Chapter III: Part 3

In the trials of Bessie Roy, of James Reid, of Patrick Currie, of Isobel Grierson, and of Grizel Gardiner[53], the charges are principally of taking off and laying on diseases either on men or cattle; meetings with the devil in various shapes and places; raising and dismembering dead bodies for the purpose of enchantments; destroying crops; scaring honest persons in the shape of cats; taking away women's milk; committing housebreaking and theft by means of enchantments, and so on. South-running water, salt, rowan-tree, enchanted flints (probably elf-arrow heads), and doggrel verses (generally a translation of the Creed or Lord's Prayer) were the means employed for effecting a cure. Diseases again were laid on by forming pictures of clay or wax, which were placed before the fire or buried with the heads downward; by placing a dead hand, or some mutilated member, in the house of the intended victim; or, as in the case of Grierson, by the simpler process of throwing an enchanted tailzie (slice) of beef against his door. It was immaterial whether the supposed powers of the witch were exerted for good or evil. In the case of Grieve, no malefice (to use the technical term) was charged against him, but simply that he had cured diseases by means of charms; and the same in the case of Alison Pearson; but both were executed. Bartie Paterson seems to have been the most pious of warlocks, for his patients were uniformly directed, in addition to his prescriptions, to "ask their health at all livand wichtis abone or under the earth, in the name of Jesus." The trial of Robert Erskine of Dun, though given as one for witchcraft, seems to have been a simple case of poisoning, he having merely resorted to a notorious witch, named Margaret Irvine, for the herbs by which he despatched his nephews. The case of Margaret Wallace, towards the close of James's reign, deserves notice as being the first where something like a stand was made against some of the fundamental positions of the demonologists; the counsel for the prisoner contending strongly against the doctrine that, in the case of a person accused of witchcraft, every cure performed by her was to be set down to the agency of the devil. The defence however, though it seems to have been ably conducted, was unsuccessful.

Matters continued much in the same state during the reign of Charles I. From 1625 to 1640 there are eight entries of trials for witchcraft on the Record, one of which, that of Elizabeth Bathgate, is remarkable, as being followed by an acquittal. In that of Katharine Oswald[54], the prisoner's counsel had the boldness to argue, that no credit was to be given to the confessions of the other witches, who had sworn to the presence of the prisoner at some of their orgies; "for all lawyers agree," argued he, "that they are not really transported, but only in their fancies, while asleep, in which they sometimes dream they see others there." This reasoning however appears to have made no impression on the jury, any more than the argument in Young's case[55], that the stoppage of the mill, which she was accused of having effected _twenty-nine years before_, by sorcery, might have been the effect of natural causes. About one-half of the convictions during this period proceed on judicial confessions; whether voluntary or extorted does not appear. They are not in general interesting, though some of the details in the trial of Hamilton[56] differ a little from the ordinary routine of the witch trials of the time. Having met the devil on Kingston Hills, in East Lothian, he was persuaded by the tempter to renounce his baptism--a piece of apostasy for which he received only four shillings. The devil further directed him to employ the following polite adjuration when he wished to raise him, namely, to beat the ground three times with his stick, and say, "Rise up, foul thief!" On the other hand, the devil's behaviour towards him was equally unceremonious; for on one occasion, when Hamilton had neglected to keep his appointment, he gave him a severe drubbing with a baton.

The scene darkens however, towards the close of this reign, with the increasing dominion of the Puritans. In 1640 the General Assembly passed an act, that all ministers should take particular note of witches and charmers, and that the commissioners should recommend to the supreme judicature the unsparing application of the laws against them. In 1643 (August 19), after setting forth the increase of the crime, they recommend the granting a standing commission from the Privy Council or Justiciary to any "understanding gentlemen or magistrates," to apprehend, try, and execute justice against the delinquents. The subject appears to have been resumed in 1644, 1645, and 1649; and their remonstrances, it would seem, had not been without effect, for in 1649, the year after the execution of Charles, an Act of Parliament was passed confirming and extending the provisions of Queen Mary's, so as more effectually to reach consulters with witches, in regard to whom it was thought (though we do not see why) that the terms of the former act were a little equivocal. From this time, not only does the number of convictions, which since the death of James had been on the decline, increase, but the features of the cases assume a deeper tinge of horror. The old, impossible, and abominable fancies of the 'Malleus' were revived in the trials of Janet Barker and Margaret Lauder[57], which correspond in a remarkable manner with some of the evidence in the Mora trials. About thirty trials appear on the record between this last date and the Restoration, only one of which appears to have terminated in an acquittal; while at a single circuit-court, held at Glasgow, Stirling, and Ayr, in 1659, seventeen persons were convicted and burnt for this crime.

Numerous however as are the cases in the Records of Justiciary, it must be kept in view that these afford an extremely inadequate idea of the extent to which this pest prevailed over the country. For though Sir George Mackenzie doubts whether, in virtue merely of the general powers given by the act, 1563, inferior judges did at any time, of their own authority, try and condemn criminals accused of witchcraft, the same end was managed in a different way. The Court of Justiciary was anxious to get rid of a jurisdiction which would alone have afforded them sufficient employment; and the Privy Council were in use to grant commissions to resident gentlemen and ministers, to examine, and afterwards to try and execute, witches all over Scotland; and so numerous were these commissions, that Wodrow expresses his astonishment at the number found in the Registers. Under these commissions multitudes were burnt in every part of the kingdom. In Mercer's Manuscript Diary, Lamont's Diary, and Whitelock's Memorials, occasional notices of the numbers burnt are perpetually occurring.

In every case of the kind it would appear that the clergy displayed the most intemperate zeal. It was before them that the poor wretches "delated" of witchcraft were first brought for examination,--in most cases after a preparatory course of solitary confinement, cold, famine, want of sleep, or actual torture. On some occasions the clergy themselves actually performed the part of the prickers, and inserted long pins into the flesh of the witches in order to try their sensibility; and in all they laboured, by the most persevering investigations, to obtain from the accused a confession, which might afterwards be used against them on their trial, and which in more than one instance, even though retracted, formed the sole evidence on which the convictions proceeded. In some cases, where the charge against the criminal was that she was "habit and repute a witch," the notoriety of her character was proved before the Justiciary Court by the oath of a minister, just as habit and repute is now proved in cases of theft by that of a police officer.

Though the tide of popular delusion in regard to this crime may be said to have turned during the reign of Charles II., its opening was perhaps more bloody than that of any of its predecessors. In the first year after the Restoration (1661), about twenty persons appear to have been condemned by the Justiciary Court, two of whom, though acquitted on their first trial, were condemned on the second on new charges. The numbers executed throughout the country are noticed by Lamont. Fourteen commissions for trials in the provinces appear to have been issued by the Privy Council in one day (November 7, 1661). Of the numbers of nameless wretches who died and made no sign, under the hands of those "understanding gentlemen" (as the General Assembly's overture styles them) to whom the commissions were granted, it is now almost impossible to form a conjecture. In reference however to the course of procedure in such cases, we may refer to some singular manuscripts relative to the examination of two confessing witches in Morayshire in 1662, in the possession of the family of Rose, of Kilravock; more particularly as the details they contain are, both from their minuteness and the unparalleled singularity of their contents, far more striking than anything to be found on the Records of Justiciary about this time.

The names of these crazed beldames were Isobel Gowdie and Janet Braidhead. Two of the latter's examinations are preserved; the former appears to have been four times examined at different dates between the 13th April and 27th May, 1662, before the sheriff and several gentlemen and ministers of the neighbourhood; and on one of these is a marking by the Justice Depute Colville, as follows:--"Having read and considered the confession of Isobel Gowdie, within contained, as paction with Sathan, renunciation of baptism, with divers malefices, I find that a commission may be very justly given for her last trial.--_A. Colville_[58]." The confessions are written under the hand of a notary public, and subscribed by all the clergymen, gentlemen, and other witnesses present; as would appear to have been the practice where the precognitions were to be transmitted to the Justiciary, with the view of obtaining a commission to try and punish the crime. What the result of Isobel Gowdie's "last trial" was, it is easy, from the nature of her confessions, to conjecture.

"Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda, e passa."

Though examined on four different occasions, at considerable intervals of time, and undoubtedly undergoing solitary confinement in the interim, so minute and invariable are the accounts given by Gowdie in particular, of the whole life and conversation of the witches to whom she belonged, that a pretty complete institute of infernal science might be compiled from her confession. The distinctness with which the visions seem to have haunted her, the consistency they had assumed in her own mind, and yet the inconceivable absurdity and monstrosity of these conceptions, to many of which we cannot even allude, furnish some most important contributions to the history of hypochondriac insanity.

Her devotion to the service of the devil took place in the kirk of Auldearn, where she was baptized by him with the name of Janet, being held up by a companion, and the devil sucking the blood from her shoulder[59]. The band or coven to which they belonged consisted of thirteen (whose names she enumerates, and some of whom appear to have been apprehended upon her delation), that being the usual number of the covens. Each is provided with an officer, whose duty it is to repeat the names of the party after Satan; and a maiden, who seems to hold sway over the women, and who is the particular favourite of the devil, is placed at his right hand at feasts. A grand meeting of the covens takes place quarterly, when a ball is given. Each witch has a "sprite" to wait upon her, some appearing "in sad dun, some in grass green, some in sea green, some in yellow." Those of Gowdie's coven were, "Robert the Jakes, Sanders the Reed-Reever, Thomas the Fairy, Swein the Roaring Lion, Thief of Hell wait-upon-herself, MacHector," and so on. Some of these spirits, it would appear, did not stand high in Isobel's opinion; for Robert the Jakes, she says, was aged, and seemed to be "a gowkit glaikit spirit." Each of the witches too received a sobriquet, by which they were generally known[60]. Satan himself had several spirits to wait upon him; "sometimes he had boots and sometimes shoes upon his feet, but still his feet are forked and cloven." The witches, it appears, occasionally took considerable liberties with his character, on which occasions Satan, on detecting the calumny, used to beat the delinquents "up and down like naked gaists" with a stick, as Charon does the naked spirits in the 'Inferno,' with his oar. (Cant, iii.) He found it much more easy however to deal with the warlocks than with the fair sex. "Alexander Elder," says the confessing witch, "was soft, and could not defend himself, and did naething but greit and crye while he will be scourging him; but Margaret Wilson in Auldearn would defend herself finely, and cast up her hands to cape the blows, and Bessie Wilson would speak crustily with her tongue, and would be bellin again to him stoutly."

The amusements and occupations of the witches are described with the same firmness and minuteness of drawing. When the devil has appointed an infernal diet, the witches leave behind them, in bed, a besom or three-legged stool, which assumes their shape till their return, a feature exactly corresponding with the Mora trials. When proceeding to the spot where their work is to be performed, they either adopt the shape of cats, hares, etc., or else, mounting upon corn or bean straws, and pronouncing the following charm,--

"Horse and hattock, horse and go,
Horse and pellats, ho! ho!"

they are borne through the air to the place of their destination. If any see these straws in motion, and "do not sanctify themselves," the witches may shoot them dead. This feat they perform with elf-arrow heads, which are manufactured by Satan himself; and his assistants the elf boys, who are described, like the Scandinavian trolls, as little humpbacked creatures who speak "goustie like" (gruffly); each witch receiving from Satan a certain number of these "Freischütze." A list of forty or fifty persons is given by the witch, who had been destroyed by herself and her companions, by these means; while she also mentions that she had made an unsuccessful attempt against the life of Mr. Harry Forbes, minister of Auldcarn, one of the witnesses actually present and subscribing her confession.

