An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Flagellation, its use in Folk Rites

It is evident from a number of old records that flagellation entered into the rites of witchcraft, partly as a means of discipline and partly as a religious or magical act.

For instance, in August 1678, according to Law’s Memorialls (quoted by Montague Summers in his Geography of Witchcraft, Kegan Paul, London, 1927), “the devil had a great meeting of witches in Loudian”, that is Lothian in Scotland. This was probably the Lammas Sabbat. Prominent among the witch-leaders was a former Protestant minister, one Gideon Penman, who was later accused of taking part in this gathering. It was said that he “was in the rear in all their dances, and beat up all those that were slow”.

This kind of dancing is known among primitive people from Morocco to South America, with a whip or some other means of scourging being used to urge on the dancers. Its object is to stimulate and excite the participants, and to keep them in the direction and rhythm of the dance.

Mild flagellation was also widely believed in in ancient times as driving away evil influences and arousing the forces of life. At the old Horn Fair, which used to be held at Charlton in Kent, part of the traditional ceremonies consisted of whipping women with what William Hone in The Year Book (William Tegg and Co. London, 1848) describes as “furze”, though it is more likely to have been green broom (Planta genista). This old fair, which was connected with the worship of the Horned God, was such an occasion for licence and frolic that it gave rise to the proverb, “All is fair at Horn Fair.” It was eventually banned, for this reason.

FLAGELLATION. “They sacrifice to the Devil, and not to God” are the words on this miniature in a fifteenth-century French manuscript of St. Augustine’s Civitas Dei.

On the Continent, fresh green branches, called ’rods of life’, were used in old-time folk festivals for ritual beating, sometimes on Holy Innocents’ Day and sometimes at Easter. These rods were used by one sex upon the other, and they were believed to give renewed health and fertility to those who submitted to the rite.

Ritual flagellation goes back to the days of Ancient Egypt, and probably beyond. Herodotus states that at the annual festival held at Busiris in honour of the Goddess Isis, while the sacrifice was being performed, ritual flagellation was practised by the whole assembly, amounting to several thousands of both men and women. He adds that he is not allowed to mention the reason why these beatings were performed. That is, they were part of the Mysteries, into which Herodotus had been initiated.

When the house called ’The Villa of the Mysteries’ was discovered in the ruins of Pompeii in 1910, its remarkable and beautiful fresco paintings gave the world an actual picture of initiation into one of the Mystery cults of olden time. It is thought to depict an initiation into the Mysteries of Dionysus. Part of the initiation scene shows the neophyte, a girl being scourged upon her naked flesh by the initiator, who is depicted as a winged goddess, Telete, the Daughter of Dionysus. In this instance, flagellation appears as an ordeal which the neophyte had to pass, and also perhaps as a means of purification before a person was admitted to the Mysteries.

This villa was probably a secret meeting place of initiates, after the Dionysiac Mysteries had been banned by the Roman Senate.

However, the Lupercalia Festival of Ancient Rome, which also involved ritual flagellation, was not only tolerated, but members of the nobility willingly took part in it. This is mentioned in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, when Caesar’s wife takes part in the Lupercalia, in order to be cured of her barrenness and be able to have a child.

The festival of the Lupercalia was performed in honour of the god Pan. It took place in February, and this month actually derives its name from the Latin februa, meaning ’purification’. A curious old book gives a lively description of this time-honoured rite:

Virgil speaks of the dancing Salii and naked Luperci, and the commentators explain that these last were men who, upon particular solemnities, used to strip themselves stark naked, and who ran about the streets, carrying straps of goat’s leather in their hands, with which they struck such women as they met in their way. Nor did those women run away; on the contrary, they willingly presented the palms of their hands to them in order to receive the strokes, imagining that these blows, whether applied to their hands or to other parts of their body, had the power of rendering them fruitful or procuring them an easy delivery.

The Luperci were in early times formed into two bands, named after the most distinguished families in Rome, Quintiliani and Fabiani; and to these was afterwards added a third band, named Juliani, from Julius Caesar. Marc Anthony did not scruple to run as one of the Luperci, having once harangued the people in that condition. This feast was established in the time of Augustus, but afterwards restored and continued to the time of Anastasius. The festival was celebrated so late as the year 496, long after the establishment of Christianity. Members of noble families ran for a long time among the Luperci, and a great improvement was moreover made in the ceremony. The ladies, no longer contented with being slapped on the palms of their hands as formerly, began to strip themselves also, in order to give a fuller scope to the Lupercus, and to allow him to display the vigour and agility of his arm. It is wickedly said that the ladies became in time completely fascinated with this kind of ’diversion’, and that the ceremony being brought to a degree of perfection was so well relished by all parties, that it existed long after many of the other rites of paganism were abolished; and when Pope Gelasius at length put an end to it, he met with so much opposition that he was obliged to write an apology.

