During two years, 1615 and 1616, twenty cases of Demonidolatry were punished in Sologne and Berry; these persons were accused of being at a vigil, without having been anointed with frictions however. An old villain, aged seventy-seven years, named Nevillon, pretended to have seen a procession of six hundred people, in which Satan took the shape of a ram, or buck, and paid the sorcerers eight sous, for the murder of a man, and five sous for the murder of a woman. They accused him of having killed animals by the aid of his bewitchings. Nevillon was hung along with those he accused. Another peasant, by the name of Gentil Leclercq, avowed that he was the son of a sorcerer, that he had been baptized at the _vigil_, by a demon called _Aspic_; he was condemned to be hanged, and his body was burnt. The same it was in the case of a man called Mainguet and his wife, together with one Antoinette Brenichon, who asserted they had all three visited a witch reunion in company. An accusation of anthropophagy was launched against the inhabitants of Germany, by Innocent VIII., in 1484, and a hundred women were also accused of having committed murders, and cohabiting with demons. The Inquisitors inspired the story of Nider, on the Sorceries of the Vaudois. They found, according to the testimony of certain witnesses, that these Vaudois cut the throats of their infants, in order to make magical philters, which would permit them to traverse space to attend the _vigil_ of the witches, (_Sorcerers_). Other persons _accused themselves_ of cohabiting with demons; some pretended they had caused disasters, floods and tempests, by the influence they had through Satan. Many submitted to the most horrible tortures with an insensibility so complete, that the theologians concluded that the fat of the first born males procured this demonological faculty for bearing pain. This general anæsthesia permits us to affirm that these unfortunates were neuropathic. It would be a difficult matter to establish the exact number of victims offered up to the fanaticism of the Inquisition. Already, in 1436, the inhabitants in the country of Vaud, Switzerland, had been accused of anthropophagy, of eating their own children, in order to satisfy their ferocious appetites. Some one said they had submitted to the Devil, and raised the outcry that they had eaten thirteen persons within a very short time. Immediately the Judge and the Prosecutor of Eude, investigated the story. Failing to obtain the proof of eye witnesses, they subjected, according to Calmeil, hundreds of unfortunates to the tortures of the rack, after which a certain number were burned at the stake. Entire families overpowered by terror, fled from home, and found refuge in more hospitable lands; but fanaticism and death followed them like a plague.[74]