Chapter VI: Sorcery and Occult Arts (1)

Few things are so indestructible as a superstitious belief once fairly implanted in human credulity. It passes from one race to another and is handed down through countless generations; it adapts itself successively to every form of religious faith; persecution may stifle its outward manifestation, but it continues to be cherished in secret, perhaps the more earnestly that it is unlawful. Religion may succeed religion, but the change only multiplies the methods by which man seeks to supplement his impotence by obtaining control over supernatural powers, and to guard his weakness by lifting the veil of the future. The sacred rites of the superseded faith become the forbidden magic of its successor. Its gods become evil spirits, as the Devas or deities of the Veda became the Daevas or demons of the Avesta; as the bull-worship of the early Hebrews became idolatry under the prophets, and as the gods of Greece and Rome were malignant devils to the Christian Fathers.

Europe thus was the unhappy inheritor of an accumulated mass of superstitions which colored the life and controlled the actions of every man. They were vivified with a peculiar intensity by the powerful conception of the Mazdean Ahriman--the embodiment of the destructive forces of nature and the evil passions of man--which, transfused through Judaism and adorned with the imaginings of the Haggadah, became a fixed article of the creed as the fallen prince of angels, Satan, who drew with him in rebellion half of the infinite angelic hosts, and thenceforth devoted powers inferior only to those of God himself to the spiritual and material perdition of mankind. Omnipresent, and well-nigh omnipotent and omniscient, Satan and his demons were ever and everywhere at work to obtain, by cunning arts, control over the souls of men, to cross their purposes, and to vex their bodies. The food of these beings was the suffering of the damned, and human salvation their most exquisite torment. To effect their objects human agents were indispensable, and Satan was always ready to impart a portion of his power, or to consign a subordinate demon, to any one who would serve him. Thus a dualistic system sprang up, less hopeful and inspiring than that of Zarathustra Spitama, which in its vivid realization of the ever-present and ever-acting Evil Principle, cast a sombre shadow over the kindly teachings of Christ. Some even held that human affairs were governed by demons, and this belief grew sufficiently prevalent to induce Chrysostom to undertake its refutation. He admitted that they were inspired with a fierce and irreconcilable hatred for man, with whom they carried on an immortal war, but he argued that the evil of the world was the just punishment inflicted by God.[402]

Man thus lived surrounded by an infinite world of spirits, good and bad, whose sole object was his salvation or his perdition, and who were ever on the watch to save him or to lure him to destruction. Thus was solved the eternal problem of the origin of evil, which has perplexed the human soul since it first began to think, and thus grew up a demonology of immense detail which formed part of the articles of faith. Almost every race has shared in such belief, whether the evil spirits were of supernatural origin, as with the Mazdeans and Assyrians, or whether, as with the Buddhists and Egyptians, they were the souls of the damned seeking to gratify their vindictiveness. Although Greece and Rome had no such distinctive class, yet had they peopled the world with a countless number of genii and inferior supernatural beings, who were accepted by Christianity and placed at the service of Satan. As theology grew to be a science in which every detail of the dealings of God with man was defined with the most rigid precision, it became necessary to determine the nature and functions of the spirit world with exactitude, and the ardent intellects which framed the vast structure of orthodoxy did not shrink from the task. The numberless references to the character and attributes of demons in patristic literature show how large a space the subject occupied in the thoughts of men and the confidence which was felt in the accuracy of knowledge concerning it.[403]

Origen informs us that every man is surrounded by countless spirits eager to help or harm him. His virtues and good deeds are attributable to good angels; his sins and crimes are the work of demons of pride and lust and wrath, and of all passions and vices. Powerful as these are, however, the human soul is still superior to them and can destroy their capacity for evil; if a holy man baffles the spirit of lust who has tempted him, the conquered demon is cast into outer darkness or into the abyss, and loses his potency forever. This was received throughout the Middle Ages as orthodox doctrine. Gregory the Great tells us how the nun of a convent, walking in the garden, ate a lettuce-leaf without making the cautionary sign of the cross, and was immediately possessed of a demon. St. Equitius tortured the spirit with his exorcisms till the unhappy imp exclaimed, "What have I done? I was sitting on the leaf and she ate me;" but Equitius would listen to no excuse and forced him to depart. Cæsarius of Heisterbach relates a vast number of cases proving the perpetual interference of demons with human affairs, though he asserts as a well-known fact that Satan drew with him only one tenth of the hosts of heaven, and he proceeds to show, on the authority of Gregory the Great, that at the Day of Judgment the saved will be nine times as numerous as the devils, and of course the damned greatly more in excess; yet at the death-bed of a monk of Hemmenrode fifteen thousand demons gathered together, and at that of a Benedictine abbess more assembled than there are leaves in the forest of Kottinhold. Thomas of Cantimpré, though less profuse in his illustrative examples, is equally emphatic in showing that man is surrounded with evil spirits, who lose no opportunity to tempt, to seduce, to mislead, and to vex him. The blessed Reichhelm, Abbot of Schöngau, about 1270, had received from God the gift of being able to discern the aerial bodies of these creatures, and often saw them as a thick dust, or as motes in a sunbeam, or as thickly falling rain. He describes their numbers as so great that the atmosphere is merely a crowd of them; all material sounds, water falling, stones clashing, winds blowing, are their voices. Sometimes they would materialize as a woman to tempt him, or as a huge cat or a bear to terrify him, but their efforts were mostly directed to diverting the thoughts from pious duties and contemplations, and to inciting to evil passions, which they could well do, as an innumerable army was assigned to each individual man. These enemies of man were ever on the watch to take advantage of every unguarded thought or act. Sprenger tells us that if an impatient husband says to a pregnant wife, "Devil take you," the child will be subject to Satan; such children, he says, are often seen; five nurses will not satisfy the appetite of one, and yet they are miserably emaciated, while their weight is great. Thus man was at all times exposed to the assaults of supernatural enemies, striving to lead him to sin, to torture his body with disease, or to afflict him with material damage. We cannot understand the motives and acts of our forefathers unless we take into consideration the mental condition engendered by the consciousness of this daily and hourly personal conflict with Satan.[404]

