Europe's inner demons

The proceedings ended in a climax of profanity. Once more the witches adored the Devil and kissed his anus, while he acknowledged their attentions in a peculiarly noxious manner. A parody of the Eucharist was given, in both kinds — but what was received was an object like the sole of a shoe, black, bitter and hard to chew, and a jug full of nauseous black liquid. After this a meal would be served; and often this too would consist of revolting substances — fish and meat tasting like rotten wood, wine tasting like manure drainings, the flesh of babies. Finally, an orgiastic dance, to the sound of trumpets, drums and fifes. The witches would form a circle, facing outwards, and dance around a witch standing bent over, her head touching the ground, with a candle stuck in her anus to serve as illumination. The dance would become a frantic and erotic orgy, in which all things, including sodomy and incest, were permitted. At the height of the orgy the Devil would copulate with every man, woman and child present. Finally he would bring the sabbat to a close by sending the participants off to their homes, with instructions to perform every conceivable maleficium

against their Christian neighbours.

That is how witches were imagined when and where witch-hunting was at its height. It will be observed that they were thought of as a collectivity: though they perform maleficium

individually, they are a society, assembling at regular intervals, bound together by communal rites, subject to a rigid, centralized discipline. In every respect they represent a collective inversion of Christianity — and an inversion of a kind that could only be achieved by former Christians. That is why non-Christians, such as Jews and Gypsies, though they might be accused of maleficium

, were never accused of being witches in the full sense of the term. Witchcraft was regarded as apostasy — and apostasy in its most extreme, most systematic, most highly organized form. Witches were regarded as above all a sect of Devil-worshippers.

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How did this strange stereotype come into being? Ever since historical research into these matters began, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, two principal explanations have been offered. Some scholars have argued that a sect of witches really existed, and that the authorities who pursued and tried witches were in effect breaking the local organizations of that sect. Others have argued that the notion of a sect of witches first developed as a by-product of the campaign of the Inquisition against Catharism, and that the stereotype was first used in a massive inquisitorial witch-hunt that claimed hundreds of victims in southern France during the fourteenth century.

When it was first propounded, the first of these two theories represented a radical innovation. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries practically no educated person believed that there had ever been a sect of witches; it is only since around 1830 that this has gradually ceased to be taken for granted. Not, of course, that those scholars who have maintained that there really was a sect of witches have claimed that the sect did all those things it was originally believed to do. They have not argued that witches flew through the air to the sabbat, or that the Devil presided over it in corporeal form. But they have argued, and very forcibly, that witches were organized in groups under recognized leaders; that they adhered to a religious cult that was not only non-Christian but anti-Christian; and that they assembled, under cover of night, at remote spots, to perform the rituals of that cult. On this view, what we find in the witch-trials and the writings of witch-hunters represents a distorted perception of groups that really existed, of meetings that physically took place. Propounded by academics at leading universities in Europe and North America, often in works published by university presses, this interpretation has been taken on trust by multitudes of educated people. It still is: when conversation turns to the great witch-hunt, it is assumed more often than not that the hunt must have been directed against a real secret society.