Women and Death, Monsters and Menstruation in Hans Baldung Grien Yvonne Owens Hans Baldung Grien. Witch and Dragon, 1515. Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. Highlighted drawing. To Renaissance clerical magicians and alchemists, Death is both demon and catalyst, the bringer of the ultimate transformation of base matter into spiritual ‘gold.’ Renaissance alchemists mediated these concepts in dramatic magical narratives of apocalyptic rebirth. The material prima was simultaneously the material finis, the massa confusa, and the abyssus for Baldung’s contemporary, the prominent natural philosopher, cleric, magician and alchemist, Paracelsus (1493—1541).1 Both magical rebirth as an adeptus and the resurrection of the world in the Apocalypse required that the initiate ‘enter into its mother,’ for, “…he who would enter the Kingdom of God must first enter with his body into his mother and there die.”2 For Paracelsus, as well as for witchcraft polemicists, menstrual maleficia played a leading role in apocalyptic scenarios. “Between conception, birth and cessation of lactation, nature did not produce its poison (menstruum); the woman’s physical cycle was stilled, as God stilled the course of the sun for the benefit of his servant Joshua. The reproductive cycle assumed the dimension of a cosmic drama….”3 As figured in eschatological texts, this malign influence was one of the powers permitted the ‘scourge’ of women, by God, who created her supernaturally hostile physiology so as to initiate the tempting of Adam and the Fall of Man, precipitating the ‘Thousand Year Reign of Christ’ following upon the heels of Armageddon.4 Christ’s birth was the antidote for the Fall, redeeming the world from its fallen state at the end of the world in the travails and ultimate Judgement of the Apocalypse. The cosmic drama unfolded with Woman in the roles of both Holy Virgin and Polluted (‘Abominable,’ ‘Babylonian’) Whore.5 Baldung’s figurations of blood and fire, feminine hair, and the feminine body as poisonous vessel, negotiate this multivalent semiotics with both irony and verisimilitude. Within the complex codification that relies upon Death/Menstruation as the hermeneutic of the Fall, the Fall itself is presented as premier among Woman’s natural and inevitable maleficia. The dominant role Baldung’s witch takes in the production of visible maleficium echoes Hugh of St. Victor, who quotes from Augustine, and who is in turn echoed in the Malleus Maleficarum. Hugh paints Woman’s concupiscence conventionally, as the result of constitutional ‘weakness’ and ocular desire; the precipitous Fall of Man results from the Devil’s successful appeal to the lustful feminine gaze, as per the Augustinian trope. In the assertion that feminine malice outstrips even that of the Devil, Hugh glossed upon Augustine’s historical reading of Holy Scripture. This interpretation includes the punitive concepts of female concupiscence in bringing about the debasement of “mortal corruption” afflicting corporeal flesh through the Fall.6 Echoing Augustine, he positions Woman in the sacred drama as culpable of a more primal ‘malice’ than Satan. In these representations, woman’s ocular weakness provides the initial opening to sin; Man, being attached to her, is also contaminated, weakened and brought low. Her concupiscence is the defect, error or omission by which sin enters the world and by which mortality and 1 Eliade, 154—155. Eliade, 154. 3 Scholtz-Williams 1995, 60. 4 Though polemical arguments by Rufinus positioned Mary’s womb as the typically hostile, toxic, female corporeal vessel. McLaughlin, 149—50. Other theologians argued that Mary could not have menstruated. McCracken, 3. 5 In Reform propaganda, the Whore of Babylon icon was also used to represent the papacy. Apostolos-Cappadona, 387. 6 Hugh, 136-37. 2 corruption afflicts Man. Her ardent gaze, her seductive voice, her subversive words, her insidious malice, and her desirous touch impel this disastrous fall from grace. God affirmed, woman doubted, the devil denied. But by no means would the devil have presumed in the presence of woman to deny the words of God, if he had not first found woman herself in doubt. Therefore, she who doubted departed from Him who affirmed and approached him who denied. She herself, then, to some extent began malice, who gave to the tempter the boldness of iniquitous persuasion.7 Centuries later, the image of Woman being culpable of a greater malice than Satan appears in the Malleus Maleficarum: This is the woman mentioned in Ecclesiastes 7 and about whom the Church now laments because of the huge number of sorceresses: ‘I have found woman more bitter than death. She is a hunters’ snare, her heart is bait, and her hands are chains. He who pleases God will shun her. He who is a sinner will be captured by her.’ She is more bitter than death, that is, than the Devil: ‘His name was Death’ (Apocalypse 6). For though it was the Devil who misled Eve into committing sin, it was Eve who led Adam astray, and since the sin of Eve would not have brought the death of the soul and body upon us if the guilt in Adam to which she and not the Devil misled him had not ensued, she is ‘more bitter than death.’ Again, she is ‘more bitter than death’ because death is natural and kills only the body, but the sin introduced by woman kills the soul as well as the body by depriving it of Grace as a penalty for sin. Again, she is ‘more bitter than death’ because the death of the body is an open, fearsome enemy, but woman is a hidden, cajoling one, and for this reason she is more bitter and dangerous. She is called a snare of hunters, that is, of demons, because men are captured not merely through carnal desires at the sight and sound of them -- since their face is a burning wind and their voice a serpent’s hiss according to Bernard -- but also through their affecting countless men and domestic animals with sorcery. Her heart is called ‘bait’, that is, the imperceptible ill-will that holds sway in women’s hearts.8 One of Baldung’s images, in particular, refers to Woman’s greater malignancy, outstripping even that of the Devil, which is to say, Death. Baldung’s hieratic Woman/Witch of the ‘Witch and Dragon’ image obviously has the upper hand when it comes to the submissively cringing dragon (or basilisk) beneath her. She is strangely reminiscent of her ancient, archetypical predecessor, the ‘demon’ witch, Jahi (‘Menstruation’), who dominated AngraMainyu, the Arch-Demon of the Zoroastrian Apocalypse, finally rousing him to wreak havoc upon God, His archangels, and the world at large by her insistent, repetitive claims of her greater, 7 Hugh, 122. Christopher Mackay points out: “The reference is to Bernard, Poem of Exhortation to Rainald, The Manner of Living Well.” Kramer and Sprenger, 121—122. 8 malignant agency. Far from crushing the serpent beneath her heel, as Mary does in redeeming the primordial crime of concupiscence of her ancestress, Eve, the witch in Baldung’s image actually feeds the reptile with her menstrual blood, initiating the ancient and ‘abominable,’ demonic contract. It is interesting to view the earliest appearences of this ancient, hackneyed topos. The ‘Scarlet Woman’ of Revelations inherited many of the infamous attributes of the ancient Persian daemon of the Apocalypse, ‘Jahi’ or “Geh,’ whose name simply means ‘Menstruation.’ Re-cast as the legendary ‘Abomination’ of the Old Testament (Ashtoreth/Ishtar/Astarte, etc.), the Whore of Babylon’s worship was notoriously reinstated among the Israelites by Solomon and Jezebel, and other monarchs who ‘sinned in the eyes of the Lord.’9 Here too, “…we find menstruation flooding the world with evil,” in an eschatological, cosmological drama.10 “For it is told that Angra Mainyu [the Devil], Lord of Evil and antagonist of the good Lord Ahura Mazda [God], having slept three thousand years was awakened by a female friend, Jahi (Menstruation), who shouted at him,” saying, ‘Arise, O father of us all! For I shall now cause in the world that contention from which the misery and injury of Ahura Mazda and his Archangels are to proceed. I shall empoison the righteous man, the labouring ox, the water, plants, fire, and all creation.’ Whereupon Angra Mainyu, starting up, kissed her on the forehead, and the pollution called menstruation appeared on the demoness….’”11 Rise up, thou father of us! For in that righteous conflict I will shed thus much vexation on the righteous man and the labouring ox that, through my deeds, life will not be wanted, and I will destroy their living souls (nismo); I will empoison the water, I will empoison the plants, I will empoison the fire of Ahura Mazda, I will make the whole of creation empoisoned. And so she recounted those Evil deeds a second time, that the evil spirit was delighted and started up from that confusion; and he kissed Jahi on the head; and the pollution which they call menstruation became apparent in Jahi. He shouted to Jahi thus: ‘What is thy wish? So that I may give it thee.’ And Jahi shouted to the evil spirit thus: ‘A man is the wish, so give it to me.’ The form of the evil spirit was a log-like lizard’s (vazak) body, and he appeared a young man of fifteen years to Jahi, and that brought the thoughts of Jahi to him.12 Baldung’s form for the ‘evil spirit’ is, somewhat mystifyingly, ‘a log-like lizard’s (vazak) body’ in his ‘Witch and Dragon’ image also. This is certainly not to say that Baldung ever read the ancient Avestan source texts for his ‘dragon’ icon, but it is evidence of the ubiquitous nature of the trope, and of its migrations via the legends and romances of Alexander. These, along with the legends of Aristotle as Magus, basilisks, and Venomous Virgins, flooded into the West in the course of classical translations of Aristotelian and Alexandrian lore. Like that described in the earliest texts depicting the menstrual monster, Baldung’s monster’s form is organic and conforms to contemporary, phantasmagorical notions of the womb. The gaping orifices, at both ends, sport carefully rendered schamlippen. The adolescent ‘Poison Maiden’ of Baldung’s image, perhaps a young witch just starting out, undergoing menarche and its attendant contract 9 Brenner, 53—57. Lederer, 27. 11 Lederer, 27—28. For the full text see Müller 1880, 15—16. 12 Müller 1880, 16. 10 with the ‘evil spirit,’ is also treated to finely detailed labia. This figural composition is a symphony of abjected womb imagery in the tradition of Plato, Juvenal, Gregory, Boccaccio, Walter Map (‘Valerius’), and Rabelais, with schamlippen quoting each other at every turn. The nether orifice of the monster also bears a close resemblance to those pictured at the tip of the erect horses’ foreskins in Baldung’s woodcuts from 1534, ‘Aroused Stallion Approaching Mare’ and ‘Ejaculating Stallion.’ (Fig. 1.a & 1.b) This faithful reappearance of an idiosyncratic, liminal, ‘polluted’ motif from Baldung’s personal repertoire suggests that the physiological equations of sex, sin, femininity, masculinity and Man’s sexually degraded, fallen estate preoccupied him throughout his career. Like the meteorological event taking place in the background of his painting of the two ‘weather witches,’ the debased fire of feminine blood brings mortification and the other well-rehearsed vicissitudes of lust. The advent of the witches brings the firestorm of Armageddon in its wake, with its attendant train of war, famine, death and plague. Fig. 1.a. Hans Baldung Grien. Aroused Stallion Approaching Mare, 1534. Woodcut. Fig. 1.b. Hans Baldung Grien. Ejaculating Stallion,1534. Woodcut. (Source: Koerner 1993) As she is pictured in the ‘Apocalypse’ series of woodcuts, holding aloft the inverted, profane chalice, Dürer’s ‘Whore of Babylon’ is the arch-witch. Dürer’s representation of the Whore of Babylon/Scarlet Woman becomes, like her Persian predecessor Jahi the Whore, the personification of menstruation. Poised so as to be spilled out over the land in the forms of plagues, famine, death, and war, the feminine ‘polluted vessel’ actually initiates Armageddon and the ‘End of Days.’ Dürer’s ‘Fate’ (‘Nemesis’ or ‘Fortuna’) features the vessel in a similar gesture of threat (or promise) as that featured in his ‘Whore of Babylon’ woodcut. Deutsch made direct reference to Dürer’s ‘Fortuna’ in his ‘Airborne Witch’ of 1513, as did Urs Graf with his own version of ‘Fortuna’ in 1520. Cosmological destruction, fortune and fate, witches, turbulent skies, vulva shapes, genital lobes, labia, and vessels are the icons, signs, subjects and signifiers held in common among these images. Deutsch and Graf not only give their Fortuna figures large, elaborately lobed vessels like Dürer’s Fortuna, but picture them as belching smoke, steam and ‘menstrual vapours’ like those of Baldung’s witches, perhaps in direct response to Baldung’s developed iconography of feminine pollution in the ‘Witches’ Sabbath’ images. Albrecht Dürer. The Whore of Babylon, from ‘The Apocalypse Series,’ c. 1496--1497. Woodcut. Niklaus Manuel Deutsch. Airborne Witch Carrying Skull of the Artist, c. 1513. Highlighted drawing. Urs Graf. Copy after Fortuna, c. 1520. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg. Drawing. Dürer’s ‘Whore of Babylon’ figure is thought to have been modelled on the likeness and costume of a courtesan whom he had met, and sketched, in Venice – further naturalizing the whoredom of the witches and false preachers prophesied to sweep across the earth in the ‘End Times.’13 It is not surprising if Dürer returned to his sketches of the Venetian courtesan after his return to Nuremberg to see, from an increasingly reformist, Northern perspective, a ‘whore’ of the ‘Babylonian’ Roman Church in luxurious, increasingly ideologically opposed Italy. Dürer’s Great Whore rides on the back of the seven-headed Beast of the Apocalypse and lifts her chalice in an obscene parody of the Elevation of the Host and the Holy Chalice of the Mass. But, as it is written in Revelations, the Whore of Babylon’s cup is filled not with Christ’s blood manifesting as wine, but with “the wine of her abominations and filthiness of her fornication,”14 which is to say, the ‘wine’ of profane, feminine blood. The Whore in Revelations is represented as the prime, ‘Scarlet Woman,’ luxuriously attired in a scarlet robe. To medieval and Renaissance patristic scholars, her prideful, scarlet splendour signifies her lustful, elemental nature, which – in the hermeneutic of menstruation and the Fall – is as much as to say her ‘menstruating’ nature. Such biblical imagery informed the construction of the ‘blood libel’ form of sacrilege that Jewish women (or ‘menstruating’ Jewish men) were reputed to perform upon the Eucharistic chalice and host.15 In Baldung’s Sabbath travesties, every Everywoman/Witch is a potential Whore of Babylon, affecting the ‘blood libel,’ signified by menstrual ‘essence,’ in her fleshly contract with the Demon – subversively overturning the divinely ordained social order, and moral sovereignty of men, by means of her inverted nature. Throughout Baldung’s ‘Fall of Man’ series, Eve is depicted as the youthful, tempting siren that has brought Adam’s mortality upon him through the lure of her sexuality. Her glances are emphasised throughout the images as somehow pivotal to the onset and career of death, dereliction, and depravity, seen as manifest, at various stages, in the bodies and behaviours of Baldung’s various renditions of Adam. The father of mankind’s cadaverous condition in these pictures conflates the visual narrative with another of his favourite themes, doubling as, and referring to, his Death and the Maiden allegories. Just as Eve brought death upon Adam, so will death prey upon the Daughters of Eve in this malign meta-narrative. In a grim sort of round dance, this cycle will only stop with the restoration of humankind’s paradisiacal estate in the Kingdom of God. The Apocalypse is the remedy for the apple of the fall, with Christ’s sacrifice of blood paying the debt of sin up until the Redemption. The apple is equated with the feminine genital through Baldung’s use of a visual strategy in common use throughout the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries by artist’s depicting this scene; in Baldung’s macabre painting depicting the First Couple, the Ottawa ‘Eve, the Serpent and Adam as Death’ of 1530, as in Dürer’s ‘The Fall of Man (Adam and Eve) 1504 print, the apple is held in Eve’s lowered hand at the same level as her vulva, clearly marking the apple and Eve’s pudenda as visual synonyms. 