INVOKING
THE AKELARREIn memory of my niece,
Emily Wilby

INVOKING
THE AKELARRE

Voices of the Accused in the
Basque Witch-Craze, 1609-1614

EMMA WILBY

Copyright © Emma Wilby, 2019.

Published in the Sussex Academic e-Library, 2019.

SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS

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Contents

The Illustrations

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Text

Introduction

ONE The Basque World

TWO The Gleeful Executioners

THREE The Witches’s Voice

FOUR Black Winds

FIVE The Bloodletting Bruja

SIX ‘Powders and Poisons’

SEVEN ‘Man’s Grease’

EIGHT Hidden Healers

NINE Familiar Demons

TEN Milking the Toad

ELEVEN Jeannette’s Imagination

TWELVE The Akelarre

THIRTEEN The Meadow of Pleasure

FOURTEEN Dark Banquets

FIFTEEN ‘There is no sin in it’

SIXTEEN ‘Be nothing to God’

SEVENTEEN Theophilus and the Stage

EIGHTEEN The First Altar of Hell

NINETEEN Mass and Misrule

TWENTY The Malevolent Mass

TWENTY ONE De Lancre’s Imagination

TWENTY TWO The Cultic Template

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

The Illustrations

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to reproduce copyright material. The publishers apologize for any errors or omissions in the list below and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in the next edition or reprint of this book.

 1 Engraving by Jan Ziarnco, published in Pierre de Lancre’s Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons, Paris, 1613. University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

 2 Map of the seven Basque provinces. Designed and created by Karl Triebel, Hedgerow Print Ltd, Crediton.

 3 Explorers cutting up whales. From the La Cosmographie Universelle by André Thevet, Paris, 1575. Wellcome Collection.

 4 Vizcaíno and vizcaínas, from Civitates Orbis Terrarum, by Georg Braun (1541–1622). Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht, MAG: T fol 212 Lk (Rariora)   

 5 An auto de fé procession in a marketplace. Etching. Wellcome Collection.

 6 A mother tries to suckle a dead child. Heliogravure after Barthel Beham, c. 1528–30. Wellcome Collection.

 7 Anatomical bloodletting figure, 16th century. Wellcome Collection.

 8 Section of engraving by Jan Ziarnco, from Lancre’s Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons, Paris, 1613. University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

 9 An apothecary grinding a mixture with his pestle and mortar. Woodcut. Wellcome Collection.

10 A woman covers her eyes as she steals teeth from a hanged man. Aquatint with etching by F. Goya, ca. 1797. Wellcome Collection.

11 Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Borges, France. Photo by Mattana: Wikimedia Commons.

12 Demons forcing gluttons to eat toads in hell. Woodcut from Le Grant Kalendrier et Compost des Bergiers (Troyes, 1496). Bibliothèque Nationale de France, RES-V-278.

13 Dried frog in a silk bag, South Devon, England, 1901–1930. Science Museum, London.

14 Bishop exorcising possessed men, French 15th century. Wellcome Collection.

15 Le Siège of Chartres, March 1568. Engraving by Jean-Jacques Perrissin, 1570. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, M 087417.

16 Frontispiece from Septiceps Lutherus by Johannes Cochlaeus, Paris, 1564. Richard C. Kessler Reformation Collection, Pitts Theology Library, Candler School of Theology, Emory University.

17 Section of engraving by Jan Ziarnco, from de Lancre’s Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons, Paris, 1613. University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

18 Frontispiece to Vida del Servio de Dios V. P. Fray Gonzalo Diaz de Amarante . . . Madrid, 1678. John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

19 Garden of Eden from Biblia cu[m] concordantijs veteris & noui testamenti ex sacrorum canonum. Richard C. Kessler Reformation Collection, Pitts Theology Library, Candler School of Theology, Emory University.

20 The Land of Cockaigne, by Pieter van der Heyden, after Pieter Bruegel the Elder (after 1570). Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1926, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

21 Lucifer devouring damned souls. Anonymous illustration to Antonio Bettini’s Monte Sancto di Dio (Florence, 1477). British Museum.

22 Section of engraving by Jan Ziarnco, from de Lancre’s Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons, Paris, 1613. University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

23 Tupinambá women. Illustration from Naaukeurige versameling der gedenk-waardigste zee en land-reysen na Oost en West-Indiën . . . 1524 tot 1526, Leiden, 1707. John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

24 The Triumph of the Eucharist, 1555–1600. Anonymous Print. Rogers Fund, 1922, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

25 The Fountain of Youth. Woodcut by H.S. Beham, ca. 1536. Wellcome Collection.

26 Hans Sebald Beham, ‘Narr und Närrin’, ca. 1520/1522. Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Inv. A.B.154.

27 Huitzilopochtli. From the Description de l’univers, contenant les different systemes du mond . . . by Allain Manesson-Mallet, 1685. John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

28 The Sacrament of the Roman Catholic Church: Confirmation. Etching. Wellcome Collection.

29 Stage design for Le Passion de Valenciennes, Hubert Cailleau, 1547. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Ms. Français 12536.

30 Priest celebrates the Eucharist, from Naaukeurige versameling der gedenk-waardigste . . . 1492 tot 1499, Leiden 1707. John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

31 ‘Il Mondo alla Riversa’ by Battista Parmensis, 1585. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

32 Mocking the Lutheran Andreas Osiander at the Schembart Parade, 1539. Stadtbibliothek Nürnberg, Nor. K. 444, ca. 1550.

33 Miniature from the frontispiece of the 1562 statutes of the confraternity of Santa Maria della Morte, 1562. Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio, Bologna. Ms Fondo Speciali Ospedali, 42.

34 ‘Mulier Piscajensis’ from Habitus praecipuorum populorum tam virorum quam feminarum singulari arte depicti, by Hans Weigel, 1577. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the University of Exeter and in particular Jonathan Barry, for continuing to support me in a journey of exploration that began, over twenty years ago, with the interest and encouragement of the much-missed Gareth Roberts. Similarly, this book would not have evolved in the way that it did without the faith and patience of my publisher, Anthony Grahame. I am also greatly indebted to María Tausiet, for generously commenting on an early draft of the manuscript and alerting me to some potential pitfalls.

My attempt to analyse witchcraft prosecutions in a multilingual region would also not have progressed without the brave souls who assisted me with translations. Simon Bruni has been eager to tackle any linguistic conundrum, however obscure, and has produced translations of manuscripts and printed transcriptions that manage to be both precise and careful while also preserving the fluidity and elegance that the Golden Age Spanish deserves. The keen minds and translating skills of Marta Torres, Inma Inglis and Dylan Inglis have also, in their different ways, helped me to move more deeply into the Basque witch trial material.

I am additionally grateful to both Esperanza Adrados Villar of the Archivo Histórico Nacional Madrid and Gustav Henningsen for their encouragement and assistance with trial records, and to Euan Cameron for kindly allowing me to plunder his translation of Martín de Arles’ Tractatus. Julian Goodare, as always, has also been unfailingly generous with his knowledge and his time. Similarly, it has been a pleasure to work with Chris Launder and all the staff at the University of Exeter Library, Debra Madera of Pitt’s Theology Library, Clara Maldini of the Instituzione Biblioteche Bologna and Frans Sellies of the Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht. I have also benefitted from communications with Carmen Burón Alvarez, William Christian Jnr, Barbara and David Childs, Henry French, Irene Legarreta Burón, Richard Mansell, Tim Rees, Nicola Russell, Barbara Segall, Karl Triebel, Anthony Tucker, Martyn Windsor and the Eusko Ikaskuntza. Visits to the Museo de las Brujas of Zugarramurdi, the Monasterio de San Salvador of Urdax and l’église Sainte-Marie, Helette have also been both welcome and useful.

Finally, this book could not have been written without tea and sympathy from friends and family and I am deeply grateful to you all. I am especially indebted to Roger for his ongoing support, and to Annie, whose ongoing support is conveniently combined with proofreading skills. The forbearance and generosity of Sue and Jeremy Inglis has also been vital to this creative process. I am similarly beholden to Jamie for his enduring comradeship and understanding, and to Hamish for patiently revealing what magic tech-wizards can now wreak with words. Lastly, I am indebted to Dylan for moving so deeply into Euskara and showing me what it is to be Basque in the twenty-first century. And to the Basque people themselves, for so warmly welcoming us into their world.

A Note on the Text

The multilingualism of the Basque region presents a challenge with regard to spellings, place names and terms. In an ideal world, I would have chosen Basque (Euskara) options throughout. But for ease of comprehension (in the international context) I have predominantly employed English language conventions combined, where appropriate, with French or Spanish alternatives. In those cases where the Basque word is widely used or where, conversely, it does not have a widely-used French or Spanish equivalent, I have used the Basque form (as in pamerialak = familiar spirits). Due to the high number of non-English words employed, outside quotations all French, Spanish, Basque and Latin terms are only italicized at their first appearance.

Translations of trial records and printed transcriptions have all been undertaken with a view to readability without compromising on accuracy. Any words which are difficult to interpret or undecipherable have been marked by brackets or ellipses. Punctuation has been added where necessary to convey meaning. The elegance and accuracy of the translations of trial records, both manuscript and printed, are all attributable to the skill of linguist Simon Bruni and any mistakes are my own.

In the endnotes, references are limited to the author’s name and the first word of the title, excluding pronouns, with full titles and publication details being provided in the bibliography. Due to the large number of quotations used, multiple references from the same paragraph are often grouped together under a single endnote. In these cases, for clarity of identification all quotes are referenced in the order that they appear in the text, with author name and/or, where necessary, a keyword in parentheses to enable the quote to be paired with its correct reference. In the bibliography, manuscript sources, printed trial records and general bibliography are all alphabetized separately.

Unfortunately, due to my linguistic background the proportion of English-language works cited is higher than I would have liked, but this emphasis is ameliorated by the fact that most of these sources draw heavily on Spanish, French and Basque scholarship and oral record. Of these works, Gustav Henningsen’s Witches’ Advocate has undoubtedly been the most important. None of the perspectives developed in this book would have been possible without the detailed archival research and clear-headed analyses presented in this monumental work. These perspectives would also not have evolved if Harriet Stone, Gerhild Scholz Williams and their team had not bravely taken on the near decade-long task of producing the first English translation of Pierre de Lancre’s Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons. Florencio Idoate’s painstaking translations of numerous Basque trial records, from both during and prior to the great witch-craze, have also been invaluable here. In exploring the dense undergrowth of Basque witchcraft tradition, it has been a privilege to walk down the paths hewn by these earlier scholastic expeditions.

Whoever seeks to explain the deeds of the Devil regarding what the mysteries of witchcraft are, proceeds as if he were using one of the little glowworms that shine in the night to bring light to the whole universe, which even the sun can barely do.

PIERRE DE LANCRE, 1612

1  (opposite) The sensational crimes of the Basque witches, as depicted by Polish engraver Jan Ziarnco and published in Pierre de Lancre’s Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons, Paris, 1613.

Introduction

The records generated by the 1609–14 Basque witchcraft prosecutions are among the most exceptional to have emerged out of Europe’s witch-hunting period. Taken as a whole, they provide us with arguably the most comprehensive collection of demonological stereotypes and detailed depictions of the witches’ sabbath (or akelarre) to be found in any trial cluster in medieval or early modern Europe.¹ We find vivid descriptions of witches performing diverse acts of harmful magic or maleficium (both ruining crops and killing humans), enjoying orgiastic festivities with the Devil, disinterring corpses, feasting at cannibalistic banquets, using flying ointments, commanding demon familiars and participating in initiation ceremonies and alternative liturgies so elaborate and precise that some records ‘provide a description of the rites and social organization of the witch sect in a wealth of detail that would be hard to equal in any other witch trial’ in Europe.² The Basque records also provide us with a textbook example of the classic ‘witch-craze’; with torture, the use of child witnesses, widespread propaganda and on the Spanish side, the tongue-loosening Edict of Grace, all conspiring to fuel mass hysteria that generated thousands of accusations and false confessions. Finally, as if all this were not enough, they grandstand the methods and motivations of one of the most stereotypically zealous witch-hunters in European history, the ‘sadistic’ and ‘gleeful executioner of the Pays de Labourd’: Pierre de Lancre.³

Unsurprisingly, the Basque records have attracted scholarly interest, although this interest is less comprehensive than their significance might warrant. They are commonly referenced and discussed in the many scholarly and popular studies on European witchcraft that have proliferated in the past half century. This period has also seen a progression of transcriptions, papers and theses specific to the trials themselves and, more recently, some significant English translations of records relating to both French and Spanish prosecutions.⁴ But despite this interest, monographs specifically dedicated to the trials are comparatively few and those that do exist are, like most of the relevant research, published in either French or Spanish.⁵ In large part, this reflects the fact that the field has been dominated by the work of Danish historian Gustav Henningsen, whose magisterial monograph on the role of Spanish inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías, The Witches’ Advocate (published in English in 1980), is so comprehensive and perceptive that, nearly forty years later, it remains the primary work on the subject and has left scholars with little need or motivation to revisit the Basque witch-craze in any depth.

But there is good cause to do so now. Since The Witches’ Advocate was published, new paradigms have emerged in the field of witchcraft studies. Historians have long-emphasized that witchcraft confessions reflected preconceptions about the crime that were superimposed, by both witnesses and interrogators, onto the accused during the prosecutorial process. However, since the 1990s there has been an increasing recognition that defendants were not always passive recipients of interrogatorial projection but could also function as co-authors, weaving elements from their own belief and experience into their testimonials – from parish dances, illicit sexual encounters and infanticide to magical healing and shamanistic visionary encounters.⁶ These perspectives have illuminated our knowledge of the confession-making process and given us fresh insights into the lives and mentalities of a sector of the early modern population that has gone largely unrecorded. Like most works of its period, The Witches’ Advocate does not pay any significant attention to this issue. Henningsen’s interest in sceptical views of witchcraft, as modelled by Salazar and others, does involve examining the contributions of defendants in cases of recantation but not in relation to the more numerous and detailed confessions of guilt.⁷ Similarly, although more recent papers and monographs concentrating on the witch-craze, such as Mikel Azurmendi’s Las Brujas de Zugarramurdi, Joëlle Dusseau’s Le Juge et la Sorcière and the substantial collection of conference papers published in 2012 in the Revista Internacional de los Estudios Vascos (RIEV) have deepened our understanding of some of the social contexts that generated the Basque witchcraft accusations, the role that suspects played in the creation of confessional content still remains largely unexplored.⁸ Invoking the Akelarre is an attempt to address this issue.

But in searching for the voices of the accused in the Basque witch-craze records we are of necessity working with a larger thesis. In scholarship to date, the most successful findings in this sphere have emerged out of the study of trial documents where benign or folkloric themes clearly stand at odds with witchcraft stereotypes. Trial material with a high proportion of malefic or demonological content has proved more resistant to analysis in this context. While it is relatively easy to argue that a suspect wove personal experiences and beliefs into trial-embedded accounts of healing rituals or encounters with fairies, it is much harder to assess the extent of their contribution to accounts of destroying crops, disinterring corpses, making pacts with the Devil or performing black masses. Proving an effective deterrent, these difficulties have ensured that analysis of suspect-contribution does not figure highly in scholarly treatments of demonologically stereotypical witch trial material.⁹ But in the case of the Basque witch-craze records, we cannot avoid this issue. Because almost every action is presented as a form of maleficent magic and is deeply interwoven with stereotypical elements, if we only choose to look for the suspects’ voice in references to folklore or benign magical practice, we would find nothing at all. Being compelled to conduct our investigations through the distorting prism of maleficium and demonology brings us face to face with some difficult challenges. But it also forces us to forge new analytic tools that do not only help us to identify the contributions of the accused in the Basque witch-craze records but also, as a corollary of this, in stereotypical trial records from other parts of western Europe in this period.

This analytic focus has impacted directly on the structure of the book. Most analyses of the Basque witch records have focused on the larger dynamics of the witch-craze itself and have therefore taken a more chronological approach, with Henningsen’s work revolving around the ways in which various interrogators, and most specifically Salazar, contributed to the rise and fall of the prosecutions. In this study, however, the need to focus on confessional content favours a more thematic analysis. The crimes confessed to by Basque suspects fell into two broad, overlapping categories: the performance of maleficium and attendance at the akelarre. Reflecting this broad division, the first part of this book will explore the various kinds of maleficium attributed to the Basque witch, beginning with the magic used to harm crops and humans before moving on to poison making and the use of demon familiars. The second part will explore the activities engaged in at the akelarre, beginning with benign festivities, cannibalistic banquets and communal sex before moving on to formal cultic ritual (including the witches’ pact and the black mass) and then concluding with the overarching concept of the witches’ cult itself.

This content-based approach has provoked further structural decisions. Our focus on themes, as opposed to judicial processes, means that the analysis will primarily mine the records related to interrogations that took place early in the witch-craze – between 1609 and 1610 – with a particular emphasis on two of the lengthy sentences pronounced at the 1610 Logroño auto de fé.¹⁰ As we shall explain in Chapters Two and Three, although these records are more deeply contaminated by demonological stereotypes than those produced later in the witch-craze, their abundant detail, vivacity and narrative richness provide us with a much wider palette from which to extrapolate about the minutiae of suspects’ lives. For similar reasons, this study will not cover recantations. Although these represent the most undistorted accounts of suspect-declarations available to us they are limited in scope, being largely concerned with the various ways in which defendants were coerced to make confessions. They have also been comprehensively examined by Henningsen. Finally, this search for the voices of the accused will not explore shamanistic themes. The records do contain a proliferation of relevant motifs and narratives that, along with the clear evidence of a visionary dimension – in the form of dreams and, less commonly, visions – suggest that this would be a relevant avenue of exploration in the Basque case. But the complexity of the analytic frameworks necessary to do this subject justice in the Basque context are incompatible with the sheer quantity of material generated by this book’s core research aims.¹¹

The attempt to look for the voices of the accused in such demonologically stereotypical material will also impact on methodology. When examining the intellectual, political and social dynamics that create witch prosecutions and ideas, we have texts and statistics to work from. But when analysing the contributions of defendants as they emerge in witch trial records we usually do not. Where we find clear examples of idiosyncratic or folkloric elements being thrown back at a bemused interrogator, our task is relatively easy. However, in cases where the stereotypical elements are strong we rely on flimsier material – fleeting inconsistencies, unusual emphases and deep narrative patterns that act as echoes or reverberations of the submerged voice. Searching for suspect-contribution in this kind of material involves a certain kind of history. If we restrict ourselves to what we know for certain then we will find ourselves moving little further than the interrogators’ thought-world as determined from elite sources. But if we stand back and look at the narratives through as wide an aperture as possible, then the analysis becomes more fruitful. By knowing as much as possible about relevant generalities, such as the way a suspect may have lived, the kinds of things they may have believed and the way that they may have felt about a range of issues and experiences, makes us better equipped to speculate as to how far a given confessional statement might echo their own words, thoughts and emotional responses. From this perspective, any conclusions reached can still only be speculations – but they are more informed ones.

The problem with such a methodology, however, is that it is highly vulnerable to bias. By giving ourselves a necessarily wide remit, we are challenged by the fact that any individual confessional feature can be viewed from multiple perspectives – and yet the constraints of our medium mean that finite choices must be made. For example, a short account of how a suspect owned and fed a toad demon that ‘was dressed in purple . . . [with] some little cowbells and charms’ around its neck, can be examined in the light of what we know regarding elite demonological ideas about witches’ familiars, as set out clearly in the witchcraft texts.¹² But it can also be examined in the light of what we know about popular magical belief and practice surrounding folk spirits; oral literature about helpful imps and fairies; elite traditions pertaining to demonic servitor spirits and demon invocation; the procurement, nurture and usage of real toads for magical and medicinal purposes; the decorating of domestic or farm animals for religious festivals; the keeping of personal pets in both domestic and religious contexts; the dressing of ecclesiastical images; the mythological and symbolic links between toads, witches, folk spirits and pre-Christian goddess figures; and the role and function of the toad as it emerges in Catholic iconographies of hell. Many of these perspectives on our phenomenon are no more evidentially pertinent to the Basque witch’s description of feeding a dressed toad demon than any other and therefore the choice as to whether and how far to include them is inherently open. Faced with the need to make these choices, as the author I have focused on those elements that I consider to be most pertinent to suspect-contribution, but this choice is highly subject to personal bias. Certain themes and motifs would have appeared more or less relevant to me because of conscious logical deduction but also, and here largely below the threshold of consciousness, in response to reference points and associations rooted in my own lived history. As a consequence, while no analysis of the past can claim impartiality, some of the perspectives developed in this book are more subjective than the historiographical norm. But despite these deficiencies, this broad-spectrum methodology is employed in the belief that the extent and significance of suspect-contribution to witchcraft records as demonologically contaminated as those produced in the 1609–14 Basque witch-craze cannot be approached in any other way.

CHAPTER ONE

The Basque World

In the early-seventeenth century the Basque region consisted of seven provinces clustering around the western border between France and Spain – stretching from the Cantabrian range in the west to the Pyrenees in the east. Three lay in France (Soule, Basse-Navarre, Labourd) and the other four in Spain (Navarre, Guipúzcoa, Álava and Vizcaya). Predominantly mountainous, with steep wooded valleys and scattered highland pastures, the Basque region also embraced long stretches of coastline around the Bay of Biscay and semi-desert landscapes in the south-east. Both French and Spanish Basques shared the same genetic inheritance and spoke dialects of the same Basque language: Euskara.

In many ways, the lives of the Basque people were little different to those of the majority of Europeans in this period. The population was largely rural, living in extended families in scattered farmsteads (baserris) where they grew crops and kept livestock. The valley basins and lower mountain slopes were dense with meadows and small fields of cereal crops and hedged about with chestnut plantations and apple orchards. For many, the summer was marked by the migration of livestock to the higher mountain pastures, where they produced the rich milk necessary to make the cheese that was so valuable in the winter months. This subsistence-level rural living operated alongside a degree of industrial enterprise, with the region’s Atlantic coastline, rich mineral resources and thick forests supporting fishing, whaling, forestry, iron-smelting and shipbuilding businesses. As in other parts of Europe mortality rates were high, particularly among children. Despite the range of medical specialists available, without the benefit of modern treatments any ability to cure the sick was limited, with this vulnerability increased by the fact that crop failure, and the famine and epidemics that came in its wake, were a constant threat; with one seventeenth-century visitor noting that Basque women smoked tobacco to sustain themselves ‘against hunger’ and that begging was ‘rampant’.¹

Like many other Europeans of this period, the Basques identified themselves as Catholic. Monasteries and convents nestled in the wooded valleys, shrines peppered the mountain passes and every village boasted a parish church, with a contemporary observing that ‘the area of the Labourd and the entire coast of France and upper and lower Navarre is extremely religious in appearance and has churches that are as ornate and elaborate as one could see anywhere’. Similarly, across the border in Spain, commentators noted that the Basques were ‘of a most pious and devout nature and above all well disposed towards the Church and the Clergy’, with this religious consciousness being sharpened by the fact that all major arteries of the Camino de Santiago (‘Way of Saint James’) – the second most important pilgrimage route in medieval Europe – passed directly through the Basque lands.² Like most of their European contemporaries, the early modern Basques also mixed their Christianity with unorthodox beliefs and rituals. Christ, Mary and the saints shared the cosmos with diverse spirits of more folkloric origin, like the dragonine Heren-suge and fairy-like lamiña, and religious rituals often incorporated magical or folkloric elements. The region was also not immune to the spread of Protestant ideas, with this being exacerbated in the Basque case by the dominant Calvinist presence in the adjacent French province of Béarn.³ As in other parts of Europe in this period, ordinary Basques who incorporated unorthodox beliefs or practices into their religious devotions could easily find themselves being accused of superstition, heresy and witchcraft by the Catholic Church.⁴

2  Map of the seven Basque provinces, marked with the locations most relevant to the currrent study.

Basque Distinctiveness

But while conventional in many respects, Basque culture also possessed some distinctive characteristics that set it apart from wider European norms. There was a notable desire, among the men, to seek out experiences beyond their own shores. While Basques had long been prized as mercenaries, with some sources suggesting that they fought with Hannibal in the Carthaginian Wars, most of their enterprise, in this respect, was linked to the sea. The Bay of Biscay, with its deep canyons and high levels of cetacean fauna, provided an attractive wintering ground for whales and this geographical anomaly meant that whaling skills were developed early, with commercial sales of oil recorded from at least the seventh century. By the twelfth century these practices had evolved into advanced seamanship skills that enabled local men to chase whales to their summer grounds in the North Atlantic and later, be among the first Europeans to travel to the New World. Although the various claims that Basque sailors discovered the Americas long before Columbus are yet to be verified, the claim that a Basque man was the first to circumnavigate the globe has some evidential support. This sea-going prowess, when combined with access to rich iron fields and oak forests, also nurtured a peerless shipbuilding industry; with Mark Kurlansky claiming that by the early modern period ‘villages with populations of a few hundred were producing what were considered the best ships in the world’.⁵ This adventurousness was further combined with a keen mercantile and capitalist sense that fuelled an influence, in the world of transatlantic trade, that was highly disproportionate to the size of the country; with scholars estimating that for much of the sixteenth century the Basques controlled over two-thirds of the traffic that went between Spain and the New World. Through this trade, the Basques were among the earliest European populations to widely consume a range of American products such as maize, tobacco, chocolate and hot peppers.⁶

But nautical expertise aside, the Basques were also distinguished from their fellow Europeans by more profound cultural factors. In the period under discussion, as in the present, the Basques possessed their own language – Euskara – that is not only completely distinct from French and Spanish but is also an ‘isolate’, that is, a tongue that has not been definitively linked to any other spoken language in the world. This anomaly has not yet been fully explained. Over the past century, many scholars have argued that Euskara’s lack of Indo-European linguistic structures suggests that the Basques are the descendants of populations that migrated into Europe before the Indo-European migrations that began around 4000 BCE, although this thesis has recently been nuanced.⁷ Whatever its origin, this demographic distinctiveness has also been confirmed by research which demonstrates that although the Basques share common genetic factors with other European populations they also, until recently, experienced a ‘high degree of genetic isolation’, with a 2012 study stating that Basque-speaking peoples display a number of genetic factors that are ‘virtually absent in the rest of Europe.’⁸

The fact that the Basques had long-spoken their own language isolate had historical implications that were significant in the early modern period. Given both the size of the region and the difficulty of Euskara – which is grammatically distinct from its Indo-European counterparts – few non-Basques attempted to learn it, with a French noblewoman complaining on her passage through the Basque regions in the late-seventeenth century that ‘there are none but those born in the Country that can understand it’.⁹ This linguistic isolation was further exacerbated by the fact that in this period only a small proportion of Basques attempted to learn anything else. While some traders would have familiarized themselves with other languages to facilitate business negotiations and many Basque elites saw the mastery of French or Spanish as badges of sophistication and routes to learning, the majority of the population did not need or desire to learn any other language than their own; few, if any, of the witchcraft suspects we shall be studying, for example, spoke Spanish or French to a level that was useful to their interrogators. This linguistic isolation was further fostered by the fact that the Basques did not develop a written tradition until much later than many other western European cultures; with the first book written in Euskara not being published until 1545. The fact that from this date until the mid-nineteenth century, the majority of books in Basque were instructive religious tracts meant that Basque culture remained almost wholly oral until the modern period.¹⁰

This linguistic isolation generated, and was generated by, a strong commitment to cultural independence. The means through which the Basques interacted with the Indo-European migrates is lost to history, but there is no doubt that the mountains of the Basque country were perfectly suited to guerrilla warfare, and that by the seventeenth century a succession of larger powers, from the Romans, Visigoths and Moors to the French and Spanish had tried – and failed – to completely conquer the region. Until the nineteenth century, the Basques’ core response to invasion was to nominally concede to the superior power while negotiating self-governing rights that allowed them, in large part, to retain their ancient fueros (laws). As a result, they developed a society that differed in many core respects from those of neighbouring countries. While this cultural independence and isolation did not amount to any form of national consciousness until the nineteenth century, it did help to strengthen local ties to baserri, family, region and dialect, particularly in the mountainous districts. Well into the twentieth century, Basque folklorist Julio Caro Baroja (born in 1914) could note that in his childhood ‘the families who lived an isolated existence in the valleys and mountains just inland from the coast had no contact with modern ways of life. They were cut off and protected from the world outside by their strange language’. This isolation also bred a distrust of strangers, with Caro Baroja reporting that when one of these mountain-Basques meet a Spanish-speaking person – or even just someone speaking ‘a [Euskaran] dialect from another region’ – they make ‘a furtive gesture against the evil eye’.¹¹

This level of cultural isolation and political autonomy, persisting over a long period of time, had enabled the early modern Basques to nurture or retain some traditions and beliefs that were unusual, and on occasion unique, to European culture as a whole. As early as the twelfth century observers noted that the Basques were ‘distinct from all other nations in habits and way of being’, while five hundred years later, they appeared to Bordeaux urbanite Pierre de Lancre as ‘a completely foreign people’ to the extent that he ‘frequently compared them to the Indians of the New World.’¹² These distinctions were not only visible in aesthetic traditions, such as music, dance and dress, but also in social structures. As in all parts of Europe in this period Basque society was stratified, but this stratification existed alongside a shared belief – visible from at least the eleventh century – that all Basques, including ‘humble peasants and artisans’, shared a ‘universal noble status’ and were hidalgos de sangre (nobles by blood).¹³ These egalitarian beliefs did not generate a utopian idyll, for although some evidence suggests that the gulf between the legal rights of the nobility and those of the wider population was less wide in the Basque regions than in many other parts of Europe, clear disparities in wealth and education still existed.¹⁴ But the concept of universal nobility clearly exerted a notable effect on Basque consciousness. In the early-seventeenth century de Lancre noted with some bemusement that ‘in the Labourd the most destitute men and women from the villages call themselves Lord and Lady of such and such a house, referring to the houses that each of them has in the village, even if it is only a little pigsty.’ In the following century, eighteenth-century nobleman Don Carlos Osorio ‘ridiculed Gipuzkoa’s “noble” shoemakers, “noble” tailors, “noble” peasants [and] “noble” charcoal burners’ etc.¹⁵

Another unusual aspect of early modern Basque society is the fact that by the European standards of the time women enjoyed an exceptionally high social status. Although subject to many of the prejudices and restrictions of the age, Basque women enjoyed significant protection from the law, with Roslyn Frank claiming that:

Within the framework of Basque law, in total contradiction to the laws of feudal Europe, women were granted total equality to men. For this reason it may not be solely by chance that the French Basque Bernard d’Echepare, author of the first book written in Basque (1545), has been called ‘a fervent feminist’ for the first book written in the Basque tongue was written in praise of women.¹⁶

These legal rights were most visible with regard to inheritance, where Basque law stipulated that the baserri should go to the oldest (or sometimes, merely the most capable) child, whether male or female. If the woman was an inheritor, or even if her husband was merely absent, she was recognized as the head of the household and ‘enjoyed as much independence as absolute authority.’ Through this command, Basque women also had the ‘right and obligation’ to represent their baserri at the local assembly or even take higher political office, with Frank maintaining that ‘in the Spanish Basque provinces women were active on all levels of government, including serving as procuradores, i.e. delegates to the General Assemblies’.¹⁷ These legal rights extended to wider familial matters and enabled Basque women to dissolve an unsatisfactory marriage, recognise an illegitimate child and bring a dispute to court more easily than most of their European contemporaries.¹⁸ The high status of Basque women was also reflected in the fact that they played an unusually prominent role in religious ritual, particularly surrounding mortuary practice, with the etxeko-andrea or mistress of the house, being the ‘official representative of the etxe-ondo [house] at all religious functions held in the parish Church’; while a female lay nun, termed the serora, traditionally assisted the priest at his liturgical office and shared his exclusive access to the altar.¹⁹ As with the concept of hidalgos de sangre, we must not exaggerate this prestige, with some scholars arguing, for example, that female responsibility for mortuary rituals was not a sign of authority but a burden that reflected their lower status in traditional Basque culture.²⁰ But there does seem little doubt that Basque women enjoyed a level of gender equality that was significantly higher than the contemporary European norm.

3  Sixteenth-century woodcut depicting explorers cutting up whales. This image appeared in the Cosmographie Universelle d’André Thevet, Paris, 1574.

4  A selection of the many tasks performed by Basque women can be seen in this engraving of ‘vizcaíno and vizcaínas’ going to Vitoria market, from Civitates Orbis Terrarum by Georg Braun (1541–1622).

The origins of these rights have not been fully explained. Inheritance laws are clearly implicated here, with Frank writing that ‘the power and influence’ that the Basque woman ‘exercized in the home and outside it were the direct result of the laws of primogeniture that continued to include her as a legitimate inheritor of the etxe-ondo.’ Other scholars have argued that these laws, which appear to have existed in some form in northern Spain from at least the classical period, may be rooted in archaic matriarchal systems; pointing to the fact that many of the powerful supernaturals in Basque folklore are female and that their leader and queen, the spirit named ‘Mari’, displays an unusually high number of characteristics associated with the ‘neolithic European goddess as reconstructed from the archaeological and mythological record’.²¹ Whatever the truth of this thesis (which is disputed) we can point, more pragmatically, to the fact that by the early modern period Basque women maintained their rights through practical necessity. For many centuries, fishing and transhumance had taken many Basque men away from their homes for long periods, with Frank noting that ‘in the coastal areas the Basque sailors aboard the fishing fleets were absent for periods of up to one year or more’; while in the interior, ‘the transhumant pastoral activities were organized in such a way that the flocks left the first of May and did not return until the beginning of November.’ Similarly, the system of primogeniture forced many younger sons to find employment elsewhere as mercenaries or adventurers, while the high numbers of men lost at sea or in the New World also meant that the proportion of widows was high.²² Even accounting for hyperbole, the seventeenth-century observation that ‘in 1640, of every four people from Vizcaya, three are women because of the many men who leave and do not return’ is illustrative.²³ All of these elements would have conspired to create a level of male absenteeism that led Basque women to appropriate more of the functions that were, in other European societies, largely the preserve of men.

With regard to our study of the Basque witch trials, the cultural differences outlined above are both relevant and not relevant. On the one hand, we must be careful not to over-emphasize the independence and isolation of the Basque people. Centuries of interaction with neighbouring provinces led to deep cultural inter-change and by the seventeenth century many of their social and religious structures and beliefs were very similar to those of southern France and northern Spain. But on the other, we should not overlook the fact that Basque culture possessed some distinctive features that distinguished it from its neighbours and – as we shall find out as the book progresses – when attempting to understand the phenomenon of the witch-craze it is helpful to keep these Basque differences in mind.

Witchcraft Prosecutions – 1609–1614

The fact that the Basque country saw the emergence of witchcraft trials in 1609–14 was not unusual in itself. Like most people in early modern Europe, the Basques believed in the reality of witchcraft and during this period a range of factors – including ecclesiastical desires for reform (the Catholic and Counter Reformations) and political desires for increased centralization – saw a marked increase in witchcraft trials in the region.²⁴ In 1466 the province of Guipúzcoa petitioned Henry IV of Castile for assistance in prosecuting local witches; in 1517 Navarrese cleric Martín de Arles noted concerns about ‘the false opinion of those who believe that those witches, or female sorcerers, who are especially prevalent in the regions of the Basque country on the north side of the Pyrenees’; and in 1595 the inhabitants of Tolosa complained ‘that there were too many witches in their district and they felt that the Inquisition should be asked to take some action’.²⁵ The sixteenth century also saw some surges of prosecution that involved considerable numbers of suspects, with records indicating that in one wave of trials in Navarre in the mid-1520s at least forty-three people were convicted of witchcraft, with contemporary reports putting the figure of the accused much higher.²⁶ In this context it is not surprising that witchcraft trials should have been held in the Basque regions in 1609–14. Nor is it surprising that they involved large numbers of suspects. What was wholly unprecedented, however, was the sheer scale of the investigations that evolved over this near-six-year period.

Events began in late 1608, when two noblemen from the French-Basque province of Labourd sent a letter to Henry IV of France complaining that ‘the number of sorcerers had increased so alarmingly during the previous four years that no corner of the region was free from them’. In response, the king sent a Royal Decree to the Parlement at Bordeaux which, by May 1609, had charged two of its members to investigate: Pierre de Lancre and Jean d’Espaignet. Concerns about witchcraft appeared across the border in the Spanish-Basque provinces at around the same time. In the winter of 1608 a request was made to the Supreme Council of the Spanish Inquisition in Madrid (la Suprema), asking it to investigate a series of witchcraft accusations that had emerged in Zugarramurdi, a Navarrese village less than three kilometres from the border with Labourd.²⁷ La Suprema charged three inquisitors from the Logroño Tribunal (the department of the Inquisition with jurisdiction over that region) to investigate the accusations: senior inquisitor, Doctor Alonso Becerra Holguín and licenciados Juan de Valle Alvarado and Alonso de Salazar Frías. Although the French and Spanish investigations started at around the same time, they followed very different trajectories. The French prosecutors de Lancre and d’Espaignet arrived in Labourd in early July 1609 and had concluded their investigations by early November. Rates of execution, while not as high as historians once assumed, were still considerable, with current estimates suggesting that between fifty and eighty suspects were executed in this four-month period. The Spanish investigations, meanwhile, began in January 1609 and lasted much longer, continuing intermittently for well over five years until the autumn of 1614. Despite this longer time frame, however, only eleven suspects were condemned to death in Spain, with all of their sentences meted out at an early stage in the witch-craze at the auto de fé held in Logroño in 1610.²⁸

The fact that the Basque witch trials were conducted in two separate countries and under two separate judicial machines – the French Parlement and the Spanish Inquisition – is significant. The two institutions did have some contact, through sharing trial records and communicating with each other about the problem of suspects migrating from France into Spain, but as we shall explore later in the book, their approaches to the interrogation and prosecution of witches also displayed some clear differences. An appreciation of these differences and the ways in which they may have impacted on each other, enables us to develop a significantly more nuanced analysis of the Basque witch trials that would have been possible if we were working with records from a single prosecutorial mechanism.

Escalation into Witch-Craze

Although the French and Spanish legal systems were different, in both regions the prosecutions developed into what is termed, among historians, as a witch ‘panic’ or ‘craze’. Instead of displaying the normal pattern of witch prosecutions, where arrests are made on the basis of accusations typically levelled against individuals with established reputations for witchcraft, witch-crazes are driven by a collective hysteria in which accusations are indiscriminate and escalate exponentially, to the extent that large proportions of a population, most of whom have no previous association with witchcraft, can find themselves accused of the crime. As in all witch-crazes, the hysteria that fuelled the Basque event was generated, in large part, by the prosecutions themselves. Once accusations began to generate confessions, descriptions of the alleged crimes were disseminated widely up and down the Basque valleys, with this propagation also being fuelled by the interrogators themselves as they travelled the country in pursuit of witnesses and suspects. During their commission in Labourd, de Lancre and d’Espaignet allegedly ‘visited all twenty-seven parishes of the region’, while in Spain both Valle and Salazar went on long ‘visitations’ (lasting four and eight months respectively) that took in, between them, many of the towns in northern Navarre, Guipúzcoa and Álava.²⁹ Also incendiary in this respect were the executions. Before the witches were publicly burnt at the Logroño auto de fé in 1610, their sentences were read out to the thousands of gathered onlookers in a process that, given the fact that a single ruling could extend to forty folio pages, is estimated to have taken many hours. As if this were not enough, some of the most dramatic sentences were then summarized by observers in reports, pamphlets and broadside ballads that were printed and distributed with all the vigour and enthusiasm of the modern tabloid press.³⁰ The Tribunal’s instruction, after the auto de fé, that priests and monks should go into the Basque towns and villages and preach about dangers of witchcraft added yet further fuel to this fire, with the Bishop of Pamplona complaining in April 1611 that the rectors of Vera and Don Domingo de San Paul

gave sermons on the theme of innumerable persons in both towns belonging to this evil sect . . . [and] preached from their pulpits exactly what the child witches of France had said both in regard to the witches’ catechism and everything else related to the sect and its doctrine . . . [and as] a result of all this everyone, boys and girls, youths and maidens, married people and old people, indeed every member of the family, without being witches, knew by heart like a Hail Mary the entire art of witchcraft and all that the preachers had asserted from their pulpits.³¹

Another contributing factor to the collective hysteria in the Basque case was the high level of child involvement. In response to the frightening tales about the witches’ activities, Basque children began to claim that women came by night to carry them off to the sabbath. Their confessions appeared so genuine that parents took great efforts to protect them from these nocturnal attacks, with Gerhild Scholz Williams noting that ‘parents who tried to save their children tied them to their beds; or endeavoured to keep them awake, terrified that once the children closed their eyes even for an instant they would be unable to resist satanic abduction’. Others sent their children to sleep in churches under the protection of the priest, with the incumbent of Vera having a ‘large number’ of children ‘staying with him in the presbytery [for up to 40 days] with blessed herbs, candles and crucifixes and pictures of Our Lady in their bedrooms to protect them from the witches.’³² These experiences of abduction, terrifying in themselves, achieved a particular potency in the Basque case because the testimony of children could be legally relevant. If a child awoke from a disturbed sleep and declared that a neighbour had carried it to the sabbath, its testimony was considered seriously enough by the authorities to warrant bringing the accused neighbour in for questioning. While it was recognized that child testimony could be unreliable, many people actively encouraged them to make these accusations, thereby generating hundreds of arrests.³³

On the Spanish side, from spring 1611 levels of hysteria were also fuelled by an inquisitorial tool known as the ‘Edict of Grace’. A variant of the standard Edict of Faith – a list of heretical practices read out from churches and convents during inquisitorial visitations – the Edict of Grace could become particularly inflammatory during any witch-craze. In the Basque case, it ensured that on the inquisitor’s arrival in any region, parishioners were told that they had a ‘period of grace’ during which, if they confessed to the crime of witchcraft, they would ‘be expressly promised exemption from confiscation of property and other penalties’. Such enticements clearly fuelled confessions, with Henningsen noting that when the edict was published in the Santesteban region ‘the rush of people who wanted to confess and obtain the forgiveness of the Inquisition was overwhelming’, and Salazar confirming that during the first four months of his 1611 visitation a total of ‘1,546 people availed themselves of the Edict of Grace’.³⁴

Although the Basque witch-craze reached epidemic proportions, as with most witch-crazes it finally became so large and overblown it imploded. The perceived threat of witchcraft starts to look untenable, to villagers, witnesses and prosecutors alike, when observers begin to maintain – as they did at Lesaca and Vera – that ‘out of the entire population of the two villages more than three quarters were witches’; and where, as in Las Cinco Villas, ‘out of a total population of almost three thousand, every third inhabitant was suspected of being a witch’.³⁵ The increasing recognition on the part of the Spanish Inquisitors that accusations and confessions were being exaggerated by hysteria also led to efforts to identify and limit the factors that encouraged it. The inflammatory effects of witchcraft propaganda were reduced by the order that ‘an absolute silence is to be imposed’ on ‘popular discussion of witchcraft’ and by the subsequent publication of an ‘Edict of Silence’ that prevented the details of interrogations from being discussed and served to protect identities and prohibit the preaching of incendiary sermons.³⁶ Meanwhile, although fuelling hysteria in the short-term, in the long-term the Edict of Grace had a conciliatory aspect because it often folded accused witches back into the community and allowed them to resume their lives. These calming measures (which emerged, as we shall explore in the next chapter, out of a wider elite scepticism about witchcraft) meant that by 1614 the Spanish Inquisition felt confident enough to diminish its investigations and the waves of hysteria and prosecution that had swept across the Basque country for over six years, finally abated.

The Sources

Although a large proportion of the documentation generated by the Basque witch-craze is lost to us, there remains enough surviving material to build up a detailed picture of the phenomenon. The French records were consumed by a fire in Bordeaux in 1710, but one of the two prosecutors, Pierre de Lancre, gave a full account of his investigations in a substantial tome written in 1612, titled Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons. Although written as a polemic to justify his beliefs and judicial procedures, the Tableau is still valuable, with detailed commentary articulating de Lancre’s interrogatorial stance being interspersed with vivid accounts of the Basque region and (more importantly) ‘long extracts and reports reproduced from the witch confessions’ that, as de Lancre insists, represent the undistorted words of suspects and witnesses ‘in their original, naive form’. Although we cannot accept the latter claim uncritically and although de Lancre only included trial extracts that supported his arguments, the narratives do possess some credibility, with Williams noting that ‘de Lancre’s report has, to this very day, assumed the authority of authentic witness to the prosecutions’, and Henningsen, that the Tableau has ‘acquired considerable importance as a primary source’.³⁷

With regard to the Spanish prosecutions we have a more diverse palette. Although the Logroño Tribunal archives were destroyed during the Napoleonic Wars, a range of records associated with the prosecutions survived in the archives at the Inquisition’s headquarters in Madrid. Now stored at the Archivo Histórico Nacional, the records include letters, reports and sentences written by a variety of the inquisitorial officials involved in the prosecutions. Of particular importance, are two surviving sentences from the 1610 Logroño auto de fé: the ‘Zozaya Sentence’, which details the confession of Renteria witch María de Zozaya and the ‘Joint Sentence’, which conflates the testimonies of four early suspects from the village of Zugarramurdi. Also valuable, is a long document termed the ‘Pamplona Manuscript’ – compiled by Valle and Becerra, in 1613, to justify their prosecutorial methods – which contains a wide range of extracts from confessions elicited from 1609 onwards.³⁸ With regard to all of these sources, it is important to note that because few suspects spoke sufficient French or Spanish and none of the core prosecutors spoke Basque, all reports of interrogatorial exchanges were filtered through translators.

CHAPTER TWO

The Gleeful
Executioners

‘It is a beautiful thing to be a judge and be just. To exercise justice justly is a totally divine thing.’

Pierre de Lancre, 1607¹

In order to identify the voices of the accused in the Basque witch-craze records, we need to understand a little more about how the documents were created in the first place. There were many officials, both secular and religious, involved in the Basque prosecutions, from rural priests and lay officers to higher-ranking nobles and ecclesiastics, many of whom left letters, reports and other documentary evidence that helps us to build up a rich picture of the legal and societal dynamics that underpinned the prosecutions. But given our research focus, the present analysis will concentrate on the three men who were most clearly responsible for the rich body of confessional material to have come down to us from the period 1609–10: French parlementaire Pierre de Lancre and the two Spanish Inquisitors, Juan de Valle Alvarado and Alonso Becerra Holguín.² Through examining the opinions, prosecutorial methods and, where possible, characters of these three interrogators we can begin to understand how they may have interacted with the Basque suspects to generate this body of testimonial evidence. While primarily concerned with de Lancre, Valle and Becerra, the present chapter will also conclude with a brief analysis of the role of the third, more sceptical Spanish inquisitor, Alonso de Salazar Frías, the protagonist of Henningsen’s Witches’ Advocate. Although Salazar only exerted significant influence on proceedings from 1611, his inclusion here will give us a better insight into the spectrum of contemporary opinion regarding witchcraft and the ways in which these opinions influenced the actions of the other three interrogators.

Prosecutorial Preconceptions

In the early modern period elite opinions were divided on the matter of witchcraft; with some commentators believing that the crime was real and should therefore be subject to the harshest penalties and others believing that it was illusory and should be treated with lenience. The French lawyer, Pierre de Lancre, was firmly in the first camp. Although he conceded that the sabbath could take place in some kind of vision or dream state, he predominantly treated it as a genuinely physical event. Through his close association with prominent Catholic reformers like his brother-in-law and fellow parlementaire, Florimond de Raemond, and his experiences of presiding over witchcraft trials at the Parlement of Bordeaux, he developed the conviction that it was his moral and judicial duty both as a Christian and a judge, to reveal and eradicate the crime that ‘creeps as a serpent does’ through contemporary French communities.³ The sheer abundance of demonological and theological texts quoted in the Tableau also suggest that at the time of his visit to Labourd, de Lancre was familiar with a wide range of literature on the subject, with references also indicating that he was in direct contact with contemporary demonologists like Henri Boguet and Martín del Rio.⁴

The two Spanish Inquisitors, Valle and Becerra, had broadly similar attitudes but arrived at them via a different route. Unlike de Lancre, they appear to have come to the investigations with little prior knowledge of cultic witchcraft, with Henningsen claiming that when faced with the first accusations they were ‘somewhat at a loss’, and that in a subsequent letter to la Suprema they admitted that ‘this is a new type of case of which we had no previous experience. Therefore we have been obliged to proceed slowly.’ This response suggests that the inquisitors had not previously presided over many witchcraft trials and were not familiar with demonological works, with the latter likely to reflect the fact that these texts were not written or circulated as widely in Spain as in many other western European countries in the period.⁵ It is possible that they belatedly acquainted themselves with some relevant texts (with the most likely candidates being Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum and del Río’s Disquisitionum Magicarum) but there is no evidence for this.⁶ We do know, however, that once charged with investigating the Zugarramurdi cases, Valle and Becerra quickly familiarized themselves with the subject by exploring the Tribunal archives for trial records and other inquisitorial documents relating to previous witchcraft trials that had been held in the region. As the investigation progressed, they were also guided by instructions from la Suprema (the Inquisition headquarters in Madrid) and even gained access to some of the records from contemporaneous trials being conducted in Labourd by de Lancre.⁷ Through these examinations Valle and Becerra developed views on witchcraft that were very similar to those of their French counterpart – following de Lancre in his belief that witches’ activities were real events and becoming impatient with those who held more sceptical views. In 1613 Valle stated in a letter to the archbishop of Burgos that ‘I cannot understand how any sensible and intelligent person can bring himself to doubt this truth [i.e. the existence of the witches] and that it is ‘evident that the witches really do go to the sabbath and participate corporally in the meetings’. The inquisitors’ previous claim, in a letter to Phillip III of Spain in 1610, that ‘to eradicate so deadly a sect we for our part offer our lives in the service of our Lord God and Your Majesty, and of the purity of these Catholic kingdoms’ also indicates that they shared de Lancre’s conviction that it was their moral and spiritual duty to eradicate this threat.⁸

5  An auto de fé procession in a plaza, with priests carrying the banners and standards of the Spanish Inquisition.

Prosecutorial Coercion

Armed with these preconceptions, all three interrogators used coercive techniques to persuade suspects to confess. Although we do not know precisely what methods he used, nor how frequently, it is highly likely that de Lancre employed standard torture-procedures of the period, with Williams noting that, for the French Parlement, this ‘usually’ consisted of the ‘brodequins’: a type of boot into which wedges were driven, crushing the bones until the marrow seeped out while ‘the clerk diligently recorded the number of wedges and frequency of blows’. Similarly, de Lancre was not shy when it came to sentencing. He believed that some suspects should be executed as opposed to receiving milder forms of sentence, such as whipping or banishment, even if they had performed no maleficium, with one of the sections of the Tableau chillingly subtitled: ‘How we must put witches to death simply for having attended the sabbath and for making a pact with the Devil, even though they have been accused of no acts of witchcraft’. He also reserved the right to execute without confessions of guilt, arguing that protestations of innocence could be a sign that the Devil was trying to hide his crimes; claiming of two suspects that ‘although they never confessed’ the ‘verdict [of death] was evident’. At his most extreme, de Lancre could even support the execution of a minor, arguing that ‘one must not spare the life of a child, if by taking it one would save the lives of several others whom he will defile by his evil ways’. This hunger for conviction was also evident in his views on translation, with de Lancre warning that care should be taken when using local Basques as interpreters because ‘they come from the same country’ as the suspects and therefore ‘the many executions ordered by the courts could cause them to be overly sympathetic to the defendants or, if they are priests, to indulge blood relations.’⁹

These methods clearly enabled de Lancre to secure convictions, with recent estimates, as we have seen, suggesting that the Labourd prosecutions generated between fifty and eighty executions. Although lower than previously thought, this number would still have represented a significant tally for a four-month-long investigation and its spectre provoked ‘great numbers’ of potential suspects to flee to Spain to escape arrest.¹⁰ But perhaps the most damning indication of de Lancre’s severity is found in the evidence that many of his own contemporaries found it hard to stomach, with Williams noting that so many ‘appeals to the French crown were made against de Lancre’s vigorous persecutions’ that the Parlement eventually ‘suspended the commission of the judge, giving orders that he was to return home’.¹¹ The publication of the Tableau two years later, is widely seen as an attempt by de Lancre to justify the legality of his prosecutorial methods and criticize the excessive leniency shown towards witchcraft by many contemporary courts.¹² Hardly surprisingly, de Lancre has since elicited much criticism from historians, being typically defined as ‘absurd’, ‘bigoted’, ‘grotesque’, ‘sadistic and cruel’, ‘narrow-minded, sectarian and stubborn’ and, most graphically of all, as the ‘gleeful executioner of the Pays de Labourd’.¹³

On the Spanish side of the border, Valle and Becerra also employed torture to elicit confessions. When interrogating priests Pedro de Arburu and Juan de la Borda, they ordered ropes to be bound around their bodies and then tightened, using transverse rods or garrottes, ‘so that they cut into the flesh’.¹⁴ Also suggestive of maltreatment, if not overt torture, were their orders to treat Juanes de Goiburu ‘more severely’ when he retracted his confession; treatment that would have been exacerbated by the poor conditions in the Logroño gaol.¹⁵ As with de Lancre, the most damning indictment of Valle and Becerra is found in the evidence that their methods were condemned by their contemporaries. Observers complained that they bribed resistant suspects with copious ‘promises and guarantees’ and told them that ‘if they confessed they would be set at liberty.’ It was also alleged that they arranged ‘communications and confrontations among the prisoners . . . in order to make people confess’, such as enlisting those who had already confessed to pressurize others to do the same through specially arranged chance meetings where Basque interpreters were on hand to eavesdrop on the hoped-for disclosures. More seriously still, Valle and Becerra were accused of omitting retractions ‘from the records in the hope that the renunciations would be withdrawn’.¹⁶

The Prosecutors Humanized

These facts make for grim reading. They make it easy to understand why history has so commonly condemned or pathologized the interrogators involved in the Basque prosecutions and why the suspects have been portrayed as helpless individuals falling prey to a vicious prosecutorial machine. But the reality was more complex than this. The first caveat to be marshalled is the fact that, by European standards of the time, the interrogators’ use of torture may not have been excessive – particularly in Spain. The evidence that Valle and Becerra applied the garrotte to Pedro de Arburu and Juan de la Borda becomes considerably less chilling when considered alongside the fact that these two men appear to have been the only two witch suspects, out of the thousands interrogated, whom they tortured; and that even in this case, the procedure was curtailed early after one priest collapsed ‘at the first turn’ and the other seemed unaffected.¹⁷ This delicacy reflected the fact that, although historically associated with prosecutorial brutality, the Spanish Inquisition employed torture less frequently and with stricter guidelines than many other judicial institutions in Europe, including the Spanish secular courts; with Henningsen emphasizing that the inquisitorial authorities were sceptical of the value of torture ‘as a means of proof and therefore used it to a relatively limited extent’ and showed leniency if the prisoner ‘withstood the torture without confessing’. With regard to de Lancre there is less evidence of restraint, but his claim, in a work written two years before he was sent to Labourd, that the French judiciary was too ready to employ harsh punishment and that judges ‘resorted to excesses of punishment, using overly cruel remedies to correct all evils’ raises the possibility that his torture was not deployed indiscriminately. Certainly, Pearl has interpreted the Tableau’s repeated emphasis on the importance of acquiring competent translators as evidence that de Lancre ‘was keenly aware of the need for accurate understanding, so that people would not be punished or tortured who did not deserve it.’¹⁸ Accusations of severity must also be considered alongside the reality that some of the harsher judicial positions taken by de Lancre, such as the retention of the right to execute children or to pass the death sentence without evidence of maleficium, can all be found voiced and acted upon by other jurists of the period.¹⁹

Any attempt to condemn de Lancre, Valle and Becerra as ‘sadistic’ or ‘narrow-minded’ must also acknowledge that although their attitudes toward witchcraft may have been considered extreme to some of their contemporaries, when viewed within the context of early modern society as a whole they were not. Williams notes that de Lancre’s demonological opinions, for example, were ‘shared by many of his educated contemporaries’ and ‘other prominent demonologists’.²⁰ Their views were also shared by many of the officials that helped the Logroño Tribunal in its investigations. Men like the ‘mature and intelligent’ León de Araníbar, abbot of the monastery of San Salvadore de Urdax, worked tirelessly to collect confessions to pass on to Valle. Similarly, as Henningsen states, fiscal to the Tribunal Dr. San Vincente went so far as to complain that the Logroño suspects ‘were being tried with far too much clemency’ and that ‘the archives of the Tribunal contained the files of a large number of witches burned in 1508 and 1509 “with far less evidence than we have now.”’ The ordinary clergy were also eager to help. When Valle arrived in the town of Vera he was greeted by a young French priest, named Lorenzo de Hualde, who had also been involved in de Lancre’s prosecutions in Labourd. Assuring Valle ‘that the witch sect was active in this region as well’ and promising ‘to do his best to assist the Inquisition to expose it’, Hualde became the ringleader of Valle’s propaganda campaign; being at times so impatient for conviction that he placed children ‘beside boiling cauldrons’ or thrashed them to make them confess. The curate of Errazu, Don Miguel de Aguirre, was equally enthusiastic, imprisoning more than twenty witches, despite their protestations of innocence, and threatening women that if they didn’t confess they would be burned in front of their own houses or buried in meadows instead of consecrated ground.²¹ Support was likely to have been even higher among secular officials, who tended to pursue witches more harshly than those in episcopal or inquisitorial courts. Early in the investigations members of the Renteria town council sent letters to Valle begging him for permission to be allowed to burn witches in their town to ‘set an example’, while during the hiatus in the Inquisition’s investigations after the 1610 auto de fé, the towns around Santesteban became so impatient for legal action that ‘the local authorities took the lead by sanctioning acts of violence, imprisonment, and torture, which cost a number of lives’ to the extent that, according to Henningsen, ‘the Tribunal was well on the way to losing control of the situation.’²²

De Lancre, Valle and Becerra must also be assessed in the light of the reality that their methods and attitudes were not only supported by many fellow clergy and secular officials, but also by the mass of ordinary people from whom the majority of witchcraft suspects were drawn. As we saw in the last chapter, in Labourd large numbers of adults were convinced that witches were abducting their children and taking them to the sabbath, while others did not hesitate to testify against their neighbours, with de Lancre arguing in one instance that the protestations of innocence made by two suspects could be overridden because there were so many ‘horrible accusations made against them by countless new witnesses who continued to appear each day, without our having to look for them’.²³ The situation was comparable in Spain. When a child was found dead in the village of Zugarramurdi, ‘there was uproar and the whole place came together to see how the child had been killed by witches’. Similarly, despite complaints that he ‘showed far too much emotion in all his actions relating to the witch sect’ and ‘exceeded his authority time and again’, Hualde’s defensive claim that parents were sending their children to him ‘in the hope that he could provide a remedy’ is supported by the evidence.²⁴ This strength of public feeling is even more evident in the Bishop of Pamplona’s observation that ‘the moment a person is accused on the basis of the statements of two, three or more children, a large crowd of people rush to his house and in the name of justice they seize him, submitting him to monstrous and cruel tortures because of the hatred and bitterness felt towards anyone accused of this crime.’ That this popular outrage existed independently of elite encouragement is also vividly illustrated by Hualde’s assertion that, during the aforementioned hiatus in the Inquisitorial investigations in 1610, he had ‘been forced to lock up the fathers of the “bewitched” children three times in order to prevent them from murdering the witches’ because they ‘are highly incensed and have utterly lost hope in the law ever being put into effect.’²⁵

Also of relevance, when assessing the interrogatorial severity of de Lancre, Valle and Becerra, is the issue of timing. As stated earlier, it is widely acknowledged that witch-craze hysteria is typically fuelled by the prosecutions themselves. While this is true in the Basque case, scholars seldom give much emphasis to the fact that all three interrogators arrived in the region when local investigations had ensured that this emotional escalation was already well under way. Henningsen’s claim that ‘most probably vigils were already being kept in the church at Ciboure to prevent children and young girls from being taken off to sabbaths by the witches’ as early as December 1608, suggests that hysteria had reached high levels at least six months before de Lancre set foot in Labourd. Similarly the complaint, from the early Zugarramurdi suspects, that ‘they had been compelled to make false confessions because they had been accused and threatened with violence if they did not’ indicates that feelings ran high in some Navarrese communities long before they encountered Valle; a fact reinforced by the latter’s observation, when setting out on his first visitation, that

[t]he whole district, both here in Navarra and on the French side of the border is extremely alarmed about the witches. [On the way here] we could hear people shouting on the paths between their fields, and hear that they were shouting ‘Jorguinas! jorguinas! [‘Witches! witches!’].’²⁶

It is important to consider the impact this kind of hysteria would have had on the three interrogators. While there is no doubt that de Lancre, Valle and Becerra were all securely convinced of the reality of witchcraft before they travelled into the Basque regions, the experience of descending from their intellectual ivory towers into the visceral epicentres of community distress must surely have been a mobilizing one. Contemporary accounts indicate that both secular and ecclesiastical authorities could be genuinely moved by popular anxieties surrounding witchcraft. When the town of Renteria sought authority to burn local witches, they did not only seek it to ‘set an example’ but also, as Henningsen notes, to ‘compensate the parents of the bewitched children for the grief they had been caused [my italics]’. Similarly, the abbot of the Urdax monastery, Fray León de Araníbar, lamented that:

The evil has now gone so far that we are no longer concerned that there are witches, although they are being exposed by the dozen, if only they refrain from bewitching or infecting others. I am thinking particularly about the children, for it makes me weep blood when I see the parents crying to Heaven for aid . . .

Inquisitorial responses to this widespread anguish would have been further sharpened by encounters with distressed children, with Henningsen stating that while on visitation Valle ‘had even been forced to take some of the child witches along with him on the journey, for after having made their confessions they were frightened that adult witches would take revenge on them.’²⁷ As we shall explore in the next chapter, records of interrogatorial exchanges suggest that de Lancre, Valle and Becerra were not incapable of compassion, and on this premise we can speculate that their zeal to prosecute may have been fuelled by the palpable distress they encountered when they left their urban offices and took their investigations out into the towns and villages of Navarre and Labourd.

She ‘confessed freely’

The interrogators’ belief in the reality of witchcraft would not only have been fuelled by this evidence of popular conviction but also by the evidence that so many of the men and women accused of the crime were so ready to confess their guilt. While de Lancre seldom states whether specific confessions were coerced or not, in a minority of cases he either implies or overtly states they were not procured through torture. He makes reference, for example, to ‘Marie Bonne of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a well-known witch who had confessed freely and served as a witness against many others’; Marie Dindarte, who ‘continually confessed without torture . . . that many evil spells, voyages, and adorations were performed at the sabbath’; and the forty-eight-year-old woman from Villfranche who, despite being ‘of rather good judgement and very judicious and sane, speaking as morally as I ever saw, confessed before us, without ever changing what she said . . . that she led and transported another young woman, aged twenty-four, to the sabbath.’ Similar observations were made across the border. As Henningsen observes, Valle and Becerra were clearly struck by the fact that when they interrogated the first four suspects from Zugarramurdi they promptly ‘confessed during the very first hearings [without torture] and reaffirmed all that they had stated in their extrajudicial confessions at Zugarramurdi.’ This was not an isolated event, with Henningsen arguing with regard to Valle’s subsequent visit to Las Cinco Villas, that ‘we should not censure Valle too much for believing that the witch phenomenon was a reality. The six confessions which have been preserved in transcript from Valle’s visitation book all give the impression of having been made without any sort of compulsion.’²⁸ Also suggestive, is that this same phenomenon was observed by some of the more sceptical interrogators who were more alert to the dangers of false confession, with Jesuit Hernando de Solarte noting in the margin of a letter written to his superiors in Valladolid that:

Some people although accused have never confessed. Others confessed once to being witches and later went back on their statements. To these two groups I do not attach much importance. The third group consists of those who confess to being witches and pride themselves on it. It is here that the difficulty lies. [my italics]

The spontaneous and unprompted nature of some of these confessions is vividly illustrated by the claim, from an equally sceptical Alonso de Salazar Frías, that a young suspect who had previously been absolved of her involvement with witchcraft came to him, weeping, and confessed that ‘she had twice been taken to the witches’ sabbath since her reconciliation . . . [and] been deeply miserable day and night about these relapses’ and that ‘[s]he begged me to help her and give her fresh absolution.’ That this was not an anomaly is indicated by the fact that, as Henningsen notes, Salazar ‘had had similar problems with many of the other witches.’²⁹ The persuasiveness of these declarations would also have been fuelled by the finding that so many of them, freely given or otherwise, seemed to agree with each other on various counts. There is genuine bemusement, for example, in de Lancre’s query:

Now if the witches’ travel was not real, how could it be that two thousand Labourd children who were presented to the Devil at the sabbath by certain women whom they called by their first names and their family names . . . would swear to this travel without every varying their description and without ever confusing the one with the other? How could the women themselves, for the most part, confess to it? How could they have admitted to having presented them, made them renounce their Savior, [and] marked them with the sign of the Devil?

Valle and Becerra were also persuaded by these kinds of correspondences. In analysing the many similarities between the confessions from Zugarramurdi and those of Las Cinco Villas, Henningsen observes that ‘we are brought back to the chief argument of the inquisitors: the general agreement between the witches’ descriptions of their rituals; and this time the argument is all the more convincing when the witch concerned comes from a region far from Zugarramurdi.’³⁰

Taken together, all the perspectives outlined in this chapter make it harder to accuse de Lancre, Valle and Becerra of particular prejudice or cruelty over and above the conventions of the age. While we certainly cannot rule out the possibility that one or more of them possessed specific characterological traits that predisposed them to diminished empathy or dogmatism, on the basis of the available evidence and the standards of the time there is not enough evidence to dismiss them as psychologically outside the normal range.³¹ Their ability to ignore the patent exaggerations of collective hysteria, the psychological mechanics of false confession and the temptations of the Edict of Grace, when others around them could see these distorting factors for what they were, can be reasonably attributed to confirmation bias as opposed to any form of pathological condition.³² Indeed, while we might not sympathise, through this lens we can understand de Lancre’s frustration with judges that were so sceptical they ‘believe nothing of what even the witches confess on their own’.³³

Alonso Salazar de Frías: ‘The Witches’ Advocate’

Having introduced de Lancre, Valle and Becerra, we must now move on to the third member of the Logroño Tribunal, Alonso Salazar de Frías. Salazar joined Valle and Becerra five months after the witch hunt had started, and for nearly a year he appeared to be working well alongside his fellow inquisitors. But by June 1610, Salazar had begun to question both the reality of the experiences that suspects described and the integrity of Valle and Becerra’s judicial methods.³⁴ Within twelve months, he was sending long lists of their alleged abuses towards prisoners to la Suprema, and by July 1612 the situation had degenerated into ‘open war’, with Salazar and his fellow inquisitors often ‘disputing [so] loudly’ that their voices could be heard in the street outside. Salazar’s confidence would have been fuelled by the fact that he was not alone in his views, with similar reservations being expressed, relatively early in the campaign, by prominent clerics and intellectuals like Antonio Venegas de Figueroa, Hernando de Solarte, Pedro de Valencia and ‘an unknown number of parish priests and local officials.’³⁵

Most significant of all, however, with regard to the progress of the Spanish witch-craze, was that Salazar and his fellow sceptics also gained support from la Suprema. Despite being the architect of the notorious Logroño auto de fé that was so dramatically recorded for posterity by de Lancre, Mongastón and others, the Spanish Inquisition was in fact more sceptical about the reality of witchcraft than most other western European authorities in the period. While not denying its existence, the institution as a whole remained favourable to the early Church’s view that dramatic claims to have flown to the sabbath or raised storms were rooted in ‘fevered imaginations’ as opposed to real experience and as a consequence should be punished mildly.³⁶ As early as 1526, as María Tausiet notes, ‘a set of detailed instructions was drawn up for all inquisitors across Spain, obliging them, among other things, to ascertain whether women accused of witchcraft had been tortured by secular judges, and not to accept statements relating to any nefarious acts they might have committed as conclusive proof of their guilt.’ Nowhere is this moderation more evident than in the fact that, prior to the 1610 Logroño auto de fé, la Suprema had not authorized a single witch-burning since the 1526 ruling.³⁷

As a consequence, the authorities in Madrid displayed a degree of caution and scepticism from the very beginning of the 1609–14 campaign. Henningsen emphasizes that when Valle and Becerra sent the first batch of Zugarramurdi confessions to Madrid, la Suprema ‘did not show a great deal of enthusiasm’ for the matter. While ordering the inquisitors to embark on a visitation, instead of advising them to pursue as many convictions as possible it armed them with an interrogatorial questionnaire, developed from earlier Inquisitorial instructions, predominantly designed to ascertain whether the witches’ accounts were real or delusional and which contained questions like: ‘Were they [the suspects] convinced that they had participated corporally in the sabbath, or did the ointment make them fall asleep, so that these things were merely imprinted in their imagination or fantasy?’ This caution meant that when la Suprema began to receive critical reports from Salazar and other sceptics, they were well-disposed to listen to them. In March 2011 the inquisitor general demanded that Salazar alone – without Valle or Becerra – make the next visitation and enclosed instructions on how to proceed that ‘endorsed the view of the sceptics on nearly every count.’ Support for Salazar’s endeavours is also demonstrated by the fact that they extended his visitation from the normal four to eight months and then used his visitation reports to develop a set of cautionary instructions that effectively ended the witch-craze in 1614.³⁸ This swing toward the sceptics did not mean that Valle and Becerra lost their commission, as they continued to work on the campaign until the end, with the 1613 Pamplona Manuscript representing an ongoing and spirited defence of their prosecutorial premises. But la Suprema’s increasing reliance on Salazar generated an intense self-consciousness in the two men that clearly exerted a break on their interrogatorial excesses.

CHAPTER THREE

The Witches’ Voice

Establishing that the Basque witch suspects were not always interrogated by ‘gleeful executioners’ wielding instruments of torture does not, in itself, bring us closer to their voices.¹ Psychological investigation has demonstrated that confessions can be influenced and distorted in the absence of overt coercion in a range of contexts, from therapeutic sessions and research interviews to criminal cross-examination. In the Basque case the evidence clearly suggests that the interrogators employed a range of non-violent methods to persuade suspects to say what they wanted them to say; with Salazar, for example, stating that ‘I admonished him [the suspect] to tell the truth with exhortations so tender that they would have produced a confession far more effectively than subjection to severe torture.’² To this end, the interrogators clearly made extensive use of leading questions. As we have seen, la Suprema’s 1609 questionnaire contained suggestive, precisely worded interrogatives relating to a range of witch activities, while the Tableau reveals that de Lancre asked similarly direct questions along the lines of: ‘How did you learn to be a witch and at what age?’ The efficiency with which leading questions, when combined with a persuasive interrogatorial manner, could generate stereotypical confessions is again vividly articulated by Salazar. Although sceptical about witchcraft, the inquisitor’s desire to maintain judicial neutrality (no doubt sharpened by Valle’s complaint that he possessed ‘an excessive desire to admit revocantes’) led him to deploy standard interrogatorial techniques so efficiently that, as Salazar himself laments, they generated false confessions in those ‘unaware of my lenient approach’. Fifty-year-old Mari Sáinz de Sardui

confessed her witchcraft at great length and in great detail before me during the hearings, but before all three of us the following day she renounced everything, declaring that the fear inspired by my relentless exhortations forced her to confess contrary to the truth . . . After all, although I had to conceal my inner feelings I was always neutral, only disposed to admit people equally as confitentes or revocantes in accordance with the truth.³

In addition to being manipulated by leading questions, the voices of the accused were also distorted by the process of translation. As noted in the last chapter, translators could easily ‘mislead or, at very least, delude’ both suspects and interrogators by omitting material or giving ‘the Basque language whatever twist they believe appropriate.’⁴ While as de Lancre laments, this could allow them to mould testimony in the suspect’s favour, the pendulum could just as easily swing the other way. Although most of the men who worked as translators in the Basque investigations remain unidentified, we do know that one of those likely to have helped de Lancre (and possibly Valle) in this regard, was none other than the notorious child-thrashing, witch-denouncing priest of Vera, Lorenzo de Hualde. Given the latter’s zeal and his tendency to show ‘far too much emotion in all his actions relating to the witch sect’ we can fairly safely assume that when faced with any ambivalent or unclear utterances he would have been very tempted to twist them into something appropriately demonic.⁵

The challenge to identify the voices of the accused is further obstructed by the fact that in many documents their translated testimonies were then subjected to further distortion before being recorded on the page. Even if we believe de Lancre’s claim that the trial extracts in the Tableau were cited ‘verbatim’, it is clear that the extracts he chose to publish were specifically assembled to support his polemical defence against critics of his campaign in Labourd. With regard to Valle and Becerra we have similar problems. The confessional extracts they reproduced in the 1613 Pamplona Manuscript are distorted by the fact that the document was compiled to challenge growing inquisitorial scepticism concerning the reality of the witches’ activities, with Salazar complaining that the two men excluded confessional material that did not support their arguments, both by failing to include retractions and by omitting ‘to record the disputes and rejoinders, writing only the final resolution, of each point’ and thereby suppressing ‘the inconsistencies and irrelevancies which could have further weakened the defendants’ creditworthiness.’ Such editorial distortions also influenced other records. The Joint Sentence, which conflates the confessions of four Zugarramurdi suspects condemned at the Logroño auto de fé, provides an exceptionally coherent account of the activities of the Basque witch cult. But wider evidence suggests that when combining the four testimonies into a single narrative, Valle and Becerra deployed a certain amount of artistic licence, drawing together disparate and fragmentary references from different suspects to create a picture of cultic activity that was more coherent and organised than indicated in each individual case.⁶

But while these perspectives emphasize some of the difficulties surrounding the identification of suspects’ voices in the Basque witch records, they do not tell the whole story. Although confessions were distorted by leading questions, prejudiced translators and direct textual manipulation, these voices were not completely submerged. Contemporary evidence from witch trials throughout early modern Europe, as conducted in both coercive and non-coercive contexts, suggests that although interrogators frequently used leading questions to elicit stereotypical responses they were seldom satisfied with simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers and worked hard to generate and record supporting detail. This endeavour was motivated by a number of factors, ranging from the practical necessity to garner sufficient evidence of guilt to the more abstract desire, on the part of the interrogators, to fulfil their spiritual and moral responsibility to encourage suspects to make the genuine confessions that would secure their salvation. Whatever their motivation, however, these solicitations for supporting detail encouraged suspects to flesh out contemporary witch stereotypes with elements from their own lived experience and belief. The range of material elicited varies from one set of records to another, but in the Basque case it is notable that we do not only find evidence of this kind of supporting detail but we also find much more of it than we might have supposed. The reasons are linked to interrogatorial techniques of the kinds outlined above but they are also linked to the characters of the men who employed them.

The Curious de Lancre

With regard to de Lancre, the first point of note is that for all his emotional bias toward the reality of demonological witchcraft, the Bordeaux judge had a precise intellect that was – consciously at least – devoted to pursuit of the truth. While scholars have observed that de Lancre was not a particularly original or profound thinker, he does appear to have been an assiduous one.⁷ The Tableau reveals that when required to consider an issue, he examined it from many different angles before deciding which intellectual position to take. When approaching the subject of werewolves, for example, he determined to ‘research with much curiosity and in detail what the good books say about lycanthropy’. This intellectual rigour is also visible in the fact that although his views about demonological witchcraft followed many prominent judges of the day, he was not afraid to challenge the views of those he admired and it is not uncommon to find him taking issue with authorities like Bodin, Boguet and del Rio. These abilities were sharpened by a commitment to accuracy. Before discussing and reproducing extracts from parliamentary records pertaining to a lycanthropy case heard in Bordeaux in 1603, he spends over five hundred words justifying how and why he would edit the court texts, emphasizing that the most important passages would be reproduced ‘word for word from the trial, just as it is recorded in the documents of the court of the Parlement of Bordeaux, without adding anything to it or omitting anything.’⁸ Even more relevant, is the fact that de Lancre’s intellectual precision and commitment was combined with an exceptionally observant and attentive nature that led him to take pains to record the minutiae of what he saw and heard when in the Basque country. The polemical arguments and trial excerpts in the Tableau are interwoven with a wealth of vivid and detailed commentary on the Basque people that is drawn, as Williams terms it, with ‘an anthropological interest’ and ‘in an almost painterly fashion’. Few seventeenth-century visitors to the Basque regions would have taken the trouble, as de Lancre did, to note with such accurate realism that ‘this seems to be the most resolute nation there is. And I can say I saw girls and children so eager to do everything that they were told that they bumped into doors and windows and hurt themselves, so fast did they do it.’ These accumulated observations are sufficiently rich and unusual to provoke modern scholars to celebrate the Tableau as ‘a unique wealth of information about the Labourd, its people, and their customs that is an important source for historians of the regions today.’⁹ The range and idiosyncrasy of the observational detail in the Tableau also suggests to this author that de Lancre’s’ ‘anthropological interest’ did not just reflect an inventorial mentality but also a genuine curiosity concerning the beliefs and traditions of the men, women and children being interrogated.

De Lancre and the Witches’ Voice

Significant to our purpose here is the fact that de Lancre also applied this intellectual and observational rigour to the interrogation of witches. In one sense it increased the efficiency with which he distorted the witch’s voice, with Williams noting that his desire to explore every facet of the Labourd witchcraft phenomenon led him to embark on a truly ‘painstaking exploration of all aspects of the sabbath, of Satan, and the witch’s relationship to both’.¹⁰ But while this approach generated testimony laden with demonological stereotypes, it also produced testimony that was laden with explication and circumstantial detail. In the last chapter we saw that de Lancre was keen to condemn translators for manipulating testimony in order to protect suspects, but what we have not emphasized until now is that he was also at pains to warn them that if they were not sufficient to the task they could ‘do much harm to those who were charged with witchcraft.’ His following complaint about a deficient interpreter, for example, clearly reveals his concerns regarding accuracy.

Although he understood this [Basque] language extremely well, he nevertheless could not explain it to us in French with the same insight and fidelity, given that the Basque language has its own idiolect . . . [V]ery often the interpreters would translate confessions of the accused that were actually conditional as simple, unconditional confessions. Nevertheless, what was at stake in this difference was the life or death of the accused, and it was essential to not alter their responses in any way, and not to change the actual meaning of their words in any way whatsoever.

De Lancre maintained this scrupulousness when recording confessions. In the following excerpt from an account of poison-making confessed to the Parlement at Bordeaux, de Lancre fastidiously records an obscure word used by the suspect even though, as he emphasizes, he is not clear what it means. The suspect stated that he put the poison ingredients

in the fireplace under a good fire long enough for them to turn into powder, and that, when he took the powders out, he looked to see if they were awakened (this was the word he used, and I think that it is a particular term that they use). This term meant that one looked carefully to see if it had changed and if certain prickly little worms had appeared yet. [my italics]

This intellectual and observational rigour also motivated de Lancre to record confessional details that diverted from demonological stereotypes. In the following passage, for example, he took the time to note down what was clearly an unconventional response to his question about animal metamorphosis.

As for the transformation, she said that although sometimes the women made themselves see things from on high, for example, from a house, she never saw one of them turn into an animal in her presence. She only saw certain animals run through the sabbath and become large and small, but so swiftly that she was never able to discover how this happened.

In another passage, de Lancre carefully recorded his defendants’ comments about their dates of sabbath-attendance, even though their claims clearly conflicted with his own and other demonologists’ preconceptions on the subject, stating that ‘in the Labourd and also in all other countries . . . [the Devil] prefers as the usual days for the sabbath convocation, or more precisely, the usual nights, those of Wednesday or Friday. Still, we found that people attend the sabbath on practically all nights, which I found somewhat amazing.’¹¹

Without forgetting the evidence of bias and severity compiled in the last chapter, we can even speculate that de Lancre’s ability to generate such a wide range of confessional detail was enhanced by the fact that his native curiosity and interrogatorial rigour was softened with a degree of empathy and compassion. In the Tableau his often-stringent statements are intermittently interrupted by more emollient claims such as ‘It is important to understand, therefore, what it is to be a witch: how many types of witches there are; which ones must be condemned to die; and which ones must simply move the judges to show compassion, and be returned to their priests.’ Similar sentiments are evoked in his description of the sentencing of twenty-seven-year-old Labourdin priest Pierre Bocal, ‘for whose youth we felt some pity’, and in his observation, after interviewing a suspect near Bordeaux in 1611, that she succumbed to witchcraft because the Devil ‘regularly spends time in lonely, somber, and dark places like hers, and who normally seeks out people who are in despair, full of fear, and troubled as this poor woman was’. Although we cannot credit de Lancre with full authorship of the passage, it is also notable that the potted biography he provides in the Tableau, of a teenage boy tried for lycanthropy by the Bordeaux Parlement in 1603, is delivered with all the delicacy and perspicacity of the psychologist.

Here is a young boy abandoned and driven out by his father, who had a stepmother for a mother, who roamed the fields, without a guide and without anyone in the world to look after him, begging for his supper, who had no instruction whatsoever in the fear of God, whose nature was corrupted by evil seduction, daily necessities, and despair, all conditions that the Evil Spirit exploited. The court did not want to contribute further to the despair of this young boy . . .¹²

These perspectives are not sufficient to support the view, put forward by scholars like Jules Michelet, that de Lancre was ‘kind and humorous’ and ‘spiritually sound’. Nor are they enough to absolve him from cruelty. But given the effectiveness with which both genuine interest and empathy can encourage disclosure in any interpersonal communication, they do invite us to speculate that these qualities played a role in de Lancre’s ability to generate confessional detail.¹³

And finally, whatever the causative factors, it is also worth noting that at times de Lancre’s interrogatorial methods do appear to have generated a demonstrably lively response. His complaint that the witches ‘speak as if they were demented, about crazy, absurd, contradictory things, that seem altogether impossible’ suggests that he did not always have to work hard to elicit vivid and idiosyncratic details. Similarly, as we shall explore in Chapter Five, while his frequent condemnation of the ‘shameless’ way that the Basque suspects talked about their sabbath orgies could be dismissed as an artifice designed to mask a judicially irrelevant obsession with sex, there is an air of authenticity about his claim that ‘I am taking the precaution of saying nothing that is not contained in our inquest [about sex], and even then I will not mention half of what appears’.¹⁴

Valle, Becerra and the Witches’ Voice

With regard to Valle and Becerra we have less evidence of rigorous intellects, acute observational skills and native curiosity; but nevertheless, the evidence does suggest that their interrogatorial methods may have been more conducive to suspect disclosure than might be supposed. Valle’s discovery, on arrival in Zugarramurdi on the first leg of his visitation, that ‘the commissioner to the Inquisition at Lesaca, who had been selected by the Tribunal as official Basque interpreter, was too old and not sufficiently alert’, would have reminded him of his inquisitorial obligation to procure accurate and competent translations. That he was not wholly unscrupulous in his pursuit of demonological stereotypes is also indicated in the confessional texts, with Henningsen observing that

we must not jump to the conclusion that the confessions were merely the product of leading questions. These may well have been used with effect, but we cannot be certain to what extent, as the original records from the trial and from the visitation have not been preserved. However, in the six files which have come down to us from the last part of Valle’s visitation at Zugarramurdi it appears . . . that Valle examined the witches in a reasonably objective fashion and on the whole accepted their answers . . . ¹⁵

The confession of María de Endara, as obtained by Becerra in 1611, supports Henningsen’s assessment. Although clearly guided by the inquisitor towards stereotypical themes, María produced a highly ambiguous testimony in which she claimed that although she participated in the sabbath she did not make a pact with the Devil or perform other incriminatory acts. Although it is possible that her (for a witch, unusually high) social status led Becerra to treat her more gently than the average suspect, the lengthy and digressive nature of her confession, when combined with the fact that it was included in full in the Pamplona Manuscript, does suggest that both Valle and Becerra placed value on divergent detail and possessed a certain willingness to listen carefully to the stories that the suspects were telling them, however relevant they may or may not have been.¹⁶ That circumstantial detail of this kind came from the suspects as opposed to the inquisitors is also supported by the fact that their confession summaries often contain direct and judicially irrelevant evocations of peasant life. The proverbial humour of the Basque peasant, for example, is clearly evident in the following passage from the Joint Sentence, in which the Devil and a group of witches are frustrated by a family that was protecting a girl they wished to abduct.

[The Devil] was hitting himself on his chest with his left hand to make known how strongly he felt, and some of the witches said, ‘the guards may guard her but they will not guard the cabbages in the garden’ and with una uja [word unclear in original], to take revenge they started to pull up and they tore and snapped certain apple tree seedlings that were there . . .¹⁷

Similarly, Henningsen observes that some parts of María de Zozaya’s sentence are ‘so realistic that one gets the impression that it is based on personal experience’, while the ‘description of the rites of the witch sect’ confessed to Valle by María Martin in 1609 ‘is not only astonishingly full in detail but is also so realistic that the whole story bears the stamp of something that had really been experienced’; to the extent that ‘one cannot help wondering which is the false statement: the confession in 1609 or the recantation in 1611’. The Pamplona Manuscript has prompted other scholars to conclude that ‘witches certainly were able to inject some of their daily lives and concerns into their stories of witchcraft. The witch who walked to the aquelarre while spinning wool is a prime example of this . . . even in an undeniably elite-mediated document, the voices and personalities of the accused cannot be denied their place in this manuscript.’¹⁸

The likelihood that suspect-contributions could work their way, relatively undistorted, into the Spanish witchcraft confessions is also supported by our knowledge of the translators involved. While it is probable that Valle employed individuals (like zealous priest Lorenzo de Hualde) who were highly likely to have filtered testimony through a rigid demonological lens, others may not have been so manipulative. When Valle was required to find a replacement for the ‘old and not sufficiently alert’ translator from Lesaca he appointed the ‘intelligent and dutiful’ Juan de Monterola in his stead. Although we know little about Monterola, who was priest and inquisitorial commissioner at Arano, the fact that very few witches were identified in the district under his jurisdiction suggests that he held sceptical, or at least moderate, views of witchcraft. This impression is further supported by the fact that when Monterola was later dispatched by Salazar to investigate the ‘origin of three witch-jars [of ointment] that had been discovered by the parish priest at Zubeita’ he did not return, as it would have been all too easy to do, with evidence of guilt but with the considerably less sensational report that he had ‘questioned the witches who had presented the jars, and all admitted that the witch ointment was faked’.¹⁹ We can reasonably assume, on this basis, that when Monterola was translating for Valle and Becerra he may have refrained from the temptation to twist testimony to make it conform to demonological stereotypes.

Some commentators have even gone so far as to suggest, as we have in relation to de Lancre, that Valle and Becerra were able to elicit intimate disclosures because they expressed a level of compassion for their suspects, with Meredith Howard arguing that in the Pamplona Manuscript the two inquisitors ‘encapsulated spiritual struggle and personal concerns of the witches in moving confessions’ and that

Becerra and Valle’s favourite witches in el cuaderno [the Pamplona Manuscript] are also the ones who tell unique stories. Despite the initial claims of el cuaderno to focus on the shared and repetitive confessions of the witches, the inquisitors seem to care for individuals and their personal suffering at the hands of the Devil. Personalized confessions full of emotion, pain and daily experience characterize el cuaderno and problematize our belief that elite authorities always attempted to place witches into a set model.

Indications of suspect-engagement in the interrogatorial discourse, so evident in de Lancre’s Tableau, are also found in the Spanish records, with Valle and Becerra maintaining in the Joint Sentence that the four interrogatees ‘declare a large number of extraordinary things and events and many ceremonies and circumstances other than the ones that have been mentioned, which to avoid prolixity are not mentioned’.²⁰

Salazar and the Witches’ Voice

With regard to our search for the voices of the accused, it is also worth noting that the combination of motives and character traits outlined in this chapter prompted de Lancre, Valle and Becerra to generate confessions that drew from a wider palette than those elicited by the more sceptical Salazar. Despite his attempts to conceal his ‘inner feelings’ in order to appear judicially neutral, Salazar clearly spent interrogatorial time drawing out contradictions in testimony in order to demonstrate that purported acts of witchcraft were fictitious, with his approach gaining official support in 1614 when la Suprema issued instructions that actively encouraged recantation.²¹ This approach could generate vivid detail, with some of the recantations recorded by Salazar and fellow sceptics describing suspects giving authentic and colourful accounts of the ways in which they had been coerced to make confessions. But it could also limit confessional scope. For example, when two girls from Zugarramurdi told Salazar they had attended a sabbath the previous night, his commitment to verify that confessed acts of witchcraft had actually taken place meant that his primary motivation was not to ask what kinds of dances or rituals they had performed there but to go to the alleged spot to establish that ‘the grass was fresh and untrodden without the least sign that anyone had gathered there the preceding night.’ By contrast, when suspects from the same village made confessions before Valle and Becerra, the two men – fuelled by their profound belief in the reality and threat of witchcraft – pressed them for details about the full gamut of clandestine activities that may have taken place at the event.²² In these cases the fact that the suspects were encouraged to produce convincing narratives about a range of demonologically stereotypical activities from cannibalistic feasts and sexual orgies to formal cultic ritual, means that they were compelled, in response, to mine a wider and more complex range of personal belief and experience than if they had been pressed about purely epistemological concerns. Thus, ironically and rather counterintuitively, when searching for evidence of the voices of the accused we find that the confessions elicited by the interrogators most anxious to impose demonological stereotypes provide us with the richest lodes.

A ‘False’ Voice

Taken together, the perspectives developed in the last two chapters indicate that despite being among the most heavily demonized witch records to have emerged out of early modern Europe, the Basque texts do enable us to hear the voices of the accused. But this does not mean that these voices are easy to isolate or interpret. As noted above, some of the recantations elicited by Salazar and his fellow sceptics, in which individuals claimed they were pressured to make up confessions, do indeed represent suspects accurately describing real-life experiences in a relatively straightforward way.²³ But outside these accounts we are primarily dealing with confessions in which references suggestive of real-life experience are patently woven into narratives of fantastic events that clearly did not take place in the physical world – such as flying down chimneys to suck the blood of sleeping children or having sex with the Devil. Here the lived experience of the suspect appears to have been forged and distorted to serve the needs of an essentially false narrative in which the experience is fused with stereotypical themes, as absorbed through the community or via the suggestions of the interrogator. As a consequence, our attempt to identify and understand the suspects’ voice must first begin with an attempt to understand the deeper psychological mechanics through which these types of false narrative may have been created.

Psychologists have identified various different types of false confession, four of which are particularly relevant to our present study.²⁴ These confession types (which have been contextualized below as they may have emerged in the witch-craze) could all have been generated in either coercive or non-coercive interrogatorial environments and would all have involved personal experience merging with demonological stereotypes, albeit in different ways.

1. Misrepresentation: Through fatigue or disorientation the suspect accepted her interrogator’s redefinition of an ordinary experience into something stereotypically demonological, as in ‘the man you slept with last night was not your lover or husband, it was the Devil’. In accepting such a redefinition she allowed the interrogator to erase any distinction between his demonic projection and her lived experience and her human sexual partner and the Devil became one and the same.

2. Conscious fiction: In an effort to end coercion or gain leniency, the suspect knowingly drew on real-life events to flesh out a convincing stereotypical narrative of witch activity. In making this conscious fiction, the suspect searched her memory and imagination for relevant personal experience or belief to embellish the demonological template provided by leading questions. To make her account as convincing as possible she attempted to incorporate these elements without hesitations or cracks, much in the way that the storyteller or Basque bertsolari improvises before an audience.²⁵ Through this creative act the distinction between real-life event and stereotypical demonological event became difficult or impossible for the listener to discern.

3. False Memory: Over the period of imprisonment and interrogation the suspect developed false memories which she then interpreted as reflective of real events. In this process, persistent and persuasive questioning provoked the suspect to unconsciously fuse memories of genuine life-experience with the suggestions of the interrogator to create wholly convincing recollections of having participated in the stereotypical witch activities of which she was accused. This form of false confession would have been the most hard to identify and also the most incriminating; being all the more convincing because the suspect herself believed it to be true.²⁶

4. Visionary Experience: Rising hysteria and circulating witchcraft propaganda induced a form of auto-suggestion through which suspects generated dreams or waking visions in which they engaged in stereotypical witches’ sabbaths. Although under modern psychological criteria, reports of visionary experience would not come under the category of false confession, early modern epistemologies allow their inclusion here. In this period some forms of visionary experience were considered to be as legitimate, in ontological terms, as ordinary waking states, with dreams and waking visions believed to facilitate direct encounters with spiritual agencies, both good and bad.²⁷ In the Basque case, the fact that these experiences escalated among the young may reflect the fact that children are both more susceptible to mass hysteria than adults and less equipped to distinguish between visionary and waking states. This susceptibility was then further legitimized by the fact that in the Basque regions, as in many Catholic countries in the medieval and early modern periods, it was widely believed that spiritual agencies often chose to appear to the young.²⁸ While accounts of waking visions were recorded during the witch-craze the predominant form of visionary experience appears to have been the nocturnal dream, with Henningsen arguing that the widespread reports, by Basque children, that they had been taken to the sabbath against their will after having lain down to sleep at night, suggests that the region was ‘infected’ by a ‘dream epidemic’.²⁹ Although these dream-coerced individuals were sometimes termed ‘witnesses’ by the interrogators, their claims to have attended and participated in sabbath events means that they will be subsumed under the category of suspects here.

Analysing the Compound

In the Basque witch-craze, interrogatorial conditions would have been conducive to the generation of all four types of false confession outlined above and each confession-type could have produced similarly stereotypical narratives. As a consequence, it is virtually impossible to know which type of false confession may have been involved in any given case. Valle and Becerra’s account of their interrogation of teenage suspect María de Yriarte, for example, states that they ‘encouraged her to tell the truth’ and that when she was reluctant to respond they ‘said a great many things to her to encourage her to continue’ and ‘asked who made her a witch’ and ‘began to tell her many things so that she should understand how important it was for her to save her soul’. After a long-drawn-out session in which María interspersed moments of confession with periods of distress where she ‘began to groan and wail’ and then ‘became silent and troubled’, Valle and Becerra ‘agreed that it was best to give her more time and more admonishments in order that she might reach a complete realization of her sin . . . [and] she was therefore sent back to her cell with an earnest exhortation’ in lieu of being interrogated again at a later date. Subjected to these kinds of pressures, it is hardly surprising that María eventually succumbed and produced a coherent and stereotypical account of being taken to the sabbath and initiated into the witches’ sect.³⁰ The difficulty arises, however, in the fact that it is impossible to ascertain whether in this instance María’s eventual capitulation and false confession were due to misinterpretation, false memory generation, conscious fiction or the harnessing of half-remembered dreams. Any assessment is further complicated by the fact that the four different forms of false confession listed here were not always psychologically distinct, and that suspects may have moved from one to the other during the course of their interrogations. For example, an individual who had been persuaded by an interrogator to redefine an innocent experience as demonic may have then gone on to elaborate that redefinition themselves through conscious fiction, false memory or stereotyped dreams. Alternatively, a stereotyped dream or false memory may have been mined to create a fiction or predispose a suspect to surrender to an interrogatorial misinterpretation and so on.

Due to these difficulties, this study will follow Lyndal Roper in her judgement that ‘there is no mileage . . . in the usual historical strategy of teasing out the “real” from the fantastic elements’ in witch-testimony. We shall give no consideration to the question of whether a given testimonial is true or false or, if the latter, what kind of false confession or combination of false confessions it may have been.³¹ As a corollary of this we will not follow Salazar in his desire to establish the phenomenological status of the testimonials. While of crucial importance in other contexts, the question as to whether a confession was based on real or dream experience will be deemed irrelevant here. Instead, all confessions will be approached as valuable on the premise that in creating any type of testimony, whether false or true, visionary or non-visionary, retracted or not retracted, the process of creation would have required the suspect to mine their own belief and experience to flesh out the stereotypical template being suggested to them by their interrogators – and that because they contain this experiential prima materia all confessions, regardless of type, can be usefully examined for evidence about the lives and mentalities of the accused.

But while this approach opens up the field of enquiry and avoids many of the epistemological obstacles posed by witch trial material, some inevitable difficulties remain. Our intention to identify and analyse the personal experience woven into confessional narratives is hampered by the fact that in all the categories of false confession listed here, this experience would have been fused with stereotypical themes in a virtually seamless way. This process is most clearly illustrated with regard to dreams. Although the relationship between dreams and memory is still only partially understood, contemporary researchers believe that in order to create dream phenomena the mind conflates both episodic and semantic memories of real-life experience at an unconscious level.³² This psychological prima materia most commonly includes stored memories from the day or days leading up to the dream but can also incorporate memories of more distant events that have been drawn, by the unconscious mind, into this particular dreamscape. This older material can also include memories of previous dreams, thus generating a cyclical process of creation through which dreams feed on themselves. But one of the most remarkable abilities of the dreaming mind is the fact that it can conflate these diverse elements in an impressively natural and seamless way. While the dreamer can, on waking, sometimes identify some of the raw materials that their unconscious used to create a particular dream image or event, in the majority of cases they remain too transformed to be identified. In this way, the dream phenomenon presents like a chemical compound in which the component elements are so profoundly fused on a molecular level that it emerges as a wholly distinct material that gives no indication, via appearance or properties, of the original elements that came together to create it.

Also relevant to our case, is the fact that this type of deep fusion between stereotype and experience does not only take place in dreams but also in the formation of false memories and conscious fictions. Although false memories can be created by an individual when they are awake, like dream events they are still constructed in the unconscious mind through a process that draws on a wide range of ‘real’ memories. With regard to conscious fiction-making, meanwhile, an individual might mine their memory for relevant belief and experience with which to create a convincing extempore narrative but this process is not as conscious or as controlled as the speaker might think, particularly when occurring at speed. When exploring the mind for raw material, the extemporizing storyteller or poet is not exploring the totality of their learnt images, words, phrases and plot segments – they are exploring those elements that have, through association or some other form of unconscious mentation, risen to the surface and become accessible to their conscious mind. Their agency is further compromised by the fact that the speed of construction required leaves little time to choose what elements to include; with material appearing to emerge from the unconscious and weave itself into the poem or story as if by its own volition. In this sense, conscious fiction-making is still heavily reliant on conflations and associations made below the level of consciousness. The fact that Basque witch testimony was created through these types of psychological processes, adds another layer of difficulty to any attempt to identify the voices of the accused.

This task is then further complicated by another factor. To date, we have described the conflation process as a simple fusion between ‘personal experience’ and ‘demonological stereotype’. But this distinction is flawed in the sense that the latter term itself also signifies a conflation or composite. Although many of the stereotypical themes that emerge in the testimonials are likely to have been of recent derivation, in that they were imposed during the witch-craze, they would have been conflated with witch stereotypes that were circulating in the Basque regions long before this event. Some elements of these stereotypes would have been of elite demonological origin, filtering into the community via witch trials that took place in earlier centuries, while others would have been rooted in popular belief matrices that stretched back into the pre-Christian period. In both cases, because these older beliefs played an integral part in how a suspect felt and interpreted the world outside the witch-craze prosecutions, they belong as legitimately in the category of ‘personal experience’ as in that of ‘demonological stereotype’. But any attempt to identify these different categories of demonological belief is hampered by the lack of visibility. Sometimes a stereotypical motif can be definitively linked to older beliefs but in many instances, although we might suspect that this may have been the case, the witch belief in question is too deeply masked by more recent demonological themes superimposed during the witch-craze to be clearly visible. As a consequence, in this study we have to work with the fact that the term ‘stereotypical material’ incorporates witchcraft beliefs that circulated both during and previous to the 1609–14 witch-craze.

CHAPTER FOUR

Black Winds

Soon, the rainy west wind, swollen with the first showers, then haize beltza, ‘the black wind’ of the northwest, blowing in sharp, drenching squalls, will carry to the heart of Eskual Herri the swells of a never-ending storm . . .

Philippe Veyrin¹

Having sketched out an overview of the interrogators and the processes through which the witch-craze confessions were created, we are now in a position to examine their content. As stated in the Introduction, this analysis will progress on a thematic basis and begin with the crime of maleficium, that is, the causing of harm to humans or animals through magical means. The first of the two types of maleficium most uniformly and widely attributed to the Basque witch was that of ruining crops through the application of poisonous powders or liquids (termed here ‘crop-maleficium’). These substances could be applied directly, with María de Zozaya confessing that she went on foot to the fields and ‘bearing powders tied in a cloth she would cast these on top of them dropping them surreptitiously’ on the crops and ‘when later she went to the places where she had dropped powders by day she was well aware of the great damage she had done because they would wither within a few days’. These poisons could also be used to damage the crops more indirectly by raising bad weather, with de Lancre noting how Labourd witches throw powders ‘into the mist that comes from the sea or the mountains’ which then ‘mixes with the clouds, then this cloud changes into fog or even rain, and this destroys all the fruits’.²

While many of the crop-damaging methods, such as the one employed by María de Zozaya cited above, possessed an element of realism, others were more fantastic and involved groups of witches flying into the air, often transformed into animals, to distribute powders across wide areas. With regard to some of the suspects sentenced at the Logroño auto de fé, Valle and Becerra stated ‘senior witches’ fill their pots ‘with powders’ and

follow the Devil and behind them go all the children and junior witches, assuming different shapes, some go as dogs, some as cats. They pass through the air to the highest peaks whence they start to scatter powders over the crops, casting it over their shoulders with their left hand while the Devil cries out: ‘May all be lost!’³

In its focus on crop-maleficium the Basque records are conventional. Although its incidence varied widely, second to the direct harming and killing of humans and animals, crop-maleficium was the most common crime attributed to the European witch and all the methods used by the Basque suspects can be found represented in witch trial records from other parts of Europe. In the Basque case, the emphasis on crop-maleficium is moderately strong; although not reaching the prominence attained in prosecution clusters in places like Lorraine and Trier, it was still one of the core activities of the Basque witch.⁴

Interrogators and Suspects: Collaboration

The interrogators would have been heavily involved in generating confessional accounts of crop-maleficium. Valle, Becerra and de Lancre clearly believed that witches were guilty of the crime, with the former stating that witches ‘make use of . . . powders and poisons to destroy the harvests’, and the latter that ‘we have shown with the help of authorities, reason, and the confessions of female witches . . . that they can raise tempests and thunderstorms’.⁵ On de Lancre’s part there was demonological precedent, with most of his designated authorities, as cited in the Tableau, stating that one of the witch’s prime motivations was to invoke storms and ruin crops. Meanwhile, although we do not know whether Valle and Becerra were exposed to demonological texts, their convictions are likely to have developed in response to the relatively frequent emergence of the crime in the earlier inquisition documents and trial records they examined to inform themselves about witchcraft, with one inquisitorial letter from the mid-1520s, which we know came into Valle’s hands, stating that ‘to discover whether there are sorcerers or witches in these parts you should seek information as to whether any crops of wheat have been ruined’.⁶ The evidence suggests that, unlike the sceptical Salazar, these three interrogators gave little credence to the view, propounded by theologians since the early medieval period, that witches had no agency in this area and only God – or his entourage – possessed jurisdiction over weather and fertility.⁷

But the records also suggest that although interrogators may have encouraged the Basque suspects to confess to crop-maleficium, they were not the only authors here. The belief that witches could control the weather and ruin crops was not just the preserve of judges and demonologists, but widespread among ordinary people throughout Europe in this period. Indeed, there is a consensus among scholars that it was concern ‘from below’ that provided the critical impetus for prosecution of this crime, with cases coming before the courts when authorities chose to pursue accusations that had originally emerged on a popular level. This type of collusion between authorities and community is illustrated in a 1618 report from Catalonia, which states that a group of witches were arrested because they had: ‘caused hailstones to lay waste the fields and grain, and brought mists to destroy the fruit, and had killed children and cattle, and everybody has made complaints against them for the ills that all are suffering, so that there is no town or village which has not appointed officials to make enquiries and find out if there are witches in the terme and if so to punish them.’ Scholars have also argued that the increase in prosecutions for crop-maleficium in this period reflected popular responses to the severe climatic deterioration that took place across Europe between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries.⁸

Historically, fears about crop-maleficium were as acute in the Basque country as elsewhere in Europe. To this day, this topographically unusual region – flanked by the Atlantic to the north and west, the Castilian plateau to the south and the Pyrenean range to the east – is subject to capricious weather conditions often characterized by high winds, dense fogs, frequent precipitation and sudden hailstorms that can devastate fields of crops in only a few short minutes. That popular concerns were active during the 1609–14 witch-craze is illustrated in a Dominican preacher’s claim (to Salazar) that his sermons about crop-harming witches were based on ‘what he had heard in the streets’. The following passage from the Sentence of María de Zozaya also makes it clear that these anxieties were implicated in arrests.

[The crops] would wither within a few days and on the apple trees a [web-forming] larva appeared which dried them, and on the bercas [?] and vegetables some green worms [appeared] which ate them, and on the beans [or broad beans] a black plant louse [or aphid] [appeared] which dried them and on the chestnut trees the buds dried out and fell off, and so the owners suspected and said that Witches cursed them . . . ⁹ [my italics]

It could be argued that having established that the Basque crop-maleficium accounts were likely to have been precipitated by a collusion between community concern and interrogatorial engagement, we could legitimately leave this subject here. Through this lens all that would have been needed to generate confessions of crop-maleficium was a weary ‘yes, I did that’ from the accused to the charges levelled against them. But there is evidence that suspects’ responses may have been more complex than this. In European trial records and other sources it is not uncommon to find commentators maintaining – with more regularity than in relation to other forms of maleficent magic – that confessions of crop-maleficium were made voluntarily. Sixteenth-century French jurist Nicolas Rémy, for example, claimed to have sentenced ‘over two hundred persons, more or less, who have in free and open confession asserted that . . . they used to stir the water [of a pool or river] until there arose a dense vapour and smoke, in the midst of which they were borne up on high’ to ‘shake them [the clouds] down upon the earth as hail.’ Similar convictions were recorded during the Basque witch-craze, with the instructions sent by la Suprema to the Logroño Tribunal in 1614 clearly indicating that suspects’ confessions to having performed crop-maleficium were being made against the pull of what was, by this point, the more sceptical interrogatorial opinion promulgated by men like Salazar:

5. Item, the inquisitors shall find out about the devastations and damage the witches confess to have caused to harvests, crops and fields, if these were seen or found indeed to be harmed, and if the countryside had suffered at that time hail, fog, or any harmful wind or frost which might have caused the loss of crops.
6. Item, concerning the hailstorms and tempests which the suspects confess to have conjured up, the inquisitors shall inquire at what time of the year these occurred, whether in summer, in winter, or during the seasons in which they naturally occur.¹⁰

This volubility (on the part of the accused) is also indicated by the finding that their testimonies do not only describe the effects of crop-maleficium but also how it was performed. Detailed descriptions of how poison was scattered or mists and storms raised is unlikely to have been provided by witnesses, for unless they were witches themselves they cannot profess to have been present when the harmful magic was executed. It is also unlikely to have been provided, in its entirety at least, by the three interrogators. While men like Valle were clearly interested in application as well as effect and asked questions to this purpose, they cannot be held accountable for suspects’ claims that when applying their poisons witches would ‘fly through the air’ while ‘forming a wing’ or use ‘a little earthern jar with little holes at the bottom like a watering can . . . [making] the liquid splash through these holes’. Nor can we dismiss as interrogatorial intervention, de Lancre’s allegation that ‘when the powders are thrown in the Labourd, the women say in Basque, “This one for the wheat; this one for the apples, which are their vineyards; little remains for the press; you will arrive as a flower and not as a seed” [my italics].’¹¹

Raw Materials: Folk Demons

Examined in the context of false confession, as set out in the last chapter, these passages suggest that suspects did not simply parrot ‘yes’ to charges of crop-maleficium but responded by creating false confessions in which they actively engaged in the various crop-damaging activities alleged against them. In order to create the conscious fictions, false memories and dreams that fuelled these confessions they would have mined a wide range of belief and experience. Most influential, in this respect, would have been the stereotypical narratives surrounding crop-maleficium generated both during and prior to the 1609–14 trials, with beliefs about crops-damaging activities of witches, as we have seen, circulating in the Basque regions for many years prior to this date. But there is also evidence to suggest that suspects fleshed out these stereotypical templates with a more diverse range of raw materials.

We can begin with the folklore. We have already seen that both witches and God, along with his entourage, were considered to have jurisdiction over the crops. But what we have not emphasized until now is that these powers were also attributed to ‘devils’ or ‘demons’. These generic terms, as employed in both elite texts and popular discourse, designated a very wide range of supernatural beings. But in the present context they often pointed to beings of distinctly folkloric origin that had strong associations with the collective dead. These ‘folk demons’, as we can term them here, typically travelled in airborne hosts and possessed the ability to transform into animals, with Lecouteux stating with respect to traditions subsumed under the umbrella term ‘Wild Hunt’, that ‘in the majority of post-medieval traditions’ the hunt ‘was connected to atmospheric conditions’ and this ‘passage of souls in perdition heralded bad weather’.¹² They were also associated with moral ambivalence or malevolence. While Christian supernaturals typically damaged the crops for spiritual and moral motives, such as punishing sin, folk demons typically damaged them out of self-interest (desiring fertility or harvests for themselves), maliciousness (taking pleasure in causing harm for harm’s sake) or more fatalistically just because randomly and indiscriminately destroying the crops was just the kind of thing that folk demons did.¹³ This moral ambiguity was further complicated by the widespread belief that humans – of either beneficent, neutral or maleficent intent – could find themselves either deliberately or accidentally participating in the demons’ storm-raising and crop-harming escapades. Hardly surprisingly, these beliefs interacted directly with witchcraft beliefs. Several studies have demonstrated how early modern witch suspects responded to interrogatorial questions about crop-maleficium by producing descriptions of the activities of crop-damaging folk demons.¹⁴ These conflations would have been fuelled by the fact that humans participating in the activities of folk demons were often credited with a supernatural identity that was little different from – and sometimes synonymous with – that of their demonic companions. They would also have been fuelled by a broader evolutionary process, visible in various parts of Europe from the early medieval period onwards, that saw the witch increasingly acquire the characteristics of the folk demon and the folk demon increasingly acquire the characteristics of the witch.¹⁵

These perspectives are relevant to the present case. The Basques clearly shared the Europe-wide belief in the crop-damaging abilities of demonic agents, with Basque cleric Martín de Arles observing that in 1517 the Navarrese ‘burn herbs collected on St John Baptist’s Day against lightning, thunder, and tempests, believing that by these fumigations they will drive away demons’.¹⁶ These generic references to demons are also likely to have masked the presence of folk spirits. While few references to Basque folklore were recorded prior to the nineteenth century, later folkloric collections reveal a wide range of regional beliefs (suggestive of some antiquity) surrounding supernatural agents deemed to have jurisdiction over the crops and weather, including the mysterious huntsman commonly heard in the mountains on ‘windy and stormy nights’ who was ‘associated with the hurricane’; the animalistic Basajaun or ‘wild man of the woods’ who was linked to the ‘origins of the cultivation of wheat and grains’; the fairy-like lamiñas who were capable of ‘instantly transforming stony ground into a fertile field’; and the monarchical Mari who crossed ‘the sky seated on a horse-drawn chariot during storms, directing the clouds.’¹⁷ While we cannot draw direct parallels, these references suggest that similar beliefs about crop- or weather-manipulating folk spirits would have been available to the Basques in the period of the witch-craze and that, as a corollary of this, the suspects may have quarried these beliefs when fleshing out their accounts of crop-maleficium.

There is no direct evidence of this in the texts themselves. As noted in the Introduction, the Basque witch records contain very few direct references to folkloric motifs of any kind and as a consequence it is impossible to assess whether textual references to crop-damaging devils or demons reflected generic demonic terms employed by suspects either prior to, or as a result of, the witch-craze or reflected specific folk spirit references glossed by the interrogators as ‘devils’ or ‘demons’ during questioning or when the confessions were collated at a later stage. But while precision eludes us here it is notable that, as in witchcraft records from other parts of Europe, the broad narrative dynamics of the Basque crop-maleficium passages are strongly suggestive of folk spirit templates. When groups of Basque witches went out to destroy the crops they did not just go alone or with each other but in the company, and under the jurisdiction, of the Devil and his entourage of lesser devils. While the witches could go out in human form and scatter poisons on foot, they could also assume the shape of animals and fly ‘through the air to the highest peaks’ in noisy cavalcades like airborne hosts of folk demons. While the witches could destroy crops as a form of revenge, reflecting the core motivational impulse associated with the stereotypical European witch, they could also destroy them ‘because of the satisfaction they give to the Devil’. These servitor acts, which could be so random that the accused did not only destroy crops belonging to their neighbours but also crops belonging to themselves, were typical of the senseless and indiscriminate aggression of the folk demon.¹⁸ There is not enough folkloric evidence in the witch-craze records to ascertain how far these correspondences represent the direct mining of beliefs about crop-damaging folk demons and how far they represent the mining of beliefs about crop-damaging demons that had become subsumed over the centuries into the figure of the Basque witch. But there is clearly enough evidence to suggest that a historical relationship between these two belief matrices played a role in suspect-contribution to the crop-maleficium passages.

Ritual Themes

Circulating beliefs about crop-damaging demons may not have been the only materials that were used by the Basque defendants to flesh out their accounts. Some descriptions of crop-maleficium display a level of formality that conflicts with conventional imagery around the animalistic and randomly destructive behaviours of crop-damaging spirits. In the following passage from the Joint Sentence, the witches go to the fields in the form of ‘cats, dogs and pigs’ but on arrival their crop-destroying activities are surprisingly disciplined.

[T]o destroy the crops they all go in the company of the Devil in the form of cats, dogs, pigs and various other animals to the estates and areas they intend to destroy, the aforementioned Miguel de Goiburu filling the Devil’s main cauldron with the powders to share among the others. And the first to begin is the Devil, who with his left hand scatters powders behind him, always turning on his left hand and saying ‘powders, powders, ruin everything’ or ‘ruin half,’ depending on the damage he wants to inflict, and all the old witches scatter them and say the same thing as the Devil.

This incongruity is even more pronounced in the following passage from the Zozaya Sentence, in which the crop-damaging party is clearly processional and organized according to a well-defined social hierarchy.

Seven or eight times per year the Devil and all the other witches went to ruin the cereal crops and fruit when they were in flower with the powders that they made from the vermin and said preparations. And to inflict this damage the Devil went in front with six or seven of his pages and the King and Queen and the other old master witches and all of them forming a wing would fly through the air over the cereal crops and fruit dropping their powders and saying ‘may they have flower and not fruit’ and others would say ‘flower and do not bear fruit, turn into earth and stone’.¹⁹

While anomalous in this confessional context, if we step back and look at contemporary Basque communities through a wider lens, this discipline and formality begins to make some sense. In this period crops were so important to survival that a significant proportion of Church ritual was devoted to petitioning God and the saints to protect them – either at specific times of year or in response to crisis. Of significance here, with regard to our crop-maleficium accounts, is that these rituals were almost always communal, hierarchical and processional. In 1517, Arles recorded that in the Usso archdeaconry of Navarre ‘when the fruits of the earth were endangered at a time of drought, with great devotion the clergy and people with hymns and canticles went in procession’ to the local river to try to encourage St Peter to bring their crops some much-needed rain. In the same century Pedro Ciruelo, a prominent scholar and cleric living in the adjacent Spanish region of Castile, advised communities that if they wanted to protect their crops against pests they should say masses in honour of St Gregory and then ‘go out in procession to some hill from which the boundaries of that area can be seen. From there, they should bless the boundaries with the cross and holy water . . . [and] sprinkle water about that area.’²⁰

We know that all the suspects interrogated in the witch-craze would have participated in crop-protecting processions prior to their arrest. We also have clear evidence that processional experiences could be accessed during interrogation and distorted to demonological ends, with Catalina de Sastrearena maintaining (as paraphrased by Henningsen) that when her village ‘was taking part in a religious procession, she and some others fell out of the group in order to join a similar ceremony that the Devil had organized at his sabbath’. On this basis, it is reasonable to speculate that memories of crop-protecting ritual were drawn into crop-maleficium accounts. Certainly, descriptions of the Devil and his pages leading witches in procession, while chanting charms, into the fields seem less inappropriate when set alongside the fact that when conducting crop-protecting rituals, the priest and his pages would lead the community into the fields singing hymns and canticles. The assertion that one of the senior witches carried a cauldron containing poisons to be scattered on the crops, appears less fanciful when considered beside the fact that in procession, the priest and his pages carried cauldrons filled with holy water to be ritually sprinkled on the fields. Claims that the poisons were ‘blessed’ and that the witches’ crop-damaging expeditions took place ‘eight or nine times a year’ appear less incongruous and excessive when we recognize that the ritual substances scattered on the fields were consecrated by the priest and that the Church’s seasonal calendar ensured that crop-protecting ceremonies were performed regularly at certain times of the year. The complex psychological mechanics of fiction, dream and false memory generation would also have ensured that these ritual experiences were drawn into testimonials in very subtle ways. As we saw earlier, María de Zozaya stated that ‘the Devil went in front with six or seven of his pages and the King and Queen and the other old master witches and all of them forming a wing would fly through the air over the cereal crops and fruit, dropping their powders’. Through the lens developed here this incongruous image represents an unconscious conflation, on María’s part, between the hierarchical conventions of processional crop-protecting ritual and fantastical beliefs about the folk demons that fly through the skies in winds and storm clouds to damage the crops. With regard to the subliminal fiction-making mind, even María’s claim that the witches flew ‘forming a wing’ may have been appropriate here. Certainly, when early-twentieth century Basques were faced with restless seas they would say ‘Hegoak hegala urean du’, or ‘the south wind has a wing in the water’.²¹

Pest and Weather Conjurations

But in contributing to the ritual element of their crop-maleficium passages, some suspects may have also been influenced by less orthodox rites. From the early medieval period onward, European texts make reference to a range of crop-protecting rituals that involved conjuration. In these cases the supplicant did not just ask God to dispel storm clouds or pests but directly commanded them, often in God’s name, to move away to a different location. These rituals were performed by both priests and lay specialists, with practitioners being commonly referred to in the texts as ‘conjurers’, ‘exorcists’ or ‘tempestarii’. By the early modern period western European weather and pest conjurors were generally assumed to be male, but we do have occasional references to female ‘tempistariae’ in the early medieval records and female appropriation of the role was strong in central Europe well into the eighteenth century.²² Suggestions that women were performing this function in early modern Europe are also scattered through demonological texts. In the fifteenth century, according to German demonologist Heinrich Kramer, a woman told a judge that she could calm ‘a tempest raised by witchcraft’ by reciting a charm that began ‘I adjure you, hailstorms and winds, by the five wounds of Christ etc.’ that ‘you be dissolved and fall as rain’; while over a hundred years later, Boguet fleshed out a description of the ‘superstitious’ activities of a female magical practitioner in the Burgundy region of France by reporting that when she ‘wished to still a storm or tempest, she first came out of her house muttering I know not what between her teeth’.²³

Of particular significance for the present analysis, is that in the period leading up to the witch-craze, crop-protecting conjurors appear to have been relatively common in the Basque regions. The Balmaseda archives report both lay people and ‘expert priests’ being repeatedly commissioned to perform rituals to protect the town from bad weather throughout the sixteenth century, while Basque friar Martín de Castañega asserted in 1529 that:

The conjurers and their conjurations of clouds and tempests are so public in this kingdom that there is no town that doesn’t have one on the public payroll and a sentry-box in the bell tower or some other high place so the conjurer can be closer to the clouds and the devils. This error is so shameless that they offer to ward off all hailstorms for that year . . . ²⁴

Similar enthusiasm fuelled the widespread commissioning of conjurors (which could include the versatile lay practitioners known as saludadores) to eliminate pests through mock trials and exorcisms, with Castañega condemning ‘feigned excommunication against the locust and other similar reasonless creatures’.²⁵ It also seems likely that, as in other parts of Europe, these conjuration rites were not always dramatic public spectacles commissioned by urban councils but could be more private events organized by smaller groups and even individual farmers, as implied in Ciruelo’s complaint that in sixteenth-century Castile:

Just as the uneducated individuals place confidence in the exorcists of thunderstorms in order to protect their crops from the hail which falls from the clouds in the air, in the same manner they call upon vain men who say they know magic art and have the power to expel locusts, vine grubs and other pests which are engendered in the earth and cause great damage to wheatfields, vineyards, and orchards. There they gnaw and consume everything. Running to these imposters, the illiterate give them money to visit their land each year and enact ceremonies over their territory using both objects and words.

The enduring popularity of these rituals in the Basque region, is suggested by the evidence that as late as the twentieth century both priests and lay people ‘were believed to possess the power to raise, quell and otherwise manipulate the weather, having powers over storms, thunder, hail, rain and wind.’²⁶ Caro Baroja reports that in 1936 a Basque newspaper printed an article alleging that more than sixty years previously ‘when a storm was seen coming from the heights of Aitzgorri’ some residents of Orendain

used to climb a mound, equipped with a small branch of walnut sprinkled with holy water and saying as a sort of spell the words ‘break over Murumendi, stop on Aralar and spend yourself on Gorritimendi’ made the storm follow its route without breaking over Orendain . . . ’ Within the same period of time [continues Caro Baroja], similar reports were collected in other parts of the Gipuzkoan Goierri about conjurers from more recent times.

With regard to female agency there is less evidence. But it is notable that the lay nuns or seroras who performed a range of religious duties in many Basque parishes in the early modern period did have a ritual role in this respect, with Veyrin stating that the seroras’ traditional obligations included ‘ring[ing] the [church] bells, not only for the services, but also to keep storms at bay’; and Roslyn Frank that the serora rings the church bell ‘when needed for ritual purposes and to conjure storms’.²⁷

On the basis of these perspectives it is reasonable to assume that many, if not all, of the suspects involved in the Basque witch trials would have been familiar with, and perhaps even participated in, crop-protecting conjurations performed by priests or lay specialists in either public or private spheres. As a consequence it is also reasonable to assume that they drew on this knowledge or experience when creating their crop-maleficium accounts. Indeed, this matrix of raw material may have been particularly accessible to the suspects’ fiction-making minds because it was morally and spiritually ambiguous. As we shall revisit many times in this book, in the early modern period the Catholic and Counter Reformations saw the Basque Church increase its efforts to condemn and eradicate any religious beliefs and practices that diverted from officially sanctioned doctrine or liturgy. With regard to witchcraft, the language and ideology surrounding this condemnation is particularly relevant. Unorthodox beliefs and practices were frequently criticized as foolish or simple-minded, with this view being encouraged by the observation that they proliferated among the uneducated majority. But they were also criticized on the rather more serious grounds that they lay under the Devil’s jurisdiction and were used by him as a snare through which to trap unsuspecting Christians and lure them away from the true faith. By this logic, those who were attached to an unsanctioned or superstitious belief or ritual often found themselves in the rather incongruous position of committing a simple-minded error rooted in naivety or lack of education and – simultaneously – making implicit alliance with the embodiment of evil whose whole purpose was to overthrow God and destroy the Holy Catholic Church.

Weather and crop-related conjurations fell firmly into the category of unorthodoxy. While such practices often provided a successful and popular addition to the priest’s ritual arsenal, for the Church, the fact that they involved commanding phenomena to behave according to the practitioner’s will – even if the command was made in God’s name – brought them a little too close to the practices of the magical practitioner and, by implication, the Devil. At times, this demonic link was merely adjectival, as in Castañega’s assertion that ‘anyone with normal intelligence can recognise these acts [of crop conjuration] are vain, evil, superstitious and diabolical.’ But at other times it was more direct and overt, with Ciruelo warning that crop conjurors were ‘ministers of the devil’ who ‘perform their offices by his aid’ and that ‘good religious priests should not perform such ceremonies, for they carry a high degree of suspicion of diabolical superstition. The priests should guard themselves from performing so evil a thing, for in thinking to serve God, they would serve the Devil.’ Indeed, Ciruelo then goes even further to argue that ‘those who call upon these exorcists for protection and freedom from bad storms [also] sin, for they seek the favour of the Devil, God’s enemy.’²⁸ With regard to our witch suspects we cannot know how prescient these ecclesiastical scruples may have been, for individual perspectives on these matters are likely to have been heavily dependent on the attitudes of local priests. Those who lived in remote communities with conjuration-friendly clerics are likely to have seen no fault in them. But those in less distant or more orthodox communities may well have absorbed some of the misgivings that men like Castañega and Ciruelo had expressed for many decades prior to the witch-craze. In the latter case, when suspects unconsciously accessed personal experience to flesh out their accounts of crop-maleficium, pre-existent associations between conjuration and the Devil would have rendered crop-conjuring rituals particularly accessible, by association, to the fiction-making mind.

Crop-Maleficium and Transference

The process through which crop conjuration was drawn into accounts of crop-maleficium may have been further facilitated by beliefs surrounding magical transference. A fundamental concept in magical thought worldwide, transference reflected the belief that the magical practitioner does not achieve his desired ends by either destroying or creating phenomena – but by transferring them to or from another place. In the context of agrarian magical practice this means that crops were not protected because bad weather or pests were eliminated, but because they were merely diverted elsewhere; with these beliefs reflecting the easily observable fact that when a rain cloud or host of locusts moves away from one region it does not dissipate but moves over the skyline to another valley or village.

When applied to conjuration, this principle of transference made crop-protecting rites inherently ambiguous. When an individual farmer, village or town commissioned a specialist to perform crop conjurations they were often, in effect, asking him to divert unwanted weather or pests away from their own crops and towards those of someone else. Hardly surprisingly this belief matrix promoted discord, for when storm clouds appeared above the horizon it was all too easy to deduce that a neighbouring community had hired a conjuror to divert the storm in the direction of your crops to protect their own. The same principle applied, in reverse, with regard to fertility, in the sense that it was all too easy to conclude that a harvest had failed because its goodness had been drawn or stolen by a conjuror employed to enhance the harvests of his client. In this sense, the very act that made the conjuror heroic to one group of people made him an enemy to the other. When these rites were commissioned simultaneously by multiple communities they could quickly become adversarial, with conjurors from neighbouring villages or regions confronting each other to avoid or benefit from a range of crop-related agents and resources.²⁹ Some accounts from northern Italy and central and eastern Europe demonstrate that these battles for fertility could escalate; with groups of conjurors claiming to pit themselves against others in combative rituals that were, to all extents and purposes, a form of magical war.³⁰

At first glance, these perspectives on magical transference do not have any relevance for the practice of crop-maleficium as it emerged in demonologically stereotypical confessions such as the Basque. As argued thus far, although the conjuror’s transferral of bad weather or pests to someone else’s crops could cause harm, this harm was merely collateral damage brought about by his attempts to help his client or community; while the crop damage performed by the witch, being motivated by revenge or pure maliciousness, was not mitigated by any benign intent. But if we examine the trial records and related sources in more depth we find that this motivational distinction becomes less clear. In the first instance, crop conjurors often displayed the self-interest and even maliciousness of the classic witch. It is unlikely that Castilian pest-exorcists would have performed their rituals if people did not ‘give them money’, while some vivid contemporary examples from central and eastern Europe demonstrate that crop conjurors could be motivated by desires for self-aggrandizement or revenge.³¹ Equally pertinent is the fact that, like witches, conjurors could find their crop-protecting rites bringing them into close contact with demons or the Devil. To date, we have rather simplistically presented adversarial crop conjuration as magical battles between human conjurors but in many cases the conflict was more ontologically complex than this. The popular belief that demons or folk spirits could be responsible for crop failure and bad weather fuelled the corresponding conviction that when conjurors commanded storms or pests to leave a region, they did not just command the natural phenomenon itself but also the devils or folk demons that created or controlled it. Ciruelo, for example, complains that:

Necromancers also make people believe that in these threatening storms the devils come, so that it is necessary to exorcise them from above their cities and villages and territories. For such purposes, they have ordained certain ceremonies of exorcism; they say that with these they can cause the devils and their storms to flee and they can compel them to eject their hail and hailstones in another place – wherever the exorcists desire.³²

As a consequence, conjurors who engaged in adversarial rituals often maintained that their combatants were acting in allegiance with these crop-damaging demons or, taking the accusation even further, that this allegiance gave the rival sorcerers pseudo-demonic status. Crop-protecting specialists from Italy, Livonia and Hungary, for example, all asserted that the conjurors who fought alongside enemy demons were not just neutral magical practitioners but ‘evil sorcerers’, ‘warlocks’ or ‘witches’.³³ The crop conjuror’s resemblance to the witch is further confirmed by the evidence that he or she often found themselves in courts of law on charges of maleficium, with many of our most detailed and important accounts of contemporary crop-conjuring practices coming from trials for witchcraft and sorcery.

