Saturday, April 11, 2009

The Witch Religion
A Fantasy

Witches Sabbat by Goya

A persistent myth in the historiography of Witchcraft and the Witchcraze is the idea that underneath the distortions of the witch hunters and the hysteria of alleged “Devil Worship” was a real “Witch religion” that the Church was suppressing. The idea that the craze was about something that was nonexistent is very hard for a lot of people to swallow.

The modern origin of this notion can be reduced to three figures. The French historian Jules Michelet in his book La Sorciere1, published originally in 1862. Another writer who helped to launch the idea of an organized Witch religion was the writer Montague Summers, who wrote among a number of Books on Witchcraft, including The History of Witchcraft and Demonology, who published translations of many Witch Hunter manuals including the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, published 1486, by Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. 2 The third writer was Margaret Murray, an Egyptologist, who wrote The Witch-cult in Western Europe, (1921) and God of the Witches, (1933).3

To begin with Jules Michelet. His book La Sorciere contains a description of the Black Mass which is a tissue of conjecture and fantasy. It was based on his idea that the “witch” religion was a response to severe oppression by the en-serfed peasant population:
They decked an altar to the arch-rebel of serfs to him who had been so wronged, the old outlaw hunted out of heaven, “the Spirit by whom earth was made, the Master who ordained the budding of the plants.”4
Thus does Michelet begin his description of the Black Mass, which he proposes was an ideological attack against the oppressions inflicted on the peasantry by Church and State.

Michelet goes on to describe the ceremony as being organized by a “Witch”:
At the back of all is the Witch, dressing up her Satan, a great wooden devil, black and shaggy. By his horns, and the goat-skin near him, he might be Bacchus; but his manly attributes make him a Pan or a Priapus. It is a darksome figure, seen differently by different eyes; to some suggesting only terror, while others are touched by the proud melancholy wherein the Eternally Banished seems absorbed.*5
She is described:
The Devil's bride was not to be a child : she must be at least thirty years old, with the form of a Medea, with the beauty that comes of pain; an eye deep, tragic, lit up by a feverish fire, with great serpent tresses waving at their will: I refer to the torrent of her black untamable hair. On her head, perhaps, you may see the crown of vervein, the ivy of the tomb, the violets of death.6
The ceremony then proceeded to the "Black Mass" where challenging the powers that be the peasants under the “Witches” supervision worshiped Satan and really worshipped themselves and heaped contempt on the Church, Nobles and State. In the ceremony were such details as the "Black Mass" being celebrated on a women’s back.7

Michelet than describes the stories of the “orgies” and incest and pronounces them basically and quite justifiably as incredible. But he then goes into a long declamation in explaining why those things may have happened.8

It is all in all a good read but quite fantastic and in fact a complete myth. The ceremony Michelet describes is a reconstructed fantasy with little basis in reality. It is formed from not his reading of the source material but from his deep sympathy for two oppressed groups-peasants and women.9

To quote a modern historian concerning the veracity of this fantasy:
Now none of this figures in any contemporary account of the witches’ sabbat. Not one mentions a priestess, or so much as hints that a single woman dominates the ritual. As for the ‘black mass’ celebrated on a women’s back - that notion was born in an entirely different historical context: the ‘affair of the poisons’, which took place in Paris around 1680. Nor was the sabbat, even at its first appearance, imagined as a festival of serfs – already in 1460, at Arras, rich and powerful burghers were accused of attending it, along with humbler folk. To give his account even a shadow of plausibility, Michelet has to pretend that all extant accounts of the sabbat date from the period of its decadence; the true, original sabbat being something quite different. The argument is not likely to commend itself to historians.10
Michelet’s fantasy did unfortunately bear scholarly fruit.

