Part 1

# The literature of witchcraft ### By Burr, George Lincoln

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THE LITERATURE OF WITCHCRAFT

BY

PROF. GEORGE L. BURR

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

[REPRINTED FROM THE PAPERS OF THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION]

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

NEW YORK LONDON 27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD ST. 27 KING WILLIAM ST., STRAND The Knickerbocker Press 1890

THE LITERATURE OF WITCHCRAFT.

By PROF. GEORGE L. BURR, Cornell University.

The literature of witchcraft is not the literature of magic. Magic is world-wide. Wherever, from the first, men have found themselves face to face with the awful powers of nature and of fate which shut in their little lives, some have disdained either to bow to them in reverent submission or to seek by bribes and wheedling to win them to their side. They have tried to outwit mystery with speculation, and to outmatch force with cunning. With spell and incantation they have dared to face the grim demons of storm and fire and flood, to bid begone the lurking fiends of disease, to dip into the dread secret of the future, to call back from the shadows the loved figures of the dead, to make the gods themselves their servants. And if, at last, they have been fain to own to themselves that their lore is, after all, but vanity and their powers a delusion, they have meanwhile found in the eager credulity of their fellows, to whom they no longer dare to confess their impotence, a treasure scarcely less tempting than the favor of the gods. Over against what they deemed the hocus-pocus of worship they have set up the hocus-pocus of magic; and, as the prophet is followed by the priest, the magician is followed by the sorcerer. Under the peaceful stars of Akkadian Chaldæa, centuries before Terah wandered westward with his son, or in the tornado-torn jungles of the last-found South Sea island, the impulse and its outcome have been ever the same.

Compared with the potent share of magic in human history, its literature is indeed but scant. Its choicest secrets have always gone by word of mouth. Yet it is a literature of all times and lands. From the clay volumes of Assyrian kings and the papyrus rolls of Egypt to the latest utterance of the spirits through Mr. Slade or of the mystic sages of the Orient through Mr. Sinnett, it is as perennial as human folly itself. Its faith may be feigned, its miracles sham; but magic itself is actual and universal.

But witchcraft never was. It was but a shadow, a nightmare: the nightmare of a religion, the shadow of a dogma. Less than five centuries saw its birth, its vigor, its decay. And this birth, this vigor, this decay, were--to a degree perhaps else unknown in history--caused by and mirrored in a literature. Of that literature it has during the last decade been mine, as librarian of the President White Library at Cornell University, to aid in building up a collection. In the last few months I have had in hand the making ready of its catalogue for the press. My task is by no means finished, and I have much to learn; but it has seemed to me that even such a hurried survey of the literature of witchcraft as I may presume to attempt may not be without interest to the American Historical Association. And this the more, since no adequate bibliography of it has ever yet been published, and no historian has thoroughly known and exploited it.

The literature of witchcraft, indeed, if under the name be included all the books which touch upon that dark subject, is something enormous. For at least four centuries no comprehensive work on theology, on philosophy, on history, on law, on medicine, on natural science, could wholly ignore it; and to lighter literature it afforded the most telling illustrations for the pulpit, the most absorbing gossip for the news-letter, the most edifying tales for the fireside. But the works devoted wholly or mainly to witchcraft are much fewer. Roundly and rudely estimated, this monographic literature includes perhaps a thousand or fifteen hundred titles.[1]

The earliest of the books on witchcraft were written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Their writers were Dominicans of the Inquisition. Not that Brother Nicolas Eymeric or Brother Nicolas Jaquier or Brother John Vineti or Brother Jerome Visconti knew that he was writing on a new theme. On the contrary, they wrote to prove that this witchcraft whereof they spoke was as old as mankind. And they cited not only Thomas Aquinas and Vincent of Beauvais, but Isidore and Gregory and Cassian and Augustine, and, above all, the Bible,--nay, even Josephus and the ancient poets, Horace and Virgil and Ovid. Wherein, then, was it really new, and how did they come to write on it at all? Bear with me while I try very briefly to answer.

Magic, in truth, the Christian Church had always known. Even the ancient faiths of Greece and Rome had, like all faiths, fought magic sternly; and, like all faiths, had counted magic much that was not so. But their polytheistic tolerance had reckoned it more a crime than a sin, and had not stigmatized as magical other faiths, save when, as in the case of Christianity, their own exclusiveness seemed to stamp their votaries as foes to the rest of mankind. Less indifferent was Christianity itself. Whatever the conceptions of her founder and of his immediate disciples, it was inevitable that, from the associations of the words in which they must express themselves, from the other preconceptions of the taught, from the influence of the Jewish scriptures, from the daily contact with Hebrew or Greek or Roman neighbors, there should early creep into the Church a touch of the superstition about her. She had inherited, indeed, the monotheism of the Jews. But, at the rise of Christianity, the day was long past when the stern logic of that monotheism saw in Jehovah the sole supernatural power, and in other worships only a fruitless idolatry. From the Persian captivity the Jews had brought back an obstinate belief in a horde of minor intelligences--the angels and demons of the New Testament period; and their teachers, seeking to justify this by one or two obscure passages in their sacred books, had built up out of them a complete science of demonology.[2] To the ranks of the demons the early Christians seem at once to have assigned the deities of their heathen neighbors.[3] And the consciences of their Gentile converts, who found it far easier to believe the new God supreme than the old gods powerless, took most kindly to this solution. But, if the gods were devils, their worship was not mere idolatry--it was magic; and the two terms became for the Christian interchangeable.

