The fear of witches, which existed parallel with the love of the
Madonna, was typical of the declining Middle Ages. The first Christian
centuries knew neither the Lady of Heaven in the later meaning of the
word, nor did they know anything of witches. In the reign of Charlemagne
the penalty for the belief in witchcraft was death. At all times man has
exhibited a tendency to see in woman either a celestial or an infernal
being, and nowhere was this tendency more strongly developed than in the
soul of the mediaeval dualist: he created the beloved and adored Queen
of Heaven, the mediator between God and humanity and, as her counterpart
the witch, the despised and dreaded seducer, a being between man and
devil. Powerless to effect a reconciliation between spiritual love and
sensuous pleasure, he required two distinct female types as
personifications of the two directions of his desire; love and the
pleasure of the senses could have nothing in common, and once the
highest value was realised in the spiritual love of woman, pleasure
could not appear otherwise than degraded, sinful and diabolical. In this
respect, also, woman submitted without a murmur to the dictates of male
will.
Mary and the devil became more and more the real hostile powers of the
thirteenth century; the classical time of woman-worship was also the
climax of the fear of the devil and witchcraft. The Dominican monks
who, above all other orders, contributed to the spread of the cult of
Mary, proceeded, soon after the establishment of the Inquisition,
against the witches, the enemies of Mary. In the second half of the
thirteenth century the persecution of heresy gradually gave way to the
persecution of witchcraft.
I will not go into these well-known details, for the psychical position
is clear enough: to the man whose heart is filled with the love of good
and the spiritual love of woman, sensuousness will appear as dangerous
and perilous, and will have at the same time the glamour of the
demoniacally-sexual. It is the diabolical element of dualistic
consciousness in the sphere of eroticism. Many people of the present day
will not be able to understand this feeling, for it pre-supposes a
completely inharmonious emotional life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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