Compendium of Witches (Compendium Maleficarum)

"So, companion, since you did not bring me aid so that I might be snatched from the hands of my killer, I now lie bloodless, and the murderer intends to drag my body away to bury it in the fields outside the city walls. He has already wrapped it inside the dung prepared upon the cart. Do not allow this, I ask, for the sake of your kindness toward me, but see at least that it is committed to burial in the most honorable manner possible." At daybreak, the companion awakens, terrified by the dream; he rises immediately and goes to his companion. He asks the innkeeper, "Where is my companion?" The innkeeper answers with the words of Cain, "Am I his keeper?" A reference to Genesis 4:9, where Cain asks God, "Am I my brother's keeper?" "He rose and left, taking his things with him; I do not know where he went." The companion stood there for a little while, thinking to himself what he ought to do, and meanwhile, he sees in the courtyard a cart loaded with dung. Distressed by the imagination of his dream, and having not found his companion, he pondered the matter silently within himself. After waiting for some time, he asks again if his companion has returned. "He has not returned," he replies, "perhaps he has started his journey." "Well then," he says, "may you live, comrade, farewell. If my companion comes, tell him that I have gone ahead and he should follow me." With direct steps, he goes to the Chief Magistrate and reveals what he knows about his companion. He gives signs of the dung-laden cart and provides everything necessary for the investigation. The Magistrate sends guards, who stood at a distance watching to see what the innkeeper would do. The murderer, however, thinking that all was settled because the dead man's companion had left, sends the cart out of the house, heading outside the city. The guards watch this, run up, and say, "Whither, whither, good man? What is this dung for?" It was ordered that we inspect it. Upon overturning the cart onto the ground, they find the murdered companion lying within the dung. The murderer is seized and pays the atrocious penalties worthy of the crime.

On Artificial Magic. Chapter II.

Doctrine.

a Book on demons. b Book on Magic. Tob. 7. c Lib. 10. I shall speak simply.

Magic is twofold: natural and artificial. God bestowed natural and legitimate magic upon Adam along with other sciences, from whom posterity, taught by hand, propagated it throughout the world. This, as Psellus Michael Psellos, 11th-century Byzantine philosopher and Proclus 5th-century Neoplatonist philosopher observe, is nothing other than a more exact knowledge of the secrets of nature. By this, through the observation of the course and influence of the heavens and stars, and the sympathies and antipathies of individual things at their proper time, place, and manner, things are applied to things, and certain marvelous things are performed by this pact, which seem prestigious or miraculous to those ignorant of the causes, just as when Tobias dispelled his father's blindness with the gall of a fish, a power which Galen prominent Greek physician attributes to the Callyonimus a species of fish fish.