by this means the patient is cured. But who can doubt that in such cases it is the Devil who heals, just as he does mischief and hurt by means of the images of which we have treated above?
I wish also to mention certain more ridiculous matters, which nevertheless go to prove the same conclusion. In order to cure the falling sickness, witches would have a man use the powder from the skull of a robber who had been hanged. This is an altogether detestable practice. And when they wish to cure someone of sexual impotence, they make him piss, etc. Or else they make him go into a forest and look at the nest of a pie, etc. Also, in such a case, they make him who has been prevented from lying with his wife piss through the wedding ring, etc. Again, when a man is in doubt whether he is a victim of witchcraft, they send him to take bread and salt in the house of the suspected witch; as if the bread and salt thus taken without the witch’s knowledge had the power to heal him. I was forgetting to say that sometimes in their cures they make use of the brain of a cat or a raven’s head, which are true poisons.
In the cases which we are considering, therefore, it is Satan who effects the cure. And he does so by making use of second and natural causes, and the methods used by physicians. Bodin, Demonom. III. 2. de not. Eccl. lib. 4. c. 14.For, as the learned Cardinal Bellarmine says, when a sickness is naturally curable the Devil can bring remedies to the sick man. Or else it is merely a case of the Devil ceasing to do ill, as Tertullian says, speaking of the blind and the lame whom the Emperor Vespasian caused to see and walk, In Apolog. c. 22.according to Suetonius: “The Devil insinuates himself into the eyes of the blind and the legs of