influence in William's imagination, since the courteous keeper was
mistaken by their associate champion for Puck or Robin Goodfellow. The
spells resorted to to get rid of his supposed delusions are
alternatively that of turning the cloak--(recommended in visions of the
second-sight or similar illusions as a means of obtaining a certainty
concerning the being which is before imperfectly seen[43])--and that of
exorcising the spirit with a cudgel; which last, Corbett prudently
thinks, ought not to be resorted to unless under an absolute conviction
that the exorcist is the stronger party. Chaucer, therefore, could not
be serious in averring that the fairy superstitions were obsolete in his
day, since they were found current three centuries afterwards.
[Footnote 43: A common instance is that of a person haunted with a
resemblance whose face he cannot see. If he turn his cloak or plaid, he
will obtain the full sight which he desires, and may probably find it to
be his own fetch, or wraith, or double-ganger.]
It is not the less certain that, as knowledge and religion became more
widely and brightly displayed over any country, the superstitious
fancies of the people sunk gradually in esteem and influence; and in the
time of Queen Elizabeth the unceasing labour of many and popular
preachers, who declaimed against the "splendid miracles" of the Church
of Rome, produced also its natural effect upon the other stock of
superstitions. "Certainly," said Reginald Scot, talking of times before
his own, "some one knave in a white sheet hath cozened and abused many
thousands, specially when Robin Goodfellow kept such a coil in the
country. In our childhood our mothers' maids have so terrified us with
an ugly devil having horns on his head, fire in his mouth, and a tail at
his breech; eyes like a basin, fangs like a dog, claws like a bear, a
skin like a negro, and a voice roaring like a lion, whereby we start and
are afraid when we hear one cry, Boh! and they have so frayd us with
bull-beggars, spirits, witches, urchins, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs,
Pans, faunes, sylvans, Kitt-with-the-candlestick, tritons, centaurs,
dwarfs, giants, imps, calcars, conjurers, nymphs, changelings, incubus,
Robin Goodfellow, the spoorn, the man-in-the-oak, the hellwain, the
fire-drake, the puckle, Tom Thumb, Hobgoblin, Tom Tumbler, Boneless, and
such other bugbears, that we are afraid of our own shadows, insomuch
that some never fear the devil but on a dark night; and then a polled
sheep is a perilous beast, and many times is taken for our father's
soul, specially in a churchyard, where a right hardy man heretofore
durst not to have passed by night but his hair would stand upright.
Well, thanks be to God, this wretched and cowardly infidelity, since the
preaching of the Gospel, is in part forgotten, and doubtless the rest of
these illusions will in a short time, by God's grace, be detected and
vanish away."[44]
[Footnote 44: Reginald Scot's "Discovery of Witchcraft," book vii. chap.
15.]
It would require a better demonologist than I am to explain the various
obsolete superstitions which Reginald Scot has introduced as articles of
the old English faith, into the preceding passage. I might indeed say
the Phuca is a Celtic superstition, from which the word Pook or Puckle
was doubtless derived; and I might conjecture that the man-in-the-oak
was the same with the Erl-König of the Germans; and that the hellwain
were a kind of wandering spirits, the descendants of a champion named
Hellequin, who are introduced into the romance of Richard sans Peur. But
most antiquaries will be at fault concerning the spoorn,
Kitt-with-the-candlestick, Boneless, and some others. The catalogue,
however, serves to show what progress the English have made in two
centuries, in forgetting the very names of objects which had been the
sources of terror to their ancestors of the Elizabethan age.
Before leaving the subject of fairy superstition in England we may
remark that it was of a more playful and gentle, less wild and
necromantic character, than that received among the sister people. The
amusements of the southern fairies were light and sportive; their
resentments were satisfied with pinching or scratching the objects of
their displeasure; their peculiar sense of cleanliness rewarded the
housewives with the silver token in the shoe; their nicety was extreme
concerning any coarseness or negligence which could offend their
delicacy; and I cannot discern, except, perhaps, from the insinuations
of some scrupulous divines, that they were vassals to or in close
alliance with the infernals, as there is too much reason to believe was
the case with their North British sisterhood.[45] The common nursery
story cannot be forgotten, how, shortly after the death of what is
called a nice tidy housewife, the Elfin band was shocked to see that a
person of different character, with whom the widower had filled his
deserted arms, instead of the nicely arranged little loaf of the whitest
bread, and a basin of sweet cream, duly placed for their refreshment by
the deceased, had substituted a brown loaf and a cobb of herrings.
