Witchcraft revealed

Malcolm Gaskill examines a collection of newly translated texts on witch-hunting

Origins of the Witches’ Sabbath

ed. Michael D Bailey

Pennsylvania State University Press 2021

Pb, 127pp, £17.95, ISBN 9780271089102

During the so-called “witch craze”, c.1420–1680, most people blamed witches for blasting crops, infecting livestock and hurting their families, which the courts recognised as the crime of maleficium. But the authorities also reviled witchcraft as an anti-Christian conspiracy, carried out by witches travelling through the night to gather on hillsides to pay homage to Satan and plot mayhem.

The absence of hard evidence for this was explained by the fact that the Devil was good at covering his tracks. The other explanation – that the witches’ sabbath was a feverish delusion – was also heard. Yet perceived danger drove people towards the former. Besides, the sceptical view was a negative that could not be proved, any more than sabbaths could be proved to be real. So the idea of the sabbath, reinforced by lurid imagery of sacrificing babies, kissing the Devil’s arse and other enormities, lingered for generations in a balance of probabilities. Other factors helped keep the concept alive: men in authority wrote convincingly about it, and confessing witches described sabbaths in grisly detail.

This is a revealing volume of texts, newly translated by Michael Bailey, an expert in the history of witchcraft. They include secular as well as religious writers, given that witchcraft was a felony as well as a heresy. In short – and this was its ideological power

– it threatened everyone and everything.

These fascinating first-hand insights into pre-modern witchhunting blend demonological theory with horror film scenarios. The Vauderie of Lyon, written by an inquisitor in the 1430s, relates how the Devil appeared at a sabbath “in the form of a very repulsive man, that is black, completely covered with hair and bristles, with horns, having a monstrous, drawn out and twisted shape”. There’s also a trial record in which a 60-yearold man, Jubertus of Bavaria, admits being a necromancer and snatching a baby, whom he “killed and roasted and mixed with the blood of a child who died without being baptised”. Sometimes, one senses the accused’s own fantasies creeping in. A clerk named Hans Fründ recorded witches in the Swiss region of Valais, revealing how they anointed chairs with a magic ointment to ride from village to village, including into cellars that had the best wine.

What motivated these inquisitors and other writers? A sincere sense of peril, for sure, but also the urge to exercise power. A French magistrate included in the volume, reacting to scores of local witch-trials, explained that he put pen to paper “so that the errors of magicians and witches might be made evident to ignorant people”. It was a self-serving formula that has lasted well into modern times: stoke up fear in the masses, then sell them the remedy.

★★★★★

Has humanity confused the idea of God with memories of ET contact?

Paul Wallis 6th Books/John Hunt Publishing 2021 Pb, 181pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781789048520

The author, a Christian minister for over three decades, had a revelation whereby he now reinterprets the Genesis creation myths as literal evidence for aliens’ manipulation of humanity – a familiar theory to those who recall the “God was an astronaut” phenomenon of the 1970s, kickstarted by Erich von Däniken (who has endorsed Wallis).

Wallis writes in a personable and readable style, but seems unaware that many of his arguments were refuted long ago. He sees the Hebrew elohim as proof of multiple entities; El = God and –im = a plural marker. But pluralisation in biblical Hebrew was also used to emphasise excellence, or as an honorific. A little learning can be a dangerous thing, but not, as Zecharia Sitchin learned, necessarily dangerous to book sales.

Wallis’s quest takes him to Africa to learn of the creation myths of the Efik people of Nigeria; he also cites Dogon, Cherokee, Aztec and Aboriginal Australians’ origin myths, accepting them all as literal accounts of ancient contact with tall

(and invariably white) beings with advanced technology.

Interwoven throughout the book are Wallis’s own ET encounters as a young man, partiallysurfacing memories that his conscious mind had presumably suppressed due to their traumatic nature. He recalls a disturbing experience when five “things” appeared at the foot of his bed one night; he dispels these “short, grey, almost translucent figures” by invoking the name of Jesus. I would have liked more exploration of Wallis’s alien contact memories and of his subsequent conversion from conventional Christian minister to advocate of the “ancient alien” thesis, both potentially fascinating from a psychological perspective. Instead, the bulk of this book deals with familiar and debunked ideas.

★★