Europe's inner demons

The experiences of the Benandanti — the rides, the battles with the witches, the rescuing of the crops and the children — were all trance experiences. The Benandanti — as they themselves repeatedly stated — underwent these experiences in a state of catalepsy: throughout the relevant period they lay motionless in bed, in a stupor. It was, they said, their spirits that went out to do battle; indeed, if a spirit failed to return promptly, the body died.⁽⁴⁷⁾ Moreover, the summons to enlist in the Benandanti came to a person in his sleep; it was brought by an angel — described as golden, like the angels on altars — and the same angel stood by the banner of the Benandanti during the battle.⁽⁴⁸⁾

The Benandanti believed absolutely that their experiences were real, and that they were collective; but they never for a moment suggested that they were bodily — the witches too were said to fight only in spirit. As with the Shona women, “it only came to them as if they were dreaming”. Indeed, to be a Benandante at all it was necessary to have been born with a caul, which was regarded as a bridge by which the soul could pass from the everyday world into the world of spirits.

What Ginzburg found in his sixteenth-century archives was in fact a local variant of what, for centuries before, had been the stock experience of the followers of Diana, Herodias or Holda. It has nothing to do with the “old religion” of fertility postulated by Margaret Murray and her followers. What it illustrates is — once more — the fact that not only the waking thoughts but the trance experiences of individuals can be deeply conditioned by the generally accepted beliefs of the society in which they live.

This is merely to re-state, in modern terms, what was taken for granted by educated people almost to the close of the Middle Ages. As we have seen, until the late fourteenth century the educated in general, and the higher clergy in particular, were quite clear that these nocturnal journeyings of women, whether for benign or for maleficent purposes, were purely imaginary happenings. But in the sixteenth and still more in the seventeenth centuries, this was no longer the case. And that is what made the great witch-hunt possible: witch-hunting reached massive proportions only where and when the authorities themselves accepted the reality of the nocturnal journeyings. For without such journeyings, no witches’ sabbats.

It remains to ask what started such a great change of outlook.

12. THE MAKING OF THE GREAT WITCH-HUNT

— 1 —

The importance of the most famous of the witch-hunters’ manuals, the Malleus Maleficarum, published in 1486, has been exaggerated. The most intensive period of witch-hunting, when great holocausts took place in one region of Europe after another, began only towards the close of the following century. On the other hand, the stereotype of the witch was already fully developed half a century before the Malleus

appeared— and more fully and more horrifically than in the Malleus itself. The Malleus has little to say about the witches’ sabbat or about nocturnal flying, but both figure prominently in records of trials from the 1420s and 1430s onwards.

These trials were a by-product of the persecution of the Waldensians — which meant that they occurred most frequently in those areas where pockets of Waldensians either survived or were believed to survive. As we have seen, by the fifteenth century these were, in the main, mountainous areas; for whole colonies of Waldensians had taken refuge in the French and Swiss Alps. This circumstance is responsible for the notion, first propounded by Joseph Hansen, but still flourishing, that the fantasy of the night-witch was fostered by the peculiar conditions of mountain life.⁽¹⁾ In reality, this fantasy was extremely widespread in the Middle Ages, and in no way peculiar to mountain populations — as is obvious from the preceding chapter. And when the fantasy penetrated into the thinking of judges, ecclesiastical and secular, the results were as quickly apparent in the populous plains as in the remote Alpine valleys. A new kind of trial came into being; and the earliest examples ranged from the Alps to the area around Lyons, to Normandy, to Artois.