Chapter XXII. The proceedings at the Sabbat.

1. _The Sorcerers worship the Devil who appears under the

form of a tall black man, or as a goat. They offer him

candles & kiss his posterior._

2. _They dance. A description of their dances._

3. _They give themselves up to every kind of filthy

abomination. The Devil transforms himself into an Incubus &

into a Succubus._

4. _The hideous orgies & foul copulations practised by the

Euchites, & Gnostics._

5. _The Sorcerers feast at the Sabbat. Their meat & their

drink. The way in which they say grace before and after

table._

6. _However, this food never satisfies their appetites, &

they always arise from table as hungry as before._

7. _When they have finished their meal, they give the Devil

a full account of all their actions._

8. _They again renounce God, their baptism, &c. How Satan

incites them to do evil._

9. _They raise dark storms._

10. _They celebrate their mass. Of their vestments, & holy

water._

11. _Sometimes to conclude the Sabbat Satan seems to be

consumed in a flame of fire, & to be completely reduced to

ashes. All present take a small part of these ashes, which

the Sorcerers use for their charms._

12. _Satan is always the Ape of God in everything._

As the procedure in the various Sabbats differed very greatly according

to century, decade, country, district, nay, even in view of the station

of life and, it would seem, the very temperaments of the assembly,

it is only possible to outline in a general way some of the most

remarkable ceremonies which took place on the occasions of these infernal

congregations. An intimate and intensive study of the Sabbat would

require a large volume, for it is quite possible to reconstruct the rites

in every particular, although the precise order of the ritual was not

always and everywhere the same.

Dom Calmet, it is true, has very mistakenly said: “To attempt to give

a description of the Sabbat, is to attempt a description of what does

not exist, & what has never existed save in the fantastic & disordered

imagination of warlocks & witches: the pictures which have been drawn of

these assemblies are merely the phantasy of those who dreamed that they

had actually been borne, body & soul, through the air to the Sabbat.”[66]

Happy sceptic! But unfortunately the Sabbat did—and does—take place;

formerly in deserted wastes, on the hill-side, in secluded spots, now,

as often as not, in the privacy of vaults and cellars, and in those lone

empty houses innocently placarded “To be Sold.”

The President of the Sabbat was in purely local gatherings often the

Officer of the district; in the more solemn assemblies convened from a

wider area, the Grand Master, whose dignity would be proportionate to

the numbers of the company and the extent of his province. In any case

the President was officially known as the “Devil,” and it would seem

that his immediate attendants and satellites were also somewhat loosely

termed “devils,” which formal nomenclature has given rise to considerable

confusion and not a little mystification in the reports of witch trials

and the confessions of offenders. But in many instances it is certain—and

orthodoxy forbids us to doubt the possibility—that the Principle of

Evil, incarnate, was present for the hideous adoration of his besotted

worshippers. Such is the sense of the Fathers, such is the conclusion

of the theologians who have dealt with these dark abominations.

Metaphysically it is possible; historically it is indisputable.

When a human being, a man, occupied the chief position at these meetings

and directed the performance of the rites, he would sometimes appear

in a hideous and grotesque disguise, sometimes without any attempt at

concealment. This masquerade generally took the shape of an animal, and

had its origin in heathendom, whence by an easy transition through the

ceremonial of heretics, it passed to the sorcerer and the witch. As early

as the _Liber Pœnitentialis_ of S. Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury,

668-690, we have a distinct prohibition of this foul mummery. Capitulum

xxvii denounces the man who “in Kalendas Ianuarii in ceruulo et in uitula

uadit.” “If anyone at the kalends of January goes about as a stag or a

bull; that is making himself into a wild animal and dressing in the skin

of a herd animal, and putting on the head of beasts; those who in such

wise transform themselves into the appearance of a wild animal, penance

for three years because this is devilish.”

Among the many animal forms which the leader of the Sabbat (the “Devil”)

assumed in masquerade the most common are the bull, the cat, and above

all the goat. Thus the Basque term for the Sabbat is “Akhelarre,” “goat

pasture.” Sometimes the leader is simply said to have shown himself in

the shape of a beast, which possibly points to the traditional disguise

of a black hairy skin, horns, hoofs, claws, and a tail, in fact the

same dress as a demon wore upon the stage.[67] In an old German ballad,

_Druten Zeitung_, printed at Smalcald in 1627, “to be sung to the tune of

_Dorothea_,” it is said that the judges, anxious to extort a confession

from a witch, sent down into her twilight dungeon the common hangman

dressed in a bear’s skin with horns, hoofs, and tail complete. The

miserable prisoner thinking that Lucifer had indeed visited her at once

appealed to him for help:

Man shickt ein Henkersnecht

Zu ihr in Gefängniss n’unter,

Den man hat kleidet recht,

Mit einer Bärnhaute,

Als wenns der Teufel wär;

Als ihm die Drut anschaute

Meints ihr Bühl kam daher.

Here we have a curious and perhaps unique example of the demoniac

masquerade subtly used to obtain evidence of guilt by a trick. The

Aberdeen witch Jonet Lucas (1597) said that the Devil was at the Sabbat

“beand in likenes of ane beist.” But Agnes Wobster of the same company

declared that “Satan apperit to them in the likenes of a calff,” so

possibly two masquerades were employed. Gabriel Pellé (1608) confessed

that he attended a Sabbat presided over by the Devil, and “le Diable

estoit en vache noire.”[68] Françoise Secretain, who was tried in August,

1598, saw the Devil “tantost en forme de chat.” Rolande de Vernois

acknowledged “Le Diable se presenta pour lors au Sabbat en forme d’vn

groz chat noir.”[69] To the goat there are innumerable allusions. In the

Basses-Pyrénées (1609): “Le Diable estoit en forme de bouc ayant vne

queue & audessous vn visage d’homme noir.” (The Devil appeared in the

form of a goat having a tail & his fundament was the face of a black

man.) Iohannis d’Aguerre said that the Devil was “en forme de bouc.”[70]

“Marie d’Aguerre said that there was in the midst of the ring an immense

pitcher whence the Devil issued in the form of a goat.” Gentien le Clerc,

who was tried at Orleans in 1614, “said that, as he was told, his mother

when he was three years old presented him at the Sabbat to a goat whom

they saluted as l’Aspic.”[71] “Sur le trône,” writes Görres, “est assis

un bouc, ou du moins la forme d’un bouc, car le démon ne peut cacher ce

qu’il est.”[72]

In 1630 Elizabeth Stevenson, _alias_ Toppock, of Niddrie, avowed to

her judges that in company with Catharine Oswald, who was tried for

being by _habite and repute_ a witch, and Alexander Hamilton, “a known

warlock,” she went “to a den betwixt Niddrie and Edmiston, where the

devill had trysted hir, where he appeared first to them like a foall,

and then like a man, and appointed a new dyet at Salcott Muire.” When

one of Catharine Oswald’s intimates, Alexander Hunter, _alias_ Hamilton,

_alias_ Hattaraick, a “Warlok Cairle” who “abused the Countrey for a long

time,”[73] was apprehended at Dunbar he confessed that the Devil would

meet him riding upon a black horse, or in the shape of a _corbie_, a cat,

or a dog. He was burned upon Castle Hill, Edinburgh, 1631.

Sometimes those who are present at the Sabbat are masked. Canon Ribet

writes: “Les visiteurs du sabbat se cachent quelquefois sous des

formes bestiales, on se couvrent le visage d’un masque pour demeurer

inconnus.”[74] (Those who attend the Sabbat sometimes disguise themselves

as beasts, or cover their faces to conceal their identities.)

At the famous Sabbat of one hundred and forty witches in North Berwick

churchyard on All Hallow e’en, 1590, when they danced “endlong the

Kirk-yard” “John Fian, missellit [masked] led the ring.” The Salamanca

doctors mention the appearance at the Sabbats of persons “aut aperta,

aut linteo uelata facie,”[75] “with their faces sometimes bare,

sometimes shrouded in a linen wimple.” And Delrio has in reference to

this precaution: “Facie interdum aperta, interdum uelata larua, linteo,

uel alio uelamine aut persona.”[76] (Sometimes their faces are bare,

sometimes hidden, either in a vizard, a linen cloth, or a veil, or a

mask.)

In the latter half of the eighteenth century the territory of Limburg was

terrorized by a mysterious society known as “The Goats.” These wretches

met at night in a secret chapel, and after the most hideous orgies, which

included the paying of divine honours to Satan and other foul blasphemies

of the Sabbat, they donned masks fashioned to imitate goats’ heads,

cloaked themselves with long disguise mantles, and sallied forth in bands

to plunder and destroy. From 1772 to 1774 alone the tribunal of Foquemont

condemned four hundred Goats to the gallows. But the organization was not

wholly exterminated until about the year 1780 after a regime of the most

repressive measures and unrelaxing vigilance.

Among certain tribes inhabiting the regions of the Congo there exists a

secret association of Egbo worshippers. Egbo or Ekpé is the evil genius

or Satan. His rites are Obeeyahism, the adoration of Obi, or the Devil,

and devil-worship is practised by many barbarous races, as, for instance,

by the Coroados and the Tupayas, in the impenetrable forests between the

rivers Prado and Doce in Brazil, by the Abipones of Paraguay, as well as

by the Bachapins, a Caffre race, by the negroes on the Gold Coast and the

negroes of the West Indies. In the ju-ju houses of the Egbo sorcerers

are obscene wooden statues to which great veneration is paid, since by

their means divination is solemnly practised. Certain festivals are

held during the year, and at these it is interesting to note that the

members wear hideous black masks with huge horns which it is death for

the uninitiated to see.

The first ceremony of the Sabbat was the worship of, and the paying

homage to the Devil. It would seem that sometimes this was preceded by

a roll-call of the evil devotees. Agnes Sampson confessed that at the

meeting in North Berwick, when the whole assembly had entered the church,

“The _Devil_ started up himself in the _Pulpit_ like a mickle black man,

and calling the Row, every one answered _Here_. _Mr. Robert Grierson_

being named, they all ran _hirdie girdie_, and were angry: for it was

promised he should be called _Robert_ the _Comptroller_, _alias Rob_

the _Rower_, for expriming of his name. The first thing he demanded was

whether they had been good servants, and what they had done since the

last time they had convened.”

The witches adored Satan, or the Master of the Sabbat who presided in

place of Satan, by prostrations, genuflections, gestures, and obeisances.

In mockery of solemn bows and seemly courtesies the worshippers of the

Demon approach him awkwardly, with grotesque and obscene mops and mows,

sometimes straddling sideways, sometimes walking backwards, as Guazzo

says: Cum accedunt ad dæmones eos ueneraturi terga obuertunt & cessim eum

cancrorum more supplicaturi manus inuersas retro applicant.[77] But their

chief act of homage was the reverential kiss, _osculum infame_. This

impious and lewd ritual is mentioned in detail by most authorities and

is to be found in all lands and centuries. So Delrio writes: “The Sabbat

is presided over by a Demon, the Lord of the Sabbat, who appears in some

monstrous form, most generally as a goat or some hound of hell, seated

upon a haughty throne. The witches who resort to the Sabbat approach the

throne with their backs turned, and worship him ... and then, as a sign

of their homage, they kiss his fundament.” Guazzo notes: “As a sign of

homage witches kiss the Devil’s fundament.” And Ludwig Elich says: “Then

as a token of their homage—with reverence be it spoken—they kiss the

fundament of the Devil.”[78] “Y al tiempo que le besan debajo de la cola,

da una ventosidad de muy horrible olor,” adds the Spanish _Relacion_,

“fetid, foul, and filthy.”

To cite other authorities would be but to quote the same words. Thomas

Cooper, indeed, seems to regard this ceremony as a part of the rite

of admission, but to confine it to this occasion alone is manifestly

incorrect, for there is continual record of its observance at frequent

Sabbats by witches of many years standing. “Secondly,” he remarks, “when

this acknowledgement is made, in testimoniall of this subiection, Satan

offers his back-parts to be kissed of his vassall.”[79] But in the dittay

of the North Berwick witches, all of whom had long been notorious for

their malpractices, “_Item_, the said Agnis Sampson confessed that the

divell being then at North Barrick Kerke, attending their comming, in the

habit or likenesse of a man,[80] and seeing that they tarried over long,

hee at their comming enjoyned them all to a pennance, which was, that

they should kisse his buttockes, in sign of duety to him, which being put

over the pulpit bare, every one did as he had enjoyned them.”[81]

One of the principal charges which was repeatedly brought against

the Knights Templars during the lengthy ecclesiastical and judicial

processes, 1307-1314, was that of the _osculum infame_ given by the

juniors to their preceptors. Even so prejudiced a writer as Lea cannot

but admit the truth of this accusation. In this case, however, it has

nothing to do with sorcery but must be connected with the homosexuality

which the Order universally practised.

There are some very important details rehearsed in a Bull, 8 June,

1303, of the noble but calumniated Boniface VIII, with reference to the

case of Walter Langton, Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry (1296-1322),

and treasurer of Edward I, when this prelate was accused of sorcery

and homage to Satan: “For some time past it has come to our ears that

our Venerable Brother Walter Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield has

been commonly defamed, and accused, both in the realm of England and

elsewhere, of paying homage to the Devil by kissing his posterior, and

that he hath had frequent colloquies with evil spirits.”[82] The Bishop

cleared himself of these charges with the compurgators. Bodin refers to

Guillaume Edeline, who was executed in 1453 as a wizard. He was a doctor

of the Sorbonne, and prior of St. Germain en Laye: “The aforesaid sire

Guillaume confessed ... that he had done homage to the aforesaid Satan,

who appeared in the shape of a ram, by kissing his buttocks in token of

reverence and homage.”[83] A very rare tract of the fourteenth century

directed against the Waldenses among other charges brings the following:

“Item, in aliquibus aliis partibus apparet eis dæmon sub specie et figura

cati, quem sub cauda sigillatim osculantur.” (The Devil appears to them

as a cat, and they kiss him _sub cauda_.)[84]

Barthélemy Minguet of Brécy, a young man of twenty-five, who was tried

in 1616, said that at the Sabbat “he often saw [the Devil] in the shape

of a man, who held a horse by its bridle, & that they went forward to

worship him, each one holding a pitch candle of black wax in their

hands.”[85] These candles, as Guazzo tells us, were symbolic and required

by the ritual of the Sabbat, not merely of use for the purpose of giving

light: “Then they made an offering of pitch black candles, and as a

sign of homage kissed his fundament.”[86] The candles were ordinarily

black, and one taper, larger than the rest, was frequently carried by the

Devil himself. At the North Berwick meeting when the witches were all to

assemble in the church, “_Iohn Fein_ blew up the Kirk doors, and blew in

the lights, which wer like _Mickl black candles sticking round about the

Pulpit_.”[87] Boguet relates that the witches whom he tried confessed

that the Sabbat commenced with the adoration of Satan, “who appeared,

sometimes in the shape of a tall dark man, sometimes in the shape of a

goat, & to express their worship and homage, they made him an offering

of candles, which burned with a blue light.”[88] John Fian, also, when

doing homage to the Devil “thought he saw the light of a candle ... which

appeared blue lowe.” This, of course, was on account of the sulphurous

material whence these candles were specially compounded. De Lancre

expressly states that the candles or flambeaux used at the Sabbat were

made of pitch.

An important feature of the greater Sabbats was the ritual dance, for the

dance was an act of devotion which has descended to us from the earliest

times and is to be found in every age and every country. Dancing is a

natural movement, a primitive expression of emotion and ideals. In the

ancient world there can have been few things fairer than that rhythmic

thanksgiving of supple limbs and sweet voices which Athens loved, and

for many a century was preserved the memory of that day when the young

Sophocles led the choir in celebration of the victory of Salamis.[89]

The Mystæ in the meadows of Elysium danced their rounds with the silver

clash of cymbals and with madly twinkling snow-white feet. At the solemn

procession of the Ark from Cariathiarim (Kirjath Jearim) King David

“danced with all his might before the Lord, ... dancing and leaping

before the Lord.” S. Basil urges his disciples to dance on earth in order

to fit themselves for what may be one of the occupations of the angels

in heaven. As late as the seventeenth century the ceremonial dance in

church was not uncommon. In 1683 it was the duty of the senior canon to

lead a dance of choir-boys in the Paris cathedral. Among the Abyssinian

Christians dancing forms no inconsiderable part of worship. Year by

year on Whit Tuesday hundreds of pilgrims dance through the streets

of Echternach (Luxemburg) to the shrine of S. Willibrod in S. Peter’s

Church. Formerly the devotees danced three times round the great Abbey

Courtyard before proceeding to the sanctuary. But beyond all these the

dance has its own place in the ritual of Holy Church even yet. Three

times a year in Seville Cathedral—on Holy Thursday, upon Corpus Christi

and the Immaculate Conception—Los Seises dance before a specially

constructed altar, exquisitely adorned with flowers and lights, erected

near the outer door of the grand western entrance of the cathedral. The

ceremony in all probability dates from the thirteenth century.

The dresses of the boys, who dance before the improvised altar at

Benediction on Corpus Christi, are of the period of Philip III, and

consist of short trousers and jackets that hang from one shoulder, the

doublets being of red satin, with rich embroidery. Plumed white hats with

feathers are worn, also shoes with large scintillating buckles. On Holy

Thursday the costume is also red and white, whilst it is blue and white

for “the day of the Virgin.”

The eight boy choristers—with eight others as attendants—dance, with

castanets in their hands, to a soft organ obbligato, down the centre of

the cathedral to the decorated altar, advancing slowly and gracefully.

Here they remain for about a quarter of an hour, singing a hymn, and

accompanying it (as the carols of the olden time) with dance and

castanets. They sing a two-part hymn in front of the altar, forming in

two eights, facing each other, the clergy kneeling in a semicircle round

them.

Assuredly I cannot do better than quote Mr. Arthur Symons’ verdict on

this dance as he saw it a few years back in Seville: “And, yes, I found

it perfectly dignified, perfectly religious, without a suspicion of

levity or indecorum. This consecration of the dance, this turning of a

possible vice into a means of devotion, this bringing of the people’s

art, the people’s passion, which in Seville is dancing, into the church,

finding it a place there, is precisely one of those acts of divine

worldly wisdom which the Church has so often practised in her conquest of

the world.”

Not too fantastically has a writer suggested that High Mass itself in

some sense enshrines a survival of the ancient religious dance—that

stately, magnificent series of slow movements which surely may express

devotion of the most solemn and reverent kind, as well as can the colour

of vestment or sanctuary, or the sounds of melody.

Since the dance is so essentially religious it must needs be burlesqued

and buffooned by God’s ape. For the dance of the witches is degraded,

awkward, foul, and unclean. These very movements are withershins, as

Guazzo points out: “Then follow the round dances in which, however, they

always tread the measure to the left.”[90] “The Sorcerers,” says Boguet,

“dance a country-dance with their backs turned one to the other.”[91]

This, of course, being the exact reverse of the natural country-dance.

“Sometimes, although seldom,” he adds, “they dance in couples, &

sometimes one partner is there, another here, for always everything is

in confusion.”[92] De Lancre writes of witches’ revels: “They only dance

three kinds of brawls.... The first is _à la Bohémienne_ ... the second

with quick trippings: these are round dances.”[93] In the third Sabbat

measure the dancers were placed one behind another in a straight line.

An old Basque legend reported by Estefanella Hirigaray describes how the

witches were wont to meet near an old limekiln to dance their rounds, a

ceremony regarded throughout that district as an essential feature of

the Sabbat. De Lancre notes the brawls _à la Bohémienne_ as especially

favoured by sorcerers in Labourd. Sylvester Mazzolini, O.P. (1460-1523),

Master of the Sacred Palace, and the great champion of orthodoxy

against the heresiarch Luther, in his erudite _De Strigimagia_[94]

relates that in Como and Brescia a number of children between eight and

twelve years old, who had frequented the Sabbat, but had been happily

converted by the unsparing patience of the Inquisitors, at the request

of the Superiors gave exhibitions of these dances when they showed such

extraordinary adroitness and skill in executing the most intricate

and fantastic figures that it was evident they had been instructed

by no mere human tutelage. Marco de Viqueria, the Dominican Prior of

the Brussels monastery, closely investigated the matter, and he was a

religious of such known acumen and exceptional probity that his testimony

soon convinced many prelates at Rome who were inclined to suspect some

trickery or cunning practice. In Belgium this Sabbat dance was known as

_Pauana_.

In the Fian trial Agnes Sampson confessed that “They danced along the

_Kirk-yeard_, _Geilic Duncan_ playing on a _Trump_, and _John Fein_

mussiled led the _Ring_. The said _Agnes_ and her daughter followed next.

Besides these were _Kate Gray_, _George Noilis_ his wife, ... with the

rest of their Cummers above an hundred Persons.”[95] She further added

“that this Geillis Duncane did goe before them, playing this reill or

daunce uppon a small trumpe, called a Jewe’s trumpe, untill they entered

into the Kerk of North Barrick.”[96] “These confessions made the King

[James I, then James VI of Scotland] in a wonderfull admiration, and sent

for the saide Geillis Duncane, who, upon the like trumpe, did play the

saide daunce before the kinges maiestie.”

Music generally accompanied the dancers, and there is ample evidence that

various instruments were played, violins, flutes, tambourines, citterns,

hautboys, and, in Scotland, the pipes. Those of the witches who had

any skill were the performers, and very often they obliged the company

awhile with favourite airs of a vulgar kind, but the concert ended in

the most hideous discords and bestial clamour; the laws of harmony

and of decency were alike rudely violated. In August, 1590, a certain

Nicolas Laghernhard, on his way to Assencauria, was passing through the

outskirts of a wood when he saw through the trees a number of men and

women dancing with filthy and fantastic movements. In amaze he signed

himself and uttered the Holy Name, whereupon the company perceiving him

took to flight, but not before he had recognized many of these wretches.

He was prompt to inform the ecclesiastical tribunals, and several persons

being forthwith questioned freely acknowledged their infamies. Amongst

these a shepherd named Michael, who enjoyed a considerable reputation for

his musical talents and strangely fascinating voice, confessed that he

was the piper at the local Sabbat and that his services were in constant

requisition. At the lesser Sabbats (_aquelarre_) of Zugarramurdi, a

hamlet of Navarre, some six hundred souls, in the Bastan valley, some

twelve leagues from Pampluna, one Juan de Goyburu was wont to play upon

the flute, and Juan de Sansin the tambourine. These two unhappy wretches,

having shown every sign of sincerest contrition, were reconciled to the

Church.

Sinclar in his Relation XXXV, “Anent some Prayers, Charms, and Avies,

used in the _Highlands_,” says: “As the Devil is originally the Author

of _Charms_, and _Spells_, so is he the Author of several baudy Songs,

which are sung. A reverend Minister told me, that one who was the Devils

Piper, a wizzard confest to him, that at a Ball of dancing, the Foul

Spirit taught him a Baudy song to sing and play, as it were this night,

and ere two days past all the Lads and Lasses of the town were lilting

it throw the street. It were abomination to rehearse it.” Philip Ludwig

Elich precisely sums up the confused scene: “The whole foul mob and

stinkard rabble sing the most obscene priapics and abominable songs in

honour of the Devil. One witch yells, _Harr, harr_; a second hag, Devil,

Devil; jump hither, jump thither; a third, Gambol hither, gambol thither;

another, _Sabaoth, Sabaoth_, &c.; and so the wild orgy waxes frantic what

time the bedlam rout are screeching, hissing, howling, caterwauling, and

whooping lewd wassail.”[97] Of all the horrors of the Sabbat the climax

was that appalling blasphemy and abominable impiety by which the most

Holy Sacrifice of the Altar was mocked and burlesqued in hideous fashion.

And since no Christian will receive the Blessed Sacrament save he be duly

fasting as the Church so strictly enjoins, the witches in derision of

Christ’s ordinance satiate their appetites with a wolfish feast and cram

themselves to excess with food of all kinds, both meat and drink, before

they proceed to the ritual of hell. These orgies were often prolonged

amid circumstances of the most beastly gluttony and drunkenness.

Guazzo writes: “Tables are laid and duly furnished, whereupon they set

themselves to the board & begin to gobbet piecemeal the meats which the

Devil provides, or which each member of the party severally brings with

him.”[98] De Lancre also says: “Many authors say that sorcerers at the

Sabbat eat the food which the Devil lays before them: but very often

the table is only dressed with the viands they themselves bring along.

Sometimes there are certain tables served with rare dainties, at others

with orts and offal.” “Their banquets are of various kinds of food

according to the district & the quality of those who are to partake.”[99]

It seems plain that when the local head of the witches, who often

presided at these gatherings _absente diabolo_, was a person of wealth or

standing, delicacies and choice wines would make their appearance at the

feast, but when it was the case of the officer of a coven in some poor

and small district, possibly a meeting of peasants, the homeliest fare

only might be served. The Lancashire witches of 1613, when they met at

Malking Tower, sat down to a goodly spread of “Beefe, Bacon, and roasted

Mutton,” the sheep having been killed twenty-four hours earlier by James

Device; in 1633 Edmund Robinson stated that the Pendle witches offered

him “flesh and bread upon a trencher, and drink in a glass,” they also

had “flesh smoaking, butter in lumps, and milk,” truly rustic dainties.

Alice Duke, a Somerset witch, tried in 1664, confessed that the Devil

“bids them _Welcome_ at their _Coming_, and brings them _Wine_, _Beer_,

_Cakes_, and _Meal_, or the like.”[100] At the trial of Louis Gaufridi

at Aix in 1610 the following description of a Sabbat banquet was given:

“Then they feasted, three tables being set out according to the three

aforesaid degrees. Those who were employed in serving bread had loaves

made from wheat privily stolen in various places. They drank malmsey

in order to excite them to venery. Those who acted as cup-bearers had

filched the wine from cellars where it was stored. Sometimes they ate the

tender flesh of little children, who had been slain and roasted at some

Synagogue, and sometimes babes were brought there, yet alive, whom the

witches had kidnapped from their homes if opportunity offered.”[101] In

many places the witches were not lucky enough to get bumpers of malmsey,

for Boguet notes that at some Sabbats “They not unseldom drink wine but

more often water.”[102]

[Illustration: PLATE V

THE SABBAT. Ziarnko

[_face p. 144_]

There are occasional records of unsavoury and tasteless viands, and there

is even mention of putrefying garbage and carrion being placed before his

evil worshippers by their Master. Such would appear to have been the case

at those darker orgies when there was a manifestation of supernatural

intelligences from the pit.

The Salamanca doctors say: “They make a meal from food either furnished

by themselves or by the Devil. It is sometimes most delicious and

delicate, and sometimes a pie baked from babies they have slain or

disinterred corpses. A suitable grace is said before such a table.”[103]

Guazzo thus describes their wine: “Moreover the wine which is usually

poured out for the revellers is like black and clotted blood served in

some foul and filthy vessel. Yet there seems to be no lack of cheer at

these banquets, save that they furnish neither bread nor salt. Isabella

further added that human flesh was served.”[104]

Salt never appeared at the witches’ table. Bodin gives us the reason that

it is an emblem of eternity,[105] and Philip Ludwig Elich emphatically

draws attention to the absence of salt at these infernal banquets.[106]

“At these meals,” remarks Boguet, “salt never appears.”[107] Gentien le

Clerc, who was tried in Orleans in 1615, confessed: “They sit down to

table, but no salt is ever seen.”[108] Madeleine de la Palud declared

that she had never seen salt, olives, or oil at the Devil’s feasts.[109]

When all these wretches are replete they proceed to a solemn parody of

Holy Mass.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century Marcelline Pauper of the

Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers was divinely called

to offer herself up as a victim of reparation for the outrages done to

the Blessed Sacrament, especially by sorcerers in their black masses at

the Sabbat. In March, 1702, a frightful sacrilege was committed in the

convent chapel. The tabernacle was forced open, the ciborium stolen, and

those of the Hosts which had not been carried away by the Satanists were

thrown to the pavement and trampled under foot. Marcelline made ceaseless

reparation, and at nine o’clock of the evening of 26 April, she received

the stigmata in hands, feet, and side, and also the Crown of Thorns.

After a few years of expiation she died at Tulle, 25 June, 1708.

The erudite Paul Grilland tells us that the liturgy is burlesqued in

every detail: “Those witches who have solemnly devoted themselves to

the Devil’s service, worship him in a particular manner with ceremonial

sacrifices, which they offer to the Devil, imitating in all respects the

worship of Almighty God, with vestments, lights, and every other ritual

observance, and with a set liturgy in which they are instructed, so

that they worship and praise him eternally, just as we worship the true

God.”[110] This abomination of blasphemy is met with again and again in

the confessions of witches, and although particulars may differ here

and there, the same quintessence of sacrilege persisted throughout the

centuries, even as alas! in hidden corners and secret lairs of infamy it

skulks and lurks this very day.

What appears extremely surprising in this connexion is the statement of

Cotton Mather that the New England witches “met in Hellish _Randezvous_,

wherein the Confessors (i.e. the accused who confessed) do say, they have

had their Diabolical Sacraments, imitating the _Baptism_ and the _Supper_

of our Lord.”[111] At the trial of Bridget Bishop, _alias_ Oliver, at

the Court of Oyer and Terminer, held at Salem, 2 June, 1692, Deliverance

Hobbs, a converted witch, affirmed “that this _Bishop_ was at a General

Meeting of the Witches, in a Field at _Salem_-Village, and there partook

of a Diabolical Sacrament in Bread and Wine then administered.” In the

case of Martha Carrier, tried 2 August, 1692, before the same court,

two witnesses swore they had seen her “at a Diabolical Sacrament ...

when they had Bread and Wine Administered unto them.” Abigail Williams

confessed that on 31 March, 1692, when there was a Public Fast observed

in Salem on account of the scourge of sorcery “the Witches had a

_Sacrament_ that day at an house in the Village, and that they had

_Red Bread_ and _Red Drink_.” This “Red Bread” is certainly puzzling.

But the whole thing, sufficiently profane no doubt, necessarily lacks

the hideous impiety of the black mass. A minister, the Rev. George

Burroughs, is pointed to by accumulated evidence as being the Chief of

the Salem witches; “he was Accused by Eight of the Confessing Witches as

being an Head Actor at some of their Hellish Randezvouses, and one who

had the promise of being a King in Satan’s kingdom”; it was certainly he

who officiated at their ceremonies, for amongst others Richard Carrier

“affirmed to the jury that he saw Mr. George Burroughs at the witch

meeting at the village and saw him administer the sacrament,” whilst Mary

Lacy, senr., and her daughter Mary “affirmed that Mr. George Burroughs

was at the witch meetings with witch sacraments.”[112]

The abomination of the black mass is performed by some apostate or

renegade priest who has delivered himself over to the service of evil and

is shamefully prominent amongst the congregation of witches. It should be

remarked from this fact that it is plain the witches are as profoundly

convinced of the doctrines of Transubstantiation, the Totality,

Permanence, and Adorableness of the Eucharistic Christ, and of the power

also of the sacrificing priesthood, as is the most orthodox Catholic.

Indeed, unless such were the case, their revolt would be empty, void at

any rate of its material malice.

One of the gravest charges brought against the Templars and in the

trials (1307-1314) established beyond any question or doubt was that of

celebrating a blasphemous mass in which the words of consecration were

omitted. It has, indeed, been suggested that the liturgy used by the

Templars was not the ordinary Western Rite, but that it was an Eastern

Eucharist. According to Catholic teaching the Consecration takes place

when the words of institution are recited with intention and appropriate

gesture, the actual change of the entire substances of bread and wine

into the Body and Blood of Christ being effected in virtue of the words

_Hoc est enim Corpus meum; Hic est enim Calix sanguinis mei_.... This

has been defined by a decree of the Council of Florence (1439): “Quod

ilia uerba diuina Saluatoris omnem uirtutem transsubstantiationis

habent.” (These divine words of Our Saviour have full power to effect

transubstantiation.) But the Orthodox Church holds that an Epiklesis is

necessary to valid consecration, the actual words of Our Lord being

repeated “as a narrative” [διηγηματικῶς],[113] which would seem logically

to imply that Christ’s words have no part in the form of the Sacrament.

In all Orthodox liturgies the words of Consecration are found together

with the Epiklesis, and there are in existence some few liturgies,

plainly invalid, which omit the words of Consecration altogether. These

are all of them forms which have been employed by heretical sects; and it

may be that the Templars used one of these. But it is far more probable

that the words were purposely omitted; the Templars were corroded with

Gnostic doctrines, they held the heresies of the Mandæans or Johannites

who were filled with an insane hatred of Christ in much the same way

as witches and demonolaters, they followed the tenets of the Ophites

who venerated the Serpent and prayed to him for protection against the

Creator, they adored and offered sacrifice before an idol, a Head, which,

as Professor Prutz holds, represented the lower god whom Gnostic bodies

worshipped, that is Satan. At his trial in Tuscany the knight Bernard of

Parma confessed that the Order firmly believed this idol had the power

to save and to enrich, in fine, flat diabolism. The secret mass of the

Templars may have burlesqued an Eastern liturgy rather than the Western

rite, but none the less it was the essential cult of the evil principle.

In 1336 a priest who had been imprisoned by the Comte de Foix, Gaston III

Phébus, on a charge of celebrating a Satanic mass, was sent to Avignon

and examined by Benedict XII in person. The next year the same pontiff

appointed his trusty Guillaume Lombard to preside at the trial of Pierre

du Chesne, a priest from the diocese of Tarbes, accused of defiling the

Host.

Gilles de Sillé, a priest of the diocese of S. Malo, and the Florentine

Antonio Francesco Prelati, formerly of the diocese of Arezzo, were wont

to officiate at the black masses of Tiffauges and Machecoul, the castles

of Gilles de Rais, who was executed in 1440.

A priest named Benedictus in the sixteenth century caused great scandal

by the discovery of his assistance at secret and unhallowed rites.

Charles IX employed an apostate monk to celebrate the eucharist of

hell before himself and his intimates, and during the reign of his

brother the Bishop of Paris burned in the Place de Grève a friar named

Séchelle who had been found guilty of participating in similar profane

mysteries. In 1597 the Parliament of Paris sentenced Jean Belon, curé of

S. Pierre-des-Lampes in the Bourges diocese, to be hanged and his body

burned for desecration of the Sacrament and the repeated celebration

of abominable ceremonies.[114] The Parliament of Bordeaux in 1598

condemned to the stake Pierre Aupetit, curé of Pageas, near Chalus

Limousin. He confessed that for more than twenty years he had frequented

Sabbats, especially those held at Mathe-goutte and Puy-de-Dôme, where he

worshipped the Devil and performed impious masses in his honour.[115]

August 14, 1606, a friar named Denobilibus was put to death at Grenoble

upon a similar conviction. In 1609 the Parliament of Bordeaux sent Pierre

De Lancre and d’Espagnet to Labourd in the Bayonne district to stamp

out the sorcerers who infested that region. No less than seven priests

were arrested on charges of celebrating Satan’s mass at the Sabbat. Two,

Migalena, an old man of seventy, and Pierre Bocal, aged twenty-seven,

were executed, but the Bishop of Bayonne interfered, claimed the five

for his own tribunal and contrived that they should escape from prison.

Three other priests who were under restraint were immediately set free,

and wisely quitted the country. A twelvemonth later Aix and the whole

countryside rang with the confessions of Madeleine de la Palud who “Dit

aussi que ce malheureux Loys magicien ... a controuvé le premier de dire

la messe au sabatt et consacrer Véritablement et présenter le sacrifice à

Lucifer.”[116] It was, of course, mere ignorance on her part to suppose

that “that accursed Magician Lewes did first inuent the saying of Masse

at the Sabbaths,” although Gaufridi may have told her this to impress

her with a sense of his importance and power among the hierarchies of

evil. Certainly in her evidence the details of the Sabbat worship are

exceptionally detailed and complete.

They are, however, amply paralleled, if not exceeded, by the narrative

of Madeleine Bavent, a Franciscan sister of the Third Order, attached

to the convent of SS. Louis and Elizabeth at Louviers. Her confessions,

which she wrote at length by the direction of her confessor, des Marets,

an Oratorian, meticulously describe scenes of the most hideous blasphemy

in which were involved three chaplains, David, Maturin Picard, the curé

of Mesnil-Jourdain, and Thomas Boullé, sometime his assistant. Amongst

other enormities they had revived the heresy of the Adamites, an early

Gnostic sect, and celebrated the Mass in a state of stark nudity amid

circumstances of the grossest indecency. Upon one Good Friday Picard

and Boullé had compelled her to defile the crucifix and to break a

consecrated Host, throwing the fragments upon the ground and trampling

them. David and Picard were dead, but Boullé was burned at Rouen, 21

August, 1647.[117]

During the reign of Louis XIV a veritable epidemic of sacrilege seemed

to rage throughout Paris.[118] The horrors of the black mass were said

in many houses, especially in that of La Voisin (Catherine Deshayes)

who lived in the rue Beauregard. The leading spirit of this crew was

the infamous abbé Guibourg, a bastard son—so gossip said—of Henri de

Montmorency. With him were joined Brigallier, almoner of the Grande

Mademoiselle; Bouchot, director of the convent of La Saussaye; Dulong, a

canon of Notre-Dame; Dulausens, vicar of Saint-Leu; Dubousquet; Seysson;

Dussis; Lempérier; Lépreux; Davot, vicar of Notre-Dame de Bonne-Nouvelle;

Mariette, vicar of Saint-Séverin, skilled in maledictions; Lemeignan,

vicar of Saint-Eustache, who was convicted of having sacrificed

numberless children to Satan; Toumet; Le Franc; Cotton, vicar of St.

Paul, who had baptized a baby with the chrism of Extreme Unction and then

throttled him upon the altar; Guignard and Sébault of the diocese of

Bourges, who officiated at the black mass in the cellars of a house at

Paris, and confected filthy charms under conditions of the most fearful

impiety.

In the eighteenth century the black mass persisted. In 1723 the police

arrested the abbé Lecollet and the abbé Bournement for this profanity;

and in 1745 the abbé de Rocheblanche fell under the same suspicion. At

the hotel of Madame de Charolais the vilest scenes of the Sabbat were

continued. A gang of Satanists celebrated their monstrous orgies at

Paris on 22 January, 1793, the night after the murder of Louis XVI. The

abbé Fiard in two of his works, _Lettres sur le diable_, 1791, and _La

France Trompée_ ... Paris, 8vo, 1803, conclusively shows that eucharistic

blasphemies were yet being perpetrated but in circumstances of almost

impenetrable secrecy. In 1865 a scandal connected with these abominations

came to light, and the Bishop of Sens, in whose diocese it occurred, was

so horrified that he resigned his office and retired to Fontainebleau,

where he died some eighteen months later, practically of shock. Similar

practices were unmasked at Paris in 1874 and again in 1878, whilst it is

common knowledge that the characters of Joris Karl Huysmans’ _Là-Bas_

were all persons easy of identification, and the details are scenes

exactly reproduced from contemporary life.[119] The hideous cult of evil

yet endures. Satanists yet celebrate the black mass in London, Brighton,

Paris, Lyons, Bruges, Berlin, Milan, and alas! in Rome itself. Both South

America and Canada are thus polluted. In many a town, both great and

small, they have their dens of blasphemy and evil where they congregate

unsuspected to perform these execrable rites. Often they seem to

concentrate their vile energies in the quiet cathedral cities of England,

France, Italy, in vain endeavour to disturb the ancient homes of peace

with the foul brabble of devil-worship and all ill.

They have even been brought upon the public stage. One episode of _Un

Soir de Folie_, the revue (1925-6) at the Folies Bergère, Paris, was

“Le Sabbat et la Herse Infernale,” where in a Gothic cathedral an actor

(Mons. Benglia) appeared as Satan receiving the adoration of his devotees.

At the more frequented Sabbats the ritual of Holy Mass was elaborately

burlesqued in almost every detail. An altar was erected with four

supports, sometimes under a sheltering tree, at others upon a flat rock,

or some naturally convenient place, “auprès d’vn arbre, ou parfois auprès

d’vn rocher, dressant quelque forme d’autel sur des colonés infernales,”

says De Lancre.[120] In more recent times and to-day when the black mass

is celebrated in houses such an altar is often permanent and therefore

the infernal sanctuary can be builded with a display of the full

symbolism of the hideous cult of evil. The altar was covered with the

three linen cloths the ritual enjoins, and upon it were six black candles

in the midst of which they placed a crucifix inverted, or an image of

the Devil. Sometimes the Devil himself occupied this central position,

standing erect, or seated on some kind of monstrous throne. In 1598,

at a celebrated witch-trial before the Parliament of Bordeaux with the

Vicar-general of the Bishop of Limoges and a learned councillor Peyrat

as assessors, Antoine Dumons of Saint-Laurent confessed that he had

frequently provided a large number of candles for the Sabbat, both wax

lights to be distributed among those present and the large black tapers

for the altar. These were lit by Pierre Aupetit, who held a sacristan’s

reed, and apparently officiated as Master of the Ceremonies when he was

not actually himself saying the Mass.[121]

In May, 1895, when the legal representatives of the Borghese family

visited the Palazzo Borghese, which had been rented for some time in

separate floors or suites, they found some difficulty in obtaining

admission to certain apartments on the first floor, the occupant of

which seemed unaware that the lease was about to expire. By virtue of

the terms of the agreement, however, he was obliged to allow them to

inspect the premises to see if any structural repairs or alterations were

necessary, as Prince Scipione Borghese, who was about to be married,

intended immediately to take up his residence in the ancestral home with

his bride. One door the tenant obstinately refused to unlock, and when

pressed he betrayed the greatest confusion. The agents finally pointed

out that they were within their rights to employ actual force, and that

if access was longer denied they would not hesitate to do so forthwith.

When the keys had been produced, the cause of the reluctance was soon

plain. The room within was inscribed with the words _Templum Palladicum_.

The walls were hung all round from ceiling to floor with heavy curtains

of silk damask, scarlet and black, excluding the light; at the further

end there stretched a large tapestry upon which was woven in more than

life-size a figure of Lucifer, colossal, triumphant, dominating the

whole. Exactly beneath an altar had been built, amply furnished for the

liturgy of hell: candles, vessels, rituals, missal, nothing was lacking.

Cushioned prie-dieus and luxurious chairs, crimson and gold, were set

in order for the assistants; the chamber being lit by electricity,

fantastically arrayed so as to glare from an enormous human eye. The

visitors soon quitted the accursed spot, the scene of devil-worship

and blasphemy, nor had they any desire more nearly to examine the

appointments of this infernal chapel.[122]

The missal used at the black mass was obviously a manuscript, although

it is said that in later times these grimoires of hideous profanity have

actually been printed. It is not infrequently mentioned. Thus De Lancre

notes that the sorcerers of the Basses-Pyrénées (1609) at their worship

saw the officiant “tournant les feuillets d’vn certain liure qu’il a en

main.”[123] Madeleine Bavent in her confession said: “On lisait la messe

dans le livre des blasphèmes, qui servait de canon et qu’on employait

aussi dans les processions.”[124] The witches’ missal was often bound in

human skin, generally that of an unbaptized babe.[125] Gentien le Clerc,

tried at Orleans, 1614-1615, confessed that “le Diable ... marmote dans

un liure duquel la couuerture est toute veluë comme d’vne peau de loup,

auec des feuillets blancs & rouges, d’autres noires.”

The vestments worn by the celebrant are variously described. On rare

occasions he is described as being arrayed in a bishop’s pontificalia,

black in hue, torn, squalid, and fusty. Boguet reports that a witch

stated: “Celuy, qui est commis à faire l’office, est reuestu d’vne chappe

noire sans croix,”[126] but it seems somewhat strange that merely a plain

black cope should be used, unless the explanation is to be found in the

fact that such a vestment was most easily procurable and no suspicion of

its ultimate employment would be excited. The abbé Guibourg sometimes

wore a cope of white silk embroidered with fir-cones, which again seems

remarkable, as the symbolism is in no way connected with the Satanic

rites he performed. But this is the evidence of Marguerite, La Voisin’s

daughter, who was not likely to be mistaken.[127] It is true that the

mass was often, perhaps, partially erotic and not wholly diabolic in the

same sense as the Sabbat masses were, but yet Astaroth, Asmodeus, and

Lucifer were invoked, and it was a liturgy of evil. On other occasions

Guibourg seems to have donned the orthodox eucharistic chasuble, stole,

maniple, girdle, alb, and amice. In the thirty-seventh article of his

confession Gaufridi acknowledged that the priest who said the Devil’s

mass at the Sabbat wore a violet chasuble.[128] Gentien le Clerc, tried

at Orleans in 1614-1615, was present at a Sabbat mass when the celebrant

“wore a chasuble which was embroidered with a Cross; but there were

only three bars.”[129] Later a contemporary witness points to the use

of vestments embroidered with infernal insignia, such as a dark red

chasuble, the colour of dried blood, upon which was figured a black buck

goat rampant; a chasuble that bore the inverse Cross, and similar robes

adorned by some needle with the heraldry of hell.

In bitter mockery of the _Asperges_ the celebrant sprinkled the witches

with filthy and brackish water, or even with stale. “The Devil at the

same time made water into a hole dug in the earth, & used it as holy

water, wherewith the celebrant of the mass sprinkled all present, using

a black aspergillum.”[130] Silvain Nevillon, a sorcerer who was tried

at Orleans in 1614-1615, said: “When Tramesabot said Mass, before he

commenced he used to sprinkle all present with holy water which was

nothing else than urine, saying meanwhile _Asperges Diaboli_.”[131]

According to Gentien le Clerc: “The holy water is yellow ... & after

it has been duly sprinkled Mass is said.”[132] Madeleine de la Palud

declared that the sorcerers were sprinkled with water, and also with

consecrated wine from the chalice upon which all present cried aloud:

_Sanguis eius super nos et super filios nostros._[133] (His blood be upon

us and upon our children.)

This foul travesty of the holiest mysteries began with an invocation

of the Devil, which was followed by a kind of general confession, only

each one made mock acknowledgement of any good he might have done, and

as a penance he was enjoined to utter some foul blasphemy or to break

some precept of the Church. The president absolved the congregation by

an inverse sign of the Cross made with the left hand. The rite then

proceeded with shameless profanity, but De Lancre remarks that the

_Confiteor_ was never said, not even in a burlesque form, and _Alleluia_

never pronounced. After reciting the Offertory the celebrant drew back

a little from the altar and the assembly advancing in file kissed his

left hand. When the Queen of the Sabbat—the witch who ranked first after

the Grand Master, the oldest and most evil of the witches (“en chasque

village,” says De Lancre, “trouuer vne Royne du Sabbat”)—was present she

sat on the left of the altar and received the offerings, loaves, eggs,

any meat or country produce, and money, so long as the coins were not

stamped with a cross. In her hand she held a disc or plate “vne paix ou

platine,” engraved with a figure of the Devil, and this his followers

devoutly kissed. In many places to-day, especially Belgium, during Holy

Mass the pax-brede (_instrumentum pacis_) is kissed by the congregation

at the Offertory, and universally when Mass is said by a priest in the

presence of a Prelate the pax-brede is kissed by the officiant and the

Prelate after the _Agnus Dei_ and the first appropriate ante-communion

prayer.

Silvain Nevillon, who was tried at Orleans in 1614-15, avowed: “The Devil

preached a sermon at the Sabbat, but nobody could hear what he said, for

he spoke in a growl.”[134]

At the Sabbat a sermon is not infrequently delivered, a farrago of

impiety and evil counsel.

The hosts are then brought to the altar. Boguet describes them as dark

and round, stamped with a hideous design; Madeleine Bavent saw them as

ordinary wafers only coloured red; in other cases they were black and

triangular in shape. Often they blasphemed the Host, calling it “Iean le

blanc,” just as Protestants called it “Jack-in-the-box.” The chalice is

filled, sometimes with wine, sometimes with a bitter beverage that burned

the tongue like fire. At the _Sanctus_ a horn sounded harshly thrice,

and torches burning with a sulphurous blue flare “qui est fort puante”

were kindled. There was an elevation, at which the whole gang, now in

a state of hysterical excitement and unnatural exaltation, burst forth

with the most appalling screams and maniac blasphemies, rivalling each

other in filthy adjurations and crapulous obscenities. The protagonist

poured out all the unbridled venom that diabolic foulness could express,

a stream of scurrility and pollution; hell seemed to have vomited its

reeking gorge on earth. _Domine adiuua nos, domine adiuua nos_, they

cried to the Demon, and again _Domine adiuua nos semper_. Generally all

present were compelled to communicate with the sacrament of the pit, to

swallow morsels soiled with mud and ordures, to drink the dark brew of

damnation. Gaufridi confessed that for _Ite missa est_ these infernal

orgies concluded with the curse: “Allez-vous-en tous au nom du diable!”

Whilst the abbé Guibourg cried: “_Gloria tibi, Lucifero!_”

The black mass of the Sabbat varied slightly in form according to

circumstances, and in the modern liturgy of the Satanists it would appear

that a considerable feature is made of the burning of certain heavy and

noxious weeds, the Devil’s incense. In the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries the use of incense is very rare at the Sabbat, although Silvain

Nevillon stated that he had seen at the Sabbat “both holy water and

incense. This latter smelled foul, not fragrant as incense burned in

church.”[135]

The officiant nowadays consecrates a host and the chalice with the actual

sacred words of Holy Mass, but then instead of kneeling he turns his back

upon the altar,[136] and a few moments later—_sit uenia uerbis!_—he cuts

and stabs the Host with a knife, throwing it to the ground, treading upon

it, spurning it. A part, at least, of the contents of the chalice is

also spilled in fearful profanation, and not infrequently there further

has been provided a ciborium of consecrated Hosts, all stolen from

churches[137] or conveyed away at Communion in their mouths by wretches

unafraid to provoke the sudden judgement of an outraged God. These the

black priest, for so the celebrant is called by the Devil worshippers,

scatters over the pavement to be struggled and fought for by his

congregation in their madness to seize and outrage the Body of Christ.

Closely connected with the black mass of the Satanists and a plain

survival from the Middle Ages is that grim superstition of the Gascon

peasant, the Mass of S. Sécaire.[138] Few priests know the awful ritual,

and of those who are learned in such dark lore fewer yet would dare to

perform the monstrous ceremonies and utter the prayer of blasphemy. No

confessor, no bishop, not even the Archbishop of Auch, may shrive the

celebrant; he can only be absolved at Rome by the Holy Father himself.

The mass is said upon a broken and desecrated altar in some ruined or

deserted church where owls hoot and mope and bats flit through the

crumbling windows, where toads spit their venom upon the sacred stone.

The priest must make his way thither late attended only by an acolyte

of impure and evil life. At the first stroke of eleven he begins; the

liturgy of hell is mumbled backward, the canon said with a mow and a

sneer; he ends just as midnight tolls. The host is triangular, with

three sharp points and black. No wine is consecrated but foul brackish

water drawn from a well wherein has been cast the body of an unbaptized

babe. The holy sign of the cross is made with the left foot upon the

ground. And the man for whom that mass is said will slowly pine away, nor

doctor’s skill nor physic will avail him aught, but he will suffer, and

dwindle, and surely drop into the grave.[139]

Although there is, no doubt, some picturesque exaggeration here the main

details are correct enough. A black, triangular wafer is not infrequently

mentioned in the witch-trials as having been the sacramental bread of

the Sabbat, whilst Lord Fountainhall[140] in describing the devilish

communion of the Loudian witches says: “the drink was sometimes blood,

sometimes black moss-water,” and many other details may be closely

paralleled.

When the blasphemous liturgy of the Sabbat was done all present gave

themselves up to the most promiscuous debauchery, only interrupting

their lasciviousness to dance or to spur themselves on to new enormities

by spiced foods and copious draughts of wine. “You may well suppose,”

writes Boguet, “that every kind of obscenity is practised there, yea,

even those abominations for which Heaven poured down fire and brimstone

on Sodom and Gomorrah are quite common in these assemblies.”[141] The

erudite Dominican, Father Sebastian Michaelis, who on the 19 January,

1611, examined Madeleine de la Palud concerning her participation in

Sabbats, writes[142] that she narrated the most unhallowed orgies.[143]

The imagination reels before such turpitudes! But Madeleine Bavent (1643)

supplied even more execrable details.[144] Gentien le Clerc at Orleans

(1614-1615) acknowledged similar debauchery.[145] Bodin relates that

a large number of witches whom he tried avowed their presence at the

Sabbat.[146] In 1459 “large numbers of men & women were burned at Arras,

many of whom had mutually accused one another, & they confessed that

at night they had been conveyed to these hellish dances.”[147] In 1485

Sprenger executed a large number of sorcerers in the Constance district,

and “almost all without exception confessed that the Devil had had

connexion with them, after he had made them renounce God and their holy

faith.”[148] Many converted witches likewise confessed these abominations

“and let it be known that whilst they were witches demons had swived

them lustily. Henry of Cologne in confirmation of this says that it

is very common in Germany.”[149] Throughout the centuries all erudite

authorities have the same monstrous tale to tell, and it would serve no

purpose merely to accumulate evidence from the demonologists. To-day the

meetings of Satanists invariably end in unspeakable orgies and hideous

debauchery.

Occasionally animals were sacrificed at the Sabbat to the Demon. The

second charge against Dame Alice Kyteler, prosecuted in 1324 for sorcery

by Richard de Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory, was “that she was wont to offer

sacrifices to devils of live animals, which she and her company tore limb

from limb and made oblation by scattering them at the cross-ways to a

certain demon who was called Robin, son of Artes (Robin Artisson), one of

hell’s lesser princes.”[150]

In 1622 Margaret McWilliam “renounced her baptisme, and he baptised her

and she gave him as a gift a hen or cock.”[151] In the Voodoo rites of

to-day a cock is often the animal which is hacked to pieces before the

fetish. Black puppies were sacrificed to Hecate; Æneas offers four jetty

bullocks to the infernal powers, a coal-black lamb to Night;[152] at

their Sabbat on the Esquiline Canidia and Sagana tear limb from limb

a black sheep, the blood streams into a trench.[153] Collin de Plancy

states that witches sacrifice black fowls and toads to the Devil.[154]

The animal victim to a power worshipped as divine is a relic of remotest

antiquity.

The presence of toads at the Sabbat is mentioned in many witch-trials.

They seem to have been associated with sorcerers owing to the repugnance

they generally excite, and in some districts it is a common superstition

that those whom they regard fixedly will be seized with palpitations,

spasms, convulsions, and swoons: nay, a certain abbé Rousseau of the

eighteenth century, who experimented with toads, avowed that when one of

these animals looked upon him for some time he fell in a fainting fit

whence, if help had not arrived, he would never have recovered.[155] A

number of writers—Ælian, Dioscorides, Nicander, Ætius, Gesner—believe

that the breath of the toad is poisonous, infecting the places it

may touch. Since such idle stories were credited it is hardly to be

surprised at that we find the toad a close companion of the witch. De

Lancre says that demons often appeared in that shape. Jeannette d’Abadie,

a witch of the Basses-Pyrénées, whom he tried and who confessed at

length, declared that she saw brought to the Sabbat a number of toads

dressed some in black, some in scarlet velvet, with little bells attached

to their coats. In November, 1610, a man walking through the fields near

Bazas, noticed that his dog had scratched a large hole in a bank and

unearthed two pots, covered with cloth, and closely tied. When opened

they were found to be packed with bran, and in the midst of each was a

large toad wrapped in green tiffany. These doubtless had been set there

by a person who had faith in sympathetic magic, and was essaying a

malefic spell. No doubt toads were caught and taken to the Sabbat, nor is

the reason far to seek. Owing to their legendary venom they served as a

prime ingredient in poisons and potions, and were also used for telling

fortunes, since witches often divined by their toad familiars. Juvenal

alludes to this when he writes:

“I neither will, nor can Prognosticate

To the young gaping Heir, his Father’s Fate

Nor in the Entrails of a Toad have pry’d.”[156]

Upon which passage Thomas Farnabie, the celebrated English scholar

(1575-1647) glosses thus: “He alludes to the office of the Haruspex who

used to inspect entrails & intestines. Pliny says: The entrails of the

toad (_Rana rubeta_), that is to say the tongue, tiny bones, gall, heart,

have rare virtue for they are used in many medicines and salves. Haply

he means the puddock or hop-toad, thus demonstrating that these animals

are not poisonous, their entrails being completely inefficacious in

confecting poisons.”[157] In 1610 Juan de Echalar, a sorcerer of Navarre,

confessed at his trial before the Alcantarine inquisitor Don Alonso

Becerra Holguin that he and his coven collected toads for the Sabbat,

and when they presented these animals to the Devil he blessed them with

his left hand, after which they were killed and cooked in a stewpot with

human bones and pieces of corpses rifled from new-made graves. From

this filthy hotch-potch were brewed poisons and unguents that the Devil

distributed to all present with directions how to use them. By sprinkling

corn with the liquid it was supposed they could blight a standing field,

and also destroy flowers and fruit. A few drops let fall upon a person’s

garments was believed to insure death, and a smear upon the shed or sty

effectually diseased cattle. From these crude superstitions the fantastic

stories of dancing toads, toads dressed _en cavalier_, and demon toads at

the Sabbat were easily evolved.

There is ample and continuous evidence that children, usually tender

babes who were as yet unbaptized, were sacrificed at the Sabbat. These

were often the witches’ own offspring, and since a witch not unseldom was

the midwife or wise-woman of a village she had exceptional opportunities

of stifling a child at birth as a non-Sabbatial victim to Satan. “There

are no persons who can do more cunning harm to the Catholic faith than

midwives,” says the _Malleus Maleficarum_, Pars I, q. xi: “_Nemo fidei

catholicæ amplius nocet quam obstetrices._” The classic examples of

child-sacrifice are those of Gilles de Rais (1440) and the abbé Guibourg

(1680). In the process against the former one hundred and forty children

are explicitly named: some authorities accept as many as eight hundred

victims. Their blood, brains, and bones were used to decoct magic

philtres. In the days of Guibourg the sacrifice of a babe at the impious

mass was so common that he generally paid not more than a crown-piece for

his victim. “Il avait acheté un écu l’enfant qui fut sacrifié à cette

messe.” (“The child sacrificed at this mass he had bought for a crown.”)

These abominable ceremonies were frequently performed at the instance of

Madame de Montespan in order that Louis XIV should always remain faithful

to her, should reject all other mistresses, repudiate his queen, and in

fine raise her to the throne.[158] The most general use was to cut the

throat of the child, whose blood was drained into the chalice and allowed

to fall upon the naked flesh of the inquirer, who lay stretched along

the altar. La Voisin asserted that a toll of fifteen hundred infants had

been thus murdered. This is not impossible, as a vast number of persons,

including a crowd of ecclesiastics, were implicated. Many of the greatest

names in France had assisted at these orgies of blasphemy. From first to

last no less than two hundred and forty-six men and women of all ranks

and grades of society were brought to trial, and whilst thirty-six of

humbler station went to the scaffold, one hundred and forty-seven were

imprisoned for longer or shorter terms, not a few finding it convenient

to leave the country, or, at any rate, to obscure themselves in distant

châteaux. But many of the leaves had been torn out of the archives, and

Louis himself forbade any mention of his favourite’s name in connexion

with these prosecutions. However, she was disgraced, and it is not

surprising that after the death of Maria Teresa, 31 July, 1683, the king

early in the following year married the pious and conventual Madame de

Maintenon.

Ludovico Maria Sinistrari writes that witches “promise the Devil

sacrifices and offerings at stated times: once a fortnight, or at least

each month, the murder of some child, or an homicidal act of sorcery,”

and again and again in the trials detailed accusation of the kidnapping

and murder of children are brought against the prisoners. In the same

way as the toad was used for magical drugs so was the fat of the child.

The belief that corpses and parts of corpses constitute a most powerful

cure and a supreme ingredient in elixirs is universal and of the highest

antiquity. The quality of directly curing diseases and of protection

has long been attributed to a cadaver. Tumours, eruptions, gout, are

dispelled if the afflicted member be stroked with a dead hand.[159]

Toothache is charmed away if the face be touched with the finger of a

dead child.[160] Birthmarks vanish under the same treatment.[161] Burns,

carbuncles, the herpes, and other skin complaints, fearfully prevalent in

the Middle Ages, could be cured by contact with some part of a corpse.

In Pomerania the “cold corpse hand” is a protection against fire,[162]

and Russian peasants believe that a dead hand protects from bullet wounds

and steel.[163] It was long thought by the ignorant country folk that the

doctors of the hospital of Graz enjoyed the privilege of being allowed

every year to exploit one human life for curative purposes. Some young

man who repaired thither for toothache or any such slight ailment is

seized, hung up by the feet, and tickled to death! Skilled chemists boil

the body to a paste and utilize this as well as the fat and the charred

bones in their drug store. The people are persuaded that about Easter a

youth annually disappears in the hospital for these purposes.[164] This

tradition is, perhaps, not unconnected with the Jewish ritual sacrifices

of S. William of Norwich (1144); Harold of Gloucester (1168); William of

Paris (1177); Robert of Bury S. Edmunds (1181); S. Werner of Oberwesel

(1286); S. Rudolph of Berne (1294); S. Andreas of Rinn (1462); S. Simon

of Trent, a babe of two and a half years old (1473); Simon Abeles, whose

body lies in the Teyn Kirche at Prague, murdered for Christ’s sake on

21 February, 1694, by Lazarus and Levi Kurtzhandel; El santo Niño de la

Guardia, near Toledo (1490), and many more.[165]

The riots which have so continually during three centuries broken out in

China against Europeans, and particularly against Catholic asylums for

the sick, foundling hospitals, schools, are almost always fomented by an

intellectual party who begin by issuing fiery appeals to the populace:

“Down with the missionaries! Kill the foreigners! They steal or buy our

children and slaughter them, in order to prepare magic remedies and

medicines out of their eyes, hearts, and from other portions of their

dead bodies.” Baron Hübner in his _Promenade autour du monde_, II (Paris,

1873) tells the story of the massacre at Tientsin, 21 June, 1870, and

relates that it was engineered on these very lines. In 1891 similar

risings against Europeans resident in China were found to be due to the

same cause. Towards the end of 1891 a charge was brought in Madagascar

against the French that they devoured human hearts and for this purpose

kidnapped and killed native children. Stern legislation was actually

found necessary to check the spread of these accusations.[166]

In the Navarrese witch-trials of 1610 Juan de Echelar confessed that a

candle had been used made from the arm of an infant strangled before

baptism. The ends of the fingers had been lit, and burned with a clear

flame, a “Hand of Glory” in fact. At Forfar, in 1661, Helen Guthrie

and four other witches exhumed the body of an unbaptized babe and made

portions into a pie which they ate. They imagined that by this means no

threat nor torture could bring them to confession of their sorceries.

This, of course, is clearly sympathetic magic. The tongue of the infant

had never spoken articulate words, and so the tongues of the witches

would be unable to articulate.

