Les métamorphoses du sabbat à la fin de siècle

The paper demonstrates that if, on the one hand, the representation of sabbath betrays the fascination exerted by the supernatural at the end of the nineteenth century, on the other it becomes a device to deal with themes such as desire and sexuality. Specifically, the witches' sabbath rises to an imaginary place where to relegate the feminine in order to control it better, beginning from the idea of a feminine completely delivered to instincts and pulsionality. During the nineteenth century even the medical studies consider the feminine as a privileged object of observation, putting it under the stigmata of hysteria. The puppet body of the witch at the sabbath or of the hysteric woman can become yielding only in the hands of the doctor/magician, that means the control of the masculine over the feminine. As a matter of fact the deconsecrating process involved in medicalisation and in spectacularisation offers itself as a warrant of the surviving belief in the supernatural, keeping unstable and ambiguous the boundary which separates the magic from its demystification, the rationality from the inextinguishable need of irrationality, as the spectacles of illusionism in vogue at the end of the nineteenth century show, just drowing inspiration from the sabbath imaginary.