PAGE
ON A POSSIBLE REVIVAL OF WITCHCRAFT 1
CHAPTER II.
A SABBATH-GENERAL 19
CHAPTER III.
THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH 45
CHAPTER IV.
THE HALF-WAY WORLDS 61
CHAPTER V.
THE WITCH'S ATTRIBUTES 88
CHAPTER VI.
SOME REPRESENTATIVE ENGLISH WITCHES 114
CHAPTER VII.
THE WITCH OF ANTIQUITY 127
CHAPTER VIII.
THE WITCH IN GREECE AND ROME 141
CHAPTER IX.
FROM PAGANISM TO CHRISTIANITY 163
CHAPTER X.
THE WITCH-BULL AND ITS EFFECTS 188
CHAPTER XI.
THE LATER PERSECUTIONS IN ENGLAND 206
CHAPTER XII.
PERSECUTIONS IN SCOTLAND 232
CHAPTER XIII.
OTHER PERSECUTIONS 253
CHAPTER XIV.
PHILTRES, CHARMS AND POTIONS 278
CHAPTER XV.
THE WITCH IN FICTION 298
CHAPTER XVI.
SOME WITCHES OF TO-DAY 315
FOREWORD
Lest any reader should open this volume expecting to read an
exhaustive treatise on witches and witchcraft, treated scientifically,
historically, and so forth, let me disarm him beforehand by telling
him that he will be disappointed. The witch occupies so large a place
in the story of mankind that to include all the detail of her natural
history within the limits of one volume would need the powers of a
magician no less potent than was he who confined the Eastern Djinn
in a bottle. I have attempted nothing so ambitious as a large-scale
Ordnance Map of Witchland; rather I have endeavoured to produce a
picture from which a general impression may be gained. I have chosen,
that is to say, from the enormous mass of material only so much as
seemed necessary for my immediate purpose, and on my lack of judgment
be the blame for any undesirable hiatus. I have sought, again, to show
whence the witch came and why, as well as what she was and is; to point
out, further, how necessary she is and must be to the happiness of
mankind, and how great the responsibility of those who, disbelieving in
her themselves, seek to infect others with their scepticism. We have
few picturesque excrescences left upon this age of smoothly-running
machine-wheels, certainly we cannot spare one of the most time-honoured
and romantic of any. And if anything I have written about her seem
incompatible with sense or fact, I would plead in extenuation that
neither is essential to the firm believer in witchcraft, and that to
be able to enter thoroughly into the subject it is above all things
necessary to cast aside such nineteenth-century shibboleths.
I would here express my gratitude to the many friends who have assisted
me with material, and especially to Miss Muriel Harris, whose valuable
help has done much to lighten my task.
LONDON, _September, 1908_.
THE BOOK OF WITCHES
CHAPTER I
ON A POSSIBLE REVIVAL OF WITCHCRAFT
To the superficial glance it might seem that he who would urge a
revival of witchcraft is confronted by a task more Herculean than that
of making dry bones live--in that the bones he seeks to revivify have
never existed. The educated class--which, be it remembered, includes
those who have studied in the elementary schools of whatever nation--is
united in declaring that such a person as a witch never did, never
could, and never will exist. It is true that there are still those--a
waning band--who, preserving implicit faith in the literal exactitude
of revealed religion, maintain that witchcraft--along with Gardens of
Eden, giants, and Jewish leaders capable of influencing the movements
of sun and moon--flourished under the Old Dispensation, even though
it has become incredible under the New. Yet, speaking generally, the
witch is as extinct in civilised men's minds as is the dodo; so that
they who accept as gospel the vaticinations of race-course tipsters or
swallow patent medicines with implicit faith, yet moralise upon the
illimitability of human superstition when they read that witch-doctors
still command a following in West Africa, or that Sicilian peasants are
not yet tired of opening their purses to sham sorcerers.
Were the reality of sorcery dependent upon a referendum of our
universities--or, for that matter, of our elementary school
mistresses--it were at once proclaimed a clamant imposture. Fortunately
for the witch, and incidentally for a picturesque aspect of the human
intellect, the Enlightened, even if we include among them those who
accept their dogma as the New Gospel, are but a small--a ridiculously
small--item of the human race. Compared with the whole population
of the world, their numbers are so insignificant as to be for all
practical purposes nonexistent. There are villages but a few miles
beyond the boundary of the Metropolitan Police District, where the
witch is as firmly enthroned in the imaginations of the mobility
as in those of their ancestors three centuries ago. There are many
British legislators who would refuse to start an electioneering
campaign upon a Friday. I myself have known a man--and know him
still--a Romney Marshlander, who, within the last decade, has suffered
grievously--himself and through his children--at the hands of witches
whose names and whereabout he can detail. And I have known a woman--she
kept a lodging-house in the Kennington Road--who, if not herself a
witch, was yet the daughter of one, and of acknowledged power. It
is true that, if the daughter's tale--told to me in the small front
parlour in intervals between the crashing passage of electric trams and
motor-lorries--may be accepted, her mother's gifts were put to no worse
use than the curing of her Devonshire neighbours' minor ailments.
