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| The Malleus Maleficarum
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The Malleus Maleficarum
See expanded drop down menu for this whole section on left
The Malleus Maleficarum, also known as The Witch Hammer, written by Dominican monks, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger and published probably in 1486, was the official manual for the persecution, torture and execution of mainly women under the excuse of witchcraft. The title uses the feminine form of 'witch' not the masculine.
It was written and published under the authority of a Papal Bull and, although the Vatican tried later to suppress it, it flourished in many published editions and has influenced Western fanatics and administrations down to our times. In a long list of its horrors it is difficult to select what is most shocking about it, but contending for that place for me is that its English translator, Montague Summers, without whom we would not have access to it in that language, praised it in his Introduction of 1946.
Here is a flavour of some Amazon reviewers having read the Summers 1946 edition.
“This book should form a part of every thinking person's library as a warning beacon, if for no other reason that it is a seminal textbook on the inhumanity of humanity. - - - a compendium of fifteenth century paranoias, all the more frightening for its totalitarian modernity. ‘Anything that is done for the benefit of the State is Good’. In form, it is a ‘how to’ guide on recognizing, capturing, torturing, and executing witches. In substance, it is a diatribe against women, heretics, independent thinkers, romantic lovers, the sensitive passions, human sexuality, and compassion.
“Forming a portion of every working law library for 300 years, there is no estimate of how many women and men were put to death through the mechanism of this benighted book. Some historians estimate that the numbers may run into the millions.
“In short, - - - a license to kill. And it was used far too often and far too freely.”
Another. “The book presents a fairly cold and calculating side when dealing with the punishment of people. References to villages in which dozens of souls were executed are without emotion or the slightest tinge of regret. - - - It is also a testimony to the way in which religion can be used to justify even the most despicable treatment of human beings by people.
”At once fascinating and disturbing, this book is both special and vile. You won't feel good and there are no happy endings. However, the deepened knowledge and the lessons one can learn for today are worth the effort.”
Another. “It served as a guide book for inquisitors during the Inquisition, providing information on identifying witches, wringing confessions from them and discussing suitable punishment of offenders. This text has become the definitive example of misogyny in the witch-hunts. Throughout the book there are negative references to women such as `When a woman thinks alone she thinks evil', `She is a liar by nature', ‘she is more carnal than a man as shown by her carnal abominations'. It also goes on to describe women as defective, weak, and basically claims any misfortune from illness through to crop failure was due to their malign magic.
“- - - It is not a comfortable read to say the least, showing as it does mankind's complete inhumanity to fellow man during this period.”
In his Introduction, Summers says, “The Malleus lay on the bench of every magistrate. It was the ultimate, irrefutable, unarguable authority. It was implicitly accepted not only by Catholic but by Protestant legislature. In fine, it is not too much to say that the Malleus Maleficarum is among the most important, wisest, and weightiest books of the world.” Later he says, “What is most surprising is the modernity of the book. There is hardly a problem, a complex, a difficulty, which they have not foreseen, and discussed, and resolved. Here are cases which occur in the law-courts to-day, set out with the greatest clarity, argued with unflinching logic, and judged with scrupulous impartiality.”
I am quoting from the 1946 edition, but before reading the final lines of his Introduction one needs bear in mind that Summers wrote his original translation in 1928 before the Nazis ascended to power and before the concentration camps and the full horrors of Stalin’s Russia.
The final lines are: “It is a work which must irresistibly capture the attention of all men who think, all who see, or are endeavouring to see, the ultimate reality beyond the accidents of matter, time and space. The Malleus Maleficarum is one of the world's few books written sub specie aeternitatis.” (This means ‘under the aspect of eternity’, describing what is universally and eternally true, without any reference to or dependence upon the merely temporal portions of reality.)
It is a fitting introduction to the terrible book it presents.
