Chapter IV · The Sabbat (continued 2)

In May, 1895, when the legal representatives of the Borghese family visited the Palazzo Borghese, which had been rented for some time in separate floors or suites, they found some difficulty in obtaining admission to certain apartments on the first floor, the occupant of which seemed unaware that the lease was about to expire. By virtue of the terms of the agreement, however, he was obliged to allow them to inspect the premises to see if any structural repairs or alterations were necessary, as Prince Scipione Borghese, who was about to be married, intended immediately to take up his residence in the ancestral home with his bride. One door the tenant obstinately refused to unlock, and when pressed he betrayed the greatest confusion. The agents finally pointed out that they were within their rights to employ actual force, and that if access was longer denied they would not hesitate to do so forthwith. When the keys had been produced, the cause of the reluctance was soon plain. The room within was inscribed with the words Templum Palladicum. The walls were hung all round from ceiling to floor with heavy curtains of silk damask, scarlet and black, excluding the light; at the further end there stretched a large tapestry upon which was woven in more than life-size a figure of Lucifer, colossal, triumphant, dominating the whole. Exactly beneath an altar had been built, amply furnished for the liturgy of hell: candles, vessels, rituals, missal, nothing was lacking. Cushioned prie-dieus and luxurious chairs, crimson and gold, were set in order for the assistants; the chamber being lit by electricity, fantastically arrayed so as to glare from an enormous human eye. The visitors soon quitted the accursed spot, the scene of devil-worship and blasphemy, nor had they any desire more nearly to examine the appointments of this infernal chapel.⁠[122]

The missal used at the black mass was obviously a manuscript, although it is said that in later times these grimoires of hideous profanity have actually been printed. It is not infrequently mentioned. Thus De Lancre notes that the sorcerers of the Basses-Pyrénées (1609) at their worship saw the officiant “tournant les feuillets d’vn certain liure qu’il a en main.”⁠[123] Madeleine Bavent in her confession said: “On lisait la messe dans le livre des blasphèmes, qui servait de canon et qu’on employait aussi dans les processions.”⁠[124] The witches’ missal was often bound in human skin, generally that of an unbaptized babe.⁠[125] Gentien le Clerc, tried at Orleans, 1614-1615, confessed that “le Diable ... marmote dans un liure duquel la couuerture est toute veluë comme d’vne peau de loup, auec des feuillets blancs & rouges, d’autres noires.”

The vestments worn by the celebrant are variously described. On rare occasions he is described as being arrayed in a bishop’s pontificalia, black in hue, torn, squalid, and fusty. Boguet reports that a witch stated: “Celuy, qui est commis à faire l’office, est reuestu d’vne chappe noire sans croix,”⁠[126] but it seems somewhat strange that merely a plain black cope should be used, unless the explanation is to be found in the fact that such a vestment was most easily procurable and no suspicion of its ultimate employment would be excited. The abbé Guibourg sometimes wore a cope of white silk embroidered with fir-cones, which again seems remarkable, as the symbolism is in no way connected with the Satanic rites he performed. But this is the evidence of Marguerite, La Voisin’s daughter, who was not likely to be mistaken.⁠[127] It is true that the mass was often, perhaps, partially erotic and not wholly diabolic in the same sense as the Sabbat masses were, but yet Astaroth, Asmodeus, and Lucifer were invoked, and it was a liturgy of evil. On other occasions Guibourg seems to have donned the orthodox eucharistic chasuble, stole, maniple, girdle, alb, and amice. In the thirty-seventh article of his confession Gaufridi acknowledged that the priest who said the Devil’s mass at the Sabbat wore a violet chasuble.⁠[128] Gentien le Clerc, tried at Orleans in 1614-1615, was present at a Sabbat mass when the celebrant “wore a chasuble which was embroidered with a Cross; but there were only three bars.”⁠[129] Later a contemporary witness points to the use of vestments embroidered with infernal insignia, such as a dark red chasuble, the colour of dried blood, upon which was figured a black buck goat rampant; a chasuble that bore the inverse Cross, and similar robes adorned by some needle with the heraldry of hell.

