This 2007 paper represents historiographical research done for a graduate history seminar at Murray State University under the supervision of Professor Alice Walters, to whom I am grateful. I am posting it here on American Pathos so I may more easily share it with an interested friend.
One of the most enduring and provocative images of the witch-hunts of the Early Modern Period in Europe is that of the witches’ sabbath. The cartoon witches that were once popular fare in modern entertainment often appeared in groups, and the glamorized (and sometimes eroticized) witch imagery that appears throughout the western world each October portrays the witch as a gregarious creature, meeting with other witches, stirring pots, and flying about. To the people of the witch-hunt era, however, and especially to secular and church officials who sought out and punished suspected witches, the witch sabbaths were deadly serious business.
Stories of nocturnal witch gatherings had many sources and variations. Eventually, these concepts converged to produce the familiar sabbath. These sabbaths, sometimes referred to as sabbats, or synagogues, were said to take place at night, in secret locations to which the witches flew. The gatherings featured sex, cannibalism, infanticide, and perhaps the appearance of the devil himself. If the devil did appear, the participants would revere him in various obscene and obsequious ways, such as bowing to him, kissing his bottom, and perhaps even engaging in sexual intercourse with him.[1]
From a twenty-first century vantage point, it is safe to assume that no one flew anywhere during that era, that the devil made no personal appearances in the European wilderness, and that no one copulated with him or paid homage to his buttocks. Such rational assumptions leave other questions unanswered, however. Did witches, people who thought themselves witches, or people accused by others as witches assemble at all, for any purpose? Most modern historians have found similar answers to this question. In examining their findings, I shall focus on developments since 1975, but scholarly approaches to the question go back farther.
The most important precursor to any modern historiography of the sabbath controversy is the work of anthropologist Margaret Murray in the first half of the twentieth century. Murray believed that many of the people accused as witches had literally assembled and performed rites. They had not been witches, however. They were instead, Murray argued, members of a vestigial fertility cult dating to antiquity. Authorities in the Early Modern Period did not distinguish these practices from witchcraft and prosecuted the participants.[2] In the ensuing decades, according to Brian Levack, Murray’s cult thesis was “destroyed by her critics.” [3] One of the few modern historians to give it credence was Carlo Ginzburg, who, in The Night Battles, revealed that some Italian witches had belonged to a fertility cult.[4] Other writers, including Levack, denied Ginzburg’s position that this discovery lent at least some support to Murray’s thesis.[5] Several years later, Ginzburg published Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, in which he continued the theme, developed in Night Battles, that people had journeyed to sabbath-like meetings only in their minds.[6] As emphasized by Richard Kieckhefer, however, Ginzburg never asserted that his subjects participated in actual Sabbaths “á la Margaret Murray.”[7] The discrediting of the fertility cult thesis, however, left open the possibility that accused witches had met in large numbers for some reason.
In the last three decades, nearly all scholars who have addressed the specific question of whether such meetings literally occurred, whatever the supposed motivations of the alleged participants, have tended to answer in the negative. Writing in 1976, E. William Monter suggested that detailed confessions attesting to the realities of the sabbaths were the result of hallucinogenic dreams caused by “unguents” containing “such plants as belladonna and henbane.”[8] G. R. Quaife echoed this view, asserting not only that dreams and chemicals can explain some of the sabbath phenomena, but also that “a significant minority” of contemporary commentators believed this as well.[9] Indeed, the notion that the sabbaths were simple fantasies or dreams has a long history that predates even the Early Modern Period. Though he did not refer to chemicals as the cause, Joseph Klaits pointed out that “until the fourteenth century, the educated were unanimous in describing these beliefs [flight, sabbaths, etc.] as the fantasies of deluded women.”[10]
Of course, not all modern scholars accepted the idea that stories of participation in witch sabbaths were chemically induced. While conceding the possibility that some of the accused may have taken drugs, James Sharpe asserted that such explanations “provide us with evidence of the imaginativeness of the interpreter rather than anything which can be supported by strong historical evidence.”[11] Though rejecting the chemical explanation, and offering no real alternative as to why the accused on the continent might have confessed to participation in such shocking assemblies, Sharpe concluded that in England, at least, no such meetings ever occurred. In doing so, he also derided—without naming her—Murray’s cult thesis. Invoking Quaife (who, interestingly, did see chemicals as an explanation for the sabbath stories), Sharpe emphatically declared, “Contrary to some twentieth-century theories, we must reiterate, there is absolutely no evidence that early modern English witches were either organized devil-worshipers or the persecuted members of some pre-Christian religion.”[12]
