THE LITERATURE OF WITCHCRAFT
BY
PROF. GEORGE L. BURR
CORNELL UNIVERSITY
[REPRINTED FROM THE PAPERS OF THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION]
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK LONDON
27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD ST. 27 KING WILLIAM ST., STRAND
The Knickerbocker Press
1890
THE LITERATURE OF WITCHCRAFT.
By PROF. GEORGE L. BURR, Cornell University.
The literature of witchcraft is not the literature of magic. Magic
is world-wide. Wherever, from the first, men have found themselves
face to face with the awful powers of nature and of fate which shut
in their little lives, some have disdained either to bow to them in
reverent submission or to seek by bribes and wheedling to win them to
their side. They have tried to outwit mystery with speculation, and to
outmatch force with cunning. With spell and incantation they have dared
to face the grim demons of storm and fire and flood, to bid begone the
lurking fiends of disease, to dip into the dread secret of the future,
to call back from the shadows the loved figures of the dead, to make
the gods themselves their servants. And if, at last, they have been
fain to own to themselves that their lore is, after all, but vanity
and their powers a delusion, they have meanwhile found in the eager
credulity of their fellows, to whom they no longer dare to confess
their impotence, a treasure scarcely less tempting than the favor of
the gods. Over against what they deemed the hocus-pocus of worship they
have set up the hocus-pocus of magic; and, as the prophet is followed
by the priest, the magician is followed by the sorcerer. Under the
peaceful stars of Akkadian Chaldæa, centuries before Terah wandered
westward with his son, or in the tornado-torn jungles of the last-found
South Sea island, the impulse and its outcome have been ever the same.
Compared with the potent share of magic in human history, its
literature is indeed but scant. Its choicest secrets have always gone
by word of mouth. Yet it is a literature of all times and lands. From
the clay volumes of Assyrian kings and the papyrus rolls of Egypt to
the latest utterance of the spirits through Mr. Slade or of the mystic
sages of the Orient through Mr. Sinnett, it is as perennial as human
folly itself. Its faith may be feigned, its miracles sham; but magic
itself is actual and universal.
But witchcraft never was. It was but a shadow, a nightmare: the
nightmare of a religion, the shadow of a dogma. Less than five
centuries saw its birth, its vigor, its decay. And this birth,
this vigor, this decay, were--to a degree perhaps else unknown in
history--caused by and mirrored in a literature. Of that literature it
has during the last decade been mine, as librarian of the President
White Library at Cornell University, to aid in building up a
collection. In the last few months I have had in hand the making ready
of its catalogue for the press. My task is by no means finished, and I
have much to learn; but it has seemed to me that even such a hurried
survey of the literature of witchcraft as I may presume to attempt may
not be without interest to the American Historical Association. And
this the more, since no adequate bibliography of it has ever yet been
published, and no historian has thoroughly known and exploited it.
The literature of witchcraft, indeed, if under the name be included all
the books which touch upon that dark subject, is something enormous.
For at least four centuries no comprehensive work on theology, on
philosophy, on history, on law, on medicine, on natural science, could
wholly ignore it; and to lighter literature it afforded the most
telling illustrations for the pulpit, the most absorbing gossip for
the news-letter, the most edifying tales for the fireside. But the
works devoted wholly or mainly to witchcraft are much fewer. Roundly
and rudely estimated, this monographic literature includes perhaps a
thousand or fifteen hundred titles.[1]
The earliest of the books on witchcraft were written in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. Their writers were Dominicans of the
Inquisition. Not that Brother Nicolas Eymeric or Brother Nicolas
Jaquier or Brother John Vineti or Brother Jerome Visconti knew that he
was writing on a new theme. On the contrary, they wrote to prove that
this witchcraft whereof they spoke was as old as mankind. And they
cited not only Thomas Aquinas and Vincent of Beauvais, but Isidore and
Gregory and Cassian and Augustine, and, above all, the Bible,--nay,
even Josephus and the ancient poets, Horace and Virgil and Ovid.
Wherein, then, was it really new, and how did they come to write on it
at all? Bear with me while I try very briefly to answer.
Magic, in truth, the Christian Church had always known. Even the
ancient faiths of Greece and Rome had, like all faiths, fought
magic sternly; and, like all faiths, had counted magic much that
was not so. But their polytheistic tolerance had reckoned it more a
crime than a sin, and had not stigmatized as magical other faiths,
save when, as in the case of Christianity, their own exclusiveness
seemed to stamp their votaries as foes to the rest of mankind. Less
indifferent was Christianity itself. Whatever the conceptions of her
founder and of his immediate disciples, it was inevitable that, from
the associations of the words in which they must express themselves,
from the other preconceptions of the taught, from the influence of
the Jewish scriptures, from the daily contact with Hebrew or Greek or
Roman neighbors, there should early creep into the Church a touch of
the superstition about her. She had inherited, indeed, the monotheism
of the Jews. But, at the rise of Christianity, the day was long past
when the stern logic of that monotheism saw in Jehovah the sole
supernatural power, and in other worships only a fruitless idolatry.
