The power of these witches as we find in their earliest records
originated in their intercourse with “familiar spirits,” invisible
beings who must be supposed to be enlisted in the armies of the prince
of darkness. We do not read in these ancient memorials of any league
of mutual benefit entered into between the merely human party, and his
or her supernatural assistant. But modern times have amply supplied
this defect. The witch or sorcerer could not secure the assistance
of the demon but by a sure and faithful compact, by which the human
party obtained the industrious and vigilant service of his familiar
for a certain term of years, only on condition that, when the term was
expired, the demon of undoubted right was to obtain possession of the
indentured party, and to convey him irremissibly and forever to the
regions of the damned. The contract was drawn out in authentic form,
signed by the sorcerer, and attested with his blood, and was then
carried away by the demon, to be produced again at the appointed time.
“To deny the possibility, nay actual exsitence of Witchcraft and
Sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed Word of God,
in various passages both of the Old and New Testament; and the thing
itself is a truth to which every Nation in the World hath in its turn
borne testimony, either by examples seemingly well attested, or by
prohibitory laws, which at least suppose the possibility of commerce
with evil spirits.”―Blackstone’s “Commentaries,” book iv. chapter 4,
p. 61.
An anonymous seventeenth-century writer reasons as follows:―“To know
things aright and perfectly is to know the causes thereof. A definition
doth consist of those causes which give the whole essence, and contain
the perfect nature of the thing defined; where that is therefore found
out, there appears the very clear light. If it be perfect, it is much
the greater; though if it be not fully perfect, yet it giveth some
good light. For which respect, though I dare not say I can give a
perfect definition in this matter, which is hard to do even in known
things, because the essential form is hard to be found, yet I do give
a definition which may at the least give notice and make known what
manner of persons they be of whom I am to speak:―A witch is one that
worketh by the the Devil, or by some devilish or curious art, either
hurting or healing, revealing things secret, or foretelling things to
come, which the Devil hath devised to entangle and snare men’s souls
withal unto damnation. The Conjuror, the Enchanter, the Sorcerer, the
Diviner, and whatsoever other sort there is, are indeed encompassed
within this circle. The Devil doth (no doubt) after divers forms, deal
in these. But no man is able to show an essential difference in each of
them from the rest. I hold it no wisdom or labor well spent to travel
much therein. One artificer had devised them all.”
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”―Exodus xxii. 18. “Neither
shall ye use enchantment.”―Levit. xix. 26. “Regard not them which
have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by
them.”―Ibid. ver. 31. “When thou art come into the land which the Lord
thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations
of those nations. There shall not be found among you any one 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 necromancer.
For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord: and
because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out
from before thee.”―Deut. xviii. 9-12. Of Manasseh is recorded, that
“He caused his children to pass through the fire in the valley of the
son of Himon: also he observed times, and used enchantments, and used
witchcraft, and dealt with a familiar spirit, and with wizards.”―2
Chron. xxxiii. 6. Lastly, St. Paul mentions “witchcraft” amongst such
“works of the flesh” as “adultery, fornication, heresies, drunkenness,
and murders.”―Galat. v. 19-21.
Many of the heathens cordially defended magic and necromancy. For
example, Asclepiades, who lived in the time of Pompey the Great, cured
diseases by magic, enjoining upon his patient, in the case of falling
sickness, to bind upon his arm a Cross with a Nail driven into it.
Julianus, the magician, is reported to have driven the plague out of
Rome by magical power. Apuleius, a deciple of Plato, wrote at length
on magic. To him may be added Marcellus and Alexander Trallian. Pliny
asserts in very plain language that necromancy was so prevalent in
his day, but was condemned by the wisest, that it was classed with
treason and poisoning. And it is notorious that magic was long used as
a convenient though inefficient weapon against Christianity.―Vide,
likewise, Livy i. 20, and Strabo, lib. vi.
It is impossible to point to any period when the belief in witchcraft
and necromancy was perfectly obliterated, or to any nation which
altogether repudiated it. If one particular phase was removed, or
discountenanced, some other form, substantially and inherently similar,
eventually took its place.
Touching the antiquity of Witchcraft, we must needs confess that it
hath been of very ancient time, because the Scriptures do testify so
much, for in the time of Moses it was very rife in Egypt. Neither was
it then newly sprung up, being common, and grown into such ripeness
among the nations, that the Lord, reckoning by divers kinds, saith that
the Gentiles did commit such abominations, for which He would cast
them out before the children of Israel.―“What a Witch is, and the
Antiquities of Witchcraft,” A. D. 1612.
