Witchcraft
There is probably no age or country in which there has not existed a belief in the possibility of mortal beings acquiring the use of supernatural powers for the purpose of accomplishing some object of their desire, Good or Evil, 'Positive or Negative'. In this, as in other species of superstition, there will be more or less resemblance in the manifestations. Wherever or whenever they are exemplified; but that peculiar class of examples, which comes under the denomination of witchcraft, admits of certain lines of demarcation, which may be serviceable in keeping the subject distant from others. The proper field of this superstition was among the Christian nations of Europe, those of the north particularly. It is to be found in full maturity about the middle of the 15th Century, and flourished with tolerably equal vigour through Catholicism and Protestanism, till it gradually decayed before the progress of experimental science. In its doctrinal principles it was a mischievous application of the doctrines of Christianity, being held to be a manifestation of the powers of evil operation as antagonists to the authority of the Deity. It was not necessarily used to accomplish evil or negative ends, because many of the accusations of witchcraft relate to acts which as ends are condemned by no known moral code, but which became crimes from the means made use of. The powers of evil and negative directions, employed by human beings had their personal embodiment either in the 'Prince of Darkness' individually, or in certain sublunary agents called, 'Imps and Familiars', the messengers between the contracting parties, who bore in this agency of evil the same position as that occupied by angels in the holy hierarchy. The return given by the human being for the use of the miraculous powers thus obtained was generally his own eternal soul, which according to a superstition entertained by the ignorant in all countries where the immortality of the soul is a standard doctrine, it was held to be in the power of the corporeal possessor to convey in remainder, for value given in wealth, luxury, power, or any other object of ordinary human desire. Besides the bargain in which the parties are supposed to covenant openly with each other, each party was usually presumed to have in view the secondary object of cheating the other. German romance and the days of Balzac, French romance, have dealt largely in the horrors attending these mutual effects of imposition, where the only party is struggling to recover his chances of eternal salvation, the other to abridge the promised rewards, or to shorten the duration of their enjoyment.
It is a further general characteristic of witchcraft, that from the commencement of its history the agent or victim have, in the majority of cases, been females; and that in the later times, when the character of the superstition had degenerated both in the magnitude of the objects accomplished and the rank of the actors, witchcraft came to be considered a power exclusively possessed by old women. It is probable that a propensity to attribute the faculty of divination and the art of perpetrating supernatural mischief to females may have legitimately descended from the Pythia of the more early classical times and the poisoner of the later period of Roman history.
In the superstitions however, of nations that have had no means of acquiring knowledge of Nature, from these sources the Black African, the North American Indian and the Scandinavians, prior to Christianity, the females seem to have always been the prominent agents in the application of supernatural influences.
During its earlier stages, the art of witchcraft was used for greater purposes. Witchcraft or sorcery was a means by which 'Joan of Arc' was charged with having obtained her powers as a warrior. 'The Duchess of Gloucester' was banished to the Isle of Man for sorcery against 'Henry VI'. 'Richard III' made repeated accusations of this offence against 'Jane Shore'. 'Bessie Dunlop', who was tried in 1576, had used her art for no other purpose than the cure of diseases and the performance of other benevolent acts.
By the time that history had descended to Shakespeare's day, it had acquired from the state of opinion on the subject which passed through such adjuncts as enabled the poet, by selecting the grander and more terrific features and adding some element from the current superstitions of his day, to create those hags, " So withered and so wild in their attire, that look not like the inhabitants o' th' earth, and yet are on't".
There are two causes, which account for the similarity often found to exist in the superstitions of different and distant nations.
1. Physical and mental phenomena common to all mankind and to all parts of the globe, producing like effects when brought into the same combinations.
2. A reference to a common origin anterior to the commencement of the superstition, by which the same opinions adopted by families of mankind separated far apart, may be traced by ascent to a common parentage.
A great portion of the witchcraft superstition of Europe may be traced to both the above causes, but at the same time the identity of the phenomena of this mental disease, as exhibited in different nations, is so remarkable, as well as the rapidity with which opinions adopted in one part of the world travelled to others, that it is evident some other causes have contributed to produce the effect. The similarity of the incidents narrated, not only in the books which convey the knowledge of these mysteries, but in the reports of criminal trials and even in the confessions of the wretched victims of the creed, is so remarkable, down to the most minute particulars, as to justify the supposition that a large proportion of witchcraft superstition was propagated by means of books or through the tuition of men of letters and that thus, in that age of imperfect science, literature became for a time the means of propagating and concentrating the influence of one of the most baneful superstitions which has ever visited the human mind.
Cats are animals which hold out many inducements to the imaginative and superstitions. They bring to a certain extent the habits of wild beast into the domestic circle. The contrast between their strength and agility, their gentle and fragile appearance, their tenacity of life, their silent and rapid movements, their mysterious gatherings at night and strange cries, invest their presence with a fascinating mystery. The tombs of Egypt and the history of the Knights Templars show that they have received attention in other quarters; but the very peculiar position which they hold in the councils of the powers of darkness, in connection with the ministrations of witches, shows by its uniformity that the opinions regarding them entertained by the authorities on witchcraft lore were widely adopted by the faithful. In several of the Scottish trials and confessions women are found to have assumed the shape of cats and to have betrayed their pranks by exhibiting when restored to human form the wounds inflicted on them in their bestial capacity.
Both the English and Scottish trials frequently illustrated the power supposed to be possessed by those in league with Satan, of converting their victims into beasts of burden, which they employ to convey them to the scenes of their unhallowed assemblies.
It is a remarkable circumstance that nowhere are the identities between the opinions promulgated in doctrinal works and the practice of witchcraft more fully developed than in the confessions of the witches as produces in official documents. The horrible tortures, which the alarm produced by the supposed existence of a coalition with Satan seems to have prompted men of ordinary humanity to sanction, appear to have generally called from the exhausted victims an assent to whatever narrative was dictated to them and the inquisitors being learned men, acquainted with the best authorities on the subject, would know how to connect the received doctrines of sorcery with whatever train of real circumstances may have been brought home to the victims. Knowing, in fact, the outline of natural events, they would be able to fill up the supernatural details.
The influence on the society of a belief I witchcraft was of the most pernicious kind. It gave an unchecked flow to all the malignant passions, some venting them in accusations, others in attempts to practice the nefarious art. In the year 1515 five hundred people are said to have been executed at Geneva on charges of witchcraft and Remigius, the inquisitor, boasted that he put nine hundred to death in Lorraine. The first person that lifted his voice against these cruelties was Wierus, who wrote in 1568. He and his followers carried on a controversy with Deirio, Bodinus, Scribonius and others, in which it is generally admitted that the defenders of witchcraft were the more successful logicians.
The learned men of Europe generally were believers in witchcraft down to the end of the 17th century. The man Seldon has an apology for the law against witches that shows a lurking belief. He says that if one believes that by turning his hat three times and crying "buzz," he could take away a man's life; "this were a just law made by the state, that whoever should turn his hat and cry 'buzz' with the intention to take away a man's life, shall be put to death." The logic of Mr. Seldon's mind, if untainted by superstition, would surely have shown him that a law waging war with intentions incapable of being fulfilled must be both most useless and mischievous. Sir Thomas Browne and Sir Matthew Hale were believers in witchcraft and attested their belief by being instrumental in convictions for the crime. It was supposed that there were no executions for witchcraft in England subsequent to the year 1682. In Scotland as late as the year 1722, when the local jurisdictions were still hereditary and had not been put into the hands of professional lawyers, the sheriff of Sutherlandshire condemned a witch to death. It is a worthy of remark, as one of the last vestiges of this superstition in educated and professional minds, that in a worked called 'The Institutes of the Law of Scotland,' published in Edinburgh in 1730, by William Forbes, an author deservedly neglected by practical lawyers, after a specific definition of the nature of witchcraft, there is the following passage; "nothing seems plainer to me than there may be and have been witches and that perhaps such are now actually existing; which I intend, God willing, to clear in a larger work concerning the criminal law."
This promised work never made its appearance. Magus Lynius Shadee`.
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