Chapter VII: Witchcraft (1)

While, as we have seen, princes and warriors were toying with the dangerous mysteries of the occult sciences, influencing the destinies of states, there had been for half a century a gradually increasing development of sorcery in a different direction among the despised peasantry, which, before it ran its course, worked far greater evils than any which had thus far sprung from the same source, and left an ineffaceable stain upon the civilization and intelligence of Europe. There is no very precise line of demarcation to be drawn between the more pretentious magic and the vulgar details of witchcraft; they find their origin in the same beliefs and fade into each other by imperceptible gradations, and yet, historically speaking, the witchcraft with which we now have to deal is a manifestation of which the commencement cannot be distinctly traced backward much beyond the fifteenth century. Its practitioners were not learned clerks or shrewd swindlers, but ignorant peasants, for the most part women, who professed to have skill to help or to ban, or who were credited by their neighbors with such power, and were feared and hated accordingly. Of such we hear little during the darkest portion of the Middle Ages, but with the dawn of modern culture they confront us as a strange phenomenon, of which the proximate cause is exceedingly obscure. Probably it may be traced to the effort of the theologians to prove that all superstitious practices were heretical in implying a tacit pact with Satan, as declared by the University of Paris. Thus the innocent devices of the wise-women in culling simples, or in muttering charms, came to be regarded as implying demon-worship. When this conception once came to be firmly implanted in the minds of judges and inquisitors, it was inevitable that with the rack they should extort from their victims confessions in accordance with their expectations. Every new trial would add fresh embellishments to this, until at last there was built up a stupendous mass of facts which demonologists endeavored to reduce to a science for the guidance of the tribunals.

That such was the origin of the new witchcraft is rendered still more probable by the fact that its distinguishing feature was the worship of Satan in the Sabbat, or assemblage, held mostly at night, to which men and women were transported through the air, either spontaneously or astride of a stick or stool, or mounted on a demon in the shape of a goat, a dog, or some other animal, and where hellish rites were celebrated and indiscriminate license prevailed. Divested of the devil-worship now first introduced, such assemblages have formed part of the belief of all races. In Hindu superstition the witches, through the use of mystic spells, flew naked through the night to the places of meeting, where they danced, or to a cemetery, where they gorged themselves with human flesh or revived the dead to satiate their lust. The Hebrew witch flew to the Sabbat with her hair loosened, as when it was bound she was unable to exercise her full power. Among the Norsemen we have seen the _trolla-thing_, or assemblage of witches, for their unholy purposes.[542] In the Middle Ages the first allusion which we meet concerning it occurs in a fragment, not later than the ninth century, in which it is treated as a diabolical illusion--"Some wicked women, reverting to Satan, and seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and profess that they ride at night with Diana on certain beasts, with an innumerable multitude of women, passing over immense distances, obeying her commands as their mistress, and evoked by her on certain nights. It were well if they alone perished in their infidelity and did not draw so many along with them. For innumerable multitudes, deceived by this false opinion, believe all this to be true, and thus relapse into pagan errors. Therefore, priests everywhere should preach that they know this to be false, and that such phantasms are sent by the Evil Spirit, who deludes them in dreams. Who is there who is not led out of himself in dreams, seeing much in sleeping that he never saw waking? And who is such a fool that he believes that to happen in the body which is only done in the spirit? It is to be taught to all that he who believes such things has lost his faith, and he who has not the true faith is not of God, but the devil." In some way this utterance came to be attributed to a Council of Anquira, which could never be identified; it was adopted by the canonists and embodied in the successive collections of Regino, Burchard, Ivo, and Gratian--the latter giving it the stamp of unquestioned authority--and it became known among the doctors as the _Cap. Episcopi_. The selection of Diana as the presiding genius of these illusory assemblages carries the belief back to classical times, when Diana, as the moon, was naturally a night-flyer, and was one of the manifestations of the triform Hecate, the favorite patroness of sorcerers. Under the Barbarians, however, her functions were changed. In the sixth century we hear of "the demon whom the peasants call Diana," who vexed a girl and inflicted on her visible stripes, until expelled by St. Cæsarius of Arles. Diana was the _dæmonium meridianum_, and the name is used by John XXII. as synonymous with succubus. In some inexplicable way Bishop Burchard, in the eleventh century, when copying the text, came to add to Diana Herodias, who remained in the subsequent recensions, but Burchard in another passage substitutes as the leader Holda, the Teutonic deity of various aspect, sometimes beneficent to housewives and sometimes a member of Wuotan's Furious Host. In a tract attributed to St. Augustin, but probably ascribable to Hugues de S. Victor, in the twelfth century, the companion of Diana is Minerva, and in some conciliar canons of a later date there appears another being known as Benzozia, or Bizazia; but John of Salisbury, who alludes to the belief as an illustration of the illusions of dreams, speaks only of Herodias as presiding over the feasts for which these midnight assemblages were held. We also meet with Holda, in her beneficent capacity as the mistress of the revels, under the name of the Domina Abundia or Dame Habonde. She was the chief of the _dominæ nocturnæ_, who frequented houses at night and were thought to bring abundance of temporal goods. In the year 1211 Gervais of Tilbury shows the growth of this belief in his account of the _lamiæ_ or _mascoe_, who flew by night and entered houses, performing mischievous pranks rather than malignant crimes, and he prudently avoids deciding whether this is an illusion or not. He also had personal knowledge of women who flew by night in crowds with these _lamiæ_, when any one who incautiously pronounced the name of Christ was precipitated to the earth. Half a century later Jean de Meung tells us that those who ride with Dame Habonde claim that they number a third of the population, and when the Inquisition undertook the suppression of sorcery, in its formula of interrogatories, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, there was a question as to the night-riding of the good women.[543]

Thus the Church, in its efforts to suppress these relics of pagandom, preferred to regard the nocturnal assemblages as a fiction, and denounced as heretical the belief in the reality of the delusion. This, as part of the canon law, remained unalterable, but alongside of it grew up, with the development of heresy, tales of secret conventicles, somewhat similar in character, in which the sectaries worshipped the demon in the form of a cat or other beast, and celebrated their impious and impure rites. Stories such as this are told of the Cathari punished at Orleans in 1017, and of their successors in later times; and the Universal Doctor, Alain de Lille, even derives the name of Cathari from their kissing Lucifer under the tail in the shape of a cat.[544] How the investigators of heresy came to look for such assemblages as a matter of course, and led the accused to embellish them until they assumed nearly the development of the subsequent Witches' Sabbat, is seen in the confessions of Conrad of Marburg's Luciferans, and in some of those of the Templars.

Yet the belief in the night-riders with Diana and Herodias continued, until the latter part of the fifteenth century, to be denounced as a heresy, and any one who persisted in retaining it after learning the truth was declared to be an infidel and worse than a pagan.[545] It was too thoroughly implanted, however, in ancestral popular superstition to be eradicated. In the middle of the thirteenth century the orthodox Dominican, Thomas of Cantimpré, speaks of the demons who, like Diana, transport men from one region to another and delude them into worshipping mortals as gods. Others, he says, carry away women, replacing them with insensible images, who are sometimes buried as though dead. Thus, when the peasant wise-women came to be examined as to their dealings with Satan, they could hardly help, under intolerable torture, from satisfying their examiners with accounts of their nocturnal flights. Between judge and victim it was easy to build up a coherent story, combining the ancient popular belief with the heretical conventicles, and the time soon came when the confession of a witch was regarded as incomplete without an account of her attendance at the Sabbat, which was the final test of her abandonment to Satan. These stories became so universal and so complete in all their details that they could not be rejected without discrediting the whole structure of witchcraft. The theory of illusion was manifestly untenable, and demonologists and inquisitors were sadly at a loss to reconcile the incontrovertible facts with the denunciations by the Church of such beliefs as heresy. A warm controversy arose. Some held to the old doctrine that the devil cannot transport a human body or make it pass through a disproportionate opening, but they endeavored to explain the admitted facts by enlarging on his powers of creating illusions. The witch consecrated herself to him with words and with anointing, when he would take her figure or phantasm and lead it where she wished, while her body remained insensible and covered with a diabolical shadow, rendering it invisible; when the object had been accomplished, he brought back the phantasm, reunited it to the body, and removed the shadow. The question turned upon the ability of the devil to carry off human beings, and this was hotly debated. A case adduced by Albertus Magnus, in a disputation on the subject before the Bishop of Paris, and recorded by Thomas of Cantimpré, in which the daughter of the Count of Schwalenberg was regularly carried away every night for several hours, gave immense satisfaction to the adherents of the new doctrine, and eventually an ample store of more modern instances was accumulated to confirm Satan in his enlarged privileges.[546]

In 1458 the Inquisitor Nicholas Jaquerius hit upon the true solution of the difficulty by arguing that the existing sect of witches was wholly different from the heretics alluded to in the _Cap. Episcopi_, and adduced in evidence of their bodily presence in the Sabbat numberless cases which had come before him in his official capacity, including one of a man who, as a child, fifty-five years before, had been carried thither by his mother in company with an infant brother, and presented to Satan wearing the form of a goat, who with his hoofs had imprinted on them an indelible mark--the _stigma diabolicum_. Jaquerius, however, adds, reasonably enough, that even if the affair is an illusion, it is none the less heretical, as the followers of Diana and Herodias are necessarily heretics in their waking hours. These speculations of Jaquerius attracted little attention at the time. Thirty years later, Sprenger, who did so much to formulate belief and organize persecution, found the _Cap. Episcopi_ a constant stumbling-block in his path, as sceptics were apt to argue that, if the Sabbat was an illusion, all witchcraft was illusory. He endeavored, therefore, to argue it away, assuming that, while the devil undoubtedly possessed the power of transportation, the presence of the witch frequently was only mental. In such case she lay down on the left side and invoked the devil, when a whitish vapor would issue from her mouth, and she saw all that occurred. If she went personally, and had a husband, an accommodating demon would assume her shape and take her place to conceal her absence. Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola takes the same ground, that presence at the Sabbat was sometimes real and sometimes imaginary; the place of assemblage was beyond the river Jordan, and transportation thither took place instantaneously. He avoids the definition of the _Cap. Episcopi_ by assuming that the Decretum of Gratian had not the authority of law, and was corrupt in many places. The Inquisitor Bernardo di Como, about 1500, in addition to these arguments, had triumphantly adduced the fact that numerous persons had been burned for attending the Sabbat, which could not have been done without the assent of the pope, and this was sufficient proof that the heresy was real, for the Church punishes only manifest crimes.[547]

About this time the learned jurist, Gianfrancesco Ponzinibio, wrote a tract on the subject of witchcraft in which he upheld the doctrine of the _Cap. Episcopi_ and boldly applied it to all magic and sorcery, which he treated as delusions. With a vast array of authorities he proved his case; he exposed the baldness of the pretence that existing witches belonged to a different sect; he argued that their confessions are not to be received, as they confess what is illusory and impossible, and that their evidence as to their associates is to be rejected, as they are deluded and can only delude others. Lawyers, he added, ought to take part in trials before the Inquisition, as they are trained to deal with criminal cases. This aroused the learned theologian, Silvestro Mozzolino of Prierio, Master of the Sacred Palace and subsequently Dominican General, who, in 1521, responded in a voluminous treatise devoted to the disputed canon. As the utterance of the Council of Anquira, presumably confirmed by the Holy See, he does not dare to deny its authority, but he adopts the same reasoning as Jaquerius, and laboriously argues that the heretics to whom it refers had disappeared, that the existing witches are a new sect, originating in 1404, and that the definitions of the canon are, therefore, obsolete and inapplicable to existing circumstances. To deny the bodily presence of witches at the Sabbat, he says, is to discredit the infinite number of cases tried by the Inquisition, and consequently to discredit the laws themselves.[548] He was followed by his successor in the mastership of the Sacred Palace, Bartolomeo de Spina, who devoted three tracts to the annihilation of Ponzinibio. The latter had suggested, logically enough, though maliciously, that as the _Cap. Episcopi_ had defined as a heresy the belief that witches are corporally carried to the Sabbat, inquisitors in administering abjuration to their penitents ought to make them abjure this heresy among others. The absurd position in which this placed the Inquisition aroused Spina's indignation to the utmost. "O wonderful presumption! O detestable insanity!" he exclaimed. "Only heretics abjure, only heresies are abjured before inquisitors. Is then that belief a heresy which inquisitors defend, and according to which they judge the enemies of the faith to be worthy of extreme damnation?--that opinion which illustrious theologians and canonists prove to be true and catholic? O the extreme stolidity of the man! Must, then, all theologians and judges, the inquisitors themselves, of all Italy, France, Germany, and Spain, holding this opinion abjure before the Inquisition?"--and he concludes by calling upon the Inquisition to proceed against Ponzinibio as vehemently suspect of heresy, as a fautor and defender of heretics, and as an impeder of the Holy Office.[549] This sufficiently shows that the new beliefs had completely conquered the old. The question had passed beyond the range of reason and argument, and everywhere throughout Europe the Witches' Sabbat was accepted as an established fact, which it was dangerous to dispute. Jurists and canonists might amuse themselves with debating it theoretically; practically it had become the veriest commonplace of the courts, both secular and ecclesiastical.

That the details of the Sabbat varied but little throughout Europe is doubtless to be ascribed to the leading questions habitually put by judges, and to the desire of the tortured culprits to satisfy their examiners, yet this consentaneity at the time was an irrefragable proof of truth. The first step of the witch was to secure a consecrated wafer by pretending to receive communion, and carrying the sacrament home. On this was fed a toad, which was then burned, and the ashes were mixed with the blood of an infant, unbaptized if possible, powdered bone of a man who had been hanged, and certain herbs. With this mixture the witch anointed the palms of her hands, or her wrist, and a stick or stool which she placed between her legs, and she was at once transported to the place of meeting. As a variant of this the ride was sometimes made on a demon in the shape of a horse, or goat, or dog. The assembly might be held anywhere, but there were certain spots specially resorted to--in Germany the Brocken, in Italy an oak-tree near Benevento, and there was, besides, the unknown place beyond the Jordan. At all these they gathered in thousands. Thursday night was the one generally selected. They feasted at tables loaded with meat and wine which rose from the earth at the command of the presiding demon, and they paid homage to the devil, who was present, usually in the form of a goat, dog, or ape. To him they offered themselves, body and soul, and kissed him under the tail, holding a lighted candle. They trampled and spat upon the cross and turned up their backs to heaven in derision of God. The devil preached to them, sometimes commencing with a parody of the mass; he told them that they had no souls and that there was no future life; they were not to go to church or confession, or to use holy water, or, if they did so to avoid suspicion, they must say "By leave of our Master," and they were to bring him as many converts as they could, and work all possible evil to their neighbors. There was usually a dance, which was unlike any seen at honest gatherings. At Como and Brescia a number of children from eight to twelve years of age, who had frequented the Sabbat, and had been reconverted by the inquisitors, gave exhibitions in which their skill showed that they had not been taught by human art. The woman was held behind her partner and they danced backwards, and when they paid reverence to the presiding demon they bent themselves backwards, lifting a foot in the air forwards. The rites ended with indiscriminate intercourse, obliging demons serving as incubi or succubi as required. The reality of all this did not depend alone upon the confessions of the accused, for there was a well-known case occurring about the year 1450, when the Inquisitor of Como, Bartolomeo de Homate, the podestà Lorenzo da Concorezzo, and the notary Giovanni da Fossato, either out of curiosity or because they doubted the witches whom they were trying, went to a place of assembly at Mendrisio and witnessed the scene from a hiding-place. The presiding demon pretended not to know their presence, and in due course dismissed the assembly, but suddenly recalled his followers and set them on the officials, who were so beaten that they died within fifteen days.[550]

All this was, of course, well fitted to excite the horror of the faithful and stimulate the zeal of the inquisitor, but it was only the pastime of the witch, and the reward given to her by her master for her labors and her allegiance. Her serious occupation was in works of evil. She was abandoned, body and soul, to Satan, and was the instrument which he used to effect his malignant purposes. The demonologists argued that the witch was as necessary to the demon as the demon to the witch, and that neither could operate without the other. She was not like the magicians and sorcerers, who merely earned their livelihood by selling their services, sometimes for good purposes and sometimes for bad, but she was a being wholly evil, delighting in the exercise of her powers for the destruction of her neighbors, and constantly exhorted to activity by her master. Those powers, moreover, were sufficient to justify the terror in which she was held by the people. Sprenger divides witches into three classes, those who can injure and not cure, those who can cure and not injure, and those who can do both, and the worst are those who unite these faculties, for the more they insult and offend God, the greater power of evil he gives them. They kill and eat children, or devote them to the devil if unbaptized. They cause abortion by merely laying a hand upon a woman, or dry up her milk if she is nursing. By twirling a moistened broom, or casting flints behind them towards the east, or boiling hogs' bristles in a pot, or stirring a pool with a finger, they raise tempests and hail-storms which devastate whole regions; they bring the plagues of locusts and caterpillars which devour the harvests; they render men impotent and women barren, and cause horses to become suddenly mad under their riders. They can make hidden things known and predict the future, bring about love or hatred at will, cause mortal sickness, slay men with lightning, or even with their looks alone, or turn them into beasts. We have the unquestioned authority of Eugenius IV. that by a simple word or touch or sign they can bewitch whom they please, cause or cure sickness, and regulate the weather. Sometimes they scattered over the fields powders which destroyed the cattle. They constantly entered houses at night, and, sprinkling a powder on the pillows of the parents which rendered them insensible, would touch the children with fingers smeared with a poisonous unguent causing death in a few days; or they would thrust needles under the nails of an infant and suck the blood, which was partly swallowed and partly spit into a vessel to serve in the confection of their infernal ointments; or the child would be put upon the fire and its fat be collected for the same purpose. Witches, moreover, could transform themselves into cats and other beasts, and Bernardo di Como gravely cites the case of the companions of Ulysses, as adduced by St. Augustin, to prove the reality of such illusions. Ludicrous as all this may seem, every one of these details has served as the basis of charges under which countless human beings have perished in the flames.[551]

One very peculiar power ascribed to witches was that of banqueting in the Sabbat on infants and cattle, and then restoring them to life. We have seen the belief in early times, and among races far apart, that sorceresses could gnaw and eat men internally, which probably arose from painful gastric maladies ascribed to sorcery. In the genesis of the Sabbat this took the shape, as described by Bishop Burchard in the eleventh century, that in the nocturnal meetings under the guidance of Holda men would be slain without weapons, their flesh cooked and eaten, and then they would be brought to life again, with straw or a piece of wood substituted for their hearts. The Church was not as yet ready to accept these marvels, and Burchard penances belief in them with fasting on bread and water for seven Lents. In the next century John of Salisbury ascribes to the illusion of dreams the popular superstition that lamiæ tore children to pieces, devoured them, and returned them to their cradles; and about 1240 Guillaume d'Auvergne speaks of the superstition spread by old women of the "ladies of the night" or "good women" who appear to tear children to pieces, or to cook them on the fire. Of course this formed part of the perfected stories of the Sabbat. In some witch-trials in the Tyrol, in 1506, there are frequent allusions to children and domestic animals carried to the feast and devoured, and though they remained alive, they were doomed to die soon afterwards. The witches of the Canavese confessed that their practice was to select fat cattle from a neighboring farmer, slaughter and eat them, and then, collecting the bones and hides, resuscitate them with the simple formula "_Sorge, Ranzola_." In one case a farmer of Levone, named Perino Pasquale, killed a sick ox and skinned it, and, naturally enough, himself died within a week, as well as his dog, which lapped some of the blood; and the occurrence, according to custom, was subsequently explained by a witch on trial, who confessed that the ox was one which had thus been eaten and resuscitated, when the assembled witches resolved that whoever killed it, and the first who should eat of it, should perish. Such feats as these, it is true, gave the opponents of witchcraft the advantage of arguing that they attributed to Satan the power of God in resuscitating and recreating the dead, and the demonologists, thus hard pushed, were obliged to admit that this portion of the Sabbat was illusory, but they triumphantly added that this only proved the empire of Satan over his dupes.[552]

The killing of unbaptized children was one of the special duties imposed by Satan on his servants, which the theologians explained by the fact that they were thus damned for original sin, and, therefore, the Day of Judgment was postponed, as the number of the elect requisite before the destruction of the world is thus more tardily completed. At a little town near Basle a witch who was burned confessed that while acting as midwife she had killed more than forty infants by thrusting a needle into the superior fontanelle. Another, of the diocese of Strassburg, had thus disposed of innumerable children, when she was detected by accidentally letting fall the arm of a new-born child while passing the gate of a town in which she had been performing her functions. Witch midwives, when they abstained from this, were in the habit of dedicating to Satan the babes whom they delivered. It was doubtful whether the infants were thus in reality surrendered to Satan, but at least they were subjected to his influence, and likely to grow up witches. This, and dedication by witch mothers, explain the fact that girls even of eight and ten years of age were able to bewitch people and to raise tempests of hail and rain. In Swabia a case occurred of one who, at the age of eight, innocently revealed her power to her father, in consequence of which her mother, who had thus dedicated her, was burned. The witch midwives were so numerous that there was scarce a hamlet without them.[553]

There was apparently no limit to the evil wrought by Satan through the instrumentality of those who had thus surrendered themselves to him. Sprenger relates that one of his colleagues on a tour of duty reached a town almost depopulated on account of pestilence. Hearing a report that a woman lately buried was swallowing her winding-sheet, and that the mortality would not cease until she had accomplished the deglutition, he caused the grave to be opened and the sheet was found half swallowed. The mayor of the town drew his sword and cut off the head of the corpse and threw it out of the grave, when the pest ceased at once. An inquisition was held and the woman was found to have long been a witch. Sprenger might well deplore the threatened devastation of Christendom arising from the neglect of the authorities to suppress these crimes with due severity.[554]

To understand the credulity which accepted these marvels as the most portentous and dreadful of realities, it must be borne in mind that they were not the wild inventions of the demonologists, but were facts substantiated by evidence irrefragable according to the system of jurisprudence. Torture by this time had long been used universally in criminal trials when necessary; no jurist conceived that the truth could be elicited in doubtful cases without it. The criminal whom endless repetition of torment had reduced to stolid despair naturally sought to make his confession square with the requirements of his judge; the confession once made he was doomed, and knew that retraction, in place of saving him, would only bring a renewal and prolongation of his sufferings. He therefore adhered to his confession, and when it was read to him in public at his condemnation he admitted its truth.[555] In many cases, moreover, torture and prolonged imprisonment in the foulest of dungeons doubtless produced partial derangement, leading to belief that he had committed the acts so persistently imputed to him. In either case, desire to obtain the last sacrament, which was essential to salvation and which was only administered to contrite and repentant sinners, would induce him to maintain to the last the truth of his confession. No proof more unquestionable than this could be had of any of the events of life, and belief in the figments of witchcraft was therefore unhesitating. To doubt, moreover, if not heresy, was cause for vehement suspicion. The Church lent its overpowering authority to enforce belief on the souls of men. The malignant powers of the witch were repeatedly set forth in the bulls of successive popes for the implicit credence of the faithful, and the University of Cologne, in 1487, when expressing its approval of the _Malleus Maleficarum_ of Sprenger, warned every one that to argue against the reality of witchcraft was to incur the guilt of impeding the Inquisition.[556]

What rendered the powers of the witch peculiarly dreadful was the deplorable fact that the Church had no remedy for the evils which she so recklessly wrought. It is true that the sign of the cross, and holy water, and blessed oil, and palms, and candles, and wax and salt, and the strict observance of religious rites were in some sense a safeguard and a preventive. A witch confessed that she had been employed to kill a certain man, but when she invoked the devil for the purpose he replied that he could not do it, as the intended victim kept himself protected by the sign of the cross, and that the utmost injury that could be inflicted on him was the destruction of one eleventh of his harvests; and another one stated that on their nocturnal rounds to destroy children they were unable to enter houses in which were kept palms and blessed bread or crosses of palms or olive, or to injure those who habitually protected themselves with the sign of the cross. But it was acknowledged that, when once the spell had been cast, the victim could find no relief on earth or in heaven--human means were useless, and exorcism and the invocation of saints were powerless except in demoniacal possession. The only cure was from the devil through other witches. Curative sorcery had long been a subject of debate in theologic ethics, but it had been formally condemned as inadmissible. It not only was a pact, tacit or expressed, with Satan, but it was ascertained that one of his leading objects in urging his acolytes to injure their neighbors was to force the sufferer in despair to have recourse to sorcery and thus be drawn into evil ways. This was illustrated by a case, celebrated among demonographers, of a German bishop who, in Rome, fell madly in love with a young girl and induced her to accompany him home. During the journey she undertook to kill him by sorcery, that she might make off with the jewels with which he had loaded her, and he was nightly attacked with a burning pain in his chest which resisted all the resources of his physicians. His life was despaired of, when recourse was had to an old woman who recognized the source of his affection and told him he could only be saved by the same methods, involving the death of the bewitcher. His conscience would not allow him to assent to this without permission; he applied to Pope Nicholas V., who kindly granted him a dispensation, and then he ordered the old woman to do what she proposed. That night he was perfectly well, and word was brought him that his young paramour was dying. He went to console her, but she naturally received him with maledictions, and died devoting her soul to Satan. As Bodin admiringly remarks, the devil was cunning enough to make a pope, a bishop, and a witch all obey him, and all become accomplices in a homicide.[557]

Thus a very profitable trade sprang up in counteracting witchcraft, and many witches confined themselves to this branch of the profession, although they were as liable as their adversaries to condemnation for compact with the devil, for it was an incontrovertible fact that they could only relieve a sufferer by transferring his disease to some one else or by performing some equivalent evil act. Sprenger tells us that they were to be found every German mile or two. At Reichshofen was one whose business was so large that the lord of the place levied a toll of a penny on every one who came to her for relief, and used to boast of the large revenue which he derived from this source. A man named Hengst, at Eningen, near Constance, had more applicants than any shrine of the Virgin--even than that at Aix--and in winter, when the highways were blocked with snow, those which led to his house were trampled smooth by the crowds of his patients.[558]

When once the belief was fairly started in the existence of beings possessed of the powers which I have described, and actuated by motives purely malignant, it was destined to inevitable extension under the stimulus afforded by persecution. Every misfortune and every accident that occurred in a hamlet would be attributed to witchcraft. Suspicion would gradually attach to some ill-tempered crone, and she would be seized, for inquisitors held that a single careless threat, such as "You will be sorry for this," if followed by a piece of ill-luck, was sufficient to justify arrest and trial.[559] All the neighbors would flock in as accusers--this one had lost a cow, that one's vintage had been ruined by hail, another's garden-patch had been ravaged by caterpillars, one mother had suffered an abortion, another's milk had suddenly dried, another had lost a promising child, two lovers had quarrelled, a man had fallen from an apple-tree and had broken his neck--and under the persuasive influence of starvation or of the rack the unfortunate woman would invent some story to account for each occurrence, would name her accomplices in each, and tell whom she had met in the Sabbats, which she attended regularly. No one can read the evidence adduced at a witch-trial, or the confessions of the accused, without seeing how every accident and every misfortune and every case of sickness or death which had occurred in the vicinage for years was thus explained, and how the circle of suspicion widened so that every conviction brought new victims; burnings multiplied, and the terrified community was ready to believe that a half or more of its members were slaves of Satan, and that it would never be free from their malignant vengeance until they should all be exterminated. For more than two centuries this craze was perpetually breaking out in one part of Europe after another, carefully nursed and stimulated by popes and inquisitors like Innocent VIII. and Leo X., Sprenger and Institoris, Bernard of Como and Bishop Binsfeld, and the amount of human misery thence arising is simply incomputable.

Fortunately on one side there was a limitation upon the otherwise illimitable powers of the witch. The contrast was so absurd between the faculties attributed to her and her utter inability to protect herself against those who tortured and burned her with impunity, that some explanation of the inconsistency was requisite. The demonologists therefore invented the comforting theory that through the goodness of God the witch instantaneously lost her power as soon as the hand of an officer of justice was laid upon her. But for this, indeed, it might have been difficult to find men hardy enough to seize, imprison, try, and execute these delegates of Satan, whose slightest ill-will was so dangerous. Judges and their officials thus were encouraged to perform their functions and were told that they need dread no reprisals. It was true that, like all theories framed to meet artificial conditions, this one was not always reconcilable to the facts. The strange fortitude with which the culprits occasionally endured the severest and most prolonged tortures, so far from being a proof of innocence, was regarded as showing that even in the hands of justice the devil was sometimes able to protect his servants by endowing them with what was called the gift of taciturnity, and the ingenuity of the inquisitors was taxed to the utmost to overcome his wiles. When this was once admitted it was difficult to deny that he could assist them in other ways, and it was recommended to the officers charged with the arrest that when they seized a witch they should on no account allow her to enter her chamber, lest she should secure some charm that would enable her to endure the torture. Such charms might be secreted about her person, or under the skin, or even in accessible cavities of the body, so the first thing to be done was to shave the prisoner from head to foot and subject her to the most indecent examination. It was on record that in Ratisbon some heretics condemned to be burned remained unhurt in the flames; vainly were they submerged in the river and roasted again. A three days' fast was ordered for the whole city, when it was revealed that they had charms concealed in a certain spot under the skin, and after the removal of these there was no further trouble in reducing them to ashes. Charms could also be used from a distance. At Innsbruck a witch boasted that if she had a single thread of a prisoner's garment she could cause him to endure torture to the death without confessing. Some inquisitors, to break the spell of taciturnity, were wont to try sacred magic by administering to the prisoner, on an empty stomach, after invoking the Trinity, three drinks of holy water in which blessed wax had been melted. In one case the most excruciating torture, continued through two whole days, failed to elicit confession, but the third day chanced to be the feast of the Virgin, and during the celebration of the holy rites the devil lost the power with which he had thus far sustained the prisoner, who revealed a plot to make way with the implacable judge, Peter of Berne, by means of sorcery. These were simple devices; a more elaborate one was to take a strip of paper of the length of the body of Christ, and write on it the seven words uttered on the cross; on a holy day, at the hour of mass, this was to be bound around the waist of the witch with relics, she was to be made to drink holy water, and be at once placed on the rack. When all these efforts failed it was a mooted question whether the Church in her extremity could have recourse to the devil by calling in other magicians to break the spell, and Prierias succeeds by ingenious casuistry in proving that she could. One precaution, held indispensable by some experienced practitioners, was that the witch on arrest was to be placed immediately in a basket and thus be carried to prison, without allowing her feet to touch the earth, for if she were permitted to do so she could slay her captors with lightning and escape.[560]

