THE

SUPERSTITIONS OF WITCHCRAFT.

BY

HOWARD WILLIAMS, M.A.

ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

PREFACE.

‘The Superstitions of Witchcraft‘ is designed
to exhibit a consecutive review of the characteristic
forms and facts of a creed which (if at
present apparently dead, or at least harmless,
in Christendom) in the seventeenth century
was a living and lively faith, and caused thousands
of victims to be sent to the torture-chamber,
to the stake, and to the scaffold. At
this day, the remembrance of its superhuman
art, in its different manifestations, is immortalised
in the every-day language of the peoples
of Europe.

The belief in Witchcraft is, indeed, in its full
development and most fearful results, modern
still more than mediæval, Christian still more
than Pagan, and Protestant not less than
Catholic.

[vii]

CONTENTS.

[viii]

[ix]

[x]

[xi]

[3]

CHAPTER I.

Superstition, the product of ignorance of causes, of
the proneness to seek the solution of phenomena out
of and beyond nature, and of the consequent natural
but unreasoning dread of the Unknown and Invisible
(ignorantly termed the supernatural), is at once universal
in the extent, and various in the kinds, of its
despotism. Experience and reason seem to prove that,
inherent to and apparently coexistent with the human
mind, it naturally originates in the constitution of
humanity: in ignorance and uncertainty, in an instinctive
doubt and fear of the Unknown. Accident may
moderate its power among particular peoples and[4]
persons; and there are always exceptional minds
whose natural temper and exercise of reason are able
to free them from the servitude of a delusive imagination.
For the mass of mankind, the germ of superstition,
prepared to assume always a new shape
and sometimes fresh vigour, is indestructible. The
severest assaults are ineffectual to eradicate it:
hydra-like, far from being destroyed by a seeming
mortal stroke, it often raises its many-headed form
with redoubled force.

It will appear more philosophic to deplore the
imperfection, than to deride the folly of human
nature, when the fact that the superstitious sentiment
is not only a result of mere barbarism or vulgar
ignorance, to be expelled of course by civilisation
and knowledge, but is indigenous in the life of every
man, barbarous or civilised, pagan or Christian, is
fully recognised. The enlightening influence of
science, as far as it extends, is irresistible; and its
progress within certain limits seems sure and almost
omnipotent. But it is unfortunately limited in the
extent of its influence, as well as uncertain in duration;
while reason enjoys a feeble reign compared
with ignorance and imagination.1 If it is the great
office of history to teach by experience, it is never[5]
useless to examine the causes and the facts of a mischievous
creed that has its roots deep in the ignorant
fears of mankind; but against the recurrence of the
fatal effects of fanaticism apparent in the earliest
and latest records of the world, there can be no sufficient
security.

Dreams, magic terrors, miracles, witches, ghosts,
portents, are some of the various forms superstition
has invented and magnified to disturb the peace of
society as well as of individuals. The most extravagant
of these need not be sought in the remoter ages
of the human race, or even in the ‘dark ages’ of
European history: they are sufficiently evident in
the legislation and theology, as well as in the popular
prejudices of the seventeenth century.

The belief in the infernal art of witchcraft is perhaps
the most horrid, as it certainly is the most
absurd, phenomenon in the religious history of the
world. Of the millions of victims sacrificed on the
altars of religion this particular delusion can claim a
considerable proportion. By a moderate computation,
nine millions have been burned or hanged since the
establishment of Christianity.2 Prechristian antiquity
experienced its tremendous power, and the primitive[6]
faith of Christianity easily accepted and soon developed
it. It was reserved, however, for the triumphant
Church to display it in its greatest horrors:
and if we deplore the too credulous or accommodative
faith of the early militant Church or the unilluminated
ignorance of paganism, we may still more
indignantly denounce the cruel policy of Catholicism
and the barbarous folly of Protestant theology which
could deliberately punish an impossible crime. It is
the reproach of Protestantism that this persecution
was most furiously raging in the age that produced
Newton and Locke. Compared with its atrocities
even the Marian burnings appear as nothing: and
it may well be doubted whether the fanatic zeal of
the ‘bloody Queen,’ is no less contemptible than the
credulous barbarity of the judges of the seventeenth
century. The period 1484 (the year in which Innocent
VIII. published his famous ‘Witch Hammer’
signally ratified 120 years later by the Act of Parliament
of James I. of England) to 1680 might be
characterised not improperly as the era of devil-worship;
and we are tempted almost to embrace the
theory of Zerdusht and the Magi and conceive[7]
that Ahriman was then superior in the eternal strife;
to imagine the Evil One, as in the days of the Man
of Uz, ‘going to and fro in the earth, and walking up
and down in it.’ It is come to that at the present
day, according to a more rational observer of the
seventeenth century, that it is regarded as a part of
religion to ascribe great wonders to the devil; and
those are taxed with infidelity and perverseness who
hesitate to believe what thousands relate concerning
his power. Whoever does not do so is accounted an
atheist because he cannot persuade himself that there
are two Gods, the one good and the other evil3—an
assertion which is no mere hyperbole or exaggeration
of a truth: there is the certain evidence of facts as
well as the concurrent testimony of various writers.

Those (comparatively few) whose reason and humanity
alike revolted from a horrible dogma, loudly
proclaim the prevailing prejudice. Such protests,
however, were, for a long time at least, feeble and
useless—helplessly overwhelmed by the irresistible
torrent of public opinion. All classes of society were
almost equally infected by a plague-spot that knew
no distinction of class or rank. If theologians (like
Bishop Jewell, one of the most esteemed divines in[8]
the Anglican Church, publicly asserting on a well
known occasion at once his faith and his fears) or
lawyers (like Sir Edward Coke and Judge Hale) are
found unmistakably recording their undoubting
conviction, they were bound, it is plain, the one class
by theology, the other by legislation. Credulity of
so extraordinary a kind is sufficiently surprising even
in theologians; but what is to be thought of the deliberate
opinion of unbiassed writers of a recent age
maintaining the possibility, if not the actual occurrence,
of the facts of the belief?

The deliberate judgment of Addison, whose wit
and preeminent graces of style were especially devoted
to the extirpation of almost every sort of
popular folly of the day, could declare: ‘When I
hear the relations that are made from all parts of
the world, not only from Norway and Lapland, from
the East and West Indies, but from every particular
nation in Europe, I cannot forbear thinking that
there is such an intercourse and commerce with evil
spirits as that which we express by the name of
witchcraft…. In short, when I consider the question
whether there are such persons in the world as
those we call witches, my mind is divided between
two opposite opinions; or rather, to speak my
thoughts freely, I believe in general that there is
and has been such a thing as witchcraft, but at the
same time can give no credit to any particular[9]
modern instance of it.’4 Evidence, if additional
were wanted, how deference to authority and universal
custom may subdue the reason and understanding.
The language and decision of Addison
are adopted by Sir W. Blackstone in ‘Commentaries
on the Laws of England,’ who shelters himself behind
that celebrated author’s sentiment; and Gibbon
informs us that ‘French and English lawyers of the
present age [the latter half of the last century]
allow the theory but deny the practice of witchcraft’—influenced
doubtless by the spirit of the past
legislation of their respective countries. In England
the famous enactment of the subservient parliament
of James I. against the crimes of sorcery,
&c., was repealed in the middle of the reign of
George II., our laws sanctioning not 130 years since
the popular persecution, if not the legal punishment.[10]

The origin of witchcraft and the vulgar diabolism
is to be found in the rude beginnings of the religious
or superstitious feeling which, known amongst the
present savage nations as Fetishism, probably prevailed
almost universally in the earliest ages; while
that of the sublimer magic is discovered in the religious
systems of the ancient Chaldeans and Persians.
Chaldea and Egypt were the first, as far as is known,
to cultivate the science of magic: the former people
long gave the well-known name to the professional
practisers of the art. Cicero (de Divinatione) celebrates,
and the Jewish prophets frequently deride,
their skill in divination and their modes of incantation.
The story of Daniel evidences how highly
honoured and lucrative was the magical or divining
faculty. The Chazdim, or Chaldeans, a priestly
caste inhabiting a wide and level country, must have
soon applied themselves to the study, so useful to
their interests, of their brilliant expanse of heavens.
By a prolonged and ‘daily observation,’ considerable
knowledge must have been attained; but in the infancy
of the science astronomy necessarily took the
form of an empirical art which, under the name of
astrology, engaged the serious attention and perplexed
the brains of the mediæval students of science
or magic (nearly synonymous terms), and which still[11]
survives in England in the popular almanacks. The
natural objects of veneration to the inhabitants of
Assyria were the glorious luminaries of the sun and
moon; and if their worship of the stars and planets
degenerated into many absurd fancies, believing an
intimate connection and subordination of human
destiny to celestial influences, it may be admitted
that a religious sentiment of this kind in its primitive
simplicity was more rational, or at least sublime,
than most other religious systems.

It is not necessary to trace the oriental creeds of
magic further than they affected modern beliefs; but
in the divinities and genii of Persia are more immediately
traced the spiritual existences of Jewish and
Christian belief. From the Persian priests are derived
both the name and the practice of magic. The
Evil Principle of the Magian, of the later Jewish,
and thence of the western world, originated in the
system (claiming Zoroaster as its founder), which
taught a duality of Gods. The philosophic lawgiver,
unable to penetrate the mystery of the empire of
evil and misery in the world, was convinced that
there is an equal and antagonistic power to the representative
of light and goodness. Hence the continued
eternal contention between Ormuzd with the
good spirits or genii, Amchaspands, on one side, and
Ahriman with the Devs (who may represent the infernal
crew of Christendom) on the other. Egypt,[12]
in the Mosaic and Homeric ages, seems to have
attained considerable skill in magic, as well as in
chymistry and astrology. As an abstruse and esoteric
doctrine, it was strictly confined to the priests, or to
the favoured few who were admitted to initiation.
The magic excellence of the magicians, who successfully
emulated the miracles of Moses, was apparently
assisted by a legerdemain similar to that of the
Hindu jugglers of the present day.5

In Persian theology, the shadowy idea of the devil
of western Asia was wholly different from the grosser
conception of Christendom. Neither the evil principle
of Magianism nor the witch of Palestine has
much in common with the Christian. ‘No contract
of subjection to a diabolic power, no infernal stamp
or sign of such a fatal league, no revellings of Satan
and his hags,’6 no such materialistic notions could be
conformable to the spirit of Judaism or at least of
Magianism. It is not difficult to find the cause
of this essential dissimilarity. A simple unity was
severely inculcated by the religion and laws of Moses,
which permitted little exercise of the imagination:
while the Magi were equally severe against idolatrous
forms. A monstrous idea, like that of ‘Satan and
his hags,’ was impossible to them. Christianity, the
religion of the West, has received its corporeal[13]
ideas of demonology from the divinities and demons
of heathenism. The Satyri and Fauni of
Greece and Rome have suggested in part the form,
and perhaps some of the characteristics, of the vulgar
Christian devil. A knowledge of the arts of magic
among the Jews was probably derived from their
Egyptian life, while the Bedouins of Arabia and Syria
(kindred peoples) may have instilled the less scientific
rites of Fetishism. It is in the early accounts of that
people that sorcery, whatever its character and profession,
with the allied arts of divination, necromancy,
incantations, &c., appears most flourishing. The
Mosaic penalty, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’
and the comprehensive injunction, ‘There shall not
be found among you that maketh his son or his
daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination,
or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a
witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar
spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer,’ indicate at
once the extent and the horror of the practice.
Balaam (that equivocal prophet), on the border-land
of Arabia and Palestine, was courted and dreaded as
a wizard who could perplex whole armies by means
of spells. His fame extended far and wide; he was
summoned from his home beyond the Euphrates in
the mountains of Mesopotamia by the Syrian tribes
to repel the invading enemy. This great magician
was, it seems, universally regarded as ‘the rival and[14]
the possible conqueror of Moses.’7

About the time when the priestly caste had to
yield to a profane monarchy, the forbidden practices
were so notorious and the evil was of such magnitude,
that the newly-elected prince ‘ejected’ (as Josephus
relates) ‘the fortune-tellers, necromancers, and all
such as exercised the like arts.’ His interview with
the witch has some resemblance to modern diablerie
in the circumstances. Reginald Scot’s rationalistic
interpretation of this scene may be recommended to
the commentating critics who have been so much at
a loss to explain it. He derides the received opinion
of the woman of Endor being an agent of the devil,
and ignoring any mystery, believes, ‘This Pythonist
being a ventriloqua, that is, speaking as it were from
the bottom of her belly, did cast herself into a trance
and so abused Saul, answering to Saul in Samuel’s
name in her counterfeit hollow voice.8 An institution
very popular with the Jews of the first temple, often
commemorated in their scriptures—the schools of the
prophets—was (it is not improbable) of the same kind
as the schools of Salamanca and Salerno in the[15]
middle ages, where magic was publicly taught as an
abstruse and useful science; and when Jehu justifies
his conduct towards the queen-mother by bringing a
charge of witchcraft, he only anticipates an expedient
common and successful in Europe in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. A Jewish prophet asserts of
the Babylonian kings, that they were diligent cultivators
of the arts, reproaching them with practising
against the holy city.

Yet if we may credit the national historian (not
to mention the common traditions), the Chaldean
monarch might have justly envied, if he could scarcely
hope to emulate, the excellence of a former prince
of his now obscure province. Josephus says of
Solomon that, amongst other attainments, ‘God
enabled him to learn that skill which expels
demons, which is a science useful and sanative to
men. He composed such incantations also by which
distempers are alleviated, and he left behind him
the manner of using exorcisms by which they drive
away demons so that they never return.’9 The
story of Daniel is well known. In the captivity
of the two tribes carried away into an honourable servitude
he soon rose into the highest favour, because,
as we are informed, he excelled in a divination that
surpassed all the art of the Chaldeans, themselves
so famous for it. The inspired Jew had divined a[16]
dream or vision which puzzled ‘the magicians, and
the astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans,’
and immediately was rewarded with the greatest gift
at the disposal of a capricious despot. Most of the
apologetic writers on witchcraft, in particular the
authors of the ‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ accept the assertion
of the author of the history of Daniel that Nebuchadnezzar
was ‘driven from men, and did eat grass
as oxen,’ in its apparent sense, expounding it as
plainly declaring that he was corporeally metamorphosed
into an ox, just as the companions of Ulysses
were transformed into swine by the Circean sorceries.

The Jewish ideas of good or at least evil spirits or
angels were acquired during their forced residence
in Babylon, whether under Assyrian or Persian
government. At least ‘Satan’ is first discovered
unmistakably in a personal form in the poem of
Job, a work pronounced by critics to have been
composed after the restoration. In the Mosaic
cosmogony and legislation, the writer introduces not,
expressly or impliedly, the existence of an evil
principle, unless the serpent of the Paradisaic account,
which has been rather arbitrarily so metamorphosed,
represents it;10 while the expressions in
books vulgarly reputed before the conquest are at
least doubtful. From this time forward (from the[17]
fifth century b.c.), says a German demonologist, as
the Jews lived among the admirers of Zoroaster, and
thus became acquainted with their doctrines, are
found, partly in contradiction to the earlier views of
their religion, many tenets prevailing amongst them
the origin of which it is impossible to explain except
by the operation of the doctrines of Zoroaster: to
these belongs the general acceptance of the theory
of Satan, as well as of good and bad angels.11 Under
Roman government or vassalage, sorceric practices,
as they appear in the Christian scriptures, were
much in vogue. Devils or demons, and the ‘prince
of the devils,’ frequently appear; and the demoniacs
may represent the victims of witchcraft.
The Talmud, if there is any truth in the assertions
of the apologists of witchcraft, commemorates many
of the most virtuous Jews accused of the crime and
executed by the procurator of Judea.12 Exorcism
was a very popular and lucrative profession.[18]13 Simon
Magus the magician (par excellence), the impious
pretender to miraculous powers, who ‘bewitched the
people of Samaria by his sorceries,’ is celebrated by
Eusebius and succeeding Christian writers as the
fruitful parent of heresy and sorcery.

That witchcraft, or whatever term expresses the
criminal practice, prevailed among the worshippers
of Jehovah, is evident from the repeated anathemas
both in their own and the Christian scriptures, not
to speak of traditional legends; but the Hebrew and
Greek expressions seem both to include at least the
use of drugs and perhaps of poison.14 The Jewish
creed, as exposed in their scriptures, has deserved a
fame it would not otherwise have, because upon it[19]
have been founded by theologians, Catholic and Protestant,
the arguments and apology for the reality of
witchcraft, derived from the sacred writings, with an
ingenuity only too common and successful in supporting
peculiar prejudices and interests even of the
most monstrous kind.15

In examining the phenomenon as it existed among
the Greeks and Romans, it will be remarked that,
while the Greeks seem to have mainly adopted the
ideas of the East, the Roman superstition was of
Italian origin. Their respective expressions for the
predictive or presentient faculty (manteia and divinatio),
as Cicero is careful to explain, appear to
indicate its different character with those two peoples:
the one being the product of a sort of madness, the
other an elaborate and divine skill. Greek traditions
made them believe that the magic science was brought
from Egypt or Asia by their old philosophic and
legislating sages. Some of the most eminent of the
founders of philosophic schools were popularly accused[20]
of encouraging it. Pythagoras (it is the
complaint of Plato) is said to have introduced to his
countrymen an art derived from his foreign travels;
a charge which recalls the names of Roger Bacon,
Albertus Magnus, Galileo, and others, who had to pay
the penalty of a premature knowledge by the suspicion
of their cotemporaries. Xenophanes is said
to be the only one of the philosophers who admitted
the existence or providence of the gods, and at the
same time entirely discredited divination. Of the
Stoics, Panætius was the only one who ventured even
to doubt. Some gave credit to one or two particular
modes only, as those of dreams and frenzy; but
for the most part every form of this sort of divine
revelation was implicitly received.16

The science of magic proper is developed in the
later schools of philosophy, in which Oriental theology
or demonology was largely mixed. Apollonius of
Tyana, a modern Pythagorean, is the most famous
magician of antiquity. This great miracle-worker
of paganism was born at the commencement of
the Christian era; and it has been observed that
his miracles, though quite independent of them,
curiously coincide both in time and kind with the[21]
Christian.17 According to his biographer Philostratus,
this extraordinary man (whose travels and researches
extended, we are assured, over the whole East even
into India, through Greece, Italy, Spain, northern
Africa, Ethiopia, &c.) must have been in possession
of a scientific knowledge which, compared with that
of his cotemporaries, might be deemed almost supernatural.
Extraordinary attainments suggested to
him in later life to excite the awe of the vulgar by
investing himself with magical powers. Apollonius
is said to have assisted Vespasian in his struggle for
the throne of the Cæsars; afterwards, when accused
of raising an insurrection against Domitian, and
when he had given himself up voluntarily to the
imperial tribunal at Rome, he escaped impending
destruction by the exertion of his superhuman art.

Of the incantations, charms, and magic compounds
in the practice of Greek witchcraft, numerous examples
occur in the tragic and comic poetry of[22]
Greece; and the philtres, or love-charms, of Theocritus
are well known. The names of Colchis,
Chaldea, Assyria, Iberia, Thrace, may indicate the
origin of a great part of the Hellenic sorceries. Yet,
if the more honourable science may have been of
foreign extraction, Hellas was not without something
of the sorcery of modern Europe. The infernal
goddess Hecate, of Greek celebrity, is the omnipotent
patroness of her modern Christian slaves; and she
presides at the witch meetings of Christendom
with as much solemnity but with far greater malice.
Originally of celestial rank, by a later metamorphosis
connected, if not personally identical with, Persephone,
the Queen of Hades, Hecate was invested with many
of the characteristic attributes of a modern devil, or
rather perhaps of a witch. The triple goddess, in
her various shapes, wandered about at night with the
souls of the dead, terrifying the trembling country
people by apparitions of herself and infernal satellites,
by the horrible whining and howls of her hellhounds
which always announced her approach. She
frequented cross-roads, tombs, and melancholy places,
especially delighting in localities famous for deeds of
blood and murder. The hobgoblins, the various malicious
demons and spirits, who provoked the lively
terrors of the mediæval peoples, had some prototypes
in the fairy-land of Greece, in the Hecatean
hobgoblins (like the Latin larvæ, &c.), Empusa,[23]
Mormo, and other products of an affrighted imagination
familiar to the students of Greek literature in
the comic pages of Aristophanes.18 From the earliest
literary records down to the latest times of paganism
as the state religion, from the times of the Homeric
Circe and Ulysses (the latter has been recognised by
many as a genuine wizard) to the age of Apollonius
or Apuleius, magic and sorcery, as a philosophical
science or as a vulgar superstition, had apparently
more or less distinctly a place in the popular
mythology of old Greece. But in the pagan history
of neither Greece nor Rome do we read of holocausts
of victims, as in Christian Europe, immolated on the
altars of a horrid superstition.19 The occasion of the
composition of the treatise by Apuleius ‘On Magic’ is
somewhat romantic. On his way to Alexandria, the
philosopher, being disabled from proceeding on the
journey, was hospitably received into the mansion of
one Sicinius Pontianus. Here, during the interesting[24]
period of his recovery, he captivated, or was
captivated by, the love of his host’s mother, a wealthy
widow, and the lovers were soon united by marriage.
Pudentilla’s relatives, indignant at the loss of a
much-coveted, and perhaps long-expected fortune,
brought an action against Apuleius for having gained
her affection by means of spells or charms. The
cause was heard before the proconsul of Africa,
and the apology of the accused labours to convince
his judges that a widow’s love might be provoked
without superhuman means.20

Gibbon observes of the Roman superstition on the
authority of Petronius, that it may be inferred that it
was of Italian rather than barbaric extraction. Etruria
furnished the people of Romulus with the science of
divination. Early in the history of the Republic the
law is very explicit on the subject of witchcraft. In
the decemviral code the extreme penalty is attached[25]
to the crime of witchcraft or conjuration: ‘Let
him be capitally punished who shall have bewitched
the fruits of the earth, or by either kind of conjuration
(excantando neque incantando) shall have conjured
away his neighbour’s corn into his own field,’
&c., an enactment sneered at in Justinian’s Institutes
in Seneca’s words. A rude and ignorant antiquity,
repeat the lawyers of Justinian, had believed that rain
and storms might be attracted or repelled by means
of spells or charms, the impossibility of which has
no need to be explained by any school of philosophy.
A hundred and fifty years later than the legislation
of the decemvirs was passed the Lex Cornelia,
usually cited as directed against sorcery: but while
involving possibly the more shadowy crime, it seems
to have been levelled against the more ‘substantial
poison.’ The conviction and condemnation of 170
Roman ladies for poisoning, under pretence of incantation,
was the occasion and cause. Sulla, when dictator,
revived this act de veneficiis et malis sacrificiis,
for breach of which the penalty was ‘interdiction
of fire and water.’ Senatorial anathemas, or even
those of the prince, were ineffective to check the
continually increasing abuses, which towards the end
of the first century of the empire had reached an
alarming height.21

A general degradation of morals is often accompanied,[26]
it has been justly remarked, by a corresponding
increase of the wildest credulity, and by an
abject subservience to external religious rites in propitiation
of an incensed deity. It was thus at Rome
when the eloquence of Cicero, and afterwards the
indignant satire of Juvenal or the calm ridicule of
the philosophic Lucian,22 attempted to assert the
‘proper authority of reason.’ To speak the truth,
says Cicero, superstition has spread like a torrent over
the entire globe, oppressing the minds and intellects
of almost all men and seizing upon the weakness of
human nature.23 The historian of ‘The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire’ justifies and illustrates
this lament of the philosopher of the Republic in the
particular case of witchcraft. ‘The nations and the
sects of the Roman world admitted with equal credulity
and similar abhorrence the reality of that
infernal art which was able to control the eternal
order of the planets, and the voluntary operations of
the human mind. They dreaded the mysterious
power of spells and incantations, of potent herbs and
execrable rites, which could extinguish or recall life,
influence the passions of the soul, blast the works of[27]
creation, and extort from the reluctant demons the
secrets of Futurity. They believed with the wildest
inconsistency that the preternatural dominion of the
the air, of earth, and of hell, was exercised from the
vilest motives of malice or gain by some wrinkled
hags or itinerant sorcerers who passed their obscure
lives in penury and contempt. Such vain terrors
disturbed the peace of society and the happiness of
individuals; and the harmless flame which insensibly
melted a waxen image might derive a powerful and
pernicious energy from the affrighted fancy of the
person whom it was maliciously designed to represent.
From the infusion of those herbs which were supposed
to possess a supernatural influence, it was an
easy step to the case of more substantial poison;
and the folly of mankind sometimes became the
instrument and the mask of the most atrocious
crimes.’24

Latin poetry of the Augustan and succeeding period
abounds with illustrations, and the witches of Horace,
Ovid, and Lucan are the famous classical types.25
Propertius has characterised the Striga as ‘daring
enough to impose laws upon the moon bewitched by[28]
her spells;’ while Petronius makes his witch, as potent
as Strepsiades’ Thessalian sorceress, exclaim that the
very form of the moon herself is compelled to descend
from her position in the universe at her command. For
the various compositions and incantations in common
use, it must be sufficient to refer to the pages of the
Roman poets. The forms of incantation and horrid
rites of the Horatian Sagana Canidia (Epod. v. and
Sat. i. 8), or the scenes described by the pompous
verses of the poet of the civil war (De Bello Civili,
vi.), where all nature is subservient, are of a similar
kind, but more familiar, in the dramatic writings
of the Elizabethan age. The darker characteristics
of the practice, however, are presented in the burning
declamations of Juvenal, only too faithfully exhibiting
the unnatural atrocities perpetrated in the form
and under the disguise of love-potions and charms.
Roman ladies in fact acquired considerable proficiency,
worthy of a Borgia or Brinvilliers, in the art of
poisoning and in the use of drugs. The reputed
witch, both in ancient and modern times, very
often belonged, like the Ovidian Dipsas, to the real
and detestable class of panders: wrinkled hags were
experienced in the arts of seduction, as well as in the
employment of poison and drugs more familiar
to the wealthier class (Sat. vi.). The great Satirist
wrote in the latter half of the first century of[29]
Christianity; but even in the Augustan period such
crimes were prevalent enough to make Ovid enumerate
them among the universal evils introduced by the
Iron age (Metamorphoses, i.). The despotic will of
the princes themselves was exerted in vain; the mischief
was too deep-rooted to succumb even to the
decrees of the masters of the world. Nor did the
divi themselves disdain to be initiated in the infernal
or celestial science. Nigidius Figulus and the
two Thrasylli are magical or mathematical names
closely connected with the destinies of the two first
imperial princes. Nigidius predicted, and perhaps
promoted, the future elevation of Octavianus; and
the elder Thrasyllus, the famous Rhodian astrologer,
skilfully identified his fate with the life of his credulous
dupe but tyrannical pupil. Thrasyllus’ art is
stated to have been of service in preventing the superstitious
tyrant from executing several intended victims
of his hatred or caprice, by making their safety the
condition of his existence. The historian of the early
empire tells of the incantations which could ‘affect
the mind and increase the disease’ of Germanicus,
Tiberius’ nephew. ‘There were discovered,’ says
Tacitus, ‘dug up from the ground and out of the walls
of the house, the remains of human corpses, charms
and spells, and the name of Germanicus inscribed
on leaden tablets, ashes half consumed covered with
decaying matter, and other practices by which it is
believed that souls are devoted to the deities of[30]
hell.’26

In the fourth century, the first Christian emperor
limited the lawful exercise of magic to the beneficial
use of preserving or restoring the fruits of the earth
or the health of the human body, while the practice
of the noxious charms is capitally punished. The
science of those, proclaims the imperial convert, who,
immersed in the arts of magic, are detected either in
attempts against the life and health of their fellow-men,
or in charming the minds of modest persons to
the practice of debauchery, is to be avenged and
punished deservedly by severest penalties. But in no
sorts of criminal charges are those remedies to be
involved which are employed for the good of individuals,
or are harmlessly employed in remote
places to prevent premature rains, in the case of
vineyards, or the injurious effects of winds and hailstorms,
by which the health and good name of no one
can be injured; but whose practices are of laudable
use in preventing both the gifts of the Deity and
the labours of men from being scattered and
destroyed.27

Constantine, in distinguishing between good and[31]
bad magic, between the theurgic and goetic, maintains
a distinction made by the pagans—a distinction ignored
in the later Christian Church, in whose system
‘all demons are infernal spirits, and all commerce with
them is idolatry and apostasy.’ Christian zeal has
accused the imperial philosopher and apostate Julian
of having had recourse—not to much purpose—to
many magical or necromantic rites; of cutting up the
dead bodies of boys and virgins in the prescribed
method; and of raising the dead to ascertain the event
of his Eastern expedition against the Persians.

Not many years after the death of Julian the
Christian Empire witnessed a persecution for witchcraft
that for its ferocity, if not for its folly, can be
paralleled only by similar scenes in the fifteenth or
seventeenth century. It began shortly after the
final division of the East and West in the reigns of
Valentinian and Valens, a.d. 373. The unfortunate
accused were pursued with equal fury in the Eastern
and Western Empires; and Rome and Antioch were
the principal arenas on which the bloody tragedy was
consummated. Gibbon informs us that it was occasioned
by a criminal consultation, when the twenty-four
letters of the alphabet were ranged round a
magic tripod; a dancing ring placed in the centre
pointed to the first four letters in the name of the
future prince. ‘The deadly and incoherent mixture
of treason and magic, of poison and adultery, afforded[32]
infinite gradations of guilt and innocence, of excuse
and aggravation, which in these proceedings appear
to have been confounded by the angry or corrupt
passions of the judges. They easily discovered that
the degree of their industry and discernment was
estimated by the imperial court according to the
number of executions that were furnished from their
respective tribunals. It was not without extreme
reluctance that they pronounced a sentence of acquittal;
but they eagerly admitted such evidence as
was stained with perjury or procured by torture to
prove the most improbable charges against the most
respectable characters. The progress of the inquiry
continually opened new subjects of criminal prosecution;
the audacious informers whose falsehood was
detected retired with impunity: but the wretched
victim who discovered his real or pretended accomplices
was seldom permitted to receive the price of
his infamy. From the extremity of Italy and Asia
the young and the aged were dragged in chains to
the tribunals of Rome and Antioch. Senators,
matrons, and philosophers expired in ignominious
and cruel tortures. The soldiers who were appointed
to guard the prisons declared, with a murmur of pity
and indignation, that their numbers were insufficient
to oppose the flight or resistance of the multitude of
captives. The wealthiest families were ruined by
fines and confiscations; the most innocent citizens[33]
trembled for their safety: and we may form some
notion of the magnitude of the evil from the extravagant
assertion of an ancient writer [Ammianus
Marcellinus], that in the obnoxious provinces the
prisoners, the exiles, and the fugitives formed the
greatest part of the inhabitants. The philosopher
Maximus,’ it is added, ‘with some justice was involved
in the charge of magic; and young Chrysostom, who
had accidentally found one of the proscribed books,
gave himself up for lost.’28

The similarity of this to the horrible catastrophe
of Arras, recorded by the chroniclers of the fifteenth
century, excepting the grosser absurdities of the
latter, is almost perfect. Valentinian and Valens,
who seem to have emulated the atrocious fame of
the Cæsarean family, with their ministers, concealed,
it is probable, under the disguise of a simulated
credulity the real motives of revenge and cupidity.

The Roman world, Christian and pagan, was
subject to the prevailing fear. That portion of the
globe, however, comprehended but a small part of
the human race. The records of history are incomplete
and imperfect; nor are they more confined in
point of time than of extent. History is little more
at any period than an imperfect account of the[34]
life of a few particular peoples. Necessarily limited
almost entirely to an acquaintance with the history
of that portion of the globe included in the ‘Roman
Empire,’ we almost forget our profound ignorance of
that vastly larger proportion of the earth’s surface,
the extra-Roman world, embracing then, as now,
civilised as well as barbarous nations. The Chinese
empire (the most extraordinary, perhaps, and whose
antiquity far surpasses that of any known), comprehending
within its limits two-thirds of the population
of the globe; the refined and ingenious people of
Hindustan, an immense population, in the East: in
the Western hemisphere nations in existence whose
remains excited the admiration of the Spanish
invaders; the various savage tribes of the African
continent; the nomad populations of Northern Asia
and Europe; nearly all these more or less, on
the testimony of past and present observation,
experienced the tremendous fears of the vulgar demonism.29

With the tribes who, in the time of Cæsar or
Tacitus, inhabited the forests of Germany, and,
perhaps, amongst the Scandinavians, some more
elevated ideas obtained, the germ, however, of a[35]
degenerated popular prejudice. By all the German
tribes, on the testimony of cotemporary writers,
women were held in high respect, and were believed
to have something even divine in their mental or
spiritual faculties. ‘Very many of their women they
regard in the light of prophetesses, and when superstitious
fear is in the ascendant, even of goddesses.’
History has preserved the names of some of these
Teutonic deities. Veleda, by prophetic inspiration,
or by superior genius, directed the councils of her
nation, and for some years successfully resisted the
progress of the imperial arms.30 Momentous questions
of state or religion were submitted to their
divine judgment, and it is not wonderful if, endowed
with supernatural attributes, they, like other prophets,
helped to fulfil their own predictions. The Britons
and Gauls, of the Keltic race, seem to have resembled
the Orientals, rather than the Teutons or Italians, in
their religious systems. Long before the Romans
came in contact with them the magic science is said
to have been developed, and the priests, like those of
India or Egypt, communicated the mysteries only to
a privileged few, with circumstances of profound
secrecy. Such was the excellence of the magic
science of the British Druids, that Pliny (Hist.
Nat. xxx.) was induced to suppose that the Magi
of Persia must have derived their system from[36]
Britain. For the most part the Kelts then, as in
the present day, were peculiarly tenacious of a creed
which it was the interest of a priestly caste to
preserve. On the other hand, the looser religion of
the Teuton nations, of the Scandinavians and Germans,
could not find much difficulty in accepting the
particular conceptions of the Southern conquerors;
and the sorceric mythology of the Northern barbarians
readily recognised the power of an Erichtho to
control the operations of nature, to prevent or confound
the course of the elements, interrupt the
influence of the sun, avert or induce tempests, to
affect the passions of the soul, to fascinate or charm
a cruel mistress, &c., with all the usual necromantic
rites. But if they could acknowledge the characteristics
of the Italian Striga, those nations at the
same time retained a proper respect for the venerated
Saga—the German Hexe.

Of all the historic peoples of ancient Europe, the
Scandinavians were perhaps most imbued with a
persuasion of the efficacy of magic; a fact which
their home and their habits sufficiently explain. In the
Eddas, Odin, the leader of the immigration in the
first century, and the great national lawgiver, is represented
as well versed in the knowledge of that preternatural
art; and the heroes of the Scandinavian legends
of the tenth or twelfth century are especially am[37]bitious
of initiation. The Scalds, like the Brahmins
or Druids, were possessed of tremendous secrets;
their runic characters were all powerful charms,
whether against enemies, the injurious effects of an
evil eye, or to soften the resentment of a lover.31
The Northmen, with the exception of some nations of
Central Europe, like the Lithuanians, who were not
christianised until the thirteenth or fourteenth century,[38]
from their roving habits as well perhaps as from
their remoteness, were among the last peoples of
Europe to abandon their old creed. Urged by poverty
and the hopes of plunder, the pirates of the Baltic
long continued to be the terror of the European
coasts; but, without a political status, they were the
common outlaws of Christendom. They were the
relics of a savage life now giving way in Europe to
the somewhat more civilised forms of society, continuing
their indiscriminate depredations with impunity
only because of the want of union and
organisation among their neighbours. But they
were in a transitional state: the coasts and countries
they had formerly been content to ravage, they were
beginning to find it their interest to colonise and
cultivate. In the new interests and pursuits of civilisation
and commerce, a natural disgust might
have been experienced for the savage traditions of a
religion whose gods and heroes were mostly personifications
of war and rapine, under whose banners
they had suffered the hardships, if they had enjoyed
the plunder, of a piratic life. The national deities
from being disregarded, must have come soon to be
treated with undisguised contempt at least by the
leaders: while the common people, serfs, or slaves
were still immersed (as much as in Christian Europe)
in a stupid superstition.

When men’s minds are thus universally unsettled[39]
and in want—a want both universal and necessary in
states—of some new divine objects of worship more
suited to advanced ideas and requirements, a system of
religion more civilising and rational than the antiquated
one, will be adopted without much difficulty,
especially if it is not too exclusive. Yet the Scandinavians
were unusually tenacious of the forms of their
ancestral worship; for while the Icelanders are said to
have received Christianity about the beginning of
the eleventh century, the people of Norway were not
wholly converted until somewhat later. The halls of
Valhalla must have been relinquished with a sigh in
exchange for the less intelligible joys of a tranquil
and insensuous paradise. An ancient Norsk law
enjoins that the king and bishop, with all possible
care, make inquiry after those who exercise pagan
practices, employ magic arts, adore the genii of
particular places, of tombs or rivers, who transport
themselves by a diabolical mode of travelling through
the air from place to place. In the extremity of
the northern peninsula (amongst the Laplanders),
where the light of science, or indeed of civilisation,
has scarcely yet penetrated, witchcraft remains as
flourishing as in the days of Odin; and the Laplanders
at present are possibly as credulous in this
respect as the old Northmen or the present tribes
of Africa and the South Pacific. Before the introduction
of the new religion (it is a curious fact), the[40]
Germans and Scandinavians, as well as the Jews, were
acquainted with the efficacy of the rite of infant
baptism. A Norsk chronicle of the twelfth century,
speaking of a Norwegian nobleman who lived in the
reign of Harald Harfraga, relates that he poured
water on the head of his new-born son, and called
him Hakon, after the name of his father. Harald
himself had been baptized in the same way; and it
is noted of the infant pagan St. Olaf that his mother
had him baptized as soon as he was born. The
Livonians observed the same ceremony; and a letter
sent expressly by Pope Gregory III. to St. Boniface,
the great apostle of the Germans, directs him how
to act in such cases. It is probable, Mallet conjectures,
that all these people might intend by such a rite to
preserve their children from the sorceries and evil
charms which wicked spirits might employ against
them at the instant of their birth. Several nations
of Asia and America have attributed such a power to
ablutions of this kind; nor were the Romans without
the custom, though they did not wholly confine it to
new-born infants. A curious magical use of an
initiatory and sacramental rite, ignorantly anticipated,
it seems, by the unilluminated faith of the
pagan world.

In reviewing the characteristics of sorcery which
prevailed in the ancient world, it is obvious to com[41]pare
the superstition as it existed in the nations of
the East and West, of antiquity and of modern times.
These natural or accidental differences are deducible
apparently from the following causes:—(1) The essential
distinction between the demonology of Orientalism—of
Brahminism, Buddhism, Magianism,
Judaism, Mohammedanism—and that of the West,
of paganism and of Christianity, founded on their
respective idealistic and realistic tendencies. (2) The
divining or necromantic faculties have been generally
regarded in the East as honourable properties; whereas
in the West they have been degraded into the
criminal follies of an infernal compact. The magical
art is a noble cultivated science—a prerogative of the
priestly caste: witchcraft, in its strict sense, was
mostly abandoned to the lowest, and, as a rule, to the
oldest and ugliest of the female sex. In the one case
the proficient was the master, in the other the slave,
of the demons. (3) The position of the female sex
in the Western world has been always very opposite
to their status in the East, where women are believed
to be an inferior order of beings, and therefore
incapable of an art reserved for the superior endowments
of the male sex. The modern witchcraft may
be traced to that perhaps oldest form of religious
conception, Fetishism, which still prevails in its utmost
horrors amongst the savage peoples in different
parts of the world. The early practice of magic[42]
was not dishonourable in its origin, closely connected
as it was with the study of natural science—with
astronomy and chymistry.

The magic system—interesting to us as having
influenced the later Jewish creed and mediately the
Christian—referred like most developed creeds to a
particular founder, Zerdusht (Zarathustra of the
Zend), may have thus originated. Mankind, in
seeking a solution for that most interesting but
unsatisfactory problem, the cause of the predominance
of evil on the earth, were obliged by their
ignorance and their fears to imagine, in addition
to the idea of a single supreme existence, the
author and source of good, antagonistic influence—the
source and representative of evil. Physical
phenomena of every day experience; the alternations
of light and darkness, of sunshine and clouds; the
changes and oppositions in the outer world, would
readily supply an analogy to the moral world. Thus
the dawn and the sun, darkness and storms, in the
wondering mind of the earlier inhabitants of the
globe, may have soon assumed the substantial forms
of personal and contending deities.32 Such seems to
be the origin of the personifications in the Vedic[43]
hymns of Indra and Vritra with their subordinate
ministers (the Ormuzd and Ahriman, &c., of the
Zend-Avesta), and of the first religious conceptions
of other peoples. After this attempt to
reconcile the contradictions, the irregularities of
nature, by establishing a duality of gods whose
respective provinces are the happiness and unhappiness
of the human race, the step was easy to
the conviction of the superior activity of a malignant
god. The benevolent but epicurean security of the
first deity might seem to have little concern in
defeating or preventing the malicious schemes of the
other. All the infernal apparatus of later ages was
easy to be supplied by a delusive and an unreasoning
imagination.

[44]

[47]

CHAPTER I.

It might appear, in a casual or careless observation,
surprising that Christianity, whose original spirit, if
not universal practice, was to enlighten; whose professed
mission was ‘to destroy the works of the devil,’
failed to disprove as well as to dispel some of the most
pernicious beliefs of the pagan world: that its final
triumph within the limits of the Roman empire, or
as far as it extended without, was not attended by the
extinction of at least the most revolting practices of
superstition. Experience, and a more extended
view of the progress of human ideas, will teach that
the growth of religious perception is fitful and
gradual: that the education of collective mankind
proceeds in the same way as that of the individual
man. And thus, in the expression of the[48]
biographer of Charles V., the barbarous nations when
converted to Christianity changed the object, not the
spirit, of their religious worship. Many of the ideas
of the old religion were consciously tolerated by the
first propagators of Christianity, who justly deemed
that the new dogmas would be more readily insinuated
into the rude and simple minds of their
neophytes, if not too strictly uncompromising. Both
past and present facts testify to this compromise. It
was a maxim with some of the early promoters of
the Christian cause, to do as little violence as possible
to existing prejudices33—a judicious method still
pursued by the Catholic, though condemned by the
Protestant, missionaries of the present day.34 It was
not seldom that an entire nation was converted and
christianised by baptism almost in a single day: the[49]
mass of the people accepting, or rather acquiescing
in, the arguments of the missionaries in submission
to the will or example of their prince, whose conduct
they followed as they would have followed him into
the field. Such was the case at the conversion of the
Frankish chief Clovis, and of the Saxon Ethelbert.
But if St. Augustin or St. Boniface, and the earlier
missionaries, had more success in persuading the
simple faith of the Germans, without a written revelation
and miracles, than the modern emissaries have
in inducing the Hindus to abandon their Vedas, it
was easier to convince them of the facts, than of
the reason, of their faith. Nor was it to be expected
that such raw recruits (if the expression may
be allowed) should lay aside altogether prejudices
with which they were imbued from infancy.

The extent of the credit and practice of witchcraft
under the Church triumphant is evident from
the numerous decrees and anathemas of the Church
in council, which, while oftener treating it as a dread
reality, has sometimes ventured to contemn or to
affect to contemn it as imposture and delusion. Both
the civil and ecclesiastical laws were exceptionally
severe towards goetic practices. ‘In all those laws
of the Christian emperors,’ says Bingham, ‘which
granted indulgences to criminals at the Easter festival,
the venefici and the malefici, that is, magical[50]
practices against the lives of men, are always excepted
as guilty of too heinous a crime to be comprised
within the general pardon granted to other offenders.’35
In earlier ecclesiastical history, successive councils
or synods are much concerned in fulminating
against them. The council of Ancyra (314) prohibits
the art under the name of pharmacy: a few years’
penance being appointed for anyone receiving a
magician into his house. St. Basil’s canons, more
severe, appoint thirty years as the necessary atonement.
Divination by lots or by consulting their
sacred scriptures, just as afterwards they consulted
Virgil, seems to have been a very favourite mode of
discovering the future. The clergy encouraged and
traded upon this kind of divination: in the Gallican
church it was notorious. ‘Some reckon,’ the pious
author of the ‘Antiquities of the Christian Church’
informs us, ‘St. Augustin’s conversion owing to such
a sort of consultation; but the thought is a great
mistake, and very injurious to him, for his conversion
was owing to a providential call, like that of St.
Paul, from heaven.’ And that eminent saint’s confessions
are quoted to prove that his conversion from
the depths of vice and licentiousness to the austere
sobriety of his new faith, was indebted to a legitimate
use of the scriptures. St. Chrysostom upbraids his
cotemporaries for exposing the faith, by their illegitimate
inquiries, to the scorn of the heathen, many of[51]
whom where wiser than to hearken to any such fond
impostures.

St. Augustin complains that Satan’s instruments,
professing the exercise of these arts, were used to ‘set
the name of Christ before their ligatures, and enchantments,
and other devices, to seduce Christians
to take the venomous bait under the covert of a sweet
and honey potion, that the bitter might be hid
under the sweet, and make men drink it without discerning
to their destruction.’ The heretics of the
primitive, as well as of the middle, ages were accused
of working miracles, and propagating their accursed
doctrines by magical or infernal art. Tertullian,
and after him Eusebius, denounce the arch-heretic
Simon Magus for performing his spurious miracles
in that way: and Irenæus had declared of the heretic
Marcus, that when he would consecrate the eucharist
in a cup of wine and water, by one of his juggling
tricks, he made it appear of a purple and red colour,
as if by a long prayer of invocation, that it might be
thought the grace from above distilled the blood
into the cup by his invocation. A correspondent of
Cyprian, the celebrated African bishop, describes a
woman who pretended ‘to be inspired by the Holy
Ghost, but was really acted on by a diabolical spirit,
by which she counterfeited ecstasies, and pretended
to prophesy, and wrought many wonderful and[52]
strange things, and boasted she would cause the
earth to move. Not that the devil [he is cautious
to affirm] has so great a power either to move the
earth or shake the elements by his command; but
the wicked spirit, foreseeing and understanding that
there will be an earthquake, pretends to do that
which he foresees will shortly come to pass. And by
these lies and boastings, the devil subdued the minds
of many to obey and follow him whithersoever he
would lead them. And he made that woman walk
barefoot through the snow in the depth of winter,
and feel no trouble nor harm by running about in
that fashion. But at last, after having played many
such pranks, one of the exorcists of the Church discovered
her to be a cheat, and showed that to be a
wicked spirit which before was thought to be the
Holy Ghost.’36

Christian witchcraft was of a more tremendous
nature than even that of older times, both in its
origin and practice. The devils of Christianity were
the metamorphosed deities of the old religions. The
Christian convert was convinced, and the Fathers of
the Church gravely insisted upon the fact, that the
oracles of Delphi or Dodona had been inspired in the[53]
times of ignorance and idolatry by the great Enemy,
who used the priest or priestess as the means of accomplishing
his eternal schemes of malice and mischief.
At the instant, however (so it was confidently
affirmed), of the divine incarnation the oracular temples
were closed for ever; and the demons were no
longer permitted to delude mankind by impersonating
pagan deities. They must now find some other
means of effecting their fixed purpose. It was not
far to seek. There were human beings who, by a
preeminently wicked disposition, or in hope of some
temporary profit, were prepared to risk their future
prospects, willing to devote both soul and body to
the service of hell. The ‘Fathers’ and great expounders
of Christianity, by their sentiments, their
writings, and their claims to the miraculous powers
of exorcising, greatly assisted to advance the common
opinions. Justin Martyr, Origen, Tertullian,
Jerome, were convinced that they were in perpetual
conflict with the disappointed demons of the old
world, who had inspired the oracles and usurped the
worship of the true God. Nor was the contest always
merely spiritual: they engaged personally and corporeally.
St. Jerome, like St. Dunstan in the tenth,
or Luther in the sixteenth century, had to fight with
an incarnate demon.

Exorcism—the magical or miraculous ejection of
evil spirits by a solemn form of adjuration—was a[54]
universal mode of asserting the superior authority of
the orthodox Church against the spurious pretensions
of heretics.37

Christian theology in the first age even was considerably
indebted to the Platonic doctrines as taught
in the Alexandrian school; and demonology in the
third century received considerable accessions from the
speculations of Neo-Platonism, the reconciling medium
between Greek and Oriental philosophy. Philo-Judæus
(whose reconciling theories, displayed in his
attempt to prove the derivation of Greek religious
or philosophical ideas from those of Moses, have been
ingeniously imitated by a crowd of modern followers)
had been the first to undertake to adapt the Jewish
theology to Greek philosophy. Plotinus and Porphyrius,
the founders of the new school of Platonism,
introduced a large number of angels or demons to
the acquaintance of their Christian fellow-subjects in
the third century.38 It has been remarked that ‘such
was the mild spirit of antiquity that the nations were[55]
less attentive to the difference than to the resemblance
of their religious worship. The Greek, the
Roman, and the barbarian, as they met before their
respective altars, easily persuaded themselves that,
under various names and with various ceremonies,
they adored the same deities.’39 Magianism and
Judaism, however, were little imbued with the spirit
of toleration; and the purer the form of religious
worship, the fiercer, too often, seems to be the persecution
of differing creeds. Christianity, with something
of the spirit of Judaism from which it sprung,
was forced to believe that the older religions must have
sprung from a diabolic origin. The whole pagan
world was inspired and dominated by wicked spirits.
‘The pagans deified, the Christians diabolised, Nature.’40
It is in this fact that the entirely opposite
spirit of antique and mediæval thought, evident in[56]
the life, literature, in the common ideas of ancient and
mediæval Europe, is discoverable.

The female sex has been always most concerned
in the crime of Christian witchcraft. What was the
cause of this general addiction, in the popular belief,
of that sex, it is interesting to inquire. In the East
now, and in Greece of the age of Simonides or
Euripides, or at least in the Ionic States, women are
an inferior order of beings, not only on account of
their weaker natural faculties and social position,
but also in respect of their natural inclination to every
sort of wickedness. And if they did not act the part
of a Christian witch, they were skilled in the practice
of toxicology. With the Latin race and many European
peoples, the female sex held a better position;
and it may appear inconsistent that in Christendom,
where the Goddess-Mother was almost the highest
object of veneration, woman should be degraded into
a slave of Satan. By the northern nations they were
supposed to be gifted with supernatural power; and the
universal powers of the Italian hag have been already
noticed. But the Church, which allowed no miracle
to be legitimate out of the pale, and yet could not
deny the fact of the miraculous without, was obliged
to assert it to be of diabolic origin. Thus the priestess
of antiquity became a witch. This is the historical
account. Physically, the cause seems discoverable in[57]
the fact that the natural constitution of women
renders their imaginative organs more excitable for
the ecstatic conditions of the prophetic or necromantic
arts. On all occasions of religious or other cerebral
excitement, women (it is a matter of experience) are
generally most easily reduced to the requisite state
for the expected supernatural visitation. Their hysterical
(hystera) natures are sufficiently indicative of
the origin of such hallucinations. Their magical or
pharmaceutical attributes might be derived from
savage life, where the men are almost exclusively
occupied either in war or in the chase: everything
unconnected with these active or necessary pursuits is
despised as unbecoming the superior nature of the
male sex. To the female portion of the community
are abandoned domestic employments, preparation
of food, the selection and mixture of medicinal
herbs, and all the mysteries of the medical art.
How important occupations like these, by ignorance
and interest, might be raised into something more
than natural skill, is easy to be conjectured. That
so extraordinary an attribute would often be abused
is agreeable to experience.41

According to the earlier Christian writers, the
frailer sex is addicted to infernal practices by reason[58]
of their innate wickedness: and in the opinion of the
‘old Fathers’ they are fitted by a corrupt disposition
to be the recipients and agents of the devil’s will
upon earth. The authors of the Witch-Hammer have
supported their assertions of the proneness of women
to evil in general, and to sorcery in particular, by the
respectable names and authority of St. Chrysostom,
Augustin, Dionysius Areopagiticus, Hilary, &c. &c.42
The Golden-mouthed is adduced as especially hostile
in his judgment of the sex; and his ‘Homily on Herodias’
takes its proper place with the satires of Aristophanes
and Juvenal, of Boccaccio and Boileau.43

Reginald Scot gives the reasons alleged by the
apologists of witchcraft. ‘This gift and natural
influence of fascination may be increased in man
according to his affections and perturbations, as
through anger, fear, love, hate, &c. For by hate,
saith Varius, entereth a fiery inflammation into the
eye of man, which being violently sent out by beams[59]
and streams infect and bewitch those bodies against
whom they are opposed. And therefore (he saith)
that is the cause that women are oftener found to be
witches than men. For they have such an unbridled
force of fury and concupiscence naturally, that by
no means is it possible for them to temper or
moderate the same. So as upon every trifling
occasion they, like unto the beasts, fix their furious
eyes upon the party whom they bewitch….
Women also (saith he) are oftenlie filled full of
superfluous humours, and with them the melancholike
blood boileth, whereof spring vapours, and are carried
up and conveyed through the nostrils and mouth, to
the bewitching of whatsoever it meeteth. For they
belch up a certain breath wherewith they bewitch
whomsoever they list. And of all other women
lean, hollow-eyed, old, beetle-browed women (saith
he) are the most infectious.’44 Why old women are
selected as the most proper means of doing the
devil’s will may be discovered in their peculiar
characteristics. The repulsive features, moroseness,
avarice, malice, garrulity of his hags are said to be
appropriate instruments. Scot informs us, ‘One sort[60]
of such as are said to be witches are women which be
commonly old, lame, blear-eyed, pale, foul, and full
of wrinkles, poor, sullen, superstitious, and papists,
or such as know no religion, in whose drowsy minds
the devil hath got a fine seat. They are lean and
deformed, showing melancholy in their faces, to the
horror of all that see them. They are doting, scolds,
mad, devilish … neither obtaining for their
service and pains, nor yet by their art, nor yet at the
devil’s hands, with whom they are said to make a
perfect visible bargain, either beauty, money, promotion,
wealth, worship, pleasure, honour, knowledge,
or any other benefit whatsoever.’ As to the preternatural
gifts of these hags, he sensibly argues: ‘Alas!
what an unapt instrument is a toothless, old, impotent,
unwieldy woman to fly in the air; truly, the
devil little needs such instruments to bring his
purposes to pass.’45

Dr. Glanvil, who wrote in the latter half of the
seventeenth century, and is bitterly opposed to the
‘Witch-Advocate’ and his followers, defends the
capabilities of hags and the like for serving the
demons. He conjectures, ‘Peradventure ’tis one of[61]
the great designs, as ’tis certainly the interest, of those
wicked agents and machinators industriously to hide
from us their influences and ways of acting, and to
work as near as ’tis possible incognito; upon which
supposal it is easy to conceive a reason why they
most commonly work by and upon the weak and the
ignorant, who can make no cunning observations or
tell credible tales to detect their artifice.’46 The act
of bewitching is defined to be ‘a supernatural work
contrived between a corporal old woman and a
spiritual devil’ (‘Discoverie,’ vi. 2). The method of
initiation is, according to a writer on the subject, as
follows: A decrepit, superannuated, old woman is
tempted by a man in black to sign a contract to
become his, both soul and body. On the conclusion
of the agreement (about which there was much
cheating and haggling), he gives her a piece of
money, and causes her to write her name and make
her mark on a slip of parchment with her own blood.
Sometimes on this occasion also the witch uses the
ceremony of putting one hand to the sole of her foot
and the other to the crown of her head. On departing
he delivers to her an imp or familiar. The
familiar, in shape of a cat, a mole, miller-fly, or some
other insect or animal, at stated times of the day
sucks her blood through teats in different parts of
her body.47 If, however, the proper vulgar witch is[62]
an old woman, the younger and fairer of the sex were
not by any means exempt from the crime. Young
and beautiful women, children of tender years, have
been committed to the rack and to the stake on the
same accusation which condemned the old and the
ugly.

[63]

CHAPTER II.

Tremendous as was the power of the witch in earlier
Christendom, it was not yet degraded into the
thoroughly diabolistic character of her more recent
successors. Diabolism advanced in the same proportion
with the authority of the Church and the
ignorant submission of the people. In the civil law,
the Emperor Leo, in the sixth century, abrogated the
Constantinian edict as too indulgent or too credulous:
from that time all sorts of charms, all use of them,
beneficial or injurious, were declared worthy of
punishment. The different states of Europe, founded
on the ruins of the Western Empire, more or less
were engaged in providing against the evil consequences
of sorcery. Charlemagne pursued the
criminals with great severity. He ‘had several times
given orders that all necromancers, astrologers, and
witches should be driven from his states; but as the[64]
number of criminals augmented daily, he found it
necessary at last to resort to severer measures. In
consequence, he published several edicts, which may
be found at length in the “Capitulaire de Baluse.”
By these every sort of magic, enchantment, and
witchcraft was forbidden, and the punishment of
death decreed against those who in any way evoked
the devil, compounded love-philters, afflicted either
man or woman with barrenness, troubled the atmosphere,
excited tempests, destroyed the fruits of the
earth, dried up the milk of cows, or tormented their
fellow-creatures with sores and diseases. All persons
found guilty of exercising these execrable arts were
to be executed immediately upon conviction, that the
earth might be rid of the curse and burden of their
presence; and those who consulted them might also
be punished with death.’48

The Saxons, in the fifth century, imported into
Britain the pagan forms of the Fatherland; and the
Anglo-Saxon (Christian) laws are usually directed
against practices connected with heathen worship, of
which many reminiscences were long preserved.
Their Hexe, or witch,49 appears to be half-divine,
half-diabolic, a witch-priestess who derived her inspiration[65]
as much from heavenly as from hellish
sources; from some divinity or genius presiding at a
sacred grove or fountain. King Athelstan is said
to have made a law against witchcraft and similar
acts which inflict death; that if one by them be made
away, and the thing cannot be denied, such practicers
shall be put to death; but if they endeavour to purge
themselves, and be cast by the threefold ordeal, they
shall be in prison 120 days; which ended, their
kindred may redeem them by the payment [in the
universal style of the English penalties] of 120
shillings to the king, and further pay to the kindred
of the slain the full valuation of the party’s head;
and then the criminals shall also procure sureties for
good behaviour for the time to come; and the
Danish prince Knut denounces by an express doom
the noxious acts of sorcery.50 Some of the witches
who appear under Saxon domination are almost as
ferocious as those of the time of Bodin or of James;
cutting up the bodies of the dead, especially of
children, devouring their heart and liver in midnight
revels. Fearful are the deeds of Saxon sorcery as[66]
related by the old Norman or Anglo-Norman writers.
Roger of Wendover (‘Flowers of History’) records the
terrible fate of a hag who lived in the village of
Berkely, in the ninth century. The devil at the
appointed hour (as in the case of Faust) punctually
carries off the soul of his slave, in spite of the utmost
watch and ward. These scenes are, perhaps, rather
Norman than Saxon. It was a favourite belief of
the ancients and mediævalists that the inhospitable
regions of the remoter North were the abode of
demons who held in those suitable localities their
infernal revels, exciting storms and tempests: and
the monk-chronicler Bede relates the northern parts
of Britain were thus infested.51

From Scandinavia the Normans must have brought
a conviction of the truths of magic; and although
they had been long settled, before the conquest of
England, in Northern France and in Christianity, the
traditional glories of the land from which were de[67]rived
their name and renown could not be easily
forgotten. Not long after the Conquest the Arabic
learning of Spain made its way into this country, and
it is possible that Christian magic, as well as science,
may have been influenced by it. Magic, scientifically
treated, flourished in Arabic Spain, being extensively
cultivated, in connection with more real or practical
learning, by the polite and scientific Arabs. The
schools of Salamanca, Toledo, and other Saracenic
cities were famous throughout Europe for eminence
in medicine, chymistry, astronomy, and mathematics.
Thither resorted the learned of the North to perfect
themselves in the then cultivated branches of knowledge.
The vast amount of scientific literature of the
Moslems of Spain, evidenced in their public libraries,
relieves Southern Europe, in part at least, from the
stigma of a universal barbaric illiteracy.52 Several
volumes of Arabian philosophy are said to have been
introduced to Northern Europe in the twelfth century;
and it was in the school of Toledo that Gerbert—a[68]
conspicuous name in the annals of magic—acquired
his preternatural knowledge.

The few in any way acquainted with Greek literature
were indebted to the Latin translations of the
Arabs; while the Jewish rabbinical learning, whose
more useful lore was encumbered with much mystical
nonsense, enjoyed considerable reputation at this
period. The most distinguished of the rabbis taught
in the schools in London, York, Lincoln, Oxford, and
Cambridge; and Christendom has to confess its obligations
for its first acquaintance with science to the
enemies of the Cross.53 The later Jewish authorities
had largely developed the demonology of the subjects
of Persia; and the spiritual or demoniacal creations
of the rabbinical works of the Middle Ages might be
readily acceptable, if not coincident, to Christian
faith. But the Western Europeans, before the philosophy
of the Spanish Arabs was known, had come
in contact with the Saracens and Turks of the East
during frequent pilgrimages to the tomb of Christ; and
the fanatical crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries
facilitated and secured the hazardous journey.
Mohammedans of the present day preserve the implicit
faith of their ancestors in the efficacy of the
113th chapter of the Koran against evil spirits, the
spells of witches and sorcerers—a chapter said to[69]
have been revealed to the Prophet of Islam on the
occasion of his having been bewitched by the
daughters of a Jew. The Genii or Ginn—a Preadamite
race occupying an intermediate position between
angels and men, who assume at pleasure the form of
men, of the lower animals, or any monstrous shape,
and propagate their species like, and sometimes with,
human kind—appear in imposing proportions in
‘The Thousand and One Nights’—that rich display
of the fancy of the Oriental imagination.54 Credulous
and confused in critical perception, the crusading
adventurers for religion or rapine could scarcely fail
to confound with their own the peculiar tenets of an[70]
ill-understood mode of thought; and that the critical
and discriminating faculties of the champions of the
Cross were not of the highest order, is illustrated by
their difficulty in distinguishing the eminently unitarian
religion of Mohammed from paganism. By a
strange perversion the Anglo-Norman and French
chroniclers term the Moslems Pagans, while the
Saxon heathen are dignified by the title of Saracens;
and the names of Mahmoud, Termagaunt, Apollo,
could be confounded without any sense of impropriety.
However, or in whatever degree, Saracenic
or rabbinical superstition tended to influence Christian
demonology, from about the end of the thirteenth
century a considerable development in the mythology
of witchcraft is perceptible.55

Conspicuous in the vulgar prejudices is the suspicion
attaching to the extraordinary discoveries of
philosophy and science. Diabolic inspiration (as in
our age infidelity and atheism are popular outcries)
was a ready and successful accusation against ideas
or discoveries in advance of the time. Roger Bacon,[71]
Robert Grostête, Albert the Great, Thomas of Ercildoun,
Michael Scot—eminent names—were all more
or less objects of a persecuting suspicion. Bacon
may justly be considered the greatest name in the
philosophy of the Middle Age. That anomaly of
mediævalism was one of the few who could neglect
a vain and senseless theology and system of metaphysics
to apply his genius to the solid pursuits of
truer philosophy; and if his influence has not been
so great as it might have been, it is the fault of the
age rather than of the man. Condemned by the fear
or jealousy of his Franciscan brethren and Dominican
rivals, Bacon was thrown into prison, where he was
excluded from propagating ‘certain suspected novelties’
during fourteen years, a victim of his more
liberal opinions and of theological hatred. One of
the traditions of his diabolical compacts gives him
credit at least for ingenuity in avoiding at once a
troublesome bargain and a terrible fate. The philosopher’s
compact stipulated that after death his soul
was to be the reward and possession of the devil,
whether he died within the church’s sacred walls or
without them. Finding his end approaching, that
sagacious magician caused a cell to be constructed in
the walls of the consecrated edifice, giving directions,
which were properly carried out, for his burial in a
tomb that was thus neither within nor without the
church—an evasion of a long-expected event, which[72]
lost the disappointed devil his prize, and probably
his temper. ‘Friar Bacon’ became afterwards a
well-known character in the vulgar fables: he was
the type of the mediæval, as the poet Virgil was of
the ancient, magician. A popular drama was founded
on his reputed exploits and character in the sixteenth
century, by Robert Greene, in ‘Friar Bacon and Friar
Bungay;’ but the famous Dr. Faustus, the most
popular magic hero of that time on the stage, was a
formidable rival. While his cotemporaries denounced
his rational method, preferring their theological
jargon and scholastic metaphysics; how much the
Aristotle of mediævalism has been neglected even
latterly is a surprising fact.56

But in proof of the prevalence of the popular suspicion,
not even the all-powerful spiritual Chief of
Christendom was spared. Many of the pontiffs were
charged with being addicted to the ‘Black Art’—an
odd imputation against the vicars of Christ and the
successors of St. Peter. A charge, however, which
we may be disposed to receive as evidence that in a
long and disgusting list of ambitious priests and
licentious despots there have been some popes who,
by cultivating philosophy, may have in some sort[73]
partially redeemed the hateful character of Christian
sacerdotalism. At a council held at Paris in the
interest of Philip IV., Boniface VIII. was publicly
accused of sorcery: it was affirmed that ‘he had a
familiar demon [the Socratic Genius?]; for he has
said that if all mankind were on one side and he
alone on the other, he could not be mistaken either
in point of fact or of right, which presupposes a
diabolical art’—a dogma of sacerdotalism sufficiently
confident, but scarcely requiring a miraculous solution.
This pope’s death, it is said, was hastened by
these and similar reports of his dealings with familiar
spirits, invented in the interest of the French king
to justify his hostility. Boniface VIII.’s esoteric
opinions on Catholicism and Christianity, if correctly
reported, did not show the orthodoxy to be expected
from the supreme pontiff: but he would not be a
singular example amongst the numerous occupants
of the chair of St. Peter.57

John XXII., one of his more immediate successors,
is said to be the pope who first formally condemned
the crime of witchcraft, more systematically anathematised
some hundred and fifty years afterwards by
Innocent VIII. He complains of the universal in[74]fection
of Christendom: that his own court even,
and immediate attendants, were attached to the
devil’s service, applying to him on all occasions for
help. The earliest judicial trial for the crime on
record in England is said to have occurred in the
reign of John. It is briefly stated in the ‘Abbreviatio
Placitorum’ that ‘Agnes, the wife of Odo the merchant,
accused Gideon of sorcery; and he was
acquitted by the judgment of iron.’ The first account
of which much information is given occurs in
Edward II.’s reign, when the lives of the royal favourites,
the De Spencers, and his own, were attempted
by a supposed criminal, one John of Nottingham,
with the assistance of his man, Robert Marshall, who
became king’s evidence, and charged his master with
having conspired the king’s death by the arts of
sorcery.58 Cupidity or malice was the cause of this
informer’s accusation. One of the distinguishing
characteristics in its annals was the abuse of the
common prejudice for political purposes, or for the
gratification of private passion.

At the commencement of the fourteenth century
the persecution and final destruction of the Order of
the Knights Templars in the different countries of
Europe, but chiefly in France (an instance of the[75]
former abuse), is one of the most atrocious facts in
the history of those times. The fate of the Knights
of the Temple (whose original office it had been to
protect their coreligionists during pilgrimages in the
Holy City, and whose quarters were near the site of
the Temple—whence the title of the Order) in
France was determined by the jealousy or avarice of
Philip IV. Founded in the first half of the twelfth
century as a half-religious, half-military institution,
that celebrated Order was, in its earlier career, in
high repute for valour and success in fighting the
battles of the Cross. With wealth and fame, pride
and presumption increased to the highest pitch; and
at the end of 150 years the champions of Christendom
were equally hated and feared. Their entire
number was no more than 1,500; but they were all
experienced warriors, in possession of a number of
important fortresses, besides landed property to the
amount, throughout their whole extent, of nine
thousand manorial estates. When the Holy Land
was hopelessly lost to the profane ambition or religious
zeal of the West, its defenders returned to
their homes loaded with riches and prestige if not
with unstained honour, and without insinuations that
they had betrayed the cause of Christ and the Crusades.
Such was the condition of the Temple when
Philip, after exhausting the coffers of Jews and[76]
Christians, found his treasury still unfilled. The
opportunity was not to be neglected: it remained
only to secure the consent of the Church, and to
provoke the ready credulity of the people. Church
and State united, supported by the popular superstition,
were irresistible; and the destined victims
expected their impending fate in silent terror. At
length the signal was given. Prosecutions in 1307
were carried on simultaneously throughout the provinces;
but in French territory they assumed the
most formidable shape. In many places they were
acquitted of the gravest indictments: the English
king, from a feeling of justice or jealousy, expressed
himself in their favour. As for Spain, ‘it was not in
presence of the Moors, and on the classic ground of
Crusade, that the thought could be entertained of
proscribing the old defenders of Christendom.’ Paris,
where was their principal temple, was the centre of
the Order; their wealth and power were concentrated
in France; and thus the spoils not of a single province,
but almost of the entire body, were within the
grasp of a single monarch. Hence he assumed the
right of presiding as judge and executioner.59 On
October 12, 1307, Jacques Molay, with the heads[77]
of the Temple, was invited to Paris, where, loaded
with favours, they were lulled into fatal security.
The delusion was soon abruptly dispelled. Molay,
together with 140 of his brethren, was arrested—the
signal for a more general procedure throughout the
kingdom.

The charges have been resolved under three heads:
(1) The denial of Christ. (2) Treachery to the
cause of Christianity. (3) The worship of the devil,
and the practice of sorcery. The principal articles in
the indictment were that the knights at initiation
formally denied the divinity of Christ, pronouncing
he was not truly a God—even going so far as to
assert he was a false prophet, a man who had been
punished for his crimes; that they had no hopes of
salvation through him; that at the final reception
they always spat on the Cross, trampling it under
foot; that they worshipped the devil in the form of a
cat, or some other familiar animal; that they adored
him in the figure of an idol consecrated by anointing
it with the fat of a new-born infant, the illegitimate
offspring of a brother; that a demon appeared in the
shape of a black or gray cat, &c. The idol is a
mysterious object. According to some it was a head
with a beard, or a head with three faces: by others
it was said to be a skull, a cat. One witness testified
that in a chapter of the Order one brother said to[78]
another, ‘Worship this head; it is your God and
your Mahomet.’ Of this kind was the general evidence
of the witnesses examined. Less incredible,
perhaps, is the statement that they sometimes saw
demons in the appearance of women; and a more
credible allegation is that of a secret understanding
with the Turks.

Notoriously suspicious communication had been
maintained with the enemy; they even went so far
as to adopt their style of dress and living. Worse
than all, by an amiable but unaccustomed tolerance,
the followers of Mohammed had been allowed a free
exercise of their religion, a sort of liberality little
short of apostasy from the faith. Without recounting
all the horrors of the persecution, it must be
sufficient to repeat that fifty-four of the wretched
condemned, having been degraded by the Bishop of
Paris, were handed over to the flames. Four years
afterwards the scene was consummated by the burning
of Jacques Molay. Torture of the most dreadful
sort had been applied to force necessary confessions;
and the complaint of one of the criminals is significant—’I,
single, as I am, cannot undertake to argue
with the Pope and the King of France.’60 In attempting
to detect the mysterious facts of this dark[79]
transaction little assistance is given by the contradictory
statements of cotemporary or later writers;
some asserting the charges to be mere fabrications
throughout; others their positive reality; and recent
historians have attempted to substantiate or
destroy them. Hallam truly remarks that the rapacious
and unprincipled conduct of Philip, the
submission of Clement V. to his will, the apparent
incredibility of the charges from their monstrousness,
the just prejudice against confessions obtained by
torture and retracted afterwards; the other prejudice,
not always so just, but in the case of those not convicted
on fair evidence deserving a better name, in
favour of assertions of innocence made on the scaffold
and at the stake, created, as they still preserve, a
strong willingness to disbelieve the accusations which
come so suspiciously before us.61 An approximation
to the truth may be obtained if, rejecting as improbable[80]
the accusations of devil-worship and its concomitant
rites which, invented to amuse the vulgar,
characterise the proceedings, we admit the probability
of a secret understanding with the Turks, or
the possibility of infidelity to the religion of Christ.
Their destruction had been predetermined; the
slender element of truth might soon be exaggerated
and confounded with every kind of fiction. Their
pride, avarice, luxury, corrupt morals, would give
colour to the most absurd inventions.62

If the history of the extermination of the Templars
exemplifies in an eminent manner the political uses
made by the highest in office of a prevalent superstition,
the story of Alice Kyteler illustrates equally
the manner in which it was prostituted to the private
purposes of designing impostors. The scene is in
Ireland, the period the first half of the fourteenth
century; Richard de Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory, being
the principal prosecutor, and a lady, Alice Kyteler,
the defendant. The details are too tedious to be repeated
here;63 but the articles upon which the conviction
of Alice Kyteler and her accomplices was[81]
sought are not dissimilar to those just narrated. To
give effect to their sorcery they were in the habit of
denying the faith for a year, or shorter period, as the
object to be attained was greater or less. Demons
were propitiated with sacrifices of living animals,
torn limb by limb and scattered (a Hecatean feast)
about cross-roads. It was alleged that by sorceries
they obtained help from the devil; that they impiously
used the ceremonies of the Church in nightly
conventicles, pronouncing with lighted candles of
wax excommunication against the persons of their own
husbands, naming expressly every member from the
sole of the foot to the top of the head. Their compositions
are of the Horatian and Shakspearian sort.[82]
With the intestines of cocks were sacrificed various
herbs, the nails of dead men, hair, brains, and
clothes of children dying unbaptized, with other
equally efficacious ingredients, boiled in the skull of
a certain famous robber recently beheaded: powders,
ointments, and candles of fat boiled in the same
skull were the intended instruments for exciting
love or hatred, and in affecting the bodies of the
faithful. An unholy connection existed between
the Lady Alice and a demon in the form sometimes
of a black dog, sometimes of a cat. She was possessed
of a secret ointment for impregnating a piece
of wood, upon which, with her companions, she was
carried to any part of the world without hurt or hindrance:
in her house was found a wafer of consecrated
bread inscribed with the name of the devil.
The event of this trial was the conviction and imprisonment
of the criminals, with the important
exception of the chief object of the bishop’s persecution,
who contrived an escape to England. Petronilla
de Meath was the first to suffer the extreme penalty.
This lady, by order of the bishop, had been six times
flogged, when, to escape a repetition of that barbarous
infliction, she made a public confession involving
her fellow-prisoners. After which Petronilla was
carried out into the city and burned before all the
people—the first witch, it is said, ever burned in
Ireland. Of the other accused all were treated with[83]
more or less severity; two were subsequently burned,
some were publicly flogged in the market-place and
through the city, others banished; a few, more fortunate,
escaping altogether.

