Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, First Series
History
Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, First Series
Atlantic Coast (Ireland) -- Social life and customs; Folklore -- Ireland; Ireland -- Social life and customs
One of their favourite stories is of some famous man, John Haydon
says Socrates, falling asleep among his friends, who presently see a
mouse running from his mouth and towards a little stream. Somebody
lays a sword across the stream that it may pass, and after a little
while it returns across the sword and to the sleeper's mouth again.
When he awakes he tells them that he has dreamed of himself crossing
a wide river by a great iron bridge.
But the witch's wandering and disguised double was not the worst
shape one might meet in the fields or roads about a witch's house.
She was not a true witch unless there was a compact (or so it seems)
between her and an evil spirit who called himself the devil, though
Bodin believes that he was often, and Glanvill always, "some human soul
forsaken of God," for "the devil is a body politic." The ghost or devil
promised revenge on her enemies and that she would never want, and she
upon her side let the devil suck her blood nightly or at need.
When Elizabeth Style made a confession of witchcraft before the
Justice of Somerset in 1664, the Justice appointed three men, William
Thick and William Read and Nicholas Lambert, to watch her, and
Glanvill publishes an affidavit of the evidence of Nicholas Lambert.
"About three of the clock in the morning there came from her head
a glistering bright fly, about an inch in length which pitched at
first in the chimney and then vanished." Then two smaller flies came
and vanished. "He, looking steadfastly then on Style, perceived
her countenance to change, and to become very black and ghastly
and the fire also at the same time changing its colour; whereupon
the Examinant, Thick and Read, conceiving that her familiar was
then about her, looked to her poll, and seeing her hair shake very
strangely, took it up and then a fly like a great miller flew out
from the place and pitched on the table board and then vanished away.
Upon this the Examinant and the other two persons, looking again in
Style's poll, found it very red and like raw beef. The Examinant
ask'd her what it was that went out of her poll, she said it was a
butterfly, and asked them why they had not caught it. Lambert said,
they could not. I think so too, answered she. A little while after,
the informant and the others, looking again into her poll, found the
place to be of its former colour. The Examinant asked again what
the fly was, she confessed it was her familiar and that she felt it
tickle in her poll, and that was the usual time for her familiar to
come to her." These sucking devils alike when at their meal, or when
they went here and there to do her will or about their own business,
had the shapes of pole-cat or cat or greyhound or of some moth or
bird. At the trials of certain witches in Essex in 1645 reported
in the English state trials a principal witness was one "Matthew
Hopkins, gent." Bishop Hutchinson, writing in 1730, describes him as
he appeared to those who laughed at witchcraft and had brought the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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