The belief in such a transformation pervaded all Europe, and lasted long even in Protestant countries.

Probably no article in the witch creed had more adherents in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries than this.

Nearly every parish in Europe had its resultant horrors.
The reformed Church in all its branches fully accepted the doctrines of witchcraft and diabolic possession, and developed them still further.
No one urged their fundamental ideas more fully than Luther.

He did, indeed, reject portions of the witchcraft folly; but to the influence of devils he not only attributed his maladies, but his dreams, and nearly everything that thwarted or disturbed him.

The flies which lighted upon his book, the rats which kept him awake at night, he believed to be devils; the resistance of the Archbishop of Mayence to his ideas, he attributed to Satan literally working in that prelate's heart; to his disciples he told stories of men who had been killed by rashly resisting the devil.