always got the
best of an argument and could only be banished by some unprintably nasty
epithets hurled at his head. Satan and his satellites often took the
form of men or women and under the name of incubi and succubi had sexual
intercourse with mortals. One of the most abominable features of the
witch craze was that during its height hundreds of children of four or
five years old confessed to being the devil's paramours.

So great was the power of Satan that, in the common belief, many persons
bartered their souls to him {654} in return for supernatural gifts in
this life. To compensate them for the loss of their salvation, these
persons, the witches, were enabled to do acts of petty spite to their
neighbors, turning milk sour, blighting crops, causing sickness to man
and animals, making children cry themselves to death before baptism,
rendering marriages barren, procuring abortion, and giving charms to
blind a husband to his wife's adultery, or philters to compel love.

[Sidenote: Witches' Sabbath]

On certain nights the witches and devils met for the celebration of
blasphemous and obscene rites in an assembly known as the Witches'
Sabbath. To enable themselves to ride to the meeting-place on
broomsticks, the witches procured a communion wafer, applied a toad to
it, burned it, mingled its ashes with the blood of an infant, the
powdered bones of a hanged man and certain herbs. The meeting then
indulged in a parody of the mass, for, so the grave doctors taught, as
Christ had his sacraments the devil had his "unsacraments" or
"execrements." His Satanic Majesty took the form of a goat, dog, cat or
ape and received the homage of his subjects in a loathsome ceremony.
After a banquet promiscuous intercourse of devils and witches followed.

All this superstition smouldered along in the embers of folk tales for
centuries until it was blown into a devastating blaze by the breath of
theologians who started to try to blow it out. The first puff was given
by Innocence VIII in his bull _Summis desiderantes_. [Sidenote: December
5, 1484] The Holy Father having learned with sorrow that many persons in
Germany had had intercourse with demons and had by incantations hindered
the birth of children and blasted the fruits of the earth, gave authority
to Henry Institoris and James Sprenger to correct, incarcerate, punish
and fine such persons, calling in, if need be, the aid of the secular
arm. These {655} gentlemen acquitte