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 woman’s back — that notion was born in an entirely different historical context: the “affair of the poisons”, which took place in Paris around 1680.(6) 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.(7) 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.
Even so, the accounts of the sabbat that we do possess confront Michelet with some pretty problems. Some stock features are simply passed over in silence — not a word is said, for instance, about maleficium; but with others he copes as best he can. He is exercised by the tales of erotic orgies, with their stress on incest. There cannot, he assures us, have been any open promiscuity, as young children were present. On the other hand, he admits that incest may have occurred, discreetly, and he even offers two mutually exclusive explanations to account for it. Perhaps incest is to be understood in terms of a medieval law which extended the forbidden degrees to include cousins six times removed. Or perhaps, on the other hand, the priestess, being a woman and sympathizing with women, encouraged sons to mate with their mothers, so that mothers could be assured of a roof over their heads in old age. Again, innumerable contemporary accounts refer to the fact that Satan’s seed, when received by the witches, felt cold. Michelet suggests that whatever mating took place at the sabbat must have been followed by an icy “purification”, to prevent conception. As for the babies which were supposedly eaten at the sabbat, these were simply models of babies, made to look like meat. Placed on the back of the priestess, they represented the People; and when serfs partook of them — or went through the motions — the People were simply worshipping the People, in truly democratic spirit.
That is what La Sorcière has to say about the sabbat; and despite the special pleading, the suppression of texts and the fatuities of exegesis on which the interpretation depends, it was not without influence. For in La Sorcière Michelet deployed all those visionary and poetic gifts that make him so compelling a historian. Though he protested that the book was free from emotional romancing, was indeed the most unquestionably true of all his works, the opposite is the case. La Sorcière was written when Michelet was sixty-four, and it was written fast: the two chapters on the sabbat took a day each, almost the whole book was finished in two months.(8) Driven by a passionate urge to rehabilitate two oppressed classes — women, and the medieval peasantry — the aging romantic radical had neither time nor desire for detailed research. The result was an imaginative creation of such power that it has continued to be reprinted, and read, and taken seriously, for generation after generation. In a general sense it seems to have influenced even some highly sophisticated French historians of today. Professor Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, for instance, in his monumental work Les paysans de Languedoc (1066), still presents sabbats as real meetings in which the peasant urge to revolt found symbolic expression.(9)
But La Sorcière also contains hints of a different interpretation. In passing, Michelet suggests that the sabbat was really the celebration of a fertility cult, aimed at securing abundance of crops. At the hands of later scholars this notion was to undergo some startling elaborations.
In his notes to The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot lists, as one of the works to which he was most indebted, The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer— “a work of anthropology... which has influenced our generation profoundly”. Unlike some of Eliot’s other notes, this one was perfectly serious: first published in 1890, reissued with enlargements in twelve volumes between 1907 and 1915, The Golden Bough had indeed launched a cult of fertility cults. At least in the English-speaking world it became fashionable to interpret all kinds of rituals as derivatives of a magic originally performed to encourage the breeding of animals and the growth of plants, and to see in the most diverse gods and heroes so many disguises for the spirit of vegetation. It was to be expected that this kind of interpretation would be applied also to the history of European witchcraft; and so it was, in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, by Margaret Murray. The year was 1921, and the influence of The Golden Bough was at its height. (The Waste Land, with Eliot’s comment, appeared the following year.)(10)
The impact of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe has been extraordinary. For some forty years (1929-68) the article on “Witchcraft” in successive editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica was by Margaret Murray and simply summarized the book’s argument, as though it — were a matter of established fact. By 1962 a scholar was moved to comment with dismay: “The Murrayites seem to hold… an almost undisputed sway at the higher intellectual levels. There is, amongst educated people, a very widespread impression that Professor Margaret Murray has discovered the true answer to the problem of the history of European witchcraft and has proved her theory.”(11) Since that was written the Murrayite cause has received formidable reinforcements. The Oxford University Press, the original publishers of the Witch-Cult, re-issued it in 1962 as a paperback, which has been frequently reprinted since and is still selling well. In a foreword to this new edition the eminent medievalist Sir Steven Runciman praises the thoroughness of the author’s scholarship and makes it plain that he fully accepts her basic theory. Some leading historians of seventeenth-century England have shown themselves equally trusting. Even amongst scholars specializing in the history of witchcraft the book has exercised and — as we shall see— continues to exercise considerable influence. It has also inspired a whole library of new works, which have disseminated the doctrine amongst more or less serious readers. It is significant that in Britain even that respectable series, Pelican Books, having published an anti-Murravite work on witchcraft by Professor Geoffrey Parrinder in 1958, replaced it in by the Murrayite work of the late Pennethorne Hughes. More dramatically, the Witch-Cult and its progeny have stimulated the extraordinary proliferation of “witches’ covens” in Western Europe and the United States during the past decade, culminating in the foundation of the Witches International Craft Association, with headquarters in New York. In 1970 the association, under the leadership of Dr Leo Martello and his “high priestess” Witch Hazel, held “the world’s first public Witch-In for Halloween” in Central Park. Even Margaret Murray, one imagines, would have been surprised by the development of the Witches’ Liberation Movement, with its plans for a Witches’ Day Parade, a Witches News Service, a Witches’ Lecture Bureau and a Witches’ Anti-Defamation League.(12)