In bitter mockery of the Asperges the celebrant sprinkled the witches with filthy and brackish water, or even with stale. “The Devil at the same time made water into a hole dug in the earth, & used it as holy water, wherewith the celebrant of the mass sprinkled all present, using a black aspergillum.”⁠[130] Silvain Nevillon, a sorcerer who was tried at Orleans in 1614-1615, said: “When Tramesabot said Mass, before he commenced he used to sprinkle all present with holy water which was nothing else than urine, saying meanwhile Asperges Diaboli.”⁠[131] According to Gentien le Clerc: “The holy water is yellow ... & after it has been duly sprinkled Mass is said.”⁠[132] Madeleine de la Palud declared that the sorcerers were sprinkled with water, and also with consecrated wine from the chalice upon which all present cried aloud: Sanguis eius super nos et super filios nostros.⁠[133] (His blood be upon us and upon our children.)

This foul travesty of the holiest mysteries began with an invocation of the Devil, which was followed by a kind of general confession, only each one made mock acknowledgement of any good he might have done, and as a penance he was enjoined to utter some foul blasphemy or to break some precept of the Church. The president absolved the congregation by an inverse sign of the Cross made with the left hand. The rite then proceeded with shameless profanity, but De Lancre remarks that the Confiteor was never said, not even in a burlesque form, and Alleluia never pronounced. After reciting the Offertory the celebrant drew back a little from the altar and the assembly advancing in file kissed his left hand. When the Queen of the Sabbat—the witch who ranked first after the Grand Master, the oldest and most evil of the witches (“en chasque village,” says De Lancre, “trouuer vne Royne du Sabbat”)—was present she sat on the left of the altar and received the offerings, loaves, eggs, any meat or country produce, and money, so long as the coins were not stamped with a cross. In her hand she held a disc or plate “vne paix ou platine,” engraved with a figure of the Devil, and this his followers devoutly kissed. In many places to-day, especially Belgium, during Holy Mass the pax-brede (instrumentum pacis) is kissed by the congregation at the Offertory, and universally when Mass is said by a priest in the presence of a Prelate the pax-brede is kissed by the officiant and the Prelate after the Agnus Dei and the first appropriate ante-communion prayer.

Silvain Nevillon, who was tried at Orleans in 1614-15, avowed: “The Devil preached a sermon at the Sabbat, but nobody could hear what he said, for he spoke in a growl.”⁠[134]

At the Sabbat a sermon is not infrequently delivered, a farrago of impiety and evil counsel.

The hosts are then brought to the altar. Boguet describes them as dark and round, stamped with a hideous design; Madeleine Bavent saw them as ordinary wafers only coloured red; in other cases they were black and triangular in shape. Often they blasphemed the Host, calling it “Iean le blanc,” just as Protestants called it “Jack-in-the-box.” The chalice is filled, sometimes with wine, sometimes with a bitter beverage that burned the tongue like fire. At the Sanctus a horn sounded harshly thrice, and torches burning with a sulphurous blue flare “qui est fort puante” were kindled. There was an elevation, at which the whole gang, now in a state of hysterical excitement and unnatural exaltation, burst forth with the most appalling screams and maniac blasphemies, rivalling each other in filthy adjurations and crapulous obscenities. The protagonist poured out all the unbridled venom that diabolic foulness could express, a stream of scurrility and pollution; hell seemed to have vomited its reeking gorge on earth. Domine adiuua nos, domine adiuua nos, they cried to the Demon, and again Domine adiuua nos semper. Generally all present were compelled to communicate with the sacrament of the pit, to swallow morsels soiled with mud and ordures, to drink the dark brew of damnation. Gaufridi confessed that for Ite missa est these infernal orgies concluded with the curse: “Allez-vous-en tous au nom du diable!” Whilst the abbé Guibourg cried: “Gloria tibi, Lucifero!”

