The
Jews, also, practised arts-magic, and the Cagots sold bags of wind to the
Breton sailors, enchanted maidens to love them--maidens who never would
have cared for them, unless they had been previously enchanted--made
hollow rocks and trees give out strange and unearthly noises, and sold
the magical herb called _bon-succes_. It is true enough that, in all the
early acts of the fourteenth century, the same laws apply to Jews as to
Cagots, and the appellations seem used indiscriminately; but their fair
complexions, their remarkable devotion to all the ceremonies of the
Catholic Church, and many other circumstances, conspire to forbid our
believing them to be of Hebrew descent.
Another very plausible idea is, that they are the descendants of
unfortunate individuals afflicted with goitres, which is, even to this
day, not an uncommon disorder in the gorges and valleys of the Pyrenees.
Some have even derived the word goitre from Got, or Goth; but their name,
Crestia, is not unlike Cretin, and the same symptoms of idiotism were not
unusual among the Cagots; although sometimes, if old tradition is to be
credited, their malady of the brain took rather the form of violent
delirium, which attacked them at new and full moons.
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