Bensozia
Bensozia
According to Dom Jacques Martin (1684-1751) in his Religion de Gaulois (1727), Bensozia was "chief deviless" of a certain witchcraft Sabbat held in France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. She was, he says, the Diana of the Ancient Gauls and was also called Nocticula, Herodias, and "The Moon." One finds in the fourteenth-century manuscripts of the church at Couserans that women were said to go on horseback to the nocturnal revelries of Bensozia. All of them were forced to inscribe their names in a sabbatic catalog along with those of the sorcerers proper, and after this ceremony they believed themselves to be fairies. In eighteenth-century Montmorillin in Poitou, in a portion of an ancient temple was discovered a bas-relief with the figure of a naked woman carved upon it, and it is not unlikely, according to J. Collin de Plancy (author of Dictionnaire Infernal, 6th ed., 1803), that this figure was the original deity of the Bensozia cult.