CHAPTER VI - THE MAGIC ARTS

(i) Sorcery

If such phenomena as the Flagellant and dancing manias, the acceptance of such persons as Guglielma and Segarelli as divine incarnations is evidence of the depth of credulous superstition among the ignorant lower orders, the great witchcraft and sorcery craze, especially in the fifteenth century, is proof of a much wider diffusion of such a spirit in mediæval society. Christianity early accepted the belief in magic arts unquestioningly. The story of the Witch of Endor would have been sufficient evidence, even had it stood alone: which it was far from doing, for the Bible was full of references to magicians, demoniacs, and soothsayers. Thus it was in disbelief in such things, not in belief, that heresy lay. Incredulity challenged the authority of Scripture. Nor was it to be argued that the existence of evil spirits in Old Testament history was no warrant of their existence now. The mediæval world was profoundly conscious of the powers of Satan being abroad in the earth. It discerned the clear sign of their presence in the frequent occurrence of disaster to the undeserving, in the fits of the epileptic; it discerned them in the wizened features of the shrivelled old woman who muttered inarticulately as she gathered her herbs. Given the combination of an ignorant and wondering fear of the bewildering riddles of nature and the cold strangeness of the stars with a sincere conviction of the reality of that evil potentate who is at war with God, causing disaster among men and having subtle communion with the human heart, inspiring to wicked deeds and hideous thoughts, it is small wonder that imagination peopled the world with sorcerers, magicians and witches.

And the evidence was so extraordinarily sound. No reasonable man could resist the force of it. It was not only the proverbially superstitious Middle Ages that believed in occult arts; no one had a more wholesome faith in these matters than Luther, and no country surpassed Protestant Scotland in the savage cruelty of its witch-trials. Richard Baxter, in his ‘The Certainty of the World of Spirits,’ was able to give numerous well authenticated cases from his own lifetime; and the sceptical man of science, Glanvill, showed that unreason, not reason, rejected the evidence for witchcraft. All history was full of the exploits of these instruments of darkness, and not ‘the easily deceivable vulgar only,’ but ‘wise and grave discerners’ were first-hand witnesses, who had no interest ‘to agree together in a common lie.’[190]

The magicians and witches being almost universally believed in, it followed as a corollary that they were punished for their nefarious practices; but whereas in the pagan Roman world they had been punished simply on politic grounds, the magician being punished ‘because he injured man, not because he offended God,’[191] in the Christian era the offence was regarded as a much more heinous sin. In days of polytheism the state could be tolerant of certain magic practices; not so Christianity, which regarded all pagan deities as emanations of the Devil. The punishments, save under the apostate Julian, were usually of a most ferocious character, reputed magicians being crucified or flung to wild beasts.[192] But while thus zealous in punishing the magician, there is no doubt that Christianity itself became contaminated, and in the Dark Ages thaumaturgy became rife within the Church. On the other hand, while in the Eastern Empire sorcery continued to be punished with severity, the Teutonic tribes in the west, who in their pagan days had been thoroughly imbued with magic beliefs, were more or less tolerant. During the epoch of the Carolingian empire ecclesiastical lenience, tempered by occasional mob violence, was the rule; and such lenience or indifference continued in western Europe till the end of the twelfth century.[193] Roger Bacon, unlike learned philosophers of later and presumably more enlightened periods, gave it as his opinion that reputed sorcery was either fraudulent or a delusion. There are instances of severity on the part of the secular authority in Spain, and the first mediæval legislation against sorcery was introduced in Venice in the twelfth century; yet the Church remained apparently indifferent. And when the Inquisition came into being, it was not given authority in cases of witchcraft and sorcery. A change is to be traced from Alexander IV’s bull, Quod super nonnullis, issued in 1257, which laid it down that inquisitors were not to be distracted from their all-important duties by other business and were to leave cases of simple sorcery to the ordinary ecclesiastical tribunals; on the other hand, in sorcery cases where heresy was clearly involved, they were to take cognizance. This became the Canon law under Boniface VIII.[194]

Now, when did sorcery clearly involve heresy? It was not difficult to argue that it invariably did. Sorcery was invoking demons, trafficking with Satan, and to do this a man must surely entertain heretical ideas about Satan and demons. Certainly, if a man dealt in such trafficking, holding it to be not sinful, he was a manifest heretic.[195] Again, to seek to acquire knowledge of the future from Satan, the future depending solely on the Almighty, involved heresy. Under the title, sorcery, there came to be included astronomy’s parent, astrology.[196] Some men of unquestioned orthodoxy gave their sanction and support to it, notably Cardinal D’Ailly; and it was not apparently definitely forbidden during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in ecclesiastical formularies. But clearly, although there was no question of invoking demons in connection with astrology, on the other hand, the astrologer by maintaining that a man’s destiny was controlled by the conjunction of stars and planets at his birth was denying the freedom of the will, questioning the omnipotence of God, consequently being guilty of manifest blasphemy and heresy. Accordingly, the astrologer was always liable to prosecution by the Inquisition. The best security lay in the fact that belief in astrology was extremely widespread among all classes of society, among clergy as well as laity, of whatever degree of education. In the fourteenth century there was a marked increase in sorcery. This was probably the direct consequence of persecution on the grounds of heresy—such persecution being in a way the highest possible testimony to its genuineness. For the Inquisition never dealt with a reputed magician as a charlatan; it dealt with him as one really in league with Satan. Otherwise there would have been no heresy involved. The attitude of the Church towards sorcery—its attribution of heresy to the magician—actually put a premium upon sorcery. The sorcerer was the more in request because people were more than ever convinced that his claims were well founded, and he was able to make more out of his calling because it had become precarious. For these reasons the extreme zeal of Pope John XXII against all workers of magic failed in its object. In 1317 he satisfied himself, on grounds good or bad, that several persons in his household had been plotting to take his life. Under torture they stated that they had first had recourse to poison, but that that ordinary humdrum method having failed, they had next invoked the assistance of demons to accomplish their purpose. The Pope was roused to thorough and energetic action, and started a resolute campaign against the accursed race of magicians. Dissatisfied with the ambiguous terms of Alexander IV’s directions to the Inquisition in matters of sorcery, he gave it direct authority in such cases and urged it to earnest efforts.[197] Ten years later, however, for some reason or other, he withdrew this jurisdiction from the Inquisition; and it is to be gathered that there ensued a period of comparative immunity for sorcery until 1374, when Gregory XI once more entrusted the task of prosecuting magicians to the Holy Office.

The two most remarkable men to fall into the hands of the Inquisition as sorcerers were Peter of Abano and the Maréchal Gilles de Rais.[198] The former, an astrologer, undoubtedly harboured speculations which were flagrantly heretical; but he escaped the stake by dying a natural death before his trial was concluded. The latter—the original of the Blue-beard of the fairy-tale—had been the constant and intimate companion of Jeanne d’Arc during her leadership of the French armies. Of such military distinction as to be made a [198] Marshal of France at the age of twenty-five, he was also a man of culture, of a restless curiosity and an intense love of things brilliant and beautiful, of rich colours and ornaments, of all that was costly, magnificent and ornate. But beneath all the gorgeous external trappings of this æsthete was something much more pernicious than mere vulgar ostentation. A depraved voluptuary, he found that the ordinary modes of satisfying his sensuality soon palled, and they were succeeded by the most horrible unnatural lusts and the slow torture leading to murder of his victims, in the watching of which this monster eventually came to find his chief delight. While he indulged himself in such enormities, de Rais’ other great interest in life was the practice of the necromantic art, by which he hoped eventually to discover the philosopher’s stone, which would place him in command of all the wealth of the world. Notwithstanding the character of his favourite pursuits, the Marshal was at the same time particularly devout, showing an even perfervid faith, and now and again resolving to make atonement for his sins by going on crusade, never doubting that by this means he would wipe out all the stain of his misdeeds and eventually attain to salvation. In spite of all this outward appearance of devotion, it is remarkable that de Rais succeeded in maintaining his abominable way so long without question. But secrecy and immunity could not last indefinitely. Stories came to be bruited about of strange and loathsome happenings within the castle of Tiffanges, of children being slain in order that with their blood the sensualist magician might write a book of necromantic art. Even then, owing to the Marshal’s high position, it was difficult to strike. But eventually the Bishop of Nantes took action, citing de Rais to appear before him on the charges of having gratified his lust on children, whom he had subsequently butchered, of having invoked a familiar spirit with atrocious rites, and of having committed other crimes also suggestive of heresy. The trial that ensued was abnormal in several respects, the most notable being its publicity, public opinion being deliberately called into play, the fathers and mothers of the children, who had been spirited away into the monster’s castle, being allowed to let loose their clamourings against the villain.[199] Action was taken in a civil court contemporaneously with the ecclesiastical proceedings before bishop and inquisitors. In the ecclesiastical court he was found guilty on both counts—first, unnatural lust and sacrilege; second, heresy and the invocation of demons; but his death-sentence was pronounced in the civil court. The extraordinary man underwent the final penalty with a contrition, an assurance of salvation and an enthusiasm for God which must have been strangely edifying.[200]

