Section 2. Witchcraft

Some analogy to the wave of persecution and confessional war that swept over Europe at this time can be found in the witchcraft craze. Both were examples of those manias to which mankind is periodically subject. They run over the face of the earth like epidemics or as a great fire consumes a city. Beginning in a few isolated cases, so obscure as to be hard to trace, the mania gathers strength until it burns with its maximum fierceness and then, having exhausted itself, as it were, dies away, often quite suddenly. Such manias were the Children's Crusade and the zeal of the flagellants in the Middle Ages. Such have been the mad speculations as that of the South Sea Bubble and the panics that repeatedly visit our markets. To the same category belong the religious and superstitious delusions of the sixteenth century.

The history of these mental epidemics is easier to trace than their causes. Certainly, reason does nothing to control them. In almost every case there are a few sane men to point out, with perfect rationality, the nature of the folly to their contemporaries, but in all cases their words fall on deaf ears. They are mocked, imprisoned, sometimes put to death for their pains, whereas any fanatical fool that adds fuel to the flame of current passion is listened to, rewarded and followed.

The original stuff from which the mania was wrought is a savage survival. Hebrew and Roman law dealt with witchcraft. The Middle Ages saw the survival of magic, still called in Italy, "the old religion," and new superstitions added to it. Something of the ancient enchantment still lies upon the {652} fairylands of Europe. In the Apennines one sometimes comes upon a grove of olives or cypresses as gnarled and twisted as the tortured souls that Dante imagined them to be. Who can wander through the heaths and mountains of the Scotch Highlands, with their uncanny harmonies of silver mist and grey cloud and glint of water and bare rock and heather, and not see in the distance the Weird Sisters crooning over their horrible cauldron? In Germany the forests are magic-mad. Walking under the huge oaks of the Thuringian Forest or the Taunus, or in the pine woods of Hesse, one can see the flutter of airy garments in the chequered sunlight falling upon fern and moss; one can glimpse goblins and kobolds hiding behind the roots and rocks; one can hear the King of the Willows and the Bride of the Wind moaning and calling in the rustling of the leaves. On a summer's day the calm of pools is so complete that it seems as if, according to Luther's words, the throwing of a stone into the water would raise a tempest. But on moonlit, windy, Walpurgis Night, witches audibly ride by, hooted at by the owls, and vast spectres dance in the cloud-banks beyond the Brocken.

The witch has become a typical figure: she was usually a simple, old woman living in a lonely cottage with a black cat, gathering herbs by the light of the moon. But she was not always an ancient beldam; some witches were known as the purest and fairest maidens of the village; some were ladies in high station; some were men. A ground for suspicion was sometimes furnished by the fact that certain charletans playing upon the credulity of the ignorant, professed to be able by sorcery to find money, "to provoke persons to love," or to consume the body and goods of a client's enemy. Black magic was occasionally resorted to to get rid {653} of personal or political enemies. More often a wise woman would be sought for her skill in herbs and her very success in making cures would sometimes be her undoing.

If the witch was a domestic article in Europe, the devil was an imported luxury from Asia. Like Aeneas and many another foreign conqueror, when he came to rule the land he married its princess--in this case Hulda the pristine goddess of love and beauty--and adopted many of the native customs. It is difficult for us to imagine what a personage the devil was in the age of the Reformation. Like all geniuses he had a large capacity for work and paid great attention to detail. Frequently he took the form of a cat or a black dog with horns to frighten children by "skipping to and fro and sitting upon the top of a nettle"; again he would obligingly hold a review of evil spirits for the satisfaction of Benvenuto Cellini's curiosity. He was at the bottom of all the earthquakes, pestilences, famines and wars of the century, and also, if we may trust their mutual recriminations, he was the special patron of the pope on the one hand and of Calvin on the other. Luther often talked with him, though in doing so the sweat poured from his brow and his heart almost stopped beating. Luther admitted that the devil always got the best of an argument and could only be banished by some unprintably nasty epithets hurled at his head. Satan and his satellites often took the form of men or women and under the name of incubi and succubi had sexual intercourse with mortals. One of the most abominable features of the witch craze was that during its height hundreds of children of four or five years old confessed to being the devil's paramours.

