Christians imagined Mecca’s rites as demonic only because no Christian witnessed them

Evidence

Anastasius reports that two Christian sailors ventured to Mecca where the Saracens “have their stone and their cult.” The Saracens sacrificed goats and camels; that night, the sailors saw a horrible woman rise out of the earth and eat the heads and feet of the animals. The sailors proclaimed: “Look at their sacrifice! It did not go up, towards God, but down. And that woman is their erroneous faith!” In this curious story, Anastasius imputes an unwitting cult of demons on the Saracens; only in the dark of night, when all the Saracens are gone, is the true object of their veneration revealed. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 303

Categorization

• XREF: The inversion imagery - prayer descending to a demon rather than rising to God - parallels the vault’s material on medieval Christian projects to demonize Islamic worship via forbidden-eyed reinterpretation.
• STORYSTEM: A narrative where outsiders misinterpret a religion because they can only observe its abandoned residue (night, empty shrine, ritual remains) rather than the rite itself.