There was another popular belief, of a very different kind, concerning women who travelled at night in a supernatural manner. Around 906 Regino, formerly abbot of Prüm, was asked by the archbishop of Trier to write a guide to ecclesiastical discipline for the use of bishops when carrying out visitations of their dioceses. He included in his book a canon which probably originated in a lost capitulary of the ninth century and which later received the title Canon Episcopi from its opening phrase, "Episcopi episcoporumque ministri”.(18) ** The key passage reads as follows:
....there are wicked women who, turning back to Satan and seduced by the illusions and phantoms of the demons, believe and openly avow that in the hours of the night they ride on certain animals, together with Diana, the goddess of the pagans, with a numberless multitude of women; and in the silence of the dead of night cross many great lands; and obey (Diana's) orders as though she were their mistress, and on particular nights are summoned to her service. Would that they alone perished in their perfidy, without dragging so many others with them into the ruin of infidelity! For a numberless multitude of people, deceived by this false view, believe these things to be true and, turning away from the true faith and returning to the errors of the pagans, think that there exists some divine power other than the one God.
And the canon reminds priests of their duty: they must, from the pulpit, warn their congregations that this is all illusion, inspired not by the spirit of God but by that of Satan. For Satan knows how to deceive foolish women by showing them, while they sleep, all kind of things and of people. But who has not, in dreams, gone out of himself, so that he believed he was seeing things which he never saw when awake? And who would be so foolish as to think that things that happened only in the mind have also happened in the flesh? Everyone must be made to realise that to believe such things is a sign that one has lost the true faith, and that one belongs not to God, but to the Devil.
So far the Canon Episcopi. A century after Regino of Prüm, Burchard of Worms included the gist of it in his Decretum;(19) whence it was taken over by the later canonists Ivo of Chartres and Gratian, and so passed into the enduring corpus of canon law. It bulks large in most modern histories of European witchcraft; yet if one studies it carefully, it has no obvious bearing on witchcraft at all. The women it criticizes do not imagine themselves as night-witches, addicted to murderous and cannibalistic enterprises, but as devotees of a supernatural queen who leads and commands them on their nocturnal flights.
This supernatural queen deserves closer attention. Like Regino, Burchard calls her “Diana, goddess of the pagans”, but he adds the phrase “or Herodias”; and in another paragraph of the Corrector he refers to her as “Holda”.(20) Between them, these names lead straight to one particular body of folk-belief.
The Roman goddess Diana continued to enjoy a certain cult in the early Middle Ages. A life of St Caesarius, who was bishop of Arles early in the sixth century, mentions “a demon whom the simple people call Diana”. Gregory of Tours describes how, in the same century, a Christian hermit in the neighbourhood of Trier destroyed a statue of Diana which, though no doubt of Roman origin, was worshipped by the native peasantry.(21) Further east, in what is now Franconia, the cult was still vigorous late in the seventh century; the British missionary bishop St Kilian was martyred when he tried to convert the east Franks from their worship of Diana.(22) Goddess of the moon and lover of the night, Diana was also, in one of her aspects, identified with Hecate, goddess of magic. And it was characteristic of Hecate that she rode at night, followed by a train of women, or rather of souls disguised as women — restless souls of the prematurely dead, of those who had died by violence, of those who had never been buried.
With Diana, Burchard equates Herodias, the wife of Herod the tetrarch and the instigator of the murder of John the Baptist. Legends clustered around this figure. Already in the tenth century we hear of her from Ratherius, who was a Frank by origin but who became bishop of Verona. He complains that many people, to the perdition of their souls, were claiming Herodias as a queen, even as a goddess, and were affirming that a third part of the world was subject to her; as though, he remarks, that were the reward for killing the prophet.(23) In the twelfth century a Latin poem on Reynard the Fox, called Reinardus, provides further details. It describes how Herod’s daughter, here also called Herodias instead of Salome, falls in love with the Baptist, who repulses her. When his head is brought to her on a platter she still tries to cover it with tears and kisses, but it shrinks away. Its lips begin to blow violently, until Herodias is blown into outer space, where she must hover for evermore, a sorrowful queen. Yet she has some consolations. She has her cult, and a third part of mankind serves her. And from midnight until cockcrow she can sit on oaktrees and hazel-bushes, resting from her eternal travelling through the empty air.(24)
But it is the queen’s other name, Holda, that shows most clearly how her followers regarded her.(25) When Burchard gives this as an alternative to Diana and Herodias, he is evoking a figure who was to remain prominent in German folklore right down to the nineteenth century— and nowhere more so than in Hesse, where Burchard was born. Holda (Hulda, Holle, Hulle, Frau Holl, etc.) is a supernatural, motherly being who normally lives in the upper air, and circles the earth. She is particularly active in the depths of winter; snowflakes are the feathers that fall when she makes her bed. She travels in the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany, and this brings fruitfulness to the land during the coming year — from which one may conclude that originally she was a pagan goddess associated with the winter solstice and the rebirth of the year. She can sometimes be terrifying — she can lead the “furious army” which rides through the sky on the storm, she can also turn into an ugly old hag with great teeth and a long nose, the terror of children. Yet in the main she becomes terrifying only when angered — and what angers her is above all slackness about the house or the farm.
For Holda is not always in the sky: she visits the earth, and then she functions as patroness of husbandry. The plough is sacred to her, she assists the crops. She is particularly interested in the women’s work of spinning and weaving; and if she punishes laziness she rewards diligence, often by pushing gifts through the window. She is also concerned with childbirth — babies come from her secret places, her tree, her pond. Fruitfulness and productivity of every kind are her special preoccupations.
When Holda goes on her nocturnal journeys she is accompanied by a train of followers. These are the souls of the dead, including the souls of children and of babies who have died unbaptized (but here one must remember that often the soul itself is imagined as a child). And this makes sense of the passages in the Canon Episcopi and in Burchard’s Corrector; the women who imagined themselves to fly at night, in the trainof Diana or Herodias or Holda, were sending their souls to join, temporarily, the wandering souls of the dead — and on errands which were not murderous and destructive but, on the contrary, beneficent and sustaining.
**
The preceding canon in Regino’s book is taken from the fourth-century synod of Ancyra, and this has often led to the Canon Episcopi being ascribed to the same council. This is however mistaken. It is also mistaken to think that the text of the canon was known to Augustine; the treatise