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, of a piece with the parallel term synagoga that the same writers used for the assembly. Whatever the gathering was made to mean, it was never the Jewish Sabbath and has nothing to do with the later messianic movement that took its name from Sabbatai Zevi.

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. The strands were welded into the single, lurid scenario that the trials then treated as fact and that the accused, broken or terrified, confirmed. The broader phenomenon of the witch-belief and the persecution that punished it belongs to witchcraft; what follows concerns the imagined gathering itself — its assembly out of older fears, its architecture, and the long argument over what, if anything, lay beneath it.

The composite assembled

The fully diabolical witch — not merely a worker of harmful magic but a sworn member of a devil-worshipping sect that met by night — crystallized with remarkable suddenness in a small cluster of texts written in the 1430s, almost all of them produced along the arc of the western Alps: Savoy, the Dauphiné, the Valais, the diocese of Lausanne. The Lucerne chronicler Hans Fründ reported on the trials in the diocese of Sion around 1428. An anonymous inquisitor compiled the Errores Gazariorum, the “errors of the Gazarii,” around 1437; the name borrows the slur once aimed at the Cathars, marking the new sect as the latest in a line of heretical conspiracies. The secular judge Claude Tholosan, who had tried such cases himself in the Dauphiné, set down his Ut magorum et maleficiorum errores in the same years. The Dominican Johannes Nider, writing his vast dialogue the Formicarius around 1436 to 1438 at the time of the Council of Basel, gave the material the authority of a theologian and the wide circulation of a book that would later reach print. And the poet Martin Le Franc, a canon of Lausanne, folded the new beliefs into his enormous defense of women, Le Champion des Dames — a manuscript of which, illuminated in 1451, carries above two small flying figures the caption Des Vaudoises and so preserves the earliest known image of witches astride a broom and a stick.

These texts do not describe a custom that observers had seen. They describe a fear, and they describe it in convergent detail because they were drawing on a shared stock of inherited accusation. The decisive synthesis here — the welding of the older dread of maleficium, the harmful deed, onto the newer charge of a pact with the Devil, of flight through the air, and of collective worship at the Sabbath — is what scholarship calls the cumulative concept of witchcraft, a phrase coined by the German historian Joseph Hansen and taken up since as the standard name for the process. None of its components was new in the 1430s. What was new was their fusion into one figure who could be hunted as a conspirator.

The deepest of the inherited layers reaches back past Christianity altogether. The libel of a secret society that gathers at night, swears itself to a demonic master, feasts on murdered infants, and abandons itself to indiscriminate sex — that whole shape had been aimed, in turn, at the early Christians by pagan Rome, at heretical movements through the medieval centuries, and, in the early fourteenth century, at the Knights Templar, whose suppression from 1307 turned on charges of an obscene initiatory kiss and the worship of an idol. The fifteenth-century Sabbath inherited this ancient template of the anti-society almost whole; the witches simply became its newest tenants. To trace the charge is to follow it down through the layers of heresy-hunting and the patristic catalog of the deviant, the same machinery of accusation studied under demonology and patristic heresiology.

The night-flying women and the canon Episcopi

A second layer came from within the church’s own law, and it sat awkwardly with the rest. By the early tenth century a text known as the canon Episcopi was circulating — recorded around 906 by Regino of Prüm, who ascribed it to an ancient council, and carried forward into the influential collections of Burchard of Worms early in the eleventh century and of Gratian around 1140. The canon condemned “certain wicked women” who believed that they rode out at night on beasts, over vast distances, in the train of Diana, the goddess of the pagans. Burchard, copying it, added the name of Herodias in one place and of the Germanic Holda in another; later hands wrote Diana together with Minerva. Beneath the goddess’s many names lay a persistent folk image: a procession of women traveling by night under a female spirit who gathers the living and the dead.

The canon’s purpose, though, was flatly to deny that any of this happened. The women who imagined their rides were deluded; the journeys were phantasms planted by the Devil in sleeping minds; to believe such flights real was itself an error to be corrected. For the demonologists who five centuries later wished to prove that witches really did fly bodily to a real Sabbath, the canon was an obstacle, an authoritative statement on the books that the church’s own tradition called such flight an illusion. Much of the cleverest reasoning in the treatises went toward circumventing it — by arguing that the new sect was a different and worse thing than the women of the canon, or that what had once been mere dream had become, by the Devil’s increased power, a flight of the body. The Sabbath thus grew up half against the church’s law and half out of it, lifting the folkloric night-train of the goddess out of the canon while straining to overturn the verdict the canon had pronounced on it.

