The Sabbats of Satan

The comely young woman, standing chained to an iron post in the center of the square at Würzburg, watched with horror as the executioner heaped dry twigs about her ankles. Then she began to sob and shriek hysterically as his assistants brought up yet other fuel for her funeral pyre.

Her face had transformed to a hideous mask; her arms and wrists bled from straining against her fetters. The piled tinder mounted waist high, and suddenly the black-hooded executioner thrust his torch among them; then stood back as the crackling tongues of flame began to eat at the dry wood.

The condemned woman was 24-year-old Hildur Loher, and the time, summer 1530. Her execution was typical of thousands that had already taken place, and of tens of thousands more that would follow during the next two centuries.

Her crime was the foulest imaginable: having sexual relations with the Devil.

Among those present at her burning was her husband, Hans, who had been the chief witness against her at her trial a few days earlier. The court record is intact, and from it we can read his testimony. He was the son of a wealthy Würzburg merchant. He and Hildur had been wed for less than a year, and from the early days of their marriage he had suspected she was not being faithful to the marriage bed. Often he would wake at night to (continued on page 146)Sabbats of Satan(continued from page 83) find her absent; she would come creeping back at dawn, "her body befouled and her hair atangle." Like many a cuckolded husband, Hans gave way to violence, but his threats and beatings did no good, for Hildur would neither tell him where she had been nor what she was up to.

Then one night he wakened to find her lying on the left side of their bed, writhing like a woman in passion, and moaning softly to herself. Misinterpreting her movements as an invitation to make love to her, Hans reached out to draw her to him. But when he touched her, she struck at him furiously, leaped out of bed, and ran out of the house, clad only in her nightgown.

Hans pulled his breeches on and ran after her as she hurried through the streets toward the edge of town and passed into the forest. Hans followed at a distance, hoping to discover at last with whom she had been keeping her nocturnal rendezvous.

Inside the trees was a clearing, and gathered there on this summer's night were a score of men and women, seated around a blazing bonfire. By the fire a "tall naked man, his body all hairy," was waiting. Hans stopped dead in his tracks, realizing with a surge of panic that what he had stumbled upon was the dread witches' sabbat.

Hildur, casting off her nightgown, plunged naked through the circle, and, as Hans reported at her trial later, "That man was the Devil, and it was him that she run to."

For many centuries after the birth of Christianity, harmless relics of paganism persisted in the country regions of Europe -- veneration of the moon and of her goddesses, Diana, Luna, Hecate; nighttime festivals in honor of Pan and Bacchus. But there was no malice in these beliefs and practices, no mockery of the Church. By the year 1100, however, the differences of language (Church Latin us. the various vernaculars) had all but closed the Church against the serf; and the Church gave him no practical nor spiritual support against the terrible oppression of the feudal lords. Indeed, it was quite unmistakably on their side, and one of the chief tyrants.

It was during the 14th Century that the old pagan nocturnal rites became imbued with a fierce spirit of revolt, vengeance and despair. The Black Mass was born, the inversion of the holy sacrament, in which an altar was raised to Lucifer, the angel who had rebelled against authority. Christ -- who had shown no power to work the miracle that would set men free -- was challenged to strike the blasphemers down, if He could.

Throughout Europe for the next three centuries there existed covens of "witches" -- men and women who, renouncing Christianity and swearing the dark oath, "I cling to Satan," became, body and soul, the Devil's disciples. The word "coven" is a corruption of the Christian word "convent"; the Christian Sabbath became the Devil's "sabbat." The early covens were even limited to 13 persons, a mockery of Christ and His 12 Disciples. God's 10 commandments to Moses were perverted into 10 "Devil's Commandments," with the admonition "Thou shalt not" altered to "Thou shalt." The exact number of witches can only be estimated, but it is an irrefutable fact of history that during these three centuries more than 200,000 men, women and children went to the stake or gallows for covenanting with the Prince of Darkness and attending his unholy conclaves. Many of these, undeniably, were the victims of malicious accusations and false identifications, and not members of the secret Devil-worshiping societies at all. Yet the number of actual Devil-worshipers was astronomical, with covens in virtually every town and hamlet. In the increasingly frenzied attempts to eradicate them, some of the grimmest pages of history were written.

