Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/184

 tradition is, perhaps, not unconnected with the Jewish ritual sacrifices of S. William of Norwich (1144); Harold of Gloucester (1168); William of Paris (1177); Robert of Bury S. Edmunds (1181); S. Werner of Oberwesel (1286); S. Rudolph of Berne (1294); S. Andreas of Rinn (1462); S. Simon of Trent, a babe of two and a half years old (1473); Simon Abeles, whose body lies in the Teyn Kirche at Prague, murdered for Christ’s sake on 21 February, 1694, by Lazarus and Levi Kurtzhandel; El santo Niño de la Guardia, near Toledo (1490), and many more.

The riots which have so continually during three centuries broken out in China against Europeans, and particularly against Catholic asylums for the sick, foundling hospitals, schools, are almost always fomented by an intellectual party who begin by issuing fiery appeals to the populace: “Down with the missionaries! Kill the foreigners! They steal or buy our children and slaughter them, in order to prepare magic remedies and medicines out of their eyes, hearts, and from other portions of their dead bodies.” Baron Hübner in his Promenade autour du monde, II (Paris, 1873) tells the story of the massacre at Tientsin, 21 June, 1870, and relates that it was engineered on these very lines. In 1891 similar risings against Europeans resident in China were found to be due to the same cause. Towards the end of 1891 a charge was brought in Madagascar against the French that they devoured human hearts and for this purpose kidnapped and killed native children. Stern legislation was actually found necessary to check the spread of these accusations.

In the Navarrese witch-trials of 1610 Juan de Echelar confessed that a candle had been used made from the arm of an infant strangled before baptism. The ends of the fingers had been lit, and burned with a clear flame, a “Hand of Glory” in fact. At Forfar, in 1661, Helen Guthrie and four other witches exhumed the body of an unbaptized babe and made portions into a pie which they ate. They imagined that by this means no threat nor torture could bring them to confession of their sorceries. This, of course, is clearly sympathetic magic. The tongue of the infant had never spoken articulate words, and so the tongues of the witches would be unable to articulate.