Theology turned inside out

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 feast against the Eucharist, the pact against baptism. The host was trampled where it should be elevated; the words of prayer were spoken in reverse; the cross was profaned where it should be venerated. The gathering was imagined, in effect, as the negative of the church: the same structure read backward, which is part of why it could be described in such confident detail by men who had never seen one. They were not observing a rival cult. They were inverting, point for point, the sacramental order they knew from the inside, and the symmetry of the inversion gave the picture both its coherence and its terror.

This is why the Sabbath could not be a matter of ordinary lawbreaking. To accuse someone of attending it was to place them not merely among criminals but inside an organized counter-religion, a body whose worship was the exact mirror-image and the sworn enemy of the true one. The witch of the Sabbath was not a private practitioner of magic but a confederate in a cosmic rebellion — which is why her crime drew the response reserved for treason and apostasy together, and why a confession to it implicated others by its very logic, each accused naming further names from a feast that had no real attendance list to constrain them.

The argument over what lay beneath

Scholarship is divided over whether any genuine belief lay beneath the imposed scenario. The position that the Sabbath was, in its developed form, an elite fabrication found its most forceful statement in Norman Cohn, who argued that the integrated stereotype was stitched together by churchmen and magistrates from materials of diverse and largely literary origin, with that ancient libel of the conspiratorial sect at its core; on this reading the persecuted were innocent, and very little authentic folklore survives inside the demonologists’ account.

Against the grain of that conclusion runs the influential work of Carlo Ginzburg. Beginning from the Friulian benandanti, the good walkers he studied who claimed to leave their bodies by night in spirit to fight the witches for the year’s harvest, Ginzburg argued that beneath the demonological elaboration lay a deep and ancient substrate of ecstatic belief: journeys of the soul, processions of the dead, animal metamorphosis, the train of a female night-goddess under one of her many names. The inquisitors, encountering fragments of this living folklore, misread it as devil-worship and recast the soul-traveller as a worshipper at the Sabbath. In Ginzburg’s reconstruction two elements recur with a persistence he traced across Eurasia — the night flight and the metamorphosis into beasts — and these he held to be the genuine, if transformed, folkloric kernel inside the imposed shell. His critics have charged the argument with reaching too far, dissolving local beliefs into a single deep pattern; his defenders find in it the recovery of a voice the trials had otherwise erased. The materials that might settle the matter are, awkwardly, the same coerced confessions whose reliability is precisely what is in doubt — every detail of folklore in them having passed through the questions, and often the torments, of the men who wrote them down.

Critical editions and the textual record

The reconstruction rests above all on the early texts, and these have been put on a secure footing. The foundational descriptions of the 1430s were gathered, edited, and translated in L’imaginaire du sabbat, the critical edition prepared by Martine Ostorero, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, and Kathrin Utz Tremp with Catherine Chène (Lausanne, 1999); it remains the standard scholarly basis for the question of the Sabbath’s origins. The same cluster of sources — Fründ, Tholosan, the Errores Gazariorum, Nider’s Formicarius, and the trial records — was made available to English readers by Michael D. Bailey in Origins of the Witches’ Sabbath (Penn State University Press, 2021), which sets the founding texts side by side and shows how the conspiratorial picture took shape across them. The two great interpretive frameworks remain Cohn’s account of the stereotype’s literary descent and Ginzburg’s of its folkloric substrate, set out in Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (Italian 1989; English 1990). The broader synthesis of how the cumulative concept drove the hunts belongs to Brian Levack’s survey of the persecution as a whole.

The afterlife of the image

The Sabbath’s afterlife outran the trials that produced it. Where the Basque country prosecuted witches at the great trials around Logroño early in the seventeenth century, the assembly took the local name akelarre — the field of the he-goat — and it was this image, the Devil enthroned as a horned goat amid a ring of his devotees, that Francisco Goya would later seize on. His Witches’ Sabbath of 1798 sets a monstrous goat at the center of a crouching coven under a thin moon; in one of the Black Paintings of his last years he returned to the same scene at greater and darker scale. By then the Sabbath had become, in his hands, less a record of demonology than an emblem of crowd-fear and superstition itself. In folklore it lived on as the gathering on the mountain or the heath; in the modern occult revival the word was lifted free of its accusing charge, and some currents of modern paganism and of the broader occult reclamation took up sabbat as a name for festivals of their own — turning a libel into a calendar. 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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