discussed with a relish and a filthy minuteness worthy of Sanchez. Could
children be born of these devilish amours? Of course they could, said one
party; are there not plenty of cases in authentic history? Who was the
father of Romulus and Remus? nay, not so very long ago, of Merlin?
Another party denied the possibility of the thing altogether. Among these
was Luther, who declared the children either to be supposititious, or
else mere imps, disguised as innocent sucklings, and known as
_Wechselkinder_, or changelings, who were common enough, as everybody
must be aware. Of the intercourse itself Luther had no doubts.[111] A
third party took a middle ground, and believed that vermin and toads
might be the offspring of such amours. And how did the Demon, a mere
spiritual essence, contrive himself a body? Some would have it that he
entered into dead bodies, by preference, of course, those of sorcerers.
It is plain, from the confession of De la Rue, that this was the theory
of his examiners. This also had historical evidence in its favor. There
was the well-known leading case of the Bride of Corinth, for example. And
but yesterday, as it were, at Crossen in Silesia, did not Christopher
Monig, an apothecary's servant, come back after being buried, and do
duty, as if nothing particular had happened, putting up prescriptions as
usual, and "pounding drugs in the mortar with a mighty noise"?
Apothecaries seem to have been special victims of these Satanic pranks,
for another appeared at Reichenbach not long before, affirming that, "he
had poisoned several men with his drugs," which certainly gives an air of
truth to the story. Accordingly the Devil is represented as being
unpleasantly cold to the touch. "Caietan escrit qu'une sorciere demanda
un iour au diable pourquoy il ne se rechauffoit, qui fist response qu'il
faisoit ce qu'il pouuoit." Poor Devil! But there are cases in which the
demon is represented as so hot that his grasp left a seared spot as black
as charcoal. Perhaps some of them came from the torrid zone of their
broad empire, and others from the thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice.
Those who were not satisfied with the dead-body theory contented
themselves, like Dr. More, with that of "adscititious particles," which
has, to be sure, a more metaphysical and scholastic flavor about it. That
the demons really came, either corporeally or through some diabolic
illusion that amounted to the same thing, and that the witch devoted
herself to him body and soul, scarce anybody was bold enough to doubt. To
these familiars their venerable paramours gave endearing nicknames, such
as My little Master, or My dear Martin,--the latter, probably, after the
heresy of Luther, and when the rack was popish. The famous witch-finder
Hopkins enables us to lengthen the list considerably. One witch whom he
convicted, after being "kept from sleep two or three nights," called in
five of her devilish servitors. The first was "_Holt_, who came in like a
white kitling"; the second "_Jarmara_, like a fat spaniel without any
legs at all"; the third, "_Vinegar Tom_, who was like a long-tailed
greyhound with an head like an oxe, with a long tail and broad eyes, who,
when this discoverer spoke to and bade him to the place provided for him
and his angells, immediately transformed himself into the shape of a
child of foure yeares old, without a head, and gave half a dozen turnes
about the house and vanished at the doore"; the fourth, "_Sack and
Sugar_, like a black rabbet"; the fifth, "_News_, like a polcat." Other
names of his finding were Elemauzer, Pywacket, Peck-in-the-Crown,
Grizzel, and Greedygut, "which," he adds, "no mortal could invent." The
name of _Robin_, which we met with in the confession of Alice Duke, has,
perhaps, wider associations than the woman herself dreamed of; for,
through Robin des Bois and Robin Hood, it may be another of those
scattered traces that lead us back to Woden. Probably, however, it is
only our old friend Robin Goodfellow, whose namesake Knecht Ruprecht
makes such a figure in the German fairy mythology. Possessed persons
called in higher agencies,--Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Powers; and
among the witnesses against Urbain Grandier we find the names of
Leviathan, Behemoth, Isaacarum, Belaam, Asmodeus, and Beherit, who spoke
French very well, but were remarkably poor Latinists, knowing, indeed,
almost as little of the language as if their youth had been spent in
writing Latin verses.[112] A shrewd Scotch physician tried them with
Gaelic, but they could make nothing of it.
It was only when scepticism had begun to make itself uncomfortably
inquisitive, that the Devil had any difficulty in making himself visible
and even palpable. In simpler times, demons would almost seem to have
made no inconsiderable part of the population. Trithemius tells of one
who served as cook to the Bishop of Hildesheim (one shudders to think of
the school where he had graduated as _Cordon bleu_), and who delectebatur
esse cum hominibus, loquens, interrogans, respondens familiariter
omnibus, aliquando visibiliter, aliquando invisibiliter apparens. This
last feat of "appearing invisibly" would have been worth seeing. In 1554,
the Devil came of a Christmas eve to Lawrence Doner, a parish priest in
Saxony, and asked to be confessed. "Admissus, horrendas adversus Christum
filium Dei blasphemias evomuit. Verum cum virtute verbi Dei a parocho
victus esset, intolerabili post se relicto foetore abiit." Splendidly
dressed, with two companions, he frequented an honest man's house at
Rothenberg. He brought with him a piper or fiddler, and contrived feasts
and dances under pretext of wooing the goodman's daughter. He boasted
that he was a foreign nobleman of immense wealth, and, for a time, was as
successful as an Italian courier has been known to be at one of our
fashionable watering-places. But the importunity of the guest and his
friends at length displicuit patrifamilias, who accordingly one evening
invited a minister of the Word to meet them at supper, and entered upon
pious discourse with him from the word of God. Wherefore, seeking other
matter of conversation, they said that there were many facetious things
more suitable to exhilarate the supper-table than the interpretation of
Holy Writ, and begged that they might be no longer bored with Scripture.
Thoroughly satisfied by their singular way of thinking that his guests
were diabolical, paterfamilias cries out in Latin worthy of Father Tom,
"Apagite, vos scelerati nebulones!" This said, the tartarean impostor and
his companions at once vanished with a great tumult, leaving behind them
a most unpleasant foetor and the bodies of three men who had been hanged.
Perhaps if the clergyman-cure were faithfully tried upon the next
fortune-hunting count with a large real estate in whiskers and an
imaginary one in Barataria, he also might vanish, leaving a strong smell
of barber's-shop, and taking with him a body that will come to the
gallows in due time. It were worth trying. Luther tells of a demon who
served as _famulus_ in a monastery, fetching beer for the monks, and
always insisting on honest measure for his money. There is one case on
record where the Devil appealed to the courts for protection in his
rights. A monk, going to visit his mistress, fell dead as he was passing
a bridge. The good and bad angel came to litigation about his soul. The
case was referred by agreement to Eichard, Duke of Normandy, who decided
that the monk's body should be carried back to the bridge, and his soul
restored to it by the claimants. If he persevered in keeping his
assignation, the Devil was to have him, if not, then the Angel. The monk,
thus put upon his guard, turns back and saves his soul, such as it
was.[113] Perhaps the most impudent thing the Devil ever did was to open
a school of magic in Toledo. The ceremony of graduation in this
institution was peculiar. The senior class had all to run through a
narrow cavern, and the venerable president was entitled to the hindmost,
if he could catch him. Sometimes it happened that he caught only his
shadow, and in that case the man who had been nimble enough to do what
Goethe pronounces impossible, became the most profound magician of his
year. Hence our proverb of _the Devil take the hindmost_, and Chamisso's
story of Peter Schlemihl.
There is no end of such stories. They were repeated and believed by the
gravest and wisest men down to the end of the sixteenth century; they
were received undoubtingly by the great majority down to the end of the
seventeenth. The Devil was an easy way of accounting for what was beyond
men's comprehension. He was the simple and satisfactory answer to all the
conundrums of Nature. And what the Devil had not time to bestow his
personal attention upon, the witch was always ready to do for him. Was a
doctor at a loss about a case? How could he save his credit more cheaply
than by pronouncing it witchcraft, and turning it over to the parson to
be exorcised? Did a man's cow die suddenly, or his horse fall lame?
Witchcraft! Did one of those writers of controversial quartos, heavy as
the stone of Diomed, feel a pain in the small of his back? Witchcraft!
Unhappily there were always ugly old women; and if you crossed them in
any way, or did them a wrong, they were given to scolding and banning.
If, within a year or two after, anything should happen to you or yours,
why, of course, old Mother Bombie or Goody Blake must be at the bottom of
it. For it was perfectly well known that there were witches, (does not
God's law say expressly, "Suffer not a _witch_ to live?") and that they
could cast a spell by the mere glance of their eyes, could cause you to
pine away by melting a waxen image, could give you a pain wherever they
liked by sticking pins into the same, could bring sickness into your
house or into your barn by hiding a Devil's powder under the threshold;
and who knows what else? Worst of all, they could send a demon into your
body, who would cause you to vomit pins, hair, pebbles, knives,-indeed,
almost anything short of a cathedral,-without any fault of yours, utter
through you the most impertinent things _verbi ministro_, and, in short,
make you the most important personage in the parish for the time being.
Meanwhile, you were an object of condolence and contribution to the whole
neighborhood. What wonder if a lazy apprentice or servant-maid (Bekker
gives several instances of the kind detected by him) should prefer being
possessed, with its attendant perquisites, to drudging from morning till
night? And to any one who has observed how common a thing in certain
states of mind self-connivance is, and how near it is to self-deception,
it will not be surprising that some were, to all intents and purposes,
really possessed. Who has never felt an almost irresistible temptation,
and seemingly not self-originated, to let himself go? to let his mind
gallop and kick and curvet and roll like a horse turned loose? in short,
as we Yankees say, "to speak out in meeting"? Who never had it suggested
to him by the fiend to break in at a funeral with a real character of the
deceased, instead of that Mrs. Grundyfied view of him which the clergyman
is so painfully elaborating in his prayer? Remove the pendulum of
conventional routine, and the mental machinery runs on with a whir that
gives a delightful excitement to sluggish temperaments, and is, perhaps,
the natural relief of highly nervous organizations. The tyrant Will is
dethroned, and the sceptre snatched by his frolic sister Whim. This state
of things, if continued, must become either insanity or imposture. But
who can say precisely where consciousness ceases and a kind of automatic
movement begins, the result of over-excitement? The subjects of these
strange disturbances have been almost always young women or girls at a
critical period of their development. Many of the most remarkable cases
have occurred in convents, and both there and elsewhere, as in other
kinds of temporary nervous derangement, have proved contagious.
Sometimes, as in the affair of the nuns of Loudon, there seems every
reason to suspect a conspiracy; but I am not quite ready to say that
Grandier was the only victim, and that some of the energumens were not
unconscious tools in the hands of priestcraft and revenge. One thing is
certain: that in the dioceses of humanely sceptical prelates the cases of
possession were sporadic only, and either cured, or at least hindered
from becoming epidemic, by episcopal mandate. Cardinal Mazarin, when
Papal vice-legate at Avignon, made an end of the trade of exorcism within
his government.
But scepticism, down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, was the
exception. Undoubting and often fanatical belief was the rule. It is easy
enough to be astonished at it, still easier to misapprehend it. How could
sane men have been deceived by such nursery-tales? Still more, how could
they have suffered themselves, on what seems to us such puerile evidence,
to consent to such atrocious cruelties, nay, to urge them on? As to the
belief, we should remember that the human mind, when it sails by _dead
reckoning_, without the possibility of a fresh observation, perhaps
without the instruments necessary to take one, will sometimes bring up in
very strange latitudes. Do we of the nineteenth century, then, always
strike out boldly into the unlandmarked deep of speculation and shape our
courses by the stars, or do we not sometimes con our voyage by what seem
to us the firm and familiar headlands of truth, planted by God himself,
but which may, after all, be no more than an insubstantial mockery of
cloud or airy juggle of mirage? The refraction of our own atmosphere has
by no means made an end of its tricks with the appearances of things in
our little world of thought. The men of that day believed what they saw,
or, as our generation would put it, what they _thought_ they saw. Very
good. The vast majority of men believe, and always will believe, on the
same terms. When one comes along who can partly distinguish the thing
seen from that travesty or distortion of it which the thousand disturbing
influences within him and without him would _make_ him see, we call him a
great philosopher. All our intellectual charts are engraved according to
his observations, and we steer contentedly by them till some man whose
brain rests on a still more unmovable basis corrects them still further
by eliminating what his predecessor thought _he_ saw. We must account for
many former aberrations in the moral world by the presence of more or
less nebulous bodies of a certain gravity which modified the actual
position of truth in its relation to the mind, and which, if they have
now vanished, have made way, perhaps, for others whose influence will in
like manner be allowed for by posterity in their estimate of us. In
matters of faith, astrology has by no means yet given place to astronomy,
nor alchemy become chemistry, which knows what to seek for and how to
find it. In the days of witchcraft all science was still in the condition
of _May-be;_ it is only just bringing itself to find a higher
satisfaction in the imperturbable _Must-be_ of law. We should remember
that what we call _natural_ may have a very different meaning for one
generation from that which it has for another. The boundary between the
"other" world and this ran till very lately, and at some points runs
still, through a vast tract of unexplored border-land of very uncertain
tenure. Even now the territory which Reason holds firmly as Lord Warden
of the marches during daylight, is subject to sudden raids of Imagination
by night. But physical darkness is not the only one that lends
opportunity to such incursions; and in midsummer 1692, when Ebenezer
Bapson, looking out of the fort at Gloucester in broad day, saw shapes of
men, sometimes in blue coats like Indians, sometimes in white waistcoats
like Frenchmen, it seemed _more_ natural to most men that they should be
spectres than men of flesh and blood. Granting the assumed premises, as
nearly every one did, the syllogism was perfect.
So much for the apparent reasonableness of the belief, since every man's
logic is satisfied with a legitimate deduction from his own postulates.
Causes for the cruelty to which the belief led are not further to seek.
