[margin: Codronchus, On Harmful Magical Diseases, book 3, chapter 6; Cesalpino, On the Investigation of Demons, chapter 10]
They inflame not only the soul, but also bodies, houses, and towns, so that it easily appears that they are fuel of eternal fire.
[margin: Caelius Rhodiginus, Ancient Readings, book 15, chapter 13; Natalis Comes, Mythology, book 6, chapter 7; Seneca’s Medea]
The crown of Creusa is well known, which Medea burned up by an impious gift. Caelius and Natalis the Venetian wish it to have been anointed with a drug made from moister asphalt and sulphur, as though these things could have such force that by a moderate anointing they could seize the whole royal house of Corinth. Why did they not add medicinal naphtha? Is its force not more effective? Why not the unquenchable little fires of eternal burning, as Martianus calls them? Why not the flame-spewing cattle of Aetha? Why not the seeds of flame of Medusa? Why not all the things which the tragedian makes Medea mix?
You see the torch of a pious sister, of an impious mother, of the stepmother Althaea. Now stain Creusa’s garments; when she first puts them on, let creeping flame burn her deepest marrow. Fire shut in yellow gold lies hidden, obscure; Prometheus, who paid for heaven’s theft with his patched-up entrails, gave it to me and taught me to conceal its powers by art. Mulciber gave fires hidden beneath thin sulphur, and I brought bolts of living flame from my kinsman Phaethon. I have gifts from the midst of Chimaera; I have flames snatched from the throat of the bull burned by Coaeus; mingled with Medusa’s gall, I ordered them to preserve silent harm.
All these things are indeed fabulous, but people commonly thought them most effective for an inextinguishable fire. The poet, however, knowing that that force would be exercised by the demon through pact, concludes with a prayer to Hecate, the divinity of magicians:
Add goads to the poisons, Hecate, and preserve hidden in my gifts the seeds of flame.
How hidden and enclosed? In the way they usually do today, so that at the beginning they are touched with impunity and, to sight and sense, nothing fiery appears:
Let them deceive sight; let them endure touch.
[margin: Remigius, Demonolatry, book 2, chapter 13]
Meanwhile are they idle?
Let heat drip into her breast and veins; let her limbs smoke.
So it happens, and all things are burned:
Then at once the greedy fire, as ordered, spread through every part of the royal house. Now the whole house falls. The city is in fear; may water suppress the flames? And this marvelous thing happened in that disaster: water feeds the flames, and the more it is checked, the more the fire burns; it seizes its very remedies.
[margin: Erasmus, Epistles; Lycosthenes, Prodigies, under the year 1533]
No one here, I think, will be so much a philosopher that he does not recognize harmful magical force. Lest we think these things are fables, two recent events prove it, handed down by Nicholas Remigius:
A certain witch at Lixheim, named Jeanne Noire Armacuriana, had urgently demanded something from Francesca Huyna. When she could not obtain it, she blazed up into desire for revenge. Having received from the demon a little cloth in which certain small things like the slime of a defect were wrapped, she was warned to place it secretly in Huyna’s house and quickly go away, because not long afterward it would suddenly catch fire, and she would be consumed with all her furnishings. Therefore she wrapped the little cloth in a ball and offered it for sale to Huyna, who was then doing something in the bakehouse, as thread for the cloth which she had heard Huyna was preparing. But when Huyna denied that she needed it, because she hoped enough would come to her from household work, that good woman threw it into the baking place which was nearby, adding that, if it did not happen to be of use then, she would restore it when she wished. She had scarcely set foot outside when that flour-cellar, which contained the deposited ball, began to blaze, and then the whole house burned with so headlong a flame and fire that no remedy could be brought to it quickly enough. The distinct and separate assertion of both, and the event itself as well, won undoubted trust for itself among all.
A smaller fire, but more ruinous, was the one described by Erasmus of Rotterdam and also attested by Lycosthenes in the Prodigies. Erasmus writes thus in the Epistles:
There is a town in Switzerland named Schiltach, which on April 10 in the year 1533 suddenly burned completely. The rumor is that the cause of the fire, as far as the townsmen of that place reported it before the magistrate of Freiburg, a city eight German miles from there, was as follows. A demon gave a sign by whistling from a certain part of the house. The innkeeper, suspecting it was a thief, went up and found no one. But the same sign was given again from a higher room, and the innkeeper went up there, pursuing the thief. When nothing appeared there either, the whistle was heard from the top of the chimney. It immediately struck the innkeeper’s mind that it was something demonic. He ordered his people to be of good courage. Two priests were summoned. An exorcism was applied. The demon answered that he was a demon. Asked what he was doing there, he said that he wished to destroy the town. When the priests threatened him, he answered that he thought nothing of their threats, and that one of them was a fornicator and the other a thief. A little later he lifted into the air a poor little woman with whom he had had intercourse for fourteen years, although during that time she confessed and received the Eucharist every year. He placed her on the top of the chimney and handed her a pot. He ordered her to overturn it; she overturned it, and within an hour the whole town was burned.
Not very many years ago, certain incendiaries were raging through the Rhine region. They placed in other people’s houses a sword, spear, staff, or something else devoid of heat or fire; and a few hours later a flame burst from there, as though from firebrands, and consumed the houses.