While these findings are clear, however, bringing them to bear on stereotypically demonological witch records is difficult. With some notable exceptions, the close relationship between the crop-protecting conjuror and the witch emerges primarily in witchcraft trials from central and eastern Europe where, being relatively unfamiliar with demonological texts, interrogators were less motivated to superimpose elite witchcraft stereotypes onto confessions and therefore more likely to elicit undistorted declarations from popular magical practitioners, such as crop conjurors, who may have found themselves accused of witchcraft. Testimonies from western European trials, which were moulded by interrogators and communities better-schooled in demonological theory, are considered less useful in this context. But if we examine some of these western European sources more closely they prove to be more enlightening than might be expected. The point is demonstrated most effectively by turning to the witch trial records produced in the north-eastern French duchy of Lorraine in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Case of Lorraine

Like their Basque counterparts, the Lorraine suspects produced confessions that strongly emphasized crop-maleficium, with Robin Briggs (the foremost authority on the material) going so far as to state that in this region it was widely believed that ‘the purpose of the sabbat was to destroy the crops’. But when the suspects’ testimonies are examined in more depth we find that the motivations underpinning the crime are more complex than they might at first appear. The first point of interest is that although most suspects self-identified as witches who attended the sabbath and performed crop-maleficium, the majority maintained that they did not destroy the crops willingly but under pressure from the Devil and his allies, who punished them if they refused to comply. This resistance appears to have been primarily rooted in the fear that the activity would damage the suspects’ own crops and thereby harm themselves or their family, with Claudette Delat confessing that ‘on one recent occasion she had begged her master not to have the hail fall on the grain, because she was poor and feared that she would go hungry’; and Marie Alexey of Colroy that she ‘deliberately spilt a pot of something they [the witches] were going to use to make hail and spoil the fruit, because she had small children and feared they would go hungry.’ This concern could be extended beyond immediate family to the wider community, with Claudon Martin (1625) maintaining that ‘she herself had been beaten when unwilling to agree to such actions [that is, crop-maleficium] because of the hardship they would bring to her children and the poor’.³⁴

In itself a reluctance to harm crops, even when linked to the desire to protect the wider community, is not immediately redolent of crop-protecting conjuration – but it becomes more so when we consider that the Lorraine witch suspects did not only express their reluctance by trying to prevent crop-maleficium but also by attempting to mitigate its damage by directing storms or poisons to fall on places where they might have a less detrimental effect. In these cases direct parallels with defensive crop conjuration emerge. When Marion le Masson ‘opposed a plan to spoil the crops, on the grounds that it would cause great misery to the poor’ and proposed ‘instead to damage the belltower at St Dié’, she was surely behaving little differently from the weather conjuror who protected his community’s crops by diverting storms away from his client’s lands to somewhere else. Distinctions fade even faster in cases where this transference appears to have been performed to client demand, as in Mathiotte Claude’s claim that ‘at the prayer of some who feared they would be in need they often destroyed only one kind’ of crop.³⁵

The similarities between the transference activities of the Lorraine witch suspect and those of the crop conjuror are reinforced by the identity of their combatants. The witch records reveal that in their attempts to mitigate the effects of crop-maleficium, the suspects were not just battling against the Devil and his demons but also against a subcategory of witch. As Briggs observes, the inhabitants of Lorraine shared the ‘common idea that the sabbat was dominated by a group of rich witches, who sat higher and enjoyed the favour of the devil, while the poor were marginalized.’ Unlike their poverty-stricken counterparts, these rich witches applauded the Devil’s crop-damaging activity because it brought them personal gain, and to this end they ‘sat the top table, and . . . demanded that they should spoil the crops’ in order to ‘create a dearth, in which they could sell their grain for high prices’ and ‘make usurious loans and ultimately acquire land from those in difficulties.’³⁶ Through this lens, in attempting to mitigate the crop-destroying impulses of the Devil the Lorraine witch suspects (who almost always self-identified as ‘poor’) were simultaneously curtailing the impulses of rival witches who were in allegiance with him. In protecting their communities against this magical aggression they were acting no differently from crop-protecting magicians who defended their clients’ crops against the aggression of rival conjurors; with the only real difference being that, in this case, the human enemy that allied themselves with the crop-harming Devil was not believed to be from another village or valley but from another socioeconomic group.

Although the witch trial records from Lorraine provide us with some particularly detailed examples, similar mechanisms can be detected in stereotypically demonological trials from other parts of western Europe, with particularly strong correspondences emerging in relation to the regions of Burgundy, Swabian Austria and Trier. With regard to Burgundy, transference practices are clearly highlighted in Boguet’s assertion that ‘it is said that witches with the help of their Master, strip the fruit from one field and cause it to be transferred to another’. Claims that crops were destroyed under coercion and in the context of disputes between the rich and the poor are also reported, with Boguet noting that poor witches ‘contend at the Sabbat with those who are rich’ and that ‘when the rich wished to cause hail, the poor opposed them’. Similarly, with regard to Swabian Austria and Trier, Dillinger notes that ‘conflict between rich and poor witches over weather magic was a seminal moment in the Sabbath narratives’ and that when commanded to perform maleficium witches ‘often obeyed only hesitantly or after being beaten by their leaders or the Devil.’³⁷ In all of these cases, from Lorraine to Swabian Austria, the evidence is not sufficient to assert that the witch suspects functioned as crop conjurors of the kind so clearly visible in some eastern European cases, but it is sufficient to suggest that when pressed to create accounts of crop-maleficium, these European suspects drew on knowledge and experience of crop-conjuring rituals to flesh out their accounts.

Crop Conjuration in the Basque Trials

How are these wider perspectives on magical transference and their relation to crop-maleficium relevant to our Basque case? It is noteworthy that like their European counterparts, Basque conjurors worked with the principle of transference. We have already seen earlier in this chapter that the twentieth-century sorcerer from Orendain did not protect his home by merely diverting rain clouds away from his village but through specifically commanding them to ‘stop on Aralar’ and ‘break over Murumendi’.³⁸ That transference of this kind was performed in the early modern period, and in an overtly adversarial context, is confirmed by Castañega’s observation that local weather conjurors

offer to ward off all hailstorms for that year, and they persist and bet on it with other neighbouring conjurers (and these many times are the village priests). At the time of the spells they say and boast that they play with the clouds as with a ball, and predict which sorcerer they will throw the storm to . . . [they also] set limits within which spells will work, and they procure to cast the clouds out of their district into their neighbor’s or into another designated place.

Castañega’s earlier observation that in order to facilitate this task Basque towns placed a ‘sentry-box in the bell tower or some other high place so the conjurer can be closer to the clouds and the devils [my italics]’ is also indicative that as in other parts of Europe, the battles between the Basque conjurors simultaneously involved interactions with demons. Similarly, the fact that conjurors were on the ‘public payroll’; boasted about playing ‘with the clouds as with a ball’; and bet on the outcomes of their battles, suggests that their altruism was seasoned with desires for self-aggrandisement and financial gain. Meanwhile, a Souletin anecdote collected by anthropologist Sandra Ott suggests that as late as the twentieth century some Basques still believed that weather conjuration could be used by priests as a form of revenge. Ott was told that in the 1930s and 40s, two neighbours from the village of Sainte-Engrâce

planned to harvest their maize on the Sabbath. In keeping with convention one of the men sought the priest’s permission before doing so; but his neighbour did not. Etcheverry [the local priest] is said to have been very cross about his disobedience. On Monday torrential rains fell for twenty-four hours and the man’s crop was ruined. The priest had used his indarra [life force] to punish the man by inducing the heavy rains, which miraculously did not damage other people’s fields. Etcheverry is quoted as having reminded his hapless parishioner that ‘I did my duty but you failed to do yours. Consequently you have suffered a great loss’.³⁹

Taken as a whole this evidence clearly suggests that many of the suspects involved in the Basque witch-craze would have walked into their interrogation chambers with knowledge, or even experience, of adversarial and transference-based crop-conjuring traditions. But is there any indication that they mined this material when creating their accounts of crop-maleficium? While the Basque accounts do not display the subtlety of motivational detail that, in the Lorraine records, are so evocative of these traditions, scattered references do suggest that suspects’ reasons for ruining the crops may have been a little more complex than revenge or random malevolence. If we revisit the passage from the Joint Sentence cited earlier, we can observe that the suspects’ attempts to protect their own crops from the damaging effects of the Devil’s maleficium clearly evoke the mitigation motive outlined in those Lorraine cases where witch suspects attempt to protect their own crops, on which they and their families depend, by diverting the hailstorms raised by the Devil and his allies to somewhere else. The text states that

the first to begin is the Devil, who with his left hand scatters powders behind him, always turning on his left hand and saying ‘powders, powders, ruin everything,’ or ‘ruin half,’ depending on the damage he wants to inflict, and all the old witches scatter them and say the same thing as the Devil, and each of them says “unless it is mine,” [or possibly ‘may mine be safe’] which is why their estates are in better condition than everyone else’s . . .

De Lancre’s account of crop-maleficium, as performed by the Spanish witch, contains a variant of this chant that suggests that this self-interested transference was sometimes furthered collectively.

Sometimes they [the witches] throw these powders on fruits on very windy days to produce hail. And the Devil accompanies them, appearing as a worker, and when he throws these powders they say: ‘Poluos Poluos, Pierda se tado Queden los nuestros, y abrasense otros [“Powders, powders, help our people and dismiss others”]’.⁴⁰

If we interpret the term ‘our people’ as a reference to a sub-group within a society engaged in crop-defending rites as opposed to a group of witches performing crop-maleficium under the command of the Devil; and if we interpret the request to ‘dismiss others’ as that sub-group’s awareness of the inevitable collateral damage caused by magical transference (as opposed to a simplistic expression of the malevolent or vengeful desire to destroy) then we find ourselves with a fairly straightforward template for adversarial crop conjuration as identified in Lorraine.

It could be countered that although this narrative correspondence is interesting, the Basque accounts do not exhibit the rationales that drove the Lorraine conjurations. There is no evidence that the crop-transferring rituals described by the Basque witches evolved out of tensions between rich and poor, as in Lorraine and other regions. While distinctions in wealth and status do indeed emerge in the sabbath arena – with Spanish witch María de Endara claiming that the witches ‘were divided into two rings, the rich in one and the poor in the other’, and de Lancre that Labourdin witches saw ‘people of quality there’ – these references are scattered and seemingly unrelated to societal tensions.⁴¹ While there is no obvious answer here, it must be noted that in early modern populations, the rich-poor divide was not the only social dissonance that could generate conflicts around land. Rural Basques had allegiance to community on many different levels. Most directly, they identified themselves with the baserri (the farmstead that housed the immediate and extended family) and beyond this, with the auzo or hamlet in which the farmhouse was located and beyond this, the wider community of the local village. Village identity, in turn, extended into an affiliation with a village group (that gathered together to share resources, such as pasture land) and beyond that to the valley in which it was situated, separated from others by mountain passes and protective of its unique traditions, legends and dialect.⁴² These geographic identities were also informed by more social, occupational and ideological distinctions, with people differentiated by membership of local institutions and groups such as town councils, guilds (designed to regulate and protect certain trades and livelihoods) and religious confraternities (dedicated to a particular devotion or saint). With regard to our crop-maleficium passages it is notable that in a difficult environment where people competed for limited resources, any one of these allegiances could have provoked interregional or intercommunity tensions. Both villages and the sub-groups within them could easily find themselves in conflict with each other, with Salazar attributing false accusations of witchcraft to ‘the rivalries and clashes so rife in small villages’. More importantly, in a period where survival depended on the strength of a harvest or access to good pasture, these clashes could frequently revolve around land, with Veyrin noting that as late as the twentieth century groups of Basque villagers ‘often had to defend themselves against the envy of neighbours [with fields and pastures] less favoured by nature’. Also significant here, given that the Church was one of the greatest landowners in Spain and that many villages were situated on monastic estates, is that land-based conflicts would also have emerged between communities and the religious authorities. The village of Zugarramurdi, for example, which was located on the estate of the Premonstratensian Abbey at nearby Urdax, had engaged in disputes over land rights with the monastery since at least the early-fifteenth century, with Henningsen noting that in 1443 it ‘had obtained the usufruct of the common land and had been released from its villeinage obligations against an annual monetary charge’.⁴³ Any of the villagers involved in any of these land-based conflicts – whether fought against neighbours, auzos, villages, valleys, guilds or local monasteries – could have used crop-protecting conjurations to further their ends. And any of these conjurations performed on behalf of any of these sub-groups could have been seen as a protective act involving transference magic that was performed ‘to help our people’ through ‘dismissing others’. In an interrogatorial context, memories of these acts could all too easily have become raw material for false confessions about crop-maleficium.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Bloodletting Bruja

Alongside the destruction of crops, the other form of magical harm most commonly attributed to the Basque witch was that of causing human sickness or death by directly targeting the physical body. The commonest forms of this ‘body-maleficium’, as we can term it here, involved putting poison into food, applying poison externally to the victim’s body or creeping into houses by night, often in the form of an animal, to attack and kill children through beating, strangulation, suffocation, poison or vampirism. Thus, we find a suspect like María de Zozaya putting toxic powders in an ‘apple via its stalk in a very delicate little hole’ before giving it to her neighbour who ‘ate the apple and fell ill’; or creeping into a house under cover of darkness to remove a boy from his cradle where she ‘unwrapped him and sucked through his nipples and through his brain’.¹

In depicting body-maleficium the Basque records are conventional. In all parts of medieval and early modern Europe the most common crime attributed to the witch was that of physically harming or killing children or adults, and all the methods used by the Basque witches can also be found represented in trial records elsewhere in the continent. But despite these general correspondences, in a Europe-wide context the Basque records are unusual in three respects. Firstly, they are notable because the majority of body-maleficium attacks relate to child victims and vampirism. Although this emphasis is found in other parts of Europe – emerging particularly strongly in a cluster of trials that took place in central Italy between 1428 and 1501 and also in a number of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Pyrenean cases – it seldom achieves the prominence attained in the Basque witch-craze.² Secondly, this emphasis is reinforced by the fact that – to my knowledge – the Basque records contain the most chillingly graphic accounts of infanticidal vampirism found in any European trial in the witch-hunting period. The Joint Sentence, for example, states that witches

kill many children by sucking them through their anus or genitals and on other occasions by pricking them with pins and punching holes in their temples or on the top of their head and on their sides and other parts of their body, and sucking through these wounds they draw out their blood and eat it. And when they suck them through their anus or genitals they do not prick them with needles, instead they squeeze with their hands and suck very hard, and since children are tender this is enough to bleed them, from which many of them die and others are left withered and ill for a long time.³

Thirdly, the Basque records are notable with respect to distribution. While the accounts of crop-maleficium discussed in the last chapter are distributed relatively evenly through the French- and Spanish-Basque records, with regards to body-maleficium the overwhelming majority of cases are found in the Spanish records and in particular the records relating to suspects who were condemned at the Logroño auto de fé.

Cocreation: Interrogators, Witnesses, Suspects

We can assume that the interrogators were heavily involved in the creation of the body-maleficium accounts. There was ample demonological precedent, with the witch’s ability to kill or physically harm members of her community being emphasized by all the demonological authorities referenced by de Lancre in the Tableau. Meanwhile, although we do not know whether Valle and Becerra were exposed to demonological texts, their convictions are likely to have been encouraged by the relatively frequent emergence of the crime from the mid-fifteenth century onwards in the earlier inquisitorial records and trials they examined to inform themselves about witchcraft. That Valle and Becerra urged suspects to identify motives and names of victims and accomplices is suggested by their report that a suspect ‘mentioned up to nine children who she had killed, naming them by their names, declaring the reasons that she had and the people who helped her’.⁴

But while the interrogators encouraged suspects to talk about body-maleficium, it is also clear the theme did not originate in the prosecutorial mind alone. Historians of European witchcraft have demonstrated that, as with crop-maleficium, prosecutions for body-maleficium typically emerged out of an official response to popular concerns; although in these cases accusations were more commonly levelled against specific witches as opposed to witches in general. The accusations followed a common pattern, termed here the ‘neighbourhood-vengeance template’. An individual had an accident, became sick or died and the misfortune was attributed to maleficium, with such attributions being particularly common where there was no obvious rational or natural cause for the misfortune. The victim or their family then claimed that the maleficium was an act of vengeance performed by a neighbour with whom they were in conflict or who had a previous reputation for witchcraft. While many such witchcraft accusations were resolved outside the law, in cases where they were (often for partisan reasons) picked up by the secular or ecclesiastical authorities they then became formal witchcraft prosecutions and proceeded through the courts. While we have no extant witness statements, evidence of this neighbourhood-vengeance template can be identified in the Basque case. The Zugarramurdi suspects frequently confessed that they had performed body-maleficium as an act of revenge because the victim or (if it was a child) its parents had offended them in some way, such as accusing them of stealing bread from a neighbour’s oven or allowing their pigs to eat the ‘many apples she [the suspect] had gathered together to make cider’. If we invert these claims we can detect the accusation dynamics that were likely to have preceded them. For example, in reference to the suspect named Graciana de Barrenechea the Joint Sentence states that

a certain person who she [Graciana] named quarrelled with her and mistreated her for having stolen some cabbages from his/her garden and, having complained to the Devil she asked him for revenge to kill a son of his/hers. And having been granted it she went in his company and his servants opened the door for her and she took the boy from a cradle and she pricked, sucked and suffocated him in the manner stated, and the next day there was uproar and whole place came together to see how the child had been killed by witches.⁵

Here, we can speculate that a mother woke to find her child dead in its cradle and, in the throes of grief, desperately reached out for an explanation. Then or at a later date she remembered a recent quarrel over stolen cabbages with Graciana – a woman who already had a reputation as a witch – and became convinced that the neighbour’s vengeful malice was the cause of her child’s death. The community supported her diagnosis and she formally accused the woman, making a witness statement to this effect. When Graciana was interrogated this statement was used to frame leading questions until the witness’s assertion that ‘she killed my child because we quarrelled over some cabbages’ became Graciana’s confession that ‘I killed her child because we quarrelled over some cabbages’. While it seems disproportionate for a villager to make accusations that could end in execution because a neighbour had stolen a few vegetables, these seemingly trivial accusations had deep roots – representing the profound interpersonal tensions that could develop in tight-knit village communities where people depended upon each other for survival, and giving voice to the pressing emotional imperative to find scapegoats to alleviate the intense suffering generated by the hardships of early modern peasant life. These perspectives also help to explain why the Basque accounts of body-maleficium are disproportionately concentrated in the Spanish records relating to the 1610 Logroño auto de fé. The defendants condemned at this event were accused early in the prosecutions before the witch hysteria had escalated to the level where standard accusation dynamics had broken down and prosecutorial attention had swivelled from neighbourhood squabbles to grand demonological crimes such as attendance at the sabbath and worship of the Devil. Through this lens, the absence of body-maleficium in the French records also eflects the fact that by the time de Lancre had arrived in the region the witch-craze was already well under way.⁶

It could be argued that in establishing both interrogatorial and witness involvement in the body-maleficium passages we could now consider this subject closed. As described above in relation to the ‘stolen cabbages’ case, all that would have been needed from a suspect like Graciana to turn authority–community collusion into confessions for body-maleficium would have been a weary ‘yes’ to the charges levelled against her. But there is evidence that suspect response may have been a little more proactive than this. That María de Yriarte provided unsolicited information is clearly indicated in the Joint Sentence’s assertion that, after listing the people who had helped her kill nine children, she then ‘without being asked to do so . . . attempted to exculpate her aforementioned mother Graciana de Barrenechea and her sister Estevania’ by saying they had not been present at the killings. Textual idiosyncrasies are also suggestive. Graciana’s claim that the Devil told the witches to ‘suck hard and swallow [their victims’ blood] for it will do you good’ is certainly not stereotypical. Similarly, it is hard to credit either interrogators or witnesses with Miguel de Goiburu’s claim that he and his fellow witches tossed a victim’s body ‘to each other as though they were playing the game of the cantharus’. The fact that the following cursing charm (attributed to suspects sentenced at the auto de fé) was reported in ‘garbled Spanish mixed with Basque’ also points to suspect-contribution, with de Lancre alleging that when the witches approach their sleeping victims ‘the Devil opens their mouths and the witch puts something on their tongue and says these words’:

Of the lethal waters,

Two billy-goats say, I apply you,

With which the powders of [Sagas],

And you shall die of galloping consumption.⁷

That suspects may have been actively contributing to their body-maleficium accounts, as opposed to just reflecting back witness statements, is also suggested by the fact that after having seen the first batch of Zugarramurdi confessions, la Suprema sent a procedural instruction to the Logroño Tribunal that, as Henningsen notes, ‘concerned the interrogation of outside witnesses to the witches’ crimes; if the witches confessed to having murdered children or adults and taken their hearts out, witnesses should be sought to confirm that these crimes really had been committed [my italics].’⁸

Raw Materials: Folk Spirits

Taken together, this evidence suggests that however dramatic the allegations, suspects do appear to have made some contribution to their body-maleficium accounts. With regard to raw materials, we can assume that stereotypical narratives surrounding the crime, as generated both during and prior to the 1609–14 trials, were the dominating influence here. As we have seen, beliefs about the witches’ ability to cause physical harm to both adults and children had been circulating in the Basque regions for many years prior to 1609 and would have increased exponentially during the witch-craze. But examined in a little more detail, the texts also suggest that suspects may have simultaneously mined a more diverse range of belief and experience.

As with our analyses of crop-maleficium, we can begin with the folklore. The fact that so many Basque witches slipped into baserris under cover of darkness, often in animal form, to suffocate or suck the blood of infants strongly suggests that folk spirit matrices were implicated here. Since the classical period, commentators have recorded Europe-wide beliefs surrounding a broad category of largely malevolent folk spirit, closely linked to the dead, termed the ‘night-visiting demon’: with this umbrella term incorporating the German mahr, Slavonic mora, Romanian strigoi and classical strix.⁹ These demons typically crept into houses by night, sometimes in the guise of animals, to kill or harm victims as they slept through pinching, beating, suffocation or cannibalization (including the sucking of blood). While associated with both genders and a range of victims they were often identified as females who predated on infants. Like its crop-damaging equivalent, the night-visiting demon was driven by a range of ambiguous motives from intrinsic malevolence or greed (in the case of cannibalism and vampirism) to the rather more random, fatalistic fact that killing human beings was just the kind of thing that night-visiting demons did. Like its crop-damaging equivalent, the night-visiting demon was also associated with human agents – and particularly witches – from an early period. From at least the classical era women with supernatural powers or status were believed to have the capacity to behave like, or even directly transform themselves into, beings like the strix. This conflation was further intensified by the evidence that as the medieval period progressed, night-visiting demons became increasingly amalgamated with the figure of the witch. In the Spanish case this relationship is strongly supported by the etymology. Fabio Campagne demonstrates that the Spanish term for witch – bruja – is used interchangeably with various night-visiting folk demons in Iberian texts from the medieval through to the early modern period, with the earliest known reference being found in a late-thirteenth century text by Catalonian missionary Ramón Martín, in which the term ‘bruja’ is ‘used with the meaning of sucubo’, with a semantic closeness that ‘is indisputable to the more widely known term incubo, whose assimilation to the Nightmare and the spirits of the mahr-type appears clearly testified since the eight century’.¹⁰

These perspectives are clearly relevant to the Basque case. Although we have little evidence from the early modern period itself, the fact that later folklorists were able to collect a wide selection of Basque prayers and charms designed to protect sleepers from a range of night-visiting demons (such as the Inguma and Mahuma) strongly points to the existence of older webs of belief.¹¹ We also find evidence of conflation with the witch figure. On an etymological level, the Euskaran term sorgin, which appears as a synonym for bruja from the late-fifteenth century onwards, is also used in a number of medieval and early modern texts to refer to non-human entities, with this relationship being echoed in Barandiarán’s speculation that ‘in its primitive sense, Sorguiñ seems to be a nocturnal spirit that frequently lives in caves’ and ‘[is also] a generic name designating certain spirits, to which the people attribute different supernatural functions.’ This link was still made in the twentieth century, with Barandiarán also stating that ‘according to a report from 1942, there was in the Sara region a beggar called Mari-Terexa, [who was] considered by everybody a sorgin [witch]. But she was also called Inguma’; the spirit that ‘quita la respiración’.¹²

Coming to the trial records, although the lack of folkloric reference means that (as with crop-damaging matrices) we have no direct evidence that the Basque suspects or witnesses quarried these folk demon beliefs to flesh out their accounts of body-maleficium, the imagery and wider narrative dynamics are suggestive. There is a marked synonymy between the statement in the Joint Sentence that a suspect ‘suffocated the aforementioned child by squeezing hard on the neck with her hands until she killed her’ and later references to the Inguma that, as Barandiarán notes, ‘squeezes the throat’ of its victims to suffocate them. In the same witch record, the observation that a ‘girl’s whole body was lacerated and had black marks where she had been sucked and bitten’ by witches echoes the later folk belief that ‘any hematoma – the blue-black mark left on the skin that is associated with a bruise – was [believed to be] caused by Mahuma having pinched the person’.¹³ The Basque witch also resembled this spirit genus on a motivational level. In alleging that the suspects performed their body-maleficium ‘to avenge their feuds’, Valle evokes the emotional dynamics of the conventional neighbourhood-vengeance template. But in maintaining that they also performed it ‘at the instigation of the Devil’, he points in a different direction. In these cases, the suspects’ attacks have the random, indiscriminately malevolent and inherently fatalistic timbre of the folk demon assault.¹⁴ There is no other logic to María Presona’s claim that ‘the Devil persuaded her and María Joan to kill several children [my italics]’ and Miguel de Goiburu’s admission that when he sucked his niece ‘to death’ he did ‘not do it through any enmity with his aforementioned sister but to please the Devil who ordered him to do it’. Nor to the fact that, as Henningsen observes, María de Zozaya ‘had a private motive for revenge in only two out of the eight bewitchings to which she confessed [my italics].’¹⁵ As with crop-maleficium, the lack of folkloric reference makes it hard to ascertain how far these correspondences represent the direct mining of beliefs about night-visiting demons and how far they represent the mining of beliefs about night-visiting demons that had become subsumed over the centuries into the figure of the Basque witch. But they do suggest that a historical relationship between these two belief complexes played a role in suspect contribution to the body-maleficium passages.

The Basque Sorrow

With some adaptation, this thesis could also begin to explain the Basque witch’s predilection for killing her infant victims through vampirism. Although emerging with unusual force in the 1609–14 witch-craze, this activity was strongly characteristic of the Spanish witch from an early period, with Campagne arguing that the Spanish bruja was ‘almost exclusively associated with the murder of newborn babies’ and that ‘in the majority of cases, they killed children by sucking their blood.’ Even as late as the eighteenth century popular healers in Madrid claimed to specialise in curing children ‘chupados por las brujas [sucked by witches]’. Indeed, this cultural emphasis may have impacted on Spain’s colonies, with Hugo Nutini arguing that trans-Atlantic propagation may explain why, as recently as the twentieth century, witchcraft ‘accounts for the majority of infant deaths before the age of one’ in some parts of Hispanic Mexico. This emphasis in turn was clearly linked to beliefs surrounding the vampiric appetites of the night-visiting demon, with specific links between brujas, night-visiting demons, infanticide and vampirism being made in Iberian texts from the early fourteenth century. Campagne notes that in the surviving manuscript versions of a treatise on superstition written by Spanish priest Martín Pérez between 1312–17, the entity that creeps into houses to ‘chupan [suck] las criaturas’ is described variously as bruja or spirit, depending on the edition. Similarly, in 1434–7, Bishop Lope de Barrientos’ discussion of the bruja ‘reinforces our interpretation of the original sense of the word bruja: nocturnal demon that enters “por los resquiçios e agujeros de las casas . . . para chupar a los niños”.’ Indeed, with regard to the Basque regions it is notable that Campagne’s textual and etymological analyses do not only lead him to identify a link between night-visiting demons and Spanish witches – but also to hypothesize that this link was in fact seeded into the Hispanic mainland from the Pyrenean region. The Spanish bruja, Campagne speculates, was a specifically ‘Pyrenean avatar of the ancient figure of the malevolent demon of the night’ and that ‘everything points to the fact’ that ‘the archaic mythical complex, which is found at the heart of the figure of the Iberian witch, has its origins in the furthest northern part of the Peninsula, from where it spread to the rest of the region, even reaching, as we have seen, Portugal, the Canary Islands and Iberoamerica’.¹⁶

Whatever the truth of Campagne’s thesis, it is notable that if a belief in child-killing demons was going to gain cultural support anywhere, it would have done so among the Basques. As it emerged throughout Europe, the belief in infanticidal witches and demons was in large part a cultural response to the high child mortality rates that plagued the pre-modern era. In a period when up to a third of children died in their first year and ‘about 50 percent of early modern mortality occurred before the age of ten’ it would have been unusual for a mother not to have experienced the deaths of several children during her fertile years, with jaunty French proverbs like ‘The skipping Calfe, and wanton Lamb, are often kill’d before their damme’ masking deep cultural pain.¹⁷ Being able to blame these deaths on the nocturnal attacks of night-visiting demons and witches and being able, through counter-magic, to try and defend their living children against them, enabled women to feel less confused and powerless in the face of these traumatic events.

But even more relevant here is that in the Basque regions infant mortality had a particular sting. In the introduction to this book we noted that although Basques share common genetic factors with other European populations, their unique origins and cultural remoteness has meant that until recently they have enjoyed a high degree of genetic isolation. One of the genetically based characteristics of the Basque population is the fact that, along with some isolated Berber communities, it has the highest incidence of the rhesus negative blood type in the world, with mid-twentieth century analysis identifying twenty-nine percent of the population carrying the type (as opposed to – approximately – less than one percent in China, five percent in India and between eleven and eighteen percent elsewhere in Europe). While generally unproblematic this blood type can have devastating effects on fertility, causing a range of anemic conditions in the developing foetus which, at their most serious, can develop into hemolytic disease and result in high rates of miscarriage, stillbirth and death soon after birth or in early infancy.¹⁸ These levels of rhesus negativity mean that until the introduction of immunization in the mid-twentieth century, the Basque rate of infant mortality (including miscarriage and stillbirth) was considerably higher than the European average, with some authors even speculating that this self-limiting factor, historically perpetuated through endogamy, was one of the reasons that historically kept the Basque population levels down and prevented them from spreading out beyond the Pyrenees.¹⁹

The particular susceptibility to miscarriage and stillbirth associated with this condition lends an authenticity to the accusation, made in Ituren in 1525, that a witch had smeared a pregnant woman’s belly so that she ‘gave birth to the said child, dead’; and de Lancre’s corresponding observation nearly a century later that ‘with only one female witch in a large village you quickly see many children lost, many pregnant women lose their babies, so much great pain experienced by the poor creatures’. We can also hear echoes of miscarriage or premature delivery in witch-craze suspect Catalina de Porto’s vivid and detailed description of how she experienced intense labour pains before giving birth to several toads that she then cleaned and placed in a basket by the fire ‘as if they were children’; with the chilling realism of her account reinforced by her assertion that despite the preternatural nature of the delivery she ‘breastfed them [the toads], because the milk came as if from a normal birth.’²⁰ The symptomatology of rhesus negativity also adds realism to witness declarations, both before and during the Basque witch-craze, that their children had been specifically killed through vampirism. The hemolytic disease precipitated by this genetic condition is caused by insufficient or deficient red blood cells and as a consequence, suffering infants display the pale skin and breathing difficulties symptomatic of anemia. In the absence of any other explanation these physical signs could easily and logically be attributed to a lack of blood. Through this lens it is no surprise that beliefs surrounding demons of the night that could slip into houses and suffocate or suck the blood of infants as they lay sleeping, loomed particularly large in the mentality of the pre-modern Basques.

Infanticidal Vampirism: Zugarramurdi

While these perspectives suggest that Basque suspects are likely to have drawn on both witchcraft stereotypes and folk spirit beliefs to flesh out their accounts of body-maleficium, these may not have been the only raw materials available to them. Earlier in this chapter we observed that both vampiric and non-vampiric cases of body-maleficium were constellated in the confessions of suspects condemned at the Logrono auto de fé. But what we have not emphasized until now is that within this group of confessions the most vivid and detailed examples were found in testimonials from the village of Zugarramurdi. In this context, it is highly relevant that these texts emerged out of a very particular cultural microclimate that, if analysed in more depth, provides fresh insights into why the Basque suspects collaborated in the generation of their body-maleficium accounts and what kinds of belief and experience they may have accessed to cocreate them.

As stated in the last chapter, the Pyrenean village of Zugarramurdi was situated on the estate of the Premonstratensian monastery of San Salvador at nearby Urdax. Although the preceding centuries had seen the village gradually liberate itself from the constraints of full villeinage, the monastery – which was an open or ‘canonical’ order – ‘still had jurisdiction over both the secular and spiritual affairs’ of the villagers and as a corollary of this appointed its own monks to serve as Zugarramurdi’s parish priests. At the time of the witch-craze the incumbent was Urdax monk Fray Felipe de Zabaleta.²¹ Of relevance here with regard to our current analysis, is that these Premonstratensian monks were not only the first authority figures to respond to the witchcraft accusations when they emerged in the village in December 1608, but they were also the first authority figures to respond to them with visible zeal. When the initial group of suspects were accused by their neighbours of performing witchcraft they went straight to Zabaleta to plead their innocence. But rather than dismissing or minimizing the allegations, the priest appears to have pursued them with some aggression; with Juanes de Goiburu stating that ‘Felipe [de Zabaleta] placed a stole and certain relics on him and admonished him so that he would tell the truth’, and Juanes de Sansín that ‘the priest and other people threatened to tie them up with a rope and flog them if they did not confess it [witchcraft], and other threats that he mentions were made, and because of these they had confessed’. Wider involvement is also implicated in the report that Zabaleta was later paid 180 reales by the Inquisition for, among other things, helping ‘Juan de Yerro, the porter, with the imprisonment’ of further witchcraft suspects the following September.²² When news of the accusations reached the monastery’s abbot, Fray León de Araníbar, he appears to have responded in a similar way. Although concerned about the lack of judicial restraint and the dangers of false confession later in the witch-craze, in the winter of 1608–9 he was brimming with witch-hunting zeal. The evidence suggests that it was Araníbar who first reported the Zugarramurdi accusations to the Tribunal at Logroño. He later gave Valle a ‘warm welcome’ when he arrived in Urdax on the first leg of his 1609 visitation and informed him about how ‘efficiently’ the witches were being prosecuted over the border in Labourd. After the clearly impressed Valle had appointed him to the post of Inquisition commissioner for the Baztán Valley, Araníbar then began to pursue witches in the wider region, assiduously collecting ‘more witch confessions than all the other commissioners together.’ The abbot’s emotional engagement in the reality of witchcraft is evident in his argument, in a letter in October 1610, that ‘it would be preferable for the people to stab to death those who took the children to the sabbath, for otherwise the whole region would go to ruin’; and in his admission, quoted in Chapter Two, that he was moved to ‘weep blood’ when he saw ‘parents crying to Heaven for aid.’ Araníbar’s second-in-command – Fray José de Elizondo – was similarly committed, with the abbot emphasizing in a letter to Valle that the ‘zeal with which he [Elizondo] is applying himself to the case, both in his preaching and as confessor, makes him deserve every possible reward with which Your Eminence can recompense him.’²³

This monasterial zeal may also have been sharpened by more worldly factors. As stated in the last chapter, since at least the early-fifteenth century the villagers of Zugarramurdi had ‘filed many suits to win freedom from the monastery’, with a significant case being won less than thirty years before the witch-craze, in 1580. As Mikel Azurmendi has recently emphasized, it is highly coincidental that most of the families involved in pursuing this case – which further annexed Zugarramurdi’s ‘houses, fields, mill and heavy farm tools, leaving the monastery poorer than before’ – were the very same families that were pursued as witches in 1608–9. Azurmendi states that

the two Goiburu families accused of witchcraft [in 1608–9] overlap fatally with the leaders who, thirty years before during Zugarramurdi’s annexation, led ‘the baçarre and meeting that took place on 18 February 1580’. Our documentalist [Idoate] quotes 31 villagers, notably Juanes and Miguel Goiburu ‘exercising as jurados,’ and the neighbours Tellechea, Barrechenea, Subildegui, Arburu, Borda, Echegui, Goyeneche, Marisancena, Navarrecorena, Martinena, Bizcar, all of them punished by the Auto de fe of Logroño.²⁴

Even more telling is the finding that Miguel de Goiburu – one of the two men listed as legal officials (‘jurados’) at this seminal meeting – did not only emerge as a prominent suspect in the later witchcraft prosecutions but was also accused of being an official (the ‘king of the sabbath’) at the Zugarramurdi akelarre. Given these facts, we can support Azurmendi’s speculation that the monks’ enthusiasm to pursue the 1608–9 witchcraft accusations was fuelled by the residual resentments and ongoing tensions generated by these prior challenges to monasterial authority. With regard to the Zugarramurdi context as a whole, we can also conclude that although the early confessions elicited by Zabaleta and his fellow canons – if committed to paper at all – are lost and we therefore cannot establish which witch-related themes emerged at this stage nor how richly they were developed, the circumstances indicate that the narratives subsequently developed in Logroño by Valle and Becerra were built on confessional templates laid down in the winter of 1608–9 by the Urdax monks.²⁵

But how do these perspectives shed light on suspect-contribution to the body-maleficium in the Zugarramurdi confessions? To answer this question we need to stand back and look at the Urdax monastery through a wider lens. Despite its Pyrenean context, the monastery was not isolated in the period of the witch-craze. Situated on one of the main routes of the Camino de Santiago, it had been providing food, accommodation and medical services to pilgrims since the eleventh century. In addition to this, by the seventeenth century it had also developed a considerable specialism in the treatment of possession (being taken over and inhabited by evil spirits) and bewitchment (being harmed by witchcraft or sorcery). Such was the monastery’s renown in this respect that people travelled considerable distances to avail themselves of its skill, with a priest from the French town of Vera having no hesitation in sending a parishioner – who had become ‘possessed’ after ‘seeing two of her grandchildren “bewitched”’ – across the border to Urdax to be exorcized.²⁶ The monks’ treatment included diagnostic rituals, with Henningsen stating that ‘part of the treatment [at Urdax] consisted in laying a relic on the head of the person in question to detect whether he or she actually was possessed or bewitched . . . [they] also used the relic to detect whether a person was a witch.’ In the present context this specialism is relevant because it means that in addition to harbouring ordinary fears about witchcraft, the Urdax monks had a vocational and professional interest in the crime. Indeed, given that bewitchment and possession were primarily expressed through physical distress, we can go so far as to assert that the monks were, in effect, specialists in the diagnosis and treatment of body-maleficium.

From this perspective it is hardly surprising that the Zugarramurdi confessions should have emphasized this particular crime and that their accounts of body-maleficium should have been so graphic and detailed. When monks like Zabaleta were tasked with finding out whether the suspects had indeed bewitched and killed local children, they would have brought an interest and skill to the proceedings that exceeded that of the average witch-hunting official in the period. This interest and skill would have embraced an attention to detail. In the early modern era the symptomatology of child bewitchment could be analysed with same precision as that of natural illness, with Spanish physician Francisco Núñez devoting a whole chapter of his 1580 Libro del parto humano, to ‘the description of the infanticidal practices of the brujas.’ In the case of infanticidal vampirism, this analysis focused on the identification and analysis of bodily signs (including ‘black marks where . . . the victim had been sucked and bitten), with Nutini stating that in Hispanic Mexico, authorities diagnosed vampirism through the analysis of a complex range of ‘telltale signs or physical marks left by tlahuelpuchis [bloodsucking witches] on the corpses of infants.’ Through this lens the description of infanticidal vampirism from the Joint Sentence cited at the beginning of this chapter does not just reflect the chilling preoccupations of the witch-hunting zealot but also the cool, measured eye of the medical clinician.²⁷

But more important in the present context, is that these perspectives can also shed light on the contributions of the accused. Through its long-standing ties with Urdax, the village of Zugarramurdi would have been well aware of the monastery’s long-standing reputation for treating bewitchment and possession. Villagers would have observed people coming from far and wide to be cured of these afflictions and also, in all likelihood, used the monastery’s unwitching services themselves. Monasterial preoccupations would also have filtered into village mentalities in other ways. Some of the Zugarramurdi villagers worked for the monastery, with one of the most prominent witch suspects, shepherd Miguel de Goiburu, being employed to look after its flocks alongside his own. Others had friends and relatives who lived and worked in Urdax. Graciana Xarra – who was accused along with the first suspects from Zugarramurdi – was a ‘hospitalera’ at the monastery; a role that required her to provide pilgrims with food, accommodation and perhaps medical care.²⁸ Similarly the Urdax monk accused of witchcraft during Valle’s visitation – Pedro de Arburu – was born in Zugarramurdi and still had many family members living there.²⁹ But most notably of all, it is likely that – as Urdax monks with specialist skills in the treatment of possession and bewitchment – the parish priests of Zugarramurdi had long-publicized the dangers of these crimes from the local pulpit, with the theme being pursued with particular enthusiasm by Felipe de Zabaleta and his fellow monks during the winter of 1608–9. Through this lens we can speculate that the Zugarramurdi witch suspects had a higher-than-average – for the region and period – knowledge and concern regarding the phenomenon of body-maleficium and their responses to interrogatorial questions on the subject, as asked by both the Urdax monks and the later Logroño inquisitors, reflected this expertise.

Puncturing Vampirism

These perspectives can also shed light on one of the more obscure features of the Zugarramurdi body-maleficium accounts. The Joint Sentence is noteworthy because it does not only present the witch as an animalistic vampire that sinks its teeth into its victim’s veins – but also as a rather more fastidious predator who pricks or punctures the victim’s body at specific places with a metal implement, with the sentence stating that ‘on other occasions [they draw blood] by pricking them with pins and punching holes in their temples or on the top of their head and on their sides and other parts of their body, and sucking through these wounds they draw out their blood and eat it’. This instance is not unique, with references to puncturing vampirism emerging both elsewhere in the Basque witch-craze records and also (intermittently) in confessions from other parts of Europe. But as with body-maleficium and infanticidal-vampirism in general, the theme rises to unusual prominence and is described in unique detail in the Joint Sentence.³⁰ Even María de Zozaya, whose sentence rivals the latter in its detail and drama, punctures holes ‘with a pin’ in only one out of several vampiric attacks.

6  The pain of infant mortality is delicately intimated in this sixteenth-century German engraving, where a woman sits beside a skull and tries to suckle a child which appears to be dead.

7  Anatomical bloodletting figure from the sixteenth century. All the bloodsucking sites identified in the Basque witch-craze records are represented here.

But while relatively anomalous in the context of witchcraft belief, when examined through the lens of contemporary medicine this feature of the Joint Sentence becomes less obscure. One of the most popular medical cures of the medieval and early modern period, used on both adults and children for a wide range of illnesses, was that of ‘bloodletting’. Dating back to at least the classical period, the practice was based on the belief that disease was caused by an imbalance in the four bodily ‘humours’ and that if blood was removed, equilibrium would be restored and the patient’s health improve. The methods used typically involved either directly puncturing the veins (venesection), scraping or cutting the flesh (scarification, often accompanied by ‘cupping’) or the application of leeches. Employed on a routine basis by physicians, barber-surgeons and a range of other medical practitioners, bloodletting was practised with what would seem, to the modern eye, to be a startling lack of either squeamishness or restraint; with patients often being bled multiple times over a period of days, weeks and even months, while the amounts drawn could vary from a pint (which appears to have been the average amount) to as much as a quart at a time. Monastic houses would have been very familiar with the practice, with monks using it routinely on each other for health reasons and employing it as a core treatment at monastery hospitals.³¹

In this context, some of the methods allegedly employed by Basque witches to extract blood from their victims seem less strange. While metal tools may have been rather superfluous to the night-visiting witch (who needed little more than her canines to cannibalize her prey) they would have been vital to the bloodletter. In order to draw blood, medical practitioners typically punctured, cut or scraped veins or flesh with a variety of metal tools, with one of our foremost medical journals – ‘The Lancet’ – being named after a bladed metal bloodletting tool of the same name. Similarly, while the Zugarramurdi witches’ precise accounts of the diverse places where blood could be sucked from the victims’ body seem at odds with the animalistic nature of the vampiric attack, such specificity would have been vital to the medical bloodletter for whom different points of extraction had different therapeutic effects. Indeed, the witches’ dramatic assertion that they drew blood from various parts of the body – such as the ‘head’, ‘navel’, ‘sides’, ‘backbone and kidneys’, ‘genitals’, ‘anus’ and ‘joints of the arms’ – pales into insignificance alongside an illustration from Johann Stoeffler’s Calendarium Romanum Magnum (1518) that identifies and numbers over fifty bloodletting sites on a single ‘venesection manikin’. Given that the underside of the elbow was the most common bloodletting site throughout the period of its use, the Zugarramurdi witches’ claims to have punctured one of their victims at the ‘joints’ of her arms is also telling.³² Also rationalized in this context, is their claim to have used pins and other implements to prick their victims’ ‘head’, ‘temples’ or ‘top of . . . [the] head, a bit higher up than the part where the brains are’. These bony sites do not sit comfortably alongside classic images of vampirism but do conform with medical practice. One of the conditions considered particularly amenable to bloodletting treatments was that of mental illness, with Tausiet noting that in the northern Spanish city of Zaragoza, in the early modern period, physicians commonly bled the insane, while in eighteenth-century Paris the city’s oldest asylum bled its patients so often that the practice became known as the ‘Traitment de l’Hôtel-Dieu’.³³ On the principle that extraction sites could be chosen according to their proximity to the believed source of illness, such patients were commonly punctured and cut at the temples or on other parts of the skull. Given that mental illness was considered to be both symptomatically and causatively close to demonic possession, the fact that the Urdax monastery specialized in ritual exorcism is certainly coincidental here.

That medical bloodletting worked its way into the witches’ confessions is further supported by the discovery that echoes of the practice can be detected in other parts of the text that are unrelated to vampirism. Several passages in the Joint Sentence state that the Devil ‘marked’ novice witches to denote their allegiance to him by scratching them with his talons. While the basic narrative reflects demonological stereotype, it is worth observing that the suspects’ claims that the Devil scratched them specifically to ‘draw blood’ is also analogous with the aims of the bloodletter, with Juanes de Goiburu maintaining that ‘the Devil marked him, sinking a fingernail into his left shoulder . . . then he drew blood from him and he was in pain for a month [my italics]’.³⁴ Similarly analogous, given that medical bloodletters typically collected the patient’s blood into some kind of basin, is Mongastón’s assertion that the Devil ‘makes a wound, and draw[s] blood, which collects in a cloth or some vessel’; and de Lancre’s rather more dramatic assertion that he marked the Spanish witches ‘on the shoulder and left side, or on their thighs, breaking and tearing their skin and the flesh until blood squirts out. He collects the blood in a special container’.³⁵ At risk of overstretching the point, we can even surmise that suspects’ claims that the Devil marked them with ‘a sort of golden thing’ or ‘a pin of fake gold’ reflected the fact that metal bloodletting tools were commonly made out of bronze or brass. Given that extraction sites were typically treated with substances to aid healing, it may also be relevant that the Devil often – rather incongruously – concluded the act of puncturing the suspects’ skin and drawing blood by giving them ‘a herb to cure the wound’.³⁶ This narrative also worked its way into accounts of being disciplined at the akelarre, with María de Aldave confessing that when she had broken witch cult rules, the Devil whipped her so that ‘a lot of blood came out’ and then the witches ‘covered her with a certain ointment which removed her pain and stopped the blood’.³⁷

These evocations of bloodletting practice can of course be linked to the monk-interrogators. Presiding over a busy hospital that dealt with both locals and the constant stream of pilgrims travelling the Camino de Santiago, the monks’ occupational familiarity with bloodletting could have generated professional curiosity – and therefore close and leading questions – on the means through which the witch extracted blood from the body of her victims. But witnesses and suspects may have also been involved. Living in such close proximity to Urdax, they would have been well aware that the monastery employed bloodletting to cure both natural and supernatural diseases, with this knowledge filtering into the community via the locals who lived or worked there (such as hospitalera Graciana Xarra or monk Pedro de Arburu). Suspects are also likely to have witnessed or experienced such treatments themselves, either as administered by the monks in their role as community physicians or by the range of other medical practitioners, such as barber-surgeons, that employed the practice; with direct evidence to this effect being found in accused witch Innes de Corres’ recollection that ‘when she was sick, a barber applied some cupping glasses to her’. Given this familiarity, it is not difficult to see how suspects may have drawn bloodletting experiences into their accounts of performing vampiric attacks or receiving the witches’ mark. That suspects utilized their experiences in this way, is intimated in the following passage from the Joint Sentence where Miguel de Goiburu confesses that

he [the Devil] marked him by sinking a fingernail of his left hand under the ear and in the left eye, and from the wound near his ear he drew blood, which the Devil collected and kept in a vessel that was most likely for making certain poisons, and the devil gave him a herb to cure the wound which in Basque they call belar berza . . .³⁸

The fact that the herb used to dress the wounds (belar berza) is referenced here in Basque, and that the interrogators did not appear to know what to do with the claim that the Devil collected the blood in a vessel – noting, rather weakly, that it was ‘most likely for making poisons’ – suggests that Goiburu was not just passively reflecting prosecutorial templates but was also introducing elements of his own. Even stronger evidence can be found in María de Yriarte’s account of a vampiric attack in which she describes how

over twenty years ago, when a certain neighbour of hers who she named was alive, the Devil ordered her and the aforementioned Graciana de Barrenechea, her mother, to go to suck a five-year-old daughter of hers, and they went in the company of the Devil and took the girl from her home and took her to the akelarre, and the Devil removed the girdle [or belt] and shirt [or petticoat] that she had, and she and her aforementioned mother pricked her hard with some needles in the anus, genitals, navel and joints of her arms and sucked a large amount of blood out, with the Devil saying to them, ‘suck hard and swallow for it is very good’. And then she anointed her on the parts where they had sucked her with a black ointment that the Devil had in a little bottle and they put her shirt and girdle back on as they were and as they did this harm to her the girl protested with great emotion but they returned her to her bed [and she later died] . . .³⁹

If we ignore the Devil’s dramatic references to sucking and swallowing, this passage can be reread as a demonized account of a conventional bloodletting treatment applied to a sick child. Through this lens, a five-year-old girl was taken to a bloodletter (or the latter came to her sickbed) and her mother and other female relatives undressed her so that he could puncture some of her veins – including those at the ‘joints of her arms’ – to draw blood. When the treatment was finished the women anointed the puncture sites with an ointment provided by the bloodletter to aid healing and prevent infection, before redressing the child and putting her back to bed. Typically, the child ‘protested with great emotion’ at the cure that was being so carefully conducted for her benefit and, even more typically (for this period), the treatment was unsuccessful and the child later died. It is impossible to assess to what degree interrogator, witness or suspect was responsible for tailoring this confessional narrative so precisely to the template of a bloodletting treatment. But the level of realism strongly suggests that it was María de Yriarte herself who, through the largely unconscious dynamics of false confession, used her memories of participating in an ill-fated bloodletting treatment to create this highly incongruous account of a vampiric attack. To what degree these perspectives on Urdax bloodletting practice explain the prominence of infanticidal vampirism in the Zugarramurdi records is open to debate, but they do raise the possibility that the most striking accounts of this crime to have come down to us from the early modern period may not have emerged out of demonological theory about malevolent witches or folk belief concerning animalistic demons, but out of the more practical and clinical procedures of elite medical expertise.

CHAPTER SIX

‘Powders and Poisons’

Having outlined the two core forms of maleficium described in the Basque records, we now need to focus on one of their mutual features. As we have seen, while body and crop-maleficium could be accomplished in various ways, in both cases one of the commonest methods employed was the application of poisons, with witches ruining crops by scattering powders onto fields or into the air and harming their neighbours by smearing them with ointment or slipping powders into their food. But what we have not emphasized until now, is that the Basque records do not only state that witches used these poisons – but also that they made them. Lengthy passages describe how witches gathered ingredients – primarily herbs, vermin (molluscs, reptiles and insects), toads and human corpses – and then processed them into poisonous ‘waters’, ‘ointments’ and ‘powders’. While this manufacture often took place at the akelarre it also emerged in more domestic contexts, with the Joint Sentence stating that ‘though sometimes they make the powders and poisons at the akelarres, mostly they make them in their own homes’.¹ Unlike infanticidal vampirism, poison-making is emphasized across both French and Spanish records.

In referring to the use and preparation of poison the Basque records are conventional, with accounts of witches making poisons – using some or all of the ingredients cited – being a common feature of both medieval and early modern witchcraft confessions Europe-wide. But the Basque accounts are unusual in two core respects. Firstly, although toads and corpses both appear prominently as poison ingredients throughout Europe, the degree of emphasis placed on the collection and processing of these dark ingredients in the Basque records is unparalleled. Secondly, these accounts are distinguished by their complexity, precision and coherence. Although the claim that witches made poisons emerges relatively frequently in both demonological texts and witch trial records across Europe, descriptions of the actual manufacturing processes are generally absent or brief, with the focus being on what harm the witch did with her poison as opposed to how she made it. To my knowledge, the level of detailing in the more sophisticated Basque poison-making accounts is unique.

As with most other aspects of the witch record content, we can assume that the poison-making passages were heavily influenced by the interrogators. All the demonological works referenced as authoritative by de Lancre emphasize the witch’s role as poison manufacturer, with herbs, toads, vermin and human corpses being frequently listed as standard ingredients. His active interest in the subject is also illustrated by his complaint, with regard to the witches’ poisons, that ‘we were never able . . . to see some of it, or to recover it, despite our best efforts.’ Meanwhile, whatever Valle and Becerra’s exposure to demonological texts, they would have found examples of the crime in earlier trial records and inquisitorial documents where poison-making, often involving toads, had emerged with regularity since the fourteenth century.² This focus would have been further sharpened by la Suprema’s concern, with question eight of the first questionnaire specifically instructing them to ask the suspects:

Whether they anoint themselves to go to these gatherings and where, and whether they say some words and which ones, and with what ointment, and what it is made from and who makes it, and whether they have the ointment or the things from which it is made. And if they say they have it, have them find it, and once found, show it to physicians and apothecaries in order to state the preparation with which it is made and the effects that it may naturally have.³

Contributions of the Accused

It is also clear, however, that although the interrogators were involved, the suspects did not always respond to their leading questions with simple denials or assents. De Lancre’s report that there were ‘several’ suspects who ‘disclosed to us secrets about powders and poison’ suggests that he was receiving information about poison-making as well as superimposing it.⁴ Lively contribution from the accused is also indicated by the inclusion of idiosyncratic elements and by the fact that if we put aside the intermittent references to the Devil and dark ingredients like vermin and corpses, many of the passages contain the precisely observed detailing suggestive of lived experience. These points are well illustrated in the following extract from the Joint Sentence which, although uniquely comprehensive, does reflect the general tenor of the poison-making passages in both French- and Spanish-Basque records.

[T]he Devil forewarns them so that for the next akelarre they make powders and poisons, and the old ones, to whom the Devil has given authority to make them, and other devils (or daemons), his servants, similar in face to him, collect a large number of toads, snakes, lizards, salamanders, wall lizards, slugs, snails and puff balls, as well as the brains and bones of deceased children and adults, with which they prepare the powders and poisons for destroying the crops and doing harm to people and livestock. All of which is presided over by the Devil and by the aforementioned Graciana de Barrenechea, who as the foremost mistress and queen would instruct them and tell them what they had to do, starting to skin the toads by biting them with their teeth at their heads and, having broken their skin a little towards the neck, gripping it with their fingers, they pull with the teeth to skin them and rip off the skin, the toads shaking [or jerking] and kicking with the pain, thrashing them on their snouts. And the Devil collects the skins to share them out when the time comes among the witches, and then they break the toads and other vermin into pieces, putting them into some pots which they have on the fire with the aforementioned brains and bones of deceased people, so that everything is heated, and they stir it with sticks until the poison powders have been prepared, whereupon they are shared between the old witches and they receive them and carry them in some old pots that they have for this purpose. And to destroy the crops they all go in the company of the Devil in the form of cats, dogs, pigs and various other animals to the estates and areas that they intend to destroy . . . ⁵ and though sometimes they make the powders and poisons at the akelarres, mostly they make them in their own homes, the Devil having told them at the akelarre on what days they have to meet to make them, giving them a time and area where they can go to seek and collect the aforementioned vermin in the countryside, giving each gang its own position and places where they can search because [or perhaps ‘so’] they do not all come together at one home but in many different ones. All those who have reached the rank at which they can make poisons divide up into gangs, each with its masters and superiors whom all the others follow in making the preparations and doing everything necessary for the aforementioned poisons. And the aforenamed four people and five other [close] associates of their kin would meet at the home of the aforementioned Graciana de Barrenechea on occasions when her husband and son-in-law, who are not witches, were not at home, and mostly they would meet at the home of the aforementioned Estevania de Yriarte because, since her husband and children are witches, they would not be hindered or impeded in any way. And the aforementioned people, on the day on which they had to collect the aforementioned vermin, sometimes at nine o’clock in the morning and other times after midday, bearing hoes and some sacks in which to collect them, would meet up with the Devil, who would be in the form of a very ugly and foul-smelling man in the way that he usually appears to them, with his servants, at a livestock pen very near the place and by the home of one of the aforenamed. And when they were together with the Devil, with his left hand he would mark each of them individually, marking them between their eyebrows by moving his fingers around and saying certain words to them, and then they would all go together with the Devil who would guide them, sometimes through the air and other times walking on the ground. And then their dressed toads, which also accompanied them, would appear by each of their sides, and in this manner they could go to a certain area that they call Lapeña in the locality of Zugarramurdi where, having arrived, the Devil and his servants help them find the toads and other vermin, and the Devil’s servants who, though smaller than him, are very strong, would break and tip over rocks when necessary, if there was some vermin underneath them, and they or the witches would dig with their hoes to extract them and with some small sticks the Devil’s servants extract the toads, snakes, lizards and other vermin from the cavities, and with their hands the witches take them and gather them in the afore-mentioned sacks. And since this place was nearby, sometimes they would come across people walking through there and if they asked them what they were doing they would respond that they were looking for plant roots to give to their pigs, and the Devil would cast a shadow upon [or obscure] himself and nobody could see him other than the witches, and on other occasions he would do the same to the witches so that those who passed by could not see them, but they could see each other and the Devil very well. And having collected all the vermin they need, they would return to their homes and store them in the aforementioned Estevania de Yriarte’s [home], because there was nobody there who would have misgivings, and they would also meet there to make poisons by day when people were in the fields busy at work, and at night, and with all them thus together, the Devil would appear in his usual form with unkempt whiskers and his servants with him. And having assembled all the things from which the poisons are to be made, which are a large number of toads, snakes and the other vermin and things already mentioned, and puffballs which are earth truffles that grow in the fields that when squeezed release a brownish smoke and powder, and with all these things in the presence of the Devil, he blesses them with his left hand, saying ‘powders, powders, powders and poisons,’ in a hoarse and heavy voice. And then the Devil and all the witches, having skinned the aforementioned vermin, hand them over to the aforementioned Miguel de Goiburu, who, together with the other witches, mixes and stirs the pieces of vermin and other things until the Devil tells them that it is perfect, and they remove it and put it on some boards or tiles to dry in the sun or on the chimney, and two days later they meet with the Devil and his servants once again and, giving his blessing, he grinds it in some mortars to make powders of various colours, brown, black and red, and the Devil shares them out among the witches in the pots that they have ready for this purpose . . . ⁶

While it is clear that the suspects contributed to passages like these, what raw materials did they quarry in order to do so? The strongest influence would, of course, have been witchcraft propaganda as it circulated both prior to and during the witch-craze, with beliefs about the poison-making activities of witches, as we have seen, emerging in Basque witch trials since the fourteenth century. But the realism and precision of the accounts also suggests that the suspects may have mined a wider range of belief and experience.

Raw Materials: Domestic Medicine

Our first indications as to what these experiences may have been, appear in the Tableau. Although de Lancre generally uses the word ‘poisons’ to refer to substances employed to harm, in one instance he overtly uses it to designate substances that were used to heal; condemning witches who ‘attempt to heal the bewitched and the sick, and who use poisons for this purpose.’ The close relationship between poison and medicine also emerges in his summary of the confession of a male witch who was tried in Bordeaux in 1608.

Riuasseau said that they [his powders] were made from a skinned cat, a toad, a lizard, and an asp. He said that he put all of these things in the fireplace under a good fire long enough for them to turn into powder, and that, when he took the powders out, he looked to see if they were awakened (this was the word he used, and I think it is a particular term that they use). This term meant that one looked carefully to see if it had changed and if certain prickly little worms had appeared yet. And if there were none, they were put back under the fire until they were clarified. Then they were placed deep underground until the powders were ready to be used. They are good for making poisons and for curing illnesses, and they also serve as an antidote for people who have been put under a spell by the witches’ touch.⁷ [my italics]

These intimations, however brief, suggest that in exploring suspects’ contribution to the Basque poison-making accounts we should turn away from the witchcraft and toward the wider field of medicine. In early modern Europe the majority of medical care was performed domestically by women. As a corollary of this, although medicines could be bought from apothecaries, hospitals and medical practitioners, women typically made some or all of their pharmaceuticals themselves, with Elaine Leong noting that ‘making medicine at home was a common past time – or, for many early modern housewives, even a duty.’ Price was clearly a consideration here, particularly for the poor. In seventeenth-century England, for example, one pint of ‘aqua mirabolus’ bought from an apothecary would cost nearly four shillings, while the same amount made at home cost seventeen pence. Unfortunately, as with so many aspects of early modern life, our knowledge of contemporary medicine-making practices is heavily biased in favour of elite professionals like physicians and apothecaries and those noblewomen who had the skills and leisure to write their recipes down, with the domestic medicine-making practices of the bulk of the population going largely unrecorded until the nineteenth century. As a consequence, although there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in this aspect of medicine in recent years, it is still largely uncharted territory, with Montserrat Cabré arguing that ‘health care provided within the domestic space, [is] probably the most neglected aspect of the agenda of the – now oldish – new social history of medicine.’⁸

Despite these problems, however, the little we do know has clear relevance for the poison-making activities of the Basque witch. Most of the ingredients required for domestic medicine manufacture – whether plants, animal products or minerals – were readily available through either cultivation, foraging or purchase at market and could be processed using methods that were practicable for anyone with a decently equipped hearth. Leong argues that most medicine-making processes

8  Basque witches making poisons and children herding toads at the sabbath, as depicted in the 1613 engraving by Jan Ziarnco.

9  Crushing herbs in a mortar and pestle in a rural household. This image appeared in Publius Vergilius Maro, ed. Sebastian Brant, Strasbourg, 1502.

required only the pots and pans of the early modern kitchen: the boiling, seething, and standing of liquid medicaments could easily be done with earthen and copper pots; the melting of fats and the frying of herbs for salves were performed in skillets and pans; jelly bags and cotton cloths were used for straining medicines; and pestles and mortars were used to crush herbs and spices . . . it is likely that the majority of the methods and equipment used in the recipes were techniques and containers that were also readily used in the preparation of foodstuffs and in other household tasks, and medicine preparation would not have required a great deal of either additional learning or acquisition of equipment. While it is important to stress the familiarity of the production techniques to early modern householders it is also worthwhile to point out that the processes used within the household did not differ greatly from those used commercially.

From this perspective we can safely assume that in the period of the witch-craze it was completely acceptable, indeed expected, for Basque women to go out into the countryside to gather ingredients in order to bring them home and process them into medicines. We can also assume that a large percentage of the older witch suspects had regularly engaged in this activity, with these skills being illustrated in those cases where they made ointments in response to interrogatorial request. Henningsen notes, for example, that when their parish priest threatened them that they ‘would be burned in the marketplace next day if they did not produce their jars’ of witch-ointment, María de Mindeguía and Juana de Hualde ‘melted down some pork fat and added a little water; into this they stirred some soot from the chimney, and then put the mixture into a jar, which they gave to the priest.’ In response to a similar request, Juana de Yrurita and her daughter Catalina ‘boiled buttercups and mint “which had been blessed on Midsummer Day [St. John’s Day]” in some holy water that had been kept from Easter Eve. To give the ointment green colouring they had added an extract from a plant known in Basque as Zaradona. Finally, they drained off the liquid and put the pulp into a jar, which Catalina took to the priest.’⁹ In this context it is wholly reasonable to assume that the vivid detail, coherence and, most notably of all, realism of the Basque poison-making passages reflect the fact that when the suspects were pressed to produce accounts of poison-making, they created fictions, false memories and dreams out of their remembered experiences of making medicines at home.

Ingredients: Herbs

This thesis is supported by the finding that all the poison ingredients named by the suspects were common components in contemporary pharmaceuticals. Botanical herbs, for example, are often listed alongside the darker materials. While de Lancre alleges that witches’ poisons were concocted from ‘brains from young children, some bones from their feet and hands, countless powders, snakes, vipers, salamanders, [and] snails’, he concludes his list with ‘and an herb named wolf’s foot’. Similarly, the Zugarramurdi suspects did not only go out into the fields to collect vermin but also to collect the ‘earth truffles that grow in the fields that when squeezed release a brownish smoke and powder’.¹⁰ Among other ingredients named in the records we find ‘a plant they call ‘belaronna [deadly nightshade]’; ‘a herb that in Basque they call belar nagusia’ which, when boiled with human bones, ‘has such power that it makes them soft as turnips’; and the bark and ‘marrow’ of ‘a shrub that they call souhandourra in their language and that in our native Gascony is commonly called the witches’ tree.’¹¹ Also relevant, as we shall explore in Chapter Thirteen, is that both suspects and interrogators drew links between akelarre festivities and the Feast of St John’s Eve. On this feast day the collection of herbs was believed to be particularly auspicious, with Arles observing in 1517 that on this date ‘very early in the morning people go out to collect scented herbs, excellent and medicinal in their kind, and in the fullness of their powers because of the time of year’; and de Lancre that people value the magical efficacy of plants ‘cut the evening of the feast of St John’. As noted above, when Juana de Yrurita made a fake witch-ointment for her parish priest she used ‘buttercups and mint “which had been blessed on Midsummer Day [St. John’s Day]”’.¹²

Ingredients: Vermin and Toads

Similar links with domestic medical practice can be drawn in relation to vermin and toads. It could be reasonably assumed that these darker ingredients were introduced into the accounts by interrogators, witnesses or even confused suspects eager to reframe domestic medical practices into something stereotypically demonic. But this is not the only explanation. The small animals that came under the term ‘vermin’, as employed in the Basque records, were a common component in both elite and popular medicine throughout pre-modern Europe, with Jackson noting ‘the extensive use of creatures such as earthworms, snails, woodlice and spiders in orthodox medicine up to the 18th century and in folk medicine well into the second half of the 20th century.’¹³ Similarly in pre-modern Spain, lice were used to treat jaundice, cockroaches to cure sore throats and snail mucus to cure eye-warts and erysipelas, with fieldwork demonstrating that as late as the twentieth century Basque villagers were applying plasters of snails to head wounds. Vermin were also used in more magical forms of healing, with Castañega stating that in the sixteenth century ‘doctors order a patient to wear the peony root or the seeds of it around the neck for epilepsy, and for quartan fever they recommend live insects such as crickets or locusts and spiders.’¹⁴ While these animals clearly possessed magical symbolism, recent research has confirmed that molluscs, reptiles and insects also possess genuine pharmacological properties, with Eraldo Costa-Neto stating, for example, that ‘science has . . . proven the existence of immunological, analgesic, antibacterial, diuretic, anesthetic, and antirheumatic properties in the bodies of insects.’ More pragmatically, these animals may also have been attractive because, as Jackson observes, they ‘were common and could be caught with little difficulty.’¹⁵

A similar picture emerges with regard to the toad. The amphibian was widely used in both elite and popular medicine in pre-modern Europe to treat a wide range of problems: from nosebleeds, ulcers and dropsy to kidney stones, cancer and the plague.¹⁶ Physicians’ manuals, self-help books and personal notebooks are filled with references to their use, with French physician Moses Charas reporting in 1678 that ‘Toads that seem to be abhorr’d and abominated by all mankind, have yet their vertues, which are very considerable’ and that ‘Toad dry’d, is useful in the cure and ease of a good number of diseases.’ With regard to processing, Charas recommends cutting the dried animal in pieces, placing it in a furnace in an earthern or glass pot and then refining it into a ‘volatile Salt of Toads’, observing ‘in all things the same method as for the rectification of the pure substances of the Viper.’¹⁷ Toads, alive or dead, could also effect cures by being held in the hands or against different parts of the body. As with treatments involving vermin, some of these methods were based on magical thinking, with live amphibians (or just their amputated limbs) being typically hung around the neck, nailed on barn doors or buried in the ground in the transference-based belief that as the animal wasted away the ailing human or animal would recover. Toads were also believed to carry magical objects called ‘toadstones’ in their heads that could cure venomous bites and which, if set into rings, changed colour in the presence of poison.¹⁸ Like the Basque witches, contemporary physicians often combined toads with other ingredients, including vermin. The following prescription from Noel Chomel’s 1709 Dictionnaire Economique, for example, which details how to make an ointment to ward off the plague, would not have seemed out of place in the Joint Sentence.

[T]ake three or four large Toads, seven or eight Spiders, and as many Scorpions, put them into a Pot well stopt, where let them remain for some time, add thereto some Virgin-Honey, and stopt the Pot well, make a Fire round it, and so continue till the Whole is reduced to a Liquid, and when that is done, mix it with a Ladle, and make an Ointment of it . . .¹⁹

The toad’s popularity as a medical ingredient is likely to have stemmed, in large part, from the fact that the prominent crescent-shaped parotid glands on the sides of its head, along with smaller glands on its body, produce protective secretions that contain a range of ‘pharmacologically and therapeutically significant compounds’; with a recent study concluding that the toad is ‘probably the only such source in nature from where we can get nearly six types of drugs possessing analgesic, painkiller, antibiotic, anti-viral and anti-cancerous properties as well as possessing potential of treating cardiovascular diseases.’ In this context, some seemingly superstitious folk remedies have a firm rationale; wrapping a toad in a handkerchief and placing it against the cheek of someone suffering from toothache, for example, may have worked because the toad’s secretions seeped through the material and through their vasoconstrictive effect reduced the swelling that compressed the nerve that caused the dental pain. The toad’s pharmaceutical potential is so extensive that it is attracting increasing scientific interest, particularly in China, where toad-based medicines, which have long been an important element in traditional medicine, are produced on an industrial scale. In recent years the Australians have even begun to export cane toads (an imported species that has become a pest) to China to meet this demand.²⁰ From this perspective, the references to the use of both toads and vermin in the Basque poison-making accounts were not just stereotypical motifs introduced to make their descriptions more dark and demonic, but elements that intruded into suspects’ confessions, alongside the less-controversial herbs, via imaginal recourse to ordinary experiences of domestic medicine production.

Hierarchy and Production

These comparisons with domestic medicine also have wider implications. Earlier in this chapter we observed that due to the lack of sources the world of domestic medicine, particularly at the lower end of the social scale, is largely hidden from us. But if we accept the argument that the Basque poison-making accounts drew, however obliquely, on genuine medicine-making activities then we can – cautiously – use them to speculate more widely about this little known aspect of peasant life. From this vantage point, for example, the suspects’ claim that they went out to collect their poison ingredients in groups, could reflect the fact that among the Basque poor, medicine making was often a communal activity. Certainly, this would have been logical. Older women would have shared their foraging knowledge while younger women would have borne the heavier workload, with this all-hands-on-deck approach being particularly important when large amounts of a particular ingredient were desired (as on St John’s Eve, when plants only possessed an enhanced magical potency for a limited period). The claim that witches then took these ingredients back to each other’s houses or to the akelarre could indicate that this commonality persisted into the manufacturing stage. Again the benefits are clear. Given that some women would have been better equipped or had more domestic space or time to spare than others, it would have been advantageous to share utensils and hearths, with this perspective rationalizing the assertion, made by several witches, that they did not make poisons in their own homes but took ‘mortars, pots and other vessels, which were necessary for that purpose, to the particular house where they were meant to be made’. The claim that poisons were then shared out among participating witches could also reflect the practical advantages to be gained by manufacturing large batches of medicine collectively and then dividing them up to be taken home for private use, with these perspectives lending realism to de Lancre’s report that suspects ‘told us that during the sabbath they made poison’ and that ‘once made it was distributed among those assembled by the female witches, who acted like bakers at the sabbath.’ Communal medicine manufacture would also have reflected the need for quantity, with Leong noting that ‘it was not uncommon in contemporary medical recipes to instruct the householder to produce large quantities of a particular medicine’. In some cases this instruction reflected the fact that the remedy in question was time-consuming to prepare but had a long shelf life. In others it reflected the requirements of the treatment itself, with Leong observing that ‘many of the medicines’ described in these recipes ‘had to be taken by the “pint”’ over a period of days or weeks, with this imperative for quantity being particularly pressing if the medicine had to be produced quickly, to sudden demand.²¹

Given that collective activity was the norm in the early modern period, the insights outlined above could seem self-evident. But the records also yield more nuanced perspectives. When all the sensational references about the Devil and malevolent intent are stripped away the Basque poison-making passages depict groups of women engaged in highly disciplined operations in which tasks are allocated according to a strict skills-based hierarchy. Several passages state that although younger witches were often present at both foraging trips and the akelarre they were not allowed to make poisons until they were more mature, with Labourdin suspect Catherine de Barrendeguy telling de Lancre that witches ‘can make poison and are initiated into such a great mystery only at the age of twenty or twenty-four.’ Even on reaching this age they could only work under supervision, with the Joint Sentence stating that ‘all those who have reached the rank at which they can make poisons divide up into gangs, each with its masters and superiors who all the others follow in making the preparations’ and who ‘instruct’ the younger poison-makers and ‘tell them what they had to do’. As we shall explore in Chapter Twenty Two, this hierarchy could have reflected superimposed elite demonological assumptions about cultic structures. But it could also have reflected the evidence that with regard to medicine-making, largely non-literate peasant women did not have access to housekeeping manuals or medical journals and as a consequence were required to gain their skills by watching and listening to more experienced practitioners, with Cabré emphasizing that in late-medieval Spain domestic medical care ‘functioned primarily in the oral register’.²² The likelihood that Basque peasants structured their medicine manufacture around a skills-based hierarchy is even more compelling when we consider that then, as now, medicines could be highly dangerous. That de Lancre and many of his contemporaries used the word ‘poison’ to describe medicine was no accident. Many of the herbal and animal ingredients used in early modern medicines were highly toxic or even fatal when consumed in sufficient concentrations. Toad venom, for example, could not only burn skin but also – if ingested – kill, with medical quacks hiring ‘toad eaters’ to publicly swallow toads while remaining unharmed to demonstrate the efficacy of their nostrums. The potential dangers of these kinds of herbs and animal products were exacerbated by the fact that in this period concentrations of active ingredients often needed to be high. Before the advent of modern medicines, domestic preparations were not just used for minor ailments but to treat serious conditions like infections, cancers and heart conditions. There was also a persistent and acute need for powerful drugs to anaesthetize and dull pain. As a consequence, the challenge was to prepare and prescribe medical preparations that were strong enough to be effective but without excess toxicity. This task was further complicated by the fact that raw ingredients varied in potency, with Victor Robinson stating in relation to some of the commonly-used narcotic herbs that ‘as the active principles of drugs (alkaloids) were unknown, it was necessary to use the crude drugs themselves. Their action was uncertain, for there was no way of standardizing the dosage and apparently identical samples of opium, mandrake, or hemlock might differ markedly in narcotic power.’²³ These uncertainties meant that however skilled they may have been, manufacturers would have found it difficult to assess the potency of the drug they were making and how it would behave when used on different body weights and in high doses; a task that was further complicated when, as was usually the case, medicines combined more than one ingredient.

Given these dangers it is hardly surprising that high-toxicity medicines were viewed with ambivalence. With regard to the narcotic herbs commonly used in painkillers, for example, Robinson notes that ‘uncertainty of the potency and action of the narcotic drugs rendered their application dangerous’ and that ‘patients themselves mistrusted the drugs because of the danger of fatal outcome’. This anxiety was vividly articulated in fourteenth-century physician Bernard de Gordon’s warning that although ‘opium, henbane, mandrake, papaver and the like’ could be prescribed for pain ‘these narcotics should not be administered except in great necessity and, as it were, out of desperation’.²⁴ From the late-medieval period onwards the use of these substances was increasingly associated with maleficium, with Robinson noting that when seventeenth-century Troyes barber-surgeon Nicolas Bailly, ‘administered a narcotic potion to a patient before an operation, the venture aroused widespread condemnation’ and he ‘was arrested and fined for practicing witchcraft. The stupefaction of patients by administration of herbal remedies was then forbidden in France under heavy penalty.’ The degree to which narcotic herbs and other toxic ingredients were processed by ordinary housewives and peasant women in the early modern period is unclear and we cannot assume a direct synonymy between elite and popular practice. But the fact that their use was so widely recommended in both classical and medieval medical manuals does raise the likelihood that they were also employed on a popular level. Extreme pain and the pursuant impulse to take anything ‘out of desperation’ was just as common among the poor as the rich, with Cabré noting that housewives’ journals and other sources reveal that Spanish women made ‘a variety of pain-killers’ in the late-medieval era.²⁵

Although there is no direct evidence in the Basque records that the witch suspects manufactured these kinds of medicines, their claims to have used ingredients like toad venom and narcotics such as deadly nightshade (‘belaronna’) are suggestive here. Also relevant, are the claims that suspects used their poisons to induce sleep in householders so that they could perform their maleficium undisturbed. While these statements need not reflect any kind of reality – for by this period the witch’s use of both narcotics and sleep potions had become demonological tropes – it is notable that if we ignore the reference to bones of the dead in the following passage from the Zozaya sentence, it could be read as a relatively realistic account of the procedures through which an individual may have prepared narcotic draughts to ease pain and aid sleep. The concluding assertion that the drug was ‘not any use for anything else’ strengthens this impression.

[The witches put powders] in the opening of their [the parents’] nostrils, which are of a herb that is between blue and purple that she and the other witches collected in the summer which grow among stones on slopes and precipices as tall as an elbow and two or three fingers thick. And after drying it they make powders and [they also made powders] of bones of children and of other bones of older deceased people, and of toad bones and in all these powders they mixed in a little of the water that they drew from the dressed toads, and they combined it all together and left them in the sun and they would make these powders to tranquilize and induce deep sleep and they were not any use for anything else.²⁶

Herding Toads

This magico-medical perspective also sheds new light onto one of the more fantastical motifs to emerge in the Basque witch-craze. Both French and Spanish accounts of the akelarre were distinguished by the incongruous claim that participating children were required to ‘herd’ the toads that witches were using to make their poisons. Thus, we find French suspect Jeannette de Belloc declaring that children ‘tended the sabbath flocks, which were a mass of toads near a brook’; and the Joint Sentence stating that at the Spanish akelarre ‘the young children entertain themselves by looking after the toads that the elder witches collect in the fields to make powders and poisons, for which they use little sticks, treating them with a great deal of respect in accordance with the orders of the Devil’.²⁷ While the uniqueness and idiosyncrasy of these references (which have certainly contributed to the notoriety of the Basque witch-craze) has led scholars to assume that they were popular in derivation, their origins and meaning remain obscure.

But if we read the Basque poison-making accounts as distorted evocations of domestic-medicine manufacture, then a viable explanation emerges. Contemporary sources suggest that toads were not only used in a wide variety of medicinal substances but that some recipes required large numbers of animals. A typical prescription from seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey directs that ‘twenty great fat toads are to be stewed slowly while alive’, while his Montpellier contemporary Matte La Faveur recommended that you catch, hang and dry toads and that ‘When you have about fifty, chop them to bits and make spirits’.²⁸ Given that toads are largely solitary animals that hide under stones and in crevices where they are difficult to find, the demand for quantity must have presented a problem. In this context it is relevant that around the spring equinox toads gather together in certain locations in great numbers for approximately two weeks to breed – after which they revert to their covert, solitary lifestyles. Indeed, in parts of the British Isles today toad-migration routes are included in planning policy statements and some councils erect temporary warning signs where the routes cross busy roads. In the light of this behaviour it is logical to assume that in the early modern period, if domestic medicine manufacturers wished to collect the amphibians in any numbers, they would go to their breeding sites at the appropriate time of the year. It is also reasonable to speculate that because toads (particularly en masse) are quick and slippery and difficult to control they would have required corralling – aka ‘herding’ – into groups for easier collection and that the persons chosen to perform this time-consuming but low-skilled work would have been children (who were typically dispatched to guard and herd geese and other livestock for similar reasons). The thesis that toads were a valuable commodity to Basque medicine-makers would also justify the assertion, found in both French and Spanish records, that if children neglected toads in their care or ‘stepped on them without thinking’ they would be ‘rigorously flogged’ or ‘immediately whipped’.²⁹ It also lends rationale to Salazar’s bemused observation that ‘many others of tender years say that when watching over the toads with the rods they on occasions stoned some of them to death for being restless. However this is quite incompatible with the deep rooted belief that the toads put into the keeping of the children were demons.’³⁰ While these accounts of stoning toads may not have been compatible with the belief that the amphibians were demons, they would have been highly compatible with the experiences of bored children, dispatched to look after toads on ingredient-collecting expeditions, who entertained themselves and took out their frustrations on those disruptive animals that tried to escape. Through this lens one of the most bizarre witch motifs to have come down to us from early modern Europe has its roots in the practical imperatives of domestic medical provision.

Crop Protection

During the course of this chapter we have drawn parallels between the witches’ poisons and contemporary domestic medicines. But we must now consider the evidence that Basque suspects did not only believe that their poisons harmed the human body, but also that they harmed the crops; with the most common form of crop-maleficium, as seen in Chapter Four, being the sprinkling of poisonous liquids or powders onto fields. At first glance, there would appear to be few parallels here. We have been able to draw links between poison-making and medicine-manufacture because we have found scattered references to the use of ‘poisons’ to heal the sick. But no such mitigations have emerged in relation to crops, where the poisons always appear to have been used to maleficent effect. But if we examine the agricultural practices of early modern Europeans in more depth we find that this theme may have been more relevant to the experiences of the accused than might be assumed.

In Chapter Four we explored how contemporary communities protected their crops through the performance of religious and magical rituals – such as blessing fields with holy water and exorcizing pests – and argued that the Basque suspects may have drawn on these experiences when creating their accounts of crop-maleficium. But what we have not emphasized until now, is that these communities did not only employ methods of crop protection that were ritualistic but also methods that were practical, with the most important of these being the application of pesticides. As with medicine, we have little direct evidence as to how pesticidal substances were manufactured or employed on a popular level in this period. Accounts of their use are scarce and only appear in books and other records pertaining to agronomy written by and for the elite, with Jan Zadoks maintaining that ‘at this moment in time the information on the practice of crop protection, on what farmers really did, is scanty at best.’ Nevertheless, the evidence that medieval agronomists gained tips from ordinary farmers suggests that the practices recorded in these written sources can be cautiously extrapolated out to the wider population, with Spanish agronomist Gabriel Alonso de Herrera stating, in 1513, that he learnt ‘about agriculture from his farming father’ and returned the favour by writing his book in ‘a clear and simple language so that it could be consulted by unsophisticated farmers as well as by the landowners and their managers.’ The degree to which women were involved in pesticide use and manufacture is unclear but female involvement in both domestic gardens and field-agriculture, combined with their expertise in the manufacture of medicines and their knowledge of plants, strongly points to a level of participation. Certainly, the fact that instructions on how to prepare and apply pesticides emerge in a fourteenth-century book of housekeeping advice for Parisian women, indicates this was not an exclusively male preserve.³¹

With regard to our poison-making witches, it is highly significant that the bulk of these pesticidal preparations – which were most commonly ‘broad-spectrum insecticides’ – were made using the same methods and in many cases the same ingredients as medicines; being manufactured at home with ordinary cooking implements and employing common processing techniques such as mashing, boiling, distilling and drying to fuse ingredients into various forms, depending on their intended use. Preparations could range from ointments to grease-band trees; liquids or powders to be sprinkled on the fields at certain times of the year or in response to specific threats; and more solid substances, often containing grain, that could be used as rodent baits. As with medicines, the primary ingredients were plant-based but the sources indicate that nonbotanical materials such sulphur or arsenic, dung, lime, urine and ash were also common.³² We also find consistent, though less-frequent, references to the use of animals and their products. Fat was a relatively common admixture while there are also references to blood and various types of vermin including locusts, snails and bats, with a widely circulated collection of agronomic advice first printed in French in 1543, titled the Geoponika, advising that to eliminate caterpillars the householder should ‘take caterpillars from another garden, cook them in water with dill, let it cool down and sprinkle it over the vegetables, [and] you will kill the present caterpillars.’ As with contemporary medicines, some of these recipes could have had genuinely efficacious properties – with ash, for example, having a proven insecticidal effect. But in other cases the benefits would have been largely psychological, with Zadoks concluding that whatever its practical impact ‘another treatment of the crop ensures the farmer a good night’s sleep’.³³

With regard to witchcraft it is also relevant that – as with medicines – many of the ingredients used in pesticides could be hazardous and even fatal to humans. Fourteenth-century Parisian housewives were advised to kill rats by ‘making cakes of paste and toasted cheese and powdered aconite and setting these near to their holes, where they have naught to drink’. Meanwhile in the sixteenth century, Spanish agronomist Miguel Agustin advised that ‘strong vinegar, with henbane heated all together kills aphids in the vegetable garden’; and the authors of the Geoponika, that to make rodent bait you had to crush together ‘seed of poison hemlock with lenten rose and barley flour, or squirting cucumber, stinking nightshade or bitter almonds and lenten rose and mix it with equal parts of barley flour, dilute it in olive oil and place it near the holes of the voles, then trying it they will die’.³⁴ Early modern communities would have been well aware that the accidental ingestion of pesticides like rodent bait could cause sickness or death and that handling some of these substances could damage the lungs and skin. It is surely pertinent then, with regard to accusations of maleficium, that when these preparations were not effective (as must have so often been the case), it would have been all too easy to attribute the resultant crop failure to the malicious intent of the person who made and applied them.

Crop Protection: The Trial Records

Although there is little direct evidence that the (primarily female) suspects interrogated in the Basque witch-craze were using pesticides, we can fairly safely assume that if Parisian housewives were making and applying them with regularity in the fourteenth century then the same would have been true for rural Basque women in the seventeenth. We can even surmise that prolonged male absence due to transhumance, long-haul fishing trips and New World exploration left Basque wives and mothers shouldering more agricultural responsibility – and thereby developing more proficiency with pesticides – than was the norm for European women in this period. From this perspective it is reasonable to speculate that when creating fictions, false memories and dreams to flesh out their crop-maleficium narratives the Basque suspects unconsciously mined this expertise.

This speculation is supported by the finding that, when examined through this lens, some of the more anomalous or idiosyncratic references to poison manufacture and application begin to make more sense. De Lancre’s allegation that witches mixed their poisonous powders with ‘black millet’ to make an ‘evil paste’ appears less contrived when we consider that in this period pesticidal materials were often mixed with grain to produce rodent bait. With regard to distribution, while oddly precise in the context of crop-maleficium, Marie d’Aspilcouëtte’s claim that witches put liquid poisons ‘into a little earthern jar with little holes at the bottom like a watering can, and they make this liquid splash through these holes and spread as much as they can over the fruit’, accurately mirrors the fact that in this period liquid pesticides were commonly applied with ‘a perforated watering pot’.³⁵ Similarly, suspects’ claims that after sprinkling poisons they washed their hands to avoid harming themselves, appear less like dramatic fabrications when considered alongside the reality that unlike most medicines, pesticides can be dangerous if they come into direct contact with the skin. This interpretation also lends rationale to the assertions, from several defendants, that when they weeded crops sprinkled with poison the plants ‘burnt’ and ‘stung’ their hands – and adds realism to María Perez de Barrenechea’s elaboration that ‘as she was weeding, her hands were soiled with them [the powders], and returning home after weeding, she would wash her hands in water that she had ready for this purpose, and she would pour this water away, because if the chickens or piglets drank it, they would undoubtedly die.³⁶ These perspectives can even rationalize those confessions where suspects claim that they ‘normally’ spread poisons ‘in the mornings when there was mist because with its dew the powders adhered better to the cereal crops, vegetables and tree fruit’. Undoubtedly, these assertions could reflect a range of factors, from stereotypical witch beliefs to (more speculatively) the experience of anomalous meteorological phenomena such as acid fogs.³⁷ But in the present context, they point to the contemporary belief – and concrete observation – that some pesticides were best applied to crops when they were coated in dew, with the integrity of this practice being rooted in the fact that liquids can transform inert powders into active solutions. As Zadoks explains: ‘while rain may remove much of the [pesticidal] dust . . . dew deposited on a dusted plant surface may produce a chemically active film of water. Plant ashes will lead to an alkaline solution (high pH) and powder of sulphur might produce sulphuric acid (low pH), extremes that may prevent infection by fungi or bacteria.’³⁸ From this vantage point, we can also recalibrate some of the crop-maleficium passages which, in Chapter Four, were linked to the processional crop-protecting rituals performed by contemporary conjurors and priests.

[Miguel de Goiburu filled] the Devil’s main cauldron with the powders to share among the others. And the first to begin is the Devil, who with his left hand scatters powders behind him, always turning on his left hand and saying ‘powders, powders, ruin everything’ . . . and all the old witches scatter them and say the same thing as the Devil . . .

When they went to drop these powders each of the witches carried them in their pot, and for when they ran out an old witch carried in the Devil’s cauldron, which was made out of hide, a large quantity of powders and each would take them from there when they had run out. Not only did the Devil and the witches go to inflict this damage at night in the manner stated but they would also go flying by day dividing into one or two in one area and another two or three in another area . . .

Seven or eight times per year the Devil and all the other witches went to ruin the cereal crops and fruit when they were in flower with the powders that they made from the vermin and blessed preparations. And to inflict this damage the Devil went in front with six or seven of his pages and the King and Queen and the other old master witches and all of them forming a wing would fly through the air over the cereal crops and fruit dropping their powders . . .³⁹

While these passages evoke processional crop-protecting ritual, through the lens developed here they could also evoke the choreography of more practical agronomical activities. Accounts of poisons being guarded and meted out by senior witches could reflect the possibility that when distributing pesticides, labourers would have taken instruction from experienced individuals, particularly when hazardous materials were involved. Similarly, if we overlook the references to flight, Zozaya’s description of witches dividing into smaller groups to spread poisons on specific areas of land could reflect the possibility that in order to maximize uniformity of pesticide distribution, labourers were split into groups and given jurisdiction over different bits of land; with this need for uniformity also evoked in the narrative elaboration that when moving across the ‘cereal crops and fruit’ to scatter poison, the witches would ‘form a wing’ (that is, work in formation). References to poison-carrying cauldrons being ‘made out of hide’ could reflect the fact that, being comparatively light and impermeable, leather was an effective material for transporting powders and seeds. In a similar vein, descriptions of the Devil scattering the poisonous powders ‘behind him’ mimic the popular ‘broadcasting’ method through which seeds (or pesticidal powders) are flung behind the walker in a backwards motion; with the act, in this case, being inverted by the Devil throwing the powder with his left rather than his right hand. And finally, the accounts of witches chanting cursing rhymes while scattering their poisons could evoke the fact that prayers, charms and songs were chanted by agricultural and domestic workers across Europe in the pre-modern period, both as entertainment and to empower the process in hand through spiritual means.

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘Man’s Grease’

In the last chapter we speculated that when pressed to create accounts of poison-making, the Basque suspects mined their experiences of collecting herbs, toads and vermin and processing them into medicines and pesticides. But we reached this conclusion by avoiding one significant factor. Both French and Spanish suspects claimed they did not only use plants and animals to make their poisons but also human corpses, with Jeannette d’Abadie stating that she ‘saw many men, women, and children being disinterred in the cemeteries’ and made into ‘countless excellent poisons’, and the Zugarramurdi witches that ‘the brains and bones are buried and hidden in the akelarre in some holes so that later they can make the usual deadly poisons and ointments from them’.¹ Given their sensationalist and taboo nature, it is easy to assume that these references to corpses had a different narrative genesis to that of the other poison ingredients and should therefore not be considered within the medicine–pesticide paradigm. Certainly, it seems highly likely that the long association between witches, corpses and poisons in both demonological works and earlier Basque witchcraft trials would have encouraged de Lancre, Valle and Becerra to press suspects to confess to stereotypical examples of the crime. But on further examination we find the theme is more relevant to the arguments developed in the last chapter than we might have expected.²

Raw Materials: Corpse Medicine

In the first instance, we cannot assume that the accused did not contribute to their corpse-processing accounts. In response to interrogatorial questioning they are likely to have drawn on witchcraft stereotypes that circulated in the region both prior to and during the witch-craze. The belief that witches incorporated human body parts into their poisons emerged in Basque witch trial records from as early as the fourteenth century, with a typical account from the Salazar Valley in 1540 stating that some suspects ‘met to disinter a child and they removed the heart’ and that one of their number ‘said that the heart was to make powders to kill people and livestock, and to destroy crops.’³

But the suspects would also have had recourse to other lodes. When encountering the sensationalist accounts of poison-making maleficium in witch trial records and demonological works, it is easy to overlook the evidence that in early modern Europe it was not only witches who butchered corpses in order to process them into liquids, powders and ointments – but also ordinary men and women. Over the past decade, historians of early modern culture have been increasingly challenged by the uncomfortable fact that in this period it was ‘standard medical practice’ to use human body parts as ingredients in pharmaceuticals. This ‘corpse medicine’, as it has been termed, was practised in many parts of Europe and by people on every level of society, from royal physicians to middle-class housewives to the urban and rural poor. All parts of the human body appear to have been valued. Dried body parts and bones were particularly popular, perhaps because of their long shelf-life, but blood, flesh, organs and fat were also widely employed to medicinal ends. As Richard Sugg notes, contemporary physicians’ manuals are rich in this respect, with Ambroise Paré, surgeon to the king of France, claiming in 1585 that ‘cranium humanum, fat, blood, flesh’ and marrow were ‘useful in physic’ and that human ‘mummy’ was ‘the very first and last medicine of almost all our practitioners’ against bruising. Similarly, Estienne’s popular compendium Maison Rustique (1616) states that a ‘sovereign ointment’ for gout is made from ‘roots, rye flowers, butter and “man’s grease”’; while in the same century, French surgeon J. P. Desault reported that an ‘ointment made of one third part of mercury revived from cinnabar, one third part of human fat, and as much of hog’s lard’ was used to treat a lady who had been bitten by a stray dog on the road from Bordeaux to Medoc. The situation was similar south of the Pyrenees, with writer Francisco de Quevedo observing that in the early-seventeenth century Spanish physicians came to their clients’ bedsides ‘armed with a drug made of man’s grease’.⁴

In order to become medicine, corpses were subjected to a range of manufacturing processes that were as robust and detached as those described by the Basque witches. French chemist Antoine-Françoise de Fourcroy stated that in order to ‘prepare fat for pharmaceutical purposes’ it must be

cut in pieces, and the membranes and vessels separated; it is afterwards to be washed with much water, and melted in a new earthen vessel, with the addition of a small quantity of water; when this fluid is dissipated, and the ebullition ceases, it must be poured into an earthen glazed vessel, where it fixes, and becomes solid . . . twenty eight ounces of human fat afforded . . . twenty ounces, five drams [and] forty grains of fluid oil.

Meanwhile, if the following account of how to prepare ‘homemade mummy’ did not appear in a contemporary medical text penned by influential Paracelsian physician Johann Schröder, we would almost certainly dismiss it as fiction.

Take the fresh, unspotted cadaver of a redheaded man (because in them the blood is thinner and the flesh hence more excellent) aged about twenty-four, who has been executed and died a violent death. Let the corpse lie one day and night in the sun and moon – but the weather must be good. Cut the flesh in pieces and sprinkle it with myrrh and just a little aloe. Then soak it in spirits of wine for several days, hang it up for 6 or 10 hours, soak it again in spirits of wine, then let the pieces dry in dry air in a shady spot. Thus they will be similar to smoked meat, and will not stink.⁵

Corpses were obtained from a variety of sources. In 1694 the chief apothecary to the French king, Pierre Pomet, noted that Parisian apothecaries ‘sell human fat or grease, which is brought us from several parts’. While the latter phrase is (as Sugg notes) ‘tantalisingly cryptic’, it embraces a range of possibilities. Executioners played a major role here, with Pomet elaborating that ‘as everybody knows in Paris, the public executioner sells it [human fat] to those who want it’ and that ‘the skulls of criminals newly hanged, stripped of the fleshy membrane, and the brains taken out, being well washed and dried, and separated with a saw from the lower part, is what the druggists sell by the name of human skull’. The brisk trade in mummies allegedly imported from Egypt that emerged from the fifteenth-century onwards also brought corpses into circulation. There is even evidence that men took advantage of the battlefield, with a contemporary account of the Siege of Ostend in 1601–1604 stating that after a Spanish raiding party were slain ‘the surgeons of the town went thither . . . and brought away sacks full of man’s grease which they had drawn out of their bodies’ in the belief that it could be used heal the soldiers’ wounds. In other cases it was the Spaniards themselves who were deemed the perpetrators, with Antonio Herrera asserting (in an account that, as Suggs emphasizes, is difficult to dismiss as propaganda) that in the Americas ‘many [locals] were killed because they were fat in order to extract their grease to heal the sores of the Castilians’; to the extent that, as Sugg observes, ‘many Indians were terrified to bring firewood or food to the invaders, convinced that they would be murdered’ for this purpose.⁶ Lastly, although more difficult to assess, there is evidence that men and women directly availed themselves of body parts by going to graveyards and gallows, with accounts from various parts of Europe revealing that people clustered around executions to gain cups of blood and scavenged in cemeteries for bones. As with early modern medicine in general, it is much easier to identify corpse medicine as practised among the elites than among the common people but it is generally agreed that it formed ‘part of folk traditions among the poor’. Indeed, some scholars argue that the practice originated in popular tradition, with Beth Conklin asserting that ‘in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, medicinal uses of human corpses moved from folk medicine into the ranks of standard medical practice with the rise of the Paracelsian school of medical philosophy, which promoted the use of a variety of human body substances.’⁷

Corpse Medicine: Rationales

While corpse medicine might appear shocking to modern western sensibilities, in the early modern context it was entirely rational. Many human cultures have believed that the human corpse can be imbued with magical or spiritual power, and to this day the notion still has legitimacy in the Catholic Church. In sixteenth-century Spain the corpse of Teresa de Ávila was repeatedly plundered for body parts, from whole arms to small pieces of skin, that were quickly associated with a range of miracles. In the following century and for similar reasons the corpse of her fellow countryman, brother Martín de Carrascosa y Cabrejas, lost at least four toes on its journey from place of death to grave.⁸ In this context the belief that you can cure an illness by going on a pilgrimage to touch the bones of a saint and the belief that you can cure it by applying a preparation of mummy share the same logic.

But in early modern Europe the practice of corpse medicine was also underpinned by more prosaic factors. High levels of mortality meant that every individual, from the veteran to the young child, would have been familiar with the look, feel and smell of a corpse. On death an individual was not swept away from their home, as is so often the case today, to be prepared for burial by strangers. They would be washed, dressed and laid out in the family home by the women of the house, along with female relatives and commonly a woman who worked locally as a ‘laying out’ specialist.⁹ Although (to avoid discernible decomposition) the turnaround between death and burial was usually no longer than a few days, this short vigil still gave householders and visitors plenty of time to familiarize themselves with the corpse. It is also notable that encounters with the dead did not end after burial. In a period where cremation was seldom performed and the mortality rate high, graveyards filled so quickly that burial plots were utilized on a conveyer-belt system. Once a corpse had rotted down to the bones it was exhumed and given a ‘secondary burial’ that amounted, in most cases, to being stored in a building close to the church termed the ‘ossuary’ or ‘charnel house’. Frequent exhumation in conjunction with too-shallow burials also made for messy graveyards, with Sugg noting that ‘it has been pointed out that bones can often be seen lying scattered around in pictures of the era’s graveyards, and in the sixteenth century Rabelais claimed that beggars sometimes used them as fuel for fires’. In periods of epidemic, when the numbers of dead were too many to cope with and bodies were thrown into mass graves, this already-stretched system easily broke down. Even in ordinary times, visits to towns and cities could bring you face to face with the corpses of criminals hanging from gibbets or their body parts left, as deterrents, on public display. On a more removed level, simply walking past an apothecary or barber’s shop would have provided glimpses of skulls, bottles of blood and jars of mummy flesh exhibited in windows and stored on shelves.¹⁰ This familiarity would breed, if not contempt, then a certain detachment or diminished emotional response towards the dead body that made it easier to objectify. Such attitudes can be found in those who are exposed to corpses in large numbers today, from coroners and mortuary workers in the developed world to the locals who go about their business around the busy cremation ghats in the Indian city of Varanasi. It would have been particularly easy to detach from the unknown dead and criminals, with the latter dehumanized through their liminal status and by the fact that their body parts could be left in public places for days or weeks, to be picked at by the crows and blacken and rot in the sun. The dry, fleshless bones scattered about the graveyard or stacked in the ossuary would also have been relatively easy to divorce from their living human origin. This emotionally detached view of the corpse-as-object meant that it could be viewed as a commodity, like any other. The Parisian executioners who attempted to undercut the apothecaries by selling blood and human fat at cheaper rates were, like businessmen the world over, simply making profit out of a product for which there was a demand.¹¹

10  In this etching from eighteenth-century Spain, a woman squeamishly covers her eyes as she steals teeth from a hanged man (Francisco de Goya, 1797).

But although, for this range of reasons, the pharmaceutical processing of corpses was ‘standard medical practice’ it was not viewed without ambiguity. Although some physicians, as Montaigne tells us, ‘fear[ed] not’ to use human corpses ‘in all kinds of compositions’, others clearly condemned the practice, with Frenchman Vincent Leblanc noting that ‘some approve not of the physic’, and the Spaniard de Quevedo condemning physicians who use ‘man’s grease . . . though disguised under the name of mummy, to take off the horror and disgust of it’.¹² This cultural ambivalence was further complicated by the fact that the practice was condoned more freely in some social contexts than others. There appears to have been less elite anxiety surrounding the use of corpses by licensed medical practitioners such as physicians and surgeons, than by popular healers whose practices, as we shall explore in the next chapter, were already considered ambiguous enough without this added complication; with this double standard plainly expressed in Bodin’s claim that ‘those who keep dead people’s heads, unless they are doctors or surgeons, are engaged in the practice of necromancers [my italics].’ In large part, these elite anxieties were linked to wider mistrust surrounding the ambiguous and unorthodox nature of popular medicine and its links with magical practice. But it would also have been exacerbated by issues of access. Physicians, surgeons and the wealthy would have been able to purchase their human-body products from official sources such as the apothecary or executioner. But if the poor desired a finger, cup of blood or sliver of flesh they might be forced to go to the gibbet, graveyard or ossuary to obtain it clandestinely, with the prévot of Paris in 1673 condemning ‘persons who broke into the cemetery of Clamart to steal the teeth and hair of the dead.’¹³ Given these ambiguities it is hardly surprising that, as already speculated with regard to the medicinal use of narcotics, by the early modern period the magical or medical use of corpses by both magical practitioners and the poor had long been associated with witchcraft.

Corpse Medicine and Witchcraft

When examined from this vantage point, many of the corpse-related references in European witch trial records and demonological works acquire an unexpected realism. We see the relatively orthodox medico-magical practices of a cunning woman as opposed to the depravity of the witch in a witness’s declaration, in the Italian town of Todi in 1428, that accused witch Matteuccia di Francesco had instructed him ‘to take some meat and some fat from a man who had drowned in the Tiber and to bring it to her so that she could cook it and make a brew. He brought what she asked for and out of this meat she made a brew and some oil. This oil was used to cure people’s pains and wounds.’¹⁴ Similarly, the following description of witch-activity from French demonologist Nicolas Rémy, which follows on from a discussion of corpse-use in the classical world, can be read as a fairly accurate account of the ways in which the French poor would have attempted to gain body parts from execution sites.

The witches of our own time also use such practices, especially when they can come by the corpse of a man who has been put to death and exposed upon a cross as a public example. For they derive the material for their evil charms not only from the corpse, but even from the instruments of its punishment, such as the rope . . . for it is a common belief among them that there is some virtue and power in such things in the preparation of their magic spells.¹⁵

From this perspective, even the macabre and highly sensational account of corpse desecration that emerges in the fifteenth-century demonological text, entitled Errores Gazariorum, bears an uncanny resemblance to the Paracelsian prescription, cited earlier in this chapter, for making ‘homemade mummy’ out of ‘the fresh, unspotted cadaver of a redheaded man’ who had ‘died a violent death’.

[The witches] capture a red-haired man, not a member of the sect, but a good Catholic, and expose him naked, bound with cords, so that he can move neither hand nor foot. To the bound man they bring poisonous animals which bite him, by the actions of these most merciless and cruel members of the sect, so that the poor man, tortured by these torments, expires and dies, overcome by the poisons. When he is dead, they suspend him by the feet, placing a glass or earthen container of some sort beneath his mouth so as to catch the distilled poisons that have killed him. And mixing these drippings from the dead man on the gallows with the inner parts of dead children and those of poisonous animals, they make another ointment with the help of the devil, of which the touch alone can kill people . . .¹⁶

As this last extract illustrates, the difference between corpse medicine and corpse-use in witchcraft was not so much the mechanics of the act itself but the motive, intention and mode of body-part acquisition. The witches in the Errores Gazariorum did not just process a human corpse to make ointment, they processed a Christian corpse that they had previously tortured and murdered in order to make an ointment that could harm. In this way a potentially neutral pharmacological process was distorted into an act of heresy and sadism. Because they were more likely to involve unofficial methods of corpse acquisition, the medical practices of the poor would have been especially vulnerable to these kinds of distortion. In rural contexts in particular, visits to local graveyards and ossuaries would inevitably have brought individuals into contact with bones and body parts of people that were or had been locally known, generating more tensions than the acquisition methods of urban practitioners who had more anonymous access to larger cemeteries or busy execution sites. In these close-knit communities it would have been easier to suspect that an individual who had gained human body parts had been implicated in the act of killing someone to obtain them, with Martín del Rio stating that witches specifically killed people in order to gain access to their corpses.¹⁷ In the hands of a woman suspected of witchcraft, the dehumanized medicinal ingredient all too easily became the murder victim – and the impersonal practice of corpse medicine an act of aggression against her community.

Corpse Medicine: The Basque Trial Records

These perspectives on corpse medicine clearly have implications for the way that we view the poison-making activities of the Basque witch. Although the evidence is not extensive, there is little doubt that the attitudes towards the dead outlined over the last few pages also applied to the Basque country. Burial and execution practices bred familiarity with the corpse and, as in other parts of Europe, mortuary ritual was dominated by women, with Katarzyna Mirgos observing that ‘in the [Basque] funeral rituals, the woman takes a particular place, as the one who lays out the dead (washes the body with holy water, dresses the hair and places the candles in the hand of the deceased)’. Charnel houses and ossuaries were also widespread, with a particular attachment to this mortuary tradition demonstrated in the fact that the Basque country was one of the few western European regions where the practice of secondary burial extended well into the modern period. William Douglass states that as late as the 1960s, in the village of Murelaga

cemetery plots are not allocated to households. Whenever there is a death, the gravediggers exhume a previously buried corpse, deposit the bones in the ossuary, and then bury the newly deceased. Little attention is paid to where the individual is buried. In a few months the weeds claim the grave, and it is impossible to distinguish the outlines of the grave plot. Some domestic groups place a headstone on the grave of a deceased member, but with the knowledge that a few years later the body will be exhumed, the headstone discarded and a new corpse interred on the site.¹⁸

While the sources are thin, we also have indications that early modern Basques were familiar with corpse medicine. Guy de la Fontaine, physician to the king of Navarre, appears to have shared his colleague Ambroise Paré’s esteem for the medicinal virtues of the mummy; sending him a report on his investigations into the mummy trade on a visit to Alexandria in 1564. On a popular level, references to corpses in later accounts of Basque folk medicine suggest some form of earlier practice; with the nineteenth century inhabitants of the adjacent Béarnese city of Pau, for example, still believing that the touch of a hanged-man’s hand could cure goitre. Evidence that corpses were sought out by the poor can also be extrapolated from contemporary sorcery and witchcraft trials that took place in Zaragoza, an Aragonese city situated less than sixty kilometres south-east of the Spanish-Basque province of Navarre in the early modern period. Here, as Maria Tausiet observes, we find a ‘plethora of references’ to a ‘thirst for victims’ heads, fingers and teeth’ for use in ‘all kinds of spells’ that, like the extract from Rémy cited earlier, evoke popular magico-medical practice as opposed to demonological stereotype. There is vivid realism in Ana de Yuso’s claim that she ‘had gone one night to a hanging’ and her companion had ‘asked a man who went with them to cut her a piece of rope or a finger from the body’ but that ‘when he had unsheathed his sword to do so, another man arrived and prevented him’; and in Gracia Andreu’s claim that she ‘was unable to cut the hand from a dead man who was hanging there because people had come past’ and that she was forced to take a piece of gallows rope instead.¹⁹ Given that contemporary Paracelsian physicians could ‘very candidly’ recommend using ‘the bones of a man which hath not been buried fully a year’, making sure ‘to cleanse them well from the earth and dry them’ to make a medical preparation, we can even attribute some authenticity to the allegations, made in the Aragonese city of Barbastro in 1572, that Gascon sorcerer and healer Joan Petit had gone to the cathedral cemetery when a grave was being dug by a man named Monfarrat and ‘took a skull that Monfarrat had unearthed when he dug the mentioned grave and started to shake it and break it and remove the soil and rotten flesh (which was inside by now decayed and turned to dust) and put it in his apron to take it with him . . . with the intention of mixing it with other materials used to concoct magical potions.’²⁰

Taking these perspectives together, it is reasonable to assume that a good proportion of suspects interrogated during the Basque witch-craze would have had some knowledge, or even experience, of corpse medicine. But is there any evidence that they quarried these materials when creating their accounts of poison-making? The fact that the collection and processing of corpses was described with as much precision, coherence and above all, realism as the collection and preparation of herbs, vermin or toads, certainly raises this possibility. But because these corpse-related references so precisely mimicked stereotypical witch motifs, it is hard to be definitive in this respect. For example, using the perspectives developed in this chapter we could argue that the following passage from the Zozaya Sentence displays elements evocative of standard corpse-processing instructions as set out in contemporary medical manuals. But the argument then stalls because the passage contains no defining reference that categorically marks it out as a medical recipe as opposed to a typical, if elaborate, witchcraft narrative about the use of corpses in poison.

In their black bag [or sack] the Devil’s servants kept the bones from the bodies of the deceased because they only ate the meat and from these bones they later made powders and poisons and some of them they would break up and boil at the behest of the Devil in a pot with a certain herb that a servant of the Devil brought. And they went soft in such a way that they could then be crushed in some wooden mortars and the old and elderly witches would press them and squeeze them with their hands and draw from them a juice and yellow water that they would put in a stewpot. And they would give it to the Devil and he would keep it and he would only give a little each to the master witches and his favourites in a little jar or flask that they would bring for this purpose from their homes and they would keep it in a very small glass vessel at home and this was a very deadly poison . . .²¹

Disinterring Corpses

We can break this impasse, to a degree, by moving away from descriptions of how corpses were processed to accounts of how they were acquired in the first place. It would be hard to argue that the following account of disinterment from the Zozaya sentence is anything but another muddled elaboration of a stereotypical witch narrative, until we reach the last phrase.

Some nights she [María] went with the Devil and with the other witches to church cemeteries to take brains and bones from corpses to make these poisons added to all the other vermin, and for the brains they endeavoured to ensure they were from fresh bodies and without taking anything else from them they left them in their graves because the bones they take dry from some ossuaries. [my italics]

María’s claim that in order to obtain human bones she and her companions went to ‘some ossuaries’ is direct evidence that in constructing her disinterment account she mined knowledge or experience of secondary burial practices. This sliver of realism invites us to re-evaluate the whole passage and speculate that her assertion that a range of body parts were obtained from different places may not only have been dramatic storytelling designed to satisfy demanding interrogators, but also a distorted evocation of the kinds of practical distinctions made by people who sought out specific types of human body part for specific medical or magical purposes. Intimations of secondary burial can also be detected in the following passage from the Joint Sentence.

And once or twice a month the oldest and most pre-eminent witches make an offering of deceased people’s bones to the Devil, to which end they go to Zugarramurdi’s church with their hoes and some baskets with handles and they dig up the bones of deceased people who have been dead for many days, and removing their feet and hands and the cartilage from their noses and the little bones around them, they put these in their baskets and take them to the akelarre . . .²²

The incongruous juxtaposition of mundane, realistic detail (such as ‘hoes and some baskets with handles’) with a surprisingly graphic description of how skeletons were disinterred and dismembered becomes more logical when examined in the context of conventional exhumation practices. We noted earlier that access to human body parts would have been facilitated by the fact that bones were commonly exhumed after a number of years and taken to the ossuary. But what we have not yet emphasized, is that the individuals engaged in this work typically disarticulated the corpse in situ to facilitate easier transportation before cleaning and subsequent storage; with this disarticulation also presaging the fact that different bone types were often stacked together in the ossuary in separate piles. To this end, the hands and feet would need to be separated from the arm and leg bones, and bits of cartilage and smaller bones retrieved from larger structures like the skull, in precisely the manner described in the Zugarramurdi account. More speculatively, shades of contemporary mortuary practice can also be found in an alternative passage from the same record that states:

[Taking] hoes with them they [the witches and demons] go to the cemetery of the church where s/he is buried and the devil’s servants dig the grave where s/he was buried with the hoes until they uncover the body. And then the closest blood relatives of the deceased witch take the body from the grave and, removing the shroud, they open it up and pull out the innards and dismember it with some large machetes they take for this purpose, [and they do this] over the grave itself so that the clotted blood falls on it. And everything else that is in the body like innards and shroud they rebury in the grave, leaving it with the same proportions as before so that they evil they have done cannot be seen . . . [they then hide the bones and brains at the akelarre and later] they remove the bones from the holes where they left them buried and put them to boil together with a herb that in Basque they call belar nagusia, which has such power that it makes them as soft as turnips.²³

Despite the – at times almost-comedic – sensationalism of this passage, its description of evisceration and dismemberment is markedly visceral, detailed and coherent. We could attribute this realism to the suspects’ familiarity with flesh-butchering processes, whether via public executions or perhaps the communal animal-slaughtering and processing that was such an important part of pre-modern village life. But evisceration and dismemberment was also a feature of secondary burial. For a variety of reasons, from the medieval through to the early modern period it was not uncommon for the corpses of royals, nobles and eminent ecclesiastics to be divided and buried in more than one location, in a process that often involved the removal and separate burial of the viscera or internal organs.²⁴ Such a fate could also befall more humble people. Five years before the Basque witch-craze began, lay brother Martín de Carrascosa y Cabrejas of Cuenca (who was also the city’s ‘top candidate for sainthood’) died ‘in the village of Tebar while visiting his sister’. After some negotiations

Martín was buried with full services next to the [Tebar] parish church’s high altar. Residents from the region came to witness the event and touch the saint’s body, perhaps to grab a bit of the friar’s tunic or to steal a part of the body. Immediately after the burial, the body was disinterred, cut open, and disembowelled. Martin’s entrails were placed in a coffin and put back in the grave. The remainder of the body was sealed in a second coffin, which was carried through the summer heat to [its secondary burial in Cuenca] . . . ²⁵

Even the allegation that after eviscerating the bodies and leaving their ‘innards’ in the grave the Zugarramurdi suspects put the bones ‘to boil together with a herb that in Basque they call belar nagusia’ has rationale in this context, with Estella Weiss-Krejci stating that to ‘facilitate the transportation’ of corpses among the medieval nobility, ‘bodies were eviscerated and cut into pieces, and the flesh was removed by boiling the body in water, wine or vinegar. Flesh and intestines were usually buried at the place of death or sometimes cremated, while clean excarnated bones were wrapped in animal hides for their journey.’ Even in the ordinary exhumations performed several years after death, bones were treated to remove any remaining flesh, with Harding reporting that in early modern Paris ‘the [exhumed] skulls and large bones were cleaned’ before being stacked in the charnel house.²⁶ Given that the most graphic and coherent accounts of disinterment and evisceration emerge in the confessions from Zugarramurdi, it is also coincidental that as argued in Chapter Five, these confessions were first germinated by monks from the adjacent Urdax monastery. As Weiss-Krejci asserts, ‘in the Middle Ages monks who tended the dying and took care of their corpses often processed bodies’, and monasterial complexes emerged as specialist centres for secondary burial throughout medieval and early modern Europe. The most lavish and sophisticated ossuaries to have survived from this period are generally found attached to monasteries and these institutions frequently functioned as repositories for the physical relics of saints.²⁷

With regard to our main thesis, the finding that the dramatic accounts of disinterment can be linked so suggestively to contemporary mortuary practice, increases the likelihood that the descriptions of what the suspects did with the corpses once they had lifted them from the ground – that is, make them into poisons – were similarly reflective of genuine experience. From this perspective, when faced with deadlock passages like the Zozaya account quoted earlier, in which accounts of corpse processing are so difficult to extricate from witchcraft stereotype, we can more confidently entertain the possibility that the suspects may have mined their knowledge and experience of corpse medicine to create them.

Infant Corpses

Through this corpse-medicine lens we can also gain fresh insights into the claims, made by a significant percentage of Basque suspects, that they specifically sought out and processed the body parts of unbaptized children, with de Lancre going so far as to allege that Basque witches deliberately killed their babies before they received the sacrament ‘so that they lose their soul and become more useful and able to be used for their fat’. These references clearly reflect demonological stereotype, with the belief that poison-making witches had a predilection for the corpses of infants and children, particularly the unbaptized, emerging in demonological works from an early period. We also find the theme emerging in witch trial records in many parts of Europe prior to the witch-craze, including the Basque regions. All the examples of corpse processing recorded in Idoate’s collection of witch trial records pre-1608, for example, involve the use of children’s body parts.²⁸

Although the witch’s desire to incorporate the bodies of dead children into her medicines, as reflected in both demonological works and witch trial confessions, could be seen to represent all that is most inhumane and sensational about the stereotypical witch – in the context of corpse medicine it would have been both logical and practical. In early modern Europe the corpses of children were commonly prized by medical practitioners, with Charles Zika stating that ‘by the early seventeenth century human substances, and in particular the body-parts of children, were being widely recommended for use in medical concoctions.’ In large part, this popularity was rooted in the belief that the corpses of the young, whether the individuals had died naturally or as the result of violence or execution, were superior to those of the old because they contained an unspent life force which could be accessed by the living to beneficent effect, just as power can be drawn from a battery that has not yet run out.²⁹ In more magico-medical cures and indeed magical rites in general, the ‘pagan’ status of the unbaptized infant was also advantageous when negotiating with demonic agencies. But the corpses of children were also likely to have been prized for more pragmatic reasons. As we have seen in Chapter Five, although exact figures are hard to establish, it is clear that the deaths of infants and children were tragically commonplace in early modern Europe, with Poska emphasizing that ‘nearly one of every three children in Spain died within the first year of life’ and that up to fifteen percent of Galician infants did not survive their first month. Older children were also vulnerable, with estimates suggesting that in the European continent as a whole, between thirty-five to fifty percent of children died before they reached the age of ten.³⁰ Given that a large proportion of women of child-bearing age were giving birth approximately every two to three years, we can assume that even the smallest village generated a relatively consistent supply of child corpses that could theoretically have been employed in the manufacture of medicines.

Of course we cannot assert on this basis that the accounts of child-corpse processing that emerged in Europe’s witch trial confessions had any relation to medical practice. But we can entertain the possibility. Given that most witch suspects were female it is worth making the obvious, but easily overlooked, point that the individuals who had the greatest access to the steady supply of child corpses produced in this period were women. It was the mothers, grandmothers, sisters and aunts who brought children into the world, who also prepared them to depart from it. Washing them, dressing them in their grave clothes, carrying their stiff, doll-like bodies along the difuntuen bidea (‘road of the dead’) to burial sites and attending funeral ceremonies at which men, as a general rule, were not expected to be present.³¹ Unbaptized infants in particular, went straight from womb to swaddling clothes to shroud behind the closed doors of an almost-exclusively female world. Not qualifying for funeral rites or burial in consecrated ground, these infants were laid to rest in an informal manner by the women of the house in pieces of land abutting the cemetery or in orchards, gardens and eaves. It is also notable in this context that these factors would have been particularly acute in the Basque regions, where unusually high infant mortality rates ensured that women had particularly ready access to child corpses and that – because the complications around rhesus negativity caused infants to die in miscarriages, stillbirths or in the period soon after birth – a significant proportion of these corpses would have been unbaptized.

Alongside this access, we also have evidence that contemporary mother–child relationships were not exempt from the dynamics of detachment that, we argued earlier in this chapter, evolved in the wider population in response to the bodies of the dead. The records suggest that due to high mortality rates, many early modern parents did not have the available resources – whether emotional, temporal or physical – to grieve deeply for every child that died in childhood or infancy. Throughout the pre-modern period we find religious teachings and popular literature advising against excessive maternal grief, with stories warning that in these cases the children who were inappropriately mourned would be ‘obliged to drag behind them [in the afterlife] pails full of their parent’s tears.’ Similarly, the funerals of young children were dispatched quickly and with the minimum of fuss, as expressed with sad humour in the seventeenth-century French proverb: ‘A little mourning serves for little children’. In the Basque country these attitudes persisted into the 1960s, with William Douglass reporting that ‘when a baptized child dies’ in the village of Murelaga ‘the misa de gloria (the Mass of glory) is celebrated rather than the Mass of the Dead. Artu-emon is not offered. Neither is it proper for the domestic group to initiate formal or informal mourning.’ Attitudes toward the unbaptized could be even more peremptory, with Douglass observing that their deaths were ‘not of societal concern’ and that in Murelaga, as in many other parts of the Basque country, the ‘usual procedure is to bury the corpse in the household garden without ceremony.’ This pragmatism can also be detected in the evidence that, as controversially argued by French historian Philippe Ariès, many pre-modern parents were slow to individualize their offspring or recognize the ‘specific childhood character of young people’.³²

That these traditions reflected genuine emotional attitudes, as opposed to just textual and ritual convention, is supported by research into more recent undeveloped societies with similar birth and mortality rates to those of early modern Europe. In her analysis of mother–child bonds in the Brazilian shanty town of Alto do Cruzeiro in the 1960s, Nancy Scheper-Hughes demonstrates that although ‘mother love’ was highly prized and interaction with children very affectionate and tactile, relationships with infants were impersonal and they were not christened or named until they began to walk and talk. Child funerals were ‘an almost daily occurrence’ and ‘dispatched with a quality of la belle indifferance that outsiders sometimes find quite shocking’. Women were ‘scolded by other women if they shed tears for an infant’ and if a mother refused ‘to forget the death of a particularly favoured baby . . . their emotions tend to be dismissed as inappropriate’. That these behaviours reflected and engendered emotional detachment is indicated by the evidence that within the privacy of their homes, women could take these psychological dynamics to surprising extremes. In shanty towns like Alto do Cruzeiro, the struggle for physical existence was so acute that the high levels of care required by a chronically sickly, overly dependent or deformed child could threaten the survival of the whole family. Given this pressure, while overt aggression toward such children was deemed unacceptable it was not unusual for the mother to decide that they were ‘best left to die’ and deprive them of food, water, care and attention until they finally succumbed to starvation or dehydration, with Scheper-Hughes stating that ‘many such babies are left alone in their hammocks, while their mothers are out working . . . so they die alone and unattended’. This process of ‘ethnomedical selective neglect’ was often accompanied by the belief that the rejected children were ‘unnatural’ or an ‘angel of death’.³³

Of significance here is that this behaviour has been identified in early modern Europe, with Tausiet noting that ‘many historians have concluded that the decrease in infant mortality from the eighteenth century onwards cannot be explained by improvements in hygiene and medical practice alone; the main factor had to be the growing abandonment of the custom of allowing children to die, or helping them to die, when their lives were not wanted.’ Throughout the continent, including the Basque regions, this custom was supported by the widespread belief that an evil spirit or ‘changeling’ could take the place of a human child and that as a consequence it could be legitimately subjected to abuse; with the charge, as in Brazil, being levelled against children who were chronically sick or disabled or difficult to care for in other ways. Similar emotional dynamics can be identified in the widespread contradiction (again referenced here by Tausiet) that although infanticide was officially a criminal offence, for ‘most of the population’ it was ‘not considered a crime at all, but, on the contrary, an aid to survival.’³⁴

Comparisons between the European and Brazilian examples is further sharpened by the evidence that in both cases, these extremes of maternal detachment elicited ambivalent societal response. With regard to Alto do Cruzeiro, Scheper-Hughes notes that although selective neglect was widespread and commonly accepted, it was also hidden. The complex emotions and rationales that underpinned the process of ‘allowing’ a child to die meant that women ‘didn’t like’ talking about it and men had ‘little knowledge of the matter’. With regard to wider society the practice was ‘invisible’ and ‘generally unrecognized by those outside shantytown culture, even by professionals such as clinic doctors and teachers who came into frequent contact with severely neglected babies and young children.’ Similar dynamics can be identified in early modern Europe, with Tausiet noting that in contemporary Zaragoza forms of infanticide that involved neglect and ‘allowing children to die’ were dismissed as ‘involuntary homicides’ or ‘simple oversight or negligence’ so long as they stayed within the ‘domain of the intimate and private, confined almost entirely to the home and family circle, [that] remained a woman’s world’.³⁵

These perspectives are not proof that early modern women used the corpses of children in their medicine-making – but they do suggest that the mechanics of detachment that would have enabled them to do so may have been available to them. If, for the purposes of survival, twentieth-century Brazilian women were able to dehumanize living children to the extent that they could stand by and watch them being starved or ‘neglected’ to death, then for the purposes of survival, seventeenth-century European women may have been able to stand by and witness the bodies of dead children being processed into medicines. In drawing these conclusions we are not suggesting that large numbers of women practised child-corpse medicine in the period, but merely arguing that a percentage of the female community may have tolerated these practices as undertaken by the few. From this vantage point, demonological stereotypes about witches dismembering infant corpses to make their poisons may have articulated genuine societal fears around the degree to which maternal detachment could develop in the unpoliced domestic worlds of peasant women. There is no scope to pursue the various implications of this thesis here.³⁶ But the analyses undertaken in this chapter are certainly sufficient to suggest that when asked by their interrogators to answer questions about disinterring and processing the corpses of unbaptized children, the Basque witch-craze suspects may not have been lost for things to say.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hidden Healers

In the last two chapters we have argued that the Basque suspects may have fleshed out their poison-making accounts by mining their experience of making ointments, powders and liquids for use in medicines and pesticides. But the records also indicate that these manufacturing activities may have extended beyond the domestic sphere. At several points in the Tableau de Lancre states that the witches’ poisons were not just made for personal use but were also offered for sale, with Jeannette de Belloc allegedly confessing that ‘some stones were taken from the heads of the toads that the witches sold’; and Marie d’Aspilcouëtte that ‘at the sabbath people make a certain dough with black millet mixed with some powder of the liver of an unbaptized child . . . [s]he says that [s]he saw this dough of black millet made by a woman from Hendaye named Mescabelsa, who afterwards sold it to those who wanted to buy some.’ Elsewhere, de Lancre states that:

Others told us that people are encouraged to buy some of it, but this is only heard from those men and women who know how to use it. Le Gros said that no-one is forced into this; everyone makes his own judgement about what to buy, and they do so more or less according to their available resources and their inclination to do evil. It is very inexpensive, for the women say that for a penny one can buy enough to do a great deal of harm.¹

Given that the trading of poisons is not a strong theme in demonological works, and in the absence of any other visible reason why de Lancre should have introduced it, we can speculate that these statements were brought to the interrogations by the suspects themselves. This raises the possibility that in creating their poison-making accounts the accused did not only draw on knowledge or experience of making medicines for personal use but also to sell to others.²

This certainly reflects a reality in the period. By the seventeenth century medicine-making was a thriving commercial enterprise in many parts of Europe. As noted in Chapter Six, manufacture and sale was commonly undertaken by officially trained professionals, most commonly apothecaries. But high need and limited regulation led to a wide diversity of production and distribution, with María Luz López Terrada stating in regard to early modern Spain that ‘the sale of medicines outside the legally operating dispensaries was widespread’ and that ‘as in the rest of Europe, panaceas for the cure of one or a variety of ailments, whether provided by curanderos or by members of the academic world, represented a flourishing business.’ Some of the individuals who operated outside the legal dispensaries obtained licences to sell specific products but many others, despite the threat of prosecution, ‘made and sold medicines without authorization.’ With regard to our witch suspects, it is notable that this commerce could take place on a very local and modest scale. Ramsey observes that in eighteenth-century France ‘almost anyone could prepare remedies from a few local herbs and sell them close to home’, with the practice often pursued by the poor, and particularly widows, to supplement a meagre income.³ That some of the Basque suspects drew on their experiences of commercial medicine manufacture when cocreating their poison-making accounts is wholly congruent in this context.

