The Contemporary Witch, The Historical Witch and The Witch Myth

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 and 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
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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 auton-
omous, have failed to notice that they are merely the rearguard of 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 demonstra-
tions the participants dress up as witches. Women's bars have names such as
Blocksberg, (***) books have titles such as Hexengefliister (Witches' Whis-
pering), 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 conti-
nuity 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
10, M" mg,'mw k 79 h,'jtop-
Jim
Reproduced by kind permission of: Mirkisches Museum, Berlin, GDR

and Neue Gesellschaft fiir Bildende Kunst
This print was supposed to appear with Atina Grossmann's article in Number 14
"Abortion and Economic Crisis: The 1931 Campaign Against ?218 in Germany."
84 Bovenschen
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 picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image
which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen
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 manifesta-
tion. 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 carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.
There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.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 auton-
omous historical objectivity.
1. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations (New York,

1968), p. 257.
2. Ibid., p. 256.
The Witch 85
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it was.'
It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.3
In the interaction of phylo- and ontogenetical constituents of conscious-

ness - 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 intui-
tive - 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 rediscovered past yields critical standards which are tabooed by the
present. Moreover, the restoration of memory is accompanied by the
restoration of the cognitive content of fantasy.5
Witch mythology mediates between the historical and the empirical

witch, at the juncture between the femininity syndrome and aggressive self-
representation. 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.
My assistant returned one morning from vacation. He had somehow landed in a

train compartment which a women's group was using for an afternoon
excursion. Apparently they were annoyed to have a male traveling companion.
They loudly told risque jokes, obscenities flew back and forth, then the whole
group sang a bawdy song and verbally abused the man, asking him if he could
possibly give a rendition of the uncut version of another raucous tune. They
3. Ibid., p. 257.
4. cf. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York, 1962).
5. Ibid., p. 18.
86 Bovenschen
were . .. upstanding women of the urban upper middle class, who in this large
group on a festive occasion got excited and whose comments then became
extremely daring.
And a further example:
I experienced such women on another occasion too .... It was in late spring
and the birds were chirping - the women were out in the fields planting crops.
And they outdid themselves with obscenities. They outdid themselves with
lewd and undisciplined actions; I only know that they undressed the younger
girls, that they all took off their skirts and danced half-naked.6
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 matri-
archal) 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.
6. Will-Erich Peuckert, "Ergainzendes Kapitel fiber das deutsche Hexenwesen," in Julio

Baroja, Die Hexe und ihre Welt (Stuttgart, 1967), p. 291.
7. Ibid., p. 295.
The Witch 87
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:
Thus utopian function often has a double foundation, that of immersion in the
middle of hope. That is, preliminary work has been performed on hope within
the archaic framework. More specifically: within those archetypes which still
strike a chord, which are left over from the era of a mythical consciousness
providing categories for fantasy, and contain an undeveloped nonmythical
surplus.9
The fantastic qualities of imagination go far beyond what theoretical

discourse, hostile towards images as it is, can transmit.
Fantasy is cognitive. . . in so far as it protects, against all reason, the aspira-
tions for the integral fulfillment of man and nature which are repressed by
reason. In the realm of fantasy, the unresonable images of freedom become
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 mythologi-
cal 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 differ-
ence 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.
88 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 con-
firmed 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 accusa-
tion 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 myths and customs which we have observed dimly reflect the feelings and
reactions of men and women not only towards a woman in particular but also
towards women per se, towards the principle of femininity which, despite all
the masculinations of the modern woman, remains the source of womanhood
and dominates her physical life 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 that we try to establish a better relationship to
the feminine principle, or, as the ancients expressed it, to the Great Mother,
the Magna Dea. 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 Verhiiltnis von 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.
The Witch 89
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 destruc-
tion 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 femini-
nity in its demonic form.14 . . .a woman cognizant of her own higher level of
development recognizes this danger and carefully refrains from actions which
have such potentially disastrous consequences, because only by disciplining
desires can love and spiritual relationships between the sexes be achieved.15
The politics and ideology which reduce women to this archetypal cate-
gorization 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:
.. .everything new is eo ipso worthless, even worth-negating; for Jung and

Klages the only thing new is the present day destruction of the instincts, the
decomposition of the primeval instinctual base by the intellect. .. Psycho-
synthesis - fleeing the present, hating the future, seeking the primeval-...
then the most barren superstition ranks above Enlightenment thought; for of
course Jung's collective unconscious flows with more import in witchcraft than
in pure reason. 16
14. Ibid., p. 255.

15. Ibid., p. 290.
16. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, I, p. 67.
90 Bovenschen
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 there-
fore 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.
Myth can always, as a last resort, signify the resistance which is brought to bear
against it. Truth to tell, the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in
its turn, and to produce an artifical myth. 19
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 19th-
century 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 main-
tained - 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. cf. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York, 1972).

18. Klaus Heinrich, Parmenides und Jona, p. 27.
19. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, p. 135.
20. Egon Friedell, Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (Munich, 1931), p. 332.
The Witch 91
- 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 recommenda-
tions 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 perspec-
tive, 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 repre-
sented 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 well-
this mythologizing corresponds to the wishful thinking of men. The guide-
lines handed down from spiritual leaders to their fellow men were however,
as a rule (though more or less camouflaged), those of constant and unrelent-
ing 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 thor-
oughly 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 almost appears as if that masculine primal fear, whose traces can be followed
throughout human history, is reactivated in some mysterious way. Of course
there are many historical variables, so that it can only be surmised to what
extent the uneasiness caused by civilization itself increasingly affected the
tension of the male psyche.21
21. Hoffman R. Hays, Diimon Frau (Diisseldorf, 1969), p. 300.
92 Bovenschen
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 essentially a
projection of suppressed sexual wishes of the woman, particularly those which
relate to the feminine counterpart of the Oedipus complex, that is the love of
the father and jealousy and enmity towards the mother. Just as the child
separates the image of the father into his benevolent and malicious traits and
thereby makes possible the belief in God and the devil, it also separates the
mother into two halves, out of which stems the belief in both goddesses (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 phenom-
enon 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 characterizing witch
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.
The Witch 93
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:
The patriarchal reality principle holds sway over the psychoanalytic interpreta-
tion. It is only beyond this reality principle that the "maternal images" of the
super ego convey promises rather than memory traces - images of a free future
rather than of a dark past.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.
Prometheus is the archetype-hero of the performance principle. And in the
world of Prometheus, Pandora, the female principle, sexuality and pleasure,
appear as curse - disruptive, destructive. "Why are women such a curse?"
The denunciation of the sex with which the section (on Prometheus in Hesiod)
concludes emphasizes above all else their economic unproductivity. .. The
beauty of the woman, and the happiness she promises are fatal in the work-
world 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 sexes-
thus, in the forms of the domination of internal and external nature.
Woman is not a being in her own right, a subject. . . . The division of labor
imposed upon her by man brought her little that was worthwhile. She became
the embodiment of the biological function, the image of nature the subjugation
of which constituted that civilization's title to fame. For millennia men
dreamed of acquiring absolute mastery over nature, of converting the cosmos
into one immense hunting-ground.26
24. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 211.

25. Ibid., p. 146.
26. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 247f.
94 Bovenschen
II. The Historical Witch - The Fall of the 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, domina-
tion and utilization of nature always implied domination of human beings by
human beings - that is a thesis of Critical Theory. All practical and theoreti-
cal effort was geared solely toward this functional relationship of calcula-
tion, discipline and exploitation of internal and external nature - thus it can
be roughly summarized in retrospect.
Domination of nature includes domination of humans. Every subject must not
only take part in the subjugation of external nature, human and non-human,
but also must subjugate the nature in himself in order to achieve it. . . Because
the subjugation of internal and external nature takes place for no good reason,
nature is not really transcended or reconciled, but is simply suppressed.28
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 self-
sufficient 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 ideolog-
ically 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 culmi-
nated 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 Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main, 1964), p. 94.
29. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 9.
The Witch 95
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 phenome-
non 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 combina-
tion 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 indivi-
dual in the late Middle Ages. (The full extent of human misery can best be
traced in various gloomy artistic depictions - something the mere reitera-
tion 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 politi-
cal 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.
96 Bovenschen
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 reduction of objectivity was limited to the sensations

and perceptions of the subject; the old order, previously considered objective,
had disintegrated; and thus the orientation of the individual subject toward a
universally recognized objectivity was rendered impossible. If previously the
identity of subjectivity seemed guaranteed by that of the objective structures
which individual subjects brought into direct relationship with each other
(since they had originally been related), then the Nominalist critique of
Universal Realism negated, along with the hierarchy of being, the universally
accepted idea that subjective logical forms were valid and 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 corres-
ponded 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, strati-
fied, and lacked social mobility. It is fairly typical that as a result of social
upheavals individuals saw themselves at the mercy of the chaotic prolifera-
tion of phenomena - a fragmentary reality with infinite constellations.
Even though the medieval social order did arbitrarily assign 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 annihi-
lation 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 conse-
quence 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 denuncia-
tions 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.
The Witch 97
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; meta-
morphosis into animals; exerting magical influence over the processes of
sex, birth, etc.). Of course, there is a dilemma posed by such a characteriza-
tion, 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 adminis-
tering 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 extra-
ordinary 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 magical-
animistic 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 pre-
supposes - from our perspective - the separation of scientific thought
98 Bovenschen
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 consistency of the
material under investigation was not yet guaranteed through work; one could
only try to force the material into compliance through witchcraft in order to
achieve the desired goal. The exhortation of the natural power in materials was
not limited to the material itself, the process expanded to include humanity's
virtual power over the forces of 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. More-
over, 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 func-
tion 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.
34. Marcel Mauss, Theorie der Magie, p. 62.
The Witch 99
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.
Thus women, whose role in magic is so significant, were considered magicians or
bearers of powers solely because they had a special social position. They were
considered qualitatively different from men and were gifted with special
powers; menstruation, secret sexual processes and pregnancy were but proof of
the qualities attributed to them. Society - that of men - had a very
pronounced social responsibility toward women. .... From this special feeling
resulted the legal and particularly the disparate or subordinate religious
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
from both bodies; through both, new generations continued. In woman, the
power to germinate seed and the fertility of nature were incarnated, and Nature
analogously gives life to the life-giving woman. Children and harvests seemed
to be supernatural gifts, products of a magical force.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 relin-
quish 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.
100 Bovenschen
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., mis-
carriages 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 differ-
ent 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.
The Witch 101
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, fertility magic and the belief in the
Earth Mother become most apparent when we examine the documents of all
periods, particularly those of actual witch trials, to see how very often field and
fruit charms - love and fertility charms belong in this category too - are
mentioned; they represent a continuum between the most distant past and
today.40
More difficult to confirm is the thesis - as Margaret Murray41 states 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).
102 Bovenschen
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 touching beginnings of religion and the sciences! Later on
everything would be divided; man would become charlatan, astrologist or
prophet, black magician, priest, doctor, but in the beginning, the woman was
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 responsi-
ble 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 medieval cult practice the
subjective undercurrent of witchcraft rejected by the Church surfaced between
the antinomies of Gothic piety and infiltrated the objective religious world of
the Middle Ages while its patrons theology and church stood helplessly by; as
the principles of witchcraft turned more and more from the natural demonic to
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.
The Witch 103
the escatological-demonic, from the secret powers of the earth and its represen-
tatives to the devil and his malice, . . the ties to the old earth religion and its
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 corres-
ponds to the most horrible phase of persecution and contempt for women.
The attempt of Christianity ideologically to compensate the oppression of the
one sex by means of reverence for woman, and thus to cultivate rather than to
suppress the memory of an archaic age, is redeemed by resentment of the
ennobled woman. . . The emotion which corresponds to the practice of
oppression is contempt, not reverence, and in the centuries of Christianity,
love for one's neighbor has always concealed a lurking, forbidden though now
compulsive, hatred for woman - the object which served repeatedly to recall
the fact of futile exertion. This hatred made up for the cult of the Madonna with
the persecution of witches - a form of vengeance on the memory of those pre-
Christian prophetesses, the lasting after-image which implicitly called in
question the sacrilized patriarchal order of domination. Woman arouses the
primitive anger of the half-converted man. . .46
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 appraising woman'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.

104 Bovenschen
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-Christian times 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 purposes and uncertain effects, such as pharma-
cology, medicine, surgery, metallurgy, .... could not have survived if magic
had not supported and even protected them, lending them stability.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 empiri-
cal). Although Paracelsus, swaying precariously in the balance between
magic and science, burned the ancient writings and announced that every-
thing 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 Enlighten-
ment 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 commensur-
able. 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.
Magic thinking cannot live from abstractions; ... for them (the magicians,
S.B.) nature was not a pure idea which embraced the whole spectrum of emo-
47. M. Mauss, Theorie der Magie, p. 173.

