The Origin, Prevalence, and Variety of Superstition—The
Belief in Witchcraft the most horrid Form of Superstition—Most
flourishing in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries—The
Sentiments of Addison, Blackstone, and the Lawyers of the
Eighteenth Century upon the Subject—Chaldean and Persian
Magic—Jewish Witchcraft—Its important Influence on Christian
and Modern Belief—Greek Pharmacy and Sorcery—Early
Roman Laws against Conjuration and Magic Charms—Crimes
perpetrated, under the Empire, in connection with Sorceric
Practices—The general Persecution for Magic under Valentinian
and Valens—German and Scandinavian Sagæ—The probable
Origin of the general Belief in an Evil Principle.
Superstition, the product of ignorance of causes, of
the proneness to seek the solution of phenomena out
of and beyond nature, and of the consequent natural
but unreasoning dread of the Unknown and Invisible
(ignorantly termed the supernatural), is at once universal
in the extent, and various in the kinds, of its
despotism. Experience and reason seem to prove that,
inherent to and apparently coexistent with the human
mind, it naturally originates in the constitution of
humanity: in ignorance and uncertainty, in an instinctive
doubt and fear of the Unknown. Accident may
moderate its power among particular peoples and
persons; and there are always exceptional minds
whose natural temper and exercise of reason are able
to free them from the servitude of a delusive imagination.
For the mass of mankind, the germ of superstition,
prepared to assume always a new shape
and sometimes fresh vigour, is indestructible. The
severest assaults are ineffectual to eradicate it:
hydra-like, far from being destroyed by a seeming
mortal stroke, it often raises its many-headed form
with redoubled force.
It will appear more philosophic to deplore the
imperfection, than to deride the folly of human
nature, when the fact that the superstitious sentiment
is not only a result of mere barbarism or vulgar
ignorance, to be expelled of course by civilisation
and knowledge, but is indigenous in the life of every
man, barbarous or civilised, pagan or Christian, is
fully recognised. The enlightening influence of
science, as far as it extends, is irresistible; and its
progress within certain limits seems sure and almost
omnipotent. But it is unfortunately limited in the
extent of its influence, as well as uncertain in duration;
while reason enjoys a feeble reign compared
with ignorance and imagination.1 If it is the great
office of history to teach by experience, it is never
useless to examine the causes and the facts of a mischievous
creed that has its roots deep in the ignorant
fears of mankind; but against the recurrence of the
fatal effects of fanaticism apparent in the earliest
and latest records of the world, there can be no sufficient
security.
Dreams, magic terrors, miracles, witches, ghosts,
portents, are some of the various forms superstition
has invented and magnified to disturb the peace of
society as well as of individuals. The most extravagant
of these need not be sought in the remoter ages
of the human race, or even in the 'dark ages' of
European history: they are sufficiently evident in
the legislation and theology, as well as in the popular
prejudices of the seventeenth century.
The belief in the infernal art of witchcraft is perhaps
the most horrid, as it certainly is the most
absurd, phenomenon in the religious history of the
world. Of the millions of victims sacrificed on the
altars of religion this particular delusion can claim a
considerable proportion. By a moderate computation,
nine millions have been burned or hanged since the
establishment of Christianity.2 Prechristian antiquity
experienced its tremendous power, and the primitive
faith of Christianity easily accepted and soon developed
it. It was reserved, however, for the triumphant
Church to display it in its greatest horrors:
and if we deplore the too credulous or accommodative
faith of the early militant Church or the unilluminated
ignorance of paganism, we may still more
indignantly denounce the cruel policy of Catholicism
and the barbarous folly of Protestant theology which
could deliberately punish an impossible crime. It is
the reproach of Protestantism that this persecution
was most furiously raging in the age that produced
Newton and Locke. Compared with its atrocities
even the Marian burnings appear as nothing: and
it may well be doubted whether the fanatic zeal of
the 'bloody Queen,' is no less contemptible than the
credulous barbarity of the judges of the seventeenth
century. The period 1484 (the year in which Innocent
VIII. published his famous 'Witch Hammer'
signally ratified 120 years later by the Act of Parliament
of James I. of England) to 1680 might be
characterised not improperly as the era of devil-worship;
and we are tempted almost to embrace the
theory of Zerdusht and the Magi and conceive
that Ahriman was then superior in the eternal strife;
to imagine the Evil One, as in the days of the Man
of Uz, 'going to and fro in the earth, and walking up
and down in it.' It is come to that at the present
day, according to a more rational observer of the
seventeenth century, that it is regarded as a part of
religion to ascribe great wonders to the devil; and
those are taxed with infidelity and perverseness who
hesitate to believe what thousands relate concerning
his power. Whoever does not do so is accounted an
atheist because he cannot persuade himself that there
are two Gods, the one good and the other evil3—an
assertion which is no mere hyperbole or exaggeration
of a truth: there is the certain evidence of facts as
well as the concurrent testimony of various writers.
