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The Sabbat is a day of ascendancy for Witches. In the European countryside during the Middle Ages, the eight festival observances took on immense importance as thousands of peasants, common people, and members of the lesser nobility attended the seasonal celebrations. The Sabbats mark the passage of the year as it moves through its seasons:

Samhain, begins the year for those who follow the ways of Wicca, and it occurs near October 31, Halloween on the Christian calendar. Contrary to numerous misconceptions, however, Halloween is not a witches’ holiday, but an old Christian celebration of the dead. Samhain honors the harvest, the time when the crops “die” to become food for the winter and when the veil between worlds becomes very thin.

Yule marks the winter solstice and is celebrated near December 21, the longest, darkest night of the year.

Candlemas, observed on February 2, is the festival of the Goddess Brigid.

The spring equinox occurs around March 21, and for the practitioners of witchcraft, it is a powerful time to practice magic.

Beltane, May 1, celebrates love and oneness.

The summer solstice, occurring around June 21, is also a time of power and a time to pay homage to the strength of the deities of nature.

August 1 recognizes Lammas, a time when fruit ripens and there are signs that harvest is near.

The autumn equinox, near or on September 21, celebrates a balance between light and dark, night and day. It is also a time to prepare to embrace the many mysteries of the Goddess as she oversees the winter months of cold and darkness.

The Sabbat Dance—or, as it is commonly known, the Witches’ Round—is performed with the dancers moving in a back-to-back position with their hands clasped and their heads turned so that they might see each other. A wild dance such as this, which was essentially circular in movement, would have needed little help from the supply of plentiful drinks to induce vertigo even in the most hearty of dancers. The celebration lasted the entire night, and the crowd did not disperse until morning.

Reports of regular celebrations of the various Sabbats came from all over Europe. An estimated 25,000 attended such rituals in the countryside of southern France and around the Black Forest region of Germany.

As rumors of even larger gatherings spread throughout the land, the nobility and the churchmen decided to squelch such expressions with the use of the hideous machinery of the Inquisition. Even the most innocent amusements of the serfs were taken away. In the face of such large scale persecutions, the mass meeting celebrations of the Sabbat were made impossible. But even though great pressure was brought to bear on such outward manifestations of the rituals, modified versions of sabbats were still performed in the private fields, orchards, and cellars of the peasants.

The popularity of the pagan celebrations rose to its greatest height in the period 1200 to the Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. During this period, famines, the ill-fated Crusades, and the Black Death devastated Europe.