Eve’s Opinion: Spirit-Possession and the Witches’ Sabbath in Early Modern Europe

Abstract:This article argues that the historiographic tendency to see the demoniac and the witch as distinct has led scholars to neglect the relationship between demonic possession and the early modern witches’ sabbath, particularly with regard to western Europe. It suggests that if the definition of demonic possession is expanded to incorporate external possession or “obsessio,” the phenomenon moves from a peripheral to central position in the European sabbath complex. This positionality is then further strengthened and nuanced by contextualizing demonic possession within the broader networks of belief concerning possession by folkloric and divine spirits that informed both popular magical practice and Christian devotion. The article argues that this augmented “spirit-possession lens” provides us with a new way of mapping the evolution and impact of the witches’ sabbath stereotype across medieval and early modern Europe. It invites us to re-examine received assumptions about the way that sabbath narratives were created and evaluated in the courtroom and brings a new emotional logic to the victimhood of the European witch.