And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report? …A certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belonged to the parish priest.

from part II q1 ch 7 of key witch-hunting manual the Malleus Maleficarum (“the hammer of the witches”), by heinrich kramer and james sprenger, c. 1484 AD (trans. Montague Summers).  this chapter is entitled “How, as it were, they Deprive Man of his Virile Member”.

while this is an unusually surreal passage, the entire book is a pretty great example of how sexual repression & obsession are more interdependent than opposite. 

(via ourcatastrophe)

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