Category: Isis Unveiled, Volume II: H. P. Blavatsky (1877)

"We refer those who would learn how the Catholic clergy united duty with pleasure in the matter of exorcisms, revenge, and treasure-hunting, to volume II, chapter i., of W. Howitt's History of the Supernatural. "In the book called Pneumatologia Occulta et Vera, all the forms of adjuration and conjuration were laid down", says this veteran [...]

"IN THE FOURTEENTH BURNING, TWO PERSONS. The mother of the two little girls before mentioned. A girl twenty-four years old. IN THE FIFTEENTH BURNING, TWO PERSONS. A boy twelve years of age, in the first school. A woman. IN THE SIXTEENTH BURNING, SIX PERSONS. A boy of ten years of age. IN THE SEVENTEENTH BURNING, [...]

"Regretting that space should prevent our giving one of the most curious lists in the world of burned witches, we will nevertheless make a few extracts from the original record as printed in Hauber's Bibliotheca Magica. One glance at this horrible catalogue of murders in Christ's name, is sufficient to discover that out of 162 [...]

"The book of Dr. W. G. Soldan, of Stuttgart, has become as famous in Germany, as Bodin's book on Demonomania in France. It is the most complete German treatise on witchcraft of the sixteenth century. One interested to learn the secret machinery underlying these thousands of legal murders, perpetrated by a clergy who pretended to [...]

"The authentic documents pertaining to the great trial of the Marechale d'Ancre, during the regency of Marie de Medicis, disclose that the unfortunate woman perished through the fault of the priests with whom, like a true Italian, she surrounded herself. She was accused by the people of Paris of sorcery, because it had been asserted [...]

""Ecclesia non novit Sanguinem!", meekly repeated the scarlet-robed cardinals. And to avoid the spilling of blood which horrified them, they instituted the Holy Inquisition. If, as the occultists maintain, and science half confirms, our most trifling acts and thoughts are indelibly impressed upon the eternal mirror of the astral ether, there must be somewhere, in [...]

"The occult knowledge gleaned by the Roman Church from the once fat fields of theurgy, she sedulously guarded for her own use, and sent to the stake only those practitioners who "poached' on her lands of the Scientia Scientiarum, and those whose sins could not be concealed by the friar's frock. The proof of it [...]

"About the time of the Reformation, the study of alchemy and magic had become so prevalent among the clergy as to produce great scandal. Cardinal Wolsey was openly accused before the court and the privy-council of confederacy with a man named Wood, a sorcerer, who said that "My Lord Cardinale had suche a rynge that [...]

"It is a well-attested fact that Pope Sylvester II was publicly accused by Cardinal Benno with being a sorcerer and an enchanter. The brazen "oracular head" made by his Holiness was of the same kind as the one fabricated by Albertus Magnus. The latter was smashed to pieces by Thomas Aquinas, not because it was [...]

"Catherine, the pious Christian - who has so well deserved in the eyes of the Church of Christ for the atrocious and never-to-be-forgotten massacre of St. Bartholomew - the Queen Catherine, kept in her service an apostate Jacobin priest. Well versed in the "black art", so fully patronized by the Medici family, he had won [...]