Christian Heresy
Witchcraft: Broom, Sabbaths, Familiars, and Dancing in Circles
Abstract
Ideology… is… a way of thinking, speaking, experiencing.Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, 1980)
© Dr M D Magee and Saviour Shirlie
Contents Updated:Thursday, 12 December 2002
Sabbaths
Why would a Pagan people use a Semitic word for their festivals? Christian “scholarly authorities” have tried various ways of explaining away the use of the word “sabbath” for the witch meetings. Pennethorne Hughes tells us the authorities agree the word has nothing to do with the Hebrew word “sabbath”. What their evidence for being so sure of this is not given. Christians always accept the word of “authority” but “authority” might not want to tell the truth.
The notion of sabbaths already existed in Assyria, and it came with the Persian colonists from the east into Yehud. Sabbaths were special days when work was forbidden. They were related to the lunar cycle and so came to be every seven days, but the notion of some special occasion was not lost and the Jews had sabbath years even. It seems that the notion of sabbath as a special festival has come through the dualist tradition and been preserved in the witchcraft tradition. Again it is a likely link between Catharism and witchcraft.
Nor is sabbat the only un-Pagan word used of them. In 1477, the inquisitor, Etienne Hugonot, heard the case of a woman denounced by another witch for attending a sabbat. After many denials and prolongued torture, she confessed to attending a “synagogue!” It is not uncommon:
Satan calleth them together into a devilish synagogue, that he may understand of them how well and diligently they have fulfilled their office…Danaeus (1575)
Les Sorciers estans assemblez en leur Synagogue adorent premierement Satan…Boguet (1589)
The hags and witches, who are people of a sordid and base condition, are the first that come to adore the Prince of the Synagogue, who is Lucifer’s lieutenant.Magdalene de Demandouls (1610)
The meat they ordinarily eat is the flesh of young children, which they cook and make ready in the Synagogue.Michaelis (1613)
The Cathars characterized the Catholic Church as the synagogue of Satan, matching their refusal to use the word “Church” except for the body of true believers, and their use of “synagogue” otherwise.
The great assemblies or sabbaths were, Murray says, at the Pagan festival times in the spring and autumn. But no “sabbath” like that of the witches appears in Teutonic mythology, though it seems similar to several Roman festivals like the Liberalia, the Floralia and the Bacchanalia. The witches’ sabbath appears in Italy at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and then in the south of France.
Murray thinks that there was a sacrifice of the head witch every seven years, but it seems more likely that there was an annual new year ceremony in which some religious drama represents the death of the Old and the birth of the New, the head witch seemingly dying, then appearing reborn. This is, after all, the Christian story. The witch god appeared as a man with two faces, in Italy, where he was called Janus or Dianus, in Southern France, and in the English Midlands. Such a two faced God could be a representation of dualism, but it is certainly a representation of the change of old to new year, whence the name of our month January.
The Walpurgis Night of the German witches, was held on the eve of 1 May, and another was held on the eve of 1 November, All Hallows Eve. These are about the time of the celebration of the New Year in the Zoroastrian and Jewish religions—the equinoxes—but displaced by a few weeks. Later, Murray says, a midsummer sabbath and one at Christmas were added, and in places there were other festivals on the Christian feast days. Boguet says that the witches kept all the Christian festivals. De l’Ancre, when giving a general account of the ceremonies, says that the witches of the Basses-Pyrénées went to their assemblies at Easter and other solemn Christian festivals, and that their chief night was that of S John the Baptist. Lancashire witches (1613 and 1633) kept Good Friday. Lesser meetings were held for business purposes.
Night time festivals, to be practical, have to be held at the full moon, so that equinoctial festivals held at night might have been held at the first full moon following the equinox. That is just when the Jewish Passover was held.
