Renata stated, in her voluntary confession, that she had often at night been carried bodily to witch-Sabbaths; in one of which she was first presented to the Prince of Darkness, when she abjured God and the Virgin at the same time. Her name, with the alteration of Maria into Emma, was written in a black book, and she herself was stamped on the back as the Devil's property, in return for which she received the promise of seventy years of life, and all she might wish for. She stated that she had often, at night, gone into the cellar of the chateau and drank the best wine; in the shape of a swine had walked on the convent walls; on the bridge had milked the cows as they passed over; and several times had mingled with the actors in the theatre in London.
A question unavoidably presents itself—How came witchcraft to be in so great a degree the province of women? There existed sorcerers, no doubt, but they were comparatively few. Persons of either sex and of all ages indiscriminately interested themselves in the black art; but the professors and regular practitioners were almost exclusively women, and principally old women. The following seem to have been some of the causes. Women were confined to household toils; their minds had not adequate occupation: many young unmarried women, without duties, would lack objects of sufficient interest for their yearnings; many of the old ones, despised, ill treated probably, soured with the world, rendered spiteful and vindictive, took even more readily to a resource which roused and gave employment to their imaginations, and promised to gratify their wishes. It is evident, too, that the supposed sex of the Devil helped him here. The old women had an idea of making much of him, and of coaxing, and getting round the black gentleman. But beside all this, there lies in the physical temperament of the other sex a peculiar susceptibility of derangement of the nervous system, a predisposition to all the varieties of trance, with its prolific sources of mental illusion—all tending, it is to be observed, to advance the belief and enlarge the pretensions of witchcraft.
The form of trance which specially dominated in witchcraft was trance-sleep with visions. The graduates and candidates in the faculty sought to fall into trances, in the dreams of which they realised their waking aspirations. They entertained no doubt, however, that their visits to the Devil and their nocturnal exploits were genuine; and they seem to have wilfully shut their eyes to the possibility of their having never left their beds. For, with a skill that should have betrayed to them the truth, they were used to prepare a witch-broth to promote in some way their nightly expeditions. And this they composed not only of materials calculated to prick on the imagination, but of substantial narcotics, too—the medical effects of which they no doubt were acquainted with. They contemplated evidently producing a sort of stupor.
The professors of witchcraft had thus made the singular step of artificially producing a sort of trance, with the object of availing themselves of one of its attendant phenomena. The Thamans in Siberia do the like to this day to obtain the gift of prophecy. And it is more than probable that the Egyptian and Delphic priest habitually availed themselves of some analogous procedure. Modern mesmerism is in part an effort in the same direction.
Without at all comprehending the real character of the power called into play, mankind seems to have found out by a "mera palpatio," by instinctive experiment and lucky groping in the dark, that in the stupor of trance the mind occasionally stumbles upon odds and ends of strange knowledge and prescience. The phenomenon was never for an instant suspected of lying in the order of nature. It was construed, to suit the occasion and the times, either into divine inspiration or diabolic whisperings. But it was always supernatural. So the ignorant old lemon-seller in Zschokke's Selbstschau thought his "hidden wisdom" a mystical wonder; while the enlightened and accomplished narrator of their united stories, stands alone, in striking advance ever of his own day, when he unassumingly and diffidently puts forward his seer-gift as a simple contribution to psychical knowledge. And thus, my proposed task accomplished, my dear Archy, finally yours, &c.
Mac Davus.