Abstract

Hollywood is as much embroiled in ideology as any Marxist text, and the practices of the democratic political system, of education, of the media, as well as the customary behaviour in families, and at formal meetings and informal social events, create and transmit the ideological systems in which we are all implicated, and which we most of the time take for granted as normal and natural.

David Clines

© Dr M D Magee and Saviour Shirlie
Contents Updated:Thursday, 12 December 2002
Friday, 21 November 2003

Varieties of Witch Cults

Medieval Europe had its spell-books or grimoires which give rituals for conjuring demons, derived from Jewish, and ultimately Persian, demonology. The invoker of the demon could make a pact with the monster or force it by the power of the spell to do as he wanted. Islamic demonology, which came into Europe from Spain, regarded demons or jinns (genies) as controllable by the mage. The power of his word was the same power that makes certain devotees, especially among Jews, avoid the name of God, and even avoid the word “God” by writing it as G-d! Moreover, the meaning of “Logos” is “Word”, so the ancient doctrine of the power of the word is expressed even in the Christian faith in identifying Jesus with the Logos (John 1:1).

Popes practised the ritual form of black magic of the grimoires, and the inquisitors could have used their knowledge of the grimoires to put falsehoods into the mouths of the witches, but generally the form of witchcraft was quite different from the “high” magic based on the demonology of Jewish folklore. Witchcraft was not concerned with conjuring up spirits—there is no sound evidence of supernatural beings or acts, and plainly nothing supernatural ever intervened to save the poor wretches burnt by their Christian opponents—but was a, generally joyful, form of worship. The devil often spoken of was the leader of the ceremony, effectively the priest, or the image set up before the congregation. The witches’ confessions were written by Christian clergy, usually Dominicans who were the inquisitors, and so were heavily biased. What remains, once the extremes of the inquisitorial imagination are removed, is an cathartic and ecstatic ritual.

For Arkon Daraul, the practice of witchcraft was fairly standardized, but, whatever its roots, it had lost its original purity. The earliest ecclesiastical records mention people who worshipped Diana. Later sabbats and synagogues, potions, rubbing ointments, meetings at cross-roads, the Black Man, renouncing Christianity, and the use of primitive magic appeared. By the fifteenth century, witch meetings reported in countries as diverse as Sweden, Spain, Scotland and France were remarkably similar. Daraul writes:

Do the early references to the rites show that there is a lingering of another religion below the later Christian one? Is there any evidence of absorption of another, propagandist cult from outside? Are there ceremonies of initiation, passwords, strange names, a priesthood, evidences of a purpose behind such an association? In the case of the underground organization at first dimly descried through the hysteria of witch persecutions, everyone of these indications can be found.

Arkon Daraul, Secret Societies

A cult, closely similar in some respects to witchdraft, had crossed from Morocco into Andalusia. The Arabs called it “The Two Horned Ones”, and it seemed to be connected with moon worship, the reference not being to horned animals but the horned moon. The Moslems had, of course, gotten as far as France before they were stopped in their western advance, and there is no doubt about early influence from north Africa. Anglo-Saxon coins dated 774 AD imitating Arab dinars minted by the Caliph of Spain—even to the ’There is Only Allah and Mohammed is his Messenger’—were struck by King Offa.

The Moslem historian, Ibn Jafar, described some aspects of the Moroccan sect but seemed reluctant to say much. Its devotees were initiated with a cut from a ritual knife which left a scar somewhere on the body, and they believed some power came from dancing in a circle. They took an oath of fealty of body and soul to their priests, whom they saw only rarely. Devotees were both men and women, and from all social classes. They met by night…

…where two paths met and crossed, and he who had been so instructed bore with him a cock, which was to be sacrificed as the emblem of the new day. Each carried a staff with the two horns in brass upon the head, which is symbolical of the goat which is ridden, the sign of power and irresistibility. This is the meeting which is called the Zabbat, the Forceful or Powerful one, and the circle of companions are the Kafan. We were thus termed, because each man wears over his naked flesh during the ritual only the white, plain sheet in which he will be buried. I was to be given the sanctity that night, and to join the band of the elect who would spread joy throughout the world, those of us who are companions of the Rabbana (our Lord) exemplified by the blacksmith. Small drums beat as we twelve came into the circle which had been drawn in the dust. Two dervishes in their white kafans taught us the chant of Iwwaiy, which we repeated to the drums. Then, the end of the kafan over our shoulders was put over our heads, and we whirled in dance until there was a loud shout. At this our eyes were uncovered, and we saw that the leader had appeared.

Cited by Arkon Daraul, Secret Societies

The devotees had to swear allegiance to this Rabbana, and the cock was sacrificed by cutting its throat. Each initiate was cut in turn on the arm. The dance continued anti-clockwise ending in ecstasy. Abdelmalik Harouni writes of the “Berber sect of the horned ones”, who drink wine, light fires and dance around them, each one carrying a staff called the goat which he discards during the ecstasy of the dance. They swear allegiance to a chief at a ceremony in which they renounce any other religion, and their parents and relatives. They believe in a higher lord called Dhulqarnen—the “Two-Horned One” or “He of the Two Centuries”, the reference to two centuries pertaining to each Rabbana remaining active beyond his death for two hundred years in total. He continues after death as an inspirational spirit guiding the work of others, but himself still learning by experience, until he is reincarnated again in a form closer to ultimate perfection.

A Persian sect called the Maskhara (Revellers) danced madly to induce ecstasy, used henbane to produce visions, and gave the world the word “masquerade”, because they dressed in animal masks, blacked their faces and pretended to be supernatural creatures. The face-blacking substance is called “mascara”! In 1518 AD, Johannes de Tabia described the Maskhara as a sect of witches, and masquerades were soon to become popular.

The objectives of these cults were first liberation of people from the stifling hand of the Catholic Church, and second the replacement of Catholicism by their new faith. In Switzerland, the “devil” told seven hundred witches at a meeting in 1428 that they would have their own laws, and would overthrow Christianity! Plainly, ordinary devotees did not know the details of the belief, just as many modern Christians do not know the theology of Christianity. The priests, pastors or perfects who led the sabbats, and were called devils by the inquisitors, were the ones who knew the theology, and ordinary members had to obey him. They would hardly have done so if they were beaten and abused as some of the reports of the inquisitors made out. They did so gladly knowing that they achieved some release, catharsis or ecstasy through the rituals.

Indications showing that the cult was religious come from earlier records, before the clergy became obsessed with the allegation of Devil wordship. Observers seem to record a secret ritual. In January of 1091 AD, Father Gualchelm of St Albin’s Church, at Angers, reported a large crowd of people, on horseback and on foot, passing by. “This is the Harlechim, of whom I have heard, but in which I did not believe.”

Sexuality and Witchcraft

Ordinary Christians—the whole population of Europe—were overwhelmed with guilt about sex for centuries. Sex was sinful, and so the Devil had control of it. Every heresy had something sexual in it according to the clergy. Both witches and heretics were accused of consorting with Satan. Pope Gregory particularly directed the inquisitors to seek heretics who were in league with the Devil. Thomas Aquinas gave the Church a finished manual of devilry, and before the end of the thirteenth century the inquisitors in the south of France were condemning women for compacts or cohabitation with the Devil.

The first witch to have confessed to sexual intercourse with the Devil, we saw was burnt to death in 1275. What did it mean? Pierre de l’Ancre, a judge in the parliament of Bordeaux, said that the fish wives of the Pays de Labourd were left without their husbands for months. These and others like the members of the artificial communities in the nunneries and monasteries, and the isolates in anchorages were, not surprisingly, visited by incubi or succubi.

Christian mythology utterly ignored sexuality, indeed, it is overwhelmingly masculine bar a few token women. Sexual restrictions by the Church narrowed the range of human imagination and even experience, until only the sado-masochistic imagery of Christ’s passion, and the phony martyrdom of the saints were all that could be expressed sexually. Self-flagellation and the perversions of the voyeuristic torture of supposed heretics and witches were the approved expressions of sexuality in Christendom. Angels were asexual creatures as Jesus himself explains clearly enough for Christians. Heavenly beings are immortal and what is immortal needs no reproductive capacity. The gospel refutes the modern day spiritualism that Christianity has become without a blush, despite killing multitudes for believing less heretical things. Fallen angels were no longer in heaven. They became lustful, becoming humans, and demons—incubi and sucubi.

