Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/179

 points and black. No wine is consecrated but foul brackish water drawn from a well wherein has been cast the body of an unbaptized babe. The holy sign of the cross is made with the left foot upon the ground. And the man for whom that mass is said will slowly pine away, nor doctor’s skill nor physic will avail him aught, but he will suffer, and dwindle, and surely drop into the grave.

Although there is, no doubt, some picturesque exaggeration here the main details are correct enough. A black, triangular wafer is not infrequently mentioned in the witch-trials as having been the sacramental bread of the Sabbat, whilst Lord Fountainhall in describing the devilish communion of the Loudian witches says: “the drink was sometimes blood, sometimes black moss-water,” and many other details may be closely paralleled.

When the blasphemous liturgy of the Sabbat was done all present gave themselves up to the most promiscuous debauchery, only interrupting their lasciviousness to dance or to spur themselves on to new enormities by spiced foods and copious draughts of wine. “You may well suppose,” writes Boguet, “that every kind of obscenity is practised there, yea, even those abominations for which Heaven poured down fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah are quite common in these assemblies.” The erudite Dominican, Father Sebastian Michaelis, who on the 19 January, 1611, examined Madeleine de la Palud concerning her participation in Sabbats, writes that she narrated the most unhallowed orgies. The imagination reels before such turpitudes! But Madeleine Bavent (1643) supplied even more execrable details. Gentien le Clerc at Orleans (1614–1615) acknowledged similar debauchery. Bodin relates that a large number of witches whom he tried avowed their presence at the Sabbat. In 1459 “large numbers of men & women were burned at Arras, many of whom had mutually accused one another, & they confessed that at night they had been conveyed to these hellish dances.” In 1485 Sprenger executed a large number of sorcerers in the Constance district, and “almost all without exception confessed that the Devil had had connexion with them, after he had made them renounce God and their holy faith.” Many converted witches likewise confessed these abominations “and let it be