The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

from the Celts to the people of the Baltic, the outlines of a common Indo-European heritage seem to emerge. This is connected to the cult of the dead, the dead bringing fertility, to sorcery and shamanism in relation to the different gods of the dead, who are linked to shamanism that ensured fertility by way of the dead.13

  This idea was still in full force in 2011, when the French historian Claude Lecouteux made a comprehensive survey of medieval traditions of the nocturnal spirit bands. He asserted that

  the Wild Hunt is a band of the dead whose passage over the earth at certain times of the year is accompanied by diverse phenomena. Beyond those elements, all else varies: the makeup of the troop; the appearance of its members; the presence or absence of animals; noise or silence; the existence of a male or female leader who, depending on the country and the region, bears different names.

  He added that

  the dead presided over the fertility of the soil and livestock, and needed to be propitiated, or driven off if wicked. In one way or another, the Wild Hunt fell into the vast complex of ancestor worship, the cult of the dead, who are the go-betweens between man and the gods.14

  The emphasis on fertility in all this should alert those familiar with modern historiography and folklore studies to the influence of nineteenth-century scholarship, of the kind which culminated with Frazer and which was largely preoccupied with the idea of ancient pagan religion as a set of fertility rites. In this case, a single book lies behind the whole construct of the Wild Hunt, Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie (German, or ‘Teutonic’ mythology), first published in 1835. It was this which developed the composite image of a nocturnal ride of dead heroes, led by a pagan god and his female consort, and popularized the term ‘Wild Hunt’, Wilde Jagd, for it. In doing so he relied heavily on the two assumptions, so influential in his century and after, mentioned above: that variant forms of a popular belief recorded in historic times must be fragments of an original, unified, archaic myth; and that folklore recorded in modern times can be assumed to represent remnants of prehistoric ritual and belief, and used to reconstruct that. It should be emphasized now that some modern folk customs and beliefs can indeed be traced back to ancient origins; but that these are relatively few and the descent has to be demonstrated, from documentary evidence in the intervening millennia.15 Grimm, like most nineteenth-century folklorists, assumed that the contemporary beliefs and rites of common people, especially in rural areas, represented an unthinking and unchanging re-enactment or repetition, century by century, of ancient forms and ideas by communities which no longer understood them (so that these forms and ideas had to be studied and properly interpreted by trained intellectuals). It was a deeply patronizing attitude, which greatly underestimated the dynamic and creative aspects of popular culture.16 His construct of the Wild Hunt was therefore a melange of modern folklore from various different areas and scraps of medieval and early modern literature, mixed together to produce an imagined original that removed distinctions and discrepancies within his component material. It perfectly served his own agenda to foster a modern German nationalism by providing a politically fragmented Germany with a single ancient mythology uniting all parts of the German and Scandinavian world. His construct of the Wild Hunt has proved influential in two different contexts. One has inevitably been in twentieth-century scholarship written in German, and here the main debate was started in 1934 by Otto Höfler, who argued that it was a memory of an ancient German warrior cult dedicated to the god Wotan, alias Odin; a controversy that petered out for lack of any ability either to prove or to refute his hypothesis.17 The other has been the more recent attempt to make the Hunt one of the sources for the idea of the witches’ sabbath, as described. The idea most commonly articulated by the German and Austrian authors – that the basis for the belief in the Hunt lay in ancient cults of the dead, often connected with fertility – clearly influenced the writers interested in witchcraft; and one of the German studies from the 1930s provided the collection of medieval and early modern texts for the subject on which subsequent writers from both groups have chiefly relied.18 Mostly, however, the two contexts have hardly connected, and generally authors interested in German mythology have emphasized armies of the dead, and those interested in witchcraft, journeys led by a supernatural woman. Since the mid-twentieth century there has been greater willingness to acknowledge that the concept of the Wild Hunt is a composite, of materials of different kinds and from different dates.19 None the less, there remains a general acceptance of two major points of Grimm’s methodology: that ultimately the concept derives from ancient paganism and in particular from a cult of the dead; and that modern folklore can be used to patch up the gaps in the medieval and early modern record.

  It is proposed here to examine medieval and early modern accounts of nocturnal spirit processions without any prior assumption that they were underpinned by a unified system of ancient belief; and with a concentration only on sources compiled before 1600, by which time the concept of the witches’ sabbath was fully formed. Some recent progress has already been made in deconstructing the modern notion of the Wild Hunt by use of the second tactic. Claude Lecouteux has shown that medieval and sixteenth-century sources refer to three different kinds of spectral huntsman: a demon, chasing sinners; a sinful human huntsman, condemned to hunt without rest as a punishment; and a wild man who chases otherworldly quarries, and sometimes human livestock.20 What can be extrapolated from his work is that as none of these figures has a retinue and none is connected with the nocturnal armies and processions, the term ‘Wild Hunt’ is itself inappropriate as an umbrella term for the latter. Jeremy Harte has subtracted the character of Herne the Hunter from the mix, finding him to appear first as a solitary ghost in a play by William Shakespeare, and perhaps to have been the playwright’s own creation. It was Grimm who added him to the regional leaders of his composite Hunt, purely because of Herne’s name.21 Finally, the ghosts of heroes, especially King Arthur, were sometimes seen by medieval witnesses on a hunt, but this seems to have been viewed as a natural aristocratic pursuit, rather than having any cosmological significance.22

  When these accretions are stripped away, two different kinds of medieval nocturnal procession are found at the core of Grimm’s construct: those of the dead, and of the followers of the supernatural female. These may now be examined in turn.

  The Wandering Dead23

  Ancient Greek and Roman literature provides ample testimony that the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean often regarded the night as a dangerous and frightening place in which witches, ghosts and evil spirits were loose. Among these were phantom armies, sometimes haunting the battlefields where they perished and sometimes warning of great events in the world of the living. What is missing is any clear reference to companies of the dead roaming the earth, and Ginzburg himself concluded from the evidence that the image of a nocturnal cavalcade was basically alien to Greek and Roman mythology. In ancient Northern Europe there is an almost complete lack of contemporary source material in which such an image could be recorded: there is a single equivocal remark by the Roman historian Tacitus, and otherwise attempts to find spirit-processions in the ancient north depend wholly on back-projection from later sources. Occasional reports of phantom armies at particular places and times continued into the early Middle Ages, and Christianity added hosts of demons to the other terrors of the night. A tradition of visible companies of the dead travelling the earth, however, only started to develop in the eleventh century, as part of a much greater interest taken by Christian authors in the fate of the individual soul. Accounts of ghosts in general became more common and more detailed, and as part of them the dead were more often represented as gathering in groups. In particular, stories were told of crowds of dead people doomed to roam the earth as a penance for their sins.

  This new concept forms the backdrop to a remarkable set of French and German texts produced in the 1120s and 1130s, of which the most famous is that of the Anglo-Norman monk Orderic Vitalis. All featured
travelling hosts of dead sinners, usually knights and usually seeking the prayers of the living to gain their release from wandering. That by Orderic is distinguished by its detail and by the fact that he gave the procession which he reported a name, ‘the retinue of Herlechin’, which is never explained. By the late twelfth century the existence of bodies of tormented and penitential phantoms, usually soldiers, known as the army or retinue of Herlewin, Hellequin or Herla, was an established literary trope. It is recorded in England, France and the Rhineland, having apparently spread out from a northern French epicentre. Different storytellers perceived different figures in these processions, according to their own class and preoccupations, but most reported armed men. None seemed to know how or where the idea had started, and some made up their own (mythical) solutions to this problem. Only one of the descriptions, and that the most anomalous (an English fantasy-tale) represented these processions as having a recognizable leader, even though they were all seemingly named after one. It seems most likely that ‘Herlechin’ (a word which may derive from various different possible sources) was originally the name of the procession itself and was later mistaken for that of a chief. There seems to be no evidence in all this of a derivation from an ancient model: rather, it shows every sign of being an exemplary story created by churchmen.

  By the thirteenth century, it had percolated into popular culture, and some clerics were coming to believe that it had originated there and to regard it with suspicion, suggesting that the ghosts could be devils in disguise. Some reports of it accordingly grew more demonic, though this was a shift of degree as it had always been disturbing and forbidding, and sometimes dangerous; and this more negative view of it affected popular perceptions in turn. It also spread further afield, into Spain and Germany, and in the latter region the spectral vagrants acquired the distinctive name of das wütende Heer, the ‘furious army’. In some places heroes from other traditions were brought into the ghostly company, above all King Arthur and his knights. Little new development occurred to the myth in the rest of the Middle Ages. The marching figures were identified variously as people who had suffered violent deaths, usually in battle or on the scaffold; or had died unbaptized; or who had committed grievous sins; or else as devils who had assumed human form to lead the living astray. Late medieval references to these nocturnal parades are recorded from England to the Austrian Alps, and veer between the two thirteenth-century poles of regarding them as a divinely legitimized procession of penitential dead and as an evil and demonic host. In the sixteenth century references grew slightly more detailed and give a better sense of local belief systems. A theme not heard before, of seasonality, is now present, as the apparitions are said in some places to be especially common in midwinter, or during the four annual sets of feasts called the Ember Days. By now, however, the tradition was contracting geographically, having vanished from England and rarely being reported in France: it was becoming increasingly characteristic of the German-speaking lands.

