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Title: The Superstitions of Witchcraft
Author: Howard Williams
Release Date: October 1, 2007 [eBook #22822]
Language: English
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SUPERSTITIONS OF WITCHCRAFT.
London
Printed by Spottiswoode and Co.
New-Street Square
THE SUPERSTITIONS OF WITCHCRAFT.
by
HOWARD WILLIAMS, M.A.
St. John's College, Cambridge.
'Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,
Nocturnos lemures, portentaque Thessala rides?'
London:
Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green.
1865.
PREFACE.
'THE SUPERSTITIONS OF WITCHCRAFT' is designed to exhibit a
consecutive review of the characteristic forms and facts of a
creed which (if at present apparently dead, or at least harmless,
in Christendom) in the seventeenth century was a living and
lively faith, and caused thousands of victims to be sent to the
torture-chamber, to the stake, and to the scaffold. At this day,
the remembrance of its superhuman art, in its different
manifestations, is immortalised in the every-day language of the
peoples of Europe.
* * * * *
The belief in Witchcraft is, indeed, in its full development and
most fearful results, modern still more than mediæval, Christian
still more than Pagan, and Protestant not less than Catholic.
CONTENTS.
PART I.
CHAPTER I.
The Origin, Prevalence, and Variety of Superstition--The
Belief in Witchcraft the most horrid Form of
Superstition--Most flourishing in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries--The Sentiments of Addison,
Blackstone, and the Lawyers of the Eighteenth Century
upon the Subject--Chaldean and Persian Magic--Jewish
Witchcraft--Its important Influence on Christian and
Modern Belief--Greek Pharmacy and Sorcery--Early Roman
Laws against Conjuration and Magic Charms--Crimes
perpetrated, under the Empire, in connection with
Sorceric Practices--The general Persecution for Magic
under Valentinian and Valens--German and Scandinavian
Sagæ--Essential Difference between Eastern and Western
Sorcery--The probable Origin of the general Belief in an
Evil Principle PAGE 3
PART II.
CHAPTER I.
Compromise between the New and the Old Faiths--Witchcraft
under the Early Church--The Sentiments of the Fathers and
the Decrees of Councils--Platonic Influences--Historical,
Physiological, and Accidental Causes of the Attribution
of Witchcraft to the Female Sex--Opinions of the Fathers
and other Writers--The Witch-Compact 47
CHAPTER II.
Charlemagne's Severity--Anglo-Saxon Superstition--Norman
and Arabic Magic--Influence of Arabic Science--Mohammedan
Belief in Magic--Rabbinical Learning--Roger Bacon--The
Persecution of the Templars--Alice Kyteler 63
CHAPTER III.
Witchcraft and Heresy purposely confounded by the
Church--Mediæval Science closely connected with Magic and
Sorcery--Ignorance of Physiology the Cause of many of the
Popular Prejudices--Jeanne d'Arc--Duchess of
Gloucester--Jane Shore--Persecution at Arras 84
PART III.
CHAPTER I.
The Bull of Innocent VIII.--A new Incentive to the vigorous
Prosecution of Witchcraft--The 'Malleus Maleficarum'--Its
Criminal Code--Numerous Executions at the Commencement of
the Sixteenth Century--Examination of Christian
Demonology--Various Opinions of the Nature of
Demons--General Belief in the Intercourse of Demons and
other non-human Beings with Mankind 101
CHAPTER II.
Three Sorts of Witches--Various Modes of Witchcraft--Manner
of Witch-Travelling--The Sabbaths--Anathemas of the Popes
against the Crime--Bull of Adrian VI.--Cotemporary
Testimony to the Severity of the Persecutions--Necessary
Triumph of the Orthodox Party--Germany most subject to
the Superstition--Acts of Parliament of Henry VIII.
against Witchcraft--Elizabeth Barton--The Act of
1562--Executions under Queen Elizabeth's Government--Case
of Witchcraft narrated by Reginald Scot 126
CHAPTER III.
The 'Discoverie of Witchcraft,' published 1584--Wier's 'De
Præstigiis Dæmonum,' &c.--Naudé--Jean Bodin--His 'De la
Démonomanie des Sorciers,' published at Paris, 1580--His
Authority--Nider--Witch-case at Warboys--Evidence adduced
at the Trial--Remarkable as being the Origin of the
Institution of an Annual Sermon at Huntingdon 144
CHAPTER IV.
Astrology in Antiquity--Modern Astrology and
Alchymy--Torralvo--Adventures of Dr. Dee and Edward
Kelly--Prospero and Comus, Types respectively of the
Theurgic and Goetic Arts--Magicians on the Stage in the
Sixteenth Century--Occult Science in Southern
Europe--Causes of the inevitable Mistakes of the
pre-Scientific Ages 157
CHAPTER V.
Sorcery in Southern Europe--Cause of the Retention of the
Demonological Creed among the Protestant Sects--Calvinists
the most Fanatical of the Reformed Churches--Witch-Creed
sanctioned in the Authorised Version of the Sacred
Scriptures--The Witch-Act of 1604--James VI.'s
'Demonologie'--Lycanthropy and Executions in France--The
French Provincial Parliaments active in passing Laws
against the various Witch-practices--Witchcraft in the
Pyrenees--Commission of Inquiry appointed--Its
Results--Demonology in Spain 168
CHAPTER VI.
'Possession' in France in the Seventeenth Century--Urbain
Grandier and the Convent of Loudun--Exorcism at
Aix--Ecstatic Phenomena--Madeleine Bavent--Her cruel
Persecution--Catholic and Protestant Witchcraft in
Germany--Luther's Demonological Fears and
Experiences--Originated in his exceptional Position and
in the extraordinary Circumstances of his Life and
Times--Witch-burning at Bamburg and at Würzburg 186
CHAPTER VII.
Scotland one of the most Superstitious Countries in
Europe--Scott's Relation of the Barbarities perpetrated in
the Witch-trials under the Auspices of James VI.--The Fate
of Agnes Sampson, Euphane MacCalzean, &c.--Irrational
Conduct of the Courts of Justice--Causes of Voluntary
Witch-Confessions--Testimony of Sir G. Mackenzie,
&c.--Trial and Execution of Margaret Barclay--Computation
of the Number of Witches who suffered Death in England and
Scotland in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries--Witches burned alive at Edinburgh in 1608--The
Lancashire Witches--Sir Thomas Overbury and Dr.
Forman--Margaret Flower and Lord Rosse 203
CHAPTER VIII.
The Literature of Europe in the Seventeenth Century proves
the Universality and Horror of Witchcraft--The most
acute and most liberal Men of Learning convinced of
its Reality--Erasmus and Francis Bacon--Lawyers prejudiced
by Legislation--Matthew Hale's judicial Assertion--Sir
Thomas Browne's Testimony--John Selden--The English
Church least Ferocious of the Protestant Sects--Jewell
and Hooker--Independent Tolerance--Witchcraft under
the Presbyterian Government--Matthew Hopkins--Gaule's
'Select Cases of Conscience'--Judicial and Popular Methods
of Witch-discovery--Preventive Charms--Witchfinders a Legal
and Numerous Class in England and Scotland--Remission in the
Severity of the Persecution under the Protectorship 219
CHAPTER IX.
Glanvil's Sadducismus Triumphatus--His Sentiments on
Witchcraft and Demonology--Baxter's 'Certainty of the
World of Spirits,' &c.--Witch Trial at Bury St. Edmund's
by Sir Matthew Hale, 1664--The Evidence adduced in
Court--Two Witches hanged--Three hanged at Exeter in
1682--The last Witches judicially executed in
England--Uniformity of the Evidence adduced at the
Trials--Webster's Attack upon the Witch-creed in
1677--Witch Trials in England at the end of the
Seventeenth Century--French Parliaments vindicate the
Diabolic Reality of the Crime--Witchcraft in Sweden 237
CHAPTER X.
Witchcraft in the English Colonies in North
America--Puritan Intolerance and Superstition--Cotton
Mather's 'Late Memorable Providences'--Demoniacal
Possession--Evidence given before the
Commission--Apologies issued by Authority--Sudden
Termination of the Proceedings--Reactionary Feeling
against the Agitators--The Salem Witchcraft the last
Instance of Judicial Prosecution on a large Scale in
Christendom--Philosophers begin to expose the
Superstition--Meritorious Labours of Webster, Becker,
and others--Their Arguments could reach only the
Educated and Wealthy Classes of Society--These only
partially enfranchised--The Superstition continues to
prevail among the Vulgar--Repeal of the Witch Act in
England in 1736--Judicial and Popular Persecutions in
England in the Eighteenth Century--Trial of Jane
Wenham in England in 1712--Maria Renata burned in
Germany in 1749--La Cadière in France--Last Witch
burned in Scotland in 1722--Recent Cases of
Witchcraft--Protestant Superstition--Witchcraft in the
Extra-Christian World 259
PART I.
EARLIER FAITH.
CHAPTER I.
The Origin, Prevalence, and Variety of Superstition--The
Belief in Witchcraft the most horrid Form of
Superstition--Most flourishing in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries--The Sentiments of Addison,
Blackstone, and the Lawyers of the Eighteenth Century upon
the Subject--Chaldean and Persian Magic--Jewish
Witchcraft--Its important Influence on Christian and Modern
Belief--Greek Pharmacy and Sorcery--Early Roman Laws against
Conjuration and Magic Charms--Crimes perpetrated, under the
Empire, in connection with Sorceric Practices--The general
Persecution for Magic under Valentinian and Valens--German
and Scandinavian Sagæ--The probable Origin of the general
Belief in an Evil Principle.
Superstition, the product of ignorance of causes, of the
proneness to seek the solution of phenomena out of and beyond
nature, and of the consequent natural but unreasoning dread of
the Unknown and Invisible (ignorantly termed the supernatural),
is at once universal in the extent, and various in the kinds,
of its despotism. Experience and reason seem to prove that,
inherent to and apparently coexistent with the human mind, it
naturally originates in the constitution of humanity: in ignorance
and uncertainty, in an instinctive doubt and fear of the
_Unknown_. Accident may moderate its power among particular peoples
and persons; and there are always exceptional minds whose
natural temper and exercise of reason are able to free them from
the servitude of a delusive imagination. For the mass of mankind,
the germ of superstition, prepared to assume always a new shape
and sometimes fresh vigour, is indestructible. The severest
assaults are ineffectual to eradicate it: hydra-like, far from
being destroyed by a seeming mortal stroke, it often raises its
many-headed form with redoubled force.
It will appear more philosophic to deplore the imperfection, than
to deride the folly of human nature, when the fact that the
superstitious sentiment is not only a result of mere barbarism or
vulgar ignorance, to be expelled of course by civilisation and
knowledge, but is indigenous in the life of every man, barbarous
or civilised, pagan or Christian, is fully recognised. The
enlightening influence of science, as far as it extends, is
irresistible; and its progress within certain limits seems sure
and almost omnipotent. But it is unfortunately limited in the
extent of its influence, as well as uncertain in duration; while
reason enjoys a feeble reign compared with ignorance and
imagination.[1] If it is the great office of history to teach by
experience, it is never useless to examine the causes and the
facts of a mischievous creed that has its roots deep in the
ignorant fears of mankind; but against the recurrence of the
fatal effects of fanaticism apparent in the earliest and latest
records of the world, there can be no sufficient security.
[1] That 'speculation has on every subject of human enquiry
three successive stages; in the first of which it tends to
explain the phenomena by supernatural agencies, in the
second by metaphysical abstractions, and in the third or
final state, confines itself to ascertaining their laws of
succession and similitude' (_System of Logic_, by J. S.
Mill), is a generalisation of Positive Philosophy, and a
theory of the Science of History, consistent probably with
the progress of knowledge among philosophers, but is
scarcely applicable to the mass of mankind.
Dreams, magic terrors, miracles, witches, ghosts, portents, are
some of the various forms superstition has invented and magnified
to disturb the peace of society as well as of individuals. The
most extravagant of these need not be sought in the remoter ages
of the human race, or even in the 'dark ages' of European
history: they are sufficiently evident in the legislation and
theology, as well as in the popular prejudices of the seventeenth
century.
The belief in the _infernal_ art of witchcraft is perhaps the
most horrid, as it certainly is the most absurd, phenomenon in
the religious history of the world. Of the millions of victims
sacrificed on the altars of religion this particular delusion can
claim a considerable proportion. By a moderate computation, nine
millions have been burned or hanged since the establishment of
Christianity.[2] Prechristian antiquity experienced its
tremendous power, and the primitive faith of Christianity easily
accepted and soon developed it. It was reserved, however, for the
triumphant Church to display it in its greatest horrors: and if
we deplore the too credulous or accommodative faith of the early
militant Church or the unilluminated ignorance of paganism, we
may still more indignantly denounce the cruel policy of
Catholicism and the barbarous folly of Protestant theology which
could deliberately punish an impossible crime. It is the reproach
of Protestantism that this persecution was most furiously raging
in the age that produced Newton and Locke. Compared with its
atrocities even the Marian burnings appear as nothing: and it may
well be doubted whether the fanatic zeal of the 'bloody Queen,'
is no less contemptible than the credulous barbarity of the
judges of the seventeenth century. The period 1484 (the year in
which Innocent VIII. published his famous 'Witch Hammer' signally
ratified 120 years later by the Act of Parliament of James I. of
England) to 1680 might be characterised not improperly as the era
of devil-worship; and we are tempted almost to embrace the theory
of Zerdusht and the Magi and conceive that Ahriman was then
superior in the eternal strife; to imagine the _Evil One_, as in
the days of the Man of Uz, 'going to and fro in the earth, and
walking up and down in it.' It is come to that at the present
day, according to a more rational observer of the seventeenth
century, that it is regarded as a part of religion to ascribe
great wonders to the devil; and those are taxed with infidelity
and perverseness who hesitate to believe what thousands relate
concerning his power. Whoever does not do so is accounted an
atheist because he cannot persuade himself that there are two
Gods, the one good and the other evil[3]--an assertion which is
no mere hyperbole or exaggeration of a truth: there is the
certain evidence of facts as well as the concurrent testimony of
various writers.
[2] According to Dr. Sprenger (_Life of Mohammed_). Cicero's
observation that there was no people either so civilised or
learned, or so savage and barbarous, that had not a belief
that the future may be predicted by certain persons (De
Divinatione, i.), is justified by the faith of Christendom,
as well as by that of paganism; and is as true of witchcraft
as it is of prophecy or divination.
[3] Dr. Balthazar Becker, Amsterdam, 1691, quoted in
Mosheim's _Institutes of Ecclesiastical History_, ed. Reid.
Those (comparatively few) whose reason and humanity alike
revolted from a horrible dogma, loudly proclaim the prevailing
prejudice. Such protests, however, were, for a long time at
least, feeble and useless--helplessly overwhelmed by the
irresistible torrent of public opinion. All classes of society
were almost equally infected by a plague-spot that knew no
distinction of class or rank. If theologians (like Bishop Jewell,
one of the most esteemed divines in the Anglican Church,
publicly asserting on a well known occasion at once his faith and
his fears) or lawyers (like Sir Edward Coke and Judge Hale) are
found unmistakably recording their undoubting conviction, they
were bound, it is plain, the one class by theology, the other by
legislation. Credulity of so extraordinary a kind is sufficiently
surprising even in theologians; but what is to be thought of the
deliberate opinion of unbiassed writers of a recent age
maintaining the possibility, if not the actual occurrence, of the
facts of the belief?
The deliberate judgment of Addison, whose wit and preeminent
graces of style were especially devoted to the extirpation of
almost every sort of popular folly of the day, could declare:
'When I hear the relations that are made from all parts of the
world, not only from Norway and Lapland, from the East and West
Indies, but from every particular nation in Europe, I cannot
forbear thinking that there is such an intercourse and commerce
with evil spirits as that which we express by the name of
witchcraft.... In short, when I consider the question whether
there are such persons in the world as those we call witches, my
mind is divided between two opposite opinions; or rather, to
speak my thoughts freely, I believe in general that there is and
has been such a thing as witchcraft, but at the same time can
give no credit to any particular modern instance of it.'[4]
Evidence, if additional were wanted, how deference to authority
and universal custom may subdue the reason and understanding. The
language and decision of Addison are adopted by Sir W. Blackstone
in 'Commentaries on the Laws of England,' who shelters himself
behind that celebrated author's sentiment; and Gibbon informs us
that 'French and English lawyers of the present age [the latter
half of the last century] allow the _theory_ but deny the
_practice_ of witchcraft'--influenced doubtless by the spirit of
the past legislation of their respective countries. In England
the famous enactment of the subservient parliament of James I.
against the crimes of sorcery, &c., was repealed in the middle of
the reign of George II., our laws sanctioning not 130 years since
the popular persecution, if not the legal punishment.
[4] _Spectator_, No. 117. The sentiments of Addison on a
kindred subject are very similar. Writing about the vulgar
ghost creed, he adds these remarkable words: 'At the same
time I think a person who is thus terrified with the
imagination of ghosts and spectres much more reasonable than
one who, contrary to the reports of all historians, sacred
and profane, ancient and modern, and to the traditions of
all nations, thinks the appearance of spirits fabulous and
groundless. Could not I give myself up to the general
testimony of mankind, I should to the relations of
particular persons who are now living, and whom I cannot
distrust in other matters of fact.' Samuel Johnson (whose
prejudices were equalled only by his range of knowledge)
proved his faith in a well-known case, if afterwards he
advanced so far as to consider the question as to the
reality of 'ghosts' as _undecided_. Sir W. Scott, who wrote
when the profound metaphysical inquiries of Hume had gained
ground (it is observable), is quite sceptical.
The origin of witchcraft and the vulgar diabolism is to be found
in the rude beginnings of the religious or superstitious feeling
which, known amongst the present savage nations as Fetishism,
probably prevailed almost universally in the earliest ages; while
that of the sublimer magic is discovered in the religious systems
of the ancient Chaldeans and Persians. Chaldea and Egypt were the
first, as far as is known, to cultivate the science of magic: the
former people long gave the well-known name to the professional
practisers of the art. Cicero (_de Divinatione_) celebrates, and
the Jewish prophets frequently deride, their skill in divination
and their modes of incantation. The story of Daniel evidences how
highly honoured and lucrative was the magical or divining
faculty. The Chazdim, or Chaldeans, a priestly caste inhabiting a
wide and level country, must have soon applied themselves to the
study, so useful to their interests, of their brilliant expanse
of heavens. By a prolonged and 'daily observation,' considerable
knowledge must have been attained; but in the infancy of the
science astronomy necessarily took the form of an empirical art
which, under the name of astrology, engaged the serious attention
and perplexed the brains of the mediæval students of science or
magic (nearly synonymous terms), and which still survives in
England in the popular almanacks. The natural objects of
veneration to the inhabitants of Assyria were the glorious
luminaries of the sun and moon; and if their worship of the stars
and planets degenerated into many absurd fancies, believing an
intimate connection and subordination of human destiny to
celestial influences, it may be admitted that a religious
sentiment of this kind in its primitive simplicity was more
rational, or at least sublime, than most other religious systems.
It is not necessary to trace the oriental creeds of magic further
than they affected modern beliefs; but in the divinities and
genii of Persia are more immediately traced the spiritual
existences of Jewish and Christian belief. From the Persian
priests are derived both the name and the practice of magic. The
Evil Principle of the Magian, of the later Jewish, and thence of
the western world, originated in the system (claiming Zoroaster
as its founder), which taught a duality of Gods. The philosophic
lawgiver, unable to penetrate the mystery of the empire of evil
and misery in the world, was convinced that there is an equal and
antagonistic power to the representative of light and goodness.
Hence the continued eternal contention between Ormuzd with the
good spirits or genii, Amchaspands, on one side, and Ahriman with
the Devs (who may represent the infernal crew of Christendom) on
the other. Egypt, in the Mosaic and Homeric ages, seems to have
attained considerable skill in magic, as well as in chymistry and
astrology. As an abstruse and esoteric doctrine, it was strictly
confined to the priests, or to the favoured few who were admitted
to initiation. The magic excellence of the magicians, who
successfully emulated the miracles of Moses, was apparently
assisted by a legerdemain similar to that of the Hindu jugglers
of the present day.[5]
[5] The names of two of these magicians, Jannes and Jambres,
have been preserved by revelation or tradition.
In Persian theology, the shadowy idea of the devil of western
Asia was wholly different from the grosser conception of
Christendom. Neither the evil principle of Magianism nor the
witch of Palestine has much in common with the Christian. 'No
contract of subjection to a diabolic power, no infernal stamp or
sign of such a fatal league, no revellings of Satan and his
hags,'[6] no such materialistic notions could be conformable to
the spirit of Judaism or at least of Magianism. It is not
difficult to find the cause of this essential dissimilarity. A
simple unity was severely inculcated by the religion and laws of
Moses, which permitted little exercise of the imagination: while
the Magi were equally severe against idolatrous forms. A
monstrous idea, like that of 'Satan and his hags,' was impossible
to them. Christianity, the religion of the West, has received
its _corporeal_ ideas of demonology from the divinities and
demons of heathenism. The Satyri and Fauni of Greece and Rome
have suggested in part the form, and perhaps some of the
characteristics, of the vulgar Christian devil. A knowledge of
the arts of magic among the Jews was probably derived from their
Egyptian life, while the Bedouins of Arabia and Syria (kindred
peoples) may have instilled the less scientific rites of
Fetishism. It is in the early accounts of that people that
sorcery, whatever its character and profession, with the allied
arts of divination, necromancy, incantations, &c., appears most
flourishing. The Mosaic penalty, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch
to live,' and the comprehensive injunction, 'There shall not be
found among you that maketh his son or his daughter to pass
through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of
times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter
with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer,' indicate
at once the extent and the horror of the practice. Balaam (that
equivocal prophet), on the border-land of Arabia and Palestine,
was courted and dreaded as a wizard who could perplex whole
armies by means of spells. His fame extended far and wide; he was
summoned from his home beyond the Euphrates in the mountains of
Mesopotamia by the Syrian tribes to repel the invading enemy.
This great magician was, it seems, universally regarded as 'the
rival and the possible conqueror of Moses.'[7]
[6] Sir W. Scott, _Letters on Demonology_.
[7] Dean Stanley's _Lectures on the Jewish Church_.
About the time when the priestly caste had to yield to a profane
monarchy, the forbidden practices were so notorious and the evil
was of such magnitude, that the newly-elected prince 'ejected'
(as Josephus relates) 'the fortune-tellers, necromancers, and all
such as exercised the like arts.' His interview with the witch
has some resemblance to modern _diablerie_ in the circumstances.
Reginald Scot's rationalistic interpretation of this scene may be
recommended to the commentating critics who have been so much at
a loss to explain it. He derides the received opinion of the
woman of Endor being an agent of the devil, and ignoring any
mystery, believes, 'This Pythonist being a _ventriloqua_, that
is, speaking as it were from the bottom of her belly, did cast
herself into a trance and so abused Saul, answering to Saul
in Samuel's name in her counterfeit hollow voice.[8] An
institution very popular with the Jews of the first temple,
often commemorated in their scriptures--the schools of the
prophets--was (it is not improbable) of the same kind as the
schools of Salamanca and Salerno in the middle ages, where magic
was publicly taught as an abstruse and useful science; and when
Jehu justifies his conduct towards the queen-mother by bringing a
charge of witchcraft, he only anticipates an expedient common and
successful in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
A Jewish prophet asserts of the Babylonian kings, that they were
diligent cultivators of the arts, reproaching them with
practising against the holy city.
[8] _Discoverie of Witchcraft_, lib. viii. chap. 12. The
contrivance of this illusion was possibly like that at
Delphi, where in the centre of the temple was a chasm, from
which arose an intoxicating smoke, when the priestess was to
announce divine revelations. Seated over the chasm upon the
tripod, the Pythia was inspired, it seems, by the soporific
and maddening drugs.
Yet if we may credit the national historian (not to mention the
common traditions), the Chaldean monarch might have justly
envied, if he could scarcely hope to emulate, the excellence of a
former prince of his now obscure province. Josephus says of
Solomon that, amongst other attainments, 'God enabled him to
learn that skill which expels demons, which is a science useful
and sanative to men. He composed such incantations also by which
distempers are alleviated, and he left behind him the manner of
using exorcisms by which they drive away demons so that they
never return.'[9] The story of Daniel is well known. In the
captivity of the two tribes carried away into an honourable
servitude he soon rose into the highest favour, because, as we
are informed, he excelled in a divination that surpassed all the
art of the Chaldeans, themselves so famous for it. The inspired
Jew had divined a dream or vision which puzzled 'the magicians,
and the astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans,'
and immediately was rewarded with the greatest gift at the
disposal of a capricious despot. Most of the apologetic writers
on witchcraft, in particular the authors of the 'Malleus
Maleficarum,' accept the assertion of the author of the history
of Daniel that Nebuchadnezzar was 'driven from men, and did eat
grass as oxen,' in its apparent sense, expounding it as plainly
declaring that he was corporeally metamorphosed into an ox, just
as the companions of Ulysses were transformed into swine by the
Circean sorceries.
[9] _Antiquities_, book viii. 2. Whiston's transl.
The Jewish ideas of good or at least evil spirits or angels were
acquired during their forced residence in Babylon, whether under
Assyrian or Persian government. At least 'Satan' is first
discovered unmistakably in a personal form in the poem of Job, a
work pronounced by critics to have been composed after the
restoration. In the Mosaic cosmogony and legislation, the writer
introduces not, expressly or impliedly, the existence of an evil
principle, unless the serpent of the Paradisaic account, which
has been rather arbitrarily so metamorphosed, represents it;[10]
while the expressions in books vulgarly reputed before the
conquest are at least doubtful. From this time forward (from the
fifth century B.C.), says a German demonologist, as the Jews
lived among the admirers of Zoroaster, and thus became acquainted
with their doctrines, are found, partly in contradiction to the
earlier views of their religion, many tenets prevailing amongst
them the origin of which it is impossible to explain except by
the operation of the doctrines of Zoroaster: to these belongs the
general acceptance of the theory of Satan, as well as of good and
bad angels.[11] Under Roman government or vassalage, sorceric
practices, as they appear in the Christian scriptures, were much
in vogue. Devils or demons, and the 'prince of the devils,'
frequently appear; and the _demoniacs_ may represent the victims
of witchcraft. The Talmud, if there is any truth in the
assertions of the apologists of witchcraft, commemorates many of
the most virtuous Jews accused of the crime and executed by the
procurator of Judea.[12] Exorcism was a very popular and
lucrative profession.[13] Simon Magus the magician (_par
excellence_), the impious pretender to miraculous powers, who
'bewitched the people of Samaria by his sorceries,' is celebrated
by Eusebius and succeeding Christian writers as the fruitful
parent of heresy and sorcery.
[10] Some ingenious remarks on the subject of the serpent,
&c., may be found in _Eastern Life_, part ii. 5, by H.
Martineau.
[11] Horst, quoted in Ennemoser's _History of Magic_. It has
been often remarked as a singular phenomenon, that the
'chosen people,' so prompt in earlier periods on every
occasion to idolatry and its cruel rites, after its
restoration under Persian auspices, has been ever since
uniformly opposed, even fiercely, to any sign contrary to the
unity of the Deity. But the Magian system was equally averse
to idolatry.
[12] Bishop Jewell (_Apology for the Church of England_)
states that Christ was accused by the malice of his
countrymen of being a juggler and wizard--_præstigiator et
maleficus_. In the apostolic narrative and epistles, sorcery,
witchcraft, &c., are crimes frequently described and
denounced. The Sadducean sect alone denied the existence of
demons.
[13] The common belief of the people of Palestine in the
transcendent power of exorcism is illustrated by a miracle
of this sort, gravely related by Josephus. It was exhibited
before Vespasian and his army. 'He [Eleazar, one of the
professional class] put a ring that had a root of one of
those sorts mentioned by Solomon to the nostrils of the
demoniac; after which he drew out the demon through his
nostrils: and when the man fell down immediately he adjured
him to return into him no more, making still mention of
Solomon, and reciting the incantations which he composed.
And when Eleazar would demonstrate to the spectators that he
had such power, he set a little way off a cup or basin full
of water, and commanded the demon as he went out of the man
to overturn it, and thereby to let the spectators know he
had left the man.' This performance was received with
contempt or credulity by the spectators according to their
faith: but the credulity of the believers could hardly
exceed that of a large number of educated people, who in our
own generation detect in the miracles of animal magnetism,
or the legerdemain of jugglers, an infernal or supernatural
agency.
That witchcraft, or whatever term expresses the criminal
practice, prevailed among the worshippers of Jehovah, is evident
from the repeated anathemas both in their own and the Christian
scriptures, not to speak of traditional legends; but the Hebrew
and Greek expressions seem both to include at least the use of
drugs and perhaps of poison.[14] The Jewish creed, as exposed in
their scriptures, has deserved a fame it would not otherwise
have, because upon it have been founded by theologians, Catholic
and Protestant, the arguments and apology for the reality of
witchcraft, derived from the sacred writings, with an ingenuity
only too common and successful in supporting peculiar prejudices
and interests even of the most monstrous kind.[15]
[14] _Chashaph_ and _Pharmakeia._ Biblical critics are
inclined, however, to accept in its strict sense the
translation of the Jacobian divines. 'Since in the LXX.,'
says Parkhurst, the lexicographer of the N.T., 'this noun
[pharmakeia] and its relatives always answer to some Hebrew
word that denotes some kind of their magical or conjuring
tricks; and since it is too notorious to be insisted upon,
that such infernal practices have always prevailed, and do
still prevail in idolatrous countries, I prefer the other
sense of incantation.'
[15] A sort of ingenuity much exercised of late by 'sober
brows approving with a text' the institution of slavery:
_divine_, according to them; _the greatest evil that afflicts
mankind_, according to Alexander von Humboldt. See _Personal
Narrative_.
In examining the phenomenon as it existed among the Greeks and
Romans, it will be remarked that, while the Greeks seem to have
mainly adopted the ideas of the East, the Roman superstition was
of Italian origin. Their respective expressions for the
predictive or presentient faculty (_manteia_ and _divinatio_), as
Cicero is careful to explain, appear to indicate its different
character with those two peoples: the one being the product of a
sort of madness, the other an elaborate and divine skill. Greek
traditions made them believe that the magic science was brought
from Egypt or Asia by their old philosophic and legislating
sages. Some of the most eminent of the founders of philosophic
schools were popularly accused of encouraging it. Pythagoras (it
is the complaint of Plato) is said to have introduced to his
countrymen an art derived from his foreign travels; a charge
which recalls the names of Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Galileo,
and others, who had to pay the penalty of a premature knowledge
by the suspicion of their cotemporaries. Xenophanes is said
to be the only one of the philosophers who admitted the existence
or providence of the gods, and at the same time entirely
discredited divination. Of the Stoics, Panætius was the only one
who ventured even to doubt. Some gave credit to one or two
particular modes only, as those of dreams and frenzy; but for the
most part every form of this sort of divine revelation was
implicitly received.[16]
[16] Cicero, in his second book _De Divinatione_, undertakes
to refute the arguments of the Stoics, 'the force of whose
mind, being all turned to the side of morals, unbent itself
in that of religion.' The divining faculty is divisible
generally into the artificial and the natural.
The science of magic proper is developed in the later schools of
philosophy, in which Oriental theology or demonology was largely
mixed. Apollonius of Tyana, a modern Pythagorean, is the most
famous magician of antiquity. This great miracle-worker of
paganism was born at the commencement of the Christian era; and
it has been observed that his miracles, though quite independent
of them, curiously coincide both in time and kind with the
Christian.[17] According to his biographer Philostratus, this
extraordinary man (whose travels and researches extended, we are
assured, over the whole East even into India, through Greece,
Italy, Spain, northern Africa, Ethiopia, &c.) must have been in
possession of a scientific knowledge which, compared with that of
his cotemporaries, might be deemed almost supernatural.
Extraordinary attainments suggested to him in later life to
excite the awe of the vulgar by investing himself with magical
powers. Apollonius is said to have assisted Vespasian in his
struggle for the throne of the Cæsars; afterwards, when accused
of raising an insurrection against Domitian, and when he had
given himself up voluntarily to the imperial tribunal at Rome, he
escaped impending destruction by the exertion of his superhuman
art.
[17] The proclamation of the birth of Apollonius to his
mother by Proteus, and the incarnation of Proteus himself,
the chorus of swans which sang for joy on the occasion, the
casting out of devils, raising the dead, and healing the
sick, the sudden appearances and disappearances of
Apollonius, his adventures in the cave of Trophonius, and
the sacred voice which called him at his death, to which may
be added his claim as a teacher having authority to reform
the world, 'cannot fail to suggest,' says a writer in the
_Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography_, &c., ed. by Dr.
W. Smith, 'the parallel passages in the Gospel history.'
Of the incantations, charms, and magic compounds in the practice
of Greek witchcraft, numerous examples occur in the tragic and
comic poetry of Greece; and the _philtres_, or love-charms, of
Theocritus are well known. The names of Colchis, Chaldea,
Assyria, Iberia, Thrace, may indicate the origin of a great part
of the Hellenic sorceries. Yet, if the more honourable science
may have been of foreign extraction, Hellas was not without
something of the sorcery of modern Europe. The infernal goddess
Hecate, of Greek celebrity, is the omnipotent patroness of her
modern Christian slaves; and she presides at the witch meetings
of Christendom with as much solemnity but with far greater
malice. Originally of celestial rank, by a later metamorphosis
connected, if not personally identical with, Persephone,
the Queen of Hades, Hecate was invested with many of the
characteristic attributes of a modern devil, or rather perhaps of
a witch. The triple goddess, in her various shapes, wandered
about at night with the souls of the dead, terrifying the
trembling country people by apparitions of herself and infernal
satellites, by the horrible whining and howls of her hellhounds
which always announced her approach. She frequented cross-roads,
tombs, and melancholy places, especially delighting in localities
famous for deeds of blood and murder. The hobgoblins, the various
malicious demons and spirits, who provoked the lively terrors of
the mediæval peoples, had some prototypes in the fairy-land of
Greece, in the Hecatean hobgoblins (like the Latin larvæ, &c.),
Empusa, Mormo, and other products of an affrighted imagination
familiar to the students of Greek literature in the comic pages
of Aristophanes.[18] From the earliest literary records down to
the latest times of paganism as the state religion, from the
times of the Homeric Circe and Ulysses (the latter has been
recognised by many as a genuine wizard) to the age of Apollonius
or Apuleius, magic and sorcery, as a philosophical science or as
a vulgar superstition, had apparently more or less distinctly a
place in the popular mythology of old Greece. But in the pagan
history of neither Greece nor Rome do we read of holocausts of
victims, as in Christian Europe, immolated on the altars of a
horrid superstition.[19] The occasion of the composition of the
treatise by Apuleius 'On Magic' is somewhat romantic. On his way
to Alexandria, the philosopher, being disabled from proceeding on
the journey, was hospitably received into the mansion of one
Sicinius Pontianus. Here, during the interesting period of his
recovery, he captivated, or was captivated by, the love of his
host's mother, a wealthy widow, and the lovers were soon united
by marriage. Pudentilla's relatives, indignant at the loss of a
much-coveted, and perhaps long-expected fortune, brought an
action against Apuleius for having gained her affection by means
of spells or charms. The cause was heard before the proconsul of
Africa, and the apology of the accused labours to convince his
judges that a widow's love might be provoked without superhuman
means.[20]
[18] Particularly in the _Batrachoi_. The dread of the
infernal apparition of the fierce Gorgo in Hades blanched
the cheek of even much-daring Odysseus (Od. xi. 633). The
satellites of Hecate have been compared, not
disadvantageously, with the monstrous guardians of hell;
than whom
'Nor uglier follow the night-hag when, called
In secret, riding through the air she comes
Lured with the smell of infant blood to dance
With Lapland witches--.'
[19] An exceptional case, on the authority of Demosthenes,
is that of a woman condemned in the year, or within a year
or two, of the execution of Socrates.
[20] St. Augustin, in denouncing the Platonic theories of
Apuleius, of the mediation and intercession of demons
between gods and men, and exposing his magic heresies, takes
occasion to taunt him with having evaded his just fate by
not professing, like the Christian martyrs, his real faith
when delivering his 'very copious and eloquent' apology (_De
Civitate Dei_, lib. viii. 19). In the _Golden Ass_ of the
Greek romancist of the second century, who, in common with
his cotemporary the great rationalist Lucian, deserves the
praise of having exposed (with more wit perhaps than
success) some of the most absurd prejudices of the day, his
readers are entertained with stories that might pretty
nearly represent the sentiments of the seventeenth century.
Gibbon observes of the Roman superstition on the authority of
Petronius, that it may be inferred that it was of Italian rather
than barbaric extraction. Etruria furnished the people of Romulus
with the science of divination. Early in the history of the
Republic the law is very explicit on the subject of witchcraft.
In the decemviral code the extreme penalty is attached to the
crime of witchcraft or conjuration: 'Let him be capitally
punished who shall have bewitched the fruits of the earth, or by
either kind of conjuration (_excantando neque incantando_) shall
have conjured away his neighbour's corn into his own field,' &c.,
an enactment sneered at in Justinian's _Institutes_ in Seneca's
words. A rude and ignorant antiquity, repeat the lawyers of
Justinian, had believed that rain and storms might be attracted
or repelled by means of spells or charms, the impossibility of
which has no need to be explained by any school of philosophy. A
hundred and fifty years later than the legislation of the
decemvirs was passed the _Lex Cornelia_, usually cited as
directed against sorcery: but while involving possibly the more
shadowy crime, it seems to have been levelled against the more
'substantial poison.' The conviction and condemnation of 170
Roman ladies for poisoning, under pretence of incantation, was
the occasion and cause. Sulla, when dictator, revived this act
_de veneficiis et malis sacrificiis_, for breach of which the
penalty was 'interdiction of fire and water.' Senatorial
anathemas, or even those of the prince, were ineffective to check
the continually increasing abuses, which towards the end of the
first century of the empire had reached an alarming height.[21]
[21] It will be observed that _veneficus and maleficus_ are
the significant terms among the Italians for the criminals.
A general degradation of morals is often accompanied, it has been
justly remarked, by a corresponding increase of the wildest
credulity, and by an abject subservience to external religious
rites in propitiation of an incensed deity. It was thus at Rome
when the eloquence of Cicero, and afterwards the indignant satire
of Juvenal or the calm ridicule of the philosophic Lucian,[22]
attempted to assert the 'proper authority of reason.' To speak
the truth, says Cicero, superstition has spread like a torrent
over the entire globe, oppressing the minds and intellects of
almost all men and seizing upon the weakness of human nature.[23]
The historian of 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
justifies and illustrates this lament of the philosopher of the
Republic in the particular case of witchcraft. 'The nations and
the sects of the Roman world admitted with equal credulity and
similar abhorrence the reality of that infernal art which was
able to control the eternal order of the planets, and the
voluntary operations of the human mind. They dreaded the
mysterious power of spells and incantations, of potent herbs and
execrable rites, which could extinguish or recall life, influence
the passions of the soul, blast the works of creation, and extort
from the reluctant demons the secrets of Futurity. They believed
with the wildest inconsistency that the preternatural dominion of
the air, of earth, and of hell, was exercised from the vilest
motives of malice or gain by some wrinkled hags or itinerant
sorcerers who passed their obscure lives in penury and contempt.
Such vain terrors disturbed the peace of society and the
happiness of individuals; and the harmless flame which insensibly
melted a waxen image might derive a powerful and pernicious
energy from the affrighted fancy of the person whom it was
maliciously designed to represent. From the infusion of those
herbs which were supposed to possess a supernatural influence, it
was an easy step to the case of more substantial poison; and the
folly of mankind sometimes became the instrument and the mask of
the most atrocious crimes.'[24]
[22] If the philosophical arguments of Menippus (_Nekrikoi
Dialogoi_) could have satisfied the interest of the priests
or the ignorance of the people of after times, the
_infernal_ fires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
might not have burned.
[23] _De Divinatione_, lib. ii.
[24] _The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire_, xxv. This description applies more to the Christian
and later empires.
Latin poetry of the Augustan and succeeding period abounds with
illustrations, and the witches of Horace, Ovid, and Lucan are the
famous classical types.[25] Propertius has characterised the
Striga as 'daring enough to impose laws upon the moon bewitched
by her spells;' while Petronius makes his witch, as potent as
Strepsiades' Thessalian sorceress, exclaim that the very form of
the moon herself is compelled to descend from her position in the
universe at her command. For the various compositions and
incantations in common use, it must be sufficient to refer to the
pages of the Roman poets. The forms of incantation and horrid
rites of the Horatian Sagana Canidia (_Epod._ v. and _Sat._ i.
8), or the scenes described by the pompous verses of the poet
of the civil war (_De Bello Civili_, vi.), where all nature is
subservient, are of a similar kind, but more familiar, in
the dramatic writings of the Elizabethan age. The darker
characteristics of the practice, however, are presented in the
burning declamations of Juvenal, only too faithfully exhibiting
the unnatural atrocities perpetrated in the form and under the
disguise of love-potions and charms. Roman ladies in fact
acquired considerable proficiency, worthy of a Borgia or
Brinvilliers, in the art of poisoning and in the use of drugs.
The reputed witch, both in ancient and modern times, very often
belonged, like the Ovidian Dipsas, to the real and detestable
class of panders: wrinkled hags were experienced in the arts of
seduction, as well as in the employment of poison and drugs more
familiar to the wealthier class (_Sat._ vi.). The great Satirist
wrote in the latter half of the first century of Christianity;
but even in the Augustan period such crimes were prevalent enough
to make Ovid enumerate them among the universal evils introduced
by the Iron age (_Metamorphoses_, i.). The despotic will of the
princes themselves was exerted in vain; the mischief was too
deep-rooted to succumb even to the decrees of the masters of the
world. Nor did the _divi_ themselves disdain to be initiated in
the infernal or celestial science. Nigidius Figulus and the two
Thrasylli are magical or mathematical names closely connected
with the destinies of the two first imperial princes. Nigidius
predicted, and perhaps promoted, the future elevation of
Octavianus; and the elder Thrasyllus, the famous Rhodian
astrologer, skilfully identified his fate with the life of his
credulous dupe but tyrannical pupil. Thrasyllus' art is stated to
have been of service in preventing the superstitious tyrant from
executing several intended victims of his hatred or caprice, by
making _their_ safety the condition of _his_ existence. The
historian of the early empire tells of the incantations which
could 'affect the mind and increase the disease' of Germanicus,
Tiberius' nephew. 'There were discovered,' says Tacitus, 'dug up
from the ground and out of the walls of the house, the remains of
human corpses, charms and spells, and the name of Germanicus
inscribed on leaden tablets, ashes half consumed covered with
decaying matter, and other practices by which it is believed that
souls are devoted to the deities of hell.'[26]
[25] 'The Canidia of Horace,' Gibbon pronounces, 'is a
vulgar witch. The Erichtho of Lucan is tedious, disgusting,
but sometimes sublime.' The love-charms of Canidia and Medea
are chiefly indebted to the _Pharmakeutria_ of Theocritus.
[26] _Annales_, ii. 69. Writing of the mathematicians and
astrologers in the time of Galba, who urged the governor of
Lusitania on the perilous path to the supreme dignity, the
historian characterises them truly, in his inimitable
language and style, as 'a class of persons not to be trusted
by those in power, deceptive to the expectant; a class which
will always be proscribed and preserved in our state.'