48. J. Michelet, Die Hexe, p. 181.
The Witch 105
tions and affinities, but was a clearly outlined concept of certain characteris-
tics. ... Magic rites are less easily explained by the application of abstract laws
than as the transferral of characteristics whose effects and countereffects 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, particularly the
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 measure-
able 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 underground existence during centuries of Christiani-
zation, 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.
The proletariat created by the breaking up of the bonds of feudal retainers and
by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this 'free' proletariat
could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufacturer as fast as it was
thrown upon the world. On the other hand, these men, suddenly dragged from
their wanted mode of life, could not as suddenly adapt themselves to the disci-
49. M. Mauss, Theorie der Magie, p. 108.
106 Bovenschen
pline of their new condition. They were turned en masse into beggars, 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 func-
tions reminded men of their animalistic origins. In accord with the patri-
archal 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 witchcraft trials which the associated feudal racketeers used to terrorize
the masses when they felt themselves threatened, served at once to celebrate
and to confirm the triumph of male society over prehistoric matriarchal and
mimetic stages of development. The auto-da-f6 was the Church's heathen
bonfire, a triumph of nature in the form of self-preserving reason, to celebrate
the glory of the mastery of 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 the patriarchal seizure 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 histori-
50. Karl Marx, Capital (New York, 1906), p. 805f.

51. cf. Barrington Moore, Soziale Urspriinge von Diktatur und Demokratie (Frankfurt am
Main, 1969).
The Witch 107
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 "retour a 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 optimis-
tic belief in progress on the one hand, and as opposed to a cultural pessimism
hostile to civilization on the other.
Whether people could have developed into spiritual being without pitting spirit
against nature cannot be surmised retrospectively.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.54 But 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 subli-
mated 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.
108 Bovenschen
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,56 for Thomas Szasz the insane57 and
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.
The description of the cosmetics and grooming of the Italian courtesans would
not be complete without consideration of the real role that quackery and witch-
craft played therein. .... It was almost exclusively former prostitutes and old
madams who instructed the courtesans in the magic arts of the erotic and who
gave them medical advice of 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 want to take it upon themselves to tell this story their own way, they
will replace men as myth-makers - that is how historical and cultural develop-
ment works. If the question is one of reinterpreting these myths using the
example of the most 'feminine' of the men (Flaubert, Michelet), then new
historical perspectives will of necessity result, a new canon of history which
takes into account both the real and the imaginary . . . we feel it is a question
of showing the lost history of the oral tradition, legends, myths. . . 60
56. cf. Iwan Bloch, Die Prostituierte, II (Berlin, 1912).

57. cf. Thomas Szasz, Die Fabrikation des Wahnsinns (Olten, 1974).
58. cf. J. Michelet, Die Hexe.
59. Iwan Bloch, Die Prostituierte, II, p. I11.
60. Catherine Cl6ment, "Hexe und Hysterikerin," Alternative, 108-109 (1976), 151.
The Witch 109
The witchhunt was temporarily called off; since women were house-
bound, 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 poetic-
mimetic 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 back-
ward 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.)

62. cf. Walter Benjamin, "Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels," Gesammelte Schriften I.1
(Frankfurt am Main, 1974).
63. Wolfgang Kemp, Ikonographische Studien zur Geschichte und Verbreitung einer Allegorie,
Diss. (Tiibingen, 1973), p. 18.
64. Ibid., p. 15.
110 Bovenschen
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 corres-
ponded 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 dominant ideology with the positive concepts of
progress and wealth (also personified by woman!), can and must be embodied
by the feminine: by woman, viewed as empty, refillable vessel, passive and
malleable, as an embodying body without an existence of its own, 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 histori-
cal 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:
Symbol of the disconcerting secret power of the machine, which devours every-
thing entering its gears, everything which crosses the path of its cranks, rods
and belts or foolishly dares to reach for its wheels - this is woman. But
conversely: The insensate and brutal machine, which incessantly victimizes
countless men as if they were nought, itself symbolizes the rapacious
Minotaurian character of woman.66
65. Cecilia Rentmeister, "Berufsverbot fiir Musen," Asthetik und Kommunikation, 25