It is a fact seldom realized, but none the less of the deepest

significance, that almost every detail of the old witch-trials can be

exactly paralleled in Africa to-day. Thus there exists in Bantu a society

called the “Witchcraft Company,” whose members hold secret meetings at

midnight in the depths of the forest to plot sickness and death against

their enemies by means of incantations and spells. The owl is their

sacred bird, and their signal call an imitation of its hoot. They profess

to leave their corporeal bodies asleep in their huts, and it is only

their spirit-bodies that attend the magic rendezvous, passing through

walls and over the tree-tops with instant rapidity. At the meeting they

have visible, audible, and tangible communication with spirits. They

hold feasts, at which is eaten the “heart-life” of some human being, who

through this loss of his heart falls sick and, unless “the heart” be

later restored, eventually dies. Earliest cock-crow is the warning for

them to disperse, since they fear the advent of the morning-star, as,

should the sun rise upon them before they reach their corporeal bodies,

all their plans would not merely fail, but recoil upon themselves,

and they would pine and languish miserably. This hideous Society was

introduced by black slaves to the West Indies, to Jamaica and Hayti,

and also to the Southern States of America as Voodoo worship. Authentic

records are easily procurable which witness that midnight meetings were

held in Hayti as late as 1888, when human beings, especially kidnapped

children, were killed and eaten at the mysterious and evil banquets.

European government in Africa has largely suppressed the practice of

the black art, but this foul belief still secretly prevails, and Dr.

Norris[167] is of opinion that were white influence withdrawn it would

soon hold sway as potently as of old.

A candid consideration will show that for every detail of the Sabbat,

however fantastically presented and exaggerated in the witch-trials of so

many centuries, there is ample warrant and unimpeachable evidence. There

is some hallucination no doubt; there is lurid imagination, and vanity

which paints the colours thick; but there is a solid stratum of fact, and

very terrible fact throughout.

And as the dawn broke the unhallowed crew separated in haste, and hurried

each one on his way homewards, pale, weary, and haggard after the night

of taut hysteria, frenzied evil, and vilest excess.

“Le coq s’oyt par fois és sabbats sonna̅t le retraicte aux

Sorciers.”[168] (The cock crows; the Sabbat ends; the Sorcerers scatter

and flee away.)

NOTES TO CHAPTER IV

[1] Omnia autem honeste et secundum ordinem fiant. I Cor. xiv. 40.

[2] Miss Murray, misled no doubt by the multiplicity of material,

postulates two separate and distinct kinds of assemblies: The Sabbat, the

General Meeting of all members of the religion; the Esbat “only for the

special and limited number who carried out the rites and practices of the

cult, and [which] was not for the general public.” _The Witch-Cult in

Western Europe_, p. 97. Görres had already pointed out that the smaller

meetings were often known as _Esbats_. The idea of a “general public” at

a witches’ meeting is singular.

[3] On a voulu trouver l’etymologie du sabbat, réunion des sorciers,

dans les _sabazies_; mais la forme ne le permet pas; d’ailleurs comment,

au moyen âge aurait on connu les sabazies? Saint-Croix, _Recherches sur

les mystères du paganisme_; Maury, _Histoire des religions de la Grèce

antique_.

[4] _Metamorphoseon_, VIII. 25.

[5] Miss Murray thinks that Sabbat “is possibly a derivative of

_s’esbattre_, ‘to frolic,’” and adds “a very suitable description of the

joyous gaiety of the meetings”!!

[6] Miss Murray mistakenly says (p. 109) that May Eve (30 April) is

called Roodmas or Rood Day. Roodmas or Rood Day is 3 May, the Feast of

the Invention of Holy Cross. An early English calendar (702-706) even

gives 7 May as Roodmas. The Invention of Holy Cross is found in the

Lectionary of Silos and the Bobbio Missal. The date was not slightly

altered. The Invention of Holy Cross is among the very early festivals.

[7] Especially in the North and North-East. Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and

Baden, knew little of this particular date.

[8] In the _Rituale_ we have “Benedictio Rogi, quæ fit a Clero extra

Ecclesiam in Uigilia Natiuitatis S. Joannis Baptistæ.” (Blessing of a

pyre, which the Clergy may give on the Vigil of the Nativity of S. John

Baptist, but outside the Church.) This form is especially approved for

the Diocese of Tarbes.

[9] _Relacion de las personas que salieron al auto de la fé que los

inquisidores apostólicos del reino de Navarra y su distrito, celebraron

en la ciudad De Logroño, en 7 y 8 del mes de noviembre de 1610 años_,

1611.

[10] _Discours des Sorciers_, XXII. 12. Tertullian’s _Diabolus simia Dei_.

[11] _Idem_, XX. 2.

[12] _Tableau_, p. 65.

[13] Les lieux des assemblées des Sorciers sont notables et signalez de

quelques arbres, ou croix. _Fleau_, p. 181.

[14] Anthony Horneck; Appendix to Glanvill’s _Sadducismus Triumphatus_.

London, 1681.

[15] Locus in diuersis regionibus est diuersus; plerumque autem

comitia in syluestribus, montanis, uel subterraneis atque ab hominum

conuersatione dissitis locis habentur. _Mela._ _Lib._ 3. _cap._ 44.

montem Atlantem nominat; _de Vaulx_ Magus Stabuleti decollatus, fatebatur

1603, in Hollandia congregationem frequentissimam fuisse in Ultraiectinæ

ditionis aliquo loco. Nobis ab hoc conuentu notus atq; notatus mons

Bructerorum, Melibœus alias dictus in ducatu Brunsuicensi, uulgo _der

Blocksberg oder Heweberg_, Peucero, _der Brockersberg_, & Tilemanno

Stellæ, _der Vogelsberg_, perhibonte _Ortelio in Thesauro Geographico_.

For the Bructeri see Tacitus, _Germania_, 33: Velleius Paterculus, II,

105, i. _Bructera natio_, Tacitus, _Historiæ_, IV, 61.

[16] ... le lieu où on le trouue ordinairement s’appelle Lanne de bouc,

& en Basque _Aquelarre de verros, prado del Cabrón_, & là des Sorciers

le vont adorer trois nuicts durant, celle du Lundy, du Mercredy, & du

Vendredy. De Lancre, _Tableau_, p. 62.

[17] Boguet, _Discours des Sorciers_, p. 124.

[18] _A Pleasant Treatise of Witches_, London, 1673.

[19] Psalm xc.

[20] Conuentus, ut plurimum ineuntur uel noctis mediæ silentio, quando

uiget potestas tenebrarum; uel interdiu meridie, quo sunt qui referant

illud Psalmistæ notum de dæmonio meridiano. Noctes frequentiores, quæ

feriam tertiam et sextam præcedunt. Delrio, _Disquisitiones Magicæ_, Lib.

II. xvi.

[21] _Discours_, XIX. 1. “The Sorcerers assemble at the Sabbat about

midnight.”

[22] Her indictment consists of fifty-three points.

[23] Spottiswoode’s _Practicks_.

[24] Spalding Club, _Miscellany_, I.

[25] MS. formerly in the possession of Michael Stewart Nicolson, Esq.

[26] ... je me trouvais transporté au lieu où le Sabatt se tenait, y

demeurant quelquefois une, deux, trois, quatre heures pour le plus

souvent suivant les affections.

[27]

Ferunt uagantes Dæmonas

Lætas tenebras noctium

Gallo canente exterritos

Sparsim timere et credere.

[28]

Nocturna lux uiantibus

A nocte noctem segregans,

Præco diei iam sonat,

Iubarque solis euocat.

Hoc nauta uires colligit,

Pontique mitescunt freta:

Hoc, ipsa petra Ecclesiæ,

Canente, culpam diluit.

Surgamus ergo strenue:

Gallus iacentes excitat,

Et somnolentes increpat,

Gallus negantes arguit.

Gallo canente, spes redit,

Ægris salus refunditur,

Mucro latronis conditur,

Lapsis fides reuertitur.

The translation in text is by Caswall, 1848.

[29] _Tableau_, p. 154.

[30] For London, see Dr. Johnson’s _London_ (1738):

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam,

And sign your will before you sup from home.

In 1500 Paolo Capello, the Venetian Ambassador, wrote: “Every night they

find in Rome four or five murdered men, Prelates and so forth.” During

the reign of Philip IV (1621-1665) the streets of Madrid, noisome,

unpaved, were only lit on the occasion of festal illuminations.

[31] 1475-1546.

[32] Quando uadunt ad loca propinqua uadunt pedestres mutuo se inuicem

inuitantes. _De Strigibus_, II.

[33] Les Sorciers neâtmoins vont quelquefois de pied au Sabbat, ce qui

leur aduient principalement, lors que le lieu où ils font leur assemblée,

n’est pas guieres eslongé de leur habitation. _Discours_, c. xvii.

[34]

Enquis en quel lieu se tint le Sabbat le dernier fois qu’il y

fut.

Respond que ce fut vers Billeron à un Carroy qui est sur le

chemin tendant aux Aix, Parroisse de Saincte Soulange, Iustice

de ceans.

Enquis de quelle façon il y va.

Respond qu’il y va de son pied.

De Lancre, _Tableau_, pp. 803-805.

[35] Aussi vilain & abominable est au Sorcier d’y aller de son pied que

d’y estre transporté de son consentement par le Diable. _Tableau_, p. 632.

[36] Sinclar, _Satan’s Invisible World Discovered_ (Reprint 1875), VII.

[37] _Idem_, p. 25.

[38] _Idem_, pp. 175, 178.

[39] Illud etiam non omittendum quod quædam sceleratæ mulieres retro post

Satanam conuersæ, dæmonum illusoribus et phantasmatibus seductæ credunt

se et profitentur nocturnis horis cum Diana paganorum dea et innumera

multitudine mulierum equitare super quasdam bestias et multa terrarum

spatia intempestæ noctis silentio pertransire eiusque iussionibus uelut

dominæ obedire, et certis noctibus ad eius seruitium euocari. Minge,

_Patres Latini_, CXXXII. 352.

[40] See Professor A. J. Clark’s note upon “Flying Ointments.”

_Witch-Cult in Western Europe_, pp. 279-280.

[41] Posset dæmon eas transferre sine unguento, et facit aliquando;

sed unguento mauult uti uariis de causis. Aliquando quia timidiores

sunt sagæ, ut audeant; uel quia teneriores sunt ad horribilem illum

Satanæ contactum in corpore assumpto ferendum; horum enim unctione

sensum obstupefacit et miseris persuadet uim unguento inesse maximam.

Alias autem id facit ut sacrosancta a Deo instituta sacramenta inimice

adumbret, et per has quasi cerimonias suis orgiis reuerentiæ et

uenerationis aliquid conciliat. Delrio, _Disquitiones magicæ_, Liber II,

qᵗᵒ xvi.

[42] In antiquity we have the case of Simon Magus, who was levitated in

the presence of Nero and his court.

[43] Henri Boguet, the High Justice of the district of Saint-Claude, died

in 1616. The first edition (of the last rarity) of his _Discours des

Sorciers_ is Lyons, 1602; second edition, Lyons 1608; but there is also a

Paris issue, 1603. Pp. 64 and 104.

[44] Scot, _Discoverie of Witchcraft_ (1584). Book III. p. 42.

[45] De Lancre, _Tableau_, p. 211.

[46] Thomas Wright, _Proceedings against Dame Alice Kyteler_, Camden

Society. 1843.

[47] Cotton Mather, _Wonders of the Invisible World_, 1693. (Reprint,

1862. P. 158.)

[48] _Quarterly Journal of Science_, January, 1874.

[49] J. Godfrey Raupert, _Modern Spiritism_. 1904. Pp. 34, 35. See also

Sir W. Barrett, _On the Threshold of the Unseen_, p. 70.

[50] Arthur Lillie, _Modern Mystics and Modern Magic_, 1894, pp. 74, 75.

[51] David Lewis, _Life of S. John of the Cross_ (1897), pp. 73-4.

[52] See the Saint’s own letter (written in 1777) to the Bishop of

Foggia. _Lettere di S. Alfonso Maria de’ Liguori_ (Roma, 1887), II. 456 f.

[53] Philip Coghlan, C.P. _Gemma Galgani_ (1923), p. 62. For fuller

details see the larger biography by Padre Germano.

[54] _Vie du B. Paul de la Croix._ (French translation.) I. Book ii. c. 3.

[55] _La Mystique Divine._ Traduit par Sainte-Foi. V. viii. 17. p. 193.

[56] Giovanni Francesco Ponzinibio was a lawyer whose _De Lamiis_ was

published at Venice, 1523-4. It called forth a reply, _Apologiæ tres

aduersum Joannem Franciscum Ponzinibium Iurisperitum_, Venice, 1525. The

edition of _De Lamiis_ I have used is Venice, 1584, in the _Thesaurus

Magnorum iuris consultorum_. This reprint was met by Peña’s answer and

two treatises by Bartolomeo Spina, O.P.

[57] Rome, 1584.

[58] De modo quo localiter transferentur [sagæ] de loco ad locum....

Probatur quod possint malefici corporaliter transferri.

[59] An isti Sortilegi & Strigimagæ siue Lamiæ uere & corporaliter

deferantur a dæmone uel solum in spiritu? _De Sortilegiis_, VII.

[60] Sum modo istius secundæ opinionis quod deferantur in corpore.

[61] Doctrina multi eorum qui sequuti sunt Lutherum, & Melanctonem,

tenuerent Sagas ad conuentus accedere animi duntaxat cogitatione, &

diabolica illusione interesse, allegantes quod eorum corpora inuenta

sunt sæpe numero eodem loco iacentia, nec inde mora fuisse, ad hoc illud

pertinens quod est in uita D. Germani, de mulierculis conuiuantibus, vt

uidebantur, & tame̅ dormierant dormientes. Huiusmodi mulierculas sæpe

numero decipi certum est, sed semper ita fieri non probatur.... Altera,

quam uerissimam esse duco, est, nonnunquam uere Sagas transferri a Dæmone

de loco ad locum, hirco, uel alteri animali fantastico vt plurimum eas

simul asportanti corporaliter, & conuentu nefario interesse, & hæc

sententia est multo communior Theologorum, imò & Iurisconsultorum Italiæ,

Hispaniæ, & Germaniæ inter Catholicos; hoc idem tenent alii quam plurimi.

Turrecremata super Grillandum,[A] Remigius,[B] Petrus Damianus,[C]

Siluester Abulensis,[D] Caietanus[E] Alphonsus a Castro[F] Sixtus

Senensis[G] Crespetus[H] Spineus[I] contra Ponzinibium, Ananias,[J] &

alii quam plurimi, quos breuitatis gratia omitto. _Per Fratrem Franciscum

Mariam Guaccium Ord. S. Ambrosii ad Nemus Mediolani compilatum._

Mediolani. Ex Collegii Ambrosiani Typographia. 1626.

[A] _De hæreticis et sortilegiis._ Lugduni. 1536.

[B] Nicolas Remy, _De la démonolâtrie_.

[C] Epistolarum, IV. 17.

[D] Silvester of Avila.

[E] Tommaso de Vio Gaetani, O.P. 1469-1534.

[F] Alfonso de Castro, Friar Minor. (1495-1558). Confessor to Charles V

and Philip II of Spain.

[G] Sisto da Siéna, O.P. Bibliotheca Sancta ... (Liber V). Secunda

editio. Francofurti. 1575. folio.

[H] Père Crespet, Celestine monk. _Deux livres de la haine de Satan et

des malins esprits contre l’homme._ Paris. 1590.

[I] Bartholomeo Spina, O.P. _De lamiis._ _De strigibus._ Both folio.

Venice, 1584. _Apologiæ tres aduersus Joannem Franciscum Ponzinibium

Jurisperitum._ Venice. 1525. Giovanni Francesco Ponzinibio wrote a

_Dedamiis_ of which I have used a late edition. Venice. 1584.

[J] Giovanni Lorenzo Anania, _De natura dæmonum_: libri iiii. Venetiis.

1581. 8vo.

[62] _De Strigibus_, II. I have used the reprint, 1669, which is given

in the valuable collection appended to the _Malleus Maleficarum_ of that

date, 4 vols. 4to.

[63] Ad quam congregationem seu ludum præfatæ pestiferæ personæ uadunt

corporaliter & uigilantes ac in propriis earū sensibus & quando uadunt

ad loca propinqua uadunt pedestres mutuo se inuicem inuitantes. Si aute̅

habent congregari in aliquo loco distanti tunc deferuntur a diabolo, &

quomodocunque uadant ad dictum locum siue pedibus suis siue adferantur

a diabolo uerū est quod realiter et ueraciter & no̅ pha̅tastice, neque

illusorii abnegant fide̅ catholicam, adorant diabolum, conculcant crucem,

& plura nefandissima opprobria committunt contra sacratissimum Corpus

Christi, ac alia plura spurcissima perpetrant cum ipso diabolo eis in

specie humana apparenti, & se uiris succubum, mulieribus autem incubum

exhibenti.

