own provisions.[1] The food appears to have consisted of roast meat, bread, and beer or wine; it was always spread on a clean white cloth. In Sweden and Scotland the feast was usually indoors, in England sometimes in a house, sometimes outside, according to the weather; in France almost always out of doors. At Auldearne[2] the feast began with a grace before meat ("We eat this meat in the Devil's name," etc.), and at the end the company looked at the Devil, and bowing to him said, "We thank thee, our Lord, for this." In Great Britain I can find no first-hand evidence as to the alleged taboo on salt at the witch-feasts, though it occurs in France.
The dances were of three kinds[3]; two were danced in a circle, the dancers facing outwards. In the first, the dancers held their hands behind them, and turned first one shoulder, then the other to the middle of the ring with a backward bend of the body. The description is something like the Looby dance of the children of Great Britain. The second was also a round dance, the dancers again facing outwards; it consisted of a series of jumps, and was possibly as I have already suggested originally a dance for increasing the corn crops. Both these dances were often performed round some object such as a great stone, and it is not improbable that the Devil stood in the middle, as there is no record of his dancing in these dances.[4]
- ↑ Horneck in Glanvil's Sadducismus Triumnphatus, pt. ii. pp. 326-7. De Lancre, Tableau de l'Inconstance, y. 197. Burr, Narratives of Witchcraft Cases, p. 418, New York, 1914.
- ↑ Pitcairn, Criminal Trials, iii. 612. Also in France, de Lancre, op. cit. p. 197.
- ↑ De Lancre, op. cit. p. 210.
- ↑ It is uncertain whether this statement holds good at Auldearne, or whether the dance described by Isobel Gowdie refers to the third form. "Jean Martein is Maiden to the Coven that I am of, & hir nikname is 'Ower the dyke with it,' becaws the Divell alwayis takis the Maiden in his hand nix him, quhan we dance Gillatrypes; tV quhan he void loup from [words broken here] he & she will say, Ower the dyk with it" (Pitcairn, Criminal Trials, iii. p. 606.)
