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>Returning to the issue of witchcraft, in the 14th century the Church's view of sorcerers changed. In the 14th century, “maleficia” – spells – began to be linked to broader cults, which even involved pacts with the devil. Between 1317 and 1319, Pope John XXII discovered a conspiracy against his life, perpetrated by a doctor, a barber and a friar who were involved in sorcery mixed with the invocation of demons. Based on this, the Pope decrees the bull Super Illius Specula, which authorizes the inquisition to prosecute sorcerers. Remember that, in the 14th century, there was a “boom” in astrological cults linked to the invocation of demonic beings and which were structured in the so-called Witches’ Sabbats. Such Sabbats were a mixture of a whole wave of mysticism, witchcraft, astrological divination, survivals of pagan cults – which were linked to the cult, for example, of Roman goddesses like Diana – that had been developing at the end of the 14th century and beginning of the 15th. , where witchcraft, of a more individual and private nature, gave way to collective cults of a satanic nature. This new context was linked first to the survival of Cathar practices and doctrines. As the Cathars admitted – in their dualism – that this world was the work of the Devil, certain survivors of the Cathar heresy came to believe that, as the Devil was a creator, he should also receive a certain cult. The Cathars – as 12th century writers report – considered it necessary to practice rites of sacred promiscuity in order to free themselves from the laws of this world. From there, the ideas and practices that gave rise to the so-called “Sabbaths” probably evolved
