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Title: Magic and Witchcraft
Author: Anonymous
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MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
Reading for Travellers.
JUST PUBLISHED, OLD ROADS AND NEW ROADS.
PRICE ONE SHILLING.
NOTICES OF THE PRESS.
_The Daily News._
"Knowledge and amusement are very happily blended together, and the
reader who finds his acquaintance with the history of roads increased
at the end of his journey, will also find his available fund of
anecdote augmented."
_The Literary Gazette._
"The book contains little more than a hundred pages, and might be read
during the journey by the express train between London and Brighton;
but so suggestive is every page, that an intelligent and imaginative
reader will not reach the end till the book has been many an hour in
his hands."
_The Economist._
"This is a pleasant book, somewhat quaint, particularly the preface,
but full of amusing and instructive reading."
_The Atlas._
"If the other volumes of the series are equal to the present in
interest and value, we think we may safely predict a very extensive
popularity for the enterprise.... The author has collected from all
manner of curious and out-of-the-way sources materials for his book,
and it reads like one of old Montaigne's Essays."
_The Leader._
"A charming volume of curious and learned gossip, such as would have
riveted Charles Lamb by its fine scholarly tone and its discursive
wealth. If the other volumes are up to this mark, the series will be
by far the best of the many which now make Literature the luxury of
the poor."
_The Gardeners' Chronicle._
"Exactly the book for the amusement of a man of education. Lively and
learned, poetical and practical. This book is to the scholar fatigued
with trash like a bottle of rich Hungarian wine to a man who has been
condemned to the thin potations of France and the Rheingau."
_The Gateshead Observer._
"_Old Roads and New Roads._--(Chapman and Hall, London.) No. I. of
'Reading for Travellers.' A first-rate little volume, printed with
large type, and just the thing for a railway ride. The publishers have
acted wisely in calling to their aid a scholar and a writer of the
highest order."
_The Leicestershire Mercury._
"Messrs. Chapman and Hall have re-entered the field of Railway
Literature, and have very fittingly commenced their series of 'Reading
for Travellers' with a graphic historical sketch of _Old Roads and New
Roads_. It is at once scholarly and popular in style and
contents----yet free from the slightest tinge of pedantry or
affectation. The narrative is by no means a mere dry record of facts
and dates. It is abundantly diversified and relieved with illustrative
anecdotes and sprightly observations--philosophy and pleasantry
combining with genuine erudition to make this one of the most useful
and entertaining of the volumes of railway reading with which we have
met."
MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
"Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,
Nocturnos lemures, partentaque Thessala rides?"
_Hor. Epist. ii. 2. 208._
LONDON:
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY.
1852.
PRINTED BY
JOHN EDWARD TAYLOR, LITTLE QUEEN STREET,
LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS.
PREFACE.
We have long wished that some English or foreign university would offer a
prize for a history of Magic and Witchcraft. The records of human opinion
would contain few chapters more instructive than one which should deal
competently with the Black Art. For gross and painful as the details of
superstition may be, yet superstition, by its very etymology, implies a
dogma or a system of practice standing upon some basis of fact or truth:
and however vain or noxious the superstructure may be, the foundation of
it is in some way connected with those deep verities upon which rest also
the roots of philosophy and religion.
For a grand error, and such alone can at any time essentially affect the
opinions of mankind in general, is ever the imitation or caricature of
some grand truth. From one soil spring originally the tree which yields
good fruit and the plant which distils deadly poison. The very
discernment of the causes of error is a step towards the discovery of its
opposite. The bewilderments of the mind of man, when fully analysed,
afford a clue to the course of its movements from the right track, or at
least enable us to detect the point at which began the original separation
between Truth and Error. Alchemy led, by no very circuitous route, to the
science of chemistry; the adoption of false gods by the majority of the
human race rendered necessary the dispensations of the Jewish and
Christian schemes; and the corruption of true reverence for the Good, the
Beautiful, and the Holy, was the parent of those arts, which, under the
several appellations of Magic, Witchcraft, Sorcery, etc., drew their
professors at first and the multitude afterwards to put faith in the evil,
the deformed, and the impure. Magic and Witchcraft are little more than
the religious instincts of mankind, first inverted, then polluted, and
finally, like all corrupted matter, impregnated with the germs of a
corrupt vitality.
So universal is the belief in spiritual influences, and more especially in
their malignant influences, that no race of men, no period of time, no
region of the globe, have been exempt from it. It meets us in the remote
antiquity of Asiatic life, in the comparatively recent barbarism of the
American aborigines, in the creeds of all the nations who branched off
thousands of years ago eastward and westward from their Caucasian cradle,
in the myths, the observances, and the dialects of nations who have no
other affinity with one another than the mere form of man.
No nation, indeed, can reproach another nation with its addiction to magic
without in an equal degree condemning itself. All the varieties of mankind
have, in this respect, erred alike at different periods of their social
existence, and all accordingly come under the same condemnation of making
and loving a lie. The Chaldean erred when, dissatisfied with simple
observation of the heavenly bodies through the luminous atmosphere of his
plains, he perverted astronomy into astrology: the Egyptian erred when he
represented the omnipresence of the Deity by the ubiquity of animal
worship: the Hindoo erred when, having conceived the idea of an
incarnation, he clothed with flesh and fleshly attributes the members of
his monstrous pantheon: the Kelt and Teuton erred when, in their silent
and solitary forests, they stained the serenity of nature with the deified
attributes of war; and the more settled and civilized races who built and
inhabited the cities of the ancient world, erred in their conversion of
the indivisible unity of the Demiourgos or World-Creator into an
anthropomorphic system of several gods. But the very universality of the
error points to some common ground for it in the recesses of the human
heart; and since Paganism under all its forms was the corruption of
religion, and Witchcraft in its turn the corruption of Paganism, an
inquiry into the seeds of this evil fruit cannot fail to be also in some
measure an investigation of the very 'incunabula' of human error.
We have stated, or endeavoured to state, the real scope and dimensions of
the subject of Magic and Witchcraft--not however with any purpose of
expatiating upon it in so small a volume as the present one. In the pages
which follow we offer only a few remarks upon theories or modes of belief
which in remote or in nearer ages have affected the creeds and the conduct
of mankind. The subject, _in extenso_, belongs to larger volumes, and to
maturer learning and meditation.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
The Legendary Lucifer 3
Sources of Superstition 9
Monkish Superstition 11
Executions for Witchcraft 17
Self-Delusions 19
Spectral Illusions 25
Coincidences in Evidence 29
Sweden. The Blocula 31
Delusions 33
Confessions 35
The Reformation 37
Persecutions in Germany 39
Persecutions in Hungary 41
Edict of Louis XIV. 43
Persecution in England 45
Scottish Superstition 49
Trials in Scotland 55
Remarkable Trials 57
Case of Lady Fowlis 59
James the First 65
Tortures 67
Convention of Witches 69
Dr. Fian 71
Euphemia Macalzean 73
Charles the First 75
The Puritans 77
The Restoration 79
Isobel Gowdie 81
Amusements of Witches 83
Anecdotes of Witches 85
Superstitious Enthusiasm 87
Pagan Witchcraft 91
Lucian and Apuleius 93
The Baker's Wife 95
High Treason 97
Later Pagan Superstitions 99
MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
An amusing work appeared at Mainz, in 1826, from the pen of "Herr
Kirchenrath" Horst, the title of which, translated _in extenso_, runs
thus:--"The Magical Library; or, of Magic, Theurgy, and Necromancy;
Magicians, Witches, and Witch Trials, Demons, Ghosts, and Spectral
Appearances. By G. C. Horst, Church-Counsellor to the Grand Duke of
Hesse." The following pages formed a review of this work, which appeared
many years ago[1].
* * * * *
This book of the worthy Church-Counsellor is rather a singular one: it is
not a history of Magic, but a sort of spiritual periodical, or magazine of
infernal science, supported in a great measure by contributions from
persons of a ghostly turn of mind, who, although they affect occasionally
to write in a Sadducee vein, are many of them half-believers at heart, and
would not walk through a churchyard at night, except for a consideration
larger than we should like to pay. The field over which it travels is too
extensive, for us to attempt to follow the author throughout his elaborate
subdivisions. Dante divided hell, like Germany, into circles; and Mr.
Horst, adopting something of a similar arrangement, has parcelled out the
territory of the Prince of the Air into sundry regular divisions, by which
its whole bearings and distances are made plain enough for the use of
infant schools. It is only at one of the provinces of the Inferno,
however, that we can at present afford to glance; though for those who are
inclined to make the grand tour, the Counsellor may be taken as an
intelligent travelling companion, well acquainted with the road. In fact
his work is so methodical and distinct, and the geography of the infernal
regions so clearly laid down, according to the best authorities, from
Jamblichus and Porphyry down to Glanvil and the Abbé Fiard, that the whole
district is now about as well known as the course of the Niger; and it
must be the traveller's own fault if he does not find his exit from
Avernus as easy as its entrance has proverbially been since the days of
Virgil.
The picture, however, drawn by these intelligent spiritual travellers is
by no means calculated to impress us with a high notion of the dominions
of the Prince of the Air, or that the _personnel_ of his majesty or his
government are prepossessing. The climate, as all of them, from Faust
downwards, agree, is oppressively hot, and the face of the country
apparently a good deal like that between Birmingham and Wolverhampton,
abounding with furnaces and coal-pits. Literature is evidently at a low
ebb, from the few specimens of composition with which we are favoured in
the Zauber-Bibliothek, and the sciences, with the exception of some
practical applications of chemistry, shamefully neglected. The government
seems despotical, but subject to occasional explosions on the part of the
more influential spirits concerned in the executive. In fact, the
departments of the administration are by no means well arranged; there is
no proper division of labour, and the consequence is, that Beelzebub,
"Mooned Ashtaroth," and others of the ministry, who, according to the
theory of the constitution[2] are entitled to precedence, are constantly
jostled and interfered with by Aziel, Mephistopheles, Marbuel, and other
forward second-rate spirits, who are continually thrusting in their claws
where they are not called for. The standing army is considerable[3],
besides the volunteers by which it is continually augmented. Nothing is
heard however of the navy, and from the ominous silence which our
geographers preserve on this point, it is easy to see that water is a rare
element in this quarter.
The hints given as to the personal appearance and conduct of Lucifer, the
reigning monarch, are not flattering. Common readers are apt to believe
that Satan occupies that dignity[4], but this is a great error, and only
shows, as Asmodeus told Don Cleofas, when he fell into a similar mistake
about Beelzebub, "that they have no true notions of hell." The morals of
Lucifer, as might be expected, are as bad as possible, with this
exception, that we see no evidence of his being personally addicted to
drinking. His licentious habits, however, are attested by many a
scandalous chronicle in Sprenger, Delrio, and Bodinus; and for swearing,
all the world knows that Ernulphus was but a type of him. His jokes are
all practical and of a low order, and there is an utter want of dignity in
most of his proceedings. One of his most facetious amusements consists in
constantly pulling the spits, on which his witches are riding, from
beneath them, and applying them vigorously to their shoulders; and he has
more than once administered personal chastisement to his servants, when
they neglected to keep an appointment. He is a notorious cheat; many
enterprising young men, who have enlisted in his service on the promise of
high pay and promotion, having found, on putting their hands into their
pockets, that he had paid them their bounty in tin sixpences, and having
never risen even to the rank of a corporal. His talent might, from these
narratives, be considered very mediocre, and therefore we are afraid that
the ingenious selection from his papers, published by Jean Paul[5], must
be a literary forgery. At least all his printed speeches are bad,--flashy
enough, no doubt, in the commencement, but generally ending in smoke. He
has always had a fancy for appearing in masquerade, and once delivered a
course of lectures on magic at Salamanca, in the disguise of a professor.
So late as 1626, he lived _incog._, but in a very splendid style, for a
whole winter, in Milan, under the title of the Duke of Mammon[6]. It is in
vain, however, for his partial biographers to disguise the fact, that in
his nocturnal excursions, of which, like Haroun Alraschid, he was at one
time rather fond, and where, we learn from the Swedish witches, he
generally figured in a grey coat and red small-clothes, ornamented with
ribbons and blue stockings, he has more than once received a sound
drubbing from honest people, whom he has attempted to trip up by laying
his tail in their way. And, in fact, since his affair with St. Dunstan, he
has kept pretty much withindoors after nightfall. Luther, as we know, kept
no terms with him when he began to crack hazel-nuts in his bedroom at the
Wartburg, but beat him all to nothing in a fair contest of ribaldry and
abuse, besides leaving an indelible blot of ink upon his red smalls[7].
St. Lupus shut him up for a whole night in a pitcher of cold water, into
which he had (as he thought, cunningly) conveyed himself, with the hope
that the saint would swallow him unawares[8]. This however, considering
his ordinary temperature, must have been an act of kindness, which should
have brought on St. Lupus the censure of the church. St. Anthony, in
return for a very polite offer of his services, spat in his face; which
hurt his feelings so much, that it was long before he ventured to appear
in society again[9]. And although in his many transactions with mankind he
is constantly trying to secure some unfair advantage, a person of any
talent, particularly if he has been bred a lawyer[10], is a match for him;
and there are numerous cases in the books, in which his majesty,
attempting to apprehend the person of a debtor, has been unexpectedly
defeated by an ingenious saving clause in the bond, which, like Shylock,
he had overlooked, and non-suited in the ecclesiastical courts, where he
commonly sues, with costs[11]. Finally, we infer from the Mora Trials,
that his general health must have suffered from the climate, for in 1669
he was extremely ill in Sweden; and though he got over the attack for a
time, by bleeding and an antiphlogistic regimen, the persons who were
about him thought his constitution was breaking up, and that he was still
in a dying way.
Such is the grotesque aspect of the legendary Lucifer and his court, which
a course of dæmonology presents to us! But though we have thus spoken with
levity of these gross and palpable conceptions of the evil principle, and
though undoubtedly the first impression produced by such a farrago must be
a ludicrous one, the subject, we fear, has also its serious side. An
Indian deity, with its wild distorted shape and grotesque attitude,
appears merely ridiculous when separated from its accessories and viewed
by daylight in a museum. But restore it to the darkness of its own hideous
temple, bring back to our recollection the victims that have bled upon its
altar, or been crushed beneath its car, and our sense of the ridiculous
subsides into aversion and horror. So, while the superstitious dreams of
former times are regarded as mere speculative insanities, we may for a
moment be amused with the wild incoherencies of the patients; but when we
reflect that out of these hideous misconceptions of the principle of evil
arose the belief in witchcraft; that this was no dead faith, but one
operating on the whole being of society, urging on the mildest and the
wisest to deeds of murder, or cruelties scarcely less than murder; that
the learned and the beautiful, young and old, male and female, were
devoted by its influence to the stake and the scaffold,--every feeling
disappears except that of astonishment that such things could be, and
humiliation at the thought that the delusion was as lasting as it was
universal.
It is true that the current of human opinion seems now to set in a
different direction, and that if the evil spirit of persecution is again
to re-appear on earth, his _avatar_ must in all probability be made in a
different form. Our brains are no longer, as Dr. Francis Hutchinson says
of Bodinus, "mere storehouses for devils to dance in;" and if the
influence of the great enemy is still as active as before on earth, in the
shape of evil passions, he at least keeps personally in the background,
and has changed his tactics entirely since the days of the 'Malleus
Maleficarum.'
"For Satan now is wiser than before,
And tempts by making _rich_--not making _poor_."
Still however it is always a useful check to the pride of the human mind,
to look to those delusions which have darkened it, more especially to
such as have originated in feelings in themselves exalted and laudable.
Such is unquestionably the case in regard to one of the gloomiest chapters
in the history of human error, the belief in witchcraft and its
consequences. The wish to raise ourselves above the visible world, and to
connect ourselves with beings supposed to occupy a higher rank in
creation, seemed at first calculated to exercise only a beneficent
influence on the mind. Men looked upon it as a sort of Jacob's ladder, by
which they were to establish a communication between earth and heaven, and
by means of which angelic influences might be always ascending and
descending upon the heart of man. But, unfortunately, the supposition of
this actual and bodily intercourse with spirits of the better order,
involved also a similar belief as to the possibility of establishing a
free trade with the subterranean powers,
"Who lurk in ambush, in their earthy cover,
And, swift to hear our spells, come swarming up;"
and from these theoretical opinions, once established and acted upon, all
the horrors of those tempestuous times flowed as a natural consequence.
For thus the kingdoms of light and darkness were brought into open
contest: if Satan was ready at every one's call, to send out his spirits
like Swiss mercenaries, it became equally necessary for the true believer
to rise in arms against him with fire and sword; any wavering on his part
was construed into apostasy, and he who did not choose to be persecuted
himself was driven in self-defence to become a persecutor.
The grand postulate of direct diabolical agency being once assumed and
quietly conceded on all hands, any absurdity whatever was easily engrafted
on it. Satan being thus brought home, as it were, to men's business and
bosoms, every one speculated on his habits and demeanour according to his
own light; and soon the insane fancies of minds crazed by nature, disease,
or misfortunes, echoed and repeated from all sides, gathered themselves
into a code or system of faith, which, being instilled into the mind with
the earliest rudiments of instruction, fettered even the strongest
intellects with its baleful influence. The mighty minds of Luther, of
Calvin, and of Knox, so quick in detecting error, so undaunted and
merciless in exposing it, yielded tamely to its thrall; the upright and
able Sir Matthew Hale passed sentence of death, in 1664, on two poor women
accused of witchcraft, and Sir Thomas Browne, the historian of "Vulgar
Errors," who was examined as a witness on the trial, gave it as his
opinion that the fits under which the patients had laboured, though
natural in themselves, were "heightened by the Devil co-operating with the
malice of the witches, at whose instance he did the villanies!" and
apparently on this evidence chiefly did the conviction proceed.
Neither, in fact, were the incongruities and inconsistencies of the
witch-creed of the time so calculated, as they might at first sight
appear, to awaken men's minds to the radical insanity of the belief. The
dash of the ludicrous, which mingles itself with almost all the exploits
of Satan and his satellites, grew, naturally enough, out of the monkish
conception of Satan, and might be supposed not inconsistent with the
character of a set of beings whose proceedings of course could not be
expected to resemble those either of men or angels. The monkish Satan has
no dignity about him: in soul and body he is low and deformed.
"Gli occhi ha vermigli, e la barba unta ed atra,
E 'l ventre largo, ed unghiate le mani,
Graffia gli spirti, gli scuoja, ed isquatra[12]."
His apish tricks and satyr-like gambols were sufficiently in unison with
the idea of a spirit with boundless malice but limited powers, grinning in
despite where he could not injure, and ridiculing those sacred rites the
power of which he was compelled to acknowledge and obey. Hence he preaches
to his infernal flock, and mocks the institution of the sacrament; wreaks
his native malice even on his own adherents; plunges his deluded victims
into misery, or deserts them in their distress, deprives them of the
rewards he has promised to them; plagues and torments the good, but cowers
whenever he is boldly resisted, and is at once discomfited by any one who
wields by commission the thunders of heaven. Writers of fiction in general
have seldom seized these features of his character; indeed hardly any one
has done so, except Hoffman, who, in most of his supernatural pictures,
has painted him not with the grandeur and sullen gloom of the fallen
archangel, but with the coarse and comic malice of the spirit of the
middle ages, and has thus, on the whole, deepened the real horror of his
goblin scenes by the infusion of these outbreakings of mirth, just as the
frightful effect of an execution would be increased, if the criminal,
instead of joining in the devotions, were suddenly to strike up a lively
air from the top of the ladder.
But whether the delusion of witchcraft was thus a natural sequence of the
monkish notions of an evil principle, and of the almost universal
persuasion that intercourse with a higher order of beings was possible for
man, no one can cast a glance over its history without being satisfied
that the comprehensive nature of its influence, and its long duration,
were owing to penal laws and prosecutions. It adds one more to the long
list of instances which prove that there is no opinion, however absurd and
revolting, which will not find believers and martyrs, if it is once made
the subject of persecution. From the earliest ages of Christianity it is
certain the belief existed, and must occasionally have been employed by
strong minds as an instrument of terror to the weak; but still the frame
of society itself was not shaken, nor, with one exception[13], does the
crime begin to make any figure in history till the Bull of Innocent VIII.
in 1484 stirred up the slumbering embers into a flame.
Of the extent of the horrors which for two centuries and a half followed,
our readers we suspect have but a very imperfect conception; we remember
as in a dream that on this accusation persons were occasionally burnt, and
one or two remarkable relations from our own annals or those of the
Continent may occur to our recollection. But of the extent of these
judicial murders, no one who has not dabbled a little in the history of
demonology has any idea. No sooner has Innocent placed his commission of
fire and sword in the hands of Sprenger and his brethren, and a regular
form of process for the trial of this offence been laid down in that
unparalleled performance, the 'Malleus Maleficarum,' which was intended as
a theological and juridical commentary on the Bull, than the race of
witches seems at once to increase and multiply, till it replenishes the
earth. The original edict of persecution was enforced by the successive
bulls of the infamous Alexander VI. in 1494 (to whom Satan might indeed
have addressed the remonstrance "et tu Brute!"), of Leo X. in 1521, and
of Adrian VI. in 1522. Still the only effect of these commissions was to
render the evil daily more formidable, till at last, if we are to believe
the testimonies of contemporary historians, Europe was little better than
a large suburb or outwork of Pandemonium. One-half of the population was
either bewitching or bewitched. Delrio tells us in his preface that 500
witches were executed in Geneva in three months, about the year 1515. A
thousand, says Bartholomæus de Spina, were executed in one year in the
diocese of Como, and they went on burning at the rate of a hundred per
annum for some time after. In Lorraine, from 1580 to 1595, Remigius boasts
of having burned 900. In France the multitude of executions about 1520 is
incredible; Danæus, in the first part of his dialogue concerning witches,
calls it "infinitum pene veneficorum numerum." The well-known sorcerer,
_Trois Echelles_, told Charles IX., while he was at Poitou, the names of
1200 of his associates. This calculation is according to Mezeray's more
reasonable version of the story, for the author of the 'Journal du Règne
de Henri III.' makes the number 3000, and Bodinus, not satisfied even with
this allowance, adds a cypher, and makes the total return of witches
denounced by Trois Echelles 30,000, though he does at the same time
express some doubt as to the correctness of this account.
In Germany, to which indeed the bull of Innocent bore particular
reference, this plague raged to a degree almost inconceivable. Bamberg,
Paderborn, Wurtzburg, and Treves were its chief seats, though for a
century and a half after the introduction of the trials under the
commission no quarter of that great empire was free from its baneful
influence. It would be wearisome and revolting to go through the details
of these atrocities; but "ab uno disce omnes." A catalogue of the
executions at Wurtzburg for the period from 1627 to February 1629, about
two years and two months, is printed by Hauber in the conclusion of his
third volume of the 'Acta et Scripta Magica.' It is regularly divided into
twenty-nine burnings, and contains the names of 157 persons, Hauber
stating at the same time that the catalogue is not complete. It is
impossible to peruse this catalogue without horror. The greater part of it
consists of old women or foreign travellers, seized, it would appear, as
foreigners were at Paris during the days of Marat and Robespierre: it
contains children of twelve, eleven, ten, and nine years of age, fourteen
vicars of the cathedral, two boys of noble families, the two little sons
(_söhnlein_) of the senator Stolzenburg; a stranger boy; a blind girl;
Gobel Babelin, the handsomest girl in Wurtzburg, etc.
"Sanguine placârunt Divos _et virgine cæsá_!"
And yet, frightful as this list of 157 persons executed in two years
appears, the number is not (taking the population of Wurtzburg into
account) so great as in the Lindheim process from 1660 to 1664. For in
that small district, consisting at the very utmost of six hundred
inhabitants, thirty persons were condemned and put to death, making a
twentieth part of the whole population consumed in four years.
How dreadful are the results to which these data lead! If we take 157 as a
fair average of the executions at Wurtzburg (and the catalogue itself
states that the list was by no means complete), the amount of executions
there in the course of the century preceding 1628 would be 15,700. We know
that from 1610 to 1660 was the great epoch of the witch trials, and that
so late as 1749 Maria Renata was executed at Wurtzburg for witchcraft; and
though in the interval between 1660 and that date it is to be hoped that
the number of these horrors had diminished, there can be little doubt that
several thousands must be added to the amount already stated. If Bamberg,
Paderborn, Treves, and the other Catholic bishoprics, whose zeal was not
less ardent, furnished an equal contingent, and if the Protestants, as we
know[14], actually vied with them in the extent to which these cruelties
were carried, the number of victims from the date of Innocent's bull to
the final extinction of these persecutions must considerably exceed
100,000 in Germany.
Even the feeling of horror excited by the perusal of the Wurtzburg murders
is perhaps exceeded by that to which another document relative to the
state of matters in 1629 must give rise: namely a ballad on the subject of
these executions, detailing in doggrel verses the sufferings of the
unfortunate victims, "to be sung to the tune of Dorothea"--a common
street-song of the day. It is entitled the 'Druten Zeitung,' or Witches'
Chronicle, "being an account of the remarkable events which took place in
Franconia, Bamberg, and Wurtzburg, with those wretches who from avarice or
ambition have sold themselves to the devil, and how they had their reward
at last; set to music, and to be sung to the air of Dorothea." It is
graced also with some hideous devices in wood, representing three devils
seizing on divers persons by the hair of their heads, legs, etc., and
dragging them away. It commences and concludes with some pious reflections
on the guilt of the witches and wizards, whose fate it commemorates with
the greatest glee and satisfaction. One device in particular, by which a
witch who had obstinately resisted the torture is betrayed into
confession--namely, by sending into her prison the hangman disguised as
her familiar (Buhl Teufel)--seems to meet with the particular approbation
of the author, who calls it an excellent joke; and no doubt the point of
it in his eyes was very much increased by the consideration that upon the
confession, as it was called, so obtained, the unhappy wretch was
immediately committed to the flames[15]. What are we to think of the state
of feeling in the country where these horrors were thus made the subject
of periodical ballads, and set to music for the amusement of the
populace[16]?
It was one fatal effect of the perseverance with which Satan and his
dealings were thus brought before the view of every one, that thousands of
weak and depraved minds were actually led into the belief that they had
formed a connection with the evil being, and that the visions which had so
long haunted the brain of Sprenger and his associates had been realized in
their own case. In this way alone can we in some measure account for the
strange confessions which form the great peculiarity in the witch trials,
where unhappy creatures, with the full knowledge of their fate, admit
their intercourse with Satan, their midnight meetings, incantations, their
dealings with spirits, "white, black, and grey, with all their trumpery,"
the grotesque horrors of the sabbath,--in short, every wild and impossible
phantasm which had received colour and a body in the 'Malleus,'--and
seemed to be perfectly satisfied that they had fully merited the fiery
trial to which their confession immediately subjected them. When we read
these trials, we think of the effect of the Jew's fiddle in Grimm's fairy
tale; we see the delusion spreading like an epidemic from one to another,
till first the witnesses, then the judges, and lastly the poor criminals
themselves, all yield to the giddy whirl, and go off like dancing Dervises
under its influence.
True it is that, in many of the cases, and particularly those which occur
in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, when the diabolical
doctrines of Sprenger and Delrio were in their full vigour, the
confessions on which these convictions proceeded were elicited by torture,
moral and physical, and frequently retracted, till a fresh application of
the rack produced a fresh admission. One instance from Delrio may stand in
place of a thousand. He mentions that an unfortunate gentleman in
Westphalia had been twenty times put to the rack, "vicies sævæ quæstioni
subditum," in order to compel him to confess that he was a were-wolf! All
these tortures he resisted, till the hangman gave him an intoxicating
draught, and under its influence he confessed that he _was_ a were-wolf
after all. "En judicum _clemens_ arbitrium," says Delrio, "quo se porrigat
in illis partibus aquilonaribus."--See how long-suffering we judges are in
the north! we never put our criminals to death till we have tried them
with twenty preliminary courses of torture! This is perfectly in the
spirit of another worthy in Germany, who had been annoyed with the
pertinacity of a witch, who, like the poor lycanthrope, persisted in
maintaining her innocence. "Da liess ich sie tüchtig foltern," says the
inquisitor--"und sie gestand;"--I tortured her _tightly_ (the torture
lasted four hours), and she confessed! Who indeed under such a system
would not have confessed? Death was unavoidable either way, and the great
object was to attain that consummation with the least preparatory pain. "I
went," says Sir George Mackenzie, "when I was a Justice Depute, to
examine some women who had confessed judicially. One of them, who was a
silly creature, told me that she had not confessed because she was guilty,
but, being a poor creature who wrought for her meat, and being defamed for
a witch, she knew she would starve, for no person hereafter would give her
meat or lodging, and that all men would beat her and hound dogs at her,
and that therefore she desired to be out of the world. Whereupon she wept
most bitterly, and upon her knees called God to witness to what she
said[17]." In other cases, the torture was applied not only to the
individual accused, but to his relations or friends, to secure confession.
In Alison Pearson's case[18], it appears that her daughter, a girl of nine
years of age, had been placed in the _pilliewinks_, and her son subjected
to about fifty strokes in the _boots_. Where the torture was not
corporeally applied, terror, confusion, and the influence of others
frequently produced the same effect on the weak minds of the accused. In
the case of the New England witches in 1696, six of the poor women who
were liberated in the general gaol-delivery which took place after this
reign of terror began to decline, (and who had all confessed previously
that they had been guilty of the witchcrafts imputed to them,) retracted
their confessions in writing, attributing them to the consternation
produced by their sudden seizure and imprisonment. "And indeed," said
they, "that confession which it is said we made was no other than what was
suggested to us by some gentlemen, they telling us we were witches, and
they knew it, and we knew it, and they knew that we knew it, which made us
think that it was so, and our understanding, our reason, and our faculties
almost gone, we were not capable of judging our condition. And most of
what we said was but a consenting to what they said[19]."
But though unquestionably great part of these confessions, which at first
tended so much to prolong this delusion, were obtained by torture, or
contrary to the real conviction and belief of the accused, it is
impossible to deny that in many cases the confessions were voluntary, and
proceeded from actual belief. Nor was it to be wondered at that persons of
a weak and melancholy temperament should, more particularly at a time when
the phenomena of nature and of the human body were so little understood,
be disposed to set down every occurrence which they could not explain, and
every wild phantasm which crossed their minds, to the direct and immediate
agency of an evil power. At that period even the most natural events were
ascribed to witchcraft. If a child, after being touched by a suspected
individual, died or became ill, the convulsions were ascribed to
diabolical interference, as in Wenham's case, so late as 1712[20]. If, on
the contrary, she cured instead of killing, the conclusion was the same,
although the only charm employed might be a prayer to the Almighty[21]. If
an old woman's cat, coming to the door at night, took part in a concert
with other cats, this was nothing but a witch herself in disguise[22]. In
the case of Robert Erskine of Dun[23], tried for the murder of his
nephews, he is indicted for making away with them by _poisoning_ and
_witchcraft_, as if the poisoning was not of itself amply sufficient to
account for their death.
It was still less wonderful that those mysterious phenomena which
sometimes occur in the human frame, such as spontaneous combustion,
delusions arising from the state of the brain and nerves, and optical
deceptions, should appear to the sufferer to be the work of the devil,
whose good offices they might very probably have invoked under some fit of
despondency or misanthropy, little expecting, like the poor man in the
fable who called on Death, to be taken at their word. What a "Thesaurus of
Horror" would the spectres of Nicolai have afforded in the sixteenth
century or the commencement of the seventeenth, if embodied in the pages
of the 'Malleus' or the 'Flagellum Dæmonum,' instead of being quietly
published by the patients as optical and medical phenomena in the
'Berlinische Monatschrift' for 1799, and the 15th volume of the
'Philosophical Journal!' What a fearful glimpse into the infernal world
would have been afforded by the still more frightful illusions which
haunted poor Backzko of Königsberg[24] during his political labours in
1806; the grinning negro who seated himself opposite to him, the
owl-headed tormentor that used to stare at him every night through his
curtains, the snakes twisting and turning about his knees as he turned his
periods! If we go back to 1651, we find our English Jacob Böhme,
Pordage[25], giving an account of visions which must have been exactly of
the same kind, arising from an excited state of the brain, with the most
thorough conviction of their reality. His Philadelphian disciples, Jane
Leade, Thomas Bromley, Hooker, Sapperton, and others, were indulged, on
the first meeting of their society, with a vision of unparalleled
splendour. The princes and powers of the infernal world passed in review
before them, sitting in coaches, surrounded with dark clouds and drawn by
a _cortége_ of lions, dragons, tigers, and bears; then followed the lower
spirits arranged in squadrons with cats' ears, claws, twisted limbs, etc.;
whether they shut their eyes or kept them open, the appearances were
equally distinct; "for we saw," says the master-spirit Pordage, "with the
eyes of the mind, not with those of the body."
