Witchcraft. The philosophy underlying the ancient belief in the reality of witchcraft has been already set forth under the heads of DEMONOLOGY, DIVINATION, MAGIC, &c.; here it remains only to discuss the history of this, the most lamentable of human superstitions, as modified by Christianity, the causes of its extraordinary prevalence in the 14th, 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, and of its gradual decay before the growing light of rationalism and the modern secularisation of the human intellect. A deeply rooted popular superstition adapts itself successively to every form of religious faith, and we soon find all the sorcery of the ancient heathen world imbedded in Christianity itself, and turned to new account in the popular conception of the function of the devil. The fundamental cause of belief in magical processes is the elemental confusion made by the primitive mind between
Copyright 1892 in U.S.
by J. B. Lippincott
Company. subjective and objective relations, between the post hoc and the propter hoc, the scanty knowledge of natural causes being filled up with hypothetical causes of a metaphysical and supernatural character. Magic depends on occult faculties and devices within the control of the magician, who thus becomes gradually differentiated from the priest, as the possessor of the illegitimate rather than the legitimate means of communication with the unseen. The most rudimentary religions soon come to develop an ethical side; magic, on the other hand, stands apart from the ordinary adoration of spiritual powers, employing theurgy, thaumaturgy, spells, incantations, occult devices, rather than prayer, inspiration, oracles, miracles, and omens. Worship is essentially rational, the natural effect of an assumed theory of the unseen and spiritual, capable of being worked out into a theology; sorcery, on the other hand, is essentially supernatural and supra-rational, affording no adequate basis for a systematised theory. At the same time some of its observed phenomena may form a foundation out of which a special pseudo-science may be built up, as in the theory of augury, astrology, oneiromancy, and divination; but these harmonise into no broad synthesis of a spiritual philosophy, and cannot form foundations for a religion. Sorcery then is ever mysterious, occult, and dreadful, and under its sway man continues to be the sport of the gloomy intellectual and spiritual shadows his imagination ever generates out of the mists of the unknown, imperfect analogy—the foundation of all false philosophy—perverting by a false twist at the outset even man's intellectual faculties, and completing the process by leaving his mind a prey to the wildest vagaries of imagination. It may also be the case that the complex nature of man ever craves for an irrational and supra-sensible element—a material support—around which to cling, and that this remains a necessity to the most highly developed religious sense as well as the most rudimentary. To make the image of a thing is to reproduce it, and it is impossible to distinguish sharply between the visible representation of an object and its invisible and spiritual realisation. To burn an unpopular politician in effigy, to cherish a lock of hair of one we love, to reverence a Madonna and Child in our churches is not a whit more rational, or less irrational rather, than to torture an enemy by slowly burning his wax image or to raise a storm at sea by whipping a bucket of water with a switch. For to human nature in its ordinary conditions the symbol is necessary to any adequate or lasting realisation of the thing symbolised, and when once imperfect analogies and the confounding of the subjective and the objective are admitted, any perversity of imagination in the assumption of supra-sensible relations between things is intelligible enough. The symbolical is apt to be confused with the magical infliction of injury upon an enemy in such Scripture instances as the arrows shot thrice by King Joash on the ground in order to smite the Syrians (2 Kings, xiii. 15-18), and in the horns made by Zedekiah with which to push Syria (2 Chron. xviii. 10); while possibly a parallel may be drawn between the practice of making land barren with enchanted stones and one part of the ruin appointed for Moab (2 Kings, ii. 19-25).
We find then a belief in the possibility of sorcery everywhere in the ancient world—among the Chaldeans and the unimaginative Romans alike—and in Hebrew history the contest between Moses and the Hakhāmin, or wise men of Egypt, suggests that wonders could be wrought by the Elohim Acherim or 'other gods.' The traditional contest between St Peter and Simon Magus in the earliest Christian times shows the same belief; and we find the Fathers all unanimous in this at least, that the fact of sorcery is supported by the strongest scriptural and ecclesiastical authority. The notion of a supreme embodiment of evil, at the head of the whole hierarchy of hell, from the beginning was embodied in Christian belief, and thus the whole human world came naturally to be regarded as ringed round with a countless host of malignant spirits whose work was none other than to thwart the divine purposes by leading men into the rebellion of sin. The ministry of Satan in the trial of Job, the werewolf-like transformation of Nebuchadnezzar, the necromancy of the Witch of Endor raising up the majestic shade of Samuel to pronounce the doom of Saul, the New Testament stories of demoniacal possession, and of the dispossessed devils entering into the Gadarene swine and rushing down a steep place with them into the sea—all these, superinduced upon the elemental belief in sorcery, went to form the Christian conception of witchcraft. Even a Scripture phrase like the 'prince of the power of the air' found only too literal an interpretation in the notion of the transportation of witches through the air to the unholy Sabbath. And of atmospheric phenomena, by a natural enough specialisation of functions, rain was usually left to God, rain with hail to his rival the devil. To obtain control over supernatural powers and lift the veil of the future has from the beginning been a dream dear to mankind, and everywhere has been believed to fall within the power of specially gifted men and women, often, as in the cases of the evil eye and second-sight, without any special desire for so peculiar a privilege. Certain natural objects and certain rites and observances had in themselves a mysterious power of producing certain effects, and the art of the sorcerer consisted in the knowledge of these mysterious powers and in the skill to combine and direct them to special purposes. Rhythical incantations were effective in curing wounds and sickness, many to this day in Presbyterian Scotland preserving traces of Roman Catholic ritual; and magical properties adhered to enchanted stones, wands like the rod of Moses and the caduceus of Mercury, engraved gems, amulets, horseshoes, moles' feet, mystic numbers, especially Seven (q.v.), animals as the toad and corbie, plants as the elder, thorn, hazel, and rowan—the first and last especially as antidotes to sorcery. To the rhymes of healing there were corresponding maledictions, 'devilish prayers;' and baneful powders were made from the dismembered bodies of the dead or from herbs with naturally baneful properties. The witches' pot of Olaus Magnus is reproduced in the witches' caldron on the blasted heath in Macbeth, and indeed the brewing of poisonous hell-broth and dangerous love-philtres is a characteristic occupation of witches everywhere, and explains the old confusion between poisoning and witchcraft from the Latin veneficium.
