The book of witches

THE

BOOK OF WITCHES

BY

OLIVER MADOX HUEFFER

_Author of "In Arcady and Out," &c._

With Frontispiece in Colours by W. Heath Robinson

THE JOHN McBRIDE CO

New York

1909

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Lest any reader should open this volume expecting to read an exhaustive treatise on witches and witchcraft, treated scientifically, historically, and so forth, let me disarm him beforehand by telling him that he will be disappointed. The witch occupies so large a place in the story of mankind that to include all the detail of her natural history within the limits of one volume would need the powers of a magician no less potent than was he who confined the Eastern Djinn in a bottle. I have attempted nothing so ambitious as a large-scale Ordnance Map of Witchland; rather I have endeavoured to produce a picture from which a general impression may be gained. I have chosen, that is to say, from the enormous mass of material only so much as seemed necessary for my immediate purpose, and on my lack of judgment be the blame for any undesirable hiatus. I have sought, again, to show whence the witch came and why, as well as what she was and is; to point out, further, how necessary she is and must be to the happiness of mankind, and how great the responsibility of those who, disbelieving in her themselves, seek to infect others with their scepticism. We have few picturesque excrescences left upon this age of smoothly-running machine-wheels, certainly we cannot spare one of the most time-honoured and romantic of any. And if anything I have written about her seem incompatible with sense or fact, I would plead in extenuation that neither is essential to the firm believer in witchcraft, and that to be able to enter thoroughly into the subject it is above all things necessary to cast aside such nineteenth-century shibboleths.

I would here express my gratitude to the many friends who have assisted me with material, and especially to Miss Muriel Harris, whose valuable help has done much to lighten my task.

London, _September, 1908_.

THE BOOK OF WITCHES

[CHAPTER I]

ON A POSSIBLE REVIVAL OF WITCHCRAFT

To the superficial glance it might seem that he who would urge a revival of witchcraft is confronted by a task more Herculean than that of making dry bones live—in that the bones he seeks to revivify have never existed. The educated class—which, be it remembered, includes those who have studied in the elementary schools of whatever nation—is united in declaring that such a person as a witch never did, never could, and never will exist. It is true that there are still those—a waning band—who, preserving implicit faith in the literal exactitude of revealed religion, maintain that witchcraft—along with Gardens of Eden, giants, and Jewish leaders capable of influencing the movements of sun and moon—flourished under the Old Dispensation, even though it has become incredible under the New. Yet, speaking generally, the witch is as extinct in civilised men's minds as is the dodo; so that they who accept as gospel the vaticinations of race-course tipsters or swallow patent medicines with implicit faith, yet moralise upon the illimitability of human superstition when they read that witch-doctors still command a following in West Africa, or that Sicilian peasants are not yet tired of opening their purses to sham sorcerers.

Were the reality of sorcery dependent upon a referendum of our universities—or, for that matter, of our elementary school mistresses—it were at once proclaimed a clamant imposture. Fortunately for the witch, and incidentally for a picturesque aspect of the human intellect, the Enlightened, even if we include among them those who accept their dogma as the New Gospel, are but a small—a ridiculously small—item of the human race. Compared with the whole population of the world, their numbers are so insignificant as to be for all practical purposes nonexistent. There are villages but a few miles beyond the boundary of the Metropolitan Police District, where the witch is as firmly enthroned in the imaginations of the mobility as in those of their ancestors three centuries ago. There are many British legislators who would refuse to start an electioneering campaign upon a Friday. I myself have known a man—and know him still—a Romney Marshlander, who, within the last decade, has suffered grievously—himself and through his children—at the hands of witches whose names and whereabout he can detail. And I have known a woman—she kept a lodging-house in the Kennington Road—who, if not herself a witch, was yet the daughter of one, and of acknowledged power. It is true that, if the daughter's tale—told to me in the small front parlour in intervals between the crashing passage of electric trams and motor-lorries—may be accepted, her mother's gifts were put to no worse use than the curing of her Devonshire neighbours' minor ailments.

There is no need to go fifty, nor five, miles from London to find material for a revival in Black Magic. Scarcely a week passes but some old crone is charged before a Metropolitan police magistrate with having defrauded silly servant-girls on the pretence of telling them their futures. You cannot pass down Bond Street during the season without encountering a row of sandwich-men—themselves preserving very few illusions—earning a meagre wage in the service of this, that, or the other Society crystal-gazer, palmist, or clairvoyant. Who has not seen some such advertisement as the following—quoted from a current journal—proffering information about the future, "calculated from astrological horoscopes," at the very moderate charge of half-a-crown. The advertiser—in deference to modern convention he is described as a "Professor" rather than a sorcerer—further protests his mastery of Phrenology, Graphology, Clairvoyance, and Psychometry. And this advertiser is but one of many, all seeking to gain some humble profit by following in the footsteps of Diana and Mother Demdyke of Pendle Forest.

Are there not a hundred and one select Societies, each with its band of earnest adherents—many with official organs, published at more or less regular intervals and commanding circulations of a sort—openly furthering "arts" such as would, two centuries ago, have entailed upon their members the charge of Witchcraft? Is not spiritualism exalted into an international cult? The very existence of such a coterie as the "Thirteen Club," with a membership sworn to exhibit, _hic et ubique_, their contempt of degrading superstitions, is the strongest testimony to their ubiquitous regard. Most curious fact of all, it is in America, the New World, home of all that is most modern and enlightened, that we find superstitions commanding most implicit faith. It is only necessary to glance through the advertisement pages of an American popular magazine to realise how far the New World has outstripped the Old in its blind adherence to this form of faith. Nowhere has the Hypnotic, the Mesmeric, the Psychic Quack such unchallenged empire.

In Lady Charlotte Bury's "Memoirs of a Lady in Waiting," we find an example of the belief in Witchcraft cherished in the most exalted circle in the nineteenth century. Writing of the unhappy Princess—later Queen—Caroline, wife of George IV., she says as follows:—"After dinner her Royal Highness made a wax figure as usual, and gave it an amiable addition of large horns; then took three pins out of her garment and stuck them through and through, and put the figure to roast and melt at the fire.... Lady —— says the Princess indulges in this amusement whenever there are no strangers at table, and she thinks her Royal Highness really has a superstitious belief that destroying the effigy of her husband will bring to pass the destruction of his Royal Person." We laugh at this instance of Royal credulity; yet is not the "mascot" a commonplace of our conversation? Madame de Montespan, it is recorded, had recourse—not without success—to the Black Mass as a means towards gaining the affections of Louis XIV. It is but a few years since the attention of the police was directed towards the practices of those—Society leaders for the most part—who had revived, in twentieth-century Paris, the cult of Devil worship. The most widely circulated London newspapers of the day gravely discuss in "special articles" the respective value of various mascots for motorists, or insert long descriptive reports of the vaticinations of this spiritualist or that wise-woman as to the probable perpetrators of mysterious murders. This is no exaggeration, as he may prove for himself who has patience to search the files of the London daily Press for 1907. And, be it remembered, the self-proclaimed mission of the contemporary Press is to mirror the public mind as the most obvious way of instructing it.

Under these circumstances it is easy to credit the possibility of a revival of the belief in witchcraft even in the most civilised countries of the modern world. What is more, it is far from certain that such a revival would be altogether deplorable. Granted that oceans of innocent blood were shed in the name of witchcraft—the same might be said of Christianity, of patriotism, of liberty, of half a hundred other altogether unexceptionable ideals. And, as with them, the total extinction of the witchcraft superstition might, not impossibly, have results no less disastrous than, for instance, the world-wide adoption of European fashions in dress. This quite apart from any question of whether or no witches have ever existed or do still exist. Even if we grant that superstition is necessarily superstitious in the more degraded sense of the word, we need not therefore deny it some share in alleviating the human lot.

A very large—perhaps the greater—share of human happiness is based upon "make believe."

The world would be dull, miserable, intolerable did we believe only what our unfeeling stepmother Science would have us believe. It is already perceptibly less endurable—for those unfortunate enough to be civilised—since we definitely abandoned judgment by the senses in favour of algebraical calculations. While it might be too much to say that the number of suicides has increased in proportion to the decline of witchcraft, it is at least certain that superstition of whatever kind has, in the past, played a notable part in making humanity contented with its lot. The scientist has robbed us of Romance—he has taken from many of us our hope of Heaven, without giving us anything to put in its place; he reduces the beauty of Nature to a formula, so that we may no longer regard a primrose as a primrose and nothing more; he even denies us the privilege of regarding our virtues and vices as anything more than the inevitable results of environment or heredity. Every day he steals away more and more of our humanity, strips us of yet another of the few poor garments of phantasy shielding us from the Unbearable. He is indeed the Devil of modern days, forcing knowledge upon us whether we will or no. And we, instead of execrating him after the goodly fashion of our forefathers, offer our happiness upon his altars as though he were indeed the God he has explained away. And why? Purely on the faith of his own asseverations.

Why should we accept the scientist more than his grandmother, the witch? We have no better reason for accepting him than for rejecting what he tells us are no more than idle dreams. Let him discover what he will, it does but vouch the more decidedly for the illimitability of his, and our, ignorance. It is true he can perform apparent miracles; so could the witch. He pooh-poohs the arts that were so terrible to former generations; our posterity will laugh at his boasted knowledge as at a boastful child's. Already there are world-wide signs that whatever his success in the material world, mankind is ready to revolt against his tyranny over the Unseen. The innumerable new religious sects, the thousand and one ethical fads, the renaissance of so many ancient faiths—the Spiritualist and the Theosophist, the Christian Scientist and the Cooneyite, the Tolstoyan and the Salvationist—laugh at them individually who may—are all alike outward and visible signs of the revolt of man against being relegated to the insignificance of a scientific incident. And among such troubled waters witchcraft may well come into its own again. For it, as much as any, has brought happiness out of misery. Consider the unsuccessful man. Under the _régime_ of enlightenment he can find no one to blame for his sorrows, nor anywhere to look for their solacement. Everything works according to immutable laws; he is sick, poor, miserable, because the Law of the Inevitable will have it so; he has no God to whom he can pray for some capricious alleviation; he cannot buy good fortune from the Devil even at the price of his soul—there is no God, nor Devil, nor good fortune nor ill; nothing but the imperturbably grinding cog-wheels upon whose orbit he is inevitably bound. Were he not a happier man if he might find an old-time witch whose spells, being removed, would leave him hope, even though fulfilment never come? Undoubtedly. We have been told that had there been no God, it would have been necessary to invent one. Yes, and along with Him a Devil and good and evil spirits, and good luck and bad, and superstitions as many as we can cram into our aching pates—anything, everything that may save us from the horrible conception of a machine-like Certainty, from which there is no escape, after which there is no future. Surely it were better that a few thousand old women be murdered in the name of superstition, a few millions of human beings butchered in the name of religion, than that all mankind be doomed to such a fate.

Be it remembered, too, that even the witch has her grievance against the learned numbskulls who have undone her. For the witch-life was not without its alleviations. Consider. Without her witchcraft she was no more than a poor old, starved, shrunken woman, inconsiderable and unconsidered, ugly, despised, unhappy. With it she became a Power. She was feared—as all mankind wishes to be—hated perhaps, but still feared; courted, also, by those who sought her help. She was again Somebody, a recognisable entity, a human being distinguished from the common ruck. Surely that more than outweighed the chances of a fiery death. Nor was the method of her death without its compensations. Painful indeed it was, though scarcely more so than slow starvation. But if she knew herself innocent, she knew as well that her short agony was but the prelude to the eternal reward of martyrdom. If she believed herself, with that poor weary brain of hers, sold to the Devil, what a world of consolation in the thought that he, the Prince of the Powers of Darkness, scarcely inferior to the Almighty Himself, and to Him alone, should have singled her out as the one woman whose help he needed in all the countryside. And this being so, was there not always the hope that, as he had promised, he might appear even at the eleventh hour and protect his own. If he failed, the witch had but little time to realise it and all the Hereafter, full of infinite possibilities, before her. Few witches, I think, but would have preferred their grim pre-eminence, with its sporting interest, to being made the butt of doctors little wiser than themselves in the sight of infinity, held up to mockery as silly old women, cozening or self-cozened.

If witches do not in fact exist for us, it is because we have killed them with laughter—as many a good and evil cause has been killed. Had we laughed at them from the beginning of things it is even possible that they had never existed. But, as between them and Science, the whole weight of evidence is in their favour. There is the universal verdict of history. For untold centuries, as long as mankind has lorded it over the earth, their active existence was never held in doubt, down to within the last few generations. The best and wisest men of their ages have seen them, spoken with them, tested their powers and suffered under them, tried, sentenced, executed them. Every nation, every century bears equal testimony to their prowess. Even to-day, save for a tiny band of over-educated scoffers sprung for the most part from a race notorious for its wrong-headed prejudice, the universal world accepts them without any shadow of doubt. In August of the present year a police-court case was heard at Witham, an Essex town not fifty miles from London, in which the defendant stood accused of assaulting another man because his wife had bewitched him. And it was given in evidence that the complainant's wife was generally regarded as a witch by the inhabitants of the Tiptree district. Nor, as I have already pointed out, does Tiptree stand alone. Dare we, then, accept the opinion of so few against the experience, the faith, of so many? If so, must we not throw all history overboard as well? We are told that an Attila, a Mahomet, an Alexander, or, to come nearer to our own days, a Napoleon existed and did marvellous deeds impossible to other men. We read of miracles performed by a Moses, a Saint Peter, a Buddha. Do we refuse to believe that such persons ever existed because their recorded deeds are more or less incompatible with the theories of modern science? The witch carries history and the supernatural tightly clasped in her skinny arms. Let us beware lest in turning her from our door she carry them along with her, to leave us in their place the origin of species, radium, the gramophone, and some imperfect flying-machines.

Those same flying-machines provide yet another argument in the witch's favour. Why deny the possibility that she possessed powers many of which we possess ourselves. The witch flew through the air upon a broomstick; Mr. Henry Farman and Mr. Wilbur Wright, to mention two out of many, are doing the same daily as these lines are written. The vast majority of us have never seen either gentleman; we take their achievements on trust from the tales told by newspaper correspondents—a race of men inevitably inclined towards exaggeration. Yet none of us deny that Mr. Farman exists and can fly through the air upon a structure only more stable than a broomstick in degree. Why deny to the witch that faith you extend to the aeronaut? Or, again, a witch cured diseases, or caused them, by reciting a charm, compounding a noxious brew in a kettle, making passes in the air with her hands. A modern physician writes out a prescription, mixes a few drugs in a bottle—and cures diseases. He could as easily cause them by letting loose invisible microbes out of a phial. Is the one feat more credible than the other? The witch sent murrains upon cattle—and removed them. He were a poor M.R.C.V.S. who could not do as much. In a story quoted elsewhere in this volume, a sorcerer of Roman days bewitched his horses and so won chariot-races. We refuse him the tribute of our belief, but we none the less warn the modern "doper" off our racecourses. The witch could cause rain, or stay it. Scarcely a month passes but we read well attested accounts of how this or that desert has been made to blossom like the rose by irrigation or other means. But a few months since we were told that an Italian scientist had discovered a means whereby London could be relieved of fogs through some subtle employment of electricity. It is true that since then we have had our full complement of foggy weather; but does anyone regard the feat as incredible?

In all the long list of witch-attainments there is not one that would gain more than a passing newspaper paragraph in the silly season were it performed in the London of to-day. Why, then, this obstinate disbelief in the perfectly credible? Largely, perhaps, because the witch was understood to perform her wonders by the aid of the Devil rather than of the Dynamo. But must she be therefore branded as an impostor? Certainly not by those who believe in a personal Spirit of Evil. I do not know the proportion of professing Christians who to-day accept the Devil as part of their faith, but it must be considerable; and the same is the case with many non-Christian beliefs. They who can swallow a Devil have surely no excuse for refusing a witch. Nor is the difficulty greater for those who, while rejecting the Devil, accept the existence of some sort of Evil Principle—recognise, in fact, that there is such a thing as evil at all. For them the picturesque incidentals of witch-life, the signing of diabolical contracts, aerial journeyings to the Sabbath, and so forth, are but allegorical expression of the fact that the witch did evil and was not ashamed, are but roundabout ways of expressing a great truth, just as are the first three chapters of Genesis or the story that Hannibal cut his way through the Alps by the use of vinegar.

The conscientious agnostic, again, has no greater reason for disbelieving in witches and all their works than for refusing his belief to such historical characters as Cleopatra and Joan of Arc—eminent witches both, if contemporary records may be trusted. I pass over the great army of heterodox sects, Unitarians, Christian Scientists, and the like, many of whom unite with the orthodox in accepting the principle of Evil in some form or other, and with it, as a natural corollary, the existence of earthly agencies for its better propagation; while, for the rest, witchcraft stands in no worse position than do the other portions of revealed religion which they accept or do not accept, as their inclinations lead them.

It is sometimes held out as an argument for implicit belief in the Biblical legend of the Deluge that its universality among all races of mankind from China to Peru can only be accounted for by accepting Noah and his Ark. How much more forcibly does the same argument uphold the _bona fides_ of the witch. Not only has she been accepted by every age and race, but she has everywhere and always been dowered with the same gifts. We find the witch of ancient Babylon an adept in the making of those same waxen or clay images in which, as we have seen, a nineteenth-century Queen of England placed such fond reliance. Witch-knots, spells, philtres, divination—the witch has been as conservative as she has been enduring. Every other profession changes and has changed its aspects and its methods from century to century. Only the witch has remained faithful to her original ideals, confident in the perfection of her art. And for all reward of such unexampled steadfastness we, creatures of the moment, deny that this one unchanging human type, this Pyramid of human endeavour, has ever existed at all! Buttressed, then, upon the Scriptures, to say nothing of the holy writings of Buddhist, Brahmin, Mahometan, and every other religion of the first class, countenanced, increasingly though unwittingly, by the researches of science into the vastness of our ignorance; acceptable to orthodox and heterodox alike, vouched for by history and personal testimony of the most convincing, our rejection of the witch is based but upon the dogmaticisms of one inconsiderable class, the impenitent atheist, blinded by the imperfection of his senses into denying everything beyond their feeble comprehension. To deny our recognition to a long line of women who, however mistakenly, have yet, in the teeth of prodigious difficulties, persevered in their self-allotted task with an altruistic enthusiasm perhaps unrivalled in the history of the world—to relegate those who have left such enduring marks upon the face of history to an obscure corner of the nursery, and that upon such feeble and suspect testimony, were to brand ourselves as materialists indeed. Rather let us believe—and thus prove our belief in human nature—that long after the last atheist has departed into the nothingness he claims as his birthright, the witch, once more raised to her seat of honour, will continue to regulate the lives and destinies of her devotees as unquestioned and as unquestionable as she was in the days of Saul and of Oliver Cromwell. It is to women that we must look chiefly for the impetus towards this renaissance. Always the more devout, the more faithful half of humanity, there is yet another peculiar claim upon her sympathies towards the witch. In days such as ours, when the whole problem of the rights and wrongs of women is among the most urgent and immediate with which we have to deal, it were as anachronistic as unnatural that Woman should allow the high purpose, the splendid endurance, the noble steadfastness in inquiry, of a whole great section of her sex—including some of the most deservedly famous women that ever lived—should allow all this not only to be forgotten, but to be absolutely discredited and denied. Persecuted by man-made laws as she has ever been, and as eternally in revolt against them, there could be no more appropriate or deserving figure to be chosen as Patroness of the great fight for freedom than the much-libelled, much-martyrised, long-enduring, eternally misunderstood Witch.

No. The time has come when we can appreciate the artistic temperament of Nero; when Bluebeard is revealed to us in the newer and more kindly aspect of an eccentric Marshal of France; when many of us are ready to believe that Cæsar Borgia acted from a mistaken sense of duty; and that Messalina did but display the qualities natural to a brilliant Society leader. Surely among them all not one is more deserving of "whitewashing" than that signal instance of the _femme incomprise_, the Witch. We may not approve all her actions, we may not accept her as an example to be generally followed; let us at least so far escape the charge of narrow-mindedness and lack of imagination as to pay her the tribute, if not of a tear, at least of respectful credulity.

[CHAPTER II]

A SABBATH-GENERAL

It is wild weather overhead. All day the wind has been growing more and more boisterous, blowing up great mountains of grey cloud out of the East, chasing them helter-skelter across the sky, tearing them into long ribbons and thrashing them all together into one whirling tangle, through which the harassed moon can scarcely find her way. The late traveller has many an airy buffet to withstand ere he can top the last ascent and see the hamlet outlined in a sudden glint of watery moonlight at his feet. Those who lie abed are roused by the moaning in the eaves, to mutter fearfully, "The witches are abroad to-night!"

The witch lives by herself in a dingle, a hundred yards beyond the last cottage of the hamlet. The dingle is a wilderness of brush-wood, through which a twisted pathway leads to the witch's door. Matted branches overhang her roof-tree, and even when the moon, breaking for a moment from its net of cloud, sends down a brighter ray than ordinary, it does but emphasise the secretiveness of the ancient moss-grown thatch and the ill-omened plants, henbane, purple nightshade, or white bryony, that cluster round the walls. He were a bold villager who dared venture anywhere within the Witch's dingle on such a night as this. The very wind wails among the clashing branches in a subdued key, very different from its boisterous carelessness on the open downs beyond.

There is but one room—and that of the barest—in the witch's cottage. The village children, who whisper of hoarded wealth as old Mother Hackett passes them in the gloaming, little know how scant is the fare and small the grace they must look for who have sold themselves to such a master. She sleeps upon the earthen floor, with garnered pine-needles for mattress. She has a broken stool to sit on, and a great iron pot hangs above the slumbering embers on the clay hearth.

It wants still an hour to midnight, this eve of May Day, when there comes a stirring among these same embers. They are thrust aside, and up from beneath them Something heaves its way into the room. It is the size of a fox, black and hairy, shapeless and with many feet. From somewhere in its middle two green eyes shed a baleful light that horribly illuminates the room. It moves across the floor, after the manner of a great caterpillar, and as it nears her the witch casts a skinny arm abroad and mutters in her sleep. It reaches the bed, lifts itself upon it, and mumbles something in her ear. She awakes, rises upon her elbow, and replies peevishly. She has no fear of the Thing—it is a familiar visitant. She is angry, and scolds it in a shrill old voice for disturbing her too soon. Has she not the Devil's marks upon her—breast and thigh—round, blue marks that are impervious to all pain from without, but itch and throb when it is time for her to go about her devilish business? The Thing takes her scoldings lightly, twitting her with having overslept herself at the last Sabbath—which she denies. They fall a-jesting; she calls it Tom—Vinegar Tom; and they laugh together over old exploits and present purposes.

A moonbeam glints through a hole in the thatch. Where the witch has lain now sits a black cat, larger than any of natural generation—as large, almost, as a donkey. It talks still with the witch's voice, and lingers awhile, the two pairs of green eyes watching each other through the darkness. At last, with a careless greeting, it bounds across the floor, leaps up the wall to the chimney opening, and is gone. The shapeless Thing remains upon the bed. Its sides quiver, it chuckles beneath its breath in a way half-human, yet altogether inhuman and obscene.