S Augustine of Hippo, in The City of God, says that fallen angels appear as satyrs and fauns “commonly called incubi” which appear to “wanton women” and “sought and obtained coition with them”. The Malleus Maleficarum accepted the authority of S Augustine and declared that they were “the Good People as old women call them, though they are witches and devils in their forms”. The expression, “Good People”, at first meant heretics, then “fairies”—so Krämer and Sprenger equate heretics with fairies—but they then equate them with demons and nocturnal seducers. In the witch trials, the evidence often was that the accused witch had dealings with fairies, plainly considered to be demonic. A prime habit of demons was to tempt people sexually, whence their fondness for illicit coitus by night, but although a witch could be of either sex, the Christian prejudice against women surfaced explicitly in the Malleus Maleficarum which concludes its explanation of why superstition is found in women with:

All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in a woman is insatiable.

In 1485, according to Krämer and Sprenger, the Inquisition of Como burnt 41 witches for intercourse with incubi. They had had a wet dream and were incinerated for it! Evidently an exception was the Catholic S Theresa whose nocturnal visitor was a golden angel with a great golden spear which penetrated her entrails and “with a piercing sweetness” “caused her to utter several moans”. For this she was canonized. Poor witches dreamt of the Devil and were burnt at the stake. Even if they had really dreamt of Christ, they would have had to confess that it was the Devil if they wanted their torturers to cease. Today the incubus is not called the Devil but an alien “Gray”.

The diabolical incubus is only the sixteenth century form of a kind of sexual hysteria familar to every twentieth century psychiatrist.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

It was proverbial that “incubi infest cloisters”, and these monks aimed to get their revenge on them. The “cult” of witches was the remnants of the earlier heresies that offered an alternative to the corruption and sterility of institutionalized Christianity, finishing as no more than an ill-remembered and largely incoherent miasma of what became folk beliefs and superdtitions. It remained heretical to the Church, persuaded, like modern western leaders, by its own propaganda.

The subjective reality of the dreams of the witches, whether natural ones or induced by psychedelic ointments, they considered as real enough, and because they did, so did the ignorant and superstitious monks asking the questions, and even some clever and thoughtful clerics who should have known better, in view of the original attitude of the Church, which these men must have known.

Christian propagandists claimed heretics and witches indulged in the grossest sexual perversions with their god, Satan. They indulged in orgies, incest, cannibalism, and infanticide. Catholics also aimed exactly the same accusations of witchcraft at supposedly different heretics. Either it was a convenient blanket accusation for the Church, or the same heresy with minor variants was widespread under different names. Trevor-Roper writes:

The intellectual fantasies of the clergy seemed more bizarre than the psychopathic delusions of the madhouse.

In these recurrent fantasies, the obscene details are often identical, and their identity sheds some light on the psychological connexion between persecuting orthodoxy and sexual prurience. The springs of sanctimony and sadism are not far apart.

That is something that few Christians will think about and few will accept even if they did. Trevor-Roper warns us not to trust the accounts drawn up by accusers against rivals with which they are at war. Unfortunately, poor and ignorant people are too ready to believe such accusations in their desire not to be at the bottom of the social pile. According to the McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s in the US, communists were perverts who ate babies too. Modern propagandists know that in all warfare the enemy has to be thoroughly blackened to fool the electorate.

Defenders of the Faith tell us that the accusations made by the Church against its enemies were no worse than the accusations made by Romans like Tacitus against the early gentile Christians. That is true, but they have forgotten that Romans were supposed to have been wicked Pagans, while Chistians were children of God, a significant difference in theory, but evidently one that makes no difference to behaviour in practice. The God of love urged his followers to love their enemies, but when ever did they? If they ignore distinctive teachings like this then how can they claim to be Christians at all?

Even during the early days in the Roman empire, the leaders of the Church were not above using the same attacks on their rivals that Tacitus aimed at them. In the second century, S Clement of Alexandria, in Stromata, paints the followers of Carpocrates in lurid and perverted terms, but all Christians believe what he wrote. In the fourth century, S Epiphanius, in Panarion, made the same accusations against the Gnostics he was attacking. S Augustine said the same things against the Manichæans. They were all the same vile accusations disinterred by the Catholic Church of the twelfth century for use against the Waldensians and the Albigensians, in the fourteenth century for use against the Fraticelli, and then for use against the witches. Out of ignorance, people believed this puerile and unsubtle propaganda.

The Dominicans accused the Cathars of indulging in sexual promiscuity and orgies while worshipping Satan. The same monks accused the witches of precisely the same behaviour. Catholic monks were responsible for the hysteria which grew out of this. In every part of Europe the tribunals of the Inquisition soon became busy with witches. In Lorraine, Judge Remy boasted he sentenced 900 in fifteen years. In the diocese of Como, 1000 were executed in a year. In three months in 1515, 600 witches were burned in the bishopric of Bamberg, and 900 in the bishopric of Wurzburg. In five years, a fifth of the 600 inhabitants of the small town of Lindheim were burned as witches. Henri III of France alone might have accounted for 30,000. People were massacred in Switzerland and many were burned in Italy. An English bishop was accused at Rome of paying homage to the Devil. And the Protestant massacres had not yet begun.

Of course, the robes and pure white hands of the clergy were not stained with this blood—religious murder was always carried out by the “secular arm”.

Pattern of Witch Hunting

The pattern of the outbreaks is irregular, and no one has seen an explanation for it, though no one seems to have checked it against patterns of settlement of Cathars, whether initial settlement or resettlement after the persecutions began. Much of the conflict in Western Europe was in times and areas where Roman Catholicism was defending itself against reformation, so, some places had fewer trials than others. The only significant outbreak of witch mania in England was during the Civil War. Many countries in Europe largely escaped the witch hunt mania—Ireland executed only four witches, Russia only ten, and those nearly all male. In the Dutch republic, no witches were executed after 1600, and none were tried after 1610. In Spain and Italy accusations of witchcraft were handled by the Inquisition, and although torture was legal, only a dozen witches were burned out of 5,000 put on trial. In southwestern Germany alone, however, more than 3,000 witches were executed between 1560 and 1680. The craze affected mostly Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and France, but few areas were left untouched by it.

Eastern Orthodox countries had few witch trials. It made little use of accusations, trials and secular penalties for specifically witches, but used them against heretics, suggesting that the witch mania in the west might have been a hidden or out-of-control heresy hunt.

In parts of the Orthodox East, at least, witch hunts such as those experienced in other parts of Europe were unknown.

Three quarters of those convicted of witchcraft between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries were female. Local variations, though, show there was no rule here. In France those found to be witches were of either sex, over much of the country. Just over half of nearly 1,300 witches whose cases went to Paris for appeal were men, mainly poor peasants and artisans. In countries easily reckonable because they had low persecution rates, nine out of ten people accused as witches in Iceland were men, nearly two thirds in Estonia were, and nearly half in Finland. Wheras nine out of ten known witches in Hungary, Denmark and England were women. Most witches were older than 50.

Formerly, the total number of victims of the witch persecutions was variously given as from 100,000 to millions. No one knows the total number of victims. Apologists say less than 15,000 definite executions have been uncovered in Europe. Yet, Benedict Carpzov (1595—1666) alone has the reputation of sentencing 20,000 victims, and Remy, in his period in Lorraine, supposedly incinerated 2000-3000. Though these figure might be exaggerated, no one knows whether they are or by how much, but even if approximately true, the total of 15,000 must be far too low. Conservatively, there must have been perhaps 100,000 trials between 1450 and 1750, and between 40,000 and 50,000 executions in total, a quarter men—but it might have been many more.

Dr H C E Midelfort studied the records of the witch trials in South Western Germany from 1561 to 1670 (Witchhunting in Southwestern Germany, 1972) finding that 3229 people died in that one century in that small part of Europe.

Women testified in large numbers against other women, making up 43 per cent of witnesses in these cases on average, and predominating in 30 per cent of them. Concerning the Essex witches, about 55 percent of those who complained of being bewitched were women. The figure is general. Women were at least equally responsible for bringing accusations against oher women.

