5

THE HOSTS OF THE NIGHT

IN THE POPULAR imagination, the nights of medieval and early modern Europe abounded with spectral armies and processions, and these phantasms have come to play an important part in the explanations made by some leading scholars of the mental construct that became the early modern witches’ sabbath. The major historiographical development which led to a linkage between them and that construct was the collapse of an earlier system of explanation for the early modern witch trials: the belief, held by a succession of authors between the early nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, that the people tried for witchcraft had been practitioners of a pagan religion that had survived from antiquity and was now annihilated by the witch-hunts. This was first developed by German academics, and spread from them to the French, becoming widely adopted among English-speaking writers by the end of the nineteenth century. It was never orthodoxy among experts in the trials themselves, though those remained few until the later twentieth century; rather, it was taken up by professional scholars in other fields and disciplines, and by non-academic authors. It ably served a range of those. To conservatives and reactionaries, it was initially a way of defending the trials, by arguing that although witchcraft itself could no longer be taken seriously, the people accused of it were still adherents of bloodthirsty and orgiastic old cults that deserved to be punished and repressed. Liberals, radicals and feminists could reverse these claims, by portraying the pagan witch religion as being a joyous, life-affirming, liberating one which venerated the natural world and elevated the status of women, strongest among the common people and pitted against everything that the established Churches, aristocracies and patriarchies represented; which is why (this tradition could claim) the latter brutally crushed it. Those who disliked all religion could use this theory of witchcraft to undermine the idea that the medieval and early modern periods had been ages of universal and passionate Christian faith, because Europe had apparently harboured a rival religious allegiance, which had exercised most attraction among ordinary people. This did not necessarily involve any greater admiration for the imagined pagan witches, who could be regarded as followers of a different sort of ignorance and superstition from that of the elite. In England an increasingly fervent idealization of the shrinking countryside, and yearning for a sense of timeless and organic continuity there to offset the traumatic processes of urbanization and industrialization, found comfort in the idea that it had long hidden a paganism that had revered the natural, green and fertile.¹ In the early and mid-twentieth century, one British writer came to be especially associated with the hypothesis, a distinguished Egyptologist called Margaret Murray, who wrote about witchcraft (among other subjects) as a sideline to her own, primary, discipline. Her prominence as an advocate of witchcraft as a pagan survival derived from a number of factors. One was her remarkable longevity, so that she continued to publish on the subject for forty years, and another was the passionate certainty with which she argued her case. Also significant was that she wrote at greater length upon it than most of her predecessors, and unlike most of them drew upon primary historical sources (though always published texts, mostly British) to support her assertions. It reinforced her dominance of the idea that witchcraft had been a pagan fertility cult that she tended not to credit any predecessors with it and that when she wrote of it in a popular forum (such as the entry on witchcraft in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which she was invited to contribute) she did so as if it were established fact. That is why by the mid-twentieth century the idea had commonly become known as ‘the Murray thesis’, which gave a misleading impression both of its longevity and of the number of previous writers who had embraced it. Her passionate advocacy meant that by then it not only made a considerable impression on the general public in the English-reading world, but had also been accepted by a number of historians who were expert in other fields, some very eminent. By the 1960s doubts were being raised about it, but general belief in it only really collapsed among specialists in medieval and early modern studies during the years around 1970, with the publication of detailed studies of local witch trials based on comprehensive studies of the archival records (which Margaret Murray had neglected).² These have continued to the present and left no doubt that witchcraft was not a surviving pagan religion, or any other kind of separate and coherent religion. The idea that it had been was never accepted by historians whose primary expertise lay in the witch trials, and all that was needed to sink it was for those scholars to become more numerous and better known. None the less, it had been a hypothesis worth testing.

Its demise in a sense put back the historiographical clock to the beginning of the nineteenth century, returning to general acceptance the idea that the concept that had inspired the trials, of witchcraft as a religion dedicated to Satan and the systematic commission of evil magic, had been a tremendous delusion. This in turn posed the question more acutely of how, in that case, such a delusion could have arisen, and one of the first coherent answers was provided by Norman Cohn in 1975. His whole book was effectively a reply to the notion that witchcraft had been an actual religion, and he suggested that the satanic stereotype for one had derived instead from two different sources. One was the tradition, which had originated in pagan Rome and been taken into medieval Christianity, of accusing groups within society, who embraced a religion which did not conform to the dominant norm, of a collection of antisocial activities which usually included sexual orgies, ritual murder and cannibalism. The other strand had consisted of popular beliefs in night-flying and night-prowling beings, some again descended from pagan times. Here Cohn drew attention to the figures of the strix and the Germanic cannibal-witch, but also to the importance of very widespread medieval reports of night-roving processions and bands, some consisting of the dead and some of the followers of a superhuman female figure. He suggested that these two separate streams of fantasy had combined to create the late medieval and early modern myth of the satanic conspiracy of witches, and of the assembly, the ‘sabbath’, at which they met and worshipped the Devil.³ In its essentials, Cohn’s model has stood the test of time, and remains the basic one for the understanding of the early modern persecution of alleged witches.

These developments presented problems for Carlo Ginzburg, who was unusually conscious of the importance of folk beliefs in witch trials because of his work on the Italian benandanti, who represented an extreme case of that importance. His first publication of that work was in Italian, in 1966, at a time when the ‘Murray thesis’ was being questioned but still widely accepted. He accordingly temporized when speaking of the reality of a witch religion: after all, Margaret Murray had used records derived from the far side of Western Europe to his own, and so their accounts did not really interconnect. He made it clear that the benandanti conducted their presumed magical abilities in a state of trance or in dreams, while holding out the possibility that they represented a sectarian association with common beliefs which might have met in reality (something the evidence does not disprove but nowhere proves). In 1983 the English edition of his work came out, and by then the ‘Murray thesis’ had perished among professional historians. He therefore made plain that his own work had not confirmed that witches had met for communal rites in the early modern period, but felt that it was still true that the images and ideas that had underpinned the notion of the early modern witch religion drew heavily on folk traditions which themselves derived ultimately from an ancient pagan fertility cult. He did not, however, suggest that the cult concerned had itself survived through the Middle Ages and that the people accused of witchcraft had still practised it.⁴ At the end of the 1980s Ginzburg produced his own general study of the origins of the image of the witches’ sabbath, in which he restated this idea on a grander scale. He made full acknowledgement of the fall of the ‘Murray thesis’, declaring that by that date ‘almost all historians of witchcraft’ agreed that it was ‘amateurish, absurd, bereft of any scientific merit’. He agreed that this polemic was ‘justified’, but feared that it had diverted his colleagues from an interest in the origins of the symbols of which the stereotype of the sabbath was composed, even though they ‘document myths and not rituals’. In this fear he was correct, as the new wave of local studies tended to neglect the question of how the popular elements in beliefs and accusations had originated. In stating it he chose to distance himself from Norman Cohn, one of the few authors who had faced that question directly, and did so in two ways. The first was to argue that the short-term development of the image of the religious and social deviant – in the fourteenth century – was more important than the long-term history of European stereotyping of deviancy that Cohn had reconstructed. The second was to minimize the importance of the ancient and folkloric elements in Cohn’s model, by claiming that Cohn had shown no interest in their origins, treating them instead as examples of human psychology or anthropology.⁵

In reality, these two gifted historians had much fundamentally in common, as both emphasized the twin streams of tradition which had fused to create the idea of the sabbath: that of the stereotype of the religious and moral deviant (save that Ginzburg emphasized the final, fourteenth-century, development of it) and that of fantasies, also rooted in ancient belief, about night-roaming beings (save that Ginzburg, taking the benandanti as his normative group, neglected the predatory demoness and concentrated on bands and processions). Ginzburg also differed in that he was interested in tracking that ancient belief beyond its historical manifestations into a reconstructed prehistoric mental world, being willing in the process to make analogies, notably that with shamanism, and to presume the former existence of a single fertility religion or shamanic rite technique, or at least a single complex of either, which had spanned Eurasia. In doing this, he was actually adhering to a much older tradition of scholarship, which, like the idea that early modern witches had been pagans, had developed in the nineteenth century. This depended on two assumptions. The first was that the further back in human time one went, the more unified and cohesive human belief tended to become, so that the plurality of religions found in ancient Europe and of folkloric motifs found in medieval and modern Europe were actually fragments of a single prehistoric tradition; this idea was greatly encouraged by, if it did not actually derive from, the Bible. The other was that modern folk customs and stories were often if not mostly fragmentary survivals from a pre-Christian past, and thus could be treated as the historic equivalent of fossils. This view produced the belief that, if collected and reassembled, and sometimes also combined with the customs and stories of ‘primitive’ peoples in the non-European world, they could be used to reconstruct a convincing picture of prehistoric religion, and so perhaps of human mental evolution. Both ideas were developed primarily in Germany, but then taken up enthusiastically by the Victorian and Edwardian British, of whom the most celebrated became Sir James Frazer. They were rejected by most historians and anthropologists in the course of the early twentieth century, both because their conclusions were incapable of objective proof and because the technique of putting together so much heterogeneous data, without regard for context (and often with none for its actual history) began to worry too many people.⁶ Both, however, underpinned the representation by Mircea Eliade of shamanism as an archaic and once universal tradition of spiritual combat; and Eliade had been inspired by Frazer.⁷ Not only is Eliade’s formulation of shamanism similar to that of Ginzburg, but Farzer’s influence played a part in Ginzburg’s interpretation of the benandanti.⁸

A few other authors accomplished the same work as Cohn and Ginzburg, of rejecting Margaret Murray while retaining an interest in the folkloric roots of beliefs in witchcraft. One was Éva Pócs, who used mainly south-eastern European material both to emphasize the element of popular lore in those beliefs and its derivation from ancient thought systems, and the difference of this exercise from that enacted by Murray and her predecessors. The distinction, as Pócs formulated it, was that the latter had believed in the reality of witches’ gatherings, whereas she was identifying memories, preserved in accounts of witchcraft, which combined recollections of real societies of folk magicians (whom she nowhere suggests were pagans) with ultimately ancient beliefs in fairies, demons and battles between the spirits of special humans. In the process she generously and correctly drew attention to the importance of Norman Cohn in first pointing to the significance of that popular lore.⁹ Another was Gustav Henningsen, who wrote a large book to show explicitly how the kind of material used by Margaret Murray to demonstrate the existence of a witch religion in fact did nothing of the kind, while also providing one of the most fascinating local studies of how a popular belief in night-flying spirits could get mixed up with notions of witchcraft.¹⁰ The present study naturally follows in this dual tradition, and its precise concern now is with the medieval tradition of nocturnal hosts of spirits, which looms large in the work of all these distinguished predecessors from Norman Cohn onwards. It is time to look more closely at the ancient beliefs from which it is supposed to derive, and also at the exact nature of the tradition itself.

