True stories of witches and warlocks

Did they really fly on broomsticks to mountains to perform their sabbats?

During the witch persecutions of medieval times many poor souls were strangled and burned to death. It was sad and horrific and was mostly for political reasons and control of the populace - with religious intolerance thrown in.

Under torture most of the victims confessed to being in league with the Devil. This was the outcome the courts wanted. Some were no more than peasants who practiced herbal medicine. Others appear to have been practitioners of a very ancient tradition of sorcery that bore little or no relation to the Devil and Christianity.

Take Ursula Kollarin, who was on trial in 1661, in Gutenhag, Styria, Austria. She testified that:

"...the old Wollwerkthin smeared them all with a black salve, rubbing it into their armpits. Soon their bodies became covered with feathers and forthwith they flew to Rohitsch Mountain like so many storks."

After drinking wine at a banquet there, "her head became as if without reason."

Then there was 70-year-old Michael Zotter, who reported that he'd been "as if drunk most of the time, and found it hard to keep up with the others during the flight."

In 1596 one Agnes Gerhardts confessed that she and her companions rubbed the soles of their feet with a salve "in order to fly to the dance like snow geese," This salve, she said, was prepared "by taking tansy, hellebore, wild ginger, and frying it all in butter mixed with an egg."

What we see here is the spirit flight of shamanism. Out-of-body experiences or astral projection.

This is very much evidenced by the testimony of Diel Breull of Calbach, Germany, a self-proclaimed magician, crystal gazer and "night traveler." In 1630, it was reported that he:

"…traveled to the mountain four times a year, during the days of the fast. He had no idea how he got to the mountain. He then confessed that he was a night traveler [out-of-body]. He said that Frau Holle (to whom he travels) was a fine woman from the front, but from the back, she was like a hollow tree with a rough bark. It was in Venus Mountain that he came to know a number of herbs."

“Venus Mountain” was likely a motif for the "other world" or the astral realm. In essence people like Breull were shamans, communing with spirits and learning their secrets via the imaginal realm.

The courts, however, saw this as the “old religion” and always brought the proceedings around to Christian ideas about their victims being in league with the Devil.

A case in point happened in Scotland in 1597 where a fairy (spirit from Celtic mythology) was reinterpreted by the witch trial court as a demon. According to the records, one Andro Man from Aberdeen, was engaged in a "carnall deall" with a "devilische spreit," apparently a queen of the fairies.

Various female spirits cropped up in the account and were referred to as the "Elphen" kind - elves in other words. So clearly an ancient shamanistic tradition was being revealed, even though the courts always insisted on adding their Christian overlay of demonology.

In our mechanistic age, all this might seem like nothing more than fantasy and delusion. The reality is people were very different in medieval times and before. We consider it a bygone age. And yet the supernatural still rears its head despite the efforts of "scientism" to dismiss it.

In truth, of course, what I call scientism is another belief system. Yes, it's born of objective experimentation and has brought us many gains in terms of technology and medicine (let's not talk about the Covid vaxxes here). But like all belief systems, scientism seeks monopoly - to be the only acceptable form of belief. Thus it eschews anything it cannot explain.

Medieval times are not that long ago in the scheme of things. Yet people then lived in a completely different reality to us today. Witches and warlocks would travel to other realms of existence - such as meeting for sabbats on mountaintops, flying there by their own steam or on broomsticks.

Whether they did this literally is debatable. Mostly likely they traveled astrally, in their spirit bodies, to these other realms. But let's not rule out literal flight. After all we don't know for sure, short of traveling back in time to observe what actually went on.