delicate balance required of the initiate who would enter on the third degree, they slipped off their pivot, fell quite outside the circle of what is lawful, sure and normal, to chaotic, unlawful and horribly vile. From this, dates much of the black magic. And this was the controlling subjective influence which made witchcraft a very real, objective terror to the victims of the witches during the Middle Ages. There is little doubt that many of the witches did practice a sorcery of the most diabolical type a sorcery based upon the principles of hypnotic suggestion, and of the willful projection of the astral or double; a sorcery, whose object was to cause evil, and which did cause evil in many cases where the victims were not protected from occult mischiefworking by living pure and upright lives; a sorcery, finally, whose impelling motive was due to insane hallucinations resulting in a very large number of cases from having violated the laws of right living in sex relations on the Borderland. It is probable that many of these witches passed the second degree, while few, if any, gained the third the inner degree where aspiration in mingled purity and passion to union with God is chief factor. Some of the attributes of a witch (we need not enumerate them all: the literature of the subject is voluminous) were: 1st, that she sustained or was supposed to sustain occult sex relations with the Prince of the Powers of the Air, Yclept the Devil.
2. That she received on some part of her body a devil's mark or stigma, which was his seal of authority over her and which seems to have been hypnotically rendered insensible to pain. There were men, who did a business in discovering witches by pricking a suspected woman's body all over with a pin until they found some place insensible to the pain of the prick, when they would triumphantly announce this to be the "Devil's Mark;"
3. That the Devil or one of his imps at times visited her in the guise of some animal a dog, a cat, even a huge butterfly, to suck some part of her body, and that, whatever the part of her body chosen, it and no other spot was always resorted to by the impish creature thereafter Sometimes
