Demonographers like Delancre, Delrio, Sprenger, Bodin, and Torreblanca give reports of many prosecutions, the details of which are equally tedious and revolting. The condemned creatures were mostly hallucinated and idiotic, but they were wicked in their idiocy and dangerous in their hallucination. Erotic passion, greed and hatred were the chief causes which brought about disorder in their reason: they were indeed capable of anything. Sprenger says that sorceresses were in league with midwives to secure dead bodies of new-born children. The midwives killed these innocents at the very moment of their birth, driving long needles into the brain. The babe was said to have been still-born and was buried as such; on the night following, the stryges dug up the ground and removed the corpse, which they stewed in a pan with narcotic and poisonous herbs, afterwards distilling this human gelatine. The liquor did duty as an elixir of long life, and the solid part—pounded and incorporated with soot and the grease of a black cat—was used for magical rubbing. The stomach turns with loathing at such abominable revelations, and pity is silenced by anger; but when one refers to the trials themselves, sees the credulity and cruelty of judges, the lying promises of mercy employed to extract admissions, the atrocious tortures, obscene examinations, shameful and ridiculous precautions, and finally the public execution, with the derisive ministrations of a priesthood which surrendered to the secular arm and asked mercy on those whom it had just condemned to death, amidst all this chaos one is forced to conclude that religion alone rests holy, but that human beings are all and equally either idiots or scoundrels.