There was another comfortable theory that those who exercised public functions for the suppression of witchcraft were not subject to the influence of witches or demons. Sprenger tells us that he and his colleagues had been many times assailed by devils in the shape of monkeys, dogs, and goats, but by the aid of God they had always been able to overcome the enemy. Yet there were exceptions to this, as we have seen in the case of the unlucky inquisitor and podestà of Como; and the lenity of some judges was explained by the fact that the witch was sometimes able so to affect their minds that they were unable to convict. This steeled the heart of the conscientious inquisitor, who repressed all sentiments of compassion in the belief that they were prompted by Satan. The witch was specially able to exert this power over her judge when she looked upon him before he saw her, and it was a wise precaution to make her enter the court backwards, so that the judge had the advantage of the first glance. He and his assistants were also advised to be very careful not to let a witch touch them, especially on the wrist or other joint, and to wear around the neck a bag containing salt exorcised on Palm Sunday, with consecrated herbs enclosed in blessed wax, besides constantly protecting themselves with the sign of the cross. It was doubtless through neglect of these salutary precautions that at a witch-burning in the Black Forest, as the executioner was lifting the convict on the pile she blew in his face, saying, "I will reward you," whereupon a horrible leprosy broke out which spread over his body, and in a few days he was dead. Occasionally, moreover, the familiar demon of the witch, in the shape of a raven, would accompany her to the place of execution and prevent the wood from burning until he was driven off.[561]

To combat an evil so widespread and all-pervading required the combined exertions of Church and State. The secular and episcopal courts both had undoubted jurisdiction over it; the action of John XXII., in 1330, may have caused some question as to the Inquisition, but if so it was settled in 1374, when the Inquisitor of France was proceeding against some sorcerers and his competence was disputed, and Gregory XI., to whom the matter was referred, instructed him to prosecute them with the full severity of the laws. Commissions issued in 1409 and 1418 to Pons Feugeyron, Inquisitor of Provence, enumerate sorcerers, conjurers, and invokers of demons among those whom he is to suppress. As the growth of witchcraft became more alarming, Eugenius IV., in 1437, stimulated the inquisitors everywhere to greater activity against it, and these instructions were repeated in 1445. In 1451 Nicholas V. even enlarged the powers of Hugues le Noir, Inquisitor of France, by granting him jurisdiction over divination, even when it did not savor of heresy. There was occasional clashing, of course, between the episcopal officials and the inquisitors, but the rule seems to have been generally observed that either could proceed separately, while the Clementine regulation should be observed which prescribed their co-operation in the use of torture and punitive imprisonment and when rendering final sentence. The bishops, moreover, assumed that their assent was necessary to the action of the secular courts. In the case of Guillaume Edeline, condemned to perpetual imprisonment at Evreux in 1453, when the sentence was read by the episcopal official the bishop added "We retain our power of pardon," but the inquisitor at once entered a formal protest that the prisoner should not be released without the consent of the Inquisition.[562]

Yet in France at this period the royal jurisdiction, as embodied in the Parlement, was, as we have seen in a former chapter, successfully exerting its superiority over both bishops and inquisitors. A curious case occurring in 1460 illustrates both this and the superstitions current at the time. A priest of the diocese of Soissons named Yves Favins brought a suit for tithes against a husbandman named Jean Rogier, who held of the Hospitallers. These, like the Templars, were exempt from tithes; Favins lost his case, was condemned in the expenses, which were heavy, and was eager for revenge. A poor woman of the village who had come from Merville in Hainault, had quarrelled with the wife of Rogier over the price of some spinning, and to her Yves had recourse. She gave him a great toad which she kept in a pot, and told him to baptize it and feed it on a consecrated wafer, which he did, giving it the name of John. The woman then killed it and made of it a "_sorceron_," which her daughter took to Rogier's house under pretence of demanding the money in dispute, and cast it under the table at which Rogier, his wife, and his son were dining. They all died within three days; suspicion was aroused, and the two women were arrested and confessed. The mother was burned, but the daughter obtained a respite on the plea of pregnancy, escaped from jail and fled to Hainault, but was brought back and was carried on appeal to Paris. Yves was rich and well-connected. He was arrested and confined in the prison of the Bishop of Paris, but he obtained counsel and appealed to the Parlement; the Parlement allowed the appeal, tried him, and acquitted him.[563]

