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- [00:00]
A
Close your eyes. Listen to Monday.com feel the sensation of an AI work platform, so flexible and intuitive, it feels like it was built just for you. Now open your eyes. Go to Monday.com start for free. And finally breathe.
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B
Hello and welcome to a new episode of Legacy. I'm Peter Frankenbaum.
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C
I'm Afwa Hush.
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B
And this is Legacy, the show that explores the lives, events, and ideas that have shaped our world and asks whether they have the reputations that they truly deserve.
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C
This is Women and Healing, Part 1. The Strange Story of the penis nest trapped in a tree.
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B
I mean, penis nest. Afwa, could you just explain this one? This is your chapter heading and when we. Or title heading when we set this one up. I wasn't expecting either of those words, but do we need to go? People have to listen till at least halfway through to understand what that's all about.
- [01:15]
C
I'm not giving that away, but I promise you the penis nest trapped in a tree is arguably one of the most significant ideas to have ever affected women's relationship to healing and history. So you're gonna have to listen to the whole episode to find out why, but I want to start by asking Peter whether you have ever paid for an IV vitamin drip.
- [01:40]
B
Do you know? I've never had an IV drip, but I unfortunately like everybody listening to this getting older. And so I'm very, very conscious of the fact that as I move into middle and later middle age, that I should be looking after myself. So I've started to read a bit more about supplements, vitamins, IV oxygen tents, and generally, I think probably like a lot of men think that the right way to deal with it is to read it and then close the book or the turn things off and then forget about it. Have you had an IV drip?
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C
I have. It was one of those moments where I felt like I had fully become the most ridiculous version of myself. Went to a really nice clinic where you lie in. It's almost like a sunbed, you know, like a heated chair. And some nice nurse hooks you up to a very high dose of vitamin C and vitamin B complexes and other things that boost your immunity. And it is a little bit of a dystopian idea. It's basically saying the way we live is so completely unnatural and unhealthy that burnout is inevitable. But here's a way you can pay someone to infuse you with an also unnatural amount of intensive vitamins so that you don't suffer the natural consequences of the unhinged way you're living. And I do remember thinking how, how about I just don't live like this and then don't need a vitamin drip. But anyway, that's an inspiration.
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B
Hang on, can I just understand that? So the way to live more healthily is to be plugged into a heated seat with drips into you that feeds you stuff. That is instead, rather than eating 25 oranges in one sitting, that's supposed to be a natural way of living.
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C
You might have a more robust digestive system than me heater, but eating 25 oranges in one sitting is not an option for me.
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B
Okay, 20.
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C
Not even 20. The reason for this is that I think that we have lost a lot of more wise approaches to wellness. Hence the reason that we're going and plugging into ridiculous IV drips. And one of the reasons for that is that I think the role that women have played in wellness and healing has been under assault for centuries, actually. So I think it's going to be a really interesting topic topic to explore. What is the role women have played in healing? Why has that been under attack? And how can we get back to some kind of healthier relationship with our health and our approaches to healing and our all round wellness?
- [04:04]
B
Well, I think that that is the point of the series, isn't it? Trying to think about how we can improve our mental, physical health, how we can look after ourselves. And as we did in the first episode of this group, it's sort of funny that people spend a lot of time thinking about that in January and then they tend to forget it as the year goes on and ending with a sort of massive blowout, whether it's at Thanksgiving or Christmas. But so I think it's a good moment to be thinking about how do we look after ourselves and also how people looked after themselves in the past too.
- [04:31]
C
And some people might be wondering why the focus on women like we all need to be well and we all need healing. But if you look into the history, Peter, it's so fascinating how disproportionately women have played a role in healing cultures and practices. So the earliest known evidence of shamanic practice found by archaeologists dates back more than 30,000 years and indicates that the shaman was a woman. And that is in line with so much research that suggests that women have tended from the beginning of recorded history and before to have more expertise about the properties of plants. And the properties of plants are historically and today the foundation of all medicine and healing. Peter?
