Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/265

Rh both sexes, deviating from the Catholic faith, do not avoid to have intercourse with devils, incubi and succubi, and that by their incantations, charms, and sorceries, they blight the marriage bed, destroy the births of women, and the increase of cattle; they blast the corn of the ground, the grapes of the vineyard, the fruits of the trees, besides causing to perish, suffocating and destroying men and women, flocks and herds and other kinds of animals, vines as well as orchard-trees, pasture, grass, corn and other fruits of the earth.

Lord Coke defines a witch as "a person that hath conference with the devil, to consult with him or to do some act." It is in this aspect only that I propose to consider the witch.

It is impossible to understand the cult without first understanding the position of the chief personage in the proceedings. He was known to the contemporary Christian judges and Christian writers as the Devil; was called by them Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, the Foul Fiend, and similar names; and was entirely identified by them with the Principle of Evil, the devil of the Scriptures. But this was very far from the point of view of the witches themselves. To them this so-called Devil was God, manifest, visible, incarnate; they adored him on their knees ; they addressed their prayers to him ; they offered thanks to him as the giver of food and the