some representatives of late Romanticism and the school of historical law - the Romantic adulation of woman, in the obscure mythological interplay of the concepts folk, earth and nature, degenerated into the ideology of motherhood. The historical bound itself increasinglywith the archaicand this with the chthonic, so that the inside of historybegan to look like the interiorof the this incestuousstate of returnto the earth. This feeling of claustrophobia, womb, to night and the past culminated in Bachofen, the prophet of for the chthonicDemeter.74 with necrophilia matriarchy; yet it culminated
72. Novalis, "Die Lehrlinge zu Sais," p. 110. 73. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 78. 74. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, I, p. 152.

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Romanticism's criticism of the Enlightenment in both its utopian and regressive moments facilitates research into ancient myths (and thereby the rediscovery of matriarchy). It simultaneously realized their utopian potential - a realization which partially conflicted with Romanticism's epistemological aim. Benjamin describes this contradiction: "Even if Bachofen was emotionally sympathetic to matriarchy, his historical interest was oriented toward the origins of the patriarchy, the highest form of which he considered Christian spirituality."75 This Christian spirituality remained surprisinglysuperficial in Bachofen's myth analysis, in contrast to, for example, the works of Joseph von Gorres, who can interpret witch persecution (which he addresses in his Christliche Mystik) only from the Catholic perspective. Romantic scholarship attained its greatest influence with the publication of the Gesammelte Volksmarchen of the Brothers Grimm. In these tales - Wilhelm Grimm's editing saw to that - the witch is without exception old and evil; occasionally she appears integrated into the bourgeois family as the stepmother. Thus the potential for evil is lurking in every woman. It was even made formally implicit, as when Hansel and Gretel come out of the enchanted forest, after having burned the witch, and find their stepmother dead. Bachofen had already pointed out the continuity of gynocratic ideas and images. Because they still represent a reservoir of unresolved desires and longings, these images and myths of past and forgotten souls cannot die. This longing is of course subject to every kind of exploitation: "Fascism, too, needed the death cult of a distorted primeval past to distort the future, to establish barbarism, to impede the revolution."76 Even Fascism profited from the longing for reconciliation with nature, which is however not to say that recourse to the mythological must of necessity be negative. If the archetypalwere absolutelyregressive,there would be no archetypes whichreachforutopia,norwouldutopiabaseitselfon them;therewouldbe no progressivepoetrysearchingfor truthwith the old symbols; fantasywouldbe nothing but regression;it would have to bewareof all images,allegoriesand in the old mythical have symbolsoriginating layersof fantasy..... Archetypes theirmost recentexistencein humanhistory; onlyto thatextentarearchetypes whatthey couldbe: conciseornaments of a utopian funcmessage.The utopian tion appropriates this partfromthe past, fromthe reaction,even frommyth: occurs,the unfulfilled every time this utopianrefunctioning partof archetypes emerges and becomesrecognizable.77 That kind of thought which rejects the empty generality of abstractions and the dictatorship of the general over the specific, under which the
75. Walter Benjamin, "Johann Jakob Bachofen" in: Materialien zu Bachofens "Das Mutterrecht" (Frankfurt am Main, 1975), p. 70. 76. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, I, p. 70. 77. Ibid., p. 187.

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feminine has always been subsumed, has often turned to mythology, either in order to lapse into irrationalism or to criticize rational enlightenment. Therefore, Ernst Bloch suggests that we use Ideologiekritik to differentiate between progressive and reactionary recourse to myth. Only by being familiar with myth, allegory, symbols and ancient imagery can we reclaim these from the archaic and use them to negate our own oppressive reality. Only such a familiarity which recognizes and actualizes not the petrified symbolic content but rather the collective desires inherent in myths can bring them back to life. Despite the invariability which archetypes of femininity display Sphinx, witch, woman as dangerous sexual monster - this uniform tendency to ontologize and concretize the feminine should not itself become part of its explanation. Because women have been under male domination ever since the destruction of matristic society, there actually does exist an unvarying structure, namely that of their inferior social position. But this structure must be analyzed separately for each historical context. The stability of this oppressive situation culminates in the archetypes of witch and Sphinx and in the femininity mythologies - but so does the fear of impending revenge. Within the sex-specific structure of domination, the position of women has continued to change steadily, though not fundamentally. Actual annihilation took place only when this structure seemed to be seriously threatened by the witches. But not until the advent of the women's movement was this system of domination challenged as such. (We do not yet have a theory of patriarchy which has systematically researched human history as the domination of one sex over the other, as class analysis has done for the domination of men over men.) The fact that in the Middle Ages we find images similar to those already present in prehistoric times, images which we can still detect today in art and in dreams, should not lead us to asssume prematurely that male and female psyche are anthropologically invariant, nor should it lead us to ontologize a dichotomy of the sexes. This uniform imagery is more likely a result of the fact that women's liberation has never been realized; such an interpretation is of course diametrically opposed to the intentions of those who time and again employed these images within the male-oriented cultural sector. But precisely because the daughters and granddaughters of the witches could not emancipate themselves and become full-fledged citizens, because they remained in their parlors, unproductive and with limited rights only, or were, as wage-earners, doubly exploited by capital and husband, because they did not take part "in the appropriation and domination of nature and the resulting domination of man over man,"'78because ideology made them into homo biologicus, their naturalness and immediacy could be glorified in
78. Karin Schrader-Klebert, "Die kulturelle Revolution der Frau," Kursbuch 17 (1969), 5.

