1662 to relax. An interval of six years now occurs without a trial for
this crime, while the record bears that James Welsh[62] was ordered to be
publicly whipped for accusing several individuals of it,--a fate which he
was hardly likely to have encountered some years before. Fountainhall, in
noticing the case of the ten poor women convicted on their own confession
in 1678[63], obviously speaks of the whole affair with great doubt and
hesitation. And Sir George Mackenzie, in his 'Criminal Law,' the first
edition of which appeared in the same year, though he does not yet venture
to deny the existence of the crime or the expediency of its punishment,
lays down many principles very inconsistent with the practice of the
preceding century. "From the horridness of the crime," says he, "I do
conclude that of all crimes it requires the clearest relevancy and most
convincing probature; and I condemn, next to the wretches themselves,
those cruel and too forward judges who burn persons by thousands as guilty
of this crime." And accordingly, acting on these humane and cautious
principles, Sir George, in his Report to the Judges in 1680, relative to a
number of persons then in prison for this crime, stated that their
confessions had been procured by torture, and that there seemed to be no
other proof against them, on which they were set at liberty. "Since which
time," adds Lord Royston, "there has been no trial for this crime before
that court, nor before any other court, that I know of, except one at
Paisley by commission from the Privy Council in anno 1697." This
observation of Lord Royston is not altogether correct. The trial at
Paisley to which he alludes is evidently the noted case of the
Renfrewshire witches, tried on a charge of sorcery against a girl named
Christian Shaw, the daughter of Shaw of Bargarran. The conviction of the
accused appears to have taken place principally on the evidence of the
girl herself, who in the presence of the commissioners played off a series
of ecstasies and convulsion fits, similar to those by which the nuns of
Loudon had sealed the fate of Grandier the century before. In this
atrocious case, the Commissioners (in the Report presented by them to the
Privy Council, 9th March, 1697), reported that there were twenty-four
persons, male and female, suspected of being concerned in the sorceries;
and among them, it is to be observed, is a girl of fourteen, and a boy not
twelve years of age. After this, we almost feel surprised that out of
about twenty who were condemned, only five appear to have been executed.
They were burnt on the green at Paisley. The last trial before the Court
of Justiciary was that of Elspet Rule, tried before Lord Anstruther, on
the Dumfries circuit, 3rd of May, 1708, where the prisoner, though
convicted by a plurality of voices, was merely sentenced to be burned on
the cheek and banished Scotland for life. The last execution which took
place was that of an old woman in the parish of Loth, executed at Dornoch
in 1722, by sentence of the Sheriff depute of Caithness, Captain David
Ross, of Little Dean. "It is said, that being brought out for execution,
the weather proving very severe, she sat composedly warming herself by the
fire, while the other instruments of death were made ready!"
So ends in Scotland the tragical part of the history of witchcraft. In
1735, as already mentioned, the penal statutes were repealed; much to the
annoyance however of the Seceders, who, in their annual confession of
national sins, printed in an act of their Associate Presbytery at
Edinburgh, in 1743, enumerated, as a grievous transgression, the repeal of
the penal statutes "contrary to the express laws of God!" And though in
remote districts the belief may yet linger in the minds of the ignorant,
it has now, like the belief in ghosts, alchemy, or second sight, only that
sort of vague hold on the fancy which enables the poet and romance writer
to adapt it to the purposes of fiction, and therewith to point a moral or
adorn a tale. And, of a truth, no unimportant moral is to be gathered from
the consideration of the history of this delusion; namely, the danger of
encouraging those enthusiastic conceits of the possibility of direct
spiritual influence, which, in one shape or other, and even in our own
days, are found to haunt the brain of the weak and presumptuous. For it is
but the same principle which lies at the bottom of the persecutions of the
witches, and which shows itself in the quietism of Bourignon, the reveries
of Madame Guyon, the raptures of Sister Nativity, the prophecies of
Naylor, the dreams of Dr. Dee, or Swedenborg's prospect of the New
Jerusalem; still but an emanation of that spirit of pride, which, refusing
