Penises as Pets
One specific anecdote of Kramer’s is so absurd as to merit its own category: witches stealing penises and keeping them as pets, or hiding them in birds’ nests. Daft, one may suppose, but Kramer’s logic within the credulous context of the Catholic fifteenth-century is sound: ‘it was a greater thing to turn Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt than it is to take away the male organ’ (Malleus Part I Question IX). Kramer also has several tales of penis-stealing and, were that not sufficient evidence, expert eyewitness testimony from clergymen, to back up his claims.
The most notorious account is of witches making a nest of penises up a tree: ‘sometimes [witches] 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’ (Malleus Part II, Question 1, Chapter 7). Incredibly, Kramer is most concerned with whether the removal and reappearance of penises up a tree is a physical phenomenon or an illusion.
In case you were wondering, it is an illusion, which can be ascribed to the devil’s expertise in deceit and exploiting man’s fears. Nevertheless, it is a convincing one, for an unfortunate victim of the penis-stealing witches tells of climbing a tree, supervised by a helpful witch who instructed him ‘that he might take which he liked out of the nest in which there were several members’ (Ibid.) The tale has an unintentionally comic ending: ‘when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: you must not take that one; adding, because it belongs to a parish priest’.
