But in connexion with the statement we have just made, that witches sometimes cause the plague by means of their ointments, I shall add that they most usually poison and infect the air and the water. Riol. ad Fernel. de abdit. rer. caus. II. 12.We have seen how Antoine Tornier meant to poison the fountain of Orcieres so as to kill Big Claude Fontaine and his cattle. The great plague described by Thucydides, which so miserably afflicted Greece, was caused, according to Aratus, by the Peloponnesians poisoning several wells in the district of the Piraeus. Fulgos. IX. 11.And when the son of Philip the Fair was reigning in France there were several lepers in the countries of Languedoc and Dauphine, who surreptitiously bathed in the springs and so infected them that in a short time all the people of those countries were stained with the same disease; and therefore those first lepers were burned alive.
IV. 18.And as for the air, Nicephorus Calixtus recounts that the Persian magicians, in order to bring our religion into bad repute, caused an evil and disgusting stench to emanate from the place where Christians were. de Divinat.And St. Augustine says: “Sorcerers have the power to transmit diseases, and to corrupt and infect the air.”
In either case it is easy for them to achieve their object. For what can be easier than to poison the water supply? And if the air is sometimes corrupted by the odour from a dung-heap so as to cause a plague throughout a whole district, why should we not believe that witches can infect it by the heavy and loathsome stenches which they draw from a poison that they know how to compose with the help of their master? We read, in fact, that after the soldiers of Marcus Avidius Cassius, Mark Antony’s lieutenant,