The Malleus Maleficarum Read online

  To have built in Heav'n high Towrs; nor did he scape

  By all his Engins, but was headlong sent

  With his industrious crew to build in hell.

  Hephaestus, especially in later days, is represented with one leg shortened to denote his lameness; and throughout the Middle Ages it was popularly believed that his cloven hoof was the one feature which the devil was unable to disguise. In this connexion with Loki, the Vulcan of Northern Europe, will be readily remembered. Frederick Hall writes: Hephaestos, Vulcan and Loki, each lame from some deformity of foot, in time joined natures with the Pans and satyrs of the upper world; the lame sooty blacksmith donned their goatlike extremities of cloven hoofs, tail and horns; and the black dwarfs became uncouth ministers of this sooty, black, found fiend. If ever mortal man accepted the services of these cunning metalworkers, it was for some sinister purpose, and at a fearful price - no less than that of the soul itself, bartered away in a contract of blood, the emblem of life and the colour of fire.

  There were also dark histories of murder and blood connected with Lemnos. When the Argonauts landed here they found it inhabited only by Amazons, who, having murdered all their husbands, had chosen as their queen Hypsipyle, daughter of Thoas, whom she secretly preserved alive. When this was discovered the unfortunate woman was compelled to leave the island, and being subsequently captured by pirates she was sold to Lycurgus, king of the sacred groves that surrounded the temple of Zeus Nemeus in a remote Argive valley. Hypsipyle here became the nurse of the mysterious child Archemorus, the Forerunner of Death, who was bitten by a magic serpent and vanished, portending the doom of the Seven who went against Thebes.

  At a later time the Pelasgians are said to have massacred the inhabitants of Lemnos, and to have settled there with some Athenian maidens they had carried off from Attica. Afterwards these savages murdered both their wives and their children. In consequence of such atrocities Lemnian deeds became proverbial in Greek for horrors and sorceries. It is curious to remark that a certain red clay (terra Lemnia) found on the island was, as Pliny tells us, employed as a remedy for wounds, and especially the bite of a snake. This latter may have some obscure connexion with the story of Archemorus. In any case enough has been said to show that this island was considered a land of mystery and ancient terrors, a fitting origin for the witch Theoris.

  In Rome black magic was punished as a capital offence by the Law of the Twelve Tables, which are to be assigned to the fifth century B.C., and, as Livy records, from time to time Draconian statutes were directed against those who attempted to blight crops and vineyards or to spread rinderpest amongst flocks and cattle. None the less it is evident from many Latin authors and from the historians that Rome swarmed with occultists and diviners, many of whom in spite of the Lex Cornelia almost openly traded in poisons, and not infrequently in assassination to boot. Sometimes, as in the Middle Ages, a circumstance of which the Malleus Maleficarum most particularly complains, the sorcerers were protected by men of wealth and high estate. This was especially the case in the terrible days of Marius and of Catiline, and during the extreme decadence of the latest Caesars. Yet, paradoxical as it may appear, such emperors as Augustus, Tiberius, and Septimius Severus, whilst banishing from their realms all seers and necromancers, and putting them to death, in private entertained astrologers and wizards among their retinue, consulting their art upon each important occasion, and often even in the everyday and ordinary affairs of life.

  Nevertheless it must be noted that all the while normal legislation utterly condemned witchcraft and its works, whilst the laws were not merely carried out to their very letter, but reinforced by such emperors as Claudius, Vitelius, and Vespasian.

  These prosecutions are very significant, and I have insisted upon them in some detail, as I wish to emphasize that stern and constant official opposition to witchcraft, and the prohibition under severest penalties, the sentence of death itself, of any practice or pursuit of these dangerous and irreligious arts, was demonstrably not a product of Christianity, but had long and necessarily been employed in the heathen world and among pagan peoples and among polytheistic societies. Moreover, there are even yet savage communities who visit witchcraft with death.

  Accordingly, if we cite the Vincentian cannon, quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, we might surely say that from the earliest dawn of civilization witchcraft has been prohibited, hated, and feared.

