Dancing with the Devil

     Upon reading Lynda Roper's chapter on Sabbaths one of the many things that stood out to me was the mention of dancing. Although many view dancing as a time of joy and happiness and even Roper mentions that dances punctuated social life. She mentions how dances celebrated weddings, the birth of children, and other festivities throughout the village. Yet there is another tone given to dancing as Roper goes on. Women accused of witchcraft most often "flew" to Sabbaths and confessed to dancing with/for the devil. During this time dancing seemed to have gone from an act so joyous to something sinister. Roper mentions certain authors and their take on dancing at that time. The most common theme among these authors was that dancing was associated with fighting, adultery, murder. Even Jean Bodin condemned the dances that made "people wild and raging, and women to miscarry." Dancing was seen as an anti-fertility rite. Yet mentioned before it also celebrated the birth of children.
      It's interesting how these things in life, dancing, feasting, playing music, are simple acts yet during the witch hunts many of these activities were suddenly viewed as sinful.


   Just a fun side note: the whole time I was reading about this I was thinking "Footloose" this sounds exactly like the plot of the movie Footloose.

Silver Age: The Devil's Rejects

Even in the heretical divisions of the demon loving women across Europe, there still was a further divide in how demons viewed classes and beauty.  It was not enough to give your heart and soul to the Devil, but to be further judged in how much you as a woman brought to the table in looks and loot was a factor revealed under interrogation.  The humiliation and how far it went under the circumstances of feast and sexual debauchery was dependent on demon’s favor based on the aforementioned.  As Roper describes regarding women and their confessions of roles within the evil banquets, there was an obvious disparity in old and young hearts sought out by the demons.  While the young beauties are sought from all classes, the less affluent or older women suffered sideline rejection and even more humiliating acts that substantiated their cast within the feast, “…forced to act as human candle holders, lighting the dancing of the younger with a candle stuck in their anus” (Roper 122).  While this is a graphic representation of anal rape and humiliation, the cultural parody is derived from German custom in which young women coming of age place a lit pot outside their door as a signal of sexual maturation (Roper 123). 

Using the brief example above, how much of women’s confessions were maybe a conduit for grievances by way of fantasy/parody of cultural customs/age discrimination/societal cast.  

Roper, Lyndal. Witch Craze. Yale University Press, 2004. Print

Confession to Sex with the Devil

    In the reading Lyndal Roper talks about the confessions of the accused witches and their stories of sex with the devil. She mentions that the confessions didn't quite match up with demonological theory. The explains that some of the accounts were "numbingly formulaic" She also mentions that the stories the women told were virtually interchangeable. This being said she then goes on to talk about a woman who called the devil by the name of Bonifazius while this woman's sister referred to the devil by the name of Pauli Fazius as Roper says "the unconventional detail now repeated in garbled form"
     This made me think of the telephone effect we discussed briefly in class the other day. Its interesting how many of these accounts of sexual interaction with the devil were merely all the same and even the names mentioned above were fairly similar, one being just a garbled form of the other. Kind of like how phrases or words get jumbled up in the telephone game we all played as children. This relates back to our class discussions of torture and how many women would confess to witchcraft during torture. Well, wouldn't you tell them what they wanted to hear? This being said it seems as though throughout time many of these women heard the other women's stories and kept many of the details in the telling of their own. And if you're accused of witchcraft that almost always includes sex with the devil so why not give them a juicy tale about it?

Sex with the devil: cold, rough and possessive

For being from hell, it is interesting that the Devil was described as cold in bed. Roper stated the Devil took the form of a man the woman was already attracted to and had thought about in a sexual way. Sometimes it would be a man the woman was about to marry in Barbara Hohenberger's case (Roper 83). The woman wouldn't know it wasn't her desired man until it was too late by feeling the unusual coldness of her lover's skin. The lover also would have oddly rough feet that would have been in place of hooves. Throughout the three night process, the partner declared the woman his because she laid with him and ensured the woman that he will take care of her. While the Devil promises to take care of the seduced woman, he didn't say what the quality of such care would be. Such care could be foreshadowed by Ropers description of the blue mist of a brimstone-ridden fart as the devil leaves after sex.

By taking on the appearance of a man the woman desired, whether it was a former affair or a crush, had the woman originally been tricked into having sex with the Devil?

Roper mentioned that in the confessions, the women declared the Devil as being their ideal lover. What factors could have been included aside from his false image and promises?