Those (comparatively few) whose reason and humanity
alike revolted from a horrible dogma, loudly
proclaim the prevailing prejudice. Such protests,
however, were, for a long time at least, feeble and
useless—helplessly overwhelmed by the irresistible
torrent of public opinion. All classes of society were
almost equally infected by a plague-spot that knew
no distinction of class or rank. If theologians (like
Bishop Jewell, one of the most esteemed divines in
the Anglican Church, publicly asserting on a well
known occasion at once his faith and his fears) or
lawyers (like Sir Edward Coke and Judge Hale) are
found unmistakably recording their undoubting
conviction, they were bound, it is plain, the one class
by theology, the other by legislation. Credulity of
so extraordinary a kind is sufficiently surprising even
in theologians; but what is to be thought of the deliberate
opinion of unbiassed writers of a recent age
maintaining the possibility, if not the actual occurrence,
of the facts of the belief?
The deliberate judgment of Addison, whose wit
and preeminent graces of style were especially devoted
to the extirpation of almost every sort of
popular folly of the day, could declare: 'When I
hear the relations that are made from all parts of
the world, not only from Norway and Lapland, from
the East and West Indies, but from every particular
nation in Europe, I cannot forbear thinking that
there is such an intercourse and commerce with evil
spirits as that which we express by the name of
witchcraft.... In short, when I consider the question
whether there are such persons in the world as
those we call witches, my mind is divided between
two opposite opinions; or rather, to speak my
thoughts freely, I believe in general that there is
and has been such a thing as witchcraft, but at the
same time can give no credit to any particular
modern instance of it.'4 Evidence, if additional
were wanted, how deference to authority and universal
custom may subdue the reason and understanding.
The language and decision of Addison
are adopted by Sir W. Blackstone in 'Commentaries
on the Laws of England,' who shelters himself behind
that celebrated author's sentiment; and Gibbon
informs us that 'French and English lawyers of the
present age [the latter half of the last century]
allow the theory but deny the practice of witchcraft'—influenced
doubtless by the spirit of the past
legislation of their respective countries. In England
the famous enactment of the subservient parliament
of James I. against the crimes of sorcery,
&c., was repealed in the middle of the reign of
George II., our laws sanctioning not 130 years since
the popular persecution, if not the legal punishment.
The origin of witchcraft and the vulgar diabolism
is to be found in the rude beginnings of the religious
or superstitious feeling which, known amongst the
present savage nations as Fetishism, probably prevailed
almost universally in the earliest ages; while
that of the sublimer magic is discovered in the religious
systems of the ancient Chaldeans and Persians.
Chaldea and Egypt were the first, as far as is known,
to cultivate the science of magic: the former people
long gave the well-known name to the professional
practisers of the art. Cicero (de Divinatione) celebrates,
and the Jewish prophets frequently deride,
their skill in divination and their modes of incantation.
The story of Daniel evidences how highly
honoured and lucrative was the magical or divining
faculty. The Chazdim, or Chaldeans, a priestly
caste inhabiting a wide and level country, must have
soon applied themselves to the study, so useful to
their interests, of their brilliant expanse of heavens.
By a prolonged and 'daily observation,' considerable
knowledge must have been attained; but in the infancy
of the science astronomy necessarily took the
form of an empirical art which, under the name of
astrology, engaged the serious attention and perplexed
the brains of the mediæval students of science
or magic (nearly synonymous terms), and which still
survives in England in the popular almanacks. The
natural objects of veneration to the inhabitants of
Assyria were the glorious luminaries of the sun and
moon; and if their worship of the stars and planets
degenerated into many absurd fancies, believing an
intimate connection and subordination of human
destiny to celestial influences, it may be admitted
that a religious sentiment of this kind in its primitive
simplicity was more rational, or at least sublime,
than most other religious systems.
It is not necessary to trace the oriental creeds of
magic further than they affected modern beliefs; but
in the divinities and genii of Persia are more immediately
traced the spiritual existences of Jewish and
Christian belief. From the Persian priests are derived
both the name and the practice of magic. The
Evil Principle of the Magian, of the later Jewish,
and thence of the western world, originated in the
system (claiming Zoroaster as its founder), which
taught a duality of Gods. The philosophic lawgiver,
unable to penetrate the mystery of the empire of
evil and misery in the world, was convinced that
there is an equal and antagonistic power to the representative
of light and goodness. Hence the continued
eternal contention between Ormuzd with the
good spirits or genii, Amchaspands, on one side, and
Ahriman with the Devs (who may represent the infernal
crew of Christendom) on the other. Egypt,
in the Mosaic and Homeric ages, seems to have
attained considerable skill in magic, as well as in
chymistry and astrology. As an abstruse and esoteric
doctrine, it was strictly confined to the priests, or to
the favoured few who were admitted to initiation.
