ble in court records, depositions, and current
accounts in public and private collections, all awaiting the coming of
some master hand to transform them into an exhaustive history of the
most grievous of human superstitions.

To this day, there has been no thorough investigation or complete
analysis of the history of the witch persecutions. The true story has
been distorted by partisanship and ignorance, and left to exploitation
by the romancer, the empiric, and the sciolist.

"Of the origin and nature of the delusion we know perhaps enough; but of
the causes and paths of its spread, of the extent of its ravages, of its
exact bearing upon the intellectual and religious freedom of its times,
of the soul-stirring details of the costly struggle by which it was
overborne we are lamentably ill informed." (_The Literature of
Witchcraft_, p. 66, BURR.)

It must serve in this brief narrative to merely note, within the
centuries which marked the climax of the mania, some of the most
authoritative and influential works in giving strength to its evil
purpose and the modes of accusation, trial, and punishment.

Modern scholarship holds that witchcraft, with the Devil as the arch
enemy of mankind for its cornerstone, was first exploited by the
Dominicans of the Inquisition. They blazed the tortuous way for the
scholastic theology which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
gave new recognition to Satan and his satellites as the sworn enemies of
God and his church, and the Holy Inquisition with its massive enginery,
open and secret, turned its attention to the exposure and extirpation of
the heretics and sinners who were enlisted in the Devil's service.

Take for adequate illustration these standard authorities in the early
periods of the widespread and virulent epidemic:

Those of the Inquisitor General, Eymeric, in 1359, entitled _Tractatus
contra daemonum_; the Formicarius or Ant Hill of the German Dominican
Nider, 1337; the _De calcatione daemonum_, 1452; the _Flagellum
haereticorum fascinariorum_ of the French Inquisitor Jaquier in 1458; and
the _Fortalitium fidei_ of the Spanish Franciscan Alonso de Spina, in
1459; the famous and infamous manual of arguments and rules of procedure
for the detection and punishment of witches, compiled by the German
Inquisitors Kraemer and Sprenger (Institor) in 1489, buttressed on the
bull of Pope Innocent VIII; (this was the celebrated _Witch Hammer_,
bearing on its title page the si