34
An Examen
and of the nymph Egeria, and of several others whom the poets have particularly mentioned.
Similarly we find in the West Indies that their gods, which they call Cocoto, lay with women and had sexual intercourse with them; unless it was really certain lickerish men who abused them, as Decius Mundus, a Roman knight, whose story Josephus tells in his Antiquities, did to Paulina under pretence of being the God Anubis.
But to return to Françoise Secretain, it is a strange thing that Satan lay with her in the shape of a fowl. Paracel. de Malefic. c. 15.I am of opinion that she meant to say a gander instead of a fowl, for that is a form which Satan often takes, and therefore we have the proverb that Satan has feet like a goose. Yet it would be as easy for him to take the shape of a fowl as that of a gander. For we know that he has at different times assumed the shape of a dog for the same purpose, and we have two remarkable examples of this: Wier.one of a dog, said to be a demon, which used to lift up the robes of the nuns in a convent of the diocese of Cologne in order to abuse them; Bodin, Demonom. III. 6.the other, of certain dogs found on the beds of the nuns of a convent on Mount Hesse in Germany.