to be "but a little lower than the angels," asserts an immediate communion
and equality with them, and which, according to the temper of the patient,
feeds him with the gorgeous visions of quietism, or impels him, like a
furious Malay, along the path of persecution. Some persons assert that, in
this nineteenth century of ours, we have no enthusiasm. On the contrary,
we have a great deal too much: at no period has enthusiasm of the worst
kind been more rife; witness the impostures of Southcott and Hohenlohe,
and the thousand phantasies which are daily running their brief course of
popularity. At no time has that calenture of the brain been more widely
diffused, which, as it formerly converted every natural occurrence into
the actual agency of the devil, now transforms every leader of a petty
circle into a saint, and invests him with the garb and dignity of an
apostle. Daily, are the practical and active duties of life more neglected
under the influence of this principle; the charity which thinketh no evil
of others daily becomes more rare; the stream of benevolence which of old
stole deep and silently through the haunts of poverty and sickness at
home, is now but poorly compensated by being occasionally thrown up in a
few pompous and useless jets, at public subscriptions for distant objects;
while even in those whose minds are untinctured by the grosser evils to
which enthusiasm gives rise, life passes away in vain and illusive dreams
of self-complacent superiority, which, as they are based only in pride and
constitutional susceptibility, rarely endure when age and infirmity have
shaken or removed the materials out of which they were reared. Thus, the
enthusiast who, like Mirza, has been contemplating through the long day
the Elysian islands that lie beyond the gulf, and already walking in a
fancied communion with their myrtle-crowned inhabitants, feels, in spite
of all his efforts, that, as evening creeps upon the landscape, the
phantasmagoria becomes dimmer and more dim; the bridge, the islands, the
genius who stood beside them disappear; till at last nothing remains for
him but his own long hollow valley of Bagdad, with its oxen, sheep, and
camels grazing on its sides;--this sober, weary, working world, in short,
with all its cares and duties, through which, if he had been wisely
fulfilling the end for which he was sent into it, he should have been
labouring onward with a beneficent activity, not idly dreaming by the
wayside of the Eden for which he is bound; and so he awakes to a
consciousness of his true vocation in life when he is on the point of
leaving it, and perceives the value and the paramount necessity of
exertion, only when youth, with its opportunities, and its energies, lies
behind him for ever, like the shadows of a dream.
* * * * *
The work of Church-Councillor Horst, and the review of its principal
contents, leave however one hemisphere at least of the subject of Magic,
Theurgy, and Necromancy unnoticed. These arts, or at least the popular
belief in them, are much more ancient than any of the forms of
Christianity, and were, in fact, a most unlucky legacy bequeathed by
Paganism to the creeds which supplanted it. It needs no ghost to tell the
reader how firmly the ancients believed in all supernatural influences:
how populous, in their conceptions, were the elements with omens,
portents, and prodigies; how abject and unreasoning was their credulity;
and how dependent both their public and their domestic life upon the
exorcisms of the priest and the science of the augur. The Canidias and
Ericthos of antiquity were not mere creations of the poets; the most sober
and sceptical of historians does not disdain to relate that, in the house
of the dying Germanicus, were found burnt bones and dissevered limbs of
dead bodies; and the most philosophical of the Roman poets recounts with
complacent gravity the charms by which the dead might be evoked, or the
faithless lover recalled by his forsaken mistress. Nor did the belief in
witches and supernatural agencies decay or decline with the disbelief in
the state-religion which marked the latter ages of the Roman Empire. On
the contrary, as scepticism increased in one direction, credulity and
abject superstition grew and prevailed in another. Neither were these
infirmities of the mind by any means confined to the vulgar or the
profane. The later Platonists were deeply infected with the malady of
superstition, and there are few more curious chapters in the history of
human inconsistency, than the lives of many of the philosophers, who
argued against the being of a God, and who trembled if a hare crossed
their path, at a sinister flight of crows, or at a sudden encounter with a
beldame or a blackamoor in the grey of the morning.
