Recommended listening: Tu tu pan pan, a piper journey through medieval Europe - Poul Høxbro
Story
It was nighttime in the Rhineland. Everyone was fast asleep in their beds, for no one dared go out at night before the cock crowed. Night was a dangerous time. Spirits and demons roamed the Earth, threatening the souls of good Christians who strayed from their home in the darkness. The demons were immortal, fickle creatures who the Church said could do nothing but tempt human beings. They were fallen angels, cast from Heaven along with the Devil himself. The pagans had worshipped some of them as gods and goddesses, but Christians knew better than to fraternize with them - or so the Church insisted.
A thousand years ago, a man called Burchard took up his new post as Bishop of Worms. Having grown up in the glittering world of the imperial court, the rural peasants of his new diocese were something of a shock. He found the world around him to be full of superstitions and misguided beliefs. From love magic to divination, the people of his diocese were dangerously accustomed to dangerous practices that made them subservient to the ways of demons. As bishop, his job was to root out false beliefs and enforce a strict sense of Christian discipline on his new flock. And so he set out compiling a collection of canon laws and penitentials that would eventually be published as the Decretum. While much of the work involved pulling together older texts about the dangers of sin, Burchard also added many of his own accounts of sinful beliefs among people in his diocese. The book listed questions confessors should ask of their communities so that the people could repent for their sins. Book 19 of the Decretum was called the Corrector, and it is there that he turned his attention to the foolishness of peasants - and in particular, peasant women. His heart lit with a righteous fury, Burchard took a quill to parchment and wrote out the following words:
Have you ever believed that there is a kind of woman who can do what certain women, deceived by the Devil, claim they must do by necessity or command? Namely, with a band of devils transformed into women, which the foolish rabble calls the Holda, on some nights they must ride on various beasts, and number themselves in this assembly?
Have you believed what some women are wont to believe: That in the stillness of a quiet night while your doors are shut, you along with other minions of the devil rise up into the sky all the way to the clouds and fight there with others, and that you wound them and they wound you?
Have you believed or taken part in this kind of faithlessness that some wicked women, turning back to Satan and seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and proclaim? In the night hours they ride on certain animals with the pagan goddess Diana and a countless multitude of women, and they cross a great span of the world in the stillness of the dead of night, and they obey her commands as if she were a noble lady, and on some nights they are called to her service? A countless multitude, deceived by this false belief, believe these things are true and stray from true faith by believing them.
A century earlier, another writer had recorded the idea that some women believed they flew about on wild beasts with Diana at night. However, Burchard provided many new details. Most important of these was that the vernacular name for the nighttime retinue was Holda. In later medieval folklore, Holda or Hulda became the name of the lady of the night herself. It's unlikely that Frankish peasants ever called their leader Diana - rather, her association with the moon, women, and animals made the classically trained scholars who wrote penitentials aware of her as the closest Latin analogue to the mystical woman of the night peasant women claimed to ride with. The name Holda ultimately means "benevolent." And with that, we get our first clue to how the women of the Rhineland may have viewed their nighttime leader very differently to how Burchard did.
Rhenish peasant women had a whole host of practices which Burchard condemned as ignorant superstitions. When a man was buried, they had special rites of water and ointment to help him pass on into the next life. Women buried newly baptized infants with wax facsimiles of the bread and wine of the communion table. They knew how to weave incantations into everything from tapestries to bread. They taught each other special songs and dances to perform in graveyards and special offerings to make at crossroads. They could make potions to prevent or end a pregnancy, or to encourage one. On certain special evenings, they set the table for three invisible women who would bless the household in the coming year if they were given plenty of food and drink. During a drought, they gathered together all the women and girls of the village and carried out special rites to bring the rain, throwing henbane into the river and carrying a small girl backwards through the town.
When it came to dealing with their husbands, they helped each other perform strange rituals. A woman might knead a loaf of bread on the naked buttocks of her friend with the hopes that the bread would make her friend's husband more passionate in his love. But when a man had wronged a woman, she could douse herself in honey and roll naked in a pile of wheat. The kernels that stuck to her body would be baked into a bread that would slowly make her husband wither and die. If the stories of the night rides were to be believed, some women even thought that during their nighttime revels they ate the hearts of men and replaced them with straw. All of this, according to Burchard, was dangerous superstition. As far as he was concerned, the women of the Rhineland were trafficking with demons whether they knew it or not. The only legitimate way for women to engage with the supernatural was through the official rites of the Church, led by the male clergy who could guide them to the true faith. With the exception of love magic, which Burchard thought women could definitely perform (and should definitely do penance for), he saw all of these "magical" acts as fruitless actions that flattered demons without actually achieving anything in the physical world. For the audacity to believe in nocturnal women riding with demons through the sky, Burchard assigned anything from a fasting penance to being beaten with broomsticks and chased out of the diocese.
