An Examen of Witches/Chapter 25
Chapter XXV.
Whether Witches Kill by their Blowings and their
Breaths.
Thirdly, witches cause death and affliction by their blowings and their breath; and Clauda Gaillard, called la Fribolette, will serve as witness to the truth of this. For meeting Clauda Perrier in the church of Ebouchoux, she breathed upon her, and the woman was at once stricken with an illness and was made impotent and died after having lingered for a year in poverty and weakness. And again, because Marie Perrier had once refused her alms, she blew strongly upon her so that Marie fell to the earth and, being with difficulty raised up, was ill for some days, until her nephew Pierre Perrier threatened the witch. Mall. Malefic. II. 1. c. 11.Sprenger also recounts that a witch of the diocese of Constance breathed upon a man and so afflicted him with leprosy all over his body that he died soon after; he has many other examples of this sort of thing, to which the reader may refer. Dan. Point 4.Now there are some who think that, when witches do this sort of offence, they have in their mouth some evil drug or root by the strength and reek of which they cast the spell. And in my opinion this is possible, and I do not think it needful to linger over Bodin’s argument that the witches would, in that case, be the first to die; for they have the antidote and countercharm to protect them against their drugs and poisons, as was the case with Mithridates, who, because of the precautionary drugs which he had before taken, could not find any poison that would kill him; and the King Nicomedes also used an antidote whenever he went to any place where he suspected poison; VI. 5.and this countercharm has been described by Mattioli in his notes upon Dioscorides.
And certainly it is necessary that they who compound the poisons should have drugs to protect themselves from them. Here I may recount what Nicolas Nicole says of a certain Duke who knew the use of a poison so subtle that, if it were thrown on burning coals, the smoke of it would kill all who were in the room except himself, who was protected by a certain antidote which he took beforehand. And we spoke in the last chapter of a man of Orgelet who carried two boxes, one filled with an ointment with which he spread the plague, the other of an antidote which he used every morning to safeguard himself against the malady: this story serves as a corroboration of my contention.
Nevertheless I hold that in most cases witches have no drug or herbs in their mouths, but that Satan alone causes the death or sickness in the secret manner which we have before described.