The 15th-Century Incel Who Started The Witch Hunt

How did witchcraft go from something relatively normal to a heinous crime worthy of punishment by torture and execution? This week, Michelle Tea recounts the probably, mostly-accurate tale of the Malleus Maleficarum, a book penned by 15th century churchman and prototypical troll Heinrich Kramer, and the Austrian party girl who inspired his wrath. Michelle details the darkly funny and hypocritical techniques Kramer invents to weasel out the witches from the common folk, and how this angry piece of literature once outsold the Bible.

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Michelle Tea: Welcome to Your Magic. I’m Michelle Tea, and on this episode we are celebrating one whole year podcasting! In honor of that, today we’re going to depart from our normal format and do a deep, occasionally gruesome dive into the Malleus Maleficarum – the book that taught the West to fear witches - its influence is still felt today. Now, the story you’re about to hear happened in the 1400s, and obviously, I’m not a scholar. I did my own research — and of course have my own opinions about the misogyny I’ll be talking about — but if I got anything wrong, we’re happy to hear from you.

Now, witches have been so famously feared and loathed, scapegoated and punished, for so very long, it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always that way. Sometime between folk magic being a very normal, ordinary thing and the torture of witches through Europe and in the US, there was a moment in time when the even powerful Catholic Church didn’t give too much of a fig about witchcraft.It was frowned upon, certainly, but no one was being murdered about it.  Perhaps people recalled their mothers and grandmothers whipping up tinctures and following the path of the moon, and so it simply seemed a type of knowledge; female maybe, or from another generation. Perhaps, being older and womanly, it’s power just wasn’t taken seriously. Whatever the reason, it’s curious to ponder how Christian Europe went from tolerating vestiges of paganism, to murdering so many people for witchcraft that one village was said to resemble a burned forest, that many charred funeral pyres stood smoking in the cobbled streets. The answer to what happened – a violent witch paranoia strong enough to continue to mark our own times with prejudice – doesn’t fall completely on the shoulders of one man, but it sort-of-kind-of does. Heinrich Kramer– Tyrolean inquisitor, obsessive 15th century incel, prototypical troll, a vengeful German Churchman who vowed that his humiliating failure to prosecute a badass Austrian partygirl would be the last time such a woman escaped his wrath. His work, The Malleus Maleficarum,  is the tract that established witches as the worst of heretics, imagining their lascivious and patently absurd activities, and detailing best practices for proving and punishing their evil.

Let’s start at the Catholic Inquisition, why don’t we? Its purpose, when it was founded in the 1100s, was to stomp out heretics, heretics being, specifically, those working against the Catholic Church, undermining its efforts, making statements about Jesus not being God and other reasonable, freedom-of-religion observations; many so-called heretics railed against the falseness and hypocrisy of the popes and all their riches. The Catholic Church had an if-you’re-not-with-us-you’re-against-us stance, so to be vocal about finding the Church’s teachings fraudulent meant you risked being burned alive as punishment.

At the start of the Inquisition, witchcraft was more of a secular problem. If you were accused of harassing your neighbor by way of sorcery, you’d wind up before the King’s Justices they handled the matter. The Church wasn’t involved in these small-claims-court dust-ups. But about a hundred years in, Pope Alexander IV noted that individuals chatting with demons and using sorcery to further their will perhaps did equal heresy. The Old Testament was clear about not tolerating spell-casters and fortune tellers and those who consult with ghosts; if these activities were ungodly, then they must fall into the realm of the Devil, right? And no one wanted the Church to go belly up like Lucifer. Under this Pope’s new conclusion, in the year 1258, it became acceptable for the Inquisition to try individuals for heresy based on an accusation of witchcraft.

But, that didn’t mean it happened very much. The anti-witch frenzy grew slowly. Thomas Aquinas, that misogynist, fanned some flames. When the Church turned against their militia, the Knights Templar, in the 1300s, they utilized charges of witchcraft to bring them down. Pope John XXII super legitimized witchcraft when he accused one of his bishops of using sorcery to try to kill him in 1317. Then, in the 1340s, Europe was hit hard by the plague, and we all know how a pandemic can make people paranoid and prone to conspiracy.

Heinrich Kramer was born in 1430, and sources say he was pretty wild about the Church from the get-go. He was young when he joined the Dominicans, the order of monks charged with managing the Inquisition. Heinrich took to it with gusto, and was especially psyched to persecute witches. Now, unfortunately for him, though there was theoretical grounds to prosecute witches for heresy, Heinrich found it hard to get a witch before the Inquisition’s assessors. I guess that, just like today, the Medieval period had some folks who trended towards decency and chillness, while others, like Heinrich, veered toward unhinged drama. He had a particularly tough time making a case against a Tyrolian woman named Helena Scheuberin, in the town of Innsbruck, a snow-y, lake-y place that encompasses Northern Italy and Eastern Austria.