The magic excellence of the magicians, who successfully
emulated the miracles of Moses, was apparently
assisted by a legerdemain similar to that of the
Hindu jugglers of the present day.5
In Persian theology, the shadowy idea of the devil
of western Asia was wholly different from the grosser
conception of Christendom. Neither the evil principle
of Magianism nor the witch of Palestine has
much in common with the Christian. 'No contract
of subjection to a diabolic power, no infernal stamp
or sign of such a fatal league, no revellings of Satan
and his hags,'6 no such materialistic notions could be
conformable to the spirit of Judaism or at least of
Magianism. It is not difficult to find the cause
of this essential dissimilarity. A simple unity was
severely inculcated by the religion and laws of Moses,
which permitted little exercise of the imagination:
while the Magi were equally severe against idolatrous
forms. A monstrous idea, like that of 'Satan and
his hags,' was impossible to them. Christianity, the
religion of the West, has received its corporeal
ideas of demonology from the divinities and demons
of heathenism. The Satyri and Fauni of
Greece and Rome have suggested in part the form,
and perhaps some of the characteristics, of the vulgar
Christian devil. A knowledge of the arts of magic
among the Jews was probably derived from their
Egyptian life, while the Bedouins of Arabia and Syria
(kindred peoples) may have instilled the less scientific
rites of Fetishism. It is in the early accounts of that
people that sorcery, whatever its character and profession,
with the allied arts of divination, necromancy,
incantations, &c., appears most flourishing. The
Mosaic penalty, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,'
and the comprehensive injunction, 'There shall not
be found among you that maketh his son or his
daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination,
or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a
witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar
spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer,' indicate at
once the extent and the horror of the practice.
Balaam (that equivocal prophet), on the border-land
of Arabia and Palestine, was courted and dreaded as
a wizard who could perplex whole armies by means
of spells. His fame extended far and wide; he was
summoned from his home beyond the Euphrates in
the mountains of Mesopotamia by the Syrian tribes
to repel the invading enemy. This great magician
was, it seems, universally regarded as 'the rival and
the possible conqueror of Moses.'7
About the time when the priestly caste had to
yield to a profane monarchy, the forbidden practices
were so notorious and the evil was of such magnitude,
that the newly-elected prince 'ejected' (as Josephus
relates) 'the fortune-tellers, necromancers, and all
such as exercised the like arts.' His interview with
the witch has some resemblance to modern diablerie
in the circumstances. Reginald Scot's rationalistic
interpretation of this scene may be recommended to
the commentating critics who have been so much at
a loss to explain it. He derides the received opinion
of the woman of Endor being an agent of the devil,
and ignoring any mystery, believes, 'This Pythonist
being a ventriloqua, that is, speaking as it were from
the bottom of her belly, did cast herself into a trance
and so abused Saul, answering to Saul in Samuel's
name in her counterfeit hollow voice.8 An institution
very popular with the Jews of the first temple, often
commemorated in their scriptures—the schools of the
prophets—was (it is not improbable) of the same kind
as the schools of Salamanca and Salerno in the
middle ages, where magic was publicly taught as an
abstruse and useful science; and when Jehu justifies
his conduct towards the queen-mother by bringing a
charge of witchcraft, he only anticipates an expedient
common and successful in Europe in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. A Jewish prophet asserts of
the Babylonian kings, that they were diligent cultivators
of the arts, reproaching them with practising
against the holy city.
Yet if we may credit the national historian (not
to mention the common traditions), the Chaldean
monarch might have justly envied, if he could scarcely
hope to emulate, the excellence of a former prince
of his now obscure province. Josephus says of
Solomon that, amongst other attainments, 'God
enabled him to learn that skill which expels
demons, which is a science useful and sanative to
men. He composed such incantations also by which
distempers are alleviated, and he left behind him
the manner of using exorcisms by which they drive
away demons so that they never return.'9 The
story of Daniel is well known. In the captivity
of the two tribes carried away into an honourable servitude
he soon rose into the highest favour, because,
as we are informed, he excelled in a divination that
surpassed all the art of the Chaldeans, themselves
so famous for it. The inspired Jew had divined a
dream or vision which puzzled 'the magicians, and
the astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans,'
and immediately was rewarded with the greatest gift
at the disposal of a capricious despot. Most of the
apologetic writers on witchcraft, in particular the
authors of the 'Malleus Maleficarum,' accept the assertion
of the author of the history of Daniel that Nebuchadnezzar
was 'driven from men, and did eat grass
as oxen,' in its apparent sense, expounding it as
plainly declaring that he was corporeally metamorphosed
into an ox, just as the companions of Ulysses
were transformed into swine by the Circean sorceries.
The Jewish ideas of good or at least evil spirits or
angels were acquired during their forced residence
in Babylon, whether under Assyrian or Persian
government. At least 'Satan' is first discovered
unmistakably in a personal form in the poem of
Job, a work pronounced by critics to have been
composed after the restoration. In the Mosaic
cosmogony and legislation, the writer introduces not,
expressly or impliedly, the existence of an evil
principle, unless the serpent of the Paradisaic account,
which has been rather arbitrarily so metamorphosed,
represents it;10 while the expressions in
books vulgarly reputed before the conquest are at
least doubtful. From this time forward (from the
fifth century b.c.), says a German demonologist, as
the Jews lived among the admirers of Zoroaster, and
thus became acquainted with their doctrines, are
found, partly in contradiction to the earlier views of
their religion, many tenets prevailing amongst them
the origin of which it is impossible to explain except
by the operation of the doctrines of Zoroaster: to
these belongs the general acceptance of the theory
of Satan, as well as of good and bad angels.11 Under
Roman government or vassalage, sorceric practices,
as they appear in the Christian scriptures, were
much in vogue. Devils or demons, and the 'prince
of the devils,' frequently appear; and the demoniacs
may represent the victims of witchcraft.