"And shapes that come not at a mortal call
Will not depart when mortal voices bid.
Lords of the visionary eye, whose lid
Once raised remains aghast, and will not fall[26]."
Thus, while phenomena which experience has since shown to be perfectly
natural were universally attributed to supernatural causes, men had come
to be on the most familiar footing with spiritual beings of all kinds. In
the close of the sixteenth century, Dr. Dee was, according to his own
account, and we verily believe his own conviction, on terms of intimacy
with most of the angels. His brother physician, Dr. Richard Napier, a
relation of the inventor of the logarithms, got almost all his medical
prescriptions from the angel Raphael. Elias Ashmole had a MS. volume of
these receipts, filling about a quire and a half of paper[27]. In fact,
one would almost suppose that few persons at that time condescended to
perform a cure by natural means. Witness the sympathetic nostrums of
Valentine Greatrakes and Sir Kenelm Digby; or the case of Arise Evans,
reported by Aubrey, who "had a fungous nose, and to whom it was _revealed_
that the king's hand would cure him; and at the first coming of King
Charles II. into St. James's Park he kissed the king's hand and _rubbed
his nose with it, which troubled the king, but cured him_." In Aubrey's
time, too, the visits of ghosts had become so frequent, that they had
their exits and their entrances without exciting the least sensation.
Aubrey makes an entry in his journal of the appearance of a ghost as
coolly as a merchant now-a-days makes an entry in his ledger. "Anno 1670.
Not far from Cirencester was an apparition. Being demanded whether good
spirit or bad, returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious perfume
and a melodious twang."
Is it to be wondered at then, that, surrounded on all hands with such
superstitious fancies, the weak and depraved were early brought to believe
that all the wild chimeras of the demonologists were true, and that they
had really concluded that covenant with Satan, the possibility of which
was universally inculcated as an article of faith, and the idea of which
was constantly present to their minds? or that, under the influence of
this frightful delusion, they should voluntarily come forward to confess
their imaginary crime, as in the Amsterdam case of the poor girl who
accused herself of bewitching cattle by the words Shurius, Turius,
Tirius[28], or in another still more remarkable case in 1687, mentioned in
Reichard's 'Beyträge,' where a young woman accused herself, her friend,
and the mother of her friend, of a long course of witchcraft, with all the
usual traditional and impossible horrors of Sprenger and his brethren?
Neither, we are afraid, is there much reason to doubt that some of the
most horrible of their conceptions were founded on facts which were but
too real; that the cunning and the depraved contrived to turn the
ecstasies and the fears of these poor wretches to their own purposes; in
short, that frauds similar to those which Boccaccio has painted in his
novel of the angel Gabriel, were occasionally played off upon the deluded
victims. Without entering further on a topic which is rather of a delicate
kind, the reader will have an idea of our meaning who recollects the
disclosures that took place in the noted French case of Father Girard and
La Cadière.
Much has been said as to the wonderful coincidences to be found in the
evidence of the accused when examined separately, the minuteness of their
details, and the general harmony of the infernal narratives, as collected
from the witch trials of different countries. But the truth is that this
assertion must in the first place be received with great limitations; for
in many cases, where, accepting the assertions of Sprenger and the rest as
true, we should suppose the coincidence to be complete, the original
confessions which still exist prove that the resemblance was merely
general, and that there were radical and irreconcileable differences in
the details of the evidence. Inasfar as the assertion is really true, one
simple explanation goes far to account for the phenomenon;--"Insanire
parent _certâ ratione_ modoque." The general notions of the devil and his
demeanour, the rites of the infernal sabbath, etc. being once fixed, the
visions which crossed the minds of the unfortunate wretches accused soon
assumed a pretty determinate and invariable form; so that, even if left to
tell their own story, there would have been the closest resemblance
between the narratives of different persons. But this was not all. In
almost every case the confessions were merely the echo of questions put by
the inquisitors, all of which again were founded on the demonological
creed of the 'Malleus.' One set of questions is put to all the witches,
and the answers, being almost always simple affirmatives, necessarily
correspond. Hence it is amusing enough to observe how different were the
results, when the process of investigation fell into the hands of persons
to whom Sprenger's manual was unknown. In the Lindheim trials in 1633, to
which we have already alluded, the inquisitor happened to be an old
soldier, who had witnessed several campaigns in the Thirty Years War, and
who, instead of troubling his head about Incubi, Succubi, and the other
favourite subjects of inquiry with the disciples of the Hammer, was only
anxious to ascertain who was the queen of the infernal spirits, the
general, officers, _corporals_, etc., to all of which he received answers
as distinct and satisfactory as any that are recorded for our instruction
in the chronicles of Bodinus or Delrio.
In the seventeenth century, the manner in which the delusion was
communicated seems exactly to resemble those remarkable instances of
sympathy which occur in the cases of the Scottish Cambuslang Conversions
and the American Forest Preachings. No sooner has one hypochondriac
published his symptoms, than fifty others feel themselves at once affected
with the same disorder. In the celebrated Mora case in 1669, with which of
course all the readers of Glanvil (and who has not occasionally peeped
into his horrors?) are familiar, the disease spreads first through the
children, who believed themselves the victims of diabolical agency, and
who ascribed the convulsions, faintings, etc., with which they were
attacked, to that cause; and next through the unfortunate witches
themselves, for as soon as one or two of them, bursting into tears,
confessed that the accusation of the children was true, all the rest
joined in the confession. And what is the nature of their confession? Of
all impossible absurdities that ever entered the brain of man, this trial
is the epitome. They meet the devil nightly on the Blocula, which is the
devil's ball-room in Sweden, as the Brocken is in Germany; they ride
thither on sticks, goats, men's backs, and spits; they are baptized by a
priest provided by the devil; they sup with him, very frugally it would
appear, for the banquet commonly consists of broth made with colewort and
bacon, oatmeal, bread and butter, milk and cheese; and the devil allows no
wine. After supper they dance, and when the devil wishes to be
particularly jolly he pulls the spits from under them, and beats them
black and blue, after which he sits down and laughs outrageously.
Sometimes he treats them to a musical exhibition on the harp, for he has a
great turn for music, as his famous sonata to Tartini proves. All of them
confess intercourse with him[29], and most of them had sons and daughters
by him. Occasionally he fell sick, and required to be bled and blistered;
and once he seemed to be dead, on which occasion there was a general
mourning for him on the Blocula, as the Syrian damsels used to bewail the
annual wound of their idol Thammuz on Lebanon. Is it not frightful to
think that in a trial held before a tribunal consisting of the _élite_ of
the province of Dalecarlia, assisted by the commissioners from the
capital,--in a country where, until this time, the witch mania, already
beginning to abate in Germany, had scarcely been heard of, and where it
ceased earlier perhaps than in most other countries in
Europe,--seventy-two women and fifteen children should have been condemned
and executed at one time upon such confessions? Is it possible after this
to read without shuddering the cool newspaper-like conclusion of Dr.
Horneck--"On the 25th of August execution was done upon the notoriously
guilty, _the day being bright and glorious, and the sun shining_, and some
thousands of people being present at the spectacle!"
Thirty years before, a similar instance of the progress of the epidemic
had taken place at Lille, in the hospital founded by the pious enthusiast
Antoinette Bourignon. On entering the schoolroom one day, she imagined
that she saw a number of little black children, with wings, flying about
the heads of the girls; and not liking the colour or appearance of these
visitors, she warned her pupils to be on their guard. Shortly before this,
a girl who had run away from the institution in consequence of being
confined for some misdemeanour of which she had been guilty, being
interrogated how she had contrived to escape, and not liking probably to
disclose the truth, had maintained that she had been liberated by the
devil, to whose service she had devoted herself from a child. Nothing more
was wanting in that age of _diablerie_ to turn the heads of the poor
children; in the course of six months almost all the girls in the
hospital, amounting to more than fifty, had confessed themselves confirmed
witches, and admitted the usual intercourse with the devil, the midnight
meetings, dances, banquets, etc., which form the staple of the narrative
of the time. Their ideal banquets seem to have been on a more liberal
scale however than those of the poor Mora witches; probably because many
of the pupils had been accustomed to better fare in a populous and wealthy
town in Flanders, than the others in a poor village in Sweden. Exorcisms
and prayers of all kinds followed this astounding disclosure. The
Capuchins and Jesuits quarrelled, the Capuchins implicitly believing the
reality of the possession, the Jesuits doubting it. The parents of the
culprit now turned the tables upon poor Bourignon, by accusing her of
having bewitched them; and at last the pious theosophist, after an
examination before the Council, was glad to seek safety in flight; having
thus obtained a clearer notion than she formerly possessed of the kingdom
of Satan, with regard to which she had entertained and published as many
strange fancies as the Bishop of Benevento; and having been taught by her
own experience the danger of tampering with youthful minds, in which the
train of superstition had been so long laid, that it only required a spark
from her overheated brain to kindle it into a flame.
It would appear too that physical causes, and in particular nervous
affections of a singular kind, had about this time mingled with and
increased the delusion which had taken its rise in these superstitious
conceptions of the devil and his influence. During the very year (1669) in
which the children at Mora were suffering under convulsions and fainting
fits, those in the Orphan Hospital at Hoorn, in Holland, were labouring
under a malady exactly similar; but though the phenomena were attributed
to diabolical agency, the suspicions of the public fortunately were not
directed to any individual in particular. Another instance of the same
kind had taken place about a century before in the Orphan Hospital at
Amsterdam, of which a particular account is given in Dapper's history of
that city, where the number of children supposed to be bewitched amounted
to about seventy, and where the evil was attributed to some unhappy old
women, before whose houses the affected urchins, when led out into the
streets, had been more than usually clamorous. Such also appears to have
been the primary cause of the tragedies in New England in 1699; of the
demoniac exhibitions at Loudon, which were made a pretext for the murder
of the obnoxious Grandier; of the strange incidents which occurred so late
as 1749 in the convent of Unterzell at Wurtzburg; and of most of the other
more remarkable cases of supposed possession. The mysterious principle of
sympathy, operating in weak minds, will in fact be found to be at the root
of most of the singular phenomena in the history of witchcraft. No wonder
then that after the experience of a century, the judges, and even the
ignorant public themselves, came at last to suspect that, however the
principle might apply to other crimes, the confession of the criminal was
not, in cases of witchcraft, the _best_ evidence of the fact. In the New
England cases, says Mr. Calef (April 25, 1693), "one was tried that
confessed; but they were now so well taught what weight to lay upon
confessions, that the jury brought her in not guilty, although she
confessed she was."
But what a deluge of blood had been shed before even this principle came
to be recognized, and still more before the judicial belief in the
existence of the crime was fully eradicated! What a spectacle does Europe
present from the date of Innocent's Bull down to the commencement of the
eighteenth century! Sprenger, Henry Institor, Geiss von Lindheim, and
others in Germany; Cumanus in Italy; the Inquisition in Spain; Remigius,
Bodinus, and De l'Ancre in France and Lorraine, flooring witches on all
sides with the 'Malleus Maleficarum,' or flogging them to death with the
'Flagellum' and 'Fustis Dæmonum;' Holland, Geneva, Sweden, Denmark,
England, and Scotland vying with each other in the number of trials and
the depth of their infatuation and bigotry!
The Reformation, which uprooted other errors, only strengthened and
fostered this. Every town and village on the continent was filled with
spies, accusers, and wretches who made their living by pretending to
detect the secret marks which indicated a compact with the
devil[30],--inquisitors, judges, advocates, executioners, every one
connected with these frightful tribunals, on the watch for anything which
might afford the semblance of suspicion. To ensure the death or ruin of an
enemy, nothing more was necessary in most cases than to throw into this
lion's mouth an accusation of magic against him. "Vix aliquis eorum," says
Linden, the determined foe of these proceedings, "qui accusati sunt,
supplicium evasit." The fate of Edelin, of Urban Grandier, and of the
Maréchale d'Ancre in France, of Doctor Flaet and Sidonia von Vork in
Germany, and of Peter of Abano in Italy[31], prove how often the
accusation of sorcery was not even believed by the accusers themselves,
but was resorted to merely as a certain means to get rid of an obnoxious
enemy. Meanwhile the notaries' clerks and officials, labouring in their
vocation, grew rich from the enormous fees attendant on these trials; the
executioner became a personage of first-rate consequence: "generoso equo
instar aulici nobilis ferebatur, auro argentoque vestitus: uxor ejus
vestium luxu certabat cum nobilioribus[32]." Some partial diminution of
this persecuting zeal took place in consequence of a Rescript of John VII.
(18th December, 1591), addressed to the commission, by which the fees of
court were restricted within more moderate bounds; but still the profits
arising from this trade in human victims were sufficient to induce the
members and dependants of court, like the Brahmins in India, to support
with all their might this system of purification by fire.
At last however the horrors of Wurtzburg and Treves began to open the eyes
even of the dullest to the progress of the danger, which, commencing like
Elijah's cloud, had gradually overshadowed the land. While the executions
were confined to the lower classes, to crazed old women or unhappy
foreigners, even those whose more vigorous intellect enabled them to
resist the popular contagion chose rather to sit by spectators of these
horrors, than to expose themselves to the fate of Edelin or Flaet, by
attacking the madness in which they originated. But now, when the
pestilence, spreading on and on, threatened the lives of more exalted
victims,--when noblemen and abbots, presidents of courts and professors,
began to swell the catalogue, and when no man felt secure that he might
not suddenly be compelled by torture to bear witness against his own
innocent wife or children,--selfishness began to co-operate with truth
and reason. So, in the same way, in the case of the New England
witchcrafts, the first effectual check which they received was from the
accusation of Mrs. Hale, the clergyman's wife: her husband, who till then
had been most active in the persecution, immediately received a new light
with regard to the transaction, and exerted his whole influence for the
suppression of the trials.
The first decisive blow which the doctrines of the inquisitors received in
Germany was from the publication of the 'Cautio Criminalis,' in 1631. In
the sixteenth century, it is true that Ponzonibius, Wierus, Pietro
d'Apone, and Reginald Scott had published works which went to impugn their
whole proceedings; but the works of the foreigners were almost unknown in
Germany, and that of Wierus was nearly as absurd and superstitious as the
doctrines he combated. It is little to the credit of the Reformers that
the first work in which the matter was treated in a philosophical, humane,
and common-sense view should have been the production of a Catholic
Jesuit, Frederick Spee, the descendant of a noble family in Westphalia. So
strongly did this exposure of the horrors of the witch trials operate on
the mind of John Philip Schonbrunn, Bishop of Wurtzburg, and finally
Archbishop and Elector of Mentz, that his first care on assuming the
Electoral dignity was to abolish the process entirely within his
dominions--an example which was soon after followed by the Duke of
Brunswick and others of the German princes. Shortly after this the
darkness begins to break up, and the dawning of better views to appear,
though still liable to partial and temporary obscurations,--the evil
apparently shifting further north, and re-appearing in Sweden and Denmark
in the shape of the trials at Mora and Fioge. Reichard[33] has published a
rescript of Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, bearing date the
4th of November, 1654, addressed to the judges in reference to the case of
Ann of Ellerbroke, enjoining that the prisoner should be allowed to be
heard in defence, before any torture was resorted to (a principle directly
the reverse of those maintained by the inquisitorial courts), and
expressly reprobating the proof by water as an unjust and deceitful test,
to which no credit was to be given. Even where a conviction takes place,
as in the Neuendorf trial of Catherine Sempels, we find the sentence of
death first passed upon her by the provincial judges, commuted into
imprisonment for life by the Electoral Chamber in 1671,--a degree of
lenity which never could have taken place during the height of the mania.