So great was the power of Satan that, in the common belief, many persons bartered their souls to him {654} in return for supernatural gifts in this life. To compensate them for the loss of their salvation, these persons, the witches, were enabled to do acts of petty spite to their neighbors, turning milk sour, blighting crops, causing sickness to man and animals, making children cry themselves to death before baptism, rendering marriages barren, procuring abortion, and giving charms to blind a husband to his wife's adultery, or philters to compel love.

On certain nights the witches and devils met for the celebration of blasphemous and obscene rites in an assembly known as the Witches' Sabbath. To enable themselves to ride to the meeting-place on broomsticks, the witches procured a communion wafer, applied a toad to it, burned it, mingled its ashes with the blood of an infant, the powdered bones of a hanged man and certain herbs. The meeting then indulged in a parody of the mass, for, so the grave doctors taught, as Christ had his sacraments the devil had his "unsacraments" or "execrements." His Satanic Majesty took the form of a goat, dog, cat or ape and received the homage of his subjects in a loathsome ceremony. After a banquet promiscuous intercourse of devils and witches followed.

All this superstition smouldered along in the embers of folk tales for centuries until it was blown into a devastating blaze by the breath of theologians who started to try to blow it out. The first puff was given by Innocence VIII in his bull Summis desiderantes. [Sidenote: December 5, 1484] The Holy Father having learned with sorrow that many persons in Germany had had intercourse with demons and had by incantations hindered the birth of children and blasted the fruits of the earth, gave authority to Henry Institoris and James Sprenger to correct, incarcerate, punish and fine such persons, calling in, if need be, the aid of the secular arm. These {655} gentlemen acquitted themselves with unsurpassed zeal. Not content with trying and punishing people brought before them, they put forth The Witches' Hammer, [Sidenote: Malleus Maleficarum, 1487] called by Lea the most portentous monument of superstition ever produced. In the next two centuries it was printed twenty-nine times. The University of Cologne at once decided that to doubt the reality of witchcraft was a crime. The Spanish Inquisition, on the other hand, having all it could do with Jews and heretics, treated witchcraft as a diabolical delusion.

Though most men, including those whom we consider the choice and master-spirits of the age, Erasmus and More, firmly believed in the objective reality of witchcraft, they were not obsessed by the subject, as were their immediate posterity. Two causes may be found for the intensification of the fanaticism. The first was the use of torture by the Inquisition. [Sidenote: Torture] The crime was of such a nature that it could hardly be proved save by confession, and this, in general, could be extracted only by the infliction of pain. It is instructive to note that in England where the spirit of the law was averse to torture, no progress in witch-hunting took place until a substitute for the rack had been found, first in pricking the body of the witch with pins to find the anaesthetic spot supposed to mark her, and secondly in depriving her of sleep.

A second patent cause of the mania was the zeal and the bibliolatry of Protestantism. The religious debate heated the spiritual atmosphere and turned men's thoughts to the world of spirits. Such texts, continually harped upon, as that on the witch of Endor, the injunction, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," and the demoniacs of the New Testament, weighed heavily upon the shepherds of the people and upon their flocks. Of the reality of witchcraft Luther harbored not a doubt. The first use he made of the ban was to {656} excommunicate reputed witches. Seeing an idiotic child, whom he regarded as a changeling, he recommended the authorities to drown it, as a body without a soul. Repeatedly, both in private talk and in public sermons, he recommended that witches should be put to death without mercy and without regard to legal niceties. As a matter of fact, four witches were burned at Wittenberg on June 29, 1540.

The other Protestants hastened to follow the bad example of their master. In Geneva, under Calvin, thirty-four women were burned or quartered for the crime in the year 1545. A sermon of Bishop Jewel in 1562 was perhaps the occasion of a new English law against witchcraft. Richard Baxter wrote on the Certainty of a World of Spirits. At a much later time the bad record of the Mathers is well known, as also John Wesley's remark that giving up witchcraft meant giving up the Bible.

