Oct 10, 2021
A barren passive love underlay the Sabbath itself.
Without such amusements and the accompanying banquet, one could hardly understand this general rage for these Sabbaths. It is a kind of love without love; a feast of barrenness undisguised. Boguet has settled that point to a nicety. Differing in one passage, where he dismisses the women as afraid of coming to harm, Lancre is generally at one with Boguet, besides being more sincere. The cruel and foul researches he pursues on the very bodies of witches, show clearly that he deemed them barren, and that a barren passive love underlay the Sabbath itself. [220]
— Source: La Sorcière: The Witch of the Middle Ages by Jules Michelet https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31420