Covens

Taken from The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology by Rossell Hope Robbins

 Some recent works on witchcraft have described an extensive organisation of witches based on covens or underground cells of witches. Margaret Murray and Pennethorn Hughes, for example, believe that to obtain a true estimate of the witch tradition, the evidence of the trials must be related to “the activities of contemporary people in a comparable cultural state.” By this means, Hughes finds four groups of adherents of the cult of witchcraft:

1.      The remnant of the believers in the Stone Age religion of the “Horned God,” the “little people” who often survived in mountainous areas.

2.      Women who cherished the survival of an earlier matriarchal society in Europe.

3.      Heretical Catharists, influenced by the mystery religions of the East, who parodied Christianity.

4.      Later exploiters of the cult.

Margaret Murray, in particular, introduced the idea of the coven of twelve witches headed by a devil or leader masquerading as such. This speculation, as Kittredge said, “will not stand the test of the most elementary historical criticism. There is not the slightest evidence that [witches] were ever organised at all.” Offered in support of the Murray thesis are eighteen examples of the twelve-plus-one coven, from 1567 to 1673, one each in France, Germany, Ireland, and North America, five in England and nine in Scotland. The word first appeared in 1662, two centuries after the appearance of witchcraft, when Isobel Gowdie of the Auldearn Witches confessed “there are thirteen persons in each coven.”

 In 1922, Alex Keiller, “after detailed study of Miss Murray’s lists of Scottish and Irish witches designed to evidence the prevalence of covens of thirteen, found in a number of instances the arrangement to be unfounded and the count to be of no value.” In 1932, Ewen “checked over the corresponding figures for the alleged covens for England and found the lady’s groups of thirteen had in each case been obtained by an unwarranted omission, addition, or inconcinnous [unsuitable] disposition.” Even if the Murray count were accurate, no theory could be based on a mere eighteen instances out of a potential 15,000 covens (estimating, conservatively, about 200,000 witches executed in the entire period of the delusion). It is regrettable that the article on witchcraft in the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is written by this “authority.”

 Montague Summers, a true disciple of the classic demonologists, accepted the reality of a coven. In his Geography of Witchcraft (1927), for example, Summers referred to Bessie Dunlop, in great distress, meeting a man in Ayreshire, who “was obviously the chief officer of the witches of the district and was persuading her to join their coven.”

 The basic cause of these scholars’ confusion is the acceptance at face value of the confessions of witches extracted under torture, forced to admit whatever fantasies the minds of the ecclesiastical and lay judges might invent. Inasmuch as witchcraft was viewed as an obscene parody of Christianity, and since a common form of monastic organisation was (as Chaucer noted) the “convent” of thirteen (in commemoration of Christ and the apostles), the demonologists finally invented a corresponding “convent” or “coven” of thirteen witches. Such folly is now compounded by writers who claim the existence of present-day covens maintaining an unbroken tradition with Stone-Age paganism, and who explain thirteen as the maximum number of people who can dance in a nine-foot circle!