Some seventh-century Christians imagined Muslims’ unknowing worship of demons at Mecca.

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 ‘rising woman/devil eating the sacrifice’ motif parallels how later polemicists (like in ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ traditions) projected lurid inversions onto other cultures’ worship.
• SEED: Angle: how enemy-worship gets ‘revealed’ only nocturnally in polemic, a cross-cultural literary device from Mecca to the witches’ sabbath.
• SHARE: This story of demons eating the sacrificed goats’ heads is exactly the kind of vivid detail a medievalist friend would enjoy.