An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Devil’s Mark

The Devil’s mark was supposed to be the mark placed upon a witch by the Devil at the time of his or her initiation. It was also called the sigillum diaboli or Devil’s seal.

It might have been argued by any reasonable person that it was surely very unwise of the Devil to be obliging enough to mark witches in this way, so that they could be the more easily detected. To counter this argument, the witch-hunters asserted that this mark was of a very specialised nature, and it took great skill and experience to find it.

Consequently, a veritable guild of witch-prickers, as they came to be called, at one time existed in Scotland. These men spread the belief that witches were marked in a very subtle, often invisible manner; but that nevertheless, the Devil’s mark could be detected by them, because it was insensible, and when a pin was driven into it it would not bleed.

A suspected witch would therefore be handed over to the witch-pricker, who would strip her naked, sometimes in public, and proceed to search her for the Mark of the Devil. As these men were paid by results, and made a livelihood of their trade, one may be confident that they would not fail to find something which they would say was the Devil’s mark; unless, of course, they were well bribed not to do so.

Some of them made use of a trick bodkin, which would only appear to penetrate the skin, when in fact the point was retracted inside the hilt. So by means of a simple conjuring device they seemed to the horrified onlookers (who, impelled by religious duty, had flocked to see a naked woman being tortured), to have driven a point into her flesh, without her feeling anything or any blood issuing forth. If they had previously been using a real bodkin, which caused sufficient agony and flow of blood to convince the spectators of the seriousness of the trial, and then by sleight of hand switched to the fake one, the effect was very striking and realistic.

Eventually, after they had caused many executions, the cheats of these rogues became so notorious that in 1662 the practice of ’pricking for witchcraft’ was forbidden by law, unless it was done by special Order in Council; and when some of the men concerned received prison sentences for their frauds, the practice died out.

However, in the days of witch-hunting, almost any natural mark or peculiarity could be passed off as the Devil’s mark, if someone was determined to convict a person as a witch. The descriptions of this supposed sigillum diaboli were vague and variable. Sometimes it was said to be a blue spot, sometimes something like the print of a toad’s foot, sometimes a physical peculiarity of almost any kind. Thus, when King Henry VIII had fallen out of love with Anne Boleyn, he accused her among other things of witchcraft, and declared that a certain natural oddity of her person was the Devil’s mark.

There are various traditions of what this peculiarity was. One account says that Anne Boleyn had a rudimentary extra finger on one hand; another states that she had an extra nipple on one breast. Whatever it was, Henry seized on it to declare that “he had made this marriage seduced by witchcraft; and that this was evident because God did not permit them to have any male issue”.

The extra nipple or ’witch’s teat’ was supposed to be a particularly certain and damning mark of the Devil; because this was bestowed upon a witch in order that she could give suck to her familiar, when the latter took animal or reptile form. Sometimes even male witches were accused of maintaining familiars in this way. ’Evidence’ of this nature was particularly frequent in witch trials in Britain. The Act of Parliament of King James I against witchcraft specifically mentions those who “consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit to or for any intent of purpose”; making it an offence punishable by death.

Now, the fact is that the occurrence of extra nipples on the human body is quite well known to medical science. It is not common; but it is by no means such an unheard-of thing as people might suppose, and it is a perfectly natural phenomenon.

Such supernumerary nipples, as doctors term them, usually occur on what is called ’the milk line’, an imaginery line running through the normal location of the breasts on either side, up past the armpit to the shoulder, and downwards from the breasts towards the pelvic region. However, in some cases, though more rarely, such nipples are found in other places on the body also. Medical authorities have estimated that supernumerary nipples can be found in from one to two per cent of the population.

A famous case in medical history is that of a woman called Therese Ventre, who was written about by two French scientists in 1827. Madame Ventre not only had two normal breasts, but an extra breast on the outside of her thigh, which was sufficiently developed to give milk. A contemporary picture shows her holding a baby in her arms and feeding it in the normal way, while another small child is taking milk from the breast on her thigh. If this lady had lived a couple of centuries previously, she would certainly have been condemned as a witch.