Before the end of the century there appeared Sprenger’s celebrated ‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ the most authoritative work in existence on witchcraft from the standpoint of credulity.[204] Sprenger was an inquisitor, so that in his compendium, as in other similar treatises, we have the conclusions regarding the nature and the practices of witches, as ascertained by the examination of supposedly authentic cases. We learn in the first place the fundamental fact which explains the existence of witches—the inherent inferiority of the female sex to the male. Women are discontented, impatient creatures, who have a natural proclivity to evil. Woman is at the best a necessary evil. St. Chrysostom is quoted with approval on the subject of marriage. ‘Quid est mulier nisi amicitiae inimica, ineffugabilis poena, necessarium malum, naturalis tentatio, desirabilis calamitas, domesticum periculum, delectabile detrimentum?...’[205] Everything considered, it was not at all strange that women should be particularly prone to yielding to the corrupt wiles and solicitations of the Devil. Once bought by him, they received the sustenance for their infamous activities in the Sabbat, the great nocturnal assembly of the powers of darkness, held sometimes in the Brocken, sometimes in some unidentified spot east of Jordan, or indeed it might be in any spot chosen by Satan. To the trysting-place, however distant it might be, the witches flew through the air. This aërial transportation to the Sabbat was in the opinion of Sprenger and other first-rate authorities certainly no illusion, it was a reality—only, according to Sprenger, the witch travelled in an aërial body, a vaporous part of herself, which issued out of her mouth and by the existence of which she was enabled to be in two places at one and the same time.[206] At the nocturnal assemblage there took place the offering of unqualified allegiance to the Devil, feasting, dancing and sexual intercourse, either with Satan himself or some of his demons.[207] Foul details occur in plenty in all the fifteenth-century treatises on witchcraft concerning the sexual abominations practised by ‘incubi’ and ‘succubi’ at the Sabbat. From such horrid intercourse, we are informed by our authors, proceed giants and wizards, such as Merlin, but never an ordinary human being.[208]