Pearson’s theory, developed with great ingenuity, is that witchcraft is a revival of a very old and widespread matriarchate wherein woman not only ruled but society was everywhere permeated by her genius, and paternity was unknown. The key to this older civilization was the development of woman’s intuitive faculty under the stress of child-bearing and -rearing. The mother-age in its diverse forms has been a stage of social growth for probably all branches of the human race. With its mother-right customs it made a social organization in which there was more unity of interest, fellowship, partnership in property and sex than we find in the larger social units of to-day. Hence feminists may well look back to this as a golden age, despite the fact that it was in many respects cruel and licentious. It shows that those who talk of absolute good and bad and an unchanging moral code may help to police but can never reform society. Pearson proceeds to argue that certain forms of medieval witchcraft are fossils of the old mother-age and more or less perverted rites and customs of a prehistoric civilization, and even holds that the confessions wrung from poor old women by torture have a real scientific value for the historian of a far earlier stage of life. Primitive woman, thus, once had a status far higher and very different from anything she has since enjoyed. Man as husband and father had no place but came later. Aging women in the matriarchate were depositaries of tribal lore and family custom, and the “wise one,” “sibyl,” or “witch” passed all this along, as she did her herb-lore. She domesticated the small animals--goat, goose, cat, hen; devised the distaff, spindle, pitchfork, broom (but not the spear, axe, or hammer); and presided over rites in which there were symbols of agricultural and animal fertility and abundant traces of licentiousness and impurity in the sacred dances and ceremonies. “Witch” means “wiseacre,” “one who knows,” and some were good and some bad dames or beldames. The former brought good luck; the latter, famine, plague, etc. All witches have weather wisdom, and a descendant of the Vola or Sibyl is, in the Edda, seated in the midst of the assembly of the gods and could produce thunder, hail, and rain. Tacitus tells us of men who took the part of priestesses, probably in female attire. Kirmes is a festival lasting several days, primarily for dedicating a church, although it has many features of the celebration of a goddess, who in Christian demonology was first converted into the devil’s mother or grandmother and invested with most of the functions of old witches. These, in the witches’ sabbath, came more to devolve upon her son. In Swabia the witch stone is an old altar and the ceremonies about it suggest marriage. The devil is a professional sweetheart; his mother, a person of great importance, was supposed once to have built a palace on the Danube, to hunt with black dogs, and to be related to Frau Holda.