From the Persian captivity the Jews had brought back an obstinate
belief in a horde of minor intelligences--the angels and demons of the
New Testament period; and their teachers, seeking to justify this by
one or two obscure passages in their sacred books, had built up out of
them a complete science of demonology.[2] To the ranks of the demons
the early Christians seem at once to have assigned the deities of their
heathen neighbors.[3] And the consciences of their Gentile converts,
who found it far easier to believe the new God supreme than the old
gods powerless, took most kindly to this solution. But, if the gods
were devils, their worship was not mere idolatry--it was magic; and the
two terms became for the Christian interchangeable.
Still stranger and darker grew the conception of magic under the
influence of another Christian idea--the new idea that religion and
ethics are one. Henceforth not only is there but one true God, there
is but one good God. All others are fiends, hating men because God
loves them, and winning their trust only to cheat and ruin them. He who
willingly becomes their accomplice or their victim is utterly evil--an
enemy to his kind, to be visited by the Church with her severest
penances, by the state with death itself. It matters no longer with
what spirit one seeks the aid of the gods, or for what ends: all but
Christian worship is devil-worship,--magic,--mortal sin.
Here were indeed the germs of the later idea of witchcraft. Yet only
the germs; for there was much to stay their growth. Though the world
swarmed with demons, though the majority of mankind were devoted
to their service, the Christian had little or nothing to fear from
them.[4] A prayer, an exorcism, the sign of the cross, the mere name
of Christ, could put legions of them to instant flight. It was the
Christian’s glory to baffle and set them at naught. Moreover, the
whole theory was aimed at paganism, and paganism was passing away.
Even the inundation of Christendom by the Germanic nations could
not long retard its disappearance. Their host of deities, great and
small--Asa and Jotun and troll and nix and kobold--swelled for a
moment almost to bursting the ranks of the devils. But these, too,
soon fell back into the ghostly twilight. Here and there some canny
old mother might still gather by stealth the mystic herbs with which
she trenched so vexatiously upon the monkish trade of healing,--might
still haunt sacred spring or tree or rock, muttering the meaningless
formulas of a forgotten faith. But such, though scholars were long
prone to count them so, were not the witches of the later day. The
Church grew wisely less stern toward them, rather than more so. As
the spirit of Christianity took a more exclusive hold upon the minds
of men, the grandeur of the monotheistic idea once more asserted
itself. Resort to the old heathen rites was magic indeed; but it
was magical superstition. Its marvels were not real marvels. Only
God had power over nature. In this, though with much wavering and
self-contradiction, the teachers of western Christendom in the ninth,
the tenth, and the eleventh centuries agree[5]; and the earliest
codes of the crystallizing Canon Law, from Regino of Prüm to Gratian,
punish as superstition alike the resort to the aid of demons and the
belief that such aid can be given. “Let it be publicly announced to
all,” ran the famous canon _Episcopi_, which formed the nucleus of the
Church’s teaching on this point, “that whoso believeth such fables [as
that women may ride through the air] and things like this, has lost
the faith; and whoso has not faith in God is none of his, but is his
in whom he believes, to wit, the Devil’s. Whoever, therefore, believes
it to be possible that any creature can be changed into a worse or a
better, or transformed into any other shape or likeness, except by
the Creator himself, who made all things and by whom all things were
made, is beyond doubt an infidel and worse than a pagan.”[6] Under such
handling the hold of the older faiths upon the popular imagination had,
by the close of the twelfth century, well nigh passed away. The magic
the Church had so long fought was virtually dead.
But the wording of the canon _Episcopi_ itself suggests that a new
cloud was already fast overspreading the horizon of Christianity--the
fear, not of devils, but of the Devil. By a tendency natural to
monotheism, the intenser the conception of the oneness and the goodness
of God, the stronger the impulse to conceive of that which is opposed
to him and to his purposes as also one and as absolutely evil. Even
the earliest of the Christians seem to have understood their master
to speak of such a principle as of a personal being. And, as the
westward-moving faith waxed in literalness and in sternness,--as,
beneath the flood of Roman ideas and ideals, the figure of God grew
more majestic and imperious,--his awful shadow loomed ever more awful
in the darkening background. The rise of asceticism lent a finishing
touch, and metaphysics became mythology. To the tortured brain and
sense of the hermit-monk the Devil was the most real being in the
universe--his personal antagonist at every turn, seen and felt and
grappled with. And no Christian doubted. Athanasius, the father
of orthodoxy, himself gave to the world, in his life of Antony, a
household book of diabolism--the “Robinson Crusoe” of the Middle Ages,
with Satan (an odd man-Friday) its most vivid figure.[7] And Augustine,
the great theologian of Latin Christianity--a Manichæan in spite of
himself--in his “City of God,” that first Christian philosophy of
history, which lorded the field for a thousand years (if, indeed, it
does not lord it still), raised him to colleagueship with God himself
by setting over against the _civitas Dei_, the kingdom of Heaven, a
_civitas Diaboli_, the kingdom of this world, whose prince was Satan.
Christianity grew ever more a dualism.[8]
His place in theology thus made sure, the literature of the Devil seems
to have taken a long pause.[9] In the Lives of the Saints he still
played a large and favorite part--the villain of the plot in these
lesser comedies, as in the grand historical drama of the Gospels.[10]
But it was probably not until the ninth century that there began
to find their way into the West certain Byzantine traditions which
seemed to throw a fresh light upon the methods of his dealing with
men: legends of written compacts through which men had won the aid of
Satan in this world by making over to him their souls for the next.
Versified and dramatized by bishop and nun, these legends became widely
popular and stirred to a fever European curiosity.[11] And when, a
little later, the Crusades threw open wide the door to the fables of
the East, and kindled that love of anecdote which made every friar a
newsmonger and every preacher a story-teller, there was scarce another
domain in which the monkish imagination proved so fertile as in that of
diabolism. Stephen of Bourbon gave the subject a section,[12] Caesarius
of Heisterbach a whole book,[13] Thomas of Cantimpré dwelt on it in his
latest and longest chapters,[14] the Abbot Richalmus found it enough
for a monograph.[15] Hardly less prolific in such stories than the
moralizers were the gossiping chroniclers.[16] And the encyclopedists,
like Vincent of Beauvais, whatever else they might fail to glean,
overlooked no interference of the Devil in the affairs of men.[17]
It was, perhaps, through the channel of the Crusades that there
became known to Western theologians certain abstruser speculations of
Byzantine thinkers: a treatise “On flying demons of the night,”[18]
which gained much vogue from its ascription to the formulator of
Eastern orthodoxy, John of Damascus, and a dialogue “On the doings
of demons,”[19] by Michael Psellus, the most prolific author of the
mediæval Greek Church. Both of these discussed in minute and unblushing
detail the relations of devils with mortals.
They came opportunely. The great structure of the scholastic
philosophy, which, resting on the sure basis of Scripture and
compassing all knowledge, was to put an end forever to the restless
speculations of the human mind, was just in the making. Already the
dualism of Augustine had been made its corner-stone. And now, resting
perhaps on these Greek suggestions, as on the earlier Byzantine
vagaries of the pseudo-Dionysius, with that relentless logic which made
their system (possibly excepting the harder Protestant scholasticism
of Calvin) the baldest rationalism the world has known, its builders
wrought out, in this atmosphere of the thirteenth century, and
buttressed on every side with text and canon, the scheme of diabolism
of which the whole literature of witchcraft is but a broken reflection.
Into the details of that scheme I need not go. The Devil and his demons
become in all points the conscious parody of God and his angels.[20]
As fallen angels, they still have power over storm, and lightning, and
pestilence, and “whatsoever”--to use the schoolmen’s phrase--“has local
motion alone.” And just as God has his human servants, his church, on
earth, so also the Devil has his--men and women sworn to his service
and true to his bidding. To win such followers he can appear to men in
any form he pleases, can deceive them, seduce them, enter into compact
with them, initiate them into his worship, make them his allies for
the ruin of their fellows. Now, it is these human allies and servants
of Satan, thus postulated into existence by the brain of a monkish
logician,[21] whom history knows as “witches.”
At first, indeed, the dictum of the schoolmen seemed little to affect
the current of popular thought. The Devil played only an ever merrier
part in the travel-quickened fancy of Europe; and one can almost catch
the twinkle in the eye of the monkish story-tellers who pretend to
shudder at his pranks.
But the Church was in earnest. Scholasticism, alas, had not put an
end to thought. The minds it had trained to think kept on thinking;
and, with them, others who would not even start from the safe premises
of the Church. What, then, should a good mother-church do who had
expounded the universe, yet still found herself vexed by questioners
more numerous and troublesome than before? What if they contaminate
even the faithful? She preached a crusade against them, and wiped
the plague-spot from her sight. But the disease only struck in. How
should she inspect men’s hearts? She made stated confession necessary
to salvation. But the heretics would not confess. Then, in her
desperation, she hit upon that last expedient for the detection of
wrong thinking: she devised the Holy Inquisition and put in its hand
the torture. How supremely effective that was I need not tell you:
it is not its dealing with the heretics that concerns us. But when,
in the lands where the Inquisition had found entrance, heresy was
at last utterly rooted out,--when the souls of the faithful were
safe and the hands of the inquisitors idle,--then, as was natural,
the hungry organization cast its eyes about for other victims. Had
not the prince of the schoolmen, the oracle of the Dominican order,
taught that there were among men other servants of the Devil, more
subtle, more dangerous, than the heretics: the men and women devoted
altogether to his service--the witches? Already, as early as 1257, the
Inquisition had asked the Pope “whether it ought not to take cognizance
of divination and sorcery.” He had refused, unless manifest heresy
were involved. But, if St. Thomas is right, said the inquisitors,
witchcraft itself _is_ heresy. Their victims were forced to confess to
a renunciation of God and an actual pact with Satan, express or tacit,
and the Inquisition rapidly extended its jurisdiction in the matter. In
1320, the panic-stricken Pope, John XXII., trembling lest he himself be
bewitched by his multiplying foes, begged the inquisitors, in a formal
brief, to extirpate utterly the Devil-worshippers.[22] The Church was
now fully committed. The rules for the direction of the inquisitors
became ever more explicit,[23] _Summa_ and _Confessionale_ for priest
and sinner ever more diffuse, as to this blackest of the sins--“treason
against Heaven.”
But hindrance came from a more obstinate quarter. Even though the
Church were convinced, the world had yet to be reasoned with. What
was, then, this new crime, of which such myriads were suddenly guilty?
Even the great state trials of the Templars, in the early years of the
fourteenth century, with all the stir they made throughout Europe, and
with all the stress they sought to lay on the charge of witchcraft,
had not left the conception clear. The thing must be explained by the
inquisitors themselves. And so it happened that the beginnings of the
literature of witchcraft were made by Dominicans of the Inquisition.
