A brief history of how brutal interrogations of ‘witches’ were all about punishing sex Witchcraft allowed outwardly pious moralisers space to obsess about the most depraved sexual acts without ever denting their halos

Belief in witches, sorceresses, and wizards stretches back to the Ancient World, but it wasn’t until the sixteenth century that countries across Europe began passing laws that made witchcraft a secular crime, punishable by death. Debate rages among historians as to why witchcraft went from being a minor concern to the medieval authorities to a widespread moral panic throughout Christendom that resulted in around 40,000 people being executed as witches.

The witch hunts have often been linked to the Reformation in 1517 and the rapid spread of Protestantism. Given both the Catholic and Protestant Church’s condemnation of sexual sin, it’s telling just how sexualised the witch trials were. Although men were also accused and executed for witchcraft, around 80 per cent of those accused were women, usually over 50. Their trials and resulting confessions (gained under torture) are frequently sexual in nature, but rather than proving their own guilt, reveal the sexual motivations of their accusers.

‘The Malleus Maleficarum devotes an entire chapter to detailing how witches have sex with the devil and his minions’ i's opinion newsletter: talking points from today Email address is invalid Email address is invalid Thank you for subscribing! Sorry, there was a problem with your subscription.

At the time, it was believed women were weaker and more lustful than men, which made them particularly vulnerable to the Devil. Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s infamous witch-hunting manual, ‘The Malleus Maleficarum’ (1486) reasoned that although men can be witches, “a greater number of witches is found in the fragile feminine sex than among men.” They go on to argue that unlike men, women “know no moderation in goodness or vice”, and that “all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable”.

It was widely believed that when a woman made a pact with the devil, he had sex with her. The Malleus Maleficarum devotes an entire chapter to detailing how witches have sex with the devil and his minions. “Such demons practice the most revolting sexual acts, not for the sake of pleasure but in order to taint the soul and body of those under or on whom they lie.” As a result, those accused of witchcraft were often tortured into confessing to demonic sexual acts they couldn’t possibly have committed.

Sexual torture

For example, in 1645, Elizabeth Clarke, an elderly and disabled widow from Essex, was kept awake for four days and nights until she confessed to having had “carnal copulation with the Devil six or seven years; and that he would appear to her three or four times in a week”. In the same year, Mary Bush confessed to having sex with the devil in the guise of a “young black man”. And in 1662, Isobel Gowdie was questioned in Scotland for six weeks, and confessed to having sex with the Devil: “He was a large black hairy man, very cold, and I found his semen inside me as cold as spring water”.

It is little wonder that the ‘witches’ admitted to sexual sins when the questioning and interrogation methods employed to extract these confessions were often tantamount to sexual torture. When King James VI & I published his witch hunting guide ‘Daemonologie’ in 1597, he advised the witch hunters to look for a secret mark that the Devil leaves on the body of his disciples – the ‘witch’s teat’:

‘The Devil doth generally mark them with a private mark, by reason the Witches have confessed themselves, that the Devil doth lick them with his tongue in some privy part of their body, before he doth receive them to be his servants, which mark commonly is given them under the hair in some part of their body, whereby it may not easily be found out or scene, although they be searched’.

There are recorded incidents of the teat turning up in the throat, or on the belly or breast of the accused, but more often than not this mark was found in the genitals after the victim was stripped naked and forcibly searched. In 1619, Margaret Flowers was tortured into confessing that a black rat sucked upon the teat on her ‘inward parts of her secrets’. In 1645, Margaret Moone was found to have “long teats or bigges in her secret parts, which seemed to have been lately sucked”. In Bury-St-Edmunds, 1665, Elderly widow Rose Cullender was found to have three teats in her vulva. One “it appeared unto them as if it had lately been sucked, and upon the straining of it there issued out white milkie matter”. All were executed for witchcraft.

King James also claimed that ‘the kissing of his [Satan’s] hinder parts’ was required of every witch at their Sabbath: “Then each one kissing the Posteriors of the Devil (a sweet bit no doubt) returns upon their airy vehicles to their habitations.” This was known as the ‘osculum infame’, or the ‘shameful kiss’, and was described by W. Wright in ‘Newes from Scotland’ (1592): “and seeing that they tarried over long, he at their coming enjoined them all to a penance, which was, that they should kiss his buttocks, in sign of duty to him, which being put over the pulpit bare, everyone did as he had enjoined them”.

Imagined sexual depravity

As well as tonguing Satan, fevered moralists detailed the excesses of the sexual depravity they imagined at the witch’s Sabbath. French judge, Pierre de Lancre (1553–1631) wrote that witches gathered “to dance indecently, to banquet filthily, to couple diabolically, to sodomize execrably, to blaspheme scandalously, to pursue brutally every horrible, dirty and unnatural desire, to hold as precious toads, vipers, lizards and all sorts of poisons; to love a vile-smelling goat, to caress him lovingly, to press against and copulate with him horribly and shamelessly”.

‘Thankfully, Kramer and Sprenger decide that witches achieve this by causing victims to hallucinate, and that they don’t really keep pet penises in trees.’

Witches were believed to ride to the Sabbath, masturbating on a phallic broom handle – giving us the iconic broomstick today. In ‘Quaestio de Strigis’ (1470), Jordanes de Bergamo claimed that “the vulgar believe, and the witches confess, that on certain days or nights they anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places”.

As well as indulging in debauchery, witches were well known for cursing, breaking, and even stealing penises. ‘The Malleus Maleficarum’ has a lot to say about impotence, and devotes an entire chapter to how witches can dry up a man’s semen or cast a spell to “magically injure the power of generation – that is, so that a man cannot have sex”. They go on:

“What are we to think about those witches who shut up penises in what are sometimes prolific numbers, twenty or thirty at a single time, in a bird’s nest or some kind of box, where they move about in order to eat oats and fodder, as though they were alive – something which many people have seen and is reported by common gossip?”

Thankfully, Kramer and Sprenger decide witches achieve this by causing victims to hallucinate and that they don’t really keep pet penises in trees.

Punishing sex

Although the vast majority of those accused of witchcraft were women, it is overly simplistic to suggest the trials specifically targeted women. Not only were men identified as witches and executed, but women accused other women of sorcery, and some were employed as ‘witch prickers’ to find the fabled witch’s teat on the prisoner’s body.

The sexualised interrogation, trial and confessions suggest that the witch hunts weren’t about punishing witchcraft as much as they were about punishing sex. The figure of the witch became a repository of the repressed lust a puritanical society attempted to deny in themselves. When sex was regarded as sinful, witchcraft allowed outwardly pious moralisers space to obsess about the most depraved sexual acts without ever denting their halos.