- [05:15]
B
Well, with the first evidence of the use of plants for medicinal purposes goes back almost 20,000 years. And in fact, even the suggestions that Neanderthals even much further in the distant past than then, use things like poultices for toothaches and plants with salicylic acid to try to produce analgesic and ways of dulling the pain. But it's been very interesting, I think. I've been doing a bit of work recently on the roles that shaman play in terms of thinking about rituals and how people get themselves into altered states of consciousness. And plants play an important role in that for psychotropics as well as for medicinal stuff, too. So, I mean, it's very interesting, as you say, afw, the role that women play. Partly, I suppose, that's to do with the traditional roles that women play with domestication rather than with, with hunting. I wonder whether you think that's a key gender balance that traces back deep into the past.
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C
I think the causal arrow goes both ways, actually, because I think that women have been closer to understanding the connections between natural cycles, between plants and the elements and the, the role those play in domestic wellness and healing. And that's also been one of the factors that's made it make sense for women to own that role. But I think, you know, with words like domestic, we need to be careful as well, because the, the ways that maybe our hunter gatherer ancestors conceived those roles are very different from the modern era and the legacy of the kind of, you know, Victorian ideas about a woman's place being in the home. So there was certainly there were gender roles, but they weren't exactly what they look like today. I'm really curious, actually, where you've been doing your research on shamans and psychotropic substances.
- [07:00]
B
Peter I, I've been, I've been. I've been doing the reading about it rather than experimenting with the psychotropics. I think that's a, that's a different story. And there's lots of this stuff in Siberia and in Central Asia. But there are lots of parallels that I've been trying to read about in other parts of the world, particularly in places like Mesoamerica and Central America. And one of the things, for example, that I've been reading up on is it's not just to do with medicinal and with the use of plants, but even things like children with disabilities were highly valued in lots of societies because there was an idea that, you know, if you look or behave in a slightly different way, you must have different sorts of powers. And so I think the ways in which people get themselves into trances, how they do Bloodletting, how they understand the way in which their body works. I mean, it's very much stuff that you've written about afwa. I think there are so many different case studies and so some of it is trying to see what's what, where are the similarities and where the differences in different parts of the world. And of course it's not always easy because lots of cultures that were and are shamanic don't record their histories in written forms. And so you're, you're having to do lots with patchy evidence. But you know, there's lots of new materials that we can use, particularly from the sciences, to be able to see how it is that people are engaging with the natural world around them and particularly what kind of things they're ingesting and using for medicinal purposes.
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C
And all kinds of archaeological finds that are shedding more light on ancient and prehistoric practices. So, for example, 8,000 year old discoveries from a site in Brazil have shown that there were a selection of plants used for first aid, to treat digestive problems, intestinal worms, pain relief, wound healing and treating respiratory issues. So that's Brazil. But then you go to Scandinavia, where Mesolithic hunter gatherers were chewing birch tar, which is an antiseptic. And when researchers looked at the DNA of the body chewing the bar, they saw that mouth infections and herpes had been present in those bodies. And those are exactly the kind of conditions that this birch tar would have actually had a beneficial effect. So these ancient hunter gatherers knew what they were doing. It wasn't just superstition, it was having real scientific benefits on the health conditions they suffered from.
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B
But Aphra, tell me particularly about the gender breakdown. In lots of indigenous societies today, women have primary roles for healing. Why is that? Why so many different societies which are disconnected? They haven't learned from each other, been in different continents. Why do you think there are standardized roles and what are the role that women play to do with fertility, for example? How does that fit into things like healing and looking after your body?
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C
I think it's often connected to women's reproductive abilities. So if you look at, for example, these ancient Venus figures carved of stone, found in many cultures, they are representative of women's physical bodies, their reproductive capacity. But that also then is imbued with a deeper symbolism about regeneration, about the cycle of life and death, and its connection to the human, plant and animal worlds. They're all conceived as connected and that the body of a woman is kind of a focal point for those connections. And there are also just the practical needs of women. So women were by necessity developing expertise about contraception. There's evidence that prehistoric women were using plants to induce abortions where necessary and to manage their reproductive health. It's interesting because I think we think of that reproductive rights and reproductive health as a modern issue. But all women that we know of have been concerned with how to manage that and have been using the resources at their disposal to create solutions. If you then look at the early Egyptians, they were using thick plant pastes to block the progress of sperm, also as a contraception. And women were doing that not just because they wanted to manage their reproductive health, but because it was a matter of survival. You know, being able to maintain the balance between their environment meant controlling the size of the population, managing their own physical resources, making sure the size of the community was in sync with the supply of food available. And so I think that makes it make sense that women have never had the luxury of not being interested in advanced ideas about how to use plants for their physical needs and for healing. And then of course, childbirth being such a dangerous thing, I mean still today it's a dangerous thing for a woman to undergo, has given women a preoccupation with how to protect and heal themselves.