  At the time of the triumph of Christianity a decadent Empire in the last throes of paganism was corroded by every kind of superstition and occult art, from the use of petty and harmless sympathetic charms of healing to the darkest crimes of goetic ceremonial. Spells, scrying, conjurations, evokings of the dead were never more fashionable and never more keenly explored by every class and ever order, from the divine Caesar in his palace to the losel peasant in his humble shed. If the disease is universal, the medicine must be sharp. It was very difficult, when the infection of crime was so general, to discriminate and draw the line, to take into consideration relative differences and nice gradations. So much that was heathen, so much that was bad, was mixed up with what might seem to be simple credulity, and the harmless folk-customs of some grandam tradition and immemorial usage, a song or a country dance mayhap, innocent enough on the surface, and even pleasing, so often were but the cloak and the mask for something devilish and obscene, that the Church deemed it necessary to forbid and proscribe the whole superstition even when it manifested itself in modest fashion and seemed guileless, innoxious, and of no account. Thus, for example, to make a wind blow or to drop in a world-wide fantasy which appears harmless enough. The Esthonians when they wish to raise a wind strike a knife into a house-beam in the direction from which they desire the wind to blow, while at the same time they croon an old-time canzonet. The underlying idea is that the gentle wind will not let any innocent thing, not even a beam, suffer without coming swiftly and breathing softly thereon to assuage the pain. But at Constantinople, in the reign of Constantine, a warlock named Sopater was put to death on a charge of binding the winds by magic, which he had at any rate esssayed to do, whether or no the fact that the cornships of Egypt and Syria were detained on their voyage by calms and headwinds was actually due to his interference. The city was nearly starved, and the Byzantine mob, clamouring for bread, was ready to break out into the wildest excesses. In Scotland witches used to raise the wind by dipping the corner of a plaid in water and beating it thrice upon a stone, crooning the following words:

  I knok this rage upone this stane

  To raise the wind in the divellis name,

  It sall not lye till I please againe.

  It will readily be remembered that one of the chief charges brought against the coven of North Berwick witches during the famous trial of 1590 was that they performed incantations to raise a tempest which might wreck the fleet that was escorting James VI when he brought his queen, Anne of Denmark, from her native country to Scotland. So we see that a superstition which in a little fishing village, when some mother was calling a fair wind for her son, or some lass whistled for a gentle breeze to fill the sails of her sweetheart's trawler, was simple and kindly enough, might yet become dangerous and deadly at least in intent when launched be malevolent witches who had the will if not the power to destroy, and who if this means failed would hasten to employ other methods that should prove far more resourceful in their means and efficacious in their results.

  Accordingly, during the years 319-21 a number of laws were passed which penalized and punished the craft of magic with the utmost severity. A pagan diviner or haruspex could only follow his vocation under very definite restrictions. He was not allowed to be an intimate visitor at the house of any citizen, for friendship with men of this kind must be avoided. “The haruspex who frequents the houses of others shall die at the stake,” such is the tenor of the code. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that almost every year saw a more rigid application of the laws; although even as to-day, when fortune-telling and peering
into the future are forbidden by the Statute-Book, diviners and mediums abound, so then in spite of every prohibition astrologers, clairvoyants, and palmists had an enormous clientèle of rich and poor alike. However, under Valens, owing to his discovery of the damning fact that certain prominent courtiers had endeavoured by means ot table-rapping to ascertain who should be his successor upon the throne, in the year 367 a regular crusade, which in its details recalls the heyday of Master Matthew Hopkins, was instituted against the whole race of magicians, soothsayers, mathematici, and theurgists, which perhaps was the first general prosecution during the Christian era. Large numbers of persons, including no doubt many innocent as well as guilty, were put to death, and a veritable panic swept through the Eastern world.

  The early legal codes of most European nations contain laws directed against witchcraft. Thus, for example, the oldest document of Frankish legislation, the Salic Law (Lex salica), which was reduced to a written form and promulgated under Clovis, who died 27 November, 511, mulcts (sic) those who practise magic with various fines, especially when it could be proven that the accused launched a deadly curse, or had tied the Witch's Knot. This latter charm was usually a long cord tightly tied up in elaborate loops, among whose reticulations it was customary to insert the feathers of a black hen, a raven, or some other bird which had, or was presumed to have, no speck of white. This is one of the oldest instruments of witchcraft and is known in all countries and among all nations. It was put to various uses. The wizards of Finland, when they sold wind in the three knots of a rope. If the first knot were undone a gentle breeze sprang up; if the second, it blew a mackerel gale; if the third, a hurricane. But the Witch's Ladder, as it was often known, could be used with far more baleful effects. The knots were tied with certain horrid maledictions, and then the cord was hidden away in some secret place, and unless it were found and the strands released the person at whom the curse was directed would pine and die. This charm continually occurs during the trials. Thus in the celebrated Island-Magee case, March 1711, when a coven of witches was discovered, it was remarked that an apron belonging to Mary Dunbar, a visitor at the house of the afflicted persons, had been abstracted. Miss Dunbar was suddenly seized with fits and convulsions, and sickened almost to death. After most diligent search the missing garment was found carefully hidden away and covered over, and a curious string which had nine knots in it had been so tied up with the folds of the linen that it was beyond anything difficult to separate them and loosen the ligatures. In 1886 in the old belfry of a village church in England there were accidentally discovered, pushed away in a dark corner, several yards of incle braided with elaborate care and having a number of black feathers thrust through the strands. It is said that for a long while considerable wonder was caused as to what it might be, but when it was exhibited and became known, one of the local grandmothers recognized it was a Witch's Ladder, and, what is extremely significant, when it was engraved in the Folk Lore Journal an old Italian woman to whom the picture was shown immediately identified it as la ghirlanda delle streghe.

