CHAPTER IX.

WITCHCRAFT.

The culmination of sorcery was witchcraft and yet it was not the same. In it there is no longer talk of pact with the demon, express or tacit, to obtain certain results, with the expectation of washing out the sin in the confessional and thus cheating the devil. The witch has abandoned Christianity, has renounced her baptism, has worshipped Satan as her God, has surrendered herself to him, body and soul, and exists only to be his instrument in working the evil to her fellow-creatures, which he cannot accomplish without a human agent. That such a being should excite universal detestation was inevitable, and that no effort should be spared for her extermination was the plainest duty of legislator and judge. There are no pages of European history more filled with horror than those which record the witch-madness of three centuries, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth. No land was more exposed to the contagion of this insanity than Spain where, for more than a hundred years, it was constantly threatening to break forth. That it was repressed and rendered comparatively harmless was due to the wisdom and firmness of the Inquisition.

[Sidenote: _THE SABBAT_]

This witch-madness was essentially a disease of the imagination, created and stimulated by the persecution of witchcraft. Whereever the inquisitor or civil magistrate went to destroy it by fire, a harvest of witches sprang up around his footsteps. If some old crone repaid ill-treatment with a curse, and the cow of the offender chanced to die or his child to fall sick, she was marked as a witch; the judge had no difficulty in compelling such confession as he desired and in obtaining a goodly list of accomplices; everyone who had met with ill-luck hurried forward with his suspicions and accusations. Every prosecution widened the circle, until nearly the whole population might become involved, to be followed by executions numbered, not by the score but by the hundred, in blind obedience to the scriptural injunction "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." All destructive elemental disturbances--droughts or flood, tempests or hail-storms, famine or pestilence--were ascribed to witchcraft, and victims were sought, as though to offer propitiatory holocausts to the infernal gods or expiatory sacrifices to the Creator.

Belief in witchcraft was of comparatively recent origin, dating from the middle of the fourteenth century. Malignant sorcery had been known before, but the distinctive feature of the Sabbat first makes its appearance at this period--the midnight gathering to which the devotees of Satan were carried through the air, where they renounced Christ and worshipped their master, in the shape usually of a goat, but sometimes in that of a handsome or hideous man; where they feasted and danced and indulged in promiscuous intercourse, accommodating demons serving as incubi or succubi, and were conveyed back home, where other demons, assuming their shape, had protected their absence from observation.[460]

The development of this myth would seem ascribable to the increasing rigor of persecution towards the end of the fourteenth century, when, as we have seen, the University of Paris formulated the theory that pact with Satan was inherent in all magic, leading judges, in their eager exploration of cases brought before them, to connect this assumed pact with an old belief of night-riders through the air, who swept along in gathering hosts. With the methods in use, the judge or the inquisitor would have little difficulty in finding what he sought. When once such a belief was disseminated by trials and executions, the accused would seek to escape endless torture by framing confessions in accordance with leading questions and thus a tolerably coherent, though sometimes discordant, formula was developed, to which witches in every land were expected to conform. That this was a new development is shown by the demonologists of the fifteenth century--Nider and Jaquerius, Sprenger and Bernardo da Como--treating witches as a new sect, unknown before that age, and to this Innocent VIII impliedly gave the sanction of the Holy See in his well-known bull, _Summis desiderantes_, in 1484. This rapidly growing belief in the power of witchcraft and the duty of its extermination were stimulated by nearly every pope for almost a hundred years--by Eugenius IV in 1437 and 1445, by Calixtus III in 1457, by Pius II in 1459, and, after the special utterance of Innocent VIII, by Alexander VI in 1494, by Julius II, by Leo X in 1521, by Adrian VI, in 1523 and by Clement VII in 1524.[461]

While, for the most part, the so-called confessions of witches under trial were the result of the torture so unsparingly employed, there can be little doubt that at least a portion were truthful accounts of illusions really entertained. Even as the trances and visions of the mystics, such as Santa Teresa and the Venerable María de Agreda, are attributable to auto-hypnotism and auto-suggestion so, when the details of the Sabbat were thoroughly established and became as much a part of popular belief as the glories