Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (11 page)

It is a curious fact that when a religion is in a state of decline, either permanent or temporary, it is the least pleasant part of the religion that shows the greatest capacity for survival. Thus, today, many of those who have completely lost their faith in such traditional beliefs as the redemptive death and triumphant resurrection of Jesus Christ retain a
lurking fear of the Christian Devil and his minions. There are a lot of agnostics who avoid walking under ladders, looking at the new moon through glass, or spilling salt! The pagan cults of the Graeco-Roman world were no exception to this rule. Long after the bright gods of Olympus had been forgotten the darker gods still held their place in the hearts of the rural populace of the more out-of-the-way parts of Europe. Even if Apollo and his fellows were remembered at all, their colours had faded into sombre hues, and in their transformed forms they bore more resemblance to Priapus and Hecate than to their Olympic originals.

This transformation of gods into devils had begun almost immediately after Constantine had made Christianity the official religion of the Empire in 313
A.D.
and was continued under his successors. Thus, in 354, Constantius issued a ukase against nocturnal sacrifices “henceforth, let all such abominations cease”—a law that was clearly ineffective, for in 381 Theodosius promulgated a similar law, a clear indication that night-meetings and sacrifices to the gods were still being secretly conducted in the abandoned Temples of the old faith.

It may be that from such secret meetings, from such invocations of the old gods against the usurping Galilean, and from the desperation of conservative rural folk who had seen their ancient faith humiliated and almost destroyed by the new, sprang the mediaeval witch cult with its adoration of the sexual principle—if, indeed, such a thing as the mediaeval witch-cult ever existed!

There are four main schools of thought regarding the European witchcraft of the Middle Ages. The first, the traditional one, more or less accepts the truth of the charges made by the Church against sorcerers and witches. That is to say, it accepts the existence of a principle of spiritual evil, called the Devil, Lucifer, or Satan, and believes that it is at least theoretically possible for a human being to enter into relations with that evil principle, to co-operate with it, and even to enter into formal alliance with it by means of a pact. “We have made a covenant with Death and with Hell we are at agreement” has always been a favourite Old Testament text with this school of thought. In modern times the late Montague Summers has been the most notable exponent of this point of view; with the aid of his considerable, although sometimes shaky, scholarship he was always prepared to defend the behaviour and beliefs of the mediaeval inquisitors, however loath-some the former, however improbable the latter.

The second school of thought is that which will be always associated with the late Margaret Murray, a professional Egyptologist who also dabbled in anthropology and mediaeval history. The thesis of Dr. Murray was almost breath-taking in its simplicity; indeed, it was its very simplicity that made it so attractive to the intellectuals of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties, a period when simple answers—Adler’s psychology, Varga’s interpretation of Marx’s economics, Roger Fry’s aesthetics—were much in vogue.
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Dr. Murray held that witchcraft, which she preferred to call “the Dianic cult”, could be traced back to the prehistoric cults of, firstly, the Great Mother, principle of fertility and fecundity, and, secondly, that of the Divine King “who”, in Frazer’s words, “slew the slayer, and shall himself be slain”. She contended that this Dianic cult was a highly organised religion, with its own priests, festivals and meeting places; that it could “be traced back to pre-Christian times and appears to be the ancient religion of Western Europe”; and that it was, at certain times, a very real and dangerous rival to Christianity itself.

Dr. Murray supported her thesis with a good deal of evidence extracted from the confessions of witches themselves, confessions, it is worth remembering, that had often been extracted under torture and were therefore only too likely to have reflected the prejudices of the torturers.
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At first sight much of this evidence is extremely convincing (for example “the persistence of the number thirteen in the Covens,
the narrow geographical range of the domestic familiar, the avoidance of certain forms in the animal transformations”) but further examination shows that Dr. Murray was highly selective in her choice of material. Thus, while she accepted as truth all those points in the confessions of accused witches that supported her own theoretical point of view, she completely disregarded all those supernatural elements in the same confessions that might have either, on the one hand, validated the theological conclusions of the prosecutors or, on the other hand, shown that the confessions resulted from delusion, imposture, or the promptings of the torturers. In spite of this Dr. Murray was prepared to accept certain supernatural components of the confessions—e.g. animal transformations—when they could both be given a naturalistic explanation and used to support her own “Dianic” thesis.
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Again, Dr. Murray’s use of evidence was lacking both in scientific method and a sense of history. She argued, for example, that the extraordinarily limited number of personal names occurring among women accused of witchcraft was an indication that such names as Agnes, Alice, Isabel and Mary were “witch names”, conferred on the children of members of the witch-cult. An examination of various baptismal records, however, shows that these alleged “witch names” occurred almost as frequently among the general population as they did amongst those accused of witchcraft—what variation there was is insufficient for any statistical significance to be attached to it. In fact Dr. Murray appears to have had something of an obsession about personal names, arguing that the mere existence of the name Christian was proof that another, non-Christian, religion existed in the same society. In the same way, I suppose, it could be argued that the fact that some little girls are from the very moment of birth, named Virginia presupposes that there exist other little girls who, from the moment of birth, are
not
virgins!

As for Dr. Murray’s belief that such individuals as Gilles de Retz and even St. Joan of Arc were “Divine Kings” (incarnate deities who arranged their own sacrificial deaths as a sort of primitive agricultural fertility rite and “who, like the early Christian martyrs, rushed headlong on their fate, determined to die for their ‘faith’ ”) one can only say, firstly, that there is not the slightest shred of evidence for it and, secondly, that it depends on the theory of the Divine King as put forward by J. G. Frazer—a theory that is no longer taken seriously by anthropologists in the form that it was put forward by the Seligmans and Frazer himself.
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The third attitude towards European witchcraft—that the whole thing was a mixture of madness, imposture and folly—was first put forward in the sixteenth century by the Kentish squire Reginald Scot in his
Discoverie of Witchcraft
. It grew popular with the rationalistic, deistic intellectuals of the following century and by the year 1900 was almost universally accepted. This theory has a great deal more to be said for it than the followers of Margaret Murray would admit, and I am quite sure that it explains much of the evidence given at the trials which occurred during what Trevor-Roper has called “the European witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”. In spite of its undoubted attractions this theory has one devastating drawback; it completely fails to explain the remarkable similarities between
some
of the practices described in evidence given at the European witch-trials and witchcraft techniques definitely known to either be used or have been used in the primitive cultures of such widely separated areas as Lapland and Haiti.

The fourth interpretation of the nature of the mediaeval witch-cult—and the one to which I myself subscribe—is a compromise between the rationalistic explanations of the nineteenth-century historiographers and the ultra-credulous theorising of Margaret Murray and her followers.
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It discounts all the allegedly supernatural elements of occidental
witchcraft as being the result of fraud, hysteria, imposture and abnormal psychological states.
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On the other hand it also rejects the idea that an organised anti-Christian religion could have survived in Europe throughout the entire period from the fall of the Roman Empire to the end of the seventeenth century—the extinction of the Albigensian heresy and the rapid decline of fifteenth-century Lollardry are indications of the extreme improbability of such a survival. The witch-cult is seen to have been not an organised counter-religion (except, perhaps, for very limited periods during times of acute social and political breakdown) but as a survival of magical and other pre-Christian folk practices
without the survival of pre-Christian “theology”
. Just as the twentieth-century agnostic often ensures the baptism of his children for purely social reasons, having no belief in the doctrine of baptismal regeneration and continuing to conduct his or her personal life in conformity with the now dominant hedonistic philosophy of the permissive society, so the mediaeval “witch” cured a sick child by passing it through the symbolic hole in an upright prehistoric megalith and yet, quite sincerely, attended Mass on a Sunday and regarded herself as a good Catholic. The worship of the fertile Mother must have been performed by individuals or by very small groups of devotees. Nevertheless, in view of much of the evidence given at the witch-trials it would be futile to completely deny the occasional occurrence of the Witches’ Sabbath—i.e. a large-scale celebration of the fertility/death rites of the Great Mother.

