Europe's inner demons

But the notion of apostasy, and collective apostasy at that, now looms much larger. There is no question here of a temporary renunciation of God and the Church. Once conjured up, the demon demands conversion: Christ is to be renounced for ever, by some symbolic gesture such as trampling or spitting on the cross; homage must be paid to himself or to his master, the Devil; quite often he insists that one or more of the convert’s children shall be sacrificed. As in the case of Alice Kyteler, the Devil or his demon has sexual intercourse with his followers, varying his sex to suit theirs — but he may go further: the Devil’s mark, the stigma on the flesh, which was to bulk so large in the great witch-hunt, already figures in some of these trials.

Above all, the fantasy of the witches’ sabbat, or “synagogue” as it was usually called, is described for the first time in all its grotesque detail. The Devil or the subordinate demon provides male and female witches with the means to go to the sabbat, however distant it may be. Some receive a little black horse, others a red mare, others a fantastic beast like a greyhound; but most are given a stick and some ointment to grease it with — and so equipped, they fly like the wind. At the sabbat, demons and witches together banquet under the supervision of the Devil himself, who may appear either in the guise of a black cat or as his infernal self, crowned, clad in black, with shining eyes. The witches worship him on their knees. They also report on the acts of maleficium

which they have performed since the last sabbat; the Devil praises or blames them accordingly and issues instructions for future maleficia

. The body of a newly killed child — often a child of one of the witches— is cooked, to make the magical powders required for these purposes; after which demons and witches dance together, while the Devil plays the drum or the bagpipes. Finally each witch has intercourse with his or her particular demon — until, at cock-crow, the assembly breaks up and the witches return home on their magical steeds.⁽⁴⁾

There is no reason at all to think that most of the men and women — who confessed to these strange performances really were Waldensians. It seems, rather, that ecclesiastical and secular authorities alike, while pursuing Waldensians, repeatedly came across people — chiefly women — who believed things about themselves which fitted in perfectly with the tales about heretical sects that had been circulating for centuries. The notion of cannibalistic infanticide provided the common factor. It was widely believed that babies or small children were commonly devoured at the nocturnal meetings of heretics, it was likewise widely believed that certain women killed and devoured babies or small children, also at night; and some women even believed this of themselves. It was the extraordinary congruence between the two sets of beliefs that led those concerned with pursuing heretics to see, in the stories which they extracted from deluded women, a confirmation of the traditional stories about heretics who practised cannibalistic infanticide.

They not only saw a confirmation — they were also led to embark on an elaboration. For the supposedly — cannibalistic women were also supposed to go about their fearsome business by flying. Now the notion of a flying sect of heretics had great advantages: it made it possible to account for assemblies which were frequent, and often vast, and which nevertheless nobody ever saw. Already in 1239, at Châlons-sur-Marne, the inquisitor Robert le Bougre — a French counterpart to Conrad of Marburg — had tortured one of his female victims into confessing that she flew through the air to serve at the heretics’ banquets at Milan, hundreds of miles away.⁽⁵⁾ The notion did not catch on at that time, but it did so a couple of centuries later. And here fantasies about night-witches and also fantasies about those other night-flyers, the “ladies of the night” who followed Diana or Herodias or “Signora Oriente”, were of decisive importance.