Part 2

But the diffusion of the literature of witchcraft was no longer to wait on the slow work of the copyist. The new art of printing soon availed itself of so tempting a topic. Before 1470, Mentelin, of Strasburg, turned out from his exquisite press a fine edition of the “Fortalitium fidei”; and, about 1476, Anton Sorg, of Augsburg, followed it with the “Formicarius” of Nider. Not all of their fellow-treatises were so fortunate. A “Tractatus contra daemonum invocatores,” by the Carcassonne inquisitor Joannes Vineti,[32] got itself printed; and a lecture on the subject delivered at Paris, in 1482, by the Saragossa canon Bernard Basin,[33] was given to the press in the same or the following year. But the book of Jaquier had yet a century to wait; and fresh monographs by the Poitou theological professor Petrus Mamoris[34] and the Italian inquisitor Girolamo Visconti[35] must lie in manuscript for a decade or two, while more than one other has never been printed at all.[36] For there now appeared a work which made all such trifles needless: the terrible book which has been said, and perhaps truly, to have caused more suffering than any other written by human pen--the “Malleus maleficarum,” or “Witch-Hammer.”

The inquisitors charged with the spread of the persecution in Germany had found no easy task. Not only had they the obstinacy of the secular courts to contend with, but, still more, the jealousy of the bishops, who till now, in the Empire, had succeeded in keeping the ecclesiastical jurisdiction in their own hands. In vain, from pulpit and professor’s chair, did the Dominican brotherhood promulgate the theories of Thomas Aquinas and of Eymeric. The German bishops declared that there were no witches in their territories.[37] In despair the baffled inquisitors of Germany, Heinrich Krämer[38] and Jacob Sprenger, at last turned their steps toward Rome. There, on December 5, 1484, they won from Pope Innocent VIII. the famous bull _Summis desiderantes_. Portraying in the most startling colors, and at much length, the calamities to man and beast, vineyard and harvest, brought by the witches, who, he is grieved to learn, swarm throughout Germany, the head of the Church enjoins all the faithful, on pain of the indignation of Almighty God and of the apostles Peter and Paul, to lend aid to the inquisitors in the extirpation of such monsters. Thus armed, the two Dominicans turned homeward; but their preparation was not yet complete. Men must be taught not only what to do, but how to do it. So Sprenger and Krämer set themselves at the compilation of a hand-book of arguments, rules, and procedure for the detection and punishment of witches which should henceforth make every man his own inquisitor. Completed in 1486, the book was probably given to the press in the same year.[39] As motto, it bore on its title-page the menacing sentence: “Not to believe in witchcraft is the greatest of heresies.”[40] Edition followed edition with striking rapidity, and with the issue of the “Witch-Hammer” began a new era in the history of witchcraft and of its literature.

It is not my purpose to discuss book by book the literature whose beginnings I have tried with some fulness to describe. The barest mention of only its epoch-making titles would more than fill the space remaining to me. Many of them are familiar to all English readers, through the classical chapter of Mr. Lecky[41]; and the story of their influence may be studied in more detail in the great German works of Soldan-Heppe,[42] of Roskoff,[43] and of Längin.[44] I can now but briefly characterize what seem to me the main epochs in its development. But let me, in passing, remark that the opponents of the persecution seem to me neither so few nor so feeble as one might infer from the pages of Mr. Lecky. Its defenders are never weary of complaining of the numbers and influence of the skeptics; and, though most found it wiser to hold their tongues, or preferred to speak out only in private, the open assaults upon the delusion are more numerous than the historians of witchcraft have known.

The “Malleus maleficarum” appealed to readers of every class. The question could no longer be ignored. The book’s appearance began a period of controversy, which lasted till the outbreak of the Reformation distracted all attention to itself. Jurists like Ulrich Molitor,[45] Alciati,[46] and Ponzinibio,[47] philosophers and men of letters like Cornelius Agrippa[48] and Hans Sachs,[49] dared to oppose the superstition[50]; and a cohort of theologians like the inquisitors Bernard of Como[51] and Hoogstraten,[52] their fellow-Dominicans Dodo and Theatinus,[53] the historian and scholar Trithemius,[54] the Spanish mathematician Ciruelo,[55] the papal masters of the palace Prierias[56] and Spina,[57] even a half-monkish layman like the younger Pico della Mirandola,[58] appeared in its defence. The briefs of Leo X. and of Adrian VI., in 1521 and 1523, seemed to close the dispute in favor of the witch-hunters.