All secular tribunals were not as enlightened as the Parlement of Paris, but there seems to have been at least sometimes an effort to administer even-handed justice. About this time a case occurred at Constance in which an accuser formally inscribed himself against a peasant whom he had met riding on a wolf, and had immediately become crippled. He applied to the peasant, who cured him, but observing that the wizard bewitched others, he felt it his duty to prosecute him. The case was exhaustively argued before the magistrates, for the prosecution and the defence, by two eloquent advocates, Conrad Schatz and Ulric Blaser. Torture was not used, but the accused was condemned and burned on the testimony of witnesses.[564]

In the ecclesiastical tribunals offenders had not the same chance. We have seen in a former chapter how skilfully the inquisitorial process was framed to secure conviction, and when, after a prolonged period of comparative inactivity, the Inquisition was aroused to renewed exertion in combating the legions of Satan, it sharpened its rusted weapons to a yet keener edge. The old hesitation about pronouncing a sentence of acquittal was no longer entertained, for though the accused might be dismissed with a verdict of not proven, the inquisitor was formally instructed never to declare him innocent. Yet few there were upon whom even this doubtful clemency was exercised, for all the resources of fraud and force, of guile and torment, were exhausted to secure conviction with even less reserve than of old. Engaged in a personal combat with Satan, the inquisitor was convinced in advance of the guilt of those brought before him as defamed for sorcery, and the ancient expedients were refined upon and improved. Formerly endurance of torture might be regarded as an evidence of innocence, now it was only an additional proof of guilt, for it showed that Satan was endeavoring to save his servitor, and the duty to defeat him was plain, even though, as Sprenger tells us was frequently the case, the witch would allow herself to be torn in pieces before she would confess. Though, as formerly, torture could not be repeated, it could be "continued" indefinitely, with prolonged periods of intervening imprisonment in dungeons of which the squalor was purposely heightened to exhaust the mental and physical forces of the victim. It is true that confession was not absolutely requisite, for when the evidence was sufficient the accused could be convicted without it, but it was held that common justice required that the criminal should avow his guilt, and therefore the use of torture was universal when confession could not be otherwise secured. Yet in view of the satanic gift of taciturnity it was desirable to avoid recourse to it, and therefore promises of pardon, not indefinitely veiled under a juggle of words as of old, but positive and specifying a moderate penance or exile, were to be freely made. If the fraud was successful, the inquisitor could let the sentence be pronounced by some one else, or allow a decent interval to elapse before himself sending his deluded victim to the stake. All the other devices to entrap or seduce the prisoner to confession which we have seen employed by the older inquisitors were also still recommended. One new and infallible sign was the inability of the witch to shed tears during torture and before the judges, though she could do so freely elsewhere. In such a case the inquisitor was instructed to adjure her to weep by the loving tears shed for the world by Christ on the cross, but the more she was adjured, we are told, the drier she would become. Still, with the usual logic of the demonologist, if she did weep it was a device of the devil and was not to be reckoned in her favor.[565]

The most significant change, however, between the old procedure and the new regarded the death-penalty. We have seen that with the heretic the object was held to be the salvation of his soul, and, except in case of relapse, he could always purchase life by recantation, at the expense of lifelong imprisonment, with the prospect that in time submission might win him release. At what period the rule changed with respect to witches is uncertain. When convicted by the secular courts they were invariably burned, and the Inquisition came to adopt the same practice. In 1445 the Council of Rouen still treats them with singular mildness. Invokers of demons were to be publicly preached with mitres on their heads, when, if they abjured, the bishop was empowered to release them after performance of appropriate penance; after this, if they relapsed, clerks were to be perpetually imprisoned, and laymen abandoned to the secular arm, while for minor superstitions and incantations a month's prison and fasting were sufficient, with heavier penance for relapse. In 1448 the Council of Lisieux contented itself with ordering priests on all Sundays and festivals to denounce as excommunicate all usurers, sorcerers, and diviners. In 1453 Guillaume Edeline escaped with abjuration and prison. In 1458 Jaquerius laboriously argues that the witch is not to be treated like other heretics, to be spared if she recants, showing that the change was still a novelty, requiring justification. In 1484 Sprenger says positively that while the recanting heretic is to be imprisoned, the sorcerer, even if penitent, is to be put to death, indicating that by this time there was no longer any question on the subject. There was, as usual, a pretence of shifting the responsibility of this upon the secular authorities, for Sprenger adds that the most the ecclesiastical judge can do is to absolve the penitent and converted witch from the _ipso facto_ excommunication under which she lies and let her go, to be apprehended by the lay courts and be burned for the evil which she has wrought. Silvester Prierias shows us how transparent was this juggle, when he instructs the inquisitor that if the witch confesses and is penitent she is to be received to mercy and not be delivered to the secular arm: she is to abjure, is absolved and sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in a black dress; the dress is put on her and she is led to the church-door--but not to prison. The Inquisition takes no further concern about her; if the secular court is content, well and good--if not, it does as it pleases. What the inquisitors would have said if it pleased the secular authorities to let the witch go free may be judged by the maledictions of Sprenger on the incredulous laity who disbelieved in the reality of witchcraft, and through whose supineness the secular arm had allowed the cursed sect to so increase that its extirpation appeared impossible.[566] Still more instructive, as we shall see hereafter, was the indignation of Leo X. when the Signory of Venice refused to burn the witches of Brescia condemned by the Inquisition.