The Talmud, if there is any truth in the assertions
of the apologists of witchcraft, commemorates many
of the most virtuous Jews accused of the crime and
executed by the procurator of Judea.12 Exorcism
was a very popular and lucrative profession.13 Simon
Magus the magician (par excellence), the impious
pretender to miraculous powers, who 'bewitched the
people of Samaria by his sorceries,' is celebrated by
Eusebius and succeeding Christian writers as the
fruitful parent of heresy and sorcery.
That witchcraft, or whatever term expresses the
criminal practice, prevailed among the worshippers
of Jehovah, is evident from the repeated anathemas
both in their own and the Christian scriptures, not
to speak of traditional legends; but the Hebrew and
Greek expressions seem both to include at least the
use of drugs and perhaps of poison.14 The Jewish
creed, as exposed in their scriptures, has deserved a
fame it would not otherwise have, because upon it
have been founded by theologians, Catholic and Protestant,
the arguments and apology for the reality of
witchcraft, derived from the sacred writings, with an
ingenuity only too common and successful in supporting
peculiar prejudices and interests even of the
most monstrous kind.15
In examining the phenomenon as it existed among
the Greeks and Romans, it will be remarked that,
while the Greeks seem to have mainly adopted the
ideas of the East, the Roman superstition was of
Italian origin. Their respective expressions for the
predictive or presentient faculty (manteia and divinatio),
as Cicero is careful to explain, appear to
indicate its different character with those two peoples:
the one being the product of a sort of madness, the
other an elaborate and divine skill. Greek traditions
made them believe that the magic science was brought
from Egypt or Asia by their old philosophic and
legislating sages. Some of the most eminent of the
founders of philosophic schools were popularly accused
of encouraging it. Pythagoras (it is the
complaint of Plato) is said to have introduced to his
countrymen an art derived from his foreign travels;
a charge which recalls the names of Roger Bacon,
Albertus Magnus, Galileo, and others, who had to pay
the penalty of a premature knowledge by the suspicion
of their cotemporaries. Xenophanes is said
to be the only one of the philosophers who admitted
the existence or providence of the gods, and at the
same time entirely discredited divination. Of the
Stoics, Panætius was the only one who ventured even
to doubt. Some gave credit to one or two particular
modes only, as those of dreams and frenzy; but
for the most part every form of this sort of divine
revelation was implicitly received.16
The science of magic proper is developed in the
later schools of philosophy, in which Oriental theology
or demonology was largely mixed. Apollonius of
Tyana, a modern Pythagorean, is the most famous
magician of antiquity. This great miracle-worker
of paganism was born at the commencement of
the Christian era; and it has been observed that
his miracles, though quite independent of them,
curiously coincide both in time and kind with the
Christian.17 According to his biographer Philostratus,
this extraordinary man (whose travels and researches
extended, we are assured, over the whole East even
into India, through Greece, Italy, Spain, northern
Africa, Ethiopia, &c.) must have been in possession
of a scientific knowledge which, compared with that
of his cotemporaries, might be deemed almost supernatural.
Extraordinary attainments suggested to
him in later life to excite the awe of the vulgar by
investing himself with magical powers. Apollonius
is said to have assisted Vespasian in his struggle for
the throne of the Cæsars; afterwards, when accused
of raising an insurrection against Domitian, and
when he had given himself up voluntarily to the
imperial tribunal at Rome, he escaped impending
destruction by the exertion of his superhuman art.
Of the incantations, charms, and magic compounds
in the practice of Greek witchcraft, numerous examples
occur in the tragic and comic poetry of
Greece; and the philtres, or love-charms, of Theocritus
are well known. The names of Colchis,
Chaldea, Assyria, Iberia, Thrace, may indicate the
origin of a great part of the Hellenic sorceries. Yet,
if the more honourable science may have been of
foreign extraction, Hellas was not without something
of the sorcery of modern Europe. The infernal
goddess Hecate, of Greek celebrity, is the omnipotent
patroness of her modern Christian slaves; and she
presides at the witch meetings of Christendom
with as much solemnity but with far greater malice.
Originally of celestial rank, by a later metamorphosis
connected, if not personally identical with, Persephone,
the Queen of Hades, Hecate was invested with many
of the characteristic attributes of a modern devil, or
rather perhaps of a witch. The triple goddess, in
her various shapes, wandered about at night with the
souls of the dead, terrifying the trembling country
people by apparitions of herself and infernal satellites,
by the horrible whining and howls of her hellhounds
which always announced her approach. She
frequented cross-roads, tombs, and melancholy places,
especially delighting in localities famous for deeds of
blood and murder. The hobgoblins, the various malicious
demons and spirits, who provoked the lively
terrors of the mediæval peoples, had some prototypes
in the fairy-land of Greece, in the Hecatean
hobgoblins (like the Latin larvæ, &c.), Empusa,
Mormo, and other products of an affrighted imagination
familiar to the students of Greek literature in
the comic pages of Aristophanes.18 From the earliest
literary records down to the latest times of paganism
as the state religion, from the times of the Homeric
Circe and Ulysses (the latter has been recognised by
many as a genuine wizard) to the age of Apollonius
or Apuleius, magic and sorcery, as a philosophical
science or as a vulgar superstition, had apparently
more or less distinctly a place in the popular
mythology of old Greece. But in the pagan history
of neither Greece nor Rome do we read of holocausts
of victims, as in Christian Europe, immolated on the
altars of a horrid superstition.19 The occasion of the
composition of the treatise by Apuleius 'On Magic' is
somewhat romantic. On his way to Alexandria, the
philosopher, being disabled from proceeding on the
journey, was hospitably received into the mansion of
one Sicinius Pontianus. Here, during the interesting
period of his recovery, he captivated, or was
captivated by, the love of his host's mother, a wealthy
widow, and the lovers were soon united by marriage.