The magical art of the ancients, more especially towards the decline of
Pagandom, was indeed of an extremely dark and atrocious complexion.
Unmindful of the wise and reverent forbearance of the poet of the Æneid--
"Sin has ne possim naturæ accedere partes
Frigidus obstiterit circum præcordia sanguis,"--
the ancient wizards pried, or affected to pry, into the very "incunabula
vitæ." Could we recover a few of those books which the sorcerers at
Corinth burned and brought the price of them to St. Paul, we should
probably find in their pages, among some curious physical or medical
secrets, nearly all the elements of a cruel and obscene superstition.
Rome, we know, was both early and deeply infected with the orgiastic
worship of the East, and especially with the impure ceremonies of the
priests of Isis. It was of no avail to level to the ground the Isiac
chapels, and to banish their ministers. In an age of unbelief there was a
passion for the mysteries of darkness; and although Christianity gradually
superseded Paganism in form, the spirit of the latter long survived in the
multitude, and especially among the ignorant rural population. James
Grimm, in his erudite work upon the 'Antiquities of the German Race,'
traces with great acuteness the connection between the superstitions of
the Dark Ages and the magical formularies of Heathenism. The spells of
witches, the abracadabra of quacks, and the loathsome furniture of
Sidrophel's laboratory are genuine descendants of the impostures and
abominations which were practised for ages both in the Roman and Parthian
empires.
In Lucian and Apuleius indeed we are presented with a singular and
terrible aspect of social existence. The most ordinary acts and functions
of life were believed to be affected by the invisible powers, and those
powers were supposed to be willing to do service to all who were malignant
enough to seek their aid, and fearless enough to serve the apprenticeship
which was demanded of them. It is easy to decry the weakness and detect
the absurdity of such a creed. Yet it _was_ believed: it excited terror:
it nurtured revenge: it wrought withering and wasting effects upon the
feeble and the credulous: it cast a dark shade over life: it was potent
over the sinews of the strong and over the bloom of the beautiful: it
exercised "upon the inmost mind" all "its fierce accidents," and preyed
upon the purest spirits,
"As on entrails, joints and limbs,
With answerable pains, but more intense."
It is idle to regard such a belief as a mere superficial or individual
superstition. It pervaded all ranks of society, from the philosopher who
disputed about a first cause, and the magistrate who viewed religion in
the light of a useful system of police, to the shepherd who watched Orion
and the Pleiades, and the miner who rarely beheld either sun or star. It
was an erroneous, but it was an earnest, belief which drove men to consult
with diviners, and to question the elements for signs and wonders.
Availing ourselves of Sir George Head's excellent translation, we extract
from the 'Golden Ass' of Apuleius a story which, to our conceptions, is
unsurpassed for its horror by any of the dreariest legends of Pagan or
Medieval sorcery.
"My master, the baker, was a well-behaved, tolerably good man, but his
wife, of all the women in the world, was the most wicked creature in
existence, and continually rendered his home such a painful scene of
tribulation to him, that, by Hercules, many is the time and oft that I
have silently deplored his fate. The heart of that most detestable woman
was like a common cess-pool, where all the evil dispositions of our nature
were collected together. She was cruel, treacherous, malevolent,
obstinate, penurious, yet profuse in expenses of dissipation, faithless to
her husband, a cheat and a drunkard. One day I heard it said that the
baker had procured a bill of divorce against his execrable helpmate, and
this intelligence turned out in due time to be true. She, exasperated by
the proceedings instituted against her, communicated with a certain woman
who had the reputation of being a witch, and whose spells and incantations
were of power unlimited. Having conciliated this woman by gifts and urgent
supplications, she besought of her one of two things--either to soften the
heart of her husband, so that he might be reconciled to her; or if unable
to do that, to send a ghost or some evil spirit to put him to a violent
death. In the first endeavour the sorceress totally failed, whereupon she
set about contriving the death of my unfortunate master. To effect her
purpose, she raised from the grave the shade of a woman who had been
murdered. So one day, about noon, there entered the bakehouse a
bare-footed woman half-clad, wearing a mourning mantle thrown across her
shoulders, her pale sallow features marked by a lowering expression of
guilt, her grisly dishevelled hair sprinkled with ashes, and her front
locks streaming over her face. Unexpectedly approaching the baker, and
taking him gently by the hand, she drew him aside, and led him into an
adjoining chamber, as if she had private intelligence to communicate.
