orship was of a most licentious as well as
disgusting kind. The religious meetings terminate always in
indiscriminate debauchery.

Alchymy, astrology, and kindred arts were closely allied to the
practice of witchcraft: the profession of medicine was little
better than the mixing of magical ointments, love-potions,
elixirs, not always of an innocent sort; and Sangrados were not
wanting in those days to trade upon the ignorance of their
patients.[65] Nor, unfortunately, are the genuine seekers after
truth who honestly applied to the study of nature exempt from the
charge of often an unconscious fraud. Monstrous notions mingled
with the more real results of their meritorious labours. Science
was in its infancy, or rather was still struggling to be freed
from the oppressive weight of speculative and theological
nonsense before emerging into existence. Many of the fancied
phenomena of witch-cases, like other physical or mental
eccentricities, have been explained by the progress of reason and
knowledge. Lycanthropy (the transformation of human beings into
wolves by sorcery), with the no less irrational belief in
demoniacal possession, the product of a diseased imagination and
brain, was one of the many results of mere ignorance of
physiology. In the seventeenth century lycanthropy was gravely
defended by doctors of medicine as well as of divinity, on the
authority of the story of Nebuchadnezzar, which proved undeniably
the possibility of such metamorphoses.

[65] Pliny (_Hist. Natur._ xxx.) 'observes,' as Gibbon
quotes him, 'that magic held mankind by the triple chain of
religion, of physic, and of astronomy.'

Cotemporary annalists record the extraordinary frenzy aggravated,
as it was, by the proceedings against the Templars, the signal of
witch persecutions throughout France. The historian of France
draws a frightful picture of the insecure condition of an
ignorantly prejudiced society. Accusations poured in; poisonings,
adulteries, forgeries, and, above all, charges of witchcraft,
which, indeed, entered as an ingredient into all causes, forming
their attraction and their horror. The judge shuddered on the
judgment seat when the proofs were brought before him in the
shape of philtres, amulets, frogs, black cats, and waxen images
stuck full of needles. Violent curiosity was blended at these
trials with the fierce joy of vengeance and a cast of fear. The
public mind could not be satiated with them: the more th