The forty years of lull[59] that followed marked no decline of faith in this field. Whatever else Catholic and Protestant, Lutheran and Calvinist, might wrangle over, there remained the most edifying unanimity as to the activity of the Devil; and each party vied with the others in showing its innocence of complicity with him by hatred toward his peculiar servants, the witches. From the close of the previous century, the growing influence of the Roman law, the spread of written procedure, the substitution of public for private prosecution in criminal cases, and the introduction of torture from the ecclesiastical into the secular courts had been quietly smoothing the way for the persecution; and the written codes, which one by one embodied the new juristic attitude, gave ever fresh emphasis to witchcraft as a crime.[60] Quietly but steadily, as the religious fever waned and the zeal of revolution gave place to the timorous lassitude of reaction, the witchcraft panic and the horrors of the attendant persecution spread through the lands which had been torn by the struggle.

The first voice raised against it was that of the Rhenish physician Johann Weyer,[61] whose noble book “De praestigiis daemonum” saw the light in 1563. It ushered in a second era of controversy. Slowly, here and there, the burning words of Weyer stirred up a disciple, more or less ardent: Ewich[62] and Neuwaldt[63] and Witekind[64] and Loos[65] and Godelmann[66] and Anten[67] in Germany, Reginald Scot[68] and Gifford[69] and Harsnet[70] and Cotta[71] in England. But they stirred up adversaries tenfold more numerous and influential: Daneau[72] in Switzerland, Bodin[73] and Crespet[74] and De l’Ancre[75] in France, Erastus[76] and Bishop Binsfeld[77] and Scribonius[78] in Germany, Remy[79] in Lorraine, Boguet[80] in Franche-Comté, Delrio[81] in the Netherlands, Torreblanca[82] in Spain, and in Great Britain Bishop Jewell and Perkins[83] and the royal inquisitor, James of Scotland and of England,[84] with a multitude everywhere of lesser note or later date. It was the golden age of the witchcraft literature, as of witchcraft itself. Enterprising publishers sought in vain to sate the public appetite by throwing together, in awkward folios or fat duodecimos, all the books they could find on the subject.[85] The news-letters and _Neue Zeitungen_, printed or written, which had taken the place of the sermons and satires of the Reformation, as the newspaper was soon in turn to take their own, carried to every fireside, in rude rhyme and ruder wood-cut, the tale of the countless burnings which planted charred stakes like shade-trees before city and hamlet of the Continent, or of the prickings and swimmings and wakings with which English and Scottish procedure consoled themselves for the want of the rack. The murmur of protest, ever fainter, had all but died out.[86] In France, where alone doubt throve, skeptics like Montaigne and Charron were far too wise in their generation to embody their incredulity in monographs; and even Gabriel Naudé, who in 1625 dealt the superstition a sharp blow by the publication of his “Apologie pour les grands personnages qui ont été faussement soupçonnés de magie,” had the prudence to confine himself strictly to times at a safe distance from the present. But, in 1631, the brave young Jesuit poet, Friedrich von Spee--saint and martyr by a higher canonization than that of the Church--dared to publish, though without his name and unknown to his superiors, the eloquent “Cautio criminalis” which once more gave the persecution pause. Based on his own experience as a confessor to the witches, and attacking not the theory but only the procedure, it won attention in quarters unreachable by polemic.

