Up high, and down very low, we see the woman. Beatrice reigns in heaven among the stars, while John of Meung in the _Romaunt of the Rose_ is preaching the community of women. Pure or sullied, the woman is everywhere. We might say of her what Raymond Lulle said of God: “What part has He in the world? The whole.” But alike in heaven and in poetry the true heroine is not the fruitful mother decked out with children; but the Virgin, or some barren Beatrice, who dies young. A fair English damsel passed over into France, it is said, about the year 1300, to preach the redemption of women. She looked on herself as their Messiah. * * * * * In its earliest phase the Black Mass seemed to betoken this redemption of Eve, so long accursed of Christianity. The woman fills every office in the Sabbath. She is priestess, altar, pledge of holy communion, by turns. Nay, at bottom, is she not herself as God? * * * * * Many popular traits may be found herein, and yet it comes not wholly from the people. The peasant who honoured strength alone, made small account of the woman; as we see but too clearly in our old laws and customs. From him the woman would not have received the high place she holds here. It is by her own self the place is won. I would gladly believe that the Sabbath in its then shape was woman’s work, the work of such a desperate woman as the Witch was then. In the fourteenth century she saw open before her a horrible career of torments lighted up for three or four hundred years by the stake. After 1300 her medical knowledge is condemned as baleful, her remedies are proscribed as if they were poisons. The harmless drawing of lots, by which lepers then thought to better their luck, brought on a massacre of those poor wretches. Pope John XXII. ordered the burning of a bishop suspected of Witchcraft. Under a system of such blind repression there was just the same risk in daring little as in daring much. Danger itself made people bolder; and the Witch was able to dare anything. * * * * * Human brotherhood, defiance of the Christian heaven, a distorted worship of nature herself as God--such was the purport of the Black Mass. They decked an altar to the arch-rebel of serfs, _to Him who had been so wronged_, the old outlaw, unfairly hunted out of heaven, “the Spirit by whom earth was made, the Master who ordained the budding of the plants.” Such were the names of honour given him by his worshippers, the _Luciferians_, and also, according to a very likely opinion, by the Knights of the Temple.