In The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History, Jan Machielsen explores one of Europe’s biggest and most perplexing witch trials which occured in the Basque region in the early 17th century. Here, Machielsen unpacks the witness testimonies that fuelled the trials and the rationalist versus romantic understandings of how they unfolded. His research reveals why the slippage between truth, folklore and fantasy has captured imaginations over centuries.
The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History. Jan Machielsen. Bloomsbury Academic. 2024.
María de Ximildegui, a girl living in the Basque region between Spain and France, encountered the devil. Between ten and eleven one night in 1606 or 1607, when she was about sixteen years old, she had arranged to stay over at her neighbour Catalina’s house. María had done so many times before, but this night was different: Catalina suggested they sneak out to a party.
When the rest of the house was asleep, the two girls left without detection. They walked a few hundred metres to a sandy area just outside of town where a large gathering was taking place: “everyone was enjoying themselves, and they were dancing as much as they wished”– – and the devil was seated on a throne. There was so much noise, so many instruments being played, that María felt overwhelmed. She did not realise that “those who were there were witches, nor that the host was the devil, nor that [the visit] was a bad thing.” At the end of the party, the two girls walked home, opened and closed the door without making a noise, and went to bed.
But did any of this really happen?
The sabbat was the dark beating heart and catalyst of all early modern witch-hunts. [ … ]This is where witches met and worshipped the devil, and where they feasted, danced, and conjured up bad weather.
This is the vexed question confronting historians who work on the Basque witch-hunt of the early 1600s and its origins. This witch-hunt is famous or infamous at a European level. It was very likely France’s largest hunt before it spread across the border into Spain, achieving that same dubious national distinction there. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of Basques confessed to attending the witches’ sabbat, a ritualistic gathering where witches worshipped the devil, often by having sex with him, according to witness testimonies. On the French side, the Bordeaux judge Pierre de Lancre wove these testimonies into a sensational book which included a graphic and detailed engraving of the witches’ nocturnal feasting and dancing.
María’s testimony is the most detailed of these to have survived in the archives but hers was one of many. The witch-hunt was dominated by the stories of children and teenagers who either claimed to have witnessed a witches’ sabbat. Some, like María, said that they stumbled upon the sabbat by accident, while others, – and this was much more common – claimed that they were brought there against their will. These exceptionally vivid and detailed sabbat narratives have placed these unfortunate Basques at the very centre of our understanding of the European witch-hunt.
the most famous scholar of the Basque witch-hunt, Gustav Henningsen [ … ] maintained that suspects had ‘enough basic intelligence’ to grasp the intention behind the questioning and discover ‘what kind of truth’ the Spanish inquisitors wanted to hear.
The sabbat was the dark beating heart and catalyst of all early modern witch-hunts. Sabbats were held in the dead of night, often held in remote locations – certain mountains, like the Brocken or Blocksberg in Germany, had magical reputations. Witches would fly there, if not on broomsticks, then on goatback. This is where witches met and worshipped the devil, and where they feasted, danced, and conjured up bad weather. As a result, judges could ask who else had been seen there, allowing their investigations to snowball.
In many parts of Europe, however, the sabbat remained a rather muted element in local witchcraft lore. In England, for instance, it was virtually absent. The Basque sabbat – the “Akelarre” – was very different. The French judges and Spanish inquisitors who investigated the Great Basque Witch-Hunt of 1609 and 1610 encountered details that were both highly specific (and often sexually explicit) and outlandish. In the Basque Country, witches were said not only to have dug up the tiny bodies of unbaptised babies, but they also exhumed the remains of dead witches and consumed them at the sabbat. (The devil thoughtfully provided the older members of his cult with special dentures for the occasion.) On both sides of the French-Spanish border, sabbat participants claimed that they could no longer see the Eucharist – the communion wafer that Catholics believed was Christ’s body – at Mass, but only a dark cloud. And there were endless tales about toads: children were given toads dressed in velvet to guard, witches danced with some of the larger ones (some as large as chickens), and the creatures even acted as alarm clocks, warning witches when the next sabbat was due.
What should we make of such stories? Historians have traditionally taken two very different approaches to this material. On the one hand stood the so-called “rationalists,” who, writing from the 19th century on, argued that witches’ confessions were nothing more than reflections of the judges’ questioning, often under torture. This rationalist approach – that witchcraft was nothing more than smoke and mirrors, conjured up by cruel and bigoted interrogators seeking confirmation of their own hateful religious or misogynistic ideologies – has had many adherents over the years. They include the most famous scholar of the Basque witch-hunt, Gustav Henningsen, who maintained that suspects had “enough basic intelligence” to grasp the intention behind the questioning and discover “what kind of truth” the Spanish inquisitors wanted to hear.
Two sets of Basque testimonies, gathered separately, filtered through two very different legal systems and into two different languages ended up looking strikingly similar. But what really happened?
Against this rationalist position stands a diverse group of so-called “romantics,”. Like their counterparts, the romantic tradition stretches back to the 19th century. While they disagree amongst themselves, they are united in their belief that witches’ testimony contained some element of truth. Some of them even thought that the devil might be involved. Writing in 1862, the French historian Jules Michelet was much taken by the testimony gathered by the Bordeaux judge Pierre de Lancre, who had investigated the Basque witch-hunt as it first developed on the French side of the border. Michelet saw in witches’ sabbats echoes of once-great rebel communions, nocturnal meetings of peasant serfs who gathered to sing defiant medieval precursors to the Marseillaise. According to Michelet, de Lancre was “a man of wit” whose “visible links with some young witches” meant that he knew all about the sabbat, although his description was still adorned “with the grotesque embellishments of his time.” More recently, and in a similar vein, Carlo Ginzburg has described de Lancre as “observ[ing] the object of his persecution with a penetration often absent in the more detached observers of the subsequent century.”
Of the two approaches, the rationalist one likely appeals to us most, on an almost emotional level: there were no witches, of course, so therefore nothing about their grotesque and gruesome testimony could possibly be true. The Basque evidence, however, favours the romantics. The fact that French judges and Spanish inquisitors, who operated completely independently of one another, heard the same detailed stories is telling. Two sets of Basque testimonies, gathered separately, filtered through two very different legal systems and into two different languages ended up looking strikingly similar. But what really happened? Certainly, some sabbat narratives drew on lived experiences. Parallels and comparisons abound with church services, marriages, and market fairs. One accused witch even told Pierre de Lancre she only ever went to the sabbat to go dancing. This does not force us to accept that anyone really chewed on the corpses of the dead. These stories draw from a common folkloric knowledge relating to particular animals or objects, considering them inherently magical or demonic, like goats and toads.
My book – The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History – unravels these lines of enquiry further, but it also places them in a larger context. These highly specific folkloric tales show that the Basque witch-hunt was no outside imposition that can be blamed entirely on the evil actions of wicked foreign – French and Spanish rather than Basque – judges. The fact that the accusers in the case were children, whom we associate with innocence, truth and an uncorrupted view of the world, makes this particular witch-hunt all the more perplexing and terrifying.
Note: This article gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Engraving by Jan Ziarnko depicting a witches’ Sabbath, according to the description of Pierre de Lancre in Tableau de l’inconsstance des mauvais anges et demons (1613). Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Enjoyed this post? Subscribe to our newsletter for a round-up of the latest reviews sent straight to your inbox every other Tuesday.