Brendan Campisi’s Reviews > The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries > Status Update

Orsolina la Rossa, another witch tried by the Modenese Inquisition in 1539, was well aware of this. To the judge who wished to know why so many men and women flocked to the diabolical gatherings and could not seem to overcome this vice, she replied: 'It is because of the carnal pleasure they take with the devil, both men and women, and for no other reason.

It provided an outlet for collective aspirations and fears - the terror of famine, hopes for a good harvest, thoughts about the afterlife, forlorn longing for the dead, anxiety over their otherworldly fate...Where we might have expected to encounter the individual in his (presumed) non-historic immediacy, we find instead the force of the community's traditions, the hopes and needs tied to the life of society.

Those who believe the contrary remain unconsciously bound to the
view taken by those long-ago judges, ecclesiastical or secular, who
asked themselves before all else whether the accused had participated
*physically* in the diabolical gatherings. Even if the sabbat had been a
purely mental phenomenon (and this cannot be proved) its importance
for the historian would not be diminished.