Yet other features of the picture clearly have a quite different source, in fantasies concerning night-witches. For the Devil, who usually appeared in the form of a black animal, provided his followers with a salve to apply to chairs, on which they would fly from one village to another;Tie would also, on occasion, transport them himself from mountain-top to mountain-top. Like Diana’s troop, these followers of the Devil’s would invade people’s cellars and drink the best wine; but they were also strives, who killed, cooked and ate children, both their own and other people’s. This was done at a nocturnal meeting, where the Devil would also make an appearance, to preach a sermon warning his followers not to go to church or to make confession to any priest. The result of this earliest formulation of the witches’ sabbat was the burning of a number of men and women — which the chronicler puts now at 100, now at 200, and which must surely have been large.
On the French side of the Alps the trials were mostly initiated by the Inquisition — which in that area was staffed by Franciscans instead of by Dominicans.(3) For a century, Waldensian families had been solidly implanted in the four valleys of the Briançonnais known as Freyssinière, Argentière, Valpute and Valcluson. Now the whole population of those remote areas came to be suspect — and suspect not simply of heresy but of the new-style witchcraft.
As in Valais, the stereotype still owes something to the tradition of ritual or ceremonial magic. Before the Devil or a subordinate demon will appear, he has to be invoked-he does not present himself of his own accord and force his attentions on the future witch, as he does in the later witch-trials. Moreover the witch is as likely to be a man as a woman. Thomas Bègue, who was executed in 1436, confessed to conjuring up a demon by calling, three times, on “Mermet diable”; whereupon Mermet appeared, first in the guise of a black cat, then as an old Negro dressed in black, with horns on his feet. Jeannette, widow of Hugues Brunier, admitted having invoked a demon named Brunet, who materialized as a black dog and then, again, as a Negro dressed in black; also, she sacrificed a black cock to him each May-day. Other demons, when invoked under names like Guillemet or Griffart, would appear in the form of black cats, or black crows, before turning into Negroes. It is all still very close to the world of Alice Kyteler and her Negro Robin, “son of the art”.
But the notion of apostasy, and collective apostasy at that, now looms much larger. There is no question here of a temporary renunciation of God and the Church. Once conjured up, the demon demands conversion: Christ is to be renounced for ever, by some symbolic gesture such as trampling or spitting on the cross; homage must be paid to himself or to his master, the Devil; quite often he insists that one or more of the convert’s children shall be sacrificed. As in the case of Alice Kyteler, the Devil or his demon has sexual intercourse with his followers, varying his sex to suit theirs — but he may go further: the Devil’s mark, the stigma on the flesh, which was to bulk so large in the great witch-hunt, already figures in some of these trials.
Above all, the fantasy of the witches’ sabbat, or “synagogue” as it was usually called, is described for the first time in all its grotesque detail. The Devil or the subordinate demon provides male and female witches with the means to go to the sabbat, however distant it may be. Some receive a little black horse, others a red mare, others a fantastic beast like a greyhound; but most are given a stick and some ointment to grease it with — and so equipped, they fly like the wind. At the sabbat, demons and witches together banquet under the supervision of the Devil himself, who may appear either in the guise of a black cat or as his infernal self, crowned, clad in black, with shining eyes. The witches worship him on their knees. They also report on the acts of maleficium which they have performed since the last sabbat; the Devil praises or blames them accordingly and issues instructions for future maleficia. The body of a newly killed child — often a child of one of the witches— is cooked, to make the magical powders required for these purposes; after which demons and witches dance together, while the Devil plays the drum or the bagpipes. Finally each witch has intercourse with his or her particular demon — until, at cock-crow, the assembly breaks up and the witches return home on their magical steeds.(4)
There is no reason at all to think that most of the men and women — who confessed to these strange performances really were Waldensians. It seems, rather, that ecclesiastical and secular authorities alike, while pursuing Waldensians, repeatedly came across people — chiefly women — who believed things about themselves which fitted in perfectly with the tales about heretical sects that had been circulating for centuries. The notion of cannibalistic infanticide provided the common factor. It was widely believed that babies or small children were commonly devoured at the nocturnal meetings of heretics, it was likewise widely believed that certain women killed and devoured babies or small children, also at night; and some women even believed this of themselves. It was the extraordinary congruence between the two sets of beliefs that led those concerned with pursuing heretics to see, in the stories which they extracted from deluded women, a confirmation of the traditional stories about heretics who practised cannibalistic infanticide.
They not only saw a confirmation — they were also led to embark on an elaboration. For the supposedly — cannibalistic women were also supposed to go about their fearsome business by flying. Now the notion of a flying sect of heretics had great advantages: it made it possible to account for assemblies which were frequent, and often vast, and which nevertheless nobody ever saw. Already in 1239, at Châlons-sur-Marne, the inquisitor Robert le Bougre — a French counterpart to Conrad of Marburg — had tortured one of his female victims into confessing that she flew through the air to serve at the heretics’ banquets at Milan, hundreds of miles away.(5) The notion did not catch on at that time, but it did so a couple of centuries later. And here fantasies about night-witches and also fantasies about those other night-flyers, the “ladies of the night” who followed Diana or Herodias or “Signora Oriente”, were of decisive importance.
In the course of the fifteenth century inquisitors and lay magistrates began to combine these various fantasies with the stereotype of a Devil-worshipping, orgiastic, infanticidal sect. A few untypical inquisitors, from Conrad of Marburg to Alberto Cattaneo, had supplied what seemed to be confirmation of that stereotype; they had been able to do so thanks to the inquisitorial procedure, and in particular to the use of torture. Bishop Ledrede of Kilkenny and the Swiss judge Peter of Greyerz had integrated maleficium into the picture, along with features borrowed from ritual magic; again torture played its part. Now the nocturnal flight was added. In earlier centuries that fantasy had been rejected by the educated, but it was a different matter now. Precisely because the notion of nocturnal travels for purposes of cannibalism not only fitted in with the existing stereotype but made it much more credible, it appealed strongly to those concerned with tracking down and trying heretics. Tales which a few of the accused provided spontaneously had to be confirmed by the rest — and again, torture was used to ensure this. In the end it became a commonplace, accepted by the greater part of society, that there were heretics who, in addition to perpetrating the horrors traditionally attributed to heretics, flew at night to their assemblies. In popular parlance all these activities were identified with Waldensians — in French it was even called Vauderie. In reality, a new crime had been invented — one which, in later times, lawyers were to give a technical name, crimen magiae.