The Construct of the Wild Hunt

In modern times the roaming nocturnal spirit-bands of the medieval imagination have often been blended together under the label of ‘the Wild Hunt’, an umbrella which can cover an assembly of the human dead, or of living women and men, in spirit or bodily form, or of non-human spirits or demons. Sometimes such an assembly has been called the Furious Army, or the Herlathing, or Herlewin’s Army, or Hellequin’s Army. It often has an identifiable divine or semi-divine leader, either female (called Diana, Herodias, Holda, Perchte or by other names or by variants on those names) or male (called Odin or Wotan, Herla or Herne the Hunter or sometimes identified as King Herod or Pontius Pilate); and sometimes both, in partnership.¹¹ In his first work on the benandanti, Carlo Ginzburg drew attention to the importance of the Hunt in creating key images for the witch trials, calling it a night ride of prematurely dead humans led by a fertility goddess. To him it ‘expressed an ancient, pre-Christian, fear of the dead seen as mere objects of terror, as unrelenting maleficent entities without the possibility of any sort of expiation’, which became Christianized in the twelfth century.¹² Éva Pócs duly followed suit, declaring that when popular traditions of night-roaming spirits are examined,

from the Celts to the people of the Baltic, the outlines of a common Indo-European heritage seem to emerge. This is connected to the cult of the dead, the dead bringing fertility, to sorcery and shamanism in relation to the different gods of the dead, who are linked to shamanism that ensured fertility by way of the dead.¹³

This idea was still in full force in 2011, when the French historian Claude Lecouteux made a comprehensive survey of medieval traditions of the nocturnal spirit bands. He asserted that

the Wild Hunt is a band of the dead whose passage over the earth at certain times of the year is accompanied by diverse phenomena. Beyond those elements, all else varies: the makeup of the troop; the appearance of its members; the presence or absence of animals; noise or silence; the existence of a male or female leader who, depending on the country and the region, bears different names.

He added that

the dead presided over the fertility of the soil and livestock, and needed to be propitiated, or driven off if wicked. In one way or another, the Wild Hunt fell into the vast complex of ancestor worship, the cult of the dead, who are the go-betweens between man and the gods.¹⁴

The emphasis on fertility in all this should alert those familiar with modern historiography and folklore studies to the influence of nineteenth-century scholarship, of the kind which culminated with Frazer and which was largely preoccupied with the idea of ancient pagan religion as a set of fertility rites. In this case, a single book lies behind the whole construct of the Wild Hunt, Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie (German, or ‘Teutonic’ mythology), first published in 1835. It was this which developed the composite image of a nocturnal ride of dead heroes, led by a pagan god and his female consort, and popularized the term ‘Wild Hunt’, Wilde Jagd, for it. In doing so he relied heavily on the two assumptions, so influential in his century and after, mentioned above: that variant forms of a popular belief recorded in historic times must be fragments of an original, unified, archaic myth; and that folklore recorded in modern times can be assumed to represent remnants of prehistoric ritual and belief, and used to reconstruct that. It should be emphasized now that some modern folk customs and beliefs can indeed be traced back to ancient origins; but that these are relatively few and the descent has to be demonstrated, from documentary evidence in the intervening millennia.¹⁵ Grimm, like most nineteenth-century folklorists, assumed that the contemporary beliefs and rites of common people, especially in rural areas, represented an unthinking and unchanging re-enactment or repetition, century by century, of ancient forms and ideas by communities which no longer understood them (so that these forms and ideas had to be studied and properly interpreted by trained intellectuals). It was a deeply patronizing attitude, which greatly underestimated the dynamic and creative aspects of popular culture.¹⁶ His construct of the Wild Hunt was therefore a melange of modern folklore from various different areas and scraps of medieval and early modern literature, mixed together to produce an imagined original that removed distinctions and discrepancies within his component material. It perfectly served his own agenda to foster a modern German nationalism by providing a politically fragmented Germany with a single ancient mythology uniting all parts of the German and Scandinavian world. His construct of the Wild Hunt has proved influential in two different contexts. One has inevitably been in twentieth-century scholarship written in German, and here the main debate was started in 1934 by Otto Höfler, who argued that it was a memory of an ancient German warrior cult dedicated to the god Wotan, alias Odin; a controversy that petered out for lack of any ability either to prove or to refute his hypothesis.¹⁷ The other has been the more recent attempt to make the Hunt one of the sources for the idea of the witches’ sabbath, as described. The idea most commonly articulated by the German and Austrian authors – that the basis for the belief in the Hunt lay in ancient cults of the dead, often connected with fertility – clearly influenced the writers interested in witchcraft; and one of the German studies from the 1930s provided the collection of medieval and early modern texts for the subject on which subsequent writers from both groups have chiefly relied.¹⁸ Mostly, however, the two contexts have hardly connected, and generally authors interested in German mythology have emphasized armies of the dead, and those interested in witchcraft, journeys led by a supernatural woman. Since the mid-twentieth century there has been greater willingness to acknowledge that the concept of the Wild Hunt is a composite, of materials of different kinds and from different dates.¹⁹ None the less, there remains a general acceptance of two major points of Grimm’s methodology: that ultimately the concept derives from ancient paganism and in particular from a cult of the dead; and that modern folklore can be used to patch up the gaps in the medieval and early modern record.