The following passage, from a sermon by the late Canon Melville, is
interesting: “It is unnecessary for us to inquire what those arts may
have been in which the Ephesians are said to have greatly excelled.
There seems no reason for doubting that, as we have already stated,
they were of the nature of magic, sorcery, or witchcraft; though we
cannot profess accurately to define what such terms might import. The
Ephesians, as some in all ages have done, probably laid claim to the
intercourse with invisible beings, and professed to derive from that
intercourse acquaintance with, and power over, future events. And
though the very name of witchcraft be now held in contempt, and the
supposition of communion with evil spirits scouted as a fable of what
are called the dark ages, we own that we have difficulty in believing
that all which has passed by the names of magic and sorcery may be
resolved into sleight of hand, deception, and trick. The visible world
and the invisible are in very close contact: there is, indeed, a veil
on our eyes, preventing our gazing on spiritual beings and things, but
we doubt not that whatever passes upon the earth is open to the view of
higher and immaterial creatures. And as we are sure that a man of piety
and prayer enlists good angels on his side and engages them to perform
towards him the ministrations of kindness, we know not why there
cannot be such a thing as a man whose wickedness has caused his being
abandoned by the Spirit of God, and who, in this his desertion, has
thrown open to evil angels the chambers of his soul, and made himself
so completely their instrument, that they may use him in the uttering
or working strange things, which shall have all the air of prophecy or
miracle.”
The oldest and most authentic record from which we can derive our
ideas on the subject of witchcraft, unquestionably is the Bible. The
Egyptians and Chaldeans were early distinguished for their supposed
proficiency in magic, in the production of supernatural phenomena, and
in penetrating into the secrets of future time. The first appearance
of men thus extraordinarily gifted, or advancing pretensions of this
sort, recorded in Scripture, is on occasion of Pharoah’s dream of the
seven years of plenty, and seven years of famine. At that period the
king “sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt and all the wise
men; but they could not interpret the dream,” which Joseph afterwards
expounded.
Their second appearance was upon a most memorable occasion, when Moses
and Aaron, armed with miraculous powers, came to a subsequent king of
Egypt, to demand from him that their countrymen might be permitted to
depart to another tract of the world. They produced a miracle as the
evidence of their divine mission: and the king, who was also named
Pharoah, “called before him the wise men and the sorcerers of Egypt,
who with their enchantments did in like manner” as Moses had done;
till, after some experiments in which they were apparently successful,
they at length were compelled to allow themselves overcome, and fairly
to confess to their master, “This is the finger of God”!
The spirit of the Jewish history loudly affirms, that the Creator
of heaven and earth had adopted this nation for his chosen people,
and therefore demanded their exclusive homage, and that they should
acknowledge no other God. It is on this principle that it is made one
of his early commands to them, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
And elsewhere the meaning of this prohibition is more fully explained:
“There shall not be found among you any one 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; these
shall surely be put to death; they shall stone them with stones.”
As a matter of fact, it is computed that in the year 1515, no less than
five hundred witches were burnt in Geneva alone, and the same was the
case in other parts of Christendom,―a proof at once of the craft and
power of Satan, and of the demorilization of those who had deliberately
elected to become his servants and slaves. The earliest statute against
witchcraft enacted in England, was passed in the reign of King Henry
VI.; and additional laws of great stringency and severity, sorely
needed, were enacted under the Tudors, by Henry VIII., Queen Elizabeth,
and James I. In the year 1604, the great Act of Parliament against
witchcraft, drawn up by Coke and Bacon, was passed; and it is asserted
that no less than twelve bishops attended the committee of the House
of Lords when the bill was under discussion. Sir Matthew Hale and Sir
Thomas Browne, men of high legal and literary rank and mark, each gave
evidence at the trials which speedily followed. In this particular,
as in some others, England followed Geneva. Between the years 1565
and 1700, eleven wizards or sorcerers were burnt at the stake in the
Carrefour du Bordage, in Guernsey, the square devoted by the city
authorities of that island to this kind of punishment. The last case of
death for Witchcraft there took place in 1747.
It may here be put on record that at the period of the Reformation,
and during the succeeding century, the power of casting out devils
was claimed exclusively by those who remained in visible communion
with the See of Rome, and many Roman Catholic writers of those periods
maintained that no such power belonged either to any teacher of heresy
or to schismatics.