CHAPTER VI.

SORCERY AND OCCULT ARTS.

Few things are so indestructible as a superstitious belief once fairly

implanted in human credulity. It passes from one race to another and is

handed down through countless generations; it adapts itself successively

to every form of religious faith; persecution may stifle its outward

manifestation, but it continues to be cherished in secret, perhaps the

more earnestly that it is unlawful. Religion may succeed religion, but

the change only multiplies the methods by which man seeks to supplement

his impotence by obtaining control over supernatural powers, and to

guard his weakness by lifting the veil of the future. The sacred rites

of the superseded faith become the forbidden magic of its successor. Its

gods become evil spirits, as the Devas or deities of the Veda became the

Daevas or demons of the Avesta; as the bull-worship of the early Hebrews

became idolatry under the prophets, and as the gods of Greece and Rome

were malignant devils to the Christian Fathers.

Europe thus was the unhappy inheritor of an accumulated mass of

superstitions which colored the life and controlled the actions of every

man. They were vivified with a peculiar intensity by the powerful

conception of the Mazdean Ahriman--the embodiment of the destructive

forces of nature and the evil passions of man--which, transfused through

Judaism and adorned with the imaginings of the Haggadah, became a fixed

article of the creed as the fallen prince of angels, Satan, who drew

with him in rebellion half of the infinite angelic hosts, and

thenceforth devoted powers inferior only to those of God himself to the

spiritual and material perdition of mankind. Omnipresent, and well-nigh

omnipotent and omniscient, Satan and his demons were ever and everywhere

at work to obtain, by cunning arts, control over the souls of men, to

cross their purposes, and to vex their bodies. The food of these beings

was the suffering of the damned, and human salvation their most

exquisite torment. To effect their objects human agents were

indispensable, and Satan was always ready to impart a portion of his

power, or to consign a subordinate demon, to any one who would serve

him. Thus a dualistic system sprang up, less hopeful and inspiring than

that of Zarathustra Spitama, which in its vivid realization of the

ever-present and ever-acting Evil Principle, cast a sombre shadow over

the kindly teachings of Christ. Some even held that human affairs were

governed by demons, and this belief grew sufficiently prevalent to

induce Chrysostom to undertake its refutation. He admitted that they

were inspired with a fierce and irreconcilable hatred for man, with whom

they carried on an immortal war, but he argued that the evil of the

world was the just punishment inflicted by God.[402]

Man thus lived surrounded by an infinite world of spirits, good and bad,

whose sole object was his salvation or his perdition, and who were ever

on the watch to save him or to lure him to destruction. Thus was solved

the eternal problem of the origin of evil, which has perplexed the human

soul since it first began to think, and thus grew up a demonology of

immense detail which formed part of the articles of faith. Almost every

race has shared in such belief, whether the evil spirits were of

supernatural origin, as with the Mazdeans and Assyrians, or whether, as

with the Buddhists and Egyptians, they were the souls of the damned

seeking to gratify their vindictiveness. Although Greece and Rome had no

such distinctive class, yet had they peopled the world with a countless

number of genii and inferior supernatural beings, who were accepted by

Christianity and placed at the service of Satan. As theology grew to be

a science in which every detail of the dealings of God with man was

defined with the most rigid precision, it became necessary to determine

the nature and functions of the spirit world with exactitude, and the

ardent intellects which framed the vast structure of orthodoxy did not

shrink from the task. The numberless references to the character and

attributes of demons in patristic literature show how large a space the

subject occupied in the thoughts of men and the confidence which was

felt in the accuracy of knowledge concerning it.[403]

Origen informs us that every man is surrounded by countless spirits

eager to help or harm him. His virtues and good deeds are attributable

to good angels; his sins and crimes are the work of demons of pride and

lust and wrath, and of all passions and vices. Powerful as these are,

however, the human soul is still superior to them and can destroy their

capacity for evil; if a holy man baffles the spirit of lust who has

tempted him, the conquered demon is cast into outer darkness or into the

abyss, and loses his potency forever. This was received throughout the

Middle Ages as orthodox doctrine. Gregory the Great tells us how the nun

of a convent, walking in the garden, ate a lettuce-leaf without making

the cautionary sign of the cross, and was immediately possessed of a

demon. St. Equitius tortured the spirit with his exorcisms till the

unhappy imp exclaimed, "What have I done? I was sitting on the leaf and

she ate me;" but Equitius would listen to no excuse and forced him to

depart. Cæsarius of Heisterbach relates a vast number of cases proving

the perpetual interference of demons with human affairs, though he

asserts as a well-known fact that Satan drew with him only one tenth of

the hosts of heaven, and he proceeds to show, on the authority of

Gregory the Great, that at the Day of Judgment the saved will be nine

times as numerous as the devils, and of course the damned greatly more

in excess; yet at the death-bed of a monk of Hemmenrode fifteen thousand

demons gathered together, and at that of a Benedictine abbess more

assembled than there are leaves in the forest of Kottinhold. Thomas of

Cantimpré, though less profuse in his illustrative examples, is equally

emphatic in showing that man is surrounded with evil spirits, who lose

no opportunity to tempt, to seduce, to mislead, and to vex him. The

blessed Reichhelm, Abbot of Schöngau, about 1270, had received from God

the gift of being able to discern the aerial bodies of these creatures,

and often saw them as a thick dust, or as motes in a sunbeam, or as

thickly falling rain. He describes their numbers as so great that the

atmosphere is merely a crowd of them; all material sounds, water

falling, stones clashing, winds blowing, are their voices. Sometimes

they would materialize as a woman to tempt him, or as a huge cat or a

bear to terrify him, but their efforts were mostly directed to diverting

the thoughts from pious duties and contemplations, and to inciting to

evil passions, which they could well do, as an innumerable army was

assigned to each individual man. These enemies of man were ever on the

watch to take advantage of every unguarded thought or act. Sprenger

tells us that if an impatient husband says to a pregnant wife, "Devil

take you," the child will be subject to Satan; such children, he says,

are often seen; five nurses will not satisfy the appetite of one, and

yet they are miserably emaciated, while their weight is great. Thus man

was at all times exposed to the assaults of supernatural enemies,

striving to lead him to sin, to torture his body with disease, or to

afflict him with material damage. We cannot understand the motives and

acts of our forefathers unless we take into consideration the mental

condition engendered by the consciousness of this daily and hourly

personal conflict with Satan.[404]

It is true that all demons were not equally malignant. The converted

Barbarians of Europe could not wholly give up their belief in helpful

spirits, and as Christianity classed them all as devils, it was

necessary to find an explanation by suggesting that their characters

varied with the amount of pride and envy of God which they entertained

before the fall. Those who merely followed their companions and have

repented are not always malicious. Cæsarius tells us of one who

faithfully served a knight for a long while, saved him from his enemies,

and cured his wife of a mortal illness by fetching from Arabia lion's

milk with which to anoint her. This aroused the knight's suspicions, and

the demon confessed, explaining that it was a great consolation to him

to be with the children of men. Fearing to retain such a servitor, the

knight dismissed him, offering half of his possessions as a reward, but

the demon would accept only five sous, and these he returned, asking the

knight to purchase with them a bell and hang it on a certain desolate

church, that the faithful might be called to divine service on Sundays.

Froissart's picturesque narrative is well known of the demon Orton, who

served the Sieur de Corasse out of pure love, bringing to him every

night tidings of events from all parts of the world, and finally

abandoning him in consequence of his imprudent demand to see his

nocturnal visitor. Froissart himself was at Ortais in 1385, when the

Count of Foix miraculously had news of the disastrous battle of

Aljubarotta in Portugal the day after it occurred, and the courtiers

explained that he heard of it through the Sieur de Corasse. Thus, for

good or for evil, the barriers which divided the material from the

spiritual world were slight, and intercourse between them was too

frequent to excite incredulity.[405]

It was inevitable that this facility of intercourse should encourage

belief in the Incubi and Succubi who play so large a part in mediæval

sorcery, for such a belief has belonged to superstition in all ages. The

Akkads had their Gelal and Kiel-Gelal, the Assyrians their Lil and

Lilit, and the Gauls their Dusii, lustful spirits of either sex who

gratified their passions with men and women, while the Welsh legends of

the Middle Ages show the continuance of the belief among the Celtic

tribes. The Egyptians drew a distinction and admitted of Incubi but not

of Succubi. The Jews accepted the text concerning the sons of God and

daughters of men (Gen. VI. 1) as proving that fruitful intercourse could

occur between spiritual and human beings, and they had their legends of

the evil spirit Lilith, the first wife of Adam, who bore to him the

innumerable multitude of demons. The anthropomorphic mythology and

hero-worship of Greece consisted of little else, and the name of Satyr

has passed into a proverb. The simpler and purer Latin pantheon had yet

its Sylvans and Fauns, who, as St. Augustin tells us, "are commonly

called Incubi." The medical faculty in vain explained the belief by

Ephialtes or nightmare, and recommended for it belladonna rather than

exorcisms. Though St. Augustin, who did so much to transmit pagan

superstitions to succeeding ages, hesitates to believe in the

possibility of such powers on the part of aerial spirits, even he dares

not deny it, and though Chrysostom ridiculed it, other authorities

accepted it as a matter of course. Thus it came to be received as a

truth which few thought of disputing. In 1249 an incubus child was born

on the Welsh marches, which in half a year had a full set of teeth and

the stature of a youth of seventeen, while the mother wasted away and

died. The belief grew still more definite as perfected processes of

trial enabled judges to extort from their victims whatever confessions

they desired, such as that of Angèle de la Barthe, who, in the

Toulousain in 1275, admitted that she had habitual intercourse with

Satan, to whom, seven years before, at the age of fifty-three, she had

borne a son--a monster with a wolf's head and a serpent's tail, which

she fed for two years on the flesh of year-old babies whom she stole by

night, after which it disappeared; or those of the witches of Arras, in

1460, who were brought to confess that their demon lovers wore the

shapes of hares, or foxes, or bulls. Innocent VIII. asserts the

existence of such connections in the most positive manner, and Silvester

Prierias declares that to deny it is both unorthodox and

unphilosophical, and could only be prompted by sheer wantonness.[406]

Liaisons of this kind would be entered into with demons, and would be

maintained with the utmost fidelity on both sides for thirty or forty

years; and the connection thus established was proof against all the

ordinary arts of the exerciser. Alvaro Pelayo relates that in a nunnery

under his direction it prevailed among the nuns, and he was utterly

powerless to put a stop to it. In fact, it was peculiarly frequent in

such pious establishments. As a special crime it grew to have a special

name, and was known among canonists and casuists as Demoniality; and

Sprenger, whose authority in such matters is supreme, assures us that to

its attractiveness was due the alarming development of witchcraft in the

fifteenth century. The few who, like Ulric Molitoris, while admitting

the existence of Incubi, denied to them the power of procreation, were

silenced by the authority of Thomas Aquinas, who explained how, by

acting alternately as Succubus and Incubus, the demon could accomplish

the object, and by the indubitable facts that the Huns were sprung from

demons, and that an island in Egypt, or, as some said, Cyprus, was

peopled wholly by descendants of Incubi, to say nothing of the popular

legend which attributed such paternity to the prophet and enchanter,

Merlin. Into the physiological speculations by which these possibilities

were proved, it is not worth our while to enter. There is nothing fouler

in all literature than the stories and illustrative examples by which

these theories were supported.[407]

As Satan's principal object in his warfare with God was to seduce human

souls from their divine allegiance, he was ever ready with whatever

temptation seemed most likely to effect his purpose. Some were to be won

by physical indulgence such as that just alluded to; others by

conferring on them powers enabling them apparently to forecast the

future, to discover hidden things, to gratify enmity, and to acquire

wealth, whether through forbidden arts or by the services of a familiar

demon subject to their orders. As the neophyte in receiving baptism

renounced the devil his pomps and his angels,[408] it was necessary for

the Christian who desired the aid of Satan to renounce God. Moreover, as

Satan when he tempted Christ offered him the kingdoms of the earth in

return for adoration--"If thou therefore wilt worship me all shall be

thine" (Luke IV. 7)--there naturally arose the idea that to obtain this

aid it was necessary to render allegiance to the princes of hell. Thence

came the idea, so fruitful in the development of sorcery, of compacts

with Satan by which sorcerers became his slaves, binding themselves to

do all the evil they could encompass and to win over as many converts as

they could to follow their example. Thus the sorcerer or witch was an

enemy of all the human race as well as of God, the most efficient agent

of hell in its sempiternal conflict with heaven. His destruction, by any

method, was therefore the plainest duty of man.