  The Followers of the Lady

  The tradition of the roving retinue of a superhuman female has a different history, point of origin and geographical range to that of the wandering dead. It is probably first recorded in the ninth century, in what became one of the most famous of early medieval ecclesiastical texts, the so-called canon Episcopi. One passage of this denounced the belief of many women that they rode upon animals across the world on particular nights with the pagan goddess Diana. They did so with a huge company of other women, whom Diana had likewise called to her service and who obeyed her as their mistress. The canon ordered clergy to contest this claim, as a demonically inspired delusion, and so expel sortilegam et magicam artem, fortune-telling and the magical art, from their parishes.24 This strongly suggests that the women who made the claim were the local providers of magical services. The point of origin of the text is unknown, but it was included in a collection of canon law made around the year 900 by the abbot of Prüm in the central Rhineland, and it almost certainly derived from somewhere in the lands of the Franks. About a century later, Burchard, bishop of Worms, included it in his own collection of church decrees, and added that another name for the superhuman leader of the rides was Herodias. Burchard, however, also repeated five more condemnations of the tradition and of similar beliefs in nght-roving spirits or magicians, from unknown sources. One referred to women who believed that they rode at night on special dates upon animals among a host of other women called holda or (in one version of the text) with a strix or striga called Holda.25 The second concerned a belief by women that they flew off at night through closed doors to do battle with others in the clouds. The third was the denunciation, quoted in the second chapter of this book, of women who thought that they travelled in spirit bands at night to kill and eat other humans, and then restore them to life. The fourth accused women who claimed to be part of the night rides of also boasting of the ability to work magic which could induce either love or hate; another indication that the rides were associated with females who offered magical services. The fifth condemned a belief among women that at certain times of the year they should ‘spread a table with food and drink and three knives, so that if those three sisters come, whom past generations and ancient stupidity called parcae [the Roman word for the Fates] they can regale themselves’. The succeeding passage suggests that the ‘sisters’ concerned were expected to provide benefits to the household in return for this entertainment.26

  Worms is also in the Rhineland, but Burchard gathered his material from a wide range of earlier texts, spanning Western Europe from Italy to Ireland, and going back hundreds of years, and so this does not locate the traditions concerned. Those traditions were repeated by disapproving churchmen through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, disapproval of them becoming part of the common heritage of orthodoxy. John of Salisbury said that one of the names of the leader of the rides was Herodias, and that she convened assemblies at which her followers feasted and sported; he also crossed this story with that of the cannibal night-witches by saying that the night-roamers ate babies and then restored them to life. He called all this a diabolical illusion and commented that only ‘poor old women and the simple minded sort of men’ believed in this. One thirteenth-century French bishop, Angerius of Conserans in the Pyrenees, called the superhuman leader interchangeably Diana, Herodias or Bensozia, and another, William of Auvergne, named her Satia or Abundia and stated that she and her attendant spirits, called ‘the ladies’, were said to visit human houses at night. If food and drink were left out for them, they would enjoy these and then magically replenish them, and bless the household with prosperity; if none were on offer, they would abandon the household to ill fortune. He commented that it was mostly elderly women who told these stories.

  It seems as if two different earlier traditions, of women who joined night rides with a superhuman female, and superhuman females who visited houses to bless them, were now merging. Another famous French source of the thirteenth century, the courtly poem Roman de la Rose, cites the same tradition, concerning those who followed ‘Lady Habonde’. It called her entourage ‘the good ladies’ and stated that it roved on three nights of each week, accompanied by humans whose spirits flew out to them while their bodies remained in bed: it was said that every third child born had this gift. The ‘lady’ and her companions were themselves spirits, who could get into and out of houses through any crack and so were never obstructed by locks or bars.27 Around the same time, the Italian Jacobus of Voragine told how a saint had exposed as demons a company of ‘the good women who enter at night’ for whom food and drink had been left by a family.28 Likewise a preacher in south-eastern France, Stephen of Bourbon, had a story from the region about a man who told his parish priest that he went out at night and feasted with women called ‘the good things’, whom this priest also proved to be demons.29