It is true that all demons were not equally malignant. The converted Barbarians of Europe could not wholly give up their belief in helpful spirits, and as Christianity classed them all as devils, it was necessary to find an explanation by suggesting that their characters varied with the amount of pride and envy of God which they entertained before the fall. Those who merely followed their companions and have repented are not always malicious. Cæsarius tells us of one who faithfully served a knight for a long while, saved him from his enemies, and cured his wife of a mortal illness by fetching from Arabia lion's milk with which to anoint her. This aroused the knight's suspicions, and the demon confessed, explaining that it was a great consolation to him to be with the children of men. Fearing to retain such a servitor, the knight dismissed him, offering half of his possessions as a reward, but the demon would accept only five sous, and these he returned, asking the knight to purchase with them a bell and hang it on a certain desolate church, that the faithful might be called to divine service on Sundays. Froissart's picturesque narrative is well known of the demon Orton, who served the Sieur de Corasse out of pure love, bringing to him every night tidings of events from all parts of the world, and finally abandoning him in consequence of his imprudent demand to see his nocturnal visitor. Froissart himself was at Ortais in 1385, when the Count of Foix miraculously had news of the disastrous battle of Aljubarotta in Portugal the day after it occurred, and the courtiers explained that he heard of it through the Sieur de Corasse. Thus, for good or for evil, the barriers which divided the material from the spiritual world were slight, and intercourse between them was too frequent to excite incredulity.[405]

It was inevitable that this facility of intercourse should encourage belief in the Incubi and Succubi who play so large a part in mediæval sorcery, for such a belief has belonged to superstition in all ages. The Akkads had their Gelal and Kiel-Gelal, the Assyrians their Lil and Lilit, and the Gauls their Dusii, lustful spirits of either sex who gratified their passions with men and women, while the Welsh legends of the Middle Ages show the continuance of the belief among the Celtic tribes. The Egyptians drew a distinction and admitted of Incubi but not of Succubi. The Jews accepted the text concerning the sons of God and daughters of men (Gen. VI. 1) as proving that fruitful intercourse could occur between spiritual and human beings, and they had their legends of the evil spirit Lilith, the first wife of Adam, who bore to him the innumerable multitude of demons. The anthropomorphic mythology and hero-worship of Greece consisted of little else, and the name of Satyr has passed into a proverb. The simpler and purer Latin pantheon had yet its Sylvans and Fauns, who, as St. Augustin tells us, "are commonly called Incubi." The medical faculty in vain explained the belief by Ephialtes or nightmare, and recommended for it belladonna rather than exorcisms. Though St. Augustin, who did so much to transmit pagan superstitions to succeeding ages, hesitates to believe in the possibility of such powers on the part of aerial spirits, even he dares not deny it, and though Chrysostom ridiculed it, other authorities accepted it as a matter of course. Thus it came to be received as a truth which few thought of disputing. In 1249 an incubus child was born on the Welsh marches, which in half a year had a full set of teeth and the stature of a youth of seventeen, while the mother wasted away and died. The belief grew still more definite as perfected processes of trial enabled judges to extort from their victims whatever confessions they desired, such as that of Angèle de la Barthe, who, in the Toulousain in 1275, admitted that she had habitual intercourse with Satan, to whom, seven years before, at the age of fifty-three, she had borne a son--a monster with a wolf's head and a serpent's tail, which she fed for two years on the flesh of year-old babies whom she stole by night, after which it disappeared; or those of the witches of Arras, in 1460, who were brought to confess that their demon lovers wore the shapes of hares, or foxes, or bulls. Innocent VIII. asserts the existence of such connections in the most positive manner, and Silvester Prierias declares that to deny it is both unorthodox and unphilosophical, and could only be prompted by sheer wantonness.[406]

Liaisons of this kind would be entered into with demons, and would be maintained with the utmost fidelity on both sides for thirty or forty years; and the connection thus established was proof against all the ordinary arts of the exerciser. Alvaro Pelayo relates that in a nunnery under his direction it prevailed among the nuns, and he was utterly powerless to put a stop to it. In fact, it was peculiarly frequent in such pious establishments. As a special crime it grew to have a special name, and was known among canonists and casuists as Demoniality; and Sprenger, whose authority in such matters is supreme, assures us that to its attractiveness was due the alarming development of witchcraft in the fifteenth century. The few who, like Ulric Molitoris, while admitting the existence of Incubi, denied to them the power of procreation, were silenced by the authority of Thomas Aquinas, who explained how, by acting alternately as Succubus and Incubus, the demon could accomplish the object, and by the indubitable facts that the Huns were sprung from demons, and that an island in Egypt, or, as some said, Cyprus, was peopled wholly by descendants of Incubi, to say nothing of the popular legend which attributed such paternity to the prophet and enchanter, Merlin. Into the physiological speculations by which these possibilities were proved, it is not worth our while to enter. There is nothing fouler in all literature than the stories and illustrative examples by which these theories were supported.[407]

