Note 34 — Chapter II · Witchcraft and Sorcery.

II. Mackay’s “Memoirs of Delusions,” p. 258.

While this hideous record of blood and murder, in the name of the law, was being recorded in England, during the seventeenth century, a similar record was being written, in the criminal courts of Spain, Italy, Scotland and Germany. Thousands of innocent people lost their lives under this charge in these countries, during this century.

As an illustration of this mad carnival of death, in Würzburg, alone in the two years following 1627, one hundred and fifty-seven people were burned, in twenty-nine burnings, averaging from five to six people at a burning. The wealthy and the paupers, old and young, the ungainly and the comely, all alike suffered in this unholy crusade.

Of the list there were three play-actors; four innkeepers; three councilmen; fourteen vicars; the burgomaster’s lady; an apothecary’s wife and daughter, the wife, sons and daughter of the councillor Stolzenberg and Gobel Babelin, “the prettiest girl in the town,” thirty-two vagrants and a large number of little innocent children, who were guilty of no offense or crime other than that of living in a period when their innocence was considered a crime. (Hauber’s “Acta et Scripta Magica.”)