Duden notes a "a magic of the body" in mid-seventeenth-century Europe (the phrase is Accati's)
"the power over thunderstorms, which old women had long been able to command [...] by baring their buttocks" (8)
and "the power of a virgin to influence weather by opening her bleeding vulva toward heaven" (8)
a "war of destruction" was waged against the "self-sufficient peasant society" in this era, including inscribing the body in different ways