Some more about the book itself will follow later, but I want to move quickly to modern versions and the continuing relevance of all that the book represents. The great evil created by a totalitarian state, including the cabal it protects and rewards, coldly using the innate superstition of the mob and its tendency to indulge in moral panics, to introduce repressive regimes and to suppress dissent and intelligent dialogue is as evident today, although not so obvious perhaps to most, as it is from history. The rationale of this web site is that we are experiencing an early 21st century version of a continuing Inquisition, so where is the modern Malleus Maleficarum?
First, we need recognize that the Malleus Maleficarum came swiftly upon the heels of the invention of printing, so that the great evils spread by that mechanism would not have been achieved without it. Printing did not just educate and liberate: it spread the mechanisms of state control as the Internet is doing so to day. Is there an intelligent man or woman today who would not regret computers being in their home if the police called to check on their contents? And if any mother or father is not sure, one might ask them if they have teenage sons who surf online.
But where are the rules, the guidelines, the codification today? First in the vast array of new laws, many covering aspects of our lives formerly considered to be private and not the business of the state. In addition to the laws and supplementing and supporting them is the vast edifice of the legal profession and the judiciary. Both the laws and this edifice turn to another set of ‘rules and guidelines’ to decide both what constitutes criminality and to devise sentencing rules. These are guidelines or ‘facts’ drawn up by ‘expert committees’, more often than not using pseudo science. The greatest single example of one of these is itself another spurious Malleus Maleficarum.
This is the DSM IV, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, the manual physicians, psychiatrist, psychologists, therapists, and social workers use in order to diagnose mental illness. Where medical science draws upon scientific laboratory testing, the DSM is decided by committees of self-interested psychology ‘professionals’ in a manner very similar to the academic committees that supported the mechanisms of the Inquisition. For heretic one can easily substitute inappropriate or deviant behaviour, behaviour that can sometimes also be non-conformist or aggressive or simply greedy and anti-social. A devastating criticism of the DSM is that it had only a handful of so-called mental or social diseases half a century ago but a list of thousands today.
Returning to the Malleus Maleficarum. A search for modern examples of its application can produce striking results. As a writer I have had great difficulty accepting both the credentials and the assumed objectivity of a number of so-called ‘expert witnesses’. What struck me as particularly incongruous was the ease with which some of these adopted the role of being different to and elevated above sinners and sexual deviants. An example from child pornography may be useful. Much of what is taken to be child pornography and used to prosecute and sentence offenders is in fact child erotica, which in turn is often merely erotic posing by girls who were under 18 at the time of the photographing. The argument here is not about the rights or wrongs of this activity. Certain university professors are considered both by themselves and the law to be so objective in their viewing of such images that they have been able to collect and view them for the purposes of their classification and the drawing up of sentencing guidelines for judges depending on the level of pornography depicted.
For example the most common at Level 1 was naked and erotic posing. The principle academics involved went on to write treatises about the mind-set of the viewers – that is, other viewers. There could be another child or a parent viewing or there could be a pervert viewing, the former two probably legitimate viewers, the latter a deviant. But the academic collecting and poring over thousands of these and more pornographic images for the purposes of their codification was an objective viewer, elevated above the deviant, as is the judge who asks to take the folder of images into his private chamber for viewing so that he may give a more just verdict.
Here now is the Malleus Maleficarum on this very subject.
“There are three classes of men blessed by God, whom that detestable race (the witches and heretics) cannot injure with their witchcraft. And the first are those who administer public justice against them, or prosecute them in any public official capacity.” Policemen, lawyers and judges do not get erections.
“The second are those who, according to the traditional and holy rites of the Church, make lawful use of the power and virtue which the Church by her exorcisms furnishes in the aspersion of - - - (here the rituals are listed).” Priests do not get erections.
The Malleus is very sexually orientated, which is why it is so lethal when applied to women. There is for example quite a bit about erectile dysfunction, although not called that back then. “In the town of Ratisbon a certain young man who had an intrigue with a girl, wishing to leave her, lost his member (became impotent); that is to say, some glamour was cast over it so that he could see or touch nothing but his smooth body. In his worry over this he went to a tavern to drink wine; and after he had sat there for a while he got into conversation with another woman who was there, and told her the cause of his sadness, explaining everything, and demonstrating in his body that it was so. The woman was astute, and asked whether he suspected anyone; and when he named such a one, unfolding the whole matter, she said: ‘If persuasion is not enough, you must use some violence, to induce her to restore to you your health’. So in the evening the young man watched the way by which the witch (the girl he blamed) was in the habit of going, and finding her, prayed her to restore to him the health of his body. And when she maintained that she was innocent and knew nothing about it, he fell upon her, and winding a towel tightly about her neck, choked her, saying: ‘Unless you give me back my health, you shall die at my hands’. Then she, being unable to cry out, and growing black, said: ‘Let me go, and I will heal you’. The young man then relaxed the pressure of the towel, and the witch touched him with her hand between the thighs, saying: ‘Now you have what you desire’. And the young man, as he afterwards said, plainly felt, before he had verified it by looking or touching, that his member had been restored to him by the mere touch of the witch.”
Now it is clear from the Malleus that even though he had forced the young woman to touch him, once he had accused her, her admission of guilt (or any other plea bargained admission of guilt) might not save her from death by burning or hanging or whatever because often such plea bargaining merely allowed one to escape terrible further torture for, as with today’s crimen exceptum, once accused one is guilty of being accused.
One of the most terrifying sections of the Malleus is in Part 3. ‘The Method of Initiating a Process’. Anyone can make an accusation and either offer proof or walk off and let others prove it. In the second case he or she can make the accusation ‘out of zeal for the faith’ or because of the draconian laws that make it an offence not to report someone suspected of heresy or witchcraft. Failing individual denouncing, ‘when there is no accuser or informer, but a general report that there are witches in some town or place; and then the Judge must proceed, not at the instance of any party, but simply by the virtue of his office’. In other words, in the absence of reports of witches they will be found anyway.
Where it is such an accusation, that is concerning the crimen exceptum, which is the crime so terrible that due process, and all the apparatus of justice itself, must be superseded by the committees of the Inquisition which report to God and are therefore infallible, even the quality of the witnesses for the prosecution is not important. This is covered in the section on ‘Of the Quality and Condition of Witnesses’. Witnesses for the prosecution can include ‘persons under a sentence of excommunication, associates and accomplices in the crime, notorious evildoers and criminals, or servants giving evidence against their masters’. And as is the case so often today in sex abuse allegations, “And just as a heretic may give evidence against a heretic, so may a witch against a witch - - - , and such evidence can only be admitted for the prosecution and not for the defence: this is true also of the evidence of the prisoner's wife, sons and kindred; for the evidence of such has more weight in proving a charge than in disproving it.”
What is also notable and being repeated in our times, especially in America is that it is also virtually impossible to find a defence lawyer when the crimen exceptum, is involved. While this is seldom admitted outside the US, in the UK and Ireland for example, the reality is that neither solicitors nor lawyers want to defend sex abuse cases. In America the defence lawyers work for the judge and prosecution and engage in plea bargaining which is akin to the witch pleading guilty early on to reduce the amount of torture. Death or shaming will follow anyway.
In the case of the Malleus, even the evidence of perjurers was admissible. “The case of evidence given by perjurers, when it is presumed that they are speaking out of zeal for the faith, is dealt with in the Canon c. accusatus, § licet, where it says that the evidence of perjurers, after they have repented, is admissible.” It goes on: “And it is clear from the same chapter of the Canon that the testimony of men or low repute and criminals, and of servants against their masters, is admitted; for it says: So great is the plague of heresy that, in an action involving this crime, even servants are admitted as witnesses against their masters, and any criminal evildoer may give evidence against any person soever.”
The crimen exceptum, which brings the ideology of the Malleus down on one's head extends also to 'inappropriate parenting' or 'inappropriate behaviour' of either parents or children as judged by those empowered by the Malleus, to-day's Social Services workers and the courts that support them.
Elsewhere on this site we wrote, "If you have a PC in your home and a family with teenage or adult males in it, you are no longer safe. If however you have children in your home, you are no longer safe either because Social Services may call. Social Services are increasingly being referred to as the SS, in the Nazi sense. They operate to their own rules which can be compared with those in today's Malleus Maleficarum."