Another attempt against the life of this minister is described very graphically. The instrument employed was "a bag made of the flesh and guts and galls of toads, the liver of a hare, pickles of corn, parings of nails, of feet, and toes," which olio being steeped all night, and mixed _secundum artem_ by Satan himself, was consecrated by a charm dictated by Satan, and repeated by the witches, "all on their knees, and their hair about their shoulders and eyes, holding up their hands, and looking stedfastly on the devil, that he might destroy the said Mr. Harry." This composition one of the witches, who made her way into the minister's chamber, attempted to throw upon him, but was prevented by the presence of some other holy men in the room. Another composition of the same kind, intended for the destruction of the lairds of Park and Lochloy, was more successful, as appears from the deposition of the other witch, Janet Braidhead. Having prepared the venom, "they came to Inshock in the night time, and scattered it up and down, above and about the gate, and other places, where the lairds and their sons would most haunt. And then we, in the likeness of crows and rooks[61], stood above the gate, and in the trees opposite the gate. It was appointed so that, if any of them should touch or tramp upon any of it, as well as that it or any of it fall on them, it should strike them with boils and kill them, _which it did, and they shortly died_. We did it to make this house heirless."

It is needless to pursue further these strange details, which however form a valuable appendix to the records at that time.

It would seem as if the violence of this popular delirium began after 1662 to relax. An interval of six years now occurs without a trial for this crime, while the record bears that James Welsh[62] was ordered to be publicly whipped for accusing several individuals of it,--a fate which he was hardly likely to have encountered some years before. Fountainhall, in noticing the case of the ten poor women convicted on their own confession in 1678[63], obviously speaks of the whole affair with great doubt and hesitation. And Sir George Mackenzie, in his 'Criminal Law,' the first edition of which appeared in the same year, though he does not yet venture to deny the existence of the crime or the expediency of its punishment, lays down many principles very inconsistent with the practice of the preceding century. "From the horridness of the crime," says he, "I do conclude that of all crimes it requires the clearest relevancy and most convincing probature; and I condemn, next to the wretches themselves, those cruel and too forward judges who burn persons by thousands as guilty of this crime." And accordingly, acting on these humane and cautious principles, Sir George, in his Report to the Judges in 1680, relative to a number of persons then in prison for this crime, stated that their confessions had been procured by torture, and that there seemed to be no other proof against them, on which they were set at liberty. "Since which time," adds Lord Royston, "there has been no trial for this crime before that court, nor before any other court, that I know of, except one at Paisley by commission from the Privy Council in anno 1697." This observation of Lord Royston is not altogether correct. The trial at Paisley to which he alludes is evidently the noted case of the Renfrewshire witches, tried on a charge of sorcery against a girl named Christian Shaw, the daughter of Shaw of Bargarran. The conviction of the accused appears to have taken place principally on the evidence of the girl herself, who in the presence of the commissioners played off a series of ecstasies and convulsion fits, similar to those by which the nuns of Loudon had sealed the fate of Grandier the century before. In this atrocious case, the Commissioners (in the Report presented by them to the Privy Council, 9th March, 1697), reported that there were twenty-four persons, male and female, suspected of being concerned in the sorceries; and among them, it is to be observed, is a girl of fourteen, and a boy not twelve years of age. After this, we almost feel surprised that out of about twenty who were condemned, only five appear to have been executed. They were burnt on the green at Paisley. The last trial before the Court of Justiciary was that of Elspet Rule, tried before Lord Anstruther, on the Dumfries circuit, 3rd of May, 1708, where the prisoner, though convicted by a plurality of voices, was merely sentenced to be burned on the cheek and banished Scotland for life. The last execution which took place was that of an old woman in the parish of Loth, executed at Dornoch in 1722, by sentence of the Sheriff depute of Caithness, Captain David Ross, of Little Dean. "It is said, that being brought out for execution, the weather proving very severe, she sat composedly warming herself by the fire, while the other instruments of death were made ready!"

So ends in Scotland the tragical part of the history of witchcraft. In 1735, as already mentioned, the penal statutes were repealed; much to the annoyance however of the Seceders, who, in their annual confession of national sins, printed in an act of their Associate Presbytery at Edinburgh, in 1743, enumerated, as a grievous transgression, the repeal of the penal statutes "contrary to the express laws of God!" And though in remote districts the belief may yet linger in the minds of the ignorant, it has now, like the belief in ghosts, alchemy, or second sight, only that sort of vague hold on the fancy which enables the poet and romance writer to adapt it to the purposes of fiction, and therewith to point a moral or adorn a tale. And, of a truth, no unimportant moral is to be gathered from the consideration of the history of this delusion; namely, the danger of encouraging those enthusiastic conceits of the possibility of direct spiritual influence, which, in one shape or other, and even in our own days, are found to haunt the brain of the weak and presumptuous. For it is but the same principle which lies at the bottom of the persecutions of the witches, and which shows itself in the quietism of Bourignon, the reveries of Madame Guyon, the raptures of Sister Nativity, the prophecies of Naylor, the dreams of Dr. Dee, or Swedenborg's prospect of the New Jerusalem; still but an emanation of that spirit of pride, which, refusing to be "but a little lower than the angels," asserts an immediate communion and equality with them, and which, according to the temper of the patient, feeds him with the gorgeous visions of quietism, or impels him, like a furious Malay, along the path of persecution. Some persons assert that, in this nineteenth century of ours, we have no enthusiasm. On the contrary, we have a great deal too much: at no period has enthusiasm of the worst kind been more rife; witness the impostures of Southcott and Hohenlohe, and the thousand phantasies which are daily running their brief course of popularity. At no time has that calenture of the brain been more widely diffused, which, as it formerly converted every natural occurrence into the actual agency of the devil, now transforms every leader of a petty circle into a saint, and invests him with the garb and dignity of an apostle. Daily, are the practical and active duties of life more neglected under the influence of this principle; the charity which thinketh no evil of others daily becomes more rare; the stream of benevolence which of old stole deep and silently through the haunts of poverty and sickness at home, is now but poorly compensated by being occasionally thrown up in a few pompous and useless jets, at public subscriptions for distant objects; while even in those whose minds are untinctured by the grosser evils to which enthusiasm gives rise, life passes away in vain and illusive dreams of self-complacent superiority, which, as they are based only in pride and constitutional susceptibility, rarely endure when age and infirmity have shaken or removed the materials out of which they were reared. Thus, the enthusiast who, like Mirza, has been contemplating through the long day the Elysian islands that lie beyond the gulf, and already walking in a fancied communion with their myrtle-crowned inhabitants, feels, in spite of all his efforts, that, as evening creeps upon the landscape, the phantasmagoria becomes dimmer and more dim; the bridge, the islands, the genius who stood beside them disappear; till at last nothing remains for him but his own long hollow valley of Bagdad, with its oxen, sheep, and camels grazing on its sides;--this sober, weary, working world, in short, with all its cares and duties, through which, if he had been wisely fulfilling the end for which he was sent into it, he should have been labouring onward with a beneficent activity, not idly dreaming by the wayside of the Eden for which he is bound; and so he awakes to a consciousness of his true vocation in life when he is on the point of leaving it, and perceives the value and the paramount necessity of exertion, only when youth, with its opportunities, and its energies, lies behind him for ever, like the shadows of a dream.

* * * * *

The work of Church-Councillor Horst, and the review of its principal contents, leave however one hemisphere at least of the subject of Magic, Theurgy, and Necromancy unnoticed. These arts, or at least the popular belief in them, are much more ancient than any of the forms of Christianity, and were, in fact, a most unlucky legacy bequeathed by Paganism to the creeds which supplanted it. It needs no ghost to tell the reader how firmly the ancients believed in all supernatural influences: how populous, in their conceptions, were the elements with omens, portents, and prodigies; how abject and unreasoning was their credulity; and how dependent both their public and their domestic life upon the exorcisms of the priest and the science of the augur. The Canidias and Ericthos of antiquity were not mere creations of the poets; the most sober and sceptical of historians does not disdain to relate that, in the house of the dying Germanicus, were found burnt bones and dissevered limbs of dead bodies; and the most philosophical of the Roman poets recounts with complacent gravity the charms by which the dead might be evoked, or the faithless lover recalled by his forsaken mistress. Nor did the belief in witches and supernatural agencies decay or decline with the disbelief in the state-religion which marked the latter ages of the Roman Empire. On the contrary, as scepticism increased in one direction, credulity and abject superstition grew and prevailed in another. Neither were these infirmities of the mind by any means confined to the vulgar or the profane. The later Platonists were deeply infected with the malady of superstition, and there are few more curious chapters in the history of human inconsistency, than the lives of many of the philosophers, who argued against the being of a God, and who trembled if a hare crossed their path, at a sinister flight of crows, or at a sudden encounter with a beldame or a blackamoor in the grey of the morning.

The magical art of the ancients, more especially towards the decline of Pagandom, was indeed of an extremely dark and atrocious complexion. Unmindful of the wise and reverent forbearance of the poet of the Æneid--

"Sin has ne possim naturæ accedere partes
Frigidus obstiterit circum præcordia sanguis,"--

the ancient wizards pried, or affected to pry, into the very "incunabula vitæ." Could we recover a few of those books which the sorcerers at Corinth burned and brought the price of them to St. Paul, we should probably find in their pages, among some curious physical or medical secrets, nearly all the elements of a cruel and obscene superstition.

Rome, we know, was both early and deeply infected with the orgiastic worship of the East, and especially with the impure ceremonies of the priests of Isis. It was of no avail to level to the ground the Isiac chapels, and to banish their ministers. In an age of unbelief there was a passion for the mysteries of darkness; and although Christianity gradually superseded Paganism in form, the spirit of the latter long survived in the multitude, and especially among the ignorant rural population. James Grimm, in his erudite work upon the 'Antiquities of the German Race,' traces with great acuteness the connection between the superstitions of the Dark Ages and the magical formularies of Heathenism. The spells of witches, the abracadabra of quacks, and the loathsome furniture of Sidrophel's laboratory are genuine descendants of the impostures and abominations which were practised for ages both in the Roman and Parthian empires.

In Lucian and Apuleius indeed we are presented with a singular and terrible aspect of social existence. The most ordinary acts and functions of life were believed to be affected by the invisible powers, and those powers were supposed to be willing to do service to all who were malignant enough to seek their aid, and fearless enough to serve the apprenticeship which was demanded of them. It is easy to decry the weakness and detect the absurdity of such a creed. Yet it _was_ believed: it excited terror: it nurtured revenge: it wrought withering and wasting effects upon the feeble and the credulous: it cast a dark shade over life: it was potent over the sinews of the strong and over the bloom of the beautiful: it exercised "upon the inmost mind" all "its fierce accidents," and preyed upon the purest spirits,

"As on entrails, joints and limbs,
With answerable pains, but more intense."