Popular Healers

Having extrapolated the manufacture of poisons out of the domestic sphere, can we do the same for their application? Is there any evidence that suspects’ claims to have administered poisons to their victims did not only mine domestic medical matrices but also their knowledge and experience of specialist medical practitioners? As with so many aspects of popular culture in this period the professional dimension of popular medicine is obscure, but over the past three or four decades increased interest from social historians has begun to illuminate this hidden world. There has been an increasing recognition that officially trained medical practitioners such as physicians, surgeons and apothecaries were not the only individuals who offered medical care in the period and that many people, particularly in the countryside, frequently resorted to the cheaper and more numerous ‘popular healers’, as we shall term them here. The limited evidence that exists indicates that the latter came in many guises, ranging from ‘empirical healers’ (such as midwives) to ‘itinerant salesmen’ to a range of religious and folk healers who worked with traditional herbal remedies and/or ‘charismatic healing powers’.⁴ This range of services – more recently defined by scholars as ‘medical pluralism’ or the ‘medical marketplace’ – offered a diverse choice that was exploited according to both purse and need. Popular healers were very important in rural populations, with one sixteenth-century commentator noting that they were particularly esteemed by ‘poor rustic people distanced from aid’. Indeed among this demographic they were often considered superior to officially trained practitioners, with sixteenth-century Frenchwoman Jeanne Lescallier allegedly curing ‘a multitude of people abandoned and despaired of by the physicians.’⁵

It was also possible for popular healers to find themselves caught up in witchcraft trials. Throughout medieval and early modern Europe it was common for demonologists and other elite commentators to interpret unofficial healing methods as some form of sorcery or witchcraft, with popular healers often being designated by the term ‘witch’. De Lancre himself devoted a whole chapter of the Tableau to the threats posed by witches who branded themselves as healers, amply punctuating his diatribe with subtitles such as: ‘How it is dangerous to be healed by a witch’.⁶ European witch trial records also contain cases where it is evident that the individual being tried for witchcraft had been working in their community as a healer; with prosecutors often attempting to redefine their beneficent practices as maleficium.⁷ The extent of this conflation, however, is not clear. Until the late-twentieth century many historians and popular writers subscribed to the view that a large proportion of the women accused of witchcraft in Europe’s witch-hunting centuries functioned as magico-medical practitioners and that witchcraft prosecution was ‘primarily driven by hostility to this massive sub-culture of [popular] healers.’ But in the 1990s there was a swing toward the view that witches and healers were clearly distinguished in the period and that fewer healers were caught up in witchcraft trials than previously assumed; with Briggs more recently putting the figure, with regard to the Lorraine trials, at a modest ten percent.⁸

With regard to the Basque records, is there any evidence that the accounts of making and administering poisons were linked in any way to the activities of popular healers? Certainly, as in other parts of Europe a range of healers were operating in the Basque regions up to and during the witch-craze. In 1529 Castañega complained that ‘when mothers suspect that their child is infected by the evil eye, they shouldn’t go to old healers (santiguaderas) or witches’, while Salazar complained, when on visitation nearly a century later, that:

There were besides a great many so-called santiguadores and ensalmadores of every class and condition, even a considerable number of priests. These claim to have [special] knowledge of these matters and also of the witches . . . The villagers have come to believe in them, and they supply as many remedies as they are asked for in return for the payments and benefits which they shamelessly extort.⁹

Popular healers were even sentenced alongside Basque witches at the 1610 Logroño auto de fé, with Henningsen recording that parish clerks Dionisio de Lerma and Pedro Manrique confessed, respectively, that they ‘made a living by curing people with spells and writing prescriptions for medicine’ and ‘cured people with magic spells’. Despite the condemnation of men like Salazar these practitioners were often held in high esteem. Frank observes that as late as the early-eighteenth century Basque saludadores were ‘recognized as important and productive members of society, providing important services’, while as recently as the 1950s a famous ‘faith healer’ with a proficiency in herbs from Arruntz was known as Jainko ttipia or ‘the little God’.¹⁰ There is also evidence that over the centuries Basque healers found themselves in court on charges of witchcraft: in Pamplona in 1648–9, María de Ollo was not only prosecuted by the Inquisition because she travelled to a festive sabbath and worshipped the Devil but also because she ‘cured superstitiously different people and different diseases by applying ointments made of herbs picked on the morning of St John’.¹¹

Yet despite this promising context, when we come to the 1609–14 witch-craze records themselves, the evidence is not strong. Although de Lancre (as his diatribe in the Tableau attests) was exercised by the close link between witches and popular healers, the only clear reference to a healer to emerge from his text relates to a trial conducted by the Bordeaux Parlement in 1608, before de Lancre set foot in Labourd. We find a similar absence on the other side of the border. Aside from a suggestion that priest-suspect Juan de la Borda may have used some healing charms ‘a few times’, no Spanish suspects were positively identified as healers; to the extent that healing is not discussed in Henningsen’s comprehensive study of the Spanish prosecutions, or even referenced in the index.¹²

Acts of Healing: Overt

But although overt references to healers are sparse, the Spanish records do contain numerous references to both the Devil and witches performing acts of healing. In his account of the Logroño auto de fé de Lancre alleged that after applying flying ointment, the Spanish witches ‘fly through the night like birds, together with their dressed-up toad. And when they perform a cure, they say and repeat these words: “Emen hetan, emen hetan,” which means “Here and there, here and there”[my italics]’.¹³ Less dramatic but better-contextualized references to healing can be found in suspects’ claims, already touched on in Chapter Five, that when they received the witches’ mark or were beaten at the akelarre, the Devil ‘usually healed them afterwards with special ointment’; with the Mongastón pamphlet stating that after some errant witches had been whipped, the Devil got out ‘from his office and apothecary he has of ointments, waters and powders’ a ‘small pot of red clay, in which he had an ointment with which he anointed the scourges’. We also find an overt reference to healing by the Devil and his witches in the Zozaya sentence, which states that

if the witches who inflicted the damage should later wish to remedy it by curing them of the evil they inflicted they cannot cure them without the mandate of the Devil. And the witch who did the damage when [he or she] wants to cure them on asking him he gives [him or her] an ointment to spread on the patient and this cures them and the Devil then gathers in whatever is left over and the witches do not have access to the secret of this ointment that cures . . . even if the Witch who gives this water and caused the damage asks the Devil for remedy he seldom wants to give it . . .¹⁴

These Spanish cases are clearly complicated by the fact that they do not describe simple acts of healing but acts in which the Devil and the witches are healing wounds or sicknesses that they had caused themselves. This narrative pattern clearly reflects the belief, found throughout Europe in this period, that the best recourse for those suffering from maleficium was to seek a cure from the individual that caused it.¹⁵ In the Tableau de Lancre describes how a suspect named Isaac de Queyran, who was tried by the Bordeaux Parlement in 1608, confessed that being urged to cure a child he had bewitched, he went to the Devil for help and was given a ‘herb called pelude’ in order to make him well again. In the following year de Lancre encountered a variant of this belief in the Basque country, observing that ‘the means most commonly used by our witches in the Labourd to heal and to “de-witch” those whom they have bewitched is hand-washing.’ After giving several examples of how the ritual was practised in other regions he explains that

the hand-washing practised by the witches in the Labourd is altogether different [to that of other places]. The witch suspected of having done evil to some poor creature is summoned. She is made to wash her hands in some basin. And then the bewitched person is made to drink the dirty water . . . I have never seen anyone who was cured of it [bewitchment]. Nonetheless, this method is still used in this area practically daily, and I believe that the Devil permits this remedy to be occasionally effective in order to further trick people and to keep them captive in their superstitions. But we have never been able to see a complete and true success, even though we were told of a witch from Asparen who supposedly healed many people.¹⁶

Historians of witchcraft often argue that because suspects like Isaac and María were removing sicknesses that they themselves had caused, they cannot be termed ‘healers’ in the proper sense of the word but should remain in the category of ‘witch’ or, as Robin Briggs has recently suggested, the sub-category of ‘healing witch’. But recent research into contemporary magical practice, particularly in relation to shamanism, suggests we should avoid hard and fast distinctions here. Trial records for sorcery and witchcraft from across Europe consistently reveal that when responding to clients’ demands for healing, protection, love or the recovery of lost goods, magical practitioners often sought to resolve the problem by causing harm to the alleged guilty party in order to bring them to penitence or confession. While it is hard to assess the extent, it is also clear that – with equally ambiguous ethicality – some practitioners attempted to heal humans or animals by either transferring their sickness onto something or someone else, or by invoking and demanding help from the demons or folk spirits that caused the sickness in the first place. All of these methods were premised on the belief that magico-medical practitioners possessed – or were able to harness – supernatural forces that could either heal or harm, and meant that good reputations could be more dependent on the perceived morality of the practitioner’s motivations than the techniques employed.¹⁷

In the Basque case, the close historical relationship between the witch and the ability to heal is clearly visible in the etymology. As Frank has noted, in many parts of the country the witch is known by the name bedaguina, belaguin (Uztarroz), beraguin (Vidangoz) and bedeguin (Isaba). These words are all phonologically reduced variants of the word belharguin – a compound based on the root belhar (plant, herb) and eguin (to do, make) – rendering the literal meaning of the compound belharguin as ‘herb-worker’, that is, ‘someone or something that makes things out of plants, herbs’. Meanwhile in Soule, the concept ‘witchcraft’ is translated by the expression belhaguilego or ‘that which has to do with the one who works with herbs’. This link is also reflected in folktales collected in Euskara in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which protagonists learn how to heal the bewitched and sick by overhearing witches talking at the akelarre; with a tale recorded by Pierre Lhande describing how the hero ‘Bidabe’ followed his betrothed to a gathering where ‘he learnt a great deal about the Witches’ Sabbath, and found out, for instance, what virtue there is in alder-bark, what one can do with a stick of holly-wood, and what illness can be cured with mole’s blood.’¹⁸ This ambivalence makes it difficult to make concrete distinctions between healers and ‘healing witches’, particularly when they are viewed through the distorting prism of the witch trial record.

Acts of Healing: Covert

As touched on in Chapter Five, the Basque records also contain more covert references to healing practice. We have already argued that in creating their accounts of engaging in vampiric attacks and receiving the witches’ mark, some Basque suspects may have mined memories of medical bloodletting treatments, as reflected in Miguel de Goiburu’s claim that ‘from the wound near his ear he drew blood, which the Devil then collected and kept in a vessel’ and in the vivid accusation, in the Joint Sentence, that a group of witches along with the Devil undressed a child and ‘pricked her hard with some needles in the anus, genitals, navel and joints of her arms and sucked a large amount of blood out’ before treating the wounds with ointment. In this earlier analysis we noted that bloodletting was typically practised by official practitioners such as physicians, barber-surgeons and hospital monks, with particular reference to the treatments that may have taken place at the monastery of Urdax. But what we have not emphasized until now, is that these practices were also employed by a wide range of less official healers such as midwives, itinerant quacks, village healers and folk practitioners like the Spanish saludador. Although the source is late, a vivid example of the bloodletting expertise that may have been acquired by popular healers in the pre-modern period can be found in an account from nineteenth-century France where, despite official disapproval, the treatment was still highly popular among ordinary people. Matthew Ramsey reports that to treat an illness termed ‘es hunes’, the popular medic or panseur employed the following methods.

Taking a rusty razor, he made cuts on the wrists, the back of the hands, the fingers, the gastrocnemius (the large muscle of the calf of the leg), and other parts of the body. Sometimes he made two or three razor cuts on the palate, or opened the ranine veins or even arteries, using a lancet in place of the razor. The patient would be given a little water with which to rise his mouth, but the panseur never bandaged the wounds; in this popular version of phlebotomy, the more blood that flowed, the better. The scarifications would be repeated one or more times during propitious periods . . . Good Friday was considered to be the best day for treatment, and on that occasion it was not unusual for more than a hundred persons to come to Dol to see a panseur. But all year long, during the waning moon, one or two healers came to town each Saturday (market day) and received patients at a private house.¹⁹

From this perspective, it is possible that if the Basque witch suspects did mine their experiences of bloodletting treatments to flesh out their accounts of infanticidal vampirism and the witches’ mark, then they may have drawn on the treatments of popular as well as official practitioners. Indeed, popular treatments may have been particularly amenable to demonization in this respect because they were more likely to have contained superstitious or magical elements. Evocative comparisons, for example, can be drawn between Zugarramurdi suspect Graciana de Barrenechea’s assertion that

the Devil marked her by taking a little flesh from her nose, from which blood was drawn, with a fingernail like an eagle’s, and it was very painful for over a fortnight. And then with a sort of golden thing he marked her on the pupils of her eyes without her receiving any pain whatsoever . . .

and de Lancre’s report that a Spanish saludador

cut his [the patient’s] nostrils three times with a tiny knife, drawing from each one a bit of blood, which he collected on a small plate. Then he washed his nose with a bit of blessed wine. After conversing together for about half an hour, they noticed that in each drop of blood on the plate, which they had never failed to see, for they were separated from each other on the plate, there was a worm that was wriggling around. Afterwards he told him that he was healed . . . ²⁰

Evidence that the Basque suspects may have quarried popular bloodletting practices can also be found by looking more closely at the sucking component of the vampiric attack. When constructing our bloodletting thesis in Chapter Five, we largely ignored this element of the witches’ vampirism by focusing our attention on descriptions of puncturing veins, cutting skin and collecting blood in cups. In doing so we implied, by omission, that the theme of sucking blood was best contextualized within demonological and folkloric – as opposed to medical – matrices. But surprisingly, this theme does have some relevance for contemporary bloodletting practice. Evidence from different parts of Europe point to the popular belief, still found in traditional medicine in parts of the world today, that a healer can remove sickness-causing agents from the body by sucking them out.²¹ Matteo Duni’s research into sorcery and witchcraft trial records from the northern Italian province of Modena are particularly illuminating in this respect. Duni observes that in the district of Castelvetro in the early-sixteenth century, a ‘witch and sorceress’ named ‘la Menigotta’ allegedly ‘resurrected a child, that had been judged dead by everyone, with a thousand superstitions, sucking every single joint of the child’s body . . . so that in the end he [the child] started to say: “Alas. Stop it!”’ This practice could also require the practitioner to directly suck on bodily fluids, with Tausiet noting that during a seventeenth-century sorcery trial in Zaragoza it was alleged that a saludador

asked a sick woman to reveal her illness, and [told her] that he would cure her. And when she showed him a very horrible wound that she had near her ankle, the defendant bent down and sucked and licked at the wound without any change of expression. And [ . . .] she did not see him spit . . . [T]he defendant told him that by repeating this cure he had healed the woman . . .

The Zaragozan records also provide another example in which the act of sucking blood was more pronounced. In 1619 the prosecution alleged that cobbler (and part-time saludador) Gabriel Monteche

would put a worm in his mouth, and let it be thought by those who had been touched by rabid dogs that he was a saludador and that he would heal them. And he would have a surgeon pierce the patient’s skin, allowing a little blood to spill, and then he would come, suck that blood, and afterwards add it to a bowl of water and, having stirred the two, would add the worm from his mouth, and as it was mixed with the blood that he had sucked, they thought and believed that he had taken it from the man’s body, and they gave him money and held him to be a saludador who by the grace of God could carry out such cures.²²

It is not difficult to see how the beneficent sucking by popular healers could become conflated with the maleficent vampirism of the folk demon or witch, particularly when a healer was suspected of having performed harmful magic.²³ The only reason we know that Italian sorceress ‘la Menigotta’ used her sucking skills to resurrect a child that had been ‘judged dead by everyone’ was because she found herself in court on charges of maleficium, with Duni emphasizing that ‘this is a striking document on the perceived duplicity of a witch’s role: feared because of her terrible harmful powers, but capable of an astonishing beneficent deed such as the raising of the dead’. The process through which curative sucking skills could be conflated with vampirism is vividly demonstrated in Modenese records relating to the 1539 trial of Sassorosso suspect Orsolina Toni. While Orsolina was charged with body-maleficium, many of the details in the account such as precise knowledge of bloodletting sites, the use of metal piercing tools and spitting sucked blood into the hearth in order to process it for magical purposes, are highly evocative of the curative sucking treatments performed by saludador-type healers.

Interrogated in what way she harms babies. She answered ‘I suck their blood from under their nails of their hands or their feet, or else from their lips, and I spit that blood into the hearth, after having first put all the ashes to the side, and I make focaccia with that congealed blood and then I keep it . . . [I]nterrogated how it was possible to draw blood from babies’ fingers by sucking, as she has confessed, she answered that under both the thumb and the big toe there is a certain big vein, and that if they [the witches] pierce the finger or toe near that vein with either their nails or some other tool, they can draw as much blood as they want. She also says that babies often cry because of such a wound and therefore if they are guarded witches must run away.²⁴

These perspectives suggest that when creating fictions, false memories and dreams to flesh out their confessions of body-maleficium, the Basque witch suspects may have mined their knowledge and experience of the bloodletting and bloodsucking practices of popular healers. Through this lens, Johanes de Goucueta’s claim that when giving him the witches’ mark the Devil gave him ‘a bite with his teeth below his shoulder’ before he ‘sucked the blood that flowed out’, may have drawn on a previous encounter with a sucking saludador. Similarly, a slightly more sophisticated treatment, as practised on a local priest, may have informed Jeannette d’Abadie’s belief that defiant witches could derive their strength from a process whereby ‘the Devil pierced their left foot with an awl and took a little bit of blood from the little toe of the left foot, which he then sucked, causing them to never confess anything concerning witchcraft. She saw this being practised on Maître François de Bideguaray, a priest from a place called Bordegaina’.²⁵

The Hidden Healers

While this brief survey suggests that some of the Basque witch suspects may have drawn on their knowledge and experience of popular healing specialists when creating their testimony, it still does not indicate whether any of them operated as healers themselves. Without this confirmation we must conclude, as historians have done in relation to witch records from many other parts of Europe, that the numbers of popular healers accused of witchcraft in the Basque witch-craze is likely to have been low. But our research into domestic medicine as conducted in Chapter Six does invite us to nuance this conclusion. Given that the majority of suspects interrogated in the Basque witchcraft trials were women, we are predominantly looking for female healers. But this is precisely the category of healer that is hardest to identify. Male popular healers left more frequent traces in the historical records than their female counterparts because they were more likely to possess some form of occupational title, sometimes reinforced via licences to practise, as was frequently the case with the saludador. However skilled they may have been, women had less access to medical identities. Alison Klairmont-Lingo reports that in the records generated by the municipally funded poor hospital in sixteenth-century Lyon, male medical practitioners were often identified ‘by occupation’ but female practitioners were ‘almost always’ identified ‘simply as “women” or by their first and last name, [although] many of them engaged in the identical tasks as male practitioners’; with the term ‘woman’ being used interchangeably with that of ‘barber’. Male healers also left more records in the courts because they were more likely to operate as itinerant medicine-sellers and prescribers and were therefore more vulnerable to charges of charlatanism than religious or folk healers, whose practices often remained hidden in the unrecorded annals of village life. As a consequence, as Cabré notes with regard to studies of medieval Spain, female healers are ‘almost invisible in the historical records’.²⁶

These findings are relevant to the identification of healers in the Basque records (and indeed any witch records) because the same factors that make it difficult for modern scholars to identify female healers in medieval and early modern sources may also have made it difficult for witchcraft interrogators to identify them among witchcraft suspects. When a female healer came before a man like de Lancre or Valle she was unlikely to have had a clear occupational identity, let alone any licence to practise. This lack of professional status, when taken in conjunction with the fact that she was also more likely – than her more officially trained male counterparts – to be working with superstitious folk remedies, would have made it easier for her interrogators to assume that her activities were related to maleficent witchcraft as opposed to medical care. This supposition would have been further fuelled by the fact that, in the absence of more official forms of validation, female healers earnt their qualification to practise through the less precise – and certainly more subjective – markers of experience and reputation, with Broomhall noting that sixteenth-century French peasant woman Jeanne Lescallier ‘readily admitted’ in court ‘that she did not have university medical education, but argued that she had a valid basis for her practice [as a healer] through her extensive use of simple herbal remedies.’ As strangers to the local medical marketplace it would have been all too easy for men like de Lancre, Valle and Becerra to miss the subtle social dynamics that elevated certain individuals from ‘women’ to ‘medical practitioners’. The fact that the only clearly defined medical practitioners to emerge in the Tableau are male could also be seen to support this thesis.²⁷

But witchcraft interrogators would also have been challenged by the fact that most female healers emerged out of the domestic sphere. In the absence of official titles, a reasonable working definition of the female healer is (following Monica Green): ‘women who at some point in their lives would have either identified themselves in terms of their medical practice or been so identified by their communities’.²⁸ But the usefulness of this definition must be set against the fact that, as we have seen in the last two chapters, almost all early modern women engaged in the activity of healing to a certain extent: making and administering medicines and other treatments in the context of their role as providers of domestic medical care. As a consequence, the activity of female healing existed on a continuum with the ordinary housewife providing domestic medical care at one end, to the individual of wider reputation who ‘identified themselves in terms of their medical practice’ at the other. But there must have been many stages in between. It would have been hard for interrogators (as it is for modern historians) to draw distinctions between a woman who made cures for family members from a woman who, due to her noted expertise, was sometimes applied to for medicines by friends or the friends of friends, from a woman who enjoyed a wider local reputation as a prescriber of medicines and was therefore also visited by both members of her local community and people from further afield. For example, Zugarramurdi suspect Estevania Navarkorena claimed to have performed various acts of body-maleficium in response to conflicts with neighbours. But at one point she brings the maleficium closer to home, confessing that

when her daughter gave birth to a baby girl, she dressed herself in beautiful clothes. She took the baby in her arms, and the little girl soiled her new apron. Enraged, she consulted the Devil about it, and he gave her some powders to kill the baby. Este[v]ania told her daughter, the baby’s mother, that the child had worms, and that those powders would cure her. A few days after eating them, the baby was dead.²⁹

This passage can be read as a description of an inverted healing event. Believing that her grand-daughter had worms (maybe through examining her faeces) Estevania gave her daughter a medicine to cure the child. The trauma of the child’s subsequent death then provoked the mother or another community member to accuse her of witchcraft and under interrogation Estevania was ‘persuaded’ to invert this benign event into a deliberate act of maleficium. But in this context Estevania’s healing status is not at all clear. Neither we nor (at the time) the interrogators can easily ascertain whether she was merely a grandmother who had better knowledge than her daughter about childhood illnesses, or a woman whose abilities were sought out by wider family and friends, or a woman whose skills were famous enough to be sought out by strangers. In other words, we cannot know whether Estevania qualified for the category of ‘healer’ or just ‘woman who heals’ or something in between.

Interrogatorial perceptions may have been further clouded on this issue because these distinctions were also unimportant to Estevania’s accusers. If the charges against her originated in neighbourhood tensions, as strongly suggested by the other acts of body-maleficium attributed to her, then so far as the aggrieved accusers were concerned the question as to whether she was a ‘domestic practitioner’ or ‘popular healer’ or some permutation of these was unimportant; all they would have cared about was that she had given some powders to the child and that it had then died. If such distinctions were not important to the accusers then they would have been even less so to the interrogators. For men like de Lancre and Valle, who were under all kinds of pressure and anxious for conviction, there would have been little reason to spend much time exploring whether and to what degree the woman who stood before them had been a ‘healer’ or merely a ‘woman who healed’. All they were interested in was the alleged maleficium. These perspectives certainly help to explain why the Basque records so seldom describe suspects that can be definitively identified as ‘healers’ but simultaneously contain so many overt and covert references to medicine-making and healing. They also suggest that the historiographical tendency to analyse witchcraft records in relation to popular healers may have yielded such thin pickings because it has traditionally relied on identification categories that largely evolved in relation to men.

CHAPTER NINE

Familiar Demons

In the last three chapters we have argued that while descriptions of poison ingredients like herbs, vermin, toads and corpses owed something to interrogatorial superimposition, they may also have emerged out of suspects’ knowledge and experience of popular medicine and pesticide use, as practised both domestically and professionally in this period. But what we have not emphasized until now is that one of the raw materials used by the poison-making witch – the toad – enjoyed a uniquely dual identity. In addition to being the most important of the listed poison ingredients it also emerges as an intentioned being, often characterized as an avatar of the Devil, that could enter into a personal relationship with the witch. The toad was often given to the novice by the Devil upon initiation and then kept in the home in a pot or chest where it was regularly provided with food and drink. In return for this care the amphibian offered the witch a range of magical services, most prominent of which was access to venom which she could then use to make poisons and, more specifically, the flying ointments or waters that enabled her to travel to the akelarre. According to the Joint Sentence

[the] dressed toads are the ones that the Devil gives them at the akelarre, one for each of them after they have apostatised, and they are other devils in the form of toads whose faces have the same appearance and proportions as the lord Devil of the akelarre. And he gives these to the witches as their guardian angels to accompany them, help them and advise them on the evils that they should commit, and so that from them they can draw the water with which they anoint themselves to go to the akelarres. And they keep them in the best hiding places in their homes and they sustain them by feeding them with millet, corn, wine and everything else that they themselves eat . . .¹

Another notable feature of this anthropomorphized toad was that it was decorated with ribbons and bells and dressed in brightly-coloured little clothes. Ranging in colour from ‘black and green’ to ‘red’ or ‘different shades of yellow’, these could be sophisticated in design, with some being ‘in one piece and open between the arms and legs, and it was very tight and it also had a hood but with the face exposed . . . and only its feet and hands could be seen outside of the outfit’.² While there are points of overlap between the ordinary medicinal toad and this anthropomorphized toad (with the latter sometimes being herded at the akelarre and the former being used to make flying ointments) they can nevertheless be seen as largely distinct. Barring one isolated (and another intimated) case in the Tableau, all descriptions of the anthropomorphized toad familiar appear in the Spanish records.³

In some respects the Basque focus on the relationship between the witch and her toad is conventional. The belief that witches facilitated their acts of maleficium through interaction with the Devil or a demon in animal form emerged frequently in witchcraft records Europe-wide, with forms ranging from insects and birds to larger mammals like dogs and cats. While less common, belief that the witch did not just interact with this animalistic demon but nurtured it like a pet or ‘familiar’ also appeared in diverse regions, assuming particular prominence in England. It was also not unusual to find these animal familiars assuming amphibian form; with accounts of witches keeping, feeding and using toad familiars emerging in trial records at locations as distinct as England, France and Hungary. The Lorraine records, for example, state that in 1600 suspected witch Jean Lallemand was reputed to have ‘kept toads and whistled to them’.⁴ Despite this incidence, however, on a Europe-wide level the Basque toad familiar is anomalous on a number of levels. To my knowledge the 1609–14 Spanish-Basque prosecutions are the only European witch trial cluster to emphasize the toad-as-familiar in such vivid detail and to the virtual exclusion of all other animal familiar types (in English trials, for example, a wider range of animal forms is typically represented).⁵ Also unique or, at the very least highly unusual, is that the Basque toad familiars are decorated and dressed in little colourful outfits; that they participate so enthusiastically in the witches’ sabbath; that they are integrated so strongly into the akelarre-pact rituals; that they possess such overt identities as avatars and companions of the Devil; and that although their venom is used to make poisons they are not sent out, like animal familiars in most other parts of Europe, to directly perform specific acts of maleficium.

Cocreation: Interrogators, Witnesses, Suspects

There is evidence that the Spanish interrogators pursued the subject of toad familiars with some interest. In a letter sent in July 1609, la Suprema charged Valle and Becerra to verify the claims, from both suspects and witnesses, that local witches had been ‘keeping toads’. Similarly, the Edict of Faith circulated during the witch-craze visitations specifically demanded ‘knowledge of any people who practiced supernatural arts or were “in possession of familiar spirits [familiares]”.’ That the two men pursued this objective through questioning is indicated by the testimonies themselves. The fact that the earliest descriptions of the toad familiar all begin with an assessment of the animal’s size strongly implies an initial inquiry along the lines of: ‘How big was your familiar?’ Similarly, María de Zozaya’s claim that her toad ‘had some little cowbells and charms and she does not know who put them on it [my italics]’ presupposes the prompt: ‘And who put the cowbells and charms on the toad?’ That these leading questions could generate toad familiars where they previously did not exist, is intimated in reports that the first time Petri del Espinar was asked the identity of the ‘dirty thing’ that had been given him by the Devil, he said that he ‘didn’t know’ but by the second time he had decided that ‘it was the Devil in the form of a toad’.⁶

But while we have plenty of evidence that the Basque interrogators asked questions about toad familiars, we have less evidence of any precedent in this respect. Demonological texts, even if consulted, would have been less than enlightening. They contain only occasional and passing references to toads with familiar-like characteristics and can also be unclear as to the amphibians’ significance, with Bodin’s argument, for example, that evidence of keeping toads was compelling ‘if she [the suspect] is rumoured to be a witch’ implying that such possession may have been less suspicious in other contexts.⁷ Evidence from earlier Basque trial records is more promising in that some testimonies do hint at a level of intimacy between witch and toad above and beyond that expected between individual and poison ingredient. The cluster of trials from the Salazar Valley in 1540, in particular, describe young novices being asked to ‘touch’, ‘hold’ or even ‘kiss’ toads after renouncing their Christianity. In one typical example a group of witches ‘made a son of Sancho Adot apostatize and made him take a toad’; while in another they asked novices to ‘curse the parents who begat and created them, taking out a toad with a string tied to its leg, and making these delinquent people touch it with their hand, touching the people they told to do this with the toad, all over their face, chest, legs and body, and making them kiss and flay toads.’ Alternatively, in Logroño in 1577 interrogators stated that a group of witches from Anocíbar went to the sabbath, ruined crops and ‘gave toads to the children’.⁸ But while relevant, all of these references are brief and where they do appear, the initiatory toads are still strongly linked to their function as medicinal ingredients and possess little of the anthropomorphism or ‘kept’ relationship with the witch characteristic of their counterparts in the 1609–14 witch-craze.

Given this limited precedent, it is notable that there is evidence of extra-interrogatorial involvement here. Early witness contribution is suggested by Zugarramurdi suspect Juanes de Sansin’s complaint that even before any authorities were involved ‘ten or twelve people, some of whom they named, went one day to their houses in search of toads and made many threats to them so that they would confess to being witches’; with his claim allegedly echoed ‘unanimously, and in almost the same words’ by other accused witches. The high number of inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies in the toad-familiar accounts also point to lively suspect-participation, with questions about the amphibians’ size, for example, producing responses as diverse as ‘the size of a wood pigeon’ to that of ‘a pardola’, ‘a chicken’ and ‘a little bigger than normal’. Indeed, the interrogators’ reports that in replying to questions about toad familiars some suspects ‘answered marvellously with the following’ or ‘talked about [them] extensively’ and that all ‘others say the same, in very big quantity’, indicates that in some cases this contribution may have been considerable.⁹ Also suggestive of active suspect-participation is the fact that, according to the evidence available to us, although la Suprema did indeed encourage the Logroño Tribunal to inquire about ‘keeping toads’ in July 1609, their instruction was only made after it had encountered references to the theme in the first ten confessions from Zugarramurdi. This timeline, along with the fact that la Suprema’s instruction appears to have primarily focussed on verifying the truth of these toad-related confessions and allegations as opposed to generating more of them, suggests that its interest in the theme was directly sparked by the Zugarramurdi testimonials.¹⁰

Raw Materials: Magical Familiars

But if the Basque suspects were contributing to these accounts then what raw materials were they mining in order to do so? The primary seam would clearly have been the circulating stories of toad familiars generated by the prosecutions themselves. But the richness and idiosyncrasy of these testimonies suggests that suspects may have fleshed out this basic template by drawing on more diverse lodes. And once again we can begin with the folklore. There is a consensus among scholars that the animal familiar trope, toad or otherwise, was primarily of popular origin, with this explanation going some way toward explaining their scant appearance in demonological works. There is also a consensus that, as with many features of European witchcraft, the phenomenon was linked to wider magical matrices, with several studies drawing parallels beween beliefs about witches’ familiars, in both human and animal form, and the widespread conviction that magical practitioners could enter into working relationships with helping spirits.¹¹ In the Basque case any exploration of this link is hampered by the dearth of contemporary sources pertaining to folk traditions of any kind. However, if we once again move forward several hundred years we do find some relevant material in later folkloric collections.

The first is the widespread belief, found throughout the Basque country as late as the 1950s, in the existence of a wide range of spirits that can be subsumed under the umbrella term lamiña (or lamia) – a broad genus of folk spirit synonymous with the generic European fairy – that often inhabited caves and other subterranean realms but made frequent, nocturnal visits to human homes. These spirits appeared in a range of forms, most commonly that of long-haired females or smaller beings such as ‘gnomes’, ‘imps’ or ‘a kind of hairy and extremely nimble homunculus’, with nineteenth-century folklorist Wentworth Webster being told by an informant that the lamiñas were ‘little people who came down the chimney.’¹² These spirits could be more or less associated with specific baserri but were commonly characterized by an ability to engage in reciprocal relationships with householders in which food and hospitality was exchanged for magical services. Barandiarán reports that ‘lamias went to houses to ask for or demand food’ and that ‘the peasants would make an offering of bread, milk, cider, corn, and bacon to the lamias, who would show their gratitude by helping them in their work in the field’. Other services included household and agricultural tasks, the building of bridges, castles or churches and the general promise of good fortune and prosperity. As folklorists have often observed, the subterranean-dwelling lamiñas were closely related to the Basque dead who ‘return frequently to the surface at night [from their underworld homes], especially to their exte [house], in order to help their living family members, to consume offerings, to amuse themselves in their respective homes, and to settle accounts’.¹³

In these later sources the lamiñas overlap with another category of supernaturals that display slightly different characteristics and are specifically defined by folklorists as ‘familiar spirits’. Caro Baroja references the ‘widespread belief that there are some small familiar spirits (pamerialak) that can be “gathered in a pincushion” or even purchased at the market’ and took the form of little men, insects or beings of ‘indeterminate form’. According to Barandiarán such familiars were typically owned by ‘people who work wonders or extraordinary deeds, like the atzi, “sorcerers,” sorgin, “warlocks,” and some healers and sages’ who gained power from imps ‘who help and serve them in everything’. Gallop, meanwhile, states that ‘a sorcerer or a bewitched person cannot die until his familiar spirit (called familiara in Basque and enemiguillo in Spanish) has been either sold or given away’. The variety of regional names used to designate these spirits suggest deep cultural roots, and include the famerijelak (Cortézubi), bestemutilak (Gernika), galtxagorriak (Zaráuz), bearreztanak (Orozco), mozorroak (Albiztur) and aidetikako (Sara).¹⁴

Although the sources are scarce, there is some evidence that these two broad spirit categories existed in the Basque regions in the period of the witch-craze. As we shall explore in more detail in Chapter Thirteen, references highly suggestive of the lamiña-type spirits that visit houses in order to consume food and drink are found in witch trial records in Navarre and adjacent regions in the early modern centuries, while in 1517 Basque cleric Martín de Arles condemned the keeping of ‘demons in phials or rings, where they appear when summoned to foretell the future or to show things which have been stolen.’¹⁵ With regard to kept demons, the slim Basque evidence can be fleshed out with material from contemporary Aragon – a region of northern Spain that bordered the Basque-Spanish province of Navarre in the period of the witch-craze. Through her detailed analysis of sorcery and witchcraft trials, María Tausiet has revealed that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Aragonese sorcerers and cunning folk employed a wide cohort of spirits to perform a range of magical services, from healing the sick to finding treasure or securing love. These testimonials are of particular value because, as Tausiet notes, many of the clerics and inquisitors who conducted the prosecutions were sceptical about the reality of the crimes they were pursuing and not overly anxious to impose demonological stereotypes onto suspect testimony. In this context we can attribute some authenticity to Zaragozan sorceress María de Romerales’ declaration, in 1609, that she possessed ‘some rings, and in each one a familiar’; and to sorcerer Jerónimo de Liébana’s claim, nine years later, that he had ‘promised to supply’ each of his clients with a demon or “familiar” for his own personal use’ (with his statement reinforced by the admission – from one of his clients – that he had accepted Jerónimo’s offer because he had ‘let himself be led by his desire to have and carry with him a familiar spirit which would fulfil his every need’). While many of the Aragonese cases pertained to urban practitioners, similar beliefs could emerge in more rural areas, with a farmworker named Pascual Clemente, from the region of Embun, harvesting his crops with the help of ‘five fern seeds in the handle of a sickle, which were five demons’ that turned into the form of crows and ‘reaped as much as he wanted’ when he ‘threw the seeds to the floor’.¹⁶

The evidence that this range of beliefs surrounding helping or familiar spirits was likely to have been active in the Basque regions at the time of the witch-craze, allows us to speculate that the accused utilized these matrices when fleshing out their accounts of keeping and using toad familiars. The fact that despite all the demonological hyperbole, there are no accounts of witch-craze suspects sending their toads out to directly perform acts of maleficium, could be seen to support this thesis. But although sound, these arguments do not provide a full explanation. Although the two belief complexes identified above are clearly relevant to the toad familiar – neither is a complete fit. While there are exceptions to the rule, the lamiña matrix tends to emphasize feeding but not in the context of keptness or any kind of intimate relationship while the pamerialak (or imp) matrix emphasizes keptness and intimacy but not feeding.¹⁷ Even more problematic is that neither complex prioritizes animal form. Although the lamiñas could be depicted as animalistic (as in ‘hairy’ homunculi) and the pamerialak could take the form of insects or beings of ‘indeterminate form’, the realistic and visceral sense of the spirit-as-animal that characterizes the Basque toad familiar accounts is largely absent from these belief complexes.

We shall be providing a range of explanations for this Basque difference over the next two chapters, but at this point we must note that Tausiet’s research makes a welcome contribution here. We have already observed that sorcery and witchcraft records from early modern Aragon depict magical practitioners employing tiny, kept spirits similar to the later Basque pamerialak. But they also contain multiple descriptions of cunning women, largely from the city of Zaragoza, using and feeding spirits that specifically took the form of animals. Tausiet observes that these accounts, which also display a narrative coherence and thematic emphasis that is highly unusual in the wider European context, reveal ‘a very widespread belief that demons were in the habit of adopting the form of stray cats or dogs, meaning there was always the chance that one might just run into them, or that one could summon them without even leaving the house, luring them to the window by the simple means of scattering scraps of food – an offering in exchange for which these animal-demons would lend their services to the woman who had cast the spell.’ In one of these accounts magical practitioner Ana de Yuso advises a client that

in order to make a man love her well, she should take a little cheese and bread and meat and chew them all together in her mouth and make three mouthfuls. And between the hours of eleven and twelve at night she should throw them out into the street and say some words that she knew. And she would see a large goat or dog come, and when it came that would be a sign that the man would then rise from his bed and come to her house.¹⁸

We must be careful not to overstate the pertinence of this material to our Basque case, not least because in the absence of any other evidence we cannot know to what degree these belief complexes percolated westwards across the border into rural Navarre. There are also structural differences. Although both groups of women fed their animal spirits in return for services, the relationship between the Basque witch and her toad familiar was personal and intimate while its Zaragozan equivalent was less individualized and did not emphasize ‘keptness’ – to the extent that it is debatable whether the term ‘familiar’ would be appropriate here at all. But nevertheless, the finding that such unusually detailed and coherent accounts of the feeding and employment of animal spirits should have emerged in a city that was situated less than sixty kilometres from the province that produced Europe’s most detailed and coherent accounts of the feeding and employment of toad familiars, may turn out to be more than coincidental.

Raw Materials: Folktales

But while beliefs surrounding magical familiars clearly played a role in the construction of the toad familiar accounts, their richness and idiosyncrasy also point to other raw materials. In many of the Basque confessions the pragmatic working relationship between witch and familiar is shot through with emotional tensions that, at their most vivid, resemble the edgy-but-intimate power struggles that can occur between parents and children, siblings or married couples.¹⁹ While these emotional confrontations – which also emerge in witch–familiar relationships in other European trial records – can relate to venom extraction, they most commonly surface in relation to food. Our most vivid example can be found in a passage from the Sentence of María de Zozaya, where it states that

And that first night the toad did not say anything to her until another day when she brought it some food and it asked her why she had taken so long, and it said this in a very normal way. And sometimes she responded when she had nothing to give it ‘woe is me, I would rather have it for me than for you’ although she always paid particular attention to giving it a lunch at midday and a dinner at night of the same things that she ate, bread and croutons in broth and meat and milk and sometimes she gave it wine to drink. And she put its food on the bottom of the chest, and the toad came out of the pot that it was enclosed in and positioned itself by the bowl or plate and picked up the food in its hand and took it to its mouth like a person. And when it came out for this midday meal the toad always talked to her and said to her ‘lady mistress you give me so little, you take poor care of me,’ and other times it said ‘lady of the house why do you take so long to feed me, do you not have a reason?’ And at dinner it seldom spoke to her and if she was late giving it to it [the meal] at midday it would ask for it by singing like an ordinary toad. On the nights she had to go to the akelarres she would open the chest where the toad was and it would jump into her hands as though it were a bird . . .²⁰

It is immediately apparent to any observer familiar with European folk literature that the dramatic tension, lively direct speech and narrative structure of this passage evoke the vivid dramatizations of encounters between humans and helpful spirits that emerge in traditional folktales throughout pre-modern Europe.²¹ Like María’s account, many of these tales revolve around the power struggle between the will of the spirit and the will of the human who was trying to control them, with the following Basque legend, for example, depicting familiar spirits (galtxagorriak) that display the same persistent pugnaciousness as María de Zozaya’s toad familiar.

A lazy man . . . was once instructed where to go and purchase a box of galtxagorriak. When he got home he opened the box and many of the little demons came out and asked, ‘What can we do?’ He gave them a list of chores and within a few minutes the chores were completed. Again the galtxagorriak asked, ‘What can we do?’ and the man gave them more chores, which were again completed in a few moments. Again the galtxagorriak asked, ‘What can we do?’ but there were no chores left so the lazy man replied ‘Nothing.’ The galtxagorriak became furious and immediately set out to undo all the work they had done. The man managed to somehow get them all back into the box and resolved never to use them again.

Even more applicable to the Basque case is that in this oral canon the tensions between human and helping spirit were often focused on the provision of food. In a French folktale about an iouton (household imp) a woman

forgot to prepare the iouton’s bowl of milk as was her custom before going to bed. When he arrived in the middle of the night and noticed this over-sight he became violently mad out of irritation or jealousy’. He climbed into the attic, picked up the sacks of dried peas, and began turning them upside down . . . The mother and father quickly grasped what was going on and begged ‘Have pity on us, kind iouton. We love you. We did not do this on purpose.’ But he refused to listen to a word and furiously continued rolling the peas over the floor and down the stairs. The young girl then stepped in, ‘I love you very much, iouton, but I was so tired. I was falling asleep on my feet, and I thought I had already prepared your bowl of milk before I went to bed, as I do every day, as you know. But I promise you, I will never forget again.’ Only then would he listen and go away.²²

While the examples quoted here do not relate to spirits in the form of toads, we do find this basic narrative dynamic emerging in relation to the ‘multiplicity of European folktale types featuring amphibian protagonists’, with the most familiar of these, for most people, being the story of the ‘Frog Prince’ collected in Germany at the turn of the eighteenth century by Jacob Grimm. In this narrative we find the feisty amphibian telling the princess that it will help her retrieve her golden ball if she allows it to ‘sit at thy table, and eat from thy little golden plate, and drink out of thy cup, and sleep in thy little bed’; with the princess finally becoming so frustrated with the frog’s nagging demands that she throws it against a wall.²³

That we should find intimations of the folktale in witch trial testimony is not unexpected. In a period when performance skills of all kinds were largely non-professionalized, many people would have become skilled at memorizing and publicly delivering both poetry and prose, with scholars demonstrating that this material worked its way into witch trials in other parts of Europe.²⁴ Indeed, with regard to our witch-craze material Ana Morales has pointed out that one of the anecdotes in the Zozaya Sentence vividly evokes the Basque folktale ‘Mateo Txistu’.

[Zozaya stated that] when a young incumbent clergyman hunter went to hunt hares with his greyhounds in the town of Errenteria . . . she would say to him ‘Hey there mister so-and-so, bring lots of hares and you will give hare stew to the neighbours!’ . . . and she would appear before them in the form of a hare and the greyhounds would chase her and run and she would go round and round many times wherever she wanted until she tired them and their master out and wore them down . . .

[‘Mateo Txistu’] tells the story of a priest who, due to his uncontrollable fondness of hunting, one day interrupted the service he was celebrating at church to run with his hounds after a hare. As a punishment for that, he was condemned to wander eternally throughout the world, without ever being able to catch the hare, nor to stop to take a moment’s rest.²⁵

These correspondences invite us to speculate that when Valle and Becerra asked questions about toad familiars, the suspects did not only draw on familiar lore as it related to magical practice but also as it emerged in stories and legends that had been heard and told around the baserri hearth; with women like María de Zozaya, who were skilled at oral performance, responding particularly vividly in this respect.

‘The Devil is known by his claws’²⁶

But while this triumvirate link between familiar belief, folktales and popular magical matrices is sound, it does not pay sufficient attention to the Basque familiar’s demonic identity. In witch trial records across Europe animal familiars were commonly defined as ‘devils’ or ‘demons’, with scholars arguing that – where folk spirits were involved – these classifications are likely to have developed out of the contemporary tendency among both elites and the wider population to define all unorthodox and non-legitimate spirits in generic demonological terms. But in the Basque case the demonic characteristics displayed by the toad familiar require more explanation than this. In most western European witch-records, the animal familiar’s identity as ‘demon’ or ‘devil’ is usually mentioned in passing. But in the witch-craze records under analysis, the toad familiar is not only described as a demon but also a demon that directly resembles the Devil himself, with one record stating that it ‘had big, round and red eyes, in the same manner as the Devil’, and another that at the sabbath there ‘are other devils in the form of toads whose faces have the same appearance and proportions as the lord Devil of the akelarre’.²⁷ In addition, while most western European animal familiars have little connection with the witches’ sabbath, the Basque toad familiar has exceptionally strong links to the event; providing venom for the witches’ flying ointment; telling her when it is time to leave; travelling alongside her to the location; and once they have arrived, participating with pleasure in the akelarre festivities. These impressive demonic credentials invite analysis on a number of levels, some of which are unfortunately outside the remit of this book. But with regard to our current research focus the most relevant route of inquiry takes us back to Basque Catholicism.²⁸

In Chapter Four we argued that suspects may have drawn on experiences of religious ritual (such as seasonal crop-protecting processions) when cocreating their accounts of communal crop-maleficium. But what we have not emphasized until now, is that religious themes may have infiltrated the suspects’ confessions in an altogether different way. Throughout medieval and early modern Europe, one of primary ways that the ordinary and largely non-literate majority absorbed Catholic teachings was through the visual and auditory arts. To this end the porches, facades, windows, columns and internal walls of churches, chapels and abbeys were animated with brightly coloured images, statues and carved reliefs of spiritual beings and scenes from heaven and hell; while religious processions and plays (autos sacramentales) were animated by banners, models, floats, stage sets and vividly costumed actors portraying biblical figures and events. On a verbal level this iconography was reinforced through sermons, psalms, penitential literature, hagiographies and in a more indirect way, via the popular stories and legends about saints and the Devil that circulated around baserri hearths. Given this stimuli, it is no surprise to find that Basque suspects drew religious iconography into their confessions. Marian imagery, for example, is clearly visible in Salazar’s assertion that ‘a large number’ of witnesses told him that ‘Our Lady appeared visible to everyone at the sabbat with Her precious Son in her arms’; with the suspects’ responsibility for this image clearly indicated in the inquisitor’s sceptical observation that ‘One forbears to remark upon the difficulty of Our Lady visiting each of them simultaneously . . . which makes the case hard to believe.’²⁹ Iconographical signatures can also be traced in depictions of the Devil at the akelarre. In witchcraft trials Europe-wide the Devil often appears to the witch when she is alone, in the form of a rather ordinary-looking animal or man (albeit often dressed ‘in black’). But as María de Yriarte explains, in his role as hierophant of the Basque sabbath he sits on a big black chair with

many horns on his head, two very big ones, both over half a vara, and the rest of them small, of around a xeme and indicating how he had them it seems that they formed a sort of crown . . . [H]olding out his left hand, which was very ugly, black and with fingers like a cockerel’s feet ending in very sharp toenails, he gave it to her to kiss, and then he stood up and turning to the left he lifted up a tail like a donkey’s and revealed those parts that were very ugly and foul-smelling . . .³⁰

It is immediately apparent that despite his extravagance and exaggeration, María’s hierophant is an accurate representation of the animalistic Devil as he emerges resplendent with horns, claws and tail in conventional Catholic iconography. This resemblance can also be identified in other confessions. Claims, from some suspects, that ‘the rear end of the Grand Master has a face’ evoke the iconographical Devil and his attendant demons who frequently sport an extra face on their genitals or behind to demonstrate that they ‘have put their souls at the service of their lower appetites’. Claims that the Devil of the akelarre ‘seats himself on a great throne in royal dignity surrounded by other demons – smaller ones – who attend him as servants together with the most senior witches’ are redolent of the Devil in his role as hierophant of hell, sitting on a throne and presiding over his entourage of lesser devils and damned human souls. Claims that the sabbath was lit by bonfires, as in Jeannette d’Abadie’s insistence that ‘she saw many little demons without arms light a large fire and throw some female witches from the sabbath into it’, evoke the iconographical underworld where demons use pitchforks and whips to drive sinners into blazing infernos or boil them in cauldrons and roast them on spits over huge fires. Given that hell was typically depicted as a subterranean realm, the reports that several witches congregated in caves is also relevant here, with the creek that carved out the witches’ cavern at Zugarramurdi acquiring, at some point in its history, the name of Infernuko Erreka (Hell’s Stream). Finally, these thematic parallels are overtly identified in de Lancre’s observation that ‘even if they have to go to hell’ the witches believe ‘they are already familiar with the Devil and that eternal suffering, the fire of Hell, and that of the sabbath are the same thing [my italics].’³¹

Although the interrogators are likely to have been involved, we can take de Lancre at his word and assume that the suspects were implicated here. They certainly would have been well equipped to do so. The iconography of hell had been disseminated throughout western Europe long before the Basque witch-craze, with Jonathan Pearl noting that the ‘art and literature of the late fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries . . . [displays] an almost obsessive concern with grotesque images of Hell and the demons who inhabited there’. In the Basque case, iconographical awareness would have been historically heightened by the fact that nearly all the major branches of the Camino de Santiago snaked their way through the region. The churches, abbeys and chapels that lay on these routes did not only provide food and shelter for pilgrims but also functioned as religious pitstops where tired pilgrims could strengthen their motivation by recharging their spiritual batteries. To this end, iconographical instruction had been promulgated with considerable vigour since at least the eleventh century, with Serafín Moralejo observing that the ‘artistic flowering’ developing along the Camino generated religious art of exceptional ‘integrity, monumentality, and consistency’.³² Given that the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela was primarily an act of penitence designed to avoid the torments of hell it is not surprising to find that this ‘artistic flowering’ drew heavily on apocalyptic and underworld themes.

The Hell Toads

With regard to our enquiry into the toad familiar these perspectives are highly relevant. Among the demons, fires, cauldrons, pitchforks and other paraphernalia that clustered around the Devil in iconographical depictions of hell, it was common to find representations of a range of verminous animals such as snakes, scorpions and, most significantly of all, toads. In the French city of Bourges in 1536, a local pageant contained ‘a wagon or float on which was erected a huge Mouth of Hell’ that opened out of a huge rock on which ‘there clambered and climbed all kinds of serpents and great toads’. Often displaying human features, postures or behaviours these ‘hell toads’, as we can term them here, ‘inhabit[ed] the regions of Hell as a familiar of the Devil’ and alongside the other lesser demons ‘play[ed] prominent roles as ministers of punishment in the underworld.’ Crawling over the pale, naked bodies of the damned, sitting on their mouths and genitals, sucking at their breasts and biting their tongues they reminded the Catholic faithful of the punishments awaiting those who indulged in avarice, lust or gluttony. Like many demons of the underworld, hell toads also relished human flesh, with Boria Sax noting how ‘anthropomorphic toads or frogs’ were often depicted ‘cooking and eating human beings’. In a reversal of this theme, toads could also become objects of consumption, reflecting St Cyprian’s assertion that amphibians were the food that Lucifer fed souls in hell.³³

It is notable that a number of the toads described in Basque witch testimonies, both prior to and during the witch-craze, display some of these hell toad characteristics. We can see the hybrid features of the Devil’s attendant demons in the toad familiars that have ‘the same appearance and proportions’ as the Devil and flaunt ‘two small horns’, ‘claws like a rooster’ and ‘a yellow tail, around six fingers long and as thick as a hand’s little finger’.³⁴ We can see the amphibians who ‘inhabit the regions of Hell’ as ‘familiar[s] of the Devil’ in the toad familiars that travel alongside their witch mistresses to participate in the dark pleasures of the akelarre. We can recognize the ‘anthropomorphic toads’ that enjoy ‘cooking and eating human beings’ in the enthusiasm with which the toad familiars dive into human flesh at the sabbath banquets and ‘grunt as they eat it doggedly’ while ‘snarling and growling among themselves’. We can see the amphibians that, according to St Cyprian, were fed to sinners in hell in suspects’ assurances that they were forced to eat toads at the akelarre.³⁵ We can identify the hell toads that squat on the genitals of the damned in defendants’ claims to have given birth to amphibians, with Salazar stating that several women confessed ‘they gave birth to large toads’ after having sex with the Devil (with one birthing an amphibian ‘through her mouth’).³⁶ We can even see the hell toads that attached themselves to the breasts of female sinners in suspects’ claims that they suckled their toad familiars. Beltrana de la Fargua’s insistence that she ‘was suckling her own child, [and] the toad began to stretch and crane upwards from the floor until it caught hold of her nipple’ and that it ‘changed itself into a child so that she should pick it up in her arms and suckle it’ seems less incongruous when we consider the fact that, as parishioners in the Basque towns of Sangüesa and Saint-Palais still do today, she may have walked past carved reliefs of amphibians or reptiles suckling at the breasts of naked women every time she went into her local church.³⁷

11  In this thirteenth-century depiction of hell, from the cathedral of Saint-Étienne in Bourges, toads bite the tongues and suck at the breasts of damned souls as they are boiled in huge cauldrons. Typically, some demons display faces on their genitals and stomachs.

12  Demons force sinners to eat toads in this illustration of the punishments that await gluttons in hell, from Le Grant Kalendrier et Compost des Bergiers (Troyes, 1496).

Of course we cannot assume that these hell toad motifs were all suspect-derived, for as monks and priests the Spanish inquisitors would have been highly familiar with iconographical representations of hell. But the idiosyncratic detailing does implicate the accused. This assumption is supported by some earlier witch trial records. In 1569, suspects from the Navarrese town of Burgui confessed to having been plagued by small black demons that sported horns and tails, with María Miguel stating that ‘three black things came to where she was, one with large horns and two small, and that she was frightened and said her prayers and “Jesus” and then they went’. Some of the suspects specifically identified these demons as toads, with a group of young girls declaring that they were picnicking beside a river or pool when one of their number, a girl named ‘Gracieta’, using

sorcery that her mother and grandmother had taught her, called out loud at that lagoon or pool, in this way: come here literna, come here literna. And then a toad as big as a small dog with little horns came out of the pool and positioned itself on Gracieta’s skirts and there she petted/praised it. And seeing this, the girl Baria Baldan said ‘Jesus, Jesus, what a black thing,’ and in saying that she disappeared.

The detailed and lengthy trial records relating to these cases reveal that the interrogators did not take claims, from the suspects, that the demons were toads at face value – but took great pains to establish the exact appearance and identity of these demons through a laborious series of investigations that involved testing whether the suspects could correctly identify different kinds of animal and distinguish between different types of colour. These efforts strongly suggest that the toad demon’s identity was introduced by the accused and, by implication, support the view that that similar mechanisms may have operated during the Basque witch-craze.³⁸

‘Demon’ Familiars

These iconographical perspectives do begin to explain how the Basque toad familiar evolved from domestic folk spirit to a core player in the demonological drama between Devil, witch and akelarre. But there may have been additional factors at work here. The fact that in the Burgui case cited above, the toad demon did not just emerge from the water spontaneously but in response to some form of conjuration, points to our earlier speculations that when creating their familiar accounts, Basque suspects mined their knowledge of popular belief and practice surrounding the use of folk spirits by magical practitioners. Given that our most persuasive evidence in this regard came from contemporary witchcraft and sorcery trial records from the adjacent region of Aragon, it is highly pertinent that the Aragonese practitioners frequently referred to their spirit helpers as ‘devils’ or ‘demons’. In other contexts we could attribute these generic demonic terms to interrogatorial superimposition. But evidence that these trials were conducted by largely sceptical judges who were not anxious to superimpose demonological stereotypes, when combined with the fact that these demonic terms were deeply embedded in the confessional text alongside more idiosyncratic references to named folk spirits or spirits of the dead, strongly suggests that they came from the practitioners themselves. It would have been the defendants, rather than their interrogators, who were responsible for frequent references to a historical figure named María de Padilla who ‘was always visualized as part of a gang, accompanied by a troupe of demons’ that included ‘Martha the Bad’ and ‘most prominent of all, the Diablo Cojuelo, or lame devil.’ We can draw similar conclusions with regard to the following love charm allegedly used by Ana María Torrero, in which the range of references to demons and devils are integral to the rhythmic stresses of the prose

Martha, Martha, ‘tis to the wicked one I speak, not the holy one: she who flies through the sir, she who was put in chains and because of whom our father Adam sinned, and we all have sinned; to the demon of the bench, the demon of the stump, the demon of the well, and he who frees the prisoner and accompanies the hanged man, to the lame devil, and to the devil of the meat market and the slaughterhouse devil, may you all gather together and enter the heart of X, or fight him with blood and fire, that naught may he do till he come and find me . . .

That this demonic terminology came from the Aragonese suspects as opposed to their prosecutors, gains further support from the finding that a significant proportion of the invocatory passages contain references to the diverse names of senior demons; elaborations that sceptical interrogators would have been even less likely to interject. As part of a love charm involving animal spirits, Gracia Andreu would chew ‘nine mouthfuls of bread and nine of cheese’, then tread on the chewed food while reciting ‘three Our Fathers and three Ave Marías and three Gloria Patris’ and invoking Martha (‘not the good one, but the bad’) before finally throwing the food

out of the window, the bread to the one side and cheese to the other, saying: I am not throwing bread and cheese, but the heart and feelings of so-and-so. And then she would call on Barabbas, Satan and Lucifer: Let them come and eat up this bread and cheese, if so-and-so is to come or to love so-and-so, and if not, may no one come. And the dogs would either come or not, and the defendant does not know whether they were dogs, or demons.³⁹

This evidence makes it clear that Aragonese magical practitioners did not just use demonic terms in a relatively benign and generic sense to designate any spiritual entity that did not fit into the legitimate Catholic pantheon but also used them very specifically to denote evil spirits that inhabited hell, with María Tausiet emphasizing that while some Aragonese cunning women ‘called on the saints . . . far more people chose to invoke the spirits of the underworld, home to Satan and his infinite cohort of demons’ and to ‘various other figures who enjoyed less than savoury reputations’. Through their complex interweaving of legitimate Christian supernaturals with both folkloric and demonic figures, these unusual Aragonese records provide a vivid insight into a world of popular magical practice that is startlingly fluid and quasi-polytheistic in its approach. Although the mechanics that lay behind these invocatory choices will not be explored in any detail here they clearly involved pragmatic assessments of a spirit’s ability or willingness to solve a specific problem, as opposed to its moral status or theological legitimacy, with the lame devil, for example, being proficient at love magic because he was both fleet of foot (and able to reach the beloved quickly) and associated with lust.⁴⁰

‘Demon’ Familiars: Toads

The evidence that Aragonese cunning women operating in a region immediately adjacent to the Spanish-Basque region of Navarre overtly defined the spirits that they invoked in magical spells as ‘bad’ demons that inhabited hell, invites us to surmise that Basque cunning women did the same. But we must be cautious when drawing comparisons here. The Aragonese testimonies relate primarily to urban magical practice and belief, with the majority coming from the city of Zaragoza, while the Basque accounts emerged out of rural communities. While this does not invalidate the comparison – for a number of the women tried in Zaragoza had moved to the city from rural areas and, as Tausiet notes, ‘in those days, city and country life were still very closely linked’ – there is no doubt that urban records did reflect different emphases from their rural equivalents.⁴¹

But even more problematic, is that the Aragonese testimonies reflect influences relevant to wider Spanish, as opposed to specifically Basque, culture, history and demographics. In the early-eighth century, the Iberian peninsula was invaded by Moorish armies from North Africa who then retained control of much of the region for several centuries. Although most of the conquered areas were reclaimed by Christian kings by the thirteenth century, many Moors continued to live and practice Islam in Spain until 1525, when they were forced by edict to either convert to Christianity (and become moriscos) or be expelled from the country. Meanwhile, even before the Mooorish invasion, Jewish communities had been well-established in Spain and by the fourteenth century the country housed the largest Jewish population in western Europe. When the Jews were finally expelled from Spain in the late-fifteenth century – significantly later than in most other western European countries – many thousands took advantage of the opportunity to convert to Catholicism (becoming conversos) in order to remain. While Moorish and Jewish cultures impacted on the Spanish mentality in a range of ways, of particular significance here is that in comparison with their Christian neighbours, both harboured relatively lenient attitudes towards the range of esoteric traditions grouped by scholars under the umbrella term ‘learned magic’. Emerging in Europe in the early medieval period and heavily influenced by classical, Near Eastern and North African cultures, these traditions were characterized, among other things, by complex, text-based ritual and relationally nuanced and utilitarian attitudes toward demonic entities that led, in some cases, to such a profound emphasis on the invocation of demons that scholars have defined them as ‘demonic magic’. As a consequence, although learned magical thought and practice was condemned as soundly in Spain as in any other European country in the early Christian period, in later centuries these mutually reinforcing Moorish and Jewish worldviews enabled it to flourish and develop more freely on the Iberian Peninsula than in any other part of the continent, to the extent that ‘by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Spain had become Europe’s center for magic’.⁴²

Also relevant here is that these learned magical traditions were not restricted to elites. Many of the practitioners who dabbled in text-based magic (and among whom we find a large number of priests), moved in relatively ordinary social circles and took their skills to any man or woman in the street who could afford them, with these interactions enabling non-literate cunning men and women to absorb and incorporate fragments of elite practice into their repertoire. In areas where Moorish influence was strong, the fact that Islam did not ‘have a conception of the Devil and eternal damnation in hell in the same way as Christianity’ also helped demonic magical traditions to percolate into wider Spanish society via ordinary Moors, with Gunnar Knutsen arguing that in the Kingdom of Valencia – which functioned as a Moorish stronghold through the medieval period and hosted large numbers of moriscos post-expulsion – the Moors’ ‘perceptions of demons and the demonic did over time influence their Old Christian neighbours, giving rise to a magical tradition that emphasized techniques for controlling demons’ and generating notably liberal attitudes toward witchcraft prosecutions.⁴³ In some regions of Spain these influences can be traced in trials for superstition as late as the seventeenth century. In his recent examination of Valencian cases between 1478 and 1700, Knutsen reveals that this Islamic interest in working with demons had infiltrated into every level of magical practice, making particular reference to the evidence that ‘Valencian women were invoking not just the Devil, but all the demons of Hell, even for the relatively mundane and harmless aim of winning love. There is some bad theology in this, such as including Barrabas among the demons, but more impressive is the forthright manner in which these women would call on and command the demons to do their bidding.’ Local inquisitors elicited descriptions of popular magical rituals dense with references to demons interwoven with saints, angels and folk spirits, with one cunning woman invoking the ‘devil Guarañon and your daughters of the king Faraon’ and another, a ‘Beautiful, dashing star’ named ‘Diana’ who was ‘wife of the principle demon in Hell’.⁴⁴ The Valencian records also contain multiple references to the use of demons as personal helping spirits, with Knutsen recording that between 1566 and 1692 local inquisitors ‘investigated twenty-eight named individuals whom they had been informed were in the possession of demonic familiars’ and that familiars ‘must have been a popular subject for gossip and speculation among the inhabitants of Valencia in a far higher number of cases.’ One account details how Angela Perez suggested to a friend, Esperanza Bonfilla, that they should ‘buy a familiar together’.

[Esperanza] marvelled greatly at this and responded that this could not be. Then Angela told her that la Ribellas had three familiar demons, and would sell one for twelve reales, and between the two of them they could buy him for six reales each. Laughing at what she had said, Esperanza replied that if the devil had to belong to the two of them, they would end up fighting about whose he was and who was to make use of him.⁴⁵

These reflections are immediately relevant to our Aragonese trial material. The degree to which the invocations of the Valencian magical practitioners mirror the invocations of their Zaragonese equivalents is striking enough. But they become even more striking and certainly more understandable when we take into account the fact that Zaragoza was – like Valencia – an important Moorish stronghold during their period of occupation and followed a very similar trajectory to Valencia after the Christian reconquest. As Tausiet observes, through the medieval period Zaragoza retained a significant Moorish population that then evolved into a large morisco population subsequent to the enforced conversions after 1525 and that ‘four centuries of Muslim rule were to leave an indelible trace not only on the urban structure of Saragossa itself but also on its citizens’ mentality.’ Also relevant, is that Zaragoza housed a large Jewish quarter until the expulsions in the late fifteenth-century, with the effect that between 1118 and 1492 ‘Jews, Muslims and Christians were all free to move around the city at will, and their lives remained closely intertwined.’ These demographics suggest that in Zaragoza these Moorish – and to a lesser extent, Jewish – influences were responsible for the overt and unselfconscious use of demonic agencies by the city’s magical practitioners. This would help to explain why a substantial number of the men (and some of the women) openly employed the ritual methods and paraphernalia characteristic of learned magicians, with Jéronimo de Liébana, as we have seen, binding familiar demons by ‘tethering’ them in a ring (‘a power legendarily attributed to King Solomon’); and priest Joan Vicente employing ‘nine Masses, in accordance with the words of the Clavicula Salomonis’ in his demonic invocations. It also explains the fact that, as Tausiet observes, at least one of the women charged with witchcraft in the Zaragozan records was charged with ‘having been a Moor for ten months or one year and having carried out Moorish ceremonies’.⁴⁶

Demonic Magic in the Basque Region

What relevance do these perspectives have for our Basque toad familiars? We cannot draw simplistic parallels here, for some of the factors that normalized demonic magic in Zaragoza are clearly not as applicable to the Basque regions. With regard to the impact of Islam, for example, the Basque country was one of the few parts of the Iberian peninsula that the Moors did not penetrate, with subsequent centuries seeing their geographic and linguistic remoteness act as an additional obstacle to the dissemination of Moorish culture from mainland Spain. But the barrier was also a permeable one. Zaragoza was very close to the Basque border and the Moorish presence had been nibbling at the south-eastern rim of Basque-Navarre through its reach up the Ebron valley since the eighth century. There would also have been considerable traffic between Zaragoza and France for the purposes of work and trade via the Pyrenean ranges of Aragon and Navarre, with some occupations also requiring young people to migrate across the border on a seasonal basis. These conduits are also reflected in the evidence that a significant number of the men who practised sorcery in Zaragoza came from France, with Gascony and Béarn being represented in the city’s trial records as the home of ‘innumerable’ magicians of great fame. Cognisance of these trans-Pyrenean arteries of communication and migration are also implied in ‘the growing concern’, among the authorities in sixteenth-century Zaragoza, that ‘the Aragonese moriscos might be in league with the Protestants of the French region of the Béarn, just the other side of the Pyrenees.’ Like the wider Spanish population, ordinary Basques were also cognisant of historical clashes with the Moors, with re-enactments of the battles between Moorish and Christian kings being conducted in Basque towns and villages at the time of the witch-craze.⁴⁷

The Basques would also have been exposed to Jewish cultural influence. Although less common than in mainland Spain, significant Jewish communities persisted in many Basque cities until the fifteenth-century expulsions which, with the exception of Provence, took place at least a century later than in mainland France. Some of the first-recorded accusations of sorcery in Basque-Navarre related to Jewish magical practitioners, with Félix Segura Urra noting that the earliest witch-panics to emerge in the region (in the fourteenth century) typically involved conspiracy theories surrounding marginal social groups like lepers and Jews. Even as late as 1610, at the Logroño auto de fé, six individuals were prosecuted for Judaism alongside the Zugarramurdi witches. The importance of the Pyrenean zone for the historical transmission of magical ideas is also indicated by the fact that the Jewish Kabbalah movement emerged ‘in Southern France and Spain, because here, an intensive interchange took place between Christians, Muslims and Jews’.⁴⁸

To what degree this melting pot of influences shaped Basque magical traditions is difficult to say, but it is surely relevant that elite practitioners appear to have thrived in the region in the early modern period. Sixteenth-century clerics Castañega and Arles stated, respectively, that ‘we see every day in our own experience how women and poor needy clerics take up the office of conjurers, witches, necromancers, and diviners’ and that ‘one must not have recourse to Magi, necromancers, and sorcerers for a solution and a remedy’. We cannot conclude that all of those defined as ‘sorcerers’, ‘necromancers’ or ‘conjurors’ were practitioners of learned magic, for in this period these terms were not precise and could even, at their most generic, merely distinguish male from female magical practitioners. But we can reasonably assume that a percentage of the references, particularly those involving clerics, pointed to elite magical practice, with Castañega’s claim that ‘the spells that men cast are attributed to some science or art, and the common people therefore call them necromancers and not warlocks’ also being suggestive here. We can also detect the influence of these traditions in the rites of exorcism and weather conjuration that were so popular in the Basque regions, with both being condemned by the Church because the act of commanding demons to leave human bodies, crops or clouds was uncomfortably close to the demonic invocations of the magician. Certainly, Castañega’s observation that Basque exorcists conjured demons out of the possessed by making ‘some circles on the ground with certain signs and letters inside written in a special way, and [that] they make the possessed person kneel inside that circle’ points to the influence of learned magical traditions. Similar conclusions can be drawn from his complaint that weather conjurors use ‘as many Hebrew, Greek and unknown names they can find’ to shout at the clouds and that these methods were ‘especially dangerous for those with little knowledge, because they may say other unknown and diabolical words . . . confusing sounds and words that may mean good saints or bad ones’.⁴⁹ Concrete evidence also emerges in Arles’ claim to have found a book of ‘conjuring formulae to use against storms’ in a Navarrese parish that listed a range of invocations including ‘suspect and scandalous words, pertaining to a deliberate or implicit pact with the demons’. Arles states that

on the second folio it says ‘The Lord said, peace in heaven, peace on earth, peace be to your alleon, irastem, drachon, salvation to you is the great God, the wonderful God’, and lower down, ‘I conjure you, I send you out by elim, by olin, by saboan, by elion, by adonay, by alleluya, by tanti, by archabulon, by tetragrammaton, by the sea, by the land, by the legs and the shins’, etc. Also, lower down, it says, ‘But be you bound and fastened by these holy names of God, Alleluya, hirelli, habet, sat, mi, filisgie, adrotii gundi, tat, chamiteran, dan, yrida, fat, Sathan, Great God Almighty of the 70, Jesus Christ, Aquila’, etc.⁵⁰

As in Aragon and Valencia, these learned magical ideas and practices are also likely to have impacted on popular magical practitioners and the men and women who had recourse to them. It was ordinary people as well as the elite who gathered to watch the dramatic rituals of exorcists and weather conjurors so condemned by Castañega and Arles, with the latter complaining that ‘in this kingdom for the most part both the little and the great alike are forever running to . . . diviners, soothsayers and necromancers, even to find out or learn the most trivial of things [my italics].’ That uneducated, female practitioners employed learned magical techniques is intimated in Castañega’s complaint that ‘we see every day in our own experience how poor women and needy clerics take up the office of conjurers, witches, necromancers and diviners in order to maintain themselves and have enough to eat; and they always have their houses full of people.’ Female expertise in this respect is more overtly stated in the confession, from the young suspect of Burgui, that she was taught how to invoke her toad demon with the words ‘come here literna’ using ‘sorcery that her mother and grandmother had taught her’.⁵¹ As a consequence, although we must be cautious as to extent, these perspectives invite us to surmise that the demonic identities of the Basque toad familiars were not just the result of interrogators glossing folk spirits as demons, or suspects (with inquisitorial encouragement) mining Catholic representations of hell, but were also reflections of ordinary magical practice as typically conducted by Basque cunning men and women in the period.

CHAPTER TEN

Milking the Toad

Thus far, we have gained insights into the Basque toad familiar by exploring the abstract, imagined worlds of folk spirits and demons as brought to vivid life through contemporary magical practice, traditional literature and the iconography of hell. But these perspectives can be counterbalanced by more prosaic realities. One of the most striking features of the Basque familiar complex is that the amphibian was kept in the witch’s house or its environs in a chest, pot or hole and given food and drink in return for magical services. While this narrative, which we have already linked to folk spirit matrices and fairy tales, may seem fantastical it is surely relevant here that in its basic essentials it is also very feasible. In the present century, in countries across the globe, people choose to own toads or frogs as pets. Books have been published on amphibian care and, in more recent years, websites, blogs and forums enable people to research and discuss issues that arise from keeping these animals in the home. According to these sources, the basic requirements are a plastic box with a good lid, a relatively cool and damp environment, preferably with monitored humidity levels, and the right kind of food supply. Toads readily consume a wide variety of insects or invertebrates from woodlice, house flies, moths, crickets, spiders and cockroaches to slugs, caterpillars and worms; with nutritive value improved and the risk of disease transmission lowered by ‘gut-loading’ the animals (that is, feeding them certain substances before serving them to the amphibian). Prey can be wiggled to stimulate the toad’s instinct to flip out its tongue to take it but it is preferably offered live, with an amphibian-care manual advising that you ‘just toss them [live prey] in the tank and let your pet hunt.’ While this feeding regime may seem onerous, most adult toads only need feeding once every two to three days in the summer, while in winter when they naturally hibernate, they can go for many weeks or even months without eating at all. Modern toad owners can develop great affection for their amphibian pets and they can live for significant periods, with some species of bufo living fifteen to twenty years in captivity and (unsubstantiated) reports of some animals reaching a much greater age.¹

If toads can be kept in this way in the twenty-first century, then they could have been similarly accommodated in the seventeenth. Methods of care may have been less sophisticated and the toad’s lifespan shorter – early modern toad owners are, for example, unlikely to have gut-loaded prey or monitored humidity levels – but there is no reason why the amphibians under their care could not have survived for significant periods. This likelihood is supported by the fact that some accounts of toad care from the pre-modern period emerge outside witchcraft constructs. In the mid-eighteenth century Thomas Pennant reported that ‘one Devonshire gentry household had been keeping a tame toad as the family pet for the past thirty-six years’; while his contemporary, Gilbert White, was informed by an ‘undoubted authority’ that a group of ladies nourished a toad ‘summer after summer, for many years, until he grew to a monstrous size, with the maggots which turn to flesh-flies.’² It is pertinent that despite all their extravagant embellishments, the Basque familiar accounts do contain many elements consistent with practical toad-keeping methods. Chests or earthenware pots kept in houses or outhouses without central heating would have provided the cool, damp environments necessary for amphibian survival, while dishes of water or some other kind of liquid, as any modern toad owner would advise, is a good way of maintaining the container’s humidity. Similarly, while regular trips to the hills armed with baskets and hoes to turn over stones in order to collect insects and invertebrates may well have provided the ingredients for poisons, they would also have provided the toad with its preferred diet. Indeed, in this context it is coincidental that in some cases the vermin was gathered ‘vivos [alive]’ using ‘little sealed baskets’ – with no explanation being offered for this act other than that the Devil minimized its inconvenience by enchanting the vermin ‘so they didn’t bite them’. Through this lens, passages of instruction like the following from the Sentence of María de Zozaya, could be read less as demonologically inspired fantasy and more as a distorted account of genuine information-sharing about the care needs of domestic toads.

[S]he received into her possession the toad, and she put it in a pot and covered it with a board [or similar], and she put it inside a chest, and the Devil and mistress remained with her a long while, telling her the order that had to be kept [followed] to regale [look after?] it, and once they had instructed her they went and she was left with her toad . . .³

Keeping Toads: The Rationales

These perspectives certainly raise the possibility that when the witch-craze suspects created their accounts of toad familiars they drew on prior knowledge, or even experience, of keeping and feeding real toads. But for this hypothesis to be viable, we need to establish why the amphibians might have been kept and fed in the Basques regions in this period. We cannot rule out the simple possibility that some were kept as pets, particularly given that the damp valleys of the western Pyrenees could produce toads the size of small lapdogs. But the amphibian has never been a common pet choice and the poor were much less likely than the wealthy to take on the burden of caring for an animal unless it had some utility.⁴ The good-luck belief, found in many parts of pre-modern Europe, that if a householder treats toads that wander into their home with hospitality and kindness they will be rewarded with great fortune or riches, may also be relevant here.⁵ But a much more concrete rationale emerges in relation to contemporary medicine. In Chapter Six we observed that both toads and frogs were used for a wide range of medical treatments throughout early modern Europe. But what we have not really emphasized until now is that many of these treatments and rituals required live animals. Magico-medical cures involving physical contact are particularly relevant here, with texts advising that touching, holding or carrying a living toad next to different parts of the body can cure a range of illnesses. Seventeenth-century sources advise that toads are laid ‘on the back of the neck alive, or dried’ to stop ‘bleeding at the nose’ and that carrying a ‘living Toad or Spider shut up in a box’ or bag will protect against the ‘contagion’; while even as late as the nineteenth century, we find folk physicians drawing out poisons and healing bones by applying live toads to tumours or sprained wrists.⁶ Given that the early moderns did not always distinguish between frogs and toads, it is also noteworthy that nineteenth-century sources depict European practitioners trying to cure whooping cough by making ‘a live frog breathe into the child’s mouth’ or giving the child a ‘half-grown frog to suck’; or treating ocular complaints by advising the sufferer to ‘catch a live frog, and lick its eyes.’ Medieval and early modern prescriptions for making venom-based salts or powders could also require the practitioner to begin with a ‘live toad’, with a typical recipe from 1749 stating that powders were made by placing toads ‘while still alive, in an earthenware pot, and then dry[ing] them in a moderately heated oven’.⁷ Living amphibians were also required for some divinatory rites, with a nineteenth-century commentator noting that ‘it was common to see in Germany and Switzerland a small green frog kept in a glass vessel half full of water, with a set of wooden steps leading down into the water; and the weather was supposed to be indicated by the position of the frog. If he remained in the water, fine weather was expected; if he emerged and sat upon the steps, rain and cold were indicated.’⁸

This need for living toads must have been compromised by the fact that outside the spring breeding season the animals are difficult to find. And in this context it is reasonable to speculate that some people may have navigated this problem by having live toads to hand at all times by keeping them in or near the house. Although the toad required care, the inconvenience of having to feed it some insects or worms once every few days may have been compensated by the convenience of having all its valuable pharmacological and magical properties available on demand, with this bargain being even more advantageous in the winter when the animal often needed no feeding at all. From this perspective, for all its sensationalism the following summary of witch testimonies from the French city of Arras in 1460, could represent a distorted imaginal response to the local practice of keeping live toads in pots in case they were needed for domestic medical preparations.

[Witches] collect consecrated hosts at Easter time . . . They take it back to their home, in order to give it to toads, which they nurture in earthen pots for use in making their ointments with certain other ingredients, as described in the trials . . . [A]fter they have had [the toads] consume consecrated hosts while hungry, they extract blood from them to mix up a bloody potion. Afterward, they burn and pulverise the toads themselves for the same purpose . . .

Similarly, the following account of maleficium from a famous French trial in 1460, can be read as a distortion of a typical clinical interaction in which the popular medical practitioner pulls her toad ‘off the shelf’ in order to compile a prescription to client demand. According to the records, Soissons priest Yves Favins wanted revenge against Jean Rogier and so went to a

poor woman of the village . . . [who] have him a great toad which she kept in a pot, and told him to baptise it and feed it on a consecrated wafer, which he did, giving it the name of John. The woman then killed it and made of it a “sorceron”, which her daughter took to Rogier’s house under pretence of demanding the money in dispute, and cast it under the table at which Rogier, his wife, and his son were dining. They all died within three days.⁹

Toad-based medical practices are also intimated, with chilling realism, in earlier Basque trials, with a suspect from Burgui confessing in 1569 that ‘María Lucea took two toads from out of the chest and carried them in her hands, and she slit their throats and began to skin them with a knife, and she gave one of them to the deponent to finish skinning it, and the deponent busied herself with it, and she gave the other one to her girl companion’. The hypothesis that toads were kept in some homes for medicinal purposes in this period would explain Bodin’s assertion that the possession of toads was not in itself sufficient grounds for the death penalty and that the practice of possessing baptized toads ‘would seem ridiculous if one did not see such a thing practised everyday.’¹⁰

Venom Extraction

The possibility that the Basque witch-craze suspects mined their knowledge and experience of keeping toads for magico-medical purposes when creating their toad familiar accounts, gains additional support from the fact that through this lens, some of the more obscure elements of these narratives begin to make more sense. According to the records, one of the core reasons why suspects kept and fed their toads was in order to procure their venom, with the Joint Sentence stating that the Devil gave them the amphibians ‘so that from them they can draw the water with which they anoint themselves to go to the akelarres’. The extraction process is then described as follows.

A short while after they [the toads] have eaten they thrash them with sticks and they swell up and become poisonous until they tell them to stop hitting them, that it is enough, and then they squeeze them with their hands or with their left foot against the floor and in some troughs or vessels that they have for this purpose. They vomit, from the front and from behind, a disgusting and very foul-smelling green and black water, which they use to make their powders and poisons and to anoint themselves when they have to go to the akelarre . . .¹¹

While these claims may seem sensational and fantastic, they do evoke some of the realities of contemporary medical practice. In Chapter Six we argued that the toad’s medicinal value lay in the venom stored in glands in its skin. But what we have not yet emphasized is that although this venom can be accessed through chopping, drying and powdering the dead toad and its skin, it can also be collected from the live animal. Methods of live venom extraction are reported in traditional medical systems in various parts of the world, with practitioners in sixteenth-century China, for example, extracting the toxins ‘by pressing the animal’s head against rice paper, or by scraping the secretions off its back with bamboo sticks.’¹² In modern China, research scientists also ‘milk’ toads for their secretions, with a recent study conducted by analysts from the Shenyang and Kyoto Pharmaceutical Universities stating that ‘toad venom samples were collected from living toads which were captured from different regions of China’ and obtained ‘by squeezing the venom directly from the parotid gland onto a glass plate’.¹³

Declarations, from the accused, that in order to extract the toads’ toxins they ‘thrash them with sticks and they swell up and become poisonous’ could also have reflected reality. When toads are physically threatened they have two main defence mechanisms; making themselves bigger (by inflating their skins with air and standing ‘on tiptoe, giving the impression of being larger’) and releasing their venom, with Adrian Morgan noting that ‘when pressure is applied to the parotids . . . they erupt their contents with explosive force’. As a consequence, it would have been eminently logical to prepare a toad for milking by beating it with a stick. This logic is clearly articulated in de Lancre’s summary of a witch trial that took place in the Labourdin parish of Ustaritz in 1576.

Someone named Menioin carried an earthenware pot in which there were large spiders that were swollen with a drug called reagal, and two toads that Chorropique skinned while Augerot ground this reagal and the spiders in a mortar. This being done, he used the toads that she had skinned, after having first beaten them with a stick, poisoning them as one does a cat, but in such a way that one could extract some good from them. When this mixture was made and put back in the pot, they all threw some of it onto some pastures to make the cattle die.¹⁴ [my italics]

That suspects’ accounts of venom-extraction were rooted in genuine medico-magical experiences is also suggested by the fact that from this vantage point, we can also rationalize defendants’ claims that when they arrived at the akelarre they pooled the venom drawn from the individual toads into a single pot. María de Zozaya, for example, stated that:

She took the water she drew from the toad to the akelarre in her bowl and she poured it into a pot that was there allocated for this purpose so that all the witches who had toads could empty into it the waters that they drew from their toads. And one of the eldest witches was in charge of taking this pot to the akelarre and back to her house, and storing these waters in order to prepare the ointments and poisons that were made.

While pooling ingredients, as argued in Chapter Six, would have been a logical part of collective medicine-making, it may have been particularly important with regard to toad secretions. Individual amphibians produce different amounts of venom that contain active ingredients in differing concentrations, with these variables also being affected by region and species. In modern China, where toad venom is processed on a large scale, these inconsistencies have necessitated the development of strict quality control procedures in order to produce substances with known concentrations that can facilitate efficient dose-standardization.¹⁵ With less oversight at their disposal, the simplest way for early modern Basque villagers to reduce the dangers of diverse venom strengths would have been to pool multiple samples, as the witches did, to create single potencies that could be known and used by all.

It could be argued that however compelling these comparisons, they are undermined by diverse references – in the venom-extraction passages – that are clearly incompatible with toad biology. Claims from the accused that when they were thrashed, the toads ‘vomit, from the front and from behind, a disgusting and very foul-smelling green liquid’ that was then used to make poisons, would seem to contradict the fact that the toad venom is released from glands that accumulate in the skin on the back and legs. Similarly, claims that the venom appeared as a ‘yellowish liquid’ or a ‘disgusting and very foul-smelling green liquid’ that they then ‘poured’ into ‘troughs or vessels’ would seem at odds with the fact that toad venom is generally odourless, milky-white (sometimes with a yellowish tinge) and sticky or gelatinous in consistency, with only small amounts being released by even the biggest toad. But examined in the context of contemporary medical opinion, these assertions make new sense. When toads are threatened, they not only release venom but also foul-smelling urine which acts as a secondary form of defence. In the early modern period this urine was believed to have pharmacological effects, with seventeenth-century physician Thomas Browne noting that the belief that ‘a Toad pisseth, and this way diffuseth its venome, is generally received, not onely with us, but also in other parts’. Equally, the suspects’ claim that their toads ‘vomit’ their venomous liquids ‘from the front’ evokes the contemporary conviction that the animal’s oral emissions were also valuable, with Browne observing that ‘a Toad communicates its venom, not onely by urine, but by the humiditie and slaver of its mouth’.¹⁶

Another narrative detail that might appear at first glance to be incongruent with genuine medical practice, is the suspects’ claim that their toad familiars survived the venom-extraction process and were then ready to be milked again at a later period. This detail could owe something to contemporary folklore, with the animals’ habit of telling the witch to ‘stop hitting them [because] . . . it is enough’ when they had endured sufficient thrashing, echoing those lively folktales where humans and their magical familiars tussle for authority or bicker over their perceived obligations. But it is also relevant that if milked carefully, a toad can regenerate its venom within a period of four to six weeks and then be successfully used again; with this timescale evoking the famous witches’ charm, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: ‘Toad, that under cold stone, Days and nights hast thirty-one, Swelter’d venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.’¹⁷ While there is not enough evidence to assert that the Basque suspects – or even Basque peasants in general – engaged in the messy business of keeping toads in order to be able to re-milk them for venom every few weeks, we can reasonably speculate that circulating knowledge about these regenerative powers could have been drawn into the fictions, false memories and dreams that underpinned their toad familiar accounts.

Genuine practice can also be detected in the realistic reference, from Zugarramurdi suspect Juanes de Sansin, that his company of witches ‘take water’ from toads by ‘binding them by their legs, and for the said act the uncle [Miguel de Goiburu] took water from them, tying each one by their legs so that they didn’t run away, with a cord’. When handling and processing animals for medical or magical purposes, restraints would have commonly been used, with a prescription for drying toads from seventeenth-century French physician Moses Charas stating that ‘having ty’d a packthred to their [the live toad’s] hinder leg, and hang’d them up in an airy place’ the medic must ‘leave them there not only till they dye of themselves, but till they are quite dry.’¹⁸ The report that Sansin’s uncle used leg-cords when extracting venom also makes practical sense, with traditional medical practitioners in some parts of the world today attaching strings to the limbs of live amphibians before tying them to sticks so that their secretions can be scraped off more efficiently. To my knowledge, Sansin’s claim is the only direct allusion to such constraints to emerge in the 1609–14 records (although references to toad familiars wearing a ‘ribbon of bells’ or ‘a gold cord with a bell on it’ may have been embellishments on the theme). But it is notable that a similar reference does emerge in an earlier trial record from the Salazar Valley (1540), in which older women are accused of encouraging novices to become witches by ‘taking out a toad with a string tied to its leg’ and putting it ‘all over their face, chest, legs and body’ and making them ‘kiss’ and ‘touch it with their hand’. Through this lens, the string attached to the amphibian’s limb would have been a useful control when encouraging children to press it on parts of their body, or even kiss it, in an effort to cure sores, fevers or whooping cough.¹⁹

The Dressed Toad

The signature of magico-medical practice can also be detected in the toad familiar’s clothes. Assertions, by the accused, that their amphibians were decorated with ribbons and bells and dressed in brightly coloured suits (sometimes of velvet) with little apertures for the head, arms and legs, are so incongruous that they are hard to credit with any kind of reality. But one highly relevant reference in a letter sent to la Suprema by bishop of Pamplona Antonio Venegas de Figueroa in 1610, suggests otherwise. In the missive, Venegas describes a meeting that was convened to examine a report submitted by several Franciscan monks who had been sent to the mountains to find evidence of witchcraft. Among the ‘material proof’ of witchcraft presented at the meeting were ‘four jars containing witch salve’ and ‘a dressed toad’. Although, as Henningsen laments, ‘unfortunately, nothing further is heard’ about the toad, we cannot automatically dismiss it as fictitious. If the letter had been written by a man like Valle, anxious to exaggerate evidence for the reality of witchcraft, we might have questioned the animal’s existence. But Venegas shared Salazar’s sceptical view that the witches’ sect was likely to have been a fabrication fuelled by hysteria and coercion, and as a consequence he was more likely to debunk evidence of dressed familiars than manufacture it. Of course we cannot automatically assume that the animal, if it had existed, was an authentic folkloric object, for if (as seen in Chapter Three) suspects could manufacture false jars of witches’ salve to interrogatorial demand then they could also have conjured up false examples of dressed toads.²⁰ But it does invite us to explore the reality of the phenomenon.

We can begin by recalling that when introducing the dressed toad in Chapter Nine, we noted that it was ‘unique or, at the very least, highly unusual’. The latter qualification was premised on surviving evidence that in the Cambrésis region of Northern France in 1599, a witchcraft suspect named Reyne Percheval responded to interrogatorial questions ‘about the toads that she kept’ by explaining that (as summarized by Robert Muchembled) ‘she has raised four of them, dressed them in red, green and yellow cloth, and used their venom mixed with water to make a “dense drizzling rain” that could rot apples and pears.’²¹ This short reference is significant to our analysis in two ways. Firstly, it suggests that ideas about dressed toads were circulating in France prior to the 1609–14 trials; and secondly, it sheds important new light on the possible origins of the phenomenon. The fact that Reyne’s toads are dressed in ‘red, yellow, and green cloth’ but do not display any other humanoid traits – such as eating bread, drinking wine or engaging in conversation – markedly differentiates them from their Basque counterparts. This limited characterization could merely reflect an incomplete source, for the confession summary is brief and there may have been more detail in the original records. But when considered in the wider context of contemporary toad lore, the allegation that Reyne dressed her toads in ‘cloth’ as opposed to ‘clothes’ directs us away from the anthropomorphism of the folk familiar and back to the more utilitarian world of magico-medical practice.

Many toad-based magical and medical treatments involved the use of cloth. In various parts of Europe, from the early modern period through to the nineteenth century, we find amphibian-related cures that involved placing the live animal, its amputated limbs or its processed body parts (powdered skin, ashes etc.) in a piece of cloth or small bag and carrying it around the neck or placing it against the afflicted part of the body. In the seventeenth century a gentlewoman was advised to ‘have a live Toad put up in a Napkin and bound to her back’ to ‘stay the immoderate Flux [bleeding]’ during miscarriage or childbirth while, as Morgan notes, a fifteenth-century remedy for gout ‘recommended the taking of a live toad when neither sun nor moon was overhead, and cutting off the creature’s hind legs. These would be wrapped in deerskin and attached to the afflicted foot of the sufferer.’²² Using cloths or bags in this way was wholly logical. On an emotional level they would have reduced the feelings of squeamishness that could, even in this robust age, be generated by contact with the clammy, wriggling animals.²³ On a medicinal level they would have been an effective way to keep a squirming amphibian, or its amputated limbs, close to a patient’s body for a period of time. Some kind of covering would also have provided protection from released excreta, urine, blood and most importantly, venom (which, while having therapeutic properties, could also irritate the skin). Outside the cures themselves, it would of course have been much easier to collect, handle, store and sell or exchange toads for medicinal use if they were wrapped or contained in some way. In the present context, it is also notable that these bags and cloths must sometimes have inadvertently assumed the appearance of clothes, with the toad depicted in the following treatment for a breast complaint recorded by a ‘medical eye-witness’ in England in 1776, being clearly anthropomorphized by being ‘put into a linen bag, all but its head, and . . . applied to the sore [breast], which the animal sucked greedily’ in a cure that could involve the toads being applied ‘day and night, for five weeks without intermission.’²⁴

13  Material evidence of an early twentieth-century folk treatment from England. The dried frog was carried in the small silk bag to prevent fits. Similar treatments could also involve live toads.

Cloth was also involved in the collection of toadstones, with de Lancre’s account of the practice (referring to events taking place near Bordeaux the year after he was in Labourd), worth recounting in full.

It is important to note here what happened about one league from the city of Bazas, during the month of September of last year, 1610. As an honourable man was walking in the fields, he saw a dog all excited near a hole in the ground, as if a hare or some other prey had entered it. This aroused the attention of the honourable man and others who gathered there, causing them to look to see why the dog was so agitated. They opened the hole and found two large jars tied together side by side, the opening of the one meeting that of the other. They were wrapped in a cloth rather strangely and tied together with a strong string. The dog did not calm down, so they opened them. They were full of sawdust and underneath was a fat toad dressed in green taffeta. A man appeared behind them from nowhere, but from not far away, suspected of being a witch. He approached and cleverly confessed that it was he who had buried this prisoner in the jars, but that he had done so simply to cause the toad’s death so as to obtain a certain stone that toads have in their heads that is called ‘toadine’. But in order to obtain this stone, it was not necessary to dress the toad in such livery.²⁵

Despite de Lancre’s qualms, the Bazas man’s defensive claim that he ‘buried this prisoner in the jars’ in order to obtain ‘toadine’ may well have been authentic. Variants of the belief that toadstones could be acquired through ritual burial is recorded in many parts of Europe in this period, with cleric Thomas Lupton advising in 1597 that you should place a toad in an earthenware pot and then bury the pot in an ants’ nest, after which the ants would eat the toad’s flesh leaving the skeleton, and more importantly the toadstone, for later collection. Similarly, the report that the toad was ‘dressed in green taffeta’ could reflect the fact that since the time of Pliny and well into the early modern period, accounts of these rituals often described the use of brightly coloured cloth, with Adrian Morgan speculating that ‘the idea that a toad liked coloured fabric probably stems from traditional methods of catching edible frogs with moving baits of red cloth.’ In one typical example, sixteenth-century Swiss physician Conrad Gesner states that

I have lured [toads] more successfully than I have taken the stone from living animals by spreading pumice on a cloth of varied colours in which they delight. So, although they would otherwise be struggling, they are instead relaxed. They lay down the burden from their heads; it soon falls from an opening in the middle [of the cloth] into a casket placed underneath.²⁶

Also relevant, conversely, is de Lancre’s suspicion that the Bazas man’s claim that he buried the dressed toad ‘simply’ to obtain the toadstone was false because ‘in order to obtain this stone, it was not necessary to dress the toad in such livery’. This disapproval could have been rooted in de Lancre’s prior acquaintance, through both his Labourdin interrogations and the Logroño auto de fé, with the phenomenon of the Basque dressed toad. But it may also have been reflective of traditional curse rituals. In a wide range of sources from many parts of pre-modern Europe – including demonological works, witch trial records, folktales and anecdotal accounts – we find accounts of toads being employed to effect harmful magic. To this end, the animal is often buried or incarcerated along with objects belonging, or relevant, to the intended victim, in the transference-based belief that as the toad died so would the individual at whom the curse was aimed. It is easy to dismiss these accounts as literary sensationalism or witchcraft propaganda. But material evidence of toad-based curses has emerged from a range of traditional cultures in other parts of the world and some authentic examples have also appeared in early modern sources.²⁷ Gunnar Knutsen has recently noted that in Valencia in 1670, cunning woman Isabel Joan Montoliu was accused of attempting to kill her client’s husband by ‘putting shredded pieces of his clothes and hairs in a toad’s mouth and closing the mouth with a large needle’; while a year later, Francisca Villegas concluded a similar ritual by placing ‘the toad with tied legs between some bricks and said that when the toad died, so would the man.’ Although we cannot be certain that these rituals were actually performed as opposed to merely attributed, their ‘similarity of execution’, when combined with the fact that they emerged in trial records relatively free from demonological superimposition, has led Knutsen to surmise that ‘in Valencia there may have been a genuine tradition of [toad-based] maleficium’ in this period.²⁸

In conclusion, through the perspectives developed here, the assertion that Reyne Percheval’s kept and ‘dressed her toads in red, green, and yellow cloth’ may not have been linked to beliefs about anthropomorphized folktale familiars dressed in little human-like clothes – but could have simply reflected the more utilitarian fact that she used treatments or spells involving toads and cloth in her role as a medical or magical practitioner. Indeed, any attempt to link Reyne’s dressed toads to the familiar matrix could be seen as an overinterpretation in this context. As an extension of this, we can also conclude that although the Basque toad familiar accounts depicted animals that were dressed far more elaborately than those described by Reyne, the fictions, false memories and dreams that inspired these accounts may well have been fuelled by suspects’ knowledge and experience of the brightly coloured cloths and bags employed in magico-medical rituals and treatments.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Jeannette’s
Imagination

In the last two chapters we have outlined some of the cultural and experiential matrices that the Basque suspects may have mined, in addition to basic witchcraft propaganda, to flesh out their accounts of the toad familiar. The fact that they could access such rich and varied areas of human belief and experience when creating the fictions, false memories and dreams that informed these accounts could certainly help explain why the phenomenon springs with such depth and vivacity from the Basque witch-craze records. But although these perspectives are welcome, they still leave one question unanswered. None of the cultural or experiential influences that we have identified here as important to the toad familiar phenomenon are unique to the Basque country in the early-seventeenth century. In this period medical and magical treatments and rituals involving toads were practised throughout Europe, while the literature and imagery of hell was integral to doctrine and devotion in all Catholic countries. Firesides from Ireland to Hungary were enlivened by tales of feisty folk familiars in animal form and, while demonic magic may have been more pervasive in southern Europe than in some other parts of the continent, it still had a considerable geographical range. Yet despite this ubiquity, dressed toad familiars like those of the Basque witch-craze do not appear to have emerged anywhere else in Europe in the early modern period. In Zaragoza, for example, we find that practices involving the feeding of animal demons in return for magical services are ‘widespread’ but, despite its closeness to the Basque country, the relationships are impersonal and none of the animals take the form of toads. In Spanish regions like Valencia, rich complexes of belief surrounding personalized demon familiars live alongside the sophisticated use of toads in magical rituals but we still do not find any of these familiars described as amphibians. In France we find male witches keeping toads in pots to make ointments but no suggestion that the toads were dressed or shared intimate working relationships of the type found between magical practitioner and familiar spirit. In England, magical practitioners engaged in working magical relationships with toads that possess the lively character of the familiar of the folktale, but these relationships did not involve going to the witches’ sabbath or the toad being dressed. In Hungary we find intimate working relationships with animal familiars that were clearly influenced by the narratives and iconography of hell, but the animals do not wear clothes and the toad form does not appear to have been emphasized over and above any of the other animals associated with the underworld.¹ Given this Europe-wide picture, why the toad familiar should have emerged in the form that it did in the Basque case still remains a mystery.

The Goddess Link

In looking for answers we can begin with pre-Christian influences. Amphibians play a consistently prominent role in religious belief and mythology across the world, being frequently associated with fertility, fortune and death and having demonstrably strong links with a range of historical Near-Eastern and Mediterranean goddess complexes that included the Egyptian Heqet and classical Aphrodite. From at least the Hellenic period, these beliefs linking female supernatural agency with amphibians have influenced European mentalities; being traced in ideas and rituals surrounding the Virgin Mary, fate-women figures, fairies and, most significantly in the present case, the witch. They are also reflected in the etymology, with Giovanni Pizza claiming that in German dialects ‘Hexe signifies both “toad” and “witch,” and in many Italian dialects, the toad is defined as strega, “witch,” or fata, “fairy.” The Spanish bruja, “witch,” the old French brusche, and the Sardinian bruscia all derive from the Vulgar Latin bruscus.’ While visible in many parts of Europe these archaic links emerge more strongly in some regions than others, being described with particular vivacity, for example, in Sicilian folklore, where female magical practitioners termed donas de fuera were defined simultaneously as fairies, witches, fate-goddess figures and toads, with nineteenth-century folklore warning people not to kill the amphibians in case they were donas temporarily transformed.²

These perspectives invite us to explore whether the prominence of the Basque toad familiar reflected an archaic cultural emphasis, of the kind found in Sicily, between toads and supernatural females in Basque culture. Certainly, there are suggestions in the earlier trial records that toads possessed a symbolic value in local witchcraft beliefs. Although in the last chapter we argued that accounts of witches persuading novices to touch, hold, kiss or eat toads (in their homes or at the sabbath) drew on prior experience of magico-medical treatments, the fact that these references often emerged in initiatory contexts suggests that the relationship between witch and toad may have been more complex than this.³ The existence of a symbolic link between amphibians and witch identities is also visible in the belief, emerging in judicial records from at least the 1520s, that witches could be identified by ‘the sign of a frog’s foot’ in the ‘left eye above the pupil’, with this claim reflecting the conviction (found in many parts of pre-modern Europe) that those who possessed supernatural powers could be identified by marks or other characteristic features on their face or body.⁴ Similarly suggestive is the evidence that in 1610, a Vizcayan court document relating to a kidnapping case with no links to witchcraft, could refer to a defendant’s mother as ‘María Sapia’ (María the Toad) and state that she was ‘so named because of her reputation as a sorceress’.⁵

But although these references are scattered through the historical records, we must be careful before concluding that some form of native Basque emphasis (over and above the European norm) on the links between witches and toads was responsible for the prominence of toad familiar beliefs in the witch-craze confessions. In the first instance, if this emphasis existed you would expect it to have been picked up by de Lancre. The conditions were certainly conducive. As an inquisitive man he was clearly interested in the relationships between witches and animals, devoting a whole chapter of the Tableau to the links between witchcraft and the rooster. Similarly, an awareness of the role of animal-spirit forms in witchcraft is evidenced in his accounts of the ways in which French witches Isaac de Queyran, Pierre Aupetit and others worked magic with the help of the Devil or demons that appeared in the form of flies, cats, butterflies and birds. Cognisance of a specific link between witches and toads is also illustrated in his report that a girl ‘who seemed to recognize all male and female witches at first glance, told us that all witches from Biarritz had in their left eye a mark like that of a toad’s foot, which the women of this parish who confessed also said.’⁶ Even more pertinently, as we shall explore later, at least three Labourd suspects voiced (albeit largely in passing) the belief that toads could function as demonic assistants, with one of this number, Jeannette d’Abadie, providing de Lancre with a vivid and memorable account of a dressed toad familiar during his investigations in Ciboure. Given these facts, it seems reasonable to assume that if developed beliefs surrounding toad familiars were circulating in the Basque region in this period, a man as curious and informed as de Lancre would have uncovered them. But at no point in the Tableau does he pursue an examination of the phenomenon. Indeed, when attempting to elucidate Jeannette d’Abadie’s account of a dressed-toad familiar, he does not turn to any comparable Labourdin examples but cites a toadstone-collecting ritual recorded near the French city of Bazas in the following year. His uncharacteristically hesitant observation, when commenting on the sentences read out at the Logroño auto de fé, that the Spanish witches’ ‘dressed-up’ toads ‘surely are demons’ also points to an undeveloped opinion on the subject long after he had left Labourd.⁷

Of course the fact that de Lancre did not uncover an extended belief matrix surrounding the toad familiar does not mean it did not exist, for however curious and peripatetic, he was only one man, with his own agenda, and he may have missed it. But de Lancre’s omission is supported by the wider sources. If archaic matrices linking witches and other supernatural females with toads were particularly prominent in Basque culture you would expect them to have left an impression in the large body of folklore collected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; but here, the link emerges no more strongly than in traditional lore from many other regions of Europe. The range of helpful familiars that enliven Basque folktales and legends commonly take the form of ‘insects’, ‘tiny men’ or ‘hairy homunculi’ as opposed to any kind of amphibian. Similarly, while Basque myths, legends and popular beliefs frequently feature folk spirits that can turn into animals, behave like animals or display animalistic characteristics – such as hairy pelts, bird-like feet, bovine hooves or fishes’ tails – among this colourful array of species we seldom find the frog or the toad. Even the supernatural agents considered by folklorists to have links with archaic goddess-complexes, such as Mari the ‘queen of all the spirits’ and her handmaidens the lamiñas in female form, have no obvious links to any type of amphibian, being more commonly associated with horses or birds.⁸ This absence is also evident in the later folkloric data on witchcraft belief. While it is true that twentieth-century Basque children entertained themselves with a form of wordplay (in which an extra syllable or consonant was inserted into words) that was termed ‘the language of witches’ or of ‘toads’, we must set against this the finding that although Basque folktales do contain stories about witches or sorceresses and amphibians these do not exceed the number or tone of similar tales from other parts of Europe and do not to my knowledge feature dressed or heavily anthropomorphized toads. A relevant collection of later folktales collected in Euskara by Barandiarán, for example, titled A View from the Witches’ Cave, contains only two passing references to toads and neither resemble familiars; with this absence all the more surprising given that a significant number of the tales cited were collected in the village of Zugarramurdi.⁹ But perhaps the strongest challenge in this respect is the absence of these themes in the witchcraft records themselves. If a strong cultural emphasis on the link between supernatural females and toads had been a decisive stimulant to the emergence of the Basque toad familiar then you would expect variants of the phenomenon to have emerged in other witch trial clusters in the region. But although, as we have seen, some sixteenth-century witch confessions do depict amphibians being handled or kissed in a manner that suggests some kind of initiatory or symbolic function, accounts of toad familiars that engage in complex and human-like relationships with their witch mistresses and are dressed in bells and little velvet clothes appear to be wholly exclusive to the 1609–14 witch-craze.

The Zugarramurdi Origin

This pattern of distribution suggests that if we want to find the origins of the Basque toad familiar we need to turn away from generalities and look for factors specific to the 1609–14 prosecutions alone. We have already observed that, barring one French reference, the phenomenon appeared exclusively in the Spanish records and first emerged in the early confessions from Zugarramurdi. We have also noted that in the absence of any obvious demonological or trial-based precedent, the fact that la Suprema only asked Valle and Becerra to question the suspects about keeping and feeding familiars after they had seen these early confessions, suggests that the Zugarramurdi suspects may have been instrumental in the creation of the phenomenon and that some level of complexity and keptness emerged in their accounts from the very beginning.¹⁰ But if the Spanish toad familiar first emerged in the village of Zugarramurdi, then why?

While we do not have enough information to answer this question definitively, it is notable that the Zugarramurdi villagers did have enhanced access to two of the seams of belief and experience that have been identified, over the last two chapters, as relevant to the development of the phenomenon. The first takes us back to the practicalities of magico-medical treatment. The most precise and realistic depictions of toad-keeping to emerge from the Zugarramurdi confessions were given by three men: Miguel de Goiburu, his son Juanes de Goiburu and his nephew Juanes de Sansin, as preserved in extracts recorded in the Pamplona Manuscript. There is an air of authenticity to Miguel’s claim that after his initiation as a witch, his aunt took him to her house where she had some toads ‘hidden near the stables, where there was a large chestnut trunk that had holes at the bottom, and underneath she had a hole made in the ground with a trough in it, within which she had the aforementioned two toads covered in a black cloth’. Similar realism is found in his nephew’s claim (cited earlier) that his uncle tied ‘each one [of the toads] by their legs’ with a cord so that they ‘didn’t run away’ when he tried to extract venom; and in the report that Miguel’s son Juanes answered his interrogators ‘marvellously’ with the confession that

after four years, he went to serve a shepherd in Usua, and his aforementioned father gave him his dressed toad and he carried it in the sleeve of his cloak. And on the mountain in the cabin where he lived, to one side of it, he made a hole in the ground and put the toad in it, and he covered this with a slab of stone. And after he married, he kept it with the toad that belonged to his wife Estevania de Yriarte, who was also a witch, in the stables where the sheep were, in a hole covered with a board. And he fed it twice a day . . .

Whatever their elaborations, these accounts do vividly evoke the conditions in which real toads may have been kept for magico-medical purposes, as speculated in the previous chapter. This link is further reinforced by the fact that these three men and their relatives, including Graciana de Barrenechea (mother-in-law to Juanes de Goiburu) and María de Yriarte (Graciana’s daughter), were primarily responsible for the most elaborate and coherent toad-based poison-making accounts to emerge from the Zugarramurdi records; with Juanes de Goiburu, in particular, responding ‘ad longum’ on the subject of poison preparation.¹¹

We cannot be certain why this particular group of Zugarramurdi villagers produced these accounts. But it is potentially relevant that Miguel, his son Juanes and Graciana de Barrenechea’s husband, Juanes de Yriarte were all shepherds, with Miguel owning his own flock and also being employed to look after sheep belonging to the Urdax monastery. In the pre-modern period individuals working with livestock often acquired veterinary skills (including those of medicine manufacture) in order to treat sick animals, with the Spanish inquisitors, as we have seen, dismissing some of the witches’ flying unguents as harmless ointments used by ‘carters’ for ‘healing the sores of their draught beasts.’ Given the large number of animals involved, it is also likely that shepherding families came together to produce medicines in quantity, with these perspectives lending realism to Juanes de Goiburu’s claim that while in the company of the Devil and his servants, his wife Estevanía de Yriarte (daughter to shepherd Juanes de Yriarte) and other relatives gathered in his house to make poisons ‘mostly by day and sometimes by night. And he was rarely at home when they made them by day, because he was watching his livestock on the mountain [or in the hills]. And when he returned home at night, he found the finished potions and ointments in the house.’ Given our argument, as set out in Chapters Six to Eight, that the Basque poison-making passages evoked contemporary medical practice, it is also notable that as Ramsey has observed with regard to pre-modern France, ‘practitioners of veterinary medicine often dabbled in the treatment of human patients’ and that ‘rural empirics, and especially rebouters, were often described as shepherds.’¹²

We can even link the emphasis on toad venom in the Zugarramurdi poison-making passages directly to the shepherding profession. Animal droppings provide an attractive site for worms, dung beetles and other insects that constitute amphibian diets and as a consequence in areas where livestock are grazed, toad populations are generally high. In present-day Australia cane toads are five times as numerous on animal-excrement sites than other locations and are eating so many dung beetles (up to 160 per night) that they are threatening local ecosystems.¹³ Although we have no evidence to this effect, it is reasonable to surmise that the long seasons spent in animal barns and pastures gave the Zugarramurdi shepherds easy access to the toads that congregated in these regions and that this access generated a certain proficiency in the medical use of their venom that later informed the emphasis on toad-based poison-making in their confessions. This would certainly add rationale to the Goiburus’ otherwise incongruous confession that they hid their toads in holes ‘near a stable with the sheep’; that they kept and fed them when taking their flocks to the higher pastures and lodging in their mountain cabins; and that Miguel de Goiburu, with some expertise, tied ‘each one [of the toads] by their legs’ with a cord so that they ‘didn’t run away’ when he extracted venom. It may also be more than a coincidence, in this context, that toad venom was also strongly associated with the magico-medical practices of shepherd witches in early modern Normandy.¹⁴

With regard to Zugarramurdi origins, the second factor that may be relevant here pertains to demonic realities. In Chapter Nine we argued that the complex demonic traits displayed by the Basque toad familiar evoked those of stereotypical demons as they emerged in contemporary iconographies of hell. But what we have not yet emphasized is that the strongest evidence of this iconographic influence appears in the Zugarramurdi records, with some of the most pertinent images in this respect, such as groups of toad familiars greedily feasting on human flesh, being exclusive to this confession cluster. This may be no accident. Given Zugarramurdi’s spiritual links with the Premonstratensian monastery at Urdax, it is reasonable to conjecture that the monastery’s vocational responsibility to provide spiritual encouragement and instruction to pilgrims travelling the Camino de Santiago may have served to elevate consciousness of hell and its resident demons in the local community. But there could have been an additional impetus here. In both the medieval and early modern periods, one of the most direct and visceral ways to encounter demonic identities was through the public rites of exorcism that were normally performed, as Ciruelo notes, ‘at the conclusion of the Mass’. During these events, congregations witnessed dramatic ceremonial interactions with demons or the Devil in which participating priests did not only command the demons to leave the sick person’s body but also engaged in verbal communication with them, via the high-jacked voice of the possessed. As Castañega elaborates, these dramatic events could even involve the priest or onlookers asking the possessed person, or more accurately the demon that was speaking through them, ‘to explain if they could speak to some dead person, and in what state he is in, Hell or Purgatory, and if they can help with some benefices’.¹⁵ In this context it is highly relevant that, as seen in Chapter Five, the Urdax monastery combined its role as a staging post on the Camino de Santiago with a long-standing specialism in the treatment of spiritual maladies that – being focused on bewitchment and demonic possession – specifically demanded skills in ritual exorcism.¹⁶ Through this lens we can reasonably speculate that the monastery’s obligation to conduct public exorcisms – whether for pilgrims, local people or patients visiting from France or other parts of Spain – would have generated a higher-than-average familiarity with the visceral reality of demonic entities in the surrounding region. As a consequence, when the Zugarramurdi villagers were accused of performing witchcraft with the aid of toad familiars, both they and their monk interrogators may have brought their mutually high awareness of hell and the devils that inhabited it to the proceedings and cocreated confessional accounts of toad familiars that displayed a significant number of stereotypically demonic traits. These preoccupations are also compatible with the fact that at some point in its history, the current that created the cave where the Zugarramurdi witches gathered with their toads, became known as ‘Hell’s Stream’.

14  In this fifteenth-century woodcut from France, a bishop exorcises possessed men before the altar. A demon lurks in the background.

But while these analyses into Zugarramurdi’s shepherding communities and monasterial connections suggest that the villagers had access to particularly rich seams of belief and experience relevant to the development of narratives about the toad familiar, they still do not provide us with a full explanation. Although they present us with some viable mechanisms through which the Zugarramurdi toads may have acquired their strong demonic identities and high levels of magico-medical realism, they still do not tell us how and why they developed their anthropomorphic abilities to eat bread with their hands, engage in lively conversations and most significantly of all, dress in bells, ribbons and brightly coloured clothes. Equally significantly, these analyses fail to explain why these and any other relevant seams of belief and experience should have coalesced around the figure of a toad familiar in the first place.

Jeannette’s Imagination

While we have no definitive answers to this question, a feasible explanation emerges if we move away from the Spanish records. At the beginning of Chapter Nine we observed that although it was essentially a Spanish creation, one reference to the dressed toad familiar did emerge in the French records. In September 1609 in the French town of Ciboure, sixteen-year-old suspect Jeannette d’Abadie told de Lancre that she had seen dressed toad familiars at a party held directly after the sabbath. Jeannette’s account is notable not only because it provides the sole French example of the phenomenon but also because the creatures described do not conform with the toad familiar template as it first emerged in the Zugarramurdi records up to nine months previously. She alleged that

after the sabbath the whole assembly would go to the cemetery in Saint-Jean-de-Luz and in Ciboure, or at the very least to a great party to have toads baptized, because the Devil did not dare to do this in the house of God, which is the church. These toads were dressed in red velvet and sometimes in black velvet, with a little bell around their necks and another one around their feet, with a godfather who would hold the head of this toad and a godmother who would hold it by its feet, as one holds a creature in church. She could not name the godfather but she did know the name of the godmother, who is the daughter of Lady Martibelsarena. She saw this lady dance at the sabbath with four toads, one dressed in velvet with bells on its feet and the other three wearing no clothes. She carried them, the one that was dressed on her left shoulder, one other on her right shoulder, and the other two in each of her fists like a bird.¹⁷

While Jeannette’s creation resembles the Spanish stereotype in that it is dressed in little clothes and enjoys a degree of intimacy with the witch, it does not display the characterological complexity, initiatory significance and capacity for close working relationships, involving conversation and domestic care in exchange for magical services, that were such prominent features of the Spanish toad familiar matrix.

Although we cannot be certain in this respect, the most likely reason that Jeannette’s familiar differed so markedly from its Spanish counterparts is that her confessions were generated by de Lancre. The Bordeaux judge appears to have been well aware of the regional link between medicinal toads and the sabbath, with a number of Labourdin confessions describing the amphibians being herded and processed into poisons at the event. It is also possible that, prior to interrogating Jeannette, he had encountered local variants of the generic belief that toads, like a range of other animals, could function as witches’ familiars. But as noted earlier, he does not appear to have been aware of the fully developed motif of the dressed toad familiar until he encountered its Spanish incarnation at the 1610 Logroño auto de fé. As a consequence we can assume that when interrogating Jeannette, although de Lancre may well have asked if she had seen any toads being herded, processed, carried or interacted with at the sabbath, if and when she responded with an account of a dressed toad familiar he is unlikely, as Valle would have done, to have then pressed her with leading questions to create something that more closely resembled the kept, fed amphibian of the Spanish familiar template. This lack of direction on de Lancre’s part would have left Jeannette free to mine a different range of raw materials and create a different kind of toad familiar to her counterparts in Spain. And sure enough if we examine Jeannette’s account more closely, we gain some indications as to what these alternative inspirations may have been.

Our first clue is that instead of describing the toad familiar in its magico-medical context as a tool from which to extract venom, Jeannette describes it in relation to the ritual of baptism. In making this claim (which is unique in the Basque records) she may have been drawing on the widespread belief – condemned by many clerics in the period – that mundane objects could be magically potentized by being blessed, consecrated or even baptized, with a number of contemporary accounts from both witchcraft and sorcery trials describing toads being ritually charged in this way.¹⁸ But there is also evidence that she quarried more conventional spiritual lodes. Jeannette’s assertion that the toad was held by godparents while being baptized, along with her preceding claim (just before the toad account) that ‘she often saw children being baptized at the sabbath’, suggests that she was recalling the orthodox baptismal rite as performed by priests in her local parish. That she allowed an amphibian to (imaginally) infiltrate the sacrament in this way can be rationalized – to some extent – by the fact that animals could play a prominent role in religious ritual in pre-modern Europe. From at least the fifteenth century we have reports that on January 17 (the feast of St Anthony the Abbot, patron saint of livestock and animals) parishioners sought to protect their animals ‘from all evil’ by driving or carrying them to the churchyard, or even inside the church building itself, to be blessed by the presiding cleric.¹⁹ While we do not, to my knowledge, have any evidence that these rites were performed in the Basque country in the period of the witch-craze, the saint’s historical popularity, as evinced by the large number of rural confraternities dedicated to him in eighteenth-century Navarre, along with the fact that St Anthony’s Day rituals were popular in the region in later centuries, certainly raises the possibility.²⁰ This seam of raw material is also relevant because in pre-modern France and Spain, as in other parts of Europe, animals participating in public rituals and processions were commonly decorated or ‘dressed’ with bells, flowers, ribbons and brightly coloured cloth or clothes. In early-nineteenth century Italy, for example, animals’ ‘heads, tails, and necks, [were] decorated with bits of coloured riband and other finery’ for their presentation in the church on St Anthony’s Day.²¹

The second clue as to possible inspirations for Jeannette’s toad familiar, can be found in her assertion that it was not owned by an ordinary witch, but by an aristocratic woman identified as the ‘daughter of Lady Martibelsarena’ who dressed her toads in ‘velvet’ and ‘bells’ and carried them in her ‘fists like a bird’. This reference is anomalous, for noblewomen were not commonly accused of witchcraft in the Basque witch-craze and we find no other reference to the woman elsewhere in the records. But surprisingly, it does lend some rationale to Jeannette’s depiction of the dressed toad. In this period it was highly fashionable for aristocratic and some middle-class women, including nuns, to keep small animals, such as lapdogs, birds and rabbits as pets and dress them in decorative collars and even little ‘velvet suits to keep them warm in winter’. In contemporary paintings from both France and Spain, almost all the pet dogs dandled on the laps of wealthy women are adorned with ribbons or collars studded with jewels or hung with little bells, with French baroness Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy observing with bemusement in 1679 that the gentlewomen of Bayonne carried ‘little Sucking Pigs under their arms, as we do little Dogs: it’s true they were very spruce, and several of ‘em had Collars of Ribbons, of various Colours . . . When they danced, they must set them down, and let these grunting Animals run about the Chamber’.²² The relationship between domestic pets and their female owners is also evoked in the Burgui witch trial confessions of 1569, where ten-year-old María Ecániz stated that a group of local witches

all danced for a while and the drummer was María Alcaçaoa. And then, from a chest, the accused María Lucea took out a black thing with a bell on its neck and a long tail, and she carried it around the aforementioned room, and then she kissed it under the tail and made the deponent and the rest of them kiss it; and she saw them do the same thing with another large black, goat-like thing, which had horns.²³

Also relevant, is that these domestic pets were not confined to the home but would have been encountered by the wider community, with the ecclesiastic authorities complaining, throughout the medieval period and beyond, that the presence of these pets in church distracted congregations from their devotions.²⁴ These animals could also be the focus of ritual attention. Although the St Anthony’s Day rituals traditionally focused on livestock, from at least the early-nineteenth century some European congregations brought their pets, duly dressed and decorated for the occasion, to the church to be blessed on this date, with English satirist Douglas Jerrold claiming that on January 17 the ‘fine ladies’ of Naples even take their ‘lap-dogs to be sprinkled’ with holy water. While we cannot be sure that the gentlewomen of seventeenth-century Ciboure did the same, it is notable that the tradition of taking pets into churches to be blessed on St Anthony’s Day is very popular in modern Spain, including the Basque regions. At these events the dogs and other pets are often dressed in little hats and coats, complete with apertures for the arms, legs and head, that are strangely evocative of the outfits with ‘a hood but with the face exposed’ so that ‘only its feet and hands could be seen’ that were worn by some Basque toad familiars.²⁵

Our third clue as to possible inspirations for Jeannette’s toad familiar is found in the assertion, elsewhere in her confession, that during the witches’ mass ‘the master of the assembly and other little demons were placed on the altar in the form of saints’. This claim, again unique in the Basque witch-craze records, is clearly an inversion of the conventional Catholic practice of decorating altars with pictures and small statues of saints and other religious figures (with this reference, when taken together with the allusion to baptism, suggesting that Jeannette had a particularly intense relationship, or at least deep familiarity, with her local church). While not directly relevant to the dressed toad, this confessional passage becomes more pertinent when we consider that in Labourd in the period of the witch trials, the small saint figures displayed on church altars were intricately clothed, with de Lancre observing that the seroras ‘appear on Sunday to place a shirt and white collar, according to the custom, on the little saints who adorn the altars’.²⁶ While the clothes described by de Lancre appear to have been more modest than the velvet suits and bells sported by Jeannette’s toad familiar, it is notable that Spanish sacred images were often dressed lavishly in rich fabrics, ribbons and jewels to the extent that, as William Christian notes, in sixteenth-century Castile the Church authorities criticized local women for dressing images ‘profanely’.²⁷

We cannot know whether Jeannette utilized any of the material outlined above when creating the fictions, false memories or dreams that underpinned her toad familiar account. But the fact that its anomalous features can be reasonably linked to a range of real-life scenarios does support the view that she constructed it out of her own experiences and that she did so in a relatively unpoliced way. Not being directed by de Lancre, as the Spanish suspects seem to have been, into accessing beliefs and experiences that would most effectively produce stereotypical kept and fed familiars with strong demonic identities, Jeannette was free to mine an alternative range of raw materials and unconsciously conflate them into something quite different. Although the resultant toad familiar was considerably more one-dimensional than its Spanish counterpart, its individualistic evolution made it highly idiosyncratic and unique.

An Origin Hypothesis

These analyses can help us to understand why Jeannette’s toad familiars differed from their Zugarramurdi counterparts. But extended further, they can also provide an answer to the as-yet-unexplained question as to why the toad familiar phenomenon emerged in the Basque records in the first place. At first glance, the timeline would seem to suggest that Jeannette’s creation, as described to de Lancre in September 1609, was inspired by the toad familiars that emerged up to nine months before (December 1608) in the village of Zugarramurdi, which was less than twenty kilometres south-east of Ciboure. But if we examine the Tableau in more detail an alternative timeline presents itself. When discussing Jeannette’s case, de Lancre states that although she confessed to him on September 16, 1609, the toad encounters she described related to ‘the first appearance she made at the sabbath’ which occurred ‘approximately nine months’ earlier – a date that is roughly synonymous with the first toad-related accusations that emerged in Zugarramurdi.²⁸ This new finding does not refute the possibility that the idea of the toad familiar first travelled from Zugarramurdi to Ciboure, for the distance between the two can be walked in a day. But it does raise the possibility that the direction of travel could have gone the other way.

This hypothesis is supported by a range of circumstantial evidence. Although we have noted several times during the course of this book that accusations of witchcraft emerged in France and Spain at around the same time, what we have not emphasized until now is that the Zugarramurdi accusations appear to have been specifically propagated from Ciboure. According to the records, a teenage girl named María de Ximildegui (previously a resident of Zugarramurdi) was living in the French town when the witch hysteria began to escalate, with María alleging that ‘a girl in Ciboure had persuaded her to become a witch and had taken her to their gathering.’ María then moved back to Zugarramurdi in December 1608 where – being zealous and imaginative – she immediately began to assert that she had witnessed local villagers participating in the sabbaths she had attended while living in Ciboure. These accusations inflamed pre-existent tensions and set in motion the chain of accusations and confessions that eventually came, via Urdax monks, to the attention of the Spanish Inquisition. With regard to the evolution of the toad familiar, this dateline is significant because if she had been living in Ciboure in late November or early December 1608, María would have been experiencing sabbaths at almost exactly the same time as Jeanette d’Abadie. Given that the two girls were of similar age and that ‘most probably vigils [to prevent abductions] were already being kept in the church’ at this time, when combined with the fact that by this date witchcraft propaganda was probably circulating with sufficient potency to generate an ‘epidemic’ of stereotyped dreams, we can assume that if Jeannette’s experience of encountering dressed toad familiars had occurred in this period then María would have heard about it; and that she could have carried the motif (alongside other witch stereotypes) back to Zugarramurdi.²⁹

If we now combine this chain of events with the perspectives on Zugarramurdi drawn earlier in this chapter, we do not only have a feasible alternative timeline but also a feasible origin theory. The chain of events – which, it must be emphasized, are purely speculative – could have run like this. The belief that witches herded and processed toads at the sabbath in order to make poisons is likely to have featured prominently in the witchcraft propaganda disseminated in Labourd in 1608. While it is harder to assess extent, the belief that toads could sometimes be utilized by witches as demon familiars may also have been in circulation. Around late November or early December a particularly creative teenager, Jeannette d’Abadie, imaginatively engaged with these beliefs. But instead of envisaging her toads as medicinal ingredients or generic animal spirits, Jeannette mined a range of personal experience to create fictions, false memories or dreams in which these sabbath toads – functioning as demons – were dressed in clothes and handled by noblewomen as if they were lapdogs or pet birds. Like most highly personal and idiosyncratic fantasy content, Jeannette’s dressed toad imagery need not have gone anywhere from here. Despite its distinctiveness, for example, the ‘toad as big as a small dog with little horns’ and a ‘painted belly’ that appeared before the group of Burgui suspects in the late 1560s does not appear to have been embraced or popularized by anyone outside this event.³⁰ Similarly, if Jeannette’s creation had stayed in France it may well have descended into obscurity, with de Lancre’s records failing to suggest that her dressed toad familiar gained any currency in Labourd.

But in this case, the accident of history may have lain in the fact that Jeannette’s creation was then transported by the similarly imaginative (and clearly zealous) María de Ximildegui to a village that was uniquely equipped to exaggerate and elaborate upon it. On first arrival in Zugarramurdi, the Ciboure familiar would have been an eye-catching but rather one-dimensional figure, sporting little character or function other than the ability to wear fancy little clothes and behave like a domestic pet. But in a short space of time, local consciousness of demonic realities (as fostered by the preoccupations of the Urdax monastery) may have seen it gain some impressive links with the Devil and the iconography of hell. Simultaneously, local expertise with the keeping of toads for medicinal purposes (as possessed by the Zugarramurdi shepherding families) may have seen it acquire realism and functionality, efficiently contextualised within the working relationship between demonic familiar and witch. All that would have been needed at this point, was for one of the villagers to conflate this evolving phenomenon with the feisty, quarrelsome familiar of the traditional folktale and its metamorphosis into the fully rounded stereotype of the Spanish dressed toad familiar would have been complete.