The black mass of the Sabbat varied slightly in form according to circumstances, and in the modern liturgy of the Satanists it would appear that a considerable feature is made of the burning of certain heavy and noxious weeds, the Devil’s incense. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the use of incense is very rare at the Sabbat, although Silvain Nevillon stated that he had seen at the Sabbat “both holy water and incense. This latter smelled foul, not fragrant as incense burned in church.”⁠[135]

The officiant nowadays consecrates a host and the chalice with the actual sacred words of Holy Mass, but then instead of kneeling he turns his back upon the altar,⁠[136] and a few moments later—sit uenia uerbis!—he cuts and stabs the Host with a knife, throwing it to the ground, treading upon it, spurning it. A part, at least, of the contents of the chalice is also spilled in fearful profanation, and not infrequently there further has been provided a ciborium of consecrated Hosts, all stolen from churches⁠[137] or conveyed away at Communion in their mouths by wretches unafraid to provoke the sudden judgement of an outraged God. These the black priest, for so the celebrant is called by the Devil worshippers, scatters over the pavement to be struggled and fought for by his congregation in their madness to seize and outrage the Body of Christ.

Closely connected with the black mass of the Satanists and a plain survival from the Middle Ages is that grim superstition of the Gascon peasant, the Mass of S. Sécaire.⁠[138] Few priests know the awful ritual, and of those who are learned in such dark lore fewer yet would dare to perform the monstrous ceremonies and utter the prayer of blasphemy. No confessor, no bishop, not even the Archbishop of Auch, may shrive the celebrant; he can only be absolved at Rome by the Holy Father himself. The mass is said upon a broken and desecrated altar in some ruined or deserted church where owls hoot and mope and bats flit through the crumbling windows, where toads spit their venom upon the sacred stone. The priest must make his way thither late attended only by an acolyte of impure and evil life. At the first stroke of eleven he begins; the liturgy of hell is mumbled backward, the canon said with a mow and a sneer; he ends just as midnight tolls. The host is triangular, with three sharp points and black. No wine is consecrated but foul brackish water drawn from a well wherein has been cast the body of an unbaptized babe. The holy sign of the cross is made with the left foot upon the ground. And the man for whom that mass is said will slowly pine away, nor doctor’s skill nor physic will avail him aught, but he will suffer, and dwindle, and surely drop into the grave.⁠[139]

Although there is, no doubt, some picturesque exaggeration here the main details are correct enough. A black, triangular wafer is not infrequently mentioned in the witch-trials as having been the sacramental bread of the Sabbat, whilst Lord Fountainhall⁠[140] in describing the devilish communion of the Loudian witches says: “the drink was sometimes blood, sometimes black moss-water,” and many other details may be closely paralleled.

When the blasphemous liturgy of the Sabbat was done all present gave themselves up to the most promiscuous debauchery, only interrupting their lasciviousness to dance or to spur themselves on to new enormities by spiced foods and copious draughts of wine. “You may well suppose,” writes Boguet, “that every kind of obscenity is practised there, yea, even those abominations for which Heaven poured down fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah are quite common in these assemblies.”⁠[141] The erudite Dominican, Father Sebastian Michaelis, who on the 19 January, 1611, examined Madeleine de la Palud concerning her participation in Sabbats, writes⁠[142] that she narrated the most unhallowed orgies.⁠[143] The imagination reels before such turpitudes! But Madeleine Bavent (1643) supplied even more execrable details.⁠[144] Gentien le Clerc at Orleans (1614-1615) acknowledged similar debauchery.⁠[145] Bodin relates that a large number of witches whom he tried avowed their presence at the Sabbat.⁠[146] In 1459 “large numbers of men & women were burned at Arras, many of whom had mutually accused one another, & they confessed that at night they had been conveyed to these hellish dances.”⁠[147] In 1485 Sprenger executed a large number of sorcerers in the Constance district, and “almost all without exception confessed that the Devil had had connexion with them, after he had made them renounce God and their holy faith.”⁠[148] Many converted witches likewise confessed these abominations “and let it be known that whilst they were witches demons had swived them lustily. Henry of Cologne in confirmation of this says that it is very common in Germany.”⁠[149] Throughout the centuries all erudite authorities have the same monstrous tale to tell, and it would serve no purpose merely to accumulate evidence from the demonologists. To-day the meetings of Satanists invariably end in unspeakable orgies and hideous debauchery.

