Emperor Valens ordered, as we learn from Ammianus Marcellinus, all the
wizards and enchanters to be held to account who had endeavored by
magic art to ascertain his successor. Several thousands were accused of
witchcraft, but the charge was then, as in almost every later age, in
most cases nothing more than a pretext for proceedings against obnoxious
persons. The next monster process, as it began to be called already in
those early days, was the persecution of witches in France under the
Merovingians. The child of Chilperic's wife had died suddenly and under
suspicious circumstances, which led to the imprisonment of a prefect,
Mummolus, whom the queen had long pursued with her hatred. He was
accused of having caused her son's death by his charms, and was
subjected to fearful tortures in company with a number of old women.
Still, he confessed nothing but that the latter had furnished him with
certain drugs and ointments which were to secure to him the favor of the
king and the queen. A later trial of this kind, in which for a time calm
reason made a firm stand against superstition, but finally succumbed
ingloriously, is known as the _Vaudoisie_, and took place in Arras in
1459. It was begun by a Count d'Estampes, but was mainly conducted by a
bishop and some eminent divines of his acquaintance, whose inordinate
zeal and merciless cruelty have secured to the proceedings a peculiarly
painful memory in the annals of the church. A large number of perfectly
innocent men and women were tortured and disgracefully executed, but
fortunately the death of the main persecutor, DuBlois, made a sudden end
to the existence of witchcraft in that province. One of the most
remarkable trials of this kind was caused by a number of little
children, and led to most bloody proceedings. It seems that in the year
1669 several boys and girls in the parish of Mora, one of the most
beautiful parts of the Swedish province of Dalarne, and famous through
the memory of Gustavus Vasa and Gustavus III., were affected by a
nervous fever which left them, after their partial recovery, in a state
of extreme irritability and sensitiveness. They fell into fainting fits
and had convulsions--symptoms which the simple but superstitious
mountaineers gradually began to think inexplicable, and hence to ascribe
to magic influences. The report spread that the poor children were
bewitched, and soon all the usual details of satanic possession were
current. The mountain called Blakulla, in bad repute from of old, was
pointed out as the meeting-place of the witches, where the annual
sabbath was celebrated, and these children were devoted to Satan. Church
and State combined to bring their great power to bear upon the poor
little ones, an enormous number of women, mostly the mothers of the
young people, were involved in the charges, and finally fifty-two of the
latter with fifteen children were publicly executed as witches, while
fifty of the younger were condemned to severe punishment! More than
three hundred unfortunate children under fourteen had made detailed
confessions of the witches' sabbath and the ceremonies attending their
initiation into its mysteries. A similar fearful delusion took hold of
German children in Wuertemberg, when towards the end of the seventeenth
century a large number of little boys and girls, none of whom were older
than ten years, began to state that they were every night fetched away
and carried to the witches' sabbath. Many were all the time fast asleep
and could easily be roused, but a few among them fell regularly into a
trance, during which their little bodies became cold and rigid. A
commission of great judges and experienced divines was sent to the
village to investigate the matter, and found at last that there was no
imposture attempted, but that the poor children firmly believed what
they stated. It became, however, evident that a few among them had
listened to old women's tales about witches, with eager ears, and, with
inflamed imaginations, retailed the account to others, till a deep and
painful nervous excitement took hold of their minds and rapidly spread
through the community. Many of the children were, as was natural at
their age, led by vanity to say that they also had been at the sabbath,
while others were afraid to deny what was so positively stated by their
companions. Fortunately the commission consisted, for once, of sensible
men who took the right view of the matter, ordered a good whipping here
and there, and thus saved the land from the crime of another witches'
trial.
Our own experiences in New England, at the time when Sir William Phipps
was governor of the colonies, have been forcibly reported by the great
Cotton Mather. Nearly every community had its young men and women who
were addicted to the practices of magic; they loved to perform
enchantments, to consult sieves and turning keys, and thus were
gradually led to attempt more serious and more dangerous practices. In
Salem, men and women of high standing and unimpeached integrity, even
pious members of the church, were suddenly plagued and tortured by
unknown agencies, and at last a little black and yellow demon appeared
to them, accompanied by a number of companions with human faces. These
apparitions presented to them a book which they were summoned to sign or
at least to touch, and if they refused they were fearfully twisted and
turned about, pricked with pins, burnt as if with hot irons, bound hand
and foot with invisible fetters, and carried away to great distances.
Some were left unable to touch food or drink for many days; others,
attempting to defend themselves against the demons, snatched a distaff
or tore a piece of cloth from them, and immediately these proofs of the
real existence of the evil spirits became visible to the eyes of the
bystanders. The magic phenomena attending the disease were of the most
extraordinary character. Several men stated that they had received
poison because they declined to worship Satan, and immediately all the
usual sequences of such treatment appeared, from simple vomiting to most
fearful suffering, till counteracting remedies were employed and began
to take effect. In other cases the sufferers complained of burning rags
being stuffed into their mouths, and although nothing was seen, burnt
places and blisters appeared, and the odor and smoke of smouldering rags
began to fill the room. When they reported that they were branded with
hot irons, the marks showed themselves, suppuration took place, and
scars were formed which never again disappeared during life--and all
these phenomena were watched by the eager eyes of hundreds. The
authorities, of course, took hold of the matter, and many persons of
both sexes and all ages were brought to trial. While they were tortured
they continued to have visions of demoniac beings and possessed men and
women; when they were standing, blindfolded, in court, felt the approach
of those by whom they pretended to be bewitched and plagued, and
urgently prayed to be delivered of their presence. Finally many were
executed, not a few undoubtedly against all justice, but the better
sense of the authorities soon saw the futility, if not the wickedness of
such proceedings, and an end was made promptly, witchcraft disappearing
as soon as persecution relaxed and the sensation subsided.
Similar trials have nevertheless continued to be held in various parts
of Europe during the whole of the last century, and many innocent lives
have been forfeited to this apparently ineradicable belief in
witchcraft. Even after torture was abandoned in compliance with the
wiser views of our age, long imprisonment with its attending sufferings
and great anxiety as to the issue, proved fully sufficient to extort
voluntary confessions, which were, of course, of no value in themselves,
but served the purpose of keeping alive the popular superstition. In
1728 a specially fearful trial of this kind took place in Hungary,
during which nearly all the disgraceful scenes of mediaeval barbarity
were reenacted, and which ended in a number of cruel executions. The
last witches' trial in Germany took place in 1749, when the
mother-superior of a convent near Wuerzburg, in Bavaria, known as Emma
Renata, was condemned to be burnt, but by the leniency of the
authorities, was allowed to die by decapitation. Switzerland was the
scene of the last of these trials ever held, for with this act of
justice, as it was called by the good people of Glarus, the persecution
ended.
Even in England, however, the feeling itself seems to have lingered long
after actual trials had ceased. Thus it is well known that the terrible
trial of witches held at Marlboro, under Queen Elizabeth, led to the
establishment of a so-called witches' sermon to be delivered annually at
Huntingdon, and this custom was faithfully observed down to the latter
part of the eighteenth century. Nearly about the same time--in 1743--an
earnest effort was made in Scotland to kindle once more the fire of
fierce persecution. In the month of February of that year, the Associate
Presbytery, in a public document addressed to the Presbytery of the
Seceded Churches, required for certain purposes a solemn acknowledgment
of former sins, and a vow to renounce them forever. Among these sins
that austere body enumerated the "_abolition_ of the death penalty for
witchcraft," since the latter was forbidden in Holy Writ, and the
leniency which had taken the place of the former severity in punishing
this crime, had given an opening to Satan to tempt and actually to
seduce others by means of the same old accursed and dangerous
snares.--(_Edinb. Rev._, Jan. 1847.)
II.
BLACK AND WHITE MAGIC.
"Peace!--the charm's wound up."
--MACBETH.
The most startling of all scenes described in Holy Writ--as far as they
represent incidents in human life--is, no doubt, the mysterious
interview between unfortunate King Saul and the spirit of his former
patron, the prophet Samuel. The poor monarch, abandoned by his friends
and forsaken by his own heart, turns in his utter wretchedness to those
whom he had but shortly before "put out of the land," those godless
people who "had familiar spirits and the wizards." Hard pressed by the
ancient enemy of his people, the Philistine, and unable to obtain an
answer from the great God of his fathers, he stoops to consult a witch,
a woman. It seems that Sedecla, the daughter of the Decemdiabite--for so
Philo calls her according to Des Mousseaux--had escaped by her cunning
from the fate of her weird sisters, and, having a familiar spirit,
foretold the future to curious enquirers at her dwelling in Endor. At
first she is unwilling to incur the penalty threatened in the king's
decree, but when the disguised monarch, with a voice of authority
promises her impunity, she consents to "bring up Samuel." As soon as
the fearful phantom of the dread prophet appears, she becomes
instinctively aware of the true character of her visitor, and, far more
afraid of the power of the living than of the appearance of the
departed, she cries out trembling: "Why hast thou deceived me? Thou art
Saul!" Then follows the appalling scene in which Samuel reproves the
miserable, self-despairing king, and foretells his death and that of his
sons.
There can be no doubt that we have here before us an instance of genuine
magic. The woman was evidently capable of casting herself into a state
of ecstasy, in which she could at once look back into the past and
forward into the future. Thus she beholds the great prophet, not sent by
God from on high, as the Holy Fathers generally taught, but according to
the then prevailing belief, rising from Sheol, the place of departed
spirits, and then she utters, unconsciously, his own words. For it must
not be overlooked that Samuel makes no revelations, but only repeats his
former warnings. Saul learns absolutely nothing new from him; he only
hears the same threatenings which the prophet had pronounced twice
before, when the reckless king had dared to sacrifice unto God with his
own hand (I. Sam. xiii.), and when he had failed to smite the Amalekite,
as he was bidden. Possessed, as it were, by the spirit of the living
Samuel, the woman speaks as he had spoken in his lifetime, and it is
only when her state of exaltation renders her capable of looking into
the future also, that she assumes the part of a prophetess herself, and
foretells the approaching doom of her royal visitor.
That the whole dread scene was fore-ordained and could take place only
by the will of the Almighty, alters nothing in the character of the
woman with the familiar spirit. It is a clear case of necromancy, or
conjuring up of the spirits of departed persons, such as has been
practised among men from time immemorial. Among the chosen people of God
persons were found from the beginning of their history who had familiar
spirits, and Moses already fulminates his severest anathemas against
these wizards (Lev. xx. 27). They appear under various aspects, as
charmers, as consulters of familiar spirits, as wizards, or as
necromancers (Deut. xviii. 11); they are charged with passing their
children through the fire, with observing times (astrologers); with
using enchantments; or they are said in a general way to "use
witchcraft" (II. Chron. xxxiii. 6). That other nations were not less
familiar with the art of evoking spirits, we see, for instance, in the
"Odyssey," which mentions numerous cases of such intercourse with
another world, and speaks of necromancers as forming a kind of close
guild. In the "Persius" of AEschylus the spirit of Darius, father of
Xerxes, is called up and foretells all the misfortunes that are to
befall poor Queen Atossa. The greatest among the stern Romans could not
entirely shake off the belief in such magic, in spite of the
matter-of-fact tendencies of the Roman mind, and the vast superiority of
their intelligence. A Cato and a Sylla, a Caesar and a Vespasian, all
admitted, with clear unfailing perception, the small grains of truth
that lay concealed among the mass of rubbish then called magic. Even
Christian theology has never absolutely denied the existence of such
extraordinary powers over the spirits of the departed, although it has
consistently attributed them to diabolic influences.
In this point lies the main difference between ancient and modern magic.
For the oldest Magi whom we know were the wise men of Persia, called,
from _mah_ (great), Mugh, the great men of the land. They were the
philosophers of their day, and, if we believe the impartial evidence of
Greek writers--not generally apt to overestimate the merits of other
nations--they were possessed of vast and varied information. Their aim
was the loftiest ever conceived by human ambition; it was, in fact,
nothing less than the erection of an intellectual Tower of Babel. They
devoted the labors of a lifetime, and the full, well-trained vigor of
their intelligence to the study of the forces of nature, and the true
character of all created beings. Among the latter they included
disembodied spirits as well as those still bound up with bodies made of
earth, considering with a wisdom and boldness of conception never yet
surpassed, both classes as one and the same eternal creation. The
knowledge thus acquired they were, moreover, not disposed merely to
store away in their memory, or to record in unattractive manuscripts;
they were men of the world as well as philosophers, and looked for
practical results. Here the pagan spirit shone forth unrestrained; the
end and aim of all their restless labors was Power. Their ambition was
to control, by the superior prestige of their knowledge, not only the
mechanical forces of Nature, but also the lesser capacities of other
created beings, and finally Fate itself! Truly a lofty and noble aim if
we view it, as in equity we are bound to do, from their stand-point, as
men possessing, with all the wisdom of the earth, as yet not a particle
of revealed religion.
It was only at a much later period that a distinction was made between
White Magic and Black Magic. This arose from the error which gradually
overspread the minds of men, that such extraordinary powers--based,
originally, only upon extraordinary knowledge--were not naturally given
to men; but, could only be obtained by the special favor of higher
beings, with whom the owner must needs enter into a perilous league. If
these were benevolent deities, the results obtained by their assistance
were called White Magic; if they were gods of ill-repute, they granted
the power to perform feats of Black Magic, acts of wickedness, and
crimes. Christianity, though it abolished the gods of paganism,
maintained, nevertheless, the belief in extraordinary powers accorded by
supernatural beings, and the same distinction continued to be made.