There is no need to go fifty, nor five, miles from London to find
material for a revival in Black Magic. Scarcely a week passes but some
old crone is charged before a Metropolitan police magistrate with
having defrauded silly servant-girls on the pretence of telling them
their futures. You cannot pass down Bond Street during the season
without encountering a row of sandwich-men--themselves preserving very
few illusions--earning a meagre wage in the service of this, that, or
the other Society crystal-gazer, palmist, or clairvoyant. Who has not
seen some such advertisement as the following--quoted from a current
journal--proffering information about the future, "calculated from
astrological horoscopes," at the very moderate charge of half-a-crown.
The advertiser--in deference to modern convention he is described as
a "Professor" rather than a sorcerer--further protests his mastery
of Phrenology, Graphology, Clairvoyance, and Psychometry. And this
advertiser is but one of many, all seeking to gain some humble profit
by following in the footsteps of Diana and Mother Demdyke of Pendle
Forest.
Are there not a hundred and one select Societies, each with its band
of earnest adherents--many with official organs, published at more or
less regular intervals and commanding circulations of a sort--openly
furthering "arts" such as would, two centuries ago, have entailed upon
their members the charge of Witchcraft? Is not spiritualism exalted
into an international cult? The very existence of such a coterie as the
"Thirteen Club," with a membership sworn to exhibit, _hic et ubique_,
their contempt of degrading superstitions, is the strongest testimony
to their ubiquitous regard. Most curious fact of all, it is in America,
the New World, home of all that is most modern and enlightened, that we
find superstitions commanding most implicit faith. It is only necessary
to glance through the advertisement pages of an American popular
magazine to realise how far the New World has outstripped the Old in
its blind adherence to this form of faith. Nowhere has the Hypnotic,
the Mesmeric, the Psychic Quack such unchallenged empire.
In Lady Charlotte Bury's "Memoirs of a Lady in Waiting," we find
an example of the belief in Witchcraft cherished in the most
exalted circle in the nineteenth century. Writing of the unhappy
Princess--later Queen--Caroline, wife of George IV., she says as
follows:--"After dinner her Royal Highness made a wax figure as usual,
and gave it an amiable addition of large horns; then took three pins
out of her garment and stuck them through and through, and put the
figure to roast and melt at the fire.... Lady ---- says the Princess
indulges in this amusement whenever there are no strangers at table,
and she thinks her Royal Highness really has a superstitious belief
that destroying the effigy of her husband will bring to pass the
destruction of his Royal Person." We laugh at this instance of Royal
credulity; yet is not the "mascot" a commonplace of our conversation?
Madame de Montespan, it is recorded, had recourse--not without
success--to the Black Mass as a means towards gaining the affections
of Louis XIV. It is but a few years since the attention of the police
was directed towards the practices of those--Society leaders for the
most part--who had revived, in twentieth-century Paris, the cult of
Devil worship. The most widely circulated London newspapers of the
day gravely discuss in "special articles" the respective value of
various mascots for motorists, or insert long descriptive reports of
the vaticinations of this spiritualist or that wise-woman as to the
probable perpetrators of mysterious murders. This is no exaggeration,
as he may prove for himself who has patience to search the files of the
London daily Press for 1907. And, be it remembered, the self-proclaimed
mission of the contemporary Press is to mirror the public mind as the
most obvious way of instructing it.
Under these circumstances it is easy to credit the possibility of
a revival of the belief in witchcraft even in the most civilised
countries of the modern world. What is more, it is far from certain
that such a revival would be altogether deplorable. Granted that oceans
of innocent blood were shed in the name of witchcraft--the same might
be said of Christianity, of patriotism, of liberty, of half a hundred
other altogether unexceptionable ideals. And, as with them, the total
extinction of the witchcraft superstition might, not impossibly, have
results no less disastrous than, for instance, the world-wide adoption
of European fashions in dress. This quite apart from any question of
whether or no witches have ever existed or do still exist. Even if
we grant that superstition is necessarily superstitious in the more
degraded sense of the word, we need not therefore deny it some share in
alleviating the human lot.
