Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/242

 230 regions. Some one sees witches or fairies preparing for a distant night flight by getting astride of twigs, or ragwort stalks, and then by means of a formula—"Horse and hattock," or the like, transforming these into serviceable steeds. He imitates their actions and is speedily transported with them over land and sea to a far-off wine cellar where he joins their revels and, being overcome by his potations, is left behind, to be found next morning and arrested as a thief. The same story formula is thus applied to one set of beings or the other, but its first occurrence in a sort of promptuary for preachers compiled by Etienne de Bourbon in the thirteenth century, makes the revellers neither witches nor fairies, but the bonae res, the "Good Things," the supernatural or mortal followers of Diana, Herodias, or Abundia, according to a widespread mediaeval myth. The "Good Things" were perhaps nearer akin to fairies than sorceresses, though, as the witch superstition increased, they became more assimilated to witches.

But besides this assigning of parallel attributes and actions to different orders of beings, there was a tendency also to mingle both the two groups. Clear evidence of this exists in sixteenth and seventeenth century Scotland. Elsewhere the evidence is only occasional, but it is probable that Scottish superstition was not alone in this assimilation of two quite different groups, fairies and witches, or three, if we include the devil and his demoniac train, with whom all witchcraft had officially been associated. The official, ecclesiastical orthodoxy of Europe had long regarded all