(ii) Witchcraft

The great witchcraft craze did not seize upon Europe until the beginning of the fifteenth century. It is true that for hundreds of years before this crimes, which became associated with the name of witchcraft, had been known and punished, but until the twelfth century we do not find the precise well-defined conception of the witch as a woman who has entered into an unholy compact with Satan, is in possession of certain miraculous powers and in particular that of transporting herself through the air to the so-called Sabbath, or rather Sabbat, where she and her kind meet together to renew their allegiance to the Prince of Darkness. It is very likely that the idea of the omnipresence of the powerful and maleficent force of Satan took greater hold of western Europe than ever before in the twelfth century, that marvellous period of the earlier Renaissance, when men’s minds were quickened to a new realization of the splendour and beauty of things of the earth, when heresy took a firm root, and doubt and hesitation sometimes usurped the place of a faith which had been childlike and unquestioning, a period of clashing between intellectual aspiration and the inflexibility of dogma, such that the timid and the ignorant were assailed by a vivid consciousness of the dangers pressing around the Ark of the Lord upon every side, of the sinister might of the dark powers arrayed against the Redeemer. In such circumstances more insistent, more clearly defined became the conception of those evil beings going about in the world, who had sold themselves to the Devil and were assisting him in his fell purposes.[201]

At first the Church refused its sanction to the popular tales about witches, more especially to the tale of the Sabbat and the transportation of witches through the air, often over immense distances. The canonists, Ivo of Chartres and Gratian, dismiss this as a fiction: which to believe is pagan, an error in the faith—in short heresy. But popular credence triumphed over the canonists. The reports of the activities of witches became so numerous, so determined and so circumstantial that it was wellnigh impossible to disbelieve. It became simply a question of how to reconcile well-authenticated facts with the canonists. A way out of the dilemma was discovered in the fifteenth century, at a time when the craze had almost reached its height. The witches meant by the canonists must have been a different order of being from those referred to by a later generation when they spoke of witches. It was merely a matter of nomenclature after all. Those responsible not only for guarding the purity of the faith but also for protecting the faithful from the assaults of the Evil One as delivered by witches could no longer allow their freedom of action to be curtailed, the powers of the Devil actually aggrandized by the misinterpreted ruling that belief in witches was error. Accordingly, when a certain eminent lawyer named Ponzinibio dared to maintain the accuracy of the canonists and to assert that all belief in witchcraft and sorcery was a delusion, the master of the Sacred Palace, Bartholomew de Spina, wrote a vehement and momentous reply, in which he turned the vials of a righteous indignation against Ponzinibio and called upon the Inquisition to proceed against the lawyer as himself a fautor of heretics.[202] The attitude of the Church had indeed made a complete reversal. What previously it had been heresy to assert it now became heresy to deny. The divine law was now discovered clearly to prove the existence of witches, and the Scriptures were reinforced by the civil code.[203] There no longer remained any room for doubt or equivocation.

