THE MAGIC OF THE PEOPLE AND THE STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH AGAINST IT.
Wherever religious thought divides the empire of the world and humanity into two absolutely opposed powers, a good and an evil, there it also distinguishes two kinds of magic: the divine and the infernal. So with the Persians who knew a white and a black magic. So also in the Middle Ages of Christianity. The Greeks, on the contrary, knew nothing of this distinction. The world being to them a harmonious whole, both in moral and physical respects, magic was with them only a means of finding out and using the secret powers in the harmonious cosmos; and the wonder-worker who could not be thought of as deriving his powers from an evil source, was undoubtedly a favorite of the gods and an equal with the heroes, not unworthy of statues and temples, if he used his art for the benefit of humanity. For the rest, magical speculation was with the Greeks more and more pushed aside by philosophy,—by scepticism and rational investigation, until on account of the nearer contact between Europe and Asia, after the death of Alexander, it began again to exercise its influence, and finally celebrated its triumph in that dualistic form of religion which by the name of Christianity took possession of the Occident.
The struggle which the spirit of orientalism waged on its march through Europe, first against the Hellenic paganism, and then against the Christian paganism which had penetrated into the Church itself, has been briefly sketched above. When Christianity had spread later among the Germanic and Slavic nations, there arose a new process of attraction and repulsion between it and the natural religions of the barbarians, the elements of which were partly blended with it and partly repelled by it. The gods were transformed into devils, but their attributes and the festivities in their honor were transferred to the saints. Pope Gregory the Great ordained that the pagan festivities should be changed only gradually to Christian, and that they were to be imitated in many respects.[40]
In the time of Boniface there were many Christian priests in Germany who sacrificed to Thor and baptized in the name of Jesus at the same time. Of especial influence on the rapid spread of Christianity was the maxim of Gregory not to be particular in the choice of proselytes, because hope was to be placed in the better generations of the future. To be allowed to attend divine service, and to be buried in the churchyard, it was only necessary to have the benediction of the priest. Gifts to the Church, pilgrimages, self-scourgings, repeating of prayers in Latin, opened the gates of heaven to the proselytes easier than virtue and bravery those of Valhall to the heathen. For the rest the pagan could enter the community of the Church while retaining his whole circle of ideas. The Church did not deny, but it confirmed, the real existence of every thing which had been the object of his faith, but it treated these objects in accordance with its dualistic scheme, sometimes elevating them to the plane of sanctity, and again degrading them to something diabolical. Thus, for instance, it changed the elementary spirits—which the Celts and Germans believed in—from good or morally indifferent natural beings into fallen angels, envying man his heavenly inheritance; and if a thinking heathen could before accept or reject the existence of such beings at his pleasure, it now, when he had become a proselyte, became a matter of eternal bliss to believe in them. There was no superstitious idea gross enough not to receive the signet of the Church; nay, the grosser it was, the more likely was it to be appropriated. Even so cultured an intellect as Augustine, the most prominent of the fathers and authors of his time, declared it to be “insolent” to doubt the existence of fauns, satyrs and other demoniac beings which lie in wait for women, have intercourse with them and children by them.[41] Thus was laid the foundation of that immense labyrinth of superstition in the darkness of which humanity has groped during the thousand years of the Middle Ages.
In the rupture between the Church and the natural religion of the northern peoples we find, in a certain sense, the same spectacle repeated which we have seen in the struggle between the Christian and the Greco-Roman culture. If the Neoplatonicians held up their Appolonius of Tyana as a type of the Christian sorcerers, Celts, Germans and Northmen had also their soothsayers endowed with supernatural powers whom the Christian missionaries must excel in the power of working miracles, if they would gain consideration for the new religion. There are many accounts of bishops and priests who have worn gloves of fire, walked on white-hot iron, and so forth, before the eyes of the astonished heathen. If the miracles worked by the apostles of Christianity had their source in divine agencies, then those performed by its opponents must have their origin in the assistance of the devil. Already here the white magic stood opposed to the black magic, the immediate and supernatural power of God in His agents to the devil: and if the chief significance of the Church was to be an institution for deliverance from the devil; if all her magical usages from the sacrament to the amulet were so many weapons against his attacks; if the pagan religions which had succumbed to Christianity were nothing but varied kinds of the same devil-worship, and their priests, seers and physicians but tools of Satan; then it was natural for all traditions from the pagan time which the Church had not transformed and appropriated should be banished within the pale of devil-worship, and partly also that every act to which supernatural effects were ascribed, but which was not performed by a Christian priest, or in the name of Jesus, should be referred to a black magic, partly in fine that the possibility of an immediate co-operation, a conscious league between the devil and men should be elevated to a dogma.
A struggle between good and evil, between God and Satan, between church and paganism, which is carried on with the weapons of miracles by two directly opposed human representatives of these principles, was a theme which must by necessity urge the power of creative imagination into activity, and we find also in one of the oldest monuments of Christian literature[42] a tale of this character. It is Simon Peter, the rock on which the Church is built, who fights there against Simon the magician of Samaria, mentioned in the Acts. When the cities of Asia Minor had witnessed their emulation in miracle-working, the decisive battle was fought out to the end in Rome. In the presence of the assembled people, Simon the magician attempts an ascension into heaven, but falls and breaks his legs because Simon Peter had commanded the evil spirits who were carrying the magician towards the sky to let him drop. This fable appears still further embellished in later ecclesiastical authors. It is soon accompanied by others, such as that of Cyprianus, Theophilus, Militaris, Heliodorus, and many others, who from love of earthly glory abjure Christ and enter into solemn covenants with the devil. In the biography of the holy Basilius, archbishop of CÆsarea and Cappadocia (he was a contemporary of the apostate emperor Julian), there is a story of a young man who had obtained from a heathen sorcerer a letter of recommendation to Satan. When the young man, according to the precept of the magician, had gone to a heathen grave and there taken out the letter, he was suddenly taken up and borne to the place where Satan, surrounded by his angels, sat on a throne. The youth abjured in writing his baptism and swore allegiance to his new master. But after some time the apostate repented and confessed to the holy Basilius what he had done. The bishop prayed for him forty days. When at length the day had come that Satan according to the compact should bear away his victim, the bishop had the young man placed in the midst of his congregation. Satan arrived: a battle between him and the bishop followed—a battle which was carried on with the people stretching forth their hands imploring God for assistance, and was ended when the compact fell from the claws of the fiend, and was torn by the bishop. The before-mentioned Theophilus had likewise pawned his soul to the devil, but the contract was restored to him after urgent supplication, by the holy Virgin, after which, warned by his experience, he led a holy life, and became Saint Theophilus before he closed his eyes. These early legends of compacts between the devil and men end, as we see, with the sinner’s salvation; not so the later. If we now remember that it was one of the dogmas proclaimed by the Church that all magical and miraculous arts not performed by the priests in the name of Jesus were wrought by the devil; that he gives his adherents power over nature and that the demons as “incubi” and “succubi” seek and obtain carnal intercourse with human beings,[43] we discover already in the ideas of the first Christian centuries the elements of the sorcery of the Middle Ages. And when we read further the accusations which the first Christian sects hurled against one another,—when we learn that the party which was raised by the Council of Nice to the orthodox position accused the Gnostics, Marcionites and Arians of devil-worship, confederacy with Satan and sorcery, we meet already here that union of heresy and sorcery by which the Church of the Middle Ages acquired such a fearful weapon against dissenters,—a union which must not be looked upon as a mere casual invention of wickedness and theological hatred, but as the necessary consequence of the whole dualistic theory of morals, as the necessary fruit of the belief in devils.
A long time must have been required for the festivals common to the natural religions of Europe to become extinct or be remodelled into Christian form. The external practices by which religious ideas obtain a sensuous expression, possess generally more tenacious power of existence than the ideas themselves, and continue in existence when these have disappeared, as the shell after the death of the nautilus. In certain religions of natural development adoration of the sun and the moon are the most important. Among the Celtic, Germanic and Slavic tribes, as before among Hebrews and Phoenicians, these divinities of the light were adored by kindling fires, by sacrifices and banquets on mountains and in groves, especially at the time of the vernal equinox (Easter), at the beginning of May (Valpurge’s night), and on the night of the summer solstice. From the fact that traces of the custom still exist in our own day, though its original significance is lost, we can all the more safely assume that it continued to exist without interruption, openly at first, then in secret, retaining its significance, in spite of the efforts of spiritual and profane authorities to extirpate it, and assuming more and more in the popular mind that character of devil-worship with which the Church has branded these reminiscences, from heathen times. And when finally it ceased entirely, or was changed into seasons of popular festivity which had no dangerous suggestiveness even in the eyes of the Church, still the remembrance of the demoniacal festivals of mountain and grove must have been inherited from generation to generation, and then it was but another step to believe that they still continued and were participated in by persons who practiced magical arts, and had been invested with the suspicious wisdom of the ancient valas and druids—the female seers and physicians of the pagans. That the notion of the Witches’ Sabbath, which was celebrated on the night before the first of May, and of the paschal journey of the witches to Blokulla have this historical origin is very probable. The ecclesiastical literature from the first half of the Middle Ages does not leave us without significant hints apparently corroborating this opinion. St. Egidius, who died in 659 A. D., speaks frequently against the fire-worship, practiced during midsummer nights, which as inherited from pagan forefathers was accompanied with dancing, and against the invocation of the sun and moon (which he calls “the demons Hercules and Diana”), and against worshipping in groves and by trees, springs and crossroads. The apostle of the Allemans, St. Firminus, who died in 754 A. D., preaches against the same customs, and especially dwells on the pertinacity with which old women adhere to the infernal festivals with their magical songs and dances. Modern authors on the subject in question speak of a synodal decree which is said to date back to the council of Ancyra in 314 A. D., and which enjoins the bishops especially to watch the godless women who, deceived by the delusions of the demons, imagine that they traverse in the night, in the company of Diana and Herodias and riding on certain animals, wide tracts of country, and are required to assemble for a certain number of nights by the command of their mistress. But although this synodal decree is spurious and belongs to a far later period and a different locality (it is referred to for the first time in the ninth century, in a work composed by the Abbot Regino[44]), it is old enough to deserve our attention here. To the decree is appended a number of questions which the bishops must put to such women in confession. Among them are the following, which connect immediately the witch-journey with heathen traditions:—
“Have you followed the practice inherited from the heathen of considering the course of the stars, the moon and the eclipses of the new moon? And have you imagined that by the exclamation ‘Conquer, moon’ (vince, Luna), you could reproduce its light? When you wished to pray, have you resorted to other places than the church, as, for instance, to springs, stones, trees or crossroads? Have you there kindled fires and sacrificed bread or aught else?”
John of Salisbury, who died A. D. 1182, writes of women who, led by a “night-queen,” assemble and celebrate banquets at which they most relish children stolen from their cradles. He still supposed that this may not really be a fact, but only demoniacal illusions, phantasmagorial tricks played by the devil, and empty dreams, especially as such things happen among women, and not among men, who possess a stronger reason. The same view of the case is held by William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris (died A. D. 1248). But already during the life of this prelate the belief in the reality of witch-feasts was sanctioned by the authority of Pope Gregory IX., and every doubt in regard to it was declared to be heresy.
At the same time the connection between heresy and witchcraft was revived and confirmed by the Church, so that all heretics were to be considered as the sworn subjects of the devil, and initiated into sorcery, even though not all sorcerers and witches were necessarily heretics. The Church at this time threatened by several newly arisen sects, had recourse to every expedient to uphold its hierarchy and the unity of confession. In the year 1223 Gregory IX. promulgated a letter which exhorted to a crusade against the Stedinghs, a sect which had spread themselves in Friesland and Lower Saxony. He accused them of worshipping and having secret communion with the prince of darkness. According to the papal edict the Stedinghs considered the devil as the real and the good deity, expelled by the other and the evil from heaven, but returning thither in the fulness of time, when the usurper on account of his extreme tyranny, cruelty and injustice had made himself hated by the race of men and had finally become convinced of his own incapability and powerlessness. In truth if such a belief had sprung up it would not have been strange. Everywhere the power and the influence of the devil was seen, but nowhere God’s, if not in the bloody and terrible laws and oppressive social system which were declared by spiritual and profane authorities to be divine. The very theory by which the Church sought to save for God his attribute of omnipotence—the theory of consent, according to which the devil exercises such power only by God’s permission—this very theory was suited to augment the confusion and the terror. “Never,” says Bunsen,[45] “has there been a time when a divine and universal government was so much despaired of as in the Middle Ages.” Bunsen inclines to the view of the French historian Michelet, that from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, after the Waldenses and Albigenses in France had been exterminated by Romish persecution, and the lower classes had been reduced to serfs, a religion of despair, a real Satanic cultus sprang up, and that the Witches’ Sabbath was in fact founded upon nightly congregations, in which thousands of brutalized men driven by misery and oppression gathered themselves together in order to worship the devil and invoke his aid. But there exists no absolutely certain historical fact to prove that such meetings have really taken place. We consider it more probable, as pointed out above, that the Witches’ Sabbath was as it were the lingering twilight, constantly deepening, and constantly painted in more monstrous colors, after the day of the degraded festivals in the religion of nature,—an incubus of imagination which oppressed the bosom of humanity buried in a world of dreams; and that nothing more than the belief in its reality, which the Church sanctioned, was necessary to produce the phenomena we describe. The Waldenses and the Albigenses were treated like the Stedinghs. “Let the judges know,” writes an inquisitor, “that the sorcerers, the witches and the devil-workers are almost all Waldenses. The Waldenses are by profession, essentially and formally, devil-workers; and though not all conjurers, still conjuration and Waldenseism have much in common.” The highest authorities of the Church constantly nourished that awe of the devil and his tools which filled the mind, and they could do it without scruple, being themselves seized by the same terror. Thus John XXII. promulgated, A. D. 1303, two letters, in which he complains that he himself, not less than countless numbers of his sheep, was in danger of his life by the arts of sorcerers who could send devils into mirrors and rings, and make away with men by their words alone. He mentions especially that his enemies have sought to kill him by piercing dolls which they had baptized with his name by needles, invoking the aid of the devil. It is needless to point out what influence such proclamations from Christ’s vicar, the infallible head of the Church, would exercise over the common mind. The dualistic philosophy ripened more and more until that terrible crisis which broke out in the fifteenth century. That crisis was preceded by the trial of the Templars and by several great but local witch-processes, with subsequent executions, until finally, Dec. 5th, 1484, the bull of Pope Innocent VIII., “Ad forturan rei memoriam,” appeared. This bull with its companion, the “Witch-hammer” (Malleus Malificarum), composed by the monk and inquisitor Sprenger, brought the evil to its climax. Hell was no longer a mere product of the imagination: we see it established on earth in dread reality and stretching its dominion over all Christendom.
Our space does not allow us to reproduce in a literal translation this bull of Pope Innocent, written in barbarous Latin worthy of its subject.[46] We must, however, give some account of its contents. “The serf of God’s serfs” begins by testifying the care which as the guardian of souls he must exercise in promoting the growth of the Catholic faith and driving the infamy of heresy far from the proximity of the faithful. “But,” he continues, “it is not without profound grief that I have learned recently that persons of both sexes, forgetting their own eternal welfare and erring from the Catholic faith, mix with devils, with incubi and succubi, and injure by witch songs, conjurations and other shameful practices, revelries, and crimes, the unborn children of women, the young of animals, the harvests of the fields, the grapes of the vineyards and the fruit of the trees; that they also destroy, suffocate and annihilate men, women, sheep and cattle, vineyards, orchards, meadows, and the like; visit men, women, cattle and other animals with internal and external pains and sickness; prevent men from procreation and women from conception, and render them entirely unfit for their mutual duties, and cause them to recant, besides, with sacrilegious lips, the very faith which they have received in baptism.”... The pope therefore appoints his beloved sons, the professors of theology Henry Institor and Jacob Sprenger, to be prime inquisitors with absolute power over all districts which are contaminated with those diseases; and since he knows that there are persons who are not ashamed to insist upon their perverse assertion that such crimes are only imaginary, and should not be punished, he threatens them, whatever be their position or dignity, with the severest punishments, in case they dare to counteract in any way the inquisitors, or interfere in behalf of the accused. Finally, he proclaims that no appeal from the tribunals of the inquisitors to other courts, not even to the pope himself, will be allowed. The inquisitors and their assistants are invested with unlimited power over life and death, and are exhorted to fulfil their commission with zeal and severity.
The bull contains no further indications as to how the judges should proceed in the trial of witches. The “Witch-hammer” was allowed to establish its own norm of procedure. It is of importance here to give a rÉsumÉ of the contents of this book, since it became a juridical authority which was followed in all countries, even in the Protestant, until after the beginning of the eighteenth century. The spirit of the time can not be better characterized than by this book; in no clearer or more tangible way can it be shown whither supernatural ideas in cosmic philosophy will lead, and how they finally will destroy reason, morality, human feeling, and change the world into a mad-house.
The book to which the bull of Pope Innocent and a diploma from the emperor Maximilian serve as a commendatory introduction, begins with an apology intended to show that its author does not introduce any thing novel and untried, but that its theories are entirely founded upon the Scriptures. To prove this he quotes passages from the Old and New Testaments, from the fathers, the decrees of the councils, the canonical letters, from the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Damianus and others. The devil, says the “Witch-hammer,” has no power indeed to suspend natural laws, but the Bible shows incontestably that God has vouchsafed him a wide dominion over the natural powers of corporeal things. Witness only the history of Job, and the temptation of Jesus in the desert. Further, the existence of the many demoniacs spoken of in the New Testament proves that Satan can dwell in man and use the human body as his implement. “But,” says the “Witch-hammer,” constantly aiming to deduce all its conclusions ostensibly according to logic, “there must be no confusion between demoniacs and witches. The existence of the former does not prove the existence of the latter; this must be demonstrated in a different way. And this is the proof: The devil as a spiritual being is not capable of a real corporeal contact. He must therefore make use of an instrument to which he imparts his power; for every bodily effect is produced by contact. These instruments are the sorcerers and the witches. It being then incontestable on the one side that the power of the devil is great, and on the other that he can accomplish nothing without the aid of sorcerers and witches, the necessary conclusion is that these must exist. This conclusion is for the rest most decisively confirmed by the Bible. Moses ordains that witches should be put to death, a command which would be entirely superfluous if witches had not existed. He who asserts that there are no witches must therefore rightly be accounted a heretic.”
The “Witch-hammer” then broaches the question, why it is that women are especially addicted to sorcery, and answers it as follows: The holy fathers have often said that there are three things which have no moderation in good or evil: the tongue, a priest, and a woman. Concerning woman this is evident. All ages have made complaints against her. The wise Solomon, who was himself tempted to idolatry by women, has often in his writings given the feminine sex a sad, but true, testimonial; and the holy Chrysostom says: “What is woman but an enemy of friendship, an unavoidable punishment, a necessary coil, a natural temptation, a desirable affliction, a constantly flowing source of tears, a wicked work of nature covered with a shining varnish?” Already had the first woman entered into a sort of compact with the devil; should not then her daughters do it also? The very word femina (woman) means one wanting in faith; for fe means “faith,” and minus “less.”[47] Since she was formed of a crooked rib, her entire spiritual nature has been distorted and inclined more towards sin than virtue. If we here compare the words of Seneca, “Woman either loves or hates; there is no third possibility,” it is easy to see that when she does not love God she must resort to the opposite extreme and hate him. It is thus clear why women especially are addicted to the practice of sorcery.[48]
It might now be asked: How is it possible that God permits sorcery? The “Witch-hammer” answers that God has allowed, without any detriment to his perfections, the fall of angels and of our first parents; and as he formerly sanctioned persecutions against the Christians, that the glory of the martyr might be increased, so he also now permits sorcery that the faith of the just may be the more manifest.
The crime of the witches exceeds all other. They unite in one person the heretic, the apostate, and the murderer. The “Witch-hammer” proves that they are worse than the devil himself, for he has fallen once for all, and Christ has not suffered for him. The devil sins therefore only against the Creator, but the witch both against the Creator and the Redeemer.
It is with these and similar questions that the first part of the “Witch-hammer” is occupied. The second part, describing the various kinds and effects of witchcraft and the celebration of the Witches’ Sabbath is prefaced with an account of the power of witches. They produce hail, thunder and storms whenever they wish; they fly through the air from one place to another; they can make themselves insensible on the rack; they often subdue the judge’s mind by charms, and confuse him through compassion; they deprive men and animals of reproductive power; they can see the absent, and predict coming events; they can fill, at their pleasure, human hearts with relentless hatred and passionate love; they destroy the foetus in the womb, cause miscarriages, change themselves and others into cats and were-wolfs; nay, they are able to enchant and kill men and beasts by their very looks. Their strongest passion is to eat the flesh of children; still they eat only unchristened children: if at any time a baptized child is taken by them, it happens by special divine concession.
Their compact with the devil is of two kinds: either a solemn one entered into with all formalities, or a mere private contract. The former is concluded as follows: The witches assemble upon a day set apart by the devil. He appears in the assembly, exhorts them to faithfulness, and promises them glory, happiness and long life, and orders the older witches to introduce the novices whom he puts to the test and causes to take the oath of allegiance; whereupon he teaches them to prepare from the limbs of new-born babes witch-potions and witch-salves, and presents them with a powder, instructing them how it is to be used to the injury of men and beasts.[49] When then the novice has renewed the ceremony of allegiance on the next Witch Sabbath she is a genuine witch. The children needed for the witches’ kettles and the sabbath banquets are obtained as follows: The victims are killed by looks or by the above-mentioned powder, when they lie in their cradle or in bed with their mothers. Simple people will then believe that they have died from some natural cause,—from sickness or suffocation. Then when buried the witches steal them from the grave. It has happened that judges have opened, after similar confessions, the grave and found the child in it; but in such cases the judge must consider that the devil is a great taskmaster who may have cheated the eyes of the servants of justice, in order to protect his servants, and in such a case the confession of the witch (forced from her by torture) should prove more than the easily deluded vision of the judge. [What a triumph of supernaturalistic argumentation!]
The witch accomplishes her aerial voyages, says the “Witch-hammer,” by smearing a vessel, a broom and a rake, a broomstick and a piece of linen, with the witch-salve; then rising she moves forth through the air, visible or invisible, according to her choice. The “Witch-hammer” reminds those who doubt these air-voyages, of Matt. iv. 5, where it is related how the devil carried Jesus up through the air to the pinnacle of the temple.
We now proceed to the third part of the “Witch-hammer,” the criminal law of the witch-courts, which gives instructions how “sorcerers, witches and heretics are to be tried before spiritual as well as civil tribunals.”
In regard to preliminary forms of procedure, the “Witch-hammer” lays down first, “That the trial may commence without any previous accusation, and on the strength of a simple report that witches are found somewhere; for it is the duty of the judge in a case fraught with many dangers to the soul, not to wait for an informer or accuser, but, ex officio, to institute immediate inquiry.” When an inquisitor comes to a city or a village, he must exhort every body by means of proclamations nailed to the doors of churches and town-halls, and by threats of excommunication and punishment, to give information of all persons in any way suspected of the least connection with the practice of witchcraft, or otherwise of bad repute. The informers may be rewarded if the inquisitor thinks it well, by the blessing of the Church, and with money. A box to receive the statements of such informers as wish to be unknown should be placed in the Church.
Two or three witnesses are sufficient to prove guilt. In case so many do not present themselves, then the judge may take means to find and summon them, and force them to tell the truth under oath. He has also the right to examine witnesses previous to the actual trial. As for the qualifications necessary to appear as witnesses, the “Witch-hammer” declares that the excommunicate, accomplices, outlawed, runaway and dissolute women are irreproachable witnesses in cases where the faith is involved. A witch is allowed to testify against a witch, wife against husband, husband against wife, children against parents and so on, but if the testimonies of accomplices or relatives are to the advantage of the accused, then they are of no validity; for blood is of course thicker than water, and one raven does not willingly pick out the eyes of another.
The “Witch-hammer” allows an accused to have an advocate, but adds: “If the counsellor defends his suspected client too warmly, it is right and reasonable that he should be considered as far more criminal than the sorcerer or the witch herself; that is to say, as the protector of witches and heretics, he is more dangerous than the sorcerer. He should be looked upon with suspicion in the same degree as he makes a zealous defence.” But a trial may be difficult enough without being clogged and hampered by a cunning advocate. In order to confuse such a one and ensnare the accused, it is necessary, says the “Witch-hammer,” that a judge should remember the words of the apostle, “Being crafty I caught you with guile,” and show himself crafty. The “Witch-hammer” informs the judge of five “honest and apostolical tricks” (these are the very words of the book); one of them consists in embodying in the copy of the proceedings which is given to the defending lawyer, a number of facts that have not occurred in the trial, and in mixing the names of the witnesses. “By that means the accused and their lawyer may be so confused that they nowise know who has said any thing, or what has been said.”
Among the questions to be put to a person under accusation, the “Witch-hammer” recommends a number, the quality of which may be appreciated by reading the following examples: “Do you know that people hold you to be a witch? Why have you been observed upon the precincts of N. N.? Why have you touched N. N.’s child (or cow)? How did it happen that the child (or the cow) soon after fell sick? What was your business outside of your house when the storm broke forth? How can you explain that your cow yields three times as much milk as the cows of others?”
Sprenger’s work gives a detailed account of the treatment to which a person who is accused of sorcery and handed over to the judge must be subjected. Before the trial the accused must be put on the rack in order that his mind may be inclined to confession. Some, rather than confess their guilt, allow themselves to be torn asunder limb by limb; they are “the worst witches,” and their endurance is explained by the supposition “that the devil hardens them against their tortures.” Others who have been less faithful to him he abandons, and are thus easily induced to confess. “If no confession has been wrung from the witch during the first day”—we quote the “Witch-hammer” literally—“the torture is to be continued the second and the third day. The civil law forbids, to be sure, to repeat the torture, when no proof has been adduced, but it may be continued.”
The judge should therefore use the following formula: “We ordain that the torture shall be continued (not repeated) to-morrow.”
The second day the instruments of torture are to be exhibited to the accused, and an attending priest shall read the following adjuration: “I adjure thee, N. N., in the name of the Holy Trinity, by the bitter tears of Jesus Christ which he shed upon the cross ... by the tears of God’s saints and elect which they have shed over the world ... that, if thou art innocent, thou pour forth immediately abundant tears; but, if thou art guilty, no tears at all. In the name of God our Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
The person thus adjured seldom weeps. But if this should occur, the judge should see that it be not saliva or some other fluid that moistens the eye of the witch. The witch must be led into the court-room backwards, that the judge may see her before she sees him. Otherwise she may enchant him and move him to criminal compassion.
Before the examination of witnesses, the accused must be stripped of all her clothing and have all the hair on her body shaved off, and her limbs must be carefully examined to ascertain if they bear marks, for the devil marks his own. It must be further ascertained by pricking with a needle if any part of the body is devoid of feeling, for that is a sure sign of a witch. Still the absence of such a sign nowise proves innocence.
If the witch can not be made to confess by any means, then the judge must send her to a distant prison. The janitor, some friend and chaste women are to be persuaded to visit the prisoner, and promise to help her to escape, if she will only inform them of some of her arts. In this way, remarks the author of the “Witch-hammer,” many a one has been ensnared by us.
We conclude here our account of Sprenger’s dreadful book. The reader has contemplated sufficiently this fruit on the tree of the devil.—It may fill us with loathing to consider it, but its teachings are instructive. May we know the tree from the fruit, and may we tear it up with its roots—with those roots yet so abundantly watered by men who know not what they are doing. The fires which the bull of Pope Innocent kindled all over Europe, threw their weird light far into the times which have been called the modern,—far in the eighteenth century. To count these victims of the stake would be impossible. It is, however, sometimes attempted in our days; archives are searched through and discoveries are made which surpass every anticipation. The victims amount to millions.
No age was spared. Children were brought to the stake with their mothers. A silent, gloomy presentiment seized every community when the proclamation on the church doors announced that the inquisitor had arrived. All work in the shops and fields ceased, and all the evil passions flared up into greater activity. He who had an open enemy, or suspected secret envy, knew beforehand that he was lost. It was considered better to anticipate than to be anticipated in denouncing; and the tribunal had hardly commenced its activity, ere it was overcrowded with informers. “When they had commenced in one place to burn witches,” says an author of the seventeenth century, “more were found in proportion as they were burned.” In various communities in Germany and France all the women were sent to the stake. In many instances it went so far that princes and potentates were forced, from fear of seeing their subjects exterminated, to stay by authoritative command the madness of the inquisitors. Greed brought fuel to the flames which superstition and hatred kindled. We will quote but one example from the history of the Scotch witch-processes. A man named Hopkins who was sent to the gallows, convicted of murder, confessed there that he had brought two hundred women to the stake, and for a recompense of twenty shillings each,—a sum with which the judge rewarded him.
And there was heard in all Europe for many centuries not a single voice raised in the effort to stay the murder with weapons of reason or religion! If there was any who did not share the madness of his time, fear paralyzed his tongue, and learning and religion, far from impeding the evil, had yoked themselves to its triumphal ear. With the Bible in their hands, the theologians sanctioned these barbarous proceedings, and the learned defended them with reasons drawn from the fathers and with subtle argumentation. The Protestant theologians vied with the Catholic in learning. Even Luther and the first reformers did not check, but promoted, the belief in devils. If paganism had been described by the fathers as Satan’s work and empire, Luther referred the preceding life of the Church from the beginning of papacy to the same sphere, and changed the whole history of humankind to a diabolical drama. The struggle between the Reformation and Catholicism contributed in still another way to intensify the faith in devils. The religious contest stirred the mind of the age in its innermost depths. Many who occupied middle ground between the reforming preacher on the one hand and the Catholic priest on the other, were hesitating between the old and the new, and many consciences which had already embraced the new were agitated by uneasiness and doubt. The Catholic divine saw in these doubts the beginning of the victory over Satanic error; the Protestant theologian declared the same doubts to be inspired by the originator of papacy, the devil. We can appreciate this state of things by reading Luther’s “Tischreden.” Men terrified, for instance, by a dream or a strange noise in the night (nothing more than this was required for such an effect) hurried to their pastor to lay their troubles before him. They were then informed, on the one hand, that the dream or the voice was caused by the devil, to whom their apostacy had bound them over, or, on the other, that Satan was trying to frighten them back into the errors which they had abandoned. In both cases the archfiend was the agent. “He was in the castle of the knight, the palaces of the mighty, the libraries of the learned, on every page of the Bible, in the churches, in the halls of justice, in the lawyer’s chambers, in the laboratories of physicians and naturalists, in cottages, farmyards, stalls,—everywhere.”[50]He was indeed everywhere, and Christendom had become a hell. “The belief in the devil,” says a British author,[51] speaking upon this subject, “had had the effect, that all rational knowledge had disappeared, that all sound philosophy was denounced, that the morality of the people was poisoned and humanity sunk in a whirlpool of folly, godlessness and brutality. All classes were carried away by this whirlpool. The God of nature and Revelation had no longer the reins of the world in his hand. The powers of hell and darkness, born of a diseased imagination, reigned upon the earth.”
Throwing its gloomy shadow even into the eighteenth century, it was, however, during the Middle Ages that the belief in sorcery sent down its deep and mighty roots. This is not to be wondered at. The men of the Middle Ages lived less in the real than in a world of magic, in a world resembling more the paintings of “Helvetes-Breughels” than the descriptions of Armidas isle. The air was saturated with demoniacal vapors. The popular literature consisted of legends of saints and stories about the devil. The Church, the general asylum against the devil, saw and taught the people to see everywhere the play of evil powers which must be conquered by magical practices, and amidst Ahriman and his hosts who had now established themselves in the Occident, and as heirs to the horns and tails of Pans and fauns, a crowd of native spirits moved; imps, giants, trolls, forest-spirits, elves and hobgoblins in and on the earth; nicks, river-sprites in the water, fiends in the air, and salamanders in the fire. And to these elementary spirits were added a whole fauna of monsters, such as dragons, griffins, were-wolves, witch-kine, Thor’s-swine, and so on. But this does not conclude the review: spectres, ghosts, vampires, spirits causing the nightmare, and so on,—supernatural beings derived from the human world, but of dimmer outlines than the preceding,—conclude the motley procession. The mandrake has a place in it also. This being deserves a few lines here, inasmuch as it has now faded from the popular superstitions.
The mandragora or alrun[52] is originally a very rare herb which can hardly be found except below the gallows where a pure youth has been hanged.[53] He who seeks the herb should know that its lower part has the shape of a human being, and that its upper part consists of broad leaves and yellow flowers. When it is torn from the soil it sighs, shrieks and moans so piteously, that he who hears it must die. To find it one should go out before sunrise on a Friday morning, after having filled his ears carefully with cotton, wax or pitch, and bring with him a black dog without one white hair. The sign of the cross must be made three times over the mandrake, and the soil dug up carefully all around it, so that it be attached only by the fine rootlets. It is then tied by a string to the tail of the dog and he is attracted forward by a piece of bread. The dog pulls the plant out of the earth, but falls dead, struck by the terrible shriek of the mandragora. It is then brought home, washed in red wine, wrapped in red and white silk, laid in a shrine, washed again every Friday, and dressed in a white frock. The mandragora reveals hidden things and future events, and procures for the owner the friendship of all men. A silver coin deposited with it in the evening is doubled in the morning. Still the coin must not be too large in size. If you buy the mandragora it remains with you, throw it wherever you will, until you sell it again. If you keep it till your death you must depart with it to hell. But it can be sold only for a lower price than it was bought. Therefore is he who has bought it with the smallest existing coin, irretrievably lost.
The being called mandragora was, as we see, a kind of “Spiritus familiaris.” But it appeared in still another form. It happened that adventurers represented themselves as mandragoras, and on account of this mystical origin had gained success at court, having first been spiritually made human by Christian baptism. But they lost by baptism their wonder-working power, greatly to their own and others’ pecuniary disadvantage. Still greater was the number of those adventurers during the Middle Ages who asserted themselves or others to be the bastards of devils and human beings. But if they led a blameless life, evincing a firm belief in the dogmas of the Church, the danger of such a pedigree was not greater than the honor. The son of a fallen angel did not need to bend his head before a man of noble birth.In the demoniacal fauna of the Middle Ages the were-wolf plays too important a role to be passed over in silence. He was the terror of rural districts. Were-wolves are men who change themselves for a time into wolves, and then rove about hunting for children. The belief in the were-wolf is very ancient. Antique authors speak of it as a superstition among the Scythians, and among shepherds and peasants in the eastern provinces.[54] Then the change was considered to result from certain herbs growing in Pontus; in the Middle Ages it was the devil who wrapped a wolf’s hide around the witch or the enchanted person. Even this belief was embraced and proclaimed by Augustine. Augustine,—the same father who declared that he would not believe the gospel if the authority of the Church did not exhort him to do so,—found it worthy of a Sadducean or a pagan philosopher alone to deny the existence of so well-known a phenomenon as the were-wolf. The emperor Sigismund had the question investigated “scientifically” in his presence by theologians, and they came to the general agreement that the were-wolf is “a positive and constant fact”; for the existence of the devil being accepted, there is no reason to deny that of the were-wolf, sup-ported as it is by the authority of the fathers of the Church and by general experience.[55] This “general experience” finally became, like the belief in sorcery, a raging mental disease, an epidemic (“insama zoanthropica”) infecting whole districts in various parts of Europe and sending many insane persons who had confessed before the courts their imagined sin, to the place of execution.[56]Nearly related to this lycanthropy is the more horrible vampirism. The vampires, according to the belief of the Middle Ages, are disembodied souls which clothe themselves again in their buried bodies, steal at night into houses, and suck from the nipple of the sleeping all their blood. He who is thus bereft of the vital fluid is in his turn changed into a vampire and visits preferably his own relatives. If the corpse of a person suspected of vampirism is dug up, and its stomach pressed, an abundance of fresh blood flows from the mouth. The corpse is well preserved. The belief in vampires has likewise produced a kind of psychical pestilence which yet in the eighteenth century spread terror in the Austrian provinces.[57]
If sorcery was an imaginary people’s magic, there existed also a real, and it consisted in an infinite variety of usages, observances and rules for all conditions of life. Not to speak of the astrologers’ extensive hand-written calendars, which pointed out which constellations, seasons and days are auspicious for bathing, bleeding, hair-cutting, shaving, house-building, wooing, engaging servants, setting out on travels and so on, there existed among the people an incredibly large mass of rules for living which any body that would avoid the constant danger of bringing misfortune on himself and his family, must know.
From waking up in the morning to going asleep at night, such maxims were to be observed: putting the wrong foot first out of bed in the morning was as sure to be followed by annoyances in the course of the day as a neglect to place the shoes with the heels toward the bed at night was certain to cause the visit of ghosts or evil dreams. When children are born, no one must go out or in, or open the door without bringing fire with him, that the trolls may not find their way in and exchange the child; and no one entering must say a word before he has touched the fire. For the same reason the child, while unchristened, must be watched carefully every night, and a fire must be kept constantly burning on the hearth. Before the christening a child must not be moved from one room to another without putting steel beside it. If two boys are baptized on the same occasion, that one who obtains his name and blessing first will be best endowed both bodily and mentally. On the day of christening the mother should avoid handling an axe, knife or other cutting instruments, otherwise the child will some time be murdered. If the floor under a cradle is swept, the child will be bereft of its sleep. If the cradle is moved while the child is not in it, the child becomes peevish. When a child yawns, the sign of the cross must be made over its mouth, and the words “Jesus, God’s son!” added; otherwise the devil will then enter into it. If a child looks out through the window or looks in a mirror at night, it will fall sick. Children punished on Sunday become disobedient; but a child whipped on Good Friday before sunset, will become obedient and well-behaved. If the child walks about in one shoe, the mother will have a sore back. If a child walks or runs backwards, it drives its parents so many steps into hell. A child eating and reading at the same time gets a bad memory. If a suitor’s first gift to his betrothed consists of shoes, she will be unfaithful, if of stockings, she will be jealous. Nuptials on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays are unfortunate. If a bridal procession comes to a stop for any reason, the married pair will meet with dissensions. If the marriage-ring is too small, misfortune is in store. Of the bridal pair, that one dies first who first kneels down or rises from kneeling. Those who hold the canopy must not change hands or touch the bride’s crown, for that prognosticates misfortune and ennui. If in going out an old woman or one carrying water is met, the room should be re-entered. When the table is set, the bread must be laid upon it immediately. Bread must never be placed with the upper crust down. Great care must be taken to remove all substances separated from the body, as hair, nails, blood; they must be buried in the soil so as not to come in contact with diseased persons, or fall into the hands of witches.
We have selected the preceding observances and rules as examples of those thousands of precepts for all conditions of life which have been collected by investigations in this field from the mouths of the people. A full collection would require a large volume. In all of them is seen a servile fear of mysterious evil influences, lurking on all sides, and whose power or impotency as regards man nowise depends on his morality, but only on the way in which he observes certain ethically indifferent acts. Many of them seem to have arisen only by faulty application of the theory of causality; others depend on a symbolical method of contemplating nature. What a difference between this popular wisdom and that stored up in the gnomes of the Greeks or in the heathen Havamal! Part of the former may be likewise an heirloom, but how exuberantly these superstitions grew during the centuries of ripe and glaring belief in personified evil; how deeply they struck root among the people, while Havamal has been saved from the flood of time only by the hand of the student!
Among the superstitions are to be counted the magical prognosis of diseases and death. Many were the tokens of the approaching skeleton-figure with his scythe and glass. They were heard in the cawing of crows and ravens, in the howling of dogs, in the chirping of the cricket, and the regular ticking of the wood-worm concealed in the wall. If the horse of a priest riding to visit a sick person in his parish lowered its head upon arriving at a house, if a gnat was caught gnawing any clothing, if a light suddenly went out, if an image fell down, if a glass or a mirror was broken, it indicated an approaching death in the house. To determine the fate of a sick person, a piece of bread of which he had eaten was laid in a dark corner, and its change of color was observed; or a piece of fat with which the soles of the sick had been smeared was offered to a dog, or a stone was lifted to see if any thing was concealed beneath it. If the bread became dark, or if the dog refused to eat what was offered him, or if there was no living thing under the stone, then the sick person was considered incurable, and nothing could be hoped even from the inherited medical skill of the wise old men and women. The exercise of this skill consisted in the use, along with “reading” and conjurations, partly of herbs of more or less known efficiency, and partly also, as it appears, of magnetic forces, resorted to mechanically without reflection.
The medical art inherited among the people from generation to generation is a subject which none but a clear-sighted and unprejudiced scientist of the medical profession can treat, and which has been left hitherto without that investigation which the subject undoubtedly deserves, at least from a historical point of view. There was, at the end of the Middle Ages, among the devotees of the Galenic art a man of genius who, despairing to find in the folios of the medical scholastics any traces of truth, abandoned the lecture-room and went forth into the world without in order, as he himself said, to read the book of nature and learn something of that medical instinct with which God, as he believed, must have endowed men as well as animals, and which must find a true expression only in the people living in immediate reciprocity with nature. This man was Paracelsus. He who despised and overwhelmed with mockery the coryphei of his days in the medical faculties, did not disdain to listen to “the experience of peasants, old women, night-wanderers, and vagabonds,” and the magnetical system which he constructed “by the illumination of nature’s light, and not by the lamp-flare of an apothecary’s shop,” rest in all probability on the general principles which he found in the plurality of sympathetic cures practiced among the people. In the “reading” by which these cures were accompanied, Paracelsus saw rightly nothing but a subjective moment, and means of making faith and imagination the allies of the physician. A mass of these conjuration-formulÆ in different diseases have been collected and published in various countries of Europe. They offer the reader little or nothing of interest.[58]
A very common usage during the Middle Ages was to measure the sick person, at one time to cure him, at another to find out if the disease was decreasing or increasing. Another means was to drag him through a hole. Sick children were pulled through holes dug in the earth or through a cleft cherry-tree. Sick sheep were forced to creep through the cleft of an oak, and so on. Another remedy against many kinds of sufferings was the binding of a thread or a band which had been read over, around the neck or some limb of the sick. Connected with this is the tying of witch-knots, used only with evil intent. Bands of different colors and material[59] were required for these. They were buried near the dwelling of the person to be injured. It was thought that by this means any limb or bodily power of an enemy could be impaired. A French jurist and witch-judge, Pierre Delancre, complains that in his days there were few married couples in France whose happiness had not been marred by this means; young men hardly dared to marry from fear of it. Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, advised, as a remedy against this influence, a diligent use of the sacraments. In French rituals church-prayers against the effects of witch-knots are prescribed. Hardly less universally was it the custom to make dolls of rags, dough, wax or clay, baptize them with the name of the hated person, put them in the fire or pierce them with needles, and bury them under the threshold of that individual, all in order to inflict sufferings on him.[60] Diseases could also be transferred to dolls by reading certain formulÆ, and placing them in some inaccessible place, or in running water.
Not only against diseases, but also against the dangers of fire and war, against ill-luck in love or chase, on voyages and the like, magical remedies were freely resorted to by the people. The “Witch-hammer” complains bitterly against the criminal practice of the soldiers in mutilating crucifixes in order to harden themselves against the sword and bullets. The executioner in Passau gained, during the Thirty Years’ War, a wide reputation for his skill in hardening the human frame, which he did by means of scraps of paper with cabalistic figures (Passauer Henkers-Zettel), which were eaten. The belief that hunters procured, by means of conjurations, “free-arrows” and “free-bullets” was very common. The “Witch-hammer” accuses various potentates of having in their pay “diabolical archers” who hit their mark from a long distance without aiming. It was customary at fires to throw into the flames so-called shields of David,—plates with two intersecting triangles and the motto “Agla” (the initials of four Hebrew words meaning: “Thou art strong eternally, O Lord!”) and “consummatum est.” As late as in the middle of the last century the magistrate of Leipzig ordered that such plates should be laid up in the rathhaus to be used in case of fires. In Catholic countries the clergy took the employment of magical appliances against fires into their own hands; processions singing and bearing relics went around the burning house three times, and if this had no salutary effect, it was a sure sign that God had allowed the devil to wield the consuming element unto destruction.
The extent of this treatise does not allow a detailed exposition of the many divinatory arts which had their adepts among the people. The Church preaching mightily against those arts and representing them as devices of the devil, the father of lies and founder of oracles, did not, however, deny, but could confirm by biblical quotation, their power to unveil futurity.
Every thing that we have here described was to the Church black magic: all mystical practices among the people, whether resorted to for good or evil purposes, to heal or cure, were looked upon as implying contempt for the divine magic of the Church itself, and also a league with the devil, if not a formal one, at any rate a “pactum implicitum.” It was therefore the possessors of the traditional popular art of healing who were first sent to the stake wherever the inquisition commenced its trials. But no terrorism could eradicate the popular magic so long as the persecutors themselves believed in its efficiency, and fought only for a consecrated superstition against its outlawed counterfeit. The struggle against the superstition of the Church as well as of the people, was reserved for another time and for another theory of the universe and of morals.
The so-called wandering scholastics (scholastici vagantes, scholares erratici) formed a kind of connecting link between the magic of the learned and that of the common people. They were ruined and adventurous students, priests and monks who wandered about in the rural districts of most of the European states, especially Germany, representing themselves as treasure-diggers, selling “spiritus familiares,” amulets, love-potions, and life-elixirs, conjuring spirits, divining by the stars, and healing men and cattle. These adventurers were associated in a regular guild, and had like other vagrant tradesmen, their lodgings and hospitals in the cities. They were dreaded competitors of the witch-fathers of the cloisters, were several times excommunicated by the Church, and seem to have nearly disappeared when the witch-trials commenced in earnest. It is to a person of that kind that the Faust-legend is attached. It reflects the popular opinions concerning the power of learned magicians.[61]
The same period which saw the bull of Innocentius promulgated, and the belief in devils culminate in the witch-processes, gave birth to the renaissance. This saviour came to the world in the hour of its intensest need. The Hellenic spirit, born again from the study of classic literature and classic art, was a new Messias putting his heel on the head of the old serpent and saving humanity from the power of death and of the devil. The people sitting in darkness illumined only by the lurid flames kindled by the inquisition saw a great light and stretched their hands towards the new dawn. The study of the ancients had an immense influence, all the more as the actual world was so different from the antique world. The exhumed monuments of Hellas revealed other state systems than the feudal of the Middle Ages,—states which were organizations, not mere mechanical conglomerates of conquerors and conquered, and were founded upon a nobler basis than given or assumed privileges. These monuments revealed an independent search for truth which had placed itself above tradition—a novel spectacle to the people of the Middle Ages! They revealed an art in which harmony reigned between spirit and nature, between the higher life and sensuousness, between the relative opposites which the Middle Ages had conceived as absolute, placing them against one another in a struggle which wrecked beauty and morality. They revealed large symmetrical characters as free from the asceticism of the Middle Ages as from the wild sensuality of that time. All these ideas, hailed with enthusiasm, could not but transform the appearance of the world. They overthrew the darkness of the Middle Ages, put the devil and hell to flight, and drove them into that lumber-corner of the spiritual kingdom where they are at present, but from which, at any political reaction, they peer out eagerly watching whether they may not once more bring the great wide world into their power. But they shall scarcely succeed in this, as long as freedom of thought and scientific independence are guarded as the foremost conditions of the spiritual health of mankind; and they shall utterly fail when an all-extended intelligence has taught the people that the premises of the devil-dogma, if they could be again inoculated into the popular mind, would show anew the same results which have been depicted above, and lead us back to the terrible times of the inquisition and the burning of witches. This, no doubt, even the orthodox defenders of belief in an impersonated evil principle do not desire; but they do not observe that history acts more consistently than they, and cures general errors only by making long generations draw from them the last consequences and suffer their full effect.
THE END.
INDEX.
Adam’s sin, brings countless woes on man, 12.
Agnus Dei, 63;
its power, 64.
Ahriman, affirmed to have been Judaized in “Satan,” 35;
repelled at Marathon, 36;
his power over man limited, 47;
author of black magic, 54.
Alexander, conquers Asia, but helps the triumph of dualism, 37.
Ammonius Sacca, tries to restore Neoplatonism, 40.
Amulets employed in Church-magic, 62, 63.
Angels, belong to the lowest hierarchy, 5;
have the care of mortals, 6.
Appolonius of Tyana, deemed the peer of Christ in gift of miracles, 40, 163.
Archangels, part of the lowest hierarchy, 5;
protect religion, 6.
Archetypes, world of, i. e., the Empyrean, 1;
all celestial things are in the Empyrean; are immaterial, 6.
Aristotle’s method revives science, 44.
Astrology, introduction to (Table II. of correspondences), 127.
Atmosphere of earth situate next below space of the moon, 2.
Augustine, a Manicheian, 43;
last of the fathers educated in philosophy, 44;
quoted on baptism, 57;
quoted on the existence of fauns, satyrs, etc., 162;
believes in the existence of were-wolves, 206.
Baptism, copied, in anticipation, in the Mithras mysteries, 57.
Baptismal water, its various efficacy, 58.
Bartholomeus Chassaneus, instructs how to proceed in the courts against common pests, 78.
Benoit de Montferrand, bishop of Lausanne, excommunicates may-bugs, 75, 76.
Bereshit, its mystic meaning, 144.
Bethesda, the efficacy of the water in its pool inferior to that of baptism, 57.
Bishop Gerhard, converts the heretics of Arras, 60.
Boethius, on the basis of creation, 124.
Borrichius (Olaf Borch) cited, 115.
Bunsen’s Gott in der Geschichte, quoted, 93, 94, 175.
Cabalists’ method of searching out the inner meaning of the Bible, 144;
discover the seventy-two mystical names of God, 146.
Christian fathers, one of, doubts if his way of attaining perfection is the only one, 32;
one of, declares every thing in heathen thought to be of the devil, 42.
Church the, prepared for by election of the Jews, and founded by Christ, 14;
is one body; accumulates a wealth of supererogatory works, and grants remission of guilt also to dead, 15;
a mole against the tide of sin, 16;
the kingdom of God on earth; her destiny universal extension, 18;
can not check the growth of sin; her emblem an ark, 22;
the only legitimate bodily physician, 68;
forbids at several councils the secular practice of medicine, 72.
Church bells, their power against the demons, 74.
Clemens of Alexandria, fights for the union of belief and thought, 41;
quoted on the mission of philosophy, 42;
rejects the doctrine of eternal punishment, 43.
Colquhoun quoted, 200.
Conception-billets described, 64-66.
“Conjurer of Hell,” 148.
Contrast between state of Society in Middle Ages and Hellenic and later European civilizations due to different theories of the universe, 29.
Cosmic Philosophy of Middle Ages, 1-28.
Cyprianus and others enter into league with Satan, 165.
Delrio, ascribes the origin of witchcraft to Zoroaster, 45.
Demonianism, cured by the Church, 70.
Demons, fallen intelligences of the middle hierarchy, 11;
war against the good angels; cause storms and drouth; pervade the elements, 12;
entice man, 13;
able to take full possession of men, 25.
Deutsche Theologie, quoted on the nature of evil, 26.
Differences between the dualism of Zoroaster and the Christian, 46-48.
Dissection prohibited, 71.
Dominion, order of angels, receives the commands of God, 5.
Dualism, of the Middle Ages affirmed to have been derived from Persia, 34;
its conflict with the unitarian notions of Greece the sum of history between Cyrus and Constantine; wins a flank-position on the Mediterranean upon the return of the Jews from captivity; its demon-belief testified to by the many demoniacs in the time of Christ, 35;
magic and belief upon authority its necessary consequences, 36;
derived from Zoroaster, 38;
spreads over the Roman provinces, 39;
advances against Europe, as Manicheism, 43;
is finally absolute and brings on the Dark Ages, 44;
is intensified after entering Christianity, 46,
and undergoes changes, 47, 48;
attacks the inner authority, 92.
Earth, encompassed by ten heavens, 1;
made a paradise for man; explains symbolically man’s destiny, 8.
Egidius, opposes fire-worship, 171.
Electrum magicum, 138.
Elements, four prime in the constitution of all things, 3.
Eleusinian mysteries, fragments of, preserved in magic of the learned, 117.
Empire, third order of angels, ward off all hindrances, 5.
Empyrean, the heaven of fire; world of archetypes, 1;
remains after the final conflagration, 26.
Europe, belief, of in Middle Ages, 1;
defeats dualism, 36;
goes into the enemy’s country, 37.
Eucharist, perennial source of power and sanctification, 59.
Faust, quoted, 98, 109.
Faust-legend, at first proposed to employ H. C. Agrippa as its chief character, 221.
Field-rats prosecuted, 78-80.
Formula against bloody-flux, 215;
against epilepsy, 215.
Formulary of malediction used by priests, 81, 82.
Gnosticism springs up, 38.
God, enthroned in the Empyrean, 1;
associates with man, 8-9.
Gregory IX. exhorts to a crusade against the Stedinghs, 174.
Gregory the Great, mentioned, 44, 60;
forbade the abrogation of pagan festivities, 160.
Heaven of crystal, next beneath Empyrean,—primum mobile; of fixed stars, devoid of weight, 2.
Hell, becomes a place of punishment, 11;
remains after final conflagration, 26.
Henricus Cornelius Agrippa ab Nettesheim, on God as the source of all power, 3, 4;
is not chosen to represent the magician in the Faust-legend, 221.
Heretics of Arras, their belief, 60.
Hermes Trismegistus, transmuted whatever he chose to gold, 115.
Hincmar, archb. of Rheims, propounds a remedy against witch-knots, 216.
Hippocrates, mentioned, 71, 72.
Historical development of Middle-age Cosmic Philosophy, 28-51.
History, a spiritual comedy, 23.
Homunculus philosophicus, how produced, 132, 133.
Horst’s Demonomagie quoted, 199.
Houses of the planets, 134.
“Hubertus-bands” and “Hubertus-keys,” 69.
Images, their miraculous properties, 67, 68.
Incense appropriate for Mars, 139.
“Incubi” and “succubi,” 167.
Inevitable causation, not admitted in the Middle Age Cosmic philosophy, 4.
Isis, secrets of entrusted to the sons of Ham, 114.
Jacob’s ladder, structure of the universe likened to, 6.
Jamblichus, practices secret arts, to outrival Christian magi, 40.
Jean Bodin, ascribes witchcraft to Zoroaster, 45.
John of Salisbury upon witch-festivals, 173.
Judaico-Alexandrian philosophy blooms, 38.
Jupiter belonging to the second of the planetary spaces, 2.
Knowledge of highest truths revealed to man, 20.
Lucifer, prince of Seraphim, 9;
revolts, and wars with Michael, 10;
is conquered, is permitted to tempt man, 10;
transformed into an angel of light, 12;
triumphs, 14.
Luther, on Satanic malice as the cause of accidents, 24, 25;
esteems highly “Deutsche Theologie,” 26;
Tischreden quoted, 168;
referred to, 199.
Lycanthropy of the Middle Ages, 205-207.
“Magia Divina,” quoted 130-133.
Magic, of the Church, 51-94;
what enters into all employment of it, 53, 54;
white and black magic, celestial and diabolical, 54;
of the Church defined, 92.
—Magic of the Learned, 95-158;
is derived from various sources, 116;
first principle of, 128.
—Magic of the People, 158-224;
black magic and devil worship, 164.
Magician, the learned of the 15th century, 100;
his apartments described, 105, 108, 110;
explains his science, 112-129;
performs an incantation, 129-155.
Malice of the devil, causes unforeseen accidents, 24, 25.
Man, a microcosm; must dwell on earth, 7;
at first happy, 8.
Mandrake, superstitions concerning, 201.
Manicheism, new form of dualism; advances against Europe; finds a follower in Augustine, 43.
Marathon, Salamis and PlatÆa really battle-fields of a religious war, 35.
Mars, situate in the third of the planetary spaces, 2.
Matter, devoid of force and all quality, 3.
May-bugs excommunicated, 75.
Men are often terrified into an alliance with the devil, 25.
Mercury, path of in planetary world, 2.
Middle Ages, Cosmic Philosophy of, 1-28;
historical origin of, 28-55, 94.
Miracles, defined, 4.
Mithras mysteries, contain a copy, by anticipation, of the sacrament of baptism, 57;
imitate other mysteries of the Church, 58, 60.
Moon, path of, 2.<
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“Mus exenteratus,” etc., quoted, 60.
Native spirits popularly believed to inhabit land, air and water, 202.
Nature, knowledge of, same as a knowledge of the angels, 5.
Neoplatonism arises, 40.
Nine revolving heavens, 1.
Nork’s “Sitten und GebrÄuche der Deutschen,” etc., quoted, 202.
Number 72, its significance, 143, 144;
number 488, 147.
Origen, attempts to unite belief and thought, 41;
rejects the doctrine of eternal punishment, 43.
Origin of the names of the days of the week, 135, 136.
Ormuzd and Ahriman, are the real adversaries repelled at Marathon, 36;
author of white magic, 54.
Pentecost, its gifts transmitted, 91.
Peter de Abano, author of an important question, 97.
Perpetuum mobile naturÆ, method of producing, 130, 131.
Pierre Delancre complains against witch-knots, 216.
Philosophy, system of possible within the Church, 20;
adherents of the scholastic may use Aristotle’s dialectics, 21.
Planetary world, next beneath that of fixed stars, 2;
consisting of seven heavens, 2.
Planets guided by angels, 3;
influence the elements and man, 134, 135.
Plotinus, tries to restore Neoplatonism, 40.
Pope, feudal lord of emperors, 18;
determines the true inductions of philosophy, 21;
Sergius III., 63;
Urban Vitus, 65.
Pope John XXII., complains that his life is endangered by sorcerers, 177.
Pope Innocent VIII., puts forth a bull against the spread of sorcery, 178.
Popular maxims of superstition, 208-211.
Power, from a spiritual source only, 3;
communicated to the heavens and the earth by angels, 3.
Power, order of angels, guide the stars and planets, 5.
Principalities, Archangels, and Angels, the third and lowest hierarchy, hold supremacy over terrestrial things, 5, 6.
Principalities, part of the lowest hierarchy of angels, guardian spirits of nations, 6.
Proclus, last Neoplatonician, 44.
Pythagoras, glorified as fit to rank with Christ in miraculous gifts, 40;
believed the universe founded on numbers, 124.
Rain-processions in the Middle Ages, 74.
Reason, darkened by apostacy, 13.
“Recognitiones divi Clementis ad Jacob.,” quoted, 165.
Reformation, retains somewhat of the Church-magic, 92.
Relics, their magical use, 66.
Remigius, ascribes witchcraft to Zoroaster, 45.
Renaissance, overthrew the darkness and superstition of the Middle Ages, 222-223.
Saints, intercession of, more effective than that of Seraphim, Footnotes:
[1] Henricus Cornelius Agrippa ab Nettesheim: “De occulta Philosophia.”—I., XIII.
[2] Henricus Cornelius Agrippa ab Nettesheim: “De occulta Philosophia.”—I., XIII.
[3] Ibidem.
[4] This passage, directed against the ruler of Assyria, was already interpreted by the early fathers as having reference to Satan. Thus Lucifer, the Latin translation for Morning Star, came to be a name for the prince of darkness.
[5] Luke x. 18.
[6] “De Contemptu Mundi sive de Miseria HumanÆ Conditionis,” a little book written about 1200, by the afterwards Pope Innocent III.
[7] The words of Luther, who, in addition to his dualistic belief, was a genuine son of this same Middle Age, though the destroyer of its autocratic faith.
[8] As such,—as perishable and unreal, are all evil things regarded by an unknown author in the Middle Ages. In his beautiful opuscule “Deutsche Theologie,” he says among other things: “Now some one may ask, ‘Since we must love every thing, must we also love sin?’ The answer is, no; for when we say every thing, we only mean every thing that is good. Every thing that exists is good by virtue of its existence. The devil is good in so far as he exists. In this sense, there is nothing evil in existence. But it is a sin to wish, desire or love any thing else than God. Now all things are essentially in God, and more essentially in God than in themselves; therefore are they all good in their real essence.”—The little work from which the above is quoted, is the expression of a deep and pious soul, struggling to master the dualism which fettered his age. It is remarkable that Luther was not more strongly influenced by its spirit, although he confesses that “Next to the Bible and St. Augustine I have found no book from which I have learned more.”
[9] See the work “Summa Theologica” (supplementum ad tertiam partem, quÆst. 94) by the most prominent and most influential among the theologians of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas. It is there said: “Ut beatitudo sanctorum eis magis complaceat et de ea uberiores gratias Deo agant, datur eis ut poenam impiorum perfecte videant.... Beati, qui erunt in gloria, nullam compassionem ad damnatos habebunt.... Sancti de poenis impiorum gaudebunt, considerando in eis divinÆ justitiÆ ordinem et suam liberationem de qua gaudebunt.”—With this may be compared the following execrable effusion of another theologian: “Beati coelites non tantum non cognatorum sed nec parentum sempiternis suppliciis ad ullam miserationem flectentur. Imo vero lÆtabuntur justi, cum viderint vindictam; manus lavabunt in sanguine peccatorum.”
[10] Tertullian.
[11] This has been denied in so far as the original teachings of Zoroaster are concerned, but is confirmed by a passage in Aristotle (Metaphys., I., XIV., c. 4).
[12] A. F. Ch. Vilmar: “Theologie der Thatsachen wider die Theologie der Rhetorik” (Marburg, 1857).
[13] Thus, for instance, the red lustre of copper was supposed to indicate that it was connected with Mars, which shines with a reddish light.
[14] “Non baptisatis parvulis nemo promittat inter damnationem regnumque coelorum quietis vel felicitatis cujuslibet atque ubilibet quasi medium locum; hoc enim eis etiam hÆresis Pelagiana promisit” (Augustinus: De Anima et Ejus Origine, 1. I., c. IX). In one of his letters Augustine declares that even if the parents hurry to the priest, and he likewise hasten to baptize the child, but find it dead before it has obtained the sacrament, it is nevertheless then doomed to be eternally tormented with the damned, and to blaspheme the name of God.
[15] All these are found, in connection with baptism, in heathen mysteries.
[16] Extract from the formula given at the council of Rome, A. D. 1059, to Berengar of Tours, to which he was forced to swear under penalty of death.
[17] The wafer substituted in the twelfth century for bread was called the host.
[18] The discovery made in our days by the Danish theologian Martensens that the food obtained in the Supper of our Lord is not for the soul only, but also for the body,—for the nourishment of our ascension-body, is not really new; the pagan initiated into the Mithras mysteries was taught that the consecrated bread and wine, being assimilated into his flesh and blood, gave immortality to his corporeal being. Like presuppositions produce in different times like ideas.
An important question in the Middle Ages and one which had been already argued with great heat from the time of Petrus Lombardus until the seventeenth century, is propounded as follows: Has a rat which has eaten of the host thereby partaken of Christ’s body? In connection with this it was further asked: How is a rat which has eaten of Christ’s body to be treated,—ought it to be killed or honored? Ought the sacrament to be venerated even in the stomach of the rat? If some of the consecrated bread is found in the stomach of a rat, is it a duty to eat it? What must be done if immediately after partaking of the sacrament one is attacked by vomiting? When a rat can eat the host, can not the devil also do it?—One of the last products of these important investigations is a book published in TÜbingen in 1593, entitled: “Mus exenteratus, hoc est tractatus valde magistralis super quÆstione quadam theologica spinosa et multum subtili,” etc.
[19] During the period of political reaction in 1815, when Schlegel and de Maistre praised the Middle Ages as man’s era of bliss, and GÖrres sought to restore to credence during the “state period of enlightenment” all the forgotten ghost and vampire stories, the clergy of Brussels were celebrating with processions and other solemnities the anniversary of this persecution of the Jews in Namur.
At the synod in A. D. 1099 a proclamation was issued forbidding priests to enter into any servile relations with laymen, because it were shameful if the most holy hands which prepared the flesh and blood of Almighty God should serve the unconsecrated laity. The famous orator Bourdaloue requested that greater homage should be paid to the priest than to the holy Virgin, because God had been incarnated in her bosom only once, but was in the hands of the priest daily, as often as the mass was read.
[20] The oldest Christian art in which the dying spirit of antiquity yet reveals itself, represented Jesus as a shepherd youth carrying a lamb upon his bosom. Many a one could only turn away sadly from the beaming world of Olympus to the new Christian ideal, and when they must needs so do, they would fain transfer to the new “puer redemptor” the mild beauty of the former youthful mediator, Dionysus Zagreus. In the hymns, still preserved to us, of Synesius, who combined in one person the bishop and the Greek who still longs for wisdom and beauty (doubtless known to many of our readers by Kingsley’s novel of Hypatia), this sadness is in wonderful harmony with Christian devotion. With the ruin of the antique world, this longing as well as the capability of satisfying it ceased. The material symbol obtained thereafter a more prominent place. If the Phoenicians and Canaanites represented their god corporeally as the powerful steer, the Christians chose the patient and inoffensive lamb as the type of theirs. The Council of Constantinople in A. D. 692 confirmed this lamb-symbol. As Aaron had made a golden calf, Pope Sergius III. procured a lamb to be made of gold and ivory. All who rebelled against its worship were treated as disorderly and heretical. In the time of Charlemagne one of them, Bishop Claudius of Turin, from whom the Waldenses derive their origin, complained: “Isti perversorum dogmatum auctores agnos vivos volunt vorare et in pariete pictos adorare.”
[21] Pope Urban Vitus presented an agnus Dei to the Byzantine Emperor. An accompanying note described its wonderful powers in the following monkish-Latin hexameters:—
Balsamus et munda cera cum chrismatis unda
Conficiunt agnum, quod munus do tibi magnum
Fonte velut natum per mystica sanctificatum.
Fulgura desursum depellit, et omne malignum
Peccatum frangit, ut Christi sanguis et angit.
PrÆgnans servatur, simul et partus liberatur.
Dona refert dignis, virtutem destruit ignis.
Portatus munde de fluctibus eripit undÆ.
[22] As late as 1784 a statute was issued by Carl Theodor, Elector of Pfalz, referring to the magic power of St. Hubert-relics, and forbidding the employment of “worldly” remedies against the bite of mad dogs.
[23] In the year 1240 a large rain-procession was held in LÜttich. Three times repeated it failed of all effect, “because in the supplication of all saints God’s mother had been forgotten.” In a new procession “Salve regina” was therefore sung, and the rain immediately came down with such violence that the devout procession was dispersed.—The clergy sometimes, in order to produce rain, would lead a donkey before the gate of the church, hang the litany about his neck, put a wafer in his mouth, and then bury the animal alive.
[24] Especially was the Church of the Middle Ages rich in awful formularies of malediction, testifying to an enormous brutalization of thought and feeling. A single specimen of these formularies will be more than sufficient to illustrate:—
“By the might, power and authority of God, the Almighty Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost and in the name of the Holy Virgin the mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, by the holy angels, archangels, St. Michael and St. John the Baptist, in the name of the holy apostle Peter and all the apostles, in the name of the holy Stephen and all the holy martyrs, and St. Adelgunda and all the holy virgins, and of all the saints in heaven and on earth to whom power is given to bind and loose,—we curse, execrate and exclude from the mother Church through the bond of malediction (here follows the name of the persons). May their children be orphaned; may they be cursed upon the field, cursed in the city, in the forest, in their houses and barns, in their chamber and their bed, in the town-hall, in the village, on land and sea; may they be cursed in the church, in the churchyard, in the court-room, on the public square and in war; whether they be talking, sleeping, waking, eating or drinking, whether they be going or resting, or doing any other thing, let them be accursed in soul and body, reason and all their senses: cursed be their progeny, cursed be the fruit of their land, cursed be all their limbs, head, nose, mouth, teeth, throat, eyes, and eyelashes, brain, larynx, tongue, breast, lungs, liver, legs, and arms, skin and hair; cursed be every thing living and moving in them from head to foot, etc. I conjure thee, Lucifer, and all your crew, by the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, by the incarnation and birth of Christ; I conjure thee by the power and the virtue of all saints, that thou never leave them in quiet, night or day, until thou have brought them to ruin, destroyed them by water, or led them to the gallows, or caused them to be torn by wild beasts, or their throat to be cut by enemies, or their bodies to be destroyed by fire,” etc., etc.
[25] A biblical ground for ordeals was found in Numbers v. 12-28.
[26] The “Witch-hammer” will be more fully described hereafter. The student of history should not neglect this volume, which is the ripest fruit of Catholic dualism, and clearly shows the results to which it tends.
[27] “Gott in der Geschichte,” III.
[28] Yet in the days of Erasmus of Rotterdam the theologians were making great ado over this knotty problem.
[29] This confession Cornelius Agrippa makes in his “Occult Philosophy.” Theophrastus Paracelsus and others were less modest.
[30] Thus reasoned, as late as the middle of the sixteenth century, Borrichius (Olaf Borch), who was professor in chemistry at the University of Copenhagen and wrote a book upon the wisdom of the Egyptian Hermes.
[31] Agrippa: “De Occulta Philosophia,” 1. I., c. 24.
[32] We have found in a “Magia Divina” the following directions for accomplishing a perpetuum mobile naturÆ, the efficacy of which we leave for the reader to decide.
“During the twelve nights after Christmas 1½ measures of dew are collected from fruit-trees, and preserved well enclosed. In the month of March dew is again collected from both fruit-trees and meadows and is preserved in another phial. Dew collected in May is poured in a third and rain of a thunderstorm during the summer in a fourth. Thereupon the contents of the four phials are mixed and one measure of it is poured into a great transparent glass retort where, well covered, it must remain a month until it becomes foul. Put it then over fire and subject to heat of the second degree. When sufficiently distilled a substance thick as honey is left. In this residue are poured four grains of astral tincture. The mixture is exposed to a heat of the first degree, by which it is converted into a thick, jet-black lump which again is dissolved, forming below an ink-like fluid, and above a vapor, in which many colors and figures are seen. These soon disappear, and every thing is changed into water, which begins to turn green, and green palaces, constantly enlarging, and mountains and lovely pastures appear, while the water is diminished more and more. When now you find that no more dew rises from the earth within the glass, take the water which you received from the distillation, mix with it a drachm of astral tincture and pour an ounce of this mixture into the glass bulb. Then every thing begins again to live and grow. Add every month an ounce of this mixture. If then the glass ball is well closed, and is not stirred, a vapor gradually arises, and is condensed into two shining stars, like the sun and the moon, and like the latter, one of these stars waxes and wanes; and all the phenomena of nature, thunder, lightning, hail, rain, snow and dew, will appear in your glass ball as in the real world around you. All this will happen if you keep the great Creator before your eyes and in your heart, and if you conceal from the wicked world this great secret.”
From the second part of Goethe’s Faust the reader may remember Doctor Wagner, Faust’s former famulus, busily engaged at the alchemic furnace in preparing a homunculus, an artificial man. The same “Magia Divina” from which we have quoted the preceding directions, allows us also to trace the secret of the learned Wagner: the art of producing “homunculos philosophicos.” In a retort of the most beautiful crystal glass is poured one measure of the purest May-dew, collected when the moon is crescent, and two measures of blood from a youth, or three measures from a girl. Both the boy and the girl must be hale and, “if possible,” chaste. When this mixture has fomented during a month, and been transformed into a reddish clay, the menstruum which is formed on the top is drawn off by means of tubes hermetically attached to the retort, gathered into a clean glass vessel, mixed with one drachm animal tincture, and the mixture is again poured into the retort where it is kept during a month in gentle heat. A sort of bladder will have then formed which is soon gradually covered with an organic net of little veins and nerves. Sprinkled every fourth week with the menstruum above quoted, the bladder grows during four months. When now you notice a peeping sound and movements of vitality in the glass, look into it and you will discover to your joy and amazement a most beautiful pair, a boy and a girl, which you can contemplate with heart-felt admiration for this lovely work of nature, though their height is but six inches. They move and walk about in the glass, where in the midst there is a tree growing with all kinds of pleasant fruits. If now you pour into the retort every month, two grains of animal tincture, you can keep them alive six whole years. When one year old they can inform you of many secrets of nature. They are benevolent in their disposition, and obey you in every thing. But at the end of the sixth year you will find that this beautiful pair who have eaten hitherto of all kinds of fruit, except those growing on the tree which sprang up in the midst of the retort, now begin to eat also the fruit of that. Then a vapor is found in the retort, which grows denser, assumes a blood-red color and emits flashes. The two homunculi are terrified, and try to hide themselves. Finally every thing around them is parched, they die, and the whole is changed into a fuming mass. If the glass is not very large and strong it explodes, causing great damage.
[33] Every planet had among the twelve signs of the Zodiac its own house, and it was especially propitious when in any of those abodes. The following table shows the order:—
| Saturn | dwells | in | Capricornus. |
| Jupiter | " | " | Pisces and Sagittarius. |
| Mars | " | " | Aries and Scorpio. |
| The Sun | " | " | Leo. |
| Venus | " | " | Taurus and Ursa Major. |
| Mercurius | " | " | Virgo and Gemini. |
| The Moon | " | " | Cancer. |
Each of the twelve signs (thirty degrees on the arc of the heavens) was divided into three “faces” (ten degrees). The position of the planet was most auspicious when in the first face of the house; if in the third its favorable influence was doubtful.
As the reader will see from the first table given above, the signs of the Zodiac were supposed to sustain a relation to the elements and to temperaments. Aries, Leo and Sagittarius were warm, dry, fiery and choleric. Mars entering these signs—excepting that of Aries which was his own house, in which he was auspicious—must therefore bode draught, conflagration and pestilence. Taurus, Virgo and Capricornus, were cold, dry, earthy, melancholic. Saturn in the second sign of Taurus might consequently betoken a severe winter. The signs of Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces were cold, damp, watery and sanguine. The dominion of the Zodiacal constellations over the human body was divided as follows: Aries presided over the head and face, Taurus over the neck and throat, Gemini over the shoulders, arms and hands, Cancer over the breast, ribs, lungs and spleen, Leo over the upper part of the stomach, back and side, Virgo over the lower part of the stomach and intestines, Scorpio over the generative organs, Sagittarius over the anus, Capricornus over the knees, Aquarius over the thighs, Pisces over the feet. The planets exercised the same influence as their houses, and all elementary things subordinated to a planet were considered to be, during auspicious aspects, excellent remedies for affections in the limbs presided over by that planet. The series of analogies, of which we have given an example above, were therefore inexhaustible mines even for the physicians of the Middle Ages. Since, for instance, Capricornus which presided over the knees, is the house of Saturn, and all crawling animals are connected with this planet, the fat of snakes is an effective remedy against gout in the knees, especially on Saturday, the day of Saturn.
[34] The days bear yet, in many languages, the names of the planets which were assigned to them in gray antiquity by Astrology.
Sunday, dies Solis, is the day of the Sun.
Monday, dies LunÆ, is the day of the Moon.
Tuesday, dies Martis, is the day of Mars, i. e., Tiw.
Wednesday, dies Mercurii, is the day of Mercury.
Thursday, dies Jovis, is the day of Jupiter, i. e., Thor.
Friday, dies Veneris, is the day of Venus, i. e., Freja.
Saturday, dies Saturni, is the day of Saturn.
The original names seem to have been introduced by the Romans during the later period of the republic. That the idea is derived from Egypt is shown by a passage in Dion Cassius [l. XLIII., c. 26; compare E. Roth, “Geschichte userer abendlÄndischer Philosophie,” I., pag. 211]. The question when and how they were introduced by our forefathers will perhaps remain forever a matter only of conjecture. It has caused astonishment that the order in which the days were named after the planets, though the same with all nations, is not the order in which they were supposed to be placed in the universe (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon). This riddle is solved by the passage in Dion Cassius referred to, in a manner such that the astrological origin of this nomenclature must be undoubted. He relates, namely, that the Egyptians devoted every one of the twenty-four hours to a certain planet. The first hour of the first week-day (Saturday) was given to the uppermost planet, Saturn, the second to Jupiter, the third to Mars and so on, according to the order of the planets. The 24th hour of Saturday consequently fell also to Mars, and the first hour of the succeeding day to the Sun, by which that day was therefore named Sunday. The 24th hour of Sunday falls according to the same calculation to Mercury, and the first hour of Monday to the Moon; and so on. The astrological distribution of the hours between the planets according to their successive order in the heavens thus explains the apparent disorder which occurs in the week. In the magical works by Cornelius Agrippa, Peter de Albano and others, of which the author has availed himself, tables concerning the distribution of the hours are found. These writers have collected from all quarters, and not least from Ptolemy and the Alexandrians, materials for their magical apparatus.
[35] The prescriptions for these perfumes are found in Cornelius Agrippa’s “Occulta Philosophia,” l. I., c. 44.
[36] They are found in Agrippa’s “Occulta Philosophia,” l. III. cc. 25, 26, 27, 28.
[37] Many pages could be filled with subtle speculations over the word Bereshit, the first word in the Old Testament. That the sensual world is only a secondary world, a reflex of the ideal world, the Cabalists proved by showing that Holy Writ commences not with the first but with the second letter of the Alphabet, namely ? (b), which in its form is half a square [found in the number of the world], and therefore signifies an accomplished separation between spirit and matter, between good and evil. By a transposition of the letters in Bereshit, in accordance with the method of the Cabala, two other words are obtained which mean “in the first Tishri,” showing that the world had been created in the month of Tishri (September). The sum of the numerical value of the letters in the word Bereshit equals the sum of the numerical value of the letters in two words which mean “He created by the law,”—a proof that the law is the instrumental cause of the world. Further, Bereshit can be divided so as to form two words meaning “He created six” (six days, six millenniums, the six extensions of universal space, etc.); or, “He created a ram,” which was, according to the Hebrew Cabalists, the same ram that was sacrificed instead of Isaac, and the Christians add, the same “Lamb of God” which gave itself a sacrifice for man.
[38] The table from which the author has amused himself in extracting, according to the rules, this name, is found in “Occulta Philosophia,” 1. III. c. 26.
[39] Agrippa’s book gives the subtle rules for finding the “signs” or the signatures of the demons.—The reader must remember the part played by the “signs” of microcosmos and the earth-spirit in Goethe’s Faust.
[40] Since they (the newly converted Anglo-Saxons) are accustomed to slaughter many oxen and horses in their feasts to the honor of the devils (their ancient gods) it is necessary to allow this custom to remain, but based upon another principle. Thus there must likewise be celebrated on the feast days of the Church and of the Holy Martyrs whose relics are kept in the churches built in heathen sacrificial groves, a perfectly similar festival, by enclosing a place with green trees and preparing a religious banquet. Still the animals must not be sacrificed to Satan’s honor, but slaughtered to the praise of God and for the sake of food, for which the Giver of all good gifts must be thanked.
[41] “Creberrima fama est multique se expertos vel ab eis qui experti essent, de quorum fide dubitandum non est, audisse confirmant, silvanos et faunos, quos incubos vocant, improbos sÆpe exstitisse mulieribus et earum appetisse ac peregisse concubitum, et quosdam dÆmones, quos Dusios Galli nuncupant, hanc assidue immunditiam et tentare et efficere plures talesque asseverant, ut hoc negare impudentiÆ videatur.” (De civitate Dei. lib. 15, cap. 23).
[42] “Recognitiones divi Clementis ad Jacob,” lib. II.
[43] This view is expressed already in Henoch’s book and in the writings of the Rabbi. Like them even the fathers interpreted the “Sons of God” mentioned in Genesis who “were fascinated by the daughters of men” as fallen angels. Thus Cyrillus, Anthenagoras, IrenÆus, Lactantius, Turtullianus, and others. We have just instanced above a quotation from Augustine. The Greek mythology with its amours between gods and men was destined to give support to this superstition.—Luther, who could not free himself from the superstition of his time, tells us often in his “Tischreden” that the devil can beget children by connection with human beings. “Es ist wahrlich ein graÜlich, schrecklich Exempel,” he says in one place, “dass der Teufel kann die Leute plagen, dass er auch kinder zeuget.”
[44] Reginonis libri duo de synodalibus causis et disciplinis ecclesiasticis. The work was republished in Leipzig in the year 1840.
[45] “Gott in der Geschichte,” III.
[46] It is found complete in its original form in Horst’s “Demonomagie,” II.
[47] Many etymologies as profound occur in the “Witch-hammer.” The word diabolus (devil) is derived from duo, “two,” and bolus, “morsel,” which is thus explained, that the devil fishes at the same time after two morsels, the soul and the body.
[48] This deduction, replete with indecencies which can not be handled, occupies thirty-three pages of the “Witch-hammer.” It pretends to be very convincing. It has also sent women by hundreds of thousands to death.
[49] To give the reader a clearer idea of the really diabolical blindness and brutality which characterizes the terrible book we are giving an account of, we quote the following statement from the “Witch-hammer,” p. 223: “We (the inquisitors Sprenger and his colleagues) find that of all women that we have condemned to the flames very few have voluntarily done harm by sorcery. They have generally been forced by the devil to do it. After having confessed every thing (on the rack) they generally attempt suicide before being taken to the stake. It is the devil who tempts them thus, for he is afraid that by repentance and confession they will receive the pardon of God. If this wily trick is not successful, and if they are prevented from destroying themselves, he knows how to rob them of the chance of grace by other means, namely, by smiting them with fury, madness or sudden death!”—Behold a sample of how theological arguments founded on superior natural influences can be used!
[50] Horst: “Demonomagie,” I.
[51] Colquhoun.
[52] ???a ?a?d?a????? (in Hebrew dudaim) is in the Septuagint a name for the love-apples with which Leah regaled her husband (Gen. xxx. 14). Pliny speaks of the mandragora as a poisonous herb, dangerous to dig; now already Columella knows the mandragora as a half-human being—“semihomo mandragoras.”
[53] Man sagt: wenn ein Erbdieb, dem, wie den Ziguenern das Stehlen angeboren ist, oder dessen Mutter, als sie mit ihm schwanger ging, gestohlen, oder doch gross GelÜsten dazu gehabt—nach Einigen; auch ein Unschuldiger, welcher in der Tortur sich fÜr einen Dieb bekennt—und der ein reiner Junggeselle ist, gehÄnkt wird, und das Wasser lÄsst, oder sein Same auf die Erde fÄllt, so wÄchst an solchem Ort der Alraun.—“Nork: Sitten und GebrÄuche der Deutschen und ihrer NachbarvÖlker.”
[54] So Propertius and Plinius. Virgil (eclog. VIII.) makes a shepherd sing:
Has herbas, atque hÆc Ponto mihi lecta venena,
Ipse dedit Moeris: nascuntur plurima Ponto.
His ego sÆpe lupum fieri, et se condere selvis
Moerim ... vidi.
[55] Melancthon, who firmly believed in the were-wolf, reasoned in the same way.
[56] As late as 1804 a vagabond named MarÉchal was accused by the peasants in Longueville as a sorcerer and were-wolf. At his trial the mysterious were-wolf excursions were resolved into thieving rambles, and MarÉchal was condemned for burglary to the galleys.
[57] During the restauration in 1815, when all the dead rose in their sepulchres, the famous von GÖrres sought to revive the belief in vampirism. He has written about it a work of mighty learning, wherein he discourses profusely of the “vegetative” sources of the body, which he asserts continue their activity after death, and thus enable the soul of the deceased to reoccupy and for a while reoperate its old machinery.
[58] Some of the popular forms of conjuration are in Latin, though corrupted so as to be almost beyond recognition. A couple of restored examples may be given. This is the formula against bloody-flux:
Sanguis mane in venis
Sicut Christus in poenis,
Sanguis mane fixus
Sicut Christus fuit crucifixus.
Against fever:
Deus vos solvet sambuco, panem et sal ego vobis adduco, febrem tertianam et quotidianam accipite vos, qui nolo eam.
Against epilepsy:
Melchior, Balthaser, portans hÆc nomina Caspar,
Solvitur e morbo Domini pietate caduco.
Perpetret et ternas defunctis psallere missas.
Barachun. Barachagim. Destrue. Subalgat.
[59] Compare Virgil, Ecl. VIII:
Terna tibi hÆc primum triplici diversa colore
Licia circumdo....
Necte tribus nodis ternos, Amarylli, colores:
Necte, Amarylli, modo: et Veneris, dic, vincula necto.
[60] Compare same eclogue:
Limus ut hic durescit, et hÆc ut cera liquescit
Uno eodemque igni: sic nostro Daphnis amore.
[61] The Faust-legend, formed during the time of the Reformation, sought at first to employ one of the heroes of the learned magic, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, as its chief character; but a biography of him, published by his pupil, Wierus, having dispelled the fantastical halo enveloping his personality, the creative desire sought a more obscure object which it could transform according to its bizarre imaginations.
