In the year 1609 there comes from the County of Tipperary a strange story of magical spells being counteracted by the application of a holy relic; this is preserved for us in that valuable monastic record, the _Triumphalia S. Crucis_. At Holy Cross Abbey, near Thurles, there was preserved for many years with the greatest veneration a supposed fragment of the True Cross, which attracted vast numbers of people, and by which it was said many wonderful miracles were worked. Amongst those that came thither in that year was "Anastasia Sobechan, an inhabitant of the district of Callan (co. Kilkenny), tortured by magical spells (veneficis incantationibus collisa), who at the Abbey, in presence of the Rev. Lord Abbot Bernard [Foulow], placed a girdle round her body that had touched the holy relic. Suddenly she vomited small pieces of cloth and wood, and for a whole month she spat out from her body such things. The said woman told this miracle to the Rev. Lord Abbot while she was healed by the virtue of the holy Cross. This he took care to set down in writing."
That most diligent gleaner of things strange and uncommon, Mr. Robert Law, to whom we are deeply indebted for much of the matter in this volume, informs us in his _Memorialls_ that in the first half of the seventeenth century there was to be found in Ireland a celebrated Doctor of Divinity, in Holy Orders of the Episcopal Church, who possessed extreme adroitness in raising the Devil--a process that some would have us believe to be commonly practised in Ireland at the present day by persons who have no pretensions to a knowledge of the Black Art! Mr. Law also gives the _modus operandi_ at full length. A servant-girl in the employment of Major-General Montgomerie at Irvine in Scotland was accused of having stolen some silverwork. "The lass being innocent takes it ill, and tells them, If she should raise the Devil she should know who took these things." Thereupon, in order to summon that Personage she went into a cellar, "takes the Bible with her, and draws a circle about her, and turns a riddle on end from south to north, or from the right to the left hand [_i.e._ contrary to the path of the sun in the heavens], having in her right hand nine feathers which she pulled out of the tail of a black cock, and having read the 51st [Psalm?] forwards, she reads backwards chapter ix., verse 19, of the Book of Revelation." Upon this the Devil appeared to her, and told her who was the guilty person. She then cast three of the feathers at him, and bade him return to the place from whence he came. This process she repeated three times, until she had gained all the information she desired; she then went upstairs and told her mistress, with the result that the goods were ultimately recovered. But escaping Scylla she fell into Charybdis; her uncanny practices came to the ears of the authorities, and she was apprehended. When in prison she confessed that she had learnt this particular branch of the Black Art in the house of Dr. Colville in Ireland, who habitually practised it.