- [11:28]
B
Look, I think when we come back, why don't we have a sort of walk through a few different societies for the looking at some parallels and some differences about the role that women play to do with the health of the body, blending in things like fertility, things like digestions, things like medicines, to see why it is that so many different societies evolve in reasonably similar ways around gender splits.
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D
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- [12:17]
E
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B
Okay, let's start with Egypt Afwa. And you know, I think people have heard of Isis, the great goddess of Medicine. But how does this play out in Egyptian cultures and society?
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C
Worship of Isis was universal among ancient Egyptians. You know, there are other gods who are regional or more relevant to specific groups, but Isis was universal in the culture. And there are incredible temples, I mean, as many people will know, built in Harana. And priestesses of Isis were regarded as the pinnacle of physician healers, and their healing powers were connected to the goddess Isis. So, like in many ancient cultures, this connection between healing and the divine, this idea that you're using plants and techniques, but that they are coming from a supernatural divine source, has been a way of conceiving and understanding the power of healing.
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B
Well, then it's. I mean, it's amazing that you find not just knowledge being passed on, but being taught specifically and deliberately. So at Sais, a city at the mouth of the Nile, women are both students and teachers at a women's school specializing in childbearing issues. And we even have Egyptian records that show that women are studying at the royal medical school at Heliopolis, at the City of the sun, three and a half thousand years ago. So, you know, we've got all these images of women performing surgery, and they're quite common on tombs and on temples throughout Egypt, suggesting that women doctors and physicians were widely accepted by the general population. It was also very visible.
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C
I think that's really important, Peter, because I, you know, we maybe imagine ancient women doing more shamanic rituals, which they did, but they also were exactly as you said, competent surgeons, doctors practicing the kind of skills that we associate with doctors today. In ancient Greece, the goddess Athena, who cured blindness, Hera, the chief healing deity, and Leto the surgeon were worshiped for their healing skills. And again, people who were connected with those gods were regarded as deriving their ability to conduct healing, surgery and curative practices from the divine. If you look at statues of Hygiea and Panacea, they were located in over 300 healing temples throughout Greece. And there you have oracles who are interpreted by both male and female priests who were prescribing treatments and cures to their patients.
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B
So how about that, Afra? I mean, some people have heard of Asclepius, really important as a kind of founding father. They know the word Apanacea, but probably don't connect that to a particular person and not to Asclepius's daughter. But there is a shift in Greece where men and Hippocrates, who people will know from the Hippocratic oath, I suppose that doctors still take that men start to colonize women's space Tell us a little bit too, about. About how that, how. Why that happens in ancient Greece.
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C
Well, it's really interesting because I think like many of these histories, it's partly what actually happened, but it's also partly what's been recorded and remembered and valued by historians. So there were women in Greece who were renowned physicians, but we don't know their names. You know, we haven't had the oath that doctors still take named after them. Women like Margarita, who Galen recorded, was a woman physician who held a prestigious position as an army surgeon. You know, a position that you don't play with in the army. You need a doctor who can really deliver the goods. And Origenia, whose remedies for hemoptysis and diarrhea, he prays. So we only even have the record of these women primarily through the recorded writing of men. But we do know that the skills of Greek medical women were highly sought after. And women who were sold as captives in Roman slave markets, for example, who had those medical skills, were highly prized. And we can see that reflected in the prices that they commanded at slave auctions. And then you can trace that through to Rome. So physical physicians in ancient Rome, called medicai, managed busy practices and were often on an equal footing with male physicians. So, you know, we could do a whole separate episode about the kind of patriarchal contribution of ancient Greece and Rome to modern ideas about gender. But at the same time, the contemporary reality was more complicated than I think many of us were taught at school.
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B
That does also complicates the way in which specialist knowledge tends to get colonized by people. So Hippocrates, for example, bars women from studying medicine under his tutelage, with the exception of one satellite school in Asia Minor. But men start to become specialists in pregnancy and childbirth and other aspects of women's health, as I think is probably no surprise. But it's kind of ironic that men become specialists in things that they don't have any firsthand experience of. I guess there's a longer story there too. But do you think that's because status comes with being able to heal people, and therefore it becomes a competition for who gets the highest levels of status. And men want to become doctors and push women out because it's part of a social hierarchy.
