ered all its own nobler instincts, reason, justice, benevolence and
sympathy."[24]

Any woman was suspect. Michelet, after a thirty years' study, wrote:
"Witches they are by nature. It is a gift peculiar to woman and her
temperament. By birth a fay, by the regular recurrence of her ecstasy
she becomes a sibyl. By her love she grows into an enchantress. By her
subtlety ... she becomes a witch and works her spells."[29]

Just how many victims there were of the belief in the power of women as
witches will never be known. Scherr thinks that the persecutions cost
100,000 lives in Germany alone.[30] Lord Avebury quotes the estimate of
the inquisitor Sprenger, joint author of the "Witch Hammer," that during
the Christian period some 9,000,000 persons, mostly women, were burned
as witches.[31] Seven thousand victims are said to have been burned at
Treves, 600 by a single bishop of Bamburg, 800 in a single year in the
bishopric of Wurtzburg. At Toulouse 400 persons perished at a single
burning.[29: ch.1] [20: v.1. ch.1] One witch judge boasted that he
executed 900 witches in fifteen years. The last mass burning in Germany
was said to have taken place in 1678, when 97 persons were burned
together. The earliest recorded burning of a witch in England is in
Walter Mapes' _De Nugis Curialium_, in the reign of Henry II. An old
black letter tract gloats over the execution at Northampton, 1612, of a
number of persons convicted of witchcraft.[32] The last judicial
sentence was in 1736, when one Jane Wenham was found guilty of
conversing familiarly with the devil in the form of a cat.[33]

The connection between the witchcraft delusion and the attitude toward
all women has already been implied.[34] The dualistic teaching of the
early church fathers, with its severance of matter and spirit and its
insistence on the ascetic ideal of life, had focussed on sexuality as
the outstanding manifestation of fleshly desires. The contact of the
sexes came to be looked upon as the supreme sin. Celibacy taught that
through the observance of the taboo on woman the man of God was to be
saved from pollution. Woman was the arch temptress who by the natural
forces of sex attraction, reinforced by her evil charms and
incantations, made it so difficult to attain the celibate ideal. From
her ancestress Eve woman was believed to inherit the natural propensity
to lure man to his undoing. Thus the old belief in the uncleanness of
woman was renewed in the minds