Tale about demons

Witches need their demons.

Or, as my witch would say: „Everyone needs a best friend, you know?“ And I know that she thinks of this kind of friendship that lets people finish each others sentences and pass each other by at certain places without having agreed so, because they know each other so well, and I remember those friendships and how there had always been a thousand reasons for them to never last.

Witches were believed to have a bond with the devil, and since the devil himself was most likely to busy to deal with all of them, many witches will have had to do with his assistants. The demons. The dark angels, or whatever they were supposed to be.
What actually were these demons supposed to be?
If you look for an answer in „Malleus maleficarum“, you will find demons and witches as depending on each other. Demons are described as unable to take actions in this world and needing a witch as an executive force.

„Yes, yes!“, my witch would giggle. „Demons are useless. Can‘t even pick up a cookie on their own.“ And her eyes would search the shadows with yearning.

The witch on the other hand is described as not being powerful enough on her own to perform any of the known transformations to this world. She needed a demon, a being in possession of a dark kind of power to do her damage, because otherwise she could never touch god‘s creation in any way.
The believe in witchcraft that simple people have had for centuries before the witching trials of early modern days took place had no need for demons. People simply believed in magic as a powerful tool to bring either good or bad things upon them (for example to either heal an illness or make it worse), and people (male and female) capable of this had to be trustworthy, obviously. Only when the churches began to discuss witchcraft, the devil and demons were needed. They had to be included to give the witch the power to do actual damage to this world. Without the witch borrowing power from the devil as god‘s evil counterpart (and yes, with this definition I‘m on thin ice, I know), there was no explanation for them to damage something God had created, and to trial someone for witchcraft it was very important to find them capable of exactly that!

So, witches and demons could be seen as a very useful combination that can make worlds collapse and be reborn? Sounds like a friendship anyone would need, and I have to think of an exhibition I once went to several years ago. It showed copper engravings by Hieronymus Bosch, picturing the end of the world as expected in the 15th century. All I could think of while looking at those images was that the end of the world definitely happened and keeps on happening whenever most of us had a weekend off, since it basically pictured people eating too much, sleeping in and sometimes even having sex.
Demons as a friend to go for this? Yes, who wouldn‘t want that.
Actually, this showed another important aspect that demons added to the witching myth. Witches were seen as their servants and therefore were believed to take care of all their needs, even having sex with them, which was probably their worst crime, because this kind of sex was seen as highly unnatural, since no healthy human offspring could ever come from this. According to some sources, this also was way too much fun, since the demons were believed to be equipped with double as much as a normal man. So, traditionally on the first of May and November, witches and demons were believed to have orgies including a lot of unnaturally good sex and also eating children. So far, I have not found out how that came together. I could think of eating Babies as another ultimate crime, since it threatens the weakest ones as well as the future generation, but this is just my personal interpretation.

To sum it all up: There are demons serving the devil who need witches to have power in this world and witches who want to do evil things and need the power they can borrow from those devils and together they do actual damage to this world (as in crop failure, plagues etc.), and they sometimes meet to have orgies and eat children.

“If you listen closely”, my witch continued, “you can still hear them trying to get a cookie out of the pack, and they just can’t!” And she would giggle once more, before disappearing into a long autumn shadow to help out her demon with enjoying the sweet sensation right before his eyes, and they both would sink into perceiving each other.

As for mine, it has just recently equipped me with chocolate and waffles, and I won’t say more about it.
Friends you find in the shadows are weird, but worth it, and I just have to keep believing in these bonds to last longer than any of the normal ones that have already failed.
What else would transforming the world be good for, after all, if not to keep a pain away that most people have accepted too easily?

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These are my sources. They are all in German, but in case anyone is interested …
1. Hille, I. 2010. Der Teufelspakt in frühneuzeitlichen Verhörprotokollen: Standardisierung und Regionalisierung im Frühneuhochdeutschen. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.
2. Institoris, H. u. Sprenger J. 2019. Hexenhammer (Malleus Maleficarum). Books on Demand.
3. decker, r. 2010. die päpste und die hexen. aus den geheimen akten der inquisition. darmstadt: primus-verlag 2003. 184 p.: erbe und auftrag. benediktinische monatsschrift. Dietrich’s Index Philosophicus [online]. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.

Finally, I wrote a blog post on this that was detailed enough that I thought it necessary to mention where I got my information from. All of my description are a very free and personal interpretation and for my creative purpose only.