The Malleus demands simplicity in the institution of proceedings in the event of a revelation of the crimen exceptum, without the arguments and contentions of advocates and ‘without the legal quibbles and contentions which are introduced in other cases’. In other words the whole procedure as with those in American and UK courts today is to ensure conviction.
Perhaps some light may be cast on the mindset of the terible Dominican monks who created this monstrous work when we read these words from their text: “- - - all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.” It becomes clear that to be a strong woman or to defy conventions in those times was very dangerous indeed. Women were accused of debauchery, infanticide, casting evil spells and stealing men’s penises. Young maidens were accused of tempting young devils.
What has changed today is that in addition to women being pursued for inappropriate parenting, men are being pursued and persecuted with allegations of sexual heresy, as that is one of the two main current crimen exceptum (the other being not patriotic or an enemy of the state), but the number of pages in the Malleus Maleficarum, has actually grown. As has the edifice of police, prosecutor, psychologist, expert witness and judge erected to convict and punish the sinner.
And what about the horrifying tortures carried out in the name of the Faith in that earlier Inquisition? In the case of sexual heretics today, apart from such tortures as that inflicted with the penile plethysmograph (See Torture in menu), they are being shamed and hounded from normal society, while the enemies of the state are suffering torture both within America's secret camps and when 'outsourced' to allies who operate repressive regimes.
The sections of the modern Malleus Maleficarum used for the torture of suspected terrorists tend to be classified, but it is no surprise that America, the Western state practising the torture of its perceived enemies, has the most comprehensive system of prosecuting and 'treating' what are perceived to be sexual deviants, including minors and children.
The Malleus Maleficarum supports the dominant narratives.
See the video The Truth about Mental Health Disorders - Psychology.
Evolution of the crimen exceptum
While child sex abuse and sex abuse in general continue to be the main crimen exceptum shared only by terrorist or enemy of the state (heresy) in some Western countries, it is possible that if the 'war on terror' ends or abates that the new crimen exceptum could be dissent with the doctrine of climate change. Note, not being an individual who contributes to the perceived causes of climate change, such as driving a big car, but one who disagrees with the required doctrine - in other words a heretic.
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.... The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home." James Madison
The English Index. The new Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
The new law on dangerous pornography received the Royal Assent on 8 May 2008. As all attempts to prevent it becoming law have failed, some fear that the only way to prevent a new Operation Ore type wave of police dawn raids is to create a version of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, to be known as The English Index.
On 6 May 2008, a small group met outside the British Library and burned images taken from a range of ‘coffee table’ books. They believed that these images could now be illegal under the new ‘Dangerous Pictures Act’, as they call the new legislation. They included images by famous photographers and even some from Sex by Madonna.
Web sites hosted in Great Britain, British bookstores, libraries and, above all, private home owners must now carefully examine their books and images and decide which if any are worth holding onto, despite the possibility of prison sentences and listing as a sex offender, and which should be burnt in the backyard. The few that have fought the long battle against this draconian legislation are well aware of this dilemma and are now considering the creation of The English Index, modelled on the earlier Index of the Roman Catholic Church, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, which was in force well into the 20th century. The new index would allow those fearful of police dawn raids to check their inventories of images and books.
Were it not so serious, it might be fascinating to study this process, in particular the brief journey from child porn to dangerous porn that has smoothed the path of development of the police state. For example that an Index Librorum Prohibitorum, should have become a necessity for one’s protection sits quite appropriately with the idea that there is also a modern Malleus Maleficarum, which instructs us in how to behave, and lays down the penalties for misbehaviour. And the required therapeutic therapies.
The new law is good news for a few, such as those associated with this web site and the individuals mounting the group action against Operation Ore. For one thing, we are no longer a lonely minority. For another, our warnings have been shown to have been realistic. And finally, the populace might awaken to the dangers that now threaten them. Women also have joined the forces against this legislation in larger numbers, for one reason seeing that the cause of ‘protecting them’ against the kind of dangerous fantasies being criminalized actually insults them, as these same fantasies may already be a part of their own private bedroom activities.
