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Most commonly his feet were deformed; and he was obliged to curl up and conceal his tall in some part of his habiliments; for, take what shape he would, he could not get rid of that encumbrance. He sometimes changed himself into a tree or a river; and upon one occasion he transformed himself into a barrister, as we learn from Wierus, book iv, chapter ix.
Wierus was saluted by many contemporaries as a Hercules who destroyed monsters, and himself not immodestly claimed the civic wreath for having saved the lives of fellow-citizens. Posterity should not forget a man who really did an honest life's work for humanity and the liberation of thought.
Wierus, whose book was published not long after Faust's death, apparently doubted the whole story, for he alludes to it with an ut fertur, and plainly looked on him as a mountebank. See Grimm's D.M., under Hexenfart, Wutendes Heer, &c. Some Catholics, indeed, affirmed that he himself was the son of a demon who lodged in his father's house under the semblance of a merchant.
Of fraudulent imitation the Franciscans of Orleans were accused, and for this crime they were severely punished. We have the Arrest des Commissaires du Conseil d'Etat du Roi, from MS. 7170, A. of the Bibliotheque du Roi. We have also allusions in the Franciscanus, a satire in Latin hexameter by George Buchanan. Finally, we have versions in Lavaterus, and in Wierus, De Curat. Laes.
We can now establish a catena of rappings and pour prendre date, can say that communications were established, through raps, with a so-called 'spirit, more than three hundred years before the 'Rochester knockings' in America. Very probably wider research would discover instances prior to that of Lyons; indeed, Wierus, in De Praestigiis Daemonum, writes as if the custom was common.
He is fond of books, and, above all, of old books strange, old medical works, for example full of portents and prodigies, such as those of Wierus. New England, owing to its famous college, Harvard, and its steady maintenance of the literary and learned tradition among the clergy, was, naturally, the home of the earliest great American school of writers.
The gross and carnal hallucinations of what is called "Spiritualism" the weakest-kneed of all whimsies that have come upon the parish from the days of the augurs down to our own would be disenchanted at once in a neighborhood familiar with Del Rio, Wierus, Bodin, Scot, Glanvil, Webster, Casaubon, and the Mathers.
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