Clever was their argument and portentous their array of authorities.
First of all, the Bible. And let the historian frankly admit that, but
for what they found here, the world would never have come to their
side. That strange sixth chapter of Genesis,--the terrible verdict
of the Mosaic code, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,”--the
story of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, which seemed
to a literal age to set a divine seal on the most startling of the
witch-doctrines: had not the Devil personally appeared to Jesus?--had
he not miraculously transported him through the air?--had he not shown
himself the lord of the kingdoms of this world?--had he not sought to
make a pact with the Christ himself by offering him all?--were it not
dishonor to the Son of God to suppose that all men could resist as he
had done? These passages, and a host of others which we have learned
to forget, or obscure, or explain away, made the Bible, from first to
last, the great corner-stone of the literature of witchcraft.[24] Yet
this was but the inquisitor’s starting-point. He knew how to press into
his service poet and philosopher, the apologists of the early Church,
her liturgies with their exorcisms and renunciations of the Devil,
the canons of synods and councils, the laws of Christian emperors,
the great works of the Fathers and of the Schoolmen, the lives of the
saints, the tales of the chroniclers, the utterances of the popes.
The earliest known to me of these inquisitorial treatises on
witchcraft is from the pen of the great compiler of the code of
the Inquisition, the author of the “Directorium inquisitorum,” the
Aragonese Inquisitor-General, Nicolas Eymeric. As early as 1359, only
three years after entering on his duties, he produced his “Tractatus
contra daemonum invocatores,”[25] to prove that witchcraft was heresy,
and that its punishment belonged to the Inquisition. But the world was
still hard of faith. The Inquisition in France having shown itself too
active, the Parlement of Paris in 1390 assumed to the secular courts
all jurisdiction in cases of witchcraft.
But, in 1431, the trial and condemnation of Jeanne d’Arc, at Rouen, by
an ecclesiastical court under English protection, drew the eyes of
all Europe; and, though in it the charge of witchcraft had taken but
a subordinate place, and had been used with an awkwardness at which
the judges of the following century would have blushed, it was this
charge that struck the popular mind. In 1437 Pope Eugene ventured
again to urge the inquisitors everywhere to greater diligence against
witchcraft; and in the same year the German Dominican, Johannes Nider,
put forth, as the fifth and culminating book of his “Formicarius,”
or “Ant-Hill,” the first popular essay on the witches.[26] Of their
horrible depravity he heaps up anecdote upon anecdote; and it is soon
clear that he has found a new and exhaustless source--the testimony of
the witches themselves.
Who need longer doubt the reality of the crime when its perpetrators
confess to all, and more than all, that the inquisitors have told?
Torture was a new thing in procedure, as yet unknown outside the
ecclesiastical courts; and two centuries of horrors must pass before
men should learn that its victims may confess more than the truth.[27]
No wonder that Nider’s book was popular! The literature of witchcraft
was fairly launched.
No rival appeared, however, till in 1452 the French inquisitor, Nicolas
Jaquier,[28] wrote his treatise, “De calcatione daemonum,”[29] and
in 1458 produced his monograph on witchcraft proper--his “Flagellum
haereticorum fascinariorum.”[30] Jaquier expressly tells us that his
book is written because of the hindrances thrown in the way of the
inquisitors by skeptics. His whole work is but one long refutation of
the canon _Episcopi_; and, while drawing as largely as his predecessors
from the Bible and from Thomas Aquinas, he, too, finds his most
irrefutable arguments in the fresh confessions of tortured witches. In
the following year--1459--the Spanish Franciscan, Alonso (or Alfonso)
de Spina,[31] brought out his “Fortalitium fidei,” and lent a climax
to its refutation of Jewish and Saracen errors by making its fifth and
last book treat “Of the war of the demons”--“De bello daemonum.”
But the diffusion of the literature of witchcraft was no longer to
wait on the slow work of the copyist. The new art of printing soon
availed itself of so tempting a topic. Before 1470, Mentelin, of
Strasburg, turned out from his exquisite press a fine edition of the
“Fortalitium fidei”; and, about 1476, Anton Sorg, of Augsburg, followed
it with the “Formicarius” of Nider. Not all of their fellow-treatises
were so fortunate. A “Tractatus contra daemonum invocatores,” by the
Carcassonne inquisitor Joannes Vineti,[32] got itself printed; and a
lecture on the subject delivered at Paris, in 1482, by the Saragossa
canon Bernard Basin,[33] was given to the press in the same or the
following year. But the book of Jaquier had yet a century to wait;
and fresh monographs by the Poitou theological professor Petrus
Mamoris[34] and the Italian inquisitor Girolamo Visconti[35] must lie
in manuscript for a decade or two, while more than one other has never
been printed at all.[36] For there now appeared a work which made all
such trifles needless: the terrible book which has been said, and
perhaps truly, to have caused more suffering than any other written by
human pen--the “Malleus maleficarum,” or “Witch-Hammer.”
The inquisitors charged with the spread of the persecution in Germany
had found no easy task. Not only had they the obstinacy of the
secular courts to contend with, but, still more, the jealousy of the
bishops, who till now, in the Empire, had succeeded in keeping the
ecclesiastical jurisdiction in their own hands. In vain, from pulpit
and professor’s chair, did the Dominican brotherhood promulgate the
theories of Thomas Aquinas and of Eymeric. The German bishops declared
that there were no witches in their territories.[37] In despair
the baffled inquisitors of Germany, Heinrich Krämer[38] and Jacob
Sprenger, at last turned their steps toward Rome. There, on December
5, 1484, they won from Pope Innocent VIII. the famous bull _Summis
desiderantes_. Portraying in the most startling colors, and at much
length, the calamities to man and beast, vineyard and harvest, brought
by the witches, who, he is grieved to learn, swarm throughout Germany,
the head of the Church enjoins all the faithful, on pain of the
indignation of Almighty God and of the apostles Peter and Paul, to lend
aid to the inquisitors in the extirpation of such monsters. Thus armed,
the two Dominicans turned homeward; but their preparation was not yet
complete. Men must be taught not only what to do, but how to do it. So
Sprenger and Krämer set themselves at the compilation of a hand-book
of arguments, rules, and procedure for the detection and punishment
of witches which should henceforth make every man his own inquisitor.
Completed in 1486, the book was probably given to the press in the same
year.[39] As motto, it bore on its title-page the menacing sentence:
“Not to believe in witchcraft is the greatest of heresies.”[40] Edition
followed edition with striking rapidity, and with the issue of the
“Witch-Hammer” began a new era in the history of witchcraft and of its
literature.
It is not my purpose to discuss book by book the literature whose
beginnings I have tried with some fulness to describe. The barest
mention of only its epoch-making titles would more than fill the space
remaining to me. Many of them are familiar to all English readers,
through the classical chapter of Mr. Lecky[41]; and the story of
their influence may be studied in more detail in the great German
works of Soldan-Heppe,[42] of Roskoff,[43] and of Längin.[44] I can
now but briefly characterize what seem to me the main epochs in its
development. But let me, in passing, remark that the opponents of
the persecution seem to me neither so few nor so feeble as one might
infer from the pages of Mr. Lecky. Its defenders are never weary of
complaining of the numbers and influence of the skeptics; and, though
most found it wiser to hold their tongues, or preferred to speak out
only in private, the open assaults upon the delusion are more numerous
than the historians of witchcraft have known.
The “Malleus maleficarum” appealed to readers of every class. The
question could no longer be ignored. The book’s appearance began
a period of controversy, which lasted till the outbreak of the
Reformation distracted all attention to itself. Jurists like Ulrich
Molitor,[45] Alciati,[46] and Ponzinibio,[47] philosophers and men of
letters like Cornelius Agrippa[48] and Hans Sachs,[49] dared to oppose
the superstition[50]; and a cohort of theologians like the inquisitors
Bernard of Como[51] and Hoogstraten,[52] their fellow-Dominicans Dodo
and Theatinus,[53] the historian and scholar Trithemius,[54] the
Spanish mathematician Ciruelo,[55] the papal masters of the palace
Prierias[56] and Spina,[57] even a half-monkish layman like the younger
Pico della Mirandola,[58] appeared in its defence. The briefs of Leo
X. and of Adrian VI., in 1521 and 1523, seemed to close the dispute in
favor of the witch-hunters.
The forty years of lull[59] that followed marked no decline of faith
in this field. Whatever else Catholic and Protestant, Lutheran and
Calvinist, might wrangle over, there remained the most edifying
unanimity as to the activity of the Devil; and each party vied with the
others in showing its innocence of complicity with him by hatred toward
his peculiar servants, the witches. From the close of the previous
century, the growing influence of the Roman law, the spread of written
procedure, the substitution of public for private prosecution in
criminal cases, and the introduction of torture from the ecclesiastical
into the secular courts had been quietly smoothing the way for the
persecution; and the written codes, which one by one embodied the
new juristic attitude, gave ever fresh emphasis to witchcraft as a
crime.[60] Quietly but steadily, as the religious fever waned and the
zeal of revolution gave place to the timorous lassitude of reaction,
the witchcraft panic and the horrors of the attendant persecution
spread through the lands which had been torn by the struggle.
