Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/110

 It is obvious that there is no question here of animal familiars, but rather of evil intelligences who were, it is believed, able to assume a body of flesh. The whole question is, perhaps, one of the most dark and difficult connected with Witchcraft and magic, and the details of these hideous connexions are such—for as the Saints attain to the purity of angels, so, on the other hand, will the bond slaves of Satan defile themselves with every kind of lewdness—that many writers have with an undue diffidence and modesty dismissed the subject far too summarily for the satisfaction of the serious inquirer. In the first place, we may freely allow that many of these lubricities are to be ascribed to hysteria and hallucinations, to nightmare and the imaginings of disease, but when all deductions have been made—when we admit that in many cases the incubus or succubus can but have been a human being, some agent of the Grand Master of the district,—none the less enough remains from the records of the trials to convince an unprejudiced mind that there was a considerable substratum of fact in the confessions of the accused. As Canon Ribet has said in his encyclopædic La Mystique Divine, a work warmly approved by the great intellect of Leo XIII: “After what we have learned from records and personal confessions we can scarcely entertain any more doubts, and it is our plain duty to oppose, even if it be but by a simple affirmation on our part, those numerous writers who, either through presumption or rashness, treat these horrors as idle talk or mere hallucination.” Bizouard also in his authoritative Rapports de l’homme avec le démon writes of the incubus and succubus: “These relations, far from being untrue, bear the strongest marks of authenticity which can be given them by official proceedings regulated and approved with all the caution and judgement brought to bear upon them by enlightened and conscientious magistrates who, throughout all ages, have been in a position to test plain facts.”

It seems to me that if unshaken evidence means anything at all, if the authority of the ablest and acutest intellects of all ages in all countries is not to count for merest vapourings and fairy fantasies, the possibility—I do not, thank God, say the frequency—of these demoniacal connexions is not to be denied. Of course the mind already resolved that such things caanot be is inconvincible even by demonstration, and