Toward no crime have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in
punishing difference of belief, and the first systematic persecutions for
witchcraft began with the inquisitors in the South of France in the
thirteenth century. It was then and there that the charge of sexual
uncleanness with demons was first devised. Persecuted heretics would
naturally meet in darkness and secret, and it was easy to blacken such
meetings with the accusation of deeds so foul as to shun the light of day
and the eyes of men. They met to renounce God and worship the Devil. But
this was not enough. To excite popular hatred and keep it fiercely alive,
fear must be mingled with it; and this end was reached by making the
heretic also a sorcerer, who, by the Devil's help, could and would work
all manner of fiendish mischief. When by this means the belief in a
league between witch and demon had become firmly established, witchcraft
grew into a well-defined crime, hateful enough in itself to furnish
pastime for the torturer and food for the fagot. In the fifteenth
century, witches were burned by thousands, and it may well be doubted if
all paganism together was ever guilty of so many human sacrifices in the
same space of time. In the sixteenth, these holocausts were appealed to
as conclusive evidence of the reality of the crime, terror was again
aroused, the more vindictive that its sources were so vague and
intangible, and cruelty was the natural consequence. Nothing but an
abject panic, in which the whole use of reason, except as a mill to grind
out syllogisms, was altogether lost, will account for some chapters in
Bodin's _Démonomanie_. Men were surrounded by a forever-renewed
conspiracy whose ramifications they could not trace, though they might
now and then lay hold on one of its associates. Protestant and Catholic
might agree in nothing else, but they were unanimous in their dread of
this invisible enemy. If fright could turn civilized Englishmen into
savage Iroquois during the imagined negro plots of New York in 1741 and
of Jamaica in 1865, if the same invisible omnipresence of Fenianism shall
be able to work the same miracle, as it perhaps will, next year in
England itself, why need we be astonished that the blows should have
fallen upon many an innocent head when men were striking wildly in
self-defence, as they supposed, against the unindictable Powers of
Darkness, against a plot which could be carried on by human agents, but
with invisible accessories and by supernatural means? In the seventeenth
century an element was added which pretty well supplied the place of
heresy as a sharpener of hatred and an awakener of indefinable suspicion.
Scepticism had been born into the world, almost more hateful than heresy,
because it had the manners of good society and contented itself with a
smile, a shrug, an almost imperceptible lift of the eyebrow,--a kind of
reasoning especially exasperating to disputants of the old school, who
still cared about victory, even when they did not about the principles
involved in the debate.
The Puritan emigration to New England took place at a time when the
belief in diabolic agency had been hardly called in question, much less
shaken. The early adventurers brought it with them to a country in every
way fitted, not only to keep it alive, but to feed it into greater vigor.
The solitude of the wilderness (and solitude alone, by dis-furnishing the
brain of its commonplace associations, makes it an apt theatre for the
delusions of imagination), the nightly forest noises, the glimpse,
perhaps, through the leaves, of a painted savage face, uncertain whether
of redman or Devil, but more likely of the latter, above all, that
measureless mystery of the unknown and conjectural stretching away
illimitable on all sides and vexing the mind, somewhat as physical
darkness does, with intimation and misgiving,--under all these
influences, whatever seeds of superstition had in any way got over from
the Old World would find an only too congenial soil in the New. The
leaders of that emigration believed and taught that demons loved to dwell
in waste and wooded places, that the Indians did homage to the bodily
presence of the Devil, and that he was especially enraged against those
who had planted an outpost of the true faith upon this continent hitherto
all his own. In the third generation of the settlement, in proportion as
living faith decayed, the clergy insisted all the more strongly on the
traditions of the elders, and as they all placed the sources of goodness
and religion in some inaccessible Other World rather than in the soul of
man himself, they clung to every shred of the supernatural as proof of
the existence of that Other World, and of its interest in the affairs of
this. They had the countenance of all the great theologians, Catholic as
well as Protestant, of the leaders of the Reformation, and in their own
day of such men as More and Glanvil and Baxter.[114] If to all these
causes, more or less operative in 1692, we add the harassing excitement
of an Indian war (urged on by Satan in his hatred of the churches), with
its daily and nightly apprehensions and alarms, we shall be less
astonished that the delusion in Salem Village rose so high than that it
subsided so soon.
I have already said that it was religious antipathy or clerical interest
that first made heresy and witchcraft identical and cast them into the
same expiatory fire. The invention was a Catholic one, but it is plain
that Protestants soon learned its value and were not slow in making it a
plague to the inventor. It was not till after the Reformation that there
was any systematic hunting out of witches in England. Then, no doubt, the
innocent charms and rhyming prayers of the old religion were regarded as
incantations, and twisted into evidence against miserable beldames who
mumbled over in their dotage what they had learned at their mother's
knee. It is plain, at least, that this was one of Agnes Simpson's crimes.
But as respects the frivolity of the proof adduced, there was nothing to
choose between Catholic and Protestant. Out of civil and canon law a net
was woven through whose meshes there was no escape, and into it the
victims were driven by popular clamor. Suspicion of witchcraft was
justified by general report, by the ill-looks of the suspected, by being
silent when accused, by her mother's having been a witch, by flight, by
exclaiming when arrested, _I am lost!_ by a habit of using imprecations,
by the evidence of two witnesses, by the accusation of a man on his
death-bed, by a habit of being away from home at night, by fifty other
things equally grave. Anybody might be an accuser,--a personal enemy, an
infamous person, a child, parent, brother, or sister. Once accused, the
culprit was not to be allowed to touch the ground on the way to prison,
was not to be left alone there lest she have interviews with the Devil
and get from him the means of being insensible under torture, was to be
stripped and shaved in order to prevent her concealing some charm, or to
facilitate the finding of witch-marks. Her right thumb tied to her left
great-toe, and _vice versa_, she was thrown into the water. If she
floated, she was a witch; if she sank and was drowned, she was lucky.
This trial, as old as the days of Pliny the Elder, was gone out of
fashion, the author of _De Lamiis_ assures us, in his day, everywhere but
in Westphalia. "On halfproof or strong presumption," says Bodin, the
judge may proceed to torture. If the witch did not shed tears under the
rack, it was almost conclusive of guilt. On this topic of torture he
grows eloquent. The rack does very well, but to thrust splinters between
the nails and flesh of hands and feet "is the most excellent gehenna of
all, and practised in Turkey." That of Florence, where they seat the
criminal in a hanging chair so contrived that if he drop asleep it
overturns and leaves him hanging by a rope which wrenches his arms
backwards, is perhaps even better, "for the limbs are not broken, and
without trouble or labor one gets out the truth." It is well in carrying
the accused to the chamber of torture to cause some in the next room to
shriek fearfully as if on the rack, that they may be terrified into
confession. It is proper to tell them that their accomplices have
confessed and accused them ("though they have done no such thing") that
they may do the same out of revenge. The judge may also with a good
conscience lie to the prisoner and tell her that if she admit her guilt,
she may be pardoned. This is Bodin's opinion, but Walburger, writing a
century later, concludes that the judge may go to any extent _citra
mendacium_, this side of lying. He may tell the witch that he will be
favorable, meaning to the Commonwealth; that he will see that she has a
new house built for her, that is, a wooden one to burn her in; that her
confession will be most useful in saving her life, to wit, her life
eternal. There seems little difference between the German's white lies
and the Frenchman's black ones. As to punishment, Bodin is fierce for
burning. Though a Protestant, he quotes with evident satisfaction a
decision of the magistrates that one "who had eaten flesh on a Friday
should be burned alive unless he repented, and if he repented, yet he was
hanged out of compassion." A child under twelve who will not confess
meeting with the Devil should be put to death if convicted of the fact,
though Bodin allows that Satan made no express compact with those who had
not arrived at puberty. This he learned from the examination of Jeanne
Harvillier, who deposed, "that, though her mother dedicated her to Satan
so soon as she was born, yet she was not married to him, nor did he
demand that, or her renunciation of God, till she had attained the age of
twelve."