[64] George Gandillon, la nuict d’vn Ieudy Sainct, demeura dans son

lict, comme mort, pour l’espace de trois heures, & puis reuint à soy en

sursaut. Il a depuis esté bruslé en ce lieu auec son père & vne sienne

sœur.

[65] Chapitre xvi. Comme, & en quelle façon les Sorciers sont portez au

Sabbat.

1. _Ils y sont portez tantost sur un baston, ou ballet, tantost

sur un mouton ou bouc, & tantost par un homme noir._

2. _Quelquefois ils se frotte̅t de graisse, & à d’autres non._

3. _Il y en a, lesquels n’estans pas Sorciers, & s’estans

frottez, ne delaissent pas d’estre transportez au Sabbat, & la

raison._

4. _L’onguent, & la graisse ne seruent de rien aux Sorciers,

pour leur transport au Sabbat._

5. _Les Sorciers sont quelquefois portez au Sabbat par un vent

& tourbillon._

Chapitre xvii. Les Sorciers vont quelques fois de pied au Sabbat.

Chapitre xviii. Si les Sorciers vont en ame seulement au Sabbat.

1 & 3. _L’affirmatiue, & exemples._

2. _Indices, par lesquels on peut coniecturer, qu’vne certaine

femme estoit au Sabbat en ame seulement._

4. _La negatiue._

5. _Comme s’entend ce que l’on dit d’Erichtho, & d’Apollonius

lesquels resusciterent l’un un soldat, & l’autre une ieune

fille._

6. _Les Sorciers ne peuuent resusciter un mort, & exemples._

7. _Non plus que les heretiques & exemples._

8. _Opinion de l’Autheur sur le suiect de ce chapitre._

9. _Satan endort le plus souuent les personnes, & exemples._

Chapitre xix.

1. _Les Sorciers vont enuiron la minuict au Sabbat._

2. _La raison pourquoy le Sabbat si tient ordinairement de

nuict._

3. _Satan se plait aux tenebres, & à la couleur noire, estant

au contraire la blancheur agreable à Dieu._

4. _Les Sorciers dansent doz contre doz au Sabbat, & se

masquent pour la plus part._

5, 8. _Le coq venant à chanter, le Sabbat disparoit aussi tost,

& la raison._

6. _La voix du coq funeste à Satan tout ainsi qu’au lyon, & au

serpent._

7. _Le Demon, selon quelques uns a crainte d’vne espée nue._

Chapitre xx. Du iour du Sabbat.

1. _Le Sabbat se tient à un chacun iour de la semaine, mais

principalement le Ieudy._

2. _Il se tient encor aux festes les plus solemnelles de

l’année._

Chapitre xxi. Du lieu du Sabbat.

1. _Le lieu du Sabbat est signalé, selon aucuns, de quelques

arbres ou bien de quelques croix, & l’opinion de l’autheur sur

ce suiect._

2. _Chose remarquable d’vn lieu pretendu pour le Sabbat._

3. _Il faut de l’eau au lieu, où se tient le Sabbat, &

pourquoy._

4. _Les Sorciers, à faute d’eau, urinent dans un trou, qu’ils

font en terre._

Chapitre xxii. De ce qui se fait au Sabbat.

1. _Les Sorciers y adorent Satan, estăt en forme d’homme noir,

ou de bouc, & luy offrent des chandelles, & le baisent aux

parties honteuses de derriere._

2. _Ils y dansent, & de leurs danses._

3. _Ils se desbordent en toutes sortes de lubricitez, & comme

Satan se fait Incube & Succube._

4. _Incestes, & paillardises execrebles des Euchites &

Gnostiques._

5. _Les Sorciers banquettent au Sabbat, de leurs viandes, &

breuuages, & de la façon qu’ils tiennent à benir la table, & à

rendre graces._

6. _Ils ne prennent cependant point de gout aux Viandes, &

sortent ordinairement auec faim du repas._

7. _Le repas paracheué, ils rendent conte de leurs actions à

Satan._

8. _Ils renoncent de nouueau à Dieu, au Chresme, &c. Et comme

Satan les sollicite à mal faire._

9. _Ils y font la gresle._

10. _Ils y celebrent messe, & de leurs chappes, & eau benite._

11. _Satan se consume finalement en feu, & se reduit en cendre,

de laquelle les Sorciers prennent tous, & a quel effet._

12. _Satan Singe de Dieu en tout._

[66] Vouloir donner une description du Sabbat, c’est vouloir decrire ce

qui n’existe point, & n’a jamais subsisté que dans l’imagination creuse

& séduite des Sorciers & Sorcieres: les peintures qu’on nous en fait,

sont d’après les rêveries de ceux & de celles qui s’imaginent d’être

transportés à travers les airs au Sabbat en corps & en ame. _Traité sur

les Apparitions des Esprits_, par le R. P. Dom Augustin Calmet, Abbé de

Sénones. Paris, 1751, I. p. 138.

[67] See the woodcut upon the title-page of Middleton & Rowley’s _The

World tost at Tennis_, 4to, 1620.

[68] De Lancre, _L’Incrédulité_, p. 769.

[69] Boguet, _Discours des Sorciers_.

[70] De Lancre, _Tableau_, p. 217.

[71] De Lancre, _L’Incrédulité_, p. 800.

[72] Görres, _La Mystique Divine_, traduit par Charles Sainte-Foi. V.

viii. 19. p. 208.

[73] George Sinclar, _Satan’s Invisible World Discovered_, Relation XVII.

[74] _La Mystique Divine_, 1902 (Nouvelle édition). III. p. 381.

[75] _Tractatus_, xxi. c. 11. P. xi. n. 179.

[76] _Disquisitiones Magicæ_, Lib. II. qᵗᵒ x.

[77] _Compendium Maleficarum_, p. 78.

[78] “Solent ad conuentum delatæ dæmonem conuentus præsidem in solio

considentem forma terrifica, ut plurimum hirci uel canis, obuerso ad

illum tergo accedentes, adorare ... et deindo, homagii quod est indicium,

osculari eum in podice.”[K] Guazzo notes: “Ad signum homagii dæmonem

podice osculantur.”[L] And Ludwig Elich says: “Deinde quod homagii

est indicium (honor sit auribus) ab iis ingerenda sunt oscula Dæmonis

podici.”[M]

[K] _Disquisitiones Magicæ_, Lib. II. qto xvi.

[L] _Compendium Maleficarum_, I. 13.

[M] _Dæmonomagia_, Quæstis x.

[79] _Mystery of Witchcraft._

[80] It may be remembered that, as related elsewhere, there is strong

reason to suppose Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell, grandson of James V,

was “the Devil” on this occasion, as he was certainly the Grand Master of

the witches and the convener of the Sabbat.

[81] _Newes from Scotland, declaring the damnable Life of Doctor Fian._

London. W. Wright. [1592].

[82] Dudum ad audientiam nostram peruenit, quod uenerabilis frater

noster G. Conuentrensis et Lichefeldensis episcopus erat in regno Angliæ

et alibi publice defamatur quod diabolo homagium fecerat et eum fuerat

osculatus in tergo eique locutus multotius.

[83] Confessa ledit sire Guillaume ... avoir fait hommage audit ennemy

en l’espèce et semblance d’ung mouton en le baisant par le fondement en

signe de révérence et d’hommage. Jean Chartier, _Chronique de Charles

VII_ (ed. Vallet de Viriville). Paris, 1858. III. p. 45. Shadwell, who

has introduced this ceremony into _The Lancashire Witches_, II, (The

Scene Sir _Edward’s_ Cellar), in his notes refers to “Doctor _Edlin_ ...

who was burn’d for a Witch.”

[84] _Reliquiæ Antiquæ_, vol. I. p. 247.

[85] Il a veu [le diable] quelque fois en forme d’homme, tenant son

cheval par le frein, & qu’ils le vont adorer tenans vue chandelle de poix

noir en leurs mains, le baisent quelque fois au nombril, quelque fois au

cul. De Lancre, _L’Incredulité_, p. 25.

[86] Tum candelis piceis oblatis, vel vmbilico infantili, ad signum

homagii eum in podico osculantur, Liber I. xiii.

[87] _Satan’s Invisible World Discovered_, Relation III.

[88] ... qui apparait là, tantost en forme d’vn grand homme noir,

tantost en forme de bouc, & pour plus grand hommage, ils luy offrent

des chandelles, qui rendent vne flamme de couleur bleüe. _Discours des

Sorciers_, p. 131.

[89]

εἴθε λύρα καλὴ γενοίμην ἐλεφαντίνη,

καί με καλοὶ παίδες φέροειν Διονύσιον ες χορόν.

(Fain would I be a fair lyre of ivory, and fair boys carrying me to

Dionysus’ choir.)

[90] Sequuntur his choree quas in girum agitant semper tamen ad læuam

progrediendo. _Compendium Maleficarum_, I. xiii.

[91] Les Sorciers, dansent & font leurs danses en rond doz contre doz.

[92] Quelquefois, mais rarement, ils dansent deux à deux, & par fois l’vn

çà & l’autre là, & tousiours en confusion.

[93] On n’y dançoit que trois sortes de bransles.... La premiere c’est à

la Bohemienne.... La seconde c’est à sauts: ces deux sont en rond. Sir

John Davies in his _Orchestra or A Poeme on Dauncing_, London, 18mo,

1596, describes the seven movements of the Cransles (Crawls) as:

_Upward_ and _downeward_, _forth_ and _back againe_,

_To this side_ and _to that_, and _turning round_.

[94] II. 1.

[95] Sinclar, _Satan’s Invisible World Discovered_, III.

[96] _Newes from Scotland_,(1592).

[97] Tota turba colluuiesque pessima fescenninos in honorem dæmonum

cantat obscenissimos. Hæc cantat _Harr, harr_; illa Diabolo, Diabolo,

salta huc, salta illuc; altera lude hic, lude illic; alia Sabaoth,

Sabaoth, &c.; immo clamoribus, sibilis, ululatibus, propicinis furit ac

debacchatur. _Dæmonomagia_, Quæstio x.

[98] Hi habent mensas appositas & instructas accumbunt & incipiunt

conuiuari de cibis quos Dæmon suppeditat uel iis quos singuli attulere,

_Compendium Maleficarum_, I. xiii.

[99] Les liures disent que les sorciers mangent au Sabbat de ce que

le Diable leur a appresté: mais bien souue̅t il ne s’y trouue que des

viandes qu’ils ont porté eux mesmes. Parfois il y a plusieurs tables

seruies de bons viures & d’autres fois de tres meschans. “Les Sorciers

... banquettent & se festoient,” remarks Boguet, “leur banquets estans

composez de plusieurs sortes de viandes, selon les lieux & qualitez des

personnes.” _Tableau_, p. 197. _Discours des Sorciers_, p. 135.

[100] Sinclar, _Invisible World Discovered_, Relation XXIX.

[101] Ils banquêtent, dressant trois tables selon les trois diversités

des gens susnommés. Ceux qui ont la charge du pain, ils portent le pain

qu’ils font de blé dérobé aux aires invisiblement en divers lieux. Ils

boivent de la malvoisie, pour eschauffer la chair à la luxure, que les

députés portent, la dérobant des caves où elle se trouve. Ils y mangent

ordinairement de la chair des petits enfants que les députés cuisent à

la Synagogue et parfois les y portent tout vifs, les dérobant à leurs

maisons quand ils trouvent la commodité. Père Sébastien Michaëlis, O.P.

_Histoire admirable de la possession_, 1613.

[102] On y boit aussi du vin, et le plus souvent de l’eau.

[103] Conuiuant de cibis a se uel a dæmone allatis, interdum

delicatissimis, et interdum insipidis ex infantibus occisis aut

cadaueribus exhumatis, præcedente tamen benedictione mensæ tali coetu

digna. _Salamanticenses_, Tr. xxi. c. 11. P. 11. n. 179.

[104] Uinum eorum præterea instar atri atque insinceri sanguinis in

sordido aliquo scipho epulonibus solitum propinari. Nullam fere copiam

rerum illic deesse afferunt præterqua̅ panis et salis. Addit Dominica

Isabella apponi etiam humanas carnes. _Compendium Maleficarum_, I. xiii.

[105] _De la Démonomanie_, III. 5.

[106] _Dæmonomagio_, Quæstio vii.

[107] Il n’y a jamais sel en ces repas. _Discours des Sorciers_.

[108] On se met à table, où il n’a iamais veu de sel.

Shadwell draws attention to this detail: _The Lancashire Witches_, II,

the Sabbat scene; where Mother Demdike says:

See our Provisions ready here,

To which no Salt must e’er come near!

[109] Père Sébastien Michaëlis, O.P. _Histoire admirable_, 1613.

[110] Isti uero qui expressam professionem fecerunt, reddunt etiam

expressum cultum adorationis dæmoni per solemnia sacrificia, quæ ipsi

faciunt diabolo, imitantes in omnibus diuinum cultum, cum paramentis,

luminaribus, et aliis huiusmodi, ac precibus quibusdam et orationibus

quibus instructi sunt, adeo ipsum adorant et collaudant continue, sicut

nos uerum Creatorem adoramus. _De Sortilegiis_, Liber II. c. iii. n. 6.

[111] _The Wonders of the Invisible World_. A Hortatory Address, p. 81.

[112] J. Hutchinson, _History of Massachusett’s Bay_, II. p. 55. (1828.)

[113] _Euchologion_ of the Orthodox Church, ed. Venice, 1898, p. 63.

[114] Baissac, _Les grands jours de la Sorcellerie_ (1890), p. 391.

[115] Calmeil, _De la folie_, I. p. 344.

[116] Sébastien Michaëlis, _Histoire admirable_. 1613. Translated as

_Admirable Historie_. London, 1613.

[117] Desmarest, _Histoire de Magdelaine Bavent_. Paris. 4to. 1652.

[118] For full details see François Ravaisson, _Archives de la Bastille_,

Paris, 1873, where the original depositions are given.

[119] _Là-Bas_ appeared in the _Echo de Paris_, 1890-1.

[120] _Tableau_, p. 401. For the full account of these ceremonies I have

chiefly relied upon Guazzo; Boguet, _Discours_, XXII, 10; De Lancre, pp.

86, 122, 126, 129; and Görres, _Mystique_, V. pp. 224-227. It hardly

seems necessary to give particular citations here for each circumstance.

[121] De Lancre, _Tableau_, IV. 4.

[122] _Corriere Nazionale di Torino_, Maggio. 1895.

[123] De Lancre, _Tableau_, p. 401.

[124] Görres, _Mystique_, V. p. 230.

[125] Roland Brévannes, _L’Orgie Satanique_, IV. Le Sabbat, p. 122.

[126] _Discours_, p. 141.

[127] S. Caleb, _Messes Noires_, p. 153.

[128] _Confession faicte par Messire Loys Gaufridi_, A Aix. MVCXI.

[129] A vne Chasuble qui a vne croix; mais qu’elle n’a que trois barres.

[130] Le Diable en mesme temps pisse dans vn trou à terre, & fait de

l’eau beniste de son vrine, de laquelle celuy, qui dit la messe, arrouse

tous les assistants auec vn asperges noir. Boguet, _Discours_, p. 141.

[131] ... lors que Tramesabot disoit la Messe, & qu’auant la commencer

li iettoit de l’eau beniste qui estoit faicte de pissat, & faisoit

la reverence de l’espaule, & disoit _Asperges Diaboli_. De Lancre,

_L’Incredulité_.

[132] L’eau beniste est iaune comme du pissat d’asne, & qu’apres qu’on la

iettée on dit la Messe.

[133] Michaëlis _Histoire admirable_, 1613. Miss Murray, _The

Witch-Cult_, p. 149, suggests that this sprinkling was “a fertility

rite”! An astounding theory. This blasphemy, of course, alludes to the

curse of the Jews, S. Matthew xxvii. 25.

