THE SABBATH St. James the Elder combating the diabolical enchantments of a magician. Composed by Brueghel the Elder; engraved by Cock

(16th Century)

with gifts of money. After this examination was passed, the demon distributed among his worshippers unguents, powders, and other articles for the perpetration of evil. A French witch, executed in 1580, confessed that some of her companions offered a sheep or a heifer; and another, executed the following year, stated that animals of a black colour were most acceptable. A third, executed at Gerbeville in 1585, declared that no one was exempt from this offering, and that the poorer sort offered a hen or a chicken, and some even a lock of their hair, a little bird, or any trifle, they could put their hands upon. Severe punishments followed the neglect of this ceremony. In many instances, according to the confessions of the witches, besides their direct worship of the devil, they were obliged to show their abhorrence of the faith they had deserted by trampling on the cross, and blaspheming the saints, and by other profanations.

Before the termination of the meeting, the new witches received their familiars, or imps, who they generally addressed as their "little masters," although they were bound to attend at the bidding of the witches, and execute their desires. These received names, generally of a popular character, such as were given to cats, and dogs, and other pet animals and the similarity these names bear to each other in different countries is very remarkable.

After all these preliminary ceremonies had been transacted, and a great banquet was laid out, and the whole company fell to eating and drinking and making merry. At times, every article of luxury was placed before them, and they feasted in the most sumptuous manner. Often, however, the meats served on the table were nothing but toads and rats, and other articles of a revolting nature. In general they had no salt, and seldom bread. But, even when best served, the money and the victuals furnished by the demons were of the most unsatisfactory character; a circumstance of which no rational explanation is given. The coin when brought forth by open daylight, was generally found to be nothing better than dried leaves or bits of dirt; and, however, greedily they may have eaten at the table, they commonly left the meeting in a state of exhaustion from hunger.

The tables were next removed, and feasting gave way to wild and uproarious dancing and revelry. The common dance, or carole, of the middle ages appears to have been performed by the persons taking each other's hand in a circle, alternately a man and a woman. This, probably the ordinary dance among the peasantry, was the one generally practised at the Sabbaths of the witches, with this peculiarity, that their backs instead of their faces were turned inwards. The old writers endeavour to account for this, by supposing that it was designed to prevent them from seeing and recognising each other. But this, it is clear, was not the only dance of the Sabbath; perhaps more fashionable ones were introduced for witches in better conditions in society; and moralists of the succeeding age maliciously insinuate that many dances of a not very decorous character invented by the devil himself to heat the imaginations of his victims, had subsequently been adopted in classes in society who did not frequent the Sabbath. It may be observed, as a curious circumstance that the modern waltz is first traced among the meetings of the witches and their imps! It was also confessed, in almost every case, that the dances at the Sabbaths produced much greater fatigue than commonly arose from such exercises. Many of the witches declared that, on their return home, they were, usually unable to rise from their bed for two or three days.

Their music, also, was by no means of an ordinary character. The songs were generally obscene, or vulgar, or ridiculous. Of instruments there was considerable variety, but all partaking of the burlesque character of the proceed

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ings. Some played the flute upon a stick or bone; another was seen striking a horse's skull for a lyre; there you saw them beating the drum on the trunk of an oak, with a stick; here, others were blowing trumpets with the branches. The louder the instrument, the greater satisfaction it gave; and the dancing became wilder and wilder, until it merged into a vast scene of confusion, and ended in scenes over which, though minutely described in the old treatises on demonology, it will be better to throw a veil." The witches separated in time to reach their homes before cock-crow.

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We then see that Satan had taken the place of the deities of the older and abandoned cults of the non-Aryans, whose obscene rites were attended by "initiated or "adopted neophytes of a race to the generality of which they were abominable, that witches often worked by means of familiars, whose shapes they were able to take, or by means of direct satanic agency. But there were probably mythological elements in witchcraft as well.

Powers of Witches.-In the eyes of the populace the powers of witches were numerous. The most peculiar of these were: The ability to blight by means of the evil eye (q.v.) the sale of winds to sailors, power over animals, and capacity to transform themselves into animal shapes. Thus, says Gomme-" The most usual transformations are into cats and hares, and less frequently into red deer, and these have taken the place of wolves. Thus, cattransformations are found in Yorkshire, hare-transformations in Devonshire, Yorkshire and Wales, and Scotland, deer-transformations in Cumberland, raven-transformations in Scotland, cattle-transformations in Ireland. Indeed the connection between witches and the lower animals is a very close one, and hardly anywhere in Europe does it occur that this connection is relegated to a subordinate place. Story after story, custom after custom is recorded as appertaining to witchcraft, and animal transformation appears always.

Witches also possessed the power of making themselves invisible, by means of a magic ointment supplied to them by the devil, and of harming others by thrusting nails into a waxen image representing them.

Witchcraft among Savage People.-Witchcraft among savage people is, of course, allied to the various cults of demonism in vogue among barbarian folk all over the world. These are indicated in the various articles dealing with uncultured races. The name witchcraft is merely a convenient English label for such savage demon-cults, as is" witch-doctors applied to those who "smell out these practitioners of evil.

Evidence for Witchcraft.-The evidence for witchcraft, says Podmore (Modern Spiritualism) falls under four main heads (a) the confessions of witches themselves; (b) the corroborative evidence of lycanthropy, apparitions, etc.; (c) the witch-marks; (d) the evidence of the evil effects produced upon the supposed victims.

"(a) The confessions, as is notorious, were for the most part extracted by torture, or by lying promises of release. În England, where torture was not countenanced by the law, the ingenuity of Matthew Hopkins and other professional witch-finders could generally devise some equally efficient substitute, such as gradual starvation, enforced sleeplessness, or the maintenance for hours of a constrained and painful posture. But apart from these extorted confessions, there is evidence that in some cases the accused persons were actually driven by the accumulation of testimony against them, by the pressure of public opinion, and the singular circumstances in which they were placed, to believe and confess that they were witches indeed. Some of the women in Salem who had pleaded guilty to witchcraft explained afterwards, when the persecution had died down and they were released, that they had been

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"consternated and affrighted even out of their reason confess that of which they were innocent. And there were not a few persons who voluntarily confessed to the practice of witchcraft, nocturnal rides, compacts with the devil, and all the rest of it." The most striking instances of this voluntary confession are afforded by children. For even among the earlier writers on witchcraft the opinion was not uncommonly held that the nocturnal rides and banquets with the devil were merely delusions, thought the guilt of the witch was not lessened thereby. And in the sixteenth centuries, at least in English-speaking countries this belief seems to have been generally alike by believers in witchcraft and their opponents. Thus Gaule: "But the more prodigious or stupendous (of the things narrated by witches in their confessions) are effected merely by the devil; the witches all the while either in a rapt ecstasie, a charmed sleepe, or a melancholy dreame; and the witches imagination, phantasie, common sense, only deluded with what is now done, or pretended. Even Antoinette Bourignon, observing her scholars eat" great pieces of bread and butter" at breakfast, pointed out to them that they could not have such good appetites if they had really fed on dainty meats at the devil's Sabbath the night before.

(b)-But if the witch's own account of her marvellous feats may be explained as, at best, the vague remembrance of a nightmare, it is hardly necessary to go beyond this explanation to account for the prodigies reported by others. In most cases there is no need to suppose even so much foundation for the marvels, since the evidence (e.g., for lycanthropy) is purely traditional. And when we get accounts' at first hand, they are commonly concerned, not with such matters as levitation, or transformation of hares into old women, but merely with vague shapes seen in the dusk, or the unexplained appearance of a black dog. Even so the evidence comes almost exclusively from ignorant peasants, and is given years after the events."

"(c)-The evidence for "witch-marks" does not greatly concern us. The insensible patches on which Matthew Hopkins and other witch-finders relied may well have been genuine in some cases. Such insensible areas are known to occur in hysterical subjects, and the production of insensibility by means of suggestion is a commonplace in modern times. The supposed witches' teats, which the imps sucked, appear to have been found almost exclusively, like the imps themselves, in the English-speaking countries. Any wart, boil, or swelling would probably form a sufficient warrant for the accusation; we read in Cotton Mather of a jury of women finding a preter-natural teat upon a witch's body, which could not be discovered when a second search was made three or four hours later, and of a witch's mark upon the finger of a small child, which took the form of a deep red spot, about the bigness of a flea-bite." And the witch-mark which brought conviction to the mind of Increase Mather in the case of George Burroughs was his ability to hold a heavy gun at arm's length, and to carry a barrel of cider from the canoe to the shore."

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(d)-Of most of the evidence based upon the injuries suffered by the witches' supposed victims, it is difficult to speak seriously. If a man's cow ran dry, if his horse stumbled, his cart stuck in a gate, his pigs or fowls sickened, if his child had a fit, his wife or himself an unaccustomed pain, it was evidence acceptable in a court of law against any old woman who might be supposed within the last twelve months-or twelve years-to have conceived some cause of offence against him and his. Follies of this kind are too well known to need repetition.

But there is another feature of witchcraft, at any rate of the cases occurring in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England and America, which is not so well recognised, and which has a more direct bearing upon our

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present inquiry-the predominant part played in the initial stages of witch persecution by malevolent or merely hysterical children and young women."

Symptoms of Bewitchment.-Mr. Podmore remarks: "The symptoms of the alleged bewitchment were, in all these cases monotonously alike. The victims would fall into fits or convulsions, of a kind which the physicians called in were unable to diagnose or to cure. In these fits the children would commonly call out on the old woman who was the imaginary cause of their ailment; would profess, at times, to see her shape present in the room, and would even stab at it with a knife or other weapon. (In the most conclusive cases the record continues that the old woman, being straightway sought for, would be found attempting to conceal a corresponding wound on her person.) These fits, which sometimes lasted, with slight intermission, for weeks together would be increased in violence by the approach of the supposed witch; or, as Hutchinson notes, by the presence of sympathetic spectators. The fits, as was also commonly noted by contemporary chroniclers, would diminish or altogether cease when the witch was imprisoned or condemned; on the other hand, if the supposed witch were released the victim would continue to suffer horrible tortures, insomuch that at the Salem trials one old woman who had been acquitted by the jury was, because of the hideous outcry from the afflicted persons in court, straightway re-tried and condemned. The witch's touch would always provoke severe attacks, indeed, contact with the witch or the establishment of rapport between her and the victim by means of some garment worn by the latter, as in Mistress Faith Corbet's case, was generally regarded as an essential pre-requisite of the enchantment. Once this rapport established the mere look of the witch, or the direction of her evil will would suffice. The afflicted in Salem were, as the Mathers testify, much tortured in court by the malevolent glances of the poor wretches on trial; and two visionary' girls added greatly to the weight of the evidence by foretelling with singular accuracy, when such or such of the afflicted persons then present would feel the baneful influence, and howl for anguish. It should be added-though the evidence as we now understand the word, for the fact alleged is of course practically negligible-that it was commonly reported that the witch's victim could, although blindfolded, distinguish her tormentor by the touch alone from all other persons, and could even foresce her approach and discern her actions at a considerable distance.

The effect of the convulsions and cataleptic attacks, which modern science would unhesitatingly dismiss as being simply the result of hysteria, was heightened in many cases by manifestations of a more material kind. It was a common feature for the victim to vomit pins, needles, wood, stubble, and other substances; or for thorns or needles to be found embedded in her flesh. In a case recorded by Glanvil an hysterical servant girl, Mary Longdon, in addition to the usual fits, vomiting of pins, etc., was tormented by stones being continually flung at her, which stones when they fell to the ground straightway vanished. Her master bore witness in court to the falling of the stones and their miraculous disappearance. Moreover, the same Mary Longdon would frequently be transported by an invisible power to the top of the house, and there" laid on a board betwixt two Sollar beams," or would be put into a chest, or half suffocated between two feather-beds.

"Gross as these frauds appear to us, it is singular that for the most part they remained undetected, and even, it would seem, unsuspected, not merely by the ignorant peasants, for whose benefit the play was acted in the first instance, but in the larger theatre of a law court. But there

are some notorious instances of confession or detection. Edmund Robinson, the boy on whose accusation the Lancashire witches were tried, subsequently confessed to imposture. Other youths were detected with blacklead in their mouths when foaming in sham epileptic fits, colouring their urine with ink, concealing crooked pins about their persons in order to vomit them later, scratching the bed posts with their toes, and surreptitiously eating to repletion during a pretended fast. But commonly the spectators were so convinced beforehand of the genuineness of such portents that they held it superfluous to examine the claims of any particular performance of this kind on their credence.

"It is difficult to know in such cases where self-deception ends and where malevolent trickery begins. Nor would the examination of these bygone outbreaks of hysteria trivial in themselves as terrible in their consequences-be of interest in the present connection, except for the fact that we find here the primitive form of those Poltergeist manifestations which gave the popular impetus in 1848 to the belief in Modern Spiritualism, and which are still appealed by those who maintain the genuineness of the physical manifestations of the séance room as instances of similar phenomena occurring spontaneously."

Difference between British and Continental Witcheraft.The salient difference between British and Continental witchcraft systems seems to have been that whereas the former was an almost exclusively female system, the Continental one favoured the inclusion in the ranks of sorcerers (as foreign witches were called) of the male element; this at least was the case in France and Germany, but there is evidence that in Hungary and the Slavonic countries, the female element was the more numerous. In Ireland we find women also pre-eminent; this is probably to be accounted for by the circumstance before noted that the non-alien priesthoods in their decline became almost entirely dependent upon the offices of women. But the various forms of witchcraft are duly entered in the several articles dealing with European countries.

Growth of Belief in Witchcraft.-It is significant that in early times the supernatural side of witchcraft won little public credence. People believed in such things as magical poisoning and the raising of tempests by witches, but they refused to give credence to such superstitions as that the witch rode through the air, or had communion in any way with diabolic agency. As early as 800 A.D. an Irish synod pronounced the belief of flight through the air and vampirism, to be incompatible with Christian doctrine, and many early writers like Stephen of Hungary and Regino state that flight by night and kindred practices are merely a delusion. Indeed those who held these beliefs

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actively punished by penance. In face of the later development of belief in witchcraft, this frank scepticism is almost amazing, and it is most strange that the tenth and eleventh centuries should have rejected superstitions embraced widely by the sixteenth and seventeenth.

From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries we find the conception of witchcraft and demonology greatly furthered and assisted by the writings of scholars and the institution of the Inquisition to deal with the rise of unbelief. A vast amount of literature was circulated dealing with questions relating to magic and sorcery, and regarding the habits and customs of witches, magicians and practitioners in " black magic,” and many hairs were split. The Church gladly joined in this campaign against what it regarded as the forces of darkness, and indeed both accused and accusers seem to have lingered under the most dreadful delusionsdelusions which were to cost society dear as a whole. The scholastic conception of demonology was that the witch was not a woman but a demon. Rationalism was at a

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discount and the ingenuity of medieval scholars disposed of all objections to the phenomena of witchcraft. The deities of pagan times were cited as practitioners of sorcery, and erudition, especially in ecclesiastical circles, ran riot on the subject. There also arose a class of judges or inquisitors like Bodin in France and Sprenger in Germany, who composed lengthy treatises upon the manner of discovering witches, of putting them to the test, and generally of presiding in witchcraft trials. The cold-blooded cruelty of these textbooks on current demonology can only be accounted for by the likelihood that their authors felt themselves justified in their composition through motives of fidelity to their church and religion. The awful terror disseminated especially among the intelligent by the possibility of a charge of witchcraft being brought against them at any moment brought about an intolerable condition of things. The intellectual might be arraigned at any time on a charge of witchcraft by any rascal who cared to make it. Position or learning were no safeguard against such a charge, and it is peculiar that the more thoughtful and serious part of the population should not have made some attempt to put a period to the dreadful condition of affairs brought about by ignorance and superstition. Of course the principal reason against their being able to do so was the fact that the whole system was countenanced by the Church, in whose hands the entire procedure of trials for witchcraft lay.

Strangely enough convents and monasteries were often the centres of demoniac possession. The conception of the incubi and succubi undoubtedly arose from the ascetic tortures of the monk and the nun. Wholesale trials, too, of wretched people who were alleged to attend Sabbatic orgies of the enemy of mankind on dreary heaths were gone through with an elaborateness which spread terror in the public mind. The tortures inflicted on those unfortunates were generally of the most fiendish description, but they were supposed to be for the good of the souls of those who bore them. In France the majority of these trials took place in the fifteenth century; whereas in England we find that most of them were current in the seventeenth century. Full details regarding these will be found in the articles France and England. The famous outburst of fanaticism in New England under Cotton Mather (See America) in 1691 to 1692 was by no means the last in an English-speaking country, for in 1712 a woman was convicted of witchcraft in England, and in Scotland the last trial and execution for sorcery took place in 1722. In Spain we find burnings by the Inquisition in 1781; in Germany as late as 1793, and as regards Latin South America a woman was burned in Peru so recently as 1888. The death of the belief in witchcraft was brought about by a more sane spirit of criticism than had before obtained. Even the dull wits of the inquisitorial and other courts began to see that the wretched creatures upon whom they passed sentence either confessed because of the extremity of torture they had to suffer, or else were under hallucination regarding the nature of their connection with the satanic power. Reginald Scot in his Discovery of Witchcraft (1584) proved that the belief on the part of the witch that she was a servant of the Devil was purely imaginary, and in consequence drew upon his work the wrath of the British Solomon, James I., who warmly replied to him in his Demonologie. But Friedrich von Spee's Cautio Criminalis, 1631, advanced considerations of still greater weight from the rationalistic point of viewconsiderations of such weight indeed that Bodin, the archdemonologist, denounced him and demanded that he should be added to the long list of his victims.

Psychology of Witchcraft.-No doubt exists nowadays when the conditions of savage witchcraft have been closely