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literature. By abolishing the bourgeois prejudice againstwomen, Romanticism and other cultural movements could utilize women as in allegories for the longing for immediacy which transcended the commercialization, restriction and atomization of individuals. This is of course a very artificial longing for the "natural" life prior to "original sin," which occurred as if at least a few members of the female sex had escaped bourgeois socialization pressures: excluded from determining the course of history, they became instead its passive victim. she (thewoman,S.B.) By virtueof herdistancefromthe processof production the humanbeingwhois not yet entirely retainscertaintraitswhichcharacterize in the graspof society.79 This potential for resistance is rooted in the anachronistic female role: its dysfunctionality allows for utopian thinking. But the natural qualities of woman which are often evoked are only in part utopian fiction; they are also component of an impoverished reality. These seemingly contradictory images have their origin in the archetype Natura, back to which the metamorphoses can be traced: both that of Isis, the witch and the modern Medusas of the film industry, and that of the "Great Mother," the bourgeois image of motherhood and the servile conforming housewife, who, according to modern advertising, is eternally guilt-ridden and whose achievements are never recognized. And yet: "This anachronism has a specific power, the power to rupture, to disturb, to change, limited of course to imaginary displacements. Everything happens as if the resistance of the past would survive in signs and symptoms. . ."80 The interpretation of these signs and symptoms has until now been men's affair - and that is how both idolatry and defamation began. These ideologies, "frameworks through which myths could still filter" (Catherine Clement), are indicative of men's fear of a femininity which still is reputed to be in league with nature. While some men seek in women an unblemished nature - nature as it was before turning into a junk yard - others conceive of her as possessing the destructive powers of anarchistic Eros. Karin Schrader-Klebert writes in an analysis of Roman Polanski's witch film Rosemary's Baby and the ritual murder of Sharon Tate: only as an instanceof social Sensualityappearedin the historyof civilization destructiveness.Normalcystill manifestsitself throughthe annihilationof towardssexuality.... The fleshis sensuality,throughfear of and aggression evil. The fleshalliesitselfwithaddiction to alcohol,drugs,orgies,blackmagic, in shortwith everything evil - andevil is thatwhichdisrupts the abilityof the

79. Th. W. Adorno, Prisms (London, 1967), p. 82. 80. Catherine Clment, "Hexe und Hysterikerin," p. 154.

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its abilityto adaptto the needs body to function,thatwhichmakesproblematic of the apparatus.. .81 The ideological longing for a "return to nature" is most often channeled into the suburban idyll and into the artificially and sensationally staged natural landscapes of mass tourism. Likewise tamed to conform to the petty bourgeois life style, woman too becomes an ideal and loses her sting. But idylls always reveal themselves as deceptive. The biological-naturalmoments of human existence only appear to have been fully expunged from masculine everyday life: that relationship to inner nature which has not yet been mastered is projected onto woman, so that woman must pay for the dysfunctionality of man's natural drives. The institutionalized repression of those "natural" processes which remind us of our animalistic origins - birth, death, caring for the helpless, processes securely hidden behind institutional walls, rationally managed and removed from everyday life - is constantly threatened by woman, who is responsible for the biological and social reproduction of the species. A pregnant woman on the street looks like a relic from an archaic world. The midwife still serves an important function, even in the supermodern, well-equipped delivery room. "The violent social appropriation of nature is dissociated from the real driving forces of this appropriation. The relationship to procreation, birth and death remains a continued relationship to nature."82 According to ideology, this violent force is not a structural element of patriarchal society, but, rather, becomes personalized. In world theatre, it appears as a tragi-comical battle. From Hans Sachs, through Strindberg and Albee, to Bergmann's Scenes from a Marriage, it is hidden behind the construct of an everlasting struggle between one man and one woman. This violence may be depicted, but obviously only in form of isolated cases. Any more general reference to this potential of violence is dubbed radical feminism. But it was not women who began the battle of the sexes, and public violence against women, as attested by women's conferences in Brussels and Munich, is not a mere thing of the past. In the torture methods still used today against women (for example in Chile),83 the sexual-sadistic moment is so pronounced that these torturers could easily be mistaken for those who took part in the witch burnings.
81. K. Schrader-Klebert, "Verbrechen und Ritual," in Aesthetik und Gewalt (Giitersloh, 1970), p. 120. 82. Ibid., p. 90. 83. UN Report on the Violation of Human Rights in Chile, Documentation of the Evangelical News Agency, Frankfurt am Main, May 1976 (one of many such horrifying statements): "A young woman reported that she was held for 30 days, was stripped, thrown to the floor, and beaten all over her body. Various objects were inserted into her vagina. She was then dressed, brought together with other persecuted people and beaten further; since she could no longer stand, they poured cold water over her and threw her down. She was told that she would be shot. She was beaten unconscious, revived again, her eyes were bound, they beat her and continued the questioning. Together with other women