As Satan's principal object in his warfare with God was to seduce human souls from their divine allegiance, he was ever ready with whatever temptation seemed most likely to effect his purpose. Some were to be won by physical indulgence such as that just alluded to; others by conferring on them powers enabling them apparently to forecast the future, to discover hidden things, to gratify enmity, and to acquire wealth, whether through forbidden arts or by the services of a familiar demon subject to their orders. As the neophyte in receiving baptism renounced the devil his pomps and his angels,[408] it was necessary for the Christian who desired the aid of Satan to renounce God. Moreover, as Satan when he tempted Christ offered him the kingdoms of the earth in return for adoration--"If thou therefore wilt worship me all shall be thine" (Luke IV. 7)--there naturally arose the idea that to obtain this aid it was necessary to render allegiance to the princes of hell. Thence came the idea, so fruitful in the development of sorcery, of compacts with Satan by which sorcerers became his slaves, binding themselves to do all the evil they could encompass and to win over as many converts as they could to follow their example. Thus the sorcerer or witch was an enemy of all the human race as well as of God, the most efficient agent of hell in its sempiternal conflict with heaven. His destruction, by any method, was therefore the plainest duty of man.

This was the perfected theory of sorcery and witchcraft by which the gentile superstitions inherited and adopted from all sides were fitted into the Christian dispensation and formed part of its accepted creed. From the earliest periods of which records have reached us there have been practitioners of magic who were credited with the ability of controlling the spirit world, of divining the future, and of interfering with the ordinary operations of nature. When this was accomplished by the ritual of an established religion it was praiseworthy, like the augural and oracular divination of classic times, or the exorcism of spirits, the excommunication of caterpillars, and the miraculous cures wrought by relics or pilgrimages to noted shrines. When it worked through the invocation of hostile deities, or of a religion which had been superseded, it was blameworthy and forbidden. The Yatudhana, or sorcerer of the Vedas, doubtless sought his ends through the invocation of the Rakshasas and other dethroned divinities of the conquered Dasyu. His powers were virtually the same as those of the mediæval sorcerer: with his _yatu_, or magic, he could encompass the death of his enemies or destroy their harvests and their herds; his _kritya_, or charmed images and other objects, had an evil influence which could only be overcome by discovering and removing them, exactly as we find it in the Europe of the fifteenth century; while the counter-charms and imprecations employed against him show that there was virtually no difference between sacred and prohibited magic.[409] The same lesson is taught by Hebrew tradition, which admitted that wonders could be wrought by the _Elohim acherim_, or "other gods," as instanced in the contest between Moses and the Chakamim, or wise men of Egypt. The Talmudists inform us that when he changed his rod into a serpent Pharaoh laughed at him for parading such tricks in a land full of magicians, and sent for some little children who readily performed the same feat, but the failure of Jannes and Jambres to cope with him when he came to the plague of the lice was because their art would not extend to the imitation of things smaller than a barley-corn. The connection between their magic and the worship of false gods is seen in the legend that it was Jannes and Jambres who fabricated for Aaron the golden calf. A similar indication is seen in the Samaritan tradition that the falling away of the Hebrews from the ancient faith was explicable by the magic arts of Eli and Samuel, who studied them in the books of Balaam, gaining thereby wealth and power, and seducing the people from the worship of Jehovah.[410]

How great was the impression produced on the surrounding nations by the powers of the Egyptian Chakamim is shown by the later Jews, who, familiar as they were with the mysteries of the Magi and Chaldeans, yet declared that of the ten portions of magic bestowed upon the earth, nine had fallen to the lot of Egypt. That kingdom therefore furnishes naturally enough the oldest record of a trial for sorcery, occurring about 1300 B.C., showing that the use of magic was not regarded as criminal of itself, but only when employed by an unauthorized person for wrongful ends. The proceedings in the case recite that a certain Penhaiben, a farm superintendent of cattle, when passing by chance the Khen, or hall in the royal palace where the rolls of mystic lore were kept, was seized with a desire to obtain access to their secrets for his personal advantage. Procuring the assistance of a worker in stone named Atirma, he penetrated into the sacred recesses of the Khen and secured a book of dangerous formulas belonging to his master, Rameses III. Mastering their use, he soon was able to perform all the feats of the doctors of mysteries. He composed charms which, when carried into the royal palace, corrupted the concubines of the Pharaoh; he caused hatred between men, fascinated or tormented them, paralyzed their limbs, and in short, as the report of the tribunal states, "He sought and found the real way to execute all the abominations and all the wickedness that his heart conceived, and he performed them, with other great crimes, the horror of every god and goddess. Consequently he has endured the great punishment, even unto death, which the divine writings say that he merited."[411]

Hebrew belief, which necessarily served as a standard for orthodox Christianity, drew from these various sources an ample store of magic practitioners. There was the _At_, or charmer; the _Asshaph_, _Kasshaph_, _Mekassheph_, the enchanter or sorcerer; the _Kosem_, or diviner; the _Ob_, _Shoel Ob_, _Baal Ob_, the consulter with evil spirits, or necromancer (the Witch of Endor was a _Baalath Ob_); the _Chober Chaber_, or worker with spells and ligatures; the _Doresh el Hammathim_, or consulter with the dead; the _Meonen_, or augur, divining by the drift of clouds or voices of birds--the "observer of times" of the A. V.; the _Menachesh_, or augur by enchantments; the _Jiddoni_, or wizard; the _Chakam_, or sage; the _Chartom_, or hierogrammatist; the _Mahgim_, or mutterers of spells; and in later times there were the _Istaginen_, or astrologer; the _Charori_, or soothsayer; the _Magush, Amgosh_, or enchanter; the _Raten_, or magus; the _Negida_, or necromancer; and the _Pithom_, inspired by evil spirits. There was here an ample field in which Christian superstition could go astray.

