'Incredulite et
Mescreance du Sortilege pleinement convaincue,' 1622. The
expiration of the term of the Bordeaux commission brought the
proceedings to a close, and fortunately saved a number of the
condemned.

In Spain, the land of Torquemada and Ximenes, which had long ago
fanatically expelled the Jews and recently its old Moorish
conquerors from its soil, the unceasing activity of the
Inquisition during 140 years must have extorted innumerable
confessions and proofs of diabolic conspiracies and heresy.
Antonio Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, to whose rare
opportunities of obtaining information we are indebted for some
instructive revelations, has exposed a large number of the
previously silent and dark transactions of the Holy Office. But
the demonological ideas of the Southern Church and people are
profusely displayed in the copious dramatic literature of the
Spaniards, whose theatre was at one time nearly as popular, if
not as influential, as the Church.

The dramas of the celebrated Lope de Vega and of Calderon in
particular, are filled with demons as well as angels[122]--a
sort of religious compensation to the Church for the moral
deficiencies of a licentious stage, or rather licentious public.

[122] In the _Nacimiento de Christo_ of Lope de Vega the
devil appears in his popular figure of the dragon.
Calderon's _Wonder-Working Magician_, relating the
adventures of St. Cyprian and the various temptations and
seductions of the Evil Spirit, like Goethe's Faust,
introduces the devil in the disguise of a fashionable and
gallant gentleman.--Ticknor's _History of Spanish
Literature_.

CHAPTER VI.

'Possession' in France in the Seventeenth Century--Urbain
Grandier and the Convent of Loudun--Exorcism at
Aix--Ecstatic Phenomena--Madeleine Bavent--Her cruel
Persecution--Catholic and Protestant Witchcraft in
Germany--Luther's Demonological Fears and
Experiences--Originated in his exceptional Position and in
the extraordinary Circumstances of his Life and
Times--Witch-burning at Bamburg and at Wuerzburg.

Demoniacal possession was a phase of witchcraft which obtained
extensively in France during the seventeenth century: the victims
of this hallucination were chiefly the female inmates of
religious houses, whose inflamed imaginations were prostituted by
their priestly advisers to the most atrocious purposes. Urbain
Grandier's fate was conn