reddish tint which gradually became more and more diffused. We seemed to
hear the thunder rolling, at first from a distance, then nearer, finally
over our heads. It was as if the tower had been shaken and the vault over
our heads been rent. My knees trembled. Suddenly a flash of lightning shot
through the red mass. The magician extended his staff, as if he had
wished to stop it. He raised his voice anew, strong and powerful amidst
the continued peals of thunder. The smoke grew thin again; from its
wreaths there appeared before the magician in the immediate vicinity of
the circle, and at the opposite end of his staff, a dim apparition, a
figure whose first aspect bereft me of my reason. I felt as if I had
fallen to the floor,--as if I had been lost....
I awakened with the perspiration of agony on my forehead, but fortunately
in my own bed and in the nineteenth century. The view from my window is
cheerful and enlivening. I see a river which bears proud ships, quays
swarming with men, and broad streets with houses in a graceful and light
_renaissance_ style. I lived again in the present which pleased me the
best, next to dreaming of the future....
They strove for something great, however, those learned magicians of the
Middle Ages. Theirs was a mighty imaginative creation. It lies in ruins
never to arise again; but the crumbled _debris_ testify to the belief in
an all-embracing human power and knowledge.
These learned magicians were likewise restless Faust-natures, as distinct
from the usual type of the learned of their time as Faust from the
pedantic _gloss_-proud, unaspiring milk-sop Wagner. While they paid their
tribute of weakness to tradition, and formed their system on received
dicta, it was among them that presentiments of the future began to stir,
and a longing for a clearer light than that with which the scholastics and
doctors _angelici et seraphici_ felt themselves well contented. When the
study of ancient Greece was recommencing, when the dawn of the
_renaissance_ appeared, it was these enthusiastic natures, still groping
among the dreams of magic art, that first began to awake and think. It was
a feeling of the insufficiency of the ruling theology and scholasticism
which had driven them into the temple of "secret philosophy." Since its
pillars were brought from diverse spheres of culture, distrust and fear of
magic had become more universal than directly ecclesiastical; they had
drunk as deeply from profane tradition as from Christian, considering them
both to flow from the same divine source: their writers quote Porphyrius
by the side of John, and the pretender Hermes by the side of Paul. The
courage with which they tried to burst open the portals of the
spirit-world served them afterwards when from the shores of their
childhood's belief they were to venture out on the ocean of thought.
Campanella, Vanini, Giordano Bruno, and Cardanus stand on the dividing
line between dogmatico-fantastical magic and a philosophy in the sense of
the old Greeks and of modern times. If already previously some magicians
of the old type had died from persecution, it was not to be wondered at
that such "atheists" as Vanini and Bruno must now ascend the pile.
The occult sciences of the Middle Ages with their origin not from paradise
and Noah's ark, as believed by their adherents, but from an ancient
Oriental culture and with their power over even the strongest and most
independent souls that could arise under the influence of a Church which
levels all thought, may properly remind those who are willing to forget
it, of a sad but incontestable truth: That humanity may embrace during the
course of many and long centuries with the most candid faith, and
construct with immense labor into a system, dogmas which have been
received without questioning, and which contain more of the false than of
the true, the great antiquity of which does not give them more claim for
validity than is possessed by the error which arose yesterday and vanished
to-day. No special divine influence has saved or will save the generations
from inheriting the errors less than the acquired truths of their
predecessors--no other divine influence, I should say, than the impulse we
feel to think for ourselves in order to attain to clearness.
IV.
THE MAGIC OF THE PEOPLE AND THE STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH AGAINST IT.
Wherever religious thought divides the empire of the world and humanity
into two absolutely opposed powers, a good and an evil, there it also
distinguishes two kinds of magic: the divine and the infernal. So with the
Persians who knew a white and a black magic. So also in the Middle Ages of
Christianity. The Greeks, on the contrary, knew nothing of this
distinction. The world being to them a harmonious whole, both in moral and
physical respects, magic was with them only a means of finding out and
using the secret powers in the harmonious cosmos; and the wonder-worker
who could not be thought of as deriving his powers from an evil source,
was undoubtedly a favorite of the gods and an equal with the heroes, not
unworthy of statues and temples, if he used his art for the benefit of
humanity. For the rest, magical speculation was with the Greeks more and
more pushed aside by philosophy,--by scepticism and rational
investigation, until on account of the nearer contact between Europe and
Asia, after the death of Alexander, it began again to exercise its
influence, and finally celebrated its triumph in that dualistic form of
religion which by the name of Christianity took possession of the
Occident.
The struggle which the spirit of orientalism waged on its march through
Europe, first against the Hellenic paganism, and then against the
Christian paganism which had penetrated into the Church itself, has been
briefly sketched above. When Christianity had spread later among the
Germanic and Slavic nations, there arose a new process of attraction and
repulsion between it and the natural religions of the barbarians, the
elements of which were partly blended with it and partly repelled by it.