In the fourth century, the first Christian emperor limited the
lawful exercise of magic to the beneficial use of preserving or
restoring the fruits of the earth or the health of the human
body, while the practice of the noxious charms is capitally
punished. The science of those, proclaims the imperial convert,
who, immersed in the arts of magic, are detected either in
attempts against the life and health of their fellow-men, or in
_charming_ the minds of modest persons to the practice of
debauchery, is to be avenged and punished deservedly by severest
penalties. But in no sorts of criminal charges are those remedies
to be involved which are employed for the good of individuals, or
are harmlessly employed in remote places to prevent premature
rains, in the case of vineyards, or the injurious effects of
winds and hailstorms, by which the health and good name of no one
can be injured; but whose practices are of laudable use in
preventing both the gifts of the Deity and the labours of men
from being scattered and destroyed.[27]
[27] _Cod. Justinian_, lib. ix. tit. 18.
Constantine, in distinguishing between good and bad magic,
between the _theurgic_ and _goetic_, maintains a distinction made
by the pagans--a distinction ignored in the later Christian
Church, in whose system 'all demons are infernal spirits, and all
commerce with them is idolatry and apostasy.' Christian zeal has
accused the imperial philosopher and apostate Julian of having
had recourse--not to much purpose--to many magical or necromantic
rites; of cutting up the dead bodies of boys and virgins in the
prescribed method; and of raising the dead to ascertain the event
of his Eastern expedition against the Persians.
Not many years after the death of Julian the Christian Empire
witnessed a persecution for witchcraft that for its ferocity, if
not for its folly, can be paralleled only by similar scenes in
the fifteenth or seventeenth century. It began shortly after the
final division of the East and West in the reigns of Valentinian
and Valens, A.D. 373. The unfortunate accused were pursued with
equal fury in the Eastern and Western Empires; and Rome and
Antioch were the principal arenas on which the bloody tragedy was
consummated. Gibbon informs us that it was occasioned by a
criminal consultation, when the twenty-four letters of the
alphabet were ranged round a magic tripod; a dancing ring placed
in the centre pointed to the first four letters in the name of
the future prince. 'The deadly and incoherent mixture of treason
and magic, of poison and adultery, afforded infinite gradations
of guilt and innocence, of excuse and aggravation, which in these
proceedings appear to have been confounded by the angry or
corrupt passions of the judges. They easily discovered that the
degree of their industry and discernment was estimated by the
imperial court according to the number of executions that were
furnished from their respective tribunals. It was not without
extreme reluctance that they pronounced a sentence of acquittal;
but they eagerly admitted such evidence as was stained with
perjury or procured by torture to prove the most improbable
charges against the most respectable characters. The progress of
the inquiry continually opened new subjects of criminal
prosecution; the audacious informers whose falsehood was detected
retired with impunity: but the wretched victim who discovered his
real or pretended accomplices was seldom permitted to receive the
price of his infamy. From the extremity of Italy and Asia the
young and the aged were dragged in chains to the tribunals of
Rome and Antioch. Senators, matrons, and philosophers expired in
ignominious and cruel tortures. The soldiers who were appointed
to guard the prisons declared, with a murmur of pity and
indignation, that their numbers were insufficient to oppose the
flight or resistance of the multitude of captives. The wealthiest
families were ruined by fines and confiscations; the most
innocent citizens trembled for their safety: and we may form some
notion of the magnitude of the evil from the extravagant
assertion of an ancient writer [Ammianus Marcellinus], that in
the obnoxious provinces the prisoners, the exiles, and the
fugitives formed the greatest part of the inhabitants. The
philosopher Maximus,' it is added, 'with some justice was
involved in the charge of magic; and young Chrysostom, who had
accidentally found one of the proscribed books, gave himself up
for lost.'[28]
[28] _The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire_, xxv.
The similarity of this to the horrible catastrophe of Arras,
recorded by the chroniclers of the fifteenth century, excepting
the grosser absurdities of the latter, is almost perfect.
Valentinian and Valens, who seem to have emulated the atrocious
fame of the Cæsarean family, with their ministers, concealed, it
is probable, under the disguise of a simulated credulity the real
motives of revenge and cupidity.
The Roman world, Christian and pagan, was subject to the
prevailing fear. That portion of the globe, however, comprehended
but a small part of the human race. The records of history are
incomplete and imperfect; nor are they more confined in point of
time than of extent. History is little more at any period than an
imperfect account of the life of a few particular peoples.
Necessarily limited almost entirely to an acquaintance with the
history of that portion of the globe included in the 'Roman
Empire,' we almost forget our profound ignorance of that vastly
larger proportion of the earth's surface, the extra-Roman world,
embracing then, as now, civilised as well as barbarous nations.
The Chinese empire (the most extraordinary, perhaps, and whose
antiquity far surpasses that of any known), comprehending within
its limits two-thirds of the population of the globe; the refined
and ingenious people of Hindustan, an immense population, in the
East: in the Western hemisphere nations in existence whose
remains excited the admiration of the Spanish invaders; the
various savage tribes of the African continent; the nomad
populations of Northern Asia and Europe; nearly all these more or
less, on the testimony of past and present observation,
experienced the tremendous fears of the vulgar demonism.[29]
[29] It may be safely affirmed, according to a celebrated
modern philosopher, that popular religions are really, in
the conception of their more vulgar votaries, a species of
demonism. 'Primus in orbe deos fecit timor,' or, in the
fuller expression of a modern, 'Fear made the devils, and
weak Hope the gods.'
With the tribes who, in the time of Cæsar or Tacitus, inhabited
the forests of Germany, and, perhaps, amongst the Scandinavians,
some more elevated ideas obtained, the germ, however, of a
degenerated popular prejudice. By all the German tribes, on
the testimony of cotemporary writers, women were held in
high respect, and were believed to have something even divine
in their mental or spiritual faculties. 'Very many of their
women they regard in the light of prophetesses, and when
superstitious fear is in the ascendant, even of goddesses.'
History has preserved the names of some of these Teutonic
_deities_. Veleda, by prophetic inspiration, or by superior genius,
directed the councils of her nation, and for some years
successfully resisted the progress of the imperial arms.[30]
Momentous questions of state or religion were submitted to their
_divine_ judgment, and it is not wonderful if, endowed with
supernatural attributes, they, like other prophets, helped to
fulfil their own predictions. The Britons and Gauls, of the Keltic
race, seem to have resembled the Orientals, rather than the Teutons
or Italians, in their religious systems. Long before the Romans came
in contact with them the magic science is said to have been
developed, and the priests, like those of India or Egypt,
communicated the mysteries only to a privileged few, with
circumstances of profound secrecy. Such was the excellence of the
magic science of the British Druids, that Pliny (_Hist. Nat._
xxx.) was induced to suppose that the Magi of Persia must have
derived their system from Britain. For the most part the Kelts
then, as in the present day, were peculiarly tenacious of a creed
which it was the interest of a priestly caste to preserve. On the
other hand, the looser religion of the Teuton nations, of the
Scandinavians and Germans, could not find much difficulty in
accepting the particular conceptions of the Southern conquerors;
and the sorceric mythology of the Northern barbarians readily
recognised the power of an Erichtho to control the operations of
nature, to prevent or confound the course of the elements,
interrupt the influence of the sun, avert or induce tempests, to
affect the passions of the soul, to fascinate or charm a cruel
mistress, &c., with all the usual necromantic rites. But if they
could acknowledge the characteristics of the Italian Striga,
those nations at the same time retained a proper respect for the
venerated Saga--the German Hexe.
[30] Aurinia was the Latin name of another of these
venerable sagæ. Tacitus, _Histor._ iv. 61, and _Germania_,
viii.
Of all the historic peoples of ancient Europe, the Scandinavians
were perhaps most imbued with a persuasion of the efficacy of
magic; a fact which their home and their habits sufficiently
explain. In the Eddas, Odin, the leader of the immigration in the
first century, and the great national lawgiver, is represented as
well versed in the knowledge of that preternatural art; and the
heroes of the Scandinavian legends of the tenth or twelfth
century are especially ambitious of initiation. The Scalds,
like the Brahmins or Druids, were possessed of tremendous
secrets; their _runic_ characters were all powerful charms,
whether against enemies, the injurious effects of an evil eye,
or to soften the resentment of a lover.[31] The Northmen, with
the exception of some nations of Central Europe, like the
Lithuanians, who were not christianised until the thirteenth or
fourteenth century, from their roving habits as well perhaps as
from their remoteness, were among the last peoples of Europe to
abandon their old creed. Urged by poverty and the hopes of
plunder, the pirates of the Baltic long continued to be the
terror of the European coasts; but, without a political status,
they were the common outlaws of Christendom. They were the relics
of a savage life now giving way in Europe to the somewhat more
civilised forms of society, continuing their indiscriminate
depredations with impunity only because of the want of union and
organisation among their neighbours. But they were in a
transitional state: the coasts and countries they had formerly
been content to ravage, they were beginning to find it their
interest to colonise and cultivate. In the new interests and
pursuits of civilisation and commerce, a natural disgust might
have been experienced for the savage traditions of a religion
whose gods and heroes were mostly personifications of war and
rapine, under whose banners they had suffered the hardships, if
they had enjoyed the plunder, of a piratic life. The national
deities from being disregarded, must have come soon to be treated
with undisguised contempt at least by the leaders: while the
common people, serfs, or slaves were still immersed (as much as
in Christian Europe) in a stupid superstition.
[31] The following story exhibits the influence of
witchcraft among the followers of Odin. Towards the end of
the tenth century, the dreaded Jomsburg sea-rovers had set
out on one of their periodical expeditions, and were
devastating with fire and sword the coast of Norway. A
celebrated Norwegian Jarl, Hakon, collected all his forces,
and sailed with a fleet of 150 vessels to encounter the
pirates. Hakon, after trying in vain to break through the
hostile line, retired with his fleet to the coast, and
proceeded to consult a well-known sorceress in whom he had
implicit confidence for any emergency. With some pretended
reluctance the sorceress at length informed him that the
victory could be obtained only by the sacrifice of his son.
Hakon hesitated not to offer up his only son as a
propitiatory sacrifice; after which, returning to his fleet,
and his accustomed post in the front ranks of the battle, he
renewed the engagement. Towards evening the Jomsburg pirates
were overtaken and overwhelmed by a violent storm,
destroying or damaging their ships. They were convinced that
they saw the witch herself seated on the prow of the Jarl's
ships with clouds of missile weapons flying from the tips of
her fingers, each arrow carrying a death-wound. With such of
his followers as had escaped the sorceric encounter, the
pirate-chief made the best of his way from the scene of
destruction, declaring he had made a vow indeed to fight
against men, but not against witches. A narrative not
inconsistent with the reply of a warrior to an inquiry from
the Saint-king Olaf, 'I am neither Christian nor pagan; my
companions and I have no other religion than a just
confidence in our strength, and in the good success which
always attends us in war; and we are of opinion that it is
all that is necessary.'--Mallet's _Northern Antiquities_.
When men's minds are thus universally unsettled and in want--a
want both universal and necessary in states--of some new
divine objects of worship more suited to advanced ideas and
requirements, a system of religion more civilising and rational
than the antiquated one, will be adopted without much difficulty,
especially if it is not too exclusive. Yet the Scandinavians were
unusually tenacious of the forms of their ancestral worship; for
while the Icelanders are said to have received Christianity about
the beginning of the eleventh century, the people of Norway were
not wholly converted until somewhat later. The halls of Valhalla
must have been relinquished with a sigh in exchange for the less
intelligible joys of a tranquil and insensuous paradise. An
ancient Norsk law enjoins that the king and bishop, with all
possible care, make inquiry after those who exercise pagan
practices, employ magic arts, adore the genii of particular
places, of tombs or rivers, who transport themselves by a
diabolical mode of travelling through the air from place to
place. In the extremity of the northern peninsula (amongst
the Laplanders), where the light of science, or indeed of
civilisation, has scarcely yet penetrated, witchcraft remains as
flourishing as in the days of Odin; and the Laplanders at present
are possibly as credulous in this respect as the old Northmen or
the present tribes of Africa and the South Pacific. Before the
introduction of the new religion (it is a curious fact), the
Germans and Scandinavians, as well as the Jews, were acquainted
with the efficacy of the rite of infant baptism. A Norsk
chronicle of the twelfth century, speaking of a Norwegian
nobleman who lived in the reign of Harald Harfraga, relates that
he poured water on the head of his new-born son, and called him
Hakon, after the name of his father. Harald himself had been
baptized in the same way; and it is noted of the infant pagan St.
Olaf that his mother had him baptized as soon as he was born. The
Livonians observed the same ceremony; and a letter sent expressly
by Pope Gregory III. to St. Boniface, the great apostle of the
Germans, directs him how to act in such cases. It is probable,
Mallet conjectures, that all these people might intend by such a
rite to preserve their children from the sorceries and evil
charms which wicked spirits might employ against them at the
instant of their birth. Several nations of Asia and America have
attributed such a power to ablutions of this kind; nor were the
Romans without the custom, though they did not wholly confine it
to new-born infants. A curious magical use of an initiatory and
sacramental rite, ignorantly anticipated, it seems, by the
unilluminated faith of the pagan world.
In reviewing the characteristics of sorcery which prevailed in
the ancient world, it is obvious to compare the superstition as
it existed in the nations of the East and West, of antiquity and
of modern times. These natural or accidental differences are
deducible apparently from the following causes:--(1) The
essential distinction between the demonology of Orientalism--of
Brahminism, Buddhism, Magianism, Judaism, Mohammedanism--and that
of the West, of paganism and of Christianity, founded on their
respective _idealistic_ and _realistic_ tendencies. (2) The
divining or necromantic faculties have been generally regarded in
the East as honourable properties; whereas in the West they have
been degraded into the criminal follies of an infernal compact.
The magical art is a noble cultivated science--a prerogative of
the priestly caste: witchcraft, in its strict sense, was mostly
abandoned to the lowest, and, as a rule, to the oldest and
ugliest of the female sex. In the one case the proficient was the
master, in the other the slave, of the demons. (3) The position
of the female sex in the Western world has been always very
opposite to their status in the East, where women are believed to
be an inferior order of beings, and therefore incapable of an art
reserved for the superior endowments of the male sex. The modern
witchcraft may be traced to that perhaps oldest form of religious
conception, Fetishism, which still prevails in its utmost
horrors amongst the savage peoples in different parts of the
world. The early practice of magic was not dishonourable in its
origin, closely connected as it was with the study of natural
science--with astronomy and chymistry.
The magic system--interesting to us as having influenced the
later Jewish creed and mediately the Christian--referred like
most developed creeds to a particular founder, Zerdusht
(Zarathustra of the Zend), may have thus originated. Mankind, in
seeking a solution for that most interesting but unsatisfactory
problem, the cause of the predominance of evil on the earth, were
obliged by their ignorance and their fears to imagine, in
addition to the idea of a single supreme existence, the author
and source of good, antagonistic influence--the source and
representative of evil. Physical phenomena of every day
experience; the alternations of light and darkness, of sunshine
and clouds; the changes and oppositions in the outer world, would
readily supply an analogy to the moral world. Thus the dawn and
the sun, darkness and storms, in the wondering mind of the
earlier inhabitants of the globe, may have soon assumed the
substantial forms of personal and contending deities.[32] Such
seems to be the origin of the personifications in the Vedic hymns
of Indra and Vritra with their subordinate ministers (the Ormuzd
and Ahriman, &c., of the Zend-Avesta), and of the first religious
conceptions of other peoples. After this attempt to reconcile the
contradictions, the irregularities of nature, by establishing a
duality of gods whose respective provinces are the happiness and
unhappiness of the human race, the step was easy to the
conviction of the superior activity of a malignant god. The
benevolent but epicurean security of the first deity might seem
to have little concern in defeating or preventing the malicious
schemes of the other. All the infernal apparatus of later ages
was easy to be supplied by a delusive and an unreasoning
imagination.
[32] The despotism of language and its immense influence on
the destiny, as well as on the various opinions, of mankind,
is well shown by Professor Max Müller. 'From one point of
view,' he declares, 'the true history of religion would be
neither more nor less than an account of the various
attempts at expressing the Inexpressible' (_Lectures on the
Science of Language_, Second Series). The witch-creed may be
indirectly referred, like many other absurdities, to the
perversion of language.
PART II.
MEDIÆVAL FAITH.
CHAPTER I.
Compromise between the New and the Old Faiths--Witchcraft
under the Early Church--The Sentiments of the Fathers and
the Decrees of Councils--Platonic Influences--Historical,
Physiological, and Accidental Causes of the Attribution of
Witchcraft to the Female Sex--Opinions of the Fathers and
other Writers--The Witch-Compact.
It might appear, in a casual or careless observation, surprising
that Christianity, whose original spirit, if not universal
practice, was to enlighten; whose professed mission was 'to
destroy the works of the devil,' failed to disprove as well as to
dispel some of the most pernicious beliefs of the pagan world:
that its final triumph within the limits of the Roman empire, or
as far as it extended without, was not attended by the extinction
of at least the most revolting practices of superstition.
Experience, and a more extended view of the progress of human
ideas, will teach that the growth of religious perception is
fitful and gradual: that the education of collective mankind
proceeds in the same way as that of the individual man. And thus,
in the expression of the biographer of Charles V., the barbarous
nations when converted to Christianity changed the object, not
the spirit, of their religious worship. Many of the ideas of the
old religion were consciously tolerated by the first propagators
of Christianity, who justly deemed that the new dogmas would be
more readily insinuated into the rude and simple minds of their
neophytes, if not too strictly uncompromising. Both past and
present facts testify to this compromise. It was a maxim with
some of the early promoters of the Christian cause, to do as
little violence as possible to existing prejudices[33]--a
judicious method still pursued by the Catholic, though condemned
by the Protestant, missionaries of the present day.[34] It was
not seldom that an entire nation was converted and christianised
by baptism almost in a single day: the mass of the people
accepting, or rather acquiescing in, the arguments of the
missionaries in submission to the will or example of their
prince, whose conduct they followed as they would have followed
him into the field. Such was the case at the conversion of the
Frankish chief Clovis, and of the Saxon Ethelbert. But if St.
Augustin or St. Boniface, and the earlier missionaries, had more
success in persuading the simple faith of the Germans, without a
written revelation and miracles, than the modern emissaries have
in inducing the Hindus to abandon their Vedas, it was easier to
convince them of the facts, than of the reason, of their faith.
Nor was it to be expected that such raw recruits (if the
expression may be allowed) should lay aside altogether prejudices
with which they were imbued from infancy.
[33] The remark of a late Professor of Divinity in the
University of Cambridge. 'The heathen temples,' says
Professor Blunt, 'became Christian churches; the altars of
the gods altars of the saints; the curtains, incense,
tapers, and votive-tablets remained the same; the
_aquaminarium_ was still the vessel for holy water; St.
Peter stood at the gate instead of Cardea; St. Rocque or St.
Sebastian in the bedroom instead of the Phrygian Penates;
St. Nicholas was the sign of the vessel instead of Castor
and Pollux; the Mater Deûm became the Madonna; alms pro
Matre Deûm became alms for the Madonna; the festival of the
Mater Deûm the festival of the Madonna, or _Lady Day_; the
Hostia or victim was now the Host; the "Lugentes Campi," or
dismal regions, Purgatory; the offerings to the Manes were
masses for the dead.' The parallel, he ventures to assert,
might be drawn out to a far greater extent, &c.
[34] Conformably to this plan, the first proselytisers in
Germany and the North were often reduced (we are told) to
substituting the name of Christ and the saints for those of
Odin and the gods in the toasts drunk at their bacchanalian
festivals.
The extent of the credit and practice of witchcraft under the
Church triumphant is evident from the numerous decrees and
anathemas of the Church in council, which, while oftener treating
it as a dread reality, has sometimes ventured to contemn or to
affect to contemn it as imposture and delusion. Both the civil
and ecclesiastical laws were exceptionally severe towards
_goetic_ practices. 'In all those laws of the Christian
emperors,' says Bingham, 'which granted indulgences to criminals
at the Easter festival, the _venefici_ and the _malefici_, that
is, magical practices against the lives of men, are always
excepted as guilty of too heinous a crime to be comprised within
the general pardon granted to other offenders.'[35] In earlier
ecclesiastical history, successive councils or synods are much
concerned in fulminating against them. The council of Ancyra
(314) prohibits the art under the name of pharmacy: a few years'
penance being appointed for anyone receiving a magician into his
house. St. Basil's canons, more severe, appoint thirty years as
the necessary atonement. Divination by lots or by consulting
their sacred scriptures, just as afterwards they consulted
Virgil, seems to have been a very favourite mode of discovering
the future. The clergy encouraged and traded upon this kind of
divination: in the Gallican church it was notorious. 'Some
reckon,' the pious author of the 'Antiquities of the Christian
Church' informs us, 'St. Augustin's conversion owing to such a
sort of consultation; but the thought is a great mistake, and
very injurious to him, for his conversion was owing to a
providential call, like that of St. Paul, from heaven.' And that
eminent saint's confessions are quoted to prove that his
conversion from the depths of vice and licentiousness to the
austere sobriety of his new faith, was indebted to a legitimate
use of the scriptures. St. Chrysostom upbraids his cotemporaries
for exposing the faith, by their illegitimate inquiries, to the
scorn of the heathen, many of whom where wiser than to hearken to
any such fond impostures.
[35] Bingham's _Origines Ecclesiasticæ_, xvi.
St. Augustin complains that Satan's instruments, professing the
exercise of these arts, were used to 'set the name of Christ
before their ligatures, and enchantments, and other devices, to
seduce Christians to take the venomous bait under the covert of a
sweet and honey potion, that the bitter might be hid under the
sweet, and make men drink it without discerning to their
destruction.' The heretics of the primitive, as well as of the
middle, ages were accused of working miracles, and propagating
their accursed doctrines by magical or infernal art. Tertullian,
and after him Eusebius, denounce the arch-heretic Simon Magus for
performing his spurious miracles in that way: and Irenæus had
declared of the heretic Marcus, that when he would consecrate the
eucharist in a cup of wine and water, by one of his juggling
tricks, he made it appear of a purple and red colour, as if by a
long prayer of invocation, that it might be thought the grace
from above distilled the blood into the cup by his invocation. A
correspondent of Cyprian, the celebrated African bishop,
describes a woman who pretended 'to be inspired by the Holy
Ghost, but was really acted on by a diabolical spirit, by which
she counterfeited ecstasies, and pretended to prophesy, and
wrought many wonderful and strange things, and boasted she would
cause the earth to move. Not that the devil [he is cautious to
affirm] has so great a power either to move the earth or shake
the elements by his command; but the wicked spirit, foreseeing
and understanding that there will be an earthquake, pretends to
do that which he foresees will shortly come to pass. And by these
lies and boastings, the devil subdued the minds of many to obey
and follow him whithersoever he would lead them. And he made that
woman walk barefoot through the snow in the depth of winter, and
feel no trouble nor harm by running about in that fashion. But at
last, after having played many such pranks, one of the exorcists
of the Church discovered her to be a cheat, and showed that to be
a wicked spirit which before was thought to be the Holy
Ghost.'[36]
[36] _Origines Ecclesiasticæ_, xvi. The exorcists were a
recognised and respectable order in the Church. See id. iii.
for an account of the _Energumenoi_ or demoniacs. The lawyer
Ulpian, in the time of Tertullian, mentions the Order of
Exorcists as well known. St. Augustin (_De Civit. Dei_,
xxii. 8) records some extraordinary cures on his own
testimony within his diocess of Hippo.
Christian witchcraft was of a more tremendous nature than even
that of older times, both in its origin and practice. The devils
of Christianity were the metamorphosed deities of the old
religions. The Christian convert was convinced, and the Fathers
of the Church gravely insisted upon the fact, that the oracles of
Delphi or Dodona had been inspired in the times of ignorance and
idolatry by the great Enemy, who used the priest or priestess as
the means of accomplishing his eternal schemes of malice and
mischief. At the instant, however (so it was confidently
affirmed), of the divine incarnation the oracular temples were
closed for ever; and the demons were no longer permitted to
delude mankind by impersonating pagan deities. They must now find
some other means of effecting their fixed purpose. It was not far
to seek. There were human beings who, by a preeminently wicked
disposition, or in hope of some temporary profit, were prepared
to risk their future prospects, willing to devote both soul and
body to the service of hell. The 'Fathers' and great expounders
of Christianity, by their sentiments, their writings, and
their claims to the miraculous powers of exorcising, greatly
assisted to advance the common opinions. Justin Martyr, Origen,
Tertullian, Jerome, were convinced that they were in perpetual
conflict with the disappointed demons of the old world, who had
inspired the oracles and usurped the worship of the true God. Nor
was the contest always merely spiritual: they engaged personally
and corporeally. St. Jerome, like St. Dunstan in the tenth, or
Luther in the sixteenth century, had to fight with an incarnate
demon.
Exorcism--the magical or miraculous ejection of evil spirits by a
solemn form of adjuration--was a universal mode of asserting the
superior authority of the orthodox Church against the spurious
pretensions of heretics.[37]
[37] The art of expelling demons, indeed, has been preserved
in the Protestant section of the Christian Church until a
recent age. The _exorcising_ power, it is remarkable, is the
sole claim to miraculous privilege of the Protestants. The
formula _de Strumosis Attrectandis_, or the form of touching
for the king's evil (a similar claim), was one of the
recognised offices of the English Established Church in the
time of Queen Anne, or of George I.
Christian theology in the first age even was considerably indebted
to the Platonic doctrines as taught in the Alexandrian school; and
demonology in the third century received considerable accessions
from the speculations of Neo-Platonism, the reconciling medium
between Greek and Oriental philosophy. Philo-Judæus (whose
reconciling theories, displayed in his attempt to prove the
derivation of Greek religious or philosophical ideas from those
of Moses, have been ingeniously imitated by a crowd of modern
followers) had been the first to undertake to adapt the Jewish
theology to Greek philosophy. Plotinus and Porphyrius, the
founders of the new school of Platonism, introduced a large number
of angels or demons to the acquaintance of their Christian
fellow-subjects in the third century.[38] It has been remarked that
'such was the mild spirit of antiquity that the nations were less
attentive to the difference than to the resemblance of their
religious worship. The Greek, the Roman, and the barbarian, as
they met before their respective altars, easily persuaded themselves
that, under various names and with various ceremonies, they adored
the same deities.'[39] Magianism and Judaism, however, were little
imbued with the spirit of toleration; and the purer the form of
religious worship, the fiercer, too often, seems to be the
persecution of differing creeds. Christianity, with something of
the spirit of Judaism from which it sprung, was forced to believe
that the older religions must have sprung from a diabolic origin.
The whole pagan world was inspired and dominated by wicked
spirits. 'The pagans _deified_, the Christians _diabolised_,
Nature.'[40] It is in this fact that the entirely opposite
spirit of antique and mediæval thought, evident in the life,
literature, in the common ideas of ancient and mediæval Europe,
is discoverable.
[38] 'The knowledge that is suited to our situation and
powers, the whole compass of moral, natural, and
mathematical science, was neglected by the new Platonists;
whilst they exhausted their strength in the verbal disputes
of metaphysics, they attempted to explore the secrets of the
invisible world, and studied to reconcile Aristotle with
Plato on subjects of which both these philosophers were as
ignorant as the rest of mankind. Consuming their reason in
those deep but unsubstantial meditations, their minds were
exposed to illusions of fancy. They flattered themselves
that they possessed the secret of disengaging the soul from
its corporeal prison; claimed a familiar intercourse with
demons and spirits; and by a very singular revolution,
converted the study of philosophy into that of magic.'--_The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, chap. xiii.
[39] The Egyptians, almost the only exception to polytheistic
tolerance, seem to have been rendered intolerant by the
number of antagonistic animal-gods worshipped in different
parts of the country, enumerated by Juvenal, who describes
the effects of religious animosity displayed in a faction
fight between Ombi or Coptos and Tentyra.--_Sat._ xv.
[40] _Life of Goethe_, by G. H. Lewes.
The female sex has been always most concerned in the crime of
Christian witchcraft. What was the cause of this general
addiction, in the popular belief, of that sex, it is interesting
to inquire. In the East now, and in Greece of the age of
Simonides or Euripides, or at least in the Ionic States, women
are an inferior order of beings, not only on account of their
weaker natural faculties and social position, but also in respect
of their natural inclination to every sort of wickedness. And if
they did not act the part of a Christian witch, they were skilled
in the practice of toxicology. With the Latin race and many
European peoples, the female sex held a better position; and
it may appear inconsistent that in Christendom, where the
Goddess-Mother was almost the highest object of veneration, woman
should be degraded into a slave of Satan. By the northern nations
they were supposed to be gifted with supernatural power; and the
universal powers of the Italian hag have been already noticed.
But the Church, which allowed no miracle to be legitimate out of
the pale, and yet could not deny the fact of the miraculous
without, was obliged to assert it to be of diabolic origin. Thus
the _priestess_ of antiquity became a _witch_. This is the
historical account. Physically, the cause seems discoverable in
the fact that the natural constitution of women renders their
_imaginative_ organs more excitable for the ecstatic conditions
of the prophetic or necromantic arts. On all occasions of
religious or other cerebral excitement, women (it is a matter of
experience) are generally most easily reduced to the requisite
state for the expected supernatural visitation. Their hysterical
(_hystera_) natures are sufficiently indicative of the origin of
such hallucinations. Their magical or pharmaceutical attributes
might be derived from savage life, where the men are almost
exclusively occupied either in war or in the chase: everything
unconnected with these active or necessary pursuits is despised
as unbecoming the superior nature of the male sex. To the female
portion of the community are abandoned domestic employments,
preparation of food, the selection and mixture of medicinal
herbs, and all the mysteries of the medical art. How important
occupations like these, by ignorance and interest, might be
raised into something more than natural skill, is easy to be
conjectured. That so extraordinary an attribute would often be
abused is agreeable to experience.[41]
[41] Quintilian declared, '_Latrocinium_ facilius in viro,
_veneficium_ in feminâ credam.' To the same effect is an
observation of Pliny: 'Scientiam feminarum in _veneficiis_
prævalere.'
According to the earlier Christian writers, the frailer sex is
addicted to infernal practices by reason of their innate
wickedness: and in the opinion of the 'old Fathers' they are
fitted by a corrupt disposition to be the recipients and agents
of the devil's will upon earth. The authors of the _Witch-Hammer_
have supported their assertions of the proneness of women to evil
in general, and to sorcery in particular, by the respectable
names and authority of St. Chrysostom, Augustin, Dionysius
Areopagiticus, Hilary, &c. &c.[42] The Golden-mouthed is adduced
as especially hostile in his judgment of the sex; and his 'Homily
on Herodias' takes its proper place with the satires of
Aristophanes and Juvenal, of Boccaccio and Boileau.[43]
[42] 'They style a wife
The dear-bought curse and lawful plague of life,
A bosom-serpent and a domestic evil.'
[43] The royal author of the _Demonologie_ finds no
difficulty in accounting for the vastly larger proportion of
the female sex devoted to the devil's service. 'The reason
is easy,' he declares; 'for as that sex is frailer than man
is, so is it easier to be entrapped in the gross snares of
the devil, as was over-well proved to be true by the
serpent's deceiving of Eva at the beginning, which makes him
the homelier with that sex sensine:' and it is profoundly
observed that witches cannot even shed tears, though women
in general are, like the crocodile, ready to weep on every
light occasion.
Reginald Scot gives the reasons alleged by the apologists of
witchcraft. 'This gift and natural influence of fascination
may be increased in man according to his affections and
perturbations, as through anger, fear, love, hate, &c. For by
hate, saith Varius, entereth a fiery inflammation into the eye of
man, which being violently sent out by beams and streams infect
and bewitch those bodies against whom they are opposed. And
therefore (he saith) that is the cause that women are oftener
found to be witches than men. For they have such an unbridled
force of fury and concupiscence naturally, that by no means is it
possible for them to temper or moderate the same. So as upon
every trifling occasion they, like unto the beasts, fix their
furious eyes upon the party whom they bewitch.... Women also
(saith he) are oftenlie filled full of superfluous humours, and
with them the melancholike blood boileth, whereof spring vapours,
and are carried up and conveyed through the nostrils and mouth,
to the bewitching of whatsoever it meeteth. For they belch up a
certain breath wherewith they bewitch whomsoever they list. And
of all other women lean, hollow-eyed, old, beetle-browed women
(saith he) are the most infectious.'[44] Why _old_ women are
selected as the most proper means of doing the devil's will may
be discovered in their peculiar characteristics. The repulsive
features, moroseness, avarice, malice, garrulity of his hags are
said to be appropriate instruments. Scot informs us, 'One sort of
such as are said to be witches are women which be commonly old,
lame, blear-eyed, pale, foul, and full of wrinkles, poor, sullen,
superstitious, and _papists_, or such as know no religion, in
whose drowsy minds the devil hath got a fine seat. They are lean
and deformed, showing melancholy in their faces, to the horror of
all that see them. They are doting, scolds, mad, devilish ...
neither obtaining for their service and pains, nor yet by their
art, nor yet at the devil's hands, with whom they are said to
make a perfect visible bargain, either beauty, money, promotion,
wealth, worship, pleasure, honour, knowledge, or any other
benefit whatsoever.' As to the preternatural gifts of these hags,
he sensibly argues: 'Alas! what an unapt instrument is a
toothless, old, impotent, unwieldy woman to fly in the air;
truly, the devil little needs such instruments to bring his
purposes to pass.'[45]
[44] _Discoverie of Witchcraft_, book xii. 21.--We shall
have occasion hereafter to notice this great opponent of the
devil's regime in the sixteenth century. We may be inclined
to consider a more probable reason--that spirits, being in
the general belief (so Adam infers that God had 'peopled
highest heaven with spirits masculine') of the masculine
gender, the recipients of their inspiration are naturally of
the other sex: evil spirits could propagate their human or
half-human agents with least suspicion and in the most
natural way.
[45] _Discoverie_, i. 3, 6.--Old women, however, may be
negatively useful. One of the writers on the subject (John
Nider) recommends them to young men since '_Vetularum
aspectus et colloquia amorem excutiunt_.'
Dr. Glanvil, who wrote in the latter half of the seventeenth
century, and is bitterly opposed to the 'Witch-Advocate' and his
followers, defends the capabilities of hags and the like for
serving the demons. He conjectures, 'Peradventure 'tis one of
the great designs, as 'tis certainly the interest, of those
wicked agents and machinators industriously to hide from us their
influences and ways of acting, and to work as near as 'tis
possible _incognito_; upon which supposal it is easy to conceive
a reason why they most commonly work by and upon the weak and the
ignorant, who can make no cunning observations or tell credible
tales to detect their artifice.'[46] The act of bewitching is
defined to be 'a supernatural work contrived between a corporal
old woman and a spiritual devil' ('Discoverie,' vi. 2). The
method of initiation is, according to a writer on the subject, as
follows: A decrepit, superannuated, old woman is tempted by a man
in black to sign a contract to become his, both soul and body. On
the conclusion of the agreement (about which there was much
cheating and haggling), he gives her a piece of money, and causes
her to write her name and make her mark on a slip of parchment
with her own blood. Sometimes on this occasion also the witch
uses the ceremony of putting one hand to the sole of her foot and
the other to the crown of her head. On departing he delivers to
her an imp or familiar. The familiar, in shape of a cat, a mole,
miller-fly, or some other insect or animal, at stated times of
the day sucks her blood through teats in different parts of her
body.[47] If, however, the proper vulgar witch is an old woman,
the younger and fairer of the sex were not by any means exempt
from the crime. Young and beautiful women, children of tender
years, have been committed to the rack and to the stake on the
same accusation which condemned the old and the ugly.
[46] _Sadducismus Triumphatus_, part i. sect. 8.
[47] _Grose's Antiquities_, in Brand's _Popular Antiquities
of Great Britain_.
CHAPTER II.
Charlemagne's Severity--Anglo-Saxon Superstition--Norman and
Arabic Magic--Influence of Arabic Science--Mohammedan Belief
in Magic--Rabbinical Learning--Roger Bacon--The Persecution
of the Templars--Alice Kyteler.
Tremendous as was the power of the witch in earlier Christendom,
it was not yet degraded into the thoroughly diabolistic character
of her more recent successors. Diabolism advanced in the same
proportion with the authority of the Church and the ignorant
submission of the people. In the civil law, the Emperor Leo, in
the sixth century, abrogated the Constantinian edict as too
indulgent or too credulous: from that time all sorts of charms,
all use of them, beneficial or injurious, were declared worthy of
punishment. The different states of Europe, founded on the ruins
of the Western Empire, more or less were engaged in providing
against the evil consequences of sorcery. Charlemagne pursued the
criminals with great severity. He 'had several times given orders
that all necromancers, astrologers, and witches should be driven
from his states; but as the number of criminals augmented daily,
he found it necessary at last to resort to severer measures. In
consequence, he published several edicts, which may be found at
length in the "Capitulaire de Baluse." By these every sort of
magic, enchantment, and witchcraft was forbidden, and the
punishment of death decreed against those who in any way evoked
the devil, compounded love-philters, afflicted either man or
woman with barrenness, troubled the atmosphere, excited tempests,
destroyed the fruits of the earth, dried up the milk of cows, or
tormented their fellow-creatures with sores and diseases. All
persons found guilty of exercising these execrable arts were to
be executed immediately upon conviction, that the earth might be
rid of the curse and burden of their presence; and those who
consulted them might also be punished with death.'[48]
[48] M. Garinet's _Histoire de la Magic en France_, quoted
in _Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions_.
The Saxons, in the fifth century, imported into Britain the pagan
forms of the Fatherland; and the Anglo-Saxon (Christian) laws are
usually directed against practices connected with heathen
worship, of which many reminiscences were long preserved. Their
Hexe, or witch,[49] appears to be half-divine, half-diabolic, a
witch-priestess who derived her inspiration as much from heavenly
as from hellish sources; from some divinity or genius presiding
at a sacred grove or fountain. King Athelstan is said to have
made a law against witchcraft and similar acts which inflict
death; that if one by them be made away, and the thing cannot be
denied, such practicers shall be put to death; but if they
endeavour to purge themselves, and be cast by the threefold
ordeal, they shall be in prison 120 days; which ended, their
kindred may redeem them by the payment [in the universal style of
the English penalties] of 120 shillings to the king, and further
pay to the kindred of the slain the full valuation of the party's
head; and then the criminals shall also procure sureties for good
behaviour for the time to come; and the Danish prince Knut
denounces by an express doom the noxious acts of sorcery.[50]
Some of the witches who appear under Saxon domination are almost
as ferocious as those of the time of Bodin or of James; cutting
up the bodies of the dead, especially of children, devouring
their heart and liver in midnight revels. Fearful are the deeds
of Saxon sorcery as related by the old Norman or Anglo-Norman
writers. Roger of Wendover ('Flowers of History') records the
terrible fate of a hag who lived in the village of Berkely, in
the ninth century. The devil at the appointed hour (as in the
case of Faust) punctually carries off the soul of his slave, in
spite of the utmost watch and ward. These scenes are, perhaps,
rather Norman than Saxon. It was a favourite belief of the
ancients and mediævalists that the inhospitable regions of the
remoter North were the abode of demons who held in those suitable
localities their infernal revels, exciting storms and tempests:
and the monk-chronicler Bede relates the northern parts of
Britain were thus infested.[51]
[49] The Saxon 'witch' is derived, apparently, from the verb
'to weet,' to know, _be wise_. The Latin 'saga' is similarly
derived--'Sagire, sentire acute est: ex quo _sagæ_ anus,
quia malta _scire_ volunt.'--Cicero, _de Divinatione_.
[50] A curious collection of old English superstitions in
these and their allied forms, as exhibited in various
documents, appears in a recent work of authority, entitled
'Leechdoms, Wort-Cunning, and Starcraft of Early England.
Published by the authority of the Lords Commissioners of Her
Majesty's Treasury, under the direction of the Master of the
Rolls.' Diseases of all sorts are for the most part inflicted
upon mankind by evil demons, through the agency of spells and
incantations.
[51] Strutt derives the 'long-continued custom of swimming
people suspected of witchcraft' from the Anglo-Saxon mode of
judicial trial--the ordeal by water. Another 'method of
proving a witch,' by weighing against the Church Bible (a
formidable balance), is traced to some of their ancient
customs. James VI. (_Demonologie_) is convinced that 'God
hath appointed, for a supernatural sign of the monstrous
impiety of witches, that the water shall refuse to receive
them in her bosom that have shaken off them the sacred water
of baptism and wilfully refused the benefit thereof.'
From Scandinavia the Normans must have brought a conviction of
the truths of magic; and although they had been long settled,
before the conquest of England, in Northern France and in
Christianity, the traditional glories of the land from which were
derived their name and renown could not be easily forgotten. Not
long after the Conquest the Arabic learning of Spain made its way
into this country, and it is possible that Christian magic, as
well as science, may have been influenced by it. Magic,
scientifically treated, flourished in Arabic Spain, being
extensively cultivated, in connection with more real or practical
learning, by the polite and scientific Arabs. The schools of
Salamanca, Toledo, and other Saracenic cities were famous
throughout Europe for eminence in medicine, chymistry, astronomy,
and mathematics. Thither resorted the learned of the North to
perfect themselves in the then cultivated branches of knowledge.
The vast amount of scientific literature of the Moslems of Spain,
evidenced in their public libraries, relieves Southern Europe,
in part at least, from the stigma of a universal barbaric
illiteracy.[52] Several volumes of Arabian philosophy are said to
have been introduced to Northern Europe in the twelfth century;
and it was in the school of Toledo that Gerbert--a conspicuous
name in the annals of magic--acquired his preternatural
knowledge.
[52] The royal library of the Fatimites consisted of 100,000
manuscripts, elegantly transcribed and splendidly bound,
which were lent, without avarice or jealousy, to the
students of Cairo. Yet this collection must appear moderate
if we believe that the Ommiades of Spain had formed a
library of 600,000 volumes, 44 of which were employed in the
mere catalogue. Their capital, Cordova, with the adjacent
towns of Malaga, Almeira, and Murcia, had given birth to
more than 300 writers; and above 70 public libraries were
opened in the cities of the Andalusian kingdom.--_Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire_, lii.
The few in any way acquainted with Greek literature were indebted
to the Latin translations of the Arabs; while the Jewish
rabbinical learning, whose more useful lore was encumbered with
much mystical nonsense, enjoyed considerable reputation at this
period. The most distinguished of the rabbis taught in the
schools in London, York, Lincoln, Oxford, and Cambridge; and
Christendom has to confess its obligations for its first
acquaintance with science to the enemies of the Cross.[53] The
later Jewish authorities had largely developed the demonology of
the subjects of Persia; and the spiritual or demoniacal creations
of the rabbinical works of the Middle Ages might be readily
acceptable, if not coincident, to Christian faith. But the
Western Europeans, before the philosophy of the Spanish Arabs was
known, had come in contact with the Saracens and Turks of the
East during frequent pilgrimages to the tomb of Christ; and the
fanatical crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries
facilitated and secured the hazardous journey. Mohammedans of the
present day preserve the implicit faith of their ancestors in the
efficacy of the 113th chapter of the Koran against evil spirits,
the spells of witches and sorcerers--a chapter said to have been
revealed to the Prophet of Islam on the occasion of his having
been bewitched by the daughters of a Jew. The Genii or Ginn--a
Preadamite race occupying an intermediate position between angels
and men, who assume at pleasure the form of men, of the lower
animals, or any monstrous shape, and propagate their species
like, and sometimes with, human kind--appear in imposing
proportions in 'The Thousand and One Nights'--that rich display
of the fancy of the Oriental imagination.[54] Credulous and
confused in critical perception, the crusading adventurers for
religion or rapine could scarcely fail to confound with their own
the peculiar tenets of an ill-understood mode of thought; and
that the critical and discriminating faculties of the champions
of the Cross were not of the highest order, is illustrated by
their difficulty in distinguishing the eminently unitarian
religion of Mohammed from paganism. By a strange perversion the
Anglo-Norman and French chroniclers term the Moslems _Pagans_,
while the Saxon heathen are dignified by the title of _Saracens_;
and the names of Mahmoud, Termagaunt, Apollo, could be confounded
without any sense of impropriety. However, or in whatever degree,
Saracenic or rabbinical superstition tended to influence
Christian demonology, from about the end of the thirteenth
century a considerable development in the mythology of witchcraft
is perceptible.[55]
[53] Chymistry and Algebra still attest our obligation by
their Arabic etymology.