The higher kind of European magic in the middle ages was mixed up with what physical science there then was; and the most noted men of the time, like Roger Bacon and Cornelius Agrippa, were addicted to the pursuit, or were at least reputed to be so. So far from deriving his power from the kingdom of darkness, the scientific magician by the mere force of his art could compel the occasional services of the arch-fiend himself, and make the inferior demons the involuntary slaves of his will. But this allowable magic occupied but a small place compared with the illegitimate prostitution of such powers to the ends of evil, and thus sorcery came naturally to mean the unholy art of employing the artillery of hell against defenceless man—the Black Art proper. Satan moreover required human agents for his damnable purposes, and thus the whole life of man became a mere theatre wherein struggled countless hordes of devils, which to specially gifted eyes might sometimes be seen like a thick dust falling to the ground, or like motes in a sunbeam. Wier gives 72 princes and 7,405,925 inferior fiends, but as the astute Pierre de l'Ancre notes so precise a number could only have been communicated by Satan himself. The old heathen gods themselves came to be looked upon as devils with specialised functions—a theory we find imbedded in the demonology even of the Paradise Lost. St Augustine's treatise, De Divinatione Daemonum, did much to formulate the orthodox opinion of Western Christianity on the subject, and in course of time the effects apparently produced by the intervention of the sorcerer were universally ascribed to the operations of the wicked angels who delighted to burlesque the divine methods and cause false dreams, visions, and prophetic inspirations, resembling in everything save their origin and their end those so often vouchsafed to the saints. Special personal compacts with the devil naturally came to be believed in, the individual, having the freedom of determining whether his own soul should be ultimately saved or lost, being able by a kind of post-obit bargain to purchase power and sensual gratification in this present world at the price of eternal damnation in the next. The literature of sorcery is full of such stories, from the 6th-century Theophilus (q.v.), saved through the special intervention of the Virgin, down to the awful fate of Dr Faustus which supplied a motive to two of the greatest modern masters of tragic art.
Apart from obsession, to which all men were liable, the actual fact of the possession of individuals, supported on such unexceptionable Scripture authority, was of course indisputable, and we find the power of casting out devils granted by Christ to his apostles continued in the church as a special grace. Pope Cornelius in the 3d century speaks of the Exorcists as a special order of the clergy, and the fourth Council of Carthage (396) prescribes a form for their ordination the same in substance as that given in the Roman Pontifical and used at the present day. There were six general symptoms of possession: barbarous and discordant screams, a fierce and horrid visage, numbness of the limbs, restlessness, unnatural strength, personal suffering—feeling the demons creeping like ants between the flesh and the skin, or like the pricking of needles. Speaking an untaught language was also held an infallible proof. The most effectual means of expulsion were holy water, consecrated wax, the clangor campanarum, and fumigation, which in Tobit is effectual in driving an obstinate Incubus from Ecbatana to Egypt. The exorcist first endeavours to fix the demon in the tongue, and during the process he applies rue or relics to the demoniac's nose, the while provoking the demon to come out by opprobrious epithets. Some go forth as bees or ants, with a loud noise and hissing, others are imprisoned in a ring or phial, or escape in the body of some animal. It is often necessary to hold down the demoniac under water lest the fiend take refuge in his hair.
But, as regards sorcery, witchcraft, and compacts with the devil generally, many individual theologians and a whole series of provincial councils had pronounced such beliefs to be heathenish, sinful, and heretical, and even in Gratian's Decretal there was a canon requiring the clergy to teach the people that witchcraft was a delusion, and as such incompatible with Christian faith. And indeed it was not till after the establishment of the Inquisition in the beginning of the 13th century that witchcraft came fully to be recognised as falling within the province of the church—regarded simply as a correlative with heresy, both the work of the agencies of hell employed to pervert the faithful from the truth, and therefore to be punished with torture and the stake. The wide-spread social misery of the 11th and 12th centuries, the alarming spread of Catharist and Waldensian heresies, the terror of the Black Death which devastated the whole of western Europe in the 14th century, and its startling concomitants, the Flagellant and Dancing manias, had all contributed naturally to prepare men's minds for a conviction of the reality of Satanic agencies operating with fresh virulence in the world, and terror induced persecution, while in its turn persecution propagated terror. The general theories on the subject were early formulated by the Inquisitors, to whose leading questions alone may be attributed the substantial identity in the confessions made by thousands of poor distracted creatures racked by the agonies of torture, and the awful terrors of the stake and an eternity of hell. The stern injunction in the Mosaic law (Exodus, xxii. 18) was claimed as proof of the fact of witchcraft, and the obscure passage 'because of the angels' (1 Cor. xi. 10), together with that in Gen. vi. 2, was taken to establish the reality of the Incubus, a form of demon addicted to unclean commerce with women. Such inversions of nature as monachism and clerical celibacy generated all manner of notions as to the inherent pravity of women, in whom a morbid monkish imagination saw the favourite agents of the devil. And such a phantasy as Gautier's Morte Amoureuse may well have visited the imagination of many a virtuous monk as the revenge of nature against the struggle to attain a fictitious virtue. Demoniality or carnal connection with demons was a besetting snare to mediæval nuns, and Sprenger ascribes to nothing else the great 15th-century development of witchcraft. Aquinas is very strong upon the point; and were not the Huus known to be sprung from such connections?