Some Descriptions of the Sabbats
The ritual of the sabbath is so consistently given by the witches everywhere that we can confidently describe it. Arno Runeberg, in Witches, Demons and Fertility Magic (1947), noted that not all of the descriptions of the witches’ gatherings were intrinsically fantastic. Some sounded like a board meeting or a trades union meeting, the members travelling there by horse or on foot and not by flight, with someone in the chair, and each bringing some normal drink and victuals. The Chairman is a normal man, albeit with some sign of office, and the formal proceedings are concluded with a party. Descriptions with this as the core are evidently more or less fantastically embellished by the accused ones in their trials, but again not in inexplicable ways, thus, the members were perhaps masked as animals, and that the partying involved some sort of psychedelic drug. Anyway, some witnesses tell a plausible story that can reasonably be relied on.
Jules Michelet, in Sorcery (1862), says the dances of the sabbat in the context of witchcraft were first mentioned in a witch trial at Toulouse in 1353. In 1459, Robinet de Vaulx, who had lived the life of a hermit in Burgundy, was arrested, brought to a trial at Langres, and burnt. He confessed to witchcraft—then, Vauderie, or properly Vaulderie, meant witchcraft—and named names, some of whom were burnt after they had confessed. They met at a fountain in a wood near Arras. They got there by foot, but they also anointed a wooden rod with an ointment given to them by “the Devil”, also rubbing it on the palms of their hands, and, placing the rod between their legs, they quickly arrived at the place of assembly. They found there a multitude of people, of both sexes, and of all estates and ranks, even wealthy burghers and nobles, ordinary ecclesiastics, bishops and even cardinals. They found tables already spread, covered with all sorts of meats, and abundance of wines. The Devil presided, usually in the form of a goat, “with the tail of an ape” [apes do not have tails], and a human countenance. Each paid homage to him, and then kissed him “on the posteriors”. The worshippers held burning torches in their hands. They trampled on the cross, and spit upon it, then seated themselves at the tables, ate and drank sufficiently, and rose to hold promiscuous intercourse, including with the demon. The devil preached to them not to go to church, hear mass, touch holy water, or be Christians. Then they dispersed.
The fear of witchcraft spread over Italy, France, and Germany. Inquisitors worked up witchcraft into a system in this period, writing their manuals directed against it. The friar and inquisitor of Switzerland, John Nider, devoted a book of his Formicarium to witchcraft there, but did not mention any witches’ sabbath. Early in 1489, Ulric Molitor published another manual called De Pythonicis Mulieribus, and then the Malleus Maleficarum, the work of the inquisitors for Germany, appeared. Even the Malleus Maleficarum makes no allusions to a witches’ sabbath. Sabbaths were being mentioned, but they were not picked up by the inquisitors in the teutonic countries.
About a century later, Bodin, a Frenchman, published a new textbook on witchcraft (1580), and now the witches’ sabbath is described fully. Another Frenchman, Pierre de l’Ancre, a judge in the parliament of Bordeaux, was commissioned in 1609 to proceed against witches in Labourd, in the Basque provinces, notorious for witchcraft and immorality. He blamed it all on the local women who ate too many apples and, as a consequence, habitually acted like Eve! After four months, de Lancre, returned to Bordeaux and took to studying witchcraft, eventually writing a new treatise on it (1612).
The accounts show that some quiet spot in the neighbourhood, a hill, a wood or an ancient stone monument was appointed for the meeting, and in the dead of night the witches found their way to it, generally on foot, as it was not usually far away, but often on horse or ass. In 1592, Agnes Sampson acknowledged that she rode to the meeting at the church of North Berwick on a pillion behind her son-in-law, John Couper. The Lancashire and Swedish witches were on horses the same. Rich Alsatian witches went in carriages or waggons, the poorer ones “rode on sticks”, perhaps a wattle litter or sled pulled by a goat, or walked. This might be what the women who “confess” that they had ridden on broomsticks lubricated with ointment of babies’ fat meant. The runners of the rough sled were anointed with tallow or beeswax. The hour of assembly was midnight, and the festival usually lasted until near dawn.
Broomsticks
Witches possibly flew to their sabbats in the same sense that we say today, “I am late, I must fly”, deliberately misunderstood by the inquisitors. They were eager to get to them because they found them joyful and inspiring occasions. Some supposedly flew on broomsticks, but the old peasant tradition was for the woman of the house to leave her broom by the door or up the chimney when she was out to show she was not in. These broomsticks were possibly just staves taken, as staves usually were, for safety as a weapon, and for support on the rough tracks, and for vaulting over muddy puddles and narrow streams by those having to walk.