Incensed at such a coarse regale, the elves dragged the peccant
housewife out of bed, and pulled her down the wooden stairs by the
heels, repeating, at the same time, in scorn of her churlish
hospitality--
"Brown bread and herring cobb!
Thy fat sides shall have many a bob!"
But beyond such playful malice they had no desire to extend their
resentment.
[Footnote 45: Dr. Jackson, in his "Treatise on Unbelief," opines for the
severe opinion. "Thus are the Fayries, from difference of events
ascribed to them, divided into good and bad, when as it is but one and
the same malignant fiend that meddles in both; seeking sometimes to be
feared, otherwhiles to be loued as God, for the bodily harmes or good
turnes supposed to be in his power."--Jackson on Unbelief, p. 178, edit.
1625.]
The constant attendant upon the English Fairy court was the celebrated
Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, who to the elves acted in some measure as the
jester or clown of the company--(a character then to be found in the
establishment of every person of quality)--or to use a more modern
comparison, resembled the Pierrot of the pantomime. His jests were of
the most simple and at the same time the broadest comic character--to
mislead a clown on his path homeward, to disguise himself like a stool,
in order to induce an old gossip to commit the egregious mistake of
sitting down on the floor when she expected to repose on a chair, were
his special enjoyments. If he condescended to do some work for the
sleeping family, in which he had some resemblance to the Scottish
household spirit called a Brownie, the selfish Puck was far from
practising this labour on the disinterested principle of the northern
goblin, who, if raiment or food was left in his way and for his use,
departed from the family in displeasure. Robin Goodfellow, on the
contrary, must have both his food and his rest, as Milton informs us,
amid his other notices of country superstitions, in the poem of
L'Allegro. And it is to be noticed that he represents these tales of the
fairies, told round the cottage hearth, as of a cheerful rather than a
serious cast; which illustrates what I have said concerning the milder
character of the southern superstitions, as compared with those of the
same class in Scotland--the stories of which are for the most part of a
frightful and not seldom of a disgusting quality.
Poor Robin, however, between whom and King Oberon Shakespeare contrives
to keep a degree of distinct subordination, which for a moment deceives
us by its appearance of reality, notwithstanding his turn for wit and
humour, had been obscured by oblivion even in the days of Queen Bess. We
have already seen, in a passage quoted from Reginald Scot, that the
belief was fallen into abeyance; that which follows from the same author
affirms more positively that Robin's date was over:--
"Know ye this, by the way, that heretofore Robin Goodfellow and
Hobgoblin were as terrible, and also as credible, to the people as hags
and witches be now; and in time to come a witch will be as much derided
and condemned, and as clearly perceived, as the illusion and knavery of
Robin Goodfellow, upon whom there have gone as many and as credible
tales as witchcraft, saving that it hath not pleased the translators of
the Bible to call spirits by the name of Robin Goodfellow, as they have
diviners, soothsayers, poisoners, and cozeners by the name of
witches."[46] In the same tone Reginald Scot addresses the reader in the
preface:--"To make a solemn suit to you that are partial readers to set
aside partiality, to take in good part my writings, and with indifferent
eyes to look upon my book, were labour lost and time ill-employed; for I
should no more prevail herein than if, a hundred years since, I should
have entreated your predecessors to believe that Robin Goodfellow, that
great and ancient bull-beggar, had been but a cozening merchant, and no
devil indeed. But Robin Goodfellow ceaseth now to be much feared, and
Popery is sufficiently discovered; nevertheless, witches' charms and
conjurers' cozenage are yet effectual." This passage seems clearly to
prove that the belief in Robin Goodfellow and his fairy companions was
now out of date; while that as to witchcraft, as was afterwards but too
well shown, kept its ground against argument and controversy, and
survived "to shed more blood."
[Footnote 46: Reginald Scot's "Discovery of Witchcraft," book vii. chap,
ii.]
We are then to take leave of this fascinating article of the popular
creed, having in it so much of interest to the imagination that we
almost envy the credulity of those who, in the gentle moonlight of a
summer night in England, amid the tangled glades of a deep forest, or
the turfy swell of her romantic commons, could fancy they saw the
fairies tracing their sportive ring. But it is in vain to regret
illusions which, however engaging, must of necessity yield their place
before the increase of knowledge, like shadows at the advance of morn.
These superstitions have already survived their best and most useful
purpose, having been embalmed in the poetry of Milton and of
Shakespeare, as well as writers only inferior to these great names. Of
Spenser we must say nothing, because in his "Faery Queen" the title is
the only circumstance which connects his splendid allegory with the
popular superstition, and, as he uses it, means nothing more than an
Utopia or nameless country.
With the fairy popular creed fell, doubtless, many subordinate articles
of credulity in England, but the belief in witches kept its ground. It
was rooted in the minds of the common people, as well by the easy
solution it afforded of much which they found otherwise hard to explain,
as in reverence to the Holy Scriptures, in which the word _witch,_ being
used in several places, conveyed to those who did not trouble themselves
about the nicety of the translation from the Eastern tongues, the
inference that the same species of witches were meant as those against
whom modern legislation had, in most European nations, directed the
punishment of death. These two circumstances furnished the numerous
believers in witchcraft with arguments in divinity and law which they
conceived irrefragable. They might say to the theologist, Will you not
believe in witches? the Scriptures aver their existence;--to the
jurisconsult, Will you dispute the existence of a crime against which
our own statute-book, and the code of almost all civilized countries,
have attested, by laws upon which hundreds and thousands have been
convicted, many or even most of whom have, by their judicial
confessions, acknowledged their guilt and the justice of their
punishment? It is a strange scepticism, they might add, which rejects
the evidence of Scripture, of human legislature, and of the accused
persons themselves.
Notwithstanding these specious reasons, the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries were periods when the revival of learning, the invention of
printing, the fearless investigations of the Reformers into subjects
thought formerly too sacred for consideration of any save the clergy,
had introduced a system of doubt, enquiry, disregard of authority, when
unsupported by argument, and unhesitating exercise of the private
judgment, on subjects which had occupied the bulls of popes and decrees
of councils. In short, the spirit of the age was little disposed to
spare error, however venerable, or countenance imposture, however
sanctioned by length of time and universal acquiescence. Learned writers
arose in different countries to challenge the very existence of this
imaginary crime, to rescue the reputation of the great men whose
knowledge, superior to that of their age, had caused them to be
suspected of magic, and to put a stop to the horrid superstition whose
victims were the aged, ignorant, and defenceless, and which could only
be compared to that which sent victims of old through the fire to
Moloch.
The courageous interposition of those philosophers who opposed science
and experience to the prejudices of superstition and ignorance, and in
doing so incurred much misrepresentation, and perhaps no little
ill-will, in the cause of truth and humanity, claim for them some
distinction in a work on Demonology. The pursuers of exact science to
its coy retreats, were sure to be the first to discover that the most
remarkable phenomena in Nature are regulated by certain fixed laws, and
cannot rationally be referred to supernatural agency, the sufficing
cause to which superstition attributes all that is beyond her own narrow
power of explanation. Each advance in natural knowledge teaches us that
it is the pleasure of the Creator to govern the world by the laws which
he has imposed, and which are not in our times interrupted or suspended.
The learned Wier, or Wierus, was a man of great research in physical
science, and studied under the celebrated Cornelius Agrippa, against
whom the charge of sorcery was repeatedly alleged by Paulus Jovius and
other authors, while he suffered, on the other hand, from the
persecution of the inquisitors of the Church, whose accusation against
this celebrated man was, that he denied the existence of spirits, a
charge very inconsistent with that of sorcery, which consists in
corresponding with them. Wierus, after taking his degree as a doctor of
medicine, became physician to the Duke of Cleves, at whose court he
practised for thirty years with the highest reputation. This learned
man, disregarding the scandal which, by so doing, he was likely to bring
upon himself, was one of the first who attacked the vulgar belief, and
boldly assailed, both by serious arguments and by ridicule, the vulgar
credulity on the subject of wizards and witches.