The last English trial for witchcraft was in 1712, when Jane Wenham was convicted, but not executed. In Scotland, trials, accompanied by torture, were frequent in the seventeenth century. The last trial and execution took place in 1722. On the continent of Europe, the beginning of the sixteenth century saw witchcraft cases taken out of the hands of the Inquisition in France and Germany, and the secular influence of the Malleus became dominant. In Spain, a woman was burnt in 1781 at Seville by the Inquisition. The secular courts condemned a girl to decapitation in 1782. In Germany, an execution took place in Posen in 1793. In South America and Mexico, witch-burning lasted till well on into the second half of the nineteenth century, the latest instance being as late as 1888 in Peru.

Seeking an Explanation

The Church invented the crime of witchcraft, established the process by which to prosecute it, and then insisted that witches be prosecuted. After much of society had rejected witchcraft as a delusion, some of the last to insist upon the validity of witchcraft were among the clergy. Indeed, some still believe it. Under the pretext of first heresy, and then witchcraft, anyone could be disposed of who questioned authority or the Christian view of the world.

In many parts of Europe, Helen Ellerbe observed, trials for witchcraft began exactly as the trials for other types of heresy were stopping. Not until the fourteenth century did Catholics conceive of an organized sect of witches, although John Nider in the fifteenth century thought the idea was formed as early as 1137. Before the idea of an organization took hold witches were always individual sorcerers, and for almost a millennium there was no suggestion of an organization of them.

Ronald Hutton confirms the persecution of witches derived not from persecution of Pagans, but from the punishment and persecution of Christian heretics, until in the fifteenth century the concept of a Satanic conspiracy to destroy Christendom appeared, which resulted in thousands of executions. Hutton perhaps did not see them as the same heretics. They were.

Catholic priests and ex-Catholic priests like Montague Summers and Joseph McCabe thought the witches were a genuine rival religion to Catholicism. Fr Herbert Thurston, in the Catholic Encyclopedia, is himself a believer in witchcraft and the Devil, but admits that in 99 cases out of 100 the allegations were wrong. In many witch prosecutions, victims confessed spontaneously, often without threat of torture. The admission of guilt seems constantly to have been confirmed on the scaffold when the victim had nothing to gain or lose by the confession. Thurston thought it was a psychological problem, but the victims behaved just like the mythical “brave Christian” being offered up to the beasts in Rome. Here is a strongly held religious belief.

Some historians think witch hunts were mass hysterics, fostered and spread initially by the Catholic Church, then by others. Jenny Gibbons, a NeoPagan authority on witch hunts, assumes from this that persecution of witches ought therefore to have been worst when the Church’s power was the greatest—in the Middle Ages, before the Reformation split the Church into Catholic and Protestant. It is not an assumption that has to follow from the premise, and so does not invalidate it.

A Church, like the Medieval Catholic Church, that has total power over what people think, can spread whatever it likes, and can stop whatever errors it likes! When it felt quite secure at the height of the dark ages, it did not need to persecute witches or heretics to any extent, and did not need to foment hysteria. When the Puritanical sects started to get stronger from the thirteenth century, the Church did not feel so secure. It had a reason to foment panic among people to effect a policy of limiting the power of the dissidents. The Church did preciselly this when it felt it had to. Hunting heretics and witches need only be done when necessary, and that is not when the Church is unchallenged.

England, which had a strong government which rejected the Inquisition, had little witch hunting. In Italy and Spain, where the Catholic Church and its Inquisition reigned unquestioned, witch hunting was uncommon. The worst excesses were where the Catholic Church was less strong but engaged in a battle with the Puritans. It suggests that the witch hunts and the Inquisition were serving the same purpose, so where the Inquisition hunted heretics, there was no need for it or anyone else to hunt witches.

The Church began to feel the challenge of the Cathari at the height of its power in the twelfth century. It instituted the Albigensian crusade and the Inquisition and few witches died for the next three hundred years. The Cathari had gone underground, and were now more dangerous, the Church believed, than when they were out in the open. The Reformation started a panic in the Catholic Church. It had been trying but was failing miserably overall to control the reformers. At this point the propaganda against the heretics spiralled out of control. The belief in a Satanic plot took root in Europe, and the weakening Church was mostly not able to control its own creation.

Persecutions did not reach epidemic levels until after the Reformation, when the Catholic Church had lost its position as Europe’s indisputable moral authority. Moreover most of the killing was done by secular courts. These are not strange facts. A single strong Church would have continued to exercise control, but it had lost its total power. Where it retained the influence of the Inquistion, it retained control. Church courts tried many witches but few died. A witch might be excommunicated, given penance, or imprisoned, but not often killed. The Inquisition would pardon a witch who confessed and repented. Witches per se were not the Church’s target. The trouble was that they had defined the heretics as if they were Satanic, and the hysterical population had seen Satan in every peculiar person they saw, or in every cough they coughed. The local eccentrics became the involunary target.

Panics clustered around borders where refugees might be seeking access or egress. France’s major crazes occurred on its Spanish and eastern fronts. Italy’s worst persecution was in the northern regions. Spain’s one craze centered on the Basque lands straddling the French/Spanish border. Germany and Switzerland were intermixed feudal principalities, united in confederacies. It was a mass of borders!

Jenny Gibbons, says the Christian church is not to blame for the witch deaths—all of European society was to blame. No one had clean hands. Those are two different points. Why a supposed witch and Pagan feels the need to flatter the Church, is for her to answer but here she shows she is trying too hard to be nice to the Church. Even when the Church was directly involved in these judicial murders, as in the Inquisition, it turned the victim over to the secular authorities for execution of the sentence. The Church was most careful never to be seen with dirty hands in the sense of actually murdering the victims, however dirty they were. They devised the scheme for the very purpose of seeming spotless. Gibbons correctly says:

The Church helped created the stereotypes and religious intolerance that led to the witch hunts.

Christian Catholics unleashed the hounds of fear and prejudice onto the witches by stirring up witch hatred. They could placidly then drink claret while the secular courts of Europe killed the witches, leaving the Church spotless as ever. The pope says he is sorry for the deaths. It is impossible to apologize for such vile and monstrous crimes. Those who think an apology suffices have not got the scale and horror of the crimes into their heads.

The sermons of either Catholic or Protestant preachers often set off a witch hysteria and hunt. A French witch mania triggered the panic in the Basque regions of Spain in 1610. Fray Domingo de Sardo preached there about witchcraft, and the inquisitors were mainly convinced. But one skeptic called Alonso de Salazar observed:

There were neither witches nor bewitched until they were talked and written about.

He convinced La Suprema, the ruling body of the Spanish Inquisition, that it was hysteria. An “Edict of Silence” forbade discussing witchcraft. The edict dissipated the panic and accusations. This serves to prove that the Church had it in its power to stop hysteria and mob rule when it wanted. It can therefore not pretend that awful mobs and greedy princes did things irrespective of the Church. It came to be so, but for most of the time the Church pretends innocence. It was not innocent. Jenny Gibbons says the Spanish Inquisition always insisted it alone had the right to condemn witches—which it refused to do. She relates a case where it stops a panic. Why did it not do it elsewhere? Any superstitious mob or prince needed only threatening with eternal death, and they would stop defying the Church.

She answers that the Inquisition in 1616, in another witch craze in Vizcaya in the same Basque regions as before, re-issued the “Edict of Silence”, but “the secular authorities petitioned the king for the right to try witches themselves. The king granted the request, and 289 people were quickly sentenced”. The Inquisition dismissed all the charges, nevertheless. It is impossible to think that a Catholic king of Spain, especially one as self-consciously pious as Phillip III, would not do what the Church wanted, so the whole episode looks like a popularity stunt. The Church knew there were no witches. It was after heretics not witches, but had succeeded in convincing significant populations in Europe of a terrible Satanic threat. In cases like these, they stopped the injustice because they knew these people were innocent. They were not witches because there were none.