After the mania reached its height in the closing years of the century, anything, however trivial, would arouse suspicion. A cow would go dry, or a colt break its leg, or there would be a drought, or a storm, or a murrain on the cattle or a mildew on the crops. Or else a physician, baffled by some disease that did not yield to his treatment of bleeding and to his doses of garlic and horses' dung, would suggest that witchcraft was the reason for his failure. In fact, if any contrariety met the path of the ordinary man or woman, he or she immediately thought of the black art, and considered the most likely person for denunciation. This would naturally be the nearest old woman, especially if she had a tang to her tongue and had muttered "Bad luck to you!" on some previous occasion. She would then be hauled before the court, promised liberty if she confessed, stripped and examined for some mark of Satan or to be sure that she was not hiding a charm {657} about her person. Torture in some form was then applied, and a ghastly list it was, pricking with needles under nails, crushing of bones until the marrow spurted out, wrenching of the head with knotted cords, toasting the feet before a fire, suspending the victim by the hands tied behind the back and letting her drop until the shoulders were disjointed. The horrible work would be kept up until the poor woman either died under the torture, or confessed, when she was sentenced without mercy, usually to be burned, sometimes to lesser punishments.

When the madness was at its height, hardly anyone, once accused, escaped. John Bodin, a man otherwise enlightened and learned, earned himself the not unjust name of "Satan's attorney-general" by urging that strict proof could not be demanded by the very nature of these cases and that no suspected person should ever be released unless the malice of her accusers was plainer than day. Moreover, each trial bred others, for each witch denounced accomplices until almost the whole population of certain districts was suspected. So frequently did they accuse their judges or their sovereign of having assisted at the witches' sabbath, that this came to be discounted as a regular trick of the devil.

Persecution raged in some places, chiefly in Germany, like a visitation of pestilence or war. Those who tried to stop it fell victims to their own courage, and, unless they recanted, languished for years in prison, or were executed as possessed by devils themselves. At Treves the persecution was encouraged by the cupidity of the magistrates who profited by confiscation of the property of those sentenced. At Bonn schoolboys of nine or ten, fair young maidens, many priests and scores of good women were done to death.

No figures have been compiled for the total number {658} of victims of this insanity. In England, under Elizabeth, before the craze had more than well started on its career, 125 persons are known to have been tried for witchcraft and 47 are known to have been executed for the crime. In Venice the Inquisition punished 199 persons for sorcery during the sixteenth century. In the year 1510, 140 witches were burned at Brescia, in 1514, 300 at Como. In a single year the bishop of Geneva burned 500 witches, the bishop of Bamberg 600, the bishop of Wuerzburg 900. About 800 were condemned to death in a single batch by the Senate of Savoy. In the year 1586 the archbishop of Treves burned 118 women and two men for this imaginary crime. Even these figures give but an imperfect notion of the extent of the midsummer madness. The number of victims must be reckoned by the tens of thousands.

Throughout the century there were not wanting some signs of a healthy skepticism. When, during an epidemic of St. Vitus's dance at Strassburg, [Sidenote: 1588] the citizens proposed a pilgrimage to stop it, the episcopal vicar replied that as it was a natural disease natural remedies should be used. Just as witches were becoming common in England, Gosson wrote in his School of Abuse: [Sidenote: 1578] "Do not imitate those foolish patients, who, having sought all means of recovery and are never the nearer, run into witchcraft." Leonardo da Vinci called belief in necromancy the most foolish of all human delusions.

As it was dangerous to oppose the popular mood at its height, the more honor must go to the few who wrote ex professo against it. The first of these, of any note, was the Protestant physician John Weyer. [Sidenote: Weyer] In his book De praestigiis daemonum [Sidenote: 1563] he sought very cautiously to show that the poor "old, feeble-minded, {659} stay-at-home women" sentenced for witchcraft were simply the victims of their own and other people's delusions. Satan has no commerce with them save to injure their minds and corrupt their imaginations. Quite different, he thought, were those infamous magicians who really used spells, charms, potions and the like, though even here Weyer did not admit that their effects were due to supernatural agency. This mild and cautious attempt to defend the innocent was placed on the Index and elicited the opinion from John Bodin that the author was a true servant of Satan.