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C
Exactly that, Peter. You know, when we come to medieval Europe, we'll see something very similar where when it was considered a lower status women's issue, childbirth and gynaecology was left to community midwives, essentially women who were using their traditional intergenerational knowledge and once it started to be absorbed into a higher status idea of a medical profession, something that carried rewards and opportunities for men, they began to colonize the field and squeeze women out. So we see the same patterns repeated through history, but the reality is that women have been harbouring this knowledge and conducting these practices. And you know, whether that's because they were high status as they initially were in ancient Greece and Rome, or whether it's because, as we'll see later, there were still women who didn't have access to the now highly prized high status male physicians, women would step in. And that's still the case in many communities who don't have access to modern professional Western medicine. It's the women in the community who still have traditional knowledge and have been learning and practicing similar skills over generations, who will treat people close to them. And one of the things I'm looking forward to talking about later as well is how in modern Western society that's now becoming aspirational, you know, people who are giving birth actually want a doula who is a woman who's been practicing those traditional inherited ideas, either in addition to a more conventional doctor, or instead of. So it's almost like we're coming full circle and beginning to ask what was it that those women who'd been practicing these ideas for millennia knew that might have got lost in the male dominated modern medical profession? But we'll come back to that.
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B
I mean, it's funny because the hierarchies, I mean, places like Central Asia, the status of doctors is not particularly high. I mean, generally in the Western world, doctors are, you know, they tend to be very highly trusted. You know, you can see that when you see all the stats about how people trust the news, how people trust government and so on, who scored typically very low.
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C
I always notice, because I used to be a lawyer, that lawyers consistently rank bottom, I think along with the state agents and used car salesmen. As to who's the least trusted from professionals, well, I feel we, I feel.
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B
We feel your pain. We're not here to push anybody down. But doctors are usually very high up because, you know, people, people are normally nervous when they go to the doctor because they're worried about something. You know, you typically don't bother going to see your GP unless you're worried that you're ill. And so a very high status. But in, in some parts of the world it doesn't work that way. Secura's journey, I think about what the sort of occupation of the space about medical care and how you look after people's bodies and minds, who's gained that status. But I mean, even in the Roman Empire.
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C
Yeah, sorry, I was just gonna say in LA has been a real wake up call for me, where I spend quite a lot of time there. And doctors there are the opposite end of the spectrum. I mean, some of the highest earning individuals in Hollywood are physicians who have kind of celebrity rosters. And now I've learned people have these concierge services. So they have a doctor who's already extremely highly paid, but then they pay 10, $20,000 a month directly to the doctor for this concierge access, which means you can call your doctor any time of day or night and get access to them. So whether they use it or not, they're just paying a regular fee. And that explains why some of these doctors have bigger houses than, you know, the A list celebrities that you would expect to live in palaces in Beverly Hills. It's really interesting because, you know, from a British perspective, you know, my friends who are GPs or even consultants on the NHS, you know, they, they do well, but they're not in any way living among the super rich. And in America, this is a whole different status and remuneration system that doctors enjoy.
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B
Well, you know, you could, you could put it the other way, which is that those doctors aren't either paid enough or respected enough. I mean, look, in the Roman Empire, women who did this healthcare and practiced things like medicine and midwifery got made saints, you know, so Saint Bridget, for example, in Ireland, or Saint Scholastica, who helped her brother Saint Benedict during the plague, are venerated and prayed to. You know, so there's a, there is a space for people who are able to explain what's going on and to heal. You know, I think that's something that's been really interesting. And, you know, that all goes to the flows of who gets to be educated. How much does knowledge get diffused and shared. Like when we talked about Luther and the way in which the printing press starts to democratize ideas. It's been, I think, quite interesting to see how medical professions were still the preserve of men until very recently. And some of that's to do with the ways in which society works and some, some of it to do with how education through school, university, because training to be a doctor is expensive, because you need, I mean, I remember my friends when I was at university, on day one, they got introduced to a dead body that they, you know, get to then spend the next year or so getting to know, to work out how everything joined itself up together so. So that there is a value in being able to understand the human body. And I wonder whether you think, Afra, that the mind and mental health is something that fits alongside physical health, whether those which sound very separate in today's world actually are two ends of the same stick.
