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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 mediaeval, 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
Sagae--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--Mediaeval 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
Praestigiis Daemonum,' &c.--Naude--Jean Bodin--His 'De la
Demonomanie 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 Wuerzburg 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 Cadiere 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 Sagae--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 mediaeval 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--_praestigiator 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, Panaetius 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 Caesars; 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 mediaeval peoples, had some prototypes in the fairy-land of
Greece, in the Hecatean hobgoblins (like the Latin larvae, &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 Caesarean 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 Caesar 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 sagae. 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 Mueller. '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.
MEDIAEVAL 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 Deum became the Madonna; alms pro
Matre Deum became alms for the Madonna; the festival of the
Mater Deum 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 Ecclesiasticae_, 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 Irenaeus 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 Ecclesiasticae_, 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-Judaeus (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 mediaeval thought, evident in the life,
literature, in the common ideas of ancient and mediaeval 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 femina credam.' To the same effect is an
observation of Pliny: 'Scientiam feminarum in _veneficiis_
praevalere.'
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 mediaevalists 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 _sagae_ 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
Grostete, 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 mediaevalism 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 mediaeval, 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 mediaevalism 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--Mediaeval 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'Orleans 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 Notre 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 strigiatus haeresi_. 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-fe_ 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, praecipue 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
haereticae_, 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-fe_ 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 AEtna, 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 mediaevalists 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 mediaeval 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
Numae; Wierus, de Praestigiis Daemon., 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 (_Athenae 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.