"First, because Witchcraft is a rife and common sinne in these our daies, and very many are intangled with it, beeing either practitioners thereof in their owne persons, or at the least, yielding to seeke for helpe and counsel of such as practise it." _A Discovrse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft_, PERKINS, 1610.
"And just as God has his human servants, his church on earth, so also the Devil has his--men and women sworn to his service and true to his bidding. To win such fol owers he can appear to men in any form he pleases, can deceive them, enter into compact with them, initiate them into his worship, make them his allies for the ruin of their fellows.
Now it is these human allies and servants of Satan, thus postulated into existence by the brain of a monkish logician, whom history knows as witches." _The Literature of Witchcraft_, BURR.
Witchcraft in its generic sense is as old as human history. It has written its name in the oldest of human records. In al ages and among all peoples it has taken firm hold on the fears, convictions and consciences of men. Anchored in credulity and superstition, in the dread and love of mystery, in the hard and fast theologic doctrines and teachings of diabolism, and under the ban of the law from its beginning, it has borne a baleful fruitage in the lives of the learned and the unlearned, the wise and the simple.
King and prophet, prelate and priest, jurist and lawmaker, prince and peasant, scholars and men of affairs have felt and dreaded its subtle power, and sought relief in code and commandment, bull and anathema, decree and statute--entailing even the penalty of death--and all in vain until in the march of the races to a higher civilization, the centuries enthroned faith in the place of fear, wisdom in the place of ignorance, and sanity in the seat of delusion.
In its earlier historic conception witchcraft and its demonstrations centered in the claim of power to produce certain effects, "things beyond the course of nature," from supernatural causes, and under this general term al its occult manifestations were classified with magic and sorcery, until the time came when the Devil was identified and acknowledged both in church and state as the originator and sponsor of the mystery, sin and crime--the sole father of the Satanic compacts with men and women, and the law both canonical and civil took cognizance of his malevolent activities.
In the Acropolis mound at Susa in ancient Elam, in the winter of 1901-2, there was brought to light by the French expedition in charge of the eminent savant, M. de Morgan, one of the most remarkable memorials of early civilization ever recovered from the buried cities of the Orient.
It is a monolith--a stele of black diorite--bearing in bas-relief a likeness of Hammurabi (the Amrephel of the Old Testament; Genesis xiv, 1), and the sixth king of the first Babylonian dynasty, who reigned about 2250 B.C.; and there is also carved upon it, in archaic script in black letter cuneiform--used long after the cursive writing was invented--the longest Babylonian record discovered to this day,--the oldest body of laws in existence and the basis of historical jurisprudence.
It is a remarkable code, quickly made available through translation and transliteration by the Assyrian scholars, and justly named, from its royal compiler, Hammurabi's code. He was an imperialist in purpose and action, and in the last of his reign of fifty-five years he annexed or assimilated the suzerainty of Elam, or Southern Persia, with Assyria to the north, and also Syria and Palestine, to the Mediterranean Sea.
This record in stone original y contained nineteen columns of inscriptions of four thousand three hundred and fourteen lines, arranged in two hundred and eighty sections, covering about two hundred separate decisions or edicts. There is substantial evidence that many of the laws were of greater antiquity than the code itself, which is a thousand years older than the Mosaic code, and there are many striking resemblances and paral els between its provisions, and the law of the covenant, and the deuteronomy laws of the Hebrews.
The code was based on personal responsibility. It protects the sanctity of an oath before God, provides among many other things for written evidence in legal matters, and is wonderful y comprehensive and rich in rules for the conduct of commercial, civic, financial, social, economic, and domestic affairs.
These sections are notably illustrative:
"If a man, in a case (pending judgment), utters threats against the witnesses (or), does not establish the testimony that he has given, if that case be a case involving life, that man shal be put to death.
"If a judge pronounces a judgment, renders a decision, delivers a verdict duly signed and sealed and afterwards alters his judgment, they shal call that judge to account for the alteration of the judgment which he had pronounced, and he shall pay twelvefold the penalty which was in the said judgment, and, in the assembly, they shal expel him from his seat of judgment, and he shal not return, and with the judges in a case he shal not take his seat.
"If a man practices brigandage and is captured, that man shal be put to death.
"If a woman hates her husband, and says: 'thou shalt not have me,' they shal inquire into her antecedents for her defects; and if she has been a careful mistress and is without reproach and her husband has been going about and greatly belittling her, that woman has no blame. She shal receive her presents and shal go to her father's house.
"If she has not been a careful mistress, has gadded about, has neglected her house and has belittled her husband, they shal throw that woman into the water.
"If a physician operates on a man for a severe wound with a bronze lancet and causes the man's death, or opens an abscess (in the eye) of a man with a bronze lancet and destroys the man's eye, they shal cut off his fingers.
"If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction firm and the house, which he has built, col apses and causes the death of the owner of the house, that builder shal be put to death."
It is, however, with only one of King Hammurabi's wise laws that this inquiry has to do, and it is this:
"If a man has placed an enchantment upon a man, and has not justified himself, he upon whom the enchantment is placed to the Holy River (Euphrates) shall go; into the Holy River he shal plunge. If the Holy River holds (drowns) him he who enchanted him shal take his house. If on the contrary, the man is safe and thus is innocent, the wizard loses his life, and his house."
Or, as another translation has it:
"If a man ban a man and cast a spell on him--if he cannot justify it he who has banned shal be killed."
"If a man has cast a spel on a man and has not justified it, he on whom the spell has been thrown shall go to the River God, and plunge into the river. If the River God takes him he who has banned him shall be saved.
If the River God show him to be innocent, and he be saved, he who banned him shal be killed, and he who plunged into the river shal take the house of him who banned him."
There can be no more convincing evidence of the presence and power of the great witchcraft superstition among the primitive races than this earliest law; and it is to be especial y noted that it prescribes one of the very tests of guilt--the proof by water--which was used in another form centuries later, on the continent, in England and New England, at Wurzburg and Bonn, at Rouen, in Suffolk, Essex and Devon, and at Salem and Hartford and Fairfield, when "the Devil starteth himself up in the pulpit, like a meikle black man, and cal ing the row (roll) everyone answered, Here!"