Incubi and Succubi infested nuns and monks in turn, and sometimes had the devilish malice to assume the form of a holy man or woman and allow themselves to be caught in a compromising situation. To gratify lust, to obtain power to forecast the future, to gain wealth, to gratify enmity were the chief ends of all witchcraft, and the last embraced every form of evil which wicked ingenuity could devise. None of the devices of witchcraft was more persistent or distressing than the magic 'ligatures' which prevented the consummation of marriage. A belief in the reality of this was maintained by many provincial councils or synods and hundreds of bishops, and we are told how the father of Guibert de Nogent suffered the impediment for seven years, during which his wife magnanimously refused to avail herself of this pretext for a divorce. Nor against the dread of witchcraft was there any remedy; exorcism and the invocation of saints could avail only in demoniacal possession—for witchcraft the only cure was to get seerance from the devil through the intercession of other witches. The difficulty of the contrast between the illimitable power for evil of the witch and her helpless inability to save herself was explained by the fact that through the goodness of God the power of the witch left her as soon as she was seized by the officers of justice. Moreover, that power could be broken by drawing her blood 'above the breath,' or by employing in precaution the vervain, the mountain-ash, and the like, or the horseshoe over one's doorway. Her own state of wretchedness while enjoying immense power for evil over others was due to the radical faithlessness of the devil. The details of the witches' Sabbath varied very little throughout Europe, being for the most part a mere parody of the rites of divine service, eked out with filthy and unmeaning ceremonies. Music and dancing with lascivious orgies were its most characteristic features, and Sinclair (Satan's Invisible World Discovered, 1685) assures us that the devil often acted as piper, and taught many of those bawdy songs and their tunes unhappily so popular. Torture induced confessions which when made had to be adhered to, for Sprenger and most of the other inquisitors were strongly against pardon being granted even to a repentant witch. One of the especial tasks of the witch was the killing of unbaptised children, and many acted as midwives for no other purpose. The power of enduring torture was a special grace granted them by the devil, and other characteristic signs were crossing the legs, intertwining the fingers, women throwing their hair loose, walking backwards or contrary to the course of the sun (Scot. widershins), an inability to shed tears or repeat the Lord's Prayer, and especially the impression upon some part of the body of a secret mark imprinted by the devil at the Sabbath, when witches renounced their baptism and professed formally their submission. To discover this the prisoner was often shaved from head to foot, and subjected to horrible indecencies in the examination. This part was supposed to be insensible to pain, and one of the chief devices of the infamous 17th-century English witch-finder, Matthew Hopkins, was to prick the body of his victim all over until he found the spot. If his search was fruitless, he placed the witch cross-legged on a table in the middle of a closed room, with a hole in the door for the imps to enter by. In this manner she was kept for a day or even two days without sleep or food. Next she was walked up and down till her feet were blistered. By this time confessions enough were mostly forthcoming; but if all this had failed she was flung into a pond with thumbs and toes tied together cross-wise, when if a witch it was impossible for her to sink. The value of the watery ordeal depended upon the fact that Satan, being very light, supported those that were his own. Their extraordinary levity was again seen when they were weighed in the scales against the Bible. But these English tortures were gentleness itself compared with the infamies habitual to the Inquisition, and not unknown to Scottish Presbyterianism. And even in Scotland, though witches were occasionally burned quick, they were usually strangled before the fire reached them. They are supposed to have been fastened to the stake with those witch-bridles examples of which exist.