[134] Que le Diable dit le Sermo au Sabbat, mais qu’on n’entend ce qu’il

dit, parce qu’il parle com̅e en gro̅dant. Which suggests the wearing of a

mask, or, at least, a voice purposely disguised.

[135] Dit qu’il a veu bailler au Sabbat du pain benist & de l’encens,

mais il ne sentoit bon comme celuy de l’Eglise.

[136] So in the Orleans trial Gentil le Clerc confessed that the Devil

“tourne le dos à l’Autel quand il veut leuer l’Hostie & le Calice, qui

sont noirs.”

[137] Silvain Nevillon, (1614-1615). Dit aussi auoir veu des Sorciers &

Sorcieres qui apportoient des Hosties au Sabbat, lesquelles elles auoient

gardé lors qu’on leur auoit baillé à communier à l’Eglise.

[138] Presumably S. Cæsarius of Arles, 470-543, who incidentally was

famous for eradicating the last traces of Pagan superstitions and

practices. He imposed the penalty of excommunication upon all those who

consulted augurs and wore heathen amulets. The Gnostics were especially

notorious for their employment of such periapts, talismans, and charms.

[139] J. F. Bladé, _Quatorze superstitions populaires de la Gascogne_,

pp. 16 _sqq._ Agen. 1883.

[140] _Decisions._ Edinburgh, 1759.

[141] Ie laisse à penser si l’on n’exerce pas là toutes les especes de

lubricités veu encor que les abominations, qui firent foudre & abismer

Sodome & Gomorrhe, y font fort communes. Boguet, _Discours_, c. xxii. p.

137.

[142] _Histoire admirable_, 1613.

[143] Finalement, ils paillardent ensemble: le dimanche avec les diables

succubes ou incubes; le jeudi, commettent la sodomie; le samedi la

bestialité; les autres jours à la voie naturelle.

[144] The Louviers process lasted four years, 1643-7.

[145] Après la Messe on dance, puis on couche ensemble, hommes auec

hommes, & auec des femmes. Puis on se met à table.... Dit qu’il a cognu

des hommes & s’est accouplé auec eux; qu’il auoit vne couppe on gondolle

par le moyen de laquelle toutes les femmes le suiuoient pour y boire.

[146] Apres la danse finie les diables se couchere̅t auecques elles, &

eure̅t leur co̅pagnie.

[147] ... grand nombre d’hommes & femmes furent bruslees en la ville

d’Arras, accusees les vns par les autres, & co̅fesserent qu’elles

estoient la nuict transportees aux danses, & puis qu’ils se couploient

auecques les diables, qu’ils adoroient en figure humaine.

[148] ... toutes generalement sans exception, confessoient que le diable

auoit copulation charnelle auec elles, apres leur auoir fait renoncer

Dieu & leur religion.

[149] ... c’est à sçauoir que les diables, ta̅t qu’elles auoient esté

Sorcieres, auoie̅t eu copulation auec elles. Henry de Cologne confirmant

ceste opinion dit, qu’il y a rien plus vulgaire en Alemaigne.

[150] ... quod sacrificia dabant dæmonibus in animalibus uiuis, quæ

diuidebant membratim et offerebant distribuendo in inferne quadruuiis

cuidam dæmoni qui se facit appellari Artis Filium ex pauperioribus

inferni. _Dame Alice Kyteler_, ed. T. Wright. Camden Society. 1843. pp.

1-2.

[151] _Highland Papers_, III. p. 18.

[152] _Æneid_, VI. 243-251.

[153] Horace, _Sermonum_, I. viii.

[154] _Dictionnaire Infernal_, ed. 1863, p. 590.

[155] Salgues, _Des erreurs et des prejugés_, I. p. 423.

[156] III. 44-45.

[157] Alludit ad Haruspicis officium, qui exta & viscera inspiciebat.

Plinius inquit: _Ex ranæ rubetæ uisceribus; id est, lingua, ossiculo,

licne, corde, mira fieri posse constat, sunt enin plurimis medicaminibus

referta_. Forte intelligit rubetam uel bufonem, indicans se non esse

ueneficum, nec rubetarum extis uti ad uenefica. Cf. also Pliny, _Historia

Naturalis_, XXXII. 5.

[158] Ravaisson, _Archives de la Bastille_, VI. p. 295 _et alibi_. The

interrogatories of these scandals may be found in volumes IV and V of

this work.

[159] L. Strackerjan, _Aberglaube und Sagen aus dem Herzogthum Oldenburg_

(1867), I. 70.

[160] _Königsberger Hartung’sche Zeitung_, 1866. No. 9.

[161] V. Fossel. _Volksmedicin und medicinischer Aberglaube in

Steiermark_, Graz, 1886.

[162] U. Jahn, _Zauber mit Menschenblut und anderen Teilen des

menschlichen Körpers_, 1888.

[163] A. Löwenstimm, _Aberglaube und Strafecht_, (_Die Volksmedizin_),

1897.

[164] V. Fossel, _Volksmedicin_, _ut supra_.

[165] Adrian Kembter, C.R.P., writing in 1745 enumerates 52 instances,

and his last is dated 1650. This number might be doubled, and extends

until the present century. H. C. Lee, in an article, _El santo nino de la

Guardia_, has signally failed to disprove the account. See the series of

forty-four articles in the _Osservatore Cattolico_ March and April, 1892,

Nos. 8438-8473.

[166] _Le Temps_, Paris, 1 Feb. and 23 March, 1892.

[167] _Fetichism in West Africa_, New York, 1904.

[168] De Lancre, _Tableau_, p. 154.

CHAPTER V

THE WITCH IN HOLY WRIT

In the course of the Holy Scriptures there occur a great number of

words and expressions which are employed in connexion with witchcraft,

divination, and demonology, and of these more than one authority has

made detailed and particular study. Some terms are of general import,

one might even venture to say vague and not exactly defined, some are

directly specific: of some phrases the signification is plain and

accepted; concerning others, scholars are still undecided and differ more

or less widely amongst themselves. Yet it is noteworthy that from the

very earliest period the attitude of the inspired writers towards magic

and related practices is almost wholly condemnatory and uncompromisingly

hostile. The vehement and repeated denunciations launched against the

professors of occult sciences and the initiate in foreign esoteric

mysteries do not, moreover, seem to be based upon any supposition of

fraud but rather upon the “abomination” of the magic in itself, which

is recognized as potent for evil and able to wreak mischief upon life

and limb. It is obvious, for example, that the opponents of Moses, the

sorcerers[1] Jannes and Mambres, were masters of no mean learning and

power, since when, in the presence of Pharaoh, Aaron’s rod became a live

serpent, they also and their mob of disciples “fecerunt per incantationes

Ægyptiacas et arcana quædam similiter,” casting down their rods, which

were changed into a mass of writhing snakes. They were able also to bring

up frogs upon the land, but it was past their wit to drive them away.

We have here, however, a clear acknowledgement of the reality of magic

and its dark possibilities, whilst at the same time prominence is given

to the fact that when it contests with the miraculous power divinely

bestowed upon Moses it fails hopelessly and completely. The serpent,

which was Aaron’s rod, swallows all the other serpents. The swarms of

mosquitoes and gadflies which Aaron caused to rise in myriads from the

dust the native warlocks could not produce, nay, they were constrained

to cry “Digitus Dei est hic”; whilst a little later they were unable to

protect even their own bodies from the pest of blains and swelling sores.

None the less a supernatural power was possessed by Jannes and Mambres

as truly as by Moses, although not to the same extent, and derived from

another, in fact, from an opposite and antagonistic source.

Even more striking is the episode of Balaam, who dwelt at Pethor, a

city of Mesopotamia (the Pitru of the cuneiform texts), and who was

summoned thence by Balak, King of Moab, to lay a withering curse upon

the Israelites, encamped after their victory over the Amorrhites at the

very confines of his territory. The royal messengers come to Balaam “with

the rewards of divination in their hand,” a most illuminating detail,

for it shows that already the practice of magical arts is rewarded with

gifts of great value.[2] In fact when Balaam refuses, although with

reluctance, to accompany the first embassy, princes of the highest rank

are then sent to him with injunctions to offer him rank and wealth or

whatsoever he may care to ask. “I will promote thee to very great honour,

and I will do whatsoever thou sayest unto me; come, therefore, and curse

this people,” are the king’s actual words. After great difficulties, for

Balaam is, at first, forbidden to go and only wins his way on condition

that he undertakes to do what he is commanded and to speak no more than

he is inspired to say, the seer commences his journey and is met by

the king at a frontier town, and by him taken up “unto the high places

of Baal,” to the sacred groves upon the hill-tops, where seven mystic

altars are built, and a bullock and a ram offered upon each. Balaam then

senses the imminent presence of God, and withdraws swiftly apart to some

secret place where “God met” him. He returns to the scene of sacrifice

and forthwith blesses the Israelites. Balak in consternation and dismay

hurries him to the crest of Pisgah (Phasga), and the same ceremonies are

performed. But again Balaam pours forth benisons upon the people. A third

attempt is made, and this time was chosen the summit of Peor (Phogor), a

peculiarly sacred sanctuary, the centre of the local cult of Baal Peor,

whose ancient worship comprised a ritual of most primitive obscenity.[3]

Again the sevenfold sacrifice is offered upon seven altars, and this

time Balaam deliberately resists the divine control, a vain endeavour,

since he passes into trance, and utters words of ineffable benediction

gazing down the dim avenues of futurity to the glorious vision of the

Madonna, Stella Jacob, and her Son, the Sceptre of Israel. Beating his

clenched hands together in an access of ungovernable fury the choused and

exasperated king incontinently dismisses his guest.

It must be remarked that throughout the whole of this narrative, the

details of which are as interesting as they are significant, there is on

the part of the writer a complete recognition of the claims put forth by

Balaam and so amply acknowledged and appreciated by Balak. Balaam was a

famous sorcerer, and one, moreover, who knew and could launch the mystic

Word of Power with deadly effect. Among the early Arabs as among the

Israelites the magic spell, the Word of Blessing or the Curse, played a

prominent part. In war, the poet, by cursing the enemy in rhythmic runes,

rendered services not inferior to the heroism of the warrior himself.

So the Jews of Medina used to bring into their synagogues images of

their hated enemy Malik b. al-Aglam; and at these effigies they hurled

maledictions each time they met. The reality of Balaam’s power is clearly

the key-note of the Biblical account. Else why should his services be

transferred to the cause of Israel? Balak’s greeting to the seer is no

empty compliment but vitally true: “I wot that he whom thou blessest is

blessed, and he whom thou cursest is cursed.” Not impertinent is the

bitter denunciation in the song of Deborah, Judges v. 23, “Curse ye me

Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants

thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord against the

mighty!” (A.V.) Belief in the potency of the uttered word has existed at

all times and in all places, and yet continues to exist everywhere to-day.

Although Balaam prophesied it must be borne in mind that he was not a

prophet in the Scriptural sense of the term; he was a soothsayer, a

wizard; the Vulgate has _hariolus_,[4] which is derived from the Sanskrit

_hira_, entrails, and equivalent to _haruspex_. This term originally

denoted an Etruscan diviner who foretold future events by an inspection

of the entrails of sacrificial victims. It was from the Etruscans

that this practice was introduced to the Romans. It is probable that

Balaam employed the seven bullocks and rams in this way, the technical

_extispicium_, a method of inquiry and forecasting which seems to have

been almost universal, although the exact manner in which the omens

were read differed among the several peoples and at various times. It

persisted, none the less, until very late, and indeed it is resorted to,

so it has been said, by certain occultists even at the present day. It is

known to have been practised by Catherine de’ Medici, and it is closely

connected with the dark Voodoo worship of Jamaica and Hayti. S. Thomas,

it is true, has spoken of Balaam as a prophet, but the holy doctor

hastens to add “a prophet of the devil.” The learned Cornelius à Lapide,

glossing upon Numbers xxii and xxiii writes: “It is clear that Balaam

was a prophet, not of God, but of the Devil.... He was a magician, and

he sought for a conference with his demon to take counsel with him.”[5]

He is of opinion that the seven altars were erected in honour of the

Lords of the Seven Planets. Seven is, of course, the perfect number, the

mystic number, even as three; and all must be done by odd numbers. The

woman in Vergil who tries to call back her estranged lover Daphnis by

potent incantations cries: _numero deus impare gaudet_. (Heaven loves

unequal numbers.) Eclogue viii. 75 (_Pharmaceutria_). S. Augustine, S.

Ambrose, and Theodoret consider that when Balaam on the first occasion

withdrew hastily saying “Peradventure the Lord will come to meet me,” he

expected to meet a demon, his familiar. But “God met Balaam.” The very

precipitation and disorder seem to point to the design of the sorcerer,

for as in the Divine Liturgy all is done with due dignity, grace, and

comeliness, so in the functions of black magic all is hurried, ugly, and

terrible.

One of the most striking episodes in the Old Testament is concerned with

necromancy, the appearance of Samuel in the cave or hut at Endor. Saul,

on the eve of a tremendous battle with the Philistines, is much dismayed

and almost gives away to a complete nervous collapse as he sees the

overwhelming forces of the ruthless foe. To add to his panic, when he

consulted the Divine Oracles, no answer was returned, “neither by dreams,

nor by Urim, nor by prophets.” And although he had in the earlier years

of his reign shown himself a determined represser of Witchcraft, in his

dire extremity he catches at any straw, and bids his servants seek out

some woman “that hath a familiar spirit,” and his servants said to him,

“Behold there is a woman that hath a familiar spirit at Endor,” which is

a miserable hamlet on the northern slope of a hill, lying something south

of Mount Tabor.

The phrase here used, rendered by the Vulgate “pytho” (Quærite mihi

mulierem habentem pythonem) and by the Authorized Version “familiar

spirit,” is in the original _’ôbh_,[6] which signifies the departed

spirit evoked, and also came to stand for the person controlling such a

spirit and divining by its aid. The Witch of Endor is described as the

possessor of an _’ôbh_. The LXX. translates this word by ἐγγαστράμυθος,

which means ventriloquist, either because the real actors thought that

the magician’s alleged communication with the spirit was a mere deception

to impose upon the inquirer who is tricked by the voice being thrown

into the ground and being of strange quality—a view which mightily

commends itself to Lenormant [7] and the sceptical Renan[8] but which

is quite untenable—or rather because of the belief common in antiquity

that ventriloquism was not a natural faculty but due to the temporary

obsession of the medium by a spirit. In this connexion the prophet

Isaias has a remarkable passage: Quærite a pythonibus, et a diuinis qui

strident in incantationibus suis. (Seek unto them that have familiar

spirits, and unto wizards that peep and that mutter. _A.V._) Many Greek

and Latin poets attribute a peculiar and distinctive sound to the voices

of spirits. Homer (_Iliad_, XXIII, 101; _Odyssey_, XXIV, 5, and 9) uses

τρίξειν, which is elsewhere found of the shrill cry or chirping of

partridges, young swallows, locusts, mice, bats,[9] and of such other

sounds as the creaking of a door, the sharp crackling of a thing burned

in a fire. Vergil _Æneid_, III, 39, speaks of the cry of Polydorus from

his grave as _gemitus lacrimabilis_, and the clamour of the spirits in

Hades is _uox exigua_. Horace also in his description of the midnight

Esbat on the Esquiline describes the voice as _triste et acutum;_

(_Sermonum_, I. viii, 40-1):

singula quid memorem, quo pacto alterna loquentes

umbrae cum Sagana resonarent triste et acutum.

Statius, _Thebais_, VII, 770, has “stridunt animæ,” upon which Kaspar von

Barth, the famous sixteenth-century German scholar, annotates “Homericum

hoc est qui corporibus excedentes animas stridere excogitauit.” So in

Shakespeare’s well-known lines, _Hamlet_ I, 1:

the sheeted dead

Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.