[54] A common tradition is that Soliman, king of the Jews,
having finally subdued--a success which he owed chiefly to
his vast magical resources--the rebellious spirits, punished
their disobedience by incarcerating them in various kinds of
prisons, for longer or shorter periods of time, in proportion
to their demerits. For the belief of the followers of
Mohammed in the magic excellence of Solomon, see Sale's
_Koran_, xxi. and xxvii. According to the prophet, the devil
taught men magic and sorcery. The magic of the Moslems, or,
at least, of the Egyptians, is of two kinds--high and
low--which are termed respectively _rahmanee_ (divine) and
_sheytanee_ (Satanic). By a perfect knowledge of the former
it is possible to the adept to 'raise the dead to life, kill
the living, transport himself instantly wherever he pleases,
and perform any other miracle. The _low_ magic (_sooflee_ or
_sheytanee_) is believed to depend on the agency of the devil
and evil spirits, and unbelieving genii, and to be used for
bad purposes and by bad men.' The _divine_ is 'founded on the
agency of God and of His angels, &c., and employed always for
good purposes, and only to be practised by men of probity,
who, by tradition or from books, learn the names of those
superhuman agents, &c.'--Lane's _Modern Egyptians_, chap.
xii.
[55] Its effect was probably to enlarge more than to modify
appreciably the current ideas. A large proportion of the
importations from the East may have been indebted to the
invention, as much as to the credulity, of the adventurers;
and we might be disposed to believe with Hume, that 'men
returning from so great a distance used the liberty [a too
general one] of imposing every fiction upon their believing
audience.'
Conspicuous in the vulgar prejudices is the suspicion attaching
to the extraordinary discoveries of philosophy and science.
Diabolic inspiration (as in our age infidelity and atheism are
popular outcries) was a ready and successful accusation against
ideas or discoveries in advance of the time. Roger Bacon, Robert
Grostête, Albert the Great, Thomas of Ercildoun, Michael
Scot--eminent names--were all more or less objects of a
persecuting suspicion. Bacon may justly be considered the
greatest name in the philosophy of the Middle Age. That anomaly
of mediævalism was one of the few who could neglect a vain and
senseless theology and system of metaphysics to apply his genius
to the solid pursuits of truer philosophy; and if his influence
has not been so great as it might have been, it is the fault of
the age rather than of the man. Condemned by the fear or jealousy
of his Franciscan brethren and Dominican rivals, Bacon was thrown
into prison, where he was excluded from propagating 'certain
suspected novelties' during fourteen years, a victim of his more
liberal opinions and of theological hatred. One of the traditions
of his diabolical compacts gives him credit at least for
ingenuity in avoiding at once a troublesome bargain and a
terrible fate. The philosopher's compact stipulated that after
death his soul was to be the reward and possession of the devil,
whether he died within the church's sacred walls or without them.
Finding his end approaching, that sagacious magician caused a
cell to be constructed in the walls of the consecrated edifice,
giving directions, which were properly carried out, for his
burial in a tomb that was thus neither within nor without the
church--an evasion of a long-expected event, which lost the
disappointed devil his prize, and probably his temper. 'Friar
Bacon' became afterwards a well-known character in the vulgar
fables: he was the type of the mediæval, as the poet Virgil was
of the ancient, magician. A popular drama was founded on his
reputed exploits and character in the sixteenth century, by
Robert Greene, in 'Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay;' but the famous
Dr. Faustus, the most popular magic hero of that time on the
stage, was a formidable rival. While his cotemporaries denounced
his rational method, preferring their theological jargon and
scholastic metaphysics; how much the Aristotle of mediævalism has
been neglected even latterly is a surprising fact.[56]
[56] The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge have not
exhibited the same impatience for a worthy edition of the
works of Bacon with which Clement IV. expected a copy of the
_Opus Majus_. His principal writings remained in MS. and
were not published to the world until the middle of last
century.
But in proof of the prevalence of the popular suspicion, not even
the all-powerful spiritual Chief of Christendom was spared. Many
of the pontiffs were charged with being addicted to the 'Black
Art'--an odd imputation against the vicars of Christ and the
successors of St. Peter. A charge, however, which we may be
disposed to receive as evidence that in a long and disgusting
list of ambitious priests and licentious despots there have been
some popes who, by cultivating philosophy, may have in some
sort partially redeemed the hateful character of Christian
sacerdotalism. At a council held at Paris in the interest of
Philip IV., Boniface VIII. was publicly accused of sorcery: it
was affirmed that 'he had a familiar demon [the Socratic
Genius?]; for he has said that if all mankind were on one side
and he alone on the other, he could not be mistaken either in
point of fact or of right, which presupposes a diabolical art'--a
dogma of sacerdotalism sufficiently confident, but scarcely
requiring a miraculous solution. This pope's death, it is said,
was hastened by these and similar reports of his dealings with
familiar spirits, invented in the interest of the French king to
justify his hostility. Boniface VIII.'s esoteric opinions on
Catholicism and Christianity, if correctly reported, did not show
the orthodoxy to be expected from the supreme pontiff: but he
would not be a singular example amongst the numerous occupants of
the chair of St. Peter.[57]
[57] Leo X. (whose tastes were rather profane than pious)
instructed or amused himself by causing to be discussed the
question of the nature of the soul--himself adopting the
opinion 'redit in nihilum quod fuit ante nihil,' and the
decision of Aristotle and of Epicurus.
John XXII., one of his more immediate successors, is said to be
the pope who first formally condemned the crime of witchcraft,
more systematically anathematised some hundred and fifty years
afterwards by Innocent VIII. He complains of the universal
infection of Christendom: that his own court even, and immediate
attendants, were attached to the devil's service, applying to him
on all occasions for help. The earliest judicial trial for the
crime on record in England is said to have occurred in the reign
of John. It is briefly stated in the 'Abbreviatio Placitorum'
that 'Agnes, the wife of Odo the merchant, accused Gideon of
sorcery; and he was acquitted by the judgment of iron.' The first
account of which much information is given occurs in Edward II.'s
reign, when the lives of the royal favourites, the De Spencers,
and his own, were attempted by a supposed criminal, one John of
Nottingham, with the assistance of his man, Robert Marshall, who
became king's evidence, and charged his master with having
conspired the king's death by the arts of sorcery.[58] Cupidity
or malice was the cause of this informer's accusation. One of the
distinguishing characteristics in its annals was the abuse of the
common prejudice for political purposes, or for the gratification
of private passion.
[58] _Narratives of Sorcery and Magic_, by Thomas Wright.
At the commencement of the fourteenth century the persecution and
final destruction of the Order of the Knights Templars in the
different countries of Europe, but chiefly in France (an instance
of the former abuse), is one of the most atrocious facts in
the history of those times. The fate of the Knights of the
Temple (whose original office it had been to protect their
coreligionists during pilgrimages in the Holy City, and whose
quarters were near the site of the Temple--whence the title of
the Order) in France was determined by the jealousy or avarice of
Philip IV. Founded in the first half of the twelfth century as a
half-religious, half-military institution, that celebrated Order
was, in its earlier career, in high repute for valour and success
in fighting the battles of the Cross. With wealth and fame, pride
and presumption increased to the highest pitch; and at the end of
150 years the champions of Christendom were equally hated and
feared. Their entire number was no more than 1,500; but they were
all experienced warriors, in possession of a number of important
fortresses, besides landed property to the amount, throughout
their whole extent, of nine thousand manorial estates. When the
Holy Land was hopelessly lost to the profane ambition or
religious zeal of the West, its defenders returned to their homes
loaded with riches and prestige if not with unstained honour, and
without insinuations that they had betrayed the cause of Christ
and the Crusades. Such was the condition of the Temple when
Philip, after exhausting the coffers of Jews and Christians,
found his treasury still unfilled. The opportunity was not to
be neglected: it remained only to secure the consent of the
Church, and to provoke the ready credulity of the people. Church
and State united, supported by the popular superstition,
were irresistible; and the destined victims expected their
impending fate in silent terror. At length the signal was given.
Prosecutions in 1307 were carried on simultaneously throughout
the provinces; but in French territory they assumed the most
formidable shape. In many places they were acquitted of the
gravest indictments: the English king, from a feeling of justice
or jealousy, expressed himself in their favour. As for Spain, 'it
was not in presence of the Moors, and on the classic ground of
Crusade, that the thought could be entertained of proscribing the
old defenders of Christendom.' Paris, where was their principal
temple, was the centre of the Order; their wealth and power were
concentrated in France; and thus the spoils not of a single
province, but almost of the entire body, were within the grasp of
a single monarch. Hence he assumed the right of presiding as
judge and executioner.[59] On October 12, 1307, Jacques Molay,
with the heads of the Temple, was invited to Paris, where, loaded
with favours, they were lulled into fatal security. The delusion
was soon abruptly dispelled. Molay, together with 140 of his
brethren, was arrested--the signal for a more general procedure
throughout the kingdom.
[59] Dante seems to refer to this recent spoliation in the
following verses:--
'Lo! the new Pilate, of whose cruelty
Such violence cannot fill the measure up,
With no decree to sanction, pushes on
Into the Temple his yet eager sails.'
_Purgat._ xx. Cary's Transl.
The charges have been resolved under three heads: (1) The denial
of Christ. (2) Treachery to the cause of Christianity. (3) The
worship of the devil, and the practice of sorcery. The principal
articles in the indictment were that the knights at initiation
formally denied the divinity of Christ, pronouncing he was not
truly a God--even going so far as to assert he was a false
prophet, a man who had been punished for his crimes; that they
had no hopes of salvation through him; that at the final
reception they always spat on the Cross, trampling it under foot;
that they worshipped the devil in the form of a cat, or some
other familiar animal; that they adored him in the figure of an
idol consecrated by anointing it with the fat of a new-born
infant, the illegitimate offspring of a brother; that a demon
appeared in the shape of a black or gray cat, &c. The idol is a
mysterious object. According to some it was a head with a beard,
or a head with three faces: by others it was said to be a skull,
a cat. One witness testified that in a chapter of the Order one
brother said to another, 'Worship this head; it is your God and
your Mahomet.' Of this kind was the general evidence of the
witnesses examined. Less incredible, perhaps, is the statement
that they sometimes saw demons in the appearance of women; and a
more credible allegation is that of a secret understanding with
the Turks.
Notoriously suspicious communication had been maintained with the
enemy; they even went so far as to adopt their style of dress and
living. Worse than all, by an amiable but unaccustomed tolerance,
the followers of Mohammed had been allowed a free exercise of
their religion, a sort of liberality little short of apostasy
from the faith. Without recounting all the horrors of the
persecution, it must be sufficient to repeat that fifty-four
of the wretched condemned, having been degraded by the Bishop
of Paris, were handed over to the flames. Four years afterwards
the scene was consummated by the burning of Jacques Molay.
Torture of the most dreadful sort had been applied to force
necessary confessions; and the complaint of one of the criminals
is significant--'I, single, as I am, cannot undertake to argue
with the Pope and the King of France.'[60] In attempting to
detect the mysterious facts of this dark transaction little
assistance is given by the contradictory statements of cotemporary
or later writers; some asserting the charges to be mere
fabrications throughout; others their positive reality; and recent
historians have attempted to substantiate or destroy them. Hallam
truly remarks that the rapacious and unprincipled conduct of
Philip, the submission of Clement V. to his will, the apparent
incredibility of the charges from their monstrousness, the just
prejudice against confessions obtained by torture and retracted
afterwards; the other prejudice, not always so just, but in the
case of those not convicted on fair evidence deserving a better
name, in favour of assertions of innocence made on the scaffold
and at the stake, created, as they still preserve, a strong
willingness to disbelieve the accusations which come so
suspiciously before us.[61] An approximation to the truth may
be obtained if, rejecting as improbable the accusations of
devil-worship and its concomitant rites which, invented to
amuse the vulgar, characterise the proceedings, we admit the
_probability_ of a secret understanding with the Turks, or the
_possibility_ of infidelity to the religion of Christ. Their
destruction had been predetermined; the slender element of truth
might soon be exaggerated and confounded with every kind of
fiction. Their pride, avarice, luxury, corrupt morals, would give
colour to the most absurd inventions.[62]
[60] Michelet's _History of France_, book v. 4. M. Michelet
suggests an ingenious explanation of some of their supposed
secret practices. 'The principal charge, the denial of the
Saviour, rested on an equivocation. The Templars might
confess to the denial without being in reality apostates.
Many averred that it was a symbolical denial, in imitation
of St. Peter's--one of those pious comedies in which the
antique Church enveloped the most serious acts of religion,
but whose traditional meaning was beginning to be lost in
the fourteenth century.' The idol-head, believed to
represent Mohammed or the devil, he supposes to have been 'a
representation of the Paraclete, whose festival, that of
Pentecost, was the highest solemnity of the Temple.' Some
have identified them, like those of the Albigenses or
Waldenses, with the ceremonies of the Gnostics.
[61] _View of the Middle Ages_, chap. i. The judicial
impartiality (eulogised by Macaulay) and patient
investigation of truth (the first merits of a historian) of
the author of the _Constitutional History of England_, might
almost entitle him to rank with the first of historians,
Gibbon.
[62] The alliance of the Church--of the Dominican Order in
particular--with the secular power against its once foremost
champions, is paralleled and explained by the causes that led
to the dissolution of the Order of Jesus by Clement XIV. in
the eighteenth century--fear and jealousy.
If the history of the extermination of the Templars exemplifies
in an eminent manner the political uses made by the highest in
office of a prevalent superstition, the story of Alice Kyteler
illustrates equally the manner in which it was prostituted to the
private purposes of designing impostors. The scene is in Ireland,
the period the first half of the fourteenth century; Richard de
Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory, being the principal prosecutor, and a
lady, Alice Kyteler, the defendant. The details are too tedious
to be repeated here;[63] but the articles upon which the
conviction of Alice Kyteler and her accomplices was sought are
not dissimilar to those just narrated. To give effect to their
sorcery they were in the habit of denying the faith for a year,
or shorter period, as the object to be attained was greater or
less. Demons were propitiated with sacrifices of living animals,
torn limb by limb and scattered (a Hecatean feast) about
cross-roads. It was alleged that by sorceries they obtained help
from the devil; that they impiously used the ceremonies of the
Church in nightly conventicles, pronouncing with lighted candles
of wax excommunication against the persons of their own husbands,
naming expressly every member from the sole of the foot to the
top of the head. Their compositions are of the Horatian and
Shakspearian sort. With the intestines of cocks were sacrificed
various herbs, the nails of dead men, hair, brains, and clothes
of children dying unbaptized, with other equally efficacious
ingredients, boiled in the skull of a certain famous robber
recently beheaded: powders, ointments, and candles of fat boiled
in the same skull were the intended instruments for exciting love
or hatred, and in affecting the bodies of the faithful. An unholy
connection existed between the Lady Alice and a demon in the form
sometimes of a black dog, sometimes of a cat. She was possessed
of a secret ointment for impregnating a piece of wood, upon
which, with her companions, she was carried to any part of the
world without hurt or hindrance: in her house was found a wafer
of consecrated bread inscribed with the name of the devil. The
event of this trial was the conviction and imprisonment of the
criminals, with the important exception of the chief object of
the bishop's persecution, who contrived an escape to England.
Petronilla de Meath was the first to suffer the extreme penalty.
This lady, by order of the bishop, had been six times flogged,
when, to escape a repetition of that barbarous infliction, she
made a public confession involving her fellow-prisoners. After
which Petronilla was carried out into the city and burned before
all the people--the first witch, it is said, ever burned in
Ireland. Of the other accused all were treated with more or less
severity; two were subsequently burned, some were publicly
flogged in the market-place and through the city, others
banished; a few, more fortunate, escaping altogether.
[63] They are given in full in _Narratives of Sorcery and
Magic from the most Authentic Sources_, by Thomas Wright. In
the _Annals of Ireland_, affixed to Camden's _Britannia_,
ed. 1695, sub anno 1325 A.D., the case of Dame Alice Ketyll
is briefly chronicled. Being cited and examined by the
Bishop of Ossory, it was discovered, among other things,
'That a certain spirit called Robin Artysson lay with her;
and that she offered him nine red cocks on a stone bridge
where the highway branches out into four several parts.
_Item_: That she swept the streets of Kilkenny with besoms
between Compline and Courefeu, and in sweeping the filth
towards the house of William Utlaw, her son, by way of
conjuring, wished that all the wealth of Kilkenny might flow
thither. The accomplices of this Alice in these devilish
practices were Pernil of Meth, and Basilia the daughter of
this Pernil. Alice, being found guilty, was fined by the
bishop, and forced to abjure her sorcery and witchcraft. But
being again convicted of the same practice, she made her
escape with Basilia, and was never found. But Pernil was
burnt at Kilkenny, and before her death declared that
William above-said deserved punishment as well as she--that
for a year and a day he wore the devil's girdle about his
bare body,' &c.
CHAPTER III.
Witchcraft and Heresy purposely confounded by the
Church--Mediæval Science closely connected with Magic and
Sorcery--Ignorance of Physiology the Cause of many of the
Popular Prejudices--Jeanne d'Arc--Duchess of
Gloucester--Jane Shore--Persecution at Arras.
What can hardly fail to be discerned in these prosecutions is the
confusion of heresy and sorcery industriously created by the
orthodox Church to secure the punishment of her offending
dissentients. There are few proceedings against the pretended
criminals in which it is not discoverable; the one crime being,
as a matter of course, the necessary consequence of the other. In
the interest of the Church as much as in the credulity of the
people must be sought the main cause of so violent an epidemic,
of so fearful a phenomenon in its continuance and atrocities, a
fact demonstrated by the whole course of the superstition in the
old times of Catholicism. Materials for exciting animosity and
indignation against suspected heretics were near at hand. In
the assurance of the pre-scientific world everything remote
from ordinary knowledge or experience was inseparable from
supernaturalism. What surpassed the limits of a very feeble
understanding, what was beyond the commonest experience of
every-day life, was with one accord relegated to the domain of
the supernatural, or rather to that of the devil. For what was
not done or taught by Holy Church must be of 'that wicked
One'--the cunning imitator.
In the twelfth century the Church was alarmed by the simultaneous
springing up of various sects, which, if too hastily claimed by
Protestantism as _Protestants_, in the modern sense, against
Catholic theology, were yet sufficiently hostile or dangerous to
engage the attention and to provoke the enmity of the pontiffs.
The fate of the Stedingers and others in Germany, of the
Paulicians in Northern France; of the Albigenses and Waldenses in
Southern Europe, is in accordance with this successful sort of
theological tactics. Many of the articles of indictment against
those outlaws of the Church and of society are extracted from the
primitive heresies, in particular from the doctrines of the
anti-Judaic and _spiritualising_ Gnostics, and their more than
fifty subdivided sects--Marcionites, Manicheans, &c. Gregory IV.
issued a bull in 1232 against the Stedingers, revolted from the
rule of the Archbishop of Bremen, where they are declared to be
accustomed to scorn the sacraments, hold communion with devils,
make representative images of wax, and consult with witches.[64]
[64] A second bull enters into details. On the reception of
a convert, a toad made its appearance, which was adored by
the assembled crowd. On sitting down to the banquet a black
cat comes upon the stage, double the size of an ordinary
dog, advancing backwards with up-turned tail. The neophytes,
one after another, kissed this feline demon, with due
solemnity, on the back. Walter Mapes has given an account of
the similar ceremonies of the _Publicans_ (Paulicians).
Heretical worship was of a most licentious as well as
disgusting kind. The religious meetings terminate always in
indiscriminate debauchery.
Alchymy, astrology, and kindred arts were closely allied to the
practice of witchcraft: the profession of medicine was little
better than the mixing of magical ointments, love-potions,
elixirs, not always of an innocent sort; and Sangrados were not
wanting in those days to trade upon the ignorance of their
patients.[65] Nor, unfortunately, are the genuine seekers after
truth who honestly applied to the study of nature exempt from the
charge of often an unconscious fraud. Monstrous notions mingled
with the more real results of their meritorious labours. Science
was in its infancy, or rather was still struggling to be freed
from the oppressive weight of speculative and theological
nonsense before emerging into existence. Many of the fancied
phenomena of witch-cases, like other physical or mental
eccentricities, have been explained by the progress of reason and
knowledge. Lycanthropy (the transformation of human beings into
wolves by sorcery), with the no less irrational belief in
demoniacal possession, the product of a diseased imagination and
brain, was one of the many results of mere ignorance of
physiology. In the seventeenth century lycanthropy was gravely
defended by doctors of medicine as well as of divinity, on the
authority of the story of Nebuchadnezzar, which proved undeniably
the possibility of such metamorphoses.
[65] Pliny (_Hist. Natur._ xxx.) 'observes,' as Gibbon
quotes him, 'that magic held mankind by the triple chain of
religion, of physic, and of astronomy.'
Cotemporary annalists record the extraordinary frenzy aggravated,
as it was, by the proceedings against the Templars, the signal of
witch persecutions throughout France. The historian of France
draws a frightful picture of the insecure condition of an
ignorantly prejudiced society. Accusations poured in; poisonings,
adulteries, forgeries, and, above all, charges of witchcraft,
which, indeed, entered as an ingredient into all causes, forming
their attraction and their horror. The judge shuddered on the
judgment seat when the proofs were brought before him in the
shape of philtres, amulets, frogs, black cats, and waxen images
stuck full of needles. Violent curiosity was blended at these
trials with the fierce joy of vengeance and a cast of fear. The
public mind could not be satiated with them: the more there were
burnt, the more there were brought to be burnt.[66] In 1398 the
Sorbonne, at the chancellor's suggestion, published 27 articles
against all sorts of sorcery, pictures of demons, and waxen
figures. Six years later a synod was specially convened at
Langres, and the pressing evil was anxiously deliberated at the
Council of Constance.
[66] Michelet, whose poetic-prose may appear hardly suitable
to the philosophic dignity of history, relating the fate of
two knights accused with a monk of having 'sinned' with the
king's daughter-in-law 'even on the holiest days,' and who
were castrated and flayed alive, truly enough infers that
'the pious confidence of the middle age which did not
mistrust the immuring of a great lady along with her knights
in the precincts of a castle, of a narrow tower; the
vassalage which imposed on young men as a feudal duty the
sweetest cares, was a dangerous trial to human nature.'
Conspicuous about this period, by their importance and iniquity,
are the cases of the Pucelle d'Orléans and the catastrophe of
Arras. Incited (it is a modern conviction) by a noble enthusiasm,
by her own ardent imagination, the Pucelle divested herself of
the natural modesty of her sex for the dress and arms of a
warrior; and 'her inexperienced mind, working day and night on
the favourite object, mistook the impulses of passion for
heavenly inspiration.' Reviewing the last scenes in the life of
that patriotic shepherdess, we hesitate whether to stigmatise
more the unscrupulous policy of the English authorities or the
base subservience of the Parliament of Paris. The English Regent
and the Cardinal of Winchester, unable to allege against their
prisoner (the saviour of her country, taken prisoner in a sally
from a besieged town, had been handed over by her countrymen to
the foreigner) any civil crime, were forced to disguise a
violation of justice and humanity in the pretence of religion;
and the Bishop of Beauvais presented a petition against her, as
an ecclesiastical subject, demanding to have her tried by an
ecclesiastical court for sorcery, impiety, idolatry, and magic.
The University of Paris acquiesced. Before this tribunal the
accused was brought, loaded with chains, and clothed in her
military dress. It was alleged that she had carried about a
standard consecrated by magical enchantments; that she had been
in the habit of attending at the witches' sabbath at a fountain
near the oak of Boulaincourt; that the demons had discovered to
her a magical sword consecrated in the Church of St. Catherine,
to which she owed her victories; that by means of sorcery she had
gained the confidence of Charles VIII. Jeanne d'Arc was convicted
of all these crimes, aggravated by _heresy_: her revelations were
declared to be inventions of the devil to delude the people.[67]
[67] Shakspeare brings the fiends upon the stage: their work
is done, and they now abandon the enchantress. In vain La
Pucelle invokes in her extremity--
'Ye familiar spirits, that are cull'd
Out of the powerful regions under earth,
Help me this once, that France may get the field.
Oh, hold me not with silence over-long!
'Where I was wont to feed you with my blood,
I'll lop a member off, and give it you,
In earnest of a further benefit;
So you do condescend to help me now.
* * * * *
Cannot my body, nor blood-sacrifice,
Entreat you to your wonted furtherance?
Then take my soul; my body, soul, and all,
Before that England give the French the foil.
See! they forsake me.
* * * * *
My ancient incantations are too weak
And hell too strong for me to buckle with.'
But a worthier, if contradictory, origin is assigned for her
enthusiasm when she replies to the foul aspersion of her
taunting captors--
'Virtuous, and holy; chosen from above,
By inspiration of celestial grace,
To work exceeding miracles on earth,
I never had to do with wicked spirits.
But you--that are polluted with your lusts,
Stain'd with the guiltless blood of innocents,
Corrupt and tainted with a thousand vices--
Because you want the grace that others have,
You judge it straight a thing impossible
To compass wonders, but by help of devils.'
Her ecclesiastical judges then consigned their prisoner to the
civil power; and, finally, in the words of Hume, 'this admirable
heroine--to whom the more generous superstition of the ancients
would have erected altars--was, on pretence of heresy and magic,
delivered over alive to the flames; and expiated by that dreadful
punishment the signal services she had rendered to her prince and
to her native country.'[68]
[68] _History of England_, XX. Shakspeare (_Henry VI._ part
ii. act i.) has furnished us with the charms and
incantations employed about the same time in the case of the
Duchess of Gloucester. Mother Jourdain is the representative
witch-hag.
Without detracting from the real merit of the patriotic martyr,
it might be suspected that, besides her inflamed imagination, a
pious and pardonable collusion was resorted to as a last
desperate effort to rouse the energy of the troops or the hopes
of the people--a collusion similar to that of the celebrated
Constantinian Cross, or of the Holy Lance of Antioch. Every
reader is acquainted with the fate of the great personages who in
England were accused, politically or popularly, of the crime; and
the histories of the Duchess of Gloucester and of Jane Shore are
immortalised by Shakspeare. In 1417, Joan, second wife of Henry
IV., had been sentenced to prison, suspected of seeking the
king's death by sorcery; a certain Friar Randolf being her
accomplice and agent. The Duchess of Gloucester, wife of Humphry
and daughter of Lord Cobham, was an accomplice in the witchcraft
of a priest and an old woman. Her associates were Sir Roger
Bolingbroke, priest; Margery Jordan or Guidemar, of Eye, in
Suffolk; Thomas Southwell, and Roger Only. It was asserted 'there
was found in their possession a waxen image of the king, which
they melted in a magical manner before a slow fire, with the
intention of making Henry's force and vigour waste away by like
insensible degrees.' The duchess was sentenced to do penance and
to perpetual imprisonment; Margery was burnt for a witch in
Smithfield; the priest was hanged, declaring his employers had
only desired to know of him how long the king would live; Thomas
Southwell died the night before his execution; Roger Only was
hanged, having first written a book to prove his own innocence,
and against the opinion of the vulgar.[69] Jane Shore (whose
story is familiar to all), the mistress of Edward IV., was
sacrificed to the policy of Richard Duke of Gloucester, more than
to any general suspicion of her guilt. Both the Archbishop of
York and the Bishop of Ely were involved with the citizen's wife
in demoniacal dealings, and imprisoned in the Tower. As for the
'harlot, strumpet Shore,' not being convicted, or at least
condemned, for the worse crime, she was found guilty of adultery,
and sentenced (a milder fate) to do penance in a white sheet
before the assembled populace at St. Paul's.[70]
[69] The historian of England justly reflects on this case
that the nature of the crime, so opposite to all common
sense, seems always to exempt the accusers from using the
rules of common sense in their evidence.
[70] This unfortunate woman was celebrated for her beauty
and, with one important exception, for her virtues; and, if
her vanity could not resist the fascination of a royal lover,
her power had been often, it is said, exerted in the cause of
humanity. Notwithstanding the neglect and ill-treatment
experienced from the ingratitude of former fawning courtiers
and people, she reached an advanced age, for she was living
in the time of Sir Thomas More, who relates that 'when the
Protector had awhile laid unto her, for the manner sake, that
she went about to bewitch him, and that she was of counsel
with the lord chamberlain to destroy him; in conclusion, when
no colour could fasten upon this matter, then he laid
heinously to her charge the thing that herself could not
deny, that all the world wist was true, and that natheless
every man laughed at to hear it then so suddenly so highly
taken--that she was naught of her body.'--_Reign of Richard
III._, quoted by Bishop Percy in _Reliques of Old English
Romance Poetry_. The deformed prince fiercely attributes his
proverbial misfortune to hostile witchcraft. He addresses his
trembling council:
'Look how I am bewitch'd; behold mine arm
Is, like a blasted sapling, wither'd up:
And this is Edward's wife, that monstrous witch,
Consorted with that harlot, strumpet Shore,
That by their witchcraft thus have marked me.'
_Richard III._ act iii. sc. 4.
More tremendous than any of the cases above narrated is that of
Arras, where numbers of all classes suffered. So transparent were
the secret but real motives of the chief agitators, that even the
unbounded credulity of the public could penetrate the thin
disguise. The affair commenced with the accusation of a woman of
Douai, called Demiselle (une femme de folle vie). Put to the
torture repeatedly, this wretched woman was forced to confess she
had frequented a meeting of sorcerers where several persons were
seen and recognised; amongst others Jehan Levite, a painter at
Arras. The chronicler of the fifteenth century relates the
diabolical catastrophe thus: 'A terrible and melancholy
transaction took place this year (1459) in the town of Arras, the
capital of the county of Artois, which said transaction was
called, I know not why, _Vaudoisie_: but it was said that certain
men and women transported themselves whither they pleased from
the places where they were seen, by virtue of a compact with the
devil. Suddenly they were carried to forests and deserts, where
they found assembled great numbers of both sexes, and with them a
devil in the form of a man, whose face they never saw. This devil
read to them, or repeated his laws and commandments in what way
they were to worship and serve him: then each person kissed his
back, and he gave to them after this ceremony some little money.
He then regaled them with great plenty of meats and wines, when
the lights were extinguished, and each man selected a female for
amorous dalliance; and suddenly they were transported back to the
places they had come from. For such criminal and mad acts many of
the principal persons of the town were imprisoned; and others of
the lower ranks, with women, and such as were known to be of this
sect, were so terribly tormented, that some confessed matters to
have happened as has been related. They likewise confessed to
have seen and known many persons of rank, prelates, nobles, and
governors of districts, as having been present at these meetings;
such, indeed, as, upon the rumour of common fame, their judges
and examiners named, and, as it were, put into their mouths: so
that through the pains of the torments they accused many, and
declared they had seen them at these meetings. Such as had been
thus accused were instantly arrested, and so long and grievously
tormented that they were forced to confess just whatever their
judges pleased, when those of the lower rank were inhumanly
burnt. Some of the richer and more powerful ransomed themselves
from this disgrace by dint of money; while others of the highest
orders were remonstrated with, and seduced by their examiners
into confession under a promise that if they would confess, they
should not suffer either in person or property. Others, again,
suffered the severest torments with the utmost patience and
fortitude. The judges received very large sums of money from such
as were able to pay them: others fled the country, or completely
proved their innocence of the charges made against them, and
remained unmolested. It must not be concealed (proceeds
Monstrelet) that many persons of worth knew that these charges
had been raked up by a set of wicked persons to harass and
disgrace some of the principal inhabitants of Arras, whom they
hated with the bitterest rancour, and from avarice were eager to
possess themselves of their fortunes. They at first maliciously
arrested some persons deserving of punishment for their crimes,
whom they had so severely tormented, holding out promises of
pardon, that they forced them to accuse whomsoever they were
pleased to name. This matter was considered [it must have been an
exceedingly ill-devised plot to provoke suspicion and even
indignation in such a matter] by all men of sense and virtue as
most abominable: and it was thought that those who had thus
destroyed and disgraced so many persons of worth would put their
souls in imminent danger at the last day.'[71]
[71] Enguerrand de Monstrelet's _Chronicles_, lib. iii. cap.
93, Johnes' Translation. _Vaudoisie_, which puzzles the
annalist, seems to disclose the pretence, if not the motive,
of the proceedings. Yet it is not easy to conceive so large
a number of all classes involved in the proscribed heresy of
the Vaudois in a single city in the north of France.
Meanwhile the inquisitor, Jacques Dubois, doctor in theology,
dean of Nôtre Dame at Arras, ordered the arrest of Levite the
artist, and made him confess he had attended the 'Vauldine;' that
he had seen there many people, men and women, burghers,
ecclesiastics, whose names were specified. The bishops' vicars,
overwhelmed by the number and quality of the involved, began to
dread the consequence, and wished to stop the proceedings. But
this did not satisfy the projects of two of the most active
promoters, Jacques Dubois and the Bishop of Bayrut, who urged the
Comte d'Estampes to use his authority with the vicars to proceed
energetically against the prisoners. Soon afterwards the matter
was brought to a crisis; the fate of the tortured convicts was
decided, and amidst thousands of spectators from all parts, they
were brought out, each with a mitre on his head, on which was
painted the devil in the form in which he appeared at the general
assemblies, and burned.
They admitted (under the severest torture, promises, and threats)
the truth of their meetings at the sabbaths. They used a sort of
ointment well known in witch-pharmacy for rubbing a small wooden
rod and the palms of their hands, and by a very common mode of
conveyance were borne away suddenly to the appointed rendezvous.
Here their lord and master was expecting them in the shape of a
goat with the face of a man and the tail of an ape. Homage was
first done by his new vassals offering up their soul or some part
of the body; afterwards in adoration kissing him on the back--the
accustomed salutation.[72] Next followed the different signs and
ceremonies of the infernal vassalage, in particular treading and
spitting upon the cross. Then to eating and drinking; after which
the guests joined in acts of indescribable debauchery, when the
devil took the form alternately of either sex. Dismissal was
given by a mock sermon, forbidding to go to church, hear mass, or
touch holy water. All these acts indicate schismatic offences
which yet for the most part are the characteristics of the
sabbaths in later Protestant witchcraft, excepting that the
wicked apostates are there usually _papistical_ instead of
_protestant_. During nearly two years Arras was subjected to the
arbitrary examinations and tortures of the inquisitors; and
an appeal to the Parliament of Paris could alone stop the
proceedings, 1461. The chance of acquittal by the verdict of the
public was little: it was still less by the sentence of judicial
tribunals.
[72] The 'Osculum in tergo' seems to be an indispensable
part of the Homagium or _Diabolagium_.
PART III.
MODERN FAITH.
CHAPTER I.
The Bull of Innocent VIII.--A new Incentive to the vigorous
Prosecution of Witchcraft--The 'Malleus Maleficarum'--Its
Criminal Code--Numerous Executions at the Commencement of
the Sixteenth Century--Examination of Christian
Demonology--Various Opinions of the Nature of
Demons--General Belief in the Intercourse of Demons and
other non-human Beings with Mankind.
Perhaps the most memorable epoch in the annals of witchcraft is
the date of the promulgation of the bull of Pope Innocent VIII.,
when its prosecution was formally sanctioned, enforced, and
developed in the most explicit manner by the highest authority in
the Church. It was in the year 1484 that Innocent VIII. issued
his famous bull directed especially against the crime in Germany,
whose inquisitors were empowered to seek out and burn the
malefactors _pro strigiatûs hæresi_. The bull was as follows:
'Innocent, Bishop, servant of the servants of God, in order to
the future memorial of the matter.... In truth it has come to our
ears, not without immense trouble and grief to ourselves, that
in some parts of Higher Germany ... very many persons of both
sexes, deviating from the Catholic faith, abuse themselves with
the demons, Incubus and Succubus; and by incantations, charms,
conjurations, and other wicked _superstitions_, by criminal acts
and offences have caused the offspring of women and of the lower
animals, the fruits of the earth, the grape, and the products of
various plants, men, women, and other animals of different kinds,
vineyards, meadows, pasture land, corn, and other vegetables of
the earth, to perish, be oppressed, and utterly destroyed; that
they torture men and women with cruel pains and torments,
internal as well as external; that they hinder the proper
intercourse of the sexes, and the propagation of the human
species. Moreover, they are in the habit of denying the very
faith itself. We therefore, willing to provide by opportune
remedies according as it falls to us by our office, by our
apostolical authority, by the tenor of these presents do appoint
and decree that they be convicted, imprisoned, punished, and
mulcted according to their offences.... By the apostolic rescript
given at Rome.'
This, in brief, is an outline of the proclamation of Innocent
VIII., the principles of which were developed in the more
voluminous work of the 'Malleus Maleficarum,'[73] or Hammer of
Witches, five years later. In the interval, the effect of so
forcible an appeal from the Head of the Church was such as might
be expected. Cumanus, one of the inquisitors in 1485, burned
forty-one witches, first shaving them to search for 'marks.'
Alciatus, a lawyer, tells us that another ecclesiastical officer
burned one hundred witches in Piedmont, and was prevented in his
plan of daily _autos-da-fé_ only by a general uprising of the
people, who at length drove him out of the country, when the
archbishop succeeded to the vacant office. In several provinces,
even the servile credulity of the populace could not tolerate the
excesses of the judges; and the inhabitants rose _en masse_
against their inquisitorial oppressors, dreading the entire
depopulation of their neighbourhood. As a sort of apology for the
bull of 1484 was published the 'Malleus'--a significantly
expressive title.[74] The authors appointed by the pope were
Jacob Sprenger, of the Order of Preachers, and Professor of
Theology in Cologne; John Gremper, priest, Master in Arts; and
Henry Institor. The work is divisible, according to the title,
into three parts--Things that pertain to Witchcraft; The Effects
of Witchcraft; and The Remedies for Witchcraft.
[73] Ennemoser (_History of Magic_), a modern and milder
Protestant, excepts to the general denunciations of Pope
Innocent ('who assumed this name, undoubtedly, because he
wished it to indicate what he really desired to be') by
Protestant writers who have used such terms as 'a scandalous
hypocrite,' 'a cursed war-song of hell,' 'hangmen's slaves,'
'rabid jailers,' 'bloodthirsty monsters,' &c.; and thinks
that 'the accusation which was made against Innocent could
only have been justly founded if the pope had not
participated in the general belief, if he had been wiser
than his time, and really seen that the heretics were no
allies of the devil, and that the witches were no heretics.'
[74] The complete title is 'MALLEUS MALEFICARUM in tres
partes divisus, in quibus I. Concurrentia ad maleficia; II.
Maleficiorum effectus; III. Remedia adversus maleficia. Et
modus denique procedendi ac puniendi maleficas abunde
continetur, præcipue autem omnibus inquisitoribus et divini
verbi concionatoribus utilis et necessarius.' The original
edition of 1489 is the one quoted by Hauber, _Bibliotheca
Mag._, and referred to by Ennemoser, _History of Magic_.
In this apology the editors are careful to affirm that they
_collected_, rather than _furnished_, their materials originally,
and give as their venerable authorities the names of Dionysius
the Areopagite, Chrysostom, Hilary, Augustin, Gregory I.,
Remigius, Thomas Aquinas, and others. The writers exult in the
consciousness of security, in spite of the attempts of the
demons, day and night, to deter them from completing their
meritorious labours. Stratagems of every sort are employed in
vain. In their judgment the worst species of human wickedness
sink into nothing, compared with apostasy from the Church and, by
consequence, alliance with hell. A genuine or pretended dread of
sorcery, and an affected contempt for the female sex, with an
extremely low estimate of its virtues (adopting the language of
the Fathers), characterises the opinions of the compilers.
Ennemoser has made an abstract from the 'Demonomagie' of Horst
(founded on Hauber's original work), of the 'Hexenhammer,' under
its three principal divisions. The third part, which contains the
Criminal Code, and consists of thirty-five questions, is the most
important section. It is difficult to decide which is the more
astonishing, the perfect folly or the perfect iniquity of the
Code: it is easier to understand how so many thousands of victims
were helplessly sacrificed. The arrest might take place on the
simple rumour of a witch being found somewhere, without any
previous denunciation. The most abandoned and the most infamous
persons may be witnesses: no criminal is too bad. Even a witch or
heretic (the _worst_ criminal in the eye of ecclesiastical law)
is capable of giving evidence. Husbands and wives may witness one
against the other; and the testimony of children was received as
good evidence.
The ninth and tenth chapters consider the question 'whether a
defence was to be allowed; if an advocate defended his client
beyond what was requisite, whether it was not reasonable that he
too should be considered guilty; for he is a patron of witches
and heretics.... Thirteenth chapter: What the judge has to notice
in the torture-chamber. Witches who have given themselves up for
years, body and soul, to the devil, are made by him so insensible
to pain on the rack, that they rather allow themselves to be torn
to pieces than confess. Fourteenth chapter: Upon torture and the
mode of racking. In order to bring the accused to voluntary
confession, you may promise her her life; which promise, however,
may afterwards be withdrawn. If the witch does not confess the
first day, the torture to be continued the second and third days.
But here the difference between continuing and repeating is
important. The torture may not be _continued_ without fresh
evidence, but it may be _repeated_ according to judgment.
Fifteenth chapter: Continuance of the discovery of a witch by her
marks. Amongst other signs, weeping is one. It is a damning thing
if the accused, on being brought up, cannot shed tears. The
clergy and judges lay their hands on the head of the accused, and
adjure her by the hot tears of the Most Glorified Virgin that in
case of her innocence, she shed abundant tears in the name of God
the Father.'[75]
[75] Ennemoser's _History of Magic_. Translated by W.
Howitt. There are three kinds of men whom witchcraft cannot
touch--magistrates; clergymen exercising the pious rites of
the Church; and saints, who are under the immediate
protection of the angels.
The 'Bull' and 'Malleus' were the code and textbook of Witchcraft
amongst the Catholics, as the Act and 'Demonologie' of James VI.
were of the Protestants. Perhaps the most important result of the
former was to withdraw entirely the authorised prosecution and
punishment of the criminals from the civil to the ecclesiastical
tribunals. Formerly they had a divided jurisdiction. At the
same time the fury of popular and judicial fanaticism was
greatly inflamed by this new sanction. Immediately, and almost
simultaneously, in different parts of Europe, heretical witches
were hunted up, tortured, burned, or hanged; and those parts of
the Continent most infected with the widening heresy suffered
most. The greater number in Germany seems to show that the
dissentients from Catholic dogma there were rapidly increasing,
some time before Luther thundered out his denunciations. An
unusual storm of thunder and lightning in the neighbourhood of
Constance was the occasion of burning two old women, Ann Mindelen
and one 'Agnes.'[76] One contemporary writer asserts that 1,000
persons were put to death in one year in the district of Como;
and Remigius, one of the authorised _inquisitores pravitatis
hæreticæ_, boasts of having burned 900 in the course of fifteen
years. Martin del Rio states 500 were executed in Geneva in
the short space of three months in 1515; and during the next
five years 40 were burned at Ravensburgh. Great numbers suffered
in France at the same period. At Calahorra, in Spain, in 1507,
a vast _auto-da-fé_ was exhibited, when 39 women, denounced
as sorceresses, were committed to the flames--religious
carnage attested by the unsuspected evidence of the judges and
executioners themselves.
[76] Hutchinson's _Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft_,
chap ii.
It is opportune here to examine the common beliefs of demonology
and sorcery as they existed in Europe. Christian demonology is a
confused mixture of pagan, Oriental, and Christian ideas. The
Christian Scriptures have seemed to suggest and sanction a
constant personal interference of the 'great adversary,' who is
always traversing the earth 'seeking whom he may devour;' and his
popular figure is represented as a union of the great dragon,
the satyrs, and fauns. Nor does he often appear without one or
other of his recognised marks--the cloven foot, the goat's
horns, beard, and legs, or the dragon's tail. With young and
good-looking witches he is careful to assume the recommendations
of a young and handsome man, whilst it is not worth while to
disguise so unprepossessing peculiarities in his incarnate
manifestations to _old_ women, the enjoyment of whose souls is
the great purpose of seduction.
Sir Thomas Browne ('Vulgar Errors'), a man of much learning and
still more superstitious fancy, speciously explains the
phenomenon of the cloven foot. He suggests that 'the ground of
this opinion at first might be his frequent appearing in the
shape of a goat, which answers this description. This was the
opinion of the ancient Christians concerning the apparitions of
_panites_, fauns, and satyrs: and of this form we read of one
that appeared to Anthony in the wilderness. The same is also
confirmed from exposition of Holy Scripture. For whereas it is
said "Thou shalt not offer unto devils," the original word is
_Seghuirim_, i. e. rough and hairy goats; because in that shape
the devil most often appeared, as is expounded by the rabbins, as
Tremellius hath also explained; and as the word _Ascimah_, the
God of Emath, is by some explained.' Dr. Joseph Mede, a pious and
learned divine, author of the esteemed 'Key to the Apocalypse,'
pronounces that 'the devil could not appear in human shape while
man was in his integrity, because he was a spirit fallen from his
first glorious perfection, and therefore must appear in such
shape which might argue his imperfection and abasement, which was
the shape of a beast; otherwise [he plausibly contends] no reason
can be given why he should not rather have appeared to Eve in the
shape of a woman than of a serpent. But since the fall of man the
case is altered; now we know he can take upon him the shape of a
man. He appears in the shape of man's imperfection rather for age
or deformity, as like an old man (for so the witches say); and,
perhaps, it is not altogether false, which is vulgarly affirmed,
that the devil appearing in human shape has always a deformity
of some uncouth member or other, as though he could not yet take
upon him human shape entirely, for that man is not entirely and
utterly fallen as he is.' Whatever form he may assume, the
cloven foot must always be visible under every disguise; and
Othello looks first for that fabulous but certain sign when he
scrutinises his treacherous friend.
Reginald Scot's reminiscences of what was instilled into him in
the nursery may possibly occur to some even at this day. 'In our
childhood,' he complains, 'our mothers' maids have so terrified
us with an ugly devil having horns on his head, fire in his
mouth, a tail in his breech, eyes like a bison, fangs like a dog,
a skin like a _niger_, a voice roaring like a lion, whereby we
start and are afraid when we hear one cry Boh!' Chaucer has
expressed the belief of his age on the subject. It seems to have
been a proper duty of a parish priest to bring to the notice of
his ecclesiastical superior, with other crimes, those of sorcery.
The Friar describes his 'Erchedeken' as one--
That boldely didde execucioun
In punyschying of fornicacioun,
Of wicchecraft....
This ecclesiastic employed in his service a subordinate
'sompnour,' who, in the course of his official duty, one day
meets a devil, whose 'dwellynge is in Helle,' who condescends to
enlighten the officer on the dark subject of demon-apparitions:--
When us liketh we can take us on
Or ellis make you seme that we ben schape
Som tyme like a man or like an ape;
Or like an aungel can I ryde or go:
It is no wonder thing though it be so,
A lowsy jogelour can deceyve the;
And, parfay, yet can I more craft than he.
To the question why they are not satisfied with _one_ shape for
all occasions, the devil answers at length:--
Som tyme we ben Goddis instrumentes
And menes to don his commandementes,
Whan that him liste, upon his creatures
In divers act and in divers figures.
Withouten him we have no might certayne
If that him liste to stonden ther agayne.
And som tyme at our prayer, have we leve
Only the body and not the soule greve;
Witnesse on Job, whom we didde ful wo.
And som tyme have we might on bothe two,
That is to say of body and soule eeke
And som tyme be we suffred for to seeke
Upon a man and don his soule unrest
And not his body, and al is for the best.
Whan he withstandeth our temptacioun
It is a cause of his savacioun.
Al be it so it was naught our entente
He schuld be sauf, but that we wolde him hente.
And som tyme we ben servaunt unto man
As to the Erchebisschop Saynt Dunstan;
And to the Apostolis servaunt was I.
* * * * *
Som tyme we fegn, and som tyme we ryse
With dede bodies, in ful wonder wyse,
And speke renably, and as fayre and wel
As to the Phitonissa dede Samuel:
And yit wil som men say, it was not he.
I do no fors of your divinitie.[77]
[77] _Canterbury Tales._ T. Wright's Text. Chaucer, the
English Boccaccio in verse, attacks alike with his sarcasms
the Church and the female sex.
Jewish theology, expanded by their leading divines, includes a
formidable array of various demons; and the whole of nature in
Christian belief was peopled with every kind
'Of those demons that are found
In fire, air, flood, or under ground.'
Various opinions have been held concerning the nature of devils
and demons. Some have maintained, with Tertullian, that they are
'the souls of baser men.' It is a disputed question whether they
are mortal or immortal; subject to, or free from, pain. 'Psellus,
a Christian, and sometime tutor to Michael Pompinatius, Emperor
of Greece, a great observer of the nature of devils, holds they
are corporeal, and live and die: ... that they feel pain if they
be hurt (which Cardan confirms, and Scaliger justly laughs him to
scorn for); and if their bodies be cut, with admirable celerity
they come together again. Austin approves as much; so doth
Hierome, Origen, Tertullian, Lactantius, and many eminent fathers
of the Church; that in their fall their bodies were changed into
a more aerial and gross substance.' The Platonists and some
rabbis, Porphyrius, Plutarch, Zosimus, &c., hold this opinion,
which is scornfully denied by some others, who assert that they
only deceive the eyes of men, effecting no real change. Cardan
believes 'they feed on men's souls, and so [a worthy origin]
belike that we have so many battles fought in all ages,
countries, is to make them a feast and their sole delight: but if
displeased they fret and chafe (for they feed belike on the souls
of beasts, as we do on their bodies) and send many plagues
amongst us.'
Their exact numbers and orders are differently estimated by
different authorities. It is certain that they fill the air, the
earth, the water, as well as the subterranean globe. The air,
according to Paracelsus, is not so full of flies in summer as it
is at all times of invisible devils. Some writers, professing to
follow Socrates and Plato, determine nine sorts. Whatever or
wherever the supralunary may be, our world is more interested in
the sublunary tribes. These are variously divided and subdivided.
One authority computes six distinct kinds--Fiery, Aerial,
Terrestrial, Watery, Subterranean and Central: these last
inhabiting the central regions of the interior of the earth. The
Fiery are those that work 'by blazing stars, fire-drakes; they
counterfeit suns and moons, stars oftentimes. The Aerial live,
for the most part, in the air, cause many tempests, thunder and
lightning, tear oaks, fire steeples, houses; strike men and
beasts; make it rain stones, as in Livy's time, wool, frogs, &c.;
counterfeit armies in the air, strange noises ... all which Guil.
Postellus useth as an argument (as, indeed, it is) to persuade
them that will not believe there be spirits or devils. They
cause whirlwinds on a sudden and tempestuous storms, which,
though our meteorologists generally refer to natural causes, yet
I am of Bodine's mind, they are more often caused by those aerial
devils in their several quarters; for they ride on the storms as
when a desperate man makes away with himself, which, by hanging
or drowning, they frequently do, as Kormannus observes,
_tripudium agentes_, dancing and rejoicing at the death of a
sinner. These can corrupt the air, and cause sickness, plagues,
storms, shipwrecks, fires, inundations.... Nothing so familiar
(if we may believe those relations of Saxo Grammaticus, Olaus
Magnus, &c.) as for witches and sorcerers in Lapland, Lithuania,
and all over Scandia to sell winds to mariners and cause
tempests, which Marcus Paulus, the Venetian, relates likewise of
the Tartars.[78]
[78] It is still the custom of the Tartar or Thibetian
Lamas, or at least of some of them, to scatter charms to the
winds for the benefit of travellers. M. Huc's _Travels in
Tartary, Thibet, &c._
'These are they which Cardan thinks desire so much carnal
copulation with witches (Incubi and Succubi), transform bodies,
and are so very cold if they be touched, and that serve
magicians.... Water devils are those naiads or water nymphs which
have been heretofore conversant about waters and rivers. The
water (as Paracelsus thinks) is their chaos, wherein they live
... appearing most part (saith Trithemius) in women's shapes.
Paracelsus hath several stories of them that have lived and been
married to mortal men, and so continued for certain years with
them, and after, upon some dislike, have forsaken them. Such an
one was Egeria, with whom Numa was so familiar, Diana, Ceres,
&c.... Terrestrial devils are Lares, Genii, Fauns, Satyrs,
Wood-nymphs, Foliots, Fairies, Robin Goodfellows, Trulli; which,
as they are most conversant with men, so they do them most harm.
Some think it was they alone that kept the heathen people in awe
of old.... Subterranean devils are as common as the rest, and do
as much harm. Olaus Magnus makes six kinds of them, some bigger,
some less, commonly seen about mines of metals, and are some of
them noxious; some again do no harm (they are guardians of
treasure in the earth, and cause earthquakes). The last (sort)
are conversant about the centre of the earth, to torture the
souls of damned men to the day of judgment; their egress and
ingress some suppose to be about Ætna, Lipari, Hecla, Vesuvius,
Terra del Fuego, because many shrieks and fearful cries are
continually heard thereabouts, and familiar apparitions of dead
men, ghosts, and goblins.'
As for the particular offices and operations of those various
tribes, 'Plato, in _Critias_, and after him his followers,
gave out that they were men's governors and keepers, our
lords and masters, as we are of our cattle. They govern
provinces and kingdoms by oracles, auguries, dreams, rewards
and punishments, prophecies, inspirations, sacrifices and
religious _superstitions_, varied in as many forms as there be
diversity of spirits; they send wars, plagues, peace, sickness,
health, dearth, plenty, as appears by those histories of
Thucydides, Livius, Dionysius Halicarnassensis, with many others,
that are full of their wonderful stratagems.' They formerly devoted
themselves, each one, to the service of particular individuals as
familiar demons, 'private spirits.' Numa, Socrates, and many
others were indebted to their _Genius_. The power of the devil is
not limited to the body. 'Many think he can work upon the body,
but not upon the mind. But experience pronounceth otherwise, that
he can work both upon body and mind. Tertullian is of this
opinion.'
The causes and inducements of 'possession' are many. One writer
affirms that 'the devil being a slender, incomprehensible spirit
can easily insinuate and wind himself into human bodies, and
cunningly couched in our bowels, vitiate our healths, terrify our
souls with fearful dreams, and shake our minds with furies. They
go in and out of our bodies as bees do in a hive, and so provoke
and tempt us as they perceive our temperature inclined of itself
and most apt to be deluded.... Agrippa and Lavater are persuaded
that this humour [the melancholy] invites the devil into it,
wheresoever it is in extremity, and, of all other, melancholy
persons are most subject to diabolical temptations and illusions,
and most apt to entertain them, and the devil best able to work
upon them. 'But whether,' declares Burton, 'by obsession, or
possession, or otherwise, I will not determine; 'tis a difficult
question.'[79]
[79] _The Anatomy of Melancholy_, by Democritus junior;
edited by Democritus minor. Part i. sect. 2. An equally
copious and curious display of learning. Few authors,
probably, have been more plagiarised.
The mediævalists believed themselves surrounded everywhere by
spiritual beings; but unlike the ancients, they were convinced
not so much that they were the peculiar care of heaven as that
they were the miserable victims of hellish malice, ever seeking
their temporal as well as eternal destruction; a fact apparent in
the whole mediæval literature and art.[80]
[80] Sismondi (_Literature of the South of Europe_) has
observed of the greatest epic of the Middle Age, that
'Dante, in common with many fathers of the Church, under the
supposition that paganism, in the persons of the infernal
gods, represented the fallen angels, has made no scruple to
adopt its fables.' Tasso, at a later period, introduces the
deities of heathendom. In the _Gerusalemme Liberata_ they
sit in council to frustrate the plans and destroy the forces
of the Christian leaders before Jerusalem (iv). Ismeno, a
powerful magician in the ranks of the Turks, brings up a
host of diabolic allies to guard the wood which supplied the
infidels with materials for carrying on the siege of the
city (xiii.). And the masterpieces of art of Guido or
Raffaelle, which excite at once admiration and despair in
their modern disciples, consecrated and immortalised the
vulgar superstition.
Glanvil's conjectures on the cause of the _comparative_ rarity of
demoniac and other spiritual apparitions in general may interest
the credulous or curious reader. ''Tis very probable,' reasons
the Doctor, 'that the state wherein they are will not easily
permit palpable intercourses between the bad genii and mankind:
since 'tis like enough their own laws and government do not allow
their frequent excursions into the world. Or it may with great
probability be supposed that 'tis a very hard and painful thing
for them to force their thin and _tenuious_ bodies into a visible
consistence, and such shapes as are necessary for their designs
in their correspondence with witches. For in this action their
bodies must needs be exceedingly compressed, which cannot well be
without a painful sense. And this is, perhaps, a reason why there
are so few apparitions, and why appearing spirits are commonly in
such a hurry to be gone, viz. that they may be delivered of the
unnatural pressure of their tender vehicles,[81] which I confess
holds more in the apparition of good than evil spirits ... the
reason of which probably is the greater subtlety and tenuity of
the former, which will require far greater degrees of compression
and consequently of pain to make them visible; whereas the latter
are feculent and gross, and so nearer allied to palpable
existences, and more easily reducible to appearance and
visibility.'[82]
[81] So specious a theory must have occurred to, and its
propriety will easily be recognised by, the spirit and ghost
advocates of the present day.
[82] _Sadducismus Triumphatus._ Considerations about
Witchcraft. Sect. xi.
'Palpable intercourses between the bad genii and mankind' are
more frequent than Dr. Glanvil was disposed to believe; and he
must have been conversant with the acts of Incubus and Succubus.
In the first age (orbe novo c[oe]loque recenti) under the
Saturnian regime, 'while yet there was no fear of Jove,'[83]
innocence prevailed undisturbed; but soon as the silver age was
inaugurated by the usurpation of Jove, _liaisons_ between gods
and mortals became frequent. Love affairs between good or bad
'genii' and mankind are of common occurrence in the mythology of
most peoples. In the romance-tales of the middle age lovers find
themselves unexpectedly connected with some mysterious being of
inhuman kind. The writers in defence of witchcraft quote Genesis
vi. in proof of the reality of such intercourses; and Justin
Martyr and Tertullian, the great apologists of Christianity, and
others of the Fathers, interpret _Filios Dei_ to be angels or
evil spirits who, enamoured with the beauty of the women, begot
the primeval giants.[84]
[83] 'Jove nondum Barbato.'
[84] Milton indignantly exclaims, alluding to this common
fancy of the leaders of the Primitive Church, 'Who would
think him fit to write an apology for Christian faith to the
Roman Senate that could tell them "how of the angels"--of
which he must needs mean those in Genesis called the Sons of
God--"mixing with women were begotten the devils," as good
Justin Martyr in his Apology told them.' (_Reformation in
England_, book i.). And 'Clemens Alexandrinus, Sulpicius
Severus, Eusebius, &c., make a twofold fall of angels--one
from the beginning of the world; another a little before the
deluge, as Moses teacheth us, openly professing that these
_genii_ can beget and have carnal copulation with woman'
(_Anatomy of Melancholy_, part i.). Robert Burton gives in
his adhesion to the sentiments of Lactantius (xiv. 15). It
seems that the later Jewish devils owe their origin
(according to the Talmudists, as represented by Pererius in
the _Anatomy_) to a former wife of Adam, called Lilis, the
predecessor of Eve.
Some tremendous results of diabolic connections appear in the
metrical romances of the twelfth or thirteenth century, as well
as in those early Anglo-Norman chroniclers or fabulists, who have
been at the pains to inform us of the pre-historic events of
their country. The author of the romance-poem of the well-known
Merlin--so famous in British prophecy--in introducing his hero,
enters upon a long dissertation on the origin of the infernal
arts. He informs us on the authority of 'David the prophet, and
of Moses,' that the greater part of the angels who rebelled under
the leadership of Lucifer, lost their former power and beauty,
and became 'fiendes black:' that instead of being precipitated
into 'helle-pit,' many remained in mid-air, where they still
retain the faculty of seducing mortals by assuming whatever
shape they please. These had been much concerned at the
miraculous birth of Christ; but it was hoped to counteract the
salutary effects of that event, by producing from some virgin a
semi-demon, whose office it should be to disseminate sorcerers
and wicked men. For this purpose the devil[85] prepares to seduce
three young sisters; and proceeds at once in proper disguise to
an old woman, with whose avarice and cunning he was well
acquainted. Her he engaged by liberal promises to be mediatrix in
the seduction of the elder sister, whom he was prevented from
attempting in person by the precautions of a holy hermit. Like
'the first that fell of womankind,' the young lady at length
consented; was betrayed by the _fictitious_ youth, and condemned
by the law to be burnt alive.
[85] Probably,
'Belial, the dissolutest spirit that fell,
The sensualist; and after Asmodai
The fleshliest Incubus.'--_Par. Reg._
The same fate, excepting the fearful penalty, awaited the second.
And now, too late, the holy hermit became aware of his disastrous
negligence. He strictly enjoined on the third and remaining
sister a constant watch. Her security, however, was the cause of
her betrayal. On one occasion, in a moment of remissness, she
forgot her prayers and the sign of the cross, before retiring for
the night. No longer excluded, the fiend, assuming human shape,
effected his purpose. In due time a son was born, whose
parentage was sufficiently evinced by an entire covering of black
hair, although his limbs were well-formed, and his features fine.
Fortunately, the careless guardian had exactly calculated the
moment of the demon's birth; and no sooner was he informed of the
event, than the new-born infant was borne off to the regenerating
water, when he was christened by the name of Merlin; the fond
hopes of the demons being for this time, at least, irretrievably
disappointed. How Merlin, by superhuman prowess and knowledge,
defeated the Saracens (Saxons) in many bloody battles; his
magical achievements and favour at the court of King Vortigern
and his successors, are fully exhibited by the author of the
history.[86] Geoffrey of Monmouth recounts them as matters of
fact; and they are repeated by Vergil in the History of Britain,
composed under the auspices of Henry VIII.
[86] See _Early English Metrical Romances_, ed. by Sir H.
Ellis.
By the ancients, whole peoples were sometimes said to be derived
from these unholy connections. Jornandes, the historian of the
Goths, is glad to be able to relate their hated rivals, the Huns
(of whom the Kalmuck Tartars are commonly said to be the modern
representatives), to have owed their origin to an intercourse of
the Scythian witches with infernal spirits. The extraordinary
form and features of those dreaded emigrants from the steppes of
Tartary, had suggested to the fear and hatred of their European
subjects, a fable which Gibbon supposes might have been derived
from a more pleasing one of the Greeks.[87]
[87] A sufficiently large collection from ancient and modern
writers of the facts of _inhuman_ connections may be seen in
the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, part iii. sect. 2. Having
repeated the assertions of previous authors proving the fact
of intercourses of human with inferior species of animals,
Burton fortifies his own opinion of their reality by
numerous authorities. If those stories be true, he reasons,
that are written of Incubus and Succubus, of nymphs,
lascivious fauns, satyrs, and those heathen gods which were
devils, those lascivious Telchines of whom the Platonists
tell so many fables; or those familiar meetings in our day
[1624] and company of witches and devils, there is some
probability for it. I know that Biarmannus, Wierus, and some
others stoutly deny it ... but Austin (lib. xv. _de Civit.
Dei_) doth acknowledge it. And he refers to Plutarch, _Vita
Numæ; Wierus, de Præstigiis Dæmon., Giraldus Cambrensis,
Malleus Malef., Jacobus Reussus, Godelman, Erastus, John
Nider, Delrio, Lipsius, Bodin, Pererius, King James, &c_.
The learned and curious work of the melancholy Student of
Christ Church and Oxford Rector has been deservedly
commended by many eminent critics. That 'exact mathematician
and curious calculator of nativities' calculated exactly,
according to Anthony Wood (_Athenæ Oxon._), the period of
his own death--1639.
The acts of Incubus assume an important part in witch-trials and
confessions. Incubus is the visitor of females, Succubus of
males. Chaucer satirises the gallantries of the vicarious Incubus
by the mouth of the wife of Bath (that practical admirer of
Solomon and the Samaritan woman),[88] who prefaces her tale with
the assurance:--
That maketh that ther ben no fayeries,
For ther as wont was to walken an elf
Ther walketh noon but the _Lymitour_ himself.
* * * * *
Women may now go safely up and downe;
In every busch and under every tre
Ther is noon other _Incubus_ but he.
[88] The wife of Bath, who had buried only her fifth
husband, must appear modest by comparison. Not to mention
Seneca's or Martial's assertions or insinuations, St. Jerome
was acquainted with the case of a woman who had buried her
_twenty-second_ husband, whose conjugal capacity, however,
was exceeded by the Dutch wife who, on the testimony of
honest John Evelyn, had buried her _twenty-fifth_ husband!
Reginald Scot has devoted several chapters of his work to a
relation of the exploits of Incubus.[89] But he honestly warns
his readers 'whose chaste ears cannot well endure to hear of such
lecheries (gathered out of the books of divinity of great
authority) to turn over a few leaves wherein I have, like a
groom, thrust their stuff, even that which I myself loath, as
into a stinking corner: howbeit none otherwise, I hope, but that
the other parts of my writing shall remain sweet.' He repeats a
story from the 'Vita Hieronymi,' which seems to insinuate some
suspicion of the character of a certain Bishop Sylvanus. It
relates that one night Incubus invaded a certain lady's bedroom.
Indignant at so unusual, or at least disguised, an apparition,
the lady cried out loudly until the guests of the house came and
found it under the bed in the likeness of the bishop; 'which holy
man,' adds Scot, 'was much defamed thereby.' Another tradition or
legend seems to reflect upon the chastity of the greatest saint
of the Middle Ages.[90] The superhuman oppression of Incubus is
still remembered in the proverbial language of the present day.
The horrors of the infernal compacts and leagues, as exhibited in
the fates of wizards or magicians at the last hour, formed one of
the most popular scenes on the theatrical stage. Christopher
Marlow, in 'The Life and Death of Dr. Faustus,' and Robert
Greene, in 'Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,' in the Elizabethan
age, dramatised the common, conception of the Compact.
[89] See the fourth book of the _Discoverie_.
[90] 'It is written in the legend of St. Bernard,' we are
told, 'that a pretty wench that had the use of Incubus his
body by the space of six or seven years in Aquitania (being
belike weary of him for that he waxed old), would needs go to
St. Bernard another while. But Incubus told her if she would
so forsake him, he would be revenged upon her. But befal what
would, she went to St. Bernard, who took her his staff and
bad her lay it in the bed beside her. And, indeed, the devil,
fearing the staff or that St. Bernard lay there himself,
durst not approach into her chamber that night. What he did
afterwards I am uncertain.' This story will not appear so
evidential to the reader as Scot seems to infer it to be. If
any credit is to be given to the strong insinuations of
Protestant divines of the sixteenth century, the 'holy bishop
Sylvanus' is not the only example among the earlier saints of
the frailty of human nature.
CHAPTER II.
Three Sorts of Witches--Various Modes of Witchcraft--Manner
of Witch-Travelling--The Sabbaths--Anathemas of the Popes
against the Crime--Bull of Adrian VI.--Cotemporary Testimony
to the Severity of the Persecutions--Necessary Triumph of
the Orthodox Party--Germany most subject to the
Superstition--Acts of Parliament of Henry against
Witchcraft--Elizabeth Barton--The Act of 1562--Executions
under Queen Elizabeth's Government--Case of Witchcraft
narrated by Reginald Scot.
The ceremonies of the compact by which a woman became a witch
have been already referred to. It was almost an essential
condition in the vulgar creed that she should be, as Gaule
('Select Cases of Conscience touching Witches,' &c., 1646)
represents, an old woman with a wrinkled face, a furred brow, a
hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, a
scolding tongue, having a ragged coat on her back, a skull-cap on
her head, a spindle in her hand, a dog or cat by her side. There
are three sorts of the devil's agents on earth--the black, the
gray, and the white witches. The first are omnipotent for evil,
but powerless for good. The white have the power to help, but not
to hurt.[91] As for the third species (a mixture of white and
black), they are equally effective for good or evil.
[91] A writer at the beginning of the seventeenth century
(Cotta, _Tryall of Witchcraft_) says, 'This kind is not
obscure at this day, swarming in this kingdom, whereof no
man can be ignorant who lusteth to observe the uncontrouled
liberty and licence of open and ordinary resort in all
places unto _wise_ men and _wise_ women, so vulgarly termed
for their reputed knowledge concerning such diseased persons
as are supposed to be bewitched.' And (_Short Discoverie of
Unobserved Dangers, 1612_) 'the mention of witchecraft doth
now occasion the remembrance in the next place of a sort of
practitioners whom our custom and country doth call wise men
and wise women, reputed a kind of good and honest harmless
witches or wizards, who, by good words, by hallowed herbs
and salves, and other superstitious ceremonies, promise to
allay and calm devils, practices of other witches, and the
forces of many diseases.' Another writer of the same date
considers 'it were a thousand times better for the land if
all witches, but specially the _blessing witch_, might
suffer death. Men do commonly hate and spit at the
_damnifying_ sorcerer as unworthy to live among them,
whereas they fly unto the other in necessity; they depend
upon him as their God, and by this means thousands are
carried away, to their final confusion. Death, therefore, is
the just and deserved portion of the _good_
witch.'--_Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great
Britain_, by Brand, ed. by Sir H. Ellis.
Equally various and contradictory are the motives and acts
assigned to witches. Nothing is too great or too mean for their
practice: they engage with equal pleasure in the overthrow of a
kingdom or a religion, and in inflicting the most ordinary evils
and mischiefs in life. Their mode of bewitching is various: by
fascination or casting an evil eye ('Nescio,' says the Virgilian
shepherd, 'quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos'); by making
representations of the person to be acted upon in wax or clay,
roasting them before a fire; by mixing magical ointments or
other compositions and ingredients revealed to us in the
witch-songs of Shakspeare, Jonson, Middleton, Shadwell, and
others; sometimes merely by muttering an imprecation.
They ride in sieves on the sea, on brooms, spits magically
prepared; and by these modes of conveyance are borne, without
trouble or loss of time, to their destination. By these means
they attend the periodical sabbaths, the great meetings of the
witch-tribe, where they assemble at stated times to do homage, to
recount their services, and to receive the commands of their
lord. They are held on the night between Friday and Saturday; and
every year a grand sabbath is ordered for celebration on the
Blocksberg mountains, for the night before the first day of May.
In those famous mountains the obedient vassals congregate from
all parts of Christendom--from Italy, Spain, Germany, France,
England, and Scotland. A place where four roads meet, a rugged
mountain range, or perhaps the neighbourhood of a secluded lake
or some dark forest, is usually the spot selected for the
meeting.[92]
[92] 'When orders had once been issued for the meeting of
the sabbath, all the wizards and witches who failed to
attend it were lashed by demons with a rod made of serpents
or scorpions. In France and England the witches were
supposed to ride uniformly upon broom-sticks; but in Italy
and Spain, the devil himself, in the shape of a goat, used
to transport them on his back, which lengthened or shortened
according to the number of witches he was desirous of
accommodating. No witch, when proceeding to the sabbath,
could get out by a door or window were she to try ever so
much. Their general mode of ingress was by the key-hole, and
of egress by the chimney, up which they flew, broom and all,
with the greatest ease. To prevent the absence of the
witches being noticed by their neighbours, some inferior
demon was commanded to assume their shapes, and lie in their
beds, feigning illness, until the sabbath was over. When all
the wizards and witches had arrived at the place of
rendezvous, the infernal ceremonies began. Satan having
assumed his favourite shape of a large he-goat, with a face
in front and another in his haunches, took his seat upon a
throne; and all present in succession paid their respects to
him and kissed him in his face behind. This done, he
appointed a master of the ceremonies, in company with whom
he made a personal examination of all the witches, to see
whether they had the secret mark about them by which they
were stamped as the devil's own. This mark was always
insensible to pain. Those who had not yet been marked
received the mark from the master of the ceremonies, the
devil at the same time bestowing nick-names upon them. This
done, they all began to sing and dance in the most furious
manner until some one arrived who was anxious to be admitted
into their society. They were then silent for a while until
the new comer had denied his salvation, kissed the devil,
spat upon the Bible, and sworn obedience to him in all
things. They then began dancing again with all their might
and singing.... In the course of an hour or two they
generally became wearied of this violent exercise, and then
they all sat down and recounted their evil deeds since last
meeting. Those who had not been malicious and mischievous
enough towards their fellow-creatures received personal
chastisement from Satan himself, who flogged them with
thorns or scorpions until they were covered with blood and
unable to sit or stand. When this ceremony was concluded,
they were all amused by a dance of toads. Thousands of these
creatures sprang out of the earth, and standing on their
hind-legs, danced while the devil played the bagpipes or the
trumpet. These toads were all endowed with the faculty of
speech, and entreated the witches there to reward them with
the flesh of unbaptized infants for their exertions to give
them pleasure. The witches promised compliance. The devil
bade them remember to keep their word; and then stamping his
foot, caused all the toads to sink into the earth in an
instant. The place being thus cleared, preparations were
made for the banquet, where all manner of disgusting things
were served up and greedily devoured by the demons and
witches, although the latter were sometimes regaled with
choice meats and expensive wines, from golden plates and
crystal goblets; but they were never thus favoured unless
they had done an extraordinary number of evil deeds since
the last period of meeting. After the feast, they began
dancing again; but such as had no relish for any more
exercise in that way, amused themselves by mocking the holy
sacrament of baptism. For this purpose the toads were again
called up, and sprinkled with filthy water, the devil making
the sign of the cross, and all the witches calling
out--[some gibberish]. When the devil wished to be
particularly amused, he made the witches strip off their
clothes and dance before him, each with a cat tied round her
neck, and another dangling from her body in form of a tail.
When the cock crew they all disappeared, and the sabbath was
ended. This is a summary of the belief that prevailed for
many centuries nearly all over Europe, and which is far from
eradicated even at this day.'--_Memoirs of Extraordinary
Popular Delusions_, by C. Mackay.
A mock sermon often concludes the night's proceedings, the
ordinary salutation of the _osculum in tergo_ being first given.
But these circumstances are innocent compared with the obscene
practices when the lights are put out; indiscriminate debauchery
being then the order of the night. A new rite of baptism
initiated the neophyte into his new service: the candidate being
signed with the sign of the devil on that part of the body least
observable, and submitting at the same time to the first act of
criminal compliance, to be often repeated. On these occasions the
demon presents himself in the form of either sex, according to
that of his slaves. It was elicited from a witch examined at a
trial that, from the period of her servitude, the devil had had
intercourse with her _ut viri cum f[oe]minis solent_, excepting
only in one remarkable particular.
During the pontificate of Julius II.--the first decade of the
sixteenth century--a set of sorceresses was discovered in large
numbers: a dispute between the civil and ecclesiastical
authorities averted their otherwise certain destruction. The
successors of Innocent VIII. repeated his anathemas. Alexander
VI., Leo X., and Adrian VI. appointed special commissioners for
hunting up sorcerers and heretics. In 1523, Adrian issued a bull
against _Hæresis Strigiatûs_ with power to excommunicate all who
opposed those engaged in the inquisition. He characterises the
obnoxious class as a sect deviating from the Catholic faith,
denying their baptism, showing contempt for the sacraments, in
particular for that of the Eucharist, treading crosses under
foot, and taking the devil as their lord.[93] How many suffered
for the crime during the thirty or forty years following upon the
bull of 1484, it is difficult exactly to ascertain: that some
thousands perished is certain, on the testimony of the judges
themselves. The often-quoted words of Florimond, author of a work
'On Antichrist,' as given by Del Rio the Jesuit ('De Magiâ'), are
not hyperbolical. 'All those,' says he, 'who have afforded us
some signs of the approach of antichrist agree that the increase
of sorcery and witchcraft is to distinguish the melancholy period
of his advent; and was ever age so afflicted with them as ours?
The seats destined for criminals before our judicatories are
blackened with persons accused of this guilt. There are not
judges enough to try enough. Our dungeons are gorged with them.
No day passes that we do not render our tribunals bloody by the
dooms we pronounce, or in which we do not return to our homes
discountenanced and terrified at the horrible contents of the
confessions which it has been our duty to hear. And the devil is
accounted so good a master that we cannot commit so great a
number of his slaves to the flames but what there shall arise
from their ashes a number sufficient to supply their place.'
[93] Francis Hutchison's _Historical Essay concerning
Witchcraft_, chap. xiv.; the author quotes Barthol. de
Spina, _de Strigibus_.
It is within neither the design nor the limits of these pages to
repeat all the witch-cases, which might fill several volumes; it
is sufficient for the purpose to sketch a few of the most
notorious and prominent, and to notice the most remarkable
characteristics of the creed.
Maximilian I., Emperor of Germany, protected the inquisitorial
executioners from the indignant vengeance of the inhabitants of
the districts of Southern Germany, which would have been soon
almost depopulated by an unsparing massacre and a ferocious zeal:
while Sigismund, Prince of the Tyrol, is said to have been
inclined to soften the severity of a persecution he was totally
unable, if he had been disposed, to prevent. Ulric Molitor,
under the auspices of this prince, however, published a treatise
in Switzerland ('De Pythonicis Mulieribus') in the form of a
dialogue, in which Sigismund, Molitor, and a citizen of Constance
are the interlocutors. They argue as to the practice of
witchcraft; and the argument is to establish that, although the
practicers of the crime are worthy of death, much of the vulgar
opinion on the subject is false. Even in the middle of the
fifteenth century, and in Spain, could be found an assertor, in
some degree, of common sense, whose sentiments might scandalise
some Protestant divines. Alphonse de Spina was a native of
Castile, of the order of St. Francis: his book was written
against heretics and unbelievers, but there is a chapter in which
some acts attributed to sorcerers, as transportation through the
air, transformations, &c., are rejected as unreal.
From that time two parties were in existence, one of which
advocated the entire reality of all the acts commonly imputed to
witches; while the other maintained that many of their supposed
crimes were mere delusions suggested by the Great Enemy. The
former, as the orthodox party, were, from the nature of the case,
most successful in the argument--a seeming paradox explained by
the nature and course of the controversy. Only the _received_
method of demoniacal possession was questioned by the adverse
side, accepting without doubt the possibility--and, indeed, the
actual existence--of the phenomenon. Thus the liberals, or
pseudo-liberals, in that important controversy were placed in an
illogical position. For (as their opponents might triumphantly
argue) if the devil's power and possession could be manifested in
one way, why not by any other method. Nor was it for them to
determine the appointed methods of his schemes, as permitted by
Providence, for the injury and ruin of mankind. The diabolic
economy, as evidently set forth in the work of man's destruction,
might require certain modes of acting quite above our reason and
understanding. To the sceptics (or to the _atheists_, as they
were termed) the orthodox could allege, 'Will you not believe
in witches? The Scriptures aver their existence: to the
jurisconsults will you dispute the existence of a crime against
which our statute-book and the code of almost all civilised
countries have attested by laws upon which hundreds and thousands
have been convicted; many, or even most, of whom have, by their
judicial confessions, acknowledged their guilt and the justice of
their punishment? It is a strange scepticism, they might add,
that rejects the evidence of Scripture, of human legislature, and
of the accused persons themselves.'[94] Reason was hopelessly
oppressed by faith. In the presence of universal superstition, in
the absence of the modern philosophy, escape seemed all but
impossible.
[94] Sir W. Scott's _Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft_,
chap. vi.
If preeminence in this particular prejudice can be assigned to
any single region or people, perhaps Germany more than any other
land was subject to the demonological fever. A fact to be
explained as well by its being the great theatre for more than a
hundred years of the grand religious struggle between the
opposing Catholics and Protestants, as by its natural fitness.
The gloomy mountain ranges--the Hartz mountains are especially
famous in the national legend--and forests with which it abounds
rendered the imaginative minds of its peoples peculiarly
susceptible to impressions of supernaturalism.[95] France
takes the next place in the fury of the persecution. Danæus
('Dialogue') speaks of an innumerable number of witches. England,
Scotland, Spain, Italy perhaps come next in order.
[95] How greatly the imagination of the Germans was
attracted by the supernatural and the marvellous is plainly
seen both in the old national poems and in the great work of
the national mythologist, Jacob Grimm (_Deutsche
Mythologie_).
Spain, the dominion of the Arabs for seven centuries, was
naturally the land of magic. During the government of Ferdinand
I., or of Isabella, the inquisition was firmly established. That
numbers were sent from the dungeons and torture-chambers to the
stake, with the added stigma of dealing in the 'black art,' is
certain; but in that priest-dominated, servilely orthodox
southern land, the Church was not perhaps so much interested in
confounding the crimes of heresy and sorcery. The first was
simply sufficient for provoking horror and hatred of the
condemned. The South of France is famous for being the very nest
of sorcery: the witch-sabbaths were frequently held there. It was
the country of the Albigenses, which had been devastated by De
Montfort, the executioner of Catholic vengeance, in the twelfth
century, and was, with something of the same sort of savageness,
ravaged by De Lanere in the seventeenth century. Scotland, before
the religious revolution, exhibits a few remarkable cases of
witch-persecution, as that of the Earl of Mar, brother of James
III. He had been suspected of calling in the aid of sorcery to
ascertain the term of the king's life: the earl was bled to death
without trial, and his death was followed by the burning of
twelve witches, and four wizards, at Edinburgh. Lady Glammis,
sister of the Earl of Angus, of the family of Douglas, accused of
conspiring the king's death in a similar way, was put to death in
1537. As in England, in the cases of the Duchess of Gloucester
and others, the crime appears to be rather an adjunct than the
principal charge itself; more political than popular. Protestant
Scotland it is that has earned the reputation of being one of the
most superstitious countries in Europe.
In 1541 two Acts of Parliament were passed in England--the first
interference of Parliament in this kingdom--against false
prophecies, conjurations, witchcraft, sorcery, pulling down
crosses; crimes made felony without benefit of clergy. Both the
last article in the list and the period (a few years after the
separation from the Catholic world) appear to indicate the causes
in operation. Lord Hungerford had recently been beheaded by the
suspicious tyranny of Henry VIII., for consulting his death by
conjuration. The preamble to the statute has these words: 'The
persons that had done these things, had dug up and pulled down an
infinite number of crosses.'[96] The new head of the English
Church, if he found his interest in assuming himself the
spiritual supremacy, was, like a true despot, averse to any
further revolution than was necessary to his purposes. Some
superstitious regrets too for the old establishment which, by a
fortunate caprice, he abandoned and afterwards plundered, may
have urged the tyrant, who persecuted the Catholics for
questioning his supremacy, to burn the enemies of
transubstantiation. Shortly before this enactment, eight persons
had been hanged at Tyburn, not so much for sorcery as for a
disagreeable prophecy. Elizabeth Barton, the principal, had been
instigated to pronounce as revelation, that if the king went on
in the divorce and married another wife, he should not be king a
month longer, and in the estimation of Almighty God not one hour
longer, but should die a villain's death. The Maid of Kent, with
her accomplices--Richard Martin, parson of the parish of
Aldington; Dr. Bocking, canon of Christ Church, Canterbury;
Deering; Henry Gold, a parson in London; Hugh Rich, a friar, and
others--was brought before the Star Chamber, and adjudged to
stand in St. Paul's during sermon-time; the majority being
afterwards executed. In Cranmer's 'Articles of Visitation,' 1549,
an injunction is addressed to his clergy, that 'you shall inquire
whether you know of any that use charms, sorcery, enchantments,
witchcrafts, soothsaying, or any like craft, invented by the
devil.'
[96] Hutchison's _Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft_.
The author, chaplain in ordinary to George I., published his
book in 1718. It is worth while to note the colder
scepticism of the Hanoverian chaplain as compared with the
undoubting faith of his predecessor, Dr. Glanvil.
During the brief reigns of Edward VI. and Mary I. in England, no
conspicuous trials occur. As for the latter monarch, the queen
and her bishops were too absorbed in the pressing business of
burning for the real offence of heresy to be much concerned in
discovering the concomitant crimes of devil-worship.[97] An
impartial judgment may decide that superstition, whether engaged
in vindicating the dogmas of Catholicism or those of witchcraft,
is alike contemptible and pernicious.
[97] Agreeably to that common prejudice which selects
certain historical personages for popular and peculiar
esteem or execration, and attributes to them, as if they
were eccentricities rather than examples of the age, every
exceptional virtue or vice, the 'Bloody Queen' has been
stigmatised, and is still regarded, as an _extraordinary_
monster, capable of every inhuman crime--a prejudice more
popular than philosophical, since experience has taught that
despots, unchecked by fear, by reason, or conscience, are
but examples, in an eminent degree, of the character, and
personifications of the worst vices (if not of the best
virtues) of their time. Considered in this view, Mary I.
will but appear the example and personification of the
religious intolerance of Catholicism and of the age, just as
Cromwell was of the patriotic and Puritanic sentiment of the
first half, or Charles II. of the unblushing licentiousness
of the last half, of the seventeenth century.
In the year of Elizabeth's accession, 1558, Strype ('Annals of
the Reformation,' i. 8, and ii. 545) tells that Bishop Jewell,
preaching before the queen, animadverted upon the dangerous and
direful results of witchcraft. 'It may please your Grace,'
proclaims publicly the courtly Anglican prelate, 'to understand
that witches and sorcerers, within these last few years, are
marvellously increased within your Grace's realm. Your Grace's
subjects pine away even to the death, their colour fadeth, their
flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed, their senses are bereft.
I pray God they never practise further than upon the subject.'
For himself, the bishop declares, 'these eyes have seen most
evident and manifest marks of their wickedness.' The annalist
adds that this, no doubt, was the occasion of bringing in a bill
the next Parliament, for making enchantments and witchcraft
felony; and, under year 1578, we are informed that, whether it
were the effect of magic, or proceeded from some natural cause,
the queen was in some part of this year under excessive anguish
_by pains of her teeth_, insomuch that she took no rest for
divers nights, and endured very great torment night and day. The
statute of 1562 includes 'fond and fantastic prophecies' (a very
common sort of political offences in that age) in the category of
forbidden arts. With unaccustomed lenity it punished a first
conviction with the pillory only.
Witch-persecutions (which needed not any legal enactment) sprung
up in different parts of the country; but they were not carried
out with either the frequency or the ferocity of the next age, or
as in Scotland, under the superintendence of James VI. A number
of pamphlets unnecessarily enforced the obligatory duty of
unwearied zeal in the work of discovery and extermination.[98]
Among the executions under Elizabeth's Government are specially
noticed that of a woman hanged at Barking in 1575; of four at
Abingdon; three at Chelmsford; two at Cambridge, 1579; of a
number condemned at St. Osythes; of several in Derbyshire and
Staffordshire. One of the best known is the case at Warboys, in
Huntingdonshire, 1593.
