[102] Théatre Français au Moyen Age (Monmerqué et Michel), pp. 139, 140.
[103]
"There sat Auld Nick in shape o' beast,
A towzy tyke, black, grim, an' large,
To gie them music was his charge."
[104] Hence, perhaps, the name Valant applied to the Devil, about the origin of which Grimm is in doubt.
[105] One foot of the Greek Empusa was an ass's hoof.
[106] Salt was forbidden at these witch-feasts.
[107] De Lamiis, p. 59 et seq.
[108] If the Blokula of the Swedish witches be a reminiscence of this, it would seem to point back to remote times and heathen ceremonies. But it is so impossible to distinguish what was put into the mind of those who confessed by their examining torturers from what may have been there before, the result of a common superstition, that perhaps, after all, the meeting on mountains may have been suggested by what Pliny says of the dances of Satyrs on Mount Atlas.
[109] Wierus, whose book was published not long after Faust's death, apparently doubted the whole story, for he alludes to it with an ut fertur, and plainly looked on him as a mountebank.
[110] See Grimm's D.M., under Hexenfart, Wutendes Heer, &c.
[111] Some Catholics, indeed, affirmed that he himself was the son of a demon who lodged in his father's house under the semblance of a merchant. Wierus says that a bishop preached to that effect in 1565, and gravely refutes the story.