Even so… a woman called Antoine Rose, a witch of Savoy, tortured and tried in 1477, confessed the first time she was taken to the synagogue, she saw many men and women enjoying themselves and dancing backwards. The Devil, whose name was Robinet, was a dark man who spoke in a hoarse voice. Kissing Robinet’s foot in homage, she renounced God and the Christian faith. He put his mark on her, on the little finger of her left hand, and gave her a stick, 18 inches long, and a pot of ointment. She used to smear the ointment on the stick, put it between her legs and say, “Go, in the name of the Devil, go!” At once she would be carried though the air to the synagogue. The pictures of witches riding on a besom are therefore a polite interpretation of the truth.
The thirteenth century Stephen of Bourbon wrote that the “good women” rode on sticks but that the “evil women” rode on wolves. The broom “stick” was evidently used as an artificial penis to insert the ointment into the vagina for better absorption into the blood, speeding up the psychedelia. The supposed sexual penetration of the witch master might have been the same. His cold hard member administered a psychedic ointment which gave the witches hallucinations. The Errores Gazariorum (Errors of the Cathars) of 1450 said that a stick with flying ointment was presented to all new witches after offering the kiss of shame. Ulrich Molitor, writing in 1489, was less convinced and believed that:
During sleep as well as during the waking state, devils can produce impressions so vivid that men believe they see or act in actuality.
Reginald Scot, using the work of Bodin, writes in his book, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, published in 1584:
At these magical assemblies, the witches never failed to dance, and in their dance they sing these words, “Har, har, divell divell, dance here, dance here, plaie here, plaie here, sabbath, sabbath”. And whiles they sing and dance, every one hath a broom in her hand, and holdeth it up aloft.
Jean Bodin had earlier seen a jumping dance, in which the witches seemed to be riding on staves. The call of “Har, Har” takes us to the Norse God Odin, “har” being the word for “high”, and therefore signifying the high god. Interestingly, a wall painting from the twelfth century in Schleswig Cathedral (Germany) shows the Norse deity Frigg riding her staff. In Norse mythology, Odin led a band of women, called the Valkyries, through the skies. They were said, perhaps by Christians, to be collecting the souls of the dead. In Germany, the goddess Holda or Holle led the Wild Hunt. These facets might have produced the image of witches riding broomsticks through the air. In Medieval Europe, the goddess Diana was the leader of the Wild Hunt:
It is also not to be omitted that some wicked women, perverted by the Devil, seduced by illusions and phantasm of demons, believe and profess themselves in the hours of the night to ride upon certain beasts with Diana, the goddess of pagans, and an innumerable multitude of women, and in the silence of the dead of the night to traverse great spaces of earth, and to obey her commands as of their mistress, and to be summoned to her service on certain nights.Canon Episcopi
The evidence not extracted by torture shows that witches commonly believed they had experienced peculiar things. Some of their powers might have been the powers of suggestion, known to be a real factor in witch-doctoring, but this is likely to be simply rationalization. The descriptions of later witches show that in many cases their sanity was questionable, and a hysterical desire to please the examiners led some to agree to anything in the hope of a reprieve. Mainly the events they related were subjective experiences, perhaps induced by psychedelic ointments and balms of the kinds that witches were known to use, or perhaps magic mushrooms, as John Allegro might prefer.
Even in the fifteenth century, many poets and intellectuals in France and the low countries refused to believe the tall stories told of witches, such as them flying to the sabbats, but they blamed the witches’ delusions on to the Devil. Rational thought, credulity and religious rationalisation in terms of diabolical deeds and illusions all held sway among some people. The attitude of the church had been set down by Ss Augustine and Aquinas.
All that happens visibly in the world can be done by demons.
No one seemed to notice, and certainly did not bother if they did, that besides being the justification for hounding supposed Satanists, it was a refutation of any holy miracle that impressed the faithful. Denis the Carthusian exclaimed that conjurations often happened unintentionally when the Devil intervened, even by the devout! People were confused. The Summis desiderantes of Innocent VIII in 1484 followed quickly by the Malleus Maleficarum in 1487 settled doubts, and began God’s worst persecution since the Albigensian crusade.