(September 1976).
66. Eduard Fuchs, Die Frau in der Karikatur (Munich, 1906), p. 174 (quoted from C. Rentmeister).
The Witch 111
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.
112 Bovenschen
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 through the law of nature, women as well as children are defenseless
before the judgment of men. . . . Thus the total upbringing of women has to
take place with due consideration given to men. To please them, to be useful to
them, . . . to raise them while they are young, to care for them as men, ...
these have been the duties of women through the ages, that is what they should
be taught from childhood on.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 re-
established, 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 resur-
rected 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.
The Witch 113
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.
Long ago, instead of scientific explanations one found fairy tales and poems full
of strange images, people, gods and animals as common task masters, and one
heard the world described in the most natural way possible ... If this method
pursues the ephemeral with a frivolous mind, the newer method tries to dissect
the internal structure and elemental proportion with the surgeon's knife.
Under their hands amiable nature died and only twitching remains were left
behind; the poet, on the other hand, as if animated by the spirit of the wine,
narrates the most divine and happiest fantasies .... 72

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.
Novalis' definition, according to which all philosophy is homesickness, holds
true only if this longing is not dissolved into the phantasm of a lost remote
antiquity, but represents the homeland, nature itself as wrested from myth.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 representa-
tives 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 increasingly with the archaic and this with the
chthonic, so that the inside of history began to look like the interior of the
earth. This feeling of claustrophobia, this incestuous state of return to the
womb, to night and the past culminated in Bachofen, the prophet of
matriarchy; yet it culminated with necrophilia for the chthonic Demeter.74
72. Novalis, "Die Lehrlinge zu Sais," p. 110.

114 Bovenschen
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 epistemologi-
cal 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 surprisingly superficial 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 archetypal were absolutely regressive, there would be no archetypes
which reach for utopia, nor would utopia base itself on them; there would be no
progressive poetry searching for truth with the old symbols; fantasy would be
nothing but regression; it would have to beware of all images, allegories and
symbols originating in the old mythical layers of fantasy. .... Archetypes have
their most recent existence in human history; only to that extent are archetypes
what they could be: concise ornaments of a utopian message. The utopian func-
tion appropriates this part from the past, from the reaction, even from myth:
every time this utopian refunctioning occurs, the unfulfilled part of archetypes
emerges and becomes recognizable.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.
77. Ibid., p. 187.
The Witch 115
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,"'78 because 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.
116 Bovenschen
literature. By abolishing the bourgeois prejudice against women, 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.
By virtue of her distance from the process of production she (the woman, S.B.)
retains certain traits which characterize the human being who is not yet entirely
in the grasp of 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 meta-
morphoses 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. Every-
thing 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:
Sensuality appeared in the history of civilization only as an instance of social
destructiveness. Normalcy still manifests itself through the annihilation of
sensuality, through fear of and aggression towards sexuality. ... The flesh is
evil. The flesh allies itself with addiction to alcohol, drugs, orgies, black magic,
in short with everything evil - and evil is that which disrupts the ability of the
79. Th. W. Adorno, Prisms (London, 1967), p. 82.

80. Catherine Clment, "Hexe und Hysterikerin," p. 154.
The Witch 117
body to function, that which makes problematic its ability to adapt to the needs
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-natural moments
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 dysfunc-
tionality 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 repro-
duction 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
118 Bovenschen
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 multi-
plies, 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 organs escape from the control of the subject, and
independently obey fundamental biological stimuli .... For a few moments
these reactions effect an adaptation to circumambient, motionless nature. But
as the animate approaches the inanimate, and the more highly-developed form
of life comes closer to nature, it is alienated from it, since inanimate nature,
which life in its most vigorous form aspires to become, is capable only of wholly
external, spatial relationships.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 severity with which the rulers prevented their own followers
and the subjugated masses from reverting to mimetic modes of existence,
starting with the religious prohibition on images, going on to the social banish-
ment of actors and gypsies, and leading finally to the kind of teaching which
does not allow children to behave as children, has been the condition for civili-
zation. . . . All devotion and all deflection has a touch of mimicry about it. In
the constitution of the ego reflective mimesis becomes controlled reflection.
"Recognition in the concept," the absorption of the different by the same,
takes the place of physical adaptation 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."
85. Ibid., p. 180f.
The Witch 119
more modemrn, stupefying doze. Women reacted idiosyncratically only as

long as they themselves believed in the rules of existence prescribed for them
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
\oo & Con 1SCIo0