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C
Well, in the ancient world it was understood universally the connection between mind, body and crucially spirit, that these ideas of the spirit world, the supernatural, deities, whether benevolent or evil, were all bound up in health and well being. And you know, some of those ideas are very, very difficult to reconcile today. But there are areas that I think we do understand are having to relearn the connection, as you said, between mental and physical health. But the next stage of the story and where it really went, left for women, especially in Europe, is all connected to this idea that to have healing powers is to have access to some kind of supernatural source and that this supernatural source is definitely not benevolent, that the women who could heal were getting their skills directly from Satan. So when we come back after the break, we are going to see how women who could heal started to become seen as witches.
- [24:01]
E
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- [24:40]
B
So here's what you come for. It's, you know, the new new year, new you. And you've come here to listen to wellness and the idea of how you renew yourself. But we, we're going to talk about witches and about the ways in which women have been castigated and characterized as being responsible for psychotic episodes and so on. Tell us, Aphrodite, a little bit about the history of witchcraft and how that fits into the story of mental well being.
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C
I mean the terminology is so loaded, isn't it? Although currently there is this big drive to reclaim the language of witchcraft and witches. I don't know if you've seen Peter, but Witchtok is one of the most successful threads ever on TikTok as people are kind of reclaiming and embracing those ideas because essentially what we call witchcraft has meant women who still have the skills we discussed earlier in the ancient world of understanding how the supernatural and the natural world connect, how they can use the power of plants and elements and divine inspiration to heal, to treat problems, to affect outcomes. And so witchcraft is widespread in the early Christian world as remnants of a pre Christian culture throughout Europe and, and arguably still survives actually in many parts of Europe as well as throughout much of the world. Because all of these indigenous traditional healing practices begin to be seen as witchcraft. And there are a few underlying reasons why this starts to be seen as a threat. And Peter, you know, one of the things I love about your work is how you are so good at kind of digging down into the, the pressures on population and food and geopolitics that we don't necessarily see and making that make sense. And in, in terms of, which is one of the things that I think is really interesting is that in the medieval period you have this rising phenomenon of the single woman, which was something that had not existed in the same numbers before. You know, like by the time you get to the 16th century, you've got an increase in the number of single women from 5% to 15 to 20%. And these newly independent spinsters and widows are seen as a threat to a paternalistic society. You know, they don't have a man controlling them. The older they are, the more agency and experience and social status they have. And this is exactly the demographic group that are beginning to be seen as a threat to this kind of male ordered Christian society.
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B
Well, it's also not a coincidence. The Middle Ages, particularly in Europe, are a time of extreme violence and warfare. So it means that the men die in larger numbers and so those populations skew like likewise, although there are nuns and convents as well, the number of men who are claimed by the church, you know, means that there is going to be an imbalance. So you know, that's, that's, that's a sort of in, in one way not surprising. I think what's interesting is how that then manifests itself. How does it present in different ways? And I definitely want to know what you think about why single women are perceived and considered to be dangerous. And even the words and names like spinster are important. I mean, but, but just going back to words, witchcraft and which comes to the Old English Wicca just means someone who practices magic. And I think people in today's world, probably because of horror films and things like that, think of witchcraft as being something that is connected to the occult and to dark forces. I mean personally, anybody who's ever had toothache or antibiotics, I mean, if that's not magic, I don't know what it is. When you pop a pill and suddenly your diseases start to cure up or your pain starts to go, I mean, what is that other than something that's truly magical in their qualities too? I think it's just the way in which witchcraft and witchery and witches have been stigmatized linguistically is kind of part of that story. But I'm very interested, Afwa, in your point about, about single women being part of a problem, because you can see where those demographic shifts come. But why? How are women a problem? In what way? And how do they start to get characterized as being erratic and dangerous and problematic?