Another historian who rejected the idea of large witch gatherings and believed them hallucinations, was Brian Levack. Levack pointed out that descriptions of the sabbaths seemed culture-bound, suggesting that they existed only in the minds of the participants. “The problem” with Murray’s theories, and all other theories that sought to explain why the accused might have met, suggested Levack, “is that there is no proof that witches ever gathered in large numbers for any purpose, diabolical or otherwise.” [13] Like Monter, Levack believed that chemical unguents might have lay behind some of the sabbath accounts; he also offered an alternative explanation. Pointing out that some secretive heretical groups did indeed meet during the early modern period, Levack suggested that such meetings of already hated and suppressed groups could have spawned the widespread assumption that witches assembled for purposes even more sinister.[14] Levack was not alone in believing that known heretical practices might have promoted the notion of the witches’ sabbath. Richard Kieckhefer pointed out that charges of such gatherings had been used against heretical groups for centuries, and Jeffrey Russell discussed this theory at length in his richly illustrated A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics, and Pagans.[15] Russell argued that heretical groups, particularly the Catharists and the Gnostics, were often accused of participating in some of the activities ascribed to the witches’ sabbaths, particularly promiscuous sexual activity. Most such claims were false, suggested Russell, but some may have been true, especially in the case of the Gnostics.[16] The reality of such gatherings created fertile ground for the assumption that witches gathered to practice evil. “Once sorcery was transformed into heresy,” Russell stated, “the inquisitors assumed that the sorcerer-heretics, or witches, also practiced in groups.”[17] Still, Russell, like so many others, saw no evidence of actual large gatherings of witches. In dismissing the notion, he called into question the reality of witch activities in general, stating, “The history of European witchcraft is essentially the history of a concept whose relationship to physical reality was tenuous.” He concluded, “The concept took the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.”[18]
Few scholars have denounced the reality of witches’ sabbaths in more emphatic terms than Robin Briggs. In Witches and Neighbors, Briggs attributed the sabbath stories to “fantasy,” combined with the lurid imaginations of the authorities who prosecuted witchcraft.[19] Briggs dismissed descriptions of the activities at the gatherings as “a kind of scholarly pornography,” with “torture [securing] the required confessions.”[20] Briggs strongly condemned Murray and her followers, suggesting not only that they falsified evidence, but that they had engaged in scholarship that was “intellectually very weak.”[21] Briggs’ conclusion on the central question of the reality of the sabbaths was in line with that of Levack and others, and could hardly have been more direct. “There is no good evidence that a single coven existed or that witches ever participated in a sabbat of any kind,” she wrote. “The natural conclusion from the documentary sources is that the whole myth of the sabbat was a fabrication from beginning to end.”[22]
Historians continue to theorize reasons why people claimed to have attended witch sabbaths. These have included nightmares associated with the scientifically documented phenomenon of “sleep paralysis,” misogyny and syphilis, and many others.[23] Underlying the explanations for the claims, however, is the stark fact that the overwhelming—almost unanimous—weight of academic opinion since 1975 (and even before) holds that the sabbaths were simply stories, whether they resulted from hallucinations, illness, or other causes. While it is possible that some new claim will emerge, any modern historian who asserts that supposed witches actually met in large numbers for evil purposes will face a heavy presumption to the contrary.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Briggs, Robin. Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft. New York: Viking, 1996.
Davies, Owen. “The Nightmare Experience, Sleep Paralysis, and Witchcraft Accusations.” Folklore 114, no. 2 (2003): 181 –204.
Ginzburg, Carlo. Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Pantheon, 1991.
————— The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Translated by John and Anne Tedeschi. New York: Penguin, 1986.
Kieckhefer, Richard. Review of Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, by Carlo Ginzburg. American Historical Review 97, no. 3 (June 1992): 837 –9.
————— Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Klaits, Joseph. Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.
Levack, Brian P. The Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 2d. ed. Harlow, England: Longman, 1995.
Martin, J. “Journeys to the World of the Dead: The Work of Carlo Ginzburg.” Social History 25, no. 3 (1992): 613 –26.
Monter, E. William. Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976.
Murray, Margaret. The Witch Cult in Western Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921.
Quaife, G. R. Godly Zeal and Furious Rage: The Witch in Early Modern Europe. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.
Ross, Eric B. “Syphilis, Misogyny, and Witchcraft in 16th-century Europe.” Current Anthropology 36, no. 2 (1995): 333 –37.
Russell, Jeffrey. A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics, and Pagans. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1980.
Sharpe, James. Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
[1] Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe 2d. ed. (Harlow, England: Longman, 1995), 38 –40.
[2] Margaret Murray, The Witch Cult in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921); Levack, Witch Hunt, 18 –19.
[4] Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (New York: Penguin, 1986), 78; J. Martin, “Journeys to the World of the Dead: The Work of Carlo Ginzburg, Social History 25, no. 3 (1992): 613 –626.
[6] Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon, 1991).
[7] Richard Kieckhefer, review of Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, by Carlo Ginzburg, American Historical Review 97, no. 3 (June 1992): 837.
[8] E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976), 199 –200.
[9] G. R. Quaife, Godly Zeal and Furious Rage: The Witch in Early Modern Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 201, 200 –207.
[10] Joseph Klaits, Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 39.
[11] James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 11.
[15] Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 197; Jeffrey Russell, A History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics, and Pagans (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 63 –71.
[16] Russell, A History of Witchcraft, 62.
[19] Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New York: Viking, 1996), 32.
[23] Owen Davies, “The Nightmare Experience, Sleep Paralysis, and Witchcraft Accusations,” Folklore 114, no. 2 (2003): 181 –204; Eric B. Ross, “Syphilis, Misogyny, and Witchcraft in 16th-century Europe,” Current Anthropology 36, no. 2 (1995): 333 –37.