Europe's inner demons полностью

Nor is the evidence wholly confined to the laws. So little German literature has survived from the early Middle Ages that it would be unrealistic to expect vernacular texts to set alongside Ovid and Apuleius. Nevertheless there is one revealing passage in the translation which the Swiss monk Notker Labeo (c. 952-1022) made of that curious fifth-century encyclopaedia, Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae. Commenting on the fact that certain savage tribes were supposed to practise cannibalism, Notker remarks that “here at home”, witches are said to do the same.⁽¹³⁾

The notion of cannibalistic witches, then, was familiar to many of the Germanic peoples in the early Middle Ages. Moreover the linguistic evidence suggests that, like their Roman precursors, these creatures were imagined as flying at night. The Latin of the early medieval laws is, admittedly, fairly debased — and nevertheless the clerics who wrote it must certainly have known that striga was derived from strix, and that a strix was something that flew about, screeching, in the dark. If they had not wished to convey this idea they could very well have used the term malefica, which also meant “witch” but had no bird-like associations.

In any case, by the beginning of the eleventh century there is firm evidence that in parts of Germany the image of the cannibalistic woman often, if not invariably, included the ability to fly about at night. It is to be found in the fifth chapter of_Burchard’s Corrector, which has already afforded us such valuable insights into the maleficium beliefs of the early Middle Ages. One of the questions proposed in this penitential reads as follows:

This passage has several points of interest. It expounds the fantasy of the cannibalistic night-witch in much greater detail than any earlier Germanic source. It confirms the hint which the Lex Salica had dropped some five centuries earlier, that night-witches were imagined to move and act collectively, and to cook their victims before eating them. Above all it supplies strong evidence that in Germany the figure of the cannibalistic night-witch belonged to the world of traditional folkbeliefs.