Magic, sorcery, soon passed from the East into the West, and extended itself throughout the earth. The sort of sorcery that came from the Jews was called Sabbatum by the Romans, who thus confounded their sacred day with their secret abominations. Thence it was, that in the neighboring nations, to be a sorcerer and to go to the sabbath, meant the same thing. Wretched village women, deceived by knaves, and still more by the weakness of their own imaginations, believed that after pronouncing the word "_abraxa_", and rubbing themselves with an ointment mixed with cow-dung and goat's hair, they went to the sabbath on a broom-stick in their sleep, that there they adored a goat, and that he enjoyed them. This opinion was universal. All the doctors asserted that it was the devil, who metamorphosed himself into a goat. This may be seen in Del Rio's "Disquisitions," and in a hundred other authors. The theologian Grillandus, a great promoter of the Inquisition, quoted by Del Rio, says that sorcerers call the goat Martinet. He assures us that a woman who was attached to Martinet, mounted on his back, and was carried in an instant through the air to a place called the Nut of Benevento. There were books in which the mysteries of the sorcerers were written. I have seen one of them, at the head of which was a figure of a goat very badly drawn, with a woman on her knees behind him. In France, these books were called "_grimoires_"; and in other countries "the devil's alphabet." That which I saw contained only four leaves, in almost illegible characters, much like those of the "Shepherd's Almanac." Reasoning and better education would have sufficed in Europe for the extirpation of such an extravagance; but executions were employed instead of reasoning. The pretended sorcerers had their "_grimoire_" and the judges had their sorcerer's code. In 1599, the Jesuit Del Rio, a doctor of Louvain, published his "Magical Disquisitions." He affirms that all heretics are magicians, and frequently recommends that they be put to the torture. He has no doubt that the devil transforms himself into a goat and grants his favors to all women presented to him. He quotes various jurisconsults, called demonographers, who assert that Luther was the son of a woman and a goat. He assures us that at Brussels, in 1595, a woman was brought to bed of a child, of which the devil, disguised as a goat, was father, and that she was punished, but he does not inform us in what manner. But the jurisprudence of witchcraft has been the most profoundly treated by one Boguet, "_grand juge en dernier ressort_" of an abbey of St. Claude in Franche-Comté. He gives an account of all the executions to which he condemned wizards and witches, and the number is very considerable. Nearly all the witches are supposed to have had commerce with the goat.