Helena seems pretty cool. Hans P. Broedel in his book The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft, describes her as and  “aggressive, independent woman not afraid to speak her mind.” But she found herself on the receiving end of some town gossip after a noble knight named Jorg Speiss turns up dead. Knight Jorg had been sick, and the orders he’d received from his doctor was to avoid the home of Helena Scheuberin.

Now, Helena had a rich husband. Maybe they threw big parties, maybe they were doing opium or drinking beer brewed with Belladonna, maybe Noble Knight Jorg was hitting the medieval intoxicants too hard at Helena’s ragers and the doctor knew it, and that’s what he meant. I mean, I’m deeply speculating here. But it is weird that the doctor was literally, “Keep away from Helena’s house, or you’ll die.” And then he died. Was he having an affair with her, and was poisoned by her jealous husband? Maybe he had some sort of dirt on Helena and she was poisoning him? Do I watch too much I-D Discovery? Word on the streets of Innsbruck was that it might have been witchcraft.

This is the kind of tea Heinrich lives for. Word of this mysterious death, the doctor’s ominous warning, Helena’s ‘aggressive, independent’ personality, the townspeople’s gossip of magic, it sends him flying to Innsbruck faster than a colonial witch with a broom up her vagina. He sets himself up with some sermons at the local church and gets to harassing Helena. But good luck, Heinrich, because the lass lives up to her fearsome reputation. Upon meeting her assessor in the street, Helena jumps in his face, shouting, “Fie on you, you bad monk, may the falling evil take you!” Okay: Fie on you. You bad monk. May the falling evil take you. I have chills. This is an amazing diss. She’s good.

Helena mostly avoids Heinrich’s sermons, of course, and urges others to as well, and Heinrich takes this as evidence of her sorcery. You would think he’d be happy about her absence, since when she does attend she heckles him, calling him an ‘evil man in league with the devil.’ Yes, Helena, flip that script!

Heinrich eventually manages to begin a trial for Helena, along with some other women, her witchy girl-gang no doubt. But, the local authorities aren’t having it. Maybe they’re Team Helena, maybe they don’t believe in witchcraft. Maybe they think Heinrich is a nerd, or that the Catholic Church is a bully. Either way, the powers of Innsbruck actually kick Heinrich out of town. I can and will imagine the victory bash Helena and her rich hubby threw when that happened. Let the nightshade-laced mead flow! But, a troll doesn’t give up that easy. Heinrich was far from done with Helena and the witches of Innsbruck. In a big baby move, he went straight to the Vatican and whined to the Pope about how terribly he was treated in Tyrol, basically asking him to write a note telling everyone they have to take his authority seriously.

Pope Innocent VIII – wait, can you even with these popes? That name is so ironic it’s actually offensive. Pope Innocent VIII invested in the trade of enslaved Africans, he ran a scheme of targeting Noble Women and accusing them of heresy so the church could seize their money, and he literally created positions within the church to be sold to the highest bidder. Inncent.  How dare they.Anyway, Pope Innocent obliges Heinrich – he’d recently promoted Heinrich to Head of the Inquisition, they were buds. Pope Innocent draws up a papal decree called the Summis Desiderante Affectibus, which is Latin for ‘you better be nice to Heinrich.’ It affirms that witches are real, that they are heretics, that the Church has the right to try them, and anyone who interferes are themselves heretics and subject to punishment.

Heinrich returns to Innsbruck, all smug with his papal decree. Wait – can we take a moment to envision this jerk, with the help of some existing medieval portraits? Medieval artists had an infamously strange gaze, did they not? In some paintings, Heinrich’s face appears to be a popped football, his bald head ringed with a classic Dominican fringe. One portrait depicts him as emaciated with a prominent chin wattle; in another he’s plump, his eyes quite near his nose. One portrait is not so odd. His bulky, black jacket looks cozy, and is stylishly belted. He sports a little beret, and his cheekbones look like the fruits of a YouTube contouring tutorial. Willem Dafoe could convincingly play him in a biopic. He’s seated in a little, wooden room, caught up in his thoughts, lost in a reverie. He looks like a poet being gently touched by the muse, not like a medieval serial killer penning his macabre how-to book.

