At this point Isobel’s interrogators cut her short: she was straying too far from the demonological material they required. After a further three weeks in gaol she produced a version in which the fairies were duly integrated into the Devil’s kingdom. The Devil himself, she asserted, shaped “elf-arrow-heads” and handed them over to small hunch-backed elves, who sharpened them and in turn passed them to the witches for shooting. As the witches had no bows, they flicked the arrows from their thumb-nails as they sailed overhead on their straws and bean-stalks; and the arrows killed those they hit, even through a coat of armour.(25) This is the passage that led Murray to her theory about the fugitive aboriginal race; others will interpret it in a different sense. Certainly we are a long, long way from those commonplace feastings at Grangehill and Auldearn.
At the risk of some repetitiousness we may add one further sample, concerning the famous sabbat supposed to have been held at a (nonexistent) place called Blokulla, or Blockula, in Sweden, in 1669. Murray quotes the following passages from a contemporary English translation of a German pamphlet:
Another boy confessed too, that one day he was carried away by his mistress, and to perform the journey he took his own father’s horse out of the meadow where it was, and upon his return she let the horse go in her own ground. The next morning the boy’s father sought for his horse, and not finding it, gave it over for lost; but the boy told him the whole story, and so his father fetched the horse back again.... In a huge large room of this house, they said, there stood a very long table, at which the witches did sit down.... They sat down to table, and those that the Devil esteemed most, were placed nearest to him, but the children must stand at the door, where he himself gives them meat and drink. The diet they did use to have there, was, they said, broth and colworts and bacon in it, oatmeal, bread spread with butter, milk and cheese. And they added that sometimes it tasted very well, and sometimes very ill.(26)
The reader would hardly divine what followed the meal: the Devil mated with all the women present, and in due course they produced sons and daughters for him, who then married one another, and brought forth toads and serpents. Nor could one guess what other means of transportation were available for that same journey: “For their journey, they said they made use of all sorts of instruments, of beasts, of men, of spits and posts, according as they had the opportunity; if they do ride upon goats, and have many children with them, so that all may have room, they stick a spit into the back-side of the goat, and then are anointed with the aforesaid ointment” — which enables the whole party to fly through the air “over churches and high walls”.(27)
Murray is of course aware of these fantastic features — but she nevertheless contrives, by the way she arranges her quotations, to give the impression that a number of perfectly sober, realistic accounts of the sabbat exist. They do not; and the implications of that fact are, or should be, self-evident. Stories which have manifestly impossible features are not to be trusted in any particular, as evidence of what physically happened. Since the stories of witches’ sabbats adduced by Murray abound in such features, they are to be strongly distrusted. As soon as the methods of historical criticism are applied to her argument that women really met to worship a fertility god, under the supervision of the god’s human representatives, it is seen to be just as fanciful as the argument which Michelet had propounded, with far greater poetic power, some sixty years earlier.
