Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/24

 a sufficiently grotesque, but by no means an impossible, action. And this bizarre ceremony, evidence of which—with no reference to flying through the air—is frequent, has been exaggerated and transformed into the popular superstition that sorcerers are carried aloft and so transported from place to place, a wonder they were all ready to exploit in proof of their magic powers. And yet it is not impossible that there should have been actual instances of levitation. For, outside the lives of the Saints, spiritistic séances afford us examples of this supernormal phenomenon, which, if human evidence is worth anything at all, are beyond all question proven.

As for the unguents wherewith the sorcerers anointed themselves we have the actual formulæ for this composition, and Professor A. J. Clark, who has examined these, considers that it is possible a strong application of such liniments might produce unwonted excitement and even delirium. But long ago the great demonologists recognized and laid down that of themselves the unguents possessed no such properties as the witches supposed. “The ointment and lotion are just of no use at all to witches to aid their journey to the Sabbat,” is the well-considered opinion of Boguet who, speaking with confident precision and finality, on this point is in entire agreement with the most sceptical of later rationalists.

The transformation of witches into animals and the extraordinary appearance at their orgies of “the Devil” under many a hideously unnatural shape, two points which have been repeatedly held up to scorn as self-evident impossibilities and proof conclusive of the untrustworthiness of the evidence and the incredibility of the whole system, can both be easily and fairly interpreted in a way which offers a complete and convincing explanation of these prodigies. The first metamorphosis, indeed, is mentioned and fully explained in the Liber Pœnitentialis of S. Theodore, seventh Archbishop of Canterbury (668–690), capitulum xxvii, which code includes under the rubric De Idolatria et Sacrilegio “qui in Kalendas Ianuarii in ceruulo et in uitula uadit,” and prescribes: “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