The Encyclopedia Of Demons And Demonology

218 sabbat
with his claw (see DEVIL’S MARK). There followed a great
feast, with much drinking and eating, although demonologists
often noted that the food tasted vile, and that
no salt was present, for nothing evil could abide salt. If
infants had been sacrificed, they were cooked and eaten
by roasting or made into pies. Witches ate disinterred
corpses and drank wine that looked and tasted like clotted
black blood. If they refused to eat and drink or spat it
out, they were beaten by demons.
After the feasting—which always left people hungry
and never satisfied—were dancing and indiscriminate
copulation among the witches and demons. Witches
danced with their backs to one another as an additional
precaution to prevent being recognized. They did ring
dances, moving widdershins, or counterclockwise. One
example cited by both FRANCESCO-MARIA GUAZZO and
NICHOLAS REMY was that of Johann von Hembach, a German
youth who lived in the late 16th century. His mother
allegedly was a witch and took him one night to a sabbat.
Von Hembach was a skilled flute player, and his mother
told him to climb up into a tree and play for the assembly.
He did so and was aghast at the revelry that he watched
while he played. He exclaimed, “Good God! Where did
this crowd of fools and madmen come from?” As soon as
he uttered the words, he fell out of the tree and injured his
shoulder. When he called for help, the witches vanished.
Von Hembach talked freely about this experience,
which some believed and others said was an imaginative
vision. In 1589, a witch who supposedly was present at
that sabbat, Catharina Prevotte, was arrested on charges
of witchcraft in Freissen. Prevotte told the same story. Two
other women found guilty of witchcraft in 1590, Otilla
Kelvers and Anguel Eysartz, also told the same story and
said that the sabbat had taken place at Mayebuch.
The witches also conducted obscene religious masses
(see BLACK MASS). On occasion, the witches would go out
into the night and raise storms or cause other trouble.
The witches flew home before dawn and the crow of the
cock.
The nights of the sabbats varied. Some witches said
they attended weekly sabbats, some at the traditional pagan
seasonal festival times, and others only once or twice
a year.
In 1459–60, accused witches tried at Arras, France,
confessed to sabbats, described by the inquisitor Pierre
le Broussard:
When they want to go to the vauderie, they spread an
ointment, which the Devil has given them, on a wooden
stick and rub it on their palms and all over their hands
also; then they put the stick between their legs and fly
off over towns, woods and stretches of water, being led
by the devil himself to the place where their assembly is
to be held. There they meet together and the also they
find tables loaded with wines and things to eat, and
there the devil appears to them, sometimes in the form
of a he-goat, sometimes as a dog or monkey; never in
human form. They make oblations and pay homage to
the Devil, worshiping him. Many of them give him their
souls or at least part of their bodies. Then with candles
in their hands they kiss the hind parts of the goat that is
the Devil. . . .
. . . When the paying of homage was over, they all
walked over a cross spitting on it, scorning Christ and
the Holy Trinity. Then they exposed their hinder parts
to the sky and the heavens above as a sign of their disregard
for God, and, after eating and drinking their fill,
they all had sexual intercourse; and the Devil appeared
in both the form of a man and of a woman, and the men
had intercourse with him in the form of a woman and
the women in the form of a man. They also committed
sodomy and practiced homosexuality and other vile and
monstrous crimes against god and nature.
In 1659, a French shepherdess gave this description of
a sabbat that occurred on the summer solstice, observed
by her and some companions:
[They] heard a noise and a very dreadful uproar, and,
looking on all sides to see whence could come these
frightful howlings and these cries of all sorts of animals,
they saw at the foot of the mountain the figures of
cats, goats, serpents, dragons, and every kind of cruel,
impure and unclean animal, who were keeping their
Sabbath and making horrible confusion, who were uttering
words that were most filthy and sacrilegious that can
be imagined and filling the air with the most abominable
blasphemies.
Sabbat accounts even appeared in witchcraft cases in
the American colonies. In the 1692–93 hysteria in Salem,
Massachusetts, accused witches participated in “Diabolical
Sacraments,” according to the Puritan minister and
witch hunter Cotton Mather.
Heretics as well as witches indulged in these rites.
For example, the Fratricelli, a sect that broke away from
the Franciscan order, were said to hold orgiastic sabbats.
Children born from the orgies were sacrificed and
burned, and their ashes were mixed into the wine drunk
by the priests. Similarly, the Waldenses, whom the church
eventually eradicated, were said to turn to the Devil and
make pacts with him because they were excluded from
the church.
Demonologists debated whether people attended sabbats
in physical reality or in flights of imagination. The
MALLEUS MALEFICARUM (1487), the leading inquisitors’
handbook, insisted that witches could be transported
bodily, although some did have imaginary experiences.
Henri Boguet was among demonologists who believed in
literal rites.
Remy said that both real and imaginary sabbats occurred.
He cited the confessions of witches such as Prevotte,
mentioned earlier, that sometimes witches were
fully awake and present, and sometimes they visited in
their sleep. Their demons either transported them bodily
or impressed images upon their sleeping minds.