The Sabbath
As part of the covenant with Satan, witches must promise to encourage others to follow the evil path, and in this way become instruments of Satan’s sin: ‘the devil demands… [that s/he] do her utmost to bring others of both sexes into his power’ (Malleus Part II, Question 1, Chapter 2). In an infernal parody of the evangelising spirit of Christianity, witches are required to recruit others hungry for power or revenge and fearless of eternal damnation. Often this took place within families, and it was at gatherings of local witches that Satanic oaths were most often made.
Sabbaths were occasions for great celebration and Dionysian-indulgence. They usually took place on important Christian feast days, as not celebrating them and sinning on the same day was an act of heresy that would please Satan greatly. Kramer links the Sabbath to pre-Christian festivals at which ‘the Pagans made much boisterous revelry, and were very merry among themselves, holding various dances and feasts’ (Malleus Part II, Question 1, Chapter 5). Isidore, who Kramer quotes here, was an early Church Father writing at a period when the Church was fighting to spread the faith in the face of widespread paganism.
Even in 1487, Isidore’s writing was antiquated. However, these allusions to the activities of witches at Sabbaths were seized upon and expanded by Renaissance readers to be regular and well-attended events, which many people were executed for supposedly attending. At some, it was claimed that thousands of witches were present, which only served to increase paranoia at the height of the European witch hunt. The Sabbath was also embellished to include wild music and dancing, possibly as gloss for Kramer’s likening of Sabbaths to ‘bad Christians [who] imitate these [Pagan] corruptions, turning them to lasciviousness… at the time of Carnival’.
Along with the general festivities, the point of the Sabbath is to discuss which evil should be perpetrated with other witches, and the commitment to Satan could be renewed: ‘witches meet together in the conclave on a set day, and the devil appears to them in the assumed body of a man, and urges them to keep faith with him, promising them worldly prosperity and length of life’ (Malleus Part II, Question 1, Chapter 2). By taking on a bodily form, the devil would also satisfy the carnal lust of the assembled witches (see the next page).