English law, which ranked it as a felony; but they were thus nourished in
secret, and by their aid the witch might raise storms, blight crops,
abort births, lame cattle, topple over houses, and cause pains,
convulsions, and illness. If she desired to hurt a person she made a clay
or waxen image in his likeness, and the harms and indignities wreaked on
the puppet would be suffered by the one bewitched, a knife or needle
thrust in the waxen body being felt acutely by the living one, no matter
how far distant he might be. By placing this image in running water, hot
sunshine, or near a fire, the living flesh would waste as this melted or
dissolved, and the person thus wrought upon would die. This belief is
still current among negroes affected by the voodoo superstitions of the
South. The witch, too, had the power of riding winds, usually with a
broomstick for a conveyance, after she had smeared the broom or herself
with magic ointment, and the flocking of the unhallowed to their sabbaths
in snaky bogs or on lonely mountain tops has been described minutely by
those who claim to have seen the sight. Sometimes they cackled and
gibbered through the night before the houses of the clergy, and it was
only at Christmas that their power failed them. The meetings were devoted
to wild and obscene orgies, and the intercourse of fiends and witches
begot a progeny of toads and snakes.

Naturally the Indians were accused, for they recognized the existence of
both good and evil spirits, their medicine-men cured by incantations in
the belief that devils were thus driven out of their patients, and in the
early history of the country the red man was credited by white settlers
with powers hardly inferior to those of the oriental and European
magicians of the middle ages. Cotton Mather detected a relation between
Satan and the Indians, and he declares that certain of the Algonquins
were trained from boyhood as powahs, powwows, or wizards, acquiring
powers of second sight and communion with gods and spirits through
abstinence from food and sleep and the observance of rites. Their severe
discipline made them victims of nervous excitement and the
responsibilities of conjuration had on their minds an effect similar to
that produced by gases from the rift in Delphos on the Apollonian
oracles, their manifestations of insanity or frenzy passing for deific or
infernal possession. When John Gibb, a Scotchman, who had gone mad
through religious excitement