Cult in Western Europe,65 although worked out with nice ingenuity and no little documentation, is radically and wholly erroneous. Miss Murray actually postulates that “underlying the Christian religion was a cult practised by many classes of the community” which “can be traced back to pre-Christian times, and appears to be the ancient religion of Western Europe.” We are given a full account of the chief festivals of this imaginary cult, of its hierarchy, its organization, and many other details. The feasts and dances—the obscene horrors of the Sabbat—“show that it was a joyous religion”! It is impossible to conceive a more amazing assertion. Miss Murray continues to say that “as such it must have been quite incomprehensible to the gloomy Inquisitors and Reformers who suppressed it.” The Reformers, for all their dour severity, perfectly well appreciated with what they were dealing, and the Inquisitors, the sons of S. Dominic who was boundless in his charity and of S. Francis, whose very name breathes Christ-like love to all creation, were men of the profoundest knowledge and deepest sympathies, whose first duty it was to stamp out the infection lest the whole of Society be corrupted and damned. Miss Murray does not seem to suspect that Witchcraft was in truth a foul and noisome heresy, the poison of the Manichees. Her “Dianic cult,” which name she gives to this “ancient religion” supposed to have survived until the Middle Ages and even later and to have been a formidable rival to Christianity, is none other than black heresy and the worship of Satan, no primitive belief with pre-agricultural rites, in latter days persecuted, misinterpreted, and misunderstood. It is true that in the Middle Ages Christianity had—not a rival but a foe, the eternal enemy of the Church Militant against whom she yet contends to-day, the dark Lord of that city which is set contrariwise to the City of God, the Terrible Shadow of destruction and despair.
Miss Murray with tireless industry has accumulated a vast number of details by the help of which seeks to build up and support her imaginative thesis. Even those that show the appropriation by the cult of evil of the more hideous heathen practices, both of lust and cruelty, which prevailed among savage or decadent peoples, afford no evidence whatsoever of any continuity of an earlier religion, whilst by far
