hough evanescent as a vision the brain
sometimes retains of a dream, and as senseless in the cold light of
reason as Monna Sidonia's invocation at the Witches' Sabbath: (_Romance
of Leonardo da Vinci_, p. 97, MEREJKOWSKI.)
"Emen Hetan, Emen Hetan, Palu, Baalberi,
Astaroth help us Agora, Agora, Patrisa,
Come and help us."
"Garr-r: Garr-r, up: Don't knock
Your head: We fly: We fly:"
And who may count himself altogether free from the subtle power of the
old mystery with its fantastic imageries, when the spirit of unrest is
abroad? Who is not moved by it in the awesome stillness of night on the
plains, or in the silence of the mountains or of the somber forest
aisles; in wild winter nights when old tales are told; in fireside
visions as tender memories come and go? And who, when listening to the
echoes of the chambers of the restless sea when deep calleth unto deep,
does not hear amid them some weird and haunting refrain like Leland's
sea song?
"I saw three witches as the wind blew cold
In a red light to the lee;
Bold they were and overbold
As they sailed over the sea;
Calling for One Two Three;
Calling for One Two Three;
And I think I can hear
It a ringing in my ear,
A-calling for the One, Two, Three."
Above all, in its literature does witchcraft exhibit the conclusive
proof of its age, its hydra-headed forms, and its influence in the
intellectual and spiritual development of the races of men.
What of this literature? Count in it all the works that treat of the
subject in its many phases, and its correlatives, and it is limitless, a
literature of all times and all lands.
Christian and pagan gave it place in their religions, dogmas, and
articles of faith and discipline, and in their codes of law; and for
four hundred years, from the appeal of Pope John XXII, in 1320, to
extirpate the Devil-worshipers, to the repeal of the statute of James I
in 1715, the delusion gave point and force to treatises, sermons,
romances, and folk-lore, and invited, nay, compelled, recognition at the
hands of the scientist and legist, the historian, the poet and the
dramatist, the theologian and philosopher.
But the monographic literature of witchcraft, as it is here considered,
is limited, in the opinion of a scholar versed in its lore, to fifteen
hundred titles. There is a mass of unpublished materials in libraries
and archives at home and abroad, and of information as to witchcraft and
the witch trials, accessi
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