After the baker had departed, and a considerable period had elapsed
without his returning, the servants went to his chamber-door and knocked
very loudly, and, after continued silence, called several times, and
thumped still harder than before. They then perceived that the door was
carefully locked and bolted; upon which, at once concluding that some
serious catastrophe had happened, they pushed against it with their utmost
strength, and by a violent effort, either breaking the hinge or driving it
out of its socket, they effected an entrance by force. The moment they
were within the chamber, they saw the baker hanging quite dead from one of
the beams of the ceiling, but the woman who had accompanied him had
disappeared, and was nowhere to be seen."
This evoking of the dead to destroy the living, this warring of a corpse
with a living sold, and then the sudden dismissal, when its foul and fatal
errand had been accomplished, of the ghost to its grave, presents to the
mind a climax of terrors, for which we do not know where, in history or in
fiction, to find a counterpart.
The Lex Majestatis, or law of High Treason, was one of the most effectual
and terrible weapons which the imperial constitution of Rome placed in the
hands of its military despots. Against one offence this double-handled and
sure-smiting engine was frequently levelled, viz. against the crime or the
charge of inquiring into the probable duration of the Emperor's life. This
was done in various ways,--by fire applied to waxen images, by consulting
the stars, by casting nativities, by employing prophets, by casual omens,
but especially by certain permutations and combinations of numbers,
"numeros Babylonios," or the letters of the alphabet. The following
extract from Ammianus Marcellinus affords an example of this treasonable
sacrilege, the practice or suspicion of which, on so many occasions, led
to the expulsion of the "mathematicians" from Italy. The Romans indeed,
profoundly ignorant of science, or contemning it as the art of Greek
adventurers or Egyptian priests, neither of whom were in good odour with
the government at any period, gave to the current impostors of those days
an appellation which Cambridge wranglers now account equal to a patent of
nobility.
The following story seems to have been substantially a deposition taken
before the magistrates of Constantinople, and extracted from the witnesses
or defendants by torture. The principal deponent is said to have been
brought "ad summas angustias"--to the last gasp almost, before he would
confess.
"This unlucky table," he said, "which is now produced in court, we made up
of laurel boughs, after the fashion of that which stands before the
curtain at Delphi. Terrible were the auspices, awful the charms, long and
painful the dances, which preceded and accompanied its construction and
consecration. And as often as we consulted this disc or table, the
following was our mode of procedure. It was set in the midst of a chamber
which had previously been well purified by the smoke of Arabian gums and
incense. On the table was placed a round dish, welded of divers metals. On
the rim of the dish were engraven the twenty-four letters of the alphabet,
separated from one another by equal and exactly measured spaces. Beside
the table stood a certain man clad in linen, and having linen buskins or
boots on his feet, with a handkerchief bound around his head. He waved in
one hand a branch of vervain, that propitious herb; he recited a set
formulary of verses, such as are wont to be sung before the Averruncal
gods, He that stood by the table was no ordinary magician. With his other
he held and shook a ring which was attached to curtains, spun from the
finest Carpathian thread, and which had often before been used for such
mystic incantations. The ring thus shaken dropped ever and anon between
the interspaces of the letters, and formed by striking the letters
together certain words, which the sorcerer combined into number and
measure, much after the manner of the priests who manage the oracles of
the Pythian and Branchidian Apollo. Then, when we inquired who perchance
would succeed to the reigning Emperor, the bright and smooth ring, leaping
among the letters, struck together T, H, E, O, and afterwards a final S,
so that one of the bystanders at once exclaimed that THEO[DORU]S was the
emperor designated by the Fates. We asked no more questions: seeing that
Theodorus was the person whom we had sought for."