There is no more painful reading than this, except the trials of the
witches themselves. These awaken, by turns, pity, indignation, disgust,
and dread,--dread at the thought of what the human mind may be brought to
believe not only probable, but proven. But it is well to be put upon our
guard by lessons of this kind, for the wisest man is in some respects
little better than a madman in a strait-waistcoat of habit, public
opinion, prudence, or the like. Scepticism began at length to make itself
felt, but it spread slowly and was shy of proclaiming itself. The
orthodox party was not backward to charge with sorcery whoever doubted
their facts or pitied their victims. Bodin says that it is good cause of
suspicion against a judge if he turn the matter into ridicule, or incline
toward mercy. The mob, as it always is, was orthodox. It was dangerous to
doubt, it might be fatal to deny. In 1453 Guillaume de Lure was burned at
Poitiers on his own confession of a compact with Satan, by which he
agreed "to preach and did preach that everything told of sorcerers was
mere fable, and that it was cruelly done to condemn them to death." This
contract was found among his papers signed "with the Devil's own claw,"
as Howell says speaking of a similar case. It is not to be wondered at
that the earlier doubters were cautious. There was literally a reign of
terror, and during such _régimes_ men are commonly found more eager to be
informers and accusers than of counsel for the defence. Peter of Abano is
reckoned among the earliest unbelievers who declared himself openly.[115]
Chaucer was certainly a sceptic, as appears by the opening of the Wife of
Bath's Tale. Wierus, a German physician, was the first to undertake
(1563) a refutation of the facts and assumptions on which the
prosecutions for witchcraft were based. His explanation of the phenomena
is mainly physiological. Mr. Leckie hardly states his position correctly,
in saying, "that he never dreamed of restricting the sphere of the
supernatural." Wierus went as far as he dared. No one can read his book
without feeling that he insinuates much more than he positively affirms
or denies. He would have weakened his cause if he had seemed to
disbelieve in demoniacal possession, since that had the supposed warrant
of Scripture; but it may be questioned whether he uses the words _Satan_
and _Demon_ in any other way than that in which many people still use the
word _Nature_. He was forced to accept certain premises of his opponents
by the line of his argument. When he recites incredible stories without
comment, it is not that he believes them, but that he thinks their
absurdity obvious. That he wrote under a certain restraint is plain from
the Colophon of his book, where he says: "Nihil autem hic ita assertum
volo, quod aequiori judicio Catholicae Christi Ecclesiae non omnino
submittam, palinodia mox spontanea emendaturus, si erroris alicubi
convincar." A great deal of latent and timid scepticism seems to have
been brought to the surface by his work. Many eminent persons wrote to
him in gratitude and commendation. In the Preface to his shorter treatise
_De Lamiis_ (which is a mere abridgment), he thanks God that his labors
had "in many places caused the cruelty against innocent blood to
slacken," and that "some more distinguished judges treat more mildly and
even absolve from capital punishment the wretched old women branded with
the odious name of witches by the populace." In the _Pseudomonarchia
Daemonum_, he gives a kind of census of the diabolic kingdom,[116] but
evidently with secret intention of making the whole thing ridiculous, or
it would not have so stirred the bile of Bodin. Wierus was saluted by
many contemporaries as a Hercules who destroyed monsters, and himself not
immodestly claimed the civic wreath for having saved the lives of
fellow-citizens. Posterity should not forget a man who really did an
honest life's work for humanity and the liberation of thought. From one
of the letters appended to his book we learn that Jacobus Savagius, a
physician of Antwerp, had twenty years before written a treatise with the
same design, but confining himself to the medical argument exclusively.
He was, however, prevented from publishing it by death. It is pleasant to
learn from Bodin that Alciato, the famous lawyer and emblematist, was one
of those who "laughed and made others laugh at the evidence relied on at
the trials, insisting that witchcraft was a thing impossible and
fabulous, and so softened the hearts of judges (in spite of the fact that
an inquisitor had caused to burn more than a hundred sorcerers in
Piedmont), that all the accused escaped." In England, Reginald Scot was
the first to enter the lists in behalf of those who had no champion. His
book, published in 1584, is full of manly sense and spirit, above all, of
a tender humanity that gives it a warmth which we miss in every other
written on the same side. In the dedication to Sir Roger Manwood he says:
"I renounce all protection and despise all friendship that might serve
towards the suppressing or supplanting of truth." To his kinsman, Sir
Thomas Scot, he writes: "My greatest adversaries are _young ignorance_
and _old custom_; for what folly soever tract of time hath fostered, it
is so superstitiously pursued of some, as though no error could be
acquainted with custom." And in his Preface he thus states his motives:
"God that knoweth my heart is witness, and you that read my book shall
see, that my drift and purpose in this enterprise tendeth only to these
respects. First, that the glory and power of God be not so abridged and
abased as to be thrust into the hand or lip of a lewd old woman, whereby
the work of the Creator should be attributed to the power of a creature.
Secondly, that the religion of the Gospel may be seen to stand without
such peevish trumpery. Thirdly, that lawful favor and Christian
compassion be rather used towards these poor souls than rigor and
extremity. Because they which are commonly accused of witchcraft are the
least sufficient of all other persons to speak for themselves, as having
the most base and simple education of all others, the extremity of their
age giving them leave to dote, their poverty to beg, their wrongs to
chide and threaten (as being void of any other way of revenge), their
humor melancholical to be full of imaginations, from whence chiefly
proceedeth the vanity of their confessions.... And for so much as the
mighty help themselves together, and the poor widow's cry, though it
reach to Heaven, is scarce heard here upon earth, I thought good
(according to my poor ability) to make intercession that some part of
common rigor and some points of hasty judgment may be advised upon."....
The case is nowhere put with more point, or urged with more sense and
eloquence, than by Scot, whose book contains also more curious matter, in
the way of charms, incantations, exorcisms, and feats of legerdemain,
than any other of the kind.
Other books followed on the same side, of which Bekker's, published about
a century later, was the most important. It is well reasoned, learned,
and tedious to a masterly degree. But though the belief in witchcraft
might be shaken, it still had the advantage of being on the whole
orthodox and respectable. Wise men, as usual, insisted on regarding
superstition as of one substance with faith, and objected to any scouring
of the shield of religion, lest, like that of Cornelius Scriblerus, it
should suddenly turn out to be nothing more than "a paltry old sconce
with the nozzle broke off." The Devil continued to be the only recognized
Minister Resident of God upon earth. When we remember that one man's
accusation on his death-bed was enough to constitute grave presumption of
witchcraft, it might seem singular that dying testimonies were so long of
no avail against the common credulity. But it should be remembered that
men are mentally no less than corporeally gregarious, and that public
opinion, the fetish even of the nineteenth century, makes men, whether
for good or ill, into a mob, which either hurries the individual judgment
along with it, or runs over and tramples it into insensibility. Those who
are so fortunate as to occupy the philosophical position of spectators
_ab extra_ are very few in any generation.
