Europe's inner demons

Michelet imagines serfs coming together secretly, at night, to perform ancient pagan dances, with which they blended satirical farces directed against lord and priest. This, he thinks, happened already in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; in the fourteenth, when both the Church and the nobility were largely discredited, the sabbat turned into a ritualized defiance of the existing social order, epitomized by the Christian God. Michelet calls it “the black mass”; and at its centre he puts not the Devil, nor a man impersonating the Devil, but a woman — a female serf in her thirties “with a face like Medea, a beauty born of sufferings, a deep, tragic, feverish gaze, with a torrent of black, untamable hair falling as chance takes it, like waves of serpents. Perhaps, on top, a crown of vervain, like ivy from tombs, like violets of death.”⁽⁴⁾

This romantic figure is the priestess of the cult; indeed, Michelet credits her with inventing, organizing and staging the entire sabbat. She induces peasants to give food for the communal meal — knowing that those who do so will find themselves committed to a conspiracy. She sets up a giant wooden figure, hairy, horned, with a great penis. It represents Satan, imagined as “the great serf in revolt”, a rebel against the God who unjustly cast him out of heaven, but also himself a sort of nature god, “who makes plants germinate”, who even “found Nature prostrate, cast out by the Church like a dirty baby, and picked Nature up and put it in his breast”.⁽⁵⁾

At the sabbat the priestess ritually mates with Satan: before the assembled multitude, she seats herself on his lap and, in a simulated copulation, receives his spirit. Later, after the banquet and the dance, she turns herself into an altar. A man disguised as a demon makes offerings on her prostrate body: corn is offered to Satan to ensure a good harvest, a cake is cooked on her back and distributed as Eucharist. Finally the priestess shouts defiance at the Christian God; while a horde of “demons” rush out and jump over fires, to cure the assembled peasants of their fear of hell-fire.

Now, none of this figures in any contemporary account of the witches’ sabbat. Not one mentions a priestess, or so much as hints that a single woman dominates the ritual. As for the “black mass” celebrated on a woman’s back — that notion was born in an entirely different historical context: the “affair of the poisons”, which took place in Paris around 1680.⁽⁶⁾

Nor was the sabbat, even at its first appearance, imagined as a festival of serfs — already in 1460, at Arras, rich and powerful burghers were accused of attending it, along with humbler folk.⁽⁷⁾ To give his account even a shadow of plausibility, Michelet has to pretend that all extant accounts of the sabbat date from the period of its decadence; the true, original sabbat being something quite different. The argument is not likely to commend itself to historians.

Even so, the accounts of the sabbat that we do possess confront Michelet with some pretty problems. Some stock features are simply passed over in silence — not a word is said, for instance, about maleficium; but with others he copes as best he can. He is exercised by the tales of erotic orgies, with their stress on incest. There cannot, he assures us, have been any open promiscuity, as young children were present. On the other hand, he admits that incest may have occurred, discreetly, and he even offers two mutually exclusive explanations to account for it. Perhaps incest is to be understood in terms of a medieval law which extended the forbidden degrees to include cousins six times removed. Or perhaps, on the other hand, the priestess, being a woman and sympathizing with women, encouraged sons to mate with their mothers, so that mothers could be assured of a roof over their heads in old age. Again, innumerable contemporary accounts refer to the fact that Satan’s seed, when received by the witches, felt cold. Michelet suggests that whatever mating took place at the sabbat must have been followed by an icy “purification”, to prevent conception. As for the babies which were supposedly eaten at the sabbat, these were simply models of babies, made to look like meat. Placed on the back of the priestess, they represented the People; and when serfs partook of them — or went through the motions — the People were simply worshipping the People, in truly democratic spirit.