The first voice raised against it was that of the Rhenish physician
Johann Weyer,[61] whose noble book “De praestigiis daemonum” saw the
light in 1563. It ushered in a second era of controversy. Slowly, here
and there, the burning words of Weyer stirred up a disciple, more or
less ardent: Ewich[62] and Neuwaldt[63] and Witekind[64] and Loos[65]
and Godelmann[66] and Anten[67] in Germany, Reginald Scot[68] and
Gifford[69] and Harsnet[70] and Cotta[71] in England. But they stirred
up adversaries tenfold more numerous and influential: Daneau[72] in
Switzerland, Bodin[73] and Crespet[74] and De l’Ancre[75] in France,
Erastus[76] and Bishop Binsfeld[77] and Scribonius[78] in Germany,
Remy[79] in Lorraine, Boguet[80] in Franche-Comté, Delrio[81] in the
Netherlands, Torreblanca[82] in Spain, and in Great Britain Bishop
Jewell and Perkins[83] and the royal inquisitor, James of Scotland
and of England,[84] with a multitude everywhere of lesser note or
later date. It was the golden age of the witchcraft literature, as
of witchcraft itself. Enterprising publishers sought in vain to sate
the public appetite by throwing together, in awkward folios or fat
duodecimos, all the books they could find on the subject.[85] The
news-letters and _Neue Zeitungen_, printed or written, which had
taken the place of the sermons and satires of the Reformation, as
the newspaper was soon in turn to take their own, carried to every
fireside, in rude rhyme and ruder wood-cut, the tale of the countless
burnings which planted charred stakes like shade-trees before city and
hamlet of the Continent, or of the prickings and swimmings and wakings
with which English and Scottish procedure consoled themselves for the
want of the rack. The murmur of protest, ever fainter, had all but died
out.[86] In France, where alone doubt throve, skeptics like Montaigne
and Charron were far too wise in their generation to embody their
incredulity in monographs; and even Gabriel Naudé, who in 1625 dealt
the superstition a sharp blow by the publication of his “Apologie pour
les grands personnages qui ont été faussement soupçonnés de magie,” had
the prudence to confine himself strictly to times at a safe distance
from the present. But, in 1631, the brave young Jesuit poet, Friedrich
von Spee--saint and martyr by a higher canonization than that of the
Church--dared to publish, though without his name and unknown to his
superiors, the eloquent “Cautio criminalis” which once more gave the
persecution pause. Based on his own experience as a confessor to the
witches, and attacking not the theory but only the procedure, it won
attention in quarters unreachable by polemic.
There followed an age of better omen. Steadily, but almost as quietly
as it had gathered strength during the Reformation, the delusion now
faded before the advance of that more Christian spirit of mingled
science and humanity which the world has too long stigmatized as
rationalism. In one territory after another the flames died out.
Jurists and theologians remained conservative, and such literature, of
sermon and opinion, as was devoted to witchcraft, was mainly on the
side of the superstition. From the universities a host of academic
dissertations, in law and theology, echoed the orthodox tenets of
the teachers--if, indeed, they were not the product of their pens.
But it was apparent that they were now on the defensive. Not less
significant as a symptom was the rapid growth of that literature
which found in the superstition only a means of selfish profit or
amusement: the collections of witch stories and devil stories which
pandered to popular curiosity and love of horror. In 1657 even the
older church herself, which had steadily put on her index of forbidden
books the works written against the persecution, found herself
constrained to issue a tardy _Instructio_[87] urging her inquisitors to
circumspection. In England alone, where Puritan bibliolatry had ensured
the dogma a longer tenure, and had found it an unexpected advocate in
Joseph Glanvill,[88] was the struggle for a moment serious and the
result doubtful; but the assaults of a Gaule,[89] a Filmer,[90] an
Ady,[91] a Wagstaffe,[92] a Webster,[93] were fast letting in the purer
daylight; and even Presbyterian Scotland was sure, however slowly, to
wake to it in due time. The New England panic at Salem was but a last
bright flicker of the ghastly glare which had so long made hideous the
European night.[94] Already, even before Spee, the Dutchman Greve[95]
had struck a blow at the root of the superstition on the Continent by
attacking the use of the torture, and now, in 1691, his countryman,
Balthasar Bekker, aimed one yet more deadly at its very heart by
denying, in his “Betooverde Wereld,” the personal agency of the Devil
in human affairs. And its period of silent decay came sharply to an
end, just at the close of the century, when, in 1701, the free-thinking
Halle professor, Christian Thomas (or Thomasius, as his Latin-writing
contemporaries preferred to call him), published in the name of a
student his pungent “Theses de crimine magiae.”[96]
So began for witchcraft the age of the “Aufklärung.” For a moment
its defenders, thus brought to bay, fought with tooth and nail. But,
as the taunts and jeers of its assailants grew ever louder and more
confident, they slunk back into obscurity. Only now and then, as
the century advanced, did some stranded theologian mutter in print
his grouty protest, or some over-hasty reformer stir up a buzz of
pamphlets by obtruding his rationalism into a last snoozing-place of
orthodoxy. The witch burnings and hangings grew fewer and fewer and
disappeared altogether, and with them the need of their justification.
The publishers of the witch stories learned to appeal to readers of
ever lower grades of intelligence or to throw into their tone a banter
which flattered the vanity of the class that gloats over the errors
of its fellows. A mass of lesser superstitions, galvanized into fresh
life by scribbling adventurers, gave refuge to those enlightened before
their time. And at last the storm of the French Revolution, destroying
torture-chamber and code as it swept over Europe, buried in their ruins
the witch-persecution and its literature, and did somewhat to clear the
air for that new scientific study of its psychology and history which
was to be the task of the nineteenth century.