The black cat is hastening towards the hamlet under the shadow of the brush-wood. When she comes within sight of the end house, she leaves the path and strikes out into the gorse-clad waste beyond the pasture, keeping to it until she is opposite the cottage of Dickon the waggoner. A child has been born, three days back, to Dickon and Meg his wife. It is not yet baptised, for the priest lives four miles away, beyond the downs, and Dickon has been too pressed with work to go for him. To-morrow will be time enough, for it is the healthiest child, not to say the most beautiful, the gossips have ever set eyes upon. Perhaps, if Meg had not forgotten in her new-found happiness how, just after her wedding, when old Mother Hackett passed her door, she made the sign of the cross and cried out upon the old dame for a foul witch, she might not be sleeping so easily now with her first-born on her bosom.

The black cat creeps on under the shadow of a hedge. Old Trusty, the shepherd's dog, left to guard the flock during the night, sees where she goes, and, taking her for a lurking fox, charges fiercely towards the hedge, too eager to give tongue. But at the first flash of the green eyes as she turns her head, he knows with what he has to deal, and flies whimpering for shelter in the gorse, his tail between his legs. For a dog can tell a witch more readily than can his master—and fears her as greatly.

The black cat being come to Dickon's cottage, waits for a moment to be sure that all is quiet, then leaps upon the low roof, gains the summit, and so descends by way of the chimney to the room where lie the sleeping family. Again it waits, listening to their regular breathing, its tail whipping to and fro in suppressed excitement. It rises upon its hinder legs and makes certain passes in the air, North and South and East and West. It approaches the bed, and softly, softly draws the child from its sleeping mother's arms. It makes again for the chimney, and in two bounds is in the open air, carrying the child nestled against its warm black fur. Scarcely has it gained the shadow of the hedge when the mother, her sleep disturbed, it may be, by some vague presentiment of danger, opens her eyes. But the warm weight is still upon her breast, and she drops off to sleep again in security. Did you peep into the witch's cottage now, you would find that the black shapeless Thing is gone. For the Devil's imps can take what shape they will in their master's service.

The black cat, with its sleeping charge, hastens back towards the dingle. Reaching the cottage, it places the child upon the bed, turns twice, and in that moment the witch, clad only in her shift, stands where the cat has been. She is awaiting something, and grows anxious and uneasy, hobbling hither and thither about the room, mumbling below her breath, and once, when the child wakes and wails, taking it in her arms and hushing it, almost as might a woman. It is close upon midnight, yet the sign has not come. For the Evil One, being above all things inconstant, never lets his servants know time or place until the last moment, and that in some unlooked-for way.

At last, when she is quite tormented with anxiety lest she have unwittingly angered her master, comes a stealthy clattering of wings upon the thatch, and down through the hole that serves for chimney rustles a black raven with fiery eyes. It flutters straight for the witch's shoulder and there settles, whispering hoarsely in her ear, while the light from its eyes throws her lean features, with their twitching muscles, into pale relief against the darkness. Nodding eager assent to the message, Mother Hackett hobbles to her bed, and, from a safe hiding-place among the rustling pine-needles, draws out a phial. Next she makes for the corner beside the hearth, and picks up the broomstick leaning against the wall. The raven quits her shoulder for the pillow, thence to watch her with its head at an approving angle. She opens the phial and smears the contents on the broomstick, head and handle. It is an ointment, and it shines with the phosphorescent light that is born of corruption. Well it may, for it is compounded of black millet and the dried powdered liver of an unbaptised child, just such a one as now lies upon the witch's bed, with the grim raven gazing down on it. The witch—deluded wretch—believes the ointment to have magic powers; that, smeared upon her broomstick, it gives the senseless wood volition and the power to carry her sky-high; or, if she swallow it, that it will render her insensible to pain, so that the worst efforts of the torturer and the executioner shall force her to confess nothing. The Devil, her master, knows—none better—that no such potency is in any ointment, but that his own hellish magic supports his minions in the air and comes, and he so will, to their aid in time of trial. But this he hides from them, so that in their folly they may be led to murder babes—the sacrifice he loves above all other.

The witch takes a broken eggshell and smears it also with the ointment. She goes to the bed and picks up the child, the broomstick hopping after her across the floor. Being now ready to set out, she steps astride the broom-handle, that holds itself aslant for her easier mounting. She waves her hand to the attendant raven, and with a rush that sends a spirtle of bright sparks up from the embers, she is away—up the chimney, through the overhanging branches, through the ragged clouds, and far on her journey under the stars. Yet, if any should enter the witch's hut then or thereafter till the dawn, they would find her sleeping peacefully upon the bed. The raven, having carried their master's message, has this further duty: to take upon himself the witch's shape until her return, lest any, finding her from home, should scent out her errand.

The wind is from the East. The witch must steer across it, for the Sabbath-General, as the corvine messenger has told her, is to be held on a lonely peak of the Cevennes, in mid-France. Her task is not of the easiest, for the gusts come fierce and sudden, and the broomstick dips and leaps before them like a cockle-boat on a rough sea. The witch's scanty locks and scantier clothing stream out almost at a right angle, and once the baby in her arms raises its voice in a tiny wail that would soften the heart of any but a servant of the Devil. Up here the moonlight wells down unchecked, turning the clouds below into the shifting semblance of snow mountains and lakes of silver. They open out now and again at the wind's bidding to allow glimpses of the dark, silent earth far down beneath.

So for a time—a little time, for Devil's messengers fly fast—the witch drives onward in mid-air. At last the broomstick slackens speed, seems to hesitate, circles twice or thrice, and then dives earthwards. The hag alights upon the sea-shore, upon a pebbly beach whereon the waves fling themselves in white fury at the lashings of the wind, now grown so high that Mother Hackett can scarcely stand against it. Whether because he foresees some chance of evil-doing, or from mere inconstancy, for he works without method and against reason, the Devil has ordered that she shall not cross the Channel on her broomstick. She seizes the interval between two waves to launch the eggshell she has brought with her, steps into it, raises the broomstick aloft as sail or ensign, and puts out to sea in the teeth of the gale. The great waves roar far above her head, in foaming whirlpools that might sink a war-fleet, but the eggshell rides triumphantly among them, dancing upon their crests and shipping never a drop of water on its passage. Nor can the best efforts of the wind stay its speed. Only once does it deviate from its course, when a straining ship, its spars and sails all splintered and riven, drives through the mist to leeward. As she nears it, the witch rises to her feet, throws out one skinny hand towards it, and shrieks an incantation down the wind. A flicker of lightning shows itself in the East, and a cloud drives over the face of the moon. When its shadow is past, there is no more sign of the ship or its toiling crew upon the lonely face of the waters. Mother Hackett mews gleefully as she speeds Francewards.

Coming to where the low grey coast rises from the waves, she once more sets herself astride the broomstick. As she speeds on, sky-high, towards the meeting-place, she falls in with company bent on the same errand. From all sides they come, converging to the goal, old, lean hags like herself, women in the prime of life, young girls not yet out of their teens. Some bear with them unweaned babes, others children of a larger growth, yet others youths or grown men, as offerings to Satan. These they carry pillion-wise before them, for in the Devil's kingdom all is awry, imperfect, contrariwise to the ways of Christian folk. Some of them are mounted on goats, some upon great toads, or flying snakes, or reptiles of uncertain shape, or simple broomsticks, as fancy has directed their imperious despot. One—a man—rides side-seated upon a great fiery dragon, that in the distance glows like a newly-risen star. He is a mighty sorcerer, one who commands Satan instead of serving him, coming to the Sabbath for some reason of his own, and mounted on a steed of his own providing.

The meeting-place of the Sabbath-General, as Satan, in mockery of Christian ritual, chooses to call this foregathering of his servants, is a bare peak in the loneliest part of the Cevennes. It stands a little removed from the centre of a great mountain amphitheatre, and just below the summit is a mountain tarn, crystal-pure and casting back the starlight as peacefully as though there were no such things as witch or warlock beneath God's Heaven. Yet it is not the first time the same meeting-place has been chosen, for not a blade of grass, not the humblest creeping plant, grows upon the sterile rocks. Every growing thing withered away, root and branch, when last the forces of Hell gathered here. So must the place remain, desert and bare, mute witness of its desecration, until the Judgment Day.

The witches come skirling down from the sky like a flight of unclean birds, circling above the crags, hovering to choose a settling-place where no sharp-pointed rock shall gash their naked feet, chattering shrilly the while. Those already arrived are seated in a wide circle on a flat rock-ledge jutting from the mountain side. They are mostly witches of the neighbourhood, who have come afoot and have set out betimes lest they be detained upon the way. As more and more join the circle you may find proof that they lie who declare the Devil's servants mostly women. It is true that woman, by reason of the frailty of her nature, seeks more often to pry into forbidden things, to her own destruction, and thus there are many more witches than warlocks or magicians. Yet of those gathered for this Sabbath-General, for every witch there is one mortal man, to say nothing of demons; for while some, as Mother Hackett, have come alone, others, being the younger and fairer of the witches, have brought with them two or even three youths or young men, ready to take service with the Evil One and cast away their hope of salvation, as did our Father Adam, at the bidding of these Delilahs. Thus it is that, in the unholy dances which are to follow, every witch will have a man for her partner, save the most favoured who dance with the superior demons, for thus the Devil will have it.

Mother Hackett, when she dismounts from her broomstick, takes her place beside one Luckie, a gossip of former Sabbaths, ill-favoured as herself, who comes from the kingdom of Fife, where she is much feared for the sudden tempests she raises when the fishing-fleets are sailing homeward with full catches. Next to her is a younger witch, fair and well-born, Sidonia by name, of a noble house in Mecklenburg. She is a tall, pale girl, with hair the colour of ripe wheat, and grey-blue eyes. She is held in high esteem by Satan, both for her beauty and for the number of well-born youths she has delivered into his hands. Next to her is a witch of Spain, beautiful also, though brown and with black, beady eyes. Between these two there is little love lost, seeing that they are women no less than witches, and either would do the other a mischief could she compass it.

Though all those bidden have joined the circle, there is yet no sign of the Devil's coming. The witches cease their clacking and scan the sky impatiently, muttering curses against their master. Can it be that he means to play them false, having bidden them merely for a jest and to make a mock of them? It would not be for the first time—for his mind is so crafty and so uncertain, his purpose so errant, that not the most favoured of his ministers has any inkling of it.

Suddenly there is an eager rustling around the expectant circle. A figure has appeared in the centre. But their relief fades into angry disappointment. It is not the Devil himself. It is a small, mean, inconsiderable devil, so inferior in the infernal hierarchy that he has not even horns upon his head. The circle grows smaller as the witches press towards him, buzzing with angry questions. They have no fear, no respect for him; he is a servant like themselves. If he have been deputed to represent his master, he must expect to pay dearly for the honour. He scans the lowering faces anxiously and mutters apologies. No doubt their Master is upon the way and will soon arrive. He himself is but a poor devil, a little devil; they may be sure that he would not think of putting a slight on witches of such eminence. But fair words will not placate them. Already hands are raised to strike him, already some of them are preparing to scratch him with the nails of their little fingers, always worn long and sharp by witches, such being one of the signs you may know them by. Already he has been tweaked and buffeted as earnest of what he is to look for. But now another, more dreadful shape looms up in the very centre of the circle, and the angry witches fall back before it in grovelling terror. At first, seen in the dim light of the waning moon, it is shapeless, inchoate. Slowly it takes form before their eyes into the trunk of a great tree, with tangled limbs stretching out from it. It has about it the suggestion of a face, leering and horrible, with set features that half emerge and half conceal themselves in the gnarling of the bark—such a face as a man may see peering after him out of the darkness when he passes, tip-toe, through the depths of an ancient forest at midnight. Before it the witches make obeisance, turning their backs upon it and bowing to the ground, in mockery of Christian reverence. When they turn again the tree has changed into a goat, its eyes aflame with obscene passion, and, even as they look, the goat fades into a lion with bloody jaws. The lion fades in turn into a man, a comely man in all but his expression, and his eyes, which, whatever his shape, are always those of a goat, bestial and foul. He is dressed all in black, but his face and hands are dull red—for his vitals are consuming in the flames of Hell—and when he raises his hand, his wrist and forearm glow within his cuff as though they were made of molten iron. On his left hand the fingers are all grown together into one misshapen claw, for however fair the human seeming into which the Devil moulds himself, you may always know him for what he is, in that some part of him, an ear, a foot, or a hand, is horribly misshapen.

Now at last, all being prepared, attendant imps pass round the circle, checking the numbers of those present and who bears the Devil's mark and who must still receive it, and who has carried out her appointed task and who has failed. Returning, they whisper the tale into their master's ear, who gibbers with delight and leaps into the air and cracks his heels together, for there is nothing noble or of dignity about him, being in all things mean and petty, a thing of low vices rather than of heroic crimes. Thereafter he sits upon a throne, seemingly of gold, that rises from the earth to receive him, while his attendants hold aloft candles made of the fat of drowned mariners, burning with a pale blue light. One by one he calls the witches before him, calling them by nicknames, as "Old Toothless," or "Wag-in-the-wind," or "Cozling," but never by the names given them in Holy Baptism. And they, making obscene obeisance before his throne, speak to him thuswise also, calling him "Monsieur," or "Grizzleguts," or other fouler names. Next, standing with her back towards the throne, each in turn makes recital of her foul deeds since their last meeting: how many of God's children she has ruined and undone, what evil spells she has cast upon crops and bestial, what tempests she has raised, how she has fared in furthering her master's kingdom. Those who have done well Satan fondles and caresses, promising them great reward, but the others he hands over to his imps for present punishment. Thus there is one, plump and well-favoured, being a witch of Sweden, who, having been given for her task that she shall bring a neighbour's son—a rich young farmer—to her master's allegiance, has failed therein, and that although granted extension of time for the emprise. Her the Devil, losing all further patience, of which he has but little at the best of times, marks out for punishment, and his demons, casting her straightway to the ground, beat her with whips of living snakes and scorpions, and bite and otherwise torment her with tooth and claw, so that the blood runs from her in streams. And while she yells and screams for mercy, flapping here and there upon the ground like a fish upon a line, the whole assembly shakes with hideous laughter at the grotesqueness of her agony.

Mother Hackett, her turn being come, rises eagerly, knowing that she has done evil full measure since the last Sabbath. The waggoner's child she hands to Gossip Luckie, the time for its presentation being not yet come, and hobbles her fastest to her place before the throne, puckering her old eyes beneath the glare from the surrounding corpse-candles. It is for this that she has borne the hardships, the hatred and persecution of her Christian neighbours, the starvation of hunger and cold during the long winter months since the last Sabbath. Her tale is of murrains cast upon a rich farmer's cattle, of a crop of barley that has withered away beneath her spell, of a tempest raised by her to unroof the priest's tithe-barn three parishes away, of the digging up of bodies from the churchyard to grace the Sabbath banquet, of three boys who, having stoned her, have ever since gone cross-eyed, vomiting needles incessantly, and of the ship sunk in mid-Channel upon her late crossing. Also there is the unbaptised child she has brought with her, to be devoted to the Devil's service for all time. When her tale is told she waits yet a long moment, expectant of praise and reward. Praise indeed her master lavishes upon her, though he chides her also for having brought him but a waggoner's brat in place of a child well-born, for in them he delights most—and of future reward great promise. But he speaks as one whose thoughts are elsewhere, and his eyes—which are always the eyes of a lustful goat—wander to where the beauteous Sidonia waits smiling for her turn. So Mother Hackett must hobble back to her place in the circle, her heart full of bitterness and disappointment, feeling that she has been tricked out of her deserts, knowing that she must labour in ill-doing yet another year before she can hope for the rich rewards promised her so many weary years ago, yet still to look for. And she curses under her breath as Sidonia passes in all the pride of her unholy beauty, going to where the Evil One leans forward in his chair, his eyes glowing like hot coals, and motions to her to come yet nearer as she tells with trills of silvery laughter, that yet is altogether horrible, of three youths she has bewitched, and how one has hanged himself, cursing the name of God, and how another has murdered his own brother, and now lies in durance awaiting death, and the third she has brought with her to the Sabbath, to enter himself among the Devil's servants, abandoning his hope of Heaven for her sake. Of her tale Satan loses no word, and when she is done he clips her in his arms and fondles her and keeps her beside him throughout what follows.

When all the witches have rendered account, it is the turn of the victims they have brought with them, the unbaptised children first and they of tender years. They are led or carried before the Devil's throne, and stand there, curious and open-eyed, understanding nothing of what is going forward, clustering together in a group, the elder girls holding the infants in their arms and hushing them awkwardly when they cry. The Evil One speaks to them, suiting his words to their condition, his voice purring like a cat. He draws bright pictures of the reward they may expect for absolute obedience—if they renounce their kindred and, those of them who are baptised, their godfathers and godmothers, and with them God and the Child Jesus. Some of the elder among them demur at this, whereupon he reasons with them, his voice still soft and cruel as a cat's, telling them that what they have learned of Holy Writ is but an old wife's tale, and that there is no God but he who speaks, being master of both worlds. Then his eyes blaze brighter and his voice grows fierce and menacing, and he leads them to the side of the mountain and shows them, far below, a dreadful chasm with fierce flames leaping about it and grim fire-monsters lifting up their open jaws from its centre. It is but a lying vision, conjured up by his hellish arts; but how should such poor babes know false from true? The witches gather round them and cozen and threaten, telling them that if they refuse they will be surely cast into the flames, but if they obey they shall have all that a child best loves, full measure. So at last they do as they are bidden, and swear away their young souls and their hope of salvation for ever and ever, and make obeisance to Satan with obscene ceremonies of which they understand nothing, doing all for fear of the witches who instruct them. When all, even to the unweaned babes, are bound for ever to Satan's allegiance, they are led away to the shore of the mountain tarn, whither come great toads swimming up from its clear depths and clambering to the shore. These the children are set to mind, being given little white switches for that end—Satan promising that next year, if they have deserved well, they shall be granted the full privileges of servants of Hell. Childlike, when they have overcome their first horror of the hideous toads, they make play-things of them, seeking to make them gallop with the white switches, and, especially the boys, forgetting all that has passed in the gleefulness of the moment.

Meanwhile the more mature recruits to Satan's army are called in turn before him, to be examined in their love of evil, to make obeisance and to receive his mark—invented by him in impious mockery of our Saviour's wounds and the stigmata borne on their bodies by many of His saints. All this to the accompaniment of rites so foul and bestial that they may not be written down. And next, the present business being disposed of, the whole crew falls a-dancing, men, women, and imps together. Back to back the couples dance, for the most part stark-naked, and some with black cats hanging from their necks or waists, spitting and scratching, and some with hideous toads and serpents pressed to their bosoms, and all capering and gesturing with such lewd and obscene antics that the mind of man can scarcely follow them. The imps who are of the number hold aloft their corpse-candles, to light their paces, and in the middle of all sits the Devil blowing upon a bag-pipe, sometimes in one form and sometimes in another, as the whim takes him. Higher and higher they leap, and faster and faster grow their steps, whirling hither and thither under the blue light of the candles, spurred on by the droning of the infernal pipes, until they fall a-gasping. When the last couple has ceased its pirouettings, the Devil—being now again in the form of a man—lays aside his instrument and leads them to where a banquet is prepared for them. The tables are heaped high with all the delicacies of the earth, the rarest fruits, the choicest meats, and the most costly wines, heaped upon golden dishes that might ransom all the kings of Christendom. For attendants there are demons of inferior rank, who have tricked themselves out into the strangest shapes they can devise. Thus, one has a monstrous nose, shaped like a flute, upon which he plays with his hands. Another has sparks shooting from horns and tail, the which, as they fall upon the table, turn into great beetles. Another, having neither arms nor legs nor head, rolls like a wheel upon his belly, in the centre of which blazes one great eye. Another is nought but a huge mouth, and hops underneath the tables biting the ankles of the witches. While yet another takes the shape of a beaker, whence pours sparkling wine into the goblets of the guests. If they seek to drink, it turns to burning pitch. Thus it is indeed with all the viands, for though they seem all that the heart or belly of man can desire and of all things plenty—saving only salt, for that Satan cannot abide, as recalling the Last Supper upon earth of the Lord Christ—yet being tested they are proved a mockery. For when the guests stretch out their hands for what they most covet it vanishes from their eyes, and in its place is corruption and rottenness, the reeking flesh of murderers and heretics or of cattle that have died of a murrain, the entrails of reptiles or the scrapings of middens, with, for drink, water in which drowned suicides have rotted, and such-like. Some of those but newly entered draw back in horror from such fare, whereat the more hardened mock at them, falling upon it themselves with horrid zest.

Grown merry after such feasting, they fall a-rioting, jesting, and playing after such wise as may not be told, until the time is come for their next enterprise, what time the Devil toys with the most well-favoured wantons among them. When at last the signal is given, the whole hellish crew rise into the air again, their master leading them, shrilling and squawking like a flight of wild geese across the darkling sky. The Devil leads them to an old cathedral town, a place of ancient towers and crumbling walls and tall, high-shouldered houses that lean out over narrow lanes as if a-gossiping. Before the great cathedral is a wide market-place, very busy in the day, but silent now as a graveyard, with only now and then the creaking of some wind-harried sign to tell of human energies. Four roads meet in the centre of the market-place, and there the Evil One alights, his ministers behind him, and there his throne is set up facing the portal of the cathedral—for it is thus that Satan loves best to carry on his mockery of Christian ritual. First is gone through a blasphemous parody of Holy Baptism, toads taking the place of children. Each is tricked out in a velvet suit of black or scarlet, with a bell tied to each paw and one hung round its neck. An unfrocked priest, who has been a miracle of shamelessness and is now sold to Satan, performs the blasphemy, and the oldest and foulest witches stand as sponsors, vying with each other in the lewdness of their responses. While this is going forward a brace of night-rovers, intent upon a deed of sacrilege, come creeping through the shadows round the cathedral walls, seeking to force an entrance into the holy place. Their eyes and ears are at their keenest, lest they be apprehended, but though they look right through the crowd of demons and witches thronging the open market-place, they yet see nothing of them—for, evil-doers though they be, they have not yet lost their chance of salvation, and none but those irrevocably sworn of Satan's following can see what befalls upon a Witches' Sabbath.

The christening of the toads being gone through, follows the yet more blasphemous celebration of the Black Mass. The foresworn priest again officiates, the imps, witches, and demons acting as deacons, acolytes, or worshippers, all impiously mimicking the servants of God. In place of the Host is exalted a black wafer, cut in the form of a triangle, and the whole service of the Mass is gone through backwards from end to beginning. The onlookers also make their obeisances backwards, with lewd gesture not forgotten, towards where the father of all evil sits grinning and mowing upon his throne over against the cathedral door. Yet are they not permitted to finish their blasphemies, for even as the false priest makes to administer the wafer to an imp, who receives it, for the greater mockery, standing upon his head, the first pale shadow of the dawn creeps up the eastern sky. Seeing it, a lusty cock, roosting in some farmyard beyond the city walls, welcomes it with shrill crowings. The Devil's brood break off and listen fearfully, for Chanticleer is a servant of God, and held in awe by all demons, witches, and sorcerers as the herald of God's daylight. A rival bird takes up the challenge, and it is echoed far and wide over the countryside. The Evil One waits no longer, but sinks at once, with his throne, downwards through the cobble-stones to his abiding-place, followed by his attendant demons. The witches and sorcerers of the company tarry not, but cast themselves afloat upon the air, wasting no time or breath upon their farewells lest daylight surprise them ere they can reach their homes and all their wickedness be made clear.