This was the perfected theory of sorcery and witchcraft by which the

gentile superstitions inherited and adopted from all sides were fitted

into the Christian dispensation and formed part of its accepted creed.

From the earliest periods of which records have reached us there have

been practitioners of magic who were credited with the ability of

controlling the spirit world, of divining the future, and of interfering

with the ordinary operations of nature. When this was accomplished by

the ritual of an established religion it was praiseworthy, like the

augural and oracular divination of classic times, or the exorcism of

spirits, the excommunication of caterpillars, and the miraculous cures

wrought by relics or pilgrimages to noted shrines. When it worked

through the invocation of hostile deities, or of a religion which had

been superseded, it was blameworthy and forbidden. The Yatudhana, or

sorcerer of the Vedas, doubtless sought his ends through the invocation

of the Rakshasas and other dethroned divinities of the conquered Dasyu.

His powers were virtually the same as those of the mediæval sorcerer:

with his _yatu_, or magic, he could encompass the death of his enemies

or destroy their harvests and their herds; his _kritya_, or charmed

images and other objects, had an evil influence which could only be

overcome by discovering and removing them, exactly as we find it in the

Europe of the fifteenth century; while the counter-charms and

imprecations employed against him show that there was virtually no

difference between sacred and prohibited magic.[409] The same lesson is

taught by Hebrew tradition, which admitted that wonders could be wrought

by the _Elohim acherim_, or "other gods," as instanced in the contest

between Moses and the Chakamim, or wise men of Egypt. The Talmudists

inform us that when he changed his rod into a serpent Pharaoh laughed at

him for parading such tricks in a land full of magicians, and sent for

some little children who readily performed the same feat, but the

failure of Jannes and Jambres to cope with him when he came to the

plague of the lice was because their art would not extend to the

imitation of things smaller than a barley-corn. The connection between

their magic and the worship of false gods is seen in the legend that it

was Jannes and Jambres who fabricated for Aaron the golden calf. A

similar indication is seen in the Samaritan tradition that the falling

away of the Hebrews from the ancient faith was explicable by the magic

arts of Eli and Samuel, who studied them in the books of Balaam, gaining

thereby wealth and power, and seducing the people from the worship of

Jehovah.[410]

How great was the impression produced on the surrounding nations by the

powers of the Egyptian Chakamim is shown by the later Jews, who,

familiar as they were with the mysteries of the Magi and Chaldeans, yet

declared that of the ten portions of magic bestowed upon the earth, nine

had fallen to the lot of Egypt. That kingdom therefore furnishes

naturally enough the oldest record of a trial for sorcery, occurring

about 1300 B.C., showing that the use of magic was not regarded as

criminal of itself, but only when employed by an unauthorized person for

wrongful ends. The proceedings in the case recite that a certain

Penhaiben, a farm superintendent of cattle, when passing by chance the

Khen, or hall in the royal palace where the rolls of mystic lore were

kept, was seized with a desire to obtain access to their secrets for his

personal advantage. Procuring the assistance of a worker in stone named

Atirma, he penetrated into the sacred recesses of the Khen and secured a

book of dangerous formulas belonging to his master, Rameses III.

Mastering their use, he soon was able to perform all the feats of the

doctors of mysteries. He composed charms which, when carried into the

royal palace, corrupted the concubines of the Pharaoh; he caused hatred

between men, fascinated or tormented them, paralyzed their limbs, and in

short, as the report of the tribunal states, "He sought and found the

real way to execute all the abominations and all the wickedness that his

heart conceived, and he performed them, with other great crimes, the

horror of every god and goddess. Consequently he has endured the great

punishment, even unto death, which the divine writings say that he

merited."[411]

Hebrew belief, which necessarily served as a standard for orthodox

Christianity, drew from these various sources an ample store of magic

practitioners. There was the _At_, or charmer; the _Asshaph_,

_Kasshaph_, _Mekassheph_, the enchanter or sorcerer; the _Kosem_, or

diviner; the _Ob_, _Shoel Ob_, _Baal Ob_, the consulter with evil

spirits, or necromancer (the Witch of Endor was a _Baalath Ob_); the

_Chober Chaber_, or worker with spells and ligatures; the _Doresh el

Hammathim_, or consulter with the dead; the _Meonen_, or augur, divining

by the drift of clouds or voices of birds--the "observer of times" of

the A. V.; the _Menachesh_, or augur by enchantments; the _Jiddoni_, or

wizard; the _Chakam_, or sage; the _Chartom_, or hierogrammatist; the

_Mahgim_, or mutterers of spells; and in later times there were the

_Istaginen_, or astrologer; the _Charori_, or soothsayer; the _Magush,

Amgosh_, or enchanter; the _Raten_, or magus; the _Negida_, or

necromancer; and the _Pithom_, inspired by evil spirits. There was here

an ample field in which Christian superstition could go astray.

Greece contributed her share, although of strictly Goetic magic--the

invocation of malignant spirits or the use of illicit means for wrongful

ends--there was little need, in a religion of which the deities, great

and small, were subject to all the weaknesses of humanity, were ready at

any moment to inflict on man the direst calamities to gratify their love

or their spleen or their caprice, and could be purchased by a prayer or

a sacrifice to exercise their omnipotence irrespective of justice or

morality. In such a religion the priest exercises the functions which in

purer faiths are relegated to the sorcerer. Yet it is only necessary to

mention the names of Zetheus and Amphion, of Orpheus and Pythagoras, of

Epimenides, Empedocles, and Apollonius of Tyana to show that both

tradition and history taught the existence and power of thaumaturgy and

theurgy.[412] This theurgy was developed to its fullest extent in the

marvels related of the Neo-Platonists, thus directly influencing

Christian thought, which necessarily ascribed its miracles to the

invocations of demons.[413] Yet by the side of all this there was no

lack of Goetic magic, such as the legends attribute to the Cretan

Dactyls or Curetes, to the Telchines, to Medea, and to Circe.[414] This

is said to have received a powerful impetus in the Medic wars, when the

Magian Osthanes, who accompanied Xerxes, scattered the seeds of his

unholy lore throughout Greece. Plato speaks with the strongest

reprobation of the venal sorcerers who hire themselves at slender wages

to those desirous of destroying enemies with magic arts and

incantations, ligatures, and the figurines, or waxen images, which have

always been one of the favorite resources of malignant magic, and which

in Greece wrought their evil work by being set up in the cross-roads, or

affixed to the door of the victim or to the tomb of his ancestors.

Philtres, or love-potions, which would excite or arrest love at will

were among their ordinary resources. Even the triform Hecate was subject

to their spells; they could arrest the course of nature and bring the

moon to earth. The fearful rites which superstition attributed to these

sorcerers are indicated in one of the charges brought against Apollonius

of Tyana when tried before Domitian--that of sacrificing a child.[415]

In Rome the gods of the nether world furnished a link between the sacred

ceremonies of the priest and the incantations of the sorcerer, for while

they were objects of worship to the pious, they were also the customary

sources of the magician's power. Lucan's terrible witch, Erichtho, is a

favorite with Erebus; she wanders among tombs from which she draws their

shades; she works her spells with funeral-torches and with the bones and

ashes of the dead; her incantations are Stygian; gluing her lips to

those of a dying man, she sends her dire messages to the under-world.

Horace's Canidia and Sagana seek their power at the same source, and the

description of their hideous doings bears a curious resemblance to much

that sixteen centuries later occupied the attention of half the courts

in Christendom. It is the same throughout all the allusions to Latin

sorcery--the deities invoked are infernal, and the rites are celebrated

at night,[416] The identity of the means employed with those of modern

sorcery is perfect. When Germanicus Cæsar, the idol of the empire, was

doomed by the secret jealousy of Tiberius; when his subordinate in

command of the East, Cneius Piso, was commissioned to make way with him,

and Germanicus was stricken with mortal illness, it reads like a passage

in Grillandus or Delrio to see that his friends, suspecting Piso's

enmity, dug from the ground and the walls of his house the objects

placed there to effect his destruction--fragments of human bodies,

half-burned ashes smeared with corruption, leaden plates inscribed with

his name, charms, and other accursed things, by which, says Tacitus, it

is believed that souls may be dedicated to the infernal gods. The

ordinary feats of the witch could be more easily performed. A simple

incantation would blight the harvest or dry the running fountain, would

destroy the acorn on the oak and the ripening fruit on the bough. The

figurine, or waxen image, of the person to be assailed, familiar to

Hindu, Egyptian, and Greek sorcery, assumes in Rome the shape in which

we find it in the Middle Ages. Sometimes the name of the victim was

traced on it in letters of red wax. If a mortal disease was to be

induced in any organ, a needle was thrust in the corresponding part of

the image; or if he was to waste away in an incurable malady, it was

melted with incantations at a fire. The victim could moreover be

transformed into a beast--a feat which St. Augustin endeavors to explain

by dæmonic delusion.[417] It is observable that the terrible magician is

almost always an old woman--the _saga_, _strix_, or _volatica_--the

wise-woman or nocturnal bird or night-flyer--corresponding precisely

with the hag who in mediæval Europe almost monopolized sorcery. But the

male sorcerer, like his modern descendant, had the power of transforming

himself into a wolf, and was thus the prototype of the wer-wolves, or

_loups-garoux_, who form so picturesque a feature in the history of

witchcraft.[418]

The philtres, charms, and ligatures for exciting desire or preventing

its fruition, or for arousing hatred, which meet us at every step in

modern sorcery, were equally prevalent in that of Rome. The virtual

insanity of Caligula was attributed to powerful drugs administered to

him in a love-potion by Cæsonia, whom he married after the death of his

sister and concubine Drusilla, and so firm was the conviction of this

that when he was assassinated she was likewise put to death for having

thus brought the greatest calamities on the republic. That such a man as

Marcus Aurelius could be supposed to have caused his wife Faustina to

bathe in the blood of the luckless gladiator who was the object of her

affections before seeking his own embraces, while doubtless invented to

account for the character of his son Commodus, shows the profound belief

accorded to such arts. Appuleius found this to his cost when he was

tried for his life on the charge of having by incantations and sorcery

secured the affections of his bride Pudentilla, a woman of mature age

who had been fourteen years a widow. Had the court, like those of the

Middle Ages, enjoyed the infallible resource of torture, he would

readily have been forced to confession, with the attendant

death-penalty; but as there was no charge of treason involved, he was

free to disculpate himself by evidence and argument, and he

escaped.[419]