[84]

CHAPTER III.

What can hardly fail to be discerned in these prosecutions
is the confusion of heresy and sorcery industriously
created by the orthodox Church to secure
the punishment of her offending dissentients. There
are few proceedings against the pretended criminals
in which it is not discoverable; the one crime being,
as a matter of course, the necessary consequence of
the other. In the interest of the Church as much
as in the credulity of the people must be sought
the main cause of so violent an epidemic, of so fearful
a phenomenon in its continuance and atrocities, a
fact demonstrated by the whole course of the superstition
in the old times of Catholicism. Materials for
exciting animosity and indignation against suspected
heretics were near at hand. In the assurance of the[85]
pre-scientific world everything remote from ordinary
knowledge or experience was inseparable from
supernaturalism. What surpassed the limits of a
very feeble understanding, what was beyond the
commonest experience of every-day life, was with
one accord relegated to the domain of the supernatural,
or rather to that of the devil. For what
was not done or taught by Holy Church must be of
‘that wicked One’—the cunning imitator.

In the twelfth century the Church was alarmed by
the simultaneous springing up of various sects, which,
if too hastily claimed by Protestantism as Protestants,
in the modern sense, against Catholic theology, were
yet sufficiently hostile or dangerous to engage the
attention and to provoke the enmity of the pontiffs.
The fate of the Stedingers and others in Germany,
of the Paulicians in Northern France; of the Albigenses
and Waldenses in Southern Europe, is in
accordance with this successful sort of theological
tactics. Many of the articles of indictment against
those outlaws of the Church and of society are extracted
from the primitive heresies, in particular from
the doctrines of the anti-Judaic and spiritualising
Gnostics, and their more than fifty subdivided sects—Marcionites,
Manicheans, &c. Gregory IV. issued
a bull in 1232 against the Stedingers, revolted from
the rule of the Archbishop of Bremen, where they are
declared to be accustomed to scorn the sacraments,[86]
hold communion with devils, make representative
images of wax, and consult with witches.64

Alchymy, astrology, and kindred arts were closely
allied to the practice of witchcraft: the profession of
medicine was little better than the mixing of magical
ointments, love-potions, elixirs, not always of an innocent
sort; and Sangrados were not wanting in those
days to trade upon the ignorance of their patients.65
Nor, unfortunately, are the genuine seekers after truth
who honestly applied to the study of nature exempt
from the charge of often an unconscious fraud.
Monstrous notions mingled with the more real results
of their meritorious labours. Science was in its infancy,
or rather was still struggling to be freed from
the oppressive weight of speculative and theological
nonsense before emerging into existence. Many of
the fancied phenomena of witch-cases, like other
physical or mental eccentricities, have been explained[87]
by the progress of reason and knowledge. Lycanthropy
(the transformation of human beings into
wolves by sorcery), with the no less irrational belief
in demoniacal possession, the product of a diseased
imagination and brain, was one of the many results
of mere ignorance of physiology. In the seventeenth
century lycanthropy was gravely defended by doctors
of medicine as well as of divinity, on the authority of
the story of Nebuchadnezzar, which proved undeniably
the possibility of such metamorphoses.

Cotemporary annalists record the extraordinary
frenzy aggravated, as it was, by the proceedings
against the Templars, the signal of witch persecutions
throughout France. The historian of France draws
a frightful picture of the insecure condition of an
ignorantly prejudiced society. Accusations poured
in; poisonings, adulteries, forgeries, and, above all,
charges of witchcraft, which, indeed, entered as an ingredient
into all causes, forming their attraction and
their horror. The judge shuddered on the judgment
seat when the proofs were brought before him in the
shape of philtres, amulets, frogs, black cats, and waxen
images stuck full of needles. Violent curiosity was
blended at these trials with the fierce joy of vengeance
and a cast of fear. The public mind could not be
satiated with them: the more there were burnt, the[88]
more there were brought to be burnt.66 In 1398 the
Sorbonne, at the chancellor’s suggestion, published 27
articles against all sorts of sorcery, pictures of demons,
and waxen figures. Six years later a synod was
specially convened at Langres, and the pressing evil
was anxiously deliberated at the Council of Constance.

Conspicuous about this period, by their importance
and iniquity, are the cases of the Pucelle d’Orléans
and the catastrophe of Arras. Incited (it is a modern
conviction) by a noble enthusiasm, by her own ardent
imagination, the Pucelle divested herself of the
natural modesty of her sex for the dress and arms of
a warrior; and ‘her inexperienced mind, working
day and night on the favourite object, mistook the
impulses of passion for heavenly inspiration.’ Reviewing
the last scenes in the life of that patriotic
shepherdess, we hesitate whether to stigmatise more
the unscrupulous policy of the English authorities or
the base subservience of the Parliament of Paris.
The English Regent and the Cardinal of Winchester,
unable to allege against their prisoner (the saviour of[89]
her country, taken prisoner in a sally from a besieged
town, had been handed over by her countrymen to the
foreigner) any civil crime, were forced to disguise a
violation of justice and humanity in the pretence of
religion; and the Bishop of Beauvais presented a
petition against her, as an ecclesiastical subject, demanding
to have her tried by an ecclesiastical court
for sorcery, impiety, idolatry, and magic. The University
of Paris acquiesced. Before this tribunal the
accused was brought, loaded with chains, and clothed
in her military dress. It was alleged that she had
carried about a standard consecrated by magical enchantments;
that she had been in the habit of
attending at the witches’ sabbath at a fountain near
the oak of Boulaincourt; that the demons had discovered
to her a magical sword consecrated in the
Church of St. Catherine, to which she owed her
victories; that by means of sorcery she had gained
the confidence of Charles VIII. Jeanne d’Arc was
convicted of all these crimes, aggravated by heresy:
her revelations were declared to be inventions of the
devil to delude the people.67

Her ecclesiastical judges then consigned their[90]
prisoner to the civil power; and, finally, in the
words of Hume, ‘this admirable heroine—to whom
the more generous superstition of the ancients would
have erected altars—was, on pretence of heresy and
magic, delivered over alive to the flames; and expiated
by that dreadful punishment the signal services she
had rendered to her prince and to her native country.’68

But a worthier, if contradictory, origin is assigned for her enthusiasm
when she replies to the foul aspersion of her taunting captors—

[91]

Without detracting from the real merit of the patriotic
martyr, it might be suspected that, besides her inflamed
imagination, a pious and pardonable collusion
was resorted to as a last desperate effort to rouse the
energy of the troops or the hopes of the people—a
collusion similar to that of the celebrated Constantinian
Cross, or of the Holy Lance of Antioch. Every
reader is acquainted with the fate of the great personages
who in England were accused, politically or
popularly, of the crime; and the histories of the
Duchess of Gloucester and of Jane Shore are immortalised
by Shakspeare. In 1417, Joan, second
wife of Henry IV., had been sentenced to prison,
suspected of seeking the king’s death by sorcery; a
certain Friar Randolf being her accomplice and
agent. The Duchess of Gloucester, wife of Humphry
and daughter of Lord Cobham, was an accomplice in
the witchcraft of a priest and an old woman. Her associates
were Sir Roger Bolingbroke, priest; Margery
Jordan or Guidemar, of Eye, in Suffolk; Thomas
Southwell, and Roger Only. It was asserted ‘there
was found in their possession a waxen image of the
king, which they melted in a magical manner before a
slow fire, with the intention of making Henry’s force
and vigour waste away by like insensible degrees.’
The duchess was sentenced to do penance and to per[92]petual
imprisonment; Margery was burnt for a witch
in Smithfield; the priest was hanged, declaring his
employers had only desired to know of him how long
the king would live; Thomas Southwell died the
night before his execution; Roger Only was hanged,
having first written a book to prove his own innocence,
and against the opinion of the vulgar.69 Jane
Shore (whose story is familiar to all), the mistress of
Edward IV., was sacrificed to the policy of Richard
Duke of Gloucester, more than to any general suspicion
of her guilt. Both the Archbishop of York
and the Bishop of Ely were involved with the citizen’s
wife in demoniacal dealings, and imprisoned in
the Tower. As for the ‘harlot, strumpet Shore,’ not
being convicted, or at least condemned, for the
worse crime, she was found guilty of adultery, and
sentenced (a milder fate) to do penance in a white
sheet before the assembled populace at St. Paul’s.70

More tremendous than any of the cases above[93]
narrated is that of Arras, where numbers of all classes
suffered. So transparent were the secret but real
motives of the chief agitators, that even the unbounded
credulity of the public could penetrate the
thin disguise. The affair commenced with the
accusation of a woman of Douai, called Demiselle
(une femme de folle vie). Put to the torture repeatedly,
this wretched woman was forced to confess
she had frequented a meeting of sorcerers where
several persons were seen and recognised; amongst
others Jehan Levite, a painter at Arras. The chronicler
of the fifteenth century relates the diabolical catastrophe
thus: ‘A terrible and melancholy transaction
took place this year (1459) in the town of Arras, the
capital of the county of Artois, which said transaction
was called, I know not why, Vaudoisie: but it was
said that certain men and women transported themselves[94]
whither they pleased from the places where
they were seen, by virtue of a compact with the
devil. Suddenly they were carried to forests and
deserts, where they found assembled great numbers
of both sexes, and with them a devil in the form of a
man, whose face they never saw. This devil read to
them, or repeated his laws and commandments in
what way they were to worship and serve him: then
each person kissed his back, and he gave to them
after this ceremony some little money. He then regaled
them with great plenty of meats and wines,
when the lights were extinguished, and each man
selected a female for amorous dalliance; and suddenly
they were transported back to the places they
had come from. For such criminal and mad acts
many of the principal persons of the town were imprisoned;
and others of the lower ranks, with women,
and such as were known to be of this sect, were so
terribly tormented, that some confessed matters to
have happened as has been related. They likewise
confessed to have seen and known many persons of
rank, prelates, nobles, and governors of districts, as
having been present at these meetings; such, indeed,
as, upon the rumour of common fame, their judges
and examiners named, and, as it were, put into their
mouths: so that through the pains of the torments
they accused many, and declared they had seen them
at these meetings. Such as had been thus accused[95]
were instantly arrested, and so long and grievously
tormented that they were forced to confess just whatever
their judges pleased, when those of the lower
rank were inhumanly burnt. Some of the richer and
more powerful ransomed themselves from this disgrace
by dint of money; while others of the highest
orders were remonstrated with, and seduced by their
examiners into confession under a promise that if
they would confess, they should not suffer either in
person or property. Others, again, suffered the
severest torments with the utmost patience and fortitude.
The judges received very large sums of money
from such as were able to pay them: others fled the
country, or completely proved their innocence of the
charges made against them, and remained unmolested.
It must not be concealed (proceeds Monstrelet) that
many persons of worth knew that these charges had
been raked up by a set of wicked persons to harass
and disgrace some of the principal inhabitants of
Arras, whom they hated with the bitterest rancour,
and from avarice were eager to possess themselves of
their fortunes. They at first maliciously arrested
some persons deserving of punishment for their
crimes, whom they had so severely tormented, holding
out promises of pardon, that they forced them to
accuse whomsoever they were pleased to name. This
matter was considered [it must have been an exceedingly
ill-devised plot to provoke suspicion and even[96]
indignation in such a matter] by all men of sense
and virtue as most abominable: and it was thought
that those who had thus destroyed and disgraced so
many persons of worth would put their souls in imminent
danger at the last day.’71

Meanwhile the inquisitor, Jacques Dubois, doctor
in theology, dean of Nôtre Dame at Arras, ordered
the arrest of Levite the artist, and made him confess he
had attended the ‘Vauldine;’ that he had seen there
many people, men and women, burghers, ecclesiastics,
whose names were specified. The bishops’ vicars,
overwhelmed by the number and quality of the involved,
began to dread the consequence, and wished
to stop the proceedings. But this did not satisfy the
projects of two of the most active promoters, Jacques
Dubois and the Bishop of Bayrut, who urged the
Comte d’Estampes to use his authority with the vicars
to proceed energetically against the prisoners. Soon
afterwards the matter was brought to a crisis; the
fate of the tortured convicts was decided, and amidst
thousands of spectators from all parts, they were
brought out, each with a mitre on his head, on which
was painted the devil in the form in which he appeared
at the general assemblies, and burned.

They admitted (under the severest torture, promises,[97]
and threats) the truth of their meetings at the
sabbaths. They used a sort of ointment well known
in witch-pharmacy for rubbing a small wooden rod
and the palms of their hands, and by a very common
mode of conveyance were borne away suddenly to
the appointed rendezvous. Here their lord and
master was expecting them in the shape of a goat
with the face of a man and the tail of an ape.
Homage was first done by his new vassals offering up
their soul or some part of the body; afterwards
in adoration kissing him on the back—the accustomed
salutation.72 Next followed the different signs
and ceremonies of the infernal vassalage, in particular
treading and spitting upon the cross. Then to
eating and drinking; after which the guests joined
in acts of indescribable debauchery, when the devil
took the form alternately of either sex. Dismissal
was given by a mock sermon, forbidding to go to
church, hear mass, or touch holy water. All these
acts indicate schismatic offences which yet for the
most part are the characteristics of the sabbaths
in later Protestant witchcraft, excepting that the
wicked apostates are there usually papistical instead
of protestant. During nearly two years Arras was subjected
to the arbitrary examinations and tortures of
the inquisitors; and an appeal to the Parliament of[98]
Paris could alone stop the proceedings, 1461. The
chance of acquittal by the verdict of the public was
little: it was still less by the sentence of judicial
tribunals.

[101]

CHAPTER I.

Perhaps the most memorable epoch in the annals of
witchcraft is the date of the promulgation of the bull
of Pope Innocent VIII., when its prosecution was
formally sanctioned, enforced, and developed in the
most explicit manner by the highest authority in the
Church. It was in the year 1484 that Innocent
VIII. issued his famous bull directed especially
against the crime in Germany, whose inquisitors
were empowered to seek out and burn the malefactors
pro strigiatûs hæresi. The bull was as
follows: ‘Innocent, Bishop, servant of the servants
of God, in order to the future memorial of the
matter…. In truth it has come to our ears, not
without immense trouble and grief to ourselves, that
[102]in some parts of Higher Germany … very many
persons of both sexes, deviating from the Catholic
faith, abuse themselves with the demons, Incubus and
Succubus; and by incantations, charms, conjurations,
and other wicked superstitions, by criminal acts and
offences have caused the offspring of women and of
the lower animals, the fruits of the earth, the grape,
and the products of various plants, men, women, and
other animals of different kinds, vineyards, meadows,
pasture land, corn, and other vegetables of the earth,
to perish, be oppressed, and utterly destroyed; that
they torture men and women with cruel pains and
torments, internal as well as external; that they
hinder the proper intercourse of the sexes, and the
propagation of the human species. Moreover, they
are in the habit of denying the very faith itself. We
therefore, willing to provide by opportune remedies
according as it falls to us by our office, by our
apostolical authority, by the tenor of these presents
do appoint and decree that they be convicted, imprisoned,
punished, and mulcted according to their
offences…. By the apostolic rescript given at
Rome.’

This, in brief, is an outline of the proclamation
of Innocent VIII., the principles of which were developed
in the more voluminous work of the ‘Malleus
Maleficarum,’73 or Hammer of Witches, five years
later. In the interval, the effect of so forcible an[103]
appeal from the Head of the Church was such as
might be expected. Cumanus, one of the inquisitors
in 1485, burned forty-one witches, first shaving them
to search for ‘marks.’ Alciatus, a lawyer, tells us
that another ecclesiastical officer burned one hundred
witches in Piedmont, and was prevented in his plan
of daily autos-da-fé only by a general uprising of the
people, who at length drove him out of the country,
when the archbishop succeeded to the vacant office.
In several provinces, even the servile credulity of
the populace could not tolerate the excesses of the
judges; and the inhabitants rose en masse against
their inquisitorial oppressors, dreading the entire
depopulation of their neighbourhood. As a sort of
apology for the bull of 1484 was published the
‘Malleus’—a significantly expressive title.74 The
authors appointed by the pope were Jacob Sprenger,[104]
of the Order of Preachers, and Professor of Theology
in Cologne; John Gremper, priest, Master in Arts;
and Henry Institor. The work is divisible, according
to the title, into three parts—Things that pertain
to Witchcraft; The Effects of Witchcraft; and The
Remedies for Witchcraft.

In this apology the editors are careful to affirm
that they collected, rather than furnished, their
materials originally, and give as their venerable
authorities the names of Dionysius the Areopagite,
Chrysostom, Hilary, Augustin, Gregory I., Remigius,
Thomas Aquinas, and others. The writers exult in the
consciousness of security, in spite of the attempts of
the demons, day and night, to deter them from completing
their meritorious labours. Stratagems of every
sort are employed in vain. In their judgment the
worst species of human wickedness sink into nothing,
compared with apostasy from the Church and, by
consequence, alliance with hell. A genuine or pretended
dread of sorcery, and an affected contempt
for the female sex, with an extremely low estimate
of its virtues (adopting the language of the Fathers),
characterises the opinions of the compilers.

Ennemoser has made an abstract from the ‘Demonomagie’
of Horst (founded on Hauber’s original work),
of the ‘Hexenhammer,’ under its three principal divisions.[105]
The third part, which contains the Criminal
Code, and consists of thirty-five questions, is the
most important section. It is difficult to decide
which is the more astonishing, the perfect folly or
the perfect iniquity of the Code: it is easier to
understand how so many thousands of victims were
helplessly sacrificed. The arrest might take place
on the simple rumour of a witch being found somewhere,
without any previous denunciation. The
most abandoned and the most infamous persons may
be witnesses: no criminal is too bad. Even a witch
or heretic (the worst criminal in the eye of ecclesiastical
law) is capable of giving evidence. Husbands
and wives may witness one against the other; and the
testimony of children was received as good evidence.

The ninth and tenth chapters consider the question
‘whether a defence was to be allowed; if
an advocate defended his client beyond what was
requisite, whether it was not reasonable that he too
should be considered guilty; for he is a patron of
witches and heretics…. Thirteenth chapter:
What the judge has to notice in the torture-chamber.
Witches who have given themselves up for years,
body and soul, to the devil, are made by him so insensible
to pain on the rack, that they rather allow
themselves to be torn to pieces than confess. Fourteenth
chapter: Upon torture and the mode of[106]
racking. In order to bring the accused to voluntary
confession, you may promise her her life; which
promise, however, may afterwards be withdrawn. If
the witch does not confess the first day, the torture
to be continued the second and third days. But
here the difference between continuing and repeating
is important. The torture may not be continued
without fresh evidence, but it may be repeated
according to judgment. Fifteenth chapter: Continuance
of the discovery of a witch by her marks.
Amongst other signs, weeping is one. It is a damning
thing if the accused, on being brought up, cannot
shed tears. The clergy and judges lay their hands
on the head of the accused, and adjure her by the
hot tears of the Most Glorified Virgin that in case
of her innocence, she shed abundant tears in the
name of God the Father.’75

The ‘Bull’ and ‘Malleus’ were the code and textbook
of Witchcraft amongst the Catholics, as the Act
and ‘Demonologie’ of James VI. were of the Protestants.
Perhaps the most important result of the
former was to withdraw entirely the authorised prosecution
and punishment of the criminals from the
civil to the ecclesiastical tribunals. Formerly they[107]
had a divided jurisdiction. At the same time the
fury of popular and judicial fanaticism was greatly
inflamed by this new sanction. Immediately, and
almost simultaneously, in different parts of Europe,
heretical witches were hunted up, tortured, burned,
or hanged; and those parts of the Continent most
infected with the widening heresy suffered most.
The greater number in Germany seems to show that
the dissentients from Catholic dogma there were
rapidly increasing, some time before Luther thundered
out his denunciations. An unusual storm of
thunder and lightning in the neighbourhood of Constance
was the occasion of burning two old women,
Ann Mindelen and one ‘Agnes.’76 One contemporary
writer asserts that 1,000 persons were put to
death in one year in the district of Como; and
Remigius, one of the authorised inquisitores pravitatis
hæreticæ, boasts of having burned 900 in the
course of fifteen years. Martin del Rio states 500
were executed in Geneva in the short space of three
months in 1515; and during the next five years 40
were burned at Ravensburgh. Great numbers suffered
in France at the same period. At Calahorra,
in Spain, in 1507, a vast auto-da-fé was exhibited,
when 39 women, denounced as sorceresses, were
committed to the flames—religious carnage attested
by the unsuspected evidence of the judges and executioners[108]
themselves.

It is opportune here to examine the common
beliefs of demonology and sorcery as they existed in
Europe. Christian demonology is a confused mixture
of pagan, Oriental, and Christian ideas. The Christian
Scriptures have seemed to suggest and sanction
a constant personal interference of the ‘great
adversary,’ who is always traversing the earth
‘seeking whom he may devour;’ and his popular
figure is represented as a union of the great dragon,
the satyrs, and fauns. Nor does he often appear
without one or other of his recognised marks—the
cloven foot, the goat’s horns, beard, and legs, or the
dragon’s tail. With young and good-looking witches
he is careful to assume the recommendations of a
young and handsome man, whilst it is not worth
while to disguise so unprepossessing peculiarities in
his incarnate manifestations to old women, the
enjoyment of whose souls is the great purpose of
seduction.

Sir Thomas Browne (‘Vulgar Errors’), a man of
much learning and still more superstitious fancy,
speciously explains the phenomenon of the cloven
foot. He suggests that ‘the ground of this opinion
at first might be his frequent appearing in the shape
of a goat, which answers this description. This was
the opinion of the ancient Christians concerning the[109]
apparitions of panites, fauns, and satyrs: and of
this form we read of one that appeared to Anthony
in the wilderness. The same is also confirmed from
exposition of Holy Scripture. For whereas it is said
“Thou shalt not offer unto devils,” the original word
is Seghuirim, i. e. rough and hairy goats; because
in that shape the devil most often appeared, as is
expounded by the rabbins, as Tremellius hath also
explained; and as the word Ascimah, the God of
Emath, is by some explained.’ Dr. Joseph Mede, a
pious and learned divine, author of the esteemed
‘Key to the Apocalypse,’ pronounces that ‘the devil
could not appear in human shape while man was in
his integrity, because he was a spirit fallen from his
first glorious perfection, and therefore must appear
in such shape which might argue his imperfection
and abasement, which was the shape of a beast;
otherwise [he plausibly contends] no reason can be
given why he should not rather have appeared to
Eve in the shape of a woman than of a serpent.
But since the fall of man the case is altered; now we
know he can take upon him the shape of a man.
He appears in the shape of man’s imperfection rather
for age or deformity, as like an old man (for so
the witches say); and, perhaps, it is not altogether
false, which is vulgarly affirmed, that the devil
appearing in human shape has always a deformity of
some uncouth member or other, as though he could[110]
not yet take upon him human shape entirely, for
that man is not entirely and utterly fallen as he is.’
Whatever form he may assume, the cloven foot must
always be visible under every disguise; and Othello
looks first for that fabulous but certain sign when he
scrutinises his treacherous friend.