Witches Sabbat c. 1510
Montague Summers is a rather unusual case has a scholar. He was a firm ally of the Witch Hunters of former times and approves with relish and joy their violence, terror and death dealing ways. Regarding the skeptics he says:
For we know that the Continental stories of witch gatherings are with very few exceptions the chronicle of actual fact. It must be confessed that such feeble skepticism, which repeatedly mars his summary of the witch-trials, is a serious, blemish in Professor Notestein's work, and in view of his industry much to be regretted.11
Keen intelligences and shrewd investigators such as Gregory XV, Bodin, Guazzo, De Lancre, D'Espagnet, La Reynie, Boyle, Sir Matthew Hale, Glanvill, were neither deceivers nor deceived.12
And Summer’s states that his purpose is:
In the following pages I have endeavoured to show the witch as she really was an, evil liver; a social pest and parasite; the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed; an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and other creeping crimes; a member of a powerful secret organization inimical to Church and state; a blasphemer in word and deed; swaying the villagers by terror and superstition; a charlatan and a quack sometimes; a bawd; an abortionist; the dark counselor of lewd court ladies and adulterous gallants; a minister to vice and inconceivable corruption; battening upon the filth and foulest passions of the age.13
Regarding the “Black Mass” or “Sabbat” Summers says:
The President of the Sabbat was in purely local gatherings often the Officer of the district; in the more solemn assemblies convened from a wider area, the Grand Master, whose dignity would be proportionate to the numbers of the company and the extent of his province. In any case the President was officially known as the “Devil” and it would seem that his immediate attendants and satellites were also somewhat loosely termed “devils” which formal nomenclature has given rise to considerable confusion and not a little mystification in the reports of witch trials and the confessions of offenders. But in many instances it is certain and orthodoxy forbids us to doubt the possibility - that the Principle of Evil, incarnate, was present for the hideous adoration of his besotted worshippers.14
Through it all Summers maintains that the “Witches” were indeed part of a vast Satan worshiping, subversive movement dedicated to the overthrow of Church and State. Summers did not let go of its relevance for his day:


Nearly a century and a half ago Anacharsis Clootz, "the personal enemy of Jesus Christ" as he openly declared himself, was vociferating "God is Evil," "To me then Lucifer, Satan! whoever you may be, the demon that the faith of my fathers opposed to God and the Church." This is the credo of the witch.15
Witches Sabbat c. 1550

Further Summers states that:
So that Summers concludes:
There can be no doubt—— and this is a fact which is so often not recognized (or it may be forgotten) that one cannot emphasize it too frequently——that witchcraft in its myriad aspects and myriad ramifications is a huge conspiracy against civilization. It was as such that the Inquisitors knew it, and it was this which gave rise to the extensive literature on the subject, those treatises of which the Malleus Maleficarum is perhaps the best known among the other writers.17
For as Summers says elsewhere:
…yet when every allowance has been made, every possible explanation exhausted, there persists a congeries of solid proven fact which cannot be ignored, save indeed by the purblind prejudice of the rationalist, and cannot be accounted for, save that we recognize there were and are individuals and organizations deliberately, nay, even enthusiastically, devoted to the service of evil, greedy of such emotions and experiences, rewards the thralldom of wickedness may bring,…18
It is with very ill disguised relish that Summers describes the horrors of the witch hunt. There can be little doubt as the above quotes show that, Summers firmly believed in a vast conspiracy of Witch Satan-worshipers, against civilization. This leads to him to with, almost speechless credulity to accepting the mad ravings of the Witch Hunters. It is of interest that Summers quite deliberately compared the alleged Witch conspirators with his big bugaboo, the Bolsheviks. Further that he deeply regrets the ending of the inquisition and the drastic curtailing of state terror against “subversives”.

Among the groups Summers approves the violent and murderous suppression of is the Vaudois, also called Waldesians. This is almost funny except that what Summers is approving of is the violent suppression, i.e., torture, mass murder, etc., of a quite harmless group of proto-Protestant “heretics” whose patient endurance of martyrdom and persecution deserve respect not gleeful satisfaction in their misery. What also seems to have escaped Summers is that the Waldesians still exist.19

Summers thus accepts fully the fantasies of the Witch Hunters and approves of their murderous activities.