The severest penalties of the law, in fact, were traditionally directed

against all practitioners of magic. The surviving fragments of the

Decemviral legislation show that this dated from an early period of the

republic. With the spread of the Roman conquests, the introduction of

Orientalized Hellenism was followed by the magic of the East, more

imposing than the homelier native practices, arousing the liveliest fear

and indignation. In 184 B.C. the praetor L. Nævius was detained for four

months from proceeding to his province of Sardinia, by the duty assigned

to him of prosecuting cases of sorcery. A large portion of these were

scattered through the suburbicarian regions; the culprits had a short

shrift, and he manifested a diligence which Pierre Cella or Bernard de

Caux might envy, if the account be true that he condemned no less than

two thousand sorcerers. Under the empire decrees against magicians,

astrologers, and diviners were frequent, and from the manner in which

accusations of sorcery were brought against prominent personages the

charge would seem to have been then, as it proved in the fourteenth and

fifteenth centuries, one of those convenient ones, easy to make and hard

to disprove, which are welcome in personal and political intrigue. Nero

persecuted magic with such severity that he included philosophers among

magicians, and the cloak or distinctive garment of the philosopher was

sufficient to bring its wearer before the tribunals. Musonius the

Babylonian, who ranked next to Apollonius of Tyana in wisdom and power,

was incarcerated, and would have perished as intended but for the

exceptional robustness which enabled him to endure the rigors of his

prison. Caracalla went even further and punished those who merely wore

on their necks amulets for the cure of tertian and quartan fevers. The

darker practices of magic were repressed with relentless rigor. To

perform or procure the performance of impious nocturnal rites with the

object of bewitching any one was punished with the severest penalties

known to the Roman law--crucifixion or the beasts. For immolating a man

or offering human blood in sacrifices the penalty was simple death or

the beasts, according to the station of the offender. Accomplices in

magic practices were subjected to crucifixion or the beasts, while

magicians themselves were burned alive. The knowledge of the art was

forbidden as well as its exercise; all books of magic were to be burned,

and their owners subjected to deportation or capital punishment,

according to their rank. When the cross became the emblem of salvation,

it of course passed out of use as an instrument of punishment; with the

abolition of the arena the beasts were no longer available; but the

fagot and stake remained, and for long centuries continued to be the

punishment for more or less harmless impostors.[420]

With the triumph of Christianity the circle of forbidden practices was

enormously enlarged. A new sacred magic was introduced which superseded

and condemned as sorcery and demon-worship a vast array of observances

and beliefs, which had become an integral and almost ineradicable part

of popular life. The struggle between the rival thaumaturgies is

indicated already in Tertullian's complaint, that when in droughts the

Christians by prayers and mortifications had extorted rain from God, the

credit was given to the sacrifices offered to Jove; he challenges the

pagans to bring before their own tribunals a demoniac, when a Christian

will force the possessing spirit to confess himself a demon. The triumph

of the new system was typified in the encounter between St. Peter and

Simon Magus, when the flight through the air of the heathen theurgist

was arrested by the prayers of the Christian, and he fell with a

disastrous crash, breaking a hip-bone and both heels. If, as conjectured

by some modern critics, Simon Magus is the Petrine designation of St.

Paul, the partisans of the latter were not behindhand in recounting the

triumph of their leader over the older thaumaturgists, for when he

wrought wonders at Ephesus and the Jewish conjurers were put to shame,

then "many of them also which used curious arts brought their books

together and burned them before all men; and they counted the price of

them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver."[421]

Still more convincing was the incident which occurred to Marcus Aurelius

in the Marcomannic war when, in the territory of the Quadi, he was cut

off from water, so that his army was perishing from thirst. Though he

had persecuted the Christians, he had recourse to the intervention of

Christ, when a sudden tempest supplied the Romans abundantly with water,

while the lightning slew the Teutons and dispersed them, so that they

were readily slaughtered. When, finally, the new faith and the old met

in their death-grapple, Eusebius describes Constantine as preparing for

the struggle by calling around him his most holy priests and marching

under the shade of the sacred Labarum. Licinius on his side collected

diviners and Egyptian prophets and magicians. They offered sacrifices

and endeavored to learn the result from their deities. Oracles

everywhere promised victory; the sacrificial auguries were favorable;

the interpreters of dreams announced success. On the eve of the first

battle Licinius assembled his chief captains in a sacred grove where

there were many idols, and explained to them that this was to be the

decisive test between the gods of their ancestors and the unknown deity

of the barbarians--if they were vanquished it would show that their gods

were dethroned. In the ensuing combat the cross bore down everything

before it; the enemy fled when it appeared, and Constantine seeing this

sent the Labarum as an amulet of victory, wherever his troops were sore

bestead, and at once the battle would be restored. Defeat only hardened

the heart of Licinius, and again he had recourse to his magicians.

Constantine, on the other hand, arranged an oratory in his camp, to

which before battle he would retire to pray with the men of God, and

then sallying forth would give the signal for attack, when his troops

would slay all who dared to stand before them. So complete became the

trust enjoined in the efficacy of the invocation of God, that

enthusiasts denounced it as unworthy a Christian to rely upon human

prudence and sagacity in trouble. St. Nilus tells us that in cases of

sickness recourse is to be had to prayer, rather than to physicians and

physic; and St. Augustin, in his recital of miraculous cures beyond the

reach of science to effect, evidently regards the appeal to God and the

saints as far more trustworthy than all the resources of the medical

art.[422]

It was inevitable that the triumphant theurgy should set to work with

remorseless vigor to extirpate its fallen rival, as soon as it could

fully control the powers of the State. It was not so much the worship

and propitiation of the pagan gods that was first attacked, as the

thousand methods of divination and devices to avert evil which had

become ingrained in daily life--oracles and auguries and portents and

omens and soothsaying. Their efficacy was the work of Satan to deceive

and seduce mankind, and their use was the direct or indirect invocation

of demons. To attempt to foretell the future in any way was sorcery, and

all sorcery was the work of the devil; and it was the same with the

amulets and charms, the observance of lucky and unlucky days, and the

innumerable trivial superstitions which amused the popular imagination.

Zeal for the repression of every species of magic was not only

stimulated by the conviction that it was an essential part of the

conflict with a personal Satan, but by obedience to the commands of God

in the Mosaic law. The awful words, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch

(_Mekasshepha_) to live" have rung through the centuries, and have

served as a justification for probably more judicial slaughter than any

other sentence in the history of human jurisprudence. Rabbinical Judaism

enforced this relentlessly in spite of the kindliness of the rabbis and

their extreme indisposition to shed human blood. One of the first

reforms of the Pharisees on coming into power after the persecution of

Alexander Jannai was the abrogation of the Mosaic penal code in favor of

milder laws. The leader in the revolution was Simon ben Shetach, who in

organizing the Sanhedrin refused the presidency and conferred it on

Judah ben Tabbai. The latter chanced to condemn a man for false witness

on the testimony of a single person, though the law required two, when

Simon reproached him as blood-guilty, and he resigned. Yet this man, so

scrupulous about taking life, had no hesitation in hanging at Ascalon

eighty witches in a single day. According to the Mishna, the Pithom and

the Jiddoni are to be stoned, and false diviners and those who read the

future in the name of idols are to be hanged, while the Talmud adds that

he who learns a single word from a Magus is to be put to death.

Christianity thus derived from Judaism the complete assurance that in

ruthlessly exterminating all thaumaturgy save that of its own priesthood

it was obeying the unquestioned command of God.[423]

The machinery of the Church was therefore early set to work to exhort

and persuade the faithful against a sin so unpardonable and apparently

so ineradicable; and as soon as it gathered its prelates together in

councils it commenced to legislate for the suppression of such

practices.[424] When it grew powerful enough to influence the head of

the State it procured a series of cruel edicts which doubtless were

effective in destroying the remains of tolerated paganism as well as in

suppressing the special practices so offensive in the eyes of the

orthodox. It was not difficult to commence with the time-honored

practices of divination, for, although these had formed part of the

machinery of State, yet when the State was centred in the person of its

master, any inquiry into the future of public affairs was an inquiry

into the fortune and fate of the monarch, and no crime was more

jealously repressed and more promptly punished than this. Even so warm

an admirer of ancestral institutions as Cato the Elder had long before

warned his paterfamilias to forbid his _villicus_, or farm-steward, to

consult any haruspex or augur. These gentry had a way of breeding

trouble, and it boded no good to the master when the slaves were

over-curious and too well-informed. In the same spirit Tiberius

prohibited the secret consultation of haruspices. Constantine was thus

serving a double purpose when, as early as 319, he threatened with

burning the haruspex who ventured to cross another's threshold, even on

pretext of friendship; the man who called him in was punished with

confiscation and deportation, and the informer was rewarded. Priest and

augur were only to celebrate their rites in public. Even this was

withdrawn by Constantius in 357; any consultation with diviners was

punishable with death, and the practitioners themselves, whether of

magic or augury, or the expounding of dreams, when on trial were

deprived of exemption from torture and could be subjected to the rack or

the hooks to extort confession.[425] Under this Constantius organized an

active persecution throughout the East, in which numbers were put to

death upon the slightest pretext; passing among the tombs at night was

evidence of necromancy, and hanging a charm around the neck for the cure

of a quartan was proof of forbidden arts. The witch-trials of modern

times were prefigured and anticipated. Under Julian there was a

reaction, and in 364 Valentinian and Valens proclaimed freedom of

belief; in 371 they included in this the old religious divination, while

capital punishment was restricted to magic arts, but the persecution in

the East under Valens in 374, following the conspiracy of Theodore,

obliterated all distinction. Commencing with those accused of magic, it

extended to all who were noted for letters or philosophy. Terror reigned

throughout the East; all who had libraries burned them. The prisons were

insufficient to contain the prisoners, and in some towns it was said

that fewer were left than were taken. Many were put to death, and the

rest were stripped of their property. In the West, under Valentinian,

persecution was not so sweeping, but the laws were enforced, at least in

Rome, with sufficient energy to reduce greatly the number of sorcerers;

and a law of Honorius, in 409, by its reference to the bishops, shows

that the Church was beginning to participate with the State in the

supervision over such offenders.[426] Yet that even the faithful could

not be restrained from indulging in these forbidden practices is seen in

the earnest exhortations addressed to them by their teachers, and the

elaborate repetition of proofs that all such exhibitions of supernatural

power were the work of demons.[427]

The Eastern Empire maintained its severity of legislation and continued

with more or less success to repress the inextinguishable thirst for

forbidden arts. From some transactions under Manuel and Andronicus

Comnenus in the latter half of the twelfth century we learn that

blinding was a usual punishment for such offences, that the classical

forms of augury had disappeared to be replaced by necromantic formulas,

and that such accusations were a convenient method of disposing of

enemies.[428]

In the West the Barbarian domination introduced a new element. The

Ostrogoths, who occupied Italy under Theodoric, were, it is true, so

much Romanized that, although Arians, they adopted and enforced the laws

against magic. Divination was classed with paganism and was capitally

punished. About the year 500 we hear of a persecution which drove all

the sorcerers from Rome, and Basilius, the chief thaumaturge among them,

although he escaped at the time, was burned on venturing to return. When

Italy fell back into the hands of the Eastern Empire the prosecution of

these offences seems to have been committed to the Church as a part of

its ever-widening sphere of influence and jurisdiction.[429]

The Wisigoths who took possession of Aquitaine and Spain, although less

civilized than their Eastern brethren, were profoundly influenced by

Roman legislation, and their princes issued repeated enactments to

discourage the forbidden arts. It is significant of the Barbarian

tenderness for human life, however, that the penalties were greatly less

than those of the savage Roman edicts. A law of Recared declares

magicians and diviners and those who consult them to be incapable of

bearing testimony; one of Egiza places these crimes in the class for

which a slave could be tortured against his accused master; and several

edicts of Chindaswind provide, for those who invoke demons or bring hail

upon vineyards, or use ligatures or charms to injure men or cattle or

harvests, scourging with two hundred lashes, shaving, and carrying

around for exhibition in the vicinage, to be followed by imprisonment.

Those who consult diviners about the health of the king or of others are

threatened with scourging and enslavement to the fisc, including

confiscation, if their children are accomplices; judges who have

recourse to divination for guidance in doubtful cases are subjected to

the same penalties, while the simple observation of auguries is visited

with fifty lashes. These provisions, which were mostly carried with

little change into the Fuero Juzgo, remained the law of the Spanish

Peninsula until the Middle Ages were well advanced. They show how

impossible it had been to eradicate the old superstitions, and that the

pagan observances and auguries still flourished among all classes, which

is confirmed by the denunciations of the Spanish councils and

ecclesiastical writers. They have a further significance as presenting a

middle term between the severity of Rome and the laxity of the other

Barbarian tribes.[430]

These latter were ruder and less amenable to Roman influences. In their

conversion the Church rendered an immense service to humanity, and it

did not dare to interfere too rudely with the customs and prejudices of

its unruly neophytes; in fact, it harmonized its own with them as far as

it could, and became considerably modified in consequence. This process

is well symbolized in the instructions of Gregory the Great to Augustin,

his missionary to England, to convert the pagan temples into churches by

sprinkling them with holy water, so that converts might grow accustomed

to their new faith by worshipping in the wonted places, while the

sacrifices to demons were to be replaced by processions in honor of some

saint or martyr, when oxen were to be slaughtered, not to propitiate

idols, but in praise of God, to be eaten by the faithful. In this

assimilation of Christianity to paganism it is not surprising that

Redwald, King of East Anglia, after his conversion set up in his temple

two altars, at one of which he worshipped the true God and at the other

offered sacrifices to demons.[431] The similar adoption by Christian

magic of elements from that which it supplanted is well illustrated by

the hymn, or rather incantation, known as the Lorica of St. Patrick, in

which the forces of nature and the Deity are both summoned as by an

enchanter to the assistance of the thaumaturge. A MS. of the seventh

century assures us that "Every person who sings it every day with all

his attention on God shall not have demons appearing to his face. It

will be a safeguard to him against sudden death. It will be a protection

to him against every poison and envy. It will be an armor to his soul

after his death. Patrick sang this at the time that the snares were set

for him by Loegaire, so that it appeared to those who were lying in

ambush that they were wild deer and a fawn after them."[432]

The Barbarians brought with them their own superstitions, whether

transmitted from the prehistoric Aryan home, or acquired in the course

of their wanderings, and they readily added to these such as they found

among their new subjects, whether they were under the ban of the Church

or not. They had parted from their brethren before the religious

revolution caused by Zoroaster's dualistic conception of Hormazd and

Ahriman, and their religions have no trace of a personification of the

Evil Principle. Loki, its nearest representative, was rather tricky than

incorrigible. It is true that there were evil beings, such as the

Hrimthursar, Trolls, or Jotuns, the Jotun-dragon Fafnir, the wolf

Fenrir, Beowulf's Grendal and others, but they were none of them

analogous to the Mazdean Ahriman or the Christian Satan, and when the

Teutonic races adopted the latter they came to represent him, as Grimm

well points out, rather as the blundering Jotun than as the arch-enemy.

To how late a period the ancestral conceptions of the spirit-world

prevailed in Germany may be seen in the answers of the learned Abbot

John of Trittenheim to the questions of Maximilian I.[433]

The Teutonic tribes had little to learn from the conquered peoples in

the wide circle of the magic arts, for in no race, probably, has the

supernatural formed a larger portion of daily life, or claimed greater

power over both the natural and the spiritual worlds. Divination in all

its forms was universally practised. Gifted beings known as _menn

forspair_ could predict the future either by second sight, or by

incantations, or by expounding dreams. Still more dreaded and respected

was the Vala or prophetess, who was worshipped as superhuman and

regarded as in some way an embodiment of the subordinate Norns or Fates,

as in the case of Veleda, Aurinia, and others who, as Tacitus assures

us, were regarded as goddesses, in accordance with the German custom of

thus venerating their fatidical women; and in the Volüspa the Vala

communes on equal terms with Odin himself.[434] For those not thus

specially gifted there was ample store of means to forecast the future.

The most ordinary method was by necromancy, either by placing under the

tongue of a corpse a piece of wood carved with appropriate runes, or by

raising the shades of the dead precisely as the Witch of Endor did with

Samuel, or as was practised in Rome.[435] The lot was also used

extensively, whether to ascertain the divine will, like the Hebrew Urim

and Thummim, or to ascertain the future with a bundle of sticks,

apparently almost identical with the Chinese trigrams and

hexagrains.[436] As in Greece and Rome, sacrifices were often offered

to the gods in expectation of a response; auguries were drawn from the

flight of birds as carefully as by the Roman augurs, while the sacred

chickens were replaced with white horses consecrated to the gods, whose

motions and actions when harnessed to the sacred chariot were carefully

observed.[437] Saving the Etruscan _haruspicium_ and the omens derived

from sacrificial victims, Hellenic and Italiote divination had little to

distinguish it from that of the Teutons.

As regards magic, scarce any limit can be set to the power of the

sorcerer. In no literature do his marvels fill a larger space, nor are

the feats of wizard or witch received with more unquestioning faith than

in what remains to us of the sagas of the North. Especially were the

lands around the Baltic regarded as the peculiar home and nursery of

sorcerers, whither people from every land, even from distant Greece and

Spain, resorted for instruction or for special aid. In Adam of Bremen's

"Churland" every house was full of diviners and necromancers, while the

people of northern Norway could tell what every man in the world was

doing, and could perform with ease all the evil deeds ascribed to

witches in Holy Writ. Both Saxo Grammaticus and Snorri Sturlason, in

their widely differing Euhemeristic accounts of the origin of the Æsir,

or gods, agree that the founders of the Northern kingdom owed their

deification solely to the magic skill which led their subjects and

descendants to venerate them as divine.[438]

Norse magic was roughly classified into that which was legitimate, or

_galder_, and that which was wicked, or _seid_. To the former belonged

the infinite powers of runes, whether sung as incantations or carved as

talismans and amulets. Their invention was attributed to the ancient

Hrimthursar or Jotuns, and it was his profound knowledge of this magic

lore which enabled Odin to achieve his supremacy. Runes it was that kept

the sun upon his course and maintained the order of nature. All runes

were mingled together in the sacred drink of the Æsir, whence were

derived their supernatural attributes, and some have been allowed to

reach man, which were carefully classified and studied.[439] As an

adjunct of these was the _seidstaf_, or wand, so indispensable to the

magician of all races. The Icelandic Yala Thordis had one of these known

as Hangnud, which would deprive of memory him whom it touched on the

right cheek and restore it with a touch on the left cheek. Philtres and

love-potions, causing irresistible desire or indifference or hatred,

were among the ordinary resources of Norse magic. Pricking with the

sleep-thorn produced magic sleep for an indefinite time. Magicians could

also throw themselves into a deep trance, while the spirit wandered

abroad in some other form: women who were accustomed to do this were

called _hamleypur_, and if the _ham_, or assumed form, were injured, the

hurt would be found on the real body--a belief common to almost all

races.[440] The adept, moreover, could assume any form at will, as in

the historical case of the wizard who in the shape of a whale swam to

Iceland as a spy for Harold Gormsson of Denmark, when the latter was

planning an expedition thither; or two persons could exchange

appearances, as Signy did with a witch-wife, or Sigurd with Gunnar, when

Brynhild was deceived into marrying the latter.[441] Enchanted swords

that nothing could resist, enchanted coats that nothing could penetrate,

caps of darkness which, like the Greek helm of Pluto, rendered the

wearer invisible, are of frequent occurrence in Norse legendary

history.[442]

All this was more or less lawful magic, while the impious sorcery known

as _seid_ or _trolldom_ was based on a knowledge of the evil secrets of

nature or the invocation of malignant spirits, such as the Jotuns and

their troll-wives. _Seid_ is apparently derived from _sjoda_, to seethe

or boil, indicating that its spells were wrought by boiling in a caldron

the ingredients of the witches' hell-broth, as we see it done in

Macbeth. It was deemed infamous, unworthy of men, and was mostly left to

women, known as _seid konur_, or seid wives, and as "riders of the

night." In the oldest text of the Salic law, which shows no trace of

Christian influence, the only allusion to sorcery is a fine imposed for

calling a woman a witch, or for stigmatizing a man as one who carries

the caldron for a witch.[443] Scarce any limit was assigned to the power

of these sorcerers. One of their most ordinary feats was the raising and

allaying of tempests, and to such perfection was this brought that storm

and calm could be enclosed in bags for use by the possessor, like those

which Æolus gave to Ulysses. As Christianity spread, this power gave

rise to trials of strength between the old and the new religion, such as

we have seen when Constantine overcame Licinius. St. Olaf's first

expedition to Finland barely escaped destruction from a dreadful tempest

excited by the Finnish sorcerers. Olaf Tryggvesson was more fortunate in

one of his missionary raids, when he defeated Raud the Strong and drove

him to his fastness on Godo Island in the Salten Fiord--a piece of water

whose fierce tidal currents were more dreaded than the Maelström itself.

Repeated attempts to follow him were vain, for, no matter how fair was

the weather outside, inside Raud maintained a storm in which no ship

could live. At length Olaf invoked the aid of Bishop Sigurd, who

promised to test whether God would vouchsafe to overcome the devil.

Tapers and vestments and holy water and sacred texts were too much for

the evil spirits; the king's ships sailed into the fiord with smooth

water around them, though everywhere else the waves ran high enough to

hide the mountains: Raud was captured, and, as he obstinately refused

baptism, Olaf put him to the most cruel death that his ingenuity could

devise.[444]

The sorcerer also had endless power of creating illusions. A beleaguered

wizard could cause a flock of sheep to appear like a band of warriors

hastening to his assistance. Yet this would appear superfluous, since by

his glances alone he could convulse nature and cause instant death.

Gunhild, who married King Eric Blood-Axe, says of the two Lap sorcerers

who taught her magic: "When they are angry the very earth turns away in

terror and whatever living thing they look upon falls dead." When she

betrayed them to Eric she cast them into a deep sleep and drew sealskin

bags over their heads, so that Eric and his men could despatch them in

safety. Similarly when Olaf Pa surprised Stigandi asleep he drew a skin

over the wizard's head. There chanced to be a small hole in it through

which Stigandi's glance fell upon the grassy slope of an opposite

mountain, whereupon the spot was torn up with a whirlwind and living

herb never grew there again.[445]

One of the most terrifying powers of the witch was her fearful

cannibalism, a belief which the Teutons shared with the Romans. This is

referred to in some of the texts of the Salic law and in the legislation

of Charlemagne, and the unlimited extent of popular credulity with

regard to it is seen in an adventure of Thorodd, an envoy of St. Olaf,

who saw a witch-wife tear eleven men to pieces, throw them on the fire,

and commence devouring them, when she was driven off.[446]

The _trolla-thing_, or nocturnal gathering of witches, where they danced

and sang and prepared their unholy brewage in the caldron, was a

customary observance of these wise-women, especially on the first of May

(St. Walpurgis' Night), which was the great festival of pagandom.[447]

We shall see hereafter the portentous growth of this, which developed

into the Witches' Sabbat. It is a feature common to the superstition of

many races, the origin of which cannot be definitely assigned to any.

That the practice of this impious sorcery was deemed infamous is clear

from the provision of the Salic law, already alluded to, imposing a fine

of eighty-nine sols for calling a free woman a witch without being able

to prove it. Yet the mere addiction to it in pagan times was not a penal

offence, and penalties were only inflicted for injuries thus committed

on person or property. In extreme cases, where death was encompassed,

there seems to have been a popular punishment of lapidation, which was

the fate incurred, after due sentence, by three noted sorcerers, Katla

and Kotkel and Grima. The codified laws of the barbarians, however,

never prescribed the death penalty, fines being the universal

retribution for crime, and in a later text of the Salic law two hundred

sols is designated for the witch who eats a man. Yet individual cases

can be found of persecution, such as that by Harald Harfaager, whose

early experience had inspired him with intense hatred of the art. One of

his sons, Rögnvald Rettilbein, received from him the government of

Hadeland, where he learned sorcery and became a great adept; so when

Vitgeir, a noted wizard of Hordeland, was ordered by Harald to abandon

his evil ways he retorted:

"The danger surely is not great,

From wizard born of mean estate,

When Harald's son in Hadeland,

King Rögnvald, to the art lays hand."

Rögnvald's wrong-doing being thus betrayed, Harald lost no time in

despatching Eric Blood-Axe, his son by another wife, who promptly burned

his half-brother in a house, along with eighty other sorcerers--a piece

of practical justice which we are told met with general popular

applause.[448]

* * * * *

Such were the beliefs and practices of the races with which the Church

had to do in its efforts to obliterate paganism and sorcery. There was

little difference between the provinces which had belonged to the empire

and the regions over which Christianity began for the first time to

spread, for in the former the conquerors and the conquered were imbued,

as we have just seen, with superstitions nearly akin. The exchange of

imperial for barbarian rule worked the same result as to sorcery as that

related in a former chapter with regard to the persecution of heresy,

though it must be borne in mind that, while heresy almost disappeared in

the intellectual hebetude of the times, sorcery grew ever more vigorous.