Reginald Scot’s reminiscences of what was instilled
into him in the nursery may possibly occur to some
even at this day. ‘In our childhood,’ he complains,
‘our mothers’ maids have so terrified us with an ugly
devil having horns on his head, fire in his mouth, a
tail in his breech, eyes like a bison, fangs like a dog,
a skin like a niger, a voice roaring like a lion, whereby
we start and are afraid when we hear one cry Boh!’
Chaucer has expressed the belief of his age on the
subject. It seems to have been a proper duty of a
parish priest to bring to the notice of his ecclesiastical
superior, with other crimes, those of sorcery.
The Friar describes his ‘Erchedeken’ as one—

This ecclesiastic employed in his service a subordinate
‘sompnour,’ who, in the course of his official
duty, one day meets a devil, whose ‘dwellynge is in
Helle,’ who condescends to enlighten the officer on
the dark subject of demon-apparitions:—

To the question why they are not satisfied with one
shape for all occasions, the devil answers at length:—

Jewish theology, expanded by their leading divines,[112]
includes a formidable array of various demons; and
the whole of nature in Christian belief was peopled
with every kind

Various opinions have been held concerning the
nature of devils and demons. Some have maintained,
with Tertullian, that they are ‘the souls of baser
men.’ It is a disputed question whether they are
mortal or immortal; subject to, or free from, pain.
‘Psellus, a Christian, and sometime tutor to Michael
Pompinatius, Emperor of Greece, a great observer of
the nature of devils, holds they are corporeal, and
live and die: … that they feel pain if they be hurt
(which Cardan confirms, and Scaliger justly laughs
him to scorn for); and if their bodies be cut, with
admirable celerity they come together again. Austin
approves as much; so doth Hierome, Origen, Tertullian,
Lactantius, and many eminent fathers of the
Church; that in their fall their bodies were changed
into a more aerial and gross substance.’ The Platonists
and some rabbis, Porphyrius, Plutarch, Zosimus,
&c., hold this opinion, which is scornfully denied
by some others, who assert that they only deceive the
eyes of men, effecting no real change. Cardan believes
‘they feed on men’s souls, and so [a worthy[113]
origin] belike that we have so many battles fought
in all ages, countries, is to make them a feast and
their sole delight: but if displeased they fret and
chafe (for they feed belike on the souls of beasts, as
we do on their bodies) and send many plagues
amongst us.’

Their exact numbers and orders are differently
estimated by different authorities. It is certain that
they fill the air, the earth, the water, as well as the
subterranean globe. The air, according to Paracelsus,
is not so full of flies in summer as it is at all times of
invisible devils. Some writers, professing to follow
Socrates and Plato, determine nine sorts. Whatever
or wherever the supralunary may be, our world is
more interested in the sublunary tribes. These are
variously divided and subdivided. One authority
computes six distinct kinds—Fiery, Aerial, Terrestrial,
Watery, Subterranean and Central: these last
inhabiting the central regions of the interior of the
earth. The Fiery are those that work ‘by blazing
stars, fire-drakes; they counterfeit suns and moons,
stars oftentimes. The Aerial live, for the most part,
in the air, cause many tempests, thunder and lightning,
tear oaks, fire steeples, houses; strike men and
beasts; make it rain stones, as in Livy’s time, wool,
frogs, &c.; counterfeit armies in the air, strange
noises … all which Guil. Postellus useth as
an argument (as, indeed, it is) to persuade them that[114]
will not believe there be spirits or devils. They
cause whirlwinds on a sudden and tempestuous
storms, which, though our meteorologists generally
refer to natural causes, yet I am of Bodine’s mind,
they are more often caused by those aerial devils in
their several quarters; for they ride on the storms
as when a desperate man makes away with himself,
which, by hanging or drowning, they frequently do,
as Kormannus observes, tripudium agentes, dancing
and rejoicing at the death of a sinner. These can
corrupt the air, and cause sickness, plagues, storms,
shipwrecks, fires, inundations…. Nothing so
familiar (if we may believe those relations of Saxo
Grammaticus, Olaus Magnus, &c.) as for witches and
sorcerers in Lapland, Lithuania, and all over Scandia
to sell winds to mariners and cause tempests, which
Marcus Paulus, the Venetian, relates likewise of the
Tartars.78

‘These are they which Cardan thinks desire so much
carnal copulation with witches (Incubi and Succubi),
transform bodies, and are so very cold if they be
touched, and that serve magicians…. Water
devils are those naiads or water nymphs which have
been heretofore conversant about waters and rivers.
The water (as Paracelsus thinks) is their chaos,[115]
wherein they live … appearing most part
(saith Trithemius) in women’s shapes. Paracelsus
hath several stories of them that have lived and been
married to mortal men, and so continued for certain
years with them, and after, upon some dislike, have
forsaken them. Such an one was Egeria, with whom
Numa was so familiar, Diana, Ceres, &c….
Terrestrial devils are Lares, Genii, Fauns, Satyrs,
Wood-nymphs, Foliots, Fairies, Robin Goodfellows,
Trulli; which, as they are most conversant with
men, so they do them most harm. Some think it
was they alone that kept the heathen people in awe
of old…. Subterranean devils are as common
as the rest, and do as much harm. Olaus Magnus
makes six kinds of them, some bigger, some less,
commonly seen about mines of metals, and are some
of them noxious; some again do no harm (they are
guardians of treasure in the earth, and cause earthquakes).
The last (sort) are conversant about the
centre of the earth, to torture the souls of damned
men to the day of judgment; their egress and
ingress some suppose to be about Ætna, Lipari,
Hecla, Vesuvius, Terra del Fuego, because many
shrieks and fearful cries are continually heard thereabouts,
and familiar apparitions of dead men, ghosts,
and goblins.’

As for the particular offices and operations of those
various tribes, ‘Plato, in Critias, and after him his[116]
followers, gave out that they were men’s governors
and keepers, our lords and masters, as we are of our
cattle. They govern provinces and kingdoms by
oracles, auguries, dreams, rewards and punishments,
prophecies, inspirations, sacrifices and religious superstitions,
varied in as many forms as there be diversity
of spirits; they send wars, plagues, peace, sickness,
health, dearth, plenty, as appears by those histories
of Thucydides, Livius, Dionysius Halicarnassensis,
with many others, that are full of their wonderful
stratagems.’ They formerly devoted themselves,
each one, to the service of particular individuals as
familiar demons, ‘private spirits.’ Numa, Socrates,
and many others were indebted to their Genius.
The power of the devil is not limited to the body.
‘Many think he can work upon the body, but not
upon the mind. But experience pronounceth otherwise,
that he can work both upon body and mind.
Tertullian is of this opinion.’

The causes and inducements of ‘possession’ are
many. One writer affirms that ‘the devil being a
slender, incomprehensible spirit can easily insinuate
and wind himself into human bodies, and cunningly
couched in our bowels, vitiate our healths, terrify our
souls with fearful dreams, and shake our minds with
furies. They go in and out of our bodies as bees do
in a hive, and so provoke and tempt us as they
perceive our temperature inclined of itself and most
apt to be deluded…. Agrippa and Lavater are[117]
persuaded that this humour [the melancholy] invites
the devil into it, wheresoever it is in extremity, and,
of all other, melancholy persons are most subject to
diabolical temptations and illusions, and most apt to
entertain them, and the devil best able to work
upon them. ‘But whether,’ declares Burton, ‘by
obsession, or possession, or otherwise, I will not
determine; ’tis a difficult question.’79

The mediævalists believed themselves surrounded
everywhere by spiritual beings; but unlike the ancients,
they were convinced not so much that they
were the peculiar care of heaven as that they were
the miserable victims of hellish malice, ever seeking
their temporal as well as eternal destruction; a
fact apparent in the whole mediæval literature
and art.80

Glanvil’s conjectures on the cause of the comparative[118]
rarity of demoniac and other spiritual apparitions
in general may interest the credulous or curious reader.
”Tis very probable,’ reasons the Doctor, ‘that the state
wherein they are will not easily permit palpable intercourses
between the bad genii and mankind: since
’tis like enough their own laws and government do
not allow their frequent excursions into the world.
Or it may with great probability be supposed that
’tis a very hard and painful thing for them to force
their thin and tenuious bodies into a visible consistence,
and such shapes as are necessary for their
designs in their correspondence with witches. For
in this action their bodies must needs be exceedingly
compressed, which cannot well be without a painful
sense. And this is, perhaps, a reason why there are
so few apparitions, and why appearing spirits are
commonly in such a hurry to be gone, viz. that they
may be delivered of the unnatural pressure of their
tender vehicles,81 which I confess holds more in the
apparition of good than evil spirits … the reason
of which probably is the greater subtlety and tenuity
of the former, which will require far greater degrees
of compression and consequently of pain to make
them visible; whereas the latter are feculent and
gross, and so nearer allied to palpable existences,
and more easily reducible to appearance and visibility.’[119]82

‘Palpable intercourses between the bad genii and
mankind’ are more frequent than Dr. Glanvil was
disposed to believe; and he must have been conversant
with the acts of Incubus and Succubus. In the
first age (orbe novo cœloque recenti) under the
Saturnian regime, ‘while yet there was no fear of
Jove,’83 innocence prevailed undisturbed; but soon as
the silver age was inaugurated by the usurpation of
Jove, liaisons between gods and mortals became frequent.
Love affairs between good or bad ‘genii’
and mankind are of common occurrence in the
mythology of most peoples. In the romance-tales of
the middle age lovers find themselves unexpectedly
connected with some mysterious being of inhuman
kind. The writers in defence of witchcraft quote
Genesis vi. in proof of the reality of such intercourses;
and Justin Martyr and Tertullian, the great apologists
of Christianity, and others of the Fathers, interpret
Filios Dei to be angels or evil spirits who, enamoured
with the beauty of the women, begot the primeval
giants.84

Some tremendous results of diabolic connections[120]
appear in the metrical romances of the twelfth or
thirteenth century, as well as in those early Anglo-Norman
chroniclers or fabulists, who have been at
the pains to inform us of the pre-historic events of
their country. The author of the romance-poem of
the well-known Merlin—so famous in British prophecy—in
introducing his hero, enters upon a long
dissertation on the origin of the infernal arts. He
informs us on the authority of ‘David the prophet,
and of Moses,’ that the greater part of the angels
who rebelled under the leadership of Lucifer, lost
their former power and beauty, and became ‘fiendes
black:’ that instead of being precipitated into ‘helle-pit,’
many remained in mid-air, where they still
retain the faculty of seducing mortals by assuming
whatever shape they please. These had been much[121]
concerned at the miraculous birth of Christ; but it
was hoped to counteract the salutary effects of that
event, by producing from some virgin a semi-demon,
whose office it should be to disseminate sorcerers and
wicked men. For this purpose the devil85 prepares
to seduce three young sisters; and proceeds at once
in proper disguise to an old woman, with whose
avarice and cunning he was well acquainted. Her
he engaged by liberal promises to be mediatrix in
the seduction of the elder sister, whom he was prevented
from attempting in person by the precautions
of a holy hermit. Like ‘the first that fell of womankind,’
the young lady at length consented; was
betrayed by the fictitious youth, and condemned by
the law to be burnt alive.

The same fate, excepting the fearful penalty,
awaited the second. And now, too late, the holy
hermit became aware of his disastrous negligence.
He strictly enjoined on the third and remaining
sister a constant watch. Her security, however, was
the cause of her betrayal. On one occasion, in a
moment of remissness, she forgot her prayers and the
sign of the cross, before retiring for the night. No
longer excluded, the fiend, assuming human shape,
effected his purpose. In due time a son was born,[122]
whose parentage was sufficiently evinced by an entire
covering of black hair, although his limbs were well-formed,
and his features fine. Fortunately, the careless
guardian had exactly calculated the moment of
the demon’s birth; and no sooner was he informed
of the event, than the new-born infant was borne off
to the regenerating water, when he was christened
by the name of Merlin; the fond hopes of the demons
being for this time, at least, irretrievably disappointed.
How Merlin, by superhuman prowess and
knowledge, defeated the Saracens (Saxons) in many
bloody battles; his magical achievements and favour at
the court of King Vortigern and his successors, are
fully exhibited by the author of the history.86 Geoffrey
of Monmouth recounts them as matters of fact; and
they are repeated by Vergil in the History of Britain,
composed under the auspices of Henry VIII.

By the ancients, whole peoples were sometimes
said to be derived from these unholy connections.
Jornandes, the historian of the Goths, is glad to be
able to relate their hated rivals, the Huns (of whom
the Kalmuck Tartars are commonly said to be the
modern representatives), to have owed their origin to
an intercourse of the Scythian witches with infernal
spirits. The extraordinary form and features of those
dreaded emigrants from the steppes of Tartary, had[123]
suggested to the fear and hatred of their European
subjects, a fable which Gibbon supposes might have
been derived from a more pleasing one of the
Greeks.87

The acts of Incubus assume an important part in
witch-trials and confessions. Incubus is the visitor
of females, Succubus of males. Chaucer satirises the
gallantries of the vicarious Incubus by the mouth of
the wife of Bath (that practical admirer of Solomon
and the Samaritan woman),88 who prefaces her tale
with the assurance:—

Reginald Scot has devoted several chapters of his
work to a relation of the exploits of Incubus.89 But
he honestly warns his readers ‘whose chaste ears
cannot well endure to hear of such lecheries (gathered
out of the books of divinity of great authority) to
turn over a few leaves wherein I have, like a groom,
thrust their stuff, even that which I myself loath, as
into a stinking corner: howbeit none otherwise, I
hope, but that the other parts of my writing shall
remain sweet.’ He repeats a story from the ‘Vita
Hieronymi,’ which seems to insinuate some suspicion
of the character of a certain Bishop Sylvanus. It
relates that one night Incubus invaded a certain
lady’s bedroom. Indignant at so unusual, or at least
disguised, an apparition, the lady cried out loudly
until the guests of the house came and found it
under the bed in the likeness of the bishop; ‘which
holy man,’ adds Scot, ‘was much defamed thereby.’
Another tradition or legend seems to reflect upon[125]
the chastity of the greatest saint of the Middle Ages.90
The superhuman oppression of Incubus is still remembered
in the proverbial language of the present
day. The horrors of the infernal compacts and
leagues, as exhibited in the fates of wizards or
magicians at the last hour, formed one of the most
popular scenes on the theatrical stage. Christopher
Marlow, in ‘The Life and Death of Dr. Faustus,’ and
Robert Greene, in ‘Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,’
in the Elizabethan age, dramatised the common,
conception of the Compact.

[126]

CHAPTER II.

The ceremonies of the compact by which a woman
became a witch have been already referred to. It
was almost an essential condition in the vulgar creed
that she should be, as Gaule (‘Select Cases of Conscience
touching Witches,’ &c., 1646) represents, an
old woman with a wrinkled face, a furred brow, a
hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking
voice, a scolding tongue, having a ragged coat on
her back, a skull-cap on her head, a spindle in her
hand, a dog or cat by her side. There are three sorts
of the devil’s agents on earth—the black, the gray,
and the white witches. The first are omnipotent for
evil, but powerless for good. The white have the
power to help, but not to hurt.91 As for the third
species (a mixture of white and black), they are[127]
equally effective for good or evil.

Equally various and contradictory are the motives
and acts assigned to witches. Nothing is too great
or too mean for their practice: they engage with
equal pleasure in the overthrow of a kingdom or a
religion, and in inflicting the most ordinary evils
and mischiefs in life. Their mode of bewitching
is various: by fascination or casting an evil eye
(‘Nescio,’ says the Virgilian shepherd, ‘quis teneros
oculus mihi fascinat agnos’); by making
representations of the person to be acted upon in
wax or clay, roasting them before a fire; by mixing[128]
magical ointments or other compositions and ingredients
revealed to us in the witch-songs of Shakspeare,
Jonson, Middleton, Shadwell, and others; sometimes
merely by muttering an imprecation.

They ride in sieves on the sea, on brooms, spits
magically prepared; and by these modes of conveyance
are borne, without trouble or loss of time, to
their destination. By these means they attend the
periodical sabbaths, the great meetings of the witch-tribe,
where they assemble at stated times to do
homage, to recount their services, and to receive the
commands of their lord. They are held on the
night between Friday and Saturday; and every year
a grand sabbath is ordered for celebration on the
Blocksberg mountains, for the night before the first
day of May. In those famous mountains the obedient
vassals congregate from all parts of Christendom—from
Italy, Spain, Germany, France, England,
and Scotland. A place where four roads meet, a
rugged mountain range, or perhaps the neighbourhood
of a secluded lake or some dark forest, is
usually the spot selected for the meeting.92

A mock sermon often concludes the night’s proceedings,[129]
the ordinary salutation of the osculum in
tergo being first given. But these circumstances are
innocent compared with the obscene practices when[130]
the lights are put out; indiscriminate debauchery
being then the order of the night. A new rite of
baptism initiated the neophyte into his new service:
the candidate being signed with the sign of the devil
on that part of the body least observable, and submitting
at the same time to the first act of criminal
compliance, to be often repeated. On these occasions
the demon presents himself in the form of
either sex, according to that of his slaves. It was
elicited from a witch examined at a trial that, from
the period of her servitude, the devil had had inter[131]course
with her ut viri cum fœminis solent, excepting
only in one remarkable particular.

During the pontificate of Julius II.—the first decade
of the sixteenth century—a set of sorceresses
was discovered in large numbers: a dispute between
the civil and ecclesiastical authorities averted their
otherwise certain destruction. The successors of
Innocent VIII. repeated his anathemas. Alexander
VI., Leo X., and Adrian VI. appointed special commissioners
for hunting up sorcerers and heretics. In
1523, Adrian issued a bull against Hæresis Strigiatûs
with power to excommunicate all who opposed those
engaged in the inquisition. He characterises the
obnoxious class as a sect deviating from the Catholic
faith, denying their baptism, showing contempt for
the sacraments, in particular for that of the Eucharist,
treading crosses under foot, and taking the devil as
their lord.93 How many suffered for the crime during
the thirty or forty years following upon the bull of
1484, it is difficult exactly to ascertain: that some
thousands perished is certain, on the testimony of the
judges themselves. The often-quoted words of Florimond,
author of a work ‘On Antichrist,’ as given by
Del Rio the Jesuit (‘De Magiâ’), are not hyperbolical.
‘All those,’ says he, ‘who have afforded us some signs
of the approach of antichrist agree that the increase
of sorcery and witchcraft is to distinguish the melancholy[132]
period of his advent; and was ever age so
afflicted with them as ours? The seats destined for
criminals before our judicatories are blackened with
persons accused of this guilt. There are not judges
enough to try enough. Our dungeons are gorged
with them. No day passes that we do not render
our tribunals bloody by the dooms we pronounce, or in
which we do not return to our homes discountenanced
and terrified at the horrible contents of the confessions
which it has been our duty to hear. And the devil
is accounted so good a master that we cannot commit
so great a number of his slaves to the flames but
what there shall arise from their ashes a number
sufficient to supply their place.’

It is within neither the design nor the limits of
these pages to repeat all the witch-cases, which might
fill several volumes; it is sufficient for the purpose
to sketch a few of the most notorious and prominent,
and to notice the most remarkable characteristics of
the creed.

Maximilian I., Emperor of Germany, protected
the inquisitorial executioners from the indignant
vengeance of the inhabitants of the districts of
Southern Germany, which would have been soon
almost depopulated by an unsparing massacre and a
ferocious zeal: while Sigismund, Prince of the Tyrol,
is said to have been inclined to soften the severity of
a persecution he was totally unable, if he had been[133]
disposed, to prevent. Ulric Molitor, under the auspices
of this prince, however, published a treatise in
Switzerland (‘De Pythonicis Mulieribus’) in the form
of a dialogue, in which Sigismund, Molitor, and a
citizen of Constance are the interlocutors. They argue
as to the practice of witchcraft; and the argument is
to establish that, although the practicers of the crime
are worthy of death, much of the vulgar opinion
on the subject is false. Even in the middle of the
fifteenth century, and in Spain, could be found an
assertor, in some degree, of common sense, whose
sentiments might scandalise some Protestant divines.
Alphonse de Spina was a native of Castile, of the
order of St. Francis: his book was written against
heretics and unbelievers, but there is a chapter in
which some acts attributed to sorcerers, as transportation
through the air, transformations, &c., are rejected
as unreal.

From that time two parties were in existence, one
of which advocated the entire reality of all the acts
commonly imputed to witches; while the other
maintained that many of their supposed crimes were
mere delusions suggested by the Great Enemy. The
former, as the orthodox party, were, from the nature
of the case, most successful in the argument—a
seeming paradox explained by the nature and course
of the controversy. Only the received method of
demoniacal possession was questioned by the adverse
side, accepting without doubt the possibility—and,[134]
indeed, the actual existence—of the phenomenon.
Thus the liberals, or pseudo-liberals, in that important
controversy were placed in an illogical position.
For (as their opponents might triumphantly argue)
if the devil’s power and possession could be manifested
in one way, why not by any other method.
Nor was it for them to determine the appointed
methods of his schemes, as permitted by Providence,
for the injury and ruin of mankind. The diabolic
economy, as evidently set forth in the work of man’s
destruction, might require certain modes of acting
quite above our reason and understanding. To the
sceptics (or to the atheists, as they were termed) the
orthodox could allege, ‘Will you not believe in
witches? The Scriptures aver their existence: to
the jurisconsults will you dispute the existence of a
crime against which our statute-book and the code
of almost all civilised countries have attested by laws
upon which hundreds and thousands have been convicted;
many, or even most, of whom have, by their
judicial confessions, acknowledged their guilt and
the justice of their punishment? It is a strange
scepticism, they might add, that rejects the evidence
of Scripture, of human legislature, and of the accused
persons themselves.’94 Reason was hopelessly oppressed
by faith. In the presence of universal superstition,
in the absence of the modern philosophy,
escape seemed all but impossible.

If preeminence in this particular prejudice can be[135]
assigned to any single region or people, perhaps
Germany more than any other land was subject to
the demonological fever. A fact to be explained as
well by its being the great theatre for more than a
hundred years of the grand religious struggle between
the opposing Catholics and Protestants, as by
its natural fitness. The gloomy mountain ranges—the
Hartz mountains are especially famous in the
national legend—and forests with which it abounds
rendered the imaginative minds of its peoples peculiarly
susceptible to impressions of supernaturalism.95
France takes the next place in the fury of the persecution.
Danæus (‘Dialogue’) speaks of an innumerable
number of witches. England, Scotland, Spain,
Italy perhaps come next in order.

Spain, the dominion of the Arabs for seven centuries,
was naturally the land of magic. During the
government of Ferdinand I., or of Isabella, the inquisition
was firmly established. That numbers were
sent from the dungeons and torture-chambers to the
stake, with the added stigma of dealing in the ‘black
art,’ is certain; but in that priest-dominated, servilely
orthodox southern land, the Church was not perhaps
so much interested in confounding the crimes of[136]
heresy and sorcery. The first was simply sufficient
for provoking horror and hatred of the condemned.
The South of France is famous for being the very
nest of sorcery: the witch-sabbaths were frequently
held there. It was the country of the Albigenses,
which had been devastated by De Montfort, the
executioner of Catholic vengeance, in the twelfth century,
and was, with something of the same sort of
savageness, ravaged by De Lanere in the seventeenth
century. Scotland, before the religious revolution,
exhibits a few remarkable cases of witch-persecution,
as that of the Earl of Mar, brother of James III.
He had been suspected of calling in the aid of sorcery
to ascertain the term of the king’s life: the earl was
bled to death without trial, and his death was followed
by the burning of twelve witches, and four
wizards, at Edinburgh. Lady Glammis, sister of the
Earl of Angus, of the family of Douglas, accused of
conspiring the king’s death in a similar way, was
put to death in 1537. As in England, in the cases
of the Duchess of Gloucester and others, the crime
appears to be rather an adjunct than the principal
charge itself; more political than popular. Protestant
Scotland it is that has earned the reputation
of being one of the most superstitious countries in
Europe.