A far more thorough and brilliant attack on the superstition was Reginald Scott's Discovery of Witchcraft, wherein the lewd dealings of Witches and Witchmongers is notably defected . . . whereunto is added a realise upon the Nature and Substance of Spirits and Devils. [Sidenote: 1584] Scott had read 212 Latin authors and 23 English, on his subject, and he was under considerable obligation to some of them, notably Weyer. But he endeavored to make first-hand observations, attended witch trials and traced gossip to its source. He showed, none better, the utter flimsiness and absurdity of the charges on which poor old women were done to death. He explained the performance of the witch of Endor as ventriloquism. Trying to prove that magic was rejected by reason and religion alike, he pointed out that all the phenomena might most easily be explained by wilful imposture or by illusion due to mental disturbance. As his purpose was the humanitarian one of staying the cruel persecution, with calculated partisanship he tried to lay the blame for it on the Catholic church. As the very existence of magic could not be disproved completely by empirical reasons he attacked it on a priori grounds, alleging that spirits and bodies are in two categories, unable to act directly upon each {660} other. Brilliant and convincing as the work was, it produced no corresponding effect. It was burned publicly by order of James I.

Montaigne, who was never roused to anger by anything, had the supreme art of rebutting others' opinions without seeming to do so. It was doubtless Bodin's abominable Demonology that called forth his celebrated essay on witchcraft, in which that subject is treated in the most modern spirit. The old presumption in favor of the miraculous has fallen completely from him; his cool, quizzical regard was too much for Satan, who, with all his knowledge of the world, is easily embarrassed, to endure. The delusion of witchcraft might be compared to a noxious bacillus. Scott tried to kill it by heat; he held it up to a fire of indignation, and fairly boiled it in his scorching flame of reason. Montaigne tried the opposite treatment: refrigeration. He attacked nothing; he only asked, with an icy smile, why anything should be believed. Certainly, as long as the mental passions could be kept at his own low temperature, there was no danger that the milk of human kindness should turn sour, no matter what vicious culture of germs it originally held. He begins by saying that he had seen various miracles in his own day, but, one reads between the lines, he doesn't believe any of them. One error, he says, begets another, and everything is exaggerated in the hope of making converts to the talker's opinion. One miracle bruited all over France turned out to be a prank of young people counterfeiting ghosts. When one hears a marvel, he should always say, "perhaps." Better be apprentices at sixty then doctors at ten. Now witches, he continues, are the subject of the wildest and most foolish accusations. Bodin had proposed that they should be killed on mere suspicion, but Montaigne observes, "To kill human beings there is required a bright-shining {661} and clear light." And what do the stories amount to?

How much more natural and more likely do I find it that two men should lie than that one in twelve hours should pass from east to west? How much more natural that our understanding may by the volubility of our loose-capring mind be transported from his place, than that one of us should by a strange spirit in flesh and bone be carried upon a broom through the tunnel of a chimney? . . . I deem it a matter pardonable not to believe a wonder, at least so far forth as one may explain away or break down the truth of the report in some way not miraculous. . . . Some years past I traveled through the country of a sovereign prince, who, in favor of me and to abate my incredulity, did me the grace in his own presence and in a particular place to make me see ten or twelve prisoners of that kind, and amongst others an old beldam witch, a true and perfect sorceress, both by her ugliness and deformity, and such a one as long before was most famous in that profession. I saw both proofs, witnesses, voluntary confessions, and some insensible marks about this miserable old woman; I enquired and talked with her a long time, with the greatest heed and attention I could, and I am not easily carried away by preconceived opinion. In the end and in my conscience I should rather have appointed them hellebore than hemlock. It was rather a disease than a crime.

Montaigne goes on to argue that even when we cannot get an explanation--and any explanation is more probable than magic--it is safe to disbelieve: "Fear sometimes representeth strange apparitions to the vulgar sort, as ghosts . . . larves, hobgoblins, Robbin-good-fellows and such other bugbears and chimaeras." For Montaigne the evil spell upon the mind of the race had been broken; alas! that it took so long for other men to throw it off!

Erikoenig.