Book contents
Chapter 3
from Question 1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2015
Summary
NOW the topics of their ceremonies and of the procedures they use in their works must be taken up.
First, the works that they perform on themselves and their own persons. Since being transported bodily from place to place is one of their principal actions (as is engaging in filthy carnal acts with incubus demons), we will relate a few details about each of them, and first about their bodily transportation. Here it should be noted that, as was discussed quite often above, this transportation is subject to difficulty on the basis of a single passage of Scripture. This is 26, Q. 5, “Episcopi,” where it is stated from the Council of Acquira, “It should not be overlooked, that certain criminal women, converting back to Satan and being led astray by the demons' illusions and fantastical images, believe and proclaim that during the nighttime hours, they ride on certain wild animals with Diana, a goddess of the pagans, or with Herodias and a countless multitude | of women, and pass over great stretches of land during the silence of the dead of night, obeying her in all things as their mistress” and so on. “Wherefore the priests of God ought to preach to the congregation so that they know these things to be altogether false and that such fantastical images are inflicted on the minds of the faithful not by a divine but by an evil spirit. For it is Satan himself who turns himself into the appearances and resemblances of different persons, and by deluding in dreams the minds that he holds captive he takes them on journeys through all sorts of places off the beaten path,” and so on. Illustrations to this effect are sometimes drawn in public sermons from the story of St. Germain and a certain other man who kept watch on his daughter in connection with this matter, as if it were altogether impossible for these things to happen.
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- The Hammer of WitchesA Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, pp. 292 - 302Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009