Europe's inner demons

Two and a half centuries later this was still the case. In the midthirteenth century a poet from the Tirol mocked these same popular beliefs about cannibalistic night-witches. Jokingly, he says that he has gone from university to university, in many countries; nowhere has he heard any scholar lecture on these uncanny beings. Indeed, he adds, it would be a wondrous thing to see a woman riding on a calf or a broomstick or a poker, over mountains and villages. For himself, he could never believe it, whoever might say it, unless he saw it with his own eyes. It is also all lying nonsense that a woman can cut out a man’s heart and put straw in its place.⁽¹⁵⁾ The Englishman Gervase of Tilbury, who around 1211 wrote a book of table-talk for the delectation of the Emperor Otto IV, was also familiar with the idea that certain men and women fly by night through vast distances, enter homes, dissolve human bones, suck human blood, and move infants from place to place. It is true that he gives St Augustine as his authority; nevertheless, he is clearly reflecting a contemporary belief, for he also says that physicians attribute such ideas to nightmares.⁽¹⁶⁾

And anyway there is nothing in Augustine that could have served as a source.

Because the night-witch was known to the Romans also, it has often been assumed that the Germanic peoples must have taken the idea from them; or more precisely, that wherever the night-witch appears in a medieval text, it is due to the influence of Latin literature.⁽¹⁷⁾ Yet the balance of evidence is heavily against this view. The earliest written Germanic law, the Lex Salica

, treats the night-witch as a reality — and no Roman law ever did that. And later laws, which deny the reality of the night-witch, are clearly directed not against the sophisticated fancies of literati raised on Ovid, but against beliefs which were so deep and widespread amongst the common people that they were liable to express themselves in insults and violence. Down to the thirteenth century, it was the educated elite who, in the name of Christian doctrine, rejected the night-witch; while the common people continued to believe in her. And one can go a little further. Burchard’s penitential shows that some women assimilated the belief so completely that they imagined themselves to be night-witches. It condemns such women— not for doing harm to others but for indulging in a pagan superstition. What they were really doing was living out, in their dreams, a collective fantasy or folk-belief that was traditional amongst the Germanic peoples.

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There was another popular belief, of a very different kind, concerning women who travelled at night in a supernatural manner. Around 906 Regino, formerly abbot of Prüm, was asked by the archbishop of Trier to write a guide to ecclesiastical discipline for the use of bishops when carrying out visitations of their dioceses. He included in his book a canon which probably originated in a lost capitulary of the ninth century and which later received the title Canon Episcopi from its opening phrase, "Episcopi episcoporumque ministri”.⁽¹⁸⁾

^** The key passage reads as follows:

....there are wicked women who, turning back to Satan and seduced by the illusions and phantoms of the demons, believe and openly avow that in the hours of the night they ride on certain animals, together with Diana, the goddess of the pagans, with a numberless multitude of women; and in the silence of the dead of night cross many great lands; and obey (Diana's) orders as though she were their mistress, and on particular nights are summoned to her service. Would that they alone perished in their perfidy, without dragging so many others with them into the ruin of infidelity! For a numberless multitude of people, deceived by this false view, believe these things to be true and, turning away from the true faith and returning to the errors of the pagans, think that there exists some divine power other than the one God.