A very large--perhaps the greater--share of human happiness is based
upon "make believe."
The world would be dull, miserable, intolerable did we believe only
what our unfeeling stepmother Science would have us believe. It is
already perceptibly less endurable--for those unfortunate enough to
be civilised--since we definitely abandoned judgment by the senses in
favour of algebraical calculations. While it might be too much to say
that the number of suicides has increased in proportion to the decline
of witchcraft, it is at least certain that superstition of whatever
kind has, in the past, played a notable part in making humanity
contented with its lot. The scientist has robbed us of Romance--he has
taken from many of us our hope of Heaven, without giving us anything
to put in its place; he reduces the beauty of Nature to a formula, so
that we may no longer regard a primrose as a primrose and nothing more;
he even denies us the privilege of regarding our virtues and vices as
anything more than the inevitable results of environment or heredity.
Every day he steals away more and more of our humanity, strips us of
yet another of the few poor garments of phantasy shielding us from the
Unbearable. He is indeed the Devil of modern days, forcing knowledge
upon us whether we will or no. And we, instead of execrating him after
the goodly fashion of our forefathers, offer our happiness upon his
altars as though he were indeed the God he has explained away. And why?
Purely on the faith of his own asseverations.
Why should we accept the scientist more than his grandmother, the
witch? We have no better reason for accepting him than for rejecting
what he tells us are no more than idle dreams. Let him discover what he
will, it does but vouch the more decidedly for the illimitability of
his, and our, ignorance. It is true he can perform apparent miracles;
so could the witch. He pooh-poohs the arts that were so terrible to
former generations; our posterity will laugh at his boasted knowledge
as at a boastful child's. Already there are world-wide signs that
whatever his success in the material world, mankind is ready to revolt
against his tyranny over the Unseen. The innumerable new religious
sects, the thousand and one ethical fads, the renaissance of so many
ancient faiths--the Spiritualist and the Theosophist, the Christian
Scientist and the Cooneyite, the Tolstoyan and the Salvationist--laugh
at them individually who may--are all alike outward and visible signs
of the revolt of man against being relegated to the insignificance
of a scientific incident. And among such troubled waters witchcraft
may well come into its own again. For it, as much as any, has brought
happiness out of misery. Consider the unsuccessful man. Under the
_régime_ of enlightenment he can find no one to blame for his sorrows,
nor anywhere to look for their solacement. Everything works according
to immutable laws; he is sick, poor, miserable, because the Law of
the Inevitable will have it so; he has no God to whom he can pray for
some capricious alleviation; he cannot buy good fortune from the Devil
even at the price of his soul--there is no God, nor Devil, nor good
fortune nor ill; nothing but the imperturbably grinding cog-wheels
upon whose orbit he is inevitably bound. Were he not a happier man if
he might find an old-time witch whose spells, being removed, would
leave him hope, even though fulfilment never come? Undoubtedly. We have
been told that had there been no God, it would have been necessary to
invent one. Yes, and along with Him a Devil and good and evil spirits,
and good luck and bad, and superstitions as many as we can cram into
our aching pates--anything, everything that may save us from the
horrible conception of a machine-like Certainty, from which there is no
escape, after which there is no future. Surely it were better that a
few thousand old women be murdered in the name of superstition, a few
millions of human beings butchered in the name of religion, than that
all mankind be doomed to such a fate.
Be it remembered, too, that even the witch has her grievance against
the learned numbskulls who have undone her. For the witch-life was
not without its alleviations. Consider. Without her witchcraft she was
no more than a poor old, starved, shrunken woman, inconsiderable and
unconsidered, ugly, despised, unhappy. With it she became a Power.
She was feared--as all mankind wishes to be--hated perhaps, but still
feared; courted, also, by those who sought her help. She was again
Somebody, a recognisable entity, a human being distinguished from the
common ruck. Surely that more than outweighed the chances of a fiery
death. Nor was the method of her death without its compensations.
Painful indeed it was, though scarcely more so than slow starvation.
But if she knew herself innocent, she knew as well that her short agony
was but the prelude to the eternal reward of martyrdom. If she believed
herself, with that poor weary brain of hers, sold to the Devil, what a
world of consolation in the thought that he, the Prince of the Powers
of Darkness, scarcely inferior to the Almighty Himself, and to Him
alone, should have singled her out as the one woman whose help he
needed in all the countryside. And this being so, was there not always
the hope that, as he had promised, he might appear even at the eleventh
hour and protect his own. If he failed, the witch had but little time
to realise it and all the Hereafter, full of infinite possibilities,
before her. Few witches, I think, but would have preferred their grim
pre-eminence, with its sporting interest, to being made the butt of
doctors little wiser than themselves in the sight of infinity, held up
to mockery as silly old women, cozening or self-cozened.
