Among persons who, upon this subject, purged their eyes with rue and
euphrasie, besides the Rev. Dr. Harsnet and many others (who wrote
rather on special cases of Demonology than on the general question),
Reginald Scot ought to be distinguished. Webster assures us that he was
a "person of competent learning, pious, and of a good family." He seems
to have been a zealous Protestant, and much of his book, as well as that
of Harsnet, is designed to throw upon the Papists in particular those
tricks in which, by confederacy and imposture, the popular ideas
concerning witchcraft, possession, and other supernatural fancies, were
maintained and kept in exercise; but he also writes on the general
question with some force and talent, considering that his subject is
incapable of being reduced into a regular form, and is of a nature
particularly seductive to an excursive talent. He appears to have
studied legerdemain for the purpose of showing how much that is
apparently unaccountable can nevertheless be performed without the
intervention of supernatural assistance, even when it is impossible to
persuade the vulgar that the devil has not been consulted on the
occasion. Scot also had intercourse with some of the celebrated
fortune-tellers, or Philomaths, of the time; one of whom he brings
forward to declare the vanity of the science which he himself had once
professed.

To defend the popular belief of witchcraft there arose a number of
advocates, of whom Bodin and some others neither wanted knowledge nor
powers of reasoning. They pressed the incredulous party with the charge
that they denied the existence of a crime against which the law had
denounced a capital punishment. As that law was understood to emanate
from James himself, who was reigning monarch during the hottest part of
the controversy, the English authors who defended the opposite side were
obliged to entrench themselves under an evasion, to avoid maintaining an
argument unpalatable to a degree to those in power, and which might
perchance have proved unsafe to those who used it. With a certain degree
of sophistry they answered that they did not doubt the possibility of
witches, but only demurred to what is their nature, and how they came to
be such--according to the scholastic jargon, that the question in
respect to witches was not _de existentia_, but only _de modo
existendi_.

By resorting to so subtle an argument those who impugned the popular
belief were obliged, with some inconsistency, to grant that witchcraft
had existed, and might exist, only insisting that it was a species of
witchcraft consisting of they knew not what, but certainly of something
different from that which legislators, judges, and juries had hitherto
considered the statute as designed to repress.

In the meantime (the rather that the debate was on a subject
particularly difficult of comprehension) the debating parties grew warm,
and began to call names. Bodin, a lively Frenchman of an irritable
habit, explained the zeal of Wierus to protect the tribe of sorcerers
from punishment, by stating that he himself was a conjurer and the
scholar of Cornelius Agrippa, and might therefore well desire to save
the lives of those accused of the same league with Satan. Hence they
threw on their antagonists the offensive names of witch-patrons and
witch-advocates, as if it were impossible for any to hold the opinion of
Naudæus, Wierus, Scot, &c., without patronizing the devil and the
witches against their brethren of mortality. Assailed by such heavy
charges, the philosophers themselves lost patience, and retorted abuse
in their turn, calling Bodin, Delrio, and others who used their
arguments, witch-advocates, and the like, as the affirming and defending
the existence of the crime seemed to increase the number of witches, and
assuredly augmented the list of executions. But for a certain time the
preponderance of the argument lay on the side of the Demonologists, and
we may briefly observe the causes which gave their opinions, for a
period, greater influence than their opponents on the public mind.

It is first to be observed that Wierus, for what reason cannot well be
conjectured, except to show the extent of his cabalistical knowledge,
had introduced into his work against witchcraft the whole Stenographia
of Trithemius, which he had copied from the original in the library of
Cornelius Agrippa; and which, suspicious from the place where he found
it, and from the long catalogue of fiends which it contained, with the
charms for raising and for binding them to the service of mortals, was
considered by Bodin as containing proof that Wierus himself was a
sorcerer; not one of the wisest, certainly, since he thus unnecessarily
placed at the disposal of any who might buy the book the whole secrets
which formed his stock-in-trade.

Secondly, we may notice that, from the state of physical science at the
period when Van Helmont, Paracelsus, and others began to penetrate into
its recesses, it was an unknown, obscure, and ill-defined region, and
did not permit those who laboured in it to give that precise and
accurate account of their discoveries which the progress of reasoning
experimentally and from analysis has enabled the late discoverers to do
with success. Natural magic--a phrase used to express those phenomena
which could be produced by a knowledge of the properties of matter--had
so much in it that was apparently uncombined and uncertain, that the art
of chemistry was accounted mystical, and an opinion prevailed that the
results now known to be the consequence of laws of matter, could not be
traced through their various combinations even by those who knew the
effects themselves. Physical science, in a word, was cumbered by a
number of fanciful and incorrect opinions, chiefly of a mystical
character. If, for instance, it was observed that a flag and a fern
never grew near each other, the circumstance was imputed to some
antipathy between these vegetables; nor was it for some time resolved by
the natural rule, that the flag has its nourishment in marshy ground,
whereas the fern loves a deep dryish soil. The attributes of the
divining-rod were fully credited; the discovery of the philosopher's
stone was daily hoped for; and electricity, magnetism, and other
remarkable and misconceived phenomena were appealed to as proof of the
reasonableness of their expectations. Until such phenomena were traced
to their sources, imaginary and often mystical causes were assigned to
them, for the same reason that, in the wilds of a partially discovered
country, according to the satirist,

"Geographers on pathless downs
 Place elephants for want of towns."

