have to do with the “right to life” of the unborn fetus.
It was also said that midwives were able to remove labor
pains from the woman and transfer those pains to her
husband—clearly in violation of divine injunction and
intention both.
The origins of the magical content of the pagan cults
can be traced back to the fairies, who were a real, neolithic people, smaller in stature than the natives of northern Europe or England. They were a pastoral
people who had no knowledge of agriculture. They
fled before stronger, technologically more advanced
murderers and missionaries who had contempt for
their culture. They set up communities in the inlands and concealed their dwellings in mounds half hidden in the ground. The fairies developed those
magical skills for which the witches, centuries later,
were burned.
The socioreligious organization of the fairy culture
was matriarchal and probably polyandrous. The fairy
culture was still extant in England as late as the 17th
century when even the pagan beliefs of the early witches
had degenerated into the Christian parody which we
associate with Satanism. The Christians rightly recognized the fairies as ancient, original sorcerers, but
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wrongly saw their whole culture as an expression o f the
demonic. T here was communication between the fairies
and the pagan women, and any evidence that a woman
had visited the fairies was considered sure proof that
she was a witch.
T here were, then, three separate, though interrelated, phenomena: the fairy race with its matriarchal social organization, its knowledge o f esoteric magic
and medicine; the woman-oriented fertility cults, also
practitioners o f esoteric magic and medicine; and later,
the diluted witchcraft cults, degenerate parodies o f
Christianity. T here is particular confusion when one
tries to distinguish between the last two phenomena.
Many o f the women condemned by the Inquisition were
true devotees o f the Old Religion. Many were confused by Christian militancy and aggression, not to mention torture and threat o f burning, and saw themselves as diabolical, damned witches.
An understanding o f what the Old Religion really
was, how it functioned, is crucial if we want to understand the precise nature o f the witch hunt, the amount and kind o f distortion that the myth o f feminine evil
made possible, who the women were who were being
burned, and what they had really done. T he information available comes primarily from the confessions o f accused witches, recorded and distorted by the Inquisitors, and from the work o f anthropologists like Margaret Murray and C. L'Estrange Ewen. T h e scenario o f the witchcraft cults is pieced together from those sources, but many pieces are missing. A lot o f
knowledge disappears with 9 million people.
T h e religion was organized with geographic integ
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rity. Communities had their own organizations, mainly
structured in covens, with local citizens as administrators. There were weekly meetings which took care of business —they were called esbats. Then there were
larger gatherings, called sabbats, where many covens
met together for totemic festivities. There may have
been an actual continental organization with one all-
powerful head, but evidence on this point is ambiguous.
It was a proselytizing religion in that nonmembers were
approached by local officials and asked to join. Conditions of membership in a coven were the free consent of the individual, abjuration of all other beliefs and
loyalties (particularly renunciation of any loyalty to the
new Catholic Faith), and an avowal of allegiance to the
horned god. Membership was contractual, that is, a
member signed an actual contract which limited her
obligations to the cult to a specific number of years,
at the end of which she was free to terminate allegiance.
Most often the Devil “promised her Mony, and that she
would live gallantly and have the pleasure of the
World. . . ” 28 The neophyte’s debts probably were paid
and she no doubt also learned the secrets of medicine,
drugs, telepathy, and simple sanitation, which would
have considerably improved all aspects of her earthly
existence. It was only according to the Church that she
lost her soul as part o f the bargain. And, needless to
say, it was the Church, not the Devil, which took her life.
Once the neophyte made the decision for the
horned god, she went through a formal initiation, often
conducted at the sabbat. The ceremony was simple.
The initiate declared that she was joining the coven
of her own free will and swore devotion to the master
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o f the coven who represented the horned god. She was
then marked with some kind o f tattoo which was called
the witches’ mark. T h e inflicting o f the tattoo was painful, and the healing process was long. When healed, the scar was red or blue and indelible. One method particularly favored by the witch hunters when hunting was to take a suspected woman, shave her pubic and other
bodily hair (including head hair, eyebrows, etc. ) and,
upon finding any scar, find her guilty o f witchcraft.
Also, the existence o f any supernumerary nipple, common in all mammals, was proof o f guilt.
T he initiate was often given a new name, especially
if she had a Christian name like Mary or Faith. Children, when they reached puberty, were initiated into the coven — parents naturally wanted their children to
share the family religion. T he Inquisition was as ruthless with children as it was with adults. T here are stories o f children being whipped as their mothers
were being burned —prevention, it was called.
T he religious ceremony, which was the main content o f the sabbat, included dancing, eating, and fucking. T he worshipers paid homage to the horned
god by kissing his representative, the master o f the
coven, anywhere he indicated. T he kiss was generally
on the master’s ass —designed, some say, to provoke the
antisodomy Christians. That ritual kiss was possibly
placed on a mask which the costumed figure —masked,
horned, wearing animal skins, and probably an artificial
phallus —wore under his tail. T h e disguise conjures up
the ancient, two-faced Janus.
T he witches danced ring dances in a direction opposite to the path o f the sun, an ancient, symbolic
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rite. The Lutherans and Puritans forbade dancing because it evoked for them the spectacle of pagan worship.
After the dancing, the witches ate. Often they
brought their own food, rather in the tradition of picnic lunches, and sometimes the coven leader provided a real feast. The Christians alleged that the witches were