Europe's inner demons

Questioned concerning the Apostles’ Creed and the faith that every believer owes to our holy religion, (Anne-Marie de Georgel) answered, as a true daughter of Satan, that between God and the Devil there is complete equality; that the first is king of heaven and the second king of the earth; that all souls which the Devil succeeds in seducing are lost for the All-High and remain for ever between earth and sky; that every night these souls visit the houses they used to inhabit, and try to induce in their children and relatives a desire to serve the Devil rather than God.

She also said that this struggle between God and the Devil has lasted from all eternity and will continue for ever; that now one and now the other has been victorious, but that at present things are developing in such a way that Satan’s triumph is assured.

Catherine, wife of Pierre Delort, said much the same:

Questioned concerning the Apostles’ Creed and the faith that every believer owes to our holy religion, she answered that between God and the Devil there is complete equality; that the first reigns in heaven and the second on earth; that the struggle between them will never end; that one should choose to serve the Devil, because he is wicked and because he can command the souls of the dead, which he sends against us to disturb our reason; that the reign of Jesus Christ in this world was temporary and is now drawing to its close; and that Antichrist will appear and wage battle on behalf of the Devil, etc.

The implications are weighty. On the strength of this document it has been widely assumed that the inquisitors operating at Toulouse in the 1330s, being familiar both with the facts of maleficium and with Catharist doctrine, combined the two, distorting both in the process, and so arrived at the notion of a sect of witches that assembled at intervals to worship the Devil in corporeal form. By the use of torture they were able to force some women of lowly status to produce confessions in which they described these assemblies and denounced the other participants. The immediate result was the first mass witch-hunt; the long-term result, the creation of a new stereotype, which was to legitimate further and larger witch-hunts, extending from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. All this would indeed follow if the document were genuine; but none of it does, for the document can be shown to be a nineteenth-century forgery.