his tract The Trial of Witchcraft; or Witchcraft: Arraigned and Condemned, published early in the eighteenth century, explains: “The witch mark is sometimes like a blew spot, or a little tate, or reid spots, like flea biting; sometimes also the flesh is sunk in, and hollow, and this is put in secret places, as among the hair of the head, or eye-brows, within the lips, under the arm-pits, and in the most secret parts of the body.” Robert Hink, minister at Aberfoill, in his Secret Commonwealth (1691), writes: “A spot that I have seen, as a small mole, horny, and brown-coloured; throw which mark, when a large pin was thrust (both in buttock, nose, and rooff of the mouth), till it bowed and became crooked, the witches both men and women, nather felt a pain nor did bleed, nor knew the precise time when this was doing to them, (their eyes only being covered).” This mark was sometimes the complete figure of a toad or a bat; or, as Delrio says, the slot of a hare, the foot of a frog, a spider, a deformed whelp, a mouse.54 The same great authority informs us on what part of the body it was usually impressed: “In men it may often be seen under the eyelids, under the lips, under the armpits, on the shoulders, on the fundament; in women, moreover, on the breast or on the pudenda.”55
In his profound treatise De Dæmonialitate that most erudite Franciscan Ludovico Maria Sinistrari writes: “[Sagæ seu Malefici] sigillantur a Dæmone aliquo charactere, maxime ii, de quorum constantia dubitat. Character uero non est semper eiusdem formæ, aut figuræ: aliquando enim est simile lepori, aliquando pedi bufonis, aliquando araneæ, uel catello, uel gliri; imprimitur autem in locis corporis magis occultis: uiris quidem aliquando sub palpebris, aliquando sub axillis, aut labiis, aut humeris, aut sede ima, aut alibi: mulieribus autem plerumque in mammis, seu locis muliebribus. Porro sigillum, quo talia signa imprimuntur, est unguis Diaboli.” (The Demon imprints upon [the Witches or Wizards] some mark, especially on those whose constancy he suspects. That mark, moreover, is not always of the same shape or figure: sometimes it is the image of a hare, sometimes a toad’s leg, sometimes a spider, a puppy, a dormouse. It is imprinted on the most hidden parts of the body: with men, under the eye-lids, or the armpits, or the lips, on the shoulder, the fundament, or somewhere else:
