WITCHCRAFT IN SIAM IN EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SIX, COMPARED WITH
WITCHCRAFT IN ENGLAND IN SEVENTEEN HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN.
It might be difficult, at the present time, anywhere in any enlightened
Christian community, to find persons of the most ordinary intelligence
who entertain the smallest faith in witchcraft.
But yet there are thousands upon thousands who implicitly believe in
spirit-rapping and in table-turning, in mesmerism and animal magnetism,
and in Mr. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, his successor, who exhibits
such extraordinary powers in prophecy and sensualism at Utah; and in
fact it would seem that the doctrine of "Credo quia impossibile" never
had more earnest disciples than it now numbers.
Yet we all alike, with one accord, profess our utter disbelief in
witchcraft.
[Illustration: AN AMAZON OF THE ROYAL BODY GUARD.]
This scepticism on our part, however, is of very modern date; for even
in the early part of this century the belief was not quite eradicated
in England, and we have only to step back a century more to find it
acknowledged without shame by a civilized and highly enlightened
people, and at a time, too, when the literary intellect of England
shone as brightly as ever in her history; when the memory of Dryden
was still fresh in the minds of many of his most cherished friends and
admirers; when Pope had risen, and Addison was painting his genial
portrait of Sir Roger de Coverly; when the bewitching "nightingale
at Twickenham" poured forth his sweetest songs, and kind-hearted
Steele and Swift, stern, incorrigible, and lonely, domineered over
the proudest of English peers and statesmen. Nothing can ever be more
touching than the sad record of those dark days when the fair Eleanor
Cobham, the wife of a duke, and the aunt of a king of "Great Britain,"
did penance for her "witchcraft," and walked "hoodless save her
'kerchief" through all the crowded streets of London and Westminster,
taunted and hooted at by a ragged crowd, to offer a "consecrated taper"
at the high altar of St. Paul's, and thence to her cruel, life-long
imprisonment at Kenilworth, while her wretched accomplice, Bolingbroke,
expiated his crime on a gibbet at Tyburn. And there are those seemingly
darker days when Archbishop Cranmer, a high-priest of the tender
Jesus, directed his clergy at large to make "strict inquiry into all
witchcraft and such like craft invented by the devil"; and when that
very honorable personage, the Lord Chief Justice Coke, uttered these
memorable words: "It would be a great defect in government if so great
an abomination had passed with impunity." Then no one cast even the
shadow of a doubt on the existence of witchcraft, or even questioned
the extraordinary powers which were at the time imputed to a witch. And
one becomes sensible of the dark superstitions that must have pervaded
even the general atmosphere of the immortal poet Shakespeare, when he
makes Ford lay his cudgel across the shoulders of Falstaff, supposing
him to be the "wise woman of Brentford," and embodies the grander and
more terrible idea of witchcraft as no man has ever done before or
after him in the tragedy of "Macbeth."
Almost every page of ecclesiastical history of ancient times is full
of monstrous relations of the powers of the devil, or of those who
had entered into copartnership with him; and, emerging thence into
the light of more recent times, we shall find the same superstition
in such men as Matthew Hopkins, the "witch-finder"; in Matthew Hale,
presiding at the trial of the Bury St. Edmunds witches; and in Sir
Thomas Browne, author of the "Religio Medici," and of the "Inquiry into
Vulgar Errors," giving the evidence on which so many wretched old and
young women were sent to the gallows. But, alas! what shall we say when
we hear such holy men as Baxter and Wesley asserting that the belief in
witchcraft was essentially connected with Christianity, and one of its
most important points; and, down almost to our own day, find Johnson
half doubting and half believing in the existence of witches and in
their supernatural powers?
It was not until the close of 1763 that the statute which made
witchcraft a felony punishable by death was repealed; and so lately as
1716 the curious reader will find in Gough's Brit., Vol. I., p. 439,
an account of a substantial English farmer, named Hicks, who publicly
accused his wife and child--a girl of only nine years of age--of
witchcraft; and, what seems more incredible still, that they were
actually tried at the assizes at Huntingdon before a learned judge, and
visited by pious and God-fearing "divines" to whom the poor victims
confessed the belief--which was forced into their own convictions by
the strong current of public opinion, and still more by the unnatural
conduct of a father and a husband--"that they were witches"; for which
the unhappy wife and tender child were hanged at Huntingdon, on the
28th of July, 1716.
Can any page in the history of Siam be more appalling than this? Let
the reader turn from England in her light and glory, her civilization,
refinement, and power, from her altars raised to the true God,
and centuries after her baptism in the matchless name of Christ,
to benighted Siam still bound in the iron fetters of paganism,
idolatry, and slavery, and he will find there in many respects just
such a picture as England presented in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries.
Nothing can be more appalling than the incurable superstition of the
Eastern mind, and even while their belief in the supernatural inspires
them with perpetual horror, they cannot be brought to give it up. In
fact, it seems a part of their nature to cherish in their secret hearts
the belief that there are spirits, good and bad, who walk the earth
unseen, and delight either to bless or to cheat and abuse mankind; and
that there are witches and wizards in the country who have the power of
turning men into any shape they choose.
Rational and reasonable on all other points as the Siamese are, the
moment you try to approach them through their religious senses they
appear like a world coming suddenly under an eclipse of the sun; slowly
and surely the disk of their mind is darkened, and the gloom and
perplexity increase, till it becomes completely obscured.