The history of witchcraft and demonology — John Shaqi
The history of witchcraft and demonologySummers, Montague
History
The history of witchcraft and demonology
Summers, Montague
Demonology; Demonology -- History; Witchcraft; Witchcraft -- History
of these ashes can scarcely ever be persuaded to abandon his heresies
and to turn his thoughts towards the true path. It must suffice to give
only these details, as a warning to all Christians to take no part in
these abominations, and God forbid that curiosity should lead anybody to
explore them.”[53]
At Forfar, in 1661, Helen Guthrie and four other witches exhumed the
body of an unbaptised infant, which was buried in the churchyard near
the south-east door of the church, “and took severall peices thereof,
as the feet, hands, a pairt of the head, and a pairt of the buttock,
and they made a py thereof, that they might eat of it, that by this
meanes they might never make a confession (as they thought) of their
witchcraftis.”[54]
The belief of 1022 and 1661 is the same, because it is the same
organization. The very name of the Vaudois, stout heretics, survives in
Voodoo worship, which is, in effect, African fetishism or Witchcraft
transplanted to America soil.
In 1028 Count Alduin burned a number of Manichees at Angoulême, and the
chronicle runs: “Interea iussu Alduini flammis exustæ sunt mulieres
maleficæ extra urbem.”[55] (About this time certain evil women, heretics,
were burned without the city by the command of Alduin.) The Templars,
whose Order was suppressed and the members thereof executed on account
of their sorceries, were clearly a Society of Gnostic heretics, active
propagandists, closely connected with the Bogomiles and the Mandæans or
Johannites.[56]
It is true that in his recent study _The Religion of the Manichees_,[57]
Dr. F. G. Buskitt, with a wealth of interesting detail and research, has
endeavoured to show that the Bogomiles, the Cathari, the Albigenses,
and other unclean bodies only derived fragments of their teaching from
Manichæan sources, and he definitely states “I think it misleading to
call these sects, even the Albigensians, by the name of Manichees.” But
in spite of his adroit special pleading the historical fact remains;
although we may concede that the abominable beliefs of these various
Gnostics were perhaps a deduction from, or a development of, the actual
teaching of Mani. Yet none the less their evil was contained in his
heresy and a logical consequence of it.
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