Witches' Sabbath

The term "Sabbath" derives from the Hebrew word "Shabbat," meaning "rest," referring to the biblical day of rest. In the context of the Witches' Sabbath, the term was likely adopted by accusers to imbue the supposed gatherings with a sense of unholy inversion of sacred time and practice.

The supposed festival and gathering of witehes 344 THEOSOPIIICAL in some lonely spot, where the witches were accused of conferring!: directly with the Devil. Every race and jieople believed in it, and some believe in it .still. Thus the chief headquarters and place of meeting of all the witehes in Russia is said to b(» the Bald Mountain (Lyssaya Gora), near Kief, and in Germany the lirocken, in the Ilarz Mountains. In old Boston, U.S.A., they met near the "Devil's Pond", in a large forest wliich has now disappeared. At Salem, they were put to death almost at the will of the Church Ellders, and in South Carolina a witch was burnt as late as 1865. In Germany and England they were murdered by Church and State in thousands, being forced to lie and confess under tortui-e their partieipation in tlie "Witches' Sabbath".

The Witches' Sabbath, as chronicled in Blavatsky's era and before, is less a historical event and more a potent mythos, a shadowy mirror reflecting the fears and repressions of the societies that conjured it. Mircea Eliade, in his explorations of shamanism and archaic religions, often noted how dominant cultures reinterpreted or demonized the spiritual practices of others, casting them as dark rituals. The supposed pacts with the Devil, the unholy communion, the inversion of sacred time—these elements speak to a deep-seated human need to categorize and control the unknown, to assign malevolence to that which deviates from the norm.

The "Sabbath" itself, a corruption of the Hebrew "Shabbat" (rest), suggests a deliberate inversion, a diabolical parody of divine order. It taps into an ancient fear of the liminal, the nocturnal, the spaces where the veil between worlds is perceived to be thinnest. The folklore surrounding these gatherings, often involving flight, transformation, and ecstatic revelry, echoes themes found in various ecstatic traditions, though stripped of their original spiritual context and imbued with accusations of malice. Carl Jung's concept of the shadow, the repressed aspects of the psyche, offers another lens through which to view these accusations, suggesting that the Witches' Sabbath became a canvas onto which societal anxieties and forbidden desires were projected. The very idea of a secret gathering, a clandestine communion, speaks to a yearning for connection and power that, when demonized, becomes a source of terror. It is in these imagined assemblies, these phantoms of the night, that we can glimpse the enduring human fascination with the edges of reality and the forces that lie beyond our immediate grasp.