Clearly the “case” which Rose uses to clinch his argument was taken not from the original sources but from Murray. It is a revealing slip. Though he wrote his book largely in order to combat some of Murray’s more glaring fallacies, he remained under her influence. By her selective use of sources Murray had been able to persuade others as well as herself that there really were covens, in the sense of fixed, local groups of witches; this was indeed one of her most original contributions to the misinterpretation of history. Rose adopted the idea of the coven without, it would seem, ever recognizing its origin or questioning its validity. Like Runeberg, he wrote a better book than the Witch-Cult. Like Runeberg, he made ingenious suggestions as to what an organization of witches might have been like. But when one asks for proofs that an organization of witches really existed, nothing is forthcoming beyond those sources which Murray had already offered — and which, when examined, turn out to be full of the wildest fantasies.
Less read, perhaps, than they used to be, the works of Montague Summers still deserve mention in this context. Both The History of Witchcraft and Demonology and The Geography of Witchcraft were originally published, in 1926 and 1927 respectively, in the Kegan Paul series “The History of Civilization”, edited by that eminent Cambridge personality C. K. Ogden. Both were republished as recently as 1963-5; and some of their basic contentions continue to be taken seriously by some historians down to the present day. Summers claimed, though with doubtful justification, to be in holy orders. What is certain is that he was a religious fanatic: a Roman Catholic of a kind now almost extinct — obsessed by thoughts of the Devil, perpetually ferreting out Satan’s servants whether in past epochs or in the contemporary world; horrified yet at the same time fascinated by tales of Satan-worship, promiscuous orgies, cannibalistic infanticide and the rest. He was also a prolific writer, whose productions included, in addition to the works mentioned above, half a dozen editions and translations of witch-hunters’ manuals, three books on werewolves and vampires, a book on the Marquis de Sade and numerous editions of Restoration comedies.
For Summers witches were what the witch-hunters of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries said they were: members of a conspiracy, organized and controlled by Satan, to bring about the destruction of Christianity and the spiritual and physical ruination of mankind. The confessions given in witchcraft trials and the stories in the manuals and memoirs of witch-hunting magistrates are accepted as true in essentials. “We know,” he writes, “that the Continental stories of witch gatherings are with very few exceptions the chronicle of actual fact.”(38) And again: “There persists a congeries of solid proven fact which cannot be ignored, save by the purblind prejudice of the rationalist, and cannot be accounted for save that we recognize that there were and are organizations deliberately nay, even enthusiastically, devoted to the service of evil.”(39)
Not that Summers himself wholly denies the claims of rationalism, for he follows Murray in playing down the manifestly impossible features in the accounts of the sabbat. Where a sabbat story can be made to look natural by omitting certain details, he omits them. The physical presence of the Devil at the sabbat is interpreted as Murray interpreted it: men impersonated the Devil (and sure enough, one of those men was Francis Stewart, Earl of Both well). As for flight through the air, Summers claims that it rarely figures in such accounts (though in fact it is a stock feature).(40) In his basic outlook Summers is utterly opposed to Murray and her disciples: for them witchcraft is a purely human creation, for him it is an extreme manifestation of the unremitting war of Satan against God. But he is just as convinced as they that an organization of witches existed, and held meetings — and just as unable to produce any credible evidence for that view; or rather, any evidence that remains credible if pursued to its source.
The school of thought we have been considering is by no means extinct, even amongst professional historians. On the contrary, it has recently found a new and vigorous exponent in Professor Jeffrey Russell, of the University of California. Professor Russell is a distinguished medievalist who has specialized in the history of religious dissent. His Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, published by the Cornell University Press in 1972, is by far the most learned attempt ever made to show that witchcraft really was an organized, anti-Christian religion. It could well convince many who have not been convinced by any of the works mentioned above.
As its title indicates, the book deals not with the great witch-hunt of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but with its medieval antecedents. More specifically, it aims to show that witchcraft was a cult, indeed a sect, which developed out of medieval heresy: “The development of medieval witchcraft is closely bound to that of heresy, the struggle for the expression of religious feeling beyond the limits tolerated by the Church.”(41) Like heresy, medieval witchcraft can be understood only if it is studied in the context in which it flourished — the context of a profoundly Christian civilization. It was a protest against the dominant religion, and this meant that it was also a form of social rebellion:. “The witch was a rebel against Church and society at a time when the two were wholly identified.”(42) That is why towards the close of the Middle Ages, in a time of economic, political and social crisis, witchcraft increased along with other forms of revolt.(43)
Russell does not, of course, claim that every form of religious dissent, or heresy, contributed to the development of witchcraft; but he does claim that one particular tendency, perhaps even one particular tradition, contributed mightily. The groups which he regards as representative of that tendency or tradition are in the main the groups described in the second and third chapters of the present volume. But whereas in the present volume the stories which were told about those groups are treated as examples of demonization, Russell believes them to have been more truthful than not. In his view the canons of Orléans who were burned in 1022, the victims of Conrad of Marburg in Germany in 1231-3 and various German and Italian groups in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries did in all probability worship the Devil and hold indiscriminate erotic orgies, even on occasion kill and eat babies.(44) Indeed, he regards these groups as being already, in all essentials, organizations of witches. Writing of the period 1000–1150 he comments: “Through its connection with heresy, witchcraft in this period witnessed the addition of new elements and the further development and definition of older ones: the sex orgy, the feast, the secret meetings at night in caves, cannibalism, the murder of children, the express renunciation of God and adoration of demons, the desecration of the cross and the sacraments. All these had now become fixed elements in the composition of witchraft.”(45) And when we come to the thirteenth century the section on Conrad of Marburg’s victims is headed simply “heretic witches”. By the time of the great witch-hunt new features have appeared, but most of these too are treated as reflecting real practices. Of course witches did not fly through the air, but witches’ sabbats took place, and in very much the form traditionally ascribed to them. Instead of being held in a cave or cellar they were held in the open air; the participants were mostly women; and the proceedings were dominated throughout by a being who was understood to be the Devil. Still addicted to their old practices, blasphemous, promiscuous and cannibalistic, the witches nevertheless devoted much of their attention to their master. They kissed his behind and, being mostly women, copulated with him. Russell considers that “the stirrings of feminine discontent” may have contributed to “the orgiastic elements in the witches’ revels”; but he also notes that copulation with the Devil was not pleasurable. He advances a number of hypotheses in explanation of this paradox; one being that “we cannot suppose that… a woman submitting sexually to a being she believes to be the Devil can be wholly relaxed”.(46)