Still stranger and darker grew the conception of magic under the influence of another Christian idea--the new idea that religion and ethics are one. Henceforth not only is there but one true God, there is but one good God. All others are fiends, hating men because God loves them, and winning their trust only to cheat and ruin them. He who willingly becomes their accomplice or their victim is utterly evil--an enemy to his kind, to be visited by the Church with her severest penances, by the state with death itself. It matters no longer with what spirit one seeks the aid of the gods, or for what ends: all but Christian worship is devil-worship,--magic,--mortal sin.

Here were indeed the germs of the later idea of witchcraft. Yet only the germs; for there was much to stay their growth. Though the world swarmed with demons, though the majority of mankind were devoted to their service, the Christian had little or nothing to fear from them.[4] A prayer, an exorcism, the sign of the cross, the mere name of Christ, could put legions of them to instant flight. It was the Christian’s glory to baffle and set them at naught. Moreover, the whole theory was aimed at paganism, and paganism was passing away. Even the inundation of Christendom by the Germanic nations could not long retard its disappearance. Their host of deities, great and small--Asa and Jotun and troll and nix and kobold--swelled for a moment almost to bursting the ranks of the devils. But these, too, soon fell back into the ghostly twilight. Here and there some canny old mother might still gather by stealth the mystic herbs with which she trenched so vexatiously upon the monkish trade of healing,--might still haunt sacred spring or tree or rock, muttering the meaningless formulas of a forgotten faith. But such, though scholars were long prone to count them so, were not the witches of the later day. The Church grew wisely less stern toward them, rather than more so. As the spirit of Christianity took a more exclusive hold upon the minds of men, the grandeur of the monotheistic idea once more asserted itself. Resort to the old heathen rites was magic indeed; but it was magical superstition. Its marvels were not real marvels. Only God had power over nature. In this, though with much wavering and self-contradiction, the teachers of western Christendom in the ninth, the tenth, and the eleventh centuries agree[5]; and the earliest codes of the crystallizing Canon Law, from Regino of Prüm to Gratian, punish as superstition alike the resort to the aid of demons and the belief that such aid can be given. “Let it be publicly announced to all,” ran the famous canon _Episcopi_, which formed the nucleus of the Church’s teaching on this point, “that whoso believeth such fables [as that women may ride through the air] and things like this, has lost the faith; and whoso has not faith in God is none of his, but is his in whom he believes, to wit, the Devil’s. Whoever, therefore, believes it to be possible that any creature can be changed into a worse or a better, or transformed into any other shape or likeness, except by the Creator himself, who made all things and by whom all things were made, is beyond doubt an infidel and worse than a pagan.”[6] Under such handling the hold of the older faiths upon the popular imagination had, by the close of the twelfth century, well nigh passed away. The magic the Church had so long fought was virtually dead.

But the wording of the canon _Episcopi_ itself suggests that a new cloud was already fast overspreading the horizon of Christianity--the fear, not of devils, but of the Devil. By a tendency natural to monotheism, the intenser the conception of the oneness and the goodness of God, the stronger the impulse to conceive of that which is opposed to him and to his purposes as also one and as absolutely evil. Even the earliest of the Christians seem to have understood their master to speak of such a principle as of a personal being. And, as the westward-moving faith waxed in literalness and in sternness,--as, beneath the flood of Roman ideas and ideals, the figure of God grew more majestic and imperious,--his awful shadow loomed ever more awful in the darkening background. The rise of asceticism lent a finishing touch, and metaphysics became mythology. To the tortured brain and sense of the hermit-monk the Devil was the most real being in the universe--his personal antagonist at every turn, seen and felt and grappled with. And no Christian doubted. Athanasius, the father of orthodoxy, himself gave to the world, in his life of Antony, a household book of diabolism--the “Robinson Crusoe” of the Middle Ages, with Satan (an odd man-Friday) its most vivid figure.[7] And Augustine, the great theologian of Latin Christianity--a Manichæan in spite of himself--in his “City of God,” that first Christian philosophy of history, which lorded the field for a thousand years (if, indeed, it does not lord it still), raised him to colleagueship with God himself by setting over against the _civitas Dei_, the kingdom of Heaven, a _civitas Diaboli_, the kingdom of this world, whose prince was Satan. Christianity grew ever more a dualism.[8]