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The fact that women are considered threatening natural beings is based on their widespread exclusion from the sphere of production and from relevant areas of public life. There have of course been some changes in the last hundred years, but this has resulted in a contradiction: woman can no longer live up to any expectation totally; neither can she fulfill the role of housewife and mother, of the compliant slave, nor that of the dedicated career woman. Still responsible for biological reproduction, for the care and raising of children, as well as for nurturing of any kind, her burden multiplies, and she tries to - or is in many cases forced to - do justice to all roles. It is precisely in this ambivalence of the feminine cultural and social character that the possibilities and potentials of the women's movement lie. For a long time women reacted to their plight, to the violence done to them, to the given rules of their existence as anachronistic creatures of nature, in an appropriately "natural" way, namely in submissive, lifeless, anxiety-ridden mimicry: they reacted idiosyncratically. In idiosyncrasy, individual organsescapefromthe controlof the subject,and independentlyobey fundamental biologicalstimuli.... For a few moments these reactionseffect an adaptation to circumambient, motionlessnature.But as the animateapproaches the inanimate, andthe morehighly-developed form of life comes closer to nature,it is alienatedfromit, since inanimate nature, whichlife in its mostvigorousformaspiresto become,is capable onlyof wholly external, spatialrelationships.84 Mimicry has always been a deceptive kind of protection, for torpor made women defenseless to the violence done to them. But their partial exclusion from the civilizing process has also saved them from harm. For centuries,the severitywithwhichthe rulersprevented theirown followers and the subjugatedmasses from revertingto mimeticmodes of existence, on images,goingon to the socialbanishstartingwith the religiousprohibition ment of actorsand gypsies, and leadingfinallyto the kindof teachingwhich does not allowchildren to behaveas children,hasbeen the conditionforcivilization. . . . All devotionandall deflectionhasa touchof mimicry aboutit. In the constitutionof the ego reflectivemimesisbecomescontrolledreflection. "Recognitionin the concept," the absorptionof the differentby the same, takes the place of physicaladaptation to nature.85 Today women are at last rousing themselves from their torpor. Sleeping Beauty has finally awakened, the prince's kiss had only lulled her into a
she was taken to a place, picked up again, stripped naked, electrodes were attached to her breasts, her elbows, her sex organs, down to her feet. Very young girls had to watch." They were sent to a transport, again questioned about bombs and weapons, and tortured until unconscious. This witness was brought out of the prison with a car, and was thrown in the street. She is definitely damaged, both mentally and physically." 84. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 180. 85. Ibid., p. 180f.

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more modemrn, stupefying doze. Women reacted idiosyncratically only as as themselves believed in the rules of existence prescribed for them long they as pseudo-natural beings. Today, because they are actively taking their fate into their own hands, rejecting the traditional roles assigned to them and deciphering the traces of their own history, they are finally arising from that mimetic torpor. They will resist the temptation to nullify, simply by recourse to nature, "the historical defeat of the female sex" (Engels), the theoretical expression of which was precisely the subsumption of woman under the concept of nature. Women are creatures of the 20th century, they can repair cars, they perform (because they are forced) the hardest and most ill paid work in industry, they win (more or less under duress) Olympic medals for their countries. But because of their different history, their exclusion from important sectors of domination and production, because of their specific social functions, women actually have not "become hardened to self-sacrifice" and have instead maintained behavioral possibilities which resist instrumental rationality. That is why women, though not the creatures of nature that men wanted to make of them, will remain witches for as long as their oppression endures. Translated by Jeannine Blackwell, Johanna Moore and Beth Weckmueller

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Autumn 1978

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Number 4

Contents include: Monique Plaza: "'Phallomorphic power" and the psychology of "woman". Pasquale Pasquino: Theatrum Politicum. The genealogy of capital police and the state of prosperity. Giovanna Procacci: Social economy and the government of poverty. Denise Riley: Developmental psychology, biology and marxism. Rick Anderson: Writing sociology and the politics of speech. David Macey: Review article - Jacques Lacan's Ecrits and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The previousthree issueshave includedpapersby M. Foucaultand F. Rossi-Landi, criticalanalysesof the workof M.PecheuxandJ. Piaget,studiesof the relationsof of knowledgeand power in the prisonsand in psychoanalytic practice,discussions theories of ideology, psychology, psychoanalysis, semiology and sexuality, plus anddebate. reviews,correspondence Eachissue contains128 pagesand is available from bookshopsat a coverprice of below at a cost of ?1.35/S 3.00 including ?1.20/S 2.50, or by post fromthe address and post packing. For subscription rates,detailsof backissuesandotherinformation, pleasecontact: I & C, 1 Woburn Mansions, Torrington Place, London WC1.