The True Story vs. Myth of Witchcraft. William Godwin
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and witchcraft, as if the poisoning was not of itself amply sufficient to account for their death.
It was still less wonderful that those mysterious phenomena which sometimes occur in the human frame, such as spontaneous combustion, delusions arising from the state of the brain and nerves, and optical deceptions, should appear to the sufferer to be the work of the devil, whose good offices they might very probably have invoked under some fit of despondency or misanthropy, little expecting, like the poor man in the fable who called on Death, to be taken at their word. What a “Thesaurus of Horror” would the spectres of Nicolai have afforded in the sixteenth century or the commencement of the seventeenth, if embodied in the pages of the ‘Malleus’ or the ‘Flagellum Dæmonum,’ instead of being quietly published by the patients as optical and medical phenomena in the ‘Berlinische Monatschrift’ for 1799, and the 15th volume of the ‘Philosophical Journal!’ What a fearful glimpse into the infernal world would have been afforded by the still more frightful illusions which haunted poor Backzko of Königsberg24 during his political labours in 1806; the grinning negro who seated himself opposite to him, the owl-headed tormentor that used to stare at him every night through his curtains, the snakes twisting and turning about his knees as he turned his periods! If we go back to 1651, we find our English Jacob Böhme, Pordage25, giving an account of visions which must have been exactly of the same kind, arising from an excited state of the brain, with the most thorough conviction of their reality. His Philadelphian disciples, Jane Leade, Thomas Bromley, Hooker, Sapperton, and others, were indulged, on the first meeting of their society, with a vision of unparalleled splendour. The princes and powers of the infernal world passed in review before them, sitting in coaches, surrounded with dark clouds and drawn by a cortége of lions, dragons, tigers, and bears; then followed the lower spirits arranged in squadrons with cats’ ears, claws, twisted limbs, etc.; whether they shut their eyes or kept them open, the appearances were equally distinct; “for we saw,” says the master-spirit Pordage, “with the eyes of the mind, not with those of the body.”
“And shapes that come not at a mortal call
Will not depart when mortal voices bid.
Lords of the visionary eye, whose lid
Once raised remains aghast, and will not fall26.”
Thus, while phenomena which experience has since shown to be perfectly natural were universally attributed to supernatural causes, men had come to be on the most familiar footing with spiritual beings of all kinds. In the close of the sixteenth century, Dr. Dee was, according to his own account, and we verily believe his own conviction, on terms of intimacy with most of the angels. His brother physician, Dr. Richard Napier, a relation of the inventor of the logarithms, got almost all his medical prescriptions from the angel Raphael. Elias Ashmole had a MS. volume of these receipts, filling about a quire and a half of paper27. In fact, one would almost suppose that few persons at that time condescended to perform a cure by natural means. Witness the sympathetic nostrums of Valentine Greatrakes and Sir Kenelm Digby; or the case of Arise Evans, reported by Aubrey, who “had a fungous nose, and to whom it was revealed that the king’s hand would cure him; and at the first coming of King Charles II. into St. James’s Park he kissed the king’s hand and rubbed his nose with it, which troubled the king, but cured him.” In Aubrey’s time, too, the visits of ghosts had become so frequent, that they had their exits and their entrances without exciting the least sensation. Aubrey makes an entry in his journal of the appearance of a ghost as coolly as a merchant now-a-days makes an entry in his ledger. “Anno 1670. Not far from Cirencester was an apparition. Being demanded whether good spirit or bad, returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious perfume and a melodious twang.”
Is it to be wondered at then, that, surrounded on all hands with such superstitious fancies, the weak and depraved were early brought to believe that all the wild chimeras of the demonologists were true, and that they had really concluded that covenant with Satan, the possibility of which was universally inculcated as an article of faith, and the idea of which was constantly present to their minds? or that, under the influence of this frightful delusion, they should voluntarily come forward to confess their imaginary crime, as in the Amsterdam case of the poor girl who accused herself of bewitching cattle by the words Shurius, Turius, Tirius28, or in another still more remarkable case in 1687, mentioned in Reichard’s ‘Beyträge,’ where a young woman accused herself, her friend, and the mother of her friend, of a long course of witchcraft, with all the usual traditional and impossible horrors of Sprenger and his brethren?
Neither, we are afraid, is there much reason to doubt that some of the most horrible of their conceptions were founded on facts which were but too real; that the cunning and the depraved contrived to turn the ecstasies and the fears of these poor wretches to their own purposes; in short, that frauds similar to those which Boccaccio has painted in his novel of the angel Gabriel, were occasionally played off upon the deluded victims. Without entering further on a topic which is rather of a delicate kind, the reader will have an idea of our meaning who recollects the disclosures that took place in the noted French case of Father Girard and La Cadière.
Much has been said as to the wonderful coincidences to be found in the evidence of the accused when examined separately, the minuteness of their details, and the general harmony of the infernal narratives, as collected from the witch trials of different countries. But the truth is that this assertion must in the first place be received with great limitations; for in many cases, where, accepting the assertions of Sprenger and the rest as true, we should suppose the coincidence to be complete, the original confessions which still exist prove that the resemblance was merely general, and that there were radical and irreconcileable differences in the details of the evidence. Inasfar as the assertion is really true, one simple explanation goes far to account for the phenomenon;—“Insanire parent certâ ratione modoque.” The general notions of the devil and his demeanour, the rites of the infernal sabbath, etc. being once fixed, the visions which crossed the minds of the unfortunate wretches accused soon assumed a pretty determinate and invariable form; so that, even if left to tell their own story, there would have been the closest resemblance between the narratives of different persons. But this was not all. In almost every case the confessions were merely the echo of questions put by the inquisitors, all of which again were founded on the demonological creed of the ‘Malleus.’ One set of questions is put to all the witches, and the answers, being almost always simple affirmatives, necessarily correspond. Hence it is amusing enough to observe how different were the results, when the process of investigation fell into the hands of persons to whom Sprenger’s manual was unknown. In the Lindheim trials in 1633, to which we have already alluded, the inquisitor happened to be an old soldier, who had witnessed several campaigns in the Thirty Years War, and who, instead of troubling his head about Incubi, Succubi, and the other favourite subjects of inquiry with the disciples of the Hammer, was only anxious to ascertain who was the queen of the infernal spirits, the general, officers, corporals, etc., to all of which he received answers as distinct and satisfactory as any that are recorded for our instruction in the chronicles of Bodinus or Delrio.
In the seventeenth century, the manner in which the delusion was communicated seems exactly to resemble those remarkable instances of sympathy which occur in the cases of the Scottish Cambuslang Conversions and the American Forest Preachings. No sooner has one hypochondriac published his symptoms, than fifty others feel themselves at once affected with the same disorder. In the celebrated Mora case in 1669, with which of course all the readers of Glanvil (and who has not occasionally peeped into his horrors?) are familiar, the disease spreads first through the children, who believed themselves the victims of diabolical agency, and who ascribed the convulsions, faintings, etc., with which they were attacked, to that cause; and next through the unfortunate witches themselves, for as soon as one or two of them, bursting into tears, confessed that the accusation of the children was true, all the rest joined in the confession. And