His place in theology thus made sure, the literature of the Devil seems to have taken a long pause.[9] In the Lives of the Saints he still played a large and favorite part--the villain of the plot in these lesser comedies, as in the grand historical drama of the Gospels.[10] But it was probably not until the ninth century that there began to find their way into the West certain Byzantine traditions which seemed to throw a fresh light upon the methods of his dealing with men: legends of written compacts through which men had won the aid of Satan in this world by making over to him their souls for the next. Versified and dramatized by bishop and nun, these legends became widely popular and stirred to a fever European curiosity.[11] And when, a little later, the Crusades threw open wide the door to the fables of the East, and kindled that love of anecdote which made every friar a newsmonger and every preacher a story-teller, there was scarce another domain in which the monkish imagination proved so fertile as in that of diabolism. Stephen of Bourbon gave the subject a section,[12] Caesarius of Heisterbach a whole book,[13] Thomas of Cantimpré dwelt on it in his latest and longest chapters,[14] the Abbot Richalmus found it enough for a monograph.[15] Hardly less prolific in such stories than the moralizers were the gossiping chroniclers.[16] And the encyclopedists, like Vincent of Beauvais, whatever else they might fail to glean, overlooked no interference of the Devil in the affairs of men.[17]

It was, perhaps, through the channel of the Crusades that there became known to Western theologians certain abstruser speculations of Byzantine thinkers: a treatise “On flying demons of the night,”[18] which gained much vogue from its ascription to the formulator of Eastern orthodoxy, John of Damascus, and a dialogue “On the doings of demons,”[19] by Michael Psellus, the most prolific author of the mediæval Greek Church. Both of these discussed in minute and unblushing detail the relations of devils with mortals.

They came opportunely. The great structure of the scholastic philosophy, which, resting on the sure basis of Scripture and compassing all knowledge, was to put an end forever to the restless speculations of the human mind, was just in the making. Already the dualism of Augustine had been made its corner-stone. And now, resting perhaps on these Greek suggestions, as on the earlier Byzantine vagaries of the pseudo-Dionysius, with that relentless logic which made their system (possibly excepting the harder Protestant scholasticism of Calvin) the baldest rationalism the world has known, its builders wrought out, in this atmosphere of the thirteenth century, and buttressed on every side with text and canon, the scheme of diabolism of which the whole literature of witchcraft is but a broken reflection. Into the details of that scheme I need not go. The Devil and his demons become in all points the conscious parody of God and his angels.[20]

As fallen angels, they still have power over storm, and lightning, and pestilence, and “whatsoever”--to use the schoolmen’s phrase--“has local motion alone.” And just as God has his human servants, his church, on earth, so also the Devil has his--men and women sworn to his service and true to his bidding. To win such followers he can appear to men in any form he pleases, can deceive them, seduce them, enter into compact with them, initiate them into his worship, make them his allies for the ruin of their fellows. Now, it is these human allies and servants of Satan, thus postulated into existence by the brain of a monkish logician,[21] whom history knows as “witches.”

At first, indeed, the dictum of the schoolmen seemed little to affect the current of popular thought. The Devil played only an ever merrier

## part in the travel-quickened fancy of Europe; and one can almost catch

the twinkle in the eye of the monkish story-tellers who pretend to shudder at his pranks.

But the Church was in earnest. Scholasticism, alas, had not put an end to thought. The minds it had trained to think kept on thinking; and, with them, others who would not even start from the safe premises of the Church. What, then, should a good mother-church do who had expounded the universe, yet still found herself vexed by questioners more numerous and troublesome than before? What if they contaminate even the faithful? She preached a crusade against them, and wiped the plague-spot from her sight. But the disease only struck in. How should she inspect men’s hearts? She made stated confession necessary to salvation. But the heretics would not confess. Then, in her desperation, she hit upon that last expedient for the detection of wrong thinking: she devised the Holy Inquisition and put in its hand the torture. How supremely effective that was I need not tell you: it is not its dealing with the heretics that concerns us. But when, in the lands where the Inquisition had found entrance, heresy was at last utterly rooted out,--when the souls of the faithful were safe and the hands of the inquisitors idle,--then, as was natural, the hungry organization cast its eyes about for other victims. Had not the prince of the schoolmen, the oracle of the Dominican order, taught that there were among men other servants of the Devil, more subtle, more dangerous, than the heretics: the men and women devoted altogether to his service--the witches? Already, as early as 1257, the Inquisition had asked the Pope “whether it ought not to take cognizance of divination and sorcery.” He had refused, unless manifest heresy were involved. But, if St. Thomas is right, said the inquisitors, witchcraft itself _is_ heresy. Their victims were forced to confess to a renunciation of God and an actual pact with Satan, express or tacit, and the Inquisition rapidly extended its jurisdiction in the matter. In 1320, the panic-stricken Pope, John XXII., trembling lest he himself be bewitched by his multiplying foes, begged the inquisitors, in a formal brief, to extirpate utterly the Devil-worshippers.[22] The Church was now fully committed. The rules for the direction of the inquisitors became ever more explicit,[23] _Summa_ and _Confessionale_ for priest and sinner ever more diffuse, as to this blackest of the sins--“treason against Heaven.”

But hindrance came from a more obstinate quarter. Even though the Church were convinced, the world had yet to be reasoned with. What was, then, this new crime, of which such myriads were suddenly guilty? Even the great state trials of the Templars, in the early years of the fourteenth century, with all the stir they made throughout Europe, and with all the stress they sought to lay on the charge of witchcraft, had not left the conception clear. The thing must be explained by the inquisitors themselves. And so it happened that the beginnings of the literature of witchcraft were made by Dominicans of the Inquisition.

Clever was their argument and portentous their array of authorities. First of all, the Bible. And let the historian frankly admit that, but for what they found here, the world would never have come to their side. That strange sixth chapter of Genesis,--the terrible verdict of the Mosaic code, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,”--the story of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, which seemed to a literal age to set a divine seal on the most startling of the witch-doctrines: had not the Devil personally appeared to Jesus?--had he not miraculously transported him through the air?--had he not shown himself the lord of the kingdoms of this world?--had he not sought to make a pact with the Christ himself by offering him all?--were it not dishonor to the Son of God to suppose that all men could resist as he had done? These passages, and a host of others which we have learned to forget, or obscure, or explain away, made the Bible, from first to last, the great corner-stone of the literature of witchcraft.[24] Yet this was but the inquisitor’s starting-point. He knew how to press into his service poet and philosopher, the apologists of the early Church, her liturgies with their exorcisms and renunciations of the Devil, the canons of synods and councils, the laws of Christian emperors, the great works of the Fathers and of the Schoolmen, the lives of the saints, the tales of the chroniclers, the utterances of the popes.

The earliest known to me of these inquisitorial treatises on witchcraft is from the pen of the great compiler of the code of the Inquisition, the author of the “Directorium inquisitorum,” the Aragonese Inquisitor-General, Nicolas Eymeric. As early as 1359, only three years after entering on his duties, he produced his “Tractatus contra daemonum invocatores,”[25] to prove that witchcraft was heresy, and that its punishment belonged to the Inquisition. But the world was still hard of faith. The Inquisition in France having shown itself too

## active, the Parlement of Paris in 1390 assumed to the secular courts

all jurisdiction in cases of witchcraft.

But, in 1431, the trial and condemnation of Jeanne d’Arc, at Rouen, by an ecclesiastical court under English protection, drew the eyes of all Europe; and, though in it the charge of witchcraft had taken but a subordinate place, and had been used with an awkwardness at which the judges of the following century would have blushed, it was this charge that struck the popular mind. In 1437 Pope Eugene ventured again to urge the inquisitors everywhere to greater diligence against witchcraft; and in the same year the German Dominican, Johannes Nider, put forth, as the fifth and culminating book of his “Formicarius,” or “Ant-Hill,” the first popular essay on the witches.[26] Of their horrible depravity he heaps up anecdote upon anecdote; and it is soon clear that he has found a new and exhaustless source--the testimony of the witches themselves.

Who need longer doubt the reality of the crime when its perpetrators confess to all, and more than all, that the inquisitors have told? Torture was a new thing in procedure, as yet unknown outside the ecclesiastical courts; and two centuries of horrors must pass before men should learn that its victims may confess more than the truth.[27] No wonder that Nider’s book was popular! The literature of witchcraft was fairly launched.

No rival appeared, however, till in 1452 the French inquisitor, Nicolas Jaquier,[28] wrote his treatise, “De calcatione daemonum,”[29] and in 1458 produced his monograph on witchcraft proper--his “Flagellum haereticorum fascinariorum.”[30] Jaquier expressly tells us that his

## book is written because of the hindrances thrown in the way of the

inquisitors by skeptics. His whole work is but one long refutation of the canon _Episcopi_; and, while drawing as largely as his predecessors from the Bible and from Thomas Aquinas, he, too, finds his most irrefutable arguments in the fresh confessions of tortured witches. In the following year--1459--the Spanish Franciscan, Alonso (or Alfonso) de Spina,[31] brought out his “Fortalitium fidei,” and lent a climax to its refutation of Jewish and Saracen errors by making its fifth and last book treat “Of the war of the demons”--“De bello daemonum.”