Okay, now that we’re all imagining Willem Dafoe striding into a medieval village, waving a Papal Bull, let’s continue. With the legitimizing Church document in hand, the leaders of Innsbruck had less power to evict Heinrich from the village. And so, a witch trial against Helena Scheuberin and her best bitches officially commenced. The trial lasted about a month, from Leo Season in the summer to Virgo season at the start of fall. What’s interesting is that, though there were townspeople accusing Helene and company of witchcraft, none of them made mention of the Devil. It was the Church who was equating witchcraft – pagan folk magic – with Satanism, and Heinrich did bring accusations of fraternizing with the Devil, celebrating the orgiastic Witch’s Sabbat and all that. Apparently, Heinrich based much of his accusations against Helena on her supposed promiscuity. But in spite of these efforts, the trial ended without a confession. There was a month or so of respite, where Helena could return to her sumptuous home and party or recuperate. But after not so long, Heinrich was back. He would get a confession from his witch, if he had to torture it out of her. Which, as we know, was the Church’s favorite method of extracting confessions for crimes that didn’t actually exist.

Like the trial, the torturing of Helena and the other accused women lasted about a month. A popular medieval device for such occasions was a hideous contraption called the Strappado. A person’s hands were tied behind their back, and then lifted high into the air, so that your body hung heavily, in such a contorted fashion, and your shoulders dislocated as you dangled. Weights were sometimes attached to the body, to make an impossibly gruesome situation more so. The victim would generally die within an hour.

There were other methods of getting women to confess to nonexistent love affairs with Satan. Sleep deprivation often brought about a successful disclosure; after being kept awake by Devil-obsessed maniacs for four or five consecutive nights who wouldn’t start hallucinating they’re the consort of the Horned God?

One of Heinrich’s favorite torture tasks was to have an accused witch carry a chunk of red hot iron for precisely three steps, without dropping it. If you could do this, you were not a witch, even though it seems that it would take supernatural powers to override your body’s instinct to toss it from your swiftly blistering hands. If you did have a natural reaction, if you burst into tears and screamed FUCK and dropped the glowing blob of iron to the ground, you were a witch.

A final common torture for the era was the ‘swimming’ of witches, that famous lose-lose in which the accused was hog-tied and dropped into water. If she lived, she was a witch, and was imminently doused in flames. If she drowned, well, the poor lass had been innocent after all, but she’s gone to a better place now, hasn’t she? Actually, in this case – maybe?

I couldn’t find any writing that specified which malevolent method Heinrich employed to manifest his confession, but a month of torture probably featured a sickening variety. However, at the end of it all, Heinrich lost. The Church could not prove that Helena Scheuberin had murdered the Noble Knight Jorg Spiess with witchcraft or otherwise. Helena was truly unbreakable; whatever torture was deployed upon her, she did not crack, and I’d like to imagine the barrage of insults she hurled upon the weasley inquisitor.

Heinrich, as you can tell, was not the sort of gent to adopt a ‘you win some, you lose some’ about his witch trials. He had a hard time letting go. His obsession with Helena continued to fester, and he stayed in Innsbruck to harass her, even after the local authorities again demanded he leave. It took an appeal to the Bishop to finally get him to quit bothering the woman, and depart Innsbruck. Heinrich gathered up all of his fury and resentment, his wounded Dominican ego and Catholic righteousness, and crawled back under a rock in Cologne, Germany. He focused the storm of psychedelic rage swirling inside him, and he began to write.

Published in 1486, the Malleus Maleficarum was Heinrich Kramer’s life work, his lasting legacy. Although fellow Dominican Jacob Sprenger was listed as a co-author on editions published after 1519, Heinrich died in 1505, and scholars now credit the entire authorship of the Malleus Maleficarum to Heinrich Kramer. There’s also an internet rumor that Sprenger fucking hated Kramer, but I couldn’t find anything to really back that up.

So, what’s the Malleus, this medieval piece of revenge porn penned by a 15th century incel, actually about? Heinrich meant it to be the legal bones behind the Christian scripture, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a sorceress to live.’ First and foremost, it’s a legal document; it includes and elaborates upon Pope Innocent’s Papal Bull instituting witchcraft as heresy; it lobbies the courts of Europe to prosecute it as such. It delineates a sort of best practices for trying witches, advising that judges wear a charm of blessed salt around their neck, that witches should be stripped and shaved and led into the courtroom backwards. It explained how to gain confessions via torture and the sort of punishment by death to pursue once witchery has been established. As burning at the stake was the most traditional way to dispose of heretics in general, it was easily applied to witches. As Heinrich believed god would not allow an innocent person to be mistakenly murdered for witchcraft, that took care of any concern about wrongful death and what have you.