Fasting was important to the Cathars, certainly to the Perfects, but the Believers were doubtless expected to show their commitment by fasting too. The period for a fast is before a festival, the festival being the breakfast. It follows, if witches were heretics, that they fasted before a sabbat. Food deprivation would make them dream of food and, therefore, of the sabbat itself, the best feast that they normally had, food being mainly bread and hard cheese. All of them would have saved their food resources for the sabbats, where the food was shared, and boosted by whatever the purser of the coven was able to add. If witches also used ointments that induced hallucinations and psychedelia, then hallucinating the sabbat would have been likely for a half starved witch, and these hallucinations got mixed up with reality.
Homage to the Master
The women believed they were in the presence of the living representative of Lucifer on these occasions, yet much evidence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries showed that people known to be devout and professing Christians, including priests, had been present at the sabbath, joined in the ceremonies, and worshipped the witches’ god. De l’Ancre said of the Basses Pyrénées, in 1613, “the greater part of the priests are witches”. De l’Ancre records that the witches…
…said frankly that they who went had an overpowering desire to go and to be there, finding the days before the so longed-for night so far off, and the hours required to get there so slow, and being there, too short for that delightful sojourn and delicious amusement.
Homage to the Master was always paid at the beginning of all the sacred functions, and this often included the offering of a burning candle. At Poitiers in 1574, the Devil was in the form of “a large black goat who spoke like a person”, and to whom the witches rendered homage holding a lighted candle. Boguet says, in 1598, that the witches worshipped a goat:
For greater homage they offer to him candles which give a flame of a blue colour. Sometimes he holds a black image which he makes the witches kiss, and when kissing it they offer a candle or a wisp of burning straw.
The Somerset witches, in 1664, said that when they met the Man in Black at the sabbath “they all make low obeysance to him, and he delivers some Wax Candles like little Torches, which they give back again at parting”. De l’Ancre says that the Devil usually had three horns, with…
…a kind of light on the middle one, by which he is accustomed to illuminate the sabbath, and to give fire and light to those witches who hold lighted candles at the ceremonies of the mass which they counterfeit.
The three horns might have been the Tau cross with a flame in the center. The symbolism conveyed the meaning that, to the worshippers, their god was the source of all light. Throughout the ceremony the people knelt bowing their heads to the ground, or they lay prostrate, all uniting in a prayer to their god for help.
Often the witch master has another face “behind”, or under his tail, which does not speak but was kissed. The consistent testimony of witnesses is that homage meant kissing the leader’s buttocks—practically a universal custom. Guazzo says, “as a sign of homage, witches kiss the Devil’s fundament”. It is always taken that “behind”, “posteriors” and “under the tail” mean the anal area, as the examiners doubtless intended, but did it simply mean behind the head? Was the tail a mane or fringe which hid the face looking towards the rear? Janette d’Abadie, of Siboro, sixteen years old, said that “Satan” had a face before and another behind his head, like the god Janus! She wore a fig (ficus, fuck!) of leather for protection against the Devil(!), meaning an image of a fist making the priapic fig sign of the thumb between the index and middle finger.
Descriptions of the supposed witches’ rites tell of a large satyr-like image of Satan with the flame between its horns, looking upon the assembled worshippers. A beautiful virgin is stripped naked for sacrifice, yet willingly kisses the rump of the idol. A second’s thought shows that no one could have seen this happen, even if it did. If the idol faced the throng then its rump could not have been visible to them.
What is interesting about this is that the same claim was made by the Catholics against the Waldenses and the Templars. If this is not simply a Catholic calumy of their enemies, it means they all had a common practice, whatever it was. In other records, the word “arse” is freely used. Yet, kissing the Devil’s “arse” might just be a crude way of describing the Moslem form of obeisance to the Perfect by kneeling and bowing low to kiss, or seeming to kiss, the earth. The earth was the very fundament of the Devil’s material kingdom, and the Cathars might have seen their habit of bowing in this way as kissing the Devil’s arse. The obeisance was just a custom of the east, but the witches, as Cathars, saw it as suitably disrespectful to the Devil, or defiant of him.