Through these evolutions, Jeannette’s vivid but initially rather simplistic prototype would have been supercharged into an imaginally sophisticated and multifaceted creation that combined so many layers of practical, folkloric and theological significance that it soon had a life of its own, disseminating out beyond the village of Zugarramurdi and seeding in other minds and other imaginations – reaching markedly vivid exposition in the hands of suspects, like María de Zozaya, who possessed bardic skills.³¹ Of course this thesis is so speculative that it could almost be classed as fiction. It also fails to establish how the quarrelsome folk familiar characteristics worked their way into the mix, with this absence suggesting that other key players, on either the French or Spanish side, may have made imaginative leaps crucial to the familiar’s development that we have been unable to identify. But an evolutionary mechanism of the kind outlined here would certainly help to explain why the toad familiar phenomenon was such a significant presence in the 1609–14 prosecutions but so notably absent from witchcraft trials and folklore recorded either before or after this date. Only a developmental process through which individual, highly idiosyncratic imaginations interacted with specific micro-climates at particular moments in time could explain why, like an exotic flower that requires very particular conditions to bloom, the kept, dressed and talking toad familiar only emerged briefly and spontaneously in the rarefied atmosphere of the Basque witch-craze.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Akelarre

In the last eleven chapters we have examined a range of the magical activities performed by the Basque witch, from body and crop-maleficium to poison-making and the possession of toad familiars. But while all these are characteristic, the activity that arguably set the Basque witch apart from her neighbours was not a magical act per se but the fact that she convened with other witches at meetings, termed the witches’ sabbath or – in Euskara – the ‘akelarre’.¹

While the akelarre could function as a venue for the planning and execution of maleficium – being used, for example, as a convening point before setting off to attack children or crops or as a place to make poisons – it was predominantly devoted to a range of festive and ritual activities that typically included feasting, dancing, sexual acts, initiation rites and the performance of a ‘witches’ mass’. These activities were characterized by deep contradictions. In some ways they were ordinary and relatively benign, with witches sitting at tables ‘with tablecloths’ to feast on ‘bread, cheese and onions’; ‘dancing and prancing to the sound of a tambor and drum’ and queuing up in an orderly fashion to place alms in the collection plate at mass.² But they were also distorted by darker elements that were morally degenerate and often inverted the conventions of ordinary life: with feasts, for example, lapsing into cannibalism, dances merging into orgiastic sex and the witches’ mass turning into a rite that honoured the Devil and mocked the rituals of the Catholic Church.

In containing descriptions of the witches’ sabbath the Basque records are not unusual. Many witch trial records across early modern Europe feature witches’ meetings or gatherings, with the theme rising to particular prominence in witch-crazes, where participation in the event often became the core focus of accusations. But the accounts that emerged in the Basque country during the 1609–14 witch-craze are unique; both in their level of detail, coherence, idiosyncrasy and imaginal extravagance and in the degree to which they incorporate themes of moral degeneracy and inversion. As a consequence, for both academic and popular commentators the Basque examples have become the apotheosis or gold standard of the sabbath phenomenon, with scholars claiming that the Tableau’s description of the event ‘is not only the most detailed available, but it is also the most sensational’ and that de Lancre was the ‘poet of the Sabbath’ and ‘perhaps the greatest expert of all on the sabbat’. For others, the ‘aquelarre described during the Zugarramurdi witchcraft trials is one of the most accomplished expressions of the sabbat in all its history.’³

As with all other aspects of witch activity in the Basque records, interrogatorial intervention was clearly significant here. For de Lancre, there would have been ample demonological precedent. The event is referenced in all the authorities cited in the Tableau, with this incidence reflecting the current scholarly consensus that the stereotype of the witches’ sabbath was a ‘noxious ideological stew’ developed by elite minds over the medieval period in response to a range of cultural factors. Similarly, while the extent of their exposure to demonological works is unclear, the Spanish inquisitors would have found inspiration in earlier witchcraft records and inquisitorial documents, with descriptions of witches gathering to engage in sabbath-like festivities emerging in Basque witch trials from the late-fifteenth century onwards, with a distinct escalation in the sixteenth.⁴ But although these precedents existed, they did not necessarily correlate with the emphasis that emerged in the 1609–14 Basque witch-craze. Among the demonologists referenced by de Lancre, the level and type of attention given to the activities that actually took place at the event could vary considerably and was often quite limited. While Grillandi and Rémy explored the subject in some detail we find that del Rio, Bodin and Boguet produced relatively brief and formulaic descriptions of the event that consisted, in large part, of reciting extracts from other authors, while the Malleus Maleficarum barely mentions the sabbath at all. Similarly with regard to earlier Basque witch trials, most accounts of the event that emerged in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century testimonies were considerably shorter and less ritually sophisticated than those recorded by Valle and Becerra.⁵ In this context, the reason why both French and Spanish interrogators should have directed their attentions so specifically and enthusiastically towards the construct of the witches’ sabbath still demands fuller explanation.

Links with Heresy

In looking for answers we can begin with the subject of heretical dissent. From its earliest emergence in Europe the Roman Church had been beset by a range of nominally Christian groups or movements – generally defined as ‘heretical cults’ or ‘sects’ – that followed doctrines and devotions that self-consciously diverted from orthodoxy as legitimized by canon law. The need to identify and eliminate the threat posed by these groups, which appear to have peaked numerically in the twelfth century and slowly declined thereafter, led to the development of the Catholic Inquisitions across Europe. From their emergence, heretical cults were ‘routinely portrayed as devil-worshippers’, with contemporary critics typically arguing that although they professed to serve the Christian God through purified doctrines and liturgy, they were, in fact, being fooled by the Devil who sought to draw people away from God and ensnare them in some form of demonic alternative faith. Along with other marginal social groups, such as Jews and lepers, all of these medieval heretical groups were associated to varying degrees with blasphemous rituals and immoral and taboo activities such as sexual promiscuity, ritual infanticide and cannibalism.⁶

Scholars agree that one of the core factors – indeed, if not the core factor – behind the emergence of the concept of the witches’ sabbath in western European mentalities was that from at least the fourteenth century onwards theologians and scholars increasingly associated the activities of popular magical practitioners and witches with acts of heresy of the kind typically associated with heretical cults. Through this identification, elites began to imagine that witches did not only engage in acts of maleficium but also gathered together at meetings or ‘sabbaths’ where they performed rituals in honour of the Devil.⁷ We have clear hints of sabbath-like activity emerging in various parts of Europe by the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth century, including the Languedoc region of France, Catalonia, Italy and the Alps; with the stereotype being first concretized in its classic form in a series of texts written by clerics in (or in reference to) the western Alpine region in the first half of the fifteenth century, and which included Claude Tholosan’s Ut magorum et maleficiorum errores, the anonymously-penned Errores Gazariorum (with the term gazarii originally referring to the Cathar heresy) and Johannes Nider’s highly influential Formicarius (Book Five).⁸ Notably, these trials and texts emerged in areas where heretical cult activity was currently or historically strong. The south of France and the Pyrenees had seen the influential heresies of the Cathars and Waldensians flourish from the eleventh and twelfth centuries (respectively), while as Ostorero notes, the Alpine demonological texts were all ‘written in a context in which witches’ trials were preceded by persecutions against heretics’. Similarly, Michael Bailey observes that while Nider’s motivations sprang from conventional Catholic Reformation piety, his Formicarius was penned in an environment where ‘many clerical authors . . . were convinced of the existence of a vast network of clandestine [heretical] sects spread across much of Germany.’⁹ Although the numbers of heretical cults (or at least the perceived threat posed by them) appears to have declined significantly by the early-fifteenth century, once formed the concept of the witches’ sabbath as a form of heretical cult meeting persisted. While later trial confessions and elite tracts did not always impute the same centrality to the theme as earlier demonological authors, the belief that witches gathered together at heretical-cult-like meetings became a common feature of late-medieval and early modern witchcraft, as imagined by the elite.¹⁰

Heresy: The Interrogators

What implications do these developments have for the 1609–14 witch-craze? In a general sense, since the beginning of Europe’s witch-hunting period all prosecutors, whether ecclesiastical or secular, would have been aware of the current or historical threats posed by heresy and would have viewed witchcraft confessions through heretical templates, either as found in general theological works or as conflated with witchcraft matrices in demonological texts. But we can speculate that in the case of the Basque witch-craze, the emphasis on the witches’ sabbath and its status as an epistemologically real event may reflect the fact that the interrogators involved were particularly sensitive and proactive in this respect.

Beginning with de Lancre. Southern France, where he was born circa 1553 and spent most of his adult life, had been a hotbed of heretical activity and persecution in the medieval period, particularly in relation to the sect of the Cathars. During his lifetime it then became one of the major conflict zones for the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598) in which Catholic nobles resisted the attempts of Protestant factions to seize political power. De Lancre’s consciousness of the Protestant threat would have been further exacerbated by the knowledge that (less than 150 kilometres) to the south, in the French-Pyrenean province of Béarn, the Calvinist ‘experiment’ was so powerful that the practice of Catholicism was actually forbidden between 1569 and 1599. Although the Protestant faith was embraced by elites and sanctioned by states (with de Lancre’s king, Henry IV of Navarre, being raised a Protestant), in the period of the witch-craze Catholics still defined it as a heresy and did not forget that its rise to power had been fuelled in its early stages by nocturnal, clandestine meetings of the classic ‘cultic’ kind.¹¹

Reared among the Bordeaux elite, de Lancre would have also been encouraged to link this Protestant threat to witchcraft. In marshalling their armoury against this existential challenge, French-Catholic intellectuals developed a propagandist link between Protestants, witches and the Devil that served to reinvigorate older emphases on the links between heresy and witchcraft and, as a corollary of this, the convictions concerning the physical reality of the sabbath that were so evident in Nider’s period. De Lancre would have engaged with these ideas through both written texts and personal contacts. According to Jonathan Pearl it is ‘highly probable’ that when studying in Paris he attended lectures by the charismatic Spanish-Jesuit professor, Juan de Maldonado who, as one of the most influential thinkers in the field, provided his students with ‘a detailed and learned account of the intimate connection that tied the Devil, witches and heretics together’ and pressed home the argument that to disbelieve in the reality of witchcraft was ‘heretical in itself’. De Lancre was also exposed to Maldonado’s ideas through his links with Martín del Rio, the friend and demonologist for whom he reserved the greatest praise and who based his best-selling Disquisitiones Magicae ‘directly on the 1570–2 lectures of Maldonat’.¹²

This engagement would have been further intensified by the fact that de Lancre’s brother-in-law was the prominent Catholic intellectual and parlementaire, Florimond de Raemond. Celebrated by scholars as ‘one of the most widely read historians of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century in France’, Raemond published a number of influential texts on heresy, including L’Antichrist (1597) and L’Histoire de la naissance, progrèz et décadence de l’hérésie de ce siècle (1605). In these works he argued that the recent proliferation of witchcraft, Protestantism (‘the army of Satan’) and other heresies was a sign of the pending apocalypse and the imminent arrival of the Antichrist.¹³ Given that he was ten years older than de Lancre and considerably more successful, it is possible that Raemond acted as a mentor – or at the very least a competitive stimulus – to his younger brother-in-law, with a level of intellectual intimacy suggested in the likelihood that, according to Barbara Sher Tinsley, his second wife passed ‘some, if not all’ of Raemond’s earlier notes on to de Lancre after her husband’s death in 1601. We can also extrapolate, though here more tentatively, that an intimacy is reflected in the men’s shared writing styles. Given that (as observed in Chapter Three) de Lancre’s anthropological approach to his Basque investigations was unusual for this period, it is surely coincidental that this approach was also a feature of Raemond’s work, with Tinsley observing that the latter’s ‘concern for interesting, sociological and psychological interpretations and detail lend a modern touch to the books he produced. Such interests were not common in his day’.¹⁴

15  The French Wars of Religion saw many seminal conflicts. This contemporary engraving depicts Protestant forces laying siege to the city of Chartres in 1568. De Lancre would have been about fifteen when this event took place.

16  In the frontispiece of this anti-Protestant polemic by Johannes Cochlaeus, Martin Luther is caricatured as a duplicitous antichrist (as identified with the seven-headed beast from the Book of Revelation).

With regard to heresy and witchcraft, discourse between the two men would also have been fuelled on a more visceral level by their shared participation in witchcraft prosecutions while serving on the Parlement of Bordeaux. In 1594 both Raemond and de Lancre were present at the trial of a woman from the Souterraine region, named Jeanne Bosdeau, who provided the court with an account of the witches’ sabbath that was, according to Raemond, so dramatic and detailed that it ‘surpassed all those described by Bodin in his Demonomanie’. This case clearly made an impression on all concerned, for not only were Bosdeau’s confessions vivid, coherent and maintained vigorously until her death, but their impact was reinforced by the fact that she confessed ‘with a remarkable frankness and naivete’ that was all-the-more remarkable because ‘for a rustic, she had a good mind’. For de Lancre this impact would have been further intensified by the fact that his influential brother-in-law later chose to reproduce Bosdeau’s ‘histoire prodigieuse’ in full in his bestselling 1597 monograph as a prime example of the kinds of ‘vices’ that presaged the arrival of the Antichrist.¹⁵ We can assume that through these intellectual and familial connections de Lancre would have developed particularly strong convictions about the close relationship between witchcraft and heresy long before he arrived in Labourd, with these views clearly visible in his frustrated plea in the Tableau that ‘if heresy, a true church crime, is understood to be a privileged crime, why is witchcraft not considered a crime against the church, if not because it is also in part heresy, as described in the Bull of Pope Innocent [VII]’.¹⁶

With regard to heretical templates, the evidence is also marked in relation to Valle and Becerra. The institution they served – the Spanish Inquisition – had been specifically created in 1478 to identify and eliminate heretical belief and practice in Spanish Catholicism. While originally devised to focus on the religious deviations of newly converted Moors (moriscos) and Jews (conversos), as it moved into the sixteenth century the Inquisition turned its attention to Protestants – which, like French Catholics, they defined as heretics – and other ‘unorthodox’ individuals such as magical practitioners. Given this context we find that while the Spanish Inquisition was often sceptical of the reality of witchcraft and therefore reluctant to prosecute, where it did decide that witches’ sabbaths had taken place in reality then its raison d’être was to rationalize them using heretical templates. This equation was clearly demonstrated in 1526 when, in an attempt to clarify its position on witchcraft in response to escalating witch panic in Navarre, la Suprema voted by a close majority that witches ‘really go’ to the Sabbat rather than ‘go in imagination’ so that they could legitimately ‘try them as heretics and apostates’.¹⁷ By this measure, it is clear that once Valle and Becerra had discarded scepticism and decided that the Basque akelarre took place in reality, it immediately became a heretical event, with these convictions informing their claim to la Suprema in 1610 that they intended to ‘pose many questions in order to reach an understanding of the content and principles of this form of heresy.’¹⁸

But we can also speculate that in Valle and Becerra’s case, these standard inquisitorial preoccupations were intensified by a number of additional factors. It may be relevant, for example, that before he obtained his inquisitorship at the Logroño Tribunal, Valle had been the secretario de cámara or ‘confidential secretary’ to inquisitor general Juan Bautista de Acevedo – la Suprema’s most senior official – for at least five years until the latter’s death in 1608. While we have little information about Valle’s character, it is reasonable to assume that this intimacy with the most powerful man in the Spanish Inquisition would have fostered in him an enhanced sense of responsibility and ownership regarding the Inquisition’s duty to eliminate heresy in Spain. We can also surmise that these motivations were sorely tested on arrival in Logroño. As Monter notes, in the late sixteenth century the Logroño Tribunal presided over an inquisitorial district that was by mainland Spanish standards ‘remarkably heterogeneous’, with the south-eastern border nudging the old Moorish stronghold of Zaragoza and the north-eastern border, the Calvinist province of Béarn; which, along with the busy coastal ports, allowed for the easy infiltration of Protestants into Spain. This situation, when combined with the fact that the region’s ‘ethnic diversity and mountainous terrain made it extremely difficult [for the Inquisition] to supervise’, meant that the region was considered to be a breeding ground for heretical activity, with a number of individuals being prosecuted for Judaism, Mohammedanism and Lutheranism, for example, alongside the witches at the Logroño auto de fé of 1610. Indeed, there were so many prosecutions levelled against groups of Protestants, conversos and moriscos by the Logroño Tribunal between 1580 and 1610 that, according to Monter, if we include the witch trials of 1610 this thirty-year period saw this regional branch of the Inquisition experience ‘the richest variety of “heretical conspiracies” anywhere in Spain’.¹⁹ For Valle, moving to a Tribunal that was so highly-sensitized to the threats posed by heretical groups can only have fuelled any predisposition to rationalize the 1609–14 witchcraft accusations through heretical templates. Having worked at the Logroño Tribunal since 1601, Becerra would have been highly cognisant of these factors long before Valle’s arrival.

But while the perceived threats from conspiratorial Moors, Jews and Protestants may have encouraged Valle and Becerra to view witchcraft through heretical templates, some further factors also merit consideration here. Given the importance of the Zugarramurdi accusations to the emergence and subsequent tone of the Spanish prosecutions, it may be relevant that a surprisingly high number of suspects from the village were, as recently argued by Mikel Azurmendi, married to ‘Cagots’. A demographic group of obscure origins with familial as opposed to racial or religious cohesion, Cagots had existed on both sides of the western Pyrenees since the tenth century. Often associated with lepers, they lived in segregated and largely endogamous communities on the edges of villages and towns and endured a social status roughly comparable to India’s untouchables. This included being prohibited from working within the food chain and enduring partial exclusion from community worship – such as being required to enter churches by a side door, take communion separately and use a different font and so on – with the Consul of Navarre stating quite openly, as late as 1517, that conversation between Cagots and ‘other Christians was very dangerous and transmitted contagion.’ But of particular relevance here, is that in addition to being associated with lepers, Cagots also endured a long-standing association with heretics. In early-sixteenth century Navarre, Cagot communities complained that priests were refusing to administer them the sacrament and that ‘they faced discrimination because they were thought to be descendants of followers of the Counts of Toulouse (Albigensians or Cathars) who were guilty of rebellion against the church nearly three hundred years earlier’. This opinion clearly persisted into the following century, with André du Chesne stating in 1629 that ‘some say’ the Cagots were ‘Abigeos heretics’.²⁰ It is not clear why gentiles were intermarrying with Cagots in early-seventeenth century Zugarramurdi, but as Azurmendi argues, tensions generated by this demographic anomaly may have played a role in the early accusations. If this was the case we can speculate that the Cagots’ historical links with heresy may have encouraged the Basque interrogators to view these accusations through heretical templates.²¹

But the Cagots may not have been the only peripheral group to have exerted an influence here. It is notable that although most heretical cults had either disappeared or declined significantly in Europe by the early-fifteenth century, Spain saw a number of late-flowering sects (distinct from Protestanism) emerging in and after this period. Among the most notable was a movement that appeared in the Vizcayan town of Durango in the 1440s, led by Franciscan friar Alonso Mella. Allegedly containing a high proportion of women, the sect was reputed to hold nocturnal meetings ‘in forests and mountains, [or] sometimes right in the town’ and eventually became so divisive it threatened the stability of the whole province. Unsurprisingly it was persecuted heavily by the inquisitorial and civil authorities, with a number of unrepentant members being ‘burned alive’. Although the hypothesis is disputed, some scholars have even suggested that followers of Alonso Mella were being prosecuted as late as 1487 and possibly even 1500.²² Meanwhile, the next couple of decades saw groups of heretics termed the Alumbrados, also composed of a high proportion of women, emerge in the neighbouring region of Castile before subsequently spreading into southern parts of Spain (and later France); prompting the Inquisition to issue edicts against the sect in Castile in 1525, Extremadura in 1574 and Seville in 1623.²³

It is reasonable to speculate that – historically – the existence of these (clearly very real) heretical movements either in or (in the case of the Alumbrados) adjacent to the Basque country may have encouraged some Basque inquisitors to attribute the same reality – and therefore heretical identity – to witchcraft.²⁴ But is there any evidence that it did so in Valle and Becerra’s case? We cannot assume they had any knowledge of the fifteenth-century heresy of Alonso Mella, but given that Durango was under the jurisdiction of the Logroño Tribunal and that – as we shall explore below – the heresy cast a long shadow, means that we cannot rule out the possibility. With regard to the more immediate and prescient threat of the Alumbrados, however, we are on firmer ground. Valle and Becerra would not only have heard of the sect (particularly in the case of Valle, as confidential secretary to the inquisitor general) but were directly charged to seek it out. As Henningsen notes, the Edict of Faith circulated in the Basque regions during the witch-craze visitations contained

the enumeration of the many different forms of heresy. Firstly there was a detailed account of Jewish customs and the concepts of Judaism. Then followed similar descriptions of Mohammedanism, Protestantism, and the mystical movement of ‘los alumbrados.’ These religious groups together made up the chief object of the Inquisition’s concern.²⁵

But we can also entertain the possibility that Valle and Becerra’s responses were heightened by more personal factors. The evidence that Valle was born (around 1553), grew to adulthood and worked as both priest and inquisitorial commissioner in the province of Santander – an area that was at its eastern border less than eighty kilometres from Durango – raises the possibility that he might have been aware of the historical impact of Mella’s cult from an early age. While we do not know whether cult members were being prosecuted as late as 1500, there is no doubt that their activities remained alive in the local mind. Both Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and cleric Juan de Zumárraga (the latter born in Durango) penned references in works published in 1535 and 1543 respectively, that either conflated or drew close comparisons between a group of witches tried in the Durango region in 1507 and the ‘followers of the condemned sect of fray Alonso de Mella’. Local gossip on the subject also appears to have enjoyed surprising longevity, with Charles Lea noting that ‘the affair must have made a profound impression on the popular mind, for even until modern times the people of Durango were reproached by their neighbours with the “autos de Fray Alonso”’. Similarly, Caro Baroja speculates that early-nineteenth century reports that Durango was mocked by surrounding villages as ‘the town of the horns [tromperri], alluding to the manner in which the heretics typically announced themselves’, could indicate that ‘the heretic seed planted by Brother Alonso Mella has lived on in the farmhouses and humble manor houses of the Durango area, latent until the nineteenth century’.²⁶

With regard to Becerra, we can draw comparable links with the Alumbrados. The inquisitor was born and spent much of his adult life in Extremadura; a region that, a little more than a decade after his birth in 1560, witnessed one of the ‘most dramatic outbreaks’ of the Alumbrados movement to occur in Spain. The Extremaduran prosecutions were notable for their ferocity, with a 1579 auto de fé held in Llerena punishing no less than nineteen individuals for the ‘sect and doctrine of Alumbrados’. But they were also driven by a Dominican monk, named Fray Alonso de la Fuente, who was particularly obsessed with demonizing the sect’s activities, with Jessica Fowler noting that he

accused members of this group of being witches (hechiceros) and practicing the magic arts (arte mágica). He claimed they were inspired by the demonic, alternatively describing what he uncovered as the work of Satan, the Antichrist, or demons. They invoked the Devil and made explicit pacts with him.²⁷

Although we cannot extrapolate too much from these considerations, for in the case of both Valle and Becerra the temporal and geographical distances involved were still significant, they do raise the possibility that the two men’s readiness to apply cultic templates to the activities of the Basque witches may have been fuelled, even if only unconsciously, by prior sensitization to the threats posed by heretical cult activity at an early and formative age.

That the prominence of the akelarre was linked to enhanced interrogatorial concerns about heretical cult activity, is supported by one last consideration. While, to a greater or lesser degree, all European witch narratives evoke heretical templates, the records that emerge in the 1609–14 Basque witch-craze do contain an exceptionally high concentration of stereotypical heretical motifs. Claims that the suspects ‘met to participate in many outrages against the holy cross and images of the saints, knocking them down from the altars and other places where they are located, trampling on them with their feet’ evoked the desecrations performed by Protestants and other heretical iconoclasts who rejected ‘the need for corporeal manifestations of faith’ and believed that Catholic images and symbols possessed no intrinsic spiritual power.²⁸ Claims that ‘when the priest raised the host and chalice a cloud or black thing would appear’ evoked the heretic’s dissociation from the Catholic Eucharist, with edicts stating that the Alumbrados ‘lowered their eyes during the consecration of the host’.²⁹ Claims that the suspects simulated their Christian devotions, as set out in the following extract from the Joint Sentence, provide a vivid summary of the characteristically heretical conviction that the core doctrines and rituals of Catholicism, including transubstantiation and confession, were meaningless and unnecessary for salvation.

[The suspects stated that] since they became witches and separated themselves from their true God, they have never had Him as their God nor looked favourably upon the things that Christians did. And when they confessed, received communion, heard mass and went to church, they did so falsely to dissimulate and without Christian souls [or intentions?]. And though they made others think that when they were in church they prayed and took holy water, they did not know Christian things nor believe that when they confessed they would be forgiven for their sins, nor that God was in the consecrated Host, because the Devil had taught them otherwise . . .³⁰

But perhaps the most strikingly heretical feature to emerge in the Basque witch-craze records was the allegation that suspects did not only despise the symbols, doctrines and rituals of orthodox Catholicism, but that they also believed the witch cult could provide them with an equivalent and indeed superior route to salvation. According to a range of testimonials, the Devil did not just encourage his followers to reject Christianity but also to accept him as a spiritual figurehead that presided over a different religion and promised an alternative afterlife. Through this lens, the Basque akelarre was not just a place where witch suspects learned about evil magic but also a place where they celebrated religious rituals and received spiritual instruction and consolation, with the Devil proclaiming in one of his sermons that ‘he is a good god, and that though in this life they must endure hardship, work and poverty, in the next they will enjoy much rest’ and that ‘only in him should they place their hopes’ because ‘only he could save them’. In this context it is not surprising that Valle and Becerra expended so much energy reminding suspects that ‘nobody can be saved outside of the holy Catholic faith and guild of the holy mother church of Rome’.³¹ In conclusion, we must be careful not to overattribute agency to heretical concerns in the Basque case; for the simple reason that during the late-medieval and early modern centuries many different witchcraft prosecutors from many different parts of Europe would have been subjected to intense, localized concerns about heresy but did not generate sabbath accounts as sensationally heretical as those of the Basque witch-craze. But it is surely relevant that the interrogators responsible for generating arguably the most ‘detailed’ and ‘accomplished expressions of the sabbat in all its history’ were so highly sensitized to heretical threats.

Contributions from the Accused

While de Lance, Valle and Becerra were clearly responsible for bringing heretical templates to the Basque sabbath accounts, before we move on from this subject it is important to add that they may not have not worked alone. Although there is marked evidence of interrogatorial involvement in the construction of the akelarre accounts, there is also evidence of suspect-contribution. That the interrogators were receiving, as opposed to just superimposing, information about the event is overtly indicated in de Lancre’s bemused observation that ‘we found that people attend the sabbath on practically all nights, which I found somewhat amazing. There are so many that whenever we heard witnesses in each parish, we found an astonishing number of them who assured us that they had been at their assembly the night before.’ A similar willingness to confess to participation in the sabbath, even in the face of interrogatorial scepticism, is indicated in Salazar’s assertion that he was so unconvinced by defendants’ claims to have attended the event that he went to the alleged site to ‘inspect the grass and conditions of the above-mentioned field’ for material evidence.³²

We shall be exploring the diverse range of raw materials that may have been mined by the accused to create their akelarre accounts in some depth in later chapters. But of immediate relevance here, is that when creating fictions, false memories and dreams about their sabbaths, Basque defendants may well have followed their interrogators in quarrying heretical lodes. Both Church propaganda and the mechanics of the rumour mill would have ensured that stories about the doctrines, practices and persecution of Jews, Moors, Cagots, and more recently conversos, moriscos, Alumbrados and Protestants, would have circulated around towns, villages and baserri hearths with as much vigour as they did the inquisitorial chambers. This transmission would also have been potentized by demographic factors. Although the Alumbrados movement could attract educated members, its adherents were often ‘simple folk with no more than an elementary education’; and while the Durango heretics of the fifteenth century were led by literate cleric Alonso Mella, the membership was largely comprised of ‘humble people, farmers and artisans and many women also.’³³ Similarly although Protestantism fast became a tool of the French elites, it had always resonated among ordinary people, with de Lancre’s brother-in-law Florimond de Raemond stating sarcastically that ‘those who first heard the [Protestants’] “truth” (for this was their password) were goldsmiths, masons, carpenters and other miserable wage-earners, even down to those who had managed nothing other than a plough or a spade and who, overnight, became first-class theologians’. Though made in Bordeaux, this judgement was clearly borne out in the Basque regions, with the Protestants convicted by the Logroño Tribunal in the second half of the sixteenth century being merchants, locksmiths and muleskinners.³⁴ As a consequence, we can assume that although Basque suspects would have appropriated the heretical ideas introduced into the interrogations by their inquisitors, they would also have been perfectly capable of introducing heretical ideas into their testimonials themselves.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Meadow
of Pleasure

Having noted its links to heretical templates, we will now move more deeply into the Basque sabbath by examining it on a theme-by-theme basis. Although the distinctiveness of the akelarre relates largely to its demonological and malevolent elements, these darker activities revolved around a core of relatively ordinary pursuits that typically included feasting, dancing and music-making. Although these ‘benign festivities’, as we can term them here, are not particularly unusual and to a large extent reflect Europe-wide sabbath conventions, an examination of their origins is a necessary first step toward a better understanding of the Basque akelarre as a whole.

The interrogators were clearly involved in the development of this theme, with ordinary festive elements being common features of the witches’ sabbath as described in both the demonological works cited in the Tableau and the early trial records and other inquisitorial documents examined by the Spanish Inquisitors. De Lancre’s claim that ‘in several places we had the children and the young ladies dance as they had danced at the sabbath’, and Salazar’s assertion that suspects were ‘asked about the meals or food which the witches eat at the aquelarre’, indicate that the interrogators asked direct questions on the subject. But whatever the level of prosecutorial direction it is also clear that the suspects provided an active response, with their eagerness to contribute to accounts of sabbath festivities clearly indicated in de Lancre’s report that ‘we have heard from many people that one could hear all sorts of instruments there [my italics]’, and in the evidence that when he asked suspects to show him the dances that they ‘danced at the sabbath’ they were more than happy to oblige.¹ Given that the ability to provide an account of the akelarre presupposed attendance at the event, whether voluntarily or involuntarily (through abduction), our analysis of the akelarre will work on the premise that all extra-interrogatorial contributions were made by suspects or suspect-witnesses as opposed to witnesses proper.

Raw Materials: The ‘Real’ Akelarre

We must assume that when crafting their accounts of benign akelarre festivities, suspects drew on the gossip and propaganda surrounding the nocturnal meetings of witches that circulated in the region both before and during the witch prosecutions. But while these beliefs inevitably played a major role, there is also evidence that suspects fleshed out these stereotypes with raw materials from more diverse sources. Scholars of witchcraft have demonstrated, in relation to many different parts of Europe, that when suspects created accounts of witches’ sabbaths they drew inspiration from the festive experiences of ordinary peasant life – and there is every reason to believe that was also true in the Basque case. In this region as elsewhere on the continent in this period, the rigours of preindustrial living were leavened by a range of religious and secular ceremonies and celebrations that typically-included feasts, dances, processions, theatrical performance, sports and pilgrimages to shrines. Festivities were also a core component of life-cycle rites such as baptisms, weddings and wakes and of more regular events like Sunday dances and evening gatherings of neighbours and friends. Considered in the whole these events shared many features with the Basque akelarres, particularly in a rural context. Like the witches’ gatherings, communal festivities typically revolved around feasting, music-making and dance; they ranged in size from small groups of people to much larger assemblies; they could be held in diverse venues from houses to plazas to local meadows; and they frequently took place at night, with de Lancre complaining that the Labourdins ‘walk about at night like hooligans . . . and love reveling and dances at night as well as during the day’.² The resemblance between akelarres and communal festivities is also reinforced by the fact that it was noted by the suspects themselves, with Marie de la Ralde declaring that ‘she particularly liked going to the sabbath, so much so that when someone came to ask her to go there, she went as if she were going to a wedding’; and de Lancre observing that suspects ‘do not apologize in the least. They say that they only go to the sabbath to dance, as they always do in the Labourd, going to these places just as they would to a parish celebration.’³ Also notable, is that the claim that sabbaths took place in specific meadows, such as the ‘Meadow of the Sagardi [apple grove]’ or ‘Field of Beroscoberro’ (as opposed to more generic locations), reflect the traditional rural practice of giving features of the natural landscape locally pertinent identities and names.⁴ That these references were suspect-derived is further supported by the following passage from the confession of María de Endara, which clearly indicates that although the interrogators were interested in the names of sabbath locations, they did not necessarily superimpose them onto confessional narratives. Endara stated that when she was being taken to the akelarre she asked her guide (a lay nun or serora) to

tell her where they were going, and the serora responded: ‘we are going to the meadow of . . .’. And then she started imagining [remembering/guessing?] what the meadow was called. And she said she had forgotten what the meadow was called.⁵

The links between akelarre and ordinary festivities are also clearly visible in relation to dance. In the following extract, again from María de Endara’s confession, the phrase ‘as is the custom in those lands’ suggests that the sabbath dances reflected contemporary dance traditions.

And then the Devil took her off to dance and prance and enjoy herself with the witches who were there, of whom it appeared to her that there were around thirty, men and women, who danced in a ring as is the custom in those lands, holding eachother’s hands. And they danced to the sound of a tambor played by a farmworker named Miquelecho, whose surname she knows not, a resident of Echalar. And they were divided into two rings, the rich in one and the poor in the other, and they all danced to the same rhythm.

Even closer links emerge in the following passage from the Tableau where, in his typically precise way, de Lancre reports that in response to his enquiries about sabbath dances he was told that

they very often dance there [at the sabbath] one by one, that is, one man with one woman or girl, as we do in our galliards. They told us and assured us that people only dance three kinds of steps there, usually with each turning their shoulders and their backs to the circle of the dance and with their faces turned outside. The first is in the Gipsy style, for the Gipsy runners are also half demons . . . The second dance consists of leaps, as our artisans do in the streets of our cities and villages and in the fields. Both of these are circle dances. And the third is also done with the back turned, but while the dancers all hold on to each other, without ever letting go of their hands. They come so close together that they touch each other and have their backs touch each other, every man touching a woman. And, dancing to a certain beat, they bump each other and wantonly bring their backsides up against each other. But we were also told that the strange Devil would not always make them line up with their backs turned toward the dance circle, as people generally say. Thus one would have his back turned and the other would face the other way, and so forth and so on until the end of the dance.⁶

While de Lancre was clearly interested, this emphasis on dance could also have reflected contemporary cultural trends. Seventeenth-century observations that a Basque child ‘knows how to dance before it can call its father or its nurse by name’ and that ‘during the Carnival, it is impossible in the Pays Basque to do aught but dance’ evoke the devotion to traditional dance that is, to this day, one of the Basque region’s most enduring tourist attractions, with Caro Baroja describing the vivid theatricality of the guizondantza (royal dance), etxe-andre dantza (dance of the housewives), mutil-dantza (dance of the boys), the makildantza (stick dance), jorrai-dantza (dance of the weed), karrikadantza (drinking dance), sorguiñ-dantza (dance of the warlocks) and so on. Given that many traditional Basque dances are characterized by dramatic and athletic leaps, we can safely assume that when Zugarramurdi suspect María de Yriarte stated that ‘the one who most stood out and danced best was a French girl from another akelarre who played some big castanets [or ‘clicked her fingers loudly’] and jumped so high that it inspired admiration’ she was recalling a moment of collective appreciation experienced at a local fiesta or carnival.⁷

The Queen of the Sabbath

The argument that suspects drew inspiration from ordinary festive gatherings when fleshing out their accounts of the Basque sabbath, also enables us to shed light on some of the event’s more anomalous features. The akelarre reflects demonological witch stereotypes in that it is directed by the Devil, but departs from them in that the Devil is frequently accompanied by a female witch, termed the ‘queen of the sabbath’, who sits beside him and acts as both ritual hierophant and sexual partner. Although the female authority figure does emerge in a significant minority of medieval and early modern witch records and (more rarely) demonological works, she is not a stereotypical feature of the European sabbath. It could be argued that in the Basque case, her emergence is attributable to the influence of de Lancre’s mentor, Martín del Rio, who was one of few demonologists to record the existence of a ‘King or Queen of the journey or assembly [sabbath]’.⁸ But while this source undoubtedly provided de Lancre with a concrete precedent, the contrast between the brevity of this reference and the detail and richness of both the French- and Spanish-Basque sabbath-queen accounts, suggests that a wider range of range of raw materials was involved in their creation.⁹

Of particular relevance here is that the French sabbath queen was specifically chosen for her youth and attractiveness and that her royal duties extended to little more than sitting beside the Devil and acting as his concubine. One suspect claimed that the Devil ‘selects and chooses the prettiest women’ to be his queen, while de Lancre stated that ‘those who are thus honoured . . . he places next to him sumptuously clothed’ until ‘during or after the dance’ they satisfy his carnal desires.¹⁰ While this portrait of the female hierophant of the sabbath as glorified beauty queen seems incongruous, it gains rationale when considered alongside the evidence that at many seasonal festivities in the period, attractive young girls were elected to play the role of ‘temporary queen’, with Natalie Zemon Davis stating that in France they were ‘elected among the young unmarried women at certain times of the year, especially in May’. We know that these traditions were alive in the Basque regions at the time of the trials and have remained so until recent times, with Caro Baroja noting that in the Baztan Valley in the mid-twentieth century ‘the May holiday is characterized above all by the selection of a little girl as queen’ who ‘was carried from house to house, dressed in white . . . [where] she danced at the doors, singing a begging song.’ Around the same period, Gallop observed that the Basques

choose a young girl and dress her as a Queen. She must be able to remain serious, and not laugh . . . They seat her on a chair, to which they fasten her arms with ribbons. Sometimes they strew roses round the Queen and decorate her hair with flowers. The women sing to the accompaniment of a tambourine. Every passer-by is called upon to place a contribution in the royal cup. In return they sing to each a verse of which the words vary according to the amount of the gift and the condition of the giver . . .¹¹

Through this lens, we can speculate that the queen of the sabbath emerged to such prominence in the Basque records because many of the suspects were from that sector of society – young, rural women – whose imaginations would have been most strongly seduced by the festive queen tradition. Every Basque girl must have entertained private dreams of being dressed in sumptuous clothes, garlanded with flowers, seated on a throne and treated like a queen for a day; and could have mined these preoccupations when creating her account of the festive akelarre. On this basis, we could even surmise that de Lancre’s observation that ‘in fact all those whom we saw who held the title of queen were endowed with a more distinctive beauty than the others’ reflected the fact that those suspects identified by their peers as queens of the sabbath, may have been the same girls whose personal qualities identified them as past or prospective candidates for the role of festive queen in real life.¹² The correlation between these traditions and the akelarre is further sharpened by the claim, found in some witch records, that the sabbath queen was accompanied by a ‘king of the sabbath’ who was distinct from the Devil, with these references clearly reflecting the fact that at seasonal festivities in the Basque regions – as in other parts of early modern Europe – festive queens were often accompanied by similarly elected festive kings.

Fires and Festivals

These perspectives can also shed light on claims, from the Basque accused, that they entertained themselves at the akelarre by dancing around and tripping ‘in and out’ of large bonfires. The suspects allegedly stated that this activity, which was not a stereotypical feature of the sabbath in either witch trial records or demonological works, was instigated by the Devil to reduce their fear of damnation. Labourd suspect Jeannette d’Abadie alleged that at the Ciboure akelarre, little demons threw witches into the fires and then ‘pulling them out without their feeling any pain, the Devil told them that they would experience no greater pain from the fire of hell’; while the Zugarramurdi suspects stated that they went ‘walking and jumping around fires that the Devil said were those of hell and which they should not be afraid of entering because they would not burn or do them any harm at all’.¹³ Whether this rationalization did in fact come from the suspects or was imposed by the interrogators is difficult to assess, but in the context of parish celebrations it is notable that contemporary Basques are likely to have been familiar with public displays of resistance to extreme heat. Some of the magical practitioners or medicine sellers who displayed acts of supernatural or medical prowess at markets and fairs in order to garner clients, clearly exploited the dramatic potential of fire, with Ciruelo complaining that in order to make ‘simple, unlettered people’ believe they had ‘the spiritual power to heal sicknesses’ the saludadores ‘hold a burning coal or a heated iron in their hand for a while’, ‘wash their hands in boiling water or oil’, ‘walk a rod of red-hot iron in their bare feet’ or ‘walk into an extremely hot oven.’ Similar feats would have been witnessed on the many feast days – such as those dedicated to St Agatha, St Anthony and St John – at which the act of leaping over bonfires was believed to bring beneficial magical effects. In the early-sixteenth century, Basque clergyman Martín de Arles observed that on St John Baptist’s Day, ‘some people light fires at the crossroads in between the fields’ and ‘bathe themselves on that day in the morning, and leap over a fire of those herbs at night, believing that in this means they will escape the itching or the scab for the whole of that year’. The enduring popularity of this belief is demonstrated in the evidence that four hundred years later, ‘when jumping over the [St John’s Eve] bonfires, breathing their smoke and dancing around them’, the Basques still believed that they could defend themselves against certain illnesses, protect themselves against witches, thieves, harmful animals and ‘arbitrary setbacks’ and even guarantee ‘a prompt marriage, if one jumps in a certain way.’¹⁴

This association between fire-jumping rituals and the Basque akelarre is further reinforced by the fact that, as noted in our examination of domestic medicine in Chapter Six, both the interrogators and suspects consistently drew links between the witches’ sabbath celebrations and the festivities of St John’s Eve, with de Lancre alleging that ‘every night they celebrate the feast of St John the Baptist, which for them is the most debauched and dissolute holiday’; and the Zugarramurdi suspects, that their gatherings took place on ‘Saint John’s Nights’.¹⁵ This link is further strengthened by the fact that celebrations involving fire-jumping rituals were often the same rituals that involved the election of festive kings and queens, with Spanish suspect Juana Telletxea maintaining that she did not go to the akelarre on the ‘Night of Saint John’ because her husband had been chosen to be ‘rey de los Moros [king of the Moors]’ in the evening’s theatricals and it was incumbent on him ‘to hold a certain dinner and party for the other locals because of the custom they have for this in that place.’ From this vantage point, the claim that the akelarre fire-jumping was a preparation for hell appears like a retrospective – and impressively opportunist – attempt on the part of the interrogators to rationalize the fact that suspects brought fire-ritual imagery to their descriptions of sabbath festivities. Certainly, it is the high-spirited gymnastics of St John’s Eve, as opposed to the gravity of the theological lesson, that is evoked in the claims, made by the bishop of Pamplona and Valle respectively, that the witches learn ‘how the fire in no way causes pain but rather great happiness and joy’ and that ‘they trip in and out of the fires, making merry to the noise of timbrel, drum and fiddle’.¹⁶

The ‘General Assembly’

Exploring the akelarre festivities from this perspective can also help us to rationalize the claim that groups of witches from different locations could gather together for grand meetings. The following example from the Joint Sentence does not only showcase the theatricality and narrative coherence that has won the Basque sabbath such notoriety, but also represents one of the most sophisticated examples of witchcraft as an integrated and transregional network of cultic activity to have come down to us from early modern sources.

And twenty years ago the lord of the akelarre of Zugarramurdi, accompanied by his witches, went to the akelarre of Pamplona, where he met twelve lord Devils of the akelarres in a general assembly with a large number and multitude of witches, and they all obeyed and venerated the lord of Pamplona for being more beautiful and important than any of them . . . and some sat on one side and the others sat on the other, and the most important one after the Pamplona one seemed to be the Zugarramurdi one because he was sitting at his left hand, which is the second place after the most important one because the Devil does all his operations on that side, and also because, in the worshipping of him by all the lords of the akelarres, the first to arrive was the Zugarramurdi one with all his witches, and they kissed him under his tail. And since it was a meeting of all the lords of the akelarres, there were a large number of witches, and from their outfits it was very obvious that they were from different places, and there was a lot of noise [or ‘talk’] and music because the lords brought their officials, drums and instruments and they enjoyed themselves a great deal, committing vile, indecent and carnal acts. And then each of the aforementioned lords offered food to their witches on various tables, and after enjoying themselves a great deal they gave great obedience and courtesy to the lord of the akelarre of Pamplona, and they said farewell with much love and joy . . .¹⁷

The Zugarramurdi suspects may have developed this narrative in response to interrogatorial questioning, for the idea that witches gathered together at ‘massive, supra-regional witches’ assembl[ies] that threatened all of Christendom’ does emerge in some demonological texts.¹⁸ But in its precision and realism it also points to evidence that in the Basque regions, as in all parts of early modern Catholic Europe, many administrative and festive gatherings were similarly ‘supra-regional’ in that they involved multiple towns, villages or confraternities congregating in the same place. Shrines, for example, were usually sacred to more than one community and on holy days or in times of need, pilgrimages could be made by several villages or towns simultaneously, with Timothy Mitchell stating that in Castile ‘sometimes the local community will converge at the shrine with other nearby towns that share the devotion’. Collaborative rituals between villages are also indicated in Salazar’s observation that when a new chapel was completed in Santesteban ‘Mass was celebrated there at Michaelsmas with large numbers from the surrounding villages attending the procession’. Similarly, just as each group of witches attending the Pamplona super-akelarre was led by its own ‘lord Devil’ and displayed a distinctive mode of dress, so the villages, towns and confraternities attending transregional events would typically arrive in processions led by local priests and other officials and were distinguished from each other through their use of banners, emblems and costumes. Even the struggles for status between different witches’ covens intimated in the Zugarramurdi account were reflected in these communal parish events, with reports from eighteenth-century Soule stating that on Rogation Day the convergence of up to twenty parishes at a single church could become so fraught that they began ‘colliding into eachother, and quarrelling over who has right of way, so that in these sorts of encounters, whole parishes rise in rebellion against each other, [and] come to blows’.¹⁹ Like the witches’ grand meetings, these inter-village gatherings were also commonly concluded by convergence at an open space to engage in festivities, with an observer noting in 1615 that at the Castilian shrine of Our Lady of Sopetrán, local villages

come in procession the Wednesday of the Litanies, the day before Ascension, and a great fair is held in this place . . . It is very pleasing to see them eating in family groups. Each village separately spreads out very large tablecloths in the meadow. The parish priest, clergy, mayors, and corregidor sit at the head, and then the mass of the people. The concejo generally gives each community bread and wine, and each person brings his own food. To see in one meadow thirty or forty entire towns, some with two hundred, others three hundred men all together around their food is very pleasing to the eye.²⁰

Passages like this also provide an explanation for de Lancre’s bemused observation that ‘books describe how at the sabbath the witches eat whatever the Devil has prepared for them; but often there are only the meats that they bring along themselves.’ While suspects supplying their own sabbath feasts may not have reflected demonological convention, it did reflect the fact that communal gatherings like the above, particularly those that involved travel, commonly required that ‘each person brings his own food’, with Kamen stating in regard to contemporary Catalonia that ‘in rural villages, particular importance was given to processions made to local shrines, which took the form of community outings armed with packed lunches, drink and music.’ Similarly, the observation that the Castilian ‘great fair’ (described above) saw the ‘parish priest, clergy, mayors, and corregidor’ sit ‘at the head’ of the feast, accurately mirrors the ‘hierarchical position[ing]’ of guests commonly observed at the Basque sabbath, with Spanish suspect Fransisco Bertol describing how witches ‘dined at the akelarre on black blankets that they spread out on the ground and that the devil was at the head. And sitting with him in the most preeminent place were the clerics, and then, behind them, the most favoured witches, and everyone else sat on the ground.²¹

The Devil’s Dances

The ease with which experiences of communal festivities worked their way into the Basque sabbath accounts would have been helped, to no small degree, by their vulnerability to demonization. In the Basque regions as in other parts of Europe over the early modern period, attempts to purify and homogenize popular Catholicism saw a wide range of festive and ritual activities – including nocturnal vigils, wakes, theatrical performances and processions – increasingly condemned and repressed by the ecclesiastical authorities. As we have seen with regard to other aspects of popular religiosity such as weather conjuration, the language used by the Church to condemn these activities could simply point to ignorance or a lack of propriety; as in ‘scandalous’, ‘immodest’, ‘profane’ or ‘debauched and dissolute’.²² But it could also imply a rejection of Christianity or even an implicit alliance with the Devil himself. Sixteenth-century clerics Martín de Arles and Diego Pérez alleged, respectively, that some of the rites performed on St John’s Eve were an ‘act against the faith’ and that ‘even the prudent gentiles condemn dancing, a practice the devil taught to men’. These opinions were echoed in the eighteenth century by Basque author Juan Ramón de Iturriza, who maintained that the gazte dantza (a dance that involved young people making bridges with their hands for others to pass under) was ‘a diabolical invention and ancient custom that should have been banished from Christianity.’²³ How far the festivity loving Basques were aware or indeed cared that their revels were being demonized by the Church authorities, is difficult to ascertain. We can suppose that parishioners who took their lead from the significant number of contemporary Basque priests who participated in public dances, ‘decorated themselves to excess’ and ‘played pelota with unseemly passion’ would have been far more ignorant of the Church’s opinion on these matters than others may have been.²⁴ But even if suspects did not think that their parish festivities had anything to do with witchcraft or the Devil before they were arrested, on being interrogated by men who told them that these activities were ‘debauched and dissolute’ and went ‘against the faith’, it may not have taken long for them to be persuaded that this was the case.

Experiences of communal festivity may also have worked their way into akelarre accounts for more subtle reasons. As seen in earlier chapters, the rigours of pre-industrial living meant that early modern communities endured high levels of physical and psychological suffering, with the ever-present threat of sudden death through infection or disease and the pressure of rolling bereavement exerting a particularly heavy toll. While this burden was leavened by the spiritual prospects of heaven or paradise, it was also leavened on a more immediate basis by the more material consolations available in the here and now. Entered into with enough fervency and commitment the simple activities of communal eating, drinking, dancing, singing and music-making would have provided profound release from the relentless consciousness of past, present and future suffering that weighed so heavily on the early modern mind. Fuelled by the understanding that every day, week or year could be one’s last, contemporary festivities would have been embarked upon with a collective emotional intensity of the kind that might only be replicated in the modern developed world in the face of natural disasters or war. Psychological research has consistently demonstrated that ‘events that contain emotional relevance are more likely to be remembered than events devoid of emotional import’ and this mechanism clearly impacts on the content of all imaginal constructs, from dreams and visions to false memories.²⁵ In the case of the Basque witchcraft interrogations, this cognitive dynamic certainly helps to explain why suspects produced such vivid accounts of ruined crops and dead children. But it also helps to explain why these traumatic themes were so incongruously interwoven with seemingly frivolous references to feasting, music-making and dance.

Festive Folk Spirits

While suspects clearly drew on experiences of parish festivities when creating their accounts of the festive akelarre, the evidence suggests that they also drew on more abstract sources. Earlier in this book we argued that in creating their accounts of toad familiars and crop- and body-maleficium, the defendants may have quarried contemporary beliefs surrounding the magical activities of folkloric spirits, demons and the dead (overlapping categories that we shall, for the purposes of simplicity, subsume here under the term ‘folk spirits’). Given that all these spirits were believed to enjoy feasting, dancing and general merrymaking, it is therefore no surprise to find that they can also be linked to the akelarre. Scholars have long-observed that beliefs about folk spirit festivities were a primary influence on the evolution of the elite stereotype of the witches’ sabbath, with many of the event’s more fantastic elements – such as flight, spirit travel, animal metamorphosis and the performance of magic – pointing more directly to these folkloric matrices than to heretical cult templates. There is also a consensus that as with crop-damaging and night-visiting demons, the sabbath’s evolution involved a process of witchization through which, over a period of centuries, festive witches became progressively conflated with festive folk spirits and took on many of their characteristics. Analysis of witch trial records from diverse parts of Europe has revealed that when suspects found themselves in courts of law on charges of witchcraft they often mined these folkloric complexes to flesh out their accounts of the witches’ sabbath. It is also clear that interrogators could be insensitive to these distinctions, with some studies of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Italian and Sicilian witchcraft trials vividly demonstrating how suspects could walk into a series of interrogations with accounts of folk spirit festivities and have transformed them into accounts of stereotypical sabbaths by the time they walked out.²⁶ As lamented earlier in the book, with regard to the Basque records under analysis the lack of folkloric reference and high levels of demonological content mean that any evidence of folk spirit beliefs is hard to find. But if we look more closely at the festive akelarre, some suggestive references do emerge.

Festive Folk Spirits: The Basque Records

That folk spirit beliefs played a role in the development of the Basque sabbath is suggested in Salazar’s second visitation report. During a long passage that lists a range of sabbath accounts the inquisitor declares that two people ‘who are not witches’ told him that while they were alone in the countryside they inadvertently came across, or were carried to, an uncanny festive gathering. The longer of the two accounts reads:

Among the declarations made by people who were not witches, one man over forty, of sound disposition and common sense, said that coming back alone on a still, clear summer’s night some fourteen years ago, he had seen certain people dancing measures among themselves with great leaps and much mirth to the sound of a fiddle or whatever instrument it was they were playing. Although he clearly discerned the figures and the number of people there he could not recognise anyone not even the man with the fiddle, who was drawing near to him. As he approached they were hidden from him in a cloud.

Salazar’s rather bemused observation that ‘neither of these two [witnesses] thought of declaring that it had been an assembly of witches’ is highly relevant here.²⁷ Although his statement does not confirm whether the two men believed the beings encountered to be folk spirits, the fact that Salazar’s gentler, more sceptical questioning should have generated accounts of undemonized nocturnal gatherings of this type (that in the hands of Valle would almost certainly have been turned into witches’ sabbaths) points strongly to folk spirit belief.

We can also identify these beliefs in more demonological parts of the witch testimony. When exploring the origins of the Basque toad familiar in Chapter Nine, we referred to the broad genus of Basque fairy termed the lamiña. We observed that although these spirits (which could exist in either gnome-like or female form) lived in countryside locations they often sought food and festivity in human homes, with numerous Basque folktales describing how they enter houses by night, have ‘a party with the leftovers. Then, in greatest secrecy . . . disappear again up the chimney’.²⁸ Although we noted in this earlier chapter that the behaviours of this fairy genus resembled that of the witches’ toad familiars, of relevance here is that in their female form they are just as evocative of the Basque witches themselves. Although we have focused on countryside locations, it is notable that a significant minority of Basque sabbaths took place in more domestic locations. De Lancre alleged that the Devil ‘organizes and holds the sabbath in almost all the witches’ houses’; with two young suspects maintaining that they ‘were also at the Chateau d’Amou, which belongs to the lord of this place, the bailli of the Labourd, and at many other homes.’ Similarly, if we overlook the references to harm we find a distinct evocation of the house-to-house perambulations of the lamiñas in the Joint Sentence’s statement that the witches frequently

leave the akelarre and go to various different places to enjoy themselves or to frighten people . . . And in this manner they tend to go and enjoy themselves and dance and inflict damage on the homes of people who do not say grace at table when they have lunch or dinner. And in the akelarre the Devil tells them to go and enjoy themselves at the homes of these people, and in this manner they went to the homes of certain neighbours where they enjoyed themselves and danced . . .²⁹

Given that the lamiñas were associated with subterranean abodes and were often encountered sitting at the mouths of gorges or caves, it is also telling that these haunts were favoured by some Basque witches. The akelarre attended by Johana de Goyenechea was ‘in a cave which had many rooms’, while Zugarramurdi suspect Graciana de Barrenechea took María de Echaleco ‘by air one day after eating to a field where a cave was’; with this particular cave being associated with witchcraft to this very day. This link is also visible in earlier trials, with suspects stating in Pamplona in 1595 that they met ‘in the cave of Alli, near Lecumberri’ (also termed ‘the cave of Beezlebub’) where the bones of dead children were spread ‘at intervals around the cave, and they gave light as if they were the tapers of candles’.³⁰ Correspondences between the gatherings of lamiñas and the witches’ akelarre can also be identified with regard to money and food. In the Basque country as in many other parts of Europe, traditional stories about both fairies and the dead often describe how objects enjoyed or received from the spirits disappeared or lost their value when they were brought back to the ordinary world, with Barandiarán noting that ‘according to a legend in Zarauz in the [fairy] cave of Amboto . . . there are objects that seem to be made of gold; but when taken outside they turn into rotten sticks.’ The Basque witch suspects also maintained that when they attempted to eat akelarre food it turned into mud or ‘nothing but air’ while ‘money which appeared there likewise dissolved away.’ We cannot assume that these references related to fairy belief, for by the early modern period the motif had firmly worked its way from folk spirit matrices into demonological stereotype. But the suspects’ enthusiasm for the theme, as demonstrated in Salazar’s rather bemused observation that ‘there are many of all ages who, on being asked about the meals or food which the witches eat at the aquelarre, say that when they reached out for the food it would vanish into the thin air’, suggests that the wider corpus of folk spirit belief may also have played a role here.³¹

These correspondences are supported by the evidence that witches could be conflated with lamiñas in the period, with Pau Castell Granados recently emphasizing that a reference by Castilian bishop Lope de Barrientos (around 1450) to bloodsucking witches who transform into geese, alludes to the metamorphosing abilities of the Basque lamiñas (portrayed in subsequent folklore with the body parts of birds, and most specifically the feet of hens, ducks or geese). While contemporary evidence is thin, the conflation also emerges emphatically in the later sources, with Webster prefacing his mid-nineteenth century edition of folktales collected in Euskara with the claim that ‘in these few stories it is evident that the witch is often a fairy, and the fairy a witch’; and Campagne, in a recent survey of Basque literature, that the ‘sematic field of the term sorgin’ (the commonest Basque term for witch) can also refer to ‘certain deities [lamiñas] that comb their hair at the banks of the rivers’.³² Also relevant to the Basque witch-craze records, is that this rather elastic lamiña-identity could also be extended to the ‘small devil[s]’ and ‘little demons’ that accompanied the witches in their festivities. In Chapter Nine we noted that in their roles as the ‘Devil’s servants’, these malevolent horned spirits behaved like demons of hell. But in possessing superhuman strength that could be placed at the service of their human allies, they also behaved like the lamiñas in their diminutive or gnome-like forms. Just as lamiñas could plough whole fields or build entire bridges in the blink of an eye, so these small demons helped the witches collect vermin, with the Joint Sentence stating that ‘when these animals are under large stones they lift them and tip them over even if they are very large because the aforementioned Devils have great strength’.³³ Similarly, just as the lamiñas had a taste for the dramatic (being able to cover a field ‘with stones of such size that no man could move them’ in a matter of hours or confound their human allies by building ‘old castles, bridges, and even certain churches’ in ‘a single night’), so more than twenty of the Devil’s ‘little demons’ gathered to help the Zugarramurdi witches lift up an entire mill ‘which was supported by four pillars, and pulled up the whole thing without it falling apart, carrying it off with great rejoicing to a nearby hill’.³⁴

Due to the high level of demonization, it is difficult to assess how far these correspondences reflected the direct mining of folk spirit belief and how far they reflected the mining of folk spirit belief that had, as a result of the witchization process, been seamlessly conflated with demonological templates long before the witch-craze period. While there is no firm answer to this question, as Pau Castell Granados has observed, we do have evidence that folk spirit beliefs were accessed directly by suspects in earlier Basque witch trial records. An overt reference to the topoi of the ‘fairies’ laundry’ emerges in a Navarrese suspect’s claim in 1576 that after the sabbath ‘they all went to the river of the said place of Anocíbar and stayed there a while, cleaning some cloths and sounding a drum’. Similarly, while other explanations could also be proposed, the white clothes traditionally associated with the Pyrenean fairy are evoked in the assertion, made in Navarre in 1595, that some sabbath participants were dressed in the ‘white clothing’ and ‘white shifts’. Moving across the border into Aragon, folk spirit beliefs are also likely to have been responsible for the unusual mother–child exchange recorded in a trial in 1576 in which the child says ‘Mother, there are no witches now’ and the mother answers ‘Daughter, it is not time to walk around because there is not much wine; since when there is plenty of it, wine vat witches suffocate children’. According to Castell Granados, this exchange is ‘one of the most precious examples’ of the ‘mythical [fairy] component’ of the sabbath-stereotype to have come down to us from Iberia, with the expression ‘time to walk around’ recalling ‘the medieval tradition of the night courtships [fairy or fate-spirit groups] that entered houses to eat and drink’.³⁵

The ‘queen of all the spirits’

Further parallels between the witches’ akelarre and the gatherings of the lamiñas can be drawn in relation to the queen of the sabbath. Thus far we have attributed this figure to an interrogator–suspect fusion of demonological precedent (as in the reference by del Rio) and real-life experiences pertaining to the seasonal election of festive kings and queens. But the sabbath queen also has folk spirit characteristics. When the female authority figure emerges in medieval and early modern witch trial records and demonological works, she is generally entwined with a range of folkloric signatures and as a consequence, scholars have commonly identified her with beliefs and traditions linked to nocturnal goddess figures of pre-Christian origin.³⁶ Even del Rio’s reference to a ‘King or Queen of the journey or assembly’ emerges in conjunction with a folkloric resurrection ritual – termed by Behringer the ‘miracle of the bones’ – that is strongly linked to these archaic complexes.³⁷ Although the lack of folkloric reference in both the witch-craze records and wider contemporary sources makes it difficult to establish these links in the Basque case, it is surely relevant that goddess-related themes do emerge strongly in the later folklore. Many of the myths and legends collected in Euskara in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries refer to a female authority figure termed ‘Mari’, who shares many of the characteristics of the female lamiña but is distinguished by her function as ‘leader or queen of all the spirits that inhabit the world’ and has been identified by some scholars as a composite goddess figure of archaic, possibly pre-Indo-European, origin.³⁸

Even more telling is that if we examine Mari in relation to the queen of the sabbath as she emerges at the Basque akelarre, a range of shared characteristics emerge. Like the queen of the sabbath, Mari the ‘queen of all the spirits’ sits on a throne and is served by a coterie of lesser spirits that are, according to Barandiarán, directly linked to witches and demons through the subterranean ‘nocturnal spirit’ sorgin. Like the sabbath queen, Mari assumes the role of hierophant and sexual partner to her male consort (in this case the serpent-spirit Sugaar or Sugoi who was ‘master of the lamias’ and often conflated with the Devil). And like the sabbath queen, Mari is associated with remote locations and caves, with Caro Baroja reporting that her dwellings ‘are the mountain ranges and highlands of Orhi, Aralar, Aia, Oiz, Anboto, Gorbeia, and elsewhere and caves and caverns in various places in Gipuzkoa, Navarre, and the French Basque country: thus, she is also known as Mari of the Cave.’³⁹ Moving on to more specific correspondences, Marie de Juretegui’s assertion that the ‘queen of the sabbath . . . appearing as a mare, acted like a demented person’ evokes the Mari that sometimes ‘crosses the sky in the form of a horse.’⁴⁰ Similarly, Juanes de Yribarren’s claim that ‘when the witches were traveling through the air they made as much noise as forty galloping horses’ and de Lancre’s observation that witches were sometimes ‘warned’ that they must go to the sabbath ‘by the clamor of the troupe that accompanies the queen of the sabbath in the air’ both evoke the dramatic airborne passage of Mari the ‘queen of all the spirits’ who can shoot across the sky ‘in a carriage drawn through the air by four horses’ making a noise ‘like a squadron of cavalry at the trot’ with her form reflecting ‘the noise that accompanies her passage.’⁴¹ Indeed, given the degree of correspondence here, it is hardly surprising that Basque folklorists Julio Caro Baroja and Joseba Zulaika have defined Mari as ‘mistress of all the witches’ and the ‘mythical flying witch’; while Campagne notes that the semantic field of the term sorgin (the commonest Basque term for ‘witch’) can refer, among other things, to ‘the nocturnal spirits at the service of Mari’.⁴²

Even more significantly, these comparisons can contribute to our analysis of crop-maleficium. In Chapter Four we observed that the lack of folkloric reference makes it difficult to assess which folk spirits, if any, may have been implicated in the Basque suspects’ accounts of raising storms and destroying harvests. In this context it is highly coincidental that of all the figures in the Basque folk spirit pantheon, Mari was the figure most commonly associated with the weather, with Barandiarán maintaining that:

Mari is the forger of storms. In Oyarzun they say that she forms them on Aralar and on Trinidademendi. In Cegama and other villages in Goyerri they say she hurls them forth, either from Aketegui cavern or from Murumendi cavern . . . In Tolosa they say that Mari crosses the sky seated on a horse-drawn chariot during storms, directing the clouds. The mere appearance of this spirit usually signals the next storm.⁴³

Mari’s control over the weather also impacted on fertility and the wellbeing of the crops, with Barandarián noting that ‘in Orozco, they say that when she is in Supalur, there is an abundant harvest’. As a reflection of these beliefs, as late as the twentieth century it was believed that ‘a person who makes an offering to Mari each year will not see hail fall on his crops’ and that some people ‘who believe they are endowed with magical power’ use ‘certain phrases consecrated by tradition to address the storm spirit (Mari or her subordinates Odei and Eate), sometimes using gestures to signal where rain should fall and where it should hail.’⁴⁴

We cannot know how closely these later beliefs reflected those of earlier centuries, but the fact that they emerge with such vivacity and coherence in the later folklore suggests that Mari’s storm spirit characteristics were likely to have been present, in some form, in the early modern period. In this context it may be relevant that the book of conjuring formulae discovered by Arles in a Navarrese parish in the early-sixteenth century, contained a description of a supernatural being that could be invoked through an incantation beginning ‘I conjure you Sabella, you who have the face of a woman, and the loins of a fish, holding your head in the clouds, and your feet in the sea, you wield the seven winds, and give commands to the devils.’ Embedded in elite magical rhetoric, this figure almost certainly had Mediterranean or Near Eastern connections, but given that Sabella had the ‘face of a woman’ and ‘loins of a fish’ it is notably coincidental that ‘in legends from coastal Bizkaia and other zones . . . [the lamiñas] appear with the bust of a woman and the tail of a fish’ and that a lamiña in this form can be found on a coat of arms from the Bertiz Valley.⁴⁵ Although such evidence is indirect, it does invite us to speculate that when a suspect like María de Zozaya maintained that the ‘King and Queen [of the sabbath] and the other old master witches . . . forming a wing would fly through the air’ to drop poisons on the crops, she may not only have been drawing, as argued in earlier chapters, on memories of pesticide distribution and ritual crop-protecting processions but also on imagery surrounding the atmospheric cavalcades of the storm spirit Mari and her entourage of lamiñas and demons.

Dispersing the Gatherings

Folk spirit beliefs can also be detected in the ways through which the akelarre was dispersed. While these methods could vary, of particular interest here are claims from the Spanish suspects that when they were dancing at the sabbath one of the witches ‘uttered the name of Jesus and the Devil and everyone who was there fled with such great urgency’. The trope was also found in the French trials, with de Lancre noting the ‘countless examples in our court records of people who, after having been led to the sabbath, miraculously invoked the name of Jesus and were grievously beaten and abandoned (the whole assembly having disappeared) in a place that was very wild and far from home.’⁴⁶ There was clearly an interrogatorial involvement here, for the trope emerged in several of the demonological authorities cited by de Lancre and the questionnaire sent by la Suprema to Valle and Becerra in March 1609, directly instructed them to ask defendants ‘if coming and going to and from the said sabbaths or being in them to utter the name of Jesus, or due to something else the sabbaths were disbanded’.⁴⁷

But it is also possible that suspects brought this trope to their testimonies themselves. Beliefs that demons could be dispersed through the use of Christian names, symbols or ritual gestures worked their way into demonological works via orthodox Catholicism. Parishioners would have heard these methods described in religious stories and teachings; seen them employed to dramatic effect in exorcism rituals; and used them personally as a spiritual defence during any perceived encounters with ghosts or demons. Through this lens, Joana de Lanz’s confession that when she met suspected witch María de Miguelena with a cat in her arms, she ‘crossed herself, saying “Jesus, what has this cat done?” and the cat disappeared’ could have been rooted in a genuine interchange that took place between the two women prior to their arrest.⁴⁸ With regard to our enquiry into the akelarre, it is also relevant that these methods could also be used to disperse folk spirits (including the malevolent dead). Later folktales and legends abound with references to the ways in which lamiñas and other spirits were dispelled through the use of Christian words, gestures or symbols. That these beliefs circulated in the period of the witch-craze is evinced by a rare medieval genealogy of the lords of Vizcaya, which recounts how a lamiña-like being who ‘was very beautiful and her body was in every way perfect except that she had one foot like that of a goat’, promised to marry the love-struck man who had stumbled upon her singing ‘on a crag’ if he ‘would promise never to make the sign of the cross’.⁴⁹ That the suspects drew on these broader matrices when producing their sabbath-dispersal trope – as opposed to merely reflecting interrogatorial preconceptions – is also suggested by the fact that it emerges in both of the undemonized festive accounts recorded by Salazar, with the first witness being so ‘astonished and dismayed by what he had seen, [that] he crossed himself, and at the name of Jesus the dance, the people, and the cloud, all disappeared leaving no sign there had ever been anything there at all’.⁵⁰

Christian Otherworlds

Our suggestion that the Basque suspects drew on folk spirit beliefs to flesh out their accounts of the festive sabbath is not original or controversial, for as observed earlier many scholars have reached similar conclusions in relation to witchcraft records from other parts of medieval and early modern Europe. But the Basque festive sabbath accounts also invite us to travel into less charted waters. In Chapter Nine we observed that the witch-craze records make both direct and indirect references to hell. But what we have not emphasized until now is that they also make direct and indirect references to its existential opposite: paradise. In the Tableau, de Lancre notes that suspects report ‘the place where the sabbath is held to be a paradise’; that ‘the sabbath was the real paradise, where there are many more pleasures that can be described’; and that they journeyed ‘to some place where there are a hundred thousand strange and new things to see, where they hear so many different and melodious instruments that they are enraptured and believe themselves to be in some earthly paradise’. Similar statements were made by Spanish suspects, with the Devil allegedly telling María de Zozaya that ‘only in him should they place their hopes and he would give them paradise’.⁵¹ We cannot assume these references were wholly of interrogatorial derivation. It is hard to believe that de Lancre or Valle would have conflated two destinations – the witches’ sabbath and paradise – that were situated at such opposite ends of the cosmological and moral spectrum, particularly when demonologists like Boguet specifically warned that the Devil makes witches ‘abandon their share in Paradise’. Equally, de Lancre’s report that witches ‘believe themselves to be’ or ‘told us’ that they had been in paradise, indicates that this conflation was being made – or at least agreed to – by the defendants themselves, with this assessment supported by the evidence that demonstrably suspect-derived references to paradise emerged in other European witch trial records.⁵²

On one level this is no surprise. The Catholic instruction that introduced Basque congregations to the tortures of hell would also have introduced them to the pleasures of paradise – and we have every reason to believe that this realm occupied a very special place in the early modern mind.⁵³ That paradise existed, and that every man, woman and child had the opportunity to reach it, was a powerful beacon of hope in difficult lives. When they reached this realm, human souls could live ‘permanently with God, His Son, and Mary, along with the angels, prophets, patriarchs, apostles and martyrs’; they could enjoy eternal bliss and be free from sickness and the frailties of old age; and most importantly of all, they could be reunited with their children and their loved ones who had already died. While essentially a world of the dead, for those with an ecstatic bent paradise could also be experienced while still alive; with claims to have seen the realm – or even tasted its joys – being reported by orthodox contemplatives like Teresa de Ávila, heretical visionaries such as the Waldensians and Alumbrados and peasant mystics like the Swiss cattle herder, Chonrad Stoeckhlin.⁵⁴ That these narratives were mined by the Basque accused is intimated by the emotional intensity of their akelarre accounts. The sabbath festivities took place in a ‘Meadow of Pleasure’; they brought them ‘extra-ordinary pleasure and joy’ and ‘many more pleasures than can be described’; and were accompanied by ‘many instruments accompanied by bells so melodious that no one had ever heard anything so softly harmonious’. Once tasted, they invoked feelings of longing that echoed those of religious mystics, with de Lancre stating that ‘time elapses so quickly because of the pleasure and contentment that they [the witches] experience, so much so that they cannot leave without experiencing an unusual regret that is so intense that they cannot wait to return’; and that the Devil holds ‘their hearts and their will so tightly that he barely let any other desire enter them.’ Similarly, just as the sick and the suffering find their health miraculously restored on arrival in paradise, so on reaching the akelarre the older witches are given ‘special strength so they can chew’ the banquet meats; while as de Lancre notes, ‘the lame, the decrepit and the crippled dance at the sabbath with more ease’.⁵⁵

The imagery of paradise can also be detected in the figure of the queen of the sabbath. Earlier in this chapter we linked this female authority figure to both festive queen traditions and folkloric legends about the ‘great witch’ Mari. But given that the sabbath queen presided over a realm so redolent of paradise, it is surely coincidental that in Catholic iconography and literature this afterlife was governed by the Virgin Mary in her role as ‘Queen of Paradise’ or ‘Queen of Heaven’. Since at least the twelfth century, iconography had presented Mary presiding over the celestial hosts, either alone or at the right hand of Christ and bearing a crown and other symbols of monarchy, with her royal status celebrated in the hugely popular Marian anthems Regina Coeli, Salve Regina and Ave Regina Caelorum. With regard to our witch records, it is notable that this devotion to Mary-as-monarch was very popular in the Basque regions. Early-seventeenth century accounts describe the Regina Coeli being sung in local religious processions, while a life of the popular St Amaro published in Burgos in 1552 describes how the saint glimpsed a ‘terrestrial paradise’ where ‘a great number of virgins and other female saints [were] singing and dancing in the garden, with the Virgin Mary in their midst.’ Basque legends collected in later centuries describe Mary introducing herself to visionaries as the ‘Queen of Angels’; and to this day, local villagers remember her as the ‘Queen of Heavens’ in their prayers.⁵⁶

17  The Basque Devil seated next to the Queen of the Sabbath, as depicted in Ziarnco’s engraving. The nun-like figure on the Devil’s left is unexplained, but could reflect de Lancre’s demonization of the practices of the Basque serora (as discussed in Chapters Eighteen and Twenty One).

18  The Virgin as Queen of Paradise is clearly depicted in this engraving of the Marian visions of Portuguese monk and missionary Gonzalo Diaz de Amarante (1540–1618).

We know that the witch-craze suspects would have been familiar with Marian devotions, with Catalina de Porto feeling her first labour pains (before giving birth to three toads) while ‘being in the church [on] a day of celebration, while the Magnificat [hymn to Mary] was being sung’.⁵⁷ We also know that they wove Marian iconography into their confessions, with many child suspects confessing that while they were at the sabbath the Virgin appeared to them as a young woman with the Christ Child in her arms.⁵⁸ As a consequence it is wholly reasonable to speculate that these same suspects could also have woven images and beliefs about the Virgin who sat beside Christ as queen of paradise, into their fictions, false memories and dreams about the witch who sat beside the Devil as queen of the akelarre. Imaginally, these Marian materials would also have blent well with imagery and experience around festive queens. From an early period, ideas about the Virgin Mary as ‘Queen of Heavens’ worked their way into May Day traditions, with sources indicating that by the eighteenth century the Catholic Church had largely transformed ‘the Queen of the May into the Virgin Mary’. In many countries today ‘statues of the Virgin are [still] bedecked in flowers and crowned on May 1, and carried in gay processions through flower-strewn streets’. Although it is difficult to know when this transformation took place, it is notable that the Virgin was specifically honoured in the month of May in one of the Cantigas de Santa María composed at the court of Castile and León as early as the thirteenth century.⁵⁹

Earthier Paradises

While the evidence suggests that Basque suspects may well have employed paradisiacal constructs to flesh out their accounts of the akelarre, this thesis does raise a difficult question. While it is easy to understand why the defendants would have fantasized about the pleasures of paradise, it is less easy to comprehend why they should have equated this realm with the profanities and evils of the witches’ sabbath. Why, when being asked to produce an account of moral depravity and sensual excess in a world dominated by the Devil, should the suspects have drawn on imagery surrounding the celestial home of God, the Virgin Mary and Christ?

Some explanation can be found in the fact that paradise as imagined by ordinary Basques is likely to have been very different from paradise as imagined by the Church. Since Christianity first emerged, centuries of theological debate over contradictory biblical references on the subject in combination with circulating knowledge about pre-Christian utopias and afterlives, had rendered concepts and understandings of paradise surprisingly diverse. Within this diversity, two broad categories emerged: the ‘spiritual’ paradise (commonly conflated with heaven) and an ‘earthly’ paradise (credited with more physical reality than its more abstract counterpart). As Herman Pleij observes, the earthly paradise was firmly rooted in biblical stories of the Garden of Eden but was also, like Eden itself, more specifically influenced by the ‘astonishing number of paradises, golden ages, and blessed isles, all of which bear remarkable similarities to one another’ developed by the ‘Indo-Germanic cultures of Eurasia’ prior to Christianization.⁶⁰ Hardly surprisingly, while theologians and scholars toyed with the rarefied dimensions of a spiritual paradise as an expression of mystical union with the Godhead, the evidence suggests that it was the second, more earthly, paradise that was more commonly imagined by ordinary people. This realm possessed the core features of its more spiritual variant, in that its inhabitants lived alongside Christ and the heavenly hosts and were united with their dead loved ones in a realm free from pain and full of joy, but these freedoms and joys were articulated in a very material, sensual way. The inhabitants of earthly paradise were not only happy because they were in the presence of celestial beings or liberated from the oppressions of hunger, sickness and old age, but they were also happy because they had licence to indulge themselves in every sensory pleasure to a degree of abandon and excess that would not have been possible, for both practical and moral reasons, when alive. Arguably the most abiding feature of the earthly paradise was a huge feast that went on and on for eternity, with Pleij maintaining that ‘all these medieval paradises were furnished according to the tastes of the times. There was an abundance of food, plenty of music, no lack of song and dance, and Jesus was up there performing the duties of a generous host, carving the meat, slicing the bread, and pouring the wine’. From this vantage point, it is easier to see how the Basque witch-craze suspects may have found themselves drawing paradisiacal imagery into their fictions, false memories and dreams about the sensual pleasures of dance, music and ‘sumptuous [sabbath] tables . . . prepared with all kinds of food’ that were enjoyed at the akelarre. Indeed, as we have already seen, this link was clearly stated in de Lancre’s claim that when Labourd witches attend the sabbath ‘they are enraptured and believe themselves to be in some earthly paradise [my italics]’.⁶¹

But with regard to the Basque akelarre, it is also relevant that popular ideas about earthly paradise could take a wide variety of idiosyncratic forms. Over the long centuries, the pre-Christian utopias and afterlives that fuelled the development of Christian ideas about Eden had also fuelled narratives about a range of alternative realms – all with strong earthly paradise characteristics – that persisted in popularity both with and without pretensions to reality well into Europe’s early modern era. While many of these narratives are relevant to the akelarre, the one that emerges most strongly in this respect is the ‘Land of Cockaigne’. Flourishing ‘chiefly amid the rural population’ in many parts of the continent, including France and Spain, the imagery of Cockaigne worked its way into songs, stories and theatricals to such a degree that it has been described, along with its cognate realms, as ‘among the longest lived and most widespread folklore traditions in western Europe during the medieval and early modern periods.’⁶² Cockaigne’s attraction lay in the fact that it promised the freedom from suffering and the sensual pleasure found in many earthly paradises and utopias, but brought humour and catharsis to the proceedings by articulating this freedom and pleasure through oppositions or paradoxes that made them comedically absurd. Thus with regard to food:

[C]andies and pastries would rain from the sky, sausages would grow on trees, birds would fly into people’s mouths to be eaten, cows and dogs would defecate pies and pancakes, pigs would wander around with knives in their back, ready and eager for their flesh to be sliced away and consumed . . . houses were built of waffles, roofs were tiled with tarts.

In this upside-down world age was turned on its head, with one text stating that ‘in that country there is also a wonderful and inviting fountain of youth, or rejuvenation pool, in which elderly people bathe and gradually regain their youth’; and another that ‘when its waters touch their tongue, Old folk all start turning young’. Games were subject to the same subversion; gamblers always win their money back twice over; drinkers earn money for getting drunk; the archer that ‘shoots furthest from the bulls eye’ gains the prize; and the winner of the race ‘is always the one who comes in last.’⁶³

It is immediately apparent that although the ‘Meadows of Pleasure’ enjoyed by the Basque witches did not contain sausages growing on trees or cows defecating pancakes, some of their sabbath festivities clearly evoked the comedic absurdities of Cockaigne. We can see its incongruent levity in claims by suspects from Saint-Pée, that when the Devil holds the sabbath in their houses he ‘carries a lame woman named Jeannette Biscar, who right away does a somersault in front of him’; and in the way that Domingina Maletena leapt so high that she jumped ‘all the way’ from the heights of the Rhune mountain ‘onto a beach between Hendaye and Fuenterrabia, a distance of close to two leagues’. We can see its subversive humour in de Lancre’s observation that ‘the lame, the decrepit, and the crippled’ do not only dance at the sabbath with ‘more ease’ but ‘with more ease than the others’ attending the event. We can even glimpse the contrary joys of a world where ‘old folk all start turning young’ when the fountain of youth ‘touch[es] their tongue’ in the Zugarramurdi suspects’ claims that when they left the akelarre, they picked up a mill and

19  Typical representation of the Garden of Eden, published in 1521. Adam and Eve are taking their ease among trees hanging with ripe fruit and surrounded by tame animals.

20  Typical representation of the Land of Cockaigne, published after 1570. As in Eden, the subjects are taking their ease in a land of plenty, although in this case they are supine through overindulgence and the animals are not only tame but also present themselves as ready-to-eat. On the left, a pig has a knife strapped to its back while top right a bird feeds a woman in a house covered with tarts.

without it falling apart, carr[ied] it off with great rejoicing to a nearby hill called Lavaquin, and they stayed there for a while, overjoyed to see how they had carried off the entire machine in one piece. And there was much laughter because the aforementioned Graciana de Barrenechea and others of her age, which is of over eighty years, since it was hard work for them to carry such a big machine, were saying ‘girls here, and old women at home!’⁶⁴

The process through which the absurd and sensual delights of earthly paradise and Cockaigne were converted into the demonic pleasures of the akelarre are also likely to have been fuelled by interrogatorial disdain. The images of paradise conjured up by pious and urbane men like de Lancre or Valle were unlikely to have contained houses built of cakes, pigs running around with knives in their rumps and old ladies turning somersaults. Through their unforgiving lens, any evocations of the comedic and extravagant pleasures of popular utopias that suspects brought to the courtroom would have been highly vulnerable to distortion and demonization. De Lancre, for example, does not interpret reports that ‘the lame, crippled, and old decrepit people and the almost dead . . . are the ones who dance [at the sabbath] with greater ease’ as expressions of comedic utopian pleasures, but as ‘celebrations of disorder, where everything appears to be irregular and to be going against the laws of nature.’ Even if the interrogators believed the suspects to be sincere in their conviction that the sabbath was a form of paradise, they would have found it easy to condemn their experiences as demonic. Since the early-medieval period the Church had taught that in order to tempt people into sin, the Devil had the skills to make their senses ‘conjure up visions of paradise’ and that his ‘greatest success consists of deluding people into thinking they are actually in heaven.’⁶⁵ As a result, even the most orthodox of mystics could find themselves scrutinized by the Church to ascertain whether their experiences of paradise were genuine revelations or demonic delusion. In the light of such suspicions, we can be sure that if a witch suspect charged with attendance at the akelarre declared that she was innocent because she had merely been visiting some kind of earthly paradise, a man like de Lancre is unlikely to have given her the benefit of the doubt.

Merging Otherworlds

These perspectives on paradise need not contradict the assertions, made earlier in this chapter, that Basque suspects quarried folk spirit matrices to flesh out their festive sabbath accounts, for the unconscious fiction-making mind can easily draw on more than one matrix of belief or experience at the same time. But in the Basque case, we can surmise that this retrieval process was fuelled by the ease with which peasant utopias and folk spirit realms could be conflated in the early modern mind. Although the Church taught that the dead were destined for either purgatory, heaven or hell, in both popular folklore and elite literature (particularly the romance genre) the dead could easily find themselves somewhere else. Given that folk spirits were closely associated with the dead, it is no surprise to find contemporary stories, legends and even eyewitness accounts describing how the dead were recognized in fairyland; with the realm, in this context, functioning as an ambiguous form of afterlife.⁶⁶ Through this lens, it is not difficult to see how the Basque suspects could have forged fictions, false memories and dreams of the festive akelarre through processes of unconscious association that drew, simultaneously and without conflict, on templates relating to heaven, paradise, purgatory, fairyland, hell and Cockaigne and any number of additional utopias and afterlives that existed on the same imaginal and emotional continuum in the Basque mind. From this perspective, in creating their account of moving an entire mill ‘in one piece’ amid ‘great rejoicing’ and comic wordplay, the Zugarramurdi suspects could have drawn on narratives and imagery surrounding the malevolent damage caused by witches, the destructive escapades of hell demons, the superhuman strength of the lamiñas, the physical rejuvenations of earthly paradise and the comedic reversals of the Land of Cockaigne – all at the same time.

An insight into how these kinds of imaginal conflations may have worked in the Basque case can be gained by analysing the experiences of mid-seventeenth century Portuguese visionary, María de Macedo. From ten or eleven years of age, María claimed that supernatural beings kept persuading her to travel with them to another world. Over a period of decades, she was questioned by a range of people in her native Lisbon, from family members and local clergy to officers of the Inquisition, in an attempt to ascertain what her experiences signified and whether or not they were demonic. The surviving documentation, analysed with precision by Bryan Givens, reveals that over María’s life the landscapes, leading characters and most importantly perceived identity of her otherworld changed. As a child, she believed she was coerced and enticed by fairy-type spirits (defined, as was typical in Portugal in the period, as ‘enchanted Moors’) to journey to a location that was clearly some kind of fairyland. But as the years progressed, she changed her mind and decided that this land was not the realm of the enchanted Moors but a mythic utopia of local significance termed the ‘Hidden Isle’ (which, according to local belief, also served as a refuge for the legendary sixteenth-century Portuguese King Sebastian). This transformation was further nuanced by the fact that during its evolution from one world to another, María’s envisioned realm also accumulated motifs from affiliated otherworlds, including earthly paradise (the island’s inhabitants ‘celebrate[d] all the divine offices’); the magical isle of Avalon (the island was visited by the legendary King Arthur); and the Land of Cockaigne (the island provided ‘food without work’, ‘docile animals’ and ‘archetypal fountains’). This transformation process, Givens argues, suggests that María ‘had a variety of legendary matrices by which to understand her experience’ and that in response to life events ‘she made choices (consciously or unconsciously) among them.’ As a child, she was particularly susceptible to tales of fairyland and willingly accepted her aunt’s judgement that she was encountering fairies. In the following months and years, as she developed a Christian identity and came under increasing scrutiny from local clergy, she incorporated more orthodox religious motifs into the mix; with Givens suggesting that her ‘impetus to Christianize her voyages [may have] stemmed from her confirmation’. As she then grew into maturity and developed a civic and political conscience, María became more cognisant of the millenarian conviction, circulating in Lisbon at the time, that King Sebastian was preparing his imminent return from his refuge to liberate Portugal from the Spanish yoke. This awareness then left her vulnerable to local suggestions that her otherworld destination was in fact the ‘Hidden Isle’ and that the individuals she encountered there were not enchanted Moors but the followers of the legendary sixteenth-century monarch.⁶⁷ As a consequence, María’s process of personal maturation saw her visions progress from childhood idiosyncrasy to attempts at religious conformity to prophecy of political significance. We cannot draw direct comparisons between María’s experiences and those of the suspects caught up in the Basque witch-craze, not least because the identity of María’s otherworld changed over a period of several decades and in response to a series of interrogations that took place intermittently over many years. But in the white heat of the Basque witch-craze, it is possible that collective hysteria, imprisonment and the combined pressures of both community and interrogatorial coercion could have meant that similar fusions and similar reinterpretations occurred in a much shorter period of time.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Dark Banquets

The perspectives developed in the last chapter have begun to illumine our understanding of the akelarre festivities described in the Basque records. But they are only the first part of the story. As previously observed, the benign feasting, dancing and music-making that took place at these events were interwoven with darker festive activities – and to understand how the akelarre accounts were constructed we need explore where these came from and what, if anything, they had to do with the Basque suspects. We shall begin with cannibalism. Although, as we have seen, the witches ate ordinary food at akelarre feasts, several accounts state that the plates of bread, fruit and ‘other things’ were interspersed with dishes piled with human body parts obtained by the witches from local graves. This ‘feast-cannibalism’, as we can term it here, appears predominantly in the Spanish records. Although de Lancre alleges that ‘countless witches’ testified they ‘saw many bad pieces of meat being eaten’ at the akelarre, he only describes one cannibalistic feast in any detail and even here he devotes no more than five lines to the subject. Valle and Becerra, meanwhile, recorded many vivid, detailed and in some cases very lengthy, accounts of these events.¹

In containing accounts of feast-cannibalism, the Basque records are not anomalous. While less common than its notoriety might suggest – with some contemporaneous sabbath accounts, such as those emerging in the French province of Lorraine, barely mentioning the activity at all – the theme appears in European witch trial confessions with enough frequency to render it unexceptional.² But the Basque accounts are unusual in their emphasis. While the theme is prominent in several European trial clusters, the detail and vividness with which this activity is described in the Spanish-Basque records is arguably unique. No extant accounts of feast-cannibalism, for example, rival the following passage from the Joint Sentence.

And whenever a witch dies, the Devil forewarns all the old witches who have reached the rank at which they can make poisons, and before they go to the akelarre they meet at the home of a certain person, a witch who they name, with the Devil and his servants, and taking hoes with them they go to the cemetery of the church where s/he is buried . . . [They disinter the witch then] they go in the company of the Devil and the other witches to the akelarre where they eat it roasted, boiled and raw, finding it to be more flavoursome and tasty to eat than any other food, even better than partridge and capon. And they collect up the leftovers with great care and take it to their homes where they keep them in a chest together with the bread and wine that was left over, so that the people who are not witches cannot see it, and then they eat it among themselves at their convenience, finding it to be of the same taste and flavour as at the akelarre, albeit very foul-smelling. And in the same way they have disinterred, dismembered and eaten all the bodies of the witches who have died in the last fifty to sixty years from now in which they have been witches, as well as the children, men and women that the witches themselves have killed and many of the other deceased, always having the consideration to give the heart of each of them to the Devil, because among them this is held to be the choicest morsel. And the brains and bones are buried and hidden in the akelarre in some holes so that later they can make the usual deadly poisons and ointments from them. And they are so perverse and inhuman in everything that parents disinter, dismember and eat their children, children do so to their parents, wives to husbands and husbands to wives, and the ones they find tastiest are the bodies of deceased witches and those of men more than those of women in all ways but particularly when roasted. And they also give portions of it to the dressed toads, which grunt as they eat it doggedly. And in the next akelarre they remove the bones from the holes where they left them buried and put them to boil together with a herb that in Basque they call belar nagusia, which has such power that it makes them soft as turnips, and they mentioned a large number of witches young and old, naming them by their names, who they have disinterred and eaten as stated.³

Interrogatorial Interest

In attempting to explain the prominence of this theme in the Basque records we move into complex territory. Despite being one of the most arresting images of the witches’ sabbath, feast-cannibalism has attracted relatively little scholarly attention, with no monographs and only a few papers exploring the subject in any depth.⁴ The research that does exist points to interrogatorial interest in the theme, and this is confirmed in the Basque case. The first questionnaire that la Suprema sent to the Logroño Tribunal (dated March 1609) contained instructions about how to obtain evidence from witnesses to verify suspects’ claims to have disinterred human hearts. Similarly, the last instructions sent to Valle before he went on his visitation (dated July 1609) urged him to examine the claims that suspects had been ‘exhuming and devouring the corpses of witches and unbaptized children.’ That Valle was motivated in this respect is also indicated by his decision to devote one whole section of the Pamplona Manuscript to suspects’ accounts of vomiting up ‘fetid things’ after eating human meat at the akelarre.⁵

But while it clearly existed, the origins of this interrogatorial interest is harder to establish. Although Valle and Becerra were primed on the matter by la Suprema in both March and July 1609 – the information they received appears to have been relatively limited. Although the March questionnaire mentioned the disinterment of hearts it made no mention of cannibalism; and although the July instructions did make reference to the eating of human flesh this was not elaborated in the context of akelarre banquets. In addition, it is unlikely that Valle or Becerra would have been able to flesh out these templates through recourse to earlier Basque witch trial records. To the best of my knowledge, although these sources contain several accounts of witches disinterring corpses and removing children’s hearts for use in poisons they do not contain any references to cannibalistic feasts at the akelarre.⁶ The possibility that Valle and Becerra enhanced their knowledge of feast-cannibalism via demonological works, while worth considering, is also unpromising. Early works such as the Formicarius and Errores Gazariorum do contain some vivid references to the crime, but the accounts are short and just as frequently focus on the processing of corpses for poison-making as for consumption. Meanwhile many later demonological treatises, including all of those cited as authorities by de Lancre, either address the theme in passing or omit it completely.⁷ While del Rio alleges that witches ‘rend’ babies ‘in pieces . . . [and] eat them, a food they find very pleasing’ and, elsewhere, that some witches confessed to cannibalism, his description of the sabbath contains no references to the crime at all, with the sabbath tables being laid with food that was, at its worst, merely ‘tasteless and unsalted.’ Similarly in his over-800–word-long account of the sabbath, Rémy’s reference to feast-cannibalism amounted to the brief observation that ‘Dominique Isabelle added that sometimes the [sabbath] table was even laid with human flesh’; while Bodin and Boguet do not mention the practice at all.⁸ That demonological precedent played a key role in the prominence of Basque feast-cannibalism is further thrown into question by the fact that the interrogator most well versed in demonological works – de Lancre – was also the one to pay it least attention.

In the absence of any obvious demonological or trial-based precedent, it is notable that our argument in Chapter Twelve that Valle and Becerra were particularly sensitive to the heretical threats, may well be relevant here. The cannibalistic feast was one of the core acts that typified heretical activity, with a range of cults (along with other marginal groups such as Jews and lepers) being frequently accused of the crime in Europe since at least the eleventh century. Scholars have argued that the theme is likely to have entered the stereotype of the witches’ sabbath via these sources, with the early demonological works in which feast-cannibalism first appears being strongly influenced by clerical concerns about heretical cult activity. From this perspective, it would seem reasonable to speculate that the theme rose to such prominence in the Basque witch-craze because, like the authors of these earlier demonological works, Valle and Becerra were deeply preoccupied with the threats that heretical movements posed to the Church. But while there may be some truth in this thesis, it cannot be taken too far. Although we do find Jews being accused of infanticide and dismemberment (implicating cannibalism) in some medieval Basque trials, the heretical groups that emerged in Spain in the early modern period – including the Durango group, the Alumbrados, the Protestants and even the heretic-like Cagots – do not appear to have been accused of the crime.⁹ In this context, Valle and Becerra’s fear of feast-cannibalism is more likely to have been fuelled by historical, as opposed to immediate, anthropophagic threats.

Contributions of the Accused

In our search to explain the prominence of feast-cannibalism in the Basque witch-craze records we must also consider the role of the accused. The fact that la Suprema’s March 1609 questionnaire outlined procedures for obtaining evidence from witnesses to verify suspects’ claims to have performed exhumations, makes it clear that some individuals did indeed confess to having disinterred corpses and removed their hearts. Even more pertinently, the fact that (according to the evidence as presented by Henningsen) la Suprema’s first direct references to cannibalism only emerged in instructions sent to Valle four months after they had compiled the questionnaire, and after they had been sent a further six confessions from Zugarramurdi, also raises the possibility that the theme first travelled from the suspects to the interrogators as opposed to the other way round. It is also noteworthy that while they do not contain the levels of idiosyncrasy and realism evoked by some witchcraft themes, the feast-cannibalism accounts do contain some vivid and anomalous details suggestive of suspect-contribution. Active participation on the part of the accused is suggested by the graphic accounts of post-cannibalism vomiting recorded in the Pamplona Manuscript, with Martin de la Espidia maintaining that after the akelarre-feast ‘he would spend a whole day with a full and disgusting stomach, and the stink of what he had eaten and drunk would come up to his mouth’. It is also heard in the allegation – in the Joint Sentence – that suspects gave ‘portions of it [human meat] to the dressed toads, which grunt as they eat it doggedly’.¹⁰ Similarly, it is highly unlikely that de Lancre was responsible for the idiosyncratic detailing in the confession from Jeannette d’Abadie, where she describes seeing many infants being eaten and

among them one who was held to be the son of Master Jean de Lasse, lieutenant in the visenechancé des Lannes. She saw this child’s ear being eaten by Marie Balcoin. But people never eat a whole child at a sabbath held in one individual parish. Thus the same child that she saw being carried and cut up at one sabbath in Ciboure was cut into quarters, one of which was eaten in Ciboure; the other three parts were sent to three other different parishes.¹¹

Taken together, these sources suggest that although Valle, Becerra and de Lancre clearly pressed suspects with questions about feast-cannibalism, they were met with a lively response and that suspects were actively involved in creating fictions, false memories and visionary experiences surrounding the event.

Raw Materials: Folk Spirit Matrices

When co-authoring their accounts of feast-cannibalism, the suspects’ primary source of inspiration would have been circulating demonological stereotypes generated by the witchcraft prosecutions themselves. But they are also likely to have fleshed out these templates with a wider range of raw materials. In looking for these, we can again begin with the folklore. Scholarly exploration into the folkloric origins of early modern witch-cannibalism tends to focus on vampirism and its links to night-visiting demon beliefs, while feast-cannibalism is generally examined in social and religious contexts; with an emphasis, as we have seen, on beliefs surrounding heretical cults and other marginal groups. Yet the folkloric links are there. In our exploration of bloodsucking body-maleficium in Chapter Five, we argued that witches had been conflated with vampiric night-visiting demons from at least the classical period, with this link being intensified through the medieval and early modern periods via the process of witchization. But what we have not emphasized until now is that this demon–witch complex was not just associated with bloodsucking but also with the consumption of human body parts. In the first decade of the sixth century, an edict issued by King Clovis of the Franks imposed heavy penalties on any ‘stria’ who ‘eats’ a person, with an accompanying reference glossing the term herburgius as ‘one who carries a cauldron to where striae do their cooking’; an explication that, as Ronald Hutton points out, suggests ‘the nocturnal women concerned were believed to meet to cook and eat the fat or organs they subtracted from their victims’. In the following century an edict issued by the Lombard King Rotharius stated simply that it ‘was impossible for a Christian mind to believe that a woman could eat the viscera of a living man.’ While these references only hint at collective activity, a seminal passage from Burchard of Worm’s Corrector makes it clear that by the early-eleventh century, the practice was associated with groups, with Burchard reporting that some women ‘believe and affirm to be true’ that ‘in the silence of the quiet night’ they ‘go out through the closed doors and travel through the spaces of the world, together with others who are similarly deceived; and that without visible weapons, you kill people who have been baptized and redeemed by Christ’s blood, and together cook and devour their flesh; and that where the heart was, you put straw or wood or something of the sort; and that after eating these people, you bring them alive again’.¹² While it is difficult to know how far or in what way these particular witch figures were identified with demons, the following mid-twelfth century account from John of Salisbury (who spent much of his adult life in France) clearly indicates that women could perform these acts of nocturnal cannibalism in the company of a group of folk spirits.

They assert that a certain woman who shines by night, or Herodias, or the mistress of the night, summons gatherings and assemblies, which attend various banquets. The figure receives all kinds of homage from her servants . . . Furthermore, they say that infants are exposed to the lamiae; some of them being dismembered and gluttonously devoured, while the mistress takes pity on others and has them put back in their cradles.

Similar assertions were made in the following century by Gervais of Tilbury, who maintained that ‘many women declare participating in nocturnal processions in the company of the lamiae; every time they enter a house they crush sleepers, they drink human blood, they remove newborn babies from their cradles, and cause serious illnesses [my italics].’¹³ While scholars disagree as to the significance of Salisbury’s ‘mistress of the night’, there is a general consensus that his report – and others like it – is linked to the wider corpus of European belief, visible from the early medieval period through to the nineteenth century, pertaining to ambivalent or malevolent and predominantly nocturnal groups of spirits that roamed the countryside predating on humans and animals. These supernaturals, which were strongly associated with a range of folk spirits, demons and, perhaps most significantly, the dead (and were often the same beings that ruined crops and raised storms) could kill or abduct their human prey, with victims being dismembered and/or consumed (followed in some cases by resuscitation) or press-ganged into joining the company on either a temporary or permanent basis. While the term’s usage is disputed, due to their predatory characteristics the spirit-group traditions in this corpus have often been subsumed under the umbrella term ‘Wild Hunt’.¹⁴

Of particular reference here, with regard to our enquiry into feast-cannibalism, is that although from the late-medieval period onwards, beliefs surrounding the anthropophagic practices of predatory spirit-groups were increasingly contextualized within the template of demonological witchcraft – they were remarkably persistent on their own terms. Later collections of folklore reveal that seven hundred years after John of Salisbury and Gervais of Tilbury wrote their reports, French peasants were still sharing tales and anecdotes in which the protagonist asks a passing ‘hunt’ [ or ‘chasse’] for a share in its booty only to find that, for example, ‘this rash individual may [later] find part of a human being’ nailed to his door.¹⁵ In the Cholet region, according to Lecouteux, it was reported that if a man shouts ‘Galerie Hunt, leave me a piece of what you are hunting’ the next morning he might ‘find near his house the arm or leg of a little child.’ Similarly folklorist Branch Johnson noted that in early-twentieth century Normandy, ‘the Chasse Proserpine, or Cheserquine, or Mère Harpine, is [believed to be] led by the most repulsive hag the mind can conceive; she and her associates feed on human bodies disinterred from graveyards, with which they play in the air as a cat does with a mouse.’¹⁶ From Salisbury onwards, all these sources are problematic in that it is difficult to ascertain how far they reflected archaic themes and popular folk belief and how far they reflected scholarly conflations or elite demonological stereotypes.¹⁷ But despite these uncertainties, they are certainly sufficient to suggest that beliefs surrounding body part anthropophagy as performed by both groups of spirits and supernatural women that were linked to – but nevertheless distinct from – elite witchcraft stereotypes, were circulating in Europe prior to, during and after the witch-hunting period.

Due to the lack of contemporary folkloric information, it is impossible to ascertain whether or to what degree these belief matrices were present in the Basque regions in the period of the witch-craze. But suggestive references do emerge in the later folklore. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Basque folklorists collected an abundance of tales, legends and beliefs in which groups of demons or folk spirits descend from the skies or emerge out of caves to abduct human prey, with the victims being either killed, kept as prisoners in the spirits’ abode or simply disappearing (leaving their final fate unknown). In ‘Carried away by Devils’, the abductee is swept away by a malign host, never to return, while in ‘The Lady of Axralar’, the spirit-host’s victim is ‘engulfed in flames’ before disappearing from sight.¹⁸ While these supernatural predators are often generically termed ‘devils’ or ‘demons’, they are also defined as (or display the characteristics of) folk spirits. Abduction tales are often constructed around the lamiñas who, despite their capacity for beneficence, ‘long to get possession of human beings’, ‘carry off infants unbaptized’ and more generally ‘pursue men’; while ‘Joxepa Ederra’ [Joséphine the Beautiful], describes how Joxepa was collecting water from a well when she was carried away by a group of women known as ‘night-walkers’.¹⁹ Links to the lamiña complex are further confirmed by the finding that abductees often found themselves transported to subterranean realms, with the protagonist of ‘Carried away by Devils’ being taken to the cave at Amboto, a place sacred to both the lamiñas and Mari. As elsewhere in Europe, these beliefs overlapped with those surounding solitary night-visiting demons, with some tales of abduction by the Gaueko, for example, being very similar to stories like ‘Joxepa Ederra’, in that the demon’s abductee goes to collect water and ‘later on, some drops of blood and the empty pitcher the girl had been carrying fell down through the chimney’ and ‘she was never heard from again.’²⁰ Although we cannot assess how far these later folkloric forms may have been influenced by both the passage of time and the historical dissemination of elite demonological ideas, they do raise the likelihood that similar traditions surrounding predatory spirit-groups were circulating in the Basque regions in the period of the witch-craze.

But while we can assume such beliefs existed, is there any evidence that they were mined by the accused to flesh out their accounts of feast-cannibalism? As always the lack of folkloric reference makes such analysis difficult, but some suggestive thematic correspondences do emerge. The fact that Basque witches seldom acted alone but generally crept into their victims’ bedrooms in the company of other witches and spirits (the queen of the sabbath, the Devil and his servant-demons) does evoke the collective nocturnal-hunting expeditions that lie at the heart of the predatory spirit-group narrative. Similarly, the fact that Basque witches did not only harm or kill their victims in situ but also abducted them and took them to the sabbath, is highly suggestive of the Basque folktales and legends in which spirit-groups carry their victims away to their celestial or (more commonly) underworld abodes. While the theme of suspect-abduction is not prominent in demonological works (and only becomes common in European witch trial records in the mid-seventeenth to the early-eighteenth century), there is a clear narrative synonymy between accounts of Basque witch suspects who were carried away to the akelarre against their will and forced to engage in the witches’ dark festivities – and accounts of Basque folktale protagonists who were whisked away to remote locations and required to spend ‘hours spinning and spinning’ without ever making a thread or carried to ‘the caves of Aralar, Aizkorri, and Burumendi’ and forced to travel ‘from one mountain to another’ trailing ‘tremendous thunder and lightning’ in the retinue, or as an avatar of, the ‘great witch’ Mari.²¹

But while the strength of the abduction theme in the predatory spirit-group matrix, as it emerges in the later Basque folklore, certainly raises the possibility that witch-craze suspects drew these raw materials into their accounts of the akelarre, this thesis does not take us all the way to feast-cannibalism. Although the folklore contains many examples of spirit-group predation and these beliefs are clearly linked, via the solitary night-visiting demon complex, to beliefs surrounding the vampiric witch, very few of these accounts depict these spirit-groups overtly engaging in body part cannibalism. While there may be intimations – with ‘drops of blood’, for example, falling down the chimney post-abduction – these accounts are qualitatively distinct from the highly organized and lavish cannibalistic banquets described in the Basque akelarre-accounts. Thus, while these belief complexes may have supported the narrative machinery that contextualised the feast-cannibalism phenomenon, the fact that the activity itself rose to such prominence in the Basque records still requires explanation.

Anthropophagic Devils and Ogres

To this end, further insights can be found by returning to the figure of the Devil. In many accounts of feast-cannibalism, as they emerge in both demonological works and trial records, the Devil is not featured in any prominent way. But at the Basque akelarre he stands centre-stage; presiding over the disinterment, processing and consumption of corpses and taking the best of the meat for himself. In one passage, the witches ‘give the heart of each of them [their victims] to the Devil, because among them this is held to be the choicest morsel’; while in another, the witches carry human bones to the akelarre and then

make their offering to the Devil who receives it with a display of great satisfaction, to which end each of them make their demonstrations of obedience and reverence, each of them saying “Lord, I bring this for your favour,” to which the Devil responds “I am very grateful to you for it.” And taking them he puts them in a large spherical basket that he has there for this purpose and after this offering he starts eating the aforementioned bones in a very ugly manner, munching on them like a pig with his teeth which are very big and white, sharing them with the oldest witches to whom he gives special strength so they can chew.²²

21  The anthropophagic Lucifer devouring souls in hell, surrounded by scenes of sinners being tortured by lesser devils. Engraving from Antonio Bettini’s Monte Sancto di Dio (Florence, 1477).

In attempting to explain the Devil’s behaviour, we can begin with iconography. In Chapter Nine we argued that the toad familiars who ‘grunt’ as they ‘doggedly’ eat human meat at the akelarre evoked the man-eating demons who feasted on human flesh in Catholic images of hell. But what we have not yet emphasized is that these appetites were shared by the Devil in his role as hierophant of the underworld. By the sixteenth century, Catholic iconography commonly included portrayals of the Devil as a huge, human-eating machine, with Zika stating that one ‘well-known image of Satan’ is ‘of a devouring cannibal from whose mouth hang the mangled limbs and bodies of his victims.’ Since the eleventh century, Basque churches had been decorated with brightly painted carvings and paintings on the theme, with parishioners of the Souletin village of l’Hopital-Saint-Blaise to this day encountering a carving of the Devil, with the head and torso of a hapless sinner disappearing down his gullet, when approaching the altar in their local church. The image was also circulated through sermons, religious theatre and literature, with Zika noting that by the sixteenth century depictions of the cannibalistic Devil were ‘broadly disseminated through the medium of print’; with the theme overlapping with conventional iconography that represented hell itself as a dragonine monster with an immense mouth that devoured human souls.²³ Through this lens, in creating a bestial Devil that ‘starts eating the aforementioned [human] bones in a very ugly manner, munching on them like a pig with his teeth which are very big’, the Basque suspects were mining images of the animalistic jaws and anthropophagic appetites of the Devil as he emerged in contemporary iconographies of hell.

But this man-eating Devil may also have drawn on more folkloric roots. To date, we have identified two categories of spirit that were believed to consume human flesh in pre-modern Europe: the solitary night-visiting demon and the predatory spirit-group. But what we have not emphasized until now, is that solitary anthropophagic predation was also practised by another category of supernatural being: the large, animalistic and predominantly-male entities generically known as ‘ogres’. The belief that ogres fed on human flesh were widespread in pre-modern Europe, with the popularity of this theme and its links with witchcraft evidenced in Marina Warner’s observation that ‘only four stories by Perrault do not feature cannibalism as such. In the Grimm Brothers’ later, seminal anthology, the tally can’t be made, as stories of ogres and flesh-eating witches are so numerous, and many of them overlap.’ Later Basque folklore certainly has its fair share of fe-fi-fo-fumming ogres and monsters that haunt caves and remote places and have a lust for human flesh, with the list including the one-eyed Tartaro; the ‘half-human, half-bear being known as Hamalau’ and its derivatives; and the dragonine Herensuge – ‘one of the most important spirits’ in Basque mythology – that ‘fed on human beings’ and demanded human sacrifice.²⁴ Equally relevant, with regard to our Basque akelarre accounts, is that many of these man-eating ogres were strongly associated with the theme of abduction, with Barandiarán reporting in relation to the Tartaro that the ogre appears ‘in the most terrifying stories in Basque homes. It kidnaps some young person or captures someone forced by a storm to take refuge in his cave, then draws and quarters him, roasts him on the fire and eats him.’ These abductions could also be performed by evil female figures, with a tale collected María de Zozaya’s hometown of Renteria describing how a mother decapitated her son then ‘cut him up in little pieces and put him in a cauldron to cook’. Beliefs and stories about ogres also overlapped with other folk spirit complexes, with tales of man-eating ogres fusing with or mirroring tales of the anthropophagic attacks of both solitary night-visiting demons and predatory spirit-groups.²⁵

While we cannot suppose these later belief matrices to have remained unchanged since the early modern period, we can safely assume that they existed in some form in the period of the Basque witch-craze. Roslyn Frank has recently demonstrated the pre-Christian origins of belief surrounding the Hamalau and its derivatives (such as the Marrau, Mamu and Joaldun), while the Tartaro has been linked to both the medieval ‘Tartar’ and the classical Cyclops. The finding that these figures were so widely known in the 1850s – with Webster maintaining that ‘We never met with a Basque peasant who could not tell us what are the Tartaro and Heren-Suge, [and] Basa-Jaun’ – also implies some degree of longevity. The conflation between ogre and Devil would have been made all the easier by the fact that, according to the Church, the two were interchangeable, with this ambiguity reflected in those cases where the same story collected in different regions could appear with a folk ogre protagonist in one version and a devil protagonist in another.²⁶ Thus, when creating fictions, false memories and dreams of an akelarre feast presided over by a Devil that ate human ‘bones in a very ugly manner, munching on them like a pig with his teeth which are very big’, the unconscious minds of the Basque suspects may well have been mining depictions of man-eating devils absorbed from Catholic iconography and teaching – but could also have been mining images of man-eating folk ogres absorbed around the baserri hearth.

The Fears of the Child

The arguments developed in this chapter are interesting but they still do not explain the prominence of feast-cannibalism in the Basque witch-craze records, for the simple reason that none of the raw materials identified thus far were peculiar to the Basques. The Devil as the human-eating hierophant of hell is a feature of Catholic iconography Europe-wide, and there is also no evidence that ogre lore or the mythology surrounding predatory spirit-groups was noticeably stronger in the Basque regions than in many other parts of contemporary Europe. We therefore find ourselves confronting the question: if many European populations developed these anthropophagic belief complexes then why did their witch trial testimonies not contain accounts of feast-cannibalism that were as vivid and detailed as those of the Basques?

One possible explanation can be found in the age of the suspects. We observed earlier that the Basque records are unusual, from a demonological perspective, in that they contain a high proportion of abduction narratives. But what we have not yet articulated is that nearly all the suspects who claimed to have been abducted were young – typically from about seven years of age to late teens. In this context it is surely relevant that in later Basque folktales and beliefs, the overwhelming majority of the individuals who were whisked away by ogres, night-visiting demons or predatory spirit-groups were also children or youths. Indeed, these narratives were specifically used as child behaviour correctives, with abduction commonly presented as a punishment for excessive curiosity or disobedience, such as straying too far from home. In a typical example the child misbehaves, the mother curses, and then the abduction takes place, with tales stating that ‘the young girl did not want to obey, so her mother cursed her and asked that she be carried away by devils’ or ‘her mother scolded her harshly, [saying] “I hope that by the time I return from Mass, some infernal spirit has carried you away!”’ This narrative was also reflected in everyday exchange, with Frank observing that when their children cried or misbehaved, twentieth-century Basque parents warned them that the Marrau or Mamu (and other representations of the Hamalau complex) would ‘take [them] away’. These threats – which could also make direct reference to the ogre’s cannibalistic tastes – could be incorporated into teasing gestures of affection, with Basque ethnographer J. M. Satrústegui noting that ‘in the village of Luzaide when children begin to understand things, they say to them while caressing their faces, “Marrau! Eat this child! Today or tomorrow? Today, today, today!”’²⁷ These messages would have been reinforced through ritual and theatre. As in other parts of Europe, child-eating ogres are likely to have been represented in carnival processions and traditions, with Frank maintaining, with regard to one of the Basque region’s most enduring good luck traditions, that it is ‘highly probable’ that ‘in times past’ when local men dressed in animal pelts, horns and masks (to represent the Marrau, Hartza or some other expression of the Hamalau complex) to visit houses and aggressively demand gifts, ‘children would have immediately identified the frightful [ogre] creature (that their parents had already spoken to them about) with these performers’.²⁸ These methods of behaviour correction, which exploited the youthful inability to draw hard and fast distinctions between myth and reality, would have ensured that Basque children were not only tormented by images of man-eating ogres and predatory spirit-groups – but also by the belief that these ogres and spirit-groups were specifically hunting for them.²⁹ From this perspective, the prominence of feast-cannibalism in the Basque witch-craze may have reflected the fact that, as children and teenagers, a large proportion of the suspects lived very closely with the emotional and visual intensity of these anthropophagic beliefs and as a consequence, walked into their interrogations ready-primed to respond with particular vivacity and expertise to questions about cannibalistic predation.

But although this argument is feasible, it must be measured against the finding that – once again – the factors identified here were not unique to the Basques. While parents from Navarre and Labourd certainly used tales of man-eating and child-abducting ogres and spirit-groups to frighten their children, so did their counterparts in other parts of Europe, with Frank reporting that Sardinian parents also sought to quieten and scare their children with tales of Hamalau-type beings; as in ‘Si no fais a bonu, beni Mommoti e ti furada’ [If you misbehave, the Mommoti comes and takes you away] or ‘Si no ti cittis, beni Mommoti e ti pappada’ [If you aren’t quiet, the Mommoti will come and eat you!].³⁰ More significantly, there is also clear evidence that children did not always draw these fears into witchcraft testimony. The witch-craze that swept across northern Sweden in the mid-seventeenth century (1668–76) was fuelled by the testimony of children and bears close comparison with the 1609–14 Basque witch-craze. Like their Basque counterparts, the Swedish child suspects emphasized the theme of abduction, frequently and vividly describing how witches swept them away against their wills to the sabbath (held at a site named Blåkulla). And as in the Basque country sixty years earlier, their stories were so convincing that their parents tried a range of methods, that included tying themselves to their children at night, to try and stop the abductions taking place. But despite these similarities, the Swedish children maintained that when they feasted at the sabbath the food was ‘ample and often good’ – of the kind that would be enjoyed in paradise – and did not refer to cannibalistic feasts of any kind.³¹ We cannot attribute this absence to a lack of imaginal raw materials for, as in the Basque country, Scandinavian myths, legends and folk theatricals are replete with examples of human-abducting and man-eating supernaturals.³² Similarly, traditional images of the Devil-as-predator survived in Swedish churches long after the Protestant Reformation began in 1527.³³ As a consequence we can only conclude that because Swedish children did not weave their fears surrounding child-eating folk spirits into their abduction narratives, we must be cautious before proposing that this dynamic was significantly responsible for the prominence of feast-cannibalism in the Basque case.

Real-World Cannibalism

Given the ambiguity of the folklore, we must look elsewhere for explanations. In the period of the witch-craze Europeans did not only believe that human flesh was consumed by spirits or supra-natural agents such as witches, ogres, devils and malign hosts – but also by more ordinary human beings. Through the medieval and into the early modern period, wars and regional conflicts generated sustained reports of cannibalism that, though now unverifiable, were clearly taken seriously at the time. Charles Zika observes that the atrocities performed in the French Wars of Religion in the 1570s led to ‘claims and counter claims of cannibalism’ that fuelled the ongoing ‘propaganda war’, with Protestants reporting that Catholics ate ‘the hearts of killed Huguenots as well as “fricassées d’oreilles d’hommes”’. More regional conflicts generated similar accounts. According to an eyewitness report, when the poor of Naples attacked town councillor Giovan Vincenzo Storace (in 1585) for his role in raising food prices, they lynched, stripped, castrated and mutilated him and then ‘cut out his intestines, his heart, and the other internal organs, which were cut up into little pieces that they avidly divided among themselves . . . They said to the onlookers that they wanted to eat the pieces in proper fashion, but also some of them bit into the raw flesh, inhumanely sucking the blood.’³⁴ Europeans would also have been familiar with tales of cannibalism that took place in more remote locations. By the fifteenth century the memoirs of medieval travellers like Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone and John Mandeville were widely disseminated and ‘appropriately illustrated with representations of the cannibals who live in distant lands.’ By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the burgeoning exploration of the New World generated numerous reports of cannibalistic practice among the native peoples of the Americas which achieved widespread circulation through the growing popularity of print; with German traveller Hans Staden’s eyewitness account of ritual cannibalism among the Brazilian Tupinambá, first published in 1557, enjoying particular success and being ‘republished and translated nine times before the end of the century.’ Texts depicting this ‘pagan cannibalism’, as we can term it here, were further enlivened by woodcut images, with Zika stating that these illustrations ‘were given almost canonical status in the narratives of European voyages to America put together and illustrated in various editions by Theodor de Bry and his sons between the 1590s and 1620s’. They could also be circulated even more quickly and widely through being printed and distributed as single-leaf woodcuts. From the early-sixteenth century, maps of the Americas increasingly featured images of cannibalism with the guilty locations typically labelled ‘Terra Canibalor’ or some other variant of the proverbial ‘Here be Cannibals’.³⁵

These developments are relevant to witchcraft. Scholars have argued that from the late-sixteenth century onwards, the circulation of images and narratives about New World anthropophagy breathed new life into the long-standing relationship between witches and cannibalism in Europe. Direct conduits from one matrix to the other, for example, can be traced in the visual image of the grill, with Charles Zika noting that after first appearing in the iconography surrounding New World cannibalism, the motif subsequently emerged in the imagery of witchcraft, with both Crispin de Passe and Henri Leroy depicting sabbaths at which victims were roasted on grills. But more relevant to our purpose here is that we can also identify this American influence in the narrative tenor of the Basque witch trial records. We have already emphasized at the beginning of this chapter that the sabbath narratives collected by Valle and Becerra provide uniquely vivid and detailed accounts of the acquisition, preparation and consumption of human flesh, with the Joint Sentence describing how the witches butcher and cook the corpses and then display the body parts on long tables – rather incongruously alongside the bread and wine – with all the busy nonchalance of women preparing communal meals at parish festivities.³⁶ It is surely relevant, then, that we find very similar imagery and tone in representations of cannibalism in the New World. Although contemporary authors were keen to condemn the Amerindians as ‘wild, naked, and savage man-munching people’, many of the eyewitness accounts and woodcut images of their ritual cannibalistic feasts depict civilized order as opposed to animalistic chaos.³⁷ Corpses are efficiently skinned and body parts are laid out systematically on huge grills and served to groups of women on large round platters, with naked or half-naked Indians, each with their designated tasks, going about their business in a state of concentrated industry. In the following account of a Tupinambá ritual from Hans Staden’s True History, the festive atmosphere, prominent role of women, careful division and processing of body parts and pragmatic retrieval of the leftovers to be taken home are uncannily redolent of the cannibalistic feasts of the Basque witches. After many rituals have been performed the Tupi king chooses a warrior to kill the sacrificial victim with a specially prepared weapon, then

he is seized by the women, who drag him to the fire, scrap all his skin off, making him quite white . . . When the skin is scraped off, a man takes the body and cuts the legs off above the knee, and the arms. Then four women come and carry away the four pieces, and run with them round the huts, raising cries of joy. Thereupon they cut off his back with the posterior from the fore-part: this they then divide among themselves; but the entrails are kept by the women, who boil them, and with the broth they make a mess called Mingan. This they and the children drink, the bowels they devour, and they also eat the flesh from off the head, the tongue and whatever else is eatable, the young ones eat. When this is done, all go home again, and take their share with them.³⁸

Why the Basques?

These correspondences are compelling, but they raise a fundamental question: if reports, woodcuts and lavishly illustrated travelogues depicting pagan cannibalism were circulating widely throughout Europe in this period, then why should this influence have been brought so heavily to bear on the confessions of the Spanish-Basques? In looking for answers, we can begin with the evidence that early modern Spain had ‘the strongest claim and easiest access of any European power to the potential of the New World’, and that many of the regions it colonized were strongly associated with cannibalism. Spanish elites were also eager to exploit stories of the practice for political purposes, with Duffy and Metcalf noting that ‘Rumours of cannibalism soon served the imperial aspirations of Spain. Reports of cannibalism, whether accurate or not, became the justification for the enslavement of Indians. Queen Isabella signed a law in 1503 that permitted indigenous groups who were cannibals to be legally enslaved.’³⁹

Even more pertinent, however, is that links with Amerindian cannibalism may have been even more intense in the Basque regions than in mainland Spain. As noted in Chapter One, rich stores of wood and iron and centuries of chasing whales across the Atlantic had enabled the Basques to develop considerable shipbuilding and seafaring prowess. These nautical abilities were also combined with a keen mercantile sense, an adventurous spirit and inheritance laws that encouraged young men to leave their birthplace and seek their fortunes elsewhere. The Basque nun, Catalina de Erauso (born c. 1585), who famously escaped her convent to become a cross-dressing soldier in the colonies, followed a father, uncle and no less than four brothers to the Americas. By the late-sixteenth century these factors may well have conspired to ensure that although the Basque country was small, the percentage of its inhabitants involved in interaction with the Americas was arguably the highest in Europe, with John Lynch estimating that ‘almost 80 percent of . . . New World traffic between 1520 and 1580 was Basque-controlled, while between 1580 and 1610 Basque interests represented 50 percent of the total’; to the effect that the region was ‘the nursery of Spanish seamen, which supplied most of the manpower on the American run.’⁴⁰ This Basque involvement was also demonstrated in the wealth of New World products that proliferated in the regions from an early period; while tobacco, for example, was still an ‘expensive luxury for the wealthy’ in countries like Britain, it was plentiful in the Basque regions, with de Lancre maintaining that ‘they all have a few [tobacco] plants of this kind in their gardens, however small they may be. They smoke it to clear their minds, sometimes sustaining themselves against hunger . . . and they use it three or four times a day.’⁴¹

22  Basque witches enjoying cannibalistic feasts at the akelarre, as depicted Ziarnco’s 1613 engraving.

23  With similar insouciance, Amerindian women and children feast on the intestines of a sacrificial victim. This is one of many similar illustrations that first appeared in Theodor de Bry’s 1590 publication of Hans Staden’s account of his nine-month captivity among the Brazilian Tupinambá.

As elsewhere in Europe, at the time of the witch-craze visual, literary and theatrical representations of the New World – and by implication the cannibalism that was practised there – were also circulating in the Basque region. Seventeenth-century Aragonese nun María de Ágreda, who was cloistered in a convent close to Navarre border, responded so intensely to these representations that she experienced a series of visions in which she believed herself to travel to the Americas through miraculous feats of ‘bilocation’; with Marilyn Fedewa noting that her imagination had been profoundly charged on the subject as early as age seven, when she saw Lope de Vega’s religious play The New World as Discovered by Christopher Columbus at a local Corpus Christi celebration. For others, these impressions could have been reinforced by encounters with some of the many thousands of Amerindians who, most commonly as slaves, made the journey to Spain, with de Lancre’s relative by marriage, Michel de Montaigne, meeting and being impressed by a member of the cannibalistic Tupinambá tribe in the French port city of Rouen. But we can speculate that for ordinary Basques, the most vivid and memorable impressions of Amerindian life were gleaned from the fathers, husbands, brothers and other family members who, like Catalina de Erauso, had travelled to the New World and enjoyed ‘recounting with spirited delight the story of . . . [their] adventures’ on coming home.⁴² In this context, it is no surprise to find that several witch suspects confessed to having flown to the New World to attend sabbaths or sabotage fishing trips, with a Labourdin woman stating that she had ‘gone to Newfoundland, perched on top of a ship’s mast’ before poisoning all the fish that had been caught.⁴³

Taking these factors together we can surmise that at the time of the witch-craze, awareness of the cannibalistic activities of the Amerindians was higher among the ordinary Basques than among the average European population in this period. We can also surmise that Basque children – already sensitized to stories about child-eating devils, folk ogres and hell demons – may have been particularly receptive to circulating stories about the ‘man-munching’ savages of the New World. Through this lens, in crafting an account of a Devil who stored human bones ‘in a large spherical basket that he has there for this purpose’ and ate ‘the aforementioned bones in a very ugly manner, munching on them like a pig with his teeth which are very big and white, sharing them with the oldest witches’, the Zugarramurdi suspects may well have mined stories about folk ogres and the anthropophagic Prince of Hell. But they may also have been mining reports from a New World where, according to Hans Staden, an explorer could meet an Amerindian king who ‘had a large basket full of human flesh before him . . . [and] ate (a bit) off a leg’ before offering it to him saying ‘Jauware sche; I am a tiger-animal. It tastes well.’ Particularly if, as was recorded in Mongastón’s version of the Zugarramurdi akelarre, the Devil munched these bones ‘with teeth that are very big and as white as the blacks usually have them’.⁴⁴

Cannibalism and the Spanish Inquisitors

With regard to the construction of the sabbath-feast accounts, it is also important to recognize that Amerindian imagery could also have been quarried by the interrogators. Although the exploration of the Americas was fuelled by the desire to gain goods and gold, in the febrile atmosphere of Counter Reformation Spain it was also fuelled by the desire to save souls, with Walter Mignolo noting that ‘missionary orders had an enormous importance in the colonization’ of the New World’. The opportunity to ‘build a new Christendom’ on the other side of the Atlantic was a potent motivating force in the minds of many Catholics even if they did not set foot out of Spain, with the intensity of these ideas evinced in María de Ágreda’s assertion that – despite being a cloistered nun – her visionary bilocation to New Mexico was an act of missionary communication.⁴⁵ Like their secular counterparts, clerical accounts of these missions often contained reports of pagan cannibalism, with particularly detailed descriptions of Mexican anthropophagic ritual, for example, appearing in the bestselling and influential Natural and Moral History of the Indies published in 1590 by Jesuit monk José de Acosta.⁴⁶

These factors cannot fail to have impacted on Valle and Becerra. Even if they were not drawn to the subject by natural curiosity, as clerics and inquisitors they would have been obliged to engage with the evangelical efforts of their peers. And we can deem it probable that, through hearing and reading missionary reports and texts, they would have been exposed to accounts of Amerindian cannibalism. This possibility is particularly strong in the case of Valle. The town of Santander was an important trading port for the Americas and we can assume that, being born in the province, Valle may have been familiar with the sight of ships arriving in the harbour and unloading their exotic cargoes of spice, tobacco, chocolate, maize and Amerindian slaves. His awareness of the New World would then have been further intensified in adulthood when he became ‘confidential secretary’ to the bishop of Valladolid, Juan Bautista de Acevedo Muñoz (appointed in 1601). The Castilian city of Valladolid was the residence of the Spanish court until 1561, and for a further brief period between 1601 and 1606. As ‘the occasional and de facto capital of the Spanish Empire during both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, the city was one of the most important – and at times the primary – administrative and financial engine fuelling Spain’s imperial interests in the Americas.⁴⁷ Its university ‘drew students from all over Spain, training candidates for posts in the Spanish Empire’ and acted as an intellectual hub for contemporary debates about Hispanic expansion in the New World. Relevant texts were also produced here, with Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s popular account of his time as Governor of Río de la Plata, which contained a vivid account of Tupinambá cannibalistic banqueting, being published in Valladolid in 1555. José de Acosta, author of the influential Natural and Moral History of the Indies, became the superior of Valladolid’s Jesuit order in 1594.⁴⁸

While we do not know how much time Acevedo and Valle spent in Valladolid, particularly after the former’s promotion to inquisitor general in 1603, we can surmise that these factors would have impacted on Valle in a range of ways. Since his promotion to the bishopric of Valladolid in 1601 (and probably before) Acevedo would have been engaged with missionary efforts in the New World at the highest level, with the records stating that he was the principle consecrator for Juan de Valle y Arrendondo, Bishop of Guadalajara, Mexico and also Ignatius Loyola’s grand-nephew, Martín Ignacio de Loyola, Bishop of Paraguay – a widely-travelled cleric of great zeal who had twice taken his missionary efforts to China.⁴⁹ His engagement in this respect is further intimated by the fact that in 1606, just five years after taking the bishopric in Valladolid and two years after becoming inquisitor general, Valle’s employer was further decorated, this time by King Phillip III of Spain, with the honorary title of ‘Patriarch of the West Indies [the Americas]’.⁵⁰ Although it held no jurisdictional significance, the title was unique and prestigious, elevating Acevedo above his episcopal peers and linking him imaginatively with a large and challenging patriarchate in the New World. We do not know how far this role impacted on Acevedo’s preoccupations and workload, but it is fair to assume that it would have intensified his intellectual and practical engagement with American missionary work. It is also fair to assume that it impacted on Valle. As Acevedo’s confidential secretary, Valle would have been deeply involved in the research, discussion and compiling of letters and reports necessary to further his employer’s efforts to ‘build a new Christendom’ among the ‘savage man-munching people’ of the New World. Of course, there is not enough evidence to chart the degree to which these factors may have influenced Valle’s subsequent engagement with the Basque witch-craze. But it is surely a coincidence that the man who was primarily responsible for generating the most New-World-like accounts of feast-cannibalism to emerge in any European witchcraft trial, had previously worked so intimately with the man who was the bishop of the city that served as the epicentre of Spanish interactions with the Americas and, even more importantly, had been formally appointed the ‘patriarch’ of this newly discovered realm.

