For there is no doubt that it was as much a fantasy in this as in all earlier cases. Not only were all the confessions obtained by torture — Peter of Greyerz also maintained that in order to evade capture, the leaders of the sect could emit evil smells which incapacitated their captors, and could even turn themselves into mice. He also believed that when he himself fell downstairs one night in the dark, it was because invisible witches had pushed him.
These two trials, at Kilkenny in Ireland and at Boltigen in Switzerland, bring us to the threshold of the great witch-hunt. Neither was a simple reflection of age-old, popular beliefs about maleficium. In both, the essential elements were supplied not by an illiterate peasantry but by the upper, educated strata of society. Both the awareness, however distorted, of ritual magic, and the fantasy of a sect of demon-worshipping heretics, had originated amongst the literate. And so, of course, had the inquisitorial procedure, with the use of torture.
On the other hand, neither Bishop de Ledrede nor Peter of Greyerz was a professional inquisitor. Both men were clearly fanatics, driven by their own inner demons, rather than officials coolly following the routine of a great bureaucratic machine. Dominated by demonological obsessions, they used the inquisitorial procedure to justify and confirm those obsessions. Between them, they produced a true prelude to the great witch-hunt.
Yet before the great witch-hunt could begin, the idea of witchcraft had to undergo a further transformation: intellectuals had to persuade themselves that witches could fly. So long as witches were supposed to proceed to their meetings on foot, those meetings could not plausibly be represented as either very frequent or very large. It was a different matter when men in positions of authority began to maintain that witches proceeded by magical means, invisibly, through the air. Here too the first steps were taken in the fourteenth century.
11. THE NIGHT-WITCH IN POPULAR IMAGINATION
The ancient Romans already knew of a creature which flew about at night, screeching, and lived on the flesh and blood of human beings. Their literature in the first two centuries after Christ abounds in references to it. They called it a strix, from a, Greek word meaning “to screech”; usually they thought of it as an owl, and granted it feathers and even eggs, but they were also clear that it was no mere bird. Pliny the Elder admitted that he could not fit the strix into any recognized species of bird; and he added that according to popular belief it offered its breasts to babies to suck.(1) Its purpose in so doing was sinister: Serenus Sammonicus, who wrote about medical science, considered that its milk was poison.(2).
Ovid has worse things to say about striges. In the Fasti he describes them as ravenous birds, with hooked beaks and grasping talons, grey feathers, and eyes that stare fixedly out of big heads. These owl-like creatures may, he says, be natural birds, or they may be old women magically transformed into birds — but in any case they fly about at night in search of babies unprotected by their nurses. When they find one they drag it from its cradle and tear out and eat its entrails, until their own stomachs are distended with swallowed blood. The poet also describes devices for holding these birds at bay. You must touch the lintels and threshold with a sprig of arbutus and place a wand of white-thorn at the window. Above all you must offer the strix, as a substitute for the baby’s entrails, the entrails of a young pig, saying: “Birds of night, spare this child’s vitals! A young victim dies instead of this little baby. Take, I beg you, another heart instead of that heart, other vitals instead of those vitals! We offer you this life instead of a better life.”(3)
These visitations were not confined to babies. Petronius tells of a dead boy whose entrails were devoured by a strix which then substituted a straw doll for the human body; a slave who tried to drive the creature off with his sword became black and blue all over, as though he had been scourged, and died after a couple of days. And the author comments that adults who suddenly lose their strength, and particularly men who lose their potency, commonly think they are being eaten by a strix.(4) Both Petronius and Ovid refer to a special food — a mixture of ham and bean-soup — which was taken to counteract the effects of being inwardly devoured.
From all this it is plain that striges were indeed thought of not as ordinary birds but as beings into which certain women could transform themselves. There is a relevant comment in Ovid’s description, in the Amores, of the procuress and witch Dipsas. She is an old hag, who specializes in destroying the chastity of the young, but she also possesses vast magical powers. Dipsas not only understands the occult use of herbs, she can conjure up the dead, cleave the solid ground, make a river flow back to its source. Moreover, says Ovid, “if I may be believed, I have seen the stars drip blood, and blood darken the moon. I believe that then (Dipsas), transformed, was flying through the darkness of the night, her hag’s carcase clad in feathers. This I suspect, and such is the report.”(5)
Apuleius, in The Golden Ass, throws more light on the matter with his portrait of that Thessalian lady, Pamphile. Like Dipsas, Pamphile is a super-witch, who by sorcery can subdue the elements, trouble the planets and even disturb the gods; and she too is accustomed to change herself into a bird on certain nights. She does this by means of a magic concoction of laurel and dill dissolved in water, which she drinks and with which she rubs herself from head to foot; whereupon feathers spring out of her skin, her nose turns into a beak and her nails into claws, she begins to hoot like an owl and at last flies off in quest of a lover. Moreover if a young man is so imprudent as to repulse Pamphile, she destroys him. For Pamphile, we are told, is continually on fire with lust; every handsome young man attracts her; and if anyone is rash enough to reject her, she will either change him into a beast or kill him outright.(6)
In other words, the strix is a witch who is a woman by day but at night flies through the air on amorous, murderous or cannibalistic errands. Thus the grammarian Festus, in his work on the meanings of words, defines the late Latin word strigae as “the name given to women who practise sorcery, and who are also called flying women”.(7)
Most of these writers knew perfectly well that there were no such things as striges or strigae; they were simply using the idea to ornament their fiction.* And certainly the law took no cognizance of these mysterious creatures. It did recognize maleficent sorcery, and people were frequently tried and sentenced as sorcerers. But nobody was taken into custody for being a strix.
Yet the literary references are clearly to a belief which was taken seriously in some quarters, and it may well be that amongst the common people belief in striges was real and widespread. Certainly this was the case amongst the Germanic peoples before they came under first Roman and then Christian influence. The notion of a witch as an uncanny, cannibalistic woman had developed amongst them too — it seems, independently of outside influence. And the earliest body of Germanic law, the Lex Salica, which was written in the sixth century but which reflects the beliefs and attitudes of a still earlier age, treats the stria or striga as a reality, and her cannibalism as something that really occurred. It hints at assemblies of witches with cauldrons; it fixes the fine to be paid “if a stria shall devour a man and it shall be proved against her”; and it also fixes the fine in the event that “anyone shall call a free woman a stria and shall not be able to prove it”.(8)