The displaying of supposed witchcraft : $b Wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of deceivers and impostors, and divers persons under a passive delusion of melancholy and fancy. But that there is a corporeal league made betwixt the devil and the witch, or that he sucks on the witches body, has carnal copulation, or that witches are turned into cats, dogs, raise tempests, or the like, is utterly denied and disproved. Wherein also is handled, the existence of angels and spirits, the truth Webster, John
Religion
The displaying of supposed witchcraft : $b Wherein is affirmed that there are many sorts of deceivers and impostors, and divers persons under a passive delusion of melancholy and fancy. But that there is a corporeal league made betwixt the devil and the witch, or that he sucks on the witches body, has carnal copulation, or that witches are turned into cats, dogs, raise tempests, or the like, is utterly denied and disproved. Wherein also is handled, the existence of angels and spirits, the truth
Webster, John
Witchcraft; Witchcraft -- Early works to 1800
1. One of the Causes that produceth this depraved and passive delusion,
is evil education; they being bred up in ignorance, either of God, the
Scriptures, or the true grounds of Christian Religion, nay not being
taught the common Rules of Morality, or of other humane Literature; but
only imbibing and sucking in, with their mothers and nurses milk, the
common gross and erroneous opinions that the blockish vulgar people do
hold, who are all generally inchanted and bewitched with the belief of
the strange things related of Devils, Apparitions, Fayries, Hobgoblins,
Ghosts, Spirits, and the like: so that thereby a most deep impression of
the verity of the most gross and impossible things is instamped in their
fancies, hardly ever after in their whole life time to be obliterated or
washt out: so prevalent a thing is Custom and Institution from young
years, though the things thus received, and pertinaciously believed, and
adhered unto, are most abominable falsities and impossibilities, having
no other existence but in the brains and phantasies of old, ignorant,
and doting persons, and are meerly _muliercularum & nutricum
terriculamenta & figmenta_, and therefore did _Seneca_ say: _Gravissimum
est consuetudinis imperium_. And that this is one main cause of this
delusion, is manifest from all the best Historians, that where the light
of the Gospel hath least appeared, and where there is the greatest
brutish ignorance and heathenish Barbarism, there the greatest store of
these deluded Witches or Melancholists are to be found, as in the North
of _Scotland_, _Norway_, _Lapland_, and the like, as may be seen at
large in _Saxo Grammaticus_, _Olaus Magnus_, _Hector Boetius_, and the
like.
[Sidenote: _Schenck. observ. medic._ _lib._ 1. _pag._ 129.]
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