It is proposed here to examine medieval and early modern accounts of nocturnal spirit processions without any prior assumption that they were underpinned by a unified system of ancient belief; and with a concentration only on sources compiled before 1600, by which time the concept of the witches’ sabbath was fully formed. Some recent progress has already been made in deconstructing the modern notion of the Wild Hunt by use of the second tactic. Claude Lecouteux has shown that medieval and sixteenth-century sources refer to three different kinds of spectral huntsman: a demon, chasing sinners; a sinful human huntsman, condemned to hunt without rest as a punishment; and a wild man who chases otherworldly quarries, and sometimes human livestock.²⁰ What can be extrapolated from his work is that as none of these figures has a retinue and none is connected with the nocturnal armies and processions, the term ‘Wild Hunt’ is itself inappropriate as an umbrella term for the latter. Jeremy Harte has subtracted the character of Herne the Hunter from the mix, finding him to appear first as a solitary ghost in a play by William Shakespeare, and perhaps to have been the playwright’s own creation. It was Grimm who added him to the regional leaders of his composite Hunt, purely because of Herne’s name.²¹ Finally, the ghosts of heroes, especially King Arthur, were sometimes seen by medieval witnesses on a hunt, but this seems to have been viewed as a natural aristocratic pursuit, rather than having any cosmological significance.²²

When these accretions are stripped away, two different kinds of medieval nocturnal procession are found at the core of Grimm’s construct: those of the dead, and of the followers of the supernatural female. These may now be examined in turn.

The Wandering Dead²³

Ancient Greek and Roman literature provides ample testimony that the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean often regarded the night as a dangerous and frightening place in which witches, ghosts and evil spirits were loose. Among these were phantom armies, sometimes haunting the battlefields where they perished and sometimes warning of great events in the world of the living. What is missing is any clear reference to companies of the dead roaming the earth, and Ginzburg himself concluded from the evidence that the image of a nocturnal cavalcade was basically alien to Greek and Roman mythology. In ancient Northern Europe there is an almost complete lack of contemporary source material in which such an image could be recorded: there is a single equivocal remark by the Roman historian Tacitus, and otherwise attempts to find spirit-processions in the ancient north depend wholly on back-projection from later sources. Occasional reports of phantom armies at particular places and times continued into the early Middle Ages, and Christianity added hosts of demons to the other terrors of the night. A tradition of visible companies of the dead travelling the earth, however, only started to develop in the eleventh century, as part of a much greater interest taken by Christian authors in the fate of the individual soul. Accounts of ghosts in general became more common and more detailed, and as part of them the dead were more often represented as gathering in groups. In particular, stories were told of crowds of dead people doomed to roam the earth as a penance for their sins.

This new concept forms the backdrop to a remarkable set of French and German texts produced in the 1120s and 1130s, of which the most famous is that of the Anglo-Norman monk Orderic Vitalis. All featured travelling hosts of dead sinners, usually knights and usually seeking the prayers of the living to gain their release from wandering. That by Orderic is distinguished by its detail and by the fact that he gave the procession which he reported a name, ‘the retinue of Herlechin’, which is never explained. By the late twelfth century the existence of bodies of tormented and penitential phantoms, usually soldiers, known as the army or retinue of Herlewin, Hellequin or Herla, was an established literary trope. It is recorded in England, France and the Rhineland, having apparently spread out from a northern French epicentre. Different storytellers perceived different figures in these processions, according to their own class and preoccupations, but most reported armed men. None seemed to know how or where the idea had started, and some made up their own (mythical) solutions to this problem. Only one of the descriptions, and that the most anomalous (an English fantasy-tale) represented these processions as having a recognizable leader, even though they were all seemingly named after one. It seems most likely that ‘Herlechin’ (a word which may derive from various different possible sources) was originally the name of the procession itself and was later mistaken for that of a chief. There seems to be no evidence in all this of a derivation from an ancient model: rather, it shows every sign of being an exemplary story created by churchmen.

By the thirteenth century, it had percolated into popular culture, and some clerics were coming to believe that it had originated there and to regard it with suspicion, suggesting that the ghosts could be devils in disguise. Some reports of it accordingly grew more demonic, though this was a shift of degree as it had always been disturbing and forbidding, and sometimes dangerous; and this more negative view of it affected popular perceptions in turn. It also spread further afield, into Spain and Germany, and in the latter region the spectral vagrants acquired the distinctive name of das wütende Heer, the ‘furious army’. In some places heroes from other traditions were brought into the ghostly company, above all King Arthur and his knights. Little new development occurred to the myth in the rest of the Middle Ages. The marching figures were identified variously as people who had suffered violent deaths, usually in battle or on the scaffold; or had died unbaptized; or who had committed grievous sins; or else as devils who had assumed human form to lead the living astray. Late medieval references to these nocturnal parades are recorded from England to the Austrian Alps, and veer between the two thirteenth-century poles of regarding them as a divinely legitimized procession of penitential dead and as an evil and demonic host. In the sixteenth century references grew slightly more detailed and give a better sense of local belief systems. A theme not heard before, of seasonality, is now present, as the apparitions are said in some places to be especially common in midwinter, or during the four annual sets of feasts called the Ember Days. By now, however, the tradition was contracting geographically, having vanished from England and rarely being reported in France: it was becoming increasingly characteristic of the German-speaking lands.

The Followers of the Lady

The tradition of the roving retinue of a superhuman female has a different history, point of origin and geographical range to that of the wandering dead. It is probably first recorded in the ninth century, in what became one of the most famous of early medieval ecclesiastical texts, the so-called canon Episcopi. One passage of this denounced the belief of many women that they rode upon animals across the world on particular nights with the pagan goddess Diana. They did so with a huge company of other women, whom Diana had likewise called to her service and who obeyed her as their mistress. The canon ordered clergy to contest this claim, as a demonically inspired delusion, and so expel sortilegam et magicam artem, fortune-telling and the magical art, from their parishes.²⁴ This strongly suggests that the women who made the claim were the local providers of magical services. The point of origin of the text is unknown, but it was included in a collection of canon law made around the year 900 by the abbot of Prüm in the central Rhineland, and it almost certainly derived from somewhere in the lands of the Franks. About a century later, Burchard, bishop of Worms, included it in his own collection of church decrees, and added that another name for the superhuman leader of the rides was Herodias. Burchard, however, also repeated five more condemnations of the tradition and of similar beliefs in nght-roving spirits or magicians, from unknown sources. One referred to women who believed that they rode at night on special dates upon animals among a host of other women called holda or (in one version of the text) with a strix or striga called Holda.²⁵ The second concerned a belief by women that they flew off at night through closed doors to do battle with others in the clouds. The third was the denunciation, quoted in the second chapter of this book, of women who thought that they travelled in spirit bands at night to kill and eat other humans, and then restore them to life. The fourth accused women who claimed to be part of the night rides of also boasting of the ability to work magic which could induce either love or hate; another indication that the rides were associated with females who offered magical services. The fifth condemned a belief among women that at certain times of the year they should ‘spread a table with food and drink and three knives, so that if those three sisters come, whom past generations and ancient stupidity called parcae [the Roman word for the Fates] they can regale themselves’. The succeeding passage suggests that the ‘sisters’ concerned were expected to provide benefits to the household in return for this entertainment.²⁶

Worms is also in the Rhineland, but Burchard gathered his material from a wide range of earlier texts, spanning Western Europe from Italy to Ireland, and going back hundreds of years, and so this does not locate the traditions concerned. Those traditions were repeated by disapproving churchmen through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, disapproval of them becoming part of the common heritage of orthodoxy. John of Salisbury said that one of the names of the leader of the rides was Herodias, and that she convened assemblies at which her followers feasted and sported; he also crossed this story with that of the cannibal night-witches by saying that the night-roamers ate babies and then restored them to life. He called all this a diabolical illusion and commented that only ‘poor old women and the simple minded sort of men’ believed in this. One thirteenth-century French bishop, Angerius of Conserans in the Pyrenees, called the superhuman leader interchangeably Diana, Herodias or Bensozia, and another, William of Auvergne, named her Satia or Abundia and stated that she and her attendant spirits, called ‘the ladies’, were said to visit human houses at night. If food and drink were left out for them, they would enjoy these and then magically replenish them, and bless the household with prosperity; if none were on offer, they would abandon the household to ill fortune. He commented that it was mostly elderly women who told these stories.

It seems as if two different earlier traditions, of women who joined night rides with a superhuman female, and superhuman females who visited houses to bless them, were now merging. Another famous French source of the thirteenth century, the courtly poem Roman de la Rose, cites the same tradition, concerning those who followed ‘Lady Habonde’. It called her entourage ‘the good ladies’ and stated that it roved on three nights of each week, accompanied by humans whose spirits flew out to them while their bodies remained in bed: it was said that every third child born had this gift. The ‘lady’ and her companions were themselves spirits, who could get into and out of houses through any crack and so were never obstructed by locks or bars.²⁷ Around the same time, the Italian Jacobus of Voragine told how a saint had exposed as demons a company of ‘the good women who enter at night’ for whom food and drink had been left by a family.²⁸ Likewise a preacher in south-eastern France, Stephen of Bourbon, had a story from the region about a man who told his parish priest that he went out at night and feasted with women called ‘the good things’, whom this priest also proved to be demons.²⁹

The tradition of the night rides had reached Iceland before the end of the thirteenth century, where it appears unsurprisingly in a saga remarkable for its number of Continental European influences. None the less, the author transmuted the passage from Burchard into a native form, declaring that the people who followed Diana or Herodias rode on whales, seals, birds and other northern wildlife.³⁰ Finally among these high medieval texts, mid thirteenth-century sermons by the German Bertold of Regensburg warned against giving credence to a range of nocturnal spirits, called variously the ‘night-wanderers’, the ‘Benevolent Ones’, the ‘Malevolent Ones’, the ‘night women’, those who rode on ‘this or that’, and the ‘blessed ladies’ or ‘ladies of the night’ for whom peasant women left tables laid when they retired to bed.³¹ He did not attempt to distinguish them, if he knew how. The names for each were in German, save for the ‘blessed ladies’, who were in Latin, and those for the benevolent and malevolent, hulden and unhulden, recall the holda mentioned by Burchard.

