"Historians such as Carlo Ginzburg, Gabór Klaniczay and Éva Pócs have argued that descriptions of sabbath experiences and familiar-encounters found in early modern European witch trials were expressions of popular experiential traditions rooted in pre-Christian shamanistic beliefs and practices.

At the same time, however, he modifies the controversial thesis, advanced by Carlo Ginzburg... that the Friulian peasants known as benandanti who, like Stoecklin, fell into trances and went out at night to fight the witches, represented the essence of a mythic pan-European consciousness rooted in pagan fertility rites.

For Behringer the long process of Christianization during the Middle Ages, coupled with the efforts of the Counter Reformation to root out superstition and to provide catechetical instruction during the sixteenth century, had already dissolved some of the elements of these ancient myths.

He goes on to note that Behringer's "patient dissection of [the folklorists'] sleights of hand is one of the many delights of the book, but another is his vivid and moving evocation of the social, economic, and political realities of the early modern Alpine world and his tone of solidarity with the victims and their class (for example, automatically supplying the birth and death dates of even the humblest bit-players in his story)."

Praising Midelfort's English language translation, Johnson believed that it was a "tribute to Behringer's fascinating book" that it left the reader yearning "to know more", particularly about "how the social, economic, political and religious tensions evident in this region, as elsewhere, in the post-Reformation period affected relationships between the living and the dead generally.