The gods were transformed into devils, but their attributes and the
festivities in their honor were transferred to the saints. Pope Gregory
the Great ordained that the pagan festivities should be changed only
gradually to Christian, and that they were to be imitated in many
respects.[40]
In the time of Boniface there were many Christian priests in Germany who
sacrificed to Thor and baptized in the name of Jesus at the same time. Of
especial influence on the rapid spread of Christianity was the maxim of
Gregory not to be particular in the choice of proselytes, because hope was
to be placed in the better generations of the future. To be allowed to
attend divine service, and to be buried in the churchyard, it was only
necessary to have the benediction of the priest. Gifts to the Church,
pilgrimages, self-scourgings, repeating of prayers in Latin, opened the
gates of heaven to the proselytes easier than virtue and bravery those of
Valhall to the heathen. For the rest the pagan could enter the community
of the Church while retaining his whole circle of ideas. The Church did
not deny, but it confirmed, the real existence of every thing which had
been the object of his faith, but it treated these objects in accordance
with its dualistic scheme, sometimes elevating them to the plane of
sanctity, and again degrading them to something diabolical. Thus, for
instance, it changed the elementary spirits--which the Celts and Germans
believed in--from good or morally indifferent natural beings into fallen
angels, envying man his heavenly inheritance; and if a thinking heathen
could before accept or reject the existence of such beings at his
pleasure, it now, when he had become a proselyte, became a matter of
eternal bliss to believe in them. There was no superstitious idea gross
enough not to receive the signet of the Church; nay, the grosser it was,
the more likely was it to be appropriated. Even so cultured an intellect
as Augustine, the most prominent of the fathers and authors of his time,
declared it to be "insolent" to doubt the existence of fauns, satyrs and
other demoniac beings which lie in wait for women, have intercourse with
them and children by them.[41] Thus was laid the foundation of that
immense labyrinth of superstition in the darkness of which humanity has
groped during the thousand years of the Middle Ages.
In the rupture between the Church and the natural religion of the northern
peoples we find, in a certain sense, the same spectacle repeated which we
have seen in the struggle between the Christian and the Greco-Roman
culture. If the Neoplatonicians held up their Appolonius of Tyana as a
type of the Christian sorcerers, Celts, Germans and Northmen had also
their soothsayers endowed with supernatural powers whom the Christian
missionaries must excel in the power of working miracles, if they would
gain consideration for the new religion. There are many accounts of
bishops and priests who have worn gloves of fire, walked on white-hot
iron, and so forth, before the eyes of the astonished heathen. If the
miracles worked by the apostles of Christianity had their source in divine
agencies, then those performed by its opponents must have their origin in
the assistance of the devil. Already here the white magic stood opposed to
the black magic, the immediate and supernatural power of God in His agents
to the devil: and if the chief significance of the Church was to be an
institution for deliverance from the devil; if all her magical usages from
the sacrament to the amulet were so many weapons against his attacks; if
the pagan religions which had succumbed to Christianity were nothing but
varied kinds of the same _devil-worship_, and their priests, seers and
physicians but tools of Satan; then it was natural for all traditions from
the pagan time which the Church had not transformed and appropriated
should be banished within the pale of devil-worship, and partly also that
every act to which supernatural effects were ascribed, but which was not
performed by a Christian priest, or in the name of Jesus, should be
referred to a black magic, partly in fine that the possibility of an
immediate co-operation, a conscious league between the devil and men
should be elevated to a dogma.
A struggle between good and evil, between God and Satan, between church
and paganism, which is carried on with the weapons of miracles by two
directly opposed human representatives of these principles, was a theme
which must by necessity urge the power of creative imagination into
activity, and we find also in one of the oldest monuments of Christian
literature[42] a tale of this character. It is Simon Peter, the rock on
which the Church is built, who fights there against Simon the magician of
Samaria, mentioned in the Acts. When the cities of Asia Minor had
witnessed their emulation in miracle-working, the decisive battle was
fought out to the end in Rome. In the presence of the assembled people,
Simon the magician attempts an ascension into heaven, but falls and breaks
his legs because Simon Peter had commanded the evil spirits who were
carrying the magician towards the sky to let him drop. This fable appears
still further embellished in later ecclesiastical authors. It is soon
accompanied by others, such as that of Cyprianus, Theophilus, Militaris,
Heliodorus, and many others, who from love of earthly glory abjure Christ
and enter into solemn covenants with the devil. In the biography of the
holy Basilius, archbishop of Caesarea and Cappadocia (he was a contemporary
of the apostate emperor Julian), there is a story of a young man who had
obtained from a heathen sorcerer a letter of recommendation to Satan. When
the young man, according to the precept of the magician, had gone to a
heathen grave and there taken out the letter, he was suddenly taken up and
borne to the place where Satan, surrounded by his angels, sat on a throne.
The youth abjured in writing his baptism and swore allegiance to his new
master. But after some time the apostate repented and confessed to the
holy Basilius what he had done. The bishop prayed for him forty days. When
at length the day had come that Satan according to the compact should bear
away his victim, the bishop had the young man placed in the midst of his
congregation. Satan arrived: a battle between him and the bishop
followed--a battle which was carried on with the people stretching forth
their hands imploring God for assistance, and was ended when the compact
fell from the claws of the fiend, and was torn by the bishop. The
before-mentioned Theophilus had likewise pawned his soul to the devil, but
the contract was restored to him after urgent supplication, by the holy
Virgin, after which, warned by his experience, he led a holy life, and
became Saint Theophilus before he closed his eyes. These early legends of
compacts between the devil and men end, as we see, with the sinner's
salvation; not so the later. If we now remember that it was one of the
dogmas proclaimed by the Church that all magical and miraculous arts not
performed by the priests in the name of Jesus were wrought by the devil;
that he gives his adherents power over nature and that the demons as
"_incubi_" and "_succubi_" seek and obtain carnal intercourse with human
beings,[43] we discover already in the ideas of the first Christian
centuries the elements of the sorcery of the Middle Ages. And when we read
further the accusations which the first Christian sects hurled against one
another,--when we learn that the party which was raised by the Council of
Nice to the orthodox position accused the Gnostics, Marcionites and Arians
of devil-worship, confederacy with Satan and sorcery, we meet already here
that union of heresy and sorcery by which the Church of the Middle Ages
acquired such a fearful weapon against dissenters,--a union which must not
be looked upon as a mere casual invention of wickedness and theological
hatred, but as the necessary consequence of the whole dualistic theory of
morals, as the necessary fruit of the belief in devils.
A long time must have been required for the festivals common to the
natural religions of Europe to become extinct or be remodelled into
Christian form. The external practices by which religious ideas obtain a
sensuous expression, possess generally more tenacious power of existence
than the ideas themselves, and continue in existence when these have
disappeared, as the shell after the death of the nautilus. In certain
religions of natural development adoration of the sun and the moon are the
most important. Among the Celtic, Germanic and Slavic tribes, as before
among Hebrews and Phoenicians, these divinities of the light were adored
by kindling fires, by sacrifices and banquets on mountains and in groves,
especially at the time of the vernal equinox (Easter), at the beginning of
May (Valpurge's night), and on the night of the summer solstice. From the
fact that traces of the custom still exist in our own day, though its
original significance is lost, we can all the more safely assume that it
continued to exist without interruption, openly at first, then in secret,
retaining its significance, in spite of the efforts of spiritual and
profane authorities to extirpate it, and assuming more and more in the
popular mind that character of devil-worship with which the Church has
branded these reminiscences, from heathen times. And when finally it
ceased entirely, or was changed into seasons of popular festivity which
had no dangerous suggestiveness even in the eyes of the Church, still the
remembrance of the demoniacal festivals of mountain and grove must have
been inherited from generation to generation, and then it was but another
step to believe that they still continued and were participated in by
persons who practiced magical arts, and had been invested with the
suspicious wisdom of the ancient valas and druids--the female seers and
physicians of the pagans. That the notion of the Witches' Sabbath, which
was celebrated on the night before the first of May, and of the paschal
journey of the witches to Blokulla have this historical origin is very
probable. The ecclesiastical literature from the first half of the Middle
Ages does not leave us without significant hints apparently corroborating
this opinion. St. Egidius, who died in 659 A. D., speaks frequently
against the _fire-worship_, practiced during midsummer nights, which as
inherited from pagan forefathers was accompanied with dancing, and against
the invocation of the sun and moon (which he calls "the demons Hercules
and Diana"), and against worshipping in groves and by trees, springs and
crossroads. The apostle of the Allemans, St. Firminus, who died in 754 A.
D., preaches against the same customs, and especially dwells on the
pertinacity with which old women adhere to the infernal festivals with
their magical songs and dances. Modern authors on the subject in question
speak of a _synodal decree_ which is said to date back to the council of
Ancyra in 314 A. D., and which enjoins the bishops especially to watch the
godless women who, deceived by the delusions of the demons, imagine that
they traverse in the night, in the company of Diana and Herodias and
riding on certain animals, wide tracts of country, and are required to
assemble for a certain number of nights by the command of their mistress.
