The Witch

by Ronald Hutton

  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.47 This 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 s
tatue 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.55 This 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.