This substitution of mystical fancies for experimental reasoning gave,
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a doubtful and twilight
appearance to the various branches of physical philosophy. The learned
and sensible Dr. Webster, for instance, writing in detection of supposed
witchcraft, assumes, as a string of undeniable facts, opinions which our
more experienced age would reject as frivolous fancies; "for example,
the effects of healing by the weapon-salve, the sympathetic powder, the
curing of various diseases by apprehensions, amulets, or by
transplantation." All of which undoubted wonders he accuses the age of
desiring to throw on the devil's back--an unnecessary load certainly,
since such things do not exist, and it is therefore in vain to seek to
account for them. It followed that, while the opposers of the ordinary
theory might have struck the deepest blows at the witch hypothesis by an
appeal to common sense, they were themselves hampered by articles of
philosophical belief which they must have been sensible contained nearly
as deep draughts upon human credulity as were made by the Demonologists,
against whose doctrine they protested. This error had a doubly bad
effect, both as degrading the immediate department in which it occurred,
and as affording a protection for falsehood in other branches of
science. The champions who, in their own province, were obliged by the
imperfect knowledge of the times to admit much that was mystical and
inexplicable--those who opined, with Bacon, that warts could be cured by
sympathy--who thought, with Napier, that hidden treasures could be
discovered by the mathematics--who salved the weapon instead of the
wound, and detected murders as well as springs of water by the
divining-rod, could not consistently use, to confute the believers in
witches, an argument turning on the impossible or the incredible.

Such were the obstacles arising from the vanity of philosophers and the
imperfection of their science, which suspended the strength of their
appeal to reason and common sense against the condemning of wretches to
a cruel death on account of crimes which the nature of things rendered
in modern times totally impossible. We cannot doubt that they suffered
considerably in the contest, which was carried on with much anger and
malevolence; but the good seed which they had sown remained uncorrupted
in the soil, to bear fruit so soon as the circumstances should be
altered which at first impeded its growth. In the next letter I shall
take a view of the causes which helped to remove these impediments, in
addition, it must always be remembered, to the general increase of
knowledge and improvement of experimental philosophy.




LETTER VII.

       Penal Laws unpopular when rigidly exercised--Prosecution of Witches
    placed in the hand of Special Commissioners, _ad
    inquirendum_--Prosecution for Witchcraft not frequent in the Elder
    Period of the Roman Empire--Nor in the Middle Ages--Some Cases took
    place, however--The Maid of Orleans--The Duchess of
    Gloucester--Richard the Third's Charge against the Relations of the
    Queen Dowager--But Prosecutions against Sorcerers became more common
    in the end of the Fourteenth Century--Usually united with the Charge
    of Heresy--Monstrelet's Account of the Persecution against the
    Waldenses, under pretext of Witchcraft--Florimond's Testimony
    concerning the Increase of Witches in his own Time--Bull of Pope
    Innocent VIII.--Various Prosecutions in Foreign Countries under this
    severe Law--Prosecutions in Labourt by the Inquisitor De Lancre and
    his Colleague--Lycanthropy--Witches in Spain--In Sweden--and
    particularly those Apprehended at Mohra.


Penal laws, like those of the Middle Ages, denounced against witchcraft,
may be at first hailed with unanimous acquiescence and approbation, but
are uniformly found to disgust and offend at least the more sensible
part of the public when the punishments become frequent and are
relentlessly inflicted. Those against treason are no exception. Each
reflecting government will do well to shorten that melancholy reign of
terror which perhaps must necessarily follow on the discovery of a plot
or the defeat of an insurrection. They ought not, either in humanity or
policy, to wait till the voice of the nation calls to them, as Mecænas
to Augustus, "_Surge tandem carnifex_!"

It is accordingly remarkable, in different countries, how often at some
particular period of their history there occurred an epidemic of terror
of witches, which, as fear is always cruel and credulous, glutted the
public with seas of innocent blood; and how uniformly men loathed the
gore after having swallowed it, and by a reaction natural to the human
mind desired, in prudence, to take away or restrict those laws which had
been the source of carnage, in order that their posterity might neither
have the will nor the means to enter into similar excesses.

A short review of foreign countries, before we come to notice the
British Islands and their Colonies, will prove the truth of this
statement. In Catholic countries on the Continent, the various kingdoms
adopted readily that part of the civil law, already mentioned, which
denounces sorcerers and witches as rebels to God, and authors of
sedition in the empire. But being considered as obnoxious equally to the
canon and civil law, Commissions of Inquisition were especially
empowered to weed out of the land the witches and those who had
intercourse with familiar spirits, or in any other respect fell under
the ban of the Church, as well as the heretics who promulgated or
adhered to false doctrine. Special warrants were thus granted from time
to time in behalf of such inquisitors, authorizing them to visit those
provinces of Germany, France, or Italy where any report concerning
witches or sorcery had alarmed the public mind; and those Commissioners,
proud of the trust reposed in them, thought it becoming to use the
utmost exertions on their part, that the subtlety of the examinations,
and the severity of the tortures they inflicted, might wring the truth
out of all suspected persons, until they rendered the province in which
they exercised their jurisdiction a desert from which the inhabitants
fled. It would be impossible to give credit to the extent of this
delusion, had not some of the inquisitors themselves been reporters of
their own judicial exploits: the same hand which subscribed the sentence
has recorded the execution.

In the earlier period of the Church of Rome witchcraft is frequently
alluded to, and a capital punishment assigned to those who were supposed
to have accomplished by sorcery the death of others, or to have
attempted, by false prophecies or otherwise, under pretext of consulting
with the spiritual world, to make innovation in the state. But no
general denunciation against witchcraft itself, as a league with the
Enemy of Man, or desertion of the Deity, and a crime _sui generis_,
appears to have been so acted upon, until the later period of the
sixteenth century, when the Papal system had attained its highest pitch
of power and of corruption. The influence of the Churchmen was in early
times secure, and they rather endeavoured, by the fabrication of false
miracles, to prolong the blind veneration of the people, than to vex
others and weary themselves by secret investigations into dubious and
mystical trespasses, in which probably the higher and better instructed
members of the clerical order put as little faith at that time as they
do now. Did there remain a mineral fountain, respected for the cures
which it had wrought, a huge oak-tree, or venerated mount, which beauty
of situation had recommended to traditional respect, the fathers of the
Roman Church were in policy reluctant to abandon such impressive spots,
or to represent them as exclusively the rendezvous of witches or of evil
spirits. On the contrary, by assigning the virtues of the spring or the
beauty of the tree to the guardianship of some saint, they acquired, as
it were, for the defence of their own doctrine, a frontier fortress
which they wrested from the enemy, and which it was at least needless to
dismantle, if it could be conveniently garrisoned and defended. Thus the
Church secured possession of many beautiful pieces of scenery, as Mr.
Whitfield is said to have grudged to the devil the monopoly of all the
fine tunes.

It is true that this policy was not uniformly observed. The story of the
celebrated Jeanne d'Arc, called the Maid of Orleans, preserves the
memory of such a custom, which was in that case turned to the prejudice
of the poor woman who observed it.

It is well known that this unfortunate female fell into the hands of the
English, after having, by her courage and enthusiasm manifested on many
important occasions, revived the drooping courage of the French, and
inspired them with the hope of once more freeing their country. The
English vulgar regarded her as a sorceress--the French as an inspired
heroine; while the wise on both sides considered her as neither the one
nor the other, but a tool used by the celebrated Dunois to play the part
which he assigned her. The Duke of Bedford, when the ill-starred Jeanne
fell into his hands, took away her life in order to stigmatize her
memory with sorcery and to destroy the reputation she had acquired among
the French. The mean recurrence to such a charge against such a person
had no more success than it deserved, although Jeanne was condemned both
by the Parliament of Bordeux and the University of Paris. Her indictment
accused her of having frequented an ancient oak-tree, and a fountain
arising under it, called the Fated or Fairy Oak of Bourlemont. Here she
was stated to have repaired during the hours of divine service, dancing,
skipping, and making gestures, around the tree and fountain, and hanging
on the branches chaplets and garlands of flowers, gathered for the
purpose, reviving, doubtless, the obsolete idolatry which in ancient
times had been rendered on the same spot to the _Genius Loci_. The
charmed sword and blessed banner, which she had represented as signs of
her celestial mission, were in this hostile charge against her described
as enchanted implements, designed by the fiends and fairies whom she
worshipped to accomplish her temporary success. The death of the
innocent, high-minded, and perhaps amiable enthusiast, was not, we are
sorry to say, a sacrifice to a superstitious fear of witchcraft, but a
cruel instance of wicked policy mingled with national jealousy and
hatred.

To the same cause, about the same period, we may impute the trial of the
Duchess of Gloucester, wife of the good Duke Humphrey, accused of
consulting witches concerning the mode of compassing the death of her
husband's nephew, Henry VI. The Duchess was condemned to do penance, and
thereafter banished to the Isle of Man, while several of her accomplices
died in prison or were executed. But in this instance also the alleged
witchcraft was only the ostensible cause of a procedure which had its
real source in the deep hatred between the Duke of Gloucester and
Cardinal Beaufort, his half-brother. The same pretext was used by
Richard III. when he brought the charge of sorcery against the Queen
Dowager, Jane Shore, and the queen's kinsmen; and yet again was by that
unscrupulous prince directed against Morton, afterwards Archbishop of
Canterbury, and other adherents of the Earl of Richmond. The accusation
in both cases was only chosen as a charge easily made and difficult to
be eluded or repelled.

But in the meanwhile, as the accusation of witchcraft thus afforded to
tyranny or policy the ready means of assailing persons whom it might not
have been possible to convict of any other crime, the aspersion itself
was gradually considered with increase of terror as spreading wider and
becoming more contagious. So early as the year 1398 the University of
Paris, in laying down rules for the judicial prosecuting of witches,
express their regret that the crime was growing more frequent than in
any former age. The more severe enquiries and frequent punishments by
which the judges endeavoured to check the progress of this impious
practice seem to have increased the disease, as indeed it has been
always remarked that those morbid affections of mind which depend on the
imagination are sure to become more common in proportion as public
attention is fastened on stories connected with their display.

In the same century schisms arising from different causes greatly
alarmed the Church of Rome. The universal spirit of enquiry which was
now afloat, taking a different direction in different countries, had in
almost all of them stirred up a sceptical dissatisfaction with the
dogmas of the Church--such views being rendered more credible to the
poorer classes through the corruption of manners among the clergy, too
many of whom wealth and ease had caused to neglect that course of
morality which best recommends religious doctrine. In almost every
nation in Europe there lurked in the crowded cities, or the wild
solitude of the country, sects who agreed chiefly in their animosity to
the supremacy of Rome and their desire to cast off her domination. The
Waldenses and Albigenses were parties existing in great numbers through
the south of France. The Romanists became extremely desirous to combine
the doctrine of the heretics with witchcraft, which, according to their
account, abounded especially where the Protestants were most numerous;
and, the bitterness increasing, they scrupled not to throw the charge of
sorcery, as a matter of course, upon those who dissented from the
Catholic standard of faith. The Jesuit Delrio alleges several reasons
for the affinity which he considers as existing between the Protestant
and the sorcerer; he accuses the former of embracing the opinion of
Wierus and other defenders of the devil (as he calls all who oppose his
own opinions concerning witchcraft), thus fortifying the kingdom of
Satan against that of the Church.[47]

[Footnote 47: Delrio, "De Magia." See the Preface.]

A remarkable passage in Monstrelet puts in a clear view the point aimed
at by the Catholics in thus confusing and blending the doctrines of
heresy and the practice of witchcraft, and how a meeting of inoffensive
Protestants could be cunningly identified with a Sabbath of hags and
fiends.

"In this year (1459), in the town of Arras and county of Artois, arose,
through a terrible and melancholy chance, an opinion called, I know not
why, the Religion of Vaudoisie. This sect consisted, it is said, of
certain persons, both men and women, who, under cloud of night, by the
power of the devil, repaired to some solitary spot, amid woods and
deserts, where the devil appeared before them in a human form--save that
his visage is never perfectly visible to them--read to the assembly a
book of his ordinances, informing them how he would be obeyed;
distributed a very little money and a plentiful meal, which was
concluded by a scene of general profligacy; after which each one of the
party was conveyed home to her or his own habitation.

"On accusations of access to such acts of madness," continues
Monstrelet, "several creditable persons of the town of Arras were seized
and imprisoned along with some foolish women and persons of little
consequence. These were so horribly tortured that some of them admitted
the truth of the whole accusations, and said, besides, that they had
seen and recognised in their nocturnal assembly many persons of rank,
prelates, seigneurs, and governors of bailliages and cities, being such
names as the examinators had suggested to the persons examined, while
they constrained them by torture to impeach the persons to whom they
belonged. Several of those who had been thus informed against were
arrested, thrown into prison, and tortured for so long a time that they
also were obliged to confess what was charged against them. After this
those of mean condition were executed and inhumanly burnt, while the
richer and more powerful of the accused ransomed themselves by sums of
money, to avoid the punishment and the shame attending it. Many even of
those also confessed being persuaded to take that course by the
interrogators, who promised them indemnity for life and fortune. Some
there were, of a truth, who suffered with marvellous patience and
constancy the torments inflicted on them, and would confess nothing
imputed to their charge; but they, too, had to give large sums to the
judges, who exacted that such of them as, notwithstanding their
mishandling, were still able to move, should banish themselves from that
part of the country." Monstrelet winds up this shocking narrative by
informing us "that it ought not to be concealed that the whole
accusation was a stratagem of wicked men for their own covetous
purposes, and in order, by these false accusations and forced
confessions, to destroy the life, fame, and fortune of wealthy persons."

Delrio himself confesses that Franciscus Balduinus gives an account of
the pretended punishment, but real persecution, of these Waldenses, in
similar terms with Monstrelet, whose suspicions are distinctly spoken
out, and adds that the Parliament of Paris, having heard the affair by
appeal, had declared the sentence illegal and the judges iniquitous, by
an arrГ©t dated 20th May, 1491. The Jesuit Delrio quotes the passage, but
adheres with lingering reluctance to the truth of the accusation. "The
Waldenses (of whom the Albigenses are a species) were," he says, "never
free from the most wretched excess of fascination;" and finally, though
he allows the conduct of the judges to have been most odious, he cannot
prevail on himself to acquit the parties charged by such interested
accusers with horrors which should hardly have been found proved even
upon the most distinct evidence. He appeals on this occasion to
Florimond's work on Antichrist. The introduction of that work deserves
to be quoted, as strongly illustrative of the condition to which the
country was reduced, and calculated to make an impression the very
reverse probably of that which the writer would have desired:--

"All those who have afforded us some signs of the approach of Antichrist
agree that the increase of sorcery and witchcraft is to distinguish the
melancholy period of his advent; and was ever age so afflicted with them
as ours? The seats destined for criminals before our judicatories are
blackened with persons accused of this guilt. There are not judges
enough to try them. Our dungeons are gorged with them. No day passes
that we do not render our tribunals bloody by the dooms which we
pronounce, or in which we do not return to our homes discountenanced and
terrified at the horrible contents of the confessions which it has been
our duty to hear. And the devil is accounted so good a master that we
cannot commit so great a number of his slaves to the flames but what
there shall arise from their ashes a number sufficient to supply their
place."[48]

[Footnote 48: Florimond, "Concerning the Antichrist," cap. 7, n. 5,
quoted by Delrio, "De Magia," p. 820.]

This last statement, by which it appears that the most active and
unsparing inquisition was taking place, corresponds with the historical
notices of repeated persecutions upon this dreadful charge of sorcery. A
bull of Pope Innocent VIII. rang the tocsin against this formidable
crime, and set forth in the most dismal colours the guilt, while it
stimulated the inquisitors to the unsparing discharge of their duty in
searching out and punishing the guilty. "It is come to our ears," says
the bull, "that numbers of both sexes do not avoid to have intercourse
with the infernal fiends, and that by their sorceries they afflict both
man and beast; that they blight the marriage-bed, destroy the births of
women, and the increase of cattle; they blast the corn on the ground,
the grapes of the vineyard, the fruits of the trees, the grass and herbs
of the field." For which reasons the inquisitors were armed with the
apostolic power, and called upon to "convict, imprison, and punish," and
so forth.

Dreadful were the consequences of this bull all over the Continent,
especially in Italy, Germany, and France,[49] About 1485 Cumanus burnt
as witches forty-one poor women in one year in the county of Burlia. In
the ensuing years he continued the prosecution with such unremitting
zeal that many fled from the country.

[Footnote 49: Dr. Hutchinson quotes "H. Institor," 105, 161.]

Alciatus states that an inquisitor, about the same period, burnt an
hundred sorcerers in Piedmont, and persevered in his inquiries till
human patience was exhausted, and the people arose and drove him out of
the country, after which the jurisdiction was deferred to the
archbishop. That prelate consulted Alciatus himself, who had just then
obtained his doctor's degree in civil law, to which he was afterwards an
honour. A number of unfortunate wretches were brought for judgment,
fitter, according to the civilian's opinion, for a course of hellebore
than for the stake. Some were accused of having dishonoured the crucifix
and denied their salvation; others of having absconded to keep the
Devil's Sabbath, in spite of bolts and bars; others of having merely
joined in the choral dances around the witches' tree of rendezvous.
Several of their husbands and relatives swore that they were in bed and
asleep during these pretended excursions. Alciatus recommended gentle
and temperate measures; and the minds of the country became at length
composed.[50]

[Footnote 50: Alciat. "Parerg. Juris," lib. viii. chap. 22.]

In 1488, the country four leagues around Constance was laid waste by
lightning and tempest, and two women being, by fair means or foul, made
to confess themselves guilty as the cause of the devastation, suffered
death.

About 1515, 500 persons were executed at Geneva, under the character of
"Protestant witches," from which we may suppose many suffered for
heresy. Forty-eight witches were burnt at Ravensburgh within four years,
as Hutchison reports, on the authority of Mengho, the author of the
"Malleus Malleficarum." In Lorraine the learned inquisitor, Remigius,
boasts that he put to death 900 people in fifteen years. As many were
banished from that country, so that whole towns were on the point of
becoming desolate. In 1524, 1,000 persons were put to death in one year
at Como, in Italy, and about 100 every year after for several years.[51]

[Footnote 51: Bart. de Spina, de Strigilibus.]

In the beginning of the next century the persecution of witches broke
out in France with a fury which was hardly conceivable, and multitudes
were burnt amid that gay and lively people. Some notion of the extreme
prejudice of their judges may be drawn from the words of one of the
inquisitors themselves. Pierre de Lancre, royal councillor in the
Parliament of Bourdeaux, with whom the President Espaignel was joined in
a commission to enquire into certain acts of sorcery, reported to have
been committed in Labourt and its neighbourhood, at the foot of the
Pyrenees, about the month of May, 1619. A few extracts from the preface
will best evince the state of mind in which he proceeded to the
discharge of his commission.

His story assumes the form of a narrative of a direct war between Satan
on the one side and the Royal Commissioners on the other, "because,"
says Councillor de Lancre, with self-complaisance, "nothing is so
calculated to strike terror into the fiend and his dominions as a
commission with such plenary powers."

At first, Satan endeavoured to supply his vassals who were brought
before the judges with strength to support the examinations, so that if,
by intermission of the torture, the wretches should fall into a doze,
they declared, when they were recalled from it to the question, that the
profound stupor "had something of Paradise in it, being gilded," said
the judge, "with the immediate presence of the devil;" though, in all
probability, it rather derived its charms from the natural comparison
between the insensibility of exhaustion and the previous agony of acute
torture. The judges took care that the fiend seldom obtained any
advantage in the matter by refusing their victims, in most cases, any
interval of rest or sleep. Satan then proceeded, in the way of direct
defiance, to stop the mouth of the accused openly, and by mere force,
with something like a visible obstruction in their throat.
Notwithstanding this, to put the devil to shame, some of the accused
found means, in spite of him, to confess and be hanged, or rather burnt.
The fiend lost much credit by his failure on this occasion. Before the
formidable Commissioners arrived, he had held his _cour plГ©niГЁre_ before
the gates of Bourdeaux, and in the square of the palace of Galienne,
whereas he was now insulted publicly by his own vassals, and in the
midst of his festival of the Sabbath the children and relations of the
witches who had suffered not sticking to say to him, "Out upon you! Your
promise was that our mothers who were prisoners should not die; and look
how you have kept your word with us! They have been burnt, and are a
heap of ashes." To appease this mutiny Satan had two evasions. He
produced illusory fires, and encouraged the mutinous to walk through
them, assuring them that the judicial pile was as frigid and inoffensive
as those which he exhibited to them. Again, taking his refuge in lies,
of which he is well known to be the father, he stoutly affirmed that
their parents, who seemed to have suffered, were safe in a foreign
country, and that if their children would call on them they would
receive an answer. They made the invocation accordingly, and Satan
answered each of them in a tone which resembled the voice of the
lamented parent almost as successfully as Monsieur Alexandra could have
done.

Proceeding to a yet more close attack, the Commissioners, on the eve of
one of the Fiend's Sabbaths, placed the gibbet on which they executed
their victims just on the spot where Satan's gilded chair was usually
stationed. The devil was much offended at such an affront, and yet had
so little power in the matter that he could only express his resentment
by threats that he would hang Messieurs D'Amon and D'Urtubbe, gentlemen
who had solicited and promoted the issuing of the Commission, and would
also burn the Commissioners themselves in their own fire. We regret to
say that Satan was unable to execute either of these laudable
resolutions. Ashamed of his excuses, he abandoned for three or four
sittings his attendance on the Sabbaths, sending as his representative
an imp of subordinate account, and in whom no one reposed confidence.
When he took courage again to face his parliament, the Arch-fiend
covered his defection by assuring them that he had been engaged in a
lawsuit with the Deity, which he had gained with costs, and that six
score of infant children were to be delivered up to him in name of
damages, and the witches were directed to procure such victims
accordingly. After this grand fiction he confined himself to the petty
vengeance of impeding the access of confessors to the condemned, which
was the more easy as few of them could speak the Basque language. I have
no time to detail the ingenious method by which the learned Councillor
de Lancre explains why the district of Labourt should be particularly
exposed to the pest of sorcery. The chief reason seems to be that it is
a mountainous, a sterile, and a border country, where the men are all
fishers and the women smoke tobacco and wear short petticoats.

To a person who, in this presumptuous, trifling, and conceited spirit,
has composed a quarto volume full of the greatest absurdities and
grossest obscenities ever impressed on paper, it was the pleasure of the
most Christian Monarch to consign the most absolute power which could be
exercised on these poor people; and he might with as much prudence have
turned a ravenous wolf upon an undefended flock, of whom the animal was
the natural enemy, as they were his natural prey. The priest, as well as
the ignorant peasant, fell under the suspicion of this fell Commission;
and De Lancre writes, with much complacency, that the accused were
brought to trial to the number of forty in one day--with what chance of
escape, when the judges were blinded with prejudice, and could only hear
the evidence and the defence through the medium of an interpreter, the
understanding of the reader may easily anticipate.

Among other gross transgressions of the most ordinary rules, it may be
remarked that the accused, in what their judges called confessions,
contradicted each other at every turn respecting the description of the
Domdaniel in which they pretended to have been assembled, and the fiend
who presided there. All spoke to a sort of gilded throne; but some saw a
hideous wild he-goat seated there; some a man disfigured and twisted, as
suffering torture; some, with better taste, beheld a huge indistinct
form, resembling one of those mutilated trunks of trees found in ancient
forests. But De Lancre was no "Daniel come to judgment," and the
discrepancy of evidence, which saved the life and fame of Susannah, made
no impression in favour of the sorcerers of Labourt.

Instances occur in De Lancre's book of the trial and condemnation of
persons accused of the crime of _lycanthropy_, a superstition which was
chiefly current in France, but was known in other countries, and is the
subject of great debate between Wier, NaudГ©, Scot, on the one hand, and
their demonological adversaries on the other. The idea, said the one
party, was that a human being had the power, by sorcery, of transforming
himself into the shape of a wolf, and in that capacity, being seized
with a species of fury, he rushed out and made havoc among the flocks,
slaying and wasting, like the animal whom he represented, far more than
he could devour. The more incredulous reasoners would not allow of a
real transformation, whether with or without the enchanted hide of a
wolf, which in some cases was supposed to aid the metamorphosis, and
contended that lycanthropy only subsisted as a woful species of disease,
a melancholy state of mind, broken with occasional fits of insanity, in
which the patient imagined that he committed the ravages of which he was
accused. Such a person, a mere youth, was tried at Besançon, who gave
himself out for a servant, or yeoman pricker, of the Lord of the
Forest--so he called his superior--who was judged to be the devil. He
was, by his master's power, transformed into the likeness and performed
the usual functions of a wolf, and was attended in his course by one
larger, which he supposed the Lord of the Forest himself. These wolves,
he said, ravaged the flocks, and throttled the dogs which stood in their
defence. If either had not seen the other, he howled, after the manner
of the animal, to call his comrade to his share of the prey; if he did
not come upon this signal, he proceeded to bury it the best way he
could.

Such was the general persecution under Messieurs Espiagnel and De
Lancre. Many similar scenes occurred in France, till the edict of Louis
XIV. discharging all future prosecutions for witchcraft, after which the
crime itself was heard of no more.[52]

[Footnote 52: The reader may sup full on such wild horrors in the
_causes cГ©lГЁbres_.]

While the spirit of superstition was working such horrors in France, it
was not, we may believe, more idle in other countries of Europe. In
Spain, particularly, long the residence of the Moors, a people putting
deep faith in all the day-dreams of witchcraft, good and evil genii,
spells and talismans, the ardent and devotional temper of the old
Christians dictated a severe research after sorcerers as well as
heretics, and relapsed Jews or Mahommedans. In former times, during the
subsistence of the Moorish kingdoms in Spain, a school was supposed to
be kept open in Toboso for the study, it is said, of magic, but more
likely of chemistry, algebra, and other sciences, which, altogether
mistaken by the ignorant and vulgar, and imperfectly understood even by
those who studied them, were supposed to be allied to necromancy, or at
least to natural magic. It was, of course, the business of the
Inquisition to purify whatever such pursuits had left of suspicious
Catholicism, and their labours cost as much blood on accusations of
witchcraft and magic as for heresy and relapse.

Even the colder nations of Europe were subject to the same epidemic
terror for witchcraft, and a specimen of it was exhibited in the sober
and rational country of Sweden about the middle of last century, an
account of which, being translated into English by a respectable
clergyman, Doctor Horneck, excited general surprise how a whole people
could be imposed upon to the degree of shedding much blood, and
committing great cruelty and injustice, on account of the idle
falsehoods propagated by a crew of lying children, who in this case were
both actors and witnesses.

The melancholy truth that "the human heart is deceitful above all
things, and desperately wicked," is by nothing proved so strongly as by
the imperfect sense displayed by children of the sanctity of moral
truth. Both the gentlemen and the mass of the people, as they advance in
years, learn to despise and avoid falsehood; the former out of pride,
and from a remaining feeling, derived from the days of chivalry, that
the character of a liar is a deadly stain on their honour; the other,
from some general reflection upon the necessity of preserving a
character for integrity in the course of life, and a sense of the truth
of the common adage, that "honesty is the best policy." But these are
acquired habits of thinking. The child has no natural love of truth, as
is experienced by all who have the least acquaintance with early youth.
If they are charged with a fault while they can hardly speak, the first
words they stammer forth are a falsehood to excuse it. Nor is this all:
the temptation of attracting attention, the pleasure of enjoying
importance, the desire to escape from an unpleasing task, or accomplish
a holiday, will at any time overcome the sentiment of truth, so weak is
it within them. Hence thieves and housebreakers, from a surprisingly
early period, find means of rendering children useful in their mystery;
nor are such acolytes found to evade justice with less dexterity than
the more advanced rogues. Where a number of them are concerned in the
same mischief, there is something resembling virtue in the fidelity with
which the common secret is preserved. Children, under the usual age of
their being admitted to give evidence, were necessarily often examined
in witch trials; and it is terrible to see how often the little
impostors, from spite or in mere gaiety of spirit, have by their art and
perseverance made shipwreck of men's lives. But it would be hard to
discover a case which, supported exclusively by the evidence of children
(the confessions under torture excepted), and obviously existing only in
the young witnesses' own imagination, has been attended with such
serious consequences, or given cause to so extensive and fatal a
delusion, as that which occurred in Sweden.

The scene was the Swedish village of Mohra, in the province of Elfland,
which district had probably its name from some remnant of ancient
superstition. The delusion had come to a great height ere it reached the
ears of government, when, as was the general procedure, Royal
Commissioners were sent down, men well fitted for the duty entrusted to
them; that is, with ears open to receive the incredibilities with which
they were to be crammed, and hearts hardened against every degree of
compassion to the accused. The complaints of the common people, backed
by some persons of better condition, were that a number of persons,
renowned as witches, had drawn several hundred children of all classes
under the devil's authority. They demanded, therefore, the punishment of
these agents of hell, reminding the judges that the province had been
clear of witches since the burning of some on a former occasion. The
accused were numerous, so many as threescore and ten witches and
sorcerers being seized in the village of Mohra; three-and-twenty
confessed their crimes, and were sent to Faluna, where most of them were
executed. Fifteen of the children were also led to death. Six-and-thirty
of those who were young were forced to run the gauntlet, as it is
called, and were, besides, lashed weekly at the church doors for a whole
year. Twenty of the youngest were condemned to the same discipline for
three days only.

The process seems to have consisted in confronting the children with the
witches, and hearing the extraordinary story which the former insisted
upon maintaining. The children, to the number of three hundred, were
found more or less perfect in a tale as full of impossible absurdities
as ever was told around a nursery fire. Their confession ran thus:--

They were taught by the witches to go to a cross way, and with certain
ceremonies to invoke the devil by the name of Antecessor, begging him to
carry them off to Blockula, meaning, perhaps, the Brockenberg, in the
Hartz forest, a mountain infamous for being the common scene of witches'
meetings, and to which Goethe represents the spirit Mephistopheles as
conducting his pupil Faustus. The devil courteously appeared at the call
of the children in various forms, but chiefly as a mad Merry-Andrew,
with a grey coat, red and blue stockings, a red beard, a high-crowned
hat, with linen of various colours wrapt round it, and garters of
peculiar length. He set each child on some beast of his providing, and
anointed them with a certain unguent composed of the scrapings of altars
and the filings of church clocks. There is here a discrepancy of
evidence which in another court would have cast the whole. Most of the
children considered their journey to be corporeal and actual. Some
supposed, however, that their strength or spirit only travelled with the
fiend, and that their body remained behind. Very few adopted this last
hypothesis, though the parents unanimously bore witness that the bodies
of the children remained in bed, and could not be awakened out of a deep
sleep, though they shook them for the purpose of awakening them. So
strong was, nevertheless, the belief of nurses and mothers in their
actual transportation, that a sensible clergyman, mentioned in the
preface, who had resolved he would watch his son the whole night and see
what hag or fiend would take him from his arms, had the utmost
difficulty, notwithstanding, in convincing his mother that the child had
not been transported to Blockula during the very night he held him in
his embrace.

The learned translator candidly allows, "out of so great a multitude as
were accused, condemned, and executed, there might be some who suffered
unjustly, and owed their death more to the malice of their enemies than
to their skill in the black art, I will readily admit. Nor will I deny,"
he continues, "but that when the news of these transactions and
accounts, how the children bewitched fel into fits and strange unusual
postures, spread abroad in the kingdom, some fearful and credulous
people, if they saw their children any way disordered, might think they
were bewitched or ready to be carried away by imps."[53] The learned
gentleman here stops short in a train of reasoning, which, followed out,
would have deprived the world of the benefit of his translation. For if
it was possible that some of these unfortunate persons fell a sacrifice
to the malice of their neighbours or the prejudices of witnesses, as he
seems ready to grant, is it not more reasonable to believe that the
whole of the accused were convicted on similar grounds, than to allow,
as truth, the slightest part of the gross and vulgar impossibilities
upon which alone their execution can be justified?

[Footnote 53: Translator's preface to Horneck's "Account of what
happened in the Kingdom of Sweden." See appendix to Glanville's work.]

The Blockula, which was the object of their journey, was a house having
a fine gate painted with divers colours, with a paddock, in which they
turned the beasts to graze which had brought them to such scenes of
revelry. If human beings had been employed they were left slumbering
against the wall of the house. The plan of the devil's palace consisted
of one large banqueting apartment and several withdrawing-rooms. Their
food was homely enough, being broth made of coleworts and bacon, with
bread and butter, and milk and cheese. The same acts of wickedness and
profligacy were committed at Blockula which are usually supposed to take
place upon the devil's Sabbath elsewhere; but there was this particular,
that the witches had sons and daughters by the fiends, who were married
together, and produced an offspring of toads and serpents.

These confessions being delivered before the accused witches, they at
first stoutly denied them. At last some of them burst into tears, and
acquiesced in the horrors imputed to them. They said the practice of
carrying off children had been enlarged very lately (which shows the
whole rumours to have arisen recently); and the despairing wretches
confirmed what the children said, with many other extravagant
circumstances, as the mode of elongating a goat's back by means of a
spit, on which we care not to be particular. It is worth mentioning that
the devil, desirous of enjoying his own reputation among his subjects,
pretended at one time to be dead, and was much lamented at Blockula--but
he soon revived again.

Some attempts these witches had made to harm individuals on middle
earth, but with little success. One old sorceress, indeed, attempted to
strike a nail, given her by the devil for that purpose, into the head of
the minister of Elfland; but as the skull was of unusual solidity, the
reverend gentleman only felt a headache from her efforts. They could not
be persuaded to exhibit any of their tricks before the Commissioners,
excusing themselves by alleging that their witchcraft had left them, and
that the devil had amused them with the vision of a burning pit, having
a hand thrust out of it.

The total number who lost their lives on this singular occasion was
fourscore and four persons, including fifteen children; and at this
expense of blood was extinguished a flame that arose as suddenly, burned
as fiercely, and decayed as rapidly, as any portent of the kind within
the annals of superstition. The Commissioners returned to Court with the
high approbation of all concerned; prayers were ordered through the
churches weekly, that Heaven would be pleased to restrain the powers of
the devil, and deliver the poor creatures who hitherto had groaned under
it, as well as the innocent children, who were carried off by hundreds
at once.

If we could ever learn the true explanation of this story, we should
probably find that the cry was led by some clever mischievous boy, who
wished to apologise to his parents for lying an hour longer in the
morning by alleging he had been at Blockula on the preceding night; and
that the desire to be as much distinguished as their comrade had
stimulated the bolder and more acute of his companions to the like
falsehoods; whilst those of weaker minds assented, either from fear of
punishment or the force of dreaming over at night the horrors which were
dinned into their ears all day. Those who were ingenuous, as it was
termed, in their confessions, received praise and encouragement; and
those who denied or were silent, and, as it was considered, impenitent,
were sure to bear the harder share of the punishment which was addressed
to all. It is worth while also to observe, that the smarter children
began to improve their evidence and add touches to the general picture
of Blockula. "Some of the children talked much of a white angel, which
used to forbid them what the devil bid them do, and told them that these
doings should not last long. And (they added) this better being would
place himself sometimes at the door betwixt the witches and the
children, and when they came to Blockula he pulled the children back,
but the witches went in."