But if we take a step back, an alternative perspective is visible through the cracks of his misogynistic moralizing. Piece by piece, a picture emerges of women who found ways to help each other and empower themselves. How many women must have helped each other navigate the uneven relationships with the men in their lives? Lost to history are the brutal circumstances that may have motivated a desperate woman to try to kill her husband by thrashing around in honey and wheat, but it isn't hard to imagine. And how many women, devastated by the loss of a child, felt comforted by the rites their fellow women performed for the baby? Or how many women, fearing they wouldn't be able to feed their families, brought peace of mind to their fellow hungry mothers by leading rituals to bring the rain? Burchard of Worms and other clergymen like him saw these rites as repugnant because they allowed laywomen to take control over their own lives in ways that the Church wanted priests to do for them. Enforcing episcopal authority meant bringing laypeople, and especially laywomen, in line by portraying their cherished rituals and beliefs as the deceptions of demons. To the Rhenish women, however, what they were doing wasn't demonic - it was taking part in a time-honoured tradition of knowledge handed down from one generation to the next. They all probably thought of themselves as Christians and balked at the presumption of the new bishop to tell them that what they were doing was wrong.
And so, when we return to the story of the night riders, we can imagine for a moment what this experience meant to them. Their journeys in the sky were far more than a dream for these women. Leaving their bodies behind in their husbands' arms, they flew up into the sky and mounted wild beasts of the forest. Their leader, the mysterious and benevolent Lady, led them winding through the clouds and above the treetops. Sometimes she guided them to the moon which they pulled together out of the sky, causing a lunar eclipse. Other times they did battle with other beastborne women. When they came back into the world of the waking, they shared their experiences with others who respected the gravity of what they'd done. Their newfound prestige made them the ones to consult in the village about all matters of magic, whether healing an illness or changing the weather. To them, the Lady was neither a demonic goddess of the pagan past nor a saint of the Christian present. She simply was. She was just as much a part of the world as the beasts that she commanded and the moon that lighted her path.
The women in this illustration no doubt had worries in the waking world. Perhaps they found the embrace of their husbands oppressive, or perhaps they were merely weary from the difficulties of life as a peasant woman a thousand years ago. But in the quiet of the night, the moonlight washed all of their troubles away. They were free to leap through the skies with the wind in their hair. Up here, no troubles from below could reach them, and there was no authority but the Lady. The magical arts she taught would prove crucial to survival once they awoke and returned to lives of labour and toil, and the other women who shared in their nocturnal journey would support them through the difficult times that inevitably lay ahead. But for now, they were far above the clouds and flying happily through the air, free to follow their Lady into the unknown pleasures of the night.
A thousand years ago, a man called Burchard took up his new post as Bishop of Worms. Having grown up in the glittering world of the imperial court, the rural peasants of his new diocese were something of a shock. He found the world around him to be full of superstitions and misguided beliefs. From love magic to divination, the people of his diocese were dangerously accustomed to dangerous practices that made them subservient to the ways of demons. As bishop, his job was to root out false beliefs and enforce a strict sense of Christian discipline on his new flock. And so he set out compiling a collection of canon laws and penitentials that would eventually be published as the Decretum. While much of the work involved pulling together older texts about the dangers of sin, Burchard also added many of his own accounts of sinful beliefs among people in his diocese. The book listed questions confessors should ask of their communities so that the people could repent for their sins. Book 19 of the Decretum was called the Corrector, and it is there that he turned his attention to the foolishness of peasants - and in particular, peasant women. His heart lit with a righteous fury, Burchard took a quill to parchment and wrote out the following words:
Have you ever believed that there is a kind of woman who can do what certain women, deceived by the Devil, claim they must do by necessity or command? Namely, with a band of devils transformed into women, which the foolish rabble calls the Holda, on some nights they must ride on various beasts, and number themselves in this assembly?
Have you believed what some women are wont to believe: That in the stillness of a quiet night while your doors are shut, you along with other minions of the devil rise up into the sky all the way to the clouds and fight there with others, and that you wound them and they wound you?
Have you believed or taken part in this kind of faithlessness that some wicked women, turning back to Satan and seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and proclaim? In the night hours they ride on certain animals with the pagan goddess Diana and a countless multitude of women, and they cross a great span of the world in the stillness of the dead of night, and they obey her commands as if she were a noble lady, and on some nights they are called to her service? A countless multitude, deceived by this false belief, believe these things are true and stray from true faith by believing them.