Reversing its policy of denying the existence of witches, in the thirteenth century the Church began depicting the witch as a slave of the Devil. The Church began authorizing frightening portrayals of the Devil in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Images of a witch riding a broom first appeared in 1280. The Church now portrayed witches with the same images so frequently used to characterize heretics—a small clandestine society engaged in anti-human practices, including infanticide, incest, cannibalism, bestiality and orgiastic sex. These were the Church’s descriptions of the Cathars after they had been scattered and forced underground by the Albigensian Crusades.

Protestants were the same. The social turmoil created by the Reformation intensified witch hunting. The reformers demanded a greater obligation towards personal moral perfection. They either saw the idea of the Satan worshipping witch as a moral lesson that served a valuable purpose, or they simply accepted the Catholic propaganda blown out of proportion by fancy, as it was. Perhaps both. In their odious fundamentalism, Calvin and Knox thought it a denial of the bible to deny witchcraft, and John Wesley, founder of Methodism agreed:

The English in general and indeed most of the men of learning in Europe have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions as old wives’ fables.

The giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving up of the bible.

John Wesley, Methodist Founder, 1768

Witch hunters declared that “rebellion is as the sin of Witchcraft”. In 1661, Scottish royalists proclaimed that “Rebellion is the mother of witchcraft”. And in England the Puritan William Perkins called the witch, “the most notorious traytor and rebell that can be”.

Using magic was to call upon the Devil to help in the physical world. Both Protestants and Catholics did not have as much faith in their own Trinitarian God as they had in the Devil, the supposed god of the witches’ magic. Witches were thought by some to have the power of Christ—they could raise the dead, turn water into wine or milk, control the weather and know the past and future. Catholics could use ritual acts like crossing themselves to ward off the hex, but Protestants lacked similar superstitions. They concluded they had to kill the witch. Belief in the power of witchcraft itself is what gives rise to witch hunts, and the best way to stop them is to stop people believing in witchcraft. Even today in South Africa, western missionaries report that the Christian Zulu Zionists, “in claiming to be able to cure the evil influences of traditional magic, are reinforcing the belief in it”.

We may well imagine a half Christian mythology inspired by theology substituting Satan for the divinities worshipped by the yokels of the middle ages.

George Bataille, Eroticism (1962)

Margaret Murray proposed that witches were members of a clandestine religion which she took to be Pagan.

The best explanation is that it was indeed a religion, but it was the scattered remnants of the Cathars—the Albigenses in particular but also in central Europe, the Patarenes, Waldenses, Beguines and Bogomiles. Here the meaning of the word “pagan” is relevant. It is taken to mean a rustic or yokel from the countryside, supposedly reflecting the inclination of the country folk to stick to their traditional non-Christian beliefs when the towns and cities had all converted to the new religion. This etymology suits Margaret Murray’s thesis. The trouble is that it is untenable.

Tertullian distinguished Christians and Pagans as “Milites” and “Pagani” (De Corona Militis 11) in about 200 AD when the dominant religions of the empire, and therefore the cities, were still non-Christian. The distinction is a military one from the Latin “pagus” meaning a sub-division. Christians considered themselves as soldiers of Christ, active in the militant Church, divided from the “pagani”, those not enrolled in God’s army. The whole concept is dualistic, echoing Mithraism. Heretics would not have considered themselves Pagans but “milites”, and to have been called “pagan” must have been a dire insult, but it was not an insult that was used much. The word “pagan” was not common in English before the time of Shakespeare, the earliest citation in the OED being 1375, though, interestingly, Shakespeare used the word to mean a man’s lover or a prostitute.

Witches were not generally accused of paganism, but were considered as Christian heretics. The great witch hunt was not just hysteria. It had been started by the Church’s concern for heresy. It was a deliberate attempt by the Catholics to exterminate the Cathari—Christianity’s rival religion. The idea of the Devil had nothing to do with European Pagan tradition. It was purely Zoroastrian, and came into the West via Mithraism, Christianity and Judaism.

Joan of Arc, whom Murray takes to be a witch, refused to say the Paternoster, and this is said to have been true of witches. For Cathars, it was the principal prayer, but only Parfaits were allowed to say it, not Croyants, and, as their most sacred utterance, it seems unlikely that a Parfait would say it at the insistance of their profane enemies. She also spoke of “their party” and said she saw those who spoke to her walking among the Christians. She used the expression “My Lord” instead of “Christ”. She was supposedly visited by S Michael, who is, in fact Christ, the archangel Michael. She was a Cathar, not a Pagan.

Gilles de Rais, Joan’s main military supporter, was accused of sacrificing 800 children, and confessed to a string of crimes and abuses without even being tortured. His wickedness is laid on too thickly to be taken seriously, without patent confirmation. Even so he has been called Bluebeard, a legendary monster of Brittany. The simplest explanation is that de Rais chose voluntary martyrdom to save his fellow heretics, whether witches or Cathars. Monstelat, who chronicled the case, said:

Notwithstanding his many and atrocious cruelties, he made a very devout end, full of penancies…

Cathar Beliefs

The heretics declare that God is a tyrant, the popes say. They called them Manichæans and said they believed that the evil principle had created matter which was evil. Christians said their evil principle was Lucifer, and they claimed Lucifer was for the heretics one of the two sons of God, unjustly cast off by an overbearing father and condemned to hell. For heretics Lucifer is the real creator of the world and prince of men, and in the end he will regain his place. He became their “prince” and “lord”, and believed he would ultimately triumph. Here in the anti-Cathar propaganda of the Catholics is the basis of the Satanism myth which was always associated with witches.

The Reliquiæ Antiquæ list among the errors of the heretics that they met to indulge in promiscuous sexual intercourse, that they held perverse doctrines, that for some, the devil appeared to them in the form of a cat, and that each kissed him under the tail, and that some rode to the place of meeting upon a staff anointed with a certain unguent, and were conveyed thither in a moment of time. Heresy not witchcraft!

Psellus, one of the leading Greek orthodox writers of the tenth century, describes a witches’ sabbat, except that it is a meeting of heretics! This story was applied to the heretics all over Europe, and is the origin of the witch scare.

The heretics used to meet at night by candle light and invoke the Devils. When these appeared as animals, the lights were extinguished and the worshipers indulged in an orgy of sexuality with the Devils and with each other.

A letter of pope Gregory IX written in 1233 to the bishops of Germany, urging them to seek out and persecute the heretics, also shows the connexion with witchcraft. The pope says that amongst these heretics “when a neophyte is received there appears to him a kind of frog”, though some say it is a toad. Some kiss it shamelessly on the buttocks, others on the mouth, drawing the tongue and spittle of the animal into their mouths. Sometimes this toad is “as big as a goose or a duck”. The neophyte next encounters a “man of extraordinary paleness, with deep black eyes, and so thin that his skin seems to be stretched over his bones”. The neophyte kisses him and finds that he is “as cold as ice.”

The worshippers then sit to table, and a large black cat comes out of a statue, and all of them in the order of their dignity, kiss its buttocks. The lights are extinguished and there is the usual orgy of sexual intercourse. If, the pope gravely explains, there are more men than women, or women than men, they resort to sodomy. The candles are relit, and they sit again at table, when from a dark corner of the room comes a man “shining like the sun from the loins upward, but rough as a cat below”. To this Devil the neophyte is presented, and the faithful also give consecrated hosts which they have stolen from the churches where they have communicated.

Let us recapitulate their real beliefs.