Pudentilla's relatives, indignant at the loss of a
much-coveted, and perhaps long-expected fortune,
brought an action against Apuleius for having gained
her affection by means of spells or charms. The
cause was heard before the proconsul of Africa,
and the apology of the accused labours to convince
his judges that a widow's love might be provoked
without superhuman means.20
Gibbon observes of the Roman superstition on the
authority of Petronius, that it may be inferred that it
was of Italian rather than barbaric extraction. Etruria
furnished the people of Romulus with the science of
divination. Early in the history of the Republic the
law is very explicit on the subject of witchcraft. In
the decemviral code the extreme penalty is attached
to the crime of witchcraft or conjuration: 'Let
him be capitally punished who shall have bewitched
the fruits of the earth, or by either kind of conjuration
(excantando neque incantando) shall have conjured
away his neighbour's corn into his own field,'
&c., an enactment sneered at in Justinian's Institutes
in Seneca's words. A rude and ignorant antiquity,
repeat the lawyers of Justinian, had believed that rain
and storms might be attracted or repelled by means
of spells or charms, the impossibility of which has
no need to be explained by any school of philosophy.
A hundred and fifty years later than the legislation
of the decemvirs was passed the Lex Cornelia,
usually cited as directed against sorcery: but while
involving possibly the more shadowy crime, it seems
to have been levelled against the more 'substantial
poison.' The conviction and condemnation of 170
Roman ladies for poisoning, under pretence of incantation,
was the occasion and cause. Sulla, when dictator,
revived this act de veneficiis et malis sacrificiis,
for breach of which the penalty was 'interdiction
of fire and water.' Senatorial anathemas, or even
those of the prince, were ineffective to check the
continually increasing abuses, which towards the end
of the first century of the empire had reached an
alarming height.21
A general degradation of morals is often accompanied,
it has been justly remarked, by a corresponding
increase of the wildest credulity, and by an
abject subservience to external religious rites in propitiation
of an incensed deity. It was thus at Rome
when the eloquence of Cicero, and afterwards the
indignant satire of Juvenal or the calm ridicule of
the philosophic Lucian,22 attempted to assert the
'proper authority of reason.' To speak the truth,
says Cicero, superstition has spread like a torrent over
the entire globe, oppressing the minds and intellects
of almost all men and seizing upon the weakness of
human nature.23 The historian of 'The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire' justifies and illustrates
this lament of the philosopher of the Republic in the
particular case of witchcraft. 'The nations and the
sects of the Roman world admitted with equal credulity
and similar abhorrence the reality of that
infernal art which was able to control the eternal
order of the planets, and the voluntary operations of
the human mind. They dreaded the mysterious
power of spells and incantations, of potent herbs and
execrable rites, which could extinguish or recall life,
influence the passions of the soul, blast the works of
creation, and extort from the reluctant demons the
secrets of Futurity. They believed with the wildest
inconsistency that the preternatural dominion of the
the air, of earth, and of hell, was exercised from the
vilest motives of malice or gain by some wrinkled
hags or itinerant sorcerers who passed their obscure
lives in penury and contempt. Such vain terrors
disturbed the peace of society and the happiness of
individuals; and the harmless flame which insensibly
melted a waxen image might derive a powerful and
pernicious energy from the affrighted fancy of the
person whom it was maliciously designed to represent.
From the infusion of those herbs which were supposed
to possess a supernatural influence, it was an
easy step to the case of more substantial poison;
and the folly of mankind sometimes became the
instrument and the mask of the most atrocious
crimes.'24
Latin poetry of the Augustan and succeeding period
abounds with illustrations, and the witches of Horace,
Ovid, and Lucan are the famous classical types.25
Propertius has characterised the Striga as 'daring
enough to impose laws upon the moon bewitched by
her spells;' while Petronius makes his witch, as potent
as Strepsiades' Thessalian sorceress, exclaim that the
very form of the moon herself is compelled to descend
from her position in the universe at her command. For
the various compositions and incantations in common
use, it must be sufficient to refer to the pages of the
Roman poets. The forms of incantation and horrid
rites of the Horatian Sagana Canidia (Epod. v. and
Sat. i. 8), or the scenes described by the pompous
verses of the poet of the civil war (De Bello Civili,
vi.), where all nature is subservient, are of a similar
kind, but more familiar, in the dramatic writings
of the Elizabethan age. The darker characteristics
of the practice, however, are presented in the burning
declamations of Juvenal, only too faithfully exhibiting
the unnatural atrocities perpetrated in the form
and under the disguise of love-potions and charms.
