16 WOMAN AS WITCH 



on relationship, were all unholy, licentious, and diaboli- 

 cal in the extreme. What the missionary could he 

 repressed, the more as his church grew in strength ; 

 what he could not repress he adopted or simply left 

 unregarded. Allemania was Christianised by the indi- 

 vidual missionary, and the mother - goddesses became 

 local saints of the Catholic Church. Saxony was 

 Christianised by the edge of the sword, and scarcely 

 a single Saxon goddess has crept into the Koman 

 calendar. What the missionary tried to repress became 

 mediaeval witchcraft ; what he judiciously disregarded 

 survives to this day in peasant weddings and in the 

 folk -festivals at the great changes of season. The 

 licentiousness of witchcraft is not then a merely re- 

 pulsive feature of mediaeval superstition; it is to be 

 looked upon as a fossil and degraded form of marriage 

 characteristic of a totally different phase of civilisation 

 from our own or from the patriarchal. It marks very 

 clearly the good and bad features of the old mother- 

 age. 



Let me try and carry you back for a moment to 

 those days when early Christianity met the fragments 

 of the old civilisation, already decaying. When women 

 dancing at night round the sacred trees and wells, torch 

 or candle in hand, when the common meal, the sacrifice, 

 the choral song, had not been stamped as witchcraft, 

 but were characteristic of the great religious fetes of the 

 old worship and the matrimonial rites of the group. 

 The missionary built his church near the old sacred 

 spots, the priestesses of yore the witches of the coming 

 ages did not cease their rites on that account. Choruses 