Of the sexual aspects of the Devil's sabbats a great deal is known, both from the documents of the period and from the confessions of the admitted participants. The sabbats were performed with the coven's leader, or "wizard," using the naked body of a young woman as an altar, and it was the wizard's amours with this same young woman which stimulated the others to wild debauchery. Hardly a sabbat was held that was not concluded in promiscuous lovemaking.

Many swore that it was not the wizard but the Devil himself who roistered with them, and many a woman, great with child, believed sincerely that the unborn life stirring within her womb was "Prince Satan's own gat."

The identity of most wizards was a strict secret even from their own memberships, but their power over the unholy congregations, in their role as the Devil's direct agents, was absolute. To prevent detection, the wizard wore a two-faced wooden mask, called an "ooser." The mask depicted on one side the face of the old god Janus, god of life's crossroads and controller of the sun and moon, and on the other, the head of a goat. The goat was regarded as the favored animal of Satan, and it was believed that it was this shape the Fiend most often took when materializing at the sabbats for some earthly hell-raising. Nearly every coven had its own black goat -- a creature who was the Devil's substitute.

Once the declension to Satan was made, initiation into a coven was relatively simple. The new convert would come before the other witches and in their presence renounce all allegiance to God, pledging himself wholly to the Prince of Darkness. The wizard would then place his hand on the convert's head, and in a "dry baptism" spoken through the goat-faced "ooser," intone the words: "All that is under my hand, body and soul, be the Devil's, at this moment and eternally." The wizard then pricked the finger of the new convert and, in his own blood, had him sign his name or make his mark in the Book of Death, a roster of the local membership that the wizard kept in his possession "for the Devil's reference." The new witch was given another name in keeping with his new calling -- "Devil's Whelp," "Thief of Heaven," or something similar -- by which he would be known to the coven. He then had to undergo a probationary period to prove his allegiance to "all things evil," performing various tasks assigned him by the wizard in the Devil's name. If he completed these satisfactorily, the newcomer was assigned a permanent place in the circle at the sabbats, and entrusted with the coven's secrets, including its private formula for "witch ointment."

Witch ointment, which supposedly made witches capable of flying, was an indispensable ingredient of the sabbats and of witchcraft in general. While the formulas for these foul-smelling unguents varied, nearly all included drugs whose soporific and excitant properties are well-known today. Properly compounded, they produced in the witches a hallucinatory state in which they could actually imagine themselves and their fellow witches air-borne. Belladonna, which produces hallucinations, was a chief ingredient, as were hemlock, producing excitement and paralysis, and mandragora, "that insane root which takes the reason prisoner" -- plunging those who drink of its juices into a comatose, nightmare-haunted slumber. Castor, poppy, henbane and foxglove were other potent components; less potent but more obnoxious were such items as the brains of cats, powdered goat bones, menstrual blood, dogs' semen, female rats, the hair and fingernails of corpses, ants' eggs, bats' eyes, horse urine and soot.

Spread over the body "to the thickness of about two inches," after the flesh had been roughly scrubbed to open the pores properly, the unguent and its vapors quickly sent those attending the sabbat into a state of wild imaginings. Usually the anointing took place in the Devil-cultist's own home prior to departure for the meeting, though sometimes -- particularly with new converts -- it was applied at the sabbat itself.

On moonlit nights the cultists gathered at their meeting places -- at a crossroads, under a rotten tree or near a gallows. The nights for assembling varied from country to country and from century to century. French witches preferred Wednesdays and Sundays, English witches Mondays and Saturdays. Italian and Germanic witches, for some reason, favored Thursdays.

But wherever and whenever the sabbats took place, they followed a standard five-phase agenda. First the members of the coven assembled at the appointed spot, approaching from different directions and angles so that they would all meet in a circle about the blazing bonfire which the wizard had kindled. The last few steps were taken backwards, so that all the witches arrived facing away from the fire. The men carried wooden staffs and the women brooms, on the end of which they had affixed candles, which would later be lighted in the "hellfire" as part of the ceremony.

