hardly be found except below the gallows where a pure youth has been
hanged.[53] He who seeks the herb should know that its lower part has the
shape of a human being, and that its upper part consists of broad leaves
and yellow flowers. When it is torn from the soil it sighs, shrieks and
moans so piteously, that he who hears it must die. To find it one should
go out before sunrise on a Friday morning, after having filled his ears
carefully with cotton, wax or pitch, and bring with him a black dog
without one white hair. The sign of the cross must be made three times
over the mandrake, and the soil dug up carefully all around it, so that it
be attached only by the fine rootlets. It is then tied by a string to the
tail of the dog and he is attracted forward by a piece of bread. The dog
pulls the plant out of the earth, but falls dead, struck by the terrible
shriek of the mandragora. It is then brought home, washed in red wine,
wrapped in red and white silk, laid in a shrine, washed again every
Friday, and dressed in a white frock. The mandragora reveals hidden things
and future events, and procures for the owner the friendship of all men. A
silver coin deposited with it in the evening is doubled in the morning.
Still the coin must not be too large in size. If you buy the mandragora it
remains with you, throw it wherever you will, until you sell it again.
If you keep it till your death you must depart with it to hell. But it can
be sold only for a lower price than it was bought. Therefore is he who has
bought it with the smallest existing coin, irretrievably lost.
The being called mandragora was, as we see, a kind of "_Spiritus
familiaris_." But it appeared in still another form. It happened that
adventurers represented themselves as mandragoras, and on account of this
mystical origin had gained success at court, having first been spiritually
made human by Christian baptism. But they lost by baptism their
wonder-working power, greatly to their own and others' pecuniary
disadvantage. Still greater was the number of those adventurers during the
Middle Ages who asserted themselves or others to be the bastards of devils
and human beings. But if they led a blameless life, evincing a firm belief
in the dogmas of the Church, the danger of such a pedigree was not greater
than the honor. The son of a fallen angel did not need to bend his head
before a man of noble birth.
In the demoniacal fauna of the Middle Ages the were-wolf plays too
important a role to be passed over in silence. He was the terror of rural
districts. Were-wolves are men who change themselves for a time into
wolves, and then rove about hunting for children. The belief in the
were-wolf is very ancient. Antique authors speak of it as a superstition
among the Scythians, and among shepherds and peasants in the eastern
provinces.[54] Then the change was considered to result from certain herbs
growing in Pontus; in the Middle Ages it was the devil who wrapped a
wolf's hide around the witch or the enchanted person. Even this belief was
embraced and proclaimed by Augustine. Augustine,--the same father who
declared that he would not believe the gospel if the authority of the
Church did not exhort him to do so,--found it worthy of a Sadducean or a
pagan philosopher alone to deny the existence of so well-known a
phenomenon as the were-wolf. The emperor Sigismund had the question
investigated "scientifically" in his presence by theologians, and they
came to the general agreement that the were-wolf is "a positive and
constant fact"; for the existence of the devil being accepted, there is no
reason to deny that of the were-wolf, sup-ported as it is by the authority
of the fathers of the Church and by general experience.[55] This "general
experience" finally became, like the belief in sorcery, a raging mental
disease, an epidemic ("_insama zoanthropica_") infecting whole districts
in various parts of Europe and sending many insane persons who had
confessed before the courts their imagined sin, to the place of
execution.[56]
Nearly related to this lycanthropy is the more horrible vampirism. The
vampires, according to the belief of the Middle Ages, are disembodied
souls which clothe themselves again in their buried bodies, steal at night
into houses, and suck from the nipple of the sleeping all their blood. He
who is thus bereft of the vital fluid is in his turn changed into a
vampire and visits preferably his own relatives. If the corpse of a person
suspected of vampirism is dug up, and its stomach pressed, an abundance of
fresh blood flows from the mouth. The corpse is well preserved. The belief
in vampires has likewise produced a kind of psychical pestilence which yet
in the eighteenth century spread terror in the Austrian provinces.[57]
If sorcery was an imaginary people's magic, there existed also a real,
and it consisted in an infinite variety of usages, observances and rules
for all conditions of life. Not to speak of the astrologers' extensive
hand-written calendars, which pointed out which constellations, seasons
and days are auspicious for bathing, bleeding, hair-cutting, shaving,
house-building, wooing, engaging servants, setting out on travels and so
on, there existed among the people an incredibly large mass of rules for
living which any body that would avoid the constant danger of bringing
misfortune on himself and his family, must know.