13 Dodwell, 14. St. John, Rev. XVII, 3—4. 15 Netenyahu, 826—833. 14 Hans Baldung Grien. Eve, the Serpent and Adam as Death, 1530. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Oils. Albrecht Dürer, The Fall of Man (Adam and Eve), 1504. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. With menstruation signifying pollution and the concomitant spiritual Death operating as Baldung’s hermeneutic of the fall, here, as in the artist’s doctrinal sources, original sin is figured as contact with feminine, physiological pollution. It brings mortality in its wake, to Adam and all of his descendants, the most egregious of the ills signifying the fallen condition that continues to plague Man up to Armageddon. Such ideas and their eschatological mediations depended – for their core meanings, credibility and coherence – upon a very precise theological interpretation of the role of women in bringing about the Fall. Seminal, moral texts are unequivocal on the attribution of blame to Woman in the form of Eve: “You are the unsealer of that forbidden tree. You are the first deserter of the divine law. You are she who persuaded him whom the Devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert, that is death, even the Son of God had to die.”16 Monsters The association of women with monsters extends back at least as far as Aristotle, who postulated the human norm in terms of bodily organization based on a male model, or paradigm, in his Generation of Animals.17 The female form is therefore an anomaly, a variation on the main theme of mankind, that only happens when and if something goes wrong or is defective (or deficient) in the reproductive process. “For Aristotle, not surprisingly, women are not endowed with a rational soul.”18 Braidotti points out that the topos of women as a sign of abnormality or inherent monstrousness props up the derivative topos of difference as a mark of inferiority, which remains a constant in Western scientific discourse. One of the byproducts this association has produced is the misogynistic literary genre of antifeminist satire, which trades upon abjection and horror of the female body. She points out that, stylistically, the satirical text is “inherently monstrous,” and can afford to express, “a degree of monstrousness that might shock in other literary genres,”19 bringing to mind the virulently antifeminist satires of Ovid, Juvenal, Boccaccio, and Map – the stylized imageries of which may ultimately have informed the misogynistic, ‘witchcraft’-themed, visual satires of Baldung. Baldung’s renditions of the monstrous activities and dangerous, deviant bodies of witches are well positioned within the history of teratology, the science of monsters, in which, as Braidotti describes it, “the body in general and the female body in particular have been conceptualized in Western scientific discourse….”20 Sixteenth century reproductive theory held that women conceived according to the sights that entered into imaginative conception through their eyes; Paracelsus asserted that, “What the body sees and desires during pregnancy will also come forth in the child.”21 The feminine imagination worked like a powerful magnet: “It drew into the matrix what the eyes perceived; in this way it was believed to resemble the imagination of a painter who reproduces what he first 16 Terttullian, 118. Braidotti, 79—83. 18 Braidotti, 79. 19 Braidotti, 79—80. 20 Braidotti, 83. 21 Scholtz-Williams 1995, 57. 17 sees with his inner eye.”22 Mental concepts and uterine conceptions were thus configured as magically connected in the feminine reproductive process. Women could curse or bless with their gaze alone; they could cast the ‘evil eye,’ ensnare male lovers, or bewitch judges into leniency. Their eyes were not merely vents for the womb’s ‘evil vapours,’ but also for the womb’s tyrannical influence. Fig. 2. Hans Baldung Grien. New Year’s Greeting, 1514. Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna. Pen and ink with white highlights. 22 Scholtz-Williams 1995, 57. Women’s eyes and wombs might be seen as synonymous in terms of magical/sexual symbolism. By the sixteenth century, ideas of uterine/ocular powers had sponsored an theory of monstrous birthing, on the best authority, that survived into the Reform; “in a lecture on Genesis, Martin Luther cited the case of a woman ‘who gave birth to a mouse’ after the sight of one surprised her during pregnancy.”23 Monstrosities issued from women who conceived while menstruating, just as from witches who copulated with devils. Menstrual ‘witches’ engendered monstrosities and deformities as ‘signs,’ that heralded the onset of the Apocalypse. With their basilisk-like, dangerous gazes, the ‘somersaulting witch’ of the ‘New Years Greeting’ (Fig. 2), and the younger of the two, so-called ‘Weather Witches’ (Fig. 3) may represent adolescent, premenarche ‘poison maidens,’ or ‘venomous virgins.’ As pubescent, ‘naturally’ monstrous females, versions of Aristotle’s ‘unnatural’ or defective males, they appear to represent elemental witches in the making. Fig. 3. Hans Baldung Grien. Two Witches (or Weather Witches), 1523. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. Oil and tempera on panel. 23 Musacchio, 48. The youthful woman of the ‘Witch and Dragon’ image certainly fits this popular archetype. Legends of the ‘Venomous Virgin’ or ‘Poison Damsel’ proliferated through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, whereby “some fell disease, which was looked upon as a magic poisoning, the handiwork of a witch, or exceedingly clever woman, whose knowledge was something out of the ordinary,” effected high-profile assassinations of princes and kings.24 The legend of the death of King Wenceslaus II of Bohemia in 1305 tells just such a tale. “Suspicion fell on the king’s most trusted mistress, one Agnes, a most beautiful and accomplished woman. It was rumoured that she had accepted bribes from certain men to defile herself in such a way as to bring about the king’s death by her embrace.”25 In 1414 the King of Naples was said to have been similarly murdered by his beautiful, young mistress – a ‘poison maid’ who had been groomed by her ‘unnatural,’ physician father. These tales remained in full force after Baldung’s death in 1545. “For instance, the strange story of how the enemies of Francis I of France encompassed that monarch’s death in 1547 may be part fact and part fiction. In this case one of his mistresses, known as ‘La belle Ferronniere,’ was said to have been ‘poisoned’ with syphilis germs.”26 Much earlier, the trope had informed Kramer’s descriptions of witch/courtesans in the Malleus. The early origins of the ‘Venomous Virgin,’ like those of her corollary, the basilisk, are, like Jahi the Whore, to be found in Vedic and Avestan texts. “The ‘Venomous Virgin’ or ‘poison damsel’ (visakanya), …is a stock character from Sanskrit drama and narrative, a solitary figure of seduction and danger, a lethal secret weapon of assassination wielded by unscrupulous kings and ministers.”27 The Poison Damsel did not remain consigned to exotic histories, arcane medical texts, or rumours of assassinated rulers and political intrigues. “Such was her reputation in the medieval world that Aristotle was widely believed to have written a letter to his pupil Alexander the Great, warning him to be careful of lavish gifts from Indian kings, and reminding him of a time when he had narrowly escaped death at the hands of just such a poison-maiden, who had from childhood been nourished on snake venom.”28 The earliest known records of the poison maid motif, whose venomous powers were augured in her natal astrology and purposefully intensified throughout childhood by means of a poisonous diet, appear in Indian medical sources. She is considered a luxury item in the arsenal of kings and rulers, expensive to find (by means of perusing the astrological charts of beautiful girl children), and painstaking to train and raise, but well worth it when dealing with high-ranking enemies. For “if a Venomous Virgin is used, a man can lose his life instantly.”29 The tradition likely first appeared in Europe in the Secretum Secretorum, a Latin translation of the Arabic Kitab Sirr al-Asrar, itself probably based upon a Syriac text, now lost.30 “The Venomous Virgin subsequently became a well-known motif in medieval European medical and religious lore, appearing in the literatures of France, Germany, England, Spain and many other countries, not only in translations of the Secretum 24 Penzer and Bhatta, 66—68. Penzer and Bhatta, 67. 