In his classic study of magistrates and witches in seventeenthcentury France, Robert Mandrou describes how a growing reluctance to accept the demonic origin of witchcraft practices led in 1682 to a royal edict that virtually ended prosecutions for witchcraft in secular courts. Previously, following a tradition that remained entrenched in some provincial jurisdictions, persons suspected of causing harm through witchcraft could be brought before a royal magistrate and charged with sortileges and maléfices (acts of witchcraft and the casting of evil spells). Even those who had performed seemingly more innocent actions, such as reciting incantations to lift spells or treat illness, might also be charged with using diabolical arts. What these practices had in common was that they were believed to depend on the intervention of the devil or his agents. To indulge in them was to defy God, and no less so than the acts described in the demonological literature which more explicitly involved commerce with the devil, such as an overt pact, sexual intercourse with demons or participation in a witches' sabbath - behaviours that the prosecutors in any case readily attributed to the defendants. Hence the charge, sometimes levelled in French courts, of divine lése majesté.