Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/145

 certain of the Aberdeen witches (1597) “danced a devilish dance, riding on trees, by a long space.” In an old representation of Dr. Fian and his company swiftly pacing round North Berwick church withershins the witches are represented as running and leaping in the air, some mounted on broomsticks, some carrying their besoms in their hands.

There was discovered in the closet of Dame Alice Kyteler of Kilkenny, who was arrested in 1324 upon the accusation of nightly meeting a familiar Artisson and multiplied charges of sorcery, a pipe of ointment, wherewith she greased a staff “upon which she ambolled and gallopped thorough thicke and thin, when and what manner she listed.” In the trial of Martha Carrier, a notorious witch and “rampant hag” at the Court of Oyer and Terminer, held by adjournment at Salem, 2 August, 1692, the eighth article of the indictment ran: “One Foster, who confessed her own share in the Witchcraft for which the Prisoner stood indicted, affirm’d, that she had seen the prisoner at some of their Witch-meetings, and that it was this Carrier, who perswaded her to be a Witch. She confessed that the Devil carry’d them on a pole, to a Witch-meeting: but the pole broke, and she hanging about Carriers neck, they both fell down, and she then received an hurt by the Fall, whereof she was not at this very time recovered.”

In many of these instances it is plain that there is no actual flight through the air implied; although there is a riding a-cock-horse of brooms or sticks, in fact, a piece of symbolic ritual.

It is very pertinent, however, to notice in this connexion the actual levitation of human beings, which is, although perhaps an unusual, yet by no means an unknown, phenomenon in the séances of modern spiritism, where both the levitation of persons, with which we are solely concerned, and the rising of tables or chairs off the ground without contact with any individual or by any human agency have occurred again and again under conditions which cannot possibly admit of legerdemain, illusion, or charlatanry. From a mass of irrefutable evidence we may select some striking words by Sir William Crookes, F.R.S., upon levitation. “This has occurred,” he writes, “in my presence on four occasions in darkness; but … I will only mention cases in which