From this vantage point, we can begin to see why feast-cannibalism may have emerged to such prominence in the Basque accounts. In an environment where both suspects and interrogators brought an enhanced consciousness of New World anthropophagy into the interrogation chamber, any reference to the cannibalistic proclivities of witches would have been collaboratively embellished and developed through mutual recourse to these imaginative lodes. Through this cocreative process, suspects and interrogators would have created accounts of cannibalistic witches that – while evoking the predatory and man-eating proclivities of heretics, spirit-hosts, ogres and hell demons – were ultimately defined by their capacity to process, cook and consume human corpses with all the clinical, ritual industry of the Tupinambá Indians of Brazil. This hypothesis helps to explain why Basque children may have brought cannibalistic feasts into their accounts of the sabbath while Swedish children did not. It also helps to explain why the most detailed and coherent accounts of cannibalistic banquets to have come down to us from early modern Europe were elicited by interrogators that, to our knowledge, had little exposure to demonological texts. And if we take Valle’s involvement on board, it also goes some way towards elucidating why, although New World exploration had been vigorously pursued by the Spanish since the late-fifteenth century, elaborate accounts of feast-cannibalism did not emerge in their witch confessions until the 1609–14 witch-craze.

The Cannibalistic Self

We have now identified a range of raw materials that could have been used by the Basque suspects to create their accounts of feast-cannibalism, with representations of the New World emerging as the most significant factor. But there is a further perspective on this issue that remains unexamined. All the imaginal components identified thus far involve acts of cannibalism performed by, what can be termed here as, ‘evil others’; whether witches, war enemies, hell demons, predatory spirit-groups, ogres or pagan Amerindians. To produce their feast-cannibalism accounts therefore, each Basque suspect had to make the imaginative and semantic jump from ‘they performed cannibalism’ to ‘I performed cannibalism’. The complex unconscious processes that generate fictions, false memories and stereotyped dreams would not have made this shift in agency difficult, but also worth emphasizing here is that this shift may have been aided by the fact that suspects had access to additional raw materials that did not require such redefinition – imaginal and experiential constructs in which cannibalistic acts were, from the very beginning, performed by the suspects themselves.

Although most of the tales about cannibalism that circulated in early modern Europe related to evil others, a significant minority involved less extraordinary or offensive protagonists. The French Wars of Religion did not only generate accounts of cannibalism between warring enemies but also accounts of civilian populations eating each other because they were starving, with Jean de Léry reporting that in the siege of the Protestant town of Sancerre in 1572–3, a family had resorted to eating their own child. Early modern Europeans were also exposed to both oral and printed rumours about ‘hunger cannibalism’, as we can term it here, among settlers in the New World, with a text published in 1624 containing an allegedly eye-witness account of Virginian colonists who ‘were reduced to eating the flesh of their dead companions or local inhabitants, disguising the taste with herbs and roots’ to stay alive.⁵¹ Similar action was taken – on a more municipal level – during the Siege of Paris in 1590, when the city authorities ordered that the charnel houses be plundered and the bones ground to make bread; giving a chilling authenticity to the infamous fairy tale rhyme: ‘Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread!’ There is also evidence that hunger cannibalism took place at sea, with Heike Behrend stating that among sailors it was

a more or less accepted practice until 1884, when two respectable seamen, lately of the yacht Mignonette, were sentenced to death for the murder and cannibalism of their shipmate. A bench of five judges ruled that one must not kill one’s shipmates in order to eat them however hungry one might be. Before this judgement, cannibalism as a form of maritime survival after shipwreck was seen as socially acceptable if preceded by a fair process such as the drawing of lots, particularly if agreed by a council of sailors.

In the present debate, hunger cannibalism at sea and in the colonies may be particularly relevant. As we have seen, centuries of chasing whales across the Atlantic had seen the Basques engaging in long-haul sea voyages long before the period of the witch-craze; with their nautical activities escalating in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries when growing New World interests saw their region become ‘the nursery of Spanish seamen, which supplied most of the manpower on the American run.’⁵² We can therefore speculate that through the testimony of their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and other family members, Basque communities were more exposed to tales of hunger cannibalism than the average European population in this period. Being able to draw on narratives in which the anthropophagic act was not just performed by evil others, but also by ordinary sailors or colonists who just happened to find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, would have made it easier for the suspects’ unconscious minds to construct fictions, false memories and dreams in which they themselves engaged in cannibalistic acts.

Corpse Medicine Revisited

But the process through which the Basque suspects imagined themselves into cannibals could have also been fuelled by experiences closer to home. Returning to the witch records, it is notable that some of the cannibalistic events described take place outside the akelarre feasts in more intimate and domestic settings. In reference to the suspects condemned at the Logroño auto de fé, Valle stated:

Some of the witches who are kinsfolk and friends gather also of their own accord, especially when a child or relative of their’s has died while yet small. Without the devil they go to the church, dig up the corpse, bear it back to their house and devour it. The owner of the house provides the necessary bread and wine while the cost of the meal is shared out between them.

Similarly, the Sentence of María de Zozaya states that:

Often as a favourite and chosen one of the Devil she would take home from the akelarre the pieces of meat from the bodies of the aforementioned witches which were left over from the dinner, and with these she invited the witches and other friends to her home for whom it was a great gift and [sign of] friendship to be at this banquet in which she would serve bread and wine and other things . . .⁵³

These descriptions of witches consuming human body parts in their homes appear to be distinct from the accounts of grand cannibalistic banquets at the akelarre and their genesis is not immediately clear. They could represent an intrusion into the akelarre narrative of suspects’ memories of smaller celebratory meals celebrated in domestic contexts, with the Zozaya passage also reflecting the reality that larger communal feasts would have generated leftovers that were collected up to be eaten at home. But there is another factor that may be relevant here. In our examination of poison making in Chapter Seven, we observed that witches often disinterred corpses and took them home or to the akelarre to process them into toxic ointments and powders. While these poison-making passages may at first glance appear to have little to do with cannibalism, on closer observation it is evident that in many of these cases the corpses taken home for poison-making and the corpses dismembered and cooked for consumption were one and the same. The Zozaya sentence states that ‘in their black bag the Devil’s servants kept the bones from the bodies of the deceased because they only ate the meat and from these bones they later made powders and poisons’; while the Joint Sentence echoes that witches ate parts of the disinterred corpses at the akelarre and then buried ‘the brains and bones’ in ‘some holes so that later they can make the usual deadly poisons and ointments from them.’⁵⁴ Examined in the context of the perspectives developed in Chapter Seven – where we argued that the poison-making accounts were inspired by genuine medicine and pesticide-making practices – this conflation between the disinterring of corpses for poisons and the disinterring of corpses for cannibalistic feasts could be seen to reflect successful interrogatorial efforts to hijack suspects’ references to benign corpse-use in order to divert them into demonologically stereotypical narratives about feast-cannibalism. But of relevance here is that the suspects’ ability to collaborate with this proposed conflation may have been fuelled by an altogether different source.

We demonstrated in Chapter Seven that the use of corpses was standard procedure in early modern medicine, on both elite and popular levels. But what we have not emphasized until now is that these prescriptions were not just designed to be used on the body in the form of ointments and so on, but also to be taken internally; with Montaigne maintaining that ‘physicians fear not, in all kinds of compositions availful to our health, to make use of [the human body], be it for outward or inward applications’. This ‘medicinal cannibalism’, as it has been termed, was ‘practised more or less extensively throughout Europe’ in the early modern period and was rooted in the belief, found in a wide range of human cultures, that the ingestion of corpses can confer some kind of religico-magical benefit. As with corpse medicine in general, medicinal cannibalism did not just involve the processing and consumption of dry, dehumanized bones (as pragmatically utilized to combat hunger by the Paris authorities in 1590) but also other bits of the corpse including ‘human flesh, blood, heart, skull, bone marrow, and other body parts’.⁵⁵ Medicinal prescriptions often required the corpse to be dismembered and then manufactured into powder or liquid that was then incorporated with other ingredients to make it more palatable and detached from its human origins. But consumption could also be startlingly direct. The epileptics who went to execution sites seeking the curative benefits of criminals’ blood, were required to drink it from a receptacle as if it were a cup of water, with seventeenth-century English physician Edward Taylor emphasizing that ‘human blood, drunk warm and new is held good in the falling sickness’; and French doctor Moses Charas condemning the contemporary belief that ‘the blood of man, gulped down warm as it runs out of the veins, is a specific remedy against the epilepsy’. Also notable is the assertion, by some early modern physicians, that fresh blood could be drunk direct from the living to restore youth and health to an ailing or ageing body. While it is hard to assess whether this practice occurred in reality, the surviving evidence is sufficient for Richard Sugg to postulate that ‘there may . . . have been a relatively general habit of bloodsucking in [fifteenth-century] France among the elderly.’⁵⁶ There is certainly some clinical precision in contemporaneous claims by Italian priest Marsilio Ficino that the patient must find a youth

who is willing, happy, and temperate, whose blood is of the best but perhaps too abundant. They will suck, therefore, like leeches, an ounce or two from a scarcely opened vein of the left arm; they will immediately take an equal amount of sugar and wine; they will do this when hungry and thirsty and when the Moon is waxing. If they have difficulty digesting raw blood, let it first be cooked together with sugar; or let it be mixed with sugar and moderately distilled over hot water and then drunk . . .⁵⁷

Although we have little direct evidence, the fact that medicinal cannibalism was popular in France and Spain in the early modern period renders it wholly reasonable to assume that it was also practised in the Basque regions. And as a corollary of this, we can speculate that a proportion of the men and women interrogated in the witch-craze were not only aware of these practices but that some may even have prepared corpse medicines for internal consumption or consumed such medicines themselves. When asked by the interrogators to talk about feast-cannibalism, those in possession of this knowledge and experience would have found it all the easier to create fictions, false memories and dreams in which they personally ate human corpses both in the home and at the akelarre. There is of course a big difference between the more discreet process of swallowing medicinal powders containing ground human bones and the more overt act of sitting at a table sinking one’s teeth into a dismembered human limb or heart – but the remembered experience of opening the mouth and consuming a corpse, however medically processed and for whatever good reason, would have provided suspects’ imaginations with a core of real life experience around which the more exotic cannibalistic narratives could constellate.

This thesis would provide an alternative explanation, alongside that of interrogatorial conflation, as to why accounts of the disinterment of corpses for use in poisons were blent so seamlessly with the procurement of body parts for the cannibalistic feast, and why episodes of feast-cannibalism at the akelarre so easily devolved into cannibalistic meals at the suspects’ homes. It also sheds light on anomalous declarations, from the Zugarramurdi suspects, that when they were performing their acts of infanticidal vampirism the Devil urged them to: ‘Suck and swallow, for it is very good for you!’ Considered in isolation this exhortation represents all that is senseless, inhumane and sensational about the early modern witch. But examined alongside the finding that early modern physicians were advising their patients to drink fresh blood ‘as it runs out of the veins’ of young men and criminals in order to cure epilepsy or restore youth, it appears less strange. Measured against this belief, the Zugarramurdi villager (or villagers) responsible for this reference could have fleshed out their infanticidal vampirism account by drawing on their knowledge or experience of medicinal cannibalism and the therapeutic effects of fresh blood; with the Devil’s advisory role reflecting our earlier contention that Basque suspects drew on their experiences of specialist bloodletters when creating their accounts of both Devil-led vampirism and the witches’ mark. While this conflation between vampirism and the medicinal cannibalism may seem far-fetched, it was in fact made in the early modern period itself, with Ficino prefacing his account of therapeutic bloodsucking with the claim that ‘there is a common and ancient opinion that certain prophetic old women who are popularly called “screech-owls” suck the blood of infants as a means, insofar as they can, of growing young again. Why shouldn’t our old people, namely those who have no [other] recourse, likewise suck the blood of a youth?’⁵⁸ This evidence does not suggest that medicinal cannibalism was more common in the Basque regions than anywhere else in Europe in this period, nor that it was responsible for the emphasis on feast-cannibalism in the witch records, but it does raise the possibility that once the theme had emerged in the Basque interrogations, it helped some of the suspects take ownership of the cannibalistic event.

Very Catholic Cannibals

This sense of ownership could also have been fuelled by more orthodox channels. The common tendency to define anthropophagy as morally repugnant makes it easy to overlook the fact that in early modern Europe, as now, the primary vehicle of communal Catholic worship – the mass – revolved around an act of ritual cannibalism: the sacrament of the Eucharist. The scriptural authority for the rite lay in New Testament accounts of the Last Supper, where Christ gave bread and wine to his disciples, saying: ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.⁵⁹ The ‘Eucharist ritual’, as it shall be termed here, is essentially a re-enactment of this event in which the priest consecrates bread and wine then ritually consumes it before distributing it to be consumed by members of the congregation.⁶⁰

This sacrament, which has many levels of meaning, was the focus of much debate and dispute throughout the medieval and early modern period. For the Church it was, at its most fundamental, a means through which a supplicant could achieve mystical union with God (with the rite also being termed ‘holy communion’). But as we shall explore in more depth in later chapters, for many ordinary laity and clergy the rite was a vehicle through which to supplicate God to provide more immediate, practical benefits such as good health and prosperity, with this utilitarian approach reflected in contemporary allegations that parishioners secreted or stole the Eucharist bread (or ‘host’) for use in domestic magico-medical rituals.⁶¹ Although the majority of parishioners only consumed the Eucharist once a year on Easter Sunday, the great value set on witnessing the performance of the rite and particularly the elevation of the host, meant that the average mass-attending Catholic would have interacted visually and emotionally with this ritual act of cannibalism every week of the year.⁶² While always important, from the late-medieval period onwards the Eucharist ritual was promoted with increasing energy by the Church. The ‘cult of the consecrated host’ became the ‘central symbol’ of Catholic worship and the feast of Corpus Christi’ (Christ’s body) evolved into one of the most important religious events of the year.⁶³ Indeed, according to some scholars, by the period of the witch-craze the feast of Corpus Christi was the ‘greatest festival in the Church calendar’ in Spain.⁶⁴

Did this sacrament have any influence on suspects’ contributions to their accounts of feast-cannibalism? At first glance there is little evidence of this. While, as we shall argue in Chapter Eighteen, the accounts of mass-like ceremonies celebrated at the akelarre strongly suggest that suspects did indeed mine their experiences of the Eucharist rite when creating their accounts of the sabbath event – the graphic and sensational accounts of witches, devils and toad familiars munching on human hearts and brains at the sabbath feasts are much more evocative of the bloodthirsty banquets of devils, ogres and predatory spirit-groups than the solemn experience of kneeling at the altar to sacramentally consume the Eucharist bread at communion. But with regard to the cannibalistic feast, we may simply be dealing with Eucharistic influences that were a little more covert. The first point of relevance here is that according to the Catholic Church, the act of cannibalism at the core of the Eucharist was ‘real’. It was not merely commemorative or symbolic. Through the miraculous process of transubstantiation, the bread and wine consecrated by the priest was genuinely transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ. But arguably even more relevant is that in order to foster a better devotion to the Eucharist ritual, the Catholic Church targeted the human imagination. Devotional manuals urged supplicants to use their powers of mental visualization to concentrate on ‘the flesh, blood and physical body-parts of Christ’ in the belief that this would enable them to better understand the mystery of the ‘corporeal presence of Christ in the Mass’ and gain a more profound Eucharistic experience. Although the Last Supper (on which the Eucharist was based) took place when Christ was an adult, these attempts were also promulgated through legends, recorded since the time of the Desert Fathers, that depicted Christ appearing in the host in the form of a child.⁶⁵ One of the first and most vivid versions of this narrative appears in an early Christian account in which a sceptical monk went with two companions to mass and

24  In this sixteenth-century Italian woodcut, worshippers look on as Christ appears in the Eucharist chalice as the ‘Man of Sorrows’.

when the loaves were placed on the altar, it seemed to the three monks that a little Boy lay there. As the priest stretched out his hand to break the bread, an angel of God came down from heaven and stabbed the Child with a knife, catching His blood in a chalice. When the priest broke the bread into small pieces, the angel cut up the Boy’s limbs. The doubting monk went forward to partake of the Sacrament, and was given bleeding flesh, whereupon he cried out, ‘Lord, I believe that the bread laid on the altar is Thy Body and the chalice Thy Blood.’⁶⁶

As Leah Sinanoglou attests, this astonishing and savage legend in which ‘the bread of the Eucharist is transformed between the very hands of the priest at mass into a small living child, then slain and dismembered before the eyes of the congregation’ was ‘very common’ throughout medieval Europe. Appearing as a ‘pulpit favorite’ in sermons, it was also re-enacted in religious plays, referenced in devotional texts and depicted on church tabernacles and windows.⁶⁷ It was even debated by theologians, with Thomas of Aquinas applying his mind to the thorny question of ‘whether Christ’s Body Is Truly There When Flesh or a Child Appears Miraculously in This Sacrament’; while fourteenth-century fictional character Piers Ploughman could refer, without feeling the need for explanation, to the Eucharist rite as having ‘eaten the whole child and drunk its blood.’⁶⁸

These perspectives are immediately relevant to our theme. We have argued many times that the fictions, false memories and dreams that underpinned the suspects’ false confessions were fuelled by psychological processes that involved the creative faculties of both the conscious and unconscious mind. If the suspects’ imaginations had already been primed before they came to their interrogations to visualize the dismemberment and consumption of Christ’s body in the Eucharist ritual, then a wide range of cannibalistic imagery would have been available to them. When pressed to produce accounts of feast-cannibalism, the same experiences and skills that enabled them to imagine the Eucharist as a real event would have helped them to visualize the dismemberment and consumption of human bodies at the akelarre.⁶⁹ Imagery surrounding the child–host miracle, in particular, would have made it easier to construct narratives in which the Devil and his witches divided and ritually ingested the bodies of children; with this imagery being particularly compulsive, perhaps, to a demographic group that endured the highest infant mortality rate in early modern Europe. That suspects and interrogators could conspire to profane the Eucharist ritual in this way finds support in other quarters. As Susan Zimmerman has observed, in the medieval period it was widely believed that from either ‘malice or curiosity’ Jews (and sometimes Muslims) ‘were obsessed with “testing” the presence of Christ in the Host’. Reports and legends circulated in which, instead of being sacrificed and dismembered by angels or priests in an endorsed and sacred way, the Christ Child was murdered and abused, with Zimmerman noting that ‘most visual depictions of Jewish host desecrations featured an image of the bleeding Christ Child on the mutilated wafer, so that the intended sacrilege encompassed both deicide and infanticide.’ The canon also depicted Jews ritually killing young boys who had been chosen to serve as ‘substitutes’ for the host, with one widely circulated legend reporting that in Holy Week in 1475 they abducted a three-year-old child named Simon of Trent and then circumcised, ‘punctured, bled, and eviscerated’ their young victim.⁷⁰ We do not know whether any Basque suspects were familiar with these legends, although it is notable that Jews were accused of murdering Christian children in the Basque regions as early as 1332.⁷¹ But these traditions do show how easily and effectively early modern imaginations could distort the imagery of the Eucharist into something evil and profane and support the view that access to this imagery may have helped Basque witch suspects appropriate the cannibalistic event.

The Eucharist and the Interrogators

If we explore the Spanish context in a little more depth, we find additional evidence to support this case. It may well be relevant that the two men who orchestrated the overwhelming majority of the Basque feast-cannibalism accounts – Valle and Becerra – both had religious vocations and, as such, would have experienced a more intense relationship with the Eucharist than the average man, woman or non-ecclesiastic judge. While this means little in itself – for hundreds of monks and priests interrogated witches at ecclesiastical and inquisitorial courts throughout the medieval and early modern periods without eliciting elaborate accounts of feast-cannibalism – it becomes more significant when we consider some of the circumstantial evidence. As argued in Chapter Twelve, Valle and Becerra were intensely concerned with the existential threats being posed to Catholicism, and indeed Christendom as a whole, by contemporary heretical movements, particularly Protestantism. In this context it is surely relevant that one of the major zones of conflict between the Catholic and Protestant Church was the sacrament of the Eucharist. The doctrinal assertion that the consecrated bread and wine turned into the ‘real’ body and blood of Christ had always presented difficulties (in terms of outside opinion) for the Catholic theologians, with the members of many heretical groups and alternative religions – such as the host-desecrating Jews described above – denying the reality of transubstantiation and the belief that the Eucharist sacrament was necessary for salvation.⁷² These historical difficulties increased exponentially during the Reformation, when Catholic theologians were increasingly pressured to defend the doctrine of transubstantiation against Protestant claims that the bread-to-flesh transformation was merely symbolic, with the Council of Trent ruling that: ‘If any one saith, that Christ, given in the Eucharist, is eaten spiritually only, and not also sacramentally and really; let him be anathema [cursed].’⁷³ Serving an institution – the Spanish Inquisition – specifically dedicated to the promotion of Catholic orthodoxy, these concerns would have been central to Valle and Becerra’s inquisitorial work. But they would also have made cannibalistic witchcraft a tricky crime to navigate. As both witchcraft interrogators and Spanish inquisitors, they found themselves in the unenviable position of having to condemn the cannibalistic feasts that were so important to the witches while simultaneously defending, with some vigour, the reality of the cannibalistic acts that were so important to their own Catholic faith. Their attempts to resolve this conundrum may well have seen them try to create as much distance as they could between the two forms of anthropophagy, making the witches’ sabbath feasts appear as savage, morally repugnant and demonic as possible to distinguish them from the Eucharist rite.

With regard to Valle, these efforts may have been further intensified through his engagement with the Americas. While the Eucharist ritual was threatened in Europe by Protestant scepticism, it was also threatened in the New World by indigenous Amerindian cannibalism. Any attempt, on the part of Catholic missionaries, to foster an attachment to the Eucharist had to simultaneously work to sever any existing attachment to more traditional forms of ritual anthropophagy. In meeting this challenge, missionaries attempted to minimize or spin their teachings on the reality of transubstantiation so as not to encourage native cannibalistic practices, whilst also distinguishing them from the Eucharist ritual by emphasizing their links with the Devil.⁷⁴ Through his years spent living and working in Valladolid as confidential secretary to the Patriarch of the West Indies, Valle may well have been more familiar with the existential threats that Amerindian anthropophagy posed to the Eucharist than many of his ecclesiastical and secular colleagues. And his enhanced anxieties in this regard may have invigorated his attempts to condemn the cannibalistic practices of the Basque witches and link them, both thematically and motivationally, with the degenerate feasts of the ‘man-munching’ pagans of the New World.

But while Valle’s involvement was probably crucial here, it is also possible that Eucharistic concerns worked their way into the Basque feast-cannibalism accounts long before they even reached him at the Logroño Tribunal. Earlier in this chapter we observed that according to the evidence compiled by Henningsen, la Suprema only made reference to (and gave instructions regarding) the consumption of corpses – as opposed to just exhumation – after it had seen the first ten confessions from Zugarramurdi. This, along with the fact that the Joint Sentence contains the most detailed and coherent accounts of feast-cannibalism to emerge in the Basque records, suggests that the theme may have originated in, or at least received a large impetus from, these early testimonials. We also noted in previous chapters that although these early confessions were developed and formalized in Logroño by Valle and Becerra, they first emerged out of a series of interrogations that were conducted in the village of Zugarramurdi itself by monks from the nearby Premonstratensian monastery. With regard to the present discussion, then, it is surely coincidental that the Premonstratensian order was characterized by a very specific and passionate vocational commitment to the Holy Eucharist (Cultus Eucharisticus). The order’s founder, St Norbert, was actually known as the ‘Apostle of the Blessed Sacrament [the Eucharist]’, and as a consequence ‘devotion to the Holy Eucharist as a sacrifice and sacrament’ had ‘the first place in the heart of a son of St. Norbert’. This pre-occupation is also reflected in the finding that the earliest accounts of the saint’s life contained two separate versions of the child–host miracle.⁷⁵ Even more to the point, is that this vocational commitment is unlikely to have remained hidden behind cloister walls. As priest of the Zugarramurdi parish, Urdax monk Felipe de Zabaleta may well have transmitted his ‘devotion to the Holy Eucharist’ to his congregation, sermonizing on and celebrating the rite with a particular intensity and perhaps encouraging his parishioners, with the help of St Norbert’s Life, to engage imaginatively with the reality of transubstantiation through the miracle of the Christ Child in the Host. With regard to the witch confessions, these preoccupations may have motivated Zabaleta to question the suspects closely and defensively on the subject of the witches’ cannibalistic feasts. But even if they had not, any raised consciousness of the Eucharist ritual among the Zugarramurdi parishioners, and any enhanced ability to enter into and own the imagery and narratives of ritual cannibalism, would have made them very vulnerable to Valle’s subsequent interest.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

‘There is no sin in it’

Along with banquet cannibalism, the other dark festivity that characterized the Basque akelarre was communal and demonic sex. The records state that at some point, generally towards the end of the proceedings, the witches would have intercourse with the Devil and/or other witches, with these orgiastic encounters typically including multiple partners, adultery, homosexuality, sodomy and incest. In an account from Labourd, Jeanette d’Abadie tells de Lancre that not only was she seduced by Satan, but that

The Devil would command them to form couples and have sex, giving each of them all that nature most abhors, that is to say, the daughter to her father, the son to his mother, the sister to her brother, the goddaughter to her godfather, the penitent to her confessor, without regard to either age or social standing, or degree of kinship . . . The Devil brought them together and forced them to commit this sin, either with him or with other people gathered at the sabbath.

Similarly, the Joint Sentence states that after the witches’ mass

the Devil knows them all carnally and sodomitically, taking them one by one saying ‘go there, for I must know you carnally’; saying this with vile and indecent words. And all the other witches mix with each other in indecent and sodomitic acts with no regard for the level of their kinship with one another nor for whether man and man come into contact. And on the aforementioned nights of the main feasts the Devil knows all those who are aged fourteen and above carnally . . .¹

Accounts of ‘akelarre-’ or ‘sabbath-sex’, as we can term it here, emerge prominently in Basque records on both sides of the border; although in this case – in direct contrast to feast-cannibalism – the most vivid and detailed accounts emerge in France as opposed to Spain. In describing sexual activity per se the Basque records are not anomalous, with the theme being a common feature of witchcraft trials Europe-wide. But once again they are unusual in their emphasis. In European witch-trials as a whole, accounts of private sexual encounters between individual witches and the Devil outside the sabbath were much more common than those of orgiastic sabbath-sex, with Briggs observing in relation to early modern Lorraine, for example, that although beliefs in ‘seductions by the devil’ were ‘widespread’ they generally emerged in the context of private encounters and the ‘idea that the sabbat was a scene of depraved sexuality only surfaced occasionally, and then mostly by implication.’² The Basque records run counter to this European norm. While we do find multiple accounts of private sex between witches and the Devil in the Spanish sources, in the records as a whole the references to sabbath-sex are not only more numerous but their richness and intricacy make them the most prominent accounts of the phenomenon to have come down to us from witch-hunting Europe.

Akelarre-Sex: The Interrogators

As with feast-cannibalism, in examining akelarre-sex we move into a relatively unexplored area. Much scholarly attention has been devoted to private demonic sex, with many studies noting that both personal sexual experiences and beliefs about carnal relationships between humans and spirits (as they emerge in theological, demonological and folkloric matrices) influenced confessional reports of the theme. Although there is no scope to explore this issue here, there are indications to suggest that these same avenues of research would bear fruit with regard to the Basque private-sex accounts.³ But despite its exoticism, sexual activity at the sabbath has been subjected to far less scholarly scrutiny, and its origins and the mechanics through which it emerged in trial confessions are less well-understood. Unlike private demonic sex, the theme has no clear precedent in either elite or popular debates concerning sexual relationships between humans and spirits and is also harder to link to real-life eroticism; Catalina de Porto’s claim that she and the Devil were privately ‘hugging and kissing one another like man and wife, and talking and chatting about amorous things’, for example, can be much more easily linked to personal sexual experience than frenzied, public displays of sodomy and incest.⁴

In exploring this issue in the Basque case, we can begin with the fact that the interrogators were clearly involved in creating the accounts of akelarre-sex. De Lancre freely admits that he pursued suspects with ‘sordid’ and ‘untoward’ questions about their ‘infamous and cursed coupling’ at the sabbath; while lengthy passages in the Pamplona Manuscript demonstrate that Valle and Becerra pressed suspects for material proof that they had engaged in sex at the event (in this case, having ‘blooded’ garments on their return). With regard to precedent, de Lancre had ample recourse to demonological works, with the allegation that witches engaged in communal sex at the sabbath emerging in the majority of the authorities cited in the Tableau. Boguet, whom de Lancre directly references on the subject, alleges that ‘after the dancing the witches begin to couple with each other; and in this matter the son does not spare his mother, nor the brother his sister, nor the father his daughter; but incest is commonly practised . . . [and] Satan becomes an Incubus for the women and a Succubus for the men.’ We also know that de Lancre encountered the theme in witchcraft trials before he came to Labourd, with Jeanne Bosdeau telling the Bordeaux Parlement in 1594 that after meeting the Devil at the sabbath he took her aside into the woods and had sex with her and ‘la semence aussi froide que glace [the semen was cold as ice]’.⁵ With regard to Valle and Becerra, the extent of their exposure to demonological precedent is unknown but it is highly likely that they came across references to akelarre-sex in the inquisitorial documents and trial records they examined to acquaint themselves with the crime of witchcraft. One of the inquisitorial letters sent to the Tribunal by la Suprema, which dated from the first half of the sixteenth century, cited ‘participación carnal’ between men, women and the Devil as one of the features of the witches’ gatherings.⁶ The theme also appeared intermittently in earlier trial records, with suspects from Garayoa claiming in 1577 that when they were at the sabbath an ugly ‘black man’ went on all fours like a goat when he had sex with them; and others from Inza in 1595 that the witches worshipped ‘Beezlebub and the woman who sat beside him. And the women had sex with this Beezlebub, and the men with the said woman.’ The inquisitors may also have encountered associated beliefs in theological tracts, with the treatise on superstition published by Arles in 1517 reporting that a ‘respectable married woman’ told her confessor that she experienced dreams in which she was ‘riding on animals through the fields with other people, and while thus crossing over water a man would have sexual intercourse with her and she would feel an intense lustful pleasure in the act.’⁷

But while this evidence points to interrogatorial involvement, it still does not explain why this involvement should have generated the most prominent accounts of sabbath-sex to have come down to us from medieval and early modern Europe. While Valle and Becerra may well have been influenced by earlier witch trial records and inquisitorial documentation, their emphasis on akelarre-sex exceeds this historical emphasis. And with regard to de Lancre, although demonological precedent may have helped, it could not have helped that much. Although most of the demonological authorities cited in the Tableau referred to sabbath-sex, none of them subjected it to as much scrutiny or contextualized it so firmly within the sabbath as de Lancre. As with feast-cannibalism, the crime was emphasized more strongly in earlier demonological works such as the Formicarius, but even here the references tend to be more formulaic and less detailed than those that emerged in the Tableau. Even more notably, both the Malleus Maleficarum and most of the later demonologists frequently cited by de Lancre such as Bodin, del Rio and Rémy, focus primarily on private sex with the Devil and only discuss or imply orgiastic sex in passing.⁸ Similarly, although de Lancre also encountered the theme first hand before arriving in Labourd via the dramatic testimony of Jeanne Bosdeau, her description of sabbath-sex (as reported in L’Antichrist at least) was a short and essentially private sexual encounter with the Devil that took place in some woods alongside the sabbath, as opposed to being a public, communal experience central to the whole event. Although we cannot rule out the possibility that de Lancre encountered high levels of sabbath-sex at other witchcraft trials conducted in Bordeaux, there is no evidence of this; and if such cases had occurred we would expect them to have been referenced in the Tableau.

In looking for alternative explanations, we can turn to heresy. In Chapter Twelve we argued that the marked interest in the witches’ sabbath displayed by both French and Spanish interrogators, may have reflected their shared preoccupation with heretical threats. In this context it is highly coincidental that along with feast-cannibalism, orgiastic sex had been a stereotypical feature of heretical-cult activity from an early period, with scholars arguing that the theme first entered into fifteenth-century stereotypes of the witches’ sabbath – alongside feast-cannibalism – via these heretical templates.⁹ In the Basque case the interrogators may well have been inspired by historical cults, following Boguet’s observation that the ‘incests and lecheries [of the witches] bring to my mind the practices of the Euchites and the Gnostics’. But in the case of Valle and Becerra, we can also suspect that they may have been influenced by heresies closer to home. In Chapter Twelve we argued that the two inquisitors would have been highly cognisant of the threats posed by the Spanish Alumbrados, with specific and detailed warnings about the sect featuring in the Edict of Faith circulated in Basque churches during the witch-craze visitations. In this context, it is surely relevant that the Alumbrados had been specifically associated with sexual promiscuity from an early period. Emerging faintly in the first Castilian trials, reports of the crime escalated dramatically in the Extremaduran prosecutions of the early-1570s, to the extent that sexual immorality was formally recognized as one of the cult’s crimes. The leader of the Jaén Alumbrados, Gaspar Lucas, was accused of ‘regularly’ engaging ‘in sexual acts with his beatas, both inside and outside of the confessional’; while interrogator Alonso de la Fuente reported that ‘the Devil had sex with some of these [Alumbrados] women, occasionally appearing in the form of Christ crucified and causing them thousands of “pollutions”.’¹⁰ As a result of these concerns, in 1578 a clause was added to the Edict of Faith (1574) stating that the cult gathered ‘together in private homes, men and women [to] dine and sup and at the end conjoin themselves carnally, saying there is no sin in it because they see none in it’. Reports of these sexual exploits could have reached Valle and Becerra via their inquisitorial roles, but it is also possible that they impacted on them at an earlier and more formative life stage. Born in the Extremaduran town of Cáceres in 1560 and received into a local monastery at a young age, Becerra would have been a teenager when reports of Alumbrados promiscuity first began to circulate in the region. Similarly if Valle’s early life in Santander – as argued in Chapter Twelve – had fostered an awareness of the historical threats posed by the heretics of Durango, it is surely coincidental that this cult was also ‘characterized by its followers practising the communal sharing of goods and women, [and] a great licentiousness, mixed with certain mystical practices.’¹¹ In the absence of any hard evidence our speculations must be highly tentative here, but it is notable that powerful impressions of heretical cult sexuality, received at an impressionable age, could certainly have fuelled the commitment with which Valle and Becerra pursued confessions about akelarre-sex.

While enlightening, however, these perspectives can only take us so far. There is the general point – also made in relation to feast-cannibalism – that throughout the medieval and early modern periods many European witchcraft interrogators would have been oppressed by fears of heretical cult sexuality without feeling the need to produce sabbath-sex accounts as vivid and graphically detailed as those that emerged in the Basque witch-craze. There is also the more specific problem of de Lancre. If heretical cult templates had been the prime inspiration here, you might expect the Spanish accounts to be the most prominent but in fact the opposite is the case. While the latter do produce some vividly realistic depictions of private sex with the Devil, their descriptions of sabbath-sex often amount to little more than an acknowledgement that it occurred followed by a mechanical list of the stereotypical taboos broken and some kind of material proof, such as a shirt or camisole stained with blood, that the event had really taken place.¹² The French records, meanwhile, are much more likely to contain details concerning the appearance and status of the suspects involved, the emotions they experienced when engaging in these acts and, most dramatically of all, long digressions on the size, shape and texture of the Devil’s penis. As a consequence, with regard to interrogatorial input, the prominence of akelarre-sex in the French-Basque records still requires explanation.

The Contributions of the Accused

In looking for further explanations, we can turn to the suspects. Scholars have long-noted that medieval and early modern witch suspects actively contributed to their confessional accounts of private demonic sex, but less attention has been paid to the possibility that they may also have contributed to accounts of sex at the sabbath. As we have seen above, as early as 1517 Basque women were describing their fantasies of having ‘intense lustful’ sex in a communal setting to religious confessors and there is evidence to suggest that similar accounts were produced by the accused during the Basque witch-craze. The clearest indications are found in de Lancre’s repeated assertions that suspects were eager to talk about their sexual exploits, as in his criticism that ‘instead of keeping silent about this damnable coupling, which makes one blush and cry’, young girls ‘thirteen to fourteen years old, explain with more willingness than required.’ While such comments could be dismissed as disingenuous attempts to mask a judicially inappropriate interest in the subject of sex, they often have the ring of authenticity. That de Lancre did not just superimpose his own preoccupations onto suspect-testimony is also indicated by his observation, after recounting a teenage defendant’s claim that she had ‘frequently seen the Devil have sex with a great many women’, that ‘it is clear that what she said was true’ because ‘since she was quite young, her youth prevented her from inventing a filthy story’. Evidence of suspect-contribution can also be found in the places where de Lancre was clearly surprised by new disclosures on the subject, as illustrated in his allegation that during a discussion about the Devil’s promiscuity: ‘on this subject a spinster said something interesting, namely that he Devil hardly ever had intercourse with virgins, because with them he could not admit adultery: thus he waits for them to be married.’ That the Bordeaux judge was receiving as well as interjecting information on this theme is also suggested by his admission that some defendants’ statements contradicted the demonological manuals; concluding a summary of their descriptions of the ‘length, the width, and the thickness’ of the Devil’s penis with the observation that ‘this is completely opposite to what Boguet says, namely that the women from his country never saw his organ to be longer than a finger and just as wide. Thus all the female witches of the Labourd are better served by Satan than are those of Franche-Comté.’ That de Lancre’s surprise was genuine gains further support from the fact that Salazar (who was not a man to encourage sensationalism) also observed that ‘some of the things that cause most surprise are those experiences they say they undergo as witches . . . an older man of eminently sound reason, stated that the Devil had married him off to a certain female witch at the aquelarre and that for a long time he had had sexual intercourse with her there.’¹³

We also hear the voices of the accused in the idiosyncrasies and anomalies that pepper the akelarre-sex accounts. We find the Devil forming ‘some sort of cloud when he wants to couple with a woman or girl’ so that children ‘could not see this unspeakable act’ (that could include having sex ‘with the pretty ones from the front and with the ugly ones from behind’). We hear defiance in the claim that the Devil ‘brought them together and forced them to commit this sin, either with him [the suspect’s cousin] or with other people gathered at the sabbath. Thus, it was not really her fault’; and an incongruous romanticism in the claim that when the Devil ‘wants to have relations with some girl or woman at the sabbath, he makes a silk bed appear, on which he pretends to put them to sleep.’ But the most strikingly idiosyncratic references emerge in relation to the Devil’s penis. While an interest in demonic sex may have led the interrogators to ask questions about its size and appearance – with coldness, for example, being a prime feature of the Devil’s semen and phallus – it is highly unlikely that they would have been responsible for the assertions that ‘if extended, the Devil’s organ would be about as long as an alder bush, but he has it twisted and wound up like a snake’; or that he ‘always had a mule’s organ, which he chose because he thought it was the best endowed . . . [and] is long and as big as an arm.’ Similarly, we cannot look to de Lancre for claims that the Devil’s member was ‘red, dark and twisted, very stiff and pointy at the tip’; ‘divided, half-iron and half-flesh all along its length’; ‘made out of horn, or so at least it seems’; or ‘covered with scales that are like a poison’ that ‘tighten up as the Devil enters her’ and ‘lift up and pinch her as his organ is withdrawn.’ That these details were of suspect derivation is further suggested by the finding that although some of the akelarre-sex passages reflected the demonological convention that sex with the Devil was painful, many of the Labourd suspects ‘expressed such joy and such gaiety about their filthy embraces’, with this sentiment being echoed in the Devil’s exhortation, when orchestrating promiscuity at the Spanish akelarre, that: ‘This is good for you and you are good for it!’¹⁴ The sheer quantity and quality of material here suggests that if we want to find explanations for the prominence of akelarre-sex in the Basque records, we should look beyond the interrogators to the contributions of the accused.

Raw Materials: Heretical Sex

With regard to these contributions, witchcraft propaganda clearly played a major role. Given that women had been confessing to having engaged in communal sex at the akelarre with intermittent regularity throughout the century preceding the witch-craze, we can assume that in creating their fictions, false memories and dreams of akelarre-sex the defendants were able to draw on witchcraft stereotypes that were circulating in the region both prior to and during the 1609–14 prosecutions. But the richness and idiosyncrasy of their narratives also suggests that they drew on a wider range of raw materials. Perhaps surprisingly, the lode that first presents itself as significant here is that of heretical belief. Given that reports of heretical cult activity circulated on all levels of society in the early modern period, we cannot preclude the basic possibility that the Basque witch suspects may have drawn images and ideas about the ‘sexual lasciviousness’ and ‘communal sharing of goods and women’ practised by the heretics of Durango, Castile and Extremadura into their accounts of akelarre-sex. But there is also some evidence to suggest that the suspects’ agency in this respect may have been greater than we might expect.¹⁵ In order to explore this evidence we need to temporarily move away from the Basque witch-craze and explore heretical cult sexuality in more depth.

Academic debate on the historical associations between heretics and communal sex tends to focus on the dynamics of scapegoating and projection, and as a consequence can underemphasize the evidence that sexual promiscuity was in fact highly compatible with some heretical creeds. In medieval Europe this link emerged most strongly in relation to the collection of cultic movements subsumed by scholars under the term ‘heresies of the free spirit’. While our knowledge of these – largely orally transmitted – creeds is slim, and while the term ‘free spirit heresies’ embraces a diverse range of groups only loosely connected to each other by virtue of some broadly compatible characteristics, some scholarly consensus regarding their core ideologies has emerged. Like many heretics, advocates of the free spirit were united by ‘a diffuse belief in the possibility of union with God without any kind of sacramental or clerical mediation’ and pursued this union by attempting to attain spiritual perfection through embracing a life of poverty and self-mortification.¹⁶ But in a twist on this basic tenet, they also adhered to the antinomian belief that once a human being had achieved perfection they were no longer capable of sin and were ‘free to do whatever nature dictated’. And doing whatever nature dictated included satisfying physical desires, with a particular emphasis on sexual promiscuity. In other words, as Herman Pleij notes, ‘in order to make it quite clear that one had attained a state of perfection, it was necessary to violate all the moral precepts commonly held to be the desired norm, particularly the highly restrictive Christian principles governing sexuality and chastity . . . promiscuity was often the sin chosen on principle.’¹⁷ To this end, fourteenth-century Beghard John of Brünn could maintain in all earnestness that ‘giving oneself over to eroticism indicated that one was free in spirit and therefore in a state of complete sinlessness no matter what one did’. James Brundage elaborates that:

The sectarians known as the Men of Intelligence, and the associated group of Brethren of Free Spirit, were particularly notorious for sexual exploits with the women associated with their movements. Inquisitors elicited from members of these groups confessions on a wide range of sexual aberrations. Buggery, sodomy, incest, adultery, and indiscriminate fornication were, according to informants, commonplace among heretics, who considered these activities no sin at all . . . ¹⁸

To what degree free spirit heretics actually engaged in ideologically driven promiscuity of this kind – as opposed to just confessing it after being accused – is an ongoing matter of debate. In recent years blanket dismissal of the possibility has moved to a concession that such practices may have taken place in some groups under the influence of persuasive, charismatic personalities. While not proof, the report that in 1627 a Barcelonan priest was ‘denounced for forming a group to practice free love’, and that in 1653 Zaragozan saludador and ascetic Pablo Borao was tried for successfully convincing a large number of women that they could obtain physical and spiritual benefits from the ‘grace’ or ‘power’ in his semen, indicates that the psychological mechanisms necessary to generate ideologically driven promiscuity did exist (with myths about ‘spiritual semen’ still being successfully spun by Spanish priests as late as the twentieth century).¹⁹

With regard to feasibility, it is also relevant that there was an ideological compatibility between free spirit sexuality and poverty. The antinomian belief that individuals who were perfect and therefore incapable of sin could indulge in any kind of earthly pleasure without fear of damnation could be, and undoubtedly often was, merely libertine opportunism in fancy dress. But it could also be a powerful psychological defence against deprivation. In the medieval and early modern periods, as now, it was all too easy for the poor man to allow feelings of powerlessness and envy to poison his enjoyment of life. But if he believed himself to be pure and incapable of sin and therefore able to indulge in pleasures that were denied to other – more materially privileged – men, then he could stand before the greatest nobles in the land and feel superior, or at the very least, satisfied with his lot. Christian teachings on the sanctity of poverty and biblical metaphors about rich men and the eyes of needles would have supported this position, with Pleij maintaining that ‘the poorer one was, the easier it was to indulge in carefree eroticism, spurred on by the thought that all the rich people of the world were already doomed to eternal damnation.’ These psychological dynamics were reflected in the fact that although free spirit movements could flourish among the nobility and their leaders tended to be clerics or men with some education, their members often came from the poorer sectors of society. They are also reflected in the evidence that free-spirit-like cults enjoyed an extraordinary popularity, proliferating with such dynamism across ‘vast areas’ of Europe during the medieval period that as Norman Cohn emphasizes, ‘in the social – as distinct from the purely political – history of western Europe the heresy of the Free Spirit played a more important part than Catharism.’ More indirectly, this popularity was also reflected in the frequency with which ‘arguments in favour’ of free spirit sexuality emerged in contemporary literature, with Pleij noting that the influential medieval bestseller, Le Roman de la Rose, ‘bluntly urged one to follow unconditionally the demands of nature and to indulge freely in sexual gratification, unimpeded by the unnatural constraints imposed by marriage.’²⁰

Returning to the Basque trials, what relevance do these perspectives have for our understanding of suspect-contribution to accounts of akelarre-sex? They do raise the possibility that some of the witch-craze defendants were familiar with ideas about free spirit sexuality (with it being notable in this respect that the ‘sexual lasciviousness’ and ‘communal sharing of goods and women’ of the Durango and Alumbrado heretics place them firmly in the free spirit category). They also raise the possibility that some of the defendants may have nurtured more forgiving attitudes toward free spirit sexuality than their interrogators (with this perspective certainly lending rationale to the Devil’s incongruous exhortation that they should engage in akelarre-sex because ‘this is good for you, and you are good for it!’).²¹ But can we now go one step further and speculate – on the basis of these premises – that the Basque suspects mined these attitudes and this knowledge when contributing to their accounts of akelarre-sex?

Sex and Paradise

Surprisingly, some evidence for this can be found in the texts. In our exploration of benign sabbath festivities in Chapter Thirteen, we argued that in creating their accounts of feasting, dancing and music-making at the akelarre, the suspects drew on narratives and imagery about popular utopias and paradises – such as the Land of Cockaigne – where the freedom from suffering characteristic of more theologically orthodox Christian afterlives was combined with a range of sensory pleasures that could be indulged in to excess and without restraint. But in the context of our analysis into akelarre orgies, it is also relevant that from the late-medieval period onwards, the sensory pleasures that could be experienced in these realms did not just include feasting, singing and dancing – but also sex. Bryan Givens states that in Cockaigne

sexual licence of all sorts, including homosexuality and incest in some of the more libertine traditions, was encouraged, and the presence of a rejuvenating fountain ensured a state of perpetual youth that guaranteed permanent erections for men and renewable virginity for women . . . The prospect of casual fornication was joyously proclaimed in many, though not all, of the versions of the Cockaigne legend that were circulating in medieval and early modern Europe.²²

The theme of sexual licence was not an anomaly in this context. Sexual freedom was a common feature of many of the pagan otherworlds that underpinned the popular utopias of the medieval age, with Pleij observing the ‘Celtic paradises, which became known in all of Europe through early medieval mariners’ tales’ made ‘provisions for free sex’ and that the Golden Age of classical antiquity also displayed ‘a natural promiscuity’. Also significant was the ‘major role played by erotic love’ in accounts of the Muslim paradise that were ‘well known in the West’ from an early period, most notably via Latin translations of the Koran and traveller’s tales, with thirteenth- and fourteenth-century writers like Vincent of Beauvais and Sir John Mandeville highlighting the delights of an Islamic paradise ‘seasoned’, as Pleij notes, with ‘the immediately overwhelming flavour of unbridled sex’. This interest persisted into the early modern period, with a German knight who went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1486 defining the Mohammedan utopia as a place where ‘young girls and boys dance to all kinds of music, and, finally, mention must be made of the surfeit of sexual satisfaction, for everyone is always ready and willing to take anyone as a partner.’ Unsurprisingly the Islamic paradise made an impact in Spain, with a fifteenth-century Cuencan man responding to interference from the Inquisition by swearing ‘to God that if the inquisitions stopped for a little he would go to a seaport, and there he would be a Moor or Arab, or whatever he liked, and he would be there with whoever he liked’.²³ The archaic affinity between free love and utopian fantasy even emerged in Christian cosmologies via biblical representations of a Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve were ‘naked . . . and were not ashamed’. Indeed, de Lancre describes the Basque women as ‘Eves who willingly seduce Adam’s children and who, with their heads bare, live in the mountains in total freedom and innocence just as Eve lived in the earthly Paradise.’²⁴ These inconvenient associations (which were also the reason that some free spirit heretics were termed ‘Adamites’) had required the Church to downplay the sexual dimension of Eden from an early period.

In both the medieval and early modern periods this range of belief surrounding sexualized otherworlds was closely associated with free spirit ideologies. Heretical groups specifically linked their sexual permissiveness to utopian concepts by arguing that through attaining the spiritual perfection that enabled them to engage in unrestrained sex they were in effect creating their own simulacrum of paradise on earth, with Pleij noting that from at least the eleventh century onwards the Adamites ‘were said to run around naked’ and engage ‘nocturnal orgies full of wild and totally promiscuous sex’ in an attempt to ‘reenact the Creation up to the time of the Fall by setting up a true paradise. The second time around, however, the focus was on sex in the here and now.’ The closeness of the links between these heresies and concepts of earthly paradise are illustrated in the fact that, according to some scholars, circulating tropes about free spirit sexuality were likely to have contributed to the emergence of sexualized themes in the Cockaigne myth in the late-medieval period.²⁵

Coming back to the witch trial records, these perspectives clearly support our earlier speculations that some Basque suspects may have viewed the sexual permissiveness of heretics in a more indulgent – or at least more nuanced and ironic – light than their interrogators and that they may have brought these sentiments to their accounts of akelarre-sex. Indeed, on this premise we could even surmise that these attitudes enabled them to enter into the task with some enthusiasm and creativity. Men and women schooled on sexualized utopias where ‘loose women are highly thought of . . . and the more wanton and frolicsome they are, the more they’re loved’ would have found it less difficult than we might suppose to produce fictions, false memories and dreams about sabbath festivities where men and women constantly ‘engage in promiscuous activity . . . without regard to either age, or social standing, or degree of kinship’. Constructing an akelarre where ‘debauchery happens constantly’ and ‘father deflowers daughter without shame’ may well have been relatively easily for an unconscious mind charmed since childhood with colourful rhymes about subversive paradises where:

To the music of pipes and the trumpet’s sound,

They all make merry and dance in the round.

Lovely women and girls may be taken to bed,

Without the encumbrance of having to wed.

Nothing sinful about it, no one feels shame,

For their custom in this is not to lay blame . . .²⁶

The claim that the Basque defendants ‘expressed such joy and gaiety about their filthy embraces’ also becomes less incongruous when we consider that while such emotions are incompatible with the debased and painful sexuality of the Devil, they are completely compatible with the playful and pleasurable sexual experiences to be enjoyed in earthly paradise or Cockaigne.²⁷

These perspectives are also congruent with our argument – in Chapter Fourteen – that accounts of the Basque akelarre were influenced by reports from the New World. European travellers and missionaries condemned pagan peoples for indulging in ritual cannibalism, but they also condemned them for indulging in libertarian sex, with Marco Polo providing ‘repeated descriptions of tribes who practised adultery and openly indulged in promiscuity with ever-willing women.’ In the early modern centuries, Amerindians were commonly depicted as naked, sexually permissive peoples who lived ‘in a bestial anarchy without morals or restraints’, with Stephanie Wood observing that ‘in early Brazil, European men also rhapsodized about a land of insatiable, sexually welcoming native women.’ Although these reports were distorted, as with feast-cannibalism they gained a certain authority through being rooted in real events. In the early period of colonization some Amerindian tribes did consider it a ‘great honour’ if their foreign visitors slept with their women although, as Wood notes, ‘these attitudes changed over time, as in New Mexico, when it became obvious that the invaders did not really behave as gods’.²⁸ With regard to the witch-craze, we can speculate that if – as argued in the last chapter – both the suspects and their Spanish inquisitors were better informed about New World people and places than was average for Europe the period, then it would not have been difficult for them to mine these rumours of Amerindian promiscuity when creating their accounts of akelarre-sex. On both conscious and unconscious levels, this process would have been further fuelled by the fact that pagan libertarianism was easily conflated, in the European mind, with free spirit heresies and utopian otherworlds. As early as the fourteenth century Sir John Mandeville claimed to have encountered ‘Adamites, of the purest sort’ in a country ‘called Lamory to the northwest of Sumatra’; while in the early modern period many travellers likened the Americas to the Garden of Eden or some other form of earthly paradise, with Columbus going so far as to declare that the Americas were ‘a veritable Cockaigne!’ As Pleij observes, the influence of European paradisiacal literature can be seen in the ‘caricatural way excesses of food and willing women’ were depicted in contemporary accounts of the New World, while conversely ‘the societies found in the New World were important sources of inspiration for the establishment of such utopias’ in early modern Europe.²⁹

Ordinary Sex

The possibility that suspects’ contributions to akelarre-sex accounts were invigorated by positive, or at least not wholly negative, attitudes towards promiscuous sex gains further support from a rather more prosaic source. While the Basques were influenced by ideas about sex as conducted in utopian, heretical, Amerindian and demonological contexts, they were also influenced by experiences of sex that occurred much closer to home. Earlier in this chapter we observed that while scholars frequently link private demonic sex to real life sexual experience, orgiastic sabbath-sex is seldom contextualized in this way. But attempts can be made. Historians consistently emphasize that in the early modern period popular attitudes towards sex were different from those espoused by the religious and secular authorities, with this dissonance reflected in the fact that regulating sexual behaviour became one of the main preoccupations of the Counter Reformation Church. Kamen states that in this period ‘it was a common presumption, found throughout Spain’ that ‘sex between unmarried adults was neither wrong nor sinful’. Elites also observed that rural peoples (for whom the ‘breeding of animals would have been no secret’) had an unnervingly pragmatic attitude to sexuality, with Castilian cleric Francisco Farfan’s observation in 1585 that ‘rustics and [the] uninstructed’ held ‘fornication to be natural’ being pithily echoed six years later in a Spanish farmworker’s declaration that ‘I do not believe that anyone will go to hell just for screwing.’ Explicit language and bawdy humour was also the norm in songs, stories, proverbs, charms, popular theatricals and ordinary speech, with one medieval French fableaux mocking a girl for being too squeamish to use the word ‘foutre’ (screw). These attitudes were also clearly visible in the fact that until the Reformation (when they began to be repressed) publicly licensed brothels could be found in most European cities. Indeed, when the Inquisition first set up the Tribunal at Logroño in 1570 the city’s ‘municipal brothel was right next door’.³⁰

Of particular significance here, is that in early modern Europe sex was more public than it is today. Extended families living and sleeping together in houses with few private bedrooms had different boundaries regarding physical intimacy than modern Europeans, with it being notable (given the high proportion of young suspects in the Basque case) that many children would have been familiar with the sounds and sights of their parents and other relatives having sex. Also significant, is that sexual activity was strongly associated with large gatherings of people. The Church authorities consistently condemned the manner in which communal events were exploited as opportunities for sexual licence. Spring and midsummer rites, with their clear links to fertility and youth, were among the most heavily criticized, with Muir noting that on May Day ‘many young couples, it appears, got “lost” for the night in the woods to enjoy semi-clandestine love.’ Pilgrimages to shrines (romerías) were also causes for concern, particularly if the destination were distant or remote and the journey necessitated an overnight stay, as they provided opportunities for both sexes to mingle in a dark, outdoor environment in the absence of the usual societal constraints, with Barcelonan cleric Diego Pérez complaining that these temptations provoked ‘young women [to] become pilgrims for a whim and without any godly intention.’³¹ As we shall explore in more depth later, licentious behaviour was also a prominent feature of contemporary carnivalesque festivities. While it is difficult to assess what sexualized behaviours actually took place – as opposed to were merely imagined to take place – at these events, there is no doubt that ‘fornication’ occurred. Muir notes that in early modern England ‘the Carnival season produced more conceptions that any other period except the late spring period of May and June’, while in Spain in 1583, Pérez lamented that ‘it has been observed from many years’ experience that counting from those days of carnival the time that lapses coincides exactly with the number of babies who are taken to the General Hospital. From which one can infer the unhappy dissoluteness of the masques’. There is also some evidence to support the accusation that during the carnival season in towns like Dijon and Arles, youth gangs roamed the streets looking for violence and sex, with Jacques Rossiaud recently estimating that in Dijon ‘about half of the youths participated at least once in the gang rape of a young woman’.³² Taken together, these perspectives clearly indicate that the reality of early modern peasant life was not so far from the sensory indulgences of the heretics’ paradise or the Land of Cockaigne as the Church would have liked to think.

Returning to the Basque case, the records do suggest that suspects drew real-life sexual experiences into their accounts of akelarre orgies. The fact that de Lancre compared the French sabbaths to the ‘debauched and dissolute holiday’ of St John’s Eve, when taken alongside the evidence that these festivities were often overseen by female authority figures with strong festive queen characteristics, strongly suggests that the Labourdin suspects – who were mostly young women – were fleshing out their accounts of akelarre-sex by drawing on memories of the sexually charged spring and summer festivities that would have been among the most memorable experiences of their short lives. These same suspects also provided descriptions of the Devil’s penis that evoke the ‘symbolism of sexual indulgence’ that ‘pervade[d] Carnival’ where ‘the prominent, long nose common on many masks was widely understood to represent the phallus, and bawdy jokes about sausages explicitly connected food and sex.’³³ While the fantastic yet strangely concrete depictions of the Devil’s ‘erect member’ as ‘made out of horn’, ‘wound up like a snake’ or ‘covered with scales’ are incongruous when seen in isolation, they become less so when we consider that the fools, devils, harlequins and ‘wild men’ prominent in carnivalesque festivities were typically armed with penis-like clubs or ‘baubles’, often made of inflated pig bladders, with observers stating that in the sixteenth-century French city of Clermont young men ran through the streets in the carnival period ‘masked and disguised as fools . . . carrying clubs stuffed with straw and animal hair to look like a phallus’. Similar objects could be deployed in theatre, with Frank noting that as late as the twentieth century in Basque villages like Barèges, quack doctors in mummers’ plays were ‘outfitted with a large wooden phallus and a matching pair of wooden testicles’.³⁴ Indeed, witch suspect Johannés d’Aguerre’s claim that ‘the Devil appearing as a billy-goat had his penis attached to his backside and that he would have sex with the women by moving it and pushing it against their bellies’ acquires surprising realism when we consider that contemporary carnival actors would ‘leap, spin, [and] pirouette with lewd and lascivious movements and shameful words’ and use their penis-like clubs to ‘strike at men and at women whom they obviously idolize’. Contextualizing the Devil’s phallus in carnival would also explain why the suspects described ‘their filthy embraces, the length, the width, and the thickness of the instruments that nature created’ for akelarre-sex with such inappropriate ‘liberty and gaiety’.³⁵ Through this lens, we could even extrapolate that the particular emphasis on communal, as opposed to private, sexual encounters with the Devil in the French confessions could reflect the fact that when it came to akelarre-sex, de Lancre’s prime confessors were children and teenagers; precisely the demographic that would have been more likely to mine sexual imagery and emotion from memories of public festive events as opposed to mature sexual relationships.

Basque Permissiveness

The perspectives set out in this chapter bring us closer to understanding why and how Basque suspects could have contributed so creatively to their accounts of sabbath-sex. When developing fictions, false memories and dreams in response to questions on the theme, they could have fleshed out demonological templates with a wide range of complementary raw materials, from beliefs about the unbridled eroticism of free spirit heretics, native Amerindians and the inhabitants of popular utopias, to memories of the sexually charged gatherings that took place closer to home. But once again these perspectives can only take us so far in that – as with toad familiars and feast-cannibalism – they still fail to explain why the theme should have emerged so prominently in this particular trial cluster. Given that the sex-related beliefs and behaviours listed in this chapter were found throughout Europe in the early modern period, the reasons why they should have been so effectively channelled into accounts of sabbath-sex during the 1609–14 Basque witch-craze remain unclear.

There are a range of viable explanations here, all of which merit more examination than is practicable in the present work. The evidence that (compared with many other parts of Europe) promiscuous sex was relatively prominent in Basque witch trials in the century leading up to the witch-craze may well be significant, as may the evidence that late-flourishing free spirit heresies, such as the Alumbrados, gained a particularly warm reception in early modern Spain. It is also possible that Basque women were more likely than the average European to be familiar with imagery and ideas about sexualized paradises. Given our earlier speculation that the late-survival of Moorish influence in Zaragoza may have fuelled the popularity of demonic invocation in Basque magical practice, we can reasonably conjecture that the same channels of influence may have seen the ‘major role played by erotic love’ in the Islamic paradise also transmitted with unusual vigour into Basque utopian matrices.³⁶

But perhaps the most compelling explanation for the prominence of akelarre-sex in the Basque records can be found in more concrete cultural attitudes. De Lancre complained that when Basque women went to mass ‘they offer a candle attached to a small piece of cake in a rather suggestive shape, which is not appropriate for a decent woman.’ While his assumptions regarding this ‘suggestive shape’ may or may not have been well-founded, the reference does alert us to the body of evidence suggesting that while popular attitudes toward sex were often permissive in many parts of Europe in this period, the Basque country was notably liberal in this respect. At the time of the witch-craze premarital sex was common and, as Lola Valverde observes, rates of illegitimate birth were ‘extremely high, particularly when compared with the rates prevailing over much of rural western Europe’; constituting, in some villages, for nearly a third of all live births. In large part, these statistics emerged out of the practice of cohabitation or ‘concubinage’ which, despite declining throughout Europe in the medieval period, still ‘persisted to an extraordinary extent in the Basque country’, with de Lancre bemoaning the freedom with which the Basque peasants ‘try out’ their wives ‘for several years before marrying them, taking them as if on a trial basis’. According to another bemused observer, ‘this ancient usage [cohabitation]’ was ‘still remembered and to some extent practiced’ in Labourd as late as 1718.³⁷ It was also not uncommon to find Basque priests keeping long-term concubines, adding authenticity to Labourdin suspect Catherine de Barrendeguy’s claim that at the akelarre she saw the Fasso priest talking to ‘a widow named Salbouhouria . . . with whom, according to the local gossip, she had a child whom he had raised.’ This clerical enthusiasm is also visible in the discordant fact that the ‘highly erotic verses’ that appeared in the first book published in Euskara (in 1545) were composed by a Basque priest. Also notable, is that these practices generated lower levels of stigma than the contemporary European or even later-Basque norm. Women felt no loss of honour when they had premarital sex and preferred concubinage to a bad marriage, while illegitimate children had legal rights which could be pursued through the courts and enabled them to inherit. Taking all these factors together, it is no surprise to find that as William Douglass notes, ‘in some of the medieval literature from western Europe, the Basques are described as sexually promiscuous.’³⁸

25  The sexual freedoms characteristic of many paradisiacal realms are clearly intimated in this section of Hans Sebald Beham’s Fountain of Youth, ca. 1536.

26  The phallic symbolism of the fool’s paraphernalia is overt in this woodcut print, again by German artist Hans Sebald Beham, ca. 1522.

While there is no scope to explore the roots of these cultural attitudes here, it is notable that they may have been linked to practical considerations. High rates of premarital sex are likely to have been a response to challenging matrimonial conventions, with both the average age at marriage and the percentage of women who never married being firmly at the higher end of the European average. But also significant is that for many Basque men, baserri life was punctuated by a series of lengthy absences, both due to transhumance and dangerous sea voyages from which there was no certainty of return. Although de Lancre alleged that these ‘long travels across the sea’ turned Basque men into ‘half-husbands’ who displayed a ‘coldness’ and ‘indifference’ towards their wives, it is more likely that the opposite was true and that this insecure environment fostered the kinds of physical and emotional intensity that serve to liberate sexual mores in times of war. In protecting the rights of both the women who conceived out of marriage and their illegitimate children, these attitudes toward sexuality can also be seen as a reflection of the evidence that, as observed in Chapter One, the social status of Basque women was generally higher than the average European norm, with Allyson Poska concluding that similarly lenient attitudes toward cohabitation and illegitimacy in early modern Galicia was linked to the fact that in this province, as in the Basque region, the status of women was comparatively high. It is even possible (though this requires more research) that the Basque concepts of universal nobility that enabled even ‘the most destitute men and women’ to ‘call themselves Lord and Lady of such and such a house . . . even if it is only a little pigsty’ fuelled the confidence with which both Basque men and women owned and expressed their sexuality.³⁹

Of even more significance here, with regard to the witch craze records, is that these attitudes also appear to have influenced the ways in which Basque women talked about sex. In his examination of court documents from early modern Vizcaya, Renato Barahona observes that many of the defendants charged with cohabitation ‘freely admitted to past seduction, loss of virginity, sexual relations and long-term unions that had resulted in pregnancies and children’ – and that the reason ‘explicit descriptions of sex acts’ are largely absent from the Vizcayan lawsuits is not because the witnesses and suspects did not provide them but because the interrogators did not consider them judicially relevant. That this openness reflected wider social factors – and female empowerment in particular – is suggested by the findings in contemporary Galicia, with Poska observing that in this region of Spain both ‘witnesses and defendants seem to have spoken with remarkable candour about their lives and opinions’ and ‘even young women showed little hesitation about speaking their minds about sex and marriage.’⁴⁰ These perspectives lend a new authenticity to de Lancre’s complaints that Labourdin suspects talked ‘openly and shamelessly’ about their sexual experiences at the akelarre, describing ‘all things that we dared not ask about by their rightful names’ and

recount[ing] the dirtiest and most unchaste aspects of it [akelarre-sex] with such liberty and gaiety that they take pride in what they say, and particular pleasure in telling about it, believing the caresses of this filthy demon to be more worthy than those of the most just husband they could ever meet. They do not blush at all, however improper and sordid or untoward the questioning. Thus our interpreter or translator, who was from the church, felt more shame in posing our questions than in answering them. The young girls, thirteen to fourteen years old, explain with more willingness than is required . . . I fear that in addressing this subject in writing I will be even more shameless than they. But I do not know how to convince them of the shamelessness if I do not say something about it. However, I am taking the precaution of saying nothing that is not contained in our inquest, and even then I will not mention half of what appears.⁴¹

From this viewpoint, the prominence of akelarre-sex in the Basque witch-craze records reflects a clash of mentalities. As learned, urban Counter Reformation men, both the French and Spanish interrogators would have been experientially and intellectually remote from the visceral realities of peasant sexuality as it was experienced in the more remote towns and villages of the Pyrenees. Such men are likely to have been shocked by popular attitudes to sex in their home provinces, let alone in the Basque regions, and it is not difficult to see how and why they would have clung onto demonological and heretical-sex templates in order to rationalize the sexual behaviour that the witch suspects brought, in such an explicit and unabashed way, into the Basque interrogations.

And it is here, in the culture clashes of the courtroom, that we finally find an explanation as to why accounts of akelarre-sex were more prominent in the French records than the Spanish. Like many of his contemporaries, de Lancre believed that women were less rational, less intelligent and less moral than men, with Pearl observing that ‘much of the early part’ of a 1,057-page work published by de Lancre in 1607 – titled Tableau de l’inconstance et instabilité de toutes choses – was ‘a detailed discussion of the basically evil nature of women.’ But if we dig a little deeper, we find that his gender bias was more complex than this. The fact that the majority of de Lancre’s akelarre-sex accounts were collected from teenage girls and that, unlike their Spanish equivalents, they emphasize the Devil’s tendency to choose ‘the prettiest women’ to have sex with, suggests that de Lancre may have been particularly receptive to female youth and attractiveness. This is further reinforced by the evocative – but legally irrelevant – observations that suspects were ‘very beautiful’, ‘beautiful and young’ or ‘delicate and sweet’ found scattered throughout his reports.⁴² To this, we can also add that for all his pious swagger, de Lancre may not have been a textbook Counter Reformation man. While deeply concerned about moral rectitude and godliness, his interest in dance suggests a rather hypocritical fondness for worldly pleasure, with Jan Machielsen arguing that de Lancre’s pious admonitions of the witches’ ‘indecent dances’ are disingenuous when considered alongside his boastful claims that ‘as a young man he had even impressed the dissolute Pietro de Medici with his dancing moves.’ Even more disingenuous, given his censure of the witches’ sexual escapades, is the rather unexpected fact – which goes against all that de Lancre would appear to represent – that several years after he was married he fathered an illegitimate child. We know little about this affair, other than that it took place around 1595 and that on de Lancre’s death the child (listed in his will as a Jesuit named Pierre Biénassis) inherited his library. But whatever the precise circumstances, this incident indicates that at the mature age of forty-two, de Lancre was still a man for whom sexual desire was strong enough to subdue and silence the profound moral conscience that, one presumes, had developed in tandem with his fervent Catholic faith.⁴³ This robust sensuality is also implied in some passages in the Tableau. In de Lancre’s hands, for example, a simple account of youths swimming at the Basque coast becomes a piece of erotic prose-poetry.

Grown girls and young fishermen can be seen at the coast of Anglet, covered by a cape and totally naked underneath, jumping into the waves. This allows Love to get her hooks into them, takes them into her net, inviting them to fish in this churned-up water, and inspires in them as much desire as they have freedom and comfort. Wet all over, they can go and dry off in the neighbouring chamber of love, which Venus seems to have intentionally provided for this singular occasion on the seashore.⁴⁴

The poeticism of this passage also suggests that de Lancre’s sexual attraction to women was combined with a strong aesthetic or romantic component. Sensitivity to beauty for its own sake as opposed to its links to the desire for sex, is indicated by his observation that a male suspect was a ‘beautiful and well-mannered child’. Alternatively, some of his observations on the appearance of Basque women evoke the grandiloquent yearning of the religious mystic or the troubadours of courtly love that flourished in southern France in the medieval period.

[They] have their hair covering half their cheeks, flowing down over their shoulders and complementing their eyes in such a way that they seem much more beautiful in all this innocence, and they are more attractive than if none were to see them in the open field. With such beautiful hair they show themselves to great advantage and are so well armed that the sun shines its rays on these tresses as it would on a cloud. The sheen of their hair is so striking and forms highlights as brilliant as those appearing in the sky when one witnesses the birth of Isis. This gives them their bewitching eyes, which are as dangerous in love as in witchcraft . . .

Given that devotions around the Virgin Mary combine mystical sensibilities with a profound appreciation of the female face and form, our knowledge that de Lancre nurtured a particular affection for Marian religiosity – with Jean Bernou noting that he went on pilgrimage to the Italian shrine of ‘Our Lady of Loretto’ no less than three times – would also be compatible here.⁴⁵

To complicate matters even further, the evidence also suggests that de Lancre’s responses to the female sex were further refined by a more mundane, but no less appreciative, interest in their everyday habits and dress; reflecting, in this case, the generally investigative nature that gave his Tableau the quality of an ‘anthropological report’. In Chapter Thirteen we observed the enthusiasm with which de Lancre asked ‘the children and the young ladies [to] dance as they had danced at the sabbath’, with the quality of his attention also evident in the precision with which he recorded their performances. Similarly, the phrase ‘they have confessed to me’ in the following passage makes it abundantly clear that de Lancre sought information about the practical intricacies of women’s dress that would surely have been beneath the consideration of most male interrogators in the period.

For the hairstyle of the high-born women of Bayonne and the flowing fabrics, with their handiwork on the undergarment decorated with a border and embroidery, which they wear across their chest – all these things are respectable, if bothersome both in terms of the labor required to make them and the cost involved. They have confessed to me that it takes half a day to whiten them well and to arrange and put them on correctly.⁴⁶

Taken together, these references suggest that de Lancre had a complex attitude toward women in which sexual desire and the conventionally misogynistic attitudes of the period were conflated with aesthetic sensibility, romanticism and native curiosity about the minutiae of their lives. In an interrogation chamber, seeking out confessions of akelarre-sex from teenage girls, this cornucopia of traits could have been deployed to great effect. While de Lancre’s interest in demonology and heresy would have driven him to ask leading questions about communal and taboo-breaking sex, his naturally curious and viscerally appreciative responses to his female interrogatees may have imbued these conventional inquiries with a very different emotional subtext. Sensing this subtext, the inexperienced young suspects may well have been flattered by de Lancre’s complex fusion of focused interrogatorial attention and aesthetic regard, particularly if he were charismatic and exploited the sexual magnetism that power confers. Flourishing under his attentive gaze, they may have found themselves disclosing their libidinal responses to Amerindian paradises, utopian Cockaignes and communal and carnivalesque festivities much more freely than they might have done to less receptive and interested interrogators.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

‘Be nothing to God’

For all its associations with the Devil, thus far in our investigations the Basque akelarre has emerged primarily as a party destination. Whether its festivities involved cannibalism and orgies or benign feasting and dancing the company was informal and focused on the sensual pleasures that were offered by this dark simulacrum of paradise. But the akelarre had a more ceremonial dimension, in that it was also a gathering of individuals who self-identified as a cult that honoured the Devil and participated in rituals to this end. This formal cultic ritual, which is equally prominent in both French and Spanish records, can be divided into two categories; the ceremony of initiation into the witches’ cult – typically termed the ‘demonic pact’ by historians – and a ceremony of worship that aped the Catholic mass. The first category, which shall be our focus in the next two chapters, can be further subdivided into the private pact that was forged between the witch and the Devil when alone, and the public pact that was performed before the gathered witches at the sabbath. Because the latter emerges most prominently in the Basque records (with the private pact being largely restricted to a handful of Spanish accounts), the public demonic pact – or as we shall term it the ‘akelarre-’ or ‘sabbath-pact’ – will be our focus here.

The sabbath-pact, as it emerged in both the French and Spanish records, typically involved some or all of the following elements: the novice witches are presented to the Devil by an older witch or ‘witch mistress’; they renounce God and Christianity and swear an oath of allegiance to the Devil; they kiss their new Lord, most commonly on the arse; and they receive from him a mark or brand termed the ‘witch’s’ or ‘Devil’s’ mark. The report on the 1610 Logroño auto de fé maintained that the Devil

seats himself on a great throne in royal dignity surrounded by other demons – smaller ones – who attend him as servants together with the most senior witches. The witch mistress obliges the one who is to apostatize to fall on his knees before the Devil saying at the same time: ‘Lord, I present this one to you’. The Devil replies: ‘We have a new recruit. Let us treat him well so that we shall have more’. Forthwith he bestows on him the blessing with which he begins all his performances . . . Then, repeating the words after the Devil the new recruit makes the renunciation denying God, Holy Mary His Mother, all the Saints, as well as his baptism and confirmation and both the Holy Christmas [received therein] together with his parents, godparents and all Christians. He goes on to accept the Devil as lord and god, worshipping as such. Thereapon he kisses the Devil’s left hand, breasts and private parts and plants a kiss under his tail. The Devil finally brands him, sticking a nail into his left hand into whatever part of the body he chooses and drawing blood.

French accounts of the initiatory ritual are a little less detailed, but often share many of the same features, with Jeannette d’Abadie claiming that she was first led to the sabbath by a woman named Gratiane and that

after Gratiane had presented her [to the Devil], she received a large handful of gold as a reward. Then he made her renounce and deny her Creator, the Holy Virgin, the saints, baptism, her father, mother, relatives, heaven, earth and everything in the world. . . . Then she went over to kiss his behind.¹

It is not unusual to find accounts of the sabbath-pact in European witch trial confessions and in this sense the Basque records are conventional. But they are unusual in their emphasis. Europe-wide, the private pact with the Devil emerges far more frequently than the sabbath-pact, with this imbalance being exacerbated by the fact that the latter is not an automatic feature of the witches’ gathering. In early modern Lorraine, for example, the theme of the sabbath is prominent but references to the public, ceremonial pact are rare, with suspects typically making a private pact with the Devil before attending the event.²

Interrogatorial Influence

As with feast-cannibalism and akelarre-sex, in focusing on the public pact we move into a relatively unexamined area. While the private demonic pact has received much scholarly attention, particularly with regard to its links with learned magical traditions and its role in the evolution of elite demonological theory, the sabbath-pact has attracted less interest. While the complexity of the phenomenon means we cannot hope to redress this balance here – indeed, the subject deserves a book-length study of its own – in the present and later chapters we can draw attention to some of the elements that may have contributed to its prominence in the Basque case.

Hardly surprisingly, there is clear evidence of interrogatorial involvement. According to the Tableau, French suspect Janne de Hortilopits ‘was asked if she had adored the Devil, and if, in doing so, she had kissed his rear end’. Similarly, after describing how she made a pact with the Devil and then kissed his hand, Spanish suspect María de Endara was ‘asked what other parts she kissed’.³ In focusing on this theme, the interrogators followed precedent. The belief that witches made overt pacts of any kind with the Devil, is one of the oldest and most consistent themes to emerge in demonological works, and accounts of the rite being publicly performed at the sabbath are found in texts from an early period. One of the pact accounts in Nider’s Formicarius, for example, states that:

The first Sunday before holy water has been consecrated, the future disciple has to go into the church with his instructors and there, in their presence, deny Christ, his faith, his baptism and the Catholic Church. Then he has to pay homage to le petit maître, that is, ‘the little teacher’, which is what they call the demon. (They use no other title.) Next, he drinks from a bottle . . . and after he has done this, he immediately feels deep inside him that he is imagining and retaining images of our [magical] practices and the principal rituals of this sect.

Meanwhile, whatever their exposure to demonological works, Valle and Becerra’s questioning would have been directly guided by the Edict of Faith circulated during the visitations, which asked parishioners to declare ‘whether they knew or had heard of any’ who were ‘warlocks or witches’ or ‘who had made a pact with the Devil’.⁴ Even without this directive, the two inquisitors would have found numerous cases in earlier trial records and inquisitorial documents, with both public and private pacts emerging in a significant percentage of witch testimonials from the sixteenth century, with particularly vivid examples being found in trial clusters from the Navarrese mountains around 1527, 1540 and 1569.⁵ But while these collective precedents were clearly important, as they stand they still do not explain why de Lancre, Valle and Becerra should have emphasized the public pact as opposed to the private. Many other interrogators in other parts of early modern Europe had access to the same demonological works and had recourse to sabbath-pact accounts from earlier trial records – so why did the idea of the ceremonial sabbath-pact rise to such unusual prominence in the 1609–14 witch-craze?

A range of potential explanations present themselves here. The first point of note is that some of the earlier sabbath-pact accounts encountered by the Spanish inquisitors were exceptionally vivid and detailed. Among the many documents that were sent to Valle (by la Suprema) to instruct him about the crime of witchcraft, was a letter penned by an anonymous inquisitor which described the series of witchcraft prosecutions that took place in the Salazar Valley around 1526–7. The letter contains an elaborate sabbath-pact account that so closely resembles those that emerged in the 1609–14 witch-craze records that we can strongly suspect Valle used it as a template when eliciting confessional accounts of the rite.

The first thing they do is renounce God our Lord and his holy law and the glorious Virgin Mary His mother Our Lady and all the saints of heaven and their own fathers and mothers, and they take the devil and specifically Satan as their lord. And they induce people to do this with promises of large sums of money and great wealth and delights, converting them by their own will, and with threats that they will kill them should they not convert, and after they have converted them, and made them apostatize as mentioned, they show them how to anoint themselves . . . and in this manner the converter and the converted go to the aforementioned meeting together, and as a great service the converter introduces the converted to the devil who is in the form of a large, black he-goat, and says to him, ‘I have converted this man or woman to your law, and I have brought him or her to serve you.’ And he welcomes them and tells them to observe the law, saying that he is the lord of the world, and his law is the best of all, and he promises to give them money and anything they need. And so they show reverence and submission to him as if he were a lord with their left foot, touching themselves with their left hands on their chests, and going down on their left knee on the ground, they worship him on the most improper part of his body, and as a rule he gives them a coin and a donation . . .⁶

Interrogatorial motivations may also have been fuelled by wider concerns. In earlier chapters we argued that both the French and Spanish prosecutors had elevated concerns about the threats heresy posed to the Catholic Church. It is surely pertinent, then, that the heretical movements that first emerged in Europe in the medieval period were not just famous for engaging in promiscuous sex and cannibalistic feasts but also for fostering a cultic identity defined by collective adherence to doctrines and rituals, including initiation ceremonies, that diverted from contemporary religious norms. From an early period, the Church had associated rituals through which the heretic pledged allegiance to the cult or its spiritual patron with renunciations of Christianity. In 1232, for example, a papal rule stated that a group of heretics from the German region of Stedingerland engaged in initiation ceremonies that involved kissing the hind parts of a huge toad and a man who is ‘cold as ice’ with ‘black’ eyes, after which ‘every remnant of faith in the Catholic Church that lingers in the novice’s heart leaves him’. As Jonathan Durrant emphasizes, many of these early heresy cases also featured the osculum infame (which typically involved kissing the Devil on the arse), with examples emerging ‘strongly’ in French trials as early as the twelfth century.⁷ As concluded with regard to feast-cannibalism and sabbath-sex, there is a scholarly consensus that the sabbath-pact stereotype first worked its way into early demonological works via these heretical templates, with these origins reflected in the finding that after pledging to deny Christianity, the novice in one of Nider’s pact accounts also promises to do a range of stereotypically heretical things like ‘never worship the Host and find the power to trample on the cross’.⁸

How far these heretical templates were directly mined by interrogators during the Basque witch-craze and how far they were mined via their fusion with witchcraft matrices in demonological texts and witch trial records, is difficult to say – but some form of direct cross-pollination is suggested by the pact phraseology. Many European sabbath-pact accounts, as they emerged in both trial confessions and demonological texts, were relatively simple in that suspects merely ‘denied God’ or ‘denied Christianity’. But in the Basque witch-craze the vows are particularly comprehensive and verbose, with suspects typically confessing that they did not only pledge to deny God or Christianity but also ‘God and Saint Mary and all the saints and the baptism and confirmation and the chrisms and holy oils and her godparents and parents and all Christians’. Given that, as Joëlle Dusseau notes, this broad-spectrum denial of many of the core tenets of Catholic belief is characteristic of heretical manifestos, we can speculate that its prominence in the witch-craze records reflected a raised consciousness, on the part of the Basque interrogators, to prescient heretical threats. That heretical templates could infiltrate Basque pact phraseology in this way is supported by evidence that the set of elaborate renunciations emerging from the Roncal Valley in 1569 – and which were, as Florencio Idoate observes, similarly verbose to those of the 1609–14 witch-craze – were overtly linked to concerns about the regional infiltration of Protestantism.⁹

Other fears may also have been significant here. In earlier chapters we argued that both the French and (particularly) Spanish interrogators are likely to have been intellectually and emotionally engaged with contemporary efforts to colonize and Christianize the New World. It is relevant, then, that when the Europeans encountered the Americas they did not only find groups of people who enjoyed cannibalism, promiscuous sex and the other sensual delights of ‘a veritable Cockaigne’, but also groups of people who had organized themselves into complex societies that participated in highly ritualized public ceremonies performed in honour of a range of non-Christian gods. Given that in Europe in this period, the Church even defined the humble household imp as ‘the Devil’ or ‘a demon’, it is no surprise to find that it demonized Amerindian deities and spirits in a very similar way. As a result, from at least the mid-sixteenth century onwards, Europeans were fed a constant stream of vivid, eyewitness accounts of the processions, sacrifices and religious rituals that were being overtly performed by peoples across the Atlantic in honour of the Devil. Jesuit monk José de Acosta, whose influential Natural and Moral History of the Indies was first published in Seville in 1590, sets out the paradigm clearly in the following passage.

[A]lthough idolatrie has beene rooted out of the best and most notable partes of the worlde, yet he [the Devil] hath retired to himself into the most remote parts, and hath ruled in that other part of the worlde which, although it be much inferiour in nobilitie, yet is it not of less compasse . . . Truely wee shall not finde it very strange that hee makes himselfe to be worshipped as God by ignorant nations . . . [and] strives to imitate and to pervert, to bee honoured, and to cause men to be damned: for we shall see the great God hath Sacrifices, Priests, Sacraments, Religious Prophets and Ministers, dedicated to his divine service and holy ceremonies, so the Divell hath his sacrifices, priests, his kinds of sacraments, his ministers appointed etc. . . . ¹⁰

This equivalence also extended to rituals of initiation, with a Spanish Jesuit priest describing a Muisca ritual, in 1599, in which novices seeking the priesthood were taught ‘to become inebriated by a certain type of tobacco smoke, and in this state the devil appears to him, induces him to make his pact and teaches him the things of his cult’ and after long graduation the ‘boy begins to exercise his office and to ensnare souls, sending them to hell’.¹¹

27  In this seventeenth-century engraving from a text by French cartographer Alain Manesson Mallet, the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli directly evokes the European Devil (even displaying a second face on his stomach).

The men who observed these rituals often drew parallels with European witchcraft, with French explorer Jean de Léry including Bodin’s depiction of the witches’ sabbath in his Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1585) along with the conclusion, as paraphrased by Clark, that ‘Brazilian women in their religious rites and European witches in theirs “were guided by the same spirit of Satan”.’ Similarly, the ‘first text written in Mexico devoted strictly to the issue of demonology’ – Fray Andrés de Olmos’ Tratado de hecherías y sortilegios (1553) – was ‘inspired almost entirely’ by a treatise on Spanish-Basque superstition and witchcraft written by Basque cleric Martín de Castañega over two decades before. Even more pertinently, as Fernández Juarez has recently emphasized, American inquisitors made both implicit and explicit reference to the Spanish-Basque prosecutions of 1609–14 when framing, identifying and prosecuting crimes of demonological witchcraft in the New World.¹² While none of the Basque interrogators would have been immune here, we can surmise that through his prior employment as confidential secretary to the bishop of Valladolid and Patriarch of the West Indies, Valle would have been particularly susceptible to reportage surrounding the overt and contractual worship of the Devil that was taking place, in plain sight, in the New World; and that his enhanced engagement with trans-Atlantic Christianization helped to fuel the emphasis on ritually elaborate, and very public, demonic pacts that emerged in the Basque witch-craze.

Contributions of the Accused

While the factors outlined above could be sufficient to explain the prominence of the sabbath-pact in the Basque records, we should not overlook the significance of suspect-contribution here. While the interrogators clearly asked leading questions on the theme, the evidence suggests that they did not always receive simplistic ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers in response. When, in a blatant attempt to elicit an account of the obscene kiss, the interrogators asked Spanish witch María de Endara ‘what other parts she kissed . . . her expression changed and she said nowhere apart from the hand’. Similarly, when de Lancre asked Janne de Hortilopits ‘if she had kissed his [the Devil’s] rear end’ she replied emphatically ‘no, and that the Devil kissed all of them on the rear . . . [and] that it was the custom there for grown-ups to kiss his rear end, while the Devil kissed the children’s rear ends.’ In a further variation on the theme, Bertrand de Handuch told de Lancre that ‘she had kissed the great devil on the rear’ while a smaller devil ‘kissed children on their rear ends.’ That these anomalies came from the accused as opposed to de Lancre, is further indicated by the latter’s weak attempts to explain Bertrand’s variations by alleging that ‘in this way the Devil takes pleasure in changing all that he does at the sabbath’.¹³ As argued in Chapter Four, suspect-contribution can also be detected in some of the idiosyncratic detailing found in accounts of the witches’ mark, where we find defendants claiming to have been pricked ‘on the left side of her groin’; scratched ‘under the ear’; and marked in the pupil with ‘a sort of golden thing’. Others maintained that the Devil removed ‘a little flesh from her nose’ or, in another memorable case, took ‘a bite with his teeth below his [the suspect’s] shoulder’ before sucking the blood that ‘flowed out’.¹⁴ De Lancre’s passing observation, during a discussion of more conventional sabbath-pacts, that ‘I saw people who told us that they are especially made to renounce St. Anthony’, is also unlikely to have emerged from the interrogatorial imagination, both because it diverges from demonological convention and because de Lancre was clearly bemused by the idea; following his comment with the admission that ‘I do not know whether this is because poor, simple people who are nonetheless very religious pray to St. Anthony for their pigs.’ That suspects were actively involved in the co-creation of their sabbath-pact accounts is also supported by the emergence of similar idiosyncrasies in earlier Basque trial records. The cluster of trials that took place in Navarre around 1540 generated suspects that renounced ‘God and Saint Mary and all the saints, and the knee of his father’s right leg and his mother’s womb’ or (in another case) ‘her mother’s breasts and her father’s knee’. Conversely, the report that in 1569 a group of accused witches provided four different versions of the renunciation in Euskaran dialects so regional that specialists from their home valley of Roncal had to be brought in to translate them, is clear evidence that suspects were involved.¹⁵

Raw Materials: Ordinary Oaths

When contributing to their sabbath-pact accounts, defendants would undoubtedly have been influenced by the witchcraft propaganda that circulated prior to and during the witch-craze; as we have seen, Basque witches had been confessing to having made public, ceremonial pledges to the Devil at gatherings of witches as early as the fifteenth century. But the evidence suggests that when fleshing out these templates, the suspects also drew on a wider range of raw materials. Some possibilities have been examined earlier in relation to the interrogators. Reports that heretical groups overtly renounced the worship of the Virgin Mary and the saints and other elements of the Catholic faith would have been widely known, and in some cases actively promulgated, by ordinary people in the period. Similarly, it was not only Jesuit missionaries but also Basque husbands, uncles and brothers who would have returned from their Atlantic voyages with tales of the overt and highly ritualistic forms of Devil worship that were taking place in the New World.

But the evidence also suggests that the suspects quarried more prosaic lodes. The dramatic nature of the akelarre-pact makes it easy to forget that that in this period most Europeans would, at some point in their lives and probably on more than one occasion, have made an oath or vow in public before gathered members of their community. On a secular level, such oaths were made by vassals to their lords, soldiers to their commanders and by individuals who wished to become members of trade guilds, local councils and so on. On a religious level, vows of allegiance were made by congregations to God and the institution of the Catholic Church: with Henningsen stating that during the witch-craze, before the Edict of Faith was read out at mass, ‘the whole congregation with one accord took the solemn oath of loyalty to the Inquisition. They declared themselves one and all to be on the side of the Holy Catholic Faith’. Congregations also made public, ceremonial vows to saints or other holy figures when they were asking for a protection against a specific threat such as sickness or drought, with William Christian noting that in sixteenth-century Spain, highly choreographed public vows to saints were, in effect, ‘governmental acts’. On a more individual level, almost every parishioner would have made public vows to confirm their Christian identity: as godparents at baptisms, husbands and wives at marriage ceremonies, ‘soldiers of Jesus Christ’ at confirmations and cofrades at the initiatory rites of religious confraternities.¹⁶ If they chose a religious life, a range of vows were also made when becoming a priest or a member of a monastic order.

Scholars of European witchcraft have often observed that sabbath-pacts can be contextualized within these wider oath-making traditions, and on closer analysis we can identify at least five options that may have been instrumental in the Basque case. The vows made to saints can be clearly detected in de Lancre’s assertion that some suspects ‘told us that they are especially made to renounce St. Anthony . . . because poor, simple people who are nonetheless very religious pray to St. Anthony for their pigs.’ While anomalous in the context of orthodox demonology, this reference is wholly compatible with popular Catholic belief that if a saint did not fulfil its contractual obligations, the community could attempt to coerce it to comply by subjecting its name, images or relics to verbal or physical threats that amounted, in essence, to a temporary renunciation. Although these ‘humiliations’, as they have been termed, saw a decline after their apparent peak in the Romanesque era they persisted – in reduced form – into the early modern period, with the sixteenth-century parishioners of the Navarrese archdeaconry of Usso, for example, seeking to coerce a recalcitrant St Peter to respond to their requests for rain by submerging his image in the local river.¹⁷ Through this lens, de Lancre’s speculation that ‘one could say that Satan wants them to renounce this recommendation, this intercessional prayer to God, which they direct to this good saint [Anthony] for the protection of their beasts’ may have been an attempt to demonize reports that local Labourdin farmers, angry with St Anthony for not caring sufficiently for their livestock, had subjected him to some form of verbal or ritual castigation. We gain other glimpses of oath-making traditions in the Joint Sentence, where accounts of witches ‘going down on their knees to worship him [the Devil] by kissing the left hand’ evoke conventional villeinage rituals in which vassals ‘swear fealty to their feudal Lord’. Indeed, it may also be relevant here that one of the co-creators of this pact account, Miguel de Goiburu, would have sworn a public oath when acting as a ‘jurado’ in the territorial case filed against the Urdax monastery in 1580. Outside this case, it is also possible that if Goiburu was ever an alderman, he would also have found himself in the rather incongruous position of having to publicly pledge allegiance to the monastery’s abbot, Fray León de Araníbar. Moving back to France, an overt reference to ordination rituals appears in a priest-suspect’s claim that ‘he had renounced and denied his Creator, and accepted allegiance to the Devil instead of the holy orders and allegiance to the priesthood.’ As we shall explore later, there is also evidence to suggest that the initiation rites of religious confraternities may also have been an inspiration here.¹⁸

But while all these oath-making traditions may have played a role, the rite that bears the closest resemblance to the Basque akelarre-pact comes from a very different quarter. Our primary clue can be found in those places where, in both French and Spanish records, suspects maintain that aspirant witches can only participate in the rite when they reach a certain age, with the Joint Sentence stating that the suspects

said that at the time when they apostatize they are required to have reached the age of discretion, because the Devil wants them to have the awareness to know what they are doing and therefore, though he accepts small children so that they can become witches, he does not make them apostatize until they reach the aforementioned age of discretion, and the Devil cannot force them to apostatize without their consent and therefore, when they apostatize, all the witches know and understand what they are doing.

In this period a range of oaths of allegiance were age-dependent in this way. Aspirant monks or nuns had to attain levels of experience and understanding before they could take their vows, with the Council of Trent imposing a minimum age of twelve (for the wearing of the nun’s habit) and sixteen (before professing religious vows). The fact that Becerra was a member of the religious-military Order of Alcántara, and therefore highly familiar with the ritual progression from novice to monk through the profession of age-related vows under the auspices of a presiding ‘grand master’, may also be relevant here.¹⁹

But the most pertinent ritual – with regard to the ‘age of discretion’ – was that of confirmation. This sacrament, which could only be administered by a bishop, was not to be performed until a child ‘attained the use of reason’, with the Council of Trent stating ‘if it does not seem well to defer [confirmation] to the age of twelve, it is most proper to postpone this Sacrament to at least that of seven years’; with the effect that in this period the majority of European children were confirmed between the ages of seven and fourteen. This ritual, which was essentially a conscious re-enactment of the ritual of baptism and an act of Christian initiation, was deferred until this age so that the confirmand (that is, the individual to be confirmed) could consciously and with a doctrinal knowledge of the significance of what they were doing, confirm their allegiance to God and begin their life’s work as ‘perfect Christians and soldiers of Jesus Christ.’²⁰ If we compare the component parts of the akelarre-pact to those of confirmation we find a surprising congruity.²¹ Just as the novice witch is ‘instructed’ in ‘their renouncement and the other things they had to do’ and then presented to the Devil by an older woman or ‘mistress witch’, so the confirmand is instructed and presented to the bishop by a ‘confirmation sponsor’ (often a godparent) specially chosen to mentor the child to religious maturity. Just as the novice witch stands or kneels down to make her akelarre-pact before the Devil, who is seated on a throne, so the confirmand stands or kneels down to make her confirmation oath before a bishop who is seated on his Cathedra (the bishop’s official chair). Just as the novice witch has to repeat the words of the renunciation after the Devil, so the confirmand has to speak the words of the confirmation pledge in response to promptings from the bishop; and just as the Devil asks the novice to renounce God, Mary and the saints and pledge her allegiance to the Devil, so the bishop is, through the confirmation ritual, asking the confirmand to reaffirm their baptismal commitment to renounce the Devil and pledge themselves to God, Mary and the saints. Just as the Devil then marks the novice witch on their face or body with his fingernail, so the bishop then marks the confirmand on the forehead with his finger, making the sign of the cross with scented oil or ‘chrism’ (with Saint Ambrose stating that through this act ‘God the Father has marked you with his sign’). Just as the novice witch then kisses the Devils’ arse (or sometimes claw), so the confirmand concludes the confirmation ritual by kissing the bishop’s hand. Just as the young witch receives gifts (‘some coins and a dressed toad’), from the Devil via her ‘mistress’, so the young confirmand or her family receives ritual gifts of clothes, money and toys from her confirmation sponsor.²²

28  This early eighteenth-century engraving of the Catholic sacrament of confirmation evokes the theatricality of the rite, with the godparents publicly presenting confirmands to the bishop to be marked with chrism.

Although the confirmation ritual is not a direct inversion of the akelarre-pact, there are enough parallels here to suggest that it may have been utilized by the Basque suspects when contributing to their pact accounts. This likelihood is further supported by the fact that a large proportion of the suspects involved in the Basque witch-craze were teenagers or children; precisely the demographic for whom the rite of confirmation would have been most significant. For early modern children, the sacrament may well have been one of the most memorable experiences of their short lives, with months of preparation and instruction under the watchful eyes of the priest and confirmation sponsor, culminating in an emotional and aesthetically powerful ritual in which, for that brief moment, all the eyes of their community rested on them as they publicly renounced the Devil and pledged themselves to God. That young Basque witch suspects could bring these experiences to their akelarre-pact accounts is supported by earlier trial records. The cluster of pact accounts that emerged from the Navarrese mountains in 1540 (Salazar Valley) and 1569 (Roncal Valley) – and which, as observed earlier, were very similar to those produced during the 1609–14 witch-craze – were primarily produced by youths and children. In the Roncal case the young suspects (who were all between seven and ten years old) were accused of being lured into witchcraft and taught the renunciation by a witch mistress and a man named Pedro de Lecumberri, with the texts recording that ‘the witnesses stated that the aforementioned Don Pedro de Lecumberri and the other accused taught them to renounce God and His saints, and they declare which words persuaded them to do this.’ In the present context, this reference is significant because Lecumberri was none other than the local priest who ‘used to teach’ the children their ‘Christian doctrine and prayers’. Whether or not he had been preparing the children for confirmation (though given their age range he may well have been), the records clearly suggest that his young parishioners drew on their memories of these religious instructions when asked about demonic pacts – with the subversive psychological processes that create false confessions efficiently turning the priest’s requests that they recite Christian creeds and prayers into requests that they recite some form of renunciation. Indeed, it is a sad irony that Lecumberri’s ministry may have impacted so deeply on the children’s imaginations precisely because he was unusually solicitous in his work, with his defenders arguing that unlike many of his lazier contemporaries, the priest made an effort to teach the Basque children their prayers in Spanish instead of Euskara.²³

The presence of an engaged, conscientious clergy may also explain why the most precise and detailed examples of the akelarre-pact to emerge in the Basque witch-craze were produced by the villagers of Zugarramurdi, as recorded in the Joint Sentence. Despite the importance of the sacrament, contemporary records suggest that in early modern Europe the failure of bishops to manage the long and difficult journeys to remote parishes meant that many children reached adulthood, or even went to their graves, without being confirmed, with Kamen noting that ‘numerous reports of the period leave us in no doubt that in many parts of the [Iberian] peninsula generations would come and go without ever once laying their eyes on a bishop’.²⁴ Given that Zugarramurdi was under the pastoral supervision of the Urdax monastery and that, reflecting the canonical nature of the order, its abbot was mitred and ‘enjoyed the rank of Bishop’, we can surmise that the sacrament was performed with due regularity in the village and that, as a consequence, its residents were more literate with regard to the ritual of confirmation than many of their contemporaries elsewhere in the Pyrenean region.²⁵

The Involvement of the Devil

According to the perspectives developed here, when drawing their experience of Catholic oath-making into their accounts of the akelarre-pact, the suspects had to perform an inversion that converted some variant of ‘I pledge allegiance to God and renounce the Devil’ into some variant of ‘I pledge allegiance to the Devil and renounce God’. The complex unconscious processes that generate fictions, false memories and stereotyped dreams would not have made this inversion difficult, but we must now consider the possibility that there were additional raw materials accessible to the suspects that did not require such redefinition; imaginal and experiential matrices in which the pact was directed from the very beginning towards the Devil himself.

The febrile nature of scholarly witchcraft discourse, both in the modern and pre-modern periods, makes it easy to forget that on a simple verbal level, the renunciation of God was not so foreign to early modern mentalities as we might think. Despite the religiosity of the age, the crime of blasphemy was not only common throughout Europe but was ‘the offense most frequently prosecuted by religious authorities’ in early modern Spain. Indeed, as Maureen Flynn notes, the Spanish people ‘have devised some of the most imaginative and effective profanities against the Catholic religion known in our vernacular languages’ and have invented blasphemies ‘that are both stunningly sharp in their attack on dogma and brazenly irreverent in their slander of heavenly personages.’²⁶ Of relevance here is that a significant percentage of the thousands of testimonies taken from blasphemers in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain involved some form of renunciation of God. John Chuchiak states that ‘it was common to hear in Spanish gambling houses and taverns’ expletives like ‘Reniego a Dios (I renounce God)’, and ‘Descreo de Dios (I disbelieve in God)’. Similar exclamations were ‘often provoked by outdoor games’, with a man playing pelota in Soria exclaiming ‘I don’t believe in God, buggering St John!’; and another playing bowls in Coruna del Conde that ‘I reject the whore of a God [the Virgin Mary]!’ Blasphemous expressions of this kind also emerged in more domestic contexts, with a Cuencan tailor bluntly telling his inquisitors that he had exclaimed ‘I renounce God’; and his fellow countryman, Alonso de Carranza, that after rising ‘from bed to wash himself in the morning’ and having difficulty lighting a lamp ‘I got very angry and said that I deny God and his saints and my father and my mother.’²⁷ While less common, we do find vernacular renunciations of this kind combined with a pledge to the Devil, with a group of villagers from near Toledo in 1544 telling the Inquisition that ‘they had witnessed a gamester pledge his allegiance to the devil, since God had clearly forsaken him’; while in New Spain in 1539, a tailor was accused of telling his wife (during arguments) that she ‘should not pray so much to God but rather to the Devil!’²⁸ While there is no scope to explore the psychological dynamics behind blasphemy here, it is notable that in early modern Spain the practice was so widespread that the Inquisition was compelled to develop a pragmatically lenient response. To this end, it ruled that while such expletives had the potential to be heretical, if they were uttered ‘in anger while a person was emotionally distraught’ then they were ‘simple blasphemy and not heresy’ and punished relatively lightly, with Cuencan Cebrián de Alcara mounting this classic defence in his claim that he ‘caught himself renouncing God “through anger and wrath without heeding what I said”.’²⁹ We can safely assume that the men and women caught up in the Basque witch-craze were familiar with expletives of this type. Over twenty-three percent of the judicial cases dealt with by the Logroño Tribunal between 1582 and 1635 were concerned with palabras hereticas (heretical words), with at least fourteen men being sentenced, alongside the witches, for making blasphemous or heretical statements at the 1610 auto de fé. These crimes were also highlighted in the Edict of Faith circulated around the Basque parishes during the witch-craze visitations, with the refrain ‘I renounce my God [if what I am saying is not true]’ being overtly cited in the text as an example of blasphemous speech.³⁰

This verbal familiarity with the act of renouncing God would have been reinforced through oral literature. When discussing the origins of the demonological stereotype of the demonic pact, historians unanimously point to the influence of a range of legends, recorded from at least the sixth century, in which individuals renounced their Christianity and pledged allegiance to the Devil. The most popular and widely circulated of these was the legend of Theophilus (alleged to have been a sixth-century archdeacon from the Turkish city of Adana). The well-known version by thirteenth-century Castilian poet Gonzalo de Berceo, as paraphrased by Caro Baroja, states:

When Theophilus was trying to find a protector after the death of a bishop who had previously looked after his interests, he consulted a Jewish sorcerer who promised him success. In the middle of the night, the sorcerer took him to a cross-roads, warning him not to cross himself while he was there. Shortly afterwards a sinister looking group of people arrived carrying candles, with their ruler in their midst. This ruler gave an audience to the sorcerer who introduced Theophilus, and the latter cursed Christ and the Virgin Mary. Subsequently, Theophilus and the King signed a pact, and by cock-crow Theophilus was back in his house, without anybody noticing that he had ever left it. From then onwards he lost his ‘good colour’ and even his shadow, and was only finally saved by repentance and the intercession of the Virgin Mary.

We cannot know for certain if this legend was circulating orally in the Basque regions in the early-seventeenth century, but its popularity in both France and Spain, when combined with the evidence that Berceo’s version was written in the Spanish vernacular over four hundred years before the witch-craze in a village that was less than forty kilometres south-west of Logroño, makes it highly likely. The fact that the story of Theophilus was ‘a favourite with the Jesuits’ – a religious order founded in the 1530s by Basque nobleman Ignatius of Loyola – may also be relevant here. Similarly, wider perspectives suggest that a range of other narratives of this ilk are likely to have been circulating in the Basque regions in the period, with folklorists demonstrating that folktales depicting down-on-their-luck protagonists making overt pacts with individuals implied to be, or overtly identified as, the Devil or a demon were widespread across Europe in the pre-modern period.³¹

Demonic Pacts in Magical Practice

But while blaspheming practices and popular pact legends are likely to have influenced the way that Basque suspects thought about demonic pacts, the subject would also have impacted on their lives in a more tangible and ritual way. When examining the toad familiar in Chapter Nine, we noted that both elite and popular magical practitioners established working relationships with spirits of either humanoid or animal form that could be defined as demons or the Devil. We also observed that these relationships were reciprocal or contractual in nature, in that the human offered something, such as food or care, in return for the spirit’s magical service. But what we have not emphasized until now is that the contractual element of this relationship was often overtly defined and sealed through some kind of ritual oath or pact. The practices emerge most clearly in the elite magical traditions, with a papal bull issued in the 1320s specifically stating that magicians were guilty of binding demons to their service but also of ‘entering into pacts with them’. Such contracts typically involved the magician accepting the spirit’s magical help in return for various promises and gifts, from ‘homage’, ‘service’ or the ‘soul’ to more material objects such as sacrificed animals or the magician’s own blood or body parts. In an Inquisitorial guide from 1369, Spanish inquisitor Nicolas Eymeric stated that when a magician ‘makes offerings of his own blood’ to a demon, he engages in an act of apostasy.³² As stated earlier in this chapter, there is a scholarly consensus that these covenanting practices had a profound impact on the development of demonological ideas about the witches’ pact, with the influential legend of Theophilus and similar stories clearly representing aesthetic elaborations of the theme.

But while ritual covenanting emerged most clearly in learned magical traditions, it was also found in popular magical practice. Jobbing conjurors and cunning folk across Europe claimed to enter into overtly contractual relationships with a range of folk spirits or demons, with Tausiet observing in reference to Francisco Fajardo Spinola’s study of traditional sorcery in the Canaries, that sorcerers’ ‘orations’ were ‘basically commercial transactions complete with clearly set-out terms and conditions (including the “signs” demanded from souls as proof of their acceptance of the contract), to the extent that sometimes those casting the spells even indulged in imaginary haggling with the spirits they were invoking.’³³ Vivid examples of overtly contractual working relationships between popular magical practitioners and folk spirits or demons can also be found in contemporary Aragonese trial records, with these examples being all the more valuable because they emerged in a sceptical interrogatorial environments where, as Tausiet notes, ‘far from believing that the demonic pacts confessed to under torture were real, and far from considering these defendants dangerous or even capable of harbouring heretical intentions, the judges accepted the fundamentally inoffensive nature of their confessions.’ In these records we find Gracia Andreu stating in 1656 that Zaragozan cunning women were ‘accustomed to offering’ black henbane to the Devil and that her mother ‘used it and was hired to the Devil, for which reason she was able to do that which she wished’. She also maintained that she herself had negotiated help from a spirit of the dead (the ‘Anima Sola’) with the words ‘I come with a gift for you, another I ask for you in return . . . if you do as I ask, I shall offer a Mass to you, and if not, I shall give you nothing.’ Alternatively, Ana Ruiz allegedly paid the Devil for services rendered with footwear, telling a client

that to make a man love a woman faithfully [...] she had to break a piece of bread [...] into twelve scraps and throw them out of a window calling Satan, Beezlebub, Barrabas and the great devil, and they might bring her to the person she loved, by offering to give them a gift. And if the man in question were to come, she should throw out of the window a shoe or some other thing as payment to the devil for having done as she wished.³⁴

This contractual template also emerged in the trial of Embun farmworker Pascual Clemente. In Chapter Nine we saw that Pascual had confessed to harvesting his grain with the help of five familiars kept, in the form of fern seeds, in the handle of a sickle. But of relevance here is his additional claim that a clergyman had told him that ‘the five seeds were familiars and that to take advantage of them, it was necessary to make a pact with the Devil’. Elsewhere, we find evidence that contractual exchanges could involve body parts, with de Lancre providing a vivid example from a trial conducted by the Bordeaux Parlement in 1608. While it is unclear as to whether the suspect’s identification of the spirit as the Devil was original or retrospective, the template of popular magical practice is clearly evident in his confession that

he was led by two of his friends into a dark chamber, where he remained three hours a day for eight days. The Devil appeared to him and told him that if he wanted, he would allow him to cure people and free them from magic spells. The Devil said that he would have to give him two toes and half of his foot, which he promised to do. The pact thus made, the two witches came to remove him from the place where he had been transported. And not once after that was he able to escape from that black man, who, at the end of eight days took away from him the flesh from his first and second toes, and half of the third toe of his left foot, which made two and a half toes, without causing him any pain. And the Devil said that if he was not content to know how to cure people and if he wanted to learn how to inflict pain, it would be necessary to give him half of the foot and all five of his toes. He recounted that six months later the bones of these toes, because this foot was fleshless, dried up, and finally fell off him, causing great pain, as if they were bewitched, and he wrapped them up and buried them in the ground at the foot of a tree. This is the very pact that he made with the Devil, which was executed a piece at a time. For he showed us his foot, and he had accurately described the two and a half toes that the Devil had carried away, and he knew very well how to cure people . . .³⁵

We also have evidence that pacts of this kind, which involved the contractual exchange of blood or body parts, were also circulating in the Basque regions in this period, with Salazar noting that ‘Cataline de Echevarría, an old woman who was reconciled at the tribunal at Logroño, said in her confessions that when she became a witch the Devil removed three toes from her left foot.’³⁶ While we cannot claim too close a synonymy between Basque rural traditions and predominantly urban practices from Aragon and Bordeaux, these parallels do raise the possibility that some Basque magical practitioners were overtly covenanting with spirits that they identified as demons, or even the Devil himself, at the time of the witch-craze. And as a consequence, we can speculate that knowledge or experience of these practices would have helped Basque suspects imaginatively engage with the idea of the sabbath-pact during witchcraft interrogations.

Folkloric Renunciations

Deeper analysis of the Aragonese material reinforces and nuances this thesis. Some of the Zaragozan records contain popular magical pacts that display stereotypically demonological elements. While we cannot determine whether these stereotypical elements were elite or popular in origin, the scepticism of the Aragonese authorities and their reluctance to superimpose demonological templates means that we can fairly safely assume that they were genuine components of the magical pacts as used by suspects prior to their arrest and interrogation. We find the surrender of the soul intimated in Gracia Andreu’s claim that while her mother gave black henbane to the Devil in order ‘to do that which she wished’, she herself ‘did not use this herb, but [instead used] valerian, which was good for gaining happiness and with it she did not offer her spirit to the devil [my italics].’ A more overt example appears in a summary of the trial of cunning woman María García in 1656, where it is stated that a woman

was weeping because she had no news of her husband, who had gone away. The defendant told her not to upset herself, that her husband was well, although he was not thinking much about her. And when she asked how she knew this, this defendant told her that if she wanted news of her husband, the two of them would stand at a window one night and recite certain words for three nights, and with that he would have to come and see her, though he would then have to leave again. And that if they heard people talking it would be a sign that he would come soon, and that if [they heard] horses neighing, [it would be] a sign that he was going further away. And the words were: Demon, I summon you; demon, I summon you; demon, I summon you; my body and soul I give you; my body and soul I give you; my body and soul I give you; I shall not deliver it to you or give it to you until you bring me so-and-so in person.

Here, we have the soul-surrendering characteristic of the stereotypical demonic pact (‘my body and soul I give you’) spliced into a clearly folkloric ritual that includes coercive commands indicative of conjuring traditions (‘I shall not deliver it to you’ until ‘you bring me so-and-so in person’). While we cannot identify the exact origin of the phrase ‘my body and soul I give to you’ (for it could have emerged out of witch-propaganda, magical practice or orthodox Christian prayer – as in ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit’) its presence in this popular magical invocation clearly illustrates how easy it would have been for magical practitioners charged with witchcraft to produce descriptions of ritual events that were highly redolent of the demonic pact.³⁷

Fusions of a different kind emerge with regard to renunciation. In Chapter Nine we observed that Zaragozan suspects could employ magical rituals that invoked Christian and non-Christian spiritual beings either simultaneously or independently and with no apparent conflict of interest. But what we have not yet emphasized is that some of these rites and invocations explicitly acknowledged the tensions between these different classes of spirit and recognized that because of this, the act of asking the Devil for help necessitated somehow navigating around God. With regard to one case, Tausiet reports that:

One woman who was a witness at the trial of Cándida Gombal stated that having consulted the defendant as to ‘how to marry an absent man’, she had been advised ‘to go one night to the Ebro bridge with three pieces of bread and give them to the first dog she met, without mentioning on the way there or back either Jesus, Mary or any saint’.³⁸

This ritual, variants of which can also be found in other parts of early modern Europe, clearly reflects the ubiquitous belief that folk spirits and demons are hostile to Christianity (as also examined in Chapter Thirteen in relation to sabbath-dispersal tropes). It is not clear whether the participant had to avoid mentioning ‘Jesus, Mary or any saint’ because it might anger the demonic spirits being invoked or because Jesus et al. might hear their names called and come and disperse them (thereby undoing the effectiveness of the spell). But whatever the reason, it is clear that the verbal suppression, as advised by Gombal, was a pragmatic, working method through which to circumvent the operational conflict between Christian and non-Christian powers. Even more significantly, through the current lens this act of not ‘mentioning on the way there or back either Jesus, Mary or any saint’ can be interpreted as an act of renunciation in which – for a single purpose and specified length of time – the client refrains from visibly articulating her customary allegiance to God. Once we know what to look for, we can detect this logic in popular magical pacts from other parts of Europe. The following example, from the confession of Modenese cunning woman Orsolina Toni (1539), combines classic commanding tropes from demonic magical traditions, such as ‘dominat[ing]’ and ‘calling to the Devil’ with a series of renunciatory statements.

[She] conjured the Devil like this: ‘I deny Christ and the Virgin Mary and his saints, and I do not want God and the Virgin Mary to have anything to do with me or my soul, and may the Devil be at my mercy and may I dominate him.’ At this point I hit the ground with the stick, calling to the Devil three times like this, ‘Devil, come for me’.

While the first half of Orsolina’s renunciation (‘I deny Christ and the Virgin Mary and his saints’) would be hard to separate from demonological stereotype, the second half (‘I do not want God and the Virgin Mary to have anything to do with me or my soul’) can be read as a more demonologically sophisticated articulation of the strategic suppression of Christian allegiance articulated in the Ebro bridge charm cited earlier; with Gombal’s tactic of ‘[not] mentioning’ God for the duration of the ritual evolving into Orsolina’s overt declaration that for the period of time that she was ‘calling to’ and utilizing the Devil, God would not have ‘anything to do’ with her or her soul.³⁹

Of interest here with regard to our analysis into the akelarre-pact, is that very similar narrative patterns can be identified in the Basque witch-craze records. In Chapter Thirteen we observed the frequent claim that if a sabbath participant either deliberately or accidentally mentioned the name of Jesus, the company was instantly dispersed. But what we have not emphasized until now is that the novice witches were specifically warned that this could be the case before they attended the sabbath. Mongastón’s pamphlet states that

while they are at the akelarre they [the Spanish witches] cannot name the holy name of Jesus, nor of the Holy Virgin Mary, his mother, but must deny them, nor can they cross themselves; and they warn them of this when they are admitted to the witches’ sect; and if they sometimes neglect this and name them great harm occurs to them, the akelarre is undone and the people who named them are severely punished.

Other passages suggest that this warning was formally introduced at a designated point after the sabbath-pact ritual, with Mongastón stating that ‘once the renunciation is finished the Devil and the other senior witches who are present warn the novice not to mention the name of Jesus or the Holy Virgin Mary etc.’ The additional assertion, in the Pamplona Manuscript, that senior witches were seldom punished for mentioning Jesus’ name ‘because as they were already so taught they do not name him’ suggests that this renunciation tactic was seen as something that should be ritually learnt, as a form of magical skill.⁴⁰ This narrative, in which senior witches advise novices at ritually opportune moments that for the duration of the akelarre they must not make reference to any Christian persons, gestures or symbols, has a clear morphological similarity to the Ebro bridge account cited earlier, in which Cándida Gombal told her client that when she goes to the bridge to perform her ritual, she should go ‘without mentioning on the way there or back either Jesus, Mary or any saint’. Although the comparison is not an exact one, in that the akelarre was communal and festive while the Ebro bridge case involved a private and solitary ritual, by being designed and entered into for the express purpose of obtaining magical help from non-legitimate spirits, the two activities shared an underlying symmetry.

There is another passage from the Basque records that bears even closer comparison with our popular pact material. Although the Joint Sentence contains the most stereotypically detailed account of the akelarre-pact to emerge in any Basque witch-craze record, in another section of the document we also find a short reference to an altogether different kind of pact ceremony. In reference to the witches’ preparations for travel to the akelarre the text states that

on the nights when they have to go [to the akelarre] they entertain themselves by conversing with each other and they do not go to bed, but those who are youngsters who do not yet have toads in their possession anoint their hands, temples, face, chest, shameful parts and the soles of their feet saying ‘I am a devil, from now on I must be one and the same with the Devil. I must be a Devil and be nothing to God,’ and then they commend themselves to the Devil . . .

This highly anomalous account bears little resemblance to the standard sabbath-pact as presented in the rest of the Basque records. Not only is the wording idiosyncratic, but the ritual is performed by novices before going to the akelarre as opposed to with the Devil at the event itself. But viewed through the perspectives developed in this chapter, the tone and content of the rite is immediately redolent of the invocatory renunciations – of the kind cited above – used by contemporary cunning women. The novices’ startlingly direct imperative: ‘I am a Devil, from now on I must be nothing to God’, for example, directly evokes Orsolina Toni’s strident claim that ‘I do not want God and the Virgin Mary to have anything to do with me or my soul’.⁴¹ Isolated and short as it is, this valuable example strongly suggests that some Basque suspects were familiar with popular magical charms and conjurations containing renunciatory elements. In turn, this invites us to speculate that while religious rituals like confirmation helped the suspects build narrative and texture into their akelarre-pact accounts, it may well have been the covenanting aspect of popular magical practice that enabled them to so fluently and vividly invert these templates into ritual acts in which they personally renounced God and surrendered themselves to the Devil.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Theophilus and
the Stage

We have demonstrated how a wide range of factors could have fuelled suspect-contribution to accounts of the akelarre-pact. But there is one last resource that needs to be examined here. While requiring a significant change of direction, it has the advantage of not only shedding light on the construction of the pact passages but also on the character and origins of the being – the Devil – with whom the pact was made. Although, in the period of the witch-craze, modern theatre (in the form of professional acting troupes and permanent stages) was only just beginning to emerge in Europe, community-based dramatic performance was a prominent feature of both rural and urban life. Devised and presented by groups of local people, typically via the construct of guilds or specially devised ‘festive societies’, these theatricals assumed a wide variety of forms. Feast days and festivals were enlivened by colourful and highly choreographed processions involving elaborate floats, vividly costumed characters and ‘large figures of wood and paper painted to represent saints, historic heroes or symbolic creatures’.¹ Alongside or incorporated into these processions, were scripted dramatic performances, often on carts or temporary stages, that ranged from religious plays (autos sacramentales) to re-enactments of historical battles, with conflicts between the Christians and Moors being particularly popular in Spain. Masquerading traditions which typically combined masked actors, dancing and theatrical skits (including ‘mummers’ plays’) with processions and house-to-house visits, were also widespread; while charivaris delivered community justice by humiliating wrongdoers with noisy street processions. While the European theatrical landscape was constantly evolving in response to cultural change, in Catholic regions in the early-seventeenth century it was still substantially reflective of medieval themes and structural forms and therefore, where useful, medieval sources will be used in this discussion.

Of particular relevance to our investigations into the sabbath-pact, is that in medieval and early modern Europe one of the commonest figures represented across the range of theatrical genres was the Devil and his entourage of demons. These ‘theatrical devils’, as we can term them here, strode boldly across street and stage, aggressively goading onlookers, harrying sinners, tempting protagonists to perform evil and fleeing in a noisy panic at the sign of the cross. Their dramatic impact was reinforced by elaborate costumes and staging. Alida Degeler suggests that in medieval France ‘considerable pains’ were taken to have the Devil ‘represented as hideously as possible’ with a tail, horns, cloven feet or long nails and, if dressed, black clothes; while the lesser devils were costumed to look ‘more like beasts or monsters than human beings’. In the religious plays – which were performed on large carts adapted with multilevel staging that depicted heaven above and hell below – some of the most popular scenes involved the Devil and his demons dragging sinners into a large ‘hell’s mouth’ that sat, like the ‘maw of a monstrous dragon or serpent’, bellowing smoke on the lower left-hand of the stage.² Devil figures were also a prominent feature of religious processions and celebrations, with the Catalonian Church complaining in the first half of the seventeenth century that ‘many men take part dressed as devils or as women, and dance around gesticulating like devils’ or dress ‘like devils with ugly masks, bells on their legs and a sort of stick in their hands from which they fired many firecrackers’. In Seville in 1607, a giant dragon or Tarasca – a staple feature of Spanish Corpus Christi processions – was driven by a ‘demon with a whip in his right hand’ and accompanied by goats, satyrs, ‘savages’ and four mojarillas (‘little devils’) with a seat for Lucifer reserved inside its hollowed-out back.³ Devils were also evoked in the masquerading and charivari rituals where young men blackened their faces with earth or manure and wore demonic and animalistic masks, including those of stags and birds. This popular devil corpus overlapped with a range of aggressive and provocative characters from history, literature and folklore, including the harlequins, fools and wild men that, as we saw in Chapter Fifteen, enjoyed teasing and striking onlookers with their phallic clubs and bladders.⁴

With regard to our investigations into the sabbath-pact, of even more relevance here is that the activities performed by Devil figures in medieval and early modern theatre also included the making of bargains or pacts with humans. In a range of medieval plays we find scenes in which the Devil persuades saints, sorcerers or ordinary men and women to enter into verbal or written covenants in return for his help. Taking just a handful of examples from France and Spain: Le Chevalier qui Donna sa Femme au Diable features a knight who strikes a bargain to allow the Devil to take away his wife; L’Enfant Donne au Diable features a couple who seal a contract to allow the Devil to claim their son; while El Esclavo de Demonio stars a Portuguese priest who makes a pact with the Devil to satisfy his lust. Given its popularity, it is also unsurprising to find that the legend of Theophilus was dramatized from an early period. The popular version by French poet Rutebeuf (Le Miracle de Théophile) – first performed around 1261 – is the second oldest miracle play extant in France and gives us, according to Jerry Root, ‘one of our most detailed and specific accounts of the homage that Theophilus made to the Devil.’⁵ It is also notable that this interest in dramatizing the demonic pact persisted into the early modern era, with Lima observing that in Golden Age Spain dramatists were particularly ‘fascinated’ by the theme. With regard to our current analysis, this evidence is importance because it indicates that in the period of the witch-craze the populations of Europe did not only hear stories about demonic pacts as circulated via sermonizers, storytellers, sorcerers and witchcraft prosecutions, but would also have seen them vividly represented in three-dimensions on the contemporary stage. Through the viscerality of theatre, they would have seen and smelt the sweat and paint glistening on the Theophilus’ grimacing face as he grappled with the temptation to ‘denounce all the saints’; and been physically thrilled, as Robert Lima notes, by ‘the hermetic mystery of the demonic pact and the horror attendant upon its execution.’⁶

29  An illustration of the set built for the Mystère de la Passion performed in the French city of Valenciennes in 1547. Although this was an elaborate urban production, the set followed basic conventions, with paradise stage right and hell’s mouth stage left.

Basque Theatre

These perspectives can be brought to bear on the Basque akelarre-pact in a variety of ways. Although we have very little documentation relating to Basque drama before the eighteenth century, the surviving evidence points to theatrical traditions as rich and diverse as those in other parts of Europe. Henningsen reports, for example, that at the Feast of Corpus Christi in Pamplona between 1606 and 1612 there were

two places in the city [where] huge triumphal arches were erected, and altars ornamented with flowers were set up in the squares. Along the route of the Corpus Christi procession the facades of the houses were covered with magnificent carpets that hung down from the balconies and windowsills. Venegas (the Bishop) ensured that all the different crafts with their guild banners participated in the magnificent procession through the city along with the religious orders and several hundred soldiers from the city garrison. During the eight days of the feast there were concerts, religious plays (autos sacramentales) and fireworks.

Religious plays were also performed, either wholly or partly in Euskara, in the smaller towns in the period.⁷ As an inhabitant of Renteria, María de Zozaya may well have joined the crowds that gathered on the Feast of Santa Magdalena in 1603, to see a religious play titled The Triumph of Almsgiving or – four years earlier – watched the group of young men who ‘danced in the day’ and later performed a drama about the ‘conversion and penance of the patron saint of the people’.⁸ That re-enactments of historical battles also took place in the Basque regions in this period is indicated by Zugarramurdi suspect Juana Telletxea’s confession that she could not go the akelarre because her husband had been chosen to play the ‘king of the Moors’ in the village revels that took place on St John’s Eve. Similarly, evidence of masquerading and charivari traditions can be extrapolated from the reports of ‘masked men called mozorros who went out to make a racket’ in early-seventeenth century Oiartzun, and in the detailed accounts of a lively theatrical procession performed in order to humiliate two witchcraft suspects near Santesteban in 1611. The enthusiasm with which contemporary Basques engaged with theatrical events is also vividly described in a rare account, from Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, of a play about the life of St Anthony performed in the Álavan town of Vitoria-Gasteiz in 1679.

When I entered into the Room, the People set forth an hollowing, Mira, mira! Which is to say, Look, Look! The Decoration of the Theatre was not over Magnificent; it was rais’d on Barrels, and ill-rang’d Planks; the Windows of the Room were open, for they used no Candles or Flambeaux . . . They acted the Life of St. Anthony; and when the Players said any thing which pleas’d the Company, all the People cried out ‘Victoria, Victoria; I was informed this was the Custom of the Country . . . [and] when St. Anthony said his Confiteor, which he did often enough, all the Spectators fell down on their Knees, and gave themselves such rude Mea Culpa’s as was enough to beat the breath out of their Bodies.⁹

Due to the lack of sources, specific evidence of theatrical Devil figures is limited in the Basque case, though they clearly existed, with d’Aulnoy observing that the Álavan Life of St Anthony featured a Devil wearing ‘a pair of Stockings of a Flame colour, and a pair of Horns to distinguish him.’ The Devil and his entourage were also a lively and prominent feature of the later Basque Pastorale and Maskarada traditions that have been clearly linked, by folklorists, to medieval forms.¹⁰ Veyrin notes that in mid-twentieth century Soule, charivarique comedies and pastorales were ‘linked together’ by ‘the intrigues, combats and dances of the Satan figures’; while even today, the beltzak or ‘black teams’ of the Maskarada performances display the same horns, animal pelts and ‘subversion of meaning, primarily through their obscenities, unrefined speeches, and the enactment of uncontrolled bodily movements’ that were the stock-in-trade of the theatrical devils of the pre-modern age.¹¹ While concrete proof that earlier Basque theatricals included demonic pacts is hard to find, the popularity of the theme in medieval and early modern French and Spanish stagecraft, when taken together with the evidence that the theme held a particular fascination for dramatists in Golden Age Spain, means we can fairly safely assume that pacts with the Devil were represented on the early modern Basque stage.

