The Catholic Inquisition published a book that was probably the bloodiest work in the history of humanity: the “Malleaus maleficarum”, “the witches’ hammer”, had indoctrinated the world on the “danger of free-thinking women and taught to the clergy how to locate them, torture them, and destroy them.
The category of so-called “witches”, defined thus by the Church, included all women:
– educated,
– the priestesses,
– the gypsies,
– nature lovers,
– herbalists
– and many women “suspiciously linked to the natural world.
Midwives were also killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to alleviate the pain of childbirth, a suffering, the Church proclaimed, which was God’s just punishment because Eve had wanted to taste the Fruit of Knowledge, with the consequent original sin .
In three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church had burned hundreds of thousands of women at the stake.
The propaganda and bloodshed had worked.
Today’s world is living proof of this. The woman, once celebrated as the essential half of spiritual enlightenment, had been banished from the temples of the world.
There were no female Orthodox rabbis, no Catholic priestesses, no women of religion, no Islamic imams.
The once sacred act of “hieros gamos”, the natural sexual union between man and woman, with which each of the two acquired spiritual unity, had been redefined as a sin.
Men of faith, who once needed sexual union with their female equivalents to commune with God, now feared their natural sexual impulses and saw them as the work of the devil, who worked with his favorite accomplice, the woman.
Not even the association between the left side and the feminine had escaped the defamation of the Church. In France and Italy, left and left had taken on a negative connotation, while the terms relating to the right took on a connotation of justice, correctness and skill. Even today, everything evil is considered “sinister.”
The goddess’s days were over.
The swing had swung the pendulum the other way. Mother Earth had become a world of men, and the gods of destruction and war had taken their terrible toll.
For two millennia the male ego had no longer been held back by its female counterpart. This elimination of the sacred feminine in modern life has caused what the Hopi Americans call “kojanisquatsi” – life without balance – a situation of instability marked by wars fueled by testosterone, a plethora of misogynistic societies and a growing lack of respect for Mother Earth!