In 1541 two Acts of Parliament were passed in
England—the first interference of Parliament in this[137]
kingdom—against false prophecies, conjurations,
witchcraft, sorcery, pulling down crosses; crimes
made felony without benefit of clergy. Both the
last article in the list and the period (a few years
after the separation from the Catholic world) appear
to indicate the causes in operation. Lord Hungerford
had recently been beheaded by the suspicious tyranny
of Henry VIII., for consulting his death by conjuration.
The preamble to the statute has these words:
‘The persons that had done these things, had dug up
and pulled down an infinite number of crosses.’96 The
new head of the English Church, if he found his interest
in assuming himself the spiritual supremacy,
was, like a true despot, averse to any further revolution
than was necessary to his purposes. Some superstitious
regrets too for the old establishment which,
by a fortunate caprice, he abandoned and afterwards
plundered, may have urged the tyrant, who persecuted
the Catholics for questioning his supremacy,
to burn the enemies of transubstantiation. Shortly
before this enactment, eight persons had been hanged
at Tyburn, not so much for sorcery as for a disagreeable
prophecy. Elizabeth Barton, the principal, had
been instigated to pronounce as revelation, that if the
king went on in the divorce and married another[138]
wife, he should not be king a month longer, and in
the estimation of Almighty God not one hour longer,
but should die a villain’s death. The Maid of Kent,
with her accomplices—Richard Martin, parson of the
parish of Aldington; Dr. Bocking, canon of Christ
Church, Canterbury; Deering; Henry Gold, a parson
in London; Hugh Rich, a friar, and others—was
brought before the Star Chamber, and adjudged to
stand in St. Paul’s during sermon-time; the majority
being afterwards executed. In Cranmer’s ‘Articles of
Visitation,’ 1549, an injunction is addressed to his
clergy, that ‘you shall inquire whether you know of
any that use charms, sorcery, enchantments, witchcrafts,
soothsaying, or any like craft, invented by the
devil.’

During the brief reigns of Edward VI. and Mary I.
in England, no conspicuous trials occur. As for the
latter monarch, the queen and her bishops were too
absorbed in the pressing business of burning for the
real offence of heresy to be much concerned in discovering
the concomitant crimes of devil-worship.97
An impartial judgment may decide that superstition,[139]
whether engaged in vindicating the dogmas of
Catholicism or those of witchcraft, is alike contemptible
and pernicious.

In the year of Elizabeth’s accession, 1558, Strype
(‘Annals of the Reformation,’ i. 8, and ii. 545)
tells that Bishop Jewell, preaching before the
queen, animadverted upon the dangerous and direful
results of witchcraft. ‘It may please your
Grace,’ proclaims publicly the courtly Anglican
prelate, ‘to understand that witches and sorcerers,
within these last few years, are marvellously increased
within your Grace’s realm. Your Grace’s subjects
pine away even to the death, their colour fadeth,
their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed, their
senses are bereft. I pray God they never practise
further than upon the subject.’ For himself, the
bishop declares, ‘these eyes have seen most evident
and manifest marks of their wickedness.’ The annalist
adds that this, no doubt, was the occasion of
bringing in a bill the next Parliament, for making
enchantments and witchcraft felony; and, under
year 1578, we are informed that, whether it were[140]
the effect of magic, or proceeded from some natural
cause, the queen was in some part of this year under
excessive anguish by pains of her teeth, insomuch
that she took no rest for divers nights, and endured
very great torment night and day. The statute of
1562 includes ‘fond and fantastic prophecies’ (a
very common sort of political offences in that age)
in the category of forbidden arts. With unaccustomed
lenity it punished a first conviction with the
pillory only.

Witch-persecutions (which needed not any legal
enactment) sprung up in different parts of the
country; but they were not carried out with either
the frequency or the ferocity of the next age, or as
in Scotland, under the superintendence of James VI.
A number of pamphlets unnecessarily enforced the
obligatory duty of unwearied zeal in the work of
discovery and extermination.98 Among the executions
under Elizabeth’s Government are specially
noticed that of a woman hanged at Barking in 1575;
of four at Abingdon; three at Chelmsford; two at[141]
Cambridge, 1579; of a number condemned at St.
Osythes; of several in Derbyshire and Staffordshire.
One of the best known is the case at Warboys, in
Huntingdonshire, 1593.

The author of the ‘Discoverie’ relates a fact that
came under his personal observation: it is a fair
example of the trivial origin and of the facility of
this sort of charges. ‘At the assizes holden at
Rochester, anno 1581, one Margaret Simons, wife of
John Simons, of Brenchly in Kent, was arraigned
for witchcraft, at the instigation and complaint of
divers fond and malicious persons, and especially by
the means of one John Farral, vicar of that parish,
with whom I talked about the matter, and found
him both fondly assotted in the cause and enviously
bent towards her: and, which is worse, as unable to
make a good account of his faith as she whom he
accused. That which he laid to the poor woman’s
charge was this. His son, being an ungracious boy,
and ‘prentice to one Robert Scotchford, clothier,
dwelling in that parish of Brenchly, passed on a day
by her house; at whom, by chance, her little dog
barked, which thing the boy taking in evil part,
drew his knife and pursued him therewith even to
her door, whom she rebuked with such words as the
boy disdained, and yet nevertheless would not be
persuaded to depart in a long time. At the last he[142]
returned to his master’s house, and within five or six
days fell sick. Then was called to mind the fray
betwixt the dog and the boy: insomuch as the vicar
(who thought himself so privileged as he little mistrusted
that God would visit his children with sickness)
did so calculate as he found, partly through
his own judgment and partly (as he himself told me)
by the relation of other witches, that his said son
was by her bewitched. Yea, he told me that his son
being, as it were, past all cure, received perfect
health at the hands of another witch.’ Not satisfied
with this accusation, the vicar ‘proceeded yet further
against her, affirming that always in his parish church,
when he desired to read most plainly his voice so failed
him that he could scant be heard at all: which he
could impute, he said, to nothing else but to her enchantment.
When I advertised the poor woman
thereof, as being desirous to hear what she could say
for herself, she told me that in very deed his voice did
fail him, specially when he strained himself to speak
loudest. Howbeit, she said, that at all times his
voice was hoarse and low; which thing I perceived
to be true. But sir, said she, you shall understand
that this our vicar is diseased with such a kind of
hoarseness as divers of our neighbours in this parish
not long ago doubted … and in that respect
utterly refused to communicate with him until such
time as (being thereunto enjoined by the ordinary)[143]
he had brought from London a certificate under the
hands of two physicians that his hoarseness proceeded
from a disease of the lungs; which certificate
he published in the church, in the presence of the
whole congregation: and by this means he was cured,
or rather excused of the shame of the disease. And
this,’ certifies the narrator, ‘I know to be true, by
the relation of divers honest men of that parish.
And truly if one of the jury had not been wiser than
the others, she had been condemned thereupon, and
upon other as ridiculous matters as this. For the
name of witch is so odious, and her power so feared
among the common people, that if the honestest
body living chanced to be arraigned thereupon, she
shall hardly escape condemnation.’

[144]

CHAPTER III.

Three years after this affair, Dr. Reginald Scot
published his ‘Discoverie of Witchcraft, proving
that common opinions of witches contracting with
devils, spirits, or their familiars, and their power to
kill, torment, and consume the bodies of men,
women, and children, or other creatures, by disease,
or otherwise, their flying in the air, &c., to be but
imaginary, erroneous conceptions and novelties:
wherein also the lewd, unchristian, practices of
witchmongers upon aged, melancholy, ignorant, and
superstitious people, in extorting confessions by
inhuman terrors and tortures, is notably detected.’99

This work is divided into sixteen books, with a[145]
treatise affixed upon devils and spirits, in thirty-four
chapters. It contains an infinity of quotations from
or references to the writings of those whom the author
terms witch-mongers; and several chapters are devoted
to a descriptive catalogue of the charms in
repute and diabolical rites of the most extravagant
sort. On the accession of James I., whose ‘Demonologie’
was in direct opposition to the ‘Discoverie,’
it was condemned as monstrously heretical; as many
copies as could be collected being solemnly committed
to the flames. This meritorious and curious
production is therefore now scarce.

Prefixed is a dedicatory epistle, addressed to the
Right Worshipful, his loving friend, Mr. Dr. Coldwell,
Dean of Rochester, and Mr. Dr. Readman,
Archdeacon of Canterbury, in which the author appealingly
expostulates, ‘O Master Archdeacon, is it
not pity that that which is said to be done with the
almighty power of the Most High God, and by our
Saviour his only Son Jesus Christ our Lord, should
be referred to a baggage old woman’s nod or wish?
Good sir, is it not one manifest kind of idolatry for
them that labour and are laden to come unto witches
to be refreshed? If witches could help whom they
are said to have made sick, I see no reason but
remedy might as well be required at their hands as a
purse demanded of him that hath stolen it. But[146]
truly it is manifest idolatry to ask that of a creature
which none can give but the Creator. The papist
hath some colour of Scripture to maintain his idol of
bread, but no Jesuitical distinction can cover the
witchmongers’ idolatry in this behalf. Alas! I am
ashamed and sorry to see how many die that, being
said to be bewitched, only seek for magical cures whom
wholesome diet and good medicine would have recovered.’100
An utterance of courage and common
sense equally rare and useless. Reginald Scot, perhaps
the boldest of the early impugners of witchcraft,
was yet convinced apparently of the reality of ghostly
apparitions.

Johannes Wierus, physician to the Duke of Cleves,
and a disciple of the well-known Cornelius Agrippa
(himself accused of devotion to the black art), in 1563
created considerable sensation by an attack upon the
common opinions, without questioning however the
principles, of the superstition in his ‘De Præstigiis
Dæmonum Incantationibus et Veneficiis.’ His common
sense is not so clear as that of the Englishman.
Another name, memorable among the advocates of
Reason and Humanity, is Gabriel Naudé. He was
born at Paris in 1600; he practised as a physician of[147]
great reputation, and was librarian successively to Cardinals
Richelieu and Mazarin, and to Queen Christina
of Sweden. His book ‘Apologie pour les Grands
Hommes accusés de Magie,’ published in Paris in
1625, was received with great indignation by the
Church. Some others, both on the Continent and in
England, at intervals by their protests served to prove
that a few sparks of reason, hard to be discovered in
the thick darkness of superstition, remained unextinguished;
but they availed not to stem the torrent
of increasing violence and volume.

A more copious list can be given of the champions
of orthodoxy and demonolatry; of whom it is sufficient
to enumerate the more notorious names—Sprenger,
Nider, Bodin, Del Rio, James VI., Glanvil, who compiled
or composed elaborate treatises on the subject;
besides whom a cloud of witnesses expressly or incidentally
proclaimed the undoubted genuineness of all the
acts, phenomena, and circumstances of the diabolic
worship; loudly and fiercely denouncing the ‘damnable
infidelity’ of the dissenters—a proof in itself of
their own complicity. Jean Bodin, a French lawyer,
and author of the esteemed treatise ‘De la République,’
was one of the greatest authorities on the orthodox
side. His publication ‘De la Démonomanie des
Sorciers’ appeared in Paris in the year 1580: an undertaking
prompted by his having witnessed some of the
daily occurring trials. Instead of being convinced of[148]
their folly, he was or affected to be, certain of their
truth, setting himself gravely to the task of publishing
to the world his own observations and convictions.

One of the most surprising facts in the whole history
of witchcraft is the insensibility or indifference
of even men of science, and therefore observation, to
the obvious origin of the greatest part of the confessions
elicited; confession of such a kind as could be
the product only of torture, madness, or some other
equally obvious cause. Bodin himself, however,
sufficiently explains the fact and exposes the secret.
‘The trial of this offence,’ he enunciates, ‘must not be
conducted like other crimes. Whoever adheres to
the ordinary course of justice perverts the spirit of
the law both divine and human. He who is accused
of sorcery should never be acquitted unless the malice
of the prosecutor be clearer than the sun; for it is
so difficult to bring full proof of this secret crime,
that out of a million of witches not one would be convicted
if the usual course were followed.’101 He speaks
of an old woman sentenced to the stake after confessing[149]
to having been transported to the sabbath in
a state of insensibility. Her judges, anxious to know
how this was effected, released her from her fetters,
when she rubbed herself on the different parts of her
body with a prepared unguent and soon became insensible,
stiff, and apparently dead. Having remained
in that condition for five hours, the witch as suddenly
revived, relating to the trembling inquisitors a number
of extraordinary things proving she must have
been spiritually transported to distant places.102 An
earlier advocate of the orthodox cause was a Swiss
friar, Nider, who wrote a work entitled ‘Formicarium’
(Ant-Hill) on the various sins against religion. One
section is employed in the consideration of sorcery.
Nider was one of the inquisitors who distinguished
themselves by their successful zeal in the beginning
of the century.

The Swiss witches, like the old Italian larvæ and
most of the sisterhood, display extraordinary affection
for the blood of new-born unbaptized infants; and it
is a great desideratum to kill them before the pre[150]ventive
rite has been irrevocably administered; for
the bodies of unbaptized children were almost indispensable
in the witches’ preparations. Soon as buried
their corpses are dug out of their graves and carried
away to the place of assembly, where they are boiled
down for the fat for making the ointments.103 The
liquid in which they are boiled is carefully preserved;
and the person who tastes it is immediately initiated
into all the mysteries of sorcery. A witch, judicially
examined by the papal commission which compiled
the ‘Malleus,’ gives evidence of the prevalence of this
practice: ‘We lie in wait for children. These are
often found dead by their parents; and the simple
people believe that they have themselves overlain
them, or that they died from natural causes; but it
is we who have destroyed them. We steal them out
of the grave, and boil them with lime till all the
flesh is loosed from the bones and is reduced to one
mass. We make of the firm part an ointment, and
fill a bottle with the fluid; and whoever drinks
with due ceremonies of this belongs to our league,
and is already capable of bewitching.’ ‘Finger of
birth-strangled babe’ is one of the ingredients of
that widely-collected composition of the Macbeth[151]
witches.

The case at Warboys, which, connected with a
family of some distinction, occasioned unusual interest,
was tried in the year 1593. The village of Warboys,
or Warbois, is situated in the neighbourhood of
Huntingdon. One of the most influential of the inhabitants
was a gentleman of respectability, Robert
Throgmorton, who was on friendly terms with the
Cromwells of Hitchinbrook, and the lord of the
manor, Sir Henry Cromwell. Three criminals—old
Samuel, his wife, and Agnes Samuel their daughter,
were tried and condemned by Mr. Justice Fenner
for bewitching Mr. Throgmorton’s five children,
seven servants, the Lady Cromwell, and others. The
father and daughter maintained their innocence to
the last; the old woman confessed. A fact which
makes this affair more remarkable is, that with the
forty pounds escheated to him, as lord of the manor,
out of the property of the convicts, Sir Samuel Cromwell
founded an annual sermon or lecture upon the
sin of witchcraft, to be preached at their town every
Lady-day, by a Doctor or Bachelor of Divinity of
Queen’s College, Cambridge; the sum of forty pounds
being entrusted to the Mayor and Aldermen of Huntingdon,
for a rent-charge of forty shillings yearly to
be paid to the select preacher. This lecture, says Dr.
Francis Hutchison, is continued to this day—1718.

Four years previously to this important trial, Jane[152]
Throgmorton, a girl ten years of age, was first suddenly
attacked with strange convulsive fits, which
continued daily, and even several times in the day,
without intermission. One day, soon after the first
seizure, Mother Samuel coming into the Throgmortons’
house, seated herself as customary in a chimney-corner
near the child, who was just recovering from
one of her fits. The girl no sooner noticed her than
she began to cry out, pointing to the old woman,
‘Did you ever see one more like a witch than she is?
Take off her black-thumbed cap, for I cannot abide
to look at her.’ The illness becoming worse, they
sent to Cambridge to consult Dr. Barrow, an experienced
physician in that town; but he could discover
no natural disease. A month later, the other
children were similarly seized, and persuaded of
Mother Samuel’s guilt. The parents’ increasing
suspicions, entertained by the doctors, were confirmed
when the servants were also attacked. About the
middle of March, 1590, Lady Cromwell arrived on a
visit to the Throgmortons; and being much affected
at the sufferings of the patients, sent for the suspected
person, whom she charged with being the malicious
cause. Finding all entreaty of no avail in extorting
an admission of guilt, Lady Cromwell suddenly and
unexpectedly cut off a lock of the witch’s hair (a
powerful counter-charm), at the same time secretly[153]
placing it in Mrs. Throgmorton’s hands, desiring her
to burn it. Indignant, the accused addressed the
lady, ‘Madam, why do you use me thus? I never
did you any harm as yet‘—words afterwards recollected.
‘That night,’ says the narrative, ‘my lady
Cromwell was suddenly troubled in her sleep by a
cat which Mother S. had sent her, which offered to
pluck the skin and flesh off her bones and arms. The
struggle betwixt the cat and the lady was so great in
her bed that night, and she made so terrible a noise,
that she waked her bedfellow Mrs. C.’ Whether, ‘as
some sager’ might think, it was a nightmare (a sort
of incubus which terrified the disordered imagination
of the ancients), or some more substantial object that
disturbed the rest of the lady, it is not important to
decide; but next day Lady Cromwell was laid up
with an incurable illness. Holding out obstinately
against all threats and promises, the reputed witch
was at length induced to pronounce an exorcism, when
the afflicted were immediately for the time dispossessed.
‘Next day being Christmas-eve and the Sabbath,
Dr. Donington [vicar of the parish] chose his text
of repentance out of the Psalms, and communicating
her confession to the assembly, directed his discourse
chiefly to that purpose to comfort a penitent heart
that it might affect her. All sermon-time Mother
S. wept and lamented, and was frequently so loud in
her passions, that she drew the eyes of the congrega[154]tion
upon her.’ On the morrow, greatly to the disappointment
of the neighbours, she contradicted her
former confession, declaring it was extracted by
surprise at finding her exorcism had relieved the
child, unconscious of what she was saying.

The case was afterwards carried before the Bishop
of Lincoln. Now greatly alarmed, the old woman
made a fresh announcement that she was really a
witch; that she owned several spirits (of the nine may
be enumerated the fantastic names of Pluck, Hardname,
Catch, Smack, Blew), one of whom was used
to appear in the shape of a chicken, and suck her
chin. The mother and daughters were, upon this
voluntary admission, committed to Huntingdon gaol.
Of the possessed Jane Throgmorton seems to have
been most familiar with the demons.104

The sessions at Huntingdon began April 4, 1593,[155]
when the three Samuels were arraigned; and the
above charges, with much more of the same sort,
were repeated: the indictments specifying the particular
offences against the children and servants of
the Throgmortons, and the ‘bewitching unto death’
of the lady Cromwell. The grand jury found a true
bill immediately, and they were put upon their trial
in court. After a mass of nonsense had been gone
through, ‘the judge, justices, and jury said the case
was apparent, and their consciences were well satisfied
that the said witches were guilty, and deserved
death.’ When sentence of death was pronounced, the
old woman, sixty years of age, pleaded, in arrest of
judgment, that she was with child—a pleading which
produced only a derisive shout of laughter in court.
Husband and daughter asserted their innocence to
the last. All three were hanged. From the moment
of execution, we are assured, Robert Throgmorton’s
children were permanently freed from all their sufferings.
Such, briefly, are the circumstances of a witch[156]
case that resulted in the sending to the gallows three
harmless wretches, and in the founding an annual
sermon which perpetuated the memory of an iniquitous
act and of an impossible crime. The sermon, it
may be presumed, like other similar surviving institutions,
was preserved in the eighteenth century
more for the benefit of the select preacher than for
that of the people.

[157]

CHAPTER IV.

The nobler arts of magic, astrology, alchymy, necromancy,
&c., were equally in vogue in this age with
that of the infernal art proper. But they were more
respected. Professors of those arts were habitually
sought for with great eagerness by the highest personages,
and often munificently rewarded. In antiquity
astrology had been peculiarly Oriental in its
origin and practice. The Egyptians, and especially
the Chaldæans, introduced the foreign art to the
West among the Greeks and Italians; the Arabs
revived it in Western Europe in the Middle Age.
Under the early Roman Empire the Chaldaic art
exercised and enjoyed considerable influence and
reputation, if it was often subject to sudden persecutions.
Augustus was assisted to the throne, and
Severus selected his wife, by its means. After it had[158]
once firmly established itself in the West,105 the Oriental
astrology was soon developed and reduced to
a more regular system; and in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries Dee and Lilly enjoyed a
greater reputation than even Figulus or Thrasyllus
had obtained in the first century. Queen Elizabeth
and Catherine di Medici (two of the astutest persons
of their age) patronised them. Dr. Dee in
England, and Nostradamus in France, were of
this class. Dr. Caius, third founder of a college still
bearing his name in the university of Cambridge,
Kelly, Ashmole, and Lilly, are well-known names in
the astrological history of this period. Torralvo,p
whose fame as an aerial voyager is immortalised by
Cervantes in ‘Don Quixote,’ was as great a magician
in Spain and Italy as Dee in England, although not
so familiar to English readers as their countryman,
the protégé of Elizabeth. Neither was his magical
faculty so well rewarded. Dr. Torralvo, a physician,
had studied medicine and philosophy with extraordinary
success, and was high in the confidence of
many of the eminent personages of Spain and Italy,
for whom he fortunately predicted future success. A
confirmed infidel or freethinker, he was denounced[159]
to the Inquisition by the treachery of an associate as
denying or disputing the immortality of the soul, as
well as the divinity of Christ. This was in 1529.
Torralvo, put to the torture, admitted that his informing
spirit, Zequiel, was a demon by whose
assistance he performed his aerial journeys and all
his extraordinary feats, both of prophecy and of
actual power. Some part of the severity of the
tortures was remitted by the demon’s opportune
reply to the curiosity of the presiding inquisitors, that
Luther and the Reformers were bad and cunning
men. Torralvo seems to have avoided the extreme
penalty of fire by recanting his heresies, submitting
to the superior judgment of his gaolers, and still
more by the interest of his powerful employers; and
he was liberated not long afterwards.

The life of Dr. Dee, an eminent Cambridge mathematician,
and of his associate Edward Kelly,
forms a curious biography. Dee was born in 1527.
He studied at the English and foreign universities
with great success and applause; and while the
Princess Elizabeth was quite young he acquired her
friendship, maintained by frequent correspondence,
and on her succession to the throne the queen
showed her good will in a conspicuous manner. John
Dee left to posterity a diary in which he has inserted
a regular account of his conjurations, prophetic intimations,
and magical resources. Notwithstanding[160]
his mathematical acumen, he was the dupe of his
cunning subordinate—more of a knave, probably,
than his master. In 1583 a Polish prince, Albert
Laski, visiting the English court, frequented the
society of the renowned astrologer, by whom he was
initiated in the secrets of the art; and predicted to
be the future means of an important revolution in
Europe. The astrologers wandered over all Germany,
at one time favourably received by the credulity, at
another time ignominiously ejected by the indignant
disappointment, of a patron.106 Dee returned to England
in 1589, and was finally appointed to the wardenship
of the college at Manchester. In James’s
reign he was well received at Court, his reputation as
a magician increasing; and in 1604 he is found presenting
a petition to the king, imploring his good
offices in dispelling the injurious imputation of being
‘a conjuror, or caller, or invocator of devils.’ Lilly,
the most celebrated magician of the seventeenth
century in England, was in the highest repute during
the civil wars: his prophetic services were sought
with equal anxiety by royalists and patriots, by king[161]
and parliament.107 Sometimes the professor of the
occult science may have been his own dupe: oftener
he imposed and speculated upon the credulity of
others.

Prospero is the type of the Theurgic, as Comus is
of the Goetic, magician. His spiritual minister
belongs to the order of good, or at least middle
spirits—

Prospero, by an irresistible magic, subdued to his
service the reluctant Caliban, a monster ‘got by the
devil himself upon his wicked dam:’ but that semi-demon
is degraded into a mere beast of burden,
brutal and savage, with little of the spiritual essence
of his male parent. Comus, as represented in that
most beautiful drama by the genius of Milton, is of
the classic rather than Christian sort: he is the
true son of Circe, using his mother’s method of
enchantment, transforming his unwary victims into
the various forms or faces of the bestial herd. Like
the island magician without his magical garment,[162]
the wicked enchanter without his wand loses his sorceric
power; and—

it is not possible to disenchant his spell-bound prisoners.

In the sixteenth century many wonderful stories
obtained of the tremendous feats of the magic art.
Those that related the lives of Bacon, and of Faust
(of German origin), were best known in England;
and, in the dramatic form, were represented on the
stage. The comedy of ‘Friar Bacon and Friar
Bungay,’ and the tragedy of ‘The Life and Death of
Dr. Faustus,’ are perhaps the most esteemed of the
dramatic writings of the age which preceded the
appearance of Shakspeare. In the latter Faustus
makes a compact with the devil, by which a familiar
spirit and a preternatural art are granted him for
twenty-four years. At the end of this period his
soul is to be the reward of the demons.109 From the
‘Faustus’ of Christopher Marlow, Goethe has derived[163]
the name and idea of the most celebrated tragedy of
our day.

