Part 9
It might now be asked: How is it possible that God permits sorcery? The "Witch-hammer" answers that God has allowed, without any detriment to his perfections, the fall of angels and of our first parents; and as he formerly sanctioned persecutions against the Christians, that the glory of the martyr might be increased, so he also now permits sorcery that the faith of the just may be the more manifest.
The crime of the witches exceeds all other. They unite in one person the heretic, the apostate, and the murderer. The "Witch-hammer" proves that they are worse than the devil himself, for he has fallen once for all, and Christ has not suffered for him. The devil sins therefore only against the Creator, but the witch both against the Creator and the Redeemer.
It is with these and similar questions that the first part of the "Witch-hammer" is occupied. The second part, describing the various kinds and effects of witchcraft and the celebration of the Witches' Sabbath is prefaced with an account of the power of witches. They produce hail, thunder and storms whenever they wish; they fly through the air from one place to another; they can make themselves insensible on the rack; they often subdue the judge's mind by charms, and _confuse him through compassion_; they deprive men and animals of reproductive power; they can see the absent, and predict coming events; they can fill, at their pleasure, human hearts with relentless hatred and passionate love; they destroy the foetus in the womb, cause miscarriages, change themselves and others into cats and were-wolfs; nay, they are able to enchant and kill men and beasts by their very looks. Their strongest passion is to eat the flesh of children; still they eat only unchristened children: if at any time a baptized child is taken by them, it happens by special divine concession.
Their compact with the devil is of two kinds: either a solemn one entered into with all formalities, or a mere private contract. The former is concluded as follows: The witches assemble upon a day set apart by the devil. He appears in the assembly, exhorts them to faithfulness, and promises them glory, happiness and long life, and orders the older witches to introduce the novices whom he puts to the test and causes to take the oath of allegiance; whereupon he teaches them to prepare from the limbs of new-born babes witch-potions and witch-salves, and presents them with a powder, instructing them how it is to be used to the injury of men and beasts.[49] When then the novice has renewed the ceremony of allegiance on the next Witch Sabbath she is a genuine witch. The children needed for the witches' kettles and the sabbath banquets are obtained as follows: The victims are killed by looks or by the above-mentioned powder, when they lie in their cradle or in bed with their mothers. Simple people will then believe that they have died from some natural cause,--from sickness or suffocation. Then when buried the witches steal them from the grave. It has happened that judges have opened, after similar confessions, the grave and found the child in it; but in such cases the judge must consider that the devil is a great taskmaster who may have cheated the eyes of the servants of justice, in order to protect his servants, and in such a case the confession of the witch (forced from her by torture) should prove more than the easily deluded vision of the judge. [What a triumph of supernaturalistic argumentation!]
The witch accomplishes her aerial voyages, says the "Witch-hammer," by smearing a vessel, a broom and a rake, a broomstick and a piece of linen, with the witch-salve; then rising she moves forth through the air, visible or invisible, according to her choice. The "Witch-hammer" reminds those who doubt these air-voyages, of Matt. iv. 5, where it is related how the devil carried Jesus up through the air to the pinnacle of the temple.
We now proceed to the third part of the "Witch-hammer," the criminal law of the witch-courts, which gives instructions how "sorcerers, witches and heretics are to be tried before spiritual as well as civil tribunals."
In regard to preliminary forms of procedure, the "Witch-hammer" lays down first, "That the trial may commence without any previous accusation, and on the strength of a simple report that witches are found somewhere; for it is the duty of the judge in a case fraught with many dangers to the soul, not to wait for an informer or accuser, but, _ex officio_, to institute immediate inquiry." When an inquisitor comes to a city or a village, he must exhort every body by means of proclamations nailed to the doors of churches and town-halls, and by threats of excommunication and punishment, to give information of all persons in any way suspected of the least connection with the practice of witchcraft, or otherwise of bad repute. The informers may be rewarded if the inquisitor thinks it well, by the blessing of the Church, and with money. A box to receive the statements of such informers as wish to be unknown should be placed in the Church.
Two or three witnesses are sufficient to prove guilt. In case so many do not present themselves, then the judge may take means to find and summon them, and force them to tell the truth under oath. He has also the right to examine witnesses previous to the actual trial. As for the qualifications necessary to appear as witnesses, the "Witch-hammer" declares that the excommunicate, accomplices, outlawed, runaway and dissolute women are irreproachable witnesses in cases where the faith is involved. A witch is allowed to testify against a witch, wife against husband, husband against wife, children against parents and so on, but if the testimonies of accomplices or relatives are to the advantage of the accused, then they are of no validity; _for blood is of course thicker than water_, and one raven does not willingly pick out the eyes of another.
The "Witch-hammer" allows an accused to have an advocate, but adds: "If the counsellor defends his suspected client too warmly, it is right and reasonable that he should be considered as far more criminal than the sorcerer or the witch herself; that is to say, as the protector of witches and heretics, he is more dangerous than the sorcerer. He should be looked upon with suspicion in the same degree as he makes a zealous defence." But a trial may be difficult enough without being clogged and hampered by a cunning advocate. In order to confuse such a one and ensnare the accused, it is necessary, says the "Witch-hammer," that a judge should remember the words of the apostle, "_Being crafty I caught you with guile_," and show himself crafty. The "Witch-hammer" informs the judge of five "honest and apostolical tricks" (these are the very words of the book); one of them consists in embodying in the copy of the proceedings which is given to the defending lawyer, a number of facts that have not occurred in the trial, and in mixing the names of the witnesses. "By that means the accused and their lawyer may be so confused that they nowise know who has said any thing, or what has been said."
Among the questions to be put to a person under accusation, the "Witch-hammer" recommends a number, the quality of which may be appreciated by reading the following examples: "Do you know that people hold you to be a witch? Why have you been observed upon the precincts of N. N.? Why have you touched N. N.'s child (or cow)? How did it happen that the child (or the cow) soon after fell sick? What was your business outside of your house when the storm broke forth? How can you explain that your cow yields three times as much milk as the cows of others?"
Sprenger's work gives a detailed account of the treatment to which a person who is accused of sorcery and handed over to the judge must be subjected. Before the trial the accused must be put on the rack in order that his mind may be inclined to confession. Some, rather than confess their guilt, allow themselves to be torn asunder limb by limb; they are "the worst witches," and their endurance is explained by the supposition "that the devil hardens them against their tortures." Others who have been less faithful to him he abandons, and are thus easily induced to confess. "If no confession has been wrung from the witch during the first day"--we quote the "Witch-hammer" literally--"the torture is to be continued the second and the third day. The civil law forbids, to be sure, to _repeat_ the torture, when no proof has been adduced, but it may be _continued_."
The judge should therefore use the following formula: "We ordain that the torture shall be _continued_ (not _repeated_) to-morrow."
The second day the instruments of torture are to be exhibited to the accused, and an attending priest shall read the following adjuration: "I adjure thee, N. N., in the name of the Holy Trinity, by the bitter tears of Jesus Christ which he shed upon the cross ... by the tears of God's saints and elect which they have shed over the world ... that, if thou art innocent, thou pour forth immediately abundant tears; but, if thou art guilty, no tears at all. In the name of God our Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen."
The person thus adjured seldom weeps. But if this should occur, the judge should see that it be not saliva or some other fluid that moistens the eye of the witch. The witch must be led into the court-room backwards, that the judge may see her before she sees him. Otherwise she may enchant him and move him to criminal compassion.
Before the examination of witnesses, the accused must be stripped of all her clothing and have all the hair on her body shaved off, and her limbs must be carefully examined to ascertain if they bear marks, for the devil marks his own. It must be further ascertained by pricking with a needle if any part of the body is devoid of feeling, for that is a sure sign of a witch. Still the absence of such a sign nowise proves innocence.
If the witch can not be made to confess by any means, then the judge must send her to a distant prison. The janitor, some friend and chaste women are to be persuaded to visit the prisoner, and promise to help her to escape, if she will only inform them of some of her arts. In this way, remarks the author of the "Witch-hammer," many a one has been ensnared by us.
We conclude here our account of Sprenger's dreadful book. The reader has contemplated sufficiently this fruit on the tree of the devil.--It may fill us with loathing to consider it, but its teachings are instructive. May we know the tree from the fruit, and may we tear it up with its roots--with those roots yet so abundantly watered by men who know not what they are doing. The fires which the bull of Pope Innocent kindled all over Europe, threw their weird light far into the times which have been called the modern,--far in the eighteenth century. To count these victims of the stake would be impossible. It is, however, sometimes attempted in our days; archives are searched through and discoveries are made which surpass every anticipation. The victims amount to millions.
No age was spared. Children were brought to the stake with their mothers. A silent, gloomy presentiment seized every community when the proclamation on the church doors announced that the inquisitor had arrived. All work in the shops and fields ceased, and all the evil passions flared up into greater activity. He who had an open enemy, or suspected secret envy, knew beforehand that he was lost. It was considered better to anticipate than to be anticipated in denouncing; and the tribunal had hardly commenced its activity, ere it was overcrowded with informers. "When they had commenced in one place to burn witches," says an author of the seventeenth century, "more were found in proportion as they were burned." In various communities in Germany and France _all_ the women were sent to the stake. In many instances it went so far that princes and potentates were forced, from fear of seeing their subjects exterminated, to stay by _authoritative command_ the madness of the inquisitors. Greed brought fuel to the flames which superstition and hatred kindled. We will quote but one example from the history of the Scotch witch-processes. A man named Hopkins who was sent to the gallows, convicted of murder, confessed there that he had brought two hundred women to the stake, and for a recompense of twenty shillings each,--a sum with which the judge rewarded him.
And there was heard in all Europe for many centuries not a single voice raised in the effort to stay the murder with weapons of reason or religion! If there was any who did not share the madness of his time, fear paralyzed his tongue, and learning and religion, far from impeding the evil, had yoked themselves to its triumphal ear. With the Bible in their hands, the theologians sanctioned these barbarous proceedings, and the learned defended them with reasons drawn from the fathers and with subtle argumentation. The Protestant theologians vied with the Catholic in learning. Even Luther and the first reformers did not check, but promoted, the belief in devils. If paganism had been described by the fathers as Satan's work and empire, Luther referred the preceding life of the Church from the beginning of papacy to the same sphere, and changed the whole history of humankind to a diabolical drama. The struggle between the Reformation and Catholicism contributed in still another way to intensify the faith in devils. The religious contest stirred the mind of the age in its innermost depths. Many who occupied middle ground between the reforming preacher on the one hand and the Catholic priest on the other, were hesitating between the old and the new, and many consciences which had already embraced the new were agitated by uneasiness and doubt. The Catholic divine saw in these doubts the beginning of the victory over Satanic error; the Protestant theologian declared the same doubts to be inspired by the originator of papacy, the devil. We can appreciate this state of things by reading Luther's "Tischreden." Men terrified, for instance, by a dream or a strange noise in the night (nothing more than this was required for such an effect) hurried to their pastor to lay their troubles before him. They were then informed, on the one hand, that the dream or the voice was caused by the devil, to whom their apostacy had bound them over, or, on the other, that Satan was trying to frighten them back into the errors which they had abandoned. In both cases the archfiend was the agent. "He was in the castle of the knight, the palaces of the mighty, the libraries of the learned, on every page of the Bible, in the churches, in the halls of justice, in the lawyer's chambers, in the laboratories of physicians and naturalists, in cottages, farmyards, stalls,--everywhere."[50]
He was indeed everywhere, and Christendom had become a hell. "The belief in the devil," says a British author,[51] speaking upon this subject, "had had the effect, that all rational knowledge had disappeared, that all sound philosophy was denounced, that the morality of the people was poisoned and humanity sunk in a whirlpool of folly, godlessness and brutality. All classes were carried away by this whirlpool. The God of nature and Revelation had no longer the reins of the world in his hand. The powers of hell and darkness, born of a diseased imagination, reigned upon the earth."
* * * * *
Throwing its gloomy shadow even into the eighteenth century, it was, however, during the Middle Ages that the belief in sorcery sent down its deep and mighty roots. This is not to be wondered at. The men of the Middle Ages lived less in the real than in a world of magic, in a world resembling more the paintings of "Helvetes-Breughels" than the descriptions of Armidas isle. The air was saturated with demoniacal vapors. The popular literature consisted of legends of saints and stories about the devil. The Church, the general asylum against the devil, saw and taught the people to see everywhere the play of evil powers which must be conquered by magical practices, and amidst Ahriman and his hosts who had now established themselves in the Occident, and as heirs to the horns and tails of Pans and fauns, a crowd of native spirits moved; imps, giants, trolls, forest-spirits, elves and hobgoblins in and on the earth; nicks, river-sprites in the water, fiends in the air, and salamanders in the fire. And to these elementary spirits were added a whole fauna of monsters, such as dragons, griffins, were-wolves, witch-kine, Thor's-swine, and so on. But this does not conclude the review: spectres, ghosts, vampires, spirits causing the nightmare, and so on,--supernatural beings derived from the human world, but of dimmer outlines than the preceding,--conclude the motley procession. The mandrake has a place in it also. This being deserves a few lines here, inasmuch as it has now faded from the popular superstitions.
The mandragora or alrun[52] is originally a very rare herb which can hardly be found except below the gallows where a pure youth has been hanged.[53] He who seeks the herb should know that its lower part has the shape of a human being, and that its upper part consists of broad leaves and yellow flowers. When it is torn from the soil it sighs, shrieks and moans so piteously, that he who hears it must die. To find it one should go out before sunrise on a Friday morning, after having filled his ears carefully with cotton, wax or pitch, and bring with him a black dog without one white hair. The sign of the cross must be made three times over the mandrake, and the soil dug up carefully all around it, so that it be attached only by the fine rootlets. It is then tied by a string to the tail of the dog and he is attracted forward by a piece of bread. The dog pulls the plant out of the earth, but falls dead, struck by the terrible shriek of the mandragora. It is then brought home, washed in red wine, wrapped in red and white silk, laid in a shrine, washed again every Friday, and dressed in a white frock. The mandragora reveals hidden things and future events, and procures for the owner the friendship of all men. A silver coin deposited with it in the evening is doubled in the morning. Still the coin must not be too large in size. If you buy the mandragora it remains with you, throw it wherever you will, until you sell it again. If you keep it till your death you must depart with it to hell. But it can be sold only for a lower price than it was bought. Therefore is he who has bought it with the smallest existing coin, irretrievably lost.
The being called mandragora was, as we see, a kind of "_Spiritus familiaris_." But it appeared in still another form. It happened that adventurers represented themselves as mandragoras, and on account of this mystical origin had gained success at court, having first been spiritually made human by Christian baptism. But they lost by baptism their wonder-working power, greatly to their own and others' pecuniary disadvantage. Still greater was the number of those adventurers during the Middle Ages who asserted themselves or others to be the bastards of devils and human beings. But if they led a blameless life, evincing a firm belief in the dogmas of the Church, the danger of such a pedigree was not greater than the honor. The son of a fallen angel did not need to bend his head before a man of noble birth.
In the demoniacal fauna of the Middle Ages the were-wolf plays too important a role to be passed over in silence. He was the terror of rural districts. Were-wolves are men who change themselves for a time into wolves, and then rove about hunting for children. The belief in the were-wolf is very ancient. Antique authors speak of it as a superstition among the Scythians, and among shepherds and peasants in the eastern provinces.[54] Then the change was considered to result from certain herbs growing in Pontus; in the Middle Ages it was the devil who wrapped a wolf's hide around the witch or the enchanted person. Even this belief was embraced and proclaimed by Augustine. Augustine,--the same father who declared that he would not believe the gospel if the authority of the Church did not exhort him to do so,--found it worthy of a Sadducean or a pagan philosopher alone to deny the existence of so well-known a phenomenon as the were-wolf. The emperor Sigismund had the question investigated "scientifically" in his presence by theologians, and they came to the general agreement that the were-wolf is "a positive and constant fact"; for the existence of the devil being accepted, there is no reason to deny that of the were-wolf, sup-ported as it is by the authority of the fathers of the Church and by general experience.[55] This "general experience" finally became, like the belief in sorcery, a raging mental disease, an epidemic ("_insama zoanthropica_") infecting whole districts in various parts of Europe and sending many insane persons who had confessed before the courts their imagined sin, to the place of execution.[56]
Nearly related to this lycanthropy is the more horrible vampirism. The vampires, according to the belief of the Middle Ages, are disembodied souls which clothe themselves again in their buried bodies, steal at night into houses, and suck from the nipple of the sleeping all their blood. He who is thus bereft of the vital fluid is in his turn changed into a vampire and visits preferably his own relatives. If the corpse of a person suspected of vampirism is dug up, and its stomach pressed, an abundance of fresh blood flows from the mouth. The corpse is well preserved. The belief in vampires has likewise produced a kind of psychical pestilence which yet in the eighteenth century spread terror in the Austrian provinces.[57]
If sorcery was an imaginary people's magic, there existed also a real, and it consisted in an infinite variety of usages, observances and rules for all conditions of life. Not to speak of the astrologers' extensive hand-written calendars, which pointed out which constellations, seasons and days are auspicious for bathing, bleeding, hair-cutting, shaving, house-building, wooing, engaging servants, setting out on travels and so on, there existed among the people an incredibly large mass of rules for living which any body that would avoid the constant danger of bringing misfortune on himself and his family, must know.