As we have seen, it was not till towards the close of the 13th century that the Inquisition succeeded in including sorcery within its jurisdiction. The university of Paris gave all the weight of its learning in 1398 to the reality of the fact, and already in 1330 Pope John XXII. had given a powerful impetus to the persecution; but it was not till 1484, when Innocent VIII. issued his infamous bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, that the reign of terror really began. The earliest detailed account of witchcraft is found in Nider's Formicarius (1337), in which we can trace the development out of ordinary sorcery. The Flagellum Hæreticorum Fascinariorum of the Inquisitor Nicholas Jaquerius (1458) already shows the Holy Office realising the need of a regular procedure, and this was at last given with much fullness in the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (1489), the work of the sincere fanatic Sprenger and his coadjutor, Krämer (Institor), who, armed with Pope Innocent's bull, traversed Germany, leaving behind them a track of blood and fire. The infection spread far and wide, and witches were no longer buried in twos and threes, but in scores and hundreds. In the small bishopric of Bamberg within three months 600 perished; in Würzburg, which is scarcely larger, 900; in Geneva, 500 (1515); in the district of Como, Bart. de Spina (De Strigibus) says over a hundred were burned every year; at Toulouse 400 perished together, and 50 at Douay in a single year; Nicholas Remigius, a judge of Lorraine, boasts in 1597 that he had condemned 900 in fifteen years; the Archbishop of Trèves avenged the coldness of the spring of 1586 upon 118 women and 2 men burned together. And his promptitude was well advised, for some of his victims on the way to their place of doom declared that with three more days they would have brought cold so intense as to destroy every green thing, and plunge the whole country into starvation. The Inquisition did its work effectively, for Parano boasts that by 1404, within a century and a half of its foundation, it had burned at least 30,000 witches who, if left unchecked, could easily have brought the whole world to destruction. The charge of sorcery had been a prominent feature in the infamous trials of the Templars in France; the Maid of Orleans had been burned on this charge at Ronen in 1431 at the instance of the English, but by sentence of a French bishop; and these cases, with that of the Vandois, or witches of Arras, of whom 34 were arrested and 12 burned (1460), were the most conspicuous examples of such processes before the identification between sorcery and heresy was complete, and the jurisdiction passed finally into the control of the Inquisition. The progress of the witchcraft epidemic had indeed not been rapid, and all three cases had aroused widespread public incredulity, while Joan's character was solemnly rehabilitated in 1456; and the Parlement finally in 1491 upset the Arras processes and sentences as unjust and excessive, ordered reparation to be made even to the dead in the shape of masses for their souls, and decreed that the cruel and unusual tortures employed should be prohibited for the future in all secular and ecclesiastical tribunals. Perhaps in consequence of all this the Inquisition made its way much slower in France than in Germany and Italy. But the most severe rebuff it experienced was from the republic of Venice, which had jealously preserved the secular jurisdiction over sorcery. Brescia had become specially infested by witches, and in 1510 as many as 70 men and 70 women were burned there; in 1514, 300 at Como; while it was currently reported that the Sabbath on the plain of Tonale near Brescia was attended by 25,000; and finally in 1518 the senate was informed that the inquisitor had burned 70 witches of the Valcamonica, that he had as many more in his prisons, and that those suspected or accused amounted to about 5000, or one-fourth of the population of the valleys. The Signoria at once interposed its veto, and even the fiery bull of Leo X., Honestis (1521), could not force its outraged sense into submission.
The Reformation of the 16th century made no change in the popular view of witchcraft, which, indeed, rather rose to a height during the 17th century. Theologians of all confessions believed in the possibility and reality of compacts with the devil as strongly as they believed in the dogma of the personality of the devil itself. Erasmus and Luther were equally strong believers in witchcraft, and the latter realised the active interference of the devil as few men have done in any age. Catholic and Protestant theologians alike defended the prosecutions; on the one side, Jean Bodin, Peter Binsfeld, and the Jesuit Martin Delrio; on the other, the Heidelberg physician Thomas Erastus, King James I. of England, and the famous criminal lawyer Carpzov of Leipzig. But in spite of this array of learning, and the vast preponderance alike of clerical and lay opinion, there had not been wanting a succession of honest doubt, whether from natural scepticism or from humanity. Johann Wier (q.v.), a physician, by his famous work, De Præstigiis Daemonum (1564), and its complements, De Lamiis and Pseudo-monarchia Daemonum (appended as a sixth chapter to the 1577 edition), has left a name imperishable among the benefactors of humanity. His scepticism was not too strong, but he went as far as he durst, and evidently meant to imply more than he dared say. The reply of the famous political philosopher, Jean Bodin, De Magorum Daemonomania (1579), is mainly an indignant and completely credulous appeal to authority—to universal law, the Scriptures, and the Fathers. The great work of the enlightened Englishman, Reginald Scot, The Discovërie of Witchcraft, followed in 1584, and stands alone, more than a century before its time, as a full and outspoken appeal to reason and to humanity against a puerile and cruel superstition. Montaigne in his essay 'Of Cripples' (1588), with regard to this question, strikes the fundamental note of modern rationalism, and adds with exquisite irony, 'after all, it is setting a high value on our conjectures to roast a man alive on account of them.'