The Basque Theatrical Pact

Working on this premise, we can now view the Basque suspects’ contribution to their akelarre-pact accounts in a new light. There is no overt evidence in the records that theatrical performance influenced their testimonies, whether in relation to pacts with the Devil or anything else. But if we spread our net wide and conduct a thematic comparison between the Devil as depicted by suspects in the Basque witch-craze and the Devil as depicted in theatrical performance in both medieval and early modern France and Spain, some interesting correspondences do emerge. Claims that the Basque Devil sported horns, claws and ‘a tail like a donkey’s’ recall the ‘considerable pains’ that were taken to make theatrical devils appear iconographically grotesque; while assertions that he had ‘two faces one on either side of his head’; ‘a tail and underneath it the face of a black man’; and that ‘the rear end of the Grand Master has a face’ evoke the theatrical devils that wore costumes with ‘faces painted on various parts of the body’.¹² Claims that the Basque Devil presided over a demonic court or congregation where witches were punished if they had not performed enough evil or had failed to attend meetings, recall medieval plays where the theatrical Devil rules over a ‘fully organized society’ of ‘lesser devils’ using ‘a definite code of honour, reward, punishment, [and] benedictions’, and chastises and beats those demons who do not fulfil his commands. Even the suspects’ paradoxical insistence that their master urged them to make penance for any ‘good deeds’ they had done, echo the Devil’s paradoxical demands, in Rutebeuf’s Miracle de Théophile, that the cleric must swear to ‘never love the poor and needy; when a poor man in distress begs his aid, he must turn a deaf ear. If some one is humble before him, he must answer him haughtily and severely. Never must he give alms. Humility, pity, charity, gentleness, friendship, fasting penitence and prayer hurt the Devil and Theophile therefore must avoid them.’¹³ Claims that the Basque Devil ‘blesses’ the witches before they set off to perform maleficium, evoke those French plays where the theatrical Devil ‘gives each [lesser] devil his special blessing’ before they embark on missions in order to ensure ‘future success’. Assertions, from some suspects, that they leavened these malefic missions with quirky rhymes, chants and aphorisms (like ‘the guards may guard her but they will not guard the cabbages in the garden!’) mirror the fact that – despite their brutish associations – theatrical devils were often eloquent and witty and could debate, flatter and poeticize with skill.¹⁴ Claims that suspects were forced to perform an obscene kiss at the end of the akelarre-pact, and that when they lifted the Devil’s vestments he ‘spews out a flatulence’, reflect the incongruous fact that in spite of their solemn theological significance as emissaries of evil and enemies of God, stage devils were ‘notorious farters’ who commonly bared their arses to audiences as a sign of comic disrespect. This comic emphasis saw devil figures taking a prominent role in the humorous interludes and theatricals that enlivened autos sacramentales and processions, driving the bishop of Solsona to complain that in the Corpus Christi festivities of 1689, their bawdy gestures ‘moved the faithful more to laughter than to piety’.¹⁵ The depictions of sabbaths as joyful events where witches and demons could ‘prance and dance’ and jump in and out of huge bonfires without fear, are redolent of dramaturgical scenes where devils amuse spectators by ‘cutting up capers’ and cart sinners ‘off to hell in great glee, amid much noise and rejoicing’ through the smoking, fiery jaws of hell’s mouth. Claims, from the Zugarramurdi accused, that they took one of their child victims ‘out into the square where all the witches enjoyed themselves with him, tossing him to each other as though they were playing the game of the cantharus’, echo medieval French plays where groups of burlesque devils dispatch children with incongruous hilarity; with one script describing how they throw a child into a well and ‘delight in its death’ while rejoicing ‘so loudly that two other devils hear them and come to see what it is all about.¹⁶ Complaints that ‘the Devil butted her with his head and horns like a ram’ or ‘whipped her with his tail at the aquelarre’ mirror contemporary carnivalesque conventions where actors portraying devils used their tails, claws, horns and weapons like whips and tridents to harry and flirt with the watching congregation, with Gallop noting that even in twentieth century, the ‘Satans’ of the Basque Pastorales ‘carry a whip or stick with an iron claw, recalling the fork carried by the devils of the medieval Mysteries . . . [going] up and down the stage, tempting the virtuous and urging on the wicked.’¹⁷

It is highly likely that these evocations of theatrical devils came from the suspects, as opposed to their interrogators. While all levels of early modern society would have been familiar with contemporary community theatricals, Counter Reformation clerics and lay men like Valle, Becerra and de Lancre, are not likely to have looked favourably on their more comical and carnivalesque features; seeing them, at best, as crude stratagems necessary to encourage the broader population to engage with the autos sacramentales and religious processions that, in a largely non-literate society, were important forms of spiritual education and inspiration. Given this disapproval, it is hard to see why the interrogators would have been motivated to actively introduce and superimpose these farcical features onto the depictions of the Devil created in the courtroom. It is far more likely that these elements were brought to the witchcraft interrogations by the men and women who appreciated and enjoyed them on stage.

The correspondences drawn here between the devils of the Basque akelarre and the devils of the contemporary stage, are supported by the emergence of similar references in witchcraft records outside the 1609–14 witch-craze. With regard to the Basque country, the horned masks and painted costumes worn by theatrical devils are evoked in Catalina Bront’s claim in 1569 that she saw ‘a black thing . . . [with] horns on its head, in the manner of a goat’s horns’ and a ‘painted belly’. Other claims from her companions that when dancing with the Devil at the sabbath ‘they saw him cast money from . . . [his] horns’ evoke the kauterak of the traditional Basque masquerades, who wore headdresses made out of ram or deer horns and – in one of their most famous dances – ‘jump up to catch the money’ when their ‘master throws coins into the air’.¹⁸ Moving from the Basque country into other parts of western Europe, Rémy’s allegation that French witches ‘never assemble together without being masked, or with their faces blacked’ clearly links the theatricals of the sabbath to the subversive dramatics of the masquerade.¹⁹ More specifically, as early as 1437 a Ratisbon skinner told his inquisitor that he made a demonic pact with three devils named ‘Lecherous’, ‘Arrogant’ and ‘Miserly’; and that ‘when he used to worship the demons as gods, he would turn his face to the west and his arse to the east . . . [and] when he used to have sex with “Lecherous”, the others would laugh.’ Through the lens developed here, the skinner’s demonic allies are redolent of the allegorical figures commonly represented in religious and comic plays, while his sexual exploits evoke the ribald interactions that typically took place between onlookers and actors during carnival. An even more direct example emerges from a witchcraft investigation in Augsburg in 1661 where, as Lyndal Roper notes, a chimney sweep named Johann Lutzenberger claimed to have covenanted with a ‘man dressed in black’ who gave him ‘nuts, pears and handfuls of coin’. While Lutzenberger ‘was certain his benefactor was the Evil One . . . when his companions were interrogated, they said they thought the strange man had come from the Comedi, a carnival character: they were sure this was theatre, not witchcraft.’²⁰

‘On the side of the bad guys’²¹

The number of correspondences identified here support the view that theatrical experience influenced Basque accounts of the akelarre-pact. Encounters with such a wide range of vivid, visceral and above all, three-dimensional impressions of pact-making devils would have made it easier for the suspects to create realistic fictions, false memories and dreams around this stereotypically demonological event. But before we leave the subject, we must observe that perhaps the greatest stimulus exerted by the theatrical Devil on the akelarre-pact accounts, was not the impressions he left on the senses but the impressions he left on the heart. One of the more puzzling aspects of the Basque witch narratives is that although they depict the Devil as a sexually dominating autocrat who demanded obedience and promulgated a creed of evil, when looked at in the round, they also portray a Devil that was considerably more nuanced than this. As seen earlier in the book, he provided his witches with an akelarre that was more party destination than religious convention. While capricious and quick to anger, he was also open to negotiation and protected his own, responding to the witches’ demands to avenge their enemies, providing cures for their victims and teaching them how to process herbs or influence the weather to spare their crops. Similarly, while the Devil could kill a child without compunction, he could also caress a witchcraft suspect like a loving husband, solicitously heal the wounds left by the witches’ mark, offer salvation and an end to earthly suffering and, as we have seen earlier in this chapter, be witty, entertaining and always game for a laugh.

Of significance here with regard to our theatrical lens, is that while characterization this complex sits uneasily with scholastic stereotypes, it sits very comfortably with the demonic identities of medieval and early modern theatre. Scholars have long argued that as the medieval period progressed the theatrical Devil underwent a gradual process of ‘humanization’. While God, Christ, angels and saints possessed the characterological one-dimensionality reflective of moral perfection, the Devil and his entourage – as imperfect beings conflicted by the sensual desires and ambitions that typically raged in the human mind and heart – were much closer reflections of the ordinary man or woman. From a dramatic point of view, this characterological complexity was valuable because it gave the medieval writers the flexibility to make the Devil do or say whatever they wanted, with Degeler noting that he was ‘the one character of life and action capable of personally appearing in an actual struggle on the stage’ because ‘it would be undignified for God or Christ to do this.’ At its most abstruse, this humanization could even blur the Devil’s moral nature, with Degeler adding that in the medieval plays of Arnoul Gréban he is ‘ludicrous, burlesque, grotesque, funny or pathetic and one might almost say good or bad [my italics].’²²

Of even more relevance, with regard to the relationship between Basque witches and the Devil, is that in addition to being a useful tool for the playwright, the humanized Devil was a character with whom audiences could identify and empathize. He was, of course, the villain of the piece, but theatrical villains need only display the slightest shred of vulnerability or intelligence to make them more compelling than the wholly virtuous hero, however handsome and strong he or she might be. For the same reason, we can suppose that many early modern peasants participating in community theatre would have eschewed the prestigious roles of angel or saint for the chance to arm themselves with firecrackers and inflated pigs’ bladders and become morally ambiguous devils, with all the freedoms and catharsis that these liminal roles provided. We can see both this pleasure and this ambivalence in Caro Baroja’s observation that in traditional Souletin Pastorales, the chorus ‘is always on the side of the bad guys’, and that the ‘satans’ are not only attractive because they can ‘dance, sing, and make a racket’ but also because they ‘carry a small pole wrapped in ribbons, a marvellous pole with which they can do everything: kill, revive, or transform people’. In the period of the witch trials, these nuanced impressions of the theatrical Devil would have been cross-pollinated with and reinforced by the equally complex portrayals of the Devil and his demonic entourage that emerged in folktales and popular conjuring traditions. Like their theatrical counterparts, these demon figures were unpredictable, demanding and morally ambivalent but they could be helpful – securing love, finding treasure and so on – and also a good deal of fun. As Tausiet notes, the ‘lame devil’ commonly invoked in seventeenth-century Zaragozan love charms was portrayed by Spanish dramatist Luis Vélez de Guevara as a ‘mischievous, mocking, cheerful character, inventor of a great number of popular dances, songs and instruments’.²³

The fact that these characterological complexities are reflected so comprehensively in the figure of the Basque Devil, invites us to speculate that in creating this figure the suspects mined raw materials from early modern theatre (and its thematic correspondences in both folk literature and popular conjuring traditions). But it can also give us a deeper insight into why they appear to have contributed to their confessional accounts of the akelarre-pact with such creativity and apparent ease. The psychological processes that create fictions, false memories and dreams fuse sensory impressions, thought processes and emotions in complex and largely unconscious ways. Even if a suspect could never consciously imagine herself making an akelarre-pact, if she had ever felt pleasure, amusement, sympathy, empathy or indeed any kind of emotional affinity with the Devil, as encountered in either theatrical performance, folktale or conjuration ritual, then those emotional responses – stored in her memory – would have become valuable raw materials for her unconscious fiction-making mind. Without knowing it, such a defendant would have had all the cognitive tools necessary to participate in the creation of a narrative in which she took pleasure in, enjoyed the protection of, and most importantly entered into a formal alliance with, the enemy of mankind.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The First Altar of Hell

And Bocal clearly deserved to die for having learned the ceremonies of his first Mass from the enemy of God, and for having celebrated it at the sabbath at the entry and at the first altar of Hell

Pierre de Lancre, 1612¹

The second type of cultic ritual performed at the Basque akelarre took the form of an elaborate ceremony that aped the Catholic mass. Like many activities performed at the sabbath, this ritual was a distortion or inversion of the ordinary event, with Tausiet’s observation that ‘every act of the celebration was represented in the figure of its opposite’ being reflected in de Lancre’s allegation that ‘the Devil makes all things occur at the sabbath in the reverse way’.² There is some regional differentiation with regard to the celebrants, with the French mass being led by a ‘witch-priest’ and the Spanish, by the Devil himself. Also notable, is that although the phenomenon emerges equally strongly in both sets of records, some of the individual Spanish accounts are markedly superior in detail to the French, with the finest of these emerging in the Joint Sentence. While the ceremony is frequently designated in scholarly works by the terms ‘witches’ mass, ‘black mass’ or ‘alternative liturgy’, in the present work we will predominantly employ the terms ‘sabbath-’ or ‘akelarre-mass’.

The Basque sabbath-mass is justly notorious. Not only has it been consistently celebrated by scholars of witchcraft as representing the most vivid and detailed example of the phenomenon to emerge from witch-hunting Europe, but its impact has been sufficient to ensure that the alternative liturgy modelled by the Basque witches has become one of the most sensational and recognizable features of the European witches’ sabbath as discussed in both academic and popular texts. But this notoriety can obscure the fact that the most exceptional feature of the Basque sabbath-mass is not that it is uniquely vivid and detailed – but that it exists at all. When celebrating the phenomenon, scholars seldom emphasize the important contextual fact that only a handful of brief descriptions of the sabbath-mass ceremony emerge in any witch trial records outside the Basque witch-craze.³ In these conditions, in examining the sabbath-mass we are not only exploring why it emerged to such prominence in the Basque records but also why it emerged in this cluster of trials in the first place. To better appreciate the magnitude of the task ahead of us, we shall begin by reproducing some extracts from the most coherent and comprehensive description of the phenomenon to have come down to us, as it emerges in the Joint Sentence.

[I]n addition to the aforementioned three days per week, they gathered at the akelarre on the eves of the solemnities and feasts of Christmas, of the Resurrection, Pentecost, Ascension, Corpus Christi and all those of Our Lady and all the Saints and Saint John to make solemn offerings to and worship the Devil. And to do so they bring from their homes money, obládas, wine, candles and other things that they tend to offer to the Devil in the way that the Catholic Christians do in church. And on such nights the Devil says mass, to which end his servants set up an altar with black and ugly altar cloths under a dossal of old, black and torn cloth and an altarpiece with images and figures of the Devil. And before mass begins they have a missal ready and all the other things needed for saying it, and the Devil hears the confessions of all the witches, who admit as sins the times they have been to church, the masses they have heard, the good deeds they have done and the evil deeds they have failed to do. And once they have confessed to the Devil he dresses in certain long, black and ugly vestments and he begins his mass, his servants singing it in hoarse, low and out-of-tune voices. And in a certain part of it he preaches a sermon to them in which he tells them not to be vainglorious in searching for a god other than the one they have, for he is a good god, and that though in this life they must endure hardship, work and poverty, in the next they will enjoy much rest. And when it is time for the offertory he turns to the witches and the aforementioned Graciana de Barrenechea would sit by his side on a chair, for as the most important and queen of them all she was responsible for the alms dish . . .

The text then states that the witches all go up and deposit coins in the alms dish, according to their means, then

the Devil says to them ‘pax tecum, you give this for the lord of the world and in honour of the feast’. And then they go down on their knees in the presence of the Devil and kiss him on his left hand and chest and shameful parts and under the tail. And once they have all made this offering and veneration the Devil continues his mass and lifts up a round thing of the size of a Host which is black like the sole of a shoe, on which an image of the Devil is painted, and as he lifts it he says ‘this is my body.’ And while they are all on their knees beating themselves on their chests, in veneration they say ‘aquerragoite, aquerraveite’ which means ‘he-goat up, he-goat down.’ And in the same way he lifts up a sort of chalice, seemingly of black wood, and once the mass has ended he gives them communion while they are on their knees around him and giving each of them a sort of black shape on which there is an image of the Devil, which is very sharp [or ‘rough’ ] to swallow, and he gives them a draught of a very bitter drink which noticeably chills their hearts . . .⁴

Interrogatorial Influence

We can assume that the interrogators were involved in the creation of these passages, with active questioning on the subject clearly implicated in de Lancre’s observation that Jeannette d’Abadie ‘could not explain’ why the witches chanted certain words at the elevation of the ‘black host’ and ‘could not say what it was made of.’ But the factors that fuelled this interest are more difficult to identify. There was some demonological precedent. All the demonologists referenced in the Tableau refer to an alternative liturgy performed by witches, whether at the sabbath or elsewhere, with Grillandi stating that witches are found ‘imitating in all respects the worship of Almighty God, with vestments, lights, and every other ritual observance’; Kramer that in order to ‘work injury’ witches ‘make their instruments of witchcraft by means of the Sacraments or sacramental things of the Church, or some holy thing consecrated to God’; and del Rio that ‘Sometimes they [witches] imitate the sacrifice of the Mass (the greatest of all their crimes), as well as purifying with water and similar Catholic ceremonies.’ De Lancre also encountered the theme in witchcraft trials before he came to Labourd, reporting that he heard a description of the sabbath-mass from Bordeaux suspect Jeanne Bosdeau as early as 1594. Moving over to Spain, while we do not know whether Valle and Becerra were exposed to many demonological works, they are likely to have been very familiar with the range of texts on superstition produced by anxious Catholic Reformation Spanish theologians. While not always addressing witches specifically, these texts placed significant emphasis on abuses of the Christian liturgy, with Ciruelo, for example, condemning those who ‘employ the sacred sacraments in which God is honoured above man and turn them to the service and honour of the devil’; and Arles, those magical practitioners that ‘use the sacrament of the Eucharist in their sorceries’.⁵

But although these precedents existed, when examined in more depth they do not seem relevant or extensive enough to explain the prominence of the sabbath-mass in the Basque witch-craze records. While demonological works and treatises on superstition do spend a considerable amount of time condemning alternative liturgical practices, most of their attention is focused on liturgy in its general sense – as in, ‘a form or formulary according to which public religious worship is conducted’ – as opposed to the specific rite of the mass.⁶ As a consequence, the ritual abuses and inversions condemned are commonly the everyday religious practices identified as ‘superstitious’ by the Church. To take a typical example, Kramer’s dramatic claim (cited earlier) that witches ‘work injury . . . by means of the Sacraments or sacramental things of the Church’, sounds considerably less dramatic when we realize that the comment refers to the common practice of placing objects beneath the altar during mass in the belief that through this process the object is consecrated, and thereby thereby charged with spiritual power. Similarly, Ciruelo’s claim that people turn sacraments to ‘the service and honour of the devil’ becomes significantly less chilling when we recognize that it predominantly refers to minor abuses of conventional practices ‘commonly employed among Christians’, such as praying when standing on one foot or with the arms outstretched in the shape of the cross.⁷ When looked at more closely, even Grillandi’s assertion that the witches imitate ‘in all respects the worship of Almighty God’ – which has been interpreted by scholars as an allusion to the sabbath-mass – only condemns their imitation of Christian worship in a general sense and does not make any specific reference to the sacrament itself.

Those witches who have solemnly devoted themselves to the Devil’s service, worship him in a particular manner with ceremonial sacrifices, which they offer to the Devil, imitating in all respects the worship of Almighty God, with vestments, lights, and every other ritual observance, and with a set liturgy in which they are instructed, so that they worship and praise him eternally, just as we worship the true God.⁸

To my knowledge, the only overt references to specific simulations of the mass being performed at the witches’ sabbath appear in just two texts: Martín del Rio’s Disquisitiones Magicae and Henri Boguet’s Discours des Sorciers. Also notable is that these references are brief, with del Rio’s statement amounting to nothing more than ‘sometimes they [witches] imitate the sacrifice of the Mass (the greatest of all their crimes)’; with the qualifying line ‘as well as purifying with water and similar Catholic ceremonies’ taking us swiftly back to the more generic superstitious practices described in contemporary texts on demonology and superstition.⁹ Although Boguet’s reference is a little more vivid and detailed, it is still some distance from the comprehensive accounts found in the Basque records:

Sometimes, again, they say Mass at the sabbat. But I cannot write without horror of the manner in which it is celebrated; for he who is to say the office is clothed in a black cope with no cross apon it, and after putting the water in the chalice he turns his back to the altar, and then elevates, in place of the Host, a round of turnip coloured black; and then all the witches cry aloud: ‘Master, help us.’¹⁰

Similarly, although de Lancre claimed to have heard an account of the sabbath-mass at Jeanne Bosdeau’s trial fourteen years before going to Labourd, this may well have been his only encounter with the theme, for there is no evidence to suggest that any of the other, often elaborate, accounts of the sabbath he encountered while sitting on the Bordeaux Parlement contained any reference to the performance of a mass. Moving on to Spain, it is also notable that no references to masses being celebrated at the akelarre appear, to my knowledge, in any of the witch trial records prior to the 1609–14 witch-craze.¹¹ Even the prosecutions conducted in the Salazar Valley in the mid-1520s, that generated the detailed and highly ritualistic pact accounts that (we have argued) were likely to have been used by Valle and Becerra as a template for the akelarre-pact, make no allusion to a sabbath-mass. While these perspectives suggest that demonological works and prior trial records may have introduced the Basque interrogators to relevant concepts, it is still difficult to see how they could have – by themselves – motivated them to orchestrate the richest and most detailed accounts of the sabbath-mass phenomenon to emerge from Europe’s witch-hunting period.

Influences: Heresy and the New World

In pursuing alternative explanations, we could speculate that religious vocations were significant here. As Counter Reformation clerics and laymen, Valle, Becerra and de Lancre would have placed more emphasis on the observance of the mass than the average European in the period, with this attachment illustrated in their commitment, during the witch-craze prosecutions, to celebrate mass ‘before settling down to the business of the day’. Indeed, according to Henningsen, on the 1611 visitation Salazar and his companions ‘brought [on mules] with them a portable altar for saying Mass every morning before starting the hearings.’ But although relevant, the widespread evidence that hundreds of clerics and pious laymen conducted witchcraft trials across early modern Europe without finding the need to generate detailed accounts of the sabbath-mass means that, in isolation, this explanation cannot take us very far. We make more progress, however, if we return to some of the factors already identified in our study as specifically relevant to interrogatorial mentalities in the 1609–14 witch-craze. Heretical matrices are clearly pertinent. We have already argued that heretical scepticism concerning the miracle of transubstantiation – as illustrated in reports of heretics trampling on the host or closing their eyes during the elevation – may have contributed to de Lancre, Valle and Becerra’s anxieties surrounding feast-cannibalism. But of relevance here, is that these anxieties would also have extended to the ceremony – the mass – at which this miracle was believed to take place. Since at least the eleventh century, the rejection of the need for sacraments, ritual, images and all other ‘exterior manifestations of faith’ devised by the Church to mediate an individual’s relationship with God, had not only led heretical groups to renounce the doctrine of transubstantiation but also much of the pomp and circumstance that surrounded it. These objections intensified during the Reformation, with Protestants mounting sustained attacks on the use of extravagant or distracting ritual and its paraphernalia, such as rich vestments, incense and the pax, and on the celebration of the mass in Latin and so on.¹² It is therefore reasonable to surmise that in such a sceptical climate, Valle, Becerra and de Lancre were particularly sensitive to the possibility that the Basque witch suspects sought to undermine the ceremony that was such an important part of their spiritual and professional lives.

As with feast-cannibalism, we can also speculate that this sensitivity was fuelled by the spiritual threats posed by the New World. Catholic writers and missionaries did not just believe that the peoples of the Americas worshipped the Devil, but that they were, as Fernando Cervantes puts it, ‘members of a counter-church set up by a devil anxious to be honoured like God’ and that to ‘this purpose Satan had set up his own church as a mimetic inversion of the Catholic Church’. With regard to the mass, arguably the most systematic and powerful proponent of this thesis was José de Acosta, who devoted several chapters of his seminal Natural and Moral History of the Indies to describing ‘in what maner the Divell hath laboured in Mexico to counterfaite the feast of the holy Sacrament and Communion on the holy Church.’ His elaborate account explains how in honour of the God Vitzlipuztli, the Indians made small loaves out of maize flour that were ‘blessed and consecrated . . . [as] the flesh and bones of this idol’ and then given ‘to the people in maner of a communion’ who

30  An early-eighteenth-century depiction of the mass celebrated on a temporary altar near the mouth of the Amazon for Spanish explorer Diego de Lepe and his men in 1500. Native Americans are worshipping in the congregation.

received it with such teares, feare, and reverence as it was an admirable thing, saying that they did eate the flesh and bones of God, wherewith they were grieved . . . Who would not wonder to see the divell so curious to seeke to be worshipped and reverenced in the same maner that Jesus Christ our God hath appoynted and also taught, and as the Holy Church hath accustomed.

Threats were also posed to the ritual post-conversion. Time and again, missionaries would return to a community they had converted to Christianity to find that the residents had retained elements of their pagan belief and practice in their celebration of the mass, to the extent that they even included their old deities (sometimes defined as the Devil) in the rituals and fused communion with genuine cannibalism. In early seventeenth-century Mexico, for example, governor Pedro Ponce

observed that the crucifix and parodies of the Mass had been incorporated into certain midnight [human] sacrifices that the Indians performed ‘according to their ancient customs’. It is interesting that only one half of the sacrifice was offered to ‘the god of fire’, whom the Indians had no qualms about calling the devil; the other half was reverently taken as an offering to the church.¹³

Through his employment as secretary to Juan Bautista de Acevedo, bishop of Valladolid and ‘Patriarch of the West Indies’, Valle would have corresponded with (and probably met) men who had experienced first-hand how ‘Satan had set up his own church’ in the Americas and how converted natives could be enticed by old gods and allegiances to perform demonic variants of the Catholic mass. He would also have succumbed – we can assume – to contemporary temptations to draw parallels between the religious abuses of the New World and the religious abuses performed by superstitious Christians in Europe. As a consequence, when Valle moved from this employment to pursue the witchcraft accusations in Zugarramurdi, he would have been perfectly placed to extrapolate that the mass-related abuses that were occurring in Mexican villages may also have been taking place in the foothills of the Pyrenees.¹⁴

Influences: Raemond and Castañega

These heretical and New World matrices can also point to how and why some of the sabbath-mass detailing may have evolved. At the beginning of this chapter we observed that one of the dominant and characteristic features of both the French and Spanish sabbath-mass was its level of liturgical inversion which was, in the Spanish case, developed to a degree of precision and coherence unprecedented in any other European witch trial. The vivid perception that across the sea in the Americas ‘Satan had set up his own church as a mimetic inversion of the Catholic Church’ may well have helped the interrogators generate sabbath-masses at which ‘the Devil makes all things occur . . . in the reverse way’.¹⁵ But we can also identify further factors specific to the interrogators that may explain why ‘mimetic inversion’ became so pronounced in the Basque case.

In a general sense, that the concept of inversion should have emerged in the trials – in relation to Amerindians, heretics, witches or anyone else – is unsurprising. As Stuart Clark has emphasized, much of medieval and early modern thought was predicated on the perception that existence emerged out of tensions between contrary forces and that ‘an exactly balanced conflict of opposites was essential to the settled order of the world’. During the the Reformation, when conflict between competing versions of truth and reality became particularly acute, this principle of contrariety was often employed by intellectuals as an analytical tool with which to make sense of the world – with commentators frequently lamenting that the current unrest reflected the fact that these oppositional tensions had become unbalanced, or that material and spiritual phenomena were being unnaturally reversed or inverted into their opposite. The ‘supreme inversionary symbol’ to emerge in both the medieval and early modern European mind was a figure that was ‘opposite to Christ’ – the ‘Antichrist’ – with many people believing that the social and religious upheavals of the Reformation presaged imminent attempts by this controversial figure to wrest power from God and take control of Christendom. In this apocalyptic arena, heresy and witchcraft played major roles, both as examples of inversion (in that they distorted true religious faith into its opposite) and as ‘precursors of the Antichrist, part of Satan’s preparations for his arrival’, with Boguet alleging that ‘among the signs that are given of his [the Antichrist’s] arrival, this is one of the chief, namely, that witchcraft shall then be rife throughout the world.’¹⁶

While many contemporary intellectuals, both Protestant and Catholic, utilized concepts of inversion, there is reason to believe that the Basque witch-craze interrogators may have been particularly active in this respect. In the case of de Lancre, it is surely relevant that his brother-in-law Florimond de Raemond was, as Clark suggests, the ‘greatest French Catholic authority on the Antichrist’. In his seminal and bestselling work on the subject – L’Antichrist – Raemond maintained that when the eponymous villain arrived on earth, all things would be converted to their darker opposite and the world would ‘be reduced to another chaos; all things will be turned upside-down’. In making his case, he identified heretics and witches as precursors of this threat, with Clark observing that Raemond’s ‘depictions of upside-down France’ were immediately followed by ‘a chapter on the [current] vogue for witchcraft’ in France. In the same chapter and by way of illustrating these arguments, Raemond also included a lengthy rendition of the sabbath-mass account that Jeanne Bosdeau had given to the Bordeaux Parlement in 1594.¹⁷ In this context, it is no surprise that Raemond’s brother-in-law and fellow parlementaire Pierre de Lancre should have generated witchcraft confessions that placed such an emphasis on the principle of inversion.

With regard to the Spanish inquisitors, we can posit exposure via a different route. As noted earlier in relation to the New World, in 1529 Basque friar Martín de Castañega published a treatise on superstition and witchcraft termed Tratado de las supersticiones y hechizerías. While the work has many fine qualities, of interest here is that it has been celebrated by scholars as arguably the most precise and comprehensive description of witch-related liturgical inversion to emerge out of early modern Europe, with Caro Baroja declaring that ‘if any work makes witchcraft out to be ia complete inversion of Catholicism, it is this one.’ Indeed, through its influence on Olmos’ treatise about Mexican demonology, this work also made a concrete contribution to the development of the view that native Amerindian religion was a ‘mimetic inversion of the Catholic Church’. Of importance to us here, however, is that the inversionary images drawn by Castañega in his Tratado are highly compatible with those found in the Spanish witch-craze records. Castañega’s assertion that there are ‘two churches on earth: the Catholic and the diabolical’ and that ‘the devil and his ministers’ order ‘ceremonies and execrations in imitation of the sacraments’, is vividly evoked in the emphatic claim, in the Logroño Sentences, that the Devil does not just persuade the witches to reject God and perform maleficium but also to join a rival Church complete with its own doctrines and simulations of the Catholic ritual and sacraments. Even more suggestively, Castañega’s assertion that when the ministers of this diabolical Church copy the sacraments they do so using ‘dirty and abominable things’ and ‘obscure, ugly, rhymed words’, are precisely mirrored in the witch-records’ claim that the Devil and his pages use ‘ugly altar cloths’ and ‘black and ugly vestments’ and chant profane rhymes in ‘hoarse, low and out-of-tune voices’ when celebrating the mass.¹⁸ These correspondences are of interest here because, while there is no concrete evidence to this effect, it is entirely feasible that the Spanish inquisitors encountered Castañega’s text. Valle may have come across it prior to or when working for Acevedo in Valladolid, either directly or through its links with Olmos’ work. But it is perhaps more likely that he encountered it on arrival in Logroño. As a Catholic Reformation text written specifically to help the Church deal with Basque religious unorthodoxy, the Tratado is likely to have been useful to the Tribunal, with this likelihood increased by the evidence that its place of publication was none other than Logroño, eighty years earlier. Through this lens it is entirely likely that the inquisitors – and particularly Becerra, who had worked at the Tribunal for eight years prior to the witch-craze – mined the Tratado’s clearly articulated dichotomy between ‘the Catholic and the diabolical [Church]’ to generate their accounts of Basque sabbath ritual. Indeed, we could even go one step further and suggest that this hypothesis could not only explain why the inversionary detail in the Spanish sabbath-mass accounts was so precise and comprehensive, but also why it was the most precise and comprehensive to emerge out of the whole of witch-hunting Europe. For all its elegance and conceptual precision and for all its influence on Olmos, Castañega’s Tratado was not widely circulated either inside or outside Spain in this period, with Campagne noting that it was ‘a minor text, practically ignored by the theologians of the time’; and David Darst that it was ‘totally eclips[ed]’ by the longer treatise on superstition written by Castilian theologian Pedro Ciruelo two years later in 1530–31.¹⁹ Indeed, the text was so neglected that subsequent to its first publication in Logroño in 1529, it was not published again, in any form, until 1946. While we have no concrete proof, the fact that the inquisitorial Tribunal that produced Europe’s most exquisitely detailed accounts of sabbath-related liturgical inversion was also the institution most uniquely positioned, via its location in Logroño, to access this ‘ignored’ and ‘eclipsed’ exemplar of inversionary witchcraft is surely an interesting coincidence.

Inversion and Ritual Magic

Castañega’s Tratado also points to another factor that may have fuelled interrogatorial focus on the akelarre-mass. As noted in earlier chapters, it was not only the rituals of heretics, witches and Amerindians that were condemned by the Catholic (and Protestant ) Church, but also those of magical practitioners. The rites conducted by both elite and popular sorcerers also came under the category of liturgical abuse and could also be rationalized as demonic inversions, with Clark stating that it was not just witches and heretics but also ‘magicians . . . [who] were in fact the precursors of the Antichrist’. The importance of sorcery to the development of ideas about liturgical witchcraft is evident in the Tratado. While, as we have seen, Castañega’s claim that when imitating the sacraments ‘the devil and his ministers’ use ‘dirty and abominable things that are difficult to find’ evokes the activities of the Basque witches; in being ‘difficult to find’ these objects are even more suggestive of the obscure materials – like elaborate ritual knives, rare animal parts, blood and foetus skin – that were used by sorcerers in contemporary invocatory rituals. Similarly, while Castañega’s claim that diabolic ministers use ‘obscure, ugly, rhymed words’ evokes the verbal liturgies of the Basque akelarre; in following this statement with the qualifying phrase ‘for which diligence and study are needed’, Castañega points, with even more precision, to the complex invocatory terms – often of classical, Hebraic or North African derivation – found in learned magical texts. The likelihood that the activities of elite sorcerers played a significant role in the development of Castanega’s ideas about the ‘diabolic church’ is further corroborated by his choice to devote large sections of the Tratado to the condemnation of the ritual practices of the weather conjurors and exorcists that ‘are so public in this kingdom’.²⁰

If the activities of sorcerers influenced Castañega’s concept of the diabolic church, then can we assume that they influenced the diabolic church that was created by de Lancre, Valle and Becerra during the Basque witch-craze? As we have seen in previous chapters, both elite and popular magical practitioners were active in southern France, northern Spain and the Basque regions in this period. And certainly, if we did not know that the following reference from the Tableau was written in the context of witchcraft, we could easily assume that it was an account, by a cleric such as Castañega, condemning the imitation and inversion of Catholic liturgical practice by conjuror-clerics. De Lancre accuses some Labourdin priests of

having been present at the execrable ceremonies of the infernal spirits . . . [and] with having committed abominable sacrifices during ceremonies that resembled those that they normally conducted for God during real ceremonies in a church . . . [and] they were especially accused of having adored the Devil, of having said there some form of mass, and of having abused the holy sacrament of the Eucharist.²¹

The influence of contemporary conjuring practices can also be extrapolated from the fact that, as the above-quoted passage illustrates, the Basque witch-priests were accused of specifically abusing the ritual of the mass. In earlier chapters we observed that both popular and elite sorcerers incorporated Catholic prayers and rituals into their invocations, but what we have not yet emphasized is that they also appropriated aspects of the mass itself. Castañega alleged that weather conjurors use ‘superstitious spells composed of a few ignorant repetitions (and they prize them if they are written on virgin parchment) in which are many parts of the Mass and sacramental words, for they think that since these words turn bread into the body of Christ and wine into his blood, they will also turn hail into water.’ Other sources indicate that conjurors did not only use ‘parts of the Mass’ but the whole ceremony, with Arles stating that ‘common people say, that it is of great help to them to have those necromancers do things in their actions and sorceries which are holy and honourable, as for instance to fast, to be chaste, [and] to celebrate masses’. Some unusually vivid insights into how sorcerers employed the sacrament in their magical rituals can be found in those cases, in the Zaragozan trial records, where the mass was employed to consecrate ritual objects for use in magical ceremonies. Early-sixteenth century servant Jerónimo de Valdenieso confessed to having participated in a magical ritual in which a range of objects, including candles, cloths, herbs and knives tempered with gosling blood, were gathered together and then ‘over all these things, wrapped in a consecrated cloth of sendal, a certain number of Masses had to be said’; with Jerónimo adding the pragmatic detail that the lead celebrant – a priest named Joan Vicente – ‘wanted to say [the prayers and masses] over everything, so that he would not have to say them so many times over single objects.’ Meanwhile in 1618, ‘false priest’ Jerónimo de Liébana allegedly combined a series of masses with rituals that involved ‘three he-goat’s horns’ and ‘a bone from a child who had died before being baptized’.²² In the context of the Basque witch-craze, we can speculate that the interrogators’ awareness of the prominence of the mass in both elite and popular magical practice, would have made it all the easier for them to assume that the rite, or parts of the rite, were also used by witches and then question them to this effect.

In conclusion, it seems reasonable to assume that either one, or a combination of the factors outlined in this chapter may have encouraged de Lancre, Valle and Becerra to press the suspects to produce accounts of liturgical inversion during the witch-craze interrogations. But while these perspectives certainly deepen our understanding of interrogatorial involvement in formal cultic ritual, they fall short in that they do not sufficiently explain why their attentions should have focused so specifically on the phenomenon of the mass. While the liturgical abuses performed by heretics, sorcerers and Amerindians often involved the ritual methods and paraphernalia reflective of the ceremony, their abuses did not include precise, inverted parodies of the mass of the type recorded in the Basque witch-craze. In the case of heresy, for example, it is not at all clear how or why Valle or Becerra would have orchestrated the transformation of stereotypical heretical abuses – such as trampling on the host or closing the eyes during the elevation – into precise simulacrums of the Eucharist ritual and its supporting rites; particularly when former inquisitors (such as Johannes Nider) who were similarly oppressed by perceived heretical threats, did not. Problems also arise with regard to Castañega. Although he produced arguably the most detailed description of the witches’ alternative liturgy to have come down to us from early modern Europe, his Tratado was in many ways wholly conventional in that it focused on everyday distortions of Christian liturgy as opposed to precise, self-conscious inversions of the mass. Even Castañega’s dramatic assertion that ‘there are two churches on earth: the Catholic and the diabolical’ diminishes in relevance when we discover that he did not specifically define the latter as a highly organized group of Devil-worshipping witches or conjurors, but maintained that the ‘diabolical church is in general all the unfaithful who are outside of the Catholic Church [such as Jews, Muslims and ignorant or ‘superstitious’ Christians]; [and] is not properly speaking one Church . . . but only many diabolical congregations distinct from each other with no agreement or participation among them’.²³ In conclusion, while these perspectives shed some light on interrogatorial participation in the creation of the sabbath-mass accounts, the phenomenon itself still requires more explanation.

Contributions of the Accused

At this point we can gainfully turn back to the accused. Despite all the evidence of inquisitorial involvement, both French and Spanish accounts of the sabbath-mass were peppered with idiosyncratic elements that were unlikely to have been of interrogatorial origin. While de Lancre may well have asked suspects if they saw a witch-priest raise the host at the akelarre, he would not have been responsible for the elaboration that the priest’s ‘body was upside down’ and ‘his feet in the air’ while he was doing it. Similarly, while de Lancre may have asked witches if they made the sign of the cross, he would not have suggested that they did so while chanting a rhyme containing ‘dirty words from the Spanish language, without rhyme or reason’ in a garbled mixture of Latin, Spanish and Basque. Across the border in Spain, we can be certain that neither Valle nor Becerra were responsible for suspects’ claims that when they lifted the host they cried “aquerragoite, aquerraveite” [‘he-goat up, he-goat down’]; particularly given the fact that, while written with Castilian spelling, the term is Euskaran. That the accused were not just mirroring interrogatorial suggestion is also indicated by Jeannette d’Abadie’s declaration that she was taught to say, ‘black crow, black’ crow’ at the elevation of the chalice, and by de Lancre’s claim that she ‘could not explain this any other way than to say that the other witches said the same things, and that she heard them said by Maríacho de Bernatena at the church of Ciboure.’ Suspect-contribution is also indicated in de Lancre’s comments about priests. It is clear that the both French and Spanish witnesses and suspects accused local priests of celebrating – or helping the Devil celebrate – mass at the sabbath, with de Lancre maintaining that suspects ‘testified that they had heard a sort of grand mass held there, with deacons and subdeacons, and they called them by their first and last names, and, what’s worse, they insisted in our presence – providing many specific details and offering many witnesses – that they were forced to say and to swear that the Devil made them see the priests in the flesh there.’ But the Bordeaux judge was clearly reluctant to pursue these allegations, devoting many pages of the Tableau to justifications as to why he was interrogating and prosecuting ‘God’s lieutenants on earth’. In one passage, for example, he states that

in order to show more clearly that this is an illness and a disease that has infected an entire country, I will mention those whom we saw, not rustics or idiots, but those who make it their business to instruct and to teach the best and the most approved doctrine that ever existed among mortals, which is the word of God, which priests speak who are responsible for the souls of men. It angers me greatly to speak so ominously of this, all the more so because it was the noblest part of our investigations. If I wanted not to talk about this at all, it is out of the sense of honour and respect that I have toward the holy order of the priesthood, and out of fear that the enemies of the church will take advantage of the situation.²⁴

These protestations could have been crocodile tears produced to deflect the accusations of over-zealousness and legal impropriety levelled against his Labourd campaign. But de Lancre’s authentic tone, coupled with concern that by attacking the priesthood he risked ‘enemies of the church’ – that is, the Protestants – taking ‘advantage of the situation’, suggests he was not hellbent on proving that priests performed the mass at Basque sabbaths but was forced to draw this conclusion in response to suspect testimony. In conclusion, the evidence suggests that although the interrogators were involved creating the akelarre-mass accounts, a significant role was also played by the accused.

The Catholic Mass

With regard to raw materials, we can assume that once the witch-craze had generated momentum, the suspects’ primary resource would have been circulating witchcraft propaganda about sabbath-masses generated by the trials themselves. But they would also have been mining other lodes. Unsurprisingly, the first of these would have been the Catholic mass itself. Given its importance to contemporary Catholic elites as a vehicle through which to assert the spiritual and social dominance of the Church, it is easy to forget that the ceremony of the mass was also very important to ordinary people. This does not mean they attended regularly or with due propriety, with historians emphasizing that in many parts of medieval and early modern Europe the religious obligation to attend mass regularly may have been more of an ideal than a reality. Kamen notes that in rural areas of pre-Tridentine Spain the lack of available clergy meant ‘there had been no great stress on the obligation to hear or say mass in church, with the result that the ritual was not as available as we might suppose. A worshipper looking for a mass might have to travel a long way indeed to find one’. It is also clear that even if parishioners attended the rite they did not always afford it due reverence, with contemporary observers typically complaining that parishioners came in ‘when mass was half way through and then left before it was finished’. Once present at the ceremony, people were often distracted, with canon of Barcelona Pere Font complaining that worshippers were always ‘turning their faces from one side to the other and looking at what they should not, and talking and chatting with others and combing their heads or beards, and when they should be kneeling with two knees kneeling with one, and wishing that mass should be kept as short as possible and getting angry if it goes on for long.’²⁵

But these behaviours did not mean that the rite was unimportant. While ordinary people may not always have engaged with the higher doctrinal implications of the mass or its ability to lead them to ‘a state of intense and ineffable grace’, they certainly engaged with its status as an extremely effective vehicle – arguably the most effective vehicle – through which spiritual beings could be petitioned to give material aid.²⁶ This is vividly illustrated by the fact that, as touched on in our analysis of crop-maleficium in Chapter Four, if parishes were suffering any kind of collective privation – such as bad weather, pests or plague – they would collectively celebrate masses in honour of whichever saint was considered to have jurisdiction over these areas in the hope that he or she might resolve the problem. If the masses did not work, they might perform a humiliation to try and bully the recalcitrant supernatural into giving assistance or move on and direct their supplication to a different spiritual agent. Through this means, as contemporary theologians lamented, the ritual of the mass became little more than a magical tool – a kind of spiritual antibiotic – to be mechanically administered to achieve a particular practical result, with many of the superstitious practices condemned by men like Castañega and Ciruelo, such as placing objects under the altar to be consecrated, working on the same magical rationale.

The rite’s importance was also enhanced by its operational flexibility. We have already seen that masses were regularly celebrated on weekdays or feast days, and could also be organized outside these dates as community-wide responses to environmental or social disasters. But what we have not yet noted is that they could also be commissioned by individuals or smaller groups of parishioners in response to more personal problems. At any time of the year, and as often as they could afford, laypeople could charge clergymen to perform ‘votive masses’ (that is, masses offered for a ‘specific intention’) through which they petitioned a spiritual agent to help them with a range of problems, from curing a sick family member or finding stolen goods to protecting a traveller about to embark on a long voyage. There was also flexibility with regard to location. While the mass was most commonly heard in churches it could also be heard in smaller chapels and shrines, with the existence of portable altars enabling it to be taken directly to hospital beds, administrative buildings, village meadows and, perhaps most commonly, private houses, with Kamen noting that in 1543 a Sevillian clergyman ruled that ‘the parish priest should exhort his parishioners to come to the church to hear divine office and not hear mass in their houses’ and that ‘permission to have mass in the home had been given too freely in the past’.²⁷

When assessing popular interactions with the ritual of the mass, it is also important to remember that although attendance could be intermittent, attention unfocused and intentions mechanical, these factors would not have screened ordinary men and women from the ritual’s aesthetic and emotional effects. When they attended mass in church parishioners, used to long working hours in cottages, barns, fields and remote pastures, moved into a consecrated space that was captured, in a stony embrace, by a forest of carved columns and arches and filled with a dissolving darkness split by shafts of sunlight from small, high windows. They felt the watchful eyes of numerous statues brought alive in their niches and side chapels by flickering candles, and heard the congregational voices reverberating around the walls in polyphonic song. They saw the priest and his pages progress up to the altar in swirls of incense and coloured vestments and watched the final sacred act, half-glimpsed through the lattice of the rood screen, when the celebrant elevated the host and Christ became physically present in the ritual space. These aesthetic responses were also sharpened by personal circumstance. Although masses were often attended or commissioned as mechanical means through which to obtain practical aid, the circumstances that drove people to seek this aid – such as drought, famine, sickness, familial absence and bereavement – would have been emotionally intense. For the individual who attended a mass in the hope of curing a dying child or bringing a husband safe home from the Americas, the ceremony would have been profoundly charged. Such experiences, in which participants knelt – desperate and vulnerable – before the invisible forces that shaped the world and begged them for help, would have ensured that the mass ceremony left a deep mark on the contemporary imagination.

The Suspects’ Mass

We can assume the Basque witch suspects were all touched, to a greater or lesser extent, by this range of experiences. Given that Catholicism was well established in the region, it is no surprise to find the ordinary mass ritual referenced in their testimony. In Spain, the Zugarramurdi suspects allegedly ‘confessed, received communion, heard Mass and went to church’, while María de Zozaya maintained that she ‘confessed sacramentally with the priests’ and ‘went into churches and heard mass’. In France, de Lancre tells us that ‘one infamous witch, among others, told us that she . . . often saw some form of mass being said there with more pomp than in a real church’, while Marie de la Ralde declared that ‘she had much more fun there [at the sabbath] than she did going to mass’. The witch suspects were also likely to have been familiar with the mass, in a general sense, because they were predominantly women, with de Lancre noting that in Labourd ‘except for the magistrats, the men never go to mass’.²⁸ Given the high proportion of children and youths among the suspects, it is also notable that the young may have been just as susceptible to the impact of the ceremony as the old, with Basque historian José Ignacio Tellechea stating that ‘at age eight in 1936 confessing and saying Mass for his pals on a makeshift altar in the Navarrese village of Ituren. The children held processions, prayed, and sang hymns in the attic, where an image of the Infant Jesus of Prague presided over the ceremonies’, and that their play-ceremony was ‘immensely serious.’²⁹ Taken as a whole, this evidence suggests that the suspects are likely to have drawn on their experiences of ordinary mass-devotions when creating fictions, false memories and dreams about the akelarre-mass.

That this was the case is supported by deeper analysis of the records themselves. At the beginning of this chapter we observed that the most detailed and coherent accounts of the akelarre-mass emerge in the Spanish records and that the most superior of these Spanish examples can be found in the Joint Sentence.³⁰ It is surely relevant, then, that through their close links with the Premonstratensian monastery at Urdax, the villagers of Zugarramurdi may have engaged more intensely with the ceremony of the mass than was average for this region and period. Some of the reasons for this have already been highlighted in earlier chapters. The fact that the village was less than three kilometres from Urdax; that the Premonstratensians were a canonical order; and that Urdax monk Felipe de Zabaleta functioned as Zugarramurdi’s parish priest, meant that community worship would certainly not have been compromised by priest absenteeism. Similarly, the order’s vocational devotion to the Eucharist (as examined in our prior analysis of feast-cannibalism) would have meant that Zabaleta and his fellow monks did not only celebrate mass frequently but also with particular reverence. But there is one last feature of the Urdax monasterial life – as yet unemphasized – that is even more relevant to the issue under discussion here. From an early period, the canonical status of the Premonstratensian order had seen its vocational devotion to the Eucharist combined with specialist abilities in the performance of liturgy, including the ‘singing of the Divine Office’. In the case of the Urdax establishment this liturgical specialism was taken so seriously that, as Henningsen notes, by the period of the witch-craze it ‘functioned as a kind of seminary’ and trained individuals to become priests.³¹ Given this context, it is wholly reasonable to surmise that the masses celebrated by Zabaleta at the Zugarramurdi church (and also by monks at the Urdax monastery) would not only have been performed frequently and with reverence, but also with a particular attention to ritual precision and skill; precisely the qualities that emerge so strongly in the akelarre-mass described in the Joint Sentence.

The Ritual Queen

More surprisingly, evidence of suspect-involvement in the akelarre-mass accounts can also be found in the behaviour of the queen of the sabbath. We have already linked this female authority figure (who is uncommon in European witch confessions) to elected festive queens, Mari the ‘queen of the [folk] spirits’ and Mary the ‘queen of heaven’. But what we have not explored until now is that unlike the French queen – who was young, pretty and sexually available – the Spanish sabbath monarch was typically presented as an older woman who was preoccupied with a range of ritual duties that included officiating at the akelarre-mass. As stated in the Joint Sentence,

when it is time for the offertory he [the Devil] turns to the witches and the aforementioned Graciana de Barrenechea would sit by his side on a chair, for as the most important and queen of them all she was responsible for the alms dish which had a gold-like chain that went around her neck. And in one hand she held a pax on which an image of the Devil is painted and in the other she held an alms dish like the one they collect with at church doors to illuminate [?] the saints. And then all the witches, in order of their age, rank and role, each go by themselves to make their offering and make certain venerations to the Devil, including going down on one knee, first kissing the pax which the aforementioned Graciana has and then making their offering, placing in the alms dish whatever each of them brings depending on their means; offering a sos [?] which is half a tarja or a whole tarja, and the richest and most powerful ones offer a franc, which is worth three reals.³²

Given her links with seductive festive queens, storm-raising folk spirits and the beatific Virgin Mary, it seems slightly incongruous to find the queen of the sabbath in this rather pecuniary and bureaucratic role. But her behaviour becomes less strange when we consider that in the Basque country as elsewhere, ritualized alms-collection (in conjunction with the kissing of the pax) was a standard feature of the Catholic mass in the medieval and early modern periods. Although the custom of kissing the pax has declined in recent centuries, Barandiarán reports that in the Sara region in the mid-twentieth century ‘the priest awaits them [the congregation] with a pax (metal plaque with a cross); they kiss this and make their offering by depositing a franc in a bag or on a collection plate held by an altar-boy.’ The queen of the sabbath’s alms-collecting behaviour becomes even more understandable when we consider that in the period of the witch-craze, this activity was often coordinated by a lay nun termed the serora (and her helpers), with de Lancre observing a group of women ‘carrying alms dishes that people in church use to take up the collection . . . Then I saw a certain woman whom they call the benedicte [serora] assume the role of marguilliere. She approached the altars, carrying alms, lighting the candles and other such things.’³³ On this basis, we can conjecture that the queen of the sabbath who collected alms at the sabbath-mass was directly modelled on the contemporary officiating duties of the Basque serora.

Once established, this link enables us to identify the serora matrix in other aspects of the akelarre liturgy. Roslyn Frank argues that the serora’s alms-collecting activities were but one aspect of her wider ceremonial role as the ‘priestess or mistress of ceremonies for women’. Her most important responsibility in this respect was officiating over rites and prayers for the community’s dead at the family tombstones or jarlekus that were situated either in the church interior or graveyard. Frank notes that the serora

acted as minister and coordinator of female ritual activities carried out at the respective sepulchral stones, led the ritual processions of women, took the offerings of bread and candles to the altar and presided over the complicated ritual acts for the dead under the guardianship of the etxekoandreak [mistresses of the house]. In addition, the serora accompanied the women to the home of the deceased member where she said her Requiescat in pace in Latin or Basque.

We can clearly trace the shapes of these serora-led mortuary rituals in the akelarre-mass. Given that the majority of the witches attending the akelarre-mass were women, it is notable that the serora’s ritual remit was predominantly female-centric, with Frank adding that ‘it is noteworthy that neither the etxekojuanak (masters of the house) nor their male relatives participated in the funeral rituals associated with the jarleku, the latter being seen as the exclusive domain of the etxekoandrea, the serora and other female members of the parish.’ Given that the institution of the serora provided the organizational structure through which gifts – predominantly bread and candles – were brought by women to the church during the ritual year, both as ordinary offerings and in order to commemorate the dead, it is also notable that (as recorded in the Pamplona Manuscript) ‘some [suspects] say, that on the said nights of offering they carry small candles that were brought at San Juan de Luz’; and that on the day before the akelarre, some women ‘kneaded and made offerings of wheat flour bread’ that was then carried to the ceremony ‘in baskets’. Even more directly, the Joint Sentence states that witches ‘bring from their homes money, obládas, wine, candles and other things that they tend to offer to the Devil, in the way that the Catholic Christians do in church’; with the word ‘obládas’ being directly translated from the Old Spanish as ‘funeral offering of bread for the souls of the deceased.’ In this respect, the witches’ behaviour accurately mirrors that of the Labourdin women who, according to an exasperated de Lancre, gather ‘throughout the church’ and ‘spend so much time there [sorting out their offerings] that frequently mass has been said before they have finished what they came to do.’³⁴

These links with the serora matrix are also visible in the wider functions of the queen of the sabbath, as she operated outside the akelarre-mass. As observed several times in the course of this book, the Spanish queen typically worked with the help of a group of senior witches who assisted her in a range of activities. These witches played an important role in the recruitment of novices for the witches’ sect (persuading candidates to join, taking them to the akelarre, presenting them to the Devil and teaching them how to make the demonic pact and care for their toad familiars and so on). They also played a prominent role in the poison-making process, with the Logroño Sentences stating that when preparing these substances ‘the queen would meet another three or four senior witches’ and ‘would instruct them and tell them what they had to do’. While we have already linked these activities to a range of different sources, it is notable in this context that this operational hierarchy and pattern of occupation can also be very clearly identified in the serora matrix. Just as the sabbath queen was helped by senior witches, so the serora always worked with female assistance, which often included one or two more permanent female helpers whom she paid out of the benefices provided by parishioners and patrons. Just as the sabbath queen and her senior witches mentored the witch novices, so the serora and her helpers were responsible for mentoring female children, with Caro Baroja noting that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries education was the responsibility of clergymen, ‘who appointed a teacher for the boys and who entrusted the education of the girls to seroras.’³⁵ Similarly, just as the sabbath queen and her senior witches oversaw the preparation of poisons, so the serora and her helpers were historically implicated in domestic medicine, with scholars arguing that they traditionally provided ‘health care to the populace’. Indeed, etymologist Roslyn Frank has recently asserted that the terms used to denote the serora’s assistants in the church archives (braguine/brayine/braine) are ‘phonologically reduced dialectical variants of the compound expression belharguin’ – a compound based on the root belhar (plant, herb) and eguin (to make) – which can be glossed as ‘herb-worker’. This has led Frank to conclude that ‘based on the linguistic evidence available we can determine that the serora’s helpers were once understood by members of the community to fulfil important functions as “healers”.’ Of even more significance, as noted in Chapter Eight, is that the same etymological roots can be traced in relation to many Euskaran terms for ‘witch’ (as in belaguin, bedeguin etc.).³⁶

Parallels can also be identified in the queen of the sabbath’s relationship with the Devil. Although some confessions refer to a ‘king of the sabbath’ it is clear that the Devil is the queen’s true partner, with the records stating that ‘as this queen and owing to her pre-eminence in rank she [Graciana de Barrenechea] is always by the Devil’s side and with her he discusses most particularly the evil deeds and abominable sins that all the witches should commit’. We have already identified some potential inspirations for this consort role, citing the partnerships between festive kings and queens, the mythic Mari and her dragonine consort Sugaar, and even the Virgin Mary and Christ as they sit side by side in paradise. But in the present context, it is notable that this role is also evoked in the relationship between serora and priest. When performing mortuary ritual, all female parishioners enjoyed an exclusive access to the sanctuary area of the church where the jarlekus were situated, while the men (who were denied entry to this part of the building) had to sit in the upstairs galleries, gaining access to their seats via a special staircase either outside or in the portico area.³⁷ But the serora’s obligation to light candles, collect alms, organize offerings and other tasks during mass meant that her access was further extended to the altar and that, in performing these ritual duties, she functioned as an ‘adjunct to the priest’. Also relevant here, is that in addition to her ceremonial functions the serora also fulfilled a range of caretaking duties that encouraged further intimacy with the minister. De Lancre himself alleges that ‘as soon as it was daybreak’ the serora ‘needed to be the first one in the church in order to put the white tablecloths and other ornaments on the altar’; and that after evening prayers she stayed behind with the priest to ‘straighten out the ornaments and extinguish the lights’. At these times, he laments, she could ‘lock herself up in church with the priest . . . in total freedom; in the morning and at night’; and that the couple could then enjoy ‘all the comfort and freedom to say and do what they wish’.³⁸

While there is no scope in the present work to provide a comprehensive examination of the serora complex, the range of comparisons presented here between the activities of the serora and the activities of the Basque witch do support the likelihood that the vividness and detail of the akelarre-mass accounts owed something to the popular religiosity of the Basques.³⁹ Coming from Bordeaux and mainland Spain, de Lancre, Valle and Becerra would not have been familiar with the figure of the serora and although they encountered her on arrival in the Basque country, their lack of familiarity makes it more likely that it was the suspects who drew her into the accounts of the akelarre-mass. This is supported by the breadth of the correspondences identified. If the queen of the sabbath’s serora-like activity had been restricted to prominent public duties like alms collection, then we could speculate a higher level of interrogatorial involvement. But the ease with which the akelarre alms collection can be so broadly contextualized within such a wide range of other serora-related activities points more firmly to the accused. While the interrogators could have quickly ascertained the serora’s role at mass, they would have been less knowledgeable about her wider functions in the community, not least because many of them took place in domestic and exclusively female spheres. Through this lens the complex and multi-layered evocation of the serora in the Basque records – from alms-collector and hierophant of women’s jarleku rites to employer, caretaker, healthcare provider and educator of children – is not the serora as seen remotely through the eyes of an urban male interrogator, but the serora as seen through the eyes of Basque village women.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Mass and Misrule

In the last chapter we argued that aside from demonological stereotypes, the primary raw material mined by the Basque suspects when cocreating their akelarre-mass accounts was the ordinary mass experience. By this measure it was the interrogators with their fears about the liturgical abuses of heretics, pagans and magicians and their intellectual concepts about inversion and the Antichrist who ensured, through close and leading questions, that every aspect of the suspect’s ordinary mass experience degenerated into its darker opposite. But although there is undoubtedly much truth to this thesis, it is oversimplistic. For if we examine the lives and mentalities of the accused in a little more depth, we find they may have contributed more creatively and proactively to the inversionary aspects of the akelarre-mass than might be assumed.

We can begin with the fact that the suspects would have been exposed to many of the same influences that, as argued in the last chapter, may have provoked interrogatorial interest in alternative liturgical practice. Although they would not have encountered demonological or theological texts, suspects would have been just as likely as de Lancre, Valle and Becerra, to have heard about the unorthodox masses performed by heretics, conjurors and the peoples of the New World. With regard to heretics, ordinary Basques would have been well aware that groups of people gathered together in clandestine meetings to engage in religious rituals and festivities that challenged those of the Catholic Church; and they would have heard, if not believed, the Church’s allegation that although such people claimed to be worshipping God they were in fact worshipping the Devil. Similarly, through the family members and friends who returned from fishing and trading trips to the New World, ordinary Basques would have enjoyed reports – and perhaps even first-hand accounts – of the elaborate and bloodthirsty rituals performed by the Amerindians in honour of Satan. They would also have been familiar with the use of the mass, or parts thereof, by magical practitioners. The weather conjurors who used ‘words from the mass’ as they directed the clouds, invariably performed their magical feats before a local audience. It would also have been ordinary Basques who sought cures from men like parish clerk Pedro Manrique, who confessed in Logroño in 1610 to having performed healing spells that ‘contained the words of transubstantiation in the communion service’; and from the saludadores who, according to del Rio, went onto battlefields to heal Spanish soldiers’ wounds with a prayer that narrated the events of the Last Supper. Similarly, although the magical masses conducted by male sorcerers were often shrouded in secrecy and performed before select groups of clients, they did not take place in a vacuum. With regard to early modern Zaragoza, Tausiet observes that ‘time and again the same pattern is repeated: a stranger arrives in the city and inveigles a number of locals into joining him and meeting in secret on one of the nearby hills to conjure demons.’ The five local men – including a tailor, painter and notary – who accompanied Jerónimo de Liébana to the hills for ‘nine or ten days’ to perform daily masses to potentize their demonic invocations, would have found it hard to prevent details of these exotic and protracted events from leaking out into their local community.¹ From this vantage point, we can assume that when Basque suspects were questioned about mass ceremonies at the sabbath, they drew their accumulated knowledge and experience surrounding the ritual practices of heretics, Amerindians and sorcerers into their false confessions – and in doing so, colluded with the interrogatorial impetus to conflate these unorthodox liturgies with the akelarre-mass.

The ‘Black’ Mass

But in contributing to these demonic liturgies, the suspects may have also been mining more prosaic lodes. One of the core inversionary motifs in the Basque sabbath-mass was the colour black. Instead of ritual objects and vestments made out of rich, coloured material or precious metals, we find the hierophants of the akelarre-mass using ‘long, black and ugly vestments’; ‘a dossal of old, black and torn cloth’; a ‘black wood’ chalice; and ‘a host which is black like the sole of a shoe, on which an image of the Devil is painted’. Although not emphasized to the same extent, the colour black also figures in the Labourd cases, with de Lancre referring to the use of ‘a black host and a black chalice’ and ‘black candles’ that were ‘made out of resin or, more often, because resin is not dark enough, pitch.’² In itself, this theme is not surprising and reflects the little demonological precedent that does exist, with Boguet alleging that the witch-priest wears a ‘black cope’ and elevates a host that is a piece of ‘turnip coloured black’. It also echoes the wider cultural association between the Devil and the colour black that emerges widely in theatre, literature and religious iconography since the early medieval period.³ Witch trial records from many parts of early modern Europe also typically state that the Devil appeared as a ‘black man’ or a man wearing black clothes. But while these precedents do exist, they do not adequately explain why the colour black should have been woven so extensively and creatively into Basque accounts of the akelarre-mass.

In this context, it is surely relevant that the colour black was an important element in ordinary Catholic ritual. In the last chapter, we observed that early modern enthusiasm for the mass was expressed in a range of contexts, but what we have not noted until now, is that a large proportion of this enthusiasm was directed toward the celebration of masses for the dead. In the Basque regions as elsewhere in Europe, the deceased could be honoured with funeral masses (performed with the body present) or memorial masses (performed with the body not present, at any time after burial), with the latter including masses said on certain designated holy days (such as All Souls’ Day) and votive masses that were commissioned to hasten a soul’s progress through purgatory to heaven. While masses for the dead had been a consistent feature of Catholic religiosity from an early period, their impact on society had increased considerably from the late-medieval period onwards through the escalating popularity of the votive memorial mass. While we cannot be certain how far ordinary Basques were, as Kamen puts it, ‘storming heaven with demands for salvation’, it is clear they were very familiar with the practice, with early-seventeenth century Basque cleric Lope Martínez de Isasti stating that ‘since we are uncertain whether the souls of the faithful departed are freed from Purgatory, we must continue to implore God for them – with prayers, masses, alms etc.’. Even as late as the twentieth century, Caro Baroja could maintain that one of the commonest narratives about the dead in Basque oral culture featured departed souls appearing before their relatives to demand that they ‘order masses for his benefit’.⁴ Whatever the degree of practice, all types of masses for the dead are highly relevant to our analysis of the Basque sabbath-mass, for the simple reason that in the early modern period as now, mortuary rituals were strongly associated with the colour black. D’Orsay Pearson reports that in sixteenth-century Castile ‘black vestments and candles were used for the Mass of the Dead’; and de Lancre that ‘the people from Bayonne and the Basques . . . decorate the areas around their sepulchres in the churches and cemeteries with a black flag.’ Into the modern period, at Basque funerals ‘the yarleku is [still] covered in sackcloth and black fabric’; while according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, ‘Requiem masses should always be celebrated with black vestments and ornaments’.⁵

There is clearly a thematic correspondence between the ‘blackness’ of these mortuary rituals and the ‘blackness’ of the akelarre-mass. Indeed, de Lancre himself makes the link, with his claim that the Basques decorated their sepulchres ‘with a black flag’ being expressly made to support his assertion that the witches made their candles out of black resin or pitch ‘because the Devil wants to imitate’ such mortuary practices.⁶ But is there any evidence that the suspects drew these black-themed mortuary experiences into their sabbath-mass accounts? While there is little to be gained by looking at the texts head-on (for references to black-themed ritual are so effectively absorbed into demonological stereotypes), if we step back and look at our material through a wider lens we find that we have amassed considerable evidence to support this thesis already. In our analysis of the queen of the sabbath in the last chapter, we argued that in describing a female official who collected alms at the akelarre-mass, the Spanish suspects were drawing on their knowledge of the lay nun or serora who was not only ‘mistress of the ceremonies of women’ but also had particular jurisdiction over the ‘complicated ritual acts for the dead’.⁷ We also argued that in claiming to have brought obládas to the ceremony, the suspects were mining their remembered experiences of bringing offerings, such as bread and candles, to their local church in honour of the deceased. From this position, it is clearly no stretch to argue that this same seam of mortuary experience was quarried by the accused when creating akelarre-masses that were characterized by the colour black.

This conclusion comes as no surprise. Being predominantly women, the Basque suspects were precisely that sector of society whose imaginations would have been most shaped and shadowed by the black-themed ceremonies of the dead. As seen in Chapter Five, it was the women of the community who shouldered most of the responsibility around mortuary ritual, particularly with regards to children. It was the women – and not the men – who washed and dressed the bodies of the deceased; who followed the corpses of children along the ‘roads of the dead’; and gathered in orchards to bury the unbaptized infants who were ‘not of societal concern’.⁸ It was the women of the community – and not the men – who continued to care for the deceased in the years following their death. Assisted by the serora and her helpers, they organized and attended commemorative masses, with Barandiarán observing that as late as the twentieth century in Sara, female relatives ‘attend the Mass for the soul of the recently deceased’ in the first few days after a funeral. It was also the female relatives who, along with the serora, attended memorial masses at various times during the following year and on the anniversary of the death; and who made sure that the ‘rolled taper burning in the yarleku during the funeral’ was ‘lit every day during one of the masses being celebrated in the church’. Indeed, the significance of these mortuary customs is reflected in Barandiarán’s lament that after the death of the last serora 1902 (and her functional successors, mid-century), prayers for the dead were ‘no longer sung in the yarlekuak [in Sara] except in a very few cases, because there are no women to preside over them.’ It is even possible to extrapolate that the kinds of emotional bonds that would have developed in response to sharing these dark responsibilities, can be found reflected in the complex mixture of grit and humour that characterizes female camaraderie at the Basque akelarre. While distorted by prejudice, the following passage from de Lancre manages to evoke some of the incongruous mixture of gallows wit, grief and comfort that must have fuelled these mortuary obligations.

[Labourdin women] visit cemeteries day and night, and cover and surround the graves with crosses and scented herbs, not wishing the odor of their husband’s bodies to reach their nostrils. It is a deception when they cry or seem to be crying hot tears for their husbands who have been dead for more than twenty years, even though they do not shed a tear on the first day of the funeral ceremonies. There they sit or crouch down in groups, not on their knees, cackling and scheming more often than not about what they saw the previous night, and the pleasures they had at the sabbath . . . ⁹

Comic Inversions

But while this thesis goes some way towards explaining the blackness of the akelarre-mass, it does not account for some of its other inversions. As observed in the last chapter, one of the notable characteristics of the ceremony, as it emerges in both the French and Spanish records, is not only that it contains ritual distortions but that many of these distortions are distinctly ridiculous or comedic. Chants such as ‘he-goat up, he-goat down’ do not evoke the gravity of any mass, whether for the living or the dead. The Labourdin claim that when ‘making the sign of the cross . . . [the witches] utter dirty words from the Spanish language’ that are translatable as ‘in the name of Patrick of Aragon, Janicot of Castile, give me a kiss on my rear!’ is similarly hard to explain. That such references came from the accused as opposed to the interrogators is clearly indicated by de Lancre’s clumsy efforts to make the following, rather farcical, sabbath account fit into a demonological template. The suspect maintained that the witches

heard the mass said six or seven times at the sabbath by Maître Jean Souhardibels, in a place called La Cohandia, and to having seen the elevation performed with a black host. His feet were raised over his head, which was lowered before the Devil, and he remained in this position during the elevation, so long as it took for people to recite the Credo. And the witness assumed this position before us to show us better (for Satan teaches them the most horrible things one has ever seen). And he further told us something that he could not express well, that the body of the priest was completely lifted into the air, and that while his body was upside down and he had his head lowered to the ground and his feet in the air, he was still able to perform the elevation from this position. He indicated that the body and arms of the priest, respectively, were as high as our priests have them when they perform the real elevation in the Church of God, because the Devil makes all things occur at the sabbath in the reverse way, things that seem entirely impossible to men but not to him.¹⁰

In Chapter Thirteen we argued that similarly farcical elements emerging in other parts of the Basque accounts (such as old women performing somersaults or chanting nonsensical rhymes) reflected the influence of circulating narratives about popular utopias like the Land of Cockaigne. At first glance, these findings do not seem applicable to the sabbath-mass. Religion, with all its constraints on morality and behaviour, would appear to have little place in arcadian otherworlds characterized by excessive indulgence and lack of moral restraint. But if we move away from liturgical matters and revisit the world of theatrical performance, we find that popular ideals about utopias like Cockaigne may have been more relevant to the ritual aspects of the sabbath than we might have anticipated.

Comic Inversion and the Theatre

Earlier in this book we argued that when contributing to their akelarre-sex and akelarre-pact accounts, the Basque suspects may have drawn on their experiences of contemporary comedic performance; observing that some of the more incongruous behaviours of the Devil, such as farting in the witches’ faces, whipping them with his tail or wielding outsized penises made of iron or horn, were directly evocative of the antics of the comic demons that leavened autos sacramentales and enlivened carnivalesque processions and other forms of contemporary theatrical performance. But what we have not observed until now, is that while bawdry and physical theatre were enduringly popular, contemporary comedy could also be more sophisticated than this, with humorous dances, songs, plays and prose or verse performances of remarkable inventiveness and complexity being integrated into contemporary festivities in a range of different ways. Even more pertinently, these diverse theatrical forms often drew their comedy from the subversion of cultural norms, with Clark stating that:

Throughout the late medieval and Renaissance period ritual inversion was a characteristic element of village folk-rites, religious and educational ludi, urban carnivals and court entertainments. Such festive occasions shared a calendrical licence to disorderly behaviour or ‘misrule’ based on the temporary but complete reversal of customary priorities of status and value.¹¹

At its most basic, this inversionary misrule was expressed through over-indulgence, with gluttonous eating and drinking directly perverting the Christian virtues of temperance and self-discipline. Similarly, conventions surrounding sex and aggression were flouted through provocative dances and costumes, along with the free trading of verbal insults, fights involving food, ordure and pails of water and, of course, the lascivious and confrontative antics of devils, fools and wild men.¹² On a more complex level, hierarchies and rituals surrounding social status, gender and the rule of law were subverted through satiric and parodic theatricals, with individuals being elected as kings and queens or lords and ladies and given temporary authority to preside ‘over ephemeral commonwealths complete with the paraphernalia of serious kingship but dedicated to satire and clowning’. In the spirit of the theme, elected figures were given titles like ‘Prince of High Folly’, ‘The Patriarch of Syphilitics’, ‘Duke Kickass’ and ‘Mère Folle’, with a ‘King of the Bean’ being ‘mentioned various times in accounts of the court of Navarre of the fourteenth century’.¹³ Comic actors also engaged in mock jurisdictions over domestic affairs and marriages, with a group of young men in sixteenth-century Lyon performing judicial farces featuring a ‘Judge of Misrule’ and a ‘Bench of Bad Advice’.¹⁴ Visual motifs of inversion, such as carrying and wearing objects upside down or inside out or riding backwards on animals were also staple comic devices. While any group of individuals could turn their hand to satire or parody, by the fifteenth century these comic theatricals were typically performed by groups of young people who had organized themselves into festive societies (also termed by French historians, sociétiés joyeuses) that gathered together to devise, finance and enact performances and processions at certain times of year.¹⁵ These diverse comedic forms were particularly associated with the carnival season that ran, in its broadest sense, between late-December and mid-February or early March. But they also permeated theatricals throughout the whole calendrical year, with Peter Burke arguing that there ‘is a sense in which every festival was a miniature Carnival because it was an excuse for disorder and because it drew from the same repertoire of traditional forms’. Also notable, given our analyses in Chapter Thirteen, is that carnivalesque celebrations were linked morphologically to the concept of Cockaigne, with Burke adding that ‘Cockaigne is a vision of life as one long Carnival, and Carnival a temporary Cockaigne’. The obvious congruity between the two realms – the one imaginal and the other real – was also widely acknowledged in the early modern period itself, with Brueghel giving his famous depiction of the drunken excesses of carnival the title, The Land of Cockaigne (Luilekkerland). Narratives, verses and theatricals celebrating the absurdist indulgences of the peasant utopia were also read out and performed during carnival celebrations.¹⁶

31  The concept of inversion was utilized to comedic effect in ‘Il Mondo alla Riversa’ (The World Turned Upside-Down) by Battista Parmensis in 1585. An ox guides a plough pulled by two peasants, a child interrogates three professors, a fish catches a bird and so on.

These traditions clearly have relevance for our Basque material. Scholars have long-argued that European accounts of the witches’ sabbath – as they emerged in demonological texts, visual art and witch trial records – were imaginatively linked to carnivalesque templates on both elite and popular levels. In the case of the Basque sabbath, we can fairly safely assume that when fleshing out their subversively comedic accounts of akelarre festivities, the suspects did not only mine the utopian narratives outlined in Chapter Thirteen – but also mined these narratives as articulated and elaborated through their experiences of theatrical misrule. These conclusions are echoed in Williams’ observation that de Lancre believed the Labourdin people ‘to be celebrating a perpetual hedonistic carnival, which he translated into his vividly imagined descriptions of the witches’ sabbath’ We also find them articulated in later Basque folk genres, where the witch often emerges as a ‘carous[ing]’ or ‘burlesque’ figure; with Begoña Echeverria noting that the ‘exclusively female witch captured in Basque song is merely ribald, rowdy, and unruly’.¹⁷ But while these perspectives are highly relevant, they do not necessarily bring us much closer to understanding the akelarre-mass. When drawing parallels between the witches’ sabbath and theatrical misrule, historians have certainly noted that these correspondences extend to ritual and that sabbath liturgies evoke the tropes of carnivalesque subversion. But because these parallels are predominantly explored in relation to the festive – as opposed to ritualistic – aspects of the sabbath phenomenon, these liturgical links are generally referred to in passing. As a consequence, although we have a clear direction of travel, our knowledge of whether and to what extent the Basque suspects may have drawn on misrule traditions when creating their accounts of the akelarre-mass is still fairly limited.¹⁸

Liturgical Inversion

In exploring this issue further, we can begin with the evidence that during both the medieval and early modern periods, theatrical misrule interfaced with liturgy in a range of different ways. On a basic level, revellers were quite happy to take their carnivalesque processions and plays from the meadows and plazas and into their local churches, even when the congregations were celebrating mass. In Catalonia in 1630, an episcopal visitor to Sabadell lamented that ‘young people enter the church with the insignias of king or count on solemn feasts and provoke laughter and disturbance in the whole church and distract those listening to divine service’; while in 1573, the bishop of Gerona denounced people for ‘bringing into the church the giant, the giantess, the eagle, the dragons and other types of animals, and dancing and letting off fireworks . . . embracing each other before the altar and the Blessed Sacrament, the musicians playing immodest songs and the people dancing sardanas . . . as a result of which it is impossible to celebrate divine service’.¹⁹ Even more relevant (with regard to the akelarre-mass) is that theatrical revellers were not only happy to disrupt the ritual space but also the institution, doctrines and liturgy of the Church itself. Arguably the most dramatic – or at least the most shocking – examples of this disruption emerge in relation to clerical behaviour at the midwinter festival known as the Feast of Fools. During Christmas week, lower clergy or their affiliates would elect a leader from among their number and name them ‘abbot’, ‘pope’ or ‘cardinal’ etc.; with the most common recipient being a youth crowned as a ‘boy bishop’. This simulated leader would then officiate at specially adapted rituals that could – according to the faculty of the University of Paris in 1445 – involve ‘wearing masks and monstrous visages’; dancing ‘in the choir dressed as women, panders or minstrels’; singing ‘wanton songs’; and censing ‘with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes’.²⁰ Medieval clerics also entertained themselves by parodying the liturgy through the composition and performance of Latin texts termed parodia sacra (which were sometimes incorporated into Feast of Fool performances). These works, which were designed to entertain an audience whilst simultaneously warning against the dangers of sin, could include beautifully crafted ‘mock’ sermons, confessions, litanies, prayers and saints’ lives. The ‘mock sermon’, for example, employed traditional rhetorical rules but subverted their typical message by praising carnality or greed, quoting from bogus scripture or citing hagiographies in which saints behaved like dissolute drunkards and so on.²¹ The canon also produced ‘mock gospels’; with the ‘money gospel’ containing paradoxical homilies such as ‘blessed are the rich, for they shall be satisfied’; ‘the rich shall be first and the poor last’; ‘to those who have, it shall be given’; and ‘from him who has not, it is fitting that what he has shall be taken from him’. Even more pertinently, we find direct parodies of the mass. The ‘gambler’s mass’ was celebrated in honour of the god of gambling; the ‘drinker’s mass’ was sung in honour of the god of wine (usually Bacchus); and the ‘glutton’s mass’ extolled the virtues of greed. These liturgies were not subtle. With regard to the drinker’s mass for example, Martha Bayless states that ‘an entire mock religion was constructed around this god [Bacchus], incorporating into the holy rites the stock elements of inebriation, debts, loss of clothes, vomiting, shrewd tavern keepers, and, above all, the drunkard’s fervent devotion to his lord.’ To this end, we find the Agnus Dei rephrased as ‘Lamb of Bacchus, who takest away the things we have pawned, grant drink to us’ etc.; and the Lord’s Prayer as ‘Father Bacchus, who art in cups, hallowed be thy good wine. Thy ruination come. Thy turmoil be done in the cup as in the tavern. Give us this day our daily drink’.²² Given the subversive nature of many peasant utopias, it is not surprising to find that the comedic pleasures described in the parodia sacra were sometimes conflated with the comparable pleasures to be experienced in realms like Cockaigne. According to Bryan Given, this hedonistic otherworld was ‘a largely anticlerical’ or ‘antiecclesiastical’ place where clerics were ‘fellow participants in, rather than critics of, the delights of that land’. In an English narrative from around 1300, Cockaigne is located ‘on an island with a monastery complete with an abbot, gluttonous monks, and biddable nuns’; while a colourful version of a drinker’s mass from the thirteenth-century Carmina Burana has the narrator stating that:

I am the abbot of Cockagne

and my council is with the drinkers

and my affection is with the sect of the Die [dice],

and who shall seek me in the tavern in the morning,

he shall leave naked at the end of the evening . . .²³ [my italics]

In recent years, scholars have been keen to emphasize that these clerical parodies were not intended to undermine the Church. Max Harris has recently challenged the scholarly consensus that the Feast of Fools involved derisive parody of the kind described by the Parisian theologians in 1445, arguing that it was a largely respectful ceremony that did not challenge or mock the liturgy. But we can nevertheless assume that giving groups of (what would have been mostly) young men permission to take liberties with ritual norms would sometimes have slid into irreverence, and that the authorities’ concern that saying ‘mass merrily’ at the Feast of Fools should not degenerate into mockery was not completely baseless. Similarly, while Bayless and others have emphasized that Latinate parodia sacra sought to mock the drinker or gambler and their vice as opposed to Christian ritual and doctrine, the fact that these literary forms ‘may well have been an entertainment for any occasion of merriment, as were drinking songs and ribald stories’, raises the likelihood that in the hands of tipsy young clerics, the line between what was being mocked and what was not must sometimes have become blurred.²⁴

Popular Impacts

Of particular relevance here, with regard to our investigations into the akelarre-mass, is that although the parodic examples cited here were created and performed by clerics, they impacted on the wider population. Peter Burke notes that ‘ordinary people participated’ in the unorthodox liturgies of the clerical Feast of Fools ‘in the same way as they participated at Mass, in the congregation’. The evidence also suggests that – both at these feasts and in more private settings – clerics could entertain and instruct the wider laity with parodia sacra translated into the vernacular. Harris reports that in the French town of Viviers in 1365, the festivities included a ‘fool bishop’ who gave a benediction and a chaplain who ‘pronounced a mock indulgence’ in the local Occitan, with the text including crowd-pleasing phrases like ‘my lord, who is here present, gives you twenty baskets of toothache’ and ‘on behalf of my lord the bishop, may God give you a great pain in your liver, with a basket full of pardons and two fingers of skin rash under your chin.’²⁵

But liturgical parody had a longer reach than this. With regard to parodia sacra, although we have focused on the clerical production and performance of Latinate texts, what we have not yet emphasized is that scholars and educated laymen were also enthusiastic proponents of the genre. Even more pertinently, from the late-medieval period onwards this lay enthusiasm also saw the rapid emergence and proliferation of parodia sacra in the vernacular that – whether adaptations of Latin texts or original compositions – were more specifically tailored to ordinary lay audiences. These vernacular forms (which could range from parodic prose stories to prayers, carols, hagiographies, episcopal addresses, wedding or funeral liturgies and mock sermons) were an important part of popular entertainment, with Parsons noting of the mock sermon that ‘during the medieval and early modern periods, the mock sermon was one of the most widely staged festive rituals’ and ‘there was in fact barely an occasion for festivity that did not come to include’ them. Hardly surprisingly, these texts also percolated into the oral canon, although our knowledge of these non-literate forms is limited, with Ian Russell lamenting in regard to the popular sermon that any ‘evidence of these popular parodies was rarely recorded and what there is must inevitably come to us via scholars who had been educated by the church’.²⁶ Vernacular parodia sacra could resemble their Latinate equivalents in that they aimed to reinforce doctrine and right behaviour by mocking the sins that were parodied as opposed to the liturgy itself. Gluttony, for example, was targeted in the French ‘sermon of Saint Ham and Saint Sausage’; and the excessive costs of marriage in a sermon, also in the French vernacular, that cited scriptural references recorded ‘on the page illuminated with shit’ in the ‘Book of Calf’s Tripe’. But being more commonly composed by laymen, these vernacular forms were also more likely to be employed as vehicles of anticlericalism. In these cases, their primary purpose was not to reinforce religious doctrine but to mock and satirize the clergy and the institution of the Church itself. As early as the thirteenth century, the popular collection of trickster fables titled the Roman de Renart featured ‘repeated mockery of the clergy’ that echoed the Feast of Fools through a ‘parody of parish vespers (including an elaborately farsed Benedictamus), prolonged ringing of the church bells, inversion of roles, and [the] dressing of animals in priestly vestments’.²⁷ Also notable, particularly where the oral canon is concerned, is that many vernacular scripts would have been both less sophisticated and more idiosyncratic than their Latin or high-literary equivalents, since they could be created by any monk, mendicant, student or labourer with sufficient motivation and a suitably pithy turn of phrase.

Even more relevant, with regard to popular mentalities, is that this vernacular appropriation of liturgical parody extended beyond texts to dramatic performance. We have already seen that laypeople could participate as members of the congregation in the clerical Feast of Fools. But in fact, their primary exposure to liturgical parodies of this kind is more likely to have been via lay theatre. Earlier in this chapter we observed that carnivalesque traditions gave temporary licence for lay performers to satirize and parody powerful social institutions like the monarchy and the law; but what we have not emphasized until now is that this licence also extended to the Church. Staged satires and parodies of the doctrines, hierarchies and ministers of the Church were a highly popular feature of contemporary lay theatre and could assume a wide variety of dramaturgical forms. The delivery of a mock sermon could involve the sermonizers wrapping themselves in blankets to simulate clerical vestments, blessing the crowd and even handing out fake indulgences as rewards for sin. Comedic processions and plays could include more elaborate liturgical parodies, with Heather Arden noting that French sotties (short plays featuring ‘fool’ characters) could mock the ‘divine service’ through ‘the singing of an irreverent text in the vernacular to a Gregorian chant’ or the ‘joining together of liturgical fragments in a macaronic jumble to create a pseudo-religious effect’.²⁸ Lay enthusiasm for these forms is vividly expressed in the evidence that the festive societies producing comic theatricals often overtly defined themselves as ‘abbeys of misrule’ and performed their own secular variant of the Feast of Fools. Like their clerical counterparts, these societies elected one of their own (or an ‘abducted’ member of the clergy) to play the ‘boy bishop’ or ‘Abbot of Misrule’ and then performed an idiosyncratic liturgy, with the records stating that in 1483 a youth group termed the Confrérie de la Jeunesse in Noyon near Arras ‘staged a public burlesque of the church’s sacraments, for which offense the cathedral chapter ordered them imprisoned.’ While these festivities aped the clerical Feasts of Fools, they also overtly diverged from them in that – as Max Harris emphasizes – they were essentially adaptations or elaborations of the more secular traditions, such as masquerading and charivari, that were traditionally pursued by groups of youths in the carnival period. As a consequence, these secular variants were more ready to embrace ‘street’ elements such as cross-dressing, masking and the subversion of moral norms. This link is clearly articulated in a record from the chapter of Troyes in 1380 that lists payment for ‘a new iron stem for one of the large leather candlesticks that Marie la Folle [Mère Folle] broke at the Feast of Fools’; with Mère Folle, at the Dijon carnival, being played by ‘a cross-dressed man who led a company of several hundred lay fools through the streets’.²⁹

32  In the Schembart Parade at the Nuremberg Carnival, 1539, a ‘Hell Wagon’ built in the shape of a ship – carrying a Lutheran priest and a motley crew of animalistic devil figures – is stormed and burnt by the crowds. Fools and wild men can also be identified among the festival participants.

The inventiveness and burlesque irreverence of these popular liturgical parodies is vividly illustrated in a famous account from 1524, that describes how the ‘young men and miners of the village’ of Buchholz in electoral Saxony led a procession which featured ‘banners made of rags’ and ‘a mock bishop dressed in a straw cloak, with a fish basket for a mitre’ and ‘an old fish kettle . . . for a holy water vessel, and dung forks for candles.’ They progressed to an abandoned mine shaft where they unearthed some mock relics, including a horse’s head and the jawbone of a cow, and then threw them into a dung cart and marched to the town’s marketplace where, ‘in a parody sermon the bishop, after praising dear Saint Benno’s holy ass-bone, proclaimed an indulgence.’ It is also clear that like the mock sermon, parodic performances of the liturgy could be enjoyed in more informal contexts, with an example of their spontaneous emergence in a domestic setting being illustrated in the following account of a Mardi Gras celebration in the Spanish region of La Mancha in 1567.

A group of people, including two men and two women, were drinking and dancing at home. Inspired by the moment, one of the women picked up a plateful of earth and ashes and began to make the sign of the cross on everyone’s foreheads, saying, ‘Memento homo.’ Then one of the men caught up a potful of water and an oxtail and began to sprinkle water on everyone who had been marked. The merrymakers liked the effect so much that they decided to turn their clothes inside out, put on masks and visit the town’s familiar of the Inquisition and his employer.³⁰

While there could be conflict, the comic liturgies performed by lay people often existed harmoniously alongside those of the Church. Many towns catered for the full range of societal tastes by hosting both clerical and lay Feasts of Fools on the same day, while the lower clergy could find themselves – either willingly or unwillingly – participating in the lay variant. Indeed, as Harris has recently argued, it may well have been a confusion in the records between clerical and lay performances of the festival that has led to historical misapprehensions surrounding the crude excesses of the clerical Feast of Fools. While these theatrical forms enjoyed a certain level of tolerance through the medieval period, the reforming zeal of the early modern era saw both clerical and lay traditions decline. But as many of the examples cited in this chapter have shown, these prohibitions were slow to take effect. The clerical Feast of Fools survived ‘well into the sixteenth century’ and possibly later; while as late as 1756 in the French town of Llinàs, ‘on Innocent’s Day the parish elects a bailiff and town council commonly known as The Rogues, who enter in the church like ruffians and assist at divine service.’ In some parts of Europe, mock sermons and lay boy bishop traditions were recorded well into the twentieth century.³¹

Liturgical Misrule: The Basque Context

Returning to our main thesis, these perspectives clearly invite us to speculate that experiences of liturgical misrule were implicated in the Basque akelarre-mass accounts. But is there any evidence for this? The sources suggest that the early modern Basques were just as keen as their European neighbours to conflate the comedic and the serious, with Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy reporting that ‘at the end of each serious Act’ of the Life of St Anthony, as dramatized in Vitoria-Gasteiz in 1679, ‘another began of Farce and Pleasantry, Wherein appear’d him they called El Gracioso, which is to say, the Buffoon, who, among much insipid Stuff, says sometimes something less nauseous: The interludes were [also] mixt with Dances, to the sound of the Harps and Guitars.’ The Basques also took their carnivalesque theatricals into the churches. In 1599, the villagers of Lekeitio paid a group of gypsies to perform ‘certain leaps and dancing and rejoicing’ in ‘front of the Holy Sacrament’; while in San Sebastián in 1547, an observer complained that ‘when some are getting married in the church and are attending mass . . . people to come and make a noise and ring bells and shout and yell in church and at the altar . . . in great derision, mockery and ridicule of the holy sacrament of matrimony’. The St John’s Eve theatricals that took place in Zugarramurdi in the early-seventeenth century – and which, we noted earlier, were enjoyed by some of the suspects caught up in the witch-craze – also appear to have encroached into the church itself, with Caro Baroja noting that in this period there were ‘musical groups of Moors and Christians who attended the mass of the day, making a great din, and at the head of which there were a Moorish king and a Christian king, perfumed with incense.’³² The evidence also suggests that these carnivalesque theatricals did not only disrupt church liturgy, but also imitated or parodied it. Julio de Urquijo reports that in 1591 the Synod of Pamplona prohibited the use of ‘holy vestments’ in ‘comedies and plays’ and stated that ‘no ecclesiastical person must be imitated [in them]’ on ‘pain of major excommunication and a fine of six ducats’. The following statement from the Church authorities of Calahorra and La Calzada, circa 1530, suggests that clerics could also participate in these practices, with the report stating that they had been informed

[that] in some churches and chapels of our diocese some vigils are held that are attended by a large number of men and women, and instead of the reverence and devotion that they should have . . . they do many dishonest things, dancing in the churches and saying many dishonest words of mockery and performing plays that do not conform to the feasts and places where they are performed . . . we therefore order the clerics, by virtue of holy obedience and on pain of suspension, and the laypeople, on pain of excommunication, all of those who go to such vigils whether men or women, clerics or laypeople, to behave devoutly in them with great devotion and not to do the aforementioned inside the churches unless they are devout plays in accordance with the feast.

That parodic sermons were also performed is intimated by the report that as late as 1799, in the porch of the Vizcayan Church of Baracaldo, ‘the ‘Sermon of the Descent’ (a satirical take on the theme of the Ascent) was performed on Good Friday, with Julio de Urquijo noting that the ‘disorder’ generated ‘gave rise that same year to the abolition of these mock sermons’. This form of sermonizing can also be detected, in spirit at least, in the survival into the modern period of the Basque xelebre; a member of the community who ‘shows a very particular theatricality’ and is, as Caro Baroja puts it, ‘distinguished for his witticisms, his comments, in which he generally defends the opposition (inverse) opinion from that externalized by the majority.’³³

But perhaps the strongest evidence that liturgical parody was not only extant but also widespread in the period of the witch-craze, comes from de Lancre himself. The boy bishop template is clearly visible in the following passage from the Tableau, with the protagonist’s noble status also reflecting the contemporary practice of recruiting misrule clerics from ‘young adult males of the upper classes’.

There are bishops and prelates, even in the parish of Saint-Pée. After the Devil saw the image of St. Peter [the first Bishop of Rome] with a gilded tiara in the church, witnesses who went regularly to the sabbath told us they had seen the young Sieur de Lancinena, with a large hat made in the shape of the said tiara, who was generally called and believed to be the bishop of the sabbath. They said the Devil would dance with him, holding him by the hand, and that as they passed in front of him, everyone would bow to him, as if he were a person of great importance.

That liturgical misrule of this kind did indeed take place in Labourd in the period is then confirmed in de Lancre’s later assertion that:

I have made yet another observation, namely, that in all their parishes they take the titles of ecclesiastics, and the minor magistrats call themselves abbots. During their many festivals they never fail to name one person bishop and in their games another one becomes the Abbot de Mangouver (ie: Malgouverner, misrule]. This does nothing but profane the mysteries of the faith.

Reports of these traditions in Álava, Guipúzcoa and Navarre as late as the nineteenth and twentieth century is testament to the enduring popularity of these traditions among the Basques, with Caro Baroja stating that in the latter region ‘schoolchildren chose one of their number that they dressed as a bishop and with whom they went begging from door to door. The obispillo San Nicolás (as he is called in Spanish) corresponds, in other areas, to the obispillo de Inocentes, and he exercises a similar authority on the day of Epiphany and on other days’.³⁴

Liturgical Misrule: The Witch Records

On the basis of this evidence we can assume that many, if not all, of the suspects interrogated in the Basque witch-craze would have either observed or participated in carnivalesque parodies of religious ritual prior to their arrest and interrogation. As a corollary of this, we can reasonably surmise that they either consciously or (more likely) unconsciously utilized these experiences when creating fictions, false memories and dreams about the subversive liturgical activities of local witches. But is this argument supported by the texts themselves? We must be careful here. The heavy overlap between motifs of liturgical misrule and both heretical and demonological stereotypes means we cannot automatically assume that any given misrule-like reference relates to popular theatrical traditions – for there is always the possibility that it entered the confession via these more conventional routes. But despite these interpretative difficulties, it is surely relevant that many of the features of akelarre ritual that are obscure or ridiculous when examined in isolation, make new sense when viewed through the liturgical misrule lens.

To pick a few examples from many. Claims from the accused that the Devil’s vestments were ‘shabby’ appear less strange when we know that parodic liturgical processions used ‘banners made of rags’, and that the men who stood on crates or scaffolds to make their mock sermons, wrapped themselves in old blankets to simulate vestments. Claims that the witch-priests elevated hosts made from ‘a round of turnip’ seem less obscure when we know that in the medieval centuries, misrule revellers imitated clerics by censing with ‘the soles of old shoes’.³⁵ Allegations that the witches included nonsensical chants and rhymes in their akelarre-liturgy are less incongruent when considered alongside the evidence that in carnival traditions, priests and laymen liked to ‘mix profane songs and words with the psalms and hymns of Holy Church’ and indulge in mocking word-exchanges, such as ‘Halledrunken’ for ‘Hallelujah’, ‘Fraud be with you’ for ‘God be with you’, and ‘Let us wail’ for ‘Let us pray’. In this company, we can willingly concur with Caro Baroja’s assertion that when Labourdin witches chanted ‘In nomine Patrica, Aragueaco, Petrica, Agora . . . etc.’ as they made the sign of the cross, they were reciting a comic rhyme that had been incorporated into local carnivalesque liturgy (in this case, possibly referring to the fifteenth-century wars between ‘King Pedro of Aragon and Juan of Castile’). We can also understand why the suspects would have been moved to (as noted by an exasperated de Lancre) utter such ‘dirty words . . . without rhyme or reason, except ridiculing the mystery.’ Claims that the witches chanted ‘billy goat up, billy goat down’ when they raised the chalice during mass is also more intelligible when we know that in fifteenth-century France, clerics entertained themselves and others with parodic litanies to the Virgin Mary designed to disparage poor tavern food, that read:

Holy withered she-goat, pray for us.

Holy most scrawny she-goat, pray for us.

Holy she-goat, dead of starvation, pray for us.

Holy ancient she-goat, pray for us,

Holy she-goat, dead without a blade, pray for us.

Holy she-goat, most rank mother of goats, pray for us.³⁶

Descriptions of the Devil sitting on a throne ‘that had upside-down arms’ and of a witch-priest performing the elevation of the host ‘while his body was upside down’, seem less anomalous when we remember that ‘physical reversal’ was a central theme in carnival, with carnivalesque imagery depicting people standing ‘on their heads’ and cities floating ‘in the sky’ and actors, in the Feast of Fools, holding ‘the missal upside down’ and turning ‘their fur-lined vestments inside out’. The Devil’s habit of making the sign of the cross with his left hand and sprinkling his followers with urine instead of holy water is also less nonsensical – and considerably less dark – when considered alongside the antics of Spanish revellers who used ‘earth and ashes’ to make signs of the cross on each other’s foreheads and oxtails to ‘sprinkle water on everyone who had been marked.’ While by this point a demonological stereotype, these references to urine could also have reflected the juxtaposition of the excreta and the sacred seen in many liturgical parodies and satires, with mock sermons citing scripture from pages ‘illuminated with shit’ and youths parading saints’ relics in dung carts. Comic inversion of the ‘usual hierarchy between souls and bowels’ is also reflected in the act of kissing the Devil on the behind, as an irreverent variant of the liturgical Kiss of Peace.³⁷ Claims, by the suspects, that they took the Devil ‘as their God’ and offered him the same devotions as they would their Christian Lord, seem less shocking when we know that in the ‘drinker’s mass’, devotees of the grape turned away from the true God to pay homage to the God of Wine and that in some cases they did so in the ‘Devil’s chapel’ (the tavern). Reports that the horned Devil of the akelarre was seen dancing with the ‘bishop of the sabbath’ and ‘holding his hand’ seems less fantastical when we remember that in the clerical Feast of Fools, boy bishops danced with their entourage and that the secular hierophants of misrule were often accompanied in their festive theatricals by groups of men dressed in horned devil or animal masks.³⁸ Claims that ‘the Devil hears the confessions of all the witches, who admit as sins the times they have been to church, the masses they have heard, the good deeds they have done and the evil deeds they have failed to do’, seem less paradoxical when considered alongside mock confessions and sermons in which ‘the system of divine punishments and rewards’ is ‘reversed’. From this angle, the Devil is behaving no differently from the burlesque sermonizers who bestowed mock indulgences as prizes for bad behaviour and encouraged their listeners to ‘always drink freely should the chance arise, and your soul will find its way to paradise’; or advised them that, ‘if thou see thy brother in need, pluck out his eye.’³⁹ The comparison is even tighter with regard to the popular satirical polemic termed the ‘Devil’s Letter’, where these mordant rewards for sin are promised by the Devil himself. Similarly perverse moral diatribes, albeit more secular in tone, are likely to have been given by the ‘Bench of Bad Advice’ when they heard their ‘foolish cases’ at Lyon.⁴⁰

The likelihood that the Basque suspects fleshed out their akelarre-mass narratives by recalling their experiences of liturgical misrule, is further supported by the demographics of the accused. Given the high proportion of child suspects in the 1609–14 witch-craze, it is surely relevant that theatrical performance of any kind would have impacted with particular intensity on the imaginations of the young. An adult spectator of a Corpus Christi procession or sermon joyeux would have been fully aware that it was the local apprentice dressed up in a horned headdress and painted devil suit who ran about frightening onlookers with whips and firecrackers; and that it was an itinerant friar touting for laughs who preached the virtues of drunkenness from a makeshift pulpit in the market square. But children, for whom the distinction between reality and unreality is more inchoate, may not have known this or may not have known it so well. In Chapter Fourteen we saw how this perceptual immaturity was exploited by Basque parents, who used stories and theatricals about anthropophagic supernaturals to control their offspring’s behaviour. We also argued that children’s imaginative engagement with the reality of predatory spirit-groups and ogre figures may have contributed to the unusual prominence of feast-cannibalism in Basque akelarre accounts. That this imaginative engagement extended to carnivalesque performance is suggested by the fact that, both within and without the witch-craze, some of the most direct evocations of theatrical devils to emerge in the Basque witch records came from suspects of between seven and ten years of age.⁴¹ Through this lens we can speculate that with regard to misrule, Basque children may have given mock sermons, boy bishop processions and other theatrical displays of liturgical subversion more significance and reality than they deserved, and that these exaggerated impressions worked their way into their descriptions of the witches’ sabbath rituals. Given that a high proportion of the most vivid and detailed akelarre-mass accounts came from teenagers, it may also be relevant that this was precisely the sector of society that may have been most engaged, as either participants or peer-observers, in the youth abbeys.⁴²

The likelihood that Basque suspects drew liturgical misrule into their akelarre-mass accounts is also supported by the prosecutorial context. De Lancre’s complaint that the election of boy bishops in Labourd, ‘does nothing but profane the mysteries of the faith’ indicates that he shared the view, common among religious reformers in the period, that such traditions were offensive and should be suppressed. Indeed, he may have been particularly motivated in this respect by events closer to home. In 1578, when de Lancre was about twenty-five, the Bordeaux authorities prohibited a misrule celebration that traditionally took place on the Feast of St John and involved, as Tinsley notes, ‘the staging of amateur (artisan performed) dramas depicting Christ’s baptism. Wooden stages and elaborate clerical costumes were part of the equipment needed, while real clergymen subjected themselves to indignities such as a “baptism” of water sprayed at them by the actors’ who walked barefoot with ‘wooden trenchers on their heads’. The city’s move to prohibit these theatricals may have impacted particularly strongly on the young de Lancre because the individual who was lauded for ‘having put an end’ to this ‘unworthy, undignified custom’ was none other than Florimond de Raemond, the jurist and author who had married his sister Catharine several years before. Given these views, we can safely assume that if any of these subverted liturgical motifs worked their way into the false confessions of the Basque suspects, de Lancre would have been predisposed to condemn them. Even if he recognized that the ‘young Sieur de Lancinena’ who dressed up in ‘a large hat made in the shape of [a bishop’s mitre] . . . and was generally called and believed to be the bishop of the sabbath’ was engaging in behaviours redolent of boy bishop traditions, his prejudice against misrule festivities would have encouraged him to agree with those suspects who maintained that the young man had been presiding over the sabbath and dancing with the Devil. De Lancre’s judgement on this matter would have clashed directly with those of the Labourd suspects, for whom the experiences of liturgical misrule were joyful and cathartic. Certainly, this conflict of worldviews goes some way toward explaining the stark contradiction between horror (from de Lancre) and pleasure (from the suspects) in the former’s description of how, after performing cannibalism at the sabbath, the witches

had to watch the debasement of the most precious sacraments of the church and other desecrations so abominable that just to hear them makes one’s hair stand on end, giving one goosebumps and making one shiver all over. Nevertheless, they freely admitted that they went there and watched all these desecrations with obvious pleasure . . . They felt that all these abominations, all these horrors, these shadows were nothing but fleeting things that disappeared so quickly that no pain, no displeasure could attach itself to their bodies or remain in their minds. They retained only the novelty of their experiences . . . ⁴³

The Wider Context

To my knowledge, the Basque witch-craze records are unique in the extent to which their alternative liturgical motifs can be differentiated from conventional heretical and demonological tropes and linked to suspects’ experience of theatrical misrule. But these findings do make it easier to detect the signature of liturgical misrule in other Basque records from other time periods where the evidence is less plentiful and clear. The mock sermon in which ‘the system of divine punishments and rewards’ is reversed, is intimated in the declaration in Anocíbar in 1575 that ‘more than a thousand went to these gatherings [akelarres], and they would rejoice a great deal and ask about and discuss the evils that each of them had done. And the one who said and declared that he/she had done the most evil would be honoured the most.’ Similarly, although the following allegation from the Roncal Valley in 1569 contains many conventionally heretical themes that could have worked their way into the confessions via demonological and theological influences, the comedically dramatic nature of the abuses evoke more theatrical subversions.

[The witches] danced to the threshing floors. And to the crosses that they encountered, they gave the finger and lifted their skirts and showed them their flesh, mocking them. And they soiled themselves near the crosses, and with their [animal] dung they soiled the crosses. And in this way and ordering the girls to renounce God and His saints, and the same villainies as before, they returned to their house, where with their sorcery they made the billy goat spew money from its mouth and horns. . . . And this they did on many nights, ordering them to [ . . . ] give the finger to the priest and to the host when they rose, and to say these words instead of the prayer: Latacan tiracan and God vast, and other words like this, with Don Pedro present at all of this . . . ⁴⁴

In the same trial cluster, comic subversion is also echoed in the allegations that ‘under the apron or skirts they [the suspects] give the finger and say shit, shit, and other rude words’, with Florencio Idoate noting that ‘on occasion, the famous Gracieta, to whom the most colourful deeds and words are attributed, as the most veteran woman, was heard to say these words: “It hurts, it hurts you, and though you might regret it, you’ll drink it around there.” These mocking ditties were part of the Roncal witches’ formulary.’⁴⁵

Significantly, similar intimations can be traced in trial records from other parts of early modern Europe. We can hear echoes of liturgical misrule in Bavarian suspect Anna Pappenheimer’s claim (in 1600) that when she went to the sabbath, the witches ‘thought very little of me . . . I was always having to hold a candle, for they stood me on my head and – begging your pardon – stuck a candle in my backside’; and in the anecdote in the Malleus Maleficarum where the witch suspect interjects ‘give me the tongue in the arse’ to the blessing given at mass. Boguet’s allegation that French witches worshipped a host made of ‘a round of turnip coloured black’ and that the Devil pissed in a hole in the ground ‘to make Holy Water’, are also suggestive here, as is the assertion by suspects from Lorraine in 1624, that their ‘master Taupin had taken the form of an ox to say Mass at the sabbat, with a turnip as the host’ and that the ceremony had involved ‘an altar made of planks, a wooden host, an iron plate that the witches kissed, and horses’ urine sprinkled in the place of holy water.’⁴⁶ We can detect the absurdist performances of the mock sermonizer in allegations, in the German province of Valais in 1428, that ‘the evil spirit would come there [to the sabbath] and behave like a teacher, preach a sermon against the Christian faith and forbid them to practice confession and penitence’. Meanwhile, the highly ritualistic sabbaths recorded in the French city of Arras in 1460, were tellingly led by a ‘Master of Ceremonies’ (a suspect named Jean Tannoye) who was overtly identified as a member of a confrérie joyeuse who went by the name of the ‘Abbot of Folly’. Indeed, that Tannoye’s theatrical experiences worked their way into his confessions is directly indicated by contemporary claims that the words he spoke to the Devil – ‘Sire, ne te desplaise’ [Begging your lordship’s pardon] – were also the words that he ‘regularly’ used to address ‘patrons at the end of his public recitations of poetry.’⁴⁷

Although brief, these examples are sufficient to indicate that our Basque findings are relevant to the wider European context. While historians have long-noted a general link between carnivalesque misrule and the witches’ sabbath, the analysis into the Basque akelarre-mass undertaken in this chapter suggests that this link may have been a particularly crucial factor in the development of confessional accounts of the alternative liturgy, as they emerged in witch trial records across Europe. With regard to the Basque testimonials, these perspectives have additional value in that they begin to explain, where theories surrounding the influence of heretical, conjuring and Amerindian matrices have not, why the defendants did not only provide their interrogators with general descriptions of alternative liturgy but also with such precise and detailed parodies of the Catholic mass.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Malevolent Mass

Over the last two chapters we have identified a range of experiences that could have been mined, by the Basque suspects, to flesh out their confessional accounts of the akelarre-mass. But in doing so we have overlooked one fundamental issue. One of the core features of the ceremony, from the interrogators’ point of view, was that it was a celebration of evil: a collective ritual confirmation of the witches’ pledge to serve the Devil and as a corollary of this, to harm members of their Christian community through the performance of maleficium. But from the perspective of the modern historian, the raw materials listed thus far are fundamentally benign. While Basque mortuary ritual could be unorthodox, it was essentially designed to ensure salvation for the dead; while liturgical parody was subversive, it was predominantly a vehicle for merriment and catharsis; and although the sorcerer’s mass was used to invoke demons, these demons were generally raised to procure relatively harmless benefits such as love, money or success at gambling etc. This dissonance is not problematic, for malevolence would undoubtedly have worked its way into these basic mass-templates via the interrogators and circulating witchcraft propaganda. But if we widen our investigations into the popular religiosity of the Basques, we find that some of this malevolence may have emerged more directly out of the life experiences of the accused.

We can begin with Catholicism. We have noted many times that the Church provided its congregations with a range of ritual methods, such as processions, pilgrimages, exorcisms and sacraments, through which they could protect themselves against the threats of the early modern world. But what we have not examined until now is that some of the ritual aids it offered were a little more ambiguous, in that they enabled its parishioners to protect themselves against these threats by directly harming others. Until recently these darker traditions have been largely overlooked by scholars, but over the past three decades there has been an increasing recognition that they played a larger role in pre-modern religiosity than has previously been acknowledged. These rites, which can be loosely defined here as ‘Christian cursing practices’, were based on the simple but rational premise that if a Christian was suffering and believed their misfortune was caused by someone else, they could ask God to punish them; with God’s credentials in this respect being vividly displayed in Old Testament texts where he curses, or is called upon to curse, individuals and families or indeed whole races of people with dramatic impunity. Theologically speaking, the Christian curse differed from any other kind of curse, including verbal maleficium, because the responsibility for the act lay with God who, as the ultimate arbiter of morality, would only realize the harmful intent if the curse was justified. Given that there was a fine line between a curse that was routed via God and a curse that was routed via another agency (such as a fairy, devil or witch), it is hardly surprising that these practices were never viewed with complete equanimity by the Church, particularly when practised in private, with Ciruelo condemning those who pray ‘for a thing which is unjust and contrary to the honour of God and His saints, or is in contradiction to the charity and love that one ought to have for one’s neighbour’ and arguing that ‘it would also be a sin of malice and envy if the man should ask God to bring evil to his enemies and withhold His grace from them as well as His other good gifts, both spiritual and corporal.’ Similarly, Calvin condemned as an ‘open secret’ the contemporary use of Psalm 109 (a favourite in cursing rituals since the early Middle Ages) as a protection against enemies.¹

Liturgical Cursing

In the medieval and early modern periods, Christian cursing practices could be divided into two overlapping categories: private (incorporated into personal prayer) and ‘liturgical’ (incorporated into ‘communal worship according to prescribed forms’).² It is the latter that has most relevance for the sabbath-mass. ‘Liturgical cursing’, as we can term it here, can be further divided into three overlapping sub-categories. The first, which we have already encountered in previous chapters, is the excommunication rite. Although we might not immediately associate this rite with the curse, it was essentially a ritual mechanism through which God was asked to punish sinners by temporarily, or sometimes permanently, banishing them from the Christian community. The more serious variants – termed ‘Anathemas’ – included startlingly visceral curse-phrases, with one early-seventeenth century example stating that the excommunicated sinners would find that their ‘food and drink, their waking and sleeping shall be damned’; ‘their children shall be orphans and always in want’; and that ‘wheresoever they shall turn their steps they will be met with abhorrence and shown no pity.’³ The second form of liturgical cursing, which often included excommunications, was a ritual termed the ‘clamour’ that was typically performed at certain points during mass to defend a community against material threats. Most surviving accounts of clamours emerge in relation to medieval monasteries, where monks sought to curse those who sought to violate church property, but there is also evidence that they could also be performed by lay people. Lester Little states that in northern France in the Romanesque period (circa 1050–1200) ‘individuals or groups of lay-people made their own clamour, or made a clamour jointly with some clerics, or in yet another combination, made a clamour parallel to but sharply differentiated from the one made by clerics’; with typical reports describing how peasants living on monasterial lands came together to perform clamours to prevent their fields being used for illegal grazing and protect their village from local pillagers.⁴

The third type of liturgical cursing, which again overlaps considerably with the previous two, is the most relevant to our discussion because it involved petitioning God to punish enemies specifically through the use of the mass. This curse form evolved directly out of contemporary religious conventions. As we have seen in Chapter Eighteen, if parishioners wished to resolve a problem, such as sickness or the need to liberate a deceased soul from purgatory, they commissioned priests or monks to perform votive masses in order to solicit God’s help. In the liturgical cursing context, if parishioners believed their problem was caused by the actions of another, they simply petitioned God, via the vehicle of the mass, to help them by thwarting or punishing the perpetrator of their misfortune. However much the Church disliked these ‘cursing masses’, as we can term them here, it was hard to challenge their rationality, with John Bossy noting that

although it had long been pointed out that mass should be offered for good things, not for evil . . . it was strictly impossible to prevent the downfall of enemies from being prayed for in the commemoration of the living, or a string of votive forms de or pro inimicis, contra adversantes and so on, from appearing in the missal alongside those for friends . . . In short, despite scriptural injunctions and the nervous reservations of ecclesiastical authority, there was a rigorous logic about the process which made the commemoration of the living a vehicle for the pursuit of social hostilities as well as for the consolidation of social affection: [fifteenth-century theologian Gabriel] Biel was respecting his own logic in suggesting that it was not a good idea for the clergy to inquire too closely into the intentions of laymen who asked, and paid, for masses to be said for them.⁵

The darkest form of cursing mass involved causing the death of the victim by performing a requiem or funeral mass in their name while they were still alive, with Bossy observing that to this end, priests ‘inserted into the commemoration of the dead the name of a living enemy, on the assumption that God would feel obliged to answer the prayer and convey him [to heaven] as rapidly as possible’. This chilling rite could be further reinforced through repetition, with twelfth-century French theologian Petrus Cantor stating that such rites ‘could be used ten times or more for one person so they die on the tenth day’.⁶ Unsurprisingly, the temptation to ‘turn the Mass into a death-blow’ was often condemned by the Church, with the Council of Toledo denouncing as early as 694 those ‘priests who, from a vile and wicked superstition, shall say the office of the mass of the dead for the living, in order by so doing to cause their death.’ But like other forms of liturgical cursing, the rite still enjoyed a level of ambiguous legitimacy, with John Bossy observing that:

Surprising as it may seem, this [the black mass] was not a totally unlawful or superstitious practice: in a monastic ritual from early medieval France, a series of votive masses pro furtu contained a Requiem ‘in the name of the thief’ threatening him with death; something like it was employed as a normal part of the rite whereby lepers were excluded from the Christian community and their ritual death enacted. In its crude form it was the object of numerous ecclesiastical condemnations . . .⁷

As many of the above-quoted examples illustrate, although liturgical cursing appears to have peaked in western Europe in the Romanesque era and slowly declined thereafter, it clearly persisted into the early modern centuries. This survival is most clearly seen in the excommunication rituals that became part of the standard liturgy of Catholic Church. But it is also notable that less legitimate forms of both private and liturgical cursing also persisted, with Little noting that there is evidence of ‘regular recitations of generic curses and excommunications all through the early modern period.’ As late as 1530, Ciruelo referred to those Castilians who ‘say the Psalm, “Deus laudem meam,” in order that God will bring vengeance upon their enemies . . . [or] say some Masses and Psalms and other devout orations of the church and fast in order to bring about something bad’; while an inquisitorial report indicates that the same psalm was also being used as a coercive tool in love charms in late-fifteenth century Cuenca.⁸ The cursing mass appears to have enjoyed similar longevity, with Bossy claiming that ecclesiastical condemnation of this particular curse form was ‘seemingly more frequent during the late middle ages’ than in the earlier medieval period. That these rites still enjoyed some form of legitimacy at the highest level in the early modern era is suggested by Philippe de Commine’s assertion, around the turn of the fifteenth century, that in the presence of King Louis XI, the archbishop of Vienna sang a mass to kill his enemy, the Duke of Burgundy. Similar intentions were implemented ‘with the authorization of the Sorbonne in a series of masses offered by the Catholics of Paris against King Henri III in 1589.’⁹ We also find the rite, along with other liturgical curses, referenced in demonological works. Both the Italian judge Paolo Grillandi and Spanish demonologist Martín del Rio describe the cursing-mass, with the latter condemning priests who ‘celebrate Requiem Mass for the living to make someone die the faster’. The rite even emerges in the Tableau, with de Lancre citing two examples from Grillandi and de Commine.¹⁰ This longevity is also suggested in the fact that accounts of cursing masses, along with other liturgical cursing rites, have emerged in countries such as Spain, France, Germany and Hungary as late as the nineteenth and possibly even twentieth century.¹¹

Cursing Liturgies: The Parish Level

Despite this evidence, however, it is difficult to bring these perspectives to bear on the popular cultures of western Europe in the period of the witch-craze. While formal, Church-commissioned excommunication rites emerge quite clearly in the sources, the less official forms of liturgical cursing are harder to identify and assess. Evidence that they persisted into the early modern era, for example, does not necessarily mean that they were common. Even in the Romanesque period, when the practices appear to have been at their peak, references to liturgical cursing were not numerous and, where they do appear, are too brief to give us any real idea as to how they were integrated into ordinary religious practice on a day to day level. Reports by early modern commentators like Ciruelo and del Rio are so short and generic that it is difficult to assess how far they reflected contemporary practice and how far merely the recitation of tropes. Similarly, Barry’s observation that condemnation of requiems for the living were ‘seemingly more frequent during the late middle ages’, could just as easily reflect Catholic Reformation anxiety as opposed to levels of practice. But despite these caveats, it could also be speculated that the incidence of liturgical cursing was likely to have been higher than the sources suggest. While there is some evidence – as we shall touch on later in the chapter – to suggest that cursing intent may have sometimes been publicized as a behaviour corrective, we can assume that many of the clerics and magical practitioners who performed curses to lay demand would not have been required to record or advertise their practices – and nor would they have wanted to. Some of this reluctance may have been rooted in their knowledge that, with the exception of orthodox excommunication rituals, these practices hovered ambiguously ‘on the borders of legitimacy’. But it may also have reflected the likelihood that because these rituals articulated inter-parishioner conflict and were therefore highly divisive, few monks or priests who valued parish harmony would have been keen to broadcast this aspect of their pastoral care. This conspiracy of silence makes it particularly hard to establish how these liturgical cursing rites may have operated on a parish level. While we do have some vivid accounts of the verbal maledictions uttered in medieval monasteries and also, of course, diverse reports of more orthodox excommunication ceremonies, the types of rituals used by ordinary clerics and lay people (such as our witchcraft suspects) and the societal dynamics that underpinned their commissioning and performance, are far less clear.

However, some insights into the mechanics of these traditions, as they may have existed in early modern Europe, can be gained if we temporarily step outside our period. Éva Pócs has recently analysed a body of folkloric evidence, collected in the late-twentieth century, pertaining to liturgical cursing practices among Roman Catholic Hungarians in the old Transylvanian county of Csík. Although the evidence ‘was in fact not so much the practice as the narratives about [it]’, it does point to a coherent body of practice that existed in some form close, if not up to, the period of collection. While we cannot assume a simplistic synonymy between the ritual complexes of twentieth-century Transylvania and those of western Europe three centuries earlier, the accuracy with which the Csík evidence reflects and fleshes out the skeleton provided by our early modern sources does suggest a surprising degree of correspondence, with Pócs herself observing that some earlier western curse forms are ‘almost exact equivalents of the Csík system.’¹²

According to the Csík narratives, individuals involved in inter-personal conflicts would approach a third party – usually a Romanian orthodox monk or priest, termed the kaluger, but sometimes a (generally female) lay magician from their own or a neighbouring village – and ask them to perform rituals to gain resolution. The methods employed could involve constructive divination, as in an attempt to establish the whereabouts of stolen goods or the identity of the thief and so on. But in other cases, it involved the laying of a curse, with Pócs noting that in many instances the client ‘evidently know[s] the identity of the wrongdoer’ and ‘their primary aim is personal revenge, the miscreant’s just punishment through the priest’s curse.’ The kaluger’s curses could be divided into three over-lapping categories. The first involved the manipulation of objects, with the kaluger typically bewitching or ‘shedding a curse’ on objects belonging to the target, which are then placed in or near their home. The second involved the use of verbal or ritual curses directly aimed at the guilty party, with the most formal expression being a cursing mass, with Pócs stating that ‘according to the narratives, [the rite has] a distinctly witches’-mass-like variant, which is held at night and considered particularly evil in its effect – it causes death.’ These two methods can be combined, with the cursing mass, for example, being performed over an object belonging to the target, which is then put in their path. The third type of curse employed by the kaluger was that of client-fasting, which was often used to potentize the other curse forms, with Pócs noting that ‘besides the curse-rite performed by himself, the priest [kaluger] may prescribe for his clients various individual methods of black magic such as a fasting vow . . . while at the same time he undertakes or performs the mass or the curse. The fast may include the burning of candles or lamps in a prescribed way; with this, through analogy, the victim’s life, as it were, burnt out.’ Whatever the method used, the transaction between kaluger and client was businesslike and precise, with Pócs stating that:

The kaluger’s most important activity is holding masses, saying prayers and casting curses according to the wishes of his clients who pay the money for the mass in advance and tell him what they want with it. According to the narratives, maleficium is an act consciously carried out by the priest . . . Those who go to the kaluger must tell him what the prayer, curse or mass should be for; and they have to define the exact degree of misfortune – ‘she gave the money so that he should become lame’; or somebody gives money for a mass to have his wife die.¹³

In justifying these cursing rituals the Csík inhabitants used the same rationales employed in the early modern period, with individuals absolving themselves of responsibility for the act by delegating it to God. Pócs reports that ‘our informants talk about their wish to have their curses come true quite openly, even if it causes a serious illness or even the life of a fellow being; they do not consider it a sin or malevolence, only the just punishment of fate or God.’ The Csík material also reveals that this harsh logic had a beneficial side effect, in that the perception of the liturgical curse as a form of moral arbitration enabled it to function as a method of conflict avoidance and resolution. To this end, for example, the threat of a cursing-mass could be used to intimidate enemies, as in: ‘Don’t you say so, for I will see justice done, for I will go to the kaluger!’ Alternatively, the promise to ‘lift’ a curse could resolve disputes, with Pócs stating that

if the wrongdoers make amends for their transgressions, the punishment will be stopped. In such cases the person ordering the maleficium may go to the kaluger to take it back. Thus, as a result of the mass ordered against the thief of the three lambs, one bewitched wrongdoer went to the gate of the curser: ‘Oh Vilma! Oh, oh, Vilma, don’t you say masses anymore, don’t you order masses any more . . . for it was I who stole the three lambs.’¹⁴

While, as noted earlier, we must be careful about making simplistic comparisons, these sources are surprisingly congruent with our early modern material. The following passage from Ciruelo, in which he lists some of the cursing practices extant in sixteenth-century Castile, so closely evokes the range of rites described in the later Csík material, that we can reasonably assume that on a local parish level both Csík and Spanish cursing methods were integrated into popular religiosity in very similar ways.

[Some] say the Psalm, ‘Deus laudem meam,’ in order that God will bring vengeance upon their enemies. Others make witchcrafts and enchantments against those to whom they wish evil, employing pieces of the consecrated portion of the altar or other sacred relics or candles, or with consecrated herbs. Others say some Masses and Psalms and other devout orations of the church and fast in order to bring about something bad or gain the goods of the world.¹⁵

Basque Curses

Having established, with a little more precision, how these liturgical cursing traditions may have operated on a popular level in early modern Europe, we are now in a position to explore whether they played any role in the malevolence of the akelarre-mass. We can begin by confirming that a range of liturgical cursing was likely to have been practised in the Basque regions in the early modern period. As in the rest of Europe, local congregations would have been familiarized with curse phraseology through the excommunication rituals that took place in local churches. For example, the visceral Anathema cited earlier in this chapter (‘their waking and sleeping shall be damned’ and ‘their children shall be orphans’ etc.) was read out in Basque churches during the witch-craze visitations in order to punish those parishioners who had not confessed or reported crimes of witchcraft – with the verbal impact of the rite being reinforced by the fact that, at its conclusion, the celebrants thrust lighted candles into a vessel of holy water saying, ‘as these candles die in this water, so shall the souls of these rebellious and obstinate people die and be buried in Hell’. Maledictions were also integral to the excommunication rituals that, as we saw in Chapter Four, were used to banish bad weather and pests, with the aggressive implications of these rites being clearly articulated in Castañega’s complaint that the ‘sentence of excommunication . . . drawn up against the locust’ by the pest-conjuror was merely an attempt ‘to undo one curse with another’.¹⁶ While evidence for the less legitimate forms of liturgical cursing is more scarce, that they existed in this period is strongly indicated by contemporary reports that these practices were taking place in adjacent regions like Castile. Their existence is also supported, more tangentially, by the relatively frequent emergence of liturgical elements in the accounts of Basque cursing practices collected by nineteenth and twentieth-century folklorists. We find the ritual manipulation of candles in Barandiarán’s claim that ‘when a person suffers a long illness, in Berástegi you will hear them say: “Orri bate batek argizarie piztu zook” (‘Someone lit a candle against him’)’, with this belief also illustrated in anecdotes where protagonists ‘twisted a candle and lighted it, hoping that this would twist the body and snuff out the life of an individual they wished to harm or upon whom they wished to avenge themselves for an insult.’ Some accounts even depict parishioners commissioning ritual specialists to perform these curses on their behalf, with Barandiarán reporting that when a seer (atzi) from Tolosa was ‘consulted by a resident of Ataun who wished to know who had stolen his cow’ he ‘advised him to light a wax candle, which would represent the thief. As the candle gradually burned down, the thief would waste away. In this way, he would be exposed.’¹⁷ The later folklore also reveals that Basques were familiar with requiem masses for the living. According to William Christian, in the Vizcayan town of Bedia in the early-twentieth century ‘many in the community, including the parish priest’ went to the shrine of Begoña to pray for the soul of a beggar woman who ‘had died when a relative had had a Mass said in order to kill her.’ Oral testimonies collected by anthropologist Sandra Ott suggest that priests were also commissioned to perform these rites in Soule at around the same period. Ott reports that:

By virtue of his indarra a priest is not only able to expel evil spirits; he is also able to compel them to do harm by giving an eiharr meza, literally a ‘desiccation Mass’. If a ‘bad type’ (ur gaixto) wishes to inflict harm upon an enemy, he may ask the priest to give this Mass, which I was assured had no benediction and was held outside the church. As a result the victim would suffer great pain, shrivel, and die. One woman in her seventies told me that in her youth someone had asked the priest to give an eiharr meza, but he refused to do so.¹⁸

These later collections indicate that like their Hungarian counterparts, the Basques believed that priests played a primary role in liturgical cursing activities. According to Ott’s informants, in the 1930s-40s a priest named ‘Etcheverry’ from the Souletin parish of Sainte-Engrâce cursed a man ‘in the name of God’ for laughing during mass and that ‘as soon as he did so, the man’s mouth became disfigured and remained that way until his death.’ In another case, as we saw in Chapter Four, Etcheverry ‘used his indarra [spiritual force]’ to create ‘torrential rains’ in order to ruin the crops of a parishioner who had refused to ask his permission to harvest maize on the sabbath.¹⁹ Being anecdotal, and also collected over three hundred years after the witch-craze, these sources must be treated with caution. But they do suggest that if liturgical cursing rites were being talked about in the Basque regions in the twentieth century, then there is every likelihood that they were being talked about, and even performed, in the Basque regions in the seventeenth. In turn, this raises the firm possibility that these kinds of cursing rituals were discussed, witnessed and even commissioned by some of the suspects interrogated in the witch-craze and that, as a consequence of this, they may have mined these rites when creating their fictions, false memories and dreams about the akelarre-mass.

