Note 44 — Chapter I

Discoverie of Witchcraft, book xii. 21.—We shall have occasion hereafter to notice this great opponent of the devil's regime in the sixteenth century. We may be inclined to consider a more probable reason—that spirits, being in the general belief (so Adam infers that God had 'peopled highest heaven with spirits masculine') of the masculine gender, the recipients of their inspiration are naturally of the other sex: evil spirits could propagate their human or half-human agents with least suspicion and in the most natural way.