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Europe's inner demons

The theme was known already to the pagan populations in the Roman Empire, but in the Christian Europe of the Middle Ages and the early modern period it took on a new meaning. In the “synagogue of Satan” and its successor the “witches’ sabbat”, the orgy is combined with a sacrilegious parody of divine service, eroticism goes hand in hand with apostasy. What in Antiquity had been imagined as a merely human debauch now came to be imagined as a ritual inversion of Christianity, carried out under the supervision, and with the participation, of Satan or of a subordinate demon.

It is easy to see why the notion of unbridled sexuality could so easily be combined with that of a cult in which Christianity was systematically repudiated and burlesqued. Christianity, whether medieval or post-medieval, Catholic or Protestant, has generally tended to exalt spiritual values at the expense of the animal side of human nature. The imaginary cult of a Devil who materializes as a tom-cat or a goat-man, and in that guise is kissed by or mates with his followers, male or female, would seem to be a clear example of “the return of the repressed” — the repressed in this case being human animality, distorted and made monstrous by the very fact of repression.

What is involved is not anti-clericalism — that was open, avowed and very widespread throughout the later Middle Ages. Nor is it intellectual agnosticism — that first appeared in the seventeenth century, and then only in very restricted circles. It is, rather, unconscious resentment against Christianity as too strict a religion, against Christ as too stern a taskmaster. Psychologically it is altogether plausible that such an unconscious hatred would find an outlet in an obsession with the overwhelming power of Christ’s great antagonist, Satan, and especially in fantasies of erotic debauches with him. It is not at all surprising that the tension between conscious beliefs and ideals on the one hand, and unconscious desires and resentments on the other, should lead some frustrated or neurotic women to imagine that they had given themselves, body and soul, to the Devil or to a subordinate demon. Nor is it surprising that these same tensions, operating in a whole stratum of society, should end by conjuring up an imaginary outgroup as a symbol of apostasy and of licentiousness — which is practically what witches became in many parts of Europe. In that case the tens of thousands of victims who perished would not be primarily victims of village tensions but victims of an unconscious revolt against a religion which, consciously, was still accepted without question.

It may well be that the entire story told in this book is ultimately understandable only in such terms as these. As far back as the records go, people had always been apt to imagine troublesome or eccentric old women as being linked in a mysterious and dangerous way with the earth and with the forces of nature, and as themselves uncanny, full of destructive power. But from the twelfth century onwards a new element appears — at first amongst monks, then amongst other literate elements in the population: the need to create a scapegoat for an unacknowledged hostility to Christianity. Perhaps the great witch-hunt became possible when the two resentments — the one avowed and widespread, the other unavowed and socially far more restricted — fused in a blind, terror-stricken hatred of a sect or society of witches that in reality did not exist at all.

The hypothesis at least deserves consideration. It might lead on to further insights. It might even prove possible to find out why the notion of erotic orgies around a monstrously erotic Devil became increasingly fascinating in the later Middle Ages, and reached its height only in the early modern period; and why it bulked so much larger in northern and central than in southern Europe.

That task lies outside the scope of this study, which is already vast enough. What began as an enquiry into the origins of the great witch-hunt has led in some unexpected directions and has produced some unexpected results. On the one hand various widely accepted notions have turned out to be baseless, while on the other hand various factors which have generally been overlooked have turned out to be of decisive importance. The story itself, I think, is now tolerably clear. But again and again I have felt that beneath the terrain which I was charting lay depths which were not to be explored by the techniques at my disposal. The purpose of these “Psycho-historical speculations” is to encourage others, better equipped, to venture further — downwards, into the abyss of the unconscious.