In 1534, Elizabeth Barton, “the Maid of Kent,” was executed for witchcraft in England, together with seven men who had been confederate with her.  In 1541 the Earl of Hungerford was beheaded for inquiring of a witch how long Henry VIII. would live.  In 1549 it was made the duty of bishops, by Archbishop Cranmer’s articles of visitation, to inquire of their clergy, whether “they know of any that use charms, sorcery, enchantments, witchcraft, soothsaying, or any like craft invented by the Devil.”  In 1563 the King of Sweden carried four witches with him, as a part of his armament, to aid him in his wars with the Danes.  In 1576, seventeen or eighteen were condemned in Essex, in England.  A single judge or inquisitor, Remigius, condemned and burned nine hundred within fifteen years, from 1580 to 1595, in the single district of Lorraine; and as many more fled out of the country; whole villages were depopulated, and fifteen persons destroyed themselves rather than submit to the torture which, under the administration of this successor of Draco and rival of Jeffries, was the first step taken in the trial of an accused person.  The application of the rack and other instruments of torment, in the examination of prisoners, was recommended by him in a work on witchcraft.  He observes that “scarcely any one was known to be brought to repentance and confession but by these means”!

The most eminent persons of the sixteenth century were believers in the popular superstition respecting the existence of compacts between Satan and human beings, and in the notions associated with it.  The excellent Melancthon was an interpreter of dreams and caster of nativities.  Luther was a strenuous supporter of the doctrine of witchcraft, and seems to have seriously believed that he had had frequent interviews with the arch-enemy himself, and had disputed with him on points of theology, face to face.  In his “Table-Talk,” he gives the following account of his intimacy with the Devil:  speaking of his confinement in the Castle of Wartburg, he says, “Among other things they brought me hazel-nuts, which I put into a box, and sometimes I used to crack and eat of them.  In the night-times, my gentleman, the Devil, came and got the nuts out of the box, and cracked them against one of the bedposts, making a very great noise and rumbling about my bed; but I regarded him nothing at all:  when afterwards I began to slumber, then he kept such a racket and rumbling upon the chamber stairs, as if many empty barrels and hogsheads had been tumbled down.”  Kepler, whose name is immortalized by being associated with the laws he discovered that regulate the orbits of the heavenly bodies, was a zealous advocate of astrology; and his great predecessor and master, the Prince of Astronomers, as he is called, Tycho Brahe, kept an idiot in his presence, fed him from his own table, with his own hand, and listened to his incoherent, unmeaning, and fatuous expressions as to a revelation from the spiritual world.