That Pesky Satan Interferes with Executions

In sixteenth-century Germany an execution was a public ritual carefully designed to impress on the audience the power of divine justice and the majesty of the state. It could therefore be assumed that the devil hated these rituals and did all in his power to spoil them. Executioners regularly carried amulets to protect them from devilish tricks, or from spells cast by friends of the guilty man. One of the devil's favorite tricks was to confound the vision of the executioner before a beheading, so that he saw three heads instead of one.  Fortunately there was a simple counter measure that would usually defeat this ploy: "aim for the middle one."