The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  Epona was a goddess popular across most of the northern Roman world, as she is recorded from Britain to Hungary and as far south as Rome itself and Africa: over two hundred undoubted images of her survive, and thirty-three inscriptions. The epicentre of her cult was, however, in Gaul, and especially its eastern parts, now eastern France and the Rhineland, and was spread from there largely by the cavalry units of the Roman army stationed along the northern frontier, as she was pre-eminently a deity of horses and patroness of their welfare and breeding. She may have had wider associations with fertility or prosperity, because she sometimes carries ears of corn, or a dish of it, but these may just have been intended as treats for her equine charges, whom she rides or with whom she stands or sits in her icons.61 In view of her activity of riding, and her ancient popularity in an area in which the medieval night rides were recorded, it is not surprising that Ginzburg took her to be one of the origin points for the mistress of those rides.62 There are, however, points of divergence on either side of the equation: Epona is never shown with a retinue of followers, and the medieval rides were not really associated with horses but with wild beasts. Their leader corresponds more to a type of goddess found in various world mythologies and known to experts in comparative religion as ‘the Mistress of the Animals’; and there seems to be no such figure in the material of Roman France, Germany and the Alps, though particular goddesses there were associated with particular animals.

  The Matres or Matronae, the ‘Mothers’ or ‘Ladies’, were even more popular and widely venerated than Epona, being found across most of the western Roman Empire, though likewise the centre of their worship seems to have been in eastern Gaul. Images of them took the standard form of three stately women, standing or (more usually) seated in a row, and often holding dishes, bread, fruit or flowers: emblems of prosperity. Sometimes one of them, in the same form, was shown alone. Once again, they were particularly loved by soldiers, who accounted for much of the far extent of their cult. It is not always clear that the same three goddesses were being represented by their images and inscriptions, as the latter often honour them specifically as the Mothers of particular provinces or institutions.63 As apparent givers of the blessings of prosperity and abundance, they would make good ancestresses of superhuman ladies who came to bless houses; but again there are discrepancies: the Matres or Matronae were never shown with a retinue or in motion, instead of standing or sitting, and never associated with animals; and the various medieval ‘ladies’ did not usually travel in trios. No other figures in the abundant evidence for religious belief in the northern Roman Empire, moreover, make any better fit with the medieval images of the night rides. On the other hand, the benevolent Matres could make a good fit with the ‘three sisters’ mentioned by Burchard as visiting houses, and may have been the root of the whole house-blessing function attributed later to the ‘Lady’ and her retinue. It is also true that Burchard may also have been recording a separate, Italian, tradition that awarded that function to the Fates, as he indeed named them, or – given the European tendency to put superhuman females into threes – that an independent belief had grown up in the early Middle Ages which gave it to three other ‘sisters’.

  East of the Rhine, in ancient Germany, there is no comparable evidence and attempts to produce some have usually consisted of back-projections of medieval material. The results of this are inconclusive. Of the two principal goddess-like figures in the medieval German accounts, Holda, Holle or Hulda may have been generated in the Middle Ages as a personification of the night-journeys themselves. If his Latin is read correctly, in all but one of its surviving versions Burchard used the term holda to describe not the leader of female night rides but the actual rides. As said above, a single recension of his text speaks instead of Holda as the leader of them, and calls her a strix or striga, identifying her with the demoness or witch of Roman mythology and the cannibal witch of German; but this usage does not seem to work grammatically in the passage as the more normal one does, and the manuscript in which it appears is not one of the earliest. A character called Holda does appear much earlier, in a praise-poem for Judith, wife of the Holy Roman Emperor Louis the Pious, composed by the monastic scholar Walahfrid Strabo, who lived on an island in Lake Constance in the early ninth century.64 The passage, however, pairs Holda with Sappho, the great Greek poetess, to both of whom Judith is compared.

