"To deny the possibility, nay actual evidence of witchcraft and sorcery, is at once to flatly contradict the revealed word of God in various passages both of the Old and New Testaments." _Blackstone's Commentaries_ (Vol. 4, ch. 4, p. 60).
"It was simply the natural result of Puritanical teaching acting on the mind, predisposing men to see Satanic influence in life, and consequently eliciting the phenomena of witchcraft." LECKY's _Rationalism in Europe_ (Vol. I, p. 123).
Witchcraft's reign in many lands and among many peoples is also attested in its remarkable nomenclature. Consider its range in ancient, medieval and modern thought as shown in some of its definitions: Magic, sorcery, soothsaying, necromancy, astrology, wizardry, mysticism, occultism, and conjuring, of the early and middle ages; compacts with Satan, consorting with evil spirits, and familiarity with the Devil, of later times; al at last ripening into an epidemic demonopathy with its countless victims of fanaticism and error, malevolence and terror, of persecution and ruthless sacrifices.
It is still most potent in its evil, grotesque, and barbaric forms, in Fetichism, Voodooism, Bundooism, Obeahism, and Kahunaism, in the devil and animal ghost worship of the black races, completely exemplified in the arts of the Fetich wizard on the Congo; in the "Uchawi" of the Wasequhha mentioned by Stanley; in the marriage customs of the Soudan devil worshipers; in the practices of the Obeah men and women in the Caribbees--notably their power in matters of love and business, religion and war--in Jamaica; in the incantations of the kahuna in Hawaii; and in the devices of the voodoo or conjure doctor in the southern states; in the fiendish rites and ceremonies of the red men,--the Hoch-e-ayum of the Plains Indians, the medicine dances of the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, the fire dance of the Navajos, the snake dance of the Moquis, the sun dance of the Sioux, in the myths and tales of the Cherokees; and it rings in many tribal chants and songs of the East and West.
It lives as wel , and thrives luxuriantly, ripe for the ful vintage, in the minds of many people to whom this or that trivial incident or accident of life is an omen of good or evil fortune with a mysterious parentage. Its roots strike deep in that strange element in human nature which dreads whatsoever is weird and uncanny in common experiences, and sees strange portents and dire chimeras in all that is unexplainable to the senses. It is made most virile in the desire for knowledge of the invisible and intangible, that must ever elude the keenest inquiry, a phase of thought always to be reckoned with when imagination runs riot, and potent in its effect, though evanescent as a vision the brain sometimes retains of a dream, and as senseless in the cold light of reason as Monna Sidonia's invocation at the Witches' Sabbath: (_Romance of Leonardo da Vinci_, p. 97, MEREJKOWSKI.)
"Emen Hetan, Emen Hetan, Palu, Baalberi, Astaroth help us Agora, Agora, Patrisa,
Come and help us."
"Garr-r: Garr-r, up: Don't knock
Your head: We fly: We fly:"
And who may count himself altogether free from the subtle power of the old mystery with its fantastic imageries, when the spirit of unrest is abroad? Who is not moved by it in the awesome stillness of night on the plains, or in the silence of the mountains or of the somber forest aisles; in wild winter nights when old tales are told; in fireside visions as tender memories come and go? And who, when listening to the echoes of the chambers of the restless sea when deep calleth unto deep, does not hear amid them some weird and haunting refrain like Leland's sea song?
"I saw three witches as the wind blew cold In a red light to the lee;
Bold they were and overbold
As they sailed over the sea;
Cal ing for One Two Three;
Cal ing for One Two Three;
And I think I can hear
It a ringing in my ear,
A-calling for the One, Two, Three."
Above al , in its literature does witchcraft exhibit the conclusive proof of its age, its hydra-headed forms, and its influence in the intel ectual and spiritual development of the races of men.
What of this literature? Count in it al the works that treat of the subject in its many phases, and its correlatives, and it is limitless, a literature of all times and all lands.
Christian and pagan gave it place in their religions, dogmas, and articles of faith and discipline, and in their codes of law; and for four hundred years, from the appeal of Pope John XXII, in 1320, to extirpate the Devil-worshipers, to the repeal of the statute of James I in 1715, the delusion gave point and force to treatises, sermons, romances, and folk-lore, and invited, nay, compel ed, recognition at the hands of the scientist and legist, the historian, the poet and the dramatist, the theologian and philosopher.
But the monographic literature of witchcraft, as it is here considered, is limited, in the opinion of a scholar versed in its lore, to fifteen hundred titles. There is a mass of unpublished materials in libraries and archives at home and abroad, and of information as to witchcraft and the witch trials, accessible in court records, depositions, and current accounts in public and private collections, all awaiting the coming of some master hand to transform them into an exhaustive history of the most grievous of human superstitions.
To this day, there has been no thorough investigation or complete analysis of the history of the witch persecutions. The true story has been distorted by partisanship and ignorance, and left to exploitation by the romancer, the empiric, and the sciolist.
"Of the origin and nature of the delusion we know perhaps enough; but of the causes and paths of its spread, of the extent of its ravages, of its exact bearing upon the intel ectual and religious freedom of its times, of the soul-stirring details of the costly struggle by which it was overborne we are lamentably ill informed." (_The Literature of Witchcraft_, p. 66, BURR.)
It must serve in this brief narrative to merely note, within the centuries which marked the climax of the mania, some of the most authoritative and influential works in giving strength to its evil purpose and the modes of accusation, trial, and punishment.
Modern scholarship holds that witchcraft, with the Devil as the arch enemy of mankind for its cornerstone, was first exploited by the Dominicans of the Inquisition. They blazed the tortuous way for the scholastic theology which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries gave new recognition to Satan and his satellites as the sworn enemies of God and his church, and the Holy Inquisition with its massive enginery, open and secret, turned its attention to the exposure and extirpation of the heretics and sinners who were enlisted in the Devil's service.
Take for adequate illustration these standard authorities in the early periods of the widespread and virulent epidemic: Those of the Inquisitor General, Eymeric, in 1359, entitled _Tractatus contra daemonum_; the Formicarius or Ant Hill of the German Dominican Nider, 1337; the _De calcatione daemonum_, 1452; the _Flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum_ of the French Inquisitor Jaquier in 1458; and the _Fortalitium fidei_ of the Spanish Franciscan Alonso de Spina, in 1459; the famous and infamous manual of arguments and rules of procedure for the detection and punishment of witches, compiled by the German Inquisitors Kraemer and Sprenger (Institor) in 1489, buttressed on the bul of Pope Innocent VIII; (this was the celebrated _Witch Hammer_, bearing on its title page the significant legend, "_Not to believe in witchcraft is the greatest of heresies_"); the Canon Episcopi; the bul s of Popes John XXII, 1330, Innocent VIII, 1484, Alexander VI, 1494, Leo X, 1521, and Adrian VI, 1522; the Decretals of the canon law; the exorcisms of the Roman and Greek churches, al hinged on scriptural precedents; the Roman law, the Twelve Tables, and the Justinian Code, the last three imposing upon the crimes of conjuring, exorcising, magical arts, offering sacrifices to the injury of one's neighbors, sorcery, and witchcraft, the penalties of death by torture, fire, or crucifixion.
Add to these classics some of the later authorities: the _Daemonologie_
of the royal inquisitor James I of England and Scotland, 1597; Mores'
_Antidote to Atheism_; Ful er's _Holy and Profane State_; Granvil's _Sadducismus Triumphatus_, 1681; _Tryal of Witches at the Assizes for the County of Suffolk before Sir Matthew Hale, March, 1664_ (London, 1682); Baxter's _Certainty of the World of Spirits_, 1691; Cotton Mather's _A Discourse on Witchcraft_, 1689, his _Late Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions_, 1684, and his _Wonders of the Invisible World_, 1692; and enough references have been made to this literature of delusion, to the precedents that seared the consciences of courts and juries in their sentences of men, women, and children to death by the rack, the wheel, the stake, and the gal ows.
Where in history are the horrors of the curse more graphical y told than in the words of Canon Linden, an eye witness of the demonic deeds at Trier (Treves) in 1589?
"And so, from court to court throughout the towns and villages of all the diocese, scurried special accusers, inquisitors, notaries, jurors, judges, constables, dragging to trial and torture human beings of both sexes and burning them in great numbers. Scarcely any of those who were accused escaped punishment. Nor were there spared even the leading men in the city of Trier. For the Judge, with two Burgomasters, several Councilors and Associate Judges, canons of sundry col egiate churches, parish-priests, rural deans, were swept away in this ruin. So far, at length, did the madness of the furious populace and of the courts go in this thirst for blood and booty that there was scarcely anybody who was not smirched by some suspicion of this crime.
"Meanwhile notaries, copyists, and innkeepers grew rich. The executioner rode a blooded horse, like a noble of the court, and went clad in gold and silver; his wife vied with noble dames in the richness of her array.
The children of those convicted and punished were sent into exile; their goods were confiscated; plowman and vintner failed." (_The Witch Persecutions_, pp. 13-14, BURR.)
Fanaticism did not rule and ruin without hindrance and remonstrance. Men of great learning and exalted position struck mighty blows at the root of the evil. They could not turn the tide but they stemmed it, and their attacks upon the whole theory of Satanic power and the methods of persecution were potent in the reaction to humanity and a reign of reason.
Always to be remembered among these men of power are Johann Wier, Friedrich Spee, and notably Reginald Scot, who in his _Discovery of Witchcraft_, in 1584, undertook to prove that "the contracts and compacts of witches with devils and al infernal spirits and familiars, are but erroneous novelties and erroneous conceptions."
"After all it is setting a high value on our conjectures to roast a man alive on account of them." (MONTAIGNE.) Who may measure in romance and the drama the presence, the cogent and undeniable power of those same abiding elements of mysticism and mystery, which underlie al human experience, and repeated in myriad forms find their classic expression in the queries of the "Weird Sisters," "_those elemental avengers without sex or kin_"?
"When shal we three meet again,
In thunder, lightning or in rain?
When the hurly burly's done,
When the battle's lost and won."
Are not the mummeries of the witches about the cauldron in Macbeth, and Talbot's threat pour la Pucelle,
"Blood will I draw on thee, thou art a witch,"
uttered so long ago, echoed in the wailing cry of La Meffraye in the forests of Machecoul, in the maledictions of Grio, and of the Saga of the Burning Fields?
Their vitality is also clearly shown in their constant use and exemplification by the romance and novel writers who appeal with certainty and success to the popular taste in the tales of spectral terrors. Witness: Farjeon's _The Turn of the Screw_; Bierce's _The Damned Thing_; Bulwer's _A Strange Story_; Cranford's _Witch of Prague_; Howells' _The Shadow of a Dream_; Winthrop's _Cecil Dreeme_; Grusot's _Night Side of Nature_; Crockett's Black Douglas; and _The Red Axe_, Francis' _Lychgate Hall_; Caine's _The Shadow of a Crime_; and countless other stories, traditions, tales, and legends, written and unwritten, that invite and receive a gracious hospitality on every hand.