.:: The Sabbath or Ludus Bonae Societatis ::.
According to Luisa Muraro [1], the oldest term to indicate the gathering of witches, i.e. the Sabbath, is “Game” or “Game of the Good Society” (“Ludus” or “Ludus Bonae Societatis” in Latin), to the point that there are also characters at the head of the witches who keep this name, such as the “Lady of Good Game” (“Donna del Buon Gioco” or “Signora del Buon Gioco” in Italian, and “Dòna del Zöch” in norther Italian dialect) or “Domina Ludi”.
In her book we read that the set of witches, the totality of all the witches, was referred to as the “Society” or the “Good Society”, and that what in Scotland are called Covens, in Italy (the Muraro witness it for the North while Henningsen reports it for Sicily) were called “Companies”.
.:: The dates of the Sabbath ::.
When did the Ludus take place? It was not - unlike what we think nowdays - of unique dates throughout Europe or throughout single Countries, but they changed depending on the area and the region. The days of the Sabbath are not the same of the seasonal celebrations of the country or village festivals (although these may have a pre-Christian origin), which instead took place in the general community in broad daylight and had a more social function, while the Sabbaths were more private meetings.
Normally, the dates are remembered in popular memory, are found in the declarations of the accused in trials, and in legends about the “nights of witches” (or “the nights of the Wild Hunt” or even “of the Procession of the Dead”), sometimes accompanied by rites or spells carried out by the extended population to remove the “evil effects” (from a Christian perspective) of these days.
In Italy the most used dates are: the Thursday of the Four Ember Days, st. John’s night, the night of the Dead, the 12 nights from Christmas to Epiphany, and Full Moons. In some regions instead, like Sicily, the meetings (in this case of the Women from Outside, the Sicilian witches/fairies) took place on a weekly basis.
So, how to discover the dates in our region? Let’s take a book of folklore of our region.
By reading it, let’s ask ourselves: when, in folklore and legends of the area in which we live, witches or fairies gather together? When, if there are any, legends say the Procession of the Dead or of the Fairies will pass? And so on.
If we find these legends, usually we’ll also find the days in which these phenomenons happen, according to the legend.
We can take these as days for celebrating the Sabbath.
.:: Who was worshipped in the Sabbath? ::.
Although the witch had various spiritual allies (various “Familiar Spirits”, such as the Spirit of the House, Fairies, Ancestors, Plant Allies, the Animal Familiar, and so on), only the Major Spirit, i.e. the Domina Nocturna (the female spirit that led the Witches’ Procession, the Wild Hunt or the Procession of the Dead) and/or his male counterpart was worshiped in the Sabbath.
In short, therefore, there was a sort of henotheism/exclusiveness towards the Major Spirit to whom the witch was bound: the Ludus was not aimed at a pantheon but to the Entity to which the Company was bound (which normally changed from Country to Country and from region to region, for example the French witches went with Abonde/Abundia/Satia, the German witches with Holda or Perchta, in Northern Italy we find the Lady of the Good Game, in Scotland the Queen and the King of Elphame, in Sicily the Queen and the King of the Fairies, in Rieti - reports Bellezza Orsini in her trial - Befania, on the Sibillini Mountains the Apennine Sibyl, the Redodesa in the Veneto, Herodias in Rome, Sa Rejusta, Araja or Arada in Sardinia, etc.).
The Company could meet at the Ludus in a physical way (“corporaliter”) or in an altered state of consciousness (“in somniis”). Since we talked about the Ludus in somniis in the previous post ( https://elegantshapeshifter.tumblr.com/post/170926906491/dreamwork-and-the-oneiric-sabbath ), now we’ll talk about the Ludus Corporaliter.
.:: Ludus Corporaliter ::.
Let us now analyze the formation of the concept of physical Sabbath. One of the first references to the procession of witches is certainly the Canon Episcopi (dated 906 CE). I quote from it:
“This also is not to be omitted, that certain wicked women, turned back toward Satan, seduced by demonic illusions and phantasms, believe of themselves and profess to ride upon certain beasts in the nighttime hours, with Diana, the Goddess of the Pagans, (or with Herodias) and an innumerable multitude of women, and to traverse great spaces of earth in the silence of the dead of night, and to be subject to her laws as of a Lady, and on fixed nights be called to her service.”
But here we are still talking about a non-corporeal encounter, it is a gathering in the spiritual realm. So let’s go forward and see how this spiritual gathering is gradually going to “stabilize” and “becoming physical”.
In Roman de la Rose (1237) we find the following verses to testify to the belief that the procession of witches went from house to house:
“As a result, many people, in their folly,
think themselves sorcerers by night,
wandering with Lady Abonde.
And they say that in the whole world
every third child born is
of such disposition that
three times a week he goes
just as destiny leads him;
that such people push into all houses;
that they fear neither keys nor bars,
but enter by cracks,
cat-hatches, and crevices;
that their souls leave their bodies
and go with good ladies
into strange places and through houses;
and they prove it with such reasoning:
the different things seen
have not come in their beds,
but through their souls, which labor
and go running about thus through the world;
and they make people believe that,
as long as they are on such a journey,
their souls could never enter their bodies
if anyone had overturned them.
But this idea is a horrible folly
and something not possible,
for the human body is a dead thing
as soon as it does not carry its soul;
thus it is certain
that those who follow this sort of journey
three times a week
die three times and revive three
times in the same week.
And if it is as we have said,
then the disciples of such a convent
come back to life very often.”
