A SURVIVAL OF MEDIEVAL CREDULITY. 707 



would be no sense in piercing the consecrated wafer unless it was 

 believed to be the real body of Christ; but as she rejected the 

 doctrine of transubstantiation as a childish superstition, she was 

 unwilling to make a fool of herseK by assaulting a piece of ordi- 

 nary bread with a show of wrath. She would not hesitate to com- 

 mit sacrilege, but did object to being silly. This scruple, or rather 

 this lively sense of the ridiculous, rendered her unpopular with the 

 Freemasons, inasmuch as it marred the performance of their most 

 important and impressive Satanic ceremony, and thus gave her 

 rival, Sophia Walder, an advantage, which she was quick to im- 

 prove. 



We need not follow the career of Sophia Walder, known to 

 the infernals as Sophia Sapho. She is said to have been born in 

 Strasburg, September 29, 1863, as the supposititious daughter of 

 a Protestant parson, Phiiias Walder, and a Rosicrucian dame, Ida 

 Jacobsen, with whom the clergyman lived after having murdered 

 his wife in Copenhagen. Her real father, however, was the devil 

 Bitru, who declared her to be the predestined great-grandmother 

 of antichrist. In 1896, while in Jerusalem, she gave birth to a 

 daughter, the grandmother of antichrist; this child was also of 

 demoniac paternity. Owing to her uncompromising Luciferian- 

 ism, she was a favorite of the Freemasons, and excited the jealousy 

 of Diana Vaughan, who tells with zest of the practical jokes played 

 on her. Thus, at a banquet of the Freemasons, somebody put a 

 few drops of Lourdes water in her glass of lemonade, which caused 

 terrible pain and threw her into spasms, from which she finally 

 found relief by vomiting fire. This incident is cited by a Catholic 

 writer. Dr. Michael Germanus,* in his Secrets of Hell (Geheimnisse 

 der Holle), as conclusive proof that " Sophia was possessed." 



Bitru's proclamation 

 of Sophia Sapho as the 

 prospective great-grand- 

 mother of the incarnate 

 antichrist is given in 

 full. It was dictated in 

 Latin by Bitru at a meet- 

 ing of Freemasons in Italy, and written down by Luigi Revello, 

 and bears the devil's signature, composed of Satanic signs and 

 symbols, darts, sword, cords, lightning, bugle-horn, trident, and 

 crowing cock. 



* Michael Germanus (a Latinizatiou of " Der deut^che Miche/" the personification of 

 the German nation, analogous to the English ".John Bull" and the American "Brother 

 Jonathan ") is the pseudonym of a priest, Parson Kiiazle, of Feldkirch, in the Tyrolese 

 Yoralberg. 



