Canon episcopi

The Canon episcopi was a canon law provision in the Early Middle Ages, that was against sorcery and superstition and in the night ecstatic flights of women were explicitly condemned in the wake of the pagan goddess Diana as imagination and delusion. On one hand, the clerics should fight all magic in their communities and the convicted men and women violated. On the other hand, the Church turned against the apparently widespread belief in night driving women.

Content

Because of their deviation from the Christian faith of the Church, the canon referred to soothsayers and magicians, be they men or women, as heretics ( heretics ). The bishops and their assistants, that the parish clergy to that fight, which spread the belief in witches and violated the convicted persons. The required by canon expulsion of the heretics from the parish is to be regarded as an extremely serious canonical penalty.

As evident particularly severe cases are in the regulatory text that " wicked women " means that would have turned away from God again Satan would claim to or believe nightly along with a large number of other women in the wake of the pagan goddess Diana on animals flights over long distances away to have done. These women, the canon would obey the goddess Diana as a mistress and be certain nights summoned from her. These followers of the said women towards her mistress Diana and their reverence as a divine being is interpreted from the canon as infidelity or transgression against God, apostasy from the true faith and relapse into paganism.

The error of these women so there was not that they were witches, but that they claimed it to be, even though they were not there. The Canon Episcopi is a condemnation of the belief in witchcraft. The Canon Episcopi specifies that the witch craze was diabolical.

The key sentence is in German translation: This, too, must not be overlooked that some wicked, Satan again converted women are seduced by the delusions and fantasies of evil spirits and believe and claim that they rode, late at night with Diana, the goddess of pagans, and a countless amount of women on certain animals and laid in the silence of the deep night vast land distances and obeyed her ( Diana's ) commands, such as those of a mistress and would on certain nights for their official summoned ( Hartmann 2004, p 421)

The religious idea of women against the priests to preach emphatically, is referred in the text as imagination and delusion. Satan, who had been transformed into an angel of light, would the women pretend such delusions to spread in this way to the people 's unbelief. He could turn into the shapes as well as in the images of any persons and deceive the women in this way in their dreams. These women would now believe to have experienced this imagination of aviation and physically. Thus, the interpretation of the notion of women from the perspective of the early medieval canon law. Whether behind the fighting ideas hides a more common in various forms in Europe pagan- Christian faery, is controversial.

Creation and reception

The text after the beginning " Episcopi " ( the bishops ) appointed Canon first appeared around 906 in written in Trier " Libri duo de synodalibus causis et ecclesiasticis disciplinis " Send the Manual of Abbot Regino of Prüm. There, the text erroneously a council of Ancyra was attributed to the 4th century. About possible templates Reginos can only speculate.

The decisive factor was the general reception of the text: About Burchard of Worms (d. 1025) and Ivo of Chartres (d. 1115/1116 ) was the Canon Episcopi inclusion in the large collection of canon laws of Gratian and thus in the Corpus Juris Canonici, which remained valid until 1918.

The Canon Episcopi could be interpreted in very different ways in the Church's fight against sorcery and witchcraft. Heretic persecutors made ​​from the waste of God in a dream an explicit pact with the devil, witch hunters refused to equate them considered as real witches flying with the prestigious than diabolical delusion in the Canon Episcopi flight. Opponents of the witch trials as Johann Weyer and moderate theologians (such as in Württemberg in the 16th century) were able to rely on the Canon Episcopi as a central argument against the witches flight as an important element of early modern witches teaching it.