The True Story vs. Myth of Witchcraft. William Godwin

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The True Story vs. Myth of Witchcraft - William Godwin


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to abandon their old creed. Urged by poverty and the hopes of plunder, the pirates of the Baltic long continued to be the terror of the European coasts; but, without a political status, they were the common outlaws of Christendom. They were the relics of a savage life now giving way in Europe to the somewhat more civilised forms of society, continuing their indiscriminate depredations with impunity only because of the want of union and organisation among their neighbours. But they were in a transitional state: the coasts and countries they had formerly been content to ravage, they were beginning to find it their interest to colonise and cultivate. In the new interests and pursuits of civilisation and commerce, a natural disgust might have been experienced for the savage traditions of a religion whose gods and heroes were mostly personifications of war and rapine, under whose banners they had suffered the hardships, if they had enjoyed the plunder, of a piratic life. The national deities from being disregarded, must have come soon to be treated with undisguised contempt at least by the leaders: while the common people, serfs, or slaves were still immersed (as much as in Christian Europe) in a stupid superstition.

      When men's minds are thus universally unsettled and in want—a want both universal and necessary in states—of some new divine objects of worship more suited to advanced ideas and requirements, a system of religion more civilising and rational than the antiquated one, will be adopted without much difficulty, especially if it is not too exclusive. Yet the Scandinavians were unusually tenacious of the forms of their ancestral worship; for while the Icelanders are said to have received Christianity about the beginning of the eleventh century, the people of Norway were not wholly converted until somewhat later. The halls of Valhalla must have been relinquished with a sigh in exchange for the less intelligible joys of a tranquil and insensuous paradise. An ancient Norsk law enjoins that the king and bishop, with all possible care, make inquiry after those who exercise pagan practices, employ magic arts, adore the genii of particular places, of tombs or rivers, who transport themselves by a diabolical mode of travelling through the air from place to place. In the extremity of the northern peninsula (amongst the Laplanders), where the light of science, or indeed of civilisation, has scarcely yet penetrated, witchcraft remains as flourishing as in the days of Odin; and the Laplanders at present are possibly as credulous in this respect as the old Northmen or the present tribes of Africa and the South Pacific. Before the introduction of the new religion (it is a curious fact), the Germans and Scandinavians, as well as the Jews, were acquainted with the efficacy of the rite of infant baptism. A Norsk chronicle of the twelfth century, speaking of a Norwegian nobleman who lived in the reign of Harald Harfraga, relates that he poured water on the head of his new-born son, and called him Hakon, after the name of his father. Harald himself had been baptized in the same way; and it is noted of the infant pagan St. Olaf that his mother had him baptized as soon as he was born. The Livonians observed the same ceremony; and a letter sent expressly by Pope Gregory III. to St. Boniface, the great apostle of the Germans, directs him how to act in such cases. It is probable, Mallet conjectures, that all these people might intend by such a rite to preserve their children from the sorceries and evil charms which wicked spirits might employ against them at the instant of their birth. Several nations of Asia and America have attributed such a power to ablutions of this kind; nor were the Romans without the custom, though they did not wholly confine it to new-born infants. A curious magical use of an initiatory and sacramental rite, ignorantly anticipated, it seems, by the unilluminated faith of the pagan world.

      In reviewing the characteristics of sorcery which prevailed in the ancient world, it is obvious to compare the superstition as it existed in the nations of the East and West, of antiquity and of modern times. These natural or accidental differences are deducible apparently from the following causes:—(1) The essential distinction between the demonology of Orientalism—of Brahminism, Buddhism, Magianism, Judaism, Mohammedanism—and that of the West, of paganism and of Christianity, founded on their respective idealistic and realistic tendencies. (2) The divining or necromantic faculties have been generally regarded in the East as honourable properties; whereas in the West they have been degraded into the criminal follies of an infernal compact. The magical art is a noble cultivated science—a prerogative of the priestly caste: witchcraft, in its strict sense, was mostly abandoned to the lowest, and, as a rule, to the oldest and ugliest of the female sex. In the one case the proficient was the master, in the other the slave, of the demons. (3) The position of the female sex in the Western world has been always very opposite to their status in the East, where women are believed to be an inferior order of beings, and therefore incapable of an art reserved for the superior endowments of the male sex. The modern witchcraft may be traced to that perhaps oldest form of religious conception, Fetishism, which still prevails in its utmost horrors amongst the savage peoples in different parts of the world. The early practice of magic was not dishonourable in its origin, closely connected as it was with the study of natural science—with astronomy and chymistry.


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