Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/180

 known that whilst they were witches demons had swived them lustily. Henry of Cologne in confirmation of this says that it is very common in Germany.” Throughout the centuries all erudite authorities have the same monstrous tale to tell, and it would serve no purpose merely to accumulate evidence from the demonologists. To-day the meetings of Satanists invariably end in unspeakable orgies and hideous debauchery.

Occasionally animals were sacrificed at the Sabbat to the Demon. The second charge against Dame Alice Kyteler, prosecuted in 1324 for sorcery by Richard de Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory, was “that she was wont to offer sacrifices to devils of live animals, which she and her company tore limb from limb and made oblation by scattering them at the cross-ways to a certain demon who was called Robin, son of Artes (Robin Artisson), one of hell’s lesser princes.”

In 1622 Margaret McWilliam “renounced her baptisme, and he baptised her and she gave him as a gift a hen or cock.” In the Voodoo rites of to-day a cock is often the animal which is hacked to pieces before the fetish. Black puppies were sacrificed to Hecate; Æneas offers four jetty bullocks to the infernal powers, a coal-black lamb to Night; at their Sabbat on the Esquiline Canidia and Sagana tear limb from limb a black sheep, the blood streams into a trench. Collin de Plancy states that witches sacrifice black fowls and toads to the Devil. The animal victim to a power worshipped as divine is a relic of remotest antiquity.

The presence of toads at the Sabbat is mentioned in many witch-trials. They seem to have been associated with sorcerers owing to the repugnance they generally excite, and in some districts it is a common superstition that those whom they regard fixedly will be seized with palpitations, spasms, convulsions, and swoons: nay, a certain abbé Rousseau of the eighteenth century, who experimented with toads, avowed that when one of these animals looked upon him for some time he fell in a fainting fit whence, if help had not arrived, he would never have recovered. A number of writers—Ælian, Dioscorides, Nicander, Ætius, Gesner—believe that the breath of the toad is poisonous, infecting the places it may touch. Since such idle stories were credited