• Critics call them Manichæans but they hated Mani! They considered him as anathema, so they were obviously not Manichæans at all. But they were dualists—which is what the Church means by Manichæan—with a heavenly father who ruled the world to come. The ruler of this world, though was a wicked lesser god. Angels were the good inhabitants of God’s good world.
• They considered themselves as the true Catholic church, believing that the whole of humanity would be saved by the grace of God, but they did not build churches and used the Greek word, proseuxai, usually translated as synagogue, for the places where they met. Their Church was a human church of the interior spirituality of its members. The word Church only applied to the whole body of believers.
• God had two sons, Satanael and Michael. The older son rebelled and became the evil spirit. He then made the lower heavens and the earth.
• Humanity is the outcome of the primal war in heaven when the rebellious angels were driven off and were imprisoned in terrestrial bodies. They were forced into a covenant as slaves to Satanael. Men are fallen angels, and the aim of life is to reverse the fall. God’s spiritual world is the antithesis of this material one. Death is no liberation. A person has to become a new Adam, like Christ, receive the gift of the spirit and become a Paraclete.
• Then God sent his younger son, Michael, to break Adam’s covenant with Satanael. Thus the evil spirit was vanquished and lost his “-el”, and his equal power, becoming Satan. Satan is the God of this world, the temporal and material world. He is the lord of the flesh which corrupts and makes people captives to desire and sin. Since this world is the world of the Devil, we actually live in Hell! There is only one way to go, and that is into the spirit, the world of Christ, which is why everyone must be saved eventually.
• Satan set up the whole evil religion of traditional Christianity with its gaudy and meretricious grand objects and churches, vestments and raiments, icons and images, sacraments and ceremonies, and monks and priests to impress simple humans as if God was an earthly king. Because Cathars regarded Christ to be physically with them in the form of their holy caste of Perfects, they rejected images of Christ on the cross and symbols like the cross itself. They renounced the church of the persecutors, the cross, earthly baptism—the cross was cursed rather than holy. They annoyed traditional Christians by breaking crosses when they saw them. They were against sacerdotalism and authority—and consequently the authorities regarded them all as subversive.
• They permitted outward conformity to the persecuting Church, holding that Christ would forgive it, in view of its wickedness.
• Christ is really the Greek for “good”, “chrestos”, the name given to good slaves. This ties in with a title of Cathar priests which was “Good Men”.
• They had two castes, the Credentes and the Perfecti. They held high moral standards and upheld scripture against the divines of the Churches with their commitment to matters of pleasure and politics. Christ was Michael, a life giving spirit and the bon homines (bonhommes) or good men, the Cathar Parfaits, were his ambassadors. They are instituted with the spiritual baptism by fire instituted by Christ. The Parfaits are presbyters who have been “consoled” and become a Paraclete in the flesh. Ordinary Cathar “hearers” were ready to worship them as Christs. The Parfaits were Christs and they presented themselves in the form of a cross. They would stand in prayer with their arms outstretched in the form of a cross while the audience of “hearers” adored the Christ in him. They supposedly laid flat before him, but it is more likely they bowed with their head to the ground in Islamic style. Catholics said they attended mass standing on their heads!
• The main rite, the “consolamentum”, was baptism with the spirit of the Paraclete or Comforter sent from God by Christ. The rite had been started by Christ and had been passed on by the bonhommes. It was the equivalent of the apostolic succession in Catholicism. This baptism of the spirit removed original sin, righted the effects of the Fall, prepared the soul for the return to heaven, and restored immortality. To be one of the consoled was already to be an angel, waiting temporarily in the flesh for its return to heaven, and the beatific vision of Christ. It is plain to see why these people, facing death as heretics and witches, burnt to death with such composure.
• The virgin was an allegory of the heavenly Jerusalem. That was where Christ had come from. So, there was no actual virgin birth.
• The Eucharist was not the body and blood of Christ because material things are the creation of the wicked god, and Christ is a spiritual creature. The Cathar Eucharist was a benediction of bread, but no one thought it was the body of Christ.
• They fasted Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays when they only took bread and water. The novitiate, like the Essene novitiate, was for several years—we can guess three—and they were on a permanent fast of bread and water. They included wine in the humble repast at easter, and on some other occasions fish. Only fish was allowed of flesh because fish were not considered to indulge in sexual procreation. Cheese, eggs and milk all have plain sexual connotations and were absolutely forbidden. Besides that, they had the same idea as the Pythagoreans, since they accepted metempsychosis—any animal might be the home of a human soul. The Perfects were not allowed to kill anything.
• A curious practice they had was to starve themselves to death when they felt the end of their life had come, after they had taken the “consolamentum”. This world was wicked, and once they had taken the “consolamentum”, elderly Cathars could see no point in prolonging life in it.
• They had a baptism only at the age of 30, like Jesus, but it was not a sacrament. They considered it “mere bath water”, denying it any magic purifying effect. In other words it was simply a symbolic outward purification meant to accompany the inner purification that commitment to Cathar belief was.
• They had no paid clergy or built churches, but met in private homes like the first Christians. Ordination was by the Elect of the congregation who had reached the perfection of Christ, and were called literally Christs and Perfects.
• Those who die unreconciled to God through Christ are reincarnated either as an animal or as a human—the wicked soul will seek any refuge it can.
• Cathars also repudiated marriage. They were wedded to their Church, but “Croyants” could marry, though it was not encouraged. Anything in the Gospel and the Apostle that seemed to approve of marriage was considered a reference to Christ and the Church, which makes sense as a Christian adaptation of the marriage of God to Israel, that it had been for the Essenes. The Christian Church had become the new Israel, and God had acted through Christ.

These are the beliefs that the Catholic Church mocked as the concept of Devil worship, considered to have been just a reversal of Christian rites and practices:

1. Whereas God imposed divine law, the Devil demanded adherence to a pact.
2. Where Christians showed reverence to God by kneeling, witches paid homage to the Devil by standing on their heads.
3. The sacraments in the Catholic Church became excrements in the Devil’s church.
4. Communion was parodied by the Black Mass.
5. Christian prayers could be used to work evil by being recited backwards.
6. The eucharist bread or host was imitated in the Devil’s service by a turnip.
7. The baptismal character or stigmata of the mysteries was parodied by the Devil’s mark impressed upon the witch’s body by the claw of the Devil’s left hand.
8. Whereas saints had the gift of tears, witches were said to be incapable of shedding tears.

This is nearly all propaganda or distortion—Devil worship was a simple parody of Christianity. Julio Caro Baroja writes:

The Devil causes churches and altars to appear with music… and Devils decked out as saints. The dignitaries reach rank of bishop, and sub-deacons, deacons and priests serve Mass. Candles and incense are used for the service and water is sprinkled from a thurifer. There is an offertory, a sermon, a blessing over the equivalents of bread and wine… So that nothing should be missing there are even false martyrs in the organization.

The signing of a contract is utterly unbelievable for the Pagan Nature religion that Murray thought witchcraft was. Signing a contract cannot be part of a primitive ceremony. Primitive people cannot read and write, and nor could poor people at this time, so they must have signed the contract with an arbitrary mark. It does not appear in the witch trial records until the later cases and shows the influence of the examiners’ presumptions. The cautionary tale of Dr Faustus was by then well known, and the signing of a pact with the Devil became a standard question, inviting some affirmative answers. Moreover, the idea that clandestine organizations would have such a practice seems incredible.

Because of the parody of Catholic ritual that the Cathars seem to have made at their festivals—sort of satirical buffoonery of the Church—Murray persuaded herself that the witches worshipped the neolithic horned god. This is vanishingly likely. There is a long gap in history when the evidence of the practice is scarce, and the association with the horned god, Pan, the ancient god of fertility in the countryside, seems to have been by the Church, not the witches or heretics.

If we are to believe the evidence, witches agreed their god was the Devil. The Catholics were in a sense right in saying that Satan was the Cathar God because he was the God of this world, in their cosmogony. Ancient dualists could agree the Devil was the God of the World without implying a desire to worship him. For the examiners, the admission that Satan was the God of the World was sufficient. That is the Christian propaganda and calumny which led to the idea of Satanism, and that witches worshipped Satan.

The Secret Cult

What was witchcraft? The prevailing, almost universal, opinion of those who at length rose against the persecution, and of the nineteenth century writers on witchcraft, was that the cult and all the details alleged about it were a creation of popular credulity and the imagination of monks. The secret meetings or Sabbaths were thought to have been as fictitious as the ride through the air on a greased broomstick. The “Devil” who is put as the central object of the cult was declared a fiction. The witches’ mark, the orgies, the homage, and all the rest were regarded as wholly imaginary.

Inquisitors wrote their manuals of these things, and the unfortunate men and women confessed whatever they willed in order to put an end to the diabolical tortures, administered by the agents of the loving Christian God. Thousands of victims of the witch hunters were good Christians, driven by torture to confess anything that the torturer wanted. So early as the eleventh century, Anselm could write of the French, “Through error coupled with cruelty, many truly Catholic people had been killed in the past”. Suicide was common amongst them. Remy, the French judge, says that he knew fifteen cases of suicide in one year. Death for witchcraft was preferable to prolonged torment, and few were ever acquitted, but can the whole of the details be ascribed to imagination, fear, hysteria, or sex obsession?