Its suppression was practically abandoned. As mentioned above, the

earliest text of the Salic law provides no general penalty for it. In

subsequent recensions, besides the fine imposed for cannibalism, some

MSS. have clauses imposing fines for bewitching with ligatures and

killing men with incantations--in the latter case, with the alternative

of burning alive--but even these disappear in the _Lex Emendata_ of

Charlemagne, possibly in consequence of the legislation of the

Capitularies described below. The Ripuarian code only treats murder by

sorcery like any other homicide, to be compounded for by the ordinary

wer-gild, or blood-money, and for injuries thus inflicted it provides a

fine of one hundred sols, to be avoided by compurgation with six

conjurators. The other codes are absolutely silent on the subject.[449]

As under the Frankish rule laws were personal and not territorial, the

Gallo-Roman population was still governed by the Roman law, but

evidently there was no attempt made to enforce it. Gregory of Tours

relates for us several miracles to prove the superiority of the

Christian magic of relics and invocation of saints over the popular

magic of the conjurer, which indicate that the first impulse of the

people in case of accident or sudden sickness was to send for the

nearest _ariolus_, or practitioner of forbidden arts, and that the

profession was exercised openly and without fear of punishment, in spite

of repeated condemnations by the councils of the period. How little such

persons had to fear is seen in the case of a woman of Verdun, who

professed to be a soothsayer and to discover stolen goods. She was so

successful that she drove a thriving trade, purchased her freedom of her

master, and accumulated a store of money. At length she was brought

before Bishop Ageric, who only treated her for demoniacal possession

with exorcisms and inunctions of holy oil, and finally discharged

her.[450]

Occasionally, of course, cases occurred in which the unrestrained

passions of the Merovingians wreaked savage cruelty on those who had

incurred their ill-will, but these were exceptional and outside of the

law. When Fredegonda lost two children by pestilence, her stepson Clovis

was accused of causing it by sorcery. The woman designated as his

accomplice was tortured until she confessed, and was burned, although

she retracted her confession, after which Chilperic delivered his son

Clovis to Fredegonda, who caused him to be assassinated. When,

subsequently, another son, Thierry, died in 584, Mummolus, the royal

favorite, whom Fredegonda disliked, was accused of having caused it by

incantations. Thereupon she seized some women of Paris, and by scourging

and torture forced them to confess themselves sorceresses who had caused

numerous deaths, including that of Thierry, whose soul was accepted in

place of that of Mummolus. Some of these poor wretches were simply put

to death, others she burned, and others she broke on the wheel.

Chilperic then caused Mummolus to be tortured by suspension with his

arms tied behind his back, but he only confessed to having obtained from

the women philtres and ointments to secure the favor of the king and

queen. Unluckily he said to the executioner on being taken down, "Tell

the king that I feel no ill from what has been done." On hearing this

Chilperic exclaimed, "Is he really a sorcerer that this does not hurt

him?" and had him stretched on a rack and scourged with leathern thongs

till the executioners were exhausted. Mummolus finally begged his life

of Fredegonda, but was stripped of his possessions and sent in a wagon

to his native city, Bordeaux, where he died on his arrival. Cases like

this throw light on the beliefs of the period, but not upon its judicial

routine.[451]

The Lombards in Italy fell to a greater degree under Roman influence,

and towards the close of their domination adopted general laws of some

severity against the practice of sorcery, irrespective of the injury

committed. The sorcerer was to be sold as a slave beyond the province,

and the price received was divided between the judge and other

officials, according to their respective merits in the prosecution: if

through bribes or pity the judge refused to condemn, he was mulcted in

his whole wer-gild, or the amount of his blood-money, and half as much

if he neglected to discover a sorcerer who was found out by another. The

penalty for consulting a sorcerer, or for not informing on him, or for

performing incantations, was half the wer-gild of the offender. At the

same time the grosser superstitions were rejected, and Rotharis forbade

putting sorceresses to death, under the popular belief that they could

devour men internally.[452]

In the long anarchy which accompanied the fall of the Merovingians, all

respect for the Church, its precepts and observances, was well-nigh lost

throughout the Frankish kingdoms. One of the incidents of

reconstruction, as the Carlovingian dynasty slowly emerged, and as St.

Boniface, under papal authority, sought to restore the Church, was the

suppression of Bishop Adalbert, who taught the invocation of the angels

Uriel, Raguel, Tubuel, Inias, Tubuas, Sabaoc, and Simiel. Adalbert was

venerated as a saint, and the clippings of his nails and hair were

treasured as relics. Repeated condemnations at home had no effect on

this false worship of angels, and Pope Zachary held, in 745, a synod in

Rome which declared it to be a worship of demons, as the only angels

whose names are known are Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. Yet this

superstition took so firm a hold upon the people that it was long before

it could be eradicated; indeed, it seems to be alluded to, even in the

middle of the tenth century, by Atto of Vercelli.[453] When such was the

condition of the Church, no suppression of sorcery was to be looked for.

Among the instructions to Boniface and his fellow-missionaries was the

eradication of all pagan observances, including divination, sorcery, and

cognate superstitions. As the Church became reorganized, councils were

held in 742 and 743, in which Church and State united in prohibiting

them, although only a moderate fine was threatened, but the

ecclesiastical jurisdiction over such offences was established by

ordering the bishops to make yearly visitations of their sees to

suppress paganism and the forbidden arts. Boniface, however, complained

to Zachary that when the Frank or German visited Rome he saw there,

openly practised, the things which they were laboriously endeavoring to

suppress at home. The first of January was celebrated with pagan dances;

women wore amulets and ligatures, and publicly offered them for sale.

The pope could only reply that these things had long ago been

prohibited, but as they had broken out afresh he had forbidden them

again--but we may be assured without success.[454]

In the Carlovingian reconstruction which followed, efforts were made to

suppress all superstitious arts, and they were treated with gradually

increasing severity, but still with comparative lenity. The most

vigorous legislation was an edict of Charlemagne in 805, which confides

the matter to the Church, and orders the archpriest of each diocese to

investigate all who were accused of divination or sorcery, apparently

permitting moderate torture to obtain confession, and keeping the

culprits in prison until they amend. In his efforts to christianize

Saxony, on the one hand Charlemagne punished with death all who burned

witches and ate them, under the belief so widely spread that they ate

men, and on the other hand all soothsayers and sorcerers were made over

to the Church as slaves. During this period, moreover, and for a couple

of centuries following, the parallel legislation of the Church,

inflicting spiritual penalties, was singularly mild, although the

different penitentials vary so much that it is impossible to deduce any

system from them. That which passes under the name of Theodore of

Canterbury, and was of general authority, only prescribes a penance of

twoscore days or a year for sorcery, or, if the offender is an

ecclesiastic, three years, but it orders seven years for placing a child

on a roof or in an oven to cure it of fever, and Ecbert of York

indicates five years for the same practice. There evidently was no

settled rule, but the most systematic code is that of Gaerbald, who was

Bishop of Liége about the year 800. He orders all offenders to be

brought before him for trial, and enacts seven years' penance and

liberal almsgiving for committing homicide by means of sorcery, seven

years without almsgiving for rendering the victim insane, five years and

almsgiving for consulting diviners or practising augury from birds,

seven years for sorcerers who bring on tempests, three years and

almsgiving for honoring sorcerers, one year for sorcery to excite love,

provided it did not result in death, but if the offender was a monk, the

penalty was increased to five years. Another penitential of the period

prescribes twoscore days or a year for divination or diabolical

incantations, but seven years if a woman threatens another with sorcery,

to be reduced to four if she is poor. In 829 the Council of Paris

attributes the misfortunes of the empire to the prevalence of crime, and

especially of sorcery; it quotes the savage provisions of the Mosaic

law, and enumerates at considerable length the evil deeds of the

offenders--how men are rendered insane by philtres and love-potions, how

tempests and hail are induced, how harvests and milk and fruits are

transferred from their lawful owners, and how the future is predicted,

but it indicates no penalties, and only asks the secular rulers to

punish these crimes sharply. Similarly Erard, Archbishop of Tours, in

838 uttered a general prohibition, but only threatened public penance

without indicating details. All that we can gather from this confused

legislation, from the collections known as the Capitularies, and from

the speculations and arguments of Rabanus Maurus and Hincmar of Reims,

is that every species of divination and sorcery, Roman and Teutonic, was

rife; that it was held to derive its power directly from Satan; that the

Church was wholly unable to deal with it; that secular legislation

threatened only moderate penalties, and that these were for the most

part wholly unenforced.[455]

Yet, outside of the organized machinery of the Church and State, there

was a rough popular justice--a sort of Lynch law--which handled

individual offenders with scant ceremony. A chance allusion about this

period to Gerberga, who was drowned by the Emperor Lothair in the river

Arar, "as is customary with sorcerers," indicates that much was going on

not provided for in the Capitularies. The same is seen in a curious

statement by St. Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, who waged such

ineffectual battle with many of the superstitions of the time. One of

these, as we have seen, was that tempests could be caused by sorcery--a

belief which the Church at first pronounced heretical because it

inferred the Manichæan dualistic theory, which placed the visible world

under the control of Satan, but which it finally accepted as orthodox,

and Thomas Aquinas proved that, with the permission of God, demons could

bring about perturbations of the air. Agobard tells us that the belief

in his province was universal, among all ranks, that there was a region

named Magonia, whence ships came in the clouds and carried back thither

the harvests destroyed by hail, the Tempestarii, as these sorcerers were

called, being paid by the Magonians for bringing on the storms. Whenever

the rumbling of thunder was heard it was a customary remark that a

sorcerer's wind was coming. These Tempestarii carried on their nefarious

trade in secrecy, but there was a recognized class of practitioners who

professed to be able to neutralize them, and were regularly paid for

doing so with a portion of the crops, which came to be known as the

"canonical portion," and men who paid no tithes and gave nothing in

charity were regular in contributing to these impostors. On one occasion

three men and a woman were seized, charged with being Magonians who had

fallen from one of their aerial ships. A meeting of the people was

summoned, before whom the prisoners were brought in chains, and they

were promptly condemned to be stoned to death, when Agobard himself came

to the rescue, and after prolonged argument succeeded in procuring their

liberation. A similar instance of extra-judicial action was seen when a

destructive murrain invaded the herds, and the story spread that it was

caused by Grimoald, Duke of Benevento, who, out of enmity to

Charlemagne, sent emissaries to scatter a magic powder on the mountains

and fields and streams. As Agobard says, every inhabitant of Benevento,

with three wagons apiece, could not have sprinkled a territory so

extensive as that affected, but nevertheless large numbers of wretches

were captured and put to death on the charge of being concerned in the

matter. When he adds that it was marvellous that these persons confessed

their pretended crime, and could not be prevented from bearing false

witness against themselves, either by scourging, torture, or the fear of

death, we learn the means adopted to secure conviction; and in this

early and irregular instance of the use of torture we see a

foreshadowing of the time when all the extravagant absurdities of the

Witches' Sabbat were, by the same efficacious methods, eagerly

confessed, and the confessions persisted in to the stake. We see also

what an atmosphere of superstitious terror pervaded the life of

Europe.[456]

Carlovingian civilization was but a brief episode in the darkness of

those dreary centuries. In the disorder which accompanied the

breaking-up of the empire, the organization of feudalism, and the

founding of the European monarchies, although the Church was quietly

attributing to itself the functions and the jurisdiction on which were

based its subsequent claims of theocratic supremacy, it took no

efficient steps to destroy the kingdom of Satan, though his agents the

diviners and sorcerers were as numerous as ever. The Council of Pavia in

850 merely prescribed penance during life for sorceresses who undertook

to provoke love and hatred, leading to the death of many victims. There

may have been an occasional explosion of popular cruelty, such as

indicated by the brief mention in a doubtful MS. of the burning of a

number of sorcerers in Saxony in 914, but in fact the Church came almost

virtually to tolerate them. About the middle of the tenth century Bishop

Atto of Vercelli felt it necessary to revive and publish anew a

forgotten canon of the Fourth Council of Toledo, which threatened with

degradation and perpetual penance in a monastery any bishop, priest,

deacon, or other ecclesiastic who should consult magicians or sorcerers

or augurs. Atto, however, was a puritan, who endeavored to resist the

general demoralization of the age. How little repugnance was felt for

the forbidden arts is seen in the fact that the reputation for

necromantic skill gained in Spain did not prevent the election of

Gerbert of Aurillac to the archiepiscopal sees of Reims and Ravenna, and

finally to the papacy itself; while as late as 1170 we have seen an

archbishop of Besançon have recourse to an ecclesiastic skilled in

necromancy to aid him in detecting some heretics.[457]

