points and black. No wine is consecrated but foul brackish water drawn from a well wherein has been cast the body of an unbaptized babe. The holy sign of the cross is made with the left foot upon the ground. And the man for whom that mass is said will slowly pine away, nor doctor’s skill nor physic will avail him aught, but he will suffer, and dwindle, and surely drop into the grave.139
Although there is, no doubt, some picturesque exaggeration here the main details are correct enough. A black, triangular wafer is not infrequently mentioned in the witch-trials as having been the sacramental bread of the Sabbat, whilst Lord Fountainhall140 in describing the devilish communion of the Loudian witches says: “the drink was sometimes blood, sometimes black moss-water,” and many other details may be closely paralleled.
When the blasphemous liturgy of the Sabbat was done all present gave themselves up to the most promiscuous debauchery, only interrupting their lasciviousness to dance or to spur themselves on to new enormities by spiced foods and copious draughts of wine. “You may well suppose,” writes Boguet, “that every kind of obscenity is practised there, yea, even those abominations for which Heaven poured down fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah are quite common in these assemblies.”141 The erudite Dominican, Father Sebastian Michaelis, who on the 19 January, 1611, examined Madeleine de la Palud concerning her participation in Sabbats, writes142 that she narrated the most unhallowed orgies.143 The imagination reels before such turpitudes! But Madeleine Bavent (1643) supplied even more execrable details.144 Gentien le Clerc at Orleans (1614–1615) acknowledged similar debauchery.145 Bodin relates that a large number of witches whom he tried avowed their presence at the Sabbat.146 In 1459 “large numbers of men & women were burned at Arras, many of whom had mutually accused one another, & they confessed that at night they had been conveyed to these hellish dances.”147 In 1485 Sprenger executed a large number of sorcerers in the Constance district, and “almost all without exception confessed that the Devil had had connexion with them, after he had made them renounce God and their holy faith.”148 Many converted witches likewise confessed these abominations “and let it be
