Ge Se ee Xe * * Tae vos ahs i424 18 eile RAE dh c8 48 ya ah wr af 4%! . area! LO £9 2S AAS LS 4F 4 Ge rare 2,059 FP ary rori sReEEESEE SEES age ECRUGEERS : iri C ie RF Spe 4 — Bri_~Ff eo eters Mere , a ; SEE a Sos 2 Saas Sp eset wi nde * Secces eee ¥ ; SNM note Ay f OK aye Dre SE A PP, % MA » i, Ser = tS > Er 44 Boose so ee Sse 05, ae Pas rs ve OD Se es eS et Oe >) Be S HS Se USL PLL AL ee AeA AAA AD AP APers 29096 Dey ‘ ae oe A A A (AKA OE ALAK, OS Uy¢ ere he » eM i Ne * ee ; ~ : ae hoe ‘ ; ; ; SAILS POX : f a : : ee ; , oe. ; S Oets 2! Pig B Bt aoe eae : Fe OS : S ; : oy : oA < Bb oBae OA PSH ew Po Lor 2 SLES 4 4 AAA AA A AA Aa Aw 8 afae fata s Pe ee ee 4 rey care < at Fl Oh Ok w, Oh ‘ =a en 5 i aa Sara ES . - : a amet THE PHILOSOPHY OF Wal dina CeRvAr rh THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT BY IAN FERGUSON AUTHOR OF ‘*MR KELLO” GEORGE G. HARRAP &. CO, LID. LONDON CAECUTIA SYDNEY First published 1924 dy Grorce G. Harrap & Co. Lp. 39-41 Parker Street, Kingsway, London, W.C.2 Printed in Great Britain by The Riverside Press Limited, Edinburgh Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library httos://archive.org/details/philosophyofwitcOOferg PREFACE N the progress of the witch four comprehensive stages are noticeable. She was in the beginning the counsellor and consoler of man, the genius of the domestic arts, the treasury of knowledge, and the inspiration of belief. She was the prophet, priest, and king of paganism, and her territory was the world. In her second stage her children, grown up and envious of her, blessed her no longer, and there sounded the hour of challenge. A wise woman I am, and for that sin To divers ill names men would pen me in. Science had commenced the abduction of her ancient lore, and what had been popular superstition was rapidly becoming pure knowledge. Her decline set wn. She sank from official recognition to the popular adherence of the common people. Her philosophy was welcomed as a defiance of social and religious tyrannies, and even formed its tenets into a political factor of revolution. The third stage is the familiar and terrible period 7 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT of the religious persecutions, when the Middle Ages were obsessed by a sense of the Devil abroad. The oldest antagonism of man—the conflict between the things of earth and of heaven—now found in the witch an actual physical victim, and the long degradation of the spiritual actually gave to those concerned in her oppression a sense of crusade and moral victory. This study of witchcraft in social history goes beyond the boundaries of historical survey. It has seemed to me permissible to accept the witch not merely as an actual personage, but as a symbol of the predominant instinct toward what may be termed ‘a philosophy of comfort,’ against which ethics and pure knowledge have striven and are striving to-day. In her philosophy the witch appealed, whether in medicine, ritual, or literature, to what is recognized as ‘popular’ rather than to the scientific or arduous. This line of least resistance as reproduced in modern life and thought is consequently, I think, of more than casual correlation to our subject, and it is upon this assumption that I have built the fourth and final phase of witchcraft. In conclusion, I need hardly add that this slender survey has no pretensions to be regarded as an 8 PREFACE academic contribution to a profound and inexhaust- ible subject. It is simply the expression of certain views associated with the historical witch, and any- one sufficiently interested to follow in the track of abler and more scholarly minds may find in the Bib- liography signposts to a comprehensive examination of the various aspects so briefly touched upon. My dependence upon both authors and publishers for the valuable use of their publications is so wide that I trust my expression of indebtedness may be served by this general acknowledgment. IAN FERGUSON March 1924 4 - Mad ’ ait he ek, Views ae lama tM ks ; A Ae Se, oe a8 a a, heey a ‘ »* ab ony iA% 4 ¢ BA eet he Seale Se r q fi 7 Ped a ah a wat CONTENTS CHAPTER I. Tue Oricins oF THE WITCH IJ. Earty CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH III. Macic anp MEDICINE IV. FoLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS V. Tue TrRiumPH oF THEOLOGY VI. THe SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL Dis- CIPLINE VII. THe DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES BIBLIOGRAPHY 13 34 52 81 107 140 169 Py; I] THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT Eg HLA LERerl THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH I HE witch comes out of antiquity as ‘one who knows.’ It was to woman that man looked in his earliest infancy; it was on her that he depended to keep his primitive home together while he was out on his ceaseless hunt for food; it was from her that he acquired the first rude domesticities. Accordingly, in this earliest stage of Wall, when the roving tribes lived in groups, the hagetisee, or hag (to use our familiar, discreditable expression), signified the woman of the stockade. Within that partially protected place she would be left to pursue her domestic duties throughout the daytime. She bore children who acknowledged no father, and in her fertility possessed without dis- pute the supremacy of the creative agent. Without fertility death stands at the threshold. Within her protected place the woman would remain while A THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT the men exhausted their bodies and minds in the ageless warfare with nature, and turning her hand and her ingenious mind to the production of food founded the domestic arts. All the world of know- ledge lay before her. For her and her companions in the hot summer or the winter storm there was abundance of time to argue upon ways and means and the greater mysteries that enclosed them and lay behind the black and threatening forests. Time was upon the side of the primeval woman. Before her stretched whole zons of years in which a philosophy of life could be slowly and arduously erected. She was the court of appeal so far as men were concerned. They were glad enough to benefit by her wisdom. They were too tired to argue. In the daytime the women plied their simple domestic round, cleared enclosures for growing food, and taking their children to the dark wood-streams watched the wild animals at play. Out of this life a crude knowledge would be gleaned and be the heritage of another generation. Necessity compelled experiment, and experiment is the threshold of know- ledge. Primitive agriculture developed into a rude accomplishment, providing at the worst a scanty pro- vender when hunting days were bad. ‘This perpetual 14 THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH conflict with nature would drive woman to strange, ingenious resources and delusions. The sickness of children would send her in desperation to the herbs that animals ate. Out of a thousand poignant disasters or whole-hearted fatalities knowledge of antidotes and poisons alike would come. The daily burden of the primitive woman would not cease with the preparation of food or relief of pain or on the falling of darkness. In the group system in which primitive peoples lived the evening would be the hour for gossip. Woman was accordingly the first historian, poet, dramatist, and theologian. About the lonely, wretched place where they crouched lay the silent, mysterious world, so ominous and so alive with baflling forces and malevolent powers. What was the explanation of the fierce and howling gale, the roaring, living current of the river, and the black and lowering mountain? It could be nothing but spirits or demons of confirmed malignity. Or who could explain the warm and generous sun, the plen- ~tiful fruits which it produced, and the frenzy of love in the spring, except by kindly and amicable divinities ? Such elementary problems were the commonplaces among which religion was born. The deep mystery of the world produced its inevitable impression, and 15 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT as man fought the elements for his bare existence the interpretation of nature as a force implacable except by arbitration became the foundation upon which witchcraft was established. IT The second stage in the witch’s progress is of the utmost importance. She emerges out of the dimness of the primitive world as the wise woman who soothes man with her potions or scares him with her tales. But there is as yet nothing about her to explain her survival into epochs of mature civilization. She lacks the essential attribute of immortality. Archeological research has exploded the old belief that civilization was born when the peoples who were later to be called Greeks and Latins crossed the Balkans and the Alps and came into touch with the sea. It is now realized that before the Greeks or Latins be- came powerful a series of brilliant cultures developed in the regions between the South-eastern Mediter- ranean and the Persian Gulf. The afhinities of these cultures are still obscure, but at least they presented certain resemblances. ‘They achieved a high level of material splendour. The men of the Bronze Age were not savages winning a precarious livelihood with inadequate weapons, but gifted and progressive beings 16 THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH with a real mastery over the arts and a considerable knowledge of engineering. Moreover, they were pro- foundly conscious of the mystery of life, and their whole culture was influenced by their speculations upon it. The Bronze Age men resembled the men of the nineteenth century in one capacity: they thought upon biological lines. They conceived the idea of a great Mother-goddess accompanied by a son or husband who died, was mourned, and was restored to life. There could be no more forcible or direct symbolical rendering of the processes of nature, and the scheme was widely and enthusiastically accepted. Its influence is very visible in Egypt, though there it was somewhat overlaid by a cult of the dead and its associated rites. But it was established along the coast of Asia Minor, and from there, in the shape of the Adonis story, passed into the heritage of Greece. Above all, the Mother-goddess ruled in Crete. She dominated the brilliant, versatile Minoan life, and with Minoan trade penetrated to every corner of the Eastern Mediterranean world. When the Greek in- vaders from the North broke up the Cretan Empire and built their kingdoms on its ruins they found the predominant religious conceptions too speculative and too limited artistically to make any appeal to their practical, esthetic minds. Officially, therefore, B 17 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT the old religion was dethroned with the old race. But both race and religion lived on, and even in the days of Athens’ glory the mysterious Demeter of Eleusis maintained her position side by side with the matter-of-fact goddess of the Acropolis. More- over, the old religion, in the days of its decay, gave rise throughout the Greek world to a multitude of simple nature-cults, congenial to the minds of peasants, which underlay and coloured Greek thought throughout the era of its supremacy. These cults, having lost the stimulus of the high spiritual con- ception which created them, threw out the abundance of deities so characteristic of the pagan religion of nature in its historic phase. There were the good spirits of the corn and the grape, the evil spirits of storm or hail; there was Pan himself, a strange, wild creature, fit emblem of a nature-worship that had lost its inner meaning; and, abounding in a land not yet cleared for tillage, there were the manifold local spirits of the forest and the chase. To these may be traced the origins of that Dianic cult which, as will be shown in a later chapter, proved the ruin of the medieval witch. But, whatever their local form, these deities derived in the main from the religions of the Bronze Age, with its ruling Mother- goddess. Behind each cult lay the original worship 18 THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH of life itself, of that principle of fertility which was the source and cause of all being. It followed naturally enough that the ministrations of the cult were performed by a priestess rather than by a priest; and the supremacy in Europe of the witch over the wizard is due to this worship of the god- dess of fertility and to the consequent presidency of a woman at her shrine in the sacred grove. ‘There would be celebrated the seasonal dances at which the worshippers assembled periodically to practise a recognized sexual rite. There was nothing of magic in all this, nothing terrifying or morbid; but there was a potent appeal to simple minds untroubled by the leaven of ideas which was beginning to work in the towns. Moreover—a point which weighed heavily with the Greek mind—the cult was politically satisfactory in that it ensured the maintenance of the race. Of this widespread worship, which was destined to make religious and political history in the later witches’ sabbaths of the days of persecution, the wise woman with all her treasury of magic and traditional lore became the centre. Her supremacy was absolute. Everything associated with her was destined to take its part in the celebration of fertility, and the tools of her domestic craft became part of ceremonies which oo THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT were to cause profound amazement in medieval courts. Since she was skilled in home and field, the broom and distaff and pitchfork were the sacred symbols of the faith, and took their established place in worship. The early supremacy of woman is inseparable from the universality of the witch. She was prophet, priest, and king. In public worship she celebrated the rites ; in the life of the tribe she dictated her policy by means of secret incantations and spells; in the private life of the individual she acted as medical practitioner and priest in one. A further development was the inevitable tamper- ing with spiritualism. Out of her spiritual prestige arose the craving for knowledge of the future. Un- daunted, she practised her spells, worked her charms, and by her profound insight into human nature (with possibly quite a dose of psycho-therapy thrown in) achieved her dubious triumphs. She cured by sug- gestion with the same facility as she killed by dread. But in the age of her supremacy she was a political and religious force not to be despised. She had the childhood of civilization in her hands, and she moulded t with a vision and significance altogether beyond the intellectual ideals or social importance of her liminished successor, the historical witch. 20 THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH III The Greeks dealt with the witch as they dealt with everything else they touched. The figure they found was weird and grotesque; the figure they left was natural and simple; and in the transformation they had added the spell of immutability. Never again did witchcraft lose an intimacy with elemental forces. The Greek genius endures; but time drove the witch out of the sunlight. The first impulse toward the darkness was given, almost unconsciously, by a people who, like the Greeks, have left an abiding mark. The Romans, as history first knows them, were men of the Early Bronze Age, with its appropriate virtues. One fact in particular was stamped upon their consciousness. Their strength lay in their new command over metals, and this command could not be exercised without fire. Moreover, fire, that mysterious force of good and evil, was clearly divine. It was also domestic. It was therefore attached exclusively to women. The fire was kept in the tribe’s central stockade, and men who were wanted for hunting or fighting could not be spared to look after it. That virginity should have been imposed on these women is, without question, a most impressive tribute to the importance 21 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT of fire in the Early Bronze Age economy. The success of the tribe was felt to depend on two things, the right hands of its warriors and the maintenance of its fire, and so nearly were these defences placed on the same level that it was not felt possible to permit the same woman to be concerned with both. She might bear children or she might tend the tribal flame, but one function or the other was enough to command all her energies, Further, since mothers were many, while the keepers of the fire needed to be but few, the selection of these latter was made with the utmost care, and since, when once selected, they had to turn their backs on domestic joys they were compensated by honours such as were given to no other women and to few men. It is a fact of no small bearing in the history of the witch that the people who came to dominate the civilized world paid this exceptional reverence to a group of virgin priestesses of the hearth. As the prestige of Rome waxed the supremacy of the Vestals began to react upon the position of the priestesses of the old nature- worship. They too sought to establish some associ- ation with the most exalted priesthood of them all. It can fairly be advanced that they too sought to occupy themselves with fire, and, as a consequence, developed their nocturnal rites. Under the influence 22 THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH of Rome the flight from the sunlight Meee and in the Vestal’s hearth may be the sympathetic origin of the witch’s cauldron. Wherever Roman feeling penetrated the wise woman developed into a creature of mystery. But it was long before she lost her old kinship with the beneficent nature-deities. The final degradation to a companionship with evil is part of that intellectual revolution which it was the destiny of Rome to en- courage. In the hey-day of Greek thought man was concerned with his duty to his country. In the hey- day of medieval Christianity he was concerned with his duty to his soul. This remarkable abandonment of the material world began with Plato, grew powerful in the first three centuries of our era, and triumphed when the Cesars were replaced by the Popes. Its progress is marked by the growth of a philosophy of demons. The new philosophy was prolific in minor gods. The gradations between good and evil were perceived to be infinite, and each new gradation ap- peared to demand a new supernatural being as its author. ‘The minds of men thus began to be haunted by visions of immense troops of minor divinities, posi- tive or negative reflections of the ultimate God, the angels or demons of later theology. Moreover, as the times grew more and more portentous, and as wars 23 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT and pestilence sapped the strength of Europe, demons were realized to be more numerous or at least more active than angels. The old bucolic nature-deities began to change their characters under the influence of this conception, born of an atmosphere of gather- ing pessimism, of imperfect divinities, and this change laid great and ever-growing emphasis on organized rites of nature-worship. Such was the atmosphere of credulity and gloom which Christianity found. It struggled hard and not unsuccessfully to preserve its own doctrines from contamination, but it could not remain uninfluenced by the prevalent mode of thought. On the contrary, Christianity was inspired by it in the attitude which it adopted toward the faiths it was already resolute to extirpate. The mind of the modern Christian is practically untrammelled by the pagan gods. For him they do not exist at all; they are mere figments of the imagination, It was very different with the Christian of the early Church. For him the pagan gods had a very real existence; only they were not gods, but devils. They were so many aspects of evil, so many presentations of the Adversary. Hence with the progress of Christianity the old gods were driven more and more from the sunlight into the darkness, and their priestesses were transformed 24 THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH more and more completely from wise women into witches. At last the battle was won. The demons were driven from their strongholds, and none did them reverence any more for their ancient qualities. But the victory was too complete. With the lapse of time the Church had developed its function. Instead of preparing for the imminent Last Judgment it had become engaged in an interminable fight against evil. That fight was not ended however utterly the appar- ent enemy had been routed. Driven from the sacred groves, the old gods gave place to the terrible pres- ence of the Prince of Darkness, against whom the real battle must now be joined; and the women who had hitherto been mere servants of devils were now believed to be in unholy compact with Satan himself. The evolution of the witch was complete. IV What, then, were the chief characteristics of the prehistoric wise woman in the days of her earliest challenge? The dividing line between the priestess of the ancient pre-Christian faith and the lesser figure of the medieval witch was created partly by the develop- ment of religious thought, but partly also by political 25 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT and social upheaval. The formation of townships and a more settled habit of life drove the wise woman more and more from the seat of government into the home from which she had first emerged and into the less conspicuous activities of her ancient calling. Her place in the temple was challenged by the priest, who broke down her monopoly of oracles, prophecies, and ritual, and made them his own. She was overcome, but maintained her place by her arts of healing and secret knowledge. Religion is a wide field, but the world is a broader place than the temple. The wise woman pursued a narrower and less innocent path. When science departed from her she developed the more sinister fragments of her lore. No longer allowed to concern herself with political ascendancy or established religion or the official treatment of disease, she followed the line of least resistance as local practitioner and adviser of a profoundly credu- lous and superstitious peasantry. With the limitations of her sphere her functions remained traditional and static, partly ritualistic, partly curative, more and more reactionary and dependent upon the psychology of fear. The familiar instances of her craft underwent little change until the days of persecution. But they touch upon elements not without significance in their 26 THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH bearing upon the witch on trial, and should therefore be mentioned. As a general hypothesis it has been observed that with the universal acceptance of diabolic influences controlling every human contingency the procedure of the witch became closely knit with the supernatural. Faith, whether it be justified or misguided, has always proved the salvation of the charlatan and the despair of the scientist. Her dependence, for example, upon the supernatural in medicine is illustrative. The witch, like her modern imitators, soon appreciated the power of auto-suggestion and self-hypnotism to ac- complish what her rudimentary craft failed to achieve. The means at her disposal were potent enough, and in an age dark with spiritual terrors she brought relief or worked a miracle by the faith in her counter-spells. It is probable that she dulled the patient’s sensibility by drugs and hypnotism. A form of anesthesia has been known since the dawn of medicine. “These properties,” says Dr Park, with reference to sopori- fics, “have especially been ascribed to the juices of the poppy, the deadly nightshade, henbane, the Indian hemp, and the mandragora, which for us now is the true mandrake, whose juice has long been known as possessing soporific influence. Ulysses and his companions succumbed to the influence of Nepenthe ; a] THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT and, nineteen hundred years ago, when crucifixion was a common punishment of malefactors, it was custom- ary to assuage their last hours upon the cross by a draught of vinegar with gall or myrrh, which had real or supposititious narcotic properties.” 1 Belladonna was also among the witch’s prescriptions, and the powdered parts of animals, revolting in char- acter, but not lacking in the essential compounds of the modern patent medicine, were possibly of as much benefit as harm. But her greatest triumphs were achieved by the union of auto-suggestion and charla- tanry. Terror of the witch deepened as her excur- sions into the supernatural increased. She stood by popular acceptance between two worlds, and her re- puted association with both good and evil spirits gave her a monopoly in spiritualism that only the Church could, and speedily did, challenge. Accordingly, when she became the living symbol for more than a dying faith, she provided a practical objective for the organized warfare of Christendom against Satan, a solitary Prince of Evil undreamed of in the old world of innumerable demons. The practice of auto-suggestion was cultivated in a score of ways. In the hands of beneficent witches it dispelled an imaginary sense of diabolic possession by 1 Roswell Park, The Evil Eye Thanatology, 28 THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH the repetition of words or the wearing of charms or the assurance of health. So long as there was faith there was not merely hope, but in minor ailments recovery. The personal power or fascination of the witch is recorded throughout antiquity. Both Greeks and Romans erected statues of Nemesis to protect men from the doom of the evileye. The idea of this power of the spirit or imagination to bring moral and physical ruin upon innocent people has always been firmly implanted in social history, whether in the curse of a witch or the Hymn of Hate of a nation, and may be noted in the avoidance among certain modern scientific religious sects of contact with the atmosphere of conflict or hatred or disease. Indeed, there existed a remarkable belief, recorded by Heliodorus in his Zthiopica, that sickness was transmitted by the evil eye, the more practical explanation of infection being at that time unsuspected. There was also the witch’s good or malign influence by the sense of touch, The belief in the potency of the human hand is a commonplace of profane and sacred literature. Christ said: “Somebody hath touched me ; for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me.” But the use of incantations was perhaps the most effective way of achieving a miracle by perfectly 29 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT legitimate and impressive methods. Incantations served the useful purpose either of producing auto- suggestion for imaginary ills or covering with the haze of magic a practical remedy in the case of actual disability. Mr William W. Story’ remarks: It is interesting to know that no less a person than Marcus Porcius Cato has left us an ancient form of incanta- tion, probably Etruscan, by which he asserts that fractures or dislocations can be healed. ‘‘ Take,” he says, ‘‘a reed of about four or five feet in length, split it in the middle, and let two men hold each end, on a level with their thighs. Let one then sing these words as they move towards each other, ‘AZotas valta darces dardaries asta- taries dissunapiter. At the point where they meet and touch each other, let the reed be cut in halves with a sword held in the left and right hand of each; and if this be bound on to the fracture or dislocation it will be healed. Every day an incantation must be sung in these words, ‘Huat Hanat Huat ista pista sista domiabo damnausta,’ or in these, ‘Huat Haut Haut ista sistar sis ardannuabor Dunnaustra.” Is this an instance of orthopedic surgery or psycho- therapy or simply a shot in the dark? More prob- ably its author, in dim groping after knowledge, was unable to distinguish between superstition and science. Another forbidding but not unnatural belief was in the mysterious exchange of disease, which could apparently be worked by evil influence, and in like 1 Castle St Angelo and the Evil Eye. 30 THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH a a aranETE TEER manner removed by the aid of witchcraft. It will be readily understood how fiercely the terrors of an epi- demic weighed upon people who watched asit were with apathetic submission the blows of infuriated devils. To ignorant minds, untempered by science, sick- ness meant one thing only, and that was the malicious shaft of an enemy by the hand of magic. After the introduction of Christianity disease became the work of Satan. Witches, therefore, waged a profitable war one upon another, and the condition of the patients was aggravated by competing magicians. The prehistoric witch was also an adept at rais- ing the spirits of the dead, which she accomplished in quite our modern way with the assistance of a familiar or medium, or with considerable success alone. But she took a bolder line than our more solemn wizards. There is a classical passage where it 1s clearly stated that if arguments about the separation of soul and body are continued by sceptics a magician will evoke from the lower regions the spirits of the dead so that they are visible to human eyes and will oblige them to speak.’ 1 Story, Castle St Angelo and the Evil Eye. The procedure is indicated in the eleventh book of the Odyssey. The ghosts of the dead are con- ceived as recognizable, but differing from living things in that they are bloodless. Once they are allowed to drink a draught of blood they can hold converse with the living. 31 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT The ancient and not medieval recipe for removing a person who was distasteful by the simple formula of moulding his image in clay and pricking it with pins to the accompaniment of certain words appears to be a policy of despair rather than a triumph of evil until the psychic significance is grasped. On the surface it seems, like so many of the traditions of the witch, a silly and futile act. The act was both silly and futile, but in an age convinced of the diabolic consequences of such ritual the means were sufficient for the end. ‘Take two images,” records Wierus, “one of wax and the other of the dust of a dead man. Put an iron which could cause the death of a man into the hand of one of the figures so that it may pierce the head of the image which represents the person whose death you desire.” The explanation of the efficacy of this magic lies within that mysterious region which unites body and mind. It would be related to the man whose death was contemplated that he was under a witch’s spell. In an age when the Church had not yet produced its own spiritual antitoxins he was oppressed by a sense of his utter incapacity to resist unconquerable forces. A feeling of despair would deprive the miserable man of all interest in life. He would be shunned by his friends, fearful of the evil eye, and his wife would 32 THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH lie sleepless by his side at night. At the first tremor of sickness he would succumb, and be hailed as another witch’s victim. Men may die of imagination So depe may impression be taken. It was against these and other ancient origins of witchcraft that Christianity and science were fated to strive and not prevail. All the world was pagan to the core, and the early followers of Christ could not fling off their deepest convictions like worn-out coats. Instead they baptized the witch in the plaintive hope that she would become whiter than snow. Super- stition henceforth fought superstition, and witchcraft was worshipped both in cathedral and pagan shrine. CHAPTER II EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH I HE wise woman was so much a part of the ancient world that to challenge her would have been to challenge the very foundations of society. Nor is there any reason to suppose that her presence in the social fabric was either resented or denied. She was much nearer the fairy godmother bestowing upon the children of light the abundance of her treasure. She was a tower of refuge in a perilous world ostensibly bullied by malicious and inscrutable forces. By acting under her guidance the demons were appeased, and by adopting her magic potions pangs and penalties were assuaged. If failure rewarded her spells still was she not dis- graced, since’against the malevolence of demons even the greatest magic is fallible. Her companions upon the long road of knowledge were the pioneers of the sciences, pledged to eternal warfare with inaccurate knowledge, but without the foundations of truth to give them any sense of security. 34 EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH The benefactions of the witch were accordingly widely adopted by the elementary schools of thought, and formed the undigested and indigestible meal of the future. But she laid the road, however erratic and reactionary, to accurate knowledge. She halted on the threshold as one who is pledged to imagery rather than reality. Against the sense of wonder would be levelled both the authority of the Church and the contempt of science. She who had given all would be denied everything, even her miserable life. Throughout this survey it will be indicated that where the Church denounced the witch with hatred the struggling schools of medicine treated her with a contempt that was sometimes hardly justified by the instability of their own researches. Against the ancient philosophy of witchcraft the Church struggled to maintain the spiritual values, and in her frantic zeal to put heaven within the hail of man commenced the long subservience of eternal verities. Where other sciences advanced theology alone was static. Be- tween these two forces of things proved and things revealed stood the witch, with her eternal philosophy of delusion and hope. There are in the early relationship of Christianity and witchcraft two important aspects tonote. There 35 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT is the attempt to convert the followers of the old faith (of which the witch was priestess) tothe new. There is, secondly, the evidence—in itself of the first im- portance in any final explanation of witchcraft—of the official recognition of the dying creed out of which the medieval witch descended. The early Church was so familiar with the pagan spirit that it would have been its greatest miracle had it driven it from the temple. What was the situation? In those days, when Christianity was barely more than tolerated and must walk with circumspection through the dark forest of an immemorial paganism, the witch stood at every turn of the path. She was the priestess of ceremonies sufficiently exhilarating for the taste of a rude and temperamental civilization ; she was the intercessor between the powers of dark- ness and humanity; she cured the terrors of the mind by charms and relieved the pangs of the body by spells and medicaments. There isa picturesque and dramatic legend that on the birth of Christianity a voice travel- ling along the shores of the Aigean Sea was heard to cry: “Great Pan is dead.” This poetic idea is hardly justified by history. In the first place, the ancient religion of nature did not collapse at a breath. Swinburne, inflamed with the allurement of poetic extravagance, wrote, 36 EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH Thou hast conquer’d, O pale Galilean; the World has grown grey from thy breath, whereas for ten centuries and more the tardy progress of the Church was marked by the adoption rather than the condemnation of pagan rites, with all their accessory superstitions. It has been observed that woman held a place of divinity in the ancient world. It had become a part of religious worship that woman, not man, should guard the mysteries or guide the destinies of a people. In her stead the Christian Church canonized the Mother of Jesus. The Middle Ages made for themselves a New Re- deemer endowed with all the qualities they needed most, and fashioned with every poetic liberty which the reti- cence of the four evangelists permitted. There grew up practically a Gospel of Mary, with all the details lacking in the four Gospels and acts of Mary to supply all that is not said about her in Acts. She becomes all that she must needs be if the ordinary man is to reconcile himself at all to this exacting Christianity.’ Reconciliation—it was reconciliation upon which the early Church was prepared to sacrifice ALLER EO win the heathen it must perforce give its benediction to the witch. Secondly, the pagan mind was like a twilight in 1 G, G. Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion. 37 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT which all manner of shadows flitted and were lost. The witch had charms against perils by night and perils by day, against sickness and death and curses and demons. How could the Church meet such an armoury of antidotes and spiritual emetics? Not by the Sermon on the Mount. It adopted the obvious course of meeting charm with charm and spell with spell. Where the witch was triumphant the Church was also exalted, and between these two rival camps the humble doctor pursued his more commonplace activities. A patient could choose which he would, for all three practitioners were sympathetic in theory. A single example will illustrate the point. The most prevalent disease in primitive life was probably osteo- arthritis. ‘The witch by the use of oil and warmth dispersed the demons by pagan incantation. The priest next door by the use of oil and warmth dis- persed the Devil by Christian invocations. Between these two the doctor by the use of oil and the advocacy of angels and devils alike had even higher hopes of a speedy convalescence. As sickness was attributed to the presence of evil spirits, the witch expelled them by pagan incantations; the priest with equal enthusiasm routed them with Christian exorcism. Galtona Moroni, in Dizionario Storico Ecclesiastico, says, with admirable gravity: 38 EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH The only efficacious remedies against infestation by spirits are those which the Church adopts, which are: the venerable sign of the Cross—exorcisms—prayer— fasting —charities—the relics of saints—benediction of houses—and sprinkling of blessed water. Also: The Agnus Dei, the rosary, the scapulary, and medals which have been blessed, which are also permitted by the Church, are a potent preservative against the deceits of the devil, illusions, and superstitions. Or, as Herrick has written: Holy water, come and bring, Sacred spittle, bring ye hither ; Meale and it now mix together And a little oil with either. Give the tapers here their light, Ring the saint bells to affright Far from hence the evil sprite. Hypocrisy did not influence these early healers, nor was superstition repellent to the priest or monk. Rather was it the breath of his life. He set his mir- acles of light against the witch’s miracles of darkness, and both were equally spontaneous. ‘The Venerable Bede narrates that the heathen of Britain were im- pressed first and last by a practical demonstration of divine efficiency, and an entire philosophy of mysticism would not make up for the clumsiest sleight of hand. Accordingly Germanus the Bishop, overtaken by a 39 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT ee storm, sprinkled at a propitious moment a little holy water and quelled it, and upon landing gave sight to a blind girl by touching her eyes with the relics of a saint. But it is only fair to record that in another miracle, after the great man had laid his hands upon a patient with a fractured skull and thus established the cure, he instructed the humble practitioner to perform the merely formal ceremonies of his calling. This deliberate determination of Christianity to adopt the ancient formulas of witchcraft is obvious enough in extracts from the prescriptions of physi- cians, of which Dr Payne, in English Medicine in the Anglo-Saxon Times, provides many interesting and illu- minating examples from the Leech Book of Bald. The following is the prescription for “elf disease”: Go on Thursday evening when the sun is set where thou knowest that Helenium stands; then sing the Bene- dicite and Pater Noster and a litany, and stick thy knife into the wort [root]; make it stick fast and go away; go again when day and night divide; at the same time go first to church and cross thyself, and commend thy- self to God. Then go in silence and though anything of an awful nature or a man meet thee, say not any word ere thou come to the wort which thou didst mark the evening before. Then sing the Benedicite and the Pater Noster and a litany; delve up the wort, let the knife stick in it. Go again as quick as thou canst to church and lay it under the altar with the knife. Let it lie till 40 EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH the sun be up, wash it afterwards, and make into a drink with bishopwort and lichen off a crucifix; boil in milk thrice, thrice pour holy water upon it and sing the Pater Noster, the Credo, and the Gloria in Excelsis, and sing upon it a litany, and mark a cross with a sword round it on three sides; and after that let the man drink the wort; soon will it be well within him. The casual insertion of **soon” is admirable in discretion, More sceptical is this: Against bite of snake if a man procures and eats rind which cometh out of Paradise, no venom will damage him. ‘Then said he that wrote this book that the rind was hard to be gotten. The writing of words for the cure of ailments ap- peared very early in medical and religious superstition, and is simply another variety of suggestion borrowed from the witch. For those troubled by chills the following, if trusted implicitly, worked wonders: Against chills at all hours of the day write on a paper and bind with a cord on the neck of the patient in the evening the following, “‘In the name of our Lord, cruci- fied under Pontius Pilate, by the sign of the Cross of Christ. Fevers or quotidian chills, or tertian, or quartan, depart from the servant of God. Seven hundred and fourteen thousands of angels will follow you, Eugenius, Stephanus, Protacius, Sambucius, Dionisius, Chesilius, and Quiriacus.” Write these names, and let the patient carry them upon him. 41 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT ————————— To remove a bone sticking in the throat: Look at the patient and say ‘‘Come up, bone, whether bone or fruit, or whatever else it is; as Jesus Christ raised Lazarus from the tomb, and Jonah out of the whale.” Another charm in which spiritual and physical work together for good is: Take hold of the patient’s larynx and say ‘‘ Blasius the martyr, servant of God, saith ‘ Go up bone, or go down.’” 4 The practical treatment of periodical lunacy or perhaps neurasthenia was sharp enough medicine, but in certain instances probably efficacious : In case a man be month sick [lunatic] take skin of mere-swine [ porpoise] make it intoa whipe. Swinge him therewith ; soon will he be well. Amen.? The natural tendency of a widening Christianity was that knowledge of all kinds should henceforth be confined more and more to Rome. (‘The saints of the Romanists have usurped the place of the zodiacal constellations in their observance of the parts of a man’s body and that for every limb they have a saint.”) The proprietary rights of the pseudo- science of astrology are amusing enough: St Otilia keeps the head instead of Aries; St Blasius is appointed to govern the neck instead of Taurus; 1 JEtius, Tetrabiblon, Book VIII. 2 J. F. Payne, English Medicine in the Anglo-Saxon Times. 42 EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH St Lawrence keepes the backe and shoulders instead of Gemini, Cancer and Leo; St Erasmus rules the belly with the entrayles, in place of Libra and Scorpius; in the stead of Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarias, and Pisces, the holy Church of Rome hath elected St Burgarde, St Rochus, St Quirinus, St John, and many others, which governe the thighs, feet, shinnes and knees. Diseases were allotted to Roman saints with the same confidence as they are handed over to Harley Street specialists to-day. St Erasmus was as competent to deal with cholic as was St Herbert to handle hydrophobia. For the itch the discreet St Martin should be instantly summoned, and very naturally for the jumps the renowned St Vitus. For the wider fields into which medical science might trespass there were sacred wells and sacred relics as there are to-day, and pilgrimages of a hun- dred kinds for every conceivable ailment sent to tor- ment the sinner by an indignant God or a vindictive Devil. Whatever might happen afterward it could for centuries be written of men wise and simple: Old wives and stanes are his counsellors: his night spell is his guard, and charms his physicians. He wears Paracelsian characters for the toothache, and a little hallowed wax is his antidote for all ills. 1 John Melton, Astrologaster. 43 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT II And yet it would be a gross injustice to infer that in the early history of the Church the fatal partner- ship with superstition was not unchallenged. As in medicine, the impulse toward pure knowledge glowed for a time before it was quenched. The Church did for a time recognize the universality of magic with- out announcing a holy war of heaven against earth. Superstition was still superstition and not godly or diabolic, according to authority. Medicine still aimed at curing disease and not at routing Satan by God’s aid and a powder of dried mice. Furthermore, the Church was not without its wit- nesses for truth. ‘There was the Bishop of Noyon, who was no friend to the truce with superstition. He wrote in the seventh century: Before all things I declare and testify to you that you shall observe none of the impious customs of the pagans, neither sorcerers, nor diviners, nor soothsayers, nor en- chanters, nor must you presume for any cause, or for any sickness to consult or enquire of them; for he who com- mits this sin loses unavoidably the grace of baptism. In like manner pay no attention to auguries and sneezings ; and when you are on a journey pay no attention to the singing of certain little birds. But whether you are setting out on a journey, or beginning any other work, cross yourself in the name of Christ, and say the Creed and 4.4 EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH the Lord’s Prayer with faith and devotion, and then the enemy can do you no harm. Let no Christian place lights at the temples, or the stones, or at fountains, or at trees, . . . or at places where three ways meet, or pre- sume to make vows. Let none presume to hang amulets on the neck of man or beast, even though they be made by the clergy and called holy things and contain the words of Scripture; for they are fraught, not with the remedy of Christ, but with the poison of the Devil. Let no one presume to make lustrations, nor to enchant herbs, nor to make flocks pass through a hollow tree, or an aperture in the earth; for by so doing he seems to consecrate them to the Devil. Moreover, as often as any sickness occurs, do not seek enchanters, nor diviners, nor sorcerers, nor soothsayers, to make devilish amulets at fountains or trees or cross- roads; but let him who is sick trust only to the mercy of God, and receive the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ with faith and devotion; and faithfully seek con- secrated oil from the Church, wherewith he may anoint his body in the name of Christ, and according to the apostle, the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up. ? This extract, written roughly a thousand years before the height of the great witch persecutions, presents several points that bear upon future chapters. Apart altogether from the moderation and sound sense of the injunctions, which display an extraordinary 1 The recognized sacred places of the ancient faith which figure in the medieval witch trials, 2 Maitland, The Dark Ages. 45 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT intellectual freedom for the times, it is evident that the Bishop fully appreciated the superstitious practices of the old faith, but is not deluded by the medieval conception of the compact of the witch with Satan. It is clear also that he was fully acquainted with the ceremonial places where the old religion was prac- tised, and it is worth recalling that from such innocent and commonplace information as this the Inquisition established the historical proof and nature of witch- craft. What the princes of the later medieval Church ignored then as now was the impious suggestion that even the holy amulets and rosaries were only super- stition under adoption. Finally, his reference to the anointing with oil is in accordance with the practical teaching of Christ, which at a later period had de- generated into the ceremonial ritual of Holy Unction. St Benedict (480-543) is also representative of the highest tradition of the early Christian missionary. Here was an instance of a man practical in the affairs of this world and born before the crusade against earthly salvation. He founded an infirmary in con- junction with the monasteries, and instructed the abbot in his duty in the words: The care of the sick is to be placed above and before every other duty, as if, indeed, Christ were being directly served in waiting on them. It must be the peculiar care 46 EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH of the Abbot that they suffer from no negligence. The Infirmarian must be thoroughly reliable, known for his piety and diligence and solicitude for his charge. Cleanliness was here, as never afterward until our present age, next to godliness. ‘Let baths be pro- vided,” he wrote, “‘ for the sick as often as they need them.” The treatment of disease was then a special duty of Christians. By the end of the fourth century, as Dr James Walsh in his admirable Medieval Medicine points out, hospitals were, with their different classes of patients, dwellings for physicians and nurses and convalescents, with their workshops and _ industrial schools, more advanced than those existing fourteen hundred years afterward. In church-worship the challenge was equally un- mistakable. A popular misconception due to the deepening clouds of superstition has allotted to the Reformers the dubious honour of building churches stripped of ornament and emptied of music. The Church of Rome with all its astonishing ritual has come in course of time to be regarded as established upon ceremonial, whereas Dr G. G. Coulton in one of his Medieval Studies says: Nothing has more hopelessly undermined extreme ritualism than the historical researches of the most learned +) THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT ritualists, who have discovered that the thirteenth-century altar was bare indeed compared with many which seem quite moderate nowadays; and that (to quote from one of them) “‘Some pious usages (or later ritual) flow from very muddy sources.” The Christian Church in the period before the Reformation had many faults, but they were not ex- travagances of ceremonial. The friars, as Dr Coulton has emphasized, may have erred in many respects, but they did so on the lines of the most extreme Cal- vinists. They cultivated the bleak doctrine of pre- destination; their lives lacked nothing in austerity and the avoidance of worldly cares; but the theory of eternal damnation unrelieved by purgatory is an orig- inal contribution of the Roman not Calvinistic faith. More than that, the pre-Reformation friars held resolutely to simplicity of worship as a counter-attack upon the superstitious institutions that were entirely pagan in origin and intention. The early Catholic Church would have suffered the utmost amazement and wonder at the ritual and doctrines of our en- lightened age. Sentences from contemporary records indicate the purity of thirteenth-century ideals. It was no contemporary Anglo-Catholic who wrote: What fruit do we expect from these things? The admiration of fools or the offerings of the simple? Or 48 EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH since we are mingled among the heathen, perchance we have learned their works and even yet serve their idols. «These beauties and outward elegancies,” wrote a Carthusian of the twelfth century, regarding Church pictures, images, and candles, “quickly enervate the manly purpose and effeminate the masculine mind, It better befits a mind intent on its inward health that all without should be rude and neglected.” *¢Our small churches will preach,” cried St Francis “and men will be more edified by these things than by words.” Such solitary voices in the conflict with the witch should not be forgotten. They make the catastrophe that was coming more tragic in its futility, but they are after all the pioneers who pointed the ultimate pathway of progress. They made the Reformation a historical fact. They achieved more. In their idealism, so soon quenched and obliterated, they were of the divine company of witnesses in the cause of a high moral conception of spiritual values. III Finally this question naturally arises: If the early Church was faced by a definite witch organization whose origin lay in a pagan religion lost in antiquity, D sty THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT what evidence can be produced of a direct line of suc- cession uniting the medieval witch with the primitive and universal faith? In reply it can be held that there is a sufficiency of evidence in England alone that the claims and professions of the historical witch were in all cases identical with pagan practices prohibited by monarchical and ecclesiastical law from the seventh century onward. Miss Murray in an admirable article has summar- ized the edicts of the early period denouncing the illusions of women who state that they fly by night and prohibiting the wearing of skins of animals at the calends of January and forbidding the worship of wells or trees. In the twelfth century John of Salisbury mentions witches’ sabbaths, or assemblies of worshippers of the ancient faith. From the earliest days, therefore, the presence of a faith older than Christianity was recognized and opposed. What was this faith: To the early Chris- tian it was heathenism. To the medieval Churchman it was witchcraft. On the other hand, to the followers of the Dianic cult the supreme master of nature was the equivalent of God. To say, therefore, that the society of witches was a mere figment of the imagina- tion or an invention of the Roman Church 1s utterly 1 Folklore, vol. xxviii, No. 3. 50 EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND THE WITCH contrary to historical evidence. But to regard such an Organization as definitely Antichrist is equally erroneous. Finally, it must be remembered that the witch sect as an organized religious community declined in some countries more rapidly than in others. In England it was moribund before the days of medieval inquisition, whereas in Scotland it exercised very definite activities until the eighteenth century. 51 OPEART TER TEE MAGIC AND MEDICINE I HE contact between witchcraft and medicine was less violent than the rivalry with the Church because it was inspired by the desire for truth rather than by the passion for suppression. The doctor, gleaning what he could from the legendary wisdom of the ages, differed from the witch not in principle so much as in intention. The witch, like the priest, cured to dominate: the doctor cured to exist. With the witch, like her rival the priest, the treatment of disease was only a department of a vast incoherent medley of religious and social rites. To the doctor, though possibly an approved Christian and prepared to recite the names of the Apostles rather than of the gods, the main, and in fact the only, objective was medical. He kept aloof from divine partnerships. But beyond this humble general practitioner there were men who combated the false with that thirst after pure knowledge which has been in all ages such a source of vituperation and violence. In this respect 52 MAGIC AND MEDICINE the history of medicine is a picturesque and impressive instance not of the triumph but of the persistence of superstition in contemporary life. ‘Tradition, being established upon the most cherished habits and customs of the greatest number of people, offers a natural and combative front to innovation. Since knowledge is destitute of pity toward everything that is false or retrogressive, so is it found on the frontier line of civilization. Behind all discovery there is resentment and suspicion. As one sacred thing follows another, the sense of ruthless brigandage has directed against the scientific mind a popular instinct of hostility. It is a peculiarity of human psychology that no news is better than bad, and pleasant news, however dubious, best of all. The El Dorado of the scientist had little enough of the philosophy of dreams. In his zeal for facts he shattered fancies, and threatening at the threshold of history the wide realm of demons finally pronounced the cold austerities of natural law in a physical world. From the commencement medicine was aware of at least two powerful enemies. The Church, pronounc- ing the sickness of the body as the visitation of the Devil, preached more and more the mournful ideals of mortification and victory over death by the humilia- tion of the flesh. In the hands of God, not of men, 53 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT lay the cure of all earthly afflictions, and by prayers and exorcisms were mortal disabilities driven forth. Such an attitude, based as it was upon a profound sense of faith, worked its apparent miracles in cases of hysterical or neurotic disease, while in fatal and organic cases the will of God was made manifest and the gates of heaven reached. Conceive how arduous was the task of scientific medicine when faced by the enmity of the greatest power in Europe, backed up by the instinctive antagonism of the people. But apart from the challenge of witch and priest the scientist in medicine was confronted then as now by the embarrassment of the honest or dishonest protagonist within his own company. ‘There was the charlatan then as now who reaped his easy affluence by the union of magic and medicine. ‘There was also the honest, but no less dubious, attendant upon scientific progress—the advocate of what was popular rather than of what was proved. It is this attitude of the human mind, so sympa- thetic to short cuts to happiness, which provided the early pioneers of medicine with a problem similar to that of the early Christian priests. The charlatan is a charlatan only so far as he pre- scribes rubbish with the knowledge that it is rubbish. 54 MAGIC AND MEDICINE To prescribe rubbish with every belief that it is of value is simply to persuade a patient to utilize the re- serves of his own subconscious curative properties and to carry on the tradition of witch, priest, and popular physician. It is too late in the day to challenge the unknown hinterland of human consciousness. What is vulgarly called charlatanism is a means of real success in medicine, assuming that it is sufficiently skilful to inspire great confidence and to form a circle of faith. In medicine, above all, it is faith which saves. ‘There is scarcely a village which does not possess its male or female compounder of occult medicine, and these people are—almost everywhere and always—incomparably more successful than physicians approved by the faculty. ‘The remedies which they prescribe are often strange or ridicu- lous, but on this account are so much the more effectual, for they exact and realise more faith on the part of patients and operators. An old merchant of our acquaint- ance, a man of eccentric character and exalted religious sentiment, after retiring from business set himself to practise occult medicine, gratuitously and out of Christian charity, in one of the Departments of France. His sole specifics were oil, insufflations and prayers. The institution of a lawsuit against him for the illegal exercise of medicine established in public knowledge that ten thousand cures had been attributed to him in the space of about five years, and that the number of his believers increased in proportions calculated to alarm all the doctors of the district. We saw also at Mans a poor nun who was re- garded as slightly demented, but she healed nevertheless 55 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT all diseases in the surrounding country by means of an elixir and plaster of her own invention. The elixir was taken internally, the plaster was applied outwardly, so that nothing escaped this universal panacea. The plaster never adhered to the skin save at the place where its application was necessary, and it rolled up and fell off by itself—such at least was asserted by the good sister and declared to.be the case by the sufferers. This thaumaturge was also subjected to persecution, for she impoverished the practice of all the doctors round about her; she was cloistered rigidly, but it was soon found necessary to produce her at least once a week, and on the day for her consultations we have seen Sister Jane Frances surrounded by the country folk, who had arrived overnight, awaiting their turn, lying at the convent gate. They had slept upon the ground and tarried only to receive the elixir and plaster of the devoted sister. The remedy being the same in all diseases, it would appear needless for her to be acquainted with the cases of her patients, but she listened to them invariably with great attention and only dispensed her specific after learning the nature of the complaint. There was the magical secret. ‘The direction of the intention imparted its special virtue to the remedy, which was insignificant in itself. The elixir was aromatic brandy mixed with the juice of bitter herbs; the plaster was a compound analogous to theriac as regards colour and smell; it was possibly electuary Burgundy pitch, but whatever the substance, it worked wonders, and the wrath of the rural folk would have been visited on those who questioned the miracles of their nun? 1 Eliphas Levi, Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual. (London: William Rider and Son, Ltd.) 56 MAGIC AND MEDICINE But the conscious charlatan is another matter, be- cause he hates and derides accurate observation. The following remarks of Rhazes throw some light upon the agile medical charlatans of the ninth century : There are so many little arts used by mountebanks and pretenders to physic that an entire treatise, had I mind to write one, would not contain them. Their impudence is equal to their guilt in tormenting persons in their last hours. Some of them profess to cure the falling sickness [epilepsy] by making an issue at the back of the head in form of a cross, and pretending to take something out of the opening which they held all the time in their hands. Others give out that they will draw snakes out of their patients’ noses ; this they seem to do by putting an iron probe up the nostril until the blood comes. ‘Then they draw out an artificial worm, made of liver. Other tricks are to remove white specks from the eye, to draw water from the ear, worms from the teeth, stones from the bladder, or phlegm from various parts of the body, always having concealed the substance in their hands which they pretend to extract. Another performance is to collect the evil humours of the body into one place by rubbing that part with winter cherries until they cause an inflammation. Then they apply some oil to heal the place. Some assure their patients they have swallowed glass. To prove this they tickle the throat with a feather to induce vomiting, when some particles of glass are ejected which were put there by the feather. No wise man ought to trust his life in their hands, nor take any of their medicines, which have proved fatal to many. 1 See Chronicles of Pharmacy, vol. i. 57 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT And yet to those early pioneers of scientific medicine the whole subject must have been bewildering in its chaos and in its possibilities. As Sir Squire Sprigge has remarked in a recent volume: Medicine, as we now understand it, has evolved slowly ; true philosophers have been aided in their work as well as impeded by wizards and astrologers; the lore of mysticism and the researches of herbalists have alike been drawn upon. Fundamental scientific discoveries have enabled us to sift the materials, whatever their sources, from time to time, fitting into a homogeneous scheme what duly belongs there, and rejecting what is seen to be absurd. But followers of the discarded doctrines are not always satisfied by this process; they register their protests, and disciples spring up who cling to the whole of the ancient creed because parts of it have been substantiated by later work, and thus elevated from intuition to deduction. The fact that once certain doctrines stood for scientific medicine is remembered, and permanent faith in them, as an entity, is claimed to have a sound basis. In this situation comprehensive negatives may be from one time to another time necessary, for at the selected time they prevent our knowledge from being choked by its own undergrowth." The whole field was bristling with possibilities which might produce the wildest thories. At one time, in medicine, any fancied sign of resemblance in the drug or in its name to something in the disease or in the disease’s name was thought to be nature’s seal of 1 Physic and Fiction, 58 MAGIC AND MEDICINE its efficacy in that disease, and in country districts nettle- tea (Urtica, nettle) is still the popular remedy ofr nettle- rash (urticaria). The so-called principle that like cures like —similia similibus curantur—which is the foundation of the so-called homceopathic system of medicine, was not the induction of full and careful experience, not a conclusion reached through adequate observation of instances, but a specious theory engendered in the mind of its discoverer by the captivating suggestion of the words. Its faithful application in practice in all cases might issue in results not unlike those which followed the practice of the ingenious person who, obeying the Scriptural injunction to pour oil into his enemy’s wounds, poured oil of vitriol into them.” It was the urgency of the “comprehensive nega- tives” of Sir Squire Sprigge in the face of the pre- vailing habit of magic in the early practice of medicine that drew from Galen words as strict and condemna- tory as those of the Bishop of Noyon. Referring to a writer on herbs he says: 1 The doctrine of signatures was founded on the absurd hypothesis “that every natural substance which possesses any medicinal virtue indicates by an obvious and well-marked external character the disease for which it isa remedy, or the object for which it should be employed.” Mandrake, from its supposed resemblance to the human form, was esteemed as a remedy for sterility ; turmeric as a remedy for jaundice because of its brilliant yellow colour; euphrasia (eyebright) as an application for diseases of the eye, because it has a black spot in its corolla resembling the pupil ; and the bloodstone, because of the occa- sional small specks of a blood-red colour on its green surface, is even at this day used in some parts of Scotland and England to stop a bleeding from the nose, (Paris’s Pharmacologia, p. 33.) 2 Henry Maudsley, M.D., Natural Causes. 59 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT He was given to old wives’ fables, and certain mar- vellous Egyptian quackeries, mixed up with incantations used in gathering medicinal herbs ; he employed periapts [amulets] and juggleries which were not only useless and outside the art of medicine, but perfectly false; and to discuss these things would be waste of time.! Another early writer has expressed the scientific attitude toward magic as follows: Such medicines are to be exploded that consist of words, characters, spells and charms, which can do no good at all but out of a strong conceit as Pomponatius proves; or the Devil’s policy who is the first founder and teacher of them. Galen, that great pioneer of medicine, did not attempt to meet superstition half-way, but cut abso- lutely adrift. It was inevitable that a school of advanced scientific ideals should ultimately fall foul of the Church and the State, but during the brilliant epoch of its youth it established the first principles of medical technique, accurate diagnosis, and academic methods of research. No greater evidence of the extraordinary power of witchcraft can be given than the humiliation of so advanced a science as medicine in the early Middle Ages. To a layman the modern methods of treatment and 1 Galen, De Simplicium Medicamentorum Facultatibus, Book VI. 60 MAGIC AND MEDICINE the wide professional experience of the early medical teachers is startling in comparison with the spiritual and intellectual bondage that is the most prominent feature of medieval life. Discoveries which were not so long ago a source of proper pride to the medical faculty have been recognized as readjustments or modifica- tions of methods of that golden era, and systems of treatment which perished in the Dark Ages have re- appeared like sunlight after storm. That so much was a commonplace between the sixth and thirteenth centuries is not as fully realized as it should be. A few instances will emphasize the point. Alexander of Tralles, the author of Pathology and Therapeutics of Internal Diseases, practised in the sixth century the modern treatment of consumption. He advised milk and sea-air. For nervous complaints he was as careful as a modern Harley Street specialist. Pains in the head he diagnosed as due to worry, indigestion, or insomnia. He was an enthusiast for massage, hot baths, and diet. For sore throat he suggests alumand soda. His philosophy of treatment sounds in this era of spells, persecutions, and hell-fire a note almost fantastic. When all nature and man- kind were declared to be the prey of demons, and when this brief life was best treated with hatred and scorn, he writes quite calmly: 61 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT The duty of the physician is to cool what is hot, to warm what is cold, to dry what is moist, and to moisten what is dry. He should look upon the patient as a besieged city, and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command. The physician should be an inventor, and think out new ways and means by which the cure of the patient’s affection and the relief of his symptoms may be brought about. He was conservative in his preference for leaving Nature to save herself as against the new movement of his day for operations. He had an instinct against methods of treatment likely to cause collapse, and arrived at his diagnosis by an elaborate examination of the symptoms and the organs of the patient. He was perhaps the earliest physician to inquire as a matter of procedure into the history of the case. Rhazes, who lived in the tenth century, was the first physician to diagnose smallpox. He is of interest in this particular, that he did not, like Galen, shrink from the thought of auto-suggestion, at that time under the shadow of the witch. He aimed in the best modern manner at the union of skill and hope. In treating a patient let your first thought be to strengthen his natural vitality. If you strengthen that, you remove ever so many ills without more ado. If you weaken it, however, by the remedies that you use, you always work harm. 62 MAGIC AND MEDICINE The great school of medicine founded at Salerno in the ninth century reached its zenith in the twelfth. When De Renzi produced his history of the Saler- nitan school of medicine he laid, as Dr Walsh points out,! the whole medical profession under a profound debt to him. There are several points of interest which Dr Walsh emphasizes, The term of attend- ance was three years of college work, four years at medicine, a year of practice with a doctor, and an additional year of study in anatomy should the student desire to practise in surgery. If anyone troubles to compare this stringent course with the training of the eighteenth-century physician he will appreciate the obvious cause of the abundant quackery of that age. One of the most valuable and curious documents associated with the medical school of Salerno is the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, a manual of treatment in Latin verse, of which Professor Ordronaux has published a translation. It was not intended to be more than a popular handbook, and enjoyed an enor- mous vogue in the early Middle Ages. It contains nothing revolutionary, but it is so modern in its sanity and in the absence of the exaggerated gloom and apprehension of the medieval religious mind that it is only by a stretch of imagination that one can picture 1 Medieval Medicine, 63 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT The duty of the physician is to cool what is hot, to warm what is cold, to dry what is moist, and to moisten what is dry. He should look upon the patient as a besieged city, and try to rescue him with every means that art and science place at his command. The physician should be an inventor, and think out new ways and means by which the cure of the patient’s affection and the relief of his symptoms may be*brought about. He was conservative in his preference for leaving Nature to save herself as against the new movement of his day for operations. He had an instinct against methods of treatment likely to cause collapse, and arrived at his diagnosis by an elaborate examination of the symptoms and the organs of the patient. He was perhaps the earliest physician to inquire as a matter of procedure into the history of the case. Rhazes, who lived in the tenth century, was the first physician to diagnose smallpox. He is of interest in this particular, that he did not, like Galen, shrink from the thought of auto-suggestion, at that time under the shadow of the witch. He aimed in the best modern manner at the union of skill and hope. In treating a patient let your first thought be to strengthen his natural vitality. If you strengthen that, you remove ever so many ills without more ado. If you weaken it, however, by the remedies that you use, you always work harm. 62 MAGIC AND MEDICINE The great school of medicine founded at Salerno in the ninth century reached its zenith in the twelfth. When De Renzi produced his history of the Saler- nitan school of medicine he laid, as Dr Walsh points out,! the whole medical profession under a profound debt to him. ‘There are several points of interest which Dr Walsh emphasizes, The term of attend- ance was three years of college work, four years at medicine, a year of practice with a doctor, and an additional year of study in anatomy should the student desire to practise in surgery. If anyone troubles to compare this stringent course with the training of the eighteenth-century physician he will appreciate the obvious cause of the abundant quackery of that age. One of the most valuable and curious documents associated with the medical school of Salerno is the Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum, a manual of treatment in Latin verse, of which Professor Ordronaux has published a translation. It was not intended to be more than a popular handbook, and enjoyed an enor- mous vogue in the early Middle Ages. It contains nothing revolutionary, but it is so modern in its sanity and in the absence of the exaggerated gloom and apprehension of the medieval religious mind that it 1s only by a stretch of imagination that one can picture 1 Medieval Medicine, 63 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT an Inquisitor or Calvinist pondering the admirable in- junction which, if followed, might have left the Great Plague out of national catastrophes: Let air you breathe be sunny, clear, and bright, Free from disease or cess-pools’ fetted light. To those with catarrh it is advised: Fast well and watch. Eat hot your daily fare, Work some, and breathe a warm and humid air. Of drink be spare; your breath at time suspend. These things observing you your cold would end. A cold whose ill-effects extend as far As on the chest is known as a catarrh; Bronchitis, if into the throat it flows ; Coryza, if it reach alone the nose. II The decline in scientific medicine has been attri- buted to so many social and political factors that it would be fruitless to advance the belief that in an age given over to warfare upon this present world the doctor was not likely to receive more encourage- ment than the magician. And yet in a period when the surgeon was forbidden to practise and therefore became extinct, when the witch could cure only by Satan and was therefore burned, there was little enough bounty for the scientific doctor. And it can- not be ignored that in 1527 Paracelsus, Professor of 64 MAGIC AND MEDICINE Medicine, cast the works of Galen on the fire and swore his knowledge was all drawn from witchcraft. But upon one point there can be no sustained argument. In the days of the witch in travail magic, instead of being routed, was more firmly entrenched than ever in the social and religious life. The cere- monies of the Church were as steeped in superstition as the festivals of the Dianic cult; the edicts of astrology controlled the affairs of monarchs and serving-men; the sleepless search for the philosopher’s stone engaged the greatest intellects of the age; spiritualism and necromancy lent an academic flavour to witchcraft then as now; surgery, divorced by law from any practical knowledge of anatomy, was mori- bund, and medicine had come down to the apothecary in the town and the witch in the woods. Romeo says: I do remember an apothecary, And hereabouts he dwells, which late I noted In tatter’d weeds, with overwhelming brows, Culling of simples ; meagre were his looks, Sharp misery had worn him to the bones: And in his needy shop a tortoise hung, An alligator stuff'd, and other skins Of ill-shaped fishes ; and about his shelves A beggarly account of empty boxes, Green earthen pots, bladders, and musty seeds, Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses, Were thinly scatter’d to make up a show. THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT It is a dismal enough picture, and yet the memory of the great days of medicine was not altogether obliterated. It lingered at the back of memory, Anesthesia disappeared during the Middle Ages, and was rediscovered in the nineteenth century. It is worthy of note that Tom Middleton in Women Beware Women writes: I’]l imitate the pities of old surgeons To this lost limb, who, ere they show their art, Cast one asleep, then cut the diseased part. To return to the decay of medicine, Culpeper, in a passage which is as quaint now as it was once, no doubt, satisfactory, solemnly declares the greatest antipathy to be between Mars and Venus: One is hot, the other cold; one diurnal, the other nocturnal; one dry, the other moist; their houses are opposite; one masculine, the other feminine; one public, the other private; one is valiant, the other effeminate ; one loves the light, the other hates it; one loves the field, the other the sheets; then the throat is under Venus, the quinsie lies in the throat (it being under Taurus, her sign). Mars eradicates all diseases in the throat by his herbs (of which wormwood is one), and sends them to A‘gypt on an errand, never to return more; this by antipathy. The eyes are under the luminaries; the right eye of a man, and the left eye of a woman, the sun claims dominion over; the left eye of a man, and the right eye of a woman, are the privileges 66 MAGIC AND MEDICINE of the moon; wormwood, an herb of Mars, cures both ; what belongs to the sun by sympathy, because he is exalted in his house, but what belongs to the moon by antipathy, because he hath his falls in hers.? From the title-page of his treatise some indication may be gathered of the intellectual quality of the medical profession : The English Physician Enlarged. With three hundred sixty and nine medicines, made of English Herbs that were not in any impression until this. Being an Astrologo- Physical Discourse of the Vulgar Herbs of this Nation, containing a complete method of Physick; whereby a man may preserve his body in health, or cure himself, being sick, for three pence charge. By Nich. Culpeper, Gent. Student in Physick and Astrology. 1653. The method by which Nich. Culpeper, Gent., derived his evidently exhaustive knowledge of the properties of herbs may be indicated by his notes upon “ The Bay-tree. Its Government and Virtues”: That it is a Tree of the Sun and under the celestial sign Leo and resisteth Witchcraft very potently, as also all the evils old Saturn can do to the Body of Man, and they are not a few, for it is the speech of one, and I am mistaken if it was not Mizaldus, ‘‘ That neither Witch nor Devil, Thunder nor Lightning, will hurt a man in the place where a Bay-tree is.” 1 Culpeper, The English Physician, 7 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT Seventeenth-century medicine flung a wide net for secret remedies. Noage of witchcraft among primeval man or modern savage ever ventured so far. Their next business is, from herbs, minerals, gums, oils, shells, salts, juices, sea-weed, excrements, barks of trees, serpents, toads, frogs, spiders, dead men’s flesh and bones, birds, beasts, and fishes, to form a composition for smell and taste the most abominable, nauseous, and detestable they can possibly conceive.! The idea so evident in all superstitious medicine— that strange parts of animals hold magical properties —is simply an inheritance from the witch, and is traceable to the primitive faith of savages that if | they eat the heart of a lion their bravery will be established. But at no other time in the whole history of medicine did the use of animals in pharmacy become so degraded or absurd. Even the witch in her decline could hardly hope to emulate the grave use of ‘cocks’ combs, cygnets, ants’ eggs, earthenware, frog’s spawn, hairs from silkworms, jaws of pikes, perspiration, saliva, in- ternals of hens, spiders’? webs, woodlice and a host of others.” Against this generous range may be placed the following fifteen articles, which cover the zoology of the British Pharmacopeeia of 1898: 1 Swift, 4 Voyage to the Houyhnhnms. 68 MAGIC AND MEDICINE ‘<‘Cantharides, cod-liver oil, cochineal, honey, lard, leeches, musk, ox-bile, pepsin, spermaceti, mutton suet, sugar of milk, thyroid gland, wax, wood-fat.” ! The eighteenth century was hardly less credulous. The efficacy of the moss on the human skull? of a murderer received the serious attention of the pro- fession, while faith in powdered Egyptian mummies existed until the dawn of the nineteenth century. Bechler, in Parnassus Medicinalis, records: Powdered human bone, in red wine, will cure dysen- tery. The marrow and oil distilled from bone is good for rheumatism. Prepared human skull is a sure cure for the falling sickness [epilepsy]. Moss grown on a skull is a hemostatic, The trade in mummies was largely in the hands of the Jews, who, with a very proper professional pride and not wishing either to impede science or to lose a profitable calling, upon finding mummies increas- ingly scarce, established a special factory where, by a process similar to the faking of antique furniture, contemporaries “ belonged to the ages.” Pepys mentions the habit of cutting pigeons in 1 A.C. Wootton, Chronicles of Pharmacy, vol, ii. 2 The charges brought against the witch for disinterring bodies or being found in the vicinity of executed criminals have this reasonable explanation, and the magical trust in a dead man’s hand during burglary certainly existed until comparatively recently. 69 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT half while alive and applying their bodies to the feet. Schroder swears by the gall of a black puppy for epilepsy. Ambroise Paré congratulates himself upon the recipe of a doctor in Turin for the cure of gun- shot wounds; this was composed of young whelps boiled with earthworms, turpentine, and oil of lilies. Snails made a useful cough mixture when soaked in sugar; woodlice bruised and soaked in Rhine wine made the Vinum Millepedarum given for dropsy and jaundice. For diabetes the cure called fora stout heart: “A dead mouse, dried and powdered, to be taken each morning for three consecutive days.” Good Queen Anne knighted an oculist who in his magnum opus records that it is beneficial to put a louse in a dull eye, because it “tickleth and pricketh so that it maketh the eye moist and rheumatick and quickeneth the spirits.” III If this comment upon the collapse of scientific “medicine explains anything, it is, as perhaps many superior persons do not sufficiently realize, the confirmed suspicion among unlettered countryfolk until our own generation of a profession not always so sincere or so efficient as it is to-day. It also JO MAGIC AND MEDICINE makes the position of the latter-day village witch rather more reasonable, since until our own period her homely remedies were frequently beneficial and rarely actually dangerous. Hers was a little knowledge, but being as old as time was averse to dramatic innovations. Secondly, in her com- pany the rustic could speak at his ease and know where he stood. ‘Thirdly, if his instinct prompted him, he felt no scruples in seeking the counsel of some rival whose advice might better suit his wishes. This attitude of open-mindedness toward the claims of both magic and medicine was inseparable from the horizon of the peasantry, and is by no means extinct to-day. It is illustrated in the following reminiscence : As I come in, he puts down a thumbed copy of Cul- peper’s Herbal, which was his father’s, and which he still reads with vague notions of profit, although he does not know a tithe of the herbs by sight, and never gathered simples under sun or moon. He sometimes tells me there’s a deal more in those old books than you’d think for. ‘‘ Doctors” (here bubbles up the latent distrust and hostility to the regular practitioner, which goes together with absolute dependence upon that hard-working gentle- man in hour of need: a sentiment running back perhaps to times of witchcraft and home medicine of the pro mirifico kind, a rebellion against hard and fast rules and the stern categories of -osis and -itis), ‘‘ doctors, they don’t seem to reckon much on ’em; but it might be 71 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT better for some on us if we used them herbs more. Father, he was wonderful fond of them; he’d go out of a night to gather ’em under the Planets. Once” (and here comes the inevitable triumphant instance) “he was bad with the ’sipelas in the face; and the book said as how mash-maller was the thing to cure it; and he hadn’t got no mash-maller, so he took and put on the tea-leaves out of the pot, two or three times; and that took it clean away. And them gipsy-women, he declares, they be won’erful clever, sometimes. ‘There was one came to the door sellin’ skewers a year or two ago, and she told his wife to take dandelion tea; and that took the slug off her liver as quick as quick.” ? IV But the most dramatic feature in the growth and decline of medical science in the Middle Ages is the rapid rise and fall of surgery, which after a brief dawn of brilliant promise almost completely dis- appeared, while medicine struggled on through the twilight of magic, to emerge out of a morass of necromancies in the nineteenth century. Excom- municated by the Church, suppressed by the State, and ignored by popular opinion, the eclipse of surgery was so complete that its scientific possibilities before the days of its extinction can be judged only by a brief outline of its progress before the fourteenth century. 1 John Halsham, Idlehurst (Smith, Elder), 72 MAGIC AND MEDICINE The surgeon of that and any period must be judged by the character of his technique in the light of his knowledge. It might well be asked how surgery was possible at all in view of obvious problems in tech- nique. ‘Two points of surgical routine, for example, would appear to rule out the major operation from all medieval practice. How was septic poisoning avoided and exhaustion through pain prevented? The surgeon of the early Middle Ages was ex- tremely particular regarding cleanliness of hands and mouth, and for a disinfectant used wine and oil in preference to dressings. Professor Allbutt has written : They washed the wound with wine, scrupulously re- moving every foreign particle; then they brought the edges together, not allowing wine nor anything else to remain within—dry adhesive surfaces were their desire. Nature, they said, produced the means of union in a viscous exudation—or natural balm, as it was afterwards called by Paracelsus, Paré, and Wurtz. In older wounds they did their best to obtain union by cleansing, desicca- tion, and refreshing of the edges. Upon the outer surface they laid only lint steeped in wine. Powder they regarded as too desiccating, for powder shuts in decomposing matters; wine, after washing, purifying, and drying the raw surfaces, evaporates.! 1 The Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery down to the Sixteenth Century. 73 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT It is not possible to give statistics of the mortality of cases, but when cleanliness was so obviously a part of fu the surgeon’s routine, and a disinfectant of a use- lif primitive kind was used, it is open to question whether the chances of death were not more certain in the London Hospital a generation or so ago. Sir Frederick Treves, who was nothing if not frank, wrote of is the old receiving-room : Treatment was very rough, The surgeon was rough. He had inherited that attitude from the days when opera- tions were carried through without anesthetics, and when he had need to be rough, strong and quick, as well as very indifferent to pain. Pain was with him a thing that had to be. It was a regrettable feature of disease. It had to be submitted to. At the present day pain is a thing that has not to be. It has to be relieved and not merely en- dured. . . . There was no object in being clean. Indeed, cleanliness was out of place. It was considered to be finicking and affected. An executioner might as well manicure his nails before chopping off a head. ‘The surgeon operated in a slaughter-house-suggesting frock- coat of black cloth. It was stiff with the blood and filth of years. The more sodden it was, the more forcibly did it bear evidence to the surgeon’s prowess. I, of course, commenced my surgical career in such a coat, of which I was quite proud. There was one sponge to a ward. With this putrid article and a basin of once-clear water all the wounds in the ward were washed in turn twice a day. By this ritual any chance that a patient had of recovery was eliminated. I remember a whole ward MAGIC AND MEDICINE being decimated by hospital gangrene. . . . People often say how wonderful it was that surgical patients lived in these days. As a matter of fact, they did not live, or at least only a few of them.' The rules for the medieval surgeon in operative pro- cedure were as excellent as they were simple: “To bring together separated parts, to separate those that have become abnormally united, and to extirpate what is superfluous.” Regarding the second point—namely, collapse— there is no doubt that anesthesia, one of the genuine heritages of witchcraft, was used with good results. Chauliac, the most distinguished of the French sur- geons of the Middle Ages, states that anesthesia was produced by inhalation. Some surgeons prescribe medicaments, such as opium, the juice of the morel, hyoscyamus, mandrake, ivy, hem- lock, lettuce, which send the patient to sleep so that the incision may not be felt. A new sponge is soaked by them in the juice of these and left to dry in the sun; when they have need of it they put this sponge into warm water, and then hold it under the nostrils of the patient until he goes to sleep. Then they perform the operation. Before leaving this question it is a melancholy fact to be noted that with the science of surgery, destined, 1 The Elephant Man, 75 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT one might have expected, to relieve the coming genera- tions of a burden of suffering and disability, anesthesia disappeared beneath the onslaughts of superstition, and even the blessed boon of chloroform, discovered last century, excited the bitter antagonism of sectionsof the Christian Church. The hostility of the times was so united as to be overwhelming. During the European War facial surgery was widely recognized as a new triumph of technique. But it should be remembered that six hundred years earlier operations for the res- toration of the nose were performed by the Brancas, and the union of torn lips and ears effected success- fully. To restore the nose flesh was taken from the upper arm. The Brancas were fortunate enough to live in a period before the Roman Church decided (as one might toss up a coin) that surgery was a repre- hensible business and must cease. Their successor in plastic surgery, Tagliacozzi, was denounced and persecuted. The tide of religious superstition was indeed running high. As Dr Walsh remarks: “As late as 1788 the Paris faculty interdicted face-repairing altogether.” Nerve-surgery was practised by Lanfranc in Paris in the thirteenth century, and his successor, Monde- ville, has written with great foresight and wisdom: ‘It is impossible that a surgeon should be expert who 76 MAGIC AND MEDICINE does not know not only the principles, but everything worth while knowing about medicine, just as it is impossible for a man to be a good physician who is entirely ignorant of the art of surgery.” The excommunication of surgery aroused no popular outcry. Of all ages the medieval was one of acqui- escence. Pope Innocent III in 1215 prohibited any operation in which blood was shed, and at the close of the thirteenth century surgery was formally separated from medicine, and immediately declined in consequence. ‘The edict was absolutely final. For some time elementary surgical knowledge was handed on by priests to the barbers who shaved them, and who thus became the authorized bleeders. Under Henry VIII it was enacted that ‘No person using any shaving or barbary in London shall occult any surgery, letting of blood, or other matter except only drawing of teeth.” In 1540 the United Company of Barbers and Surgeons was permitted yearly the bodies of four executed persons for dissection! So profound was the respect in the sixteenth century for the study of anatomy. Can one be surprised that as surgery vanished medicine ceased to be acquainted with the formation or functions of the human body and placed its faith in such flights of optimism as the cure of 77 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT obscure disorders by the powder of disinterred mummies? Henceforth medicine was tolerated only so long as it conformed to theological edicts regarding the supernatural origin of disease. The shadow of pre- destination robbed life and death of any spirit of hope or curiosity. It relegated accurate knowledge to the kingdom of delusion and ultimate damnation. Vv It is unfortunate that the struggle between official Christendom and the forces that represented in their widely antagonistic ideals the spirit of revolt—the per- secution of witch, heretic, and scientist together—has been obscured in Protestant history by the warmth of religious prejudice. Nothing has proved more con- genial and convincing than to condemn the Church of Rome out of the records of her persecutions; it has been the privilege of every corner orator since the Reformation. The Roman Church was not a remote tyranny holding men’s eager souls in bondage. The Church was the State and the State was the nation. It pre- sented the passionate beliefs of the vast majority of both intellectual and simple Christians. It did not 78 MAGIC AND MEDICINE act alone or against popular opinion in burning witch, heretic, and scientist. It simply expressed the doctrine it held according to the universal faith of the age. The spirit of suppression was universal, and in perse- cution the Reformerwas as enthusiastic as the Catholic, The sense of the enormity of pain was supported neither by spiritual nor popular credence. Even in the enlightened Victorian age the ancient conflict against the relief of natural and authorized suffering was more than smouldering. It is therefore beating the air to explain away the Middle Ages as the dark era of hypocrisy, malice, and a kind of epidemic of spiritual lunacy. It was admittedly an age of darkness, but of a darkness that was logical, not simply unfortunate. The shadow that enveloped the whole life and thought of Europe was the science of theology—that im- mense and formidable structure that conceived fresh ingenuities of hell-fire at the birth of the Reforma- tion. The ideal of the individualist was to break out of the forest of superstition and discover the new world. The ideal of the Christian Church was equally passionate. It was to defeat this fresh revelation of Satan in his new evangel of the glory of the earth. The Church nourished no malice or jealousy against the physician as an individual. It simply 79 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT excommunicated him should he assume that the ailments of the body were natural and not super- natural, The Church had every admiration for the astronomer, but when he persisted in his heresy that the world rotated or the sun had spots the in- fallibility of divine revelation was threatened; and what was one man’s body where a million souls might be imperilled ? } The primary cause that drove the scientist into exile was not the Inquisition, but the philosophy of life which made the Inquisition its approved and historical instrument. Freedom of thought 1s a perilous enough doctrine, and met with little enough sympathy in medieval times. It was held, not without sound reason, that the ordinary man is a better follower than leader, and that the spiritual is a higher ideal than the material. What was arrayed against this grim and formidable power in Christendom? ‘There was the eternal instinct of mankind for the things of this present world, which was the bedrock of the philosophy of witchcraft. 80 GEAP GER LY FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS I OWEVER much the scientist might trim his sails to meet the onslaught of the Papal gale, the historic witch was utterly doomed. Her time of security had passed away by the fourteenth century, leaving her the hapless rival of the Christian faith. To appreciate the fullness of her condemnation one must compare the philosophy of witchcraft with the theology of Rome. These two show at their most extreme points the pagan love of the world and the Christian adoration of heaven, or the sense of material as against spiritual values. The differences between them had, with the accumulation of one theological dogma upon another, grown beyond reconciliation. Then as now the function of morality in civilization cannot justify two masters, and the Christian faith was destined sooner or later to challenge the witch, since the sense of values preached by Christ never aimed at an easy or pleasurable life. Compare, F SI THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT therefore, the fundamental truths of Christian teach- ing with the philosophy of the witch. If it is any- thing, Christianity is a medium for correspondence between this world and heaven, and there is no authority whatever, Scriptural or philosophical, for believing the way is either broad or smiling. It has become a modern. phase of thought to interpret the Christian method as one of smooth and cordial virtues, whereas the supreme significance of Christianity in its relationship with the ancient world was revealed in the last scene at Calvary. The victory of death and the triumph of suffering were not, as the Jews imagined, a sordid termination to an eccentric dream, They were rather the dramatic confirmation of a pro- found and historic truth. The shadow of the Cross, erected in all its hideous barbarism against the falling sunlight of an Eastern sky, went down in darkness, to rise over the whole world of men. The Cross stood henceforth like the corner-stone upon which a vast building ultimately depends, and it was the stark vision of the Crucifixion that haunted the coming centuries. ‘The symbol of death was the path of life. The Cross was erected in the churches and cathedrals; it met the wayfarer upon the solitary road; it hung by the bedside of the devout, and came to be a kind of passport to spiritual preservation in the hands ot 82 FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS the dying. No symbolism of the immense, perpetual presence of death has ever in other historic faiths worked so profound an influence. Other teachers have not been ignorant of the ethics of Jesus Christ. The fundamental principles were in general accepted and even practised before His day. In the growth of the early Church pagan ritual and the spiritual environment of the old world were grafted upon the new revelation, and still maintain their strange, in- congruous partnership. But, distinct from Egyptian philosophy, with its submission to the inevitability of death, from the Greek passion for the life that is, from Buddhism, with its tepid refuge now and hereafter, and from the Roman’s agnostic stoicism, Christianity proclaimed a message that in its pale radiance was like a new moon rising over a tired world. The words of Christ were destined to build up a science of theology as unwieldy as it was portentous. The attitude of Jesus to the temptations of the world sounded like a clarion note to mortification, asceticism, and seclusion. It developed into the weariness of religious orders and the gloom of death in life. It cast the shadow of a perpetual uneasiness over the most trivial actions of thoughtless men. “He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” 83 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT If anything was obscure in the words of the Master it was not his attitude toward eternity. He en- couraged no happy death-bed conversion as a door to eternal bliss.) He never ceased to reiterate that the spiritual was won by the spiritual and the material by the material. Eternal life might be a man’s birth- right—it was not necessarily his destiny. In the first years after His crucifixion this martyred life and impending coming overwhelmed all else in the teaching of Christ. It became in time strength- ened and established as centuries passed and the sun rose, as it were, in perpetuity from year to year. The early Christians died in the ecstasy of a fresh exultant sacrifice that was keener than the happiness of earthly joys. ‘They passed, and still the Lord of the Dawn tarried. In the vigil of many years the impatient anticipation of the Day of Judgment faltered, and in its place there rose a Church which aimed at per- manence where its Creator had promised the last day of all, and strove for supremacy where its Founder had preached that the least of these are the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. But at its roots were smouldering a definite theology of hell-fire and a violence against the things of this world which at the end of the Middle Ages blazed into a fanaticism and persecution almost beyond the comprehension of 84 FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS the modern mind. The conception of Satan, the terror of damnation, predestined or otherwise, be- trayed a whole continent to panic and desolation. That out of the simplicity, the austerity, and the wide horizon of the teaching of Christ a Church should emerge and continue to emerge in varying degrees of bitter, dogmatic, and irrational bigotry must ever be an amazing and saddening reflection. It proclaimed with authority and reason eternal warfare between earth and heaven. Within the shadow of such an austere concep- tion theology established a god of ferocity and unslumbering vengeance. Instead of illimitable know- ledge it preached unending tribulation; instead of the mystery of spiritual perfection it described eternal misery; until there remained of Christian ethics nothing beyond the enormity of this earthly life, the purchase through Holy Church of the next, and behind them both, like a concealed voice on a tragic stage, the blazing wrath of an Almighty God. In face of that deluded spiritual conception the followers of the witch were the pioneers of the gospel of humanity. And yet the future darkened gradually. It has been observed that the early Church did not per- ceive in the old religion the enormities that produced 85 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT the sinister presence of a medieval Satan. It has been shown that both monk and doctor were eager enough to adopt the primitive arts of healing practised by the wise woman, and that many pagan rites were grafted on to the ceremonials of Christian worship, and are there to-day. The tide was ebbing fast. To take a step farther, it is a remarkable fact that on the eve of this historical notoriety of the witch she was fallen into decrepitude and insignificance, She had been routed not by intention, but by pro- gress. Her decline was as natural and as timely as the fall of the leaf. As a witch she was a relic of the past. As a pawn in social and political affairs she had lost importance. Time and the township had set the old worship definitely in retreat. Medicine had challenged the magic of the witch. The Church carried the lamp of knowledge throughout the darkness of Europe. In truth, in that bright period of her establishment as the pilgrim of civiliza- tion, culture, and the purity of Christian ethics the hope of the world lay within her grasp. She was healer, spiritual comforter, and teacher. Where the doctor could not come the monk sat by the bedside of the peasant; where a stranger would have been slain the priest passed unhurt. Wherever the Cross was raised a curative centre was founded. 86 FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS The Church cried to the kings, Give, and gold was poured into her exchequers; she condemned a man who had defied her, and he had no longer a place among mankind; she pro- claimed a Truce of God, and the swords of robber knights were sheathed; she preached a crusade, and Europe was hurled into Asia. She lowered the pride of the haughty, and she exalted the heart ot the poor; she softened the rage of the mighty, she consoled the despair of the op- pressed. She fed the hungry, and she clothed the naked ; she took children to her arms and signed them with the Cross; she administered the sacraments to dying lips, and laid the cold body in the peaceful grave. Her first word was to welcome, and her last word to forgive. Inthe Dark Ages the European States were almost entirely severed from one another; it was the Roman Church alone which gave them one sentiment in common, and which united them within her fold. In those days of violence and confusion, in those days of desolation and despair, when a stranger was a thing which, like a leper or a madman, anyone might kill, when every gentleman was a highway robber, when the only kind of lawsuit was a duel, hundreds of men dressed in gowns of coarse dark stuff, with cords round their waists and bare feet, travelled with impunity from castle to castle, preaching a doctrine of peace and good will, holding up an emblem of humility and sorrow, receiving confessions, pronouncing penance or absolutions, soothing the agonies of a wounded conscience, awakening terror in the hardened mind. Parish churches were built : the baron and his vassals chanted together the Kyrie Eleison, and bowed their heads together when the bell sounded and the Host was raised. Here and there in the 87 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT sombre forest a band of those holy men encamped, and cut down the trees and erected a building which was not only a house of prayer, but also a kind of model farm. The mons worked in the fields, and had their carpenter’s and their blacksmith’s shops. They copied out books in a fair J.and; they painted Madonnas for their chapel ; they com- posed music for their choir; they illuminated missals; they studied Arabic and Greek; they read Cicero and Virgil ; they preserved the Roman Law. Bright, indeed, yet scanty are these gleams. In the long night of the Dark Ages we look upon the earth, and only the convent and the castle appear to be alive. Inthe convent the sound of honourable labour mingles with the sound of prayer and praise. Inthe castle sits the baron with his children on his lap, and his wife leaning on his shoulder: the troubadour sings, and the page and demoiselle exchange a glance of love. The castle is the home of music and chivalry and family affection. The convent is the home of religion and of art. But the people cower in their wooden huts, half starved, half frozen, and wolves sniff at them through the chinks in the walls. The convent prays, and the castle sings : the cottage hungers, and groans, and dies. Such is the dark night : here and there a star in the heaven: here and there a torch upon the earth: all else is cloud and bitter wind. Here was the fatal philosophy of the witch. It was in the cottages that, with her secret arts and potions and her universal knowledge of good and evil, she was welcome as feudal oppression deepened. The Church seemed very far removed from the quaint 1 Winwood Reade, Te Martyrdom of Man, The italics are mine. 88 FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS terrors and old beliefs of the peasantry, who accepted what they could from Christ, but clung with pathetic insistence to the solace and freedom of a worship that during the misery of their serfdom was to provide at any rate the dregs of happiness. The material pros- perity of the Church did not render its authority less heavy or its doctrines less terrible. The discipline of Rome, like that of the Scots Kirk in later years, accompanied a man from his cradle to his grave. It did more; for whereas the baron was compelled to relinquish his serf at death the Church pursued him into purgatory. He must attend Mass or be fined ; he must pay for his sins, for his poor strip of land, for his wages, for the wool on his sheep’s back, and for the wayside grass; he must pay for a respite of spiritual torment, and bequeath his meagre goods to Holy Church on his death-bed. Life was dreary enough, but death no longer promised oblivion. What was the natural inclination of a peasantry steeped in immemorial superstition and driven to despair? Surely it was to turn with a desperate anticipation toward the natural excesses that still lingered in the traditional festivals of the old religion of nature. There is abundant evidence to prove that Christianity had barely touched the fringe of pagan- ism. Even at the end of the twelfth century the 89 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT Bishop of Exeter discloses his knowledge of the prevalence of witchcraft in words that clearly in- dicate the existence of the ancient Dianic cult in England. He condemns whosoever, ensnared by the Devil’s wiles, may believe and profess that they ride with countless multitudes of others in the train of her whom the foolishly vulgar call Herodias or Diana, and that they obey her behests. Whosoever has prepared a table with three knives for the service of the fairies, that they may predestinate good to such as are born in the house.! Diana and the fairies! Between the two the witch had much to explain if she were to satisfy the courts of heaven. II The tragedy lay in the fact that after nine centuries of devoted labour the Church had failed to win the peasantry for Christ; already her energy was spent and her power was greater than her charity. Benedictus Levita wrote of that period: When the populace come to Church it shall only do there what belongs to the service of God. In very truth these dances and capers, these disgraceful lewd songs, + Superstitions condemned in the Pcenitential of Bartholomew Iscanus, Bishop of Exeter (1161-86). See A Medieval Garner, by G. G. Coulton, go FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS must not be performed either in the churchyards or the houses of God, nor in any other place, because they remain from the custom of the heathen. The change of mind from the ninth century to the fifteenth is very remarkable. What the Church called with very natural reluctance “the custom of the heathen which was a description true enough— it hailed with an outburst of startled horror within five hundred years of concentrated theology as “a compact with the devil”? The truth is that the dis- covery of Satan was inevitable. The whole trend of doctrine had made his presence essential and spon- taneous. To deny his existence after such exhaustive investigations as those upon which the whole intellect of Europe was engaged would have been to doubt the universe or to deny the supernatural. The more these learned persons wrangled about the pains and penalties of hell-fire, the greater grew the movement of the miserable serf toward the witch. He stood in peril of losing both earth and heaven, and he snatched in his despair at a pre- carious present rather than at a portentous future. He crouched under the spiritual shadow of the monastery and the physical shadow of the castle. They were all the message Christianity extended to him. He had no freedom, no pride, and no hope. gl THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT He was born into a slavery from which there was no escape. His life and his poor possessions were at the mercy of bishop or lord. His daughters, if they were comely, were dragged to the castle before his eyes. He lived, without expectation, where there was nothing but perpetual servitude and dishonour for him and his. ‘Even in the seventeenth century,” records Michelet, “the great ladies died with laughing when the Duke of Lorraine told them how, in peaceful villages, his people went about harrying and torturing the women.” Centuries before there was no solace except in the philosophy of the witch. Had the Church challenged the iniquities of those barbarous days, had it set its benediction upon the light of learning that was struggling out of the East, the Reformation would never have taken place, the Renaissance would have been hastened by a thousand years, the witch would not have perished with the scientist nor the man of letters with the bewildered peasant. And so the serf clung to his old faith where all was darkness,and becauseof his wretched plight he became secretive and haunted by a sense of his own audacity. Ancient customs took new life, and were gradually transformed. What had been natural and unaffected was become desperate and sinister. The philosophy of g2 FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS witchcraft approached happiness by stealth. The serf became banded with his fellow-slaves into a sect apart from monastery or castle. If these were Christian he would cling to the witch and the old ceremonies, which the Church had begun to denounce as the worship of Satan. This invention of one devil where there had hitherto been a multitude was like a two-edged sword. It sank so deep into the national consciousness that it obsessed a vast number who were learning to look upon the figure of Christ with horror and hatred. When the monastery and the castle were silent under the moon the dark forms of the serfs crept under the trees to the appointed place. There they declaimed their wrongs and defied their oppressors, and after a night of organized riot returned in the pale dawn to their eternal drudgery. iil Within the homes of such miserable people the philosophy of witchcraft developed. Behind closed doors and round a dancing fire old, wonderful tales were retold, old songs were sung, and a refuge found in the land of make-believe, that country of dreams that never come true. ‘To-day fragments profoundly beautiful in their simplicity and grandeur are collected as things more precious than gold, and reveal a 93 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT common gift of tongues which perished under the blight of religious condemnation, Inseparably linked with the witch was her foster-sister the fairy. The witch was a physical fact and the fairy an imagina- tive consolation, but both ministered to the eternal spirit of wonder. Across the sky the dark clouds sweep, And all is dark and drear above ; The bare trees toss their arms and weep. Rest on, and do not wake, dear Love. Since glad dreams haunt your slumbers deep Why should you scatter them in vain? Dreams all too brief, Dreams without grief, Once they are broken, come not again.! In this sense and it was a very real and tragic sense to those in bondage—the yearning of the human heart for an escape from reality discovered in magic a refuge from the world. There is, therefore, in this aspect of the poetic in paganism something very beautiful and haunting. It was the conception of the witch as the last priestess of nature that inspired Michelet to canonize her in La Sorciere. She was of the common people, and it is the voice of the common people that he hears behind the roar of leaping flames. * Rosa Newmarch, Hore Amoris (Elkin Mathews), quoted by the courtesy of the author and publisher. 04 FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS But it was her sister the fairy who played the more innocent part. In these enterprising days, when it is thought necessary to photograph fairies as an evidence of their reality, it is not an easy thing to estimate the part they played in the imaginative background of all pastoral peoples. Whatever their actual origin—and possibly they are a lingering memory of the prehistoric dwarf folk who were driven underground by advanc- ing tribes—fairies are present in the storehouses of nearly all primitive races. It is conceivable that from practical slavery the original dwarfs became long after their extinction the symbols of spontaneous industry and also the pixies of irresponsible mischief. Their mysterious existence underground would linger in the idea of fairy mounds; their servitude would become the housewife’s dream of the little people who work in the night; and their natural spite toward their strong oppressors would be exercised in petty degra- dations. However that may be, the idea of the fairy is a practical reaction against the ceaseless tedium of getting up and a protest against the confined monotony of the day’s work. In their company poverty, sick- ness, oppression were accepted because of the glamour of that kingdom of Faerie which none could take away. When the little people were driven into exile the candle of the peasantry flickered and went out. 95 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT Because the fairies meant to the poor the things that dreams bring—the life that means more than daily toil—they were like a spiritual document against an age of misery. It has been observed how after the hard day all simple folk tell or compose wonder- ful and incredible stories; and the more intolerable their lives the more finely the evening tale is dressed. The hovel becomes a palace; Cinderella goes to the ball; rubbish turns to gold; and the castle that they must bow their heads before until sunset becomes just “a big rough cave with water oozing over the edges of the stones, and through the clay; and the lady, and the lord, and the child, weazened, poverty- bitten craturs—nothing but skin and bone, and the rich dresses were all rags.” This passionate longing for transformation is the basis of the ancient fairy tale. The desire to get away from a life that was unbearable produced the ideal of the fairy who performed the drudgery to give respite and carried the magical ointment which, rubbed on the eyes, presented a new heaven and a new earth. Of such vain hopes and actual forbidden assemblies the cottage whis- pered, while all Christendom was given up to the evil of mortal life and the immensity of death. The story-teller could not expect much sympathy. 96 FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS A contemporary writer, dealing with the cause of witchcraft, mentions old wives’ fables, who sit talking and chattering of many false old stories of witches and fairies and Robin Goodfellow, and walking spirits and the dead walking again; all of which lying fancies people are more natur- ally inclined to listen after than to the Scriptures. The fairy died, but she died hard. She retained to the last the delicate sense of beauty elusive and tender, while the witch was driven to evil and hatred. Chaucer compliments with a nice irony the monks on their expulsion: In old time of the King Artour, Of which that Bretons speken great honour, All was this land fulfilled of faerie ; The Elf queen, with her joly company, Danced full oft in many a grene mead. This was the old opinion, as 1 rede— I speake of many hundred years ago, But now can no man see no elves mo. For now the great charity and prayers Of limitours,! and other holy freres, That searchen every land and every stream, As thick as motes in the sunne-beam, Blessing halls, chambers, kitchenes, and boures, Cities and burghes, castles high and towers, Thropes and barnes, sheep-pens and dairies, This maketh that there ben no fairies. 1 Friars limited to beg within a certain district. G 97 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT needed all the goodness he had, love put softening in his heart, and he carried her down to the sea and let her swim away to her own kith and kin, where she ought to be. And she spent that night, it is said, on a reef near the shore singing like a daft mavis, and this is one of her croons—indeed, all the seals are good at the songs, and though they are really of the race of Iochlann, it is the Gaelic they like best.} IV It would, however, be inaccurate to represent even the poetic philosophy of witchcraft as innocuous until it was driven to retaliation. Old desperate customs were there with old songs, and the tide was running toward despair, and out of despair arose the harsh tongue of revolution. Michelet? is of the opinion that the serfs were in the habit of meeting the witch or whoever presided at the sabbaths without any more definite motive than the desire for romance until the Peasants’ War of 1364. Henceforth the fire of rebellion smouldered. It was given definite inspiration in the hoarse chant- ing of Nous sommes hommes commes ils sont! Tout aussi grand cceur nous avons ! Tout autant souffrir nous pouvons. 1 Marjory Kennedy Fraser, Songs of the Hebrides. 2 La Sorciere. 100 FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS Here was the faint cry which was to end with the Marseillaise. It was the soul of the common people, who followed Jeanne d’Arc because she was to them the incarnate goddess of the ancient faith. By the fifteenth century the forces arrayed against this philosophy of life were grown to immeasurable heights of fanaticism and gloom. Professor Mac- kinnon remarks: It was the age of obscurantism in things of the mind, the age of visions and miracles of saints, of the fighting bishop and abbot who could wield a sword, but could hardly read the alphabet, of lazy monks who lived on the fat of the land in ignorance and vice, of quibbling pedants in the schools who wasted their ingenuity on the discus- sion of such a mighty question as how many angels could stand on the point of a needle, of crusading hordes who mistook a holy war to recover the sepulchre of Christ and secure shiploads of relics of the true cross and other holy rubbish for the real warfare of loving one’s neighbour and attaining to the higher Christian morality. It had indeed its great conceptions, its soaring aspirations, as its mighty temples of stone show ; its feelings for humanity, its sense of duty, as the better aspects of Christian chivalry remind us; its fits of real devotion, as the self-sacrifice of a St Francis in the service of the miserable testifies. But the greatness of its Gothic architecture exhausted its intellectual greatness, and its Knights Templars and ‘ts Franciscans at their best were not the exponents of the spirit of the age. It was in general an age of un- enlightenment. The modern spirit of liberty of thought IOI THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT and conscience could not have breathed freely, if at all, in that murky atmosphere of priestlyintolerance, crass super- stition, puerile pedantry. For those who rose above that murky atmosphereinto the ethereal currentof spiritual free- dom the world was a veritable purgatory, a worldof torture and misery, a world of sorrow, barrenness, and death. What men thought of that world of theirs we learn from Dante, and Dante sends pope and priest to the deepest inferno to expiate_their misdeeds. Much that we count great, much that we hold dear, pope and priest degraded and blasted. “The world was a desert. Its beauties, its charms, were snares. Between science according to the school of Salerno and mysticism according to the witch there existed little enough sympathy or understanding. To the Church they were simply two arms of Satan. The briefest consideration of the principal doctrines of the Church, then stronger than any state or monarch, will indicate how irreconcilable were the ideals of this world with the edicts of heaven. It has been remarked how soon the Cross took a supreme place on the horizon of Christian life and thought, with the resultant reaction against normal life. And with the sense of sin in this world there grew up in consequence the doctrine of hell-fire in the next. The ancients knew nothing of Satan or of eternal punishment. They feared death only as all 1 A History of Modern Liberty, vol. ii. 102 FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS mortal flesh shrinks from annihilation. But with Satan at every man’s elbow, alluring the weak from the path of obedience, life became a perpetual warfare in a sense that was unparalleled in religious history. Fresh edicts of the Church rang out one after another like the sombre notes of mournful bells. From the cradle to the grave man was held hand and foot by the priest. All life was now seething with sin. The perpetual wrath of an almighty God slowly created by centuries of theological conferences fascinated and occupied every man of intellect. Were a painter ambitious to win fame his art was best directed toward pictures of pallid saints and lurid illustrations of Doom, Judgment, “the path of Salvation,” and scenes from hell, with the triumph of Satan over infants in perdition. To these the medieval preacher could point with appalling emphasis as witnesses of the final plight of indifferent church-goers. The carvers worked the same mourn- ful designs; the masons chipped gargoyles as hideous as nightmares. Beyond the citadel of the Church there was social and spiritual desolation. Life and death lay by one door only. Were any final proof of spiritual terror- ism required the doctrine of the eternal damnation of unbaptized infants was beyond misconstruction, for if the helpless infant perished how poor a chance had 103 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT sinful men and women! Bellarmine, the most noted of Roman Catholic controversialists, writes, with a kind of awful acquiescence: “We must hold, by the Catholic faith, that infants dying unbaptized are absolutely condemned, and shall for ever lack not only heavenly but even natural happiness.” Let it be added in common fairness, however, that it was left for a Protestant, in Jonathan Edwards, to express their absolutely hopeless state of agony in terms beyond our modern comprehension. From childhood onward the feet of the believer were sorely beset by snares. A doctrineof peculiar ferocity, eagerly developed by the Protestants, created the monstrous belief that out of the hosts of men some were of the Elect and the vast majority were already damned by hereditary guilt. Well did a thirteenth- century heretic cry in the face of his accusers: “If J could lay hold on that God who, out of a thousand human beings whom he hath made, saves a single one and damns all the rest, then I would tear and rend him with tooth and nail as a traitor.” Such wild words were as spray on the wind. What concerned the Church was the preservation of its autocracy, in which, beneath all the corruption of the period, was the faith for which it would have perished, the faith for which in the hey-day of the Reformers 104. FOLK-LORE—THE REFUGE OF DREAMS its priests were ready to die. The sacred duty of the Church pointed in one direction only, and that was toward the absolute downfall of heresy and witchcraft. These kindred foes of Christendom must be uprooted together, or none could say what might befall; and it must be allowed that the Middle Ages were hardly ready for raw speculative thought. Nor, to be just, must it be supposed from the vantage-point of an- other age that the Church with a colossal arrogance slammed the door of intellectual inquiry and truth in the face of a rebellious populace. It was notso. The Church, acting with absolute reason according to its lights, perceived in heresy and witchcraft not simply Satan in arms, but a revolution or degradation of thought quite alien to the spirit of the times. Religion was in those days the only important part of life. Devotion to the Church and what she represented as the Will of God was a patriotic creed. The heretic, therefore, not merely attacked the faith—he became an outlaw and an enemy of the social order. The witch, plying her ancient trade, was no better, and was reputed to be a good deal worse. Both were universally regarded by priests, judges, princes, and burghers as anarchists and traitors. The Church and the State were one. They stood together for the protection of society. 105 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT Nor must one be persuaded by vague memories of the Inquisition in fiction that on the Roman Catholic side stood fiendish torture and on the side of heresy sublime courage. The only profitable purpose in the study of human error is the realization that human conscience is the tragic slave of environment. The majority of the heretical sects such as the Albi- genses, Dolcinists, and Flagellants had no more sense of inspiration than a Hyde Park orator, and a consider- able amount of bestiality as well. The Inquisition was established to recall such apostles of vague conceptions to Holy Church. It demanded repent- ance. Nothing else could stand between its victims and the rack. For that reason the witch fared less harshly with the Inquisitor than with the civil court, where confession of guilt was extracted by torture. The medieval point of view being so completely contradictory to the modern, the trumpet-call of the Church to demolish heresies and sorceries met with an astonishing enthusiasm. It is well enough to-day to picture under the cloud of fanaticism the persecuted figures of learning, poetry, science, and freedom of action. However noble their inspira- tion and however tragic their fate, the arts and sciences stood by common consent as the enemies of established and venerated things. 106 CHAE PERG, THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY I T was not until the twelfth century that the | witch, already falling into decline, was abruptly | shaken from the conventional surroundings of her | ancient calling and solemnly exposed as the secret servitor of the Prince of Darkness. The conse- quences of such a denunciation are without parallel in human history, and are still a source of bewilder- ment to-day. The witch passed immediately from the social to the historical stage. Whatever had passed | hitherto for ancient survivals or innocent amusement | or secret knowledge was henceforth Satanic. Faced | by this problem, the modern mind seeks in hysteria, Catholic intrigue, or actual existence of occult power for the solution of one of the greatest mysteries in human history. ‘To present-day thought the witch was either a crazy, misused old woman, or she actually exploited those dark secrets of the supernatural which are so terrible that they simply will not bear examina- tion! Where, then, did truth begin and fantasy end? 107 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT The simplest course to adopt in an examination of the witch persecutions is to grasp and sympathize with, in the light of the medieval mind, the proven guilt of the witch. It is only a step once the hypotheses are understood to appreciate the secondary factor— namely, the gradual belief of the witch herself in the powers which she was proved to possess and for which, to clinch the matter, she was destroyed. The transformation of ancient pagan rites into theo- logical anathema was of slow but inevitable growth, and cannot have been ultimately anything of a surprise to a social order assured by centuries of accumulative reiterance that the world was the playground of the Devil, that sickness and plague were manifestations of his malevolence, and that all human emotions out- side the celebrations of Holy Church were wiles and snares of Satan, whose servants must consequently be hunted down for the salvation of Christendom. Furthermore, the dread of witchcraft gaining ground with extraordinary rapidity proved of far-reaching political importance by acting as a check upon the dangerous speculations that were already threatening the intellectual placidities of Europe. Heresy and witchcraft were naturally enough inseparable in the warfare with the enemy of Christendom. The wholesale massacre of the Albigenses did not 108 Ceo er THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY serve to steady, but only to disturb still further, the perplexities of many. The dim stirring of the intel- lect was evident in the speculative fields of astrology, a subject with heretical boundaries and for which Galileo was todie. ‘Threatened by such ominous signs of revolt, in which the faithful saw the onslaught of Satan, the Church preached with ever - deepening menace the sin of all traffic with idle pleasures and wicked speculations. Distracted, allured, and terrified at once by the sensational infamy of the witch, men looked for Satan everywhere, and Satan duly appeared. Enjoying definite physical presence, his existence was at once beyond denial. Moreover, he was the Prince of Pleasure, the spirit of reaction against conformity. The very contrast between the droning monotony of the cathedral and the reputed ecstasies of a witches’ sabbath made men ponder in secret and imagine in- credible escapes from life. ‘They were both exhilar- ated and tortured by such thoughts, knowing them to be the wages of sin. More than that, a profound and psychological change was revolutionizing the witch and her followers. The peasantry, learning on the authority of their spiritual masters that the customs of their forefathers were a dangerous con- spiracy against the powers of throne and altar, were not reluctant to defy the Christian faith, which gave 109 THF PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT them nothing but servitude and low wages, and take their chance with this new Prince of Darkness, who was admittedly a hater of priests and a lover of license. In the fourteenth century a culminating wave of terror swept Europe in the Black Death. It is esti- mated that a fourth part of the whole population perished from this mysterious and horrible affliction. The victory of Satan was surely near at hand. With extraordinary lack of foresight it was proclaimed from every pulpit in Europe. Frantic with fear and lost to any further hope of divine assistance or mercy, their God actually defeated, great numbers for the first time began to see in the Devil the king of the earth. In the Black Death whole congregations perished, and the diminished company of priests, en- riched beyond measure by the wealth that had been poured on their altars for the gift of immortal life, were sunk either in apathy or utter despair. The Reformation dawned; and whatever its eventual destiny it was as firmly established upon the rock of infallibility and the abomination of heresy. ‘There was no safe refuge now for philosopher or scientist, doctor or man of letters. Flying from the Inquisition, the unhappy Servetus, the eminent forerunner of Harvey in his theory of the circulation of the blood, 110 THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY was trapped by Calvin and burnt. Toward such pioneers the only difference in point of view be- tween Romanists and Reformers was that, whereas the former linked Protestantism with heresy, the latter united the witch with the Catholic. Both were allied against freedom of thought, and both had a contempt for the kind of toleration that is now at once our national pride and embarrassment. ‘* Whoever shall now contend that it is unjust to put heretics and blasphemers to death,” wrote Calvin, in his amiable way, “will, knowingly and willingly, incur their very guilt. This is not laid down on human authority ; it is God that speaks and preaches a perpetual rule for His Church.” In this fashion witchcraft became a philosophy, with a literature of its own. In an age when all intellec- tual speculation was restricted to theology and when, outside doctrinal argument, all subjects were suspect, the study of the witch became a new science, with schools of research from Rome to Paris and Paris to Aberdeen. Evidence was gathered and collated from every country in Christendom. The faster it was cata- logued and approved the faster it poured in. It was universal, and therefore supernatural. What other explanation could account for a ritual independent of language, locality, and human propaganda? The III THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT Reformer of Scotland was agreed with the Inquisitor of Spain upon at least one point: the existence of the Satanic cult was not local but universal, and was proved to the hilt by evidences of the same rites, the same ceremonies, the same confessions, whether they were collected in Scots dialect or in the patois of the Pyrenees. The point was incontrovertible so far as it went. The witch organization resembled freemasonry, with common bonds and customs be- yond race or language, and given the hypothesis that Satan was a grim and vital reality, and not a mystical term for naturalism, there was suflicient evidence to depopulate the serfdom of a continent. With the two supreme religious bodies in Europe united in the condemnation of all the witch repre- sented, the Papal Bull of Innocent VIII, in which all the evil pretensions of the witch were laboriously set forth, made a definite step in 1485 toward systematic suppression. The Inquisition, a highly skilled body founded to bring heretics (not witches proper) to repentance, very speedily accustomed its courts to the expert knowledge and examination of both. Sprenger, an Inquisitor of considerable energy and no sense of scepticism, conducted what might be called a publicity campaign in order that the epidemic of magic might receive an adequate antitoxin. He 112 THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY wrote an immense book, Malleus Maleficarium (“The Witches’ Hammer”), in which all the signs and varieties of witches are carefully explained and the proper methods of diagnosis gravely enumerated. From this, the greatest standard work ever based upon a misinterpretation, it was practically impos- sible for the accused, guilty or innocent, to escape. Sprenger’s conclusions led him to the interesting belief that the real menace of witchcraft was due to the wretched frailty of women, and therefore the war- lock or head of the assemblage hardly suffered at all. He was the first to raise a remote and non-Christian survival of the Dianic cult into Antichrist. He made it his business to turn what was chaotic into what was concrete, and revealed a startling enough state of affairs. The Inquisition, not composed, as so many earnest Protestants imagine, of a masked band of persons selected for their inhuman ferocity, but the most brilliant legal council of the day, was ordered to convict the witch upon the evidence afforded. With such a fatal court moving hither and thither, and confronted everywhere by the same evidence of Satanic worship, the Church reaped an ever greater harvest of witchcraft and heresy. What, then, provided the evidence that satisfied the conscience, not simply of priests and ministers, but of H 113 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT laymen with no grudge against helpless women, some of them tottering with years, and children of thirteen and upward? The answer is twofold. The belief in witchcraft as a penal offence was ordained by the Christian faith, Catholic or Reformed. Therefore the witch existed, and accordingly must be destroyed. Secondly, the ac- knowledged ritual-of the witches could be explained on no more reasonable grounds than the worship of the Devil, since the Devil was very prevalent and who else could the witches worship ? The first standpoint supplies the second. But how was it that the witch had been tolerated so long? For centuries, whether as wise woman, doctor, priest- ess, or incarnate fairy, she had been recognized or discouraged or simply ignored by Christianity. The explanation is that in the early centuries she was too strong to be crushed, but in the beginning of the Middle Ages she was utterly helpless. Her doom was consequently assured when Satan became for a period the greatest protagonist in religious history. She was his counterpart on earth, and her release came only when human credulity lost touch with the crude realities of heaven and hell. Let the first point be considered. Upon what authority was the witch condemned as an individual? 114 THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY ——— Her death-warrant was in Holy Writ. Now unless a man thirsted for the stake he could not deny the Holy Scriptures, and the historic witch perished upon a text. The smoke of countless fires rose in a cloud over Europe (and never so fiercely as in Scotland) because Moses, in his desire to secure political prestige for the authentic prophets of Israel, discountenanced all amateur soothsayers and magicians a words: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus xxii, 18). These eight words, plucked from their civilization and their political significance, became henceforth little better than a death-warrant in the pocket of every Inquisitor, Reformer, civil judge, or venomous busybody. ‘They were, at a time when the Bible was a locked book, written in an unknown tongue, containing the prohibitions of a most choleric and unreasonable God, the soul of brevity and the breath of authority. They were irrefutable where none dared to argue, and to be accused was to be condemned. All that was required were the proofs of the practice of witchcraft. The text from Exodus is therefore like a corner-stone in the whole structure of witch trials, and it is not without a tragic humour that its accurate meaning was not even fairly comprehended. It has been remarked in an earlier chapter that the 115 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT witch of paganism could not have been dethroned without the entire dismemberment of the old reli- gion. She was its evil, but also its good genius; its magician, but also its priestess; its poisoner, but also its healer. Witches there had always been. They were an accepted part of human nature. The presence of the witch might have become upon occasion a cause of embarrassment— it could hardly have been one of serious concern. She held no anti- religious creed, and was never declared the foe of any established faith, There is no evidence whatever to prove that the premedieval witch plotted against Christianity until she was hunted to death. It should for that reason be obvious that the circumstances of the command of Moses were peculiar. The Hebrews were inclined to consult witches regarding the future, according to the acknowledged purpose of magic. Nor was there any criminal action in prophecy, since the Hebrews had their own approved prophets. The crime lay in patronizing unauthorized sorcery, and thus denying the established oracles. The witch was the unqualified prophet of those early days, and was therefore beyond the professional pale. But there was no idea of spiritual warfare. There was no talk of Satan, for the simple reason that Satan was still a spiritual abstraction and not a physical 116 THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY presence. Nor was the guilt of Saul in seeking knowledge of the future or in consulting a diviner. It lay in seeking prophecy from an improper source. Had the activities of witches been more reprehensible, or witchcraft more heinous, it is to be presumed that the references to them in the Bible would have been more numerous. Even St Paul, no lenient man, does not refer to the practice except with a casual and cursory comment. The familiar narrative of Saul (1 Samuel xxviii, 6) is as follows: ‘¢ And when Saul enquired of the Lord, the Lord answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets. «Then said Saul unto his servants, Seek me a woman that hath a familiar spirit, that I may go to her, and enquire of her.” And finally the consequences are clear enough: “‘So Saul died for his transgression . . . against the word of the Lord, which he kept not” (1 Chr. bee Il The second point—namely, given the express authority of the Almighty to hunt down witches, wherein lay the evidence of their pact with Satan? —is to be resolved by a study of the trials in the 117 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT —_— light of certain hypotheses. In simple words, given a genuine belief in Satan, did the evidence sustain the charge? The investigation of these documents—which have seemed to the superior person so utterly contemptible, to the resolute sceptic a flagrant instance of ecclesi- astical conspiracy, and to the norma] humble person a mental aberration—should therefore be directed from the vantage-point of the pre-Christian pagan faith. There can be little question that the witch cult was in direct succession to the most primitive of all faiths—the worship of Janus. With him was Diana, the leader of the witches. As Miss Murray has pointed out: As Janus Quadrifrons he presided over cross-roads. It must surely be more than a coincidence that the Italian two-faced god of fertility should be the patron of cross- roads, and that the two-faced god of the witches should preside over fertility rites which were celebrated at cross- roads.? In the ancient religion innocent festivals with or without sexual rites were, and are still, a part of the life of pastoral peoples. The organization for cele- brations to the goddess of fertility is, for example, more or less rooted in every tribal system. The 1 Folklore, vol. xxviii, No. 3. 118 THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY evidence that burned the witch was therefore both comprehensive and consecutive. It presented, with- out the least suggestion of error to a continent crazy with the idea of the Satanic presence, the fundamental machinery of a secret society in the governing officials, the meeting-places, the dancing and licentious be- haviour, the accredited vows, spells, and magic of the witch. It is beyond challenge that the witch organization, or Dianic cult,! had certain established rites common to every district where it survived. These forms of ritual were simply survivals of the old pagan worship. The ancient faith, being a religion of fertility, de- manded an incarnate god or goddess who ultimately suffered sacrifice? at one of the sabbaths, a name in no way connected with Christianity. The sabbaths were held four times in the year. They were closely concerned with the periods of fertility in stock animals, and consequently, as in many primitive tribes to-day, both the wearing of skins and acts of sexual immorality were part of the actual ritual of the witches’ meetings. ‘The presence of an official leader at the 1 See in this connexion Miss Murray’s invaluable study, The Witch Cult in Western Europe. 2 There is some reason to believe that the legend of Lady Godiva, certainly not a historical account of the saving of Coventry, is a survival of the Druidical festivals in which the incarnate goddess was led to sacrifice, 119 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT medieval sabbaths was in apostolical succession to the original high priest. This leader, when there were so many demons to placate, was dressed as the animal whose good offices were desirable." In later times, and when the Church had made Satan supreme in the things of this world, the Devil assumed chief place in the worship of nature. But he was canonized by the Church, not by witchcraft. ‘There had been alliances with numerous demons prior to the Middle Ages in the sense that a worshipper begged for security. But the historic spiritual and physical compact with Satan was a product of the medieval mind. It struck the sombre note that was symbolic of the age. Where all was become dark and secretive a witches’ sabbath was not incredible, but the most natural thing in Christendom. It was whis- pered wherever men met that, by a compact with this new Satan, the irreligious became rich and protected ; and doubtless the Devil won his followers quite apart from the services of the witch. The local witch society met under its leader, who represented the Devil in person, and was usually dis- guised. Associated with him were twelve officials, making the dread thirteen in all. These supplied the 1 Any student of Red Indian customs will appreciate the significance of the dance ritual and their association with the traits of animals or birds, I20 THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY “‘coyens,”! and the most cursory examination of the Scots or New England lists of the accused leaves it beyond dispute that the regulations of the organiza- tion in this respect were common toall countries. The coven, a system of elders which reminded Cotton Mather? of the ruling body of the Congregational Church, attended to the business of the cult and made the arrangements for its celebrations. The gatherings at the esbat were local, at the sabbaths more general. Many persons quite outside the genuine sect of paganism were known by the Church to seek relaxation and debauchery in the flickering lights of these gatherings of witches. Indeed, the presence of priests and men of high standing rendered the public exposure of a sabbath not without its em- barrassments and its damaging social indiscretions. Above the leaders of the local covens was occasion- ally a Grand Master (masquerading as the Devil), and it would provide a curious and attractive side-line of historical research to discover how far the secret schemes of such an important personage (whose name would be certainly carefully concealed) influenced his humble followers in the direction of anti-clerical and revolutionary movements. There is little doubt that 1 Conventicles, 2 See The Witch Cult in Western Europe. 3 See Miss Murray’s article in Folklore, vol, xxviii, No. 3. 121 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT in Scotland John Fian,! head of the Berwickshire witches, died in horrible agony to preserve the life of the Grand Master, the Earl of Bothwell. The personal excitement of King James in this isolated case has been ascribed to his exaggerated sense of superstitious terror. It is no less dramatic, and prob- ably nearer the actual facts, to suppose that he be- lieved he could lay his hands on his arch-enemy and prove him guilty of high treason. The idea of a god incarnate, with its doctrine of ultimate sacrifice, is common to all primitive beliefs. Nor is it outside probability that many of the witches were martyrs in the sense that they welcomed death as the predestined price of a faith ancient when the Israelites crossed the Red Sea. In this peculiar and awful elevation the peasantry saw the fulfilment of their legendary beliefs. ‘There was nothing base or degraded in that. The association of Jeanne d’?Arc with the Dianic cult is a tragic and moving instance of the immeasurable inspiration of the pagan faith. Jeanne d’Arc, a child called at the familiar age of thirteen by voices near a sacred tree, was, as by the stroke of a magic wand, set at the head of a victorious army. She rode a black horse, and by her side was Marshal de Rais, the most famous and infamous of 1 Which signifies “ fairy,” 122 THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY —_———. the warlocks of France. ‘That she was a pure and innocent visionary is more than a cherished tradition —it is an imperishable truth. But to shrink from the very suggestion that Jeanne d’Arc might be in truth a white witch and not an authentic Christian saint is to confuse the whole idea and significance of the ancient religion, underlying which were the two eternal springs of the beautiful and the ugly, the natural and the supernatural. Riding at the head of her peasant army, Jeanne was radiant with the poetry and the loveliness of vision. At her side was the warlock De Rais, who had the vilest butchery of scores of children on his soul. But here were white and black magic incarnate, the good and evil in all human nature, older than religion, as eternal as man. The place of Jeanne d’Arc in history attracts century by century a deepening reverence and admiration. In particular has she won the devotion of men of letters and of poetry. Christian or agnostic, they all do her homage because of the spirit of beauty she brought back to the earth. And yet the mystery of her life and death abides and will probably never suffer intrusion. Why should a monarch of France listen to a simple peasant child? Why should an army, disheartened by defeat, follow a girl at the heel of dreams? Why should adoring soldiers accept 123 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT her death with such composure and let her pass as it were back to the country of infinite loveliness ° The solution of this sacred mystery lies perhaps in the inherent belief among an inarticulate peasantry that in the Maid there was sent from Tir-nan-og, that wonderful land of youth, the divine gift of inspiration and passion and beauty which is not destined to survive except in the hearts of men. Ii The most celebrated of all instances of Satanic worship was the notorious witches’ sabbath. Around this social and religious gathering there arose in an age destitute of historical antecedents a mass of data which accumulated into a mountain of evidence. It was believed (and confirmed) that witches flying upon broomsticks assembled to pay tribute to Satan, who was himself present, and that a physical compact was entered into. It was stated that at these meetings vows were taken, schemes hatched, spells weaved, blasphemies uttered, and Antichrist hailed as lord of the world. It cannot be denied that of such activities was the medieval witch cult. The explanation is to be found in the conservatism of the human mind and the persistence of human customs. ‘The witches’ sabbath was a survival of the 124 THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY times before the patriarchal system, when marriage was upon a group system and not monogamous, Being a simple folk-gathering, it existed in more modest forms until recently. The following is of importance as showing the innocent yet condemnatory appearance of such superstitious practices: We learn from Anna Mauczin (1600) that the witch gatherings were called Hochzezten, and treated as a type of marriage feast; we learn from Anna Kegreifen the names of the actual people (including the priest’s servant) who came to the dances; we find on the one hand dis- appointed or deserted wives and foolish village maidens, on the other village loafers and students from Tubingen, who joined in the midnight dances and the feasting and drinking beneath the Nunenbaum or by the well at the upper gate of Rotenburg. The trials bring out clearly enough who came to these witches’ sabbaths; how the usual piper was a well-known shepherd, but on some occasions one was brought specially from Tubingen. Here I will cite a few questions from a confession. ‘The supposed witch was asked if she had been at a witch dance and replied, ‘‘ Yes, for she was there initiated as a witch.” Who had taken her to it? ‘The old shepherd’s wife had fetched her, and they had gone with a broom.” Did she mean that they had flown through the air on a broom? ‘Certainly not; they had walked to Etterle, and then placed themselves across the broom, and so come on to the dancing green.” . . . Who were on the dancing green? ‘‘ Witches and their sweetheart devils.” Had she a sweetheart devil? 125 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT ‘Yes, the Sniveller.’? Did she not fear this devil? ‘©No, he was only a sweetheart devil.” What was the difference? ‘The sweetheart devil was no real devil, only a witch’s sweetheart like the Sniveller, who was old Zimmerpeterle’s son.” And Dr Pearson concludes: Here we have a most remarkable confession showing that the witch gatherings were real meetings, that the women took with them the symbol of the old hearth or home goddess, the broom, that the devils were real men of the neighbourhood. Further, that the broom was ridden like a hobby-horse on to the dancing green. This riding of broom or the pitchfork, or even the goat, should be taken in conjunction with the riding of the hobby-horse or wooden goat round the village by the young men at peasant festivals in parts of Germany. Both seem closely connected with the worship of a female deity, whose symbols are those of the hearth and primitive agriculture. When we remember that the great witch dances to which students and even doctors of Tubingen used to go out were especially held on the eve of the first of May, how suggestive is the statement that people of quality in the old days used to go from London to dance in the villages of Essex on May Day.’ Secondly, it is highly probable that in many cases, especially those in which witches died a hideous death declaring they worshipped the Devil, hysteria, united with religious conviction, however false, did actually produce martyrs and not simply victims. 1 Chances of Death, 126 THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY The religious and sexual importance of dancing in all primitive civilizations is a commonplace, and there is no doubt that under abnormal excitement trance conditions and hysterical phenomena presented the witch with a genuine or possibly fraudulent source of income and prestige. The most flagrant claims of the practice of sorcery were evidenced by the accused at witch trials, and it is easy to comprehend the result of such an attitude in a court fully convinced already. Self-hypnotism, actual faith in Satan, or sheer vanity may have influenced such appalling self-convictions. It must also be remembered that the sabbaths prob- ably produced phenomena as extravagant as those of a modern séance. In writing of the prophetic ecstasy of Syrian as well as Israelite prophets Dr T. H. Robinson refers to a peculiar psychic condition in which the subject seemed to be possessed of powers, indeed of a whole sphere of consciousness, which were denied to the ordinary in- dividual, and to the prophet himself in normal states. He did not cease to be conscious of the world as it appeared to others, but he heard and saw things which were be- yond their range. There were a number of well-marked physical phenomena connected with the condition of ecstasy, though these were not invariable. ‘The subject might be affected with a certain constriction of the muscles, in which case the state resembled that of a trance. On the other hand, muscular activity might be largely 127 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT increased. Leaping, bodily contortions, and loud cries resulted, which, as they tended to become regular and rhythmical, developed into dancing and song. ‘The subject frequently experienced a kind of anesthesia, and would slash wildly at his own body with knife or whip, without showing any signs of physical pain." In this highly neurotic state, at a time when the nervous system was shaken with delirium and frenzy and the encompassing terror of capture, is it beyond comprehension that witches did honestly believe in their supernatural powers? To put it at its lowest, even vanity in the comfortable middle-class homes of England to-day is producing ambitious revelations of spiritual messages, apparitions, ghostly manipulations, and all in the most cosy and material atmosphere. It was therefore no wonder the witch imagined she flew to the meeting-place. It was part of the oldest legend of her faith that the great witches flew through the woods with Diana the huntress like a pack of unearthly hounds. Miss Murray remarks: The use of certain drugs produced profound physio- logical results and delusions. ‘The use of aconite (in the form of an ointment with belladonna) is in the opinion of Professor A. J. Clark likely to produce the impression of 1 W. O. E, Oesterley, The Sacred Dance. 128 THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY flying. Irregular action of the heart in a person falling asleep produces the well-known sensation of suddenly falling through space, and it seems quite possible that the combination of a delirifacient like belladonna with a drug producing irregular action of the heart like aconite might produce the sensation of flying.? One of the most baffling pieces of evidence at the witch trials of the Middle Ages concerned the legendary flight of the witches despite the contrary evidence that they had never left their beds. That the rubbing of ointments was an established custom is beyond dispute; that the ointments contained bella- donna and aconite is a fact; and the consequences must be left to the credulity or sceptical attitude of the reader. That a witch could transform herself into an animal would, were it conceivable, make a strong case for the intellectual acumen of the Middle Ages, but it is not carping to ponder upon the wretched and helpless condition of the witch in the hands of her enemies when a mouse could have stolen away, but hardly one prisoner escaped. A third strong argument in condemnation of the witch was the extraordinary similarity of evidence at trials widely distant. It is well enough for the modern sceptic to dismiss the whole business as an 1 The Witch Cult in Western Europe, Appendix V, I 129 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT immense delusion dependent upon old women’s inco- herencies, but when the incoherencies are not merely common to every language, but are also compara- tively abstruse, can it be a matter for astonishment that superstitious courts were satisfied regarding the guilt of the witch? Had the court been able to arrest a fairy the unity of evidence would have been equally overwhelming. A fairy charged in Sweden would have pleaded the same fantastic folk-lore as a fairy taken captive among the Irish hills. The court was faced, therefore, by the existence of an actual organization which might or might not be Satanic, and furthermore by the evidence of a compact with the Devil. Now here was a curious instance of the adjustment of human beliefs to the evolution of theological doctrines. There is no evidence that the famous compact with Satan was recorded before the Church had hailed him as Anti- christ. How did this strange and repugnant idea take form? The medieval compact was celebrated with rites belonging to the old faith. There was a ceremony of ‘dancing customary in the ancient fertility festival. The disguised official acting as Satan (or whoever was the deity of the period) would bring up the tail in order that he might keep the pace active. Among 130 THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY the Ked Indians this personage wielded until recently a serviceable knobbed stick, and among our fore- fathers the familiar words “the Devil tak’? the hindmost ” may have conveyed a very definite mean- ing. Gideon Penman, a renegade Scots minister, “‘was in the rear in all their dances, and beat up all those that were slow.” A Scots witch was charged thus: ‘On Hallow eve last, and there, accompanied by thy own two daughters, and certain others, ye danced all together, about a great stone, under the conduct of Satan, your master, a long space.” The custom of meeting together especially in the month of May has an obvious explanation. It was in ancient times the admitted season for sexual intercourse. It became in more sophisticated days the time for village communities to make merry with the maypole in the day and dancing in the evening. This custom of assembling on May Eve existed in England until far into the nineteenth century, and was accompanied by music, feasting, and dancing. The use of masks, so important in the days of witchcraft both as a rite and as a disguise, also descended to a generation not long before our own. “In Wales the dancers are under the command of the Cadi, who is chief marshal, orator, buffoon, and money collector. . . . His countenance is particularly 131 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT distinguished by a hideous mask, or is blackened all over; and then the lips, cheeks, and orbits of the eyes are sometimes painted red.” * It is a curious instance of the influence of con- temporary usages upon the decadent witch cult of the days of persecution that in its purely religious activities bastard imitations of current Christian cele- brations gave to the very name of a witches’ sabbath a definite sense of blasphemy and Antichrist. In Scotland the witches celebrated a sacrament, whereas in France it was the Black Mass. In Scotland too, as though there were not abundance already, the Devil, according to evidence in Pitcairn’s Trials, delivered a sermon, which is preserved, and in which he remarked: ‘Spare not to do evil, and to eat, drink, and be blyth, taking rest and ease, for he should raise them up at the latter day gloriously.” Finally, it must be admitted that within the witch society the genuine members remained staunch to each other and their faith. Traitors suffered for their betrayal. It was safer sometimes for a witness to abide in prison than go free, and even within the four walls of his cell he might be done to death. And yet, as the thoughtful even then realized in silence where speech was fatal, witchcraft flourished 1 Hone, Everyday Book I, May 1. 132 THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY most and was most dangerous (judging by the number of burnings) where it was most eagerly sought. In Salem, for instance, the Puritans had an eye keen as a razor for the Devil. But in Canada, then a Roman Catholic colony, they were for some reason or other lethargic in the gracious cause. Her peace was never much troubled by witches. They were held to exist, it is true; but they wrought no panic. Mother Mary of ‘ The Incarnation’ reports on one occa- sion the discovery of a magician in the person of a con- verted Huguenot miller, who, being refused in marriage by a girl of Quebec, bewitched her, and filled the house where she lived with demons, which the bishop tried in vain to exorcise. The miller was thrown into prison, and the girl sent to the Hétel-Dieu, where not a demon dared enter. ‘The infernal crew took their revenge by creating a severe influenza among the citizens.? Finally, and especially in England, there passed into social history the witch who suffered rough treatment principally upon the senilities of age and the brutality of the times. Here is the witch not of tragedy so much as of the fairy books, who, at any rate in English records, has discounted the profound and far-reaching significance of her Continental sister. In this solitary and hapless dame there possibly dwelt 1 Francis Parkman, Te Old Régime in Canada (Macmillan), £33 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT some remnants of the oldest folk-lore in the world. It is likely enough that she possessed the attributes of the witch—that is, the use of herbs in sickness, the practice of a mild auto-suggestion and telepathy, possibly a dash of second sight (which now owns the resounding name of ‘cryptesthesia’), and a love of mystery. Vanity again has sealed more sentences of death than one might think: like her modern counterpart, she léarned to profess more than she could achieve. She surrounded herself with the atmosphere of the occult. She lived alone, was attended bya cat, and worked upon the simple minds of village maids by her dark and sinister falsehoods. It was said she flew by night, that she could become a toad or a mouse, and that she was beyond the touch of pain. Were such things true, then the witch was more interesting than her successors. But they were most tragically false. The most common and tragic side of the trials was conviction by personal evidence or confession. To the courts a witch was a witch whether she belonged to a coven, and might therefore be labelled genuine, or was simply a foolish old woman who attended the sabbaths with her friends and was no more authentic or more superstitious than any other old woman within the Roman fold. Or she might be altogether 134 THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY ee eee innocent. A great number of the executions were the result of quite innocent persons being sworn to death by a prisoner frantic to win the leniency of the court. To weigh further the dice against the accused there grew up, with the obnoxious science of official witch-finding, a series of tests which convicted numbers of persons with no further proof whatever. It was believed that a witch was insensible to pins thrust into certain parts of her body’; that she was unable to weep or look an honest man in the eye; that she could not drown; that upon her would be found certain malformations. In Scotland in 1 « There came then to Inverness one Mr Paterson, who had run over the kingdom for triall off witches, and was ordinarly called the Pricker, becaus his way of triall was with a long brasse pin. Stripping them naked, he alleadged that the spell spot was seen and discovered, After rubbing over the whole body with his palms he slipt in the pin, and, it seemes, with shame and fear being dasht, they felt it not, but he left it in the flesh, deep to the head, and desired them to find and take it out. It is sure some witches were discovered but many honest men and women were blotted and broak by this trick, In Elgin there were two killed ; in Forres two; and one Margret Duff, a rank witch, burn in Inverness, This Paterson came up to the Church of Wardlaw, and within the church pricked 14 women and one man brought thither by the Chisholm of Commer, and 4 brought by Andrew Fraser, chamerlan of Ferrintosh. He first polled all their heads and amassed the heap of haire together, hid in the stone dick, and so proceeded to pricking. Severall of these dyed in prison never brought to confession. This villan gaind a great deale off mony, haveing two servants ; at last was discovered to be a woman dis- guished in mans cloathes, Such cruelty and rigure was sustained by a vile varlet imposture.” (See The Wardlaw Manuscript, p. 446, Scottish History Society publication, Edinburgh .) 135 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT particular such rubbish carried great weight, and un- scrupulous men were actually employed to hunt down women to be accused upon such trumpery charges. But that was persecution gone crazy and in decline. At the same time, the attitude toward the common- place witch of legend has its relation to the conclusions that are elaborated in the final section of this study. Superstition was perceived then more than now to be a grave lowering of the spiritual conception of life. It was realized by at least one writer that the associa- tion of trumpery phenomena with the supernatural is - confounded not by evidence, but by instinct. Reginald Scot remarks in his Discoverie of Witch- craft : I therefore do only desire you to consider of my report concerning the evidence that is commonly brought before you against them. See first whether the evidence be not frivolous and whether the proofs brought against them be not incredible, consisting of guesses, presumptions, and impossibilities contrary to reason, Scripture, and nature. See also what persons complain upon them, whether they be not of the basest, the unwisest, and the most faithless kind of people. Also, may it please you, to weigh what accusations and crimes they lay to their charge, namely: She was at my house of late, she would have had a pot of milk, she departed in a chafe because she had it not, she railed, she cursed, she mumbled and whispered ; and, finally, she said she would be even with 136 THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY me; and soon after my child, my cow, my sow, or my pullet died, or was strangely taken. My greatest adversaries are young ignorance and old custom. For what folly soever tract of time hath fostered, it is so superstitiously pursued of some, as though no error could be acquainted with custom. But if the law of nations would join with such custom, to the mainten- ance of ignorance and to the suppressing of knowledge, the civilest country in the world would soon become barbarous. For as knowledge and time discover the errors, so doth superstition and ignorance in time breed them. IV The list of the condemned is a proof of the terror that had captured the medieval imagination. ‘“ Seven thousand are said to have been burned at Tréves, six hundred by a single bishop in Bamberg, and nine hundred in a single year in the bishopric of Wartz- burg.” About 1515 five hundred persons were killed in Geneva “as Protestant witches.” Four hundred died together in Toulouse in one day. It was the proud boast of a French judge that he had burned eight hundred women in sixteen years. In Como a thousand were killed in one year. In Lorraine an ecclesiastical competitor of the Nancy judge achieved nine hundred lives in fifteen years. The persecution of the witch is like a mirror 137 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT revealing the political or religious convictions and the state of civilization of her oppressors.’ The Roman Church was united with the Protestant in one respect, since both found divine condemnation of the witch in the Old Testament. But where the Romanist re- cognized in the witch the actual presence of the Evil One and a practical opportunity for quelling the seething intellectual unrest of Europe, the Calvinist, with greater purity of inspiration, but an unqualified extravagance that obscured the real significance of the Reformation, beheld in her the supreme degra- dation of a sinful world. She became, therefore, the symbol of evil. From her upward all life was tainted with the Devil and dark with his wiles. Human history is made and unmade by strong and conflicting currents. The ancient warfare between the spiritual and material Utopia is as old as the sea, but the middle of the road has ever been the least accessible to wayfarers. ‘The witch stood for more than the victim of an obsession. She was after all the solitary voice of pleasure and common humanity and make- believe. Where the individual went down in a cloud of flames the old discredited instinct remained. The t A witch was burned in Southern Ireland as late as the last decade of the nineteenth century, and a wizard, to my own knowledge, practises a lucrative trade in a remote part of Wales to-day, 138 THE TRIUMPH OF THEOLOGY Puritans alone fought it to a standstill. They stood to the last by an infallible Bible, and they will in future ages be judged according to their faith. They may have killed normal pleasure, but they at any rate gave a vein of iron to the constitution of a nation. The ancient antagonism between the things of heaven and the things of earth had in fact so narrowed its boundaries that in Puritanism the war on the world was triumphant beyond all precedent. The period has long since become a source of popular amusement for its grotesque and even revolting habits of conduct. But it should be estimated not by personalities, but by performance. The persecution of the witch was not so much the torment of an individual as the ex- pression of an ideal which, however contorted, drew its strength from the spiritual and not from the material, and produced in due season that wonderful age of faith, learning, and discovery—the Scotland of the nineteenth century. AS0 CHAPTER VI THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE I HE persecution of the witch in Europe is a historical presentation of ecclesiastical sup- pression rather than of spiritual abhorrence. To the Roman Catholic the path to eternity was through Holy Church. To the Scots Kirk it lay through the pure heart of each individual man; the spiritual was to be won by the sweat of purpose and the iron discipline of the flesh. The contrast is of superlative importance, because it established, if only for an era, the first and greatest instance of a nation in spiritual armour dependent not upon the absolution of man, but the uncertain acceptance of God. The attitude, therefore, of the Kirk to- ward the witch was the attitude of a stern and ruthless creed toward the disintegrating lures of this present life. It forms a historic instance of the moulding of national character, and all that signifies in civilization, upon an ethical belief in man’s place in the universe. 14.0 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE The narrative of witchcraft in Scotland presents no particular points of variance from Continental records. It has been suggested by Burton that the witch per- secutions reached their height in Scotland owing to the fanaticism of a mountainous people in whose gloomy imagination the powers of nature were ever present and actual. This theory, however attractive on the surface, is hardly borne out by the preponder- ance of witch trials in the vicinity of Dunbar and the absence of the witch scare beyond the Highland Line, thus proving once again that witches were classified by law and not by environment. The Highlanders of the fourteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, speaking another tongue and inured to war, were sufficiently dangerous neighbours to chill even a Re- former’s ardour, and consequently the witch suffered most where she was most likely to be found, and that was within the range of the greatest number of Puritan ministers. Nor was the landscape terrific or portentous. Stage thunder did not roll from one calamitous valley to another. No prospect could be more peaceful and less ominous than the quiet stretches of the Lammermuirs. Sunlight flashes on the sea between the coast-line and the Bass. The brown woods are like a cloak cast over the shoulder of the hills; the landscape is serene and placid. Yet 141 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT here, within this pleasant place, the smoke of many a burning could be seen by ships bound for the Firth of Forth. The fate of the witch in Scotland is not a pleasant page in religious history. It has given innumerable openings for shafts of satire and moral indignation, and has added another chapter to the mournful record of persecution in the name of Christ. And yet the ultimate end was justified by the means. The Kirk declared war on the things the witch practised, and stood by her guns when the rest of Christendom was in lamentable retreat. Her tragedy may have been one of error—it was never one of faith, for no men have ever endured more for conscience than the ministers of Scotland. In the end in our own day the long conflict has died away from an exalted if exaggerated passion and spiritual agony to the paralysis of no spiritual ideal whatever. Out of bloodshed comes bloodshed, but also out of lethargy comes extinction. The causes of the extreme severity directed against witchcraft in Scotland were inevitable in a race of strong and ruthless temperament and inflamed by the doctrines of Calvinism. But even then the crusade was not democratic in its origin. The Reformation in Scotland was in its origins not an upheaval of the 142 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE people. It was, if anything, unsympathetic to a peasantry ground down by feudalism and satisfied with a spiritual mixture of Roman Catholicism and witchcraft. The Reformation in Scotland was as much political as religious. The wealth and power of the Church were a larger incitement to the greedy Scots nobility than the thirst for liberty of conscience, and in the eclipse of the Papacy and the triumph of Puritanism one ecclesiastical tyranny was replaced by another infinitely more arduous. Under the Church of Rome the people had lived in oppression and spiritual tyranny, but they had retained some of the privileges of human beings. So long as they were orthodox they were assured of a certain degree of protection here and hereafter. It is true that they weret aught to have a superstitious dread of an in- fallible Church, but under the Reformed faith the infallibility of the Church was replaced by the in- fallibility of the Bible. Henceforth all happiness was denounced as sin; all the past was the reign of Satan; all the future was dark with guilt. It can be urged that this worship of the Bible as the indisputable Word of God did not merely revolu- tionize national thought—it transformed an entire nation, creating a spiritual wilderness and denouncing every aspect of normal life. It can be added that 143 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT henceforth until the end of the nineteenth century the Scots nation lived according to the tribal laws of Israel. It has been pointed out in support of this contention that when the Highlands, the home of a passionate and romantic race, came under the shadow of Presbyterianism the philosophy of witchcraft fled away and the symbols of a heroic people became the tall hat and the tin bell. On the other hand, such ruthless spiritual tyranny imposed upon the most indomitable race in the world ought, according to the laws of human psychology, to have inspired a swift and violent revolution. In-_ stead the Kirk became the citadel of Scottish faith and liberty. In the long struggle against a savage and grasping nobility it was the Kirk that stood with indomitable purpose for the people. Her doctrines were harsh and sombre, promising little enough comfort here or hereafter, but they became the rallying-ground for a spiritual ideal so determined and invincible that kings, nobles, and bishops were swept away in its victories, and in its days of defeat the martyrdom of the Covenanters still haunts the lonely countrysides. However strange the paradox in this uncouth and oppressive creed, there was in its spiritual discipline the breath of liberty and the birth of a nation. 144 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE Il The witch provided the infant Kirk with a most serviceable object lesson. She enabled it to attack Satan in the very citadel of the last refuges of the Roman faith and stamp out superstitious practices masquerading under God’s name as well as Satan’s. That the problem of dealing with the witch presented few difficulties will best be understood by some acquaintance with the authority of a Scots minister within the bounds of his parish. According to the Presbyterian polity, which reached its height in the seventeenth century, the clergyman of the parish selected a certain number of laymen on whom he could depend, and who, under the name of elders, were his councillors, or rather the ministers of his authority. They, when assembled together, formed what was called the Kirk Session, and this little court, which enforced the decisions uttered in the pulpit, was so supported by the superstitious reverence of the people that it was far more powerful than any civil tribunal. By its aid the minister became supreme. For whoever presumed to disobey him was excommunicated, was de- prived of his property, and was believed to have incurred the penalty of eternal perdition. Against such weapons, in such a state of society, resistance was impossible. The clergy interfered with every man’s private concerns, ordered how he should govern his family, and often took upon themselves the personal control of his house- hold. Their minions, the elders, were everywhere, for K 145 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT each parish was divided into several quarters, and to each quarter one of these officials was allotted in order that he might take special notice of what was done in his district. Besides this spies were appointed so that nothing could escape their supervision. Not only the streets but even private houses were searched and ran- sacked to see if anyone was absent from church while the minister was preaching. ‘To him all must listen and all must obey. Without the consent of his tribunal no person might engage himself either as a domestic servant or as a field labourer." The discipline of the Kirk was inexorable. It suffered neither high nor low to escape the severity of its penalties. In the Booke of Universal Kirke it is mentioned that one Paul Methuen, having suffered excommunication for a certain offence, was restored upon his serious supplication and great expressions of sorrow, and released thus: two severall Sabbath dayes in Edinburgh, Dunie, and Jedburgh, both dayes in sackcloth, standing before sermon at the church door barefooted and bareheaded, and the last of the two, when he is absolved and released, layes aside that habite, and is embraced in his own habite, yit not to be admitted to the Lord’s Table while he report to the nixt General Assembly in December sufficient testimoniale of his repentance, publict, and also of his private Christian carriage. The discovery of the witch was no less stupendous 1 Buckle, History of Civilization in England, vol, iii, 146 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE because she had always existed. For in her exposure the Kirk, like all contemporary Christendom, saw a most vital method of routing Satan not merely in a proven organization, but in the more elusive hearts ofmen. But there wasa difference. ‘To the Church of Rome the whole affair was tinged with heresy and political menace; to the Church of England, ever good-natured and yet dutiful, the episode was like an incomprehensible indiscretion of the Almighty ; but to the Kirk of Scotland the witch was the sin of the world. Her fate was therefore both merciless and certain. In a land where the minister was omnipotent and omniscient, and where he even claimed to be the mouthpiece of God, there was no chance of escape and no encouragement to conceal. | Moreover, the swift overthrow of the Roman faith had come too suddenly for simple people to realize that all that had gone before was iniquitous and devilish, whether it sprang from priest or witch. Here, therefore, as on the Continent, the same dogged and persistent loyalty to the old festivals was the perplexity of the Scots minister as it had long been that of the Roman priest. The Glasgow Kirk Session, on December 26, 1583, arraigned five persons before them who were 147 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT ordered to make public repentance because they kept the superstitious day called Yule. The baxters were required to give the names of those for whom they had baked Yule bread, so that they might be dealt with by the Church. Ten years after this, in 1593, an Act was again passed by the Glasgow Session against the keeping of Yule, and therein it was ordained that the keepers of this feast were to be de barred from the privileges of the Church, and also to be punished by the magistrates. Notwithstanding these measures, the people still inclined to observe Yule, for, fifty-six years after, in 1649, the General Assembly appointed a commission to make report of the public practices, among others “the druidical customs observed at the fires of Beltane, Midsummer, Hallowe’en and Ule.” In the same year appears the following minute in the session- book of the parish of Slains: 26th Nov. 1649. ‘The said day, the minister and elders being convened in session, and after invocation of the name of God, intimate that Yule be not kept, but that they yoke their oxen and horse, and employ their servants in their service that day as well as on other days.’ The substitution of superstition for superstition, which had proved in the Roman Church a temporary 1 See Rust’s Druidism Exhumed. 148 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE advantage and a permanent embarrassment, was not merely unnecessary under the Reformers, but treason to God. They were men of sterner mould, practising what they preached. The bishop whom they drove out had “indulged in recreation, thinking a game of cards [‘ the deil’s picture-books”] or gold not amiss ; they even danced or looked on while others danced!” All this was simply Satan to the Puritan movement of Melville, which, instead of degenerating in virility as is the nature of all things, grew more stern and vindictive year by year. Compare, then, the standpoints of natural religion (which to the Puritan was simply witchcraft in all its activities) and this implacable Puritanism, The witch, in the minds of the Scots peasantry, as op- pressed and ignorant a type as any in Europe, repre- sented ancient, indestructible fears and fancies, fairies and demons, good luck and bad. She provided coarse pleasures and extravagant joys best suited to hard, unlettered times. She loved the beauty of the forest and the stream; she treasured old, wonderful tales ; she could bless as well as curse, and cure as well as kill, Where witchcraft flourished unchallenged it was undistinguishable from the natural joy and folk-lore of the race. Only in its outbreaks of ferocity was it typical of historical representation. 149 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT Against the ethics of the witch the Kirk launched its counter-attack. All the natural affections, all social pleasures, all amuse- ments, and all the joyous instincts of the human heart were sinful, and were to be rooted out. It was sinful for a mother to have sons, and, if she had any, it was sinful to be angry about their welfare. It was asin to please your- self, or to please others; for by adopting either course you were sure to displease God. All pleasures therefore, however slight in themselves or however lawful they might appear, must be carefully avoided. When mixing in society, we should edify the company if the gift of edification had been bestowed upon us; but we should by no means attempt toamuse them. Cheerfulness, especi- ally when it rose to laughter, was to be guarded against, andwe should choose for our associates grave and sorrowful men who were not likely to indulge in so foolish a practice. Smiling, provided it stopped short of laughter, might oc- casionally be allowed; still, being a carnal pastime, it was a sin to smile on Sunday. And again: It was, moreover, wrong to take pleasure in beautiful scenery, for a pious man had no concern with such matters, which were beneath him, and the admiration of which should be left to the unconverted. . . . To write poetry, for instance, was a grievous offence and worthy of especial condemnation. To listen to music was equally wrong... . Dancing was so extremely sinful that an edict expressly 1 Buckle, History of Civilization in England, vol. iii, 150 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE prohibiting it was enacted by the General Assembly, and read in every church in Edinburgh.’ To ignore the Kirk was not possible, since escape was impracticable, and, spiritual penalties failing, im- prisonment, branding, beating, or exposure in an iron collar before the parish cooled any feverish notions of the sacred right of liberty. Ill The witch persecutions received their greatest impetus from the royal approval of James I and VI. Whether that unwholesome and cynical personage was genuinely credulous of Satan’s imminence is un- known, but that he was fully aware of its political significance regarding himself is very probable. He expressed delight when, during a trial, it was stated that the Devil looked upon the King as his most doughty foe, but as the Scots Master of the Revels was embodied in the form of Bothwell the compli- ment was tempered with very practical perils. In 1603 the College of Aberdeen ordered every minister, with the assistance of his watch-dogs, the elders, to make “a subtle and privy inquisition ” for witches, and as the whole science of witchcraft was elabo- rated for the guidance of those who were conducting 1 Buckle, History of Civilization in England, vol, it, 151 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT the examination it remained only to discover the witch. And instantly the shadow of an intolerable dread fell over every parish in the Lowlands. To be sus- pected of witchcraft in even its most innocent form was to be sooner or later accused, and to be accused was almost certainly to suffer death. In Scotland, unlike the Continent, the defence of the witch did not depend upon lack of evidence in the prosecution, or her denial, or any other reasonable count—it depended upon her ability to withstand torture or her good luck in possessing none of the fatal physical insignia. In other lands witches frequently confessed will- ingly, or confessed under torture, but the court was not compelled to wring a confession by force, ala every kirk in Scotland hung a box in which names of suspected persons could be inserted secretly for official investigation. When the minister was in- formed of a woman under the shadow of such vile gossip he denounced her straightway from the pulpit and encouraged evidence against her. From that moment the unfortunate creature was doomed. There could be no door of escape where it was a matter of conscience that a witch must die. The minister was all-powerful in his parish. He accused the witch, 152 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE caused her to be dragged before him as commissioner, put her to an examination as thorough and more merciless than that of an Inquisitor, and when she refused to speak, or denied her guilt, ordered her to be tortured. The process of compelling confessions was ap- proved, and encouraged as the humiliation of the Evil One. The tortures used were revolting. Pitcairn relates: One of the most powerful incentives to confession was systematically to deprive the suspected witch of the re- freshment of her natural sleep. Iron collars, or witch’s bridles, used for such iniquitous purposes are still pre- served in various parts of Scotland. These instruments were so constructed that by means of a hoop which passed over the head a piece of iron having four points or prongs was forcibly thrust into the mouth, two of these being directed to the tongue and palate, the others pointing outward to each cheek. This infernal machine was secured by a padlock. At the back of the collar was fixed a ring by which to attach the prisoner to a staple in the wall of her cell. Thus equipped, and night and day waked and watched by some skilful person appointed by her inquisitors, the unhappy creature, after a few days of such discipline, maddened by the misery of her forlorn and helpless state, would be rendered fit for confessing anything in order to be rid of the dregs of her wretched life. At intervals fresh examinations took place; these were repeated from time to time, until her ‘ contumacy,” as it was termed, was subdued. ‘The clergy and the 153 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT Kirk Sessions appear to have been the unwearied instru- ments of ‘‘ purging the land of witchcraft, and to them, in the first instance, all the complaints and informations were made.” + The only possible certainty of securing comparative safety lay in a close adherence to the Kirk and the zealous hunting down of superstition in all its shapes and forms. The habit of eavesdropping and spying, so characteristic of Puritanism, became a natural safe- guard, for if a man was not at his neighbour’s key- hole it was probable that his neighbour would be at his. Every witch trial was charged with common peril. By the use of thumbscrews, the boots, and a terrible iron frame in which the human leg was fixed and charred were extracted not merely personal con- fessions, but name after name of fellow-parishioners, who in their turn would be hard put to it to prove they had not danced a reel on such and such a night, the moon being out and Satan quite evidently abroad. W itch-finding now increased rapidly in Scotland. No fewer than fourteen special commissions were issued for the sole purpose of trying witches for the sederunt of November the 7th, 16613; and on the 23rd of January, 1662, fourteen more were made out. It was the popular amusement of the day, and no one or two men then living could have turned the tide in favour of these poor persecuted creatures. Even Sir George Mackenzie, that 154 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE ‘‘noble wit of Scotland,” failed to make any reasonable impression on the besotted public, though his pleadings and writings got him into immense disfavour with the religious part of the community, and caused him to be ranked as an atheist and Sadducee, and classed with the Pilates and Judases of history. Though it had been the Bull of Pope Innocent VIII in 1484 which had first stirred up the zeal of the godly against witchcraft, and written that terrible text, ‘‘ Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” in still more terrible characters of blood and suffering, yet Calvinistic Scotland soon outstripped even the super- stitious Papacy in her frantic piety, and poured out a sea of innocent blood which will stain her pages with an ineffaceable stain for ever and for ever. Yet she was nearly a hundred years behind Rome in her zeal, for it was not till June, 15632, that she made the subject matter for legislation at all, and then the Estates! enacted ‘that ‘nae person take upon hand to use any manner of witch- crafts, sorcery, or necromancy, nor give themselves furth to have ony sic craft or knowledge thereof therethrough abusing the people’; also, that ‘nae person seek ony help, response, or consultation, at ony sic users or abusers of witchcrafts under pain of death.’ This is the statute under which all the subsequent witch trials took place.” But bad as it was under the Presbyterians and the Elders, it is true that under the Restoration the witch persecutions in Scotland were even more excessive than during the reign of the Covenanters, and that the return of Charles II brought satisfaction and pleasure to the younger women only of his dominions, but nothing save torture to the old, the poor, andthe despised. Ray says 1 Chambers, Domestic Annals. 155 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT that about a hundred and twenty witches suffered in the year 1661, the year after the Restoration had brought joy and gladness to all loyal hearts, so that it mattered little whether Puritan or Cavalier, Presbyterian or Episcopalian, had the upper hand. The incessant burning of witches became a part of social life and parochial record. No voice was raised to denounce the murder of the innocent, many of them young and beautiful girls who, tragically enough, preferred ‘to die rather than return after trial to a home and a village that would never again admit them. IV Such examples of the tragedies of fanaticism expose Hagrantly enough what is possible under religious tyranny. But they also reveal the extraordinary dominance of the Scots Kirk and the submission of a dour and courageous people to the greatest spiritual authority within modern times. Any investigation of persecution must interest itself finally, not in the terrors of the hour, but in the progressive or retrogressive genius of its objective. Generalizations are notoriously unstable, but for the sake of an objective and historical symbol the witch has presented in this outline the philosophy of 1 E. L. Linton, Witch Stories. 156 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE the material as opposed to the idealism of the spiritual. The distinction is as old as time and as typical of every age as the voice of right and of wrong. It is, however, a commonplace, of which the persecution of witchcraft is a classic example, that the sense of values, particularly of spiritual values, is at the mercy of the inherent malobservation of human intelligence. In the Middle Ages the science of theology, by establishing dogma upon dogma, had formulated a static faith without the power of change or the breath of eternity. Challenged by the Renaissance, and faced by revelations of natural instead of super- natural law, it declared a Holy War in this world instead of preaching the timeless mystery of God in the next. In a similar fashion the Kirk of Scotland was des- tined, though not so savagely, to find her foundations were of sand. She had set up the infallibility of the Bible instead of the infallibility of Holy Church, and the downfall of Satan was the first sign of her dis- solution. The eternal and invisible had been so long shackled to the temporal and visible that when one stone collapsed the whole structure was threatened. Glanire wrote truly enough: “ Atheism is begun in Sadducism, and those that dare not bluntly say there is no God, content themselves (for a fair step and 157 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT introduction) to deny there are spirits or witches.” In 1768 John Wesley struck the same prophetic note in the words: It is true likewise that the English in general, and in- deed most of the men of learning in Europe, have given up all account of witches and apparitions as mere old wives’ fables. I am sorry for it, and I willingly take this opportunity of entering my solemn protest against this violent compliment which so many that believe the Bible pay to those who do not believe it. They well know (whether Christians know it or not) that the giving up witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible. Here, then, was the last taunt of the historic witch. Her enemies had destroyed her upon the divine authority of a tribal text. To laugh her out of court was a kindly enough dismissal—but she did not depart alone. For with her went the infallibility of the Bible. If witchcraft was but a delusion and Satan a myth, as the sceptics of the new learning hastened to make known, then the very foundations of theology were split in twain, and the elements of witchcraft—the goodly things of this world—had been in exile not because of a dream, but because of a nightmare. It is not difficult to understand how swiftly the tide turned back to shores hardly touched for a thousand years—how a new dawn seemed to show in the East, and the kingdom of heaven to have 158 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE come down to earth. All over the world the discip- line of the Church was challenged except within the ranks of her confirmed adherents. She no longer con- trolled the State, nor could she prosecute the pioneers of learning. With the advance of education and the inestimable influence of raw knowledge flung hap- hazard into the world the eighteenth century became the centre of a profound reaction against the super- - natural in all its forms. The French Revolution, that final challenge to oppression after centuries of unrest, set the whole world of unlettered men in a ferment. They burst their bonds, and with their proud equality, fraternity, and liberty shackled themselves anew in the industrial slavery of the nineteenth century. In this new warfare between the spiritual and the material Scotland stood, in her rigid condemnation of the things of this world, as the last antagonist of the witch. The derision of Montaigne had set all Europe gloating over the discomfiture of Rome. In England —ever the land of the middle course—there was no sense of triumph, but only of immense relief. In Scotland the Kirk neither recanted nor denied. The historical witch might pass, but the perils of the flesh remained. Satan was never in retreat; he only mani- fested himself through more subtle channels. He had passed from the primeval forest into the seats of 159 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT learning, there to be enshrined as the liberator of the soul of progress and the spirit of science. But the passion for the spiritual rather than the material moulded Scottish character in the zenith of its un- equalled intellectual and commercial progress, and therefore cannot be lightly dismissed or ridiculed. In the days of the witch burnings the severity of the Kirk brought physical terror enough, but it also infected a whole nation with a sense of the brevity of life and with the urgency of morality in national conduct. It gave strength, vision, sincerity, where there had been little enough of these before. It also set in the heart of an inarticulate people a kind of poetic passion and idealism, so that it can be said without exaggeration that one of the virtues of spiritual discipline was the profound consciousness of spiritual freedom. Vv In the Scotland of the nineteenth century there is the greatest modern instance of the will to live in accordance with a definite understanding of the spiritual in its relationship to the world. There was in her national life, however grotesque, how- ever mistaken, a cohesive and constructive ethical policy. To ridicule the extraneous elements of that 160 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE policy is simple enough. But the tree is judged by its fruit. Behind the rigid standards, the heart- breaking desert of austerities, there dwelt the vision of the spiritual and the faith that endures to the end. What were the means by which that remarkable fibre was woyen into the texture of a people? The Scots Kirk elevated spiritual discipline to a pinnacle of national idealism. It preached God as the righteous judge of all the world, before Whom the inmost hearts of men would be revealed. This sense of the infinite nearness of eternity hardened the national conscience against every form of indul- gence and aimless pleasure. But it did not extin- guish happiness. Rather it grafted it upon the rugged tree of independence and self-government. Never before did a nation respond with such readiness to a faith so apparently stripped of beauty and senti- ment. It was like a religion of granite, and on the surface it bred a race after its own grim heart. But under the surface it gave to Scots domestic life a sweetness and a loyalty and a reality that are passing and are gone. It is therefore of significance to examine not so much the crude pains and penalties which Buckle has so zealously striven to contend cowed the whole spirit of progress until the last generation, but rather L 101 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT the contribution such laws of conduct have made to the history of progress. It can be said that in Scotland as in no other country religion and education for three hundred years became national ideals. In the Middle Ages the authority of Holy Church formed and governed the very life and inspiration of an entire continent, but its supremacy was largely dependent upon the sup- pression of intellectual inquiry. In Scotland the thirst for knowledge and a high sense of values was im- planted and fostered as a divine duty. Honourable success on earth was preached as an illustration of that great and beautiful exordium, “ Well done, good and faithful servant,” but it was not the reward so much as the justification of endeavour. The Kirk stood for democracy in an age when king, bishops, and nobles were united against the people. It is almost a solitary instance of organized Christianity standing for the humble and obscure. However obstinate or irrational the Covenanters may have been, they held life more cheaply than acqui- escence, and the association of the parish minister with the cause of the oppressed was a worthy enough tribute to his future place in Scots life and character. Nor was the Kirk retrogressive in spirit. In the nineteenth century the manse became a 162 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE synonym for high culture, learning, and faith. At the very heart of Scotland’s national characteristics it was permanently stationed, and an examination of its ideals presents the homely interior of Scottish life. From the manse came religious observance, educa- tion, and a type of simplicity which was as lofty as it was kindly. It was, as nowhere else, the central point or pivot of the parish. Among all the houses in a Scottish parish the homeliest and kindliest is the manse, for to its door some time in the year comes every inhabitant, from the laird to the cottar woman. Within the familiar and old-fashioned study, where the minister’s chair and writing-table could not be changed without discomposing the parish, and where there are fixed degrees of station, so that the laird has his chair, and the servant lass hers, the minister receives and does his best for all the folk committed to his charge. Here he consults with the factor about some improvement in the arrangements of the little commonwealth; he takes counsel with a farmer about his new lease and promises to say a good word to his lordship; he confirms the secret resolution of some innocent gifted lad to study for the holy ministry; he hears the shamefaced confession of some lassie whom love has led astray; he gives good advice to a son leaving the glen for the distant world; he comforts the mother who has received bad news from abroad. Generations have come in their day to this room, and 163 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT en, generations still unborn will come in their joys and sorrows, with their trials, while the manse stands and human life runs its old course.! Within this little world minister and school- teacher worked together to set the feet of the young generation on the paths of knowledge. Edu- cation hardly sought and hardly won was the pride of the castle and the croft. It became the greatest thing in life. The passion for learning permeated the whole nation from professor to ploughman, and was carried throughout the English-speaking world. It sent the Scots missionary to darkest Africa, the Scots pioneer to the mountains of Canada, and the Scots engineer to open out the highways of the world. It gave to our colonies that basis of endurance and self-dependence that is the real value and moral purpose of an empire. In a recent book, Sons of the Manse, the Rey. A. W. Fergusson records two interesting quotations in this connexion. Biot, the great French physicist, remarks: The results of education are such that they strike with astonishment those who observe them for the first time. The Scots, poor, and inhabiting a country by no means fertile, have risen by their education and civilization to + Tan Maclaren, Kate Carnegie (Hodder and Stoughton), 164. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE the level of, and, if the lower orders are considered, have surpassed, a nation which is regarded as one of the most enlightened on the face of the earth. Wherever a Scotsman goes, the education he has received in the parish schools gives his mind a peculiar power of obser- vation, and enables him to extend his view far beyond the range of objects which occupy the attention of persons of the same social status who have not been so educated. And the other is the better-known statement of Macaulay : The old parochial school was the foundation of Scot- land’s proudest distinction, and proved the great source of her prosperity ; and it is owing not indeed solely but principally to it that in spite of her climate her people have made such progress in agriculture, in manufacture, in commerce, in letters, in science, in all that constitutes civilization, as the old world has never seen equalled, and as the new world has scarcely seen surpassed. It was the spirit of the parish school that set so high a price on education, but behind that national austerity, that dour determination, which alike in Presbyterian regiments and the mission field has become an accepted characteristic of the North, there burned a high sense of independence and religion learned in the parish kirk. It has been emphasized how near the minister lived to the lives of his flock. A poor man himself, yet he was de- pendent on none, and in the troubles and emotions 165 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT of his flock he stood for the defenceless against the rapacity of chieftain and landowner. The per- secutions of landowners and the harsh eviction of thousands of helpless people during the nineteenth century were borne with unexampled patience and heroism as the will of Almighty God. In those searching times the ministers exercised an influence at once courageous and faithful, and in many cases went into exile with their people. However opinions may differ regarding the rights or wrongs of the Disruption of 1843, the spectacle of several hundred men, many of them old and penniless, risking absolute wreckage for conscience’ sake produced a profound impression upon a nation pledged to independence. It set up in a century already handed over to indus- trialism a memorial of sacrifice and spiritual freedom. That the source of this national type should be the manse is natural enough, since from the manse has come the largest proportion of eminent men in Scotland The manse resembled the English vicarage in its simplicity of life, its large families, and its spirit of idealism. Simplicity of life gave to its children bodily health and happiness and patience ; its family circle and interests were too large for 1 For statistics see Sons of the Manse, by the Rev. A. W. Fergusson, B.D. (Gardner), 166 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE introspection or imaginary grievances; and its sense of the spiritual formed an imperishable background of immortality. But the Scots manse differed enormously from the English vicarage in its racial influence. It was in- comparably more the centre of national consciousness. It became the embodiment of Scotland wherever her children wandered. It inspired from early childhood that loyalty which is the meaning of patriotism. If, then, the peculiar genius of the Scots people, which reached its height in the nineteenth century, produced a national type at once progressive and re- ligious, the sources from which those qualities sprang have an interest more than reminiscent. Progress is not simply confined to education, nor even to discipline, unless discipline is accepted as the way of life. What John Henry Newman wrote eighty years ago is true enough to-day: If virtue be a mastery over the mind, if its end be action, if its perfection be universal order, harmony and peace .. . the problem of statesmen of this age is how to educate the masses; and literature and science cannot give the solution, Faith, not knowledge or argument, is our principle of action. . . . Intrinsically excellent and noble as are scientific pursuits and worthy of a place in a liberal education, and fruitful in temporal gifts to the com- munity, still they are not, and cannot be, the instruments 167 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT of an ethical training. The apprehension of the un- seen is the only known principle of subduing moral evil, educating the multitude, and organising society. And whereas man is born for action, action flows not from inferences, but from impressions—not from reasonings, but from faith. If it is reasonable to explain the national charac- teristics of the nineteenth century in Scotland as a triumph of spiritual discipline and to associate with that rule of conduct extraordinary progress in com- merce and life, is it not within the boundaries of this examination of such moral values to consider in con- clusion the attitude of modern thought toward the spiritual ? 168 CHAPTER VII THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES I T has been suggested in an earlier chapter that in the long conflict between authoritative Chris- tianity and the material world the Church evolved a science of theology which, being defective in its spiritual values, was finally challenged upon material issues and discountenanced. To take a familiar in- stance, when the Kirk of Scotland was embarrassed by the higher critic with his pointed exposures of Scriptural fallibility an immediate impression was given that God had perished in the ruins. The corner- stone of authority appeared to have broken in twain. The consequences were soon visible in every section of society. Not only Presbyterianism, but education as well, lost its early quality of renunciation, so that in Scotland to-day mental stamina and the ideal of pure knowledge have lost their old meaning. The same depreciation of values higher than commercial prestige are a commonplace of modern civilization. These results are more and more engaging the serious 169 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT examination of social historians. And yet the causes of decay in contemporary standards are less easy to define than those, for example, in Scotland. ‘There is not so much observable chaos as a vacuum in civilization created by the disappearance of certain intense and volcanic psychological forces. These may have been inspired by religion, patriotism, or some other human emotionalism. It is their disappearance, not their nature, that is significant. In their place other forces, not unfamiliar, but never hitherto supreme, are on trial, and in their turn will receive the praise or condemnation of history. In the course of this inadequate outline there has been small hope of any achievement beyond the sug- gestion of some lines of inquiry. ‘The presence of the witch in the social structure has symbolized the natural proclivity of all humanity to degenerate from ethical progress into the more easy state of material stasis. On the other side the Church has evidenced, however crudely and however mistakenly, the ideal of spiritual energy. It has been emphasized that out of witchcraft came science, and it is a dream of mechanical conquest that has principally misled and deluded modern civilization. 1 «No storm is so insidious as a perfect calm, and no enemy so dangerous as the absence of all enemies” (St Ignatius). 170 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES Secondly, the sense of the world as a material entity responding to material laws removed the mystery of natural phenomena. At the same time it must be admitted that after long centuries of travail the un- folding of the revelation of natural law, however im- pressive its miracles, affected in no degree the spiritual and emotional in either literature or life. The re- action, so pathetic and disturbing, to-day toward the more superstitious hinterland of human beliefs is due to the supreme disillusionment that the wonders of scientific research have brought the ordinary man. What he expected who can say? What he has re- ceived is a stone instead of bread. The symptoms of this reaction are not explained away by war, or unsettled conditions, or advanced knowledge, for all these things have existed in one way or another before. They can only indicate a realization of failure. In the most cursory examination of Western civilization to-day the noticeable factor is the spirit of energy combined with the spirit of unrest. They are the fruit not of the grey delusion that out of bloodshed emerges content, but of that more ancient knowledge that man cannot live by bread alone. Our ancestors did not travel in automobiles, but their vision of life was steadier than ours. It was also loftier, The genius of the age is mediocrity. As José 171 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT Enrique Rodo remarks in his moving criticism of modern American standards of life: The clash between the democratic rule and the higher life becomes a fatal reality when that rule imparts the disregard of even legitimate superiorities and the substi- tution of mechanical government for a faith in heroism (in Carlyle’s sense). All in civilization that is more than material excellence, economic prosperity, is a height that will be levelled when moral authority is given to the average mind. ‘Though there be no longer external invading hordes to hurl themselves upon the beacon lights of civilization with a might now devastating and now regenerating, the high culture of to-day should guard itself against the soft and gradual dissolvent work of those other crowds, pacific, even educated—the un- escapable multitudes of the vulgar, whose Attila might well be personified in “Mr Homais,” whose heroism is shrewdness, ordered by an instinctive repugnance for what is great; whose device is the leveller. Immovable indifference and quantitative superiority are its attributes, the usual result of its labours; yet is it not entirely incapable of rising to epic heights, usually of anger, giv- ing free reins to its antipathies. Charles Morice called it «those phalanxes of ferocious Prudhommes who have for their device Mediocrity, and march together in their hatred of all that is extraordinary.” Elevated to power, these Prudhommes will make of their triumphant will an organized hunting-party against all that shows aptitude or daring wing to fly high. Its social formula will be a democracy which leads to the consecration of Pope Anyone, the coronation of King Average. They will hate merit as a rebellion. In their dominion all noble 172 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES superiority will be like a marble statue placed in a miry road to be spattered by the mud of any passing waggon. They will call the dogmatism of common sense, wisdom ; mean aridness of heart, gravity ; adaptation to the mediocre, sound judgment; and bad taste, manly indifference to trifles. Their notion of justice will lead them either to substitute in history the immortality of great men by the common forgetfulness of all, or to preserve it with the equal memory of a Mithridates who knew the names of all his soldiers. Its manner of republicanism will resemble that of Fox, who used to submit his projects to the criterion of that member who seemed to him the most perfect type of the country gentleman, judging by the limitation of his faculties and the rudeness of his gestures. What were the primary causes of this crude and blatant materialism, which more than any orgy of the witch are bringing their to-morrow of sorrow and misery? They arose very largely through the diminishing sense of values and the consequent progress of the gospel of wealth. It is important to appreciate the meaning of true and false values according to Ruskin and not John Stuart Mill. A true sense of values makes for that art of life that is independent of material burdens. As Mr F. J. Stimson recently wrote: Value may be defined as that which gives strength to life and elevation to the soul. Beauty does this; and purity of thought ; and high knowledge, both of past and + Ariel, translated by F. J, Stimson (Houghton Mifflin Co.) ya! THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT present ; and these are works of art and of teaching, not of science. And virtue, which is the word value as applied to the spirit, is born of thought and bred to character. It is toward such a conception of life that all re- ligion and philosophy has struggled. ‘The reliance of modern Western civilization upon mechanical methods for the expression of its energy is not merely deceptive in its obvious activity, but damaging in its evidences of progress judged by achievement. During the nineteenth century, in that prolonged Victorian era which is ceasing to seem so amusing, youth aspired to some idealism of life beyond its dreams of conquest. ‘To-day there are handbooks with the narrow path to wealth preached with the urgency of a Savonarola, and the biographies of unheroic men of millions are written with a kind of passionate fervour and like a new revelation of the Almighty The progress of the witch—to recur to the medieval symbol of worldliness—has never so speedily advanced as in our time, in the Western adoration of worldly success allied with the gospel of comfort. To the most casual observer of our ethical values the thirst to “get something out of 1 «The world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords,”—Lord Birkenhead’s Rectorial address to the students of Glasgow University, November 7, 1923. 174 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES life,’ to move from sensation to sensation, lends to our actions a kind of tremendous insignificance which, if it possesses more ultimate importance than the ro- tation of a squirrel in a cage, has, one cannot deny, hardly more actual reality. Such a civilization, with its scurried educational system, its empty idealism of human freedom and human welfare, its inability to concentrate steadily or feel consistently, confronted the Church with a challenge at once arrogant and complacent. It had summed up the spiritual as a wholesale shop might sum up the struggling trades- man, and with the greatest effrontery ordered the eternal mysteries into line. In other words, the gospel of comfort had no use for spiritual discipline of the Scots Kirk type. If life was to be worth living it must be easy-going. Like the theatre or the cinema or the latest fiction, the Church must preach according to the needs of the age. And the chief need of the age, apart from the commercial justification of life, was the sense of security both here and hereafter. There must be no mental acceleration beyond the affairs—those real affairs— of commerce. If the Church was to persist it must conform to new standards of existence, As the doctor must soften any notion of gravity in disease and so smooth it over that it is hardly there at all 175 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT the Church must be businesslike in its department. It must remember that the worshipper in the pew knows as much as the vicar in the pulpit, and that the tired business man cannot sit or stand or listen or achieve on the seventh day any of the normal functions of physical or mental acceleration. One must allow that the Church has more than met “the needs of the age.” It speedily hurried into obscurity the Victorian God of Judgment, stern but righteous, and set up in His stead a kind of unc- tuous bachelor uncle ever ready with expressions of congratulation and pardon. The historic priest who had struggled with the old degeneration of mankind now blossomed into the contemporary Christian rejoic- ing in bazaars and unembarrassed by any intellectual or traditional convictions. In this fashion the twentieth century dawned with an indescribable effulgence. The whole horizon of life being thus drawn down to the limits of the world, the sense even of the mystery and wonder of the universe faded more and more from contemporary thought, or found compensation and satisfaction in the marvels of purely mechanical and scientific achieve- ments. Such phases are symptoms of all civilizations in twilight, but the faculty for conducting national affairs without any particular ethical or spiritual con- 176 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES victions is an original contribution to the history of mankind. Not that the idea of the spiritual has vanished, Rather has it materialized and become shop-soiled. No longer feared, it provides in a nervy age a sense of delicious intimacy. Dragged down to earth, its manifestations are now the topic of tea- tables and the subject of newspaper articles. After all the long years of searching and denial, after all the ecstasies of the mystic and the agonies of the martyr, the spiritual is proclaimed the most accessible and amenable of the human attributes. To examine evidences of this modern attitude toward the things that are of heaven is not simply to outline certain familiar examples of contemporary thought, but to let such examples serve as their own commentary upon the sense of values that is satisfied with their conclusions. One of the most arresting features in the works of writers upon “ metapsychics” (to use the term of Professor Richet) is the rather injured attitude that a “new” science should be combated by malicious and material enemies. In what sense spiritualism (as apart from a natural interpretation of the sub- conscious) can be regarded either as “new” or a ‘science’? is perplexing. So long as the super- natural explanation of admittedly baffling phenomena M 177 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT is maintained it is older than all the sciences, and will continue to meet with opposition until it can supply the evidences of proof required by all hypotheses and also until it ceases to lower the plane of spiritual values. Any examination of the assumptions of its several lines of investigation produces no evidence that is either beyond the possibility of a natural interpretation or that, if it is incomprehensible, warrants any spiritual explanation. In what sense is it “new” or “scientific”? It is new only in the sense that it is represented by a body of persons devoted to psychical research. In what sense has knowledge of the psychic advanced? Apart from documentary records, it has if anything advanced only from the supernatural to the natural, and usually from the superstitious to the scientific. Unless modern research, undertaken as it is by men of trained observation and integrity, can afford evidence that proves the co-operation of an ex- traneous personality in relation to the human mind the spiritualistic explanation must perish, and is perishing. How much of the ancient lore of the witch is now declared as belonging to the subconscious is sufficient indication of the way the tide is running, since practically all the evidence recently sustained as supernatural is now relegated to the subconscious, 178 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES What remains must for a while meet the final test of all. That test will never be substantiated by cross- correspondence, or messages in envelopes, or photo- graphs of ghosts. If the spiritual exists beyond the yearning of the soul of man it is severed from the material not merely by evidence, but by reason. To assume that the spiritual is upon the same natural and ethical plane as the material is to degrade the most sublime and most passionate force in human history. IT In a candid examination of the psychic it is not an essential that one should have attended séances, since the records of séances are at anyone’s disposal. What is essential is that the evidence should either provide irrefutable proof of extraneous influence or that, lacking such proof, the general atmosphere of the negotiations should coincide with a reasonable belief in the ethical nobility of the spiritual plane. Without either of these two attributes psychical in- vestigation may have (and assuredly has) immense scientific discoveries to reveal in the subconscious processes of the human mind, but it must cease to claim any direct correspondence with the spiritual ie, THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT world. It may seem a dogmatic test, but after so many thousands of years of persistent depreciation of spiritual values it possesses at least the support of time and of eternity. The great moral contribu- tion of the scientific spirit has been the passion for pure knowledge. What is inaccurate must be sacri- ficed. With this sense of the scientific attitude toward all evidence it has been a matter of contro- versy that the spiritualist refuses to admit the credentials of men trained, to put it no higher, in the phenomena of the human mind and body. Threatened by such an investigation the spiritualist pleads that the supernatural is a special domain like no other department of knowledge, or that a medium is averse to strangers, or that the spirit of incredulity hurts the feelings of the attendant immortals from ‘the ather:sidt.7: Before the more specialized departments of psychical phenomena are noticed it should be ob- served that there are within the experience of the majority of people episodes that are inexplicable except upon the grounds of supernatural agency. In other words, we are all more or less partisans of the plaintiff. How much is our evidence worth? In the vast majority of cases such incidents gain value by hearsay. There is no more elusive person than 180 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES the man your uncle met. Like stories of haunted houses, first-hand evidence is difficult to find, and in practically all instances unreliable upon examination, It is also extraordinarily conventional. The inherent instinct toward the dramatic in life is also a persistent danger, and the craze for sensation has no convincing representation of sincerity. At the same time, it is true that in all ages the presence of cryptesthesia, or “a hidden sensibility,” has pro- duced an accumulation of similar phenomena sufficient to indicate secret forces of the subconscious respect- ing things unknown and visions of people, alive or dying, who are at a distance. But the origin of such phenomena must be emphasized. Premonitions have never produced any evidence of knowledge which 1s not experienced by telepathic conditions, however mysterious these may be. ‘The evidence is there- fore all upon the natural, not the supernatural, plane. Beyond attested cases of telepathic correspondence (both by arrangement and not by arrangement), the case for the more sensational by-paths of the psychic is more for fiction than for serious attention, and must be left at that. When a lady states that her house contains “an elemental” she is following her instinct for social prestige, and when a ghost is seen it is 181 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT lee. the perquisite of a particular type of imagina- tive mind, It is also a weakness in all human nature to meet acceptable knowledge more than half-way. The subconscious removes intellectual doubts as our modern physicians say it removes physical disabilities. An example of profound credulity in an eminent man of proved intellectual acumen is provided by a cer- tain record of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Let it be allowed that no man can prove the origin of the in- formation he quotes. Is the spiritualistic hypothesis then established? Most certainly not. It must present some sense of value or reality and some adequate reason for the miraculous inter-relationship between material and spiritual. And there is appar- ently some purpose in a close scrutiny of the inci- cident, because it was recorded by an eminent spiritualist, has been since quoted by Professor Richet, and only last year was again emphasized in a speech by Sir Arthur. It is fair therefore to approach it as a notable instance. And yet it baflles and eludes with its inconsequence and irrelevance. It produces once more that sense of bewilderment and uneasiness lest by some tragic declension the spiritual world is really surging with aimless spirits who, knowing all, have lost the gift * Authors’ Club, November rg, 1923. 182 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES of coherence or are like frail mortals on the wrong exchange. Upon April 4th, 1917, I awoke with a feeling that some communication had been made to me of which I had only carried back one word, which was ringing in my head. That word was ‘“Piave.” To the best of my belief I had never heard that word before. As it sounded like the name of a place I looked up the index of my atlas . . . a river in Italy some forty miles behind the front lines, which at that time was victoriously advancing. ... I could not think how any military event of consequence could arise there, but none the less I was so impressed that I drew up a statement that some such event would occur there and had it signed by my secretary and witnessed by my wife, with the date April 4th attached. Now the arid facts of this momentous affair are these: Considerably before the Italian forces were operating on the Piave Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dreamed that he heard the name. The months passed, and the Piave became a commonplace. Here, therefore, was a message from a spiritual friend. But what an amazingly fruitless one! Sir Arthur had, one gathers, no personal tie in Italy, and there were infinitely greater crises in the war. The voice, having pronounced this single name, vanished, never to return. It had won its great opportunity of con- verting the world, and it lamentably failed. One 182 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT lingers over the appalling futility of such a spiritual agency. If the movement on the Piave was known among the stars so long before, then the catastrophe of the Dardanelles was no secret, the Tsar was doomed, the fate of the Lusitania was ordained, and the shadow of death had already fallen over the Hampshire. But it is not to avert such calamities that the voices speak, but, like the oracles of old, to utter mystic and pliant words which will never either afford a fruitful interpretation or suffer a deserved rebuff. The secondary type of evidence met half-way is the familiar assemblage of data invariably associated with doctors or deans or judges, and thus given an almost immaculate and incontrovertible stamp of truth. The following 1s typical: The writers of an article on ‘‘ Visible Apparitions” in the Nineteenth Century of July, 1884, who are secretaries of the ghost-seeking society, relate a case of the kind communicated to them by Sir Edmund Hornby, late Chief Judge of the Supreme Consular Court of China and Japan, who describes himself as a lawyer by education, family, and tradition, wanting in imagination and no believer in miracles. It was his habit to allow reporters to come to his house in the evening to get his written judgments for the next day’s paper. On this occasion he had written out his judgment and left it with the butler for the re- porter, who was expected to call for it. Having gone to 184 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES bed, and to sleep, he was awakened soon by a tap at the door, which, when he took no notice, was repeated. In reply to his call, ‘‘ Come in,” the reporter solemnly entered and asked for the judgment. Thereupon ensued a dia- logue between Sir E. Hornby—who referred him again and again to the butler, protesting against the unwarrant- able intrusion—and the reporter, who persisted in his earnest requests for the judgment. Impressed at last by his solemn earnestness, and fearful of awakening his wife (who had slept soundly during all the energetic and ani- mated dialogue), Sir Edmund gave him the gist of the judgment, which he appeared to take down in shorthand, after which he apologized for his intrusion and withdrew. It was then just half-past one. When Lady Hornby awoke, as she did immediately, the whole incident was related to her. Next day, when Sir Edmund entered the Court, the usher announced to him the sudden death of the re- porter, some time between one and half-past one. The cause of death, as ascertained by a formal inquest, was heart-disease. The poor man had not left his house the night before. Here then is a precise and circumstantial story related by a person of eminence and ability, accustomed to weigh evidence, and confirmed (for the writers say so) by his wife. Naturally it attracted much attention, and much jubilant attention from those who were specially interested in ghosts and apparitions. The Spectator saw in it, I be- lieve, incontestable proof of the reality of the spiritual world. Amongst others it attracted the attention of Mr Balfour, the editor of the North China Herald, who was well acquainted with Sir Edmund and the reporter alluded to. Inaletter to the Nineteenth Century (November, 1884) 185 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT this gentleman asks the editor to compare the story with the following remarks : “‘1, Sir Edmund says Lady Hornby was with him at the time, and subsequently awoke. I reply that no such person was in existence. Sir Edmund’s second wife had died two years previously, and he did not marry again till three months after the event he relates. “2, Sir Edmund mentions an inquest on the body. Il reply, on the authority of the coroner, that no inquest was ever held. «<2, Sir Edmund’s story turns upon the judgment of a certain case, which was to be delivered next day, the 2oth January, 1875. There is no record of any such judgment in the Supreme Court and Consular Gazette, of which I am now editor. “4, Sir Edmund says that the editor died at one in the morning. This is wholly inaccurate; he died between eight and nine a.M., after a good night’s rest.” The editor of the Nineteenth Century, having submitted Mr Balfour’s letter to Sir E. Hornby, subjoins that gentle- man’s rejoinder, in which, after accusing Mr Balfour of want of good-feeling and taste in not having written to him privately instead of amusing the public at his expense, he practically, though ungraciously, admits the whole case against him.? Beyond the range of this perfectly vague and more or less recreational proclivity there is the genuine psychic investigator, who is as anxious to sift the grain from the chaff as any other research-worker, but in whom the intense spirit of hope has until 1 Henry Maudsley, M.D., Natural Causes. 186 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES recently obscured the philosophical touchstone of spiritual values. The serious student of the psychic, in searching for a natural explanation instead of a supernatural, is simply following the long course of knowledge. Long since all nature was supernatural. To-day the province of the witch narrows and narrows. Even what is still mysterious is not there- fore spiritual. It is possible to provide an excellent example of the handling of the inexplainable as the material awaiting explanation. I refer to the commercial use of the divining-rod. It is no longer disputed that certain individuals can discover hidden springs of water by the use of a hazel twig. It is further known that this instinct has proved the verdict of geologists utterly at sea. And yet could anything be more incredible except upon a super- natural hypothesis? Nor can it be said that any perfectly satisfactory explanation is there to support the materialist. But it is beyond even the capacity of the determined spiritualist to associate the common- place province of estimates and contracts with ghostly conveyance! The divining-rod therefore is an inter- esting example of natural law presented in a form so complex as to elude a scientific formula. Otherwise the tendency from the supernatural hypothesis to the natural is strengthened year by 187 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT year, and in a very brief survey of several of the more prominent activities of the spiritualist it 1s an arduous task to perceive either the shadow of the spiritual or the absence of the material. (a2) Table-turning (modern name ‘telekinesis ”) was practised in the days of Tertullian, when people were as desirous. of information in advance as any Wall Street speculator, and also greatly fascinated by the idea of extraneous and possibly portentous spiritual encounters. That the messages afforded by such séances then and now have never produced any attested sequence of facts unknown or unsus- pected to contemporary thought or circumstances is one of those arid truths that stand for sane judgment. The material will very probably produce the material. But what of the physically impossible? What of © levitation? It is stated that the powers of raising the human body (if true) can be produced only by extraneous influence. ‘The name of Hume is quoted, but unhappily Hume was not photographed, and as Sir William Barrett scouts his pretensions on the hypothesis of hypnotism let smaller sceptics follow suit. Levitation has been recorded all through the ages, and if it is a mystery of the magnetic forces of the subconscious must remain for the moment in the province of speculation. But the argument for the 188 | THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES spiritual operating through the material is utterly dis- counted upon the assumption that to the supernatural muscular limitations do not present an insuperable problem. In other words, only a very beggarly idea of the supernatural would restrict its miracles to the level of the power of a man of normal vigour. As Professor Richet most excellently points out: These movements are produced through a human being and do not exceed the limits of average human muscular power. They are produced easily when the object is light, with more difficulty when it is heavy, and are not produced at all when it is very heavy. To say that the force that displaces objects is limited, and approximates to human muscular power, advances the enquiry some- what, for if a transcendental force were essentially different in its nature from known mechanical forces there would seem no reason that a weight of a ton should not be raised as easily as a weight of an ounce." (b) Ectoplasm, There is probably no department of psychical phenomena that attracts so much curiosity as the materialization of viscous semblances emanat- ing from the human form. It is claimed that such emanations assume the appearance of other persons utterly unlike the medium. Until such a claim is demonstrated for a larger and less credulous circle of inquirers it cannot be accepted. But, once more, 1 Thirty Years of Psychical Research, 189 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT what purpose, spiritual or scientific, does the recorded evidence suggest? Is the phenomena “new” and therefore worthy of hope, or ancient and full of delusion? Professor Richet refers to ectoplasm as though it were a modern and startling revelation of the un- seen. It is nothing of the kind. It has existed in the history of the psychic without either development or significance ever since the origins of witchcraft. In this connexion Sir Squire Sprigge has remarked, in his concise and deliberate way: Baron von Schrenck Notzing’s work is an unfortunate one to be brought forward as a record of scientific experi- ence because of the close way in which his description of materialisation phenomena follows the description given by well-known mystics. Cornelius Agrippa, originator of much semi-scientific disquisition, in his De Principis Rerum Naturalium mentioned the bitter fight which has gone on from the beginnings of history among philosophers concerning the matter which should be held as the origin of all things, and in that chapter, as well as throughout the treatise De Vanitate Omnium Scientiarum et Artium, betrays how intimately scientific research has been mixed up from the beginning of time with magic, this being par- ticularly the case in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, when the search for the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life engaged so much attention. ‘Thomas Vaughan, the author of Aula Lucis and eight or nine other treatises inculcating various mystical doctrines, acknowledges his 190 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES indebtedness to Agrippa, and in one of his essays postu- lates a kind of primordial stuff whose elements are com- pounded by God into ‘‘a sperm, viscous and slimy,” and throughout his writing speaks of something ‘not water otherwise than to the sight, but a coagulable fat humidity ” on the ‘‘ seminal viscosity of which vegetables feed.” In another place he speaks of ‘‘a subtle moisture but glutin- ous”; acertain ‘thick, permanent, saltish water that is dry and wets not the hands”; and of “viscous slimy water generated out of the fatness of the earth.” Vaughan claimed to have seen, handled, and tasted * what he believed to be the first matter, of which he says immediately later: ‘‘ In vegetables it oftentimes appears, for they feed not—-as some think—on water, but on this seminal viscosity that is hid in the water. This indeed they attract at the roots, and from thence it ascends to the branches, but sometimes it happens by the way to break out at the bark, where, meeting with the cold air, it subsists and congeals toa gum. ‘This congelation is not sudden, but requires some small time, for if you find it while it is fresh it is an exceedingly subtle moisture but glutinous, for it will spin into strings as small as any hair ; and had it passed up to the branches it had been formed —in time—to a plum or cherry.” Over and over again allusions are made in Vaughan’s eloquent and incom- prehensible essays to some volatile coagulable origin of all things, formed, under the direction of some divine chemistry, from all the elements, ‘‘ fire, air and pure earth, overcast indeed with water.” Compare some of those imaginings with the descriptions 1 A similar claim is made with the greatest gravity by modern spiritualists, who even promise to analyse what even a sceptic would allow should be beyond the material. 1gI THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT of the manifestations supposed to have taken place in connection with a medium, as recorded by Baron von Schrenck Notzing, and the similarity between the words of the modern scientist and the seventeenth-century mystic will be found striking.! Let it be added that phenomena, even in a “new science,” should not be discarded because they have lain more or less-dormant throughout time. Revela- tion awaits its own interpreters. Admittedly that is a fair statement. But on the other hand it is equally fair to express some dismay that when psychical investigation has encouraged every path to spiritual correspondence the kind of evidence of materializa- tion even from an observer so scientific and so free from dogmatism as Professor Richet is marked with a shoddy triviality that rings out its resounding verdict for the material. Professor Richet records: At the Villa Carmen I saw another very well-defined materialization, now published for the first time. On the day preceding my departure, after a long stay at Algiers, Bien Boa, speaking by the voice of Marthe, said, in order to detain me, ‘‘Stay! You will see her whom you desire.” It will easily be understood that I stayed. On the next day, almost as soon as the curtains were 1 Physic and Fiction, 2 Her voice was halting and wooden and guttural, a sort of Punchi- nello’s voice. (Richet’s footnote.) 192 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES drawn, they were reopened, and between them appeared the face of a young and beautiful woman with a kind of gilt ribbon or diadem covering her fair hair and the crown of her head. She was laughing heartily and seemed greatly amused ; I can still vividly recall her laugh and her pearly teeth. She appeared two or three times, showing her head and then hiding it, like a child playing bo-peep. Then she refused to return. The general said to me, “Put your hand behind the curtain and you can touch her hair,” which I did ; and he added, ‘It is soft like silk, is it not?” I replied, ‘‘ Excuse me, it is more like horse-hair,” and in fact this was the sensation produced. I then received a light tap on the back of the hand; the hair was felt no more, and a voice from behind the curtain said, ‘< Bring scissors to-morrow.” I brought the scissors next day. The Egyptian queen returned, but only showed the crown of her head with very fair and very abundant hair; she was anxious to know if I had brought the scissors. I then took a handful of her long hair, but I could scarcely distinguish the face that she kept concealed behind the curtain. As I was about to cut a lock high up, a firm hand behind the curtain lowered mine, so that I cut only about six inches from the end. As I was rather slow about doing this, she said in a low voice, “Quick! Quick!” and disappeared. I have kept this lock; it is very fine, silky, and undyed. Microscopical examination shows it to be real hair; and I am informed that a wig of the same would cost a thousand francs. Marthe’s hair is very dark, and she wears her hair rather short. It would seem that the purpose that this Egyptian prin- cess had in view was that I should cut off a lock of her hair (?), for I saw her no more. Next day, in visiting Mme Noel, who was ill, I half saw, very vaguely, a N 193 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT fugitive form in the dressing-room which vanished as [| ap- proached. But my recollection of this is very undefined.' Even after a careful reading of this passage I am tempted to believe I am stupid enough to have fallen upon some flight of satire. It would seem unbeliey- able that anyone could claim material hair for spiritual revelation ! (c) Automatic writing may be summed up on its failure to produce any evidence of extraneous influence beyond a natural explanation. What it records is either already known or beyond proof or denial, being simply a vague and elusive message like “Piave.” It has never presented any national revela- tion of the future which should from an interested spiritual plane be conceivable ; it has never presented any personal information which could not have been derived by telepathy or the subconscious. (The imag- inary messages from eminent persons bear the stamp of earthly minds rather under than above the average. When Byron, hurried from the shades, remarks with petulance, Vex not the bard, his lyre is broken His last song sung, his last word spoken, one realizes the historical wisdom of respecting the silence of the dead !) 1 Thirty Years of Psychical Research. 194 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES But the spiritual explanation of automatic writing is no longer held by advanced investigators, to whom the material explanation is overwhelming. ““Let us put aside these divagations,” remarks Professor Richet; “they would only be matter for laughter if it were not for the melancholy fact that they have been accepted as genuine by honourable men. In fact they are but manifestations of the subconsciousness of the mediums, which is often below mediocrity.” (2) Mediums. In any examination of the claims of spiritualistic phenomena under trance conditions the same attitude should be employed—namely, given a supernatural or extraneous influence, has any con- vincing presentation of separate spiritual person- ality ever been produced, assuming that the spiritual is a higher plane than the material? Secondly, judg- ing by such evidence as is provided by spiritualists, is there any objection to the view that all such phenomena within the boundaries of material in- spiration are conditions, however mysterious, of the subconscious ? The medium is as ancient as the witch. The ‘“‘familiar spirit” was regarded with deepening sus- picion in the days of the Israelites, and has century 1 Thirty Years of Psychical Research, 195 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT by century baffled and disappointed, being unexplain- able and yet profoundly provocative and disappointing. The Church accordingly forbade all séances, satisfied with the comprehensive ruling that as the spiritual was perfection, and these revelations were puerile, they must come from the Devil. Such an attitude displayed a rough-and-ready scepticism that is re- freshing in our hazardous modern reverence for the obscure. The actual trance conditions of the medium have altered hardly at all during the long retreat of super- stition before science. All through the progress of the medium the spiritual hypothesis has been advanced upon the assumption that by no other channel could an uneducated woman express erudite knowledge. There is no necessity to accept such a sensational verdict. In direct correspondence, a spiritual person- ality anxious to provide proof of survival after death (upon which Sir Oliver Lodge has repeatedly laid stress) would reveal some information not known to mortality unless the spiritual is upon the same plane as the material, which is impossible. Wherefore to claim for the spiritual what can be performed equally upon material hypotheses is to court ultimate con- fusion, When Sir William Barrett, in his experi- ments with an unprofessional medium, convinced 196 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES himself that he could communicate with her from the distance of a mile he demonstrated (at any rate to his own satisfaction) the astounding properties of telepathy. Scientific inquiry was to that extent furthered. But if it was anything it was a demon- stration of natural, not spiritual, law. Beyond what is obviously inspired by subconscious correspondence there remains no evidence whatever that any medium has lifted the screen that must divide a material from a spiritual world. Numerous persons are assured they have received messages from their deceased relatives. To deny the existence of extraneous influence is therefore naturally an affront. When any person is refreshed by the belief that the dead have returned there can be no absolute and convincing counter-argument upon the lines of practical proof. But it can be stated that mediums or persons with psychic gifts perform greater miracles without any dependence upon, or recognition of, the supernatural, It can be further pointed out that the description of another world is invariably in accord- ance with the religious denomination or social status of the narrator. In other words, it is a fair assump- tion that however human ideas of the spiritual state may change from decade to decade and century to century the eternal should reflect an unmistakable 197 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT conservatism. To examine the spiritual by the spiritual is surely a fair and honest hypothesis. It has been advanced that the spiritual visitants, appreciating the rank scepticism of this passing world, are determined to prove their survival for the consola- tion of their relatives. Were that so, they make a pitiful enough exhibition of their incapacity. Their failure is so profound that they are convicted upon their own evidence. But let them be judged on that basis. Let their words be studied as voices from eternity where all is known and all is perfection. The examples that follow are not carefully sought, but are typical in their incoherence, their gross associa- tion, and their lack of any conceivable importance. They ring out like mournful bells sounding some hopeless and inevitable presage of extinction. Long since, in Elizabethan days, the founder of modern spiritualism, Dr John Dee, was duped by a scamp called Kelly, and under the impression that he could turn gross metal into gold died in great obscurity and indigence. But his records of conver- sations with the spiritual are just as promising as their successors. They are in fact just as coherent, just as illuminating, just as commonplace. Indeed, the following is, on the whole, more coherent and not so childish as the majority of modern communications. 198 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES It means nothing—it suggests no objective. It carries the note of its age, and is playfully evasive when crude reality is sought. She. Whose man are you? Dee. 1 am the servant of God, both by my bound duty, and also (I hope) by His adoption. A voice. You shall be beaten if you tell. She. Am I not a fine maiden? Give me leave to play in your house ; my mother told me she would come and dwell here. [She went up and down with most lively gestures of a young girl playing by herself, and divers times another spake to her from the corner of my study by a great perspective glass, but none was seen beside herself.| Shall I? Iwill. [Now she seemed to answer me in the afore- said corner of my study.| 1 pray you let me tarry a little. [Speaking to me in the foresaid corner. | Dee. Tell me what you are. She. I pray you let me play with you a little, and I will tell you who I am. Dee. In the name of Jesus then, tell me. She. I rejoice in the name of Jesus, and I am a poor little maiden; I am the last but one of my mother’s children; I have little baby children at home. Dee. Where is your home? She. I dare not tell you where I dwell, I shall be beaten. Dee. You shall not be beaten for telling the truth to them that love the truth; to the Eternal Truth all creatures must be obedient. She. I warrant you I will be obedient; my sisters say they must all come and dwell with you. 199 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT Dee. I desire that they who love God should dwell with me, and I with them. She. I love you now you talk of God. Dee. Your eldest sister—her name is Esiméli. She. My sister is not so short as you make her. Dee. O, I cry you mercy! She is to be pronounced Esimili ! Kelly. She smileth ; one calls her, saying, ‘‘ Come away, maiden.” She. I will read over my gentlewomen first ; my master Dee will teach me if I say amiss. Dee. Read over your gentlewomen, as it pleaseth you. She. I have gentlemen and gentlewomen; look you here. Kelly. She bringeth a little book out of her pocket. She pointeth to a picture in the book. She. Is not this a pretty man ? Dee. What is his name ? She. My [mother] saith his name is Edward; look you, he hath a crown upon his head; my mother saith that this man was Duke of York.} There was no suggestion then or since that this revelation served any ostensible purpose. But it over- whelmed Dr Dee, whom an influential spiritualist has hailed as the founder of psychical research. The following is a séance recorded by Sir Oliver Lodge some three hundred years after the foregoing example of what is claimed to be a new and pro- gressive science: + 'W. H. Davenport Adams, Witch, Warlock, and Magician, 200 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES The full account of these sittings is long, and would require a great deal of annotation to make the details clear. For the sake of brevity, I propose merely to abstract them. There are a number of erroneous statements, some of them to be partially accounted for by the fact that Dr and Mrs C. are cousins (a fact which I did not know, and which Phinuit did not ascertain); so he mixed their relatives at the second sitting. The family seems to be a very large one. I quote later the misstatements, but first I pick out the correct ones or those which require comment. Sitting No. 43. Monday evening, December 23rd. Present: Dr and MrsC. and O. J. L. (Statement correct when not otherwise noted.) **How’s little Daisy? She will get over her cold. But there’s something the matter with her head. There’s somebody round you lame and somebody hard of hearing. That little girl has got music in her. This lady is fidgety. There are four of you, four going to stop with you, one gone out of the body. One got irons on his foot. Mrs Allen in her surroundings is the one with iron on leg. {Allen was maiden name of mother of lame one.] There’s about four hundred of your family. There’s Kate; you callher Kitty. She’s the one that’s kind ofacrank. Trust- worthy, but cranky. She will fly off and get married, she will. Thinks she knows everything, she does. [This is the nurse-girl, Kitty, about whom they seem to have a joke that she is a walking compendium of information. ] [ An envelopewith letters written inside N—H—P—O—Q was here handed in, and Phinuit wrote down B—J—R— O—I—S, not in the best of tempers.] A second cousin of your mother’s drinks. The little dark-eyed one is Daisy. I like her. She can’t hear very well. The lame one is asister’s child. [A cousin’s child, and one née Allen, really. ] 201 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT The one that’s deaf in her head is the one that’s got the music in her. That’s Daisy, and she’s going to have the paints I told you of. [Fond of painting.] She’s growing up to be a beautiful woman. She ought to have a paper ear. [An artificial drum had been contemplated.] You have an Aunt Eliza. ‘There are three Maries, Mary the mother, Mary the mother, Mary the mother. [Grand- mother, aunt, and granddaughter.] Three brothers and two sisters your lady has. Three in the body. There were eleven in your family, two passed out small. [Only know of nine.] Fred is going to pass out suddenly. He married a cousin. He writes. He has shining things. Lorgnettes. Heisaway. He’s got a catchy trouble with heart and kidneys, and will pass out suddenly.” [Not the least likely. I have inquired and find that the ‘ Fred” supposed to be intended is still alive in 1909. O. J. L.]? It is not my desire to provoke amusement at this record, which contains actual data beyond normal ex- planation. Given certain hypotheses, the conclusions of Sir Oliver Lodge are both fair and moderate. But such evidence, if it proves anything, proves the extra- ordinary powers of the subconscious upon the purely material plane. Every word rings with sympathetic thought-transference. ‘To attempt to associate the spiritual with such fantastic evolutions is utterly contrary to the most crude conception of spiritual values. That many intelligent persons should claim to be satisfied with the lowering of the spiritual to 1 The Survival of Man. 2.02 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES commonplace standards can be understood only upon the drastic hypothesis that material and spiritual are equal and similar. Under such a monstrous assertion one might as well set out to convince the Peculiar People that they are not peculiar. Now the record just quoted is admittedly in- offensive. But upon the spiritualist’s hypothesis that the material consciousness is unaffected by its new environment all messages from the unseen have the same validity. In other words, one must not be snobbish in things spiritual! Where, then, does one halt? At what stage does one snub the supernatural ? There can be no going back. Upon the evidence provided by the spiritualist the world to come holds possibilities far more appalling than mere hell-fire! To the normal mind the following séance is a typical instance of clairvoyance: Medium| Mr Tyrre/]. With the gentleman right against the wall I see a gentleman pointing for someoneacross there. He would be fifty-six before passing into spirit life. A fairly well-built man. He is surrounded with sea-shells, and I should judge he would be passionately fond of music. Probably his whole time would be spent with music. He wears a dark tweed suit. Not passed away many years. He holds up acornet and had something to do with a band. His name is Isaac Shepherd. I get Westfield Road, Shipley, with this gentleman. He is bringing a young soldier with him, and he wants me to tell you that this is Mrs Varley’s 2.03 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT boy. He says: ‘‘ Dry the tears from your eyes, Mother.” He is glad he has done his duty. [ Recognised. | With you, friend. What a beautiful girl comes there in your surroundings! She isin spirit robes. As I look at you your face is lit up with a beautiful mantle. She is holding over your head such a beautiful basket of flowers, and across the basket these words illuminated: ‘‘ In affec- tionate memory of Martha Collins who passed away 9th March, 1898.” [The person addressed did not know her, but someone else in the audience recognised the name. | With this friend here: there is a beautiful lady in your surroundings, about sixty-four or sixty-five. She might be older, but would carry age well. Ithink she was a lady that knew about spiritualism, and she seems to me to have done a little magnetic healing in her time. She has been passed away some time, for the earth conditions are falling away. Her name is Mrs Tate. Answer. I know her. Medium. Did she know about spiritualism ? Answer. Yes. [Cousin of someone present, but not a former member of the church. | Medium. With our friend here, a beautiful girl. I should take her to be seventeen before passing. She was trying to show herself this afternoon, but could not. She is looking round for someone. Her hair flows down her back. She is in spirit robe, and holding up an anchor, and on the anchor are these words: ‘‘In affectionate re- membrance of Edith (Whitehope or W hiteoak), who passed away October Ist, 1889.” A long while back. It is her birthday to-morrow in spirit. 2.04. THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES Answer. Yes. Medium. She says something about letting her mother know. Answer. Twilllet her mother know. The mother was here this afternoon. Medium. There isa gentlemanhere, about seventy-three or seventy-four years old. A well-built gentleman, some- what redin complexion. I should think he would not have ailed much as a general rule, yet I think he would get a little bit feeble before passing away. He wears a kind of Scotch tweed suit. Full in body, with moustache and beard round here [pointing], and bushy eyebrows. He is surprised to come back here. He would have been surprised if asked to come toa spiritualist church in earth life. I get Thomas Rhodes, Daisy Hill Lane. He is showing me now a steel that butchers use; probably a butcher in earth life. [Recognised as ‘This lady’s uncle.” |* Ill Now it is as difficult to disprove that an immortal soul wears a tall hat as it is to prove he wears a crown of gold. The standpoint of the spiritualist is unassail- able upon material grounds. It becomes incredible only when estimated by even the most moderate spiritual hypothesis. ‘It were better,” wrote Bacon in one of his essays, “to have no opinion of God at all, than such an opinion as is unworthy of Him; for the one is unbelief, the other is contumely: and certainly superstition is the reproach of the Deity.” 1 J, Arthur Hill, Spiritualism, its History, Phenomena, and Doctrine, 205 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT Once again the whole basis for judgment returns, as it must always return, to some compromise between the conception of the supernatural and its relationship with the natural. How can a compromise be accomplished? Has in fact there ever been an impressive historical instance of the spiritual ruling human affairs? When a despairing or antagonistic mind condemns religion as the historical enemy of liberty and progress it is coloured by the background of medieval theology or modern Evangelicalism. It is impressed by the ebb and flow of the warfare between two worlds. A vengeful God or a sentimental Christ—here has been the persistent, enduring reproach of the spiritual which has provided the outline of this survey. For weal or woe the Roman Church sold the thrones of heaven at a price, since Christianity was not within the grasp of a gross and superstitious peasantry. The spiritual was therefore degraded to the comprehension of the crowd, and being comprehended was finally suspect and discredited. Secondly, it has been shown how the Reformation, pledged to reaction from the things of earth, pro- duced a sense of eternity that was not a vision, but a nightmare. In preaching the urgency of personal salvation Calvinism was progressive enough, but it also presented a heaven of portentous judgments 206 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES instead of an evolutionary plane of ultimate per- fection, Such spiritual discipline hardened national character, as was evident in Scotland, because it gave faith to life and a lively sense of that mortality in which progress is rooted. But it was a definite advance upon a by-road. The succeeding stage, produced by the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, either ignored the spiritual as unprofitable or degraded it to the deplorable Evangelicalism of “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.” In all the preceding agony of religious intolerance Almighty God had at least remained a figure remote and full of mystery. Hence it has evolved this approved depreciation of the spiritual which is the most striking apologia of metapsychics. What would seem at a glance to prove the bankruptcy of spiritualism is its greatest strength. The capacity of the human mind to credit what is incredible has always stood at the door of truth. Of all human terrors the most lasting (as it is the most inevitable) is the fear of death. Spiritualism is the latest emollient for a universal complaint. How does the spiritualist explain the absurdities of his evidence? It presents no difficulties whatever. The solution is so beguiling that it has eased the 207 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT wholesome dread in many a credulous and thought- less mind. It preaches the gospel of uninterrupted existence undisturbed even by the loss of cigarettes. How does spiritualism explain the seeming futility of the world it describes? It explains it by the ingenuous answer that the spiritual is on the same level as the material. This attitude toward eternity is after all the reflection of the modern mind. For a considerable time the Church, with no justification in Holy Writ or traditional doctrine, has comforted the bereaved with the assurance that death is but an amiable awakening in heaven. To this soporific doctrine, which entails neither forethought, honest endeavour, nor any ethical conception of this life or another, the spiritualist has added a new and final degradation, He has preached the gospel of chaos in heaven. There arises at this stage a very natural point, and one that concerns this unexpected credulity in an age admittedly sceptical and progressive. Un- happily scepticism has never ranked higher than its worth, and progress is a matter of opinion. There are none so eager in inquiry as the unorthodox, while pro- gress in mechanical and time-saving appliances must not be mistaken for progress in the higher standards of civilization. The rivalry between science and 208 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES superstition left the former by the end of the nine- teenth century in undisputed possession of the field. From that period onward there seemed no limits to the possibilities of the inventive genius. For a time —perhaps until the War sent a shudder throughout the world because of the machines of death that genius produced—the popular imagination was on fire with the wonders of our era. To-day the spirit of reaction is visible. In the amazing facilities of our modern existence there is missing that soul of permanence and individual expression concerning which science has no data and atheism no revela- tion. In the temporary interest shown in psychical phenomena there is this additional tragedy, that what- ever really exists beyond the inaccessible grottos of the human fantasy is already being claimed and summarized by science and passing as of yore from superstition into knowledge. The phase of spiritual- ism will pass. It may be—so disturbing are the concepts of the human mind—that with the last ebb of the belief in spiritualistic manifestations the veritable lamp of hope will flicker and die for the adherents of the “New Revelation.” It is a prospect that is not without its tragedy. Professor Charles Richet, in Thirty Years of Psychical Research, records: Q 2.09 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT supreme over the universe, is to invest moral distinctions with immensity and eternity, and lift them from the provincial stage of human society to the imperishable theatre of all being. When planted thus in the very substance of things, they justify and support the ideal estimates of the conscience; they deepen every guilty shame; they guarantee every righteous hope; and they help the will with a Divine casting vote in every balance of temptation.”2 ‘That morality has a basis in human society, that Nature has a Religion, surely makes the Death of the soul when left to itself all the more appalling. It means that, between them, Nature and morality provide all for virtue—except the Life to live it.? In other words, conviction of man’s place in the universe means character, because it means expres- sion. In our industrial civilization one of the most melancholy and disappointing factors has proved to be that, despite protective trade unions, old age pensions, medical panels, and the means of cheap amusement, the proletariat is aware of a physical and intellectual slavery which is apparently without release, because its origins are moral and not material. The chances of physical freedom are wonderful. The opportunities for ethical liberty have slowly vanished away. 1 Martineau, Wide the whole symposium on “ The Influences upon Morality of a Decline in Religious Belief,” Nineteenth Century, vol. i. 2 Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 212 THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES ———$ Dr Schweitzer has recently written : With the giving up of ethical ideals which accompanies our passion for reality our practical efficiency is not, therefore, improved, but diminished. It does not make the man of to-day a cool observer and calculator such as he supposes himself to be, for he is under the influence of opinions and emotions which are created in him by facts. All unconsciously he mixes with what is the work of his reason so much of what is emotional that the one spoils the other. Within this circle move the judgments and impulses of our society, whether we deal with the largest questions or the smallest. Individuals and nations alike, we deal indiscriminately with real and imaginary values, and it is just this confused medley of real and unreal, of sober thought and capacity for enthusiasm for the unmeaning, that makes the mentality of the modern man so puzzling and so dangerous." In a chapter of this book the expression of the spiritual in Scotland has been treated with some detail, because even if the influence of the super- natural upon the natural is challenged, even if it is advanced that character can be moulded at too stern a price, the incontrovertible fact remains, and is rather strengthened by such charges, that with faith civilization advances, even when it is dimmed by mis- conception and darkened by human violence. This conclusion is supported also by the sustained 1 The Decay and the Restoration of Civilization, 213 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT conviction and teaching of all human wisdom and revelation that the spiritual is won not dy, but against the material conception of life. However skilfully smoothed away, it was the solemn assertion of Christ that a man must be born again, or he cannot enter the-kingdom of heaven; that to love life is to lose the eternal values; that in the essence of worldliness is the poison that corrodes both body and soul. With our comfortable modern gospel the Church has struggled to explain away doctrines which would cause grave offence to greatly valued worshippers. But the fact remains. It is the Christian revelation. It is also a practical and historical truth. Science may reveal what is the relationship of the natural world to man. But it lies within historical evidence as much as mystical faith to emphasize the infinitely greater part that the spiritual has played in human destinies. Refuse to admit any save the material sources in the lives of idealists, saints, and martyrs; let it be allowed that they all laboured under some crude fanaticism, that the summum bonum was a vision which, however ex- cellent, was a splendid intellectual dream; the fact remains that beyond the material confines of know- ledge and custom, beyond necessity and inclination, some incomprehensible force drove such men to 214. THE DEPRECIATION OF SPIRITUAL VALUES point the way toward a deeper sense of human | °y *4° responsibility. The breath of God, blowing where it listeth, touches with its mystery of Life the dead souls of men, bears them across the bridgeless gulf between the natural and the spiritual, between the spiritually inorganic and the spirit- ually organic, endows them with its own high qualities, and develops within them these new and secret faculties by which those who are born again are said to see the Kingdom of God.* The tragedy of our civilization, leaving it arid and disturbed, surrounded by its marvels of mechani- cal ingenuity, and haunted by the shadow of the futile and evanescent, is the decay of ethical corre- spondence between the material and the spiritual. . Individuality has been submerged, and with it has passed the formation of character, and with the pride of knowledge has gone the genius of conviction and contemplation. It is observed with disillusionment that facts are unstable, and what is known is full of perplexity and contradiction. But it is also true now as always that behind reason is revelation, and be- hind the actual is the ideal. The fundamental essence of true civilization inclines therefore to be a rugged philosophy of life based upon the consecration of nature by morality. In it is little enough of the 1 Henry Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 215 _ THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT visionary philosophy of a golden age. It recognizes instead that the development of character is more precious than the modern ideal of communism in nationality. It perceives that progress is guided by individual idealism and not by an elusive dream of utilitarian affluence. 216 BIBLIOGRAPHY Apams, W. H. Davenport: Witch, Warlock, and Magician (Chatto and Windus). Biack, G. W.: Folk Medicine (publication of the Folklore Society). Buckie, H. T.: History of Civilization in England, vols. i, li, and 111 (Longmans, Green). Burton, J. H.: Criminal Trials in Scotland, vols. i and i (Chapman and Hall). CampBELL, J. G.: Superstitions of the Highlands (MacLehose). Cou.tton, G. G.: 4 Medieval Garner (Constable), Five Centuries of Religion (Cambridge University Press). Drummonp, Henry: Natural Law in the Spiritual World (Hodder and Stoughton). Fercusson, A. W.: Sons of the Manse (Matthew). Hart_anp, E.S.: The Science of Fairy Tales (Walter Scott). Hix, J. ArrHuR: Spiritualism, its History, Phenomena, and Doctrine (Cassell). Lecxy, W. E.: Rationalism in Europe, vol. i (Longmans, Green), History of European Morals (Longmans, Green). Levi, Exrenas: Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual, translated by Arthur Edward Waite (William Rider). Linton, E. Lynn: Witch Stories (Chapman and Hal). LopcE, Oxiver: The Survival of Man (Methuen). Mackinnon, James: 4 History of Modern Liberty, vols. i and ii (Longmans, Green). 217 THE PHILOSOPHY OF WITCHCRAFT MaipMENT, James: The Spottiswoode Miscellany, vols. i and ii (printed for the Spottiswoode Society). Marrianp, S. R.: The Dark Ages (F. and J. Rivington). Maupstey, Henry: Natural Causes and Supernatural Seeming (Kegan Paul). Micue.et, J.: La Sorciere, translated by L. J. Trotter (Simpkin, Marshall). Muir, P. McApam: Modern Substitutes for Christianity (Hodder and Stoughton). Murray, M. A.: The Witch Cult in Western Europe Oxford University Press). See also article in Folklore, vol. xxviii, No. 3. Napier, James: Folklore (Gardner). Norestein, Watiace: 4 History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 (Washington: American Historical Association. London: Oxford University Press). Park, Roswett: The Evil Eye Thanatology (Boston: Richard G. Badger). Payne, J. F.: English Medicine in the Anglo-Saxon Times (Oxford University Press). Pearson, Kari: Chances of Death, vol. ii (Edward Arnold). Pertricrew, T. J.: On Superstitions connected with the History and Practice of Medicine and Surgery (John Churchill). Provanp, W. S.: Puritanism in the Scottish Church (Gardner). Reape, Winwoop: The Martyrdom of Man (Kegan Paul). Ricuet, CuHaries: Thirty Years of Psychical Research (Collins). ScHWEITZER, ALBERT: The Decay and the Restoration of Civilization, translated by C. T. Campion (Black). Scot, RecinaLD: Discoverie of Witchcraft. Scorr, WaLTER : Demonology and Witchcraft (Murray). 218 BIBLIOGRAPHY SHARPE, C. K.: The History of Witchcraft in Scotland (Hamilton, Adams and Co.). SPRIGGE, SQUIRE: Physic and Fiction (Hodder and Stoughton). STorY, W. W.: Castle St Angelo and the Evil Eye (Chap- man and Hall). THORNDIKE, Lynn: 4 History of Magic and Experimental Sczence (Macmillan). TuRBERVILLE, A. S.: Mediaeval Heresy and the Inquisition (Crosby Lockwood). Watsh, J. J.: Medieval Medicine (Black). | Woorron, A. C.: Chronicles of Pharmacy, vols. i and ii (Macmillan). Miscellany of the Spalding Club, vols. i and v. Report of a Clerical and Medical Committee of Inquiry into Spiritual Faith and Mental Healing (Macmillan). Witches of Renfrewshire, The (published by Alexander Gardner). BeNOR OF WIFTGHGRART MR KELLO BY IAN FERGUSON Size 44x 5 inches, 7s. 6d. net EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS Daily Telegraph: <¢ A remarkable book, vivid and intense from first to last. Nothing stronger or more dramatic has come from Scotland since The House with the Green Shutters.” Morning Post: ‘A feat of literary art.” The Times: ‘¢Mr Ferguson has achieved a remarkable repre- sentation of contemporary life and morals.” Glasgow Herald: “Unquestionably one of the weirdest and most powerfully enthralling of recent Scottish novels.” MicuarEL Tempe in The Referee: ‘Scotch, sombre, and sinister, this is an extra- ordinary and in some ways a dreadful book, a remorse- less study of the devilish masquerade of religion inflicted on the Lowlands by the sixth James.” oe a F if ah wr of Mae aie As * 7 a2 & —. =a. a | vt, Cfo GAYLORD | PRINTEDINU.S.A. BF1566 .F35 The philosophy of witchcraft cal il et il e iia 1 1012 00105 0865 fim