constrained to offer him their Children.” Elizabeth Francis of Chelmsford, a witch tried in 1566, was only about twelve years old when her grandmother first taught her the art of sorcery.[1] The famous Pendle beldame, Elizabeth Demdike “brought vp her owne Children, instructed her Graundchildren, and tooke great care and paines to bring them to be Witches.”[2] At Salem, George Burroughs, a minister, was accused by a large number of women as “the person who had Seduc’d and Compell’d them into the snares of Witchcraft.”
Sixthly: The Devil administers to witches a kind of sacrilegious baptism, and after abjuring their Godfathers and Godmothers of Christian Baptism and Confirmation they have assigned to them new sponsors—as it were—whose charge it is to instruct them in sorcery: they drop their former name and exchange it for another, generally a scurrilous and grotesque nickname.
In 1609 Jeanette d’Abadie, a witch of the Basses-Pyrénées, confessed “that she often saw children baptized at the Sabbat, and these she informed us were the offspring of sorcerers and not of other persons, but of witches who are accustomed to have their sons and daughters baptized at the Sabbat rather than at the Font.”[3] June 20, 1614, at Orleans, Silvain Nevillon amongst other crimes acknowledged that he had frequented assemblies of witches, and “that they baptize babies at the Sabbat with Chrism. … Then they anoint the child’s head therewith muttering certain Latin phrases.”[4] Gentien le Clere, who was tried at the same time, “said that his mother, as he had been told, presented him at the Sabbat when he was but three years old, to a monstrous goat, whom they called l’Aspic. He said that he was baptized at the Sabbat, at Carrior d’Olivet, with fourteen or fifteen other children. …”[5]
Among the confessions made by Louis Gaufridi at Aix in March, 1611, were: “I confess that baptism is administered at the Sabbat, and that every sorcerer, devoting himself to the Devil, binds himself by a particular vow that he will have all his children baptized at the Sabbat, if this may by any possible means be effected. Every child who is thus baptized at the Sabbat receives a name, wholly differing from his own name. I confess that at this baptism water,