Roman ladies in fact acquired considerable proficiency,
worthy of a Borgia or Brinvilliers, in the art of
poisoning and in the use of drugs. The reputed
witch, both in ancient and modern times, very
often belonged, like the Ovidian Dipsas, to the real
and detestable class of panders: wrinkled hags were
experienced in the arts of seduction, as well as in the
employment of poison and drugs more familiar
to the wealthier class (Sat. vi.). The great Satirist
wrote in the latter half of the first century of
Christianity; but even in the Augustan period such
crimes were prevalent enough to make Ovid enumerate
them among the universal evils introduced by the
Iron age (Metamorphoses, i.). The despotic will of
the princes themselves was exerted in vain; the mischief
was too deep-rooted to succumb even to the
decrees of the masters of the world. Nor did the
divi themselves disdain to be initiated in the infernal
or celestial science. Nigidius Figulus and the
two Thrasylli are magical or mathematical names
closely connected with the destinies of the two first
imperial princes. Nigidius predicted, and perhaps
promoted, the future elevation of Octavianus; and
the elder Thrasyllus, the famous Rhodian astrologer,
skilfully identified his fate with the life of his credulous
dupe but tyrannical pupil. Thrasyllus' art is
stated to have been of service in preventing the superstitious
tyrant from executing several intended victims
of his hatred or caprice, by making their safety the
condition of his existence. The historian of the early
empire tells of the incantations which could 'affect
the mind and increase the disease' of Germanicus,
Tiberius' nephew. 'There were discovered,' says
Tacitus, 'dug up from the ground and out of the walls
of the house, the remains of human corpses, charms
and spells, and the name of Germanicus inscribed
on leaden tablets, ashes half consumed covered with
decaying matter, and other practices by which it is
believed that souls are devoted to the deities of
hell.'26
In the fourth century, the first Christian emperor
limited the lawful exercise of magic to the beneficial
use of preserving or restoring the fruits of the earth
or the health of the human body, while the practice
of the noxious charms is capitally punished. The
science of those, proclaims the imperial convert, who,
immersed in the arts of magic, are detected either in
attempts against the life and health of their fellow-men,
or in charming the minds of modest persons to
the practice of debauchery, is to be avenged and
punished deservedly by severest penalties. But in no
sorts of criminal charges are those remedies to be
involved which are employed for the good of individuals,
or are harmlessly employed in remote
places to prevent premature rains, in the case of
vineyards, or the injurious effects of winds and hailstorms,
by which the health and good name of no one
can be injured; but whose practices are of laudable
use in preventing both the gifts of the Deity and
the labours of men from being scattered and
destroyed.27
Constantine, in distinguishing between good and
bad magic, between the theurgic and goetic, maintains
a distinction made by the pagans—a distinction ignored
in the later Christian Church, in whose system
'all demons are infernal spirits, and all commerce with
them is idolatry and apostasy.' Christian zeal has
accused the imperial philosopher and apostate Julian
of having had recourse—not to much purpose—to
many magical or necromantic rites; of cutting up the
dead bodies of boys and virgins in the prescribed
method; and of raising the dead to ascertain the event
of his Eastern expedition against the Persians.
Not many years after the death of Julian the
Christian Empire witnessed a persecution for witchcraft
that for its ferocity, if not for its folly, can be
paralleled only by similar scenes in the fifteenth or
seventeenth century. It began shortly after the
final division of the East and West in the reigns of
Valentinian and Valens, a.d. 373. The unfortunate
accused were pursued with equal fury in the Eastern
and Western Empires; and Rome and Antioch were
the principal arenas on which the bloody tragedy was
consummated. Gibbon informs us that it was occasioned
by a criminal consultation, when the twenty-four
letters of the alphabet were ranged round a
magic tripod; a dancing ring placed in the centre
pointed to the first four letters in the name of the
future prince. 'The deadly and incoherent mixture
of treason and magic, of poison and adultery, afforded
infinite gradations of guilt and innocence, of excuse
and aggravation, which in these proceedings appear
to have been confounded by the angry or corrupt
passions of the judges. They easily discovered that
the degree of their industry and discernment was
estimated by the imperial court according to the
number of executions that were furnished from their
respective tribunals. It was not without extreme
reluctance that they pronounced a sentence of acquittal;
but they eagerly admitted such evidence as
was stained with perjury or procured by torture to
prove the most improbable charges against the most
respectable characters. The progress of the inquiry
continually opened new subjects of criminal prosecution;
the audacious informers whose falsehood was
detected retired with impunity: but the wretched
victim who discovered his real or pretended accomplices
was seldom permitted to receive the price of
his infamy. From the extremity of Italy and Asia
the young and the aged were dragged in chains to
the tribunals of Rome and Antioch. Senators,
matrons, and philosophers expired in ignominious
and cruel tortures. The soldiers who were appointed
to guard the prisons declared, with a murmur of pity
and indignation, that their numbers were insufficient
to oppose the flight or resistance of the multitude of
captives. The wealthiest families were ruined by
fines and confiscations; the most innocent citizens
trembled for their safety: and we may form some
notion of the magnitude of the evil from the extravagant
assertion of an ancient writer [Ammianus
Marcellinus], that in the obnoxious provinces the
prisoners, the exiles, and the fugitives formed the
greatest part of the inhabitants. The philosopher
Maximus,' it is added, 'with some justice was involved
in the charge of magic; and young Chrysostom, who
had accidentally found one of the proscribed books,
gave himself up for lost.'28
The similarity of this to the horrible catastrophe
of Arras, recorded by the chroniclers of the fifteenth
century, excepting the grosser absurdities of the
latter, is almost perfect. Valentinian and Valens,
who seem to have emulated the atrocious fame of
the Cæsarean family, with their ministers, concealed,
it is probable, under the disguise of a simulated
credulity the real motives of revenge and cupidity.