If witches do not in fact exist for us, it is because we have killed
them with laughter--as many a good and evil cause has been killed. Had
we laughed at them from the beginning of things it is even possible
that they had never existed. But, as between them and Science, the
whole weight of evidence is in their favour. There is the universal
verdict of history. For untold centuries, as long as mankind has lorded
it over the earth, their active existence was never held in doubt,
down to within the last few generations. The best and wisest men of
their ages have seen them, spoken with them, tested their powers and
suffered under them, tried, sentenced, executed them. Every nation,
every century bears equal testimony to their prowess. Even to-day, save
for a tiny band of over-educated scoffers sprung for the most part from
a race notorious for its wrong-headed prejudice, the universal world
accepts them without any shadow of doubt. In August of the present year
a police-court case was heard at Witham, an Essex town not fifty miles
from London, in which the defendant stood accused of assaulting another
man because his wife had bewitched him. And it was given in evidence
that the complainant's wife was generally regarded as a witch by the
inhabitants of the Tiptree district. Nor, as I have already pointed
out, does Tiptree stand alone. Dare we, then, accept the opinion of
so few against the experience, the faith, of so many? If so, must we
not throw all history overboard as well? We are told that an Attila, a
Mahomet, an Alexander, or, to come nearer to our own days, a Napoleon
existed and did marvellous deeds impossible to other men. We read of
miracles performed by a Moses, a Saint Peter, a Buddha. Do we refuse
to believe that such persons ever existed because their recorded deeds
are more or less incompatible with the theories of modern science?
The witch carries history and the supernatural tightly clasped in her
skinny arms. Let us beware lest in turning her from our door she carry
them along with her, to leave us in their place the origin of species,
radium, the gramophone, and some imperfect flying-machines.
Those same flying-machines provide yet another argument in the witch's
favour. Why deny the possibility that she possessed powers many of
which we possess ourselves. The witch flew through the air upon a
broomstick; Mr. Henry Farman and Mr. Wilbur Wright, to mention two
out of many, are doing the same daily as these lines are written.
The vast majority of us have never seen either gentleman; we take
their achievements on trust from the tales told by newspaper
correspondents--a race of men inevitably inclined towards exaggeration.
Yet none of us deny that Mr. Farman exists and can fly through the air
upon a structure only more stable than a broomstick in degree. Why
deny to the witch that faith you extend to the aeronaut? Or, again, a
witch cured diseases, or caused them, by reciting a charm, compounding
a noxious brew in a kettle, making passes in the air with her hands.
A modern physician writes out a prescription, mixes a few drugs in a
bottle--and cures diseases. He could as easily cause them by letting
loose invisible microbes out of a phial. Is the one feat more credible
than the other? The witch sent murrains upon cattle--and removed them.
He were a poor M.R.C.V.S. who could not do as much. In a story quoted
elsewhere in this volume, a sorcerer of Roman days bewitched his horses
and so won chariot-races. We refuse him the tribute of our belief,
but we none the less warn the modern "doper" off our racecourses.
The witch could cause rain, or stay it. Scarcely a month passes but
we read well attested accounts of how this or that desert has been
made to blossom like the rose by irrigation or other means. But a few
months since we were told that an Italian scientist had discovered a
means whereby London could be relieved of fogs through some subtle
employment of electricity. It is true that since then we have had our
full complement of foggy weather; but does anyone regard the feat as
incredible?
In all the long list of witch-attainments there is not one that would
gain more than a passing newspaper paragraph in the silly season
were it performed in the London of to-day. Why, then, this obstinate
disbelief in the perfectly credible? Largely, perhaps, because the
witch was understood to perform her wonders by the aid of the Devil
rather than of the Dynamo. But must she be therefore branded as an
impostor? Certainly not by those who believe in a personal Spirit of
Evil. I do not know the proportion of professing Christians who to-day
accept the Devil as part of their faith, but it must be considerable;
and the same is the case with many non-Christian beliefs. They who can
swallow a Devil have surely no excuse for refusing a witch. Nor is the
difficulty greater for those who, while rejecting the Devil, accept
the existence of some sort of Evil Principle--recognise, in fact,
that there is such a thing as evil at all. For them the picturesque
incidentals of witch-life, the signing of diabolical contracts,
aerial journeyings to the Sabbath, and so forth, are but allegorical
expression of the fact that the witch did evil and was not ashamed,
are but roundabout ways of expressing a great truth, just as are the
first three chapters of Genesis or the story that Hannibal cut his way
through the Alps by the use of vinegar.