Yet it was only very gradually that the superstition gave way. Nicholaus Remigius published his Dæmonolatria in 1595, the Jesuit Martin Delrio his erudite and ponderous Disquisitiones Magicæ in 1599. But two Jesuits may also be counted among the earliest enemies of the superstition, Adam Tanner (1572-1632) and Friedrich Spee, whose Cautio Criminalis, seu de Processibus contra Sagas (1631), was an appeal for more circumspection in the trials, the author having been present at many of these in the dioceses of Würzburg and Bamberg, and having come to the conclusion that many of the victims were entirely innocent. He advances no less than fifty-two doubts, and his conclusion is that there is so much difficulty in such cases that processes should be suspended. He dared not put his name to his work, and could print it only in a Protestant town, Kinteln. The Dutch Protestant Balthasar Bekker, in his curious work De Betoverde Wereld (1691-93), expresses openly a strong disbelief in sorcery, magic, possession by the devil, and even the existence of the devil himself. He was deposed and excommunicated for his temerity. The great Halle jurist, Christian Thomasius, published in 1701 a masterly tract, Theses de Crimine Magicæ, which did much to educate the public opinion of Germany. But the devil did not give way before the philosophers without a struggle. There was a great outburst of lycanthropy in the later half of the 16th century in southern France, the most interesting trial being that of Gilles Garnier at Dôle in 1573. The provincial Parlements of Paris, Rouen, Rheims, and Bordeaux enacted stringent decrees against all forms of witchcraft, and the cases of some of their victims give reason to suspect the real guilt of toxological practices, thus reviving the full signification of the ancient veneficus. The Parlement of Bordeaux appointed a commission to inquire into the causes of the prevalence of witchcraft in the Basque provinces, and these remain to the curious in the work of Pierre de l'Ancre, one of the most interesting of its class, Tableau de l'Inconstance des Mauvais Anges et Démons (1612). He found the whole population of the Labourd infected with witchcraft—the men, the women, and even the priests and children, as many as 2000 of the last alone flocking nightly to the Sabbath. He sees a singular affinity between tobacco and sorcery, and finds a special significance in the Basque fondness for the apple, the fruit of transgression; but the real reason why women are naturally so much more prone to sorcery than men he thinks most probably a secret wrapped up in the inscrutable wisdom of God. Another phase of witchcraft rife in France during the 17th century was demoniacal possession, and this reached its height in the strange convulsions of the Ursuline nuns of Sainte-Baume near Aix, and the abominable immoralities of their corrupter Louis Gauffridi, burned alive deservedly in 1611; in the famous case of Urban Grandier (burned 1634) and the nuns of Loudun in Poitou; and in the ecstatic trances of Madeleine Bavent and her guilty relations with her abandoned confessor at the convent of Louviers (1635-47). These unedifying histories of lust and cruelty may be read in the glowing pages of Michelet, La Sorcière (2d ed. 1862). In the same century the fires of persecution raged hotly in Bamberg and Würzburg, as many as 900 trials having taken place in the reign of the prince-bishop John George II., in the two courts of Bamberg and Zeil between 1625 and 1630, and 600 are supposed to have been burned, so little care being taken that the accused are not enumerated by name, but merely cited as No. 1, 2, 3, and so on. Under Bishop Philipp Adolf, who came to the see of Würzburg in 1623, a great confederacy of sorcerers was quickly discovered, and during two or three years hundreds of persons of all ages and conditions, children of ten and twelve years old, vicars, canons, students, together with 'Göbel's child, the most beautiful girl in Würzburg,' were hurried to the stake. The ghastly catalogue of these victims in twenty-nine burnings is printed in Hauber's Bibliotheca Magica, and reprinted in Thomas Wright's excellent Narratives of Sorcery and Magic (2 vols. 1851). A great epidemic of witchcraft broke out in the village of Mohra in Sweden in 1669, and a commission of clergy and laymen appointed by the king examined as many as 300 children, and found a singular unanimity in the confession of particulars. Seventy persons were condemned to death, 15 being children, while 36 more between nine and sixteen were forced 'to run the gantlet,' and 20 more were whipped every Sunday for a year. See the account by Anthony Horneck, D.D., appended to Glanvill's Collection of Relations.
In 1672 we find Colbert directing the magistrates in France to receive no accusations of sorcery and commuting sentences of death into banishment, an indulgence against which the Parlement of Rouen protested as dishonouring to God and Christian tradition. The most remarkable trial for sorcery at this period was that of the Marshal of Luxembourg in 1681, and we find in the last two decades of the century only seven sorcerers burned in France. Yet the Parlement of Bordeaux burned a man as a nouveau d'aiguillettes in 1718; and in spite of all the boasted illumination of the 18th century an old nun was burned as a witch at Würzburg in 1749. In the year 1754 a girl of thirteen, and in 1756 another of fourteen, were put to death at Landshut on suspicion of witchcraft. A servant-girl at Glarus in German Switzerland in 1782 was the latest judicial victim in Europe—the last of 300,000 women who are computed to have perished since the promulgation of the bull of Innocent VIII. Within the range of Catholicism, so late as 20th August 1877, five witches were burned alive by the Alcalde Ignacio Castello of San Jacobo in Mexico, 'with consent of the whole population.'