To quote one writer about Summers:
What is certain is that he [Summers] was a religious fanatic: a Roman Catholic of a kind almost extinct – obsessed by thoughts of the Devil, perpetually ferreting out Satan’s servants whether in past epochs or in the contemporary world; horrified yet at the same time fascinated by tales of Satan-worship, promiscuous orgies, cannibalistic infanticide and the rest.20
Fortunately for us Summers never got to be Grand Inquisitor.
Witches Sabbat 1626
About Margaret Murray is must be said that an author more different from Summers can hardly be imagined. Whereas Michelet imagined Witchcraft and the “Black Mass” as a form of protest by the powerless, and Summers imagined a vast conspiracy by the forces of darkness; Murray imagined a powerful pre-Christian fertility religion. Now Murray was an Egyptologist and singularly unable to realize that her approach tended to credulity:
I have omitted the opinions of the authors, and have examined only the recorded facts, without however including the stories of ghosts and other “occult” phenomena with which all the commentators confuse the subject. I have also, for the reason given below, omitted all reference to charms and spells when performed by one witch alone, and have confined myself to those statements only which show the beliefs, organization, and ritual of a hitherto unrecognized cult.21
Although claiming to be working from contemporary sources it is of interest that Murray admits that she will omit the fantastic features of the testimony and down play their importance. This is fascinating because it is precisely those fantastic features that call into question the entirety of such testimony.

Murray describes her “finds” as follows:
Ritual Witchcraft or, as I propose to call it, the cult embraces the religious beliefs and ritual of the people known in late mediaeval times as ‘Witches’. The evidence proves that underlying the Christian religion was a cult practiced by many classes of the community, chiefly, however, by the more ignorant or those in the less thickly inhabited parts of the country. It can be traced back to pre-Christian times, and appears to be the ancient religion of Western Europe. The god, anthropomorphic or theriomorphic, was worshipped in well-defined rites; the organization was highly developed; and the ritual is analogous to many other ancient rituals. The dates of the chief festivals suggest that the religion belonged to a race which had not reached the agricultural stage; and the evidence shows that various modifications were introduced, probably by invading peoples who brought in their own beliefs. I have not attempted to disentangle the various cults; I am content merely to point out that it was a definite religion with beliefs, ritual, and organization as highly developed as that of any other cult in the world.22
Murray basically was describing a fertility religion and its chief God Murray described as:
The deity of this cult was incarnate in a man, a woman, or an animal; the animal form being apparently earlier than the human, for the god was often spoken of as wearing the skin or attributes of an animal. At the same time, however, there was another form of the god in the shape of a man with two faces. Such a god is found in Italy (where he was called Janus or Dianus), in Southern France (see pp. 62, 129), and in the English Midlands. The feminine form of the name, Diana, is found throughout Western Europe as the name of the female deity or leader of the so-called Witches, and it is for this reason that I have called this ancient religion the Dianic cult. The geographical distribution of the two-faced god suggests that the race or races, who carried the cult, either did not remain in every country which they entered, or that in many places they and their religion were overwhelmed by subsequent invaders.23
Murray conceived of the “Witch Cult” as being organized in a manner similar to a Church complete with record keeping:
The Chief or supreme Head of each district was known to the recorders as the "Devil’. Below him in each district, one or more officers according to the size of the district were appointed by the chief. The officers might be either men or women; their duties were to arrange for meetings, to send out notices, to keep the record of work done, to transact the business of the community, and to present new members. Evidently these persons also noted any likely convert, and either themselves entered into negotiations or reported to the Chief, who then took action as opportunity served. At the Esbats [Sabbats] the officer appears to have taken command in the absence of the Grand Master; at the Sabbaths the officers were merely heads of their own Covens, and were known as Devils or Spirits, though recognized as greatly inferior to the Chief. The principal officer acted as clerk at the Sabbath and entered the witches' reports in his book; if he were a priest or ordained minister, he often performed part of the religious service; but the Devil himself always celebrated the mass or sacrament. In the absence of all direct information on the subject, it seems likely that the man who acted as principal officer became Grand Master on the death of the previous Chief. Occasionally the Devil appointed a personal attendant for himself, who waited upon him on all solemn occasions, but does not appear to have held any official position in the community. 24
It is remarkable that not a single such “record” as been produced or was ever produced at a single Witch trial anywhere in Europe. Neither were any of the “notices”. Murray manages not to explain how this miracle came to pass. And it is clear that Murray’s model for her “Dianic” and its organization is in fact an organized Christian sect.

