It was a big theological problem for the church.

Witches have sex with devils. (Everybody knows that.) Sometimes these acts result in pregnancies. Since devils, like angels, don't really have bodies, and therefore can't actually produce semen, how can this be?

According to Dominican theologian Alonso Tostado (d. 1455), these interspecies (?) matings produce children because the devils make use of actual human semen spilled in masturbation or other non-procreative sexual acts.

So gentlemen, it's up to us. There's a whole new generation of witch babies out there, just waiting to be sired. It's time to get to work and spill some seed.

You could even call it a religious duty.

 

For more on this, and other aspects of classic witch sexuality, see Walter Stephen's magisterial Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

 

Above:

Devil Seducing Witch, illustration for Ulrich Müller's Von den Unholden un Hexen (Konstanz, [1489?])