A short canon of church law that shaped the legal position on night flight for five hundred years. It orders bishops to drive sorcery from their dioceses, and then states that women who believe they ride out at night in the train of Diana are deceived by dreams sent by the Devil, and that to hold such journeys to be bodily real is itself unbelief. The offence it names is the belief, not the flight. Because the canon carried the authority of church law, later demonologists could not simply ignore it, and the argument they built to get around it, that the sect they were describing was a new one the canon had never addressed, is one of the hinges on which the witch trials turned.
Facts
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Literary Form Sources
Textual NoteIts ascription to a council at Ancyra in the early fourth century is spurious, and was already doubted by early modern scholars. The misattribution added to its authority rather than reducing it. 1 Textual NoteThe canon states that women who believe they ride out at night in the train of Diana are deceived by the Devil in dreams, and that to hold such journeys to be bodily real is unbelief. The offence it names is the belief, not the flight. 1 Scholarship
How Its Legacy Is ContestedFifteenth century demonology did not overturn the canon; it argued around it, holding that the canon described an older pagan delusion while the courts now faced a new sect formed by pact, which the canon's authors had never addressed. 2 TransmissionCarried from Regino into the collection of Burchard of Worms, and from there into Gratian's Decretum in the twelfth century, which made it standard canon law across the Latin West. 1 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteHistorians of witchcraft treat the canon as evidence that early medieval church authorities held a skeptical, rationalist position on claims of nocturnal magical flight, a position the later witch trials effectively abandoned. 1 Origins
Era of Composition Era of Composition Attributed Author / CompilerAnonymous. It is first recorded in the handbook Regino of Prum compiled for bishops on visitation. 1 Transmission
Manuscript TraditionRegino's original handbook, De Synodalibus Causis, survives in a small number of medieval manuscripts, the earliest a tenth century copy, none in the author's own hand and none matching each other exactly in wording, so editors work from a collated composite text rather than a single authoritative witness. 1 Learn More
The Night Ride Was Held to Be a Dream
For most of the Middle Ages the official position of Western canon law on the night flight was that it did not happen. The Canon Episcopi says that certain wicked women, turned back to the Devil, believe and profess that they ride out at night on beasts in the train of Diana, and that they are deluded. The passage goes on to say that these things happen only in the mind, that the Devil supplies the images while the sleeper's body stays where it is, and that anyone who believes such journeys are bodily real has lost the faith.
Two things follow from that, and they are worth separating. The canon is not friendly to the women it describes: it treats them as apostates deceived by the Devil, and it instructs bishops to expel sorcery from their dioceses. But the offence it identifies is a false belief, and the remedy it prescribes is correction rather than execution. The one thing it refuses to do is grant that the flight took place.
That refusal was binding for five centuries because of where the text ended up. It appears first in a handbook Regino of Prum compiled around 906 for bishops on visitation, passed from there into the collection of Burchard of Worms, and then into Gratian's Decretum in the twelfth century, which is where medieval canonists went to find the law. A rule reaching a court through Gratian carried real weight. Its own claimed origin at a fourth century council at Ancyra is spurious, and was already doubted by early modern scholars, but the misattribution only added to its standing.
How the Demonologists Argued Around It
If the flight is a dream, the sabbath cannot be a meeting, and if there is no meeting there is no sect to prosecute. Every writer who wanted courts to try witches as conspirators had to deal with the Canon Episcopi first, and the manoeuvre they settled on is one of the pivots of the whole subject.
The argument, developed across fifteenth century demonology and pressed hard in the Malleus Maleficarum, was that the canon was right about what it described and irrelevant to the present case. The women in the canon, on this reading, were pagans of an older kind, deceived about Diana. What the courts now faced was something new, a sect formed by pact, which the canon's authors had never seen and therefore had not ruled on. Some writers added that God permits the Devil more now than then. Others simply asserted that both were true, that some flights are illusory and some real, which let a judge accept whichever the confession in front of him required.
None of this overturned the canon. It went around it. The text stayed in the law books while the demonologists built a category it did not cover, and the sceptics who came later, Johann Weyer, Reginald Scot and Friedrich Spee among them, kept reaching back for it. The canon is one of the reasons the persecution cannot be read as the simple, inevitable position of the medieval church. The church's own law had said the opposite, in writing, for five hundred years.
Cross-Tradition Connections
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The canon held the night flight to be a dream and belief in it to be unbelief. The Malleus could not overturn it and argued around it instead, holding that the canon described an older delusion while the courts faced a new sect formed by pact.
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