About the “Black Mass” Murray says:
The exact order of the ceremonies is never given and probably varied in different localities, but the general rule of the ritual at the Sabbath seems to have-been that proceedings began by the worshippers paying homage to the Devil, who sat or stood in a convenient place. The homage consisted in renewing the vows of fidelity and obedience, in kissing the Devil on any part of his person that he chose to indicate, and sometimes in turning a certain number of times widdershins. Then followed the reports of all magic worked since the previous Sabbath, either by individuals or at the Esbats, and at the same time the witches consulted the Master as to their cases and received instructions from him how to proceed; after which came admissions to the society or marriages of the members. This ended the business part of the meeting. Immediately after all the business was transacted, the religious service was celebrated, the ceremonial of which varied according to the season of the year; and it was followed by the ‘obscene’ fertility rites. The whole ceremony ended with feasting and dancing, and the assembly broke up at dawn.25
The actual service, according to Murray, involved a blessing and the partaking of wine and bread that was interpreted has a mockery of the Mass. It included bread wafers, sacramental wine and even a sermon and frequently used a women has an altar.26 Its interesting to speculate why Murray cannot see that this is obviously a parody of the Mass that the Witch Hunters imagined would happen in a obscene Satanic version of Christianity with Satan substituted for Christ. And since they thought that Witches worshipped Satan, so they would of course imagine Satan being worshipped in a “Black Mass”.

Murray even brings child sacrifice into it:
The child-victim was usually a young infant, either a witch's child or unbaptized; in other words, it did not belong to the Christian community. This last is an important point, and was the reason why unbaptized children were considered to be in greater danger from witches than the baptized.27
Aside from the paucity of actual bodies the fact is all sorts of people have been accused of child sacrifice, from Christians in the Roman Empire to the infamous “Blood Libel” against the Jews to modern day fantasies of a vast Satanic conspiracy of child and adult sacrifice.28

In her later books Murray went a little nuts. For example:
In the entire history of Rufus, more particularly in the stories of his death, it is clear that the whole truth is not given; something is kept back. If, however, Rufus was in the eyes of his subjects the God Incarnate, Man Divine, who died for his people, the Christian chroniclers would naturally not record a fact which to them would savour of blasphemy, and the Pagans, being illiterate, made no records.

The date of Rufus's death, August 2nd, seems significant; it is always emphatically called "the morrow of Lammas". Lammas, the 1st of August, was one of the four great Festivals of the Old Religion and there is evidence to show that it was on the great Sabbaths only that the human sacrifice was offered. If then my theory is correct Rufus died as the Divine Victim in the seven−year cycle.29
William Rufus, or William II of England was a son of William the Conqueror and nothing, but nothing, indicates that he was a pagan. Although the chronicles of the time complain that he was not sufficiently respectful of the Church, however that does not make him a pagan it was a common complaint of churchmen about Kings and others who occasionally seized Church property.

In God of the Witches Murray engages in similar fantasizing and historigraphical murder to shoehorn in Joan of Arc and Thomas Becket. Joan of Arc has a pagan is especially risible.

