Magic and Witchcraft [1852].pdf

Uv-^-
h''^
J
o
la
\
\
^
^
READING FOR TRAVELLERS.
iicabiiig for Cnibtllcrs.
JUST PUBLISHED,
OLD ROADS AKD NEW EGADS.
PiaCE OJiE SHILLING.
NOTICES OF THE PRESS.
The. Daily News.
"Knowledge and amusemeut are very happDy blended together, and the
reader who finds his acquiiintance with the history of roads increaied at the
end of his journey, wiU also find his available fund of anecdote augmented."
The Literary Gazette.
"The (jook contains little more than a hundred pages, and might be read
during the journey by the express train between London and Brighton ; but
so suggestive is every page, that an intelligent and imaginative reader will
not reach the end till the book has been many an hour in his hands."
The Economist.
"This is a pleasant book, somewhat quaint, partieularly the preface, but
fuU of amusing and instructive reading."
The Atlas.
"
If the other volumes of the series are equal to the present in interest and
value, we think we may safely predict a very extensive popularity for the
enterprise. . . . The author has collected from all manner of curious and
out-of-the-way sources materials for his book, and it reads like one of old
Montaigne's Essays."
The Lender.
"
A charming volume of curious and learned gossip, such as would have
riveted Charles Lamb by its fine scholarly tone and its discursive wealth.
If the other volumes are up to this mark, the series will be by far the best of
the many which now make Literature the luxury of the poor."
The Gardeners' Chronicle.
"
Exactly the book for the amusement of a man of education. Lively and
learned, poetical and practical. This book is to the scholar fatigued with
trash Uke a bottle of rich Hungarian wine to a man who has been condemned
ti) the thin potations of France and the Rheingau."
The Gateshead Observer.
"
Old SoluU ami New Roads.—(Chapman and HaU, London.) No. I. of
'
Reading for Travellers.' A first-rate little volume, printed with large type,
and just the thing for a railway ride. The publishers have acted wisely in
calling to their aid a scholar and a writer of the highest order."
The Leicestershire Mercury.
"
Messrs. Chapman and HaU have re-entered the field of Railway Litera-
ture, and have very fittingly commenced their series of
'
Beading for Tra-
veOers
'
with a graphic historical sketch of Old lioadu and Netc Roads. It
is at once scholarly and popular in style and contents yet free from the
slightest tinge of pedantry or afifeotation. The narrative is by no means a
mere dry record of facts and dates. It is abundantly diversified and reUeved
with illustrative anecdotes and sprightly observations—philosophy and plea-
santry combining with genuine eruditiou to make this one of the most useful
and entertaining of the volun-.es of railway reading with which we have met."
MAGIC
WITCHCRAFT.
MAGIC
WITCHCRAFT
'
Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,
Nocturnos lemures, partentaque Thessala rides
?"
Uor. Epkt. a. 2. !
LONDON
:
CHAPMAN AND HALL,
193, PICCADILLY.
1852.
FRinTSD BY
JOHX EXir/AlID TAXLOB, LITTLB Ql'BEK STEEET,
PREFACE.
We have long wished that some English or foreign
university would offer a prize for a history of
Magic and Witchcraft. The records of human
opinion would contain few chapters more instruc-
tive than one which should deal competently with
the Black Art. For gross and painful as the de-
tails of superstition may be, yet superstition, by
its very etymology, implies a dogma or a system of
practice standing upon some basis of fact or truth
:
and however vain or noxious the superstructure
may be, the foundation of it is in some way con-
nected with those deep verities upon which rest
also the roots of philosophy and religion.
For a grand error, and such alone can at any
time essentially affect the opinions of mankind in
general, is ever the imitation or caricature of some
grand truth. From one soil spring originally the
tree which yields good fruit and the plant which
PREFACE.
distils deadly poison. The very discernment of the
causes of error is a step towards the discovery of
its opposite. The bewildennents of the mind of
man, when fidly analysed, afford a clue to the
course of its movements from the right track, or
at least enable us to detect the point at which
began the original separation between Truth and
Error. Alchemy led, by no very circuitous route,
to the science of chemistry ; the adoption of false
gods by the majority of the human race rendered
necessary the dispensations of the Jewish and
Christian schemes ; and the corruption of true re-
verence for the Good, the Beautiful, and the Holy,
was the parent of those arts, which, under the
several appellations of Magic, Witchcraft, Sorcery,
etc., drew their professors at first and the multi-
tude afterwards to put faith in the evil, the de-
formed, and the impiu'c. JNIagic and Witchcraft
are little more than the religious instincts of man-
kind, first inverted, then polluted, and finally, like
all corrupted matter, impregnated with the germs
of a corrupt vitality.
So universal is the belief in spiritual influences,
and more especially in their malignant influences,
that no race of men, no period of time, no region
of the globe, have been exempt fi'om it. It meets
us in the remote antiquity of Asiatic life, in the
comparatively recent barbarism of the American
aborigines, in the creeds of all the nations who
branched off thousands of years ago eastward and
westward from their Caucasian cradle, in the myths,
the observances, and the dialects of nations who
have no other affinity with one another than the
mere form of man.
No nation, indeed, can reproach another nation
with its addiction to magic without in an equal
degree condemning itself. All the varieties of man-
kind have, in this respect, erred alike at different
periods of their social existence, and all accordingly
come under the same condemnation of making
and loving a lie. The Chaldean erred when, dissa-
tisfied vidth simple observation of the heavenly
bodies through the luminous atmosphere of his
plains, he perverted astronomy into astrology : the
Egyptian erred when he represented the omni-
presence of the Deity by the ubiquity of animal
worship : the Hindoo erred when, having conceived
the idea of an incarnation, he clothed with flesh
and fleshly attributes the members of his mon-
strous pantheon : the Kelt and Teuton erred
when, in their silent and solitary forests, they
stained the serenity of nature with the deified at-
tributes of war ; and the more settled and civilized
races who built and inhabited the cities of the
ancient world, erred in their conversion of the indi-
visible unity of the Demiourgos or World-Creator
into an antkropomorpliic system of several gods.
But the very uuiversality of the error points to
some common ground for it in the recesses of the
human heart; and since Paganism under all its
forms was the corruption of religion, and Witch-
craft in its turn the corruption of Paganism, an
inquiry into the seeds of this evil fruit cannot fail
to he also in some measure an investigation of the
very
'
incunabula' of human error.
We have stated, or endeavoured to state, the
real scope and dimensions of the subject of jMagic
and Witchcraft—not however with any pm-pose
of expatiating upon it in so small a volume as the
present one. In the pages which follow we offer
only a few remarks upon theories or modes of belief
which in remote or in nearer ages have affected
the creeds and the conduct of mankind. The sub-
ject, in extenso, belongs to larger volumes, and to
maturer learning and meditatjon.
CONTENTS.
The Legendary Lixeifer .
MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
An amusing work appeared at Mainz, in 1826,
from tlie pen of
"
Herr Kirchenratli" Horst, the
title of whicli, translated in extenso, runs thus
:
—
"The Magical Library; or, of Magic, Theurgy,
and Necromancy; Magicians, Witches, and Witch
Trials, Demons, Ghosts, and Spectral Appearances.
By G. C. Horst, Church-Counsellor to the Grand
Duke of Hesse." The following pages formed a
rc\iew of this work, which appeared many years
This book of the worthy Church-Coimsellor is
rather a singular one : it is not a history of Magic,
but a sort of spiiitual periodical, or magazine of
infernal science, supported in a great measure by
*
Since they were written, Sii- Walter Scott's
'
Demonology and
Witclicraft' has been published, a book replete with interesting
historical notices.
4 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
contributions from persons of a ghostly turn of
mind, who, although they affect occasionally to
write in a Sadducee vein, are many of them half-
believers at heart, and would not walk through a
churchyard at night, except for a consideration
larger than we shoidd like to pay. The field over
wliich it travels is too extensive, for us to attempt
to follow the author throughout his elaborate sub-
divisions. Dante divided hell, hke Germany, into
circles; and Mr. Horst, adopting sometliing of a
similar arrangement, has parcelled out the terri-
toiy of the Prince of the Air into sundry regular
di^-isions, by which its whole bearings and distances
are made plain enough for the use of infant schools.
It is only at one of the provinces of the Inferno,
however, that we can at present afford to glance
;
though for those who are inclined to make the
grand torn', the Counsellor may be taken as an
intelligent travelling companion, well acquainted
with the road. In fact his work is so methodical
and distinct, and the geography of the infernal
regions so clearly laid do^Ti, according to the best
authorities, from Jamblichus and Porphyry down
to Glamil and the Abbe Fiard, that the whole
flistrict is now about as well known as the course
of the Niger
; and it must be the traveller's own
fault if he does not find his exit from Avernus as
easy as its entrance has proverbially been since
the days of Vii-gil.
The picture, however, drawn by these intelli-
THE LEGENDARY LUCIFER. 3
gent spiritual travellers is by no means calculated
to impress us with a high notion of the dominions
of the Prince of the Air, or that the personnel of
liis majesty or his government are prepossessing.
The climate, as all of them, from Faust doAvn-
wards, agi'ce, is oppressively hot, and the face of
the country apparently a good deal like that be-
tween Birmingham and Wolverhampton, abound-
ing with furnaces and coal-pits. Literature is
evidently at a low ebb, from the few specimens
of composition with which we are favoured in the
Zauber-Bibliothek, and the sciences, with the ex-
ception of some practical applications of chemistry,
shamefully neglected. The government seems des-
potical, but subject to occasional explosions on the
part of the more influential spirits concerned in
the executive. In fact, the departments of the
administration are by no means well arranged
;
there is no proper division of labour, and the con-
sequence is, that Beelzebub,
"
Mooned Ashtaroth,'^
and others of the ministry, who, according to the
theory of the constitution^ are entitled to prece-
dence, are constantly jostled and interfered with by
*
Faustus, who is a sort of Delolme in matters infernal, has
an ahle treatise on the subject, entitled
'
Mrrakel- Kimst- und
Wunder-Buch, oder der schwartze Eabe, auch der dreifache
Hollen Zwang genannt,' in wliich the poUtical system of Luci-
fer's dominions is examiaed. Dionysius the Areopagite indeed
is not more exact in his calendar of the celestial hierarchy. Per-
haps these treatises are the common parents of the modern
'
Blue Books.'
4 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
Aziel, Mepliistopheles, Marbuel, and other forward
second-rate spii'its, who are continually thrusting
in their claws where they are not called for. The
standing army is considerable*, besides the volun-
teers by which it is continually augmented. No-
thing is heard however of the navy, and from the
ominous silence wliich our geographers preserve
on this point, it is easy to see that water is a rare
element in this quarter.
The hints given as to the personal appearance
and conduct of Lucifer, the reigning monarch, are
not flattering. Common readers are apt to believe
that Satan occupies that dignityf, but this is a
great error, and only shows, as Asmodeus told Don
Clcofas, when he fell into a similar mistake about
Beelzebub,
"
that they have no true notions of hell."
The morals of Lucifer, as might be expected, are
as bad as possible, with this exception, that we see
no evidence of his being personally addicted to
*
Eeginald Scott's
'
Discoverie of Witchcraft' contains an
army-list or muster-roll of the infernal forces. Thus the Duke
of Amazeroth, who seems to be a sort of brigacher-general, has
the command of sixty legions, etc.
+
Satan is a mere tlui'd-i-ate spirit, as they will find by con-
sulting a list of the Infernal Privy Council for 1669, contained
in Faust's
'
Black Eaven.' But we are not told the exact date of
his deposition from his primacy. It is singular that both in the
book of Job, where he is mentioned for the fii-st time, and in
the Scandinavian mythologers, he appears m a sumlar character
—
" The Ranger," or
"
Eovuig Spirit of Tartarus." See ^\^liter,
Etymologicon, vol. iii., in wliich very learned, though now for-
gotten work, there is much diaboHeal eruchtion.
THE LEGENDARY LUCIFER.
drinking. His licentious habits, however, are at-
tested by many a scandalous chronicle in Spren-
ger, Delrio, and Bodinus; and for swearing, all
the world knows that Ernulphus was but a type
of him. His jokes are aU practical and of a low
order, and there is an utter want of dignity in
most of his proceedings. One of his most face-
tious amusements consists in constantly pulling
the spits, on which his witches are riding, from be-
neath them, and applying them vigorously to their
shoulders ; and he has more than once adminis-
tered personal chastisement to his servants, when
they neglected to keep an appointment. He is a
notorious cheat ; many enterprising young men,
who have enlisted in his service on the promise of
high pay and promotion, having foimd, on putting
their hands into their pockets, that he had paid
them their bounty in tin sixpences, and having
never risen even to the rank of a corporal. His
talent might, from these narratives, be consi-
dered very mediocre, and therefore we are afraid
that the ingenious selection from his papers,
published by Jean Paid*, must be a literary for-
gery. At least all his printed speeches are bad,
—
flashy enough, no doubt, in the commencement,
but generally ending in smoke. He has always
had a fancy for appearing in masquerade, and
*
Auswahl aug des Teufels Papieren. Yet, like Cato the
Censor, Lucifer may have taken to study late in life.
b MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT,
once delivered a course of lectures on magic at
Salamanca, in the disguise of a professor. So
late as 1626, he lived incog., but in a very splen-
did style, for a whole winter, in ]\Iilan, under the
title of the Didce of Mammon"^, It is in vain,
however, for his partial biographers to disguise the
fact, that in his nocturnal excursions, of which,
like Haroun Alraschid, he was at one time rather
fond, and where, we learn from the Swedish
witches, he generally figured in a grey coat and
red small-clothes, ornamented with ribbons and
blue stockings, he has more than once received a
sound di'ubbing from honest people, whom he has
attempted to trip up by laying his tail in their way.
And, in fact, since his affair with St. Dunstan,
he has kept pretty much withindoors after night-
fall. Luther, as we know, kept no terms with him
when he began to crack hazel-nuts in his bedroom
at the "Wartbm'g, but beat him all to nothing in a
fair contest of ribaldry and abuse, besides leaving
an indelible blot of ink upon his red smalls
f.
St.
Lupus shut him up for a whole night in a pitcher
of cold water, into which he had (as he thought,
*
Lotichius, Oratorio super fatalibus hoc tempore Acaclemi-
anun periculis : 1631. Lotichius took the trouble to compose
a Latin poem on the subject of lus triumphal entry. A book
entitled
'
Mammon' had some reputation in its day. The acknow-
ledged author's name indeed is Harris
;
yet some commentator
of the year 2150 will perhaps suggest that it was
'
Old Harry's
3Tammon.' We have seen worse
"
conjectural emendations."
t
Colloquia Mensalia.
I
THE LEGENDARY LUCIFEE. /
cunuingly) conveyed himself, with the hope that
the saint would swallow him unawares'^. This
however^ considering his ordinary temperatxirej
must have been an act of kindness^ which should
have brought on St. Lupus the censure of the
church. St. Anthony, in retm-n for a very polite
offer of his services, spat in his face ; which hurt
his feelings so much, that it was long before he
ventured to appear in society againf. And al-
though in his many transactions with mankind he
is constantly trying to secure some unfair advan-
tage, a person of any talent, particularly if he has
been bred a lawyer
J,
is a match for him ; and there
are niunerous cases in the books, in which his ma-
jesty, attempting to apprehend the person of a
debtor, has been unexpectedly defeated by an inge-
nious saving clause in the bond, which, like Shylock,
he had overlooked, and non-suited in the ecclesias-
tical courts, where he commonly sues, with costs
§.
Finally, we infer from the Mora Trials, that his
*
Legenda Aurea Jacob, de Voragine, leg. 123.
t
Ihid. leg. 21.
J
Or even a bishop. See Southey's pithy and profitable tale
of ' Eleemon, or a Sinner Saved.'
§
In the case of St. Lydvina, when he pleaded his case in
person, and thought it a clear one, he was faii'ly laughed out of
court,
"
deriso explosoque Dtemone." (Brugmann, Vita Lyd-
vinse,
p. 290.) He was hoaxed in a stLU more ingenious manner
by Nostradamus, who having agreed that the devil should have
him, if he was bm-ied either in the church or out of it, left direc-
tions that he should be buried m. a hole in the waU. Sometimes
» MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
general health must have suffered from the climate,
for in 1669 he was extremely ill in Sweden; and
though he got over the attack for a time, by bleed-
ing and an antiphlogistic regimen, the persons
who were about him thought his constitution was
breaking up, and that he was still in a dying way.
Such is the grotesque aspect of the legendary
Lucifer and his court, which a coui'se of dsemono-
logy presents to us ! But though we have thus
spoken with levity of these gross and palpable
conceptions of the e^dl principle, and though un-
doubtedly the first impression produced by such a
farrago must be a ludicrous one, the subject, we
fear, has also its serious side. An Indian deity,
with its wild distorted shape and grotesque atti-
tude, appears merely ridiculous when separated
from its accessories and \iewed by daylight in a
museum. But restore it to the darkness of its
own hideous temple, bring back to our recollection
the victims that have bled upon its altar, or been
crushed beneath its car, and our sense of the
ridiculous subsides into aversion and horror. So,
while the superstitious di'cams of former times are
regarded as mere speculative insanities, we may
for a moment be amused with the wild incoheren-
however he -was the gainer in such equivocal compacts,—as, for
example, in the case of the monk who was to Uve so long as he
abstained from sleeping between sheets. The monk always slept
in a chair ; but in an unlucky hour Satan caught him as fast as
a top with his head between the sheets of a sermon, and claimed
his bond.
SOURCES OF SUPERSTITION.
9
cies of the patients
;
but when we reflect that out
of these hideous misconceptions of the principle
of evil arose the belief in witchcraft ; that this was
no dead faith^ but one operating on the whole
being of society, urging on the mildest and the
wisest to deeds of murder, or cruelties scarcely less
than murder ; that the learned and the beautiful,
young and old, male and female, were devoted by
its influence to the stake and the scaffold,—every
feeling disappears except that of astonishment
that such things could be, and humiliation at the
thought that the delusion was as lasting as it was
imiversal.
