Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/289

Rh the silence of the witch when taken before a Christian judge. As the child was always an infant too young to speak, the witches apparently thought that to eat its flesh would prevent their tongues from uttering articulate words.

The exhuming of dead bodies is explicitly stated to have been for use in making charms.

In conclusion I have brought together certain facts which appear to show a connection between the witches and fairies. By fairies I do not mean those little beings which the exquisite and delicate fancies of the poets have evolved; the fairies of the witch trials are the fairies of Scotch and Irish legend. In the early trials and in the more remote districts there are frequent mentions of elves and fairies, of the Fairy Queen and the Queen of Elfin ; the imps or familiars are called individually Elva or Robin, and generically Puckerels ; the knowledge of the witches is said to be elf-lore. The ritual of the witches is like the ritual of the fairies; both sacrifice children to their god, whom the Christians stigmatised as the Devil; both stole unbaptised children for the sacrifice ; both sacrificed their god or "devil" every year, apparently on May day; both had ritual dances, which were so like one another that Boguet can say of the witch dances that "they are like those of the fairies, true devils incarnate,