The People of The Secret - The Arise of The European Witch Cult of The Middle Ages

The following is from "The People of The Secret" by Ernest Scott http://www.amazon.com/People-Secret-PBK-Ernest-Scott/dp/0863040381 It was up to a couple of years ago published by Octagon Press, but, has been withdrawn from their list last time I looked. The extract in no way negates Goddess worship or those who find they have natural powers, rather it is research drawing on little known historical events and a fair bit of the research drawing from Sufic records and history. The purpose of the chapter that this was taken from was to explain one of the reasons why secrete developmental techniques of groups can be a great danger if leaked out.

This is rather long, so if you are like me you may find it better to print it out and sit back with a cup of tea to read it.


The European Witch cult may be a further example of an activity arising from the leakage of developmental knowledge. Like the Albigenses, the witches are known chiefly from the accounts of their enemies, and it is possible that no objective assessment of witchcraft, in its inner nature, exists. Certainly modern witches do not know the origins of their practices and researchers are constantly struck by the avidity with which present day witch groups seize on "origins" found for them by academic witchologists like Margaret Murray.

Modern apologists of the cult like Gerald Gardner and Justin Glass appear to be engaged in plausible whitewashing while the traditional Roman Catholic attitude, deriving from Inquisitional material, is one of superstitious horror and vilification.

Material of the Malleus Maleficarum variety, i.e., intentional vilification, tend nowadays to defeat its own ends. Instead of confirming Satanic practices at physical level, it suggests rather a turgid excitation of the lower levels of the human subconscious: psychological rather than physical goings-on.

However, it seems undeniable that witchcraft has repeatedly shaded off into Black Magic of the most palpable kind and modern material from Huysman's Là-bas to current newspaper accounts of rural tombstone-turners confirms this.

The original nature of witchcraft remains in all probability unassessed.

Though something like the cult has probably existed since Neolithic times, the version of it familiar to Medieval Europe suggests that the original impulse obtained a high octane fuel injection from a Sufi source.

Sufic/Witch parallels are overwhelming.

The ritual knife of the witches is called Athane. The same instrument of the Saracen Two Horned cult is Adh-dhamme. The winding sheet in which the members of the Two Horned dance their rituals is the Kafan which looks very like the origin of the word coven. Members of the Two-Horned call their meeting Az Zabat ("powerful occasion") which is almost certainly the witch Sabbat.

Thomas à Becket is rumoured to have been connected with a ritual sacrifice. The legend has resemblances to disguised teaching material. Becket is said to have had a Saracen mother.

There is some connection between the Order of the Garter and witchcraft, and there are plain correspondences between Garter and Sufic ritual.

The areas in which witchcraft was were strongest were the areas most strongly under Saracen influence, Spain was conquered in A.D. 711 and was not Christianized till 1492. Arabs were in Languedoc in 759 and in Provence from 889. They were strongly established also in Savoy, Piedmont and Switzerland - all areas associated with witchcraft.

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Father Gualchelm of St. Albin's, Angers, reported in 1901 a great crowd passing him on the road. These, he decided, were the Harlechim "of whom I have heard but in which I did not believe". "Harlechim" may have been a corruption of Aghlaqin, a Sufic group known as The Silent Ones who wore patchwork clothes.

A tract of 1450, Errores Gaziorum, gives an account of a witch rite. Gaziorum would seem to be a Latinized version of Gazair-ites - the Arabic for "Andalusians". Errores Gaziorum re-translated into Arabic would give Ghulat al Algazairyin, "the Errors of the Andalusians" where "error" is an Arabic technical term for a sectarian belief.

The Sufic master Jalaluddin Rumi mentions "riding on a stick" which is a familiar witch idea.

A witch cult leader apprehended in Sweden during a witch pogrom of 1668 wore a turban, and like witch leaders in England before and since, was invoked with the word Antecessor. "Antecessor" in Arabic is Qadim which means both "antecessor" and "ancient".

Robin is a recurring witch name. The word in Persian is Rah-bin, "he who sees the road", and in the Berber Two-Horned sect the leader is referred to as Rabbans ("our master").

A considerable number of other links are given by Idries Shah in The Sufis. The connection between witchcraft - at any rate from the 10th century on - and some sort of Saracen cult activity seems beyond dispute.