When all were present, the second phase took place: humbling oneself before Satan. This perverted adoration was directed toward the barn-foul goat which was the Devil's proxy and which stood in the center of the circle, sometimes on a raised dais. As the wizard read from his Book of Death the roster of witches, those present performed their unholy obeisance. The witches approached by "going backward like crabs," putting their hands out behind them to touch the goat in supplication. Once contact was made, the devotee turned around, lit his candle in the bonfire, and kissed the goat, as a 1580 account by French demonologist Jean Bodin puts it, "in that place which modesty forbids writing or mentioning." A Scottish witch, Agnes Sampson, less discreet than the learned Frenchman, described it more bluntly: "The Devil caused all the company to come and kiss his arse."

Once all had performed the infamous "kiss of shame," the witches had a banquet, consisting usually of black bread and ale, supplied by the participants, but sometimes given an added fillip with a "witch cake" supplied by the wizard. The witch cake, made of black millet, urine and certain herbs, produced a "light and airy state" in those partaking of it.

The "merrymaking" following the banquet consisted chiefly of dancing. One frenzied number was performed by the sabbat participants while straddling the staffs and brooms they had brought: hence our present-day Halloween picture of witches as hags who fly through the air on broomsticks. Another dance, the notorious "Witches' Round," was performed by couples dancing back to back, which was considered the height of lasciviousness in the 16th and 17th Centuries.

The wizard's "sermon," delivered over the naked female altar as the dance-wearied rested, was a mockery of Christian ritual, employing rosaries made of bones and dice, and using the sign of the cross made from left to right rather than in the proper manner. The wizard led the witches in repeating the Lord's Prayer backward, and chanting, en masse, the Devil's Commandments. He also exhorted them to commit whatever evil acts they were able to perpetrate -- to lie, cheat, steal and murder, and to be continuously on the lookout for prospective new converts to Satan.

The fifth and final phase of the sabbat was indiscriminate copulation. Drugged with their ointment, drunk with their ale, and worked to a froth by the wizard's wild, hypnotic sermonizing, the witches fell upon each other in orgiastic frenzy. The wizard, reversing his "ooser" so that the goat-face showed, initiated the woman who was his altar (a newcomer when one was available) into the unholy pleasures of the "Devil's Couch." Witch after witch believed it was the Devil performing the act in person, for in the eerie light of the fire it was quite possible to imagine that the randy goatlike creature rutting the naked woman was indeed Satan, and that the drunken, slavering partners of the other revelers were demons. Frequently the couples designated by the wizard to have intercourse were father and daughter, mother and son, brother and sister. It was far easier to believe that it was actually a devil who had temporarily assumed the shape of some loved one than to admit the fact of what was actually taking place.

The orgies continued as long as nature permitted, with frequent changes of partners, until, spent and exhausted, the witches dragged themselves home before cockcrow.

Widespread persecution of coven members commenced in 1184 when the Church moved to wipe out the witches once and for all. A papal bull issued by Pope Lucius III instructed the bishops to investigate heretics, forcing persons "found marked by suspicion alone" to prove their innocence or be punished. Officers of the law who did not cooperate were excommunicated. Slowly, coven by coven, the witches were unmasked, and the number of those put to death reached into the thousands. It is estimated, perhaps conservatively, that 200,000 "wizards, witches, sorcerers, sorceresses and heretics" had been executed by the time the persecution expended itself in the 1700s. In a single three-month period in 1515, for instance, 600 people were burned in the small bishopric of Bamberg, 900 in Würzburg, 500 in Geneva. In 1664, in the German community of Lindheim, whose inhabitants numbered only 600, 30 persons were burned. In 1589 at Quedlinburg in Saxony, a town of about 12,000 inhabitants, 133 were burned in one day. In Toulouse the number burned in one day was 400.

It is disturbing to recall that when Protestantism emerged during this prolonged reign of terror, the more zealous inquisitors often treated deviants from Catholicism in the same manner as the Devil's disciples, so that thousands of God-fearing Protestants met death side by side with the acknowledged witches on the same general charges of heresy. It was flight from this kind of religious intolerance that led the Puritans, Quakers and other Protestant sects to Plymouth, Philadelphia and the other early settlements of the New World -- where some of them exhibited considerable intolerance of their own, including the execution of New World witches.