In 1701 the celebrated inaugural Thesis of Thomasius, 'De Crimine Magiæ,'
was publicly delivered, with the highest applause, in the University of
Halle, a work which some fifty years before would assuredly have procured
the author no other crown but that of martyrdom, but which was now
received with general approbation, as embodying the views which the honest
and intelligent had long entertained. Thomasius's great storehouse of
information and argument was the work of Bekker, who again had modelled
his on the Treatise of Van Dale on Oracles; and Thomasius, while he
adopted his facts and arguments, steered clear of those Cartesian
doctrines which had been the chief cause why the work of Bekker had
produced so little practical effect. Still, notwithstanding the good thus
produced, the fire of persecution seems to have been smothered only, not
extinguished. In 1728 it flamed up again at Szegedin in Hungary, where
thirteen persons were burnt alive on three scaffolds, for witchcraft,
under circumstances of horror worthy of the wildest periods of this
madness. And so late as 1749 comes the frightful story of Maria Renata, of
Wurtzburg, the whole official details of which are published by Horst, and
which in its atrocity was worthy to conclude the long series of murders
which had polluted the annals of Bamberg. This trial is remarkable from
the feeling of disgust it seems to have excited in Germany, Italy, and
France; and the more so because, whatever may be thought of the reality of
her pretensions, there seems to be no doubt from the evidence that Maria
was by no means immaculate, but _was_ a dabbler in spells and potions, a
_venefica_ in the sense of the Theodosian code. But there is a time, as
Solomon says, for everything under the sun; and the glories of the
'Malleus Maleficarum' were departed. The consequence was, that taking this
trial as their text-book, various foreigners, particularly Maffei,
Tartarotti, and Dell' Ossa, attacked the system so vigorously, that since
that time the adherents of the old superstition seem to have abandoned the
field in Germany.
Matters had come to a close much sooner in Switzerland and France. In the
Catholic canton of Glarus, it is said, a witch was burnt even so late as
1786; but in the Protestant cantons no trials seem to have taken place for
two centuries past. The last execution in Geneva was that of Michel
Chauderon, in 1652. Sebastian Michaelis indeed would have us to believe,
that at one time the tribunal at Geneva put no criminals accused of
witchcraft to death, unless on proof of their having done actual injury to
men or animals, and that the other phenomena of confessions, etc., were
regarded as mere mental delusions. If such however was originally the
case, this humane rule was unfortunately soon abandoned; for nowhere did
the mania of persecution at one time rage more than in Geneva, as is
evident from Delrio's preface. It seems fairly entitled however to the
credit of having been the first state in Europe which emancipated itself
from the influence of this bloody superstition.
In France, the edict of Louis XIV., in 1682, directed only against
_pretended_ witches and prophets, proves distinctly that the belief in the
reality of witchcraft had ceased, and that it was merely the pretended
exercise of such powers which it was thought necessary to suppress. It is
highly to the credit of Louis and his ministry, that this step was taken
by him in opposition to a formal _requête_ by the Parliament of Normandy,
presented in the year 1670, on the occasion of his Majesty having commuted
the punishment of death into banishment for life, in the case of a set of
criminals whom the Parliament had condemned _more majorum_ for
witchcraft[34]. In this apology for their belief, they reminded Louis of
the inveterate practice of the kingdom; of the numerous arrêts of the
Parliament of Paris, from the trials in Artois in 1459, reported by
Monstrelet, down to that of Leger in May 1616; of the judgments pronounced
under the commission addressed by Henry the Great to the Sieur de l'Ancre,
in 1609; of those pronounced by the Parliament of Toulouse, in 1577; of
the celebrated case of Gaufridy, in 1611; of the _arrêts_ of the
Parliaments of Dijon and Rennes, following on the remarkable trial of the
Maréchal de Retz, in 1441, who was burnt for magic and sorcery in the
presence of the Duke of Bretagne: and after combating the authority of a
canon of the Council of Aucyra, and of a passage in St. Augustine, which
had been quoted against them by their opponents, they sum up their
pleading with the following placid and charitable supplication to his
Majesty--"Qu'elle voudra bien souffrir l'exécution des arrêts qu'ils ont
rendus, et leur permettre de continuer l'instruction et jugement des
procès des personnes accusés de sortilège, et que la piété de Votre
Majesté ne souffrira pas que l'on introduise durant son règne une nouvelle
opinion contraire aux principes de la religion, pour laquelle Votre
Majesté a toujours si glorieusement employé ses soins et ses armes."
Notwithstanding this concluding compliment to his Majesty's zeal and
piety, it is doubtful whether the Parliament of Normandy, in their anxiety
for the support of their constitutional privileges, could have taken a
more effectual plan to ruin their own case, than by thus presenting Louis
with a sort of anthology or elegant extracts from the atrocities of the
witch trials; and in all probability the appearance of the edict of 1680
was accelerated by the very remonstrance by which the Norman sages had
hoped to strangle it.
In turning from the Continent to the state of matters in England and
Scotland, the prospect is anything but a comfortable one; and certainly
nothing can be more deceitful than the unction which Dr. Francis
Hutchinson lays to his soul, when he ventures to assert that England was
one of those countries where its horrors were least felt and earliest
suppressed. Witness the trials and convictions which, even before the
enactment of any penal statute, took place for this imaginary offence, as
in the case of Bolingbroke and Margery Jourdain, whose incantations the
genius of Shakespear has rendered familiar to us in the Second Part of
King Henry VI. Witness the successive statutes of Henry VIII., of
Elizabeth, and of James I., the last of which was repealed only in 1736,
and passed while Coke was Attorney-General, and Bacon a member of the
Commons! Witness the exploits of Hopkins, the witch-finder-general,
against the wretched creatures in Lincolnshire, of whom--
"Some only for not being drown'd,
And some for sitting above ground
Whole nights and days upon their breeches,
And feeling pain, were hanged for witches."
_Hudibras_, part ii. canto iii.
What would the Doctor have said to the list of THREE THOUSAND victims
executed during the dynasty of the Long Parliament alone, which Zachary
Grey, the editor of Hudibras, says he himself perused? What absurdities
can exceed those sworn to in the trials of the witches of Warboys, whose
fate was, in Dr. Hutchinson's days, and perhaps is still, annually
"improved" in a commemoration sermon at Cambridge? or in the case of the
luckless Lancashire witches, sacrificed, as afterwards appeared, to the
villany of the impostor Robinson, whose story furnished materials to the
dramatic muse of Heywood and Shadwell? How melancholy is the spectacle of
a man like Hale, condemning Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, in 1664, on
evidence which, though corroborated by the opinion of Sir Thomas Browne, a
child would now be disposed to laugh at? A better order of things, it is
true, commences with the Chief-justiceship of Holt. The evidence against
Mother Munnings, in 1694, would, with a man of weaker intellect, have
sealed the fate of the unfortunate old woman; but Holt charged the jury
with such firmness and good sense, that a verdict of Not Guilty, almost
the first then on record in a trial for witchcraft, was found. In about
ten other trials before Holt, from 1694 to 1701, the result was the same.
Wenham's case, which followed in 1711, sufficiently evinced the change
which had taken place in the feelings of judges. Throughout the whole
trial, Chief Justice Powell seems to have sneered openly at the
absurdities which the witnesses, and in particular the clergymen who were
examined, were endeavouring to press upon the jury; but, with all his
exertions, a verdict of guilty was found against the prisoner. With the
view however of securing her pardon, by showing how far the prejudices of
the jury had gone, he asked, when the verdict was given in, "whether they
found her guilty upon the indictment for conversing with the devil in the
shape of a cat?" The foreman answered, "We find her guilty of that!" It is
almost needless to add that a pardon was procured for her. And yet after
all this, in 1716, Mrs. Hicks and her daughter, aged _nine_, were hanged
at Huntingdon for selling their souls to the devil, and raising a storm,
by pulling off their stockings and making a lather of soap!
With this crowning atrocity, the catalogue of murders in England closes;
the penal statutes against witchcraft being repealed in 1736, and the
pretended exercise of such arts being punished in future by imprisonment
and pillory. Even yet however the case of Rex _v._ Weldon, in 1809, and
the still later case of Barker _v._ Ray, in Chancery (August 2, 1827),
proves that the popular belief in such practices has by no means ceased;
and it is not very long ago that a poor woman narrowly escaped with her
life from a revival of Hopkins's trial by water[35]. Barrington, in his
observations on the statute 20 Henry VI., does not hesitate to estimate
the numbers of those put to death in England on this charge at 30,000!
We now turn to Scotland. Much light has been thrown on the rise and
progress, decline and fall, of the delusion in that country by the
valuable work of Mr. Pitcairn[36], which contains abstracts of every trial
in the supreme Criminal Court of Scotland: the author has given a faithful
and minute view of the procedure in each case, accompanied with full
extracts from the original documents, where they contained anything of
interest.
In no country perhaps did this gloomy superstition assume a darker or
bloodier character than in Scotland. Wild, mountainous, and pastoral
countries, partly from the striking, varied, and sometimes terrible
phenomena which they present,--partly from the habits and manner of life,
the tendency to thought and meditation which they create and foster,--have
always been the great haunts in which superstition finds its cradle and
home. The temper of the Scots, combining reflection with enthusiasm--their
mode of life in earlier days, which amidst the occasional bustle of wild
and agitating exertion, left many intervals of mental vacuity in
solitude--their night watches by the cave on the hill-side--their
uncertain climate, of sunshine and vapour and storm--all contributed to
exalt and keep alive that superstitions fear with which ignorance looks on
every extraordinary movement of nature. From the earliest period of the
Scottish annals, "All was bot gaistis, and eldrich phantasie;" the meteors
and auroræ boreales which prevailed in this mountainous region were
tortured into apparitions of horsemen combating in the air, or
corpse-candles burning on the hill-tops[37]. Skeletons danced as familiar
guests at the nuptials of our kings[38]: spectres warned them back from
the battle-field of Flodden, and visionary heralds proclaimed from the
market-cross the long catalogue of the slain.
"Figures that seemed to rise and die,
Gibber and sign, advance and fly,
While nought confirmed, could ear or eye
Discern of sound or mien;
Yet darkly did it seem as there
Heralds and pursuivants appear,
With trumpet sound and blazon fair,
A summons to proclaim."
_Marmion_, canto v.
Incubi and succubi wandered about in all directions, with a degree of
assurance and plausibility which would have deceived the very elect[39];
and wicked churchmen were cited by audible voices and an accompaniment of
thunder before the tribunal of Heaven[40]. The annals of the thirteenth
century are dignified with the exploits of three wizards, before whom
Nostradamus and Merlin must stoop their crests, Thomas of Ercildoune, Sir
Michael Scott, and Lord Soulis. The Tramontane fame of the second had even
crossed the Alps, for Dante[41] accommodates him with a place in Hell,
between Bonatto, the astrologer of Guido di Monte Feltro, and Asdente of
Parma.
But previous to the Reformation, these superstitious notions, though
generally prevalent, had hardly assumed a form much calculated to disturb
the peace of society. Though in some cases, where these powers had been
supposed to have been exercised for treasonable purposes, the punishment
of death had been inflicted on the witches[42], men did not as yet think
it necessary, merely for the supposed possession of such powers, or their
benevolent exercise, to apply the purifying power of fire to eradicate the
disorder. Sir Michael and the Rhymer lived and died peaceably; and the
tragical fate of the tyrant Soulis on the Nine Stane Rigg was owing, not
to the supposed sorceries which had polluted his Castle of Hermitage, but
to those more palpable atrocities which had been dictated by the demon of
his own evil conscience, and executed by those iron-handed and
iron-hearted agents, who were so readily evoked by the simpler spell of
feudal despotism.
From the commencement of the Records of the Scottish Justiciary Court,
down to the reign of Mary, no trial properly for witchcraft appears on the
record. For though in the case of the unfortunate Countess of Glammis,
executed in 1536, during the reign of James V., on an accusation of
treasonably conspiring the king's death by poison, some hints of sorcery
are thrown into the dittay, probably with the view of exciting a popular
prejudice against one whose personal beauty and high spirit rendered her a
favourite with the people, it is obvious that nothing was really rested on
this charge.
But with the introduction of the Reformation "novus rerum nascitur ordo."
Far from divesting themselves of the dark and bloody superstitions which
Innocent's bull had systematized and propagated, the German reformers had
preserved this, while they demolished every other idol, and moving
"In dismal dance around the furnace blue,"
had made even children pass through the fire to Moloch. Their Scottish
brethren, adopting implicitly the creed of their continental prototypes,
transplanted to our own country, a soil unfortunately but too well
prepared for such a seed, the whole doctrine of Satan's visible agency on
earth, with all the grotesque horrors of his commerce with mankind. The
aid of the sword of justice was immediately found to be indispensable to
the weapons of the spirit; and the verse of Moses which declares that a
witch shall not be suffered to live, was forthwith made the groundwork of
the Act 73 of the ninth parliament of Queen Mary, which enacted the
punishment of death against witches or consulters with witches.
The consequences of this authoritative recognition of the creed of
witchcraft became immediately obvious with the reign of James which
followed. Witchcraft became the all-engrossing topic of the day, and the
ordinary accusation resorted to whenever it was the object of one
individual to ruin another, just as certain other offences were during the
reign of Justinian, and during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in
Italy. In Scotland the evil was not less busy in high places, than among
the humbler beings, who had generally been professors of the art magic. A
sort of relation of clientage seems to have been established between the
operative performers, and those noble patrons (chiefly, we regret to say,
of the fair sex) by whom their services were put in requisition. The Lady
Buccleugh, of Branxholm Hall, whose spells have furnished our own
Northern Wizard with some of his most striking pictures,--the Countess of
Athol, the Countess of Huntly, the wife of the Chancellor Arran, the Lady
Ker, wife of James, Master of Requests, the Countess of Lothian, the
Countess of Angus, (more fortunate in her generation than her grandmother
Lady Glammis), were all, if we are to believe the scandal of Scotstarvet,
either protectors of witches or themselves dabblers in the art[43]. Even
Knox himself did not escape the accusation of witchcraft; the power and
energy of mind with which Providence had gifted him, the enemies of the
Reformation attributed to a darker source. He was accused of having
attempted to raise "some sanctes" in the churchyard of St. Andrew's; but
in the course of this resuscitation upstarted the devil himself, having a
huge pair of horns on his head, at which terrible sight Knox's secretary
became mad with fear, and shortly after died. Nay, to such a height had
the mania gone, that Scot of Scotstarvet mentions that Sir Lewis
Ballantyne, Lord Justice Clerk of Scotland, "by curiosity dealt with a
warlock called Richard Grahame," (the same person who figures in the trial
of Alison Balfour, as a confederate of Bothwell), "to raise the devil, who
having raised him in his own yard in the Canongate, he was thereby so
terrified that he took sickness and thereof died." This was a "staggering
state of Scots statesmen" indeed, when even the supreme criminal judge of
Scotland was thus at the head of the delinquents. Well might any
unfortunate criminal have said with Angelo--
"Thieves for their robbery have authority,
When judges steal themselves."
_Measure f. Measure_, ii. 2.
Nor, in fact, was the Church less deeply implicated than the court and the
hall of justice; for in the case of Alison Pearson (1588) we find the
celebrated Patrick Adamson, Archbishop of St. Andrew's, laying aside the
fear of the Act of Parliament, and condescending to apply to this poor
wretch for a potion to cure him of his sickness!
A faith so strong and so general could not be long in manifesting itself
in works. In 1572 occurs the first entry in the Justiciary Record, the
trial of Janet Bowman, of which no particulars are given, except the
emphatic sentence "Convict: and Brynt." No fewer than thirty-five trials
appear to have taken place before the Court of Justiciary during the
remainder of James's reign, (to 1625), in almost all of which the result
is the same as in the case of Bowman.
Two or three of these are peculiarly interesting; one, from the difference
between its details and those which form the usual materials of the witch
trials; the others, from the high rank of some of those involved in them,
and the strange and almost inexplicable extent of the delusion. The first
to which we allude is that of Bessie Dunlop[44], convicted on her own
confession; the peculiarity in this case is that, instead of the devil
himself _in propriâ personâ_, the spiritual beings to whom we are
introduced are our old friends the fairies, the same sweet elves whom
Paracelsus defends, and old Aubrey delighted to honour. Bessie's familiar
was a being whom she calls Thom Reed, and whom she describes in her
judicial declaration[45] as "an honest weel elderlie man, gray bairdit,
and had ane gray coitt with Lumbard sleeves of the auld fassoun, ane pair
of gray brekis, and quhyte schankis gartarrit abone the kne." Their first
meeting took place as she was going to the pasture, "gretand (weeping)
verrie fast for her kow that was dead, and her husband and child that were
lyand sick in the land-ill (some epidemic of the time), and she new risen
out of gissane (childbed)." Thom, who took care that his character should
open upon her in a favourable light, chid her for her distrust in
Providence, and told her that her sheep and her child would both die, but
that her husband should recover, which comforted her a little. His true
character, however, appeared at a second "forgathering," when he
unblushingly urged her "to denye her christendom and renounce her baptism,
and the faith she took at the fount stane." The poor witch answered, that
"though she should be riven at horse-tails she would never do that," but
promised him obedience in all things else,--a qualified concession with
which he rather grumblingly departed. His third appearance took place in
her own house, in presence of her husband and _three_ tailors (three!). To
the infinite consternation of this trio and of the gudeman, he took her by
the apron and led her out of the house to the kiln-end, where she saw
eight women and four men sitting; the men in gentlemen's clothing, and the
women with plaids round about them, and "very seemly to see." They said to
her, "Welcome Bessie, wilt thou go with us?" but as she made no answer to
this invitation, they, after some conversation among themselves which she
could not understand, disappeared of a sudden, and "a hideous ugly sough
of wind followed them." She was told by Thom, after their departure, that
these "were the gude wights that wonned in the Court of Elfane," and that
she ought to have accepted their invitation. She afterwards received a
visit from the Queen of Elfane in person, who condescendingly asked a
drink of her, and prophesied the death of her child and the recovery of
her husband. The use which poor Bessie made of her privileges was of the
most harmless kind, for her spells seem to have been all exerted to cure,
and not to kill. Most of the articles of her indictment are for cures
performed, nor is there any charge against her of exerting her powers for
a malicious purpose. As usual however she was convicted and burnt.
