Flying Girlfriend, Frightened Boyfriend and the Witch Orgy October 19, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Beach has recently become obsessed with stories about witches’ flying exploits. Here is a tale (sounds almost a folk tale) from the pen of the dreadful Jean Bodin, one of Europe’s most important sixteenth-century witch theorists.
There was… at Lyons a young noblewoman a few years ago, who got up at night and, lighting the candle, took a jar of ointment and spread it over herself. Then with a few words she was transported away.
A couple of points here. We are effortlessly introduced to the woman’s depravity because she is noble and has a lover. The idea of a jar of ointment for flying dates back to ancient times. In The Golden Ass by Apuleius Pamphile rubs oil on herself to turn into a bird, something that Lucius foolishly copies and turns into an ass. In any case, back to medieval Lyons.
Her lover who was in bed with her, seeing this mystery enacted, took the candle and looked everywhere. Not finding her, but just the jar of grease, out of curiosity to learn the power of the ointment he did as he had seen done, and suddenly he also was transported, and found himself in the region of Lorraine with the coven of witches, where he was terrified.
Anyone who knows medieval and modern fairy tales know that you cannot evoke God’s name in the company of the good people.
But as soon as he called on God to help him, the whole company disappeared, and he found himself all alone and naked.
The young man actually got off lightly. There are some sixteenth-century claims that flying witches had accidentally said the name of God while flying, as you do, and had fallen to the ground breaking bones and causing serious injuries. In any case, there is now the romantic denouement. The woman shared her body, her ointment and secret access to a pagan rave in the middle of the French countryside to her paramour and what does she get out of it?
He returned to Lyons where he denounced the witch, who confessed and was condemned to be burned.
Bodin wrote his work on sorcery in 1580, ‘a few years ago’ should take us back then into the mid sixteenth century, when burning noble women for witchcraft had rather gone out of fashion: it was never really that in vogue even in the fifteenth century. Does JB somehow obliquely refer to a real account? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
