Alright, buckle up, buttercups, because we’re about to dissect a truly delightful period: late medieval and early modern Europe. This was an epoch where asking to borrow a cup of sugar from your neighbor could just as easily get you a warm welcome as an accusation of consorting with Satan. In this pressure cooker of paranoia, “witchcraft” became the go-to explanation for everything from a bad harvest to a stubbed toe, especially when things got really weird with tales of cannibalism and perversions of the Eucharist. Merrall Llewelyn Price’s Consuming Passions isn’t just a book; it’s an autopsy of these intertwined terrors, revealing how accused witches weren’t merely brewing herbal remedies but were also stirring society’s bubbling cauldron of collective anxieties. So, park your broom by the door, try not to look too shifty, and let’s wade through the muck of medieval fears. This isn’t for the faint of heart; consider it a post-mortem on an entire era’s sanity.
THE MATERNAL BODY AND THE PRELINGUISTIC: A MOTHER’S LOVE… WITH FAVA BEANS?
It seems the shrinks have a fancy term for everything. In this case, we’re dissecting the link between the maternal, the pre-verbal, and why, in the eyes of medieval hysterics, this sometimes translated into a mother with a rather… adventurouspalate.
CANNIBALISM AND THE LACANIAN IMAGINARY: MOMMY DEAREST, OR DEMON DEAREST?
Let’s start with the Freudian-adjacent babble: the Lacanian Imaginary. Sounds like a prog-rock album, but it’s essentially how our baby-brains first try to make sense of ourselves through Mom. In the upside-down logic of witch-panics, this primal mother-child bond got hideously twisted. Cannibalism and all manner of witchy depravity were thus projected onto this foundational relationship. Witches, you see, weren’t just cackling old crones; they were seen as grotesque parodies of motherhood itself – the all-giving mother who also devours, the nurturer who secretly yearns to gnaw on your liver. It’s a delightful paradox: the source of life reimagined as the ultimate consumer. Family therapy clearly hadn’t been invented yet.
WITCHCRAFT AND MATERNAL POWER: WHEN “WOMAN’S WORK” INCLUDES HEXES
Think your PTA meetings are rough? Try being a mother in medieval Europe when the witch-finders came calling. Women accused of witchcraft often found themselves in the stocks for allegedly using their maternal roles for nefarious ends – cursing their own children, or worse, using their unique biological knowledge for evil. Midwives were prime suspects. After all, who else had such intimate access to the miracle of birth, the blood, the afterbirth, the vulnerable newborn? If a baby died, or was born deformed, wasn’t it easier to blame the woman who smelled faintly of herbs and knew a bit too much, than, say, poor sanitation or genetics? The fear of women wielding any control over reproduction, life, and death was so potent, it practically fueled the pyres. Witch hunts, in many ways, were just brutally effective HR policies for keeping women confined to their divinely ordained (and powerless) domestic sphere.
BLOOD LIBEL AND SACRAMENTAL HERESY: A DEVILISH DUET OF DEFAMATION
When societal paranoia seeks scapegoats, it rarely stops at one. The accusations against witches found a convenient, pre-existing template of horror in the antisemitic trope of blood libel, all wrapped up with a perverse bow of eucharistic anxiety.
INTERCONNECTIONS WITH BLOOD LIBEL: SAME SCRIPT, DIFFERENT CAST
Let’s add another rancid ingredient to this toxic stew: blood libel. This particularly nasty piece of antisemitic propaganda accused Jews of ritually murdering Christian children to use their blood in religious rites. Surprise, surprise! Witch-accusers, never ones to let a good horror story go to waste, simply copy-pasted these atrocities onto their new favorite scapegoat. Witches, they shrieked, were also stealing Christian babies for their midnight snacks and unholy rituals. This conflation wasn’t accidental; it was a masterstroke of “Othering,” creating a nebulous, all-purpose enemy out of anyone who didn’t fit the increasingly narrow definition of “good Christian.” The modus operandi was clear: find a fear, amplify it, and then pin it on whichever group you fancy persecuting today.
