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Updated: May 20, 2025
Paul de Kock calls an English nobleman, in one of his last novels, Lord Boulingrog, and appears vastly delighted at the verisimilitude of the title. For the "rugissements et bondissements, bacchanale et saturnale, galop infernal, ronde du sabbat tout le tremblement," these words give a most clear, untranslatable idea of the Carnival ball. A sight more hideous can hardly strike a man's eye.
Lord Bacon suggests that the ointments with which witches anointed themselves might have had the effect of stopping the pores and congesting the rain, and thus impressing the sleep of the unhappy dupes of their own imagination with dreams so vivid that, on waking, they were firmly convinced that they had been borne through the air to the Sabbat.
But, while such stories were current throughout the Middle Ages, the notion behind them does not seem to have been connected with the other features of what was to make up the idea of witchcraft until about the middle of the fourteenth century. It was about that time that the belief in the "Sabbat" or nocturnal assembly of the witches made its appearance.
"Mademoiselle Angelique des Meloises, one hears enough of her! a high lady indeed! who will be low enough at last! A minx as vain as she is pretty, who would marry all the men in New France, and kill all the women, if she could have her way! What in the name of the Sabbat does she want with La Corriveau?"
To my amazement, I beheld these formal matrons and sober fathers of families forming themselves into a dance, turbulent as a children's ball at Christmas; and when, suddenly desisting from his music, Margrave started up, caught the skeleton hand of lean Miss Brabazon, and whirled her into the centre of the dance, I could have fancied myself at a witch's sabbat.
Yet more: there were strange sounds and voices in the air, subdued murmurings such as she had never heard before, and that made her start in terror; the stifled hum of marching men, the neighing and snorting of steeds, the clash of arms, hoarse words of command, given in guttural accents; an evil dream of a demoniac crew, a witch's sabbat, in the depths of those unholy shades.
The day was too warm for rapid movement, and she soon stopped and listened. There were the usual woodland sounds; leaves rustling, grasshoppers chirping, and birds singing; but not a human voice or footstep. She began to think that the god-like figure was only the Hermes of Praxiteles, suggested to her by Goethe's classical Sabbat, and changed by a day-dream into the semblance of a living reality.
"Angelique des Meloises, you send your gold and your roses to me because you believe me to be a worse demon than yourself, but you are worthy to be crowned tonight with these roses as queen of hell and mistress of all the witches that ever met in Grand Sabbat at the palace of Galienne, where Satan sits on a throne of gold!"
"Me do 'tempt su'thing. But missie knows, de Sabbat' be de only day de people hab, and dey tink mostly of oder tings." "And there is no church for you all to go to?" "No, missis; no church." There was a sad tone in his answer. I did not know how to go on. I turned to something else. "Uncle Darry, I don't think your home looks very comfortable." Darry almost laughed at that.
"What do you think of the Bourse?" asked Lemercier, as their carriage took the way to the Bois. "I cannot think of it yet; I am stunned. It seems to me as if I had been at a 'Sabbat, of which the wizards were 'agents de change, but not less bent upon raising Satan." "Pooh! the best way to exorcise Satan is to get rich enough not to be tempted by him.
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