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wrongly saw their whole culture as an expression o f the
demonic. T here was communication between the fairies
and the pagan women, and any evidence that a woman
had visited the fairies was considered sure proof that
she was a witch.
T here were, then, three separate, though interrelated, phenomena: the fairy race with its matriarchal social organization, its knowledge o f esoteric magic
and medicine; the woman-oriented fertility cults, also
practitioners o f esoteric magic and medicine; and later,
the diluted witchcraft cults, degenerate parodies o f
Christianity. T here is particular confusion when one
tries to distinguish between the last two phenomena.
Many o f the women condemned by the Inquisition were
true devotees o f the Old Religion. Many were confused by Christian militancy and aggression, not to mention torture and threat o f burning, and saw themselves as diabolical, damned witches.
An understanding o f what the Old Religion really
was, how it functioned, is crucial if we want to understand the precise nature o f the witch hunt, the amount and kind o f distortion that the myth o f feminine evil
made possible, who the women were who were being
burned, and what they had really done. T he information available comes primarily from the confessions o f accused witches, recorded and distorted by the Inquisitors, and from the work o f anthropologists like Margaret Murray and C. L'Estrange Ewen. T h e scenario o f the witchcraft cults is pieced together from those sources, but many pieces are missing. A lot o f
knowledge disappears with 9 million people.
T h e religion was organized with geographic integ
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Woman Hating
rity. Communities had their own organizations, mainly
structured in covens, with local citizens as administrators. There were weekly meetings which took care of business —they were called esbats. Then there were
larger gatherings, called sabbats, where many covens
met together for totemic festivities. There may have
been an actual continental organization with one all-
powerful head, but evidence on this point is ambiguous.
It was a proselytizing religion in that nonmembers were
approached by local officials and asked to join. Conditions of membership in a coven were the free consent of the individual, abjuration of all other beliefs and
loyalties (particularly renunciation of any loyalty to the
new Catholic Faith), and an avowal of allegiance to the
horned god. Membership was contractual, that is, a
member signed an actual contract which limited her
obligations to the cult to a specific number of years,
at the end of which she was free to terminate allegiance.
Most often the Devil “promised her Mony, and that she
would live gallantly and have the pleasure of the
World. . . ” 28 The neophyte’s debts probably were paid
and she no doubt also learned the secrets of medicine,
drugs, telepathy, and simple sanitation, which would
have considerably improved all aspects of her earthly
existence. It was only according to the Church that she
