Both, perhaps, contributed their share. Sometimes a
mountain, as in Germany the Blocksberg,[108] sometimes a conspicuous oak
or linden, and there were many such among both Gauls and Germans sacred
of old to pagan rites, and later a lonely heath, a place where two roads
crossed each other, a cavern, gravel-pit, or quarry, the gallows, or the
churchyard, was the place appointed for their diabolic orgies. That the
witch could be conveyed bodily to these meetings was at first admitted
without any question. But as the husbands of accused persons sometimes
testified that their wives had not left their beds on the alleged night
of meeting, the witchmongers were put to strange shifts by way of
accounting for it. Sometimes the Devil imposed on the husband by a
_deceptio visus_; sometimes a demon took the place of the wife; sometimes
the body was left and the spirit only transported. But the more orthodox
opinion was in favor of corporeal deportation. Bodin appeals triumphantly
to the cases of Habbakuk (now in the Apocrypha, but once making a part of
the Book of Daniel), and of Philip in the Acts of the Apostles. "I find,"
he says, "this ecstatic ravishment they talk of much more wonderful than
bodily transport. And if the Devil has this power, as they confess, of
ravishing the spirit out of the body, is it not more easy to carry body
and soul without separation or division of the reasonable part, than to
withdraw and divide the one from the other without death?" The author of
_De Lamiis_ argues for the corporeal theory.
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