England was long preserved from the infection of regular persecutions for witchcraft, the first formal enactment declaring it a felony dating only from 1541. Besides, as we have seen in the Templar trials, torture was naturally repellent to the national spirit, and without systematic torture and leading questions such prosecutions could not thrive. At the same time there had been ever since the Conquest occasional trials for sorcery, and victims had been burned by the king's writ De Hæretico comburendo, after condemnation in the ecclesiastical courts. The Act of 1541 was supplemented by another under Elizabeth in 1562, and in the first year of James I. was passed the law which continued in force for over a hundred years. Its most important section ran as follows: 'If any person or persons shall use, practise, or exercise any invocation or conjuration of any evil and wicked spirit, or shall consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed, or reward any evil and wicked spirit to or for any intent or purpose, or take up any dead man, woman, or child out of his, her, or their grave or any other place where the dead body resteth, or the skin, bone, or any part of any dead person, to be employed or used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment, or shall use, practise, or exercise any witchcraft, enchantment, charm, or sorcery, whereby any person shall be killed, destroyed, wasted, consumed, pined, or lamed in his or her body or any part thereof, every such offender is a felon without benefit of clergy. We find in earlier days sorcery regarded with a kind of vague dread, heard of occasionally in such cases (in large part political) as those of Dame Alice Kyteler of Kilkenny, who saved herself only by flight in 1324, leaving her obscurer accomplices to perish; the Duchess of Gloucester, who did public penance and was imprisoned at Chester, while her secretary was hanged and her accomplice, the celebrated Witch of Eye, Margery Jourdemayne, burned (1441); and Jane Shore; but the wisdom of the Modern Solomon brought a knowledge of it down to everyday village life, and what had heretofore in England caused but occasional local mischief now became a virulent epidemic frenzy. In Cranmer's 'Articles of Visitation' (1549) an injunction is addressed to the clergy, that 'you shall inquire whether you know of any that use charms, sorcery, enchantments, witchcraft, soothsaying, or any like craft invented by the devil.' Strype tells us Bishop Jewell, preaching before the queen in 1558, said: 'It may please your Grace 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.' Reginald Scot's protest fell unheeded, or rather roused the king to write his Dæmonologie (1597), which was ostensibly aimed against the 'damnable opinions of Wierus and Scot, the latter of whom is not ashamed in public print to deny there can be such a thing as witchcraft.' In Lancashire especially there was found to be a deplorable increase of witches; in 1612 fifteen were indicted at Lancaster and twelve condemned, and in 1634 seventeen Pendle Forest witches were condemned on the evidence of one boy, who was fortunately discovered to be an impostor. Under the Commonwealth there was a great increase of persecution, and especially in the Puritan eastern counties. The infamous 'Witch-finder General' Matthew Hopkins pricked, waked, and swam hundreds of unhappy women in Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Huntingdonshire, carrying with him an assistant and a female searcher, and charging twenty shillings expenses in every town he visited. Hopkins caused to be hanged sixty in one year (1644) in Essex, and [Bishop] Hutchinson in his reliable Essay on Witchcraft (1718) enumerates sixteen executions at Yarmouth in 1644, fifteen in Essex in 1645, nearly forty at Bury St Edmunds in 1645-46—among these last 'an old reading parson,' John Lowes, who had been for nearly fifty years vicar of Brandeston in Suffolk, and who under torture confessed to having employed two imps to sink a ship. Baxter in his Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits (1691) tells with approval this pitiful story, and elsewhere we are told how the old man read the burial-service for himself just before his execution. John Gaule, vicar of Great Stoughton, published his Select Cases of Conscience touching Witches and Witchcraft (1646), attacking the methods of Hopkins, and it is a satisfaction to find that there is every probability Hopkins was himself swum and hanged in 1647. One of the most striking cases occurred in 1664, when the enlightened Sir Matthew Hale tried and condemned two women, Amy Dury and Rose Cullender, at Bury St Edmunds, for bewitching children, the opinion of Sir Thomas Browne, who was present, telling with great weight against the prisoners. Chief-justices North and Holt were the first in high places who had the good sense and the courage to set their faces against the continuance of this delusion, and to expose the general absurdity of such charges. The last trial in England was that of Jane Wenham, convicted at Hereford in 1712, but not executed.
But popular beliefs die hard, and we find a poor paralysed Frenchman dying in consequence of being swum by a mob at Castle Hedingham in Essex in 1865, and again in 1879 at East Dereham in Norfolk a man fined for assaulting the daughter of an old woman who had charmed him by a 'walking toad.' And even in the Daily News of April 12, 1890, we read that at the inquest on the body of a child at Fressingfield in Suffolk the parents confidently ascribed its death to the witchcraft of its step-grandmother, who had died a few hours before it. The child was taken out in a perambulator from which the father saw smoke come forth, while the mother said the child when it was brought home was hot and dry and smelt of brimstone. But indeed the spiritualism and theosophy of the 19th century harmonise well with the exploded doctrine of witchcraft, and would have given much comfort to Bodin, Remigius, or Delrio. We have seen Sir Thomas Browne and Baxter's conviction of the reality of witchcraft, and we find Selden, with characteristic caution, recommending that witches should be hanged for their malignant intentions at any rate. Three books which deserve to be named in the roll of honour as outspoken appeals to humanity and sense are A Candle in the Dark, by Thomas Ady (1655), The Question of Witchcraft Debated, published anonymously by John Wagstaffe (1669), and The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677), by John Webster, a work of singular vigour and ability. Hobbes was sceptical on the matter, but the philosophical Glanvill in his famous Sadducism Triumphatus (1681) made a bold attempt to buttress the already decaying belief, maintaining that Atheism grew out of Sadducism, and that witches once disproved, all spiritual existence disappeared with them. More and Cudworth approved the book, and even so late as 1768 John Wesley repeated the same argument: 'It is true likewise that the English in general, and indeed most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all accounts of witches and apparitions as mere old wives' fables. I am sorry for it, and I willingly take this opportunity of entering my solemn protest against this violent compliment which so many that believe the Bible pay to those who do not believe it. I owe them no such service. I take knowledge that these are at the bottom of the outcry which has been raised, and with such insolence spread through the land in direct opposition not only to the Bible, but to the suffrage of the wisest and best of men in all ages and nations. They well know (whether Christians know it or not) that the giving up witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible.'
