As a result of this belief in the diabolic power of woman, judicial murder of helpless women became an institution, which is thus characterized by Sumner:  “After the refined torture of the body and nameless mental sufferings, women were executed in the most cruel manner.  These facts are so monstrous that all other aberrations of the human race are small in comparison....  He who studies the witch trials believes himself transferred into the midst of a race which has smothered 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 of men with even greater intensity than ever before, and in addition to a dangerous adventure, even within the sanction of wedlock the sex act became a deed of shame.  The following quotations from the church fathers will illustrate this view: