So You Want to Become an Early Modern Witch: 16 Steps July 18, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
We are back in the seventeenth century and your neighbours are really getting on your nerves, money is tight and, frankly, you want to let down your hair and deny God and the mother Church. How do you get involved with early modern Satanists and impress at the Sabbat? Well, luckily for you someone was keeping notes.
1) Make an appointment with the local coven for Sunday or another very holy day.
2) Help them break into a church where the initiation will take place next to the high altar (or the font).
3) Dress up (details not given, but not naked! Got that Wiccans?)
4) You are introduced to a ‘man’ (pictured) who is ‘labouring to hide his cloven foote’
5) Bow to said ‘man’ and then do homage ‘kissing his backe parts’
6) If you are a Christian then your baptism must be explicitly renounced
7) Accept baptism in the Devil’s name and accept a new name and Devilparents
8) Look up as the ‘man’ may start to get a bit frisky scratching your forehead (if anyone has signed the cross there)
9) The mark of the beast is branded upon you (‘the fleshbrand’), somewhere.
10) Listen as you are given a quick course in making dead baby ointment.
11) Swear or write in blood a pronouncement renouncing God, Jesus, the HG and particularly Mary.
12) Take mental note of your homework including spitting during mass, and fasting on Sundays and feasting on Fridays.
13) Promise to bring up your children to Satan and to lure others in: basically a mirror image of the Church.
14) The man, hiding his feet, promises in return to be there for you: money, pleasure, revenge…
15) Receive a familiar imp: cat, dog, weasel, mouse, baby dragon…
16) Promise to meet thrice yearly with others of your kind: and next time he won’t be hiding his feet.
Don’t do this at home.
We made up the bit about a baby dragon, the rest is paraphased. Where does this come from? John Gaule, Select Cases of Conscience touching Witches and Witchcraft, 57-65 (if you push past the initial Biblical quotations it makes for addictive reading). JG was a moderate: he believed in trying and killing witches but only after due process. His writings were consulted at the Salem trials, which says it all… He was very clear that witches could not be saved. His charity extended to the innocents who might be tried and executed mistakenly.
Seriously, don’t do this at home.
Other information on witch initiation, Neo-Murrayian or otherwise? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
