Published: 2021-06-29

The Sabbath of witches as a figure demonizing the night

Magdalena Toboła-Feliks Logo ORCID

Abstract

The meeting of witches known as the “witches’ Sabbath” is a semantic construct that denotes a set of imaginary ritual and magical actions. The female participants of these meetings – known as witches – were believed to free themselves from all the constraints of mundane mortal existence. Visions of the world losing its structure during a “devil’s feast” on top of the “bald mountain” was bound to inspire fear, a reaction further intensified by the sense of a person losing one’s bearings in the dark of the night. The night became a category perpetually combined with the figure of the witch for at least the following reasons: diminished self-confidence brought on by a person’s wandering in the dark; lack of a set of rules that governed such meetings; uncritical belief in the reality of these meetings.

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Toboła-Feliks, M. (2021). The Sabbath of witches as a figure demonizing the night. Studia Etnologiczne I Antropologiczne, 21(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.31261/SEIA.2021.21.01.01

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Vol. 21 No. 1 (2021)
Published: 2021-12-31


ISSN: 1506-5790
eISSN: 2353-9860
Ikona DOI 10.31261/SEIA

Publisher
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press

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