In fact, the Church occupied an inconsistent attitude. Occasionally it

took the enlightened view that these beliefs were groundless

superstitions. An Irish council of the ninth century anathematizes any

Christian who believes in the existence of witches, and forces him to

recant before admitting him to reconciliation. Similarly, in 1080,

Gregory VII. in writing to Harold the Simple of Denmark, strongly

reproves the custom of attributing to priests and women all tempests,

sickness, and other bodily misfortunes: these are the judgments of God,

and to wreak vengeance for them on the innocent is only to provoke still

more the divine wrath. More generally, however, the Church admitted

their truth and sought, though with little energy, to repress them with

spiritual censures. This halting position is well illustrated by the

canons of Burchard, Bishop of Worms, in the early part of the eleventh

century, where sometimes it is the belief in the existence of sorcery

that is penanced, and sometimes it is the practice of the art. If

confessors, moreover, followed Burchard's instructions and interrogated

their penitents in detail as to the various magic processes which they

might have performed, it could only result in disseminating a knowledge

of those wicked arts in a most suggestive way. At the same time

Burchard, like the other canonists, Regino of Pruhm and Ivo of Chartres,

gave an ample store of prohibitory canons drawn from the early councils

and the writings of the fathers, showing that the reality of sorcery was

freely admitted as well as the duty of the Church to combat it. So

implicit was the belief in magic powers that the Church conceded the

dissolution of the indissoluble sacrament of matrimony when the

consummation of marriage was prevented by the arts of the sorcerer, and

exorcisms and prayers and almsgiving and other ecclesiastical remedies

proved powerless for three years to overcome the power of Satan. Guibert

of Nogent relates, with pardonable pride, that although this occurred

when his father and mother were married, through the malice of a

stepmother, yet his mother resisted all persuasion to avail herself of a

divorce, although the impediment continued for seven years, and the

spell was broken at last, not by priestly ministrations, but by an

ancient wise-woman. Such a cause was alleged when Philip Augustus

abandoned his bride, Ingeburga of Denmark, on their marriage-day, and

Bishop Durand, in his _Speculum Juris_, tells us that these cases were

of daily occurrence. Even so enlightened a man as John of Salisbury airs

his learning in describing all the varieties of magic, and is careful to

define that if sorcerers kill men with the violence of their spells it

is through the permission of God; while Peter of Blois, if he shows

himself superior to the vulgar belief in omens, admits the potency of

Satanic suggestiveness in the darker forms of magic.[458]

With this universal belief in sorcery and in its diabolic origin, there

seems to have been no thought of enforcing the severity of the laws.

About 1030, Poppo, Archbishop of Trèves, sent to a nun a piece of his

cloak of which to make him a pair of shoes to be worn in saying mass.

She bewitched them so that when he put them on he found himself dying

of love for her. He resisted the desire and gave the shoes to one of his

chief ecclesiastics, who experienced the same effect. The experiment was

tried with like result on all the principal clergy of the cathedral, and

when the evidence was overwhelming the fair offender was condemned

simply to expulsion from the convent, while Poppo himself expiated his

transient passion by a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It was felt,

however, that the discipline of the nunnery must be dangerously lax, and

the other nuns were given the option of adopting a stricter rule or of

dispersion. They chose the latter, and were replaced with a body of

monks. When, in 1074, a revolt in Cologne forced the archbishop to fly,

it is related among the excesses of the triumphant rebels that they

threw from the walls and killed a woman defamed for having crazed a

number of men by magic arts. That was regarded as a crime which three

centuries later would have been a manifestation of praiseworthy zeal.

About the same time a council in Bohemia warns the faithful not to have

recourse in their troubles to sorcerers; but it only prescribes

confession and repentance and to abstain from a repetition of the

offence.[459]

Still, the accusation of sorcery was felt to be damaging, and as it was

easy to bring and hard to disprove, it was bandied about somewhat

recklessly. It was not enough for Berenger of Tours to be compelled to

abjure his notions concerning transubstantiation, but he was stigmatized

as the most expert of necromancers. In the bitter strife of Gregory

VII., with the empire, when, in 1080, the Synod of Brescia deposed him

and elected Wiberto of Ravenna as antipope, one of the reasons alleged

against him was that he was a manifest necromancer--an art which he was

supposed to have learned in Toledo. The manner in which partisanship

availed itself of this method of attack is curiously illustrated by the

opposing accounts given of Liutgarda, niece of Egilbert, Archbishop of

Trèves, at this period. He was a resolute imperialist, and accepted his

pallium from Wiberto, after which he made Liutgarda abbess of a convent

in his diocese. The account of his episcopate is written by a

contemporary; one MS., which is doubtless the genuine one, describes

her as a cultured and exemplary woman, who ruled her nunnery in the

service of God for forty years, leaving a happy memory behind her;

another MS. of the same chronicle calls her a blasphemous witch and

sorceress, under whose government the convent was almost ruined. After

the Church had triumphed over the empire, it is easy to understand why

such an interpolation should have been made.[460]

While thus the ancient laws against sorcery were practically falling

into desuetude on the Continent, the legislation of the Anglo-Saxons

shows that in England _lyblac_ or witchcraft was the object of greater

solicitude. About the year 900 the laws of Edward and Guthrum class

witches and diviners with perjurers, murderers, and strumpets, who are

ordered to be driven from the land, with the alternatives of reforming,

of being executed, or of paying heavy fines--a provision which was

repeatedly re-enacted by succeeding monarchs to the time of Cnut.

Athelstan soon after decreed that when death was caused by _lyblac_, and

the perpetrator confessed it, he should pay with his life; if he denied,

he underwent the triple ordeal: failing in this he was imprisoned for

four months, after which his kinsmen could release him on paying the

wer-gild of the slain, the heavy fine of one hundred and twenty

shillings to the king, and giving security for his good behavior.

Towards the middle of the tenth century, Edward the Elder denounced

perpetual excommunication for _lyblac_ unless the offender repented. In

the compilation known as the Laws of Henry I. murder by sorcery

forfeited the privilege of redemption by paying wer-gild, and the

perpetrator was handed over to the kinsmen of the slain, to be dealt

with at their pleasure. For minor injuries thus caused, redemption was

allowed as in other cases. When the accused denied, he was tried before

the bishop, thus subjecting this offence to ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

This severity seems to have changed with the Norman Conquest, for

William the Conqueror, when besieging the Island of Ely, by advice of

Ivo Taillebois placed at the head of his army a sorceress whose

incantations were expected to paralyze the resistance of the defenders.

Unluckily for the scheme, Hereward of Burgh made a flank attack on the

invaders, and, setting fire to the reeds, burned the sorceress and all

who were with her.[461]

When Olaf Tryggvesson, early in the eleventh century, endeavored to

christianize Norway, he recognized the sorcerers as the most formidable

enemies of the faith, and handled them unsparingly. At a Thing, or

assembly, in Viken, he proclaimed that he would banish all who could be

proved to deal with spirits or in witchcraft, and this he followed up

with proceedings somewhat rigorous. He ransacked the district and had

all the sorcerers brought together; he gave them a great feast with

plenty of liquor, and when they were drunk he had the house fired, so

that none escaped save Eyvind Kellda, a grandson of Harald Harfaager,

and a peculiarly obnoxious wizard, who climbed through the smoke-hole in

the roof. In the spring Olaf celebrated Easter on Kormt Island, when

thither came Eyvind in a long ship fully manned with sorcerers. Landing,

they put on caps of darkness, which rendered them invisible, and

surrounded themselves with a thick mist, but when they came to

Augvaldsness, where King Olaf lay, it became clear day and they were

stricken with blindness, so that they wandered helplessly around till

the king's men seized them and brought them before him. He had them

bound and placed on a rock which was bare only at low water, and Snorri

Sturlason says that in his time it was still known as the Skerry of

Shrieks. Another pious act related of Olaf illustrates both the methods

requisite to spread the gospel among the rugged heroes of Norway and one

of the explanations given by the Christians of the powers of sorcerers.

Olaf captured Eyvind Kinnrif, a noted sorcerer, and sought to convert

him, but in vain. Then a pan of fire was placed upon his belly, which he

stoically endured until he burst asunder before asking its removal.

Regarding this tardy request as a sign of yielding, Olaf asked him

"Eyvind, wilt thou now believe in Christ?" "No," replied Eyvind, "I can

take no baptism, for I am an evil spirit placed in a man's body by

Lapland sorcery, because in no other way could my father and mother

have a child," and with that he died. Yet in the earliest Icelandic

code, the Grágás, compiled probably in 1118, there is no mention of

sorcery, which seems to have been left to the spiritual courts; while in

the contemporary ecclesiastical body of law the punishment of magic arts

is only three years' exile, unless injury or death to man or beast has

been wrought, when it is perpetual. In either case the accused is

entitled to trial before twelve good men and true.[462]

Elsewhere throughout Europe, by the end of the twelfth century, the

repression of sorcery seems to have been well-nigh abandoned by both

secular and ecclesiastical authorities. This was not because its

practice had been either given up or rendered lawful. In 1149 we find

Abbot Wibald of Corvey accusing Walter, one of his monks, of using

diabolical incantations. The cause which led Alexander III., in 1181, to

monopolize for the Holy See the canonization of saints was that the

monks of the Norman abbey of Gristan were addicted to magic, and by its

means endeavored to gain the reputation of working miracles; during the

absence in England of the abbot, the prior one day got drunk at dinner

and struck with a table-knife two of his monks, who retaliated by

beating him to death, and he perished unhouselled, yet by evil arts the

monks succeeded in inducing the people to adore him as a saint until

Bishop Arnoul of Lisieux reported the truth to Alexander. So easily were

such offences condoned that in the case of a priest who, to recover

something stolen from his church, employed a magician and looked into an

astrolabe, Alexander only ordered the punishment of a year's suspension,

and this decision was embodied by Gregory IX. in the canon law as a

precedent to be followed. This method of divination involved the

invocation of spirits, and was wholly unlawful, yet it was employed

without scruple. John of Salisbury, who died in 1181, relates that when

he was a boy he was given to a priest to be taught the psalms. His

instructor mingled with his sacred functions the practice of

catoptromancy, and once made use of his pupil and an older scholar to

look into the polished basin, after due conjurations and the use of the

holy chrism. John could see nothing, and was relieved from further

service of the kind, but his comrade discerned shadowy forms and thus

was a more useful subject. Thus the forbidden arts flourished with but

slender repression, and in this period of virtual toleration they worked

little evil, save perhaps an occasional case of poisoning in a

love-potion.[463]

It might be expected that this toleration would cease as the human mind

awakened and in its gropings began to cultivate with increased assiduity

the occult sciences, in the endeavor to penetrate the secrets of nature;

as scholastic theology developed itself into a system which sought to

frame a theory of the universe; as the revived study of the Roman law

brought again into view the imperial edicts against sorcery, and as the

spiritual courts became effectively organized for their enforcement. Yet

the development of persecution was wonderfully slow. The Church had a

real and a dangerous enemy to combat in the threatening growth of

heresy, and had little thought to bestow on a matter which did not

endanger the power and privileges of the hierarchy. An occasional

council, like those of Rouen in 1189 and of Paris in 1212, denounced the

practitioners of magic, but there was no defined penalty, and only

excommunication was threatened against them. Yet there was a popular

idea that, like heresy, burning was the appropriate punishment, as in

the case, about the same period, of a young cleric of Soest named

Hermann, who, when vainly tempted by an unchaste woman, was accused by

her of magic arts, was condemned and burned. In the flames he sang the

Ave Maria until silenced by a blazing stick thrust into his mouth by a

kinsman of the accuser; but his innocence shone forth in the miracles

wrought at his grave, and a chapel was built over it which stood as a

warning against such inconsiderate zeal.[464]

