“You have witnessed something of which everyone talks without knowledge; you have been initiated into secrets no less terrible than the grotto of Trophonius; you have been present at the Sabbath.”
-from Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual (1896) by Eliphas Levi
The witches’ sabbath has long been a source of fascination and debate. Sphinx-like, for ages it has lurked in the darkest corners our psyches, inspired our greatest artists, and puzzled generations of historians. Its lasting appeal can probably be partly attributed to the fact that it was believed to involve, to use Elizabeth Montagu’s words, beings “whose nature we do not understand, whose actions we cannot control, and whose influence we know not how to escape”.
The immortality or inescapability of witchcraft is also an idea that frequently appears in various folk traditions, and is perhaps best expressed in the belief –popularised by Charles Godfrey Leland–that a witch cannot die without transferring her magical powers to another person. In a similar fashion, one cannot read texts on witches, demons, and sorcery without becoming, in a certain sense, transfigured. As in the fairy-stories of old, he who stumbles upon an elvish banquet is obliged to join.
In this way, scholars like Dr Jan Machielsen, while forensically analysing early modern witch trials and lore, are also preserving their spell. Machielson is a lecturer on early modern cultural history at Cardiff University. His first monograph, Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation, was published in 2015. Machielsen is also the editor The Science of Demons: Early Modern Authors Facing Witchcraft and the Devil (2020), a collection of new essays on Renaissance diabolism, witch-hunting, and storytelling. Machielsen touches on several of these topics in our interview below.
The Custodian: Until the mid-twentieth century, there was a tendency among some scholars, as Willem de Blécourt noted in his essay on “Sabbath stories”, to reduce, pathologise, or dismiss the witches’ sabbath as a purely hallucinogen-inspired or imagined event. Can you tell us more about the kind of methods that historians today use to better understand and analyse these accounts?
Jan Machielsen: The witches’ sabbat–we often skip the “h” these days to distinguish it more clearly from the Jewish day of rest–has been a particular puzzle. Historians have often thought about it in terms of dream epidemics–Gustav Henningsen set out this argument for instance for the confessions of children in the 1609-1614 Basque witch-hunt–which literally makes the sabbat the stuff of nightmares. And there is, of course, also the older historiography of Margaret Murray and Carlo Ginzburg that considers the sabbat a real or ecstatic event. Those types of arguments seem to be prompted by a desire to explain witchcraft away–coming up with some sort medical, physical, real explanation.
These days we are more interested in narratives. A graduate student of mine, inspired partly by Blécourt’s work, Livia Torquetti dos Santos, is working on the trope of the stranger in early modern sabbat narratives. We can find versions of this story everywhere. It typically involves a suspicious husband who follows his wife in secret when she leaves the house at night, who ends up by accident at the sabbat and then, horrified, shouts out “Jesus” or some such. The whole sabbat disappears and he is left stranded far from home. By charting where and when this story is reported and the different variations, we can learn more about how deeply rooted these beliefs were and how they spread. It’s really interesting work.
Another approach–in my view–is that we are getting more sophisticated in reading these trial documents, where sabbat narratives occur. We pay more attention to the role of the judges, the motivations of others (for instance, in the Basque case, the parents of the children who confess). Lu Ann Homza has published a fascinating article on this for the Spanish side, but much the same seems to be the case on the French side that I am working on. One thing that is also happening there is that the child witnesses are sharing dormitories and it seems that these children may be developing these narratives together.
C: You’ve studied several demonologists and witch-hunters; what for you is so unique about Pierre de Lancre and his approach to witchcraft?
JM: Pierre de Lancre is an exceptional figure, and we have not quite given credit as to how unusual he is. He authored three works of demonology (including his account of his 1609 witch-hunt in the French Basque country) and when you add up the number of pages you get to a figure of close to 1,800 pages of text on witchcraft alone (with some divination, werewolfery and other allied beliefs thrown in the mix). No other person in history has written that much on the subject of witchcraft.
Historians also represent him as a deeply orthodox figure, as a Catholic magistrate acting as a religious reformer. But this just one side to him, if you press just a bit more firmly you realize that he is actually quite a heterodox thinker, for whom witchcraft offers an opportunity to explore demonic sex in minute and graphic detail. I think historians have traditionally liked their demonologists to be exemplars of orthodoxy (the bigoted inquisitor rooting out imaginary heresies) but De Lancre was nothing of the sort.
C: Who were his key philosophical influences?
JM: De Lancre married Jeanne de Mons, a niece of perhaps the greatest French philosopher of the sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne, who was among those who signed their marriage contract. Montaigne was a generation older and long dead by the time De Lancre left for the Basque country, but his influence was profound. Before turning to witchcraft, De Lancre wrote a philosophical treatise, the title of which was inspired by one of Montaigne’s essays, and he had it published by Montaigne’s publisher. Montaigne and De Lancre were similar free thinkers, both possessed minds that roamed freely, but whereas for Montaigne this provoked scepticism (how do we know what we know), for De Lancre it seemed to lead to opposite conclusion–that especially where flighty demons were concerned, everything might be true.
C: What, in your opinion, is the least-known and most bizarre of De Lancre’s adventures?
JM: Where to start? If I can mention two adventures, one comes from De Lancre’s many travels to Italy. (Perhaps the one thing he and I have in common is that we are both Italophiles.) De Lancre visited the so-called Cave of Dogs near Pozzuoli (Naples). For centuries toxic carbon dioxide fumes made the bottom of the cave dangerous for smaller animals (because oxygen is lighter, a human standing up would be safe). It was a local tourist tradition to test this by bringing a dog, watch it asphyxiate and then attempt to revive it in a nearby lake. De Lancre was so enthusiastic that he visited the cave twice, once bringing a particularly big and energetic dog to see what happens. (Sadly, he doesn’t tell us if the pooch lived or died.)
The second adventure would be a second much smaller witch-hunt that De Lancre was involved in in 1613. This was in Amou, not too far from the Basque country and it involved only a handful of accused. He adds references to these trials in the second 1613 edition of his account of the Basque witch-hunt but to my knowledge those have not yet been picked up or analysed.
C: Could you tell us more about your forthcoming projects?
JM: I am working on a variety of things. I am currently on research leave, trying to write my book on Pierre de Lancre and the Basque witch-hunt. It is tentatively entitled Anatomy of a Witch-Hunt until I come up with a better title. I also have a long-standing side project on the early nineteenth-century origins of witchcraft historiography that I hope to announce something more about soon. In the long-term though, I want to leave the subject of witchcraft behind me and return to my other interest in early modern Catholic history. It is a subject that involves a lot less death (and more travel to Italy).
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