Torture was not used in England. A fiendish witch finder like Hopkins had his own irregular way of torturing the women he suspected, but after arrest and during trial they were questioned without torture, and many tell the same story as the tortured witches of the continent. Margaret Murray deals especially with English witches, and they often gloried in their religion. Rose Hallybread and Rebecca West “died very stubborn and refractory, without any remorse or seeming terror of conscience for their abominable witchcraft”. At Northampton, a mother and daughter were led together to the scaffold. A priest exhorted them to pray, and “they both set up a loud laughter”, says an eyewitness, “calling for the Devil to come and help them”, and deriding Christianity. The plain truth is that they were convinced they were going to a better place! Cathars considered the world to be hell. Pagans did not. Bodin says:

Satan promises that they shall be so happy after this life that it prevents their repenting and they die obstinate in their wickedness.

Nor are all the testimonies to witchcraft merely the statements of prisoners. There was a remarkable case at Lille in 1661. A home for poor and ignorant girls was presided over by a Mme Bourignon, a pious Christian, and she was horrified to discover that thirty two of the girls were witches. They explained that they had been dedicated in the religion as children and would not abandon it and become Christians. A young woman of twenty two whom she tried to convert, said:

No, I will not be other than I am: I find too much content in my condition.

A common observation of the less fanatical and sometimes distressed inquisitors was that many witches “blasphemed” to the end and took pride in their religion. Some sought death with equanimity and, had they been Christians facing the Romans, would have been canonised. Most of the Christian saints are fictitious anyway, and the stories of their martyrdom were taken from the bravery of Pagan martyrs facing Christian torture, of which there were many times more than persecuted Christians. Such bravery in the face of torture and death is testimony to a deeply held belief in an afterlife, like that of the Moslem martyrs today.

It is easy even for seemingly liberal writers to sound callous about the persecution of witches. Pennethorne Hughes ( Witchcraft ) writes:

Witches often appeared to resist appalling tortures in a state of some sort of hyperanaesthesia which made them insusceptible to pain. Whether this was due to a psychic conditions or physical preparations, it at all events argues against technical innocence.

Making preparations to ease the awful ordeal that they faced, for this writer, shows they were not technically innocent. Were the completely innocent to expect God to stop the injustice at the last minute? It is the torturer in him speaking! Anyone facing the certain prospect of being burnt alive, a process that might take an hour before unconsciousness and death intervenes, would take an anaesthetic or better still a deadly poison before the faggots were lit, assuming they had friends able to supply it. Such a let out would have been available to few people, mainly those with friends in high places. Most faced the torture and being burnt alive out of the conviction that the Devil was doing its worst, and they would soon have eternal bliss.

De l’Ancre, the famous French lawyer, inquisitor and judge of the seventeenth century, was sent to exterminate the heretical cult in the Pays de Labourd. He called them “witches”, and making a close study of the ones he tried, he wrote books about them. Instead of finding the women terrorized by torture into confessing anything that the examiners wanted them to admit, he notes with great surprise and perplexity that they tell a consistent story, deliberately and even joyfully adhere to it, and unquestionably have a real religion. McCabe gives his translation of the old French:

A distinguished witch tells us that she has always believed that witchcraft is the best religion.

Jeanne Dibasson, twenty nine years old, tells us that the Sabbath is the true Paradise where there is more pleasure than one can express. Those who went there found the time too short because of the pleasure and happiness they enjoyed, so that they left with infinite regret and longed for the time when they could go again.

Marie de la Ralde, twenty eight years old, a beautiful young woman, deposes that she takes special pleasure in going to the Sabbath… as to a wedding, not so much for the liberty and license they have together (which, from modesty, she says she has never done or seen done) but because the Devil kept their hearts and will so attached that it was hardly possible for any other desire to enter… She went there with much more pleasure than to Mass, for the Devil gave them to understand that he was the real God, and that the joy which the witches had at the Sabbath was but the prelude of much greater glory.

There are witches so devoted to his diabolical service that no torture or torment can surprise them, and they say that they go to a real martyrdom and to death for love of him as gaily as they would go to a festival or a public rejoicing. When they are arrested, they do not weep or shed a single tear, either over their false martyrdom or the torture, and the scaffold is to them so pleasant that some of them are in a hurry to be executed, and they joyously endure the trial, they are in such a hurry to be with the Devil.

An abundance of cases show the witch defiantly meeting her end refusing to deny her creed, whereas a Christian tortured into momentary “confessions” would pray for mercy and repentance. The reality of witchcraft was an organized anti-Christian religion, and the main features of the cult seem consistent in different countries, despite some variations. The religion seems to be essentially monotheistic. Christian clerks or judges write that its central deity is “the Devil”. The witches insist that this being is “the true god”. He is their lord, master and prince, and they disdain Christianity. Such testimony is not wrung from terrorized witnesses, but it will be misreported in the terms used, the assumption being that their God is the Devil, rather than any deduction from honest inquiry. J McCabe does not think it had to do with ancient Paganism. Catharism is more likely than any ancient Pagan cult.

The God of the Witches

In de l’Ancre’s descriptions, the god of the witches seems to take on different forms, but often he seems lifeless, described as like a tree trunk, and without arms, and without feet but with a frightful face. Surely this is an idol. But some described the god as moving, so, it seems that there was both an idol and a master of ceremonies, who were confused. Since some described the grand master as being thrown into a fire and burnt to a powder, it seems they actually burnt an effigy, presumably the idol. S Hildegard of Bingen, a Catholic mystic, had a vision of Satan as “a beast with monstrous, coal black head, flaming eyes, ass’s ears, and a gaping iron fanged maw”. One wonders whether she had attended any heretical conventicles and witnessed the satanic effigy that represented the Catholic Church. Much of what she wrote took her to the fringe of heresy if not beyond its bounds. The confessions have the witches themselves using the words “Devil” and “Satan”, the accounts saying that “the Devil” was the real God. Others said “the Devil” looked like a large goat with various numbers of horns, sometimes three or five with the center one alight.

Estébene de Cambrue, of the parish of Amou, a woman twenty-five years of age, said the place of the grand convocation was generally called the “Lanne de Bouc”—the goat’s heath [†]Bout de l’An. The witch celebrations have been linked with Pagan occasions such as Samhain and Beltane, these being the main divisions of the ancient year. Traditionally bonfires were lit at both of these festivals since they were related to the sun, but the tradition came to be particularly associated with Samhain or Summer’s end. The tradition in Britain has been transferred to Guy Fawkes’ night, but not everywhere. In Northern Ireland burning an effigy of the Catholic Guy Fawkes was considered in modern times as too provocative to the Catholic minority, and the Guy Fawkes’ bonfires were transferred to Halloween (All Saints Eve) which had been the Catholic Church’s response to the ancient Pagan festival of Samhain.

Interesting in this context, though, is that the tradition in Guernsey, in the English Channel Islands, where French continued to be spoken, is that bonfire night had no reference to Guy Fawkes at all but was called “Boudlo”, a slurring of “Bout de l’An”, in French, the “End of the Year”, which is what Samhain was. Bout de l’An has such a curious echo of Lanne de Bouc that one wonders whether there is a deliberately punning connexion here.. Or is it the god’s heath? Bouc, in French, is goat, but the word “bouca”, is puck or bog, a god! Has this myth in France that the witches worshipped a goat come from a misunderstanding, or has the use of “bouc” for a goat itself come from the goat being a god?

To the witches this so-called Devil was God, manifest and incarnate. They adored him on their knees, they addressed their prayers to him, they offered thanks to him as the giver of food and the necessities of life, they dedicated their children to him. The examiner of Marian Grant of Aberdeen, 1596, puts down “the Devil whom thou calls thy god… caused thou worship him on thy knees as thy lord”. Pierronne, a follower of Joan of Arc, was burnt to death by fire as a witch. She persisted to the end in her statement, which she made on oath, that God appeared to her in human form and spoke to her as friend to friend, and that the last time she had seen him he was clothed in a scarlet cap and a long white robe.

