Europe's inner demons полностью

One feature of the spurious confessions remains to be accounted for: the references to the Dualist religion. No other witch, in the entire history of European witchcraft, ever seems to have maintained that God and the Devil are equal powers, locked in eternal struggle; or that the Devil is on the point of defeating God; or that this earth is the Devil’s realm; or that the souls of the dead belong to the Devil and serve his purposes. These ideas were contributed by Lamothe-Langon himself. As a Toulousain, he knew something about Catharism — indeed, a major part of his history is concerned with the Inquisition’s struggle against that exotic heresy. By introducing these distortions of Catharist beliefs into his portrayal of witchcraft he effected a major falsification of history.

In 1828 Karl Ernst Jarcke, writing in Berlin, launched the notion of a society of witches going back to pre-Christian times. In 1829 Etienne-Leon de Lamothe-Langon published in Paris his fabrication of an inquisitorial report attributing Dualist beliefs to a pair of fourteenth-century witches. It is hard to say which did more to bedevil research into the true origins of the great witch-hunt.

Historians might have been less willing to believe in the fourteenth-century witch-hunt in the south of France but for the fact that the same thing had apparently happened in the north of Italy. Here the authority looked absolutely unimpeachable: a legal opinion written and signed, some time around 1350, by the great Italian jurist and professor of civil law Bartolus, or Bartolo, of Sassoferrato. In his own day Bartolo’s prestige was unique, and for centuries after his death his remained a name to conjure with. Certainly nobody seems to have questioned the authenticity of the legal opinion with which we are concerned. Nevertheless it is a forgery. This can be proved; and in addition the approximate date of the forgery can be established and the forger identified.

The first modern historian to draw attention to the text seems to have been Johann Joseph von Görres, who summarized it in the third volume of his Christliche Mystik, published in 1840.⁽³⁸⁾ Three years later another German, Wilhelm Soldan, mentioned it in his pioneering history of the witch-trials, alongside the stories which he took from Bardin and Lamothe-Langon.⁽³⁹⁾ Soon it was being used for frankly polemical purposes. In 1869 Pope Pius IX decided to make papal infallibility a dogma of the Church, and called the first Vatican council to promulgate it. In the furious controversy which this step provoked within the Church, the celebrated Bavarian historian and professor of theology Johann Joseph Ignaz von Dollinger emerged as the most formidable critic of the new dogma. In a work which attracted attention throughout western Europe, he marshalled the historical arguments against papal infallibility. Here the Bartolo text appears in a peculiarly sinister light. When dealing with the treatment of suspected witches by the Inquisition, Dollinger writes:

Since then the text has figured in most histories of the witch-hunt. In particular, in 1900-1 Joseph Hansen printed it in full in his collection of sources and summarized it very fully in his history — which was enough to ensure its acceptance right down to the present day.⁽⁴¹⁾

In its original Latin form the opinion is presented as a reply by Bartolo to an enquiry from the bishop of Novara. Minus the references to earlier legal authorities, it can be translated as follows: