Note 490 — Chapter IX · WITCHCRAFT.

MSS. of Library of Univ. of Halle, Yc, 20, T. I.—This case is not unexampled. In 1686, Sor Teresa Gabriel de Vargas, a Bernardine Recollect, charged herself with the same crime before the Madrid tribunal, but, as she added the denial of the power of God, she was reconciled for the heresy.—Archivo de Simancas, Inq., Lib. 1024, fol. 31.

Even more significant is the case of Sor Rosa de San Joseph Barrios, a Clare of the convent of San Diego, Garachico, Canaries, a woman of 25 who, in July 1773, in sacramental confession to Fray Nicolás Peraza, related how, through desire to gratify her lust, she had given herself to Satan, in a writing which disappeared from her hand, and at his command had renounced God and the Virgin and had treated the consecrated host and a crucifix with the foulest indignities. In reward for this during four years he had served her as an incubus, coming at her call about twice a month. Fray Peraza applied to the tribunal for a commission to absolve her which was granted and, on August 15th, he reported having done so, with fuller details as to her apostasy. The tribunal then decided that he had exceeded his powers; it evidently did not regard the case as hallucination for it required her to be formally reconciled and prescribed a course of life-long spiritual penance, which she gratefully accepted. An incident not readily explicable is that the bishop deprived Fray Peraza of the faculty of hearing confessions.—Birch, Catalogue of MSS. of the Inquisition in the Canary Islands, I, p. 21; II, pp. 922-30.