Now, officially establishing witchcraft as heresy effectively created another legal rule – it became mandatory that people believe in witches and witchcraft; to deny their evil legitimacy would subject you to their fate. If you perhaps wanted to believe in witches but worried that you just didn’t know enough about them or really understand their customs, here’s where Heinrich really shines – in the portion of the Malleus that describes what exactly the witches are up to. Surely, their most interesting activity was causing the penises of men to vanish from their bodies and reappear up high in the treetops, cozied together in a nest, as if a flock of baby birds, and like a flock of baby birds the witches would feed these magically castrated phalluses a meal of oats. Don’t believe me? I don’t blame you. But, let me quote from the book: “What are we to think about those witches who shut up penises in what are sometimes prolific numbers, twenty or thirty at a single time, in a bird’s nest or some kind of box, where they move about in order to eat oats and fodder, as though they were alive – something which many people have seen and is reported by common gossip?” Many people saw this? Like, many? Okay. I mean, common gossip is never wrong.

Now, to Heinrich’s credit, he didn’t think that the witches were actually stealing penises from the bodies of men. He wasn’t crazy. To remove a penis you’d need a proper demon’s help, and, frankly, most witches weren’t that powerful. What they could do is make you hallucinate that your penis had vanished, and then give you a vision of it eating oats in a tree. Likewise, the witches of medieval Europe couldn’t actually turn you into an animal, because they didn’t have that level of demonic power. They could only make you think they’d turned you into an animal.

Props to Heinrich for simultaneously minimizing the witches’ powers while affirming their terror and malevolence. Hallucination or no, who wants to look down and find their junk no longer in their pants? Not I. And remember, lest you scoff at this tale and call it unbelievable, you now risk being accused of heresy yourself.

The Malleus goes on to relay much delicious witchy-doings, such as the tale of a woman, miffed that she had not been invited to a wedding, who flied to a hillside, pisses into a bowl, stirs her urine counter-clockwise and brings down a storm upon the festivities. A great spell to try yourself next time you’re feeling left of your own community. 

 Actually, in case you are interested, here’s what you need to do in order to become a Medieval-style witch. Much of this lore had already been established by the Catholic Church by the time Heinrich came along, but he elaborated upon and popularized it. First, you must swear off Christianity and enter into a pact with the Devil. Check. Next, you put your money where your mouth is, and seal the deal by actually having sex with the Devil. Now, the Devil, being Satanic, has particular tastes. While he was reportedly a good time in the sack – a seductive lover and all that – he also required his new acolytes to prove their love with the ‘osculum infame.’ Also called ‘The Shameful Kiss,’ it is was but a kiss upon the Devil’s anus, or a bit of a medieval rim job, I guess depending upon the enthusiasm of witch.

The Devil would then show his appreciation by granting the witch the gift of flight, very important if she was to make it to the frequent witch gatherings in the deepest woods, presided over by Satan himself. Who’d want to miss that?! By taking a special ointment made from the fat of unbaptized babies and applying it to a broom or household chair, the objects would then be enchanted enough to serve as a vehicle to get you to the deep woods witch party. (Of course, there are theories that the ointments were made with hallucinogens, not baby fat, and then inserted into the vagina via broomstick or chair leg, causing quite a ‘flight.’)

While this was all standard Church lore, Heinrich claimed that if a witch for some reason was unable to journey to the Satanic Rave, maybe because she was lazy, or suffered social anxiety or she was under a seven-day quarantine for Covid, she could join remotely, by lying on her left side and breathing a blue vapor from her mouth. The vapor acted as a sort of Medieval zoom room, allowing the witch to observe the goings-on from the comfort of her cottage. But really, you’d rather be there in person, as the gatherings were veritable sex parties, and possibly the only place a lady could get it on with a demon. Strangely, Heinrich noted the ‘nobility’ of the demon’s natures, and suggested that many of them probably didn’t even want to have sex with the witches, they were just doing it because it was, like, their job. It feels a little like Heinrich is projecting right here. Obviously demons love having sex with witches. After the orgy portion of the gathering is over, everyone gets to cursing and hexing, and the slaughtering and eating of unbaptized babies. Or, the drinking of. After they’ve been slow cooking in the cauldron all this time, the flesh falls off the bones, creating a rather slurpable bone broth. Don’t you dare yuck at me - I’m simply sharing the knowledge of a rather important Dominican monk, okay? If you want to see for yourself, there is currently a first edition for sale on the internet for $202,000.

