Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/115

 straying far from the Catholic Faith, have (had commerce) with evil spirits, both incubi and succubi.”

I have quoted many and great names, men of science, men of learning, men of authority, men to whom the world yet looks up with admiration, nay, with reverence and love, inasmuch as to-day it is difficult, wellnigh inconceivable in most cases, for the modern mind to credit the possibility of these dark deeds of devilry, these foul lusts of incubi and succubi. They seem to be some sick and loathly fantasy of dim mediæval days shrieked out on the rack by a poor wretch crazed with agony and fear, and written down in long-forgotten tomes by fanatics credulous to childishness and more ignorant than savages. “Even if such horrors ever could have taken place in the dark ages,”—those vague Dark Ages!—men say, “they would never be permitted now.” And he who knows, the priest sitting in the grated confessional, in whose ears are poured for shriving the filth and folly of the world, sighs to himself, “Would God that in truth it were so!” But the sceptics are happier in their singleness and their simplicity, happy that they do not, will not, realize the monstrous things that lie only just beneath the surface of our cracking civilization.

It may not impertinently be inquired how demons or evil intelligences, since they are pure spiritual beings, can not only assume human flesh but perform the peculiarly carnal act of coition. Sinistrari, following the opinion of Guazzo, says that either the evil intelligence is able to animate the corpse of some human being, male or female, as the case may be, or that, from the mixture of other materials he shapes for himself a body endowed with motion, by means of which he is united to the human being: “ex mixtione aliarum materiarum effingit sibi corpus, quod mouet, et mediante quo homini unitur.” In the first instance, advantage might be taken, no doubt, of a person in a mediumistic trance or hypnotic sleep. But the second explanation seems by far the more probable. Can we not look to the phenomena observed in connexion with ectoplasm as an adequate explanation of this? It must fairly be admitted that this explanation is certainly borne out by the phenomena of materializing séance where physical forms which may be touched and handled are built up and disintegrated again