Pious men and women performed miracles by the aid of angels and saints;
wicked sinners did as much by an unholy league with the Evil One. The
Egyptian charmer, of Apulejus, who declared that no miracle was too
difficult for his art, since he exercised the blind power of deities who
were subject to his will, only expressed what the lazzarone of Naples
feels in our day, when he whips his saint with a bundle of reeds, in
order to compel him to do his bidding. Magicians did not change their
doctrine; they hardly even modified their ceremonies; their allegiance
only was transferred from Jupiter to Jehovah, even as the same column
that once bore the great Thunderer on Olympus, is now crowned by a
statue of Peter Boanerges. Nor has the race of magicians ever entirely
died out; we find enough notices in classic authors, whose evidence is
unimpeachable, to know that the Greeks were apt scholars of the ancient
Magi and transferred the knowledge they had thus obtained and long
jealously guarded, to the priests of Egypt, who in their turn became the
masters of the two mightiest nations on earth. First Moses sat at their
feet till, at the age of forty, he "was learned in all the wisdom of the
Egyptians," and could successfully cope with their "magicians and
sorcerers." Then the land of the Nile fell into the hands of the Romans,
and poverty and neglect drove the wise men of Egypt to seek refuge in
the capital of the world, where they either lived upon the minor arts
and cunning tricks of their false fate, or, being converted to
Christianity, infected the pure faith with their ill-applied knowledge.
Certain portions of true magic survived through all persecutions and
revolutions; some precious secrets were preserved by the philosophers of
later ages and have--if we believe the statements made by trustworthy
writers of every century--ever since continued in the possession of
Freemasons and Rosicrucians; others became mixed up with vile
superstitions and impious practices, and only exist now as the Black Art
of so-called magicians and witches.
Wherever magic found a fertile soil among the people, it became a
science, handed down from father to son, and such we find it still in
the East Indies and the Orient generally; when it fell into the hands of
skeptics, or weak, feeble-minded men, it degenerated with amazing speed
into imposture and common jugglery. What is evident about magic is the
well-established fact that its ceremonies, forms, and all other
accessories are almost infinite in variety since they are merely
accidental vehicles for the will of man, and real magicians know very
well that the importance of such external aids is not only overrated but
altogether fallacious. The sole purpose of the burning of perfumes, of
imposing ceremonies and awe-inspiring procedures, is to aid in producing
the two conditions which are indispensable for all magic phenomena: the
magician must be excited till his condition is one resembling mental
intoxication or becomes a genuine trance, and the passive subject must
be made susceptible to the control of the superior mind. For it need not
be added, that the latter will all the more readily be affected, the
feebler his will and the more imperfect his mental vision may be by
nature or may have been rendered by training and careful preparation.
Hence it is that the magic table of the dervish; the enchanted drum of
the shaman; the medicine-bag of the Indian are all used for precisely
the same purpose as the ring of Hecate; the divining rod and the magic
wand of the enchanter. Legend and amulet, mummy and wax-figure, herb and
stone, drug and elixir, incense and ointment, are all but the means,
which the strong will of the gifted Master uses in order to influence
and finally to control the weaker mind. Thus powerful perfumes, narcotic
odors, and anaesthetic salves are employed to produce enervation and
often actual and complete loss of self-control; in other cases the
neophyte has to turn round and round within the magic circle, from east
to west, till he becomes giddy and utterly exhausted. It is very curious
to observe how, as far as these preparations go, in the most distant
countries and among the most different forms of society the same means
are employed for the same purpose: the whirling dance of the fanatic
dervish is perfectly analogous to the wild raving of our Indian
medicine-man, who ties himself with a rope to a post and then whirls
around it in fierce fury. Thus, also, the oldest magicians speak with
profound reverence of the powers of a little herb, known to botanists as
_Hypericum perforatum L._, and behold! in the year 1860 a German author
of eminence, Justinus Kerner, still taught seriously, that the leaves
of that plant were the best means to banish evil spirits! Mandrake and
elder have held their own in the false faith of nations from the oldest
times to our day, and even now Germans as well as slaves love to plant
the latter everywhere in their graveyards, as suggestive of the realm of
spirits!
