he devil, whom they seemed
unable to escape (a single evil thought was sufficient to doom their
souls to eternal damnation), in the hope that he would at least save
their bodies from the stake and vouchsafe them the pleasures of this
world. Satan promised his worshippers unlimited pleasure; he became the
redeemer of those whom the clergy persecuted. It is asserted that his
worship consisted in an obscene parody of the Mass; according to
Michelet, the body of a female worshipper served as the altar on which a
toad was consecrated and partaken of instead of the Host. The adept
solemnly renounced Jesus and did homage to Satan by kissing his image.

Asceticism and libertinism always go hand in hand. They are convertible
principles rending their victim. _Temptation_ is the fundamental motif
of this condition. The devil was believed to send out his servants to
win new souls; monks were visited by demons in the shape of a voluptuous
woman, the _succubus_; Satan himself, or one of his emissaries,
disguised as a fashionable gentleman, the _incubus_, appeared to the
nuns. Undoubtedly the dreams of over-excited men and women played a very
important part in this connection; many hysterical women felt the
devil's kiss and embrace. All these women were themselves convinced of
the truth of their hallucinations and imaginings, and once the belief in
witchcraft was firmly established (in the thirteenth century) the
obvious atonement for their hysteria was the stake.

The fear of witches, which existed parallel with the love of the
Madonna, was typical of the declining Middle Ages. The first Christian
centuries knew neither the Lady of Heaven in the later meaning of the
word, nor did they know anything of witches. In the reign of Charlemagne
the penalty for the belief in witchcraft was death. At all times man has
exhibited a tendency to see in woman either a celestial or an infernal
being, and nowhere was this tendency more strongly developed than in the
soul of the mediaeval dualist: he created the beloved and adored Queen
of Heaven, the mediator between God and humanity and, as her counterpart
the witch, the despised and dreaded seducer, a being between man and
devil. Powerless to effect a reconciliation between spiritual love and
sensuous pleasure, he required two distinct female types as
personifications of the two directions of his desire; love and the
pleasure of the senses could have nothing in common, and once the
highest value