THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH
The witch, in the broader sense of the word, may be said to have
existed ever since mankind first evolved an imagination, and may be
expected to expire only with the death of the last woman. Given the
supernatural, and sorcery must follow in some shape or other as its
corollary. Whence also the witch is as ubiquitous as she is enduring.
Under some form or other she exists, and has existed, in every quarter
of the globe; she is as familiar to the English peasant as to the West
African, in South America as in Japan. Her attributes vary, and have
varied, with the racial temperament and the religious conceptions
of her worshippers and persecutors, as widely as do, and have done,
their gods. But it was left for mediæval Christianity to give her the
definite shape in which she is now most universally recognised, and it
is to the Christian ideal of celibacy that she owes, if indirectly,
the more obscene, and latterly the more grotesque, of her attributes,
lifting her at first to an evil equality with the horned Devil of the
Middle Ages, degrading her ultimately to the "horrid old witch" of
nursery legend.
It is a far cry from this same "horrid old witch" to the pagan
divinity, but there is no break in the long pedigree. It may be traced
still further through the mists of antiquity--to the earliest days of
human motherhood. Only, as between goddess and witch, we are confronted
with a Darwinian problem. Is the witch indeed daughter of the goddess,
or are both descended from a common ancestress? To my mind, the latter
is the more correct line of descent, with the pagan priestess as
connecting link.
"To one wizard, ten thousand witches," quotes Michelet from a forgotten
writer of the days of Louis Treize; and throughout all the history
of sorcery women have formed the majority of its practitioners. Our
forefathers attributed this to the weakness of womankind, always
curious to probe the mysteries of the Unknown, always prone to fall
into the snare of evil. A more charitable--and correcter--explanation
would be found in the greater quickness of her perceptions. If Eve
first gave the apple to Adam, she gave with it the future of civilised
humanity. The first mother gave birth to twin-daughters, the goddess
and the witch, and from one or other of them came the impetus which has
carried mankind to its present stage of progress, and will carry it
yet nearer towards Heaven.
The primitive father was an animal, with potentialities--among animals
without them. His intellect was concentrated in his activities, in
providing for the material needs of himself and his family. His
position towards his wife was very much what satirists would have us
believe is that of the American business man to-day. His laborious
days were spent in tracking his prey through the forest, his leisure
in sleeping, eating, and digesting. The mother, on the other hand, was
bound to the home by reason of her motherhood. Less active, she was
more contemplative, noting in the order of events the best means of
preservation for the small pink thing that could not live without her
care, her mind always alert to the exigencies of the moment. Thus she
acquired knowledge of things beneficent or harmful, of the food most
apt for its nourishment, of the herbs growing around the clearing best
fitted to cure its infantile complaints. She experimented, cautiously
but continuously, and with each recurrent need she added a little to
her small stock of wisdom. Small in itself, but vast in proportion
to that of men or childless women. Little by little she "walked her
hospital"; little by little she learnt the relative value of her
simple potions, to whom they should be given, and how, and when. To
the primitive mind this was cause for wonder, as indeed it is, almost
as wonderful as the first smile of the first baby. Pain can no longer
run riot unchecked. If it have not yet found its mistress, at least
a protest has been entered against it--reason not only for joy and
wonder, but for respect and gratitude--even perhaps for worship.
Whatever his divinity, Man worships himself. In every form of religion
the worshipped tends to become confused with the worshipper. Man cannot
escape his own environment. The thunderstorm frightens him; there must
be a storm-demon. What is that demon but another man like himself,
though uglier and wickeder and very much more powerful? Such a demon
must be flattered and propitiated as an angry man of might must be. But
a Primitive with his living to make cannot spare the time necessary
to propitiate a worldful of demons. He deputes the duty to a weaker
neighbour, one who sits at home, engaging for his own part to find
food for both. Whence the first priestess--from whom later descends
the first priest. For who so apt at propitiation as she who can cajole
that most domesticated of demons, the ever-present Pain. So, later,
when the propitiation of Evil gives place to the invocation of good,
who so worthy of honour, which is to say of worship, as she who, in the
dawning of the race, first relieved poor humanity of its bodily ills?
Goddess, priestess, White Witch and Black--all are but variations on
that oldest and most beautiful of themes, Motherhood.
To return to the first house-wife. Throughout her life she adds always
a little to her store of natural knowledge, and when she dies she
bequeaths it to her daughters. They in turn add to it until the time
comes when to the cure of bodies is added that of minds. For Man's
nascent mind begins to trouble him almost as much as does his body.
Already the eternal problem of why and wherefore raises its head;
already he begins his age-long struggle with the inevitable. That "all
that is, is good" does not commend itself to Pre-historic Man. He
knows so much better. He must often go hungry, his cattle die, drought
destroys his meagre crops, his neighbour robs him of his war-spoil.
He appeals to the woman, who thinks so much, for a way out. Cannot
she, who with her potions drove the pain out of his body, help him in
this also? Can she not cure his cattle? Can she not reason with the
delinquent rain-demon, or, by making a little rain herself, move him
to emulation? Best of all, can she not, out of the plenitude of her
wisdom, suggest some means of outwitting that treacherous neighbour? He
will reward her handsomely, especially for this last.
It is at this point that the priestess and the witch come to the
crossing of the ways, henceforward to follow divergent paths. The one
sister, from whom is to be born the devout priestess, is ready to do
all that she can. She invokes the cattle-demon, the rain-demon; she,
no more than the man, has any doubt of their invocability, but if they
refuse to answer it must be because they are angry. She cannot make it
rain if the demon gainsay her prayer. She is honest, acknowledging her
inferiority to the supernatural. Only she claims to understand more
than most the best way to approach it.
Consider the other woman--the ancestress of the witch, in the
opprobrious sense. She knows very well that she cannot make rain.
Probably she has made the experiment already. But--such faith in her
power is tempting--so are the gifts thus easy to be earned. The man
believes in her--almost she begins to believe in herself. Perhaps
she tries to persuade herself that she may succeed this time. She
is weatherwise, and she reads in natural signs the probability that
rain may shortly be expected. If it should not--well, she must take
precautions against incurring blame. She must impose conditions, and
any failure must be set down to their non-fulfilment. There is a
very pleasant sense of power in gulling the overgrown baby who is so
ready to be gulled. She accepts the trust, commands the rain-demon
to let down his showers. Her reading of the signs is justified--the
expected rain comes. Her reputation is assured--until belief in the
supernatural shall be no more. Her daughter and her grand-daughters
inherit her claims. They also command the storm, using the same form
of words. Possibly they are themselves deceived--believing that there
is some virtue in the form of their mother's words, now become an
incantation. From the first claim to power over the elements, to the
finished sorceress, and thence to the "horrid old witch" of fairy
legend, is but a matter of regular evolution.
Just as the priestess was the mother of the priest, so the wizard is
born of the witch. Man, though he start later--very much as the boy
is slower in development than is his sister--is not content always
to remain second in the race for knowledge. For a time--perhaps for
long centuries--he has been content to leave things intellectual to
his womenfolk. But when he starts he is not content to stay upon
the threshold of knowledge, as woman, who has approached it only
from necessity, has done. One day a male iconoclast rebels, pitting
his awakening intellect against the woman's inherited reputation.
Victorious, he yet trembles at his victory, while all Palæolithia
awaits the angry fire from Heaven. But nothing happens. No lightning
strikes him; no swift disease destroys him, or his children, or his
cattle. A new era has begun--the wizard places himself beside the
witch, slowly but surely to elbow her into the second place.
As the slow centuries pass society has been gradually forming and
shaping itself. In his search for a civilisation Man has left the
secluded cave wherein he wrung the empire of the world from the jaws
of the cave-bear and the scythe-toothed tiger. He has built himself
homes and collected them into villages; from the scattered family he
has evolved the tribe, and from the tribe the nation. Having learned
his own power when buttressed upon that of his neighbours, he is slowly
broadening and extending it until it is little inferior to that of the
divinities before whom it pleases him to tremble. He--or Nature for
him--chooses out rulers, who become his gods in all but divinity; and
his respect for them, if less absolute, is more immediate than for his
gods. Government, making all things possible, becomes an accomplished
fact.
Government, once instituted, loses no time in measuring itself
against Heaven. In one form or other the conflict between Church and
State--disguise it as men may--has lasted from the beginning, and
must last as long as both survive. That ideal which reached the point
nearest of attainment in the theoretic constitution of the Holy Roman
Empire, of two rulers, co-existent and co-equal, governing one the
spiritual and one the material empire of the world, was in the very
nature of things doomed to remain an ideal. Either God or Man must be
first. With their struggles for the mastery the fortunes of the witch,
as of all exponents of the supernatural, were intimately bound up.
At first sheltering itself beneath the wings of the spiritual power,
the material flourished--at its protector's expense. The realm of
Nature seemed at first so inconsiderable compared to that of the
supernatural, that he were a bold iconoclast who dared compare them.
Only, the King was always in the midst of his people; the god, century
by century, retreated further into the unscaleable skies. Slowly the
civil power emancipated itself from the tutelage of the spiritual--as
it is still doing in our own time--slowly and with many falterings and
many backward glances, asserting itself in prosperity, appealing for
help in adversity, retreating often, but never so far as it advanced.
With the first introduction of civil government the witch and the
priestess finally part company, to range themselves henceforward
upon opposite sides. It is true that as religion follows religion
the priestess of the former era often becomes the witch of its
successor, thereby only accentuating the distinction. For, in the
unceasing efforts to arrange a _modus vivendi_ between the human
and the supernatural worlds, the priestess accommodates herself to
circumstances--the witch defies them. The priestess, acknowledging
her own humanity, claims only to interpret the wishes of the god, to
intercede with him on behalf of her fellow-men. The witch, staunch
Tory of the old breed, claims to be divine, in so far as she exercises
divine power unamenable to human governance, and thus singles herself
out as one apart, independent of civil and ecclesiastical powers
alike--and as such an object of fear and of suspicion. Even so she
is still respectable, suspect indeed, but not condemned. The public
attitude towards her is variable; she is alternately encouraged and
suppressed, venerated and persecuted--and through all she flourishes,
now seductive as Circe, now hag-like as was Hecate.
Ages pass, empires flourish and decay, and slowly a great change is
coming over society. Unrest is in the air; old systems and old creeds
are dying of inertia, and men look eagerly for something to take
their place. The spirit of individual liberty steals round the world,
whispering in all men's ears. The slave, toiling at the oar, hears
them, though he dare not listen, and hugs them in his heart--and a
heresy, threatening the very foundations of society, spreads far and
wide. Is it just possible that men are not born slave or master by
divine decree?
The First Socialist is born in the East. He and His disciples preach a
creed so blasphemous, so incompatible with the rights of property, that
it becomes a sacred duty, if vested interests are to be preserved, to
crucify Him as an encouragement to others. He proclaims, in a word,
that all men are equal. It is well for Christianity that He adds the
qualification, "In the sight of God," or how could either slave or
master believe in anything so contrary to the senses' evidence? Vested
interests notwithstanding, the new creed spreads, as any creed so
comforting to the great majority, the downtrodden and oppressed, is
bound to spread. But, though it preached the acceptable doctrines of
liberty, equality, and fraternity, Christianity introduced with them
sin into the world. All men might be equal in the sight of God, but
they were all equally sinners. Humility and self-abasement were to take
the place of the old pagan joyousness. To the Christian--to the Early
Christian, at any rate--the world ceased to be man's inheritance, as
Heaven was that of a congerie of shifting divinities-an inheritance the
enjoyment of which was as blameless as it was natural. It was become a
place of discipline and education, a hard school designed to prepare
him for a glorious future, and one in which only the elect were to
share. Everything that did not actively help towards that end was evil;
all who did not work towards that end were evil-doers. The pagan and
his easy-going paganism were alike accursed and tolerance a sin.
The contest between two such schools of thought--however long drawn
out--could have but one conclusion. Capricious persecutions, on civil
rather than religious grounds, gave the iconoclasts the one remaining
impetus needed to snatch the sceptre of the world. Successful, they
persecuted in their turn, systematically and with the thoroughness born
of conscious virtue. In spite--or because of--such attempts to stamp
out pagan and paganism together, the old order still survived in secret
long after the known world was officially Christianised. Naturally
enough, the Christian could only suppose that such criminal persistence
was the direct work of that Evil One whom he first had exploited. Pagan
rites were nothing more nor less to him than Devil worship, those who
practised them the direct representatives of Satan. Some of the pagan
gods had been pressed into the service of Christianity as saints, their
festivals as saints' days. Those that remained were classed together,
with their ministers and attributes, under the generic heading of
Magic, shunned and feared at first, but as the Church more and more
stepped into the shoes of the civil power, warred upon without mercy.