This was evidently a pure case of mental delusion, but it was soon
followed by one of a darker and more complex character, in which, as far
as the principal actor was concerned, it seems doubtful whether the
mummery of witchcraft formed anything more than a mere pageant in the dark
drama of human passions and crimes. We allude to the trials of Lady Fowlis
and of Hector Munro of Fowlis, for witchcraft and poisoning, in 1590. This
is one of those cases which might plausibly be quoted in support of the
ground on which the witch trials have been defended by Selden, Bayle, and
the writers of the Encyclopédie,--namely, the necessity of punishing the
pretensions to such powers, or the belief in their existence, with as
great rigour as if their exercise had been real. "The law against
witches," says Selden, "does not prove there be any, but it punishes the
malice of those people that use such means to take away men's lives. If
one should profess that, by turning his hat and crying buz, he could take
away a man's life, though in truth he could do no such thing, yet this
were a just law made by the state, that whoever should turn his hat thrice
and cry buz, with an intention to take away a man's life, shall be put to
death." We shall hardly stop to expose the absurdity of this doctrine of
Selden in the abstract, which thus makes the will universally equal to
the deed; but when we read such cases as that of Lady Fowlis, it cannot at
the same time be denied, that the power which the pretended professor of
such arts thus obtained over the popular mind, and the relaxation of moral
principle with which it was naturally accompanied in the individual
himself, rendered him a most dangerous member of society. In general, the
profession of sorcery was associated with other crimes, and was frequently
employed as a mere cover by which these might with the more security and
effect be perpetrated. The philters and love-potions of La Voisin and
Forman, the private court calendar of the latter, containing "what ladies
loved what lords best," (which the Chief Justice prudently would not allow
to be read in court), are sufficiently well known. Charms of a more
disgusting nature appear to have been supplied by our own witches, as in
the case of Roy, tried before the sheriff of Perth, in 1601[46], and in
that of Colquhoun, of Luss, tried for sorcery and incest, 1633, where the
instrument of seduction was a jewel obtained from a necromancer. In short,
wherever any flagitious purpose was to be effected, nothing more was
necessary than to have recourse to some notorious witch. In poisoning, in
particular, they were accomplished adepts, as was naturally to be expected
from the power which it gave them of realizing their own prophecies.
Poisoners and witches are classed together in the conclusion of Louis
XIV.'s edict; and the trials before the Chambre Ardente prove that the two
trades were generally found in harmonious juxtaposition. Our own Mrs.
Turner, in England, affords us no bad specimen of this union of the
poisoner with the procuress and the witch; while the prevalence of the
same connection in Scotland appears from the details of the case of Robert
Erskine, of Dun, from that of the daughter of Lord Cliftonhall, Euphemia
Macalzean, and still more from the singular case of Lady Fowlis.
The object of the conspirators in this last case was the destruction of
the young lady of Balnagown, which would have enabled George Ross, of
Balnagown, to marry the young Lady Fowlis. But in order to entitle them to
the succession of Fowlis, supposing the alliance to be effected, a more
extensive slaughter was required. Lady Fowlis's stepsons, Robert and
Hector, with their families, stood in the way, and these were next to be
removed. Nay, the indictment goes the length of charging her with
projecting the murder of more than thirty individuals, including an
accomplice of her own, Katharine Ross, the daughter of Sir David Ross,
whom she had seduced into her schemes, a woman apparently of the most
resolute temper, and obviously of an acute and penetrating intellect;
there seems reason to doubt whether she had any faith in the power of the
charms and sorceries to which she resorted, but she probably thought that,
in availing herself of the services of those hags whom she employed, the
more prudent course would be to allow them to play off their mummeries in
their own way, while she combined them with more effective human means.
Accordingly the work of destruction commenced with the common spell of
making two pictures of clay, representing the intended victims; but
instead of exposing them to the fire, or burying them with their heads
downward, the pictures were in this case hung up on the north side of the
room, and the lady, with her familiars, shot several arrows, shod with
elf-arrow heads, at them, but without effect. Though the Lady Fowlis gave
orders that other two pictures should be prepared, in order to renew the
attempt, she seems forthwith to have resorted to more vigorous measures,
and to have associated Katharine Ross and her brother George in her plans.
The first composition prepared for her victims was a stoupful of poisoned
ale, but this ran out in making. She then gave orders to prepare "a pig of
ranker poison, that would kill shortly," and this she dispatched by her
nurse to the young Laird of Fowlis. Providence however again protected
him: the "pig" fell and was broken by the way, and the nurse, who could
not resist the temptation of tasting the contents, paid the penalty of her
curiosity with her life. So corrosive was the nature of the potion, that
the very grass on which it fell was destroyed. Nothing however could move
Lady Fowlis from her purpose. Like Mrs. Turner, who treated Overbury with
spiders, cantharides, and arsenic, alternately, that she might be able to
"hit his complexion," she now proceeded to try the effect of "ratton
poyson," (ratsbane,) of which she seems to have administered several doses
to the young laird, "in eggs, browis, or kale," but still without effect,
his constitution apparently proving too strong for them. She had more
nearly succeeded, however, with her sister-in-law, her female victim. The
"ratton poyson" which she had prepared for Lady Balnagown, she contrived,
by means of one of her subsidiary hags, to mix in a dish of kidneys, on
which Lady Balnagown and her company supped; and its effects were so
violent, that even the wretch by whom it was administered revolted at the
sight. At the date of the trial, however, it would seem the unfortunate
lady was still alive. Lady Fowlis was at last apprehended, on the
confession of several of the witches she had employed, and more than one
of whom had been executed before her own trial took place. The proceedings
after all terminated in an acquittal, a result which is only explicable by
observing that the jury was evidently a packed one, and consisted
principally of the dependants of the houses of Munro and Fowlis.
This scene of _diablerie_ and poisoning, however, did not terminate here.
It now appeared that Mr. Hector, one of his stepmother's intended victims,
had himself been the principal performer in a witch underplot directed
against the life of his brother George. Unlike his more energetic
stepmother, credulous to the last degree, he seems to have been entirely
under the control of the hags by whom he was surrounded, and who harassed
and terrified him with fearful predictions and ghastly exhibitions of all
kinds. He does not appear to have been naturally a wicked man, for the
very same witches who were afterwards leagued with him against the life of
George, he had consulted with a view of curing his elder brother Robert,
by whose death he would have succeeded to the estates. But being seized
with a lingering illness, and told by his familiars that the only chance
he had of recovering his health was that his brother should die for him,
he seems quietly to have devoted him to death, under the strong instinct
of self-preservation. In order to prevent suspicion, it was agreed that
his death should be lingering and gradual, and the officiating witch, who
seemed to have the same confidence in her own nicety of calculation as the
celebrated inventress of the _poudre de successions_, warranted the victim
until the 17th of April following. It must be admitted that the
incantations which followed were well calculated to produce a strong
effect, both moral and physical, on the weak and credulous being on whom
they were played off. Shortly after midnight, in the month of January,
the witches left the house in which Mr. Hector was lying sick at the time,
and passed to a piece of ground lying betwixt the lands of two feudal
superiors, where they dug a large grave. Hector Munro, wrapped in
blankets, was then carried forth, the bearers all the time remaining dumb,
and silently deposited in the grave, the turf being laid over him and
pressed down with staves. His foster-mother, Christian Neill, was then
ordered to run the breadth of nine riggs, and returning to the grave, to
ask the chief witch "which was her choice." She answered that Mr. Hector
was her choice to live, and his brother George to die for him. This
cooling ceremony being three times repeated, the patient, frozen with cold
and terror, was carried back to bed. Mr. Hector's witches were more
successful than the hags employed by his stepmother. George died in the
month of April, as had been predicted, doubtless by other spells than the
force of sympathy, and Hector appears to have recovered. He had the
advantage, however, of a selected jury on his trial, as well as Lady
Fowlis, and had the good fortune to be acquitted.
Scarcely had the agitation produced by these trials subsided, when the
public mind was again confounded by a new, a more extensive, and almost
inexplicable scene of enchantment, directed against the life of James and
his Queen, in 1591.
The first hint of those strange proceedings which were afterwards
disclosed, was derived from the confessions of a girl named Gellie, or
Gellis Duncan, servant to the Deputy Bailiff of Tranent. Some sudden cures
performed by this girl, and other suspicious points in her conduct, having
attracted the observation of her master, he, with a laudable anxiety for
the discovery of the truth, "did, with the help of others, torment her
with the torture of the pilliewinkis [a species of thumbscrew] upon her
fingers, which is a grievous paine, and binding or wrenching her head with
a cord or rope, which is a most cruel torment also[47]." But,
notwithstanding these persuasive applications, no confession could be
extorted. At last it was suggested by some of the operators, that her
silence was owing to her having been marked by the devil, and on a
diligent examination the mark was found on the fore part of the throat. No
sooner was it detected than the charm was burst: she confessed that all
her cures were performed by the assistance of the devil, and proceeded to
make disclosures relative to the extent of her guilt, and the number of
associates, which utterly eclipse all the preceding "discoveries of
witchcraft," with which the criminal records furnish us down to this time.
Thirty or forty different individuals, some of whom, as the pamphlet
observes, were "as civill honest women as anie that dwelled within the
city of Edinburgh," were denounced by her, and forthwith apprehended upon
her confession. Nor was this list confined to the lower classes, from whom
the victims offered to this superstition had generally been selected; for
among those apprehended on Duncan's information was Euphemia Macalzean,
the daughter of Lord Cliftonhall, one of the senators of the College of
Justice.
To trace out the wide field of witchcraft which was opened to him by the
confessions of the accused, as they were successively examined, was an
employment highly congenial to the credulous mind of James, prone to every
superstition, and versed in all the traditionary lore of Sprenger and
Bodinus. Day after day he attended the examinations in person, was put
into a "wonderful admiration" by every new trait of grotesque horror which
their confessions disclosed, and even carried his curiosity so far as to
send for Gellie Duncan herself, who had, according to the confession of
another witch, Agnes Sampson (the wise wife of Keith), played a reel or
dance before the witches, as they moved in procession to meet the devil in
the kirk of North Berwick, in order that he might himself listen to this
infernal air--"who upon the like trumpe did play the said dance before the
King's majestie, who, in respect of the strangeness of these matters, took
great delight to be present at these examinations."
All these disclosures, however, it may be anticipated, were not without a
liberal application of the usual compulsitor in such cases--the torture.
The chief sufferer was a person named Cuningham, who figures in the trials
under the name of Dr. Fian, a schoolmaster near Tranent, and apparently a
person of dissolute character, although, as appeared from his conduct on
this inquisition, also of singular strength of mind and firmness of nerve.
He was put to the question, "_first_, by thrawing of his head with a rope,
whereat he would confess nothing; _secondly_, he was persuaded by _fair
means_ to confess his folly," (would it not have been as natural to have
tried the fair means first?) "but that would prevail as little; lastly, he
was put to the most cruel and severe pain in the world, called the
Boots[48], who, after he had received three strokes, being inquired if he
would confess his damnable acts and wicked life, his tongue would not
serve him to speak." Being released from this instrument of torture, he
appears, under the influence of the agony produced by it, to have
subscribed a confession, embracing not only the alleged charges of
conspiracy against the King by means of witchcraft, but a variety of
particulars relative to his own life and conversation, by no means of an
edifying character.
But the weight to be attached to this confession was soon made apparent by
what followed; for Fian, who had been recommitted to prison, and who had
appeared for a day or two to be "very solitarye" and penitent, contrived
in the course of the next night to make his escape, and on his
re-apprehension and second examination thought fit, to the great
discomposure of James, to deny the whole of the charges which he had
previously admitted. "Whereupon the King's majestie, perceiving his
stubborn wilfulnesse," prescribed the following remedy for his relapse.
"His nayles upon his fingers were riven and pulled with an instrument
called in Scottish a Turkas[49]. And under every naile there was thrust in
two needles over even up to the heads. At all which torments,
notwithstanding, the doctor never shrunke anie whitt, neither would he
then confess it the sooner for all the tortures inflicted upon him. Then
was he _with all convenient speed_ by commandment conveyed again to the
torment of the boots, where he continued a long time, and abode so many
blows in them that his legs were crushed and beaten together _as small as
might be_, and the bones and flesh so bruised, that the blood and marrow
spouted forth in great abundance, whereby they were made unserviceable for
ever."
The doctor, it will be seen, did not long require their services; but
whether his confession was obtained by fair means or foul, it certainly
bears so startling a resemblance to that of the leading witch, Agnes
Sampson, a woman whom Spottiswood describes as "matron-like, grave and
settled in her answers," that it is hardly to be wondered at that the
superstitious mind of James should have been confounded by the
coincidence. Nothing, in fact, can exceed the general harmony of the
accounts given by the different witches of their proceedings, except the
ludicrous and yet horrible character of the incidents which they record,
and which might well extort, even from James himself, the observation he
appears to have made in the commencement of the proceedings, that they
were all "extreme lyars."
James, it appears, from his singular piety, and the active part which,
long before the composition of his 'Dæmonologie,' he had taken against
Satan and his invisible world, had been, from the first, most obnoxious to
his servants upon earth. On one occasion, when an unsuccessful attempt had
been made against his life, the fiend pleaded (though we do not see why a
Scotch devil should speak French) that he had no power over him, adding,
"Il est homme de Dieu[50]." The visit which, in a sudden fit of romantic
gallantry, he paid to Norway, to bring over his queen, was too favourable
an opportunity for the instruments of Satan to be neglected; and
accordingly it was resolved by the conclave that every exertion should be
made to raise such a tempest as should infallibly put an end to the
greatest enemy (as Satan himself confidentially admitted to one of the
witches) whom the devil ever had in the world. The preparations were
therefore commenced with all due solemnity. Satan undertook, in the first
instance, to raise a mist so as to strand the King on the English coast,
but, more active measures being thought necessary, Dr. Fian, as the
devil's secretary, or register, as he is called throughout these trials,
addressed a letter to a distinguished witch, Marion Linkup, and others of
the sisterhood, directing them to meet their master on the sea within five
days, for the purpose of destroying the King[51]. On All-hallowmas Eve the
infernal party, to the number of about two hundred, embarked, "each in a
riddle or sieve, and went into the same very substantially." In what
latitude they met with Satan is not stated, but after some cruizing about
he made his appearance, and delivered to Robert Grierson a cat, which it
appears had previously been drawn nine times through the cruik[52], giving
the word to "cast the same into the sea! Hola!" And this notable charm was
not without its effect, for James, whose fleet was at that time clearing
the Danish coast, afterwards declared that his ship alone had the wind
contrary, while all the other vessels had a fair one.
The charm upon the water being finished, the witches landed, and after
enjoying themselves with wine, which they drank out of the same sieves in
which they had previously sailed so "substantially," they moved on in
procession towards the kirk of North Berwick, which had been fixed on as
their place of rendezvous with their master. The company exceeded one
hundred, of whom thirty-two are enumerated in Agnes Sampson's confession.
And they were preceded by Gellie Duncan, playing upon the Jew's-harp the
following ditty:
"Cummer, goe ye before, Cummer, goe ye,
Gif ye will not go before, Cummer, let me!"
Here their master was to appear in a character less common in Scotland
than on the Continent, that of a preacher. Doctor Fian, who, as the
devil's register, took the lead in the ceremonies at the kirk, _blew_ up
the doors, and blew in the lichts, which resembled black candles sticking
round about the pulpit, while another of the party, Grey Meill, acted as
door-keeper. Suddenly the devil himself started up in the pulpit, attired
in a gown and hat, both black. The sketch of his appearance given in Sir
James Melville's Memoirs has something of the power and picturesqueness of
Dante. "His body was hard lyk yrn, as they thocht that handled him; his
faice was terrible, his nose lyk the bek of an egle, gret bournyng eyn"
(occhi di bragia); "his handis and leggis were herry, with clawis upon his
handis, and feit lyk the Griffin, and spak with a how voice." He first
called the roll of the congregation, to which each answered by name; he
then demanded of them whether they had been good servants, what they had
done since the last time they had convened, and what had been the success
of their conjurations against the King. Gray Meill, the doorkeeper, who
was rash enough to remark, that "naething ailet the King yet, God be
thankit," was rewarded for this _mal-apropos_ observation by a great blow.
The devil then proceeded to admonish them to keep his commandments, which
were simply to do all the evil they could; on his leaving the pulpit, the
whole congregation, male and female, did homage to him, by saluting him in
a way and manner which we must leave those who are curious in such
ceremonies to ascertain from the original indictments.
Such is the strange story in which all the criminals examined before James
and the Council substantially agree; and unquestionably the singular
coincidence of their narratives remains at this day one of the most
difficult problems in the philosophy of Scottish history. The fate of the
unfortunate beings who confessed these enormities could not, in that age
of credulity, be for a moment doubtful. Fian, to whom, after the inhuman
tortures to which he had been subjected, life could not be of much value,
was condemned, strangled, and burnt. Agnes Sampson underwent a similar
fate. Barbara Napier, another person said to have been present at the
convention, though acquitted of this charge, was condemned on certain
other charges of sorcery in the indictment; but so strongly was the mind
of James excited, that, though he had secured a conviction against her, he
actually brought the assize to trial for wilful error in acquitting her on
this point of dittay.
But the most distinguished victim connected with this scene of witchcraft
was Euphemia Macalzean, the daughter of an eminent judge, Lord
Cliftonhall, a woman of strong mind and licentious passions, a devoted
adherent to the Roman Catholic faith, a partisan of Bothwell (who was
accused by several of the witches as implicated in these practices against
the King's life), and a determined enemy to James and to the Reformed
religion. Whatever may have been the precise extent of this lady's
acquirements in sorcery, there can be no doubt that she had been on terms
of the most familiar intercourse with abandoned wretches of both sexes,
pretenders to witchcraft, and that she had repeatedly employed their aid
in attempting to remove out of the way persons who were obnoxious to her,
or who stood in the way of the indulgence of her passions. The number of
sorceries, poisonings, and attempts at poisoning, charged against her in
the indictment, almost rivals the accusations against Brinvilliers; and,
though the jury acquitted her of several of these, they convicted her of
participation in the murder of her own godfather, of her husband's nephew,
and of Douglas of Pennfrastone; besides being present at the convention of
North Berwick, and various other meetings of witches, at which the King's
death had been contrived. Her punishment was the severest which the court
could pronounce: instead of the ordinary sentence, directing her to be
first strangled at a stake and then burned, the unhappy woman was doomed
to be "bund to ane staik and burnt in assis, _quick_, to the death," a
fate which she endured with the greatest firmness, on the 25th of June,
1591. So deep and permanent was the impression made by these scenes upon
the King's mind, that we owe to them the preparation of an Act of
Parliament anent the form of process against witches, mentioned among the
unprinted acts for 1597, and more immediately the composition of that
notable work of the Scottish Solomon, the 'Dæmonologie.'
In the trials of Bessie Roy, of James Reid, of Patrick Currie, of Isobel
Grierson, and of Grizel Gardiner[53], the charges are principally of
taking off and laying on diseases either on men or cattle; meetings with
the devil in various shapes and places; raising and dismembering dead
bodies for the purpose of enchantments; destroying crops; scaring honest
persons in the shape of cats; taking away women's milk; committing
housebreaking and theft by means of enchantments, and so on. South-running
water, salt, rowan-tree, enchanted flints (probably elf-arrow heads), and
doggrel verses (generally a translation of the Creed or Lord's Prayer)
were the means employed for effecting a cure. Diseases again were laid on
by forming pictures of clay or wax, which were placed before the fire or
buried with the heads downward; by placing a dead hand, or some mutilated
member, in the house of the intended victim; or, as in the case of
Grierson, by the simpler process of throwing an enchanted tailzie (slice)
of beef against his door. It was immaterial whether the supposed powers of
the witch were exerted for good or evil. In the case of Grieve, no
malefice (to use the technical term) was charged against him, but simply
that he had cured diseases by means of charms; and the same in the case of
Alison Pearson; but both were executed. Bartie Paterson seems to have been
the most pious of warlocks, for his patients were uniformly directed, in
addition to his prescriptions, to "ask their health at all livand wichtis
abone or under the earth, in the name of Jesus." The trial of Robert
Erskine of Dun, though given as one for witchcraft, seems to have been a
simple case of poisoning, he having merely resorted to a notorious witch,
named Margaret Irvine, for the herbs by which he despatched his nephews.
The case of Margaret Wallace, towards the close of James's reign, deserves
notice as being the first where something like a stand was made against
some of the fundamental positions of the demonologists; the counsel for
the prisoner contending strongly against the doctrine that, in the case of
a person accused of witchcraft, every cure performed by her was to be set
down to the agency of the devil. The defence however, though it seems to
have been ably conducted, was unsuccessful.
Matters continued much in the same state during the reign of Charles I.
From 1625 to 1640 there are eight entries of trials for witchcraft on the
Record, one of which, that of Elizabeth Bathgate, is remarkable, as being
followed by an acquittal. In that of Katharine Oswald[54], the prisoner's
counsel had the boldness to argue, that no credit was to be given to the
confessions of the other witches, who had sworn to the presence of the
prisoner at some of their orgies; "for all lawyers agree," argued he,
"that they are not really transported, but only in their fancies, while
asleep, in which they sometimes dream they see others there." This
reasoning however appears to have made no impression on the jury, any more
than the argument in Young's case[55], that the stoppage of the mill,
which she was accused of having effected _twenty-nine years before_, by
sorcery, might have been the effect of natural causes. About one-half of
the convictions during this period proceed on judicial confessions;
whether voluntary or extorted does not appear. They are not in general
interesting, though some of the details in the trial of Hamilton[56]
differ a little from the ordinary routine of the witch trials of the time.
Having met the devil on Kingston Hills, in East Lothian, he was persuaded
by the tempter to renounce his baptism--a piece of apostasy for which he
received only four shillings. The devil further directed him to employ the
following polite adjuration when he wished to raise him, namely, to beat
the ground three times with his stick, and say, "Rise up, foul thief!" On
the other hand, the devil's behaviour towards him was equally
unceremonious; for on one occasion, when Hamilton had neglected to keep
his appointment, he gave him a severe drubbing with a baton.
The scene darkens however, towards the close of this reign, with the
increasing dominion of the Puritans. In 1640 the General Assembly passed
an act, that all ministers should take particular note of witches and
charmers, and that the commissioners should recommend to the supreme
judicature the unsparing application of the laws against them. In 1643
(August 19), after setting forth the increase of the crime, they recommend
the granting a standing commission from the Privy Council or Justiciary
to any "understanding gentlemen or magistrates," to apprehend, try, and
execute justice against the delinquents. The subject appears to have been
resumed in 1644, 1645, and 1649; and their remonstrances, it would seem,
had not been without effect, for in 1649, the year after the execution of
Charles, an Act of Parliament was passed confirming and extending the
provisions of Queen Mary's, so as more effectually to reach consulters
with witches, in regard to whom it was thought (though we do not see why)
that the terms of the former act were a little equivocal. From this time,
not only does the number of convictions, which since the death of James
had been on the decline, increase, but the features of the cases assume a
deeper tinge of horror. The old, impossible, and abominable fancies of the
'Malleus' were revived in the trials of Janet Barker and Margaret
Lauder[57], which correspond in a remarkable manner with some of the
evidence in the Mora trials. About thirty trials appear on the record
between this last date and the Restoration, only one of which appears to
have terminated in an acquittal; while at a single circuit-court, held at
Glasgow, Stirling, and Ayr, in 1659, seventeen persons were convicted and
burnt for this crime.
Numerous however as are the cases in the Records of Justiciary, it must be
kept in view that these afford an extremely inadequate idea of the extent
to which this pest prevailed over the country. For though Sir George
Mackenzie doubts whether, in virtue merely of the general powers given by
the act, 1563, inferior judges did at any time, of their own authority,
try and condemn criminals accused of witchcraft, the same end was managed
in a different way. The Court of Justiciary was anxious to get rid of a
jurisdiction which would alone have afforded them sufficient employment;
and the Privy Council were in use to grant commissions to resident
gentlemen and ministers, to examine, and afterwards to try and execute,
witches all over Scotland; and so numerous were these commissions, that
Wodrow expresses his astonishment at the number found in the Registers.
Under these commissions multitudes were burnt in every part of the
kingdom. In Mercer's Manuscript Diary, Lamont's Diary, and Whitelock's
Memorials, occasional notices of the numbers burnt are perpetually
occurring.
In every case of the kind it would appear that the clergy displayed the
most intemperate zeal. It was before them that the poor wretches "delated"
of witchcraft were first brought for examination,--in most cases after a
preparatory course of solitary confinement, cold, famine, want of sleep,
or actual torture. On some occasions the clergy themselves actually
performed the part of the prickers, and inserted long pins into the flesh
of the witches in order to try their sensibility; and in all they
laboured, by the most persevering investigations, to obtain from the
accused a confession, which might afterwards be used against them on their
trial, and which in more than one instance, even though retracted, formed
the sole evidence on which the convictions proceeded. In some cases, where
the charge against the criminal was that she was "habit and repute a
witch," the notoriety of her character was proved before the Justiciary
Court by the oath of a minister, just as habit and repute is now proved in
cases of theft by that of a police officer.
Though the tide of popular delusion in regard to this crime may be said to
have turned during the reign of Charles II., its opening was perhaps more
bloody than that of any of its predecessors. In the first year after the
Restoration (1661), about twenty persons appear to have been condemned by
the Justiciary Court, two of whom, though acquitted on their first trial,
were condemned on the second on new charges. The numbers executed
throughout the country are noticed by Lamont. Fourteen commissions for
trials in the provinces appear to have been issued by the Privy Council in
one day (November 7, 1661). Of the numbers of nameless wretches who died
and made no sign, under the hands of those "understanding gentlemen" (as
the General Assembly's overture styles them) to whom the commissions were
granted, it is now almost impossible to form a conjecture. In reference
however to the course of procedure in such cases, we may refer to some
singular manuscripts relative to the examination of two confessing witches
in Morayshire in 1662, in the possession of the family of Rose, of
Kilravock; more particularly as the details they contain are, both from
their minuteness and the unparalleled singularity of their contents, far
more striking than anything to be found on the Records of Justiciary about
this time.
The names of these crazed beldames were Isobel Gowdie and Janet Braidhead.
Two of the latter's examinations are preserved; the former appears to have
been four times examined at different dates between the 13th April and
27th May, 1662, before the sheriff and several gentlemen and ministers of
the neighbourhood; and on one of these is a marking by the Justice Depute
Colville, as follows:--"Having read and considered the confession of
Isobel Gowdie, within contained, as paction with Sathan, renunciation of
baptism, with divers malefices, I find that a commission may be very
justly given for her last trial.--_A. Colville_[58]." The confessions are
written under the hand of a notary public, and subscribed by all the
clergymen, gentlemen, and other witnesses present; as would appear to
have been the practice where the precognitions were to be transmitted to
the Justiciary, with the view of obtaining a commission to try and punish
the crime. What the result of Isobel Gowdie's "last trial" was, it is
easy, from the nature of her confessions, to conjecture.
"Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda, e passa."
Though examined on four different occasions, at considerable intervals of
time, and undoubtedly undergoing solitary confinement in the interim, so
minute and invariable are the accounts given by Gowdie in particular, of
the whole life and conversation of the witches to whom she belonged, that
a pretty complete institute of infernal science might be compiled from her
confession. The distinctness with which the visions seem to have haunted
her, the consistency they had assumed in her own mind, and yet the
inconceivable absurdity and monstrosity of these conceptions, to many of
which we cannot even allude, furnish some most important contributions to
the history of hypochondriac insanity.
Her devotion to the service of the devil took place in the kirk of
Auldearn, where she was baptized by him with the name of Janet, being held
up by a companion, and the devil sucking the blood from her shoulder[59].
The band or coven to which they belonged consisted of thirteen (whose
names she enumerates, and some of whom appear to have been apprehended
upon her delation), that being the usual number of the covens. Each is
provided with an officer, whose duty it is to repeat the names of the
party after Satan; and a maiden, who seems to hold sway over the women,
and who is the particular favourite of the devil, is placed at his right
hand at feasts. A grand meeting of the covens takes place quarterly, when
a ball is given. Each witch has a "sprite" to wait upon her, some
appearing "in sad dun, some in grass green, some in sea green, some in
yellow." Those of Gowdie's coven were, "Robert the Jakes, Sanders the
Reed-Reever, Thomas the Fairy, Swein the Roaring Lion, Thief of Hell
wait-upon-herself, MacHector," and so on. Some of these spirits, it would
appear, did not stand high in Isobel's opinion; for Robert the Jakes, she
says, was aged, and seemed to be "a gowkit glaikit spirit." Each of the
witches too received a sobriquet, by which they were generally known[60].
Satan himself had several spirits to wait upon him; "sometimes he had
boots and sometimes shoes upon his feet, but still his feet are forked and
cloven." The witches, it appears, occasionally took considerable liberties
with his character, on which occasions Satan, on detecting the calumny,
used to beat the delinquents "up and down like naked gaists" with a stick,
as Charon does the naked spirits in the 'Inferno,' with his oar. (Cant,
iii.) He found it much more easy however to deal with the warlocks than
with the fair sex. "Alexander Elder," says the confessing witch, "was
soft, and could not defend himself, and did naething but greit and crye
while he will be scourging him; but Margaret Wilson in Auldearn would
defend herself finely, and cast up her hands to cape the blows, and Bessie
Wilson would speak crustily with her tongue, and would be bellin again to
him stoutly."
The amusements and occupations of the witches are described with the same
firmness and minuteness of drawing. When the devil has appointed an
infernal diet, the witches leave behind them, in bed, a besom or
three-legged stool, which assumes their shape till their return, a feature
exactly corresponding with the Mora trials. When proceeding to the spot
where their work is to be performed, they either adopt the shape of cats,
hares, etc., or else, mounting upon corn or bean straws, and pronouncing
the following charm,--
"Horse and hattock, horse and go,
Horse and pellats, ho! ho!"
they are borne through the air to the place of their destination. If any
see these straws in motion, and "do not sanctify themselves," the witches
may shoot them dead. This feat they perform with elf-arrow heads, which
are manufactured by Satan himself; and his assistants the elf boys, who
are described, like the Scandinavian trolls, as little humpbacked
creatures who speak "goustie like" (gruffly); each witch receiving from
Satan a certain number of these "Freischütze." A list of forty or fifty
persons is given by the witch, who had been destroyed by herself and her
companions, by these means; while she also mentions that she had made an
unsuccessful attempt against the life of Mr. Harry Forbes, minister of
Auldcarn, one of the witnesses actually present and subscribing her
confession.
Another attempt against the life of this minister is described very
graphically. The instrument employed was "a bag made of the flesh and guts
and galls of toads, the liver of a hare, pickles of corn, parings of
nails, of feet, and toes," which olio being steeped all night, and mixed
_secundum artem_ by Satan himself, was consecrated by a charm dictated by
Satan, and repeated by the witches, "all on their knees, and their hair
about their shoulders and eyes, holding up their hands, and looking
stedfastly on the devil, that he might destroy the said Mr. Harry." This
composition one of the witches, who made her way into the minister's
chamber, attempted to throw upon him, but was prevented by the presence of
some other holy men in the room. Another composition of the same kind,
intended for the destruction of the lairds of Park and Lochloy, was more
successful, as appears from the deposition of the other witch, Janet
Braidhead. Having prepared the venom, "they came to Inshock in the night
time, and scattered it up and down, above and about the gate, and other
places, where the lairds and their sons would most haunt. And then we, in
the likeness of crows and rooks[61], stood above the gate, and in the
trees opposite the gate. It was appointed so that, if any of them should
touch or tramp upon any of it, as well as that it or any of it fall on
them, it should strike them with boils and kill them, _which it did, and
they shortly died_. We did it to make this house heirless."
It is needless to pursue further these strange details, which however form
a valuable appendix to the records at that time.
It would seem as if the violence of this popular delirium began after
1662 to relax. An interval of six years now occurs without a trial for
this crime, while the record bears that James Welsh[62] was ordered to be
publicly whipped for accusing several individuals of it,--a fate which he
was hardly likely to have encountered some years before. Fountainhall, in
noticing the case of the ten poor women convicted on their own confession
in 1678[63], obviously speaks of the whole affair with great doubt and
hesitation. And Sir George Mackenzie, in his 'Criminal Law,' the first
edition of which appeared in the same year, though he does not yet venture
to deny the existence of the crime or the expediency of its punishment,
lays down many principles very inconsistent with the practice of the
preceding century. "From the horridness of the crime," says he, "I do
conclude that of all crimes it requires the clearest relevancy and most
convincing probature; and I condemn, next to the wretches themselves,
those cruel and too forward judges who burn persons by thousands as guilty
of this crime." And accordingly, acting on these humane and cautious
principles, Sir George, in his Report to the Judges in 1680, relative to a
number of persons then in prison for this crime, stated that their
confessions had been procured by torture, and that there seemed to be no
other proof against them, on which they were set at liberty. "Since which
time," adds Lord Royston, "there has been no trial for this crime before
that court, nor before any other court, that I know of, except one at
Paisley by commission from the Privy Council in anno 1697." This
observation of Lord Royston is not altogether correct. The trial at
Paisley to which he alludes is evidently the noted case of the
Renfrewshire witches, tried on a charge of sorcery against a girl named
Christian Shaw, the daughter of Shaw of Bargarran. The conviction of the
accused appears to have taken place principally on the evidence of the
girl herself, who in the presence of the commissioners played off a series
of ecstasies and convulsion fits, similar to those by which the nuns of
Loudon had sealed the fate of Grandier the century before. In this
atrocious case, the Commissioners (in the Report presented by them to the
Privy Council, 9th March, 1697), reported that there were twenty-four
persons, male and female, suspected of being concerned in the sorceries;
and among them, it is to be observed, is a girl of fourteen, and a boy not
twelve years of age. After this, we almost feel surprised that out of
about twenty who were condemned, only five appear to have been executed.
They were burnt on the green at Paisley. The last trial before the Court
of Justiciary was that of Elspet Rule, tried before Lord Anstruther, on
the Dumfries circuit, 3rd of May, 1708, where the prisoner, though
convicted by a plurality of voices, was merely sentenced to be burned on
the cheek and banished Scotland for life. The last execution which took
place was that of an old woman in the parish of Loth, executed at Dornoch
in 1722, by sentence of the Sheriff depute of Caithness, Captain David
Ross, of Little Dean. "It is said, that being brought out for execution,
the weather proving very severe, she sat composedly warming herself by the
fire, while the other instruments of death were made ready!"
So ends in Scotland the tragical part of the history of witchcraft. In
1735, as already mentioned, the penal statutes were repealed; much to the
annoyance however of the Seceders, who, in their annual confession of
national sins, printed in an act of their Associate Presbytery at
Edinburgh, in 1743, enumerated, as a grievous transgression, the repeal of
the penal statutes "contrary to the express laws of God!" And though in
remote districts the belief may yet linger in the minds of the ignorant,
it has now, like the belief in ghosts, alchemy, or second sight, only that
sort of vague hold on the fancy which enables the poet and romance writer
to adapt it to the purposes of fiction, and therewith to point a moral or
adorn a tale. And, of a truth, no unimportant moral is to be gathered from
the consideration of the history of this delusion; namely, the danger of
encouraging those enthusiastic conceits of the possibility of direct
spiritual influence, which, in one shape or other, and even in our own
days, are found to haunt the brain of the weak and presumptuous. For it is
but the same principle which lies at the bottom of the persecutions of the
witches, and which shows itself in the quietism of Bourignon, the reveries
of Madame Guyon, the raptures of Sister Nativity, the prophecies of
Naylor, the dreams of Dr. Dee, or Swedenborg's prospect of the New
Jerusalem; still but an emanation of that spirit of pride, which, refusing
to be "but a little lower than the angels," asserts an immediate communion
and equality with them, and which, according to the temper of the patient,
feeds him with the gorgeous visions of quietism, or impels him, like a
furious Malay, along the path of persecution. Some persons assert that, in
this nineteenth century of ours, we have no enthusiasm. On the contrary,
we have a great deal too much: at no period has enthusiasm of the worst
kind been more rife; witness the impostures of Southcott and Hohenlohe,
and the thousand phantasies which are daily running their brief course of
popularity. At no time has that calenture of the brain been more widely
diffused, which, as it formerly converted every natural occurrence into
the actual agency of the devil, now transforms every leader of a petty
circle into a saint, and invests him with the garb and dignity of an
apostle. Daily, are the practical and active duties of life more neglected
under the influence of this principle; the charity which thinketh no evil
of others daily becomes more rare; the stream of benevolence which of old
stole deep and silently through the haunts of poverty and sickness at
home, is now but poorly compensated by being occasionally thrown up in a
few pompous and useless jets, at public subscriptions for distant objects;
while even in those whose minds are untinctured by the grosser evils to
which enthusiasm gives rise, life passes away in vain and illusive dreams
of self-complacent superiority, which, as they are based only in pride and
constitutional susceptibility, rarely endure when age and infirmity have
shaken or removed the materials out of which they were reared. Thus, the
enthusiast who, like Mirza, has been contemplating through the long day
the Elysian islands that lie beyond the gulf, and already walking in a
fancied communion with their myrtle-crowned inhabitants, feels, in spite
of all his efforts, that, as evening creeps upon the landscape, the
phantasmagoria becomes dimmer and more dim; the bridge, the islands, the
genius who stood beside them disappear; till at last nothing remains for
him but his own long hollow valley of Bagdad, with its oxen, sheep, and
camels grazing on its sides;--this sober, weary, working world, in short,
with all its cares and duties, through which, if he had been wisely
fulfilling the end for which he was sent into it, he should have been
labouring onward with a beneficent activity, not idly dreaming by the
wayside of the Eden for which he is bound; and so he awakes to a
consciousness of his true vocation in life when he is on the point of
leaving it, and perceives the value and the paramount necessity of
exertion, only when youth, with its opportunities, and its energies, lies
behind him for ever, like the shadows of a dream.
* * * * *
The work of Church-Councillor Horst, and the review of its principal
contents, leave however one hemisphere at least of the subject of Magic,
Theurgy, and Necromancy unnoticed. These arts, or at least the popular
belief in them, are much more ancient than any of the forms of
Christianity, and were, in fact, a most unlucky legacy bequeathed by
Paganism to the creeds which supplanted it. It needs no ghost to tell the
reader how firmly the ancients believed in all supernatural influences:
how populous, in their conceptions, were the elements with omens,
portents, and prodigies; how abject and unreasoning was their credulity;
and how dependent both their public and their domestic life upon the
exorcisms of the priest and the science of the augur. The Canidias and
Ericthos of antiquity were not mere creations of the poets; the most sober
and sceptical of historians does not disdain to relate that, in the house
of the dying Germanicus, were found burnt bones and dissevered limbs of
dead bodies; and the most philosophical of the Roman poets recounts with
complacent gravity the charms by which the dead might be evoked, or the
faithless lover recalled by his forsaken mistress. Nor did the belief in
witches and supernatural agencies decay or decline with the disbelief in
the state-religion which marked the latter ages of the Roman Empire. On
the contrary, as scepticism increased in one direction, credulity and
abject superstition grew and prevailed in another. Neither were these
infirmities of the mind by any means confined to the vulgar or the
profane. The later Platonists were deeply infected with the malady of
superstition, and there are few more curious chapters in the history of
human inconsistency, than the lives of many of the philosophers, who
argued against the being of a God, and who trembled if a hare crossed
their path, at a sinister flight of crows, or at a sudden encounter with a
beldame or a blackamoor in the grey of the morning.
The magical art of the ancients, more especially towards the decline of
Pagandom, was indeed of an extremely dark and atrocious complexion.
Unmindful of the wise and reverent forbearance of the poet of the Æneid--
"Sin has ne possim naturæ accedere partes
Frigidus obstiterit circum præcordia sanguis,"--
the ancient wizards pried, or affected to pry, into the very "incunabula
vitæ." Could we recover a few of those books which the sorcerers at
Corinth burned and brought the price of them to St. Paul, we should
probably find in their pages, among some curious physical or medical
secrets, nearly all the elements of a cruel and obscene superstition.
Rome, we know, was both early and deeply infected with the orgiastic
worship of the East, and especially with the impure ceremonies of the
priests of Isis. It was of no avail to level to the ground the Isiac
chapels, and to banish their ministers. In an age of unbelief there was a
passion for the mysteries of darkness; and although Christianity gradually
superseded Paganism in form, the spirit of the latter long survived in the
multitude, and especially among the ignorant rural population. James
Grimm, in his erudite work upon the 'Antiquities of the German Race,'
traces with great acuteness the connection between the superstitions of
the Dark Ages and the magical formularies of Heathenism. The spells of
witches, the abracadabra of quacks, and the loathsome furniture of
Sidrophel's laboratory are genuine descendants of the impostures and
abominations which were practised for ages both in the Roman and Parthian
empires.
In Lucian and Apuleius indeed we are presented with a singular and
terrible aspect of social existence. The most ordinary acts and functions
of life were believed to be affected by the invisible powers, and those
powers were supposed to be willing to do service to all who were malignant
enough to seek their aid, and fearless enough to serve the apprenticeship
which was demanded of them. It is easy to decry the weakness and detect
the absurdity of such a creed. Yet it _was_ believed: it excited terror:
it nurtured revenge: it wrought withering and wasting effects upon the
feeble and the credulous: it cast a dark shade over life: it was potent
over the sinews of the strong and over the bloom of the beautiful: it
exercised "upon the inmost mind" all "its fierce accidents," and preyed
upon the purest spirits,
"As on entrails, joints and limbs,
With answerable pains, but more intense."
It is idle to regard such a belief as a mere superficial or individual
superstition. It pervaded all ranks of society, from the philosopher who
disputed about a first cause, and the magistrate who viewed religion in
the light of a useful system of police, to the shepherd who watched Orion
and the Pleiades, and the miner who rarely beheld either sun or star. It
was an erroneous, but it was an earnest, belief which drove men to consult
with diviners, and to question the elements for signs and wonders.
Availing ourselves of Sir George Head's excellent translation, we extract
from the 'Golden Ass' of Apuleius a story which, to our conceptions, is
unsurpassed for its horror by any of the dreariest legends of Pagan or
Medieval sorcery.
"My master, the baker, was a well-behaved, tolerably good man, but his
wife, of all the women in the world, was the most wicked creature in
existence, and continually rendered his home such a painful scene of
tribulation to him, that, by Hercules, many is the time and oft that I
have silently deplored his fate. The heart of that most detestable woman
was like a common cess-pool, where all the evil dispositions of our nature
were collected together. She was cruel, treacherous, malevolent,
obstinate, penurious, yet profuse in expenses of dissipation, faithless to
her husband, a cheat and a drunkard. One day I heard it said that the
baker had procured a bill of divorce against his execrable helpmate, and
this intelligence turned out in due time to be true. She, exasperated by
the proceedings instituted against her, communicated with a certain woman
who had the reputation of being a witch, and whose spells and incantations
were of power unlimited. Having conciliated this woman by gifts and urgent
supplications, she besought of her one of two things--either to soften the
heart of her husband, so that he might be reconciled to her; or if unable
to do that, to send a ghost or some evil spirit to put him to a violent
death. In the first endeavour the sorceress totally failed, whereupon she
set about contriving the death of my unfortunate master. To effect her
purpose, she raised from the grave the shade of a woman who had been
murdered. So one day, about noon, there entered the bakehouse a
bare-footed woman half-clad, wearing a mourning mantle thrown across her
shoulders, her pale sallow features marked by a lowering expression of
guilt, her grisly dishevelled hair sprinkled with ashes, and her front
locks streaming over her face. Unexpectedly approaching the baker, and
taking him gently by the hand, she drew him aside, and led him into an
adjoining chamber, as if she had private intelligence to communicate.
After the baker had departed, and a considerable period had elapsed
without his returning, the servants went to his chamber-door and knocked
very loudly, and, after continued silence, called several times, and
thumped still harder than before. They then perceived that the door was
carefully locked and bolted; upon which, at once concluding that some
serious catastrophe had happened, they pushed against it with their utmost
strength, and by a violent effort, either breaking the hinge or driving it
out of its socket, they effected an entrance by force. The moment they
were within the chamber, they saw the baker hanging quite dead from one of
the beams of the ceiling, but the woman who had accompanied him had
disappeared, and was nowhere to be seen."
This evoking of the dead to destroy the living, this warring of a corpse
with a living sold, and then the sudden dismissal, when its foul and fatal
errand had been accomplished, of the ghost to its grave, presents to the
mind a climax of terrors, for which we do not know where, in history or in
fiction, to find a counterpart.
The Lex Majestatis, or law of High Treason, was one of the most effectual
and terrible weapons which the imperial constitution of Rome placed in the
hands of its military despots. Against one offence this double-handled and
sure-smiting engine was frequently levelled, viz. against the crime or the
charge of inquiring into the probable duration of the Emperor's life. This
was done in various ways,--by fire applied to waxen images, by consulting
the stars, by casting nativities, by employing prophets, by casual omens,
but especially by certain permutations and combinations of numbers,
"numeros Babylonios," or the letters of the alphabet. The following
extract from Ammianus Marcellinus affords an example of this treasonable
sacrilege, the practice or suspicion of which, on so many occasions, led
to the expulsion of the "mathematicians" from Italy. The Romans indeed,
profoundly ignorant of science, or contemning it as the art of Greek
adventurers or Egyptian priests, neither of whom were in good odour with
the government at any period, gave to the current impostors of those days
an appellation which Cambridge wranglers now account equal to a patent of
nobility.
The following story seems to have been substantially a deposition taken
before the magistrates of Constantinople, and extracted from the witnesses
or defendants by torture. The principal deponent is said to have been
brought "ad summas angustias"--to the last gasp almost, before he would
confess.
"This unlucky table," he said, "which is now produced in court, we made up
of laurel boughs, after the fashion of that which stands before the
curtain at Delphi. Terrible were the auspices, awful the charms, long and
painful the dances, which preceded and accompanied its construction and
consecration. And as often as we consulted this disc or table, the
following was our mode of procedure. It was set in the midst of a chamber
which had previously been well purified by the smoke of Arabian gums and
incense. On the table was placed a round dish, welded of divers metals. On
the rim of the dish were engraven the twenty-four letters of the alphabet,
separated from one another by equal and exactly measured spaces. Beside
the table stood a certain man clad in linen, and having linen buskins or
boots on his feet, with a handkerchief bound around his head. He waved in
one hand a branch of vervain, that propitious herb; he recited a set
formulary of verses, such as are wont to be sung before the Averruncal
gods, He that stood by the table was no ordinary magician. With his other
he held and shook a ring which was attached to curtains, spun from the
finest Carpathian thread, and which had often before been used for such
mystic incantations. The ring thus shaken dropped ever and anon between
the interspaces of the letters, and formed by striking the letters
together certain words, which the sorcerer combined into number and
measure, much after the manner of the priests who manage the oracles of
the Pythian and Branchidian Apollo. Then, when we inquired who perchance
would succeed to the reigning Emperor, the bright and smooth ring, leaping
among the letters, struck together T, H, E, O, and afterwards a final S,
so that one of the bystanders at once exclaimed that THEO[DORU]S was the
emperor designated by the Fates. We asked no more questions: seeing that
Theodorus was the person whom we had sought for."
