Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/155

 such is the conclusion of the theologians who have dealt with these dark abominations. Metaphysically it is possible; historically it is indisputable.

When a human being, a man, occupied the chief position at these meetings and directed the performance of the rites, he would sometimes appear in a hideous and grotesque disguise, sometimes without any attempt at concealment. This masquerade generally took the shape of an animal, and had its origin in heathendom, whence by an easy transition through the ceremonial of heretics, it passed to the sorcerer and the witch. As early as the Liber Pænitentialis of S. Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, 668–690, we have a distinct prohibition of this foul mummery. Capitulum xxvii denounces the man who “in Kalendas Ianuarii in ceruulo et in uitula uadit.” “If anyone at the kalends of January goes about as a stag or a bull; that is making himself into a wild animal and dressing in the skin of a herd animal, and putting on the head of beasts; those who in such wise transform themselves into the appearance of a wild animal, penance for three years because this is devilish.”

Among the many animal forms which the leader of the Sabbat (the “Devil”) assumed in masquerade the most common are the bull, the cat, and above all the goat. Thus the Basque term for the Sabbat is “Akhelarre,” “goat pasture.” Sometimes the leader is simply said to have shown himself in the shape of a beast, which possibly points to the traditional disguise of a black hairy skin, horns, hoofs, claws, and a tail, in fact the same dress as a demon wore upon the stage. In an old German ballad, Druten Zeitung, printed at Smalcald in 1627, “to be sung to the tune of Dorothea,” it is said that the judges, anxious to extort a confession from a witch, sent down into her twilight dungeon the common hangman dressed in a bear’s skin with horns, hoofs, and tail complete. The miserable prisoner thinking that Lucifer had indeed visited her at once appealed to him for help: