The shadowy sisterhood

Ordinary folk huddled fearfully
in their beds when,
with a rush of wind and skirl
of laughter,
witches coursed the nighttime sky.

One frosty autumn morning many centuries past, a curious little drama unfolded against the placid setting of an English farming village. At the edge of this village was a close - a small, hedged-in area of land where a farmer stabled his four milk cows at night. Beside the close, crouched in the shadow of the hedge, was the farmer himself, holding his scythe across his knees. He waited stolidly in this position, as he had waited all the long night through, while good folk in his village slept safe in their beds. All good folk but one, that is. That one - not yet identified - was a thief, who each night stole the milk from the farmer's cows and left the animals torn and injured.

The morning star faded, the moon grew pale and slipped from sight, the cows slept on, and the farmer watched. Nothing stirred. Then a hare, silky-furred, silver-gray and almost invisible in the faint light, hopped from the shadows into the close. As soon as it touched the open ground, it sat up on its haunches and froze - eyes shining, long ears erect, motionless except for twitching nostrils and whiskers. The farmer, downwind of the hare and therefore unnoticed, watched but made no move. It was a pretty little creature, after all, and as long as it kept clear of his vegetable patch, he was prepared to let it go about its business.

But what was this hare's business? Satisfied of safety, it dropped to all fours and hopped unconcernedly among the hoofs of the cattle, where it reared again, showing its long shining teeth as it reached greedily toward an udder.

After a horrified moment, the farmer sprang like an avenging angel from his hiding place, lifting his scythe. He brought down the blade in a murderous arc as the terrified hare streaked past him. At first, he thought he had missed the mark, but then the animal gave a savage shriek. The hare vanished throught the hedge. On the ground of the close lay its forepaw, severed at the first joint.

The farmer set down his scythe and calmed his frightened cattle, brushing them down with a handful of straw while he thought about the matter. By the time he had finished his work, the cocks had begun to crow and the morning light to glow in crimson streaks in the east. He picked up the hare's foot, wrapped it carefully in a rag and, balancing his scythe upon his shoulder, set off down the dusty lane that led through his village.

The farmer followed this dismal track past the gardens and cottages of his waking neighbors, past the churchyard with its brooding yew trees, past the village well. At the well, the tiny stains, now browning in the dust, led down another lane to a house the farmer knew - as he did every house in his village.

The hare had gone to ground, it seemed, at the very doorstep of a goodwife of that neighborhood, the widow of a freeman like himself. The farmer stood in her small yard and looked around, but everything seemed as usual. The house thatch steamed as the morning sun thawed its mantle of frost; woodsmoke drifted fragrantly from the eaves, showing that the goodwife was up and about her work. In the yard, three beehives stood in a row on their bench, the colonies quiet; ducks and geese pecked in the dirt around the farmer's feet. The wounded hare was nowhere to be seen.

Leaning his scythe against the cottage wall, the farmer stepped through the door of the cottage and called his neighbor's name. There was no answer, but as far as he could see in the dim light, all was in order. Everywhere were the signs of the thrifty housewife: in the sweet-smelling bunches of herbs drying on the wall, in the massive hams hanging from the ridgepole to cure in the woodsmoke, in neatly stacked sacks of grain, in baskets of carded wool, in distaff and spindle, in the butter churn and cheese molds. The little cottage was much like his own.

The housewife herself he saw last, after his eyes grew accustomed to the shadows. She was crouched in a far corner, her back to him. She gave forth a stream of whimpering mumbles, horrible to hear.
"Goodwife," began the farmer gently.
The woman swung around to confront him. Her face was ashen, and at her bosom she clutched a scarlet bundle. She bared her teeth, gibbering at the farmer, and stretched the arm that held the bundle toward him. The bandages fell away to reveal the bloody stump of the woman's right arm, severed at the wrist joint. The farmer took a step backward and shifted his glance away from the sunken, glittering eyes. His hand came up in the sign that turned evil aside. "You are a witch, then," said he, and began to edge toward the door.
"Give back the hare's foot," said she.
"Oh no," said he, "I'll keep it for luck." And he fled to the safety of the lane.

That such a thing could be so was no cause for wonderment: Country people had known of witches and their ways for time out of mind. The woman had simply changed her shape to that of an animal and, when wounded as an animal, carried the wound when she reverted to her human form. In her animal shape she had engaged in one form of malevolence commonplace among witches - stealing the milk that nourished people's bodies.

But talk of witches can be no more simple and straightforward than witchcraft itself. Little about these matters was written down, and that little is often confusing and contradictory - fragmentary tales and observations of anonymous people in unnamed villages. In later centuries, there were, of course, the records of the Church's Inquisition, but the transcripts of witchcraft trials - piteous records of the torture and murder of thousands of innocent people - reveal only superstition and outright invention. The trial records gauge the Church's determination to thwart deviation from its norms, but they rarely cast light on real witches. Their story must be teased from the scanty evidence of earlier times, before the trials.

In those days, while Roger Bacon and his fellows conversed with kings or practiced their sophisticated sorceries in the universities and in royal courts, the mass of humankind followed the rhythmic cycle of the farmer's seasons. Almost everyone lived in small villages nestled among long furrowed fields and broad patches of forest. People's lives revolved around those of their near neighbors, for the villages were isolated: One might be three hours' walk from the next, or a day or two days, and the walk would lead along rutted tracks that turned into a quagmire as soon as rain began to fall.

So people kept close to their own cottages and fields, their own village wells, their own miller's white-sailed mills and their own blacksmith's smoking forges. They measured out the year in the tasks of sustenance. In the spring they sowed beans, oats and barley and tended the lambing and calving; in summer they sheared their sheep; in the autumn they harvested, planted more crops and slaughtered the animals they could not feed through the cold season. They measured their days in similar fashion - in morning and evening milking and egg gathering; in the weeding of gardens and the threshing and winnowing of grains; in the churning of butter and the making of cheese; in the spinning and weaving of wool; in the getting and bearing of children.

Theirs was a hard life and an uncertain one: In those centuries, famine and plague often stalked the land, and Death on his pale horse was never very far away. Life hung by the slenderest of threads: The failure of a crop of the drying-up of a cow could spell starvation; a wasting disease could turn a hale and hearty man into a trembling skeleton in a matter of weeks.

No one could tell when disaster might strike, for concealed among the country people themselves were the black witches, the age-old enemies of healthy growth and life. Some were descendants of the hags and night riders of time immemorial, evil creatures whose powers apparently were inborn. Others were peoples who sold their souls to Satan - in the manner of their more distinguished counterparts, the wizards - in exchange for magic power. They could wither crops or steal the goodness - what the English called the foyson - from grain, command destructive winds and rains, steal milk or make it sour, or keep rich cream from being churned to butter. They could make men impotent and women miscarry; by the power of a glance alone, they could cause crippling strokes. They were the enemies and, it was said, the devourers of children, who were the living proof of the countinuity of life.

The black witch's destructive activities were the same everywhere and in every era: The witches of medieval Europe practiced the same cold magic as those of classical Rome, and they worked by the same methods. It is no wonder that the sign to avert the witch's evil power was the ancient, potent phallic gesture - the arm outstretched, the hand with its two inner fingers curled and its two outers ones stiffly extended.

Other protection - and protectors, as well - existed to ward off the powers of black witchcraft. People could and did hedge themselves with rituals, spells and charms drawn from a body of magic lore and knowledge that had been preserved from generation to generation by good and careful people known variously as 'cunning folk', 'white witches' or 'fairy doctors'. These people were healers, skilled by birth (the powers seemed to run in families) and by training in the use of herbs and in midwifery, as well as in weather prediction, in the discovery of theft and sometimes in fortunetelling. White witches seemed to sense when black witchcraft was a work and sometimes could defeat it. And they taught the weaker folk around them how to preserve their health and happiness.

The first rule was to lead a rightous life, adhering to the patterns that helped define the order of the world. Unlettered farmers could not be expected to understand the complex patterns of the cosmos, of course, but they could conduct their affairs according to practical guidelines that sprang from those patterns.

Thus, for instance, lambs should be conceived on September 29th, at Michaelmas, the Feast of Saint Michael the Archangel, they should be born at Candlemas, on February 2nd, and they should be weaned on May 1st, the Feast of Saint Philip and Saint James. Beans and garlic should be sowed on the feast day of Saint Edmund the King, November 20th. It was unlucky to do any business on December 28th, the anniversary of the massacre of the Holy Innocents. And it was unwise to plow on Friday, that being the day of the Crucifixion, stones might be picked from the field then, but the earth could not be disturbed.

All of these rules - and there were similar regulations for every activity - helped preserve the general order and thus buttress the world against agents of disorder.

But also in common use were important protections against witchcraft. One was salt. A preservative of food and a source of health, salt derived its power from its incorruptibility. It was placed in the cradles of newborn babies until they could be baptized, farmers poured it into holes drilled in their plowes, hoping to ensure fertile fields; fishermen sprinkled it on their nets for safety at sea. Another protection was strong iron in the form of a horseshoe - symbol of that potent worker of iron, the smith. The horseshoe was hung, horns up, over doorways and on ships' masts. Still other weapons were two herbs that flowered at midsummer: Vervain and St-John's-wort, hung in houses or carried by travelers, served, it was thought, as barriers against evil.

Of spoken charms against evil there were many, and chief among them were protective spells to be said when night fell, good things of day retreated into sleep, and witches and other dangerous creatures walked freely abroad. Some of these charms, such as the well-known White Paternoster - "Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lie on" - were indistinguishable from prayers.

Other charms invoked the powers of goodness to aid the charm-sayer in more specifically aggressive ways. Among the many examples is a night spell intended to protect the beasts of the field. In order to make the spell, the farmer stood in his pasture and invoked Christ on the Cross, adding, "Through the virtue of His might, let no thief enter in this night." These words were followed by a chilling curse, made in the names of the Trinity, on those who dared to tread where the farmer stood. Trespassers would be rooted to the spot, "their lives mightless and their eyes sightless, enclosed about with dread and doubt."

Such common spells and many more were stored in the memories of the cunning folk, for spoken charms - dim mermories of the great words of the very first wizards - gave power to the rustic arts these good people practiced. Healing, for instance, required an understanding of the use of herbs. The white witches could describe lemon balm for weak stomachs, periwinkle for treatment of the skin, betony as an aid against insomnia and a preventative of nightmare, lavender for cough. But with each herb went an age-old charm. Thus the power of creeping cinquefoil, chosen for toothache, was made effective by a homely charm, recited for centuries, that began;

Saint Peter was sitting on a marble stone...
"Whoever keeps these words for my sake
shall never have the toothache."

Memory, faith and strong character supported the wise white witches. As a rule, they were unimportant country peasants compared with such learned wizards as Roger Bacon and his colleagues, but the very best of them were brave indeed, and quite prepared to battle sickness and evil and creatures of the night, too, as a Welsh tale shows.

The tale begins with a cottage that was infested by a demon or a ghost (its nature was not quite clear from the garbled accounts of those who had had the misfortune to see it). It was certainly evil, and so viciously frightening that not one could would sleep in the cottage and no one who lived in that village would even approach the building. Eventually and old wise woman - not distinguished, but known for her skill and courage - was told of the creature. She offered to send it about its business by battling it in the night.

Accordingly, she went at dusk to the desterted cottage, taking only her missal and a candle for light. She locked herself in and sat down to read. The last of the daylight died, the moon rose and began its passage across the skies outside, and the hours passed slowly by. No sound disturbed the reader but the rustle of her turning pages, the occasional crackle of her candle flame and the busy scratching scamper of the mice in the walls.

She came to the end of her reading and looked up from the page of her missal. Standing before her in a patch of moonlight was a shapeless mass of shadows, at the top of which glittered two eyes of flickering flame, full of hate and death and decay. The old woman regarded the creature without flinching, and it regarded her.

She would not drop her eyes, and at last it made its challenge. "Thy faith is in that candle flame," it said.
"Demon, thou liest," she replied, and defiantly put out the light. Then she straightened her back, fixed her wise old eyes on the evil points of flame in the darkness before her and prepared to wait out the night.

But the servant of evil - whatever it was - could not match her steadfast and faithful will. The flame points flickered and died. The shadows dissolved in the air and the old woman was left alone in the dark but innocently empty chamber. In the morning she left the little building and went briskly about her chores. No spirit invaded that cottage again.

The rustic skills and courage of wise old women were all very well, as far as they went, but to battle an enemy, one had first to know who the enemy was. That was the dilemma in dealing with evil witches. They were extraordinary elusive. They lived - disguised as perfectly ordinary folk - in villages and hamlets among people who had known them all their lives, and unless caught in action, they might never betray their evil natures, although the superstitious thought there were signs.

Black witchcraft, for instance, was an expression of intrinsic malevolence, greed and destructiveness, therefore, it often was assumed that witches' bodies reflected their souls, that they resembled the bent-over, bad-tempered crones of whom every village had its share. Having animals other than the usual barnyard creatures inhabiting one's cottage could lead to suspicious of witchcraft, too: Witches habitually assumed the form of animals - hares, cats or ravens, for instance - in order to go about their business undetected. And those witches who derived their powers, like Doctor Faustus in Wittenberg, from pacts with Satan, were accompanied everywhere by familiars - demonic servants in the shapes of cats, toads, snakes, birds, even spiders or bees.

All told, it was risky to be an ill-formed, scolding, solitary old woman who kept a pet cat or toad (toads were not uncommon in dirt-floored village cottages) to ease the loneliness. Old women of that sort were likely to be shunned or even tormented by unkind or frightened neighbors; on the other hand, some of these old women were not above pretending to witchcraft to blackmail their neighbors with threats that produced gifts of food and money.

Meanwhile, real witches pursued their pastimes with impunity. Some, indeed, were old women, but others were simply healthy-looking housewifes or even the housewive's rosy children.

Glimpses of such witch children could be charming, as in the taled of the Shetland housewife found standing at her door, brandishing the washing with which she was busy and loudly berating seven frantically mewing tabby kittens. They were her children, whom she had taught to shift shape; unfortunately, they could not recall the means of returning to human form. The woman turned them back into children and boxed their ears soundly for forgetting their lessons.