Already, in 1712, Thomasius had devoted a thesis to the origin of the
persecution,[97] and before his death he was able to welcome the more
elaborate history by the English clergyman, Hutchinson,[98] whose
retrospect was, however, almost wholly confined to his own land and her
colonies. Before the middle of the eighteenth century, the Lutheran
divine, Hauber, had gathered what still remains the richest body of
materials for the study of the subject,[99] and in 1784 another German
pastor, Schwager, published the first volume of a general history of
the witch-trials.[100] Yet these were but beginnings. I could have
wished to close this hasty survey of the growth of the literature of
witchcraft with a more careful discussion of what our own century has
done towards its study; but my paper is already too long. I may barely
mention the bibliography of Grässe, which, with all its omissions and
inaccuracies, is still the best we have; the comprehensive narratives
attempted by Horst, and Scheltema, and Scott, and Scholtz, and Soldan,
and Wright, and Michelet, and Heppe; the more partisan contributions
of Görres, and Scherr, and Diefenbach, and Längin; the light thrown
upon it by the brilliant work in neighboring fields of Wächter,
and Maury, and Roskoff, and Buchmann, and Rydberg, and Conway, and
Baissac, and Meyer, and Lea. But of the histories of its career in
single lands, districts, towns, by a myriad of patient students, whose
researches will furnish the most precious of all stores for the future
historian,--of the biographies, all too few, of the heroes of the
struggle,--of the valuable chapters scattered through periodicals, and
proceedings, and local histories, and histories of civilization or
theology or law or medicine or literature or natural science, I cannot
so much as speak.
Yet, much as has been written on the subject, it is amazing how small
a proportion of it has been serious in aim or in method. Perhaps no
province of history has been so largely the domain of the sciolist and
the charlatan. From the “Formicarius” of Nider to the just-published
hodge-podge of Davenport Adams, it has been the prey of writers who
have sought to entertain more than to enlighten. As was pointed out
more than a decade ago by Friedrich Nippold,[101] there has been as
yet not an attempt at an exhaustive investigation of the history of
the witch-persecution. Even the noble book of Soldan-Heppe, which is
still beyond question the most thorough, makes little effort to utilize
other than printed sources, and of the latter it is for German lands
alone that the author’s material approached completeness. Of the origin
and nature of the delusion, we know perhaps enough; but of the causes
and paths of its spread, of the extent of its ravages, of its exact
bearing upon the intellectual and religious freedom of its times,
of the soul-stirring details of the costly struggle by which it was
overborne, we are lamentably ill-informed. The archives and libraries
of Europe--aye, and of many parts of America as well--abound in still
unpublished documents which would throw light upon these problems. The
labors of local antiquaries are every day opening fresh mines for a
more exhaustive history of witchcraft. When that history comes to be
written, may the collection which has suggested my paper be not without
its use; and may it aid in making clear to future generations why the
literature of witchcraft belongs not to folk-lore, but to theology.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] I need not say that the President White Library does not possess
them all; its lacunæ are many, and not unimportant. It has, however,
the largest collection, private or public, with which I am acquainted.
My estimate is a guess, based partly upon it, partly upon the
“Bibliotheca magica” of Grässe, partly upon my notes as to the gaps in
each; but it is hard to discriminate between books treating mainly of
witchcraft and those treating only largely or ostensibly of it.
[2] Notably out of the poetic opening verses of the sixth chapter of
Genesis, which always remained the proof-passage for the demonologic
system of the Church. On it had been based that mystical “book of
Enoch,” which exercised so striking an influence upon Jewish thought
during the centuries just before and just after the Christian era, and
indeed upon the writers of the New Testament themselves (Jude, for
example, cites it largely and by name), and which was treated by the
early Christians as wholly canonical. Hence came the legend of the fall
of the angels, so familiar to us through Milton, and a commonplace
in the older day. Of even more lasting influence was the demonologic
romance of Tobias, or Tobit, which is now classed by Protestants as
apocryphal, but which was cited by the earliest Christian writers with
the same freedom as any part of the Old Testament, and still retains
its place in the Catholic Bible. No book was so largely quoted by the
later Christian writers on diabolism and witchcraft. The whole theory
of exorcism indeed is mainly based on it; and, still more, the horrible
belief in _incubi_. Of importance also (besides all that could be
found in the books of our canon) were the demonologic passages of the
apocryphal “Wisdom of Solomon” and “Ecclesiasticus.” Tertullian cites
the latter, like any other book of Scripture, with the solemn “as
it is written” (_sicut scriptum est_). See Diestel, “Geschichte des
Alten Testaments in der christlichen Kirche”; Reuss, “Geschichte des
Alten Testaments”; and Emanuel Deutsch, “The Talmud” (in his “Literary
remains”).
[3] This impulse must have been powerfully aided by the current
translation of a familiar passage in the Psalms. Where we read
(Ps. xcvi, 5): “All the gods of the nations are idols,” the early
Church read: “All the gods of the nations are devils.” The passage
is constantly cited by the Fathers in this sense. Even Wiclif
translates: “Alle the goddis of hethene men ben feendis [fiends].”
[4] What could be more vivid than the story of the old hermit who
prayed God that he might see the demons, and would not be denied;
“and God opened his eyes, and he saw them, for just like bees do they
surround man, grating their teeth over him.”--“Verba Seniorum,” lib.
vi., libel. i., c. 11 (“Vitæ Patrum,” ii.).
[5] Only Archbishop Agobard, of Lyons (779-c. 841), a man in many ways
before his time, went so far as to write a book--what we should call a
pamphlet--upon the absurdity of the popular superstitions: his “Liber
contra insulsam vulgi opinionem de grandine et tonitruis.” The essay
“De magicis artibus” (perhaps the first Christian monograph on the
subject) by his learned contemporary and colleague, Archbishop Hrabanus
Maurus, of Mainz, is far more credulous, and, like most of that great
teacher’s work, mainly a compilation. Not forgotten by him are the
Scripture texts against witchcraft, beginning with the terrible “Thou
shalt not suffer a witch to live.” He treats the same theme in similar
fashion in his encyclopædic “De universo” and in his “Penitentiale.” It
was later in the same century that another great Frankish archbishop,
Hincmar of Rheims, found himself brought face to face with the problem
of magic, in his legal response on the divorce of King Lothaire (“De
divortio Lotharii regis et Tetbergae reginae”), three of the thirty
questions asked him involving it. He discussed the subject at much
length, and, though credulously enough, in the main sensibly.
