Part 2

His apish tricks and satyr-like gambols were sufficiently in unison 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 compelled 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, deprives 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 discomfited 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 Hoffman, 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 natural sequence of the monkish notions of an evil principle, and of the almost universal persuasion 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 comprehensive nature of its influence, and its long duration, were owing to penal laws and prosecutions. It adds one more to the long list of instances which prove that there is no opinion, however absurd and revolting, 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 weak; but still the frame of society itself was not shaken, nor, with one exception[13], does the crime begin to make any figure in history till the Bull of Innocent VIII. in 1484 stirred up the slumbering embers into a flame.

Of the extent of the horrors which for two centuries and a half followed, our readers we suspect have but a very imperfect conception; we remember 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 Continent 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 offence been laid down in that unparalleled performance, the 'Malleus Maleficarum,' which was intended as a theological and juridical commentary on the Bull, than the race of witches seems at once to increase and multiply, 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 remonstrance "et tu Brute!"), of Leo X. in 1521, and of Adrian VI. in 1522. Still the only effect of these commissions was to render the evil daily more formidable, till at last, if we are to believe the testimonies of contemporary historians, Europe was little better than a large suburb 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 Bartholomæus de Spina, were executed 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; Danæus, 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 Règne 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 Echelles 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 Innocent bore particular reference, this plague raged to a degree almost inconceivable. Bamberg, Paderborn, Wurtzburg, and Treves were its chief seats, though for a century and a half after the introduction of the trials under the commission no quarter of that great empire was free from its baneful influence. It would be wearisome and revolting to go through the details of these atrocities; but "ab uno disce omnes." A catalogue of the executions at Wurtzburg 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 regularly divided into twenty-nine burnings, and contains the names of 157 persons, Hauber stating at the same time that the catalogue is not complete. It is impossible to peruse this catalogue without horror. The greater part of it consists of old women or foreign travellers, seized, it would appear, as foreigners were at Paris during the days of Marat and Robespierre: it contains children of twelve, eleven, ten, and nine years of age, fourteen vicars of the cathedral, two boys of noble families, the two little sons (_söhnlein_) of the senator Stolzenburg; a stranger boy; a blind girl; Gobel Babelin, the handsomest girl in Wurtzburg, etc.

"Sanguine placârunt Divos _et virgine cæsá_!"

And yet, frightful as this list of 157 persons executed in two years appears, the number is not (taking the population of Wurtzburg into account) so great as in the Lindheim process from 1660 to 1664. For in that small district, consisting 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 complete), the amount 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 bishoprics, whose zeal was not less ardent, furnished an equal contingent, and if the Protestants, as we know[14], actually vied with them in the extent to which these cruelties were carried, the number of victims from the date of Innocent's bull to the final extinction of these persecutions must considerably exceed 100,000 in Germany.

Even the feeling of horror excited by the perusal of the Wurtzburg murders is perhaps exceeded 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 in doggrel verses the sufferings of the unfortunate victims, "to be sung to the tune of Dorothea"--a common street-song of the day. It is entitled the 'Druten Zeitung,' or Witches' Chronicle, "being an account of the remarkable events which took place in Franconia, Bamberg, and Wurtzburg, with those wretches 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 devils 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 wizards, whose fate it commemorates with the greatest glee and satisfaction. One device in particular, by which a witch who had obstinately resisted 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 point of it in his eyes was very much increased by the consideration that upon the confession, as it was called, so obtained, the unhappy wretch was immediately committed to the flames[15]. What are we to think of the state of feeling in the country where these horrors were thus made the subject of periodical ballads, and set to music for the amusement of the populace[16]?

It was one fatal effect of the perseverance with which 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 visions which had so long haunted the brain of Sprenger and his associates had been realized in their own case. In this way alone can we in some measure account for the strange confessions which form the great peculiarity in the witch trials, where unhappy creatures, with the full knowledge of their fate, admit their intercourse with Satan, their midnight meetings, incantations, their dealings with spirits, "white, black, and grey, with all their trumpery," the grotesque horrors of the sabbath,--in short, every wild and impossible phantasm which had received 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. When we read these trials, we think of the effect of the Jew's fiddle in Grimm's fairy tale; we see the delusion spreading like an epidemic from one to another, till first the witnesses, then the judges, and lastly the poor criminals themselves, all yield to the giddy whirl, and go off like dancing Dervises under its influence.

True it is that, in many of the cases, and particularly those which occur in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, when the diabolical doctrines of Sprenger and Delrio were in their full vigour, the confessions on which these convictions proceeded were elicited by torture, moral and physical, and frequently retracted, till a fresh application of the rack produced a fresh admission. One instance from Delrio may stand in place of a thousand. He mentions that an unfortunate gentleman in Westphalia had been twenty times put to the rack, "vicies sævæ quæstioni subditum," in order to compel him to confess that he was a were-wolf! All these tortures he resisted, till the hangman gave him an intoxicating draught, and under its influence he confessed that he _was_ a were-wolf after all. "En judicum _clemens_ arbitrium," says Delrio, "quo se porrigat in illis partibus aquilonaribus."--See how long-suffering we judges are in the north! we never put our criminals to death till we have tried them with twenty preliminary courses of torture! This is perfectly in the spirit of another worthy in Germany, who had been annoyed with the pertinacity of a witch, who, like the poor lycanthrope, persisted in maintaining her innocence. "Da liess ich sie tüchtig foltern," says the inquisitor--"und sie gestand;"--I tortured her _tightly_ (the torture lasted four hours), and she confessed! Who indeed under such a system would not have confessed? Death was unavoidable either way, and the great object was to attain that consummation with the least preparatory pain. "I went," says Sir George Mackenzie, "when I was a Justice Depute, to examine some women who had confessed judicially. One of them, who was a silly creature, told me that she had not confessed because she was guilty, but, being a poor creature who wrought for her meat, and being defamed for a witch, she knew she would starve, for no person hereafter would give her meat or lodging, and that all men would beat her and hound dogs at her, and that therefore she desired to be out of the world. Whereupon she wept most bitterly, and upon her knees called God to witness to what she said[17]." In other cases, the torture was applied not only to the individual accused, but to his relations or friends, to secure confession. In Alison Pearson's case[18], it appears that her daughter, 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 witches in 1696, six of the poor women who were liberated 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 witchcrafts imputed to them,) retracted their confessions in writing, attributing them to the consternation produced by their sudden seizure and imprisonment. "And indeed," said they, "that confession 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 understanding, 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[19]."

But though unquestionably great part of these confessions, which at first tended so much to prolong 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 proceeded from actual belief. Nor was it to be wondered 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 understood, be disposed to set down every occurrence which they could not explain, and every wild phantasm which crossed their minds, to the direct 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 to diabolical interference, as in Wenham's case, so late as 1712[20]. If, on the contrary, she cured instead of killing, the conclusion was the same, although the only charm employed might be a prayer to the Almighty[21]. 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 witch herself in disguise[22]. In the case of Robert Erskine of Dun[23], tried for the murder of his nephews, he is indicted for making away with them by _poisoning_ and _witchcraft_, as if the poisoning was not of itself amply sufficient to account for their 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 brain and nerves, and optical deceptions, should appear to the sufferer to be the work of the devil, whose good offices they might very probably have invoked under 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 afforded in the sixteenth century or the commencement of the seventeenth, if embodied in the pages of the 'Malleus' or the 'Flagellum Dæmonum,' instead of being quietly published by the patients as optical and medical phenomena in the 'Berlinische Monatschrift' for 1799, and the 15th volume of the 'Philosophical Journal!' What a fearful glimpse into the infernal world would have been afforded by the still more frightful illusions which haunted poor Backzko of Königsberg[24] during his political labours in 1806; the grinning negro who seated himself opposite to him, the owl-headed tormentor that used to stare at him every night through his curtains, the snakes twisting and turning about his knees as he turned his periods! If we go back to 1651, we find our English Jacob Böhme, Pordage[25], giving an account of visions which must have been exactly of the same kind, arising from an excited state of the brain, with the most thorough conviction of their reality. His Philadelphian disciples, Jane Leade, Thomas Bromley, Hooker, Sapperton, and others, were indulged, on the first meeting of their society, with a vision of unparalleled splendour. The princes and powers of the infernal world passed in review before them, sitting in coaches, surrounded with dark clouds and drawn by a _cortége_ of lions, dragons, 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 Pordage, "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[26]."

Thus, while phenomena which experience has since shown to be perfectly natural were universally 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 medical prescriptions from the angel Raphael. Elias Ashmole had a MS. volume of these receipts, filling about a quire and a half of paper[27]. In fact, one would almost suppose that few persons at that 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 sensation. Aubrey makes an entry in his journal of the appearance of a ghost as coolly as a merchant now-a-days makes an entry in his ledger. "Anno 1670. Not far from Cirencester was an apparition. Being demanded whether good spirit or bad, returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious perfume and a melodious twang."

Is it to be wondered at then, that, surrounded 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 this frightful delusion, they should voluntarily come forward to confess their imaginary crime, as in the Amsterdam case of the poor girl who accused herself of bewitching cattle by the words Shurius, Turius, Tirius[28], or in another still more remarkable case in 1687, mentioned in Reichard's 'Beyträge,' where a young woman accused herself, her friend, and the mother of her friend, of a long course of witchcraft, 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 conceptions were founded on facts which were but too real; that the cunning and the depraved contrived to turn the ecstasies and the fears of these poor wretches to their own purposes; in short, that frauds similar to those 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 Cadière.

Much has been said as to the wonderful coincidences to be found in the evidence of the accused 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, accepting the assertions of Sprenger and the rest as true, we should suppose the coincidence to be complete, the original confessions which still exist prove that the resemblance was merely general, and that there were radical and irreconcileable differences in the details of the evidence. Inasfar as the assertion is really true, one simple explanation goes far to account for the phenomenon;--"Insanire parent _certâ 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 determinate and invariable form; so that, even if left to tell their own story, there would have been the closest resemblance between the narratives of different persons. But this was not all. In almost every case the confessions were merely the echo of questions put by the inquisitors, all 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 different were the results, when the process of investigation fell into the hands of persons to whom Sprenger's manual was unknown. In the Lindheim trials in 1633, to which we have already alluded, 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 Incubi, Succubi, and the other favourite subjects of inquiry with the disciples of the Hammer, 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 that are recorded for our instruction in the chronicles of Bodinus or Delrio.