The True Story vs. Myth of Witchcraft. William Godwin
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judicial trial—the ordeal by water. Another 'method of proving a witch,' by weighing against the Church Bible (a formidable balance), is traced to some of their ancient customs. James VI. (Demonologie) is convinced that 'God hath appointed, for a supernatural sign of the monstrous impiety of witches, that the water shall refuse to receive them in her bosom that have shaken off them the sacred water of baptism and wilfully refused the benefit thereof.'
52. The royal library of the Fatimites consisted of 100,000 manuscripts, elegantly transcribed and splendidly bound, which were lent, without avarice or jealousy, to the students of Cairo. Yet this collection must appear moderate if we believe that the Ommiades of Spain had formed a library of 600,000 volumes, 44 of which were employed in the mere catalogue. Their capital, Cordova, with the adjacent towns of Malaga, Almeira, and Murcia, had given birth to more than 300 writers; and above 70 public libraries were opened in the cities of the Andalusian kingdom.—Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, lii.
53. Chymistry and Algebra still attest our obligation by their Arabic etymology.
54. A common tradition is that Soliman, king of the Jews, having finally subdued—a success which he owed chiefly to his vast magical resources—the rebellious spirits, punished their disobedience by incarcerating them in various kinds of prisons, for longer or shorter periods of time, in proportion to their demerits. For the belief of the followers of Mohammed in the magic excellence of Solomon, see Sale's Koran, xxi. and xxvii. According to the prophet, the devil taught men magic and sorcery. The magic of the Moslems, or, at least, of the Egyptians, is of two kinds—high and low—which are termed respectively rahmanee (divine) and sheytanee (Satanic). By a perfect knowledge of the former it is possible to the adept to 'raise the dead to life, kill the living, transport himself instantly wherever he pleases, and perform any other miracle. The low magic (sooflee or sheytanee) is believed to depend on the agency of the devil and evil spirits, and unbelieving genii, and to be used for bad purposes and by bad men.' The divine is 'founded on the agency of God and of His angels, &c., and employed always for good purposes, and only to be practised by men of probity, who, by tradition or from books, learn the names of those superhuman agents, &c.'—Lane's Modern Egyptians, chap. xii.
55. Its effect was probably to enlarge more than to modify appreciably the current ideas. A large proportion of the importations from the East may have been indebted to the invention, as much as to the credulity, of the adventurers; and we might be disposed to believe with Hume, that 'men returning from so great a distance used the liberty (a too general one) of imposing every fiction upon their believing audience.'
56. The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge have not exhibited the same impatience for a worthy edition of the works of Bacon with which Clement IV. expected a copy of the Opus Majus. His principal writings remained in MS. and were not published to the world until the middle of last century.
57. Leo X. (whose tastes were rather profane than pious) instructed or amused himself by causing to be discussed the question of the nature of the soul—himself adopting the opinion 'redit in nihilum quod fuit ante nihil,' and the decision of Aristotle and of Epicurus.
58. Narratives of Sorcery and Magic, by Thomas Wright.
59. Dante seems to refer to this recent spoliation in the following verses:—
'Lo! the new Pilate, of whose cruelty
Such violence cannot fill the measure up,
With no decree to sanction, pushes on
Into the Temple his yet eager sails.'
Purgat. xx. Cary's Transl.
60. Michelet's History of France, book v. 4. M. Michelet suggests an ingenious explanation of some of their supposed secret practices. 'The principal charge, the denial of the Saviour, rested on an equivocation. The Templars might confess to the denial without being in reality apostates. Many averred that it was a symbolical denial, in imitation of St. Peter's—one of those pious comedies in which the antique Church enveloped the most serious acts of religion, but whose traditional meaning was beginning to be lost in the fourteenth century.' The idol-head, believed to represent Mohammed or the devil, he supposes to have been 'a representation of the Paraclete, whose festival, that of Pentecost, was the highest solemnity of the Temple.' Some have identified them, like those of the Albigenses or Waldenses, with the ceremonies of the Gnostics.
61. View of the Middle Ages, chap. i. The judicial impartiality (eulogised by Macaulay) and patient investigation of truth (the first merits of a historian) of the author of the Constitutional History of England, might almost entitle him to rank with the first of historians, Gibbon.
62. The alliance of the Church—of the Dominican Order in particular—with the secular power against its once foremost champions, is paralleled and explained by the causes that led to the dissolution of the Order of Jesus by Clement XIV. in the eighteenth century—fear and jealousy.
63. They are given in full in Narratives of Sorcery and Magic from the most Authentic Sources, by Thomas Wright. In the Annals of Ireland, affixed to Camden's Britannia, ed. 1695, sub anno 1325 a.d., the case of Dame Alice Ketyll is briefly chronicled. Being cited and examined by the Bishop of Ossory, it was discovered, among other things, 'That a certain spirit called Robin Artysson lay with her; and that she offered him nine red cocks on a stone bridge where the highway branches out into four several parts. Item: That she swept the streets of Kilkenny with besoms between Compline and Courefeu, and in sweeping the filth towards the house of William Utlaw, her son, by way of conjuring, wished that all the wealth of Kilkenny might flow thither. The accomplices of this Alice in these devilish practices were Pernil of Meth, and Basilia the daughter of this Pernil. Alice, being found guilty, was fined by the bishop, and forced to abjure her sorcery and witchcraft. But being again convicted of the same practice, she made her escape with Basilia, and was never found. But Pernil was burnt at Kilkenny, and before her death declared that William above-said deserved punishment as well as she—that for a year and a day he wore the devil's girdle about his bare body,' &c.
Chapter III.
Witchcraft and Heresy purposely confounded by the Church—Mediæval Science closely connected with Magic and Sorcery—Ignorance of Physiology the Cause of many of the Popular Prejudices—Jeanne d'Arc—Duchess of Gloucester—Jane Shore—Persecution at Arras.
What can hardly fail to be discerned in these prosecutions is the confusion of heresy and sorcery industriously created by the orthodox Church to secure the punishment of her offending dissentients. There are few proceedings against the pretended criminals in which it is not discoverable; the one crime being, as a matter of course, the necessary consequence of the other. In the interest of the Church as much as in the credulity of the people must be sought the main cause of so violent an epidemic, of so fearful a phenomenon in its continuance and atrocities, a fact demonstrated by the whole course of the superstition in the old times of Catholicism. Materials