Europe's inner demons

For there is no doubt that it was as much a fantasy in this as in all earlier cases. Not only were all the confessions obtained by torture — Peter of Greyerz also maintained that in order to evade capture, the leaders of the sect could emit evil smells which incapacitated their captors, and could even turn themselves into mice. He also believed that when he himself fell downstairs one night in the dark, it was because invisible witches had pushed him.

These two trials, at Kilkenny in Ireland and at Boltigen in Switzerland, bring us to the threshold of the great witch-hunt. Neither was a simple reflection of age-old, popular beliefs about maleficium. In both, the essential elements were supplied not by an illiterate peasantry but by the upper, educated strata of society. Both the awareness, however distorted, of ritual magic, and the fantasy of a sect of demon-worshipping heretics, had originated amongst the literate. And so, of course, had the inquisitorial procedure, with the use of torture.

On the other hand, neither Bishop de Ledrede nor Peter of Greyerz was a professional inquisitor. Both men were clearly fanatics, driven by their own inner demons, rather than officials coolly following the routine of a great bureaucratic machine. Dominated by demonological obsessions, they used the inquisitorial procedure to justify and confirm those obsessions. Between them, they produced a true prelude to the great witch-hunt.

Yet before the great witch-hunt could begin, the idea of witchcraft had to undergo a further transformation: intellectuals had to persuade themselves that witches could fly. So long as witches were supposed to proceed to their meetings on foot, those meetings could not plausibly be represented as either very frequent or very large. It was a different matter when men in positions of authority began to maintain that witches proceeded by magical means, invisibly, through the air. Here too the first steps were taken in the fourteenth century.

11. THE NIGHT-WITCH IN POPULAR IMAGINATION

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The ancient Romans already knew of a creature which flew about at night, screeching, and lived on the flesh and blood of human beings. Their literature in the first two centuries after Christ abounds in references to it. They called it a strix

, from a, Greek word meaning “to screech”; usually they thought of it as an owl, and granted it feathers and even eggs, but they were also clear that it was no mere bird. Pliny the Elder admitted that he could not fit the strix into any recognized species of bird; and he added that according to popular belief it offered its breasts to babies to suck.⁽¹⁾ Its purpose in so doing was sinister: Serenus Sammonicus, who wrote about medical science, considered that its milk was poison.⁽²⁾.

Ovid has worse things to say about striges. In the Fasti he describes them as ravenous birds, with hooked beaks and grasping talons, grey feathers, and eyes that stare fixedly out of big heads. These owl-like creatures may, he says, be natural birds, or they may be old women magically transformed into birds — but in any case they fly about at night in search of babies unprotected by their nurses. When they find one they drag it from its cradle and tear out and eat its entrails, until their own stomachs are distended with swallowed blood. The poet also describes devices for holding these birds at bay. You must touch the lintels and threshold with a sprig of arbutus and place a wand of white-thorn at the window. Above all you must offer the strix, as a substitute for the baby’s entrails, the entrails of a young pig, saying: “Birds of night, spare this child’s vitals! A young victim dies instead of this little baby. Take, I beg you, another heart instead of that heart, other vitals instead of those vitals! We offer you this life instead of a better life.”⁽³⁾

These visitations were not confined to babies. Petronius tells of a dead boy whose entrails were devoured by a strix which then substituted a straw doll for the human body; a slave who tried to drive the creature off with his sword became black and blue all over, as though he had been scourged, and died after a couple of days. And the author comments that adults who suddenly lose their strength, and particularly men who lose their potency, commonly think they are being eaten by a strix.⁽⁴⁾ Both Petronius and Ovid refer to a special food — a mixture of ham and bean-soup — which was taken to counteract the effects of being inwardly devoured.