Satanic rites, and engage in conjugal relations with demons. In 1326, Pope John XXII issued the papal bull Super illius Specula, which condemned folk divination practices as consultation with Satan. By the 1430s, the Catholic Church began to regard witchcraft as part of a vast conspiracy led by Satan himself. Early modern period During the Early Modern Period, Christians gradually began to regard Satan as increasingly powerful and the fear of Satan's power became a dominant aspect of the worldview of Christians across Europe. During the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther taught that, rather than trying to argue with Satan, Christians should avoid temptation altogether by seeking out pleasant company; Luther especially recommended music as a safeguard against temptation, since the Devil "cannot endure gaiety." John Calvin repeated a maxim from Saint Augustine that "Man is like a horse, with either God or the devil as rider." In the late fifteenth century, a series of witchcraft panics erupted in France and Germany. The German Inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger argued in their book Malleus Maleficarum, published in 1487, that all maleficia ("sorcery") was rooted in the work of Satan. In the mid-sixteenth century, the panic spread to England and Switzerland. Both Protestants and Catholics alike firmly believed in witchcraft as a real phenomenon and supported its prosecution. In the late 1500s, the Dutch demonologist Johann Weyer argued in his treatise De praestigiis daemonum that witchcraft did not exist, but that Satan promoted belief in it to lead Christians astray. The panic over witchcraft intensified in the 1620s and continued until the end of the 1600s. Brian Levack estimates that around 60,000 people were executed for witchcraft during the entire span of the witchcraft hysteria. The early English settlers of North America, especially the Puritans of New England, believed that Satan "visibly and palpably" reigned in the New World. John Winthrop claimed that the Devil made rebellious Puritan women give birth to stillborn monsters with claws, sharp horns, and "on each foot three claws, like a young fowl." Cotton Mather wrote that devils swarmed around Puritan settlements "like the frogs of Egypt". The Puritans believed that the Native Americans were worshippers of Satan and described them as "children of the Devil". Some settlers claimed to have seen Satan himself appear in the flesh at native ceremonies. During the First Great Awakening, the "new light" preachers portrayed their "old light" critics as