The interest of the celibate clerical judges in the sexual side of the sabbats reached a fever pitch during the persecutions, and the ecclesiastics wrung from those they condemned to fire and gibbet every possible scrap of information. The "confessions" were often the products of thumbscrew and rack, and must be partially disallowed; yet enough is known of the covens' uninhibited sex habits that even the extorted admissions cast illuminating sidelights. And not all the confessions were painfully extracted -- many were freely given by persons who knew full well that their shameful admissions were their death warrants.

"It is the Devil himself who comes to us," the confessing witches swore, stating that not only did Satan partake copiously of the sabbats' lewd pleasures; he also brought with him a horde of sexless younger devils who had the power to transform themselves into either men or women to cohabit with the human participants.

Practicing this quick-change artistry was, in fact, a favorite trick of the hellish visitors: often a man would be locked in amorous embrace with a succubus (a devil in female form) when the devil would transform himself to a male incubus, with attendant complications which the demon found hilarious. The reverse also took place, when the female witch, at the height of her abominable ravishment, found her hellish gallant had gone aglimmering, leaving her in the arms of a succubus.

It was soon apparent that the confessing witches found sleeping with the Devil a far from joyous experience. Henri Boguet, an eminent French lawyer, reported: "Nearly all the witches say such intercourse is by no means pleasurable to them because of the Devil's ugliness and deformity." Nicholas Remy (1530-1612), an inquisitor from Lorraine with 800 condemnations to his "credit" ("So good is my justice that last year there were no less than 16 killed themselves rather than pass through my hands"), wrote in his book Demonolalry: "When they are laid by their demons, they can admit, only with the greatest pain, what are reputed their tools .... Nearly all the women complain they are very unwilling to be embraced by their demons, but that it is useless to struggle against them."

The Devil, both insatiable and sadistic, demanded intercourse "sometimes 50 and 60 times a night," making his consorts "to cry out like women in travail with child." He also whimsically used the quick-change artistry of the lesser demons with practiced ease, starting his love play in the shape of a handsome, stalwart youth but transforming at midpoint to a goat, dog or tiger.

However their other accounts varied, witches from all parts of Europe were unanimous on one point: that the Devil's sex organ was extremely cold. Isobel Gowdie, a Scottish witch burned in 1662, described Satan as "a mickle, black, rough man, very cold, so that I found even his 'nature' as cold within me as spring well water." Sixteen-year-old Adelaide Harwell, tried in London in 1708, was "commonly visited by the Devil once a day, in the shape of a very handsome young man." But she, too, reported: "His touches were as cold as ice or snow."

The "explanation" which the clerics formulated for the Devil's iciness was, if nothing else can be said for it, at least ingenious: it was that, "having no semen of his own, he gathers up that of mortal men wasted in their nightdreams or masturbations, storing it up in his own abhorred body for later usage."

A more accurate accounting for the coldness comes from the confessions of condemned wizards who told of a cold douche given to chill, sterilize and prevent pregnancy. The instrument was "cold, hard, very slender, a little longer than a finger -- part of it metal, the other part flexible." This device, which the drugged witches undoubtedly mistook for part of their demon's anatomy, enabled the wizards of the latter-day covens to boast with reasonable honesty, "No woman need fear leaving a sabbat heavier than she came."

Occasionally a witch reported giving birth to some monstrosity as the result of Satanic couplings, but such accounts were not frequent. Angela to Labarthe, the first woman known to have been burned for having sex with the Devil (Toulouse, 1275), allegedly bore a demon with a wolf's head and a snake's tail, but "the Devil took his son away with him" before anyone else saw it. A scattering of other witches claimed that the Satanic stud service spawned in them such offspring as tapeworms, serpents, bats and children "crippled and hairy."

According to the witches' confessions, the sexual activities of the Devil and of the incubi and succubi were by no means confined strictly to the sabbats. The Devil, who was "Prince of the Air" as well as of the Darkness, could make himself invisible and in this guise have intercourse with his converts before the very eyes of the godly, the Christian souls being none the wiser. If a woman was a witch and her husband was not, she and her demon lover could copulate in the very bedroom she was sharing with her earthly mate "and never waken him, provided that they do keep it to the left side of the bed."

