On the Illusions of Demons

EPISTLE

Romans 14

measurement original: "remens," likely continuing "prout cuique uisum fuerit praemetiri" from the previous page it seems to tremble, or according to the weight and quality of the talent given by God; nevertheless, these matters will often not have so much importance that they either touch the soul’s salvation in any way, or even entirely disturb or dissolve friendships.

Opinion concerning witches

But daily experience teaches how execrable an alienation from God, how close a bond with the demon, how much hatred among neighbors, what quarrelsome factions of neighbors, what feuds of peasants, what dissensions of cities, and how frequent the slaughters of the innocent—with the devil as the tragic author—that most fertile mother of calamities produces: namely, the opinion conceived about the prodigious power of the witches’ maleficium; the supposed use of supernatural power to cause harm (I do not say veneficium; the actual use of poison).

And since there are few diseases whose causes the common people, perversely instructed in the Christian religion, do not attribute to the work of witches: scarcely any other order of men is found to whom this entire business of impiety is more deeply known, and upon whom a more just occasion for taking action on this matter falls, than physicians. Their minds are so disturbed and their ears so grated by this kind of disbelief, that nothing rings so loudly among the sick as that biting and false accusation against innocent poor women for an evil supposedly inflicted in this manner.

Reason for writing

This Camarina A reference to an ancient Sicilian marsh; a classical proverb meaning a dangerous situation that is better left undisturbed, or in this context, a foul mess being stirred up, which for some time did not exhale such a virulent stench—since there was hope it would eventually perish through sound instruction from the Word of God—is now being heavily stirred up again. Thus the virus of contagion now spreads much further and wider to the destruction of many, as the spirit of storms blows horribly upon it...