A century earlier, another writer had recorded the idea that some women believed they flew about on wild beasts with Diana at night. However, Burchard provided many new details. Most important of these was that the vernacular name for the nighttime retinue was Holda. In later medieval folklore, Holda or Hulda became the name of the lady of the night herself. It's unlikely that Frankish peasants ever called their leader Diana - rather, her association with the moon, women, and animals made the classically trained scholars who wrote penitentials aware of her as the closest Latin analogue to the mystical woman of the night peasant women claimed to ride with. The name Holda ultimately means "benevolent." And with that, we get our first clue to how the women of the Rhineland may have viewed their nighttime leader very differently to how Burchard did.
Rhenish peasant women had a whole host of practices which Burchard condemned as ignorant superstitions. When a man was buried, they had special rites of water and ointment to help him pass on into the next life. Women buried newly baptized infants with wax facsimiles of the bread and wine of the communion table. They knew how to weave incantations into everything from tapestries to bread. They taught each other special songs and dances to perform in graveyards and special offerings to make at crossroads. They could make potions to prevent or end a pregnancy, or to encourage one. On certain special evenings, they set the table for three invisible women who would bless the household in the coming year if they were given plenty of food and drink. During a drought, they gathered together all the women and girls of the village and carried out special rites to bring the rain, throwing henbane into the river and carrying a small girl backwards through the town.
When it came to dealing with their husbands, they helped each other perform strange rituals. A woman might knead a loaf of bread on the naked buttocks of her friend with the hopes that the bread would make her friend's husband more passionate in his love. But when a man had wronged a woman, she could douse herself in honey and roll naked in a pile of wheat. The kernels that stuck to her body would be baked into a bread that would slowly make her husband wither and die. If the stories of the night rides were to be believed, some women even thought that during their nighttime revels they ate the hearts of men and replaced them with straw. All of this, according to Burchard, was dangerous superstition. As far as he was concerned, the women of the Rhineland were trafficking with demons whether they knew it or not. The only legitimate way for women to engage with the supernatural was through the official rites of the Church, led by the male clergy who could guide them to the true faith. With the exception of love magic, which Burchard thought women could definitely perform (and should definitely do penance for), he saw all of these "magical" acts as fruitless actions that flattered demons without actually achieving anything in the physical world. For the audacity to believe in nocturnal women riding with demons through the sky, Burchard assigned anything from a fasting penance to being beaten with broomsticks and chased out of the diocese.
But if we take a step back, an alternative perspective is visible through the cracks of his misogynistic moralizing. Piece by piece, a picture emerges of women who found ways to help each other and empower themselves. How many women must have helped each other navigate the uneven relationships with the men in their lives? Lost to history are the brutal circumstances that may have motivated a desperate woman to try to kill her husband by thrashing around in honey and wheat, but it isn't hard to imagine. And how many women, devastated by the loss of a child, felt comforted by the rites their fellow women performed for the baby? Or how many women, fearing they wouldn't be able to feed their families, brought peace of mind to their fellow hungry mothers by leading rituals to bring the rain? Burchard of Worms and other clergymen like him saw these rites as repugnant because they allowed laywomen to take control over their own lives in ways that the Church wanted priests to do for them. Enforcing episcopal authority meant bringing laypeople, and especially laywomen, in line by portraying their cherished rituals and beliefs as the deceptions of demons. To the Rhenish women, however, what they were doing wasn't demonic - it was taking part in a time-honoured tradition of knowledge handed down from one generation to the next. They all probably thought of themselves as Christians and balked at the presumption of the new bishop to tell them that what they were doing was wrong.
And so, when we return to the story of the night riders, we can imagine for a moment what this experience meant to them. Their journeys in the sky were far more than a dream for these women. Leaving their bodies behind in their husbands' arms, they flew up into the sky and mounted wild beasts of the forest. Their leader, the mysterious and benevolent Lady, led them winding through the clouds and above the treetops. Sometimes she guided them to the moon which they pulled together out of the sky, causing a lunar eclipse. Other times they did battle with other beastborne women. When they came back into the world of the waking, they shared their experiences with others who respected the gravity of what they'd done. Their newfound prestige made them the ones to consult in the village about all matters of magic, whether healing an illness or changing the weather. To them, the Lady was neither a demonic goddess of the pagan past nor a saint of the Christian present. She simply was. She was just as much a part of the world as the beasts that she commanded and the moon that lighted her path.