Wherever it had originated, therefore – and the evidence suggests somewhere in the broad Franco-German region – by the high Middle Ages the idea of the night journeys led by a superhuman female or females was spread over a wide area of Western Europe which included England, France, Italy and Germany. It is possible that in some parts of this range, such as England, churchmen were simply repeating reports from elsewhere that they had heard or read, but the thirteenth-century French and German material seems to reflect genuine popular belief. During the late Middle Ages references to it continued, following much the same model as those earlier but with some local idioms. One French text from the early fourteenth century satirized the belief with a story of how criminals robbed the house of a rich and gullible peasant by dressing as women and pretending to be the ‘good beings’ visiting the house to bless it. The same collection reported how an old woman tried to get a reward from a parish priest by claiming that she had visited his home with ‘the ladies of the night’.³² By the mid-fourteenth century, the lady for whom people left out food at night was known in some German districts as ‘Perchte’ or ‘Berchten’; and she seemed as such to have a more forbidding or unattractive character as she was nicknamed ‘of the iron nose’ or ‘the long nose’.³³ It is hard to identify these districts with any precision, although one of the first authors to refer to her came from Bavaria.³⁴ In Italy around this time a Dominican friar reported that it was believed, especially by women, that living people of both sexes went about at night in a parade called the tregenda, led by Diana or Herodias.³⁵ In the fifteenth century such descriptions multiply further, so that a professor at Vienna, Thomas von Haselbach, could name different kinds of spectral nocturnal visitor as ‘Habundia’, ‘Phinzen’, ‘Sack Semper’ and ‘Sacria’. He also termed Perchte an alias of Habundia and said that she was active at the feast of Epiphany, which ended the Christmas season. Successive editions of a set of sermons preached at Nuremberg equated Diana with ‘Unholde’ or ‘Frau Berthe’ or ‘Frau Helt’, and a penitential from the same century equated Perchte with the ancient Roman Fates. In 1484 an Austrian author identified Diana, Herodias, ‘Frau Perchte’ and ‘Frau Hult’ as the same being. A dictionary of 1468 stated that the lady for whom refreshments were left out at night was called Abundia or Satia, or by the common people Frau Perchte or Perchtum, and that she came with a retinue. She was by now especially believed to visit during the Christmas season, and the old tropes that the food and drink taken would be magically replenished, and that she would bless the generous household in return, were preserved.³⁶ Again, these references point to a southern German distribution, which was indeed the one evident in stories about her in later folklore.³⁷ In that folklore, likewise, Dame Holda, Hulda, Holle or Hulle had become Perchte’s equivalent, as a night-roving female spirit of winter, in central Germany.³⁸ On the other hand, she may at times have got further afield. The English homily Dives and Pauper, from the 1400s, condemned the leaving out of food and drink at New Year ‘to feed All-holde’.³⁹ The author may, however, have been quoting from a foreign source, as he soon after repeated the much older canon Episcopi concerning night spirit-rides. In North Italy the celebrated preacher Bernadino of Siena delivered sermons during the 1420s in which he condemned ‘the followers of Diana’ and old women who claimed to travel with Herodias on the night of Epiphany, the end of the Christmas holidays. He added that these women offered divination, healing and the breaking of bewitchment, to customers.⁴⁰

It is not clear whether the earlier stories and warnings reflected claims that people made themselves about riding with the lady or ladies or claims that others made about them. By the fourteenth century, however, trial records are appearing in the archives in which those who had said that they joined the spirit rides were allowed to give testimony, although filtered through the perceptions and preoccupations of inquisitors, magistrates and clerks. In a now celebrated pair of trials at Milan in 1384 and 1390, two women stated that they had gone to the ‘society’ or ‘game’ of ‘Lady Oriente’, whom the inquisitor dutifully called Diana or Herodias, and paid homage to her. Her following included every kind of animal except the donkey and fox. It feasted off beasts which were then restored to life, and visited neatly kept homes to bless them, and Oriente instructed her human followers in the arts of herb lore and divination. These they put to the usual ends of benevolent magic, to heal, break bewitchment and find stolen goods. One of them said that Oriente ruled her own followers even as Christ did the world.⁴¹ The famous churchman Nicholas of Cusa presided over a trial of two old women when he was bishop of Brixen, in the South Tyrolese Alps, in 1457. They confessed to belonging to the society led by a ‘good woman’ whom they called ‘Richella’ (and the erudite Nicholas equated with Diana, Fortuna and Hulda). She came to them at night as a well-dressed woman riding in a cart, who, once they had renounced the Christian faith, led them to a gathering of people who feasted and revelled and (in part contradiction of the repudiation of Christianity) hairy men ate those attending who had not been properly baptized. They had attended these parties for several years, during the Ember Days, famed by the late Middle Ages as a time when spirits were especially active.⁴² It may be seen, therefore, that by the end of the Middle Ages the popular tradition of night-roving and generally benevolent female spirits occupied a region covering the southern half of Germany, the Alps and Lombardy. Within this zone, however, it took three different forms. In northern Italy, as seen, it very clearly had a leader, who was sometimes but not generally named, and humans regularly claimed to have joined it. On the German side of the Alpine watershed, the idea of a benign society of nocturnal rovers, which privileged people could join, also flourished, but there is less emphasis on a leader of it. Wolfgang Behringer’s ‘shaman of Oberstdorf’, a healer and witch-hunter from the Bavarian Alps who was tried as a witch himself in 1586, claimed to travel long distances with the Nachtschar, the ‘night company’, which consisted of both sexes.⁴³ In the west of the German-speaking Alpine zone, at the Swiss city of Luzern, a citizen wrote up a chronicle of its affairs in the early seventeenth century which relied heavily on his own memory of them, stretching far back into the sixteenth. He recorded a belief in the ‘good army’ or ‘blessed people’, who visited favoured and deserving individuals. It included individuals who were yet alive and who claimed to have been given the special privilege of being allowed to join it at times on its wanderings, thereby winning the admiration of their neighbours. Again, he spoke of no leading figure in connection with it.⁴⁴ To the north of the Alps, across central and south Germany, and lowland Austria, the nocturnal host which gave blessings certainly had one, in Hulda or Perchte; but here things differed again, in that nobody seems to have claimed to travel with it themselves. It does not seem to feature in any trial for witchcraft or magic in this region.

