rable.
They carried on this worship by night, and sacrificed mysterious
animals to the goddess of death and to the race of giants. It was these
priestesses more especially--so at least we may conclude--who, as
_Hazusen_ or _Hegissen_, or _Hexen_ (witches), were handed down by
tradition to a late period in the middle ages.

The remembrance of these heathen beings became mixed with a wild chaos
of foreign superstitions, which had been brought from all the nations
of antiquity into heathen Rome, that great nursery of every
superstition, and from that ancient world had penetrated into
Christianity. The _Strigen_ and _Lamien_, evil spirits of ancient Rome,
which like vampires consumed the inward life of men, sorceresses who
flew through the air, and assembled nightly to celebrate disgraceful
orgies, were also handed down to the Germans, who mingled them with
similar conceptions, having perhaps a like origin. It is not always
possible to discover which of these notions were originally German or
which were derived from other nations.

The western Church in the beginning of the middle ages kept itself pure
from this chaos of gloomy conceptions; it condemned them as devilish,
but punished them on the whole with mildness and humanity, when they
did not lead to social crimes. But when the Church itself was frozen
into the rigidity of a hierarchical system, when strong hearts were
driven into heresy by the worldly claims of the papacy, and the people
became degraded under the nomination of begging monks, these
superstitions gradually produced in the Church a narrow-minded system.
Whatever was considered to be connected with the devil was put an end
to by bloody persecution. After the thirteenth century, about the
period when great masses of the people poured into the Sclave countries
from the interior of Germany, fanatical monks disseminated the odious
notion that the devil, as ruler of the witches, held intercourse with
them at nightly meetings, and that there was a formal ritual for the
worship of Satan, by accursed men and women, who had abjured the
Christian faith; and for this a countless number of suspected persons,
in France, in the first instance, were punished with torture and the
stake, by delegated inquisitors. In Germany itself, these persecutions
of the devil's associates first became prevalent after the funeral pile
of Huss. The more vehement the opposition of reason to these
persecutions, the more violent became th