There followed an age of better omen. Steadily, but almost as quietly as it had gathered strength during the Reformation, the delusion now faded before the advance of that more Christian spirit of mingled science and humanity which the world has too long stigmatized as rationalism. In one territory after another the flames died out. Jurists and theologians remained conservative, and such literature, of sermon and opinion, as was devoted to witchcraft, was mainly on the side of the superstition. From the universities a host of academic dissertations, in law and theology, echoed the orthodox tenets of the teachers--if, indeed, they were not the product of their pens. But it was apparent that they were now on the defensive. Not less significant as a symptom was the rapid growth of that literature which found in the superstition only a means of selfish profit or amusement: the collections of witch stories and devil stories which pandered to popular curiosity and love of horror. In 1657 even the older church herself, which had steadily put on her index of forbidden books the works written against the persecution, found herself constrained to issue a tardy _Instructio_[87] urging her inquisitors to circumspection. In England alone, where Puritan bibliolatry had ensured the dogma a longer tenure, and had found it an unexpected advocate in Joseph Glanvill,[88] was the struggle for a moment serious and the result doubtful; but the assaults of a Gaule,[89] a Filmer,[90] an Ady,[91] a Wagstaffe,[92] a Webster,[93] were fast letting in the purer daylight; and even Presbyterian Scotland was sure, however slowly, to wake to it in due time. The New England panic at Salem was but a last bright flicker of the ghastly glare which had so long made hideous the European night.[94] Already, even before Spee, the Dutchman Greve[95] had struck a blow at the root of the superstition on the Continent by attacking the use of the torture, and now, in 1691, his countryman, Balthasar Bekker, aimed one yet more deadly at its very heart by denying, in his “Betooverde Wereld,” the personal agency of the Devil in human affairs. And its period of silent decay came sharply to an end, just at the close of the century, when, in 1701, the free-thinking Halle professor, Christian Thomas (or Thomasius, as his Latin-writing contemporaries preferred to call him), published in the name of a student his pungent “Theses de crimine magiae.”[96]

So began for witchcraft the age of the “Aufklärung.” For a moment its defenders, thus brought to bay, fought with tooth and nail. But, as the taunts and jeers of its assailants grew ever louder and more confident, they slunk back into obscurity. Only now and then, as the century advanced, did some stranded theologian mutter in print his grouty protest, or some over-hasty reformer stir up a buzz of pamphlets by obtruding his rationalism into a last snoozing-place of orthodoxy. The witch burnings and hangings grew fewer and fewer and disappeared altogether, and with them the need of their justification. The publishers of the witch stories learned to appeal to readers of ever lower grades of intelligence or to throw into their tone a banter which flattered the vanity of the class that gloats over the errors of its fellows. A mass of lesser superstitions, galvanized into fresh life by scribbling adventurers, gave refuge to those enlightened before their time. And at last the storm of the French Revolution, destroying torture-chamber and code as it swept over Europe, buried in their ruins the witch-persecution and its literature, and did somewhat to clear the air for that new scientific study of its psychology and history which was to be the task of the nineteenth century.

Already, in 1712, Thomasius had devoted a thesis to the origin of the persecution,[97] and before his death he was able to welcome the more elaborate history by the English clergyman, Hutchinson,[98] whose retrospect was, however, almost wholly confined to his own land and her colonies. Before the middle of the eighteenth century, the Lutheran divine, Hauber, had gathered what still remains the richest body of materials for the study of the subject,[99] and in 1784 another German pastor, Schwager, published the first volume of a general history of the witch-trials.[100] Yet these were but beginnings. I could have wished to close this hasty survey of the growth of the literature of witchcraft with a more careful discussion of what our own century has done towards its study; but my paper is already too long. I may barely mention the bibliography of Grässe, which, with all its omissions and inaccuracies, is still the best we have; the comprehensive narratives attempted by Horst, and Scheltema, and Scott, and Scholtz, and Soldan, and Wright, and Michelet, and Heppe; the more partisan contributions of Görres, and Scherr, and Diefenbach, and Längin; the light thrown upon it by the brilliant work in neighboring fields of Wächter, and Maury, and Roskoff, and Buchmann, and Rydberg, and Conway, and Baissac, and Meyer, and Lea. But of the histories of its career in single lands, districts, towns, by a myriad of patient students, whose researches will furnish the most precious of all stores for the future historian,--of the biographies, all too few, of the heroes of the struggle,--of the valuable chapters scattered through periodicals, and proceedings, and local histories, and histories of civilization or theology or law or medicine or literature or natural science, I cannot so much as speak.