From waking up in the morning to going asleep at night, such maxims were
to be observed: putting the wrong foot first out of bed in the morning was
as sure to be followed by annoyances in the course of the day as a neglect
to place the shoes with the heels toward the bed at night was certain to
cause the visit of ghosts or evil dreams. When children are born, no one
must go out or in, or open the door without bringing fire with him, that
the trolls may not find their way in and exchange the child; and no one
entering must say a word before he has touched the fire. For the same
reason the child, while unchristened, must be watched carefully every
night, and a fire must be kept constantly burning on the hearth. Before
the christening a child must not be moved from one room to another without
putting steel beside it. If two boys are baptized on the same occasion,
that one who obtains his name and blessing first will be best endowed both
bodily and mentally. On the day of christening the mother should avoid
handling an axe, knife or other cutting instruments, otherwise the child
will some time be murdered. If the floor under a cradle is swept, the
child will be bereft of its sleep. If the cradle is moved while the child
is not in it, the child becomes peevish. When a child yawns, the sign of
the cross must be made over its mouth, and the words "Jesus, God's son!"
added; otherwise the devil will then enter into it. If a child looks out
through the window or looks in a mirror at night, it will fall sick.
Children punished on Sunday become disobedient; but a child whipped on
Good Friday before sunset, will become obedient and well-behaved. If the
child walks about in one shoe, the mother will have a sore back. If a
child walks or runs backwards, it drives its parents so many steps into
hell. A child eating and reading at the same time gets a bad memory. If a
suitor's first gift to his betrothed consists of shoes, she will be
unfaithful, if of stockings, she will be jealous. Nuptials on Mondays,
Wednesdays and Saturdays are unfortunate. If a bridal procession comes to
a stop for any reason, the married pair will meet with dissensions. If the
marriage-ring is too small, misfortune is in store. Of the bridal pair,
that one dies first who first kneels down or rises from kneeling. Those
who hold the canopy must not change hands or touch the bride's crown, for
that prognosticates misfortune and ennui. If in going out an old woman or
one carrying water is met, the room should be re-entered. When the table
is set, the bread must be laid upon it immediately. Bread must never be
placed with the upper crust down. Great care must be taken to remove all
substances separated from the body, as hair, nails, blood; they must be
buried in the soil so as not to come in contact with diseased persons, or
fall into the hands of witches.
We have selected the preceding observances and rules as examples of those
thousands of precepts for all conditions of life which have been collected
by investigations in this field from the mouths of the people. A full
collection would require a large volume. In all of them is seen a servile
fear of mysterious evil influences, lurking on all sides, and whose power
or impotency as regards man nowise depends on his morality, but only on
the way in which he observes certain ethically indifferent acts. Many of
them seem to have arisen only by faulty application of the theory of
causality; others depend on a symbolical method of contemplating nature.
What a difference between this popular wisdom and that stored up in the
gnomes of the Greeks or in the heathen Havamal! Part of the former may be
likewise an heirloom, but how exuberantly these superstitions grew during
the centuries of ripe and glaring belief in personified evil; how deeply
they struck root among the people, while Havamal has been saved from the
flood of time only by the hand of the student!
Among the superstitions are to be counted the magical prognosis of
diseases and death. Many were the tokens of the approaching
skeleton-figure with his scythe and glass. They were heard in the cawing
of crows and ravens, in the howling of dogs, in the chirping of the
cricket, and the regular ticking of the wood-worm concealed in the wall.
If the horse of a priest riding to visit a sick person in his parish
lowered its head upon arriving at a house, if a gnat was caught gnawing
any clothing, if a light suddenly went out, if an image fell down, if a
glass or a mirror was broken, it indicated an approaching death in the
house. To determine the fate of a sick person, a piece of bread of which
he had eaten was laid in a dark corner, and its change of color was
observed; or a piece of fat with which the soles of the sick had been
smeared was offered to a dog, or a stone was lifted to see if any thing
was concealed beneath it. If the bread became dark, or if the dog refused
to eat what was offered him, or if there was no living thing under the
stone, then the sick person was considered incurable, and nothing could be
hoped even from the inherited medical skill of the wise old men and women.
The exercise of this skill consisted in the use, along with "reading" and
conjurations, partly of herbs of more or less known efficiency, and partly
also, as it appears, of magnetic forces, resorted to mechanically without
reflection.
The medical art inherited among the people from generation to generation
is a subject which none but a clear-sighted and unprejudiced scientist of
the medical profession can treat, and which has been left hitherto without
that investigation which the subject undoubtedly deserves, at least from
a historical point of view. There was, at the end of the Middle Ages,
among the devotees of the Galenic art a man of genius who, despairing to
find in the folios of the medical scholastics any traces of truth,
abandoned the lecture-room and went forth into the world without in order,
as he himself said, to read the book of nature and learn something of that
medical instinct with which God, as he believed, must have endowed men as
well as animals, and which must find a true expression only in the people
living in immediate reciprocity with nature. This man was Paracelsus. He
who despised and overwhelmed with mockery the coryphei of his days in the
medical faculties, did not disdain to listen to "the experience of
peasants, old women, night-wanderers, and vagabonds," and the magnetical
system which he constructed "by the illumination of nature's light, and
not by the lamp-flare of an apothecary's shop," rest in all probability on
the general principles which he found in the plurality of sympathetic
cures practiced among the people. In the "reading" by which these cures
were accompanied, Paracelsus saw rightly nothing but a subjective moment,
and means of making faith and imagination the allies of the physician. A
mass of these conjuration-formulae in different diseases have been
collected and published in various countries of Europe. They offer the
reader little or nothing of interest.[58]
A very common usage during the Middle Ages was to measure the sick person,
at one time to cure him, at another to find out if the disease was
decreasing or increasing. Another means was to drag him through a hole.
Sick children were pulled through holes dug in the earth or through a
cleft cherry-tree. Sick sheep were forced to creep through the cleft of an
oak, and so on. Another remedy against many kinds of sufferings was the
binding of a thread or a band which had been read over, around the neck or
some limb of the sick. Connected with this is the tying of witch-knots,
used only with evil intent. Bands of different colors and material[59]
were required for these. They were buried near the dwelling of the person
to be injured. It was thought that by this means any limb or bodily power
of an enemy could be impaired. A French jurist and witch-judge, Pierre
Delancre, complains that in his days there were few married couples in
France whose happiness had not been marred by this means; young men hardly
dared to marry from fear of it. Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, advised, as
a remedy against this influence, a diligent use of the sacraments. In
French rituals church-prayers against the effects of witch-knots are
prescribed. Hardly less universally was it the custom to make dolls of
rags, dough, wax or clay, baptize them with the name of the hated person,
put them in the fire or pierce them with needles, and bury them under the
threshold of that individual, all in order to inflict sufferings on
him.[60] Diseases could also be transferred to dolls by reading certain
formulae, and placing them in some inaccessible place, or in running water.
Not only against diseases, but also against the dangers of fire and war,
against ill-luck in love or chase, on voyages and the like, magical
remedies were freely resorted to by the people. The "Witch-hammer"
complains bitterly against the criminal practice of the soldiers in
mutilating crucifixes in order to harden themselves against the sword and
bullets. The executioner in Passau gained, during the Thirty Years' War, a
wide reputation for his skill in hardening the human frame, which he did
by means of scraps of paper with cabalistic figures (Passauer
Henkers-Zettel), which were eaten. The belief that hunters procured, by
means of conjurations, "free-arrows" and "free-bullets" was very common.
The "Witch-hammer" accuses various potentates of having in their pay
"diabolical archers" who hit their mark from a long distance without
aiming. It was customary at fires to throw into the flames so-called
shields of David,--plates with two intersecting triangles and the motto
"Agla" (the initials of four Hebrew words meaning: "Thou art strong
eternally, O Lord!") and "_consummatum est_." As late as in the middle of
the last century the magistrate of Leipzig ordered that such plates
should be laid up in the rathhaus to be used in case of fires. In Catholic
countries the clergy took the employment of magical appliances against
fires into their own hands; processions singing and bearing relics went
around the burning house three times, and if this had no salutary effect,
it was a sure sign that God had allowed the devil to wield the consuming
element unto destruction.
The extent of this treatise does not allow a detailed exposition of the
many divinatory arts which had their adepts among the people. The Church
preaching mightily against those arts and representing them as devices of
the devil, the father of lies and founder of oracles, did not, however,
deny, but could confirm by biblical quotation, their power to unveil
futurity.
