Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/252

240 province of Satan's kingdom. Its author had carefully attended to the evidence of Scottish witch trials, as some passages of his show. One of the interlocutors asks how it is that witches have confessed that "they have been transported with the Phairie to such a hill, which opening, they went in, and there saw a faire Queene, who gave them a stone which had sundrie virtues, which at sundrie times hath been produced in judgment." The other replies that it is a delusion of the devil, who, when the witches' senses are asleep, presents to their fantasy such hills and houses within them, such glistering courts and trains, and, their bodies being senseless, places in their hand a stone or such like thing, which he makes them believe to have received in such a place. This is sound enough reasoning, granting the existence of the devil, but it is strange that the British Solomon should still believe in an actual bodily transport to the Sabbat. The fairies, in his opinion, were delusive creations of the devil. The foretelling by witches of the death of persons seen by them in fairyland, not persons already dead, is either a mistake or a diabolical prompting. Rather unreasonably, while James pities those, not being witches, to whom fairies appear, he thinks that witches, seeing them in fantasy, ought to be punished. They were willing victims of the father of lies. Some speak of their traffic with fairies in order that ignorant magistrates may not punish them, as they would punish witches leagued with the devil. This is possible, and, while some of the "witches" made no pretension to alliance with the devil, it was certainly a widespread belief that fairies could give supernatural power to their favourites. It may partly explain the mingling of the two beliefs; but if so, we have not met with such magistrates as would have accepted this milder origin of the witches' power, and clearly the king would not have tolerated them.