There were exceptions, it is true, but the old cruelties went on. In 1610
a case came before the tribunal of the _Tourelle_, and when the counsel
for the accused argued at some length that sorcery was ineffectual, and
that the Devil could not destroy life, President Seguier told him that he
might spare his breath, since the court had long been convinced on those
points. And yet two years later the grand-vicars of the Bishop of
Beauvais solemnly summoned Beelzebuth, Satan, Motelu, and Briffaut, with
the four legions under their charge, to appear and sign an agreement
never again to enter the bodies of reasonable or other creatures, under
pain of excommunication! If they refused, they were to be given over to
"the power of hell to be tormented and tortured more than was customary,
three thousand years after the judgment." Under this proclamation they
all came in, like reconstructed rebels, and signed whatever document was
put before them. Toward the middle of the seventeenth century, the safe
thing was still to believe, or at any rate to profess belief. Sir Thomas
Browne, though he had written an exposure of "Vulgar Errors," testified
in court to his faith in the possibility of witchcraft. Sir Kenelm Digby,
in his "Observations on the Religio Medici," takes, perhaps, as advanced
ground as any, when he says: "Neither do I deny there are witches; I only
reserve my assent till I meet with stronger motives to carry it." The
position of even enlightened men of the world in that age might be called
semi-sceptical. La Bruyère, no doubt, expresses the average of opinion:
"Que penser de la magie et du sortilége? La théorie en est obscurcie, les
principes vagues, incertains, et qui approchent du visionnaire; mais il y
a des faits embarrassants, affirmés par des hommes graves qui les ont
vus; les admettre tous, ou les nier tous, paraît un égal inconvénient, et
j'ose dire qu'en cela comme en toutes les choses extraordinaires et qui
sorteut des communes règles, il y a un parti à trouver entre les âmes
crédules et les esprits forts."[117] Montaigne, to be sure, had long
before declared his entire disbelief, and yet the Parliament of
Bourdeaux, his own city, condemned a man to be burned as a _noüeur
d'aiguillettes_ so lately as 1718. Indeed, it was not, says Maury, till
the first quarter of the eighteenth century that one might safely publish
his incredulity in France. In Scotland, witches were burned for the last
time in 1722. Garinet cites the case of a girl near Amiens possessed by
three demons,--Mimi, Zozo, and Crapoulet,--in 1816.
The two beautiful volumes of Mr. Upham are, so far as I know, unique in
their kind. It is, in some respects, a clinical lecture on human nature,
as well as on the special epidemical disease under which the patient is
laboring. He has written not merely a history of the so-called Salem
Witchcraft, but has made it intelligible by a minute account of the place
where the delusion took its rise, the persons concerned in it, whether as
actors or sufferers, and the circumstances which led to it. By deeds,
wills, and the records of courts and churches, by plans, maps, and
drawings, he has recreated Salem Village as it was two hundred years ago,
so that we seem wellnigh to talk with its people and walk over its
fields, or through its cart-tracks and bridle-roads. We are made partners
in parish and village feuds, we share in the chimney-corner gossip, and
learn for the first time how many mean and merely human motives, whether
consciously or unconsciously, gave impulse and intensity to the passions
of the actors in that memorable tragedy which dealt the death-blow in
this country to the belief in Satanic compacts. Mr. Upham's minute
details, which give us something like a photographic picture of the
in-door and out-door scenery that surrounded the events he narrates, help
us materially to understand their origin and the course they inevitably
took. In this respect his book is original and full of new interest. To
know the kind of life these people led, the kind of place they dwelt in,
and the tenor of their thought, makes much real to us that was
conjectural before. The influences of outward nature, of remoteness from
the main highways of the world's thought, of seclusion, as the
foster-mother of traditionary beliefs, of a hard life and unwholesome
diet in exciting or obscuring the brain through the nerves and stomach,
have been hitherto commonly overlooked in accounting for the phenomena of
witchcraft. The great persecutions for this imaginary crime have always
taken place in lonely places, among the poor, the ignorant, and, above
all, the ill-fed.
One of the best things in Mr. Upham's book is the portrait of Parris, the
minister of Salem Village, in whose household the children who, under the
assumed possession of evil spirits, became accusers and witnesses, began
their tricks. He is shown to us pedantic and something of a martinet in
church discipline and ceremony, somewhat inclined to magnify his office,
fond of controversy as he was skilful and rather unscrupulous in the
conduct of it, and glad of any occasion to make himself prominent. Was he
the unconscious agent of his own superstition, or did he take advantage
of the superstition of others for purposes of his own? The question is
not an easy one to answer. Men will sacrifice everything, sometimes even
themselves, to their pride of logic and their love of victory. Bodin
loses sight of humanity altogether in his eagerness to make out his case,
and display his learning in the canon and civil law. He does not scruple
to exaggerate, to misquote, to charge his antagonists with atheism,
sorcery, and insidious designs against religion and society, that he may
persuade the jury of Europe to bring in a verdict of guilty.[118] Yet
there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his belief. Was Parris
equally sincere? On the whole, I think it likely that he was. But if we
acquit Parris, what shall we say of the demoniacal girls? The probability
seems to be that those who began in harmless deceit found themselves at
length involved so deeply, that dread of shame and punishment drove them
to an extremity where their only choice was between sacrificing
themselves, or others to save themselves. It is not unlikely that some of
the younger girls were so far carried along by imitation or imaginative
sympathy as in some degree to "credit their own lie." Any one who has
watched or made experiments in animal magnetism knows how easy it is to
persuade young women of nervous temperaments that they are doing that by
the will of another which they really do by an obscure volition of their
own, under the influence of an imagination adroitly guided by the
magnetizer. The marvellous is so fascinating, that nine persons in ten,
if once persuaded that a thing is possible, are eager to believe it
probable, and at last cunning in convincing themselves that it is proven.
But it is impossible to believe that the possessed girls in this case did
not know how the pins they vomited got into their mouths. Mr. Upham has
shown, in the case of Anne Putnam, Jr., an hereditary tendency to
hallucination, if not insanity. One of her uncles had seen the Devil by
broad daylight in the novel disguise of a blue boar, in which shape, as a
tavern sign, he had doubtless proved more seductive than in his more
ordinary transfigurations. A great deal of light is let in upon the
question of whether there was deliberate imposture or no, by the
narrative of Rev. Mr. Turell of Medford, written in 1728, which gives us
all the particulars of a case of pretended possession in Littleton, eight
years before. The eldest of three sisters began the game, and found
herself before long obliged to take the next in age into her confidence.