Old members might kiss his face, and even neophytes might be directed to kiss his cheek, arm, or thigh. Curiously enough, for a phallic religion, as Christians say it was, witches rarely kissed the leader’s phallus, unless “arse” was a euphemism for it. Since De l’Ancre’s witness, Marie de la Ralde, denied all impropriety, and Cathar Perfects, if not the Credentes, were committed to sexual abstinence, sexual orgies seem unlikely. If there is anything in this hypothesis, it is Christian denigration, or Lea is right to judge the Cathar religion to have become debased through dispersion and loss of leadership. The argument against such debasement is the noble way many died even when they were supposedly indulging in vulgar rituals.
The records of the witch trials tell us that each witch had to report to the Devil “what wickedness he hath committed”. If it is true that they had to do this, then it is the same as the Catholic confession, which was adopted by the Lateran Council of 1215—the Great Council of Innocent III, aimed at countering the Cathars and Waldensians—alongside several other, now established Church practices, which seem to have been introduced to counter heresy by approving certain popular heretical practices in a Catholic context. Confession plainly is a report to the priest on what wickedness the confessor has done since the last confession. A form of confession, like the last rites, might have begun in the Cathar heresy, and continued with the witches, by which time the Church would have been accusing them of parodying Christianity. Transubstantiation of the host was established in Church law, because the Cathars had been mocking it. “Hoc est corpus”, was “hocus pocus” to the Cathars, and so it remains today, although everyone has forgotten where it came from. “Hoax” has the same origin. That these Cathar mockeries of Catholicism survive shows that Catharism overlapped with Protestantism, even though it was officially expunged 200 years before.
A Confirmation?
An important part of this ceremony was that mothers presented their children to the “Devil”. All the inquisitors say the “witches” liked to have their children received by their god, and to be brought up in the tenets and practice of their religion. Bodin says:
Witches must be examined, whether their parents were witches or no, for witches come by propagation.
The formula given by several witnesses is:
Great Lord, whom I worship, I bring you this new servant who desires to be your slave forever.
When the child was old enough to understand, an age which varied from nine to thirteen years, they made a public profession of faith, repeating the homage in their own names, and the “grand mistress” or “queen of the sabbath”—some woman who was closely allied with the Goodman—then directed them to renounce the Christian God, Jesus, the Church, the sacraments, the clergy and monks, and everything connected with the prevailing religion. It had to be done before witnesses but not necessarily at a great sabbath. The candidate prostrated themmself on the ground at the feet of the master who asked:
Dost thou come of thine own free will?
The candidate replied, “Yes”, and the master then said:
Do what I desire and what I do.
The candidate still kneeling made the profession of faith:
Thou art my god and I am thy slave.
Here “my God” is perhaps substituted by the recorders for “my Christ”, which would not suit their Satanism theory. Proof that the word “God”, when used by the witch, was deliberately changed into the word “Devil” by the Christian recorders occurs at Bute in 1662. The recorder twice reports a witch as saying, “God let him never rise till I go see him”. First, he writes “Devil” for God in her own evidence, but writes “God” quoting it to another witness in evidence. The witch was plainly using the word God. It was her God, interpreted by the recorder as the Devil. Another example is Agnes Sampson’s description in the official record: “He had on him a gown, and a hat, which were both black”. Sir James Melville, in his Memoirs, expands it thus:
The devil wes clad in a black gown with a black hat upon his head… His face was terrible, his nose like the beak of ane eagle, great burning eyes. His hands and legs were hairy, with claws upon his hands, and feet like the griffon.