Nowhere were the witchcraft trials more cruel than in Scotland, where the clergy controlled the whole social life, and an iron theology dominated the imaginations of men; the more vividly the torments of hell are realised the more callous do men ever become to human sufferings in this world. We find the Scottish clergy throughout the leading managers of the prosecutions, before whom the confessions were taken and the tortures inflicted. The ministers and kirk sessions were required to make strict inquisition, and private accusations were invited even from the pulpit. There is but little account of sorcery in the earliest Scottish records, scarce anything in Fordun, but enough in Wyntoun, and ample store also in the Breviary of Aberdeen (1510). The statute of 1563 was the first regular enactment, and the earliest conviction is supposed to have been that in 1479 for consuming a waxen image of the king. Yet comparatively early we find it occasionally ascribed to persons of high estate. Sir Michael Scott of Balwearie, and William, Lord Soulis of Hermitage Castle, who was boiled to death, were notable sorcerers; Janet Douglas, Lady Glamis, was executed under James V. (1537) for devising the death of the king by poison or witchcraft; John Kuoix mentions the Countess of Huntly as a notable patroness of witches, and himself was supposed to have gained the affections of Lord Ochiltree's youthful daughter by sorcery; Catherine Ross, Lady Fowlis, only escaped with difficulty on a charge of sorcery in 1590; and the Earl of Gowrie of the mysterious conspiracy was a master of magic, the word Tetragrammaton, found written in parchment on his body, preventing the blood flowing even when he was dead. Some ten years earlier a vast hellish conspiracy was formed near Edinburgh to drown King James VI. on his voyage from Denmark. It centred round Doctor Fian, alias John Cunningham, master of the school at Salt-pans in Lothian, and Agnes Sampson, the 'Wise Woman of Keith' (Haddingtonshire), whom Archbishop Spottiswoode describes as 'a woman not of the base and ignorant sort of witches, but matron-like, grave, and settled in her answers, which were all to some purpose.' Fian's nails were torn from his fingers, and his legs were crushed by the boot till the marrow was squeezed out of the bones, and finally, in January 1591, he ended his sufferings in the fire. The confessions of the woman told how as many as two hundred witches had flocked to the kirk of North Berwick, where the devil preached damnable blasphemies and denunciations of the king, and made all the witches kiss his bare buttocks over the pulpit. Dr W. Ramesey in his Elminthologia (1668) tells us he saw nine witches burning together on Leith Links in 1644, and about 1650 we hear of John Kincaid of Tranent, especially skilful as a pricker, using pins about three inches in length. We read in Pitcairn how Alesoun Balfour was burned at Kirkwall in 1596, after being tormented with the caschielawis for forty-eight hours, her aged husband before her eyes bound in the lang irnis of fifty stone weight, her son tortured with the boot to the extent of fifty-seven strokes, her daughter, but seven years old, put in the pillie-winkis (thumbscrews). The Restoration set the witch-fires ablaze with greater fury than ever, ignorant justices abetted by frenzied ministers sentencing all delated to them. As many as fifty commissions from the Privy-council to individuals of certain districts to hold trials, each with the names of from one to ten delinquents, were issued within eight months from January 1662, and these distinct from the ordinary Court of Justiciary, Sheriffs, and Bailies of Regalities. One of the most striking cases was that of Isobel Gowdie of Auldearn, burned in 1662 after a series of confessions of unusual imaginativeness, printed in full by the painstaking Pitcairn. This small district contained at that time so many witches that Satan, for convenience, was obliged to divide them into companies of thirteen, called covines. Major Weir was strangled and burned at Edinburgh in 1670 for sorcery and incest; his sister Jean, who confessed to intercourse with evil spirits, and employed a familiar to spin her lint, was hanged the day after. In 1662 there was a great outburst of witchcraft at Inverkip, Renfrewshire, where Marie Lamont, a girl of eighteen, made a series of remarkable confessions. In Renfrewshire also seven suffered in 1697 at Paisley for bewitching Christian Shaw, of Bargarran, a girl of eleven, who afterwards was the means of beginning the thread-manufacture in Paisley. Other more notable cases occurred also at Kinross (1718), Spott in East Lothian (1705), Pittenweem (1704); as well as the death through the use of a waxen figure of Sir George Maxwell of Pollock in 1677, for which five suffered at Paisley, and the obstinate bewitching of Lord Torphichen's son in 1720. The last execution in Scotland took place at Dornoch in 1722, where a poor old woman perished for having ridden her own daughter, transformed into a pony, and shod by the devil, which made the girl ever after lame, both in hands and feet, as well as her son after her. The weather was cold, and the old woman sat quietly warming herself by the fire prepared to burn her while the preparations were being made. Sir George Mackenzie (q.v.), who is not usually credited in Scotland with humanity, among other sensible and humane remarks on witchcraft, adds: 'Most of these poor creatures are tortured by their keepers, who, being persuaded they do God good service, think it their duty to vex and torment poor prisoners; and I know, ex certissimâ scientiâ, that most of all that ever were taken were tormented after this manner; and this usage was the ground of all their confession.' William Forbes, professor of law in Glasgow, declares his firm belief in witchcraft in his Institutes of the Law of Scotland (1730), defining it as 'that black art whereby strange and wonderful things are wrought by a power derived from the devil. . . . Nothing seems plainer to me than that there may be and have been witches, and that perhaps such are now actually existing; which I intend, God willing, to clear in a larger work concerning the criminal law.' The statutes against witchcraft were finally repealed in 1736, to the great displeasure of the leading seceders from the Church of Scotland, for we find enumerated, in the confession of national and personal sins printed in an act of the Associate Presbytery at Edinburgh in 1743, the act of Queen Anne's parliament tolerating Episcopacy in Scotland, the act for adjourning the Court of Session during the Christmas holidays, 'as also the penal statutes against witches having been repealed by parliament, contrary to the express law of God; for which a holy God may be provoked in a way of righteous judgment to leave those who are already ensnared to be hardened more and more; and to permit Satan to tempt and seduce others to the same dangerous and wicked snare.'
