THE SCENE: The passage below describes, in horribly plausible detail, how the practice of infanticide sometimes played out within the folk beliefs of medieval Europe. In essence, the child that was offered to the woods was considered a “changing”, and thus not a real baby.
THE TEXT: Women especially, with sick or poorly children, carried them to the place, and went off a league to another nearby castle where an old woman could teach them a ritual for making offerings and invocations to the demons and lead them to the right spot. When they arrived, they would make offerings of salt and other things; they would hang their babies’ swaddling-clothes on the bushes roundabout: they would drive nails into the trees which had grown in this place; they would pass the naked babies between the trunks of two trees the mother, on one side, held the baby and threw it nine times to the old woman, who was on the other side. Invoking the demons, they called upon the fauns in the forest of Rimite to take the sick, feeble child which, they said, was theirs [the fauns], and to return their child that the fauns had taken away, fat and well, safe and sound.
Having done this, the infanticidal mothers took their children and laid them naked at the foot of the tree on straw from the cradle; then, using the light they had brought with them, they lit two candies, each an inch long, one on each side of the child’s head and fixed them in -the trunk above it. Then they withdrew until the candles had burnt out, so as not to see the child or hear him crying. Several people have told us that while the candies were burning like this they burnt and killed several babies. One woman also told me that she had just invoked the fauns and was withdrawing from the scene when she saw a wolf come out of the forest towards the baby. If maternal love had not made her feel pity and go back for him, the wolf, or as she put it, the devil in the shape of a wolf, would have devoured the baby.
– De Supersticione, Stephen de Bourbon, 13th Century AD
[Image Credit: “Infanticide of a Dream” by Karen Kiefer]
