15. The Sabbath Of The Sorcerers-h

He is preceded commonly by a violent wind which seems to make the whole country resound. Then domestic animals tremble and hide away, the assistants feel a breath upon their faces, and their hair, damp with cold sweat, rises upon their heads. The Grand and Supreme Appellation, according to Peter of Apono, is as follows: The ordinary signs and signatures of demons are given in the next figure following: But they are those of inferior demons, and here follow the official signatures of the princes of hell, attested judicially - judicially, O M. le Comte de Mirville! -and preserved in the archives of justice as convincing evidences for the trial of the unfortunate urban Grandier: These signatures appear under a pact of which Collin de Plancy gives a facsimile reproduction in the Atlas of his Infernal Dictionary . It has this marginal note: “The draught is in hell, in the closet of Lucifer”, a valuable item of information about a locality but imperfectly explored, and belonging to a period in no wise remote from our own, though anterior to the trial of young Labarre and Etalonde, who, as everyone knows, were contemporaries of Voltaire. Evocations were followed frequently by pacts written on parchment of goat skin with an iron pen and blood drawn from the left arm. The document was in duplicate: one copy was carried off by the fiend and the other swallowed by the wilful reprobate. The reciprocal engagements were that the demon should serve the sorcerer during a given period of years and that the sorcerer should belong to the demon after a determined time. The Church in her exorcisms has consecrated the belief in all these things; it may be said indeed that Black Magic and its darksome prince are the true, living and terrific creations of Roman Catholicism; that they are even its special and characteristic work, for priests invent not God. So also true Catholics cleave from the bottom of their hearts to the conservation and even the regeneration of this great work, which is the philosophical stone of the official and positive cultus. In prison slang the devil is called BAKER by convicts; all our desire, and we speak no longer from the standpoint of the Magus, but as a devoted child of Christianity and of that Church to which we owe our earliest education and our first enthusiasms - all our desire, we say, is that the phantom of Satan may no longer be called also the BAKER for ministers of morality and representatives of the highest virtue. Will they appreciate our intention and forgive the boldness of our aspirations in consideration of our devoted intentions and the sincerity of our faith? The devil-making Magic which dictated the Grimoire of Pope Honorius, the ENCHIRIDION of Leo III, the exorcisms of the Ritual, the verdicts of inquisitors, the suits of Laubardement, the articles of the Veuillot brothers, the books of MM. de Falloux, de Montalembert, de Mirville, the Magic of sorcerers and of pious persons who are not sorcerers, is truly a thing to be condemned in some and infinitely deplored in others. It is above all to combat these unhappy aberrations of the human mind by their exposure that we have published this book. May it further the holy cause! But we have not yet exhibited these impious devices in all their turpitude, in all their monstrous folly. We must stir up the blood-stained filth or perished superstitions; we must tax the annals of demonomania, so as to explore certain crimes which imagination alone could not invent. The Kabalist Bodin, Israelite by conviction and Catholic by necessity, had no other intention in his Demonomania of Sorcerers than to impeach Catholicism in its works and undermine it in the greatest of all its doctrinal abuses.