Europe's inner demons

Nor is the evidence wholly confined to the laws. So little German literature has survived from the early Middle Ages that it would be unrealistic to expect vernacular texts to set alongside Ovid and Apuleius. Nevertheless there is one revealing passage in the translation which the Swiss monk Notker Labeo (c. 952-1022) made of that curious fifth-century encyclopaedia, Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae. Commenting on the fact that certain savage tribes were supposed to practise cannibalism, Notker remarks that “here at home”, witches are said to do the same.⁽¹³⁾

The notion of cannibalistic witches, then, was familiar to many of the Germanic peoples in the early Middle Ages. Moreover the linguistic evidence suggests that, like their Roman precursors, these creatures were imagined as flying at night. The Latin of the early medieval laws is, admittedly, fairly debased — and nevertheless the clerics who wrote it must certainly have known that striga was derived from strix

, and that a strix was something that flew about, screeching, in the dark. If they had not wished to convey this idea they could very well have used the term malefica

, which also meant “witch” but had no bird-like associations.

In any case, by the beginning of the eleventh century there is firm evidence that in parts of Germany the image of the cannibalistic woman often, if not invariably, included the ability to fly about at night. It is to be found in the fifth chapter of_Burchard’s Corrector, which has already afforded us such valuable insights into the maleficium

beliefs of the early Middle Ages. One of the questions proposed in this penitential reads as follows:

Have you believed what many womer, turning back to Satan, believe and affirm to be true; as that you believe that in the silence of the quiet night, when you have settled down in bed, and your husband lies in your bosom, you are able, while still in your body, to go out through the closed doors and travel through the spaces of the world, together with others who are similarly deceived; and that without visible weapons, you kill people who have been baptized and redeemed by Christ’s blood, and together cook and devour their flesh; and that where the heart was, you put straw or wood or something of the sort; and that after eating these people, you bring them alive again and grant them a brief spell of life? If you have believed this, you shall do penance on bread and water for fifty days, and likewise in each of the seven years following.⁽¹⁴⁾

This passage has several points of interest. It expounds the fantasy of the cannibalistic night-witch in much greater detail than any earlier Germanic source. It confirms the hint which the Lex Salica had dropped some five centuries earlier, that night-witches were imagined to move and act collectively, and to cook their victims before eating them. Above all it supplies strong evidence that in Germany the figure of the cannibalistic night-witch belonged to the world of traditional folkbeliefs.