husband as you wes lying in yor bed at qch tyme you engadged to be his servant and receaved a dollar from him'.[1] When a man had special knowledge as to which women were witches, it is suggestive that he might be himself the Devil; as in the case of the Rev. Allan Logan, who 'was particularly knowing in the detection of witches. At the administration of the communion, he would cast his eye along, and say: "You witch wife, get up from the table of the Lord", when some poor creature would rise and depart.'[2]
It seems probable that the infamous Abbé Guibourg was the head of the Paris witches, for it was he who celebrated the 'black mass' and performed the sacrifice of a child, both of which were the duties of the 'Devil'.[3]
At Salem also the account given by the witches of the Rev. George Burroughs points to his filling the office of 'Devil', for he was 'Head Actor at some of their Hellish Randezvouses, and one who had the promise of being a King in Satan's kingdom.—He was the person who had Seduc'd and Compell'd them into the snares of Witchcraft'.[4] That Burroughs was a religious person is no argument against his being also the 'Devil' of Salem. Apart from the well-known psychological fact that a certain form of religious feeling can exist at the same time as the propensity to and practice of sexual indulgence, there is proof that many of the witches were outwardly religious according to the tenets of Christianity. So many Christian priests were also followers of the witch-religion that the Inquisitors of the sixteenth century were greatly exercised in their minds as to how to deal with the offenders. Antide Colas confessed that she attended the midnight mass on Christmas Eve, then went to a witch meeting, and returned to the church in time for the mass at dawn on Christmas morning.[5] At Ipswich in 1645 'Mother Lakeland hath been a professour of Religion, a constant hearer of the Word for these many years, and yet a witch (as she confessed) for the space of near twenty years'.[6] The best-known case
