Benemmerinnen
Hebrew witches who haunt women in childbirth for the purpose of stealing new-born infants. Benjees, The: A people of the East Indies, given over to the worship of the Devil; and whose temples and pagodas are filled with horrible statues of him. The king of Calicut had a temple wholly filled with awful figures of the devil, and which was lighted only with the gleam of many lamps. In the centre was a copper throne, on which was seated a devil, made of the same metal, with a large tiara on his head, three huge horns and four others which come out of his forehead. On his tongue and in his hand were two figures-souls, which the Indians say, he s preparing to devour. 66 Bensozia According to Don Martin in his Religion de
Gaulois, chief deviless" of a certain Sabbatic meeting 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 manuscripts of the church at Couserans. that the ladies of the fourteenth century were said to go on horseback to the nocturnal revelries of Bensozia. All of them were forced to inscribe their names in a Sabbatic catalogue along with those of the sorcerers proper, and after this ceremony they believed themselves to be fairies. There was found at Montmorillon in Poitou, in the eighteenth century, a portion of an ancient temple, a basrelief with the figure of a naked woman carved upon it, and it is not unlikely, thinks Collin de Plancy, that this figure was the original deity of the Bensozia cult.