Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/60

 of certain forms in the animal transformation” is upon a a general view of Witchcraft found to be nothing other than the non-occurrence of the lamb and the dove, and these two were abhorred by sorcerers, seeing that Christ is the Lamb of God, Agnus Dei, whilst the Dove is the manifestation of the Holy Ghost. There is one instance, the trail [sic] of Agnes Wobster at Aberdeen in 1597, when the Devil is said to have appeared to the witch “in the liknes of a lamb, quhom thou callis thy God, and bletit on the, and thaireftir spak to the.” But this rare exception must be understood to be a black and deformed lamb, not the snow-white Agnus Dei. In pictures of the Doctors of the Church, particularly perhaps S. Gregory the Great and S. Alphonsus de Liguori, the Dove is seen breathing divine inspiration into the ear of the Saint who writes the heavenly message, thus directly given by God the Holy Ghost. So in a Franco-German miniature of the eleventh century in the Hortus Deliciarum we see a black hideous bird breathing into the ear of a magician thoughts evil and dark. This cloudy and sombre spirit, violent in its attitude and lean in body stretches its meagre throat towards the ear of the wicked man, who, seated at a desk, transcribes upon a parchment the malevolent and baleful charms which it dictates. It is in fact the Devil.

With reference to the argument based upon “the limited number of personal names among the women-witches” this simply resolves itself into the fact that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were in general use (particularly amongst the peasantry) far fewer personal names than have been employed of more recent years. To assert “that the name Christian clearly indicates the presence of another religion” is simple nonsense. It may be noticed, too, how many of the names which Miss Murray has catalogued in such conscientious and alas! impertinent detail are those of well-known Saints whose cult was universal throughout Europe: Agnes, Alice, Anne, Barbara, Christopher, Collette, Elizabeth, Giles, Isabel, James, John, Katherine, Lawrence, Margaret, Mary, Michael, Patrick, Thomas, Ursula—and the list might be almost indefinitely prolonged.

“The survival of the names of some of the early gods” is also asserted. In connexion with Witchcraft, however, very few examples of this can be traced even by the most careful