[98] One of these productions, printed in London, bore the
sensational title, 'A very Wonderful and Strange Miracle of
God, shewed upon a Dutchman, of the age of 23 years, who was
possessed of ten devils, and was, by God's Mighty
Providence, dispossessed of them again the 27 January last
past, 1572.' Another, dedicated to Lord Darcy, by W. W.,
1582, sets forth that all those tortures in common use 'are
far too light, and their rigour too mild; and in this
respect he (the pamphleteer) impudently exclaimeth against
our magistrates who suffer them to be but hanged, when
_murtherers and such malefactors be so used, which deserve
not the hundredth part of their punishment_.'
The author of the 'Discoverie' relates a fact that came under his
personal observation: it is a fair example of the trivial origin
and of the facility of this sort of charges. 'At the assizes
holden at Rochester, anno 1581, one Margaret Simons, wife of John
Simons, of Brenchly in Kent, was arraigned for witchcraft, at the
instigation and complaint of divers fond and malicious persons,
and especially by the means of one John Farral, vicar of that
parish, with whom I talked about the matter, and found him both
fondly assotted in the cause and enviously bent towards her: and,
which is worse, as unable to make a good account of his faith as
she whom he accused. That which he laid to the poor woman's
charge was this. His son, being an ungracious boy, and 'prentice
to one Robert Scotchford, clothier, dwelling in that parish of
Brenchly, passed on a day by her house; at whom, by chance, her
little dog barked, which thing the boy taking in evil part, drew
his knife and pursued him therewith even to her door, whom
she rebuked with such words as the boy disdained, and yet
nevertheless would not be persuaded to depart in a long time. At
the last he returned to his master's house, and within five or
six days fell sick. Then was called to mind the fray betwixt the
dog and the boy: insomuch as the vicar (who thought himself so
privileged as he little mistrusted that God would visit his
children with sickness) did so calculate as he found, partly
through his own judgment and partly (as he himself told me) by
the relation of other witches, that his said son was by her
bewitched. Yea, he told me that his son being, as it were, past
all cure, received perfect health at the hands of another witch.'
Not satisfied with this accusation, the vicar 'proceeded yet
further against her, affirming that always in his parish church,
when he desired to read most plainly his voice so failed him that
he could scant be heard at all: which he could impute, he said,
to nothing else but to her enchantment. When I advertised the
poor woman thereof, as being desirous to hear what she could say
for herself, she told me that in very deed his voice did fail
him, specially when he strained himself to speak loudest.
Howbeit, she said, that at all times his voice was hoarse and
low; which thing I perceived to be true. But sir, said she, you
shall understand that this our vicar is diseased with such a kind
of hoarseness as divers of our neighbours in this parish not
long ago doubted ... and in that respect utterly refused to
communicate with him until such time as (being thereunto enjoined
by the ordinary) he had brought from London a certificate under
the hands of two physicians that his hoarseness proceeded from a
disease of the lungs; which certificate he published in the
church, in the presence of the whole congregation: and by this
means he was cured, or rather excused of the shame of the
disease. And this,' certifies the narrator, 'I know to be true,
by the relation of divers honest men of that parish. And truly if
one of the jury had not been wiser than the others, she had been
condemned thereupon, and upon other as ridiculous matters as
this. For the name of witch is so odious, and her power so feared
among the common people, that if the honestest body living
chanced to be arraigned thereupon, she shall hardly escape
condemnation.'
CHAPTER III.
The 'Discoverie of Witchcraft,' published 1584--Wier's 'De
Præstigiis Dæmonum, &c.'--Naudé--Jean Bodin--His 'De la
Démonomanie des Sorciers,' published at Paris, 1580--His
authority--Nider--Witch-case at Warboys--Evidence adduced at
the Trial--Remarkable as being the origin of the institution
of an Annual Sermon at Huntingdon.
Three years after this affair, Dr. Reginald Scot published his
'Discoverie of Witchcraft, proving that common opinions of
witches contracting with devils, spirits, or their familiars, and
their power to kill, torment, and consume the bodies of men,
women, and children, or other creatures, by disease, or
otherwise, their flying in the air, &c., to be but imaginary,
erroneous conceptions and novelties: wherein also the lewd,
unchristian, practices of witchmongers upon aged, melancholy,
ignorant, and superstitious people, in extorting confessions by
inhuman terrors and tortures, is notably detected.'[99]
[99] The edition referred to is that of 1654. The author is
commemorated by Hallam in terms of high praise--'A solid and
learned person, beyond almost all the English of that
age.'--_Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the
Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries._
This work is divided into sixteen books, with a treatise affixed
upon devils and spirits, in thirty-four chapters. It contains an
infinity of quotations from or references to the writings of
those whom the author terms _witch-mongers_; and several chapters
are devoted to a descriptive catalogue of the charms in repute
and diabolical rites of the most extravagant sort. On the
accession of James I., whose 'Demonologie' was in direct
opposition to the 'Discoverie,' it was condemned as monstrously
heretical; as many copies as could be collected being solemnly
committed to the flames. This meritorious and curious production
is therefore now scarce.
Prefixed is a dedicatory epistle, addressed to the Right
Worshipful, his loving friend, Mr. Dr. Coldwell, Dean of
Rochester, and Mr. Dr. Readman, Archdeacon of Canterbury, in
which the author appealingly expostulates, 'O Master Archdeacon,
is it not pity that that which is said to be done with the
almighty power of the Most High God, and by our Saviour his only
Son Jesus Christ our Lord, should be referred to a baggage old
woman's nod or wish? Good sir, is it not one manifest kind of
idolatry for them that labour and are laden to come unto witches
to be refreshed? If witches could help whom they are said to have
made sick, I see no reason but remedy might as well be required
at their hands as a purse demanded of him that hath stolen it.
But truly it is manifest idolatry to ask that of a creature
which none can give but the Creator. The papist hath some colour
of Scripture to maintain his idol of bread, but no Jesuitical
distinction can cover the witchmongers' idolatry in this behalf.
Alas! I am ashamed and sorry to see how many die that, being said
to be bewitched, only seek for magical cures whom wholesome diet
and good medicine would have recovered.'[100] An utterance of
courage and common sense equally rare and useless. Reginald Scot,
perhaps the boldest of the early impugners of witchcraft, was yet
convinced apparently of the reality of ghostly apparitions.
[100] Writing in an age when the _magical_ powers of steam
and electricity were yet undiscovered, it might be a
forcible argument to put--'Good Mr. Dean, is it possible for
a man to break his fast with you at Rochester, and to dine
that day in Durham with Master Dr. Matthew?'
Johannes Wierus, physician to the Duke of Cleves, and a disciple
of the well-known Cornelius Agrippa (himself accused of devotion
to the black art), in 1563 created considerable sensation by an
attack upon the common opinions, without questioning however the
principles, of the superstition in his 'De Præstigiis Dæmonum
Incantationibus et Veneficiis.' His common sense is not so clear
as that of the Englishman. Another name, memorable among the
advocates of Reason and Humanity, is Gabriel Naudé. He was
born at Paris in 1600; he practised as a physician of great
reputation, and was librarian successively to Cardinals Richelieu
and Mazarin, and to Queen Christina of Sweden. His book 'Apologie
pour les Grands Hommes accusés de Magie,' published in Paris in
1625, was received with great indignation by the Church. Some
others, both on the Continent and in England, at intervals by
their protests served to prove that a few sparks of reason, hard
to be discovered in the thick darkness of superstition, remained
unextinguished; but they availed not to stem the torrent of
increasing violence and volume.
A more copious list can be given of the champions of orthodoxy
and demonolatry; of whom it is sufficient to enumerate the more
notorious names--Sprenger, Nider, Bodin, Del Rio, James VI.,
Glanvil, who compiled or composed elaborate treatises on the
subject; besides whom a cloud of witnesses expressly or
incidentally proclaimed the undoubted genuineness of all the
acts, phenomena, and circumstances of the diabolic worship;
loudly and fiercely denouncing the 'damnable infidelity' of the
dissenters--a proof in itself of their own complicity. Jean
Bodin, a French lawyer, and author of the esteemed treatise 'De
la République,' was one of the greatest authorities on the
orthodox side. His publication 'De la Démonomanie des Sorciers'
appeared in Paris in the year 1580: an undertaking prompted by
his having witnessed some of the daily occurring trials. Instead
of being convinced of their folly, he was or affected to be,
certain of their truth, setting himself gravely to the task of
publishing to the world his own observations and convictions.
One of the most surprising facts in the whole history of
witchcraft is the insensibility or indifference of even men of
science, and therefore observation, to the obvious origin of the
greatest part of the confessions elicited; confession of such a
kind as could be the product only of torture, madness, or some
other equally obvious cause. Bodin himself, however, sufficiently
explains the fact and exposes the secret. 'The trial of this
offence,' he enunciates, 'must not be conducted like other
crimes. Whoever adheres to the ordinary course of justice
perverts the spirit of the law both divine and human. He who is
accused of sorcery should _never_ be acquitted unless the malice
of the prosecutor be clearer than the sun; for it is so difficult
to bring full proof of this secret crime, that out of a million
of witches _not one would be convicted if the usual course were
followed_.'[101] He speaks of an old woman sentenced to the stake
after confessing to having been transported to the sabbath in a
state of insensibility. Her judges, anxious to know how this was
effected, released her from her fetters, when she rubbed herself
on the different parts of her body with a prepared unguent and
soon became insensible, stiff, and apparently dead. Having
remained in that condition for five hours, the witch as suddenly
revived, relating to the trembling inquisitors a number of
extraordinary things proving she must have been _spiritually_
transported to distant places.[102] An earlier advocate of the
orthodox cause was a Swiss friar, Nider, who wrote a work
entitled 'Formicarium' (_Ant-Hill_) on the various sins against
religion. One section is employed in the consideration of
sorcery. Nider was one of the inquisitors who distinguished
themselves by their successful zeal in the beginning of the
century.
[101] Yet the lawyer who enunciated such a maxim as this has
been celebrated for an unusual liberality of sentiment in
religious and political matters, as well as for his
learning. Dugald Stewart commends 'the liberal and moderate
views of this philosophical politician,' as shown in the
treatise _De la République_, and states that he knows of 'no
political writer of the same date whose extensive, and
various, and discriminating reading appears to me to have
contributed more to facilitate and to guide the researches
of his successors, or whose references to ancient learning
have been more frequently transcribed without
acknowledgment.'--Bayle considered him 'one of the ablest
men that appeared in France during the sixteenth
century.'--_Dissertation First_ in the _Encyclopædia
Britannica_. Hallam (_Introduction to the Literature of
Europe_) occupies several of his pages in the review of
Bodin's writings. Jean Bodin, however, on the authority of
his friend De Thou, did not escape suspicion himself of
being heretical.
[102] In witchcraft (as in the sacramental mystery) it was a
subject for much doubt and dispute whether there might not be
simply a _spiritual_ (without a _real corporeal_) presence at
the sabbath. Each one decided according to the degree of his
orthodoxy.
The Swiss witches, like the old Italian larvæ and most of the
sisterhood, display extraordinary affection for the blood of
new-born unbaptized infants; and it is a great desideratum to
kill them before the preventive rite has been irrevocably
administered; for the bodies of unbaptized children were almost
indispensable in the witches' preparations. Soon as buried their
corpses are dug out of their graves and carried away to the place
of assembly, where they are boiled down for the fat for making
the ointments.[103] The liquid in which they are boiled is
carefully preserved; and the person who tastes it is immediately
initiated into all the mysteries of sorcery. A witch, judicially
examined by the papal commission which compiled the 'Malleus,'
gives evidence of the prevalence of this practice: 'We lie in
wait for children. These are often found dead by their parents;
and the simple people believe that they have themselves overlain
them, or that they died from natural causes; but it is we who
have destroyed them. We steal them out of the grave, and boil
them with lime till all the flesh is loosed from the bones and is
reduced to one mass. We make of the firm part an ointment, and
fill a bottle with the fluid; and whoever drinks with due
ceremonies of this belongs to our league, and is already capable
of bewitching.' 'Finger of birth-strangled babe' is one of the
ingredients of that widely-collected composition of the Macbeth
witches.
[103] A practice not entirely out of repute at the present
day if we may credit a statement in the _Courrier du Hâvre_
(as quoted in _The Times_ newspaper, Nov. 7, 1864), that
recently the corpse of an old woman was dug up for the
purpose of obtaining the fat, &c., as a preventive charm
against witchcraft, by a person living in the neighbourhood
of Hâvre.
The case at Warboys, which, connected with a family of some
distinction, occasioned unusual interest, was tried in the year
1593. The village of Warboys, or Warbois, is situated in the
neighbourhood of Huntingdon. One of the most influential of
the inhabitants was a gentleman of respectability, Robert
Throgmorton, who was on friendly terms with the Cromwells of
Hitchinbrook, and the lord of the manor, Sir Henry Cromwell.
Three criminals--old Samuel, his wife, and Agnes Samuel their
daughter, were tried and condemned by Mr. Justice Fenner for
bewitching Mr. Throgmorton's five children, seven servants, the
Lady Cromwell, and others. The father and daughter maintained
their innocence to the last; the old woman confessed. A fact
which makes this affair more remarkable is, that with the forty
pounds escheated to him, as lord of the manor, out of the
property of the convicts, Sir Samuel Cromwell founded an annual
sermon or lecture upon the sin of witchcraft, to be preached at
their town every Lady-day, by a Doctor or Bachelor of Divinity of
Queen's College, Cambridge; the sum of forty pounds being
entrusted to the Mayor and Aldermen of Huntingdon, for a
rent-charge of forty shillings yearly to be paid to the select
preacher. This lecture, says Dr. Francis Hutchison, is continued
to this day--1718.
Four years previously to this important trial, Jane Throgmorton,
a girl ten years of age, was first suddenly attacked with strange
convulsive fits, which continued daily, and even several times in
the day, without intermission. One day, soon after the first
seizure, Mother Samuel coming into the Throgmortons' house,
seated herself as customary in a chimney-corner near the child,
who was just recovering from one of her fits. The girl no sooner
noticed her than she began to cry out, pointing to the old woman,
'Did you ever see one more like a witch than she is? Take off her
black-thumbed cap, for I cannot abide to look at her.' The
illness becoming worse, they sent to Cambridge to consult Dr.
Barrow, an experienced physician in that town; but he could
discover no natural disease. A month later, the other children
were similarly seized, and persuaded of Mother Samuel's guilt.
The parents' increasing suspicions, entertained by the doctors,
were confirmed when the servants were also attacked. About the
middle of March, 1590, Lady Cromwell arrived on a visit to the
Throgmortons; and being much affected at the sufferings of the
patients, sent for the suspected person, whom she charged with
being the malicious cause. Finding all entreaty of no avail in
extorting an admission of guilt, Lady Cromwell suddenly and
unexpectedly cut off a lock of the witch's hair (a powerful
counter-charm), at the same time secretly placing it in Mrs.
Throgmorton's hands, desiring her to burn it. Indignant, the
accused addressed the lady, 'Madam, why do you use me thus? I
never did you any harm _as yet_'--words afterwards recollected.
'That night,' says the narrative, 'my lady Cromwell was suddenly
troubled in her sleep by a cat which Mother S. had sent her,
which offered to pluck the skin and flesh off her bones and arms.
The struggle betwixt the cat and the lady was so great in her bed
that night, and she made so terrible a noise, that she waked her
bedfellow Mrs. C.' Whether, 'as some sager' might think, it was a
nightmare (a sort of incubus which terrified the disordered
imagination of the ancients), or some more substantial object
that disturbed the rest of the lady, it is not important to
decide; but next day Lady Cromwell was laid up with an incurable
illness. Holding out obstinately against all threats and
promises, the reputed witch was at length induced to pronounce an
exorcism, when the afflicted were immediately for the time
dispossessed. 'Next day being Christmas-eve and the Sabbath, Dr.
Donington [vicar of the parish] chose his text of repentance out
of the _Psalms_, and communicating her confession to the
assembly, directed his discourse chiefly to that purpose
to comfort a penitent heart that it might affect her. All
sermon-time Mother S. wept and lamented, and was frequently so
loud in her passions, that she drew the eyes of the congregation
upon her.' On the morrow, greatly to the disappointment of the
neighbours, she contradicted her former confession, declaring it
was extracted by surprise at finding her exorcism had relieved
the child, unconscious of what she was saying.
The case was afterwards carried before the Bishop of Lincoln. Now
greatly alarmed, the old woman made a fresh announcement that she
was really a witch; that she owned several spirits (of the nine
may be enumerated the fantastic names of Pluck, Hardname, Catch,
Smack, Blew), one of whom was used to appear in the shape of a
chicken, and suck her chin. The mother and daughters were, upon
this voluntary admission, committed to Huntingdon gaol. Of the
possessed Jane Throgmorton seems to have been most familiar with
the demons.[104]
[104] The following ravings of epilepsy, or of whatever was
the disorder of the girl, are part of the evidence of Dr.
Donington, clergyman in the town, and were narrated and
could be received as grave evidence in a court of justice.
They will serve as a specimen of the rest. The girl and the
spirit known as _Catch_ are engaged in the little by-play.
'After supper, as soon as her parents were risen, she fell
into the same fit again as before, and then became
senseless, and in a little time, opening her mouth, she
said, "Will this hold for ever? I hope it will be better one
day. From whence come you now, Catch, limping? I hope you
have met with your match." Catch answered that Smack and he
had been fighting, and that Smack had broken his leg. Said
she, "That Smack is a shrewd fellow; methinks I would I
could see him. Pluck came last night with his head broke,
and now you have broken your leg. I hope he will break both
your necks before he hath done with you." Catch answered
that he would be even with him before he had done. Then,
said she, "Put forth your other leg, and let me see if I can
break that," having a stick in her hand. The spirit told her
she could not hit him. "Can I not hit you?" said she; "let
me try." Then the spirit put forth his leg, and she lifted
up the stick easily, and suddenly struck the ground.... So
she seemed divers times to strike at the spirit; but he
leaped over the stick, as she said, like a Jackanapes. So
after many such tricks the spirit went away, and she came
out of her fit, continuing all that night and the next day
very sick and full of pain in her legs.'
The sessions at Huntingdon began April 4, 1593, when the three
Samuels were arraigned; and the above charges, with much more of
the same sort, were repeated: the indictments specifying the
particular offences against the children and servants of the
Throgmortons, and the 'bewitching unto death' of the lady
Cromwell. The grand jury found a true bill immediately, and they
were put upon their trial in court. After a mass of nonsense had
been gone through, 'the judge, justices, and jury said the case
was apparent, and their consciences were well satisfied that the
said witches were guilty, and deserved death.' When sentence of
death was pronounced, the old woman, sixty years of age, pleaded,
in arrest of judgment, that she was with child--a pleading which
produced only a derisive shout of laughter in court. Husband and
daughter asserted their innocence to the last. All three were
hanged. From the moment of execution, we are assured, Robert
Throgmorton's children were permanently freed from all their
sufferings. Such, briefly, are the circumstances of a witch case
that resulted in the sending to the gallows three harmless
wretches, and in the founding an annual sermon which perpetuated
the memory of an iniquitous act and of an impossible crime. The
sermon, it may be presumed, like other similar surviving
institutions, was preserved in the eighteenth century more for
the benefit of the select preacher than for that of the people.
CHAPTER IV.
Astrology in Antiquity--Modern Astrology and
Alchymy--Torralvo--Adventures of Dr. Dee and Edward
Kelly--Prospero and Comus Types respectively of the Theurgic
and Goetic Arts--Magicians on the Stage in the 16th
century--Occult Science in Southern Europe--Causes of the
inevitable mistakes of the pre-Scientific Ages.
The nobler arts of magic, astrology, alchymy, necromancy, &c.,
were equally in vogue in this age with that of the infernal art
proper. But they were more respected. Professors of those arts
were habitually sought for with great eagerness by the highest
personages, and often munificently rewarded. In antiquity
astrology had been peculiarly Oriental in its origin and
practice. The Egyptians, and especially the Chaldæans, introduced
the foreign art to the West among the Greeks and Italians; the
Arabs revived it in Western Europe in the Middle Age. Under the
early Roman Empire the Chaldaic art exercised and enjoyed
considerable influence and reputation, if it was often subject to
sudden persecutions. Augustus was assisted to the throne, and
Severus selected his wife, by its means. After it had once
firmly established itself in the West,[105] the Oriental
astrology was soon developed and reduced to a more regular
system; and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Dee and
Lilly enjoyed a greater reputation than even Figulus or
Thrasyllus had obtained in the first century. Queen Elizabeth and
Catherine di Medici (two of the astutest persons of their age)
patronised them. Dr. Dee in England, and Nostradamus in France,
were of this class. Dr. Caius, third founder of a college still
bearing his name in the university of Cambridge, Kelly, Ashmole,
and Lilly, are well-known names in the astrological history of
this period. Torralvo, whose fame as an aerial voyager is
immortalised by Cervantes in 'Don Quixote,' was as great a
magician in Spain and Italy as Dee in England, although not so
familiar to English readers as their countryman, the protégé of
Elizabeth. Neither was his magical faculty so well rewarded. Dr.
Torralvo, a physician, had studied medicine and philosophy with
extraordinary success, and was high in the confidence of many
of the eminent personages of Spain and Italy, for whom he
fortunately predicted future success. A confirmed infidel or
freethinker, he was denounced to the Inquisition by the treachery
of an associate as denying or disputing the immortality of the
soul, as well as the divinity of Christ. This was in 1529.
Torralvo, put to the torture, admitted that his informing spirit,
Zequiel, was a demon by whose assistance he performed his aerial
journeys and all his extraordinary feats, both of prophecy and of
actual power. Some part of the severity of the tortures was
remitted by the demon's opportune reply to the curiosity of the
presiding inquisitors, that Luther and the Reformers were bad and
cunning men. Torralvo seems to have avoided the extreme penalty
of fire by recanting his heresies, submitting to the superior
judgment of his gaolers, and still more by the interest of his
powerful employers; and he was liberated not long afterwards.
[105] The diffusion and progress of astrology in the last
two centuries before the Empire, in Greece and Italy, was
favoured chiefly by the four following causes: its
resemblance to the meteorological astrology of the Greeks;
the belief in the conversion of the souls of men into stars;
the cessation of the oracles; the belief in a tutelary
genius.--Sir G. C. Lewis's _Historical Survey of the
Astronomy of the Ancients_, chap. v.
The life of Dr. Dee, an eminent Cambridge mathematician, and of
his associate Edward Kelly, forms a curious biography. Dee was
born in 1527. He studied at the English and foreign universities
with great success and applause; and while the Princess Elizabeth
was quite young he acquired her friendship, maintained by
frequent correspondence, and on her succession to the throne the
queen showed her good will in a conspicuous manner. John Dee left
to posterity a diary in which he has inserted a regular account
of his conjurations, prophetic intimations, and magical
resources. Notwithstanding his mathematical acumen, he was the
dupe of his cunning subordinate--more of a knave, probably, than
his master. In 1583 a Polish prince, Albert Laski, visiting the
English court, frequented the society of the renowned astrologer,
by whom he was initiated in the secrets of the art; and predicted
to be the future means of an important revolution in Europe. The
astrologers wandered over all Germany, at one time favourably
received by the credulity, at another time ignominiously ejected
by the indignant disappointment, of a patron.[106] Dee returned
to England in 1589, and was finally appointed to the wardenship
of the college at Manchester. In James's reign he was well
received at Court, his reputation as a magician increasing; and
in 1604 he is found presenting a petition to the king, imploring
his good offices in dispelling the injurious imputation of being
'a conjuror, or caller, or invocator of devils.' Lilly, the most
celebrated magician of the seventeenth century in England, was in
the highest repute during the civil wars: his prophetic services
were sought with equal anxiety by royalists and patriots, by king
and parliament.[107] Sometimes the professor of the occult
science may have been his own dupe: oftener he imposed and
speculated upon the credulity of others.
[106] While traversing Bohemia, on a particular occasion, it
was revealed to be God's pleasure that the two friends
should have a community of wives; a little episode noted in
Dee's journal. 'On Sunday, May 3, 1587, I, John Dee, Edward
Kelly, and our two wives, covenanted with God, and
subscribed the same for indissoluble unities, charity, and
friendship keeping between us four, and all things between
us to be common, as God by sundry means willed us to do.' A
sort of inspiration of frequent occurrence in religious
revelations, from the times of the Arabian to those of the
American prophet.
[107] William Lilly wrote a History of his own life and
times. His adroitness in accommodating his prophecies to the
alternating chances of the war does him considerable credit
as a prophet.
Prospero is the type of the Theurgic, as Comus is of the Goetic,
magician. His spiritual minister belongs to the order of good, or
at least middle spirits--
'Too black for heav'n, and yet too white for hell.'[108]
[108] Released by his new lord from the sorceric spell of
that 'damn'd witch Sycorax,' he comes gratefully, if
somewhat weariedly, to answer his 'blest pleasure; be't to
fly, to swim, to dive into the fire, to ride on the curl'd
clouds,' &c.
Prospero, by an irresistible magic, subdued to his service the
reluctant Caliban, a monster 'got by the devil himself upon his
wicked dam:' but that semi-demon is degraded into a mere beast of
burden, brutal and savage, with little of the spiritual essence
of his male parent. Comus, as represented in that most beautiful
drama by the genius of Milton, is of the classic rather than
Christian sort: he is the true son of Circe, using his mother's
method of enchantment, transforming his unwary victims into the
various forms or faces of the bestial herd. Like the island
magician without his magical garment, the wicked enchanter
without his wand loses his sorceric power; and--
'Without his rod reversed,
And backward mutters of dissevering power,'
it is not possible to disenchant his spell-bound prisoners.
In the sixteenth century many wonderful stories obtained of the
tremendous feats of the magic art. Those that related the lives
of Bacon, and of Faust (of German origin), were best known in
England; and, in the dramatic form, were represented on the
stage. The comedy of 'Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,' and the
tragedy of 'The Life and Death of Dr. Faustus,' are perhaps the
most esteemed of the dramatic writings of the age which preceded
the appearance of Shakspeare. In the latter Faustus makes a
compact with the devil, by which a familiar spirit and a
preternatural art are granted him for twenty-four years. At
the end of this period his soul is to be the reward of the
demons.[109] From the 'Faustus' of Christopher Marlow, Goethe has
derived the name and idea of the most celebrated tragedy of our
day.
[109] Conscious of his approaching fate, the trembling
magician replies to the anxious inquiries of his surrounding
pupils--'"For the vain pleasure of four-and-twenty years
hath Faustus lost eternal joy and felicity. I writ them a
bill with my own blood; the date is expired; this is the
time, and he will fetch me." First Scholar--"Why did not
Faustus tell us of this before, that divines might have
prayed for thee?" Faust--"Oft have I thought to have done
so; but the devil threatened to tear me in pieces if I named
God; to fetch me body and soul if I once gave ear to
divinity. And now it is too late."' As the fearful moment
fast approaches, Dr. Faustus, orthodox on the subject of the
duration of future punishment, exclaims in agony--
'Oh! if my soul must suffer for my sin,
Impose some end to my incessant pain.
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years--
A hundred thousand, and at the last be saved:
No end is limited to damned souls.
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Oh, why is this immortal that thou hast?' &c.
Mephistopheles, it need hardly be added, was on this occasion
true to his reputation for punctuality. _Friar Bacon and
Friar Bungay_ is remarked for being one of the last dramatic
pieces in which the devil appears on the stage in his proper
person--1591. It is also noticeable that he is the only
Scripture character in the new form of the play retained from
the _miracles_ which delighted the spectators in the
fifteenth century, who were at once edified and gratified by
the corporal chastisement inflicted upon his vicarious back.
Magic and necromantic prowess was equally recognised in Southern
Europe. The Italian poets employed such imposing paraphernalia in
the construction of an epic; and Cervantes has ridiculed the
prevailing belief of his countrymen.[110]
[110] Benvenuto Cellini, the Florentine engraver, in his
amusing _Autobiography_, astonishes his readers with some
necromantic wonders of which he was an eyewitness. Cellini
had become acquainted and enamoured with a beautiful
Sicilian, from whom he was suddenly separated. He tells with
his accustomed candour and confidence, 'I was then indulging
myself in pleasures of all sorts, and engaged in another
amour to cancel the memory of my Sicilian mistress. It
happened, through a variety of odd accidents, that I made
acquaintance with a Sicilian priest, who was a man of
genius, and well versed in the Latin and Greek authors.
Happening one day to have some conversation with him upon
the art of necromancy, I, who had a great desire to know
something of the matter, told him I had all my life felt a
curiosity to be acquainted with the mysteries of this art.
The priest made answer that the man must be of a resolute
and steady temper who enters upon that study.' And so it
should seem from the event. One night, Cellini, with a
companion familiar with the Black Art, attended the priest
to the Colosseum, where the latter, 'according to the custom
of necromancy, began to draw marks upon the ground, with the
most impressive ceremonies imaginable; he likewise brought
thither _asaf[oe]tida, several precious perfumes and fire,
with some compositions which diffused noisome odours_.'
Although several legions of devils obeyed the summons of the
conjurations or compositions, the sorceric rites were not
attended with complete success. But on a succeeding night,
'the necromancer having begun to make his tremendous
invocations, called by their names a multitude of demons who
were the leaders of the several legions, and invoked them by
the virtue and power of the eternal uncreated God, who lives
for ever, insomuch that the amphitheatre was almost in an
instant filled with demons a hundred times more numerous
than at the former conjuration ... I, by the direction of
the necromancer, again desired to be in the company of my
Angelica. The former thereupon turning to me said, "Know
that they have declared that in the space of a month you
shall be in her company." He then requested me to stand
resolutely by him, because the legion were now above a
thousand more in number than he had designed; and besides,
these were the most dangerous, so that after they had
answered my question it behoved him to be civil to them and
dismiss them quietly.' The infernal legions were more easily
evoked than dismissed. He proceeds--'Though I was as much
terrified as any of them, I did my utmost to conceal the
terror I felt; so that I greatly contributed to inspire the
rest with resolution. But the truth is,' ingenuously
confesses the amorous artist, 'I gave myself over for a dead
man, seeing the horrid fright the necromancer was
in.'--_Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini_, chap. xiii.,
Roscoe's transl.--The information was verified, and
Benvenuto enjoyed the society of his mistress at the time
foretold.
Alchymy, the science of the transformation of baser metals into
gold, a pursuit which engaged the anxious thought and wasted the
health, time, and fortunes of numbers of fanatical empirics, was
one of the most prized of the abstruse _occult_ arts. Monarchs,
princes, the great of all countries, eagerly vied among
themselves in encouraging with promises and sometimes with more
substantial incentives the zeal of their illusive search; and
Henry IV. of France could see no reason why, if the bread and
wine were transubstantiated so miraculously, a metal could not be
transformed as well.[111]
[111] The class of horoscopists (the old Chaldaic
_genethliacs_), or those who predicted the fortunes of
individuals by an examination of the planet which presided
at the natal hour, was as much in vogue as that of any other
of the masters of the occult arts; and La Fontaine, towards
the end of the seventeenth century, apostrophises the class:
'Charlatans, faiseurs d'horoscope!
Quittez les cours des princes de l'Europe;
Emmenez avec vous les souffleurs tout d'un temps;
Vous ne méritez pas plus de foi.'....
_Fables_, ii. 13.
But it is only necessary to recollect the name of Cagliostro
(Balsamo) and others who in the eighteenth century could
successfully speculate upon the credulity of people of rank
and education, to moderate our wonder at the success of
earlier empirics.
Among the eminent names of self-styled or reputed masters of the
nobler or white magic, some, like the celebrated Paracelsus, were
men of extraordinary attainments and largely acquainted with the
secrets of natural science. A necessarily imperfect knowledge, a
natural desire to impose upon the ignorant wonder of the vulgar,
and the vanity of a learning which was ambitious of exhibiting,
in the most imposing if less intelligible way, their superior
knowledge, were probably the mixed causes which led such
distinguished scholars as Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan,
and Campanella to oppress themselves and their readers with a
mass of unintelligible rubbish and cabalistic mysticism.[112]
Slow and gradual as are the successive advances in the knowledge
and improvement of mankind, it would not be reasonable to be
surprised that preceding generations could not at once attain to
the knowledge of a maturer age; and the teachers of mankind
groped their dark and uncertain way in ages destitute of the
illumination of modern times.'[113]
[112]
'Cardan believed great states depend
Upon the tip o' th'
Bear's tail's end,'
correctly enough expresses both the persuasion of the public
and that of many of the soi-disant philosophers of the
intimate dependence of the fates of both states and
individuals of this globe upon other globes in the universe.
[113] It was not so much a want of sufficient observation of
known facts, as the want of a true method and of
verification, which rendered the investigations of the
earlier philosophers so vague and uncertain. And the same
causes which necessarily prevented Aristotle, the greatest
intellect perhaps that has ever illuminated the world, from
attaining to the greater perfection of the modern philosophy,
are applicable, in a greater degree, to the case of the
mediæval and later discoverers. The causes of the failure of
the pre-scientific world are well stated by a living writer.
'Men cannot, or at least they will not, await the tardy
results of discovery; they will not sit down in avowed
ignorance. Imagination supplies the deficiencies of
observation. A theoretic arch is thrown across the chasm,
because men are unwilling to wait till a solid bridge be
constructed.... The early thinkers, by reason of the very
splendour of their capacities, were not less incompetent to
follow the slow processes of scientific investigation, than a
tribe of martial savages to adopt the strategy and discipline
of modern armies. No accumulated laws, no well-tried methods
existed for their aid. The elementary laws in each department
were mostly undetected.' The guide of knowledge is
verification. 'The complexity of phenomena is that of a
labyrinth, the paths of which cross and recross each other;
one wrong turn causes the wanderer infinite perplexity.
Verification is the Ariadne-thread by which the real issues
may be found. Unhappily, the process of verification is slow,
tedious, often difficult and deceptive; and we are by nature
lazy and impatient, hating labour, eager to obtain. Hence
credulity. We accept facts without scrutiny, inductions
without proof; and we yield to our disposition to believe
that the order of phenomena must correspond with our
conceptions.' A profound truth is contained in the assertion
of Comte (_Cours de Philosophie Positive_) that 'men have
still more need of method than of doctrine, of education than
of instruction.'--_Aristotle_, by G. H. Lewes.
CHAPTER V.
Sorcery in Southern Europe--Cause of the Retention of the
Demonological Creed among the Protestant Sects--Calvinists
the most Fanatical of the Reformed Churches--Witch-Creed
sanctioned in the Authorised Version of the Sacred
Scriptures--The Witch-Act of 1604--James VI.'s
'Demonologie'--Lycanthropy and Executions in France--The
French Provincial Parliaments active in passing Laws against
the various Witch-practices--Witchcraft in the
Pyrenees--Commission of Inquiry appointed--Its
Results--Demonology in Spain.
In the annals of black magic, the silent tribunals of the
Inquisition in Southern Europe which has consigned so many
thousands of heretics to the torture room and to the flames, do
not reveal so many trials for the simple crime of witchcraft as
the tribunals of the more northern peoples: there all dissent
from Catholic and priestly dogma was believed to be inspired by
the powers of hell, deserving a common punishment, whether in the
form of denial of transubstantiation, infallibility, of skill in
magic, or of the vulgar practice of sorcery. Throughout Europe
penalties and prosecutions were being continually enacted. The
popes in Italy fulminated abroad their decrees, and the
parliaments of France were almost daily engaged in pronouncing
sentence.
Where the papal yoke had been thrown off in Northern Germany, in
Scotland, and in England, the belief and the persecution remained
in full force, indeed greatly increased; and it is obvious to
inquire the cause of the retention, with many additions, of the
doctrine of witchcraft by those who had at last finally rejected
with scorn most of the grosser religious dogmas of the old
Church, who were so loud in their just denunciation of Catholic
tyranny and superstition. A general answer might be given that
the Reformation of the sixteenth century, while it swept away in
those countries in which it was effected the most injurious
principles of ecclesiasticism, the principles of infallibility
and authority in matters of faith, for the destruction of which
gratitude is due to the independent minds of Luther, Zuinglius,
and others, was yet far from complete in its negations. The
leaders of that great revolution, with all their genius and
boldness, could only partially free themselves from the
prejudices of education and of the age. To develope the important
principles they established, the rights of private judgment and
religious freedom, was the legacy and duty of their successors; a
duty which they failed to perform, to the incalculable misfortune
of succeeding generations. The Sacred Scriptures, the common
and only authority on faith among the different sections
of Protestantism, unfortunately seemed to inculcate the dread
power of the devil and his malicious purposes, and both the
Jewish and Christian Scriptures apparently taught the reality
of witchcraft. Theologians of all parties would have as easily
dared to question the existence of God himself as to doubt the
actual power of that other deity, and the unbelievers in his
universal interference were not illogically stigmatised as
atheists. With the Protestants some adventitious circumstances
might make a particular church more fanatical and furious than
another, and the Calvinists have deserved the palm for the
bitterest persecution of witchcraft. But neither the Lutheran nor
the Anglican section is exempt from the odious imputation.[114]
[114] Lord Peter, and his humbler brothers Martin and Jack,
in different degrees, are all of them obnoxious to the
accusation; and Bossuet (_Variations des Eglises
Protestantes_, xi. 201), who is assured that St. Paul
predicted the 'doctrines of devils' to be characteristic of
Manichæan and Albigensian heresy, might have more safely
interpreted the prophecy as applicable to the universal
Christian Church (at least of Western Europe) of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The followers of Calvin were most deeply imbued with hatred and
horror of Catholic practices, and, adopting the old prejudice or
policy of their antagonists, they were willing to confound the
superstitious rites of Catholicism with those of demonolatry. The
Anglican Church party, whose principles were not so entirely
opposite to the old religion, had far less antipathy: until the
revolution of 1688 it was for the most part engaged in contending
against liberty rather than against despotism of conscience;
against Calvinism than against Catholicism. Yet the Church of
England is exposed to the reproach of having sanctioned the
common opinions in the most authoritative manner. In the
authorised version of the Sacred Scriptures, in the translation
of which into the English language forty-seven selected divines,
eminent for position and learning, could concur in consecrating
a vulgar superstition, the most imposing sanction was given.
Had they possessed either common sense or courage, these Anglican
divines might have expressed their disbelief or doubt of
its truth by a more rational, and possibly more proper,
interpretation of the Hebrew and Greek expressions; or if that
was not possible, by an accompanying unequivocal protest. But the
subservience as well as superstition of the English Church under
the last of the Tudors and under the Stuarts is equally a matter
of fact and of reprobation.
It was in the first year of the first King of Great Britain that
the English Parliament passed the Act which remained in force, or
at least on the Statute Book, until towards the middle of last
century.[115] After due consideration the bill passed both
Houses; and by it, it was enacted that 'If any person shall use
any invocation or conjuration of any evil or wicked spirit, or
shall consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed, or reward
any evil or cursed spirit to or for any intent or purpose, or
take up any dead man, woman, or child out of the grave--or the
skin, bone, or any part of the dead person, to be employed or
used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment;
or shall use, exercise, or practice any sort of witchcraft, &c.,
whereby any person shall be destroyed, killed, wasted, consumed,
pined or lamed in any part of the body; that every such person
being convicted shall suffer death.' Twelve bishops sat in the
Committee of the Upper House.[116]
[115] The 'Witch Act' of James I. was passed in the year
1604. The new translation, or the present authorised
version, of the Bible, was executed in 1607. The inference
seems plain. An ecclesiastical canon passed at the same
period, which prohibits the inferior clergy from exorcising
without episcopal licence, proves at the same time the
prevalence of 'possession' and the prevalence of exorcism in
the beginning of the seventeenth century.
[116] The parliament of James I. would have done wisely to
have embraced the philosophic sentiment of a Hungarian prince
(1095-1114) who is said to have dismissed the absurd
superstition with laconic brevity: 'De strigis vero, quæ non
sunt, nulla quæstio fiat.'
The Scottish Parliament, during Queen Mary's reign, anathematised
the _papistical_ practices; and from that time the annals of
Scottish judicature are filled with records of trials and
convictions. James was educated among the stern adherents of
Calvin. In whatever matters of ecclesiastical faith and rule the
countryman of Knox may have deviated from the teaching of his
preceptors, he maintained with constant zeal his faith in the
devil's omnipotence; and we may be disposed to concede the
title of 'Defender of the Faith' (so confidently prefixed to
successive editions of the Authorised Version) to his activity in
the extermination of witches, rather than to his hatred of
priestcraft. While monarch only of the Northern kingdom, he
published a denunciation of the damnable infidelity of the 'Witch
Advocates,' and his own unhesitating belief. James VI. and his
clerical advisers were persuaded, or affected to be persuaded,
that the devil, with all his hellish crew, was conspiring to
frustrate the beneficial intentions of a pious Protestant prince.
Infernal despair and rage reached the climax when the marriage
with the Danish princess was to be effected. But, far from being
terrified by so formidable a conspiracy, he gloried in the
persuasion that he was the devil's greatest enemy; and the man
who shuddered at the sight of a drawn sword was not afraid to
enter the lists against the _invisible_ spiritual enemy.
The 'Demonologie' was published at Edinburgh in 1597. The author
introduces his book with these words: 'The fearful abounding at
this time in this country of these detestable slaves of the
devil, the witches or enchanters, hath moved me (beloved reader)
to despatch in post this following treatise of mine, not in any
wise (as I protest) to serve for a show of my learning and
ingine, but only moved of conscience to press thereby so far as I
can to resolve the doubting hearts of many; both that such
assaults of Sathan are most certainly practised, and that the
instruments thereof merits most severely to be punished: against
the damnable opinions of two principally in our age, whereof the
one called Scot, an Englishman, is not ashamed in public print to
deny that there can be such a thing as witchcraft, and so
maintains the old error of the Sadducees in denying of spirits.
The other, called Wierus, a German physician, sets out a public
apology for all these crafts-folks, whereby procuring for their
impunity, he plainly bewrays himself to have been one of that
profession. And for to make this treatise the more pleasant and
facile, I have put it in form of a dialogue, which I have divided
into three books: the first speaking of magic in general, and
necromancy in special; the second, of sorcery and witchcraft; and
the third contains a discourse of all those kinds of spirits and
spectres that appears and troubles persons, together with a
conclusion of the whole work. My intention in this labour is
only to prove two things, as I have already said: the one, that
such devilish arts have been and are; the other, what exact trial
and severe punishment they merit; and therefore reason I what
kind of things are possible to be performed in these arts, and
by what natural causes they may be. Not that I touch every
particular thing of the devil's power, for that were infinite;
but only, to speak scholasticly (since this cannot be spoken in
our language), I reason upon _genus_, leaving _species_ and
_differentia_ to be comprehended therein.'[117]
[117] Speculating on the manner of witches' aerial travels,
he thinks, 'Another way is somewhat more strange, and yet it
is possible to be true: which is, by being carried by the
force of their spirit, which is their conductor, either
above the earth or above the sea swiftly to the place where
they are to meet: which I am persuaded to be likewise
possible, in respect that as Habakkuk was carried by the
angel in that form to the den where Daniel lay, so think I
the devil will be ready to imitate God as well in that as in
other things, which is much more possible to him to do,
being a spirit, than to a mighty wind, being but a natural
meteor to transport from one place to another a solid body,
as is commonly and daily seen in practice. But in this
violent form they cannot be carried but a short bounds,
agreeing with the space that they may retain their breath;
for if it were longer their breath could not remain
unextinguished, their body being carried in such a violent
and forcible manner.... And in this transporting they say
themselves that they are invisible to any other, except
amongst themselves. For if the devil may form what kind of
impressions he pleases in the air, as I have said before,
speaking of magic, why may he not far easier thicken and
obscure so the air that is next about them, by contracting
it straight together that the beams of any other man's eyes
cannot pierce through the same to see them?'
&c.--_Cyclopædia of English Literature_, edited by Robert
Chambers.
The following injunction is characteristic of all persecuting
maxims, and is worthy of the disciple of Bodin: 'Witches ought to
be put to death according to the law of God, the civil and the
imperial law, and the municipal law of all Christian nations.
Yea, to spare the life and not to strike whom God bids strike,
and so severely in so odious a treason against God, is not only
unlawful but doubtless as great a sin in the magistrate as was
Saul's sparing Agag.' It is insisted upon by this _sagacious_
author (echoing the rules laid down in the 'Malleus'), that any
and every evidence is good against an exceptional crime: that the
testimony of the youngest children, and of persons of the most
infamous character, not only may, but ought to be, received.
This mischievous production is a curious collection of
demonological learning and experience, exhibiting the reputed
practices and ceremonies of witches, the mode of detecting them,
&c.; but is useless even for the purpose of showing the popular
Scottish or English notions, being chiefly a medley of classical
or foreign ideas, inserted apparently (spite of the royal
author's assurance to the contrary) to parade an array of
abstruse and pedantic learning. That some of the excessive terror
said to have been exhibited was simulated to promote his
pretensions to the especial hostility of Satan, is probable: but
that also he was impressed, in some degree, with a real and
lively fear scarcely admits of doubt. The modern Solomon might
well have blushed at the superior common sense of a barbaric
chief; and the 'judges of the seventeenth century might have been
instructed and confounded at the superior wisdom of Rotharis
[a Lombardic prince], who derides the absurd superstition and
protects the wretched victims of popular or judicial cruelty.'[118]
[118] _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, xlv. It would
have been well for his subjects if he could have
congratulated himself, like Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (the
model of philosophic princes, and a more practically
virtuous, if not wiser, philosopher than the proverbial
Solomon, and of whom Niebuhr, _History of Rome_, v.,
asserts, 'If there is any sublime human virtue, it is his'),
that he had learnt from his instructors to laugh at the
bugbears of witches and demons.--[Greek: Ta eis
heauton.]--_The Meditations of M. A. Antoninus._
Previously to the 'Witch Act,' the charge of sorcery was, in most
cases, a subordinate and subsidiary one, attached to various
political or other indictments. Henceforward the practice of the
peculiar offence might be entirely independent of any more
substantial accusation. In England, compared with the other
countries of Europe, folly more than ferocity, perhaps, generally
characterises the proceedings of the tribunals. During the
pre-Reformation ages, France, even more than her island
neighbour, suffered from the crime. The fates of the Templars, of
Jeanne d'Arc, of Arras, of those suspected of causing the mad
king's, Charles VI., derangement (when many of the _white_
witches, or wizards, 'mischievously good,' suffered for failing,
by a pretended skill, to effect his promised cure) are some of
the more conspicuous examples. But in France, as in the rest of
Europe, it was in the post-feudal period that prosecutions became
of almost daily occurrence.
A prevalent kind of sorcery was that of lycanthropy, as it was
called, a prejudice derived, it seems, in part from the
Pythagorean metempsychosis. A few cases will illustrate the
nature of this stupendous transformation. That it is mostly
found to take place in France and in the southern districts, the
country of wolves, that still make their ravages there, is a fact
easily intelligible; and if the devil can enter into swine, he
can also, in the opinion of the demonologists, as easily enter
into wolves. At Dôle, in 1573, a loup-garou, or wehr-wolf
(man-wolf), was accused of devastating the country and devouring
little children. The indictment was read by Henri Camus, doctor
of laws and counsellor of the king, to the effect that the
accused, Gilles Garnier, had killed a girl twelve years of age,
having torn her to pieces, partly with his teeth, and partly with
his wolf's paws; that having dragged the body into the forest, he
there devoured the larger portion, reserving the remainder for
his wife; also that, by reason of injuries inflicted in a similar
way on another young girl, the loup-garou had occasioned her
death; also that he had devoured a boy of thirteen, tearing him
limb by limb; that he displayed the same unnatural propensities
even in his own proper shape. Fifty persons were found to bear
witness; and he was put to the rack, which elicited an unreserved
confession. He was then brought back into court, when Dr. Camus,
in the name of the Parliament of Dôle, pronounced the following
sentence: 'Seeing that Gilles Garnier has, by the testimony of
credible witnesses and by his own spontaneous confession, been
proved guilty of the abominable crimes of lycanthropy and
witchcraft, this court condemns him, the said Grilles, to be
this day taken in a cart from this spot to the place of
execution, accompanied by the executioner, where he, by the said
executioner, shall be tied to a stake and burned alive, and that
his ashes be then scattered to the winds. The court further
condemns him, the said Gilles, to the costs of this prosecution.
Given at Dôle this 18th day of January, 1573.' Five years later a
man named Jacques Rollet was burned alive in the Place de Grêve
for the same crime, having been tried and condemned by the
Parliament of Paris.[119]
[119] A still more sensational case happened at a village in
the mountains of Auvergne. A gentleman while hunting was
suddenly attacked by a savage wolf of monstrous size.
Impenetrable by his shot, the beast made a spring upon the
helpless huntsman, who in the struggle luckily, or unluckily
for the unfortunate lady, contrived to cut off one of its
fore-paws. This trophy he placed in his pocket, and made the
best of his way homewards in safety. On the road he met a
friend to whom he exhibited a bleeding paw, or rather a
woman's hand (so it was produced from the hunter's pocket)
upon which was a wedding ring. His wife's ring was at once
recognised by the other. His suspicions aroused, he
immediately went in search of his wife, who was found
sitting by the fire in the kitchen, her arm hidden beneath
her apron: when the husband seizing her by the arm found his
terrible suspicions verified. The bleeding stump was there,
evidently just fresh from the wound. She was given into
custody, and in the event was burned at Riom in presence of
thousands of spectators. Among some of the races of India,
among the Khonds of the mountains of Orissa, a superstition
obtains like that of the _loup-garou_ of France. In India
the tiger takes the place of the wolf, and the metamorphosed
witch is there known as the _Pulta-bag_.
A kindred prejudice, Vampirism, has still many adherents in
Eastern Europe. The vampire is a human being who in his tomb
maintains a posthumous existence by ascending in the night
and sucking the bodies of the living. His punishment was
necessarily less tremendous than that of the witch: the
_dead_ body only being burned to ashes. An official document,
quoted by Horst, narrates the particulars of the examination
and burning of a disinterred vampire.
Several witches were burned in successive years throughout the
kingdom. In 1564, three witches and a wizard were executed at
Poictiers: on the rack they declared that they had destroyed
numbers of sheep by magical preparations, attended the Sabbaths,
&c. Trois Echelles, a celebrated sorcerer, examined in the
presence of Charles IX. and his court, acknowledged his
obligation to the devil, to whom he had sold himself, recounting
the debaucheries of the Sabbath, the methods of bewitching, and
the compositions of the unguents for blighting cattle. The
astounding fact was also revealed that some twelve hundred
accomplices were at large in different parts of the land. The
provincial parliaments in the end of this and the greater part of
the next century are unremittingly engaged in passing decrees and
making provisions against the increasing offences.[120] 'The
Parliament of Rouen decreed that the possession of a _grimoire_
or book of spells was sufficient evidence of witchcraft; and that
all persons on whom such books were found should be _burned
alive_. Three councils were held in different parts of France in
1583, all in relation to the same subject. The Parliament of
Bordeaux issued strict injunctions to all curates and clergy
whatever to use redoubled efforts to root out the crime of
witchcraft. The Parliament of Tours was equally peremptory, and
feared the judgments of an offended God if all these dealers with
the devil were not swept from the face of the land. The
Parliament of Rheims was particularly severe against the _noueurs
d'aiguillettes_ or 'tiers of the knot'--people of both sexes who
took pleasure in preventing the consummation of marriage that
they might counteract the command of God to our first parents to
increase and multiply. This parliament held it to be sinful to
wear amulets to preserve from witchcraft; and that this practice
might not be continued within its jurisdiction, drew up a form of
exorcism 'which could more effectually defeat the agents of the
devil and put them to flight.'[121]
[120] Montaigne, one of the few Frenchmen at this time who
seemed to discredit the universal creed, in one of his
essays ventures to think 'it is very probable that the
principal credit of visions, of enchantments, and of such
extraordinary effects, proceeds from the power of the
imagination acting principally upon the more impressible
minds of the vulgar.' He is inclined to assign the prevalent
'liaisons' (nouements d'aiguillettes) to the apprehensions
of a fear with which in his age the French world was so
perplexed (si entravé). _Essais_, liv. i. 20.
[121] _Extraordinary Popular Delusions_, by Mackay, whose
authorities are Tablier, Boguet (_Discours sur les
Sorciers_), and M. Jules Garinet (_Histoire de la Magie_).
In France, and still more in Italy, there is reason for believing
that many of the convicts were not without the real guilt of
toxicological practices; and they might sometimes properly
deserve the opprobrium of the old _venefici_. The formal trial
and sentence to death of La Maréchale de l'Ancre in 1617 was
perhaps more political than superstitious, but witchcraft was
introduced as one of the gravest accusations. Her preponderance
in the councils of Marie de Medici and of Louis XIII. originated
in the natural _fascination_ of royal but inferior minds. Two
years afterwards occurred a bonâ fide prosecution on a large
scale. A commission was appointed by the Parliament of Bordeaux
to inquire into the causes and circumstances of the prevalence of
witchcraft in the Pyrenean districts. Espaignol, president of the
local parliament, with the better known councillor, Pierre de
l'Ancre, who has left a record ('Tableau de l'Inconstance des
Mauvais Anges et Démons, où il est amplement traité des Sorciers
et Démons: Paris'), was placed at the head of the commission. How
the district of Labourt was so infested with the tribe, that of
thirty thousand inhabitants hardly a family existed but was
infected with sorcery, is explained by the barren, sterile,
mountainous aspect of the neighbourhood of that part of the
Pyrenees: the men were engaged in the business of fishermen, and
the women left alone were exposed to the tempter. The priests too
were as ignorant and wicked as the people; their relations with
the lonely wives and daughters being more intimate than proper.
Young and handsome women, some mere girls, form the greater
proportion of the accused. As many as forty a day appeared at the
bar of the commissioners, and at least two hundred were hanged or
burned.
Evidence of the appearance of the devil was various and
contradictory. Some at the _Domdaniel_, the place of assemblage,
had a vision of a hideous wild he-goat upon a large gilded
throne; others of a man twisted and disfigured by Tartarean
torture; of a gentleman in black with a sword, booted and
spurred; to others he seemed as some shapeless indistinct object,
as that of the trunk of a tree, or some huge rock or stone. They
proceeded to their meetings riding on spits, pitchforks,
broom-sticks: being entertained on their arrival in the approved
style, and indulging in the usual licence. Deputies from witchdom
attended from all parts, even from Scotland. When reproached by
some of his slaves for failing to come to the rescue in the
torture-chamber or at the stake, their lord replied by causing
illusory fires to be lit, bidding the doubters walk through the
harmless flames, promising not more inconvenience in the bonfires
of their persecutors. Lycanthropic criminals were also brought up
who had prowled about and devastated the sheepfolds. Espaignol
and De l'Ancre were provided with two professional Matthew
Hopkinses: one a surgeon for examining the 'marks' (generally
here discovered in the left eye, like a frog's foot) in the men
and older women; the other a girl of seventeen, for the younger
of her sex. Many of the priests were executed; several made their
escape from the country. Besides the work before mentioned, De
l'Ancre published a treatise under the title of 'L'Incrédulité et
Mescréance du Sortilége pleinement convaincue,' 1622. The
expiration of the term of the Bordeaux commission brought the
proceedings to a close, and fortunately saved a number of the
condemned.
In Spain, the land of Torquemada and Ximenes, which had long ago
fanatically expelled the Jews and recently its old Moorish
conquerors from its soil, the unceasing activity of the
Inquisition during 140 years must have extorted innumerable
confessions and proofs of diabolic conspiracies and heresy.
Antonio Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, to whose rare
opportunities of obtaining information we are indebted for some
instructive revelations, has exposed a large number of the
previously silent and dark transactions of the Holy Office. But
the demonological ideas of the Southern Church and people are
profusely displayed in the copious dramatic literature of the
Spaniards, whose theatre was at one time nearly as popular, if
not as influential, as the Church.
The dramas of the celebrated Lope de Vega and of Calderon in
particular, are filled with demons as well as angels[122]--a
sort of religious compensation to the Church for the moral
deficiencies of a licentious stage, or rather licentious public.
[122] In the _Nacimiento de Christo_ of Lope de Vega the
devil appears in his popular figure of the dragon.
Calderon's _Wonder-Working Magician_, relating the
adventures of St. Cyprian and the various temptations and
seductions of the Evil Spirit, like Goethe's Faust,
introduces the devil in the disguise of a fashionable and
gallant gentleman.--Ticknor's _History of Spanish
Literature_.
CHAPTER VI.
'Possession' in France in the Seventeenth Century--Urbain
Grandier and the Convent of Loudun--Exorcism at
Aix--Ecstatic Phenomena--Madeleine Bavent--Her cruel
Persecution--Catholic and Protestant Witchcraft in
Germany--Luther's Demonological Fears and
Experiences--Originated in his exceptional Position and in
the extraordinary Circumstances of his Life and
Times--Witch-burning at Bamburg and at Würzburg.
Demoniacal possession was a phase of witchcraft which obtained
extensively in France during the seventeenth century: the victims
of this hallucination were chiefly the female inmates of
religious houses, whose inflamed imaginations were prostituted by
their priestly advisers to the most atrocious purposes. Urbain
Grandier's fate was connected with that of an entire convent. The
facts of this celebrated sorcerer's history are instructive. He
was educated in a college of the Jesuits at Bordeaux, and
presented by the fathers, with whom his abilities and address had
gained much applause, to a benefice in Loudun. He provoked by his
haughtiness the jealousy of his brother clergy, who regarded him
as an intruder, and his pride and resentment increased in direct
proportion to the activity of his enemies, who had conspired to
effect his ruin. Mounier and Mignon, two priests whom he had
mortally offended, were most active. Urbain Grandier was rash
enough to oppose himself alone to the united counsels of
unscrupulous and determined foes. Defeated singly in previous
attempts to drive him from Loudun, the two priests combined with
the leading authorities of the place. Their haughty and careless
adversary had the advantage or disadvantage of a fine person and
handsome face, which, with his other recommendations, gained him
universal popularity with the women; and his success and
familiarities with the fair sex were not likely to escape the
vigilance of spies anxious to collect damaging proofs. What
inflamed to the utmost the animosities of the two parties was the
success of Canon Mignon in obtaining the coveted position of
confessor to the convent of Ursulines in Loudun, to the exclusion
of Grandier, himself an applicant. This convent was destined to
assume a prominent part in the fate of the curé of the town. The
younger nuns, it seems, to enliven the dull monotony of monastic
life, adopted a plan of amusing their leisure by frightening the
older ones in making the most of their knowledge of secret
passages in the building, playing off ghost-tricks, and raising
unearthly noises. When the newly appointed confessor was informed
of the state of matters he at once perceived the possibility,
and formed the design, of turning it to account. The offending
nuns were promised forgiveness if they would continue their
ghostly amusement, and also affect demoniacal possession; a fraud
in which they were more readily induced to participate by an
assurance that it might be the humble means of converting the
heretics--Protestants being unusually numerous in that part of
the country.
As soon as they were sufficiently prepared to assume their parts,
the magistrates were summoned to witness the phenomena of
possession and exorcism. On the first occasion the Superior of
the convent was the selected patient; and it was extracted from
the demon in possession that he had been sent by Urbain Grandier,
priest of the church of St. Peter. This was well so far; but the
civil authorities generally, as it appears, were not disposed to
accept even the irrefragable testimony of a demoniac; and the
ecclesiastics, with the leading inhabitants, were in conflict
with the civil power. Opportunely, however, for the plan of the
conspirators, who were almost in despair, an all-powerful ally
was enlisted on their side. A severe satire upon some acts of the
minister of France, Cardinal Richelieu, or of some of his
subordinates, had made its appearance. Urbain was suspected to be
the author; his enemies were careful to improve the occasion; and
the Cardinal-minister's cooperation was secured. A royal
commission was ordered to inquire into the now notorious
circumstances of the Loudun diabolism. Laubardemont, the head of
the commission, arrived in December 1633, and no time was lost in
bringing the matter to a crisis. The house of the suspected was
searched for books of magic; he himself being thrown into a
dungeon, where the surgeons examined him for the 'marks.' Five
insensible spots were found--a certain proof. Meanwhile the nuns
become more hysterical than ever; strong suspicion not being
wanting that the priestly confessors to the convent availed
themselves of their situation to abuse the bodies as well as the
minds of the reputed demoniacs. To such an extent went the
audacity of the exorcists, and the credulity of the people, that
the _enceinte_ condition of one of the sisters, which at the end
of five or six months disappeared, was explained by the malicious
slander of the devil, who had caused that scandalous illusion.
Crowds of persons of all ranks flocked from Paris and from the
most distant parts to see and hear the wild ravings of these
hysterical or drugged women, whose excitement was such that they
spared not their own reputations; and some scandalous exposures
were submitted to the amusement or curiosity of the surrounding
spectators. Some few of them, aroused from the horrible delusion,
or ashamed of their complicity, admitted that all their previous
revelations were simple fiction. Means were found to effectually
silence such dangerous announcements. The accusers pressed on the
prosecution; the influence of his friends was overborne, and
Grandier was finally sentenced to the stake. Fearing the result
of a despair which might convincingly betray the facts of the
case to the assembled multitude, they seem to have prevailed upon
the condemned to keep silence up to the last moment, under
promise of an easier death. But already fastened to the stake, he
learned too late the treachery of his executioners; instead of
being first strangled, he was committed alive to the flames. Nor
were any 'last confessions' possible. The unfortunate victim of
the malice of exasperated rivals, and of the animosity of the
implacable Richelieu, has been variously represented.[123] It is
noticeable that the scene of this affair was in the heart of the
conquered Protestant region--Rochelle had fallen only six years
before the execution; and the heretics, although politically
subdued, were numerous and active. A fact which may account for
the seeming indifference and even the opposition of a large
number of the people in this case of diabolism which obtained
comparatively little credit. It had been urged to the nuns that
it would be for the good and glory of Catholicism that the
heretics should be confounded by a few astounding miracles.
Whether Grandier had any decided heretical inclinations is
doubtful; but he wrote against the celibacy of the priesthood,
and was suspected of liberal opinions in religion. A Capuchin
named Tranquille (a contemporary) has furnished the materials for
the 'History of the Devils of Loudun' by the Protestant Aubin,
1716.
[123] Michelet apparently accepts the charge of immorality;
according to which the curé took advantage of his popularity
among the ladies of Loudun, by his insinuating manners, to
seduce the wives and daughters of the citizens. By another
writer (Alexandre Dumas, _Celebrated Crimes_) he is supposed
to have been of a proud and vindictive disposition, but
innocent of the alleged irregularities.
Twenty-four years previously a still more scandalous affair--that
of Louis Gauffridi and the Convent of Aix, in which Gauffridi, who
had debauched several girls both in and out of the establishment,
was the principal actor--was transacted with similar circumstances.
Madeleine, one of the novices, soon after entering upon her
noviciate, was seized with the ecstatic trances, which were
speedily communicated to her companions.[124] These fits, in the
judgment of the priests, were nothing but the effect of witchcraft.
Exorcists elicited from the girls that Louis Gauffridi, a powerful
magician having authority over demons throughout Europe, had
bewitched them. The questions and answers were taken down, by
order of the judges, by reporters, who, while the priests were
exorcising, committed the results to writing, published afterwards
by one of them, Michaelis, in 1613. Among the interesting facts
acquired through these spirit-media, the inquisitors learned that
Antichrist was already come; that printing, and the invention of
it, were alike accursed, and similar information. Madeleine,
tortured and imprisoned in the most loathsome dungeon, was reduced
to such a condition of extreme horror and dread, that from this
time she was the mere instrument of her atrocious judges. Having
been intimate with the wizard, she could inform them of the
position of the 'secret marks' on his person: these were
ascertained in the usual way by pricking with needles. Gauffridi,
by various torture, was induced to make the required confession,
and was burned alive at Aix, April 30, 1611.
[124] M. Maury, in a philosophical and learned work (_La
Magie et l'Astrologie dans l'Antiquité et au Moyen Âge_),
has scientifically explored and exposed the mysteries of
these and the like ecstatic phenomena, of such frequent
occurrence in Protestant as well as in Catholic countries;
in the orphan-houses of Amsterdam and Horn, as well as in
the convents of France and Italy in the 17th century. And
the Protestant revivalists of the present age have in great
measure reproduced these curious results of religious
excitement.
Demoniacal possession was a mania in France in the seventeenth
century. The story of Madeleine Bavent, as reported, reveals the
utmost licentiousness and fiendish cruelty.[125] Gibbon justly
observes that ancient Rome supported with the greatest difficulty
the institution of _six_ vestals, notwithstanding the certain fate
of a living grave for those who could not preserve their
chastity; and Christian Rome was filled with many thousands of
both sexes bound by vows to perpetual virginity. Madeleine was
seduced by her Franciscan confessor when only fourteen; and she
entered a convent lately founded at Louviers. In this building,
surrounded by a wood, and situated in a suitable spot, some
strange practices were carried on. At the instigation of their
director, a priest called David, the nuns, it is reported, were
seized with an irresistible desire of imitating the primitive
Adamite simplicity: the novices were compelled to return to the
simple nudity of the days of innocence when taking exercise in
the conventual gardens, and even at their devotions in the
chapel. The novice Madeleine, on one occasion, was reprimanded
for concealing her bosom with the altar-cloth at communion. She
was originally of a pure and artless mind; and only gradually and
stealthily she was corrupted by the pious arguments of her
priest. This man, Picart by name--one of that extensive class the
'tristes obsc[oe]ni,' of whom the Angelos and Tartuffes[126] are
representatives--succeeded to the vacant office of directing
confessor to the nuns of Louviers; and at once embraced the
opportunities of the confessional. Without repeating all the
disgusting scenes that followed, as given by Michelet, it is only
necessary to add that the miserable nun became the mistress and
helpless creature of her seducer. 'He employed her as a magical
charm to gain over the rest of the nuns. A holy wafer steeped in
Madeleine's blood and buried in the garden would be sure to
disturb their senses and their minds. This was the very year in
which Urban Grandier was burned. Throughout France men spoke of
nothing but the devils of Loudun.... Madeleine fancied herself
bewitched and knocked about by devils; followed about by a lewd
cat with eyes of fire. By degrees other nuns caught the disorder,
which showed itself in odd supernatural jerks and writhings.'
[125] It is but one instance of innumerable amours within
the secret penetralia of the privileged conventual
establishments. In the dark recesses of these vestal
institutions on a gigantic scale, where publicity, that sole
security, was never known, what vices or even crimes could
not be safely perpetrated? Luther, who proved in the most
practical way his contempt for the sanctity of monastic vows
by eloping with a nun, assures us, among other scandals
attaching to convent life, of the fact that when a fish-pond
adjoining one of these establishments in Rome was drained
off, six thousand infant skulls were exposed to view. A
story which may be fact or fiction. But while fully
admitting the probability of invention and exaggeration in
the relations of enemies, and the fact that undue prejudice
is likely to somewhat exaggerate the probable evils of the
mysterious and unknown, how could it be otherwise than that
during fourteen centuries many crimes should have been
committed in those silent and safe retreats? Nor, indeed, is
experience opposed to the possibility of the highest fervour
of an unnatural enthusiasm being compatible with more human
passions. The virgin who,
'Ut flos in septis secretus nascitur hortis
Ignotus pecori,'
as eulogised by the virgin-chorus in the beautiful
epithalamium of Catullus, might be recognised in the
youthful 'religieuse' if only human passion could be
excluded; but the story of Heloise and Abelard is not a
solitary proof of the superiority of human nature over an
impossible and artificial spirituality.
[126] As Tartuffe privately confesses,
'L'amour qui nous attache aux beautés éternelles
N'étouffe pas en nous l'amour des temporelles.
* * * * *
Pour être dévot, je n'en suis pas moins homme.'
The Superior was not averse to the publication of these events,
having the example and reputation of Loudun before her. Little is
new in the possession and exorcism: for the most part they are a
repetition of those of Aix and Loudun. During a brief interval
the devils were less outrageous: for the Cardinal-minister was
meditating a reform of the monastic establishments. Upon his
death they commenced again with equal violence. Picart was now
dead--but not so the persecution of his victim. The priests
recommenced miracle-working with renewed vigour.[127] Saved from
immediate death by a fortunate or, as it may be deemed,
unfortunate sensitiveness to bodily pain, she was condemned for
the rest of her life to solitary confinement in a fearful
dungeon, in the language of her judges to an _in pace_. There
lying tortured, powerless in a loathsome cell, their prisoner was
alternately coaxed and threatened into admitting all sorts of
crimes, and implicating whom they wished.[128] The further
cruelties to which the lust, and afterwards the malignancy, of
her gaolers submitted her were not brought to an end by the
interference of parliament in August 1647, when the destruction
of the Louviers establishment was decreed. The guilty escaped by
securing, by intimidation, the silence of their prisoner, who
remained a living corpse in the dungeons of the episcopal palace
of Rouen. The bones of Picart were exhumed, and publicly burned;
the curé Boullé, an accomplice, was dragged on a hurdle to the
fish-market, and there burned at the stake. So terminated this
last of the trilogical series. But the hysterical or demoniacal
disease was as furious as ever in Germany in the middle of the
eighteenth century; and was attended with as tremendous effects
at Würzburg as at Louviers.
[127] To the diabolic visions of the other they opposed
those of 'a certain Anne of the Nativity, a girl of sanguine
hysterical temperament, frantic at need, and half mad--so
far at least as to believe in her own lies. A kind of
dog-fight was got up between the two. They besmeared each
other with false charges. Anne saw the devil quite naked by
Madeleine's side. Madeleine swore to seeing Anne at the
Sabbath with the Lady Superior, the Mother Assistant, and
the Mother of the novices.... Madeleine was condemned,
without a hearing, to be disgraced, to have her body
examined for the marks of the devil. They tore off her veil
and gown, and made her the wretched sport of a vile
curiosity that would have pierced till she bled again in
order to win the right of sending her to the stake. Leaving
to no one else the care of a scrutiny which was in itself a
torture, these virgins, acting as matrons, ascertained if
she were with child or no; shaved all her body, and dug
their needles into her quivering flesh to find out the
insensible spots.'--_La Sorcière._
[128] The horrified reader may see the fuller details of this
case in Michelet's _La Sorcière_, who takes occasion to state
that, than 'The History of Madeleine Bavent, a nun of
Louviers, with her examination, &c., 1652, Rouen,' he knows
of 'no book more important, more dreadful, or worthier of
being reprinted. It is the most powerful narrative of its
class. _Piety Afflicted_, by the Capuchin Esprit de Bosrager,
is a work immortal in the annals of tomfoolery. The two
excellent pamphlets by the doughty surgeon Yvelin, the
_Inquiry_ and the _Apology_, are in the Library of Ste.
Geneviève.'--_La Sorcière_, the Witch of the Middle Ages,
chap. viii. Whatever exaggeration there may possibly be in
any of the details of these and similar histories, there is
not any reasonable doubt of their general truth. It is much
to be wished, indeed, that writers should, in these cases,
always confine themselves to the simple facts, which need not
any imaginary or fictitious additions.
In Germany during the seventeenth century witches felt the fury
of both Catholic and Protestant zeal; but in the previous age
prosecutions are directed against Protestant witches. They
abounded in Upper Germany in the time of Innocent VIII., and
what numbers were executed has been already seen. When the
revolutionary party had acquired greater strength and its power
was established, they vied with the conservatives in their
vigorous attacks upon the empire of Satan.
Luther had been sensible to the contagious fear that the great
spiritual enemy was actually fighting in the ranks of his
enemies. He had personal experience of his hostility. Immured for
his safety in a voluntary but gloomy prison, occupied intensely
in the plan of a mighty revolution against the most powerful
hierarchy that has ever existed, engaged continuously in the
laborious task of translating the Sacred Scriptures, only
partially freed from the prejudices of education, it is little
surprising that the antagonist of the Church should have
experienced infernal hallucinations. This weakness of the
champion of Protestantism is at least more excusable than the
pedantic folly of the head of the English Church. When Luther,
however, could seriously affirm that witchcraft 'is the devil's
proper work wherewith, when God permits, he not only hurts people
but makes away with them; for in this world we are as guests and
strangers, body and soul, cast under the devil: that idiots, the
lame, the blind, the dumb are men in whom ignorant devils have
established themselves, and all the physicians who attempt to
heal these infirmities as though they proceeded from natural
causes, are ignorant blockheads who know nothing about the power
of the demon,' we cannot be indignant at the blind credulity of
the masses of the people. It appears inconsistent that Luther,
averse generally to supernaturalism, should yet find no
difficulty in entertaining these irrational diabolistic ideas.
The circumstances of his life and times sufficiently explain the
inconsistency.[129]
[129] The following sentence in his recorded conversation,
when the free thoughts of the Reformer were unrestrained in
the presence of his most intimate friends, is suggestive. 'I
know,' says he, 'the devil thoroughly well; he has over and
over pressed me so close that I scarcely knew whether I was
alive or dead. Sometimes he has thrown me into such despair
that I even knew not that there is a God, and had great
doubts about our dear Lord Christ. But the Word of God has
speedily restored me' (Luther's _Tischreden_ or _Table
Talk_, as cited in Howitt's _History of the Supernatural_).
The eloquent controversialist Bossuet and the Catholics have
been careful to avail themselves of the impetuosity and
incautiousness of the great German Reformer.
Of all the leaders of the religious revolution of the
sixteenth century, the Reformer of Zurich was probably the
most liberally inclined; and Zuinglius' unusual charity
towards those ancient sages and others who were ignorant of
Christianity, which induced him to place the names of
Aristides, Socrates, the Gracchi, &c., in the same list with
those of Moses, Isaiah, and St. Paul, who should meet in the
assembly of the virtuous and just in the future life, obliged
Luther openly to profess of his friend that 'he despaired of
his salvation,' and has provoked the indignation of the
bishop of Meaux.--_Variations des Eglises Protestantes_, ii.
19 and 20.
On the eve of the prolonged and ferocious struggle on the
continent between Catholicism and Protestantism a wholesale
slaughter of witches and wizards was effected, a fitting prologue
to the religious barbarities of the Thirty Years' War. Fires were
kindled almost simultaneously in two different places, at Bamburg
and Würzburg; and seldom, even in the annals of witchcraft, have
they burned more tremendously. The prince-bishops of those
territories had long been anxious to extirpate Lutheranism from
their dioceses. Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamburg, a
vigorous supporter of the Jesuits, was the chief agent of John
George II. He waged war upon the heretical sorcerers in the
'whole armour of God,' _Panoplia armaturæ Dei_. According to the
statements of credible historians, nine hundred trials took
place in the two courts of Bamburg and Zeil between 1625 and
1630. Six hundred were burned by Bishop George II. No one was
spared. The chancellor, his son, Dr. Horn, with his wife and
daughters, many of the lords and councillors of the bishop's
court, women and priests, suffered. After tortures of the most
extravagant kind it was extorted that some twelve hundred of them
were confederated to bewitch the entire land to the extent that
'there would have been neither wine nor corn in the country, and
that thereby man and beast would have perished with hunger, and
men would be driven to eat one another. There were even some
Catholic priests among them who had been led into practices too
dreadful to be described, and they confessed among other things
that they had baptized many children in the devil's name. It must
be stated that these confessions were made under tortures of the
most fearful kind, far more so than anything that was practised
in France or other countries.... The number brought to trial in
these terrible proceedings were so great, and they were treated
with so little consideration, that it was usual not even to take
the trouble of setting down their names; but they were cited as
the accused Nos. 1, 2, 3, &c. The Jesuits took their confessions
in private, and they made up the lists of those who were
understood to have been denounced by them.'
More destructive still were the burnings of Würzburg at the same
period under the superintendence of Philip Adolph, who ascended
the episcopal throne in 1623. In spite of the energy of his
predecessors, a grand confederacy of sorcerers had been
discovered, and were at once denounced.[130]
[130] 'A catalogue of nine and twenty _brände_ or burnings
during a very short period of time, previous to the February
of 1629, will give the best notion of the horrible character
of these proceedings; it is printed,' adds Mr. Wright, 'from
the original records in Hauber's _Bibliotheca Magica_.' E.g.
in the Fifth Brände are enumerated: (1) Latz, an eminent
shopkeeper. (2) Rutscher, a shopkeeper. (3) The housekeeper
of the Dean of the cathedral. (4) The old wife of the Court
ropemaker. (5) Jos. Sternbach's housekeeper. (6) The wife of
Baunach, a Senator. (7) A woman named Znickel Babel. (8) An
old woman. In the Sixteenth Burning: (1) A noble page of
Ratzenstein. (2) A boy of ten years of age. (3, 4, 5) The
two daughters of the Steward of the Senate and his maid. (6)
The fat ropemaker's wife. In the Twentieth Burning: (1)
Gobel's child, the most beautiful girl in Würzburg. (2) A
student on the fifth form, who knew many languages, and was
an excellent musician. (3, 4) Two boys from the New Minster,
each twelve years old. (5) Stepper's little daughter. (6)
The woman who kept the bridge gate. In the Twenty-sixth
Burning are specified: (1) David Hans, a Canon in the New
Minster. (2) Weydenbusch, a Senator. (3) The innkeeper's
wife of the Baumgarten. (4) An old woman. (5) The little
daughter of Valkenberger was privately executed and burned
on her bier. (6) The little son of the town council bailiff.
(7) Herr Wagner, vicar in the cathedral, was burned
alive.--_Narratives of Sorcery and Magic._ The facts are
taken from Dr. Soldan's _Geschichte der Hexenprocesse_,
whose materials are to be found in Horst's _Zauber
Bibliothek_ and Hauber's _Bibliotheca Magica_.
Nine appears to have been the greatest number, and sometimes only
two were sent to execution at once. Five are specially recorded
as having been burned alive. The victims are of all professions
and trades--vicars, canons, goldsmiths, butchers, &c. Besides the
twenty-nine conflagrations recorded, many others were lighted
about the same time: the names of whose prey are not written in
the Book of Death. Frederick Spee, a Jesuit, formerly a violent
enemy of the witches, but who had himself been incriminated by
their extorted confessions at these holocausts, was converted to
the opposite side, and wrote the 'Cautio Criminalis,' in which
the necessity of caution in receiving evidence is insisted
upon--a caution, without doubt, 'very necessary at that time for
the magistracy throughout Germany.' All over Germany executions,
if not everywhere so indiscriminately destructive as those in
Franconia and at Würzburg, were incessant: and it is hardly the
language of hyperbole to say that no province, no city, no
village was without its condemned.
CHAPTER VII.
Scotland one of the most Superstitious Countries in
Europe--Scott's Relation of the Barbarities perpetrated in
the Witch-trials under the auspices of James VI.--The Fate
of Agnes Sampson, Euphane MacCalzean, &c.--Irrational
Conduct of the Courts of Justice--Causes of voluntary
Witch-confessions--Testimony of Sir G. Mackenzie, &c.--Trial
and Execution of Margaret Barclay--Computation of the number
of Witches who suffered death in England and Scotland in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--Witches burned alive at
Edinburgh in 1608--The Lancashire Witches--Sir Thomas
Overbury and Dr. Forman--Margaret Flower and Lord Rosse.
Scotland, by the physical features of the country and by the
character and habits of the people, is eminently apt for the
reception of the magical and supernatural of any kind;[131] and
during the century from 1563 it was almost entirely subject to
the dominion of Satan. Sir Walter Scott has narrated some of the
most prominent cases and trials in the northern part of the
island. The series may be said to commence from the confederated
conspiracy of hell to prevent the union of James VI. with the
Princess Anne of Denmark. An overwhelming tempest at sea during
the voyage of these anti-papal, anti-diabolic royal personages
was the appointed means of their destruction.
[131] A late philosophic writer has ventured to institute a
comparison in point of superstition and religious
intolerance between Spain and Scotland. The latter country,
however, has denied to political what it conceded to
priestly government: hence its superior material progress
and prosperity.--Buckle's _History of Civilisation in
England_.
The human agents were Agnes Sampson, the wise wife of Keith (one
of the better sort, who cured diseases, &c.); Dame Euphane
MacCalzean, widow of a senator of the College of Justice, and a
Catholic; Dr. John Fian or Cunninghame, a man of some learning,
and of much skill in poison as well as in magic; Barbara Napier
or Douglas; Geillis Duncan; with about thirty other women of the
lowest condition. 'When the monarch of Scotland sprung this
strong covey of his favourite game, they afforded the Privy
Council and himself sport for the greatest part of the remaining
winter. He attended on the examinations himself.... Agnes
Sampson, after being an hour tortured by the twisting of a cord
around her head according to the custom of the buccaneers,
confessed that she had consulted with one Richard Grahame
concerning the probable length of the king's life and the means
of shortening it. But Satan, to whom at length they resorted for
advice, told them in French respecting King James, _Il est un
homme de Dieu_. The poor woman also acknowledged that she had
held a meeting with those of her sisterhood, who had charmed a
cat by certain spells, having four joints of men knit to its
feet, which they threw into the sea to excite a tempest: they
embarked in sieves with much mirth and jollity, the fiend rolling
himself before them upon the waves dimly seen, and resembling a
huge haystack in size and appearance. They went on board of a
foreign ship richly laden with wines, where, invisible to the
crew, they feasted till the sport grew tiresome; and then Satan
sunk the vessel and all on board. Fian or Cunninghame was also
visited by the sharpest tortures, ordinary and extraordinary. The
nails were torn from his fingers with smiths' pincers; pins were
driven into the places which the nails usually defended; his
knees were crushed in the _boots_; his finger-bones were
splintered in the _pilniewincks_. At length his constancy,
hitherto sustained, as the bystanders supposed, by the help of
the devil, was fairly overcome; and he gave an account of a great
witch-meeting at North Berwick, where they paced round the church
_withershins_--i. e. in reverse of the motion of the sun. Fian
then blew into the lock of the church door, whereupon the bolts
gave way: the unhallowed crew entered, and their master the devil
appeared to his servants in the shape of a black man occupying
the pulpit. He was saluted with a "Hail, Master!" but the company
were dissatisfied with his not having brought a picture of the
king, repeatedly promised, which was to place his Majesty at the
mercy of this infernal crew.... The devil, on this memorable
occasion, forgot himself, and called Fian by his own name instead
of the demoniacal sobriquet of Rob the Rowan, which had been
assigned to him as Master of the Rows or Rolls. This was
considered as bad taste; and the rule is still observed at every
rendezvous of forgers, smugglers, or the like, where it is
accounted very indifferent manners to name an individual by his
own name in case of affording ground of evidence which may upon
a day of trial be brought against him. Satan, something
disconcerted, concluded the evening with a divertissement and
a dance after his own manner. The former consisted in disinterring
a new-buried corpse, and dividing it in fragments among
the company; and the ball was maintained by well-nigh two
hundred persons, who danced a ring dance.... Dr. Fian, muffled,
led the ring, and was highly honoured, generally acting as
clerk or recorder. King James was deeply interested in those
mysterious meetings, and took great delight to be present at the
examinations of the accused. He sent for Geillis Duncan, and
caused her to play before him the same tune to which Satan and
his companions led the brawl in North Berwick churchyard. His
ears were gratified in another way: for at this meeting it was
said the witches demanded of the devil why he did bear such
enmity against the king, who returned the flattering answer,
that the king was the greatest enemy whom he had in the world.
Almost all these poor wretches were executed: nor did Euphane
MacCalzean's station in life save her from the common doom, which
was strangling to death and burning to ashes thereafter. The
majority of the jury which tried Barbara Napier, having acquitted
her of attendance at the North Berwick meeting, were themselves
threatened with a trial for wilful error upon an assize, and
could only escape from severe censure and punishment by pleading
guilty, and submitting themselves to the king's pleasure. The
alterations and trenching,' adds Scott, 'which lately took place
on the Castle-hill at Edinburgh for the purpose of forming the
new approach to the city from the west, displayed the ashes of
the numbers who had perished in this manner, of whom a large
proportion must have been executed between 1590--when the great
discovery was made concerning Euphane MacCalzean and the wise
wife of Keith and their accomplices--and the union of the
crowns.'[132]
[132] Sir W. Scott's _Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft_,
ix.
Euphane's exceptional doom was 'to be bound to the stake, and
burned in ashes _quick_ to the death.' 'Burning quick' was not an
uncommon sentence: if the less cruel one of hanging or strangling
first and afterwards burning was more usual. Thirty warlocks and
witches was the total number executed on June 25th, 1591. A few,
like Dr. Cunninghame, may have been really experienced in the use
of poison and poisonous drugs. The art of poisoning has been
practised perhaps almost as extensively as (often coextensively
with) that of sorcery; a tremendous and mostly inscrutable crime
which science, in all ages, has been able more surely to conceal
than to detect.
Two facts eminently illustrate the barbarous iniquity of the
Courts of Justice when dealing with their witch prisoners. An
expressed malediction, or frequently an almost inaudible mutter,
followed by the coincident fulfilment of the imprecation, was
accepted eagerly by the judges as sufficient proof (an antecedent
one, contrary to the boasted principle of English law at least,
which assumes the innocence until the guilt has been proved, of
the accused) of the crime of the person arraigned. And they
complacently attributed to conscious guilt the ravings produced
by an excruciating torture--that equally inhuman and irrational
invention of judicial cruelty; confidently boasting that they
were careful to sentence no person without previous confession
duly made.
But these confessions not seldom were partly extracted from a
natural wish to be freed from the persecution of neighbours as
well as from present bodily torture. Sir George Mackenzie, Lord
Advocate of Scotland during the period of the greatest fury, and
himself president at many of the trials, a believer, among other
cases in his _Criminal Law_, 1678, relates that of a condemned
witch who had confessed judicially to him and afterwards 'told me
under secrecy, 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 should starve, for no person
thereafter would either give her meat or lodging, and that all
men would beat her and set 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.
Another told me that she was afraid the devil would challenge a
right to her after she was said to be his servant, and would
haunt her, as the minister said when he was desiring her to
confess, and therefore she desired to die. And really,' admits
the learned judge, 'ministers are oft-times indiscreet in their
zeal to have poor creatures to confess in this; and I recommend
to judges that the wisest ministers should be sent to them; and
that those who are sent should be cautious in this particular.'
Another confession at the supreme moment of the same sort, as
recorded by the Rev. G. Sinclair in 'Satan's Invisible World
Discovered' is equally significant and genuine. What impression
it left upon the pious clergyman will be seen in his concluding
inference. The witch, 'being carried forth to the place of
execution, remained silent during the first, second, and third
prayer, and then, perceiving there remained no more but to rise
up and go to the stake, she lifted up her body and with a loud
voice cried out, "Now all you that see me this day know that I am
now to die as a witch by my own confession, and I free all men,
especially the ministers and magistrates, of the guilt of my
blood. I take it wholly upon myself--my blood be upon my own
head; and as I must make answer to the God of heaven presently, I
declare I am as free of witchcraft as any child. But being
delated by a malicious woman, and put in prison under the name of
a witch; disowned by my husband and friends, and seeing no ground
of hope of my coming out of prison or ever coming in credit
again, through the temptation of the devil I made up that
confession on purpose to destroy my own life, being weary of it,
and choosing rather to die than live"--and so died; which
lamentable story as it did then astonish all the spectators, none
of which could restrain themselves from tears, so it may be to
all a demonstration of Satan's subtlety, whose design is still to
destroy all, partly by tempting many to presumption, and some
others to despair.'
The trial of Margaret Barclay took place in 1613. Her crime
consisted in having caused by means of spells the loss of a ship
at sea. She was said to have had a quarrel with the owner of the
shipwrecked vessel, in the course of which she uttered a wish
that all on board might sink to the bottom of the sea. Her
imprecation was accomplished, and upon the testimony of an
itinerant juggler, John Stewart, she was arraigned before a Court
of Justice. With the help of the devil in the shape of a handsome
black dog, she had moulded some figures of clay representing the
doomed sailors, which with the prescribed rites were thrown into
the deep. We are informed by the reporters of the proceedings at
this examination, that 'after using this kind of gentle torture
[viz. placing the legs in a pair of stocks and laying on
gradually increasing weights of iron bars], the said Margaret
began, according to the increase of the pain, to cry and crave
for God's cause to take off her shin the foresaid irons, and she
should declare truly the whole matter. Which being removed, she
began at her formal denial; and being of new assayed in torture
as before, she then uttered these words: "Take off, take off! and
before God I shall show you the whole form." And the said irons
being of new, upon her faithful promise, removed, she then
desired my Lord of Eglinton, the said four justices, and the said
Mr. David Dickson, minister of the burgh; Mr. George Dunbar,
minister of Ayr; Mr. Mitchell Wallace, minister of Kilmarnock;
Mr. John Cunninghame, minister of Dalry; and Hugh Kennedy,
provost of Ayr, to come by themselves and to remove all others,
and she should declare truly, as she should answer to God, the
whole matter. Whose desire in that being fulfilled, she made her
confession in this manner without any kind of demand, freely
without interrogation: God's name by earnest prayer being called
upon for opening of her lips and easing of her heart, that she by
rendering of the truth might glorify and magnify His holy name
and disappoint the enemy of her salvation.'
One of those involved in the voluntary confession was Isabel
Crawford, who was frightened into admitting the offences alleged.
In court, when asked if she wished to be defended by counsel,
Margaret Barclay, whose hopes and fears were revived at seeing
her husband, answered, 'As you please; but all I have confessed
was in agony of torture; and, before God, all I have spoken is
false and untrue.' She was found guilty; sentenced to be
strangled at the stake; her body to be burned to ashes. Isabel
Crawford, after a short interval, was subjected to the same sort
of examination: a new commission having been granted for the
prosecution, and 'after the assistant-minister of Irvine, Mr.
David Dickson, had made earnest prayers to God for opening her
obdurate and closed heart, she was subjected to the torture of
iron bars laid upon her bare shins, her feet being in the stocks.
She endured this torture with incredible firmness, since she did
"admirably, without any kind of din or exclamation, suffer above
thirty stone of iron to be laid on her legs, never shrinking
thereat in any sort, but remaining, as it were, steady." But in
shifting the situation of the iron bars, and removing them to
another part of her shins, her constancy gave way; she broke out
into horrible cries of "Take off! take off!" On being relieved
from the torture she made the usual confession of all that she
was charged with, and of a connection with the devil which had
subsisted for several years. Sentence was given against her
accordingly. After this had been denounced she openly denied all
her former confessions, and died without any sign of repentance;
offering repeated interruptions to the minister in his prayers,
and absolutely refusing to pardon the executioner.'[133] It might
be possible to form an imperfect estimate of how many thousands
were sacrificed in the Jacobian persecution in Scotland alone
from existing historical records, which would express, however,
but a small proportion of the actual number: and parish registers
may still attest the quantity of fuel provided at a considerable
expense, and the number of the fires. By a moderate computation
an average number of two hundred annually, making a total of
eight thousand, are reckoned to have been burned in the last
forty years of the sixteenth century.[134]
[133] _Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft_, ix.
The Scotch trials and tortures, of which the above cases are
but one or two out of a hundred similar ones, are perhaps the
more extraordinary as being the result of _mere_
superstition: religious or political heresy being seldom an
excuse for the punishment and an aggravation of the offence.
[134] A larger proportion of victims than even those of the
Holy Office during an equal space of time. According to
Llorente (_Hist. de l'Inquisition_) from 1680 to 1781, the
latter period of its despotism (which flourished especially
under Charles II., himself, as he was convinced, a victim of
witch-malice), between 13,000 and 14,000 persons suffered by
various punishments: of which number, however, 1,578 were
burned alive.
In England, from 1603 to 1680, seventy thousand persons are said
to have been executed; and during the fifteen hundred years
elapsed since the triumph of the Christian religion, millions are
reckoned to have been sacrificed on the bloody altars of the
Christian Moloch. An entry in the minutes of the proceedings in
the Privy Council for 1608 reveals that even James's ministers
began to experience some horror of the consequences of their
instructions. And the following free testimony of one of them is
truly 'an appalling record:'--'1608.--December 1.--The Earl of
Mar declared to the council that some women were taken in
Broughton [suburban Edinburgh] as witches, and being put to an
assize and convicted, albeit they persevered constant in their
denial to the end, yet they were burned _quick_ after such a
cruel manner that some of them died in despair, renouncing and
blaspheming God; and others half-burned broke out of the fire,
and were cast _quick_ in it again till they were burned to the
death.'[135]
[135] The terrestrial and _real_ Fiends seem to have striven
to realise on earth and to emulate the 'Tartarus horrificos
eructans faucibus æstus' described by the Epicurean
philosophic poet (Lucretius, _De Rerum Naturâ_, iii.).
Equally monstrous and degrading were the disclosures in the
torture-chambers; and many admitted that they had had children by
the devil. The circumstances of the Sabbath, the various rites of
the compact, the forms and method of bewitching, the manner of
sexual intercourse with the demons--these were the principal
staple of the judicial examinations.
In the southern part of the island witch-hanging or burning
proceeded with only less vehemence than in Scotland. One of the
most celebrated cases in the earlier half of the seventeenth
century (upon which Thomas Shadwell the poet laureate, who, under
the name of MacFlecknoe, is immortalised by the satire of Dryden,
founded a play) is the story of the Lancashire Witches. This
persecution raged at two separate periods; first in 1613, when
nineteen prisoners were brought before Sir James Altham and Sir
Edward Bromley, Barons of Exchequer. Elizabeth Southern, known as
'Mother Demdike' in the poet laureate's drama, is the leader of
the criminals. In 1634 the proceedings were renewed wholly on the
evidence of a boy who, it was afterwards ascertained, had been
instructed in his part against an old woman named Mother
Dickenson. The evidence was of the feeblest sort; nor are its
monotonous details worth repetition. Out of some forty persons
implicated on both occasions, fortunately the greater number
escaped. 'Lancashire Witches,' a term so hateful in its origin,
has been long transferred to celebrate the superior _charms_ (of
another kind) of the ladies of Lancashire; and the witches'
spells are those of natural youth and beauty.
The social position of Sir Thomas Overbury has made his fate
notorious. An infamous plot had been invented by the Earl of
Rochester (Robert Kerr) and the Countess of Essex to destroy a
troublesome obstacle to their contemplated marriage. The practice
of 'hellish charms' is only incidental; an episode in the dark
mystery. Overbury was too well acquainted with royal secrets
(whose disgusting and unnatural kind has been probably correctly
conjectured), too important for the keeping of even a private
secretary. His ruin was determined by the revenge of the noble
lovers and sealed by the fear of the king. At the end of six
months he had been gradually destroyed by secret poison in his
prison in the Tower (to which for an alleged offence he had been
committed) by the agency of Dr. Forman, a famous 'pharmaceutic,'
under the auspices of the Earl of Rochester. This Dr. Forman
had been previously employed by Lady Essex, a notorious
_dame d'honneur_ at James's Court, to bewitch the Earl to an
irresistible love for her, an enchantment which required,
apparently, no superhuman inducement. A Mrs. Turner, the
countess's agent, was associated with this skilful conjuror. They
were instructed also to bewitch Lord Essex, lately returned from
abroad, in the opposite way--to divert his love from his
wife.[136]
[136] The husband was impracticable; he could not be
_disenchanted_. Conjurations and charms failing, 'the
countess was instructed to bring against the Earl of Essex a
charge of conjugal incapacity: A commission of reverend
prelates of the church was appointed to sit in judgment,
over whom the king presided in person; and a jury of matrons
was found to give their opinion that the Lady Essex was a
maiden.' Divorce was accordingly pronounced, and with all
possible haste the king married his favourite to the
appellant with great pomp at Court. After the conspirators
had been arraigned by the public indignation, a curious
incident of the trial, according to a cotemporary report,
was, that there being 'showed in court certain pictures of a
man and a woman made in lead, and also a mould of brass
wherein they were cast; a black scarf also full of white
crosses which Mrs. Turner had in her custody; enchanted paps
and other pictures [as well as a list of some of the devil's
particular names used in conjuration], suddenly was heard a
crack from the scaffold, which carried a great fear, tumult,
and commotion amongst the spectators and through the hall;
every one fearing hurt as if the devil had been present and
grown angry to have his workmanship known by such as were
not his own scholars' (_Narratives of Sorcery and Magic_, by
Thomas Wright). Whatever may have been the crime or crimes
for the knowledge of which Sir Thomas Overbury was doomed,
it is significant that for his own safety the king was
compelled to break an oath (sworn upon his knees before the
judges he had purposely summoned, with an imprecation that
God's curse might light upon him and his posterity for ever
if he failed to bring the guilty to deserved punishment),
and to not only pardon but remunerate his former favourite
after he had been solemnly convicted and condemned to a
felon's death. The crime, the knowledge of which prevented
the appearance of Somerset at the gibbet or the scaffold,
has been supposed by some, with scarcely sufficient cause or
at least proof, to be the murder by the king of his son
Prince Henry. Doubt has been strongly expressed of the
implication at all of the favourite in the death of
Overbury: the evidence produced at the trial about the
poisoning being, it seems, made up to conceal or to mystify
the real facts.
Two women were executed at Lincoln, in 1618, for bewitching Lord
Rosse, eldest son of the Earl of Rutland, and others of the
family--Lord Rosse being bewitched to death; also for preventing
by diabolic arts the parents from having any more children.
Before the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and one of the
Barons of the Exchequer, it was proved that the witches had
effected the death of the noble lord by burying his glove in the
ground, and 'as that glove did rot and waste, so did the liver of
the said lord rot and waste.' Margaret Flower confessed she had
'two familiar spirits sucking on her, the one white, the other
black spotted. The white sucked under her left breast,' &c.
CHAPTER VIII.
The Literature of Europe in the Seventeenth Century proves
the Universality and Horror of Witchcraft--The most acute
and most liberal Men of Learning convinced of its
Reality--Erasmus and Francis Bacon--Lawyers prejudiced by
Legislation--Matthew Hale's judicial Assertion--Sir Thomas
Browne's Testimony--John Selden--The English Church least
Ferocious of the Protestant Sects--Jewell and
Hooker--Independent Tolerance--Witchcraft under the
Presbyterian Government--Matthew Hopkins--Gaule's 'Select
Cases of Conscience'--Judicial and Popular Methods of
Witch-discovery--Preventive Charms--Witchfinders a legal and
numerous Class in England and Scotland--Remission in the
Severity of the Persecution under the Protectorship.
Had we not the practical proof of the prevalence of the credit of
the black art in accomplished facts, the literature of the first
half of the seventeenth century would be sufficient testimony to
its horrid dominion. The works of the great dramatists, the
writings of men of every class, continually suppose the universal
power and horror of witchcraft. Internal evidence is abundant.
The witches of Macbeth are no fanciful creation, and Shakspeare's
representation of La Pucelle's fate is nothing more than a copy
from life. What the vulgar superstition must have been may be
easily conceived when men of the greatest genius or learning
credited the possibility, and not only a theoretical but actual
occurrence, of these infernal phenomena. Gibbon is at a loss to
account for the fact that the acute understanding of the learned
Erasmus, who could see through much more plausible fables,
believed firmly in witchcraft.[137] Francis Bacon, the advocate
and second founder of the inductive method and first apostle of
the Utilitarian philosophy, opposed though he might have been to
the vulgar persecution, was not able to get rid of the principles
upon which the creed was based.[138] Sir Edward Coke, his
contemporary, the most acute lawyer of the age, or (as it is
said) of any time, ventured even to define the devil's agents in
witchcraft. Sir Thomas Browne (author of 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica'
or 'Vulgar Errors!'), a physician and writer of considerable
merit, and Sir Matthew Hale, in 1664, proved their faith, the one
by his solemn testimony in open court, the other by his still
more solemn sentence.
[137] See _Miscellaneous Works: Abstract of my Readings_.
[138] 'Consorting with them [the unclean spirits who have
fallen from their first estate] and all use of their
assistance is unlawful; much more any worship or veneration
whatsoever. But a contemplation and knowledge of their
nature, power, illusions, not only from passages of sacred
scripture but _from reason or experience_, is not the least
part of spiritual wisdom. So truly the Apostle, "We are not
ignorant of his wiles." And it is not less permissible in
theology to investigate the nature of demons, than in physics
to investigate the nature of drugs, or in ethics the nature
of vice.'--_De Augmentis Scientiarum_, lib. iii. 2.
If theologians were armed by the authority or their
interpretation of Scripture, lawyers were no less so by that of
the Statute Book. Judge Hale, in an address to the jury at Bury
St. Edmund's, carefully weighing evidence, and, summing up,
assures them he did 'not in the least doubt there are witches:
first, because _the Scriptures affirmed it_; secondly, because
the _wisdom of all nations_, particularly of our own, _had
provided laws_ against witchcraft which implied their belief of
such a crime.'[139] Sir Thomas Browne, who gave his professional
experience at this trial, to the effect that the devil often acts
upon human bodies by natural means, afflicting them in a more
surprising manner through the diseases to which they are usually
subject; and that in the particular case, the fits (of vomiting
nails, needles, deposed by other witnesses) might be natural,
only raised to a great degree by the subtlety of the devil
cooperating with the malice of the witches, employs a well-known
argument when he declares ('Religio Medici'), 'Those that to
confute their incredulity desire to see apparitions shall
questionless never behold any. The devil hath these already in a
heresy as capital as witchcraft; and to appear to them were _but_
to convert them.'
[139] Unfortunately for the cause of truth and right, Sir
Matthew Hale's reasons are not an exceptional illustration
of the mischief according to Roger Bacon's experience of
'three very bad arguments we are always using--This has been
shown to be so; This is customary; This is universal:
Therefore it must be kept to.' Sir Thomas Browne, unable, as
a man of science, to accept in every particular alleged the
actual bonâ fide reality of the devil's power, makes a
compromise, and has 'recourse to a fraud of Satan,'
explaining that he is in reality but a clever juggler, a
transcendent physician who knows how to accomplish what is
in relation to us a prodigy, in knowing how to use natural
forces which our knowledge has not yet discovered. Such an
unworthy compromise was certainly not fitted to arouse men
from their 'cauchemar démonologique.'--See _Révue des Deux
Mondes_, Aug. 1, 1858.
John Selden, a learned lawyer, but of a liberal mind, was gifted
with a large amount of common sense, and it might be juster to
attribute the _dictum_ which has been supposed to betray 'a
lurking belief' to an excess of legal, rather than to a defect of
intellectual, perception. Selden, inferring that 'the law against
witches does not prove there be any, but it punishes the malice
of those people that use such means to take away men's lives,'
proceeds to assert that 'if one should profess that by turning
his hat thrice 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 whosoever shall turn his hat ... with
an intention to take away a man's life, should be put to
death.'[140]
[140] _Table Talk or Discourses_ of John Selden. Although it
must be excepted to the lawyer's summary mode of dealing
with an imaginary offence, we prefer to give that eminent
patriot at least the benefit of the doubt, as to his belief
in witchcraft.
If men of more liberal sentiments were thus enslaved to old
prejudices, it is not surprising that the Church, not leading but
following, should firmly maintain them. Fortunately for the
witches, without the motives actuating in different ways
Catholics and Calvinists, and placed midway between both parties,
the reformed English Church was not so much interested in
identifying her crimes with sorcerers as in maintaining the less
tremendous formulæ of Divine right, Apostolical succession, and
similar pretensions. Yet if they did not so furiously engage
themselves in actual witch-prosecutions, Anglican divines have
not been slow in expressly or impliedly affirming the reality of
diabolical interposition. Nor can the most favourable criticism
exonerate them from the reproach at least of having witnessed
without protestation the barbarous cruelties practised in the
name of heaven; and the eminent names of Bishop Jewell, the great
apologist of the English Church, and of the author of the
'Ecclesiastical Polity,' among others less eminent, may be
claimed by the advocates of witchcraft as respectable authorities
in the Established Church. The 'judicious' Hooker affirms that
the evil spirits are dispersed, some in the air, some on the
earth, some in the waters, some among the minerals, in dens and
caves that are under the earth, labouring to obstruct and, if
possible, to destroy the works of God. They were the _dii
inferi_ [the old persuasion] of the heathen worshipped in
oracles, in idols, &c.[141] The privilege of 'casting out devils'
was much cherished and long retained in the Established Church.
[141] Quoted in Howitt's _History of the Supernatural_. The
author has collected a mass of evidence 'demonstrating an
universal faith,' a curious collection of various
superstition. He is indignant at the colder faith of the
Anglican Church of later times.
During the ascendency of the Presbyterian party from 1640 to the
assumption of the Protectorship by Cromwell, witches and
witch-trials increased more than ever; and they sensibly
decreased only when the Independents obtained a superiority.
The adherents of Cromwell, whatever may have been their own
fanatical excesses, were at least exempt from the intolerant
spirit which characterised alike their Anglican enemies and
their old Presbyterian allies. The astute and vigorous intellect
of the great revolutionary leader, the champion of the people
in its struggles for civil and religious liberty, however
much he might affect the forms of the prevailing religious
sentiment, was too sagacious not to be able to penetrate,
with the aid of the counsels of the author of the 'Treatise
of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes,' who so triumphantly
upheld the fundamental principle of Protestantism,[142]
somewhat beneath the surface. In what manner the Presbyterian
Parliament issued commissions for inquiring into the crimes
of sorcery, how zealously they were supported by the clergy
and people, how Matthew Hopkins--immortal in the annals of
English witchcraft--exercised his talents as witchfinder-general,
are facts well known.[143]
[142] 'Seeing therefore,' infers Milton, the greatest of
England's patriots as well as poets, 'that no man, no synod,
no session of men, though called the Church, can judge
definitively the sense of Scripture to another man's
conscience, which is well known to be a maxim of the
Protestant religion; it follows plainly, that he who holds
in religion that belief or those opinions which to his
conscience and utmost understanding appear with most
evidence or probability in the Scripture, though to others
he seem erroneous, can no more be justly censured for a
heretic than his censurers, who do but the same thing
themselves, while they censure him for so doing.... To
Protestants therefore, whose common rule and touchstone is
the Scripture, nothing can with more conscience, more
equity, nothing more Protestantly can be permitted than a
free and lawful debate at all times by writing, conference,
or disputation of what opinion soever disputable by
Scripture.... How many persecutions, then, imprisonments,
banishments, penalties, and stripes; how much bloodshed,
have the forcers of conscience to answer for--and
Protestants rather than Papists!' (_A Treatise of Civil
Power in Ecclesiastical Causes._) The reasons which induced
Milton to exclude the Catholics of his day from the general
toleration are more intelligible and more plausible, than
those of fifty or sixty years since, when the Rev. Sidney
Smith published the _Letters of Peter Plymley_.
[143] Displayed in the satire of _Hudibras_, particularly in
Part II. canto 3, Part III. 1, and the notes of Zachary Grey.
The author of this amusing political satire has exposed the
foibles of the great Puritan party with all the rancour of a
partisan.
That the strenuous antagonists of despotic dogmas, by whom the
principles of English liberty were first inaugurated, that they
should so fanatically abandon their reason to a monstrous idea,
is additional proof of the universality of superstitious
prejudice. But the conviction, the result of a continual
political religious persecution of their tenets, that if heaven
was on their side Satan and the powers of darkness were still
more inimical, cannot be fully understood unless by referring to
those scenes of murder and torture. Hunted with relentless
ferocity like wild beasts, holding conventicles and prayer
meetings with the sword suspended over their heads, it is not
surprising that at that period these English and Scotch
Calvinists came to believe that they were the peculiar objects of
diabolical as well as human malice. Their whole history during
the first eighty years of the seventeenth century can alone
explain this faith. Besides this genuine feeling, the clergy of
the Presbyterian sect might be interested in maintaining a creed
which must magnify their credit as miracle-workers.[144]
[144] The author of _Hudibras_, in the interview of the
Knight and Sidrophel (William Lilly), enumerates the various
practices and uses of astrology and witchcraft in vogue at
this time, and employed by Court and Parliament with equal
eagerness and emulation. Dr. Zachary Grey, the sympathetic
editor of _Hudibras_, supplies much curious information on
the subject in extracts from various old writers. 'The
Parliament,' as he states, 'took a sure way to secure all
prophecies, prodigies, and almanac-news from stars, &c., in
favour of their own side, by appointing a licenser thereof,
and strictly forbidding and punishing all such as were not
licensed. Their man for this purpose was the famous Booker,
an astrologer, fortune-teller, almanac-maker, &c. The words
of his license in Rushorth are very remarkable--for
mathematics, almanacs, and prognostications. If we may
believe Lilly, both he and Booker did conjure and
prognosticate well for their friends the Parliament. He
tells us, "When he applied for a license for his _Merlinus
Anglicus Junior_ (in Ap. 1644), Booker wondered at the book,
made many impertinent obliterations, framed many objections,
and swore it was not possible to distinguish between a king
and a parliament; and at last licensed it according to his
own fancy. Lilly delivered it to the printer, who, being an
arch-Presbyterian, had five of the ministers to inspect it,
who could make nothing of it, but said it might be printed;
for in that he meddled not with their Dagon." (_Lilly's
Life._) Which opposition to Lilly's book arose from a
jealousy that he was not then thoroughly in the Parliament's
interest--which was true; for he frankly confesses, "that
till the year 1645 he was more Cavalier than Roundhead, and
so taken notice of; but after that he engaged body and soul
in the cause of the Parliament."' (_Life._) Lilly was
succeeded successively by his assistant Henry Coley, and
John Partridge, the well-known object of Swift's satire.
The years 1644 and 1645 are distinguished as especially abounding
in witches and witchfinders. In the former year, at Manningtree,
a village in Essex, during an outbreak in which several women
were tried and hanged, Matthew Hopkins first displayed his
peculiar talent. Associated with him in his recognised legal
profession was one John Sterne. They proceeded regularly on their
circuit, making a fixed charge for their services upon each
town or village. Swimming and searching for secret marks were
the infallible methods of discovery. Hopkins, encouraged
by an unexpected success, arrogantly assumed the title of
'Witchfinder-General.' His modest charges (as he has told us)
were twenty shillings a town, which paid the expenses of
travelling and living, and an additional twenty shillings a head
for every criminal brought to trial, or at least to execution.
The eastern counties of Huntingdon, Cambridge, Suffolk,
Northampton, Bedford, were chiefly traversed; and some two or
three hundred persons appear to have been sent to the gibbet or
the stake by his active exertions. One of these specially
remembered was the aged _parson_ of a village near Framlingham,
Mr. Lowes, who was hanged at Bury St. Edmund's. The pious Baxter,
an eyewitness, thus commemorates the event: 'The hanging of a
great number of witches in 1645 and 1646 is famously known. Mr.
Calamy went along with the judges on the circuit to hear their
confessions and see that there was no fraud or wrong done them. I
spoke with many understanding, pious, learned, and credible
persons that lived in the counties, and some that went to them in
the prison and heard their sad confessions. Among the rest, an
old _reading_ parson named Lowes, not far from Framlingham, was
one that was hanged, who confessed that he had two imps, and that
one of them was always putting him upon doing mischief; and he
being near the sea as he saw a ship under sail, it moved him to
send it to sink the ship, and he consented and saw the ship sink
before them.' Sterne, Hopkins's coadjutor, in an Apology
published not long afterwards, asserts that Lowes had been
indicted thirty years before for witchcraft; that he had made a
covenant with the devil, sealing it with his blood, and had those
familiars or spirits which sucked on the marks found on his body;
that he had confessed that, besides the notable mischief of
sinking the aforesaid vessel and making fourteen widows in one
quarter of an hour, he had effected many other calamities; that
far from repenting of his wickedness, he rejoiced in the power of
his imps.
The excessive destruction and cruelty perpetrated by the
indiscriminate procedure of the Witchfinder-General incited a Mr.
Gaule, vicar of Great Staughton in Huntingdonshire, to urge some
objections to the inhuman character of his method. Gaule, like
John Cotta before him and others of that class, was provoked to
challenge the propriety of the ordinary prosecutions, not so much
from incredulity as from humanity, which revolted at the
extravagance of the judges' cruelty. In 'Select Cases of
Conscience touching Witches and Witchcraft,' the minister of
Great Staughton describes from personal knowledge one of the
ordinary ways of detecting the guilt of the accused. 'Having
taken the suspected witch, she is placed in the middle of a room
upon a stool or table, cross-legged, or in some other uneasy
position, to which, if she submits not, she is then bound with
cords: there is she watched and kept without meat or sleep for
the space of four-and-twenty hours (for they say within that
time they shall see her imps come and suck); a little hole is
likewise made in the door for the imps to come in at, and, lest
they should come in some less discernible shape, they that watch
are taught to be ever and anon sweeping the room, and if they see
any spiders or flies to kill them; and if they cannot kill them,
then they may be sure they are her imps.'
'Swimming' and 'pricking' were the approved modes of discovery.
By the former method the witch was stripped naked, securely bound
(hands and feet being crossed), rolled up in a blanket or cloth,
and carried to the nearest water, upon which she was laid on her
back, with the alternative of floating or sinking. In case of the
former event (the water not seldom refusing to receive the
wretch, because--declares James I.--they had impiously thrown off
the holy water of baptism) she was rescued for the fire or the
gallows; while, in case of sinking to the bottom, she would be
properly and clearly acquitted of the suspected guilt. Hopkins
prided himself most on his ability for detecting special marks.
Causing the suspected woman to be stripped naked, or as far as
the waist (as the case might be), sometimes in public, this
stigmatic professor began to search for the hidden signs with
unsparing scrutiny. Upon finding a mole or wart or any similar
mark, they tried the 'insensibleness thereof' by inserting
needles, pins, awls, or any sharp-pointed instrument; and in an
old and withered crone it might not be difficult to find
somewhere a more insensitive spot.
Such examinations were conducted with disregard equally for
humanity and decency. All the disgusting circumstances must be
sought for in the works of the writers upon the subject. Reginald
Scot has collected many of the commonest. These marks were
considered to be teats at which the demons or imps were used to
be suckled. Many were the judicial and vulgar methods of
detecting the guilty--by repeating the 'Lord's Prayer;' weighing
against the church Bible; making them shed tears--for a witch can
shed tears only with the left eye, and that only with difficulty
and in limited quantity. The counteracting or preventive charms
are as numerous as curious, not a few being in repute in some
parts at this day. 'Drawing blood' was most effective. Nailing up
a horse-shoe is one of the best-known preventives. That
efficacious counter-charm used to be suspended over the
entrance of churches and houses, and no wizard or witch could
brave it.[145] 'Scoring above the breath' is omnipotent in
Scotland, where the witch was cut or 'scotched' on the face and
forehead. Cutting off secretly a lock of the hair of the accused,
burning the thatch of her roof and the thing bewitched; these
are a few of the least offensive or obscene practices in
counter-charming.[146] In what degree or kind the Fetish-charms
of the African savages are more ridiculous or disgusting than
those popular in England 200 years ago, it would not be easy to
determine.
[145] Gay's witch complains:
'Straws, laid across, my pace retard.
The horse-shoe's nailed, each threshold's guard.
The stunted broom the wenches hide
For fear that I should up and ride.
They stick with pins my bleeding seat,
And bid me show my secret teat.'
[146] The various love-charms, amulets, and spells in the
pharmacy of witchcraft are (like the waxen image known, both
to the ancient and modern art) equally monstrous and absurd.
Of a more natural and pleasing sort was the [Greek: himas
poikilos], the irresistible charm of Aphrodite. Here--
[Greek: Thelktêria panta tetykto;
Enth' eni men philotês, en d' himeros, en d' oaristys,
Parphasis, hê t' eklepse noon pyka per phroneontôn.]
Matthew Hopkins pursued a lucrative trade in witch-hunting for
some years with much applause and success. His indiscriminating
accusations at last excited either the alarm or the indignation
of his townspeople, if we may believe the tradition suggested
in the well-known verses of Butler, who has no authority,
apparently, for his insinuation ('Hudibras,' ii. 3), that this
eminent _Malleus_ did not die 'the common death of all men.'
However it happened, his death is placed in the year 1647. An
Apology shortly before had been published by him in refutation
of an injurious report gaining ground that he was himself
intimately allied with the devil, from whom he had obtained a
memorandum book in which were entered the names of all the
witches in England. It is entitled 'The Discovery of Witches; in
Answer to several Queries lately delivered to the Judge of Assize
for the County of Norfolk; and now published by Matthew Hopkins,
Witchfinder, for the Benefit of the whole Kingdom. Printed for R.
Royston, at the Angel in Inn Lane, 1647.'[147] It is, indeed,
sufficiently probable that, confident of the increasing coolness,
and perhaps of the wishes, of the magistrates, the mob, ever
ready to wreak vengeance upon a disgraced favourite who has long
abused the public patience, retaliated upon Hopkins a method of
torture he had frequently inflicted upon others.[148]
[147] Quoted by Sir W. Scott from a copy of this 'very rare
tract' in his possession.
[148] Dr. Francis Hutchinson (Historical Essay), referring to
the verses of Samuel Butler, says that he had often heard
that some persons, 'out of indignation at the barbarity [of
the witchfinder], took him and tied his own thumbs and toes,
as he used to tie others; and when he was put into the water,
he himself swam as they did.' But whether the usual fate upon
that event awaited him does not appear. The verses in
question are the following:--
'has not he, within a year,
Hang'd threescore of 'em in one shire,
* * * * *
Who after prov'd himself a witch,
And made a rod for his own breech?'
The Knight's Squire on the same occasion reminds his master
of the more notorious of the devil's tricks of that and the
last age:--
'Did not the devil appear to Martin
Luther in Germany for certain,
And would have gull'd him with a trick
But Mart was too, too politic?
Did he not help the Dutch to purge
At Antwerp their cathedral church?
Sing catches to the saints at Mascon,
And tell them all they came to ask him?
Appear in divers shapes to Kelly,
And speak i' th' nun of Loudun's belly?
Meet with the Parliament's committee
At Woodstock on a pers'nal treaty?
... &c. &c.'
_Hudibras_, II. 3.
Hopkins is the most famous of his class on account of his
superior talent; but both in England and Scotland witchfinders,
or _prickers_, as they were sometimes called, before and since
his time abounded--of course most where the superstition raged
fiercest. In Scotland they infested all parts of the country,
practising their detestable but legal trade with entire impunity.
The Scottish prickers enjoyed a great reputation for skill and
success; and on a special occasion, about the time when
Hopkins was practising in the South, the magistrates of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne summoned from Scotland one of great
professional experience to visit that town, then overrun with
witches. The magistrates agreed to pay him all travelling
expenses, and twenty shillings for every convicted criminal. A
bellman was sent round the town to invite all complainants to
prefer their charges. Some thirty women, having been brought to
the town-hall, were publicly subjected to an examination. By the
ordinary process, twenty-seven on this single occasion were
ascertained to be guilty, of whom, at the ensuing assizes,
fourteen women and one man were convicted by the jury and
executed.
Three thousand are said to have suffered for the crime in England
under the supremacy of the Long Parliament. A respite followed on
this bloody persecution when the Independents came into power,
but it was renewed with almost as much violence upon the return
of the Stuarts. The Protectorship had been fitly inaugurated by
the rational protest of a gentleman, witness to the proceedings
at one of the trials, Sir Robert Filmore, in a tract, 'An
Advertizement to the Jurymen of England touching Witches.' This
was followed two years later by a similar protest by one Thomas
Ady, called, 'A Candle in the Dark; or, a Treatise concerning the
Nature of Witches and Witchcraft: being Advice to Judges,
Sheriffs, Justices of the Peace and Grand Jurymen, what to do
before they pass Sentence on such as are arraigned for their
Lives as Witches.' Notwithstanding the general toleration of the
Commonwealth, in 1652, the year before Cromwell assumed the
Dictatorship (1653-1658), there appeared to be a tendency to
return to the old system, and several were executed in different
parts of the country. Six were hanged at Maidstone. 'Some there
were that wished rather they might be burned to ashes, alleging
that it was a received opinion amongst many that the body of a
witch being burned, her blood is thereby prevented from becoming
hereafter hereditary to her progeny in the same evil, while by
hanging it is not; but whether this opinion be erroneous or not,'
the reporter adds, 'I am not to dispute.'
CHAPTER IX.
Glanvil's Sadducismus Triumphatus--His Sentiments on
Witchcraft and Demonology--Baxter's 'Certainty of the World
of Spirits,' &c.--Witch Trial at Bury St. Edmund's by Sir
Matthew Hale, 1664--The Evidence adduced in Court--Two
Witches hanged--Three hanged at Exeter in 1682--The last
Witches judicially executed in England--Uniformity of the
Evidence adduced at the Trials--Webster's Attack upon the
Witch-Creed in 1677--Witch Trials in England at the end of
the Seventeenth Century--French Parliaments vindicate the
Diabolic Reality of the Crime--Witchcraft in Sweden.
The bold licentiousness and ill-concealed scepticism of Charles
II. and his Court, whose despotic prejudices, however, supported
by the zeal of the Church, prosecuted dissenters from a form of
religion which maintained 'the right divine of kings to govern
wrong,' might be indifferent to the prejudice of witchcraft. But
the princes and despots of former times have seldom been more
careful of the lives than they have been of the liberties, of
their subjects. The formal apology for the reality of that crime
published by Charles II.'s chaplain-in-ordinary, the Rev.
Dr. Joseph Glanvil, against the modern Sadducees (a very
inconsiderable sect) who denied both ghosts and witches, their
well-attested apparitions and acts, has been already noticed.
His philosophic inquiry (so he terms it) into the nature and
operations of witchcraft (_Sadducismus Triumphatus_, Sadduceeism
Vanquished, or 'Considerations about Witchcraft'), was occasioned
by a case that came under the author's personal observation--the
'knockings' of the demon of Tedworth in the house of a Mr.
Mompesson. The Tedworth demon must have been of that sort of
active spirits which has been so obliging of late in enlightening
the spiritual _séances_ of our time.
Glanvil traces the steps by which a well-meaning student may
unwarily be involved in _diablerie_. This philosophical inquirer
observes:--'Those mystical students may, in their first address
to the science [astrology], have no other design than the
satisfaction of their curiosity to know remote and hidden things;
yet that in the progress, being not satisfied within the bounds
of their art, doth many times tempt the curious inquirer to use
worse means of information; and no doubt those mischievous
spirits, that are as vigilant as the beasts of prey, and watch
all occasions to get us within their envious reach, are more
constant attenders and careful spies upon the actions and
inclinations of such whose genius and designs prepare them for
their temptations. So that I look on judicial astrology as a fair
introduction to sorcery and witchcraft; and who knows but it was
first set on foot by the infernal hunters as a lure to draw the
_curiosos_ into those snares that lie hid beyond it. And yet I
believe it may be innocently enough studied.... I believe there
are very few among those who have been addicted to those strange
arts of wonder and prediction, but have found themselves attacked
by some unknown solicitors, and enticed by them to the more
dangerous actions and correspondencies. For as there are a sort
of base and sordid spirits that attend the envy and malice of the
ignorant and viler sort of persons, and betray them into compacts
by promises of revenge; so, no doubt, there are a kind of more
airy and speculative fiends, of a higher rank and order than
those wretched imps, who apply themselves to the curious....
Yea, and sometimes they are so cautious and wary in their
conversations with more refined persons, that they never offer to
make any _express_ covenant with them. And to this purpose, I
have been informed by a very reverend and learned doctor that one
Mr. Edwards, a Master of Arts of Trinity College, in Cambridge,
being reclaimed from conjuration, declared in his repentance that
the demon always appeared to him like a man of good fashion, and
never required any compact from him: and no doubt they sort
themselves agreeably to the rate, post, and genius of those with
whom they converse.'[149]
[149] _Sadducismus Triumphatus_, section xvi.
The sentiments of the royal chaplain on demonology are curious.
'Since good men,' he argues, 'in their state of separation are
said to be [Greek: isangeloi], why the wicked may not be supposed
to be [Greek: isodaimones] (in the worst sense of the word), I
know nothing to help me to imagine. And if it be supposed that
the imps of witches are sometimes wicked spirits of our own kind
and nature, and possibly the same that have been witches and
sorcerers in this life: this supposal may give a fairer and more
probable account of many of the actions of sorcery and witchcraft
than the other hypothesis, that they are always devils. And to
this conjecture I will venture to subjoin another, which hath
also its probability, viz. that it is not improbable but the
familiars of witches are a vile kind of spirits of a very
inferior constitution and nature; and none of those that
were once of the highest hierarchy now degenerated into the
spirits we call devils.... And that all the superior--yea, and
inferior--regions have their several kinds of spirits, differing
in their natural perfections as well as in the kinds and degrees
of their depravities; which being supposed, 'tis very probable
that those of the basest and meanest sorts are they who submit to
the servilities.'[150] It is a curious speculation how the old
apologists of witchcraft would regard the modern 'curiosos'--the
adventurous _spirit-media_ of the present day, and whether the
consulted spirits are of 'base and sordid rank,' or are 'a kind
of airy and more speculative fiends.' It is fair to infer,
perhaps, that they are of the latter class.
[150] _Sadducismus Triumphatus_, Part I. sect. 4. Affixed to
this work is a _Collection of Relations_ of
well-authenticated instances. Glanvil was one of the first
Fellows of the recently established Royal Society. He is the
author of a philosophical treatise of great merit--the
_Scepsis Scientifica_--a review of which occupies several
pages of _The Introduction to the Literature of Europe_, and
which is favourably considered by Hallam. Not the least
unaccountable fact in the history and literature of
witchcraft is the absurd contradiction involved in the
unbounded credulity of writers (who were sceptical on almost
every other subject) on the one subject of demonology.
The author of the 'Saints' Everlasting Rest,' the moderate and
conscientious Baxter, was a contemporary of the Anglican divine.
In another and later work this voluminous theological writer more
fully developed his spiritualistic ideas. 'The Certainty of the
World of Spirits fully evinced by unquestionable Histories of
Apparitions, Witchcrafts, Operations, Voices, &c., proving the
Immortality of Souls, the Malice and Misery of Devils and the
Damned, and the Blessedness of the Justified. Written for the
Conviction of Sadducees and Infidels,' was a formidable
inscription which must have overawed, if it did not subdue, the
infidelity of the modern Sadducees.[151]
[151] It would not be an uninteresting, but it would be a
melancholy, task to investigate the reasoning, or rather
unreasoning, process which involved such honest men as
Richard Baxter in a maze of credulity. While they rejected
the principle of the ever-recurring ecclesiastical miracles
of Catholicism (so sympathetic as well as useful to ardent
faith), their devout imagination yet required the aid of a
present supernaturalism to support their faith amidst the
perplexing doubts and difficulties of ordinary life, and
they gladly embraced the consoling belief that the present
evils are the work of the enmity of the devil, whose
temporary sovereignty, however, should be overthrown in the
world to come, when the faith and constancy of his victims
shall be eternally rewarded.
The sentence and execution of two old women at Bury St. Edmund's,
in 1664, has been already noticed. This trial was carried on with
circumstances of great solemnity and with all the external forms
of justice--Sir Matthew Hale presiding as Lord Chief Baron: and
the following is a portion of the evidence which was received two
hundred years ago in an English Court of Justice and under the
presidency of one of the greatest ornaments of the English Bench.
One of the witnesses, a woman named Dorothy Durent, deposed that
she had quarrelled with one Amy Duny, immediately after which her
infant child was seized with fits. 'And the said examinant
further stated that she being troubled at her child's distemper
did go to a certain person named Doctor Job Jacob, who lived at
Yarmouth, who had the reputation in the country to help children
that were bewitched; who advised her to hang up the child's
blanket in the chimney-corner all day, and at night when she put
the child to bed to put it into the said blanket; and if she
found anything in it she should not be afraid, but throw it into
the fire. And this deponent did according to his direction; and
at night when she took down the blanket with an intent to put the
child therein, there fell out of the same a great toad which ran
up and down the hearth; and she, having a young youth only with
her in the house, desired him to catch the toad and throw it into
the fire, which the youth did accordingly, and held it there with
the tongs; and as soon as it was in the fire it made a great and
terrible noise; and after a space there was a flashing in the
fire like gunpowder, making a noise like the discharge of a
pistol, and thereupon the toad was no more seen nor heard. It was
asked by the Court if that, after the noise and flashing, there
was not the substance of the toad to be seen to consume in the
fire; and it was answered by the said Dorothy Durent that after
the flashing and noise there was no more seen than if there had
been none there. The next day there came a young woman, a
kinswoman of the said Amy, and a neighbour of this deponent, and
told this deponent that her aunt (meaning the said Amy) was in a
most lamentable condition, having her face all scorched with
fire, and that she was sitting alone in her house in her smock
without any fire. And therefore this deponent went into the house
of the said Amy Duny to see her, and found her in the same
condition as was related to her; for her face, her legs, and
thighs, which this deponent saw, seemed very much scorched and
burnt with fire; at which this deponent seemed much to wonder,
and asked how she came in that sad condition. And the said Amy
replied that she might thank her for it, for that she (deponent)
was the cause thereof; but she should live to see some of her
children dead, and she upon crutches. And this deponent further
saith, that after the burning of the said toad her child
recovered and was well again, and was living at the time of the
Assizes.' The accused were next arraigned for having bewitched
the family of Mr. Samuel Pacy, merchant, of Lowestoft. The witch
turned away from their door had at once inflicted summary
vengeance by sending some fearful fits and pains in the stomach,
apparently caused by an internal pricking of pins; the children
shrieking out violently, vomiting nails, pins, and needles, and
exclaiming against several women of ill-repute in the town;
especially against two of them, Amy Duny and Rose Cullender.
