1484: The Witches' Hammer

By Ajax the Great (Pete Jackson)

(Originally posted on the Vive La Difference! blog)

Here is a good preliminary idea for a historical fiction novel, short story, or movie perhaps, tentatively titled "1484: The Witches' Hammer", a title which is clearly laden with puns:

Inspired by Sylvia Federici's 2004 book Caliban and the Witch, and a few recent Substack articles from Katie Jgln as well as the author with the pen name "15th Century Feminist", I have been thinking of an idea lately.  As Federici notes, the Inquisition which devolved into the Burning Times / Women's Holocaust (aka witch trials of Europe) was in effect a counterrevolution against the slow-burn Women's revolution of the 14th and 15th centuries and a bit beyond as well.  That is, in addition to midwives, herbalists, healers, and of course Women who owned property (so it could be seized by men), the primarily-targeted Women as "witches" were in fact revolutionaries against feudalism, patriarchy, and what eventually came to be known as capitalism.  And combined with the enclosures of the commons, such a counterrevolution, lasting into the latter half of the 17th century, and even into the 18th, ultimately paved the way for patriarchy's favorite brainchild, capitalism, which was actually a regress from feudalism for the first few centuries.  The entire working class ultimately suffered as a result, and poverty worsened dramatically until the 19th century. 

(Men were victims of the Burning Times too, of course, but except in the very strange case of Iceland where it was mostly men killed, men were largely collateral damage, and persecuted primarily as "heretics" rather than "witches".  In fact, if you go back far enough, there was even a double standard where "sorcery" was still socially acceptable for men, but not for Women.  Read that again.  Natch.)

Anyway, while this bloody gynocidal counterrevolution had already begun before it, it did not really take off in earnest until after the Malleus Maleficarum ("The Witches' Hammer") by Heinrich Kramer, was published in 1486, following that fateful "load of papal bull" from Pope Innocent VIII (or as I like to call him, "Pope Guilty As Sin", given how much blood he had on his hands) in 1484 which inspired it.  It was the 15th century equivalent of clickbait, fake news, misinformation, and disinformation, and it was the gasoline dumped on the smoldering fires of what would soon become the Burning Times.  And as Katie Jgln notes, it was in fact enabled by the advent of the printing press, without which such disinformation could not have traveled nearly as fast.

So my idea for historical fiction would be for a group of people, mostly or entirely Women, from the present era to find a way to go back in time to 1484, and publish (using those same printing presses) a counter-manifesto rebutting and discrediting the execrable Pope Guilty's vile and slanderous words and the entire moral panic he inspired, and warning everyone about what the patriarchal establishment planned to do.  Then, after that but sometime before 1486, they would take an actual, literal hammer to as many printing presses as they could find, preventing or at least delaying the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum itself, long enough for it to be discredited before put into practice.  That would buy the Women revolutionaries some time to at least "tread water" (if not advance further) until around 1600 when they would finally get access to the "magic elixir of revolution" (as foretold in the counter-manifesto) when it arrives in Europe for the first time:  COFFEE.  And then from there, and also with tea from 1650 or so, the revolution would have accelerated, and Women would have eventually won the gender war and gradually taken over completely by now.  

First Europe, then the world.  In an organic, protopian, slow-burn revolution, i.e. the way Women prefer to do revolution. 

(In actual history, when it was first introduced to Europe from the Middle East, coffee literally came be associated with revolution for a while, and the first coffeehouses generally excluded Women, of course.  Gee, I wonder why that was?)

Indeed, as the old adage goes, if you change one thing, you end up changing everything.  By doing so, a time paradox occurs where many of the people who would have otherwise existed would end up not existing, or more likely having been reincarnated as other species.  That is because after Women took over, they refuse to be breeding slaves for men, so the world population ended up much smaller it currently is.  And since Women are much better stewards of the Earth than men, nonhuman species would have flourished more, and not been decimated nearly as much, as they have been under male rule.  And of course, capitalism would have been leapfrogged over completely (or at least largely) towards some flavor of post-capitalism and/or communalism.  

(And let's not forget all of the fuzzy kitties that would have been superstitiously targeted by the evil purveyors of the Burning Times as well, but were spared when such atrocities were largely prevented by smashing those printing presses!)

In other words, perhaps the key to having any future that is worth having, is to go back in time and correct such a truly terrible mistake.  Let the planetary healing begin!

P.S. To anyone reading this, especially Women, please feel free to steal this idea, as I hereby release this general idea of mine into the public domain, giving due credit of course to those who inspired me.  God knows that men have been stealing Women's ideas for thousands of years, so many things, from beer to baseball to the automobile to computers to the structure of DNA and so much more.  Even horticulture, most likely invented by Women thousands of years ago, has been rediscovered and rebranded as "permaculture" by men.

(To be continued....)