Greece contributed her share, although of strictly Goetic magic--the invocation of malignant spirits or the use of illicit means for wrongful ends--there was little need, in a religion of which the deities, great and small, were subject to all the weaknesses of humanity, were ready at any moment to inflict on man the direst calamities to gratify their love or their spleen or their caprice, and could be purchased by a prayer or a sacrifice to exercise their omnipotence irrespective of justice or morality. In such a religion the priest exercises the functions which in purer faiths are relegated to the sorcerer. Yet it is only necessary to mention the names of Zetheus and Amphion, of Orpheus and Pythagoras, of Epimenides, Empedocles, and Apollonius of Tyana to show that both tradition and history taught the existence and power of thaumaturgy and theurgy.[412] This theurgy was developed to its fullest extent in the marvels related of the Neo-Platonists, thus directly influencing Christian thought, which necessarily ascribed its miracles to the invocations of demons.[413] Yet by the side of all this there was no lack of Goetic magic, such as the legends attribute to the Cretan Dactyls or Curetes, to the Telchines, to Medea, and to Circe.[414] This is said to have received a powerful impetus in the Medic wars, when the Magian Osthanes, who accompanied Xerxes, scattered the seeds of his unholy lore throughout Greece. Plato speaks with the strongest reprobation of the venal sorcerers who hire themselves at slender wages to those desirous of destroying enemies with magic arts and incantations, ligatures, and the figurines, or waxen images, which have always been one of the favorite resources of malignant magic, and which in Greece wrought their evil work by being set up in the cross-roads, or affixed to the door of the victim or to the tomb of his ancestors. Philtres, or love-potions, which would excite or arrest love at will were among their ordinary resources. Even the triform Hecate was subject to their spells; they could arrest the course of nature and bring the moon to earth. The fearful rites which superstition attributed to these sorcerers are indicated in one of the charges brought against Apollonius of Tyana when tried before Domitian--that of sacrificing a child.[415]

In Rome the gods of the nether world furnished a link between the sacred ceremonies of the priest and the incantations of the sorcerer, for while they were objects of worship to the pious, they were also the customary sources of the magician's power. Lucan's terrible witch, Erichtho, is a favorite with Erebus; she wanders among tombs from which she draws their shades; she works her spells with funeral-torches and with the bones and ashes of the dead; her incantations are Stygian; gluing her lips to those of a dying man, she sends her dire messages to the under-world. Horace's Canidia and Sagana seek their power at the same source, and the description of their hideous doings bears a curious resemblance to much that sixteen centuries later occupied the attention of half the courts in Christendom. It is the same throughout all the allusions to Latin sorcery--the deities invoked are infernal, and the rites are celebrated at night,[416] The identity of the means employed with those of modern sorcery is perfect. When Germanicus Cæsar, the idol of the empire, was doomed by the secret jealousy of Tiberius; when his subordinate in command of the East, Cneius Piso, was commissioned to make way with him, and Germanicus was stricken with mortal illness, it reads like a passage in Grillandus or Delrio to see that his friends, suspecting Piso's enmity, dug from the ground and the walls of his house the objects placed there to effect his destruction--fragments of human bodies, half-burned ashes smeared with corruption, leaden plates inscribed with his name, charms, and other accursed things, by which, says Tacitus, it is believed that souls may be dedicated to the infernal gods. The ordinary feats of the witch could be more easily performed. A simple incantation would blight the harvest or dry the running fountain, would destroy the acorn on the oak and the ripening fruit on the bough. The figurine, or waxen image, of the person to be assailed, familiar to Hindu, Egyptian, and Greek sorcery, assumes in Rome the shape in which we find it in the Middle Ages. Sometimes the name of the victim was traced on it in letters of red wax. If a mortal disease was to be induced in any organ, a needle was thrust in the corresponding part of the image; or if he was to waste away in an incurable malady, it was melted with incantations at a fire. The victim could moreover be transformed into a beast--a feat which St. Augustin endeavors to explain by dæmonic delusion.[417] It is observable that the terrible magician is almost always an old woman--the _saga_, _strix_, or _volatica_--the wise-woman or nocturnal bird or night-flyer--corresponding precisely with the hag who in mediæval Europe almost monopolized sorcery. But the male sorcerer, like his modern descendant, had the power of transforming himself into a wolf, and was thus the prototype of the wer-wolves, or _loups-garoux_, who form so picturesque a feature in the history of witchcraft.[418]