By and by the youngest, finding her sisters pitied and caressed on
account of their supposed sufferings while she was neglected, began to
play off the same tricks. The usual phenomena followed. They were
convulsed, they fell into swoons, they were pinched and bruised, they
were found in the water, on the top of a tree or of the barn. To these
places they said they were conveyed through the air, and there were those
who had seen them flying, which shows how strong is the impulse which
prompts men to conspire with their own delusion, where the marvellous is
concerned. The girls did whatever they had heard or read that was common
in such cases. They even accused a respectable neighbor as the cause of
their torments. There were some doubters, but "so far as I can learn,"
says Turell, "the greater number believed and said they were under the
evil hand, or possessed by Satan." But the most interesting fact of all
is supplied by the confession of the elder sister, made eight years later
under stress of remorse. Having once begun, they found returning more
tedious than going o'er. To keep up their cheat made life a burden to
them, but they could not stop. Thirty years earlier, their juggling might
have proved as disastrous as that at Salem Village. There, parish and
boundary feuds had set enmity between neighbors, and the girls, called on
to say who troubled them, cried out upon those whom they had been wont to
hear called by hard names at home. They probably had no notion what a
frightful ending their comedy was to have; but at any rate they were
powerless, for the reins had passed out of their hands into the sterner
grasp of minister and magistrate. They were dragged deeper and deeper, as
men always are by their own lie.
The proceedings at the Salem trials are sometimes spoken of as if they
were exceptionally cruel. But, in fact, if compared with others of the
same kind, they were exceptionally humane. At a time when Baxter could
tell with satisfaction of a "_reading_ parson" eighty years old, who,
after being kept awake five days and nights, confessed his dealings with
the Devil, it is rather wonderful that no mode of torture other than
mental was tried at Salem. Nor were the magistrates more besotted or
unfair than usual in dealing with the evidence. Now and then, it is true,
a man more sceptical or intelligent than common had exposed some
pretended demoniac. The Bishop of Orléans, in 1598, read aloud to Martha
Brossier the story of the Ephesian Widow, and the girl, hearing Latin,
and taking it for Scripture, went forthwith into convulsions. He found
also that the Devil who possessed her could not distinguish holy from
profane water. But that there were deceptions did not shake the general
belief in the reality of possession. The proof in such cases could not
and ought not to be subjected to the ordinary tests. "If many natural
things," says Bodin, "are incredible and some of them incomprehensible,
_a fortiori_ the power of supernatural intelligences and the doings of
spirits are incomprehensible. But error has risen to its height in this,
that those who have denied the power of spirits and the doings of
sorcerers have wished to dispute physically concerning supernatural or
metaphysical things, which is a notable incongruity." That the girls were
really possessed, seemed to Stoughton and his colleagues the most
rational theory,--a theory in harmony with the rest of their creed, and
sustained by the unanimous consent of pious men as well as the evidence
of that most cunning and least suspected of all sorcerers, the Past,--and
how confront or cross-examine invisible witnesses, especially witnesses
whom it was a kind of impiety to doubt? Evidence that would have been
convincing in ordinary cases was of no weight against the general
prepossession. In 1659 the house of a man in Brightling, Sussex, was
troubled by a demon, who set it on fire at various times, and was
continually throwing things about. The clergy of the neighborhood held a
day of fasting and prayer in consequence. A maid-servant was afterwards
detected as the cause of the missiles. But this did not in the least
stagger Mr. Bennet, minister of the parish, who merely says: "There was a
_seeming blur_ cast, though not on the whole, yet upon some part of it,
for their servant-girl was at last found throwing some things," and goes
off into a eulogium on the "efficacy of prayer."
In one respect, to which Mr. Upham first gives the importance it
deserves, the Salem trials were distinguished from all others. Though
some of the accused had been terrified into confession, yet not one
persevered in it, but all died protesting their innocence, and with
unshaken constancy, though an acknowledgment of guilt would have saved
the lives of all. This martyr proof of the efficacy of Puritanism in the
character and conscience may be allowed to outweigh a great many sneers
at Puritan fanaticism. It is at least a testimony to the courage and
constancy which a profound religious sentiment had made common among the
people of whom these sufferers were average representatives. The accused
also were not, as was commonly the case, abandoned by their friends. In
all the trials of this kind there is nothing so pathetic as the picture
of Jonathan Cary holding up the weary arms of his wife during her trial,
and wiping away the sweat from her brow and the tears from her face.
Another remarkable fact is this, that while in other countries the
delusion was extinguished by the incredulity of the upper classes and the
interference of authority, here the reaction took place among the people
themselves, and here only was an attempt made at some legislative
restitution, however inadequate. Mr. Upham's sincere and honest
narrative, while it never condescends to a formal plea, is the best
vindication possible of a community which was itself the greatest
sufferer by the persecution which its credulity engendered.
If any lesson may be drawn from the tragical and too often disgustful
history of witchcraft, it is not one of exultation at our superior
enlightenment or shame at the shortcomings of the human intellect. It is
rather one of charity and self-distrust. When we see what inhuman
absurdities men in other respects wise and good have clung to as the
corner-stone of their faith in immortality and a divine ordering of the
world, may we not suspect that those who now maintain political or other
doctrines which seem to us barbarous and unenlightened, may be, for all
that, in the main as virtuous and clear-sighted as ourselves? While we
maintain our own side with an honest ardor of conviction, let us not
forget to allow for mortal incompetence in the other. And if there are
men who regret the Good Old Times, without too clear a notion of what
they were, they should at least be thankful that we are rid of that
misguided energy of faith which justified conscience in making men
unrelentingly cruel. Even Mr. Leckie softens a little at the thought of
the many innocent and beautiful beliefs of which a growing scepticism has
robbed us in the decay of supernaturalism. But we need not despair; for,
after all, scepticism is first cousin of credulity, and we are not
surprised to see the tough doubter Montaigne hanging up his offerings in
the shrine of our Lady of Loreto. Scepticism commonly takes up the room
left by defect of imagination, and is the very quality of mind most
likely to seek for sensual proof of supersensual things. If one came from
the dead, it could not believe; and yet it longs for such a witness, and
will put up with a very dubious one. So long as night is left and the
helplessness of dream, the wonderful will not cease from among men. While
we are the solitary prisoners of darkness, the witch seats herself at the
loom of thought, and weaves strange figures into the web that looks so
familiar and ordinary in the dry light of every-day. Just as we are
flattering ourselves that the old spirit of sorcery is laid, behold the
tables are tipping and the floors drumming all over Christendom. The
faculty of wonder is not defunct, but is only getting more and more
emancipated from the unnatural service of terror, and restored to its
proper function as a minister of delight. A higher mode of belief is the
best exorciser, because it makes the spiritual at one with the actual
world instead of hostile, or at best alien. It has been the grossly
material interpretations of spiritual doctrine that have given occasion
to the two extremes of superstition and unbelief. While the resurrection
of the body has been insisted on, that resurrection from the body which
is the privilege of all has been forgotten. Superstition in its baneful
form was largely due to the enforcement by the Church of arguments that
involved a _petitio principii_, for it is the miserable necessity of all
false logic to accept of very ignoble allies. Fear became at length its
chief expedient for the maintenance of its power; and as there is a
beneficent necessity laid upon a majority of mankind to sustain and
perpetuate the order of things they are born into, and to make all new
ideas manfully prove their right, first, to be at all, and then to be
heard, many even superior minds dreaded the tearing away of vicious
accretions as dangerous to the whole edifice of religion and society. But
if this old ghost be fading away in what we regard as the dawn of a
better day, we may console ourselves by thinking that perhaps, after all,
we are not so _much_ wiser than our ancestors. The rappings, the trance
mediums, the visions of hands without bodies, the sounding of musical
instruments without visible fingers, the miraculous inscriptions on the
naked flesh, the enlivenment of furniture,--we have invented none of
them, they are all heirlooms. There is surely room for yet another
schoolmaster, when a score of seers advertise themselves in Boston
newspapers. And if the metaphysicians can never rest till they have taken
their watch to pieces and have arrived at a happy positivism as to its
structure, though at the risk of bringing it to a no-go, we may be sure
that the majority will always take more satisfaction in seeing its hands
mysteriously move on, even if they should err a little as to the precise
time of day established by the astronomical observatories.
