Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/512

 496 WITCHCRAFT. the tail in the shape of a cat.* How the investigators of heresy came to look for such assemblages as a matter of course, and led the accused to embellish them until they assumed nearly the de- velopment of the subsequent Pitches' Sabbat, is seen in the con- fessions of Conrad of Marburg's Luciferans, and in some of those of the Templars. Yet the belief in the night-riders with Diana and Herodias continued, until the latter part of the fifteenth century, to be de- nounced as a heresy, and any one who persisted in retaining it after learning the truth was declared to be an infidel and worse than a pagan. f It was too thoroughly implanted, however, in ancestral popular superstition to be eradicated. In the middle of the thirteenth century the orthodox Dominican, Thomas of Can- timpre, speaks of the demons who, like Diana, transport men from one region to another and delude them into worshipping mortals as gods. Others, he says, carry away women, replacing them with insensible images, who are sometimes buried as though dead. Thus, when the peasant wise- women came to be examined as to their dealings with Satan, they could hardly help, under intolerable torture, from satisfving- their examiners with accounts of their nocturnal flights. Between judge and victim it was easy to build up a coherent story, combining the ancient popular belief with the heretical conventicles, and the time soon came when the confession of a witch was regarded as incomplete without an account of her attendance at the Sabbat, which was the final test of her abandon- ment to Satan. These stories became so universal and so com- plete in all their details that they could not be rejected without discrediting the whole structure of witchcraft. The theory of illusion was manifestly untenable, and demonologists and inquisi- tors were sadly at a loss to reconcile the incontrovertible facts with the denunciations by the Church of such beliefs as heresy. A warm controversy arose. Some held to the old doctrine that the — Gualteri Mapes de Nugis Curialium Dist. i. c. 30. — Alani de Insulis contra Haeret. Lib. i. c. 63. t Concil. Trevirens. ann. 1310 c. 81 (Martene Thes. IV. 257).— Concil. Am- bianens. c. 1410 cap. iii. No. 8 (Martene Ainpl. Coll. VII. 1241).— Eyineric. p. 341. — Alonso de Spina, Fortalic. Fidei, fol. 284. — Albertini Repertor. Inquisit s. v. Xorguince.
 * Pauli Carnot. Vet. Agano. Lib. yi. c. 3. — Adhemari Cabannens. ann. 1022.