Every thing that we have here described was to the Church black magic: all
mystical practices among the people, whether resorted to for good or evil
purposes, to heal or cure, were looked upon as implying contempt for the
divine magic of the Church itself, and also a league with the devil, if
not a formal one, at any rate a "_pactum implicitum_." It was therefore
the possessors of the traditional popular art of healing who were first
sent to the stake wherever the inquisition commenced its trials. But no
terrorism could eradicate the popular magic so long as the persecutors
themselves believed in its efficiency, and fought only for a consecrated
superstition against its outlawed counterfeit. The struggle against the
superstition of the Church as well as of the people, was reserved for
another time and for another theory of the universe and of morals.
The so-called wandering scholastics (_scholastici vagantes_, _scholares
erratici_) formed a kind of connecting link between the magic of the
learned and that of the common people. They were ruined and adventurous
students, priests and monks who wandered about in the rural districts of
most of the European states, especially Germany, representing themselves
as treasure-diggers, selling "_spiritus familiares_," amulets,
love-potions, and life-elixirs, conjuring spirits, divining by the stars,
and healing men and cattle. These adventurers were associated in a regular
guild, and had like other vagrant tradesmen, their lodgings and hospitals
in the cities. They were dreaded competitors of the witch-fathers of the
cloisters, were several times excommunicated by the Church, and seem to
have nearly disappeared when the witch-trials commenced in earnest. It is
to a person of that kind that the Faust-legend is attached. It reflects
the popular opinions concerning the power of learned magicians.[61]
The same period which saw the bull of Innocentius promulgated, and the
belief in devils culminate in the witch-processes, gave birth to the
_renaissance_. This saviour came to the world in the hour of its
intensest need. The Hellenic spirit, born again from the study of classic
literature and classic art, was a new Messias putting his heel on the head
of the old serpent and saving humanity from the power of death and of the
devil. The people sitting in darkness illumined only by the lurid flames
kindled by the inquisition saw a great light and stretched their hands
towards the new dawn. The study of the ancients had an immense influence,
all the more as the actual world was so different from the antique world.
The exhumed monuments of Hellas revealed other state systems than the
feudal of the Middle Ages,--states which were organizations, not mere
mechanical conglomerates of conquerors and conquered, and were founded
upon a nobler basis than given or assumed privileges. These monuments
revealed an independent search for truth which had placed itself above
tradition--a novel spectacle to the people of the Middle Ages! They
revealed an art in which harmony reigned between spirit and nature,
between the higher life and sensuousness, between the relative opposites
which the Middle Ages had conceived as absolute, placing them against one
another in a struggle which wrecked beauty and morality. They revealed
large symmetrical characters as free from the asceticism of the Middle
Ages as from the wild sensuality of that time. All these ideas, hailed
with enthusiasm, could not but transform the appearance of the world. They
overthrew the darkness of the Middle Ages, put the devil and hell to
flight, and drove them into that lumber-corner of the spiritual kingdom
where they are at present, but from which, at any political reaction, they
peer out eagerly watching whether they may not once more bring the great
wide world into their power. But they shall scarcely succeed in this, as
long as freedom of thought and scientific independence are guarded as the
foremost conditions of the spiritual health of mankind; and they shall
utterly fail when an all-extended intelligence has taught the people that
the premises of the devil-dogma, if they could be again inoculated into
the popular mind, would show anew the same results which have been
depicted above, and lead us back to the terrible times of the inquisition
and the burning of witches. This, no doubt, even the orthodox defenders of
belief in an impersonated evil principle do not desire; but they do not
observe that history acts more consistently than they, and cures general
errors only by making long generations draw from them the last
consequences and suffer their full effect.
THE END.
INDEX.
Adam's sin, brings countless woes on man, 12.
Agnus Dei, 63;
its power, 64.
Ahriman, affirmed to have been Judaized in "Satan," 35;
repelled at Marathon, 36;
his power over man limited, 47;
author of _black_ magic, 54.
Alexander, conquers Asia, but helps the triumph of dualism, 37.
Ammonius Sacca, tries to restore Neoplatonism, 40.
Amulets employed in Church-magic, 62, 63.
Angels, belong to the lowest hierarchy, 5;
have the care of mortals, 6.
Appolonius of Tyana, deemed the peer of Christ in gift of miracles, 40,
163.