Footnotes:
[98] Salem Witchcraft, with an Account of Salem Village, and a
History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects. By Charles W.
Upham. Boston: Wiggin and Lunt. 1867. 2 vols.
Ioannis Wieri de praestigiis daemonum, et incantationibus ac
veneficiis libri sex, postrema editione sexta aucti et recogniti.
Accessit liber apologeticus et pseudomonarchia daemonum. Cum rerum et
verborum copioso indice. Cum Caes. Maiest. Regisq: Galliarum gratia
et privelegio. Basiliae ex officina Oporiniani, 1583.
Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft: proving the common opinions of
Witches contracting with Divels, Spirits, or Familiars; and their
power to kill, torment, and consume the bodies of men, women, and
children, or other creatures by diseases or otherwise; their flying
in the Air, &c.; To be but imaginary Erronious conceptions and
novelties; Wherein also the lewde, unchristian practises of
Witchmongers, upon aged, melancholy, ignorant and superstitious
people in extorting confessions by inhumane terrors and Tortures, is
notably detected. Also The knavery and confederacy of Conjurors. The
impious blasphemy of Inchanters. The imposture of Soothsayers, and
infidelity of Atheists. The delusion of Pythonists, Figure-casters,
Astrologers, and vanity of Dreamers. The fruitlesse beggarly art of
Alchimistry. The horrible art of Poisoning and all the tricks and
conveyances of juggling and lieger-demain are fully deciphered. With
many other things opened that have long lain hidden: though very
necessary to be known for the undeceiving of Judges, Justices, and
Juries, and for the preservation of poor, aged, deformed, ignorant
people; frequently taken, arraigned, condemned and executed for
Witches, when according to a right understanding, and a good
conscience, Physick, Food, and necessaries should be administered to
him. Whereunto is added a treatise upon the nature and substance of
Spirits and Divels &c., all written and published in Anno 1584. By
Reginald Scot, Esquire. Printed by R.C. and are to be sold by Giles
Calvert dwelling at the Black Spread-Eagle, at the West-End of Pauls,
1651.
De la Demonomanie des Sorciers. A Monseigneur M. Chrestofe De Thou,
Chevalier, Seigneur de Coeli, premier President en la Cour de
Parlement et Conseiller du Roy en son privé Conseil. Reveu, Corrigé,
et augmenté d'une grande partie. Par I. Bodin Angevin. A Paris: Chez
Iacques Du Puys, Libraire Iuré, á la Samaritaine. M.D.LXXXVII. Avec
privilege du Roy.
Magica, seu mirabilium historiarum de Spectris et Apparitionibus
spirituum: Item, de magicis et diabolicis incantationibus. De
Miraculis, Oraculis, Vaticiniis, Divinationibus, Praedictionibus,
Revelationibus et aliis eiusmodi multis ac varijs praestigijs,
ludibrijs et imposturis malorum Daemonum. Libri II. Ex probatis et
fide dignis historiarum scriptoribus diligenter collecti. Islebiae,
cura, Typis et sumptibus Henningi Grossij Bibl. Lipo. 1597. Cum
privilegio.
The displaying of supposed Witchcraft wherein is affirmed that there
are many sorts of Deceivers and Impostors, and divers persons under a
passive delusion of Melancholy and Fancy. But that there is a
corporeal league made betwixt the Devil and the Witch, or that he
sucks on the Witch's body, has carnal copulation, or that Witches are
turned into Cats, Dogs, raise Tempests or the like is utterly denied
and disproved. Wherein is also handled, The existence of Angels and
Spirits, the truth of Apparitions, the Nature of Astral and Sydereal
Spirits, the force of Charms and Philters; with other abstruse
matters. By John Webster, Practitioner in Physick. Falsa etenim
opiniones Hominum non solum surdos sed et coecos faciunt, ita ut
videre nequeant quae aliis perspicua apparent. Galen. lib. 8, de
Comp. Med. London: Printed by I.M. and are to be sold by the
booksellers in London. 1677.
Sadducismus Triumphatus: or Full and Plain Evidence concerning
Witches and Apparitions. In two Parts. The First treating of their
Possibility; the Second of their Real Existence. By Joseph Glanvil,
late Chaplain in Ordinary to His Majesty, and Fellow of the Royal
Society. The third edition. The advantages whereof above the former,
the Reader may understand out of Dr H. More's Account prefixed
therunto. With two Authentick, but wonderful Stories of certain
Swedish Witches. Done into English by A. Horneck DD. London, Printed
for S.L. and are to be sold by Anth. Baskerville at the Bible, the
corner of Essex-street, without Temple-Bar. M.DCLXXXIX.
Demonologie ou Traitte des Demons et Sorciers: De leur puissance et
impuissance: Par Fr. Perraud. Ensemble L'Antidemon de Mascon, ou
Histoire Veritable de ce qu'un Demon a fait et dit, il y a quelques
années en la maison dudit Sr. Perreaud a Mascon. I. Jacques iv. 7, 8.
"Resistez au Diable, et il s'enfuira de vous. Approchez vous de Dieu,
et il s'approchera de vous." A Geneve, chez Pierre Aubert. M,DC,LIII.
The Wonders of the Invisible World. Being an account of the tryals of
several witches lately executed in New-England. By Cotton Mather,
D.D. To which is added a farther account of the tryals of the New
England Witches. By Increase Mather, D.D., President of Harvard
College. London: John Russell Smith, Soho Square. 1862. (First
printed in Boston, 1692.)
I.N.D.N.J.C. Dissertatio Juridica de Lamiis earumque processu
criminali, _Von Hexen und dem Peinl. Proceß wider dieselben_, Quam,
auxiliante Divina Gratia, Consensu et Authoritate Magnifici JCtorum
Ordinis in illustribus Athenis Salanis sub praesidio Magnifici,
Nobilissimi, Amplissimi, Consultissimi, atque Excellentissimi Dn.
