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More "Witchcraft" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a care of him yourself; for surely there is witchcraft betwixt his lips: He is a wolf within the sheepfold; and therefore I will be earnest, that you ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... on earth is one to go?" "Don't ask me," the Englishman protested. "And above all, don't tell me. I don't want to know. Since I've been on this job, I've learned to believe in telepathy and mind reading and witchcraft and all manner of unholy rot. And I don't want you to come to a sudden end through somebody's establishing illicit intercourse with ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... gentle with them. The spell of savage witchcraft had been broken. John and all of them knew it. They were hustled forward in the darkness, and as they approached the village Muro told them to advise the chiefs in his presence what John ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Conquest of the Savages • Roger Thompson Finlay
... wonderful story[121] told by his father of a ghost or demon which he saw in his youth while he was a scholar in the house of Giovanni Resta at Pavia. He searches the pages of Hector Boethius, Nicolaus Donis, Rugerus, Petrus Toletus, Leo Africanus, and other chroniclers of the marvellous, for tales of witchcraft, prodigies, and monstrous men and beasts, and devotes a whole chapter to chiromancy,[122] a subject with which he had occupied his plenteous leisure when he was waiting for patients at Sacco. The diagram of the human hand given by him does not ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... of that strange and little-known phenomenon called repercussion, by means of which any injury done to, or any mark made upon, the astral body in the course of its wanderings will be reproduced in the physical body. We find traces of this in some of the evidence given at trials for witchcraft in the middle ages, in which it is not infrequently stated that some wound given to the witch when in the form of a dog or a wolf was found to have appeared in the corresponding part of her human body. The same strange law has sometimes ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... Hugo always had more than the rest. He did not spend it, but once a year a man with a red flannel cap like Hugo's appeared and received all the boy's pay for overwork, and then went away. The boys made up their minds that Hugo had some sort of witchcraft in his copper coin. After some years his apprenticeship expired, and Hugo became a journeyman, working in the same quiet way and doing more work than any other man in the village, though he did not work any faster. Meantime several of his brothers, ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... blue spark flashing for the Sahib to the Indus and back again in less time than it takes to smoke a hookah. At Gwadur, no sooner was the cable landed than the people of the surrounding country flocked down to hear and talk of the Feringhee witchcraft. Chiefs of the Beloochees, Muscatees, and Heratees, with their retainers, trod upon each other's toes in their eagerness to see it work. Gwadur has given up the idea that Mahomet taught everything that could be known, and now sits ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... Marian Holbrook's lost footsteps; but no clue to the painful mystery was to be found. From the moment when she vanished from the eyes of the servant-woman watching her departure from the Grange gate, she seemed to have disappeared altogether from the sight of mankind. If by some witchcraft she had melted into the dim autumnal mist that hung about the river-bank, she could not have left less trace, or vanished more mysteriously than she had done. The local constabulary gave in very soon, in spite of Gilbert Fenton's ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... from the offertory money, are very generally worn for the cure of epilepsy. Water that had been used in baptism was believed in West Scotland to have virtue to cure many distempers; it was a preventive against witchcraft, and eyes bathed with it would never see a ghost. Dalyell puts the evidence very succinctly. "Everything relative to sanctity was deemed a preservative. Hence the relics of saints, the touch of their clothes, of their tombs, and even portions of structures consecrated to divine offices ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... enchantments. The doctrines of Sakya, as they prevailed in Udyana in old times, were probably strongly tinged with Sivaitic magic, and the Tibetans still regard that locality as the classic ground of sorcery and witchcraft. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Monopoly, regrating, and forestalling, which two last are only particular modes of monopolizing, have been considered as chimeras, as imaginary practices that have never existed, and that cannot possibly exist. They have been likewise assimilated to witchcraft, an ideal belief, arising in the times of ignorance. It is now become the creed of legislators and ministers, that trade should be left to regulate itself, that monopoly ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... sort of diviners, who divine the truth, not by rules of art, but by an instinctive repugnance and extreme detestation which a noble nature has of the power of pleasure, in which they think that there is nothing sound, and her seductive influence is declared by them to be witchcraft, and not pleasure. This is the use which you may make of them. And when you have considered the various grounds of their dislike, you shall hear from me what I deem to be true pleasures. Having thus examined the nature ...
— Philebus • Plato
... hence to Hell; there hide thy Head lower than Darkness. Wou'd thou hadst been acting Incest, Murder, Witchcraft, when thou cam'st to pray: Thou hadst in any thing sinn'd less ...
— Representation of the Impiety and Immorality of the English Stage (1704); Some Thoughts Concerning the Stage in a Letter to a Lady (1704) • Anonymous
... appearance caused by the constant rubbing against it of the head of a person whilst seated on the rock. This and other circumstances led us to conjecture that the cave was frequented by some wise man or native doctor who was resorted to by the inhabitants in cases of disease or witchcraft. We saw many footmarks about, and found other signs of the close presence of the natives, ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... are themselves unchangeable, still by witchcraft and deception they may make us think that they appear in ...
— The Republic • Plato
... understand all this mysterious talk. You are hinting at strange things. Let me know about it. Is there witchcraft in the matter?" ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. But when once the invisible world was supposed to be opened, and the lawless agency ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... of Apparitions. It is to be regretted, that Coleridge has never yet gratified the wish he professed to feel, in the first volume of his Friend, p. 246, to devote an entire work to the subject of dreams, visions, ghosts, witchcraft, &c; in it we should have had the satisfaction of tracing the workings of a most vivid imagination, analyzed by the most discriminating judgment. See Barrow's sermon on the being of God, proved from supernatural effects. We need scarcely request the reader to bear in mind, that Barrow was ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... tree, and at last laid down the glass. "There is nothing to be seen," said he, thoughtfully. "If the gentry we are expecting carried any thing besides scythes, we should be compelled to believe there is some witchcraft at work. But now all is uncertainty. Beware of ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... forsooke, To wander, where wilde fortune would me lead, And other bywaies he himselfe betooke, Where never foot of living wight did tread, 440 That brought[*] not backe the balefull body dead; In which him chaunced false Duessa meete, Mine onely foe, mine onely deadly dread, Who with her witchcraft, and misseeming sweete, Inveigled him to follow her desires ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... she could have succeeded in this, for the squire looked high, and over high, for the wife of his heir; he detested all foreigners, and moreover held all Roman Catholics in dread and abomination something akin to our ancestors' hatred of witchcraft. All these prejudices were strengthened by his grief. Argument would always have glanced harmless away off his shield of utter unreason; but a loving impulse, in a happy moment, might have softened his heart to what he most detested in the former days. But the happy ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... wreaths in their bonnets; gamblers were set in the pillory, and card-playing and nine-pins were denounced as gambling. Heresy was punished with death; and in sixty years one hundred and fifty people were burned to death, in Geneva, for witchcraft. Legislation extended to dress and private habits; many innocent amusements were altogether suppressed; also holidays and theatrical exhibitions. Excommunication was as much dreaded ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... The necromancy, divination, and witchcraft, forbidden in the Old Testament and practised by the heathen of those times, were all of a similar character. A necromancer was one who had, or pretended to have communication with the dead,—who sought ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... 'Witchcraft!when all's done,' said Dr. Arthur. 'Dane, when your independent power is in the market, let me know.'He followed them into the red room, and took a cup of coffee there, standing; but then went off at once to see some patient, promising ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... experiments in witchcraft, I. his book, I. at the execution of George Burroughs, I. on "Devil's authority," I. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... candle burns down; the woman takes its expiring end between her fingers, lights another at it, crams the guttering frying morsel deep into the candlestick, and rams it home with the new candle, as if she were loading some ill-savoured and unseemly weapon of witchcraft; the new candle in its turn burns down; and still he lies insensible. At length what remains of the last candle is blown out, and daylight ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... The discouerie of witchcraft, Wherein the lewde dealing of witches and witchmongers is notablie detected, the knauerie of coniurors, the impietie of inchantors, the follie of soothsaiers, the impudent falshood of cousenors, the infidelitie of atheists, the pestilent practises ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... up last of all, and the witnesses would all be examined before he himself was called to make his defence. He was nervous and anxious. Even while he was sitting there, Giovanni might be finding out some new accusation against him or the officer of archers might be accusing him of witchcraft and of having a compact with the devil himself. He was innocent, but he had broken the law, and no doubt many an innocent man had sat on that same bench before him, who had never again returned to his home. It was not strange that his lips should ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... It is written in the Decretals (XXVI, qu. v, can. Sortes): "We decree that the casting of lots, by which means you make up your mind in all your undertakings, and which the Fathers have condemned, is nothing but divination and witchcraft. For which reason we wish them to be condemned altogether, and henceforth not to be mentioned among Christians, and we forbid the practice ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... sunlight, and at the head of the bank there walked an aged woman, bearing upon her bent back a bundle of faggots. Ailsa raised her blue eyes, and at sight of the old woman shrank back and felt in her dark hair for the sprig of feathery rowan leaves that she wore there as a charm against witchcraft. ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... to bad observation, to the post hoc, ergo propter hoc; and bad observers are almost all superstitious. Farmers used to attribute disease among cattle to witchcraft; weddings have been attributed to seeing one magpie, deaths to seeing three; and I have heard the most highly educated now-a-days draw consequences for the sick ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... The cavalier Pizarro y Orellana has given biographical notices of each of the brothers. It requires no witchcraft to detect that the blood of the Pizarros flowed in the veins of the writer to his fingers' ends. Yet his facts are less suspicious than his inferences.] In talent and in expansion of views, he was inferior to his brothers. Neither did he discover the ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... the Christians believed in a miraculous story may freely be acknowledged, but it is evidence of the truth of the story that we want, not evidence of their belief in it. Many ignorant people believe in witchcraft and in fortune-telling now-a-days, but their belief only proves their own ignorance, and not the truth of either superstition. The next step in the argument is that "the story which Christians have now" is "the ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... before us—such works as only true men may achieve. And what is a man? A man, methinks, is he, that, when he speaketh, speaketh ever from his heart; that, being quick to hate all evil actions, is quicker to forgive, and who, fearing neither ghost nor devil, spells nor witchcraft, dreadeth only dishonour, and thus, living without fear, he without fear may die. So now God send we all be men, my brothers. To your files there—pikes to the front and rear, bows ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... eagerly to the crowd, rushing to man after man among them, but each shook his head and hung back, daunted by the terrible charge of witchcraft. ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... The Witchcraft superstitions of the Channel Islands, sad as they were in their characteristics and results—as is abundantly evidenced by our judicial records—were but a part and parcel of that vast wave of unreasoning credulity which swept across the ...
— Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands • John Linwood Pitts
... suffering Israelites: "My little finger shall be thicker than my father's loins; my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions"; and Samuel prophesying to Saul how dearly he shall learn that "Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness as an ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... of his age, witchcraft, I think there is no allusion in Walton. Almost as uncanny, however, is his account of Donne's preparation ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... either add a fourth, or omit the third. In a capital trial, in which I had pleaded for Titinia, the daughter of Cotta, when he attempted to reply to me in defence of Serv. Naevius, he suddenly forgot every thing he had intended to say, and attributed it to the pretended witchcraft, and magic artifices of Titinia. These were undoubted proofs of the weakness of his memory. But, what is still more inexcusable, he sometimes forgot, even in his written treatises, what he had mentioned but a little before. Thus, in a book ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... infirmity could only increase the consideration with which they were disposed to surround him. He only made a guttural sound, low and languid, which had no signification. The more reason for being well skilled in the mysteries of witchcraft. ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... Old Salem in the Witchcraft days, with a charming love story: historically an informing book. 12mo. ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... many things in this narrative which I, an unlearned man, cannot explain. Still, I must tell of matters as they occurred, this, among others, especially as my relations with Eli Fraddam, Betsey's son, have been condemned by Parson Inch. It is said that the Fraddam family has witchcraft in its veins. Anyhow, it is well known that Betsey was regarded as a witch, while Eli, her son—but of the poor gnome I ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... he was broken on the wheel, being condemned on his own confession. It does not appear that he was put to the torture to make him confess. If this had been done his admissions would, of course, have been as valueless as those of the victims in trials for witchcraft. ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... 'No one should molest these evil-fated persons; to say nothing to them, to hear nothing from them, but to let them remain in their house, and that no one should injure or oppress them.' From that day, the magicians, conceiving this mysterious event to be witchcraft, have used all their exorcising arts and spells to destroy its effects; and all the inhabitants of this city read [prayers] from the glorious Kur,an, and pronounced the great name of God. It is a long while since this awful scene took ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... falling; and most of the people of the castle, not knowing what was really the matter, were at their wits' end with astonishment. Don Quixote sprang to his feet, and drawing his sword, began making passes at the grating, shouting out, "Avaunt, malignant enchanters! avaunt, ye witchcraft-working rabble! I am Don Quixote of La Mancha, against whom your evil machinations avail not nor have any power." And turning upon the cats that were running about the room, he made several cuts at them. They ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... both of these charges to be utterly false, and said that no human being was ever burned at the stake in Massachusetts for the crime of witchcraft, and though at a time when the whole civilized world believed in witchcraft on the authority of certain passages in the Old Testament, the courts of Massachusetts did execute some nineteen or twenty persons of both sexes for the alleged crime of witchcraft, it was also true that the people ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... I do not see much difference after all, between the belief of the ignorant Russians, or Spaniards, or Portuguese, or other European people, and these unhappy blacks," exclaimed Harry one day when we were discussing the subject. The fearful curse of the country, however, is the belief in witchcraft. When a person is seized with illness, he always believes that some enemy has caused it, and is not satisfied until the witch or wizard is discovered, who is immediately compelled to swallow poison, or is barbarously put to death in some other way. I prefer thus giving ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... the crime of disobedience is equal in guilt to that of idolatry and witchcraft. But what shall we say of the disobedience of the scrupulous, who so idolize their own opinions as to be absolutely slaves to them, and whom no sort of remonstrance or reasoning will convince of the ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... been my own experience," said Count Victor. "Are you sure her honesty is on more substantial grounds than her reputation for witchcraft? I demand your pardon for expressing these suspicions, but I have reasons. I cannot imagine that the attack of the Macfarlanes was connived at by your servants, though that was my notion for a little when Mungo locked me up, for they suffered more alarm at the ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... impulses or they cannot rid themselves of erroneous ideas concerning themselves and others." This means, in fact, that they had been previously hypnotised to a definite conception which had become imperative. As in Witchcraft, it is a law that one sorcerer cannot undo the work of another without extraordinary pains; so in hypnotism it is hard to undo what is already ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... and drunk your own damnation, and misused the Holy Sacrament for purposes of witchcraft! Out with you!—down to the lake and be baptized, or ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... but gives him his life; the King, however, banishes the false accuser and sets the stranger over the people of Brabant with the title of Protector. Telramund is overwhelmed by his misfortunes, but Ortrud urges him to make another trial to regain what he has lost. The knight, she says, had won by witchcraft, and if but the smallest joint of his body could be taken from him, he would be impotent. Together they instil disquiet and suspicion into the mind of Elsa as she is about to enter the minster to be married. After the wedding guests have departed, her newly found happiness is disturbed by doubt, ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... away; And if that wouldn't do, he was sure to succeed, If he took his review out and offered to read; Or, failing in plans of this milder description, 300 He would ask for their aid to get up a subscription, Considering that authorship wasn't a rich craft, To print the 'American drama of Witchcraft.' 'Stay, I'll read you a scene,'—but he hardly began, Ere Apollo shrieked 'Help!' and the authors all ran: And once, when these purgatives acted with less spirit, And the desperate case asked a remedy desperate, He drew from his pocket a foolscap epistle As calmly as if 'twere a nine-barrelled ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... original line: On nearly all plantations there were some slaves who did not wish to work, consequently, for this, or similar reasons, hid themselves in the woods.] They smuggled food to their hiding place by night, and remained away [HW: lost] in some instances, many months. Their belief in witchcraft caused them to resort to most ridiculous means of avoiding discovery. Phil told the story of a man who visited a conjurer to obtain a "hand" for which he paid fifty dollars in gold. The symbol was a hickory stick which he ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... given by Duke John V. to his son Peter, who resided here and rebuilt the castle. When attacked by his mortal illness, the physicians attributed his malady to witchcraft, and declared it could only be remedied by counter-spells. The Prince refused to have recourse to such means, saying, "I had rather die by the will of God, than live by the will of the Devil."—"J'aime mieux mourir de par Dieu, que de vivre ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... my eyes to heaven's starry dome, And gripp'd my faulchion with convulsive might, Resolv'd no witchcraft should ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... his diligence in this matter to the Council before the 15th of August, under pains of rebellion. On the 4th of June following, he appears in a curious position in connection with a prosecution for witchcraft against several women, and an abridgement of the document, as recorded in the Records of the Privy Council, is of sufficient interest to justify a place here. It is the complaint of Katherine Ross, relict of Robert Munro ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... "The Witchcraft Act assumes that there can be no possible communication between living men and spirits," he said in answer to an assertion; whereon Septimus May instantly ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... had been speaking, I had been weighing her story in my mind. I had hitherto put cases of witchcraft on one side, as mere superstitions; and my uncle and I had had many an argument, he supporting himself by the opinion of his good friend Sir Matthew Hale. Yet this sounded like the tale of one bewitched; or was it merely the effect ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... offshoot of Europe. It became a world of its own; its people developed into a new race. They had their own springs of action, their own ways of thought, different from those of Europe, more simple and intense as was shown in the Salem witchcraft excitement, or more resolute and advanced as was revealed in Bacon's ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... in waiting discovered the Queen of Hearts, with a nail of Iron knocked through the forehead, and thus fastened to the bottom of the chair: they durst not pull it out, remembering that her like thing was used to the old Countess of Sussex, and afterwards proved a witchcraft, for which certain ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 20, March 16, 1850 • Various
... experience—that strictest of school-masters. Now, you see, I have my lecturing-cap on, and am almost equal to you or Dr. Lardner in my way. But it takes you to define fascination! I suppose Mrs. Heavyside, however, could help you there—for nothing short of witchcraft could account to me for her elopement with that dreary man! To leave her sweet children, too, as if all the men on earth could be worth to a true mother her teething baby's little ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... Mark your divorce, young sir, Whom son I dare not call; thou art too base To be acknowledged: thou a sceptre's heir, That thus affects a sheep-hook!—Thou, old traitor, I am sorry that, by hanging thee, I can but Shorten thy life one week.—And thou, fresh piece Of excellent witchcraft, who of force must know The ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... afraid, dear madam. I was not thinking of any witchcraft; but only wishing your children the bright mirror of a clear and settled mind. I think such a mirror would show them that what they take for loyalty and patriotism in their own feelings and conduct, is no more loyalty and patriotism than ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... the idea that the gods curb the pride of prosperity and are jealous of it. His heroes are taught as a life policy to avert envy. Self-disparagement is an approved pose.[1822] Plutarch[1823] explains the efficiency of objects set up to avert witchcraft on the theory that by their oddity they draw the evil eye from persons and objects. Fescennine verses of the Romans, which were used at weddings and triumphs, were intended to ward off ill luck. Soldiers followed the chariot of the triumphing general and ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... suppose such a thing of your honour! And on what ground could one inform against us? Do you suppose it's some sinful contrivance of ours? No, sir, my son's not the one to lend himself to anything wicked ... or give way to any sort of witchcraft.... God forbid indeed, holy Mother of Heaven! (The old woman crossed herself three times.) He's the foremost in prayer and fasting in the whole province; the foremost, your honour, he is! And that's just ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... slow reflection of a woman's face Grew, as by witchcraft, in the oval space Of that strange glass on which the moon looked in:— As cruel as death beneath the auburn hair The dark eyes burned; and, o'er the faultless chin,— Evil as night yet as the daybreak fair,— Rose-red and sensual smiled the ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... the brutes, then there is no mistake about the sort of life which he will lead—'Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like.' An ugly list, my friends; and God have mercy on the man who gives way to them. ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... destroyed, to sacrifice unto the Lord thy God in Gilgal. 22. And Samuel said, Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams. 23. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, He hath also rejected thee from ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... hard common sense the Cap'n wanted to pounce on the paper, tear it up, announce his practical ideas on the witchcraft question, and then kick Mr. Gammon and his gander into the middle of the street. But as town officer he gazed at the end of that monitory finger and took ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... all except the coppers that she begged for. She squatted in the roadway, ink-black and clear-cut in the now blazing sunlight, alternately flattering them and pretending to a knowledge of unguessed-at witchcraft. ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... statute of. Wine, or beer, use of never regulated by sumptuary legislation; sweet white wine not to be sold at retail; sweet wine (Spanish?) must be sold at the same price as the wine of the Rhine and Gascony. Witchcraft, first act against under Henry VIII; forbidden by statute of James I. Witenagemot (see also Council), included originally all freemen in England; main function of judicial legislation; little known of in early times; ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... secluded position, being hidden by a garden filled with gooseberry-trees; but the very secrecy of their operations aroused suspicion, and popular superstition at once connected them with some kind of witchcraft or sorcery. Two old women who lived close by averred that they heard strange noises in it of a humming nature, as if the devil were tuning his bagpipes, and Arkwright and Kay were dancing a reel, and so much consternation ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... Point for point, the details of the reformation are paralleled by injunctions in Deuteronomy—notably the abolition of idolatry, the concentration of the worship at a single sanctuary (xii.), the abolition of witchcraft and star-worship, and the celebration of the passover. Some of these enactments are found in other parts of the Pentateuch, but Deuteronomy is the only code in which they are all combined. 621 B.C. then is the latest possible date for ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... well, Lady," answered the Wanderer. "To-morrow night I meet thee without the pylon gates. I also am minded to fly this land of witchcraft and of horror, but I may scarce depart till Pharaoh return again. For he has gone down to battle and left me to guard ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... fell, it lay unhurt on one of the soft sandhills that ringed the bay; but no sign of the child was to be seen. Katipah was laughing when she picked up her kite and ran home. And Bimsha thought, "Is it witchcraft, or did the child ...
— The Blue Moon • Laurence Housman
... hands somewhat forward. "It is on such clear and mellow nights that your shop is most itself. Then they appear most perfect, those moons of green and gold and crimson, which from afar oft guide the pilgrim of pain and sickness to this house of merciful witchcraft." ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... vessel hath visited a land of witchcraft, or you would not pretend to a knowledge of things, that, in their very nature, must be hidden from a stranger.—Of what value may be those beautiful feathers of ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... the belief that it is dangerous The two kinds of magic Rarity of persecution for magic before the Christian era The Christian theory of devils Constantine's laws against magic Increasing terror of magic and witchcraft Papal enactments against them Persistence of the belief in magic Its effect on the development of science Roger Bacon Opposition of secular rulers to science John Baptist Porta The opposition to scientific societies in Italy In England The effort to ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... King of Naples, he was beating a retreat, when a ball reached one of the officers beside him, on which event the hetman was so much irritated against his magician that he had him flogged in presence of all his hordes, reproaching him most bitterly because he had not turned away the balls by his witchcraft. This was plain evidence of the fact that he had more faith in his art than the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... translations of Goethe. The preliminary remarks are very characteristic, written with that intense enthusiasm which still animates all his writings. The notes at the end are full of curious information regarding the witchcraft and astrology of the Middle Ages, gathered with assiduous labour from the stores ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... he shouted, pulling himself up and flinging a leg over the mast: "ingratitood's worse than witchcraft. Sit ye there an' inwardly digest that sayin', while ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... perhaps, to prove it for himself or his descendants; and there was reference to documents and records in England in confirmation of the genealogy. Septimius saw that this paper had been drawn up by an ancestor of his own, the unfortunate man who had been hanged for witchcraft; but so earnest had been his expectation of something different, that he flung the old papers down with ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... believe in witchcraft, they are less superstitious in some respects than many of the lower classes of whites. Chief Yana Taowk seemed to take pleasure in kicking the Sitka bones that lay in his way, and neither old nor young showed the ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... who know, because he has brought the incredulity on himself. If he escapes, he can only do so by opening the eyes of the jury to the facts that medical science is as yet very imperfectly differentiated from common curemongering witchcraft; that diagnosis, though it means in many instances (including even the identification of pathogenic bacilli under the microscope) only a choice among terms so loose that they would not be accepted as definitions in any really exact science, is, even at that, an ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... replied, and knelt at his feet. He laid his hands upon her head, prayed, blessed her, and sent her to the Prior of Huntingdon, the penitentiary priest of the district, to hear her confession. She not only gave up witchcraft, but ceased to be brazen-faced and a shrew: so that people bruited this matter as a miracle, and a handsome one it was. The bishop probably saved her from the vengeance of this rural dean, for witch-burning was not unknown even then, as Walter de Map witnesses. This was not the first essay ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... from its blindness and ignorance by the innate force of the mind. Reason, the great magician, has uplifted its wand; and lo, the creatures of night disappear! It has dispelled the foolish old notions of magic, witchcraft, and miracles. It has overcome the spirit of persecution, the childish conception of original sin, and the doctrine of eternal punishment. It has put an end to bull-baiting, cock-fighting, and all the lower ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... 'nothing since I got rid of that infernal portrait. I was wrong, my friend, not to let you burn it. The devil fly away with the thing, say I! I am no believer in witchcraft and the like, but I am more than half persuaded some evil spirit is lodged in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... example. Again, the study of history, and especially of that of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, leaves no shadow of doubt on my mind that the belief in the reality of possession and of witchcraft, justly based, alike by Catholics and Protestants, upon this and innumerable other passages in both the Old and New Testaments, gave rise, through the special influence of Christian ecclesiastics, to the most horrible persecutions and judicial murders of thousands upon ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... at that time, naturally, only the pagan ideas were condemned. Accordingly, while the law of the Goths recognized trial by ordeal, wherein God is summoned to bear miraculous witness in favor of the innocent, the same law condemned belief in witchcraft! The favorite ordeal among the Goths was trial by red-hot iron. The Church took charge of this ceremony, which was accompanied by a most solemn ritual, and all this was legal and religious and approved by the highest authorities! But the poor witches ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... simple. Lucius of Madaura, a young man of property, sets out on his travels to sow his wild oats. He pursues this pleasant occupation with the greatest zeal according to the prevailing mode: he is no moralist. The partner of his first intrigue is the maid of a woman skilled in witchcraft. The curiosity of Lucius being greatly exercised about the sorceress and her magic, he importunes the girl to procure from her mistress a magic salve which will transform him at will into an owl. By mistake he receives the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... you seek in Drangey, but there shall your bones be laid, and many will begrudge you your living there. Beware of treachery; yet shall you be smitten with weapons, for strange are the dreams which I have had. Guard yourselves against witchcraft, for few things are ...
— Grettir The Strong - Grettir's Saga • Unknown
... line of argument applies to all the compliances of Christ with the Jewish prejudices (partly imported from the Euphrates) as to demonology, witchcraft, &c. By the way, in this last word, 'witchcraft,' and the too memorable histories connected with it, lies a perfect mine of bibliolatrous madness. As it illustrates the folly and the wickedness of the biliolaters, let us ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... feet were beginning to hurt, he realized; he sighed briefly, but there was no time or attention to spare for them. "I could only see you by having myself accused of witchcraft," he said. "In that way, you would be forced to listen to me. You may listen now, or later at a full ...
— Wizard • Laurence Mark Janifer (AKA Larry M. Harris)
... misled and enslaved mankind; philosophy has in all ages endeavoured to oppose their progress, and to loosen the shackles they had imposed; philosophers have on this account been called unbelievers: unbelievers of what? of the fictions of fancy, of witchcraft, hobgobblins, apparitions, vampires, fairies; of the influence of stars on human actions, miracles wrought by the bones of saints, the flights of ominous birds, the predictions from the bowels of dying animals, expounders of dreams, fortune-tellers, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... taken down by the airs of Fanchon, and they stood in awe of the far-reaching power of her aunt, from the spell of whose witchcraft they firmly believed no hiding-place, even in the deepest woods, could protect them. Merely nodding a farewell to Fanchon, the Indians silently pushed their canoe into the stream, and, embarking, returned to the city ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the bazaar. No sooner did I appear than all the water-carriers called out, 'That villain, Yussuf, is about to take away our bread. May Shitan seize him. Let us go to the cadi and complain.' The cadi listened to their story, for they accused me of witchcraft, saying that no five men could lift the skin when it was full. He sent one of his beeldars to summon me before him. I had just filled my skin at the river, when the officer came from this distributor of bastinadoes. I followed him to the court, laden as I was. The crowd opened to let me pass, and ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... which shepherds have been known to change themselves into wolves and tear the sheep that they should have protected; and he quoted to him St. Augustine's own testimony, to the belief that in Italy certain women were able to change themselves into heifers through the power of witchcraft. Finally, he told him one or two tales of ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... do you mean by hiding up like that? It is one of your infernal tricks; be careful"—tapping his pistol case—"or I shall one day put an end to you and your witchcraft together." ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... of her house was still to be seen when, in 1857, Whittier first told the story of "The Witch's Daughter," the poem now known as "Mabel Martin." She was the only woman who suffered death on a charge of witchcraft on the north side of the Merrimac. One other aged woman in this village was imprisoned, and would have been put to death, but for the timely collapse of the persecution. She was the wife of Judge Bradbury, and lived on the Salisbury side of the Powow. In his ballad Whittier ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... far lighter in colour than the men. The Ba-Kwiri are generous and open-handed among themselves; but the law of blood for blood is mercilessly fulfilled, even in cases of accidental homicide. Their religion is ancestor-worship blended with witchcraft and magic. They believe in good and evil spirits, those of the forests and seas being especially feared. In common with their neighbours the Dualla (q.v.) the Ba-Kwiri possess a curious drum language. By drum-tapping news is conveyed from ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... there must be some fire"; also that there is, probably, and almost necessarily, some grain of truth in any popular superstition, no matter how absurd it may appear at first sight. This is not less true of witchcraft—though it would be difficult to convince the average person, in all probability, that there was anything connected with it but the grossest and most repulsive superstition. Taken all in all, it most assuredly ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... new aspect every time I looked at them. The long-drawn gardens filling the valley between the Old Town and the New, and the thickly-wooded scars of the Castle rock, were a charm of landscape and a charm of art. Arthur's Seat, like a lion at rest, seemed perfect witchcraft. And from the streets in the New Town, or from Calton Hill, what singular glances of beauty were observed in the distance—the gleaming waters of the Firth, and the blue shadows among the ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... the priests of which, the arbiters of so many fates, should be trained by special study. Mathematical knowledge is perhaps less necessary to them than physiological knowledge. And do you not think that they need a little of that second-sight which is the witchcraft of great men? As it is, the examiners are former professors, honorable men grown old in harness, who limit their work to selecting the best themes. They are unable to do what is really demanded of them; and yet their functions are the noblest ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... lord, like others. At least, a few days ago they were seen travelling toward the bridge of St. Benezet in the company of certain Jews, whom, I am informed, they had rescued from the just reward of their witchcraft. I have a note of all the facts, which include the slaying of sundry good Christians on ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... audible within; low, but distinct. The notary is trying that old charge of witchcraft, which the Inquisitors, whether to justify themselves to their own consciences, or to whiten their villainy somewhat in the eyes of the mob, so often brought against their victims. And then Eustace's heart sinks within him as he hears a woman's voice reply, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... prelates, who that deed forbode, Swift with his prey, away the tyrant went, Of God's sharp justice naught he feared the rod, But in his chapel vile the image laid, On which the enchanter charms and witchcraft said. ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... repaired damages, but at length, after counsel taken together, they gave it up. Perhaps, like other unlettered folk, they came to the conclusion that the Devil was in it, and yielded to the invisible persecution of witchcraft. ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... dragon is manifesting his power on the deceptive and miracle-working line is modern Spiritualism. Multitudes of people of all classes are believers in this soul-destroying doctrine. The system is generally acknowledged to be but a modern form of what was anciently styled witchcraft, necromancy, magic, etc., while the mediums of to-day are of the same class as those formerly known as "witches," "sorcerers," "magicians." This they themselves often admit. The system is so well known both in doctrine and in its ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... grit, and a little house in Salem which has belonged to her family for more than two hundred years. She was a Hitchcock, and the Hitchcocks had been settled in Salem since the year 1. It was a great-great-grandfather of Mr. Eliphalet Hitchcock who was foremost in the time of the Salem witchcraft craze. And this little old house which she left to my friend Eliphalet Duncan ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... influential among you secretly plotted together to destroy me, and, by so doing, to set you at each other's throats like wolves fighting over a carcass, and ye have also heard what means were adopted to render the plot successful; how six of your number were sent along the Dark Path by the witchcraft of Sekosini, and how another would have taken the same journey but for the superior witchcraft of him who sits here at my side. It was his power that compelled Sekosini to come hither to-day and tell the truth; and it is to his power that 'Nkuni will owe his life, ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... faith, and 'minus' less, because women had less faith than men; which represented them as of more violent and unbridled animal passions; which explained learnedly why they were more tempted than men to heresy and witchcraft, and more subject (those especially who had beautiful hair) to the attacks of demons; and, in a word, regarded them as a necessary evil, to be tolerated, despised, repressed, and if possible shut up ...
— Women and Politics • Charles Kingsley
... also contributed a graver History of Scotland in two volumes to Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia. In 1829 likewise appeared "Anne of Geierstein," a romance, and in 1830 the "Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft." In 1831 he produced a series of "Tales on French History," uniform with the "Tales of a Grandfather," and his novels, "Count Robert of Paris," and "Castle Dangerous," as a fourth series of "Tales of My Landlord." Other productions ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... low boom rolls suddenly across the court, the rich tone of some temple bell telling the twelfth hour. Instantly the witchcraft ends, like the wonder of some dream broken by a sound; the chanting ceases; the round dissolves in an outburst of happy laughter, and chatting, and softly-voweled callings of flower-names which are names of girls, and farewell cries of "Sayonara!" ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... fro, the voices muttering most of the time. After a bit I caught a word—"Witchcraft": and then a voice speaking quite close—"There's blood 'pon her hands, an' there's blood yonder by the plough." Said another voice, higher and squeaky, "there's scent behind a fox, but you don't dig it up an' take it home." The tramp passed on, and ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... hear others again read it to me, ever since it came into my Hands; and I find I am like to do nothing else, for I know not how long yet to come: because if I lay the Book down it comes after me. When it has dwelt all Day long upon the Ear, it takes Possession all Night of the Fancy. It hath Witchcraft in every Page of it.——Oh! I feel an Emotion even while I am relating this: Methinks I see Pamela at this Instant, with all the Pride of Ornament ...