The philtres, charms, and ligatures for exciting desire or preventing its fruition, or for arousing hatred, which meet us at every step in modern sorcery, were equally prevalent in that of Rome. The virtual insanity of Caligula was attributed to powerful drugs administered to him in a love-potion by Cæsonia, whom he married after the death of his sister and concubine Drusilla, and so firm was the conviction of this that when he was assassinated she was likewise put to death for having thus brought the greatest calamities on the republic. That such a man as Marcus Aurelius could be supposed to have caused his wife Faustina to bathe in the blood of the luckless gladiator who was the object of her affections before seeking his own embraces, while doubtless invented to account for the character of his son Commodus, shows the profound belief accorded to such arts. Appuleius found this to his cost when he was tried for his life on the charge of having by incantations and sorcery secured the affections of his bride Pudentilla, a woman of mature age who had been fourteen years a widow. Had the court, like those of the Middle Ages, enjoyed the infallible resource of torture, he would readily have been forced to confession, with the attendant death-penalty; but as there was no charge of treason involved, he was free to disculpate himself by evidence and argument, and he escaped.[419]

The severest penalties of the law, in fact, were traditionally directed against all practitioners of magic. The surviving fragments of the Decemviral legislation show that this dated from an early period of the republic. With the spread of the Roman conquests, the introduction of Orientalized Hellenism was followed by the magic of the East, more imposing than the homelier native practices, arousing the liveliest fear and indignation. In 184 B.C. the praetor L. Nævius was detained for four months from proceeding to his province of Sardinia, by the duty assigned to him of prosecuting cases of sorcery. A large portion of these were scattered through the suburbicarian regions; the culprits had a short shrift, and he manifested a diligence which Pierre Cella or Bernard de Caux might envy, if the account be true that he condemned no less than two thousand sorcerers. Under the empire decrees against magicians, astrologers, and diviners were frequent, and from the manner in which accusations of sorcery were brought against prominent personages the charge would seem to have been then, as it proved in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, one of those convenient ones, easy to make and hard to disprove, which are welcome in personal and political intrigue. Nero persecuted magic with such severity that he included philosophers among magicians, and the cloak or distinctive garment of the philosopher was sufficient to bring its wearer before the tribunals. Musonius the Babylonian, who ranked next to Apollonius of Tyana in wisdom and power, was incarcerated, and would have perished as intended but for the exceptional robustness which enabled him to endure the rigors of his prison. Caracalla went even further and punished those who merely wore on their necks amulets for the cure of tertian and quartan fevers. The darker practices of magic were repressed with relentless rigor. To perform or procure the performance of impious nocturnal rites with the object of bewitching any one was punished with the severest penalties known to the Roman law--crucifixion or the beasts. For immolating a man or offering human blood in sacrifices the penalty was simple death or the beasts, according to the station of the offender. Accomplices in magic practices were subjected to crucifixion or the beasts, while magicians themselves were burned alive. The knowledge of the art was forbidden as well as its exercise; all books of magic were to be burned, and their owners subjected to deportation or capital punishment, according to their rank. When the cross became the emblem of salvation, it of course passed out of use as an instrument of punishment; with the abolition of the arena the beasts were no longer available; but the fagot and stake remained, and for long centuries continued to be the punishment for more or less harmless impostors.[420]

With the triumph of Christianity the circle of forbidden practices was enormously enlarged. A new sacred magic was introduced which superseded and condemned as sorcery and demon-worship a vast array of observances and beliefs, which had become an integral and almost ineradicable part of popular life. The struggle between the rival thaumaturgies is indicated already in Tertullian's complaint, that when in droughts the Christians by prayers and mortifications had extorted rain from God, the credit was given to the sacrifices offered to Jove; he challenges the pagans to bring before their own tribunals a demoniac, when a Christian will force the possessing spirit to confess himself a demon. The triumph of the new system was typified in the encounter between St. Peter and Simon Magus, when the flight through the air of the heathen theurgist was arrested by the prayers of the Christian, and he fell with a disastrous crash, breaking a hip-bone and both heels. If, as conjectured by some modern critics, Simon Magus is the Petrine designation of St. Paul, the partisans of the latter were not behindhand in recounting the triumph of their leader over the older thaumaturgists, for when he wrought wonders at Ephesus and the Jewish conjurers were put to shame, then "many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together and burned them before all men; and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver."[421]

Still more convincing was the incident which occurred to Marcus Aurelius in the Marcomannic war when, in the territory of the Quadi, he was cut off from water, so that his army was perishing from thirst. Though he had persecuted the Christians, he had recourse to the intervention of Christ, when a sudden tempest supplied the Romans abundantly with water, while the lightning slew the Teutons and dispersed them, so that they were readily slaughtered. When, finally, the new faith and the old met in their death-grapple, Eusebius describes Constantine as preparing for the struggle by calling around him his most holy priests and marching under the shade of the sacred Labarum. Licinius on his side collected diviners and Egyptian prophets and magicians. They offered sacrifices and endeavored to learn the result from their deities. Oracles everywhere promised victory; the sacrificial auguries were favorable; the interpreters of dreams announced success. On the eve of the first battle Licinius assembled his chief captains in a sacred grove where there were many idols, and explained to them that this was to be the decisive test between the gods of their ancestors and the unknown deity of the barbarians--if they were vanquished it would show that their gods were dethroned. In the ensuing combat the cross bore down everything before it; the enemy fled when it appeared, and Constantine seeing this sent the Labarum as an amulet of victory, wherever his troops were sore bestead, and at once the battle would be restored. Defeat only hardened the heart of Licinius, and again he had recourse to his magicians. Constantine, on the other hand, arranged an oratory in his camp, to which before battle he would retire to pray with the men of God, and then sallying forth would give the signal for attack, when his troops would slay all who dared to stand before them. So complete became the trust enjoined in the efficacy of the invocation of God, that enthusiasts denounced it as unworthy a Christian to rely upon human prudence and sagacity in trouble. St. Nilus tells us that in cases of sickness recourse is to be had to prayer, rather than to physicians and physic; and St. Augustin, in his recital of miraculous cures beyond the reach of science to effect, evidently regards the appeal to God and the saints as far more trustworthy than all the resources of the medical art.[422]

It was inevitable that the triumphant theurgy should set to work with remorseless vigor to extirpate its fallen rival, as soon as it could fully control the powers of the State. It was not so much the worship and propitiation of the pagan gods that was first attacked, as the thousand methods of divination and devices to avert evil which had become ingrained in daily life--oracles and auguries and portents and omens and soothsaying. Their efficacy was the work of Satan to deceive and seduce mankind, and their use was the direct or indirect invocation of demons. To attempt to foretell the future in any way was sorcery, and all sorcery was the work of the devil; and it was the same with the amulets and charms, the observance of lucky and unlucky days, and the innumerable trivial superstitions which amused the popular imagination. Zeal for the repression of every species of magic was not only stimulated by the conviction that it was an essential part of the conflict with a personal Satan, but by obedience to the commands of God in the Mosaic law. The awful words, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch (_Mekasshepha_) to live" have rung through the centuries, and have served as a justification for probably more judicial slaughter than any other sentence in the history of human jurisprudence. Rabbinical Judaism enforced this relentlessly in spite of the kindliness of the rabbis and their extreme indisposition to shed human blood. One of the first reforms of the Pharisees on coming into power after the persecution of Alexander Jannai was the abrogation of the Mosaic penal code in favor of milder laws. The leader in the revolution was Simon ben Shetach, who in organizing the Sanhedrin refused the presidency and conferred it on Judah ben Tabbai. The latter chanced to condemn a man for false witness on the testimony of a single person, though the law required two, when Simon reproached him as blood-guilty, and he resigned. Yet this man, so scrupulous about taking life, had no hesitation in hanging at Ascalon eighty witches in a single day. According to the Mishna, the Pithom and the Jiddoni are to be stoned, and false diviners and those who read the future in the name of idols are to be hanged, while the Talmud adds that he who learns a single word from a Magus is to be put to death. Christianity thus derived from Judaism the complete assurance that in ruthlessly exterminating all thaumaturgy save that of its own priesthood it was obeying the unquestioned command of God.[423]

The machinery of the Church was therefore early set to work to exhort and persuade the faithful against a sin so unpardonable and apparently so ineradicable; and as soon as it gathered its prelates together in councils it commenced to legislate for the suppression of such practices.[424] When it grew powerful enough to influence the head of the State it procured a series of cruel edicts which doubtless were effective in destroying the remains of tolerated paganism as well as in suppressing the special practices so offensive in the eyes of the orthodox. It was not difficult to commence with the time-honored practices of divination, for, although these had formed part of the machinery of State, yet when the State was centred in the person of its master, any inquiry into the future of public affairs was an inquiry into the fortune and fate of the monarch, and no crime was more jealously repressed and more promptly punished than this. Even so warm an admirer of ancestral institutions as Cato the Elder had long before warned his paterfamilias to forbid his _villicus_, or farm-steward, to consult any haruspex or augur. These gentry had a way of breeding trouble, and it boded no good to the master when the slaves were over-curious and too well-informed. In the same spirit Tiberius prohibited the secret consultation of haruspices. Constantine was thus serving a double purpose when, as early as 319, he threatened with burning the haruspex who ventured to cross another's threshold, even on pretext of friendship; the man who called him in was punished with confiscation and deportation, and the informer was rewarded. Priest and augur were only to celebrate their rites in public. Even this was withdrawn by Constantius in 357; any consultation with diviners was punishable with death, and the practitioners themselves, whether of magic or augury, or the expounding of dreams, when on trial were deprived of exemption from torture and could be subjected to the rack or the hooks to extort confession.[425] Under this Constantius organized an active persecution throughout the East, in which numbers were put to death upon the slightest pretext; passing among the tombs at night was evidence of necromancy, and hanging a charm around the neck for the cure of a quartan was proof of forbidden arts. The witch-trials of modern times were prefigured and anticipated. Under Julian there was a reaction, and in 364 Valentinian and Valens proclaimed freedom of belief; in 371 they included in this the old religious divination, while capital punishment was restricted to magic arts, but the persecution in the East under Valens in 374, following the conspiracy of Theodore, obliterated all distinction. Commencing with those accused of magic, it extended to all who were noted for letters or philosophy. Terror reigned throughout the East; all who had libraries burned them. The prisons were insufficient to contain the prisoners, and in some towns it was said that fewer were left than were taken. Many were put to death, and the rest were stripped of their property. In the West, under Valentinian, persecution was not so sweeping, but the laws were enforced, at least in Rome, with sufficient energy to reduce greatly the number of sorcerers; and a law of Honorius, in 409, by its reference to the bishops, shows that the Church was beginning to participate with the State in the supervision over such offenders.[426] Yet that even the faithful could not be restrained from indulging in these forbidden practices is seen in the earnest exhortations addressed to them by their teachers, and the elaborate repetition of proofs that all such exhibitions of supernatural power were the work of demons.[427]