Margaret Murray in The God of the Witches, gives many examples. Danaeus wrote in 1575 that “the witches acknowledge the Devil for their god, call upon him, pray to him, and trust in him”, and that when they go to the Sabbath “they repeat the oath which they have given unto him in acknowledging him to be their God”. De l’Ancre, the Inquisitor, wrote in 1613 that there was “a great Devil, who is the master of all, whom they all adore”. In Orleans in 1614, “they say to the Devil, we recognise you as our Master, our God, our Creator”. At Edmonton in 1621, Elizabeth Sawyer confessed that “he charged me to pray no more to Jesus Christ, but to him the Devil”.

In Lancashire in 1633, Margaret Johnson, “met a spirit or Devil in a suit of black tied about with silk points”. He instructed her to call him Mamilion, “and in all her talk and conference she called the said Mamilion her god”. Gaule, making a general statement about witch-beliefs and practices in 1646, says that the witches “promise to take him for their God, worship, invoke, obey him”. Of the Essex and Suffolk witches, whose trials made such a stir in 1646, Rebecca West “confessed that her mother prayed constantly (and as the world thought, very seriously) but she said it was to the Devil, using these words, Oh my God, my God, meaning him and not the Lord”. Ellen Greenleife also confessed that when she prayed “she prayed to the Devil and not to God”. Widow Coman “did acknowledge that she had made an agreement with him and that he was her Master and sat at the right hand of God”.

In 1673, at Newcastle-on-Tyne, Ann Armstrong testified that she had heard Ann Baites “calling him sometimes her protector, and other sometimes her blessed saviour”, and that “he was their protector, which they called their God”. The Salem witch, Mary Osgood, in 1692, said that “the Devil told her he was her God, and that she should serve and worship him”. Agnes Wobster, one of the Aberdeen witches, tried in 1597, was accused of having dealings with “Satan whom thou callest thy God”. The reports are not direct and verbatim, so words have been put into the unfortunates’ mouths. They called their leader or God “Christsonday”. It is recorded of Marian Grant:

Christsonday bade thee call him Lord, and caused thee to worship him on thy knees as thy Lord.

It is recorded of Andro (Andrew) Man:

The Devil thy master, whom thou callest Christsonday and supposest to be an angel and God’s godson… Christsonday is the goodman and has all power under God.

Christsonday came to him in the likeness of a fair angel and clad in white clothes, and said that he was an angel, and that he should put his trust in him and call him Lord and King…

Not God’s godson but simply God’s son, but he is the “goodman” (bonhomme). Interestingly, in Shetland, a minister of the church was called a “Boniman”. Murray suggests, plausibly in Cathar but not Pagan terms, “Christsonday” is a confusion of Christus Filius Dei, in which Latin “Dei” seems to have been retained as the proper name of God. Christ who is Filius Dei, properly “son of God”, becomes “son Dei” by worshippers imperfectly schooled in the Latin. It became customary to call an honest man “goodman” or “goodhusband”, and his wife “goodwife”, but was this merely politeness or was it a fashion taken from someone else’s common usage—the heretics, respected for their honesty? The word “goodwife” was abbreviated and used pejoratively as “goodie” and seems to have particularly then meant a witch, or a shrewish wife who was like a witch. The Salem witches were commonly called “Goodie” this and “Goodie” that. The Goodwife of Laggan was a Scottish witch of the seventeenth century who was torn to pieces by a witch hunter’s hounds.

The position of the Devil as the instructor of the witches is to be found in most of the trials in Great Britain. Healing had also been proscribed by the Church, whose clerics thought the will of God should not be denied. People became diseased by losing God’s protection from the Devils by being sinful. So, the role of healers had to be taken by those who considered the Catholic Church as devilish—the heretics.

The Cathars saw the human body, being material, as the Devil’s and not the good God’s at all. If the body was failing, then it was the Devil’s will, not God’s. So, they were ready to try to defy the Devil by restoring the body when they could, so that the soul within it could decide its own fate. The evidence shows that much of the sorcery was the use of herbs and stones in healing, the very things that the Essenes and primitive Christians were known for, and the Cathars too. Murray distinguishes operative witchcraft and ritual witchcraft. Operative witchcraft was the application and extension of the healings skills of the Cathars. Alison Peirson (1588) learnt her craft from William Simpson, her cousin, who “lived among the fairy folk:”

The said Mr Williame told her of every sickness and what herbs she should take to cure them, and how she should use them, and gives her his direction at all times.

Interestingly, Jonet Stewart, in 1597, learned her witchcraft from an Italian stranger called Mr John Damiet. Plainly Italians had migrated to Scotland, and they could have been Vaudois refugees. The recorder entered for Jonet Rendall, an Orkney witch (1629), that “the devil appeared to you, whom ye called Walliman, clad in white clothes with a white head and a gray beard, and said to you he should learn you to win alms by healing folk”. Cooper says:

He delivers unto his proselyte, and so to the rest, the rules of his art, instructing them in the manner of hurting and helping, and acquainting them with such medicines and poisons as are usual hereunto.

The Yorkshire witch, Alice Huson, 1664, stated that the Devil “appeared like a black man upon a black horse, with cloven feet; and then I fell down, and did worship him upon my knees”. Stearne says that she “confessed the Devil came to her in the likeness of a man in blackish clothing, but had cloven feet”. John Walsh of Dorsetshire, 1566, described the Devil, whom he called his familiar, as “sometimes like a man in all proportions, saving that he had cloven feet”. Both Cathars and Vaudois reportedly wore shoes with some peculiar feature. Forked shoes were sometimes fashionable, so the detail is not impossible, but whether the often repeated evidence of cloven feet is a response to prompting, to prove the witches” god was the Devil, or whether they wore peculiar shoes is uncertain. The skeptic has to blame the enthusiasm of the Christian examiners to prove it all true, with circumstantial evidence suporting it.

The Catholic inquisitors fastened on the charge of carnal intercourse with the Devil. Commonly the witches, the untortured English witches as well as the continental, confess that they copulated with the Devil, at any period after the age of twelve. Was this man a super stud? Murray thinks an artificial phallus was used, its coldness being described. Such things are known in older phallic religions, where women came to the priests to be deflowered.

Yet, Murray chooses to call this part of the solemnity “the fertility rites” and, if she is right, it was perhaps a continuation of the Pagan fertility rites. The God of the Witches had a tail. “Tail” is of course a popular euphemism for a phallus. The biblical Behemoth was a phallic god, being rendered in Latin as “Testiculus”.

Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.

Job 40:16-17

The “tail like a cedar” was its phallus. The sinews “of his stones” (testiculorum, in Latin) clearly shows that a literal tail was not meant. Traditional Christian propagandists were keen to tarnish the witches with such a phallic worship, but it seems unlikely, and Murray has missed the real clues. The explanation of the contradictions might be found in the dual morality that Catholics accused the Cathars of, to match their two opposing gods. Perhaps, Parfaits did not indulge in the nocturnal orgies, but Croyants did. Maybe, but the contradiction between the propriety in some cases and the impropriety in others cannot be easily accepted when we know the witch hunters wanted to discredit the witches.

People who considered the material world to be the kingdom of the Devil could easily take it that any physical sexual act in the Devil’s world amounted to copulation with the Devil. Chastity was their ideal, and even though they did not condemn their fellow religionists who did practice worldly pleasures, as traditional Christians were wont to do, they considered it as sincerely wicked, and something that they would eventually transcend, even if it were in another life.

The witch trials do not reveal any objective interest in sex by witches, whether at sabbats or otherwise, but a prurient interest in it by the Catholic inquisitors and the Protestant examiners. Even the Cathar church declared it was wrong to give the trapped soul pleasure within its prison of a body, by indulging it with pleasures like sex, but the Cathars accepted that it was natural, because it was within the material domain of Satan. The traditional Christian Church encouraged sexual repression, notably among its ascetic monks like the Dominican inquisitors. Suddenly, these judges were in a position to indulge in sexual fantasy with the approval of the authorities.