It is true that the current of human opinion
seems now to set in a different direction, and that
if the evil spirit of persecution is again to re-ap-
pear on earth, his avatar must in all probability
be made in a different form. Our brains are no
longer, as Dr. Francis Hutchinson says of Bodi-
nus, "mere storehouses for devils to dance in;''
and if the influence of the great enemy is still
as active as before on earth, in the shape of evil
passions, he at least keeps personally in the back-
ground, and has changed his tactics entirely since
the days of the
'
MaUeus Maleficarum.'
"
For Satan now is wiser than before,
And tempts by making rich—not making poor."
Still however it is always a useful check to the
pride of the human mind, to look to those de-
lusions which have darkened it, more especially
to
10 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
such as have originated in feelings in themselves
exalted, and laudable. Such is unquestionably the
case in regard to one of the gloomiest chapters in
the history of human error, the belief in witchcraft
and its consequences. The wish to raise ourselves
above the visible world, and to connect ourselves
with beings supposed to occupy a higher ranli in
creation, seemed at first calculated to exercise only
a beneficent influence on the mind. Men looked
upon it as a sort of Jacob's ladder, by which they
were to estabhsh a communication between earth
and heaven, and by means of which angelic influ-
ences might be always ascending and descending
upon the heart of man. But, unfortimately, the
supposition of this actual and bodily intercourse
mth spirits of the better order, involved also a
similar lielief as to the possibility of establishing a
free trade with the subterranean powers^
"
Who lurk in ambush, in their earthy cover,
And, swift to hear oui' spells, come swarming up
;"
and from these theoretical opinions, once esta-
blished and acted upon, all the horrors of those
tempestuous times flowed as a natural consequence.
For thus the kingdoms of light and darkness were
brought into open contest : if Satan was ready at
every one's call, to send out his spirits like Swss
mercenaries, it became equally necessary for the
true believer to rise in arms against him with fire
and sword; any Avaveriug on his part was con-
MONKISH SUPERSTITION.
11
strued into apostasy, and lie Avho did not choose
to be persecuted himself was driven in self-defence
to become a persecutor.
The grand postulate of direct diabolical agency
being once assumed and quietly conceded on all
hands, any absurdity whatever was easily engrafted
on it. Satan beiug thus brought home, as it were,
to men's business and bosoms, every one speculated
on his habits and demeanour according to his own
light ; and soon the insane fancies of minds crazed
by natm^e, disease, or misfortunes, echoed and re-
peated from all sides, gathered themselves into a
code or system of faith, which, being instilled into
the mind with the earliest rudiments of instruc-
tion, fettered even the strongest intellects with its
baleful influence. The mighty minds of Luther,
of Calvin, and of Knox, so quick in detecting
error, so undaunted and merciless in exposing it,
yielded tamely to its thrall ; the upright and able
Sii- Matthew Hale passed sentence of death, in
1664, on two poor women accused of witchcraft,
and Sir Thomas Browne, the historian of
"
Vulgar
Errors,'' who was examined as a witness on the
trial, gave it as his opinion that the fits under
which the patients had laboured, though natural
in themselves, were
"
heightened by the Devil co-
operating with the malice of the witches, at whose
instance he did the villanies
!"
and apparently on
this e\idence chiefly did the conviction proceed.
Neither, in fact, were the incongruities and
12 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
inconsistencies of the witch-creed of the time so
calculated^ as they might at first sight appear, to
awaken men^s minds to the radical insanity of the
belief. The dash of the ludicrous, which mingles
itself with almost all the exploits of Satan and
his satellites, grew, naturally enough, out of the
monkish conception of Satan, and might be sup-
posed not inconsistent with the character of a set
of beings whose proceedings of course could not
be expected to resemble those either of men or
angels. The monkish Satan has no dignity about
him : in soul and body he is low and deformed.
"
Grii occhi ha vermigli, e la barba unta ed atra,
E
'1
ventre largo, ed unghiate le mani,
G-rafSa gli spirti, gli scuoja, ed isquatra*."
His apish tricks and satyr-like gambols were suffi-
ciently in imison with the idea of a spirit with
boundless malice but limited powers, grinning in
despite where he could not injure, and ridiculing
those sacred rites the power of which he was com-
pelled to acknowledge and obey. Hence he preaches
to his infernal flock, and mocks the institution of
the sacrament ; wreaks his native malice even on
his own adherents; plunges his deluded victims
into misery, or deserts them in their distress, de-
prives them of the rewards he has promised to
them
;
plagues and torments the good, but cowers
whenever he is boldly resisted, and is at once dis-
*
Inferno, canto vi.
MONKISH SUPERSTITION. 13
comfited by any one who wields by commission
the thunders of heaven. Writers of fiction in
general have seldom seized these features of his
character; indeed hardly any one has done so^
except Hofiman, who, in most of his supernatural
pictures, has painted him not with the grandeur
and sullen gloom of the fallen archangel, but with
the coarse and comic malice of the spirit of the
middle ages, and has thus, on the whole, deepened
the real horror of his goblin scenes by the infusion
of these outbreakings of mirth, just as the frightful
effect of an execution would be increased, if the
criminal, instead of joining in the devotions, were
suddenly to strike up a lively air from the top of
the ladder.
But whether the delusion of witchcraft was thus
a natm-al sequence of the monkish notions of an
exil principle, and of the almost universal persua-
sion that intercourse with a higher order of beings
was possible for man, no one can cast a glance over
its history "without being satisfied that the compre-
hensive nature of its iafluence, and its long duration,
were owing to penal laws and prosecutions. It adds
one more to the long hst of instances which prove
that there is no opinion, however absurd and revolt-
ing, which will not find believers and martyrs, if it
is once made the subject of persecution. From the
earliest ages of Christianity it is certain the belief
existed, and must occasionally have been employed
by strong minds as an instrument of terror to the
14
MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
weak ; but still the frame of society itself was not
shaken, nor, with one exception*, does the crime
begin to make any figure in history till the Bull
of Innocent VIII. in 1484 stirred up the slumber-
ing embers into a flame.
Of the extent of the horrors which for two cen-
tm-ies and a half followed, our readers we suspect
have but a very imperfect conception ; we remem-
ber as in a dream that on this accusation persons
were occasionally burnt, and one or two remarkable
relations from our own annals or those of the Con-
tinent may occur to our recollection. But of the
extent of these judicial murders, no one who has
not dabbled a little in the history of demonology
has any idea. No sooner has Innocent placed his
commission of fire and sword in the hands of
Sprenger and his brethren, and a regular form of
process for the trial of this ofience been laid down
in that unparalleled performance, the
'
jMalleus
]\Ialeficarum,^ which was intended as a theological
and juridical commentary on the Bull, than the
race of witches seems at once to increase and mul-
tiply, till it replenishes the earth. The original edict
of persecution was enforced by the successive bulls
of the infamous Alexander VI. in 1494 (to whom
Satan might indeed have addressed the remon-
*
The trials at Arras, in 1459. Yide Monstrelet's Chronicle,
vol. iii.
p. 84 : Paris, 1572. But these were rather rehgious pro-
secutions against supposed heretics, and the crime of witchcraft
only introduced as aggravating their offences.
MONKISH SUPERSTITION. 15
strance "et tu Brute \"), of Leo X. in 1521^ and of
Adrian VI. ia 1522. Still the only effect of these
commissions was to render the evil daUy more
formidable^ tOl at last, if we are to believe the tes-
timonies of contemporary historians, Europe was
little better than a large subm'b or outwork of
Pandemonium. One-half of the population was
either bewitching or bewitched. Delrio tells us
in his preface that 500 witches were executed in
Geneva in three months, about the year 1515. A
thousand, says Bartholomseus de Spina, were exe-
cuted in one year in the diocese of Como, and they
went on burning at the rate of a hundred per
annum for some time after. In Lorraine, from
1580 to 1595, Remigius boasts of having burned
900. In France the multitude of executions about
1520 is incredible; Danseus, in the first part of
his dialogue concerning witches, calls it
"
infinitum
pene veneficorum numerum.^^ The well-known
sorcerer, Trois Echelles, told Charles IX., while he
was at Poitou, the names of 1200 of his associates.
This calculation is according to Mezeray^s more
reasonable version of the story, for the author of
the
'
Journal du Regne de Henri III.^ makes the
number
3000, and Bodinus, not satisfied even with
this allowance, adds a cypher, and makes the total
return of witches denounced by Trois EcheUes
30,000, though he does at the same time express
some doubt as to the correctness of this account.
In Germany, to which indeed the bull of Inno-
16 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
cent bore particular reference, this pla^e raged
to a degi'ce almost inconceivable. Bamberg, Pa-
derborn, "Wurtzburg, and Ti'cves were its chief
seats, though for a centmy and a half after the
introduction of the trials under the commission no
quarter of that great empire was free from its bane-
ful influence. It would be wearisome and revolt-
ing to go through the details of these atrocities
;
but
"
ab uno disce omnes.^^ A catalogue of the ex-
ecutions at AVurtzbui'g for the period from 1627 to
February 1629, about two years and two months,
is printed by Hauber in the conclusion of his third
volume of the ' Acta et Scripta Magica.' It is regu-
larly di^aded into twenty-nine burnings, and con-
tains the names of 157 persons, Hauber stating at
the same time that the catalogue is not complete.
It is impossible to peruse this catalogue A^'ithout
horror. The greater part of it consists of old
women or foreign travellers, seized, it woidd ap-
pear, as foreigners were at Paris dui-ing the days
of ]\Iarat and Robespierre : it contains children of
twelve, eleven, ten, and nine years of age, fourteen
A-icars of the cathedral, two boys of noble families,
the two little sons {sblmlein) of the senator Stol-
zenburg; a stranger boy ; a blind girl; Gobel Ba-
belin, the handsomest girl in Wurtzburg, etc.
"
Sanguine placarunt Divos et virgine ceesd
.'"
And yet, fr-ightful as this list of 157 persons
executed in two years appears, the number is not
EXECUTIONS FOR WITCHCRAFT. 17
(taking the population of Wurtzburg into ac-
count) so great as in the Lindheim process from
1660 to 1664. For in that small district, consist-
ing at the very utmost of six hundred inhabitants,
thirty persons were condemned and put to death,
making a twentieth part of the whole population
consumed in four years.
How dreadful are the results to which these
data lead! If we take 157 as a fair average of
the executions at "Wurtzburg (and the catalogue
itself states that the list was by no means com-
plete), the amoimt of executions there in the
course of the century preceding 1628 would be
15,700. We know that from 1610 to 1660 was
the great epoch of the witch trials, and that so late
as 1749 Maria Renata was executed at Wurtzburg
for witchcraft ; and though in the interval between
1660 and that date it is to be hoped that the
number of these horrors had diminished, there can
be little doubt that several thousands must be
added to the amount already stated. If Bamberg,
Paderborn, Treves, and the other Catholic bishop-
rics, whose zeal was not less ardent, furnished an
equal contingent, and if the Protestants, as we
know*, actually ^ied with them in the extent to
which these cruelties were carried, the number of
victims from the date of Innocent's bull to the
*
Cliristoph von Kanzow, a nobleman of Holstein, burned
eighteen at once on one of bis estates.
C
18 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
final extinction of these persecutions must consi-
derably exceed 100,000 in Germany.
Even the feeling of horror excited by the pe-
rusal of the Wurtzburg murders is perhaps ex-
ceeded by that to which another document relative
to the state of matters in 1629 must give rise
:
namely a ballad on the subject of these executions,
detailing ia doggrel verses the sufferings of the
unfortmiate victims,
"
to be simg to the tune of
Dorothea"—a common street-song of the day. It
is entitled the
'
Druten Zeitung/ or Witches' Clu'o-
nicle,
"
being an accoimt of the remarkable events
which took place in Franconia, Bamberg, and
Wm'tzburg, with those wi-etches who from avarice
or ambition have sold themselves to the devil, and
how they had their reward at last ; set to music,
and to be sung to the air of Dorothea." It is
graced also with some hideous devices in wood,
representing three de\ils seizing on divers persons
by the hair of their heads, legs, etc., and dragging
them away.
It commences and concludes with
some pious reflections on the guilt of the witches
and mzards, whose fate it commemorates wdth the
greatest glee and satisfaction. One device in par-
ticular, by which a witch who had obstinately re-
sisted the torture is betrayed into confession
—
namely, by sending into her prison the hangman
disguised as her familiar (Buhl Teufel) —seems to
meet with the particular approbation of the author,
who calls it an excellent joke ; and no doubt the
SELF-DELUSIONS. 19
point of it in his eyes was very mucli increased lay
the consideration that upon the confession, as it
was called, so obtained, the unhappy wretch was
immediately committed to the flames'^. What are
we to think of the state of feelmg in the country
where these horrors were thus made the subject of
periodical ballads, and set to music for the amuse-
ment of the populace
t?
It was one fatal effect of the perseverance with
*
Some of our readers may wisli to see a specimeu of tlais
precious productiou. We shall take a stanza or two, descriptive
of the joke of wliich the poor witch was the victim.
Em Hexen hat man gefangen, zu Zeit die war sehi' reich
Mit der man lang umbgaben ehe sie bekannte gleich,
Dann sie blieb darauf bestandig es gescheh ilir Unrecht gross,
Bis man ihr macht nothwendig diesen artlichen Foss{\),
Das ich mich driiber wunder ; man schickt eui Henkersknecht
Zu ihr ins Gefangniss 'nimter, den man hat kleidet recht
Mit einer Bamhaute als wenns der Teufel war
;
Als
ihm
die Drut anschaute meynts ihi- Buhl kam daher.
Sie sprach zu ihm behende, wie lestu mich so lang
In der Obrigkeit Hande ? Hilf mir aus ihi-en Zwang,
Wie du mir hast verheissen, ich bhi ja eben dein
;
Thu mich aus der Angst entreissen, o Hebster Bide meiu
!
Sie thet sich selbst verrathen, imd gab Anzeigung viel
Sie hat nit geschmeckt denBraten, was das tvarfilr ein Spiel
(!).
Er trostet sie und saget, ich will dir helfen wohl
;
Darmn sey imverzaget, Morgens geschehen soil.
It bears the colophon "Printed at Smalcald in the year 1627."
t
When these horrors were thus versified, it is not wonderful
to find them
"
improved" by the preachers of the time. At Riga,
in 1626, there appeared
'
Nine Select Witch Sermons, by Her-
mann Sampsonius, superintendent at Riga,' and many others in
the course of that century.
r
O
20 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
wliicli Satan and his dealings were thus brought
before the view of every one, that thousands of
weak and depraved minds were actually led into
the belief that they had formed a connection with
the evil being, and that the \asions which had so
long haunted the brain of Sprenger and his asso-
ciates had been realized in their own case. In
this way alone can we in some measm'c account
for the strange confessions which form the great
peculiarity in the witch trials, where unhappy
creatures, with the fidl knowledge of theu' fate,
admit then* intercom-se with Satan, their midnight
meetings, incantations, then' dealings with spii'its,
"
white, black, and grey, with all their trumpery,"
the grotesque horrors of the sabbath,—in short,
every vrHd and impossible phantasm which had re-
ceived colour and a body in the 'Malleus,^ —and
seemed to be perfectly satisfied that they had fully
merited the fiery trial to which their confession
immediately subjected them, "WTien we read these
trials, we tliink of the efiect of the Jew's fiddle in
Grimm's fairy tale; we see the delusion spread-
ing like an epidemic fi'om one to another, till first
the witnesses, then the judges, and lastly the poor
criminals themselves, all pcld to the giddy whirl,
and go off like dancing Der\dses under its influ-
ence.
True it is that, in many of the cases, and par-
ticularly those which occur in the earlier part of
the seventeenth centurv, when the diabolical doc-
SELF-DELUSIONS. 21
trines of Sprenger and Delrio were in their full
vigoiir, the confessions on which these convictions
proceeded were elicited by torture, moral and phy-
sical, and frequently retracted, till a fresh appli-
cation of the rack produced a fresh admission.
One instance from Delrio may stand in place of a
thousand. He mentions that an unfortunate gen-
tleman in Westphalia had been twenty times put
to the rack,
"
vicies ssevse qvisestioni subditum," in
order to compel him to confess that he was a were-
wolf ! AU these tortures he resisted, till the hang-
man gave him an intoxicating draught, and under
its influence he confessed that he was a were-wolf
after all.
"
En judicum clemens arbitrium,^' says
Defrio,
"
quo se porrigat in illis partibus aquilo-
naribus,"—See how long-suffering we judges are
in the north ! we never put our criminals to death
tni we have tried them with twenty preliminary
courses of torture ! This is perfectly in the spirit
of another worthy in Germany, who had been an-
noyed with the pertinacity of a witch, who, like
the poor lycanthrope, persisted in maiataining her
innocence.
"
Da hess ich sie tiichtig foltern,^^
says the inquisitor
—
"und sie gestand;"—I tortm'ed
her tightly (the torture lasted four hours), and
she confessed ! Who indeed under such a system
would not have confessed? Death was unavoid-
able either way, and the great object was to attain
that consummation with the least preparatory pain.
"
I went," says Sir George Mackenzie,
"
when I
22 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
was a Justice Depute, to examine some women
who liad confessed judicially. One of them, who
was a silly creature, told me that she had not con-
fessed because she was guilty, but^ being a poor
creatm'e avIio wrought for her meat, and being de-
famed for a mtch, she knew she would starve, for
no person hereafter would give her meat or lodg-
ing, and that all men would beat her and hound
dogs at her, and that therefore she desired to be
out of the Avorld. Whereupon she wept most bit-
terly, and upon her knees called God to witness to
what she said*." In other cases, the torture was
applied not only to the indi\'idual accused, but to
his relations or friends, to secure confession. In
Alison Pearson's casef, it appears that her daugh-
ter, a girl of nine years of age, had been placed
in the pilliewinks, and her son subjected to about
fifty strokes in the boots. Where the torture was
not corporeally applied, terror, confusion, and the
influence of others frequently produced the same
effect on the weak minds of the accused. In the
case of the New England Avitches in 1696, six of
the poor women who were liljerated in the general
gaol-delivery which took place after this reign of
terror began to decline, (and who had all confessed
previously that they had been guilty of the mtch-
crafts imputed to them,) retracted their confessions
in writing, attributing them to the consternation
*
Criminal Law. Tit. x.
t
Eccords of Justiciary. Ti-ial of the Master of Orkney.
SELF-DELUSIONS. 23
produced by tlieir sudden seizure and imprison-
ment.
