A mirror for witches

It has long been known that, on occasions, devils in the shape of humanity or in their own shapes (that is, with horns, hoofs, and tails) may fancy mortal women. By dark arts, sly promises of power, flattery, etc., they may prevail even upon Christian women, always to the destruction of these women’s souls and often to that of their bodies.

For in Northumberland, Meslie Ry was burned in 1616 because she had taken a fiend to love.

A few years later, Christie Goose, a single woman upwards of forty years, suddenly flew lunatic—and that upon the Lord’s Day. Then she did confess that each night and every night the Devil, wickedly assuming the shape of Mr. Oates, God’s minister at Crumplehorn, Oxon., came to her through her window. This fact amazed Crumplehorn, for Goose was of all women most pious, and had sat for years in humble prayerfulness at the feet of Mr. Oates. Some were astonished that even a devil should find need for this same Goose, who was of hideous aspect.

There was a young jade, servant in an alderman’s house in London, who, although she confessed nothing and remained obdurate to the end, was hanged and then burned because she bore a creature with horns on its head and a six-inch tail behind. Such a creature the just magistrates determined no mortal man might beget, although the saucy wench suggested that an alderman might. Moreover, certain children in the neighbourhood testified that they had twice or thrice seen ‘a burly big black man’ sitting on the ridgepole.

Some assume that as the gods of antiquity were in no way gods (being seekers after evil—not after light), they should therefore be considered caco-demons or devils. The Reverend Pyam Plover, of Boston, has written learnedly on this subject, saying, in part, ‘For is it not possible that the Lord God of Israel, being those days but the God of Israel, may have permitted certain of his Fallen Angels to stray from the vitals of Hell and disport themselves through Greece and ancient Italy? Here they revealed themselves ... in many ways to heathen people, who falsely worshipped them as gods. If this be true Zeus might better assume his true name of Satan, and let us call Apollo but Apollyon and recognize in Mars, Hermes, etc., Beelzebub and Belial. Then may the female “divinities” be true descendants of Lilith.’ So one may learn from antiquity (consider Leda, Io, Danaë, and others) how great is the ardour felt by devils for mortal women.

As is not yet forgotten, in 1662, near threescore years ago, a woman called Greensmith, living at Hartford in New England, confessed the Devil had carnal knowledge of her. For this she was hanged.

More strangely yet, lived, for brief space of years, famous Doll Bilby, best known as ‘Bilby’s Doll’. She flourished at Cowan Corners, close by the town of Salem, but an afternoon’s journey from my own parish of Sudbury. Of other women devil-ridden, be it Leda or Ry, Greensmith or Danaë, Christie Goose or La Voisin, little can be said, for but little is known. All were witches (if we accept as witches such women as traffic with fiends), but little else is known. Yet of Bilby’s famous Doll, in the end all things were known. From old wives’ tales, court records, and the diaries of certain men, from the sworn affidavits and depositions of others, from the demonologies of Mr. Cotton Mather, and the cipher journal of Mr. Zacharias Zelley, we may know with a nicety what this woman was and how she lived, from whence she came, how she grew to witchcraft, how she felt, thought, and at the last how she died.

2

Mr. Bilby sails far to seek out TROUBLE, and, having found Trouble, nurtures it.

She was born of a wicked witch-woman and begotten by one who was no better, that is, by a warlock. These two devil-worshippers and, they say, two hundred more were burned in one great holocaust at Mont Hoël in Brittany. Black smoke, screams of death, stench of flesh settled down over town and harbour, causing sickness and even vomiting.