  A natural companion to a classical Greek heroine as a compliment to a Christian empress, by a learned churchman, would be a biblical one, and the obvious candidate here is the godly Old Testament prophetess Huldah, called Olda in the Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate.65 As well as being completely admirable, indeed a mouthpiece for Jehovah, Huldah like Sappho spoke in verse. It is possible that she became confused with the night rides in the popular imagination because of the similarity of her name to that of the rides, but this is speculation. As for Perchte (and so on), Holda’s counterpart to the south and east, Jacob Grimm was scrupulous enough to admit that there is no mention of her before the fourteenth century; but he went on to conclude that she surely had to have been an ancient goddess, simply because to Grimm figures like her had to have been ancient goddesses.66 It has recently been plausibly suggested on linguistic evidence that Perchte’s name derives from the medieval German one for the Christian feast of the Epiphany, of which she was a late medieval personification; this would fit a general medieval pattern of personifying feasts as (usually female) figures.67 On the whole, when trying to reconstruct ancient Germanic mythology, writers from Grimm down to Claude Lecouteux have turned to that portrayed in medieval Norse literature to plug the many gaps in the record.68 This literature did, as has been seen in a previous chapter, contain references to nocturnal revels, apparently mostly of trolls and other non-human beings to which human magicians could fly in spirit. These were not, however, mainly female and (more important) had no identifiable leader.

  A different sort of superhuman female rider, who traversed great stretches of land and sea, is represented in the same literature: the Valkyries, warrior maidens who in some accounts attended Ođinn and gathered slain warriors from battlefields as recruits for his host. Some are described in Old Norse poetry as winged and some on supernatural horses which could cross sea and sky. They blend with the Disir, troops of superhuman female warriors on horseback, clad in white or black, who seek the favour of human fighters and sometimes destroy them.69 None of these Norse figures, however, ride in troops together at night behind a leader, and invite selected living humans to join them. Ođinn himself certainly did not lead such rides, although modern folklore came to associate him with them and so did Grimm: he was, on the contrary, a solitary traveller, and his one connection with the night revels of spirits and their human friends, quoted earlier in this book, was to disrupt them. It may therefore be worth listening once more to medieval commoners themselves, and considering the names they gave to the superhuman female whom they claimed to follow, and which feature in descriptions of this belief by churchmen without deriving clearly from classical myth or the Bible. They are quite revealing: Bensozia, ‘good partner’ or ‘good company’; Abundia or Habonde (‘abundance’); Satia (‘satisfaction of appetite’); Oriente (the opulent east); Sibilla (evoking the all-knowing Roman prophetess) or just ‘the mistress of the game’. Richella and Perchte seem to be personal names, but Holda has been derived from terms meaning ‘benevolent’ or ‘well-disposed’.70 The connotations are all of a generous, bountiful, powerful and caring patroness, who provides fun and feasting to poor people, and especially to poor women, and in doing so supplies them not merely with the revelry and plenty usually missing from their daytime lives, but often, when they become associated with her service in popular repute, with greater respect in their communities as wielders of arcane power and knowledge.

  That, surely, must be the crux of the matter. It remains entirely possible that popular memories of Diana, Hera, Hecate, Epona, the Matres or other less well-known ancient goddesses oper
ated in the construction of the medieval images of the night journeys led by a superhuman female. It does not, however, seem to be susceptible of actual proof, while it does appear that in no case was an ancient cult simply developed into the medieval myth; rather, the latter took a distinctive form with no precise or even near correspondence to what is known of ancient religions. It is even possible that none of these goddesses is really relevant to the medieval beliefs, and that the latter were generated as a new system in the centuries between the official conversion of the lands concerned to Christianity and the writing of the canon Episcopi. What must be emphasized here is the striking total absence of any reference to the night rides in the surviving copious denunciations made by churchmen of popular beliefs between the fifth and ninth centuries.71 Whatever the truth, the belief system that had appeared by the year 900 was to prove remarkably widespread and tenacious, surviving far into modern times. It clearly served a powerful need among some medieval commoners, especially female, and represents as such a genuinely counter-cultural tradition, part of an imperfectly ‘hidden transcript’, which enabled people to cope with aspects of established social and religious structures that worked to their disadvantage.