The women in this illustration no doubt had worries in the waking world. Perhaps they found the embrace of their husbands oppressive, or perhaps they were merely weary from the difficulties of life as a peasant woman a thousand years ago. But in the quiet of the night, the moonlight washed all of their troubles away. They were free to leap through the skies with the wind in their hair. Up here, no troubles from below could reach them, and there was no authority but the Lady. The magical arts she taught would prove crucial to survival once they awoke and returned to lives of labour and toil, and the other women who shared in their nocturnal journey would support them through the difficult times that inevitably lay ahead. But for now, they were far above the clouds and flying happily through the air, free to follow their Lady into the unknown pleasures of the night.
Artist's Comments
This was my first time depicting a supernatural scene in the series! The Corrector is so full of fantastic scenes that I have wanted to draw something from it for a long time. I finally settled on this scene because it really fires up the imagination. (Sorry, backwards crab-walking rain ritual, you were my number two!) I've wanted to draw something to do with witchcraft for a long time. These women weren't witches in the early modern sense of people who had made permanent pacts with the Devil. Rather, interactions with "demons" and the supernatural were considered commonplace in early medieval Europe. The vast extent of "superstitions" collected in the Corrector make it clear that men and women alike had everyday lives rich with supernatural activities. But did they really see them as "super"natural, or just part of the natural world? That's where the tension between Burchard and his parishioners really comes out, because he fundamentally disagreed with them about which interactions were demonic and which were perfectly normal. I hope I brought that out a bit in my story.
Moonlight was an interesting challenge for this one. I found this painting by Dean Cornwell very helpful for figuring out the palette. I also have to offer a HUGE thank you to my friend Sacha! I was pretty disappointed with how different the colours in the sky were in the scanned image compared to the original coloured pencil drawing. But Sacha was able to correct the colours digitally so that they looked much closer to the original! I am so grateful to Sacha for this because I spent so long carefully selecting the colours for this one. My brand new turquoise coloured pencil broke five times while colouring in the sky - now its sacrifice is not in vain! It was also really fun doing a fantasy scene for this series. I'm not used to asking myself questions like "What would it look like for a woman to ride a badger?" I gave the Lady a green dress as a nod to slightly later medieval folklore about mysterious supernatural women in green, like in The Miracles of Saint Æbbe of Coldingham and Saint Margaret of Scotland. She's also breaking the fourth wall by looking directly at the viewer.
It was really fun to work on a spooky picture in the leadup to Halloween, my favourite holiday. I read so many fascinating things while researching this one that it's hard to feel like I did it justice. But I hope you enjoyed learning about the Lady and her followers just as much as I did. Happy Halloween! ~ October 19, 2022
Moonlight was an interesting challenge for this one. I found this painting by Dean Cornwell very helpful for figuring out the palette. I also have to offer a HUGE thank you to my friend Sacha! I was pretty disappointed with how different the colours in the sky were in the scanned image compared to the original coloured pencil drawing. But Sacha was able to correct the colours digitally so that they looked much closer to the original! I am so grateful to Sacha for this because I spent so long carefully selecting the colours for this one. My brand new turquoise coloured pencil broke five times while colouring in the sky - now its sacrifice is not in vain! It was also really fun doing a fantasy scene for this series. I'm not used to asking myself questions like "What would it look like for a woman to ride a badger?" I gave the Lady a green dress as a nod to slightly later medieval folklore about mysterious supernatural women in green, like in The Miracles of Saint Æbbe of Coldingham and Saint Margaret of Scotland. She's also breaking the fourth wall by looking directly at the viewer.
It was really fun to work on a spooky picture in the leadup to Halloween, my favourite holiday. I read so many fascinating things while researching this one that it's hard to feel like I did it justice. But I hope you enjoyed learning about the Lady and her followers just as much as I did. Happy Halloween! ~ October 19, 2022
Resources
Want to learn more women and witchcraft in early medieval Europe? Here are some recommended resources.
"The Bishop, 'Magic', and Local Lay Women: Gender, the Supernatural, and Clerical Authority in the Central Middle Ages" by Greta Austin
I am very grateful to Greta Austin for sending me a pre-publication copy of this fascinating piece. I will update with a link once it has been officially published. Austin has done a lot of work on Burchard and his Decretum. I really like how in this article she goes into detail about how the penitential would have actually been used in episcopal visitations. She points out how we know from accounts of his life that he was much more closely involved with the laity in day-to-day life than monastic pentitential writers. Austin's analysis also makes it clear that in shoring up support for the episcopacy in Worms, Burchard created a gendered hierarchy of access to the supernatural which put lay women at the bottom. Austin has previously published an entire book on Buchard called Shaping Church Law Around the Year 1000: The Decretum of Burchard of Worms.