Before the end of the century there appeared Sprenger’s celebrated ‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ the most authoritative work in existence on witchcraft from the standpoint of credulity.[204] Sprenger was an inquisitor, so that in his compendium, as in other similar treatises, we have the conclusions regarding the nature and the practices of witches, as ascertained by the examination of supposedly authentic cases. We learn in the first place the fundamental fact which explains the existence of witches—the inherent inferiority of the female sex to the male. Women are discontented, impatient creatures, who have a natural proclivity to evil. Woman is at the best a necessary evil. St. Chrysostom is quoted with approval on the subject of marriage. ‘Quid est mulier nisi amicitiae inimica, ineffugabilis poena, necessarium malum, naturalis tentatio, desirabilis calamitas, domesticum periculum, delectabile detrimentum?...’[205] Everything considered, it was not at all strange that women should be particularly prone to yielding to the corrupt wiles and solicitations of the Devil. Once bought by him, they received the sustenance for their infamous activities in the Sabbat, the great nocturnal assembly of the powers of darkness, held sometimes in the Brocken, sometimes in some unidentified spot east of Jordan, or indeed it might be in any spot chosen by Satan. To the trysting-place, however distant it might be, the witches flew through the air. This aërial transportation to the Sabbat was in the opinion of Sprenger and other first-rate authorities certainly no illusion, it was a reality—only, according to Sprenger, the witch travelled in an aërial body, a vaporous part of herself, which issued out of her mouth and by the existence of which she was enabled to be in two places at one and the same time.[206] At the nocturnal assemblage there took place the offering of unqualified allegiance to the Devil, feasting, dancing and sexual intercourse, either with Satan himself or some of his demons.[207] Foul details occur in plenty in all the fifteenth-century treatises on witchcraft concerning the sexual abominations practised by ‘incubi’ and ‘succubi’ at the Sabbat. From such horrid intercourse, we are informed by our authors, proceed giants and wizards, such as Merlin, but never an ordinary human being.[208]

Bartholomew de Spina gives us a variety of circumstantial stories about women who had taken part in the witches’ gathering. One or two may be taken as samples of a large class. A respected burgomaster studied in his youth at Parma. Returning to his lodgings one night late, he knocked in vain at the door. He therefore let himself in by the window and went upstairs, where he found the maid-servant lying prone on the floor, naked and so inert as to appear dead. When she at last came to herself, she acknowledged that she had been to the Sabbat. This case, comments Spina, proves that in the transportation to the Sabbat no corporal transference is involved. The body of the girl had lain all the time on the floor, only her aërial spirit had been absent.[209] Again, a man one day finds his wife lying in an outhouse insensible, and on recovery she confesses to having been to the concourse. He is horrified, and, determined to rid himself of his atrocious spouse, gives information against her to the Inquisition, so that she may be burnt. The woman apparently escaped this fate by drowning herself.[210] One suspects a somewhat simpler explanation than witchcraft of this tale of conjugal infelicity. Another similar account is of a citizen of Ferrara, whose wife was in the habit of attending the Sabbat. One night he, pretending to be asleep, saw his wife rise, anoint herself and fly out of the window. As soon as she was gone he got up, and apparently succeeded in tracking her to the wine-cellar of a noble of the town, where he found her together with a number of witches. Directly he was seen, they all disappeared. The unfortunate husband, however, could not get away and was there discovered by the servants of the house, who very naturally took him for a burglar. Happily he succeeded in giving satisfactory explanations to the owner of the house. At the earliest possible opportunity he gave information against his wife, whom he handed over to the punishment she had deserved.[211] Here again we get the hint that the charge of witchcraft might be a useful weapon in the armoury of a husband, should he desire for one reason or another to separate from his wife—for good. Another tale is of a girl who saw her mother rise out of bed, anoint herself and fly out of the window. The girl did likewise, acquiring apparently the power of flight on the instant, and she found herself transported into her mother’s presence. Then, being frightened, she called upon the names of Jesus and the Virgin, and thereupon found herself back in her bed.[212]

The witches, who entered into their unholy compact with Satan at the Sabbat, were there invested with various tremendous and abominable powers. Unlike sorcerers and magicians, who occasionally used their black art to good purposes, witches could work nothing else but evil. They were particularly fond of interfering with procreation, where both men and women, because of the connection with original sin, were most vulnerable. They produced sterility in the one sex, impotence in the other.[213] Indeed it could be taken practically for certain that these two evils were invariably due to witchcraft. Witches also produced abortion and interfered with the flow of the mother’s milk.[214] They sometimes offered up infants at their birth to demons; were vampires and sustained themselves by sucking children’s blood.[215] They were able to transform men and women into beasts, to create tempests and thunder-storms.[216] Indeed they went about the world doing all manner of noxious damage, ranging in seriousness from the breaking of crucifixes to the destruction of human life. In their peregrinations they were much assisted by their being able to transform themselves into the likeness of animals, particularly of cats, so that it was very difficult to keep them out of any dwelling-house they cared to visit.[217] Indeed so powerful and versatile were witches supposed to be, not only by vulgar report, but according to authoritative statement, that it may seem difficult to understand how it could be imagined that any human agency could ever get the better of them.