Human Romance: King of Hell's Guide to Speed Dating

           While demonological theorists of the 15^th and 16^th centuries painted a dramatically peril picture for women and the plight of their sexual, albeit sometimes violent, encounters with the Devil, stories regarding that softer romantic side of the Devil spread throughout the lands, further threatening the slide of righteous women into the debauchery of witch craft.  The Devil was not just a nasty demon cast to Hell by God, but was for all intents and purposes a real being that sprang into the lives of women that were at their most sexually vulnerable.  “The Devil is not a one-night stand but a long-term relationship, the culmination of a passionate wooing” (Roper 88).   It was a time for which women may have felt they did not have the man that provided the needs, but rather created more longings and dissatisfactions in every aspect of their marriage.  Where a mere human lacked to provide, the Devil seemed appealing to provide not just the sense of renewed romanticism, but a whole life inconceivable otherwise.   It wasn’t as if the women wanted to rule the world; they simply wanted to fulfill their needs of “security, pleasure, and love” (Roper 89). 

            The common overtone in such romantic pacts with the Devil is the unhappy woman’s heart being open to the wanting of more intimacy. The Devil is skilled at the art of sweet nothings: “that he will not leave her”, “she should be his”, typical valentine candy kind of stuff, save for the pact of denouncing God and serving the will of the Devil.  The promise of love and marriage to numerous women across the ages, but what did he actually provide for them?  The occasional coincidence of wish granted such as the coincidental death of Margereta Moll’s abusive husband, Hans Hepp.  After being consoled by the Devil at her lowest, she conceded to his will so that her misery should end.  End it did, as Hans met his at the execution wheel, ironically, for being a “’witch-man’, murderer, and fish poacher” (Roper 90).   While this romantic picturesque relationship is painted by many women under the most grueling of interrogation, it is a far cry from the short trysts generally described in wildly popular cautionary tales embedded deep in the witch craze that describe relationships ending with  “the Devil letting out a terrible fart, the stink of brimstone dirtying the aftermath of lovemaking” (Roper 84).  In either case, the women were now bound to the Devil's will, and left with the tattered leftovers of yet another relationship that is worse than the one before.  

Given the time period, were the struggles women faced in relationships a signal in shift in the common paradigm of man and woman? 
Could it be that many of the stories were merely a form of entertainment and escapism that eventually got out of hand from both sides of the spectrum?    

The Devil as the Witch's Lover, 1490, woodcut

Sex with the Devil. Lookin for love in all the wrong places.

         Sex with the Devil was a popular belief with both the inquisitors of the time and with the local culture. Nearly all of the women who confessed to having sex with the Devil (usually under torture), describe him the same way. He is usually dressed in black (or is black himself), he wears a hat with a feather in it, and when they have sex, his feet are like an animal (usually goat's feet) and his member is always cold. They describe the encounter as cold and harsh with no feeling at all.
         But, could having sex with the Devil result in having offspring? Medical doctors back then argued that heat was necessary for conception and that "the friction of intercourse created the warmth which would release male and female seed, allowing them to join together" (Roper 98). Most people believed that the Devil would merely steal semen from men and use it to impregnate women. This belief was more believable and Balthasar Bekker stated that "There is not a Christian, be he Protestant or Paptist,  who believes that spirits are truly capable of engendering" (Roper 102). 
         Why were women so eager to give in to having sex with the Devil? According to Roper, the Devil usually preys on women who are in despair and in dire need of assistance. "The Devil seems to understand her plight and he offers a way out", and "Demonologists were well aware of the power of melancholy to expose women to temptation"(Roper 93). Do you believe that most women who confessed were really very depressed? Or is there something else going on?

The Protestant Reformation: A Catastrophic Catalyst for the European Witch-Hunts

The Protestant Reformation ignited the canon that would become insecurity and doubt in the beliefs and doctrines of the medieval Catholic Church. With the challenging of the practices of selling indulgences, as detailed by Martin Luther in 1521, to the dogma of papal infallibility in addition to the formation of new Christian denominations and belief systems such as Calvinism and Lutheranism, followers of the Christian faith were dazed and confused, to say the least. This sparked disagreements and conflict between those living in the same area but following different Christian denominations. Which denomination was most accurate in their beliefs? Which denomination was superior to all others? Followers of each different group believed that theirs was superior, and all others failed in comparison.

A priest performing an exorcism on an accused witch.

In areas where Catholicism was prevalent, there was persecutions of Protestants, and vice versa. In order to justify these persecutions – which often were murderous – the perpetrators did so under the guise of prosecuting and eradicating those found practicing witch craft. In The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, historian Levack states that “if witch-hunting was more widespread and intense in areas that were religiously divided, then the converse must also be true” (Levack 124). We can see from our class discussion and readings that larger states, such as Spain and Italy, had many more accusations than smaller states such as Portugal and Ireland.

The Reformation played a key role in instigating the witch-hunts, and became a large catalyst due to the invention of the printing press in 1440 that allowed for mass production of texts such as Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses which challenged the standard beliefs and practices at the time. This begs the question of whether any of the witch-hunts were truly due to thoughts of witch craft and acts of one doing nothing other than using magic and to cause malicious harm to someone, or if they were simply executing their own beliefs that were challenged and taboo at the time. 

Image credit:
http://williameamon.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Woodcut-1598-witch-trial.jpg