Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/45

 visible to them all in some mysterious way they immediately extinguish the lights, and each one of them as quickly as he can seizes upon the woman, who chances to be nearest at hand. . . . When a child happens to be born. . . on the eighth day they all meet together and light a large fire in their midst, and then the child is passed through the fire, ceremonially, according to the sacrifices of the old heathen, and finally is burnt in the flames. The ashes are collected and reserved, with the same veneration as Christians are wont to reserve the Blessed Sacrament, and they give those who are on the point of death a portion of these ashes as if it were the Viaticum. There appears to be such power infused by the Devil into the said ashes that a man who belongs to these heretics and happens to have tasted even the smallest quantity of these ashes can scarcely ever be persuaded to abandon his heresies and to turn his thoughts towards the true path. It must suffice to give only these details, as a warning to all Christians to take no part in these abominations, and God forbid that curiosity should lead anybody to explore them.”

At Forfar, in 1661, Helen Guthrie and four other witches exhumed the body of an unbaptised infant, which was buried in the churchyard near the south-east door of the church, “and took severall peices thereof, as the feet, hands, a pairt of the head, and a pairt of the buttock, and they made a py thereof, that they might eat of it, that by this meanes they might never make a confession (as they thought) of their witehcraftis.”

The belief of 1022 and 1661 is the same, because it is the same organization. The very name of the Vaudois, stout heretics, survives in Voodoo worship, which is, in effect, African fetishism or Witchcraft transplanted to America [sic] soil. In 1028 Count Alduin burned a number of Manichees at Angoulême, and the chronicle runs: “Interea iussu Alduini flammis exustæ sunt mulieres maleficæ extra urbem.” (About this time certain evil women, heretics, were burned without the city by the command of Alduin.) The Templars, whose Order was suppressed and the members thereof executed on account of their sorceries, were clearly a Society of Gnostic heretics, active propagandists, closely