What however makes all of this even more hard to take is that Murray engaged in what amounted to deception in order to make her “Witch-Cult” believable by leaving out the more fantastic parts of the testimony:
The Forfar witches had many feasts; Helen Guthrie says of one occasion: “They went to Mary Rynd's house and sat doune together at the table, the divell being- present at the head of it; and some of them went to Johne Benny's house, he being a brewer, and rought ale from hence . . . and others of them went to Alexander Hieche's and brought aqua vitae from thence, and thus made themselfes mirrie; and the divill made much of them all, but especiallie of Mary Rynd, and he kist them all except the said Helen herselfe, whose hand onlie he kist; and shee and Jonet Stout satt opposite one to another at the table.”30
What did Murray leave out and not record and instead use three dots? Why the following:
…and brought ale from hence, and they (went) through a little hole like bees, and took the substance of the ale…31
And another example of Murray engaging in deception by suppression is:
Helen Guthrie of Forfar (1661) said “that her selfe, Isobell Shyrie, and Elspet Alexander, did meit togither at ane aile house near to Barrie, a litle befor sunsett, after they hade stayed in the said house about the spaice of ane houre drinking of thrie pintis of ale togidder, they went foorth to the sandis, and ther thrie other women met them, and the divell wes there present with them all . . . and they parted so late that night that she could get no lodging, but wes forced to lye at ane dyk syde all night”32
What Murray left out by using the three dots is:
…and the Devil was there present with them all, in the shape of a great hoorse; and they decided on sinking of a ship, lying not far off from Barrie, and presently the said company appointed herself to take hold of the cable tow, and to hold it fast until they did return, and she herself did presently take hold of the said cable, and she thought, and about the space of an hour thereafter, they returned all in the likeness as before, except that the Devil was in the shape of a man upon his return, and the rest were sorely fatigued…33
Above I had quoted Murray’s comment in her introduction that she had deliberately excluded “ghosts” and “occult” phenomena which Murray claimed only “confuse” the subject. Of course such features would also make her effort to “rationalize” the subject impossible by revealing the whole “Witch-Cult” to be a fantasy so the irrational features had to be rigorously excluded, downplayed and largely ignored as inconsequential.

As a critic has said:
Murray is of course aware of these fantastic features – but she nevertheless contrives, by the way she arranges her quotations, to give the impression that a number of perfectly sober, realistic accounts of the sabbat exist. They do not; and the implications of that fact are, or should be, self-evident. As soon as the methods of historical criticism are applied to Murray’s argument that women really met to worship a fertility god, under the supervision of the god’s human representatives, it is seen to be just as fanciful as the argument which Michelet had propounded, with far greater poetic power, some sixty years earlier.34
If the Witch religion is a delusion what accounts for the idea that it is for real? Well many people cannot imagine how such a coherent set of beliefs, or why people would conjure up such a fantasy, without some basis.

Given the events of the Twentieth century people should not be surprised. Not only did events like the infamous Great Terror in Russia during the thirties reveal that fear and terror and utter irrationality on the part of those in power could generate seemingly consistent and supposedly logical grand conspiracies with NO basis. In fact that such fear / paranoia could generate “confessions" from un-tortured people who gave “proper” answers from a combination of leading questions and knowing to a large extent what was expected. Torture, the threat of torture and coercion produced seemingly “convincing” evidence of widespread conspiracy. Many people, weak minded, and deluded freely “confessed” to things that never happened also further adding to the flames.35

To cap it off we in fact did see in the late Twentieth century see a reoccurrence of the fantasy of the great conspiratorial Satanic religion in the Satanic Ritual abuse scare. Practically the whole demonology of the Witchcraze was reproduced, including babies bred for sacrifice, a vast Satanic religion conspiring against civilization, the “Black Mass”, the Sabbat, and of course the worship of Satan.36

Like the Witchcraze this modern version of it saw lots of people voluntarily confessing to being abused or in some cases to being abusers and testifying in great depth with lots of consistency to events etc., that never happened. Along with this we also had / have large numbers of people confessing and voluntarily talking about being abducted by Aliens.37

Given that the coherence of the whole intellectual apparatus that seemed to make belief in a vast “Witch” conspiracy / religion collapses if similar fantasies can exist today and people by coercion and delusion aided by true believing “inquisitors” can create seemingly logical and sensible, “facts” despite the sheer absurdity of the idea then the idea that the “Witch” religion / conspiracy is a fantasy should not be so hard to credit.

