THE CANON EPISCOPI
[1] To the end that bishops and their ministers
work to labor with all strength to entirely uproot from their
parishes the pernicious and devil-invented sorcery and malefic arts,
if they find any man or woman sectarian of this wickedness, they
eject them dishonorably disgraced from their parishes. Truly the
Apostle agrees: "Avoid a heretic after the first and second warning,
knowing he is subverted who is of that kind." They are subverted,
and they are held captive by the devil, who, leaving their creator,
curry support from the devil. And therefore, such a pest ought to be
cleansed from the holy Church.
[2] This also is not to be omitted, that
certain wicked women, turned back toward Satan, seduced by demonic
illusions and phantasms, believe of themselves and profess to ride
upon certain beasts in the nighttime hours, with Diana, the Goddess
of the Pagans, and an innumerable multitude of women, and to
traverse great spaces of earth in the silence of the dead of night,
and to be subject to her laws as of a Lady, and on fixed nights be
called to her service.
[3] But would that they alone perished in their
falsehood, and did not, through faithlessness, hand over many to
ruin with themselves! For an innumerable multitude, deceived by this
false opinion, believe this to be true, and so believing, avoid the
straight faith, and are again caught in the errors of the Pagans, by
judging there to be anything of divinity or divine will beyond the
one God. Therefore, priests throughout their churches are required
to pronounce this crime to the people, with all insistence, so this
will be known to be lies in every way; and not from a divine, but
from a malignant spirit are such phantasms imposed on the minds of
the unfaithful.
[4] Since Satan himself, who transforms himself
into an angel of light, begins with the mind of whatsoever girl -
and he will subjugate her to himself through unfaithfulness and
disbelief he immediately transforms himself into the species and
resemblances of various persons; and the mind which he holds
captive, deluded in sleep, is shown things now joyful, now mournful,
and persons, now known, now unknown; through deserted places he
leads it away; and though only the spirit endures this, the
unfaithful mind believes this to happen not in the soul, but in the
body.
[5] Who truly has not, in sleep and at night,
been summoned to visions outside of himself, and seen many things
asleep which never are seen awake? Who in truth is stupid and
foolish enough to decide all this which is done only in the spirit,
actually happens in the body, when Ezekiel the Prophet saw visions
of the Lord in the spirit, not in the body; and John the Apostle saw
and heard the sacred things of the Apocalypse in the spirit, not in
the body, just as he himself declares: "Firmly I say, I was in the
spirit." And Paul does not dare to declare he was snatched away in
the body.
[6] Therefore, publicly announce to all: any
who believe such and similar things destroys the faith, and whoever
has not the straight faith in God, is not his, but is of whom he
believes, that is, the devil. For about our Lord is written: "All
things are made by him, and without him nothing is made." Whoever,
then, believes anything can be made, or any creature can be changed
to better or worse, or transformed into another species or
resemblance - except by the Creator himself who made all things, and
through whom all things are made - is an unbeliever beyond doubt.
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