Witch Dances and Witch Salves

Abstract

The idea that witches flew to Sabbaths to worship the Devil through a variety of obscene rites, including perversions of the Christian sacraments, came to play an increasingly prominent role in learned theories of witchcraft over the course of the fifteenth century, and became a crucial element in the early modern witch persecutions.¹ It transformed an individual’s sinful behavior into evidence of participation in an underground counterreligion, which both made the threat posed by witchcraft seem much greater and implied that one witch must know the identity of others. Combating a subversive conspiracy justified more extreme measures to defend the community than dealing with individual malefactors, and the perceived need to root out entire groups led to the chain-reaction mass panics in which suspects were tortured into denouncing others, who in turn were tortured into denouncing still others, that most distinguished European witchcraft in the early modern period.