White Magic, though strictly forbidden by the Church in all ages, seems
nevertheless to have had irresistible attractions for wise and learned
men of every country. This charm it owes to the many elements of truth
which are mixed up with the final error; for it aims at a thorough
understanding of the mysteries of Nature--and so far its purpose is
legitimate and very tempting to superior minds--but only in order to
obtain by such knowledge a power which Holy Writ expressly denies to
man. When it prescribes the study of Nature as being the outer temple of
God and represents all the parts of this vast edifice, from the central
sun of the universe to the minutest living creation, as bound up by a
common sympathy, no objection can be made to its doctrines, and even the
greatest minds may fairly enroll themselves here as its pupils. But when
it ascribes to this sympathy an active power and attributes to secret
names of the Deity, to certain natural products, or to mechanically
regulated combinations of the stars, a peculiar and supernatural effect,
it sinks into contemptible superstition. Hence the constant aim of all
White Magic, the successful summoning of superior spirits for the
purpose of learning from them what is purposely kept concealed from the
mind of man, has never yet been reached. For it is sin, the same sin
that craved to eat from the tree of knowledge. Hence, also, no
beneficial end has ever yet been obtained by the practices of magic,
although wise and learned men of every age have spent their lives and
risked the salvation of their souls in restless efforts to lift the veil
of Isis.
Black Magic, the Kishuph of the Hebrews, avows openly its purpose of
forming a league with evil spirits in order to attain selfish ends,
which are invariably fatal to others. And yet it is exactly here that we
meet with great numbers of well-authenticated cases of success, which
preclude all doubt and force us to admit the occasional efficiency of
such sinful alliances. The art flourishes naturally best among the
lowest races of mankind, where gross ignorance is allied with blind
faith, and the absence of inspiration leaves the mind in natural
darkness. We cannot help being struck here also with the fact that the
means employed for such purposes have been the same in almost all ages.
Readers of classic writers are familiar with the drum of Cybele--the
Laplanders have from time immemorial had the same drum, on which heaven,
hell, and earth are painted in bright colors, and reproduce in pictorial
writing the letters of the modern spiritualist. A ring is placed upon
the tightly stretched skin, which slight blows with a hammer cause to
vibrate, and according to the apparently erratic motions of the ring
over the varied figures of gods, men, and beasts, the future is
revealed. The consulting savage lies on his knees, and as the pendulum
between our fingers and the pencil of Planchette in our hand write
apparently at haphazard, but in reality under the pressure of our
muscles acting through the unconscious influence of our will, so here
also the beats of the hammer only seem to be fortuitous, but, in
reality, are guided by the ecstatic owner. For already Olaf Magnus
("Hist. Goth." L. 3, ch. 26) tells us that the incessant beating of the
drum, and the wild, exulting singing of the magician for hours before
the actual ceremony begins, cause him to fall into a state of
exaltation, without which he would be unable to see the future. That the
drum is a mere accident in the ceremony was strikingly proved by a
Laplander, who delivered up his instrument of witchcraft to the pious
missionary (Tornaeus) by whom he had been converted, and who soon came
to complain that even without his drum he could not help seeing hidden
things--an assertion which he proved by reciting to the amazed minister
all the minute details of his recent journey. Who can help, while
reading of these savage magicians, recalling the familiar ring and
drumstick in the left hand of the Roman Isis--statues with a drum above
the head, or the rarely missing ring and hammer in the hands of the
Egyptian Isis? It need hardly be added that the Indians of our continent
have practised the art with more or less success from the day of
discovery to our own times. Already Wafer in his "Descr. of the Isthmus
of Darien" (1699) describes how Indian sorcerers, after careful
preparation, were able to inform him of a number of future events, every
one of which came to pass in the succeeding days. The prince of Neu-Wied
again met a famous medicine-man among the Crea Indians, whose prophecies
were readily accepted by the whites even, and of whose power he
witnessed unmistakable evidence. Bonduel, a well-known and generally
perfectly trustworthy writer, affirms, from personal knowledge, that
among the Menomonees the medicine-men not only practise magic, but are
able to produce most astounding results. After beating their drum,
Bonduel used to hear a heavy fall and a faint, inarticulate voice,
whereupon the tent of the charmer though fifteen feet high, rose in the
air and inclined first on one and then on the other side. This was the
time of the interview between the medicine-man and the evil spirit.
Small doll-like figures of men also were used, barely two inches long,
and tied to medicine-bags. They served mainly to inflame women with
loving ardor, and when efficient could drive the poor creatures to
pursue their beloved for days and nights through the wild forests. Other
missionaries also affirm that these medicine-men must have been able to
read the signs and perhaps to feel in advance the effects of the weather
with amazing accuracy, since they frequently engaged to procure storms
for special purposes, and never failed. It is interesting to notice
that according to the unanimous testimony of all writers on Indian
affairs, these medicine-men almost invariably find a violent and
wretched death.