Europe's inner demons

In all these trials the inquisitorial procedure was employed, though not necessarily by the Inquisition: inquisitors, bishops and secular judges were all involved, sometimes separately, sometimes in collaboration. The earliest trial seems in fact to have been mainly a secular affair. In 1428 the peasant communes of the Swiss canton of Valais — admittedly, under the guidance of their suzerain, the bishop of Sion — decided that anyone accused of witchcraft by more than two persons should be arrested; tortured if no confession was forthcoming; and burned on the strength of the confession so obtained. According to Hans Fründ, chronicler of Lucerne, writing some ten years later, a regular witch-hunt began in that same year of 1428, in the two valleys south of the Rhône known as the Val d’Anniviers and the Val d’Hérens.⁽²⁾

In the confessions extracted from some of the accused there appears, for the first time, the image of the flying, Devil-worshipping witch that was to inspire the great witch-hunt.

Torture was employed, and so ruthlessly that many who refused to make false confessions died under it. But not all possessed such extraordinary strength of character; and the picture that emerged from their utterances was both lurid and complex. In part, it reflects the traditional misconceptions about ritual or ceremonial magic. For many years, it appeared, great numbers of men and women had been formally renouncing God, the saints and the Church and had been pledging themselves to the Devil; paying him an annual tribute of a sheep or a lamb, or else promising him one of their own limbs, to be collected after death. Such things recall the trials of Pope Boniface, Bishop Guichard, and Alice Kyteler. On the other hand, the powers which the Devil bestowed in return belong largely to the age-old world of peasant maleficia

: power to make people or animals sicken or die, power to render men impotent and women sterile, power to drain cows of their milk and to devastate cornfields.

Yet other features of the picture clearly have a quite different source, in fantasies concerning night-witches. For the Devil, who usually appeared in the form of a black animal, provided his followers with a salve to apply to chairs, on which they would fly from one village to another;Tie would also, on occasion, transport them himself from mountain-top to mountain-top. Like Diana’s troop, these followers of the Devil’s would invade people’s cellars and drink the best wine; but they were also strives, who killed, cooked and ate children, both their own and other people’s. This was done at a nocturnal meeting, where the Devil would also make an appearance, to preach a sermon warning his followers not to go to church or to make confession to any priest. The result of this earliest formulation of the witches’ sabbat was the burning of a number of men and women — which the chronicler puts now at 100, now at 200, and which must surely have been large.

On the French side of the Alps the trials were mostly initiated by the Inquisition — which in that area was staffed by Franciscans instead of by Dominicans.⁽³⁾

For a century, Waldensian families had been solidly implanted in the four valleys of the Briançonnais known as Freyssinière, Argentière, Valpute and Valcluson. Now the whole population of those remote areas came to be suspect — and suspect not simply of heresy but of the new-style witchcraft.

As in Valais, the stereotype still owes something to the tradition of ritual or ceremonial magic. Before the Devil or a subordinate demon will appear, he has to be invoked-he does not present himself of his own accord and force his attentions on the future witch, as he does in the later witch-trials. Moreover the witch is as likely to be a man as a woman. Thomas Bègue, who was executed in 1436, confessed to conjuring up a demon by calling, three times, on “Mermet diable”; whereupon Mermet appeared, first in the guise of a black cat, then as an old Negro dressed in black, with horns on his feet. Jeannette, widow of Hugues Brunier, admitted having invoked a demon named Brunet, who materialized as a black dog and then, again, as a Negro dressed in black; also, she sacrificed a black cock to him each May-day. Other demons, when invoked under names like Guillemet or Griffart, would appear in the form of black cats, or black crows, before turning into Negroes. It is all still very close to the world of Alice Kyteler and her Negro Robin, “son of the art”.