The conscientious agnostic, again, has no greater reason for
disbelieving in witches and all their works than for refusing his
belief to such historical characters as Cleopatra and Joan of
Arc--eminent witches both, if contemporary records may be trusted. I
pass over the great army of heterodox sects, Unitarians, Christian
Scientists, and the like, many of whom unite with the orthodox in
accepting the principle of Evil in some form or other, and with it,
as a natural corollary, the existence of earthly agencies for its
better propagation; while, for the rest, witchcraft stands in no worse
position than do the other portions of revealed religion which they
accept or do not accept, as their inclinations lead them.
It is sometimes held out as an argument for implicit belief in the
Biblical legend of the Deluge that its universality among all races
of mankind from China to Peru can only be accounted for by accepting
Noah and his Ark. How much more forcibly does the same argument uphold
the _bona fides_ of the witch. Not only has she been accepted by
every age and race, but she has everywhere and always been dowered
with the same gifts. We find the witch of ancient Babylon an adept
in the making of those same waxen or clay images in which, as we
have seen, a nineteenth-century Queen of England placed such fond
reliance. Witch-knots, spells, philtres, divination--the witch has
been as conservative as she has been enduring. Every other profession
changes and has changed its aspects and its methods from century to
century. Only the witch has remained faithful to her original ideals,
confident in the perfection of her art. And for all reward of such
unexampled steadfastness we, creatures of the moment, deny that this
one unchanging human type, this Pyramid of human endeavour, has ever
existed at all! Buttressed, then, upon the Scriptures, to say nothing
of the holy writings of Buddhist, Brahmin, Mahometan, and every
other religion of the first class, countenanced, increasingly though
unwittingly, by the researches of science into the vastness of our
ignorance; acceptable to orthodox and heterodox alike, vouched for by
history and personal testimony of the most convincing, our rejection
of the witch is based but upon the dogmaticisms of one inconsiderable
class, the impenitent atheist, blinded by the imperfection of his
senses into denying everything beyond their feeble comprehension. To
deny our recognition to a long line of women who, however mistakenly,
have yet, in the teeth of prodigious difficulties, persevered in their
self-allotted task with an altruistic enthusiasm perhaps unrivalled
in the history of the world--to relegate those who have left such
enduring marks upon the face of history to an obscure corner of the
nursery, and that upon such feeble and suspect testimony, were to
brand ourselves as materialists indeed. Rather let us believe--and
thus prove our belief in human nature--that long after the last
atheist has departed into the nothingness he claims as his birthright,
the witch, once more raised to her seat of honour, will continue to
regulate the lives and destinies of her devotees as unquestioned and as
unquestionable as she was in the days of Saul and of Oliver Cromwell.
It is to women that we must look chiefly for the impetus towards
this renaissance. Always the more devout, the more faithful half of
humanity, there is yet another peculiar claim upon her sympathies
towards the witch. In days such as ours, when the whole problem of
the rights and wrongs of women is among the most urgent and immediate
with which we have to deal, it were as anachronistic as unnatural
that Woman should allow the high purpose, the splendid endurance,
the noble steadfastness in inquiry, of a whole great section of her
sex--including some of the most deservedly famous women that ever
lived--should allow all this not only to be forgotten, but to be
absolutely discredited and denied. Persecuted by man-made laws as she
has ever been, and as eternally in revolt against them, there could be
no more appropriate or deserving figure to be chosen as Patroness of
the great fight for freedom than the much-libelled, much-martyrised,
long-enduring, eternally misunderstood Witch.
No. The time has come when we can appreciate the artistic temperament
of Nero; when Bluebeard is revealed to us in the newer and more kindly
aspect of an eccentric Marshal of France; when many of us are ready
to believe that Cæsar Borgia acted from a mistaken sense of duty; and
that Messalina did but display the qualities natural to a brilliant
Society leader. Surely among them all not one is more deserving of
"whitewashing" than that signal instance of the _femme incomprise_, the
Witch. We may not approve all her actions, we may not accept her as an
example to be generally followed; let us at least so far escape the
charge of narrow-mindedness and lack of imagination as to pay her the
tribute, if not of a tear, at least of respectful credulity.