Apart from the new index, the protesters will employ other strategies. Clair Lewis, speaking on behalf of the image burning protest group said that their strategy was two-pronged. “On the one hand, we intend to demand from the police, from the CPS, from Government that they make crystal clear which books, which images will be illegal. Future actions are likely to involve mass visits to police stations, asking the police to provide guidance, before the law is enacted.
“On the other, we are not going to make this easy for them. It is clear from police enthusiasm for this measure that they believed that taking control of people’s sexuality would be straightforward. It will not. We will fight them all the way. Every case will cost the police and authorities very dear indeed in terms of time, resources and manpower.”
She went on: “It is not the business of government to police the bedrooms of consenting adults. We cannot conduct our sex lives on the basis of ringing for legal advice every time we open a book.”
Reflection
Clair Lewis, above, says, "It is clear from police enthusiasm for this measure that they believed that taking control of people’s sexuality would be straightforward." It is more than this. With Operation Ore collapsing on top of them, they welcome new draconian laws that could criminalize not only the innocent ruined by Ore but virtually anyone with a PC in their home.
One does not have to be a profound thinker to also recognize an anomaly here. Certain writers, in particular those influenced by the ideas of the great 20th century physicist and philosopher Lancelot Law Whyte, believe that our Western society suffers from a vast dissociation, which is a kind of lesion dividing the individual’s natural/instinctive and semantic/social states. In no sphere is this more obvious than in our sexuality. What this new British law makes more obvious is that we are experiencing the increasing eroticization of humankind, that is, we are becoming more conscious of our erotic drive and our search for eroticism and erotic beauty is increasing, at the same time that it is being criminalized in some of its expressions and brought into disrepute in many others.
We now have a new conflict, contradiction, conundrum at the heart of our sexuality – the increasing eroticisation, through the Internet, at the same time as the state attempts to increase its control of society’s erotic interest. This conundrum has for a decade at least been causing grave disquiet to many and has brought disaster down upon some, virtually all of whom have been well-educated and often highly intelligent and literate. It is possible that the conflict created by the conundrum has itself become a powerful procreant, that is a seed and a catalyst for a reaction against the state itself, such as in acts of civil disobedience or secret defiance of the law.
If correct, this could have profound significance for us all. It is explored in more detail both in ‘What is going on’ in the left hand menu and on a separate site WIGO.
Microsoft updates the Malleus Maleficarum
Microsoft has secretely developed another tool as part of its contribution to the maintainance of the police state’s Malleus Maleficarum.
First publicly publicly revealed by Wikileaks, classified, confidential, withheld from the public, it is ‘Microsoft COFEE (Computer Online Forensics Evidence Extractor) tool and documentation, Sep 2009’.
According to Wikileaks, “The tool is reportedly not publicly available for purchase or (or/but?) made available, as far as we can ascertain, to a number of developing world polices forces. The ZIP archive includes the MSI installer file, the handbook and documentation for each single tool COFEE is comprised of, verification studies from both the Florida State University (FSU) as well as the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C).”
It is notable that in all of the earlier phases of the Inquisition, the universities supplied most of the prosecution experts whose testimony helped condemn many victims.
WikiLeaks continies: “The WikiLeaks release follows various takedown demands issued by Microsoft, including one sent to Cryptome's John Young, and an uncontrolled spread of contaminated versions of the tool via P2P filesharing networks, which may compromise important investigations.”
It is altogether predictable that Microsoft should continue to contribute to the Malleus Maleficarum as its Windows software has done so much to open up the homes of families worldwide to police surveillance and attack, even to preserve both a record of sites surfed and of illegal imagery that may have been planted. A senior Microsoft official also played a key role in the notorious Landslide raid that ruined hundreds of thousands of families worldwide.
Source: Wikileaks - http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Microsoft_COFEE_%28Computer_Online_Forensics_Evidence_Extractor%29_tool_and_documentation%2C_Sep_2009
Created on 04/09/2009 09:04 AM by Editor
Updated on 05/26/2010 07:51 AM by Editor
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