It is idle to regard such a belief as a mere superficial or individual superstition. It pervaded all ranks of society, from the philosopher who disputed about a first cause, and the magistrate who viewed religion in the light of a useful system of police, to the shepherd who watched Orion and the Pleiades, and the miner who rarely beheld either sun or star. It was an erroneous, but it was an earnest, belief which drove men to consult with diviners, and to question the elements for signs and wonders.

Availing ourselves of Sir George Head's excellent translation, we extract from the 'Golden Ass' of Apuleius a story which, to our conceptions, is unsurpassed for its horror by any of the dreariest legends of Pagan or Medieval sorcery.

"My master, the baker, was a well-behaved, tolerably good man, but his wife, of all the women in the world, was the most wicked creature in existence, and continually rendered his home such a painful scene of tribulation to him, that, by Hercules, many is the time and oft that I have silently deplored his fate. The heart of that most detestable woman was like a common cess-pool, where all the evil dispositions of our nature were collected together. She was cruel, treacherous, malevolent, obstinate, penurious, yet profuse in expenses of dissipation, faithless to her husband, a cheat and a drunkard. One day I heard it said that the baker had procured a bill of divorce against his execrable helpmate, and this intelligence turned out in due time to be true. She, exasperated by the proceedings instituted against her, communicated with a certain woman who had the reputation of being a witch, and whose spells and incantations were of power unlimited. Having conciliated this woman by gifts and urgent supplications, she besought of her one of two things--either to soften the heart of her husband, so that he might be reconciled to her; or if unable to do that, to send a ghost or some evil spirit to put him to a violent death. In the first endeavour the sorceress totally failed, whereupon she set about contriving the death of my unfortunate master. To effect her purpose, she raised from the grave the shade of a woman who had been murdered. So one day, about noon, there entered the bakehouse a bare-footed woman half-clad, wearing a mourning mantle thrown across her shoulders, her pale sallow features marked by a lowering expression of guilt, her grisly dishevelled hair sprinkled with ashes, and her front locks streaming over her face. Unexpectedly approaching the baker, and taking him gently by the hand, she drew him aside, and led him into an adjoining chamber, as if she had private intelligence to communicate. After the baker had departed, and a considerable period had elapsed without his returning, the servants went to his chamber-door and knocked very loudly, and, after continued silence, called several times, and thumped still harder than before. They then perceived that the door was carefully locked and bolted; upon which, at once concluding that some serious catastrophe had happened, they pushed against it with their utmost strength, and by a violent effort, either breaking the hinge or driving it out of its socket, they effected an entrance by force. The moment they were within the chamber, they saw the baker hanging quite dead from one of the beams of the ceiling, but the woman who had accompanied him had disappeared, and was nowhere to be seen."

This evoking of the dead to destroy the living, this warring of a corpse with a living sold, and then the sudden dismissal, when its foul and fatal errand had been accomplished, of the ghost to its grave, presents to the mind a climax of terrors, for which we do not know where, in history or in fiction, to find a counterpart.

The Lex Majestatis, or law of High Treason, was one of the most effectual and terrible weapons which the imperial constitution of Rome placed in the hands of its military despots. Against one offence this double-handled and sure-smiting engine was frequently levelled, viz. against the crime or the charge of inquiring into the probable duration of the Emperor's life. This was done in various ways,--by fire applied to waxen images, by consulting the stars, by casting nativities, by employing prophets, by casual omens, but especially by certain permutations and combinations of numbers, "numeros Babylonios," or the letters of the alphabet. The following extract from Ammianus Marcellinus affords an example of this treasonable sacrilege, the practice or suspicion of which, on so many occasions, led to the expulsion of the "mathematicians" from Italy. The Romans indeed, profoundly ignorant of science, or contemning it as the art of Greek adventurers or Egyptian priests, neither of whom were in good odour with the government at any period, gave to the current impostors of those days an appellation which Cambridge wranglers now account equal to a patent of nobility.

The following story seems to have been substantially a deposition taken before the magistrates of Constantinople, and extracted from the witnesses or defendants by torture. The principal deponent is said to have been brought "ad summas angustias"--to the last gasp almost, before he would confess.

"This unlucky table," he said, "which is now produced in court, we made up of laurel boughs, after the fashion of that which stands before the curtain at Delphi. Terrible were the auspices, awful the charms, long and painful the dances, which preceded and accompanied its construction and consecration. And as often as we consulted this disc or table, the following was our mode of procedure. It was set in the midst of a chamber which had previously been well purified by the smoke of Arabian gums and incense. On the table was placed a round dish, welded of divers metals. On the rim of the dish were engraven the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, separated from one another by equal and exactly measured spaces. Beside the table stood a certain man clad in linen, and having linen buskins or boots on his feet, with a handkerchief bound around his head. He waved in one hand a branch of vervain, that propitious herb; he recited a set formulary of verses, such as are wont to be sung before the Averruncal gods, He that stood by the table was no ordinary magician. With his other he held and shook a ring which was attached to curtains, spun from the finest Carpathian thread, and which had often before been used for such mystic incantations. The ring thus shaken dropped ever and anon between the interspaces of the letters, and formed by striking the letters together certain words, which the sorcerer combined into number and measure, much after the manner of the priests who manage the oracles of the Pythian and Branchidian Apollo. Then, when we inquired who perchance would succeed to the reigning Emperor, the bright and smooth ring, leaping among the letters, struck together T, H, E, O, and afterwards a final S, so that one of the bystanders at once exclaimed that THEO[DORU]S was the emperor designated by the Fates. We asked no more questions: seeing that Theodorus was the person whom we had sought for."

