Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/121

 common in pagan antiquity, have been unblushingly practised throughout all the ages, as indeed they are at the present day, and that they have been repeatedly banned and reprobated by the voice of the Church. This very fact would recommend them to the favour of the Satanists, and there can be no doubt that amid the dark debaucheries which celebrated the Sabbats such practice was wellnigh universal. Yet when we sift the evidence, detailed and exact, of the trials, we find there foul and hideous mysteries of lust which neither human intercourse nor the employ of a mechanical property can explain. Howbeit, the theologians and the inquisitors are fully aware what unspeakable horror lurks in the blackness beyond.

The animal familiar was quite distinct from the familiar in human shape. In England particularly there is abundance of evidence concerning them, and even to-day who pictures a witch with nut-cracker jaws, steeple hat, red cloak, hobbling along on her crutch, without her big black cat beside her? It is worth remark that in other countries the domestic animal familiar is rare, and Bishop Francis Hutchinson even says: “I meet with little mention of Imps in any Country but ours, where the Law makes the feeding, suckling, or rewarding of them to be Felony.” Curiously enough this familiar is most frequently met with in Essex, Suffolk, and the Eastern counties. We find that animals of all kinds were regarded as familiars; dogs, cats, ferrets, weasels, toads, rats, mice, birds, hedgehogs, hares, even wasps, moths, bees, and flies. It is piteous to think that in many cases some miserable creature who, shunned and detested by her fellows, has sought friendship in the love of a cat or a dog, whom she has fondled and lovingly fed with the best tit-bits she could give, on the strength of this affection alone was dragged to the gallows or the stake. But very frequently the witch did actually keep some small animal which she nourished on a diet of milk and bread and her own blood in order that she might divine by its means. The details of this particular method of augury are by no means clear. Probably the witch observed the gait of the animals, its action, the tones of its voice easily interpreted to bear some fanciful meaning, and no doubt a dog, or such a bird as a raven, a daw, could be taught tricks to impress the simplicity of inquirers.