that she, the devil,
and others made an image of the girl and pierced it with thorns!
The confession is a piece of pure folklore: poor old Elizabeth
Style merely copies the statements of French and Scotch witches.
The devil appeared as a handsome man, and as a black dog! Glanvill
denies that she was tortured, or 'watched'--that is, kept awake till
her brain reeled. But his own account makes it plain that she was
'watched' after her confession at least, when the devil, under the
form of a butterfly, appeared in her cell.

This rampant and mischievous nonsense was dear to the psychical
inquirers of the Restoration; it was circulated by Glanvill, a
Fellow of the Royal Society; by Henry More; by Sinclair, a professor
in the University of Glasgow; by Richard Baxter, that glory of
Nonconformity, who revels in the burning of an 'old reading parson'--
that is, a clergyman who read the Homilies, under the Commonwealth.
This unlucky old parson was tortured into confession by being
'walked' and 'watched'--that is, kept from sleep till he was
delirious. Archbishop Spottiswoode treated Father Ogilvie, S. J.,
in the same abominable manner, till delirium supervened. Church,
Kirk, and Dissent have no right to throw the first stone at each
other.

Taking levitation, haunting, disturbances and apparitions, and
leaving 'telepathy' or second sight out of the list for the present,
he who compares psychical research in the seventeenth and nineteenth
centuries finds himself confronted by the problem which everywhere
meets the student of institutions and of mythology. The
anthropologist knows that, if he takes up a new book of travels in
the remotest lands, he will find mention of strange customs
perfectly familiar to him in other parts of the ancient and modern
world. The mythologist would be surprised if he encountered in
Papua or Central Africa, or Sakhalin, a perfectly _new_ myth. These
uniformities of myth and custom are explained by the identical
workings of the uncivilised intelligence on the same materials, and,
in some cases, by borrowing, transmission, imitation.

Now, some features in witchcraft admit of this explanation.
Highland crofters, even now, perforate the image of an enemy with
pins; broken bottle-ends or sharp stones are put, in Russia and in
Australia, in the footprints of a foe, for the purpose of laming
him; and there are dozens of such practices, all founded on the
theory of sympathy. Like affects like.