EUCHARISTIC ABUSE IN WITCHCRAFT TRIALS: THE UNHOLY COMMUNION
If there was one thing guaranteed to send medieval authorities into a frenzy, it was mucking about with the Eucharist. The consecrated host, believed to be the literal body of Christ, was potent stuff. Witches, naturally, were accused of using it for all sorts of sacrilegious shenanigans. Their Sabbats, those notorious midnight raves with the Devil, allegedly featured a blasphemous parody of the Holy Communion. Instead of wine, they supposedly chugged “black moss water” or worse, and the host was replaced with something unspeakable – a turnip, a piece of blackened leather, or even (gasp!) a bit of dried toad. The horror wasn’t just the mockery; it was the terrifying implication that these women could wield, and wilfully pervert, the most sacred power of the Church. Talk about a PR nightmare for the Almighty.
INFANTICIDAL CANNIBALISM AND MAGICAL PRACTICES: THE ULTIMATE FORBIDDEN FEAST
The accusations often spiraled into the darkest corners of human taboo, with infanticide and cannibalism taking center stage in the witch’s alleged repertoire of horrors.
ACCUSATIONS OF INFANTICIDAL CANNIBALISM: “BABY: IT’S WHAT’S FOR DINNER”
Now we get to the real prime cuts of the accusations. Witches, according to the fevered imaginations of their persecutors, had a particular taste for infants, preferably unbaptized ones. Price highlights that this wasn’t just village gossip; it was a cornerstone of learned demonology. Why the craving for baby flesh? Well, apart from general demonic depravity, it was believed to be a key ingredient in their most potent magical concoctions. Flying ointments, for instance, were said to be rendered from the fat of murdered infants. So, if you wanted to zoom around on a broomstick, you apparently needed to dabble in a bit of culinary infanticide first. It gives a whole new, horrifying meaning to “finger food.”
SUPERNATURAL POWERS AND HUMAN FLESH: THE DEVIL’S DELICATESSEN
Speaking of powers, that ever-helpful witch-hunting guide, the Malleus Maleficarum (or “Hammer of Witches,” for the uninitiated – basically the serial killer profiler’s handbook of its day, if the profilers were a bunch of misogynistic, terrified clergymen), had plenty to say on the subject. It wasn’t just flight; human remains were allegedly used for all sorts of dark arts. One charming passage suggests some witches taught others how to achieve silence under torture – a much-needed skill in those days – by preparing a brew from their first-born sons. The recipe probably involved less “eye of newt” and more “essence of filial betrayal.” It’s a grim reminder that when fear dictates the narrative, the “evidence” can be as grotesque as the imagination allows.
THE WITCH SABBAT AND RITUAL CANNIBALISM: HELL’S KITCHEN
The Sabbat was envisioned as the ultimate inversion of Christian society – a diabolical festival where every taboo was gleefully embraced.
ALLEGED CANNIBALISM AT THE SABBAT: A BANQUET OF THE DAMNED
The witch Sabbat – picture it: less a neighborhood block party, more a chaotic, demonic free-for-all. And what was on the menu at these infernal gatherings? According to the accusers, it certainly wasn’t canapés and polite conversation. Ritual cannibalism, particularly of unbaptized infants stolen for the occasion, was a recurring theme. These spectral feasts were depicted as grotesque parodies of Christian communion and social order, where human flesh was the main course, often presented by the Devil himself. It’s like they took “waste not, want not” to its most horrifying extreme.
INFANTICIDE AND ILLICIT SEXUAL ACTIVITY: THE ORIGINAL SCARLET LETTER
And where did these unfortunate infant hors d’oeuvres come from? Often, the narrative tied infanticidal cannibalism to women desperately trying to conceal “illicit” pregnancies and births. In an era where female sexuality was policed with terrifying zeal, an out-of-wedlock child could mean ruin, ostracization, or worse. Accusations easily followed that such women, having murdered their newborns to hide their “sin,” would then offer them up to the Devil or use them in Sabbat rituals. It was a neat way to entangle sexual transgression with the ultimate spiritual crime, making women’s bodies and choices the battleground for demonic temptation.
