Records of witches’ trials show that leaders of covens and more especially of the great orgiastic sabbaths appeared as “black men,” usually equipped with horns, tails and hooves, and that their followers credited them with supernatural powers and literally worshipped them as legates of a god or as the god himself. The animal disguise so exactly fitted the medieval concepts of Satan that Christian heretic-hunters quite naturally equated witchcraft with devil worship, recorded it as such, and reacted accordingly. No apologia for witchcraft is intended by this suggestion. If one grants “wise women” a knowledge of poisonous herbs and of rudimentary hypnosis, and also, as midwives, the opportunity to procure the bodies of stillborn infants for their horrid magic-working concoctions, the ugliest charges against them become plausible. Then, too, there is little doubt that sexual licence of all sorts was common at the quarterly sabbaths if not at all smaller gatherings. It is particularly noteworthy that the male leaders of these festivals had female partners, supposedly for the benefit of the few attending warlocks; but the record of at least one trial states that the celebrants “usually” consorted with leaders of the opposite sex,[2] an indication that at times they must have consorted with their own. And from secondary sources one learns that witches generally were credited with “masculine” sexual tastes and habits. Thus, homosexual practices, in themselves anathema, were associated also with witchcraft, the blackest of all possible heresies. In sharp contrast to this negative view of woman there existed at the same time a cult of woman-worship first articulated by the Provençal troubadours and later immortalized by Dante. It celebrated the ennobling and exalting influence of love for a pure woman, who, since she had transcended both common human frailty and the special aptitude of her sex for evil, deserved a twofold reverence. In its religious aspect this worship centered about the Virgin Mary and found expression in the naïvely human legends which grew up about her.[3] As her invariable championship of the underdog, man or woman, innocent or guilty, appears to be merely an apotheosis of the maternal instinct, these legends do not concern us here. On the secular side, adoration of woman flowered in the convention of courtly love, that concept of passionate devotion without overt reward which seems more often to have been celebrated in the breach than in the observance. From this idealistic code of sexual relations stemmed the copious literature of medieval romance, and indeed of subsequent romantic fiction, in all of which the parallel worship of purity and of overwhelming passion provides the basic conflict. And until the eighteenth century, romantic fiction was the almost exclusive vehicle—at least on the reputable level—for variant incident, which therefore remained technically beyond reproach.