Europe's inner demons

From all this it is plain that striges were indeed thought of not as ordinary birds but as beings into which certain women could transform themselves. There is a relevant comment in Ovid’s description, in the Amores, of the procuress and witch Dipsas. She is an old hag, who specializes in destroying the chastity of the young, but she also possesses vast magical powers. Dipsas not only understands the occult use of herbs, she can conjure up the dead, cleave the solid ground, make a river flow back to its source. Moreover, says Ovid, “if I may be believed, I have seen the stars drip blood, and blood darken the moon. I believe that then (Dipsas), transformed, was flying through the darkness of the night, her hag’s carcase clad in feathers. This I suspect, and such is the report.”⁽⁵⁾

Apuleius, in The Golden Ass, throws more light on the matter with his portrait of that Thessalian lady, Pamphile. Like Dipsas, Pamphile is a super-witch, who by sorcery can subdue the elements, trouble the planets and even disturb the gods; and she too is accustomed to change herself into a bird on certain nights. She does this by means of a magic concoction of laurel and dill dissolved in water, which she drinks and with which she rubs herself from head to foot; whereupon feathers spring out of her skin, her nose turns into a beak and her nails into claws, she begins to hoot like an owl and at last flies off in quest of a lover. Moreover if a young man is so imprudent as to repulse Pamphile, she destroys him. For Pamphile, we are told, is continually on fire with lust; every handsome young man attracts her; and if anyone is rash enough to reject her, she will either change him into a beast or kill him outright.⁽⁶⁾

In other words, the strix is a witch who is a woman by day but at night flies through the air on amorous, murderous or cannibalistic errands. Thus the grammarian Festus, in his work on the meanings of words, defines the late Latin word strigae as “the name given to women who practise sorcery, and who are also called flying women”.⁽⁷⁾

Most of these writers knew perfectly well that there were no such things as striges or strigae; they were simply using the idea to ornament their fiction.^* And certainly the law took no cognizance of these mysterious creatures. It did recognize maleficent sorcery, and people were frequently tried and sentenced as sorcerers. But nobody was taken into custody for being a strix

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Yet the literary references are clearly to a belief which was taken seriously in some quarters, and it may well be that amongst the common people belief in striges was real and widespread. Certainly this was the case amongst the Germanic peoples before they came under first Roman and then Christian influence. The notion of a witch as an uncanny, cannibalistic woman had developed amongst them too — it seems, independently of outside influence. And the earliest body of Germanic law, the Lex Salica, which was written in the sixth century but which reflects the beliefs and attitudes of a still earlier age, treats the stria or striga as a reality, and her cannibalism as something that really occurred. It hints at assemblies of witches with cauldrons; it fixes the fine to be paid “if a stria shall devour a man and it shall be proved against her”; and it also fixes the fine in the event that “anyone shall call a free woman a

stria and shall not be able to prove it”.⁽⁸⁾

Later laws, more permeated by Christian influence, no longer recognize the stria herself as a reality, but they show quite clearly that belief in the stria was still widespread. The laws of the Alamanni, which date from the first halt of the seventh century, decree a fine for a woman who calls another a stria.⁽⁹⁾

The last of the Germanic codes, the laws of the Lombards, which was promulgated by King Rothar at Pavia in 643, also warns against this kind of slander.⁽¹⁰⁾ Indeed it goes further: “Let nobody presume to kill a foreign serving-maid or female slave as a striga, for it is not possible, nor ought it to be at all believed by Christian minds that a woman can eat a living man up from within.”⁽¹¹⁾ The belief that was being attacked here reappears in Charlemagne’s capitulary for the Saxons, in 789: “If anyone, deceived by the Devil, shall believe, as is customary amongst pagans, that any man or woman is a striga, and eats men, and shall on that account burn that person to death or eat his or her flesh, or give it to others to eat, he shall be executed”.⁽¹²⁾ From this it emerges that at the end of the eighth century the still largely pagan Saxons not only believed in cannibalistic strigae, but were themselves accustomed to eat them — doubtless as a way of neutralising their supernatural destructive power once and for all.