From the evidence given at the trials—particularly from the evidence describing the happenings at the Witches’ Sabbath—it is possible to construct some sort of picture of the nature of the religion of the mediaeval witch; it is almost unnecessary to say that I use the word
“religion” not in its full sense (i.e. as (a) a theology and philosophy, (b) a set of ritual observances and techniques of worship, and (c) a socio-economic structure in its own right) but in the limited meaning of a set of traditional observances the inner significance of which had long been forgotten.

As I have already said, it is probable that only a small number of witches actually attended the Sabbath; nevertheless, a much larger number of witches seem to have
thought
that they had done so and it was the confessions of these deluded people that contained details of most of the supernatural phenomena associated with the Sabbath. An excellent example of such an imaginary visit to the Sabbath (?) was given in the sixth chapter of the first Book of the
Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage
, a late mediaeval text-book of occult practice.
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The narrator, who called himself simply “Abraham the Jew” described how:

“At Lintz I worked with a young woman, who one evening invited me to go with her, assuring me that without any risk she would conduct me to a place where I greatly desired to find myself. I allowed myself to be persuaded by her promises. She then gave unto me an unguent, with which I rubbed the principal pulses of my feet and hands; the which she did also; and at first it appeared to me that I was flying in the air in the place which I wished, and which I had in no way mentioned to her.

“I pass over in silence and out of respect, that which I saw, which was admirable, and appearing to myself to have remained there a long while, I felt as if I were just awakening from a profound sleep, and I had great pain in my head and deep melancholy. I turned round and saw that she was seated at my side. She began to recount to me what she had seen, but that which I had seen was entirely different. I was, however, much astonished, because it appeared to me as if I had been really and corporeally in the place, and there in reality to have seen that which had happened. However, I asked her one day to go alone to that same place, and to bring me back news of a friend whom I knew for certain was distant 200 leagues. She promised to do so in the space of an hour. She rubbed herself with the same unguent, and I was very expectant to see her fly away; but
she fell to the ground and remained there about three hours as if she were dead, so that I began to think that she really was dead. At last she began to stir like a person who is waking, then she rose to an upright position, and with much pleasure began to give me the account of her expedition, saying that she had been in the place where my friend was, and all that he was doing; the which was entirely contrary to his profession. When I concluded that what she had just told me was a simple dream, and that this unguent was a causer of a phantastic sleep; whereon she confessed to me that this unguent had been given to her by the Devil.”

It is interesting to compare this account with a story told by Sprenger, the author of the notorious
Malleus Maleficarum
. He relates that a woman who had voluntarily approached some Dominicans and confessed to being a witch told her interrogators that she nightly flew to the Sabbath and not even being placed in a sealed room could prevent her from doing so. At nightfall the Dominicans, who combined a healthy scepticism with a laudable taste for experiment, tested her assertion by placing her in a locked room, leaving her alone, but all the while secretly observing her through a spyhole. The woman threw herself on her bed, became rigid and went into some sort of trance. Her watchers now entered the room and tried to awake her; all their efforts, which included burning her naked foot with a candle flame, were in vain, and the “witch” continued insensible. On her eventual recovery of consciousness she gave a graphic description of her visit to the Sabbath, of those she had met there and of the rites in which she had taken part; the Dominicans, more humane than many of their fellow inquisitors, told her that she was indulging in fantasies, gave her a penance and let her depart.
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Clearly this woman suffered from some sort of spasmodic catatonic schizophrenia—but what of those witches who claimed to have flown to the Sabbath but suffered from no obvious mental illness? How did their delusions arise? “Abraham the Jew”
clearly thought that they were caused by the unguent with which he anointed himself, and he may have been right. There are several surviving recipes for the witches’ ointment and most of them seem to have contained hallucinogenic drugs; thus Reginald Scot in his
Discoverie of Witchcraft
gave details of a preparation made in accordance with the following directions; take “the fat of young children, and seeth it with water in a brasen vessel, reserving the thickest of that which remaineth boiled in the bottome” and add “Eleoselinum, Aconitum, Frondes populeas and Soote”. The first and second of these additives are hallucinogens. A.J. Clark analysed three of the recipes
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and found that: