I've been reading about the "Witches' Sabbath" a medieval idea of religious ritual for witches. Beliefs in what occurred included things such as nudity, processions, orgies, consumption of alcohol and psychedelics, all occurring under the stars in forests or mountains.
This seems to me very similar to the pagan bacchanalias and dionysias a few centuries before. Is it? Is there any link between the two? Is there any link between Satan and Dionysus separate from these festivals? Finally would you recommend the book Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath ? Thank you very much.
I've written quite a bit about this in various past posts (you can find them here). I addressed cults and witches sabbath in my AMA - Medieval Witchcraft, Heresy, and Inquisition last October. However, the salient point is that the idea of the witches sabbath developed within academic/theological environments very slowly across several centuries. Norman Cohen, in his book Europe's Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians In Medieval Christendom (Random House, 2011) is the standard (and really great) study of the development of the image of witchcraft, in particular the sabbath. Here is what I wrote:
There are still those who wish to see evidence of an near-eternal pagan fertility cult lasting through the middle ages. But the evidence is just not there. The last real kick at this can was Jeffrey Burton Russell's Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, and he can be credited with being very persuasive....until several pieces of evidence were kicked out from under him within a year of publishing it. So, although he rejected Margaret Murray's belief in the witch cult (of Diana), he tried to re-construct the same but as a literary and non-literal phenomenon. Russell was a visionary historian, who for my interests bound heresy and witchcraft under a single rubric in ways still unexplored - a very important insight. But in the issue of a witch cult he really goofed. He goofed the same way that Ginburg goofed with the Benandanti witches, and misinterpreted the evidence the same way.
By 1977 Norman Cohn had demolished the basis of this witch cult, if it was not already. But we have to realize that the witch cult idea is actually a new historiographic invention (c1915) seeking to reclaim, through some perverted modernist inversion, the Christian late medieval scholastic view that there was a demon-worshipping cult. The more prosaic truth is that diverse, unconnected belief systems have found their enemies over time who wished to connect them and those enemies reused the same tropes (cannibalism, orgies, baby-killing and eating) that were used by Romans to denigrate Christianity before it became the state religion.
In short, the trope of some sexual, perverted, demonic cult has been used repeated in history. The use of that trope is far more interesting than the fiction that such cults ever really existed. This is the problem with Ginsburg's Ecstacies - he bought into the mythology of some real (pan-historical, pan-geographic) cult. Otherwise his books on the Benandanti 'witches' are fascinating.