Liturgical Cursing: The Witch Records

But while this argument is compelling – can we find any evidence to support it in the witch records themselves? As with liturgical misrule, any attempts to identify this content is immediately hampered by interrogatorial gloss. Both the French and Spanish inquisitors would have shared the Church’s disapproval of any liturgical cursing practices that fell outside the remit of orthodox excommunication rituals, with de Lancre overtly stating that the clerics reputed to have performed cursing masses in Perugia and Paris had taken Satan as ‘their master’ and ‘deserved to be burned at the stake’.²⁰ As a consequence, any references to these practices that the suspects may have brought to their interrogations are likely to have been interpreted by their judges through the lens of demonological witchcraft. But while this probability does present some difficulties, if we examine the witch records in the context of our Csík material some interesting correspondences do emerge.

We observed in Chapter Five that the Logroño Sentences contain a significant number of references to revenge-based maleficium. But what is interesting in the present context is that when witches wished to gain vengeance they did not just do it themselves but went to the akelarre to ask the Devil for his permission, advice and help to effect it. While this behaviour is congruent with demonological stereotypes, in that the Devil typically encourages his servants to perform maleficium, it is surely coincidental that if we take the following passages from the Joint Sentence and exchange the word ‘Devil’ for that of ‘priest’ (as illustrated in parentheses) we find ourselves with narrative templates highly redolent of those collected by Pócs, in which Hungarian parishioners approach their kalugers or local seers and ask them or her to use their special supernatural powers to ‘lay’ a curse.

[I]n addition to the damage and losses that these powders inflict on the crops, they kill people who they want revenge against, using the water that they squeeze from the aforementioned vermin to make an ointment that all the witches keep at their homes in order to exact their revenge, for which they ask the Devil [priest] for permission in the akelarres, presenting to him with great emotion their grievances received, saying to him ‘Lord, for this grievance I want to avenge myself on so-and-so, give him/her a deadly disease [or possibly more specifically “leprosy”] or illness’ for however many days, depending on the revenge they want to exact. And the Devil [priest], since it is a thing so much to his liking and in his interest, grants this to them very liberally . . .

she [Graciana de Barenechea] decided to kill the aforementioned Marijoan de Odia, and having gone to the akelarre she made her complaints to the Devil [priest] and gave account of her decision to kill her for the aforementioned reason, to which he replied, ‘well if you want to do it, then do it like this’ . . .

While containing fewer references to revenge-based maleficium, some passages in the sentence of María de Zozaya also evoke the same template.

[T]o execute her vengeances at the akelarre she submitted her complaints to the Devil [priest] asking him for pain of death for those she wanted to kill or various illnesses for the people she wanted to take revenge against, making them unwell, and the Devil [priest] granting her the vengeance she asked for . . .

In another passage from the Zozaya Sentence, we are reminded of those Csík narratives in which individuals asked the kaluger to cease or end the curse once their target had suffered enough or had offered them recompense. The text states that

if the witches who inflicted the damage should later wish to remedy it by curing them of the evil they inflicted they cannot cure them without the mandate of the Devil [priest]. And the witch who did the damage when [he or she] wants to cure them on asking him he gives [him or her] an ointment to spread on the patient and this cures them. And the Devil [priest] then gathers in whatever is left over and the witches do not have access to the secret of this ointment that cures . . . even if the witch who gives this water and caused the damage asks the Devil [priest] for remedy he seldom wants to give it . . .²¹

These passages seldom specify the means through which the suspect’s revenge was implemented. But the few references that do emerge – generally relating to objects, particularly poisonous substances, that are either directly or indirectly brought into contact with the victim – are similarly evocative of the Csík methods. The following account of the Devil ‘blessing’ a poisoned food to give it the power to harm the witch’s victim is redolent of the way the Hungarian kaluger commonly ‘sheds a curse’ on an object that then brings harm to the target when placed in or near their home. The comparison becomes even more precise when we consider that, again like the kaluger, the Devil devises a curse that is specifically tailored to the individual and the severity of the crime.

And the aforementioned Miguel de Goiburu says the same and adds that when they want someone to be ill and not die they put the aforementioned powders in an apple or walnut or some other food, and consulting the Devil [priest] they ask for harm for a given number of days or months, and the Devil [priest] gives his blessing to the poisoned thing and grants it because he has the power to cause whatever death or damage he wants. And all the witches say ‘lord, through your power make him ill’ for however much time, naming the person they want, according to which they received permission from the Devil [priest]. And when they want the person to die, they take the same measures with him, asking him for a fatal illness, whereby they fulfil their intention and end the person’s life.

Similar comparisons can be drawn with regard to the verbal invocations the Zugarramurdi witches used to accompany their maleficium. If we did not know that the supplications ‘Lord, through your power make him ill’ and ‘Lord, for this grievance I want to avenge myself on so-and-so, give him/her a deadly disease or illness’ were addressed to the Devil, we could be forgiven for assuming that they were conventional liturgical curse-requests being addressed to God.²²

Unlike their Spanish counterparts, the French records contain few descriptions of witches petitioning the Devil to perform acts of revenge against specific enemies. But we do find a relevant passage in the Tableau, where de Lancre claims to have been told by two suspects and two witnesses that while he was conducting his investigations in the town of Saint-Pée a group of witches, accompanied by the Devil, had entered his hotel by night and tried to climb under his curtains with ‘the intention and the evil design of poisoning’ him. The attack failed, with de Lancre stating that the witches told the Devil that ‘they had nothing with which to do me any harm, although they tried numerous times, exerting all possible effort’. Of particular relevance here is de Lancre’s additional claim that while they were in his house ‘the witches said two masses: one was said in my room by a priest from the area of Saint-Pée and the other by Lady Sansinena [the “first mistress of Satan”] in the kitchen. People said that there was a kind of upright altar.’²³ De Lancre does not specifically state that these incongruously scheduled ceremonies were cursing masses, but the fact that they emerged outside the akelarre context and that they were celebrated clandestinely alongside ‘numerous’ other collective efforts to cause him harm, makes them wholly congruent with the cursing-mass template; particularly given that some Saint-Pée locals would have undoubtedly considered de Lancre’s investigations to be an existential threat.

In conclusion, the Spanish and French records yield different results. The former points to a wider range of cursing practice but not the cursing-mass while the latter points to the cursing-mass but no other form of liturgical cursing ritual. The reasons for this difference is not clear, although it is likely to reflect the absence, in the French records, of the neighbourhood-vengeance template that so clearly dominates the early Spanish confessions. Nevertheless, the perspectives outlined in this chapter do suggest that many of the Basque suspects would have walked into their interrogations with the knowledge that Catholic liturgy could be employed – by priests, magical practitioners or just ordinary individuals – to bring about harm. And this invites us to surmise that although their experiences of ordinary masses and liturgical misrule theatricals may have enabled them to draw detail, colour and comedy into their descriptions of the akelarre-mass, it may have been the suspects’ experiences of liturgical cursing practice that enabled them to concur so creatively with the interrogators’ conviction that the ceremony was an expression of malevolence.²⁴

The Spirits’ Mass

With regard to malevolence, however, defendants may have also quarried a very different lode. At many points in this book, we have examined confessional themes through recourse to contemporary beliefs and practices surrounding folk spirits, with this term also incorporating entities identified as demons and/or the dead. There would, at first glance, appear to be little point in examining the akelarre-mass in this context and there is certainly little scholarly precedent for doing so. As portrayed in this book thus far, folk spirits were more suited to travelling the skies in predatory hosts, raising storms, abducting children and feasting or dancing in houses by night than engaging in the sombre business of religious ritual, with this incompatibility reflected in the widespread perception that folk spirits were frequently hostile to Christianity. But surprising as it may seem, this line of inquiry does in fact bear fruit. Although we have examined folk spirit matrices in some detail, what we have not emphasized until now is that in the early modern period these spirits were not only imagined as animalistic or hedonistic hordes but also as orderly beings who structured themselves into a simulacrum of human society that could, in some cases, perform religious – and most significantly, Christian – rituals. While these practices can sometimes be associated with fairies, the category of folk spirit most commonly linked to these liturgical themes is that of the dead.²⁵

As touched on in Chapter Nineteen, in Europe since at least the early medieval period it was widely believed that after death the soul could return to earth from its residence in paradise, hell or some kind of alternative or limbo state that, by the early modern era, was most commonly defined as purgatory (the transition realm where sinners went to purify themselves in order to gain access to heaven). These itinerant dead were believed to haunt the places they had known in life. Their most well-known activity, in this respect, was that of visiting their old homes to consume the food and drink left out for them. But perhaps more surprisingly, the dead were also believed to remain attached to their local church, with Le Roy Ladurie stating that in the eastern Pyrenees in the fourteenth century, churches ‘were the normal gathering place for most of the ghosts’ and that ‘they went from church to church, though their chief attachment was to the parish church near which they had lived and to the graveyard where they had been buried.’ Indeed, these visits were taken so seriously that ‘it was incumbent upon the living to leave the church lit up at night for the visits of the dead. The dead preferred oil-lamps to candles; they burned longer and more steadily.’²⁶

Of particular relevance here, with regard to the akelarre-mass, is that these links to church and cemetery also included an attachment to the rituals that were performed there. Although the passage of the deceased through purgatory was hastened by the masses commissioned on their behalf by their living relatives, the dead also took matters into their own hands and engaged in personal acts of purification and atonement. To this end, they could embark on pilgrimages, with Lauderie noting that in the fourteenth-century Pyrenees ‘some went as far as Saint James of Compostela, taking only five days for the journey. Others went to St Gilles, Racamadour and so on.’ They could also participate in religious ceremonies. In many parts of Europe, from the medieval period through to the present, we find legends about souls of the dead who were seen marching in company, often with a light or cross-bearing figure at their head, carrying candles, containers of ‘blessed water’ and other paraphernalia of the Catholic procession. Indeed, Carolina Ramos notes that in Galicia, where this cortege was called the Santa Compaña, the belief ‘is so deeply rooted in the Galician culture that it has developed its own identity in every village.’²⁷

Even more significant, with regard to the akelarre liturgy, is that the deceased were not only believed to gather on earth to engage in pilgrimages and processions but also to celebrate the ritual of the mass. Vincente Risco argues that the Santa Compaña was partially modelled on the ‘the procession of the Holy Sacrament’; while Claude Lecouteux observes that ‘the Mass celebrated by spirits, [is] a long-standing theme, which appears in the historical work of Gregory of Tours (538–594) and which we can find throughout medieval Europe.’ In the eleventh century, Peter Damian cited the ‘case of a woman who mistakenly attended a Mass of the spirits in the basilica of Santa María of Campitella on the night of Assumption’. The following account, handed down orally in the Paderborn region of Germany, is also representative.

Around the year 1516, an old woman who wished to attend the first Mass said in honour of the dead went to Saint-Laurent Church. Being mistaken about the time of the Mass, she arrived at midnight, found the doors open, entered, and saw an elderly, unknown priest officiating at the altar and a large number of people seated. The majority of them were strangers to her, and some were even lacking heads, but she recognized several as people who had recently died and whom she had known well. Terrified, she sat down. Seeing naught but the dead, she thought they must be souls of the dead and wondered if she should stay or not.²⁸

The Spirits’ Mass: Basque Contexts

Although we have little contemporary evidence, later sources do suggest that beliefs about the liturgical activities of the dead were held by pre-modern Basques. The idea that they remained attached to their burial church is clearly visible in Barandiarán’s report that, according to one of his informants, a priest from Zugarramurdi had been asked to exorcise the church at Sara because a deceased cleric, named Bikario-xarra, had been violently shaking all the pews and chairs in his anger at not being buried inside the church building. There is also some evidence of ghostly-procession traditions. While this belief matrix does not appear to have been as dominant in the Basque country as in Asturia and Galicia, the Eusko-Folklore survey conducted in the early-twentieth century recorded how ‘a Meñaka man told of a farmer in the old days who lived near the church and cemetery and witnessed a nocturnal procession of the dead holding candles’. Similarly, in the remarkable wave of visions that began in the town of Ezkioga in the 1930s, a number of child seers ‘admitted to seeing processions of the dead’, with a girl from Unanu telling psychiatrist Victoriano Juaristi that she saw ‘macabre processions, identifying the dead of the town as they go past. Behind the dead walks a young idiot girl who used to work with a hatchet; she carries it in the funeral procession as well and limps because she wounded herself with it trying to open the gates of heaven.’²⁹ Occasionally, we also find references to the belief that spirits of the dead could participate in the mass. An Urretxu doctor told William Christian that in 1946 he had witnessed a religious procession in which

two seers, a man and a woman, went into a lengthy and “photogenic” (the doctor’s word) trance state and announced that Ignacio de Loyola was celebrating mass. The seers would narrate the mass, step by step, “Now he is going to read the Gospel, everybody stand up.” And the seers and believers received Communion; that is, they extended their tongues as if receiving the sacrament, though he and the priest saw no host.

While this mass was attended by living worshippers, its celebrant – Ignatius of Loyola – had been dead for nearly four hundred years, with this narrative also evoking conventional claims by mystics that they had witnessed the saints and the rest of God’s entourage celebrating mass in heaven. According to an anecdote told to twentieth-century folklorist Manuel Lekuona, the dead could even attend their own memorial masses. Lekuona was told that a deceased girl appeared to her sister-in-law Etcheberri of Carrika and asked her to commission two masses on her behalf. Etcheberri ‘paid for the Masses to be celebrated and that she went to the church and heard them herself. On coming out someone sprayed her with holy water; she saw no one but says that it was the spirit of her sister-in-law who thus besprinkled her’.³⁰

Also relevant here, given that the Basque country was irrigated by the Camino de Santiago, is that of all the pilgrimage routes that snaked their way through pre-modern Europe, this was the one most strongly associated with the penitentiary activities of the dead. Lecouteux describes the medieval belief that ‘between the moment of death and the time of Christian burial, the soul must undertake a journey to its place of judgement, where its fate will be fixed while it awaits Final Judgement. Often this stopping place occurs at or involves crossing over the Bridge of St. James – Santiago de Compostela – and is connected to the Milky Way as the road of souls. Those who pilgrimage there find that their souls are exempt from having to travel this pathway after their deaths.’ Those unlucky souls who did not complete the pilgrimage in life were required to make it after their death, and as early as 1400 we find narratives describing how pilgrims on the Camino witnessed ‘a crowd of the dead go by making a lot of noise’ as they rode ‘to the next world on the animals which they had given the Church as their mortuary fees’.³¹ Given these factors, we can be fairly certain that seventeenth-century Basques would have been well aware that the paths that threaded their way through the Euskaran valleys and mountain passes did not only ring with the footfalls of the penitent living but also with those of the penitent dead.

In the light of these factors, we can assume it highly likely that some – if not many – of the suspects interrogated in the Basque witch-craze held beliefs surrounding the liturgical activities of the dead. But is there any evidence in the records that they drew them into their accounts of akelarre-ritual? At first glance, the sources are not promising. Neither suspects nor interrogators appear to have linked the performance of the mass ritual to any form of proper religious feeling or penitence, and while we have drawn thematic links between the akelarre-mass and the performance of mortuary ritual, at no point are any of the company present identified as the dead. But against this, we must set the fact that in nearly every chapter of this book, at some point in the analysis, we have drawn parallels between the character and activities of the Basque witch and the character and activities of the deceased. Many of the core features of the akelarre, including the Devil, lesser demons, toad familiars, sabbath bonfires and anthropophagic feasts, have been linked to ideas and iconography surrounding the realm of hell which, while it signifies many things, is fundamentally a land of the dead. Similarly, most of the folk spirit categories that (we have argued) fed into the Basque witch stereotype – such as the lamiña, Mari, night-visiting demon and predatory spirit-group – display markedly chthonic characteristics. In emerging from their subterranean homes by night to feast on offerings laid out for them, the lamiñas behave exactly like the decedents who ‘return frequently to the surface at night, especially to their exte [Basque house], in order to help their living family members, to consume offerings’. In leaving the cavern of the great witch Mari by ‘walking backward’, the human visitor adopts a rule that, as Barandiarán observes, is ‘similar to that followed, traditionally, when the soul of a dead person approaches you, to wit: always keep it in front of you.’ Very different worlds of the dead have also been traced in suspects’ declarations that ‘the sabbath was the real paradise, where there are many more pleasures that can be described’ and where ‘they hear so many different and melodious instruments that they are enraptured and believe themselves to be in some earthly paradise’.³² As a consequence, although the Basque suspects made no overt claims that their akelarre-masses were performed or attended by souls of the dead, the evidence that their whole sabbath construct was underpinned by death-related matrices significantly raises the possibility that they were involved.

Harmful Liturgies

An involvement by the dead could also help to explain why the witch suspects appear to have conformed with such imaginative ease to their interrogators’ belief that their liturgical activities were malevolent. While we have demonstrated that the penitent dead were believed to practise Christian rituals, what we have not yet emphasized is that despite their spiritual pretensions, these rituals were not always (from the perspective of the living) wholly benign. Many accounts of ghostly processions and masses are shot through with a sense of uncanny menace. In her vivid description of the Santa Compaña, for example, Ramos reveals that it is much more than a pious group of spirits absorbed in their own penitential grief, being formed

by a group of souls (it varies from six up to a dozen) walking in one, sometimes two lines, each one carrying a candle and preceded by a living human being that carries a wooden cross and a bucket with blessed water. This living person must guide the Santa Compaña until he/she finds another living person to whom the cross and the water can be handed over . . . The Santa Compaña gives no rest to the living person, who becomes paler and thinner every night and may even die before someone else is found to fulfil his/her duty. The main purpose of this parade of the dead is to claim the soul of someone who will die soon or to announce that death will come to a person within a year – although there are other secondary reasons that vary in detail depending on the village. If one sees this procession occur, one must take certain measures of protection or else death will come shortly.

Of even more relevance with regard to akelarre-ritual, is that a similarly aggressive tone emerges in many of the accounts in which the dead are observed celebrating the mass. The sixteenth-century account from Paderborn, cited earlier, goes on to recount how the woman who stumbled across the spirits’ mass sat down ‘terrified’ and then

[a] woman broke away from the crowd of the faithful, came over, and grabbed her by the side of her cloak. The old woman recognized her as one of her neighbours who had died three weeks earlier. ‘My good woman,’ this neighbour said, ‘may God protect us. How did you get here? For the love of Christ and the Virgin, take care! At the time of the consecration, flee as fast as your feet will take you, and do not look back if you value your life.’ The old woman followed her advice and hastened out of the church at top speed. Hardly had she stepped outside when she heard a great fracas: the specters had come in pursuit of her. Catching up to her in the cemetery, they grabbed her by the cloak, but she shook off the cloak and escaped. Later the next morning, she returned to the cemetery in search of her cloak. She found it torn to pieces and saw on every tomb a piece of cloth.³³

In such accounts, the spirits’ mass often performs the same function as the Santa Compaña, in that it predicts future death. In an allegedly ‘true’ story recorded in Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg’s eleventh-century Chronicon, a priest comes across a crowd of people in the church making offerings and ‘a woman he knows who has died recently asks him what he is doing there, and he tells her. She then lets him know that he has not much longer to live.’ In the same century, the old woman who encountered the ‘Mass of the spirits in the basilica of santa María of Campitella’ met ‘a recently departed gossip . . . [who told] her that she has no more than a year left to live.’ The unsettling contradiction between the dead as dangerous aggressors and the dead as pious celebrants of the mass is articulated in those tales in which witnesses protect themselves against the spirits by using the same methods employed against gatherings of demons or folk spirits, with one account noting that the priest ‘brings holy relics with him and sprinkles holy water’ to a church frequented by the mass-performing dead, ‘but the dead emerge at their customary time, grab him, and burn him’ anyway.³⁴

These aggressive themes have led scholars to hypothesize that these popular traditions surrounding the liturgical activities of the dead reflect a fusion, occurring at some point post-Christianization, between beliefs concerning the repentant Christian deceased and older, folkloric beliefs about the malign hosts of the dead that we have linked earlier in the book with the witches’ crop- and body-maleficium. Through this conflation, the wild and predatory spirit-groups that ruin crops and slip into houses to suck the blood of children, transformed into pious, processional spirits anxious for salvation but with some of their more primitive, dangerous traits retained. Although, for example, the stately, torch-lit procession of the Santa Compaña seems completely at odds with the malign spirit-group, the two phenomena share enough traits for Lecouteux to define the latter as a ‘parallel version of the Infernal Hunt’; with both groups travelling by night and capturing human souls in order to either add them to their company or kill them, often by causing them to waste away over time. An etymological link between the two matrices is also clearly visible in those Hispanic testimonies where the Santa Compaña is ‘also called Estadea, Güestia and Estantig[u]a’ – deformations of the Latin Hostis Antiqua – the ‘army of souls’ that, according to Lecouteux, also ‘designates the devil’. We can even find these links reflected in the legend of Theophilus as recorded in the thirteenth century by Castilian poet Gonzalo de Berceo, previously quoted in Chapter Seventeen. The ‘sinister looking group of people’ who spiritually abduct Theophilus and rob him of his health and vitality are defined, by Berceo, as the ‘Uest Antigua’ – but their solemn progress through the night ‘carrying candles, with their ruler in their midst’ evokes the ritual processions of the Santa Compaña that featured so prominently in the mythic landscape of northern Spain in later periods.³⁵

We cannot be clear whether, and in what form, these malign and pious spirit-group conflations existed in the early modern Basque regions, nor determine if they were utilized by any suspects in the witch-craze. But knowledge of their existence does enable us to interpret the ritual and processional malevolence of the Basque witches in a new way. In the Joint Sentence, the Zugarramurdi suspects maintained that the Devil guided them ‘to the home of the person whom the revenge is to be exacted against, lighting their way sometimes with smoke from his horns and other times with a torch of pitch and resin held in his left hand, and he opens the doors until they reach the beds where they are sleeping and he gives his blessing’.³⁶ In creating this account, the suspects clearly drew on templates of malevolent witch activity, as defined in both elite and popular demonology. But through the lens developed here, the psychological processes that unconsciously conflate ideas and images into fictions, false memories and dreams may have simultaneously mined local legends about the light-bearing figure that led the stately Santa Compaña or Uest Antigua through sleeping Spanish villages to claim its quota of living human souls. Through this same lens we can also speculate that the menacing piety of the akelarre-mass – also led by a Devil with smoking horns and also illumined by candles of pitch – may have been cut from the same mythic cloth.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

De Lancre’s
Imagination

Over the last three chapters, we have argued that Basque suspects may have contributed more significantly to their akelarre-mass accounts than previously supposed. We have demonstrated that the range of raw materials available to them, in this respect, may have extended beyond demonological stereotypes to include their knowledge and experience of ordinary masses, memorial masses and misrule celebrations and – here more speculatively – the less orthodox liturgies linked to cursing practices, magical invocations, New World demonism and the rituals performed by spirits of the dead. That suspects were drawing on material this rich and diverse, certainly does help to explain both the richness and graphic detail of the accounts and their strange mixture of liturgical accuracy, burlesque inversion and malevolence. It also helps to explain why these accounts are so vivid and expansive in the face of relatively little demonological precedent.

But although these perspectives illuminate our understanding of the raw materials that may have been used to create the akelarre-mass, they still do not answer one fundamental question: why the phenomenon developed in the first place. None of the materials identified here were exclusive to the Basques. Europeans from all parts of the continent participated in ordinary masses, requiem masses and misrule celebrations and believed that masses could be celebrated by both Amerindians and the dead. Cursing and sorcerers’ masses, although less well-documented, were also not exclusive to the Basque region. Similarly, regarding interrogatorial intervention, de Lancre, Valle and Becerra were clearly not the only witchcraft prosecutors in early modern Europe who were keen to gloss unorthodox liturgical practices as Devil worship. In this context, the question presents itself: if the raw materials that were used to create the sabbath-mass were so readily available across Europe then why did they only converge to create such exceptional examples of the phenomenon in the Basque case?

The Basque Emphases

We can find some answers in the possibility that although these akelarre-mass components existed in many other parts of Europe in the period of the witch-craze, they may have converged with particular intensity in the Basque country. With regard to misrule, that the election of boy bishops was still widespread in the region in the early-seventeenth century (with de Lancre complaining that they took place annually ‘in all their parishes’) must be viewed in the light of the fact that Church suppression had seen a significant decline in these and other misrule traditions in many other parts of Europe by this period. That these misrule traditions had more longevity in the Basque regions than was the contemporary European norm, may also be supported by the evidence that boy bishops and ‘kings of the bean’ were still being elected in Navarre and Guipúzcoa in the nineteenth century and, in some places, to the present day.¹ Theatrical longevity is also reflected in the persistence, into the present, of the Maskarada and the Pastorale, with the latter being celebrated by scholars as bearing a marked resemblance to both ‘ancient Greek theater’ and the ‘Mysteries’ of the medieval era.² Meanwhile with regard to conjuring traditions, generalized complaints by Basque clerics like Arles that ‘both the little and the great alike are forever running’ to sorcerers could be dismissed as the hyperbole typical of contemporary elite reformers. But Castañega’s more specific assertions that weather conjurors ‘are so public in this kingdom that there is no town that doesn’t have one on the public payroll’, does suggest that these practices enjoyed a level of societal legitimacy not reported, to my knowledge, in many other parts of western Europe in the early modern centuries.³ Similarly, although more research would be needed to confirm this, our finding that later folklorists were able to collect liturgical cursing accounts of such richness and diversity from twentieth-century Basque populations when, as Pócs has argued, that the contemporary Csík material represented ‘ritual forms that have already become extinct in the West’, raises the possibility that these practices may have survived longer in the Basque regions than in many other parts of western Europe. Meanwhile with regard to the influence of New World demonism, we have already argued in Chapter Fourteen that owing to their seafaring and mercantile expertise, the Basques enjoyed a greater exposure to first-hand accounts of Amerindian cultures than many other European populations in the early modern period and that, on this premise, the rituals performed in honour of the Devil that allegedly took place across the Atlantic loomed particularly large in contemporary Basque mentalities. Moving on to mortuary matrices, we have observed that in Basque traditions, both mythology, religious practice and societal structure is profoundly linked to ideas about death, with William Douglass going so far as to claim, in relation to mid-twentieth century Murelaga, that ‘in Basque society the individual and collective responses to the crisis occasioned by death in the membership [of the community] are of such a complex nature and occupy such a prominent place in the world view of the actors that we can distinguish a death theme in the value system.’ Similarly, through hosting the major European pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela, where the dead crossed to the ‘Milky Way as the road of souls’, Basque communities would have historically been more aware, than those living in less geographically pertinent parts of Europe, that the paths through their local valleys and mountain passes were travelled by both the penitent living and the penitent dead. This awareness may also have been reinforced by the fact that these same paths led directly to those northern Spanish regions, such as Galicia, where beliefs surrounding the ritual processions of the dead were arguably the most prominent and sophisticated in Europe.⁴

Influences: Spanish Culture and Paganism

In trying to understand the prominence of the akelarre-mass, it is not only important to note that these raw materials may have converged with particular intensity in the early modern Basque regions – but also why they may have done so. We can identify two core factors here: Spanish Catholicism and Basque paganism. With regard to the first; because the Catholic traditions of Spain were relatively undisturbed by the Protestant threat (compared to those in other parts of western Europe), and because Spain was the European nation that ‘clung longest to medieval forms of dramatic structure and stagecraft’, Church-based theatricals (including liturgical misrule) were not repressed or curtailed on the peninsula to the same degree as in other western European countries. While boy bishop festivities, for example, were in serious decline throughout the continent from the mid-sixteenth century, in 1819 scholars reported that they were ‘still extant in Spain, particularly in Corunna’, and towards the end of the same century that ‘in many towns in the foothills of the Pyrenees the Bishop of San Nicolás was still elected.’ In the early modern period, Spain’s reforming but still essentially conservative Catholicism also ensured that some liturgical cursing rituals persisted more vigorously in the country than in many other parts of the continent, with Francis Young noting that after peaking in the late-seventeenth century ‘exorcisms continued to be performed in Spain with little regard for either the prevailing climate of scepticism in other parts of Europe or the edicts of Rome.’⁵ With regard to magical conjurations, we have already seen that the historical impact of the Moorish invasion, combined with a strong Jewish presence, ensured that since the early medieval era magical conjuring practices had been more accepted and widespread in Spain than was the European norm. Finally, with respect to mortuary ritual, Spain was one of the European countries that engaged most intensely with Catholic doctrines and rituals surrounding the dead, with Payne noting that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the emergence of ‘an increasingly morbid strain in Spanish religiosity which dwelt ever more on the via crucis. What foreigners used sometimes to perceive as the Spanish “cult of death”.’ As a reflection of this, while the disapproval of both Protestant and Catholic reformers saw the use of memorial masses decline in many parts of early modern Europe, Spain actually saw their incidence increase over this period, with the practice not declining significantly until well into the eighteenth century.⁶

But while the Basque emphasis on the akelarre-mass materials, as listed here, clearly owed something to Spanish Catholicism – it may have also owed something to Basque paganism. Scholars have long-recognized that beliefs and ritual practices evocative of medieval and early modern European expressions of theatrical misrule, liturgical cursing, magical conjuration and the dead can be identified in a range of non-Christian cultures that historically influenced the development of European mentalities, from the civilisations of the Celts and the classical world to those of Egypt and the Near East. These findings, when taken in conjunction with evidence that similar beliefs and practices have also been identified in a wide range of non-European tribal societies, allow us to fairly safely assume that whatever its origins, Basque paganism would have contained prototypical elements congruent with later belief and practice around misrule, cursing, conjuration and mortuary tradition. Given that pagan matrices of this kind impacted on all European mentalities, this assumption means little in itself. But it becomes more significant to our purpose when we consider the way in which the Basque region was Christianized. It is widely accepted among historians that the majority of the Basque population ‘did not accept Christianity before the tenth century, and in some cases later than that’. When it did arrive, the language barrier then ensured that it percolated into culture in a restrained and highly localized way. Frank states that Euskara

acted to retard the spread of the accepted structures of the Catholic Church . . . In those areas where Basque was the only language understood by the parishioners, it was imperative that the cleric be a Basque speaker. Perhaps the fear of having a non-Basque speaker appointed by the Bishop led to the practice of the parishioners themselves, or the patrons of the parish, selecting the individual who was to serve in the capacity of priest. The individual selected for this position was often a member of the family group(s) owning the church. Even into the 12th and 13th centuries, a time when there still were neither seminaries nor any other adequate ecclesiastical training available to those living in rural areas, the individual appointed had a very limited education and was forced to manage as best he could. His formal preparation was reduced to learning to say Mass, performing funeral rituals, and administering the Sacraments from a manual where the sacramental formulas and other liturgical acts were transcribed.⁷

It has been argued that this slow, community-based process of Christianization enabled indigenous pagan elements to persist into medieval Basque culture in surprisingly emphatic and idiosyncratic ways. To take just a few examples. Some have argued that myths and legends about Mari, ‘queen of all the spirits’, provide a unique European insight into a Neolithic goddess figure that pre-dates the female deities of the later pastoralists. Others have argued that the Mari corpus reflects the activities of a prehistoric female priesthood that is still articulated, in Christianized form, in the figure of the serora and her unique jurisdiction over Basque ritual life. Similarly deep threads have been traced with regard to traditional theatre and dance, with scholars arguing that beliefs and practices linked to folkloric figures like the Mamuson stretch directly back to the ‘bear deities’ and theatrical shamanistic structures of prehistory.⁸

But while Basque culture was historically shaped by both paganism and Spanish Catholicism, its characteristics as exhibited during the period of the witch-craze were also reflective of more recent events and influences. As noted many times during the course of this book, throughout western Europe from the late-medieval period onwards, the Catholic Church was increasingly preoccupied by the need to eliminate the unorthodox elements in popular religiosity – including beliefs and rituals associated with cursing, misrule and magical conjuration – in order to homogenize and reform Christian devotional life. But the evidence also suggests that although these reforming efforts had met with considerable success by the early-seventeenth century, they may not have been pursued with as much rigour or been as effective in the Basque country as in many other western European regions. With regard to the serora, for example, although female sacristans were found in many parts of the continent in the period of the witch-craze, their roles were marginal in comparison with their Basque variant, who enjoyed a level of responsibility surrounding mortuary ritual and other aspects of the liturgy unique to western Europe. Although, as her wider European counterparts had done before her, the serora eventually succumbed to the patriarchal imperatives of the Catholic Church and was relegated to ‘little more than a cleaning lady’, the series of decrees that prohibited her participation in liturgical rites did not begin in earnest until 1617 and, as we have seen in Chapter Eighteen, the serora was still instrumental in a range of mortuary rituals as late as the early-twentieth century.⁹ Similarly, contemporary Basque clerics and lay conjurors would have been unable to incorporate magical conjurations and exorcisms into their weather and pest-related rituals to the degree that they did, without an unusually high level of toleration toward magico-religious practice, by western European standards of the period, from the local Church authorities. This leniency is intimated, in a vividly dramatic way, in an unusual description of a fern-seed conjuring ritual found in Castañega’s Tratado. Rituals associated with the conjuration of seeds for magical purposes – particularly in relation to fern seeds, which are invisible to the naked eye – were recorded in various parts of Europe in the early modern period. In most cases, these reports emerged in the context of sorcery or witchcraft, with trial records from the Aragonese city of Zaragoza in 1656 recording a defendant’s claim that ‘on the night of St. John . . . a priest, when it struck midnight, dressed in his finery, had to say a Mass backwards, and conjure the seed so the Devil did not take it away.’ But the following extract from Castañega clearly indicates that idiosyncratic seed conjuring rites of this kind were being openly – and rather dramatically – performed by Basque priests as late as 1529. The friar states that

[t]he vain superstition of some churchmen who dress up in stoles to gather the seeds of the fern plant that they say flowers and seeds on Saint John’s Eve is also subject to condemnation. They circle the place where the ferns grow with crosses and read the bible and do ceremonies so the devil won’t disturb the gathering of the seeds. All of this is public deceit by the devil, because there are no seeds, and even if there were the devil wouldn’t need them nor would he care who should gather them. Yet there is no doubt that the effect for which those seeds are gathered, according to the fabulous opinion of the vain folk, are for service to the devil rather than for God. Therefore, those who indulge in that act should be punished as superstitious, for the very devil scatters those seeds they find in that circled space and over the blankets that are placed to catch them so that they should believe them to be from the fern and for the effects they imagine and so they won’t cease to do these vain ceremonies and believe in those vanities on such a holy day of the year.¹⁰

The Catholic Reformation was slow to make an impact in the Basque regions for a variety of reasons. On the most basic level, it is clear that the geographical and linguistic obstacles that proved such a deterrent to deeper Christianization in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries still presented difficulties in the sixteenth and seventeenth. The regional officials of the Spanish Inquisition were frequently reluctant to fulfil their obligations to make regular visitations to rural and mountainous areas because they entailed ‘lengthy and troublesome’ journeys through difficult terrain, with Henningsen noting that before Valle’s trip to the Navarrese mountains in 1609, the Logroño tribunal had only engaged in one journey of visitation since 1600.¹¹ Their efforts were also hampered, on a more subtle level, by the obduracy of local priests. Catholic reformers were all too aware that in order to effectively reform congregations you had to begin by reforming their religious instructors and, to this end, accusations of ignorance and immorality were levelled at clerics across Europe. But the Basque priesthood does appear to have been particularly culpable in this respect. Although de Lancre was not the most objective of judges, he provides a lively list of the faults displayed by Labourdin clergy that included:

Going to the cabaret, dancing, the clothes, the ball game in the streets, the sword at their side, the dagger in their hand, as they walk through the village, or as they appear at the parish feasts – none of this causes anyone to criticize them. Going on mere whim to Nôtre Dame d’Irun, and around all the other places in the country, accompanied by three or four beautiful girls is considered quite normal both by the priests from Navarre who live at the border, and our [Labourd] priests, as we have frequently observed.

De Lancre’s complaint that ‘none of this causes anyone to criticize them’ and that ‘people are not the least bit shocked by any of their actions’ suggests that the Basque parishioners were indulgent toward this clerical unorthodoxy; with this leniency also demonstrated in the evidence that, as noted earlier, it was not uncommon for Basque priests to openly cohabit with parishioners and acknowledge any children that resulted from these unions. There is no evidence of social outrage, for example, towards the Vizcayan priest who – as recorded in a 1610 trial record unrelated to sorcery or witchcraft – had an illegitimate son with a sorceress named María Sapia or ‘María the Toad’.¹² In large part this clerical laxity and the social indulgence that perpetuated it, reflected the fact that local lay authorities had historically enjoyed an unusually high degree of control over regional religious affairs. Caro Baroja maintains that the Basque nobility ‘had little respect for the ecclesiastical authorities’, citing a famous fifteenth-century case where Vizcayan dons refused a bishop entry to their seigniory (arguing that it was not within his jurisdiction) and then, after his departure, were so pleased to see him go that they ‘carefully erased the footprints of the few steps he had taken from their land’. This secular control over religious matters extended to the priesthood. While an increase in seminaries and an improvement in ecclesiastical training over the medieval centuries would have rendered early modern priests better educated, on average, than their twelfth-century predecessors, they were still very much homegrown. In reference to the Oiartzun valley in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Juan Javier Pescador states that:

[The] local government chose the parish’s beneficed priests by internal popular elections. The laypeople in charge of church upkeep [including seroras] were similarly chosen. Accordingly, no decision regarding the altars and holy images could be make without the republicas explicit consent. Very similar control over local churches could found in the old regime towns throughout the Basque Country . . .

As in earlier centuries, these traditions meant that when choosing priests, the local lay authorities tended to elect eligible young men from local families, in selection processes that were inevitably driven by local interests and intrigues. As a consequence of this, many Basque clerics would have spent their working lives compromised by the fact that their fathers, grandfathers and uncles had procured their benefice and were responsible for safeguarding their position in the future. These circumstances would have consigned them to pastoral lives lived in thrall to their elder kinsmen’s wishes. At their worse, these power inbalances would have led to situations where, as in late-sixteenth century Toledo, lay officials were ‘in such firm control that they order[ed] the priests around as if they were day laborers’.¹³

With regard to our akelarre-mass materials, these factors are important because they would have rendered Basque priests far more responsive to lay religious demands for rites involving superstitious or magical elements, than would their peers in less remote and locally proscribed contexts. This dynamic would certainly explain why they appear to have conceded to requests, from both municipal and individual clients, to conjure fern seeds and perform pest or weather exorcisms, despite the fact that ecclesiastics like Castañega and Arles had been overtly condemning these practices since at least the early-sixteenth century. Although there is little evidence to this effect, we can speculate that these same mechanics underpinned the persistence of liturgical cursing practices in the region, with Pócs noting that these practices survived in eastern Europe, in large part, because orthodox priests and monks retained the ‘populist attitude’ that gave them ‘greater readiness’ than their western counterparts to ‘cater to the concrete, daily magical needs of the people’ – to the extent that their liturgical cursing practices represented ‘a system of popular witchcraft [that] has been integrated into an actual religious system run by priests.’¹⁴

Remaining Questions

If, for the range of reasons outlined in this chapter, the raw materials necessary to create the akelarre-mass converged with particular intensity in the French- and Spanish-Basque regions, then this would certainly help to explain why such vivid and coherent accounts of the phenomenon should have emerged in Basque witchcraft records. But it does not explain why these accounts only emerged during the 1609–14 witch-craze. Given that the materials listed here were not exclusive to the early 1600s but had been present in Basque culture for, in most cases, many centuries before this period, then why did the phenomenon not emerge in any witchcraft trials that took place before this date? Since no obvious reason for this differential can be found in the wider environment then we must assume it to lie in the prosecutorial mechanics – and more specifically the individual interrogators – involved in this particular case.

We have plenty of choice here. Over the past three chapters we have argued that both the French and Spanish interrogators brought a range of preoccupations and biases to their prosecutions – over and above a general desire to prosecute witches – that may have been conducive to the development of the akelarre-mass. These include fears regarding heretical liturgies and the inverted world of the Antichrist (as reflected in de Lancre’s involvement with Florimond de Raemond and the Spanish inquisitors’ potential familiarity with Castañega); concerns about the distorted Catholic liturgies performed in honour of the Devil by the inhabitants of the New World (as fuelled by Valle’s role as secretary to the ‘Patriarch of the Indies’); and anxieties regarding the sanctity of the Eucharist and the miracle of transubstantiation (as reflected in both the wider Counter Reformation preoccupations of de Lancre, Valle and Becerra and the more specific, vocational focus of the Premonstratensian monks at the monastery of Urdax). We cannot know for certain which of these factors were the most significant in inflating the idea of an akelarre-mass from a theoretical possibility to a core characteristic of the Basque sabbath. But if we explore the evolution of the theme in more detail, we find that one interrogator and one specific factor emerges as a clear contender here.

We have noted several times that the theme of the akelarre-mass is prominent in both the French and Spanish accounts and that both sets of interrogators had access to precedents on the theme. But we have not yet examined the timeline in any detail. At first glance, the evidence that the Spanish records – and in particular the early Zugarramurdi confessions summarized in the Joint Sentence – contain the most detailed and precise accounts of the phenomenon, suggests that the sabbath-mass stereotype may have originated in Spain and then subsequently travelled across the border to influence the later prosecutions in Labourd. But on closer analysis, the sources indicate that the direction of travel was more likely to have gone the opposite way. Our primary piece of evidence is a letter penned by Becerra and Salazar and dated 15 September 1609, that was sent to la Suprema while Valle was on the first leg of his visitation. Discussing some correspondence and witness statements recently received from Valle, the letter reports that at some point in late August or early September, five teenage suspects from Zugarramurdi had made some important new confessions. It then goes on to state that although ‘the statements of the new witches agreed on almost every count’ with those given by the original group of Zugarramurdi suspects (who, now imprisoned in Logroño, had made their first confessions over seven months before), they also contained ‘something new’. The letter reads that

these five [females] also add some new things such as that on the night of Saint John they go in the company of the Devil to the church, and with him remaining outside, all of the witches enter to trample on the crosses that they pull down onto the floor and to insult them. And that the Devil, on the nights when they make offerings, says mass at the akelarre with vestments, host and chalice, and that when he raises them they all say certain nonsensical words which they state mean “he-goat up and he-goat down” and that they say the same words when the priests raise the host and chalice.¹⁵

Given that the Spanish inquisitors exchanged this correspondence over a year before they drew up the Joint Sentence in November 1610, we can surmise that these five confessions were responsible for introducing the ‘new’ concept of the akelarre-mass into the Spanish prosecutions. Once Valle and Becerra had read the accounts of the ceremony contained in the teenagers’ testimonials, it would not have been difficult for them to incorporate the emergent theme into their subsequent interrogations, both in relation to Zugarramurdi villagers already held in Logroño and the new suspects, such as María de Zozaya, who were arrested during the remaining months of Valle’s visitation.

But the dating of this correspondence also tells us something else. According to this timeline, the core elements of the akelarre-mass did not emerge in Spain until September 1609 – a date that was approximately two months after de Lancre had begun his investigations in France. This raises the possibility that the phenomenon made its initial appearance in the French prosecutions before then travelling south to Spain. Indeed, the five Zugarramurdi teenagers who produced the first Spanish accounts of the phenomenon lived less than three kilometres from the Navarrese border with Labourd. Through this lens, in looking for the spark that enabled the akelarre-mass to rise to such prominence in the Basque witch-craze, we should be turning away from the Spanish inquisitors and training our gaze on de Lancre.

De Lancre: The Spark

If we examine de Lancre’s motivations in more detail, we immediately find evidence to justify this change of focus. In Chapter Twenty One, we argued that his interest in the sabbath-mass was likely to have been stimulated by both demonological texts and judicial experience. With regard to texts, we observed that many of the demonological works cited as authorities in the Tableau referenced inverted liturgical practice, with overt accounts of the sabbath-mass first appearing in Martín del Rio’s Disquisitiones Magicae (1599–1600) and Henri Boguet’s Discours des Sorciers (1602). With regard to judicial experience, we noted de Lancre’s claim to have been influenced by the 1594 Bordeaux trial of Jeanne Bosdeau, that he attended alongside his brother-in-law Florimond de Raemond (who later referenced the trial in his 1597 work, L’Antichrist). To further our enquiries, we now need to examine de Lancre’s reference to this trial with some precision. Towards the end of the Tableau, in a discussion about the ritual aspects of the sabbath, he states that:

For the elevation [of the host], the first of the moderns who most put this into practice was the Sieur de Raemond, conseiller of this court of Parlement, referring to a witch named Jeanne Bo[s]deau, whose trial I attended in our Tournelle court, who described the mystery to us. In fact, Del Río, Boguet, and other moderns cite and claim this sole example. But I provided them with several other even more notable examples. People commonly have said since then, regarding the report of the Sieur de Raemond, that a certain kind of mass was performed at the sabbath.¹⁶

At first glance, this passage merely confirms that de Lancre had heard a confessional account of the sabbath-mass before he came to Labourd. But examined in more depth, it tells us much more than this. De Lancre’s assertion that ‘Del Río, Boguet, and other moderns cite and claim this sole example’ suggests that he believed the sabbath-mass accounts referenced by these authors – and which as noted earlier, were the first examples of the rite to emerge in any demonological texts – were in fact derived from Jeanne Bosdeau’s trial. This speculation is supported by del Rio and Boguet themselves, who both state in their respective texts that their sabbath-mass accounts were taken from Bosdeau’s confession as recorded in Raemond’s L’Antichrist (1597).¹⁷ But de Lancre also takes matters one step further by maintaining that Raemond was the ‘first of the moderns who most put this into practice’ and that ‘people commonly have said since then, regarding the report of the Sieur de Raemond, that a certain kind of mass was performed at the sabbath’. If we deem his statements accurate, and there is no reason why we should not, this indicates that del Rio and Boguet did not only use this case as their primary example of the sabbath-mass but that Jeanne Bosdeau’s confession was single-handedly responsible for introducing the idea of the sabbath-mass into the contemporary demonological mind.

That elite preoccupation with this phenomenon can be traced to an individual confession is surprising enough. But also has important implications for de Lancre and the evolution of the Basque akelarre-mass. After discussing Raemond’s claim to the rite and noting that ‘Del Rio, Boguet, and other moderns cite and claim this sole example’, de Lancre then goes on to add: ‘But I provided them with several other even more notable examples.’ While brief and in many ways unremarkable, this phrase suggests that de Lancre was not only present at the first recorded account of a sabbath-mass to emerge in witch-hunting Europe but also that he subsequently considered himself to be more knowledgeable about the phenomenon than these two prominent demonologists, to the degree that he took it upon himself to furnish them with further illustrations.¹⁸ Even outside the Labourd investigations, that de Lancre should have assumed this level of ownership over the sabbath-mass phenomenon does make psychological sense. As touched on in Chapter Twelve, his presence at the seminal trial, which clearly made a lasting impact on all those present, would have been sufficient to kindle his interest and establish his authority in this respect. But for de Lancre, this interest and authority must surely have been enhanced by his knowledge that his brother-in-law Florimond de Raemond considered Bosdeau’s testimony to be so important that he reproduced it in full in his seminal 1597 study of the Antichrist, to illustrate the darkness and chaos of an impending apocalyptic world where ‘all things will be turned upside-down’. While we do not know the timbre of their relationship, we can surmise that this familial link did not only bolster de Lancre’s status as an expert on the sabbath-mass but also engendered a sense of personal responsibility in the younger man that – particularly after Raemond’s death in 1601 – inspired him to take up the baton and pursue and explore the phenomenon that his influential brother-in-law had revealed to the world.¹⁹

These factors would have had serious implications for the Basques. De Lancre’s personal connections with this novel demonological crime would have ensured that when he arrived in Labourd in July 1609 he was actively looking for evidence of the sabbath-mass. And for the reasons outlined earlier in this chapter, in looking for this crime in Labourd he found himself in a part of Europe where he was singularly likely to find it. The towns and villages of the Basque country nurtured an expressive culture empowered by concepts of universal nobility and an esteem for the agency of women, that was particularly attached – over and above the contemporary European norm – to the diverse range of unorthodox practices identified here as sabbath-mass components, including serora-led mortuary rites, misrule celebrations, magical conjuring rites, liturgical cursing rituals and ready access to eyewitness accounts of the demonism of the New World. In such fertile ground, de Lancre’s enquiries about the sabbath-mass would have provoked a wealth of relevant response that enabled him to quickly concretize this nascent demonic crime into a coherent demonological stereotype.

We can also speculate that de Lancre’s convictions in this regard were strengthened by the fact that these mass-components were so deeply integrated into the Basque Church. On arrival in Labourd he would have found that the combined consequences of late Christianization, infrequent inquisitorial visitations, unique pagan survivals, strong cultural links with Spain and robust lay control over the local religious life had conspired to create local religious systems that were so distinct from western European Catholic norms and so distant from Counter Reformation aspirations that the only explanation available, for a man such as de Lancre, was that the very fabric of the Basque Church, including the priesthood itself, had been deeply infiltrated by the Devil. We can see his surprise and the way he used demonization to deal with it, in his reaction to the religious offices of the serora. The Bordeaux judge was clearly shocked by the degree to which local priests and their congregations allowed the lay nun to participate in Church ritual, with Frank noting that ‘his ‘scathing attack on the institution of the serora’, as set out in the Tableau, was ‘undoubtedly one of the motivating factors’ behind the series of decrees from 1617 onwards that prohibited her participation in liturgical rites. The impact that ‘the institution of the serora’ had on the Bordeaux judge is clearly evident in his observation that:

I saw a certain woman whom they call the benedicte [serora] assume the role of marguilliere. She approached the altars, carrying alms, lighting the candles, and other such things. I was amazed that this duty was given to these first ten women and not to the men and to the most notable members of the parish, as is the custom in the good cities of France, where this duty is assigned to the most honourable gentlemen. I was even more amazed that these women went from gallery to gallery (for all beautiful and large churches are composed of two or three floors of galleries) and that, once there, they pulled the men by their coats, because, leaning against the rail of the gallery, then men had their backs turned to them.²⁰

De Lancre was also critical of the close relationships that developed between seroras and priests. Observing their shared responsibility to tidy and organize the church after worship, he concludes that ‘it is thus shameful for a woman to lock herself up in church with the priest, which the benedictes [seroras] can do in total freedom; in the morning and at night’ and that ‘there are sometimes such bad [sexual] encounters that it is impossible that the Devil has no part in this.’ It was all too easy for de Lancre to interpret these unorthodox intimacies through demonological templates, as demonstrated in his complaint that in these quiet moments the priest and serora

have all the comfort and freedom to say and do what they wish, or to have whatever rendezvous or opportunities that the Devil will impose, either to go to the sabbath together, if they are both witches (the priest and the benedicte), as we have observed, or to commit a thousand other abominations inappropriate for this place and for their social standing. The pretext that they are tending to the affairs of the church serves to cover up the dishonour they commit.

As we touched on in Chapter Eighteen, de Lancre experienced the same amazed disapproval and then took refuge in the same explanations in response, regarding other activities attributed to Basque priests. He frequently alleges, for example, that the Labourdin witch-clerics celebrated ordinary masses ‘during the day in proper churches’ but ‘at night for the sabbaths’. In reference to two Ciboure priests he states that:

You might think that in saying a false mass at midnight, which is when the sabbaths take place, all in honour of Beelzebub, it would be impossible for them to show piety and devotion when they say mass the following day in the church of Ciboure, in the presence of two hundred people who had heard them say it several hours earlier in this sinful assembly. What an abuse of their role, what an execration to deceive people in this way . . .

De Lancre clearly interprets this behaviour, which was presumably reported to him by suspects, as evidence that the duplicitous priests were celebrating masses to honour the Devil as well as God. But through the perspectives developed in this book we can speculate that it reflected the rather less shocking fact that Labourdin priests engaged in a range of unorthodox mass-related activities – from misrule theatricals to magical invocations and liturgical cursing rites – that due to their ambivalent and socially divisive nature, or perhaps purely for pragmatic reasons, often took place at night. Through this lens, the priests’ diverse ritual behaviours would have been reflected and supported by the fact that the Ciboure congregation, or at least a significant percentage of it, saw no contradiction in them. Certainly, this kind of local toleration would explain why one of the priests in question was ‘warned about witchcraft’ more than ‘twenty years earlier . . . [but] found a way to avoid being accused of it’. That de Lancre was genuinely shocked by the irregular liturgical practices of the Basque priests would explain why he so frequently accused them of witchcraft, even when – out of ‘the sense of honour and respect that I have toward the holy order of the priesthood, and out of fear that the enemies of the church will take advantage of the situation’ – he was clearly reluctant to do so. It also explains his growing conviction on arrival in Labourd, that in this ‘little corner of France’ devotion to the Devil was so strong it had evolved into an oppositional religious system that ‘infected . . . [the] entire country’ – to the extent that ‘most of the priests are witches’ and ‘pastors, preachers, and parish priests are already set in place by the Devil in practically all the most famous parishes, and so much so that Satan has begun to possess not only the priests but also some polluted and profane churches’. That de Lancre responded in this emphatic way to the ritual behaviours of the Basque priests also explains why he placed so much emphasis on alternative liturgies. For in a country where ‘most of the priests are witches’ it would not have been difficult to find evidence of sabbath-pacts, sabbath-baptisms, sabbath-blessings and most importantly of all, the sabbath-mass.²¹

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

The Cultic Template

Our exploration of the akelarre-mass concludes a long examination of many core themes identified in the witch records, from crop- and body-maleficium, poison-making and toad familiars to akelarre festivities, sexual orgies, feast-cannibalism, initiation ceremonies and alternative liturgical ritual. But one important discussion remains. Thus far, each of these themes have been explored on an individual basis and yet, in the records themselves, they are not presented as separate phenomena but as facets of an integrated pattern of activity unified by the over-arching structure of the witches’ ‘sect’ or ‘cult’. Valle emphasizes these crimes in relation to ‘the diabolical and false sect of witches’ and de Lancre, that the Devil uses the sabbath to ‘celebrate his cult’.¹ This narrative is not unusual. Accounts of witches organizing themselves into cultic groups was common in European witch records and was implicated, to some degree, in any confession containing references to rituals of allegiance or the sabbath. But once again, the Basque witch-craze records are unique in their emphasis. To my knowledge, no other European trial cluster has produced such a precise and coherent picture of the structure and mechanics of the witch cult phenomenon, with Henningsen claiming of the early Zugarramurdi suspects that ‘taken together the confessions of the six prisoners provide a description of the rites and social organization of the witch sect in a wealth of detail that would be hard to equal in any other witch trial.’² Through its cogent accounts of cultic hierarchy, ritual and procedure and the ways in which these elements devolved out into practical activities like almsgiving, communal feasting and poison-making, the Basque witch cult as it emerged between 1609–14, has become the gold standard of what the European witch-cult should be.

Interrogatorial intervention was clearly important here. We have already emphasized in Chapters Twelve and Sixteen, that the idea that witches self-consciously convened in cultic organisations defined by specific aims, rituals, hierarchies and disciplinary procedures organized around the worship of the Devil, had been dominant in demonological works since the early-fifteenth century. We also noted that this ideological trend is widely assumed to reflect an increasing tendency among contemporary elites to view traditional folkloric witch-matrices through heretical cult templates. In this context, our finding that de Lancre, Valle and Becerra were all extremely well informed and profoundly concerned about the threat of heretical cult activity and its links with witchcraft, strongly suggests that they were likely to have been the driving force behind the prominence of this theme in the Basque witch-craze. By this measure, they would have taken confessional references to a range of contemporary peasant activity completely unrelated to cultic practice – such as parish festivities and confirmation rituals – and used leading questions to fuse them into a cohesive witch cult template during interrogation. But while this argument is sound, if we explore the issue in a little more depth, we find the Basque suspects may have been more responsive to these interrogatorial manipulations than we might expect.

The Idea of ‘Cult’: Suspect-Contribution

As we have touched on in earlier chapters, in relation to both the festive and ritual aspects of the akelarre, suspects’ contributions to witch cult themes would have been heavily influenced by stereotypical stories about both heretical and witch cult activity circulating in the Basque regions prior to and during the witch-craze prosecutions. But the records suggest that they may also have mined some less expected seams. In an unusual passage in the Tableau, de Lancre alleges that:

A woman from Biarritz, aged forty, spoke to us about the sabbath, crying as bitterly as I ever saw a creature cry . . . she added that she preferred paying the fines to going to the sabbath, that for each fine she paid eight sols to a certain woman whom she named. And later during our investigations, we met a man who levied the fines in Ciboure. And in Bastide in Basse-Navarre in 1610, a male witch was seen in a public square contesting the payment of these fines with a young man. He asked him for eight sols. The young man only had five to offer him. We wanted to know the cause of their dispute about the numbers 8 and 5. Finally the young man admitted that because he had failed to go to the sabbath, this witch, whose responsibility it was to levy fines, had issued a fine against him. And, wanting to force him to pay the customary amount of eight sols, the witch was bullying him because he wanted to give him only five sols, for this was all he had. We took the witch into custody because of this and other evil deeds which he confessed – some voluntarily and others under torture – so many, in fact, that he was sentenced to die and was burned at the stake, confessing at his execution that he had been assigned this noble task (of collecting fines) at the sabbath.³

Given that fine payment is not a core feature of the demonological sabbath, and given the level of realistic, prosaic detailing in this account, we can assume a level of suspect-involvement here. Indeed, the claim that the male witch confessed to having been ‘assigned this noble task’ of collecting fines ‘at his execution’ suggests that this particular suspect may have been encouraged to retrospectively link some kind of real-life negotiation to the akelarre in his final hour. But if the suspects were responsible for these fine-paying references, then why did they bring them into the interrogatorial arena and integrate them so coherently and realistically into their narratives of the sabbath?

We find a surprisingly simple answer to the question by moving away from the world of witchcraft and demonology and turning again to ordinary Basque Catholicism. While accounts of specially appointed officers fining individuals for non-attendance at meetings are rather anomalous in the demonological context, they are wholly reasonable in the context of the contemporary social structures known as ‘confraternities’. As a member of a confraternity, an individual was expected to attend regular meetings and if they reneged on this they were fined by members specifically appointed to perform this duty, with Flynn noting in regard to Spain that confraternal members (or cofrades) were obligated to attend meetings and processions and feasts on saints’ days and holy days and were also fined or ‘fraternally castigated’ for not complying with the confraternity’s statutes.⁴ It is here, in this intimation of confraternal activity, that we can find a better understanding of the nature and extent of suspects’ contribution to the concept of the witches’ cult.

The Religious Confraternity

While the societies of early modern Europe were structured around the twin edifices of Church and State, they were also shaped from within by a constellation of smaller social networks termed confraternities. While these groups, which had been present and evolving in form and function since at least the early medieval period, could vary considerably in purpose, structure and membership, they were essentially defined by a collective dedication to a particular being, occupation or cause and fell into one of two overlapping categories: ‘religious’ or ‘occupational’.⁵ Both forms of confraternity are relevant to our understanding of the Basque witch-cult, and so each shall be considered in turn here.

Religious confraternities, which increased significantly in number in Catholic countries in the early modern era, were essentially groups of people who came together at various points in the calendrical year to engage in activities and meetings that were centred on a particular religious figure or devotional preference: with the confraternity of Our Lady of the Rosary focusing on performance of the rosary and honouring days sacred to Mary, and the confraternity of Corpus Christi concentrating on the celebrations at the Corpus Christi feast and so on. Although they could emerge in both monastic and clerical contexts, in this period the majority of religious confraternities were composed of – and run by – the laity and were found on all levels of contemporary society.⁶ Even more significantly, in an age where public life was dominated by men, confraternal membership was often open to both genders was even, in some cases, exclusively female, with Susan Broomhall going so far as to assert that ‘women appear to have dominated traditional, parish-based confraternities in the second half of the [sixteenth] century.’⁷

But while religious confraternities were ostensibly focused on religious devotion, in a world where centralized support systems – whether linked to Church or State – were relatively limited, their core strength and purpose lay in that they functioned as mutual-aid societies that provided some of the safeguards now catered for, in modern Europe, by insurance companies and national health services. Cofrades worked together in relationships of obligation that extended from the spiritual (such as helping with mortuary ritual to facilitate progress through purgatory to heaven) to the practical (such as bringing medicines to those that were ill). This structure ensured that the confraternity was an inherently social institution that impacted on almost every aspect of members’ lives, with Flynn noting with regard to Spain that ‘the confraternity was involved . . . in almost all major events in the lives of constituents. Members joined celebrations of births and marriages; they consoled families at funerals; they attended common festivities and accompanied those journeying on pilgrimages’. The importance of religious confraternities to medieval and early modern life has only been fully recognized by historians in the past three or four decades. This recognition has transformed the way that scholars view religious mentalities and the role of the Church in this period, with Terpstra noting that in the light of recent research into confraternities ‘a focus on the formal hierarchy of the Catholic church [now] seems almost quaint, if not peripheral to an understanding of how faith animated local communities.’⁸

Confraternity and Witch-Cult

How do these perspectives impact on our understanding of the witch narratives in the Basque witch-craze? The first point here is that although religious confraternities were found throughout Catholic Europe in this period, they were particularly popular in Spain, with Flynn noting that ‘beyond the Pyrenees, confraternities appear to have been less numerous than in any of the Spanish provinces.’ They were also highly inclusive, with Flynn also claiming that:

[Religious] confraternities were one of the few institutions created by the populace to meet their own needs. Unlike craft guilds, they encompassed, at least in the Hispanic peninsula, women and occasionally even children in their membership. They were much more numerous than guilds in Spain. Almost everyone belonged to at least one confraternity, including the unemployed, service workers and widows, who were normally excluded from guilds.

Of even more relevance, with regard to our witch cult analyses, is that by the eighteenth century the part of Spain that boasted arguably the highest concentration of confraternities was none other than the Basque province of Navarre. As Gregorio Silanes Susaeta has observed, a census taken in 1771 reveals that although the region had only 2.22 percent of Spain’s population it possessed 4.15 percent of its confraternities. Put another way, this means that while in Spain there was a confraternity for approximately every 391 persons, in Navarre there was one for every 195, and consequently ‘there were, in relative terms, approximately double the amount of religious confraternities [in Navarre] than in other areas of Spain’. This concentration was aptly reflected in the finding that at the time of the 1771 census the villages of Urdax and Zugarramurdi boasted no less than seven confraternities between them. As in the rest of Spain, membership of these confraternities was often mixed-gender and some, like the confraternity of San Francisco Javier de Lesaca, were exclusively female.⁹

Pending further research, it is difficult to evaluate how far these eighteenth-century statistics reflect patterns of confraternal distribution in the early seventeenth. But they do enable us to safely assume that a significant proportion of the suspects who came before de Lancre, Valle and Becerra during the witch-craze were members of, or had knowledge concerning, religious confraternities and that they drew on these materials when creating their fictions, false memories and dreams in response to interrogatorial questions about witch cult activity. We have already seen that cross-referencing with confraternal structures can elucidate suspects’ claims that they were fined by specially appointed officers because they ‘failed to go to the sabbath’. But these comparisons can explain much more than this. By way of illustration, if we examine the template of the Catholic religious confraternity alongside that of the Basque witch cult through a finer lens we find a surprising number of parallels on a range of themes, from formal cultic ritual through to the more general activities of maleficium.

Hierarchy

The witch cult was constructed around a hierarchy that included, in ascending order of importance: novices, witches, senior witches (sometimes termed ‘mistresses’), the king and queen of the sabbath and finally the Devil, as the spiritual authority to whom the cult is dedicated. Confraternal membership is similarly stratified by, in ascending order of importance: novices, members, lesser officials and one or more mayordomos who oversee the ceremonies (with officials often being termed ‘masters’ and ‘mistresses’) and finally, the spiritual being or associated devotion to whom the confraternity is dedicated.

Initiation

Witch cult membership was promoted through an initiation ceremony – the sabbath-pact – in which the novice was escorted to the akelarre by a senior or mistress witch who then presented them to the Devil, after which they typically went down on one knee, swore allegiance, received the witches’ mark and kissed the Devil’s hand or behind. Confraternal membership was similarly determined through rites of initiation which, as Terpstra notes, were ‘endowed with quasi-sacramental significance’. During the ritual the novice pledged vows of allegiance to the confraternal saint or deity, typically sealing his or her initiation by kneeling before the mayordomo and giving them a ‘kiss of peace’. Just as the witch cult novices were not permitted to make their demonic pact until they had ‘reached the age of discretion, because the Devil wants them to have the awareness to know what they are doing’ so, as Silanes Susaeta records, many Navarrese religious confraternities ‘welcomed men and women of any condition not younger than seven or eight years presumably because by then they would have received their first Communion and started to have the use of reason.’¹⁰

Confession and Secrecy

The witch cult members maintained that at the sabbath ‘the Devil hears the confessions of all the witches’. Similarly, confession was a common feature of confraternal meetings, with Silanes Susaeta noting that members of the Basque confraternity of Santa Cristina de Tudela ‘confessed their faults during the general chapter which then dictated the punishments, which could sometimes even be physical’. The witches’ claims that they were contractually obliged to secrecy and ‘never to confess the secret of the school’ is also reflected in the evidence that many confraternities ‘had official statutes enjoining secrecy’.¹¹

Liturgical Ritual

The witch cult meetings were centred on the celebration of a mass in honour of the Devil, with the Labourd rite being led by a priest who was also a member of the witch cult. Similarly, the meetings and processions organized by confraternities typically included collective rituals of worship and penance and were often solemnized by a celebration of the mass in honour of their supernatural patron or devotion, with the officiating priests (and assistant seroras) often being members of the confraternal community. Silanes Susaeta states that in medieval and early modern Navarre

the communal practice of the sacraments, and in particular the Eucharist, was very important. In almost all confraternities, members met once or twice a year, usually coinciding with their patron’s celebration day, to hold a general chapter in order to deal with the association’s issues and a mass and specific prayers. All brothers used to attend the mass with lit candles as specified in the confraternity’s constitutions of Nuestra Señora de Eunate. Non-attendance at mass was punished with a fine.¹²

Black-Themed Masses and Mortuary Rituals

Witch cult members often declared that their masses were celebrated with black vestments and ritual paraphernalia and that participants brought obládas to the ceremony, with these claims being linked in Chapter Nineteen to Basque women’s collective responsibility to care for the souls of the deceased by organizing and attending funeral and memorial masses and managing the rites and offerings at the jarleku stones. Confraternal members had similar preoccupations and responsibilities, being charged with organizing and attending both funeral and memorial masses for deceased members to speed their progress through purgatory, with Flynn noting that ‘through common oaths of fidelity to corporate obligations that served the dead, cofrades sought to ensure the salvation of everyone.’ This mortuary focus was so profound that religious confraternities were in essence, according to Flynn, ‘carefully constructed death societies’, and even as late the twentieth century the Basque village of Murelaga boasted four religious confraternities whose ‘sole function’ was ‘to provide spiritual support at death for members.’ Silanes Susaeta notes that in pre-modern Navarre, cofrades were not only required ‘to attend to the funeral Mass and burial of any brother or face a monetary penalty’ but that in the case of the confraternity de Nuestra Señora del Castalar and others ‘each time a brother passed away after sunset when he couldn’t be buried, all the members had to take turns at holding a wake over the dead and pray all night.’¹³

33  Although only a miniature, this image from the frontispiece of the statutes of the Bolognan confraternity of St Maria della Morte (1562) evokes the passion that often underpinned confraternal devotion. In the background, cofrades are in procession behind a cross.

Exhumation

The witch records suggest that although the witch cult members disinterred the corpses of their victims, they preferred to exhume the corpses of fellow witches, with Jeanette d’Abadie maintaining that ‘in the cemeteries, only the bodies of male and female witches would be dug up’; and the Joint Sentence, that the witches exhumed ‘all the bodies of the witches who have died in the last fifty to sixty years from now’. This theme has little logic in a demonological or prosecutorial context, with tales of witch-on-witch abuse lessening, as opposed to increasing, the moral depravity of the exhumation act (particularly where, as in d’Abadie’s case, it was a preference). But when examined in the light of the confraternal obligation to organize and attend the burial of fellow cofrades, it makes new sense. From this perspective, we can read the following passage from the Joint Sentence as reflective of a false-confessional process in which suspects created witch-on-witch exhumation-narratives by inverting their memories of real-life experiences in which, as confraternal members, they had attended the burials of fellow cofrades (with the body being lowered into the grave by the ‘closest members of the deceased’). In this context, the reference to ‘victims’ tagged onto the end of the passage, merely reflects interrogatorial attempts to divert the confessional narrative into something more relevant to maleficium.

And whenever a witch dies, the Devil forewarns all the old witches who have reached the rank at which they can make poisons, and before they go to the akelarre they meet at the home of a certain person, a witch who they name, with the Devil and his servants, and taking hoes with them they go to the cemetery of the church where s/he is buried. And the Devil’s servants dig the grave where s/he was buried with the hoes until they uncover the body, and then the closest blood relatives of the deceased witch take the body from the grave . . . and in the same way they have disinterred, dismembered and eaten all the bodies of the witches who have died in the last fifty to sixty years from now in which they have been witches, as well as children, men and women that the witches themselves have killed and many of the other deceased . . .¹⁴ [my italics]

Contemporary evidence that confraternal obligations, post-death, could sometimes extend to secondary burial, makes these narrative parallels between the mortuary activities of the confraternity and those of the Basque witch cult even more striking. Although it is hard to establish how often and in what way exhumations were undertaken in the confraternal context, if suspects had been drawing on genuine memories of the ritual exhumation of cofrades then this passage from the Joint Sentence would have required no imaginative inversion at all.¹⁵

Money and Alms-Giving

Witch cult members reported that a range of monetary exchanges took place both at and outside the akelarre, including the extraction of fines for non-attendance; alms collection at the sabbath-mass; the gifting of money (by the Devil to the witches) at the pact-ceremonies; and the distribution of funds to help witches escape prosecution. We have already contextualized fines for non-attendance at the sabbath within the confraternal template but these other forms of monetary transaction are also relevant here. The suspects’ report that alms were collected at mass by a sabbath queen who held ‘the offering vessel’, echoes the fact that – at both confraternal and ordinary masses – officials were required to collect alms, with Douglas noting that even as late as the twentieth century in Murelaga ‘each cofradía has a mayordomo, who is selected from a list of the membership on the basis of strict rotation. The person must stand at the back of the church during the Sunday High Mass to collect alms for the association.’ Similarly the assertions from many witch cult members that money changed hands at the pact-ceremonies, reflects the evidence that confraternal novices (or their families) paid ‘entry fees’ at initiation and that many confraternities then ‘made a practice of dividing half the entry fees of new members among the rest of the cofrades to encourage attendance at initiation ceremonies’. More general parallels can also be traced between the Devil’s financial largesse and the fact that confraternal members ‘distributed corporate revenue among themselves on special occasions, hoping to invigorate communal morale’ and that ‘collective distributions of money were also common at burials’.¹⁶ Finally, suspects’ claims that sabbath-mass alms were used to secure them against prosecution are also suggestive here. Jeannette d’Abadie maintained that the man who collected alms at the sabbath ‘carries the coins into his house to protect witches against all kinds of accusations, and to aid them in all matters concerning witchcraft’; and de Lancre that ‘the person who collects [the alms], sometimes Satan himself, announces in a loud voice to the whole assembly that this money is to be used for the trials, for the witches, to support them against those who pursue them in order to bring them to the stake.’ While these declarations have no obvious links to demonological witch cult stereotypes, they accurately mirror the fact that for the confraternity, one of the primary reasons for collecting alms was so that it could then distribute the money to its members in time of need. Given the importance of salvation, the foremost confraternal expense was that of mortuary rituals, but money was also spent to meet the needs of the living, such as purchasing medicines or food in times of sickness or scarcity.¹⁷ In this context, witch suspects’ assertions that the alms were being used to protect them against prosecution accurately mirror this confraternal principle.

Ritual and Practical Aid

Witch cult members maintained that one of their core cultic activities was the performance of crop and body-maleficium, with members going in groups and processions to raise storms and scatter toxic powders on crops or creep into houses to kill young children through vampirism or the application of poison. We have argued, earlier in the book, that in fleshing out these accounts the suspects recalled their experiences of communal crop-protecting rituals and practical self-help strategies, such the scattering of pesticides or the use of bloodletting and medical preparations to heal the sick. It is therefore relevant in the present context that when contemporary Basques engaged in these types of activities, they were highly likely to have done so through the vehicle of the confraternity. Although heavily focused on mortuary aid post-death, confraternal members were also obligated to provide each other with both practical and ritual assistance during life. As noted in the previous section, this assistance could take the form of monetary support. But the sources also indicate that if a cofrade found his crops being threatened by bad weather or pests he could also expect his confraternal colleagues to convene to perform masses and processions to solicit supernatural aid. Similarly, if he became sick he could expect his fellow cofrades to provide medicines or bedside care and resolve his outstanding business, such as harvesting his crops or providing food and financial help to his family. Indeed, members of richer confraternities could even work in hospitals or set up their own sanctuaries, from which they could provide nursing care and access to apothecaries and medical practitioners for both fellow cofrades and the wider community.¹⁸ While we have no evidence to this effect, it is worth noting that it would have been wholly rational in this context for confraternal members to also commission and attend liturgical cursing rituals to protect themselves or their fellow members from external threats.

That the witches frequently asked the Devil for help before performing their acts of maleficium and that the Devil was obliged through the terms of the akelarre-pact to assist them, can also be rationalized within the confraternal context. The relationship between religious confraternities and their spiritual patrons was a contractual one, in which cofrades made oaths of allegiance and performed certain devotions to the patron in return for his or her spiritual assistance in times of need. Indeed, even the fact that the Devil’s assistance often came at the expense of – or involved direct aggression towards – the wider community, has parallels with confraternal templates, in that the spiritual patron’s help was always inherently biased toward his or her contracted cofrades. This partisanship emerged clearly in a contemporary report about a confraternity dedicated to Augustine – one of the saints believed to possess locust-deterring skills. The account, which comes from sixteenth-century Castile, states that ‘it happened that a brother of this brotherhood [of St Augustine] had a grain field between two fields of others who were not brothers, and the two adjacent fields were totally ravaged, but no harm was done to the field between them that belonged to the brother.’ This narrative bears a distinct morphological similarity to the Basque witch cult’s claim that when they threw powders on the orchards to ‘produce hail’ they chanted ‘powders, powders, help our people and dismiss others.’¹⁹ In helping ‘our people’ – that is, the witches – the Devil behaved no differently from a confraternal patron who specifically chose to provide spiritual assistance, selectively and contractually, to his personal devotees.

Festivities

Finally, witch cult members declared that while the performance of both ritual and maleficium was crucial, one of the most important shared experiences of cultic membership was the feasting, dancing and music enjoyed at the akelarre. Similar festivities were an important part of the confraternal experience, with cofrades gathering together on the days sacred to their supernatural patron and other holy days in the Catholic calendar to enjoy feasts, processions and dances. Silanes Susaeta states that on days sacred to its patron saint, the Navarrese confraternity of San Gregorio de la Berrueza concluded its meetings with festive meals where it provided ‘out of its own budget, bread, wine, logs, garlic, onions, cheese, eggs and vinegar among other necessary ingredients to prepare the meal while members had to bring the meat and the fish.’ Like witch cult members, cofrades held their celebrations at a range of venues, often meeting at night and outside the community precincts, with festivities commonly celebrated at shrines dedicated to their patron saints. Like the akelarre, confraternal meetings often roused the ire of the local Church, with Flynn noting in regard to Spain that ‘confraternal festivities were frequently the occasion for rowdy dancing and brawling in the streets’, and that in 1534 at the Cortes of Madrid, local officials complained that ‘the kingdom is full of confraternities, and they spend in eating and drinking whatever they possess’.²⁰ As we shall explore in more detail later in this chapter, the festivities enjoyed by both Basque witch cults and religious confraternities could also include theatrical display.

Occupational Confraternities

While the parallels between the Basque witch cult and the religious confraternity are remarkable, before we analyse their implications further we also need to examine the latter’s occupational variant. The ‘occupational confraternity’, as it is often termed, evoked the religious in that its members were bound together by ritual identity and obligations of mutual aid – but unlike the latter its membership was almost exclusively male and its core focus was the advancement of the professional and economic interests of its members, who typically comprised of ‘workers and artisans interested in monopolizing their trade or craft and protecting themselves from external competition.’ The desire to protect and maintain their skills base and trading status meant that occupational confraternities placed a strong emphasis on both secrecy and kinship, with professional skills often being passed down between family members. Like their religious counterparts, occupational confraternities had a liturgical component, being typically dedicated to the saint who specialized in the craft or activity to which the brotherhood was devoted and performing rituals and masses in their honour. This focus, when combined with the fact that their mutual-aid programme often covered mortuary rites and other more domestic matters, meant that occupational confraternities overlapped considerably with their religious counterparts. Although the larger, well-documented urban confraternities (widely defined as ‘trade guilds’) have historically attracted the most scholarly attention, occupational confraternities were also widespread among the poor and those who lived in rural communities, with Flynn noting that in early modern Zamora ‘artisans formed small confraternities of 20 to 30 people that served as modest mutual aid groups for members whose meager incomes left them frequently in need of financial assistance.’²¹

Before we go on to analyse the occupational confraternity in the Basque context, it is also important to note that although predominantly associated with artisanal and manual labour, the occupational confraternity also made a strong contribution to contemporary theatre. These contributions could be largely processional, with the cofradías of sixteenth-century Seville ‘carrying banners and candles and [being] accompanied by small groups of musicians’ during the Corpus Christi festivities. But they could also be more elaborate. In Chapters Seventeen and Nineteen we observed that contemporary theatrical performances were predominantly organized by community members who came together in groups in order to devise, finance and perform plays and other dramaturgical events. But what we have not emphasized until now is that these groups were, to all intents and purposes, confraternities. In many cases, the theatricals were an expression and advertisement of the group’s wider occupational focus. Urban guilds, for example, would typically subsidize or organize the performance of religious plays linked to their occupational or devotional purpose, with the baker’s guild dramatizing the Last Supper or the shipwrights’ guild performing Noah’s Ark and so on. In other cases, the confraternity more closely resembled a modern theatre group in the sense that the dramatic performance was largely, or even exclusively, the reason that it had formed in the first place. The youth abbeys or festive societies that devised and performed boy bishop celebrations, charivaris and masquerades, as described in our analysis of misrule festivities in Chapter Nineteen were, in effect, groups of young people who had organized themselves into theatrical confraternities.²²

Occupational Confraternities: The Basque Context

As in most parts of Europe, occupational confraternities were popular in the Basque regions through the medieval and early modern period. We have already seen that in the early-seventeenth century, the bishop of Pamplona ensured that on the Feast of Corpus Christi ‘all the different crafts with their guild banners participated in the magnificent procession’ through streets decorated with carpets and triumphal arches. The diversity and range of occupational confraternities that were likely to have been represented at this event is suggested by an account of an earlier Corpus Christi procession that took place in Bayonne at the end of the fourteenth century, where alongside the religious confraternities there marched

guilds of sack makers, makers of lance shafts, pot makers, weavers, gilders, barmen, barrel transporters, ox drivers, makers of leather aprons and heavy wool coats, oven makers, millers, barbers, grape growers, lathe operators, boatmen, passengers, furriers, shoemakers, boatmen from Sordes and Mont-de-Marsan, bricklayers, saltwater fishermen, freshwater fishermen, house carpenters, fishmongers from the port, pharmacists, haberdashers, coopers, rope makers, ship carpenters, seamen, town councillors, and clergy.²³

Given that the majority of our Basque witches came from the rural poor, it is the non-urban confraternities that interest us here – but these are precisely the category for which we have the least recorded information. Nevertheless, the few early modern sources that do exist, when taken in conjunction with later sources, enable us to gain some insights into these little-known structures. Rural occupational confraternities were clearly designed to protect the material interests of their members. Silanes Susaeta states that in 1601, a cofradía de Ligallo [herd-keepers or owners] from the Roncal Valley approved a series of new ordinances that included the ruling that ‘any inhabitant or dweller in the valley owning 200 sheep (or goats) or 20 or 30 cows must join the cofradía and comply with the regulations or risk a fine’. These ordinances also ruled to prevent irregularities in the sale of animals, protect against the spread of disease, regulate the duties of salaried shepherds and their employers, protect owners against stolen or lost animals, and calendar general meetings for all members on the second Saturday of every month. The efficiency and popularity of these structures is indicated in Veyrin’s observation that, well into the twentieth century, brotherhoods that acted ‘in the form of small mutual insurance societies that provide protection against illness and the death of livestock’ could be found across many Basque regions.²⁴

The evidence also suggests that these confraternities enjoyed both complex initiation ceremonies and rigorous novitiates. The shepherding and cheese-making confraternity from the Souletin village of Sainte-Engrâce – examined by anthropologist Sandra Ott in the 1970s but believed to have survived ‘in attenuated form’ since at least the sixteenth century – was specifically designed to prevent conflict with near neighbours and enhance production through the reciprocal sharing of pasture, labour and milk yields. The confraternity, termed the olha, was exclusively male and organized into a strict hierarchy with the ‘master shepherd’ at its head. Membership began at ten or twelve when boys first journeyed to the mountains with their father or another male relative to learn the shepherding trade. During these early years, the apprentice shepherd was ‘obliged to participate in several initiation rites’ in which he was ‘harassed and humiliated by the adult members of the olha’ until, after the requisite amount of time, his ‘newly acquired status as a fully-fledged olha member is formally and publicly confirmed when he attends his first annual meeting of the syndicate (artzanide), at which the shepherds renew their pact as friends and partners obliged to assist each other and co-operate.’ In many confraternities, confidentiality also appears to have been an important condition of membership, with Caro Baroja noting that from at least the fifteenth century the teams of Basque stonemasons that migrated to find work (and were typically composed of men from the same region or family) each ‘formed an association of a very particular type that was characterized – above all – by its secrecy.’²⁵

The evidence also suggests that despite their utilitarian emphasis, these rural occupational confraternities could also indulge in theatrical public display. From the sixteenth century and perhaps earlier, the coastal village of Lekeitio boasted a vibrant fishing confraternity, dedicated to Saint Peter. Presided over by an elected mayordomo and two officials termed señeros, the confraternity was primarily concerned with preserving the livelihoods of local fishermen through watchtower signalling, voyage-planning and the overseeing of fish auctions etc. It also provided assistance if a member was sick or dying, with Douglass noting that ‘in the event of the death of a member, all of the others were to come to his house to accompany the corpse to the church and also to lend comfort to the deceased’s closest relatives.’²⁶ On the feast day of its patron, St Peter, the confraternal members engaged in elaborate theatrical rituals and festivities that clearly had a significant impact on the whole village. In the following account, written in the eighteenth century about events in the seventeenth, the author notes that:

The Mayordomos spend a great deal of money on Saint Peter’s Day and the following days, but it is money well spent in honour of such a great patron . . . On the saint’s day, a relic of Saint Andrew is brought out from its altar and paraded inside the church, the Mayordomos kiss the hand, as the regiment of the Confraternity did before. At High Mass there is a sermon, and afterwards there is a handsome dance in the square. In the evening there is just a merry feast and the next day Mass is held for the seafaring dead, and then the Confraternity do the Sword Dance with tambors to the Casilla de la Atalaya [watchtower] where the new Mayordomos are selected. From time immemorial until the year 1690, from the house of the eldest Mayordomo, where the famous ark of Saint Peter was, came the Sword Dance, with the ark on some boys’ shoulders, and on top of it the statue of Saint Peter which is now carried in procession, followed by three seamen in masks and red velvet copes, all of them of good double-layer fabric, their crowns like a mitre on their heads. The one in the middle carried a large gilded silver key and those on either side carried large golden sceptres. Behind them, the regiment of the Confraternity followed them with a flag and a large retinue. They walked through all of the streets, and [to the?] naza [creel?], where it is said the ceremony is held in which Saint Peter is cast out to sea, asking if he would give them good fishing, and someone would answer yes on his behalf. In this way they went to the house of the eldest of the new Mayordomos where they handed over the chest as a symbol of holding the post, and they ate and drank to their satisfaction. Then, like now, they came to the town hall and, also like now, they held a good bullock and small bull fight, and then they offer dances to the nearby towns, and of the Dezmatorio. Every afternoon and night there were mummeries and masquerades, and the finale was to throw water on the people, particularly the young girls, which the Law was unable to stop even with punishments until just a few years ago, and a great scandal and serious disagreements ensued. On the second day of July, day of Our Lady, after the Rosary procession, the new Mayordomos and all of the adherents to the feast hold, as they do now, another identical bullfight. Preparations were made for this feast, held on the evening of Saint John the Baptist as the sun went down; the Ecclesiastic Chapter and the two Regiments would go to the walnut trees of Auria, and the dance would begin there, and behind it marched the Chapter with manteos and caps, and the two regiments in formation to the table, and from here to the square.²⁷

The Witch Cult’s ‘Occupation’

At first glance, there appears to be little reason to examine the Basque witch-cult in this ‘occupational’ context. While it displays many of the ritual and festive obligations that these confraternities shared with their religious counterparts, the witch cult is not overtly linked to any trade or profession and, unlike the overwhelming majority of occupational confraternities, is composed largely of women. But this comparison is worth pursuing – on the simple premise that in Chapters Six to Eight we did identify an occupational dimension to the Basque witch cult activities. We observed that a considerable proportion of the interaction between suspects was concerned with the collection and processing of ingredients to make poisons that were then used to either perform maleficium or sell at market. We also observed that this production operated through a division of labour and sharing of equipment and was informed by a knowledge hierarchy, with senior witches overseeing the process and younger witches being given poison-making instruction on initiation or when they reached the requisite age. Taking these factors together, we then concluded that in creating these accounts, the Basque suspects may have been drawing on collective medicine-making practices – with the novitiate system, in particular, reflecting the caution and expertise necessary to make medicines out of toxic herbs and venoms. Through the lens developed in the present chapter, this conclusion is remarkably close, in morphological terms, to the occupational confraternity; making it relatively easy to take these arguments one step further and speculate that when the Basque witches mined their experiences of collective medicine making and selling, they mined them as experienced through the vehicle of the occupational confraternity.

Such a thesis would gain little support from historical studies of the period. Contemporary medicine-production was certainly safeguarded by confraternal structures, with the records indicating that urban apothecaries, along with barber-surgeons and physicians, were trained and supported by large and powerful guilds. In late-fifteenth century Pamplona, for example, the interests of the city’s doctors, surgeons and apothecaries were protected by the confraternity of San Cosme y San Damián. But these organisations do not appear, at first glance, to be relevant to the activities of our Basque witches. As with most occupational confraternities, apothecarial guilds were almost exclusively male, and although female kin could sometimes participate in confraternal ceremonies, they were generally denied proper membership, even where they clearly possessed skill.²⁸ While there is some evidence that groups of women could organize themselves into occupational confraternities in the early modern period (with female seamstresses founding associations in cities like Rouen and Paris and some women-only religious confraternities being responsible for the pharmaceutical arm of large hospitals), the evidence is scarce and relates largely to urban centres.²⁹ But having said all this, simple logic dictates that we should not assume that the rural women who were involved in small-scale manufacture and trade did not also employ elements of the confraternal model to enhance and safeguard their operations. Even if organized quite informally, such structures would certainly have increased the efficiency of the communal-medicine making strategies outlined in Chapter Six; enhancing women’s ability to safeguard recipes and processing secrets, assure quality control and maximize productivity through the sharing of knowledge, labour and equipment. Semi-formalized apprenticeship systems would also have helped facilitate the proper transmission of skills and the inherent protectionism of the confraternal structure would have ensured that the locally made medicines retained their value, whether as a source of finance (through being sold); a form of soft power (with the ability to distribute medicines being a form of social currency); or simply as materials for personal use that came with some form of quality assurance. This hypothesis requires more evidence before it can be seriously entertained. But as we have seen, recent scholarship has clearly revealed that early modern women were highly capable of devising and running effective religious confraternities. And from this vantage point, it is not unreasonable to speculate that if seventeenth-century Basque husbands organized themselves into confraternities in order to maximize their abilities to raise livestock, catch fish and make cheese – then their wives may have organized themselves into confraternity-like groups to maximize their abilities to manufacture and distribute medicines.

‘An Oath with a Toad’

Other links to confraternal structures can be found in the unlikely figure of the toad. In the Spanish records, the suspects commonly stated that when older witches and the Devil tried to entice them into the witch cult they gave them one of the amphibians as a gift. This donation could occur informally in a domestic context, with the suspect merely encouraged to hold a toad, as in María de Yriarte’s claim that her mother told her that in order ‘to become a witch she would have to hold “the filthy thing [toad]” in her hand’. Alternatively, the gifting could take place more formally as part of the akelarre ceremony, where the amphibian was an initiatory present associated with the ritual pact. With regard to the latter, the most elaborate account is found in the Zozaya Sentence:

And for each youngster when they apostatized the Devil gave her [the mistress] a toad and she had a duty to sustain and look after it and draw the water from it and take the apprentices to the akelarre and each one had to accompany their toad. And when they were grown up at twenty-two or twenty-three years old, especially if they had a great deal of malevolence and a mind for villainy, the Devil ordered their toad to be given to them and that . . . until then they are not to have malevolence nor do they inflict any harm or damage nor do they know more than they would if they were not witches. And after they are given the toads they are allowed to make poisons and [let in on] the Devil’s secrets and [admitted to] the company of the senior witches, although among them they have higher or lower ranks and the Devil blesses them and from then on they are consummated witches.³⁰

We have already provided several explanations for the theme of the gifted toad, both in its formal and informal contexts. In Chapter Six, we argued that it could have reflected the likelihood that when they were deemed old enough, young women were required to master the unpleasant task of handling, skinning and milking toads in order to process them into medicines. In Chapter Ten, we argued that it may have been rooted in contemporary magico-medical practices in which toads or frogs were licked, held or worn close to the body as a form of healing or protection from disease. In Chapter Eleven we suggested that it may have been inspired by the fact in witchcraft belief, the toad was not just a magico-medical ingredient, but possessed a symbolic and ritual value linked to initiation, with the theme of touching or ‘taking’ toads after having apostatized emerging over sixty years before the witch-craze in trials from 1540 and also being hinted at in 1577.³¹

It is this last theory that is most significant in the confraternal context. The Zugarramurdi account reproduced above, states that after novice witches are given toads they are not only admitted to the ‘company of senior witches’ and ‘allowed to make poisons’, but are also initiated into ‘the Devil’s secrets’ – with the latter statement implying that through this rite the novice gains some form of occult or magical knowledge and power in addition to practical pharmaceutical skills. We find a similar distinction in de Lancre’s allegation that ‘it is very certain that a female witch, confirmed as such in all respects, sees, discovers, and recognizes these things that concern only witches, things that cannot be seen by those who do not take an oath with a toad.’ While these references to occult knowledge could represent attempts by the interrogators to exaggerate the spiritual threats posed by the Basque witch cult, they do have some parallels with confraternal activities. Over the past fifty years, research has demonstrated that in a range of locations in early modern Europe, popular magical healing skills were acquired and executed through membership of a specific society or group. Many of these groups – such as the Italian benandanti and Sicilian donas de fuera – have courted dispute as to how far their identities and rituals were articulated through dreams or real events and how far they represented the survival of pagan belief. But there is little doubt that by the sixteenth century these magical societies were structurally-based on confraternal templates, with meetings, mutual obligations, initiation ceremonies and vows of secrecy serving to protect the transmission and performance of magical skills, including that of healing. In the following summary by Henningsen, pertaining to the confessions of a Sicilian dona de fuera in the 1630s, we find a clear evocation of the diverse confraternal identities that underpinned parish life throughout Catholic Europe in this period.

Vicencia Rosa from Noto on the south-east coast [of Sicily] related that there were no less than five ‘companies’ in her town: ‘The Company of the Noble’, three companies of the ordinary people, and the ‘Company of the Poor’, to which she herself belonged. The same woman described how ‘in the month of March they assembled with many other [companies] from various regions in a wood full of trees, and that their prince did not wish them to do evil things, but to heal’.³²

To my knowledge, magical healing cults of this intensely folkloric kind have not been identified with any certainty in France or Spain in this period, but it is notable that echoes of confraternal templates do emerge in relation to magical healing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources. Matthew Ramsey maintains that in pre-modern France (circa 1770–1830) healing could be a divine gift acquired by birth, but it could also be a ‘secret’ knowledge that was often ‘transmitted to the eldest child, or from father to son and mother to daughter (though sometimes to alternate genders)’ through ritual means. These traditions, in which magical healers passed on their knowledge in a ritual context and in an environment where skills were shared and protected by a select group of people in conditions of secrecy, clearly evoke the structures of the confraternal matrix, with Ramsey stating that:

The transmission of secrets involved more than imparting knowledge. It was an initiation, often marked by a little ritual, sealed by a kiss or a handshake; the neophyte swore to observe certain rules and maintain the tradition of which he was now a part. (In some places, social conventions dictated the terms of the ceremony; in contemporary Corsica, the ritual takes place at midnight on Christmas eve, often in a specially laid out magical square.) The initiate in effect joined a confraternity.³³ [my italics]

With regard to the Basque gifted toads, it is also notable that in addition to intimating confraternal structures, these matrices also point to the popularity of initiatory rites involving small animals. Ramsey reports, for example, that in pre-modern France ‘the source of the [healing] gift was often an animal with an ancient place in pagan medical lore’; with the gift for ‘conjuring viper venom’ being ‘acquired by staring at the first viper met during the year and saying, “le bel oiseau, qu’il est beau” (how beautiful is the beautiful bird).’ He also points to sources in which novices do not only gain magical power by staring at an animal, but also by killing it, with records from the Bocage stating that the initiate ‘might go on the morning of the Feast of St John the Baptist to find a certain cotton-like excrescence that appears on the dog rose and crush the “worm” that it contains between thumb and index finger. These two digits would then have the power, for a year, of curing ailing teeth.’ While this ritual involved crushing an animal, others could involve asphyxiation, with Ramsey noting that a ‘common procedure was to strangle a certain animal – a snake, a toad, or (most often) a mole.’ Of particular interest, given the links drawn between the Basque dressed toad and the use of cloth wrappings or bags in early modern medicine, is that the suffocation rite could involve similar materials. Ramsey states that:

The future operator had to suffocate one or more moles under specified conditions. The mole must be enclosed in a small linen sac or in the child’s swaddling clothes; or the child must crush it ‘before the age of understanding,’ before weaning, before eating soup with grease, or before losing his virginity. In Berry, the technique was said to work only for laboureux who were the sons of laboureux (usually the third generation). One version required the child to strangle seven moles and eat their grease; in Maine a young man – who had to be a virgin – took a live mole, opened its belly, and immersed his fingers for one night [to gain healing skills].³⁴

Significantly, the French sources reveal that the animal involved could sometimes be a toad, with Ramsey also noting that:

At the beginning of the present [nineteenth] century, for example, Liniéres Bouton (Maine-et-Loire) had a healer for colic (an old woman who was said to have empowered her hands to cure by suffocating a toad while still young enough to be nursing from a bottle) and others for snakebite, darter, and burns.³⁵

These rites, in which the novitiate handles – and sometimes kills – an animal with symbolic value in order to acquire magical powers, possess a clear morphological similarity to Basque accounts where novice witches are gifted toad familiars in order to acquire knowledge of ‘the Devil’s secrets’, with the comparison being particularly fine in relation to those instances, emphasized in Chapter Eight, where the Devil’s secrets were used to heal. That toads could be gifted by family members, as in María de Yriarte’s account, also reflects the emphasis that popular magical practitioners placed on the transferral of occult knowledge between kin. The value of this thesis is further demonstrated by its ability to add welcome rationale to the accounts of toad-based initiations that emerged in earlier trial material. We can now see shades of popular rites designed to facilitate the transferral of magical healing skills in the declarations – made by a number of suspects in 1540 – that witches sought to initiate novices by ‘taking out a toad with a string tied to its leg’ and making them ‘touch it with their hand, touching the people they told to do this with the toad, all over their face, chest, legs and body, and making them kiss and flay toads’.³⁶ Similar rationales can be imputed to the assertions, from Burgui suspects nearly thirty years later, that renunciations of God were performed at meetings where they were also taught how to kill and skin toads before cooking and eating their ‘black’ meat.³⁷ This short analysis does not provide enough evidence to argue that confraternal structures through which magical healing skills were passed down between generations via initiatory rituals involving toads, existed in the Basque regions in the period of the witch-craze. But it is sufficient to speculate that the emergence of gifted toads in the sabbath-pact accounts reflects the fact that, in contributing to these narratives, suspects utilized their knowledge of conventions surrounding the use of animals in the ritual transference of magical knowledge and skill, as they existed in popular Basque culture in the period.

The Confraternal Blueprint

In assessing the impact of confraternal experience on the Basque witch narratives, it is also important to remember that suspects’ contributions, in this regard, would have met with interrogatorial support. However well-versed in heretical cults they may have been, de Lancre, Valle and Becerra would have responded favourably to suspects’ evocations of confraternal experience because they too were familiar with the structure and activities of the confraternity. As we have seen, these organizations emerged on all levels of society in both lay and religious contexts and it is certain that de Lancre, Valle and Becerra would have been knowledgeable about confraternities and perhaps even members themselves. Being trained by Jesuits, de Lancre would have been well aware that the order’s founder, Basque nobleman Ignatius de Loyola, had been strongly committed to the use of confraternal structures to spread the Jesuit message, establishing large confraternities in the Basque regions before going on to found hundreds more in Italy. Meanwhile the Order of Alcántara to which Becerra belonged, had originally evolved, as did many other military-religious orders, out of a confraternity of knights.³⁸ This combined familiarity with confraternal templates could have created the perfect storm, with the suspects unconsciously mining their confraternal knowledge when answering questions about witches’ cults and the interrogators reinforcing these contributions by unconsciously mining their own knowledge of confraternal structures in response. So many of the life events that underpinned suspects’ accounts of witch cult activity – from public vows and memorial masses to festivities, misrule theatricals and crop-protecting rites – were likely to have been experienced in the context of confraternal membership that neither the suspects nor the interrogators would have found it difficult to reconfigure them into cultic templates; indeed, their confraternal context ensured that they were configured into these templates already. This mutual reinforcement would have served to create accounts of witch cult activity that were not only stereotypically coherent and structurally precise but also vivid, detailed and shot through with the immediacy and realism of personal experience.

This creative process would also have been facilitated by the collective awareness that both religious and occupational confraternities had an ambivalent relationship with Church and State. On the one hand, confraternities were valued by the authorities for fostering religious ideals and devotions and functioning as sorely needed social-support systems, with Counter Reformation movements, like the Jesuits, using them as highly effective vehicles through which to reinvigorate the Catholic faith, strengthen resistance to Protestantism and evangelize the New World. But on the other hand, confraternities were feared as alternative power structures that threatened Catholic institutions and devotional orthodoxy, with Terpstra noting that ‘attitudes of secular as well as religious authorities to confraternities were ambivalent. Such social groupings, bound by rules, [and] often by oaths of secrecy, could be seen as threats to regimes or excluded social groups.’ On a local level, tensions often emerged in relation to confraternal meetings, with Flynn stating that in Spain, ‘mutual love and joy created in an atmosphere of food and drink did not always coincide with law and order and the city council from time to time was forced to ban communal feasting in the interests of public peace’. Similarly, Silanes Susaeta states that in early modern Navarre,

collective meals were considered extremely important by confraternity members but not so by civil and ecclesiastic authorities who would frequently create obstacles in order to eliminate them. In 1631 the “mayordomos” and brothers of the Santa Lucia de Arazuri confraternity appealed to the ecclesiastic tribunal against an inspection mandate that forbade them to spend confraternity rents in brotherhood meals and instead ordered them to use the money to repair the hermitage. The brothers alleged that their confraternity would disappear if meals were cancelled and as a result the sentence of judgement resolved in their favour.

Similar tensions emerged around confraternal theatricals. With regard to the St Peter’s day celebrations of the fishermen’s confraternity in Lekeitio, Douglass records that:

By the early seventeenth century, the ritual was a source of considerable controversy between the fishermen and both the local religious authorities and the bishopric. On several occasions, the church tried to ban it, but it was held anyway, with or without the traditional participation of the local priests. It seems that the church viewed the ceremony as a profanity . . . ³⁹

We can even speculate that power struggles of this kind were implicated in the Zugarramurdi confessions that, as argued earlier, generated a description of the ‘rites and social organisation’ of the witch cult that ‘would be hard to equal in any other witch trial’. We argued in Chapter Four that the Zugarramurdi accusations may have been fuelled by tensions between the monastery and the local families, particularly the Goiburus, who fought to win further freedoms from monasterial jurisdiction in 1580; with the ‘jurado’ at this famous meeting – Miguel de Goiburu – also being designated ‘king’ of the Zugarramurdi sabbath. We have also noted in Chapter Ten that Miguel and his son Juanes worked as shepherds, with Miguel both owning his own flocks and working as a salaried shepherd for the monastery. If we now put confraternities into the mix, these facts take on a new dimension. It is highly likely that some of the Zugarramurdi villagers were members of a livestock-based confraternity similar to those that existed in the same period in the Roncal Valley or Sainte-Engrâce; a confraternity of San Antonio Abad (the patron saint of cattle, sheep and domestic animals) was certainly active in the village in 1771. We do not know the nature or extent of the monastery’s involvement in this speculated organization, but given that livestock-based confraternities evolved specifically to deal with potential tensions between different livestock owners and between these owners and their salaried shepherds and herders, it is highly likely that any Zugarramurdi confraternity of this kind would have been deeply implicated in the disputes between the monastery and the Goiburu family that, as Azurmendi has speculated, inflamed the 1608–9 witchcraft accusations. Indeed, if this confraternity had been biased toward protecting the livelihoods of the village shepherds, then it would have been all too easy for a situation to evolve in which a confrontation between a village confraternity and the local monastery evolved into a confrontation between a witches’ cult and the holy Catholic Church.⁴⁰

But why the Basques?

These confraternal arguments also have wider relevance. Given that confraternities had been important part of European social life since the early-medieval era, it is no surprise to discover that once we know what to look for, we find them intimated in a diverse range of witch-cult accounts from at least the early-fifteenth century, when the cultic stereotype first emerged. Given the strength of the association between confraternities and contemporary theatricals, this hypothesis is reinforced by our observations in Chapter Nineteen that many European sabbath accounts contain expressions of liturgical misrule, with direct links between confraternal and witch-cult templates clearly visible in the report that the ‘Master of Ceremonies’ at the 1460 Arras sabbath was simultaneously the master or ‘Abbot’ of a local confrérie joyeuse. Confraternal templates can also be identified in the accounts of the heretical cult activity with which these early witch cults were so closely associated; indeed, at its most fundamental, the heretical cult can be defined as merely a confraternity that adheres to spiritual doctrines and practices that transgress orthodox religious norms.⁴¹

But while there is no scope to explore these wider European correspondences here, they do raise a question about our Basque material that is too important to ignore. If confraternal structures were common in many parts of Europe throughout the witch-hunting period, then why did the cultic theme only rise to such exaggerated prominence in the Basque witch-craze? Why did other witch suspects in other parts of the continent not mine these materials to produce equally detailed and coherent accounts of the cultic template? We have produced some possible answers to this question already. It is surely coincidental, for example, that while we cannot use eighteenth-century statistics to draw conclusions about the seventeenth, the 1771 census analysed by Silanes Susaeta raises the distinct possibility that if you lived in some parts of the Basque country in the early modern centuries you were more likely to have been the member of a religious confraternity than if you lived anywhere else in Europe in this period. It is also coincidental, in this respect, that the lay autonomy and empowerment – and female agency – that fuelled the existence and popularity of confraternal structures were, as noted in earlier chapters, also marked features of Basque religious and social life.⁴² But while these explanations certainly help to explain why confraternal structures should have wielded so much power over the imaginations of witchcraft suspects from the Basque regions, they still do not explain why they should have so specifically done so during the 1609–14 trial phase. Given that the Basque laity had enjoyed a high degree of control over their religious lives and as a corollary of this, a high level of confraternal membership long before the early-seventeenth century, then why did these factors not encourage suspects to give such prominence to cultic structures in witchcraft trials that emerged prior to the witch-craze?

Once again, as with the akelarre-mass, the differential must lie with the interrogators. And once again, the strongest evidence points to de Lancre. Although the most detailed and coherent cultic templates emerge in the Logroño Sentences, the fact that the witch cult theme is strongly developed in de Lancre’s records raises the possibility that, as with the akelarre-mass, it originally arrived in Spain via Labourd. The circumstantial evidence certainly supports this thesis. We have argued that when de Lancre arrived in the region, his belief that witchcraft was ‘an illness and a disease that has infected an entire country’ was not only fuelled by encountering high levels of unorthodox practice – such as serora-led mortuary rituals, theatrical misrule, liturgical cursing and magical invocation – but also by his discovery that these practices were so enthusiastically embraced by Basque priests. Given our confraternal research, we can now extend this thesis to argue that for de Lancre, the impact of these findings was further intensified by his discovery that these unorthodox practices were not only embraced with enthusiasm by local priests but also by the range of religious and occupational confraternities that were so popular in the Basque regions in this period.

This does not mean that his responses, in this respect, would have been simplistic. De Lancre would have been perfectly capable of making distinctions between confraternal meetings and witches’ sabbaths, as did the Navarrese interrogators in 1576, who recorded that María de Belzunegui of Egózcue was accused of offering blacksmith Pedro de Olagüe a poisoned apple ‘during the gathering of the Brotherhood of Our Lady of Velate’ without identifying the gathering as any form of akelarre.⁴³ While we cannot rule out the possibility that de Lancre did sometimes simplistically reinterpret an account of a confraternal meeting as a witches’ sabbath, it is more likely that in most cases he was presented with accounts of cofrade activity that had been so broken down and filtered through the distorting lens of fiction, false memory or dream experience that their benign confraternal origins were hard to identify – particularly for a man with his degree of confirmation bias. Given that history so often turns on a point of personality, some of de Lancre’s character traits may also have been significant here. The accounts of the sabbath that emerge in the Tableau differ from their Spanish counterparts in that they vividly emphasize the pleasures of dancing and sexual activity and were primarily produced by young women. In Chapter Fifteen we argued that this emphasis may have reflected de Lancre’s particular attentiveness to female youth and beauty; an interest that, when combined with the suspects’ unusual candour, expressiveness and self-esteem, enabled him to elicit disarmingly open accounts of sexual activity from the young women of Labourd. But with regard to cultic templates, it may also be relevant that one of the most popular religious confraternities in early modern Spain, including the Basque country, was termed the ‘confraternity of the Rosary’, with Silanes Susaeta noting that in 1771 it was the single most popular confraternity in the Basque province of Navarre, with one such confraternity being recorded in nearly every town or village in the region, including both Urdax and Zugarramurdi. Like many others, the confraternity of the Rosary incorporated a wide range of both orthodox and unorthodox rituals and festivities that could include elements of sabbath-like misrule, with Kamen noting that ‘in 1518 there is a reference to the head of the confraternity of the Rosary in the cathedral of Urgell’ being ‘commonly known by the title of “the abbot of misrule”’. But of more significance here, with regard to the Labourdin confessions, is that this confraternity was highly popular with young women and that its ritual festivities revolved around dance. Kamen observes that in Catalonia in this period the Rosary tradition ‘had its own rich range of dances, called Danses del Roser but taking different forms according to the locality, and danced not only on feasts of the Virgin but also in Carnival.’ These dances, which could be combined with songs, were an excuse for high jinks, with Kamen again noting that:

In many communities the confraternity of the Rosary became the principal social organisation, but the Church frowned on the freedom that young women associated with membership. In the diocese of Solsona the women would go in groups playing rosary-drums (panderos) and begging for the confraternity. The bishop’s synod in 1629 ruled that the procedure was indecent ‘because they encounter dissolute people who give them pushes and address them with amatory, loving and flirtatious words . . . The charity that men give them is not charity but sensuality, they do not give money for the love of God and the Blessed Virgin but out of the love and pleasure they get from seeing and hearing the young girls.⁴⁴

We find echoes of this confraternal template in many descriptions of the akelarre elicited by de Lancre in Labourd. Its demographic can clearly be seen in his observation that many of the witch suspects are ‘girls and women, who are beautiful and young’ and that they often assert that ‘they only go to the sabbath to dance’. We also see the young cofrades of the Rosary progressing through the streets with their panderos around their necks in de Lancre’s claim that the suspects ‘dance to the sound of the tambourine and flute, sometimes to a small violin and, on occasion, to this long instrument that they place around their necks, stretching it until it reaches their waists; they beat it with a little stick.’ We hear echoes of the ‘freedom’ and ‘flirtatious’ pleasure of the rosary dances, and the childish impatience with which the young cofrades waited to experience them again, in suspects’ claims that they had such ‘fun’, ‘delicious merriment’ and ‘extraordinary pleasure and joy’ at the ‘[Devil’s] ball’ that they were filled with an ‘insatiable desire to go there and to be there, finding that the days were too distant from the night when they could undertake the voyage so eagerly awaited’. We see the cofrades gathering to embark on their long-awaited dances in seventeen-year-old María Dindarte’s claim that sometimes she ‘calls her neighbours and they all go there [to the akelarre] together’; and in de Lancre’s report that ‘witnesses assured us that at night during the summer there were ten or twelve of them [women] in the street, watching and walking together’ before going home to prepare for the evening akelarre.⁴⁵

Through these correspondences, we can speculate that the Labourdin interrogatorial arena provided the perfect conditions in which to generate the witch cult template. De Lancre’s conviction that he had stumbled across a culture completely infiltrated by cults of witches would have been reinforced by the fact that his fascination with youth and beauty brought him into close contact with a sector of Basque society in which cultic consciousness was particularly high. Once this contact was made, his questions were attentive and appreciative enough to provoke the young Labourdin girls to be disarmingly open about the confraternal experiences that were among the most intense and pleasurable of their young lives. Only through this lens can we understand why de Lancre’s bloody trail through the Labourd, on the hunt for the ‘diabolical and false sect of witches’, should have been punctuated with the strangely paternalistic – and not unaffectionate – attempt to

offer as advice to male and female witches, especially to the young girls who allow themselves to be led astray and become bewitched by this old billy-goat Satan, an excerpt from a very appropriate saying by Theocritus: ‘But listen, you nanny goats, do not go dancing, lest perchance the billy-goat chase after you.’ Young girls, do not jump and do not lose control and let this miserable billy-goat come after you.⁴⁶

Epilogue

The guiding purpose of this book has been to identify the voices of the accused in the Basque witch craze records and to assess what these voices can tell us about the witch prosecutions and the lives of the men and women who were swept up in them. As our analysis has progressed, it has become clear that although the records are the most demonologically stereotypical to have come down to us from Europe’s witch-hunting period, the voices of the suspects ring out loud and clear. While the interrogators directed testimony with leading questions and the suspects produced confessions that were, for the most part, constructed out of conscious or partially conscious fictions and unconsciously generated false memories and dreams – in responding to these questions and in creating these fictions the suspects drew on a range of personal belief and experience. It has also become clear that the suspects did not only contribute to confessional themes traditionally associated by historians with popular belief – such as vampirism, crop-maleficium and festive sabbaths – but also to themes more commonly associated with elite superimposition, such as feast-cannibalism and formal cultic ritual.

Arguably the most notable finding to emerge is the sheer range and complexity of personal belief and experience that suspects may have drawn into their testimony. We have argued that while the accused clearly mined witchcraft stereotypes circulating in the region prior to and during the witch-craze, they may have animated these themes with raw materials sourced from much wider and deeper lodes, from the prosaic and pragmatic to the exotic and fantastical. This analysis has not attempted to argue that any one, or any combination, of these experiences or beliefs was involved at any given time and in any specific narrative – the sources are too complex and contaminated for this. Nor has it attempted to analyse the psychological mechanisms that may have been employed to weave these elements into demonological form; the obscure manner in which memories and beliefs were drawn into fiction, false memory and dream and the ways in which these creative processes combined to construct the suspects’ false confessions are beyond this analysis. To take but one example. In Chapter Fourteen we argued that in contributing to their accounts of feast-cannibalism, the witch suspects could have fleshed out circulating demonological stereotypes by mining beliefs and experiences concerning the cannibalistic feasts of heretics and lepers, predatory spirit-groups, child-eating ogres, anthropophagic hell demons, ‘man-munching’ Amerindians, cannibalistic sailors and citizens under siege, exhumation and funerary rituals, the practice of corpse medicine, the celebration of the Eucharist and the dismemberment or desecration of the Christ Child in the Host. In these cases, every witch suspect would have walked into the interrogation chamber with his or her own unique character and life experience and would have used a range of psychological processes to mine one or more of these imaginal raw materials in any combination depending on whatever was, at the moment of construction, most accessible to their conscious or unconscious mind.

In large part, this analytic process has demanded a broad-brush approach through which a diverse range of potentially relevant raw materials have been brought together in order to generally contextualize the suspects’ confessions as opposed to offering anything more precise. But nevertheless, on occasion this scattergun approach has produced some surprisingly exact theses – providing viable explanations for some of the more exotic and controversial confessional elements resistant to other forms of analysis. Through this means, for example, we have been able to demonstrate how anomalies like the graphically clinical vampiric attacks, the milking of dressed toads and the parodic inversions of the akelarre-mass are not wholly attributable to the fevered imaginations of interrogators but also to the everyday experiences of Basque peasant life.

The Prosecutions

This investigation has also deepened our understanding as to how the 1609–14 Basque witch-prosecutions escalated with such speed and ferocity into one of the largest and most sensational witch-crazes to take place in early modern Europe. It supports the consensus view that this escalation was due to an incendiary combination of zealous prosecutors, torture, the robust dissemination of propaganda, a high proportion of child witnesses and the coercive persuasions of the Edict of Grace. But it also places a new emphasis on the role played by co-authorship. While confirming that the demonological stereotypes that emerged so vividly in the Basque confessions were superimposed by the interrogating elites, this investigation also suggests that this superimposition was successful because these stereotypes resonated so strongly with the preoccupations and activities that informed the suspects’ day to day lives. Every individual living in the Basque region in this period, however unimaginative they may have been, would have been able to respond emotionally to the crimes being described to them by interrogators because they evoked so many levels of their own belief and experience. The creation of fictions, false memories and dreams about stereotypically demonological themes would have been all the easier because both witnesses and suspects had such a wealth of relevant raw material with which to generate them.

This search for the voices of the accused has also given us a more specific insight into the role of the interrogators that orchestrated the persecutions. Since the publication of Henningsen’s Witches’ Advocate, scholars have praised the role of the sceptical, rational and enlightened Alonso de Salazar Frías while leaving the character and actions of the other interrogators – Pierre de Lancre, Juan de Valle Alvarado and Alonso Becerra Holguín – more open to censure. The censure remains, but it has to be said that these three interrogators do come out of these investigations a little better than might have been expected. These analyses have indeed provided evidence of confirmation bias so strong that the interrogators chose to ignore the evidence of retraction and dream experience that were to Salazar, so indicative of false confession. Nor have we been able to completely absolve them of any personal predilection to sadism or lack of empathy. But the discovery that the Basque suspects are likely to have contributed such a wealth of convincing material to flesh out the stereotypical narratives that were projected onto them, helps us to understand why the three interrogators could have so fervently believed that they were truly guilty of the crimes they described.

These analyses also reinforce and develop the view, long-noted by scholars, that these interrogatorial assumptions were fuelled by cultural differences. Most of the witchcraft trials that took place in medieval and early modern Europe, whether conducted by secular or ecclesiastical courts, had to grapple with the inevitable perceptual gulfs arising from the fact that suspects were more likely to be poor and unschooled and prosecutors were more likely to be educated and of higher social status. But our investigations confirm that in the Basque witch-craze, this gulf was particularly acute. The interrogators were highly literate, religiously orthodox men who were mixing with (in de Lancre’s case) intellectuals and jurists who were spearheading the French Counter Reformation and (in Valle’s case) inquisitorial officials who were at the vanguard of Counter Reformation efforts in Spain. The suspects, conversely, were mostly unlettered peasants who practised a distinctly magical and folkloric form of Christianity and spent their lives working in baserri kitchens and barns or tending crops and herding livestock in mountain pastures. We have emphasized that these socioeconomic differences were then further polarized by the fact that, in not being Basque, the interrogators were to all extents and purposes foreigners who spoke a different language and had a different racial and cultural identity to the men and women they were questioning. These differences were then exacerbated yet again by the fact that centuries of linguistic isolation and geographic inaccessibility had seen the Basques develop some unique and idiosyncratic traditions that – when further distanced from French and Spanish norms through the distortions of false confession and inaccurate or biased translation – were particularly vulnerable to misinterpretation and demonological projection.

We have also identified the seminal role played in the escalation of the Basque witch-craze, by a number of the interrogators involved. We have noted that the monks from the monastery of San Salvador de Urdax, who questioned the first Zugarramurdi suspects before they came before the Inquisition at Logroño, may have been instrumental here. It has been argued that the uniquely sophisticated accounts of body-maleficium, poison-making, feast-cannibalism and formal cultic ritual recorded in the Joint Sentence may have reflected a range of monasterial activities and preoccupations that included bloodletting at the monastery hospital, treating and exorcizing those that were possessed or bewitched, training priests in the performance of ecclesiastical duties, instructing and caring for pilgrims travelling the Camino de Santiago and prioritizing their vocational focus, as Premonstratensian monks, on liturgical precision and the sacrament of the Eucharist. We have also argued that the voices of the Zugarramurdi suspects then received further amplification on reaching the Spanish Inquisitors, Becerra and Valle. While these men may not have been as familiar with demonological works as many of their contemporaries, as servants of the Spanish Inquisition they were heavily preoccupied with the threats posed by heresy, both in the form of Protestantism (which nipped at the edges of the Basque region from its stronghold in the province of Béarn) and in the remnants of Islam and Judaism that lingered among the moriscos and conversos of Spain. We have even speculated, though here much more cautiously, that for geographical reasons some of the free spirit heresies that flourished in the Iberian peninsula in the early modern centuries may have impacted with particular intensity on Valle and Becerra during their formative childhood years. But perhaps the most interesting factor to have emerged here is that Valle’s conviction – in the face of persistent scepticism from la Suprema – that the Basque witch cult was not an imaginary construct but a ‘real’ organization specifically dedicated to worshipping the Devil, may have been fuelled by the fact that before arriving in Logroño he had spent many years working as confidential secretary to Juan Bautista de Acevedo: bishop of Valladolid, ‘Patriarch of the Indies’ and inquisitor general of Spain. Through this employment, we have argued, he may not only have been exposed to the Church’s efforts to combat Iberian heresy at the highest level, but also to its battles to combat the very ‘real’ Devil worship taking place across the Atlantic in the New World.

But the interrogator that emerges as most decisive in the escalation of the Basque witch-craze was the French jurist from Bordeaux, Pierre de Lancre. Time and again, we have argued that it was de Lancre who was responsible for germinating the demonological themes that rose to such prominence in the witch-craze, with the akelarre orgies, akelarre-mass and the thematic prominence of the witch cult all developing their first character and intensity during his Labourd investigations. We have identified many possible reasons for this. We have noted the strength of de Lancre’s Counter Reformation zeal, fuelled by his upbringing in the Bordeaux region that was, during his childhood, one of the core battlegrounds of the French Wars of Religion. We have argued that his commitment was further sharpened by a more personal crusade to make his mark in the battle against heretics, witches and the Antichrist championed so eloquently and authoritatively by his influential brother-in-law Florimond de Raemond. We have argued that de Lancre was also empowered in this endeavour by his deep knowledge of demonology and his enthusiasm to uncover and extend contemporary knowledge of witchcraft, as described in the demonological texts he so evidently admired. On a more general level, we have also speculated that his intellectual concerns were invigorated and deepened by his native curiosity, anthropological attention to detail and talent for drawing out intimacies from the minds of young female witnesses and defendants. But we have attributed most agency in this matter to the likelihood that when de Lancre arrived in Labourd, he found levels of demonic conjuration and exorcism, theatrical subversion, liturgical cursing, sexual freedom, confraternal devotion and female ritual empowerment that were not only higher than in his native Bordeaux, but also deeply integrated into the fabric of a Basque Church that was highly subject to local lay control. By this measure, it was de Lancre’s misinterpretation of these cultural factors and his eagerness to contextualize them within the witch cult template that led to them being propagated so effectively across the border into Spain, to be further amplified through the imaginations of the Urdax monks and Spanish inquisitors.

Finally and with regard to both French and Spanish investigations, the charge that prosecutorial convictions of guilt were based on misinterpretation and prejudice has been somewhat mitigated by our speculations that, in relation to some issues and to varying degrees, the interrogators may well have been right. According to our research it is indeed possible that some witch suspects gathered to defend their crops by magically directing storm clouds and ‘black’ winds toward their neighbours’ fields; or collected vermin in the hills, extracted venom from toads and raided graves in order to obtain body parts to make powders and potions that had the capacity to kill. There may well have been witch suspects who kept, fed and dressed toads in the full consciousness that the Church would define them as demons; and who drank, danced and had illicit sex in the spirit of licence that pervaded feast days, carnival weeks and pilgrimages. There may well have been suspects who parodied the Eucharist, bared their arses to the altar, celebrated masses with the intent to harm, invoked the help of the Devil, renounced God (either as a magical strategy or in a fit of rage) and swore oaths of allegiance to peasant cults, bound by secret rituals and rules, that openly challenged the power and authority of the Church. While we do not know to what extent these practices were drawn directly into the courtrooms as opposed to indirectly via false confession, that they existed at all certainly make it a little easier to understand how the interrogators could accuse such a significant percentage of the Basque population of apostasy, witch cult membership and maleficium.

Suspects’ Lives

But while these perspectives on the interrogators are valuable, the most original insights to emerge out of this study relate to the men and women they were questioning. While the lives of Basque peasants in this period have gone largely unrecorded these analyses have given us a fresh view into the ‘secret, uncharted areas of peasant exchange’.¹ The fact that almost every activity described by the Basque suspects was performed in the company of other people supports the view, widely emphasized by historians of both medieval and early modern Europe, that the demands of rural, subsistence-level living required communities to be intensely interdependent and cooperative. But the records flesh out this fact by giving us a very fresh and direct insight into how this commonality may have been experienced. We have seen villagers converging in groups to work together in the fields or mountain pastures; meeting in houses to heal the sick; gathering in meadows and plazas to enjoy dances, processions, theatricals and feasts; and congregating in churches, shrines and remote countryside locations to perform religious rituals and magical conjurations. We have also seen the emotion in these experiences. Historians – particularly when examining witchcraft – frequently highlight the negative tensions generated by the enforced intimacies of pre-industrial rural life; and indeed, the Basque records clearly show us how the death of a child or the devastations of a hail storm could provoke suspicions, witchcraft accusations and the muttering of maledictory psalms or twisting of curse candles. But the records also reveal that these intimacies generated strong social bonds and intense collective pleasures; the festive excesses of seasonal feasts, the merriments of dance and song and the catharses of comedic theatricals that granted temporary reprieve from manual labour and which were such sources of ‘joy’ and ‘pleasure’ that the ‘time spent in such agreeable and delicious entertainment seemed too short’.²

Our analysis has been particularly valuable because it sheds some welcome light on the communal working lives, responsibilities and mentalities of peasant women: a gender demographic that is often hidden from the historian’s gaze. We have seen young girls sent out into the pastures with their switches to herd animals, avoiding the remote caves and crags for fear of being swept away by the cannibalistic Tartaro or the cloud-chasing hosts of the great lamiña Mari. We have seen them dreaming of being garlanded with flowers and elected as May queens; kneeling before the bishop’s cathedra at their confirmation rite; decorating their favourite animals with bells and ribbons in honour of St Anthony; gathering to jump over bonfires on St John’s Eve; and watching with envy as the daughters of aristocrats dandled velvet-clad lap dogs on their knees. We have watched young women flirting with onlookers as they dance with the confraternity of the Rosary and congregating in the plazas in the summer evenings to watch the young men don horns, pelts and animal masks and transform into devils, ogres and Moorish kings. We have seen older women sell produce at the market, work their spindles while they walk out into the countryside and leave their houses at break of dawn to scatter pesticides on the dew-covered fields. We have witnessed mothers and grandmothers bury their stillborn babies in the baserri orchards in muted, private ceremonies that were beneath ‘societal concern’; seen them cluster round the jarleku with candles and gifts, crying ‘hot tears’ for their long-dead kin; and watched them gather in cemeteries with baskets and hoes in hand, to disinter the bones of the dead and carry them to the ossuary. We have seen Basque women, burdened by the highest infant mortality rate in Europe, prepare their sick children for the bloodletting treatments of physicians and saludadores; rush out to support neighbours whose infants had died in the night; and walk into the hills to gather herbs, insects and toads to be taken back to the baserri hearths to be processed into medicines. We have watched these women wait until their daughters and granddaughters reached maturity before teaching them how to make medicines that could kill; and – here more speculatively – seen them quietly, below the radar of the apothecaries and physicians, protect their craft through the confraternal comforts most commonly associated with the occupations of men.

But while this study has illumined peasant lives, it has also shed light on the religious mentalities that underpinned them. We have seen that for contemporary Basques, there was little ambiguity surrounding the existence of God or the supernatural; when tragedy struck they did not need to scrabble around in the void, as we often do today, frantically looking for the comfort of a faith they had rationalized out of existence. But the faith that they accessed so easily was built upon spiritual convictions and behaviours that were considerably less orthodox than those peddled by the Catholic Church. We have not been able to illuminate the intricacies of this world with the precision of María Tausiet or Gunnar Knutsen, for the contemporary sources available to this author were too contaminated for this. But nevertheless, we have been able to demonstrate that early modern Basques had access to a diverse spiritual marketplace through which they could obtain specialist help from a range of practitioners, from priests and learned magicians to popular cunning folk. Via these specialists or through their own private practice, they could petition and contract with a surprisingly wide range of supernatural entities: from angels and saints to lamiñas and souls of the dead; from Mary the ‘queen of heaven’ to Mari the ‘queen of the spirits’; and from the risen Christ to the subterranean prince of darkness himself. In this pseudo-polytheistic environment, survival did not necessarily depend on the state of your soul or the strength of your devotion but on your ability to judge which supernatural entity would be best armed to deal with a particular problem and what form of negotiation would best procure that help. We have also demonstrated that, as keen proponents of this unorthodox spirituality, many early modern Basques gave themselves permission (with little fear of divine retribution) to ritually invoke spirits that despised the cross and haunted the caverns of hell; commission priests to shed curses and wield requiem masses as ‘death blows’; disrupt the sacrament of the mass with dances and ‘immodest songs’; and don false vestments and bishop’s mitres to preach of upside-down paradises where sins are virtues, beggars are kings and drunken abbots sing hymns of devotion to the gods of gambling and wine.³

But in the last analysis, perhaps the most surprising revelation to emerge from our study is that however polytheistic, morally ambivalent and unorthodox the suspects’ Christianity may have been – it was unequivocally important. Over and over again and in relation to many different themes, the witch records remind us how deeply the rituals, doctrines and lay institutions of the Basque Church shaped contemporary lives. Whether organized by the community’s parish ministry or its subsidiary network of religious and occupational confraternities, life cycles were punctuated by rituals of baptism, confirmation, marriage and final unction; seasons were marked by festivals, processions and pilgrimages; and the days and weeks were intersected by masses, ritual jarleku offerings and communal prayers. Whether organized by inquisitors, bishops, priests, lay people or sorcerers, this ritual calendar embraced the emotional polarities of human life, from the joys of feast day theatricals, romantic romerías and aesthetically moving liturgies to the pains of funeral processions, mortuary masses and solemn rituals around the broken body parts of the dismembered Christ. In their darker religiosity in particular, the witch records remind us that in this period every man, woman and child lived their lives in a rolling state of bereavement that was – particularly in the Basque case – sharpened by high levels of infant mortality. They show us how the Church sought to ease this grief through doctrine, with congregations clearly gaining solace from the promise that however many children died and however many adults were cut down in their prime, if they trusted in God, Christ, Mary and the saints they would – in the end – be reunited with their loved-ones in some form of paradise. But they have also shown us that by bringing communities together to celebrate collective rituals and festivities – day by day, week by week, season by season and year by year – the Church exploited the reality that the most powerful and immediate way to ease the anguish of bereavement is not to hear sophisticated or seductive theological creeds about utopian afterlives, but to engage on a visceral level with music, visual art, the spoken word and the physical presence of other people who have shared similar experiences and can, however temporarily, empathize with your pain. Through this lens, our search for the voices of the accused in the Basque witch records has revealed as much about community and Catholicism as malevolence and demonological theory. With sharp irony, it has revealed that the most demonologically stereotypical accounts of witch activity to emerge from the medieval and early modern periods were, in many respects, an expression of the depth with which the Basque people were committed to the comforts of a community-based Christianity that, since its late entrenchment in the tenth and eleventh centuries, they had wholeheartedly made their own.

34  Basque woman by Hans Weigel, 1577.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

 1 In this work, the term ‘demonological stereotypes’ denotes the core beliefs associated with witches that emerged in European demonological manuals through the medieval and early modern periods. ‘Akelarre’ is a Basque term for the witches’ sabbath that was frequently employed in the witch-craze.

 2 Henningsen, Witches’, 69.

 3 Pearl, Crime, 127–28.

 4 For Spanish transcriptions of the witch-craze records (with substantial commentary) see Idoate, Documento and Brujería. For supplementary transcriptions, see Valencia, Pedro; Fernández Nieto, Proceso; and Navajas Twose, ‘Una relación’. For English transcriptions see de Lancre, Tableau and Henningsen, Salazar.