The lingering belief in the old religion, and in the magical and thaumaturgical practices which had, like ivy around an oak, gradually accrued to it, was productive in the decline of Paganism of many poetical forms of superstition. It is curious and instructive to remark the increasing earnestness with which the decaying creed of Heathendom sought to array itself against the encroachments of Christianity. The light _persiflage_ with which the philosophy of the Augustan age treated the state-religion nearly disappears. The indifference of the magistrate gives place to an intolerant and indignant tone of reclamation. The Pagan Cæsars attack the new religion as a formidable antagonist; the Christian emperors, in their turn, assail directly or ferret out perseveringly the superstitions which lingered among the rural towns and districts. The ancient gods are no longer regarded by either their worshipers or their opponents as simply deified heroes or men, but as powerful and mysterious beings, informed with demoniac energies and capable of conferring temporal good or evil,--beauty, power, and wealth, on the one hand; deformity, ignominy, and disease, on the other,--upon those who honoured or abjured them. Such conceptions of blessing or of bale were embodied in strange narratives of weeping or jubilant processions of majestic forms when the moon was hid in her vacant interlunar cave, of demons assuming the shape of fair enchantresses who beguiled men to their undoing, of palaces reared in a night and dislimning in the day, of banquets, like that visionary banquet in the wilderness, which Milton has adorned with all the graces of imagination in his 'Paradise Lost.'

We can afford room for only two of the narratives of demoniac influence in which the later Pagans expressed their belief in the influence of the early gods.

1. The superstition of the Lamia. One result of the consolidation of Western Asia with Europe, under the Roman Empire, was to spread widely over the latter continent the germs of the serpent-worship of the East. The subtlest beast of the field, retaining in full vigour his powers of assuming tempting forms and uttering beguiling words, was wont, it seems, to disport himself among the sons and daughters of men under the shape in which he deceived our general mother, the over-curious Eve. Especially did he delight to entrap some hopeful youth who was studying philosophy in the schools of Athens or Berytus, or some neophyte in the Christian Church. A fair young gentleman at Corinth had been abroad on a pleasure excursion, and might perchance be returning home a little the worse for wine. However this may have been, at the gates of Corinth he encountered a damsel richly attired, "beautiful exceedingly," but with hair dishevelled, and drowned in tears. He began by inquiring the cause of her distress. Faithless servants had carried off her litter and left her lone. He offered her consolation, which she accepted, and his arm also, which she did not decline. She led him to a lordly palace in a bye street of the city, where he had never yet been. At its marble portico waited a crowd of slaves with torches awaiting their absent mistress, and the pair, now become fond, were ushered into a sumptuous banqueting hall, where a board was spread covered with all the delicacies of the season, and garnished with effulgent plate. In this palace of delight the young man abode many days, taking no account of time. But at length, cloyed with sweets, he proposed inviting a party of his college friends, much to the dismay of his fair hostess, who, with many tears and embraces, besought him to forego his wish. In an evil hour however he persevered, and his rooms were filled with gownsmen, marvelling much, not without envy, at the good fortune that had befallen their chum, Lucius, no one knew how or why. But among the undergraduates came a grave and grey college tutor, deeply read in conjurors' books, who could detect by his skill the devil under any shape. Pale and silent the old man sat at the festive board, and was ill-bred enough to stare the lady not only out of countenance, but out of her beauty also. She grew pale, livid, an indiscriminate form: she melted away; the palace melted also; the plate, the viands, and the wines vanished also; and in place of columns and ceiled roofs was a void square in Corinth, and in place of the damsel was a loathsome serpent, writhing in the agonies of dissolution. The white-bearded fellow had scanned and scotched and slain the snake--the Lamia--but he destroyed his patient also, for Lucius became a maniac; had the charm lasted awhile longer, his soul would have become the fiend's property.

2. A young man had sorely offended the great goddess Venus, or, as she was called in his native city, the Syrian Byblus, Astarte. To redeem himself from the curse upon his board and bed,--for he had recently married a fair wife,--he applied to a wise astrologer. The sage heard his case, and advised him, as his only remedy, to go on a certain night, at its very noon, to a spot just without the gates, called the Pagan's Tomb,--to station himself on the roof of it, and to recite, at a prescribed moment, a certain formulary, with which his counsel, learned in magical law, furnished him. On the Pagan's Tomb accordingly the young man placed himself at the noon of night, and awaited his deliverance. And presently, towards the confines of morning, was heard a sound of sad and solemn music, and of much wailing, and of the measured tread of a long procession. And there drew nigh a mournful company of persons, who might have seemed men and women, but for their extraordinary stature, and their surpassing majesty and beauty: and the young man remembered the words of the magician, and knew that before him was the goodly company of the gods whom his forefathers in past generations had worshiped. One only of that august and weeping band was borne in a chariot--the god Saturn--perhaps by reason of his great age; and to Saturn he addressed his prayer, which was of such potency that Saturn straightway commanded Astarte to release the petitioner from the curse she had laid upon him.

We have been able merely to indicate how wide a field lies beyond the proper domain of medieval witchcraft. It would be curious to trace the similarity of the Heathen and Christian superstitions, or rather the derivation of one from the other. But we must reserve this subject to some other occasion, and conclude with repeating the wish with which we commenced, that some competent hand would undertake to trace through all its ramifications the obscure yet recompensing subject of Magic and Witchcraft.