- [28:40]
C
It's such a big topic that the Church is essentially promoting patriarchal ideas in Europe and in the early Christian world, but especially in Europe. And actually there's a difference. If you look at Christianity in the Middle east versus Christianity in Europe at this time, there's the reality that women have knowledge that men don't have, and it works. So many of the herbal remedies developed by women in that era still have a place in modern pharmacology. For example, they understand painkillers, they have digestive aids, anti inflammatory agents. They use things like ergot for labor pain. And this is at a time when the Church is teaching that pain in labor is the Lord's punishment for Eve's original sin. They argue that women are supposed to feel pain and that it's all part of this ideology of controlling women, that women should be subservient and they should suffer. And so these women healers, who understand how to actually treat and manage this suffering, who don't regard it as a sin but as part of a natural cycle that's connected to, to other things, are really going directly against the Church's teaching. They also have things like belladonna, a plant which is still used today as an antispasmodic. So these women were able to inhibit uterine contractions during labor or prevent miscarriage, and digitalis, which is still an important drug in treating heart ailments. So this is knowledge that's been passed down from mother to daughter over generations. It's knowledge men don't have. And in a world that is increasingly giving men control of all areas of the society, it's seen as a threat. Add to that that the Church, Peter, is deeply anti empiricist. It discredits the value of the material world and it doesn't trust the senses. In fact, I mean, we were talking about Kellogg in our previous season. You know, this idea of sensuality and of physical pleasure and of being connected to different elements and experiences is is seen as anti Christian and the Church does not approve. In looking to natural laws that govern physical phenomena, they are promoting a world where everything is controlled by God. And this is a God that is kind of male presenting, that is interpreted by men who have a monopoly over the priesthood and monasteries that are producing knowledge. And they believe that sensuality comes from the devil. So St. Augustine, for example, writes, the devil creeps in all the sensual approaches. He places himself in figures, he adapts himself himself to colors, he attaches himself to sounds, he lurks in angry and wrongful conversation, he abides in smells, he impregnates with flavors and fills with certain exhalations all the channels of the understanding. The senses are the devil's playground, the arena into which he will try to lure men away from faith and into the conceits of the intellect or the delusions of carnality. Compare that to these women healers who are essentially empiricists. A woman in this era who is considered a witch is relying on her senses rather than her faith. She's using scientific methods of trial and error, cause and effect. So she's inquisitive, she is active, she has agency, and she's using them to treat disease, childbirth, pregnancy, and she's combining a combination of medications as I described, that really work, but also charms and special spiritual ideas. So the science of this is something that the Church doesn't only not understand. It actively disapproves of it and sees it as a threat to its doctrine and power.
- [32:07]
B
Yeah, look, I'd probably push back on some of that Afro. I think that the Church can get blamed for whatever you want to. And in a way, talking about an institution as though it's monolithic and everybody thinks the same thing is of course going to be going to be tricky. And a lot depends on where you're talking about what period. Augustine has some pretty strong views about lots of different things. So it's whether those views are actually shared by everybody. And there's plenty of ideas about how important senses are and how they sit alongside all kinds of empirical teaching, not just in the secular world, but also within the Church too. So I don't think it's just. I mean, obviously there is a hierarchy within an institution like the Church that is male facing because it's all run by men and only priests are men at this time. But things do also change over time. So often it's about trying to produce things like discipline. What Augustine is actually trying to say is not, look, anything that's got a color in it or smells nice is the work of the devil. What he's trying to say is, look, that there's a higher purpose to life, and that requires some discipline. That requires discipline physically. That requires discipline of thought and of faith, and that things shouldn't get in your way. And that in itself doesn't necessarily have to be an exclusionary measures, and it doesn't have to be one that's only aimed at men as well. And in fact, like we mentioned, women have very high status within the Christian church because of their roles as healers, but also as donors and are people who are willing to sacrifice themselves. And the connection of women and bloodshedding through childbirth, through menstruation, the ways in which women's body functions in different ways to men, is something that's sort of understood and taken very seriously by lots of church authorities. So, you know, I don't think throwing the institution under the bus is necessarily helpful, and I'm not.
- [33:46]
C
I'm not throwing the institution under the bus. But I think there are some things that are undeniable and are still actually very visible today in the church's teachings about women's bodies and the danger of having control of women's bodies. I mean, I remember when I was the education editor at Sky News, reporting on the sex education that was being given today in Catholic churches, which was essentially teaching girls that their sexuality was a threat, that they needed to put on lockdown, you know, that there should be shame attached to it, that it was dangerous. And, you know, it was really being criticized, including by many other Christians. And Catholics were saying, you know, you're teaching girls instead of really kind of inhabiting and owning the power they have in their bodies and their sexuality and their fertility, that they have agency over how to use it. You're kind of shutting the whole thing down.
