Note 11 — Chapter XXIV · Witchcraft.

The insignificance to which the priests had reduced the devil in the plays, where they were usually the actors, reflected their own petty routine of life. They could conceive of nothing more terrible than their own mean mishaps and local obstructions. One great office of the Devil was to tempt some friar to sleep when he should be at prayer,11 make another drink too much, or a third cast warm glances at a village beauty. The Revelations of the Abbot Richalmus, written seven hundred years ago, shows the Devil already far gone in his process of diminution. The Devil here concentrates the energies which once made the earth tremble on causing nausea to the Abbot, and making the choir cough while he is preaching. ‘When I sit down to holy studies,’ he says, ‘the devils make me heavy with sleep. Then I stretch my hands beyond my cuffs to give them a chill. Forthwith the spirits prick me under my clothes like so many fleas, which causes me to put my hands on them; and so they get warm again, and my reading grows careless.’ ‘Come, just look at my lip; for twenty years has an imp clung to it just to make it hang down.’ It is ludicrous to find that ancient characteristic of the gods of Death already adverted to—their hatred of salt, the agent of preservation—descended from being the sign of Job’s constancy to Jehovah into a mere item of the Abbot’s appetite. ‘When I am at dinner, and the devil has taken away my appetite, as soon as I have tasted a little salt it comes back to me; and if, shortly afterwards, I lose it again, I take some more salt, and am once more an hungered.’12