Mother Hackett, among the rest, throws herself astride her broom-handle and sails off down the wind. On this her return she wastes no time at the sea-coast, but shoots onward high in the air, through the increasing pallor of the morning. Over sea and down she flies, and, dropping like a stone into the dingle, enters her cottage by the chimney, unseen even by the earliest ploughman. At her coming the expectant demon in her shape rises from the bed and takes again the semblance of a raven. A few words of greeting and inquiry, and it makes its exit by the road it came, flying off heavily across the fields, regardless of the daylight, for who, seeing a raven fly towards the sea, would think of sorcery or witchcraft? Who, again, entering her humble cot and seeing there a poor old woman sleeping on a bed of poverty would recognise in her a foul witch, forward in all wickedness and a most potent agent of her master Satan. For so cunningly do these devilish hags, aided by their master's arts, conceal their exits and their entrances, their spells and incantations, that there be many ignorant men who, openly flouting Holy Writ, declare, even in these enlightened days, that there is no such thing as witchcraft or sorcery, and that they who seek out witches and slay them are no better than cruel murderers of poor helpless old women. Such are the craft and malice of Satan and the folly of mankind.

[CHAPTER III]

THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH

The witch, in the broader sense of the word, may be said to have existed ever since mankind first evolved an imagination, and may be expected to expire only with the death of the last woman. Given the supernatural, and sorcery must follow in some shape or other as its corollary. Whence also the witch is as ubiquitous as she is enduring. Under some form or other she exists, and has existed, in every quarter of the globe; she is as familiar to the English peasant as to the West African, in South America as in Japan. Her attributes vary, and have varied, with the racial temperament and the religious conceptions of her worshippers and persecutors, as widely as do, and have done, their gods. But it was left for mediæval Christianity to give her the definite shape in which she is now most universally recognised, and it is to the Christian ideal of celibacy that she owes, if indirectly, the more obscene, and latterly the more grotesque, of her attributes, lifting her at first to an evil equality with the horned Devil of the Middle Ages, degrading her ultimately to the "horrid old witch" of nursery legend.

It is a far cry from this same "horrid old witch" to the pagan divinity, but there is no break in the long pedigree. It may be traced still further through the mists of antiquity—to the earliest days of human motherhood. Only, as between goddess and witch, we are confronted with a Darwinian problem. Is the witch indeed daughter of the goddess, or are both descended from a common ancestress? To my mind, the latter is the more correct line of descent, with the pagan priestess as connecting link.

"To one wizard, ten thousand witches," quotes Michelet from a forgotten writer of the days of Louis Treize; and throughout all the history of sorcery women have formed the majority of its practitioners. Our forefathers attributed this to the weakness of womankind, always curious to probe the mysteries of the Unknown, always prone to fall into the snare of evil. A more charitable—and correcter—explanation would be found in the greater quickness of her perceptions. If Eve first gave the apple to Adam, she gave with it the future of civilised humanity. The first mother gave birth to twin-daughters, the goddess and the witch, and from one or other of them came the impetus which has carried mankind to its present stage of progress, and will carry it yet nearer towards Heaven.

The primitive father was an animal, with potentialities—among animals without them. His intellect was concentrated in his activities, in providing for the material needs of himself and his family. His position towards his wife was very much what satirists would have us believe is that of the American business man to-day. His laborious days were spent in tracking his prey through the forest, his leisure in sleeping, eating, and digesting. The mother, on the other hand, was bound to the home by reason of her motherhood. Less active, she was more contemplative, noting in the order of events the best means of preservation for the small pink thing that could not live without her care, her mind always alert to the exigencies of the moment. Thus she acquired knowledge of things beneficent or harmful, of the food most apt for its nourishment, of the herbs growing around the clearing best fitted to cure its infantile complaints. She experimented, cautiously but continuously, and with each recurrent need she added a little to her small stock of wisdom. Small in itself, but vast in proportion to that of men or childless women. Little by little she "walked her hospital"; little by little she learnt the relative value of her simple potions, to whom they should be given, and how, and when. To the primitive mind this was cause for wonder, as indeed it is, almost as wonderful as the first smile of the first baby. Pain can no longer run riot unchecked. If it have not yet found its mistress, at least a protest has been entered against it—reason not only for joy and wonder, but for respect and gratitude—even perhaps for worship.

Whatever his divinity, Man worships himself. In every form of religion the worshipped tends to become confused with the worshipper. Man cannot escape his own environment. The thunderstorm frightens him; there must be a storm-demon. What is that demon but another man like himself, though uglier and wickeder and very much more powerful? Such a demon must be flattered and propitiated as an angry man of might must be. But a Primitive with his living to make cannot spare the time necessary to propitiate a worldful of demons. He deputes the duty to a weaker neighbour, one who sits at home, engaging for his own part to find food for both. Whence the first priestess—from whom later descends the first priest. For who so apt at propitiation as she who can cajole that most domesticated of demons, the ever-present Pain. So, later, when the propitiation of Evil gives place to the invocation of good, who so worthy of honour, which is to say of worship, as she who, in the dawning of the race, first relieved poor humanity of its bodily ills? Goddess, priestess, White Witch and Black—all are but variations on that oldest and most beautiful of themes, Motherhood.

To return to the first house-wife. Throughout her life she adds always a little to her store of natural knowledge, and when she dies she bequeaths it to her daughters. They in turn add to it until the time comes when to the cure of bodies is added that of minds. For Man's nascent mind begins to trouble him almost as much as does his body. Already the eternal problem of why and wherefore raises its head; already he begins his age-long struggle with the inevitable. That "all that is, is good" does not commend itself to Pre-historic Man. He knows so much better. He must often go hungry, his cattle die, drought destroys his meagre crops, his neighbour robs him of his war-spoil. He appeals to the woman, who thinks so much, for a way out. Cannot she, who with her potions drove the pain out of his body, help him in this also? Can she not cure his cattle? Can she not reason with the delinquent rain-demon, or, by making a little rain herself, move him to emulation? Best of all, can she not, out of the plenitude of her wisdom, suggest some means of outwitting that treacherous neighbour? He will reward her handsomely, especially for this last.

It is at this point that the priestess and the witch come to the crossing of the ways, henceforward to follow divergent paths. The one sister, from whom is to be born the devout priestess, is ready to do all that she can. She invokes the cattle-demon, the rain-demon; she, no more than the man, has any doubt of their invocability, but if they refuse to answer it must be because they are angry. She cannot make it rain if the demon gainsay her prayer. She is honest, acknowledging her inferiority to the supernatural. Only she claims to understand more than most the best way to approach it.

Consider the other woman—the ancestress of the witch, in the opprobrious sense. She knows very well that she cannot make rain. Probably she has made the experiment already. But—such faith in her power is tempting—so are the gifts thus easy to be earned. The man believes in her—almost she begins to believe in herself. Perhaps she tries to persuade herself that she may succeed this time. She is weatherwise, and she reads in natural signs the probability that rain may shortly be expected. If it should not—well, she must take precautions against incurring blame. She must impose conditions, and any failure must be set down to their non-fulfilment. There is a very pleasant sense of power in gulling the overgrown baby who is so ready to be gulled. She accepts the trust, commands the rain-demon to let down his showers. Her reading of the signs is justified—the expected rain comes. Her reputation is assured—until belief in the supernatural shall be no more. Her daughter and her grand-daughters inherit her claims. They also command the storm, using the same form of words. Possibly they are themselves deceived—believing that there is some virtue in the form of their mother's words, now become an incantation. From the first claim to power over the elements, to the finished sorceress, and thence to the "horrid old witch" of fairy legend, is but a matter of regular evolution.

Just as the priestess was the mother of the priest, so the wizard is born of the witch. Man, though he start later—very much as the boy is slower in development than is his sister—is not content always to remain second in the race for knowledge. For a time—perhaps for long centuries—he has been content to leave things intellectual to his womenfolk. But when he starts he is not content to stay upon the threshold of knowledge, as woman, who has approached it only from necessity, has done. One day a male iconoclast rebels, pitting his awakening intellect against the woman's inherited reputation. Victorious, he yet trembles at his victory, while all Palæolithia awaits the angry fire from Heaven. But nothing happens. No lightning strikes him; no swift disease destroys him, or his children, or his cattle. A new era has begun—the wizard places himself beside the witch, slowly but surely to elbow her into the second place.

As the slow centuries pass society has been gradually forming and shaping itself. In his search for a civilisation Man has left the secluded cave wherein he wrung the empire of the world from the jaws of the cave-bear and the scythe-toothed tiger. He has built himself homes and collected them into villages; from the scattered family he has evolved the tribe, and from the tribe the nation. Having learned his own power when buttressed upon that of his neighbours, he is slowly broadening and extending it until it is little inferior to that of the divinities before whom it pleases him to tremble. He—or Nature for him—chooses out rulers, who become his gods in all but divinity; and his respect for them, if less absolute, is more immediate than for his gods. Government, making all things possible, becomes an accomplished fact.

Government, once instituted, loses no time in measuring itself against Heaven. In one form or other the conflict between Church and State—disguise it as men may—has lasted from the beginning, and must last as long as both survive. That ideal which reached the point nearest of attainment in the theoretic constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, of two rulers, co-existent and co-equal, governing one the spiritual and one the material empire of the world, was in the very nature of things doomed to remain an ideal. Either God or Man must be first. With their struggles for the mastery the fortunes of the witch, as of all exponents of the supernatural, were intimately bound up.

At first sheltering itself beneath the wings of the spiritual power, the material flourished—at its protector's expense. The realm of Nature seemed at first so inconsiderable compared to that of the supernatural, that he were a bold iconoclast who dared compare them. Only, the King was always in the midst of his people; the god, century by century, retreated further into the unscaleable skies. Slowly the civil power emancipated itself from the tutelage of the spiritual—as it is still doing in our own time—slowly and with many falterings and many backward glances, asserting itself in prosperity, appealing for help in adversity, retreating often, but never so far as it advanced.

With the first introduction of civil government the witch and the priestess finally part company, to range themselves henceforward upon opposite sides. It is true that as religion follows religion the priestess of the former era often becomes the witch of its successor, thereby only accentuating the distinction. For, in the unceasing efforts to arrange a _modus vivendi_ between the human and the supernatural worlds, the priestess accommodates herself to circumstances—the witch defies them. The priestess, acknowledging her own humanity, claims only to interpret the wishes of the god, to intercede with him on behalf of her fellow-men. The witch, staunch Tory of the old breed, claims to be divine, in so far as she exercises divine power unamenable to human governance, and thus singles herself out as one apart, independent of civil and ecclesiastical powers alike—and as such an object of fear and of suspicion. Even so she is still respectable, suspect indeed, but not condemned. The public attitude towards her is variable; she is alternately encouraged and suppressed, venerated and persecuted—and through all she flourishes, now seductive as Circe, now hag-like as was Hecate.

Ages pass, empires flourish and decay, and slowly a great change is coming over society. Unrest is in the air; old systems and old creeds are dying of inertia, and men look eagerly for something to take their place. The spirit of individual liberty steals round the world, whispering in all men's ears. The slave, toiling at the oar, hears them, though he dare not listen, and hugs them in his heart—and a heresy, threatening the very foundations of society, spreads far and wide. Is it just possible that men are not born slave or master by divine decree?

The First Socialist is born in the East. He and His disciples preach a creed so blasphemous, so incompatible with the rights of property, that it becomes a sacred duty, if vested interests are to be preserved, to crucify Him as an encouragement to others. He proclaims, in a word, that all men are equal. It is well for Christianity that He adds the qualification, "In the sight of God," or how could either slave or master believe in anything so contrary to the senses' evidence? Vested interests notwithstanding, the new creed spreads, as any creed so comforting to the great majority, the downtrodden and oppressed, is bound to spread. But, though it preached the acceptable doctrines of liberty, equality, and fraternity, Christianity introduced with them sin into the world. All men might be equal in the sight of God, but they were all equally sinners. Humility and self-abasement were to take the place of the old pagan joyousness. To the Christian—to the Early Christian, at any rate—the world ceased to be man's inheritance, as Heaven was that of a congerie of shifting divinities-an inheritance the enjoyment of which was as blameless as it was natural. It was become a place of discipline and education, a hard school designed to prepare him for a glorious future, and one in which only the elect were to share. Everything that did not actively help towards that end was evil; all who did not work towards that end were evil-doers. The pagan and his easy-going paganism were alike accursed and tolerance a sin.

The contest between two such schools of thought—however long drawn out—could have but one conclusion. Capricious persecutions, on civil rather than religious grounds, gave the iconoclasts the one remaining impetus needed to snatch the sceptre of the world. Successful, they persecuted in their turn, systematically and with the thoroughness born of conscious virtue. In spite—or because of—such attempts to stamp out pagan and paganism together, the old order still survived in secret long after the known world was officially Christianised. Naturally enough, the Christian could only suppose that such criminal persistence was the direct work of that Evil One whom he first had exploited. Pagan rites were nothing more nor less to him than Devil worship, those who practised them the direct representatives of Satan. Some of the pagan gods had been pressed into the service of Christianity as saints, their festivals as saints' days. Those that remained were classed together, with their ministers and attributes, under the generic heading of Magic, shunned and feared at first, but as the Church more and more stepped into the shoes of the civil power, warred upon without mercy.

Faced by such forcible arguments for conversion, the Pagan witch was not long in adopting the Christian Devil as a more potent protector than the old, easy-going gods who had formerly peopled the supernatural world. Pagan or nominal Christian, she was equally anathema to the Church, if only that she was consistently Protestant, claiming to hold direct communication with the Unseen quite regardless of the proper ecclesiastical channels. And by this very independence her hold upon the imagination of her neighbours continued to increase as Christianity progressed towards universal empire. The very definite pronouncements of the Church against witches, witchcraft, and all kinds of magic served to foster the general belief in their powers. What was so forcibly condemned must of necessity exist. There was, moreover, a certain satisfaction in this same tangibility. It simplified, smoothed out the path of virtue. With witchcraft about, your duty was plain and your task easy. You had but to mention a holy name, to make a sacred sign, to sprinkle a little holy water, and victory was assured. If all assaults of the devil were so straightforward and so vincible, the path to Heaven were broad and smooth indeed.

It was, perhaps, the popular sense of victorious ability against her spells which protected the witch, _per se_, against over-severe persecution until towards the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Absolute confidence in the power to suppress an evil diminishes the urgency for its suppression. Here and there a witch was executed, local persecutions of inconsiderable extent occurred, but for general holocausts we must wait until the more enlightened times of a James I. or a Louis XIV. The witch of the Dark Ages might count upon a life of comparative security, sweetened by the offerings of those who, pining for present joys, acted upon the advice of Omar Khayyam rather than following that of their ghostly advisers. Meanwhile, however, a mass of tradition and precedent was growing up, to be put to deadly purpose in the animadversions of learned sixteenth and seventeenth century writers upon the vile and damnable sin of witchcraft.

By the eleventh century the witch was firmly identified, in the popular as well as the ecclesiastical mind, as a woman who had entered upon a compact with Satan for the overthrowing of Christ's kingdom. The popular conception of her personality had also undergone a change. By the twelfth century there was no more question of her as a fair enchantress—she was grown older and uglier, poorer and meaner, showing none of the advantages her compact with the Evil One might have been expected to bring in its train.

The increasing tendency towards dabbling in things forbidden brought about greater severity in its repression, but it was not until the days of Innocent VIII., when witchcraft was officially identified with heresy, that the period of cruel persecution may be said really to have begun. Sorcery in itself was bad enough; associated with heresy no crime was so pernicious and no punishment too condign, especially when inflicted by the Holy Inquisition. The inquisitorial power was frequently misused; the fact that the possessions of the accused became forfeit to her judges when tried in an ecclesiastical court may seem to the sceptic to provide ample reason why the ecclesiastical authorities undertook so many more prosecutions than did the civil. But of the absolute sincerity with which all classes set themselves to stamp out so dreadful a crime, the portentous and voluminous writings of the period leave no doubt whatever. Catholic and, after the Reformation, Protestant, rich and poor, patriot and philanthropist alike, vied with each other in the enthusiasm with which they scented out their prey, and the pious satisfaction with which they tortured helpless old women to the last extremity in the name of the All-Merciful.

From the fourteenth century onwards the type of recognised witch varies only in detail. Though not invariably she is commonly the conventional hag. If young, she has been led astray by a senior, or taken to the Sabbath in childhood under constraint—which was not, however, regarded as a valid defence in time of trial. Many such were executed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in many cases mere children. But it was the toothless hag whose mumblings held the public ear and became acknowledged as the truest type. Even when men ceased to fear her she lost nothing of her grotesque hideousness to the childish mind, and as such has become finally enshrined in the nursery lore of Europe. As such, also, I have endeavoured to reconstruct her in her habit as she lived in the eyes of her mediæval contemporaries elsewhere in this volume.

[CHAPTER IV]

THE HALF-WAY WORLDS.

Having decided, very early in his earthly career, to acknowledge a supernatural world, Man promptly set to work to people it after his own image. One not providing scope for his quickening imagination, he added another to it, supplementing the heavenly by the infernal, good by evil—if, indeed, as is more probable, he did not rather deduce good out of evil. But just as there are many stages between high noon and midnight, so to the world he saw and those he imagined he added yet others which should act as their connecting links. Between the divine and the human he placed the semi-divine, between the human and the infernal the half-human. He mated God with Man and both with Devil, and dowered them with a numerous family, God-Man, Man-Devil, God-Devil, and so on, until the possibilities of his earlier imagination were exhausted. Each has his own world—and the stars cannot rival them in number; each world has its cities and its nations, differing in all things save one—that all alike feel, act, think, after the manner of mankind. So is it, again, with the other universe of half-way worlds, filling the space between the human and the bestial—centaur, satyr, were-wolf, or mermaid, all alike reflect the human imagination that has evolved them—to nondescript bodies they unite the reflected mind of man.

Conforming to the general rule, the witch is but one dweller in a half-way world that is thickly populated and in itself forms one of an intricate star-group. Externally at least, its orbit nearly coincides with that of our human world, in that its inhabitants are for the most part of human origins acquiring those attributes which raise them above—or degrade them below—the commonalty subsequently to their birth. This not invariably—nothing is invariable to the imagination. Thus the fairies, although not human beings, may yet be witches—demons also, unless many grave and reverend authorities lie. Under certain conditions they may even become human beings, as mermaids may—many a man has married a fairy wife—and it is an open question whether they have altogether lost their hope of Heaven, as witches invariably have. As witches, they must be regarded as belonging to the White, or beneficent, type; for although, as Mercutio has told us, they may sometimes play unkind pranks upon the idle or undeserving, they have always a kindly eye for the virtuous, and frequently devote themselves altogether to good works, as in the case of Lob-lie-by-the-Fire, and others equally difficult to catalogue. For the more we investigate the various orbits of the half-way worlds, the more do we find them inextricably interwoven. The Western Fairy or Oriental Djinn may partake of half-a-hundred different natures—may pervade half the imaginative universe—and as does the Fairy, so does the Witch. Hecate, a goddess, was yet no less notorious a witch than was Mother Shipton, a human being of no elevated rank. The were-wolf, though usually of human parentage, might yet have been born a wolf and obtained the power of taking human shape from some subsequent external cause. The Beast in the fairy story, though at heart a youthful Prince of considerable attractions, once transmogrified might have remained a Beast for good and all but for his fortunate encounter with Beauty's father. Who shall say exactly in which world to place, how to class beyond possibility of confusion, Circe—witch, goddess, and woman, and the men she turned to swine—or the fairies and mermaids who have, usually for love, divested themselves of their extra-human attributes and become more or less permanently women—or those human children who, stolen by the fairies, have become fairies for good and all—or how distinguish between all of these and the ladies with romantic names and uncertain aspirates who deal out destinies in modern Bond Street.

Even if we agree to confine the witch to the narrowest limits, to regard her, that is to say, as primarily a human being and only incidentally possessed of superhuman powers and attributes, there still remain many difficulties in the way of exact classification. Her powers are varied, and by no means always common to every individual. Or, again, she has the power to turn herself corporeally into a wolf or a cat—which brings her into line with the were-wolf, just as the cat or wolf may under certain circumstances transform themselves, permanently or otherwise, into a human witch. She may acquire the mind of a wolf without its body; on the other hand, many a beautiful princess has been transformed into a white doe by witchcraft. So with her male colleagues—sorcerer, magician, wizard, warlock, male-witch, diviner, and the rest of the great family. We may reach firm ground by agreeing to recognise only such as are of human origin, though by so doing we rule out many of the most eminent—the great Merlin himself among them. But even so, it is impossible to dogmatise as to where the one begins, the other ends. There have been many male-witches—more particularly in Scotland—as distinguished from wizards. Wizard and warlock again, if it be safe to regard them as distinct species, though differing from magician and sorcerer, are yet very difficult of disentanglement. The position is complicated by the fact that, just as a man may be clerk, singer, cricketer, forger, philanthropist, and stamp-collector at one and the same time, so might one professor of the Black Art take half a dozen shapes at the same time or spread over his career.

There is indeed but one pinnacle of solid rock jutting out from the great quagmire of shifting uncertainty—witch, wizard, were-wolf, or whatsoever their sub-division—one and all unite in one great certainty: that of inevitable damnation. Whatever their form, however divergent their powers, to that one conclusion they must come at last. And thus, and only thus, we may know them—posthumously.

It is true that certain arbitrary lines may be drawn to localise the witch proper, even though the rules be chiefly made up of exceptions. Thus she is, for the most part, feminine. The Scots male-witch, and those elsewhere occurrent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, might as correctly be termed wizards or warlocks, for any absolute proof to the contrary. The witch, again, has seldom risen to such heights in the profession as have her male competitors. The magician belongs, as we have seen, to a later stage of human development than does the witch, but, once evolved, he soon left her far behind; it is true that he was able to avail himself of the store of knowledge by her so slowly and painfully acquired. With its aid he soon raised himself to the highest rank in the profession—approaching it from the scientific standpoint, and leaving her to muddle along empirically and by rule of thumb. Nor was he content until he had made himself master of the Devil—using Satan and all his imps for his own private ends—while the less enterprising witch never rose to be more than the Devil's servant, or at best his humble partner in ill-doing.

