Witches' Sabbath

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The Witches’ Sabbath is the secret nocturnal assembly at which witches were believed, in early-modern Europe, to gather and worship the Devil. As the learned demonologists described it, the accused flew through the night to a remote place, paid homage to Satan present in animal or monstrous form, feasted and danced, copulated indiscriminately, and performed a deliberate inversion of the Mass — the host trampled, prayers said backward, the cross profaned — before scattering before dawn. The French and Italian sources call it the sabbat; the borrowing of the Jewish name was itself an act of slander.

Almost nothing in this picture corresponds to anything people actually did. The Sabbath is, in the main, a construct: a composite assembled over the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries by inquisitors, magistrates, and writers of demonological treatises, and then extracted as confession — frequently under torture — from the men and women they prosecuted. The image drew on older materials: ecclesiastical fears of heretical conventicles, the early-medieval canon Episcopi and its night-flying women in the train of the goddess Diana, and folk beliefs about nocturnal spirit-processions. Historians have shown how these strands were welded into the single, lurid scenario that the trials then treated as fact and that the accused, broken or terrified, confirmed.

What the courts took to be reportage was therefore closer to a theology turned inside out. Every element of the Sabbath answered to a Christian rite it desecrated — the homage to the Devil against the homage owed to God, the obscene kiss against the kiss of peace, the anti-Mass against the Mass. The gathering was imagined, in effect, as the negative of the church: the same structure read in reverse, which is part of why it could be described in such confident detail by men who had never seen one. To accuse someone of attending the Sabbath was to place them not merely among lawbreakers but inside an organized counter-religion.

Scholarship is divided over whether any genuine belief lay beneath the imposed scenario. One influential line of argument, associated with Carlo Ginzburg, traces fragments of the Sabbath to real strata of popular belief — agrarian fertility cults, shamanic ecstasies, journeys of the soul — that the demonologists misread and recast as devil-worship. Others hold the Sabbath to be almost wholly an elite invention, with little authentic folklore inside it. The question remains open, and the records that might settle it are the same coerced confessions whose reliability is in doubt.

The Sabbath’s afterlife outran the trials that produced it. Long after the prosecutions ended it survived as an image — in Goya, in folklore, in the modern occult revival, where some later witchcraft movements reclaimed the word for gatherings of their own and emptied it of its accusatory charge. The thing the courts described had, so far as the evidence shows, never taken place; the charge of it sent many thousands to their deaths.

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