Europe's inner demons

And the canon reminds priests of their duty: they must, from the pulpit, warn their congregations that this is all illusion, inspired not by the spirit of God but by that of Satan. For Satan knows how to deceive foolish women by showing them, while they sleep, all kind of things and of people. But who has not, in dreams, gone out of himself, so that he believed he was seeing things which he never saw when awake? And who would be so foolish as to think that things that happened only in the mind have also happened in the flesh? Everyone must be made to realise that to believe such things is a sign that one has lost the true faith, and that one belongs not to God, but to the Devil.

So far the Canon Episcopi

. A century after Regino of Prüm, Burchard of Worms included the gist of it in his Decretum;⁽¹⁹⁾

whence it was taken over by the later canonists Ivo of Chartres and Gratian, and so passed into the enduring corpus of canon law. It bulks large in most modern histories of European witchcraft; yet if one studies it carefully, it has no obvious bearing on witchcraft at all. The women it criticizes do not imagine themselves as night-witches, addicted to murderous and cannibalistic enterprises, but as devotees of a supernatural queen who leads and commands them on their nocturnal flights.

This supernatural queen deserves closer attention. Like Regino, Burchard calls her “Diana, goddess of the pagans”, but he adds the phrase “or Herodias”; and in another paragraph of the Corrector he refers to her as “Holda”.⁽²⁰⁾

Between them, these names lead straight to one particular body of folk-belief.

The Roman goddess Diana continued to enjoy a certain cult in the early Middle Ages. A life of St Caesarius, who was bishop of Arles early in the sixth century, mentions “a demon whom the simple people call Diana”. Gregory of Tours describes how, in the same century, a Christian hermit in the neighbourhood of Trier destroyed a statue of Diana which, though no doubt of Roman origin, was worshipped by the native peasantry.⁽²¹⁾ Further east, in what is now Franconia, the cult was still vigorous late in the seventh century; the British missionary bishop St Kilian was martyred when he tried to convert the east Franks from their worship of Diana.⁽²²⁾

Goddess of the moon and lover of the night, Diana was also, in one of her aspects, identified with Hecate, goddess of magic. And it was characteristic of Hecate that she rode at night, followed by a train of women, or rather of souls disguised as women — restless souls of the prematurely dead, of those who had died by violence, of those who had never been buried.

With Diana, Burchard equates Herodias, the wife of Herod the tetrarch and the instigator of the murder of John the Baptist. Legends clustered around this figure. Already in the tenth century we hear of her from Ratherius, who was a Frank by origin but who became bishop of Verona. He complains that many people, to the perdition of their souls, were claiming Herodias as a queen, even as a goddess, and were affirming that a third part of the world was subject to her; as though, he remarks, that were the reward for killing the prophet.⁽²³⁾ In the twelfth century a Latin poem on Reynard the Fox, called Reinardus, provides further details. It describes how Herod’s daughter, here also called Herodias instead of Salome, falls in love with the Baptist, who repulses her. When his head is brought to her on a platter she still tries to cover it with tears and kisses, but it shrinks away. Its lips begin to blow violently, until Herodias is blown into outer space, where she must hover for evermore, a sorrowful queen. Yet she has some consolations. She has her cult, and a third part of mankind serves her. And from midnight until cockcrow she can sit on oaktrees and hazel-bushes, resting from her eternal travelling through the empty air.⁽²⁴⁾