By the end of the Middle Ages if not earlier, the Italian tradition featuring the benevolent phantom women of the night extended to the southern part of the peninsula and beyond. Gustav Henningsen discovered it in a set of inquisitorial records compiled in Sicily between 1579 and 1651, concerning the donas de fuera, ‘ladies from outside’. These were described as being small groups of beautiful fairy-like women, often with animal hands or feet, which were formed around a figure called ‘the queen of the fairies’, ‘the mistress’, ‘the teacher’, ‘the Greek lady’ (Greeks being exotic to the Sicilians), ‘the graceful lady’, ‘Lady Inguanta’, ‘Lady Zabella’ or ‘the Wise Sibilia’ (again): the lack of a standard name for her is itself interesting. Sometimes she had a male consort, and sometimes the group had a male attendant. Knowledge of them was claimed by popular healers and diviners, usually female, who said that they went forth in spirit at night to join them, and learned their skills from them. Sometimes one of these informants claimed to have been elected queen for the night herself. At times the ‘ladies’ visited houses to bless them, and at others danced and feasted, or did both. The number of witnesses who informed against each of those accused before the inquisitors indicates that the latter had talked avidly of these alleged experiences. All were commoners, often poor and often old, who experienced pleasures and honours in these dreams, visions or fantasies that they could never have enjoyed in daily life; while the skills they claimed earned them money or food from clients. Though trial records of them are found only from the late sixteenth century, the offence of claiming to travel with the ‘ladies’ is mentioned in a Sicilian penitential from the late fifteenth.⁴⁵ Sicily therefore had its own local version of the northern Italian tradition of night-roving groups of female spirits with a recognized leader, which privileged humans could join. In the central and southern expanses of Italy between, the tradition seems less well recorded.⁴⁶ There is however a reference in a sixteenth-century work of theology to a belief by some women in the south of Italy in spirits called fatae (fates or fairies), for whom they prepared banquets and kept clean houses, in the hope that they would visit and bless the children.⁴⁷This sounds like a secure reference to a local version of the same idea, and others may have existed in other parts of the northern side of the Mediterranean basin, such as in Catalonia.⁴⁸

Thus there is plenty of evidence for a widespread medieval belief in a benevolent nocturnal travelling company of superhuman women, usually with a leader and usually open to membership by privileged human beings, and especially women who practised popular magic, who could join the company by sending out their spirits from their bodies. The last ability was a characteristic shared with the shamans of Siberia and Scandinavia, as was the claim to magical abilities conferred by superhuman beings with whom they associated; but those were the only things that the shamans and the women who claimed to join the night journeys had in common. Taking the evidence purely on face value, the belief in the night-journeying women first appears, as already widespread, somewhere in the future French or German lands at some point in the ninth century. It was certainly found over a large part of both France and Germany by the twelfth century, perhaps extending into England, before being recorded in a slightly different range in the late Middle Ages and early modern period (and indeed thereafter), from central Germany across the Alps into Italy and Sicily. Even within this area it seems to have taken three or four distinctive regional forms. As it is both attested earlier than the bands of the night-roaming dead and features a figure more similar to a pagan deity – indeed, under the name of Diana, explicitly one – it is much easier to regard it as a survival from ancient pre-Christian religion; but can such an assumption be proved?

Who Was She?

As said, the first name given to the leader of the night-riding superhuman women was that of the goddess Diana. At first sight the identification makes a perfect fit, because Diana was indeed a Roman deity especially associated with the night, wild nature (and above all wild animals), women and witchcraft: Horace’s ancient Roman witches pray to her. Moreover, Jacob Grimm, in the process of combining different medieval and modern traditions of literature and folklore to create his composite ancient pagan tradition, noted that there are apparent references to a continuing cult of Diana in the lands which became France and Germany, precisely the region in which the medieval stories of the night rides are first recorded.⁴⁹ A life of the sixth-century bishop Caesarius of Arles in southern France mentioned ‘a demon whom the simple people call Diana’. A history written by another bishop later in the same century told how a Christian hermit near Trier, in what became north-western Germany, destroyed a statue of Diana which was worshipped by local people. Finally, the later life of a Christian missionary to the region of Franconia in central Germany asserted that he was martyred when he tried to convert the inhabitants from their veneration of the same goddess.⁵⁰ What looks like a neat fit, however, disintegrates on closer inspection. Whatever the German-speaking people of Franconia called their goddess, assuming that the story has any basis in fact, it would not have been by the Roman name of Diana; and indeed there seems, to judge by the epigraphic evidence from the Roman Empire, to have been no widespread and local cult of Diana north of the Alps, although she is certainly attested there, as far as Britain. Conversely, the various condemnations of popular belief by ecclesiastical decrees and law codes issued south of the Alps in the whole of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages never seem to refer to night-riding women who follow a goddess figure, even though this was Diana’s homeland. There is indeed no classical myth of Diana that portrays her as scooping up human followers in cavalcades in this way. Carlo Ginzburg saw this problem and confronted it, concluding that it ‘leads us to suspect the presence of an interpretatio romana’, in other words, the imposition of a classical Roman model on what were in actuality different local traditions.⁵¹ He went on to show how the inquisitors in the Milanese trials brought Diana’s name into records in which the accused themselves had used the name Oriente for their superhuman mistress.⁵² This effect may have operated all the way back to the canon Episcopi. Not only would Diana’s actual classical associations have fitted the bill for educated clerics describing a night-roaming goddess of women, but even the less educated would have known that she is the only pagan goddess mentioned in the New Testament, and so could easily do duty as a shorthand for all.

