Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/288

256 The third dance was in line; men and women stood alternately, holding hands; in time to the music they shifted their positions till each pair stood back to back, and at a given chord in the tune each dancer took one quick step to the rear and cannoned against his or her partner. The Devil apparently was expected to lead this dance, and could change partners as often as he pleased.

A study, however short, of witch-ritual would not be complete without a mention of child sacrifice, a crime of which the witches were accused in every country, and which they actually confessed they had committed. The child had to be either a witch's child or unbaptised though born of Christian parents. Reginald Scot says that it was commonly reported that "every fortnight, or at the least every month, each witch must kill one child at the least for her part." This is a gross exaggeration as he points out, but he quotes from Psellus a sacrifice of children by a sect of "magical heretikes" called Eutychians, whom he regards as the originals of, or allied to, witches. He gives also a list of fifteen crimes laid to the charge of witches, among which are the two following: "They sacrifice their own children to the devil before baptism, holding them up in the aire to him, and then thrust a needle into their brains," and "they burne their children when they have sacrificed them."

The witches were also accused of feasting on the flesh of the sacrificed children. Though I have not found a description by an eye-witness of such a sacrifice, there is more than one confession of the eating of a dead child's flesh, but it was always done as a magical rite to ensure