Some of the witches testified that the female demons doubled as prostitutes between sabbats for want of any better amusement. A brothel keeper at Bologna was condemned in 1468 for keeping a house staffed exclusively with succubi. He was sentenced to have his flesh "torn from his bones by red-hot pincers," after which he was burned and his ashes "spat upon."

Male incubi likewise roistered outside the sabbat circle, pursuing those they lusted after even into the cloisters. The confessions of many "possessed" nuns deal with lecherous assaults by demons within the supposedly protective walls of the convents themselves. At Louviers, in Normandy, the incubi "assumed the shape of young priests," or of dogs and even cats.

The Louviers trials shocked all Europe with their sensational revelations, especially when it was learned that the nuns' bewitchment stemmed not from some outside wizard, but from Father Mathurin Picard, former chaplain at the convent. The particular sect, the Franciscan Tertiaries, believed that those filled with the Holy Ghost could commit no sin, and that nakedness, in the manner of Adam, was the epitome of holiness. According to Sister Madeline Bavent, who left a long autobiography, holy communion was received with the penitents "stripped to the waist, with breasts exposed."

Father Picard began celebrating Black Masses from above a naked altar, reading to the nuns from "a paper of blasphemy," and summoning various demons to cohabit with them "in the manner of himself."

These orgies continued for several years, but it was not until after Father Picard's death in 1642 that they came to light. Sister Madeline, who confessed the whole business, was accused by the Church of being "in her wantonness" an instrument of her sisters' downfall. She was arrested on a variety of charges, among them "sorcery, attending unholy sabbats, and copulating with Devils." She was expelled from her order and sentenced to life imprisonment in a dungeon "with bread and water three days a week to be her only sustenance." Here she wrote her lengthy confession, and made several unsuccessful attempts at suicide. A deep resignation succeeded, but there is no further record of her fate.

The judges had to content themselves with punishing Father Picard posthumously; he was ordered excommunicated, after which his body was exhumed and thrown on the fire which consumed the living body of his successor, Father Thomas Boullé, in 1647.

Two other cases of priest-turned-wizard and nun-turned-witch rocked France in the same century -- at Loudun, where Sister Catherine Cadière accused Father Urbain Grandier of having contracted with the Devil; and at Aix-en-Provence, where Sister Madeline de la Palud charged that, spurred on by Father Louis Gaufridi, she had attended sabbats "every day, beginning at 11 of the clock at night and continuing until three of the clock after midnight." This Sister Madeline, petitioning for release from her holy vows, said that at these sabbats she and her sisters were violated by a total of 6661 devils, among them such first lieutenants of Satan as Beelzebub, Leviathan, Asmodeus and Astoroth. Beelzebub they were particularly reluctant to couple with, for when he made love to them, "he did cause our bones to crack and grate against one another."

Demons who indulged in such activities were not only hard to discourage, but could prove spiteful and vindictive if the partners in their amours wanted to break off the relationships. At Pavia, one incubus, spurned by his consort who had married a soldier, avenged himself by gathering up all the stones in a field and building a wall around the marriage bed "so high that the couple were unable to leave it without using a ladder."

Certain charms could be employed to drive the demons away, but these worked only for those who had not signed the Devil's document. Prayer and calling upon God for assistance were infallible charms in all instances, but it was believed that those whose souls the Devil held in thrall were incapable of speaking any holy words. Medicinal herbs were sometimes used to counteract the witches' ointment; yet they were compounded of similar stimulants and aphrodisiacs, including sweet flag, ginger, cloves, mace, cinnamon, aloe wood and cardamom. These were boiled in brandy and water to make a potion one quaffed when he felt the demon approaching. Such a concoction would seem conducive to inviting, rather than repelling, carnal assault. Once the Devil took hold, there was little retreating: madness and death were the rewards he offered. To a witch in trouble the Devil offered no succor, unless it was to encourage her to commit suicide.

But Satanism, which flourished for so many centuries, did not die with the Middle Ages. The arcane powers of blackness still hold their unnatural fascination; as long as this is true, Belial will find his malevolent recruits.