Llorente, in his History of the Inquisition in Spain, states that the first auto-de-fé against sorcery was held at Calabarra in 1507, when thirty women charged with witchcraft by the Inquisition were burnt. In the first treatise on Spanish sorcery, that of Martin de Castanaga, a Franciscan monk (1529), we learn that Navarre was regarded as the motherland of Spanish witchcraft, and that that province sent many 'missionaries' to Aragon to convert its women to sorcery. But we find that the Spanish theologians of the sixteenth century were so much more enlightened than those of other countries that they admitted that witchcraft was merely a delusion, and the punishment they meted out to those who believed in it was inflicted in respect that the belief, erroneous though it was, was contrary to the tenets of the Church. Pedro de Valentin, in a treatise on the subject (1610), entirely adopts the opinion that the acts confessed to by the witches were imaginary. He attributed them partly to the manner in which the examinations were carried out, and to the desire of the ignorant people examined to escape by saying what seemed to please their persecutors, and partly to the effect of the ointments and draughts which they had been taught to use, which were composed of ingredients that produced sleep and acted upon the imagination and the mental faculties. The Religion of Witchcraft This view is very generally held at the present time as accounting for the phenomena of witchcraft. But the researches of Charles Godfrey Leland, Miss M. A. Murray, and others, seem to indicate that the cult of witchcraft is by no means a thing of the imagination. The last-named writer, indeed, claims that it is the detritus of an ancient pagan faith surviving into modern times, having a priesthood and well-defined ritual of its own, and in a measure conserving the practice of child-sacrifice. There can be little doubt that this conception of witchcraft is the correct one. In the records of the caste there are numerous proofs that it had a definite ritual and an established priesthood, and that imagination played but a small part in shaping the belief of the adherents of the cult. [55] The Story of Dr Torralva