The Magician, whatsoever his own private failings, has certainly deserved well of posterity. Just as the quack and the Bond Street sybil are representatives of the witch in the direct line, so, from the alchemist and the sorcerer are descended the great scientists of our own day—an impious brood indeed, who deny that their own father was aught but an impostor and a charlatan. The proprietor of, let us say, "Dr. Parabole's Pellets," is own brother—illegitimate though he be—to the discoverer of the Röntgen ray. The researches of the old-time sorcerer into the Forbidden, whatever their immediate profit, at least pointed out the direction for more profitable researches. Merlin, Cornelius Agrippa, or Albertus Magnus, had they been born in our day, would certainly have achieved the Fellowship of the Royal Society—and with good reason. It is to the search after the philosopher's stone and the elixir vitæ that we owe the discovery of radium. It was only by calling in the aid of the Devil that mankind acquired the prescience of a God.

The witch proper, on the other hand, did not trouble herself with research work. Having attained that dominion over her fellows dear to the heart of woman, she was content to rest upon her laurels. Certain incantations or charms, learned by rote, the understanding of the effect and cure of certain poisons—these were sufficient stock-in-trade to convince her neighbours, and perhaps herself. Doubtless Dr. Parabole, however aware in the beginning of the worthlessness of his own pills, comes after years of strenuous advertising to believe in them. He may stop short of taking them himself—at least he will prescribe them to his dearest friend in absolute good faith. So with the witch, his grandmother. Many, no doubt, of the millions offered up as sacrifice to the All-Merciful, were guiltless even in intention; many more allowed themselves to be convinced of their own sinfulness by the suspicions of their neighbours or the strenuous arguments of their judge-persecutors; many were hysterical, epileptic, or insane. But the larger proportion, it is scarcely too much to say, only lacked the power while cherishing the intention—witches they were in everything but witchcraft.

We thus may briefly state the difference between the witch and the magician as that the one professed powers in which she might herself believe or not believe, inherited or received by her, and by her passed on to her successors without any attempt to augment them. The magician, on the other hand, was actually a student of the mysteries he professed, and thus, if we leave aside his professional hocus-pocus devilry, cannot be considered as altogether an impostor. With the alchemist and the astrologer, more often than not combining the three characters in his one person, he stands at the head of the profession of which the witch—male or female—brings up the rear. Another distinction is drawn by sixteenth-century authorities between witches and conjurers on the one side, and sorcerers and enchanters on the other—in that while the two first-mentioned have personal relations with the Devil, their colleagues deal only in medicines and charms, without, of necessity, calling up apparitions at all. It is to be noted in this connection that the sorcerer often leads Devil and devilkin by the nose, in more senses than one—devils having extremely delicate noses, and being thus easily soothed and enticed by fumigations, a peculiarity of which every competent sorcerer avails himself. Thus, Saint Dunstan, and those other saints of whom it is recorded that they literally led the Devil by the nose, using red-hot pincers for the purpose, were but following the path pointed out for them by professors of the Art Magical.

Between the witch and the conjurer a wide gulf is fixed. The conjurer coerces the Devil, against his infernal will, by prayers and the invocation of God's Holy Name; the witch concludes with him a business agreement, bartering her body, soul, and obedience for certain more or less illusory promises. The conjurer is almost invariably beneficent, the witch usually malignant, though the White Witch exercises her powers only for good, if sometimes with a certain mischievousness, while the Grey Witch does good or evil as the fancy takes her, with a certain bias towards evil. The wizard, again, though often confused with the male-witch, is in reality a practitioner of great distinction, possessing supernatural powers of his own attaining, and, like the magician, constraining the Devil rather than serving him. He also is capable of useful public service, so much so indeed that Melton, in his "Astrologastra," published in 1620, includes what may pass as a Post Office Directory of the wizards of London. He enumerates six of importance, some by name, as Dr. Forman or "Young Master Olive in Turnbull Street," others by vaguer designations, as "the cunning man of the Bankside" or "the chirurgeon with the bag-pipe cheek." He includes one woman in the list, probably a White Witch.

The Diviners, or peerers into the future, form yet another sub-section of dabblers in the supernatural—and one which numbers very many practitioners even in our own day. Naturally enough, seeing that the desire to influence the future is the obvious corollary to that of knowing it, the part of diviner was more often than not doubled with that of witch or sorcerer. Divination is an art of the most complicated, boasting almost as many branches as medicine itself, each with its select band of practitioners. Different nations, again, favoured different methods of divining—thus the Hebrews placed most confidence in Urim and Thummim; the Greeks were famous for axinomancy, the machinery for which consisted of an axe poised upon a slate or otherwise handled. This method was as apt for present as for future needs, being especially potent in the discovery of criminals. Crime detection by divination has been—and remains—greatly favoured in the East. The Hindus, in particular, place greater reliance upon it than upon the more usual methods of our Occidental police, and many stories are told of the successes achieved by their practitioners. Nor is this surprising in cases where the diviner shows such shrewd knowledge of human nature as in that, oft-quoted, whereby all those under suspicion of a theft are ranged in a row and presented with mouthfuls of grain, with the assurance that the guilty man alone will be unable to swallow it—a phenomenon which nearly always does occur if the thief be among those present—and not infrequently when he is not! This and similar stories, though scarcely falling under the heading of divination proper, are so far pertinent to the subject that they suggest the explanation of many of its more remarkable successes. Tell a nervous man that he is destined to commit suicide upon a certain day, and, granted that he has any faith in your prophetic powers, the odds are that he will prove the correctness of your prophecy. We may compare with this the powerful influence of "tapu" upon the South Sea Island mind. Many natives have died—as has been vouched for by hundreds of credit-worthy witnesses—for no more tangible reason than fear at having incurred the curse of desecrating something placed under its protection. It may be added that the Islanders, observing that white men do not suffer the same fate, account for it by declaring that the White Man's Gods, being of a different persuasion from their own, protect their own votaries.

Divination proper takes almost innumerable forms. Without entering too closely upon a wide subject, a few examples may be profitably quoted. Among the best known are Belomancy, or divination by the flight of arrows, a form much favoured by the Arabs; Bibliomancy (of which the "Sortes Virgilianæ" is the most familiar example); Oneiromancy (or divination by dreams, honoured by Archbishop Laud and Lord Bacon among others); Rhabdomancy (by rods or wands. The "dowser," or water-finder, whose exploits have aroused so much attention of recent years, is obviously akin to the Rhabdomancist). Crystallomancy, or crystal-gazing, was first popularised in this country by the notorious Dr. Dee, and still finds many votaries in Bond Street and elsewhere. Hydromancy, or divination by water, is another variety much favoured by the Bond Street sybil, a pool of ink sometimes taking the place of the water. Cheiromancy, or Palmistry, most popular of any, may possess some claim to respect in its least ambitious form as a means towards character reading. Divination by playing-cards, another popular method, is, needless to say, of later, mediæval origin. The Roman augurs, who, as every schoolboy knows, deduced the future from the flight of birds, provide yet another example of this universal pastime, perhaps the least harmful sub-section of the Black Arts.

Among the most brilliant luminaries of the half-way worlds are those twin-stars inhabited by the Alchemist and the Astrologer. The pseudo-science of star-reading may be supposed to date from the first nightfall—and may thus claim a pedigree even older, if only by a few months or years, than that of Magic proper. Alchemy, despite its Moorish name, has a scarcely less extended history. It owes its birth—traditionally, at any rate—to the same Egyptian Man-God who first introduced witchcraft and magic in their regularised forms to an expectant world. Its principles having been by him engraved in Punic characters upon an emerald, were discovered in his tomb by no less a person than Alexander the Great. It should perhaps be added that doubts have been cast upon this resurrection. However that may be, it was much practised by the later Greeks in Constantinople from the fifth century A.D. until the Moslem conquest of the city. From them the Arabs adopted it, gave it the name by which it has ever since been known, and became the most successful of its practitioners.

To attempt any close study of the great alchemists were foreign to my present purpose, and would entail more space than is at my disposal. At the same time, so close was their connection, in the eyes of the vulgar, so intimate their actual relationship with witchcraft, that it is impossible altogether to ignore them. What is more, they lend to the witch a reflected respectability such as she can by no means afford to forgo. They held, in fact, in their own day, much the same position as do the great inventors and scientists of to-day. Mr. Edison and Mr. Marconi, had they been born ten centuries since, would certainly have taken exalted rank as alchemists or magicians. As it is, in ten centuries a whole world of magical romance will have been very likely woven about their names, even if they have not been actually exalted to divinity or inextricably confused with Lucifer and Prometheus. While some of their predecessors may have actually claimed power over the supernatural—either in self-deception or for self-aggrandisement—the great majority undoubtedly had such claims thrust upon them, either by their contemporaries or by posterity, and would have themselves claimed nothing higher than to be considered students of the unknown. The Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir Vitæ may have served indeed as the ideal goal of their researches, much as they do under their modern form of the Secret of Life in our own time; but their actual discoveries, accidental and incidental though they may have been, were none the less valuable. After such a lapse of time it is as difficult to draw the line between the alchemist-scientist and the charlatan as it will be a century hence to distinguish the false from the true among the "inventors" and "scientists" of to-day, so absolutely do the mists of tradition obscure the face of history. Leaving out of the question such purely legendary figures as Merlin, we may class them under three headings, and briefly consider one example under each. In the first may be placed the more or less mythical figures of Gebir and Albertus Magnus, both of whom, so far as it is now possible to judge, owe their ambiguous reputations entirely to the superstitions of their posterity.

Such a personage as the great Arabian physician Gebir, otherwise Abou Moussah Djafar, surnamed Al Sofi, or the Wise, living in the eighth century, was certain to gain the reputation of possessing supernatural power, even had he not busied himself in the discovery of the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir. Though he found neither, he yet in seeking them made other discoveries little less valuable, and it is scarcely too much to say, made their discovery possible in later centuries. Thus, in default of the means of making gold, he gave us such useful chemicals as nitric acid, nitrate of silver, and oxide of copper. Incidentally he wrote several hundred treatises on his two "subjects," an English translation of one, the "Summæ Perfectionis," having been published in 1686 by Richard Russell, himself an alchemist of respectable attainments.

Albertus Magnus, again, gave every excuse to the vulgar for regarding him as infernally inspired. That is to say, he was a scholar of great attainments in a day when scholars were chiefly remarkable for their dense ignorance, and fully deserved some less ambiguous sobriquet than that bestowed upon him by some writers of "Founder of the Schoolmen." A Dominican, he held the chair of Theology at Padua in 1222 while still a young man. Grown weary of a sedentary life, he resigned his professorship and taught in many of the chief European cities, and more particularly in Paris, where he lived for three years in company with his illustrious pupil, Thomas Aquinas. He was at one time appointed Bishop of Regensburg, but very soon resigned, finding his episcopal duties interfere with his studies. Of the twenty-five folios from his pen, one is devoted to alchemy, and he was a magician of the first class—so, at least, succeeding generations averred, though he himself very likely had no suspicions thereof. Among other of his possessions was a brazen statue with the gift of speech, a gift exercised with such assiduity as to exhaust the patience even of the saintly Thomas Aquinas himself, so that he was constrained to shatter it to pieces.

Roger Bacon, inventor and owner of an even more famous brazen head, was no less illustrious a scholar, and as fully deserved his admiring nickname "The Admirable Doctor," even though he were not in actual fact the inventor of gunpowder and the telescope, as asserted by his admirers. A native of Somerset, and born, traditionally, the year before the signing of Magna Charta, he might have ranked among the greatest Englishmen had not his reputation as a magician given him the suggestion of being a myth altogether. Something of a heretic he was, although in orders, and his writings brought down upon him the suspicions of the General of the Franciscan Order, to which he belonged. Pope Clement IV. extended protection to him for a time, even to the extent of studying his works, and more particularly his "Magnum Opus," but later the Franciscan General condemned his writings, and he spent fourteen years in prison, being released only two years before his death. But his historical achievements were as nothing to his legendary possession, in partnership with Friar Bungay, of the Talking Head. Less garrulous than Albertus' statue, it emitted only three sentences: "Time is. Time was. Time is past." Its last dictum, having unfortunately for all audience a foolish servant, and being by him held up to ridicule, it fell to the ground and was smashed to pieces, thus depriving its inventor of his cherished scheme—by its help to surround England with a brazen rampart no whit less efficacious against the assaults of the King's enemies than are our present-day ironclads.

Friar Bacon was not undeserving of the posthumous popularity he achieved in song and story, for he it was who made magic and alchemy really popular pursuits in this country. So numerous were his imitators that rather more than a century after his death—in 1434—the alchemical manufacture of gold and silver was declared a felony. Twenty-one years later Henry VI., being, as he usually was, in urgent need of ready money, saw reason to modify the Governmental attitude, and granted a number of patents—to ecclesiastics as well as laymen—for seeking after the Philosopher's Stone, with the declared purpose of paying the Royal debts out of the proceeds. In which design he was, it is to be feared, disappointed.

Dr. Dee, the friend and gossip of Queen Elizabeth, may be taken as marking the point at which the alchemist ceases to be an inhabitant of any half-way world and becomes altogether human. A Londoner by birth, he was born in 1527, became a B.A. of Cambridge University and Rector of Upton-upon-Severn. His ecclesiastical duties could not contain his energies, and so well versed did he become in arts magical that, upon a waxen effigy of Queen Elizabeth being found in Lincoln's Inn Fields—and a waxen effigy had only one meaning in Elizabeth's time—he was employed to counteract the evil spells contained in it, which he did with such conspicuous success that the Royal Person suffered no ill-effects whatever. Unfortunately for himself, Dr. Dee acquired in course of time a disciple, one Edward Kelly. Kelly proved an apt daunter of demons, but he was totally lacking in the innocent credulity so noticeable in the character of his reverend mentor. At his prompting Dr. Dee undertook a Continental tour, which resulted in disaster of the most overwhelming and the total loss of Dr. Dee's good name. It is true that he may be considered to have deserved his fate, for so absolute was his belief in his disciple that when that _chevalier d'industrie_ received a message from a demoniacal familiar that it was essential for the success of their alchemical enterprises that they should exchange wives—Mrs. Dee being as well-favoured as Mrs. Kelly was the reverse—the doctor accepted the situation with implicit faith, and agreed to all that the spirits desired.

Among other seekers after the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir Vitæ who may be briefly referred to were Alain de l'Isle, otherwise Alanus de Insulis, notable in that he actually discovered the elixir, if his contemporaries may be believed, and who so far lived up to his reputation as to defer his death, which occurred in 1298, until his 110th year; Raymond Lully, who, visiting England in or about 1312, was provided with a laboratory within the precincts of Westminster Abbey, where many years later a supply of gold-dust was found; Nicholas Flamel, who died in 1419, and who gained most of his occult knowledge from a volume written in Latin by the Patriarch Abraham; and, to come to later years, William Lilly, a famous English practitioner of the seventeenth century, and an adept in the use of the divining rod, with which he sought for hidden treasures in Westminster Abbey, possibly those left behind him by Raymond Lully.

Perhaps no symptom of civilisation is more disquieting than the increasing tendency to compress the half-way worlds—built up by our forefathers with such lavish expenditure of imagination—into the narrow limits of that in which we are doomed to spend our working days—not too joyously. We have seen how the alchemist and the magician from semi-divine beings, vested with power over gods and men, have by degrees come to be confounded with the cheap-jack of a country fair. So it has been with many another denizen of the Unseeable. Consider, for example, the once formidable giant. Originally gods, or but little inferior to them, so that Olympus must exercise all its might to prevail against them; at one time a nation in themselves, located somewhere in Cornwall, with kings of their own, Corcoran, Blunderbore, and the rest, aloof from man except when, for their pastime or appetite, they raided his preserves, vulnerable, indeed, though only to a superhuman Jack; where are your giants now? Goliath, though defeated by David, was yet not dishonoured, in that he was warring not against a puny, sling-armed shepherd, but against the whole might of the Jewish Jehovah. There were giants on the earth in those days, the Scriptures tell us, and that in terms giving us to understand that a giant was to be regarded with respect, if not with admiration. Polyphemus, again, though outwitted by a mortal, was none the less a figure almost divine, god-like in his passions and his agony. The whole ancient world teems with anecdotes, all proving the respectability of the old-time giant. And to-day? I saw a giant myself some few years back. He was in a show—and he was known as Goliath. A poor, lean, knock-kneed wavering creature, half-idiotic, too, with a sickly, apologetic smile, as though seeking to disarm the inevitable criticism his very existence must provoke. Yet he was not to blame, poor, anachronistic wretch. Rather it was the spirit of the age, that preferred to see him, set up for every fool to jeer at, at sixpence a time, in a showman's booth, rather than to watch him afar off, his terror magnified by distance, walking across a lonely heath in the twilight, bearing a princess or a captive knight along with him as his natural prey. The same spirit that has made the giant shrink to an absurdity can see only the charlatan beneath the flowing robes of the astrologer; and has argued the witch even out of existence.

So it is with the mermaid. They showed one at the same booth wherein the degenerate giant was mewed. A poor, shrunken, grotesque creature enough, yet even so it might have passed for a symbol, if no more, had they been content to leave it to our imagination. Instead they must explain, even while they pocketed our sixpences, that the whole thing was a dreary sham, concocted out of the fore-quarters of a monkey and the tail end of a codfish, the whole welded together by the ingenious fingers of some Japanese trickmonger. Yet there are those who would uphold such cruel candour, who would prefer to pay sixpence in order to see an ape-codfish rather than to remain in blissful ignorance, rather than imagine that every wave may have its lovely tenant, a sea-maiden of more than earthly tenderness and beauty. Civilisation prates to us of dugongs and of manatees, and other fish-beasts that, it says, rising upon the crest of a wave, sufficiently resemble the human form to be mistaken for it by credulous, susceptible mariners. But is not our faith in that tender story of the little mermaid who, for love of a man, sought the earth in human shape even though she knew that every step must cause her agony, every foot-mark be outlined with her blood—is not it better for us to believe that fairy-tale than to cram our weary brains with all the cynical truths of all the dime-museums or schools of science between London and San Francisco?

Even those who smile at Neptune and his daughters cannot refuse the tribute of a shudder to the Man-Beast. For however it be with the mermaid, the were-wolf is no figment of the imagination. Not the fanciful alone are convinced that many human beings partake of the nature of certain beasts. You may pass them by the hundred in every city street—men and women showing in their faces their kinship with the horse, the dog, cat, monkey, lion, sparrow. And not in their faces alone—for their features do but reflect the minds within them—the man with the sharp, rat-like face nine times out of ten has all the selfish canning of the rat. We have no need to seek for further explanation of the centaur myth—to argue that some horseless nation, seeing horsemen for the first time, accepted the man and his mount as one and indivisible; there are plenty of men who have as much of the equine as of the human in their composition. So it is with the wolf-man—the were-wolf. He exists, and to this day, despite all your civilising influences. Not among savages alone—or chiefly. He roams the streets of our great cities, seeking his prey. Perhaps he lives in the next street to you—a prosperous, respected citizen, with a shop in Cheapside, a wife and family, and the regard of all his neighbours. The wolf in him has never been aroused—may never be. Only, let Fate or chance so will it, and—well, who can tell us Jack the Ripper's antecedents? And where in all the annals of lycanthropy can you find a grimmer instance of the man-wolf than Jack the Ripper?

With the were-wolf we return to closer contact with witchcraft proper. It is true that the were-wolf was not always bewitched. Sometimes the tendency was inborn—the man or woman was transformed into the wolf at each recurrent full moon. In France—and more particularly in the South, where lycanthropy has always had one of its strongholds—the liability of certain individuals, especially if they be born illegitimate, to this inconvenience is still firmly credited by the popular mind. The were-wolf may be recognised for that matter, even when in his human form, usually by the shape of his broad, short-fingered hands and his hairy palm. It is even possible to effect a permanent cure should the opportunity occur, and that by the simple means of stabbing him three times in the forehead with a knife while in his lupine shape. Again, in Scandinavia and elsewhere certain men could transform themselves into wolves at will—a superstition arising naturally enough out of traditions of the Berserkers and the fits of wolfish madness into which they threw themselves. Yet again, as Herodotus tells us, lycanthropy was sometimes a national observance. The Neuri, if the Scythians were to be believed, were in the habit of changing themselves into wolves once a year and remaining in that shape for several days. But more frequently the change was attributable to some evil spell cast by a witch. It is true that the wolf was only one of many animals into whose shape she might condemn a human soul to enter. Circe is, of course, a classical example; Saint Augustine, in his "De Civitate Dei," relates how an old lady of his acquaintance used to turn men into asses by means of enchantments—an example which has been followed by younger ladies ever since, by the way—while Apuleius' "Golden Ass" gives us an autobiographical testimony to the efficacy of certain drugs towards the same end.

Doubtless because the wolf was extirpated in this country at a comparatively early date English were-wolf legends are few and far between. They could indeed only become universally current in a country mainly pastoral and infested by wolves, as, for instance, in ancient Arcadia, where indeed the were-wolf came into his highest estate, or in many parts of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe to-day. In certain Balkan districts the were-wolf shares the attributes of the vampire, another allied superstition which is by no means without its foundations of fact. Most people must have, indeed, been acquainted at some time or other with the modern form of vampire, individuals who unconsciously feed upon the vitality of those with whom they come into contact. Many stories have been written, many legends founded upon this phenomenon, to the truth of which many people have testified from their own experience. At which point I leave the subject to those with more scientific knowledge than myself.

In case there should be any who desire to transform themselves into a wolf without the trouble and expense of resorting to a witch, I will close this chapter with a spell warranted to produce the desired effect without any further outlay than the price of a small copper knife. It is of Russian origin, and is quoted from Sacharow by Mr. Baring Gould. "He who desires to become an oborot (oborot = 'one transformed' = were-wolf) let him seek in the forest a hewn-down tree; let him stab it with a small copper knife and walk round the tree, repeating the following incantation:

On the sea, on the ocean, on the island, on Bujan,
On the empty pasture gleams the moon, on an ash-stock lying
In a greenwood, in a gloomy vale.
Towards the stock wandereth a shaggy wolf,
Horned cattle seeking for his sharp white fangs;
But the wolf enters not the forest,
But the wolf dives not into the shadowy vale.
Moon, moon, gold-horned moon
Check the flight of bullets, blunt the hunters' knives,
Break the shepherds' cudgels,
Cast wild fear upon all cattle,
On men, on all creeping things,
That they may not catch the grey wolf,
That they may not rend his warm skin!
My word is binding, more binding than sleep,
More binding than the promise of a hero!

"Then he springs thrice over the tree and runs into the forest, transformed into a wolf."

[CHAPTER V]

THE WITCH'S ATTRIBUTES

In his very learned and exhaustive treatise, "De la Démonomanie des Sorciers," the worthy Bodin, with enterprise worthy of a modern serial-story writer, keeps his reader's curiosity whetted to its fullest by darkly hinting his knowledge of awesome spells and charms commonly employed by Satan's servants. Unlike the modern writer, however, he refrains from detailing them at length in his last chapter, fearing to impart knowledge which may easily be put to the worst account. However valuable a testimony to his good faith and discretion, this would certainly have brought down upon him the strictures of modern critics, and might indeed have entailed serious loss to the world had not other less conscientious writers more than rectified the omission.

It were, of course, impossible to include within the limits of such a volume as is this—or of a hundred like it—one tithe of the great store of spells, charms, and miscellaneous means towards enchantment gathered together in the long centuries since the birth of the first witch. So also it is impossible to select any particular stage in her long evolution as the most characteristic, as regards her manners and customs, of all that we imply by the word "witch." On the other hand, she has definitely crystallised in the minds of those of us who have ever been children, in the shape of the "horrid old witch" of fairy lore; and just as, in a preceding chapter, I have endeavoured to reproduce one of her working days—as imaged in the popular mind—so the witch of the Middle Ages may best be chosen when we would reconstruct her more human aspect.

Of her actual appearance, divested of her infernal attributes, no better description could be desired than that given by Reginald Scot in "The Discoverie of Witchcraft":—"Witches be commonly old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles; poore, sullen, superstitious, and papists"—(it is perhaps unnecessary to point out that Scot was of the Reformed Faith)—"or such as know no religion; in whose drousie minds the devill hath goten a fine seat; so as, what mischiefe, mischance, calamitie or slaughter is brought to passe, they are easilie persuaded the same is doone by themselves, imprinting in their minds an earnest and constant imagination hereof. They are leane and deformed, showing melancholie in their faces to the horror of all that see them. They are doting, scolds, mad, devilish."

Endowed with so unfortunate a personality, it is not surprising that, as Scot goes on to inform us, the witch should have found it difficult to make a living. It is indeed an interesting example of the law of supply and demand that such woeful figures being needed for the proper propagation of the witch-mania, the conditions of mediæval life, by their harsh pressure upon the poor and needy among women, should have provided them by the score in every village. You may find the conventional witch-figure to-day in the lonely hamlet or in the city workhouse, but, thanks to our better conditions of life, she has become almost as rare as have accusations of witchcraft against her.

The only means of subsistence open to her, Scot goes on, is to beg from house to house. In time it comes about that people grow weary of her importunities. Perhaps they show their impatience too openly. "Then," says Scot, "she curses one or the other, from the master of the house to the little pig that lieth in the stie." Someone in the wide range between those two extremes will be certain to suffer some kind of mischance before long—on much the same principle as that which gives life to one of our most popular present-day superstitions, the ill-luck attending a gathering of "thirteen at table." Any such disaster is naturally attributed to the old beggar-woman—who is thus at once elevated to the dangerous eminence of witch-hood. Nor did the sufferer always wait for her curse. Edward Fairfax, for example, the learned seventeenth century translator of Tasso, upon an epidemic sickness attacking his children, sought out their symptoms in a "book of medicine." Not finding any mention of "such agonies" as those exhibited by his children, he determined that some unholy agency must be at work. His thoughts turned, naturally enough, to the gloomy forest of Knaresborough, within convenient distance of his abode. Nothing could be more suspicious than the mere fact of living in such a suggestive locality, yet Margaret White, widow of a man executed for theft, her daughter, and Jennie Dibble, an old widow coming of a family suspected of witchcraft for generations past, were imprudent, or unfortunate, enough to live within its borders. The natural result attended their rashness—and so earnest was the worthy Fairfax that he set the whole proceedings down in a book, adding a minute account of the symptoms and delusions of the invalids.

As the King has his orb and sceptre, the astrologer his spheres and quadrant, so the witch has her insignia of office. And it is a strong indication of her descent from the first house-wife that most of them are domestic or familiar objects. The imp or "familiar" who attends her may have the form of a bird or dog, but is far more often the most domestic animal of all, the cat. Frequently it is malformed or monstrous, in common with Satan himself and all the beings who owe him allegiance. It may have any number of legs, several tails, or none at all; its mewing is diabolic; it may be far above the usual stature of its kind. Usually it is black, but is equally eligible if white or yellow. As is a common incident of all religions, the symbol is sometimes confused with the office, the witch and her cat exchanging identities. Thus witches have confessed under torture to have formerly been cats, and to owe their human shape to Satan's interference with natural laws. A piebald cat is said to become a witch if it live for nine years, and the witch, when upon a nefarious errand, frequently assumes a feline shape.

A characteristic of the witch, in common with demons and imps in general, is that she does everything contrary to the tastes and customs of good Christians. With the one steady exception of the cat, she most esteems animals repellent to the ordinary person, to women in particular, and her imps may appear as rats or mice, usually tailless, spiders, fleas, nits, flies, toads, hares, crows, hornets, moles, frogs, or, curiously enough, domestic poultry. An important item in her outfit is her broomstick—as homely an insignia as the cat. Its feminine connection is obvious, though possibly its power of flight may be derived from the magic wand. Smeared with a Satanic ointment, it acts as her chariot, or is prepared to serve her as a weapon of offence or defence—and woe to him who suffers a beating from the witch's broom-handle.

The spindle, emblem of domesticity, becomes in the witch's hands a maleficial instrument, and may be applied by her to a number of evil uses. The idea of the thread of life enters into many mythologies, and it, from some confusion of ideas, may well have been instrumental in transforming the natural occupation of an old woman into one of the dangerous tricks of witchcraft.

Just as "loathly" reptiles, the snake, the lizard, and the toad, stand in close relation to the witch, so plants growing in suggestive places or notoriously poison-bearing are especially connected with her. Hemlock, mandrake, henbane, deadly nightshade—or moonshade, as it was sometimes called—saffron, poplar-leaves, all avoided by the common folk, are held in high esteem by Satan's servants for their use in the concoction of love-philtres and other noxious brews.

For the brewing of potions a cauldron is a matter of course, and the mixtures popularly supposed to have been brewed in it were enough to have given it an evil reputation for all time. The enumeration of their ingredients is unpleasantly suggestive, even to the unbeliever, and the credulous may well have shuddered at such a mixture as:

Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blindworm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat and slips of yew,
Finger of birth-strangled babe, &c., &c.

It is true that a Macbeth was not to be catered for every day, and simpler effects could have been obtained by less complicated, though perhaps not less unappetising means.

Of all these insignia and attributes of her office the most important, as the most characteristic, were her "familiars" or imps. In mediæval real life, just as in modern fairy-lore, the witch's possession of a cat—or other animal, however harmless it might seem—was proof positive of her guilt. Without her familiar, indeed, she could scarcely have claimed the powers attributed to her, for, whatever its form, it was the ever-present reminder of her contract with their common master, and in many cases the channel through which his commands and the means for their carrying out were communicated to her. The infinite variations of form and kind of these same "imps," as set out in the proceedings at the trials, bear strong testimony of the wild imaginations possessed by our forefathers or the Devil, as we may prefer to believe. Thus Margaret White, in the Fairfax case just referred to, had for familiar a deformed creature with many feet, sooty in hue and rough-haired, being of name unknown. Her daughter, who resembled her in all things, with the addition of "impudency and lewd behaviour," had a white cat spotted with black. Jennie Dibble had a black cat called Gibbe, "who hath attended her above 40 yeares." All these imps, whatever their shape, obtained their nourishment by sucking their mistress's blood, leaving marks upon her body, which formed deadly evidence against her at her trial. Nor was there any hope of cheating justice by giving these devil's marks commonplace forms, for they were recognised even when made, by the Devil's cunning, to appear like moles, birth-marks, or even flea-bites!

There is some slight confusion about the provenance of this same witch-mark, unless it varied in individual cases—whether, that is to say, the marks were the result of suckling the imps, or whether, being already imprinted on the witch's body, they were selected for that reason. Certainly there is frequent reference to the ceremony of its imprinting immediately after the signature of the contract with Satan, and at the same time that her nickname and familiars were assigned to his new servant. Its object is ingeniously explained by the unctuous Pierre de Lancre, no mean authority. Satan, he tells us, wishing to ape God in all things, has instituted this marking of his servants in imitation of the stigmata and also of the circumcision. A more practical explanation, given by some writers, is that the Devil's mark, having the quality of itching at certain seasons, is conferred upon witches that they may never oversleep themselves and thus be late for the Sabbath ceremonies. The root of the whole matter, however, as the worthy Pierre is half-inclined to believe—and as some of us may be half-inclined to agree with him in thinking—is that the mark (he compares it to a toad's foot) has merely been instituted by Satan out of his love of importance and display, and with no further motive.

Although in earlier ages this formality may have been dispensed with, by the sixteenth century the witch invariably signed a definite contract with Satan. As was only too probable, seeing that they dispensed with an attorney, while the other person to the bargain, himself of no mean intelligence, might chose among an infinity of legal advisers, the contract was of a very one-sided nature. Nothing, at least, was ever outwardly visible of those advantages for which she bartered away body and soul. Even such satisfaction as may have come from attending the Sabbaths was dearly bought, for not only did her earthly neighbours show their resentment in the most forcible manner, but her reception by Satan, unless she had carried out his instructions to the furthest limit, was apt to be unamiable in the extreme. Of any more material satisfaction—save, of course, that, and it is perhaps as substantial as human happiness can be—of paying off old scores, there is no sign at all. It is perhaps this lack of business instinct which most markedly differentiates the witch from the sorcerer. He almost invariably gained whatever worldly advantages he desired during the term of his agreement, and not infrequently tricked Satan out of his share of the bargain at the end of it.

Of the preliminaries leading up to the bargain we are given an illuminating glimpse by Edward Fairfax in his already quoted book. His daughter Helen, being in a trance, saw the wife of one Thorp, and, with the impertinent enthusiasm of youth—as it now seems to us—urged her to pray "with such vehemence that Thorp's wife wept bitterly a long time. Then she asked her how she became a witch, and the woman answered that a man like to a man of this world came unto her upon the moor and offered her money, which at first she refused, but at the second time of his coming he did overcome her in such sort that she gave him her body and soul, and he made her a lease back again of her life for 40 years, which was now ended upon Shrove Tuesday last. The man did write their lease with their blood, and they likewise with their blood set their hands to them. That her lease was in his keeping, and every 7th year he showed it unto them, and now it was 3 years since she saw hers, and that each 7th year they renewed it. She said further that she knew 40 witches, but there were only 7 of her company." From other accounts we learn that in the act of signing the contract the witch frequently put one hand to the sole of her foot and the other to the crown of her head—a gymnastic exercise that can scarcely have been coincident with the affixing of her signature, however. Anyone who, despite his cozening of witches, may urge the number of times when Satan was over-reached by sorcerers, as a proof that his intelligence is over-rated, may find evidence that he is occasionally gifted with business acumen in the confession of one M. Guillaume de Livre, Doctor of Theology, who was so unlucky as to be condemned for witchcraft in 1453. By the terms of his bargain with Satan he was bound to preach whenever possible that there was no such thing as real sorcery. "Such," as Bodin very acutely remarks, "are the wiles and lures of the Evil One."

Her contract once signed, the witch naturally became as soon as possible proficient in the "Devil's rudiments," which James I. describes as "unlawful charms without natural causes. Such kinde of charms as commonlie dafte wives use, for healing of forspoken goodes, for preserving them from evil eyes, by knitting roun trees or sundriest kinde of hearbes, to the haire or tailes of the goodes; by curing the worme, by stemming of bloode; by healing of Horse-crookes, by turning of the riddle, or doing of such-like innumerable things by words without applying aniething meete to the part offended, as Mediciners doe." "Children cannot smile upon a witch without the hazard of a perpetual wry smile," writes Stephens in 1615. "Her prayers and amens be a charm and a curse ... her highest adoration hie yew trees, dampest churchyards, and a fayre moonlight; her best preservatives odde numbers and mightie Tetragrammaton."

Her crimes were many and varied enough to provide contemporary writers with long pages of delectable matter. Thus, Holland declares, in "A Treatise Against Witchcraft" (1590), that:—

They renounce God and all true religion.

They blaspheme and provoke His Divine Majesty with unspeakable contempt.

They believe in the Devill, adore him, and sacrifice unto him.

They offer their children unto devills.

They sweare unto Satan, and promise to bring as many as they can unto his service and profession.

They invocate Satan in their praiers, and sweare by his name.

Besides preaching gross immorality:—

They commit horrible murders, and kill young infants.

All Sorcerers for the most part exercise poison, and to kill with poison is far more heinous than simple murder.

They kill men's cattle.

And, lastly, the witches (as they themselves confesse) commit many abominations and filthenes.

Other accounts follow similar lines or add further indictments; as Jean Bodin, who also details the crimes of eating human flesh and drinking blood, destroying fruit and causing famine and sterility. Generally speaking, then, the crimes of witchcraft fall under the headings of offences against religion and the Church; of those against the community in general, such as causing epidemics or bad weather; and of those against individuals, including murder, especially of young children, causing disease, and injury to property. Such catholic appreciation in wrong-doing could not fail to arouse the disapproval of all right-thinking people, and as the mere charge of witchcraft, supported by any one accusation, implied the perpetration of all these various misdeeds, it is scarcely wonderful that the witch, once apprehended, had small chance of escape.

Although less generally harmful in its effects, the witch's passion for aviation was as reprehensible as the rest of her proceedings. For one thing, it was generally considered an offensive parody of the angels' mode of progression. Pierre de Lancre, indeed, who is unusually well informed, states this as a fact. He points out further that the good angels can fly much faster, being able to use their wings, while the witch has to make use of some artificial means of support, as, for example, a broomstick. It is characteristic of the cross-grained eccentricity of witches that whereas a good angel, like a good Christian, enters or leaves the room by the door, the witch prefers the less convenient egress of the chimney. This was the more aggravating that it rendered useless any attempts by beleaguering the house to catch her in the act, seeing that she only flies by night; and Satan further provides against discovery by allowing her to leave her imp in her own shape behind her, and thus, if need be, provide a satisfactory alibi. The only way of getting at the real fact of the matter was then by obtaining a confession from the witch herself—which could, however, usually be arranged for by the authorities. The broomstick, be it noted, was not an essential to the witch's aerial journeys; asses and horses, if properly anointed with witch-ointment, could be used at a pinch, as could a straw, an eggshell, or a barndoor fowl—to mention three out of many possible mounts. Satan has been known to take upon himself the shape of a goat, and thus to provide a steed for those he most delights to honour. This is, however, attended by one grave and dangerous disadvantage. Satan hates the sound of church-bells, and should he hear the sound of the Ave Maria while carrying a witch through the air, will very likely drop her at once—as actually happened to a witch named Lucrece in 1524.

The ever-helpful De Lancre details four ways of getting to the Sabbath:

(1) By thought or meditation, as in the vision of Ezekiel.

(2) On foot.

(3) By being carried through the air by Satan.

(4) By going in dreams or illusions, which leave the witch uncertain whether she has really been present in the flesh or only had a nightmare. But De Lancre is assured that the transport is real, seeing that they have actually been seen descending from the clouds, naked and often wounded, while they are often so exhausted thereafter as to be obliged to keep their beds for several days.

The ointment used by witches for such purposes are by many considered to have been but another instance of Satan's cunning and lack of good faith. As a tangible token of her service, they flatter the witch's sense of importance—though in themselves quite useless—while the obtaining of these ingredients necessitates a good deal of mischief being done to good Christians. Holland, who tells us that "Witches make oyntements of the fatte of young children," adds that Satan has no great opinion of the said "oyntements," but loves the bloodshed it entails. Wierus provides us with a more detailed gruesome recipe. By their spells witches cause young children to die in the cradle or by their mother's side. When they are dead, of suffocation or other causes, and have been buried, the witches take them out of the grave and boil them in a cauldron until the flesh leaves the bones, and the rest is as easy to drink as melted wax. Of the thicker portions the ointment is made; while whoever drinks the liquid will become mistress of the whole art of witchcraft. Bacon speaks of several other ingredients. To the customary fat of children "digged out of their graves," he adds the juices of smallage, wolf-bane, and cinque-foil, mingled with the meal of fine wheat, and, he says, "I suppose the soporiferous medicines are likest to do it, which are henbane, hemlock, mandrake, moonshade, tobacco, opium, saffron, and poplar-leaves." Some are of opinion that such soporific elements are introduced into the ointment by the Devil in order to dull the senses of his servants, that he may the more easily do as he likes with them—but as those who have gone so far in procuring the _pièce de résistance_ of the mixture are not likely to be over-scrupulous, such a precaution seems almost unnecessary.

The poisons, "charms," and baleful powders needed by the witches in their ordinary business-routine may be made either in their own domestic cauldron or at the Sabbath. They include such ingredients as the heads of toads, spiders, or the bark and pith of the "Arbre Maudit." The semi-solids are the most poisonous to human beings, while the liquid varieties are used to destroy crops and orchards. For doing damage on the sea or among the mountains, powders are well considered—made of toads' flesh, roasted, dried, and pulverised, and subsequently cast into the air or scattered on the ground, according to the circumstances of the case. Another and very baleful poison may be made of "green water"; so potent is it that even to touch it causes instant death. A paste entirely efficacious against confession under torture may be made with black millet mixed with the dried liver of an unbaptised child. A skinned cat, a toad, a lizard or an asp, roasted, dried, pulverised, and burned until required, may be put to excellent purposes of offence. Cast in the air or on the ground, with the words "This is for corn, this for apples," and so forth, such a powder, if used in sufficient quantities, will turn a smiling countryside into a desert. There is, indeed, one plant which resists all such spells—the common onion. Thus De Lancre tells us of a certain garden so injured by these powders that everything died except the onions—for which, he adds, the Devil has a particular respect. If this respect comes from dislike of its smell—and Satan is known to have a very delicate nose—our modern prejudice against the onion-eater immediately after dinner would seem to be only another proof of man's natural tendency to evil.

In deference to the unceasing demand, the witch has ever been a prominent exponent of prophecy and divination—nor have any of her practices given more offence to Holy Church. At the late period of her history we are now considering, she had acquired a sufficiently varied repertoire of methods to satisfy the most exacting. To quote from a long list supplied us by Holland, the witch of his times could divine:—"By fire, by the ayer, by water, by the earth, by the dead, by a sive, by a cocke, by a twibble or an axe, by a ring, by Ise, by meale, by a stone, by a lawrell, by an asse's head, by smoake, by a rodde, by pieces of wood, by a basin of water, by certain round vessels of glasse full of water, by rubbing of the nayles." All of which go to show that she had lost little of the skill possessed before her by Egyptian necromancers and mediæval magicians.

But the most fantastic, as it became the most famous, incident of the witch's life, as viewed by her contemporaries, was certainly the Sabbath. In a previous chapter I have endeavoured to provide some narrative account of such a gathering as being the simplest and directest method of reconstruction. It was, however, obviously impossible to include one tithe of the various incidents at one or other period attached thereto by writers, Inquisitors or witches themselves—and this quite apart from the obvious limitations entailed, in matters of detail, upon one who writes for the general public.

These same Sabbaths might be described in modern terms of commerce as Satan's stock-takings, whereon he might check the number and loyalty of his subjects. They were of two kinds—the more important, or "Sabbaths-General," to which flocked witches from all parts of the world, and the more localised and frequent "Sabbaths" simple. Their place and time varied, though most frequently held after midnight on Friday—an arrangement agreeable to the Church view of the Jews and their Sabbath, and not impossibly arising therefrom. In earlier days—or so De Lancre informs us—the Devil chose Monday, the first day of the week, as most suitable, but, with his usual inconstancy, has varied it several times since then. Darkness was not essential, Sabbaths having been occasionally held at high noon. In Southern countries, indeed, the hours between midday and 3 p.m. were considered the most dangerous to mortals, the terrestrial demons having then most power. The pleasures of the midday meal might have a fatal influence in putting the intended victim off his guard, his sleepy content making him peculiarly susceptible to the attacks of Satan's agents. Some authorities give from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. as the hours, seeing that, as in more legitimate assemblies, everybody could not arrive at once, and there was much business to be gone through. The Sabbaths-General, in mockery of the Church, were usually held on the four great annual festivals. They might take place anywhere, though certain spots were especially favoured. Market-places, especially if beside an important church, were among them. The mountain of Dôme, in Perigord, again, was among the most famous meeting-places in France, as were the Wrekin in England, the Blocksburg in Germany, and the Blockula in Sweden. Attendance was not a mere matter of pleasure, witches who failed being severely punished by demons sent in search of them or on their next appearance.

Satan himself usually presided in person, though he was occasionally represented by an underling, to the great anger of the witches. Thus, on one occasion, he deprecated their wrath by the explanation that in view of a strenuous persecution then on foot he had been pleading the cause of his followers with Janicot—an impious name for Jesus—that he had won his case, and that they would not be burnt. As a reward, he added, they must bring him eighty children, to be given to a certain priest present at the Sabbath, and later tried for sorcery. He appeared in many forms, that of a goat being perhaps his favourite. Anyone who has ever studied a goat's face, and more particularly the expression of its eyes, can testify to Satan's sense of the fitness of things in so doing, as also to that of the old Flemish painters, and more particularly Jerome Bosch, who, in the paintings of devils for which he is so justly famous, has made copious use of the goat's head as a model for his most demoniacal demons. As a goat Satan was usually of monstrous size, having one face in the usual position and another between his haunches. Marie d'Aguerre, who attended a Sabbath at the mature age of thirteen, and afterwards paid the penalty with her life, testified that in the middle of the assembly was a huge pitcher of water, out of which Satan emerged as a goat, grew to enormous size, and, on his departure, returned again into the pitcher. Sometimes he had two pairs of horns, in front and behind, more usually only three in all, that in the centre supporting a light, to serve the double purpose of illuminating the proceedings and of lighting the candles carried by the witches in mockery of Christian ceremonies. Above his horns he sometimes wore a species of cap, and sometimes he had a long tail, in the usual place, with a human face above it. This was saluted by his guests, but he was unable to speak with it.

He might also appear in the form of a tree-trunk, without arms or feet, but with the indistinct suggestion of a face, seated on a throne; sometimes like a giant, clad in dark clothes, as he does not wish his disciples to realise that he is himself suffering the proverbial torture of hell. Some attendants at the Sabbath—as, for instance, poor little Corneille Brolic, aged twelve—saw him as a four-horned man; others, Janette d'Abadie among them, vouch for his having two faces; others saw him as a black greyhound or a huge brass bull lying on the ground. The constant uncertainty as to the form likely to be taken by the host must have been an added interest to the proceedings—and it has been supposed by some that his powerful imagination led him occasionally to appear in a different shape to each several guest, and to change from one to another at frequent intervals during the proceedings.

The actual ceremonies, festivities, and ritual of the Sabbath varied greatly at different times and places, but having already given a typical example in an earlier chapter, it is unnecessary to dwell further on so unsavoury a subject. The various accounts, evolved from the imaginations of over-willing witnesses or tortured witch, however much they may suffer in detail, unite in being the expression of the foulest and most obscene images of a disordered brain, and as such we may leave them. So again the Devil's Mass was conducted in such a manner as might most impiously parody the Christian ritual. The Devil, however, as an old writer astutely points out, in thinking to imitate Christ by sitting on a great golden throne during the ceremony, only shows his exceeding folly, forgetting that, although Christ often spoke while sitting, He yet gained His greatest triumph on the Cross. With the aforesaid throne Satan conjures up all the paraphernalia of worship—temples, altars, music, bells—though only little ones, for he hates and fears church-bells—and even crosses. Four priests, one serving the Mass, a deacon, and a sub-deacon usually officiate. Candles, holy water, incense, the offertory, sermons, and the elevation of the Host all find place in the Devil's Mass. The sign of the cross is made with the left hand, and in further mockery they chant:—

In nomine Patricia Aragueaco
Petrica, agora, agora! Valentia
Jouanda goure gaitz goustia.