Yet, much as has been written on the subject, it is amazing how small a proportion of it has been serious in aim or in method. Perhaps no province of history has been so largely the domain of the sciolist and the charlatan. From the “Formicarius” of Nider to the just-published hodge-podge of Davenport Adams, it has been the prey of writers who have sought to entertain more than to enlighten. As was pointed out more than a decade ago by Friedrich Nippold,[101] there has been as yet not an attempt at an exhaustive investigation of the history of the witch-persecution. Even the noble book of Soldan-Heppe, which is still beyond question the most thorough, makes little effort to utilize other than printed sources, and of the latter it is for German lands alone that the author’s material approached completeness. Of the origin and nature of the delusion, we know perhaps enough; but of the causes and paths of its spread, of the extent of its ravages, of its exact bearing upon the intellectual and religious freedom of its times, of the soul-stirring details of the costly struggle by which it was overborne, we are lamentably ill-informed. The archives and libraries of Europe--aye, and of many parts of America as well--abound in still unpublished documents which would throw light upon these problems. The labors of local antiquaries are every day opening fresh mines for a more exhaustive history of witchcraft. When that history comes to be written, may the collection which has suggested my paper be not without its use; and may it aid in making clear to future generations why the literature of witchcraft belongs not to folk-lore, but to theology.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I need not say that the President White Library does not possess them all; its lacunæ are many, and not unimportant. It has, however, the largest collection, private or public, with which I am acquainted. My estimate is a guess, based partly upon it, partly upon the “Bibliotheca magica” of Grässe, partly upon my notes as to the gaps in each; but it is hard to discriminate between books treating mainly of witchcraft and those treating only largely or ostensibly of it.

[2] Notably out of the poetic opening verses of the sixth chapter of Genesis, which always remained the proof-passage for the demonologic system of the Church. On it had been based that mystical “book of Enoch,” which exercised so striking an influence upon Jewish thought during the centuries just before and just after the Christian era, and indeed upon the writers of the New Testament themselves (Jude, for example, cites it largely and by name), and which was treated by the early Christians as wholly canonical. Hence came the legend of the fall of the angels, so familiar to us through Milton, and a commonplace in the older day. Of even more lasting influence was the demonologic romance of Tobias, or Tobit, which is now classed by Protestants as apocryphal, but which was cited by the earliest Christian writers with the same freedom as any part of the Old Testament, and still retains its place in the Catholic Bible. No book was so largely quoted by the later Christian writers on diabolism and witchcraft. The whole theory of exorcism indeed is mainly based on it; and, still more, the horrible belief in _incubi_. Of importance also (besides all that could be found in the books of our canon) were the demonologic passages of the apocryphal “Wisdom of Solomon” and “Ecclesiasticus.” Tertullian cites the latter, like any other book of Scripture, with the solemn “as it is written” (_sicut scriptum est_). See Diestel, “Geschichte des Alten Testaments in der christlichen Kirche”; Reuss, “Geschichte des Alten Testaments”; and Emanuel Deutsch, “The Talmud” (in his “Literary remains”).

[3] This impulse must have been powerfully aided by the current translation of a familiar passage in the Psalms. Where we read (Ps. xcvi, 5): “All the gods of the nations are idols,” the early Church read: “All the gods of the nations are devils.” The passage is constantly cited by the Fathers in this sense. Even Wiclif translates: “Alle the goddis of hethene men ben feendis [fiends].”

[4] What could be more vivid than the story of the old hermit who prayed God that he might see the demons, and would not be denied; “and God opened his eyes, and he saw them, for just like bees do they surround man, grating their teeth over him.”--“Verba Seniorum,” lib. vi., libel. i., c. 11 (“Vitæ Patrum,” ii.).

[5] Only Archbishop Agobard, of Lyons (779-c. 841), a man in many ways before his time, went so far as to write a book--what we should call a pamphlet--upon the absurdity of the popular superstitions: his “Liber contra insulsam vulgi opinionem de grandine et tonitruis.” The essay “De magicis artibus” (perhaps the first Christian monograph on the subject) by his learned contemporary and colleague, Archbishop Hrabanus Maurus, of Mainz, is far more credulous, and, like most of that great teacher’s work, mainly a compilation. Not forgotten by him are the Scripture texts against witchcraft, beginning with the terrible “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” He treats the same theme in similar fashion in his encyclopædic “De universo” and in his “Penitentiale.” It was later in the same century that another great Frankish archbishop, Hincmar of Rheims, found himself brought face to face with the problem of magic, in his legal response on the divorce of King Lothaire (“De divortio Lotharii regis et Tetbergae reginae”), three of the thirty questions asked him involving it. He discussed the subject at much length, and, though credulously enough, in the main sensibly.

[6] The source of the canon is, indeed, now a riddle. Its ascription to the synod of Ancyra, which the Middle Age never questioned, is now known to be a mere blunder. But, from its first appearance, in the collection of Regino at the close of the ninth century, it became the recognized dictum of the Canon Law upon this subject, and remained unimpeached, even by those who devoted chapters to explaining it away, until after the Reformation. It surely was no accident that it came to light at the end of the same century in which Agobard wrote. Bishop Burchard, of Worms (d. 1025), who followed Regino as a collector of ecclesiastical law, and gave a whole book of his “Decreta” to decisions “De incantatoribus et auguribus,” sets the canon _Episcopi_ at its head. But this prominence in order it lost in the later compositions.

[7] It is true that the long discourse, put into Antony’s mouth (c. 15-20), on the power and wiles of the Devil and the way to resist him, which may almost be called the first Christian monograph on diabolism, may possibly be an interpolation; but it breathes the very spirit of the Fathers, and the whole narrative is full of the Devil’s doings. The popularity of the book throughout the Christian world is attested by what Augustine tells us in his “Confessions,” and the part there ascribed to it in his own conversion must have tended to increase its influence. What a favorite its story was with the sculptors and painters of the later Middle Ages we all know.

[8] True, Augustine taught, and the Church after him, that Satan could do nothing save by the tacit consent of God; but the limitation was scarcely more than nominal, since against sinners he was believed to be given free hand, and only the immediate and incessant protection of the Church could ensure safety. The carnal mind was powerless to recognize him: did not the Scripture itself say that he could appear as an angel of light? Nay, he often took the form of Christ himself, as more than one hermit had testified.

[9] Chrysostom’s monograph, “De imbecilitate Diaboli,” is too metaphysical to be reckoned here at all, as likewise is Anselm’s “Dialogus de casu Diaboli” of a half-dozen centuries later.

[10] For illustration of this, one has but to open the “Vitae Patrum” at random. Of the “Collationes” of Cassian, a book of the greatest influence throughout the Middle Ages, especially in the monasteries, “Collatio VII.,” “quae est prima abbatis Sereni,” and “Collatio VIII.,” “quae est secunda abbatis Sereni,” deal mainly with diabolism and are full of anecdote.

[11] Notably, of course, the famous one of Theophilus, ostensibly written by one Eutychianus in the sixth century, but known to the West through a Latin version made by a Naples deacon named Paulus, probably toward the close of the ninth century. (It may be found, with the metrical paraphrase ascribed to Bishop Marbod, in the Bollandist “Acta Sanctorum” for 4th February. Better known in our day, though not in hers, is its dramatization by the nun Hroswitha--one of many.) Another, scarcely less popular in the Middle Ages, though strangely overlooked by later writers, was the tale (first told in the “Life of Basil” ascribed apocryphally to his contemporary, Bishop Amphilochius of Iconium) of the senator’s valet who fell in love with his master’s daughter, won her by signing away his soul to the Devil, and was saved only through the aid of St. Basil, who forced the fiend to surrender the contract. I find the story (it is a long one) first told in the West by Hincmar of Rheims (d. 882) in his response “De divortio Lotharii,” who credits it to Amphilochius. Its influence in the Occident would seem, therefore, to be of about the same age as that of the Theophilus legend, which, in several respects, is less like the later witch-stories. After Hincmar the anecdote appears often. Of modern writers on witchcraft, Roskoff alone mentions it, on the basis of a vague allusion of Schwager’s; and Schwager had evidently sought for it in vain, misunderstanding it to be in Basil’s “Dialogues.” Amphilochius’ “Vita Basilii” may be found in the “Vitae Patrum,” and in the Bollandist “Acta Sanctorum” (June, vol. iii.).