Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/77

 offered him homage, they addressed prayer to him, they sacrificed. So Lambert Danéau, Dialogue of Witches (trans. 1575), asserts: “The Diuell coaundeth them that they shall acknowledge him for their god, cal vpõ him, pray to him, and trust in him.—Then doe they all repeate the othe which they haue geuen vnto him; in acknowledging him to be their God.” Cannaert records that the accusation against Elisabeth Vlamynex of Alost, 1595, was “You were not even ashamed to kneel before Belzebuth, whom you worshipped.” De Lancre, in his Tableau de l’Inconstance des mauvais Anges (1613), informs us that when the witches presented a young child they fell on their knees before the demon and said: “Grand Seigneur, lequel i’adore.” (Great Lord, whom I worship.) The novice joining the witches made profession in this phrase: “I abandon myself wholly to thy power and I put myself in thy hands, acknowledging no other god; and this since there art my god.” The words of Silvain Nevillon, tried at Orleans in 1614, are even plainer: “We say to the Devil that we acknowledge him as our master, our god, our creator.” In America in 1692, Mary Osgood confessed that “the devil told her he was her God, and that she should serve and worship him.”

There are numberless instances of prayer offered to the Devil by his servants. Henri Boguet, in his Discours des Sorciers (Lyons, 1608), relates that Antide Colas, 1598, avowed that “Satan bade her pray to him night and morning, before she set about any other business.” Elizabeth Sawyer, the notorious witch of Edmonton (1621), was taught certain invocations by her familiar. In her confession to the Rev. Henry Goodcole, who visited her in Newgate, upon his asking “Did the Diuell at any time find you praying when he came unto you, and did not the Diuell forbid you to pray to Iesus Christ, but to him alone? and did he not bid you to pray to him, the Diuell as he taught you?” She replied: “He asked of me to whom I prayed, and I answered him to Iesus Christ, and he charged me then to pray no more to Iesus Christ, but to him the Diuell, and he the Diuell taught me this prayer, Sanctibecetur nomen tuum, Amen.” So as Stearne reports in Confirmation and Discovery of Witchcraft (1648), of the Suffolk witches: “Ellen, the wife of Nicholas Greenleife of Barton in Suffolke, confessed,