SORCERERS AND MAGICIANS.
In the works of St. Augustin, we are informed that there existed in his
time in Italy, women possessed of the power attributed by the poets to
Circe, who transformed men into beasts of burthen, and compelled them to
bear their baggage. St. Augustin mentions that a priest named Præstantius
unfortunately meeting one of those women, was changed into a mule, and
compelled to bear a trunk on his back; and that it was only when she had
no further occasion for his services, he was allowed to resume his gown
and band.
Are we to infer from this passage, that one of the greatest minds that
ever enlightened the Church believed in this species of transformation?
Certainly not! The works of St. Augustin are not to be literally
interpreted.
The hyperbole simply implies that there are in Italy women whose charms
are so powerful, and whose allurements so dangerous, that men who give way
to their influence, ceasing to be men, are reduced to the condition of
brutes, and exercise the most degrading labour. As to the priest
Præstantius, his name contains the key to the mystery; and he was probably
one of the minor Canons of the Church converted into a slave to do the
errands of some attractive dame.
This version of the passage of St. Augustin, so often cited for twelve
centuries by the believers in magic, was simply an exhortation against
female seduction to the laity and clergy of his time. It has proved,
however, no small advantage to mountebanks to be backed by the authority
of the illustrious name of St. Augustin!
The annals of the Jesuits abound in terrible histories of atonement made
at the stake for imputed sorcery. The following instance is related by Dom
Calmet. Charles IV., Duke of Lorraine, had in his service a
valet-de-chambre, named Desbordes, who was accused of having hastened, by
the art of sorcery, the death of the Princess Mary of Lorraine, mother to
the Duke.
"Charles IV. conceived suspicions against Desbordes, from the period of
his having furnished a grand banquet given by the Duke to a hunting party
at a moment's notice: Desbordes having made no other preparatives than to
open a chest, having three trays, upon which were three courses ready
prepared. During another hunting party, Desbordes reanimated three
criminals suspended from a gibbet, and commanded them to make obeisance to
the Duke; having done which, he bade them hang themselves again. Another
time, he made the figures in a piece of tapestry come down and join in the
dance. Charles IV., alarmed at these supernatural feats, eventually
brought Desbordes to trial; and he was condemned and executed as a
magician for mere acts of sleight of hand.
The real cause of his condemnation was the enmity of the court-physicians
of Lorraine; whom he had irritated by the disappointment of their
predictions touching the death of the Princess Mary; for had his judges
really believed in his power of restoring the dead to life, their sentence
of execution would have been absurd.
The most learned men of times famed for their learning have sometimes
condescended to confirm these popular errors. Baronius affirms the bridge
of the Spiritus Sanctus, in Rome, to have been erected by a glance from
the eye of a child of twelve years old, named Benezet; and his assertion
is founded upon five Papal bulls.
Paulus Jovius, a man of unquestionable erudition, confirms the popular
legend concerning the black dog of Cornelius Agrippa; stating that, when
on his death-bed at Lyons, he uttered dreadful imprecations against his
faithful attendant, who was supposed by the vulgar to be a familiar spirit
disguised under the form of a cur; saying, "Away with thee wretched beast,
through whom I am lost to all eternity!" On which the dog precipitated
itself into the Saône, and appeared no more. Unfortunately for the
historian, Agrippa died at Grenoble, and not at Lyons, so that the Saône
is rather far fetched. But those who believe in familiar spirits are apt
to be loose in their notions of geography.
The work of James I., upon Demonology, is one of the most curious records
of the superstition of his time, of which the feats of Nicholas Hopkins,
the witch-finder, afford so cruel an evidence. The royal author would,
perhaps, have been better employed in seeing a more enlightened education
bestowed upon his ill-advised son, than in perpetuating his own credulity.
The Memoirs of the Cardinal de Richelieu admit his belief in witchcraft.
In his time, it was an advantage to a Minister of State to have at his
disposal accusations of a mysterious crime, where disculpation was next to
impossible. Urbain Grandier, the priest, who was condemned to death for
allowing the nuns of Loudun to communicate with the devil, was one among
many victims to the darkness of the public mind.
By the Parliaments of France, hundreds were burnt for witchcraft in the
course of a few months. The shepherds of La Brie alone supplied
innumerable victims; as the supposed authors of all the domestic
misfortunes of the district, the murrain that carried off the cattle, and
the hooping-cough that carried off the children. Like the old women in
Scotland, they were "na canny;" and like them, expiated the prejudice
among faggots and tar-barrels. But though we no longer burn for
witchcraft, the profession is far from extinct; and in the remote
districts of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, there scarcely exists
a country magistrate but has had some charge brought before him implying
the exercise of witchcraft. The horse-shoe is still seen nailed above the
doors of our villages; and fortune-tellers, and spaewives are consulted,
in spite of Sunday schools and the Lancastrian system. Not a day passes,
but the ordeal of the Bible and key, the Sortes virgiliane of the vulgar,
is resorted to in some village of the British empire; but the exorcisms of
the school-master will probably drive both witches and witch-finders from
the land.