Mary Schweidler, the amber witch: The most interesting trial for witchcraft ever known, printed from an imperfect manuscript by her father, Abraham Schweidler, the pastor of Coserow in the island of Usedom / edited by W. Meinhold ; translated from the German by Lady Duff Gordon.Meinhold, Wilhelm
General
Mary Schweidler, the amber witch: The most interesting trial for witchcraft ever known, printed from an imperfect manuscript by her father, Abraham Schweidler, the pastor of Coserow in the island of Usedom / edited by W. Meinhold ; translated from the German by Lady Duff Gordon.
Meinhold, Wilhelm
Witchcraft -- Pomerania (Poland and Germany)
And when I asked her how that could be, seeing that her goodman had been a
child of God until very near his end, and much given to prayer; albeit I
had indeed marvelled why he had other thoughts in his last illness; she
answered that one day he had seen her spirit, which she kept in a chest,
in the shape of a black cat, and whose name was Kit, and had threatened
that he would tell me of it; whereupon she, being frightened, had caused
her spirit to make him so ill that he despaired of ever getting over it.
Thereupon she had comforted him, saying that she would presently heal him
if he would deny God, who, as he well saw, could not help him. This he
promised to do; and when she had straight-way made him quite hearty again,
they took the silver which I had scraped off the new sacrament cup, and
went by night down to the seashore, where he had to throw it into the sea
with these words: "When this silver returns again to the chalice, then
shall my soul return to God." Whereupon the Sheriff, who was by,
re-baptized him in the name of Satan, and called him Jack. He had had no
sponsors save only herself, old Lizzie. Moreover, that on St. John's Eve,
when he went with them to Blockula for the first time (the Herrenberg was
their Blockula), they had talked of my daughter, and Satan himself had
sworn to the Sheriff that he should have her. For that he would show the
old one (wherewith the villain meant God) what he could do, and that he
would make the carpenter's son sweat for vexation (fie upon thee, thou
arch villain, that thou couldst thus speak of my blessed Saviour!).
Whereupon her old goodman had grumbled, and as they had never rightly
trusted him, the spirit Dudaim one day flew off with him through the air
by the Sheriff's order, seeing that her own spirit, called Kit, was too
weak to carry him. That the same Dudaim had also been the woodpecker who
afterwards 'ticed my daughter and old Paasch to the spot with his cries,
in order to ruin her. But that the giant who had appeared on the
Streckelberg was not a devil, but the young lord of Mellenthin himself, as
her spirit, Kit, had told her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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