United States or Cabo Verde ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


When worst came to worst and the ecclesiastical power took cognizance of his profession, the best he could do was to plead that he was a "good witch" and rendered valuable services to the community. But a good end was in the eyes of the church no excuse for an evil means. The good witches were dealers with evil spirits and hence to be repressed. Yet the church was very light in its punishments.

He enumerates, as facts, all the statements of the "afflicted" witnesses and confessing witches, as to the horrible and monstrous things perpetrated by the spectres of the accused parties; and he applauds the Court, testifying to the successful and beneficial issue of its proceedings.

Two low thatched cottages the only houses they passed in this lane seemed to add to its dreariness; they had no windows to speak of, and the doors were closed; it was probable that they were inhabitated by witches, and it was a relief to find that the donkey did not stop there.

This apparently acted as a restraint in favor only of the strong, leaving the weak a prey to the plunderer; but here the tie of family and clan intervened to aid him. Relatives and clansmen espoused the quarrel of him who could not right himself. Witches, with whom the Hurons and Iroquois were grievously infested, were objects of utter abomination to both, and any one might kill them at any time.

If you should have anything to do with robbers, I will give you the story of Cacus, for I have it by heart; if with loose women, there is the Bishop of Mondonedo, who will give you the loan of Lamia, Laida, and Flora, any reference to whom will bring you great credit; if with hard-hearted ones, Ovid will furnish you with Medea; if with witches or enchantresses, Homer has Calypso, and Virgil Circe; if with valiant captains, Julius Caesar himself will lend you himself in his own 'Commentaries, and Plutarch will give you a thousand Alexanders.

Lord Bacon suggests that the ointments with which witches anointed themselves might have had the effect of stopping the pores and congesting the rain, and thus impressing the sleep of the unhappy dupes of their own imagination with dreams so vivid that, on waking, they were firmly convinced that they had been borne through the air to the Sabbat.

The wicked stepmother, however, who was a witch, and well knew how the children had run away, had crept after them secretly, in the way witches do, and had bewitched all the springs in the wood.

Thorkel took the words from his lips, and no longer with sinister deliberation but with a ferocity that showed itself in the gathering swiftness of his speech. "Trouble yes! By the Hammer of Thor, I think you deserve to have trouble! Had any of your witches' brew done harm to the King, I can tell you that you would not have lived much longer. What!

When a child, a strange dark tale was told me, to the effect that the last ill-fated Abbot of Whalley laid his dying curse upon your grandmother, then an infant, predicting that she should be a witch, and the mother of witches." "I have heard the dread tradition, too," rejoined Alizon; "but I cannot, will not, believe it. An all-benign Power will never sanction such terrible imprecations."

Every one knows what dark things may be done by our own fantastic persuasions; belief insures the miracles it credits. Men dream they shall die within a certain hour; the hour comes, and the dream is realised. The most potent wizardries are less potent than fancy itself. Macbeth was a murderer, not because the witches predicted, but because their prediction aroused the thoughts of murder.