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The novice apparently “stood on their head” before the god. They then received what was known throughout the Middle Ages as “the witch’s mark”. Del Rio tells us, “the Devil’s mark… is given them, as is alledged, by a nip in any part of the body, and it is blue”. Branding was a practice of primitive Christianity. Worshippers were considered slaves of their God, and slaves were branded with the mark of their masters. The Christian baptism is the same idea but the brand of the cross is made with holy water so that no one except God can see it! Witches speak of the branding being searing like fire, but the witch hunters had so much trouble finding anything convincingly like a brand, they were either getting the wrong people or the brand was invisible like the Christian one. Madame Bourignon agrees the mark was real, but she was a Christian propagandist:
When a child offered to the Devil by its Parents, comes to the use of Reason, the Devil then demands its soul and makes it deny God and renounce its Baptism, and all relating to the Faith, promising Homage and Fealty to the Devil in manner of a Marriage, and instead of a Ring, the Devil gives them a Mark with an iron Awl in some part of the Body.
If this is so, those who were initiated to witchcraft at the sabbaths were marked, but the mark was a simple puncture made with an awl. In England, especially, much stress was laid on this mark. The witchfinders, knowing that no torture could be used in the trial, as on the continent, concentrated on searching for the witch’s mark in a suspect, and Hopkins effectively used torture in finding it. The thighs, buttocks and pubic parts of the suspects were minutely examined by the agents of the Holy Church, and every mark or pimple that nature had produced was described in grossly exaggerated language. Supernumerary nipples, which we now know to be fairly common in women, and are even found in men, were selected as indubitable proofs of diabolic action. They seem to have been examined with clerical magnifying glasses, as we read of immense teats in the most surprising parts of the witch’s anatomy—probably growths and cysts.
It is inconceivable that a persecuted minority risking capture and being burnt alive every day of their lives would mark themselves with an obvious giveaway. The mark was merely a prick to draw blood, or was notional, probably the laying on on hands, that the novice was told was the flame of the holy spirit—being the equivalent of the Apostolic Succession—and therefore psychologically experienced as hot by some.
Familiars and Masks
What of familiars or imps? Bishop Hutchinson, who made a special study of witches, says:
I meet with little mention of imps in any country but ours, where the law makes the feeding, suckling or rewarding of them to be a felony.
The law is an ass! Anyone, then, with a pet or feeding a feral or wild creature scraps, and giving them pet names, in England, became a witch. Though the domestic familiar was recognised theoretically in Scotland there is no mention of it in any Scottish witch-trial. It is found in England, and there mainly in the east.
The descriptions of the sabbath often sound more like a country masque than anything illicit. It was like:
A fair, well supplied with all sorts of objects, in which some walked about in their own form, and others were transformed, she knew not how, into dogs, cats, asses, horses, pigs, and other animals.Janette d’Abadie
The size of these sabbats is given by some inquisitors as huge and many demons were among them! At S John’s eve, in 1388, at La Mirandole, 6000 attended a sabbat. The poet, Martin Le Franc, in 1440, in his post as secretary to the anti-pope, Felix V, said a sabbat at Valpute was attended by 10,000 witches—over 3,000 was common. In the Basque country and in the German Black Forest, sabbats of 25,000 were reported. De l’Ancre claimed that 100,000 people attended a witches’ gathering near Toulouse even in 1612. Madame Bourignon, in 1661, records at Lille:
No assemblies were ever seen so numerous in the city as in these sabbaths, where came people of all qualities and conditions, young and old, rich and poor, noble, and ignoble, but especially all sorts of monks and nuns, priests and prelates.
Cornelis Saftleven in the seventeenth century painted this meeting of witches in which the convenor of the meeing, the Devil, is a goat and all the members are animals of one sort or another. It suggested they each had an animal persona, and probably wore an animal mask. They were guising or mumming.
The only sensible explanation of such multitudes, accepting that they are not simply invented, is that they are public festivals rather than private services. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the masquerade became popular. The witches whom Boguet examined, in 1598, confessed to using masks. Witches were often masked at the dance. These masks seem to have been animal ones. Was this habit related to the Persian sect of the Maskhara, described as witches? Masquerades were large open air spectacles, but in France were taken over by the nobility and became elaborate masked costume balls. They evolved from popular festivals in the sixteenth century in which disguised guests would seem to gate crash a festival with gifts, and then join the guests in a ceremonial dance. This sounds like the witches festivals described here. The Cathars had the poetic and musical tradition of the troubadours, which seemed to transfer to the witches.