Faced by such forcible arguments for conversion, the Pagan witch was
not long in adopting the Christian Devil as a more potent protector
than the old, easy-going gods who had formerly peopled the supernatural
world. Pagan or nominal Christian, she was equally anathema to the
Church, if only that she was consistently Protestant, claiming to
hold direct communication with the Unseen quite regardless of the
proper ecclesiastical channels. And by this very independence her
hold upon the imagination of her neighbours continued to increase as
Christianity progressed towards universal empire. The very definite
pronouncements of the Church against witches, witchcraft, and all kinds
of magic served to foster the general belief in their powers. What was
so forcibly condemned must of necessity exist. There was, moreover, a
certain satisfaction in this same tangibility. It simplified, smoothed
out the path of virtue. With witchcraft about, your duty was plain and
your task easy. You had but to mention a holy name, to make a sacred
sign, to sprinkle a little holy water, and victory was assured. If all
assaults of the devil were so straightforward and so vincible, the path
to Heaven were broad and smooth indeed.
It was, perhaps, the popular sense of victorious ability against
her spells which protected the witch, _per se_, against over-severe
persecution until towards the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Absolute confidence in the power to suppress an evil diminishes the
urgency for its suppression. Here and there a witch was executed,
local persecutions of inconsiderable extent occurred, but for general
holocausts we must wait until the more enlightened times of a James I.
or a Louis XIV. The witch of the Dark Ages might count upon a life of
comparative security, sweetened by the offerings of those who, pining
for present joys, acted upon the advice of Omar Khayyam rather than
following that of their ghostly advisers. Meanwhile, however, a mass of
tradition and precedent was growing up, to be put to deadly purpose in
the animadversions of learned sixteenth and seventeenth century writers
upon the vile and damnable sin of witchcraft.
By the eleventh century the witch was firmly identified, in the popular
as well as the ecclesiastical mind, as a woman who had entered upon
a compact with Satan for the overthrowing of Christ's kingdom. The
popular conception of her personality had also undergone a change.
By the twelfth century there was no more question of her as a fair
enchantress--she was grown older and uglier, poorer and meaner, showing
none of the advantages her compact with the Evil One might have been
expected to bring in its train.
The increasing tendency towards dabbling in things forbidden brought
about greater severity in its repression, but it was not until the
days of Innocent VIII., when witchcraft was officially identified with
heresy, that the period of cruel persecution may be said really to
have begun. Sorcery in itself was bad enough; associated with heresy
no crime was so pernicious and no punishment too condign, especially
when inflicted by the Holy Inquisition. The inquisitorial power was
frequently misused; the fact that the possessions of the accused became
forfeit to her judges when tried in an ecclesiastical court may seem to
the sceptic to provide ample reason why the ecclesiastical authorities
undertook so many more prosecutions than did the civil. But of the
absolute sincerity with which all classes set themselves to stamp out
so dreadful a crime, the portentous and voluminous writings of the
period leave no doubt whatever. Catholic and, after the Reformation,
Protestant, rich and poor, patriot and philanthropist alike, vied with
each other in the enthusiasm with which they scented out their prey,
and the pious satisfaction with which they tortured helpless old women
to the last extremity in the name of the All-Merciful.
From the fourteenth century onwards the type of recognised witch varies
only in detail. Though not invariably she is commonly the conventional
hag. If young, she has been led astray by a senior, or taken to the
Sabbath in childhood under constraint--which was not, however, regarded
as a valid defence in time of trial. Many such were executed in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in many cases mere children. But
it was the toothless hag whose mumblings held the public ear and became
acknowledged as the truest type. Even when men ceased to fear her she
lost nothing of her grotesque hideousness to the childish mind, and
as such has become finally enshrined in the nursery lore of Europe.
As such, also, I have endeavoured to reconstruct her in her habit as
she lived in the eyes of her mediæval contemporaries elsewhere in this
volume.