While the Malleus has obviously stood the test of time – here we are, talking about it – it had a bit of a rough start. The top theologians of the day, while clearly not averse to burning your average heretic alive, drew the line at witch hunts. Heinrich went out trying to get some Catholic influencers, some folks over at the University of Cologne, to blurb his little book, and he was told that what he’d written was unethical, illegal, and also inconsistent with established Catholic beliefs on demonology. So, Heinrich does what I, as an author, have always wished I could do – he just makes up some praise for his work and forges a celeb signature or two. But Heinrich did find a lot of support among his fellow Dominicans. As the prime movers of the Inquisition – in addition to fighting heresy, they’d taken up arms against prostitution and sodomy, and wouldn’t you know a lot of people who don’t like witches even today also don’t like queers and sex workers – anyway, the Dominicans love the Malleus Malleficarum, and with their endorsements, boom, the book starts flying off the shelves, and Heinrich is a celeb. If you need a talking head for your anti-witchcraft lecture series, or an expert witness at your village witch trial, he’s your man. He’s in high demand all over Europe, and even receives a patronage from the Patriarch of Venice. And he’s prolific; like the Joyce Carol Oates of anti-witchcraft propaganda, he’s always got a new discourse or sermon or defense to promote. Heinrich is made Papal Nuncio, a sort of diplomat to the pope, and his inquisition terrain grows to include the Czech Republic. He’s failing up. While there were always some within the church who thought Heinrich was a dingdong, the secular world and its justice systems would rely on the Malleus throughout the renaissance.

From 1484 to 1750 about 200,000 people were accused of witchcraft, tortured and/or killed in Western Europe. Famously, most were women – about three quarters of those charged. The Malleus of course explained this tendency for women to fall beneath the thrall of Satan – their inherent weak faith and sexed-up carnality made them easy marks. “They are defective in all the powers of both soul and body” Heinrich wrote, doubling down with the statement “woman, therefore, is evil as a result of nature.” A man would, on occasion, fall prey to the lure of witchcraft, but it was usually in a more macho, power-seeking way, not as a result of an interior weakness.

There was a hierarchy of evil types of women – sexy concubines were the worst, followed by midwives, with their ancient knowledge and access to babies, and lastly, women who dominated their husbands. But no matter if you didn’t see yourself represented here – the Malleus claimed that any woman would likely find themselves “succumbing to her passions and becoming a witch.” Truly the only way to insure that you didn’t find yourself with your face planted in the devil’s buttocks was to live in a religious retreat, having taken a vow of devout chastity. And so we see the virgin vs. whore dichotomy dressed up as nun vs witch. Though this was the only foolproof way to prevent your weak, female nature from sliding into witchcraft, Heinrich also understood that most people were unlikely to thrive in such an extreme environment; only a certain type of femme would be able to stand it. The rest, he claimed, “are doomed to become witches, who cannot be redeemed; and the only recourse open to the authorities is to ferret out and exterminate all witches.” As Heinrich delved deeper into his obsession, it became increasingly clear that ‘witches’ was simply a code name for ‘women.’

Heinrich died in 1505, leaving the party while he was still having fun. For 200 years after his death the Malleus reigned, outselling even the Bible. His legacy traveled across the Atlantic with the European Colonizers bound for North America, and laid the groundwork for the eventual hanging of witches in what’s now Salem, Massachusetts. In 1684 Increase Mather, President of Harvard University, gave the Malleus a shout-out in his incredibly titled work An Essay For the Recording of Illustrious Providences, Wherein an Account is given of many Remarkable and very Memorable Events, which have happened in this last Age; Especially in New-England.

By Increase Mather, Teacher of a Church at Boston in New-England. Mather’s text reads like the script of a Blumhouse movie, with flying hammers, Satan taking the form of deer, or crows, supherous smells, frying pans hanging inside chimneys and many houses generally molested by demons. And I would be remiss in my recommendations here if I did not take a moment to urge you to watch Robert Eggers’ incredible film The VVitch: An American Folktale, for a scary movie treatment of Heinrich and Increase’s fears and fetishes, featuring Anya Taylor-Joy from The Queen’s Gambit. Also, you can buy a translation of the Malleus on the interweb and do your own deep dive of this madness. If you are that nerd, you might also enjoy the million-paged book The Witches: Salem, 1692, by Stacy Schiff. I know I did!

Thank you for sticking with me through this disturbing yet informative history of witch hate and general misogyny. If you are a witchy person, but you’re a little scared to explore further, this might be the reason. If you are a witch, but you keep it in the broom closet, you can trace the your fears – and the fear of those around you – back to this one little man hundreds of years ago, who could never get over one Helena Scheuberin. Seeing how witches are thriving in 2022, in the midst of what feels like a renaissance, I almost feel bad for the schmuck, and thought briefly of lighting a candle for him on my alter, that he find his way from this plane forevermore. Then I thought, Fie on you, you bad monk! May the falling evil take you! I’ll light one for Helena instead.