THE END.

JOHN EDWARD TAYLOR, PRINTER,

LITTLE QUEEN STREET, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Since they were written, Sir Walter Scott's 'Demonology and Witchcraft' has been published, a book replete with interesting historical notices.

[2] Faustus, who is a sort of Delolme in matters infernal, has an able treatise on the subject, entitled 'Mirakel- Kunst- und Wunder-Buch, oder der schwartze Rabe, auch der dreifache Höllen Zwang genannt,' in which the political system of Lucifer's dominions is examined. Dionysius the Areopagite indeed is not more exact in his calendar of the celestial hierarchy. Perhaps these treatises are the common parents of the modern 'Blue Books.'

[3] Reginald Scott's 'Discoverie of Witchcraft' contains an army-list or muster-roll of the infernal forces. Thus the Duke of Amazeroth, who seems to be a sort of brigadier-general, has the command of sixty legions, etc.

[4] Satan is a mere third-rate spirit, as they will find by consulting a list of the Infernal Privy Council for 1669, contained in Faust's 'Black Raven.' But we are not told the exact date of his deposition from his primacy. It is singular that both in the book of Job, where he is mentioned for the first time, and in the Scandinavian mythologers, he appears in a similar character--"The Ranger," or "Roving Spirit of Tartarus." See Whiter, Etymologicon, vol. iii., in which very learned, though now forgotten work, there is much diabolical erudition.

[5] Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren. Yet, like Cato the Censor, Lucifer may have taken to study late in life.

[6] Lotichius, Oratorio super fatalibus hoc tempore Academiarum periculis: 1631. Lotichius took the trouble to compose a Latin poem on the subject of his triumphal entry. A book entitled 'Mammon' had some reputation in its day. The acknowledged author's name indeed is Harris; yet some commentator of the year 2150 will perhaps suggest that it was 'Old Harry's Mammon.' We have seen worse "conjectural emendations."

[7] Colloquia Mensalia.

[8] Legenda Aurea Jacob. de Voragine, leg. 123.

[9] _Ibid._ leg. 21.

[10] Or even a bishop. See Southey's pithy and profitable tale of 'Eleemon, or a Sinner Saved.'

[11] In the case of St. Lydvina, when he pleaded his case in person, and thought it a clear one, he was fairly laughed out of court, "deriso explosoque Dæmone." (Brugmann, Vita Lydvinæ, p. 290.) He was hoaxed in a still more ingenious manner by Nostradamus, who having agreed that the devil should have him, if he was buried either in the church or out of it, left directions that he should be buried in a hole in the wall. Sometimes however he was the gainer in such equivocal compacts,--as, for example, in the case of the monk who was to live so long as he abstained from sleeping between sheets. The monk always slept in a chair; but in an unlucky hour Satan caught him as fast as a top with his head between _the sheets_ of a sermon, and claimed his bond.

[12] Inferno, canto vi.

[13] The trials at Arras, in 1459. Vide Monstrelet's Chronicle, vol. iii. p. 84: Paris, 1572. But these were rather religious prosecutions against supposed heretics, and the crime of witchcraft only introduced as aggravating their offences.

[14] Christoph von Ranzow, a nobleman of Holstein, burned eighteen at once on _one_ of his estates.

[15] Some of our readers may wish to see a specimen of this precious production. We shall take a stanza or two, descriptive of the joke of which the poor witch was the victim.

Ein Hexen hat man gefangen, zu Zeit die war sehr reich
Mit der man lang umbgaben ehe sie bekannte gleich,
Dann sie blieb darauf beständig es gescheh ihr Unrecht gross,
Bis man ihr macht nothwendig _diesen artlichen Poss_(!),

Das ich mich drüber wunder; man schickt ein Henkersknecht
Zu ihr ins Gefängniss 'nunter, den man hat kleidet recht
Mit einer Bärnhaute als wenns der Teufel wär;
Als ihm die Drut anschaute meynts ihr Buhl kam daher.

Sie sprach zu ihm behende, wie lestu mich so lang
In der Obrigkeit Hände? Hilf mir aus ihren Zwang,
Wie du mir hast verheissen, ich bin ja eben dein;
Thu mich aus der Angst entreissen, o liebster Bule mein!

Sie thet sich selbst verrathen, und gab Anzeigung viel
Sie hat nit geschmeckt den Braten, _was das war für ein Spiel_(!).
Er tröstet sie und saget, ich will dir helfen wohl;
Darum sey unverzaget, Morgens geschehen soll.

It bears the colophon "Printed at Smalcald in the year 1627."

[16] When these horrors were thus versified, it is not wonderful to find them "improved" by the preachers of the time. At Riga, in 1626, there appeared 'Nine Select Witch Sermons, by Hermann Sampsonius, superintendent at Riga,' and many others in the course of that century.

[17] Criminal Law. Tit. x.

[18] Records of Justiciary. Trial of the Master of Orkney.

[19] Calef's Journal.

[20] Cobbett's State Trials.

[21] Trial of Bartie Paterson. Records of Scottish Justiciary. Dec. 18, 1607.

[22] In Wenham's case, Mr. Chauncy deposed that a cat belonging to Jane Wenham had come and _knocked_ at his door at night, and that he had killed it. This was founded on evidence at the trial.

[23] Rec. of Just. 1613, Dec. 1.

[24] See the 'Neue Necrologie der Deutschen, 1823,' for an account of these remarkable appearances.

[25] Divina et Vera Metaphysica.