The Roman world, Christian and pagan, was
subject to the prevailing fear. That portion of the
globe, however, comprehended but a small part of
the human race. The records of history are incomplete
and imperfect; nor are they more confined in
point of time than of extent. History is little more
at any period than an imperfect account of the
life of a few particular peoples. Necessarily limited
almost entirely to an acquaintance with the history
of that portion of the globe included in the 'Roman
Empire,' we almost forget our profound ignorance of
that vastly larger proportion of the earth's surface,
the extra-Roman world, embracing then, as now,
civilised as well as barbarous nations. The Chinese
empire (the most extraordinary, perhaps, and whose
antiquity far surpasses that of any known), comprehending
within its limits two-thirds of the population
of the globe; the refined and ingenious people of
Hindustan, an immense population, in the East: in
the Western hemisphere nations in existence whose
remains excited the admiration of the Spanish
invaders; the various savage tribes of the African
continent; the nomad populations of Northern Asia
and Europe; nearly all these more or less, on
the testimony of past and present observation,
experienced the tremendous fears of the vulgar demonism.29
With the tribes who, in the time of Cæsar or
Tacitus, inhabited the forests of Germany, and,
perhaps, amongst the Scandinavians, some more
elevated ideas obtained, the germ, however, of a
degenerated popular prejudice. By all the German
tribes, on the testimony of cotemporary writers,
women were held in high respect, and were believed
to have something even divine in their mental or
spiritual faculties. 'Very many of their women they
regard in the light of prophetesses, and when superstitious
fear is in the ascendant, even of goddesses.'
History has preserved the names of some of these
Teutonic deities. Veleda, by prophetic inspiration,
or by superior genius, directed the councils of her
nation, and for some years successfully resisted the
progress of the imperial arms.30 Momentous questions
of state or religion were submitted to their
divine judgment, and it is not wonderful if, endowed
with supernatural attributes, they, like other prophets,
helped to fulfil their own predictions. The Britons
and Gauls, of the Keltic race, seem to have resembled
the Orientals, rather than the Teutons or Italians, in
their religious systems. Long before the Romans
came in contact with them the magic science is said
to have been developed, and the priests, like those of
India or Egypt, communicated the mysteries only to
a privileged few, with circumstances of profound
secrecy. Such was the excellence of the magic
science of the British Druids, that Pliny (Hist.
Nat. xxx.) was induced to suppose that the Magi
of Persia must have derived their system from
Britain. For the most part the Kelts then, as in
the present day, were peculiarly tenacious of a creed
which it was the interest of a priestly caste to
preserve. On the other hand, the looser religion of
the Teuton nations, of the Scandinavians and Germans,
could not find much difficulty in accepting the
particular conceptions of the Southern conquerors;
and the sorceric mythology of the Northern barbarians
readily recognised the power of an Erichtho to
control the operations of nature, to prevent or confound
the course of the elements, interrupt the
influence of the sun, avert or induce tempests, to
affect the passions of the soul, to fascinate or charm
a cruel mistress, &c., with all the usual necromantic
rites. But if they could acknowledge the characteristics
of the Italian Striga, those nations at the
same time retained a proper respect for the venerated
Saga—the German Hexe.
Of all the historic peoples of ancient Europe, the
Scandinavians were perhaps most imbued with a
persuasion of the efficacy of magic; a fact which
their home and their habits sufficiently explain. In the
Eddas, Odin, the leader of the immigration in the
first century, and the great national lawgiver, is represented
as well versed in the knowledge of that preternatural
art; and the heroes of the Scandinavian legends
of the tenth or twelfth century are especially ambitious
of initiation. The Scalds, like the Brahmins
or Druids, were possessed of tremendous secrets;
their runic characters were all powerful charms,
whether against enemies, the injurious effects of an
evil eye, or to soften the resentment of a lover.31
The Northmen, with the exception of some nations of
Central Europe, like the Lithuanians, who were not
christianised until the thirteenth or fourteenth century,
from their roving habits as well perhaps as from
their remoteness, were among the last peoples of
Europe to abandon their old creed. Urged by poverty
and the hopes of plunder, the pirates of the Baltic
long continued to be the terror of the European
coasts; but, without a political status, they were the
common outlaws of Christendom. They were the
relics of a savage life now giving way in Europe to
the somewhat more civilised forms of society, continuing
their indiscriminate depredations with impunity
only because of the want of union and
organisation among their neighbours. But they
were in a transitional state: the coasts and countries
they had formerly been content to ravage, they were
beginning to find it their interest to colonise and
cultivate. In the new interests and pursuits of civilisation
and commerce, a natural disgust might
have been experienced for the savage traditions of a
religion whose gods and heroes were mostly personifications
of war and rapine, under whose banners
they had suffered the hardships, if they had enjoyed
the plunder, of a piratic life. The national deities
from being disregarded, must have come soon to be
treated with undisguised contempt at least by the
leaders: while the common people, serfs, or slaves
were still immersed (as much as in Christian Europe)
in a stupid superstition.
