Herbs, Knots and Contraception ©2004 Max Dashu

(excerpt from Secret History of the Witches, Vol VI: Women in a time of Overlords)

Priests frequently leveled accusations of sexual magic at European women. The penitential books refer often to love potions. [Rouche, 523] But sexual witchcraft went beyond those, or even the dreaded (and popular) impotence magic. Early medieval writers show that women were using herbal medicine and witchcraft to control their own fertility and childbearing. Bishops in France, Spain, Ireland, England and Germany enacted canons forbidding women to undertake means of controlling their own conception, herbal and ceremonial, as well as to end pregnancies or perform abortions.

Frankish woman from an early medieval MS at Stuttgart, surrounded by contraceptive / abortifacient herbs (some very toxic!)

Augustine, John Chrysostom and other church patriarchs had opposed contraception and abortion. Augustinian doctrine equated sexual pleasure with sin, demanding that couples should engage in sex for procreation only. These theologians established “the classic Christian hostility to contraception, which linked it to magic and abortion.” [McLaren, 84-5] Clement of Alexandria and John Chrysostom of Antioch both railed against women’s incantations over potions or libations intended to prevent conceptions. At the pope's request, bishop Caesarius of Arles renewed the campaign in the late 400s. His sermons indicate that women in Provence were using not only herbal potions but also amulets, “diabolical marks” and other magical means. [McLaren, 85]

Denouncing both contraception and abortion as homicide, Caesarius issued orders that “no woman may drink a potion that makes her incapable of conceiving...” His motto was, “So much contraception, so many murders.”[Ranke-Heinemann, 73, 146-7] The bishop preached that such women would be damned unless they did long penance. He accused them of using “diabolical drinks” to avoid childbearing and so to get rich. The degree of priestly hostility toward even marital sex can be gaged by Caesarius' prediction that a woman who had sex the night before going to church, or while menstruating, would bear a child who was a leper, epileptic or demoniac. Sermons were full of such threats, and stories like this were repeated through the middle ages. [Noonan, 146, 139ff; McLaren, 90-1]

The bishop’s solution for women who didn’t want more children was simple, and ridiculously unenforceable: they should get their husbands to agree to a life of chastity. [Schulenberg, 243] Caesarius knew that married women had no legal right to refuse sex to their husbands, and that masters regularly forced enslaved women into their beds. Unmoved by their plight, Caesarius insisted: “Chastity is the sole sterility of a Christian woman.” He wrote that he would have excommunicated men who had concubines, but there were “too many.” But numbers did not faze the bishop when it came to women's attempts at birth control. Caesarius denounced women who used contraceptive herbs, as well as women who tried to conceive “by herbs or diabolical marks or sacrilegious amulets.” [Noonan, 145-7]

Spain was another place where the early clergy tried to repress contraceptive potions and the witchcraft that women used to fortify them. In 546, the Council of Lerida condemned both men and women for using potions to cause abortion. Bishop Martin of Braga and the second Council of Braga (572) forbade contraceptive potions and magic, singling out pregnant women who sought abortion. [Dillard, online: ch 8; fn 52 on Lerida, canon 2] By the 7th century, the Visigothic kings rewarded the clergy’s agitation with harsh penalties for seeking or enabling abortion. [See Kings Versus Witches for more on this.]

Finnian, the Irish monk who authored the first known priestly confessional manual, took a page from his contemporary Caesarius. He classified women's medicine with sorcery and love spells, and forbade them all. His book, like other Irish penitentials condemning contraception and abortion, indicate that women were using herbal potions to regulate their child-bearing. Magic was part of the birth control arsenal, to such an extent that, as Lisa Bitel writes, “The penitentials interpreted magic specifically as abortifacients or love potions.” [219] Later sources repeated refer to them as herbal drinks.

For more see link above.