  The tradition of the night rides had reached Iceland before the end of the thirteenth century, where it appears unsurprisingly in a saga remarkable for its
number of Continental European influences. None the less, the author transmuted the passage from Burchard into a native form, declaring that the people who followed Diana or Herodias rode on whales, seals, birds and other northern wildlife.30 Finally among these high medieval texts, mid thirteenth-century sermons by the German Bertold of Regensburg warned against giving credence to a range of nocturnal spirits, called variously the ‘night-wanderers’, the ‘Benevolent Ones’, the ‘Malevolent Ones’, the ‘night women’, those who rode on ‘this or that’, and the ‘blessed ladies’ or ‘ladies of the night’ for whom peasant women left tables laid when they retired to bed.31 He did not attempt to distinguish them, if he knew how. The names for each were in German, save for the ‘blessed ladies’, who were in Latin, and those for the benevolent and malevolent, hulden and unhulden, recall the holda mentioned by Burchard.

  Wherever it had originated, therefore – and the evidence suggests somewhere in the broad Franco-German region – by the high Middle Ages the idea of the night journeys led by a superhuman female or females was spread over a wide area of Western Europe which included England, France, Italy and Germany. It is possible that in some parts of this range, such as England, churchmen were simply repeating reports from elsewhere that they had heard or read, but the thirteenth-century French and German material seems to reflect genuine popular belief. During the late Middle Ages references to it continued, following much the same model as those earlier but with some local idioms. One French text from the early fourteenth century satirized the belief with a story of how criminals robbed the house of a rich and gullible peasant by dressing as women and pretending to be the ‘good beings’ visiting the house to bless it. The same collection reported how an old woman tried to get a reward from a parish priest by claiming that she had visited his home with ‘the ladies of the night’.32 By the mid-fourteenth century, the lady for whom people left out food at night was known in some German districts as ‘Perchte’ or ‘Berchten’; and she seemed as such to have a more forbidding or unattractive character as she was nicknamed ‘of the iron nose’ or ‘the long nose’.33 It is hard to identify these districts with any precision, although one of the first authors to refer to her came from Bavaria.34 In Italy around this time a Dominican friar reported that it was believed, especially by women, that living people of both sexes went about at night in a parade called the tregenda, led by Diana or Herodias.35 In the fifteenth century such descriptions multiply further, so that a professor at Vienna, Thomas von Haselbach, could name different kinds of spectral nocturnal visitor as ‘Habundia’, ‘Phinzen’, ‘Sack Semper’ and ‘Sacria’. He also termed Perchte an alias of Habundia and said that she was active at the feast of Epiphany, which ended the Christmas season. Successive editions of a set of sermons preached at Nuremberg equated Diana with ‘Unholde’ or ‘Frau Berthe’ or ‘Frau Helt’, and a penitential from the same century equated Perchte with the ancient Roman Fates. In 1484 an Austrian author identified Diana, Herodias, ‘Frau Perchte’ and ‘Frau Hult’ as the same being. A dictionary of 1468 stated that the lady for whom refreshments were left out at night was called Abundia or Satia, or by the common people Frau Perchte or Perchtum, and that she came with a retinue. She was by now especially believed to visit during the Christmas season, and the old tropes that the food and drink taken would be magically replenished, and that she would bless the generous household in return, were preserved.36 Again, these references point to a southern German distribution, which was indeed the one evident in stories about her in later folklore.37 In that folklore, likewise, Dame Holda, Hulda, Holle or Hulle had become Perchte’s equivalent, as a night-roving female spirit of winter, in central Germany.38 On the other hand, she may at times have got further afield. The English homily Dives and Pauper, from the 1400s, condemned the leaving out of food and drink at New Year ‘to feed All-holde’.39 The author may, however, have been quoting from a foreign source, as he soon after repeated the much older canon Episcopi concerning night spirit-rides. In North Italy the celebrated preacher Bernadino of Siena delivered sermons during the 1420s in which he condemned ‘the followers of Diana’ and old women who claimed to travel with Herodias on the night of Epiphany, the end of the Christmas holidays. He added that these women offered divination, healing and the breaking of bewitchment, to customers.40