The Return of the Sabbat: Mental Archaeologies, Conjectural Histories or Political Mythologies?

Abstract

By the 1980s witchcraft historians approached the complex mixture that made up a witch trial from both a macro-sociological and a micro-anthropological point of view. The anthropological approach, however, was mainly a social anthropology, more concentrated on the people involved in a trial than on the concepts they applied. This was particularly unfortunate in the case of the witches’ Sabbat since, as Norman Cohn had rightly remarked, without the imagery of Sabbats and the flights to them there would not have been any mass trial.1 Moreover, the leading proponents of an anthropological perspective relied on texts from England and New England, which implied that had they wanted to look into Sabbat concepts, there was very little to research. Margaret Murray’s theory and its reception had caused witchcraft scholars in general to turn their back on witches’ assemblies. This trend was strengthened by Richard Kieckhefer, who subsumed the Sabbat under ‘diabolism’, since he could not find any trace of it in the early witnesses’ depositions. As far as he could see stories ‘about women who went on mysterious nightly rides … with some mysterious goddess’ stood apart from bewitchments. There was no evidence (at least not before 1500) that the two ever mingled on a village level.2 The prosecutors had superimposed the Sabbat on witchcraft accusations when interrogating a witch and it was derived from heretical sects such as the Waldensians and the Cathars.