Boguet Henri

An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920)

Grand Justice of the district Saint Claude, in Burgundy, who died in 1619. He was the author of a work full of peurile and ferocious zeal against sorcerers. This book, published at the commencement of the seventeenth century, was latterly burnt because of the inhumanities which crowded its pages. It is entitled Discours des sorciers, with many instructions concerning how to judge sorcerers and their acts. It is, in short, a compilation of procedures, at the majority of which the author has himself presided, and which exhibit the most incredible absurdities and criminal credulity. In its pages we discover the proceedings against the unfortunate little Louise Maillat, who at the age of eight was possessed of eight demons, of Françoise Secretain, a sorceress, who had meetings with the said demons, and who had the Devil for her lover, and of the sorcerers Gros-Jacques and Willirmoz. Claude Gailiard and Roland Duvernois and many others figure in the dreadful role of the sanguinary author's dread judgments. Boguet details the horrible doings of the witches' Sabbath, how the sorcerers caused hail to fall of which they made a powder to be used as poison, how they used an unguent which carried them to the Sabbath, how a sorcerer was enabled to slay whom he would by means of a mere breath, and how, when arraigned before a judge they cannot shed tears. He further enlarges on the Devil's mark which was found on the skins of these Boniface unfortunates, of how all sorcerers and magicians possess the power of changing their forms into those of wolves, and how, for these offences they were burnt at the stake without sacrament, so that they were destroyed body and soul. The work terminates with instructions to judges of cases of sorcery, and is often known as the Code des Sorciers.