But something had to be done. The evil tended to grow so disastrously, in this helped as a matter of fact—as in the case of sorcery—by the Church’s decision that the magic arts were no mere delusion but reality, and that while the practiser of them was a heretic, to believe that he or she was no charlatan but genuinely in league with the Devil was sound doctrine. In this way were men and women encouraged, whenever ill-fortune befell them, to find a facile explanation for unmerited calamity in such an intrinsically innocent incident, for example, as that of a sinister-looking old woman with a hooked nose having peered in at their cottage window. The simple fact of being found wandering alone in fields or woods after nightfall constituted legitimate evidence before the Inquisition. Or again, if an old woman said to someone who had injured her, ‘You will repent of this,’ and some misfortune subsequently occurred to the latter, the old woman might easily on such trivial grounds be suspect.[218]

One of the most interesting and remarkable phenomena of the history of witchcraft is that of the self-confessed witch, the woman who deliberately and of her own accord gave herself out to be possessed of supernatural powers in spite of the terrible peril incurred by such an announcement. The explanation of this is partly economic—the law of supply and demand operating in the case of the occult arts as a marketable commodity, just as in any other—partly psychological. Particularly when there was such unimpeachable authority for the reality and potency of the black arts, there were always people quite anxious to avail themselves of the means of fore-knowledge of, or avenging an injury, or discomfiting a rival, and to pay handsomely for the privilege. The demand existing, there were not wanting those willing to satisfy it, to accept the risk in view of the generosity of the remuneration. Sometimes the reputed witch succeeded in persuading herself that she was one in very deed. Some curious coincidence, the desired object actually occurring after the utterance of spells and incantations, persuaded the superstitious mind, arguing ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc,’ that the spells and incantations held in them a miraculous power. The wretched woman would then with a vain pride or a trembling apprehensive awe perceive in herself a being supernatural.[219] But clearly the greater proportion of witchcraft lore is founded upon confessions wrung by means of the rack from the supposed culprit when brought before a civil or inquisitorial tribunal.

We do not know definitely when the Inquisition was first employed against witchcraft; but certainly in 1374 it was determined by the papacy that the Holy Office was competent to try such cases.[220] In 1437 Eugenius IV called upon inquisitors everywhere to exert themselves against the evil.[221] And there is no question that throughout the fifteenth century the tribunal carried on a crusade against witchcraft with great assiduity. Although Sprenger was moved to confess that the extirpation of the pest seemed an impossibility, being inclined to lay the blame on the carelessness and inactivity of the secular authority,[222] nevertheless the number of executions was terrible. We are told that in a single year the Bishop of Bamberg destroyed six hundred witches, the Bishop of Würzburg nine hundred.[223] A thousand perished in the same space of time in the diocese of Como.[224] The execution of witches, then, both in this century and the next, assumed great proportions, largely owing to the thoroughness of inquisitorial proceedings, though it must be added—despite Sprenger’s animadversions upon its slackness—that actually the civil authority was responsible for many. The Inquisition, therefore, must bear much of the blame for the spread of witchcraft, or rather—for it amounted to the same thing—for the witchcraft craze. Largely in its records were collected the great stores of indisputable evidence of the reality of that heresy which it had become one of the functions of the tribunal to eradicate. By reason of its constitution and its methods of procedure the Inquisition was always a very effective court; but it was especially so in the case of witches, because in dealing with them the inquisitor felt that he was engaged in a personal combat with Satan himself, and that he had to exert all his powers in order to withstand, still more to overcome, so formidable an adversary. Indeed it was very fortunate that he was able to comfort himself with the knowledge that he was impervious to the attacks of witchcraft. Nevertheless it was felt necessary to take special precautions.[225]

Torture was used thoroughly where witches were concerned, and no doubt the delirium thus occasioned, the victim being willing to put an end to her torments by saying what she knew her judge wanted her to say or imagined he would like to hear, was productive of many of the most marvellous witch stories to be found in inquisitorial archives. But the severity of the torture administered in these cases was due to the extraordinary obduracy frequently shown by the victims. Such obstinacy was taken as proof positive of Satanic assistance afforded to these servants of hell, and the inquisitor was therefore goaded to greater and greater cruelty, because he felt himself put upon his mettle. The silence of the accused thus became positive evidence of guilt, as damning as confession under the pains of rack or pulley—perhaps even more so.[226] The gift of taciturnity, it was conjectured, might be due to the wearing of a charm somewhere on the person, so that as a preliminary to the application the alleged witch had to be divested of all her clothing for thorough investigation to be made.[227] It was held that a witch was unable to shed tears under torment, whereas—as Sprenger urges sententiously—it is natural for women to weep. It was desirable therefore to adjure the accused to shed tears.[228] If this solemn exhortation was successful and the victim did cry and lament under torture, she was not necessarily the better off; for this might well be a device to deceive, a wile of the Devil’s to defeat the ends of justice. The inquisitor, ever on the alert to discover such signs of Satanic intervention, was apt to disbelieve in the genuineness of the witch’s tears accordingly. Thus, whether it produced confession or only obduracy, lamentation or silence, torture was in any event practically certain to be successful. Indeed anyone defamed of witchcraft before the Inquisition became so inextricably enmeshed in the toils that escape from conviction was hardly possible save in the event of being able to prove that the accuser was actuated by mortal enmity.[229] And even the most persistent silence must, one imagines, practically always in the end have been overborne. A sufficiently prolonged continuance of torture must have produced the desired result—answers to leading questions about the Sabbat, detailed descriptions culled from the imagination of demon orgies, confessions as to the invocation of evil spirits and malpractices carried on by their help, finally the incrimination of others. So the witchcraft legend grew in substance, in precision, in lurid picturesqueness. From the lips of the witches themselves came the authentic particulars of the Sabbat, the flittings through the air on broomsticks, the blasting of human lives by foul spells, the inculpation of ever-increasing numbers in the guilt and the heresy of witchcraft.

There is a most striking illustration of the astonishing efficacy of inquisitorial methods in effectively defeating their purpose, and actually producing the spread of the witchcraft craze, in the famous case of the Vaudois or witches of Arras in the years 1459-1460, when the arrest of a single alleged witch led to the inculpation of one after another, each new victim in her torments naming others, including many of the wealthiest and most important as well as the humblest citizens, so that at length a positive panic was created.[230] Not a single member of the community in Arras could feel himself or herself secure. No one dared leave the city for fear that that innocent act might be seized upon as a confession of guilt, and no one cared to enter for fear of falling into the hands of the tribunal, thus busily engaged in investigating an outburst of heresy of such alarming proportions. To such a pass did things come that the material prosperity of Arras was seriously prejudiced, as people became afraid of having any dealings with the city. One dangerous source of economic disturbance was that all creditors demanded instant payment of their dues, fearing that their debtors might be among those arrested, seeing that conviction involved the confiscation of the victim’s property, and in such a case the creditor was held to have no claim on any part of it.

In producing such results as these the inquisitor was no doubt ever most sincere and disinterested, genuinely aghast at the magnitude of the evil he was charged to suppress, wholly blind to the fact that its magnitude was mainly of his own creation. And in the feeling that there could be no security so long as the witch remained alive, he only shared the popular view. It was simply the universal conviction that the appropriate punishment of witchcraft and the only sure remedy against it was death by fire. Nor was the inquisitor alone in bringing offenders to the stake. The civil courts and the ordinary episcopal courts were no more lenient than the Holy Office. Even in Protestant countries, where there was no Inquisition, the lot of the supposed witch in the sixteenth century was no more tolerable than in those countries where the Inquisition still continued to flourish. The belief in the reality of witchcraft had taken firm root everywhere, and Catholic and Protestant were alike in their literal interpretation of the terrible words of Scripture, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’ which seemed to afford all-sufficient sanction for the inexorable judgments of all tribunals, whether clerical or lay. At the same time the part played by the Inquisition forms one of the most important chapters in the history of witchcraft, as it was the most efficient and energetic tribunal engaged in the prosecution of the heresy in its earlier days, inasmuch especially as it contributed so much to the spread of the belief by the convinced fanaticism of its members and those methods of obtaining evidence, which not only led to sure conviction and constant incriminations, but actually provided the raw material of supposed fact on which credulity was based. The voluminous records of the holy tribunal, the learned treatises of its members are the great repositories of the true and indisputable facts concerning the abominable heresies of sorcery and witchcraft.