When he had been informed of this witch Saul, accordingly, completely

divested himself of the insignia of royalty and in a close disguise

accompanied only by two of his most trusted followers similarly muffled

in cloaks, he painfully made his way at dead of night to her remote and

squalid hovel. He eagerly requested her to exercise her powers, and to

raise the spirit of the person whom he should name. At first she refused,

since some years before the laws had been stringently enforced and the

penalty of death awaited all sorcerers and magicians. Not unreasonably

she feared that these mysterious strangers might be laying a trap for

her, to imperil her life. But the concealed king persuaded her, and bound

himself by a mighty oath that she should come to no harm. Whereupon she

consented to evoke the soul of the prophet Samuel, as he desired. The

charm commenced, and after the vision of various familiars—the woman

said: Deos uidi ascendentes de terra—and S. Gregory of Nyssa explains

these as demons, τὰ φαντάσματα,—Samuel appeared amid circumstances of

great terror and awe, and in the same moment the identity of her visitant

was recognized (we are not informed how) by the sybil.[10] In a paroxysm

of rage and fear the haggard crone turned to him and shrieked out: “Why

hast thou deceived me? For thou art Saul.” The king, however, tremblingly

reassured her for her own safety, and feeling that he was confronted

by no earthly figure—he could not see the phantom, although he sensed

a presence from beyond the grave—he asked: “What form is he of?” And

when the beldame, to whom alone the prophet was visible, described the

spirit: “An old man cometh up, and he is covered with a mantle,” Saul at

once recognized Samuel, and fell prostrate upon the ground, whilst the

apparition spake his swiftly coming doom.

[Illustration: PLATE VI

THE WITCH OF ENDOR.

[_face p. 178_]

Here we have a detailed scene of necromancy proper. There are, it

is true, some remarkable, and perhaps unusual, features: the witch

alone sees the phantom, but Saul instantly knows who it is from her

description; he directly addresses Samuel, and he hears the prediction of

the dead prophet. The whole narrative undoubtedly bears the impress of

actuality and truth.

There are several interpretations of these incidents. In the first place

some writers have denied the reality of the vision, and so it is claimed

that the witch deceived Saul by skilful trickery. This hardly seems

possible. It is not likely that she would have run so grave a risk as the

exercise, or pretended exercise, of magical arts must entail were she

a mere charlatan; an accomplice of remarkably quick wit and invention

would have been necessary to carry out the details of the plot; it is

surely incredible that they should have ventured upon so uncompromising a

denunciation of the king and have foretold so evil an end to his house.

In fact the whole tenor of the story conflicts with this explanation,

which is not allowed by the Fathers. Theodoret, it is true, inclines

to suppose that some deception was practised, but he hesitates to

maintain an unequivocal opinion in the matter. In his _Quæstiones in I

Regum_ Cap. xxviii he asks πῶς τὰ κατὰ τὴν ἐγγαστρίμυθον νοητέον;[11]

and says that some think that the witch actually evoked Samuel, others

believe the Devil took the likeness of the prophet. The first opinion he

characterizes as impious, the second foolish.

S. Jerome, whose authority would, of course, be entirely conclusive, does

not perhaps pronounce definitely; but his comments sufficiently show, I

think, that he regarded the apparition as being really Samuel. In his

tractate _In Esaiam_, III, vii, he writes: “Most authors think that a

clear sign was given Saul from the earth itself and from the very depths

of Hades when he saw Samuel evoked by incantations and magic spells.”[12]

And again, _In Ezechielem_, Lib. IV; xiii, the holy doctor, speaking of

witches, has: “they are inspired by an evil spirit. The Hebrews say that

they are well versed in baleful crafts, necromancy and soothsayings,

such as was the hag who seemed to raise up the soul of Samuel.”[13]

Some authors directly attribute this appearance of Samuel to an evil

spirit, who took the form of the prophet in order to dishearten Saul

and tempt him to despair. Thus S. Gregory of Nyssa in his letter _De

pythonissa ad Theodosium_[14] says that the Devil deceived the witch,

who thus in her turn deceived the king. S. Basil expressly lays down

(_In Esaiam_, VIII. 218): “They were demons who assumed the appearance

of Samuel.”[15] And he conjectures that, inasmuch as the denunciation

of Saul was strictly true in every detail, the demons having heard

the sentence delivered by God merely reported it. Among the Latins

Tertullian, more than a century before, had written: “And I believe that

evil spirits can deceive many by their lies; for a lying spirit was

allowed to feign himself to be the shade of Samuel.”[16]

The preponderance of opinion, however, is decidedly in favour of a

literal and exact understanding of the event, that it was, in effect,

Samuel who appeared to the guilty monarch and foretold his end. Origen

argues upon these lines, basing his reasons upon the plain statements

of Holy Writ: “But it is distinctly stated that Saul knew it was

Samuel.”[17] And later he adds: “The Scripture cannot lie. And the words

of Scripture are: And the woman saw Samuel.”[18] Elsewhere when treating

of evil spirits he precisely states: “And that souls have their abiding

place I have made known to you from the evocation by the witch of Samuel,

when Saul requested her to divine.”[19] S. Ambrose also says: “Even after

his death Samuel, as Holy Scripture informs us, prophesied of what was to

come.”[20] We have further the overwhelming witness of S. Augustine, who

in more than one place discusses the question at some length, and decides

that the phantom evoked by the sibyl was really and truly the soul of the

prophet Samuel. Thus in that important treatise _De Doctrina Christiana_,

commenced in 397 and finally revised for issue in 427, he has: “The shade

of Samuel, long since dead, truly foretold what was to come unto King

Saul.”[21] Whilst a passage in the even more famous and weighty _De Cura

pro mortuis gerenda_, written in 421, asserts: “For the prophet Samuel,

who was dead, revealed the future to King Saul, who was yet alive.”[22]

Josephus believed the apparition to have been summoned by the witch’s

necromantic powers, for in his _Jewish Antiquities_, VI, xiv, 2, when

dealing with the story of Endor, he chronicles: “[Saul] bade her bring up

to him the soul of Samuel. She, not knowing who Samuel was, called him

out of Hades,”[23] a remarkable testimony.

Throughout the whole of the Old Testament the sin of necromancy is

condemned in the strongest terms, but the very reiteration of this ban

shows that none the less evocation of the dead was extensively and

continuously practised, albeit in the most clandestine and secret manner.

The Mosaic law denounces such arts again and again: “Go not aside after

wizards, neither ask any thing of soothsayers, to be defiled by them: I

am the Lord your God” (Leviticus xix. 31); “The soul that shall go aside

after magicians and soothsayers, and shall commit fornication with them,

I will set my face against that soul, and destroy it out of the midst of

its people” (Leviticus xx. 6). Even more explicit in its details is the

following prohibition: “Neither let there be found among you any one ...

that consulteth soothsayers, or observeth dreams and omens, neither let

there be any wizard, nor charmer, nor any one that consulteth pythonic

spirits, or fortune tellers, or that seeketh the truth from the dead. For

the Lord abhorreth all these things” (Deuteronomy xviii. 10-12). Hence it

is obvious that the essential malice of the sin lay in the fact that it

was _lèse-majesté_ against God, such as is also the sin of heresy.[24]

This is, moreover, clearly brought out in the fact that the temporal

penalty was death. “A man, or woman, in whom there is a pythonical

or divining spirit, dying, let them die” (Leviticus xx. 27). And the

famous statute, Exodus xxii. 18, expressly says: “Wizards thou shalt not

suffer to live.” Nevertheless, necromancy persisted, and on occasion,

such as during the reign of Manasses, thirteenth king of Juda (692-638

B.C.),[25] it no longer lurked in dark corners and obscene hiding-holes,

but flaunted its foul abomination unabashed in the courts of the palace

and at noon before the eyes of the superstitious capital. In the days of

this monarch divination was openly used, omens observed, pythons publicly

appointed, whilst soothsayers multiplied “to do evil before the Lord, and

to provoke Him” (4 Kings [2 Kings] xxi. 6). The ghastly rites of human

sacrifice were revived, and it was common knowledge that the sovereign

himself, upon the slightest and most indifferent pretexts, resorted to

_extispicium_, the seeking of omens from the yet palpitating entrails

of boys devoted to this horrid purpose. “Manasses shed also very much

innocent blood, till he filled Jerusalem up to the mouth” (4 Kings [2

Kings] xxi. 16). We may parallel the foul sorceries of the Jewish king

with the detailed confession of Gilles de Rais, who at his trial “related

how he had stolen away children, detailed all his foul cajolements,

his hellish excitations, his frenzied murders, his ruthless rapes and

ravishments: obsessed by the morbid vision of his poor pitiful victims,

he described at length their long-drawn agonies or swift torturings;

their piteous cries and the death-rattle in their throats; he avowed that

he had wallowed in their warm entrails; he confessed that he had torn

out their hearts through large gaping wounds, as a man might pluck ripe

fruit.”[26] The demonolatry of the sixth century before Christ is the

same as that of fourteen hundred years after the birth of Our Lord.

As has been previously noticed, Balaam employed bullocks and rams for

_extispicium_, and nine centuries later, in the book of Ezechiel (xxi.

21), Esarhaddon is represented as looking at the liver of an animal

offered in sacrifice with a view to divination. “For the king of Babylon

stood in the highway, at the head of two ways, seeking divination,

shuffling arrows: he inquired of the idols, and consulted entrails. On

his right hand was the divination of Jerusalem, to set battering rams, to

open the mouth in slaughter.” The mode of sortilege by arrows, belomancy,

to which allusion is here made was extensively practised among the

Chaldeans, as also by the Arabs. Upon this passage S. Jerome comments:

“He shall stand in the highway, and consult the oracle after the manner

of his nation, that he may cast arrows into a quiver, and mix them

together, being written upon or marked with the names of each people,

that he may see whose arrow will come forth, and which city he ought

first to attack.”

Among the three hundred and sixty idols which stood round about the Caaba

of Mecca, and which were all destroyed by Mohammed when he captured the

city in the eighth year of the Hejira, was the statue of a man, made of

agate, who held in one hand seven arrows such as the pagan Arabs used in

divination. This figure, which, it is said, anciently represented the

patriarch Abraham, was regarded with especial awe and veneration.

The arrows employed by the early Arabs for magical practices were more

generally only three in number. They were carefully preserved in the

temple of some idol, before whose shrine they had been consecrated. Upon

one of them was inscribed “My Lord hath commanded me”; upon another “My

Lord hath forbidden me”; and the third was blank. If the first was drawn

the inquirer looked upon it as a propitious omen promising success in the

enterprise; if the second were drawn he augured failure; if the third,

all three were mixed again and another trial was made. These divining

arrows seem always to have been consulted by the Arabs before they

engaged in any important undertaking, as, for example, when a man was

about to go upon a particular journey, to marry, to commence some weighty

business.

In certain cases and in many countries rods were used instead of arrows.

Small sticks were marked with occult signs, thrown into a vessel and

drawn out; or, it might be, cast into the air, the direction they

took and the position in which they fell being carefully noted. This

practice is known as rhabdomancy. The LXX, indeed, Ezechiel xxi. 21, has

ῥαβδομαντεία not βελομαντεία, and rhabdomancy is mentioned by S. Cyril of

Alexandria.

In the Koran, chapter V, The Table or The Chapter of Contracts, “divining

arrows” are said to be “an abomination of the work of Satan,” and the

injunction is given “therefore avoid them that ye may prosper.”

It is noticeable that in the early Biblical narrative one form of

divination is mentioned, if not with approval, at any rate without overt

reproach. Upon the occasion of the second journey of Jacob’s sons to

Egypt to buy corn in the time of famine, Joseph gave orders that their

sacks were to be filled with food, that each man’s money was to be put

in the mouth of his sack, but that in the sack of Benjamin was also to

be concealed the “cup, the silver cup.” And the next morning when they

had set out homewards and were gone a little way out of the city they

were overtaken by a band of Joseph’s servants under the conduct of his

steward who arrested their progress and accused them of the theft of

the cup: “Is not this it in which my lord drinketh, and whereby indeed

he divineth? Ye have done evil in so doing” (_A.V._). The Vulgate has:

“Scyphus quem furati estis, ipse est in quo bibit dominus meus et in quo

augurari solet: pessimam rem fecistis” (Genesis xliv. 5). And later when

they are brought back in custody and led into the presence of Joseph

he asks them: “Wot ye not that such a man as I can certainly divine?”

Vulgate: “An ignoratis quod non sit similis mei in augurandi scientia?”

In the first place it cannot be for a moment supposed that Joseph’s

claim, which here he so publicly and so emphatically states, to be

a diviner of no ordinary powers was a mere device for the occasion.

From the prominence given to the cup in the story it is clear that his

steward regarded it as a vessel of especial value and import, dight with

mysterious properties.

This cup was used for that species of divination known as hydromantia,

a practice almost universal in antiquity and sufficiently common at the

present day. The seer, or in some cases the inquirer, by gazing fixedly

into a pool or basin of still water will see therein reflected as in a

mirror a picture of that which it is sought to know. Strabo, XVI, 2,

39, speaking of the Persians, writes: παρὰδε τοῖς πέρσαις οἱ Μάγοι καὶ

νεκυομάντεις καὶ ἔτι οἱ λεγόμενοι λεκανομάντεις καὶ ὑδρομάντεις. King

Numa, according to one very ancient tradition, divined by seeing gods in

a clear stream. “For Numa himself, not being instructed by any prophet

or Angel of God, was fain to fall to hydromancy: making his gods (or

rather his devils) to appear in water, and instruct him in his religious

institutions. Which kind of divination, says Varro, came from Persia and

was used by Numa and afterwards by Pythagoras, wherein they used blood

also and called forth spirits infernal. Necromancy, the Greeks call it,

but necromancy or hydromancy, whether you like, there it is that the dead

seem to speak” (_S. Augustine De Ciuitate Dei_. VII. 35).[27]

Apuleius in his _De Magia_,[28] quoting from Varro, says: “Trallibus de

euentu Mithridatici belli magica percontatione consultantibus puerum

in aqua simulacrum Mercuri contemplantem, quæ futura erant, centum

sexaginta uersibus cecinisse.” In Egypt to-day the Magic Mirror is

frequently consulted. A boy is engaged to gaze into a splash of water,

or it may be ink or some other dark liquid poured into the palm of the

hand, and therein he will assuredly see pictorially revealed the answers

to those questions put to him. When a theft has been committed the Magic

Mirror is invariably questioned thus. In Scandinavia the country folk,

who had lost anything, would go to a diviner on a Thursday night to see

in a pail of water who it was had robbed them.[29] All the world over

this belief prevails, in Tahiti and among the Hawaiians, in the Malay

Peninsula, in New Guinea, among the Eskimos.

Similar forms of divination are those by things dropped into some liquid,

a precious stone or rich amulet is cast into a cup, and the rings

formed on the surface of the contents were held to predict the future.

Again warm wax or molten lead is poured into a vessel of cold water,

and significant letters of the alphabet may be spelled out or objects

discerned from the shapes this wax or lead assumes; or again, the empty

tea-cup is tilted and from the leaves, their size, shape, and the manner

in which they lie, prognostications are made. This is common in England,

Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, Lithuania, whilst in Macedonia coffee-dregs

are employed in the same manner.

But whether the seer be Hebrew patriarch or Roman king and the divination

dignified by some occult name, Ceromancy (the melting of wax),

Lecanomancy (basins of water), Oinomancy (the lees of wine), or whether

it be some old plaid-shawled grandam by her cottage fire peering at the

leaves of her afternoon tea, the object is the same throughout the ages,

for all systems of divination are merely so many methods of obscuring the

outer vision, in order that the inner vision may become open.

As was inevitable hydromantia lent itself to much trickery, and

Hippolytus of Rome, presbyter and antipope (_ob._ _circa_ A.D. 236),

in his important polemic against heretics, _Philosophumena_,[30] IV,

35, explains in detail how persons were elaborately duped by the

pseudo-magicians. A room was prepared, the roof of which was painted blue

to resemble the sky, there was set therein a large vessel full of water

with a glass bottom, immediately under which lay a secret chamber. The

inquirer gazed steadfastly into the water, and the actors walking in the

secret chamber below would seem as though they were figures appearing in

the water itself.