Medieval Witchcraft: Magic, Sabbaths, and Devils of the Middle Ages

In the Shadows of the Middle Ages

The Middle Ages were a time when the light of candles trembled at the threshold of darkness. Between the cold walls of abbeys and the deep forests where spirits roamed, people lived convinced that the visible world was only a fragile surface, behind which swarmed obscure forces. Everything in the air of the time breathed fear and mystery: the Devil could hide in a breath of wind, a sudden fever, or the gaze of a neighbor who was too silent.

In this Europe steeped in faith and superstition, witchcraft was no parlor entertainment: it embodied absolute transgression, the crossing of the boundary between the world of men and that of demons. The peasant feared the curse cast upon his harvest; the lord dreaded the charm that could cloud his mind or that of his heir. As for the Church, it hunted evil like a fire creeping beneath the floor of the world, ready to set souls ablaze.

Witches at their Incantations, by Salvator Rosa © National Gallery

But things were not so simple. For before it was perceived as a crime, magic was long considered a form of knowledge: the knowledge of herbs, of the stars, of nature’s secret cycles. In villages, healers spoke to the spirits of springs and woods; in scholars’ towers, grimoires from the East were copied. The line between science and sorcery was but a thread stretched over the abyss. And it was there, in this fascinating in-between, that the figure of the witch was born — guardian of an ancient power that the Church would eventually declare accursed.

Even today, that era exerts a strange pull. Veiled silhouettes, pentacles carved in stone, sculpted skulls and horned faces haunt our collective imagination. They recall a time when the Devil was not a metaphor, but a real presence, lurking in the world’s corners.

The Soil of Fear: Faith, Superstitions, and the Invisible World

The Middle Ages were not only a time of swords and cathedrals; they were a world saturated with the invisible. For the medieval person, every breath, every gesture, every shadow could contain a divine or demonic sign. Reality was never purely material: it vibrated with presences. Angels and saints watched from the heavens, while the Devil and his legions crawled beneath the world’s crust, lying in wait for the slightest wavering soul.

This vision of the cosmos, inherited from the early Christian centuries and nourished by pagan traditions, rested on a simple principle: everything is a struggle between light and darkness. The Church, guardian of divine order, taught that God reigned over creation, yet Satan, a fallen angel, contested every inch of it. Thus, natural calamities, epidemics, monstrous births, storms, or fires were rarely seen as accidents: they were taken as signs of a demonic influence or a spiritual disorder.

Medieval countrysides, still marked by Celtic, Germanic, or Latin traditions, teemed with ancient beliefs. People whispered prayers to the moon, hung amulets to ward off fever, placed iron at door thresholds to keep spirits at bay. The Church sometimes tolerated these customs as long as they did not contradict the faith — but the balance was fragile. Priests themselves often practiced, without saying so, a kind of Christian magic: exorcisms, blessings, Latin formulas spoken over water or salt. The border between prayer and incantation was not always clear.

It was in this fertile soil — where fear and faith mingled — that medieval witchcraft took root. As theology grew more refined, spirits became more formidable. The theologians of the thirteenth century, such as Thomas Aquinas, acknowledged that the Devil had real power to act in the material world. From then on, evil was no longer merely moral: it was active, operative, infiltrated into everyday gestures.

For many, misfortunes came from a spell cast, a malevolent glance, or an invisible pact. Women with strange knowledge were accused, as were hermits too solitary, healers who knew the herbs of the moon. Their names were whispered; their recipes, ointments, and low-voiced prayers were feared. Thus, even before the Inquisition intervened, witchcraft was already a popular fear, rooted in the soil, the blood, and the people’s nightmares.

In towns, people told that on certain nights animals spoke and the dead rose to dance. In forests, horned figures appeared at crossroads, and women in black walked barefoot in the dew before dawn. These stories, passed from mouth to ear, nourished a collective imagination of rare intensity.
And when the bells rang to drive away storms, everyone knew it was not only thunder they meant to repel, but something older, darker, lurking behind the world.

