Real Zombies, the Living Dead, and Creatures of the Apocalypse. Brad Steiger
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assistance to the physicians or magicians. In Rome, the seers and soothsayers asked their familiars or magistelli to provide supernatural assistance in their performance of magic and predictions.
Experienced practitioners of Witchcraft may have the ability to manifest a spirit ally or assistant and allow it to assume the physical form of a human being so that it may carry out the Witch’s biding, but the supernatural servant is not a person whose will has been taken from him or her. In fact the entity has never been human at all, thus retaining its status as a familiar, rather than a zombie.
In his classic work The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer points out two factors influencing the nature of primitive religion: (1) the older concept of a “view of nature as a series of events occurring in an invariable order without the intervention of personal agency;” and (2) the later development that the “world is to a great extent worked by supernatural agents, that is, by personal beings acting on impulses and motives.”
The earliest rites of primitive religion consisted of sympathetic magic, which is based on the belief that something that resembles something else is able to become or attract that which it resembles, or a given cause always produces a certain effect. It was by such a process that Stone Age humans sought to ensure the success of the hunt. In Witchcraft from the Inside, Raymond Buckland writes: “One man would represent the God and supervise the Magick. As a God of Hunting, he was represented as being the animal being hunted. His representative, or priest, would therefore dress in an animal skin and wear a headdress of horns.”
Because of the importance of human and animal fertility, the Horned God was soon joined by a goddess, whose purpose it was to ensure the success of all reproductive activities. She was also the goddess who oversaw the birth of human and animal progeny. At a later date, when primitive religious thought had evolved to the point of belief in some form of continuation after death, the goddess oversaw human and animal death as well.
With the advent of agriculture, the goddess was called upon to extend her powers to ensure fertility of the crops. From this point on, the figure of the goddess began to overshadow that of the Horned God.
The population of medieval Europe descended from the central Asian plateau. Christianity and “civilized” ways were unknown to them and they brought their own gods, customs, and rituals into the land. At the dissolution of the Roman Empire, the civilizing force in Europe was the Roman Catholic church, and even though the ecclesiastical institution made great inroads into the pagan culture, it could not completely abolish the old rituals and nature worship.
Surviving the Roman Empire socially in the Middle Ages was the oppressive feudal system. Proud warriors were reduced to the role of serf farmers. Partially because of the frustrations of the common people, the celebration of nature worship and various adaptations of the ancient mystery religions began to be practiced in secret. It was in their enjoyment of the excitement and vigor of the Old Religion that the peasants could allow themselves the luxury of experiencing pleasure without the interference of Mother Church, which sought to control and repress even human emotions.
Experienced practitioners of Witchcraft may have the ability to manifest a spirit ally or assistant and allow it to assume the physical form of a human being so that it may carry out the Witch’s bidding (art by Ricardo Pustanio).
But it was that same expression of seeing the divine in all of the Creator’s works that brought the wrath of the Church down upon the witches in the terrible form of the Holy Inquisition in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. On occasions when seasonal nature celebrations were witnessed by members of the Christian clergy, the gatherings were condemned as expressions of witchcraft and were named “Black Sabbats,” to distinguish the ceremonies as the complete opposite of the true and Holy Sabbath days. And then, of course, there was the matter of the Horned God, who must certainly be Satan, and the goddess, who was without question, Diana, goddess of the Moon and the hunt.
For the serfs, the observance of nature worship was an expression of their conscious or unconscious yen to throw off the yoke of feudalism. In the Middle Ages, the Christian influence seemed to vanish at night as great groups of people gathered around a statue of the Horned God and began professing their allegiance to the great deities of nature. To staunch Christians, this horned image was an obscene representation of Satan, a black, grotesque figure that was fiendishly lit by the roaring fire in front of it. In the flickering light, the torso of the figure appeared to be human while the head, hands, and feet were shaped like those of a goat and covered with coarse, black hair.
The Sabbat is a day of ascendancy for Witches. In the European countryside during the Middle Ages, the eight festival observances took on immense importance as thousands of peasants, common people, and members of the lesser nobility attended the seasonal celebrations. The Sabbats mark the passage of the year as it moves through its seasons:
Samhain, begins the year for those who follow the ways of Wicca, and it occurs near October 31, Halloween on the Christian calendar. Contrary to numerous misconceptions, however, Halloween is not a witches’ holiday, but an old Christian celebration of the dead. Samhain honors the harvest, the time when the crops “die” to become food for the winter and when the veil between worlds becomes very thin.
Yule marks the winter solstice and is celebrated near December 21, the longest, darkest night of the year.
Candlemas, observed on February 2, is the festival of the Goddess Brigid.
The spring equinox occurs around March 21, and for the practitioners of witchcraft, it is a powerful time to practice magic.
Beltane, May 1, celebrates love and oneness.
The summer solstice, occurring around June 21, is also a time of power and a time to pay homage to the strength of the deities of nature.
August 1 recognizes Lammas, a time when fruit ripens and there are signs that harvest is near.
The autumn equinox, near or on September 21, celebrates a balance between light and dark, night and day. It is also a time to prepare to embrace the many mysteries of the Goddess as she oversees the winter months of cold and darkness.
The Sabbat Dance—or, as it is commonly known, the Witches’ Round—is performed with the dancers moving in a back-to-back position with their hands clasped and their heads turned so that they might see each other. A wild dance such as this, which was essentially circular in movement, would have needed little help from the supply of plentiful drinks to induce vertigo even in the most hearty of dancers. The celebration lasted the entire night, and the crowd did not disperse until morning.
Reports of regular celebrations of the various Sabbats came from all over Europe. An estimated 25,000 attended such rituals in the countryside of southern France and around the Black Forest region of Germany.
As rumors of even larger gatherings spread throughout the land, the nobility and the churchmen decided to squelch such expressions with the use of the hideous machinery of the Inquisition. Even the most innocent amusements of the serfs were taken away. In the face of such large scale persecutions, the mass meeting celebrations of the Sabbat were made impossible. But even though great pressure was brought to bear on such outward manifestations of the rituals, modified versions of sabbats were still performed in the private fields, orchards, and cellars of the peasants.
The popularity of the pagan celebrations rose to its greatest height in the period 1200 to the Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. During this period, famines, the ill-fated Crusades, and the Black Death devastated Europe.
As in the Old Religion, the eight main festival observances or Sabbats remain days of ascendancy