ly spread class who
had retained the beliefs and traditions of heathenism with all its
license and romance and charm of the forbidden. At their head were the
Promethean Templars, at their tail all the ignorance and superstition of
the time, and in their ranks every one who was oppressed or injured
either by the nobility or the Church. They were treated with
indescribable cruelty, in most cases worse than beasts of burden, for
they were outraged in all their feelings, not at intervals for
punishment, but habitually by custom, and they revenged themselves by
secret orgies and fancied devil-worship, and occult ties, and stupendous
sins, or what they fancied were such. I can seriously conceive--what no
writer seems to have considered--that there must have been an immense
satisfaction in selling or giving one's self to the devil, or to any
power which was at war with their oppressors. So they went by night, at
the full moon, and sacrificed to Diana, or "later on" to Satan, and
danced and rebelled. It is very well worth noting that we have _all_ our
accounts of sorcerers and heretics from Catholic priests, who had every
earthly reason for misrepresenting them, and did so. In the vast amount
of ancient witchcraft still surviving in Italy there is not much
anti-Christianity, but a great deal of early heathenism. Diana, not
Satan, is still the real head of the witches. The Italian witch, as the
priest Grillandus said, stole oil to make a love-charm. {269} But she
did not, and does not say, as he declared, in doing so, "I renounce
Christ." There the priest plainly lied. The whole history of the witch
mania is an ecclesiastical falsehood, in which such lies were subtly
grafted on the truth. But in due time the Church, and the Protestants
with them, created a Satanic witchcraft of their own, and it is this
after-growth which is now regarded as witchcraft in truth.

Cain-worshippers and witches seem to have been all in the same boat. I
think it very likely that in these two traditions which I have given we
have a remnant of the actual literature of the Cainites, that
Gnostic-revived and mystical sect of the Middle Ages. But I doubt not
that its true origin is far older than Christianity, and lost in earliest
time.

One last remark. We are told in the tale that Abel, having become rich,
"cut" the Lord, or would speak to him no longer. I suppose that he
dropped the synagogue and _Yom kippur_, and became a _Reformirter