The witches are the most credulous and docile tools of the devil; they are his hand and foot for the harm of mankind. They are “devil’s own whores who give themselves up to Satan and with whom he holds fleshly intercourse.”[1172] “Such persons ought to be hurried to justice (‘_supplicia_’). The lawyers want too much evidence, they despise these open and flagrant proofs.” When questioned on the rack they answer nothing, “they are dumb, they despise punishment, the devil will not let them speak. Such deeds are, however, evidence enough, and for the sake of frightening others they ought to be made an example.”[1173] “Show them no mercy!” so he has it on another occasion. “I would burn them myself, as we read in the Law [of Moses] that the priests led the way in stoning the evildoer.”[1174] And yet here all the ado was simply about ... a theft of milk! But sorcery as such was regarded by him as “lèse majesté” [against God], as a rebellion, a crime whereby the Divine Majesty is insulted in the worst possible of ways. “Hence it is rightly punished by bodily pains and death.”[1175] He first expresses himself in favour of the death-penalty in a sermon in 1526,[1176] and to this point of view he adhered to the end.[1177] Luther’s words and his views on witches generally became immensely popular. The invitation to persecute the witches was read in the German Table-Talk compiled by Aurifaber and published at Eisleben in 1566. It reappeared, together with the rest of the contents, in the two reprints published at Frankfurt in 1567, also in the new edition which Aurifaber himself undertook in 1568, as well as in the Frankfurt and Eisleben editions of 1569.[1178] Not only were the people exhorted to persecute the witches, but, intermixed with the other matter, we find all sorts of queer witch-stories just of the type to call up innumerable imitations. He relates, for instance, the experiences of his own mother with a neighbour who was a “sorceress,” who used to “shoot at her children so that they screamed themselves to death”; also the tale told him by Spalatin, in 1538, of a little maid at Altenburg over whom a spell had been cast by a witch and who “shed tears of blood.” The demonological literature which soon assumed huge proportions and of which by far the greater part emanated from the pen of Protestant writers, appealed constantly to Luther, and reproduced his theories and stories, and likewise his demands that measures should be taken for the punishment of the witches. It may suffice to draw attention to the curious book entitled “Pythonissa, i.e. twenty-eight sermons on witches and ghosts,” by the preacher Bernard Waldschmidt of Frankfurt. He demonstrates from Luther’s Table-Talk that the devil was able to assume all kinds of shapes, for instance, of “cats, goats, foxes, hares, etc.,” just as he had appeared at Wittenberg in Luther’s presence, first as Christ, and then as a serpent.[1179]