The lingering belief in the old religion, and in the magical and
thaumaturgical practices which had, like ivy around an oak, gradually
accrued to it, was productive in the decline of Paganism of many poetical
forms of superstition. It is curious and instructive to remark the
increasing earnestness with which the decaying creed of Heathendom sought
to array itself against the encroachments of Christianity. The light
_persiflage_ with which the philosophy of the Augustan age treated the
state-religion nearly disappears. The indifference of the magistrate gives
place to an intolerant and indignant tone of reclamation. The Pagan Cæsars
attack the new religion as a formidable antagonist; the Christian
emperors, in their turn, assail directly or ferret out perseveringly the
superstitions which lingered among the rural towns and districts. The
ancient gods are no longer regarded by either their worshipers or their
opponents as simply deified heroes or men, but as powerful and mysterious
beings, informed with demoniac energies and capable of conferring temporal
good or evil,--beauty, power, and wealth, on the one hand; deformity,
ignominy, and disease, on the other,--upon those who honoured or abjured
them. Such conceptions of blessing or of bale were embodied in strange
narratives of weeping or jubilant processions of majestic forms when the
moon was hid in her vacant interlunar cave, of demons assuming the shape
of fair enchantresses who beguiled men to their undoing, of palaces reared
in a night and dislimning in the day, of banquets, like that visionary
banquet in the wilderness, which Milton has adorned with all the graces of
imagination in his 'Paradise Lost.'
We can afford room for only two of the narratives of demoniac influence in
which the later Pagans expressed their belief in the influence of the
early gods.
1. The superstition of the Lamia. One result of the consolidation of
Western Asia with Europe, under the Roman Empire, was to spread widely
over the latter continent the germs of the serpent-worship of the East.
The subtlest beast of the field, retaining in full vigour his powers of
assuming tempting forms and uttering beguiling words, was wont, it seems,
to disport himself among the sons and daughters of men under the shape in
which he deceived our general mother, the over-curious Eve. Especially did
he delight to entrap some hopeful youth who was studying philosophy in the
schools of Athens or Berytus, or some neophyte in the Christian Church. A
fair young gentleman at Corinth had been abroad on a pleasure excursion,
and might perchance be returning home a little the worse for wine. However
this may have been, at the gates of Corinth he encountered a damsel richly
attired, "beautiful exceedingly," but with hair dishevelled, and drowned
in tears. He began by inquiring the cause of her distress. Faithless
servants had carried off her litter and left her lone. He offered her
consolation, which she accepted, and his arm also, which she did not
decline. She led him to a lordly palace in a bye street of the city, where
he had never yet been. At its marble portico waited a crowd of slaves with
torches awaiting their absent mistress, and the pair, now become fond,
were ushered into a sumptuous banqueting hall, where a board was spread
covered with all the delicacies of the season, and garnished with
effulgent plate. In this palace of delight the young man abode many days,
taking no account of time. But at length, cloyed with sweets, he proposed
inviting a party of his college friends, much to the dismay of his fair
hostess, who, with many tears and embraces, besought him to forego his
wish. In an evil hour however he persevered, and his rooms were filled
with gownsmen, marvelling much, not without envy, at the good fortune that
had befallen their chum, Lucius, no one knew how or why. But among the
undergraduates came a grave and grey college tutor, deeply read in
conjurors' books, who could detect by his skill the devil under any shape.
Pale and silent the old man sat at the festive board, and was ill-bred
enough to stare the lady not only out of countenance, but out of her
beauty also. She grew pale, livid, an indiscriminate form: she melted
away; the palace melted also; the plate, the viands, and the wines
vanished also; and in place of columns and ceiled roofs was a void square
in Corinth, and in place of the damsel was a loathsome serpent, writhing
in the agonies of dissolution. The white-bearded fellow had scanned and
scotched and slain the snake--the Lamia--but he destroyed his patient
also, for Lucius became a maniac; had the charm lasted awhile longer, his
soul would have become the fiend's property.
2. A young man had sorely offended the great goddess Venus, or, as she was
called in his native city, the Syrian Byblus, Astarte. To redeem himself
from the curse upon his board and bed,--for he had recently married a fair
wife,--he applied to a wise astrologer. The sage heard his case, and
advised him, as his only remedy, to go on a certain night, at its very
noon, to a spot just without the gates, called the Pagan's Tomb,--to
station himself on the roof of it, and to recite, at a prescribed moment,
a certain formulary, with which his counsel, learned in magical law,
furnished him. On the Pagan's Tomb accordingly the young man placed
himself at the noon of night, and awaited his deliverance. And presently,
towards the confines of morning, was heard a sound of sad and solemn
music, and of much wailing, and of the measured tread of a long
procession. And there drew nigh a mournful company of persons, who might
have seemed men and women, but for their extraordinary stature, and their
surpassing majesty and beauty: and the young man remembered the words of
the magician, and knew that before him was the goodly company of the gods
whom his forefathers in past generations had worshiped. One only of that
august and weeping band was borne in a chariot--the god Saturn--perhaps by
reason of his great age; and to Saturn he addressed his prayer, which was
of such potency that Saturn straightway commanded Astarte to release the
petitioner from the curse she had laid upon him.
We have been able merely to indicate how wide a field lies beyond the
proper domain of medieval witchcraft. It would be curious to trace the
similarity of the Heathen and Christian superstitions, or rather the
derivation of one from the other. But we must reserve this subject to some
other occasion, and conclude with repeating the wish with which we
commenced, that some competent hand would undertake to trace through all
its ramifications the obscure yet recompensing subject of Magic and
Witchcraft.
THE END.
JOHN EDWARD TAYLOR, PRINTER,
LITTLE QUEEN STREET, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Since they were written, Sir Walter Scott's 'Demonology and
Witchcraft' has been published, a book replete with interesting historical
notices.
[2] Faustus, who is a sort of Delolme in matters infernal, has an able
treatise on the subject, entitled 'Mirakel- Kunst- und Wunder-Buch, oder
der schwartze Rabe, auch der dreifache Höllen Zwang genannt,' in which the
political system of Lucifer's dominions is examined. Dionysius the
Areopagite indeed is not more exact in his calendar of the celestial
hierarchy. Perhaps these treatises are the common parents of the modern
'Blue Books.'
[3] Reginald Scott's 'Discoverie of Witchcraft' contains an army-list or
muster-roll of the infernal forces. Thus the Duke of Amazeroth, who seems
to be a sort of brigadier-general, has the command of sixty legions, etc.
[4] Satan is a mere third-rate spirit, as they will find by consulting a
list of the Infernal Privy Council for 1669, contained in Faust's 'Black
Raven.' But we are not told the exact date of his deposition from his
primacy. It is singular that both in the book of Job, where he is
mentioned for the first time, and in the Scandinavian mythologers, he
appears in a similar character--"The Ranger," or "Roving Spirit of
Tartarus." See Whiter, Etymologicon, vol. iii., in which very learned,
though now forgotten work, there is much diabolical erudition.
[5] Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren. Yet, like Cato the Censor, Lucifer
may have taken to study late in life.
[6] Lotichius, Oratorio super fatalibus hoc tempore Academiarum periculis:
1631. Lotichius took the trouble to compose a Latin poem on the subject of
his triumphal entry. A book entitled 'Mammon' had some reputation in its
day. The acknowledged author's name indeed is Harris; yet some commentator
of the year 2150 will perhaps suggest that it was 'Old Harry's Mammon.' We
have seen worse "conjectural emendations."
[7] Colloquia Mensalia.
[8] Legenda Aurea Jacob. de Voragine, leg. 123.
[9] _Ibid._ leg. 21.
[10] Or even a bishop. See Southey's pithy and profitable tale of
'Eleemon, or a Sinner Saved.'
[11] In the case of St. Lydvina, when he pleaded his case in person, and
thought it a clear one, he was fairly laughed out of court, "deriso
explosoque Dæmone." (Brugmann, Vita Lydvinæ, p. 290.) He was hoaxed in a
still more ingenious manner by Nostradamus, who having agreed that the
devil should have him, if he was buried either in the church or out of it,
left directions that he should be buried in a hole in the wall. Sometimes
however he was the gainer in such equivocal compacts,--as, for example, in
the case of the monk who was to live so long as he abstained from sleeping
between sheets. The monk always slept in a chair; but in an unlucky hour
Satan caught him as fast as a top with his head between _the sheets_ of a
sermon, and claimed his bond.
[12] Inferno, canto vi.
[13] The trials at Arras, in 1459. Vide Monstrelet's Chronicle, vol. iii.
p. 84: Paris, 1572. But these were rather religious prosecutions against
supposed heretics, and the crime of witchcraft only introduced as
aggravating their offences.
[14] Christoph von Ranzow, a nobleman of Holstein, burned eighteen at once
on _one_ of his estates.
[15] Some of our readers may wish to see a specimen of this precious
production. We shall take a stanza or two, descriptive of the joke of
which the poor witch was the victim.
Ein Hexen hat man gefangen, zu Zeit die war sehr reich
Mit der man lang umbgaben ehe sie bekannte gleich,
Dann sie blieb darauf beständig es gescheh ihr Unrecht gross,
Bis man ihr macht nothwendig _diesen artlichen Poss_(!),
Das ich mich drüber wunder; man schickt ein Henkersknecht
Zu ihr ins Gefängniss 'nunter, den man hat kleidet recht
Mit einer Bärnhaute als wenns der Teufel wär;
Als ihm die Drut anschaute meynts ihr Buhl kam daher.
Sie sprach zu ihm behende, wie lestu mich so lang
In der Obrigkeit Hände? Hilf mir aus ihren Zwang,
Wie du mir hast verheissen, ich bin ja eben dein;
Thu mich aus der Angst entreissen, o liebster Bule mein!
Sie thet sich selbst verrathen, und gab Anzeigung viel
Sie hat nit geschmeckt den Braten, _was das war für ein Spiel_(!).
Er tröstet sie und saget, ich will dir helfen wohl;
Darum sey unverzaget, Morgens geschehen soll.
It bears the colophon "Printed at Smalcald in the year 1627."
[16] When these horrors were thus versified, it is not wonderful to find
them "improved" by the preachers of the time. At Riga, in 1626, there
appeared 'Nine Select Witch Sermons, by Hermann Sampsonius, superintendent
at Riga,' and many others in the course of that century.
[17] Criminal Law. Tit. x.
[18] Records of Justiciary. Trial of the Master of Orkney.
[19] Calef's Journal.
[20] Cobbett's State Trials.
[21] Trial of Bartie Paterson. Records of Scottish Justiciary. Dec. 18,
1607.
[22] In Wenham's case, Mr. Chauncy deposed that a cat belonging to Jane
Wenham had come and _knocked_ at his door at night, and that he had killed
it. This was founded on evidence at the trial.
[23] Rec. of Just. 1613, Dec. 1.
[24] See the 'Neue Necrologie der Deutschen, 1823,' for an account of
these remarkable appearances.
[25] Divina et Vera Metaphysica.
[26] Wordsworth's 'Dion.'
[27] The prefixed characters which Ashmole interprets to mean Responsum
Raphaelis seem remarkably to resemble that cabalistic-looking initial
which in medical prescriptions is commonly interpreted "Recipe."
[28] Dapper (Beschreibung von Amsterdam, p. 150) describes her as a
melancholy or hypochondriac girl. She was burned however as usual. These
rhyming or alliterative charms are of very remote antiquity. Cato, in his
treatise on Husbandry, recommends the following formulary for a sprain or
fracture: "Huat Hanat, Huat Ista, Pista Sista, Domiabo Damnaustra," or
"Motas Væta, Daries Dardaries, Astataries Dissunapiter."
[29] This, indeed, is an almost invariable feature in the witch trials,
and, if the subject could justify the discussion, might lead to some
singular medical conclusions.
[30] The trade of a pricker, as it was called, _i. e._ a person who put
pins into the flesh of a witch, was a regular one in Scotland and England,
as well as on the Continent. Sir George Mackenzie mentions the case of one
of them who confessed the imposture (p. 48); and a similar instance is
mentioned by Spottiswood (p. 448). Sir Walter Scott gives the following
account of this trade:--"One celebrated mode of detecting witches, and
torturing them at the same time, to draw forth confession, was, by running
pins into their body, on pretence of discovering the devil's stigma, or
mark, which was said to be inflicted by him upon all his vassals, and to
be insensible to pain. This species of search, the practice of the
infamous Hopkins, was in Scotland reduced to a trade; and the young
witch-finder was allowed to torture the accused party, as if in exercise
of a lawful calling, although Sir George Mackenzie stigmatizes it as a
horrid imposture. I observe in the Collections of Mr. Pitcairn, that, at
the trial of Janet Peaston of Dalkeith, the magistrates and ministers of
that market-town caused John Kincaid of Tranent, the common pricker, to
exercise his craft upon her, 'who found two marks of what he called the
devil's making, and which appeared indeed to be so, for she could not feel
the pin when it was put into either of the said marks, nor did they (the
marks) bleed when they were taken out again; and when she was asked where
she thought the pins were put in, she pointed to a part of her body
distant from the real place. They were pins of three inches in length.'
Besides the fact, that the persons of old people especially sometimes
contain spots void of sensibility, there is also room to believe that the
professed prickers used a pin, the point or lower part of which was, on
being pressed down, sheathed in the upper, which was hollow for the
purpose, and that which appeared to enter the body did not pierce it at
all."--_Demonology and Witchcraft_, p. 297.
[31] Peter died in prison just in time to escape the flames. He was burned
in effigy however after his death.
[32] Lindon, cited by Wyttenbach, 'Versuch einer Geschichte von Trier,'
vol. iii. p. 110.
[33] Beyträge zur Beförderung einer nähern Einsicht in das gesammte
Geisterreich, vol. i. p. 284.
[34] The Abbé Fiard, one of the latest believers on record, has printed
the Requête at full length in his 'Lettres sur la Magie,' p. 117 _et seq._
[35] Even now a complaint of 'being bewitched' is occasionally made to
Justices of the Peace by the very ignorant or the very malignant.
[36] Trials and other Proceedings in Matters Criminal before the High
Court of Justiciary in Scotland, selected from the Records of that Court.
By Robert Pitcairn. Edinburgh.
[37] Holingshed, vol. i. pp. 50, 317.
[38] At the second marriage of Alexander III., Fordun, vol. ii. p. 128.
Boece, p. 294, ed. 1574.
[39] Boece, p. 149.
[40] In the case of Cameron, Bishop of Glasgow, 1466.--Buchanan.
Pitscottie.
[41]
"Quell' altro, che nei fianchi è così poco,
Michele Scotto fu, che veramente
Delle magiche frode seppe il giuoco."--_Canto xx._
[42] As in the case of the witches at Forres, who attempted to destroy
King Duffus by the favourite pagan charm of roasting his image in wax, and
those burnt at Edinburgh for a similar attempt against James III., in
1479.
[43] Scot of Scotstarvet, Home of Godscroft, _passim_.
[44] Nov. 8, 1576. Pitcairn, vol. i. p. 48.
[45] Ibid. p. 51.
[46] Rec. of Just. May 27, 1601.
[47] News from Scotland, declaring the damnable life of Dr.
Fian.--Pitcairn, vol. i. p. 213.
[48] We need hardly remind our readers of the torture of Macbriar by the
Boots, before the Privy Council, in the 'Tales of my Landlord.'
[49] Old French, _Turquois_, a smith's pincers, from _torquere_.
[50] Sir James Melville, p. 294.
[51] Pitcairn, vol. i. p. 211.
[52] Crook--the hook from which pots are hung over a Scottish kitchen
fire.
[53] Just. Records, 1590-1610.
[54] Most of the cases here cited are found in the Justiciary Records,
from about 1605 to 1640.
[55] Feb. 4, 1629.
[56] Just. Records, Jan. 1630.
[57] Just. Rec., Dec. 1643.
[58] The paper is marked on the back, "Edinburgh, July 10th, 1662:
considered and found relevant by the Justice Depute." The part of Janet
Braidhead's deposition, which appears to have borne a similar marking by
the Justice Depute, is torn off.
[59] Her fellow-witch, Braidhead, was baptized by the very inappropriate
name of _Christian_.
[60] This seems to have been a common practice in the Infernal ritual. Law
gives the nicknames of the Renfrewshire witches, in the Bangarran Case.
(Memorials, p. 122.)
[61] Taking the form of foul and ominous birds was a favourite practice of
witches in all ages. Apuleius, in his character of Lucius, thus describes
the metamorphosis of his hostess at Larissa:--
"Pamphile divested herself of all her garments, and opening a certain
cabinet took out of it a number of boxes. From one of these she selected a
salve, and anointed herself from head to foot; and after much muttering,
she began to rock and wave herself to and fro. Presently a soft down
covered her limbs, and a pair of wings sprang from her shoulders: her nose
became a beak: her nails talons. Pamphile was now in form a complete owl.
Then uttering a low shriek she began to jump from the floor, and after a
brief while flew out of the window and vanished. She winged her way, I was
assured by Fotis, to some expectant lover. And this was the last I saw of
the old lady."
[62] Just. Records. Jan. 27, 1662.
[63] Vol. i. Decisions, p. 14.
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