William Edward Frost (1810–1877) – The Three Witches of Macbeth

From Natural Magic to Diabolical Witchcraft

Before it was condemned to the stake, magic was an art, sometimes even a science.
In the early centuries of the Middle Ages, people did not yet speak of “witches” but of magicians, seers, enchanters, or wise folk. These men and women knew herbs, lunar cycles, the correspondences between the stars and the body’s humors. Their knowledge, transmitted in secret, belonged to a long ancient tradition inherited from the Greeks, the Arabs, and Eastern mages.

Natural magic, as conceived in the twelfth or thirteenth century, was not heresy. It sought to understand the hidden forces of creation, the secret virtues God had placed in plants, stones, and metals. Natural philosophers — like Roger Bacon or Albert the Great — admitted that nature was full of divine signs, if only one knew how to read them. The grimoire, then, was not yet a cursed book: it was a treatise of correspondences, a key to penetrate the world’s harmony.

But little by little, a shift occurred. As Christian theology grew stronger, the idea that man might act upon the world’s forces without going through God became suspect.
For if nature obeys the Creator, who other than the Devil could offer man the power to divert its laws?
Thus what had been an art became a transgression: invoking the stars, foretelling the future, healing by unconsecrated prayers — all that could be read as a tacit pact with the Enemy.

From the thirteenth century onward, ecclesiastical councils began condemning certain magical practices. The Decretum Gratiani and later papal decretals classified divination and conjuration among the works of the demon. In the fourteenth century, thought radicalized: the magician, yesterday still a scholar, became the sorcerer, the one who bows before the horned goat to obtain power.

Medieval chronicles report the first accusations of pacts with the devil. They speak of signatures in blood, books written in black ink, candles made of human tallow. Religious imagination turned magic into the crime of idolatry: no longer honoring God, but his adversary. In this atmosphere of growing terror arose the grand figure of the malefica, the woman who makes pacts, seduces, bewitches, and corrupts.

The decisive turning point came with the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum in 1486, by the Dominican friars Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger.
This book, a true inquisitorial manual, imposed for centuries the bleakest vision of witchcraft: that of a concrete alliance between women and the Devil. The sabbath, nocturnal flight, metamorphosis, infanticide, demonic fornication — everything is codified there. The work blends theology, superstition, and misogyny: it claims that women, weak in mind and faith, are more inclined to make pacts with infernal forces.

This text would directly influence Europe’s ecclesiastical and civil courts.
Under its pen, magic ceased to be curiosity or healing: it became a crime against God, punishable by death.
And so, from a simple quest for power or knowledge, magic tipped into witchcraft — a forbidden science, a living heresy, a sign of cosmic disorder.

Yet in the countryside, this doctrinal shift went unnoticed.
Healers kept gathering plants by moonlight; shepherds carved symbols on stones to protect their flocks; women still dropped needles into streams to ward off misfortune. But in the shadows, a new fear took hold: the fear of being seen, denounced, judged.
For now, all magic was suspect, and any mysterious woman might be a friend of the Devil.

 

The Sabbath: Theater of Shadows

There were, the elders said, nights when the earth split open, when the beasts fell silent and the stars seemed to recede.
On those nights, at the bend of mountains or deep in the woods, one heard muffled laughter, drums, the gallop of invisible animals.
This was the sabbath — the black mass of the Middle Ages, the great gathering of the Devil’s servants.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGRAVING OF THE SORCERERS’ SABBATH

 

Inquisitorial texts describe the sabbath as a ceremony of absolute perversion, a mirror image of Christian liturgy.
It is said that witches left their beds at nightfall, anointing their bodies with a magic ointment before flying astride a broom or a demonic beast. Fifteenth-century demonological treatises, such as those by Jean Bodin or Pierre de Lancre, claimed that this nocturnal flight was not merely symbolic: the Devil himself gave them the power to traverse the air.

