Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/520

 501 WITCHCRAFT. resuscitated, when the assembled witches resolved that whoever killed it, and the first who should eat of it, should perish. Such feats as these, it is true, gave the opponents of witchcraft the ad- vantage of arguing that they attributed to Satan the power of God in resuscitating and recreating the dead, and the demonolo- gists, thus hard pushed, were obliged to admit that this portion of the Sabbat was illusory, but they triumphantly added that this only proved the empire of Satan over his dupes.* The killing of unbaptized children was one of the special du- ties imposed by Satan on his servants, which the theologians ex- plained by the fact that they were thus damned for original sin, and, therefore, the Day of Judgment was postponed, as the num- ber of the elect requisite before the destruction of the world is thus more tardily completed. At a little town near Basle a witch who was burned confessed that while acting as midwife she had killed more than forty infants by thrusting a needle into the supe- rior fontanelle. Another, of the diocese of Strassburg, had thus disposed of innumerable children, when she was detected by acci- dentally letting fall the arm of a new-born child while passing the gate of a town in which she had been performing her functions. Witch mid wives, when they abstained from this, were in the habit of dedicating to Satan the babes whom they delivered. It was doubtful whether the infants were thus in reality surrendered to Satan, but at least they were subjected to his influence, and likely to grow up witches. This, and dedication by witch mothers, ex- plain the fact that girls even of eight and ten years of age were Teut. Mythol. III. 1059. — Rapp, Die Hexenprocesse and ibre Gegner aus Tyrol, Innsbruck, 1874, p. 146. — P. Vayra, Le Streghe nel Canavese (Curiosita di Storia Subalpina, 1874, pp. 229, 234-5). — Bernardi Comensis de Strigiis c. 8. A development of this belief is seen in the feat, referred to in the preceding chapter, of Zyto, the magician of the Emperor Wenceslas, who swallowed a rival conjurer and discharged him alive in a vessel of water. Yet concurrentlv with this the belief existed in the absolute eating of chil- dren. Peter of Berne told Nider that in his district thirteen were thus de- spatched in a short time, and he learned from a captured witch that they were killed in their cradles with incantations, dug up after burial, and boiled in a cal- dron. The magic unguent was made out of the flesh, while the soup had the power of winning over to the sect of Devil-worshippers whoever partook of it. — Nider Formicar. Lib. v. c. iii.
 * Burchardi Decret. xix. 5. — Johann. Saresberiens. Polyorat. n. xvii. — Grimm,