Those who crossed the Atlantic for conscience's sake carried all their superstitions with them, and we find an execution for witchcraft in New England as early as 1648, while in the abstract of the laws of that colony, printed in 1655, there stands these articles: 'Witchcraft, which is fellowship by cove- nant with a familiar spirit, to be punished with death. . . . Consulters with witches not to be tolerated, but either to be cut off by death or banishment, or other suitable punishment.' But the interest of American witchcraft centres in the famous Salem cases (1691-92), the guilt of which may in great measure be laid on the shoulders of Cotton Mather (q.v.), author of Memorable Providences relating to Witchcraft and Possessions (1685) and Wonders of the Invisible World (1692). Nineteen persons were executed, among the six men one clergyman and Giles Corey, a man over eighty, who, refusing to plead, was pressed to death. All died protesting their innocence, and even those who had been terrified into confession withdrew it, although their honesty cost them their lives. Nor were the victims here at least abandoned by their friends: in all the trials of this kind there is nothing so pathetic, says Mr Lowell, as the picture of Jonathan Cary holding up the weary arms of his wife during her trial, and wiping away the sweat from her brow and the tears from her face. A reaction speedily set in, and, though in January 1693 three more were condemned, no more exentions took place, and a few months after the governor discharged all the suspects from gaol, as many as 150 in number. One Samuel Parris, a clergyman who had been one of the main instigators of the prosecutions, confessed his error, but was dismissed by his flock in 1696, while even Cotton Mather acknowledged that there had been 'a going too far in that affair.' This lamentable story is told fully by Charles W. Upham in his History of the Salem Delusion (1831; new ed. 2 vols. 1867). See also Mr Lowell in vol. ii. of Literary Essays (1890).
Many of the more important books on witchcraft have been mentioned incidentally in the foregoing pages; the names of all the older books will be found in Grässe's Bibliotheca Magica (Leip. 1843). A comprehensive collection is that published at Frankfurt in 2 vols. 1582, containing the pertinent books of Sprenger, Nider, Basin, Molitor, the Flagellum Daemonum compiled by Mengus, Gerson, Murner, Malleolus, and Bart. de Spina. Another is the Theatrum de Veneficiis (Frankfurt, 1586), containing seventeen tracts by Danæus, Lercheimer, Bullinger, Ewich, Trithemius, &c. Among general books the best accounts of the superstition will be found in Lecky's History of Rationalism in Europe (vol. i.), Tylor's Primitive Culture, and H. C. Lea's invaluable History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (vol. iii. 1887). Serviceable books are Thomas Wright's Narratives of Sorcery and Magie (2 vols. 1852); Ennemoser's Geschichte der Magie (Eng. trans. 1854); Maury, La Magie et l'Astrologie (1860); Garinet, Histoire de la Magie en France (1818); Heppé's edition of Soldan's Geschichte der Hexenprozesse (2 vols. 1880); Scott's Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830); Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie; Howard Williams, The Superstitions of Witchcraft (1865); Roskoff's Geschichte des Teufels (1869); Conway's Demonology and Devil Lore (2 vols. 1878); Diefenbach, Die Hexenwaln (Mainz, 1886); W. H. Davenport Adams, Witch, Warlock, and Magician (1889); Le Sabbat des Soreiers (1882) and other vols. in the 'Bibliothèque Diabolique'; J. Baissac, Les Grands Jours de la Soreillerie (1890); and C. G. Leland, Gypsy Sorcery (1891). An indispensable book for Scotch witchcraft is Pitcairn's Criminal Trials in Scotland from 1484 to 1624 (4 vols. 1830-33), which may be supplemented by Wodrow's Analecta, and especially J. G. Dalyell's Darker Superstitions of Scotland (1834), J. H. Burton's Criminal Trials in Scotland (2 vols. 1852), and C. K. Sharpe's edition of Law's Memorials (1819), with introduction, itself reprinted as The History of Witchcraft in Scotland (1884). See also such folklore books as are really reliable, as those of Pitré, Krauss, Ralston, Mannhardt, &c.; and the articles ANIMISM, APPARITIONS, ASTROLOGY, DEMONOLOGY, DEVIL, DIVINATION, EVIL EYE, EXORCISM, FAIRIES, FAMILIAR, FAUST, INCANTATIONS, MAGIC, SPIRITUALISM, VAMPIRE, WEREWOLF.