The Eastern Empire maintained its severity of legislation and continued with more or less success to repress the inextinguishable thirst for forbidden arts. From some transactions under Manuel and Andronicus Comnenus in the latter half of the twelfth century we learn that blinding was a usual punishment for such offences, that the classical forms of augury had disappeared to be replaced by necromantic formulas, and that such accusations were a convenient method of disposing of enemies.[428]

In the West the Barbarian domination introduced a new element. The Ostrogoths, who occupied Italy under Theodoric, were, it is true, so much Romanized that, although Arians, they adopted and enforced the laws against magic. Divination was classed with paganism and was capitally punished. About the year 500 we hear of a persecution which drove all the sorcerers from Rome, and Basilius, the chief thaumaturge among them, although he escaped at the time, was burned on venturing to return. When Italy fell back into the hands of the Eastern Empire the prosecution of these offences seems to have been committed to the Church as a part of its ever-widening sphere of influence and jurisdiction.[429]

The Wisigoths who took possession of Aquitaine and Spain, although less civilized than their Eastern brethren, were profoundly influenced by Roman legislation, and their princes issued repeated enactments to discourage the forbidden arts. It is significant of the Barbarian tenderness for human life, however, that the penalties were greatly less than those of the savage Roman edicts. A law of Recared declares magicians and diviners and those who consult them to be incapable of bearing testimony; one of Egiza places these crimes in the class for which a slave could be tortured against his accused master; and several edicts of Chindaswind provide, for those who invoke demons or bring hail upon vineyards, or use ligatures or charms to injure men or cattle or harvests, scourging with two hundred lashes, shaving, and carrying around for exhibition in the vicinage, to be followed by imprisonment. Those who consult diviners about the health of the king or of others are threatened with scourging and enslavement to the fisc, including confiscation, if their children are accomplices; judges who have recourse to divination for guidance in doubtful cases are subjected to the same penalties, while the simple observation of auguries is visited with fifty lashes. These provisions, which were mostly carried with little change into the Fuero Juzgo, remained the law of the Spanish Peninsula until the Middle Ages were well advanced. They show how impossible it had been to eradicate the old superstitions, and that the pagan observances and auguries still flourished among all classes, which is confirmed by the denunciations of the Spanish councils and ecclesiastical writers. They have a further significance as presenting a middle term between the severity of Rome and the laxity of the other Barbarian tribes.[430]

These latter were ruder and less amenable to Roman influences. In their conversion the Church rendered an immense service to humanity, and it did not dare to interfere too rudely with the customs and prejudices of its unruly neophytes; in fact, it harmonized its own with them as far as it could, and became considerably modified in consequence. This process is well symbolized in the instructions of Gregory the Great to Augustin, his missionary to England, to convert the pagan temples into churches by sprinkling them with holy water, so that converts might grow accustomed to their new faith by worshipping in the wonted places, while the sacrifices to demons were to be replaced by processions in honor of some saint or martyr, when oxen were to be slaughtered, not to propitiate idols, but in praise of God, to be eaten by the faithful. In this assimilation of Christianity to paganism it is not surprising that Redwald, King of East Anglia, after his conversion set up in his temple two altars, at one of which he worshipped the true God and at the other offered sacrifices to demons.[431] The similar adoption by Christian magic of elements from that which it supplanted is well illustrated by the hymn, or rather incantation, known as the Lorica of St. Patrick, in which the forces of nature and the Deity are both summoned as by an enchanter to the assistance of the thaumaturge. A MS. of the seventh century assures us that "Every person who sings it every day with all his attention on God shall not have demons appearing to his face. It will be a safeguard to him against sudden death. It will be a protection to him against every poison and envy. It will be an armor to his soul after his death. Patrick sang this at the time that the snares were set for him by Loegaire, so that it appeared to those who were lying in ambush that they were wild deer and a fawn after them."[432]

The Barbarians brought with them their own superstitions, whether transmitted from the prehistoric Aryan home, or acquired in the course of their wanderings, and they readily added to these such as they found among their new subjects, whether they were under the ban of the Church or not. They had parted from their brethren before the religious revolution caused by Zoroaster's dualistic conception of Hormazd and Ahriman, and their religions have no trace of a personification of the Evil Principle. Loki, its nearest representative, was rather tricky than incorrigible. It is true that there were evil beings, such as the Hrimthursar, Trolls, or Jotuns, the Jotun-dragon Fafnir, the wolf Fenrir, Beowulf's Grendal and others, but they were none of them analogous to the Mazdean Ahriman or the Christian Satan, and when the Teutonic races adopted the latter they came to represent him, as Grimm well points out, rather as the blundering Jotun than as the arch-enemy. To how late a period the ancestral conceptions of the spirit-world prevailed in Germany may be seen in the answers of the learned Abbot John of Trittenheim to the questions of Maximilian I.[433]

