Engraving showing a witch while she is stealing wine from a barrel, while a male-witch is caught in the act of transforming himself into a cat, from The Illustrated Bartsch, Vol. 85 (1486).
In one of the first descriptions of a dangerous sect of witches in Basel, dating to about 1435-37, the German Dominican Johannes Nider describes how the witches had cooked and eaten their own children, and then had met to evoke the Devil. The corpses of the children, killed with magic ceremonies, had been boiled into a cauldron, to extract an ointment which was intended to be utilized in their magical practices and for the “metamorphoses” to which they had dedicated themselves (nostris voluntatibus et artibus et transmutationis) (Ginzburg 1989, p. 43-44). There are other documents in which the witches maintain that they are able to transform themselves temporarily into wolves to devour the cattle, others that they can become invisible, after eating certain special herbs indicated by the Devil. They went to their meetings flying on sticks or brooms and, along the road, they stopped in wineries, drank wine and defecated in the barrels (Ginzburg 1989, p. 46-47). The Italian historian concludes that the folkloric nucleus of the Sabbath stereotype can be attributable to the belief in the nocturnal flight towards diabolical meetings, which “recalled, in an upset and unrecognizable way, a most ancient motif: the ecstatic voyage of the living towards the world of the dead” (Ginzburg 1989, p. 78).

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