(Flagellation and the Flagellants: A History of the Rod in all Countries from the Earliest Period to the Present time, by “the Rev. Wm. M. Cooper, B.A.” (James Glass Bertram), London, 1868).

It is remarkable that this ritual should have continued publicly, so long after the official establishment of Christianity. There is evidence that rituals like this took place privately for a much longer period. A miniature from a fifteenth-century manuscript, for instance, shows an indoor gathering of thirteen people, some of whom are eating and drinking, some performing a round dance, while three of them, almost naked, are vigorously plying the birch upon themselves and each other. On one side is the figure of a scandalised Bishop, who has intruded upon this secret gathering. He bears a scroll in one hand, with a Latin inscription upon it, which translates: “They sacrifice to demons, and not to God”.

This miniature has usually been taken to depict the practices of the medieval sect called Flagellants; but it could represent something quite different, and not a Christian gathering at all. The ceremony is taking place in front of two pillars, reminiscent of Masonic symbolism; and on top of each pillar is a small nude statue. The facts that those taking part are a coven of thirteen; that the flagellation is evidently accompanied, not by lugubrious repentance for sin, but by feasting and dancing; and that no Christian symbols are shown, but instead two pagan statues, are surely significant, especially when taken in conjunction with the Bishop’s condemnation of “sacrificing to demons”. To the medieval Church, all pagan gods and spirits were demons. What this fifteenth-century miniature really depicts is a secret gathering of pagans.

Rumours and allegations have been frequent, that present-day witches make use of ritual flagellation in their ceremonies. The truth is that some covens do make use of this, and others do not. Those which do, however, have the warrant of a good deal of antiquity behind them; the truth of which has hitherto been obscured by the difficulties encountered by anthropologists and students of comparative religion, in the frank discussion of this subject. The reason for this seems to be that, while strict moralists have no objection, indeed are all in favour, of flagellation being used for penance and punishment, to inflict pain and suffering; nevertheless, the idea of this very ancient folk-rite being used in a magical way, not to inflict pain but as part of a fertility ritual, for some reason upsets them very much.

In later years, when the witch cult was being more severely persecuted and forbidden, flagellation was used as a means of discipline. Harsh as this may sound, the security of the coven members was literally a matter of life and death. Any breaches of coven law had to be punished, sometimes severely. Traitors were killed; and people whose carelessness or vacillation endangered the lives of their companions received a sharp and painful reminder of where their loyalty lay.

It is recorded that at Arras, France, in 1460, a wealthy man called Jean Tacquet, whose loyalty to the coven he belonged to had become doubtful, was beaten by the “Devil” with a bull’s pizzle. This weapon was actually the dried penis of a bull, which formed a severe instrument of flagellation. It was dried in a way which made it very strong and flexible, being stretched and drawn out to the length of an ordinary cane, and capable of administering a terrible castigation. In later times, the bull’s pizzle came to be used for severe forms of flagellation inflicted upon criminals; it was still being used upon women prisoners in Germany in the early nineteenth century! It is such a curious weapon, however, that its origin may well have been a ritual one, used in the witch cult to punish those who were untrue to the Horned God, to whom it was sacred.

Isobel Gowdie, the young Scottish witch who made such a remarkably full confession of what happened in the coven she belonged to, in 1662, complained of the harshness with which the “Devil” behaved. “We would be beaten if we were absent any time, or neglected anything that would be appointed to be done ... He would be beating and scourging us all up and down with cords and other sharp scourges, like naked ghosts; and we would still be crying, ’Pity! pity! Mercy! mercy our Lord!’ But he would have neither pity nor mercy.”

Such power, in the hands of a cruel and sadistic man, could be fearfully abused. One wonders whether this was the reason why Isobel Gowdie gave herself up to the authorities, and confessed her witchcraft, knowing as she must have done that the result would be her own execution. For some reason, her life had become intolerable, and she wanted to die. Though, of course, the alternative explanation of her conduct is that she was a voluntary human sacrifice. This beautiful, red-haired girl is one of the many enigmas of witchcraft’s dark history.