Forbes says that the Devil “articles with such proselytes, concerning the shape he is to appear to them in…” This suggests that part of the oath of initiation is to always see the master as some animal, even though he is human enough but just wears a mask. They too are given an animal identity explaining the supposed familiars and shape shifting of witches.
Converts
The procedure for the convert seems to have been similar to that of the heretics. Converts had to renounce their old faith, and this renunciation “had to be an express renunciation of Jesus Christ and of the Faith”, made as explicitly as possible:
I renounce and deny God, the blessed Virgin, the Saints, baptism, father, mother, relations, heaven, earth, and all that is in the world.
The formula given by Del Rio is:
I deny God, Creator of Heaven and Earth, and I adhere to thee, and believe in thee.
If the Cathars had renounced the Hebrew God as the Demiurge, the creator merely of the material world, it is quite possible that the witches really did make such denials, although they are doubtless expressed in the words of the inquisitor or recorder. Plainly, though, if they were Catharists, they did not deny Jesus Christ. What they denied was that the man who died on the cross was Christ, and there was no magic in the crucifix, which was nothing other than an idol. For Cathars, their Christs were living among them. They had no need of crucifixes and crosses. This fits the witch evidence.
Then came the baptism, the profession of faith and the vow of fidelity:
I place myself at every point in thy power and in thy hands, recognising no other god, for thou art my god.
Baptism was the less important part in the eyes of the members of the cult and was often omitted, just as it was “mere bath water” for Cathars. The kiss often followed the baptism. In places, at least, they had to trample or spit on a cross marked in the ground, just as the Knights Templar—also accused of witchcraft—did.
After the entire assembly had paid homage the chief received reports from local officers. The system of reporting everything to the master of the community has a twofold benefit in the witches’ circumstances. The ordinary witches effectively became a system of spies, and nothing could have been more valuable for an organization under perpetual threat. All the information he gathered at a time when communications were poor, allowed him to seem to have precognition. His knowledge of public and private affairs seemed miraculous to the ordinary simple members of the sect.
The Witches’ Dance
Then the dance, which seems to have been the most important part of the festival, took place. Dancing and feasting occupied the remaining hours of the night. The witches brought food with them and the dance alternated with a feast. The general belief among the Christian recorders was that at a witch feast salt was not permitted, and various reasons were adduced to account for the omission. The plain reason is that the Cathars would have been unlikely to have pampered the body by seasoning food with salt. It stimulated the appetite and encouraged the imprisoned soul to gluttony within its prison reducing its desire to escape back to the spirit. Boguet, the inquisitor, who tried and executed many witches in France, in 1608, states:
The witches, before taking their repast, bless the table, but with words full of blasphemy, making Beelzebub the author and protector of all things.
Almost every name for the Devil, the Christian could think of was used as a name of the God of the Witches, showing that they were just using their own terminology. Northbrooke, writing in 1577, attributes to S Augustine:
It is better that women should pick wool or spin on the sabbath day, than that they should dance impudently and filthily all the day long upon the days of the new moon.
Here is an admission of practices that the leaders of the Church did not like. Augustine did not approve of them, but surely, if they were Pagan, he would have sorely decried them and called for their prohibition. Possibly here was a primitive Christian practice that offended even the Christian saints. It suggests that early Christianity—and therefore Judaism—might have been much more Pagan than modern Jews and Christians will allow. People in Christian England used to say, “It is a fine moon. God bless her!” In Scotland women would curtsey to the new moon, perhaps the last trace of the impudent and filthy dancing that S Augustine did not like. Augustine incidentally warned against another lunar practice of his fellow Christians. He warned against planting trees or corn according to the phases of the moon, saying it showed worship of the moon. Obviously people were doing it, or the warning could never have been given.
Although a certain amount of dancing happened in churches in the middle ages, the divines were mainly against it as “an invention of the Devil, the occasion of frequent sin, an insult to God, and a matter of foolish joy” (Speculum Morale). This short quotation epitomizes the sheer misery of the world governed for over a thousand years by the empty moralizing of odious smug Christian priests. The traditional Christian churches, Catholic and Protestant, were against sin, and sin was anything enjoyable!