Which is to say:—

Au nom de Patrique, Petrique d'Arragon, à cette heure. Valence, tout nostre mal est passé.

Three languages, according to French authorities, Latin, Spanish and Basque, are employed in mockery of the Trinity. The priest usually elevates the Host—which is black and triangular—standing upon his head. At the elevation of the cup—often black—the whole assembly cry "Black crow!" but not even Satan dare say this at the elevation of the Host. The ceremony of baptism is performed upon toads; while even martyrs are not forgotten—this part being played by sorcerers so bemused that torture has become a mockery to them.

One Jehannes du Hard, in her confession, gives us an account of the method of compounding poisons and witch-ointments at the Sabbaths. On her second attendance she saw a great man dressed in black. At attendant produced an earthenware pot, in which were many great spiders and a white slug, along with two toads. These latter Jehannes skinned, while a companion pounded the spiders and the slug with a pestle. To this mixture the skinned toads were added later, having first been beaten with switches to render them more poisonous. The resultant mixture was used with entire success to poison cattle. There is some uncertainty whether this, and similar poisons, was identical with the ointment used by witches to anoint their broomsticks. In any case, it is intended by Satan in mockery of the sacrament of baptism and Holy Unction.

Were there any room for doubting that Satan habitually breaks faith with his servants, it would be dispelled by the testimony given before the oft-quoted authority, Pierre de Lancre, when that learned gentleman was holding an inquisition in the hag-ridden district of Labourt by command of the Parliament of Bordeaux. That of one witness, Legier Riuasseau, was the more dependable in that, although an eye-witness at the Sabbath, he was yet under no sort of obligation to Satan, having bought the privilege from him for the moderate price of two fingers and two and a half toes. His object was worthier than the mere gratifying of curiosity, for he wished to disenchant a certain Jeanne Perrin, who was among those present. That he might be present without danger, two friends shut him in a dark room, wherein he remained for eight days. There the Devil appeared to him, and explained that if he wished to see the Sabbath and also acquire the power of healing he could do it for two toes and half a foot, to which bargain he agreed. His friends afterwards released him from his voluntary captivity, but he could not escape the dark man, who eight days later took the flesh from the great and second toes and half the third of his left foot, without, however, hurting him in the least. Had he desired the power of doing evil as well, he might have bought it for the remainder of his toes and half the foot, but being as good as he was prudent he refrained. From his further evidence we learn that the Sabbath takes place in the market-square towards midnight on Wednesday or Friday—Satan preferring stormy weather, that the wind may scatter poisons over a wider area. That witnessed by Riuasseau was presided over by a large and a small devil, and all present—the witness presumably excepted—adored Satan by kissing his posterior face. Thereafter sixty witches danced before him, each with a cat tied to the tail of her shift. Marie de la Ralde, another witness, deposed that she often saw Satan approach the children present with a hot iron, but could not say definitely whether or not he branded them. She asserted that all enjoyed the Sabbath to the utmost, the Devil having absolute command over their hearts and wills. Witches, she added, hear heavenly music and really believe themselves to be in Paradise. The Devil persuades them that there is no such place as Hell, and further, by rendering them momentarily immune, that fire has no power over them. As a further proof of Satanic astuteness, she declared that witches see so many priests, pastors, confessors, and other persons of quality attending the Sabbath as to be perfectly convinced of the entire correctness of the proceedings. She herself, even when she saw that the Host was black instead of white, did not at the time realise that anything was wrong.

[CHAPTER VI]

SOME REPRESENTATIVE ENGLISH WITCHES

Having seen how the witch in general lived and went about her evil business, it may be well to consider the personality of individual members of the craft. There have been, needless to say, many women famous in other directions, who have been incidentally regarded by their contemporaries as possessing superhuman powers. Indeed, to be condemned as a witch was but to have an official seal set upon the highest compliment payable to a woman in more than one period of the earth's history, seeing that it marked her out from the dead level of mediocrity to which her sex was legally and socially condemned. It is as unnecessary as it is unfair to believe that the English and French worthies who burnt Joan of Arc were hypocrites. That a woman could do as she had done was to them capable only of two explanations. Either she must be inspired from above or from below, according to the point of view. As it was too much to expect that those whom she had defeated should regard her victories as divine, it followed that they could seem nothing but infernal. From Cleopatra or the Witch of Endor onwards, the exceptional woman has had the choice of effacing her individuality or of being regarded as an agent of the devil. It is true that in our own more squeamish days, we prefer to regard her as either eccentric or improper, according to her social position and other attendant circumstances.

We may then disregard such historical characters as have other claims to fame, and confine our attention to those whose activities were concentrated upon witchcraft pure and simple. Nor have we to go far afield for noteworthy examples, seeing that they abound, not only in England, but even in London itself. Perhaps the most generally respected of English witches, alike by her contemporaries and succeeding generations is Mother Shipton, who flourished in the reign of Henry VII. More fortunate than the majority of her colleagues, she died a natural death, and it is scarcely too much to say that her memory is green even to-day—among certain classes of society, at any rate. In common with the Marquess of Granby, Lord Nelson, and other popular idols, Mother Shipton has acted as sponsor for more than one public house in different English counties; the most familiar to Londoners being perhaps that at the corner of Malden Road, Camden Town, a stopping-place on the tram and omnibus route to Hampstead Heath. I have not been able to trace any definite connection between the witch and the hostelry—probably the choice of a sign was made in order to rival another inn named after Mother Redcap—herself a witch of some eminence—in the same district. Mother Shipton was a native of the gloomy forest of Knaresborough, in Yorkshire, a famous forcing-ground of Black Magic, and, although few details of her life have been preserved, we know, so far as tradition may be trusted, that despite her evil reputation and the certainty that she had sold herself to the devil, she was granted Christian burial in the churchyard at Clifton, in Yorkshire, where she died. Whether this implies that she repented, and cheated the devil of his bargain, before her death, or only that the local authorities were lax in their supervision of the parish cemetery, is an open question. At least, a tombstone is said to have been there erected to her memory with the following inscription:—

Here lies she who never lied,
Whose skill often has been tried.
Her prophecies shall still survive
And ever keep her name alive.

No doubt Mother Shipton was as gifted as her fellows in the customary arts of witchcraft, but tradition draws a merciful veil over her exploits as poisoner or spell-caster. Her fame rests upon her prophecies, and whether she actually uttered them herself or they were attributed to her after the event, by admiring biographers, they have ever since been accepted as worthy of all respect even when not attended by the result she anticipated. Thus, although she is said to have foretold the coming of the Stuarts in the person of James I. with the uncomplimentary comment that with him:—

From the cold North
Every evil shall come forth.

the British Solon yet placed the greatest reliance upon her prognostications, as did Elizabeth before him. It is even said that his attempts by various pronunciamentos to stay the increase in the size of London were prompted by Mother Shipton's well-known prophecy that:—

When Highgate Hill stands in the midst of London,
Then shall the folk of England be undone.

If it be argued by the sceptical that, although the London boundaries are now considerably beyond Highgate Hill, the country has so far prospered, it is to be remembered that the prophetess gave no date for the undoing of the English people, and that, if we may believe the mournful views taken of our national future by the leaders of whichever political party happens to be out of office, Mother Shipton's reliability is in a fair way of being vindicated within a very few years.

Yet another of her predictions—perhaps the most famous, indeed—may have been verified already in the days of Marlborough, Nelson, or any of several eminent commanders, or may be still in process of fulfilment. It runs as follows:

The time shall come when seas of blood
Shall mingle with a greater flood;
Great noise shall then be heard;
Great shouts and cries
And seas shall thunder louder than the skies;
Then shall three lions fight with three, and bring
Joy to a people, honour to a king.
That fiery year as soon as o'er
Peace shall then be as before;
Plenty shall everywhere be found,
And men with swords shall plough the ground.

The vagueness of this and other prophecies by Mother Shipton, however much they may exasperate the stickler for exactitude, bear witness to her direct descent from the ancient sibyls and pythons, few, if any, of whom ever vouchsafed anything more definite.

Passing by Young Nixon, the dwarf, who, although a prophet scarcely less inferior in fame to Mother Shipton, scarcely falls within the limit of this volume—though it may be noted that one of his best-known prophecies, that he would starve to death, did actually come true—we may next consider the life-history of a witch less legendary than Mother Shipton—the Mother Redcap referred to above as having provided a sign for a Camden Town public house. Her career is detailed with such care in Palmer's "St. Pancras and its History," and at the same time provides so vivid a sketch of the probable career of many another witch, that I may be excused for quoting the extract at length:—

"This singular character, known as Mother Damnable, is also called Mother Redcap and sometimes the Shrew of Kentish Town. Her father's name was Jacob Bingham, by trade a brickmaker, in the neighbourhood of Kentish Town. He enlisted in the army, and went with it to Scotland, where he married a Scotch pedlar's daughter. They had one daughter, this Mother Damnable. This daughter they named Jinney. Her father, on leaving the army, took again to his old trade of brick-making, occasionally travelling with his wife and child as a pedlar. When the girl had reached her sixteenth year, she had a child by one Coulter, who was better known as Gipsy George. This man lived no one knew how, but he was a great trouble to the magistrates. Jinney and Coulter after this lived together, but being brought into trouble for stealing sheep from some lands near Holloway, Coulter was sent to Newgate, tried at the Old Bailey, and hung at Tyburn. Jinney then associated with one Darby, but this union produced a cat and dog life, for Darby was constantly drunk; so Jinney and her mother consulted together; Darby was suddenly missed, and no one knew whither he went. About this time, her parents were carried before the justices for practising the black art, and therewith causing the death of a maiden, for which they were both hung. Jinney then associated herself with one Pitcher, though who or what he was never was known; but after a time his body was found crouched up in the oven, burnt to a cinder. Jinney was tried for the murder, but acquitted because one of her associates proved he had 'often got into the oven to hide himself from her tongue.' Jinney was now a lone woman, for her former companions were afraid of her. She was scarcely ever seen, or if she were it was at nightfall, under the hedges or in the lane; but how she subsisted was a miracle to her neighbours. It happened during the troubles of the Commonwealth that a man, sorely pressed by his pursuers, got into her house by the back-door, and begged on his knees for a night's lodging. He was haggard in his countenance and full of trouble. He offered Jinney money, of which he had plenty, and she gave him a lodging. This man, it is said, lived with her many years, during which time she wanted for nothing, though hard words and sometimes blows were heard from her cottage. The man at length died, and an inquest was held on the body, but, though everyone thought him poisoned, no proof could be found, and so she again escaped harmless. After this Jinney never wanted money, as the cottage she lived in was her own, built on waste land by her father. Years thus passed, Jinney using her foul tongue against everyone, and the rabble in return baiting her as if she were a wild beast. The occasion of this arose principally from Jinney being reputed a practiser of the black art—a very witch. She was resorted to by numbers, as a fortune-teller and healer of strange diseases; and when any mishap occurred, then the old crone was set upon by the mob, and hooted without mercy. The old, ill-favoured creature would at such times lean out of her hatch door, with a grotesque red cap on her head. She had a large broad nose, heavy shaggy eyebrows, sunken eyes, and lank and leathern cheeks; her forehead wrinkled, her mouth wide, and her look sullen and unmoved. On her shoulders was thrown a dark grey striped frieze with black patches, which looked at a distance like flying bats. Suddenly she would let her huge black cat jump upon the hatch by her side, when the mob instantly retreated from a superstitious dread of the double foe."

The extraordinary death of this singular character is given in an old pamphlet. "Hundreds of men, women, and children were witnesses of the devil entering her house, in his very appearance and state, and that although his return was narrowly watched for, he was not seen again; and that Mother Damnable was found dead on the following morning, sitting before the fireplace holding a crutch over it with a teapot full of herbs, drugs, and liquid, part of which being given to the cat, the hair fell off in two hours and the cat soon after died; that the body was stiff when found and that the undertaker was obliged to break her limbs before he could place them in the coffin, and that the justices have put men in possession of the house to examine its contents."

"Such is the history of this strange being whose name will ever be associated with Camden Town, and whose reminiscence will ever be revived by the old wayside house which, built on the site of the old beldame's cottage, wears her head as the sign of the tavern."

Mother Redcap who, to judge from the above account, would have had little cause of complaint had she suffered at the hands of the executioner instead of those of the devil, was more fortunate than many other London witches. Wapping, nowadays, is a sufficiently prosaic spot. In the seventeenth century it was the abode of one Joan Peterson, widely famous as the witch of Wapping. She was hanged at Tyburn in 1652 on evidence such as it must be confessed would nowadays scarcely satisfy even a country J.P. trying a poacher. A black cat had alarmed a woman by entering a house near Joan's abode. The woman consulted a local baker, who replied that "on his conscience he thought it was old Mother Peterson, for he had met her going towards the island a little while before." He clenched the matter when giving evidence at the trial by declaring that although he had never before been frightened by a cat, the sight of this one had terrified him exceedingly. After which no reasonable jury could entertain a doubt of Mother Peterson's guilt. Fifty years before, as recorded in Sinclair's "Satan's Invisible World Displayed," another notorious witch, Mother Jackson by name, was hanged for having bewitched Mary Glover, of Thames Street, and similar cases are common enough to show that the seventeenth-century Londoner was as open to this form of the devil's assaults as he now is to others more subtle. It is true that some professed victims of the black art were proved to be impostors. Thus in 1574, as we learn from Stow, Rachel Pinder and Agnes Briggs did penance at Paul's Cross for having pretended to be diabolically possessed, vomiting pins and so forth, much, no doubt, to the relief of the witch accused of besetting them.

The earliest English witch to attain any individual immortality was she of Berkeley, who differed from most of her successors by being extremely well off. Possibly because of this—for even in the ninth century money had its value—she was accorded Christian burial, and the prayers of the church thereafter. They were not, however, sufficient to ensure her salvation, for under the very nose of the priest the devil carried her body away from where it lay at the foot of the high altar. Although sufficiently historical to have inspired one of Southey's ballads, the Witch of Berkeley is a shadowy figure enough. Another who, seeing that she was acquitted, does not perhaps deserve to be here considered was Gideon, accused of sorcery by Agnes, wife of the merchant Odo, in the tenth year of King John's reign. Although less popular as a legendary figure, Gideon has a definite claim to regard in that her trial is the first to be found in English legal records—the "Abbrevatio Placitorum," quoted by Thomas Wright in his narrative of sorcery and magic. It is satisfactory to know that Gideon, having passed through the ordeal by red-hot iron, was acquitted in due course.

A famous witch was Margery Jourdemain, better known as the Witch of Eye, who gains a reflected halo of respectability in that she was burnt at Smithfield in 1441 as an accomplice of Eleanor of Gloucester, elsewhere referred to. The Duchess of Bedford, charged in 1478 with having bewitched Edward IV. by means of a leaden image "made lyke a man of arms, conteyning the lengthy of a mannes finger, and broken in the myddes and made fast with the wyre," as well as the unhappy Jane Shore, come under the heading of political offenders against whom witchcraft was alleged only as a side issue. More apt to our purpose, in that she was charged with the offence of witchcraft only, and for it condemned to death by Henry VIII., and executed at Tyburn in 1534, was Elizabeth Barton of Aldington, better known as the Fair Maid of Kent. It is true that she was a crazed enthusiast, suffering from a religious mania, rather than a witch, and that she was, further, a pawn in a political intrigue whereby the Catholic party endeavoured to influence the King's matrimonial schemes.

Mother Demdyke, of Pendle Forest, in Lancashire, immortalised by Harrison Ainsworth in "The Lancashire Witches," is elsewhere referred to.

Elizabeth Sawyer, the Witch of Edmonton, though during her life gaining only local fame, yet achieved the posthumous glory of providing Ford and Dekker with the material for a play. In this, indeed, she did but plagiarise Mr. Peter Fabell of the same town, otherwise known as the Merry Devil of Edmonton, who there lived and died in Henry VIII.'s reign, and upon whose pranks was founded the play called after him, and long attributed to no less an author than Shakespeare. But whereas Mr. Fabell was a sorcerer of no mean power, in that he successfully cheated the devil and died in his bed, poor Elizabeth was no more than a common witch, and as such came to the usual end. The manner of her death in 1621 may be found in the chap-book published in that year and entitled, "The Wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, A Witch late of Edmonton: Her Conviction, Condemnation and Death: Together with the relation of the Devil's Accesse to her and their Conference together. Written by Henry Goodcole, Minister of the Word of God, and her Continual Visitor in the Gaol of Newgate."

[CHAPTER VII]

THE WITCH OF ANTIQUITY

Such zealous sixteenth and seventeenth century dogmatists as King James I., the Inquisitor Sprenger, Jean Bodin, or Pierre de Lancre might have found it difficult to put forward satisfactory proof for the cause in which they were briefed had it not been for the fortunate existence of one quite unimpeachable witness—the direct command in the book of Exodus, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Probably no other sentence ever penned has been so destructive to human life or so provocative of human misery; certainly it has provided Saladin with the excuse for his bitter indictment of Christianity as being _par excellence_, as based upon the Old Testament, the religion of witchcraft. To which he adds that Christianity, now grown ashamed of its former belief, seeks to explain it away by the suggestion that the Hebrew word "chasaph" should be translated, not as "witch," but as "poisoner."

It is, of course, as true as it was natural that Christian writers on witchcraft seized eagerly upon definite Biblical authority for the sin they were condemning. Origen, who protests against literal interpretation of the Bible, is inclined to ascribe Biblical witchcraft altogether to the Devil, basing his theory upon the tribulations of Job. But St. Augustine needs no more definite proof for this variety of sin than the Bible denunciation, while Luther and Calvin, in a later age, are equally definite. At the same time, it is to be remembered that the cult of witchcraft would certainly have existed had there been no mention of it in the Bible at all. It is as universal, as ubiquitous, and as enduring as the religious instinct itself; Christianity did not invent the witch, it did but improve upon her. A Biblical text was perhaps the most convincing evidence; failing it, early Christian Fathers or late Inquisitors would have found little difficulty in adducing a substitute. Even as it was, although they quoted the Bible—and in both Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations, witchcraft is recognised and condemned—they also referred with equal zest to the great edifice of tradition and superstition founded upon the struggles after celibacy of the early fathers and their relegation of all pagan rites to the realms of Black Magic.

The Christians, in adopting to their own uses certain pagan rites and beliefs, and regarding all the rest as witchcraft and an abominable sin, were but following the example of their predecessors, the Jews. Throughout the Old Testament Jehovah is proclaimed as the one and only God, despite the backslidings to which the constant reiterations of "Thou shalt have none other gods but Me" would, in the absence of other record, be sufficient witness. The deities of other nations were "false gods" and idols, being regarded by the Jew very much as were witches and sorcerers by the Christian. Again and again he turned from the one and only God to the gods of the heathen, just as the early Christian was wont to help himself out with pagan rites when his new faith failed him, a course of action which of late years shows signs of a reviving popularity. Such being the case, it was as natural that the great Jewish rulers should denounce to the furthest limits of their vocabulary those who, religiously and politically, were undermining a theocratic government, as that a modern Pope should hail the Italian King accursed who seized upon the Patrimony.

The Jews had no national system of magic or witchcraft. Though Abraham migrated to Canaan from Ur of the Chaldees, the God of Abraham was sternly opposed to those beliefs and rites for which the Chaldeans have ever since been famous. These they partly inherited from that earlier Shumiro-Accadian people inhabiting the region between the lower courses of the Tigris and the Euphrates, whose country they invaded some forty centuries B.C. Besides peopling the universe with good and evil spirits, and having knowledge of the arts of writing and of metal-working, the Shumiro-Accadians practised sorcery and magic wherewith to conjure evil spirits, reserving prayers in the more ordinary sense of the word for the beneficent gods. At the coming of the Chaldeans, the old religion was superseded by the worship of the Sun-god Bel, whose priests were the first practising astrologers. Astrology, divination, conjuration, and incantation thus all had their part in the magico-religious practices of the Chaldeans. An elaborate system of demonology provided constant menace to the happiness of the poor Chaldeo-Babylonian, and, very naturally, by degrees he established a counter influence by whose aid to obtain relief from his tormentors. Most potent were the regular magicians, who, with elaborate ritual and ceremony, were able to drive out the demons possessing the worshipper. Such demons were controlled by the use of potions, by the tying of knots wherewith to strangle them, or by such incantations as the following:—

They have used all kinds of charms to entwine me as with ropes,...
But I, by command of Marduk, the lord of charms,
By Marduk the master of bewitchment,
Both the male and the female witch,
As with ropes I will entwine,
As in a cage I will catch,
As with cords I will tie,
As in a net I will overpower,
As in a sling I will twist,
As a fabric I will tear,
With dirty water as from a well I will fill,
As a wall throw them down.

Side by side with the regular magicians was a vast host of sorcerers practising without elaborate ritual, amongst whom witches were greatly in the ascendant. These same Babylonian and Assyrian witches were as efficient as they were unamiable. In contradistinction to the magician, the witch was in league with the demons, and ably assisted them in the infliction of bad dreams, misfortune, disease and death itself. With enthusiasm worthy of a better cause, she tore her victims' hair and clothes, brought about delusions or lasting insanity, destroyed family concord, and aroused hatred between lovers. She was past-mistress in the use of the evil eye, the evil mouth, and the evil tongue, of effigies and magic knots, while her imprecations were the most dreaded of all her practices. Of the witches of Babylon we are told that they haunted the streets and public places, beset wayfarers, and forced their way into houses. Their tongues brought bewitchment, their lips breathed poison, death attended their footsteps. Whether as originators or adaptors they were extremely proficient in that method of enchantment by means of clay, wood, or dough figures, which has continued as among the most familiar of witch-arts until our own times, and they were adepts in the tying of witch-knots. Naturally enough, such practices gained for them the unfriendly attention of the government, but it is perhaps significant of the dread inspired by them that although the law provided for their execution by fire, there is no definite proof that anything other than their effigies was ever actually burnt.

Considering the superstitions amid which their great forefather had been brought up, it was scarcely surprising that the monotheistic ideal peculiar to the Jews should have suffered occasional eclipses. Nor were Chaldean magic and Persian Zoroastrianism alone responsible for the Jewish conception of witchcraft. In time of famine Abraham and his wife went down into Egypt, just as did his descendants, and the Egyptian magician has earned for himself a fame no less enduring than has the Chaldean. Thot, who revealed himself to man as the first magician, was their divine patron—and it is significant that he also first taught mankind the arts of writing and of music, to say nothing of arithmetic, geometry, medicine, and surgery. This divine schoolmaster pointed out in advance days of ill-omen, and, his magical arts making him master of the other gods, provided counteracting remedies. The Egyptian magician interpreted dreams, cured demoniacal possession, and was skilled in casting nativities. In less amiable mood, he could send nightmares, harass with spectres, constrain the wills of men, and cause women to fall victims to infatuations. For the composition of an irresistible charm he required no more than a drop of his subject's blood, some nail-parings, hair, or a scrap of linen from his raiment—to be incorporated in the wax of a doll modelled and clothed to resemble him or her. As with the Babylonian witch and her mediæval successors, anything done to the effigy was suffered by the original. Thot also taught the magicians how to divide the waters, and a pleasant story has been preserved of a fair maiden who dropped a new turquoise ornament from a boat into the river, and, appealing in her distress to an amiable magician, was consoled by finding it, he having divided the waters for her, safe and sound on a potsherd. It is not difficult to trace to a similar origin the Jewish legend of the Red Sea passage.