The three authors writing above were arguing in different ways the argument from incredulity. It was simply incredible to them that so much consistent, seemingly plausible stories could be a fantasy; they must have some basis! They underestimated the human capacity for delusion and forgot that sometimes there is no fire just smoke. If the Twentieth century taught us anything it is that myths can be murderous fantasies. As Trevor-Roper said regarding the times of the Witchcraze:
Unfortunately, we have seen them return. With the advantage of after-knowledge, we can look back and we see that even while the liberal historians were writing., their Olympian philosophy was being threatened from beneath. It was in the 1890’s that the intellectual foundations for a new witch-craze were being laid.38
Thus does Trevor-Roper describe the beginnings of modern day anti-Semitism. We who have lived in a more recent time when supposedly sensible people at large conferences concerning law enforcement actually talked about mass human sacrifice by Satanic covens and conspiracies to take over the world by same should be warned that human delusion is ever present and no joke to its many victims.

Witches Sabbat by Goya
1. French version Internet Archive, Here, Translation in English Internet Archive, Here

2. Summers, The The History of Witchcraft and Demonology can be found at The Internet Archive, Here, Summers translation of the Malleus Maleficarum can be found at Sacred Texts, Here.

3. The Witch Cult in Western Europe, can be found at Gutenberg, Here, God of the Witches, can be located at Here.

4. Michelet, Jules, La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages, Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., London, 1863, p. 149.

5. IBID. p. 150.

6. IBID. p. 151.

7. IBID. p. 150-156.

8. IBID. p. 157-167.

9. Cohn, Norman, Europe’s Inner Demons, Revd Ed., Pimlico, London, 1993, pp. 150-152.

10. IBID. pp. 150-151.

11.Summers, Montague, The History of Witchcraft and Demonology, Alfred A. Knopf, 1926, pp. xi-xii.

12. IBID. p. xii.

13. IBID. p. xiv

14. IBID. p. 133.

15. Summers, Montague, Introduction to the Malleus Maleficarum, in Malleus Maleficarum, See Footnote 2.

16. IBID.

17. IBID.

18. Summers, 1926, p. 4.

19. See Wikipedia Waldensians, Here.

20. Cohn, p. 160.

21. Murray, Margaret Alice, The Witch Cult in Western Europe, Oxford University Press, 1921, p. 11.

22. IBID. pp. 11-12.

23. IBID. p. 12.

24. IBID. p. 186.

25. IBID. p. 124.

26, IBID. pp. 148-151.

27. IBID. p. 156.

28. See Nathan, Debbie & Snedeker, Satan’s Silence, Basic Books, New York,1995, Victor, Jeffrey S., Satanic Panic, Open Court, Chicago, 1993, Hicks, Robert D., In Pursuit of Satan, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, 1991, Hsia, R. Po-chia, The Myth of Ritual Murder, Yale University Press, New Haven CONN., 1988.

29. Murray, Margaret, Alice, William Rufus, in God of the Witches, in Footnote 3.

30. Murray, 1921, pp. 140-141.

31, Cohn, p. 157.

32. Murray, 1921, p. 98.

33. Cohn, p. 157. For more examples of Murray’s deceptions see Cohn pp. 154-160.

34. IBID. p. 160.

35. Conquest, Robert, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, Pimlico, London, 2008, pp. 71-131.

36. See Footnote 28. For a look at the Witch Hunters which reveals, unintentionally, how similar they are to modern investigators of “Satanic Ritual Abuse”, see Trevor-Roper, H. R., The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Century, Penguin Books, London, 1969, pp. 11-23, See also Crews, Frederick, The Revenge of the Repressed, Part I & II, pp. 91-133, Demonology for an Age of Science, pp. 134-152, The Trauma Trap, pp. 153-170, The Mind Snatchers, pp. 200-216, in Follies of the Wise, Shoemaker & Hoard, Emeryville CA., 2006.

37. IBID.

38. Trevor-Roper, p. 22.
Pierre Cloutier

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