But although this synodal decree is spurious and belongs to a far later
period and a different locality (it is referred to for the first time in
the ninth century, in a work composed by the Abbot Regino[44]), it is old
enough to deserve our attention here. To the decree is appended a number
of questions which the bishops must put to such women in confession. Among
them are the following, which connect immediately the witch-journey with
heathen traditions:--
"Have you followed the practice inherited from the heathen of considering
the course of the stars, the moon and the eclipses of the new moon? And
have you imagined that by the exclamation 'Conquer, moon' (_vince, Luna_),
you could reproduce its light? When you wished to pray, have you resorted
to other places than the church, as, for instance, to springs, stones,
trees or crossroads? Have you there kindled fires and sacrificed bread or
aught else?"
John of Salisbury, who died A. D. 1182, writes of women who, led by a
"night-queen," assemble and celebrate banquets at which they most relish
children stolen from their cradles. He still supposed that this may not
really be a fact, but only demoniacal illusions, phantasmagorial tricks
played by the devil, and empty dreams, especially as such things happen
among women, and not among men, who possess a stronger reason. The same
view of the case is held by William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris (died A.
D. 1248). But already during the life of this prelate the belief in the
reality of witch-feasts was sanctioned by the authority of Pope Gregory
IX., and every doubt in regard to it was declared to be heresy.
At the same time the connection between heresy and witchcraft was revived
and confirmed by the Church, so that all heretics were to be considered as
the sworn subjects of the devil, and initiated into sorcery, even though
not all sorcerers and witches were necessarily heretics. The Church at
this time threatened by several newly arisen sects, had recourse to every
expedient to uphold its hierarchy and the unity of confession. In the year
1223 Gregory IX. promulgated a letter which exhorted to a crusade against
the Stedinghs, a sect which had spread themselves in Friesland and Lower
Saxony. He accused them of worshipping and having secret communion with
the prince of darkness. According to the papal edict the Stedinghs
considered the devil as the real and the good deity, expelled by the other
and the evil from heaven, but returning thither in the fulness of time,
when the usurper on account of his extreme tyranny, cruelty and injustice
had made himself hated by the race of men and had finally become convinced
of his own incapability and powerlessness. In truth if such a belief had
sprung up it would not have been strange. Everywhere the power and the
influence of the devil was seen, but nowhere God's, if not in the bloody
and terrible laws and oppressive social system which were declared by
spiritual and profane authorities to be divine. The very theory by which
the Church sought to save for God his attribute of omnipotence--the theory
of consent, according to which the devil exercises such power only by
God's permission--this very theory was suited to augment the confusion and
the terror. "Never," says Bunsen,[45] "has there been a time when a divine
and universal government was so much despaired of as in the Middle Ages."
Bunsen inclines to the view of the French historian Michelet, that from
the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, after the Waldenses and
Albigenses in France had been exterminated by Romish persecution, and the
lower classes had been reduced to serfs, a religion of despair, a real
Satanic _cultus_ sprang up, and that the Witches' Sabbath was in fact
founded upon nightly congregations, in which thousands of brutalized men
driven by misery and oppression gathered themselves together in order to
worship the devil and invoke his aid. But there exists no absolutely
certain historical fact to prove that such meetings have really taken
place. We consider it more probable, as pointed out above, that the
Witches' Sabbath was as it were the lingering twilight, constantly
deepening, and constantly painted in more monstrous colors, after the day
of the degraded festivals in the religion of nature,--an incubus of
imagination which oppressed the bosom of humanity buried in a world of
dreams; and that nothing more than the belief in its reality, which the
Church sanctioned, was necessary to produce the phenomena we describe. The
Waldenses and the Albigenses were treated like the Stedinghs. "Let the
judges know," writes an inquisitor, "that the sorcerers, the witches and
the devil-workers are almost all Waldenses. The Waldenses are by
profession, essentially and formally, devil-workers; and though not all
conjurers, still conjuration and Waldenseism have much in common." The
highest authorities of the Church constantly nourished that awe of the
devil and his tools which filled the mind, and they could do it without
scruple, being themselves seized by the same terror. Thus John XXII.
promulgated, A. D. 1303, two letters, in which he complains that he
himself, not less than countless numbers of his sheep, was in danger of
his life by the arts of sorcerers who could send devils into mirrors and
rings, and make away with men by their words alone. He mentions especially
that his enemies have sought to kill him by piercing dolls which they had
baptized with his name by needles, invoking the aid of the devil. It is
needless to point out what influence such proclamations from Christ's
vicar, the infallible head of the Church, would exercise over the common
mind. The dualistic philosophy ripened more and more until that terrible
crisis which broke out in the fifteenth century. That crisis was preceded
by the trial of the Templars and by several great but local
witch-processes, with subsequent executions, until finally, Dec. 5th,
1484, the bull of Pope Innocent VIII., "Ad forturan rei memoriam,"
appeared. This bull with its companion, the "Witch-hammer" (Malleus
Malificarum), composed by the monk and inquisitor Sprenger, brought the
evil to its climax. Hell was no longer a mere product of the imagination:
we see it established on earth in dread reality and stretching its
dominion over all Christendom.