The lingering belief in the old religion, and in the magical and
thaumaturgical practices which had, like ivy around an oak, gradually
accrued to it, was productive in the decline of Paganism of many poetical
forms of superstition. It is curious and instructive to remark the
increasing earnestness with which the decaying creed of Heathendom sought
to array itself against the encroachments of Christianity. The light
_persiflage_ with which the philosophy of the Augustan age treated the
state-religion nearly disappears. The indifference of the magistrate gives
place to an intolerant and indignant tone of reclamation. The Pagan Cæsars
attack the new religion as a formidable antagonist; the Christian
emperors, in their turn, assail directly or ferret out perseveringly the
superstitions which lingered among the rural towns and districts. The
ancient gods are no longer regarded by either their worshipers or their
opponents as simply deified heroes or men, but as powerful and mysterious
beings, informed with demoniac energies and capable of conferring temporal
good or evil,--beauty, power, and wealth, on the one hand; deformity,
ignominy, and disease, on the other,--upon those who honoured or abjured
them. Such conceptions of blessing or of bale were embodied in strange
narratives of weeping or jubilant processions of majestic forms when the
moon was hid in her vacant interlunar cave, of demons assuming the shape
of fair enchantresses who beguiled men to their undoing, of palaces reared
in a night and dislimning in the day, of banquets, like that visionary
banquet in the wilderness, which Milton has adorned with all the graces of
imagination in his 'Paradise Lost.'
We can afford room for only two of the narratives of demoniac influence in
which the later Pagans expressed their belief in the influence of the
early gods.
1. The superstition of the Lamia. One result of the consolidation of
Western Asia with Europe, under the Roman Empire, was to spread widely
over the latter continent the germs of the serpent-worship of the East.
The subtlest beast of the field, retaining in full vigour his powers of
assuming tempting forms and uttering beguiling words, was wont, it seems,
to disport himself among the sons and daughters of men under the shape in
which he deceived our general mother, the over-curious Eve. Especially did
he delight to entrap some hopeful youth who was studying philosophy in the
schools of Athens or Berytus, or some neophyte in the Christian Church. A
fair young gentleman at Corinth had been abroad on a pleasure excursion,
and might perchance be returning home a little the worse for wine. However
this may have been, at the gates of Corinth he encountered a damsel richly
attired, "beautiful exceedingly," but with hair dishevelled, and drowned
in tears. He began by inquiring the cause of her distress. Faithless
servants had carried off her litter and left her lone. He offered her
consolation, which she accepted, and his arm also, which she did not
decline. She led him to a lordly palace in a bye street of the city, where
he had never yet been. At its marble portico waited a crowd of slaves with
torches awaiting their absent mistress, and the pair, now become fond,
were ushered into a sumptuous banqueting hall, where a board was spread
covered with all the delicacies of the season, and garnished with
effulgent plate. In this palace of delight the young man abode many days,
taking no account of time. But at length, cloyed with sweets, he proposed
inviting a party of his college friends, much to the dismay of his fair
hostess, who, with many tears and embraces, besought him to forego his
wish. In an evil hour however he persevered, and his rooms were filled
with gownsmen, marvelling much, not without envy, at the good fortune that
had befallen their chum, Lucius, no one knew how or why. But among the
undergraduates came a grave and grey college tutor, deeply read in
conjurors' books, who could detect by his skill the devil under any shape.
Pale and silent the old man sat at the festive board, and was ill-bred
enough to stare the lady not only out of countenance, but out of her
beauty also. She grew pale, livid, an indiscriminate form: she melted
away; the palace melted also; the plate, the viands, and the wines
vanished also; and in place of columns and ceiled roofs was a void square
in Corinth, and in place of the damsel was a loathsome serpent, writhing
in the agonies of dissolution. The white-bearded fellow had scanned and
scotched and slain the snake--the Lamia--but he destroyed his patient
also, for Lucius became a maniac; had the charm lasted awhile longer, his
soul would have become the fiend's property.