 5 Recent texts include Azurmendi, Brujas and Dusseau, Juge. The 2010 conference at Zugarramurdi, that commemorated both the auto de fé at Logroño in 1610 and the scholarship of Gustav Henningsen, saw the subsequent publication of a collection of papers in a special edition of RIEV: Revista Internacional de los Estudios Vascos (9), 2012.

 6 For a summary of the paradigm, see Wilby, Visions, 239–46.

 7 Henningsen, Witches’, 231–32, 389.

 8 Azurmendi, Brujas; Dusseau, Juge. For a summary of the conference papers, see Usunáriz Garayoa, ‘Prologo’. For other examples, see Morales, ‘Father’ and Fernández Juárez ‘Comer’.

 9 Given that most western European trial material falls into the latter category this means that the bulk of early modern witchcraft material remains underexamined in relation to suspect contribution.

10 The Sentence of María de Zozaya and the Joint Sentence (which summarizes the confessions of four suspects from the village of Zugarramurdi). Being read out at the auto de fé and recorded in both contemporary pamphlets and de Lancre’s Tableau, these two sentences significantly fuelled both the Basque witch-craze and its subsequent notoriety among historians and popular writers (see Henningsen, Witches’, 188, 195–97 and de Lancre, Tableau, 382–405).

11 This was a difficult decision, because the absence of shamanistic analyses inadvertently creates some misleadingly thin perspectives, particularly with regard to crop-maleficium, vampirism, sabbath journeys and the role of folk spirit matrices in Basque witchcraft belief. This visionary dimension will be tackled separately in a subsequent volume.

12 Ms. Zozaya, 406.

ONE

The Basque World

 1 De Lancre, Tableau, 59, 56.

 2 Ibid., 423. For Spain, see Henningsen, Salazar, 260.

 3 Caro Baroja, Basques, 276–78.

 4 As used by the Church, ‘superstition’ referred to any belief or practice that the ecclesiastical authorities wished to condemn or prohibit.

 5 Bard, Navarra, 7. Douglass, Amerikanuak, 50–55; Kurlansky, Basque, 55.

 6 Douglass, Amerikanuak, 70.

 7 For isolate, see Hualde, Towards, 1. Thesis nuanced in Gunther, ‘Ancient’.

 8 Masso, ‘Neurogenetic’, 2; Behar, ‘Basque’, 491.

 9 Aulnoy, Ingenious, Letter 1.

10 Aulestia, Improvisational, 1–5.

11 Caro Baroja, World, xi; Caro Baroja, Basques, 285.

12 Melczer, Pilgrim’s, 94; de Lancre, Tableau, xxxii.

13 Conversi, Ethnonationalism, 100.

14 Frank, ‘Role’, 4.

15 De Lancre, Tableau, 64; Conversi, Ethnonationalism, 101. As late as the twentieth century, ‘an ‘explicit cultural norm of egalitarianism’ existed in some Basque villages (Douglass, Death, 13).

16 Frank, ‘Inheritance’, 24–25.

17 Veyrin, Basques, 329 (see also Frank, ‘Role’, 3–4); Frank, ‘Inheritance’, 22.

18 Ibid., 14–16, Poska, Women, 232–43.

19 Frank, ‘Inheritance’, 18–19.

20 Mirgos, ‘Death’, 80.

21 Frank, ‘Role’, 24. For goddess theory, see Everson, ‘Tenacity’, 277 and Bullen, Basque, 125–33.

22 Frank, ‘Inheritance’, 23. For mercenaries, see Douglass, Americanuak, 72.

23 Poska, Women, 235.

24 For a general overview, see Caro Baroja, World, 143–55 and Monter, Frontiers, 255–69.

25 Caro Baroja, World, 143; Arles, Tractatus, Sect. 11; Caro Baroja, World, 155.

26 Usunáriz Garayoa, ‘Caza’, 310–12.

27 For letter to king, see Henningsen, Witches’, 24. For Aranibar, see ibid., 49–50.

28 For French figures, see Pearl, Crime, 133. For Spanish, see Monter, Frontiers, 160–61. Having died in jail, some of those sentenced to death were burnt ‘in effigy’ (see Goikoetxea, 400, 5–6).

29 Pearl, Crime, 135, 95, 235. In Spain, Valle went on visitation in 1609 and Salazar in 1611. Although these trips focused on witchcraft, visitations were a standard Inquisitorial method to root out heresy and other religious crimes (see Henningsen, Witches’, 95–105).

30 For reading out, see ibid., 188, 191. For pamphlets, see ibid., 195–97. Contemporary pamphlets were published by Juan de Mongastón and Juan Baptista Varesio (see Alberola, ‘Ejemplos’, 43–74).

31 Henningsen, Salazar, 51–52, 206–10.

32 De Lancre, Tableau, xxxvi. Henningsen, Salazar, 75.

33 De Lancre, Tableau, 551–52. For encouraging children, see Henningsen, Salazar, 75–76.

34 Ibid., 251, 256.

35 Henningsen, Witches’, 484, 130. The French witch-craze was cut short when the Parlement of Bordeaux recalled de Lancre in November 1609.

36 Henningsen, Salazar, 416.

37 Henningsen, Witches’, 23; de Lancre, Tableau. 3, xxx; Henningsen, Witches’, 24.

38 The records used in this book, both in manuscript and published form, are listed at the beginning of the bibliography.

TWO

The Gleeful Executioners

 1 Pearl, Crime, 131.

 2 Although de Lancre shared his commission with parliamentary president Jean d’Espaignet, the latter’s role is unclear. Many scholars have claimed that d’Espaignet played a minor role, with G. H. Williams noting that he left ‘about a month into the investigations to take care of border issues that had arisen between France and Spain, and de Lancre was left to attend to the task alone’ (de Lancre, Tableau, xxvii). However this claim has been disputed (see Henningsen, Witches’, 450 and Pearl, Crime, 133).

 3 De Lancre, Tableau, 548; Pearl, Crime, 67–68, 84–86.

 4 McGowan, ‘Sabbat’, 186–87; de Lancre, Tableau, 463. It should be borne in mind that the demonological references displayed in the Tableau may not be a wholly accurate reflection of de Lancre’s knowledge at the time of the Labourd campaign, for he may well have deepened his reading after this date to support the arguments developed in the text.

 5 Henningsen, Witches’, 51, 168. For demonological texts, see Henningsen, Salazar, 8–9.

 6 The Malleus was circulating in Spain from the early-sixteenth century, with 76 copies being confiscated from a Madrid bookseller in 1608 (Monter, Frontiers, 270–71). Del Rio’s work ‘won widespread popularity among Spanish intellectuals’ soon after its publication in 1599 (Henningsen, Salazar, 8). Also worth noting here, is that of all the demonological works written before 1609, the Spanish records bear the most striking resemblance to the anonymous Recollectio casus, status et condicionis Valdensium ydolatrarum (Arras, 1460) although we have no evidence that the inquisitors had access to this rare manuscript text (see Gow, Arras, 19–51).

 7 Henningsen, Witches’, 51–52, 59. Henningsen notes that ‘a letter from the Tribunal to la Suprema dated 26 September 1609 . . . states that Valle had received two letters, one from d’Espaignet and the other from the Lord of Urtubie, along with “seven small trial records containing evidence of the things confessed to by the witches.” The letters are stated to contain the judges’ comments on the seven trials’ (Henningsen, Witches’, 123).

 8 Henningsen, Witches’, 330; Henningsen, Salazar, 102.

 9 For torture, see de Lancre, Tableau, xli. For other refs, see ibid., 527, 494, 563, 409.

10 Pearl, Crime, 133. Some of the fleeing witches ‘professed to be traveling pilgrims on the way to Santiago [de Compostela] and Montserrat’ (Henningsen, Witches’, 123).

11 De Lancre, Tableau, xxx.

12 Ibid., xxx; Pearl, Crime, 142; de Lancre, Tableau, xlii (and for examples) 525–56. For example, between ‘1564 and 1600 of all the appeals in witchcraft cases that reached the Parisian Parlement, only 30 percent were confirmed’ (Krause, Witchcraft, 87).

13 McGowan, ‘Sabbat’, 187; Gifford, ‘Witchcraft’, 13; Pearl, Crime, 127–28.

14 Henningsen, Witches’, 170.

15 Ibid., 65. While Inquisition prisons were generally good by contemporary standards, conditions at Logroño were poor and by the time of the auto de fé in 1610, epidemics had killed 13 of the witches awaiting trial (see Henningsen, Witches’, 150–3).

16 Henningsen, Salazar, 380; Henningsen, Witches’, 62; Henningsen, Salazar, 380.

17 Henningsen, Witches’, 171.

18 Ibid., 44; (de Lancre) Pearl, Crime, 131, 135.

19 De Lancre, Tableau, xxxvi, 131, 543, 560, 565–67.

20 Ibid., xxviii–xxix.

21 Henningsen, Witches’, 293, 167–68, 130–1; Henningsen, Salazar, 76, 73–74.

22 Henningsen, Witches’, 124, 208–209.

23 De Lancre, Tableau, 494.

24 Ms. Joint, 395; Henningsen, Witches’, 293, 134.

25 For the Bishop of Pamplona, see ibid., 209. For Hualde, see ibid., 208.

26 Ibid., 31, 109.

27 Ibid., (Renteria) 124; (Aranibar) 204; (Valle) 124.

28 De Lancre, Tableau, 138, 121; Henningsen, Witches’, 52, (Cinco Villas) 125.

29 (Solarte) Henningsen, Salazar, 148; (Salazar) Henningsen, Witches’, 255–56.

30 De Lancre, Tableau, 120; Henningsen, Witches’, 162, 113.

31 Many psychological disorders or traits are associated with a lack of empathy, including psychopathy, some borderline personality disorders, and autistic spectrum disorders (see Decety, ‘Empathic’).

32 For confirmation bias in criminal prosecutions, see Hill et al., ‘The Role’.

33 De Lancre, Tableau, 526.

34 See Henningsen, Salazar, 101, 378–80. Both of Henningsen’s works, The Witches’ Advocate and The Salazar Documents are largely concerned with the development of Salazar’s scepticism.

35 Henningsen, Witches’, 222, 180, 312, 217. For Venegas and Solarte, see Henningsen, Salazar, 146–234. For Valencia, see Henningsen, Witches’, 6–9.

36 Henningsen, Salazar, 10–13. Tausiet, Urban, 24.

37 Ibid., 28; Henningsen, Salazar, 10.

38 Henningsen, Witches’, 57–58, 231–32, 370–77. Questionnaire reproduced in full in Caro Baroja, ‘Nuevo’, 270–71 and instructions in Henningsen, Salazar, 472–88.

THREE

The Witches’ Voice

 1 The term ‘suspects’ will be used here to cover individuals who were both willingly and unwillingly taken to the sabbath, despite the fact that the latter were often termed ‘witnesses’ by the interrogators.

 2 Henningsen, Salazar, 406.

 3 De Lancre’s question extrapolated from a Bordeaux interrogation (see de Lancre, Tableau, 163). For Salazar, see Henningsen, Salazar, 386.

 4 De Lancre, Tableau, 409.

 5 Henningsen, Witches’, 293. Henningsen notes ‘we can infer that he [Hualde] served ‘as a Basque interpreter . . . when he accompanied the Lord of Urtubie and the judge, Pierre de Lancre, throughout the summer campaign in the Pays de Labourd’ (see ibid., 131).

 6 Henningsen, Salazar, 380; for artistic licence, see Henningsen, Witches’, 93.

 7 Caro Baroja, World, 169; Pearl, Crimes, 130.

 8 De Lancre, Tableau, 268, (and for his challenges) 90, 131, 123, 240, 412.

 9 Ibid., xxxiii, xxxiv, 61, xxxiv.

10 Ibid., xxxix.

11 Ibid., (accuracy), 408, (Bordeaux), 158, (metamorphosis) 152, (attendance) 90.

12 Ibid., 530, 428, 182, 322. Authorship is unclear because although parts of de Lancre’s account were reproduced ‘word for word’ from Parlement records, this potted biography appears in his subsequent commentary on the case (de Lancre, Tableau, 269, 322).

13 For Michelet, see Caro Baroja, World, 157.

14 De Lancre, Tableau, 530, 233 (see also 410 & 419). For accusations of artifice, see Machielsen, ‘Thinking’, 443–45.

15 Henningsen, Witches’, (interpreter) 109, 113.

16 Idoate, Documento, 188–93. For Endara, also see Henningsen, Witches’, 133, 484–85.

17 Ms. Joint, 396.

18 Henningsen, Witches’, 165, 133; Howard, ‘Discovering’, 82.

19 (Monterola’s appointment) Henningsen, Witches’, 294, (ointment), 298.

20 Howard, ‘Discovering’, 80–81; Ms. Joint, 399.

21 Examples in Henningsen, Salazar, 302, 306, 386, 392–94.

22 Henningsen, Salazar, 92. For more examples of Salazar’s questioning, see 326–40.

23 Examples in Henningsen, Salazar, 386, 392–94

24 For an overview of false confession, see Wilby, Visions, 215–18.

25 For parallels between bardic improvization and witch-confessions, see ibid., 227–33.

26 For a detailed examination of the false memory phenomenon and its potential role in witchcraft interrogations see ibid., 218–36.

27 Ibid., 248–49. For visionary experiences of the Devil in the Spanish context, see Amelang, ‘Sleeping’, 327–41.

28 Christian, Apparitions, 2, 216 and Pescador, New, 113. For the resurgence of child visionaries in the Basque regions in the twentieth century, see Christian, Visionaries.

29 Henningsen, Witches’, 140.

30 Ibid., 63–64.

31 Roper, Oedipus, 233. The issue of revocation is therefore irrelevant here.

32 Physical sensations can also be woven into dreams and visions, with some scholars drawing links between nocturnal accounts of encountering witches or the Devil and sleep paralysis (see Dudley, Scottish, 121–39).

FOUR

Black Winds

 1 Veyrin, Basques, 33.

 2 Ms. Zozaya, 411; de Lancre, Tableau, 150.

 3 Henningsen, Salazar, 126. Basque witches also claimed to raise storms to cause shipwrecks (de Lancre, Tableau, 150–58 passim and Ms. Joint, 391).

 4 Dillinger, Evil, 48–49. Briggs, Witches, 138–39, 143.

 5 Henningsen, Salazar, 126; de Lancre, Tableau, 112–13.

 6 Caro Baroja, World, 148. In the collections of Basque witch trial records published by Idoate, we find cases of crop-maleficium recorded in 1525, 1540, 1570, 1575, 1577, 1576 and 1595 (see Idoate, Brujería, cases 11, 53, 62, 67, 68, 69, 80, 83, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 102 bis, 107, 112). Henningsen notes that the sixteenth-century inquisitorial letter, assumed to date from 1526, was mistakenly attributed by Caro Baroja and others to an inquisitor named Avellaneda (see Henningsen, Witches’, 464 n.37).

 7 Behringer, ‘Weather’, 4.

 8 (Catalonia) Kamen, Phoenix, 241; (climatic responses) Behringer, ‘Weather’, 7–12.

 9 (Salazar) Henningsen, Salazar, 336. Ms. Zozaya, 411.

10 Rémy, Demonolatry, 74. Henningsen, Salazar, 474.

11 Ms. Zozaya, 410; de Lancre, Tableau, 149, (rhyme) 158.

12 For pre-Christian examples, see Filotas, Pagan, 273; Lecouteux, Phantom, 209–19, 29.

13 Christian, Local, 33–34, 40, 44–46, 63, 97–98.

14 For a vivid example of this conflation, see Lecouteux, Witches, 168–76.

15 Pócs, ‘Fairies’, 9; Pócs, Between, 11–17.

16 Arles, Tractatus, Sect. 8.

17 Caro Baroja, Basques, 279. Cerquand, Légendes, 113, 119–20; Barandiarán, Selected Writings, 102; Caro Baroja, Basques, 260–61.

18 Henningsen, Salazar, 128. Similarly impersonal motivations are described in crop-maleficium accounts from other parts of Europe (for an example, see Gow, Arras, 101).

19 Ms. Joint, 391; Ms. Zozaya, 410–11.

20 Arles, Tractatus, Preface; Ciruelo, Treatise, 309.

21 (Catalina) Henningsen, Witches’, 249; (south wind) Veyrin, Basques, 33.

22 For Tempestarii, see de Lancre, Tableau, 291. For early sources, see Filotas, Pagan, 270–75 (including a seventh-century reference to a tempistariae or ‘mistress of the weather’). For examples of female conjurors diverting storms to protect crops in eighteenth-century Hungary, see Pócs, Between, 134–41).

23 Kramer, Malleus, 402; Boguet, Examen, 99. See also Frank, ‘Diachronic’, 2, fn. 5.

24 Caro Baroja, Basques, 308; Castañega, Tratado, 316.

25 Ibid., 315. For saludadores see Frank, ‘Bear’, 156.

26 Ciruelo, Treatise, 306. For later examples, see Caro Baroja, Basques, 308 and Ott, Circle, 95.

27 Caro Baroja, Basques, 308; Veyrin, Basques, 305; Frank, ‘Diachronic’, 2.

28 Castañega, Tratado, 316; Ciruelo, Treatise, 292, 294–95, 290.

29 As early as the tenth century European peasants did not only pay tempestarii to ‘spare their fields’ but also to ‘blast the next man’s instead’ (see Cohn, Europe’s, 212).

30 Pocs, Between, 134–43 passim: Ginzburg, Night, 147–70 passim.

31 Ciruelo, Treatise, 306; Pócs, Between, 135–38.

32 Ciruelo, Treatise, 291–92.

33 Ginzburg, Night, 6; Pocs, Between, 127–28; Lecouteux, Witches, 168–76.

34 Briggs, Witches, 139–43.

35 Ibid., 142–43, 138–39.

36 Ibid., 139, 156, 139.

37 Boguet, Examen, 97, 65; Dillinger, Evil, 54, 47. For older references see Filotas, Pagan, 272.

38 Caro Baroja, Basques, 308.

39 Castañega, Tratado, 316; Ott, Circle, 95.

40 Ms. Joint, 391; de Lancre, Tableau, 404.

41 Idoate, Documento, 190; de Lancre, Tableau, 148.

42 Local ties are vividly evoked in Ott’s descriptions of the mutual obligations and gift-giving that existed between ‘first neighbours’ of the auzo as late as the twentieth century (Ott, Circle, 63–81). Dialectical divisions could be so extreme that, even as late as the twentieth-century, Euskara-speaking Basques from one region might not be able to understand those from another, even when geographically close (ibid., 7–8).

43 Henningsen, Salazar, 334; Veyrin, Basques, 44; Henningsen, Salazar, 33.

FIVE

The Bloodletting Bruja

 1 Ms. Zozaya, 412–13. There are also accounts of witches killing victims through drowning and beating (for a range of examples, see Idoate, Documento, 127–33).

 2 For Italy, see Kieckhefer, ‘Avenging’, 94–97; For Spain, see Tausiet, ‘Witchcraft’, 179–84 and Castell Granados, ‘Wine’, 173–75; For France, see Gow, Arras, 50.

 3 Ms. Joint, 393.

 4 For early examples, see Campagne, ‘Witch’, 384; for Valle, see Ms. Joint, 395.

 5 Ibid., 393; for Graciana, see ibid., 395.

 6 Henningsen, Witches’, 30, 159.

 7 Ms. Joint, 394–95 (recorded by Mongastón as ‘chupá y tragá eso, que es Bueno para nosotras’, see Mongastón, Relacion, 115). For the charm, see de Lancre, Tableau, 403.

 8 Henningsen, Witches’, 58. The instruction was included in the first questionnaire, sent on 11 March 1609, after la Suprema had seen the first four Zugarramurdi confessions.

 9 Campagne, ‘Witch’, 389–94; Cohn, Europe’s, 162–64; Lecouteux, Secret History, 51, 67–8, 82–3.

10 (Amalgamation) Cohn, Europe’s, 163: (Spanish case) Campagne, ‘Witch’, 396.

11 Barandiarán, Selected, 86–88; Frank, ‘Evidence’, Part 2, 134–36.

12 Campagne, ‘Witch’, 398–89 (for Mari-Terexa) 400; Barandiarán, Selected, 89, 130.

13 Ms. Joint, 394–5; Barandiarán, Selected, 87; (Mahuma) Frank, ‘Evidence’, Part 2, 136.

14 Henningsen, Salazar, 128.

15 Idoate, Documento, 127; Ms. Joint, 394; Henningsen, Witches’, 158.

16 Campagne, ‘Witch’, 383–84; Nutini, Bloodsucking, 366, 113–4; Campagne, ‘Witch’, 397–99.

17 Lindemann, Medicine, 23; Cotgrave, Dictionarie, Proverbs, ‘Sickness, health, doctors, old age, and death’.

18 Bauduer, ‘Basques’, 622–23. For percentages, see Weinstock, ‘It is’, 3–6.

19 Kurlansky, Basque, 21.

20 Idoate, Brujería, 264; de Lancre, Tableau, 548; Idoate, Documento, 144.

21 As an open or canonical order, the Premonstratensians encouraged their monks to preach and take benefices. Although officially ‘canons’ they will be referred to here as monks (see Catholic Encyclopedia: ‘Premonstratensians’).

22 Ibid., 205–206; Ms. Goiburu, 170; Ms. Sansin, 172; Henningsen, Witches’, 34, (imprisonment), 478. Due to the fact that pronouns were often dropped in the Spanish, it is unclear whether the stole was placed on Goiburu or his wife.

23 Ibid., 49–50, 108–9, 49, 293 (weep blood) 204, (Elizondo) 205–6.

24 Henningsen, Salazar, 33; Idoate, Documento, 30–31; Azurmendi, Brujas, 39–40, 62. ‘Jurado’ is an imprecise term that refers to people from any social status that play a role in the local government or justice system, according to local custom. Interestingly, the Labourd accusations also emerged out of similar tensions, in this case between Tristan de Gamboa d’Alzate, Lord of Uturbie and the tenanted inhabitants of Hendaye who were fighting to establish an autonomous parish (See Dusseau, Juge, 162–64).

25 There was another link in the chain. After Araníbar informed the Inquisition they sent a commissioner to record some initial confessions in January 1609. On the basis of these reports they then summoned the first four suspects to Logroño for further questioning. It is highly likely that Zabaleta and/or Araníbar was also involved in these interrogations (see Henningsen, Witches’, 51).

26 Henningsen, Salazar, 34.

27 Ibid., 34. For Núñez, see Campagne, ‘Witch’, 384; Nutini, Bloodsucking, 67; Ms. Joint, 393.

28 Henningsen, Witches’, 27; Idoate, Documento, 30; Henningsen, Witches’, 144, 146. It is not clear whether Xarra’s duties focused on medical care or general hospitality or both.

29 Henningsen, Salazar, 138.

30 Ms. Joint, 393. For French examples, see de Lancre, Tableau, 155, 159 and Gow, Arras, 50. For Italy, see Duni, Under, 122 and Kors, Witchcraft, 243. Some English witches ‘pricked’ themselves to produce blood for familiars (Rosen, Witchcraft, 73–6). Zugarramurdi/Urdax ownership of the theme could be extrapolated from the fact that vampirism of any kind is not emphasized in the Pamplona Manuscript.

31 Davis, Bloodletting, 5; for monasteries, see Yearl, ‘Medieval’, 175–94.

32 Davis, Bloodletting, 10–12, 6, 11; Ms. Joint, 395.

33 Ms. Joint, 393; Davis, Bloodletting, 5; Tausiet, Urban, 139; Casper, Charakteristik, 21.

34 Ms. Goiburu, 171. See also de Lancre, Tableau, 194.

35 Mongastón, Relacion, 29; de Lancre, Tableau, 400.

36 Ms. Joint, 389; de Lancre, Tableau, 400; Ms. Joint, 390. A similar example emerges outside the witch-craze (Caro Baroja, World, 153). Claims that the Devil ‘healed’ the mark are also found in other parts of Europe (see MacPhail, Highland, 6, 18 and Kinloch, Reliquiae, 115–16, 125–26).

37 Idoate, Documento, 173. This evokes scarification treatments, as described in Ramsey, Professional, 262.

38 For Corres, see Idoate, Documento, 100; for Goiburu, see Ms. Joint, 390.

39 Ibid., 394–95.

SIX

‘Powders and Poisons’

 1 De Lancre, Tableau, 119; Ms. Joint, 392.

 2 De Lancre, Tableau, 137. Re Spain, in Idoate’s Brujería, for example, we find poison-making recorded in 1329–32, 1525, 1540 and 1576 (see cases 2, 11, 23, 45, 53, 94).

 3 Caro Baroja, ‘Nuevo’, 746.

 4 De Lancre, Tableau, 156.

 5 The ellipses denote an account of how the witches damage crops with the powders.

 6 Ms. Joint, 391–92.

 7 De Lancre, Tableau, 531, 549, 158.

 8 Leong, ‘Making’, 146, 165; Cabré, ‘Women’, 51.

 9 Leong, ‘Making’, 162; Henningsen, Witches’, 298–99.

10 De Lancre, Tableau, 400; Ms. Joint, 392.

11 Henningsen, Salazar, 130; Ms. Joint, 399; de Lancre, Tableau, 149.

12 Arles, Tractatus, Sect. 8; de Lancre, Tableau, 363. See also Usunáriz Garayoa, ‘Caza’, 321.

13 Jackson, ‘Role’, 35.

14 Amezcua, ‘Traditional’, 36; Foster, ‘Relationships’, 212; Barriola, Medicina, 234; Castañega, Tratado, 310.

15 Costa-Neto, ‘Entomotherapy’, 93; Jackson, ‘Role’, 35.

16 Morgan, Toads, 63; Charas, Royal, 106.

17 Ibid., 105–6.

18 For examples see Chomel, Dictionnaire: ‘Toad’ and ‘Plague’; Jackson, ‘Role’, 31–33; Morgan, Toads, 62–64; Hand, Magical, 39; Fernie, Animal, 483–93. For toadstones, see Forbes, ‘Lapis’, 140 and Morgan, Toads, 66–7.

19 Chomel, Dictionnaire, entry for ‘Plague’.

20 Garg, ‘Toad’, 10. For China, see ‘Cane Toads’.

21 Idoate, Documento, 119; de Lancre, Tableau, 157; Leong, ‘Making’, 163–64.

22 Ibid., 162; Ms. Joint, 392, 391; Cabré, ‘Women’, 36.

23 For quacks, see Jackson, ‘Role’, 32; Robinson, Victory, 31.

24 Demaitre, Medieval, 69.

25 Ibid., 38, 40; Cabre, ‘Women’, 36.

26 For belaronna, see Henningsen, Salazar, 130. Ms. Zozaya, 414.

27 Ibid., 151; Ms. Joint, 391.

28 Fernie, Animal, 485. Morgan, Toads, 66. For other examples of quantity, see Jackson, Role, 33 and Morgan, Toads, 83.

29 For planning, see ‘Common Toads’. For maltreatment, see Ms. Joint, 391 and de Lancre, Tableau, 399.

30 Henningsen, Salazar, 294.

31 Zadoks, Crop, 218, (Herrera) 34 and 37; (Paris) Power, Goodman, 140.

32 Zadoks, Crop, 240, 143. Grease-banding involved putting viscous bands around the trunk to prevent pests ascending. For ash, see Power, Goodman, 131–32. For Geoponika, see Zadoks, Crop, 101.

33 Ibid., 233, 101.

34 Power, Goodman, 139–40; Zadoks, Crop, 148, 143.

35 (Bait) De Lancre, Tableau, 157. For watering can, see ibid., 149 and Zadoks, Crop, 231.

36 De Lancre, Tableau, 150. For being stung, see Idoate, Documento, 124–26.

37 Ms. Zozaya, 411 (for similar claims, see Idoate, Documento, 125). While this idea requires more research, it is possible that algal blooms in the Bay of Biscay, along with discharge from some of the region’s pollutant industries, may have contributed to acidic or toxic rains and fogs that damaged crops and increased their vulnerability to pests.

38 Zadoks, Crop, 161.

39 Ms. Joint, 391; Ms. Zozaya, 410–11.

SEVEN

‘Man’s Grease’

 1 De Lancre, Tableau, 212; Ms. Joint, 399.

 2 Given that corpses appear to have played a far less significant role in agricultural products, our focus here will be on their medicinal use. It is relevant, however, that in the Victorian period we have reports of corpses and bones being ground for fertilizer (see Aries, Hour, 358 and Quigley, Skulls, 31).

 3 Idoate, Brujería, 295. For example, in Idoates selection the use of corpses emerge in 1329, 1525, 1540, 1576 and 1595 (see Idoate, Brujería, cases 2, 11, 23, 45, 53, 94 and 107).

 4 Conklin, Consuming, 9; Sugg, Mummies, 206, 21, 32, 233, 207.

 5 (Fourcroy) Ibid., 233; Gordon-Grube, ‘Evidence’, 195. Originally cited by Oswald Croll.

 6 Sugg, Mummies, 84; (Ostend) Ibid., 99–100; (Herrera) Ibid., 106–7.

 7 Ibid., 54; (folk) Sugg, Murder, 40; Conklin, Consuming, 9. De Lancre refers to popular corpse medicine (see Tableau, 363).

 8 For Teresa, see Eire, From Madrid, 432–64; for Cabrejas see Nalle, God, 134–35.

 9 Poska, Women, 229; Fissell, ‘Women’, 1.

10 Quigley, Skulls, 29–30; Sugg, Mummies, 97; Aries, Hour, 56–57.

11 Gordon-Grube, ‘Anthropophagy’, 407–408.

12 Sugg, Mummies, 205, 207.

13 Bodin, Demon-Mania, 107; (Paris) Harding, ‘Whose’, 186.

14 (Todi) Mammoli, ‘Record’, 32.

15 Rémy, Demonolatry, 99. De Lancre mentions witches raiding gallows in Tableau, 547.

16 Kors, Witchcraft, 161.

17 Maxwell-Stuart, Disquisitiones, 216, 97.

18 Mirgos, ‘Death’, 76; Douglass, Death, 73. See also Sugg, Mummies, 98.

19 (Fontaine) Pettigrew, History, 8; (Pau) Davies, ‘Executing’, 39; Tausiet, Urban, 93–94.

20 (Physicans) Sugg, Mummies, 98; (Petit) Tausiet, Ponzoña, 489.

21 Ms. Zozaya, 410.

22 Ibid., 409; Ms. Joint, 399.

23 Ibid., 399.

24 (Pig-slaughtering) Ott, Circle, 36; (Evisceration) Weiss-Krejci, ‘Heart’, 132. With aristocrats, the practice originally reflected the fact that they often died far from their homes. With holy men and women, the practice was more likely to be linked to the propagation, via relics, of the saint’s spiritual power (and the financial benefits it generated).

25 Nalle, God, 134.

26 Weiss-Krejci, ‘Excarnation’, 160; Harding, ‘Whose’, 186. For bone-cleaning, see Weiss-Krejci, ‘Formation’, 73. For a vivid description of a traditional Greek exhumation ritual see Danforth, Death, 58–65.

27 Weiss-Krejci, ‘Excarnation’, 162; Aries, Hour, 382–84; Quigley, Skulls, 35, 171–83. The fact that the Joint Sentence references the herb that the suspects used to boil the exhumed bones in Basque (‘belar nagusia’), suggests that the Urdax monastery’s specialism, in this regard, may have also disseminated out into the wider community.

28 Idoate, Brujería, cases 11, 23, 53, 94, 107 (for other references, see Caro Baroja, ‘Cuatro’, 97, 107, 113); de Lancre, Tableau, 545.

29 Zika, ‘Cannibalism’, 81. For life force, see Sugg, Mummies, 180.

30 Poska, Regulating, 77–78; Lindemann, Medicine, 23–25.

31 Douglass, Death, 70.

32 (Tears) Lecouteux, Phantom, 152 and Simpson, ‘Folklore’, 18–19; Cotgrave, Dictionarie, Proverbs, ‘Sickness, health, doctors, old age, and death’; Douglass, Death, 78, 74; Dekker, ‘Philippe’, 137.

33 Scheper-Hughes, ‘Culture’, 382–5.

34 Tausiet, ‘Witchcraft’, 185; (changelings) Simpson, ‘Folklore’, 24–27, (later Basque examples) Cerquand, Légendes, 104–7 and Webster, Basque, 73–5.

35 Scheper-Hughes, ‘Culture’, 382, 377; Tausiet, ‘Witchcraft’, 185, 192.

36 An important implication relates to bereavement behaviour. The attempt to transform a death into something positive through relevant charity work, organ donation etc., is an effective way to alleviate bereavement grief. Similar dynamics can be observed in the Amazonian phenomenon of ‘grief cannibalism’ (Conklin, Consuming, xv). This begs the question as to whether, with regard to European corpse medicine, using bodies of the dead to increase the survival chances of the living may have mitigated the ongoing cultural trauma caused by high mortality rates.

EIGHT

Hidden Healers

 1 De Lancre, Tableau, 152, 211, 157.

 2 As in the last chapter, we will focus primarily on medicines as opposed to pesticides. Although the latter were traded and professionally administered in the period – with rat-catchers, for example, manufacturing their own baits – information relating to pesticides is both sparser and less relevant to the Basque witch records than information relating to medicinal trade (see Zadoks, Crop, 40, 89, 116 and Cohn, Europe’s, 242).

 3 López Terrada, ‘Medical’, 19; Ramsey, Professional, 182.

 4 López Terrada, ‘Medical’, 14–16. Some of these practitioners, such as saludadores, could obtain licences to practice (see ibid., 16).

 5 Broomhall, Women’s, 102, 105.

 6 De Lancre, Tableau, 344 (whole section, 344–76). We find similar examples in Bodin, Demon-Mania, 35–36, 152–54 and Boguet, Examen, 98–119.

 7 For examples from Britain, see Wilby, Cunning, viii–xv; for France, see Briggs, Witches, 180–82, 196–217. For Italy, see Mammoli, ‘Record’, 29–35.

 8 Briggs, Witches, 196. For German examples, see Rowlands, Witchcraft, 168–75. For argument against the prevalence of healers, see de Blécourt, ‘Witch’, 288–92.

 9 Castañega, Tratado, 310; Henningsen, Salazar, 262.

10 Henningsen, Witches’, 191; Frank, ‘Bear’, 156; Veyrin, Basques, 317.

11 Usunáriz Garayoa, ‘Caza’, 321. See also Idoate, Brujería, 348 and Bazán Díaz, ‘Superstición’, 212.

12 De Lancre, Tableau, 191– 92; Henningsen, Witches’, 157. The de la Borda reference does not make it clear whether the ‘charms’ he had learnt were used on others or only himself.

13 De Lancre, Tableau, 400–1. Mongastón attributes a Basque chant ‘Here and there’ to María de Zozaya, although it is not in her sentence (see Mongastón, Relacion, 57).

14 Henningsen, Witches’, 155; Mongastón, Relacion, 62; Ms. Zozaya, 412. Suspects may also have drawn experience of public flagellation rituals into these ‘whipping’ accounts (see Silanes Susaeta, Cofradías, 298).

15 De Lancre discusses this belief extensively in the Tableau, 37–76.

16 Ibid., 166, 368–69.

17 Briggs, Witches, 168–71. For examples of ambivalent powers in Spain, see Tausiet, Urban, 58–98 passim (and for later examples) Perdiguero, Magical, 138–9. For shamanistic angles, see Pócs, Between, 107–17, 134–43 and Wilby, Visions, 369–7 and ‘Burchard’s’, 40–44. For examples of sickness-transferral, see de Lancre, Tableau, 364–66. For invoking spirits in this context, see Henningsen, ‘Ladies’, 200 and Tausiet, Ponzoña, 271.

18 Frank, ‘Diachronic’, 18; (folktales) Gallop, Book, 256 and Webster, Basque, 66–7.

19 Ramsey, Professional, 262.

20 Ms. Joint, 388; de Lancre, Tableau, 358.

21 For an Amazonian example, see Vitebsky, Shaman, 100. For the European saludador, the virtue of this practice also lay in the curative value of his ‘saliva when fasting’ (Castañega, Tratado, 308).

22 For Italy, see Duni, Under, 63; Tausiet, Urban, 113; Tausiet, ‘Healing’, 53, 48.

23 Conflations between curative sucking and cannibalistic attacks have long-emerged in traditional societies in other parts of the world (see Wilby, ‘Burchard’s’, 30–31).

24 Duni, Under, 63 (and for Sassorosso, 122).

25 Idoate, Documento, 99; de Lancre, Tableau, 155.

26 Tausiet, Urban, 103–106; Klairmont-Lingo, ‘Women’, 87, 79; (itinerants) Ramsey, Professional, 237; (Cabré) Fissell, ‘Women’, 6.

27 Broomhall, Women’s, 106; de Lancre, Tableau, (saludadores) 206–7, 357–64, (other healers) 365–66, 147, 191–92.

28 Klairmont-Lingo, ‘Women’, 82.

29 Morales, ‘Father’, 359–73. Section summarized from Idoate, Documento, 129.

NINE

Familiar Demons

 1 Ms. Joint, 390.

 2 Idoate, Documento, 105, 193, 103; Ms. Zozaya, 406.

 3 Re overlap, one suspect states that he ‘guarded toads [at the akelarre] which were dressed in black cloth with a ribbon of bells’ (see Henningsen, Salazar, 152). For the French examples, see de Lancre, Tableau, 150–51, 153–54, 226.

 4 For a recent summary of European familiar belief, see Hutton, Witch, 262–78. For toad familiar examples see (England) Rosen, Witchcraft, 70–71, 83–88, 110, 184–85; (Hungary) Pócs, ‘Popular’, 324–25. For whistling toads, see Briggs, Witches, 345.

 5 We do have brief references to familiar-type spirits in snake and bird form (see Henningsen, Salazar, 308 and Idoate, Brujería, 395–96, 399).

 6 Henningsen, Witches’, 107, 98; Howard, ‘Discovering’, 33; Ms. Zozaya, 405; Idoate, Documento, 101–8.

 7 Bodin, Demon-Mania, 210, 182. See also Serpell, ‘Guardian’, 171.

 8 Idoate, Brujería, 288, 295 (and for Anocíbar witches, see 353).

 9 Ms. Sansin, 172. For comments on toad size, see Ms. Zozaya, 404 and Idoate, Documento, 101–108 passim.

10 Henningsen, Witches’, 107.

11 For analyses into the folkloric origin of witch’s familiars in Britain and central and southeastern Europe see Wilby, Cunning Folk and Pócs, ‘Popular’, 321–27.

12 Veyrin, Basques, 289–90; Webster, Basque, 48.

13 Barandiarán, Selected, 128–29; Veyrin, Basques, 290. For the dead, see Barandiarán, Selected, 83. The lamiñas, as defined in their broadest sense, also overlapped with Caro Baroja’s list of ‘mischievous beings of lesser and burlesque evil that are linked to the home’ and included the ‘iretxo, ireltxu, irelzuzko, iratxo (Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa); arguidunak (those who have light; Zeanuri, Bizkaia); etxejaun (lord of the house; Bizkaia); txitx; khuso; lompipa; and malo’ (see Caro Baroja, Basques, 281).

14 Ibid., 281; Barandiarán, Selected, 88; Gallop, Book, 257. For names, see Barandiarán, Selected, 127.

15 Castell Granados, ‘Wine’, 188–89; Arles, Tractatus, Sect. 57.

16 Tausiet, Ponzoña, (Romerales) 470, (Clemente) 266–67. For Liébana see Tausiet, Urban, 44, 46.

17 Basque folktales do contain references to marriages between lamiña and humans, but this intimacy is markedly different from the type shared by Basque witches and toad familiars (see Barandiarán, Selected, 89, 128–29).

18 Tausiet, Urban, 88–89.

19 Wilby, Cunning, 83–84.

20 Ms. Zozaya, 405. Though removed for sense here, in the original manuscript there is an unexplained question mark after ‘woe is me’.

21 For familiar beliefs in folktales, see Wilby, Cunning, 59;

22 Bane, Encyclopedia, 144; Lecouteux, Tradition, 144.

23 Pilinovsky, ‘Review’, 128; Grimm, Complete, 1–4.

24 Wilby, Visions, 120–39.

25 Ms. Zozaya, 415; Morales, ‘Father’, 368; For full story, see Paya, Anthology, 433–34.

26 Cotgrave, Dictionarie, Proverbs: ‘The Devil is in the details’.

27 Idoate, Documento, 193; Ms. Joint, 390.

28 In shamanistic systems, for example, familiars often function as visionary aids (see Wilby, Cunning, 147–48).

29 Henningsen, Salazar, 288–90, 444.

30 Ms. Joint, 388. The Vara is a unit of length of approximately one yard and the xeme is roughly half this (being equivalent to the Latin semipes).

31 (Face) De Lancre, Tableau, 100 and Degeler, Devil, 116; (Throne) Henningsen, Salazar, 114; (Abadie) De Lancre, Tableau, 154, (hell) 156.

32 (Pearl) Bodin, Demon-Mania, 16; Moralejo, ‘On’, 182.

33 (Bourges) Lima, Stages, 34–5; Robbins, ‘Truculent’, 29–30, (for overview, 25–48). Sax, Mythical, 126; (eating toads) Flores, Animals, 38–9.

34 Ms. Joint, 390; de Lancre, Tableau, 150; Idoate, Documento, 105, 193.

35 Sax, Mythical, 126; Ms. Joint, 399; Henningsen, Salazar, 130.

36 Henningsen, Salazar, 284. See also de Lancre, Tableau, 211, 222 and Idoate, Documento, 144–47.

37 Henningsen, Witches’, 154–55 (with the practice also referenced in de Lancre, Tableau, 222). Caro Baroja also cites an example of a stone relief from Moissac (see Caro Baroja, World, 71–72).

38 Idoate, ‘Un Proceso’, 261, 253–54, (and for interrogatorial attention, 258–59, 262–63).

39 Tausiet, Urban, 82–85, 87, 83–84.

40 Ibid., 86, (lame devil), 87–88. See also Tausiet, Ponzoña, 264–5.

41 Tausiet, Urban, 144, 148. For rural–urban migration, see 120, 125–42.

42 For Jewish magic see Homza, Spanish, 13 & Pérez, Spanish, xi; (demonic magic) Fanger, Conjuring, vii-xviii; (Moorish leniency) Knutsen, Servants, 40, 7–8, 175–77; (center for magic) Corry, Perceptions, 204.

43 Knutsen, Servants, 7–8, 175–77. In 1609 ‘Moriscos comprised nearly one third of the Kingdom of Valencia’ (Monter, Frontiers, 127).

44 Knutsen, Servants, 160, 75.

45 Ibid., 165–66, 164.

46 Tausiet, Urban, 10, 26, 46, 40, 22.

47 For seasonal migration, see Yriarte, ‘Euskera’, 305; (Zaragoza) Tausiet, Ponzoña, 29 and Tausiet, Urban, 35–36, 44, 53 (concern), 10; (Theatre) Caro Baroja, Basques, 295.

48 Benbassa, Jews, 204; Segura Urra, ‘Hechichería’, 292–95; Henningsen, Witches’, 181; Stuckrad, ‘Madonna’, 287.

49 Castañega, Tratado, 302; Arles, Tractatus, Sects. 70 & 57; Castañega, Tratado, 304, 317–19.

50 Arles, Tractatus, Sect. 45.

51 Castañega, Tratado, 302; Arles, Tractatus, Sect. 89; Idoate, ‘Proceso’, 253–54.

TEN

Milking the Toad

 1 Grenard, Frogs, (hunting) 49, 51, 55. For age, see Morgan, Toads, 56.

 2 Thomas, Man, 110–11; White, Natural, 52.

 3 Idoate, Documento, 113, 114, 116–17; Ms. Zozaya, 409, 405.

 4 Morgan, Toads, 57.

 5 Crump, Eye, 232; Morgan, Toads, 58; Daniels, Encyclopedia, 712.

 6 Fernie, Animal, 485; Digby, Late, 77; Jackson, ‘Role’, 33; Morgan, ‘Who’, 64; Johnson, Folktales, 191–2.

 7 Jackson, ‘Role’, 34, 32. Remedies involving skin-to-skin contact with amphibians were more commonly associated with frogs.

 8 Inwards, Weather Lore, 145.

 9 Gow, Arras, 49; Lea, History, Vol. 3, 512–13. The case is also mentioned by de Lancre (see Tableau, 498).

10 Idoate, ‘Proceso’, 268; Bodin, Demon-Mania, 210, 138.

11 Ms. Joint, 390.

12 Morgan, Toads, 158; For a non-European example, see Aquila, ‘Biological’, 965.

13 Zhang, ‘Quality’, 1582–83.

14 Morgan, Toads, 53; de Lancre, Tableau, 129.

15 Ms. Zozaya, 406; Zhang, ‘Quality’, 1582–86.

16 Browne, Pseudodoxia, 111.

17 Ms. Joint, 390; Ms. Zozaya, 405. For Macbeth, see Serpell, ‘Guardian’, 172.

18 For Sansin, see Idoate, Documento, 104. Charas, Royal, 106.

19 (Secretions) Aquila, ‘Biological’, 965; (Salazar Valley) Idoate, Brujería, 288, 293, 295.

20 For Venegas, see Henningsen, Witches’, 219–20, 202, 390. For salve, see ibid., 297–98.

21 Muchembled, ‘Witches’, 240.

22 For the napkin cure, see Bunworth, Doctresse, 27; Morgan, Toads, 62–3.

23 For an example of squeamishness, see Henningsen, Witches’, 63–64.

24 Fernie, Animal, 486–87. Such practices may have also informed suspects’ claims that they suckled toads, as discussed in Chapter Nine, p. 137.

25 De Lancre, Tableau, 153–54.

26 Duffin, ‘Toadstone’, 3; Morgan, Toads, 67; for Gesner, see Forbes, ‘Lapis’, 143.

27 For examples of folktales, see Webster, Basque, 66–67; and for trial records, see Maxwell-Stuart, Witch, 178–79. For an example of material evidence see ‘Frog’ (St Lucia News). For general examples, see Crump, Eye, 229, 232.

28 Knutsen, Servants, 169.

ELEVEN

Jeannettes’ Imagination

 1 (Zaragoza) Tausiet, Urban, 88–89; (Spain) Knutsen, Servants, 164–66, 169–70; (France) Monter, ‘Toads’, 563–65; (Hungary) Pócs, Between, 91–92.

 2 Pizza, ‘Toads’, 1124–25; for donas de fuera, see Pitrè, Usi, 154–56.

 3 Idoate, Brujería, 288, 293, 295, 353. For eating toads, see Idoate, ‘Proceso’, 262–63.

 4 Caro Baroja, World, 148; Idoate, Brujería, 356; Tausiet, ‘Healing’, 43–44.

 5 Idoate, ‘Proceso’, 262–63; for Vizcaya, see Barahona, Sex, 213.

 6 De Lancre, Tableau, 166, 508–9, 200–1.

 7 Ibid., 153–54, 226, 401. Undressed toad familiars are referenced on pp. 150–51.

 8 Caro Baroja, Basques, 277; Barandiarán, Selected, 99, 97.

 9 Caro Baroja, Basques, 331; Barandiarán, View, 76, 102.

10 Caro Baroja, ‘De Nuevo’, 746.

11 Idoate, Documento, 103–6; 117–22. For the family tree, see Henningsen, Witches’, 33.

12 Henningsen, Witches’, 33, 145–46, (carters) 220; (Goiburus) Azurmendi, Brujas, 39–40; Idoate, Documento, 122; Ramsey, Professional, 216–17.

13 Feit, ‘Invasive’, 833. Dung also provides a moist living environment (see González-Bernal, ‘Cane’, 1–5).

14 Idoate, Documento, 103–5. For Normandy, see Monter, ‘Toads’, 592.

15 Ciruelo, Tratado, 284; Castañega, Treatise, 317.

16 Unfortunately most of the original monasterial buildings at Urdax have not survived (see Etcheverry, Monastery, 111–14). The monks’ skills may have been inspired by the various acts of exorcism attributed to their founder, St Norbert of Xanten (‘Life of St Norbert’, Vita A, 10 and 14).

17 De Lancre, Tableau, 153. Case also summarized on page 226.

18 We have seen Lea, History, Vol. 3, 512–13. For another vivid example, see Gnutsen, Servants, 169.

19 De Lancre, Tableau, 153; Kren, Masterpieces, 71.

20 Silanes Susaeta, ‘Cofradía’, 462; Caro Baroja, Basques, 292.

21 (Italy) Eaton, Rome, 233. Also notable in this context, is that the large bonfires characteristic of St Anthony’s Day celebrations were also a prominent feature of Jeannette’s akelarre (see Tausiet, ‘Fuego’, 328, 332, 337–38, 351–53).

22 (Velvet suits) Serpell, Company, 50; Aulnoy, Ingenious, 3–4.

23 Idoate, ‘Proceso’, 268.

24 Serpell, Company, 48–49.

25 Jerrold, Chronicles, 32 (the claim appears in a satirical novel); Ms. Zozaya, 406; for modern Spain, see ‘Pets’ (The Telegraph).

26 De Lancre, Tableau, 155, 87–88.

27 Christian, Local, 163, 255.

28 De Lancre, Tableau, 153. On six months exactly, this would put her experiences at mid-December. If the date is approximate then we could easily move it two or three weeks earlier (see Henningsen, Witches’, 453).

29 Ibid., 30–32.

30 With regard to pre-existent toad familiar belief the word ‘may’ (along with a similar qualification on page 168) is important. The fact that, outside Jeannette, the two other – much briefer – references to this belief recorded by de Lancre emerged from a town close to Ciboure (Hendaye), and that one was an abbreviated variant of Jeannette’s account, raises the possibility that they were inspired by the Ciboure narrative. If this was the case, then we cannot be certain that pre-existent toad familiar belief played any significant role in Jeannette’s creation at all – making her imaginative leap all-the-more noteworthy (de Lancre, Tableau, 150–51). For Burgos, see Idoate, ‘Proceso’, 253–54.

31 We hear shades of d’Abadie’s confession in Zozaya’s claim that the toad familiar jumped into her hand ‘as though it were a bird’ (Ms. Zozaya, 405).

TWELVE

The Akelarre

 1 While scholars disagree as to its precise origins, there is a consensus that the term akelarre was of local derivation then extrapolated out to general use by witchcraft prosecutors (see Azurmendi, ‘Vueltas’, 44–54).

 2 Ms. Zozaya, 410; Ms. Joint, 388.

 3 Levack, Witchcraft, 119; Clark, Thinking, 14; Roper, Witch-Craze, 113; Campagne, ‘Witch’, 383.

 4 (Stew) Gow, Arras, 8; (early trials) Segura Urra, ‘Hechichería’, 295. For a selection of sabbath accounts across the sixteenth century, see Idoate, Brujería, Cases 11, 17, 25, 40, 45, 48, 50, 51, 58–9, 62, 64, 67–8, 70, 72, 77, 78, 83, 94, 97–105, 107, 112. Also see Azurmendi, ‘Vueltas’, 52–3.

 5 Rémy, Demonolatry, 47–66; (and for Grillandi) Caro Baroja, World, 104–7 and Levack, Witch-Hunt, 56. For the more limited treatments, see Bodin, Demon-Mania, 114–20; Boguet, Examen, 55–61; Maxwell-Stuart, Disquisitiones, 91–94 (bearing in mind that these short page-ranges are found in books that were well over 200 pages long). For earlier Basque sabbath accounts, see fn 4 above.

 6 (Devil-worshippers) Hutton, Witch, 162. A good overview of the relationship between heretical cults and demonological stereotypes can be found in Cohn, Europe’s, 35–78; and more recently, Goodare, European, 33–35, 40–48.

 7 Levack, Witch-Hunt, 8, 42–43.

 8 Ostorero, ‘Concept’, 19–22; Caro Baroja, World, 88–92; Hutton, Witch, 170–79.

 9 Ostorero, ‘Concept’, 21; Caro Baroja, World, 92; Bailey, Battling, 56, 67. Fast on the heels of these tracts, was a seminal treatise written in response to a series of witch trials in Arras in 1460, where witchcraft was termed vauderie; which was etymologically linked to Waldensianism (see Gow, Arras, 1–5).

10 Many theologians and demonologists claimed that witches were worse than heretics because they sinned knowingly (for a typical example, see Gow, Arras, 97–98).

11 Duke, Perspectives, 18; (for heresy) Greengrass, French, 38 and Roberts, ‘Calvinists’, 101.

12 Pearl, Crime, 74, 68, 67, 70.

13 Tinsley, History, 9; Clark, Thinking, 61, 351–52; Pearl, Crime, 85.

14 Tinsley, History, 151, 159.

15 Raemond, L’Antichrist, 103–6. Here, Bosdeau claimed that since she was a young girl, she had joined at least sixty other persons ‘every Wednesday and Friday of each month’ to engage in communal festivities and worship the Devil, who appeared as ‘a big horned goat, all black’.

16 De Lancre, Tableau, 519.

17 Monter, Frontiers, 260; Usunáriz Garayoa, ‘Caza’, 334–37.

18 Henningsen, Witches’, 168–69.

19 Monter, Frontiers, 144, 161. For auto de fé see Henningsen, Witches’, 181. For prosecutions in Logroño from 1582 to 1635, see Zinsko Garmendia, ‘Tribunal’, 62.

20 Simms, ‘Cagots’, 45–46; Hawkins, ‘Chimeras’, 35, 7.

21 Azurmendi, Brujas, 40.

22 Caro Baroja, Basques, 269–70. For challenge, see Bazán Díaz, ‘Supersticíon’, 191–224.

23 For women, see Hamilton, ‘Alumbrados’, 111 and Ahlgren, Theresa, 12–13, 15. For edicts, see Fowler, ‘Assembling’, 257, 259, 281.

24 For example, given the proposed influence of the Durango and Alumbrados heresies, it is notable that many of the trials that took place in the Basque regions in the sixteenth century displayed strong heretical themes (see Caro Baroja, World, 146–55. Caro Baroja, ‘Cuatro’, 95; Caro Baroja, Basques, 311).

25 (Durango) Zinsko Garmendia, ‘Tribunal’, 58; Henningsen, Witches’, 98.

26 Bazán Díaz, ‘Supersticíon’, 194–95; Lea, History, Vol. 3, 169; Caro Baroja, Basques, 271.

27 Keitt, Inventing, 80; Fowler, ‘Assembling’, 269, 263.

28 Ms. Joint, 387; Fowler, ‘Assembling’, 265;

29 Ms. Joint, 418; Fowler, ‘Assembling’, 257.

30 Ms. Joint, 397. See also Tausíet, ‘Brujería’, 85.

31 Ms. Joint, 398; Ms. Zozaya, 407, 419.

32 De Lancre, Tableau, 90, 225; Henningsen, Salazar, 306.

33 (Edict) Henningsen, Witches’, 98; Pérez, Spanish, 67; (Durango) Caro Baroja, Basques, 270.

34 (Raemond) Greengrass, French, 46; (Logroño) Monter, Frontiers, 150.

THIRTEEN

The Meadow of Pleasure

 1 De Lancre, Tableau, 224. Henningsen, Salazar, 294; de Lancre, Tableau, 90, 224.

 2 Ibid., 61.

 3 Ibid., 148, 223.

 4 Ms. Joint, 389, 386, 398. Even the term ‘akelarre’ has been linked etymologically, by some scholars, to ‘meadow with alka flowers’ (Henningsen, Salazar, 106–7).

 5 Idoate, Documento, 189.

 6 Ibid., 190; de Lancre, Tableau, 225.

 7 (Observation), Gallop, Book, 178; Caro Baroja, Basques, 296–301, 349; Ms. Joint, 388.

 8 Del Rio, Disquisitiones, 114.

 9 Although there is no scope to explore this issue here, it is notable that the concept of the ‘Queen of the Sabbath’ is important in Jewish thought and worship (Frankel, Encyclopedia, 133–34).

10 De Lancre, Tableau, 239, 234–35.

11 Zemon Davis, ‘Reasons’, 51; Caro Baroja, Basques, 293; Gallop, Basques, 134.

12 De Lancre, Tableau, 239.

13 (Tripping) Henningsen, Salazar, 118; (Abadie) de Lancre, Tableau, 155; Ms. Joint, 390.

14 Ciruelo, Treatise, 256 ; Arles, Tractatus, Sect. 8; Caro Baroja, Basques, 294.

15 De Lancre, Tableau, 399; Ms. Joint, 399; Henningsen, Salazar, 120, 124.

16 For Telletxea, see Idoate, Documento, 174 and Mongastón, Relacion, 60; Henningsen, Salazar, 210, 118.

17 Ms. Joint, 397.

18 Behringer, Shaman, 104.

19 Mitchell, Violence, 32; Henningsen, Salazar, 258; Veyrin, Basques, 308.

20 Christian, Local, 118.

21 De Lancre, Tableau, 210; Kamen, Phoenix, 179; Idoate, Documento, 136.

22 Frank, ‘Diachronic’, 8; Kamen, Phoenix, 191–3; de Lancre, Tableau, 399.

23 Arles, Tractatus, Sect. 8; (Pérez) Kamen, Phoenix, 190; (Iturriza) Caro Baroja, Basques, 297.

24 Caro Baroja, Basques, 268.

25 Kensinger, ‘Remembering’, 241. For dreams, see Kramer, Dream, 109; for false memories, see Dolcos, Current.

26 For Italy, see Ginzburg, Night Battles, ix; for Sicily, see Henningsen, ‘Ladies’, 205–6.

27 Henningsen, Salazar, 290–92. There is a similar account in de Lancre, Tableau, 502–3.

28 Barandiarán, View, 110; Webster, Basque, 48.

29 De Lancre, Tableau, 92, 159; Ms. Joint, 397.

30 Idoate, Documento, 84; Mongastón, Relacion, 72; (for 1595) Idoate, Brujería, 361.

31 Barandiarán, Selected, 98 ; de Lancre, Tableau, 211 ; Henningsen, Salazar, 294.

32 Castell Granados, ‘Orígens’, 182–3; Webster, Basque, 49; Campagne, ‘Witch’, 400.

33 De Lancre, Tableau, 100, 154; Ms. Joint, 392 (for strength, also see Ms. Zozaya, 409 and Idoate, Documento, 112–23).

34 Cerquand, Légendes, 119; Veyrin, Basques, 290; Ms. Joint, 396.

35 For the 1595 trial, see Idoate, Brujería, 360; Castell Granados, ‘Wine’, 188–89. White clothes could also be worn by dancers, participants in religious processions and – of particular significance in relation to our analyses in Chapter Twenty Two – members of confraternities.

36 Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 89–110; Cohn, Europe’s, 167–175.

37 Del Rio, Disquisitiones, 114; Behringer, Shaman, 39–46, 53–56.

38 Barandiarán, View, 95–6 & Selected, 99; (for goddess) Everson, ‘Tenacity’, 277.

39 Barandiarán, Selected, 89, 133; Caro Baroja, Basques, 276.

40 De Lancre, Tableau, 398; Barandiarán, Selected, 102.

41 Henningsen, Witches’, 156; de Lancre, Tableau, 117; Barandiarán, Selected, 97; Gallop, Basques, 168; Barandiarán, Selected, 97.

42 Caro Baroja, Basques, 277. Zulaika, Basque, 11; Campagne, ‘Witch’, 400.

43 Barandiarán, Selected, 102.

44 Ibid., 102, 104, 107. In his claim that ‘when the two [Mari and Sugaar] come together, it causes a furious rain and hailstorm’ Barandiarán intimates that their lovemaking causes storms (ibid., 99).

45 Arles, Tractatus, Sect. 45; Caro Baroja, Basques, 278, 329–30.

46 Ms. Joint, 391; de Lancre, Tableau, 115. Another dispersal tool was the cock-crow, a trope that, like its ‘Jesus’ equivalent, was found in both demonological texts and folk spirit matrices (de Lancre, Tableau, 171; Gallop, Book, 171–72).

47 Find examples in Bodin, Demon-Mania, 41 and Boguet, Examen, 182–89); (for questionnaire) Caro Baroja, ‘De Nuevo Sobre’, 746 (question 7).

48 Idoate, Documento, 168.

49 Recorded in Livro dos Linhagens by Don Pedro de Barcellos (Barandiarán, Selected, 100).

50 Henningsen, Salazar, 290–92. There is a similar account in de Lancre, Tableau, 502–3.

51 Ibid., 549, 147–48; Ms. Zozaya, 407.

52 Boguet, Examen, 59; Williams, Tableau, 147–48. References to paradise-like realms are prominent in Swedish trials, 1668–76 (see Sorlin, ‘Child’, 114).

53 Although scholars have traced differentials, the terms ‘heaven’ and ‘paradise’ were often used interchangeably both in the bible and by the medieval Church.

54 Pleij, Dreaming, 237; Cohen, Life, 283–87; Behringer, ‘How’, 173, 175–76; Behringer, Shaman, 19, 24–25; (‘blessed’) Catholic Encyclopedia: ‘Heaven’.

55 De Lancre, Tableau, 458; (chewing) Ms. Joint, 399; (decrepit) De Lancre, Tableau, 225.

56 Warner, Alone, 106–122, 160, 119; (right hand) Boss, Mary, 180–81; Catholic Encyclopedia: ‘Ad Caeli Reginam’; Urquijo, ‘Misterio’, 338; (Amaro) Burkhart, ‘Voyage’, 31–32; (later legends) Zulaika, Basque, 8, 371.

57 Idoate, Documento, 144.

58 (De Porto) Idoate, Documento, 144; (iconography) Henningsen, Salazar, 288–90.

59 Warner, Alone, 289; Ferreira, ‘Medieval’, 295.

60 Pleij, Dreaming, 208.

61 Ibid., 237; (sumptuous) Henningsen, Salazar, 208; de Lancre, Tableau, 148.

62 Givens, Judging, 140. Pleij, Dreaming, 418.

63 Zipes, Oxford, 580; (food) Givens, Judging, 141; Pleij, Dreaming, 42, 35.

64 De Lancre, Tableau, 159, 226, (ease) 225; Ms. Joint, 396; This aphorism also appeared in a trial in Bilbao (see Henningsen, Witches’, 453–4).

65 De Lancre, Tableau, 225; (visions) Pleij, Dreaming, 238–39.

66 For fairyland as an afterlife see Firth Green, Elf, 158–93. For entrapment in fairyland in witch-confessions, see Wilby, Cunning, xiii, xv, 68.

67 Givens, Judging, 189, 23, 147; (aunt) 57, (Christianity) 112, (Avalon) 69, 22–23, (Cockaigne) 143, (Sebastian) 114.

FOURTEEN

Dark Banquets

 1 Idoate, Documento, 134; de Lancre, Tableau, 211–12.

 2 Wilby, ‘Burchard’s’, 20–21.

 3 Ms. Joint, 399.

 4 The most notable of these being Zika, ‘Cannibalism’. See also Wilby ‘Burchard’s’.

 5 (Questionnaire) Caro Baroja, ‘Nuevo’, 746; (letter) Henningsen, Witches’, 107; Idoate, Documento, 134–37.

 6 For examples of disinterment, see Chapter 7, fn 2. Across the border in Aragon, in 1537, some suspects claimed to roast babies over the household fire (see Tausiet, ‘Witchcraft’, 180–81).

 7 For all three texts, see Kors, Witchcraft, 155–62, 192. Also see Gow, Arras, 50.

 8 Del Rio, Disquisitiones, 119, 233, 93; Rémy, Demonolatry, 58. Boguet, Examen, 25.

 9 (heretics) Cohn, Europe’s, 39; (lepers) Zimmerman, ‘Leprosy’, 568–69; Segura Urra, ‘Hechichería’, 294; (Cagots) Hawkins, ‘Chimeras’, 42.

10 Ms. Joint, 399.

11 Caro Baroja, ‘Nuevo’, 746; (Pamplona) Idoate, Documento, 135; de Lancre, Tableau, 212.

12 Hutton, Witch, 70–71; (Rotharius) Filotas, Pagan, 311; (Burchard) Cohn, Europe’s, 165.

13 (Salisbury) ibid., 174; (Tilbury) Campagne, ‘Witch’, 395. Tilbury also spent much of his life in France.

14 The evidence from eastern Europe is particularly strong regarding these matrices (see Pócs, ‘Fairies’, 16–29). For a vivid eleventh-century example see Lecouteux, Phantom, 29–30. For disputed terminology, see Hutton, ‘Wild’, 161–78.

15 Johnson, Folktales, 122–27. For an overview, see Lecouteux, Phantom, 29–31, 72, 260.

16 Ibid., 72; Johnson, Folktales, 125.

17 See Wilby, ‘Burchard’s’, 18–21; Lecouteux, Phantom, 118–69 passim.

18 Barandiarán, View, 100, 102.

19 (Lamiñas) Webster, Basque, 48 and Caro Baroja, Basques, 278; (Joséphine) Caro Baroja, World, 232–33.

20 Barandiarán, Selected, 127.

21 (Prevalence) Bever, Realities, 115 and Henningsen, Salazar, 59; (Basque abductees) Barandiarán, View, 98–102.

22 Ms. Joint, 399.

23 Zika, ‘Cannibalism’, 91.

24 Warner, ‘Fee’, 160; Caro Baroja, Basques, 279; Barandiarán, Selected, 93; Frank, ‘Examination’, 152; Webster, Basque, 20–41.

25 (Tartaro) Barandiarán, Selected, 92 and Cerquand, Légendes, 123–39; (females) Barandiarán, View, 62 (see also Webster, Basque, 86). For an example of overlap, see ibid., 127.

26 Frank, ‘Evidence’, Parts 1 and 2, 91–150; Webster, Basque, xiv, 1–2. For conflation, see Barandiarán, Selected, 127, 131.

27 Barandiarán, View, 100–1; Frank, ‘Evidence’, Part 1, 84–85.

28 Frank, ‘Recovering’, 13–14; Frank, ‘Evidence’, Part 1, 91–92 (Though extant today, these Basque good-luck traditions are believed to be of archaic origin). Regarding carnival figures, woodcuts from sixteenth-century Germany reveal the popularity of the cannibal giant Narrenfresser, who was carried through Nuremberg on a carnival float in 1508 and 1522 (see Zika, ‘Cannibalism’, 92–93).

29 Bever, Realities, 116.

30 Frank, ‘Evidence’, Part 1, 77.

31 Sorlin, ‘Child’, 99, 103, 114, 119, 117.

32 Miller, Legendary, 107; Gunnell, Origins, 160–66, 144–46, 174.

33 Ångström Grandien, ‘Swedish’, 87, 100, 103, 110.

34 Zika, ‘Cannibalism’, 95; Behrend, Resurrecting, 49; Muir, Ritual, 120.

35 Zika, ‘Cannibalism’, 87, 89; Walker, ‘Alterity’, 9.

36 Zika, ‘Cannibalism’, 89. The Pamplona Manuscript refers to the use of ‘grills’ (Idoate, Documento, 140).

37 Staden, Hans, 5. See also Sugg, Murder, 45.

38 Staden, Captivity, 156–59.

39 Douglass, Amerikanuak, 67; Duffy, Return, 6.

40 Erauso, Memoir, xxvii; Douglass, Amerikanuak, 70.

41 For tobacco, see Shenoy, Towards, 359 and de Lancre, Tableau, 59.

42 Fedewa, María, 20, 25–26, 64–68; Duffy, Return, 7; Erauso, Memoirs, xlvii, 27.

43 For shipwrecks, see de Lancre, Tableau, 118, 123, 155.

44 Staden, Captivity, 102–3; Mongastón, Relacion, 92.

45 For Mignolo, see Acosta, Natural, xvii; Campagne, ‘Witches’, 18; Fedewa, María, 44.

46 Acosta, Natural, Vol. 2, 344–52.

47 Skaarup, Anatomy, 105.

48 Encyclopaedia Britannica: ‘University of Valladolid’. Spinks, Religion, 190; Catholic Encyclopedia: ‘José de Acosta’.

49 Hierarchy: ‘Juan Bautista de Acevedo Muñoz’.

50 Ibid. We cannot be certain that the role was a recognition of Acevedo’s prior engagement with New World issues, but it is notable that between 1483 and 1820 only one other inquisitor general had this extra role (see Lea, History, Vol. 1, 556–59).

51 (Sancerre) Behrend, Resurrecting, 43; (Virginia) Armstrong, ‘Boiled’, 167, 175.

52 Harding, Dead, 112; Behrend, Resurrecting, 43; Douglass, Amerikanuak, 70.

53 Henningsen, Salazar, 132; Ms. Zozaya, 410.

54 Ibid., 410; Ms. Joint, 399.

55 For Montaigne, see Sugg, Mummies, 205; Gordon-Grube, ‘Anthropophagy’, 406.

56 For Taylor, see ibid., 407; (Charas) Sugg, Mummies, 110, (bloodsucking), 110, 19.

57 Cornaro, Writings, 31.

58 Ms. Joint, 393; (veins) Sugg, Mummies, 110; (owls) Cornaro, Writings, 31.

59 Holy Bible. King James Version. John 6: 53–55.

60 The term ‘Eucharist’ can be used to designate both the ritual and the bread and wine itself. I use the term ‘Eucharist ritual’ to differentiate the former from the latter.

61 Cameron, Enchanted, 289; Teter, Sinners, 70; Monter, ‘Toads’, 592. Given that the Eucharist host represented the flesh of Christ, the logic of consuming it for healing purposes was little different from that of medical cannibalism.

62 Tausiet, ‘Brujería’, 81–83; Kamen, Phoenix, 121.

63 Ruiz, Spanish, 150; Catholic Encyclopedia: ‘Feast of Corpus Christi’.

64 McKendrick, Theatre, 238.

65 (Visualization) Zika, ‘Cannibalism’, 101; (corporeal) Norman, Roman Catholic, 100.

66 Account paraphrased by Sinanoglou in ‘Christ’, 491–92.

67 Ibid., 491, 500, 497; Kirakosian, ‘Bodleian’, 180–84. For Aquinas, see Gertsman, ‘Signs’, 86.

68 Ibid., 73; Langland, Piers, 210.

69 Lyndal Roper notes that references to the consumption of the host and cannibalism converge in witch trials in Germany (Roper, Witch-Craze, 73–74).

70 Zimmerman, ‘Leprosy’, 569. For an Islamic example, see Tausiet, ‘Brujería’, 78–79.

71 Segura Urra, ‘Hechichería’, 294.

72 Edwards, ‘Religious’ 9–10; Tausiet, ‘Brujería’, 77–78.

73 Council of Trent: Session X111, Canon Eight. The doctrine was vigorously defended in the writings of de Lancre’s bother-in-law, Florimond de Raemond (Tinsley, History, 101).

74 Romaine, Revisioning, 136.

75 Catholic Encyclopedia: ‘Premonstratensians’; ‘Life of St Norbert’, (Vita A) 11 and (Vita B) 22.

FIFTEEN

‘There is no sin in it’

 1 De Lancre, Tableau, 238; Ms. Joint, 398.

 2 Briggs, Witches, 135, 137.

 3 For an overview, see Stephens, Demon. For folkloric themes, see Wilby, Visions, 211–14, 386–89.

 4 We find sex between humans and spirits (particularly lamiñak) in Basque folklore (see Barandiarán, Selected, 89, 128–29). Many Basque witches’ accounts of private sex with the Devil evoke personal experience (See Henningsen, Witches’, 165 and Idoate, Documento, 140–47). For Porto, see ibid., 143.

 5 De Lancre, Tableau, 233, 232; Idoate, Documento, 140–42; Boguet, Examen, 57; (for Bosdeau) Raemond, L’Antichrist, 104.

 6 Caro Baroja, ‘Cuatro’, 96.

 7 Idoate, Brujería, 349, 351, 360; Arles, Tractatus, Sect. 12. For other early references see Idoate, Brujería, cases 11, 17, 23, 81, 82–3, 102 (bis), 103.

 8 Kramer, Malleus, 243–54; Rémy, Demonolatry, 11–27; Del Rio, Disquisitiones, 89–91, 93; Bodin, Demon-Mania, 130–34.

 9 The (arguably) most dramatic sabbath-sex accounts to emerge pre-1609 can be found in an anonymous treatise (Arras, 1460) linked to historical fears about Waldensianism (see Gow, Arras, 4, 44–47 passim).

10 Boguet, Examen, 57; Fowler, ‘Assembling’, 269, 271, 264.

11 (Alumbrados) Ferber, Demonic, 93–94; (Mella) Caro Baroja, Basques, 269–70.

12 Idoate, Documento, 140–42.

13 De Lancre, Tableau, 233, 235, 410, 240; Henningsen, Salazar, 282.

14 De Lancre, Tableau, 233–40, 410; Mongastón, Relacion, 83 (re akelarre marriage).

15 Fowler, ‘Assembling’, 263; Caro Baroja, Basques, 270.

16 Tausiet, ‘Espíritus’, 77.

17 Ibid., 78; Pleij, Dreaming, 311.

18 Pleij, Dreaming, 328; Brundage, Law, 493.

19 (Barcelona) Kamen, Phoenix, 320; (Zaragoza) Tausiet, Urban, 114. As recently as 2016, a Spanish priest was ‘accused of staging orgies with nuns’ at a convent in Galicia, with two nuns telling the police ‘that he had sex with them on a daily basis in order to purify them’ (see Keeley, ‘Nuns’, 33).

20 Pleij, Dreaming, 312; Cohn, Pursuit, 148, 163; Pleij, Dreaming, 312.

21 Mongastón, Relacion, 83.

22 Givens, Judging, 141, 143. See also Pleij, Dreaming, 418.

23 Pleij, Dreaming, 27, 208–12. For Cuenca, see Edwards, ‘Religious’, 12.

24 Holy Bible. King James Version. Genesis 2:25; de Lancre, Tableau, 62.

25 Pleij, Dreaming, 18–19; 319–20; For Cockaigne, see ibid., 318–31.

26 De Lancre, Tableau, 238, 156. Pleij, Dreaming, 43, 39.

27 De Lancre, Tableau, 410. c.

28 For Marco Polo, see Pleij, Dreaming, 260; Wood, ‘Sexual’, 14, 20–21.

29 Pleij, Dreaming, 318, 261, 259, 426.

30 Kamen, Phoenix, 318–20; Karras, Sexuality, 18; Monter, Frontiers, 145.

31 (Boundaries) Karras, Sexuality, 23; Muir, Ritual, 101; (Pérez) Kamen, Phoenix, 196.

32 Muir, Ritual, 97; Kamen, Phoenix, 179; for Dijon, see Muir, Ritual, 34.

33 De Lancre, Tableau, 399; Muir, Ritual, 97.

34 De Lancre, Tableau, 239–40; Harris, Sacred, 254–55; Frank, ‘Examination’, 181.

35 De Lancre, Tableau, 233; Harris, Sacred, 254–55; de Lancre, Tableau, 410, 233.

36 Pleij, Dreaming, 27, 209.

37 De Lancre, Tableau, 64; Valverde ‘Illegitimacy’, 51–52, 55; de Lancre, Tableau, 58; Veyrin, Basques, 327. See also Poska, Women, 233.

38 Valverde, ‘Illegitimacy’, 53–54; de Lancre, Tableau, 161, 410; (erotic verses etc.) Douglass, Basque, 253.

39 For general attitudes, see Poska, Women, 22–24; Valverde, ‘Illegitimacy’, 53–62; Weisner, Women, 71–76. For de Lancre, see Tableau, 57–58, (universal nobility) 64.

40 Barahona, Sex, 103, 56; Poska, Women, 18, 80.

41 De Lancre, Tableau, 154, 233.

42 Pearl, Crime, 130; de Lancre, Tableau, 239, 99, 147, 222.

43 Ibid., 219, 220–21; Machielsen, ‘Thinking’, 443–44; (illegitimacy) Dusseau, Juge, 60.

44 De Lancre, Tableau, 62–63.

45 Ibid., Tableau, 98, 62; Bernou, Chasse, 90.

46 De Lancre, Tableau, xxxiv, 224, 61.

SIXTEEN

‘Be nothing to God’

 1 Henningsen, Salazar, 114–15; de Lancre, Tableau, 153.

 2 Briggs, Witches, 137.

 3 De Lancre, Tableau, 100; Idoate, Documento, 193.

 4 For Nider, see Maxwell-Stuart, Witch-Beliefs, 62; Henningsen, Witches, 98.

 5 For these examples, see Caro Baroja, ‘Cuatro’, 95; Idoate, Brujería, 290–95; Idoate ‘Proceso’, 269–72 (and for discussion) 241–50. For other references to pacts or apostasy see Idoate, Brujería, cases 11, 24–5, 41, 56, 69–70, 80–83, 87, 99, 101–4, 107, 112, 287, 293, 295, 302. See also Segura Urra, ‘Hechichería’, 298 and Usunáriz Garayoa, ‘Caza’, 324–27.

 6 Caro Baroja, ‘Cuatro’, 95. Central ellipses refer to sentences on the use of flying ointment.

 7 Caro Baroja, World, 76; Durrant, ‘Osculum’, 37.

 8 Maxwell-Stuart, Witch, 62, (for another example) 89.

 9 Ms. Joint, 389; Dusseau, Le Juge, 107–8; Idoate, ‘Proceso’, 249–50.

10 Acosta, Natural, Vol 2, 299–300, 324.

11 Redden, ‘Vipers’, 153. For scarification, see Acosta, Natural, 333, 337. Military initiation ceremonies may also have played a role here, with Garcilaso de la Vega describing in detail a ceremony where the novices came ‘one by one to the King, and presenting themselves before him on their Knees, they received from his hand the first Mark and Signal of Royal Dignity, which was to have their Ears bored, and pierced by him in the soft part of their Ear, with a large Nail of Gold . . . the novitiates, in recompense for this favour, kissed the hand of the Inca’ (Vega, Royal, 229).

12 Clark, Thinking, 79; (Olmos) Campagne, ‘Witches’, 1; Fernández Juarez, ‘Comer’, 102–6.

13 De Lancre, Tableau, 100.

14 Ms. Zozaya, 404; Joint, 388–90; Idoate, Documento, 99.

15 De Lancre, Tableau, 98; Idoate, Brujería, 293 (also) 287; Idoate, ‘Proceso’, 241–50.

16 Henningsen, Witches’, 96; Christian, Local, 59; Catholic Encyclopedia: ‘Confirmation’.

17 For Usun, see Arles, Tractatus, Preface. For an overview, see Geary, Living, 95–124.

18 De Lancre, Tableau, 98; Ms. Joint, 390; (fealty) Rémy, Demonolatry, 65; (juror) Azurmendi, Brujas, 39–40, 62; Henningsen, Salazar, 33–34. Henningsen defines ‘jurado’ as ‘alderman’ although it is not clear if Goiburu ever held the role, especially given his poverty in 1608 (Henningsen, Salazar, 33; Azurmendi, Brujas, 66–67). For the priesthood, see de Lancre, Tableau, 425. For confraternal oaths, see Chapter Twenty Two of this book.

19 Ms. Joint, 390; Bamji, ‘Catholic’, 195; Wright, ‘Military’, 42–43.

20 Catholic Encyclopedia: ‘Confirmation’; Bamji, ‘Catholic’, 191, 193.

21 This list is drawn from the core features of the Catholic confirmation ritual as practised in western Europe in the early modern period.

22 Ms. Zozaya, 401; Catholic Encyclopedia: ‘Confirmation’.

23 Idoate, ‘Proceso’, 249–50, 228, 259, 229, 242. For age range, see 251–75 passim. That suspects were mining experiences of general religious instruction and/or preparation for confirmation is supported by the fact that the renunciations were made before the priest/witch-mistress at often unspecified locations as opposed to before the Devil at the akelarre.

24 Kamen, Phoenix, 105–6.

25 Bamji, ‘Catholic’, 192; Henningsen, Salazar, 34.

26 Flynn, ‘Betrayal’, 34, 30.

27 Chuchiak, Inquisition, 205; Edwards, ‘Religious’, 14; Nalle, God, 62; Flynn, ‘Betrayal’, 35–36.

28 Nash, Blasphemy, 113; Chuchiak, Inquisition, 211.

29 Chuchiak, Inquisition, 205; Flynn, ‘Betrayal’, 40.

30 Zinsko Garmendia, ‘Tribunal’, 62; Goikoetxea, ‘400’, 7; Henningsen, Witches’, 98.

31 Caro Baroja, World, 73; (Jesuits) Muir, Love, 68; Thompson, Motif, M210–M211.

32 Cohn, Europe’s, 114–15.

33 Tausiet, Urban, 92.

34 Tausiet, Urban, (pact) 129, (Andreu) 160, (Anima) 91–92, (Ruiz) 89.

35 (Clemente) Tausiet, Ponzoña, 267; de Lancre, Tableau, 191–92.

36 Henningsen, Salazar, 300. For other French examples, see de Lancre, Tableau, 506, 192.

37 Tausiet, Urban, 160, 166, (García) 129. Christian prayer based on Psalm 31:5.

38 Tausiet, Urban, 189.

39 (Clemente) Tausiet, Ponzoña, 266–67; (Orsolina) Duni, Under, 118.

40 Mongastón, Relacion, 68, 33; Idoate, Documento, 84.

41 Ms. Joint, 390; (Orsolina) Duni, Under, 118.

SEVENTEEN

Theophilus and the Stage

 1 Harris, Sacred, 244; and for floats etc., see Kamen, Phoenix, 185.

 2 Degeler, Devil, 4, 83. See also 23–24, 35, 40, 61–63; (hell’s mouth) Lima, Stages, 31, 29–37.

 3 Kamen, Phoenix, 185. For Seville, see Brooks, Dances, 211–13.

 4 For devil figures, see Harris, Sacred, 229, 206–7, 254–55, 275–77 and Lima, Stages, 55–74 passim.

 5 (Chevalier) Muir, Love, 68; (l’enfant) Degeler, Devil, 25; (esclavo) Lima, Dark, 23, 40. For Theophilus, see Root, Theophilus, 23 & Lima, Dark, 32–34.

 6 (Fascination) Lima, Stages, 241, 35, 260–61; Degeler, Devil, 11–15. Lima, Dark, 44.

 7 Henningsen, Salazar, 29–30; Léon, ‘Pastorale’, 13–15.

 8 Urquijo, ‘Teatro’, 144–45.

 9 (Telletxea) Idoate, Documento, 174 and Mongastón, Relacion, 60; (Oiartzun) Caro Baroja, Basques, 295; Henningsen, Salazar, 67–73; Aulnoy, Ingenious, 60–62.

10 Ibid., 60–62. For other examples, see Léon, ‘Pastorale’, 59–60 and Vinson, Folk-Lore.

11 Veyrin, Basques, 361; Paya, Anthology, 460; Fernández de Larrinoa, ‘Carnival’, 14, 78, 177.

12 Ms. Joint, 388; (painted faces) de Lancre, Tableau, 149, 153, 100 and Degeler, Devil, 116.

13 Degeler, Devil, 114, 76, 86, 89, 13; (Rutebeuf) Crawford, ‘The Devil’, 306.

14 (Blessing) Degeler, Devil, 88; Ms. Joint, 396; Degeler, Devil, 88.

15 (Flatulence) Ms. Zozaya 408; Allen, Farting, 92; (Solsona) Kamen, Phoenix, 185.

16 Degeler, Devil, 18–19, 55, 65; Ms. Joint, 396.

17 Henningsen, Salazar, 284; Gallop, Basques 100.

18 Idoate, ‘Proceso’, 262, 259; (kauterak) Paya, Anthology, 462.

19 Rémy also notes, with striking realism, that in 1587 Nicole Moréle asserted that ‘she still had her mask hidden in a chest at her house; and when this was searched for and found, she confessed that she had it from her step-mother, who had altered it to fit her when they first went together to those abominable assemblies’ (Rémy, Demonolatry, 62–63).

20 Maxwell-Stuart, Witch, 191; Roper, ‘Witchcraft’, 132.

21 Caro Baroja, Basques, 350.

22 Degeler, Devil, 113, 115.

23 (Pastorales) Caro Baroja, Basques, 350; Tausiet, Ponzoñas, 264.

EIGHTEEN

The First Altar of Hell

 1 De Lancre, Tableau, 438.

 2 Tausiet, ‘Brujería’, 73; de Lancre, Tableau, 463.

 3 Distribution is discussed further in Chapter 21, pp. 358–59.

 4 Ms. Joint, 398.

 5 De Lancre, Tableau, 462; Kramer, Malleus, 256; Del Rio, Disquisitiones, 93; de Lancre, Tableau, 463; Ciruelo, Treatise, 315; Arles, Tractatus, Sect. 57.

 6 Definition taken from the Oxford English Dictionary. The claim, in the Errores Gazariorum, that witches urinated in wine barrels because the Eucharist ‘is made of the said wine’ or, in the Formicarius, that novice witches ritually drank a bitter liquid in order to gain knowledge of ‘the principle rituals of this sect’ might appear more relevant, but both texts portray these activities as a sabotage, as opposed to imitation or parody, of the mass (Maxwell-Stuart, Witch-Beliefs, 71, 62). Stephens argues that the initiatory broth ‘is not a parody of the Eucharist, it is a countereucharist’ (Stephens, Demon, 199–200).

 7 Kramer, Malleus, 256–57; Ciruelo, Treatise, 312, 315–17.

 8 Summers, History, 146.

 9 Del Rio, Disquisitiones, 93.

10 Boguet, Examen, 60.

11 (Mass account) Boguet, Examen, 60. In The Basques, Caro Baroja claims that an inquisitorial letter discussing the Salazar Valley trials of 1527 (which was read by Valle) contained a ‘parody of communion’ (Caro Baroja, Basques, 311). But I have been unable to find any reference to this parody in the versions of the letter published by Caro Baroja (in ‘Cuatro’) or in his fullest discussion of the document (in World, 146–9) so I assume it did not exist. This lack of historicity regarding the sabbath-mass is supported by the fact that la Suprema does not make any direct references to the phenomenon in its instructions to the Tribunal, but only makes generalist comments like: ‘take down only what is of vital importance’ such as ‘the form of Devil worship, and the nature of apostasy’ (Henningsen, Salazar, 242).

12 Ibid., 251. For tropes, see Fowler, ‘Assembling’, 257–66 passim; Tausíet, ‘Brujería’, 83–89; (for evolution) Cohn, Europe’s, 33–78.

13 Cervantes, Devil, 25; Acosta, Natural, 356, 359–60; (Ponce) Cervantes, Devil, 51.

14 Clark, Thinking, 79; (Olmos) Campagne, ‘Witches’, 1.

15 De Lancre, Tableau, 463.

16 Clark, Thinking, 51, 350, 333; Boguet, Examen, xx.

17 Clark, Thinking, 51, 351, 61, 352.

18 Caro Baroja, World, 149; Cervantes, Devil, 25; Castañega, Tratado, 302–3; Ms. Joint, 398.

19 Campagne, ‘Witches’, 4; Castañega, Tratado, 298.

20 Clark, Thinking, 333; Castañega, Tratado, 302–3, 316.

21 De Lancre, Tableau, 426.

22 Castañega, Tratado, 317; Arles, Tractatus, Sect. 93; (Zaragoza) Tausiet, Urban, 36, 39, 41, 44, 160, 34.

23 Castañega, Tratado, 302.

24 De Lancre, Tableau, 463, 461; Ms. Joint, 398; de Lancre, Tableau, 463–64, 460, 423.

25 Kamen, Phoenix, 117, 119, 121.

26 Tausiet, ‘Witchcraft’, 82.

27 Catholic Encyclopedia: ‘Votive Mass’; Bossy, ‘Mass’, 100; Kamen, Phoenix, 118–19.

28 Ms. Joint, 397; Ms. Zozaya 418; de Lancre, Tableau, 147–48, 64.

29 Christian, Visionaries, 249.

30 The Sentence of Maria de Zozaya runs a close second.

31 Catholic Encyclopedia: ‘Premonstratensian Canons’; Henningsen, Salazar, 34.

32 Ms. Joint, 398. The tarja is a coin worth a quarter of a silver real.

33 Barandiarán, Selected, 249; de Lancre, Tableau, 83.

34 Frank, ‘Diachronic’, 2–3; Idoate, Documento, 165, 164; Ms. Joint, 398; Neuman, Dictionary, entry for ‘obládas’; de Lancre, Tableau, 63–64.

35 Ms. Zozaya, 412; Ms. Joint, 391; Frank, ‘Diachronic’, 2; ‘Caro Baroja, Basques, 411.

36 Frank, ‘Diachronic’, (populace) 22, (etymology) 17–19.

37 (Graçiana) Ms. Joint, 387; (seroras) Frank, ‘Diachronic’, 1, 10–11, 2–3. If men needed to approach the altar, they did so via an internal staircase that circumvented the sanctuary area (Frank, ‘Diachronic’, 10).

38 De Lancre, Tableau, 83–84. For more on access to the altar see Frank, ‘Diachronic’, 11.

39 For other functions of the serora, see Frank, ‘Diachronic’, 1–33. Given the Basque witches’ links to crop-maleficium, it may also be more than coincidental that, as noted in Chapter Four, the serora was required to ring the bells at churches and hermitages to ‘ward off’ or ‘conjure’ storms (Veyrin, Basques, 305).

NINETEEN

Mass and Misrule

 1 (Conjurors) Castañega, Tratado, 317; (Manrique) Henningsen, Witches’, 191; (saludador) de Lancre, Tableau, 358–59; Tausiet, Urban, 43–46, 160.

 2 Ms, Joint, 398; de Lancre, Tableau, 464, 401, 460.

 3 Boguet, Examen, 60; Degeler, Devil, 14, 48, 83, 115.

 4 Kamen, Phoenix, 128; Pescado, New, 104; Caro Baroja, Basques, 238.

 5 Ciruelo, Treatise, 322; de Lancre, Tableau, 460; Barandiarán, Selected, 249; Catholic Encyclopedia: ‘Requiem Mass’.

 6 De Lancre, Tableau, 460.

 7 Frank, ‘Diachronic’, 2–3.

 8 Douglass, Death, 70, 78, 74.

 9 Barandiarán, Selected, 250, 252; de Lancre, Tableau, 62.

10 (Billy goat) Ms. Zozaya, 408; de Lancre, Tableau, 460–61, 463.

11 Clark, ‘Inversion’, 101.

12 Lima, Stages, 55–73 passim; Burke, Popular, 183.

13 Clark, ‘Inversion’, 101; Harris, Sacred, 256; Zemon Davis, ‘Reasons’, 43–44; Caro Baroja, Basques, 302.

14 Zemon-Davis, ‘Reasons’, 44.

15 Burke, Popular, 188, 197; Zemon Davis, ‘Reasons’, 45, 43.

16 Burke, Popular, 199, (Cockaigne) 190; Pleij, Dreaming, 53–54, 149, 189.

17 For a seminal study, see Clark, ‘Inversion’, 98–127; de Lancre, Tableau, xxxv; (carouser) Echeverria, ‘Capturing’, 134. See also Duché-Gavet, ‘Sorcières’, 150–51.

18 Clark, Thinking, 17–19.

19 Kamen, Phoenix, 170, 183.

20 For Paris, see Harris, Sacred, 1–2.

21 For overview, see Bayless, Parody, 125. For sermons, see Parsons, ‘Sermon’, 96, 94, 95.

22 (Gospels) Bayless, Parody, 330–31, 139, (mass) 94, 115–16, 344.

23 Givens, Judging, 141; (island) Pleij, Dreaming, 396; (abbot) Bayless, Parody, 95.

24 Harris, Sacred, 131–55, (and ‘mass merrily’) 264; Bayless, Parody, 7, 125.

25 Burke, Popular, 192; Harris, Sacred, 152–53.

26 Parsons, Sermon, 92; Russell, ‘My Dear’, 238. There is a mock funeral described in Lecouteux, Phantom, 185.

27 (Sermons) Parsons, Sermon, 97, 94; (Renart) Harris, Sacred, 143–44.

28 (Sermon) Parsons, Sermon, 97, 100; Arden, Fool’s, 104.

29 (Abbeys) Zemon Davis, ‘Reasons’, 43; (Arras) Harris, Sacred, 205, (Mère Folle) 154.

30 (Bucholz) Finucane, Contested, 207; Scribner, Popular, 74; (La Mancha) Nalle, God, xvii.

31 Aulnoy, Ingenious, 60–61; Harris, Sacred, 263, 7, 242–43; (Llinas) Kamen, Phoenix, 176; Russell, ‘Dear’, 237–56.

32 (Gypsies) Urquijo, ‘Teatro’, 155; (marriage) Kamen, Phoenix, 316; Caro Baroja, Basques, 295.

33 Urquijo, ‘Teatro’, 160–61. Bearing in mind that in this period the term ‘comedy’ did not always denote a comedic play (see Mujica, New, 9). Caro Baroja, Basques, 233–34.

34 (Males) Burke, Popular, 184; de Lancre, Tableau, 460, 63; Caro Baroja, Basques, 301–2, 428.

35 (Rags) Finucane, Contested, 207; (blankets) Parsons, ‘Sermon’, 97; (shoes) Harris, Sacred, 2.

36 (Profane) Kamen, Phoenix, 177; (Halledrunken) Bayless, Parody, 352; Caro Baroja, World, 167–68; de Lancre, Tableau, 461; (tavern song) Bayless, Parody, 122.

37 Ms. Joint, 388; de Lancre, Tableau, 463; (cities) Burke, Popular, 188; (missal) Muir, Ritual, 103–4; (vestments) Harris, Sacred, 183; (oxtails) Nalle, God, xvii; (shit) Parsons, Sermon, 97; (ass-bones) Finucane, Contested, 207; (bowels) Parsons, Sermon, 100; Durrant, ‘Osculum’, 43.

38 Bayless, Parody, 94 ; (masks) Harris, Sacred, 161–65, 255, 234.

39 (Bacchus) Bayless, Parody, 94; (rewards) Parsons, Sermon, 100; (indulgence) Harris, Sacred, 153; (paradise) Parsons, Sermon, 100; (eye) Bayless, Parody, 374.

40 (Letter) Russell, Lucifer, 88; (Lyon) Zemon Davis, ‘Reasons’, 44.

41 Suspects from this age range confessed that ‘the rear end of the Grand Master has a face’; ‘[we saw] a black thing . . . with its painted belly’; and we ‘saw him [the Devil] cast money from the horns’ (see de Lancre, Tableau, 100 and Idoate, Brujería, 301–2).

42 In Chapter Twenty One we discuss the fact that the suspects most likely to have introduced the theme of the akelarre-mass into the Zugarramurdi Sentence, along with the most significant contributor to the theme in the Labourd prosecutions (Jeannette d’Abadie), were all between twelve and eighteen years of age.

43 (Bordeaux) Tinsley, History, 28 and Howarth, French, 68–9; de Lancre, Tableau, 223.

44 (Anocíbar) Idoate, Brujería, 324; (Roncal) Idoate, ‘Proceso’, 254.

45 The translation of “you’ll drink it around there” is ambiguous, in that ‘there’ could be also translated as ‘oh’ – but it still amounts to the same nonsensical effect (see Idoate, ‘Proceso’, 250).

46 (Bavarian) Muir, Ritual, 244; (Malleus) Durrant, ‘Osculum’, 39; Boguet, Examen, 60; (Lorraine) Briggs, Witches, 145.

47 (Valais) Maxwell-Stuart, Witch, 186; (Arras) Gow, Arras, 4, 30.

TWENTY

The Malevolent Mass

 1 Ciruelo, Treatise, 316; Schreiner, ‘Tot’, 352.

 2 Little, Benedictine, xiv, 81–83, 188. While Little focuses on Northern France, Bowman has argued that liturgical cursing was also strong in Catalonia in the Romanesque period (Bowman, Shifting, 59–79).

 3 Henningsen, Witches’, 100–1. The distinctions between excommunication and anathema were fine (see Hyland, Excommunication, 22–25 and Tausiet, ‘Excluded’, 442).

 4 Little, Benedictine, 43, 134. These clamours could involve the cursing of saints in rites such as the ‘humiliation of relics’ (see Geary, Living, 110–14).

 5 Bossy, ‘Mass’, 40–42.

 6 Ibid., 46; (Cantor) Schreiner, ‘Tot’, 343.

 7 (Death-blow) Ciruelo, Treatise, 314; (Toledo) Landon, Manual, 166; Bossy, ‘Mass’, 46.

 8 (Decline) Little, Benedictine, 44, 274; Ciruelo, Treatise, 314; (Cuenca) Nalle, God, 239.

 9 Bossy, ‘Mass’, 46; de Lancre, Tableau, 500; Bossy, ‘Mass’, 46.

10 For the cursing mass, see del Rio, Disquisitiones, 225; de Lancre, Tableau, 500. Bodin refers to the use of Psalm 108 (see Bodin, Demon-Mania, 67).

11 (Spain) Barandiarán, Selected, 69–70; (France) Frazer, Golden, 54; (Germany) Schreiner, ‘Tot’, 353; (Hungary) Pócs, ‘Curse’, 185.

12 Pocs, ‘Curse’, 174, 184. The evidence was collected on the borders of orthodox Romanian areas.

13 Ibid., 178–89.

14 Ibid., 177–80.

15 Ciruelo, Treatise, 314.

16 Henningsen, Witches’, 99–101; Castañega, Tratado, 312, 311.

17 Barandiarán, Selected, 69–70. While the Church would argue that extinguishing the candle was a symbolic act, for the congregation it must have appeared little different to an act of sympathetic magic (see Tausiet, ‘Excluded’, 447).

18 Christian, Visionaries, 340; Ott, Circle, 95.

19 Ott, Circle, 95.

20 De Lancre, Tableau, 500. For similar condemnation, see del Rio, Disquisitiones, 114.

21 Ms, Joint, 393; Ms. Zozaya, 402, 412. See also Pócs. ‘Curse’, 180.

22 (Shedding curses) Pócs. ‘Curse’, 179; Ms, Joint, 393–94, 392–93.

23 De Lancre, Tableau, 160.

24 Given that the most powerful form of liturgical cursing involved celebrating requiem masses for the living, it is also notable the Spanish akelarre-mass was so strongly associated with ritual activities associated with the dead.

25 Contemporary narratives from both Portugal and Sicily describe Christian ceremonies being celebrated by fairies (see Henningsen, ‘Witches’, 65 and Givens, Judging, 71).

26 Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou, 347, 348.

27 Ibid., 348; Ramos, ‘Animated’, 97.

28 (Risco) Lecouteux, Phantom, 145, (mass) 36–38; (Damian) Ibid., 36 and Lecouteux, Return, 67–68.

29 Barandiarán, Selected, 255; (folklore survey) Christian, Visionaries, 341, 179.

30 Ibid., 201; (Lekuona) Gallop, Book, 253.

31 Lecouteux, Phantom, 41; (1400) Schmidt, Ghosts, 143, 145 and Orme, Medieval, 126.

32 Barandiarán, Selected, 83, 105, 133; de Lancre, Tableau, 147–8.

33 Ramos, ‘Animated’, 96–97; (Paderborn) Lecouteux, Return, 68

34 Lecouteux, Phantom, 36.

35 Ibid., 144, 263; (Berceo) Caro Baroja, World, 74.

36 Ms. Joint, 392–93.

TWENTY ONE

De Lancre’s Imagination

 1 De Lancre, Tableau, 63; Caro Baroja, Basques, 301–2, 428. I state ‘may’ as opposed to ‘are’ here because it is not always possible to determine whether nineteenth and twentieth century boy bishop celebrations represent unbroken continuations or revivals (see Mackenzie, Medieval, 118, 111 & Valdivielso Arce, ‘Antigua’, 58–62).

 2 Aluesta, Improvisational, 5; Veyrin, Basques, 268–69; Paya, Anthology, 460. For an overview of the origins of Souletin pastorales, see Garamendi Azcorra, ‘Teatro’, 551–59.

 3 Arles, Tractatus, Sect. 89; Castañega, Tratado, 316.

 4 Pócs, ‘Curse’, 185; Douglass, Death, xiv; (Compostela) Lecouteux, Phantom, 41.

 5 (Stagecraft) Wickham, Medieval, 212; (boy bishop) Storer, History, Index to Salisbury Cathedral; Valdivielso Arce, ‘Antigua’, 58–62; (pests) Christian, Local, 29–31 and Kamen, Phoenix, 35–36; Young, History, 157.

 6 Payne, Spanish, 56; Casey, Early, 196. For a regional analysis, see Nalle, God, 185–99.

 7 Trask, History, 13; Frank, ‘Diachronic’, 5–6.

 8 (Mari) Everson, ‘Tenacity’, 277–95 and Trask, History, 13. (Priestesses) Frank, ‘Diachronic’, 13–20; (Mamuson) Frank, ‘Evidence’, Parts 1 and 2, 61–150.

 9 Ibid., 12.

10 (English example) Wilby, Cunning, 180; (Zaragoza) Tausiet, Urban, 160 (this ritual involved the black henbane seed); Castañega, Tratado, 311.

11 Henningsen, Witches’, 104–5.

12 De Lancre Tableau, 424; (Vizcaya) Barahona, Sex, 213.

13 Caro Baroja, Basques, 267. Similar receptions were met with in the Catalonian Pyrenees (see Kamen, Phoenix, 247–48). Pescador, New, 105; Christian, Local, 166.

14 Pócs, ‘Curse’, 187, 182.

15 Ms. Letter, 404–5.

16 De Lancre, Tableau, 463. See also Dusseau, Juge, 93–4 and Raemond, L’Antichrist, VII, 104.

17 Caro Baroja, World, 119; Boguet, Examen, 60.

18 It is unclear, from the Tableau, whether he furnished Boguet et al. with ‘more notable examples’ prior to or after the Labourd investigations, though the latter seems more likely.

19 Raemond, L’Antichrist, 103–6; Clark, Thinking, 351.

20 Frank, ‘Diachronic’, 9, 11; de Lancre, Tableau, 83.

21 Ibid., 83–84, 59, 426–28, 423, 59, 83, 50–51.

TWENTY TWO

The Cultic Template

 1 Ms. Zozaya, 401; de Lancre, Tableau, 569.

 2 Henningsen, Witches’, 69.

 3 De Lancre, Tableau, 117–18.

 4 Flynn, Sacred, 41. For Basque examples, see Silanes Susaeta, Cofradía, 295–96, 298, 310, 323.

 5 Cultic groups were also a common feature of Europe’s pre-Christian spirituality.

 6 Terpstra, Politics, 1.

 7 Flynn, Sacred, 13, 99; Broomhall, Women, 101.

 8 Flynn, Sacred, 10–11; Terpstra, Politics, 3.

 9 Flynn, Sacred, 17, 10, 23; Silanes Susaeta, Cofradía, 113–14, 462 (mixed gender) 112, 152, (women-only) 132.

10 Terpstra, Politics, 106; Kumhera, Benefits, 19; Ms. Joint, 390; Silanes Susaeta, Cofradía’, 135–36.

11 Ms, Joint, 398; Silanes Susaeta, Cofradía, 296; (secrecy) de Lancre, Tableau, 150 and Black, Early Modern, 171. While there is no scope to explore this here, there may well be an imaginative link between the violence that initiates received at the sabbath, such as beatings and whippings, and the ritual flagellations that featured in some Basque confraternities (see Silanes Susaeta, Cofradía, 297).

12 Terpstra, Politics, 1; Silanes Susaeta, Cofradía, 295.

13 Flynn, Sacred, 13; Douglass, Death, 195; Silanes Susaeta, Cofradía, 310.

14 (Abadie) De Lancre, Tableau, 212; Ms. Joint, 399. We also find this theme in del Rio, Disquisitiones, 216, 97 and Rémy, Demonolatry, 99–103; Ms. Joint, 399.

15 Black, Early, 246.

16 De Lancre, Tableau, 462. Douglass, Death, 195; Flynn, Sacred, 38–39.

17 De Lancre, Tableau, 462; (scarcity) Flynn, Sacred, 55.

18 Ibid., 31.

19 Christian, Local, 52; de Lancre, Tableau, 404.

20 Silanes Susaeta, Cofradía, 322; Flynn, Sacred, 43, 171.

21 (Definition) Gerli, Medieval, 239; Flynn, Sacred, 17.

22 (Seville) Brooks, Dances, 56; (Abbeys etc.) Harris, Sacred, 239–45; de Lancre, Tableau, 63.

23 (Pamplona) Henningsen, Salazar, 29–30; (Bayonne) Caro Baroja, Basques, 75–77.

24 Silanes Susaeta, Cofradía, 268–74; Veyrin, Basques, 296.

25 Ott, Circle, 131, 143–44; Caro Baroja, Basques, 330–31.

26 (Lekeitio) Douglass, Basque, 201, 204–7, 203.

27 Urquijo, ‘Teatro’, 159–60.

28 (Cosme) Silanes Susaeta, Cofradía, 296; Broomhall, Women, 101; Broomhall, Women’s, 30–31.

29 Crowston, ‘Women’, 18–23; (hospitals) Broomhall, Women’s, 71 and Finzsch, Institutions, 66–67.

30 (Yriarte) Henningsen, Witches’, 63; Ms. Zozaya, 417. While not prominent, this matrix is also intimated in the Labourd records, with Jeannette de Belloc claiming that at the sabbath ‘those among them who were the right age’ were ‘permitted the pleasure and the astonishment of beholding them [“the large toads belonging to the witches”], as if they were undergoing a sort of apprenticeship’ (de Lancre, Tableau, 151).

31 Idoate, Brujería, 288, 293, 295, 353.

32 De Lancre, Tableau, 201; (Benandante) Ginzburg, Night, 147–50; (Donas) Henningsen, ‘Ladies’, 195–97.

33 Ramsey, Professional, 244.

34 Ibid., 252. For more examples, see Hand, Magical, 194–97.

35 Ramsey, Professional, 252, 243.

36 Henningsen, Witches’, 63; (1540 toads) Idoate, Brujería, 288, 293, 295.

37 Idoate, ‘Proceso’, 263. Also see Idoate, Brujería, 303.

38 (Loyola) Black, Italian, 70–72; (Alcántara) Barton, Aristocracy, 157.

39 (Loyola) Black, Italian, 7–8; Terpstra, Politics, 23. Flynn, Sacred, 43; Silanes Susaeta, Cofradía, 329–30; Douglass, Basque, 202.

40 Azurmendi, Brujas, 39–40, 66–67. (Abad) Silanes Susaeta, Cofradía, 462. For example, the confraternity is likely to have been involved in any conflicts between the monastery and the Zugarramurdi villagers over access to free pasture land and in any monasterial suspicions that, as was common among herders in the period, Goiburu was fattening his own animals at the expense of his employer’s (see Henningsen, Salazar, 33–34 and Azurmendi, Brujas, 40).

41 Gow, Arras, 4, 30.

42 Silanes Susaeta, Cofradía, 113–14.

43 Usunáriz Garayoa, ‘Caza’, 325.

44 Silanes Susaeta, Cofradía, 116, 462; Kamen, Phoenix, 169. 150.

45 De Lancre, Tableau, 150, 222–23, 225, 410, 148–49, 223, 147, 119, 122.

46 Ibid., 221–22.

Epilogue

 1 Larner, Enemies, 79.

 2 De Lancre, Tableau, 223.

 3 Ciruelo, Treatise, 314.

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Index

Abadie, Jeannette de, 96, 120, 134, 158, 163–69, 186, 211, 238, 260, 292, 301, 370, 371, 425 n.42

Acevedo Muñoz, Juan Bautista de, 176, 225, 226, 296, 298, 392, 417 n.50

Acosta, José de, 225, 226, 263, 295, 420 n.11

Ágreda, María de, 224, 225

Akelarre: akelarre-mass, 290–362; akelarre-pact, 259–89; akelarre-sex, 238–58; as cultic meetings, 363–644; elite origins, 171–72; feast-cannibalism at, 208–37; festivities at, 182–207; folkloric origins 191–92; and heresy 171–80; physical reality of, 18–20. See also black mass; cannibalism; misrule; pact; sex

Alumbrados, 177–79, 181, 199, 210, 241, 252, 414 n.24

Americas (see New World)

Animal familiar, 125, 129–30, 130–33 passim. See also toads

Araníbar, León de, 23, 25, 69–70, 267, 405 n.25

Arles, Martín de, 13, 47, 49, 85, 128, 143, 144, 187, 190, 197, 240, 292, 300, 350, 356

Aulnoy, Madame Marie-Catherine de, 165, 284, 323

Auto de fé (Logroño, 1610), 3, 14, 17, 20, 27, 30, 43, 62, 63, 69, 70, 228, 259, 401 n.15; conference on, 398 n.5; de Lancre on, 64, 115, 155, 158, 164; other crimes at, 114, 143, 176, 272; pamphlets on, 15, 398, n.10

Baptism, 163–4, 166, 183, 268, 328, 362

Barrenechea, Graciana de, 63–64, 76, 79, 80, 118, 160, 193, 205, 291; as sabbath queen, 306, 308, 340

Basajaun (Basa-Jaun), 47, 218. See also ogres

Basque language (see Euskaran)

Béarn, 7, 142, 173, 176, 392

Becerra Holguín, Alonso: views on heresy, 178–79; interrogatorial methods, 21–27 passim, 34–36, 391–2; Order of Alcántara, 268, 383; views on witchcraft, 19–20

Bertsolari, 38

Bewitchment, 24, 25, 66, 71, 72, 82, 116, 117, 128, 162, 275. See also maleficium

Black Mass. See akelarre; mass

Bloodletting, 73, 74–77, 117–118, 120, 372, 392, 394, 336, 337, 388, 392

Bocal, Pierre (witch-priest), 33, 290, 361

Bodin, Jean, 31, 101, 126, 148, 171, 175, 210, 240, 264

Boguet, Henri, 19, 31, 51, 57, 171, 199, 210, 239, 241, 243, 293, 297, 311, 330, 358–59

Bosdeau, Jeanne, 175, 240, 292, 293, 297, 358, 359, 413 n.15

Boy bishops, 318, 322–28 passim, 350, 351, 374, 426 n.1

Burgui suspects, 137, 138, 144, 148, 165, 168, 382

Cagots, 177, 181, 210

Cannibalism. See corpse medicine; feast-cannibalism; vampirism

Carnival, 184, 185, 219, 250–51, 286, 287, 315–330 passim, 387. See also misrule

Castañega, Martín de, 51–58 passim, 85, 114, 143, 144, 162, 264, 297–303 passim, 338, 350, 353, 356

Child suspects, 15, 21–26 passim, 39, 90–91, 182, 201, 218–20, 224, 227, 251, 257, 269–70, 303, 327–28

Christ Child in the Host, 233–35, 237, 390

Christianization, of Basques, 352–53, 354, 360

Ciboure, 24, 186, 211, 301, 364; and priests, 361; and toad familiars, 163–69 passim

Ciruelo, Pedro, 49, 54, 292, 303, 337

Cockaigne, 203–7, 246–48, 249, 251, 258, 263, 314, 316, 318

Cohabitation, 252, 254, 255

Confirmation, 207, 259, 263, 266, 268; and pact, 268–70, 278, 364, 394, 397, 420–21 n.23

Confraternities, 60, 165, 189, 266, 267, 365–88

Confraternity of the Rosary 365, 377, 386–87, 394

Conjurors (general), 143, 144, 273, 299, 300, 301, 310. See also sorcerers

Conjurors (pest and weather), 50–55, 143–4, 299, 300, 310, 338, 350, 353, 403 n.22; and witches, 55–60

Conversos, 140, 175, 176, 181, 392

Corpses (in poisons), 78–79, 96, 101–2, 104–11, 210, 229–30, 406 n.2

Corpse medicine, 96–101, 209, 210, 390, 408 n.36; and witchcraft, 101–111; child corpses, 107–11; as cannibalism, 228–31

Curses. See liturgical cursing

Dead, spirits of the, 47, 65, 128, 138, 162, 191–93, 198, 199–207, 213, 274, 395; and ritual, 342–48, 350–51. See also hell, masses for dead, paradise, Santa Compaña

Demonic invocation. See conjurers; sorcerers

Demonic magic. See learned magic

Demonic pact. See pact with Devil

Devil, the: iconography, 134–35; theatrical, 280–89

Demons/devils: definition, 46–47. See also demonic invocation; exorcism; folk spirits; hell demons; lamiñas; theatre; toads

Disinterment. See exhumation

Domestic medicine, 81–84, 84–111 passim, 120–23, 160–61, 377–78. See also medicine

Dreams, 3, 38–41. See also false confession

Edict of Faith, 15–16, 125, 178, 261, 266, 272

Edict of Grace, 1, 15–16, 27, 390

Endara, María de, 35, 59, 183, 184, 260, 265

Errores Gazariorum, 102, 172, 210, 422 n.6

Eucharist, 179, 232–37, 292–93, 299, 301, 305, 356, 368, 390, 392, 393, 418 n. 60 and 61, 422 n.6. See also mass

Euskaran, 8, 9, 46, 76, 117, 159, 170, 194, 195, 254, 352

Excommunication, 51, 324, 332–39 passim, 425, n.3

Exhumation (and disinterment), 99, 105, 107, 210, 211, 215, 231, 236, 370–71, 389, 416 n.6

Exorcism, 51, 55, 75, 143, 162, 198, 331, 351, 353, 356, 393, 412 n.16

False confessions (as constructed from misrepresentations, conscious fictions, false memories and dreams), 1, 24, 26, 27, 29, 38–42, 46, 60, 69, 77, 84, 94, 120, 151, 155, 156, 166, 168, 181, 191, 201, 202, 206, 211, 218, 227, 230, 234, 244, 248, 252, 270, 271, 287, 288, 305, 311, 325, 328, 339, 348, 367, 386, 389, 390, 391, 393, 402, n.26

False memory, 38–41, 402, n.26. See also false confessions

Familiar spirits, 125, 128, 129, 131, 141, 156. See also animal familiars; toads

Feast-cannibalism, 65, 170, 172, 208–37, 294–96; Amerindian, 220–27; and Eucharist, 231–37, 294–96; and folk spirits, 212–20; hunger, 227–28

Feast of Fools: clerical, 318–9, 322, 323, 326, 327; secular, 320, 322, 323

Festive akelarre. See akelarre

Festive societies, 280, 316, 322, 330, 385, 374. See also youth abbeys

Fiction-making, 38–42. See also false confession

Folk spirits, 4, 116, 133, 158, 206, 398 n.11; and familiars, 127–30, 138–44; festive, 191–98 passim; and pacts, 273–79; predatory, 64–66, 68, 212–20; and ritual, 342–348; and weather, 47–48, 54. See also lamiñas

Folktales, 117, 130–32, 133, 151–59 passim, 192, 194, 198, 214, 218, 273, 288

Free spirit heresy, 244–46, 247–48, 249, 252, 392. See also Alumbrados

Galtxaggoriak, 128, 131, 134. See also pamerialak

Goddess belief, 4, 12, 157, 195, 352

Goiburu, Juanes de, 21, 69, 160, 161, 404 n.22

Goiburu, Miguel de, 49, 64, 66, 70, 72, 76, 81, 94, 117, 151, 160–61, 267, 341, 420 n.18; conflict with Urdax monastery, 70, 384, 428 n.40

Grillandi, Paolo, 171, 292, 293

Hamalau, 217–19

Healing/healers. See medicine; popular healers

Heaven. See paradise

Hell, 4, 133–37, 156, 161–63, 168, 200, 250, 264, 290, 321, 338, 342; and cannibal devil, 216–17, 218, 224, 226; fires of, 186–87; as realm of dead, 345–46; and spirit-invocation, 139, 141; in theatre, 281–85 passim

Hell toads. See Toads

Henningsen, Witches’ Advocate, xi, 2, 3

Herbs, 15, 78–83 passim, 84–85, 87, 89–90, 93, 113, 114, 117, 187, 287, 300, 313, 337, 378

Herensuge, 7, 217, 218

Heresy/heretical cults, 7, 16, 102, 171–81, 210–11, 235, 241–42, 244–49 passim, 258, 262–63, 266, 272, 274, 294–97 passim, 300–301, 325, 329, 356, 363–64, 385, 392, 399 n.29, 414 n.24. See also Alumbrados; free-spirit heretics

Hualde, Lorenzo de, 23, 24, 30, 35

Inguma, 65, 66

Inversion, 166, 170, 269, 271, 290–95 passim, 296–98, 299–301, 310–30 passim, 349, 371. See also liturgical misrule

Jews, 140, 142, 143, 171–81 passim, 210, 234–35, 301

Joint Sentence, 3, 17, 30, 398 n.10; long extracts from, 76, 79–80, 188, 208–9; uniqueness, 72, 74, 79, 188, 208, 236, 270, 278, 290–91, 305, 357, 391. See also Barrenechea, Graciana de; Goiburu, Miguel de; Yriarte, María de

Kabbalah, 43

Kaluger, 336–37, 340–41

King of the Moors, 187, 283, 324

Kramer, Heinrich, 19, 51, 292

Lamiña, 7, 47, 127–30, 159, 192–95, 197–98, 206, 214, 345, 346, 394, 395, 409 n.13, 410 n.17, 418 n.4

Lancre, Pierre de: views on heresy, 173–75; interrogatorial methods, 21–27 passim, 29–34; and the sabbath-mass, 356–62; and seroras, 360–61; views on witchcraft, 1, 18–19, 392–93; attitudes to women, 255–58, 385–88

Learned magic, 128–29, 140–44, 260, 273, 395; and Castañega, 299–300; in popular culture, 273–79. See also conjurors; sorcerers

Lecumberri, Pedro de, 270

Liturgical cursing, 331–42, 351, 352, 356, 361, 372, 386, 425 n.2 and n.4

Liturgical misrule, 331–30, 351, 352, 361, 386. See also mass

Logroño Tribunal, 181, 250, 354, 272, 298; archives, 17, 19, 23; and Castañega, 298; involvement in witch-craze, 13, 15, 17, 23, 34, 69, 400 n.7; jurisdiction, 176, 178. See also Becerra Holguín, Alonso; la Suprema; Spanish Inquisition; Valle Alvarado, Juan de

Lorraine, witchcraft in, 44, 45–59 passim, 114, 125, 208, 238, 260, 330

Macedo, María de, 206–7

Maldonado, Juan de, 173

Maleficium, 1, 3, 21, 22, 43–111 passim, 114–23 passim, 125, 129, 148, 155, 170, 172, 285, 298, 370, 372, 391; accusation dynamics, 62–63; body-maleficium, 61–77 passim, 212; crop-maleficium, 43–60 passim, 196, 303, 398 n.11; and liturgical cursing, 331–41 passim; and processions of the dead, 347

Mamuson, 353f

Mari, 47, 159, 346, 352, 395, 415 n.44; as sabbath queen, 195–97, 306, 308

Mary (Virgin), 15, 157, 199, 201, 257–68 passim, 271, 272, 276–78, 306, 308, 326, 365. See also Confraternity of the Rosary

Maskaradas (Masquerades), 284, 286, 350, 374, 377

Mass, the: confraternity, 368, 370–71, 372, 374, 376; cursing mass, 333–34, 336–39, 341–42, 395; and de Lancre, 358–62; masses for dead, 109, 312–13 376; and misrule, 314–30 passim; ordinary mass, 49, 162, 180, 189, 232, 233, 234, 252, 266, 274, 290, 294–96, 302–7; sabbath-mass, 2, 166, 170, 238, 259, 290–362, 385, 386, 390; sorcerers’ mass, 142, 296, 299–310, 310–11; spirits’ mass, 343–47. See also Eucharist

Medicine, 81–123, 147–55 passim, 229–31, 377–82; medicine-selling, 112–13. See also bloodletting; corpse medicine; domestic medicine; herbs; popular healers; toads

Misrule, 314–30, 325–30, 350–51, 352, 360–61, 374, 383, 385, 387–88. See also carnival; theatre

Mongastón, Juan de, 27, 75, 115, 225, 277, 399 n.30, 408 n.13

Montaigne, Michel de, 100, 224, 229

Monterola, Juan de, 36

Moors, 9, 140–43, 175, 176, 181, 187, 280, 283, 324; enchanted, 206, 207

Moriscos, 140, 141, 142, 175, 176, 181, 392, 410 n.43

Mortuary rites, 12, 99, 103, 105–7, 307–9, 331, 345, 350–60 passim; and confraternities, 366, 368–74, 386, 387; and mass, 212–13. See also exhumation, corpses in poisons; corpse-medicine

New World, 12, 93, 220–27, 228, 236–49, 350, 356, 417 n.50; and ritual 263–65, 294–96

Nider, Johannes, 172, 173, 261, 262, 301

Ogre, 215, 217–20, 224, 226, 232, 328

Oral tradition, xi, 4, 9, 88, 131, 132, 227, 272, 312, 320, 338

Orgies. See sex with Devil

Ossuaries (charnel houses), 99–105 passim, 107, 227, 394

Pact (with the Devil): akelarre-pact, 21, 35, 144, 179, 259–89, 293, 308; as confraternal initiation, 367–68, 371, 372, 376; in magical practice, 273–79; private, 259, 260, 261, 278; theatrical, 280–89; with toads, 262, 269, 273, 278, 308, 379–82. See also confirmation; Theophilus

Paganism, 351–53. See goddess belief

Pameleriak, xi, 128, 129

Paradise (Islamic), 247, 352

Parlement, 13, 14; leniency, 21, 400 n.12; recall de Lancre, 21, 400 n.35; Bordeaux witchcraft trials, 19, 32, 33, 115, 116, 175, 240, 274, 293, 297, 258–59, 402 n.12

Parodia sacra, 318–20

Pastorales, 284, 286, 288, 350

Pesticides, 91–95, 372

Pests, 43–60 passim, 92–95 passim, 303, 338, 353, 356, 372, 373–74. See also conjurors (pest and weather); crop-maleficium

Poison-making, 78–111 passim, 112, 160–61, 210, 229, 308, 363, 377–78, 391

Popular healers, 67, 101, 112–23 passim, 128, 129, 380; and domestic medicine, 120–23, 187, 228, 308, 381–82; in trial records, 115–22

Possession, demonic, 71, 72, 75, 162

Predatory spirit-groups, 213–20 passim, 226, 227, 232, 238, 342, 345, 347, 389. See also Wild Hunt

Priests: and de Lancre, 21, 33, 299, 301–2, 360–62; and unorthodox behaviour, 21, 51–58 passim, 114, 115, 132, 140, 142, 148, 190, 230, 245, 254, 281, 331–42 passim; as witch suspects, 21, 22, 33, 267, 290, 299–302 passim, 314, 360–62. See also liturgical cursing

Queen of the sabbath, 185–86, 195–96, 197, 199–201, 214, 414 n.9; and serora, 306–9, 312. See also Mari; Mary (Virgin)

Raemond, Florimond de, 19, 173, 175, 181, 297, 328, 358–59, 392

Recantation, 2, 3, 35, 37

Reformations (Catholic and Counter), 13, 52, 172, 220, 225, 235, 249, 250, 255, 292–98 passim, 335, 254, 356, 360, 383, 391, 392

Rémy, Nicolas de, 45, 101, 103, 171, 210, 240, 286, 422 n.19

Renunciation. See pact with the devil

Rhesus negative, 68, 109

Rio, Martín del, 19, 31, 102, 171, 173, 185, 195, 210, 240, 292, 293, 310, 334, 335, 358–59, 400 n.6

Roncal Valley, 263, 329, 375, 384. See also Burgui suspects

Sabbath (witches’). See akelarre

Saint Anthony, 187, 284, 323; pact with, 265, 267

Saint Anthony’s Day; 164–65, 166, 394

Saint Cyprian, 135, 137

Saint John’s Eve/Day, 47, 84, 85, 87, 114, 187, 190, 251, 283, 291, 324, 328, 353, 354, 357, 377, 381, 394

Saint Norbert, 236, 237, 412 n.16. See also Urdax monastery

Salazar Frías, Alonso de: sceptical attitude to witchcraft, 2, 3, 27–28, 29, 30, 36–37, 40, 45, 60, 133–34, 152, 181, 192, 193, 390–91

Salazar Valley, 96, 126, 151, 261, 293, 422 n.11

Saludadores, 51, 114–21 passim, 187, 245, 310, 394, 408 n.4, 409 n.21

Sansín, Juanes de, 69, 126, 151, 166

Santa Compaña, 343, 346–48

Serora, 12, 52, 166, 183, 200, 423 n.39; and de Lancre, 360–61; and sabbath queen, 306–9, 312, 313, 353, 355

Sex: at akelarre, 238–58, 315; in Basque culture, 249–58; in heretical cults, 244–46, 247–48; and de Lancre, 34, 240–41, 242–44 passim, 255–58, 386–88; in New World, 248–49; private sex with Devil, 238–39. See also utopias

Shaman/shamanism, 2, 3, 116, 353, 398 n.11, 408 n.17, 409 n.21, 410 n.28

Sociétiés joyeuses. See festive societies

Solarte, Hernando de, 26, 27

Sorcerers, 13, 44, 55, 57, 104, 128, 143, 349. 350, 397; and masses, 299, 300, 311, 331; and pacts, 272, 273, 281, 283. See also conjurors

Sorgin, 65, 66, 128, 184, 194, 195, 196

Spanish Inquisition, 14, 20, 22, 27–28, 34, 44, 69, 70, 114, 167, 247, 250, 266, 323, 354, 401 n.15; blasphemy, 271; heresy, 175–76, 178, 235, 392. See also la Suprema

Storytellers, 38, 41, 283. See also folktales

Suprema, la, 13, 19, 17; involvement in prosecutions, 19, 27, 28, 64, 125, 127, 152, 159, 176, 236, 261, 357, 400 n.7, 404 n.8, 405 n.25, 422 n.11; questionnaires, 28, 29, 79, 197, 209, 211; scepticism, 16, 27–28, 45, 175–76, 392. See also Spanish Inquisition

Tartaro, 217, 218, 394

Theatre, 216, 219, 251, 286–89, 311, 315–30, 353, 374; demon/devil figures in, 251, 280–87, 315, 321; in witch records, 284–87. See also misrule

Theophilus, 272, 273, 281, 283, 348

Tholosan, Claude, 172

Toads: in curses, 154–55; dressed, 4, 124, | 152–55, 165–66, 68, 209, 211, 216, 390, 409 n.3; as familiars, 124–44, 145–69 passim, 410 n.17; in folktales, 130–32; hell toads, 133–38, 161–63, 168, 345; herding, 90–91; kept, 145–55 passim; magico-medical, 78–91 passim, 112, 124, 147–55; and pact, 262, 269, 273, 278, 308, 379–82; as pets, 145–46, 165–66, 168; in poisons, 78–91 passim; and shepherds, 160–61, 168; symbolism of, 157–9; venom collection, 148–51, 393; Zugarramurdi origin, 159–69

Torture, 1, 20–23, 24–29 passim, 102, 274, 364, 390

Transference, magical, 53–60 passim, 86, 116, 155, 382

Translation (in prosecutions), 21, 22, 29–30, 32, 34, 35–36, 255, 266, 391

Transubstantiation, 179, 233, 233–37 passim, 294, 310, 356

Urdax monastery, 23, 25, 60, 69, 107, 117, 160, 161, 167, 168, 267, 270, 356, 391, 393, 405 n.30, 407 n.27, 412 n.16; bewitchment, 71–77 passim; confirmation, 270; Eucharist, 236–37; exorcism, 71, 75, 162–63; mass, 305

Utopias, 202–6 passim, 314, 316, 317, 318, 397; sex, 246–52 passim, 258. See also Cockaigne; paradise

Valladolid, 26, 225–26, 236, 265, 296, 298

Valle Alvarado, Juan de: views on heresy, 178–79; interrogatorial methods, 21–27 passim, 34–36, 391–92; links to New World, 225–27; views on witchcraft, 19–20

Vampirism, infanticidal, 61–78 passim, 118–19, 212, 231, 372, 389, 398 n.11, 405 n.30

Visions, 3, 38, 39, 191, 200, 205, 207, 224, 247, 344, 402 n.32. See also false confession

Weather, 43–60 passim, 196–97, 303, 338–39, 353, 356, 372. See also conjurors (pest and weather); crop-maleficium

Wild Hunt, 47, 213. See also predatory spirit-groups

Witch cult, 172, 363–88 passim

Ximildegui, María de, 167, 168

Youth abbeys, 322, 328, 374. See also festive societies

Yriarte, María de, 39–40, 64, 76–77, 134, 160, 185, 379, 382

Zabaleta, Felipe de, 69, 70, 71, 72, 237, 305, 405 n.25

Zaragoza, 75, 103, 110, 119, 176, 245, 352; demonic magic in, 141–42, 274, 275, 276, 288, 300, 311, 353; familiars in, 128, 129–30, 140, 156

Zozaya Sentence, 3, 17, 398 n.10, 423, n.30. See also Zozaya, Maria de

Zozaya, María de, 43–66 passim, 90, 104, 105, 107, 114, 132, 197, 198–99, 229, 283, 304, 340, 379

Zugarramurdi: accusations/prosecutions in, 13, 17, 19, 23, 24, 25, 28, 34, 62–64, 211, 357–58, 404 n.8, 405 n.30; Cagots, 177; Urdax monastery, 69–77, 107, 236–37, 270, 305, 384, 391–92, 428 n.40; and toads, 127, 159–63 passim, 167–69. See also Barrenechea, Graciana de; Goiburu, Miguel de; Joint Sentence; Urdax monastery; Yriarte, María de