The history of witchcraft and demonologySummers, Montague
History
The history of witchcraft and demonology
Summers, Montague
Demonology; Demonology -- History; Witchcraft; Witchcraft -- History
“The narrow geographical range of the domestic familiar” is not at all
apparent, and it were futile to base any presumption upon so slender
a line of argument. “The avoidance of certain forms in the animal
transformation” is upon a general view of Witchcraft found to be nothing
other than the non-occurrence of the lamb and the dove, and these two
were abhorred by sorcerers, seeing that Christ is the Lamb of God, Agnus
Dei, whilst the Dove is the manifestation of the Holy Ghost.[85] There is
one instance, the trial of Agnes Wobster at Aberdeen in 1597, when the
Devil is said to have appeared to the witch “in the liknes of a lamb,
quhom thou callis thy God, and bletit on the, and thaireftir spak to
the.”[86] But this rare exception must be understood to be a black and
deformed lamb, not the snow-white Agnus Dei. In pictures of the Doctors
of the Church, particularly perhaps S. Gregory the Great and S. Alphonsus
de Liguori, the Dove is seen breathing divine inspiration into the ear
of the Saint who writes the heavenly message, thus directly given by God
the Holy Ghost. So in a Franco-German miniature of the eleventh century
in the _Hortus Deliciarum_ we see a black hideous bird breathing into the
ear of a magician thoughts evil and dark. This cloudy and sombre spirit,
violent in its attitude and lean in body stretches its meagre throat
towards the ear of the wicked man, who, seated at a desk, transcribes
upon a parchment the malevolent and baleful charms which it dictates. It
is in fact the Devil.[87]
With reference to the argument based upon “the limited number of personal
names among the women-witches” this simply resolves itself into the fact
that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were in general
use (particularly amongst the peasantry) far fewer personal names than
have been employed of more recent years. To assert “that the name
_Christian_ clearly indicates the presence of another religion”[88] is
simple nonsense. It may be noticed, too, how many of the names which
Miss Murray has catalogued in such conscientious and alas! impertinent
detail are those of well-known Saints whose cult was universal throughout
Europe: Agnes, Alice, Anne, Barbara, Christopher, Collette, Elizabeth,
Giles, Isabel, James, John, Katherine, Lawrence, Margaret, Mary, Michael,
Patrick, Thomas, Ursula—and the list might be almost indefinitely
prolonged.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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