Europe's inner demons

If one compares the various stories about incubi which were current in the Middle Ages, a coherent pattern emerges. In each case the raw material of the story is provided by the woman herself; it is she who, of her own initiative, reveals that she has been having intercourse with an incubus. In some cases it seems that the lover who is imagined as an incubus is really a man — and it may well be that simple women were sometimes fooled in this way. In other cases the lover is clearly imaginary, a product of erotic dreams or reveries, or maybe of hallucinations. But the reason why such commonplace phenomena as erotic imaginings or extra-marital affairs were interpreted in such a sinister sense lies, of course, in the existence of a corpus of demonological lore. Without demons, no incubi.

It was a two-way process. If in the first place priests taught women to look out for incubi, by the thirteenth century theologians were reflecting on the experiences that women were reporting. Guillaume d’Auvergne, bishop of Paris, treats of the matter at some length, and in exactly the same spirit as he brings to the tales of Lady Abundia and the “ladies of the night.”⁽²⁵⁾ He is quite clear that demons cannot really have intercourse with women, because they have no true bodies and therefore no genitals; so it must be that women simply dream or imagine these things. On the other hand the bishop insists that, even if such dreams and imaginings sometimes have natural causes, they are usually the work of demons. Guillaume was more sceptical than most. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, was convinced not only that demons can mate but that they can procreate, and by a most ingenious method: as a succubus a demon receives seed which, transforming itself into an incubus, it then transmits to a woman.⁽²⁶⁾

Neither the tales about pacts with the Devil nor the fantasies about incubi were originally connected with witchcraft — but when the new stereotype of the witch began to take shape, when the witch began to be imagined less as the master than as the instrument of the demonic powers, they were there to help the process along. Ancient legends, nocturnal experiences of neurotic or sexually frustrated women — all alike were transformed into further proofs that there existed a sect in which human beings operated under the direct promptings of demons, to whom they were helplessly enslaved.

To the creation of this imaginary sect, written works contributed little. Very few of the relevant writings antedate the Arras Vauderie, let alone the earliest trials in the Dauphiné and in Switzerland. The most celebrated, Nider’s Formicarius (1435-87), adds practically nothing to the age-old notion which simply equated witchcraft with maleficium

; and, as we have seen, it explicitly denies the reality of the nocturnal flight.⁽²⁷⁾ The French poem by Martin Le Franc, Le champion des dames (1440), shows that the notions of the sabbat and the nocturnal flight were familiar at that date, but not that the author himself took them seriously.⁽²⁸⁾

The Errores Gazariorum (c. 1450)—“Gazarii” by that time meaning Waldensians — would appear to be the work of an inquisitor living in Savoy or by the Lake of Geneva.⁽²⁹⁾ It is based on the evidence already extracted during the trials, and treats that evidence as reliable; but — even apart from the fact that they exist only in a single manuscript — these few pages cannot possibly have fostered the trials themselves. We are left with the Flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum

(The scourge of the heretic-witches) by Nicolaus Jacquier.⁽³⁰⁾ The author was inquisitor for northern France in the 1450s and was familiar with the proceedings against Guillaume Adeline; and his aim was, quite specifically, to demonstrate the reality of the nocturnal flight, as against the authority of the Canon Episcopi, which had represented the orthodox view ever since the tenth century. This is indeed a polemical and propagandist work; but it was written only one year before the Arras Vauderie — by which time innumerable smaller trials had already been held.