Magic and necromantic prowess was equally recognised
in Southern Europe. The Italian poets
employed such imposing paraphernalia in the construction
of an epic; and Cervantes has ridiculed
the prevailing belief of his countrymen.110

Alchymy, the science of the transformation of baser[164]
metals into gold, a pursuit which engaged the anxious
thought and wasted the health, time, and fortunes of
numbers of fanatical empirics, was one of the most[165]
prized of the abstruse occult arts. Monarchs, princes,
the great of all countries, eagerly vied among themselves
in encouraging with promises and sometimes
with more substantial incentives the zeal of their
illusive search; and Henry IV. of France could see
no reason why, if the bread and wine were transubstantiated
so miraculously, a metal could not be transformed
as well.111

Among the eminent names of self-styled or reputed
masters of the nobler or white magic, some, like the
celebrated Paracelsus, were men of extraordinary attainments
and largely acquainted with the secrets of
natural science. A necessarily imperfect knowledge,
a natural desire to impose upon the ignorant wonder
of the vulgar, and the vanity of a learning which was[166]
ambitious of exhibiting, in the most imposing if less
intelligible way, their superior knowledge, were probably
the mixed causes which led such distinguished
scholars as Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan,
and Campanella to oppress themselves and their
readers with a mass of unintelligible rubbish and
cabalistic mysticism.112 Slow and gradual as are the
successive advances in the knowledge and improvement
of mankind, it would not be reasonable to be
surprised that preceding generations could not at
once attain to the knowledge of a maturer age; and
the teachers of mankind groped their dark and uncertain
way in ages destitute of the illumination of
modern times.’113

[168]

CHAPTER V.

In the annals of black magic, the silent tribunals of
the Inquisition in Southern Europe which has consigned
so many thousands of heretics to the torture
room and to the flames, do not reveal so many trials
for the simple crime of witchcraft as the tribunals of
the more northern peoples: there all dissent from
Catholic and priestly dogma was believed to be inspired
by the powers of hell, deserving a common
punishment, whether in the form of denial of transubstantiation,
infallibility, of skill in magic, or of
the vulgar practice of sorcery. Throughout Europe
penalties and prosecutions were being continually
enacted. The popes in Italy fulminated abroad their
decrees, and the parliaments of France were almost
daily engaged in pronouncing sentence.

Where the papal yoke had been thrown off in[169]
Northern Germany, in Scotland, and in England,
the belief and the persecution remained in full force,
indeed greatly increased; and it is obvious to inquire
the cause of the retention, with many additions, of
the doctrine of witchcraft by those who had at last
finally rejected with scorn most of the grosser religious
dogmas of the old Church, who were so loud
in their just denunciation of Catholic tyranny and
superstition. A general answer might be given that
the Reformation of the sixteenth century, while it
swept away in those countries in which it was effected
the most injurious principles of ecclesiasticism, the
principles of infallibility and authority in matters of
faith, for the destruction of which gratitude is due to
the independent minds of Luther, Zuinglius, and
others, was yet far from complete in its negations.
The leaders of that great revolution, with all their
genius and boldness, could only partially free themselves
from the prejudices of education and of the age.
To develope the important principles they established,
the rights of private judgment and religious
freedom, was the legacy and duty of their successors;
a duty which they failed to perform, to the incalculable
misfortune of succeeding generations. The
Sacred Scriptures, the common and only authority on
faith among the different sections of Protestantism,
unfortunately seemed to inculcate the dread power[170]
of the devil and his malicious purposes, and both the
Jewish and Christian Scriptures apparently taught
the reality of witchcraft. Theologians of all parties
would have as easily dared to question the existence
of God himself as to doubt the actual power of
that other deity, and the unbelievers in his universal
interference were not illogically stigmatised as
atheists. With the Protestants some adventitious
circumstances might make a particular church more
fanatical and furious than another, and the Calvinists
have deserved the palm for the bitterest persecution of
witchcraft. But neither the Lutheran nor the Anglican
section is exempt from the odious imputation.114

The followers of Calvin were most deeply imbued
with hatred and horror of Catholic practices, and,
adopting the old prejudice or policy of their antagonists,
they were willing to confound the superstitious
rites of Catholicism with those of demonolatry. The
Anglican Church party, whose principles were not so
entirely opposite to the old religion, had far less
antipathy: until the revolution of 1688 it was for
the most part engaged in contending against liberty
rather than against despotism of conscience; against[171]
Calvinism than against Catholicism. Yet the Church
of England is exposed to the reproach of having
sanctioned the common opinions in the most authoritative
manner. In the authorised version of the
Sacred Scriptures, in the translation of which into
the English language forty-seven selected divines,
eminent for position and learning, could concur in
consecrating a vulgar superstition, the most imposing
sanction was given. Had they possessed either common
sense or courage, these Anglican divines might
have expressed their disbelief or doubt of its truth
by a more rational, and possibly more proper, interpretation
of the Hebrew and Greek expressions;
or if that was not possible, by an accompanying
unequivocal protest. But the subservience as well as
superstition of the English Church under the last of
the Tudors and under the Stuarts is equally a matter
of fact and of reprobation.

It was in the first year of the first King of Great
Britain that the English Parliament passed the Act
which remained in force, or at least on the Statute
Book, until towards the middle of last century.115
After due consideration the bill passed both Houses;[172]
and by it, it was enacted that ‘If any person shall
use any invocation or conjuration of any evil or wicked
spirit, or shall consult, covenant with, entertain, employ,
feed, or reward any evil or cursed spirit to or
for any intent or purpose, or take up any dead man,
woman, or child out of the grave—or the skin, bone,
or any part of the dead person, to be employed or
used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or
enchantment; or shall use, exercise, or practice any
sort of witchcraft, &c., whereby any person shall be
destroyed, killed, wasted, consumed, pined or lamed
in any part of the body; that every such person
being convicted shall suffer death.’ Twelve bishops
sat in the Committee of the Upper House.116

The Scottish Parliament, during Queen Mary’s
reign, anathematised the papistical practices; and
from that time the annals of Scottish judicature are
filled with records of trials and convictions. James
was educated among the stern adherents of Calvin.
In whatever matters of ecclesiastical faith and rule
the countryman of Knox may have deviated from the
teaching of his preceptors, he maintained with constant
zeal his faith in the devil’s omnipotence; and
we may be disposed to concede the title of ‘Defender[173]
of the Faith’ (so confidently prefixed to successive
editions of the Authorised Version) to his activity
in the extermination of witches, rather than to his
hatred of priestcraft. While monarch only of the
Northern kingdom, he published a denunciation of
the damnable infidelity of the ‘Witch Advocates,’
and his own unhesitating belief. James VI. and his
clerical advisers were persuaded, or affected to be
persuaded, that the devil, with all his hellish crew,
was conspiring to frustrate the beneficial intentions
of a pious Protestant prince. Infernal despair and
rage reached the climax when the marriage with the
Danish princess was to be effected. But, far from
being terrified by so formidable a conspiracy, he
gloried in the persuasion that he was the devil’s
greatest enemy; and the man who shuddered at the
sight of a drawn sword was not afraid to enter the
lists against the invisible spiritual enemy.

The ‘Demonologie’ was published at Edinburgh
in 1597. The author introduces his book with these
words: ‘The fearful abounding at this time in this
country of these detestable slaves of the devil, the
witches or enchanters, hath moved me (beloved
reader) to despatch in post this following treatise
of mine, not in any wise (as I protest) to serve for a
show of my learning and ingine, but only moved of
conscience to press thereby so far as I can to resolve
the doubting hearts of many; both that such assaults[174]
of Sathan are most certainly practised, and that the
instruments thereof merits most severely to be
punished: against the damnable opinions of two
principally in our age, whereof the one called
Scot, an Englishman, is not ashamed in public print
to deny that there can be such a thing as witchcraft,
and so maintains the old error of the Sadducees in
denying of spirits. The other, called Wierus, a German
physician, sets out a public apology for all these
crafts-folks, whereby procuring for their impunity,
he plainly bewrays himself to have been one of that
profession. And for to make this treatise the more
pleasant and facile, I have put it in form of a dialogue,
which I have divided into three books: the first
speaking of magic in general, and necromancy in
special; the second, of sorcery and witchcraft; and
the third contains a discourse of all those kinds of
spirits and spectres that appears and troubles persons,
together with a conclusion of the whole work. My
intention in this labour is only to prove two things,
as I have already said: the one, that such devilish
arts have been and are; the other, what exact trial
and severe punishment they merit; and therefore
reason I what kind of things are possible to be performed
in these arts, and by what natural causes
they may be. Not that I touch every particular
thing of the devil’s power, for that were infinite; but
only, to speak scholasticly (since this cannot be spoken[175]
in our language), I reason upon genus, leaving species
and differentia to be comprehended therein.’117

The following injunction is characteristic of all persecuting
maxims, and is worthy of the disciple of
Bodin: ‘Witches ought to be put to death according
to the law of God, the civil and the imperial law, and
the municipal law of all Christian nations. Yea, to
spare the life and not to strike whom God bids strike,
and so severely in so odious a treason against God,
is not only unlawful but doubtless as great a sin in
the magistrate as was Saul’s sparing Agag.’ It is
insisted upon by this sagacious author (echoing the[176]
rules laid down in the ‘Malleus’), that any and every
evidence is good against an exceptional crime: that
the testimony of the youngest children, and of persons
of the most infamous character, not only may, but
ought to be, received.

This mischievous production is a curious collection
of demonological learning and experience, exhibiting
the reputed practices and ceremonies of witches, the
mode of detecting them, &c.; but is useless even
for the purpose of showing the popular Scottish or
English notions, being chiefly a medley of classical
or foreign ideas, inserted apparently (spite of the
royal author’s assurance to the contrary) to parade
an array of abstruse and pedantic learning. That
some of the excessive terror said to have been
exhibited was simulated to promote his pretensions
to the especial hostility of Satan, is probable: but
that also he was impressed, in some degree, with a
real and lively fear scarcely admits of doubt. The
modern Solomon might well have blushed at the
superior common sense of a barbaric chief; and the
‘judges of the seventeenth century might have been
instructed and confounded at the superior wisdom of
Rotharis [a Lombardic prince], who derides the
absurd superstition and protects the wretched victims
of popular or judicial cruelty.’118

Previously to the ‘Witch Act,’ the charge of sorcery[177]
was, in most cases, a subordinate and subsidiary
one, attached to various political or other indictments.
Henceforward the practice of the peculiar
offence might be entirely independent of any more
substantial accusation. In England, compared with
the other countries of Europe, folly more than ferocity,
perhaps, generally characterises the proceedings
of the tribunals. During the pre-Reformation
ages, France, even more than her island neighbour,
suffered from the crime. The fates of the Templars,
of Jeanne d’Arc, of Arras, of those suspected of causing
the mad king’s, Charles VI., derangement (when
many of the white witches, or wizards, ‘mischievously
good,’ suffered for failing, by a pretended skill,
to effect his promised cure) are some of the more
conspicuous examples. But in France, as in the
rest of Europe, it was in the post-feudal period that
prosecutions became of almost daily occurrence.

A prevalent kind of sorcery was that of lycanthropy,
as it was called, a prejudice derived, it seems,
in part from the Pythagorean metempsychosis. A
few cases will illustrate the nature of this stupendous[178]
transformation. That it is mostly found to take
place in France and in the southern districts, the
country of wolves, that still make their ravages
there, is a fact easily intelligible; and if the devil
can enter into swine, he can also, in the opinion of the
demonologists, as easily enter into wolves. At Dôle,
in 1573, a loup-garou, or wehr-wolf (man-wolf), was
accused of devastating the country and devouring
little children. The indictment was read by Henri
Camus, doctor of laws and counsellor of the king, to
the effect that the accused, Gilles Garnier, had killed
a girl twelve years of age, having torn her to pieces,
partly with his teeth, and partly with his wolf’s
paws; that having dragged the body into the forest,
he there devoured the larger portion, reserving the
remainder for his wife; also that, by reason of injuries
inflicted in a similar way on another young girl,
the loup-garou had occasioned her death; also that
he had devoured a boy of thirteen, tearing him limb
by limb; that he displayed the same unnatural
propensities even in his own proper shape. Fifty
persons were found to bear witness; and he was
put to the rack, which elicited an unreserved confession.
He was then brought back into court, when
Dr. Camus, in the name of the Parliament of Dôle,
pronounced the following sentence: ‘Seeing that
Gilles Garnier has, by the testimony of credible
witnesses and by his own spontaneous confession,[179]
been proved guilty of the abominable crimes of
lycanthropy and witchcraft, this court condemns
him, the said Grilles, to be this day taken in a cart
from this spot to the place of execution, accompanied
by the executioner, where he, by the said
executioner, shall be tied to a stake and burned
alive, and that his ashes be then scattered to the
winds. The court further condemns him, the said
Gilles, to the costs of this prosecution. Given at
Dôle this 18th day of January, 1573.’ Five years
later a man named Jacques Rollet was burned alive in
the Place de Grêve for the same crime, having been
tried and condemned by the Parliament of Paris.119

Several witches were burned in successive years[180]
throughout the kingdom. In 1564, three witches
and a wizard were executed at Poictiers: on the rack
they declared that they had destroyed numbers of
sheep by magical preparations, attended the Sabbaths,
&c. Trois Echelles, a celebrated sorcerer, examined
in the presence of Charles IX. and his court, acknowledged
his obligation to the devil, to whom he had
sold himself, recounting the debaucheries of the Sabbath,
the methods of bewitching, and the compositions
of the unguents for blighting cattle. The astounding
fact was also revealed that some twelve hundred
accomplices were at large in different parts of the
land. The provincial parliaments in the end of this
and the greater part of the next century are unremittingly
engaged in passing decrees and making
provisions against the increasing offences.120 ‘The
Parliament of Rouen decreed that the possession of[181]
a grimoire or book of spells was sufficient evidence
of witchcraft; and that all persons on whom such
books were found should be burned alive. Three councils
were held in different parts of France in 1583,
all in relation to the same subject. The Parliament
of Bordeaux issued strict injunctions to all curates
and clergy whatever to use redoubled efforts to
root out the crime of witchcraft. The Parliament of
Tours was equally peremptory, and feared the judgments
of an offended God if all these dealers with
the devil were not swept from the face of the land.
The Parliament of Rheims was particularly severe
against the noueurs d’aiguillettes or ‘tiers of the
knot’—people of both sexes who took pleasure in
preventing the consummation of marriage that they
might counteract the command of God to our first
parents to increase and multiply. This parliament
held it to be sinful to wear amulets to preserve from
witchcraft; and that this practice might not be continued
within its jurisdiction, drew up a form of exorcism
‘which could more effectually defeat the agents
of the devil and put them to flight.’121

In France, and still more in Italy, there is reason
for believing that many of the convicts were not[182]
without the real guilt of toxicological practices; and
they might sometimes properly deserve the opprobrium
of the old venefici. The formal trial and sentence
to death of La Maréchale de l’Ancre in 1617 was
perhaps more political than superstitious, but witchcraft
was introduced as one of the gravest accusations.
Her preponderance in the councils of Marie de
Medici and of Louis XIII. originated in the natural
fascination of royal but inferior minds. Two years
afterwards occurred a bonâ fide prosecution on a large
scale. A commission was appointed by the Parliament
of Bordeaux to inquire into the causes and
circumstances of the prevalence of witchcraft in the
Pyrenean districts. Espaignol, president of the local
parliament, with the better known councillor, Pierre
de l’Ancre, who has left a record (‘Tableau de l’Inconstance
des Mauvais Anges et Démons, où il est
amplement traité des Sorciers et Démons: Paris’),
was placed at the head of the commission. How the
district of Labourt was so infested with the tribe, that
of thirty thousand inhabitants hardly a family existed
but was infected with sorcery, is explained by
the barren, sterile, mountainous aspect of the neighbourhood
of that part of the Pyrenees: the men
were engaged in the business of fishermen, and
the women left alone were exposed to the tempter.
The priests too were as ignorant and wicked as the
people; their relations with the lonely wives and
daughters being more intimate than proper. Young[183]
and handsome women, some mere girls, form the
greater proportion of the accused. As many as
forty a day appeared at the bar of the commissioners,
and at least two hundred were hanged or
burned.

Evidence of the appearance of the devil was various
and contradictory. Some at the Domdaniel, the
place of assemblage, had a vision of a hideous wild
he-goat upon a large gilded throne; others of a man
twisted and disfigured by Tartarean torture; of a
gentleman in black with a sword, booted and spurred;
to others he seemed as some shapeless indistinct object,
as that of the trunk of a tree, or some huge rock or
stone. They proceeded to their meetings riding on
spits, pitchforks, broom-sticks: being entertained on
their arrival in the approved style, and indulging in
the usual licence. Deputies from witchdom attended
from all parts, even from Scotland. When reproached
by some of his slaves for failing to come to the rescue
in the torture-chamber or at the stake, their lord
replied by causing illusory fires to be lit, bidding the
doubters walk through the harmless flames, promising
not more inconvenience in the bonfires of their persecutors.
Lycanthropic criminals were also brought up
who had prowled about and devastated the sheepfolds.
Espaignol and De l’Ancre were provided
with two professional Matthew Hopkinses: one a[184]
surgeon for examining the ‘marks’ (generally here
discovered in the left eye, like a frog’s foot) in the
men and older women; the other a girl of seventeen,
for the younger of her sex. Many of the priests
were executed; several made their escape from the
country. Besides the work before mentioned, De
l’Ancre published a treatise under the title of ‘L’Incrédulité
et Mescréance du Sortilége pleinement
convaincue,’ 1622. The expiration of the term of
the Bordeaux commission brought the proceedings
to a close, and fortunately saved a number of the
condemned.

In Spain, the land of Torquemada and Ximenes,
which had long ago fanatically expelled the Jews
and recently its old Moorish conquerors from its
soil, the unceasing activity of the Inquisition during
140 years must have extorted innumerable confessions
and proofs of diabolic conspiracies and heresy.
Antonio Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, to
whose rare opportunities of obtaining information we
are indebted for some instructive revelations, has
exposed a large number of the previously silent and
dark transactions of the Holy Office. But the demonological
ideas of the Southern Church and people
are profusely displayed in the copious dramatic literature
of the Spaniards, whose theatre was at one
time nearly as popular, if not as influential, as the
Church.

The dramas of the celebrated Lope de Vega and[185]
of Calderon in particular, are filled with demons as
well as angels122—a sort of religious compensation
to the Church for the moral deficiencies of a licentious
stage, or rather licentious public.

[186]

CHAPTER VI.

Demoniacal possession was a phase of witchcraft
which obtained extensively in France during the
seventeenth century: the victims of this hallucination
were chiefly the female inmates of religious
houses, whose inflamed imaginations were prostituted
by their priestly advisers to the most atrocious purposes.
Urbain Grandier’s fate was connected with
that of an entire convent. The facts of this celebrated
sorcerer’s history are instructive. He was
educated in a college of the Jesuits at Bordeaux,
and presented by the fathers, with whom his abilities
and address had gained much applause, to a benefice
in Loudun. He provoked by his haughtiness the
jealousy of his brother clergy, who regarded him as
an intruder, and his pride and resentment increased[187]
in direct proportion to the activity of his enemies,
who had conspired to effect his ruin. Mounier and
Mignon, two priests whom he had mortally offended,
were most active. Urbain Grandier was rash enough
to oppose himself alone to the united counsels of unscrupulous
and determined foes. Defeated singly
in previous attempts to drive him from Loudun, the
two priests combined with the leading authorities of
the place. Their haughty and careless adversary had
the advantage or disadvantage of a fine person and
handsome face, which, with his other recommendations,
gained him universal popularity with the
women; and his success and familiarities with the
fair sex were not likely to escape the vigilance of
spies anxious to collect damaging proofs. What
inflamed to the utmost the animosities of the
two parties was the success of Canon Mignon in obtaining
the coveted position of confessor to the convent
of Ursulines in Loudun, to the exclusion of
Grandier, himself an applicant. This convent was
destined to assume a prominent part in the fate of
the curé of the town. The younger nuns, it seems,
to enliven the dull monotony of monastic life, adopted
a plan of amusing their leisure by frightening the
older ones in making the most of their knowledge of
secret passages in the building, playing off ghost-tricks,
and raising unearthly noises. When the newly
appointed confessor was informed of the state of[188]
matters he at once perceived the possibility, and
formed the design, of turning it to account. The
offending nuns were promised forgiveness if they
would continue their ghostly amusement, and also
affect demoniacal possession; a fraud in which they
were more readily induced to participate by an assurance
that it might be the humble means of converting
the heretics—Protestants being unusually
numerous in that part of the country.

As soon as they were sufficiently prepared to assume
their parts, the magistrates were summoned to witness
the phenomena of possession and exorcism. On
the first occasion the Superior of the convent was
the selected patient; and it was extracted from the
demon in possession that he had been sent by Urbain
Grandier, priest of the church of St. Peter. This
was well so far; but the civil authorities generally,
as it appears, were not disposed to accept even the
irrefragable testimony of a demoniac; and the
ecclesiastics, with the leading inhabitants, were in
conflict with the civil power. Opportunely, however,
for the plan of the conspirators, who were almost in
despair, an all-powerful ally was enlisted on their
side. A severe satire upon some acts of the
minister of France, Cardinal Richelieu, or of some of
his subordinates, had made its appearance. Urbain
was suspected to be the author; his enemies were
careful to improve the occasion; and the Cardinal-[189]minister’s
cooperation was secured. A royal commission
was ordered to inquire into the now notorious
circumstances of the Loudun diabolism. Laubardemont,
the head of the commission, arrived in December
1633, and no time was lost in bringing the matter to
a crisis. The house of the suspected was searched
for books of magic; he himself being thrown into a
dungeon, where the surgeons examined him for the
‘marks.’ Five insensible spots were found—a
certain proof. Meanwhile the nuns become more
hysterical than ever; strong suspicion not being
wanting that the priestly confessors to the convent
availed themselves of their situation to abuse the
bodies as well as the minds of the reputed demoniacs.
To such an extent went the audacity of the exorcists,
and the credulity of the people, that the enceinte condition
of one of the sisters, which at the end of five
or six months disappeared, was explained by the
malicious slander of the devil, who had caused that
scandalous illusion. Crowds of persons of all ranks
flocked from Paris and from the most distant parts to
see and hear the wild ravings of these hysterical or
drugged women, whose excitement was such that they
spared not their own reputations; and some scandalous
exposures were submitted to the amusement or
curiosity of the surrounding spectators. Some few of
them, aroused from the horrible delusion, or ashamed
of their complicity, admitted that all their previous[190]
revelations were simple fiction. Means were found
to effectually silence such dangerous announcements.
The accusers pressed on the prosecution; the influence
of his friends was overborne, and Grandier
was finally sentenced to the stake. Fearing the
result of a despair which might convincingly betray
the facts of the case to the assembled multitude, they
seem to have prevailed upon the condemned to keep
silence up to the last moment, under promise of an
easier death. But already fastened to the stake, he
learned too late the treachery of his executioners; instead
of being first strangled, he was committed alive
to the flames. Nor were any ‘last confessions’ possible.
The unfortunate victim of the malice of exasperated
rivals, and of the animosity of the implacable
Richelieu, has been variously represented.123 It
is noticeable that the scene of this affair was in the
heart of the conquered Protestant region—Rochelle
had fallen only six years before the execution; and
the heretics, although politically subdued, were
numerous and active. A fact which may account
for the seeming indifference and even the opposition
of a large number of the people in this case of diabolism
which obtained comparatively little credit.[191]
It had been urged to the nuns that it would be for the
good and glory of Catholicism that the heretics should
be confounded by a few astounding miracles. Whether
Grandier had any decided heretical inclinations is
doubtful; but he wrote against the celibacy of the
priesthood, and was suspected of liberal opinions in
religion. A Capuchin named Tranquille (a contemporary)
has furnished the materials for the ‘History
of the Devils of Loudun’ by the Protestant Aubin,
1716.