Occasionally animals were sacrificed at the Sabbat to the Demon. The second charge against Dame Alice Kyteler, prosecuted in 1324 for sorcery by Richard de Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory, was “that she was wont to offer sacrifices to devils of live animals, which she and her company tore limb from limb and made oblation by scattering them at the cross-ways to a certain demon who was called Robin, son of Artes (Robin Artisson), one of hell’s lesser princes.”⁠[150]

In 1622 Margaret McWilliam “renounced her baptisme, and he baptised her and she gave him as a gift a hen or cock.”⁠[151] In the Voodoo rites of to-day a cock is often the animal which is hacked to pieces before the fetish. Black puppies were sacrificed to Hecate; Æneas offers four jetty bullocks to the infernal powers, a coal-black lamb to Night;⁠[152] at their Sabbat on the Esquiline Canidia and Sagana tear limb from limb a black sheep, the blood streams into a trench.⁠[153] Collin de Plancy states that witches sacrifice black fowls and toads to the Devil.⁠[154] The animal victim to a power worshipped as divine is a relic of remotest antiquity.

The presence of toads at the Sabbat is mentioned in many witch-trials. They seem to have been associated with sorcerers owing to the repugnance they generally excite, and in some districts it is a common superstition that those whom they regard fixedly will be seized with palpitations, spasms, convulsions, and swoons: nay, a certain abbé Rousseau of the eighteenth century, who experimented with toads, avowed that when one of these animals looked upon him for some time he fell in a fainting fit whence, if help had not arrived, he would never have recovered.⁠[155] A number of writers—Ælian, Dioscorides, Nicander, Ætius, Gesner—believe that the breath of the toad is poisonous, infecting the places it may touch. Since such idle stories were credited it is hardly to be surprised at that we find the toad a close companion of the witch. De Lancre says that demons often appeared in that shape. Jeannette d’Abadie, a witch of the Basses-Pyrénées, whom he tried and who confessed at length, declared that she saw brought to the Sabbat a number of toads dressed some in black, some in scarlet velvet, with little bells attached to their coats. In November, 1610, a man walking through the fields near Bazas, noticed that his dog had scratched a large hole in a bank and unearthed two pots, covered with cloth, and closely tied. When opened they were found to be packed with bran, and in the midst of each was a large toad wrapped in green tiffany. These doubtless had been set there by a person who had faith in sympathetic magic, and was essaying a malefic spell. No doubt toads were caught and taken to the Sabbat, nor is the reason far to seek. Owing to their legendary venom they served as a prime ingredient in poisons and potions, and were also used for telling fortunes, since witches often divined by their toad familiars. Juvenal alludes to this when he writes:

Upon which passage Thomas Farnabie, the celebrated English scholar (1575-1647) glosses thus: “He alludes to the office of the Haruspex who used to inspect entrails & intestines. Pliny says: The entrails of the toad (Rana rubeta), that is to say the tongue, tiny bones, gall, heart, have rare virtue for they are used in many medicines and salves. Haply he means the puddock or hop-toad, thus demonstrating that these animals are not poisonous, their entrails being completely inefficacious in confecting poisons.”⁠[157] In 1610 Juan de Echalar, a sorcerer of Navarre, confessed at his trial before the Alcantarine inquisitor Don Alonso Becerra Holguin that he and his coven collected toads for the Sabbat, and when they presented these animals to the Devil he blessed them with his left hand, after which they were killed and cooked in a stewpot with human bones and pieces of corpses rifled from new-made graves. From this filthy hotch-potch were brewed poisons and unguents that the Devil distributed to all present with directions how to use them. By sprinkling corn with the liquid it was supposed they could blight a standing field, and also destroy flowers and fruit. A few drops let fall upon a person’s garments was believed to insure death, and a smear upon the shed or sty effectually diseased cattle. From these crude superstitions the fantastic stories of dancing toads, toads dressed en cavalier, and demon toads at the Sabbat were easily evolved.

