ADVERTISEMENTS

Thus, the first volume is like the Register or official record original: "procés verbal"; a formal legal report of proceedings, containing the evidence and the procedures upon which their condemnation is founded. And this second volume contains the reasons for it, and the commerce that takes place throughout the world between Satan and Sorcerers: for they have the same master, and the same way of proceeding throughout the entire Universe.

But what I call the "reasons" for Witchcraft original: "Sortilege" must be taken and understood in a civil sense. For I am not so presumptuous, nor so ignorant either, as to want to rashly publish to the world that I can know and discover all the impostures of the Devil, of Witchcraft, and of Witches, nor in what manner and how they do so many execrable things. Our Lord does not wish for man to enter into such a high inquiry. And the Devil himself may well command a Sorcerer to do this or that; but he takes great care not to discover to him the means and the fashion of it. So that even if we had put every witch in Europe on trial, and they had entirely confessed all that they know: they could never have instructed us nor represented their wickednesses so well that we could give a valid reason why or how they did it; nor make visible to the eye the artifice which Satan used to make them his own, to transport them to the Sabbath The secret nocturnal gathering of witches, to delude them in Lycanthropy Lycanthropy: the supposed transformation of a human into a wolf and other transformations, and to give them the means to cast spells original: "maleficier" and spoil men and crops, as is his custom.

But I provide all the probable reasons that experience—their sight, their confessions (whether free or tortured)—and all the books that speak of it, have been able to teach me. I know and discover just as much of it as it pleases God that I should know: my curiosity must not extend any further, and one could not go beyond without becoming ensnared oneself.