Isis, another prominent protector of witchcraft, was, in fact, more witch than goddess. An Egyptian formula against disease, dating from about 1700 B.C., commences, "O Isis, mistress of sorceries, deliver me, set me free from all bad, evil (red) things." Red, it may be noted, was the colour of Set, and thus of evil. Woman was, indeed, supposed to possess more completely than man the qualities necessary for the exercise of magic, legitimate or otherwise. She saw and heard that which the eyes and ears of man could not perceive; her voice, being more flexible and piercing, was heard at greater distances. She was by nature mistress of the art of summoning or banishing invisible beings. The "great spouse," or Queen, of Pharaoh attained, upon her accession to such rank, magical powers above the ordinary. In this connection we find another conception of the witch in the sequel to the loss of Pharaoh's army in the Red Sea. The women and slaves of the drowned warriors, fearing aggressions from the Kings of Syria and the West, elected as their queen one Dalūkah, a woman wise, prudent, and skilled in magic. She collected all the secrets of Nature in the temples and performed her sorceries at the moment when the celestial bodies were most likely to be amenable to a higher power. Whenever an army set out from Arabia or Assyria for the invasion of Egypt, the Witch-Queen made effigies of soldiers and animals corresponding in numbers to its strength, as ascertained by her spies. These she caused to disappear beneath the ground—a fate which thereupon befell the invaders also.

The Egyptians were very learned in the concoction of love-charms, spells, and philtres, a branch of their profession which we may suppose to have appealed more to the witch than to the magician. On at least one occasion a witch gained a notable victory over a male competitor in this direction, for it is recorded that Prince Setnau, familiar from his birth with all the magical arts, was yet bewitched by a very beautiful woman named Tabubu—an occurrence which, if not altogether unique in history, vouches for the potency of the lady's charms.

The use of love-philtres was common among the Jewish women, and it is probable that, with other magical operations, they borrowed it from the Egyptians. Nevertheless, Jewish references to Egyptian magic are somewhat scornful. Thus, in the divination of Pharaoh's dreams, a Jew triumphs over the best efforts of the Court magicians. When the Egyptian sorcerers cast down their rods in emulation of the magic powers exercised by Aaron, their rods changed into serpents as readily as did his. But his superiority was made manifest by the fact that his serpent devoured all the rest. So, too, Nebuchadnezzar, in his own realm, found Daniel and his three friends more than able to hold their own against the local magicians and astrologers.

The Jew, then, was no less apt in magic than were his contemporaries. Where it differed was that it was only legitimate when practised in the name and for the service of the God of Abraham, any attempt towards making use of alien rites or deities being sternly repressed.

The Babylonian captivity served to strengthen and extend the full-blooded belief in a comprehensive system of demons already inherited by the Hebrews. They recognised two varieties of evil spirits—the fallen angels and those who were but semi-supernatural. These latter were again divided into the offspring of Eve by certain male spirits and those descended from Adam by Lilith, the first really Jewish witch. Nor were the Jews slow to test the benevolence of such beings whenever the severity of Jehovah proved irksome. Saul banished from the land all wizards and those who had familiar spirits. Nevertheless, being on one occasion afraid of the Philistines, and unable to obtain favourable assurances from Jehovah either by dreams, by Urim, or by the prophets, he disguised himself and came by night to the witch of Endor. The apparition of Samuel has given rise to much speculation. Wierus, an enlightened sixteenth century writer, though a firm believer in witchcraft withal, holds that the Devil himself took the form of Samuel for the occasion. But Wierus is essentially humane, and his contemporaries held much less charitable views of the women they regarded as servants of Satan.

Although the idea of a personal Devil was familiar to the Jews—as, for instance, in his trial of strength with Jehovah for the allegiance of Job—we find no mention of his having entered into compacts with witches as in later times. On the other hand, they had dealings with familiar spirits, and, as was natural in a nation distinguished by its genius for prophecy, they excelled in divination. The early law is very severe on the subject. The law-abiding Jew might, indeed, attempt to unravel the future so long as he confined his investigations to legitimate channels. These included dreams, prophecies, and Urim and Thummim, two stones carried in the pocket of the High Priest's ephod, engraved with an affirmative and a negative respectively, one of which being taken out, the message upon the other represented the Divine will. All these, being in connection with the service of Jehovah, were permissible. On the other hand, we read in Leviticus that "a man also or a woman that hath a familiar spirit or that is a wizard shall surely be put to death. They shall stone them with stones." And again, "Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards to be defiled by them." Saul died not only for transgressing "against the word of the Lord, which he kept not," but also for asking counsel of "one that had a familiar spirit, to enquire of it." His further sin would seem to have been that in his perplexity "he enquired not of the Lord."

Manasseh (about the eighth century) incurred condemnation because "he made his children to pass through the fire," practised augury and sorcery, used enchantments, "and dealt with them that had familiar spirits and with wizards." Nor was it until the Lord punished him by causing him to be carried captive to Babylon that he humbled himself and "knew that the Lord He was God." Regarded as a preventative, this form of punishment is curious enough, seeing that the daughters of Babylon are vehemently accused of the very crime for which Manasseh was sent among them. Isaiah says, in no doubtful terms, that "the daughters of Babylon are to be punished for the multitude of sorceries and enchantments with which they have laboured from their youth." And throughout Jewish history the influence of these Babylonian witches is noticeable.

Love-magic was practised in Israel almost entirely by women, and many of the Jewish feminine ornaments were amatorial charms. Indeed, the demand for charms of all kinds was as great among the monotheistic Hebrews as their neighbours. To quote one example out of many, a charm very popular with Jewish mothers against Lilith, the witch of darkness, much feared by women in travail as having an evil propensity for stealing new-born babes, was to write upon the walls the names of three angels, Senoi, Sensenoi, and Semangelof.

Despite the wide sway of the evil and the severity of the laws against it, spasmodically enforced by several of the kings, as Saul and Hezekiah, there are no definite records of witch-persecutions comparable to those of mediæval Christianity until the reign of King Alexander Jannai, in the first century B.C. Between 79 and 70 B.C. Simon ben Schetach caused eighty witches to be hanged. After the birth of Christ but a few instances are recorded, although the Apostle of the Gentiles waged war against witchcraft with considerable energy. Thus by virtue of his superior powers he brought about the blindness of Elymas, the sorcerer who practised in the island of Paphos. At this early date a distinction was made between the witch active and those involuntarily possessed of evil spirits, a distinction too fine to be regarded by the mediæval Inquisitor. Thus the maid "having a spirit of divination" was not held criminally responsible for her powers. Her soothsaying brought her little or no personal gain, and, far from committing voluntarily "the abominable sinne of witchcraft," she was dominated by a spirit, subsequently cast out by Saint Paul by means less drastic than might have been the case fifteen centuries later.

It is, at first sight, surprising that the Chaldean, Egyptian, or Jewish witch should have conformed so closely to the type familiarised by the witch-mania of the Middle Ages. If we remember, however, how great a proportion of Christian superstitions are directly descended from Hebrew practices, and how eagerly those who made it their life-work to harry old women in the name of the Lord sought Biblical precedent, this persistence in type becomes natural enough, unique though it be. The conception of the Power who guides the universe must vary according to human conceptions of what composes that universe, but so long as we are afraid of the dark the foundations upon which we build our manifestations of evil need vary little.

[CHAPTER VIII]

THE WITCH IN GREECE AND ROME

Although the Christian witch was the direct descendant of the Jewish, there were yet other branches of her family tree not without their influence upon her final development. Chief among them were the great witch families of Greece and Rome, the one being in some sense a development of the other and through it inheriting more than a trace of Persian blood.

It is a natural feature of anthropomorphic religion that from a few representatives of the more important phases of human existence the gods and goddesses tend to increase, until there is hardly a department of human activity without its presiding deity. As there are kings and queens among men, so there will be sovereigns among the gods. The divine king will have his officers, servants and warriors just as do those earthly kings who worship him. The personal appearance of the god differs from that of the man only in degree, his connection with his worshippers is almost undignified in the closeness of his intimacy. He suffers the same passions, commits the same crimes, occasionally aspires to the same virtues; he is, in a word, man in all but name and divine only in his humanity.

Among no people was this tendency more highly and minutely developed than among the Greeks. Not only did their deities adapt themselves to every phase of human life; the famous altar to "the Unknown God," attests the limitless potentialities of the Greek Pantheon. Were all other records destroyed we could exactly reconstruct Grecian life and feeling from the doings of the Grecian gods; we may expect to find accordingly such a phase of belief as witchcraft accurately mirrored in Grecian mythology. And, accordingly, the witch proves to have her definite niche in the Greek Pantheon. Naturally also, she did not rank among the greater goddesses. On the one hand she may be looked for as the degenerate form of a goddess; on the other she corresponds nearly enough to the heroic demigods in whose veins royal blood mingled with divine ichor.

To the first category belongs the dire and dreadful form of Hecate. Originally an ancient Thracian divinity, she by degrees assumed the attributes of many, Atis, Cybele, Isis, and others. As the personification of the moon, whose rays serve but to increase the mystery of night, she was the patroness of all witches, and was invoked on all their most baleful undertakings. Gradually she grew into the spectral originator of all those horrors with which darkness affects the imagination. Hecate it was who first cast spells and became learned in enchantments; Hecate who at the approach of night loosed demons and phantoms from the lower shades. Did you, hastening through the twilight, meet with a formless monster, hoofed like an ass and radiating a stench incomparably foul, you might recognise the handiwork of Hecate—designed, perhaps, to punish you for having neglected to offer on her altars your accustomed sacrifice of dogs, or honey, or black lambs, or to set out her monthly offering of food—perhaps only in wanton exercise of her mysterious power. Did the mournful baying of your kennelled hounds lend point to the gloomy solitude of night, you might know that Hecate was abroad upon the earth somewhere at hand, with dead souls to form her retinue. Must you pass the cross-roads, or visit the place of tombs, hasten, and especially beware the spot where the blood of murdered persons has been spilt, for all such places are Hecate's chosen haunts. In the gloom and darkness she did her grisly work, now brewing philtres, now potions, with reptiles, human flesh or blood of man or beast that had died dreadful deaths for her ingredients.

The rites of Hecate worship varied in different parts of Greece; she plays a leading part in the Orphic poems, and when the old religion began to be submerged beneath foreign elements, she yet held her own and was even invoked by strangers. Her statues were erected before the houses and at the cross-roads in Athens, and such Hecatea were consulted as oracles. Her personal appearance was the reverse of attractive. She had either three bodies or three heads, according to time and circumstance, one being of a horse, the second of a dog, the third of a lion. Although usual, this habit of body was not constant, her magic arts allowing her to take whatever form she chose as freely as could her fellow divinities. But however she appeared she was invariably hideous. Nevertheless, there seem to have been those among her votaries bold enough to desire personal interviews with her, and for their benefit she provided a formula of her own composition and of such power that she was constrained to obey the citation of those availing themselves of it. It may be quoted for the benefit of those readers who desire her closer acquaintance. Make a wooden statue of the root of the wild rue, well-polished, and anoint it with the bodies of little common lizards crushed into a paste with myrrh, storax, and incense. Leave it in the open air during the waxing of the moon, and then (presumably at full moon) speak as follows:— "Come, infernal, terrestrial and celestial Bombo, goddess of the highways and the cross-ways, enemy of the light who walkest abroad at night, friend and companion of the night, thou who delightest in the barking of dogs and in the shedding of blood, who wanderest amongst the shades and about the tombs, thou who desirest blood and who bringest terror unto mortals—Gorgo, Mormo, moon of a thousand forms, cast a propitious eye upon our sacrifices." Then take as many lizards as Hecate has forms and fail not to make a grove of laurel boughs, the laurels having grown wild. Then, having addressed fervent prayers to the image, you will see her.

Hecate, who became the mother of Scylla, and, according to some accounts also of Medea and of Circe, was arch-mistress of the knowledge of herbs and simples, more especially of poisons. She is almost more typical of the later developments of the witch than of those of her own times. Hag-like and horrible, she worked only for evil, inspiring her votaries with that terror which she herself personified. Goddess though she be, she provides a poignant illustration of one characteristic of the Greek Pantheon which it shares with no other. Its gods and goddesses are always a little more human than their votaries, more prone to human weaknesses if not to human virtues. Thus Hecate shows herself more horrible and terror-breeding than any of those who did their best to model themselves upon her. Just as Mars represented the soldier, carried to his logical conclusion, so Hecate represents the witch conception carried to its furthest limits—the concentrated essence of witchcraft.

To the class of semi-divine witches belong those of Thessaly, as well as Medea and Circe, the putative daughters of Hecate, from whom they learned their magic arts. Circe was assisted by four attendant witches, who gathered for her the herbs wherewith she might brew such potions as turned the companions of Ulysses into swine. The influence of Medea was, on the whole, more benign. She cured Hercules of madness, and taught the Marubians the decidedly useful accomplishment of fascinating and subduing venomous serpents. Not that her knowledge of ointments, poisonous and otherwise, was in any way inferior to that of her sister. Euripides represents her as invoked in terms almost identical with those already quoted in connection with Hecate. The love-sick maiden, Simaetha, in the second Idyll of Theocritus, appeals to Hecate to "make this medicine of mine no less potent than the spells of Circe, or of Medea, or of Perimede of the golden hair."

Equally skilled in poison were the witches of Thessaly, who could, moreover, draw down the moon out of the sky by their magic songs and philtres. If less awful than Hecate, their proceedings inspired equally little confidence. They were addicted, for example, to such practices as tearing off with their teeth flesh from the faces of the dead, for the concoction of their spells. To prevent this early variant of body snatching, dead bodies had to be watched by night. To circumvent the watchers, the witches, as we learn from Apuleius, took the form of dogs, mice, or flies, so that the guardians of the dead must look neither to the right nor to the left, nor even wink while on duty.

Nor were such grisly exploits confined to Thessaly, for in Syria, as Marcassus tells us, troops of witches haunted the battle-field during the night, devouring the bodies of the slain. During the day they took the shape of wolves or hyenas, thus providing a link with the more common phases of lycanthropy. These same witches were definitely human beings, as distinct from spirits, and it was comparatively easy for anyone who so wished, and could obtain the necessary recipe, to follow their example. Such magic salves were usually composed of narcotics, among them being aconite, belladonna, opium, and hyoscyamus, boiled down with the fat of a little child, murdered for the purpose, and with the blood of a bat added. They needed careful and expert usage, however, lest such a mischance might befall as occurred to "the Golden Ass," who, seeking to become an owl, found himself to be no more than a donkey.

While the Thessalian witches paid more attention to the toxicological aspect of Hecate's teaching, the pythons exploited one no less important—the prediction of events to come. Every prudent Greek consulted the oracle at Delphi, before undertaking anything of importance—the oracle displaying equal prudence in the non-committal vagueness of her replies. Theseus, who, on the death of his father, wished to introduce a new form of Government in Athens, sought advice thereon, and received as his answer:—

Son of the Pitthean maid,
To your town the terms and fates
My father gives of many states.
Be not anxious or afraid,
The bladder will not fail to swim
On the waves that compass him.

To Philip of Macedon, again, the utterance of the Pythian priestess ran:—

The Battle on Thermodon that shall be
Safe at a distance I desire to see.
Far like an eagle watching in the air,
Conquered shall weep, and conqueror perish there.

That even oracles were—and perhaps are—open to human influence may be deduced from Demosthenes' irreverent suggestion that the prophetess had been tampered with in Philip's favour.

The manner of delivering an oracle doubtless gave a ritualistic example to the witches of later ages, and, as such, may be quoted. After the offering of certain sacrifices, the priestess took her seat on a tripod placed over a fissure in the ground at the centre of the temple. From this came forth an intoxicating gas which, when she breathed it, caused her to utter wild, whirling words. These were interpreted by the attendant priest and by him handed to the applicant, having been first written down in hexameters by an official poet. Divination in Greece thus owed as much to the witch as to the goddess, and it should be noted that, in the case of the Delphic oracle at any rate, the priest acted as go-between, the Pythia being only an item of the oracular machinery.

The Persian wars brought new influences to bear upon Greek religion in general and witchcraft in particular. With Darius and Xerxes came the magic practised by the followers of Zoroaster. Pliny has it that Xerxes was accompanied by Osthanes, a writer on magic, and this statement, whether or no correct in itself, expresses a general truth. Later, after the Greek irruptions into Persia and Assyria, the Chaldeans effected a peaceful occupation of Greece to such effect that "Chaldean" came to be synonymous with doctor, magician, or sorcerer. Like those of their descendants whose advertisements make the fortunes of our newspaper proprietors to-day, they cured sufferers from incurable diseases, provided, for a small fee, infallible recipes for making money quickly, and acted as mediators between heaven and such offenders as could not approach it through the regular channels with any hope of success. Naturally, also, they did not neglect such a popular "line" as prophecy, sometimes for distinguished clients, as, for example, the father of Euripides, who is said to have consulted a Chaldean as to his son's destiny. In a word, they took the place of quack-doctors, palmists, "get-rich-quickly" colleges, and the various other practitioners in allied branches of swindling, whose operations to-day are generally hailed as remarkable instances of American "cuteness" and originality.

That the Greek witch of the older school should be powerfully influenced by such innovators was natural enough, the more so that in Chaldea women took a foremost part in practising the more evil kinds of magic. Accordingly, we may accept the date of the Persian Wars as that in which commenced a change in the whole character of Grecian witchcraft. The witch became less terrible in that she was less spiritual, but more pernicious in that she dabbled more with material evil. Hecate was a sufficiently awesome figure, but her terrors were more or less impartial in their scope, and might affect one man as well as another, did he happen to come into contact with them. The witch of later times concentrated her malignancy upon a particular object, and thus became the apt instrument of private vengeance and a force definitely detrimental to social weal.

Yet another powerful influence upon Greek magic was exerted by Egypt. Witchcraft and astrology after the Egyptian method were held in as high respect as were those of the Chaldean convention, and Nectanebus, the last native King of Egypt (about 350 B.C.), was acknowledged in Hellas as the most redoubtable of the magicians. He was an adept in the use of waxen images, and among those to whom he sent dreams was Philip of Macedon.

Thus with the gradual rise of astrology in Greece and the decay of the old religion a state of things arose very similar to what is even now taking place—the nations of the East coming under the influence of Grecian culture, and in return providing her with new cults and crazes, one more fantastic than the other, but all seized upon with equal avidity by the hungry Hellenic intellect, craving always for some new thing. From comparatively simple beginnings Greek witchcraft added always to its complexity until it included everything popularly associated with the name, including a full understanding of hallucinations, dreams, demoniacal possession, exorcism, and divination, the use of wax images and useful poisons, mostly from Eastern sources, and with them a very nice understanding of philtres. A good example of a love charm is to be found in Theocritus, writing in the first decades of the third century B.C. Among the charms of which the heroine of his idyll avails herself to bring about the return of her faithless lover are laurel-leaves, bright red wool, and witch-knots—this last a distinctively Babylonian practice. The charm has a recurrent refrain of "My magic wheel, bring back to me the man I love." Barley grains must then be scattered in the fire while the following spell is intoned:—

'Tis the bones of Delphis (or another) I am scattering.

Delphis troubled me, and I against Delphis am burning this laurel. Even as it crackles loudly, when it has caught the flame, and suddenly is burned up, and we see not even the dust thereof, lo! even thus may the flesh of Delphis waste in the burning.

Even as I melt this wax, with the god to aid, so speedily may he by love be molten.

Three times do I pour libations, and thrice my Lady Moon, I speak this spell. Be it with a friend he lingers, be it with a leman that he lies, may he as clean forget them as Theseus of old did utterly forget the fair-tressed Ariadne.

Coltsfoot is an Arcadian weed that maddens on the hills the young stallions and fleet-footed mares: Ah, even as these may I see Delphis.

This fringe from his cloak Delphis has lost, that now I shred and cast into the flame....

Lo, I will crush an eft, and a venomous draught to-morrow I will bring thee.

But now, Thestylis, take these magic herbs and secretly smear the juice on the jambs of his gate-and spit and whisper, 'Tis the bones of Delphis that I smear.

When first I saw Delphis I fell sick of love, and consulted every wizard and every crone, &c., &c.

Here, then, we have a detailed account of practices identical with those such as subsequently became the object of fierce persecutions—the use of effigies, of magic herbs, the burning of some substance while calling the name of the person to be influenced, the using of a fragment of his personal belongings to his detriment, the consulting with "crones" for the satisfaction of love-cravings. It was, however, too closely related to religion for there to be any continuous expression of unfavourable public opinion. At the same time, laws existed against it, subsequently to find an echo in Roman legislation. Theoris, "the Lemnian woman," as Demosthenes calls her, was publicly tried in Athens and burned as a witch. Demoniacal possession and exorcism were believed in at least as early as 330 B.C., in which year Demosthenes refers to them in an oration. His feeling towards the practice of exorcism may be deduced from his reproaching Æschinus as being the son of a woman who gained her living as an exorcist. Plato, in the Laws, decrees:—"If any by bindings-down or allurements or incantations or any such-like poisonings whatever appear to be like one doing an injury, if he be a diviner or interpreter of miracles, let him be put to death."

But despite such minor inconveniences, the Greek witch had little to fear in the way of persecutions, so that her mediæval successors might well have looked back to the days of ancient Hellas as their Golden Age, alike spiritually and materially.

If the Greeks, who recognised no predecessors in the possession of their country, yet imported so much of their witchcraft from abroad, it is little to be wondered at that the Romans, by their own account foreign settlers in Italy, should have done so. Unlike those of Greece, Roman legends provide a definite beginning for Rome itself. The city was founded by a foreigner. What more likely than that he should bring with him the customs, cults, and superstitions of his own country.

Granting that the pious Æneas ever existed, we may also suppose that he was responsible for the Roman tendency in things magical. Of Greek magic he would have learned enough—and to spare—in the long ten years' warring on the plains of Ilium. From Dido also he might well have learned something. Virgil himself was by popular report familiar with all the laws of witchcraft, and Virgil tells us of Dido's acquaintance, if not with witchcraft, at least with a witch of unquestioned eminence. Half-priestess, half-enchantress, she could cause rivers to run backwards, to say nothing of knowing the most secret thoughts of men. Certainly if Æneas wished to introduce a reliable system of witchcraft into his adopted country, he could have gone to no better instructress.

As in Greece, so in Rome, the personal character of the witch was identical in some respects with that of the goddess, so as to be frequently indistinguishable. Egeria, the friend and counsellor of Numa, was the first witch altogether worthy of the name. The Vestal Virgins were also possessed of certain magical powers. An old French authority disposes of them summarily as thorough-going servants of Satan, his zeal outrunning his sense of chronological fitness. He adds that when Tuscia was accused of having broken her vow of chastity, Satan assisted her to prove her innocence by carrying water in a sieve—an expedient which would have certainly caused her to be burnt two thousand years later.