Arriving at the sabbath’s site — a crossroads, a summit, a desolate heath — they found a tumultuous assembly: sorcerers, beasts, specters, and at the center, the Devil in the form of a black goat.
This goat, often described as immense and crowned, sat enthroned like a king of hell.
Participants worshiped him with the “infamous kiss,” placed upon his muzzle or the lowest part of his body, a sign of absolute allegiance.
Then began the dance, guttural chants, fires, cries — an orgy of inversion where all that is sacred is profaned.

Witches’ Sabbath, by Francisco de Goya © Museo Lázaro Galdiano

Inquisitors claimed these ceremonies ended with infernal banquets of impure meats and poisoned wines, followed by a “sermon” by the Devil, a mockery of the Christian mass. Faith was renounced, crosses were burned, hosts were trampled.
But in these accounts, it is often difficult to separate reality from collective terror: most “testimonies” were obtained under torture. The sabbaths, as described, are above all mental constructions, reflections of medieval obsessions — fear of woman, of the body, of desire, of chaos.

Symbolism of the Sabbath: The Inverted Order

In medieval thought, the sabbath was not just a gathering of witches: it was the negation of the divine order.
Each gesture inverted the hierarchy of the cosmos.
Night replaced day, the low became the high, animals ruled over humans, women took the role of priests.

ENGRAVING OF THE WITCHES’ SABBATH

It was a parody of Creation, a black mass celebrating primordial disorder.
For theologians, this inversion proved the Devil’s work, for Satan does not create — he deforms.
Every sabbath, in this sense, was an image of the corrupted world, an antechamber of Hell.

The Psychic Experience of the Sabbath

Some modern historians, such as Carlo Ginzburg (The Night Battles), have suggested that the sabbath may be a vestige of ancient pagan rites linked to fertility or collective trance.
“Nocturnal flights” may evoke hallucinatory experiences induced by ointments made from toxic plants — belladonna, henbane, mandrake.
Absorbed through the skin, these substances could cause the sensation of floating, flying, witnessing infernal visions.
Thus what inquisitors took for real journeys may have been only an inner voyage, a brushing of the mind’s frontiers.
But for fifteenth-century people, such visions were proof that the Devil still walked among the living.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGRAVING Arrival at the Sabbath

The Sabbath in the Medieval Imagination

Artists and chroniclers, fascinated by these tales, gradually shaped an imagery of lasting power.
In illuminations, the Devil appears with bat wings, holding an inverted scepter.
Nude witches whirl around him, half-woman, half-beast, beneath a massive moon.
Early Renaissance engravers, like Hans Baldung or Jacques de Gheyn, would reprise these scenes with an intensity both erotic and macabre.
The sabbath thus became a theater of fantasies, where sin, death, sex, and the fear of the sacred intertwine.

These images, long condemned, nevertheless circulated. They adorned manuscript margins, church capitals, or illustrated grimoires.
They have crossed the centuries to our day, inspiring sculptors, painters, and collectors fascinated by the power of symbol.
For in the figure of the sabbath there is something universal: humanity’s confrontation with its own darkness.

Objects, Symbols, and Artifacts of Witchcraft

Medieval witchcraft cannot exist without its objects.
They are the tangible trace of the invisible, the hand extended toward the forces one seeks to tame.
Whether forged, sculpted, engraved, or molded in wax, these artifacts all had the same function: to make the symbol act.
For in the medieval world, things were not inert — they were inhabited.
A sign carved in stone could ward off disease; a bone placed beneath a threshold could seal a pact; a simple skull could become a miniature altar.

Instruments of Forbidden Knowledge

Medieval sorcerers and magicians handled a whole array of tools that demonologists would later call “diabolical equipment.”
The athame, a double-edged dagger, served to trace circles of protection or to direct magical energy.