Carlo Ginzburg was eager to find a pagan goddess behind the other figure identified at an early stage with the night rides, Herodias. On the face of it, there seems to be no doubt of her origin, in the wickedest human woman in the New Testament, who brings about the death of John the Baptist; she and Diana would therefore make a perfect fit for orthodox early medieval Christians as disreputable female figures. It may be supposed accordingly that she was applied to the stories of a night-riding goddess figure much as Ginzburg has shown later medieval churchmen as intruding Diana (and indeed, in the same example, Herodias herself) into testimonies which used other names. Ginzburg none the less proposed that ‘Herodias’ was a misreading of Hera Diana, a compound constructed by twinning the Roman goddess with a leading Greek one.

This may be so, but there are two problems with it. The first is that no such goddess is attested anywhere in the ancient or medieval record. Ginzburg cited as evidence for one inscriptions to the Greek Hera (or more specifically to a goddess called Haerecura or Aere-cura) in Switzerland and North Italy, though these do not furnish proof of a widespread cult of her there. There is also a roof tile, found in a late Roman period grave in Dauphiné, south-eastern France, and scratched with a human-like figure riding on an animal or ship and the words ‘Fera Comhera’, which may mean ‘with Hera the savage’. In its context, it looks like a curse tablet, and Hera could be a good fit with that, as a notoriously vengeful goddess, especially where marital infidelity was concerned: in which case the steed of the figure would be a peacock, her special animal. Ginzburg also cited Grimm’s discovery of a fifteenth-century reference to a belief by peasants in the Rhine Palatinate of Germany that a being called Hera roamed about in the Christmas season and brought abundance.⁵³ This is clearly the same as the one called Holda in central Germany, and Perchte further south and east, and the question does arise of how a Greek name for a goddess should have lingered through the Middle Ages in what had been a Latin-speaking area of the Roman Empire and was now a German-speaking one. The suspicion that a well-educated churchman was imposing a classical goddess on a local piece of folklore, as Ginzburg himself showed happened in Milan, must be obvious. None of these reservations refutes his hypothesis, but they indicate that the evidence for it is patchy and ambivalent.

The other problem is that the medieval people who spoke of Herodias in connection with the night rides were certain that they meant the biblical character. By the twelfth century an apocryphal legend had been created to link the two, of how the royal woman Herodias had unwittingly brought about the death of John the Baptist by falling in love with him, so causing the king, Herod, to behead the saint in a rage. When she tried to kiss the severed head, it whirled up in the sky, where she has wandered in search of it ever since, coming down to earth at night.⁵⁴ The same story added that she still had the allegiance of a third of humanity, a statement also made of her two centuries before by Ratherius, bishop of Verona on the Plain of Lombardy, who complained that many people claimed Herodias as their spiritual mistress, and said that a third of the world belonged to her.⁵⁵This of course chimes with the claim made by Le Roman de la Rose about Lady Habonde, that a third of humanity was born with the gift of joining her company. Ratherius’s statement needs to be taken seriously, for it attests to a genuinely popular cult of Herodias by his time, the tenth century. He does not mention night rides, which is a shame as otherwise this might have extended that tradition by the early Middle Ages across the Alps into north Italy, where it is so abundantly present later, although Ratherius himself came from the southern Netherlands, and might have picked up the information at any point between there and Verona. He does, however, present a strong possibility that, whether or not the character of Herodias was imposed on a night-roaming benevolent female spirit by hostile churchmen, it was genuinely taken up by ordinary people as a tradition of their own.

We are still left with the problem of finding a goddess or set of goddesses honoured across a wide swathe of Western and Central Europe in antiquity who could have retained loyalty among ordinary people sufficient to have generated the medieval tradition of the lady or ladies of the night. One possible candidate is the Greek goddess Hekate or Hecate, who was certainly well known to Roman writers and was associated with the night, witchcraft and ghosts. As such she has been useful to those who want a composite medieval tradition of wandering dead humans and a wandering goddess to derive from a common ancient fertility cult associated with the dead, down to the present.⁵⁶ The problem is that, while she was regarded as the guide of souls to the land of the dead, and of newborn babies into this world, it is hard to find Hecate described clearly as the leader of a retinue of earthbound spirits, and that is never portrayed in her iconography (as opposed to her pack of dogs).⁵⁷ The Orphic Hymn to her describes her as ‘mystery-raving with the souls of the dead’, which may be a reference to her role as their escort to Hades.⁵⁸ There may be a reference to a permanent entourage for her in a fragment of Greek tragedy which reads, ‘if a night-time vision should frighten you, or you have received a visit from chthonic Hekate’s troop’.⁵⁹ This could signify a retinue, or just be a joking reference to ghosts in general.

It would make more sense to look for the original of the medieval night-roaming lady in an ancient goddess worshipped widely in her heartland of the Alps and the land to the north. This was where Carlo Ginzburg located the birth of the tradition. He also made some fascinating connections across time, such as to point out that the fifteenth-century women interrogated by Nicholas of Cusa claimed that the face of their supernatural mistress was obscured by an ornament which sounds like the headdresses found on ancient statuary in Greece and Spain: the resemblance may or may not be coincidental.⁶⁰ The main point is whether the Rhineland, Alps and southern Germany contained any deities in ancient times who may be regarded as ancestors of the medieval lady; and here there are two, at first sight excellent, possibilities, Epona and the Matres.

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 operated 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 have 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.