Cæsarius of Heisterbach, to whom we owe this incident, has an ample

store of marvels which show that superstition was as active as ever,

that men were eager to gain what advantage they could from intercourse

with Satan, and that such practices were virtually unrepressed. He tells

of a certain ecclesiastic named Philip, a celebrated necromancer, dead

only a few years previous, apparently without trouble from Church or

State. A knight named Henry of Falkenstein, who disbelieved in demons,

applied to him to satisfy his doubts. Philip obligingly drew a circle

with a sword at a cross-roads and muttered his spells, when, with a

tumult like rushing waters and roaring tempests, the demon came, taller

than the trees, black, and of a most fearful aspect. The knight kept

within the charmed circle and escaped immediate ill, but lost his color,

and remained pallid during the few years in which he survived. A priest

undertook the same experience, but became frightened and allowed himself

to be dragged out of the circle; he was so injured that he died on the

third day, whereupon Waleran of Luxembourg piously confiscated his

house, showing that immunity was not always to be reckoned on.[465]

Compacts with Satan were also not infrequent. The heretics burned at

Besançon in 1180 were found to have such compacts inscribed on little

rolls of parchment under the skin of their armpits. It would be

difficult to find any historical fact of the period apparently resting

on better authority than the story of Everwach, who was still living as

a monk of St. Nicholas at Stalum when Cæsarius described his adventures

as related by eye-witnesses. He had been steward of Theodoric, Bishop of

Utrecht, whom he served faithfully. Accused of malversation, he found

some of his accounts missing, and in despair he invoked the devil,

saying, "Lord, if thou wilt help me in my necessity I will do homage to

thee and serve thee in all things." The devil appeared, and Everwach

accepted his conditions of renouncing Christ and the Virgin and paying

him homage, after which the accounts were proved without difficulty.

Thenceforth Everwach was in the habit of openly saying, "Those who serve

God are wretched and poor, but they who believe in the devil are

prosperous," and he devoted himself to the study of magic arts. It shows

how lax was the discipline of the time, when, in his zeal for Satan, he

bitterly opposed Master Oliver, the Scholasticus of Cologne, who

preached the cross in Utrecht, and on being reproved sought to slay him,

being only prevented by a sickness of which he died. He was plunged into

hell and subjected to the indescribable torments of the damned, but the

Lord pitied him, and he returned to life on the bier at his own funeral.

Thenceforth he was a changed man. In company with Bishop Otto of Utrecht

he made the pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, inflicting on himself all

manner of austerities, and on his return gave his property to the Church

and entered the convent at Stalum. There is another story, of a

spendthrift young knight near Liége, who, after squandering his fortune,

was induced by one of his peasants to appeal to Satan. On the promise of

wealth and honors he renounced allegiance to God and rendered regular

feudal homage to Satan; the latter, however, required him to also

renounce the Virgin, and this he refused to do, wherefore, on his

repenting, he was pardoned at her intercession.[466]

These instances, which could readily be multiplied, will suffice to show

the tendency of popular thought and belief at this period. It is true

that Roger Bacon, who was in so many things far in advance of the age,

argued that much of magic was simply fraud and delusion; that it is an

error to suppose that man can summon and dismiss malignant spirits at

will, and that it is much simpler to pray directly to God because demons

can influence human affairs only through God's permission. Even Bacon,

however, in asserting the uselessness of charms and spells, gives as his

reason that their efficacy depended on their being made under certain

aspects of the heavens, the determination of which was very difficult

and uncertain. Bacon's partial incredulity only indicates the

universality of the belief in less scientific minds, and, in view of the

activity assigned to Satan in seeking human agents and servitors, and

the ease with which men could evoke him and bind themselves to him, the

supineness of the Church with regard to such offences is remarkable. The

terrible excitement aroused by the persecution of the Stedingers and of

Conrad of Marburg's Luciferans must indubitably have given a stimulus to

the belief in demonic agencies. Thomas of Cantimpré tells us that he had

from Conrad, the Dominican provincial, as happening to one of Conrad of

Marburg's Luciferans, the well-known story that the heretic, endeavoring

to convert a friar, conducted him to a vast palace where the Virgin sat

enthroned in ineffable splendor surrounded by innumerable saints; but

the friar, who had provided himself with a pyx containing a consecrated

host, presented it to the Virgin with a demand that she should adore her

Son, when the whole array vanished in darkness. Yet this excitement left

behind it a reaction which rather created indisposition to further

persecution. Pierre de Colmieu, afterwards Cardinal of Albano, when

Archbishop of Rouen, in 1235, included invoking and sacrificing to

demons and the use of the sacraments in sorcery only among the cases

reserved to the bishops for granting absolution; and the cursory

allusion to the subject by Bishop Durand in his _Speculum Juris_ shows

that, for at least a half-century later, the subject attracted little

attention in the ecclesiastical courts. A synod of Anjou, in 1294,

declares that according to the canons priests should expel from their

parishes all diviners, soothsayers, sorcerers, and the like, and laments

that they were permitted to increase and multiply without hindrance, to

remedy which all who know of such persons are ordered to report them to

the episcopal court, in order that their horrible malignity may be

restrained.[467]

Still more remarkable is the indifference of secular jurists and

lawgivers during the thirteenth century, when the jurisprudence of

Europe was developing and assuming definite shape. In England there is a

strong contrast with the Anglo-Saxon period in the silence respecting

sorcery in Glanvill, Bracton, the Fleta, and Britton. The latter, in

describing the circuits of the sheriffs, gives an elaborate enumeration

of the offences about which they are to make inquisition, including

renegades and misbelievers, but omitting sorcery, and the same omission

is observable in the minute instructions given by Edward I. to the

sheriffs in the Statute of Ruddlan in 1283, although Peter, Bishop of

Exeter, in his instructions to confessors in 1287, mentions sorcerers

and demon-worshippers among the criminals to whom they are to assign

penance. It is true that Horn's _Myrror of Justice_ classes sorcery and

heresy together as _majestas_, or treason to the King of Heaven, and we

may assume that both were liable to the same penalty, though neither

were actively prosecuted. It is the same with the mediæval laws of

Scotland as collected by Skene. The _Iter Camerarii_ embodies detailed

instructions for the inquests to be held by the royal chamberlain in his

circuits, but in the long list of crimes and misdemeanors requiring

investigation there is no allusion to sorcery or divination.[468]

It is nearly the same in French jurisprudence. The _Conseil_ of Pierre

de Fontaines and the so-called _Établissements_ of St. Louis contain no

references to sorcery. The _Livres de Jostice et de Plet_, though based

on the Roman law, makes no mention of it in its long list of crimes and

penalties, although incidentally an imperial law is said to apply to

those who slay by poisons or enchantments. Beaumanoir, however, though

he seems only to know of sorcery employed to excite love, tells us that

it is wholly under ecclesiastical jurisdiction; its practitioners err in

the faith, and thus are justiciable by the Church, which summons them to

abandon their errors, and in case of refusal condemns them as

misbelievers. Then secular justice lays hold of them and inflicts death

if it appears that their sorcery may bring death on man or woman, while

if there is no danger of this, it imprisons them until they recant. Thus

sorcery is heresy cognizable by the Church only, and punishable when

abjured only by penitence; yet, when the obstinate sorcerer is handed

over to the secular arm, in place of being burned like a Waldensian

refusing to swear, the character of his heresy is weighed by the secular

court, and if its intent be not homicide he is simply imprisoned until

he recants, showing that sorcery was treated as the least dangerous form

of heresy. Beaumanoir's assertion of ecclesiastical jurisdiction is

confirmed by a contemporaneous decision of the Parlement of Paris in

1282, in the case of some women arrested as sorceresses in Senlis and

tried by the maire and jurats. The Bishop of Senlis claimed them, as

their offence pertained to his court; the magistrates asserted their

jurisdiction, especially as there had been cutting of skin and effusion

of blood, and the Parlement, after due deliberation, ordered the women

delivered to the spiritual court. Yet, though this was the law at the

time, it did not long remain so. Under the ancestral systems of criminal

practice, when conviction or acquittal in doubtful cases depended on the

ordeal or the judicial duel or on compurgation, the secular courts were

poorly equipped for determining guilt in a crime so obscure, and they

naturally abandoned it to the encroachments of the spiritual tribunals.

As the use of torture, however, gradually spread, the lay officials

became quite as competent as the ecclesiastical to wring confession and

conviction from the accused, and they speedily arrogated to themselves

the cognizance of such cases. At the South, where the Inquisition had

familiarized them with the use of torture at an earlier period, we

already, in 1274 and 1275, hear of an inquest held and of wizards and

witches put to death by the royal officials in Toulouse. In the North,

the trials of the Templars accustomed the public mind to the use of

torture, and demonstrated its efficiency, so that the lay courts

speedily came to have no hesitation in exercising jurisdiction over

sorcery. In 1314 Petronille de Valette was executed in Paris as a

sorceress. She had implicated Pierre, a merchant of Poitiers, and his

nephew Perrot. They were forthwith put to the ban and their property

sequestrated, but at the place of execution Petronille had exculpated

them, declaring them innocent on the peril of her soul. They hastened to

Paris and purged themselves, and the Parlement, May 8, 1314, ordered the

Seneschal of Poitou to withdraw the proceedings and release the

property. Sorcery was now beginning to be energetically suppressed, and

henceforth we shall see it occupy the peculiar position of a crime

justiciable by both the ecclesiastical and secular courts.[469]

Spain had been exposed to a peculiarly active infection. The fatalistic

belief of the Saracens naturally predisposed them to the arts of

divination; they cultivated the occult sciences more zealously than any

other race, and they were regarded throughout Europe as the most skilled

teachers and practitioners of sorcery. In the school of Cordoba there

were two professors of astrology, three of necromancy, pyromancy, and

geomancy, and one of the _Ars Notoria_, all of whom lectured daily.

