Free Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler

wrote: It is a fantasy at work both in history and the writing of history. The witch hunts would never have taken place without “the fantasy of a child-eating, orgiastic, Devil-worshipping sect.” The only continuity is in the fantasy. And where did those fantasies come from? Cohn’s answer was that they represented “the innermost selves” of many Europeans, “their obsessive fears, and also their unacknowledged, terrifying desires.” These fantasies of cannibalism and infanticide were in all folklore, and their roots were in childhood, part of the “wishes and anxieties experienced in infancy or early childhood, but deeply repressed and, in their original form, wholly unconscious.” The creation of a society of witches was, therefore, an unconscious revolt against Christianity as too strict and repressive.
    One of the problems with Cohn’s argument was his limited conception of the possible. For example, he considered all reports of orgies to be fantasy. He stated, “Orgies where one mates with one’s neighbour in the dark, without troubling to establish whether that neighbour is male or female, a stranger or, on the contrary, one’s own father or mother, son or daughter, belong to the world of fantasy.” Here he is surprisingly ignorant of the history of sex and ritual. Orgiastic practices were a part of religious rites in many cultures of the ancient world. And while most modern group sexual encounters lack a religious dimension, one has only to read reports about modern sex clubs to know that orgiastic experiences are not merely a product of fantasy.

Mircea Eliade: Witchcraft as an Archaic Pagan Survival
    In 1976, the historian Mircea Eliade wrote an essay, “Some Observations on European Witchcraft,” that noted that although Murray’s work was filled with errors and unproven assumptions, more recent studies of Indian and Tibetan documents “will convince an unprejudiced reader that European witchcraft cannot be the creation of religious or political persecution or be a demonic sect devoted to Satan and the promotion of evil.”
    As a matter of fact, all the features associated with European witches are—with the exception of Satan and the Sabbath—claimed also by Indo-Tibetan yogis and magicians. They too are supposed to fly through the air, render themselves invisible, kill at a distance, master demons and ghosts, and so on. Moreover, some of these eccentric Indian sectarians boast that they break all the religious taboos and social rules: that they practice human sacrifice, cannibalism, and all manner of orgies, including incestuous intercourse, and that they eat excrement, nauseating animals, and devour human corpses. In other words, they proudly claim all the crimes and horrible ceremonies cited ad nauseam in the Western European witch trials. 11
    Eliade pointed to the cult of the benandanti , unearthed by Carlo Ginzburg. On the four great agricultural festivals of the year these Italian wizards fought a battle (in trance) against a group of evil wizards, the stregoni . They went to their assemblies in spiritu, while they slept, and their central rite was a ceremonial battle against the stregoni to assure the harvest. “It is probable,” wrote Eliade, “that this combat between benandanti and stregoni prolonged an archaic ritual scenario of competitions and contests between two opposing groups, designed to stimulate the creative forces of nature and regenerate human society as well.” The persecution of the benandanti took place in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in most of the trials the accused were charged with adhering to a cult of Diana. The Inquisitional model pressed upon the accused had an effect and “after fifty years of Inquisitorial trials, the benandanti acknowledged their identity with the witches ( strighe and stregoni ).” They began to speak of the sabbat and pacts with