Twenty-four years previously a still more scandalous
affair—that of Louis Gauffridi and the Convent
of Aix, in which Gauffridi, who had debauched
several girls both in and out of the establishment,
was the principal actor—was transacted with similar
circumstances. Madeleine, one of the novices, soon
after entering upon her noviciate, was seized with
the ecstatic trances, which were speedily communicated
to her companions.124 These fits, in the judgment
of the priests, were nothing but the effect of
witchcraft. Exorcists elicited from the girls that
Louis Gauffridi, a powerful magician having authority[192]
over demons throughout Europe, had bewitched
them. The questions and answers were taken down,
by order of the judges, by reporters, who, while
the priests were exorcising, committed the results
to writing, published afterwards by one of them,
Michaelis, in 1613. Among the interesting facts
acquired through these spirit-media, the inquisitors
learned that Antichrist was already come; that
printing, and the invention of it, were alike accursed,
and similar information. Madeleine, tortured and
imprisoned in the most loathsome dungeon, was reduced
to such a condition of extreme horror and
dread, that from this time she was the mere instrument
of her atrocious judges. Having been intimate
with the wizard, she could inform them of the position
of the ‘secret marks’ on his person: these
were ascertained in the usual way by pricking with
needles. Gauffridi, by various torture, was induced
to make the required confession, and was burned
alive at Aix, April 30, 1611.

Demoniacal possession was a mania in France
in the seventeenth century. The story of Madeleine
Bavent, as reported, reveals the utmost licentiousness
and fiendish cruelty.125 Gibbon justly observes
that ancient Rome supported with the greatest[193]
difficulty the institution of six vestals, notwithstanding
the certain fate of a living grave for
those who could not preserve their chastity; and
Christian Rome was filled with many thousands of
both sexes bound by vows to perpetual virginity.
Madeleine was seduced by her Franciscan confessor
when only fourteen; and she entered a convent
lately founded at Louviers. In this building, surrounded
by a wood, and situated in a suitable spot,
some strange practices were carried on. At the instigation
of their director, a priest called David, the[194]
nuns, it is reported, were seized with an irresistible
desire of imitating the primitive Adamite simplicity:
the novices were compelled to return to the simple
nudity of the days of innocence when taking exercise
in the conventual gardens, and even at their devotions
in the chapel. The novice Madeleine, on one occasion,
was reprimanded for concealing her bosom with
the altar-cloth at communion. She was originally of
a pure and artless mind; and only gradually and
stealthily she was corrupted by the pious arguments
of her priest. This man, Picart by name—one of
that extensive class the ‘tristes obscœni,’ of whom
the Angelos and Tartuffes126 are representatives—succeeded
to the vacant office of directing confessor to
the nuns of Louviers; and at once embraced the
opportunities of the confessional. Without repeating
all the disgusting scenes that followed, as given by
Michelet, it is only necessary to add that the
miserable nun became the mistress and helpless
creature of her seducer. ‘He employed her as a
magical charm to gain over the rest of the nuns. A
holy wafer steeped in Madeleine’s blood and buried
in the garden would be sure to disturb their senses
and their minds. This was the very year in which[195]
Urban Grandier was burned. Throughout France
men spoke of nothing but the devils of Loudun….
Madeleine fancied herself bewitched and knocked
about by devils; followed about by a lewd cat with
eyes of fire. By degrees other nuns caught the disorder,
which showed itself in odd supernatural jerks
and writhings.’

The Superior was not averse to the publication of
these events, having the example and reputation of
Loudun before her. Little is new in the possession
and exorcism: for the most part they are a repetition
of those of Aix and Loudun. During a brief
interval the devils were less outrageous: for the
Cardinal-minister was meditating a reform of the
monastic establishments. Upon his death they commenced
again with equal violence. Picart was now
dead—but not so the persecution of his victim. The
priests recommenced miracle-working with renewed
vigour.127 Saved from immediate death by a fortunate
or, as it may be deemed, unfortunate sensitiveness to
bodily pain, she was condemned for the rest of her[196]
life to solitary confinement in a fearful dungeon, in
the language of her judges to an in pace. There
lying tortured, powerless in a loathsome cell, their
prisoner was alternately coaxed and threatened into
admitting all sorts of crimes, and implicating whom
they wished.128 The further cruelties to which the
lust, and afterwards the malignancy, of her gaolers
submitted her were not brought to an end by the interference
of parliament in August 1647, when the
destruction of the Louviers establishment was decreed.
The guilty escaped by securing, by intimidation, the
silence of their prisoner, who remained a living corpse[197]
in the dungeons of the episcopal palace of Rouen.
The bones of Picart were exhumed, and publicly
burned; the curé Boullé, an accomplice, was dragged
on a hurdle to the fish-market, and there burned at
the stake. So terminated this last of the trilogical
series. But the hysterical or demoniacal disease was
as furious as ever in Germany in the middle of the
eighteenth century; and was attended with as tremendous
effects at Würzburg as at Louviers.

In Germany during the seventeenth century witches
felt the fury of both Catholic and Protestant zeal;
but in the previous age prosecutions are directed
against Protestant witches. They abounded in
Upper Germany in the time of Innocent VIII., and
what numbers were executed has been already seen.
When the revolutionary party had acquired greater
strength and its power was established, they vied with
the conservatives in their vigorous attacks upon the
empire of Satan.

Luther had been sensible to the contagious fear
that the great spiritual enemy was actually fighting
in the ranks of his enemies. He had personal experience
of his hostility. Immured for his safety in
a voluntary but gloomy prison, occupied intensely
in the plan of a mighty revolution against the most
powerful hierarchy that has ever existed, engaged
continuously in the laborious task of translating the[198]
Sacred Scriptures, only partially freed from the prejudices
of education, it is little surprising that the
antagonist of the Church should have experienced
infernal hallucinations. This weakness of the champion
of Protestantism is at least more excusable than
the pedantic folly of the head of the English Church.
When Luther, however, could seriously affirm that
witchcraft ‘is the devil’s proper work wherewith,
when God permits, he not only hurts people but
makes away with them; for in this world we are as
guests and strangers, body and soul, cast under the
devil: that idiots, the lame, the blind, the dumb are
men in whom ignorant devils have established themselves,
and all the physicians who attempt to heal
these infirmities as though they proceeded from
natural causes, are ignorant blockheads who know
nothing about the power of the demon,’ we cannot
be indignant at the blind credulity of the masses of
the people. It appears inconsistent that Luther,
averse generally to supernaturalism, should yet find
no difficulty in entertaining these irrational diabolistic
ideas. The circumstances of his life and times sufficiently
explain the inconsistency.129

[199]

On the eve of the prolonged and ferocious struggle
on the continent between Catholicism and Protestantism
a wholesale slaughter of witches and wizards
was effected, a fitting prologue to the religious barbarities
of the Thirty Years’ War. Fires were kindled
almost simultaneously in two different places, at
Bamburg and Würzburg; and seldom, even in the
annals of witchcraft, have they burned more tremendously.
The prince-bishops of those territories had
long been anxious to extirpate Lutheranism from
their dioceses. Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamburg,
a vigorous supporter of the Jesuits, was the
chief agent of John George II. He waged war upon
the heretical sorcerers in the ‘whole armour of God,’
Panoplia armaturæ Dei. According to the statements
of credible historians, nine hundred trials took[200]
place in the two courts of Bamburg and Zeil between
1625 and 1630. Six hundred were burned by
Bishop George II. No one was spared. The chancellor,
his son, Dr. Horn, with his wife and daughters,
many of the lords and councillors of the bishop’s
court, women and priests, suffered. After tortures
of the most extravagant kind it was extorted that
some twelve hundred of them were confederated to
bewitch the entire land to the extent that ‘there
would have been neither wine nor corn in the country,
and that thereby man and beast would have
perished with hunger, and men would be driven to
eat one another. There were even some Catholic
priests among them who had been led into practices
too dreadful to be described, and they confessed
among other things that they had baptized many
children in the devil’s name. It must be stated that
these confessions were made under tortures of the
most fearful kind, far more so than anything that
was practised in France or other countries….
The number brought to trial in these terrible proceedings
were so great, and they were treated with
so little consideration, that it was usual not even to
take the trouble of setting down their names; but
they were cited as the accused Nos. 1, 2, 3, &c. The
Jesuits took their confessions in private, and they
made up the lists of those who were understood to
have been denounced by them.’

More destructive still were the burnings of Würzburg[201]
at the same period under the superintendence
of Philip Adolph, who ascended the episcopal throne
in 1623. In spite of the energy of his predecessors,
a grand confederacy of sorcerers had been discovered,
and were at once denounced.130

Nine appears to have been the greatest number,
and sometimes only two were sent to execution at
once. Five are specially recorded as having been[202]
burned alive. The victims are of all professions
and trades—vicars, canons, goldsmiths, butchers,
&c. Besides the twenty-nine conflagrations recorded,
many others were lighted about the same time: the
names of whose prey are not written in the Book of
Death. Frederick Spee, a Jesuit, formerly a violent
enemy of the witches, but who had himself been
incriminated by their extorted confessions at these
holocausts, was converted to the opposite side, and
wrote the ‘Cautio Criminalis,’ in which the necessity
of caution in receiving evidence is insisted upon—a
caution, without doubt, ‘very necessary at that time
for the magistracy throughout Germany.’ All over
Germany executions, if not everywhere so indiscriminately
destructive as those in Franconia and at Würzburg,
were incessant: and it is hardly the language of
hyperbole to say that no province, no city, no village
was without its condemned.

[203]

CHAPTER VII.

Scotland, by the physical features of the country and
by the character and habits of the people, is eminently
apt for the reception of the magical and
supernatural of any kind;131 and during the century
from 1563 it was almost entirely subject to the
dominion of Satan. Sir Walter Scott has narrated
some of the most prominent cases and trials in the
northern part of the island. The series may be said
to commence from the confederated conspiracy of[204]
hell to prevent the union of James VI. with the
Princess Anne of Denmark. An overwhelming tempest
at sea during the voyage of these anti-papal,
anti-diabolic royal personages was the appointed
means of their destruction.

The human agents were Agnes Sampson, the wise
wife of Keith (one of the better sort, who cured diseases,
&c.); Dame Euphane MacCalzean, widow of a
senator of the College of Justice, and a Catholic; Dr.
John Fian or Cunninghame, a man of some learning,
and of much skill in poison as well as in magic;
Barbara Napier or Douglas; Geillis Duncan; with
about thirty other women of the lowest condition.
‘When the monarch of Scotland sprung this strong
covey of his favourite game, they afforded the Privy
Council and himself sport for the greatest part of the
remaining winter. He attended on the examinations
himself…. Agnes Sampson, after being an
hour tortured by the twisting of a cord around her
head according to the custom of the buccaneers, confessed
that she had consulted with one Richard Grahame
concerning the probable length of the king’s
life and the means of shortening it. But Satan, to
whom at length they resorted for advice, told them
in French respecting King James, Il est un homme
de Dieu. The poor woman also acknowledged that
she had held a meeting with those of her sisterhood,[205]
who had charmed a cat by certain spells, having four
joints of men knit to its feet, which they threw into
the sea to excite a tempest: they embarked in sieves
with much mirth and jollity, the fiend rolling himself
before them upon the waves dimly seen, and resembling
a huge haystack in size and appearance.
They went on board of a foreign ship richly laden
with wines, where, invisible to the crew, they feasted
till the sport grew tiresome; and then Satan sunk
the vessel and all on board. Fian or Cunninghame
was also visited by the sharpest tortures, ordinary
and extraordinary. The nails were torn from his
fingers with smiths’ pincers; pins were driven into
the places which the nails usually defended; his
knees were crushed in the boots; his finger-bones
were splintered in the pilniewincks. At length his
constancy, hitherto sustained, as the bystanders supposed,
by the help of the devil, was fairly overcome;
and he gave an account of a great witch-meeting at
North Berwick, where they paced round the church
withershins—i. e. in reverse of the motion of the
sun. Fian then blew into the lock of the church
door, whereupon the bolts gave way: the unhallowed
crew entered, and their master the devil appeared to
his servants in the shape of a black man occupying
the pulpit. He was saluted with a “Hail, Master!”
but the company were dissatisfied with his not having
brought a picture of the king, repeatedly promised,[206]
which was to place his Majesty at the mercy of this
infernal crew…. The devil, on this memorable
occasion, forgot himself, and called Fian by his
own name instead of the demoniacal sobriquet of
Rob the Rowan, which had been assigned to him as
Master of the Rows or Rolls. This was considered as
bad taste; and the rule is still observed at every rendezvous
of forgers, smugglers, or the like, where it is
accounted very indifferent manners to name an individual
by his own name in case of affording ground
of evidence which may upon a day of trial be brought
against him. Satan, something disconcerted, concluded
the evening with a divertissement and a
dance after his own manner. The former consisted
in disinterring a new-buried corpse, and dividing it
in fragments among the company; and the ball was
maintained by well-nigh two hundred persons, who
danced a ring dance…. Dr. Fian, muffled,
led the ring, and was highly honoured, generally
acting as clerk or recorder. King James was deeply
interested in those mysterious meetings, and took
great delight to be present at the examinations of
the accused. He sent for Geillis Duncan, and caused
her to play before him the same tune to which Satan
and his companions led the brawl in North Berwick
churchyard. His ears were gratified in another way:
for at this meeting it was said the witches demanded
of the devil why he did bear such enmity against the[207]
king, who returned the flattering answer, that the
king was the greatest enemy whom he had in the
world. Almost all these poor wretches were executed:
nor did Euphane MacCalzean’s station in life save
her from the common doom, which was strangling to
death and burning to ashes thereafter. The majority
of the jury which tried Barbara Napier, having
acquitted her of attendance at the North Berwick
meeting, were themselves threatened with a trial for
wilful error upon an assize, and could only escape
from severe censure and punishment by pleading
guilty, and submitting themselves to the king’s pleasure.
The alterations and trenching,’ adds Scott,
‘which lately took place on the Castle-hill at Edinburgh
for the purpose of forming the new approach
to the city from the west, displayed the ashes of the
numbers who had perished in this manner, of whom
a large proportion must have been executed between
1590—when the great discovery was made concerning
Euphane MacCalzean and the wise wife of Keith and
their accomplices—and the union of the crowns.’132

Euphane’s exceptional doom was ‘to be bound to
the stake, and burned in ashes quick to the death.’
‘Burning quick’ was not an uncommon sentence: if
the less cruel one of hanging or strangling first and
afterwards burning was more usual. Thirty warlocks[208]
and witches was the total number executed on June
25th, 1591. A few, like Dr. Cunninghame, may
have been really experienced in the use of poison
and poisonous drugs. The art of poisoning has been
practised perhaps almost as extensively as (often
coextensively with) that of sorcery; a tremendous
and mostly inscrutable crime which science, in all
ages, has been able more surely to conceal than to
detect.

Two facts eminently illustrate the barbarous
iniquity of the Courts of Justice when dealing with
their witch prisoners. An expressed malediction, or
frequently an almost inaudible mutter, followed by
the coincident fulfilment of the imprecation, was
accepted eagerly by the judges as sufficient proof
(an antecedent one, contrary to the boasted principle
of English law at least, which assumes the innocence
until the guilt has been proved, of the accused) of
the crime of the person arraigned. And they complacently
attributed to conscious guilt the ravings
produced by an excruciating torture—that equally
inhuman and irrational invention of judicial cruelty;
confidently boasting that they were careful to sentence
no person without previous confession duly made.

But these confessions not seldom were partly extracted
from a natural wish to be freed from the
persecution of neighbours as well as from present
bodily torture. Sir George Mackenzie, Lord Advocate[209]
of Scotland during the period of the greatest fury,
and himself president at many of the trials, a believer,
among other cases in his Criminal Law, 1678, relates
that of a condemned witch who had confessed
judicially to him and afterwards ‘told me under
secrecy, that she had not confessed because she was
guilty; but being a poor creature who wrought for
her meat, and being defamed for a witch she knew
she should starve, for no person thereafter would
either give her meat or lodging, and that all men
would beat her and set dogs at her, and that therefore
she desired to be out of the world. Whereupon
she wept most bitterly, and upon her knees called
God to witness to what she said. Another told me
that she was afraid the devil would challenge a right
to her after she was said to be his servant, and would
haunt her, as the minister said when he was desiring
her to confess, and therefore she desired to die. And
really,’ admits the learned judge, ‘ministers are oft-times
indiscreet in their zeal to have poor creatures
to confess in this; and I recommend to judges that
the wisest ministers should be sent to them; and
that those who are sent should be cautious in this
particular.’ Another confession at the supreme
moment of the same sort, as recorded by the Rev. G.
Sinclair in ‘Satan’s Invisible World Discovered’ is
equally significant and genuine. What impression it
left upon the pious clergyman will be seen in his[210]
concluding inference. The witch, ‘being carried forth
to the place of execution, remained silent during the
first, second, and third prayer, and then, perceiving
there remained no more but to rise up and go to the
stake, she lifted up her body and with a loud voice
cried out, “Now all you that see me this day know
that I am now to die as a witch by my own confession,
and I free all men, especially the ministers and magistrates,
of the guilt of my blood. I take it wholly
upon myself—my blood be upon my own head; and
as I must make answer to the God of heaven presently,
I declare I am as free of witchcraft as any
child. But being delated by a malicious woman,
and put in prison under the name of a witch; disowned
by my husband and friends, and seeing no
ground of hope of my coming out of prison or ever
coming in credit again, through the temptation of the
devil I made up that confession on purpose to destroy
my own life, being weary of it, and choosing rather
to die than live”—and so died; which lamentable
story as it did then astonish all the spectators, none
of which could restrain themselves from tears, so it
may be to all a demonstration of Satan’s subtlety,
whose design is still to destroy all, partly by tempting
many to presumption, and some others to despair.’

The trial of Margaret Barclay took place in 1613.
Her crime consisted in having caused by means of
spells the loss of a ship at sea. She was said to[211]
have had a quarrel with the owner of the shipwrecked
vessel, in the course of which she uttered a wish that
all on board might sink to the bottom of the sea.
Her imprecation was accomplished, and upon the
testimony of an itinerant juggler, John Stewart, she
was arraigned before a Court of Justice. With the
help of the devil in the shape of a handsome black
dog, she had moulded some figures of clay representing
the doomed sailors, which with the prescribed
rites were thrown into the deep. We are informed
by the reporters of the proceedings at this examination,
that ‘after using this kind of gentle torture
[viz. placing the legs in a pair of stocks and laying
on gradually increasing weights of iron bars], the
said Margaret began, according to the increase of the
pain, to cry and crave for God’s cause to take off her
shin the foresaid irons, and she should declare truly
the whole matter. Which being removed, she began
at her formal denial; and being of new assayed in
torture as before, she then uttered these words:
“Take off, take off! and before God I shall show you
the whole form.” And the said irons being of new,
upon her faithful promise, removed, she then desired
my Lord of Eglinton, the said four justices, and
the said Mr. David Dickson, minister of the burgh;
Mr. George Dunbar, minister of Ayr; Mr. Mitchell
Wallace, minister of Kilmarnock; Mr. John Cunninghame,
minister of Dalry; and Hugh Kennedy, provost[212]
of Ayr, to come by themselves and to remove all
others, and she should declare truly, as she should
answer to God, the whole matter. Whose desire in
that being fulfilled, she made her confession in this
manner without any kind of demand, freely without
interrogation: God’s name by earnest prayer being
called upon for opening of her lips and easing of
her heart, that she by rendering of the truth might
glorify and magnify His holy name and disappoint
the enemy of her salvation.’

One of those involved in the voluntary confession
was Isabel Crawford, who was frightened into admitting
the offences alleged. In court, when asked
if she wished to be defended by counsel, Margaret
Barclay, whose hopes and fears were revived at seeing
her husband, answered, ‘As you please; but all I
have confessed was in agony of torture; and, before
God, all I have spoken is false and untrue.’ She was
found guilty; sentenced to be strangled at the stake;
her body to be burned to ashes. Isabel Crawford,
after a short interval, was subjected to the same sort
of examination: a new commission having been
granted for the prosecution, and ‘after the assistant-minister
of Irvine, Mr. David Dickson, had made
earnest prayers to God for opening her obdurate and
closed heart, she was subjected to the torture of iron
bars laid upon her bare shins, her feet being in the
stocks. She endured this torture with incredible[213]
firmness, since she did “admirably, without any kind
of din or exclamation, suffer above thirty stone of
iron to be laid on her legs, never shrinking thereat in
any sort, but remaining, as it were, steady.” But in
shifting the situation of the iron bars, and removing
them to another part of her shins, her constancy
gave way; she broke out into horrible cries of “Take
off! take off!” On being relieved from the torture
she made the usual confession of all that she was
charged with, and of a connection with the devil
which had subsisted for several years. Sentence was
given against her accordingly. After this had been
denounced she openly denied all her former confessions,
and died without any sign of repentance; offering
repeated interruptions to the minister in his
prayers, and absolutely refusing to pardon the executioner.’133
It might be possible to form an imperfect
estimate of how many thousands were sacrificed
in the Jacobian persecution in Scotland alone from
existing historical records, which would express, however,
but a small proportion of the actual number:
and parish registers may still attest the quantity of
fuel provided at a considerable expense, and the
number of the fires. By a moderate computation[214]
an average number of two hundred annually, making
a total of eight thousand, are reckoned to have been
burned in the last forty years of the sixteenth century.134

In England, from 1603 to 1680, seventy thousand
persons are said to have been executed; and during
the fifteen hundred years elapsed since the triumph
of the Christian religion, millions are reckoned to
have been sacrificed on the bloody altars of the
Christian Moloch. An entry in the minutes of the
proceedings in the Privy Council for 1608 reveals
that even James’s ministers began to experience
some horror of the consequences of their instructions.
And the following free testimony of one of them is
truly ‘an appalling record:’—’1608.—December 1.—The
Earl of Mar declared to the council that some
women were taken in Broughton [suburban Edinburgh]
as witches, and being put to an assize and
convicted, albeit they persevered constant in their
denial to the end, yet they were burned quick after
such a cruel manner that some of them died in[215]
despair, renouncing and blaspheming God; and others
half-burned broke out of the fire, and were cast quick
in it again till they were burned to the death.’135

Equally monstrous and degrading were the disclosures
in the torture-chambers; and many admitted
that they had had children by the devil. The circumstances
of the Sabbath, the various rites of the
compact, the forms and method of bewitching, the
manner of sexual intercourse with the demons—these
were the principal staple of the judicial examinations.

In the southern part of the island witch-hanging
or burning proceeded with only less vehemence than
in Scotland. One of the most celebrated cases in
the earlier half of the seventeenth century (upon
which Thomas Shadwell the poet laureate, who, under
the name of MacFlecknoe, is immortalised by the
satire of Dryden, founded a play) is the story of the
Lancashire Witches. This persecution raged at two
separate periods; first in 1613, when nineteen
prisoners were brought before Sir James Altham
and Sir Edward Bromley, Barons of Exchequer.
Elizabeth Southern, known as ‘Mother Demdike’ in
the poet laureate’s drama, is the leader of the
criminals. In 1634 the proceedings were renewed
wholly on the evidence of a boy who, it was after[216]wards
ascertained, had been instructed in his part
against an old woman named Mother Dickenson.
The evidence was of the feeblest sort; nor are its
monotonous details worth repetition. Out of some
forty persons implicated on both occasions, fortunately
the greater number escaped. ‘Lancashire
Witches,’ a term so hateful in its origin, has been
long transferred to celebrate the superior charms (of
another kind) of the ladies of Lancashire; and
the witches’ spells are those of natural youth and
beauty.

The social position of Sir Thomas Overbury has
made his fate notorious. An infamous plot had been
invented by the Earl of Rochester (Robert Kerr)
and the Countess of Essex to destroy a troublesome
obstacle to their contemplated marriage. The practice
of ‘hellish charms’ is only incidental; an
episode in the dark mystery. Overbury was too well
acquainted with royal secrets (whose disgusting and
unnatural kind has been probably correctly conjectured),
too important for the keeping of even a
private secretary. His ruin was determined by the
revenge of the noble lovers and sealed by the fear of
the king. At the end of six months he had been
gradually destroyed by secret poison in his prison in
the Tower (to which for an alleged offence he had
been committed) by the agency of Dr. Forman, a
famous ‘pharmaceutic,’ under the auspices of the[217]
Earl of Rochester. This Dr. Forman had been previously
employed by Lady Essex, a notorious dame
d’honneur at James’s Court, to bewitch the Earl to
an irresistible love for her, an enchantment which
required, apparently, no superhuman inducement.
A Mrs. Turner, the countess’s agent, was associated
with this skilful conjuror. They were instructed also
to bewitch Lord Essex, lately returned from abroad,
in the opposite way—to divert his love from his
wife.136