There is ample and continuous evidence that children, usually tender babes who were as yet unbaptized, were sacrificed at the Sabbat. These were often the witches’ own offspring, and since a witch not unseldom was the midwife or wise-woman of a village she had exceptional opportunities of stifling a child at birth as a non-Sabbatial victim to Satan. “There are no persons who can do more cunning harm to the Catholic faith than midwives,” says the Malleus Maleficarum, Pars I, q. xi: “Nemo fidei catholicæ amplius nocet quam obstetrices.” The classic examples of child-sacrifice are those of Gilles de Rais (1440) and the abbé Guibourg (1680). In the process against the former one hundred and forty children are explicitly named: some authorities accept as many as eight hundred victims. Their blood, brains, and bones were used to decoct magic philtres. In the days of Guibourg the sacrifice of a babe at the impious mass was so common that he generally paid not more than a crown-piece for his victim. “Il avait acheté un écu l’enfant qui fut sacrifié à cette messe.” (“The child sacrificed at this mass he had bought for a crown.”) These abominable ceremonies were frequently performed at the instance of Madame de Montespan in order that Louis XIV should always remain faithful to her, should reject all other mistresses, repudiate his queen, and in fine raise her to the throne.⁠[158] The most general use was to cut the throat of the child, whose blood was drained into the chalice and allowed to fall upon the naked flesh of the inquirer, who lay stretched along the altar. La Voisin asserted that a toll of fifteen hundred infants had been thus murdered. This is not impossible, as a vast number of persons, including a crowd of ecclesiastics, were implicated. Many of the greatest names in France had assisted at these orgies of blasphemy. From first to last no less than two hundred and forty-six men and women of all ranks and grades of society were brought to trial, and whilst thirty-six of humbler station went to the scaffold, one hundred and forty-seven were imprisoned for longer or shorter terms, not a few finding it convenient to leave the country, or, at any rate, to obscure themselves in distant châteaux. But many of the leaves had been torn out of the archives, and Louis himself forbade any mention of his favourite’s name in connexion with these prosecutions. However, she was disgraced, and it is not surprising that after the death of Maria Teresa, 31 July, 1683, the king early in the following year married the pious and conventual Madame de Maintenon.

Ludovico Maria Sinistrari writes that witches “promise the Devil sacrifices and offerings at stated times: once a fortnight, or at least each month, the murder of some child, or an homicidal act of sorcery,” and again and again in the trials detailed accusation of the kidnapping and murder of children are brought against the prisoners. In the same way as the toad was used for magical drugs so was the fat of the child. The belief that corpses and parts of corpses constitute a most powerful cure and a supreme ingredient in elixirs is universal and of the highest antiquity. The quality of directly curing diseases and of protection has long been attributed to a cadaver. Tumours, eruptions, gout, are dispelled if the afflicted member be stroked with a dead hand.⁠[159] Toothache is charmed away if the face be touched with the finger of a dead child.⁠[160] Birthmarks vanish under the same treatment.⁠[161] Burns, carbuncles, the herpes, and other skin complaints, fearfully prevalent in the Middle Ages, could be cured by contact with some part of a corpse. In Pomerania the “cold corpse hand” is a protection against fire,⁠[162] and Russian peasants believe that a dead hand protects from bullet wounds and steel.⁠[163] It was long thought by the ignorant country folk that the doctors of the hospital of Graz enjoyed the privilege of being allowed every year to exploit one human life for curative purposes. Some young man who repaired thither for toothache or any such slight ailment is seized, hung up by the feet, and tickled to death! Skilled chemists boil the body to a paste and utilize this as well as the fat and the charred bones in their drug store. The people are persuaded that about Easter a youth annually disappears in the hospital for these purposes.⁠[164] This tradition is, perhaps, not unconnected with the Jewish ritual sacrifices of S. William of Norwich (1144); Harold of Gloucester (1168); William of Paris (1177); Robert of Bury S. Edmunds (1181); S. Werner of Oberwesel (1286); S. Rudolph of Berne (1294); S. Andreas of Rinn (1462); S. Simon of Trent, a babe of two and a half years old (1473); Simon Abeles, whose body lies in the Teyn Kirche at Prague, murdered for Christ’s sake on 21 February, 1694, by Lazarus and Levi Kurtzhandel; El santo Niño de la Guardia, near Toledo (1490), and many more.⁠[165]

The riots which have so continually during three centuries broken out in China against Europeans, and particularly against Catholic asylums for the sick, foundling hospitals, schools, are almost always fomented by an intellectual party who begin by issuing fiery appeals to the populace: “Down with the missionaries! Kill the foreigners! They steal or buy our children and slaughter them, in order to prepare magic remedies and medicines out of their eyes, hearts, and from other portions of their dead bodies.” Baron Hübner in his Promenade autour du monde, II (Paris, 1873) tells the story of the massacre at Tientsin, 21 June, 1870, and relates that it was engineered on these very lines. In 1891 similar risings against Europeans resident in China were found to be due to the same cause. Towards the end of 1891 a charge was brought in Madagascar against the French that they devoured human hearts and for this purpose kidnapped and killed native children. Stern legislation was actually found necessary to check the spread of these accusations.⁠[166]

In the Navarrese witch-trials of 1610 Juan de Echelar confessed that a candle had been used made from the arm of an infant strangled before baptism. The ends of the fingers had been lit, and burned with a clear flame, a “Hand of Glory” in fact. At Forfar, in 1661, Helen Guthrie and four other witches exhumed the body of an unbaptized babe and made portions into a pie which they ate. They imagined that by this means no threat nor torture could bring them to confession of their sorceries. This, of course, is clearly sympathetic magic. The tongue of the infant had never spoken articulate words, and so the tongues of the witches would be unable to articulate.

It is a fact seldom realized, but none the less of the deepest significance, that almost every detail of the old witch-trials can be exactly paralleled in Africa to-day. Thus there exists in Bantu a society called the “Witchcraft Company,” whose members hold secret meetings at midnight in the depths of the forest to plot sickness and death against their enemies by means of incantations and spells. The owl is their sacred bird, and their signal call an imitation of its hoot. They profess to leave their corporeal bodies asleep in their huts, and it is only their spirit-bodies that attend the magic rendezvous, passing through walls and over the tree-tops with instant rapidity. At the meeting they have visible, audible, and tangible communication with spirits. They hold feasts, at which is eaten the “heart-life” of some human being, who through this loss of his heart falls sick and, unless “the heart” be later restored, eventually dies. Earliest cock-crow is the warning for them to disperse, since they fear the advent of the morning-star, as, should the sun rise upon them before they reach their corporeal bodies, all their plans would not merely fail, but recoil upon themselves, and they would pine and languish miserably. This hideous Society was introduced by black slaves to the West Indies, to Jamaica and Hayti, and also to the Southern States of America as Voodoo worship. Authentic records are easily procurable which witness that midnight meetings were held in Hayti as late as 1888, when human beings, especially kidnapped children, were killed and eaten at the mysterious and evil banquets. European government in Africa has largely suppressed the practice of the black art, but this foul belief still secretly prevails, and Dr. Norris⁠[167] is of opinion that were white influence withdrawn it would soon hold sway as potently as of old.

A candid consideration will show that for every detail of the Sabbat, however fantastically presented and exaggerated in the witch-trials of so many centuries, there is ample warrant and unimpeachable evidence. There is some hallucination no doubt; there is lurid imagination, and vanity which paints the colours thick; but there is a solid stratum of fact, and very terrible fact throughout.

And as the dawn broke the unhallowed crew separated in haste, and hurried each one on his way homewards, pale, weary, and haggard after the night of taut hysteria, frenzied evil, and vilest excess.

“Le coq s’oyt par fois és sabbats sonna̅t le retraicte aux Sorciers.”⁠[168] (The cock crows; the Sabbat ends; the Sorcerers scatter and flee away.)