BRITTANY WITCH TRIAL

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 951, 19 April 1930, Page 13

BRITTANY WITCH TRIAL

BAKER ACCUSED AS SATAN’S HENCHMAN MANY CULTS IN PARIS Is the devil capable of lifting a man bodily from behind his plough and spiriting him away to torture in the nether world? Breton peasants of StOlaph, a few hundred miles from the enlightened city of Paris, told a Judge in all seriousness that this was what happened to one of the' members of their community. They accused a local baker of having acted as a henchman of Satan in the plot. The trial of the baker, who had been apprehended on suspicion of having had a hand in the disappearance of a relative, was presided over by a Parisian Judge, whose own court in the capital is the special tribunal for occult cases of witchcraft .sorcery and evil eye. Realising that nothing could be gained by dismissing the charge of conspiring with the devil as frivolous, the Judge sought to convince the peasant witnesses in court that-their theory of the kidnapping was untenable on the ground that the devil could not lift a man of 250 pounds. Witch Doctor Cites Bible He was flatly contradicted by a village sage, an old witch doctor, who j \ cited the New Testament account of I Christ’s temptation. “Our Lord,” said the witch doctor, “was taken up bodily from the desert by Satan and transferred to the pinnacles of the Temple in Jerusalem.” i He further said that the peasants believed Satan capable of anything, because God had left him the power to torture human beings. He said the world was nothing but a struggle between God and the devil for the possession of the souls and bodies of men. The trial revealed that pagan superstitions dating from before the Christianisation of ancient Gaul persist widely in the rural regions of France and especially among the inhabitants of the bleak coasts of Brittany. This despite long centuries of efforts on the part of the clergy to stamp out the belief in weird and eerie apparitions, were wolves, witchery and occultism. At the same time Paris, sometimes called the “City of Light,” an appellation that does not refer to electric bulbs but to the advanced state of science to be found in its institutions of learning, is the world’s centre for mystical cults and the paradise of soothsayers. Mystical Cults Police tabulations show that there are more apostles and founders of faiths, prophets, fanatics and visionaries in Paris than in any other city on earth. No man can walk ten minutes on the most mundane of boulevards even in this day without having at least half a dozen addresses of curealls shoved in his hands. Women are even more frequently set upon by the agents of occultists. An entirely new sect, which disposes of a large fund, is erecting a Temple of Wisdom on the Champs Elysees. The adepts of this new faith intend to fight all religion, and to this end have invented a new one all of their own. Devil worshippers have two temples in Paris, where Satan is invoked. Still another sect makes a practice of worshipping God and the devil jointly. Two gigantic statues adorn their altar. They claim that they have revived a cult that was widely in practice in the middle ages, notably in the twelfth century, when the Notre Dame Cathedral was built. They point to the statue of Satan on one of the towers of Notre Dame in substantiation of their claim. On the same street with this Temple to God and the Devil stands the biggest insane asylum In Europe.