Europe's inner demons

On the face of it, a plausible argument. Nevertheless, it does not prove the existence of an organized body of witches. There is simply no evidence that there ever was a secret society of magicians, devoted to fostering or exploiting the fertility of crops or herds; no theological treatise or confessor’s guide even hints at such a thing. In his efforts to trace such a society Runeberg turns not to the Middle Ages, when he claims it existed, but to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and not to primary sources but to Margaret Murray. In the end the only evidence he can produce turns out to consist of those very same accounts of witches’ sabbats that we have just shown to be spurious. And the parallels between fertility rites and sabbats can all be explained without assuming that sabbats ever took place. A full century before Runeberg, Jacob Grimm established that certain folk beliefs, including beliefs about fertility, entered into the picture of the sabbat; but that proves nothing about the reality of the sabbat. Moreover, some of the features listed by Runeberg have a far more obvious explanation. It is not really surprising that when the Lord of Hell has to vanish, he should do so in flames. And if the times of the year when the large sabbats were supposed to be held were the times for fertility rites, they also coincide with major feasts and saints’ days in the calendar of the Church. As witchcraft was imagined as a blasphemous parody of Christianity, it was only to be expected that witches would foregather at times which Christians regarded as particularly sacred. On the other hand, most forms of maleficium cannot possibly be explained as Runeberg tries to explain them, in terms of “magical transfer”. Witches were supposed to harm their neighbours for the sake of revenge, or out of pure malice, or on the Devil’s orders, and only occasionally and incidentally for the purpose of augmenting their own stocks of food.

Elliot Rose’s sprightly book, A Razor for a Goat, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 1962. No fertility cult here: Margaret Murray is sharply criticized, both as historian and anthropologist, while Amo Runeberg is not even mentioned. But Rose is just as certain as they that an organization of witches existed, and just as ready to explain what it did, and why. He too goes back to pre-historic times. The famous cave-painting in the cave of the Trois Freres in the French Pyrenees, showing what may be a dancer in animal disguise, with great branching horns, is taken to represent the leader of a sorcerer’s society. One wonders whether Rose realized that the picture is reckoned to be some 20,000 years old, for the argument moves at one bound to the arrival of Christianity in Northern Europe. Faced with that event, the society of sorcerers transformed itself into a secret sect, worshipping a god who was represented as half man, half animal, and adoring a leader as the god’s manifestation. The leader was no longer disguised as a deer but as a goat; and this was interpreted, first by the Church and later by the sectarians themselves, as representing the great adversary of the Christian God, Satan. These sectarians were the witches; they were Devil-worshippers; and their leaders, when they dressed up as goat-like beings, were impersonating the Devil himself.

For Rose the libidinous aspects of the sabbat are all-important: the dancing, the copulation of the leader with his followers and of the followers with one another. They lead him to imagine a cult centering on ecstatic experiences, and specially attractive to women. In this view the witch-cult becomes a successor, in a Christianized Europe, of the Dionysian religion of ancient Greece: “The dancers are clearly Bacchantes or Mænads, and they are honouring the god who sends their frenzy.... They are his servants, inspired by him, submerging their individual wills in the inspiration.”⁽³¹⁾

The “flying ointments” used by the witches were ecstasy-inducing drugs. The leaders of the cult (Rose calls them “horned shamans”) possessed the secret knowledge of herbs which temporarily released human beings from the limitations of humanity; they were experts in the concoction of herbal drugs. Once more one feels the Zeitgeist at work: just as Murray’s

Witch-Cult appeared when the vogue of The Golden Bough

was at its height, so A Razor for a Goat was published just as the craze for psychedelic experiments and experiences was building up.