Autumn 1978 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 previous three issues have included papers by M. Foucault and F. Rossi-Landi,
critical analyses of the work of M. Pecheux and J. Piaget, studies of the relations of
knowledge and power in the prisons and in psychoanalytic practice, discussions of
theories of ideology, psychology, psychoanalysis, semiology and sexuality, plus
reviews, correspondence and debate.
Each issue contains 128 pages and is available from bookshops at a cover price of
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The Contemporary Witch, The Historical Witch and The Witch Myth

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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

I. The Contemporary Witch - The Witch Returns

The topic of "witches" has become fashionable, has indeed already

Reproduced by kind permission of: Mirkisches Museum, Berlin, GDR

This experiential appropriation of the past differs qualitatively from that

It is as if the empirical witches perceived this secret agreement Benjamin

1. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations (New York,

In the interaction of phylo- and ontogenetical constituents of conscious-

Witch mythology mediates between the historical and the empirical

My assistant returned one morning from vacation. He had somehow landed in a

And a further example:

6. Will-Erich Peuckert, "Ergainzendes Kapitel fiber das deutsche Hexenwesen," in Julio

The fantastic qualities of imagination go far beyond what theoretical

To elevate the historical witch post festum to an archetypcal image of

Of course the rediscovery of the historical existence of matrifocal

This recourse to an ontological substance of femininity initially implies

is probably based upon the fabrication of an "ancient tie" to an "ultimate

.. .everything new is eo ipso worthless, even worth-negating; for Jung and

14. Ibid., p. 255.

Of interest here, although for other reasons, is the "important fantasy

17. cf. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York, 1972).

- is the implicit assumption - often an emphatic one - that the danger

21. Hoffman R. Hays, Diimon Frau (Diisseldorf, 1969), p. 300.

According to this theory, women themselves provided (projected) this

today's theoretical psychoanalytical discussion.) The allusion to the eternally

It is not to be denied that masculine sexual fantasy and fears manifest

In literature the Pandora motif was constantly revived, leading in an

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

II. The Historical Witch - The Fall of the Witch

The new rationality established itself at the expense of an increased

27. cf. ibid., p. 3.

30. Jules Michelet, Die Hexe (Munich, 1974), p. 84.

With Nominalism, the reduction of objectivity was limited to the sensations

31. Peter Bulthaupt, Zur gesellschaftlichen Funktion der Naturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am

humans, nature and society. Spirited out of their traditional framework,

Despite the triumph of men over women, the acknowledgement of women's

35. Ibid., p. 152.

More difficult to confirm is the thesis - as Margaret Murray41 states it -

40. Anton Mayer, Erdmutter und Hexe (Munich, 1936), p. 46.

legitimation to mass annihilation. The persecution of social fringe groups is

Folk medicine, before reaching professional status and being subsumed

42. Jules Michelet, Die Hexe, p. 19.

Rather grotesquely, it was precisely the madonna cult which later

45. Anton Mayer, Erdmutter und Hexe, p. 62f.

47. M. Mauss, Theorie der Magie, p. 173.

When the process of metabolic exchange between humans and nature

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

The new techniques of production in large parts of Europe - for

50. Karl Marx, Capital (New York, 1906), p. 805f.

cal development where the exploitation of nature became systematic in

Art is supposed to keep alive the memory of "paradise lost"; people

III. Witch Mythology - Metamorphoses of the Witch

53. Karl-Heinz Haag, Philosophischer Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1967), p. 16.

institutionalized form. The mother and the prostitute were embedded in a

56. cf. Iwan Bloch, Die Prostituierte, II (Berlin, 1912).

61. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, I, p. 184.

Natura continued to be a thoroughly positive symbolic figure well into

Because the allegories of the Industrial Age, embodied by feminine

65. Cecilia Rentmeister, "Berufsverbot fiir Musen," Asthetik und Kommunikation, 25

When technological progress continues unbeknownst to those who

67. Walter Benjamin, "Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels," p. 358.

narrates the most divine and happiest fantasies .... 72