This spookiest of seasons reminds us that the supposed aerial transportations of witches and others was deeply embedded in the Early Modern era of European history. Teleportation-type phenomena – sometimes called transvections – and other forms of magical transportation were common in the older lore of fairies and spirits before it was incorporated into Christianised witchcraft and demonology. Such was the latter state of mind that an influential section of the scholarly elite believed such journeys through the air actually happened.
Traditionally, the Devil’s remit – and that of many older deities – included mastery of the airy element. But Old Nick was a veritable curmudgeon when it came to letting his thralls share some of the aerial fun that they hoped for when they signed away their souls. To be fair, they were rarely coerced; the Devil simply provided an opportunity for their basest instincts to get to work.
The old literature1 is full of disgruntled witches and other dissatisfied magic-users bending the ears of their jailors about their master’s ingratitude for their loyalty and his callous disregard for their suffering in his service. Such grievances were often given voluntarily – even amid torture – to judges and inquisitors, along with pitiful regret about signing the Devil’s contract, the small print of which would fail any universal fairtrading standard. The sabbat feasts were tasteless and unsatisfying, and gifts turned to dross by the time they were got home. Kissing his beastly arse was a dubious privilege; and sex with him – should anyone be so unlucky – was reported to be excruciating due to his unfeasibly large appendage and icy emissions.
THE DEMON IN THE DETAIL
In his critical overview of the ‘demonic pact’, the French Benedictine scholar Augustine Calmet (1672–1757),2 wondered why the Devil bothered making pacts with “idiots”. However, Calmet’s sardonic Italian correspondent, the Marquis of Maffei – Francesco Scipione (1675-1755)3 – convinced Calmet that the Devil was, in essence, the worst at everything. For example, he wrote, if he really was giving away “a power second only to God’s”, surely it would be sought out and employed by the world’s rulers and scholars? But in any eventuality, magical powers, when granted, rarely lived up to their promise, as is evident from the abundant history of such deals. Which demonstrated for any clear mind, writes Maffei, that in this transaction, as in so much else, the Devil simply could not be trusted.
Of course, it suited the philosophers of the High Church to show that the Devil wasn’t as clever as he thought he was. Only a complete idiot would habitually hide away in his small print the precise means by which this valuable deal could (in modern parlance) be hacked. As Maffei put it to Calmet: “How can anyone imagine that the Devil […] should teach the magician the true secret of this art […] of which he is the source [and also] the means of forcing [himself] to obey [the magician]?”4
Good point! But greed, ambition and hubris were a heady mix in the anti-witch era, blinding what the American mediævalist Richard Kieckhefer calls “a ‘clerical underworld’ of ritual magicians” who, undaunted and on an industrial scale, “attempted to call up angels, spirits and demons for both lofty and base purposes”.5
The most notorious of these legendary chancers was the scholar Faust, who bargained for 24 years during which all his desires would be fulfilled.6 Johann Spies’s chapbook of 1587 – the most influential version of this legend – describes how after Faust’s last-minute repentance during supper on the final day of his pact, a furious Mephistopheles dismembers him at the stroke of midnight, leaving his room “splattered with blood and brains [with his] eyes lying on the floor and his dead body in the courtyard.”
COMPLAINTS DEPARTMENT
Alongside this race of learned “idiots”, the religious elite enthusiastically lumped together with witches and heretics anyone else they found theologically disagreeable. It is interesting to note that in the Europe-wide records those accused of witchcraft complained far more about their maltreatment by the Devil and his minions than they dared do about their inquisitors.
Those who wanted to travel to the sabbats – held on faraway fields and mountains – could call up an everyday item or animal, or sometimes a fellow witch. For example, at her trial in 1673, a detailed
