Visibility as spirits or apparitions, and effluxes from their systems, were their crimes.
"Witchcraft of New England Explained by Modern Spiritualism"
Allen Putnam
But there is a more probable opinion than this maintained by some, who say that falling stars are no effluxes, nor discharges of ethereal fire, extinguished almost at the instant of its igniting by the lower air; neither are they the sudden combustion and blazing up of a quantity of the lower air let loose in great abundance into the upper region; but the heavenly bodies, by a relaxation of the force of their circular movement, are carried by an irregular course, not in general into the inhabited part of the earth, but for the most part into the wide sea; which is the cause of their not being observed.
"Plutarch-Lives-of-the-noble-Grecians-and-Romans"
Clough, Arthur Hugh
The Nile appeareth at the command of thy mouth; thou makest men to live on the effluxes that proceed from thy members, and thou makest every field to flourish.
"The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians"
E. A. Wallis Budge