- [34:31]
B
And I think, sure, but in today's.
- [34:32]
C
World, we change that ideology from this era we're looking at.
- [34:35]
B
Sure. But you can look at it in a different way, which is, in today's world, those ideas about sexuality in the body, which are very different to the traditional ones, I suppose, if you call them want of a better word, has also run into problems in different ways about. About issues around transgender in particular, around who teaches what and to whom and at what age. So I don't think it's necessarily that the. The church is reactionary or that it's. It's to do with the fact that control is always part of hierarchical. It's always part of elite Control, it's always part of who is able to shout the loudest to get people to listen. And that that's one of the things that's run into lots of trouble in the last two or three or four or five years in the UK and the Western world around who's allowed to decide what the definition of man and a woman is. And because we've now gone through the courts, I think that should allow some sort of distance from the fact that at least if you're going to talk about the church or other religious authorities, about how they monopolize things like ideas about the body, that can be done in many, many different kinds of ways and carries on today without the umbrella of a faith or faith system to calibrate it too. So I just wonder, particularly with women, what I'm really interested with witchcraft is the idea that women have been accused of being more prone to out of body experiences. And why that persecution of women, which is absolutely epic in its scale in the early Middle Ages, where that kind of come, where that comes from.
- [35:55]
C
And I think to understand that as well, we also just need to mention the Arab world, which is a big player in this story, because so many of the ideas that gave birth to modern science actually coming from Muslim countries in this period. And the Arab world is really the inspiration for the founding of modern universities in Europe from the 13th century especially, and particularly the medical schools that are beginning to appear in universities. And this new idea of university trained physicians is another way of gatekeeping. Who gets to become a physician who has legitimacy in medicine. And it's very male, it's excluding women quite deliberately. And there are actually interesting examples of women who try to kind of get through. In 1322, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris, a woman manages to kind of sneak into medical school and is found out. Her name's Jacoba Felicia. Six witnesses appear to give testimony that Jacoba has cured them, even after other doctors have given up. And one patient declared she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than any other master physician in Paris. But these testimonies are used against her because the idea of a woman having the audacity of using medical skill is such an anathema. So we're seeing the formalization of the idea that this is not a job for women, this is not women's realm. But of course, Peter, as you said, this now is merging with deeper ideas about how women are, are built, I suppose, how women are naturally more susceptible to maybe being aware of other realms, ideas that don't conform to this new practice of science and that they have this capacity to tap into forces that the church and this Christian increasingly strict idea about what Christianity means, that this is sinister, that this is magical and that it's actually satanic. And this is where the persecution of women regarded as witches really starts to come into its own.
- [37:57]
B
I mean, as Mary Kilbourne Matosian has put it, you know, the role of a healer is a very perilous and a dangerous one because people are scared by people who have seemed to have magical powers to over the living body to be able to cure you from whatever ailments. So when you're exhibiting and able to provide enlightenment or renewal or health, a bit like when we talked about Joan of Arc, you also make yourself a lightning rod for criticism because you're doing something that threatens other practitioners, particularly if you're successful. So that is dangerous too. I mean, I think that that again, lots of that of the medical information that comes from the Arab world has its own roots back to ancient Greece and to Egypt and elsewhere, India, etc. So some of it in Europe is to do with the fact that people in Europe have, have broadly, after the fall of the Roman Empire, in the western provinces, people don't live in cities. Literacy levels plummet. Information is controlled by people who can read and write, typically members of the church and monks and so on. So when cities start to grow and there's more prosperity being shared around bigger cities, then that, that information supply becomes key. And who controls information is absolutely critical because you can, you can create order. But in that context, you then find more investigations into sciences. And when women start to intrude into that space of elite knowledge and preservation of knowledge and transmission of knowledge, then women start quite quickly to be characterized as being unusual. And a bit like, like you said at the beginning, Afro, when, when you have this demographic shift where there are a lot more women than there are men lurking around because of, you know, demographics, because of warfare, because the church and so on, then suddenly there's a kind of an imbalance that is going to get corrected through persecution. So we're going to talk about persecution of women, in particular of witches in the next episode. But, but why don't you tie us up Afro, by telling us about where that all comes from?
- [39:50]
C
Well, you mentioned that literate people who tend to be men and often men in the church are really gaining a monopoly over the kind of production of knowledge and ideas. There's no better example than, than one man who played a transformative role in the persecution of women. Not in a good way. And his name was Heinrich Kramer. He was, I don't think anyone could disagree with this, an extraordinarily nasty character. 15th century German priest who was obsessed with his loathing and sense of threat from women. He wrote a book called the Malleus Maleficarum, which roughly translates as the Hammer of Witches. Now, at the point he's writing in the 15th century, people in Europe believe in witches, but they're basically still a normal fact of life. You know, they are a legacy from more ancient times. They exist in communities. Some people regard them as a minor nuisance and a bit anti Christian, but nobody is particularly fast. It's a bit of a generalization, but I think that's on the whole, true. But Kramer is about to change that with his book. Peter, tell us about the Malleus Maleficarum.
- [41:03]
B
It's a, it's a good one. I mean, I say that, I say that as sort of, as a. It's a bad joke. I mean, it's to do with trying to work out under what context and circumstances you should be able to attack people who think in different ways. It's, it's about the control as we talked about. But it describes how women who are witches keep nests of penises in trees. And you've thrown me that one up front because this is the story that you set out to tell. So, I mean, what Kramer says is that when we are going to think about witches who somehow take members in large numbers, that's 20 or 30, he.
- [41:41]
C
Says these are male members, not an exclusive private members club, but the male organ is interested in women's diversity.
- [41:49]
B
I don't know why you've done this to me again. I don't know why you've done this to me again. I get to talk about penises, masturbation with Kellogg, and now this one, okay, but it takes 20 or 30 penises and shut them all up together in a bird's nest or another box. And they move around like living members eating oats or other feed. This has been seen by many and as a matter of common talk, everybody knows about this stuff, he says, which is news, I think, to me and to pretty much everybody else. But this is all to do with the devil's work and illusion. And in fact, women are the hand servants of Satan. And that, that's pretty, pretty damning.
- [42:23]
C
So as well as harvesting penises and keeping them in nests in trees, Kramer believes that women become witches not by inheriting generations of useful knowledge about healing and herbs, but by sleeping with the devil. So, like actually having sex with Satan and then signing a pact on Satan's anus, which is their pledge to deprive men of his virile member so that she can then collect them in trees. I mean, it's completely bananas. And you'd think that this was an idea that seems so fringe that no one would take it seriously, but on the contrary, this deranged book goes on to become completely viral. It's a European bestseller. And Peter it is outsold only by the Bible for the next 200 years. For three centuries, the Malleus Maleficarum is on the bedside table of every judge, prosecutor, and witch hunter in Europe. And there are a lot of them.
- [43:27]
B
I'm not quite sure how to explain that. I suppose everybody always likes a good story. And, you know, the more lurid, I guess, the better. Just because people read it doesn't necessarily mean they believe it. But at the same time, you know, I think this idea about, what, sex being dangerous and evil and dirty is part of a wider, wider story. And the fact that women in the Bible and in the Torah, you know, and in the, you know, and in the Quranic tradition too, where, you know, we all descend from Adam and Eve, the idea that women are tempting men and they're the source of the reason why bad decisions get made rather than letting men atone for their own sins, is something that has a very long and deep tradition. But that idea of being able to blame somebody else and particularly be able to blame women generally for bad decisions made by men, physical, mental, etc. Sits within a long and deep tradition. But I'm not sure I can think of another book that has had that amount of impact. I mean, 50 Shades of Grey did quite well for a while.
- [44:30]
C
I mean, I'm personally not a big fan of Fifty Shades of Gray, but I don't think we can lay any charges as consequential as this at its door. And, you know, you say not everybody read it fair. But this wasn't just entertainment, this Fed policy on a monumental scale. And as we're going to see in the next episode, the people who read this book took these ideas not only very seriously, but completely literally. And it would inform how they treated hundreds of thousands of women for centuries.
- [45:02]
B
Thanks for listening to Legacy.
- [45:04]
C
Don't forget to hit subscribe on your favorite podcast player. You can also watch all our episodes on YouTube, so make sure you're subscribed there too.
- [45:11]
B
And of course, we're on all the socials. All the links to the show are in the notes of the episode or just Search Legacy Podcast I'm Peter Frankopen.
- [45:20]
C
I'm Afwa Hash and we'll see you.
- [45:23]
B
Next time on Legacy.
- [45:44]
E
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