26 Penzer and Bhatta, 68. 27 Wujastyk, 81. In fact, her figure can still be found, warned against as a specific, especially heinous kind of espionage tool, assassin, and spy, in online military analyses and public intelligence reports by Pakistani academics and officials discussing East Indian war tactics, and in East Indian reports discussing the secret weaponry of Pakistani militias, there used as propaganda. She is also to be found in Vedic Medicine. 28 Wujastyk, 81. 29 Wujastyk, 132. 30 Wujastyk, 81. 25 Secretorum, but also in the equally read Gesta Romanorum.”31 In medical tomes, the Venomous Virgin is represented as a virulent scourge whose touch is fatal. “If she touches you, her sweat can kill. If you make love to her, your penis drops off like a ripe fruit from its stalk.”32 She kills a lover just by her touch or her breath. Flowers and blossoms wilt when they come into contact with her head. The bugs in her bed, the lice in her clothes, and anyone who washes in the same water as her, all die. With this in mind, you should keep as far away from her as possible.33 While other Baldung images are fairly straightforward in exhibiting their supernatural equation of feminine sexual orifice to fiery efflux, the true gist of Baldung’s association of the ‘maiden’ with venomous poison can, perhaps, most clearly be seen in the ‘Witch and Dragon.’ Such a representation, showing a dragon consuming uterine blood, both references and inverts one of Dürer’s images from the Apocalypse series of woodcuts. In illustrating the passage from Revelations, Dürer represented the dragon that pursues the Woman Clothed with the Sun across the sky in order to consume her newborn child. In theological terms, Dürer’s image illustrates the passage where Satan seeks to devour and destroy the virtuously processed fire, manifested as the Divine Child, born of the cosmic Woman (who, like Bathsheba, has been ‘cleansed of her pollution’ of menstruation by having been ‘divinely’ impregnated). But Baldung’s inverted image shows the Devil is willingly fed the improperly processed, profane fire of menstruation by the witch. In this version, the woman is not clothed in the sun, nor is she clothed at all. She maintains the upper hand with the dragon/basilisk, both dominating and subjugating it to her elemental will, both nurturing and poisoning it with her menstruous, monstrous gaze. Thematically developed by Dürer in his millennial woodcut edition of 1500, the consequence of unchaste, female prolificacy is traditionally conceived as no less than the End of the World. With his dragonish Beast of the Apocalypse, the seven-headed avatar for the ‘Whore of Babylon’ based on the description of the abject creature in John of Patmos’ Book of Revelations, Dürer illustrated the passage that describes the cosmic battle between the supernatural seven-headed dragon and the Cosmic Woman. (Fig. 39) She, wearing a robe like the sun and a crown of stars, is about to give birth to the Divine Child of the new aeon, conceived as an aspect of the Christ of the Second Coming. In the folio titled ‘The Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Seven-headed Dragon’ of this series, Durer pictures the critical turning point of the End Times scenario. His tail swept a third of the stars from the sky, tossing them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she gave birth he might devour her child. And she gave birth to a son, a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron; and her child was caught up to God and to His throne. […] Then the woman fled into the wilderness where she had a place prepared by God, so that there she would be nourished for one thousand two hundred and sixty days. […] And when the dragon saw that he 31 Wujastyk, 81. Wujastyk, 82. 33 Wujastyk, 82. 32 was thrown down to the earth, he persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male child. But the two wings of the great eagle were given to the woman, so that she could fly into the wilderness to her place, where she was nourished for a time and times and half a time, from the presence of the serpent. And the serpent poured water like a river out of his mouth after the woman, so that he might cause her to be swept away with the flood. But the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and drank up the river which the dragon poured out of his mouth.34 The key meta-narrative of the Reform, that of Armageddon and the Apocalypse, has at it’s core the dramatic moment when the Cosmic Woman (esoterically conceived as St. Mary returned as the crowned Queen of Heaven) strives to elude the dragonish ‘Beast’ who seeks to devour her newly born son and the lochia, or afterbirth. How much more direly apocalyptic must these elements appear when, in a direct inversion of the biblical scenario, a diabolical witch consciously strives to achieve the opposite – to purposely feed the demonic beast with the issue of her womb? Baldung, in his ‘Witch and Dragon,’ shows a similar fluid flow as that involving the apocalyptic dragon’s mouth in St. John’s narrative. In Baldung’s version, however, the flowing form is streaming into the reptilian maw, not exiting it. In Baldung’s version, the pictured, deadly stream is narrower at its point of efflux, as in Dürer’s scene from Revelations. But in Baldung’s picture the point of efflux is the woman’s vagina, not the maw of the diabolical beast. Instead of the loathly but majestic cosmic dragon’s tail sweeping “a third of the stars from the sky,” and “tossing them to the earth,” we see the earthly dragon’s terminus being dominated and foully stoked by the diabolical Daughter of Eve, raising up a smoking miasma to heaven. In Baldung’s Sabbath travesties, every woman/witch is a potential Whore of Babylon, affecting the ‘blood libel’ signified by menstrual ‘essence.’ In her fleshly contract with the Demon, she subversively overturns the divinely ordained social order and moral sovereignty of men by means of her inverted nature. Throughout Baldung’s Fall of Man series, Eve is depicted as the youthful, tempting siren that has brought Adam’s mortality upon him through the lure of her sexuality. (Fig. 19) Her glances are emphasised throughout the images as somehow pivotal to the onset and career of death, dereliction, and depravity, shown as manifest, at various stages, in the bodies and behaviours of Baldung’s various renditions of Adam. The father of mankind’s cadaverous condition in these pictures conflates the visual narrative with another of Baldung’s favourite themes, doubling as and referring to his Death and the Maiden allegories. Just as Eve brought death upon Adam, so will death prey upon the Daughters of Eve in this malign metanarrative. In a grim sort of round dance, this cycle will only stop with the restoration of humankind’s paradisiacal estate in the Kingdom of God. The Apocalypse is the remedy for the apple of the Fall, with Christ’s sacrifice of blood paying the debt of sin up until the Redemption. 34 Revelation, 12:4—12:16. Albrecht Dürer. The Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Seven-headed Dragon, 1498. Woodcut. Witches were represented as feeding their familiars, including pet dragons, with their menstrual blood – a diabolical, inverted travesty of the medical idea that mothers fed their infants the refined or ‘purified’ product of menstrual blood as breast milk.35 Witches were also figured as signing their compacts with the Devil in menstrual blood. If we are to read the Witch and Dragon image as a parable on menarche, the scene can be interpreted as depicting the moment when the adolescent witch sets out upon her career, forging her lifelong contract with the Demon. She ‘signs’ the worldly contract in her own flesh with her transformation into a sexual being, sets her seal upon it, and delivers the earnest of her malign intent with her own blood. Basilisks and Uteri Though Baldung’s lizard-like creature has traditionally been identified as a dragon, I suggest that this is actually a representation of a basilisk in close communion with its tropic corollary, a latter-day ‘Poison Maid,’ or youthful version of the ‘natural witch.’ There is ample justification, in the annals of monstrousness, for reading the creature as basilisk; the basilisk trope acted as a signifier within standard constructions of poisonous, feminine nature, and was also cast as the witch’s common familiar according to witchcraft theorists. As the Basilisk assumed a vital role in the discourses of both witchcraft and femininity, the cipher of a monstrous toxicity, this image may more properly be called ‘Witch and Basilisk.’ The Old Testament basilisk is found in Isaiah (11:8; 14:29; 59:5) and Jeremiah (8:17). The ‘king serpent’ is a fabulous, mythical beast three spans long, with a spot on its head like a crown. “It is to the bite of this creature that in Proverbs is compared the deadly effect of strong drink; it is on its hole that the weaned child is to place its hand in the days of the Messiah; it is to its eggs, then believed to be deadly poison, that the wicked deeds of his contemporaries are compared by Isaiah; and its untameable fierceness is noticed by Jeremiah as defying the efforts of the charmer.”36 There are other possible incidences in the Bible; while the singular of the Hebrew word behemoth is used only once – the behemoth of Job 40:15, the description of the beast, with its tail that sways like a cedar tree, bears a strong resemblance to the reptilian monster represented in the basilisk. The Hebrew word ephgeh is translated to the Greek basilisk in Isaiah 59:5, but is translated into the Greek word for dragon in Job 20:16 and the Greek word for asp in Isaiah 30:6. ‘Ephgeh’ seems to include the word ‘Geh,’ the ancient Persian name for the menstrual monster otherwise known as ‘Jahi.’ The Egyptian Horapollo wrote of the basilisk in his Hieroglyphica (c. 450 CE) when describing the Cobra urea, or royal brow insignia: "…this the Egyptians call Ouraion, but the Greeks a Basilisk. They make this of gold and put it on the [heads of the] gods."37 Lucan’s Pharsalia describes the basilisk as the ‘king of the serpents’ and emphasizes his virulence, in that the first basilisk sprang from the blood of the Medusa. This bloody, monstrous, feminine genesis accounts for the deadly, ‘menstrual’ gaze of the basilisk, its serpentine nature, and the idea that it can be killed by use of a mirror; in the Medusa myth, the feminine monster was defeated by Perseus in just such a way. The birth of the basilisk is not part of a normal reproductive cycle, but a monstrous birth. The ‘polluted’ style of the monster’s nativity is found 35 Willis, 52—53. Geike, 153. 37 Gardiner, 11. 36 in the third century BCE, Septuagint’s version of Isaiah 59:5: "They break the eggs of asps and weave the spider’s web; he who would eat their eggs, having crushed the wind egg (ourion) finds in it a basilisk."38 This description also appeared in Aristotle’s History of Animals, his Generation of Animals, and Deuteronomy, 322:6.39 The creature’s toxic, embryonic state is intensified in the Latin Vulgate: “He who would eat of their eggs will die.”40 In classical histories and political critiques, tyrannical kings are conventionally figured as being ‘harmful even from a distance’ like the basilisk. The basilisk’s supernatural powers of destruction are ascribed to its numinous ‘royal blood’ in combination with its birth from the polluted, feminine blood of the Gorgon monster. The basilisk is commonly found in a desert, because its breath and sight are so destructive that it constantly creates a wasteland wherever it wanders. The word basileus in Greek was usually used to refer to a foreign king, whereas the term basiliskos often meant ‘petty tyrant.’ But both of these words connote the tyrant, foreigner, or invader, blasting and laying waste to the land, making the basilisk a perfect, allegorical metaphor for both the witch and the Antichrist. Pliny describes the venomous attributes of the basilisk in his Natural History: The like propertie hath the serpent called a Basiliske: bred it is in the province Cyrenaica, and is not above twelve fingers-breadth long: a white spot like a starre it carrieth on the head, and setteth it out like a coronet or diademe: if he but hisse once, no other serpents dare come neere: he creepeth not winding and crawling by as other serpents doe, with one part of the bodie driving the other forward, but goeth upright and aloft from the ground with the one halfe part of his bodie: he killeth all trees and shrubs not only that he toucheth, but that he doth breath upon also: as for grasse and hearbs, those hee sindgeth and burneth up, yea and breaketh stones in sunder: so venimous and deadly is he. It is received for a truth, that one of them upon a time was killed with a launce by an horseman from his horseback, but the poison was so strong that went from his bodie along the staffe, as it killed both horse and man: and yet a sillie weazle hath a deadly power to kill this monstrous serpent, as pernicious as it is [for many kings have been desirous to see the experience thereof, and the manner how he is killed.] See how Nature hath delighted to match everything in the world with a concurrent. The manner is, to cast these weazles into their holes and cranies where they lye, (and easie they be to knowe, by the stinking sent of the place all about them:) they are not so soone within, but they overcome them with their strong smell, but they die themselves withall; and so Nature for her pleasure hath the combat dispatched.41 The basilisk was an exotic staple of the medieval bestiary. It was a popular emblem for feminine danger in Romance literature, medieval alchemy, natural science, and scholastic ruminations on the nature of women and her concomitant evils. Medieval Arabic sources included the lizard-like basilisk from Persian figurations of ‘the evil spirit’ at work in the 38 South 115. Porter and Pearson, 535—536. 40 South 115. 41 Pliny 1601, Cha XXI. 39 reptilian families of ‘foul’ or ‘polluted beasts.’ Isidore of Seville traced the etymology of the basilisk’s name to identify him, like the ancients, as the ‘king of snakes, and Alexander Neckham contributed advice to the effect that it wasn’t the basilisk’s gaze that occasioned instant death but the ‘air corruption,’ likening it to the noxious effluents of the womb and its related ‘evil eye’ in their ability to infect the ‘adjacent air’ with miasma. The figure of the basilisk in Holy Scripture invested the monster’s existence with the highest authority, and the demonic figure of the beast lent itself to increasingly grotesque depictions. After these biblical passages, the earliest surviving account of the monstrous birth of the basilisk is found in Alexander Neckam’s De Naturis Rerum, written in 1180 CE. This account moves into mainstream tradition with its inclusion in Pierre de Beauvais’ enlarged bestiary of 1218 CE. In his version of the birth an egg forms in the body of an old cock, which lays it (secretly) in a dung heap. Like the unwholesome spells of witches, it is hatched by use of a toad. The resulting monster produced by this unholy alliance has the upper body of a rooster and the lower body of a snake.42 The transmission of the story of its birth through time only allowed for more detailed and more peculiar accounts. “It had to be born of an egg laid during the days of the dog star Sirius by a seven-year-old cock. Such and egg was easy to recognize: it did not have the normal ovoid shape but was spherical. It had no shell, but was covered by a thick skin or membrane. The egg then had to be hatched by a toad, and the result was an unbelievably poisonous monster which was basically a serpent but with some characteristics of the toad and the cock as well.”43 The basilisk’s political meanings proved useful in demonizing ideological enemies and fuelling apocalyptic fervour. The Bishop of Basel was identified with the basilisk as Antichrist, whereby a basilisk now elevates the Bishop’s shield in Basle's heraldic coat of arms. Forced out during the Protestant Reformation, the Bishop was blamed for the ills of Basel and marked as the avatar of the Church’s tyrannical rule. The Basel legend can be traced to a monument inscription commemorating the fatal 1356 earthquake that destroyed the city almost to the ground, blamed on the evil machinations of a basilisk: "Basilisk, you poisonous worm and fable, now you shall hold the shield of the dignified city of Basel."44 St. Michael, the Archangel, was said to have slain a basilisk in Munich, sparing the city from further, anti-Christian predations. The Antichrist-basilisk hybrid is a monster that serves as a potent symbol of death and the ‘evil demon,’ commonly depicted in Church murals or stone carvings as an emblem of the devil and sin, where it is shown being defeated by a chaste and chivalrous Christian knight. This context is explored in the moralizing and allegorical bestiaries and biblical commentaries. Secular literature opened up new avenues for the basilisk as ‘sign.’ The basilisk appears in Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale: “You’d be,’ he said, ‘far less at risk/With lions or a basilisk/Than with a woman prone to chide.’”45 42 McCulloch, 62-69, 199. Cohen, 227 44 Costello, 79—84. 45 Chaucer 2005, 127. 43 Albertus Magnus, as we have seen in the De animalibus, wrote about the killing gaze of the basilisk and gave as a source of the basilisk’s legends Hermes Trismegistus, who is also credited as the creator of the story about the basilisk's ashes being able to convert silver into gold, linking the creature to alchemy. These proto-scientific uses of the basilisk were popularized in medieval bestiaries and became a staple of alchemical tracts in the Renaissance. In Pliny we find another proto-scientific use of the creature, derived from likening the creature’s toxic blood to menstrual blood, that, like menstrual blood, has certain magical properties of benefit to the alchemist: “Its blood the magi praise to the skies, telling how it thickens as does pitch, and resembles pitch in color, but becomes brighter red than cinnabar when diluted.”46 Romance manuscript illuminations showing virginal maidens holding tame and collared ‘dragons’ by a slender leash may actually be read as depicting ‘poison maidens’ in tenuous possession of their own toxicity.47 Theatre, especially, featured the basilisk figure, often referring to the monster by its other name, as ‘cockatrice.’ This is likely because ‘cockatrice’ had become a slang term for prostitute, whereby the punning, comic, or moralizing value of the trope becomes richly compounded. In the sixteenth century, basilisks became even more resoundingly associated with the Antichrist. For witchcraft discourses, Church histories, and medical/theological gynaecologies, it was a liminal beast and thereby served as an apt epigram for feminine pollution. Like the womb, it is an impure, ambiguous mix, “…both sacred and soiled, holy and hellish… all powerful and therefore impossible to live with….”48 In a diabolical inversion of the normatively poisonous maid, who conscientiously spares the knights who come to ‘save’ her by keeping her ‘dragon’ leashed (and its basilisk stare occupied by use of mirrors), Baldung’s ‘venomous virgin’ in his ‘Witch and Dragon’ woodcut feeds her familiar spirit with their common elixir – the menstrual fire of poisonous, mordant blood. In conventional imagery, St. George plunges a well-aimed lance into the demonic dragon’s maw, killing it. In Baldung’s inverted scene of feminine diabolism, the young witch plunges her ‘wand’ into the dragon’s rear orifice, ‘stoking’ it. Where Rabelais uses a monstrous, gluttonous, simple-minded giant to express the Platonic trope of ‘effeminate’ venery, and its vagrant, single-minded, wandering-womb type appetites, Baldung uses an actual image of the womb. Wandering outside the body, Baldung’s ‘appetitive’ phallic/uterine ‘animal,’ masquerading as basilisk and monster, gives fully abject form to Plato’s horrific-erotic feminine. Wielding her toxic fire to purposefully work her witting maleficia, Baldung’s menstruating Woman/Witch is the direct inverse of the ‘Woman Attired in the Sun and Crowned With Stars’ of the apocalyptic narrative.49 In the centuries following the early 16th-century creation of the ‘Witch and Dragon’ drawing, critics, curators and art historians found the image too disturbingly obscene to exhibit, publish or write on in most instances, and the drawing was largely received as pornographic.50 The image garners shock from viewers even today, particularly at first viewing. But these perceptions, and receptions, of the work as culturally anomalous do not take into account the 46 Pliny 1601, 29, xix. Anonymous, f.167. 48 Braidotti, 81. 49 Revelation 12:1. 50 Koch, Die Zeichnungen Hans Baldung Griens, 31, 100. 47 image’s literary counterparts in contemporaneous, humanist, antifeminist satires. Abjection formed a large part of what was both titillating and edifying in antifeminist humour, never so evident a factor as in Boccaccio’s allegorical narrative describing the ‘Gulf of Setalia’ and its ‘River of Acheron,’ in The Corbaccio. In his section titled ‘Beneath the Façade,’ Boccaccio’s presentation of feminine physiology could not help but be effective as a deterrent to the contemplation of either marriage or heterosexual intimacy. As a cautionary tale, it deals in scatological terms in describing feminine genitalia, while using the effective metphor of a polluted landscape: That Gulf, then, is certainly an infernal abyss which could be filled or sated as the sea with water or the fire with wood. I will be silent about the sanguine and yellow rivers that descend from it in turn, streaked with white mould, sometimes no less displeasing to the nose than to the eyes, because the style I have picked drws me to something else [anal penetration, ‘Love from the Back’]. What shall I say further to you therefore about the village of Evilhole? Placed between two lofty mountains, from here sometimes just as with Mongibello, first with great thunderclaps and then without, there issues forth a supherous smoke, so fetid and repulsive that it pollutes the whole countryside around. I do not know what to say to you about it except that, when I lived near it (for I remained there longer than I would have liked), I was offended many times by such blasts that I thought to die there something other than a Christian death. Nor can I otherwise tell of the goaty stench which her whole corporeal bulk exudes when she groans excited sometimes by heat, and sometimes by exertion, this is so appalling that, combined with the other things I have already spoken of, it makes her bed smell like a lion’s den, so that any squeamish person would stay with far less loathing in the Val di Chiana [an unhealthy, swampy river, at the time of writing] in midsummer than near that.51 In Baldung’s ‘Witch and Dragon,’ the witch aims her rod, or wand, into the dragon’s rear orifice, as a plume of smoke (or vapour) rises from the aperture. Where St. George is traditionally depicted dominating the dragon with his lance, our witch dominates the craven dragon/basilisk creature with both her vaginal stream and her leafy ‘lance’ implanted in the coiled tail, impaling him at both ends. This reverse dynamic would seem to suggest that the witch is in possession of a preternaturally potent, sexual sort of wand. Hers is an especially fertile, vegetal kind of rod – bringing to mind the malefic power over the elements and agriculture credited to both menstruation and to witches. Leafy, flowering, vegetal wands, typologically signifying the ‘flowering rod of Jesse,’ or the House of David, are magically related to the ‘minor arcana’ suite of Tarot cards ruled by the element, humour, and planetary rulership of fire. As a topic for Northern humanists, the Tarot was dignified by major studies, lectures and essays, and various decks were invented and used by humanists for various didactic purposes, including the teaching of mathematics. Moreover, the popularity of Tarot allegories had support at the highest social and cultural levels; in 1493/94, Maximilian married Bianca 51 Boccaccio, ‘Il Corbaccio,’ 176. Maria Sforza, who brought a deck of Tarot cards with her, probably the