Archangels, part of the lowest hierarchy, 5;
protect religion, 6.
Archetypes, world of, _i. e._, the Empyrean, 1;
all celestial things are in the Empyrean; are immaterial, 6.
Aristotle's method revives science, 44.
Astrology, introduction to (Table II. of correspondences), 127.
Atmosphere of earth situate next below space of the moon, 2.
Augustine, a Manicheian, 43;
last of the fathers educated in philosophy, 44;
quoted on baptism, 57;
quoted on the existence of fauns, satyrs, etc., 162;
believes in the existence of were-wolves, 206.
Baptism, copied, in anticipation, in the Mithras mysteries, 57.
Baptismal water, its various efficacy, 58.
Bartholomeus Chassaneus, instructs how to proceed in the courts against
common pests, 78.
Benoit de Montferrand, bishop of Lausanne, excommunicates may-bugs, 75,
76.
_Bereshit_, its mystic meaning, 144.
Bethesda, the efficacy of the water in its pool inferior to that of
baptism, 57.
Bishop Gerhard, converts the heretics of Arras, 60.
Boethius, on the basis of creation, 124.
Borrichius (Olaf Borch) cited, 115.
Bunsen's Gott in der Geschichte, quoted, 93, 94, 175.
Cabalists' method of searching out the inner meaning of the Bible, 144;
discover the seventy-two mystical names of God, 146.
Christian fathers, one of, doubts if his way of attaining perfection is
the only one, 32;
one of, declares every thing in heathen thought to be of the devil,
42.
Church the, prepared for by election of the Jews, and founded by Christ,
14;
is one body; accumulates a wealth of supererogatory works, and grants
remission of guilt also to dead, 15;
a mole against the tide of sin, 16;
the kingdom of God on earth; her destiny universal extension, 18;
can not check the growth of sin; her emblem an ark, 22;
the only legitimate bodily physician, 68;
forbids at several councils the secular practice of medicine, 72.
Church bells, their power against the demons, 74.
Clemens of Alexandria, fights for the union of belief and thought, 41;
quoted on the mission of philosophy, 42;
rejects the doctrine of eternal punishment, 43.
Colquhoun quoted, 200.
Conception-billets described, 64-66.
"Conjurer of Hell," 148.
Contrast between state of Society in Middle Ages and Hellenic and later
European civilizations due to different theories of the universe,
29.
Cosmic Philosophy of Middle Ages, 1-28.
Cyprianus and others enter into league with Satan, 165.
Delrio, ascribes the origin of witchcraft to Zoroaster, 45.
Demonianism, cured by the Church, 70.
Demons, fallen intelligences of the middle hierarchy, 11;
war against the good angels; cause storms and drouth; pervade the
elements, 12;
entice man, 13;
able to take full possession of men, 25.
Deutsche Theologie, quoted on the nature of evil, 26.
Differences between the dualism of Zoroaster and the Christian, 46-48.
Dissection prohibited, 71.
Dominion, order of angels, receives the commands of God, 5.
Dualism, of the Middle Ages affirmed to have been derived from Persia,
34;
its conflict with the unitarian notions of Greece the sum of history
between Cyrus and Constantine; wins a flank-position on the
Mediterranean upon the return of the Jews from captivity; its
demon-belief testified to by the many demoniacs in the time of
Christ, 35;
magic and belief upon authority its necessary consequences, 36;
derived from Zoroaster, 38;
spreads over the Roman provinces, 39;
advances against Europe, as Manicheism, 43;
is finally absolute and brings on the Dark Ages, 44;
is intensified after entering Christianity, 46,
and undergoes changes, 47, 48;
attacks the inner authority, 92.
Earth, encompassed by ten heavens, 1;
made a paradise for man; explains symbolically man's destiny, 8.
Egidius, opposes fire-worship, 171.
_Electrum magicum_, 138.
Elements, four prime in the constitution of all things, 3.
Eleusinian mysteries, fragments of, preserved in magic of the learned,
117.
Empire, third order of angels, ward off all hindrances, 5.
Empyrean, the heaven of fire; world of archetypes, 1;
remains after the final conflagration, 26.
Europe, belief, of in Middle Ages, 1;
defeats dualism, 36;
goes into the enemy's country, 37.
Eucharist, perennial source of power and sanctification, 59.
Faust, quoted, 98, 109.