[20] The Court of Rome was fully apprized that power cannot be maintained without property, and thereupon its attention began very early to be riveted upon every method that promised pecuniary advantage. All the wealth of Christendom was gradually drawn by a thousand channels into the coffers of the Holy See. Blackstone.—Commentaries 4, 106. “The church forfeited the wizard’s property to the judge and the prosecutor. Wherever the church law was enforced, the trials for witchcraft waxed numerous and brought much wealth to the clergy. Wherever the lay tribunal claimed the management of those trials, they grew scarce and disappeared.”
[21] Burning Place of the Cross.
[22] A MS. upholding the burning of witches as heretics, written in 1450 by the Dominican Brother Hieronymes Visconti, of Milan, is among the treasures of the White Library, recently presented to Cornell University.
[23] It shall not be amiss to insert among these what I have heard concerning a witch of Scotland: One of that countrie (as by report there are too many) being for no goodness of the judges of Assize, arrayed, convicted and condemned to be burnt, and the next day, according to her judgment, brought and tied to the stake, the reeds and fagots placed around about her, and the executioner ready to give fire (for by no persuasion of her ghostly fathers, nor importunities of the sheriff, she could be wrought to confess anything) she now at the last cast to take her farewell of the world, casting her eye at one side upon her only sonne, and calls to him, desiring him verie earnestly as his last dutie to her to bring her any water, or the least quantity of licuor (be it never so small), to comfort her, for she was so extremely athirst, at which he, shaking his head, said nothing; she still importuned him in these words: “Oh, my deere sonne help me to any drinke, be it never so little, for I am most extremely drie, oh drie, drie:” to which the young fellow answered, “by no means, deere mother will I do you that wrong; for the drier you are (no doubt) you will burne the better.” Heywoode—History of Women, Lib. 9, p. 406.
[24] Lenormant.—Chaldean Magic and Sorcery, 385.
[25] Institutes of Scotland.
[26] At Bamburg, Germany, an original record of twenty-nine burnings in nineteen months, 162 persons in all, mentions the infant daughter of Dr. Schutz as a victim of the twenty-eighth burning. Hauber.—Bibliotheca Magica.
[27] In those terrible trials presided over by Pierre de Lancre, it was asserted that hundreds of girls and boys flocked to the indescribable Sabbats of Labourd. The Venetians’ record the story of a little girl of nine years who raised a great tempest, and who like her mother was a witch. Signor Bernoni.—Folk Lore.
[28] Some very strange stories of such power at the present time have become known to the author, one from the lips of a literary gentleman in New York City, this man of undoubted veracity declaring that he had seen his own father extend his hand under a cloudless sky and produce rain. A physician of prominence in a western city asserts that a most destructive cyclone, known to the Signal Service Bureau as “The Great Cyclone,” was brought about by means of magical formulae, made use of by a school girl in a spirit of ignorant bravado.
[29] These and similar powers known as magical, are given as pertaining to the Pueblo Indians, by Charles F. Lummis, in Some Strange Corners of Our Country, pub. 1892. A friend of the author witnessed rain thus produced by a very aged Iowa Indian a few years since.