Like the pythoness of Greece, the Roman sibyl was priestess as well as witch. The existence of the famous Sibylline books presupposes culture above the ordinary; she was also a student of medicine, and, in later times, more particularly of poisons. This latter art became in time a fashionable craze, as we may gather from the many laws enacted against poisoners, and Livy, in common with many other male writers, believes that poisoning and superstition alike originated with women. He also, descending to particulars, relates how Publicia and Licinia divorced their husbands expeditiously by poison, two instances out of many quoted by Latin writers.

In the comprehensive provisions of the Laws of the Twelve Tables drawn up by the Duumvirs in the fifth century B.C., witchcraft is not overlooked.

He shall be punished who enchants the corn;
Do not charm the corn of others;
Do not enchant,

are among some of its injunctions.

Roman morality being enforced upon social rather than religious grounds, witchcraft was forbidden only in so far as it was considered a pernicious influence within the State. Even in later times, when various kinds of magic were prohibited, magical rites for curing diseases and protecting the harvest from hail, snow, or tempest were not only allowed, but even encouraged. The Lex Cornelia de Sicariis et Veneficis provided against offering sacrifice in order to injure a neighbour. The maleficent sorcerer could be burned alive, and those who consulted him or her were liable to crucifixion. The possession of magical books was made criminal, and the administration of love-philtres was punishable by labour in the mines, or, in the case of persons of rank, by a fine. This contrasts with the earlier laws, which were interpreted in a far more liberal spirit and only enforced in extreme cases.

Already in the early days of the Laws of the Twelve Tables, Greek influence on Roman witchcraft was noticeable—it increased in proportion as Greek thought extended its sway over the Roman mind. By way of Greece also, as well as through independent channels, Oriental magic found its way to Rome, where the wisdom of the Egyptians was held in as high regard as in Greece itself. By the time of Marius, when the Romans had come into direct relations with the East, Chaldeans, sacrificers and interpreters of the Sibylline books positively swarmed in the city, while the use of love-philtres and waxen images was become among the commonplaces of every-day life.

How early Diana, whose close connection with the moon places her on a par with Hecate, came to be regarded as queen of the witches may be doubted; later Italian legends and customs are unanimous in according her that questionable honour. That must at least be a late conception which regards her as a constant visitor to the Witches' Sabbath, along with her daughter Herodias! Many such legends are still current in Tuscany, where, in common with other parts of Italy and Europe, Diana was worshipped long after Christianity was nominally supreme. The Italian "strege" are the direct descendants of the Latin "striges," who took their name from a bird of ill-omen that flies by night, the screech-owl, and witchcraft is still known to its votaries as "la vecchia religione," while actual belief in the old gods still survives in one form or other in many parts of the Peninsula.

It may here be noted that Herodias' father is sometimes said to have been no other than Lucifer. She also appears under the name of Aradia. Diana sends her to sojourn for a time on earth:—

Thou must go to earth below
To be a teacher unto women and men
Who would fain study witchcraft.
And thou shalt be the first of witches,
And thou shalt teach the art of poisoning,
And thou shalt teach how to ruin the crops of a rich peasant.
How to be revenged upon a priest.
Double the harm and do it in the name of Diana,
Queen of Witches all.

And Aradia taught mortals:—

To bless or curse with power friends or foes,
To converse with spirits,
To find hidden treasure in ancient ruins,
To conjure the spirits of priests who died leaving treasure,
To understand the voice of the wind,
To change water into wine,
To divine with cards,
To show the secrets of the hand,
To cure diseases,
To make the ugly beautiful,
To tame wild beasts.

Little cakes of meal, salt, honey and water are still made in the shape of Diana's horned moon, and are baked after an incantation to the goddess.

There are, of course, earlier indications than these of Diana's patronage of witchcraft. Thus Horace, in his Ode to Canidia, written in the first century B.C., puts these words into the mouth of Canidia, the witch:—

Oh, night and Dian who with true
And friendly eyes my purpose view,
And guardian silence keep whilst I
My secret orgies safely ply,
Assist me now, now on my foes
With all your wrath celestial close.

In the same ode Horace details many witch-customs, which serve to mirror the witch superstitions of the time:—

Canidia with dishevelled hair,
And short crisp vipers coiling there
Beside a fire of Colchos stands
And her attendant hags commands.

For her fire she makes use of fig-trees torn from dead men's sepulchres, cypress, eggs rubbed over with the envenomed gore of "filthy toads," screech-owl's plumes, evil herbs, and fleshless bones snatched by a witch from the jaws of starving dogs. The smell from such cookery must have been deadly enough in itself to kill any number of victims, even though it does not altogether explain why she bites her long, sharp, unpared thumb-nail while brewing her deadly potion.

However universal in its appeal, love was by no means the only disease for which witchcraft provided its remedy. According to Cato, for example, dislocation of a joint could be cured by the utterance of the following charm:—

Motas, danata, daries, dardaries, astataries.

To which Pliny adds that it must be used in conjunction with split reeds, a prudent suggestion enough. From him also we may learn particulars of other charms in common use. Love-philtres were composed of wild parsnip or mandrake, while the external application of asses' fat mixed with gander grease was a means of making certainty more sure. Amateur gardeners with a taste for early rising may be interested to know of a cure for the caterpillar pest:—A woman (presumably the gardener's wife) is to walk at a particular season round the tree affected before sunrise, ungirt and barefoot. And so on, a remedy being provided for all the ills that flesh is heir to.

The Emperors held widely divergent views on the matter of witchcraft. Augustus, realising its hold upon the popular imagination, collected the verses of the sibyls from Samos, Troy, Africa, and elsewhere, and ordered them to be submitted to the prefects of the city, there to be judged and reported on by fifteen very learned men. During the latter days of Pagan Rome there was a marked revival of witchcraft, Marcus Aurelius and Julian setting the example by their patronage. The earlier Christian Emperors revived the old laws against it, but diverted them to attack the old religion. The secret magic condemned by the Duumvirs was by them extended to cover the whole system of paganism. Almost immediately after his conversion Constantine decreed that any haruspex (diviner) entering a citizen's house with the intention of celebrating his rites should be burned alive, while the property of his employer should be confiscated and his accuser rewarded. The Emperor showed that he was in earnest by ordering the execution of one of his favourites for having caused bad weather and prevented his corn-traffic with Constantinople. It was, nevertheless, declared some two years later that the Emperor had no desire to prohibit such magical rites as cured disease or prevented bad weather. In the reign of his successor, Constantius, any person accused of witchcraft was liable to be put to torture. Proven sorcerers were ordered to be thrown to wild beasts or crucified, while, if they persisted in denying their offence, their flesh was to be torn from their bones with iron hooks. This edict also differentiated between Black and White Magic; magic charms being permitted as remedies for drought, disease, storms, and the like.

Julian the Apostate, perhaps not unnaturally, regarded sorcery with a more favourable eye, but later emperors showed themselves always more inimical. Valentian added impious prayers and midnight sacrifices to the list of things forbidden; under Theodosius every detail of pagan worship was included under the heading of magic, and as such rigorously forbidden. In the reign of Honorius, the Sibylline verses collected by Augustus were suppressed. The Codex Justinianus devotes a whole title to witchcraft.

The history of the Roman witch is thus prophetic of that of her Christian successor. So long as she was subject to the civil power alone she suffered little interference from the State, but as soon as she aroused the jealous attention of the more orthodox interpreters of the supernatural, her doom was sealed. We are apt to boast great things of the increase of knowledge in our time, and to instance the decay of superstition in evidence, but, were a sudden religious revival to take place at all comparable to the birth-throes of early Christianity or the Reformation, it is doubtful whether we should not find a belief in the wicked prowess of the witch revive along with it, and possibly our spiritual pastors and masters among the first to attack it with temporal weapons. It is difficult to see how they could logically refrain.

[CHAPTER IX]

FROM PAGANISM TO CHRISTIANITY

Seeing that it affects ourselves so considerably, we are in the habit of proclaiming the introduction of Christianity as the greatest revolution in history—a claim which will be more capable of demonstration when a few more thousand years have passed, and a few more religions have waxed and waned. At least, the mind of the cultured "Christian" of to-day varies little in its outlook—save in so far as it is affected by modern material discoveries—from that of the cultured "Pagan" of Imperial Rome, much less, indeed, than do either of them from the earnest Early Christian. The ovine tendency of human nature makes it inevitable that a few sincere believers—whatever their belief—will always attain a comet-like tail of followers, hypnotised by their earnestness, and themselves understanding very little about it. However it may have been with the small band of early Christians—whose belief was given reality by their sufferings in its cause—one may be sure that the ideas of the sixth century Christian in the village street upon Heaven, Hell, and their denizens, differed only in the change of a few names, and the addition of some intolerance from those of his pagan ancestor six centuries before. His spiritual advisers bade him worship the names of Christ, St. John, and St. Peter, in place of Apollo, Mercury, or Mars, and he, troubling his head about very little but his means of daily livelihood, accepted the change without demur. Meanwhile his mind—such as it was—worked along its old lines. As in all great religious movements, we find no sudden or violent change—except, of course, in individual cases—the older ideas were abandoned, in name, though only very slowly, and the change from Diana to Christ, so far as it affected the great bulk of worshippers, was mentally imperceptible.

There were many Christians before Christ, just as there were many pagans after the death of Paganism. For centuries the new ideas, afterwards called Christian, had been fermenting in the minds of thoughtful pagans. The spirit of the age called for their crystallisation in a leader and the call of the West again received its answer from the East. But just as Naaman, a believer in the God of Israel, was yet permitted to bow down in the house of Rimmon—or as the theory and practice of modern Socialism are time after time directly contrary—so, save for martyrs and enthusiasts—the Tolstoys of their age—the general public accepted Christianity as filling up awkward gaps in their earlier beliefs rather than as superseding them altogether.

Roman witchcraft—continually reinforced from the Orient—grew in importance as faith in the greater gods decreased. Frowned upon by the police, as being contrary to public order, it was thus liable to be confounded with Christianity—which was forbidden on similar grounds—both alike being practised in secret and penalised if brought too prominently into public notice. Christianity, as being the more aggressive, was more severely repressed—and was accordingly destined to more success. And it was reserved for the successful Christian to prove upon his former companions in misfortune the utter uselessness of persecution. Just as we may thank the pagan persecutor that we now live in the Christian era, so the mediæval—and modern—witch owed much of her existence to the persevering efforts of the early Christian towards the suppression of witchcraft and the witch. It was natural—and indeed praiseworthy—that the prominent features of paganism should be relegated to the realms of darkness by the successors to the pagan empire—the god of one religion inevitably becomes the devil of its supplanter. But whereas it was easy enough to lump together satyr, faun, centaur and siren, as varieties of demon, the witch was on a different footing. She really existed, for one thing—in so far as that she was of flesh and blood at any rate—and she exercised more personal functions than any number of divinities. Everyone was ready to acclaim reforms which did not interfere with his own comfort—and the witch was a fireside necessity. She was family doctor, lawyer, and spiritual director—and payer-off of your old scores to boot—a factor in your life the loss of which could be compensated by no amount of religion. Also she stood for tradition, "the good old times," the respectability of unchanging conservatism. Christianity—novel and iconoclastic—might make head among the inconstant townsfolk, always ready for some new thing; the provinces, the village, the lonely farmhouse or the fishing hamlet clung tenaciously to what had been good enough for their grandfathers—as, indeed, they have been doing ever since.

Nevertheless, from the great cities the creed of Christ spread slowly to the villages—suffering many modifications before it reached them. Delivered straight from the lips of a Church father, Christian doctrine might be rigid and direct enough. Passed from mouth to mouth, ignorant, or understanding, they might reach the distant flock so diluted as to have opportunity for compromise with time-honoured precedent—and what more so than witchcraft. You might—if you were an open-minded husbandman—conceive that you had been mistaken in seeing fauns dancing where the sunlight glinted down through tossing leaves, or in hearing the voices of nymphs in the chattering of a brook; but a witch—whom you could see, touch, hear, who had cured your toothache and revenged you on your dishonest neighbour—she took a great deal of explaining away. Wicked she might be, getting her power from unholy compact with the Evil One—burn, slay, persecute her by all means—if it would please Heaven—but to disbelieve in her altogether, that were asking too much of a plain man. How, indeed, could you expect it of him when the very Emperors proved by their edicts the openness of their minds. A Marcus Aurelius not only studied magic, but persecuted Christians—slaying, among others, the venerable Polycarp. An Augustus might feel called upon to take police measures against witches; an Aurelian rebuked the Senate for not consulting the Sibylline books when the barbarians threatened the gates of Rome. "One might imagine," he said, "that we were assembled in a Christian church, rather than in the temple of all the gods." Where an Elagabalus renewed old superstitions and introduced yet others, a Constantine executed his favourite for seeking to influence the weather.

The personal predilections of the Emperors did but reflect the many and involved influences at work during the first four centuries after Christ. Apart from the enduring influx of Eastern practices and superstitions, Neo-Platonism was responsible for the revival of belief in the supernatural as apart from the divine. The Alexandrian school, discarding the old systems of philosophy, converted its study into that of magic. The barbarians, again, were everywhere astir. The long warrings between Rome and the Germans culminated in the 9th year of the new era when the German Herman by his great victory over Varus brought about the eventual liberation of his country. In 259 A.D. the Emperor Gallienus married a barbarian princess and before the close of the third century A.D. the Empire had become largely "barbarised" by the Goths and Vandals who did it military service, and who, incidentally, served to bolster up paganism and to introduce new features into it. The Teutonic witch met her Roman sister, and introduced her to darker, grimmer, and more vigorous conceptions of her art. The dreadful pestilence which, in the third century, ravaged the Empire gave a new popularity to the black arts, and the Roman witch was never more sought after than in the years preceding the last and most violent persecution of the Christians at the hands of Diocletian.

Persecuted or petted, the witch was never able to progress in the good opinion of the Christian, whose protest against her existence was steady and constant whatever his own fate or condition. As soon as the last of his own persecutors had laid aside the sword, he at once seized it and set to harassing the witch with a deserving vigour which has never altogether relaxed.

Whereas the pagan had chastised the witch with rods for injuring man, the Christian set about her with scorpions as an enemy of God. Nor was the exalted testimony of the Fathers lacking to inspire his energies. Tertullian, in the second century, declared the world to be over-run with evil spirits, including among them all heathen gods, whether amiable or the reverse, from Hebe to Hecate. Origen, in his third book on Job, mentions that enchantments are sometimes of the devil. Saint Augustine, in "De Civitate Dei," has no doubt that demons and evil spirits have connection with women. The earliest ecclesiastical decree bearing on the subject is that of Ancyra, in 315 A.D., by which soothsayers are condemned to five years' penance. In 525 the Council of Auxerre prohibited all resort to soothsayers. Witchcraft, which thus took upon its shoulders all the enormities of paganism, attained an importance it had never before possessed. The plain man began to realise that his family witch was a more important person than he had hitherto believed. If not herself of semi-infernal birth, he had it on Saint Augustine's authority, as aforesaid, that she was in all probability the mistress of a sylvan, faun, or other variety of devil, and that her offspring were themselves no less diabolical. Naturally enough they increased and multiplied, so that between corporeal and spiritual devils the world was over-populated. The Messalians, indeed, went so far as to make spitting a religious exercise—in the hope of casting out the devils inhaled at every breath; and the common superstition concerning sneezing has the same origin. It might almost be said, indeed, that in those early days devils filled, and to admiration, the part now played by the microbe in every-day life.

It is to be feared that, except by those who seriously studied the question, the existence of so many devils of one kind or another did not cause such general uneasiness as the clergy might desire—very much as now happens when the medical world is appalled by the discovery of some new microbe in strawberry, telephone receiver, or shirt-cuff. The plain man accepted them, and having after some centuries discovered that they made little practical difference to his life, ceased to feel more than a languid interest in even the most appalling new varieties discovered by saintly specialists. Their constant insistence upon the inherent wickedness of humanity and the almost insuperable dangers which assail the Christian on all sides lost something of their freshness in time, one may suppose, and were succeeded by a certain weariness. Granted that Christianity was the one sure road to salvation in the next world, it was so difficult to follow without stumbling that few, if any, could hope to arrive at the goal, save by some such lucky accident as a martyrdom. Christianity was thus bound, in practice, if not in theory, to come to some working agreement with the old, comfortable pagan customs it had superseded. Certain of the more popular pagan customs and festivals found their way into Christian observance, certain popular deities were baptised and became Christian saints. A familiar instance of this occurs in the case of Saint Walpurg. In Christian hagiology she occurs as a virgin saint, and as having accompanied Saint Boniface upon his missionary travels—all of which would seem to show that pious scandal-mongering was less rife in contemporary religious circles than is the case to-day. In folk-lore we find many wells and springs associated with her and thus acquiring valuable medicinal qualities. The oil exuded from her bones upon Walpurgis-nacht was valued as relieving the pangs of toothache and of childbirth. Potent in the cure of hydrophobia, the dog is included among her pictorial attributes, while she is also represented as bearing in her hand either oil or ears of corn—the symbols of agricultural fertility. The festivals and rejoicings which took place upon Walpurgis-nacht, with their special connection with witchcraft, would further seem to show that Walpurg before she became a Christian saint had a long history as a mother-goddess. In the same manner in the cult of the Virgin may be found traces of that worship of Diana which for 600 years persisted side by side with Christianity, and is far from being altogether extinct in Italy even to-day.

As may readily be understood, these paganising tendencies were not favourably regarded by the fathers. In the year 600 A.D. St. Eligius felt called upon to forbid dancing, capering, carols, and diabolical songs upon the festival of Saint John. A statute of Saint Boniface forbids choruses of laymen and maidens to sing and feast in the churches. As the Church increased in power, many such practices—as, for example, the dancing of women round sacred trees and wells, with torches or candles in their hands, the common meal, the choral song and sacrifice—were roundly forbidden as witchcraft, the uprooting of which the Church at last felt capable of taking seriously in hand. This was indeed become a matter almost of life and death, for the Church found itself in many ways in acute competition with the witch, the one attaining by lawful means similar results to those achieved by the other through the assistance of Satan. And just as Adam, upon learning that the apple was forbidden to him, immediately hungered after it to the exclusion of all other fare, so the public showed itself more eager to obtain the forbidden services of the witch than those of the legitimate practitioner. So much was this the case that the Church was sometimes forced to resort to other means than persecution to show itself capable of competing against the witch with her own weapons. Occasionally, it must be confessed, these methods suggested rather the American Trust magnate than the fair competitor, as, for instance, the case of the Blocksberg. This hill was a place of considerable importance to witches, providing a large choice of magical herbs as the raw material for their trade in weather-charms. These could, however, be gathered only upon the eve of Saint John and during the ringing of the neighbouring church-bells. The ecclesiastical authorities, becoming aware of this, gave orders that the bells should be rung only for the shortest possible period on that date—a proceeding the unfairness of which could only have been exceeded by not ringing the bells at all.

Another story of the kind, quoted by Mr. Lecky, shows that, even in fair and open competition, holy water could hold its own against the most powerful of black magic. A certain Christian, Italicus by name, was addicted to horse-racing at Gaza. One of his most dangerous and constant competitors was a pagan Duumvir. This latter, being versed in the black arts, therewith "doped" his horses so successfully that he invariably won. Italicus, being prohibited from following his example, at last appealed to Saint Hilarion, exhorting him to uphold the honour of the Church by some signal display of supernatural power. The saint, after some hesitation, complied, and presented Italicus with a bowl of specially consecrated holy-water. At the start of the next race Italicus liberally besprinkled his team, whereupon they drew his chariot to the winning-post with supernatural rapidity. The Duumvir's horses, on the other hand, faltered and staggered, as though belaboured by an unseen hand—and, needless to say, lost the race. Whether the Duumvir appealed to the contemporary Jockey Club to disqualify the winning team, and, if so, with what result, we are not informed.

Considering the vast and ever-increasing population of witches and demons, it seemed an almost hopeless task to exterminate them altogether. Nor indeed was it until after the thirteenth century that the Church attempted the task on any universal scale. If an individual witch was unlucky enough to fall into priestly hands, her fate was likely to be unhappy—but in the early days of the faith the priest felt himself capable of triumphing over her by less material weapons. Only, as priests could not be everywhere, and the number of witches so largely exceeded their own, means were provided whereby even the layman might withstand them. Thus burning sulphur was very efficacious in the driving out of devils, the subtlety (!) of its odour having great power of purification. The gall of a black dog put in perfume was another acknowledged recipe, as was the smearing of his blood upon the walls of the infested house.

It is noteworthy, and a fact that vouches strongly for the sincerity of the early Church, that although she thus practised what was nothing less than sanctified witchcraft, she never attempted one of the most frequent and popular of witch-practices—the foretelling of the future, so far, at any rate, as this world was concerned. It is true that the Christian's earthly future, being but an uncomfortable preliminary to posthumous joys, might be more happily left unforetold. Yet many of them did not altogether despise the pleasures of this life, and were very willing to pay for an anticipatory glimpse of any likely to be encountered.

Familiarity in some measure breeding contempt, the public in these early days thus regarded neither witch nor dæmon with the dread and hatred so manifest in the fifteenth century and onwards. For one thing, faith in the power of the Church was more implicit. To dally with the forbidden had all the fascination of a sport with a spice of danger in it, when you knew that at any time a power vastly greater than those of evil was ready to step in to protect you from the consequences of your over-rashness. Before the name of a fairly efficient saint the most powerful demon must bend his head, especially with holy water anywhere in the neighbourhood. If you fell under the power of a witch it could only be through neglecting to take proper precautions or to employ someone else to do so for a moderate fee. Our own Anglo-Saxon forefathers showed a very nice spirit of prudence in such matters—as in the famous meeting between Ethelbert King of Kent and Saint Augustine, held, by royal command, in the open air, lest the missionary, being under a roof, might practise unlawful arts upon the King. The witch, in a word, was everywhere, but so were the necessary antidotes—some of them of the simplest. Thus, in the story of Hereward we learn how the Wise Woman of Brandon, near Ely, anathematised the hero from a wooden scaffolding. To be really efficacious her curses must be thrice repeated, but before she had time to do this the scaffold was set on fire by Hereward's followers, and the Wise Woman perished miserably. The witch, in fact, like her gossip the Devil, always comes off second best in folk-lore where she is matched against the truly virtuous—a comforting reflection for everybody, however ominous for their friends.

She was still to some extent a shadowy personality, of shifting and indefinite attributes. Although in 696 the Council of Berkhampstead decreed that any person sacrificing to the Devil should be punished—a clear enough reference to witches—it was not until some centuries later that the conception of the witch definitely crystallised into its modern form of a woman carrying out an actual compact with Satan, working miracles by his power, and frequently transported through the air to pay him homage at Sabbath gatherings. Until then the Church may be said to have been obtaining and sifting evidence, building up a formidable mass of precedent and tradition, to be employed with deadly effect when witchcraft was definitely branded as heresy.