weary, and haggard after the night of taut hysteria, frenzied evil, and vilest excess.
“Le coq s’oyt par fois és sabbats sonnāt le retraicte aux Sorciers.”168 (The cock crows; the Sabbat ends; the Sorcerers scatter and flee away.)
NOTES TO CHAPTER IV
1 Omnia autem honeste et secundum ordinom fiant. 1 Cor. xiv. 40.
2 Miss Murray, misled no doubt by the multiplicity of material, postulates two separate and distinct kinds of assemblies: The Sabbat, the General Meeting of all members of the religion; the Esbat “only for the special and limited number who carried out the rites and practices of the cult, and [which] was not for the general public.” The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, p. 97. Görres had already pointed out that the smaller meetings were often known as Esbats. The idea of a “general public” at a witches’ meeting is singular.
3 On a voulu trouver l’etymologie du sabbat, réunion des sorciers, dans les sabazies; mais la forme ne le permet pas; d’aillours comment, au moyen âge aurait on connu les sabazies? Saint-Croix, Recherches sur les mystères du paganisme; Maury, Histoire des religions de la Grèce antique.
4 Metamorphoseon, VIII. 25.
5 Miss Murray thinks that Sabbat “is possibly a derivative of s’esbattre, ‘to frolic,’” and adds “a very suitable description of the joyous gaiety of the meetings”!!
6 Miss Murray mistakenly says (p. 109) that May Eve (30 April) is called Roodmas or Rood Day. Roodmas or Rood Day is 3 May, the Feast of the Invention of Holy Cross. An early English calendar (702–706) even gives 7 May as Roodmas. The Invention of Holy Cross is found in the Lectionary of Silos and the Bobbio Missal. The date was not slightly altered. The Invention of Holy Cross is among the very early festivals.
7 Especially in the North and North-East. Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and Baden, knew little of this particular date.
8 In the Rituale we have “Benedictio Rogi, quæ fit a Clero extra Ecclesiam in Uigilia Natiuitatis S. Joannis Baptistæ.” (Blessing of a pyre, which the Clergy may give on the Vigil of the Nativity of 8. John Baptist, but outside the Church.) This form is especially approved for the Diocese of Tarbes.
9 Relacion de las personas que salieron al auto de la fé que los inquisidores apostólicos del reino de Navarra y su distrito, celebraron en la ciudad De Logroño, en 7 y 8 del mes de noviembre de 1610 años, 1611.
10 Discours des Sorciers, XXII. 12. Tertullian’s Diabolus simia Dei.
11 Idem, XX. 2.
12 Tableau, p. 65.
13 Les lieux des assemblées des Sorciers sont notables et signalez de quelques arbres, ou croix. Fleau, p. 181.
14 Anthony Horneck; Appendix to Glanvill’s Sadducismus Triumphatus. London, 1681.
15 Locus in diuersis regionibus est diuersus; plerumque autem comitia in syluestribus, montanis, uel subterraneis atque ab hominum conuersatione dissitis locis habentur. Mela. Lib. 3. cap. 44. montem Atlantem nominat; de Vaulx Magus Stabuleti decollatus, fatebatur 1603, in Hollandia congregationem frequentissimam fuisse in Ultraiectinæ ditionis aliquo loco. Nobis ab hoc conuentu notus atq; notatus mons Bructerorum, Meliboeus alias dictus in ducatu Brunsuicensi, uulgo der Blocksberg oder Heweberg, Peucero, der Brockersberg, & Tilemanno Stellæ, der Vogelsberg, perhibente Ortelio in Thesauro Geographico. For the Bructeri see Tacitus, Germania, 33: Velleius Paterculus, II, 105, i. Bructera natio, Tacitus, Historiæ, IV, 61.
16… le lieu où on le trouue ordinairement s’appelle Lanne de boue, & en Basque Aquelarre de verros, prado del Cabron, & là des Sorciers