Engraved rings bore planetary or angelic signs, often inspired by Kabbalah and Arabic traditions.
Black mirrors, polished in obsidian or tin, were used for divination — it was said they reflected not the mage’s face, but that of the spirit he invoked.

HAND MIRROR WITH ESOTERIC MOTIFS

Oil vials, bowls of salt, and tallow candles made up the ritual arsenal of those who dared to cross the limits of faith.

These objects were not necessarily malevolent in origin.
Many came from ancient usages, pagan rites, or medical practices.
But as fear of the demon took hold, anything escaping the Church’s control acquired a whiff of blasphemy.
A simple stone engraved with an astrological symbol could become proof of an infernal pact.

The Skull: Relic of Power and Secret

Among the strongest symbols of this imaginary, the skull holds a unique place.
A symbol of death for the Christian, it becomes, for the magician, an instrument of knowledge.
In certain hermetic traditions, the human skull was considered a receptacle of energy — a container of the word, since speech, breath, issued from it in life.
Occult texts of the fifteenth century mention the use of skulls to fashion ritual lamps or personal altars upon which offerings of blood, wax, or incense were placed.
Sometimes Latin formulas or planetary symbols were inscribed on them, making them objects of meditation or conjuration.

Human skull

In this context, the skull is not a mere remnant: it is a key between life and death, a mirror of the eternal.
That is why it still sits today in cabinets of curiosities, occult oratories, and the collections of artists fascinated by the aesthetics of vanitas.
Its empty gaze is a riddle: it looks without judging; it recalls the end, but also the power of memory.

Amulets, Talismans, and Protective Charms

Alongside the magical instruments used to conjure or invoke, medieval people maintained a whole world of small protective objects.
Amulets worn around the neck or sewn into clothing could be made of metal, stone, bone, or even fabric.

Devil pendant

They bore mysterious letters, truncated verses, symbols borrowed from the Arabic tradition (ʿilm al-ḥurūf, the “science of letters”).
Their function: to deflect the evil eye, to protect against disease or wandering spirits.

TÖDLEIN Amulet

Some amulets contained fragments of plants — vervain, St John’s wort, mugwort — known for their purifying virtues.
Others, darker, enclosed a hair, a nail, or a drop of blood: these personal talismans bound their wearer to a particular force, sometimes beneficent, sometimes dangerous.
Witchcraft trials frequently mention such objects hidden in chests, beneath floorboards, or inside house walls.
Found by inquisitors, they became proof of “commerce with spirits.”

Statues, Figures, and Demonic Effigies

But it is in sculpture and image that the art of witchcraft left its most powerful traces.
Medieval statues representing the Devil, demons, or infernal spirits served to tame fear by giving it form.
Gargoyles perched on cathedrals are not so different from the infernal statuettes some craftsmen fashioned in secret: all were born of the same fascination with the abyss.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CARVED WOOD DEMON

Some effigies, found in excavations of villages or abandoned abbeys, show horned, grimacing faces, sometimes hybrid — half human, half beast.
Their use remains mysterious: objects of exorcism, talismans of power, or representations of familiar spirits?
Period inventories also mention wax or terracotta figurines used for maleficia: the image was pierced of the enemy to transmit pain.
This principle of “sympathetic magic,” where the object becomes the person’s double, was universally feared.

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY DEVIL’S HEAD

Far from being mere objects of superstition, these demonic statues and figures express a very medieval obsession with the visible and the invisible.
They make visible what would otherwise remain an idea: temptation, vice, fear.
That is why they continue to fascinate today: they bear the mark of a world where art and sacrilege blurred together.

Cursed Objects: Between Legend and Power

Some artifacts, finally, were called “cursed.” Their mere possession was said to trouble sleep and arouse suspicion. People said there were rings one must never put on, mirrors never to be looked into under the moon, and books to be opened only within a circle of salt. These tales, passed from mouth to ear at fairs, in abbeys, or in taverns, all carried the same moral: power always has a price.