Gabriel Naudé, or Naudæus, as he termed himself, was a perfect scholar
and man of letters, busied during his whole life with assembling books
together, and enjoying the office of librarian to several persons of
high rank, amongst others, to Queen Christina of Sweden. He was,
besides, a beneficed clergyman, leading a most unblemished life, and so
temperate as never to taste any liquor stronger than water; yet did he
not escape the scandal which is usually flung by their prejudiced
contemporaries upon those disputants whom it is found more easy to
defame than to answer. He wrote an interesting work, entitled "Apologie
pour les Grands Homines Accusés de Magie;" and as he exhibited a good
deal of vivacity of talent, and an earnestness in pleading his cause,
which did not always spare some of the superstitions of Rome herself, he
was charged by his contemporaries as guilty of heresy and scepticism,
when justice could only accuse him of an incautious eagerness to make
good his argument.
Among persons who, upon this subject, purged their eyes with rue and
euphrasie, besides the Rev. Dr. Harsnet and many others (who wrote
rather on special cases of Demonology than on the general question),
Reginald Scot ought to be distinguished. Webster assures us that he was
a "person of competent learning, pious, and of a good family." He seems
to have been a zealous Protestant, and much of his book, as well as that
of Harsnet, is designed to throw upon the Papists in particular those
tricks in which, by confederacy and imposture, the popular ideas
concerning witchcraft, possession, and other supernatural fancies, were
maintained and kept in exercise; but he also writes on the general
question with some force and talent, considering that his subject is
incapable of being reduced into a regular form, and is of a nature
particularly seductive to an excursive talent. He appears to have
studied legerdemain for the purpose of showing how much that is
apparently unaccountable can nevertheless be performed without the
intervention of supernatural assistance, even when it is impossible to
persuade the vulgar that the devil has not been consulted on the
occasion. Scot also had intercourse with some of the celebrated
fortune-tellers, or Philomaths, of the time; one of whom he brings
forward to declare the vanity of the science which he himself had once
professed.
To defend the popular belief of witchcraft there arose a number of
advocates, of whom Bodin and some others neither wanted knowledge nor
powers of reasoning. They pressed the incredulous party with the charge
that they denied the existence of a crime against which the law had
denounced a capital punishment. As that law was understood to emanate
from James himself, who was reigning monarch during the hottest part of
the controversy, the English authors who defended the opposite side were
obliged to entrench themselves under an evasion, to avoid maintaining an
argument unpalatable to a degree to those in power, and which might
perchance have proved unsafe to those who used it. With a certain degree
of sophistry they answered that they did not doubt the possibility of
witches, but only demurred to what is their nature, and how they came to
be such--according to the scholastic jargon, that the question in
respect to witches was not _de existentia_, but only _de modo
existendi_.
By resorting to so subtle an argument those who impugned the popular
belief were obliged, with some inconsistency, to grant that witchcraft
had existed, and might exist, only insisting that it was a species of
witchcraft consisting of they knew not what, but certainly of something
different from that which legislators, judges, and juries had hitherto
considered the statute as designed to repress.
In the meantime (the rather that the debate was on a subject
particularly difficult of comprehension) the debating parties grew warm,
and began to call names. Bodin, a lively Frenchman of an irritable
habit, explained the zeal of Wierus to protect the tribe of sorcerers
from punishment, by stating that he himself was a conjurer and the
scholar of Cornelius Agrippa, and might therefore well desire to save
the lives of those accused of the same league with Satan. Hence they
threw on their antagonists the offensive names of witch-patrons and
witch-advocates, as if it were impossible for any to hold the opinion of
Naudæus, Wierus, Scot, &c., without patronizing the devil and the
witches against their brethren of mortality. Assailed by such heavy
charges, the philosophers themselves lost patience, and retorted abuse
in their turn, calling Bodin, Delrio, and others who used their
arguments, witch-advocates, and the like, as the affirming and defending
the existence of the crime seemed to increase the number of witches, and
assuredly augmented the list of executions. But for a certain time the
preponderance of the argument lay on the side of the Demonologists, and
we may briefly observe the causes which gave their opinions, for a
period, greater influence than their opponents on the public mind.
It is first to be observed that Wierus, for what reason cannot well be
conjectured, except to show the extent of his cabalistical knowledge,
had introduced into his work against witchcraft the whole Stenographia
of Trithemius, which he had copied from the original in the library of
Cornelius Agrippa; and which, suspicious from the place where he found
it, and from the long catalogue of fiends which it contained, with the
charms for raising and for binding them to the service of mortals, was
considered by Bodin as containing proof that Wierus himself was a
sorcerer; not one of the wisest, certainly, since he thus unnecessarily
placed at the disposal of any who might buy the book the whole secrets
which formed his stock-in-trade.
Secondly, we may notice that, from the state of physical science at the
period when Van Helmont, Paracelsus, and others began to penetrate into
its recesses, it was an unknown, obscure, and ill-defined region, and
did not permit those who laboured in it to give that precise and
accurate account of their discoveries which the progress of reasoning
experimentally and from analysis has enabled the late discoverers to do
with success. Natural magic--a phrase used to express those phenomena
which could be produced by a knowledge of the properties of matter--had
so much in it that was apparently uncombined and uncertain, that the art
of chemistry was accounted mystical, and an opinion prevailed that the
results now known to be the consequence of laws of matter, could not be
traced through their various combinations even by those who knew the
effects themselves. Physical science, in a word, was cumbered by a
number of fanciful and incorrect opinions, chiefly of a mystical
character. If, for instance, it was observed that a flag and a fern
never grew near each other, the circumstance was imputed to some
antipathy between these vegetables; nor was it for some time resolved by
the natural rule, that the flag has its nourishment in marshy ground,
whereas the fern loves a deep dryish soil. The attributes of the
divining-rod were fully credited; the discovery of the philosopher's
stone was daily hoped for; and electricity, magnetism, and other
remarkable and misconceived phenomena were appealed to as proof of the
reasonableness of their expectations. Until such phenomena were traced
to their sources, imaginary and often mystical causes were assigned to
them, for the same reason that, in the wilds of a partially discovered
country, according to the satirist,
"Geographers on pathless downs
Place elephants for want of towns."
This substitution of mystical fancies for experimental reasoning gave,
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a doubtful and twilight
appearance to the various branches of physical philosophy. The learned
and sensible Dr. Webster, for instance, writing in detection of supposed
witchcraft, assumes, as a string of undeniable facts, opinions which our
more experienced age would reject as frivolous fancies; "for example,
the effects of healing by the weapon-salve, the sympathetic powder, the
curing of various diseases by apprehensions, amulets, or by
transplantation." All of which undoubted wonders he accuses the age of
desiring to throw on the devil's back--an unnecessary load certainly,
since such things do not exist, and it is therefore in vain to seek to
account for them. It followed that, while the opposers of the ordinary
theory might have struck the deepest blows at the witch hypothesis by an
appeal to common sense, they were themselves hampered by articles of
philosophical belief which they must have been sensible contained nearly
as deep draughts upon human credulity as were made by the Demonologists,
against whose doctrine they protested. This error had a doubly bad
effect, both as degrading the immediate department in which it occurred,
and as affording a protection for falsehood in other branches of
science. The champions who, in their own province, were obliged by the
imperfect knowledge of the times to admit much that was mystical and
inexplicable--those who opined, with Bacon, that warts could be cured by
sympathy--who thought, with Napier, that hidden treasures could be
discovered by the mathematics--who salved the weapon instead of the
wound, and detected murders as well as springs of water by the
divining-rod, could not consistently use, to confute the believers in
witches, an argument turning on the impossible or the incredible.