  It seems now that we can probably jettison the nineteenth-century concept of a general prehistoric fertility religion centred on the dead, and in default of better evidence leave open the question of how much the medieval belief in good night-roaming spirits was derived from ancient paganism. Instead we can concentrate on the processes by which a medieval world of dream and fantasy, focused on these spirits, was developed and sustained.

  A Tying of Ends

  It has been suggested here that two different concepts of nocturnal spirit procession existed in the high and later Middle Ages: one of evil or penitential dead humans, and one of benevolent female spirits, often with a recognized leader. The former seems likely to have been a high medieval, Christian, development, while the latter appeared earlier and may have been based on pagan antecedents. The former was a phenomenon which virtually all living humans preferred to avoid, and which none would wish to join, while the latter was something in which many people claimed to have participated, and which gave them prestige among their communities. The former was mostly a male society, especially of soldiers, while the latter was associated especially with women. By Grimm’s time, the two had become generally mixed together, and he compounded this mixture to produce his construct of ‘the Wild Hunt’. The mixing had, however, commenced long before, and is apparent in some of the medieval and early modern sources, which mention either or both of the kinds of procession concerned. Literary sources virtually always distinguished between the two quite clearly, but at a popular level the blurring of categories is evident in places by the later Middle Ages.72

  As early as 1319 in the French Pyrenees, a local magician examined by an inquisitor claimed to have gained his knowledge by travelling with ‘the good ladies and the souls of the dead’, to visit clean and orderly homes with both. A woman questioned by the same churchman asserted that the ‘good ladies’ who travelled by night were former rich and powerful women who were punished for their sins by being compelled to wander by demons. The women tried at Milan in 1384 and 1390 claimed that Lady Oriente’s company included some dead people, including a few executed criminals who showed their shame. The citizen of Luzern mentioned earlier, recalling beliefs among the citizens in the mid and late sixteenth century, included the souls of good individuals who had suffered premature and violent deaths among the ‘good army’ or ‘blessed people’ who visited virtuous houses. He also, however, recorded a belief in a parallel, evil, ‘furious army’, and in nocturnal apparitions which made frightening noises, both clearly different from the ‘good army’. What is significant about these examples, however, is their rarity. Where the two kinds of spectral procession appear together in trials for witchcraft and magic (something which is itself rare), they are usually distinguished clearly from each other. Indeed, whereas the followers of the ‘lady’ or ‘ladies’, as shown, quite often appeared in court in the Alpine lands and north Italy, it was very unusual for people accused of being witches or magicians anywhere to speak of taking part in the processions of the dead. Some claimed to be able to see dead people and sometimes to converse with them, but this is not the same thing as joining their travels. Only a couple of Carlo Ginzburg’s benandanti, and a few individuals elsewhere, such as a local magician tried at Luzern in 1499–1500, said that they had travelled or processed with the dead, or were married to somebody who did. If travel with spirits was therefore largely something confined to the followers of the superhuman woman or women, it is worth asking what they actually meant by this; and often very hard to find out. None the less, there is testimony that provides some answers, and they occupy various categories. One consists of apparent simple deception: to make the claim, as it brought respect and customers, without actually meaning it. Two of the women brought to trial in Sicily for saying that they consorted with the donas de fuera admitted that they had made their stories up; and one who acted out the drama of the arrival of an invisible company of the spirits in front of her clients may charitably be described as in a trance but was more probably play-acting to secure the desired impression.73 Another category may be represented by the decision reached by Nicholas of Cusa: that the old women whom he was interrogating in South Tyrol were simply half mad and experienced vivid dreams, taking what happened in sleep to be reality.74 Some accounts may reflect visionary experience, hallucination or deceit, such as that of the eleven-year-old Sicilian girl who insisted that she had seen seven women in beautiful red and white dresses appear dancing to a tambourine, and talk to her, while another girl with her could see nothing.75