dynastic Mantegna Tarotcchi. The newlywed couple were said to have had more pleasure from the cards on their wedding night than from their conjugal relations. Then, in 1496, Maximilian had a ‘marriage deck’ created for his children who were entering into marriages with children of the Spanish court.52 In 1498 Jacob Faber used a didactic deck in lectures, and Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg referred to elemental Tarot concepts in his lectures on Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools. Thomas Murner created two Tarot decks, one in 1502 and one in 1507, narrowly escaping heresy charges by maintaining that he only used the decks for didactic purposes. We may assume that Baldung is, similarly, using his magical arcane for didactic, which is to say, ‘moral’ purposes. The prominence of the Tarot in regional humanist and publishing circles provides a context for the idea that Baldung is conscientiously utilising the image of the vital, fiery, leafy wand. But here, wielded by the witch, it signifies the ‘stoking’ of a debased, malefic fire from the bowels of the serpent. The fuel for this fire-starting activity is her own phlegmatic fire, the melancholic blood of her menstruation. It is her proactive menstrual malevolence, maleficium operating entirely at her instigation, with the serpent’s tube-like body functioning as a machine-like, passive receptacle that creates the miasmic fume that ‘floods the world with evil.’ The impression is one of a witch ‘nursing’ her familiar spirit, directing a stream of menstrual blood into its gaping maw, while masturbating it at the other end. To reinforce this idea, the witch is pictured directing her ‘evil eye’ toward the ‘evil eye’ of the basilisk-like monster cringing beneath her, transfixing, dominating, and hypnotizing it. The unholy unity of feminine eyes, hair, blood, utterances, polluted touch and monstrous conceptions is most fully exercised in Baldung’s finely drawn, programmatic picturing of the witch and her reptilian, uterine ‘animal’ in the ‘Witch and Dragon.’ Like the ancient romance novelist, Heliodorus, in The Aethiopica, Baldung explores the concept of a ‘love at first sight’ and its relationship to the evil eye. Alluding to the witch-like powers of the basilisk, the artist visually suggests what Heliodorus describes as the creature’s ability to “dry up and infect” everything that it touches with its mere glance or touch.53 Like Clotho, the youngest, maiden aspect of the Three Fates, or Moirae, the youthful witch maintains her obscene crouch while twirling her liminal, vegetal ‘wand’ in the basilisk’s nether orifice like a spindle. This activity produces a plume of smoke, as if from the action of starting a fire with flints and tinder. The effluent threads its way skyward, emerging from the orifice like a skein of fabric. The witch is seen ‘spinning’ the skein of smoke from the cervix-like, nether mouth of her fiery, womb-like monster; her metaphorical ‘distaff’ reproduces the womb’s activity of spinning the uncanny fabric of fallen and polluted life, in an eternally closed circuit of monstrous birthing. The basilisk/cockatrice’s rich background, and its application as a learned, risqué, double entendre, no doubt informs Baldung’s disposition of the trope in ‘Witch and Dragon,’ his most theatrical rendition of his witchcraft repertory. Where a young witch shamelessly directs her 52 This deck was printed in Oberrhein, in the region of Strasbourg, and still survives in print in Spain in Spanish editions. 53 The Aethiopica was probably written in the third century C.E. by Heliodurus, who identified himself as a ‘Phonecian.’ The antique novel migrated into the West in the early sixteenth century. Heliodorus, The Aethiopica, trans. Aristedes Colonna (Athens: The Athenian Society, 1897), 160. uterine orifice in the direction of the monster’s gaping mouth, we are directed to find the mirror image and externalized reflection of her own, cunningly hidden, monstrous conception. In Baldung’s image, the witch and basilisk/cockatrice figures are dynamically fused via their optical, oral, and genital orifices and their confluent emissions, apparently performing some sort of profane alchemy or magical curse. On a blood-like reddish-brown ground, Baldung’s ‘Witch and Dragon’ image appears to speak directly to the tropes surrounding menstruation, monstrous conceptions, meteorological disasters, and the blasting of crops and harvests credited to feminine maleficium. A putto who appears to be supporting the malignant, symbiotic cycle, flowing between the woman and the reptilian monster, attends the solitary witch. The little pagan figure holds an ouroboros symbol formed by the circuit of the dragon’s tail. The entire reptilian body is both phallic and uterine, bi-gendered in its exact physiological workings, expressing an ‘impurity’ of gender and/or type that has traditionally signified pollution, or ‘abomination,’ in Old Testament purity laws. The earliest descriptions of the liminal, basilisk monster feature it as the habitual form for the shape-shifting Devil, Angra-Mainyu, of ancient Persian scriptures. In this seminal rendition, he is already paired with the earliest figurations of the ‘Poison Damsel,’ or Witch, that emblem for menstruation, Jahi, the ‘demoness’ and whore.54 When this complex of tropes entered the Western corpus in furnishing the legends of Alexander and Aristotle, it retained its cohesive integrity, bringing its component characterizations of menstrual evil with it. Baldung mediates the trope’s component parts deftly, in an image unique among the annals of witchcraft figures. The menstrual monster is pictured either breathing the polluted fire of menstruation into, or swallowing the fiery efflux streaming out of, the witch’s vagina. Interpreters of this image have often read the streaming form flowing between the reptilian monster and the witch’s vulva as the dragon’s tongue, but this reading doesn’t make sense, as that organ is clearly visible below it. Burns sees this image as, “…explicitly pornographic and meant for private circulation among Baldung’s friends,” in that, “Witch and Dragon features a dragon directing a stream of fire from its mouth between a witch’s legs.”55 While this fluid exchange might well be meant to simply convey the idea of some molten, lava-like stream of fire, it is much more likely the mysterious stream is very specifically meant to convey the symbiotic exchange of toxic, debased fire, manifest as polluted (or ‘menstrual’) blood, that both the ‘Venomous Virgin’ and the basilisk exemplify and dispense. It is not only a labial, vaginal/oral exchange the pair so luxuriously shares, but also their fixed, gravid, optical engagement. The featuring of the toxic gaze (or ‘Evil Eye’) in the tableaux places the image within the hermeneutic of menstruation; the same menstrual ‘venom’ streams from eye to eye as flows from orifice to orifice. In Baldung’s heightened, extenuated message, the meaning is greatly intensified; the narrative frame is stretched to include the well-known trope whereby the witches ‘nurse’ their demons and familiars with that perceived, unholy ‘inversion’ of breast milk,56 which is to say, their menstrual blood. Another feature of the basilisk-like dragon, or ‘worm,’ that fits it within the eschatological discourse of world destroying, menstrual witches is, of course, its sheer monstrousness. The prevalence of monsters was a vital component of the prevailing ideology of 54 Müller 1880, 16. Burns, 16. 56 Willis, 52—53. 