[26] Wordsworth's 'Dion.'

[27] The prefixed characters which Ashmole interprets to mean Responsum Raphaelis seem remarkably to resemble that cabalistic-looking initial which in medical prescriptions is commonly interpreted "Recipe."

[28] Dapper (Beschreibung von Amsterdam, p. 150) describes her as a melancholy or hypochondriac girl. She was burned however as usual. These rhyming or alliterative charms are of very remote antiquity. Cato, in his treatise on Husbandry, recommends the following formulary for a sprain or fracture: "Huat Hanat, Huat Ista, Pista Sista, Domiabo Damnaustra," or "Motas Væta, Daries Dardaries, Astataries Dissunapiter."

[29] This, indeed, is an almost invariable feature in the witch trials, and, if the subject could justify the discussion, might lead to some singular medical conclusions.

[30] The trade of a pricker, as it was called, _i. e._ a person who put pins into the flesh of a witch, was a regular one in Scotland and England, as well as on the Continent. Sir George Mackenzie mentions the case of one of them who confessed the imposture (p. 48); and a similar instance is mentioned by Spottiswood (p. 448). Sir Walter Scott gives the following account of this trade:--"One celebrated mode of detecting witches, and torturing them at the same time, to draw forth confession, was, by running pins into their body, on pretence of discovering the devil's stigma, or mark, which was said to be inflicted by him upon all his vassals, and to be insensible to pain. This species of search, the practice of the infamous Hopkins, was in Scotland reduced to a trade; and the young witch-finder was allowed to torture the accused party, as if in exercise of a lawful calling, although Sir George Mackenzie stigmatizes it as a horrid imposture. I observe in the Collections of Mr. Pitcairn, that, at the trial of Janet Peaston of Dalkeith, the magistrates and ministers of that market-town caused John Kincaid of Tranent, the common pricker, to exercise his craft upon her, 'who found two marks of what he called the devil's making, and which appeared indeed to be so, for she could not feel the pin when it was put into either of the said marks, nor did they (the marks) bleed when they were taken out again; and when she was asked where she thought the pins were put in, she pointed to a part of her body distant from the real place. They were pins of three inches in length.' Besides the fact, that the persons of old people especially sometimes contain spots void of sensibility, there is also room to believe that the professed prickers used a pin, the point or lower part of which was, on being pressed down, sheathed in the upper, which was hollow for the purpose, and that which appeared to enter the body did not pierce it at all."--_Demonology and Witchcraft_, p. 297.

[31] Peter died in prison just in time to escape the flames. He was burned in effigy however after his death.

[32] Lindon, cited by Wyttenbach, 'Versuch einer Geschichte von Trier,' vol. iii. p. 110.

[33] Beyträge zur Beförderung einer nähern Einsicht in das gesammte Geisterreich, vol. i. p. 284.

[34] The Abbé Fiard, one of the latest believers on record, has printed the Requête at full length in his 'Lettres sur la Magie,' p. 117 _et seq._

[35] Even now a complaint of 'being bewitched' is occasionally made to Justices of the Peace by the very ignorant or the very malignant.

[36] Trials and other Proceedings in Matters Criminal before the High Court of Justiciary in Scotland, selected from the Records of that Court. By Robert Pitcairn. Edinburgh.

[37] Holingshed, vol. i. pp. 50, 317.

[38] At the second marriage of Alexander III., Fordun, vol. ii. p. 128. Boece, p. 294, ed. 1574.

[39] Boece, p. 149.

[40] In the case of Cameron, Bishop of Glasgow, 1466.--Buchanan. Pitscottie.

[41]

"Quell' altro, che nei fianchi è così poco,
Michele Scotto fu, che veramente
Delle magiche frode seppe il giuoco."--_Canto xx._

[42] As in the case of the witches at Forres, who attempted to destroy King Duffus by the favourite pagan charm of roasting his image in wax, and those burnt at Edinburgh for a similar attempt against James III., in 1479.

[43] Scot of Scotstarvet, Home of Godscroft, _passim_.

[44] Nov. 8, 1576. Pitcairn, vol. i. p. 48.

[45] Ibid. p. 51.

[46] Rec. of Just. May 27, 1601.

[47] News from Scotland, declaring the damnable life of Dr. Fian.--Pitcairn, vol. i. p. 213.

[48] We need hardly remind our readers of the torture of Macbriar by the Boots, before the Privy Council, in the 'Tales of my Landlord.'

[49] Old French, _Turquois_, a smith's pincers, from _torquere_.

[50] Sir James Melville, p. 294.

[51] Pitcairn, vol. i. p. 211.

[52] Crook--the hook from which pots are hung over a Scottish kitchen fire.

[53] Just. Records, 1590-1610.

[54] Most of the cases here cited are found in the Justiciary Records, from about 1605 to 1640.

[55] Feb. 4, 1629.

[56] Just. Records, Jan. 1630.

[57] Just. Rec., Dec. 1643.

[58] The paper is marked on the back, "Edinburgh, July 10th, 1662: considered and found relevant by the Justice Depute." The part of Janet Braidhead's deposition, which appears to have borne a similar marking by the Justice Depute, is torn off.

[59] Her fellow-witch, Braidhead, was baptized by the very inappropriate name of _Christian_.

[60] This seems to have been a common practice in the Infernal ritual. Law gives the nicknames of the Renfrewshire witches, in the Bangarran Case. (Memorials, p. 122.)

[61] Taking the form of foul and ominous birds was a favourite practice of witches in all ages. Apuleius, in his character of Lucius, thus describes the metamorphosis of his hostess at Larissa:--