[92] To see what he rescued us from in pedantry on the one hand, and vulgarism on the other, read Feltham and Tom Brown--if you can.
[93] "Cette ode mise en musique par Purcell (si je ne me trompe), pa.s.se en Angleterre pour le chef-d"oeuvre de la poesie la plus sublime et la plus variee; et je vous avoue que, comme je sais mieux l"anglais que le grec, j"aime cent fois mieux cette ode que tout Pindare."--Voltaire to M. De Chabanon, 9 mars, 1772.
Dryden would have agreed with Voltaire. When Chief-Justice Marlay, then a young Templar, "congratulated him on having produced the finest and n.o.blest Ode that had ever been written in any language, You are right, young gentleman" (replied Dryden), "a n.o.bler Ode never _was_ produced, nor ever _will_.""--Malone.
[94] This was true of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and still more of Southey who in some respects was not unlike Dryden.
[95] Pope"s notion of gentility was perhaps expressed in a letter from Lord Cobham to him: "I congratulate you upon the fine weather.
"T is a strange thing that people of condition and men of parts must enjoy it in common with the rest of the world." (Ruffhead"s Pope, p 276, _note_.) His Lordship"s naive distinction between people of condition and men of parts is as good as Pope"s between genteel and poetical men. I fancy the poet grinning savagely as he read it.
[96] "Nothing is truly sublime," he himself said, "that is not just and proper."
[97] Dennis in a letter to Tonson, 1715.
WITCHCRAFT.[98]
Credulity, as a mental and moral phenomenon, manifests itself in widely different ways, according as it chances to be the daughter of fancy or terror. The one lies warm about the heart as Folk-lore, fills moonlit dells with dancing fairies, sets out a meal for the Brownie, hears the tinkle of airy bridle-bells as Tamlane rides away with the Queen of Dreams, changes Pluto and Proserpine into Oberon and t.i.tania, and makes friends with unseen powers as Good Folk; the other is a bird of night, whose shadow sends a chill among the roots of the hair: it sucks with the vampire, gorges with the ghoule, is choked by the night-hag, pines away under the witch"s charm, and commits uncleanness with the embodied Principle of Evil, giving up the fair realm of innocent belief to a murky throng from the slums and stews of the debauched brain. Both have vanished from among educated men, and such superst.i.tion as comes to the surface now-a-days is the harmless Jacobitism of sentiment, pleasing itself with the fiction all the more because there is no exacting reality behind it to impose a duty or demand a sacrifice. And as Jacobitism survived the Stuarts, so this has outlived the dynasty to which it professes an after-dinner allegiance. It nails a horseshoe over the door, but keeps a rattle by its bedside to summon a more substantial watchman; it hangs a c.r.a.pe on the beehives to get a taste of ideal sweetness, but obeys the teaching of the latest bee-book for material and marketable honey. This is the aesthetic variety of the malady, or rather, perhaps, it is only the old complaint robbed of all its pain, and lapped in waking dreams by the narcotism of an age of science. To the world at large it is not undelightful to see the poetical instincts of friends and neighbors finding some other vent than that of verse. But there has been a superst.i.tion of very different fibre, of more intense and practical validity, the deformed child of faith, peopling the midnight of the mind with fearful shapes and phrenetic suggestions, a monstrous brood of its own begetting, and making even good men ferocious in imagined self-defence.
Imagination, has always been, and still is, in a narrower sense, the great mythologizer; but both its mode of manifestation and the force with which it reacts on the mind are one thing in its crude form of childlike wonder, and another thing after it has been more or less consciously manipulated by the poetic faculty. A mythology that broods over us in our cradles, that mingles with the lullaby of the nurse and the winter-evening legends of the chimney-corner, that brightens day with the possibility of divine encounters, and darkens night with intimations of demonic ambushes, is of other substance than one which we take down from our bookcase, sapless as the shelf it stood on, and remote from all present sympathy with man or nature as a town history. It is something like the difference between live metaphor and dead personification.
Primarily, the action of the imagination is the same in the mythologizer and the poet, that is, it forces its own consciousness on the objects of the senses, and compels them to sympathize with its own momentary impressions. When Shakespeare in his "Lucrece" makes
"The threshold grate the door to have him heard,"
his mind is acting under the same impulse that first endowed with human feeling and then with human shape all the invisible forces of nature, and called into being those
"Fair humanities of old religion,"
whose loss the poets mourn. So also Shakespeare no doubt projected himself in his own creations; but those creations never became so perfectly disengaged from him, so objective, or, as they used to say, extrinsical, to him, as to react upon him like real and even alien existences. I mean permanently, for momentarily they may and must have done so. But before man"s consciousness had wholly disentangled itself from outward objects, all nature was but a many-sided mirror which gave back to him a thousand images more or less beautified or distorted, magnified or diminished, of himself, till his imagination grew to look upon its own incorporations as having an independent being. Thus, by degrees, it became at last pa.s.sive to its own creations. You may see imaginative children every day anthropomorphizing in this way, and the dupes of that super-abundant vitality in themselves, which bestows qualities proper to itself on everything about them. There is a period of development in which grown men are childlike. In such a period the fables which endow beasts with human attributes first grew up; and we luckily read them so early as never to become suspicious of any absurdity in them. The Finnic epos of "Kalewala" is a curious ill.u.s.tration of the same fact. In that every thing has the affections, pa.s.sions, and consciousness of men. When the mother of Lemminkainen is seeking her lost son,--
"Sought she many days the lost one, Sought him ever without finding; Then the roadways come to meet her, And she asks them with beseeching: "Roadways, ye whom G.o.d hath shapen, Have ye not my son beholden, Nowhere seen the golden apple, Him, my darling staff of silver?"
Prudently they gave her answer, Thus to her replied the roadways: "For thy son we cannot plague us, We have sorrows too, a many, Since our own lot is a hard one And our fortune is but evil, By dog"s feet to be run over, By the wheel-tire to be wounded, And by heavy heels down-trampled.""
It is in this tendency of the mind under certain conditions to confound the objective with subjective, or rather to mistake the one for the other, that Mr. Tylor, in his "Early History of Mankind," is fain to seek the origin of the supernatural, as we somewhat vaguely call whatever transcends our ordinary experience. And this, no doubt, will in many cases account for the particular shapes a.s.sumed by certain phantasmal appearances, though I am inclined to doubt whether it be a sufficient explanation of the abstract phenomenon. It is easy for the arithmetician to make a key to the problems that he has devised to suit himself. An immediate and habitual confusion of the kind spoken of is insanity; and the hypochondriac is tracked by the black dog of his own mind. Disease itself is, of course, in one sense natural, as being the result of natural causes; but if we a.s.sume health as the mean representing the normal poise of all the mental facilities, we must be content to call hypochondria subternatural, because the tone of the instrument is lowered, and to designate as supernatural only those ecstasies in which the mind, under intense but not unhealthy excitement, is s.n.a.t.c.hed sometimes above itself, as in poets and other persons of imaginative temperament. In poets this liability to be possessed by the creations of their own brains is limited and proportioned by the artistic sense, and the imagination thus truly becomes the shaping faculty, while in less regulated or coa.r.s.er organizations it dwells forever in the _Nifelheim_ of phantasmagoria and dream, a thaumaturge half cheat, half dupe. What Mr. Tylor has to say on this matter is ingenious and full of valuable suggestion, and to a certain extent solves our difficulties. Nightmare, for example, will explain the testimony of witnesses in trials for witchcraft, that they had been hag-ridden by the accused. But to prove the possibility, nay, the probability, of this confusion of objective with subjective is not enough. It accounts very well for such apparitions as those which appeared to Dion, to Brutus, and to Curtius Rufus. In such cases the imagination is undoubtedly its own _doppel-ganger_, and sees nothing more than the projection of its own deceit. But I am puzzled, I confess, to explain the appearance of the _first_ ghost, especially among men who thought death to be the end-all here below. The thing once conceived of, it is easy, on Mr. Tylor"s theory, to account for all after the first. If it was originally believed that only the spirits of those who had died violent deaths were permitted to wander,[99] the conscience of a remorseful murderer may have been haunted by the memory of his victim, till the imagination, infected in its turn, gave outward reality to the image on the inward eye. After putting to death Boetius and Symmachus, it is said that Theodoric saw in the head of a fish served at his dinner the face of Symmachus, grinning horribly and with flaming eyes, whereupon he took to his bed and died soon after in great agony of mind. It is not safe, perhaps, to believe all that is reported of an Arian; but supposing the story to be true, there is only a short step from such a delusion of the senses to the complete ghost of popular legend. But, in some of the most trustworthy stories of apparitions, they have shown themselves not only to persons who had done them no wrong in the flesh, but also to such as had never even known them. The _eidolon_ of James Haddock appeared to a man named Taverner, that he might interest himself in recovering a piece of land unjustly kept from the dead man"s infant son. If we may trust Defoe, Bishop Jeremy Taylor twice examined Taverner, and was convinced of the truth of his story. In this case, Taverner had formerly known Haddock. But the apparition of an old gentleman which entered the learned Dr. Scott"s study, and directed him where to find a missing deed needful in settling what had lately been its estate in the West of England, chose for its attorney in the business an entire stranger, who had never even seen its original in the flesh.
Whatever its origin, a belief in spirits seems to have been common to all the nations of the ancient world who have left us any record of themselves. Ghosts began to walk early, and are walking still, in spite of the shrill c.o.c.k-crow of _wir haben ja aufgeklart._ Even the ghost in chains, which one would naturally take to be a fashion peculiar to convicts escaped from purgatory, is older than the belief in that reforming penitentiary. The younger Pliny tells a very good story to this effect: "There was at Athens a large and s.p.a.cious house which lay under the disrepute of being haunted. In the dead of the night a noise resembling the clashing of iron was frequently heared, which, if you listened more attentively, sounded like the rattling of chains; at first it seemed at a distance, but approached nearer by degrees; immediately afterward a spectre appeared, in the form of an old man, extremely meagre and ghastly, with a long beard and dishevelled hair, rattling the chains on his feet and hands.... By this means the house was at last deserted, being judged by everybody to be absolutely uninhabitable; so that it was now entirely abandoned to the ghost. However, in hopes that some tenant might be found who was ignorant of this great calamity which attended it, a bill was put up giving notice that it was either to be let or sold. It happened that the philosopher Athenodorus came to Athens at this time, and, reading the bill, inquired the price. The extraordinary cheapness raised his suspicion; nevertheless, when he heared the whole story, he was so far from being discouraged that he was more strongly inclined to hire it, and, in short, actually did so. When it grew towards evening, he ordered a couch to be prepared for him in the fore part of the house, and, after calling for a light, together with his pen and tablets, he directed all his people to retire. But that his mind might not, for want of employment, be open to the vain terrors of imaginary noises and spirits, he applied himself to writing with the utmost attention. The first part of the night pa.s.sed with usual silence, when at length the chains began to rattle; however, he neither lifted up his eyes nor laid down his pen, but diverted his observation by pursuing his studies with greater earnestness. The noise increased, and advanced nearer, till it seemed at the door, and at last in the chamber. He looked up and saw the ghost exactly in the manner it had been described to him; it stood before him, beckoning with the finger. Athenodorus made a sign with his hand that it should wait a little, and threw his eyes again upon his papers; but the ghost still rattling his chains in his ears, he looked up and saw him beckoning as before. Upon this he immediately arose, and with the light in his hand followed it. The ghost slowly stalked along, as if enc.u.mbered with his chains, and, turning into the area of the house, suddenly vanished. Athenodorus, being thus deserted, made a mark with some gra.s.s and leaves where the spirit left him. The next day he gave information of this to the magistrates, and advised them to order that spot to be dug up. This was accordingly done, and the skeleton of a man in chains was there found; for the body, having lain a considerable time in the ground, was putrefied and mouldered away from the fetters. The bones, being collected together, were publicly buried, and thus, after the ghost was appeased by the proper ceremonies, the house was haunted no more."[100] This story has such a modern air as to be absolutely disheartening. Are ghosts, then, as incapable of invention as dramatic authors? But the demeanor of Athenodorus has the grand air of the cla.s.sical period, of one _qui connait son monde_, and feels the superiority of a living philosopher to a dead Philistine. How far above all modern armament is his prophylactic against his insubstantial fellow-lodger! Now-a-days men take pistols into haunted houses. Sterne, and after him Novalis, discovered that gunpowder made all men equally tall, but Athenodorus had found out that pen and ink establish a superiority in spiritual stature. As men of this world, we feel our dignity exalted by his keeping an amba.s.sador from the other waiting till he had finished his paragraph. Never surely did authorship appear to greater advantage. Athenodorus seems to have been of Hamlet"s mind:
"I do not set my life at a pin"s fee, And, for my soul, what can it do to that, Being a thing immortal, as itself?"[101]
A superst.i.tion, as its name imports, is something that has been left to stand over, like unfinished business, from one session of the world"s _witenagemot_ to the next. The vulgar receive it implicitly on the principle of _omne ignotum pro possibili_, a theory acted on by a much larger number than is commonly supposed, and even the enlightened are too apt to consider it, if not proved, at least rendered probable by the hearsay evidence of popular experience. Particular superst.i.tions are sometimes the embodiment by popular imagination of ideas that were at first mere poetic figments, but more commonly the degraded and distorted relics of religious beliefs. Dethroned G.o.ds, outlawed by the new dynasty, haunted the borders of their old dominions, lurking in forests and mountains, and venturing to show themselves only after nightfall. Grimm and others have detected old divinities skulking about in strange disguises, and living from hand to mouth on the charity of Gammer Grethel and Mere l"Oie. Cast out from Olympus and Asgard, they were thankful for the hospitality of the chimney-corner, and kept soul and body together by an illicit traffic between this world and the other. While Schiller was lamenting the G.o.ds of Greece, some of them were nearer neighbors to him than he dreamed; and Heine had the wit to turn them to delightful account, showing himself, perhaps, the wiser of the two in saving what he could from the shipwreck of the past for present use on this prosaic Juan Fernandez of a scientific age, instead of sitting down to bewail it. To make the pagan divinities hateful, they were stigmatized as cacodaemons; and as the human mind finds a pleasure in a.n.a.logy and system, an infernal hierarchy gradually shaped itself as the convenient antipodes and counterpoise of the celestial one. Perhaps at the bottom of it all there was a kind of unconscious manicheism, and Satan, as Prince of Darkness, or of the Powers of the Air, became at last a sovereign, with his great feudatories and countless va.s.sals, capable of maintaining a not unequal contest with the King of Heaven. He was supposed to have a certain power of bestowing earthly prosperity, but he was really, after all, nothing better than a James II. at St. Germains, who could make Dukes of Perth and confer t.i.tular fiefs and garters as much as he liked, without the unpleasant necessity of providing any substance behind the shadow. That there should have been so much loyalty to him, under these disheartening circ.u.mstances, seems to me, on the whole, creditable to poor human nature. In this case it is due, at least in part, to that instinct of the poor among the races of the North, where there was a long winter, and too often a scanty harvest,--and the poor have been always and everywhere a majority,--which made a deity of Wish. The _Acheronta-movebo_ impulse must have been pardonably strong in old women starving with cold and hunger, and fathers with large families and a small winter stock of provision. Especially in the transition period from the old religion to the new, the temptation must have been great to try one"s luck with the discrowned dynasty, when the intruder was deaf and blind to claims that seemed just enough, so long as it was still believed that G.o.d personally interfered in the affairs of men. On his death-bed, says Piers Plowman,
"The poore dare plede and prove by reson To have allowance of his lord; by the law he it claimeth; * * * * *
Thanne may beggaris as beestes after boote waiten That al hir lif han lyved in langour and in defaute But G.o.d sente hem som tyme som manere joye, Outher here or ellis where, kynde wolde it nevere."
He utters the common feeling when he says that it were against nature.
But when a man has his choice between here and elsewhere, it may be feared that the other world will seem too desperately far away to be waited for when hungry ruin has him in the wind, and the chance on earth is so temptingly near. Hence the notion of a transfer of allegiance from G.o.d to Satan, sometimes by a written compact, sometimes with the ceremony by which homage is done to a feudal superior.
Most of the practices of witchcraft--such as the power to raise storms, to destroy cattle, to a.s.sume the shape of beasts by the use of certain ointments, to induce deadly maladies in men by waxen images, or love by means of charms and philtres--were inheritances from ancient paganism.
But the theory of a compact was the product of later times, the result, no doubt, of the efforts of the clergy to inspire a horror of any lapse into heathenish rites by making devils of all the old G.o.ds. Christianity may be said to have invented the soul as an individual ent.i.ty to be saved or lost; and thus grosser wits were led to conceive of it as a piece of property that could be transferred by deed of gift or sale, duly signed, sealed, and witnessed. The earliest legend of the kind is that of Theophilus, chancellor of the church of Adana in Cilicia some time during the sixth century. It is said to have been first written by Eutychia.n.u.s, who had been a pupil of Theophilus, and who tells the story partly as an eyewitness, partly from the narration of his master. The nun Hroswitha first treated it dramatically in the latter half of the tenth century.
Some four hundred years later Rutebeuf made it the theme of a French miracle-play. His treatment of it is not without a certain poetic merit.
Theophilus has been deprived by his bishop of a lucrative office. In his despair he meets with Saladin, _qui parloit au deable quant il voloit_.
Saladin tempts him to deny G.o.d and devote himself to the Devil, who, in return, will give him back all his old prosperity and more. He at last consents, signs and seals the contract required, and is restored to his old place by the bishop. But now remorse and terror come upon him; he calls on the Virgin, who, after some demur, compels Satan to bring back his deed from the infernal muniment-chest (which must have been fire-proof beyond any skill of our modern safe-makers), and the bishop having read it aloud to the awe-stricken congregation, Theophilus becomes his own man again. In this play, the theory of devilish compact is already complete in all its particulars. The paper must be signed with the blood of the grantor, who does feudal homage (_or joing tes mains, et si devien mes hom_), and engages to eschew good and do evil all the days of his life. The Devil, however, does not imprint any stigma upon his new va.s.sal, as in the later stories of witch-compacts. The following pa.s.sage from the opening speech of Theophilus will ill.u.s.trate the conception to which I have alluded of G.o.d as a liege lord against whom one might seek revenge on sufficient provocation,--and the only revenge possible was to rob him of a subject by going over to the great Suzerain, his deadly foe:--
"N"est riens que por avoir ne face; Ne pris riens Dieu et sa manace.
Irai me je noier ou pendre?
Ie ne m"en puis pas a Dieu prendre, C"on ne puet a lui avenir.
Mes il s"est en si haut lieu mis, Por eschiver ses anemis C"on n"i puet trere ni lancier.
Se or pooie a lui tancier, Et combattre et escrimir, La char li feroie fremir.
Or est la sus en son solaz, Laz! chetis! et je sui es laz De Povrete et de Soufrete."[102]
During the Middle Ages the story became a favorite topic with preachers, while carvings and painted windows tended still further to popularize it, and to render men"s minds familiar with the idea which makes the nexus of its plot. The plastic hands of Calderon shaped it into a dramatic poem not surpa.s.sed, perhaps hardly equalled, in subtile imaginative quality by any other of modern times.
In proportion as a belief in the possibility of this d.a.m.nable merchandising with h.e.l.l became general, accusations of it grew more numerous. Among others, the memory of Pope Sylvester II, was blackened with the charge of having thus bargained away his soul. All learning fell under suspicion, till at length the very grammar itself (the last volume in the world, one would say, to conjure with) gave to English the word _gramary_ (enchantment), and in French became a book of magic, under the alias of _Grimoire_. It is not at all unlikely that, in an age when the boundary between actual and possible was not very well defined, there were scholars who made experiments in this direction, and signed contracts, though they never had a chance to complete their bargain by an actual delivery. I do not recall any case of witchcraft in which such a doc.u.ment was produced in court as evidence against the accused. Such a one, it is true, was ascribed to Grandier, but was not brought forward at his trial. It should seem that Grandier had been shrewd enough to take a bond to secure the fulfilment of the contract on the other side; for we have the doc.u.ment in fac-simile, signed and sealed by Lucifer, Beelzebub, Satan, Elimi, Leviathan, and Astaroth, duly witnessed by Baalberith, Secretary of the Grand Council of Demons. Fancy the compet.i.tion such a state paper as this would arouse at a sale of autographs! Commonly no security appears to have been given by the other party to these arrangements but the bare word of the Devil, which was considered, no doubt, every whit as good as his bond. In most cases, indeed, he was the loser, and showed a want of capacity for affairs equal to that of an average giant of romance. Never was comedy acted over and over with such sameness of repet.i.tion as "The Devil is an a.s.s." How often must he have exclaimed (laughing in his sleeve):--
"_I_ to such blockheads set my wit, _I_ d.a.m.n such fools!--go, go, you"re bit!"
In popular legend he is made the victim of some equivocation so gross that any court of equity would have ruled in his favor. On the other hand, if the story had been dressed up by some mediaeval Tract Society, the Virgin appears in person at the right moment _ex machina_, and compels him to give up the property he had honestly paid for. One is tempted to ask, Were there no attorneys, then, in the place he came from, of whom he might have taken advice beforehand? On the whole, he had rather hard measure, and it is a wonder he did not throw up the business in disgust. Sometimes, however, he was more lucky, as with the unhappy Dr. Faust; and even so lately as 1695, he came in the shape of a "tall fellow with black beard and periwig, respectable looking and well dressed," about two o"clock in the afternoon, to fly away with the Marechal de Luxembourg, which, on the stroke of five, he punctually did as per contract, taking with him the window and its stone framing into the bargain. The clothes and wig of the involuntary aeronaut were, in the handsomest manner, left upon the bed, as not included in the bill of sale. In this case also we have a copy of the articles of agreement, twenty-eight in number, by the last of which the Marechal renounces G.o.d and devotes himself to the enemy. This clause, sometimes the only one, always the most important in such compacts, seems to show that they first took shape in the imagination, while the struggle between Paganism and Christianity was still going on. As the converted heathen was made to renounce his false G.o.ds, none the less real for being false, so the renegade Christian must forswear the true Deity. It is very likely, however, that the whole thing may be more modern than the a.s.sumed date of Theophilus would imply, and if so, the idea of feudal allegiance gave the first hint, as it certainly modified the particulars, of the ceremonial.
This notion of a personal and private treaty with the Evil One has something of dignity about it that has made it perennially attractive to the most imaginative minds. It rather flatters than mocks our feeling of the dignity of man. As we come down to the vulgar parody of it in the confessions of wretched old women on the rack, our pity and indignation are mingled with disgust. One of the most particular of these confessions is that of Abel de la Rue, convicted in 1584. The accused was a novice in the Franciscan Convent at Meaux. Having been punished by the master of the novices for stealing some apples and nuts in the convent garden, the Devil appeared to him in the shape of a black dog, promising him his protection, and advising him to leave the convent. Not long after going into the sacristy, he saw a large volume fastened by a chain, and further secured by bars of iron. The name of this book was _Grimoire_. Thrusting his hands through the bars, he contrived to open it, and having read a sentence (which Bodin carefully suppresses), there suddenly appeared to him a man of middle stature, with a pale and very frightful countenance, clad in a long black robe of the Italian fashion, and with faces of men like his own on his breast and knees. As for his feet they were like those of cows. He could not have been the most agreeable of companions, _ayant le corps et haleine puante_. This man told him not to be afraid, to take off his habit, to put faith in him, and he would give him whatever he asked. Then laying hold of him below the arms, the unknown transported him under the gallows of Meaux, and then said to him with a trembling and broken voice, and having a visage as pale as that of a man who has been hanged, and a very stinking breath, that he should fear nothing, but have entire confidence in him, that he should never want for anything, that his own name was Maitre Rigoux, and that he would like to be his master; to which De la Rue made answer that he would do whatever he commanded, and that he wished to be gone from the Franciscans.
Thereupon Rigoux disappeared, but returning between seven and eight in the evening, took him round the waist and carried him back to the sacristy, promising to come again for him the next day. This he accordingly did, and told De la Rue to take off his habit, get him gone from the convent, and meet him near a great tree on the high-road from Meaux to Vaulx-Courtois. Rigoux met him there and took him to a certain Maitre Pierre, who, after a few words exchanged in an undertone with Rigoux, sent De la Rue to the stable, after his return whence he saw no more of Rigoux. Thereupon Pierre and his wife made him good cheer, telling him that for the love of Maitre Rigoux they would treat him well, and that he must obey the said Rigoux, which he promised to do. About two months after, Maitre Pierre, who commonly took him to the fields to watch cattle, said to him there that they must go to the a.s.sembly, because he (Pierre) was out of powders, to which he made answer that he was willing.
Three days later, about Christmas eve, 1575, Pierre having sent his wife to sleep out of the house, set a long branch of broom in the chimney-corner, and bade De la Rue go to bed, but not to sleep. About eleven they heard a great noise as of an impetuous wind and thunder in the chimney: which hearing, Maitre Pierre told him to dress himself, for it was time to be gone. Then Pierre took some grease from a little box and anointed himself under the arm-pits, and De la Rue on the palms of his hands, which incontinently felt as if on fire, and the said grease stank like a cat three weeks or a month dead. Then, Pierre and he bestriding the branch, Maitre Rigoux took it by the b.u.t.t and drew it up chimney as if the wind had lifted them. And, the night being dark, he saw suddenly a torch before them lighting them, and Maitre Rigoux was gone unless he had changed himself into the said torch. Arrived at a gra.s.sy place some five leagues from Vaulx-Courtois, they found a company of some sixty people of all ages, none of whom he knew, except a certain Pierre of Dampmartin and an old woman who was executed, as he had heard, about five years ago for sorcery at Lagny. Then suddenly he noticed that all (except Rigoux, who was clad as before) were dressed in linen, though they had not changed their clothes. Then, at command of the eldest among them, who seemed about eighty years old, with a white beard and almost wholly bald, each swept the place in front of himself with his broom.
Thereupon Rigoux changed into a great he-goat, black and stinking, around whom they all danced backward with their faces outward and their backs towards the goat. They danced about half an hour, and then his master told him they must adore the goat who was the Devil _et ce fait et dict, veit que ledict Bouc courba ses deux pieds de deuant et leua son cul en haut, et lors que certaines menues graines grosses comme testes d"espingles, qui se conuertissoient en poudres fort puantes, sentant le soulphre et poudre a canon et chair puant meslees ensemble seroient tombees sur plusieurs drappeaux en sept doubles._ Then the oldest, and so the rest in order, went forward on their knees and gathered up their cloths with the powders, but first each _se seroit incline vers le Diable et iceluy baise en la partie honteuse de son corps._ They went home on their broom, lighted as before. De la Rue confessed also that he was at another a.s.sembly on the eve of St. John Baptist. With the powders they could cause the death of men against whom they had a spite, or their cattle. Rigoux before long began to tempt him to drown himself, and, though he lay down, yet rolled him some distance towards the river. It is plain that the poor fellow was mad or half-witted or both. And yet Bodin, the author of the _De Republica,_ reckoned one of the ablest books of that age, believed all this filthy nonsense, and prefixes it to his _Demonomanie,_ as proof conclusive of the existence of sorcerers.
This was in 1587. Just a century later, Glanvil, one of the most eminent men of his day, and Henry More, the Platonist, whose memory is still dear to the lovers of an imaginative mysticism, were perfectly satisfied with evidence like that which follows. Elizabeth Styles confessed, in 1664, "that the Devil about ten years since appeared to her in the shape of a handsome Man, and after of a black Dog. That he promised her Money, and that she should live gallantly, and have the pleasure of the World for twelve years, if she would with her Blood sign his Paper, which was to give her soul to him and observe his Laws and that he might suck her Blood. This after Four Solicitations, the Examinant promised him to do.
Upon which he p.r.i.c.ked the fourth Finger of her right hand, between the middle and upper Joynt (where the Sign at the Examination remained) and with a Drop or two of her Blood, she signed the Paper with an O. Upon this the Devil gave her sixpence and vanished with the Paper. That since he hath appeared to her in the Shape of a _Man_, and did so on _Wednesday_ seven-night past, but more usually he appears in the Likeness of a _Dog_, and _Cat_, and a _Fly_ like a Millar, in which last he usually sucks in the Poll about four of the Clock in the Morning, and did so _Jan_. 27, and that it is pain to her to be so suckt. That when she hath a desire to do harm she calls the Spirit by the name of _Robin_, to whom, when he appeareth, she useth these words, _O Sathan, give me my purpose_. She then tells him what she would have done. And that he should so appear to her was part of her Contract with him." The Devil in this case appeared as a black (dark-complexioned) man "in black clothes, with a little band,"--a very clerical-looking personage. "Before they are carried to their meetings they anoint their Foreheads and Hand-Wrists with an Oyl the Spirit brings them (which smells raw) and then they are carried in a very short time, using these words as they pa.s.s, _Thout, tout a tout, throughout and about_. And when they go off from their Meetings they say, _Rentum, Tormentum_. That at every meeting before the Spirit vanisheth away, he appoints the next meeting place and time, and at his departure there is a foul smell. At their meeting they have usually Wine or good Beer, Cakes, Meat or the like. They eat and drink really when they meet, in their Bodies, dance also and have some Musick.
The Man in black sits at the higher end, and _Anne Bishop_ usually next him. He useth some words before meat, and none after; his Voice is audible but very low. The Man in black sometimes plays on a Pipe or Cittern, and the Company dance. At last the Devil vanisheth, and all are carried to their several homes in a short s.p.a.ce. At their parting they say, _A Boy! merry meet, merry part!_" Alice Duke confessed "that Anne Bishop persuaded her to go with her into the Churchyard in the Night-time, and being come thither, to go backward round the Church, which they did three times. In their first round they met a Man in black Cloths who went round the second time with them; and then they met a thing in the Shape of a great black Toad which leapt up against the Examinant"s Ap.r.o.n. In their third round they met somewhat in the shape of a Rat, which vanished away." She also received sixpence from the Devil, and "her Familiar did commonly suck her right Breast about seven at night in the shape of a little Cat of a dunnish Colour, which is as smooth as a Want [mole], and when she is suckt, she is in a kind of Trance." Poor Christian Green got only fourpence half-penny for her soul, but her bargain was made some years later than that of the others, and quotations, as the stock-brokers would say, ranged lower. Her familiar took the shape of a hedgehog. Julian c.o.x confessed that "she had been often tempted by the Devil to be a Witch, but never consented. That one Evening she walkt about a Mile from her own House and there came riding towards her three Persons upon three Broomstaves, born up about a yard and a half from the ground. Two of them she formerly knew, which was a Witch and a Wizzard that were hanged for Witchcraft several years before.
The third person she knew not. He came in the shape of a black Man, and tempted her to give him her Soul, or to that effect, and to express it by p.r.i.c.king her Finger and giving her name in her Blood in token of it." On her trial Judge Archer told the jury, "he had heard that a Witch could not repeat that Pet.i.tion in the Lord"s Prayer, viz. _And lead us not into temptation_, and having this occasion, he would try the Experiment." The jury "were not in the least measure to guide their Verdict according to it, because it was not legal Evidence." Accordingly it was found that the poor old trot could say only, _Lead us into temptation, or Lead us not into no temptation_. Probably she used the latter form first, and, finding she had blundered, corrected herself by leaving out both the negatives. The old English double negation seems never to have been heard of by the court. Janet Dougla.s.s, a pretended dumb girl, by whose contrivance five persons had been burned at Paisley, in 1677, for having caused the sickness of Sir George Maxwell by means of waxen and other images, having recovered her speech shortly after, declared that she "had some smattering knowledge of the Lord"s prayer, which she had heard the witches repeat, it seems, by her vision, in the presence of the Devil; and at his desire, which they observed, they added to the word _art_ the letter _w_, which made it run, "Our Father which wart in heaven," by which means the Devil made the application of the prayer to himself." She also showed on the arm of a woman named Campbell "an _invisible_ mark which she had gotten from the Devil." The wife of one Barton confessed that she had engaged "in the Devil"s service. She renounced her baptism, and did prostrate her body to the foul spirit, and received his mark, and got a new name from him, and was called _Margaratus_. She was asked if she ever had any pleasure in his company? "Never much," says she, "but one night going to a dancing upon Pentland Hills, in the likeness of a rough tanny [tawny] dog, playing on a pair of pipes; the spring he played," says she, "was _The silly bit chicken, gar cast it a pickle, and it will grow meikle._""[103] In 1670, near seventy of both s.e.xes, among them fifteen children, were executed for witchcraft at the village of Mohra in Sweden. Thirty-six children, between the ages of nine and sixteen, were sentenced to be scourged with rods on the palms of their hands, once a week for a year. The evidence in this case against the accused seems to have been mostly that of children. "Being asked whether they were sure that they were at any time carried away by the Devil, they all declared they were, begging of the Commissioners that they might be freed from that intolerable slavery." They "used to go to a Gravel pit which lay hardby a Cross-way and there they put on a vest over their heads, and then danced round, and after ran to the Cross-way and called the Devil thrice, first with a still Voice, the second time somewhat louder, and the third time very loud, with these words, _Antecessour, come and carry us to Blockula_. Whereupon immediately he used to appear, but in different Habits; but for the most part they saw him in a gray Coat and red and blue Stockings. He had a red Beard, a highcrowned Hat, with linnen of divers Colours wrapt about it, and long Garters upon his Stockings." "They must procure some Sc.r.a.pings of Altars and Filings of Church-Clocks [bells], and he gives them a Horn with some Salve in it wherewith they do anoint themselves." "Being asked whether they were sure of a real personal Transportation, and whether they were awake when it was done, they all answered in the Affirmative, and that the Devil sometimes laid something down in the Place that was very like them. But one of them confessed that he did only take away her Strength, and her Body lay still upon the Ground. Yet sometimes he took even her Body with him." "Till of late they never had that power to carry away Children, but only this year and the last, and the Devil did at this time force them to it. That heretofore it was sufficient to carry but one of their Children or a Stranger"s Child, which yet happened seldom, but now he did plague them and whip them if they did not procure him Children, insomuch that they had no peace or quiet for him; and whereas formerly one Journey a Week would serve their turn from their own town to the place aforesaid, now they were forced to run to other Towns and Places for Children, and that they brought with them some fifteen, some sixteen Children every night. For their journey they made use of all sorts of Instruments, of Beasts, of Men, of Spits, and Posts, according as they had opportunity.
If they do ride upon Goats and have many Children with them," they have a way of lengthening the goat with a spit, "and then are anointed with the aforesaid Ointment. A little Girl of Elfdale confessed, That, naming the name of JESUS, as she was carried away, she fell suddenly upon the Ground and got a great hole in her Side, which the Devil presently healed up again. The first thing they must do at Blockula was that they must deny all and devote themselves Body and Soul to the Devil, and promise to serve him faithfully, and confirm all this with an Oath. Hereupon they cut their Fingers, and with their Bloud writ their Name in his Book. He caused them to be baptized by such Priests as he had there and made them confirm their Baptism with dreadful Oaths and Imprecations. Here-upon the Devil gave them a Purse, wherein their filings of Clocks [bells], with a Stone tied to it, which they threw into the Water, and then they were forced to speak these words: _As these filings of the Clock do never return to the Clock from which they are taken, so may my soul never return to Heaven_. The diet they did use to have there was Broth with Colworts and Bacon in it, Oatmeal-Bread spread with b.u.t.ter, Milk, and Cheese. Sometimes it tasted very well, sometimes very ill. After Meals, they went to Dancing, and in the mean while Swore and Cursed most dreadfully, and afterward went to fighting one with another. The Devil had Sons and Daughters by them, which he did marry together, and they did couple and brought forth Toads and Serpents. If he hath a mind to be merry with them, he lets them all ride upon Spits before him, takes afterwards the Spits and beats them black and blue, and then laughs at them. They had seen sometimes a very great Devil like a Dragon, with fire about him and bound with an Iron Chain, and the Devil that converses with them tells them that, if they confess anything, he will let that great Devil loose upon them, whereby all _Sweedland_ shall come into great danger. The Devil taught them to milk, which was in this wise: they used to stick a knife in the Wall and hang a kind of Label on it, which they drew and stroaked, and as long as this lasted the Persons that they had Power over were miserably plagued, and the Beasts were milked that way till sometimes they died of it. The minister of Elfdale declared that one Night these Witches were to his thinking upon the crown of his Head and that from thence he had had a long-continued Pain of the Head. One of the Witches confessed, too, that the Devil had sent her to torment the Minister, and that she was ordered to use a Nail and strike it into his Head, but it would not enter very deep. They confessed also that the Devil gives them a Beast about the bigness and shape of a young Cat, which they call a _Carrier_, and that he gives them a Bird too as big as a Raven, but white. And these two Creatures they can send anywhere, and wherever they come they take away all sorts of Victuals they can get.
What the Bird brings they may keep for themselves; but what the Carrier brings they must reserve for the Devil. The Lords Commissioners were indeed very earnest and took great Pains to persuade them to show some of their Tricks, but to no Purpose; for they did all unanimously confess, that, since they had confessed all, they found that all their Witchcraft was gone, and that the Devil at this time appeared to them very terrible with Claws on his Hands and Feet, and with Horns on his Head and a long Tail behind." At Blockula "the Devil had a Church, such another as in the town of Mohra. When the Commissioners were coming, he told the Witches they should not fear them, for he would certainly kill them all. And they confessed that some of them had attempted to murther the Commissioners, but had not been able to effect it."
In these confessions we find included nearly all the particulars of the popular belief concerning witchcraft, and see the gradual degradation of the once superb Lucifer to the vulgar scarecrow with horns and tail. "The Prince of Darkness _was_ a gentleman." From him who had not lost all his original brightness, to this dirty fellow who leaves a stench, sometimes of brimstone, behind him, the descent is a long one. For the dispersion of this foul odor Dr. Henry More gives an odd reason. "The Devil also, as in other stories, leaving an ill smell behind him, seems to imply the reality of the business, those adscit.i.tious particles he held together in his visible vehicle being loosened at his vanishing and so offending the nostrils by their floating and diffusing themselves in the open Air." In all the stories vestiges of Paganism are not indistinct. The three princ.i.p.al witch gatherings of the year were held on the days of great pagan festivals, which were afterwards adopted by the Church. Maury supposes the witches" Sabbath to be derived from the rites of Bacchus Sabazius, and accounts in this way for the Devil"s taking the shape of a he-goat. But the name was more likely to be given from hatred of the Jews, and the goat may have a much less remote origin. Bodin a.s.sumes the ident.i.ty of the Devil with Pan, and in the popular mythology both of Kelts and Teutons there were certain hairy wood-demons called by the former _Dus_ and by the latter _Scrat_. Our common names of _Deuse_ and _Old Scratch_ are plainly derived from these, and possibly _Old Harry_ is a corruption of _Old Hairy_. By Latinization they became Satyrs. Here, at any rate, is the source of the cloven hoof. The belief in the Devil"s appearing to his worshippers as a goat is very old. Possibly the fact that this animal was sacred to Thor, the G.o.d of thunder, may explain it.
Certain it is that the traditions of Vulcan, Thor, and Wayland[104]
converged at last in Satan. Like Vulcan, he was hurled from heaven, and like him he still limps across the stage in Mephistopheles, though without knowing why. In Germany, he has a horse"s and not a cloven foot,[105] because the horse was a frequent pagan sacrifice, and therefore a.s.sociated with devil-worship under the new dispensation. Hence the horror of hippophagism which some French gastronomes are striving to overcome. Everybody who has read "Tom Brown," or Wordsworth"s Sonnet on a German stove, remembers the Saxon horse sacred to Woden. The raven was also his peculiar bird, and Grimm is inclined to think this the reason why the witch"s familiar appears so often in that shape. It is true that our _Old Nick_ is derived from _Nikkar_, one of the t.i.tles of that divinity, but the a.s.sociation of the Evil One with the raven is older, and most probably owing to the ill-omened character of the bird itself.
Already in the apocryphal gospel of the "Infancy," the demoniac Son of the Chief Priest puts on his head one of the swaddling-clothes of Christ which Mary has hung out to dry, and forthwith "the devils began to come out of his mouth and to fly away as _crows_ and serpents."
It will be noticed that the witches underwent a form of baptism. As the system gradually perfected itself among the least imaginative of men, as the superst.i.tious are apt to be, they could do nothing better than describe Satan"s world as in all respects the reverse of that which had been conceived by the orthodox intellect as Divine. Have you an ill.u.s.trated Bible of the last century? Very good. Turn it upside down, and you find the prints on the whole about as near nature as ever, and yet pretending to be something new by a simple device that saves the fancy a good deal of trouble. For, while it is true that the poetic fancy plays, yet the faculty which goes by that pseudonyme in prosaic minds (and it was by such that the details of this Satanic commerce were pieced together) is hard put to it for invention, and only too thankful for any labor-saving contrivance whatsoever. Accordingly, all it need take the trouble to do was to reverse the ideas of sacred things already engraved on its surface, and behold, a kingdom of h.e.l.l with all the merit and none of the difficulty of originality! "Uti olim Deus populo suo Hierosolymis Synagogas erexit ut in iis ignarus legis divinae populus erudiretur, voluntatemque Dei placitam ex verbo in iis praedicato hauriret; ita et Diabolus in omnibus omnino suis actionibus simiam Dei agens, gregi suo acherontico conventus et synagogas, quas satanica sabbata vocant, indicit.... Atque de hisce Conventibus et Synagogis Lamiarum nullus Antorum quos quidem evolvi, imo nec ipse Lamiarum Patronus [here he glances at Wierus] scilicet ne dubiolum quidem movit. Adeo ut tuto affirmari liceat conventus a diabolo certo inst.i.tui. Quos vel ipse, tanquam praeses collegii, vel per daemonem, qui ad cujuslibet sagae custodiam const.i.tutus est, ... vel per alios Magos aut sagas per unum aut duos dies antequam fiat congregatio denunciat.... Loci in quibus solent a daemone coetus et conventicula malefica inst.i.tui plerumque sunt sylvestres, occulti, subterranei, et ab hominum conversatione remoti....
Evocatae hoc modo et tempore Lamiae, ... daemon illis persuadet eas non posse conventiculis interesse nisi nudum corpus unguento ex corpusculis infantum ante baptismum necatorum praeparato illinant, idque propterea solum illis persuadet ut ad quam plurimas infantum insontium caedes eas alliciat.... Unctionis ritu peracto, abiturientes, ne forte a maritis in lectis desiderantur, vel per incantationem somnum, aurem nimirum vellicando dextra manu prius praedicto unguine illita, conciliant maritis ex quo non facile possunt excitari; vel daemones personas quasdam dormientibus adumbrant, quas, si contigeret expergisci, suas uxores esse putarent; vel interea alius daemon in forma succubi ad latus maritorum adjungitur qui loco uxoris est.... Et ita sine omni remora insidentes baculo, furcae, scopis, aut arundini vel tauro, equo, sui, hirco, aut cani, _quorum omnium exempla prodidit Remig_. L.I.c. 14, devehuntur a daemone ad loca destinata.... Ibi daemon praeses conventus in solio sedet magnifico, forma terrifica, ut plurimum hirci vel canis. Ad quem advenientes viri juxta ac mulieres accedunt reverentiae exhibendae et adorandi gratia, non tamen uno eodemque modo. Interdum complicatis genubus supplices; interdum obverso incedentes tergo et modo retrogrado, in oppositum directo illi reverentiae quam nos praestare solemus. In signum homagii (sit honor castis auribus) Principem suum hirc.u.m in [obscaenissimo quodam corporis loco] summa c.u.m reverentia sacrilego ore osculantur. Quo facto, sacrificia daemoni faciunt multis modis. Saepe liberos suos ipsi offerunt. Saepe communione sumpta benedictam hostiam in ore a.s.servatam et extractam (horreo dicere) daemoni oblatam coram eo pede conculcant. His et similibus flagitiis et abominationibus execrandis commissis, incipiunt mensis a.s.sidere et convivari de cibis insipidis, insulsis,[106] furtivis, quos daemon suppeditat, vel quos singulae attulere, inderdum tripudiant ante convivium, interdum post illud.... Nec mensae sua deest benedictio coetu hoc digna, verbis constans plane blasphemis quibus ipsum Beelzebub et creatorem et datorem et conservatorem omnium profitentur. Eadem sententia est gratiarum actionis.
Post convivium, dorsis invicem obversis ... ch.o.r.eas ducere et cantare fescenninos in honorem daemonis obscaenissimos, vel ad tympanum fistulamve sedentis alicujus in bifida arbore saltare ... tum suis amasiis daemonibus foedissime commisceri. Ultimo pulveribus (quos aliqui scribunt esse cineres hirci illis quem daemon a.s.sumpserat et quem adorant subito coram illius flamma absumpti) vel venenis aliis acceptis, saepe etiam cuique indicto nocendi penso, et p.r.o.nunciato Pseudothei daemonis decreto, ULCISCAMINI VOS, ALIOQUI MORIEMINI. Duabus aut tribus horis in hisce ludis exactis circa Gallicinium daemon convivas suas dimitt.i.t."[107] Sometimes they were baptized anew. Sometimes they renounced the Virgin, whom they called in their rites _extensam mulierem_. If the Ave Mary bell should ring while the demon is conveying home his witch, he lets her drop. In the confession of Agnes Simpson the meeting place was North Berwick Kirk. "The Devil started up himself in the pulpit, like a meikle black man, and calling the row [roll] every one answered, _Here_. At his command they opened up three graves and cutted off from the dead corpses the joints of their fingers, toes, and nose, and parted them amongst them, and the said Agnes Simpson got for her part a winding-sheet and two joints. The Devil commanded them to keep the joints upon them while [till] they were dry, and then to make a powder of them to do evil withal." This confession is sadly memorable, for it was made before James I., then king of Scots, and is said to have convinced him of the reality of witchcraft. Hence the act pa.s.sed in the first year of his reign in England, and not repealed till 1736, under which, perhaps in consequence of which, so many suffered.
The notion of these witch-gatherings was first suggested, there can be little doubt, by secret conventicles of persisting or relapsed pagans, or of heretics. Both, perhaps, contributed their share. Sometimes a mountain, as in Germany the Blocksberg,[108] sometimes a conspicuous oak or linden, and there were many such among both Gauls and Germans sacred of old to pagan rites, and later a lonely heath, a place where two roads crossed each other, a cavern, gravel-pit, or quarry, the gallows, or the churchyard, was the place appointed for their diabolic orgies. That the witch could be conveyed bodily to these meetings was at first admitted without any question. But as the husbands of accused persons sometimes testified that their wives had not left their beds on the alleged night of meeting, the witchmongers were put to strange shifts by way of accounting for it. Sometimes the Devil imposed on the husband by a _deceptio visus_; sometimes a demon took the place of the wife; sometimes the body was left and the spirit only transported. But the more orthodox opinion was in favor of corporeal deportation. Bodin appeals triumphantly to the cases of Habbakuk (now in the Apocrypha, but once making a part of the Book of Daniel), and of Philip in the Acts of the Apostles. "I find,"
he says, "this ecstatic ravishment they talk of much more wonderful than bodily transport. And if the Devil has this power, as they confess, of ravishing the spirit out of the body, is it not more easy to carry body and soul without separation or division of the reasonable part, than to withdraw and divide the one from the other without death?" The author of _De Lamiis_ argues for the corporeal theory. "The evil Angels have the same superiority of natural power as the good, since by the Fall they lost none of the gifts of nature, but only those of grace." Now, as we know that good angels can thus transport men in the twinkling of an eye, it follows that evil ones may do the same. He fortifies his position by a recent example from secular history. "No one doubts about John Faust, who dwelt at Wittenberg, in the time of the sainted Luther, and who, seating himself on his cloak with his companions, was conveyed away and borne by the Devil through the air to distant kingdoms."[109] Glanvin inclines rather to the spiritual than the material hypothesis, and suggests "that the Witch"s anointing herself before she takes her flight may perhaps serve to keep the body tenantable and in fit disposition to receive the spirit at its return." Aubrey, whose "Miscellanies" were published in 1696, had no doubts whatever as to the physical asportation of the witch.