The Superstitions of Witchcraft by Howard Williams

Author:Howard Williams [Williams, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Barnesnoble:
Published: 2007-10-01T05:00:00+00:00

102 In witchcraft (as in the sacramental mystery) it was a subject for much doubt and dispute whether there might not be simply a spiritual (without a real corporeal) presence at the sabbath. Each one decided according to the degree of his orthodoxy.

The Swiss witches, like the old Italian larvæ and most of the sisterhood, display extraordinary affection for the blood of new-born unbaptized infants; and it is a great desideratum to kill them before the preventive rite has been irrevocably administered; for the bodies of unbaptized children were almost indispensable in the witches’ preparations. Soon as buried their corpses are dug out of their graves and carried away to the place of assembly, where they are boiled down for the fat for making the ointments.103 The liquid in which they are boiled is carefully preserved; and the person who tastes it is immediately initiated into all the mysteries of sorcery. A witch, judicially examined by the papal commission which compiled the ‘Malleus,’ gives evidence of the prevalence of this practice: ‘We lie in wait for children. These are often found dead by their parents; and the simple people believe that they have themselves overlain them, or that they died from natural causes; but it is we who have destroyed them. We steal them out of the grave, and boil them with lime till all the flesh is loosed from the bones and is reduced to one mass. We make of the firm part an ointment, and fill a bottle with the fluid; and whoever drinks with due ceremonies of this belongs to our league, and is already capable of bewitching.’ ‘Finger of birth-strangled babe’ is one of the ingredients of that widely-collected composition of the Macbeth witches.

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