"
And indeed/' said they,
"
that confes-
sion which it is said we made was no other than
what was suggested to us by some gentlemen, they
telling us we were witches, and they knew it, and
we knew it, and they knew that we knew it, which
made us think that it was so, and our imderstand-
ing, our reason, and our faculties almost gone, we
were not capable of judging our condition. And
most of what we said was but a consenting to what
they said^."
But though unquestionably great part of these
confessions, which at first tended so much to pro-
long this delusion, were obtained by torture, or
contrary to the real conviction and belief of the
accused, it is impossible to deny that in many
cases the confessions were voluntary, and pro-
ceeded from actual belief. Nor was it to be won-
dered at that persons of a weak and melancholy
temperament should, more particularly at a time
when the phenomena of nature and of the human
body were so little imderstood, be disposed to set
down every occurrence which they could not ex-
plain, and every wild phantasm which crossed
their minds, to the du'ect and immediate agency
of an evil power. At that period even the most
natural events were ascribed to witchcraft.
If a
child, after being touched by a suspected individual,
died or became ill, the convulsions
were ascribed
*
Calef's JoiATiial.
24 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
to diabolical interference, as in Wenham's case, so
late as 1712*. If, on the contrary, she cured in-
stead of killing, the conclusion was the same, al-
though the only charm employed might be a prayer
to the Almighty
f.
If an old woman's cat, coming
to the door at night, took part in a concert with
other cats, this was nothing but a mtch herself iri
disguise
J.
In the case of Robert Erskine of Dim§,
tried for the mui'der of his nephews, he is inchcted
for makiag away with them by poisoning and ivitch-
craft, as if the poisoning was not of itself amply
sufficient to account for then* death.
It was still less wonderful that those mysterious
phenomena which sometimes occur in the human
frame, such as spontaneous combustion, delusions
arising from the state of the braia and nerves, and
optical deceptions, should appear to the sufferer to
be the work of the de\il, whose good offices they
might very probably have invoked imder some fit
of despondency or misanthropy, little expecting^
like the poor man in the fable who called on Death,
to be taken at their word. What a
"
Thesaurus
of Horror^' would the spectres of Nicolai have
*
Cobbett's State Trials.
t
Trial of Bartie Paterson. Eecorcb of Scottish Justiciar}-.
Dee. 18, 1607.
X
In Wenham's case, IVIr. Cbauncy deposed that a cat belong-
ing to Jane Wenliam had come and knocked at his door at night,
and that he had killed it. This was founded on evidence at the^
trial.
§
Rec. of Just. 1613, Dec. 1.
SPECTRAL ILLUSIONS. 25
afforded in the sixteenth centmy or the com-
mencement of the seventeenth, if embodied in the
pages of the
'
Malleus' or the
'
Flagellnm Dsemo-
num/ instead of beiag quietly published by the
patients as optical and medical phenomena in the
^Berlinische Monatschrift' for
1799,
and the 15th
volume of the
'
Philosophical Journal V What a
fearful ghmpse into the infernal world would have
been afforded by the still more frightful illusions
which haunted poor Backzko of Konigsberg"^
during his political labours in 1806; the grinning
negro Avho seated himself opposite to him, the
owl-headed tormentor that used to stare at him
every night through his curtains, the snakes tAvist-
iug and turning about his knees as he tiirned his
periods ! If we go back to 1651, we find our En-
glish Jacob Bohme, Pordagef, giving an account
of visions which must have been exactly of the
same kind, arising from an excited state of the
brain, ^ith the most thorough conviction of their
reahty. His Philadelphian disciples, Jane Leade,
Thomas Bromley, Hooker, Sapperton, and others,
were indulged, on the first meeting of their society,
with a vision ofunparalleled splendour. The princes
and powers of the infernal world passed in review
before them, sitting in coaches, surroimded
with
dark clouds and drawn by a cortege of lions, dra-
*
See the
'
Neue Necrologie cler Deutschen, 1823,' for an ac-
count of these remarkable appearances,
t
Divina et Vera Metaphysica.
26 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
gons, tigers, and bears; then followed the lower
spirits arranged in squadrons with cats^ ears, claws,
twisted limbs, etc. ; whether they shut their eyes
or kept them open, the appearances were equally
distinct ;
"
for we saw," says the master-spirit Por-
dage,
"
with the eyes of the mind, not with those
of the body."
"
And shapes that come not at a mortal call
Will not depart when mortal voices bid.
Lords of the visionary eye, whose lid
Once raised remains aghast, and will not fall*."
Thus, while phenomena which experience has
since shown to be perfectly natural were imiversally
attributed to supernatural causes, men had come
to be on the most familiar footing with spiritual
beings of all kinds. In the close of the sixteenth
century. Dr. Dee was, according to his own account,
and we verily believe his own conviction, on terms
of intimacy with most of the angels. His brother
physician. Dr. Richard Napier, a relation of the
inventor of the logarithms, got almost all his me-
dical prescriptions from the angel Raphael. Elias
Ashmole had a IMS. volume of these receipts, fill-
ing about a quire and a half of paper
f.
In fact,
one would almost suppose that few persons at that
*
Wordsworth's 'Dion.'
t
The prefixed characters which Ashmole interprets to mean
Responsum Raphaehs seem remarkably to resemble that caba-
listic-looking initial which in medical prescriptions is commonly
interpreted
"
Recipe."
SPECTRAL ILLUSIONS. 27
time condescended to perform a cure by natural
means. Witness the sympathetic nostrums of
Valentine Greatrakes and Sir Kenelm Digby; or
the case of Arise Evans, reported by Aubrey, who
"
had a fungous nose, and to whom it was revealed
that the king^s hand would cure him ; and at the
first coming of King Charles II. into St. James's
Park he kissed the king's hand and rubbed his
nose with it, which troubled the king, but cured
him.'' In Aubrey's time, too, the visits of ghosts
had become so frequent, that they had their exits
and their entrances without exciting the least sen-
sation. Aubrey makes an entry in his journal of
the appearance of a ghost as coolly as a merchant
uow-a-days makes an entry in his ledger.
"
Anno
1670. Not far from Cirencester was an apparition.
Being demanded whether good spirit or bad, re-
turned no answer, but disappeared with a curious
perfume and a melodious twang."
Is it to be wondered at then, that, siuTounded
on all hands with such superstitious fancies, the
weak and depraved were early brought to believe
that all the wild chimeras of the demonologists
were true, and that they had really concluded that
covenant with Satan, the possibility of which was
universally inculcated as an article of faith, and
the idea of which was constantly present to their
minds ? or that, under the influence of tliis fright-
ful delusion, they should voluntarily come forward
to confess their imaginary crime, as in the Am-
28 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
sterdam case of the poor girl atIio accused herself
of be\\itcliing cattle by the words Shurius, Turius,
Tii'ius'^j or in another still more remarkable case
in 16S7, mentioned in Reichard's
'
Beytrage/ where
a young woman accused herself, her friend, and
the mother of her friend, of a long course of witch-
craft, with all the usual traditional and impossible
horrors of Sprenger and his brethren ?
Neither, we are afraid, is there much reason to
doubt that some of the most horrible of their con-
ceptions were founded on facts which were lint too
real
;
that the cunning and the depraved contrived
to tiu'n the ecstasies and the fears of these poor
wretches to their o^vn pui'jjoses; in short, that
frauds similar to tliose which Boccaccio has painted
in his novel of the angel Gabriel, were occasionally
played off upon the deluded victims. Without
entering further on a topic which is rather of a
delicate kind, the reader will have an idea of our
meaning who recollects the disclosures that took
place in the noted French case of Father Girard
and La Cadiere.
Much has been said as to the wonderful coinci-
dences to be found in the evidence of the accused
*
Dapper (Besclireibung von A msterdam,
p. 150)
describes
her as a melaucholy or bypochondriac girl. She was burned
however as usual. These rhjTning or aUiterative charms are of
very remote antiquity. Cato, in his treatise on Husbandry, re-
commends the following formulaiy for a spraiu or fi-acture
:
"Huat Hanat, Huat Ista, Pista Sista, Domiabo Damnaustra,"
or
"
Motas Yseta, Daries Dardaries, Astataries Dissunapiter."
COINCIDENCES IN EVIDENCE. 29
when examined separately, the minuteness of their
details, and the general harmony of the infernal
narratives, as collected from the witch trials of
different countries. But the truth is that this
assertion must in the first place be received with
great limitations; for in many cases, where, ac-
cepting the assertions of Sprenger and the rest
as true, we should suppose the coincidence to be
complete, the original confessions which stUl exist
prove that the resemblance was merely general,
and that there were radical and irreconcHeable dif-
ferences in the details of the evidence. luasfar as
the assertion is really true, one simple explanation
goes far to account for the phenomenon
;
—
" Insa-
nire parent certd ratione modoque." The general
notions of the devil and his demeanour, the rites
of the infernal sabbath, etc. being once fixed, the
visions which crossed the minds of the unfortunate
wretches accused soon assumed a pretty determi-
nate and invariable form ; so that, even if left to
tell their own story, there would have been the
closest resemblance between the narratives of dif-
ferent persons. But this was not all. In al-
most every case the confessions were merely the
echo of questions put by the inquisitors, aU of
which again were founded on the demonological
creed of the
'
Malleus.^ One set of questions is put
to all the witches, and the answers, being almost
always simple affirmatives, necessarily correspond.
Hence it is amusing enough to observe how differ-
30 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
ent were the results, when the process of investi-
gation fell into the hands of persons to whom
Sprenger^s manual was unknown. In the Lind-
heim trials in 1633, to which we have abeady al-
luded, the inquisitor happened to be an old soldier,
who had witnessed several campaigns in the Thirty-
Years War, and who, instead of troubling his head
about lucubi, Succubi, and the other favourite
subjects of inquiry with the disciples of the Ham-
mer, was only anxious to ascertain who was the
queen of the infernal spirits, the general, officers,
corporals, etc., to all of which he received answers
as distinct and satisfactory as any tliat are recorded
for oui' insti'uction in the chronicles of Bodinus
or Delrio.
In the seventeenth century, the manner in which
the delusion was communicated seems exactly to
resemble those remarkable instances of sympathy
which occur in the cases of the Scottish Cambus-
lang Conversions and the American Forest Preach-
ings. No sooner has one hypochondriac published
his symptoms, than fifty others feel themselves at
once affected with the same disorder. In the cele-
brated ^Mora case in 1669, with which of course all
the readers of Glamil (and who has not occasion-
ally peeped into his hoiTors?) are familiar, the
disease spreads first thi'ough the childi-en, who be-
lieved themselves the victims of diabolical agency,
and who ascribed the convulsions, faintings, etc.,
with which thev were attacked, to that cause ; and
SWEDEN. THE BLOCULA. 31
next
through the unfortunate witches themselves.
for as soon as one or two of them, bm'sting into
tears, confessed that the accusation of the children
was true, all the rest joined in the confession. And
what is the natm'e of their confession? Of all
impossible absurdities that ever entered the brain
of man, this trial is the epitome. They meet the
devil nightly on the Blocula, which is the devil's
ball-room in Sweden, as the Brocken is in Ger-
many; they ride thither on sticks, goats, men's
backs, and spits; they are baptized by a priest
provided by the devil ; they sup with him, very fru-
gally it would appear, for the banquet commonly
consists of broth made with colewort and bacon,
oatmeal, bread and butter, milk and cheese ; and
the devil allows no wine. After supper they dance,
and when the devil wishes to be particularly jolly
he pulls the spits from under them, and beats
them black and blue, after which he sits down and
laughs outrageously. Sometimes he treats them
to a musical exhibition on the harp, for he has
a great turn for music, as his famous sonata to
Tartini proves. All of them confess intercourse
with him^, and most of them had sons and daugh-
ters by him. Occasionally he fell sick, and required
to be bled and blistered ; and once he seemed to
be dead, on which occasion there was a general
*
This, indeed, is an almost inyariable feature in the witch
trials, and, if the subject could justify the discussion, might lead
to some singular medical conclusions.
32 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
momniing for him on tlie Blocula, as the Syrian
damsels used to bewail the annual wound of their
idol Thammuz on Lebanon. Is it not frightful
to think that in a trial held before a tribunal con-
sisting of the elite of the province of Dalecarlia,
assisted by the commissioners from the capital,
—
in a country where, until this time, the witch
mania, already beginning to abate in Germany,
had scarcely been heard of, and where it ceased
earlier perhaps than in most other comitries in
Europe,—seventy-two women and fifteen children
shoidd have been condemned and executed at one
time upon such confessions ? Is it possible after
this to read without shuddering the cool newspaper-
like conclusion of Dr. Horneck
—
" On the 25th of
August execution was done upon the notoriously
guilty, the day being bright and glorious, and the
sun shining, and some thousands of people being
present at the spectacle
\"
Thirty years before, a similar instance of the
progress of the epidemic had taken place at Lille,
in the hospital founded by the pious enthusiast
Antoinette Bourignon. On entering the school-
room one day, she imagined that she saw a number
of little black children, with wings, flying about
the heads of the girls ; and not lildng the colour or
appearance of these visitors, she warned her pupils
to be on their guard. Shortly before this, a girl
who had run away from the
institution in conse-
quence of being confined for some misdemeanour
DELUSIONS. 33
of ^rhicli she had heen guilty, being interrogated
how she had contrived to escape, and not liking
prolDably to disclose the tnith, had maintained
that she had been liberated by the devil, to whose
service she had devoted herself from a child. No-
thing more was wanting in that age of diablerie to
tnrn the heads of the poor children ; in the course
of six months almost all the girls in the hospital,
amounting to more than fifty, had confessed them-
selves confirmed witches, and admitted the usual
intercourse with the devil, the midnight meet-
ings, dances, banquets, etc., which form the staple
of the narrative of the time. Their ideal banquets
seem to have been on a more liberal scale how-
ever than those of the poor Mora witches; pro-
bably because many of the pupils had been accus-
tomed to better fare in a populous and wealthy
town in Flanders, than the others in a poor village
in Sweden. Exorcisms and prayers of all kinds fol-
lowed this astomiding disclosure. The Capuchins
and Jesuits quarrelled, the Capucliins implicitly
Ijclieving the reality of the possession, the Jesuits
doxibting it. The parents of the culprit now
turned the tables upon poor Bourignon, by accus-
ing her of ha^dng bewitched them ; and at last the
pious theosophist, after an examination before the
Council, was glad to seek safety in flight ; having
thus obtaiued a clearer notion than she formerly
possessed of the kingdom of Satan, with regard to
wliich she had entertained and published as many
D
34 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
strange fancies as the Bishop of Beuevento ; and
haA-iug been taught by her own experience the
danger of tampering ^ith youthful minds, in which
the train of superstition had been so long laid,
that it only requii'ed a spark from her overheated
brain to kindle it into a flame.
It woidd appear too that physical causes, and in
particvdar nervous aflectious of a singular kind,
had about this time mingled with and increased
the delusion which had taken its rise in these su-
perstitious conceptions of the devil and his influ-
ence. Dm-ing the very year
(1669)
in which the
children at ^Mora were suflering under convidsions
and fainting fits, those in the Oqihan Hospital at
Hoorn, in Holland, were laboiuing under a malady
exactly similar ; but though the phenomena were
atti'ibuted to diabolical agency, the suspicions of
the public fortunately were not directed to any
indi\idual in particular. Another instance of the
same kmd had taken place about a century before
in the Orphan Hospital at Amsterdam, of which a
particulai' accoimt is given in Dapper's history of
that city, where the number of children supposed
to be bewitched amounted to about seventy, and
where the e^'il was attributed to some unhappy old
women, before whose houses the afiected urchins,
when led out into the streets, had been more than
usually clamorous. Such also appears to have been
the primary cause of the tragedies in New England
in
1699; of the demoniac exhibitions at Loudon,
CONFESSIONS. 35
which were made a pretext for the murder of the
obnoxious Graudier ; of the strange incidents which
occurred so late as 1749 in the convent of Unter-
zeil at Wurtzburg ; and of most of the other more
remarkable cases of supposed possession. The my-
sterious principle of sympathy, operating in weak
minds, will in fact be found to be at the root of
most of the singular phenomena in the history of
witchcraft. No wonder then that after the expe-
rience of a century, the judges, and even the igno-
rant pubHc themselves, came at last to suspect
that, however the principle might apply to other
crimes, the confession of the criminal was not, in
cases of witchcraft, the best evidence of the fact.
In the New England cases, says Mr. Calef (April
25, 1693),
"one was tried that confessed; but
they were now so well taught what weight to lay
upon confessions, that the jmy brought her in not
guilty, although she confessed she was."
But what a deluge of blood had been shed before
even this principle came to be recognized, and still
more before the judicial belief in the existence of
the crime was fully eradicated ! WTiat a spectacle
does Europe present from the date of Innocent's
Bull down to the commencement of the eighteenth
centm-y ! Sprenger, Henry Institor, Geiss von
Lindheim, and others in Germany; Cumanus in
Italy ; the Inquisition in Spain ; Remigius, Bo-
dinus, and De TAncre in France and Lorraine,
flooring witches on all sides with the
'
Malleus
36 IMAGIC AND TVITCHCRAFT.
^Maleficarum/ or flogging them to death ^vith the
'Fkgellum' and Tustis Dsemonum;' Holland,
Geneva, Sweden, Denmark, England, and Scotland
A^dng with each other in the number of trials and
the depth of their infatuation and bigotry !
The Reformation, which uprooted other errors,
only strengthened and fostered this. Every town
and village on the continent was filled with spies,
accusers, and ATetchcs who made their living by
pretending to detect the secret marks which in-
dicated a compact viitli the dcAol^,—inquisitors,
*
The trade of a pricker, as it was called, i. e. a person who
put pins into the flesh of a witch, was a regular one in Scotland
and England, as well as on the Continent. Sir George Mackenzie
mentions the case of one of them who confessed the imposture
(p. 48) ;
and a similar instance is mentioned by Spottiswood
(p.
448). Sir Walter Scott gives the following account of tliis
trade:
—
"One celebrated mode of detecting witches, and tor-
turing them at the same time, to draw forth confession, was, by
running pins into their body, on pretence of discovering the
devil's stigma, or mark, wliich was said to be inflicted by him
upon all liis vassals, and to be insensible to pain. This species
of search, the practice of the infamous Hopkins, was in Scotland
reduced to a trade
;
and the yoiuig witch-finder was allowed to
torture the accused party, as if in exercise of a lawful calling,
although Sir George Mackenzie stigmatizes it as a hoi-rid impos-
tm'e. I observe in the Collections of Mr. Pitcaim, that, at the
trial of Janet Peaston of Dalkeith, the magistrates and ministers
of
that market-town caused John Kincaid of Tranent, the common
1 a'icker, to exercise liis craft upon her,
'
who found two marks of
what he called the devil's making, and which appeared indeed to
l-'3 so, for she could not feel the pin when it was put into either
of the said marks, nor did they (the marks) bleed when they were
taken out again
;
and when she was asked where she thought the
pins were put in, she pointed to a part of her body distant from
THE REFORMATION. 6l
judges^ advocates, executioners, every one con-
nected with these frightM tribunals, on the watch
for anything which might afford the semblance of
suspicion. To ensure the death or ruin of an enemy,
nothing more was necessary in most cases than
to throw into this lion's mouth an accusation of
magic against him.
"
Vix aliquis eorum," says
Linden, the determined foe of these proceedings,
"qui accusati sunt, supplicium evasit." The fate
of Edelin, of Urban Grandier, and of the Mare-
chale d'Ancre in France, of Doctor Flaet and
Sidonia von York in Germany, and of Peter of
Abano in Italy*, prove how often the accusation
of sorcery was not even believed by the accusers
themselves, but was resorted to merely as a certain
means to get rid of an obnoxious enemy. INlean-
while the notaries' clerks and officials, labouring in
their vocation, grew rich from the enormous fees
attendant on these trials ; the executioner became
a personage of first-rate consequence :
"
generoso
equo instar aulici nobilis ferebatm', aiu'o argen-
toque vestitus : uxor ejus vestium luxu certabat
the real place. They were pins of tliree inches in length.' Besides
the fact, that the persons of old people especially sometimes con-
tain spots void of sensibUity, there is also room to beheve that
the professed prickers used a pin, the pomt or lower part of
which was, on being pressed down, sheathed in the upper, which
was hoUow for the purpose, and that wliich appeared to enter
the body did not pierce it at all."
—
Demonology and
Witchcraft,
p.
297.
*
Peter died in prison just in time to escape the flames. He
was burned in efBgy however after his death.
Ob MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
cum nobilioiibus*." Some partial diminution of
this persecuting zeal took place in consequence of
a Rescript of John YII, (18th December,
1591),
addi'essed to the commission, by'which the fees of
coui't were restricted within more moderate bounds
;
but still the profits arising from tliis trade in human
Aictims were sufficient to induce the members and
dej)endants of coiu't, like the Brahmins in India, to
support with all theu' might this system of pm'ifica-
tion by fire.
At last however the hoiTors of Wurtzburg and
TreAcs began to open the eyes even of the dullest
to the progress of the danger, which, commencing
like Elijah^s cloud, had gradually overshadowed the
land. ^ATiile the executions were confined to the
lower classes, to crazed old women or mihappy fo-
reigners, even those whose more vigorous intellect
enabled them to resist the popular contagion chose
rather to sit by spectators of these horrors, than to
expose themselves to the fate of Edelin or Flaet,
hx attacking the madness in which they originated.
But now, when the pestilence, spreading on and on,
thi'eatened the lives of moreexalted A-ictims,—when
noblemen and abbots, presidents of courts and pro-
fessors, began to swell the catalogue, and when no
man felt secure that he might not suddenly be com-
pelled by tortiu'c to bear witness against his own
innocent wife or childi'cn,—selfishness began to
*
Lindou, cited bv Wyttonbach, ' Yersuch einer Gcischichte von
Trier,' vol. iii.
p.
110.
PERSECUTIONS IN GERMANY. 39
co-operate with truth and reason. So^ in the same
way, in the case of the New England witchcrafts,
the first effectual check which they received was
from the accusation of Mrs. Hale, the clergyman's
wife : her husband, who till then had been most
active in the persecution, immediately received a
new light with regard to the transaction, and ex-
erted his whole influence for the suppression of the
trials.
The first decisive blow which the doctrines of the
inquisitors received in Germany was from the pub-
lication of the 'Cautio Criminalis,' in 1631. In
the sixteenth centmy, it is true that Ponzonibius,
Wierus, Pietro d'Apone, and Reginald Scott had
published works which went to impugn their whole
proceedings ; but the works of the foreigners were
almost unknown in Germany, and that of Wierus
was nearly as absurd and superstitious as the doc-
trines he combated. It is little to the credit of
the Reformers that the first work in which the
matter was treated in a philosophical, humane, and
common-sense view should have been the pro-
duction of a Catholic Jesuit, Frederick Spec, the
descendant of a noble family in Westphalia. So
strongly did this exposure of the horrors of the
witch trials operate on the mind of John Philip
Schonbrunn, Bishop of Wm-tzburg, and finally
Archbishop and Elector of Mentz, that his first
care on assuming the Electoral dignity was to
abolish the process entirely within his dominions
iO MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
—an example which was soon after followed by
the Duke of Brunswick and others of the German
princes. Shortly after this the darkness begins to
break up^ and the da^vning of better views to ap-
pear, though still liable to partial and temporary
obscm-ations,—the evil apparently shifting fm'ther
north, and re-appearing in Sweden and Denmark
in the shape of the trials at Mora and Fioge.
Eeichard"^ has published a rescript of Frederick
William, Elector of Brandenbvu'g, bearing date the
4th of November, 1654, addressed to the judges in
reference to the case of Ann of Ellcrbroke, enjoin-
ing that the prisoner should be allowed to be heard
in defence, before any tortm'e was resorted to (a
principle directly the reverse of those maintained
by the inqiiisitorial courts), and expressly repro-
bating the proof by water as an unjust and de-
ccitfid test, to which no credit was to be given.
Even where a conviction takes place, as in the
Neuendorf trial of Catherine Sempels, we find the
sentence of death first passed upon her by the
provincial judges, commuted into imprisonment for
life by the Electoral Chamber in 1671,—a degree
of lenity which never could have taken place dvir-
ing the height of the mania.
In 1701 the celebrated inaugural Thesis of
Thomasius, 'De Crimine Magise,^ was publicly de-
livered, with the highest applause, in the Uni-
*
Beytrage zur Befbrderiing einer niiliern Einsicht in das ge-
saiamte Geisten-cicb, toI. i.
p.
284.
PERSECUTIONS IN HUNGARY. 41
versity of Halle, a work wliich some fifty years
before woiild assuredly have procured tlie author
no other crown but that of martyrdom, but which
was now received with general approbation, as
embodying the views which the honest and intel-
ligent had long entertained. Thomasius^s great
storehouse of information and argument Avas the
work of Bekker, who again had modelled his on
the Treatise of Van Dale on Oracles ; and Thoma-
sius, while he adopted his facts and argiunents,
steered clear of those Cartesian doctrines which
had been the chief cause why the work of Bekker
had produced so little practical eflFect. Still, not-
withstanding the good thus produced, the fire of
persecution seems to have been smothered only,
not extinguished. In 1728 it flamed up again at
Szegedin in Hungary, where thirteen persons were
burnt ahve on three scaflblds, for witchcraft, under
circumstances of horror worthy of the wildest pe-
riods of this madness. And so late as 1749 comes
the frightful stoiy of Maria Renata, of Wurtzburg,
the whole official details of which are published
by -Horst, and which in its atrocity was worthy to
conclude the long series of murders which had
polluted the annals of Bamberg. This trial is
remarkable from the feeling of disgust it seems
to have excited in Germany, Italy, and France
;
and the more so because, whatever may be thought
of the reality of her pretensions, there seems to be
no doubt from the evidence that Maria was by
42 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
no means immaculate, but ivas a dabbler in spells
and potions, a
venefica
in the sense of the Theo-
dosian code. But there is a time, as Solomon
says, for eveiytbing under the sun ; and the glories
of the
'
Malleus Maleficarum^ were departed. The
consequence was, that taking this trial as their
text-book, various foreigners, particularly IMaffei,
Tartarotti, and Dell' Ossa, attacked the system so
^•igorously, that since that time the adherents of
the old superstition seem to have abandoned the
field in Germany.
^Matters had come to a close much sooner in
Switzerland and France. In the Catholic canton
of Glarus, it is said, a witch was burnt even so late
as 1786; but in the Protestant cantons no trials
seem to have taken place for two centuries past.
The last execution in Geneva was that of Michel
Chauderon, in 1652. Sebastian Michaelis indeed
would have us to believe, that at one time the
tribunal at Geneva put no criminals accused of
witchcraft to death, unless on proof of their having
done actual injury to men or animals, and that
the other phenomena of confessions, etc., were re-
garded as mere mental delusions. If such how-
ever was originally the case, this humane rule was
unfortunately soon abandoned; for nowhere did
the mania of persecution at one time rage more
than in Geneva, as is evident from Debio's pre-
face. It seems fairly entitled however to the
credit of having been the first state in Europe
EDICT OF LOUIS XIV. 43
which emancipated itself from the influence of this
bloody superstition.
In France, the edict of Louis XIV., in 1682,
directed only against pretended witches and pro-
phets, proves distinctly that the belief in the reality
of witchcraft had ceased, and that it was merely
the pretended exercise of such powers which it was
thought necessary to suppress. It is highly to the
credit of Louis and his ministry, that this step was
taken by him in opposition to a formal requite by
the Parliament of Normandy, presented in the
year
1670, on the occasion of his Majesty having
commuted the punishment of death into banish-
ment for life, in the case of a set of criminals
whom the Parliament had condemned more ma-
jorum for witchcraft*. In this apology for their
belief, they reminded Louis of the inveterate prac-
tice of the kingdom; of the numerous arrets of
the Parliament of Paris, from the trials in Artois
in 1459, reported by Monstrelet, down to that of
Leger in May 1616 ; of the judgments pronounced
under the commission addressed by Henry the
Great to the Sieur de TAncre, in
1609 ; of those
pronounced by the Parliament of Toulouse, in
1577 ; of the celebrated case of Gaufi'idy, in
1611
;
of the arrets of the Parliaments of Dijon and
Hennes, following on the remarkable trial of the
*
The Abbe Fiard, one of the latest believers on record, has
printed the Requete at full length in his
'
Lettres sui* la
p.
117 et seq.
44 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
Mareclial de Retz, in 1441^ wlio was biu'nt for
magic and sorcery in tlie presence of tlie Duke of
Bretague : and after combating tlie authority of a
canon of the Council of Ancyra, and of a passage
in St. Augustine^ which had been quoted against
them by their opponents, they sum up their plead-
ing with the following placid and charitable sup-
plication to his Majesty
—
" Qu'elle voudra bien
soufiru' Texecution des arrets qu'ils out rendus, et
lem- permcttre de coutinuer ^instruction et juge-
ment dcs proces des personnes accuses de sor-
tilege, et que la piete de Votre Majeste ne souf-
.
frira pas que Ton introduise dm'ant son regne une
nouvelle opinion contraire aux principes de la re-
ligion, pour laquelle Votre jNIajeste a toujoiu's si
glorieusement employe ses soins et ses armes."
Notwithstanding this concluding compliment to
his Majesty^s zeal and piety, it is doubtful whether
the Parliament of Normandy, in their anxiety for
the support of their constitutional privileges, coidd
have taken a more effectual plan to ruin their OAvn
case, than by thus presenting Louis with a sort of
anthology or elegant extracts from the atrocities
of the witch trials ; and in all probability the ap-
pearance of the edict of 1680 was accelerated by
the very remonstrance by which the Norman sages
had hoped to strangle it.
In tmniing from the Continent to the state of
matters in England and Scotland, the prospect is
anything but a comfortable one; and certainly
PERSECUTION IN ENGLAND. 45
notliing can be more deceitful than tlie unction
^vliich Dr. Francis Hutchinson lays to his soul,
when he ventures to assert that Englandwas one of
those countries where its horrors were least felt
and earliest suppressed. Witness the trials and
convictions which, even before the enactment of
any penal statute, took place for this imaginary of-
fence, as in the case of Bolingbroke and Margery
Jourdain, whose incantations the genius of Shake-
spear has rendered familiar to us in the Second
Part of King Henry VI. Witness the successive
(Statutes of Henry VIII., of Elizabeth, and of
James I., the last of which was repealed only in
1736, and passed while Coke was Attorney-Ge-
neral, and Bacon a member of the Commons
!
Witness the exploits of Hopkins, the witch-finder-
general, against the wretched creatures in Lincoln-
shire, of whom
—
"
Some only for not being drown'cl,
And some for sitting above groimd
Wliole nights and days upon their breeches,
And feehng pain, were hanged for witches."
Sudibras, part ii. canto iii.
WTiat would the Doctor have said to the list
of THREE THOUSAND \dctims executed during the
dynasty of the Long Parliament alone, which Za-
chary Grey, the editor of Hudibras, says he him-
self perused ? ^liat absm-dities can exceed those
sworn to in the trials of the witches of Warboys,
whose fate was, in Dr. Hutchinson's days, and
46 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
perhaps is stilly annually
"
improvecV in a com-
memoration sermon at Cambridge ? or in the case
of the Inckless Lancashire witches, sacrificed, as
afterwards appeared, to the villany of the impostor
Robinson, whose story fiu'nished materials to the
di'amatic muse of Heywood and Shadwell ? How
melancholy is the spectacle of a man like Hale,
condemning Amy Duny and Rose Cullender, in
1664, on e\-idence which, though corroborated by
the opinion of Sir Thomas Browne, a child would
now be disposed to laugh at ? A better order of
things, it is true, commences with the Chief-
justiceship of Holt. The e\idence against ^lother
^lunnings, in 1694, would, Avith a man of weaker
intellect, have sealed the fate of the unfortunate
old woman ; but Holt charged the jiu-y with such
firmness and good sense, that a verdict of Not
Guilty, almost the fii"st then on record in a trial
for witchcraft, was found. In about ten other
trials before Holt, fi-om 1694 to 1701, the result
was the same. Wenham's case, which followed in
1711,
sufficiently evinced the change which had
taken place in the feelings of judges. Through-
out the whole trial. Chief Justice Powell seems to
have sneered openly at the absm'dities which the
A^itnesses, and in particular the clergjTnen who
were examined, were endeavoiu'ing to press upon
the juiy ; but, with all his exertions, a verdict of
guilty was found against the prisoner. With the
view however of seciu'ing her pardon, by showing
PERSECUTION IN ENGLAND. 47
how far the prejudices of the jury had gone, he
asked, when the a erdict was given in,
"
whether
they found her guilty upon the indictment for
conversing ^^ith the dcA-il in the shape of a cat?"
The foreman answered,
"
We find her guilty of
that
!
"
It is almost needless to add that a pardon
was procured for her. And yet after all this, in
1716,
jNIrs. Hicks and her daughter, aged niiie,
were hanged at Huntingdon for selling their soids
to the devil, and raising a storm, by pulling off
their stockings and making a lather of soap !
With this crowning atrocity, the catalogue of
murders in England closes; the penal statutes
against witchcraft being repealed in
1736, and the
pretended exercise of such arts being punished in
fature by
imprisonment and pillory. Even yet
however the case of Rex v. Weldon, in
1809, and
the still later case of Barker v. Ray, in Chancery
(August
2, 1827),
proves that the popular belief
in such practices has by no means ceased ; and it
is not very long ago that a poor woman narrowly
escaped with her life fi'om a re\ival of Hopkins's
trial by water'^. Barrington, in his observations
on the statute 20 Henry VI., does not hesitate to
estimate the numbers of those put to death in
England on this charge at 30,000
!
*
Even now a complaint of ' being bewitched' is occasionally
made to Justices of the Peace by the very ignorant or the very
malignant.
48 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
We now turn to Scotland. Much light has been
thrown on the rise and progress^ decline and fall,
of the delusion in that country by the valuable
work of Mr. Pitcairn*, which contains abstracts
of every trial in the supreme Criminal Coui't of
Scotland : the author has given a faithful and
minute -siew of the procedure in each case, ac-
companied with full extracts fi'om the original
docimients, where they contained anything of in-
terest.
In no country perhaps did this gloomy super-
stition assxmie a darker or bloodier character than
in Scotland. Wild, mountainous, and pastoral
countries, partly from the striking, varied, and
sometimes terrible phenomena which they present,
—partly from the habits and manner of life, the
tendency to thought and meditation which they
create and foster,—have always been the great
haunts in which superstition finds its cradle and
home. The temper of the Scots, combining re-
flection with enthusiasm—their mode of life in
earlier days, which amidst the occasional bustle of
v.-ild and agitating exertion, left many internals
of mental vacuity in solitude—their night watches
by the cave on the hill-side—their uncertain cH-
mate, of sunshine and vapour and storm—all con-
*
Trials and other Proceedings in Matters Criminal before the
High Court of Justiciary in Scotland, selected from tlie Records
of that Court. By Eobert Pitcaim. Edinburgh.
SCOTTISH SUPERSTITION.
49
tributed to exalt and keep alive that superstitious
fear with which ignorance looks on every extra-
ordinary movement of nature. From the earliest
period of the Scottish annals,
"
All was hot gaistis,
and eldrich phantasie;" the meteors and aurorse
boreales which prevailed in this moimtainous re-
gion were tortured into apparitions of horsemen
combating in the air, or corpse-candles burning
on the hill-tops
"^.
Skeletons danced as familiar
guests at the nuptials of our kingsf: spectres
warned them back from the battle-field of Flod-
den, and visionary heralds proclaimed from the
market-cross the long catalogue of the slain.
"
Figures that seemed to rise and die,
Gibber and sign, advance and fly,
WliUe nought confu-med, coidd ear or eye
Discern of sound or mien
;
Yet darkly did it seem as there
Heralds and pursuivants appear.
With trimipet soimd and blazon fair,
A summons to proclaim."
Marmion, canto v.
Incubi and succubi wandered about in all direc-
tions, with a degree of assm-ance and plausibility
which would have deceived the very elect
J
; and
wicked churchmen were cited by audible voices
and an accompaniment of thunder before the tri-
*
Holingshed, vol. i.
pp.
50, 317.
t
At the second marriage of Alexander III., Fordim, vol. ii.
p.
128. Boece,
p. 294, ed. 1574.
X
Boece,
p.
149.
E
50 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
bunal of Heaven"'^, The annals of the thirteenth
century are dignified with the exploits of three
wizards, before whom Nostradamus and MerHn
must stoop their crests, Thomas of ErcUdoune,
Sir Michael Scott, and Lord Soulis. The Tra-
montane fame of the second had even crossed the
Alps, for Dantef accommodates him mth a place
in Hell, between Bonatto, the astrologer of Guido
di Monte Feltro, and Asdente of Parma.
But previous to the Reformation, these super-
stitious notions, though generally prevalent, had
hardly assumed a form much calculated to disturb
the peace of society. Though in some cases, where
these powers had been supposed to have been ex-
ercised for treasonable piu'poses, the punishment
of death had been inflicted on the witches
J,
men
did not as yet think it necessary, merely for the
supposed possession of such powers, or their bene-
volent exercise, to apply the piu'ifying power of fire
to eradicate the disorder. Sii' Michael and the
Ehymer lived and died peaceably ; and the tragical
fate of the tyrant Soulis on the Nine Stane Rigg
*
In the case of Cameron, Bishop of Glasgow, 1466.—Bu-
chanan. Pitscottie.
+
"
Quell' altro, che nei fianchi e cosi poco,
llichele Scotto fu, che veramente
Delle magiche frode seppe il giuoco."
—
Canto xx.
J
As in the case of the witches at Forres, who attempted to
destroy King Duifus by the favourite pagan charm of roasting
his unage in wax, and those burnt at Edinburgh for a similar
attempt against James III., in 1479.
SCOTTISH SUPERSTITION. 51
was OTving, not to the supposed sorceries wMch
had polluted his Castle of Hermitage, but to those
more palpable atrocities which had been dictated
by the demon of his own evil conscience, and ex-
ecuted by those iron-handed and iron-hearted
agents, who were so readily eA^oked by the simpler
spell of feudal despotism.
From the commencement of the Records of the
Scottish Justiciary Court, down to the reign of
Mary, no trial properly for witchcraft appears on
the record. For though in the case of the unfor-
tunate Countess of Glammis^ executed in 1536,
during the reign of James V., on an accusation of
treasonably conspiring the king's death by poison,
some hints of sorcery are tlirown into the dittay,
probably with the ^dew of exciting a popular pre-
judice against one whose personal beauty and high
spu'it rendered her a favourite with the people, it
is ob^dous that nothing was really rested on this
charge.
But with the introduction of the Reformation
"
novus rerum nascitur ordo.'' Far from divest-
ing themselves of the dark and bloody supersti-
tions which Innocent's bull had systematized and
propagated, the German reformers had preserved
this, while they demoHshed every other idol, and
moving
"
In dismal dance around the fiu-nace blue,"
had made even children pass through the fire to
Moloch. Their Scottish brethren, adopting im-
E 3
52 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
plicitly the creed of their continental prototypes^
transplanted to our own country^ a soil unfortu-
nately but too Avell prepared for such a seed^ the
whole doctrine of Satan^s Aisible agency on earthy
^yith all the grotesque horrors of liis commerce
with mankind. The aid of the sword of justice
was immediately found to be indispensable to the
weapons of the spirit; and the verse of Moses
which declares that a witch shall not be suffered
to live, was forthmth made the groundwork of the
Act 73 of the ninth parliament of Queen ^Nlary^
which enacted the pmiishment of death against
Antches or considters Avith vritches.
The consequences of this avithoritative recogni-
tion of the creed of witchcraft became immediately
ob\ious with the reign of James which followed.
Witchcraft became the all-engi"ossing topic of the
day, and the ordinary accusation resorted to when-
ever it was the object of one indiAidual to ruin
another, just as certain other offences were during
the reign of Justinian, and during the fom'teenth
and fifteenth centimes in Italy. In Scotland the
evil was not less busy in high places, than among
the humbler beings, who had generally been pro-
fessors of the art magic. A sort of relation of
clientage seems to have been established between
the operative performers, and those noble patrons
(chiefly, we regret to say, of the fail- sex) by whom
their services were put in requisition. The Lady
SCOTTISH SUPERSTITION. 53
furnished our own Northern Wizard with some of
his most striking pictures^—the Countess of Athol^
the Coimtess of Huntly, the wife of the Chancellor
Arran, the Lady Ker, wife of James, Master of
Reqiiests, the Countess of Lothian, the Countess
of Angus, (more fortimate in her generation than
her grandmother Lady Glammis), were all, if we
are to believe the scandal of Scotstarvet, either pro-
tectors of witches or themselves dabblers in the
arf^. Even Knox liimself did not escape the ac-
cusation of witchcraft; the power and energy of
mind with which Providence had gifted him, the
enemies of the Reformation attributed to a darker
source. He was accused of ha\'ing attempted to
raise "some sanctes" in the churchyard of St.
Andrew's ; but in the course of this resuscitation
upstarted the de^dl himself, having a huge pair of
horns on his head, at which terrible sight Knox's
secretary became mad with fear, and shortly after
died. Nay, to such a height had the mania gone,
that Scot of Scotstarvet mentions that Sir Lewis
Ballantyne, Lord Justice Clerk of Scotland, "by
curiosity dealt with a warlock called Richard
Grahame," (the same person who figures in the
trial of Alison Balfom% as a confederate of Both-
well), "to raise the devil, who having raised him
in his own yard in the Canongate, he was thereby
so terrified that he took sickness and thereof
died." This was a "staggering state of Scots
*
Scot of Scotstarvet, Home of G-odscroft, passim.
54 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
statesmen" indeed, when even the supreme crimi-
nal judge of Scotland was thus at the head of the
delinquents. Well might any unfortunate criminal
have said Avith Angelo
—
"
Tliieves for their robbeiy have authority,
When judges steal themselves."
Measure
f.
Measure, ii. 2.,
Nor, in fact, was the Church less deeply impli-
cated than the com't and the hall of justice
;
for
in the case of Alison Pearson,
(1588) we find the
celebrated Patrick Adamson, Archbishop of St.
Andrew^s, laying aside the fear of the Act of Par-
liament, and condescending to apply to this poor
Avretch for a potion to cure him of his sickness
!
A faith so strong and so general coiild not
be long in manifesting itself in works. In 1572
occurs the first entry in the Justiciary Record, the
trial of Janet Bowman, of which no particulars
are given, except the emphatic sentence
"
Convict
:
and Brynt." No fewer than thirty-five trials
appear to have taken place before the Coui't of
Justiciary dm'ing the remainder of
Jameses
reign,
(to
1625),
in almost aU of which the residt is the
same as in the case of Bowman.
Two or three of these are peculiarly interesting
;
one, from the difference between its details and
those which form the usual materials of the witch
trials
;
the others, from the high rank of some of
those involved in them, and the strange and almost
inexpKcable extent of the delusion. The first to
TRIALS IN SCOTLAND. 55
which we allude is that of Bessie Dnnlop"^, con-
victed on her own confession ; the peculiarity in
this case is that, instead of the de^dl himself in
propria persona, the spiritual beings to whom we
are introduced are our old friends the fairies, the
same sweet elves whom Paracelsus defends, and
old Aubrey delighted to honom\ Bessie^s familiar
was a being whom she calls Thorn Reed, and
whom she describes in her judicial declarationf as
'^an honest weel elderlie man, gray bairdit, and
had ane gray coitt with Lumbard sleeves of the
auld fassoun, ane pair of gray brekis, and quhyte
schankis gartarrit abone the kne/' Their first
meeting took place as she was going to the pasture,
"gi'ctand (weeping) verrie fast for her kow that
was dead, and her husband and child that were
lyand sick in the land-ill (some epidemic of the
time), and she new risen out of gissane (childbed)
."
Thom, who took care that his character shoidd
open upon her in a favourable light, chid her for
her distrust in Providence, and told her that her
sheep and her child would both die, but that her
husband should recover, which comforted her a
little. His true character, however, appeared at
a second "forgathering,^^ when he unblushingly
urged her
"
to denye her Christendom and renounce
her baptism, and the faith she took at the fount
stane.^' The poor witch answered, that
"
though
*
Nov. 8, 1576. Pitcaim, vol. i.
p.
48.
t
Ibid.
p.
51.
56 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
she should be riven at horse-tails she would never
do that/' hut promised him obedience in all things
else^—a qualified concession vrith which he rather
grumblingiy departed. His third appearance took
place in her own house, in presence of her hus-
band and three tailors (three
!)
. To the infinite
consternation of this trio and of the gudeman, he
took her by the apron and led her out of the house
to the kiln-end, where she saw eight women and
four men sitting ; the men in gentlemen's cloth-
ing, and the women with plaids round about them,
and "very seemly to see." They said to her,
"
Welcome Bessie, wilt thou go with us V but as
she made no answer to this invitation, they, after
some conversation among themselves Avhich she
could not understand, disappeared of a sudden, and
"
a hideous ugly sough of wind followed them."
She was told by Thom, after theu' departure, that
these "were the gude "n'ights that wonned in the
Court of Elfane," and that she ought to have ac-
cepted their imitation. She afterwards received a
visit fi'om the Queen of Elfane in person, who con-
descendingly asked a drink of her, and prophesied
the death of her child and the recovery of her
husband. The use which poor Bessie made of her
privileges was of the most harmless kind, for her
spells seem to have been all exerted to cure, and
not to kill. Most of the articles of her indictment
are for cures performed, nor is there any charge
against her of exerting her powers for a malicious
REMARKABLE TRIALS. 57
pui'pose. As usual however she was con\icted and
hui'nt.
This was evidently a pure case of mental delu-
sion^ but it was soon followed by one of a darker
and more complex character, in which, as far as
the principal actor was concerned, it seems doubt-
ful whether the mummery of witchcraft formed
anything more than a mere pageant in the dark
drama of human passions and crimes. We allude
to the trials of Lady Fowlis and of Hector INIunro
of Fowlis, for witchcraft and poisoning, in 1590.
This is one of those cases which might plausibly
be quoted in support of the ground on wliich the
witch trials have been defended by Selden, Bayle,
and the writers of the Encyclopedic,—namely, the
necessity of punishing the pretensions to such
powers, or the belief in their existence, with as
great rigour as if their exercise had been real.
"
The law against witches,^' says Selden,
"
does not
prove there be any, but it pimishes the malice
of those people that use such means to take away
men^s lives. If one should profess that, by turn-
ing his hat and crying buz, he could take away a
man's life, though in truth he could do no such
thing, yet this were a just law made by the state,
that whoever should turn his hat thrice and cry
buz, with an intention to take away a man's life,
shall be put to death." We shall hardly stop to
expose the absiu'dity of this doctrine of Selden
in
the absti'act, which thus makes the will univer-
58 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
sally equal to the deed ; but when we read such
cases as that of Lady Fowlis^ it cannot at the
same time be denied, that the power which the pre-
tended professor of such arts thus obtained over
the popular mind, and the relaxation of moral prin-
ciple with which it was naturally accompanied in
the indi\idual himseK, rendered him a most dan-
gerous member of society. In general, the pro-
fession of sorcery was associated with other crimes,
and was frequently employed as a mere cover by
which these might with the more security and
eifect be perpetrated. The philters and love-
potions of La Voisin and Forman, the private
court calendar of the latter, containmg "what
ladies loved what lords best," (Avhich the Chief
Justice prudently would not allow to be read in
court), are sufficiently well kno\Mi. Charms of a
more disgusting nature appear to have been sup-
plied by our own witches, as in the case of Roy, tried
before the sheriff of Perth, in 1601*, and in
that of Colquhoun, of Luss, tried for sorcery and
incest, 1633, where the instrument of seduction
was a jewel obtained from a necromancer. In
short, wherever any flagitious purpose was to be
effected, notliing more was necessary than to have
recourse to some notorious witch. In poisoning,
in particular, they were accomplished adepts, as
was natm-ally to be expected from the power which
*
Rec. of Just. May 27,
1601.
CASE OF LADY FOWLIS. 59
it gave them of realizing their own prophecies.
Poisoners and witches are classed together in the
conclusion of Lonis XIV/s edict ; and the trials
before the Chambre Ardente prove that the two
trades were generally found in harmonious juxta-
position.
.
Our own Mrs. Tiu'ner, in England,
aflfords us no bad specimen of this union of the
poisoner with the procuress and the witch ; while
the prevalence of the same connection in Scotland
appears fi-om the details of the case of Robert
Erskine, of Dun, from that of the daughter of
Lord Cliffconhall, Euphemia ]\Iacalzean, and stiU
more from the singular case of Lady Fowlis.
The object of the conspirators in this last case
was the destruction of the young lady of Balna-
gown, which would have enabled George Ross, of
Balnagovvn, to many the young Lady Fowlis.
But in order to entitle them to the succession of
Fowlis, supposing the alliance to be effected, a
more extensive slaughter was required. Lady
Fowlis's stepsons, Robert and Hector, with their
families, stood in the way, and these were next to
be removed, ^ay, the indictment goes the length
of charging her with projecting the mm'der of more
than thirty individuals, including an accomplice of
her own, Katharine Ross, the daughter of Sir David
Ross, whom she had seduced into her schemes, a
woman apparently of the most resolute temper,
and obviously of an acute and penetrating intel-
lect: there seems reason to doubt whether she
60 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
had any faith in the power of the charms and sor-
ceries to which she resorted, but she probably
thought that, in availing herself of the ser\ices of
those hags whom she employed, the more prudent
course woidd be to allow them to play off their
mummeries in their own way, while she combined
them with more effective hiunan means. Accord-
ingly the work of destruction commenced with the
common spell of making two pictures of clay, re-
presenting the intended victims; but instead of
exposing them to the fire, or burying them with
their heads downward, the pictm'cs were in this
case hung up on the north side of the room, and
the lady, with her familiars, shot several arrows,
shod with elf- arrow heads, at them, but without
effect. Though the Lady Fowlis gave orders that
other two pictures should be prepared, in order to
renew the attempt, she seems forth^vith to have
resorted to more vigorous measures, and to have
associated Katharine Ross and her brother George
in her plans. The first composition prepared for
her victims was a stoupfiil of poisoned ale, but this
ran out in making. She then gave orders to pre-
pare "a pig of ranker poison, that would kill
shortly," and this she dispatched by her nurse to
the young Laird of Fowlis. ProWdence however
again protected him : the "pig" fell and was broken
by the way, and the nurse, who could not resist
the temptation of tasting the contents, paid the
penalty of her curiosity with her life. So corrosive
CASE OF LADY FOWLIS. 61
was the nature of the potion, that the very grass
on which it fell was destroyed. Nothing however
could move Lady Fowlis from her pm-pose. Like
Mrs. Turner, who treated Ovcrbury with spiders,
cantharides, and arsenic, alternately, that she might
be able to
"
hit his complexion," she now proceeded
to try the effect of
"
ratton poyson," (ratsbane,) of
which she seems to have administered several doses
to the young laird,
"
in eggs, browis, or kale," but
still without effect, his constitution apparently pro-
ving too strong for them. She had more nearly
succeeded, however, with her sister-in-law, her fe-
male victim. The
"
ratton poyson" which she had
prepared for Lady Balnagown, she contrived, by
means of one of her subsidiary hags, to mix in a
dish of kidneys, on which Lady Balnagown and
her company supped ; and its effects were so vio-
lent, that even the wretch by whom it was admi-
nistered revolted at the sight. At the date of the
trial, however, it would seem the unfortunate lady
was still alive. Lady Fowlis was at last appre-
hended, on the confession of several of the witches
she had employed, and more than one of whom
had been executed before her own trial took place.
The proceedings after all terminated in an acquit-
tal, a result which is only explicable by observing
that the jury was evidently a packed one, and con-
sisted principally of the dependants of the houses
of Munro and Fowlis.
This scene of diablerie and poisoning, however^
62 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
did not terminate here. It now appeared that Mr.
Hectox', one of his stepmother's intended Adetims,
had himself been the principal performer in a witch
nnderplot directed against the life of his brother
George. Unlike liis more energetic stepmother,
credulous to the last degree, he seems to have been
entirely under the control of the hags by whom
he was surrounded, and who harassed and tenified
him Avith fearful predictions and ghastly exhibitions
of all kinds. He docs not appear to have been
naturally a -nicked man, for the very same witches
who Avere aftcnvards leagued ^nth him against the
life of George, he had consulted with a ^iew of cu-
ring his elder brother Robert, by whose death he
would have succeeded to the estates. But being
seized with a lingering illness, and told by his fa-
miliars that the only chance he had of recovering
his health was that his brother should die for him,
he seems quietly to have devoted him to death,
imder the strong instinct of self-presentation. In
order to prevent suspicion, it was agreed that his
death should be lingering and gradual, and the
officiating witch, who seemed to have the same
confidence in her own nicety of calculation as the
celebrated inventress of the poudre de successions,
warranted the victim until the 17th of April fol-
loTiving. It must be admitted that the incantations
wliich followed were well calculated to produce a
strong effect, both moral and physical, on the weak
and credulous being on whom they were played oflf.
CASE OF LADY FOWLIS.
Shortly after midnight, in the month of January,
the witches left the house in which Mr. Hector Avas
lying sick at the time, and passed to a piece of
ground lying betwixt the lands of two feudal su-
periors, where they dug a large grave. Hector
Mu.m'o, wrapped in blankets, was then carried
forth, the bearers all the time remaining dumb,
and silently deposited in the grave, the turf being
laid over him and pressed down with staves. His
foster-mother. Christian Neill, was then ordered
to run the breadth of nine riggs, and returning to
the grave, to ask the chief witch
'^
which was her
choice." She answered that Mr. Hector was her
choice to live, and his brother George to die for
him. This cooling ceremony being thi'ee times
repeated, the patient, fi-ozen with cold and terror,
was carried back to bed. Mr. Hector's witches
were more successful than the hags employed
by
his stepmother. George died in the month of
April, as had been predicted, doubtless by other
spells than the force of sympathy, and Hector ap-
pears to have recovered. He had the
advantage,
however, of a selected jury on his trial, as well as
Lady Fowlis, and had the good fortune to be ac-
quitted.
Scarcely had the agitation produced by
these
trials subsided, when the public mind was
again
confoimded by a new, a more extensive,
and
almost
inexplicable scene of enchantment, directed
against
the life of James and his Queen, in 1591.
64 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
The first liint of those strange proceedings which
were afterwards disclosed, was derived from the con-
fessions of a gii'l named Gellie, or Gellis Drnican,
servant to the Deputy Bailiff of Tranent. Some
sudden cm'cs performed by this girl, and other
suspicious points in her conduct, ha^^Jlg attracted
the observation of her master, he, with a laudable
anxiety for the discovery of the truth,
"
did, with
the help of others, torment her with the torture of
the pillic^vinkis [a species of thumbscrew] upon
her fingers, wliich is a grievous paine, and binding
or wi-enching her head with a cord or rope, which
is a most cruel torment also^.^' But, notwithstand-
ing these persuasive applications, no confession
could be extorted. At last it was suggested by
some of the operators, that her silence was owing
to her haA-ing been marked by the devil, and on a
diligent examination the mark was found on the
fore part of the throat. No sooner was it detected
than the charm was bm'st : she confessed that all
her cm-es were performed by the assistance of the
dcAil, and proceeded to make disclosures relative
to the extent of her gviilt, and the number of asso-
ciates, which utterly eclipse all the preceding
"
dis-
coveries of Avitchcraft," with which the criminal
records fiu'nish us down to this time. Thirty or
forty different individuals, some of whom, as the
pamphlet obsen^es, were "as civill honest women
*
Xews il-om Scotland, declaring the damnable life of Dr. Fian.
—Pitcaim, vol. i.
p.
213.
JAMES THE FIRST.
65
as anie that dwelled within the city of Edinljui'gh/'
were denounced by her, and forthwith apprehended
upon her confession. Nor was this list confined to
the lower classes, from whom the victims offered
to this superstition had generally
been selected
;
for among those apprehended on Duncan's infor-
mation was Euphemia Macalzean, the daughter of
Lord Cliftonhall, one of the senators of the Col-
lege of Justice.
To trace out the wide field of witchcraft which
was opened to him by the confessions of the ac-
cused, as they were successively examined, was an
employment highly congenial to the credulous
mind of James, prone to every superstition, and
versed in all the traditionary lore of Sprenger and
Bodinus. Day after day he attended the exami-
nations in person, was put into a
"
wonderful ad-
miration^' by every new trait of grotesque horror
which their confessions disclosed, and even carried
his curiosity so far as to send for Gellie Duncan
herself, who had, according to the confession of
another witch, Agnes Sampson (the wise wife of
Keith), played a reel or dance before the witches,
as they moved in procession to meet the devil in
the kirk of North Berwick, in order that he might
himself listen to this infernal air
—
" who upon the
like trumpe did play the said dance before the
King's majestic, who, in respect of the strangeness
of these matters, took great delight to be present
at these examinations."
G6 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT,
All these disclosures, liowever, it may be antici-
pated, were not without a liberal application of the
usual compulsitor in such cases—the torture. The
chief sufferer was a person named Cuningham, who
figures in the trials under the name of Dr. Fian,
a schoolmaster near Tranent, and apparently a per-
son of dissolute character, although, as appeared
fi'om his conduct on tliis inquisition, also of sin-
gidar strength of mind and firmness of nem^e. He
was put to the question,
"first,
by thrawing of his
head Avith a rope, whereat he woidd confess nothing;
secondhj, he was persuaded by fair
means to confess
his folly," (woidd it not have been as natural to
have tried the fail' means first
?)
"
but that Avould
prevail as little; lastly, he was put to the most
cruel and severe pam in the world, called the
Boots^, who, after he had received three strokes,
being inquired if he would confess his damnable
acts and wicked life, his tongue would not serve
him to speak." Being released from this instru-
ment of torture, he appears, imder the influence
of the agony produced by it, to have subscribed a
confession, embracing not only the alleged charges
of conspiracy against the King by means of witch-
craft, but a variety of particulars relative to his
own life and conversation, by no means of an edi-
fying character.
*
We need hardly remind our readers ofthe torture of Macbriar
bv the Boots, before the Privy Council, in the
'
Tales of my
Landlord.'
TORTURES. 67
But the weight to be attached to this confession
was soon made apparent by what followed; for
Fian, who had been recommitted to prison, and
who had appeared for a day or two to be "very
soHtarye" and penitent, contrived in the course of
the next night to make his escape, and on his re-
apprehension and second examination thought fit,
to the great discomposure of James, to deny the
whole of the charges which he had previously ad-
mitted.
"
Whereupon the King's majestic, per-
cei\ing his stubborn wilfolnesse," prescribed the
following remedy for his relapse.
"
His nayles
upon his fingers were riven and pulled with an in-
strument called in Scottish a Turkas*. And under
every naile there was thrust in two needles over
even up to the heads. At all which torments, not-
withstanding, the doctor never shrunke anie whitt,
neither would he then confess it the sooner for all
the tortures inflicted upon him. Then was he with
all convenient speed by commandment conveyed
again to the torment of the boots, where he con-
tinued a long time, and abode so many blows in
them that his legs were crushed and beaten toge-
ther as small as might be, and the bones and flesh
so bruised, that the blood and marrow spouted
forth in great abundance, whereby they were made
unserviceable for ever."
The doctor,. it will be seen, did not long reqrdre
their services ; but whether his confession was ob-
*
Old French, Turquois, a smith's pmcers, fi'om torquere.
p 3
G8 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
tained by fair means or foul, it certainly bears so
startling a resemblance to that of the leading
witch, Agnes Sampson, a woman whom Spottis-
wood describes as
"
matron-like, grave and settled
in her answers," that it is hardly to be wondered
at that the superstitious mind of James should
have been confounded by the coincidence. No-
thing, in fact, can exceed the general harmony of
the accounts given by the different \vitches of their
proceedings, except the ludicrous and yet hon'ible
character of the incidents which they record, and
which might well extort, even from James himself,
the observation he appears to have made in the
commencement of the proceedings, that they were
all
"
extreme lyars."
James, it appears, fr'om his singular piety, and
the active part which, long before the composi-
tion of his
'
Dsemonologie,' he had taken against
Satan and his invisible world, had been, from the
first, most obnoxious to his servants upon earth.
On one occasion, when an unsuccessful attempt
had been made against his life, the fiend pleaded
(though we do not see why a Scotch devil should
speak French) that he had no power over him,
adding,
"
II est homme de Dieu'^." The A-isit
which, in a sudden fit of romantic gallantry, he
paid to Norway, to bring over his queen, was too
favourable an opportunity for the instruments of
Satan to be neglected; and accordingly it was re-
*
Sir James Melville,
p.
294.
CONVENTION OF WITCHES. 69
solved by the conclave that every exertion should
be made to raise such a tempest as should infal-
libly put an end to the greatest enemy (as Satan
himself confidentially admitted to one of the
mtches) whom the devil ever had in the world.
The preparations were therefore commenced with
all due solemnity. Satan undertook^ in the first
instance^ to raise a mist so as to strand the King
on the English coast, but, more active measures
being thought necessary, Dr. Fian, as the devil's
secretary, or register, as he is called throughout
these trials, addressed a letter to a distingiiished
-ndtch, Marion Linkup, and others of the sister-
hood, directing them to meet their master on the
sea within five days, for the purpose of destroying
the King^. On All-hallowmas Eve the infernal
partj^, to the number of about two hundred, em-
barked,
"
each in a riddle or sieve, and went into
the same very substantially." In what latitude
they met with Satan is not stated, but after some
cruizing about he made his appearance, and deh-
vered to Robert Grierson a cat, which it appears
had previously been drawn nine times through the
cruikt, giving the Avord to
"
cast the same into the
sea! Hola!" And this notable charm was not
Avithout its efiect, for James, whose fleet was at
that time clearing the Danish coast, afterwards
*
Pitcairn, vol. i.
p.
211.
f
Crook—the hook from which pots are himg oyer a Scottish
kitchen fii'e.
I
70 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
declared that his ship alone had the wind contrary,
while all the other vessels had a fair one.
The charm upon the water being finished, the
witches landed, and after enjoying themselves with
wine, which they drank out of the same sieves in
which they had previously sailed so
"
substan-
tially," they moved on in procession towards the
kirk of North Berwick, which had been fixed on
as their place of rendezvous with their master. The
company exceeded one hundred, of whom thirty-
two are enumerated in Agnes Sampson's confes-
sion. And they were preceded by Gellie Dmican,
playing upon the Jew's-harp the following ditty
:
"
Cummer, goe ye before, dimmer, goe ye,
Gif ye will not go before, Cimimer, let me
!
"
Here their master was to appear in a character
less common in Scotland than on the Continent,
that of a preacher. Doctor Fian, who, as the
devil's register, took the lead in the ceremonies at
the kirk, blew up the doors, and blew in the lichts,
which resembled black candles sticking round
about the pulpit, while another of the party. Grey
Meill, acted as door-keeper. Suddenly the de\dl
himself started up in the pulpit, attired in a gown
and hat, both black. The sketch of his appear-
ance given in Sir James Mehdlle's IVIemoirs has
something of the power and pictm-esqueness of
Dante.
"
His body was hard lyk ym, as they
thocht that handled him; his faice was terrible,
his nose lyk the bek of an egle, gret bournyng
DR. FIAN. 71
eyn " (occlii di bragia) ;
"
liis hanclis and leggis
were berry, with clawis upon his handis, and feit
lyk the Griffin, and spak with a how voice/^ He
first called the roll of the congregation, to which
each answered by name; he then demanded of
them whether they had been good servants, what
they had done since the last time they had con-
vened, and what had been the success of their
conjurations against the King. Gray Meill, the
doorkeeper, who was rash enough to remark, that
"
naething ailet the King yet, God be thankit,'^
was rewarded for this mal-a'propos observation by
a great blow. The devil then proceeded to admo-
nish them to keep his commandments, which were
simply to do all the evil they could; on his leav-
ing the pulpit, the whole congregation, male and
female, did homage to him, by saluting him in a
way and manner which we must leave those who
are curious in such ceremonies to ascertain from
the original indictments.
Such is the strange story in which all the cri-
minals examined before James and the Council
substantially agree; and unquestionably the sin-
gular coincidence of their narratives remains at
this day one of the most difficult problems in the
pliilosophy of Scottish history. The fate of the un-
fortunate beings who confessed these enormities
could not, in that age of credulity, be for a moment
doubtful. Fian, to whom, after the inhuman tor-
tures to which he had been subjected, life could
t\C MAGIC A\D WITCHCRAFT.
jiot be of much value, was condemned, strangled,
and burnt. Agnes Sampson underwent a similar
fate. Barbara Napier, another person said to have
been present at the convention, though acquitted
of this charge, was condemned on certain other
charges of sorcery in the indictment: but so
strongly Avas the mind of James excited, that,
though he had secured a conviction against her, he
actually brought the assize to trial for wiKul error
in acqiutting her on this point of dittay.
But the most distinguished %dctim connected
with this scene of witchcraft was Euphemia Mac-
alzean, the daughter of an eminent judge, Lord
Cliftouhall, a woman of strong mind and licen-
tious passions, a devoted adherent to the Roman
Catholic faith, a partisan of Bothwell (who Avas
accused by several of the Avitches as implicated
in these practices against the King^s life), and a
determined enemy to James and to the Reformed
religion. ^\Tiatever may have been the precise
extent of this lady's acquirements in sorcery, there
can be no doubt that she had been on terms of the
most famihar intercourse with abandoned wretches
of both sexes, pretenders to witchcraft, and that
she had repeatedly employed their aid in attempt-
ing to remove out of the way persons who were
obnoxious to her, or who stood in the way of the
indulgence of her passions. The number of sor-
ceries, poisonings, and attempts at poisoning,
charcrcd agrainst her in the indictment, almost
EUPHEMIA MACALZEAN. VO
rivals the accusations against Brinvilliers ; and,
though the jury acquitted her of several of these,
they competed her of participation in the murder
of her own godfather, of her husband's nephew,
and of Douglas of Pennfrastone ; besides being
present at the convention of North Berwick, and
various other meetings of witches, at which the
King's death had been contrived. Her pmiishment
was the severest which the com-t could pronounce
:
instead of the ordinary sentence, directing her to
be first strangled at a stake and then burned, the
unhappy woman was doomed to be
"
bund to ane
staik and burnt in assis, quick, to the death," a
fate which she endured with the greatest firmness,
on the 25th of June, 1591. So deep and perma-
nent was the impression made by these scenes upon
the King's mind, that we owe to them the prepa-
ration of an Act of Parliament anent the form of
process against witches, mentioned among the un-
printed acts for 1597, and more immediately the
composition of that notable work of the Scottish
Solomon, the
'
DEemonologie.'
In the trials of Bessie Roy, of James Reid, of
Patrick Currie, of Isobel Grierson, and of Grizel
Gardiner"^, the charges are principally of taking
ofi" and laying on diseases either on men or cattle
;
meetings with the devil in various shapes and
places ; raising and dismembering dead bodies for
the pm-pose of enchantments; destroying crops
j
*
Just. Eecords, 1590-1610.
74 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
scaring lionest persons in the sliape of cats ; taking
away women's milk; committing housebreaking
and theft by means of encbantmentSj and so on.
South-running water^ salt^ rowan-tree^ enchanted
flints (probably elf-arrow heads), and doggrel verses
(generally a translation of the Creed or Lord's
Prayer) were the means employed for effecting a
cure. Diseases again were laid on by forming pic-
tures of clay or wax, which were placed before the
fire or bmied Aiith the heads downward ; by pla-
cing a dead hand, or some mutilated member, in
the house of the intended victim ; or, as in the
case of Grierson, by the simpler process of tlirow-
ing an enchanted tailzie (slice) of beef against his
door. It Avas immaterial whether the supposed
powers of the A^tch were exerted for good or CA-il,
In the case of Grie\'e, no malefice (to use the tech-
nical term) was charged against him, but simply
that he had cured diseases by means of charms;
and the same in the case of Alison Pearson ; but
both were executed. Bartie Paterson seems to
have been the most pious of warlocks, for his pa-
tients Avere uniformly directed, in addition to his
prescriptions, to
"
ask theu' health at all livand
vrichtis abone or under the earth, in the name of
Jesus." The trial of Robert Erskine of Dim,
though given as one for witchcraft, seems to have
been a simple case of poisoning, he haA-ing merely
resorted to a notorious AA-itch, named ]\Iargaret
Ir\"ine, for the herbs by which he despatched his
CHARLES THE FIRST. 75
nephews. The case of Margaret Wallace^ towards
the close of James's reign^ deserves notice as being
the first where something like a stand was made
against some of the fundamental positions of the
demonologists
3
the counsel for the prisoner con-
tending strongly against the doctrine that^ in the
case of a person accused of witchcraft^ eveiy cure
performed by her was to be set down to the agency
of the devil. The defence however, though it seems
to have been ably conducted, was unsuccessfid.
Matters continued much in the same state dur-
ing the reign of Charles I. From 1625 to 1640
there are eight entries of trials for witchcraft on
the Record, one of which, that of Elizabeth Bath-
gate, is remarkable, as being followed by an acquit-
tal. In that of Katharine Oswald"^, the prisoner's
counsel had the boldness to argue, that no credit
was to be given to the confessions of the other
witches, who had sworn to the presence of the
prisoner at some of their orgies ;
"
for all lawyers
agree," argued he,
"
that they are not really trans-
ported, but only in their fancies, while asleep, in
wliich they sometimes dream they see others there."
This reasoning however appears to have made no
impression on the jury, any more than the argu-
ment in Yoimg's casef, that the stoppage of the
mill, which she was accused of having effected
*
Most of tlie cases here cited are found in the Justiciary
Eecords, from about 1605 to 1640.
t
Feb.
4,
1629.
76 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
twenty-nine years before, by sorceiy^ might have
been the effect of natural causes. About one-half
of the condctions dm-ing this period proceed on
judicial confessions ; whether voluntary or extorted
does not appear. Tliey are not in general interest-
ingj though some of the details in the trial of Ha-
milton* differ a little from the ordinary routine of
the witch trials of the time. Ha\'ing met the de^il
on Kingston Hills, in East Lothian, he was per-
suaded by the tempter to renoimce his baptism—
a
piece of apostasy for which he received only four
shillings. The dcA-il fui-ther directed him to em-
ploy the following polite adjuration when he wished
to raise him, namely, to beat the ground three
times with his stick, and say,
"
Rise up, foul thief!''
On the other hand, the devil's beha\'iour towards
him was equally unceremonious; for on one oc-
casion, when Hamilton had neglected to keep his
appointment, he gave him a severe drubbing with
a baton.
The scene darkens however, towards the close
of this reign, with the increasing dominion of the
Puritans. In 1640 the General Assembly passed
an act, that all ministers should take particular
note of witches and charmers, and that the com-
missioners should recommend to the supreme judi-
cature the tmsparing application of the laws against
them. In 1643 (August
19),
after setting forth the
increase of the crime, they recommend the grant-
*
Just. Eecords, Jan. 1630.
THE PURITANS, 77
ing a standing commission from tlie Privy Council
or Justiciary to any
"
understanding gentlemen or
I
magistrates," to apprehend, try, and execute jus-
I
tice against the delinquents. The subject appears
[
to have been resumed in 1644, 1645, and 1649;
I
and their remonstrances, it would seem, had not
been without eflFect, for in 1649, the year after the
execution of Charles, an Act of ParHament was
passed confirming and extending the pro^dsions
of Queen Mary^s, so as more effectually to reach
consulters Avith witches, in regard to whom it was
thought (though we do not see why) that the
terms of the former act were a little equivocal.
From tliis time, not only does the number of con-
victions, which since the death of James had been
on the decline, increase, but the features of the
cases assume a deeper tinge of horror. The old,
impossible, and abominable fancies of the 'Malleus'
were revived in the trials of Janet Barker and
Margaret Lauder"^, which correspond in a remark-
able manner with some of the evidence in the Mora
trials. About thirty trials appear on the record
between this last date and the Restoration, only
one of which appears to have terminated in an ac-
quittal; while at a single circuit-court, held at
Glasgow, Stirling, and Ayr, in 1659, seventeen per-
sons were convicted and burnt for this crime.
Numerous however as are the cases in the
Records of Justiciary, it, must be kept in ^dew
*
Just. Eec, Dec. 1643.
/» MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
that these afford an extremely inadequate idea of
the extent to which this pest prevailed over the
countiy. For though Sir George Mackenzie doubts
whether, in virtue merely of the general powers
given by the act, 1563, inferior judges did at any
time, of their own authority, try and condemn
criminals accused of witchcraft, the same end was
managed in a different Avay. The Court of Jus-
ticiaiy was anxious to get rid of a jimsdiction
which would alone have afforded them sufficient
employment ; and the Privy Council were in use to
grant commissions to resident gentlemen and mi-
nisters, to examine, and afterwards to try and exe-
cute, AA-itches all over Scotland; and so numerous
were these commissions, that Wodrow expresses
his astonishment at the number found in the Re-
gisters. Under these commissions multitudes were
bm-nt in every part of the kingdom. In Mercer^s
Manuscript Diary, Lamont's Diary, and TMiite-
lock's jMemorials, occasional notices of the num-
bers burnt are peiiDCtually occurring.
In every case of the kind it would appear that
the clergy displayed the most intemperate zeal.
It was before them that the poor wretches
"
de-
lated" of witchcraft were first brought for exami-
nation,—in most cases after a preparatoiy course
of solitary confinement, cold, famine, want of sleep,
or actual torture. On some occasions the clergy
themselves actiially pci^formed the part of the
prickers, and inserted long pins into the flesh of
THE RESTOKzVTTON.
79
the witches in order to try their sensibility ; and
in all they laboiu'ed^ by the most persevering in-
vestigations, to obtain from the accused a confes-
sion, which might afterwards be used against them
on their trial, and which in more than one instance,
even though retracted, formed the sole evidence on
which the convictions proceeded. In some cases,
where the charge against the criminal was that
she was
"
habit and repute a witch," the notoriety
of her character was proved before the Justiciary
Court by the oath of a minister, just as habit and
repute is now proved in cases of theft by that of a
police officer.
Though the tide of popular delusion in regard to
this crime may be said to have turned during the
reign of Charles II., its opening was perhaps more
bloody than that of any of its predecessors. In
the first year after the Restoration
(1661),
about
twenty persons appear to have been condemned by
the Justiciary Coiu't, two ofwhom, though acquitted
on their first trial, were condemned on the second
on new charges. The numbers executed through-
out the country are noticed by Lamont. Four-
teen commissions for trials in the provinces ap-
pear to have been issued by the Privy Council in
one day (November
7,
1661). Of the numbers of
nameless wretches who died and made no sign,
under the hands of those
"
understanding gentle-
men'^ (as the General Assembly's overture styles
them) to whom the commissions were granted,
80 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
it is now almost impossible to form a conjecture.
In reference however to tlie course of procedure
in sucli cases, we may refer to some singular ma-
nuscripts relative to the examination of two con-
fessing witches in Morayshire in 1663, in the
possession of the family of Rose, of Kilravock;
more particularly as the details they contain are,
both from their minuteness and the unparalleled
singularity of their contents, far more striking
than anytliing to be fomid on the Records of
Justiciary about this time.
The names of these crazed beldames were Isobel
Gowdie and Janet Braidhead. Two of the latter's
examinations are preserved ; the former appears to
have been four times examined at different dates
between the 13th April and 27th May, 1662, be-
fore the sheriff and several gentlemen and mmis-
ters of the neighbourhood ; and on one of these is
a marldng by the Justice Depute Colville, as fol-
lows
:
—
''
Having read and considered the confes-
sion of Isobel Gowdie, Avithin contained, as paction
Avith Sathan, renunciation of baptism, with divers
malefices, I find that a commission may be vciy
justly given for her last trial.
—
A. Colville^.'' The
confessions are written under the hand of a notary
pixblic, and subscribed by all the clergymen, gen-
*
The paper is mai-ked on the back,
"
Edinburgh, July 10th,
1662 : considered and found relevant by the Justice Depute."
The part of Janet Braidhead's deposition, which appears to have
boiiie a suuilar marking by the Justice Depute, is torn off.
ISOBEL GOWDIE. 81
tlemen, and otlier witnesses present ; as would ap-
pear to have been the practice where the precogni-
tions were to be transmitted to the Justiciary, with
the view of obtaining a commission to try and
punish the crime. What the result of Isobel Gow-
die^s
"
last trial" was, it is easy, fi'om the nature of
her confessions, to conjecture.
"
Nou ragioniam di lor, ma guarda, e passa."
Though examined on four different occasions, at
considerable intervals of time, and imdoubtedly
undergoing solitary confinement in the interim, so
minute and invariable are the accounts given by
Gowdie in particular, of the whole life and conver-
sation of the witches to whom she belonged, that a
pretty complete institute of infernal science might
be compiled from her confession. The distinctness
with which the visions seem to have haunted her,
the consistency they had assumed in her own mind,
and yet the inconceivable absmxlity and monstro-
sity of these conceptions, to many of which we
cannot even allude, furnish some most important
contributions to the history of hypochondriac in-
sanity.
Her devotion to the ser^dce of the devil took
place in the kirk of Auldearn, where she was bap-
tized by him with the name of Janet, being
held
up by a companion, and the devil sucking the blood
from her shoulder^. The band or coven to which
*
Her fellow-witch, Braidhead, was baptized by the very ia-
ajipropriate name of Christian.
82 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
tliey belonged consisted of thirteen (whose names
she enumerates, and some of whom appear to
have been apprehended upon her delation), that
being the usual number of the covens. Each is
provided -vnth an officer, whose duty it is to repeat
the names of the party after Satan; and a maiden,
who seems to hold sway over the women, and who
is the particular favourite of the devil, is placed
at his right hand at feasts. A grand meeting of
the covens takes place quarterly, when a ball is
given. Each \ntch has a "sprite" to wait upon
her, some appearing "in sad dun, some in grass
green, some in sea green, some in yellow." Those
of Gowdie's coven were,
"
Robert the Jakes, San-
ders the Reed-Reever, Thomas the Faiiy, Swein
the Roaring Lion, Thief of Hell wait-upon-herself,
MacIIector," and so on. Some of these spirits,
it wotdd appear, did not stand high in Isobel's
opinion ; for Robert the Jakes, she says, was aged,
and seemed to be
"
a gowkit glaikit spirit." Each
of the -witches too received a sobriquet, by which
they were generally knoAAn''^. Satan himself had
several spirits to wait upon him; "sometimes he
had boots and sometimes shoes upon his feet, but
still his feet are forked and cloven.'^ The witches,
it appears, occasionally took considerable liberties
with his character, on which occasions Satan, on
*
This seems to have been a common practice in the Infernal
ritual. Law gives the nicknames of the Renfrewshire witches,
in the Bangarran Case. (Memorials,
p. 122.)
AMUSEMENTS OF WITCHES. 83
detecting the calumny, used to beat the delinquents
"up and down like naked gaists" with a stick, as
Charon does the naked spirits in the 'Inferno/
with his oar. (Cant, iii.) He found it much more
easy however to deal with the warlocks than with
the fair sex. "Alexander Elder/' says the confess-
ing witch,
"
was soft, and could not defend him-
self, and did naething but greit and crye while he
will be scourging him ; but INIargaret Wilson in
Aiddearn would defend herself finely, and cast up
her hands to cape the blows, and Bessie Wilson
would speak crustily with her tongue, and would
be bellin again to him stoutly."
The amusements and occupations of the witches
are described with the same firmness and minute-
ness of drawing. When the devil has appointed
an infernal diet, the witches leave behind them, in
bed, a besom or three-legged stool, which assumes
their shape till their retm'n, a feature exactly cor-
responding with the Mora trials. When proceed-
ing to the spot where their work is to be performed,
they either adopt the shape of cats, hares, etc., or
else, mounting upon corn or bean straws, and pro-
nouncing the following charm,
—
"
Horse and hattock, horse and go,
Horse and pellats, ho ! ho
!"
they are borne through the air to the place of their
destination. If any see these straws in motion,
and "do not sanctify themselves," the witches
may shoot them dead. This feat they perform
g2
84 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
Avitli elf-arrow heads, which are manufactm'ccT by
Satan himself; and his assistants the elf boys, who
are described, like the Scandina\dan trolls, as
little humpbacked creatures who speak "goustie
like" (gruffly) ; each witch receiving from Satan a
certain number of these
"
Freischiitze." A list of
forty or fifty persons is given by the witch, who
had been destroyed by herself and her companions,
by these means ; while she also mentions that she
had made an unsuccessful attempt against the life
of Mr. Harry Forbes, minister of Auldearn, one of
the witnesses actually present and subscriljing her
confession.
Another attempt against the life of this minister
is described very grapliically. The instrument
employed was
"
a bag made of the flesh and guts
and galls of toads, the liver of a hare, pickles of
corn, parings of nails, of feet, and toes," which
olio being steeped all night, and mixed secundum
artem by Satan himself, was consecrated by a
charm dictated by Satan, and repeated by the
witches,
"
all on their knees, and their hair about
their shoulders and eyes, holding up their hands,
and looking stedfastly on the devil, that he might
destroy the said Mr. Harry." This composition
one of the witches, who made her way into the
minister's chamber, attempted to throw upon him,
but was prevented by the presence of some other
holy men in the room. Another composition of
the same kind, intended for the destruction of the
ANECDOTES OF WITCHES. 85
lairds of Park and Lochloy, was more successful^
as appears from the deposition of the other witch,
Janet Braidhead. Having prepared the venom,
"
they came to Inshock in the night time, and scat-
tered it up and down, above and about the gate,
and other places, where the lairds and their sons
would most haunt. And then we, in the likeness
of crows and rooks^, stood above the gate, and in
the trees opposite the gate. It was appointed so
that, if any of them shoiild touch or tramp upon
any of it, as well as that it or any of it fall on them,
it should strike them with boils and kill them,
which it did, and they shortly died. We did it to
make this house heirless.'^
It is needless to pursue further these strange
details, which however form a valuable appendix
to the records at that time.
It would seem as if the 'sdolence of this popular
*
Taking the form of foul and ominous birds was a favour-
ite practice of witches in all ages. Apuleius, in his character
of Lucius, thus describes the metamorphosis of his hostess at
Larissa
:
—
"Pamphile divested herself of all her garments, and opening
a certain cabinet took out of it a number of boxes. From one of
these slie selected a salve, and anoiated herself from head to foot
;
and after much muttering, she began to rock and wave herself
to and fro. Presently a soft down covered her limbs, and a paii*
of wings sprang from her shoulders : her nose became a beak
:
her nails talons. Pamphile was now in form a complete owl.
Then uttering a low shriek she began to jump from the floor,
and after a brief while flew out of the window and vanished.
She winged her way, I was assured by Fotis, to some expectant
lover. And this was the last I saw of the old lady."
86 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
delirium began after 1662 to relax. An interval
of six years now occurs without a trial for this
crime, while the record bears that James Welsh
"^
was ordered to be publicly whipped for accusing se-
veral individuals of it,—a fate which he was hardly
likely to have encountered some years before.
Fountainliall, in noticing the case of the ten poor
women convicted on their own confession in
1678tj,
obviously speaks of the whole aftair with great
doubt and hesitation. And Sir George Mackenzie,
in his
'
Criminal Law,^ the first edition of which
appeared in the same year, though he does not
yet venture to deny the existence of the crime or
the expediency of its pmdshment, lays down many
principles very inconsistent with the practice of
the preceding century.
"
From the horridness of
the crime," says he, "I do conclude that of all
crimes it requires the clearest relevancy and most
convincing probature ; and I condemn, next to the
wretches themselves, those cruel and too forward
judges who burn persons by thousands as guilty
of this crime." And accordingly, acting on these
humane and cautious principles. Sir George, in his
Report to the Judges in 1680, relative to a num-
ber of persons then in prison for this crime, stated
that their confessions had been procured by torture,
and that there seemed to be no other proof against
them, on which they were set at liberty. "
Since
*
Just. Eecords. Jan.
27, 1662.
t
Vol. i. Decisions,
p.
14.
SUPERSTITIOUS ENTHUSIASM. 87
n liich time/' adds Lord Royston,
"
there has been
no trial for this crime before that court, nor before
any other court, that I know of, except one at
Paisley by commission from the Privy Council in
aimo 1697." This observation of Lord Royston
is not altogether correct. The trial at Paisley to
v\ hich he alludes is evidently the noted case of the
Renfrewshire witches, tried on a charge of sorcery
against a girl named Christian Shaw, the daughter
of Shaw of Bargarran. The conviction of the ac-
cused apj)ears to have taken place principally on
tiie evidence of the girl herself, who in the pre-
sence of the commissioners played off a series of
ecstasies and convulsion fits, similar to those by
which the nuns of Loudon had sealed the fate of
Grandier the century before. In this atrocious
case, the Commissioners (in the Report presented
by them to the Privy Council, 9th March,
1697),
reported that there were twenty-four persons, male
and female, suspected of being concerned in the
sorceries ; and among them, it is to be observed,
is a girl of fom'teen, and a boy not twelve years
of age. After this, we almost feel surprised that
out of about twenty who were condemned, only five
appear to have been executed. They were burnt
on the gi-een at Paisley. The last trial before the
Court of Justiciary was that of Elspet Ride, tried
before Lord Anstruther, on the Dumfries circuit,
3rd of May, 1708, where the prisoner, though con-
victed by a plurality of voices, was merely sentenced
88 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
to be biu-ned on the cheek and banished Scotland
for life. The last execution which took place was
that of an old woman in the parish of Loth, ex-
ecuted at Dornoch in 1722, by sentence of the
Sheriff depute of Caithness, Captam David Koss,
of Little Dean.
"
It is said, that being brought
out for execution, the weather proving very severe,
she sat composedly warming herself by the fire,
while the other instruments of death were made
ready
!"
So ends in Scotland the tragical part of the his-
tory of Avitchcraft. In 1735, as already mentioned,
the penal statutes were repealed ; much to the an-
noyance however of the Seeeders, who, in their an-
nual confession of national sins, printed in an act of
their Associate Presbytery at Edinburgh, in 1743,
enumerated, as a gi'ievous transgression, the repeal
of the penal statutes
"
contrary to the express laws
of God
\"
And though in remote districts the belief
may yet linger in the minds of the ignorant, it has
now, like the belief in ghosts, alchemy, or second
sight, only that sort of vague hold on the fancy
which enables the poet and romance \\Titer to adapt
it to the purposes of fiction, and therewith to point
a moral or adorn a tale. And, of a truth, no un-
important moral is to be gathered from the consi-
deration of the history of this delusion ; namely,
the danger of encouraging those enthusiastic con-
ceits of the possibility of direct spiritual influence,
which, in one shape or other, and even in oui' own
SUPERSTITIOUS
ENTHUSIASM. 89
days, are found to haunt the brain of the weak
and presumptuous. For it is but the same prin-
ciple which lies at the bottom of the persecutions
of the witches, and which shows itself in the
quietism of Bourignon, the reveries of Madame
Guyon, the raptures of Sister Nativity, the pro-
phecies of Naylor, the dreams of Dr. Dee, or Swe-
denborg^s prospect of the New Jerusalem
;
still but
an emanation ofthat spirit of pride, which, refusing
to be
"
but a little lower than the angels," asserts
an immediate communion and equality with them,
and Avhich, according to the temper of the patient,
feeds him with the gorgeous visions of quietism,
or impels him, like a furious Malay, along the path
of persecution. Some persons assert that, in this
nineteenth century of ours, we have no enthusiasm.
On the contrary, we have a great deal too much
:
at no period has enthusiasm of the worst kind
been more rife ; witness the impostures of South-
cott and Hohenlohe, and the thousand phantasies
which are daily running their brief course of popu-
larity. At no time has that calenture of the brain
been more widely diffused, which, as it formerly
converted every natural occurrence into the actual
agency of the devil, now transforms every leader of
a petty circle into a saint, and invests him with
the garb and dignity of an apostle. Daily, are the
practical and active duties of life more neglected
under the influence of this principle ; the charity
which thinketh no evil of others daily becomes
90 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
more rare; the stream of benevolence wliich of
old stole deep and silently tlirougli the haunts of
poverty and sickness at home, is now but poorly
compensated by being occasionally throAvn up in a
few pompous and useless jets, at public subscrip-
tions for distant objects ; while even in those whose
minds are untinctured by the grosser evils to which
enthusiasm gives rise, life passes away in vain
and illusive dreams of self-complacent superiority,
Avhicli, as they are based only in pride and consti-
tutional susceptibility, rarely endure when age
and infirmity have shaken or removed the mate-
rials out of Avhich they were reared. Thus, the en-
thusiast who, like Mirza, has been contemplating
through the long day the Elysian islands that lie
beyond the gulf, and already walking in a fancied
communion with their myrtle-crowned inhabitants,
feels, in spite of all his efforts, that, as evening
creeps upon the landscape, the phantasmagoria
becomes dimmer and more dim; the bridge, the
islands, the genius who stood beside them disap-
pear
;
till at last nothing remains for him but his
own long hollow valley of Bagdad, with its oxen,
sheep, and camels grazing on its sides
;
—this sol)er,
weary, working world, in short, with all its cares
and duties, through which, if he had been wisely
fulfilling the end for which he was sent into it,
he should have been labouring onward with a be-
neficent actiAity, not idly dreaming by the way-
side of the Eden for which he is bound ; and so he
PAGAN WITCHCRAFT. 91
awakes to a conscioiisness of his true vocation in
life wlien he is on the point of lea\ing it, and per-
ceives the value and the paramount necessity of
exertion, only when youth, with its opportunities,
and its energies, lies behind him for ever, like the
shadows of a dream.
The work of Church-Councillor Horst, and the
review of its principal contents, leave however one
hemisphere at least of the subject of Magic, The-
urgy, and Necromancy unnoticed. These arts, or
at least the popular belief in them, are much more
ancient than any of the forms of Christianity, and
were, in fact, a most unlucky legacy bequeathed by
Paganism to the creeds which supplanted it. It
needs no ghost to tell the reader hoAV firmly the
ancients believed in all supernatural influences
:
how populous, in their conceptions, were the ele-
ments with omens, portents, and prodigies; how
abject and unreasoning was their credulity; and
how dependent both their public and their domes-
tic life upon the exorcisms of the priest and the
science of the augm*. The Canidias and Ericthos
of antiquity were not mere creations of the poets
;
the most sober and sceptical of historians does not
disdain to relate that,
in the house of the dying
Germanicus, were found bm'nt bones and disse-
vered limbs of dead bodies ; and the most philoso-
phical of the Roman poets recounts with compla-
92 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
cent gravity the charms by which the dead might
be evoked^ or the faithless lover recalled by his
forsaken mistress. Nor did the belief in witches
and supernatm-al agencies decay or decline with
the disbelief in the state-religion which marked
the latter ages of the Roman Empire. On the
contrary, as scepticism increased in one direction,
credulity and abject superstition grew and prevailed
in another. Neither were these infirmities of the
mind by any means confined to the ^a^lgar or the
profane. The later Platonists were deeply infected
with the malady of superstition, and there are few
more cmnous chapters in the history of human
inconsistency, than the lives of many of the philo-
sophers, who argued against the being of a God,
and who trembled if a hare crossed their path, at
a sinister flight of crows, or at a sudden encounter
^vith a beldame or a blackamoor in the gi'ey of the
morning.
The magical art of the ancients, more especially
towards the decline of Pagandom, was indeed of
an extremely dark and atrocious complexion. Un-
mindful of the wise and reverent forbearance of
the poet of the iEneid
—
"
Sin has ne possim naturae accedere partes
Frigidus obstiterit circum praecordia sanguis,"
—
the ancient wizards pried, or affected to pry, into
the very
"
incunabula \it0e." Could we recover a
few of those books which the sorcerers at Corinth
burned and brought the price of them to St. Paul,
LUCIAN AND APULEIUS. 93
'we should probably find in tlieir pages^ among
some curious physical or medical secrets^ nearly all
the elements of a cruel and obscene superstition.
Rome, we know, was both early and deeply in-
fected with the orgiastic worship of the East, and
especially with the impure ceremonies of the priests
of Isis. It was of no avail to level to the ground
the Isiac chapels, and to banish their ministers.
In an age of unbelief there was a passion for the
mysteries of darkness; and although Christianity
gradually superseded Paganism in form, the spirit
of the latter long survived in the multitude, and
especially among the ignorant rural population.
James Grimm, in his erudite work upon the
'
An-
tiquities of the German Race,' traces with great
acuteness the connection between the superstitions
of the Dark Ages and the magical formularies of
Heathenism. The spells of witches, the abraca-
dabra of quacks, and the loathsome furniture of
Sidrophel's laboratory are genuine descendants of
the impostures and abominations which were prac-
tised for ages both in the Roman and Parthian
empires.
In Lucian and Apuleius indeed we are presented
with a singular and terrible aspect of social ex-
istence. The most ordinary acts and functions of
life were believed to be affected by the invisible
powers, and those powers were supposed to be
willing to do service to all who were malignant
enough to seek their aid, and fearless enough to
94 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
serve the apprenticesliip whicli was demanded of
them. It is easy to decry the weakness and detect
the absurdity of such a creed. Yet it was be-
lieved : it excited terror : it nurtured revenge : it
wrought withering and wastmg eflPects upon the
feeble and the credulous : it cast a dark shade
over life : it was potent over the sinews of the
strong and over the bloom of the beautiful : it
exercised
"
upon the inmost mind" all
"
its fierce
accidents/' and preyed upon the pui-est spii'its,
"As on entrails, joints and limbs,
With answerable pains, but more intense."
It is idle to regard such a belief as a mere su-
perficial or individual superstition. It pervaded
all ranks of society, from the philosopher who dis-
puted about a first cause, and the magistrate who
\iewed religion in the light of a useful system of
police, to the shepherd who watched Orion and the
Pleiades, and the miner who rarely beheld either
sun or star. It was an erroneous, but it was an
earnest, belief ^^•hich di'ove men to consult with
diviners, and to question the elements for signs
and wonders.
Availing ourselves of Sir George Head's excel-
lent translation, we extract from the
'
Golden Ass'
of Apuleius a story Avhich, to our conceptions, is
unsiu'passed for its horror by any of the di'cariest
legends of Pagan or Medieval sorcery.
"
My master, the baker, was a well-behaved, to-
lerably good man, but his wife, of all the women
THE baker's
wife. 95
in the world, was the most wicked creature in
existence, and continually rendered his home such
a painful scene of tribtdation to him, that, by Her-
cules, many is the time and oft that I have silently
deplored his fate. The heart of that most detes-
table woman was like a common cess-pool, where
all the evil dispositions of om- nature were collected
together. She was cruel, treacherous, malevolent,
obstinate, penurious^ yet profuse in expenses of
dissipation, faithless to her husband, a cheat and
a drimkard. One day I heard it said that the
baker had procured a bill of divorce against his
execrable helpmate, and this intelligence turned
out in due time to be true. She, exasperated by
the proceedings instituted against her, communi-
cated with a certain woman who had the reputation
of being a witch, and whose spells and incantations
were of power milimited. Having conciliated this
woman by gifts and urgent supplications, she be-
sought of her one of two things—either to soften
the heart of her husband, so that he might be re-
conciled to her ; or if unable to do that, to send a
ghost or some evil spirit to put him to a -siolent
death. In the first endeavour the sorceress totally
failed, whereupon she set about contriving the death
of my unfortunate master. To effect her pm'pose,
she raised from the grave the shade of a woman
who had been murdered. So one day, about noon,
there entered the bakehouse a bare-footed woman
half-clad, wearing a mourning mantle thrown across
96 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
her shoulders^ licr pale sallow features marked by
a lowering expression of guilt, her grisly dishe-
velled hair sprinkled with ashes, and her front
locks streaming over her face. Unexpectedly ap-
proaching the baker, and taking him gently by the
hand, she drew him aside, and led him into an ad-
joining chamber, as if she had private intelligence
to communicate. After the baker had departed,
and a considerable period had elapsed without his
returning, the servants Avent to his chamber-door
and knocked very loudly, and, after continued si-
lence, called several times, and thumped still harder
than before. They then perceived that the door
was carcfvdly locked and bolted; upon which, at
once concluding that some serious catastrophe had
happened, they pushed against it A;ith their utmost
strength, and by a violent effort, either breaking
the hinge or driAdng it out of its socket, they ef-
fected an entrance by force. The moment they were
within the chamber, they saw the baker hanging
quite dead from one of the beams of the ceiling,
l)ut the woman who had accompanied him had
disappeared, and was nowhere to be seen."
This evoking of the dead to destroy the liAing,
this warring of a corpse with a living soul, and
then the sudden dismissal, when its foul and fatal
ciTand had been accomplished, of the ghost to its
grave, presents to the mind a climax of terrors, for
wliicli wc do not know where, in history or in fic-
tion, to find a counterpart.
HIGH TREASON. 97
The Lex Majestatis, or law of High Treason,
was one of the most effectual and terrible weapons
which the imperial constitution of Rome placed in
the hands of its military despots. Against one
offence this double-handled and sure-smiting en-
gine was frequently levelled^ viz. against the crime
or the charge of inquiring into the probable dura-
tion of the Emperor's life. This was done in va-
rious ways,—
by
fire applied to waxen images, by
consulting the stars, by casting nativities, by em-
ploying prophets, by casual omens, but especially
by certain permutations and combinations of num-
bers, ^'numeros Babylonios," or the letters of the
alphabet. The following extract from Ammianus
Marcellinus affords an example of this treasonable
sacrilege, the practice or suspicion of which, on so
many occasions, led to the expulsion of the
"
ma-
thematicians'' fi'om Italy. The Romans indeed,
profoundly ignorant of science, or contemning it
as the ai't of Greek adventurers or Egyptian priests,
neither of whom were in good odour with the go-
vernment at any period, gave to the current im-
postors of those days an appellation which Cam-
bridge wranglers now account equal to a patent of
nobility.
The following story seems to have been substan-
tially a deposition taken before the magistrates of
Constantinople, and extracted from the Avitnesses
or defendants by torture. The principal deponent
is said to have been brought
"
ad summas angus-
H
08 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
tias"—to the last gasp almost^ before lie "vroiild
confess.
"Tins unlucky table/' lie said, "which is now
produced in court, we made up of laurel boughs,
after the fashion of that which stands before the
curtain at Deli)hi. Terrible were the auspices^
awful the charms, long and painful the dances,
Avhich preceded and accompanied its construction
and consecration. And as often as we consulted
this disc or table, the following was our mode of
procedure. It was set in the midst of a chamber
^diich had previously been well purified by the
smoke of Arabian gums and incense. On the
table was placed a round dish, welded of divers
metals. On the rim of the dish were engraven
the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, separated
from one another by equal and exactly measured
spaces. Beside the table stood a certain man clad
in linen, and having linen buskins or boots on his
feet, with a handkerchief bound around his head.
He waved in one hand a branch of vervain, that
propitious herb; he recited a set formulary of
verses, such as are wont to be sung before the
Averruncal gods. He that stood by the table was
no ordinary magician. With his other he held
and shook a ring which was attached to curtains,
spun from the finest Carpathian thread, and which
had often before been used for such mystic incan-
tations. The ring thus shaken dropped ever and
anon between the interspaces of the letters, and
LATER PAGAN SUPERSTITIONS. 99
formed by striking the letters together certain
words, wliich the sorcerer combined into number
und measure, much after the manner of the priests
who manage the oracles of the Pythian and Bran-
chidian Apollo. Then, when we inquired who per-
chance would succeed to the reigning Emperor,
the bright and smooth ring, leaping among the
letters, struck together T, H, E, O, and afterwards
a final S, so that one of the bystanders at once
exclaimed that THEO[DORU]S was the emperor
designated by the Fates. We asked no more ques-
tions : seeing that Theodorus was the person whom
we had sought for."
The lingering belief in the old religion, and in
the magical and thaumaturgical practices which
had, like ivy around an oak, gradually accrued to
it, was productive in the decline of Paganism of
many poetical forms of superstition. It is curious
and instructive to remark the increasing earnest-
ness with which the decaying creed of Heathendom
sought to array itself against the encroachments of
Christianity. The hght persiflage
with which the
philosophy of the Aiigustan age treated the state-
religion nearly disappears. The indifference of the
magistrate gives place to an intolerant and indig-
nant tone of reclamation. The Pagan Csesars
attack the new religion as a formidable antagonist
;
the Christian emperors, in their turn, assail direct^
or ferret out perseveringly the superstitions which
The
100 MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.
ancient gods are no longer regarded by either their
worshipers or their opponents as simply deified
heroes or men^ but as powerful and mysterious
iDeings, informed with demoniac energies and ca-
pable of conferring temporal good or evil,—beauty,
power, and Avealth, on the one hand; deformity,
ignominy, and disease, on the other,—upon those
who honoured or abjured them. Such conceptions
of blessing or of bale were embodied in strange
narratives of weeping or jubilant processions of
majestic forms when the moon w'as hid in her va-
cant interkmar cave, of demons assuming the shape
of fair enchantresses who beguiled men to their un-
doing, of palaces reared in a night and disHmning
in the day, of banquets, like that Adsionary banquet
in the wilderness, which Milton has adorned with
all the graces of imagination in his 'Paradise
Lost.'
We can afford room for only two of the narra-
tives of demoniac influence in which the later
Pagans expressed their belief in the influence of
the early gods.
1. The superstition of the Lamia. One result
of the consoHdation of Western Asia with Europe,
under the Roman Empire, was to spread widely
over the latter continent the germs of the ser-
pent-worship of the East. The subtlest beast of
the field, retaining in full vigour his powers of
assuming tempting forms and uttering beguduig
words, was wont, it seems, to disport himself among
LATEE PAGAN SUPERSTITIONS. 101
the sons and daughters of men under the shape in
which he deceived our general mother^ the over-
curious Eve. Especially did he delight to entrap
some hopeful youth who was stiidying philosophy
in the schools of Athens or Berytus^ or some
neophyte in the Christian Church. A fair young
gentleman at Corinth had been abroad on a plea-
sure excm-sion^ and might perchance be returning
home a Httle the worse for wine. However this
may have been, at the gates of Corinth he encoun-
tered a damsel richly attired, "beautiful exceed-
ingly/^ but with hair dishevelled, and drowned in
tears. He began by inquiring the cause of her
distress. Faithless servants had carried off her
litter and left her lone. He offered her consolation,
wldch she accepted, and his arm also, which she
did not decline. She led him to a lordly palace
in a bye street of the city, where he had never yet
been. At its marble portico waited a crowd of
slaves with torches awaiting their absent mistress,
and the pair, now become fond, were ushered into
a sumptuous banqueting hall, where a board was
sjDread covered with all the delicacies of the season,
and garnished with effulgent plate. In this palace
of delight the young man abode many days, taking
no account of time. But at length, cloyed with
sweets, he proposed inviting a party of his college
friends,
much to the dismay of his fair hostess^
who, with many tears and embraces, besought him
to forego his wish. In an evil hour however he
102 MAGIC ANB WITCHCRAFT.
persevered^ and his rooms were filled with gowns-
men, marvelling much, not Avithout emy, at the
good fortune that had befallen their chum, Lucius,
no one knew how or why. But among the under-
graduates came a grave and grey college tutor,
deeply read in conjurors' books, who could detect
by his skill the devil under any shape. Pale and
silent the old man sat at the festive board, and was
ill-bred enough to stare the lady not only out of
countenance, but out of her beauty also. She grev/
pale, livid, an indiscriminate form: she melted away;
the palace melted also ; the plate, the viands, and
the wines vanished also ; and in place of columns
and ceiled roofs was a void square in Corinth, and
in place of the damsel was a loatlisome serpent,
v\Tithing in the agonies of dissolution. The white-
bearded fellow had scanned and scotched and slain
the snake—the Lamia—but he destroyed his pa-
tient also, for Lucius became a maniac; had the
charm lasted awhile longer, his soul would have
become the fiend's property.
2. A young man had sorely offended the great
goddess Venus, or, as she was called in his native
city, the Syrian Byblus, Astarte. To redeem him-
self from the curse upon his board and bed,—for he
had recently married a fair wife,—he applied to a
wise astrologer. The sage heard his case, and ad-
vised him, as his only remedy, to go on a certain
night, at its very noon, to a spot just without the
gates, called the Pagan's Tomb,—to station himself
LATER PAGAN SUPERSTITIONS. 103
on the roof of it, and to recite, at a prescribed
moment, a certain formulary, with which his coun-
sel, learned in magical law, furnished him. On
the Pagan^s Tomb accordingly the young man
placed himself at the noon of night, and awaited
his deliverance. And presently, towards the con-
fines of morning, Avas heard a sound of sad and
solemn music, and of much wailing, and of the
measured tread of a long procession. And there
drew nigh a mournful company of persons, who
might have seemed men and women, but for their
extraordinary stature, and their surpassing majesty
and beauty : and the young man remembered the
words of the magician, and knew that before him
was the goodly company of the gods whom his
forefathers in past generations had worshiped.
One only of that august and weeping band was
borne in a chariot—the god Saturn
—
perhaps by
reason of his great age; and to Saturn he ad-
dressed his prayer, which was of such potency
that Saturn straightway commanded Astarte to
release the petitioner from the cm'se she had laid
upon him.
We have been able merely to indicate how wide
a field lies beyond the proper domain of medieval
witchcraft. It would be cui'ious to trace the simi-
larity of the Heathen and Christian superstitions,
or rather the derivation of one from the other.
But we must reserve this subject to some other
101 MAGIC AND AVITCHCRAFT.
occasion, and conclude with repeating the wish
with wliich we commenced, that some competent
hand Avonhl midertake to trace througli all its
ramifications the obscm'e yet recompensing subject
of ]Magic and Witchcraft.
THE END.
JOHIf EDTVABD TAYLOR, PriXTEB,
LITTLE QUEEN STEEET, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS.
|lc;iiiing for iLraklte.
A
NEW LIBRARY OF RAILWAY LITERATURE.
Printed in a clear ami legible type, expressly adapited
to the coiivenieiiee
of
Railway Travellers.
'TELbUS IS LOKGAB ESI PATEFACTA yiKS."—T)hv.Hm.
IN iutroduciBg to the notice of the Public a new Series of
Railway Literature, the Publishers desire to explain briefly
the course which it is thcii- intention to pursue.
The above title
—
Reading foe Thavellees—may suf-
ficientlj' express the principal object in view. Frorii this,
however, it must not be assumed that the Series it denomi-
nates win be adapted to the wants of travellers only, or
intended merely to wile away an^idle hour by lessening the
tedivun of a railway journey. On the contrary, it is the
wish of the Publishers to present Works of permanent
value, rather than of merely ephemeral attraction, afford-
ing instruction v.hiLst ministering to amusement.
The Series will consist of original works on subjects of
novelty and interest, tdgethet with reprints of others, whose
merits may have been obscui'^d by time or neglect, or v,hich,
from circumstances, have not received a due share of pubhc
uoticL>. It is also ]iai't of the present plan tc reproduce, in
a slightly altered form, Essays and Eeviews ^\'hich have ap-
peared from time to time in the best Periodical Literature
of the day, accessible to the Publishers—the value of which
may justify their republication, and at the same time pro-
mote the chief object of the undertaking.
Without presumption, therefore, the Pubhshers con-
fidently hope to produce a series of Works of such sterling
literary excellence, variety, and interest, edited with scru-
pulous care and correctness, as to merit and obtain public
favour.
As a general rule, the quantity of letter-press in each
volume will be about a Hxmdred Pages, and the price
-One Sliilling; but whei'e the matter cannot be comprised
witliiu that space, enlarged volumes will be issued, at a
proportionate price. The Series will be printed imiformly,
in a clear and legible type, and so arranged as when bound
to form handsome volumes for the library. At the same
time each Work will be complete in itself.
1
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY
SOLD AT ALL THE EAILW^AT STATIONS.
Ileabiitg for StriiWks.
LIBRARY OF RAILWAY LITERATURE.
Fnnted in a clear and legible type, and eoepressly adapted
to the convenience
of
Railway Travellers.
WORKS PUBLISHED.
OLD KOADS AND NEW EOADS.
MAaiC AND WITCHCEATT.
IN THE PRESS.
FRANKLIN'S FOOTSTEPS.
FLORIAN AND CEESCENZ. By B. Aueebach,
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.
THE VILLAGE DOCTOR.
CHARLES THE SECOND.
THE DUE:E OF SULLY.