— An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews • Conny Keyber
... legend of dismemberment like that told of Sati in Assam? Of Kashmir he says that its religion was a mixture of Buddhism with other beliefs.[316] These are precisely the conditions most favourable to the growth of Tantrism and though the bulk of the population are now Mohammedans, witchcraft and sorcery are still rampant. Among the Hindu Kashmiris[317] the most prevalent religion has always been the worship of Siva, especially in the form representing him as half male, half female. This cult is not far from Saktism and many allusions[318] in the Rajatarangini ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... have preserved fragments of their primitive beliefs. The prophetic power of dreams is revealed in The Drowned Lovers, in Child Rowland, in Annie of Lochryan, and in a host of others. The spells used by witchcraft to arrest birth do not differ greatly in Willie's Lady—the 'nine witch-knots,' the 'bush of woodbine,' the 'kaims o' care,' and the 'master goat'—from those mentioned in its prototypes in Scandinavian, Greek, and Eastern ballads and stories; ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... oozed out, and a number of them paid the penalty upon the gallows, and the rest scampered off to Meissen, Leipsic, and Herse. At these places they were not long in letting the inhabitants know, by their depredations, witchcraft, devilry, and other abominations, the class of people they had in their midst, and the result was their speedy banishment from Germany; and in 1418, after wandering about for a few months only, they turned their steps towards Switzerland, reaching Zurich on August 1st, and encamped ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... Anneli, taking out her purse and producing a sound and solid English coin, about which there appeared to be no demonology or witchcraft whatsoever. ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... presently to the Castle," answered Sir Guy. "There is now great desire to see her and hear her, and to try and test the truth of her mission. The Generals scoff aloud at the thought of going to battle with a maid for leader. The Churchmen look grave, and talk of witchcraft and delusion. The ladies of the Court are in a fever to see her. As for the King and his Ministers, they are divided in mind 'twixt hope and fear; but truly matters are come to such desperate pass with us that, if ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Sorcery.— N. sorcery; occult art, occult sciences; magic, the black art, necromancy, theurgy, thaumaturgy[obs3]; demonology, demonomy[obs3], demonship[obs3]; diablerie[Fr], bedevilment; witchcraft, witchery; glamor; fetishism, fetichism, feticism[obs3]; ghost dance, hoodoo; obi, obiism[obs3]; voodoo, voodooism; Shamanism [Esquimaux], vampirism; conjuration; bewitchery, exorcism, enchantment, mysticism, second sight, mesmerism, animal magnetism; od force, odylic force[obs3]; electrobiology[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... drawbridge. Henry IV retired here on account of the Plague in London, and his second wife, Joan of Navarre, was imprisoned here. It was a favourite residence of the Court in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Here the wife of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was tried for witchcraft. Dutch prisoners were confined here in 1666 and contrived to set fire to some of the buildings. It is the home of the Wykeham Martin family, and is one of the most ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... Joseph determined he would wed. He was the handsomest and bravest prince in the land and all the princesses set their caps for him, Mirza among the others. But it came to the prince's ears that Mirza was learned in and practised witchcraft, so, despite her beauty and her grace, he would have no thought of Mirza, but chose her ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... black-whiskered face into a caricature, yelling a Greek monologue in a refrain consisting of five notes repeated over and over, and dancing around in a wide ring with one leg shorter than the other and his arms executing symbols of witchcraft. ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... immediately and gave her more power, therefore the witch with her hazel wand, probably found herself superior to those around her. We may also mention, in reference to witchcraft, that Dr. K. asserts that, in certain moods of mind, she had no weight, but was upborne upon water, like cork, thus confirming the propriety, and justice of ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... answered, "who think I'm lying here like a live corpse in its coffin, what liberty my soul—and that's just me—enjoys. Little do they know what I see and hear. And there's no witchcraft or evil-doing in it, my boy; but just what the Almighty made me. Janet, here, declares she heard the cry that I made, when this same cut, that's no so well healed yet, broke out in your bonny head. ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... when the Hebrew had relaxed his hold for a second, a vile heretic points out to the visitor (Exodus XXII, 18): "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!" and explains the witchcraft delusion to him. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... multiplied witches and wizards, by putting into possession of every foolish informer the means of punishment. In several countries of Europe, these statutes still subsist; they were not abolished in Britain till a period still at no great distance. Since the abolition of persecution, the faith of witchcraft has disappeared even among the vulgar. It was long found inconsistent with any considerable progress ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... reaction, is A QUESTION which must be reserved for the casuists of other generations.... I cannot expect that on a sudden you and your friends will come to my conclusion, that the present philosophy of the Schools and Universities of Europe, based on faith in witchcraft, magic, &c., is a system of execrable nonsense, by which quacks live on the faith of fools; but I desire a free and fair examination of my Aphorisms, and if a few are admitted to be true, merely as courteous concessions to arithmetic, my purpose will be effected, for men ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... of Endor and the raising of Samuel were literal facts. Above all others, the Nemesis and Eumenides were facts not to be withstood. And, philosophize as we may, ghosts have been seen at dead of night, and not always under the conduct of Mercury;[6] even the Salem witchcraft was very far from being a humbug. They are all true,—the gibbering ghost, the riding hag, the enchantment of wizards, and all the miracles of magic, none of which we have ever seen with the eye, but all of which we believe at heart. But who is it that weirdly draws aside the dark curtain? Who ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... mortal woman, is little disposed to yield to the demands of her lord and master one of her cherished treasures. They part in anger, and Oberon summons Puck, the arch mischief maker, and sets on foot the punishment of the rebellious lady. The audience, easy believers in spells, magic, and witchcraft, are in full sympathy with Puck's mission to secure the potion whose magic power will create love or cause infidelity and hatred. Never had poetry been fuller of imagery or sweeter in verification than in the lines spoken by Oberon; ...
— Shakespeare's Christmas Gift to Queen Bess • Anna Benneson McMahan
... make the horror pleasing! That sound so far below, is the sound of a stream the eye cannot reach—of a waterfall echoing for ever among the black rocks and pools. The schoolboy knows but little of the history of the old Castle—but that little is of war, and witchcraft, and imprisonment, and bloodshed. The ghostly glimmer of antiquity appals him—he visits the ruin only with a companion, and at midday. There and then it was that we first saw a Starling. We heard something wild and wonderful in their harsh ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... with which they were beset, they had spiritual troubles also. They fully believed in witchcraft as did all their contemporaries, in a personal devil who was busily plotting the ruin of their souls, in an everlasting hell of literal fire and brimstone, and in a Divine election, by which most ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... Church and frowns on the practice of mediumship and clairvoyance. The law denies the possibility of spirit intercourse and forbids the exercise of supernormal faculties in exploring the untrodden realms of the future. Prosecutions are instituted under the old Witchcraft and Vagrancy Acts, and psychic practitioners are fined or sent to prison in the hope of stemming the tide of inquiry. The law and the spirit were ever at variance. But it is difficult to understand why those who mourn, and who ask questions, ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... that one very poor woman and her daughter always looked healthy and plump in these dreadful times, till people began to suspect them of being witches. And they were taken, and charged before the Sheriff with living by witchcraft, and very likely they would have been burned. So they confessed that they had fed ever since the famine began—on snails! But there were not snails enough for all the country-side, even if people had cared to eat them. So many men and women died, and more ...
— The Gold Of Fairnilee • Andrew Lang
... falsely accused of witchcraft, were burned alive and ducked in this country, while clergymen and magistrates looked ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... Cherokee reservation in North Carolina in 1887 and 1888, and covering every subject pertaining to the daily life and thought of the Indian, including medicine, love, hunting, fishing, war, self-protection, destruction of enemies, witchcraft, the crops, the council, the ball play, etc., and, in fact, embodying almost the whole of the ancient religion of the Cherokees. The original manuscripts, now in the possession of the Bureau of Ethnology, were written by the shamans of the tribe, for their own use, in the Cherokee ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... very much upset indeed," agreed his father. "It was, you must recall, a superstitious age. Everything that could not be fathomed was attributed to witchcraft. Hence witchcraft was the only explanation of the present miracle. John Faust, of whom the two royal persons had bought the books, must have sold himself to the devil. They would have the unlucky merchant brought, and if he could not satisfactorily tell how and where he ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... the blind and both shall fall. The sickly charity that supplies criminals with bouquets has been dealt with summarily by the good judgment of people in the old Bay State. Inhuman medical bills, class legisla- [10] tion, and Salem witchcraft, are not ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... newspapers did not go into details. And again, a week or two later, I read how a woman has been heard screaming, and found tied to a bed-post, being whipped by a man. She belonged to a religious sect which had found her guilty of witchcraft. Another woman was about to shoot her, but this woman's nerve failed, and the "high priest" was called in, who decreed a whipping. The victim explained to the police that she would have deserved ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... sister, who was more lovely than sunlight. Her imagination fired by such stories as these, Bernadette often found it difficult to get to sleep; and this was especially the case on the evenings when the books were left aside, and some person of the company related a tale of witchcraft. The girl was very superstitious, and after sundown could never be prevailed upon to pass near a tower in the vicinity, which was said to be haunted by the fiend. For that matter, all the folks of the region were superstitious, devout, and simple-minded, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... answered Eveline; "you know not—you cannot fuess what she has made me suffer—exposing me to witchcraft and fiends. Thyself said it, and said it truly—the Saxons are still half Pagans, void of Christianity, ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... which we lay is one of those where travellers have heard from time to time, towards sunrise, subterraneous sounds, resembling those of the organ. The missionaries call these stones loxas de musica. 'It is witchcraft,' said our young Indian pilot.... But the existence of a phenomenon that seems to depend on a certain state of the atmosphere cannot be denied. The shelves of rock are full of very narrow and deep crevices. They are heated during the day to about 50 deg.. I often found their ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... shall with good will doe the best I can: But I thinke it the difficiller, since ye denie the thing it selfe in generall: for as it is said in the logick schools, Contra negantem principia non est disputandum. Alwaies for that part, that witchcraft, and Witches haue bene, and are, the former part is clearelie proved by the Scriptures, and the last by ...
— Daemonologie. • King James I
... defenders of the post had repaired the damage by the end of the month; and the enemy, finding no signs of the earthquake when they invested the place, ascribed the supposed immunity of Jellalabad to English witchcraft. ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... under his breath, "what witchcraft is going on here? what girl's voice is that?" And he ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... father should arrive was leaving to be thought of. A week agone and the tidings of his coming would have filled her with dread; now she heard them with relief. Father coming—and Aunt Agnes! Aunt Agnes, who never before had been west of the Hudson. Aunt Agnes, whose forebears had warred against witchcraft and woodcraft, against village crones and forest children, against helpless old women and stealthy young savages—all without mercy when delivered into their hands! Was it in partial reparation for the rapine, the swindling, and stealing dealt ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... Mrs. Pennycook's mouth did really resemble a new buttonhole—as the mouth of every respectable, self-righteous, provincial female bigot has had a habit of resembling even as far back as the days of the Salem witchcraft. ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... acknowledged ailments, there was one he cherished in secret. It was by far the most mysterious and deadly of the lot, a malady to be pondered on in the dark watches of the night, to be treated with weird rites and ceremonies, and to be cured only by some specialist versed in the deepest lore of witchcraft; for Gordon Lee knew beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt that a hoodoo had been laid ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... of evil example. Again, the study of history, and especially of that of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, leaves no shadow of doubt on my mind that the belief in the reality of possession and of witchcraft, justly based, alike by Catholics and Protestants, upon this and innumerable other passages in both the Old and New Testaments, gave rise, through the special influence of Christian ecclesiastics, to ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... for he seemeth Much too martial—nor a soldier Either, as he looks too modest; He may be a necromancer, An adept in all dark witchcraft, Alchemy, and other black arts. Wait, I'll catch thee;" and he turned their Talk to hidden buried treasures, And to midnight exorcisms. "Yes, my friend, here near the city Lies a sandbank in the river. At the time of Fridolinus Heaps of gold coin there were buried. One who knows, a clever ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... Jew, half gypsy, and, if there is alchemy in the mixing of blood, that combination should surely produce something peculiar. The city folk were said to have visited him in great numbers, and, notwithstanding the priests and bishops all condemned him as an imp of Satan and a follower of witchcraft, many fine people, including some court ladies, continued to go there by stealth in order to take a dangerous, inquisitive peep into the future. I say by stealth; because his ostensible occupation of soothsaying and fortune-telling was not his only business. ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... important personage, who had more than once made her tremble when she had driven her cow into her neighbor's pasture by mistake. The steward listened to the old woman's story, shook his head, and said it looked like witchcraft; then he mysteriously brought a pair of scales, weighed the guineas, which he found to be genuine and of full weight, kept as many of them as he could, and advised the owner to tell no one of this strange adventure. "If it should come to the ears of the bailiff or the seneschal," ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... the cupola fell down. He tried again—the cupola again broke down; he tried the third time—-the cupola fell to pieces a third time. Good Eremey Lukitch grew thoughtful; there was something uncanny about it, he reflected... some accursed witchcraft must have a hand in it... and at once he gave orders to flog all the old women in the village. They flogged the old women; but they didn't get the cupola on, for all that. He began reconstructing the peasants' huts on a new plan, and all on ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... domestic thresholds, disporting themselves in such grim fashions as the Puritanic nurture would permit; playing at going to church, perchance, or at scourging Quakers; or taking scalps in a sham fight with the Indians, or scaring one another with freaks of imitative witchcraft. Pearl saw, and gazed intently, but never sought to make acquaintance. If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children gathered about her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill, incoherent exclamations, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... plausible pretenses as were agreeable to their own inclinations, and were prevailed on by them. But when I was informed of this, I instructed the multitude again, that those who fled to them for refuge ought not to be persecuted: I also laughed at the allegation about witchcraft, [13] and told them that the Romans would not maintain so many ten thousand soldiers, if they could overcome their enemies by wizards. Upon my saying this, the people assented for a while; but they returned again afterwards, as irritated by ...
