Europe's inner demons

That is what La Sorcière has to say about the sabbat; and despite the special pleading, the suppression of texts and the fatuities of exegesis on which the interpretation depends, it was not without influence. For in La Sorcière Michelet deployed all those visionary and poetic gifts that make him so compelling a historian. Though he protested that the book was free from emotional romancing, was indeed the most unquestionably true of all his works, the opposite is the case.

La Sorcière was written when Michelet was sixty-four, and it was written fast: the two chapters on the sabbat took a day each, almost the whole book was finished in two months.⁽⁸⁾ Driven by a passionate urge to rehabilitate two oppressed classes — women, and the medieval peasantry — the aging romantic radical had neither time nor desire for detailed research. The result was an imaginative creation of such power that it has continued to be reprinted, and read, and taken seriously, for generation after generation. In a general sense it seems to have influenced even some highly sophisticated French historians of today. Professor Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, for instance, in his monumental work Les paysans de Languedoc

(1066), still presents sabbats as real meetings in which the peasant urge to revolt found symbolic expression.⁽⁹⁾

But La Sorcière also contains hints of a different interpretation. In passing, Michelet suggests that the sabbat was really the celebration of a fertility cult, aimed at securing abundance of crops. At the hands of later scholars this notion was to undergo some startling elaborations.

In his notes to The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot lists, as one of the works to which he was most indebted, The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer— “a work of anthropology... which has influenced our generation profoundly”. Unlike some of Eliot’s other notes, this one was perfectly serious: first published in 1890, reissued with enlargements in twelve volumes between 1907 and 1915, The Golden Bough

had indeed launched a cult of fertility cults. At least in the English-speaking world it became fashionable to interpret all kinds of rituals as derivatives of a magic originally performed to encourage the breeding of animals and the growth of plants, and to see in the most diverse gods and heroes so many disguises for the spirit of vegetation. It was to be expected that this kind of interpretation would be applied also to the history of European witchcraft; and so it was, in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, by Margaret Murray. The year was 1921, and the influence of The Golden Bough was at its height. (The Waste Land, with Eliot’s comment, appeared the following year.)⁽¹⁰⁾