But what was the nature of the Saracen "injection" which gave rise to or so deeply affected the Medieval witch cult of Europe? It may be that in researching for his book Witches and Sorcerers? Arkon Daraul uncovered the exact occasion. Among Arab migrants to Spain around 1460 were a sect of Berber ecstatics called the Two-Horned. From the information given in The Sufis by Idries Shah, this seems to have been a Moroccan branch of a sect peculiar to the Aniza tribe of Bedouins. They followed a teaching which had been given by a Dervish member of the tribe, Abu el Atahiyya, and, because the Arabic for goat has the same consonantal root as Aniza, they adopted the goat as their clan-badge. This poor goat has been appearing ever since, and is used to this day when the cover of a lurid paperback has to convey the idea of black magic. Incidentally, the tribal camel-brand of the Aniza was a broad arrow which has appeared all through the centuries as "the witches mark". The Aniza certainly started something.

According to Arkon Daraul, a branch of this sect moved from Morocco into Spain. They were a non-proselytizing cult and well disciplined; members could be cast out for an infringement of the rules.

About the time the Berber branch of this new sect moved into Spain, some dissident members met a leader of the Spanish Jews, Rabbi Ishaq Toledano. Ishaq was the head of a Jewish group who had come together with the idea of seeing whether they could use traditional Jewish magic to stem the tide of persecution by the Christians which was making Jewish life in Toledo all but impossible.

It would appear that the dissident members of the Two-Horned were welcomes eagerly by Rabbi Ishaq as being likely to make a knowledgeable contribution to the operation the Rabbi was trying to develop. In other words, the Two-Horned possessed genuine knowledge of the developmental technique and this could be used - or misused - for magical ends.

The combined organization which resulted, Jewish and Arabic, appears to have amalgamated many of the components which the West was later to identify with witchcraft.

Ishaq knew the dangers involved for himself and his followers if details of his magic operations against the Christian enemy leaked out, and he realized also - from the example of his Two-Horned recruits - the force that could be carried over to another organization by apostates. He devised a method of binding his group together.

The idea was to commit his members to actions so atrocious that none would ever dare confess to them. In this way the security of his "New Community" would be absolute. He required his members to perform evil actions and to destroy the persons and property of non-members - particularly Christians - as a trade test for advancement within the Community. He also introduced rituals involving sexual perversions and the eating of abominable material. Such activities were so outside the accepted tolerance of ordinary people of any religion as to put participants outside the pale of humanity. He also used poisons and drugs which "cemented the bond".

The sect worshipped an idol (unspecified), and when members of the cult were possessed of the spirit of the idol, they engaged in flagellation and the exchange of obscene kisses.

A devout Moslem writer, Abdus Salam ibn Zumairi, who was deported from Spain 130 years later, left an extensive description of the cult which he implied was still flourishing in his day. Rumour had it that members of the sect could fly.

About the time apostate members of the Two-Horned were collaborating with Rabbi Ishaq, the Dominican Inquisitor of Carcassonne, Jean Vineti, produced a tract declaring that a new heresy had arisen which was unconnected with the old corpus of rural beliefs which the church had more or less tolerated.

Trevor Roper regards this as a Dominican manoeuvre to get round Capitulum Episcopi. This was a sort of "common law" of Ecclesiastical Europe dating from the views of St. Boniface and Charlemagne in the 18th century. It said in effect that to believe in witches, much more to hunt and burn them, was an act of superstition unworthy of a Christian and should rank as heresy.

Trevor Roper feels that some zealous orders of the Roman Church felt that this seriously inhibited their efforts to extirpate heresy and the Dominicans at least intrigued with several Popes to rescind it and so provide Papal authority for large-scale witch-hunting.

The Dominicans apparently succeeded in 1484 when two of their number, Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, obtained a Bull from Innocent VIII which authorized "his beloved sons" to extirpate witchcraft in the Rhineland.

Trevor Roper sees the tract of Jean Vineti , thirty years earlier, as the vital link in the chain of events which made this celebrated Papal Bull possible. By claiming that the witchcraft of the middle of the 15th century was an entirely new heresy, Vineti removed it from the protection of the Capitulum Episcopi of seven centuries earlier.

There seems little doubt that some Church orders were intensely interested in finding a way round the Capitulum, but it may not be that Vineti was not so far wrong in claiming that something qualitatively different had appeared on the scene.

In the early part of the 15th century there was a purely local and unorganized form of witchcraft, which, with some exceptions, the Church put up with.

In the second half of the 15th century there was a witchcraft in the form which Europe was to have till 1650 and beyond.

In between there was Rabbi Ishaq and his New Community. The inference is not conclusive, but it is highly suggestive.

It is also interesting that the abominations alleged against the witches of the 15th and later centuries were in the same category as those developed for his own reasons by the Jewish black magician. The sequence of events strongly suggests that genuine developmental techniques possessed by a knowledgeable religious group were leaked by apostates to an outside source and gave rise to several centuries of evil and human suffering.