Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/510

 494: WITCHCRAFT. spirit ? It is to be taught to all that he who believes such things has lost his faith, and he who has not the true faith is not of God, but the devil." In some way this utterance came to be attributed to a Council of Anquira, which could never be identified ; it was adopted by the canonists and embodied in the successive collec- tions of Regino, Burchard, Ivo, and Gratian — the latter giving it the stamp of unquestioned authority — and it' became known among the doctors as the Cap. Episcopi. The selection of Diana as the presiding genius of these illusor} r assemblages carries the belief back to classical times, when Diana, as the moon, was naturally a night-flyer, and was one of the manifestations of the triform Hec- ate, the favorite patroness of sorcerers. Under the Barbarians, however, her functions were changed. In the sixth century we hear of " the demon whom the peasants call Diana," who vexed a girl and inflicted on her visible stripes, until expelled by St. Caesa- rius of Aries. Diana was the dwmon ium meridianum, and the name is used by John XXII. as synonymous with succubus. In some in- explicable way Bishop Burchard, in the eleventh century, when copying the text, came to add to Diana Herodias, who remained in the subsequent recensions, but Burchard in another passage sub- stitutes as the leader Holda, the Teutonic deity of various aspect, sometimes beneficent to housewives and sometimes a member of Wuotan's Furious Host. In a tract attributed to St. Augustin, but probably ascribable to Hugues de S. Victor, in the twelfth century, the companion of Diana is Minerva, and in some conciliar canons of a later date there appears another being known as Ben- zozia, or Bizazia ; but John of Salisbury, who alludes to the belief as an illustration of the illusions of dreams, speaks only of Herodias as presiding over the feasts for which these midnight assemblages were held. We also meet with Holda, in her beneficent capacity as the mistress of the revels, under the name of the Domina Abun- dia or Dame Habonde. She was the chief of the domincB noc- turnce, who frequented houses at night and were thought to bring abundance of temporal goods. In the year 1211 Gervais of Tilbury shows the growth of this belief in his account of the lamioB or mascce, who flew by night and entered houses, performing mis- chievous pranks rather than malignant crimes, and he prudently avoids deciding whether this is an illusion or not. He also had personal knowledge of women who flew by night in crowds with