55 the imminent Apocalypse. Monsters, evidencing the working of ‘wonders’ by Satan and his legions of demons, ‘false preachers,’ ‘false prophets,’ and witches, were the necessary coeval of the belief in Armageddon. “Wonders spoke to men and women because they conformed to biblically derived expectations; they spoke because of their ever-increasing scale and frequency; and they spoke because of their detailed forms were taken to have symbolic meanings. Monsters, in particular, yielded eschatological messages.”57 To the clerical mindset, there was nothing more innately monstrous, nor anything more comprehensively tied to the ultimate end of the postlapsarian world in the fires of Armageddon, than that emblem of ancient and original sin, the womb. This is the abject force of the ‘Witch and Dragon’ image, and it would have required no explanation for its clerically educated consumers. “Its humor parallels the combined repulsion and fascination in Rabelais' description of the seat of female sexuality as an ‘animal or member’ in a ‘secret and intestinal place . . . in which are engendered, frequently, certain humors, brackish, nitrous, acrid, mordant, shooting, and bitterly tickling, by the painful prickling and wriggling of which – for this member is extremely nervous and sensitive – the entire feminine body is shaken.’"58 Feminine Hair and Sexual Evil Women’s overabundance of the mordant and moribund phlegmatic humour gives feminine hair its lustful, ‘sinful’ connotations in Northern 16th-century medical and theological constructs, where it is closely associated with the pollution of menstruation. The theory of improper humours explains the host of evils associated with the conduct of witchcraft, and Woman’s weaker, softer, ‘unformed’ or ‘defective’ body in the Aristotelian-Galenic paradigm. It is medicalized by Albertus Magnus and his presumed disciple, Pseudo-Albertus Magnus,59 contributes to a Lutheran iconography of femininity and abject eroticism in Cranach’s melting, malleable feminine forms, and popularized in Baldung’s Mannerist figurations of ideal, allegorical feminine forms. Baldung’s idealised, normatively ‘inverted,’ allegorical, female nudes list and sway like water in the process of being poured – their hair neatly coifed, contained in seemly buns or coils. In contrast, his ‘unnatural’ inversions of ‘naturally’ inverted women – his ‘witches’ – look positively fit. Their hair streams and coils with animus, as if composed of a substance poised somewhere between air, steam, and flame. Muscular and strong, they exercise a transgressive power – an unholy strength. The aged witches are the most monstrously ‘masculine’ in their physiques, with frighteningly powerful, muscular bodies and strident, grimacing expressions. 57 Clark 1997, 365—366. Hults 1987, 269. 59 Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, 71-79. Galen’s works were published in the original Greek in 1525. Though few physicians could read the Greek, many humanists could. It was disseminated widely, in Latin, from the printing presses during the following decade. See John Gribbin, Science: A History: 1543—2001 (London: Penguin, 2000), 21; See also Galen, ‘On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body (De usu partium),’ trans. M. T. May, excerpt in Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. A. Blamires, with K. Pratt and C. W. Marks: 41-42 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 58 Hans Baldung Grien. Witches’ Sabbath, 1510. In the ‘Witches Sabbath’ images, the abundant, immodest hair of Baldung’s Hexen is rendered similarly to the steaming efflux, or fumes, shown streaming from their genitals and the many vessels and jars that act as their signifiers. These non-specific feminine efflux may also be seen spewing from the witch’s feline familiar’s mouth in the 1514 ‘Witches’ Sabbath. Hans Baldung Grien. Witches’ Sabbath, c. 1514. The humouric connections among corrupted fire, feminine hair, the fume-spouting feminine vessel or ‘jar,’ ‘plegmatic’ feminine blood, and the genital efflux of ‘superfluous blood,’ as menstruation, are also made manifestly apparent in Baldung’s pen and ink drawing with white highlights of 1514, now held at the Albertina, Witches Preparing for the Sabbath Flight. Hans Baldung Grien. Witches Preparing for the Sabbath Flight, 1514. Urs Graf also utilized this device when he depicted his Princess figure’s hair coiling skyward, visually quoting the smoke and steam exiting her vagina, as the Roman centurions lit their torches from her menstrual fire in his 1519 border illustration, showing the most popular episode from the famous, apocryphal, scholastic tale, Virgil and the King’s Daughter. Graf’s marginalia for Maximilian’s Book of Hours depicts the most titillating scene in the legend, recounting Virgil’s spectacular revenge upon the princess who had scorned his advances. In the tale, Virgil exacted his revenge by causing all the fires in Rome to go out, leaving only the ‘corrupted’ or ‘lustful’ fire issuing from the royal princess’ vulva still burning. He then let it be known that the only source of warmth and light remaining in the entire city was to be found in the flame issuing from his ex-lover’s vagina.60 This obliged all the Roman citizens and soldiery to light their hearth fires and lanterns from this one, remaining incendiary source. The famous scene is the ‘punch line’ of the popular scholastic tale, constituting a bawdy joke at the expense of women in general and pretty, conceited, royal princesses in particular (such as Phyllis, the king’s daughter who had scorned the advances of the Great Man, Aristotle, in another clerical tale). Urs Graf, Virgil and the King’s Daughter, illustration (Detail) for title page of the Dictionarium Graecum (Paris, 1519). Woodcut. 60 Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture, 335. The abundant, immodest hair of Baldung’s hexen, rendered similarly to the steaming efflux, or fumes, shown streaming from their genitals and the many vessels and jars that act as their signifiers, reference the Hippocratic theory that women’s tresses, like menstruation, are constituted from the defective, inadequately processed fire element. Baldung’s witches’ hair typically exudes an extraordinary animus, like that of writhing, coiling serpents, evincing classical humanist, literary and medical associations among women’s hair and serpents. Virgil described the Fury Allecto as having “serpents lodged in her sea-dark hair,” in the Aeneid.61 In this same vein, Pseudo-Albertus, in De secretis mulierum, cited Avicenna in claiming that serpents can be generated from the hair of a menstruating woman: “Take the hairs of a menstruating woman and place them in the fertile earth under some manure during the winter, then in spring or summer when they are heated by the sun a long, stout serpent will be generated, and he will generate another of the same species through seed.”62 An appended commentary by ‘Commentator B’ attempts to give a cogent explanation of why this should be so: The reason for this is that hairs are made from vapors that have risen to the cerebrum, and these humours are undigested in women, and they are poisonous because of the cold that remains in them. Therefore from this type of rotting a serpent is generated […]. A woman who has her menstrual period ought to hide her hair, because in this time her hair is venomous. It is naturally cold and humid because during the menses the defect of natural heat tends to move to the rear of the body. Serpents cannot be generated from the hairs of males because the humours in men are well digested so their hair is not poisonous nor does it rot as fast as a woman’s does.63 Hair is naturally virtuous in males but polluted and corrupted in females, according to the polarized Aristotelian theories of inversion. The vibrant facial and head hair of Baldung’s masculine figures, and their jaunty stances, including his pre-fallen figurations of Adam, are to be read as expressions of the wholesome, masculine fire, or virtu, that results from the superior male choler, or ‘heat.’ Hans Baldung Grien. Adam, 1520-23 61 62 Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Frederick Ahl (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 168-169. Pseudo-Albertus, ‘De secretis mulierum,’ 96. 63 Ibid. The robust, virile, curling tresses of pre-lapsarian Adam express the moral and physical strength of a healthy male perfectly balanced between sanguine and choleric, and radiant, paradigmatic spiritual light. That this is the light so cruelly felled in partaking of Eve’s proffered apple, the signifier of Man’s carnal knowledge of evil as feminine temptation, we know as the conclusion of the story, the ingress of mortality into the Garden and humanity out of it, is implicit in the moment of foul choice. Concupiscence and lust speak to First Man from the coiling form of the serpent, which bears Eve’s face.