View of the top of Mount Brocken, known also as Blocksberg, in the Harz Mountains, Central Germany. The rock on the summit was known traditionally as Teufelskanzel (“Devil’s Pulpit”) and as Hexenaltar (“Altar of the witches”). Popular belief associated this place with the meetings of the witches, the Sabbath, which were held particularly on the Walpurgis Night (May 1st), and during which the witches from all over Germany gathered on this Mount in Thuringia.
Between the XII and the XIV centuries was developed among the ecclesiastics the theory about the covenant with Satan, by which both heretics and witches were brought into the same category. Everyone who, heretic, witch, Jew or Muslim, deliberately contrasted Christian community was regarded as having made an implicit contract with the Devil and was considered as one of the Devil’s servants. The secret meeting, during which male and female witches gathered to worship the Devil, was called the “Sabbath”.
According to what emerges from documents, it was believed that male and female witches met at night, generally in lone places, in the fields or on the mountains. Sometimes, they came in flight, after having sprinkled their bodies with ointments, riding brooms or sticks, or on the back of animals. Here they paid tribute to the Devil, who appeared often in an animal or half-animal shape, and then feasts and sexual orgies followed. Such testimonies revealed to the inquisitors the existence of a real sect of male and female witches, that the witchcraft trials that followed one another between 1450 and 1700 tried to extirpate (Ginzburg 1989, XIII). It has been calculated that during this “witch craze” ravaging through Europe, between the Renaissance and the Modern Age, about one hundred thousand individuals lost their lives (Russell-Magliocco 2005: 9772).


[Image: http://www.summitpost.org/teufelskanzel-and-hexenaltar/337924]