— The Life of Flavius Josephus • Flavius Josephus
... of Charles was justly deemed an age of high civilization, it was also one of extreme credulity. Unbelief in religion went hand in hand with blind faith in astrology and witchcraft; in omens, divinations, and prophecies: neither let us too strongly despise, in these their foibles, our ancestors. They had many excuses for their superstitions; and for their fears, false as their hopes, and equally groundless. The circulation ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... romance, the first wild-flower of mystery, the first fierce passion of an uncommonly hard-fisted youth. To this day it persists the only glamour between the covers of our geography. For more than fifty years its only name has been a witchcraft, and its spell is stronger now than ever, as shall be coolly demonstrated. This has meant something in the psychology of so unfanciful a race. The flowering of imagination is no trivial incident, whether in one farm boy's life or in a people's. It ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... instances of it every day? European gentlemen are too apt to believe that things like this are not to be found here, because they are not to be found in their own country. Major Wardlow, when in charge of the Seoni district, denied the existence of witchcraft for a long time, but he was at ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... hours the walls wore a more encouraging aspect. The Afghans, when a few days afterwards they approached the fortress and saw the wonderful state of repair in which it had been placed, believed that it had escaped through the power of English witchcraft. The difficulties of the garrison, however, increased great anxiety was felt for the subsistence of the cavalry and artillery horses. Foraging parties were sent out daily under an escort, and were constantly attacked by the enemy; and the close investment of the place by Akbar ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... German political thinkers could understand that political situation, which seems to English minds so simple, there might yet be hope for them. But they regard it all as a piece of black magic, and refuse to reason about it. How should a herd of cattle be driven without goads? Witchcraft, witchcraft! ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... have a care of him yourself; for surely there is witchcraft betwixt his lips: He is a wolf within the sheepfold; and therefore I will be earnest, that ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... see much difference after all, between the belief of the ignorant Russians, or Spaniards, or Portuguese, or other European people, and these unhappy blacks," exclaimed Harry one day when we were discussing the subject. The fearful curse of the country, however, is the belief in witchcraft. When a person is seized with illness, he always believes that some enemy has caused it, and is not satisfied until the witch or wizard is discovered, who is immediately compelled to swallow poison, or is barbarously put to death in some other way. I prefer ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... not be indifferent to the reader to know that the Highland cattle are peculiarly liable to be TAKEN, or infected, by spells and witchcraft, which judicious people guard against by knitting knots of peculiar complexity on the tuft of hair which terminates the ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... only goes with the good spirits," he assured Jolly Roger. "She does not do witchcraft with the bad. And no harm can come while the good spirits are with her. It is thus she has brought us happiness and prosperity since the days ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... what a hell of witchcraft lies In the small orb of one particular tear! A Lover's Complaint, ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... scene of this affair was the puritanical colony of New England, since better known as Massachusetts, the colonists of which appear to have carried with them, in an exaggerated form, the superstitious feelings with regard to witchcraft which then prevailed in the mother country. In the spring of 1692 an alarm of witchcraft was raised in the family of the minister of Salem, and some black servants were charged with the supposed crime. Once started, the ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... was sufficiently curious. Camoys raised his left hand. "So help me God and His saints, I have upon me neither bone, stone, nor witchcraft wherethrough the power and the word of God might be diminished or ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... Montevideo. Frightful storms had buffeted the little ships about for weary weeks together, and all hands thought they were the victims of some magician on board, perhaps the 'Italianate' Doughty, or else of native witchcraft from the shore. The experienced old pilot, who was a Portuguese, explained that the natives had sold themselves to Devils, who were kinder masters than the Spaniards, and that 'now when they see ships they cast sand into the air, whereof ariseth a most gross thick fogg and ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... putting one hand on her sister's arm, "it hath an air of witchcraft! Dost not feel cold chills in ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... scatter-brained girls, my dear. My father used to say that the more sense a woman has, the more likely she is to do something foolish. Now, Alix dear, I know just how it is with you. Courtney Thane has cast a spell over you. I believe in spells, same as the old New Englander used to believe in witchcraft. You don't love him, you don't actually believe in him. You—you are sort of like a bird that is being charmed by a snake. It knows it ought to fly away and yet it can't, because it's so interested in what the snake is going to do next. Thane is attractive. He ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... who are fond of "supping full of horrors" is a devilled drama, interspersed with hydraulics— consisting, in fact, of spirits and water, sweetened with songs and spiced with witches. It is, we are informed by the official announcements, "a romantic burletta of witchcraft, in two acts, and a prologue, with entirely new scenery, dresses, and peculiar appointments, imagined by, and introduced under the direction of, Mr. Yates." Now, any person, entirely unprejudiced with a taste for devilry and free from hydrophobia, who ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 9, 1841 • Various
... come at another time to punish Artavasdes for his treachery. Cassius was again much dissatisfied: but he gave over advising Crassus, who was out of humour with him, though Cassius himself abused the barbarian. "What evil daemon," he said, "vilest of men, brought you to us, and by what drugs and witchcraft have you persuaded Crassus to plunge his army into a boundless wilderness and an abyss, and to pursue a path more fit for a nomadic chief of robbers than for a Roman Imperator?" But the barbarian, who was a cunning ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... raised between us, "Well, Mr. Paralytic," she teased, "have you brought all of yourself along today?" "Why ask me," I replied, "why not try me instead?" and throwing myself bodily into her arms, I revelled in her kisses with no witchcraft to stop me. ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... the explanation of that strange and little-known phenomenon called repercussion, by means of which any injury done to, or any mark made upon, the astral body in the course of its wanderings will be reproduced in the physical body. We find traces of this in some of the evidence given at trials for witchcraft in the middle ages, in which it is not infrequently stated that some wound given to the witch when in the form of a dog or a wolf was found to have appeared in the corresponding part of her human body. The same strange law has sometimes ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... Mrs. Eddy's life to indicate that she had not yet reached an inner serenity of faith. She was never able to free herself from a perverted belief in animal magnetism or mesmerism which showed itself in fear rather than faith. She believed herself persecuted and if she did not believe in witchcraft she believed in something curiously like it. Indeed, to Mrs. Eddy belonged the rather curious distinction of having instigated the last trial for witchcraft in the United States and with a fitting sense of historic propriety she staged it at Salem. The judge dismissed ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... the enmity of the cardinal to feed upon, and he determined to annihilate at one blow the domestic happiness of his rival. He arrested the Duchess, Bolingbroke, and a witch called Margery Gourdimain, or Jourdayn, on the charge of witchcraft and treason. He accused the priest and Margery of making, and the duchess for having in her possession, a waxen figure, which, as she melted it before a slow fire, so would the body of the king waste and decay, and his marrow wither in ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... reveals the one actually dangerous thing in Christian Science—the fallacy that one mind can weave a web that will work the undoing of another. This is the basis of a belief in witchcraft, and justifies the hangings at Salem. On page one hundred three I find this: "As used in Christian Science, animal magnetism or hypnotism is the specific term ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... suppressed, because encroaching too much on the main plot of the "Strange Story." As it stands, however, it may be considered the preliminary outline of that more elaborate attempt to construct an interest akin to that which our forefathers felt in tales of witchcraft and ghostland, out of ideas and beliefs which have crept into fashion in the society of our own day. There has, perhaps, been no age in which certain phenomena that in all ages have been produced by, or upon, certain physical temperaments, have excited ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... Galatians you will find a commentary upon this natural law. Shall we read it? 'Now the works of the flesh'—the fruit of the flesh, if you like to put it that way—'are manifest, which are these: Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... absurdity, even among the wild and ridiculous conjectures as to the personages named by Horace in which the commentators have indulged. That some well-known person was the original of Canidia is extremely probable, for professors of witchcraft abounded at the time, combining very frequently, like their modern successors, the arts of Medea with the attributes of Dame Quickly. What more natural than for a young poet to work up an effective picture out of the abundant suggestions which the ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... rustic race for flowers, one of the other children cried, 'Joanna, video te volantem juxta terrain,' 'Joan, I see you flying near the ground.' This is the one solitary hint of 'levitation' (so common in hagiology and witchcraft) which occurs in the career of the Maid. This kind of story is so persistent that I knew it must have been told in connection with the Irvingite movement in Scotland. And it was! There is, perhaps, just one trace that flying was believed to be an accomplishment ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... us that the crime of disobedience is equal in guilt to that of idolatry and witchcraft. But what shall we say of the disobedience of the scrupulous, who so idolize their own opinions as to be absolutely slaves to them, and whom no sort of remonstrance or reasoning will convince of the ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... magical, connected with food and vegetation. Still later writers, like S. Reinach, Jane Harrison and E. A. Crowley, being mainly occupied with customs of very primitive peoples, like the Pelasgian Greeks or the Australian aborigines, have confined themselves (necessarily) even more to Magic and Witchcraft. ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... road, I imagine, lord, like others. At least, a few days ago they were seen travelling toward the bridge of St. Benezet in the company of certain Jews, whom, I am informed, they had rescued from the just reward of their witchcraft. I have a note of all the facts, which include the slaying of sundry good Christians on behalf of the ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... Indus and back again in less time than it takes to smoke a hookah. At Gwadur, no sooner was the cable landed than the people of the surrounding country flocked down to hear and talk of the Feringhee witchcraft. Chiefs of the Beloochees, Muscatees, and Heratees, with their retainers, trod upon each other's toes in their eagerness to see it work. Gwadur has given up the idea that Mahomet taught everything that could be known, and now sits upon the carpet of astonishment and chews the betel-nut ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... instead of following us into Bohemia, had the imprudence to occupy the plain of Strigau, and we already concluded his army was beaten. Whoever is well acquainted with tactics, and the Prussian manoeuvres, will easily judge, without the aid of calculation or witchcraft, whether a well or ill-disciplined army, in an open plain, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... his right senses; upon reopening them he still perceived her there. The fire then went out and he saw no more. I confess I see no difficulty in accounting for this, by supposing the gentleman was afflicted with that horrid disease of which Sir Walter Scott gives many cases in his Demonology and Witchcraft. Although I have no warrant for asserting spirits do not return, yet I must say, all the tales I have ever heard do not necessarily require any such interpretation on them. It may be true, and so may everything which we have no evidence ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various