[6] The source of the canon is, indeed, now a riddle. Its ascription
to the synod of Ancyra, which the Middle Age never questioned, is now
known to be a mere blunder. But, from its first appearance, in the
collection of Regino at the close of the ninth century, it became the
recognized dictum of the Canon Law upon this subject, and remained
unimpeached, even by those who devoted chapters to explaining it away,
until after the Reformation. It surely was no accident that it came to
light at the end of the same century in which Agobard wrote. Bishop
Burchard, of Worms (d. 1025), who followed Regino as a collector of
ecclesiastical law, and gave a whole book of his “Decreta” to decisions
“De incantatoribus et auguribus,” sets the canon _Episcopi_ at its
head. But this prominence in order it lost in the later compositions.
[7] It is true that the long discourse, put into Antony’s mouth (c.
15-20), on the power and wiles of the Devil and the way to resist him,
which may almost be called the first Christian monograph on diabolism,
may possibly be an interpolation; but it breathes the very spirit of
the Fathers, and the whole narrative is full of the Devil’s doings.
The popularity of the book throughout the Christian world is attested
by what Augustine tells us in his “Confessions,” and the part there
ascribed to it in his own conversion must have tended to increase
its influence. What a favorite its story was with the sculptors and
painters of the later Middle Ages we all know.
[8] True, Augustine taught, and the Church after him, that Satan could
do nothing save by the tacit consent of God; but the limitation was
scarcely more than nominal, since against sinners he was believed to be
given free hand, and only the immediate and incessant protection of the
Church could ensure safety. The carnal mind was powerless to recognize
him: did not the Scripture itself say that he could appear as an angel
of light? Nay, he often took the form of Christ himself, as more than
one hermit had testified.
[9] Chrysostom’s monograph, “De imbecilitate Diaboli,” is too
metaphysical to be reckoned here at all, as likewise is Anselm’s
“Dialogus de casu Diaboli” of a half-dozen centuries later.
[10] For illustration of this, one has but to open the “Vitae Patrum”
at random. Of the “Collationes” of Cassian, a book of the greatest
influence throughout the Middle Ages, especially in the monasteries,
“Collatio VII.,” “quae est prima abbatis Sereni,” and “Collatio VIII.,”
“quae est secunda abbatis Sereni,” deal mainly with diabolism and are
full of anecdote.
[11] Notably, of course, the famous one of Theophilus, ostensibly
written by one Eutychianus in the sixth century, but known to the
West through a Latin version made by a Naples deacon named Paulus,
probably toward the close of the ninth century. (It may be found, with
the metrical paraphrase ascribed to Bishop Marbod, in the Bollandist
“Acta Sanctorum” for 4th February. Better known in our day, though
not in hers, is its dramatization by the nun Hroswitha--one of many.)
Another, scarcely less popular in the Middle Ages, though strangely
overlooked by later writers, was the tale (first told in the “Life of
Basil” ascribed apocryphally to his contemporary, Bishop Amphilochius
of Iconium) of the senator’s valet who fell in love with his master’s
daughter, won her by signing away his soul to the Devil, and was
saved only through the aid of St. Basil, who forced the fiend to
surrender the contract. I find the story (it is a long one) first
told in the West by Hincmar of Rheims (d. 882) in his response “De
divortio Lotharii,” who credits it to Amphilochius. Its influence in
the Occident would seem, therefore, to be of about the same age as that
of the Theophilus legend, which, in several respects, is less like
the later witch-stories. After Hincmar the anecdote appears often. Of
modern writers on witchcraft, Roskoff alone mentions it, on the basis
of a vague allusion of Schwager’s; and Schwager had evidently sought
for it in vain, misunderstanding it to be in Basil’s “Dialogues.”
Amphilochius’ “Vita Basilii” may be found in the “Vitae Patrum,” and in
the Bollandist “Acta Sanctorum” (June, vol. iii.).
[12] In his “De septem donis,” tit. vii., cap. 34, sp. 5.
[13] In his “Dialogus miraculorum,” distinctio v.
[14] In his “Bonum universale de apibus,” cap. 54-56. The first of
these chapters is “De diabolo transfigurantis se in angelum lucis”; the
last, “De demonibus aërem perturbantibus.” Thomas was a Dominican, and
wrote, as he himself here tells us, in 1258.
[15] His “Liber revelationum de insidiis et versutiis daemonum adversus
homines” (in Pez, “Thesaurus,” I., ii.).
[16] _E.g._, Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, or John of Winterthur
(Vitoduranus).
[17] Of Vincent it is especially the “Speculum Historiale” that thus
abounds. To this great compilation the earliest writers on witchcraft
owed their precedents almost as largely as they owed their arguments to
Thomas Aquinas.
[18] “De draconibus” is the usual, but misleading, form of its Latin
title.