When it was first propounded, the first of these two theories represented a radical innovation. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries practically no educated person believed that there had ever been a sect of witches; it is only since around 1830 that this has gradually ceased to be taken for granted. Not, of course, that those scholars who have maintained that there really was a sect of witches have claimed that the sect did all those things it was originally believed to do. They have not argued that witches flew through the air to the sabbat, or that the Devil presided over it in corporeal form. But they have argued, and very forcibly, that witches were organized in groups under recognized leaders; that they adhered to a religious cult that was not only non-Christian but anti-Christian; and that they assembled, under cover of night, at remote spots, to perform the rituals of that cult. On this view, what we find in the witch-trials and the writings of witch-hunters represents a distorted perception of groups that really existed, of meetings that physically took place. Propounded by academics at leading universities in Europe and North America, often in works published by university presses, this interpretation has been taken on trust by multitudes of educated people. It still is: when conversation turns to the great witch-hunt, it is assumed more often than not that the hunt must have been directed against a real secret society.
The founding of this school of thought has sometimes been ascribed to the Italian cleric Girolamo Tartarotti-Serbati, who published Del Congresso Notturno delle Lamie in 1749, or else to the great German folklorist Jacob Grimm, on account of certain passages in his Deutsche Mythologie, first published in 1835; but in both cases wrongly. Tartarotti and Grimm merely drew attention to the fact that folk beliefs dating from pre-Christian times had contributed something to the stereotype. Neither even hinted that the great witch-hunt was directed against an anti-Christian sect. The first modern scholar to advance that view seems to have been Karl Ernst Jarcke. In 1828, when Jarcke was a young professor of criminal law at the University of Berlin, he edited the records of a seventeenth-century German witch-trial for a legal journal, and appended some brief comments of his own. He argued that witchcraft was above all a nature religion that had once been the religion of the pagan Germans. After the establishment of Christianity this religion survived, with its traditional ceremonies and sacraments, as a living tradition amongst the common people; but it took on a new significance. The Church condemned it as Devil-worship, and in the end this view of the matter was adopted even by those who, in secret, still practised it. At the core of the old pagan religion were secret arts for influencing the course of nature — arts which, in the view both of the adherents of that religion and of the Christian clergy, depended on the Devil for their efficacy. As the Christian religion became the religion of the common people, the practice of those arts came to be regarded, and experienced, as a conscious, voluntary service of the evil principle; to be initiated into them was to choose the Devil’s service. That explains why, in the later form of witch-belief, anyone adept in those arts was expected to employ them for the purpose of harming others, i.e. was expected to perform maleficia.(1)
In 1839 a variation on the theme was produced by the historian Franz Josef Mone, who after a brilliant academic career was at that time director of the archives of Baden. He too saw witchcraft as a cult deriving from pre-Christian times — only in his view its origin lay not in the religion of the ancient Germans as such but in an underground, esoteric cult practised by the lowest strata of the population. The Germanic peoples who sojourned on the north coast of the Black Sea came in contact with the cult of Hecate and the cult of Dionysos, and the slave elements in the population adopted these cults and fused them into a religion of their own. This religion was characterized by the worship of a goat-like god, the celebration of nocturnal orgies and the practice of magic and poison. As the Germanic peoples moved west, the religion came with them; but free-born men and women regarded it with contempt. At all times it stood in opposition to the official religion of society, and it continued to do so when that religion was Christianity. The underground religion was witchcraft. Witches were therefore members of “a fully organized secret society” with roots in the distant past; and the Devil who presided over the sabbat was a distorted version of Dionysos. Even the maleficia against domestic animals, which bulk so large in the trials, might well reflect the fact that the Bacchantes, in their frenzy, used to kill roes and fawns.(2)
Neither of these theories is convincing. Neither Jarcke nor Mone can show that the worship of ancient gods, whether Germanic or Greek, was in fact practised by organized, clandestine groups in the Middle Ages. Nor do they even try to explain why such groups, after passing unnoticed for the best part of a thousand years, should have attracted ever increasing attention in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet both men were serious scholars, and between them they started a hare which other scholars, some of them equally serious, have continued to pursue at intervals right down to the present day.
Jarcke and Mone were ardent Roman Catholics — in fact both of them at times acted as journalistic spokesmen for the clerical interest. Moreover they propounded their theories in the midst of the reaction against the French Revolution and its consequences, when a horrified obsession with secret societies was very widespread in conservative circles.(3) They had no sympathy at all for the secret society of witches that they supposed to have existed: in their eyes it was a thoroughly evil conspiracy against the true religion and the true Church. But the opposite view also found a spokesman, in Jules Michelet. In La Sorcière (1862) he portrays witchcraft as a justified, if hopeless, protest, by medieval serfs against the social order that was crushing them.
Michelet imagines serfs coming together secretly, at night, to perform ancient pagan dances, with which they blended satirical farces directed against lord and priest. This, he thinks, happened already in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; in the fourteenth, when both the Church and the nobility were largely discredited, the sabbat turned into a ritualized defiance of the existing social order, epitomized by the Christian God. Michelet calls it “the black mass”; and at its centre he puts not the Devil, nor a man impersonating the Devil, but a woman — a female serf in her thirties “with a face like Medea, a beauty born of sufferings, a deep, tragic, feverish gaze, with a torrent of black, untamable hair falling as chance takes it, like waves of serpents. Perhaps, on top, a crown of vervain, like ivy from tombs, like violets of death.”(4)
This romantic figure is the priestess of the cult; indeed, Michelet credits her with inventing, organizing and staging the entire sabbat. She induces peasants to give food for the communal meal — knowing that those who do so will find themselves committed to a conspiracy. She sets up a giant wooden figure, hairy, horned, with a great penis. It represents Satan, imagined as “the great serf in revolt”, a rebel against the God who unjustly cast him out of heaven, but also himself a sort of nature god, “who makes plants germinate”, who even “found Nature prostrate, cast out by the Church like a dirty baby, and picked Nature up and put it in his breast”.(5)
At the sabbat the priestess ritually mates with Satan: before the assembled multitude, she seats herself on his lap and, in a simulated copulation, receives his spirit. Later, after the banquet and the dance, she turns herself into an altar. A man disguised as a demon makes offerings on her prostrate body: corn is offered to Satan to ensure a good harvest, a cake is cooked on her back and distributed as Eucharist. Finally the priestess shouts defiance at the Christian God; while a horde of “demons” rush out and jump over fires, to cure the assembled peasants of their fear of hell-fire.