That to the ancient women who still kept up the irrational remnant of the wasp-worship, beneath the sacred tree, other women might resort; not merely from curiosity, or an excited imagination, but from jealousy and revenge.  Oppressed, as woman has always been under the reign of brute force; beaten, outraged, deserted, at best married against her will, she has too often gone for comfort and help—­and those of the very darkest kind—­to the works of darkness; and there never were wanting—­there are not wanting, even now, in remote parts of these isles—­wicked old women who would, by help of the old superstitions, do for her what she wished.  Soon would follow mysterious deaths of rivals, of husbands, of babes; then rumours of dark rites connected with the sacred tree, with poison, with the wasp and his sting, with human sacrifices; lies mingled with truth, more and more confused and frantic, the more they were misinvestigated by men mad with fear:  till there would arise one of those witch-manias, which are too common still among the African Negros, which were too common of old among the men of our race.

I say, among the men.  To comprehend a witch-mania, you must look at it as—­what the witch-literature confesses it unblushingly to be—­man’s dread of Nature excited to its highest form, as dread of woman.

She is to the barbarous man—­she should be more and more to the civilised man—­not only the most beautiful and precious, but the most wonderful and mysterious of all natural objects, if it be only as the author of his physical being.  She is to the savage a miracle to be alternately adored and dreaded.  He dreads her more delicate nervous organisation, which often takes shapes to him demoniacal and miraculous; her quicker instincts, her readier wit, which seem to him to have in them somewhat prophetic and superhuman, which entangle him as in an invisible net, and rule him against his will.  He dreads her very tongue, more crushing than his heaviest club, more keen than his poisoned arrows.  He dreads those habits of secresy and falsehood, the weapons of the weak, to which savage and degraded woman always has recourse.  He dreads the very medicinal skill which she has learnt to exercise, as nurse, comforter, and slave.  He dreads those secret ceremonies, those mysterious initiations which no man may witness, which he has permitted to her in all ages, in so many—­if not all—­barbarous and semi-barbarous races, whether Negro, American, Syrian, Greek, or Roman, as a homage to the mysterious importance of her who brings him into the world.  If she turn against him—­she, with all her unknown powers, she who is the sharer of his deepest secrets, who prepares his very food day by day—­what harm can she not, may she not do?  And that she has good reason to turn against him, he knows too well.  What deliverance is there from this mysterious house-fiend, save brute force?  Terror, torture, murder, must be the order of the day.  Woman must be crushed, at all price, by the blind fear of the man.