The Teutonic tribes had little to learn from the conquered peoples in the wide circle of the magic arts, for in no race, probably, has the supernatural formed a larger portion of daily life, or claimed greater power over both the natural and the spiritual worlds. Divination in all its forms was universally practised. Gifted beings known as _menn forspair_ could predict the future either by second sight, or by incantations, or by expounding dreams. Still more dreaded and respected was the Vala or prophetess, who was worshipped as superhuman and regarded as in some way an embodiment of the subordinate Norns or Fates, as in the case of Veleda, Aurinia, and others who, as Tacitus assures us, were regarded as goddesses, in accordance with the German custom of thus venerating their fatidical women; and in the Volüspa the Vala communes on equal terms with Odin himself.[434] For those not thus specially gifted there was ample store of means to forecast the future. The most ordinary method was by necromancy, either by placing under the tongue of a corpse a piece of wood carved with appropriate runes, or by raising the shades of the dead precisely as the Witch of Endor did with Samuel, or as was practised in Rome.[435] The lot was also used extensively, whether to ascertain the divine will, like the Hebrew Urim and Thummim, or to ascertain the future with a bundle of sticks, apparently almost identical with the Chinese trigrams and hexagrains.[436] As in Greece and Rome, sacrifices were often offered to the gods in expectation of a response; auguries were drawn from the flight of birds as carefully as by the Roman augurs, while the sacred chickens were replaced with white horses consecrated to the gods, whose motions and actions when harnessed to the sacred chariot were carefully observed.[437] Saving the Etruscan _haruspicium_ and the omens derived from sacrificial victims, Hellenic and Italiote divination had little to distinguish it from that of the Teutons.

As regards magic, scarce any limit can be set to the power of the sorcerer. In no literature do his marvels fill a larger space, nor are the feats of wizard or witch received with more unquestioning faith than in what remains to us of the sagas of the North. Especially were the lands around the Baltic regarded as the peculiar home and nursery of sorcerers, whither people from every land, even from distant Greece and Spain, resorted for instruction or for special aid. In Adam of Bremen's "Churland" every house was full of diviners and necromancers, while the people of northern Norway could tell what every man in the world was doing, and could perform with ease all the evil deeds ascribed to witches in Holy Writ. Both Saxo Grammaticus and Snorri Sturlason, in their widely differing Euhemeristic accounts of the origin of the Æsir, or gods, agree that the founders of the Northern kingdom owed their deification solely to the magic skill which led their subjects and descendants to venerate them as divine.[438]

Norse magic was roughly classified into that which was legitimate, or _galder_, and that which was wicked, or _seid_. To the former belonged the infinite powers of runes, whether sung as incantations or carved as talismans and amulets. Their invention was attributed to the ancient Hrimthursar or Jotuns, and it was his profound knowledge of this magic lore which enabled Odin to achieve his supremacy. Runes it was that kept the sun upon his course and maintained the order of nature. All runes were mingled together in the sacred drink of the Æsir, whence were derived their supernatural attributes, and some have been allowed to reach man, which were carefully classified and studied.[439] As an adjunct of these was the _seidstaf_, or wand, so indispensable to the magician of all races. The Icelandic Yala Thordis had one of these known as Hangnud, which would deprive of memory him whom it touched on the right cheek and restore it with a touch on the left cheek. Philtres and love-potions, causing irresistible desire or indifference or hatred, were among the ordinary resources of Norse magic. Pricking with the sleep-thorn produced magic sleep for an indefinite time. Magicians could also throw themselves into a deep trance, while the spirit wandered abroad in some other form: women who were accustomed to do this were called _hamleypur_, and if the _ham_, or assumed form, were injured, the hurt would be found on the real body--a belief common to almost all races.[440] The adept, moreover, could assume any form at will, as in the historical case of the wizard who in the shape of a whale swam to Iceland as a spy for Harold Gormsson of Denmark, when the latter was planning an expedition thither; or two persons could exchange appearances, as Signy did with a witch-wife, or Sigurd with Gunnar, when Brynhild was deceived into marrying the latter.[441] Enchanted swords that nothing could resist, enchanted coats that nothing could penetrate, caps of darkness which, like the Greek helm of Pluto, rendered the wearer invisible, are of frequent occurrence in Norse legendary history.[442]

All this was more or less lawful magic, while the impious sorcery known as _seid_ or _trolldom_ was based on a knowledge of the evil secrets of nature or the invocation of malignant spirits, such as the Jotuns and their troll-wives. _Seid_ is apparently derived from _sjoda_, to seethe or boil, indicating that its spells were wrought by boiling in a caldron the ingredients of the witches' hell-broth, as we see it done in Macbeth. It was deemed infamous, unworthy of men, and was mostly left to women, known as _seid konur_, or seid wives, and as "riders of the night." In the oldest text of the Salic law, which shows no trace of Christian influence, the only allusion to sorcery is a fine imposed for calling a woman a witch, or for stigmatizing a man as one who carries the caldron for a witch.[443] Scarce any limit was assigned to the power of these sorcerers. One of their most ordinary feats was the raising and allaying of tempests, and to such perfection was this brought that storm and calm could be enclosed in bags for use by the possessor, like those which Æolus gave to Ulysses. As Christianity spread, this power gave rise to trials of strength between the old and the new religion, such as we have seen when Constantine overcame Licinius. St. Olaf's first expedition to Finland barely escaped destruction from a dreadful tempest excited by the Finnish sorcerers. Olaf Tryggvesson was more fortunate in one of his missionary raids, when he defeated Raud the Strong and drove him to his fastness on Godo Island in the Salten Fiord--a piece of water whose fierce tidal currents were more dreaded than the Maelström itself. Repeated attempts to follow him were vain, for, no matter how fair was the weather outside, inside Raud maintained a storm in which no ship could live. At length Olaf invoked the aid of Bishop Sigurd, who promised to test whether God would vouchsafe to overcome the devil. Tapers and vestments and holy water and sacred texts were too much for the evil spirits; the king's ships sailed into the fiord with smooth water around them, though everywhere else the waves ran high enough to hide the mountains: Raud was captured, and, as he obstinately refused baptism, Olaf put him to the most cruel death that his ingenuity could devise.[444]