One of the oldest charges against witches was that they caused impotence, either by stealing the male organe, or by impeding the conjugal actions of men and women in some less drastic ways.

Widely interpreted, it may be taken as distortion of the original fertility cults into a “black” form as well as a manifestation of the Freudian “castration fear” (the rejection of the mother figure and the primitive fear that she is all-powerful and has the power to castrate). 

As this accusation gradually disappears, it was replaced by symptoms of hysteria among women that pretended to be possessed by male demons or incubes. The earliest such recorded case occurred among a group of nuns at Cambrai in France in 1491.

The nuns had fits in which they showed superhuman forces, barked like dogs foretold the future.

Eventually the nun who had first begun to have fits and who was therefore the ringleader of the hysteria was “unmasked” as the witch herself. The Loudun, Louviers and Salem affairs were also due to collective hysteria and share the same deadly consequences