Arabic bibliographers enumerate seven thousand seven hundred writers on

the interpretation of dreams, and as many more who won distinction as

expounders of goetic magic. Intercourse with the Saracens naturally

stimulated among the Christians the thirst for forbidden knowledge, and

as the Christian boundaries advanced, there was left in the conquered

territories a large subject population allowed to retain its religion,

and propagate the beliefs which had so irresistible an attraction. It

was in vain that, in 845, Ramiro I. of Asturias burned a large number of

sorcerers, including many Jewish astrologers. Such exhibitions of

severity were spasmodic, while the denunciation of superstitions in the

councils occasionally held indicate the continued prevalence of the evil

without the application of an effective remedy. Queen Urraca of Castile,

in the early part of the twelfth century, describes her former husband,

Alonso el Batallador of Aragon, as wholly given to divination and the

augury of birds, and about 1220, Pedro Muñoz, Archbishop of Santiago,

was so defamed for necromancy that by order of Honorius III. he was

relegated to the hermitage of San Lorenzo. The ancient Wisigothic Law,

or Fuero Juzgo, was for a time almost lost sight of in the innumerable

local _fueros_ which sprang up, until in the eleventh century it was

rehabilitated by Fernando I. of Castile. In Aragon, Jayme I., el

Conquistador, in the thirteenth century, when recasting the Fuero of

Aragon and granting the Fuero of Valencia, introduced penalties for

sorcery similar to those of the Fuero Juzgo.[470] Thus the Wisigothic

legislation was practically in force until, about 1260, Alonzo the Wise,

of Castile, issued his code known as the _Siete Partidas_, in which all

branches of magic are treated as completely under the secular power and

in a fashion singularly rationalistic. There is no allusion to heresy or

to any spiritual offence involved in occult science, which is to be

rewarded or punished as it is employed for good or evil. Astrology is

one of the seven liberal arts; its conclusions are drawn from the

courses of the stars as expounded by Ptolemy and other sages; when an

astrologer is applied to for the recovery of lost or stolen goods, and

designates where they are to be found, the party aggrieved has no

recourse against him for the dishonor inflicted, because he has only

answered in accordance with the rules of his art. But if he is a

deceiver, who pretends to know that whereof he is ignorant, the

complainant can have him punished as a common sorcerer. These sorcerers

and diviners who pretend to reveal the future and the unknown by augury,

or lots, or hydromancy, or crystallomancy, or by the head of a dead man,

or the palm of a virgin, are deceivers. So are necromancers who work by

the invocation of evil spirits, which is displeasing to God and

injurious to man. Philtres and love-potions and figurines, to inspire

desire or aversion, are also condemned as often causing death and

permanent infirmity, and all these practitioners and cheats are to be

put to death when duly convicted, while those who shelter them are to be

banished. But those who use incantations for a good purpose, such as

casting out devils from the possessed, or removing ligatures between

married folk, or for dissolving a hail-cloud or fog which threatens the

harvests, or for destroying locusts or caterpillars, are not to be

punished, but rather to be rewarded.[471]

Italy affords us the earliest example of mediæval legislation on the

subject. In the first half of the twelfth century the Norman king of the

two Sicilies, Roger, threatened punishment for compounding a

love-potion, even though no injury resulted from it. The next recorded

measure is found in the earliest known statutes of Venice, by the Doge

Orlo Malipieri in 1181, which contain provisions for the punishment of

poisoning and sorcery. Frederic II. was accused by his ecclesiastical

adversaries of surrounding himself with Saracenic astrologers and

diviners, whom he employed as counsellors, and who practised for his

benefit all the forbidden arts of augury by the flight of birds and the

entrails of victims, but though Frederic shared the universal belief of

his age in keeping in his service a corps of astrologers with Master

Theodore at their head, and was addicted to the science of physiognomy,

he was too nearly a sceptic to have faith in vulgar sorcery. His

reputation merely shared the fate of that of his _protégé_, Michael

Scot, who translated for him philosophical treatises of Averrhoes and

Avicenna. In his collection of laws known as the Sicilian Constitutions,

he retained indeed the law of King Roger just alluded to, and added to

it a provision that those who administer love-potions, or noxious,

illicit, or exorcised food for such purposes, shall be put to death if

the recipient loses his life or senses, while if no harm ensues they

shall suffer confiscation and a year's imprisonment, but this was merely

a concession to current necessities, and he was careful to accompany it

with a declaration that the influencing of love or hatred by meat or

drink was a fable, and he took no note in his code of any other form of

magic. In the Latin kingdoms of the East the Assises de Jerusalem and

the Assises d'Antioch are silent on the subject, unless it may be deemed

to be comprised in a general clause in the former, declaring that all

malefactors and all bad men and bad women shall be put to death. Yet,

that sorcery was punished throughout Italy, and was regarded as subject

to the secular tribunals, is shown by an expression in the bull _Ad

extirpanda_ of Innocent IV. in 1252, ordering all potentates in public

assembly to put heretics to the ban as though they were sorcerers.[472]

In German legislation the _Treuga Henrici_, about 1224, contains the

earliest reference to sorcery, classing it with heresy and leaving the

punishment to the discretion of the judge; but the Kayser-Recht, the

Sächsische Weichbild, and the Richstich Landrecht contain no allusion to

it. In the Sachsenspiegel it is curtly included with heresy and

poisoning as punishable with burning, and there is the same provision in

the Schwabenspiegel, while in a later recension of the latter the

subject is developed by providing that whoever, man or woman, practises

sorcery or invokes the devil by words or otherwise, shall be burned or

exposed to a harsher death at the discretion of the judge, for he has

renounced Christ and given himself to Satan. In this it is evident that

the spiritual offence is alone kept in view, without regard to evil

attempted or performed, and it would further seem that the matter was

within the competence of the secular courts. The earliest legislation of

the Prussian marches, about 1310, specifies for sorcerers the loss of an

ear, branding on the cheek, exile, or heavy fines, but says nothing of

capital punishment. Among the Norsemen the temper of legislation on the

subject is to be found in the _Jarnsida_, compiled in 1258 by Hako

Hakonsen for his Icelandic subjects, and the almost identical _Leges

Gulathingenses_, issued by his son, Magnus Hakonsen, in 1274, which for

five hundred years remained the common law of Norway. Magic, divination,

and the evocation of the dead are unpardonable crimes, punished with

death and confiscation; but the accused can purge himself with twelve

compurgators, according to the Jarnsida, and with six, according to the

code of Gula, thus showing that the crime was subject to the secular

courts.[473]

In Sweden there is no allusion to sorcery in the laws compiled early in

the thirteenth century by Andreas, Archbishop of Lunden; but in those

issued by King Christopher in 1441, attempts on life by poison or

sorcery are punished with the wheel for men and lapidation for women,

and are tried by the _Nämd_--a sort of permanent jury of twelve men

selected in each district as judges. In Denmark the laws in force until

the sixteenth century were singularly mild. The accused had the right of

defence with selected compurgators; the punishment for a first offence

was infamy and withdrawal of the sacraments; for relapse, imprisonment,

and finally death for persistent offending. In Sleswick the ancient code

of the thirteenth century makes no provision for sorcery, nor does that

of the free Frisians in the fourteenth. That this leniency was not the

result of outgrowing the ancient superstitions we learn from Olaus

Magnus, who characterizes the whole Northern regions as literally the

seat of Satan.[474] In all this confused and varying legislation we can

trace a distinct tendency to increased severity after the thirteenth

century.

The slight attention paid in the thirteenth century by the Church to a

crime so abhorrent as sorcery is proved by the fact that when the

Inquisition was organized it was for a considerable time restrained from

jurisdiction over this class of offences. In 1248 the Council of

Valence, while prescribing to inquisitors the course to be pursued with

heretics, directs sorcerers to be delivered to the bishops, to be

imprisoned or otherwise punished. In various councils, moreover, during

the next sixty years the matter is alluded to, showing that it was

constantly becoming an object of increased solicitude, but the penalty

threatened is only excommunication. In that of Trèves, for instance, in

1310, which is very full in its description of the forbidden arts, all

parish priests are ordered to prohibit them; but the penalty proposed

for disobedience is only withdrawal of the sacraments, to be followed,

in case of continued obduracy, by excommunication and other remedies of

the law administered by the Ordinaries; thus manifesting a leniency

almost inexplicable. That the Church, indeed, was disposed to be more

rational than the people, is visible in a case occurring in 1279 at

Ruffach, in Alsace, when a Dominican nun was accused of having baptized

a waxen image after the fashion of those who desired either to destroy

an enemy or to win a lover. The peasants carried her to a field and

would have burned her, had she not been rescued by the friars.[475]

Yet, as the Inquisition perfected its organization and grew conscious of

its strength, it naturally sought to extend its sphere of activity, and

in 1257 the question was put to Alexander IV. whether it ought not to

take cognizance of divination and sorcery. In his bull, _Quod super

nonnullis_, which was repeatedly reissued by his successors, Alexander

replied that inquisitors are not to be diverted from their duties by

other occupations, and are to leave such offenders to their regular

judges, unless there is manifest heresy involved, and this rule, at the

end of the century, was embodied in the canon law by Boniface VIII. The

Inquisition being thus in possession of a portion of the field, rapidly

extended its jurisdiction. There was no limitation expressed when the

pious Alfonse of Toulouse and his wife Jeanne, in 1270, at

Aigues-mortes, when starting on the crusade of Tunis, issued

letters-patent conceding that their servants and household should be

answerable to the Inquisition for abjuration of the faith, heresy,

magic, sorcery, and perjury. It is doubtless to this extension of the

inquisitorial jurisdiction that we may attribute the increasing rigor

which henceforth marked the persecution of sorcery.[476]

Alexander's definition, it is true, had left open for discussion a

tolerably wide and intricate class of questions as to the degree of

heresy involved in the occult arts, but in time these came all to be

decided "in favor of the faith." It was not simply the worship of demons

and making pacts with Satan that were recognized as heretical by the

subtle casuistry of the inquisitors. A figurine to be effective required

to be baptized, and this argued an heretical notion as to the sacrament

of baptism, and the same was the case as to the sacrament of the altar

in the various superstitious uses to which the Eucharist was put. Scarce

any of the arts of the diviner in forecasting the future or in tracing

stolen articles could be exercised without what the inquisitors assumed

to be at least a tacit invocation of demons. For this, in fact, they had

the authority of John of Salisbury, who, as early as the twelfth

century, argued that all divination is an invocation of demons; for if

the operator offers no other sacrifice, he sacrifices his body in

performing the operation. This refinement was not reduced to practice,

but in time the ingenious dilemma was invented that a man who invoked a

demon, thinking it to be no sin, was a manifest heretic; if he knew it

to be a sin he was not a heretic, but was to be classed with heretics,

while to expect a demon to tell the truth is the act of a heretic. To

ask of a demon, even without adoration, that which depends upon the will

of God, or of man, or upon the future, indicated heretical notions as to

the power of demons. In short, as Sylvester Prierias says, it is not

necessary to inquire into the motives of those who invoke demons--they

are all heretics, real or presumptive. Love-potions and philtres, by a

similar system of exegesis, were heretical, and so were spells and

charms to cure disease, the gathering of herbs while kneeling, face to

the east, and repeating the Paternoster, and all the other devices which

fraud and superstition had imposed on popular credulity. Alchemy was one

of the _sept ars demonials_, for the aid of Satan was necessary to the

transmutation of metals, and the Philosopher's Stone was only to be

obtained by spells and charms; although Roger Bacon, in his zeal for

practical science, assumes that both objects could be obtained by purely

natural means, and that human life could be prolonged for several

centuries.[477] In 1328 the Inquisition of Carcassonne condemned the Art

of St. George, through which buried treasure was sought by spreading oil

on a finger-nail with certain conjurations, and making a young child

look upon it and tell what he saw. Then there was the Notory Art,

communicated by God to Solomon, and transmitted through Apollonius of

Tyana, which taught the power of the Names and Words of God, and

operated through prayers and formulas consisting of unknown

polysyllables, by which all knowledge, memory, eloquence, and virtue can

be obtained in the space of a month--a harmless delusion enough, which

Roger Bacon pronounces to be one of the figments of the magicians, but

Thomas Aquinas and Ciruelo prove that it operates solely through the

devil. A monk was seized in Paris in 1323 for possessing a book on the

subject; his book was burned, and he probably escaped with abjuration

and penance.[478]

The most prominent and most puzzling to the lawgiver of all the occult

arts was astrology. This was a purely Eastern science--the product of

the Chaldean plains and of the Nile valley, unknown to any of the

primitive Aryan races, from Hindostan to Scandinavia. When the dominion

of Rome spread beyond the confines of Italy it was not the least of the

Orientalizing influences which so profoundly modified the original Roman

character; and after a struggle it established itself so firmly that in

great measure it superseded the indigenous auguries and haruspicium, and

by the early days of the empire some knowledge of the influences of the

stars formed an ordinary portion of liberal education. The same motives

which led to the prohibition of haruspicium--that the death of the

emperor was the subject most eagerly inquired into--caused the Chaldeans

or astrologers to be the objects of repeated savage edicts, issued even

by monarchs who themselves were addicted to consulting them, but it was

in vain. Human credulity was too profitable a field to remain

uncultivated, and, as Tacitus says, astrologers would always be

prohibited and always retained. Although the complexity of the science

was such that it could be grasped in its details only by minds

exceptionally constituted, through lifelong application, it was brought

in homely fashion within the reach of all by restricting it to the

observation of the moon, and applying the results by means of the

diagram and tables known as the Petosiris, a description of which,

attributed to the Venerable Bede, shows how the superstitions of

pagandom were transmitted to the Northern races, and were eagerly

accepted in spite of the arguments of St. Augustin to prove the nullity

of the influence ascribed to the heavenly bodies.[479]