meslant cette poudre avec ladicte paste, elle a cette vertu de taciturnité: si bien que qui en mange ne confesse iamais.'[1] At Forfar, in 1661, Helen Guthrie and four others exhumed the body of an unbaptized infant, which was buried in the churchyard near the south-east door of the church, 'and took severall peices therof, as the feet, hands, a pairt of the head, and a pairt of the buttock, and they made a py therof, that they might eat of it, that by this meanes they might never make a confession (as they thought) of their witchcraftis.'[2] Here the idea of sympathetic magic is very clear; by eating the flesh of a child who had never spoken articulate words, the witches' own tongues would be unable to articulate.
4. Sacrifice of the God.—The sacrifice of the witch-god was a decadent custom when the records were made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The accounts of the actual rite come from France and Belgium, where a goat was substituted for the human victim. The sacrifice was by fire in both those countries, and there are indications that it was the same in Great Britain. It is uncertain whether the interval of time between the sacrifices was one, seven, or nine years.
Bodin and Boguet, each writing from his own knowledge of the subject, give very similar accounts, Bodin's being the more detailed. In describing a trial which took place in Poictiers in 1574, he says: 'Là se trouuoit vn grand bouc noir, qui parloit comme vne personne aux assistans, & dansoyent à l'entour du bouc: puis vn chacun luy baisoit le derriere, auec vne chandelle ardente: & celà faict, le bouc se consommoit en feu, & de la cẽdre chacun en prenoit pour faire mourir le bœuf [etc.]. Et en fin le Diable leur disoit d'vne voix terrible des mots, Vengez vous ou vous mourrez.'[3] Boguet says that in the Lyons district in 1598 the Devil celebrated mass, and 'apres auoir prins la figure d'vn Bouc, se consume en feu, & reduit en cendre, laquelle les Sorciers recueillent, & cachent pour s'en seruir à l'execution de leurs desseins pernicieux & abominables'.[4] In 1603, a Belgian witch, Claire Goessen, was present at such a sacrifice, and her account is therefore that of an eyewitness. 'Elle s'est laissée transporter à l'assemblée
