Witches and Sorcerers.
“Burn everybody,” the Inquisition seemed to say, “God can easily sort
out his own.” Poor fools, hysterical women and idiots were roasted alive
for the crime of magic.
Catherine de Medicis, the author of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, had
in her service an apostate Jacobin priest who was proficient in the
black art. King Charles lay dangerously ill, and Catherine, the queen
mother, had everything to lose by the death of the King. In her anxiety
she commanded the priest to inquire of the Devil what should be done to
save the life of the King. The priest, taking with him a beautiful
child, went into the chapel and after administering to the child its
first communion, decapitated it on the very steps of the altar and
placed the palpitating head upon the paten. Then, standing on a reversed
cross, he celebrated the Devil’s Mass before an image of the Demon, and
commanded the Devil to answer by the lips of this murdered child the
question of the Queen. Then a strange voice, which had nothing human
about it, made itself audible in this poor little martyr’s head. But the
sorcery availed nothing, the King died.—Elephas Levi.
“Pope Sylvester was publicly accused by Cardinal Benno with being a
sorcerer and enchanter. The brazen oracular head made by his Holiness
was of the same kind as the one fabricated by Albertus Magnus. The
latter was smashed to pieces by Thomas Aquinas, not because it was the
work of or inhabited by a demon, but because the spook, that was fixed
inside by mesmeric power, talked incessantly and disturbed the eloquent
saint. These heads and other talking statues, trophies of the magical
skill of monks and bishops, were fac-similes of the animated gods of the
ancient temples. It was demonstrated that this Pope was constantly
attended by demons or spirits. Benedict IX, John XX and the VI and VII
Gregory were all known as magicians. The latter Pope, it was said, could
shake lightning out of his sleeve. In the latter part of the sixteenth
century there was hardly a parish to be found in which the priests did
not study magic and alchemy. John Reuchlin, father of the Reformation
and teacher of Luther, was a Kabalist and occultist. The occult
knowledge gleaned by religion from the fat fields of theurgy was
sedulously guarded for its own use, and it sent to the stake only those
practitioners who poached on its preserves. Between 1580 and 1595 in the
single province of Lorraine, the President Remigius burned nine hundred
witches.”—Isis Unveiled, 2-57.
“The gorgeous standard of the Inquisition is represented as waving in
the Heavenly breezes at the foot of the Great White Throne of the
Almighty. On its crimson, damask face is the cross, the symbol of the
Son of God who died for mankind, with an olive branch on one side and a
sword stained to the hilt with human gore on the other.”
“The true origin of the daily accusations and death sentences for
witchcraft are traced by Dr. Soldan, of Stuttgart, to personal,
political and religious enmities. Prince Bishop, John George II, of
Bamberg, caused six hundred to be burned for sorcery in five years. The
petty princes were not unwilling to seize upon any pretence to fill
their coffers, the persons most persecuted being those whose property
was a matter of consideration.”—Sorcery and Magic, 2-185. A horse was
burnt at the stake in Lisbon in 1601 for witchcraft, because it could
tell the number of spots on a card.
In the list of twenty nine burnings, or autos da fe, in nineteen months
in Germany, 162 persons were murdered, of whom 28 were Protestants, 100
wealthy citizens and 34 little children, the youngest an infant. Wright
says that 27 little girls, from seven to ten years of age, were burnt as
witches. Lorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that
Torquamada in eighteen years burned at the stake 10,220 persons, and
otherwise punished 97,321. In Andalusia alone, in a single year, the
Inquisition sent to the stake 2000 Jews.—Buckle’s Hist. Civ. 1-136. “We
learn that much money was realized by selling to the rich dispensations
to secure them from the Inquisition.”—Conflict Between Religion and
Science, 146.
Stevens says: “A monk of St. Anthony, having been at Jerusalem, brought
home with him a bit of the finger of the Holy Ghost, the snoot of a
seraphim, one of the nails of a cherub, one of the ribs of the Word Made
Flesh, some rays of the Star of the East, and a vial of St. Michael’s
sweat. Henry III, of England, received from the Grand Master of the
Templars a vial containing some of the blood that Christ shed upon the
cross, attested by the seal of the Patriarch of Jerusalem.”
The hand of one of the innocents massacred by Herod, although Herod died
four years B. C., was, in 1837, still preserved in the Convent at
Bethlehem. There also is the pit in which the bodies of the infants were
thrown, and also the manger which came down from the constellation of
the Crab. Some depraved Christian copped the stone on which the cock
crowed when Peter denied his Master, and, in 1837, it was said to be in
a church in Rome. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem,
among other wonders, is a monument erected over the grave of Adam, who
never existed, and there is a polished marble bathtub or sarcophagus,
which they claimed was the sepulchre hewn out of the rock. See Travels
in Holy Land, 2-163.
The fight of the fools and fakirs over the location of the grave of a
mythical sun-god is certainly ludicrous, but more amusing was the magic
trick of the early Christians who stole the grave of Adam either from
Hebron or Mecca and also swiped the grave of Christ from the Damascus
Road, north of Jerusalem, and exhibited both, with other shell and
three-card-monte games, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in the
centre of Jerusalem, for the purpose of annexing the coin of the dupes,
farmers and come-ons from all over the world.
According to Tichenor, over three hundred years after the crucifixion,
St. Helena found the true cross, and also dug up the crosses of the two
thieves, and this lumber was sold for centuries to millions of the
faithful. Even a splinter will save you from Hell and cure you of what
ails you. And the bones, hair and nails of the Apostles have been sold
all over the world. You could formerly buy a gunnysack full of St.
Peter’s fingers and toes if you had the necessary dough. The people not
only worshipped the Mother of God, but worshipped St. Ann, the
Grandmother of God. God came unto Mary in the form of Gabriel, and to
prove it the monk Eiseling exhibited all over Europe a pin-feather from
Gabriel’s wing, which he shed at the conference. Thorns, from the crown
of thorns, the blood of Jesus, by the drop or the bottle, and the milk
of the Holy Virgin were peddled out all over the world for centimes.—See
Tichenor’s Roman Religion.