The True Story vs. Myth of Witchcraft. William Godwin
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applications of chemistry, shamefully neglected. The government seems despotical, but subject to occasional explosions on the part of the more influential spirits concerned in the executive. In fact, the departments of the administration are by no means well arranged; there is no proper division of labour, and the consequence is, that Beelzebub, “Mooned Ashtaroth,” and others of the ministry, who, according to the theory of the constitution2 are entitled to precedence, are constantly jostled and interfered with by Aziel, Mephistopheles, Marbuel, and other forward second-rate spirits, who are continually thrusting in their claws where they are not called for. The standing army is considerable3, besides the volunteers by which it is continually augmented. Nothing is heard however of the navy, and from the ominous silence which our geographers preserve on this point, it is easy to see that water is a rare element in this quarter.
The hints given as to the personal appearance and conduct of Lucifer, the reigning monarch, are not flattering. Common readers are apt to believe that Satan occupies that dignity4, but this is a great error, and only shows, as Asmodeus told Don Cleofas, when he fell into a similar mistake about Beelzebub, “that they have no true notions of hell.” The morals of Lucifer, as might be expected, are as bad as possible, with this exception, that we see no evidence of his being personally addicted to drinking. His licentious habits, however, are attested by many a scandalous chronicle in Sprenger, Delrio, and Bodinus; and for swearing, all the world knows that Ernulphus was but a type of him. His jokes are all practical and of a low order, and there is an utter want of dignity in most of his proceedings. One of his most facetious amusements consists in constantly pulling the spits, on which his witches are riding, from beneath them, and applying them vigorously to their shoulders; and he has more than once administered personal chastisement to his servants, when they neglected to keep an appointment. He is a notorious cheat; many enterprising young men, who have enlisted in his service on the promise of high pay and promotion, having found, on putting their hands into their pockets, that he had paid them their bounty in tin sixpences, and having never risen even to the rank of a corporal. His talent might, from these narratives, be considered very mediocre, and therefore we are afraid that the ingenious selection from his papers, published by Jean Paul5, must be a literary forgery. At least all his printed speeches are bad,—flashy enough, no doubt, in the commencement, but generally ending in smoke. He has always had a fancy for appearing in masquerade, and once delivered a course of lectures on magic at Salamanca, in the disguise of a professor. So late as 1626, he lived incog., but in a very splendid style, for a whole winter, in Milan, under the title of the Duke of Mammon6. It is in vain, however, for his partial biographers to disguise the fact, that in his nocturnal excursions, of which, like Haroun Alraschid, he was at one time rather fond, and where, we learn from the Swedish witches, he generally figured in a grey coat and red small-clothes, ornamented with ribbons and blue stockings, he has more than once received a sound drubbing from honest people, whom he has attempted to trip up by laying his tail in their way. And, in fact, since his affair with St. Dunstan, he has kept pretty much withindoors after nightfall. Luther, as we know, kept no terms with him when he began to crack hazel-nuts in his bedroom at the Wartburg, but beat him all to nothing in a fair contest of ribaldry and abuse, besides leaving an indelible blot of ink upon his red smalls7. St. Lupus shut him up for a whole night in a pitcher of cold water, into which he had (as he thought, cunningly) conveyed himself, with the hope that the saint would swallow him unawares8. This however, considering his ordinary temperature, must have been an act of kindness, which should have brought on St. Lupus the censure of the church. St. Anthony, in return for a very polite offer of his services, spat in his face; which hurt his feelings so much, that it was long before he ventured to appear in society again9. And although in his many transactions with mankind he is constantly trying to secure some unfair advantage, a person of any talent, particularly if he has been bred a lawyer10, is a match for him; and there are numerous cases in the books, in which his majesty, attempting to apprehend the person of a debtor, has been unexpectedly defeated by an ingenious saving clause in the bond, which, like Shylock, he had overlooked, and non-suited in the ecclesiastical courts, where he commonly sues, with costs11. Finally, we infer from the Mora Trials, that his general health must have suffered from the climate, for in 1669 he was extremely ill in Sweden; and though he got over the attack for a time, by bleeding and an antiphlogistic regimen, the persons who were about him thought his constitution was breaking up, and that he was still in a dying way.
Such is the grotesque aspect of the legendary Lucifer and his court, which a course of dæmonology presents to us! But though we have thus spoken with levity of these gross and palpable conceptions of the evil principle, and though undoubtedly the first impression produced by such a farrago must be a ludicrous one, the subject, we fear, has also its serious side. An Indian deity, with its wild distorted shape and grotesque attitude, appears merely ridiculous when separated from its accessories and viewed by daylight in a museum. But restore it to the darkness of its own hideous temple, bring back to our recollection the victims that have bled upon its altar, or been crushed beneath its car, and our sense of the ridiculous subsides into aversion and horror. So, while the superstitious dreams of former times are regarded as mere speculative insanities, we may for a moment be amused with the wild incoherencies of the patients; but when we reflect that out of these hideous misconceptions of the principle of evil arose the belief in witchcraft; that this was no dead faith, but one operating on the whole being of society, urging on the mildest and the wisest to deeds of murder, or cruelties scarcely less than murder; that the learned and the beautiful, young and old, male and female, were devoted by its influence to the stake and the scaffold,—every feeling disappears except that of astonishment that such things could be, and humiliation at the thought that the delusion was as lasting as it was universal.
It is true that the current of human opinion seems now to set in a different direction, and that if the evil spirit of persecution is again to re-appear on earth, his avatar must in all probability be made in a different form. Our brains are no longer, as Dr. Francis Hutchinson says of Bodinus, “mere storehouses for devils to dance in;” and if the influence of the great enemy is still as active as before on earth, in the shape of evil passions, he at least keeps personally in the background, and has changed his tactics entirely since the days of the ‘Malleus Maleficarum.’
“For Satan now is wiser than before,
And tempts by making rich—not making poor.”
Still however it is always a useful check to the pride of the human mind, to look to those delusions which have darkened it, more especially to such as have originated in feelings in themselves exalted and laudable. Such is unquestionably the case in regard to one of the gloomiest chapters in the history of human error, the belief in witchcraft and its consequences. The wish to raise ourselves above the visible world, and to connect ourselves with beings supposed to occupy a higher rank in creation, seemed at first calculated to exercise only a beneficent influence on the mind. Men looked upon it as a sort of Jacob’s ladder, by which they were to establish a communication between earth and heaven, and by means of which angelic influences might be always ascending and descending upon the heart of man. But, unfortunately, the supposition of this actual and bodily intercourse with spirits of the better order, involved also a similar belief as to the possibility of establishing a free trade with the subterranean powers,
“Who lurk in ambush, in their earthy cover,
And, swift to hear our spells, come swarming up;”
and from these theoretical opinions, once established and acted upon, all the horrors of those tempestuous times flowed as a natural consequence.