What is a witches’ sabbath?
As witch hunters imagined it, witches flew at night to secret meetings where they worshiped the Devil, often in the shape of a billy goat, feasted, danced and plotted harmful magic. In the Basque Country the place of these gatherings was called akelarre, the goat’s meadow.
A script written by judges
The image of the sabbath does not come from folk tradition but mainly from interrogations and learned writings. After his trials in the French Basque Country, the French judge Pierre de Lancre described the sabbath in great detail in 1612. Writings like this provided the pattern for later questioning, and the accused confessed to what their interrogators wanted to hear.
Zugarramurdi, 1609 to 1614
In the Basque village of Zugarramurdi, the case began with a woman who had come back to the village and said that she herself had once been a witch. The Spanish Inquisition stepped in, and on November 7, 1610, people who had been convicted were burned in Logroño. In the end, around 7,000 people were under suspicion. The inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías examined the confessions and found not a single piece of evidence. His reports led in 1614 to new instructions under which practically no one in Spain was executed as a witch anymore. This is why Gustav Henningsen called him “the witches’ advocate.”
Episodes on this topic
Further reading
- Gustav Henningsen: The Witches’ Advocate. Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–1614, 1980.
- Gustav Henningsen (ed.): The Salazar Documents, Brill, 2004.
- Pierre de Lancre: Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons, 1612.
- Lu Ann Homza: Village Infernos and Witches’ Advocates, 2022.