"There is More than Meets the Eye: Undead, Ghosts and Spirits in the Decretum of Burchard of Worms" by Andrea Maraschi
This article takes an in-depth look at rites and beliefs surrounding the dead in the Decretum. I was very tempted to draw one of the graveyard scenes discussed here! Maraschi points out that most of the beliefs about the dead and undead Burchard discusses are original to his text, suggesting that they were active beliefs in his time.
The Witch: A History of Fear, From Ancient Times to the Present by Ronald Hutton
Ronald Hutton applies his characteristic attention to detail and sensitivity to the nuances of belief in this excellent history of the concept of the "witch" in Europe. While the whole book is worth reading for its overview of the history (and historiography) of witchcraft, his chapter about "Hosts of the Night" was especially useful for researching this illustration. The way he unpicks the independent traditions that got conflated into the early modern idea of the witches' sabbath brings so much clarity to the topic.
Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000 by Martha Rampton
This book is a really thorough treatment of the relationship between women and magic in the early Christian period. While I don't agree with all of her points, particularly in some of her more sweeping statements about early medieval Europe, this book is a fantastic resource that really fired me up on this topic. Rampton weaves together so many details from primary sources into a persuasive narrative about the changing ideas towards the efficacy of women's magic in the later centuries of the first millennium. I also love how unapologetically feminist this book is. It really felt empowering to read. Some of the content covered in the book is also discussed in Rampton's earlier chapter "Burchard of Worms and Female Magical Ritual."
Pagan Survivals, Superstitions and Popular Cultures by Bernadette Filotas
I haven't read this entire book yet, but both Hutton and Rampton cite it in their own works. Her section about early medieval ideas about witchcraft had some interesting extra tidbits that they hadn't included. One of these was a more extended quotation from Regino of Prüm about the night riders.
"The Bishop, 'Magic', and Local Lay Women: Gender, the Supernatural, and Clerical Authority in the Central Middle Ages" by Greta Austin
I am very grateful to Greta Austin for sending me a pre-publication copy of this fascinating piece. I will update with a link once it has been officially published. Austin has done a lot of work on Burchard and his Decretum. I really like how in this article she goes into detail about how the penitential would have actually been used in episcopal visitations. She points out how we know from accounts of his life that he was much more closely involved with the laity in day-to-day life than monastic pentitential writers. Austin's analysis also makes it clear that in shoring up support for the episcopacy in Worms, Burchard created a gendered hierarchy of access to the supernatural which put lay women at the bottom. Austin has previously published an entire book on Buchard called Shaping Church Law Around the Year 1000: The Decretum of Burchard of Worms.
"There is More than Meets the Eye: Undead, Ghosts and Spirits in the Decretum of Burchard of Worms" by Andrea Maraschi
This article takes an in-depth look at rites and beliefs surrounding the dead in the Decretum. I was very tempted to draw one of the graveyard scenes discussed here! Maraschi points out that most of the beliefs about the dead and undead Burchard discusses are original to his text, suggesting that they were active beliefs in his time.
The Witch: A History of Fear, From Ancient Times to the Present by Ronald Hutton
Ronald Hutton applies his characteristic attention to detail and sensitivity to the nuances of belief in this excellent history of the concept of the "witch" in Europe. While the whole book is worth reading for its overview of the history (and historiography) of witchcraft, his chapter about "Hosts of the Night" was especially useful for researching this illustration. The way he unpicks the independent traditions that got conflated into the early modern idea of the witches' sabbath brings so much clarity to the topic.
Trafficking with Demons: Magic, Ritual, and Gender from Late Antiquity to 1000 by Martha Rampton
This book is a really thorough treatment of the relationship between women and magic in the early Christian period. While I don't agree with all of her points, particularly in some of her more sweeping statements about early medieval Europe, this book is a fantastic resource that really fired me up on this topic. Rampton weaves together so many details from primary sources into a persuasive narrative about the changing ideas towards the efficacy of women's magic in the later centuries of the first millennium. I also love how unapologetically feminist this book is. It really felt empowering to read. Some of the content covered in the book is also discussed in Rampton's earlier chapter "Burchard of Worms and Female Magical Ritual."
Pagan Survivals, Superstitions and Popular Cultures by Bernadette Filotas
I haven't read this entire book yet, but both Hutton and Rampton cite it in their own works. Her section about early medieval ideas about witchcraft had some interesting extra tidbits that they hadn't included. One of these was a more extended quotation from Regino of Prüm about the night riders.