Rose accepts without question the reality of sabbat assemblies both large and small. The fact that the large sabbats were held at fixed times of the year has nothing to do with any fertility cult — it simply means that the witches, like their Greek precursors, “celebrated on great occasions of the year the spiritual energy released by the use of certain herbal drugs”.(32) Moreover he thinks that originally the rites themselves probably differed from place to place, standardization being first achieved in the thirteenth century. The standardizers were goliards — wandering scholars who, despite their educational qualifications, had failed to find employment in the Church:
I suggest they were able, by virtue of their superior education and of the knowledge they pooled with each other, to gain acceptance by witches as masters of the craft, in several places where the cult held out; and that they may have organized it and welded it into a ramifying secret society. . From this time the regular coven with its regular meetings, its constituted officers and its rigid discipline may have come into being; from this time thirteen is taken as the standard number in a cell. . Now uniformity became possible, and now itinerant witch-masters carried out their visits of inspection in their allotted circuits and met together to consult on the affairs of the craft and exchange the fruits of their learning and experience. Any practice that had formerly been purely local might now become the custom of the society as a whole.... (33)
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, under the pressure of persecution, formal organization will have become still more important; so that in the end the forces of order did indeed find themselves faced with a massive underground organization of Devil-worshippers.
Rose’s book ends with a startling comment. It mentions, as an established fact, that around 1590 the “Grand Coven” of Scotland, controlling “a large and powerful organization of covens” was headed by the Earl of Bothwell.(34) Now, so far from being an established fact, this is sheer fantasy — and the original begetter of the fantasy was none other than Margaret Murray. Ten pages of the