For in the Middle Ages, no one doubted that objects could absorb the forces they were used to invoke. Steel could keep anger, wax could keep pain, and glass, the memory of faces. A talisman fashioned to ward off evil might, misused, become a receptacle of that very evil. Chroniclers speak of cursed rings that made their wearers waste away, or silver caskets whose contents disappeared each night, as if stolen by an invisible hand. Others spoke of mirrors that reflected not the onlooker, but the image of the one condemned.

Some of these objects passed from hand to hand, surrounded by taboos and rumors. They were sold at a high price to curious lords or learned monks, then disposed of in a well, a river, or beneath a chapel slab. These gestures were not trivial: to bury was to deprive the object of its breath, to prevent it from harming, but also to return it to the earth from which it was born. In the medieval mind, all that came from matter had, sooner or later, to return to it.

Over time, the line between relic and curse blurred. A consecrated stone could become a talisman of protection, but also a spiritual snare. A blessed figurine could, depending on circumstances, draw grace or ruin. What mattered was not so much the nature of the object as the intention that inhabited it. Power, it was said, resided in the gaze of the one who awakened it.

Many of these “accursed objects” were ultimately destroyed or forgotten, but their memory remains. In museums, crypts, and private collections, some artifacts still carry that troubled aura — a mixture of admiration and suspicion, fascination and doubt. For every time man shapes a symbol, he flirts with the mystery of what he does not control. And in that very tension, between creation and malediction, lies the whole power of the cursed object.

 

 

Fire and Judgment: Witch Trials

At the end of the Middle Ages, fear organized itself. What had been only a rumor became institution, a system of belief codified by law and theology.
The Devil, until then a mere tempter, became an enemy within, infiltrated into flesh and households.
Ecclesiastical and civil courts made themselves its vigilant guardians, tracking the trace of evil even in peasant women’s dreams and healers’ gestures.
It was the time of the witch trials.

The Inquisition and the Birth of Suspicion

The Inquisition, created initially to combat heresies, did not at first concern itself with witchcraft.
But from the fourteenth century onward, a convergence of religious, political, and social anxieties made the witch the perfect figure of disorder.
Europe was emerging from the Black Death; wars ravaged the countryside; famines multiplied the dead.
A culprit was needed: and the Devil, elusive, always found a human hand to act.

The first great trials appeared in the Alps and in Lorraine, where rumors of sabbaths mingled with local power struggles.
Judges, often nourished by demonology, sought in the smallest details the mark of the devil: a birthmark, a scar, a mole could suffice.
They practiced the “needle proof”: if the woman did not bleed, she bore the demon’s seal.
Confessions, obtained under torture, confirmed inquisitors’ fantasies — and in turn fed demonological manuals.

The Stake: Purification by Fire

The condemned were led to the public square, dressed in rags, sometimes with shaven heads, mouths gagged to prevent them from speaking.
Fire was to purify their souls, dispel evil, restore the broken order.
But behind this theater of penance lurked political violence: the stake served to reassure.
Each execution proved that society remained under God’s gaze, that evil had a face and could be destroyed.
The cities of Trier, Arras, Geneva, or Basel saw dozens of women burned within a few years.
At Arras in 1460, the accused were found guilty of having attended the sabbath, danced with demons, and killed children.
Everything in the records breathes collective hallucination.

Chroniclers also describe the fear of spiritual contagion: merely attending a trial sometimes sufficed to arouse suspicion.
Children denounced their mothers; neighbors spied on one another; priests trembled at the thought of being accused of weakness before the demon.
Thus witchcraft became a trap with no exit: the more it was sought, the more it seemed to multiply.

Mechanics of Judicial Delirium

What strikes us today in these trials is their circular logic.
The accused was interrogated, tortured, forced to name other “accomplices,” who in turn, under pain, denounced further names.
The hunt spread in concentric circles, swallowing up an entire village.
Judges themselves sometimes came to doubt, even ended up accused in turn.
It was less a procedure than a mental epidemic, a collective vertigo around the figure of the Devil.

