Seminar Two
Evolution of sexuality
The dark side of religion

The Malleus Maleficarum, written in 1486, rivaled the Bible in popularity in medieval Europe, with thirty-six editions published up to 1669. The increasing availability of printing most likely contributed to its common availability. According to Rossell Robbins, the Malleus Maleficarum was “without question the most important and most sinister work on demonology ever written. It crystallized into a fiercely stringent code previous folklore about black magic with church dogma on heresy, and, if any one work could, opened the floodgates of the inquisitorial hysteria.”

Witches were believed to have taken out a pact with Satan. Tens of thousands were burned at the stake over a 250-year period, and the victims were overwhelmingly women. The Malleus Maleficarum states, “Witches… copulate with devils… All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.”

Carl Sagan explains, in his gripping book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as A Candle In The Dark:

For much of our history, we were so fearful of the outside world, with its unpredictable dangers, that we gladly embraced anything that promised to soften or explain away the terror.

Tragically, belief in witchcraft and sorcery still exists. Orphanages in central Africa report that more and more children (usually girls) are called witches and accused of sorcery, blamed for extreme hardship experienced by families. When nothing else explains the misery of hardship, witches are blamed. In a 2004 editorial for New York Times, Nicholas Kristof makes a moving observation:

I firmly believe that the central moral challenge of this century… will be to address sex inequality in the third world… [there is a] ubiquitous form of evil and terror: a culture, stretching across about half the globe, that chews up women and spits them out.