Speculation would lead to no profitable result were we to endeavor by its aid—the only means now left us—to fathom the obscurity surrounding the rites and dances, and especially the foods of those witches’ gatherings.
Doctor Dupouy, in “Le Moyen Age Médical,” to which special attention is due, advances an opinion which seems to cover much of the ground in a logical manner. This in one word, amounts to the belief that the witches’ gatherings of Europe were not figments of the imagination, but really existed, and were the conventions of votaries of the cults stamped out of existence, and only traceable in the distorted and outlandish features which would most naturally commend themselves to an ignorant peasantry. “Among these sorcerers there were old panderers, who knew from personal experience all practices of debauchery, and who gave the name of ‘vigils’ to the saturnalia indulged in among villagers on certain nights,—gatherings composed of bawds and pimps, to which were invited numerous novices in libidinousness. These sorcerers and witches also knew the remedies that young girls must take when they wish to destroy the physiological results of their own imprudence, and what old men needed to restore their virility. They knew the medicinal qualities of plants, especially those that stupefied.”—(Translated by T. C. Minor, M.D., under title of “Medicine in the Middle Ages,” p. 40.)
The initiates in witchcraft may have been compelled to adopt loathsome foods as a test of the sincerity of their purposes, or they may have taken them to induce an intoxication such as that of the Zuñis of New Mexico and the wild tribes of Siberia. There is still another hypothesis to be considered before relinquishing this topic. The best food, we know, was always offered to the deities of the ruling sect, and the use of any of the appurtenants of the rites of the ruling religion in the ceremonial of a superseded cult was looked upon as the veriest sacrilege and blasphemy. For example, the use of holy water at the witches’ sabbath was considered a worse crime than that of being a witch. Therefore we may conclude that, as the votaries of the superseded religion did not dare to employ the best, they necessarily had to fall back upon inferior material out of which to construct their oblations; and as they assembled generally in mountain recesses, in caves, etc., where nothing better could be had, they offered themselves in sacrifice,—that is, they recurred to the old practices of human sacrifice, if indeed they had ever abandoned them, and gave the pledges of their own hair, saliva, urine, and egestæ.
“Pure prayer ascends to Him that High doth sit,
Down falls the filth for fiends of Hell more fit.”
Such was the answer made to the father of lies by a venerable monk,—
“A godly father sitting on a draught,
To do as need and nature hath us taught.”
The devil had reproached him for saying his prayers at such a moment.—(Harington, “Ajax,” pp. 33, 34.)
Mooney relates an instance of the abduction of an Irishwoman by fairies. She managed to impart to her husband the knowledge of the means by which her rescue could be accomplished: “He must be ready with some urine and some chicken-dung, which he must throw upon her, and then seize her.... Soon he heard the fairies approaching, and when the noise came in front of him he threw the dung and urine in the direction of the sound, and saw his wife fall from her horse.” (“The Medical Mythology of Ireland,” James Mooney, Amer. Phil. Society, 1887.) The Irish peasantry firmly believe in the power of the fairies to carry off their children; to effect a restoration, “a wise woman” is summoned, whose method is to “heat the shovel in the fireplace, place the changeling upon it, and put it out upon the dung-hill.” (Idem.) “Fire, iron, and dung, the three great safeguards against the influence of fairies and the infernal spirits.”—(Idem.)