Sin is not crime. Crime is a civil offence, an act against the functioning of society, but sin is an offence against God, according to the fundamental rules of religion that God, at some stage or other, has managed to get laid down. A crime might be a sin, but not necessarily. God’s Ten Commandments say that people should not murder others (Ex 20:13), but God contrives also to order people to kill witches because they cannot suffer a witch to live (Ex 22:18). Christians tell us that their God has the power of foresight, so in writing these contradictory commands, he knew they were going to lead to countless misery. That is no good God at work. The clerics did not want people killing anyone they liked, otherwise clerics might be top of the list, but they wanted to be able to kill anyone they did not like, and to do that all they had to do was call them a witch.
Apostasy is the worst possible sin, but in the enlightened modern world, it is not a crime at all. The Cathars, 800 years ago, had the modern enlightened view that sin or salvation were personal choices, and no business of anyone else. The Catholic Church, then the Protestant churches more vigorously still, declared dancing a sin and refused to permit it. Yet, Cathars, who saw all worldly pleasures as evil in a sense because they were pleasures of the material body and therefore of the Devil, who kept souls trapped in their fleshly bodies, left it up to each soul to decide for itself how and when it wanted to reach God.
This is why Catholic critics say that Cathars had double moral standards. They had a single standard but were not willing to force goodness on to people who were not ready for it. They would learn how unfulfilling material existence was, of their own accord, in some other incarnation, if not in this one. The Cathar attitude to food, dancing and sex was the same—perfectly good people had lost all interest in them, but it was not being perfectly good to force your view on to a soul that was not advanced enough to realize what you were on about. They therefore permitted the sins of the Devil, confident that people would grow out of them even if it took several more lifetimes.
The dances of the sabbat were circle dances, back to back dances, congas and wild ecstatic dances. Plainly, some were only suitable for young people. Ring dances, especially if there was a sacred stone or tree, were common, and a kind of conga across country was popular. The women often visibly light up with joy as they describe to the judge the wild dance across the country, the “Devil” often playing pipes, leading the way, his tail wagging before the crowd, and the long stream of witches, at the highest pitch of excitement, following in a line. The flute, drum, and other instruments also were used.
The Therapeutae, of which the Essenes were a branch, at the beginning of the Christian era, had an all night religious service like that of the witches:
After the feast they celebrate the sacred festival during the whole night. They sing hymns in honour of God, at one time all singing together, and at another moving their hands and dancing in corresponding harmony. Then when each chorus of the men and each chorus of the women has feasted by itself separately, like persons in the Bacchanalian revels, they join together.
Murray observes that this is so like the singing dances of the witches that both might come from the same source. It shows how close to the truth she was. The Essenes had to praise God continuously and sang hymns to the rising sun, as the early Christians did. If the Cathars were a survival of Essenism and primitive Christainity, then they might have done the same, and thereafter, when they were scattered by persecution, their scattered remnants will have tried to preserve the same traditions.
In some places, either at the sabbath or elsewhere, the “Devil” celebrated a communion ritual. Animals were commonly sacrificed to provide blood, and children too, if some confessions are to be believed. Mme de Montespan in 1679, in her desire to regain the love of Louis XIV, got the Abbi Guiborg, apparently a witch, to say mass with a child’s blood in the chalice. The child was bought for “a crown”. Guiberg was an opportunist, a pervert and probably a madman. Though there is testimony of child sacrifice, the unpleasant methods by which much of it was obtained, and that Christian babies were allegedly never so used, cast doubt upon the stories. Christian mothers of the time notoriously guarded their unbaptized children from the witches, but whence were the babies procured if not from Christians?
Another doubt is cast by the claim that the wafer was stolen from the Church. The witches supposedly attended Christian communion but kept the wafer dry in their mouth until out of sight of the Church. The Christian wafer is unlikely to have been so important to the witches. They spat out the wafer, when they were away from the Church, because they refused to accept the communion the Church obliged them to take, but which was to them a sacrilege.
Further Reading
- More on the persecution of heretics
- More on documents pertaining to heresy
- More on witches, and more