In truth, the discovery of witches - any witches - brought only grief to the innocent people who knew and perhaps loved them, and the case was especially hard when the witch was a child. The Irish tell a story of this sad kind, about a man who once lived happily with his wife and little daughter at Malin More, on the western coast of the island. One morning, this man went, as was hit habit, to cut peat at a bog on the cliffs high above Donegal Bay. At noon, as she did every day, his wife sent their daughter to him with a wooden bowl of steaming broth to have for his lunch.

When the father saw the girl picking her way gingerly toward him and holding the bowl carefully in her small hands so that none of the hot broth would spill, he laid down his peat knife and went with a smile to meet her. Together they found a dry place where they could sit and look out the sea. A few minutes passed in companionable silence while the father ate his meal. Presently a ship appeared, making good speed on the green water of the bay.
"Oh, where is she going?" cried the girl.
The father squinted for a moment and replied, "To Killybegs, I'd say."
There was a pause and then the daughter, with a sly, sideways glance, said softly, "I can keep her from reaching there, just by wishing."
But the father only laughed indulgently and lighted his pipe. While he smoked, the girl took his broth bowl and washed it in a little pool. When she had cleaned the bowl, she pushed it idly around the water, dragging it slowly to the edge of the pool. At length she said to her father, "Now look at the ship, and see what I have done." The father looked up. The ship, instead of beating toward Drumanoo Head, which hid the mouth of the river that led to Killybegs, was heading swiftly toward the jagged cliffs below them.
"When the ship is only a little nearer the cliffs," said the girl, "I shall turn this bowl over and it will sink, and the very same thing will happen to that pretty ship at sea." She rocked the bowl with one hand. The ship heeled far over on its side, although it was running before the wind. Then the girl smiled at her father with a bright, secret smile.

He was a good man, and the first he said was, "Let her be, daughter."
The little girl shrugged, smiled her stranger's smile again and carefully plucked the bowl from the pool. She dried it on her apron. The white-sailed ship slowly changed course and headed up the coast toward Drumanoo Head.
"Where did you learn this thing?" said the father at last.
"Oh, my mother is teaching me her craft," answered the daughter. "I learned it at my mother's knee." And taking the bowl, she walked demurely toward the cottage where they lived, with never a backward glance.

That is how a good man lost his happiness and his home. The wife he loved and trusted and the little daughter who was the apple of his eye both were in league with evil, and he was helpless, hoodwinked bystander in his own home. A taciturn man, he said nothing more to either wife or daughter. That night, when he finished his work, he took his clothing and some food and left that place forever.

The Irish tale is striking because innocent people rarely saw black witches actually at work: Black witchcraft was a secret art. To be sure, there were plenty of whispered rumors, just as there were whispers about solitary old crones and their pets.

It was widely reported in the Hertfordshire village of Little Gaddesden, for instance, that people peered through the cottage window of a woman named Rosina Massey - a dubious pastime in the first place - would see unnerving sights indeed. Dame Massey, it was said, entertained herself by standing before her hearth, conducting with great skill and vivacity while her crockery, from the teapot to the cups and saucers, danced to her commands. It was also said that her three-legged stool did her chores, including the washing of that very crockery.

And in another hamlet, whose name has been lost, children refused to walk past the house of a certain old woman. This was partly because she was abusive to children, and partly because of her collection of pottery animals displayed in her window. Each time a child in that village died or disappeared - not uncommon occurences in those days - the collection of animals increased by one.

But gossips' whispers and children's night-fears were only hearsay, after all, and sensibel people tended to treat them as such. Slightly more reliable evidence of witchcraft was to be found in cottage herb gardens. A woman who grew quantities of such plants as deadly nightshade, monkshood, thorn apple and henbane was likely to fall under suspicion: All of those plants were poisons, and black withces often indulged in poisoning. All the plants played a part, too, in the ointments some witches used to aid their night-flying.

It is only fair to point out, however, that gardens containing such herbs might possibly have belonged to white witches: The juice of the deadly nightshade berries could be made into eyedrops for fashionable ladies, to enlarge their pupils and give them a soft, doe-eyed look; monkshood was also known as wolfsbane because it could be used to kill those predators of sheep; and thorn apple and henbane were common weeds. Still, the presence of all the plants together was ominous.

So was the presence in the house of the paraphernalia of image magic. This magic worked - as it had at least since the time of the Assyrians, thousands of years before - according to the doctrine of sympathy. An effigy of a person was made, and through echantment, endowed with the essence of that person; after that, anything done to the image would affect the person. (By the same principle, the Irish child witch had endowed a simple wooden bowl with the essence of the ship at sea.)

The most common objects used for image magic, as is well known, were small figures made of wax, which could be melted in fire or dissolved in water to cause slow wasting, or could be stuck with nails or pins to produce illness in various parts of the victim's body. But the figures were also made of clay or carved of wood or plaited from straw. And the images could also be used for innocent purposes, such as attempting to draw a yearnedfor person's love to the magicworker.

Again, it should be kept in mind that many people who were not witches practiced - or made efforts to practice - image magic. In the year 975, according to Anglo-Saxon records, a Northamptonshire woman forfeited her property - and her life by drowning under London Bridge - for murdering one "Aelsi, Wulfstan's father," by sticking nails in an image of him. Sometimes, indeed, image magic was used against witches themselves. The presence of images, in short, meant only that magic was being attempted, not that a witch was at work.

The only true sign that a witch was somewhere close lay in the effects of her craft. When fishermen's boats foundered in freak storms, when inexplicable accidents occured, when strange illnesses decimated a village, when farmers' crops withered in the field, when cows went dry and cream refused to turn to butter, then people looked for malice nearby. Often enough, by one means or another, people in small villages could trace the malice to its source, if the witch was a neighbor; or they could find a way to defeat it, if the witch was one of those who lived alone in the remote countryside of forest.

Of the malevolent effects of the witch's work, few were so extensively documented as her theft of milk and her disruption of buttermaking, and that is understandable. A good milk cow was worth more than almost anything else a farmer owned, and the loss of its milk might mean the loss of his family's health. For the witch, the milk or butter she could charm to herself meant pleasure in malicious action successfully performed, as well as profit in the marketplace with little effort on her part.

There were innumerable methods of acquiring the milk. Some witches traveled to neighboring pastures or dairies in the form of butterflies and nursed the cows in this almost unnoticeable shape. (The name of the insect, in fact, comes from the practice.) Some, like the witch described earlier, traveled as hares or as hedgehogs or as cats.

A forest-dwelling Scottish witch called Madam Widecomb traveled as an elder tree. One night, the tree was seen near a cow byre, reaching its long branches toward the animals; the farmer's mother in that case threw coals on the tree, burning it severely and stopping the theft. Even household objects were put to use. In Saxony, witches stuck an axhead into a post and pumped the handle, thereby drawing milk from the neighbors' cows. A witch in Yorkshire drew her supply, appropriately enough, from the legs of a milking stool.

And another English witch, whose village is not recorded, had a capacious leather bag and a wicked sense of humor. The witch had placed the bag under an enchantment so that, morning and night, at her bidding, it moved of its own power to her neighbor's pastures, drained the cows and brought their milk to her. Eventually she was caught in the act by the goodmen of her village. They bound her hands and took her and the bag to their priest.

That particular priest seems to have been something of a skeptic, for he refused to belive the claim of his irate villagers. He ordered that the witch be unbound and that she prove her powers.
"Well, I will, priest," said the witch coolly. She set her leather bag on the road before her, where it lay in a shapeless heap. The witch stood over the bag, fixed it with a steady eye and recited a spell, which has not been preserved. Then she said:
"Walk, Bag!" The bag shuddered and rose, and, in a clumsy but determined sort of way, it began to shuffle down the road. After it had gone a hundred yards, the priest had seen enough. He signaled for the witch to halt the bag.
"Stop, Bag!" she said simply. The bag collapsed in the dust and lay still.

Moved by curiousity, the priest determined to try the spell himself. He stood over the bag, recited the witch's spell and, as she had done, ordered, "Walk, Bag!"
Nothing happened. The bag remained where it was, a lifeless mound of leather in the road. The priest turned to the witch raising his brows.
"Well, priest," she said in response to his look, "it is my bag. I have faith in the words I speak and in the power behind them. If you had the proper faith, the bag would walk for you, too, and suck cows as well. You must have faith," she added primly, "to move unmoving things." But she did not specify what power it was that commanded her faith.

The priest rather lamely ordered the witch to stop believing, and also to stop stealing milk. The former was unlikely, but the latter may well have occurred. Pragmatic villagers did sometimes come to terms with known witches, agreeing to supply milk or cream or fruit regularly in exchange for immunity. No one cared to risk an angered witch's wrath. Besided the danger it embodied, the fact of witchcraft was terrifying in itself. Evil witches had the power to alter the order of nature. This they did not because of scholarly curiousity, in the manner of the wizard Bacon, but for reasons of greed or perhaps out of a motiveless malignancy.

The greed and malice, in fact, were the source of the power of the black witch's famed Evil Eye. Just by looking at an object - a newborn infant, for instance, a witch could harm or kill it, and the harm came from the strength of her ill will. If one looked into the eyes of an evil witch, it was said, one saw only flat blankness. No welcoming reflection of the observer appeared in a witch's pupil.

Considering both the evil intent and the power to act on that intent, it is not surprising that witches attracted the attention of Satan, the Great Adversary. They were the perfect grist for his mill.

The two - prospective witch and Satanic master - struck their bargain in various ways, but the pact always was associated with borderlines, for the old power of inbetween places or times had not been forgotten. In Scotland, for instance, a would-be witch had only to go on a night of the full moon to a lonely beach and place herself between the marks of the high and low tides. At midnight - the interstice between one day and the next, called the witching hour - she made three turns in direction opposite that of the sun's path. It was a deliberate gesture inviting disorder. Then she sat down, placed one hand on the crown of her head and one beneath the soles of her feet and intoned nine times the charm,

Take all that is between my two hands.
From that time on, she was Satan's creature.

But most witches made their pacts at the festivals of the devil known as sabbats. (The name may have arisen either as a blasphemous mockery of the Christian Sabbath or from the Old French verb s'esbattre, meaning 'to frolic.') Sabbats, it was said, took place in wild and lonely settings far from the curious and condemning eyes of civilization. Peaks such as the Brocken in Germany's Harz Mountains, the Bald Mountain near Kiev or the Puy-de-Dôme in the Auvergne, in France, all were famous sabbats sites. Sabbats occured on the ancient borderline nights - the eves of May Day and Allhallows, as well as those of the equinoxes and solstices.

On those nights, good folk huddling safe in their houses heard the rush of the night wind outside or saw black shadows racing across the moon's silver face and knew that the witches were in flight. Flying was invariably the way witches and prospective witches traveled to their great gatherings. They coated their bodies with powerful ointments, mounted their steeds and raced along the narrow village lanes, breaking free to soar above the rooftops, past the steeples of the churches and high above branches of the trees.

Broomsticks were not necessarily their vehicle of choice. Some witches, in fact, left their broomsticks - transformed to look like themselves - in their beds to fool their innocent husbands. Then they flew on hurdles - rectangular frames made of branches and used as temporary fencing for farm animals. Or they flew on rakes, forks or shovels.

Some witches had magic bridles; in Scandinavia, these were fashioned from the bones and flayed skin of fresh corpses and called gand-reid bridles, meaning the bridles of supernatural beings. Flung over the head of an unsuspecting person or animal, the bridles made that human or beast fly as long and as far as the witch commanded. The expression 'hag-ridden,' applied to people or beasts who appeared to be exhausted when morning came, derived from that practice.

When the various witches and witches-to-be converged on their destination, they joined a frenzied orgy of chanting and dancing and drinking presided over by the Great Adversary himself. The central act for each witch or aspiring witch was obeisance to evil. Each person vowed her soul to Satan, and to seal the bargain she gave her body to him, to use however he pleased before the eyes of all her fellows.

Or so it was whispered. No innocent person ever saw a sabbat, although those who ventured out on Midsummer Eve somtimes heard the high fluting of music pipes and the demanding stutter of beating drums. When morning came and the world began to stir, however, the celebrants of the sabbat were in their normal guises again, back among ordinary people, going with apparent innocence about their ordinary tasks.

But they were not innocent at all. They were part of a secret sisterhood now. A saying on the Isle of Wight goes as follows:

Witches always know one another.
They pass on the lane without a glance or a word or a nod,
but as they pass, each gives a soft little laugh.

And they were in the position to get whatever they wanted and avenge any suspected slight, no matter how small, with little risk of blame.

Servants of Satan, the witches had servants themselves. These were their familiars, the demonic agents given by the Devil. The pet cat purring before a fire, the crow perched in the sun on a windowsill, the toad or snake on the cool cottage floor, the hare in the garden, even the spider, spinning its lacy web, could listen and talk and do the witch's bidding. The familiars could spy on the activities of the neighbors, bringing back useful gossip to while away an evening; they could rob the orchard and the dairy and the brewing crock. They could even maim or kill.

The mistress pampered these clever pets, feeding them on the very best table scraps and even, it is said, dressing them in velvet garments when the weather was cold. They also protected them, and for that reason, it was dangerous to harm an animal, as country people knew. Sometimes the response to such an act was little more than a warning.

In Somerset once, for instance, there lived an old woman who kept three pet toads with the engaging names of Duke, Dick and Merryboy. One autumn afternoon, carrying her toads in a basket to keep her company, she watched three young farmers reap a field, singing to the rhythm of their flashing scythes. One of the toads hopped from the basket directly into the path of the reapers. The young men sniggered and, before the woman's horrified eyes, slashed the beast to pieces.
"I'll set hell on you," cried the woman. "None of you will finish this day's work." And, having said that curse, she trudged off across the field, carrying the remaining toads carefully away.

The young men laughed, but within moments one of them had cut his hand with his scythe badly enough to stop his working. The next sliced across the toe of his boot open from one side to the other. Unnerved, they left the field. As their neighbor had said, none of them finished work that day.

It was a usefull lesson for the farmers, and one that could have been much harsher. In the Lake District, for example, there lived a witch whose cat was killed by the innkeeper's dog. The old woman stood by, sad but dry-eyed (witches could not weep) while the innkeeper's servant dug a grave for the animal. The old woman asked the servant, whose name was Willan, to read some verses over the cat from a book she had, a request that sent the man into howls of laughter. He threw the small, furry body into the hole he dug, reciting in a loud voice a silly, mockingly rhyme:
"Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Here's a hole and go thou must."
"Very well," said the old woman bitterly. "You will be punished, as you will see." And Willam was indeed punished. A day later, as he was plowing the innkeeper's field, the plowshare caught in a rock on the ground, the handles flew up into the air and pierced the young man's eyes. He was blinded for life.

Incidents of this kind were repeated endlessly, and all tell the same tale - of rural greed and petty malice, of aimless evil-doing and fierce revenge. Set apart by her enmity for her fellows, the witch led a mean and violent life and, as often as not, met a mean and violent end. For instance, traveling in animal form was a convenience, but it entailed risk - animals were vulnerable to the weapons of hunters and to the teeth and claws of stronger beasts.

The cruelty of the witches' lives and deaths was nowhere seen so clearly as in the rugged islands of the Scottish coast and in the Highlands, where the mountain winds moaned and wuthered all year long. In this bleak land, the cries of wheeling curlews carried far, and the belling of stags in autumn echoed loudly across the slopes. The summers were short and unpredictable, the winters long and dark.

The region produced a race of men who were hardy and dour. Their hatred and fear of their witches was remarkable, even for that time, and the witches returned the enmity in full measure. A tale of that era relates how the Highland witches sought revenge against two men renowned for their detestation and pursuit of their sisterhood. The first man was John Macgillichallum - called in Gaelic Iain Garbh, or 'Rugged John,' for his bravery. He lived on Raasay, an island sheltered between the Isle of Skye and the mainland. One autumn day, Macgillichallum and his men set sail for the island of Lewes, fifty miles to the northwest, to hunt deer. The morning was cold and bright and clear, the sky as blue as gentian and the high-piled clouds as white as cream. Waves sparkled around his boat as Rugged John sailed away.

He was never seen alive again. Conflicting tales about his death arose later, but little was really known. The skining day led to a night of squalls and screaming winds and another day as bad. On that second day, seamen at the Point of Aird on Skye saw the little boat beating toward them through the storm. They saw its drunken lurching in the waves and heard across the water the shouts of the men on board. And they said - the few who would talk about the incident later - that through the winds' wail and and the sheets of rain and boiling sea mist they heard another sound and saw another sight in the moments before the boat capsized and sank. The sound they heard was the angry howling of dozens of cats, and the sight they saw was the lean and shadowy shapes of the cats themselves, crawlong along the gunwales, clawing up the mast and swarming through the cockpit around Macgillichallum and his men.

The night of that day found the second man the witches hated secluded in a hunting hut in the desolate forest of Gaich, in the Inverness district called Badenoch. This man was called the Hunter of the Hills, perhaps for his prowess in the forest, and perhaps for his pursuit of the mountain witches. He saw with his deerhounds before a crackling fire, while the icy rain beat against the window and the wind screamed outside.

The door blew open. The hunter saw a cat huddled on the step, its fur soaked and matted, its meager little body trembling. The dogs sprang snarling to their feet. They would have killed it, but the hunter called them off.

He did so, he later said, because the cat had spoken, asking for a mercy he could not deny. It said it was a witch who had renounced the craft and fled to him for safety from the vengeful hunting of its sister witches.

He brought the cat in and set it before the fire to warm while he thought what to do. But it behaved as innocently as a real cat might. It washed its coat industriously as it dried and its fur fluffed, and said nothing for half an hour or more. Then it settled down before the flames, tucking its paws in for warmth and wrapping its tail neatly around its body. It began to purr. The dogs twitched nervously, but they let the little animal be.

Soothed by the heat of the fire and the rhythmic rumbling of the cat, the hunter began to drowse. The rain still beat outside, but all was quiet within. Suddenly, however, the hunter's eyes snapped open. His dogs were on their feet, bristling and growling. The cat was gone. In its place on the hearth, placidly smiling, stood a much-loved woman of his own village, who was called the Goodwife of Laggan.
"You are a gullible man, Hunter," she said. "John Macgillichallum the witch hater is dead this day. Macgillichallum lies five fathoms down, my sisters say, and the fish are nibbling at his eyes. And your time has come, too."

She sprang for his throat, her long fingernails curled and the breath hissing through her shining teeth. But the dogs were quicker. They knocked the woman to the ground. The minutes that followed were a welter of smoking blood and screaming animals. The dogs tore off the woman's breasts; she laid their bellies open with her nails. Then there was silence, save for the whimpering of the injured dogs and the flapping of a crow's wings outside the hut. The woman had vanished and the dogs were dying.

All this the hunter told his wife the following day, when he reappeared in his village, grim-faced and bearing the bodies of his hounds. He heard from his wife what he expected to hear: The Goodwife of Laggan lay in her bed; she had been taken desperately ill the night before, and the villagers despaired of her life. Without saying a word, the hunter left his wife and strode swiftly through the village lanes to the cottage where the woman lived, for there was still one more thing he had to do.

He reached the place in short order. The door stood open to reveal the firelit chamber and the quiet, plaid-shawled figures of the women of the village. They were busy about the hearth, warming blankets and brewing tea from sweet-smelling herbs that might save their neighbor's life.

The good women clustered around him when he entered, hushing the male intruder in the sick woman's chamber.
"It is a chill she caught, and she is old and frail," said one of them, and would have turned him out. He shouldered her aside and pushed to the bed where the small figure lay, making hardly a ripple in the thick mound of bedclothes. Her face was as white as the white braids that framed it, and her eyes were closed.
"How is it with you, Servant of Satan?" said the Hunter of the Hills to the Goodwife of Laggan.

She made no reply, and his neighbors fluttered angrily around him, so many protective hens with one fragile chick. But the hunter tore the bedclothes and the concealing gown away, and showed the bloody marks of his hounds' teeth and told his story.

When the hunter was done, the goodwife spoke. In a failing voice, she told the truth about the bargain she had made and the damage she had done. She felt death coming, she said, and in her head she heard the distant hoofbeats of the master who would claim her.
"There is a way you may be saved," the hunter said. He told her what it was and, having done his duty, departed. The village wives trailed silently after him, leaving the Witch of Laggan alone to die.

The rest of the tale was told by two travelers who that night were heading for the Badenoch lands through the forests of the Monadhliath Mountains, a few miles to the north. The way was hard, the night dark and rainy, and the two men walked with swift strides, keeping to the middle of the track.
"Stop a moment," one said suddenly. They stopped, and both heard ahead of them, through the whisper of the rain and the rustle of the branches, a high, breathless moaning. Then from the shadows on the track ahead emerged a figure of a woman dressed in black, the bosom of her gown soaking, and her white braids flecked with blood. She hesitated for a moment when she reached them, peering up into their faces, panting and chattering with fear.
"Is this the track that leads to Dalarossie Churchyard?" she said.
"It is," answered one man, and both men turned to watch the woman as, without another word, she set off down the road, running with a shambling gait and turning again to peer back over her shoulder. She reached the place where the road crested over a hill and vanished from view, and all the men heard then was the whisper of the rain again. Unnerved, the travelers glanced at each other and began to walk, more briskly than before. But after a few moments they paused once more and drew to the side of the track.

Loping toward them at an easy pace were two long-legged black hounds. Their heads swung from side to side as they snufled the ground, following a scent with apparent ease. They passed the travelers with no more than a glance and vanished behind them, where the road crested over the hill.

Before the men could move, a hooded rider on a black horse came into view, following the hounds. He drew rein beside the men. Two eyes glittered from the depths of the hood; a burning stench hovered in the air.
"Is this the road to Dalarossie Churchyard?" a soft voice asked.
"It is."
"And did a woman pass by you not long ago?"
"She did."
The rider turned away from the travelers, touched the horse's flank with one spurred heel and passed swiftly on. At the road's crest, he, too, disappeared.

Now the travelers put their backs into it and trudged along the track with as much speed as they could muster. They spoke not at all, for they were very frightened indeed, and they did not care for the company on that road.

Dalarossie Churchyard, at Strathdearn, where the travelers had come from, was famous in those parts. It was a sanctuary for the living, as all churchground was. But that ground had possessed singular power for centuries: It was a sanctuary for the newly dead, too. Any just-released soul, no matter how smickered, was safe from Satan's grasp at Dalarossie. For that reason, men or women who were dying sometimes had their pallets carried there when the end neared.

An hour passed and then another, and the travelers walked steadily on. At last behind them they heard the hoofs of the rider, but they did not look around. He drew rein beside them, however, and the soft voice said with satisfaction:
"She was just at the gate. It was easy for the dogs."

Slung like a limp doll across his saddle, with braids trailing in the mud, was the black-gowned figure of the Witch of Laggan, her back broken, her body bloodied and bitten beyond recognition. The travelers told their tale in Badenoch, and the listeners heard them with relief. If they had had the body, they would have buried it deep, face downward so that when the witch's corpse began to dig its way out, as sometimes happened, it would dig into the earth and not into the fresh air above. The Hunter of the Hills said nothing. But that night and every other of his life, he listened to the wind and kept an eye out for black shadows streaking across the moon, mindful of the hatred that the Witch of Laggan's sisters bore him. All of this was long ago.

As the centuries rolled by and cities grew where villages had stood, the witches retreated from humankind. They lived on for a while in deep forests and other unvisited places, practicing their sorceries in solitude. Memories of them continued to stir the fears of people for a while, but at last even the memories became no more than bedime tales to frighten children.

But some people with a taste for enchantment remembered always the witche's great forebears. Hidden from men's sight but not forgotten, the wizards Vainamöinen and Manannan and Merlin - and Gwydion, perhaps, and also Math the Ancient - all waited, patient spirits whose day to act would certainly come again...