Ernesti Frider. _Schroeter_ hereditarii in _Wickerstädt_, JCti et
Antecessoris hujus Salanae Famigeratissimi, Consiliarii Saxonici,
Curiae Provincialis, Facultatis Juridicae, et Scabinatus Assessoris
longe Gravissimi, Domini Patroni Praeceptoris et Promotoris sui nullo
non honoris et observantiae cultu sanctè devenerandi, colendi,
publicae Eruditorum censurae subjicit Michael Paris _Walburger_,
Groebzigâ Anhaltinus, in Acroaterio JCtorum ad diem 1. Maj. A. 1670.
Editio Tertia. Jenae, Typis Pauli Ehrichii, 1707.
Histoire de Diables de Loudun, ou de la Possession des Religieuses
Ursulines, et de la condemnation et du suplice d'Urbain Grandier,
Curé de la même ville. Cruels effets de la Vengeance du Cardinal de
Richelieu. A Amsterdam Aux depens de la Compagnie. M.DCC.LII.
A view of the Invisible World, or General History of Apparitions.
Collected from the best Authorities, both Antient and Modern, and
attested by Authors of the highest Reputation and Credit. Illustrated
with a Variety of Notes and parallel Cases; in which some Account of
the Nature and Cause of Departed Spirits visiting their former
Stations by returning again into the present World, is treated in a
Manner different to the prevailing Opinions of Mankind. And an
Attempt is made from Rational Principles to account for the Species
of such supernatural Appearances, when they may be suppos'd
consistent with the Divine Appointment in the Government of the
World. With the sentiments of Monsieur Le Clerc, Mr. Locke, Mr.
Addison, and Others on this important Subject. In which some humorous
and diverting instances are remark'd, in order to divert that Gloom
of Melancholy that naturally arises in the Human Mind, from reading
or meditating on such Subjects Illustrated with suitable Cuts.
London: Printed in the year M,DCC,LII. [Mainly from DeFoe's "History
of Apparitions."]
Satan's Invisible World discovered; or, a choice Collection of Modern
Relations, proving evidently, against the Atheists of this present
Age, that there are Devils, Spirits, Witches and Apparitions, from
Authentic Records, Attestations of Witnesses, and undoubted Verity.
To which is added that marvellous History of Major Weir and his
Sister, the Witches of Balgarran, Pittenweem and Calder, &c. By
George Sinclair, late Professor of Philosophy in Glasgow. No man
should be vain that he can injure the merit of a Book; for the
meanest rogue may burn a City or kill a Hero; whereas he could never
build the one, or equal the other. Sir George M'Kenzie, Edinburgh:
Sold by P. Anderson, Parliament Square. M.DCC.LXXX.
La Magie et l'Astrologie dans I'Antiquité et au Moyen Age, ou Étude
sur les superstitions païennes qui se sont perpétuées jusqu'a nos
jours. Par L.F. Alfred Maury. Troisième Edition revue et corrigée.
Paris: Didier. 1864.
[99] Lucian, in his "Liars," puts this opinion into the mouth of
Arignotus. The theory by which Lucretius seeks to explain
apparitions, though materialistic, seems to allow some influence also
to the working of imagination. It is hard otherwise to explain how
his _simulacra_, (which are not unlike the _astral spirits_ of later
times) should appear in dreams.
Quae simulacra....
.... nobis vigilantibus obvia mentes
terrificant atque in somnis, cum saepe figuras
contuimur miras simulacraque luce carentum
quae nos horrifice languentis saepe sopore
excierunt.
_De Rer. Nat._ IV. 33-37, ed. Munro.
[100] Pliny's Letters, VII. 27. Melmoth's translation.
[101] Something like this is the speech of Don Juan, after the statue
of Don Gonzales has gone out:
"Pero todas son ideas
Que da a la imaginacion
El temor; y temer muertos
Es muy villano temor.
Que si un cuerpo noble, vivo,
Con potencias y razon
Y con alma no se tema,
¿Quien cuerpos muertos temió?"
_El Burlador de Sevilla_, A. iii. s. 15.
[102] Théatre Français au Moyen Age (Monmerqué et Michel), pp. 139,
140.
[103]
"There sat Auld Nick in shape o' beast,
A towzy tyke, black, grim, an' large,
To gie them music was his charge."
[104] Hence, perhaps, the name Valant applied to the Devil, about the
origin of which Grimm is in doubt.
[105] One foot of the Greek Empusa was an ass's hoof.
[106] Salt was forbidden at these witch-feasts.
[107] De Lamiis, p. 59 _et seq_.
[108] If the _Blokula_ of the Swedish witches be a reminiscence of
this, it would seem to point back to remote times and heathen
ceremonies. But it is so impossible to distinguish what was put into
the mind of those who confessed by their examining torturers from
what may have been there before, the result of a common superstition,
that perhaps, after all, the meeting on mountains may have been
suggested by what Pliny says of the dances of Satyrs on Mount Atlas.
[109] Wierus, whose book was published not long after Faust's death,
apparently doubted the whole story, for he alludes to it with an _ut
fertur,_ and plainly looked on him as a mountebank.
[110] See Grimm's D.M., under _Hexenfart, Wutendes Heer_, &c.
[111] Some Catholics, indeed, affirmed that he himself was the son of
a demon who lodged in his father's house under the semblance of a
merchant. Wierus says that a bishop preached to that effect in 1565,
and gravely refutes the story.
[112] Footnote: Melancthon, however, used to tell of a possessed girl
in Italy who knew no Latin, but the Devil in her, being asked by
Bonaroico, a Bolognese professor, what was the best verse in Virgil,
answered at once:--
"Discite justitiam moniti, et non temnere divos,"--
a somewhat remarkable concession on the part of a fallen angel.
[113] This story seems mediaeval and Gothic enough, but is hardly
more so than bringing the case of the Furies _v._ Orestes before the
Areopagus, and putting Apollo in the witness-box, as Aeschylus has
done. The classics, to be sure, are always so classic! In the
_Eumenides_, Apollo takes the place of the good angel. And why not?
For though a demon, and a lying one, he has crept in to the calendar
under his other nnme of Helios as St. Hellas. Could any of his
oracles have foretold this?
[114] Mr. Leckie, in his admirable chapter on Witchcraft, gives a
little more credit to the enlightenment of the Church of England in
this matter than it would seem fairly to deserve. More and Glanvil
were faithful sons of the Church; and if the persecution of witches
was especially rife during the ascendency of the Puritans, it was
because they happened to be in power while there was a reaction
against Sadducism. All the convictions were under the statute of
James I., who was no Puritan. After the restoration, the reaction was
the other way, and Hobbism became the fashion. It is more
philosophical to say that the age believes this and that, than that
the particular men who live in it do so.
[115] I have no means of ascertaining whether he did or not. He was
more probably charged with it by the inquisitors. Mr. Leckie seems to
write of him only upon hearsay, for he calls him Peter "of Apono,"
apparently translating a French translation of the Latin "Aponus."
The only book attributed to him that I have ever seen is itself a
kind of manual of magic.
[116] "With the names and surnames," says Bodin, indignantly, "of
seventy-two princes, and of seven million four hundred and five
thousand nine hundred and twenty-six devils, _errors excepted_."
[117] Cited by Maury, p. 221, note 4.
[118] There is a kind of compensation in the fact that he himself
lived to be accused of sorcery and Judaism.