Archives show that confessions followed an almost identical script: pact with the demon, infamous kiss, sabbath, maleficia, orgies.
Everything repeated, as if reality no longer mattered.
What counted was to maintain fear — that inexhaustible engine of religious and civil power.

Emblematic Trials

Some trials became famous and left a lasting mark.
In 1428, in Valais, Switzerland, a wave of denunciations led to more than 150 executions.
A century later, the Trier trials (1581–1593) claimed nearly 300 lives — the largest witch hunt in Germany.
In France, that of Loudun (1634), though later, embodied the triumph of religious delirium: the priest Urbain Grandier was accused of having made a pact with Asmodeus.
Documents of the time, mixing Latin, testimonies, and magical seals, bear witness to a fascinating obsession: proving the invisible.

The Shadow of Fear

Little by little, in the seventeenth century, reason began to crack fear.
Certain jurists and physicians, such as Friedrich Spee or Johann Weyer, denounced the madness of the trials.
They showed that most of the accused were elderly, isolated, poor women — or simply different.
But the collective wound remained open.
For behind the witch hunt lay something more than a judicial error: it was a war on the imagination, an attempt to extinguish the shadowed zones of the human mind.

And yet, nothing truly went out.
The Devil did not disappear: he changed face.
He took refuge in art, in forbidden books, in symbols that still adorned houses, capitals, jewelry.
The flames of the pyres died down, but their glow continues to dance on the walls of our memory.

 

 

Heritage and Survivals of Medieval Witchcraft

The pyres have been extinguished, but their ashes have never stopped smoldering.
From those centuries of fear, faith, and blood, something deeper remains than a memory: an imprint on the collective imagination.
The Middle Ages, far from having vanished, still haunt our dreams, our arts, and our objects.
Witchcraft, once condemned, has crossed the centuries to be reborn in other forms — philosophy, aesthetics, counterculture, spiritual quest.

From Darkness to Knowledge: The Rehabilitation of Magical Learning

From the Renaissance onward, humanists rediscovered ancient texts and restored to “natural magic” its letters of nobility.
Thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino, Cornelius Agrippa, or Paracelsus affirmed that the world is traversed by divine forces that man can study without betraying God.
Grimoires circulated again, but now in the hands of scholars.
It was no longer the Devil they sought, but the key to the cosmos, the secret unity of body, matter, and spirit.

The mage was no longer a peasant witch, but a philosopher:
he meditated on correspondences among planets, metals, colors, numbers.
Thus was born Renaissance occultism, the direct heir of medieval fear, yet transfigured by the quest for knowledge.
Where the Church saw damnation, these men saw hidden knowledge — what the Greeks called gnosis.

Art and the Memory of the Devil

From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, the figure of the Devil metamorphosed.
First the theologians’ nightmare, he became the muse of artists.
Flemish painters such as Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel filled their canvases with grotesque, seductive demons.
Gothic sculptors, inspired by gargoyles, gave form to evil in order to confine it in stone.
And later, the Romantics — Hugo, Baudelaire, Goya — would in turn seize this infernal bestiary to explore the recesses of the human soul.

CANDLESTICKS THE DEVIL AND THE WITCH

Fascination with witchcraft turned into an aesthetic: the dark became sublime.
Skulls, goats, sabbaths, and grimoires appeared in paintings, engravings, and poems.
Nineteenth-century collectors began gathering these objects from another age — no longer to fear them, but to contemplate them.
The magical object lost its power of malediction to become a relic of a forbidden imagination.

Occult Objects in cabinets of curiosities

Late-Renaissance and Enlightenment aristocrats and scholars assembled in their cabinets fragments of this vanished world: bones, skulls, manuscripts, strange figurines.
These collections, halfway between science and superstition, testify to a universal need: to understand death and the invisible.
Objects once used to conjure spirits became items of study or art.
They were labeled, described, yet deep down, they continued to inspire fear.