  In a category of their own are apparent out-of-body experiences of the sort mentioned in the chapter on shamanism. Wolfgang Behringer’s horse-herd and magician in the Vorarlberg said that he travelled with the ‘night company’ and a Christian angel when he ‘fell as if unconscious’ or ‘was overcome by lethargy or unconsciousness’, and left his body motionless while his spirit roamed. These episodes lasted two to three hours, took place four times a year at any time of day or night, were involuntary, and were sometimes painful to him.76 Unusually deep sleep, with vivid dreams, could possibly account for them, but there was probably an entirely different catatonic effect involved. His angelic guide revealed to him the names of the witches who had afflicted local people, and whom he then (he claimed) compelled with Christian zeal to remove their spells. The demonologist Johann Nider, writing in the 1430s, told a story of a Dominican friar who had tried to convince a peasant woman who claimed to fly by night with ‘Diana’ that she was deluding herself. One night she agreed to let him watch her with another witness, as she put herself into a basket, rubbed herself with an ointment, uttered a spell, and fell into a stupor. When she awoke, she was convinced that she had been with ‘Diana’. A Spanish author in the same decade said that he had heard of women who became so deeply unconscious that they were insensible to blows or burns, and claimed that they had been travelling.77 An anecdote inserted into a fifteenth-century manuscript at Breslau tells of an old woman who swooned and dreamed that she was being transported in flight by ‘Herodiana’. In an impulse of joy she threw open her arms, spilled a container of water and awoke to find herself lying on the ground.78

  As Norman Cohn pointed out, these are not first-hand accounts; so it may be that they reflect what educated people wanted to believe was going on rather than what was actually happening.79 When Carlo Ginzburg calls such reports evidence of ‘an ecstatic cult’, he may be right, but we do not really know if the experiences concerned added up to that, or remained at the level of a culturally determined set of dreams and fantasies.80 He calls the description of the headdress of ‘Richella’ provided by the women questioned by Nicholas of Cusa ‘words of visionary precision’, even though he acknowledges that they are filtered through Nicholas’s account.81 Visionary experiences they may h
ave been, but it is difficult to distinguish them from an image remembered by one of the women from a vivid dream; which was the churchman’s own conclusion. Tellingly, and mercifully, between the ninth and early fourteenth centuries, none of the clerics and other members of medieval elites who recorded the tradition of the night-roaming bands following a superhuman woman, seems to have thought that they were dealing with an actual cult. The accounts of the night journeys were never treated as a heresy, but as a ridiculous delusion, of ignorant and silly people, intended by them to complement rather than oppose Christianity and so to be punished with relatively mild penances. It is true that the delusion concerned was blamed on the mischief of demons, and by the thirteenth century it was suggested by some commentators that the demons were creating actual images of the spectral processions, instead of simply planting the thought of them in peoples’ minds. There was still, however, no inclination to persecute as a heretical sect those who believed that they joined them.

  Only at the end of the fourteenth century, with a new fear of ceremonial magic as demonically inspired and assisted, did the taint of genuine heresy begin to affect those who believed in the ‘lady’ or ‘ladies’, and then only as individuals: the two women at Milan who believed in Oriente were burned in 1390, after six years in which they had repeated their claims despite being formally warned to desist.82 One now confessed (or was obliged to confess) to having a demon lover, and they were sentenced to death as relapsed heretics. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as Carlo Ginzburg and Wolfgang Behringer have masterfully shown, the tradition of the good night-roaming spirits gradually became assimilated, at places in the Alps and Lombard Plain, to the new stereotype of the demonic witch and the witches’ sabbath which underlay the early modern European trials.83 The construction of that stereotype is a process to which this book must now turn its attention at last.