Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/52

 the greater number of the facts she quotes are deflected, although no doubt unconsciously, and sharply wrested so as to be patent of the signification it is endeavoured to read on into them. Miss Murray speaks, for example, of witches “who, like the early Christian martyrs, rushed headlong on their fate, determined to die for their faith and their God.” And later, discussing the “Sacrifice of the God,” a theme which it is interesting and by no means impertinent to note, folklorists have elaborated in the most fanciful manner, basing upon the scantiest and quite contradictory evidence an abundant sheaf of wildly extravagant theories and fables, she tells us that the burning of witches at the hands of the public executioner was a “sacrifice of the incarnate deity.”  One might almost suppose that the condemned went cheerfully and voluntarily to the cruellest and most torturing punishment, for the phrase “Self-devotion to death” is used in this connexion. On the contrary, we continually find in the witch-trials that the guilty, as was natural, sought to escape from their doom by any and every means; by flight, as in the case of Gilles de Sillé and Roger de Bricqueville, companions of Gilles de Rais; by long and protracted defences, such as was that of Agnes Fynnie, executed in Edinburgh in 1644; by threats and blackmail of influential patrons owing to which old Bettie Laing of Pittenween escaped scot-free in 1718; by pleading pregnancy at the trial as did Mother Samuel, the Warbois witch, who perished on the gallows 7 April, 1593; by suicide as the notorious warlock John Reid, who hanged himself in prison at Paisley, in 1697.

Of the theoretical “Sacrifice of the incarnate deity” Miss Murray writes: “This explanation accounts for the fact that the bodies of witches, male or female, were always burnt and the ashes scattered; for the strong prejudice which existed, as late as the eighteenth century, against any other mode of disposing of their bodies; and for some of the otherwise inexplicable occurrences in connexion with the deaths of certain of the victims.” Three instances are cited to prove these three statements, but it will be seen upon examination that not one of these affords the slightest evidence in support of the triple contention. In the first place we are informed that “in the light of this theory much of the mystery which surrounds the fate of Joan of Arc is