When men's minds are thus universally unsettled
and in want—a want both universal and necessary in
states—of some new divine objects of worship more
suited to advanced ideas and requirements, a system of
religion more civilising and rational than the antiquated
one, will be adopted without much difficulty,
especially if it is not too exclusive. Yet the Scandinavians
were unusually tenacious of the forms of their
ancestral worship; for while the Icelanders are said to
have received Christianity about the beginning of
the eleventh century, the people of Norway were not
wholly converted until somewhat later. The halls of
Valhalla must have been relinquished with a sigh in
exchange for the less intelligible joys of a tranquil
and insensuous paradise. An ancient Norsk law
enjoins that the king and bishop, with all possible
care, make inquiry after those who exercise pagan
practices, employ magic arts, adore the genii of
particular places, of tombs or rivers, who transport
themselves by a diabolical mode of travelling through
the air from place to place. In the extremity of
the northern peninsula (amongst the Laplanders),
where the light of science, or indeed of civilisation,
has scarcely yet penetrated, witchcraft remains as
flourishing as in the days of Odin; and the Laplanders
at present are possibly as credulous in this
respect as the old Northmen or the present tribes
of Africa and the South Pacific. Before the introduction
of the new religion (it is a curious fact), the
Germans and Scandinavians, as well as the Jews, were
acquainted with the efficacy of the rite of infant
baptism. A Norsk chronicle of the twelfth century,
speaking of a Norwegian nobleman who lived in the
reign of Harald Harfraga, relates that he poured
water on the head of his new-born son, and called
him Hakon, after the name of his father. Harald
himself had been baptized in the same way; and it
is noted of the infant pagan St. Olaf that his mother
had him baptized as soon as he was born. The
Livonians observed the same ceremony; and a letter
sent expressly by Pope Gregory III. to St. Boniface,
the great apostle of the Germans, directs him how
to act in such cases. It is probable, Mallet conjectures,
that all these people might intend by such a rite to
preserve their children from the sorceries and evil
charms which wicked spirits might employ against
them at the instant of their birth. Several nations
of Asia and America have attributed such a power to
ablutions of this kind; nor were the Romans without
the custom, though they did not wholly confine it to
new-born infants. A curious magical use of an
initiatory and sacramental rite, ignorantly anticipated,
it seems, by the unilluminated faith of the
pagan world.
In reviewing the characteristics of sorcery which
prevailed in the ancient world, it is obvious to compare
the superstition as it existed in the nations of
the East and West, of antiquity and of modern times.
These natural or accidental differences are deducible
apparently from the following causes:—(1) The essential
distinction between the demonology of Orientalism—of
Brahminism, Buddhism, Magianism,
Judaism, Mohammedanism—and that of the West,
of paganism and of Christianity, founded on their
respective idealistic and realistic tendencies. (2) The
divining or necromantic faculties have been generally
regarded in the East as honourable properties; whereas
in the West they have been degraded into the
criminal follies of an infernal compact. The magical
art is a noble cultivated science—a prerogative of the
priestly caste: witchcraft, in its strict sense, was
mostly abandoned to the lowest, and, as a rule, to the
oldest and ugliest of the female sex. In the one case
the proficient was the master, in the other the slave,
of the demons. (3) The position of the female sex
in the Western world has been always very opposite
to their status in the East, where women are believed
to be an inferior order of beings, and therefore
incapable of an art reserved for the superior endowments
of the male sex. The modern witchcraft may
be traced to that perhaps oldest form of religious
conception, Fetishism, which still prevails in its utmost
horrors amongst the savage peoples in different
parts of the world. The early practice of magic
was not dishonourable in its origin, closely connected
as it was with the study of natural science—with
astronomy and chymistry.
The magic system—interesting to us as having
influenced the later Jewish creed and mediately the
Christian—referred like most developed creeds to a
particular founder, Zerdusht (Zarathustra of the
Zend), may have thus originated. Mankind, in
seeking a solution for that most interesting but
unsatisfactory problem, the cause of the predominance
of evil on the earth, were obliged by their
ignorance and their fears to imagine, in addition
to the idea of a single supreme existence, the
author and source of good, antagonistic influence—the
source and representative of evil. Physical
phenomena of every day experience; the alternations
of light and darkness, of sunshine and clouds; the
changes and oppositions in the outer world, would
readily supply an analogy to the moral world. Thus
the dawn and the sun, darkness and storms, in the
wondering mind of the earlier inhabitants of the
globe, may have soon assumed the substantial forms
of personal and contending deities.32 Such seems to
be the origin of the personifications in the Vedic
hymns of Indra and Vritra with their subordinate
ministers (the Ormuzd and Ahriman, &c., of the
Zend-Avesta), and of the first religious conceptions
of other peoples. After this attempt to
reconcile the contradictions, the irregularities of
nature, by establishing a duality of gods whose
respective provinces are the happiness and unhappiness
of the human race, the step was easy to
the conviction of the superior activity of a malignant
god. The benevolent but epicurean security of the
first deity might seem to have little concern in
defeating or preventing the malicious schemes of the
other. All the infernal apparatus of later ages was
easy to be supplied by a delusive and an unreasoning
imagination.