The True Story vs. Myth of Witchcraft. William Godwin
Читать онлайн книгу.
of executions there in the course of the century preceding 1628 would be 15,700. We know that from 1610 to 1660 was the great epoch of the witch trials, and that so late as 1749 Maria Renata was executed at Wurtzburg for witchcraft; and though in the interval between 1660 and that date it is to be hoped that the number of these horrors had diminished, there can be little doubt that several thousands must be added to the amount already stated. If Bamberg, Paderborn, Treves, and the other Catholic bishoprics, whose zeal was not less ardent, furnished an equal contingent, and if the Protestants, as we know14, actually vied with them in the extent to which these cruelties were carried, the number of victims from the date of Innocent’s bull to the final extinction of these persecutions must considerably exceed 100,000 in Germany.
Even the feeling of horror excited by the perusal of the Wurtzburg murders is perhaps exceeded by that to which another document relative to the state of matters in 1629 must give rise: namely a ballad on the subject of these executions, detailing in doggrel verses the sufferings of the unfortunate victims, “to be sung to the tune of Dorothea”—a common street-song of the day. It is entitled the ‘Druten Zeitung,’ or Witches’ Chronicle, “being an account of the remarkable events which took place in Franconia, Bamberg, and Wurtzburg, with those wretches who from avarice or ambition have sold themselves to the devil, and how they had their reward at last; set to music, and to be sung to the air of Dorothea.” It is graced also with some hideous devices in wood, representing three devils seizing on divers persons by the hair of their heads, legs, etc., and dragging them away. It commences and concludes with some pious reflections on the guilt of the witches and wizards, whose fate it commemorates with the greatest glee and satisfaction. One device in particular, by which a witch who had obstinately resisted the torture is betrayed into confession—namely, by sending into her prison the hangman disguised as her familiar (Buhl Teufel)—seems to meet with the particular approbation of the author, who calls it an excellent joke; and no doubt the point of it in his eyes was very much increased by the consideration that upon the confession, as it was called, so obtained, the unhappy wretch was immediately committed to the flames15. What are we to think of the state of feeling in the country where these horrors were thus made the subject of periodical ballads, and set to music for the amusement of the populace16?
It was one fatal effect of the perseverance with which Satan and his dealings were thus brought before the view of every one, that thousands of weak and depraved minds were actually led into the belief that they had formed a connection with the evil being, and that the visions which had so long haunted the brain of Sprenger and his associates had been realized in their own case. In this way alone can we in some measure account for the strange confessions which form the great peculiarity in the witch trials, where unhappy creatures, with the full knowledge of their fate, admit their intercourse with Satan, their midnight meetings, incantations, their dealings with spirits, “white, black, and grey, with all their trumpery,” the grotesque horrors of the sabbath,—in short, every wild and impossible phantasm which had received colour and a body in the ‘Malleus,’—and seemed to be perfectly satisfied that they had fully merited the fiery trial to which their confession immediately subjected them. When we read these trials, we think of the effect of the Jew’s fiddle in Grimm’s fairy tale; we see the delusion spreading like an epidemic from one to another, till first the witnesses, then the judges, and lastly the poor criminals themselves, all yield to the giddy whirl, and go off like dancing Dervises under its influence.
True it is that, in many of the cases, and particularly those which occur in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, when the diabolical doctrines of Sprenger and Delrio were in their full vigour, the confessions on which these convictions proceeded were elicited by torture, moral and physical, and frequently retracted, till a fresh application of the rack produced a fresh admission. One instance from Delrio may stand in place of a thousand. He mentions that an unfortunate gentleman in Westphalia had been twenty times put to the rack, “vicies sævæ quæstioni subditum,” in order to compel him to confess that he was a were-wolf! All these tortures he resisted, till the hangman gave him an intoxicating draught, and under its influence he confessed that he was a were-wolf after all. “En judicum clemens arbitrium,” says Delrio, “quo se porrigat in illis partibus aquilonaribus.”—See how long-suffering we judges are in the north! we never put our criminals to death till we have tried them with twenty preliminary courses of torture! This is perfectly in the spirit of another worthy in Germany, who had been annoyed with the pertinacity of a witch, who, like the poor lycanthrope, persisted in maintaining her innocence. “Da liess ich sie tüchtig foltern,” says the inquisitor—“und sie gestand;”—I tortured her tightly (the torture lasted four hours), and she confessed! Who indeed under such a system would not have confessed? Death was unavoidable either way, and the great object was to attain that consummation with the least preparatory pain. “I went,” says Sir George Mackenzie, “when I was a Justice Depute, to examine some women who had confessed judicially. One of them, who was a silly creature, told me that she had not confessed because she was guilty, but, being a poor creature who wrought for her meat, and being defamed for a witch, she knew she would starve, for no person hereafter would give her meat or lodging, and that all men would beat her and hound dogs at her, and that therefore she desired to be out of the world. Whereupon she wept most bitterly, and upon her knees called God to witness to what she said17.” In other cases, the torture was applied not only to the individual accused, but to his relations or friends, to secure confession. In Alison Pearson’s case18, it appears that her daughter, a girl of nine years of age, had been placed in the pilliewinks, and her son subjected to about fifty strokes in the boots. Where the torture was not corporeally applied, terror, confusion, and the influence of others frequently produced the same effect on the weak minds of the accused. In the case of the New England witches in 1696, six of the poor women who were liberated in the general gaol-delivery which took place after this reign of terror began to decline, (and who had all confessed previously that they had been guilty of the witchcrafts imputed to them,) retracted their confessions in writing, attributing them to the consternation produced by their sudden seizure and imprisonment. “And indeed,” said they, “that confession which it is said we made was no other than what was suggested to us by some gentlemen, they telling us we were witches, and they knew it, and we knew it, and they knew that we knew it, which made us think that it was so, and our understanding, our reason, and our faculties almost gone, we were not capable of judging our condition. And most of what we said was but a consenting to what they said19.”
But though unquestionably great part of these confessions, which at first tended so much to prolong this delusion, were obtained by torture, or contrary to the real conviction and belief of the accused, it is impossible to deny that in many cases the confessions were voluntary, and proceeded from actual belief. Nor was it to be wondered at that persons of a weak and melancholy temperament should, more particularly at a time when the phenomena of nature and of the human body were so little understood, be disposed to set down every occurrence which they could not explain, and every wild phantasm which crossed their minds, to the direct and immediate agency of an evil power. At that period even the most natural events were ascribed to witchcraft. If a child, after being touched by a suspected individual, died or became ill, the convulsions were ascribed to diabolical interference, as in Wenham’s case, so late as 171220. If, on the contrary, she cured instead of killing, the conclusion was the same, although the only charm employed might be a prayer to the Almighty21. If an old woman’s cat, coming to the door at night, took part in a concert with other cats, this was nothing but a witch herself in disguise22. In the case of Robert Erskine of Dun23, tried for the murder