The history of witchcraft and demonologySummers, Montague
History
The history of witchcraft and demonology
Summers, Montague
Demonology; Demonology -- History; Witchcraft; Witchcraft -- History
to me.”[24] Possibly this blasphemous volume is the same as that which
Satanists to-day use when performing their abominable rites.
_Tenthly_: The witches promise the Devil sacrifices and offerings at
stated times; once a fortnight, or at least once a month, the murder of
some child, or some mortal poisoning, and every week to plague mankind
with evils and mischiefs, hailstorms, tempest, fires, cattle-plagues and
the like.
The _Liber Pœnitentialis_ of S. Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury
668-690, the earliest ecclesiastical law of England, has clauses
condemning those who invoke fiends, and so cause the weather to change
“si quis emissor tempestatis fuerit.” In the _Capitaluria_ of Charlemagne
(died at Aachen, 28 January, 814), the punishment of death is declared
against those who by evoking the demon, trouble the atmosphere, excite
tempests, destroy the fruits of the earth, dry up the milk of cows, and
torment their fellow-creatures with diseases or any other misfortune.
All persons found guilty of employing such arts were to be executed
immediately upon conviction. Innocent VIII in his celebrated Bull,
_Summis desiderantes affectibus_, 5 December, 1484, charges sorcerers
in detail with precisely the same foul practices. The most celebrated
occasion when witches raised a storm was that which played so important
a part in the trial of Dr. Fian and his coven, 1590-1, when the witches,
in order to drown King James and Queen Anne on their voyage from
Denmark, “tooke a Cat and christened it,” and after they had bound a
dismembered corpse to the animal “in the night following the said Cat
was convayed into the middest of the sea by all these witches, sayling
in their riddles or cives, ... this doone, then did arise such a tempest
in the sea, as a greater hath not bene seene.”[25] The bewitching of
cattle is alleged from the earliest time, and at Dornoch in Sutherland
as late as 1722, an old hag was burned for having cast spells upon the
pigs and sheep of her neighbours, the sentence being pronounced by the
sheriff-depute, Captain David Ross of Little Dean. This was the last
execution of a witch in Scotland.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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