The Sleeping Seers of Brittany
Location: 14 Rue de la Victoire, 44110 Châteaubriant, France
Witches / Occult
by @anton
The dormouères in Gallo, known as kouskerezed ("sleeping women") in Breton, were traditional sleeping witches who entered a magical trance. People consulted them to obtain news of relatives living far away or to locate lost objects.
To do so, the dormeuse would lie down and send her spirit to the person or object in question. During this magical sleep, she was usually accompanied by a young woman—sometimes her daughter—whose role was to keep gently pinching her little finger until she awoke.
The practice is attested in the region as early as the sixteenth century. In 1546, Jean Bodin reported hearing in Nantes of seven magicians who fell into a trance before numerous witnesses and, after several hours, accurately described events that had taken place within a radius of seven leagues.
The tradition survived into modern times. In 1912, a professional dormeuse named Berthe Marchand, was arrested in Châteaubriant. A police report dated 29 November 1912 records that she was exposed after elderflowers intended for ritual fumigation were found during a search (Archives départementales de Loire-Atlantique, 19 U 654).
Remarkably, the tradition had not completely disappeared: in the early twenty-first century (around the 2010s), one dormeuse was still known in Nantes and another in Redon.
Source : Auray Christophe, Magie et sorcellerie dans les fermes bretonnes, Ouest France, 2006
(Procès verbal de Berthe Marchand,)