DIABOLICAL LACTATION AND FEEDING PRACTICES: WHEN BREASTFEEDING GOES BAD
Even the most fundamental aspects of motherhood were twisted into something sinister in the iconography of witchcraft.
THE IMAGE OF THE DIABOLICAL MOTHER: SATAN’S WET NURSE
Forget nurturing; the witch as a diabolical mother was all about nourishing evil. A common accusation involved witches suckling their “familiars” – demonic imps in animal form (cats, toads, weasels being popular choices) – with their own blood, often from “unnatural” teats or “witch’s marks” found on their bodies. These “marks,” often just moles, warts, or skin tags, were “discovered” by prickers and prodders during humiliating public examinations, serving as irrefutable “proof” of a diabolical pact. It’s a grotesque subversion of the Virgin Mary nursing Christ, replacing divine nourishment with demonic sustenance.
ATTACKS ON THE BREAST IN WITCHCRAFT EXECUTIONS: PUNISHING THE SOURCE
Given this potent symbolism, it’s hardly surprising that the female breast often became a specific target during the torture and execution of accused witches. Ritualized attacks on the breasts – whether through branding, mutilation, or specific methods of public shaming – weren’t just random acts of cruelty. They symbolized an assault on the perceived source of corrupted maternal power, a public and brutal attempt to purify the community by destroying the “unnatural” feminine. The spectacle served as a visceral warning: female agency, particularly anything outside patriarchal control, was diabolical and would be met with annihilating force.
THEOLOGICAL UNDERPINNINGS AND WITCHCRAFT: GOD VS. THE OG BAD GIRLS
The witch craze wasn’t just mob hysteria; it was propped up by a formidable theological framework that meticulously defined witchcraft as a direct assault on God and Church.
LINK BETWEEN WITCHCRAFT AND HERESY: A PACKAGE DEAL OF DAMNATION
Learned theologians and inquisitors worked overtime to link witchcraft directly to heresy, elevating it from mere folk magic to an organized, diabolical anti-religion. If heresy was a spiritual rebellion, then witchcraft, with its alleged pacts with Satan, desecration of sacraments, and cannibalistic rites, was its most depraved manifestation. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 was a pivotal moment in defining orthodoxy, particularly with its formal adoption of the doctrine of transubstantiation. While this council mandated distinctive dress for Jews and some heretics, the principle of identifying and segregating those deemed enemies of the faith laid groundwork that would later be applied to accused witches as their “crimes” were increasingly codified as a supreme form of heresy.
EARLY WITCHCRAFT MATERIALS AND EUCHARISTIC PROFANATION: STEALING GOD, ONE WAFER AT A TIME
Even before the full-blown panic, early demonological texts and trial records began to link accused witches with various forms of Eucharistic profanation. Tales abounded of wicked women (and occasionally men) stealing consecrated Hosts, not for devout adoration, but for nefarious magical purposes: to be used in love potions, to cause crops to fail, to inflict sickness, or simply to be trampled and abused in mock rituals. This narrative painted the witch as not just an outsider, but an active agent of sacrilege, striking at the very heart of Christian belief and ritual. The Host wasn’t just bread; it was God. And stealing it was tantamount to kidnapping the divine for a bit of black magic.
CONCLUSION: THE BITTER AFTERTASTE OF FEAR
And so concludes our rather unappetizing tour through the entangled fears of witchcraft, cannibalism, and Eucharistic anxieties in late medieval and early modern Europe. Thanks to scholarly dissections like Merrall Llewelyn Price’s Consuming Passions, we can see these lurid accusations not as reflections of actual satanic dinner parties, but as projections of deep-seated societal terrors. Accusations of witchcraft were less about genuine occult activity and more about enforcing social control, policing female agency (especially maternal power), and defining the “Other.” In a world gripped by paranoia, where the sacred and the profane were in constant, terrifying proximity, the witch became the ultimate receptacle for all things strange, sinister, and indigestible. So, next time your neighbor’s casserole tastes a bit “off,” maybe just stick to ordering pizza. Some historical recipes are best left untried.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Price, Merrall Llewelyn. Consuming Passions: The Uses of Cannibalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Routledge, 2003.