In the same period William of Auvergne reports the belief that the Dominae Nocturnae, in this case Abundia/Satia and her witches, would visit the houses to dance and eat food and drink present on the spot. In the absence of these, they would abandon the houses, disdained. According to this belief, people hastened to open the barrels and open the cellars, if not to provide ready food in their home’s table [2].
The Malleus Maleficarum (an inquisitorial treaty following the Canon Episcopi, and dated 1487), will then demonize these characters (a tendency that will have more and more until the eighteenth century, with the disappearance of pagan remains and the complete equation between Satanism and witchcraft):
“There was an erroneous belief that when devils came in the night (or the Good People as old women call them, though they are witches, or devils in their forms) they must eat up everything, that afterwards they may bring greater abundance of stores. Some people give colour to the story, and call them Screech Owls; but this is against the opinion of the Doctors, who say that there are no rational creatures except men and Angels; therefore they can only be devils.”
Yet, even the Malleus does not provide a description of the Sabbath as we know it today. For it we’ll have to wait the 1580 with Jean Bodin and his “De la démonomanie des sorciers”.
According to Bodin’s description, when the witch was preparing to go to the Sabbath, she would anoint herself with the ointment, ride a broom, recite a charm, fly and land on the spot of the gathering. Upon arrival, the newcomers were introduced to the Devil, who was greeted with a kiss on the buttocks, then Satan took note of the evil done by witches since the previous meeting and witches were reprimanded or praised according to their merit. At this point the practitioners gave offerings to the Devil (sometimes a sheep, sometimes a bird, other times a lock of the witch’s hair or some other object), then they trampled the cross and blasphemed the saints. So the devil had sex with the new witch, placed his mark on her skin and gave her a Familiar Spirit to her command. Then followed a large banquet and a wild dance that then flowed into an orgy. The meeting ended in time to allow the witches to reach home before the cock crowed [3].
According to Henningsen, the satanic aspects of the Sabbath shown by Bodin are actually demonizations of a more ancient and authentic complex:
“In Sicily […], the belief in the ‘evil and wicked witches’ has never existed; and therefore there is no clear dividing line between fairies and witches: both 'could exercise both good and evil’. However, on the fairies side, there are the donni di fora, and with fairies they participate in forms of sabbath marked by elegance, by beautiful music, by joyful dance, by happy banquets: a 'white fairies’ sabbath’, in contrast to the 'black witches’ sabbath’. The fairies’ sabbath […] in fact represents a 'pure model’, compared to the witches’ sabbath: the latter having to be considered rather a secondary form of it as the result of a subsequent process of demonization by the Church […] a variant of an extensive and therefore presumably ancient and deeply rooted complex of Mediterranean and European shamanistic beliefs.”
According to his vision, therefore, the blasphemies would have been added posthumously, while the osculum infame (the kiss on the devil’s buttocks) would actually be the corruption of the initial bow (also witnessed by the Milan trial of 1390 against Sibilla Zanni and Pierina de’ Bugatis, worshipers of Madonna Horiente) that was carried out in front of the Witches’ Queen.
This Witches’ Queen, again according to the witnesses reported by Henningsen of the last Women from Outside and of those who encountered them, was chosen at random from time to time among the Women from Outside/witches. One can therefore think that the Witches’ Queen represented the Domina Nocturna on Earth for the length of the Sabbath [4].
As we can see, the procedure of the reconstructed Ludus Corporaliter (physical Sabbath) was:
To bow in front of the Domina Nocturna or the Patron Major Spirit, temporarily incarnated by the Witches’ Queen chosen randomly between the witches;
Discussions and advices about the spells performed;
Now let’s talk about the Sabbath in an altered state of consciousness or in dreams.
I already described the technique in my previous post ( https://elegantshapeshifter.tumblr.com/post/170926906491/dreamwork-and-the-oneiric-sabbath ), so I will allude only briefly.
The structure is the same of the corporaliter’s, but it happens in a dimension that allows the absence of a Temporary King or a Queen of the Witches (i.e., a human representative of the Domina or Major Spirit), in whom we can feel the presence of the Entities directly and with no intermediaries.
Many witches of the past used this way of access to the Ludus, for example Isobel Gowdie, a Scottish woman who went on trial in 1662, who had a real Coven with whom she met in an oneiric way [5].
Although it can be said to be a very complex procedure that I will not elaborate here, it - as it’s logical to expect - consists of two steps:
1) to be able to meet in a dream with the other members of the Company,
2) to be able to modify the dream so that you can celebrate a Sabbath in this altered state of consciousness (advanced state of lucid dreaming).
To reach this point, various attempts and a long training period will be necessary, but if the effort is successful, the experience will not be described in human words because of its greatness.
[1] Luisa Muraro. La Signora del Gioco. La caccia alle streghe interpretata dalle sue vittime. La Tartaruga Edizioni, 2006.
[2] Claudia Manciocco, Luigi Manciocco. L’incanto e l’arcano: per una antropologia della Befana. Armando Editore, 2006.
[3] Thomas Wright. The Worship of the Generative Powers during the Middle Ages of Western Europe. London, J. C. Hotten, 1865, pp. 159-162.
[4] Gustav Henningsen. “The Ladies from Outside”: An Archaic Pattern of the Witches’ Sabbath. In: B. Ankarloo and G. Henningsen (eds.). Early Modern European Witchcraft. Oxford University Press, 1993.
[5] Emma Wilby. The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland. Sussex Academic Press, 2010.
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