SKULL AND BONE CEREMONIAL LAMP

Each talisman, each pentacle, each infernal statuette carries an echo of the Middle Ages.
Even desacralized, they keep their aura.
Tarnished metal, cracked wax, weathered stone recall that these things were once tools of power.
And it is this aura, more than their function, that continues to fascinate modern collectors — an aura made of silence, taboo, and beauty.

From Sabbath to the Modern Stage

The sabbath, too, did not disappear: it transformed.
In the seventeenth century, poets and playwrights embraced it.
Later, Symbolist artists, nineteenth-century occultists, Decadent painters, and photographers drew on this imagery to fashion a new visual language of mystery.
Figures like Éliphas Lévi, Papus, or Aleister Crowley resurrected medieval rituals in an esoteric and philosophical perspective.
Their writings, their symbols, their representations of the Devil still influence contemporary arts, from cinema to sculpture.

Thus medieval witchcraft, far from having died out, has changed realms:
it has left forests and pyres to settle in artists’ studios, collectors’ vitrines, and modern imaginations.
Where witches were once burned, their instruments are now displayed as aesthetic relics.
Sacrilege has turned into beauty.

Contemporary Fascination

In a rational, digital world, medieval witchcraft continues to captivate.
Films, games, contemporary artworks, tattoos, esoteric art objects — all bear witness to the return of the symbol.
The skull, the pentacle, the goat’s horn are no longer threats: they are archetypes, doors opened onto the unconscious.
Modern collectors no longer seek power, but emotion.
In every demonic statuette, in every ancient grimoire, they read the trace of a world where the line between faith and fear did not yet exist.

The fascination with these objects does not come from what they promise, but from what they recall:
the thrill of mystery, the beauty of the forbidden, the depth of the symbol.
And therein, perhaps, lies the true legacy of the Middle Ages: having given a face to mystery.
For as long as humankind seeks to understand what it cannot see, witchcraft will never die — it will simply change form, name, and gaze.

 

Conclusion — Where the Shadows Still Speak

Medieval witchcraft is not a simple legend: it is a mirror held up to humanity.
It speaks to us of a time when fear of evil shaped faith, when the invisible governed the simplest acts.
But it also tells us something else — something universal: the desire to understand what escapes us, to name what has no form.
For at root, magic, prayer, and science share the same origin: they arise from the need to pierce the world’s secret.

The Middle Ages, with their pyres and grimoires, were the era when this quest reached its extremes.
Faith sought purity, magic sought knowledge, and between the two, man wavered, torn between light and the abyss.
It is this tension that gave birth to so many symbols, rites, and objects: bridges between the visible and the invisible, between flesh and spirit, between fear and beauty.

Even today, these traces remain.
They slip into our museums, our studios, our homes — in the form of statues, skulls, seals, jewelry.
They are no longer instruments of power, but fragments of an ancient dream: that of a world in which everything, down to the stone, had a soul.
The collector who contemplates an infernal effigy, the sculptor who shapes a bronze demon, the reader who leafs through an old grimoire — all partake, without knowing it, in the survival of a millennial imaginary.

Medieval witchcraft, in its horror and its splendor, reminds us that the sacred and the accursed are but two faces of the same quest.
The Devil, in his crowned goat guise, may be only a reflection: that of our fascination with power, death, and mystery.
And if we continue to sculpt his horns, trace his seals, and collect his images, it is not to worship him, but to tame him.
To give him form, and thus limit.

Thus, from century to century, the shadows of the Middle Ages continue to speak.
They whisper in crypts, on canvases, in artisans’ and collectors’ vitrines.
They do not ask to be feared, but to be understood.
For there, in the listening to mystery, lies true magic — the kind that makes no pact with the Devil, but with the world’s silence.