... my high descent as soon as the words of introduction were out of his mouth; and I had begged the lady to conceal my gentilesse for the present; family pride causing me to be extremely sensitive on the subject of my low position. This was the only witchcraft I ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... life were sorely distracted by a trouble which, though not uncommon in those days, is one which we find it difficult to realise at the present time. His mother, Catherine Kepler, had attained undesirable notoriety by the suspicion that she was guilty of witchcraft. Years were spent in legal investigations, and it was only after unceasing exertions on the part of the astronomer for upwards of a twelvemonth that he was finally able to procure her acquittal and ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... the celestial ram," and of viper's bugloss, "it is a most gallant herb of the sun." The bay-tree rouses him to real eloquence, though not for Apollo's sake. "It is a tree of the sun and under the celestial sign of Leo, and resists witchcraft very potently, as also all the evils that old Saturn can do to the body of man; for neither witch nor devil, thunder nor lightning will hurt a man in the place where ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... somewhat taken down by the airs of Fanchon, and they stood in awe of the far-reaching power of her aunt, from the spell of whose witchcraft they firmly believed no hiding-place, even in the deepest woods, could protect them. Merely nodding a farewell to Fanchon, the Indians silently pushed their canoe into the stream, and, embarking, returned to the city by the way ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... same number of years subtracted from the year 1796, when our new Republic was firmly established, and when George Washington made his noble farewell address, brings us to 1692, when nineteen persons were legally hanged, charged with witchcraft in Massachusetts, and when in that State Giles Cory perished under the awful torture, judicially applied, known as ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... the daily affairs were settled by Soeren Man, there were occasions when Maren insisted on having her way—more so when it seriously affected her offspring. Then she could—as with witchcraft—suddenly forget her good behavior, brush aside Soeren's arguments as endless nonsense, and would stand there like a stone wall which one could neither climb over, nor get round. Afterwards he would be sorry that the ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... succeeded in this, for the squire looked high, and over high, for the wife of his heir; he detested all foreigners, and moreover held all Roman Catholics in dread and abomination something akin to our ancestors' hatred of witchcraft. All these prejudices were strengthened by his grief. Argument would always have glanced harmless away off his shield of utter unreason; but a loving impulse, in a happy moment, might have softened ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Hassim! Have you seen her eyes shining under her eyebrows like rays of light darting under the arched boughs in a forest? They pierced me. I shuddered at the sound of her voice! I saw her walk behind him—and it seems to me that she does not live on earth—that all this is witchcraft." ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... liable to the same death which they were so zealous to secure for the poor vendors of Testaments. So indeed they really were. Consulting the stars had been ruled from immemorial time to be dealing with the devil; the penalty of it was the same as for witchcraft; yet here was a reverend warden of a college considering it his duty to write eagerly of a discovery obtained by these forbidden means, to his own diocesan, begging him to communicate with the Cardinal of York and the Bishop of ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... Burroughs, who was hung as a witch at Salem, Mass., in 1694, may have been of the family, though I can find no proof of it. I wanted to believe that he was and in 1898 I made a visit to Salem and to Gallows Hill to see the spot where he, the last victim of the witchcraft craze, ended his life. There is no doubt that the renegade preacher, Stephen Burroughs, who stole a lot of his father's sermons and set up as a preacher and forger on his own account about 1720, was a third or ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... one will deny that it is good for heathens and savages, even if there were no life after death, to be wiser and better than they are. It is good, I presume, that they should give up cannibalism, slave-trading, witchcraft, child-murder, and a host of other abominations; and that they should be made to give them up not from mere fear of European cannon, but of their own wills and consciences, seeing that such habits are wrong and ruinous, and loathing them accordingly; in a word, ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... sudden rise to power and influence of one hitherto regarded with disfavour as stupid and intemperate. Shawnee chiefs, jealous of his position, made a plot to overthrow him. But Tenskwatawa, as he was now called, turned the tables upon them, and, accusing several of his most outspoken enemies of witchcraft, caused them to be put ...
— Tecumseh - A Chronicle of the Last Great Leader of His People; Vol. - 17 of Chronicles of Canada • Ethel T. Raymond
... to be a mer-maid, and they sing a ballad of the water-nymph. Suddenly Melusine appears and they take flight. Melusine, finding the gates of her husband's castle closed, vainly calls for him.—His mother answers in his stead, charging her with witchcraft and refusing to admit her. Melusine, sure of Raymond's love undauntedly answers that only Raymond's want of faith could undo her.—In the meantime a herald announces the arrival of Crusaders with Peter von Amiens.—The latter exhorts Count Raymond to join the holy ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... (as belonging to the older layer of archaic beliefs) are hateful to the gods, and Woden casts them out as accursed, though he himself was the mightiest of wizards. Heathen Teutonic life was a long terror by reason of witchcraft, as is the heathen African life to-day, continual precautions being needful to escape the magic of enemies. The Icelandic Sagas, such as Gretter's, are full of magic and witchcraft. It is by witchcraft that Gretter is first lamed and ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... "What witchcraft is this!" cried the King, spurring his steed cruelly. But the animal, like the dogs, obeyed the Hermit's ...
— John of the Woods • Abbie Farwell Brown
... burnt. If anyone fell ill, some "witch" had evidently a waxen image of the sufferer, and stuck needles into it; and such was the power of the witch that, wherever the person was, he felt the stab of the cruel needle. Hence the witch had to be found and burnt. If the corn crops failed, was not witchcraft the cause? for had not old Mother Maggs been heard to threaten Farmer Giles, and had not her black cat been seen running over his fields? Even good Bishop Jewel did not disbelieve in the power of ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... and feverish, adds to the meditative impulses of our particular and casual condition as respects a terrific revolutionary war, are not few, but many, and are all in one direction, all favouring, none thwarting, the solemn fascinations by which with spells and witchcraft the shadowy nature of man binds him down to look for ever into this dim abyss. The earth, whom with sublimity so awful the poet apostrophized after Waterloo, as 'perturbed' and restless exceedingly, whom with a harp so melodious and beseeching ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... together to destroy me, and, by so doing, to set you at each other's throats like wolves fighting over a carcass, and ye have also heard what means were adopted to render the plot successful; how six of your number were sent along the Dark Path by the witchcraft of Sekosini, and how another would have taken the same journey but for the superior witchcraft of him who sits here at my side. It was his power that compelled Sekosini to come hither to-day and tell the truth; and it is to his power ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... Philosophy of Apparitions. It is to be regretted, that Coleridge has never yet gratified the wish he professed to feel, in the first volume of his Friend, p. 246, to devote an entire work to the subject of dreams, visions, ghosts, witchcraft, &c; in it we should have had the satisfaction of tracing the workings of a most vivid imagination, analyzed by the most discriminating judgment. See Barrow's sermon on the being of God, proved from supernatural effects. We need scarcely request the ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... using all such gestures as he did, but when more light appeared, it vanished. Eremites and anchorites have frequently such absurd visions, revelations by reason of much fasting, and bad diet, many are deceived by legerdemain, as Scot hath well showed in his book of the discovery of witchcraft, and Cardan, subtil. 18. suffites, perfumes, suffumigations, mixed candles, perspective glasses, and such natural causes, make men look as if they were dead, or with horse-heads, bull's-horns, and such like brutish shapes, the room full ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... at her this time, but with a mazed expression as of one half-asleep. "Who? The great Objectionable himself? How did you inveigle him here? By nothing short of witchcraft, I will swear. Those pale eyes of yours are rather witch-like, do you know? Did you fly over on a broomstick to fetch him? ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... sceptical as to its origin, whether or not it came off those smaller lakes I had seen on the road the day before I crossed the river; but no one would listen to my project. They all said I must have the king's sanction first, else people, from not knowing my object, would accuse me of practising witchcraft, and would tell their king so. They still all maintained that the river did come out of the lake, and said, if I liked to ask the king's leave to visit the spot, then they would go and show it me. ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... the criminal law, the "liberte', egalite', fraternite'," together with the 2d of May 1852—all vanished like a phantasmagoria before the ban of one man, whom his enemies themselves do not pronounce an adept at witchcraft. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, to the end that, before the eyes of the whole world, it should make its own testament with its own hands, and, in the name of the people, declare: "All that exists ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... Jones of Nayland. But one far greater than these involved himself in this view. That same limitation of his reason by the simple statements of Scripture which led John Wesley to declare that, "unless witchcraft is true, nothing in the Bible is true," led him, while giving up the Ptolemaic theory and accepting in a general way the Copernican, to suspect the demonstrations of Newton. Happily, his inborn nobility of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... outskirts of Sekeletu's territory the news they heard was not encouraging. Some of the men heard that in their absence some of their wives had been variously disposed of. One had been killed for witchcraft, another had married again, while Masakasa was told that two years ago a kind of wild Irish wake had been celebrated in honor of his memory; the news made him resolve, when he presented himself among them, to declare himself an inhabitant from another world! One poor fellow's ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... of the ax; Falkenberg had gone home. I found the trees I had felled the night before, and laughed outright at the ghastly looking stumps I had left. Falkenberg would surely have seen the havoc, and wondered who could have done it. Possibly he might have set it down to witchcraft, and fled home accordingly before ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... was then a most loud matter; filling the European Courts, and especially that of Berlin, with rumors and apprehensions. No wonder Friedrich Wilhelm was grateful for that Swedish Peace of his, and named his little daughter "Ulrique" in honor of it. Tumultuous cloud-world of Lapland Witchcraft had ceased hereby, and daylight had begun: old women (or old Cardinals) riding through the sky, on broomsticks, to meet Satan, where now are they? The fact still dimly perceptible is, Europe, thanks to that pair ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... Affections are so strongly engaged, and my Fears are so raised, by what I have already read, that I cannot express my Eagerness to see the rest. Sure this Mr. Richardson is Master of all that Art which Horace compares to Witchcraft ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... acres; the mighty scheme of creation is crushed into a bandbox. The far-away creatures whom he had seen floating about him, beautiful and indistinct, are brought under his very nose; and before he has time to recover his bewilderment, hey presto, the witchcraft has begun; the magic circle is drawn around him! the spells are at work, the whole formula of sorcery is in full play, and the victim is as powerless to escape as the marble-legged prince in ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... forms of thunderbolt, are in excellent repute as amulets, not only against lightning, but against the evil eye generally. In Italy they protect the owner from thunder, epidemics, and cattle disease, the last two of which are well known to be caused by witchcraft; while Prospero in the 'Tempest' is a surviving proof how thunderstorms, too, can be magically produced. The tongues of sheep-bells ought to be made of meteoric iron or of elf-bolts, in order to insure the animals against foot-and-mouth disease or death by storm. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... boyhood could invent, were the triumphant music of Stephen on his surging and uneasy throne, as he was shifted from one bearer to another when each in turn grew tired of his weight. Just, however, as they were nearing their own neighbourhood, a counter cry broke out, "Witchcraft! His arrows are bewitched by the old Spanish sorcerer! Down with Dragons and Wizards!" And a handful of mud came full in the face of the enthroned lad, aimed no doubt by George Bates. There was a yell and rush of ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... supper, the entire school, instead of being allowed to pursue fancy work, was summoned to the lecture hall, and harangued by Miss Beasley upon the follies and dangers of superstition. She touched upon ancient beliefs in witchcraft, and modern credulity in clairvoyance and spiritualism, and placed an equal ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... be objected that one of the most constant facts in the history of all religions, from the lowest to the highest, is that religion has at all times carried on war against sorcery, witchcraft, and magic, that in the lowest stages of man's evolution witches have been 'smelt out' by the witch-finder, and that in the higher stages of civilization witches have been persecuted, tortured, and burnt, the reply made to the objection is that the ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... should be trained by special study. Mathematical knowledge is perhaps less necessary to them than physiological knowledge. And do you not think that they need a little of that second-sight which is the witchcraft of great men? As it is, the examiners are former professors, honorable men grown old in harness, who limit their work to selecting the best themes. They are unable to do what is really demanded of them; ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... "Birlstone! What's this, Mr. Holmes? Man, it's witchcraft! Where in the name of all that is wonderful ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... we can use, Wilbur, is a sequence on Sirgamesk superstition. Emphasis on voodoo or witchcraft—naked girls dancing—stuff with roots in Earth, but now typically Sirgamesk. Lots ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... of the piece is made to turn. The jealous Isabella is at last persuaded that the Marechale has robbed her of the attachment of her husband, and appears as a witness against her on the pretended charge of witchcraft and sorcery. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... the Bishop said, "The old gods are not dead, For the great Thor still reigns, And among the Jarls and Thanes The old witchcraft still is spread." Thus to King Olaf Said ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... once more saw this he said to himself, 'What a bad business this is! Can they all have been so heavy-hearted that they have all three hanged themselves? No, I can't believe that it is anything but witchcraft! But I will know the truth,' he said; 'if the two others are still hanging there it is true but if they are not it's nothing ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... that these changes did not escape the watchful solicitude of the Fathers. Indeed, the few who were first to ascribe the right eye of Salvatierra to miraculous origin and the special grace of the blessed San Carlos, now talked openly of witchcraft and the agency of Luzbel, the evil one. It would have fared ill with Hermenegildo Salvatierra had he been aught but commander or amenable to local authority. But the reverend Father, Friar Manuel de Cortes, had no power ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... lived more than two hundred years ago, and the cellar of her house was still to be seen when, in 1857, Whittier first told the story of "The Witch's Daughter," the poem now known as "Mabel Martin." She was the only woman who suffered death on a charge of witchcraft on the north side of the Merrimac. One other aged woman in this village was imprisoned, and would have been put to death, but for the timely collapse of the persecution. She was the wife of Judge Bradbury, and lived on the ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... cruel cause of our present woes. Sometimes it is the moon, sometimes water, of whom this is said: "We are all of us under the power of evil and sin, because we are children of the Water," says the Mexican baptismal formula. That Unktahe, spirit of water, is the master of dreams and witchcraft, is the belief of the Dakotas.[133-3] A female spirit, wife of the great manito whose heart is the sun, the ancient Algonkins believed brought death and disease to the race; "it is she who kills men, otherwise they would never die; ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... tells me that the practice of witchcraft in Cuba is sometimes attended with serious and fatal consequences, and that crimes of the worst description are frequently the result of it. An individual unwittingly takes his neighbour's life in obedience to commands from a sanguinary sorcerer, who requires a certain weight of human blood to complete ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... smile which was bewitching, indeed, but by no means witch-like,—a frank, open smile with just a touch of natural feminine triumph in it. "No, not witchcraft," she answered, helping herself with her dainty fingers to a burnt almond from the Venetian glass dish,—"not witchcraft,—memory; aided, perhaps, by some native quickness of perception. Though I say it myself, I never met anyone, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... alive was formerly very wide-spread. It was common among the Romans, being given in the XII. Tables as the special penalty for arson. Under the Gothic codes adulterers were so punished, and throughout the middle ages it was the civil penalty for certain heinous crimes, e.g. poisoning, heresy, witchcraft, arson, bestiality and sodomy, and so continued in some cases, nominally at least, till the beginning of the 19th century. In England, under the common law, women condemned for high treason or petty treason (murder of husband, murder of master ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... or with mankind. The gods, therefore, have no divine superiority to man in conditions or limitations; they can only be described as pre-existent, acting intelligences, with scarcely greater powers than man might hope to gain by magic or witchcraft of his own. This conception explains how easily the divine merged into the human in Greek theology, and how frequently divine ancestors occurred in family histories. (By the word 'theology' is designated the ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... shoulders, and filling it at the river, marched up to the bazaar. No sooner did I appear than all the water-carriers called out, 'That villain, Yussuf, is about to take away our bread. May Shitan seize him. Let us go to the cadi and complain.' The cadi listened to their story, for they accused me of witchcraft, saying that no five men could lift the skin when it was full. He sent one of his beeldars to summon me before him. I had just filled my skin at the river, when the officer came from this distributor of bastinadoes. I followed him to the court, ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... when she made her abjuration in front of the faggots which were to burn her to death. Her laugh was caused by the thought of her escape from persecution and of the joyful resurrection soon to come. It was not an indication that she was not serious, and that her abjuration of witchcraft was a farce, as ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... also talk of witchcraft in the village. "He hunts with evil spirits," some of the people contended, "wherefore his hunting is rewarded. How else can it be, save that he hunts with ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... witchcraft in your lips, Kate: there is more eloquence in a Sugar touch of them than in the tongues of ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... overwhelming bias of temperament, it can be as clearly demonstrated that the miraculous Christian story rests on a tissue of mistake, as it can be demonstrated that the Isidorian Decretals were a forgery, or the correspondence of Paul and Seneca a pious fraud, or that the mediaeval belief in witchcraft was the product of physical ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... nothing in common with enchanters and sorcerers,' replied Emma; 'nature is uttering a summons to thee, and—whilst a devoted wife embraces thee—protects and defends thee against demoniac powers, bids thee renounce all witchcraft, and put aside ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... Council Register. The answer of the judges I have not found, but it must have been unfavourable to the intentions of the court. Joan Bocher was burnt under the common law, for her opinions were condemned by all parties in the church, and were looked upon in the same light as witchcraft, or any other profession definitely devilish. But it was difficult to treat as heresy, under the common law, a form of belief which had so recently been sanctioned ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... progress has been the taking over of large tracts of territory that religion once regarded as peculiarly its own; and just as psychology and pathology were found to hold the key to an understanding of such a phenomenon as witchcraft, so we may yet realise that a true explanation of religious phenomena is to be found, not in some supernatural world, but in the workings ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... qualities, and not to the accidental advantages, of the candidates for her favour. As to the mother's influence, that will necessarily yield to the daughter's superior judgment. Cecilia possesses over her mother that witchcraft of gentle manners, which in the female sex is always irresistible, even over violent tempers. Prudential considerations have a just, though not exclusive, claim to Miss Delamere's attention. But her relations, I fancy, could find ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... been speaking, I had been weighing her story in my mind. I had hitherto put cases of witchcraft on one side, as mere superstitions; and my uncle and I had had many an argument, he supporting himself by the opinion of his good friend Sir Matthew Hale. Yet this sounded like the tale of one bewitched; or was ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Shore, the charitable, the merry concubine of Edward IV., and, after his death, of his favourite, the unfortunate Lord Hastings. After the loss of her protectors, she fell a victim to the malice of crook-backed Richard. He was disappointed (by her excellent defence) of convicting her of witchcraft, and confederating with her lover to destroy him. He then attacked her on the weak side of frailty. This was undeniable. He consigned her to the severity of the church: she was carried to the bishop's palace, clothed in a white sheet, with a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various
... to whom th' unlawful lawfullest * And witchcraft wisdom in her sight are grown: A mischief making brat, a demon maid, * A whorish woman and a ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... their varieties of language and physical conformation. Whether the earth moves round the sun or the contrary; whether the bodily and mental diseases of men and animals are caused by evil spirits or not; whether there is such an agency as witchcraft or not—all these are purely scientific questions; and to all of them the Canonical Scriptures profess to give true answers. And though nothing is more common than the assumption that these books come into conflict only with the speculative part of modern ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... work and shows," they are innumerable in the arguments of the Anarchists against the political activity of the proletariat. Here hate becomes veritable witchcraft. Thus Kropotkine turns their own arm—the materialist conception of history—against the Social-Democrats. "To each new economical phase of life corresponds a new political phase," he assures us. "Absolute monarchy—that ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... uninstructed beings should thus consider so unusual a fragrance, on such a spot. Whiskey has unfortunately obtained a power over the red man of this continent that it would require many Fathers Matthew to suppress, and which can only be likened to that which is supposed to belong to the influence of witchcraft. The Indian is quite as sensible as the white man of the mischief that the "fire-water" produces; but, like the white man, he finds how hard it is to get rid of a master passion, when we have once submitted ourselves to its sway. The portion of the band that could not account ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... madly in love with the gypsy. He loved her goat almost as dearly. It was a charming animal, gentle, intelligent, clever; a learned goat. Nothing was more common in the Middle Ages than these learned animals, which amazed people greatly, and often led their instructors to the stake. But the witchcraft of the goat with the golden hoofs was a very innocent species of magic. Gringoire explained them to the archdeacon, whom these details seemed to interest deeply. In the majority of cases, it was sufficient to present the tambourine to the goat in such or such ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... which was tied to his staff; and having done so he applied the singed hide to the nose of every person and of every domestic animal belonging to the house. This was imagined to secure them from diseases and other misfortunes, particularly from witchcraft, throughout the ensuing year. The whole ceremony was called calluinn because of the great noise made in beating the hide. It was observed in the Hebrides, including St. Kilda, down to the second half of the eighteenth century at least, and it seems ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the spoil. When the battle was over, Samuel came to meet him, and rebuked him as if he had been a child for what he called rebellion and stubbornness. The priest stood up before the king, and told him that his rebellion was as witchcraft, and his stubbornness as idolatry. "Because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord," he cried, "He hath also rejected thee from being king." Rebellion, stubbornness! Saul was neither rebellious nor stubborn. ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... even to the side of the hill, leaving no way, not so much as for themselves, to come out but by the ladder placed up to the side of the hill, and then lifted up, and placed again from the first stage up to the top: so that when the ladder was taken down, nothing but what had wings or witchcraft to assist it could come at them. This was excellently well contrived: nor was it less than what they afterwards found occasion for, which served to convince me, that as human prudence has the authority of Providence to justify it, so it has doubtless the ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... countries, and here in its native land has taken such form as really to constitute a new cult. Making no mention of sporadic instances of what in earlier generations would have been called (and properly enough) by the name of witchcraft, we find the beginning of so-called "spiritualism" in the "Rochester rappings," produced, to the wonder of many witnesses, by "the Fox girls" in 1849. How the rappings and other sensible phenomena were produced was a curious ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... sense of a supernatural world which breathes through words such as these, the awe and terror with which it pressed upon the life of men, found their most terrible expression in the belief in witchcraft. The dread of Satanic intervention indeed was not peculiar to the Puritan. It had come down from the earliest ages of the Christian Church, and had been fanned into a new intensity at the close of the Middle Ages by the physical calamities ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... to me," he shouted, pulling himself up and flinging a leg over the mast: "ingratitood's worse than witchcraft. Sit ye there an' inwardly digest that sayin', while I ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... God thank your great lordship, said Balin, and therewith made him ready to depart. Then the most part of the knights of the Round Table said that Balin did not this adventure all only by might, but by witchcraft. ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... use of which shepherds have been known to change themselves into wolves and tear the sheep that they should have protected; and he quoted to him St. Augustine's own testimony, to the belief that in Italy certain women were able to change themselves into heifers through the power of witchcraft. Finally, he told him one or two ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... of mankind behind the intellectual in opposing the novel tendencies. The clergy did all they could to perpetuate the squalid belief in witchcraft, but found no place for experimental science in their scheme of learning, and judged it offensive to the Maker of all things. But their opposition could do no more than hamper the new scientific impulse, which was far too potent to be ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... The "Lectures on Witchcraft," published in 1831, have long been out of print. Although frequently importuned to prepare a new edition, I was unwilling to issue again what I had discovered to be an insufficient presentation of the subject. In the mean time, it constantly became more and more apparent, that much injury ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... of Hearts, with a nail of Iron knocked through the forehead, and thus fastened to the bottom of the chair: they durst not pull it out, remembering that her like thing was used to the old Countess of Sussex, and afterwards proved a witchcraft, for which certain persons ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 20, March 16, 1850 • Various
... powwows always unite witchcraft with the application of their medicines I shall here give a short account of this ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman
... on seeing a white man, and Walker knew enough of their tongue to ascertain that they looked for the coming of the witch doctor. The chief, it appeared, had died a natural death, and, since the event is of sufficiently rare occurrence in the Fan country, it had promptly been attributed to witchcraft, and the witch doctor had been sent for to discover the criminal. The village was consequently in a lively state of apprehension, since the end of those who bewitch chiefs to death is not easy. The Fans, however, politely invited Walker to inspect ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... profanely called "the deuce to pay," abroad. The recent irruption of the Yankees into the bounds of the New Netherlands, had left behind it a doleful pestilence, such as is apt to follow the steps of invading armies. This was the deadly plague of witchcraft, which had long been prevalent to the eastward. The malady broke out at Vest Dorp, and threatened to spread throughout the country. The Dutch burghers along the Hudson, from Yonkers to Sleepy Hollow, hastened to nail horseshoes to their doors, which have ever been found ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... in common with art, that the most ordinary, everyday thing appears to it as something entirely new and attractive, as if metamorphosed by witchcraft and now seen for the first time. Life is worth living, says art, the beautiful temptress; life is worth knowing, says science. With this contrast the so heartrending and dogmatic tradition follows in a theory, and consequently in the practice ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... which two last are only particular modes of monopolizing, have been considered as chimeras, as imaginary practices that have never existed, and that cannot possibly exist. They have been likewise assimilated to witchcraft, an ideal belief, arising in the times of ignorance. It is now become the creed of legislators and ministers, that trade should be left to regulate itself, that monopoly ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... by means of waxen images was particularly in vogue. Thus, the Queen of Navarre, the sister of Francis the First, in her singular collection of tales, the "Heptameron," gives a circumstantial account of the mode in which her own life was sought by this species of witchcraft.[83] Five puppets had been provided: three, representing enemies (the queen being one of the number), had their arms hanging down; the other two, representing persons whose favor was desired, had them raised aloft. With ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... superstitious beliefs, and told me when I noticed the matted condition of the manes of some colts domiciled in a distant set of buildings that he reckoned "Old P. G."—an ancient dame in a neighbouring cottage with a reputation for witchcraft—"had been a-ridin' of 'em on moonlight nights." This matted appearance of colts' manes, which is only the natural result of their not being groomed or combed when young and unbroken, was known ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... him to the superstitious and objectionable practice of having recourse to the 'Sortes Biblicae,' by which folly he was more than once misled against his own better judgment; the same spirit tempted him to lend far too eager an ear to tales of witchcraft and magic.[742] ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... has much of the witchcraft and subtlety of William Blake. Many verses of the shy recluse, whom Mr. Higginson so happily has introduced to the world, are not only daring and unconventional, but recklessly defiant of form. But, as her editor has well said, "When a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... "Oh, there's no witchcraft about it; and, though no one has thrown that letter from above, though there is not the smallest hole in the ceiling, the ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... that the general ideas of merit and character are perfectly competent to the understanding of children of ten years. False glory is the farthest in the world from insinuating its witchcraft into the undepraved heart, where the vain and malignant passions have not yet erected their standard. It is true, the peculiar sublimities of heroism cannot be supposed perfectly within his comprehension. But something of this sort, as we have already said, ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... deal of stuff to the same purpose with that placed in the mouth of the German adept, may be found in Reginald Scott's Discovery of Witchcraft, Third Edition, folio, London, 1665. The Appendix is entitled, "An Excellent Discourse of the Nature and Substances of Devils and Spirits, in two Books; the first by the aforesaid author (Reginald Scott), the Second now added ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... was of course convinced that witchcraft was not likely to be the most serious part of the misdeeds of Tibbott the huckstress. Committing Antony Babington to the custody of his wife, he sped on his way back to the Manor-house, where Lord Shrewsbury was at present residing, ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... an old woman—the Atropos of the camp—stretched them between her fingers in half-yard lengths, simultaneously pronouncing the title of a tribe in the district. The tribe, the name of which was being uttered as the gut parted, was denounced as the source of the witchcraft which had occasioned the untimely death of the gin. Vengeance followed as a ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the presence of large human beings. The only man in the fortress who saw her without superstition was Klussman. He inclined to complain of her antics, but not to find magic in her flights and returns. At that period deformity was the symbol of witchcraft. Blame fell upon this dwarf when toothache or rheumatic pains invaded the barracks, especially if the sufferer had spoken against her unseen excursions with her swan. Protected from childhood by the family of La Tour, ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... hand, magic, witchcraft, were the subjects of the evening. Miss Pole was slightly sceptical, and inclined to think there might be a scientific solution found for even the proceedings of the Witch of Endor. Mrs Forrester believed everything, ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... night witches were supposed to fly to Bloksberg, a mythical place in Norway, upon broomsticks and in brewing tubs. There they met Gamle Erik, the evil one, who entered their names in his ledger, and instructed them in witchcraft, and, after executing the witches' dance, they returned to their respective homes in the same fashion. This tradition is common to other countries, but in Jutland the belief was that the favourite form a witch adopted was that of a hare, which evaded the huntsmen, and could not be shot except ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... the old year" with bonfires, while at Burghead in Morayshire a tar-barrel called the "Clavie" was set on fire and carried about the village and the fishing boats. Its embers were scrambled for by the people and carefully kept as charms against witchcraft.{28} These fire-customs may be compared with those on Hallowe'en, which, as we have seen, is probably ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... wildness and fury—of trouble and of energy; but how many poetical beauties do we miss? Is it possible to paint Macbeth plunged in guilt by the spells of ambition, which offer themselves to him under the shape of witchcraft? How can painting express the terror which he feels? That terror, however, which is not inconsistent with intrepid bravery? Is it possible to characterise that peculiar species of superstition which oppresses him? That belief without dignity, ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... have told you frequently that there is no such word as 's'pose.' I don't suppose anything about it. It's enough to make one believe in witchcraft. Miss Sybil Lamotte held her head above us; above plenty more, who were the peers of Mr. John Burrill. Last year, as everybody knows, she refused Robert Crofton, who is handsome, rich, and upright in character. This Spring, they say, she jilted Raymond Vandyck, and people who ought to know, say ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... had recently been made to do penance by Gloucester in a white sheet for practising witchcraft upon him; but her unhappy position, as well as her well-known charity in better days, gained for ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... (honesto) bearing, wherefore they were very well treated by the Admiral who gave them clothes and something to eat and then sent them back." Historie, p. 299. Ferdinand gives the ages as eight and fourteen and says nothing of witchcraft except that the Indians were frightened and thought they were being bewitched when Bartholomew the next day ordered the ships' clerks to write down the replies he ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... practice. He proscribes with the same rigor all ornaments for the hair used by the female sex, as well as their custom of having the arms and neck uncovered. In another part of his work he relates several instances of witchcraft which had alarmed New England. It is plain that the visible action of the devil in the affairs of this world appeared to him an incontestable and ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... by superstitions. Haunted houses were numerous and the bewitching of people was frequent. Two hundred arrests for witchcraft were made in a single year, 1692, and twenty of these persons were put to death. These persecutions were urged and defended by Cotton Mather, a representative of the highest intelligence and culture of the times. His mother was a daughter of John Cotton, and his ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... Having made a waxen image of him, they hid it in a well, together with a comb and a tuft of hair tied in eleven knots. The prophet fell into a very wasting condition, till he had a dream that informed him where these implements of witchcraft were, and accordingly had them taken away. In order to untie the knots Gabriel read to him the two last chapters of the Koran, consisting of eleven verses; each verse untied a knot, and, when ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... addition to the lands devised and the stocks, bonds and moneys willed to him, as hereinabove specified) the two mahogany bookcases numbered 11 and 13, and the contents thereof, being volumes of fairy and folk tales of all nations, and dictionaries and other treatises upon demonology, witchcraft, mythology, magic and kindred subjects, to be his, his ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... "Witchcraft—the practice of extrasensory perception, if you prefer the term—is forbidden on Mars because to practice it one must differ from his fellow men when the inexorable dangers of our frontier demand that we work ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... affairs which, as Carlyle pointed out in later days, cannot be permanently overlooked. The old horned and hoofed devil, indeed, for whom Defoe had still a weakness, shown in his History of the Devil, was becoming a little incredible; witchcraft was dying out, though Wesley still felt bound to profess some belief in it; and the old Calvinistic dogmatism, though it could produce a certain amount of controversy among the Methodists, had been ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... everything with a secret rage, indignation, and incredulity impossible to describe. He could not believe it even when it went on before his very eyes. Doctor though he was, and scientific, to a certain extent, Edward Rider would have believed in witchcraft—in some philtre or potion acting upon her mind, rather than in Nettie's voluntary folly. Was it folly? was it heroism? was it simple necessity, as she herself called it? Nobody could answer that question. The matter was as incomprehensible ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... lifted, indicating the southern route. "Here we do not come again; there is too much witchcraft ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... strange that Adams should have omitted their extraordinary stories in his narrative; for he frequently expressed to Mr. Dupuis a firm belief, that the negroes were capable of injuring their enemies by witchcraft; and he once pointed out to him a slave at Mogadore, of whom on that account he stood particularly in awe. He doubtless imbibed this belief, and learned the other absurd stories, which he related, from the Arabs, some of whom profess to be acquainted ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... for witchcraft with which we are acquainted, few have attained so great a celebrity as that of the Lady Canoness of Pomerania, Sidonia von Bork. She was accused of having by her sorceries caused sterility in many ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... which Corralat defended with its one cannon, and to the mosque. Here the Moros had rallied for the last time, trusting in what their captain-general [condestable] had told them, that they were not to retreat until they saw him fall. He believed, by some witchcraft or other, that our bullets could not injure him; and he had had proof of this, for once a ball had broken the bone of his leg, crippling him, but without breaking the skin or drawing blood. In this confidence, he came out with ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various
... of the land may bear, in some instances, unjustly upon her. She may be deprived of natural rights. No one can deny that she did thus suffer, and was grievously oppressed, by the laws against Witchcraft, in the early history of New England. Nor is it impossible that taxation may wrong her; that divorces may separate her, without right, from her partner; that fines, imprisonment, and even capital punishment, may ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... willing to make use of these mysterious powers in their beneficent and curative forms, there exist all over Hindostan abundant proofs of the dread of 'zadoo,' or witchcraft, among all classes, Moslems as well as Hindoos, when it appears to threaten them with evil. If a cultivator has transplanted his tobacco or other valuable plant, he collects old cracked earthen cooking-pots, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... to divine? "I cannot divine. I implore the mercy of this holy bishop," she replied, and knelt at his feet. He laid his hands upon her head, prayed, blessed her, and sent her to the Prior of Huntingdon, the penitentiary priest of the district, to hear her confession. She not only gave up witchcraft, but ceased to be brazen-faced and a shrew: so that people bruited this matter as a miracle, and a handsome one it was. The bishop probably saved her from the vengeance of this rural dean, for witch-burning was not unknown ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... public position allowed to a woman in a village is that of gooseherd; while those original minds who in other circumstances would take to authorship or painting have to wait, if they are peasants, till they are old, when they can take to fortune-telling and witchcraft. Herr Riehl admits that the lot of women when they are peasants is not a happy one. He does not make the admission because he thinks it of much consequence, but because it illustrates his argument that the less "feminine" ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
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