A friend of the family appeared in court, and deposed: 'At some
times the children would see things run up and down the house in
the appearance of mice, and one of them suddenly snapt one with
the tongs and threw it into the fire, and it screeched out like a
bat. At another time the younger child, being out of her fits,
went out of doors to take a little fresh air, and presently a
little thing like a bee flew upon her face and would have gone
into her mouth, whereupon the child ran in all haste to the door
to get into the house again, shrieking out in a most terrible
manner. Whereupon this deponent made haste to come to her; but
before she could get to her the child fell into her swooning fit,
and at last, with much pain and straining herself, she vomited up
a twopenny nail with a broad head; and being demanded by this
deponent how she came by this nail, she answered that the bee
brought this nail and forced it into her mouth. And at other
times the elder child declared unto this deponent that during the
time of her fits she saw flies come unto her and bring with them
in their mouths crooked pins; and after the child had thus
declared the same she fell again into violent fits, and
afterwards raised several pins. At another time the said elder
child declared unto this deponent, and sitting by the fire
suddenly started up and said she saw a mouse; and she crept under
the table, looking after it; and at length she put something in
her apron, saying she had caught it. And immediately she ran to
the fire and threw it in; and there did appear upon it to this
deponent like the flashing of gunpowder, though she confessed she
saw nothing in the child's hands.' Another witness was the mother
of a servant girl, Susanna Chandler, whose depositions are of
much the same kind, but with the addition that her daughter was
sometimes stricken with blindness and dumbness by demoniacal
contrivance at the moment when her testimony was required in
court. 'Being brought into court at the trial, she suddenly fell
into her fits, and being carried out of the court again, within
the space of half an hour she came to herself and recovered her
speech; and thereupon was immediately brought into the court, and
asked by the Court whether she was in condition to take an oath
and to give evidence. She said she could. But when she was sworn
and asked what she could say against either of the prisoners,
before she could make any answer she fell into her fits,
shrieking out in a miserable manner, crying "Burn her! burn her!"
which was all the words she could speak.' Doubts having been
hazarded by one or two of the less credulous of the origin of the
fits and contortions, 'to avoid this scruple, it was privately
desired by the judge that the Lord Cornwallis, Sir Edmund Bacon,
and Mr. Serjeant Keeling and some other gentlemen there in court,
would attend one of the distempered persons in the farthest part
of the hall whilst she was in her fits, and then to send for one
of the witches to try what would then happen, which they did
accordingly.' Some of the possessed, having been put to the proof
by having their eyes covered, and being touched upon the hand by
one of those present, fell into contortions as if they had been
touched by the witches.
The suspicion of imposture thus raised was quickly silenced by
fresh proof. Robert Sherringham, farmer, deposed that 'about two
years since, passing along the street with his cart and horses,
the axle-tree of his cart touched her house and broke down some
part of it; at which she was very much displeased, threatening
him that his horses should suffer for it. And so it happened; for
all those horses, being four in number, died within a short time
after. Since that time he hath had great losses by sudden dying
of his other cattle. So soon as his sows pigged, the pigs would
leap and caper, and immediately fall down and die. Also, not long
after, he was taken with a lameness in his limbs that he could
neither go nor stand for some days.'[152]
[152] This witness finished his evidence by informing the
Court that 'after all this, he was very much vexed with a
great number of lice, of extraordinary bigness; and although
he many times shifted himself, yet he was not anything the
better, but would swarm again with them. So that in the
conclusion he was forced to burn all his clothes, being two
suits of apparel, and then was clear from
them.'--_Narratives of Sorcery_, &c., from the most
authentic sources, by Thomas Wright.
The extreme ridiculousness, even more than the iniquity, of the
accusations may be deemed the principal characteristic of such
procedures: these _childish_ indictments were received with
eagerness by prosecutors, jury, and judge. After half an hour's
deliberation the jury returned a unanimous verdict against the
prisoners, who were hanged, protesting their innocence to the
end. The year before, a woman named Julian Coxe was hanged at
Taunton on the evidence of a hunter that a hare, which had taken
refuge from his pursuit in a bush, was found on the opposite side
in the likeness of a witch, who had assumed the form of the
animal, and taken the opportunity of her hiding-place to resume
her proper shape. In 1682 three women were executed at Exeter.
Their witchcraft was of the same sort as that of the Bury
witches. Little variety indeed appears in the English witchcraft
as brought before the courts of law. They chiefly consist in
hysterical, epileptic, or other fits, accompanied by vomiting of
various witch-instruments of torture. The Exeter witches are
memorable as the last executed judicially in England.
Attacks upon the superstition of varying degrees of merit were
not wanting during any period of the seventeenth century.
Webster, who, differing in this respect from most of his
predecessors, declared his opinion that the whole of witchcraft
was founded on natural phenomena, credulity, torture, imposture,
or delusion, has deserved to be especially commemorated among the
advocates of common sense. He had been well acquainted in his
youth with the celebrated Lancashire Witches' case, and enjoyed
good opportunities of studying the absurd obscenities of the
numerous examinations. His meritorious work was given to the
world in 1677, under the title of 'The Displaying of Supposed
Witchcraft.' Towards the close of the century witch-trials still
occur; but the courts of justice were at length freed from the
reproach of legal murders.
The great revolution of 1688, which set the principles of
Protestantism on a firmer basis, could not fail to effect an
intellectual as well as a political change. A recognition of the
claims of common sense (at least on the subject of diabolism)
seemed to begin from that time; and in 1691, when some of the
criminals were put upon their trial at Frome, in Somersetshire,
they were acquitted, not without difficulty, by the exertion of
the better reason of the presiding judge, Lord Chief Justice
Holt. Fortunately for the accused, Lord Chief Justice Holt was a
person of sense, as well as legal acuteness; for he sat as judge
at a great number of the trials in different parts of the
kingdom. Both prosecutors and juries were found who would
willingly have sent the proscribed convicts to death. But the age
was arrived when at last it was to be discovered that fire and
torture can extinguish neither witchcraft nor any other heresy;
and the princes and parliaments of Europe seemed to begin to
recognise in part the philosophical maxim that, 'heresy and
witchcraft are two crimes which commonly increase by punishment,
and are never so effectually suppressed as by being totally
neglected.'
In France, until about the year 1670, there was little abatement
in the fury or number of the prosecutions. In that year several
women had been sentenced to death for frequenting the _Domdaniel_
or Sabbath meeting by the provincial parliament of Normandy.
Louis XIV. was induced to commute the sentence into banishment
for life. The parliament remonstrated at so astonishing an
interference with the due course of justice, and presented a
petition to the king in which they insist upon the dread reality
of a crime that 'tends to the destruction of religion and the
ruin of nations.'[153]
[153] 'Your parliament,' protest these legislators, 'have
thought it their duty on occasion of these crimes, the
greatest which men can commit, to make you acquainted with
the general and uniform feelings of the people of this
province with regard to them; it being moreover a question
in which are concerned the glory of God and the relief of
your suffering subjects, who groan under their fears from
the threats and menaces of this sort of persons, and who
feel the effects of them every day in the mortal and
extraordinary maladies which attack them, and the surprising
damage and loss of their possessions.' They then review the
various laws and decrees of Church and State from the
earliest times in support of their convictions: they cite
the authority of the Church in council and in its most
famous individual teachers. Particularly do they insist upon
the opinions of St. Augustin, in his _City of God_, as
irrefragable. 'After so many authorities and punishments
ordained by human and divine laws, we humbly supplicate your
Majesty to reflect once more upon the extraordinary results
which proceed from the malevolence of this sort of people;
on the deaths from unknown diseases which are often the
consequence of their menaces; on the loss of the goods and
chattels of your subjects; on the proofs of guilt
continually afforded by the insensibility of the marks upon
the accused; on the sudden transportation of bodies from one
place to another; on the sacrifices and nocturnal
assemblies, and other facts, corroborated by the testimony
of ancient and modern authors, and verified by so many
eyewitnesses, composed partly of accomplices and partly of
people who had no interest in the trials beyond the love of
truth, and confirmed moreover by the confessions of the
accused parties themselves, and that, Sire, with so much
agreement and conformity between the different cases, that
the most ignorant persons convicted of this crime have
spoken to the same circumstances and in nearly the same
words as the most celebrated authors who have written about
it; all of which may be easily proved to your Majesty's
satisfaction by the records of various trials before your
parliaments.'--Given in _Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular
Delusions_. Louis XIV., with an unaccustomed care for human
life, resisting these forcible arguments, remained firm, and
the condemned were saved from the stake.
While most of the Governments of Europe were now content to leave
sorcerers and witches to the irregular persecutions of the
people, tacitly abandoning to the mob the right of proceeding
against them as they pleased, without the interference of the
law, in a remote kingdom of Europe a witch-persecution commenced
with the ordinary fury, under express sanction of the Government.
It is curious that at the last moments of its existence as a
legal crime, one of the last fires of witchcraft should have been
lighted in Sweden, a country which, remote from continental
Europe, seems to have been up to that period exempt from the
judicial excesses of England, France, or Germany. The story of
the Mohra witches is inserted in an appendix to Glanvil's
'Collection of Relations,' by Dr. Anthony Horneck. The epidemic
broke out in 1669, in the village of Mohra, in the mountainous
districts of Central Sweden. A number of children became
affected with an imaginative or mischievous disease, which
carried them off to a place called Blockula, where they held
communion and festival with the devil. These, numbering a large
proportion of the youth of the neighbourhood, were incited, it
seems, by the imposture or credulity of the ministers of Mohra
and Elfdale, to report the various transactions at their
spiritual _séances_. To such a height increased the terrified
excitement of the people, that a commission was appointed by the
king, consisting of both clergy and laity, to enquire into the
origin and circumstances of the matter. It commenced proceedings
in August 1670. Days for humiliation and prayer were ordered, and
a solemn service inaugurated the judicial examinations. Agreeably
to the dogma of the most approved foreign authorities, which
allowed the evidence of the greatest criminals and of the
youngest age, the commission began by examining the children,
three hundred in number, claiming to be bewitched, confronting
them with the witches who had, according to the indictment,
been the means of the devil's seduction. They were strictly
interrogated whether they were certain of the fact of having been
actually carried away by the devil in his proper person. Being
answered in the affirmative, the royal commissioners proceeded to
demand of the accused themselves, 'Whether the confessions of
those children were true, and admonished them to confess the
truth, that they might turn away from the devil unto the living
God. At first most of them did very stiffly, and without shedding
the least tear, deny it, though much against their will and
inclination. After this the children were examined every one by
themselves, to see whether their confessions did agree or no; and
the commissioners found that all of them, except some very little
ones, which could not tell all the circumstances, did punctually
agree in their confessions of particulars. In the meanwhile, the
commissioners that were of the clergy examined the witches, but
could not bring them to any confession, all continuing steadfast
in their denials, till at last some of them burst out into tears,
and their confession agreed with what the children said; and
these expressed their abhorrence of the fact, and begged pardon,
adding that the devil, whom they called _Locyta_, had stopped the
mouths of some of them, so loath was he to part with his prey,
and had stopped the ears of others. And being now gone from them,
they could no longer conceal it, for they had now perceived his
treachery.' The Elfdale witches were induced to announce--'We of
the province of Elfdale do confess that we used to go to a
gravel-pit which lies hard by a cross-way, and there we put on a
vest over our heads, and then danced round; and after this ran to
the cross-way and called the devil thrice, first with a still
voice, the second time somewhat louder, and the third time very
loud, with these words, "Antecessor, come and carry us to
Blockula." Whereupon immediately he used to appear, but in
different habits; but for the most part we saw him in a grey
coat and red and blue stockings.[154] He had a red beard, a
high-crowned hat with linen of divers colours wrapt about it, and
long garters about upon his stockings. Then he asked us whether
we would serve him with soul and body. If we were content to do
so, he set us on a beast which he had there ready, and carried us
over churches and high walls, and after all he came to a green
meadow where Blockula lies [the Brockenberg in the Hartz forest,
as Scott conjectures]. We procured some scrapings of altars and
filings of church clocks, and then he gave us a horn with a salve
in it, wherewith we do anoint ourselves, and a saddle, with a
hammer and a wooden nail thereby to fix the saddle. Whereupon we
call upon the devil, and away we go.'
[154] Accommodating himself to modern refinement, the devil
usually discards the antiquated horns, hoofs, and tail; and
if, as Dr. Mede supposed, 'appearing in human shape, he has
always a deformity of some uncouth member or other,' such
inconvenient appendages are disguised as much as possible.
As Goethe's Mephistopheles explains to his witch:
'Culture, which renders man less like an ape,
Has also licked the devil into shape.'
Many interrogatories were put. Amongst others, how it was
contrived that they could pass up and down chimneys and through
unbroken panes of glass (to which it was replied that the devil
removes all obstacles); how they were enabled to transport so
many children at one time? &c. They acknowledged that 'till of
late they had never power to carry away children; but only this
year and the last: and the devil did at that time force them to
it: that heretofore it was sufficient to carry but one of their
own children or a stranger's child with them, which happened
seldom: but now he did plague them and whip them if they did not
procure him many children, insomuch that they had no peace or
quiet for him. And whereas that formerly one journey a week would
serve their turn from their own town to the place aforesaid, now
they were forced to run to other towns and places for children,
and that they brought with them some fifteen, some sixteen
children every night.' As to their means of conveyance, they were
sometimes men; at other times, beasts, spits, and posts: but a
preferable mode was the riding upon goats, whose backs were made
more commodious by the use of a magical ointment whenever a
larger freight than usual was to be transported. Arrived at
Blockula, their diabolical initiation commenced. First they were
made to deny their baptism and take an oath of fealty to their
new master, to whom they devoted soul and body to serve
faithfully. Their new baptism was a baptism of blood: for their
lord cut their fingers and wrote their names in blood in his
book. After other ceremonies they sit down to a table, and are
regaled with not the choicest viands (for such an occasion and
from such a host)--broth, bacon, cheese, oatmeal. Dancing and
fighting (the latter a peculiarity of the Northern Sabbath) ensue
alternately. They indulge, too, in the debauchery of the South:
the witches having offspring from their intercourse with the
demons, who intermarry and produce a mongrel breed of toads and
serpents. As interludes, it may be supposed, to the serious part
of the entertainment the fiend would contrive various jokes,
affecting to be dead; and, a graver joke, he would bid them to
erect a huge building of stone, in which they were to be saved
upon the approaching day of judgment. While engaged at this work
he threw down the unfinished house about their ears, to the
consternation, and sometimes injury, of his vassals.[155] Some of
the witnesses spoke of a great dragon encircled with flames, and
an iron chair; of a vision of a burning pit. The minister of the
district gave his evidence that, having been suffering from a
painful headache, he could account for the unusual severity of
the attack only by supposing that the witches had celebrated one
of their infernal dances upon his head while asleep in bed: and
one of them, in accordance with this conjecture, acknowledged
that the devil had sent her with a sledge-hammer to drive a nail
into the temples of the obnoxious clergyman. The solidity of his
skull saved him; and the only result was, as stated, a severe
pain in his head.
[155] Le Sage's _Diable Boiteux_, who so obligingly
introduces the Spanish student to the secret realities of
human life, is, it may be observed, of both a more rational
and more instructive temperament than the ordinary demons
who appear at the witches' revels to practise their
senseless and fantastic rites.
All the persuasive arguments of the examiners could not induce
the witches to repeat before them their well-known tricks:
because, as they affirmed, 'since they had confessed all they
found all their witchcraft was gone: and the devil at this time
appeared very terrible with claws on his hands and feet, with
horns on his head and a long tail behind, and showed them a pit
burning with a hand out; but the devil did thrust the person down
again with an iron fork, and suggested to the witches that if
they continued in their confession he would deal with them in the
same manner.' These are some of the interesting particulars of
this judicial commission as reported by contemporaries. Seventy
persons were condemned to death. One woman pleaded (a frequent
plea) in arrest of judgment that she was with child; the rest
perseveringly denying their guilt. Twenty-three were burned in a
single fire at the village of Mohra. Fifteen children were also
executed; while fifty-six others, convicted of witchcraft in a
minor degree, were sentenced to various punishments: to be
scourged on every Sunday during a whole year being a sentence of
less severity. The proceedings were brought to an end, it seems,
by the fear of the upper classes for their own safety. An edict
of the king who had authorised the enquiry now ordered it to be
terminated, and the history of the commission was attempted to be
involved in silent obscurity. Prayers were ordered in all the
churches throughout Sweden for deliverance from the malice of
Satan, who was believed to be let loose for the punishment of the
land.[156] It is remarkable that the incidents of the Swedish
trials are chiefly reproductions of the evidence extracted in the
courts of France and Germany.
[156] _Narratives of Sorcery, &c._, by Thomas Wright, who
quotes the authorised reports. Sir Walter Scott refers to
'An account of what happened in the kingdom of Sweden in the
years 1669, 1670, and afterwards translated out of High
Dutch into English by Dr. Anthony Horneck, attached to
Glanvil's _Sadducismus Triumphatus_. The translation refers
to the evidence of Baron Sparr, ambassador from the court of
Sweden to the court of England in 1672, and that of Baron
Lyonberg, envoy-extraordinary of the same power, both of
whom attest the confessions and execution of the witches.
The King of Sweden himself answered the express inquiries of
the Duke of Holstein with marked reserve. "His judges and
commissioners," he said, "had caused divers men, women, and
children to be burnt and executed on such pregnant evidence
as was brought before them; but whether the actions
confessed and proved against them were real, or only the
effect of a strong imagination, he was not as yet able to
determine."'
CHAPTER X.
Witchcraft in the English Colonies in North America--Puritan
Intolerance and Superstition--Cotton Mather's 'Late
Memorable Providences'--Demoniacal Possession--Evidence
given before the Commission--Apologies issued by
Authority--Sudden Termination of the
Proceedings--Reactionary Feeling against the Agitators--The
Salem Witchcraft the last Instance of Judicial Prosecution
on a large Scale in Christendom--Philosophers begin to
expose the Superstition--Meritorious Labours of Webster,
Becker, and others--Their Arguments could reach only the
Educated and Wealthy Classes of Society--These only
partially Enfranchised--The Superstition continues to
prevail among the Vulgar--Repeal of the Witch Act in England
in 1736--Judicial and Popular Persecutions in England in the
Eighteenth Century--Trial of Jane Wenham in England in
1712--Maria Renata burned in Germany in 1749--La Cadière in
France--Last Witch burned in Scotland in 1722--Recent Cases
of Witchcraft--Protestant Superstition--Witchcraft in the
Extra-Christian World.
A review of the superstitions of witchcraft would be incomplete
without some notice of the Salem witches in New England.
An equally melancholy and mischievous access of fanatic
credulity, during the years 1688-1692, overwhelmed the colony of
Massachusetts with a multitude of demons and their human
accomplices; and the circumstances of the period were favourable
to the vigour of the delusion. In the beginning of their
colonisation the New Englanders were generally a united
community; they were little disturbed by heresy; and if they had
been thus infected they were too busily engaged in contending
against the difficulties and dangers of a perilous position to be
able to give much attention to differences in religious belief.
But soon the _purity_ of their faith was in danger of being
corrupted by heretical immigrants. The Puritans were the most
numerous and powerful of the fugitives from political and
religious tyranny in England, and the dominant sect in North
America almost as severely oppressed Anabaptists and Quakers
in the colonies as they themselves, religious exiles from
ecclesiastical despotism, had suffered in the old world. They
proved themselves worthy followers of the persecutors of
Servetus. Other enemies from without also were active in seeking
the destruction of the true believers. Fierce wars and struggles
were continuously being waged with the surrounding savages, who
regarded the increasing prosperity and number of the intruders
with just fear and resentment.
Imbued as the colonists were with demoniacal prepossessions, it
is not so surprising that they deemed their rising State beset by
spiritual enemies; and it is fortunate, perhaps, that the wilds
of North America were not still more productive of fiends and
witches, and more destructive massacres than that of 1690-92 did
not disgrace their colonial history. From the pen of Dr. Cotton
Mather, Fellow of Harvard College, and his father (who was the
Principal), we have received the facts of the history. These two
divines and their opinions obtained great respect throughout the
colony. They devoutly received the orthodox creed as expounded in
the writings of the ancient authorities on demonology, firmly
convinced of the reality of the present wanderings of Satan 'up
and down' in the earth; and Dr. Cotton Mather was at the same
time the chief supporter and the historian of the demoniacal war
now commenced. It was significantly initiated by the execution of
a papist, an Irishman named Glover, who was accused of having
bewitched the daughters of a mason of Boston, by name Goodwin.
These girls, of infantile age, suffered from convulsive fits, the
ordinary symptom of 'possession.' Mather received one of them
into his house for the purpose of making experiments, and, if
possible, to exorcise the evil spirits. She would suddenly, in
presence of a number of spectators, fall into a trance, rise up,
place herself in a riding attitude as if setting out for the
Sabbath, and hold conversation with invisible beings. A peculiar
phase of this patient's case was that when under the influence of
'hellish charms' she took great pleasure in reading or hearing
'bad' books, which she was permitted to do with perfect freedom.
Those books included the Prayer Book of the English Episcopal
Church, Quakers' writings, and popish productions. Whenever the
Bible was taken up, the devil threw her into the most fearful
convulsions.
As a result of this _diagnosis_ appeared the publication of 'Late
Memorable Providences relating to Witchcraft and Possession,'
which, together with Baxter's 'Certainty of the World of
Spirits,' a work Mather was careful to distribute and recommend
to the people, increased the fever of fear and fanaticism to the
highest pitch. The above incidents were the prelude only to the
proper drama of the Salem witches. In 1692, two girls, the
daughter and niece of Mr. Parvis, minister, suffering from a
disease similar to that of the Goodwins, were pronounced to be
preternaturally afflicted. Two miserable Indians, man and wife,
servants in the family, who indiscreetly attempted to cure the
witch-patients by means of some charm or drug, were suspected
themselves as the guilty agents, and sent to execution. The
physicians, who seem to have been entirely ignorant of the origin
of these attacks, and as credulous as the unprofessional world,
added fresh testimony to the reality of 'possession.'[157] At
first, persons of the lower classes and those who, on account of
their ill-repute, would be easily recognised to be diabolic
agents, were alone incriminated. But as the excitement increased
others of higher rank were pointed out. A _black_ man was
introduced on the stage in the form of an Indian of terrible
aspect and portentous dimensions, who had threatened the
christianising colonists with extermination for intruding their
faith upon the reluctant heathen. In May 1692, a new governor,
Sir William Phipps, arrived with a new charter (the old one
had been suspended) from England; this official, far from
discouraging the existing prejudices, urged the local authorities
on to greater extravagance. The examinations were conducted in
the ordinary and most approved manner, the Lord's Prayer and the
secret marks being the infallible tests. Towards the end of May
two women, Bridget Bishop and Susannah Martin, were hanged.
[157] A phenomenon of apparently the same sort as that which
was of such frequent occurrence in the Middle Age and in the
seventeenth century, is said to have been lately occupying
considerable attention in the South of France. The _Courrier
des Alpes_ narrates an extraordinary scene in one of the
churches in the _Commune_ of Morzine, among the women, on
occasion of the visitation of the bishop of the district. It
seems that the malady in question attacks, for the most
part, the female population, and the patients are
confidently styled, and asserted to be, _possessed_. It
'produces all the effects of madness, without having its
character,' and is said to baffle all the resources of
medical science, which is ignorant of its nature. There had
been an intermission of the convulsions for some time, but
they have now reappeared with greater violence than
ever.--_The Times_ newspaper, June 6, 1864.
On June 2, a formal commission sat, before which the most
ridiculous evidence was gravely given and as gravely received.
John Louder deposed against Bridget Bishop, 'that upon some
little controversy with Bishop about her fowls going well to bed,
he did awake in the night by moonlight, and did see clearly the
likeness of this woman grievously oppressing him, in which
miserable condition she held him unable to help himself till next
day. He told Bishop of this, but she denied it, and threatened
him very much. Quickly after this, being at home on a Lord's day
with the doors shut about him, he saw a black pig approach him,
at which he going to kick, it vanished away. Immediately after
sitting down he saw a black thing jump in at the window and come
and stand before him. The body was like that of a monkey, the
feet like a cock's, but the face much like that of a man.[158] He
being so extremely affrighted that he could not speak, this
monster spoke to him and said, "I am a messenger sent unto you,
for I understand that you are in some trouble of mind, and if you
will be ruled by me you shall want for nothing in this world."
Whereupon he endeavoured to clap his hands upon it, but he could
feel no substance; and it jumped out of window again, but
immediately came in by the porch (though the doors were shut) and
said, "You had better take my counsel." He then struck at it with
a stick, and struck only the ground and broke the stick. The arm
with which he struck was presently disabled, and it vanished
away. He presently went out at the back door, and spied this
Bishop in her orchard going towards her house, but he had no
power to set one foot forward to her; whereupon, returning into
the house, he was immediately accosted by the monster he had seen
before, which goblin was now going to fly at him; whereat he
cried out, "The whole armour of God be between me and you!" so it
sprung back and flew over the apple-tree, shaking many apples off
the tree in its flying over. At its leap, it flung dirt with its
feet against the stomach of the man, whereupon he was then struck
dumb, and so continued for three days together.' Another witness
declared in court; that, 'being in bed on the Lord's day, at
night he heard a scrambling at the window; whereat he then saw
Susanna Martin come in and jump down upon the floor. She took
hold of this deponent's foot, and, drawing his body into a heap,
she lay upon him nearly two hours, in all which time he could
neither speak nor stir. At length, when he could begin to move,
he laid hold on her hand, and, pulling it up to his mouth, he bit
some of her fingers, as he judged into the bone; whereupon she
went from the chamber down stairs out at the door,' &c.
[158] 'Rara avis in terris.' A mongrel and anomalous species
like the German _Meerkatzen_--monkey-cats.
On July 19 five women, and on August 19, six persons, were sent
to the gallows, among whom was Mr. George Burroughs, minister,
who had provoked his judges by questioning the very existence of
witchcraft. At the last moments he so favourably impressed the
assembled spectators by an eloquent address, that Dr. Mather, who
was present, found it necessary to prevent the progress of a
reactionary feeling by asserting that the criminal was no
regularly ordained minister, and the devil has often been
transformed into an angel of light. So transparently iniquitous
and absurd had their mode of procedure become, that one of the
subordinates in the service of the authorities, whose office it
was to arrest the accused, refused to perform any longer his
hateful office, and being himself denounced as an accomplice, he
sought safety in flight. He was captured and executed as a
recusant and wizard. Eight sorcerers suffered the extreme penalty
of the law on September 22. Giles Gory, a few days before,
indignantly refusing to plead, was 'pressed to death,' an
accustomed mode of punishing obstinate prisoners; and in the
course of this torture, it is said, when the tongue of the victim
was forced from his mouth in the agony of pain, the presiding
sheriff forced it back with his cane with much _sang froid_. At
this stage in the proceedings, the magistrates considered that a
justificatory memoir ought to be published for the destruction of
twenty persons of both sexes, and, at the express desire of the
governor, Cotton Mather drew up an Apology in the form of a
treatise, 'More Wonders of the Invisible World,' in which the
Salem, executions are justified by the precedent of similar and
notorious instances in the mother-country, as well as by the
universally accepted doctrines of various eminent authors of all
ages and countries. Increase Mather, Principal of Harvard
College, was also directed to solve the question whether the
devil could sometimes assume the shape of a saint to effect his
particular design. The reverend author resolved it affirmatively
in a learned treatise, which he called (a seeming plagiarism)
'Cases of Conscience concerning Witchcraft and Evil Spirits
personating Men,' an undertaking prompted by an unforeseen and
disagreeable circumstance. The wife of a minister, one of the
most active promoters of the prosecution, was involved in the
indiscriminate charges of the informers, who were beginning to
aim at more exalted prey. The minister, alarmed at the unexpected
result of his own agitation, was now convinced of the falseness
of the whole proceeding. It was a fortunate occurrence. From that
time the executions ceased.[159]
[159] If, however, individuals of the human species were at
length exempt from the penalty of death, those of the canine
species were sacrificed, perhaps vicariously. Two dogs,
convicted, as it is reported, of being accessories, were
solemnly hanged!
The dangerously increasing class of informers who, like the
'delatores' of the early Roman Empire, made a lucrative
profession by their baseness, and spared not even reluctant or
recusant magistrates themselves, more than anything else, was the
cause of the termination of the trials. If they would preserve
their own lives, or at least their reputations, the authorities
and judges found it was necessary at once to check the progress
of the infection. About one hundred and fifty witches or wizards
were still under arrest (two hundred more being about to be
arrested), when Governor Phipps having been recalled by the Home
Government, was induced by a feeling of interest or justice to
release the prisoners, to the wonder and horror of the people.
From this period a reaction commenced. Those who four years
before originated the trials suddenly became objects of hatred or
contempt. Even the clergy, who had taken a leading part in them,
became unpopular. In spite of the strenuous attempts of Dr.
Cotton Mather and his disciples to revive the agitation, the tide
of public opinion or feeling had set the other way, and people
began to acknowledge the insufficiency of the evidence and the
possible innocence of the condemned. Public fasts and prayers
were decreed throughout the colony. Judges and juries emulated
one another in admitting a misgiving 'that we were sadly deluded
and mistaken.' Dr. Mather was less fickle and less repentant. In
one of his treatises on the subject, recounting some of the
signs and proofs of the actual crime, he declares: 'Nor are these
the tenth part of the prodigies that fell out among the
inhabitants of New England. _Fleshy_ people may burlesque these
things: but when hundreds of the most solemn people, in a country
where they have as much mother-wit certainly as the rest of
mankind, know them to be true, nothing but the froward spirit of
Sadduceeism can question them. I have not yet (he confidently
asserts) mentioned so much as one thing that will not be
justified, if it be required, by the oaths of more considerate
persons than any that can ridicule these odd phenomena.'[160]
[160] _Narratives of Sorcery and Magic_, chap. xxxi. The
faith of the Fellow of Harvard College, we may be inclined
to suppose, was quickened in proportion to his doubts. To do
him justice, he admitted that _some_ of the circumstances
alleged might be exaggerated or even imaginary.
So ended the last of public and judicial persecutions of
considerable extent for witchcraft in Christendom. As far as the
superior intellects were concerned, philosophy could now dare to
reaffirm that reason 'must be our last judge and guide in
everything.' Yet Folly, like Dulness, 'born a goddess, never
dies;' and many of the higher classes must have experienced some
silent regrets for an exploded creed which held the reality of
the constant personal interference of the demons in human
affairs. The fact that the great body of the people of every
country in Europe remained almost as firm believers as their
ancestors down to the present age, hardly needs to be insisted
on; that theirs was a _living_ faith is evidenced in the
ever-recurring popular outbreaks of superstitious ignorance,
resulting both in this country and on the Continent often in the
deaths of the objects of their diabolic fear.
Such arguments as those of Webster in England, of Becker and
Thomasius in Germany, on the special subject of witchcraft, and
the general arguments of Locke or of Bayle, could be addressed
only to the few.[161] Nor indeed would it be philosophical to
expect that the vulgar should be able to penetrate an inveterate
superstition that recently had been universally credited by the
learned world.
[161] Dr. Balthazar Becker, theological professor at
Amsterdam, published his heretical work in Dutch, under the
title of 'The World Bewitched, or a Critical Investigation
of the commonly-received Opinion respecting Spirits, their
Nature, Power, and Acts, and all those extraordinary Feats
which Men are said to perform through their Aid;' 1691. 'He
founds his arguments on two grand principles--that from
their very nature spirits cannot act upon material beings,
and that the Scriptures represent the devil and his
satellites as shut up in the prison of hell. To explain away
the texts which militate against his system, evidently cost
him much labour and perplexity. His interpretations, for the
most part, are similar to those still relied on by the
believers in his doctrine' (Note by Murdock in Mosheim's
_Institutes of Ecclesiastical History_). The usually candid
Mosheim notices, apparently with contempt, '"The World
Bewitched," a prolix and copious work, in which he perverts
and explains away, with no little ingenuity indeed, but with
no less audacity, whatever the sacred volume relates of
persons possessed by evil spirits, and of the power of
demons, and maintains that the miserable being whom the
sacred writers call Satan and the devil, together with his
ministers, is bound with everlasting chains in hell, so that
he cannot thence go forth to terrify mortals and to plot
against the righteous.' Balthazar Becker, one of the most
meritorious of the opponents of diabolism, was deposed from
his ministerial office by an ecclesiastical synod, and
denounced as an atheist. His position, and the boldness of
his arguments, excited extraordinary attention and
animosity, and 'vast numbers' of Lutheran divines arose to
confute his atheistical heresy. The impunity which he
enjoyed from the vengeance of the devil (he had boldly
challenged the deity of hell to avenge his overturned
altars) was explained by the orthodox divines to be owing to
the superior cunning of Satan, who was certain that he would
be in the end the greatest gainer by unbelief. Christ.
Thomasius, professor of jurisprudence, was the author of
several works against the popular prejudice between the
years 1701 and 1720. He is considered by Ennemoser to have
been able to effect more from his professional position than
the humanely-minded Becker. But, after all, the overthrow of
the diabolic altars was caused much more by the discoveries
of science than by all the writings of literary
philosophers. Even in Southern Europe and in Spain (as far
as was possible in that intolerant land) reason began to
exhibit some faint signs of existence; and Benito Feyjoó,
whose Addisonian labours in the eighteenth century in the
land of the Inquisition deserve the gratitude of his
countrymen (in his _Téatro Critico_), dared to raise his
voice, however feeble, in its behalf.
The cessation of legal procedure against witches was negative
rather than positive: the enactments in the statute-books were
left unrepealed, and so seemed not to altogether discountenance a
still somewhat doubtful prejudice. It was so late as in the ninth
year of the reign of George II., 1736, that the Witch Act of 1604
was formally and finally repealed. By a tardy exertion of sense
and justice the Legislature then enacted that, for the future, no
prosecutions should be instituted on account of witchcraft,
sorcery, conjuration, enchantment, &c., against any person or
persons. Unfortunately for the credit of civilisation, it would
be easy to enumerate a long list of _illegal_ murders both before
and since 1736. One or two of the most remarkable cases plainly
evincing, as Scott thinks, that the witch-creed 'is only asleep,
and might in remote corners be again awakened to deeds of blood,'
are too significant not to be briefly referred to. In 1712 Jane
Wenham, a poor woman belonging to the village of Walkern, in the
county of Hertford, was solemnly found guilty by the jury on the
evidence of sixteen witnesses, of whom three were clergymen;
Judge Powell presiding. She was condemned to death as a witch in
the usual manner; but was reprieved on the representation of the
judge. She had been commonly known in the neighbourhood of her
home as a malicious witch, who took great pleasure in afflicting
farmers' cattle and in effecting similar mischief. The incumbent
of Walkern, the Rev. Mr. Gardiner, fully shared the prejudice of
his parishioners; and, far from attempting to dispel, he entirely
concurred with, their suspicions. A warrant was obtained from the
magistrate, Sir Henry Chauncy, for the arrest of the accused: and
she was brought before that local official; depositions were
taken, and she was searched for 'marks.' The vicar of Ardley, a
neighbouring village, tested her guilt or innocence with the
Lord's Prayer, which was repeated incorrectly: by threats and
other means he forced the confession that she was indeed an agent
of the devil, and had had intercourse with him.
But, even in the middle of the eighteenth century, witches were
occasionally tried and condemned by judicial tribunals. In the
year 1749, Maria or Emma Renata, a nun in the convent of
Unterzell, near Würzburg, was condemned by the spiritual, and
executed by the civil, power. By the clemency of the prince, the
proper death by burning alive was remitted to the milder sentence
of beheading, and afterwards burning the corpse to ashes: for no
vestige of such an accursed criminal should be permitted to
remain after death. When a young girl Maria Renata had been
seduced to witchcraft by a military officer, and was accustomed
to attend the witch-assemblies. In the convent she practised her
infernal arts in bewitching her sister-nuns.[162] About the same
time a nun in the south of France was subjected to the barbarous
imputation and treatment of a witch: Father Girard, discovering
that his mistress had some extraordinary scrofulous marks,
conceived the idea of proclaiming to the world that she was
possessed of the _stigmata_--impressions of the marks of the
nails and spear on the crucified Lord, believed to be reproduced
on the persons of those who, like the celebrated St. Francis,
most nearly assimilated their lives to His. The Jesuits eagerly
embraced an opportunity of producing a miracle which might
confound their Jansenist rivals, whose sensational miracles were
threatening to eclipse their own.[163] Sir Walter Scott states
that the last judicial sentence of death for witchcraft in
Scotland was executed in 1722, when Captain David Ross, sheriff
of Sutherland, condemned a woman to the stake. As for illegal
persecution, M. Garinet ('Histoire de la Magie en France') gives
a list of upwards of twenty instances occurring in France between
the years 1805 and 1818. In the latter year three tribunals were
occupied with the trials of the murderers.
[162] Ennemoser relates the history of this witch from 'The
Christian address at the burning of Maria Renata, of the
convent of Unterzell, who was burnt on June 21, 1749, which
address was delivered to a numerous multitude, and
afterwards printed by command of the authorities.' The
preacher earnestly insisted upon the divine sanction and
obligation of the Mosaic law, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch
to live,' which was taken as the text; and upon the fact
that, so far from being abolished by Christianity, it was
made more imperative by the Christian Church.
[163] The victim of the pleasure, and afterwards of the
ambition, of Father Girard, is known as La Cadière. She was a
native of Toulon, and when young had witnessed the
destructive effects of the plague which devastated that city
in 1720. Amidst the confusion of society she was
distinguished by her purity and benevolence. The story of La
Cadière and Father Girard is eloquently narrated by M.
Michelet in _La Sorcière_. The convulsions of the Flagellants
of the thirteenth century, and of the Protestant Revivalists
of the present day, exhibit on a large scale the paroxysms of
the French convents and the Dutch orphan-houses of the
seventeenth century. Nor is diabolical 'possession' yet
extinct in Christendom, if the reports received from time to
time from the Continent are to be credited. Recently, a
convent of Augustinian nuns at Loretto, on the authority of
the _Corriere delle Marche_ of Ancona, was attacked in a
similar way to that of Loudun. A vomiting of needles and
pins, the old diabolical torture, and a strict examination of
the accused, followed.
If a belief should be entertained that the now 'vulgar' ideas of
witchcraft have been long obsolete in England, it would be
destroyed by a perusal of a few of the newspapers and periodicals
of the last hundred years; and a sufficiently voluminous work
might be occupied with the achievements of modern Sidrophels, and
the records of murders or mutilations perpetrated by an ignorant
mob.[164]
[164] Without noticing other equally notorious instances of
recent years, it may be enough (to dispel any such possible
illusion) to transcribe a paragraph from an account in _The
Times_ newspaper of Sept. 24, 1863. 'It is a somewhat
singular fact,' says the writer, describing a late notorious
witch-persecution in the county of Essex, 'that nearly all
the sixty or seventy persons concerned in the outrage which
resulted in the death of the deceased _were of the small
tradesmen class_, and that none of the agricultural
labourers were mixed up in the affair. It is also stated
that none of those engaged were in any way under the
influence of liquor. The whole disgraceful transaction arose
out of a deep belief in witchcraft, which possesses to a
lamentable extent the tradespeople and the lower orders of
the district.' Nor does it appear that the village of
Hedingham (the scene of the witch-murder) claims a
superiority in credulity over other villages in Essex or in
England. The instigator and chief agent in the Hedingham
case was the wife of an innkeeper, who was convinced that
she had been bewitched by an old wizard of reputation in the
neighbourhood: and the mode of punishment was the popular
one of drowning or suffocating in the nearest pond. Scraps
of written papers found in the hovel of the murdered wizard
revealed the numerous applications by lovers, wives, and
other anxious inquirers. Amongst other recent revivals of
the 'Black Art' in Southern Europe already referred to, the
inquisition at Rome upon a well-known English or American
'spiritualist,' when, as we learn from himself, he was
compelled to make a solemn abjuration that he had not
surrendered his soul to the devil, is significant.
Nor would it be safe to assume, with some writers, that
diabolism, as a vulgar prejudice, is now entirely extirpated from
Protestant Christendom, and survives only in the most orthodox
countries of Catholicism or in the remoter parts of northern or
eastern Europe. Superstition, however mitigated, exists even in
the freer Protestant lands of Europe and America; and if
Protestants are able to smile at the religious creeds or
observances of other sects, they may have, it is probable,
something less pernicious, but perhaps almost as absurd, in their
own creed.[165] But, after a despotism of fifteen centuries,
Christendom has at length thrown off the hellish yoke, whose
horrid tyranny was satiated with innumerable holocausts. The once
tremendous power of the infernal arts is remembered by the higher
classes of society of the present age only in their proverbial
language, but it is indelibly graven in the common literature of
Europe. With the savage peoples of the African continent and of
the barbarous regions of the globe, witchcraft or sorcery, under
the name of Fetishism, flourishes with as much vigour and with as
destructive effects as in Europe in the sixteenth century; and
every traveller returning from Eastern or Western Africa, or from
the South Pacific, testifies to the prevalence of the practice of
horrid and bloody rites of a religious observance consisting of
charms and incantations. With those peoples that have no further
conception of the religious sentiment there obtains for the most
part, at least, the magical use of sorcery.[166] Superstition,
ever varying, at some future date may assume, even in Europe, a
form as pernicious or irrational as any of a past or of the
present age; for in every age 'religion, which should most
distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate
us as rational creatures above brutes, is that wherein men
often appear most irrational and more senseless than beasts
themselves.'[167]
[165] A modern philosopher has well illustrated this obvious
truth (_Natural History of Religion_, sect. xii.). 'The age
of superstition,' says an essayist of some notoriety, with
perfect truth, 'is not past; nor,' he adds, a more
questionable thesis, 'ought we to wish it past.' Some of the
most eminent writers (e.g. Plutarch, Francis Bacon, Bayle,
Addison) have rightly or wrongly agreed to consider
fanatical superstition more pernicious than atheism. When it
is considered that the scientific philosophy of Aristotle,
of more than 2,000 years ago, was revived at a comparatively
recent date, it may be difficult not to believe in a
_cyclic_ rather than really progressive course of human
ideas, at least in metaphysics. The fact, remarked by
Macaulay, that the two principal sections of Christendom in
Europe remain very nearly in the limits in which they were
in the sixteenth, or in the middle of the seventeenth
century, is incontestable. Nor, indeed, are present facts
and symptoms so adverse, as is generally supposed, to the
probability of an ultimate reaction in favour of Catholic
doctrine and rule, even among the Teutonic peoples, in the
revolutions to which human ideas are continually subject.
[166] Among the numerous evidences of recent travellers may
be specially mentioned that of the well-known traveller R. F.
Burton (_The Lake Regions of Central Africa_) for the
practices of the Eastern Africans. On the African continent
and elsewhere, as was the case amongst the ancient Jews, the
demons are propitiated by human sacrifices. To what extent
witch-superstition obtains among the Hindus, the historian of
British India bears witness. 'The belief of witchcraft and
sorcery,' says Mr. Mill, 'continues universally prevalent,
and is every day the cause of the greatest enormities. It not
unfrequently happens that Brahmins tried for murder before
the English judges assign as their motive to the crime that
the murdered individual had enchanted them. No fewer than
five unhappy persons in one district were tried and executed
for witchcraft so late as the year 1792. The villagers
themselves assume the right of sitting in judgment on this
imaginary offence, and their sole instruments of proof are
the most wretched of all incantations (_History of British
India_, book ii. 7). A certain instinctive or traditional
dread of evil spirits excites the terrors of those peoples
who have no firm belief in the providence or existence of a
benevolent Divinity. Even among the Chinese--the least
religious nation in the world, and whose trite formula of
scepticism, 'Religions are many: Reason is one,' expresses
their indifferentism to every form of religion--there exists
a sort of demoniacal fear (Huc's _Chinese Empire_, xix.). The
diabolic and magic superstitions of the Moslem are displayed
in Sale's _Korân_ and Lane's _Modern Egyptians_.
[167] _Essay concerning the Human Understanding_, book iv.
18.
* * * * *
Transcriber's notes
Page 27: Deleted extra "the"
Page 39: Removed comma after "Scandinavians."
Page 90: Added missing quotation mark.
Page 107: Corrected typo "Hutchison's."
Page 165: Corrected typo "transsubstantiated."
Page 278: Added period after "xix."
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