If the records were sexual fantasy, could it all have been in the imagination of the judges? The confessions were remarkably uniform across Europe, and Christians take it that this is evidence of a genuine Europe wide cult. More likely, it was conditioned by the set of questions that inquisitors themselves devised and published or circulated to each other. The inquisitors came to have their own preconceived ideas of the practice of witches, and their questions were not in any way subtly designed to reveal these practices. The recorder recorded the answers to standard questions in the form of statements by the poor tortured witches. Even those who were not tortured were possibly willing to affrm whatever the examiners said in the hope of leniency.

The questions will have grown on the basis of earlier interrogations in which there would have been some enforced confessions, so that they would contain elements that were actually based on the witch practice, if it were a genuine heresy. It is the complex that emerged from the continuing interrogations that led to a set of questions that invited seemingly consistent answers by terrified and perhaps tortured victims. So, as in many problems associated with the fringes of Christianity, it is hard to distinguish the truth from the accretions, but naked cavorting in the open air in central European winters seem most unlikely, whatever apologists say about drugs and drink.

Montague Summers, a former Catholic priest, whose belief in the witch cult obsessed him, in 1946 (Witchcraft and Black Magic) described the Malleus Maleficarum as a noble treatise and a very great and wise book, showing that Christians still admire the manifest insanities of deranged Dominicans even in modern times. This mad ex-priest quotes the French inquisitor Remy (Remigius) as saying about the Devil winning witches:

For such as one given to their lusts and to love, he wins by offering them the hope of gaining their desires: or if they are bowed under the load of daily poverty, he allures them by some large and ample promise of riches: or he tempts them by showing them the means of avenging themselves when they have been angered by some injury or hurt received: in short, by whatever other corruption or luxury they have been deprived, he draws them into his power, and holds them, as it were bound to him.

It is an argument that can apply to any priest or evangelist trying to make a convert to their own brand of Christianity. Whatever their concern in life, the evangelist will offer them something better in Christian life. If someone is given over to lust and they approach the evangelist, he will offer to cure it and replace it with marriage to Christ. Their desire was to overcome an obsession, and the evangelist offers a way of achieving it. With a little ambiguity of wording, this is what Remy said the witches’ Devil did. The Catholic judge will express it with the slant that suits his task, but there is no real way of being sure that the witch Devil was not a Cathar Parfait offering the same sort of spiritual salvation as the Catholic. The difference is that the Catholic one is achieved by magical sacraments whereas the Cathar one was by living a pure life. One is by Faith and the other by Works.

Remy also says that the witch master would use threats against his converts. That does not seem unlikely. The Catholic Church threatened those, whose spiritual care they claimed to ensure but were disobedient, with eternal incineration, and this at a time when people believed it because the Church made sure they were kept superstitious. The witches had a much more real reason to maintain a strict discipline—a lapse in it would lead to them being burnt in real life, not merely in a fancied life after death.

The Coven and Garter

The local unit of the witch cult was a group of thirteen men and women, or twelve and a leader, called a “coven”, from the same root ( Old French, “convenir”, to come together ) as “convene” and “convention”, and even “covenant”. The word “convent” from the thirteenth century has specifically meant the company of twelve people with a master, like Christ and the apostles. Since the English nobles then spoke French, the word modified to “couvent”, or “covent” in the English dialect, still preserved in the names of the city of Coventry, and the London district of Covent Garden. The word “coven” appears in the Scottish witch trials of the seventeeth century, but plainly has the same root and meaning.

The word “coven” also relates to “conventicle” which meant a small assembly, but had attached to it the idea of a heretical assembly. It was therefore used of the Cathars and was still being used of the Protestant reformers four hundred years later. The heretical “conventicles” might have been the later “covens” of the witches.

The structure of the coven is plainly solar. The sun has always had its twelve constellations. The Danish hero, Hrolf, had his twelve berserks. Romulus, who was both king and Incarnate God, had his twelve lictors, a coven of thirteen men. Odin had his twelve Aesir. King Arthur first had twelve knights of the Round Table, then twenty four. Incidentally, every suit in a pack of cards has a king and twelve others in his court, making a coven. The coven of the legendary Robin Hood was twelve men and one woman. Gilles de Rais (1440) had eleven men and two women. Bessie Dunlop (1567) spoke of five men and eight women, and in Kinrossshire (1662) one man and twelve women formed the coven.

The Goodman or Goodfellow, called the Devil by the Christian recorders, was the head of the coven. The coven leader had an assistant, the Officer or Summoner, who helped to give notice of meetings. They represented the Goodman in his absence, and seems to have succeeded to the mastership when the master died. There were no elections, so that the succession must have been by nomination. Heads of the local groups also were appointed. There was besides a woman-member called in Scotland the “Maiden”. Women or men could hold any position except for the Maiden which was necessarily a woman. To any member of the coven might be deputed the task of Summoner. A musician was another important member of coven.

A cord as a lace, a “point”, or in the cap was an ordinary part of clothing, but as a garter, point or band among the witches seemed an important insignia, often mentioned in the descriptions of the Devil’s costume. Elizabeth Clarke said the Devil appeared “in the shape of a proper gentleman, with a laced band, having the whole proportion of a man”. The Somerset witches, 1664, saw among other descriptions “a man in black clothes, with a little band” or “a little Man in black clothes with a little band”. The usual place to carry it on the person was round the leg where it served as a garter. Here is the evolved or hidden form of the Kushti—the cord of piety introduced by the Indo-Europeans—of the Cathars. It seems that when a witch was in danger of betraying the coven, they were strangled or hung themselves by their own Kushti. Gilles de Rais, in contempt of the ecclesiastical court trying him on a charge of witchcraft, said he “would rather be hanged in a lace than submit to their jurisdiction”. The warlock Playfair, in 1597, was actually found strangled in his prison at Dalkeith with the “point” of his breeches tied round his neck, and there are other examples. Plainly it was considered the noble thing to do.

The tradition of the foundation of the knightly Order of the Garter in the reign of Edward III (1327-1377) is that a lady, supposedly the Fair Maid of Kent or the Countess of Salisbury, dropped her garter while dancing with the king. However, the people of Ashperton, in Herefordshire, say that the woman who lost her garter in this incident was Katherine Grandison, a woman of that town. The king picked up the garter, fastened it on his own leg with the mysterious words, Honi soit qui mal y pense—“shame to those who think evil of it”—and thereafter founded, with this as its motto, the Order of the Garter for twenty-six knights, the highest of all knightly Orders in Europe (1347).

What was so significant about this garter that anyone should think it evil, and that the king was willing to wear it in apparent defiance? The Reader’s Digest, Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain avers that the garter was the badge of a witch, and the king was saving the girl from being killed as one. “Maid” is just an unmarried young woman but, according to Margaret Murray (The Witch Cult in Western Europe), it is a rank in a coven. Actually the Fair Maid of Kent was an heretic. She was a Cathar, and the “garter” was her Kushti lace or cord. She therefore stood in danger from the Church which had been persecuting Cathars for a century, but witch hunting had hardly begun. By wearing the garter, the king was announcing his protectorship over the Cathars.

The order consisted of twelve knights for the King and twelve for the Prince of Wales, twenty-six members, or two covens. Froissart wrote:

The King told them it should prove an excellent expedient for the uniting not only of his subjects one with another, but all Foreigners conjunctively with them in the Bonds of Amity and Peace.

The unity of foreigners and English was perhaps needed because of the Cathar refugees in England, and the subjects one with another could have reflected the religious differences of Catholics and Cathars. Edward was the Duke of Aquitaine, the region of France that reaches Languedoc, and he fought a long campaign against the French kings, generally succeeding in battle but being too strapped for cash to push home his advantage and take over the French throne. He defied the pope who wanted to call a peace. Edward could have been fighting a war against the French in revenge for the Cathar Crusade. He set up the Order of the Garter in imitation of Arthur’s Round Table, another solar coven. The Arthurian romances might have been composed by troubadours—who are always associated with the Cathar heresy—with their tradition of selfless love, coming into contact with the traditions of Britain and Brittany, and the poets of northern France who had been writing long chansons de geste.

Further Reading

• More on the Millennium, when Christ failed to return, and notions of heresy began to take hold in the West
• More on the persecution of heretics
• More on documents pertaining to heresy
• More on the Inquisition, and the Spanish Inquisition
• More on witchcraft as heresy

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