Europe's inner demons

All this belongs to the body of traditional, pagan beliefs about “white” magic. But one of the women also confessed to sexual intercourse with a devil called Lucifelus — a feature so out of keeping with the rest that one suspects it was suggested by the inquisitor. Moreover, in the end both women were handed over to the secular arm and executed. It is a far cry, indeed, from the Canon Episcopi.

Folk-beliefs about the “ladies of the night” would never, by themselves, have given rise to the great witch-hunt of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but they did provide materials which could be exploited by the witch-hunters. The “ladies of the night” were, after all, imagined as a highly organized body, under a supernatural leader — and this meant that, in the eyes of the orthodox, the women who dreamed that they joined this throng were dreaming of submitting themselves to the absolute rule of a demon. Cannibalistic night-witches, on the other hand, had not traditionally been imagined in this way. Though there are hints — in the Pactus legis Salicae and again in Burchard’s

Corrector—that they operate collectively, the early medieval sources never suggest that they associate with demons, let alone that they are organized under demonic leadership. Night-witches and “ladies of the night” alike belonged to the world of popular imagination, particularly peasant imagination; and there they were kept quite separate from one another. But to the educated, looking at these fantasies from outside and from above, the distinction was not necessarily so absolute. John of Salisbury, an Englishman who spent much of his time in France, has this much to say in his Policraticus, which he wrote between 1156 and 1159:⁽³³⁾

…they assert that a certain woman who shines by night,^† or Herodias, or the mistress of the night, summons gatherings and assemblies, which attend various banquets. The figure receives all kinds of homage from her servants, some of whom are handed over for punishment, while others are singled out for praise, according to their deserts. Furthermore, they say that infants are exposed to the lamiae;

^†† some of them being dismembered and gluttonously devoured, while the mistress takes pity on others and has them put back in their cradles.

Here the two ideas — of the “ladies of the night” and of night-witches who steal and devour babies — are ingeniously combined: both are commanded by the moon-goddess or by Herodias, and the image of the nocturnal banquet merges into that of the cannibalistic orgy. Of course John of Salisbury and the educated elite of his time regarded both ideas as mere delusions. “Who is so blind,” asks John, “as not to recognise this as the wicked work of deceiving devils? It is clear that these things are put about from silly women and from simple men of weak faith.” And he goes on to show how this “plague” can be cured: one must refuse to take these lies and follies seriously and, when one meets them, expose their demonic origin.

But a time was to come when the attitude of the educated elite would be very different from this. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries some of the literate began to take over both fantasies from the “silly women and simple men”, and blended them into a single fantasy about organized masses of witches flying by night, intent on cannibalistic orgies, and guided by demons. And that did indeed contribute to the outbreak of the great European witch-hunt.

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It is clear that already in the Middle Ages some women believed themselves to wander about at night on cannibalistic errands, while others believed themselves to wander about, on more benign errands, under the leadership of a supernatural queen. Later, after the great witch-hunt had begun, some women genuinely believed that they attended the sabbat and took part in its demonic orgies: not all the confessions, even at that time, are to be attributed to torture or the fear of torture. In an age such as ours, with its interest in psychedelic experiments, one is bound to ask whether these delusions could have been the result of drugs.