  The laws of the Visigoths, which were to some extent founded upon the Roman law, punished witches who had killed any person by their spells with death; whilst long-continued and obstinate witchcraft, if fully proven, was visited with such severe sentences as slavery for life. In 578, when a son of Queen Fredegonde died, a number of witches who were accused of having contrived the destruction of the Prince were executed. It has been said in these matters that the ecclesiastical law was tolerant, since for the most part it contented itself with a sentence of excommunication. But those who consider this spiritual outlawry lenient certainly do not appreciate what such a doom entailed. Moreover, after a man had been condemned to death by the civil courts it would have been somewhat superfluous to have repeated the same sentence, and beyond the exercise of her spiritual weapons, what else was there left for the Church to do?

  In 814, Louis le Pieux upon his accession to the throne began to take very active measures against all sorcerers and necromancers, and it was owing to his influence and authority that the Council of Paris in 829 appealed to the secular courts to carry out any such sentences as the Bishops might pronounce. The consequence was that from this time forward the penalty of witchcraft was death, and there is evidence that if the constituted authority, either ecclesiastical or civil, seemed to slacken in their efforts the populace took the law into their own hands with far more fearful results.

  In England the early Penitentials are greatly concerned with the repression of pagan ceremonies, which under the cover of Christian festivities were very largely practised at Christmas and on New Year's Day. These rites were closely connected with witchcraft, and especially do S. Theodore, S. Aldhelm, Ecgberht of York, and other prelates prohibit the masquerade as a horned animal, a stag, or a bull, which S. Caesarius of Arles had denounced as a “foul tradition,” an “evil custom,” a “most heinous abomination.” These and even stronger expressions would not be used unless some very dark and guilty secrets had been concealed beneath this mumming, which, however foolish, might perhaps have been thought to be nothing worse, so that to be so roundly denounced as devilish and demoniacal they must certainly have had some very grim signification which did not appear upon the surface. The laws of King Athelstan (924-40), corresponsive with the early French laws, punished any person casting a spell which resulted in death by extracting the extreme penalty. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries there are few cases of witchcraft in England, and such accusations as were made appeared to have been brought before the ecclesiastical court. It may be remarked, however, that among the laws attributed to King Kenneth I of Scotland, who ruled from 844 to 860, and under whom the Scots of Dalriada and the Pictish peoples may be said to have been united in one kingdom, is an important statute which enacts that all sorcerers and witches, and such as invoke spirits, “and use to seek upon them for helpe, let them be burned to death.” Even then this was obviously no new penalty, but the statutory confirmation of a long-established punishment. So the witches of Forres who attempted the life of King Duffus in the year 968 by the old bane of slowly melting a wax image, when discovered, were according to the law burned at the stake.

  The conversion of Germany to Christianity was late and very slow, for as late as the eighth century, in spite of the heroic efforts of S. Columbanus, S. Fridolin, S. Gall, S. Rupert, S. Willibrod, the great S. Boniface, and many others, in spite of the headway that had been made, various districts were always relapsing into a primitive and savage heathenism. For example, it is probably true to say that the Prussian tribles were not stable in their conversion until the beginning of the thirteenth century, when Bishop Albrecht reclaimed the people by a crusade. However, throughout the eleventh and the twelfth centuries there are continual instances of persons who had practised witchcraft being put to death, and the Emperor Frederick II, in spite of the fact that he was continually quarrelling with the Papacy and utterly indifferent to any religious obligation - indeed it has been said that he was “a Christian ruler only in name,” and “throughout his reign he remained virtually a Moslem free-thinker” - declared that a law which he had enacted for Lombardy should have force throughout the whole of his dominions. “Henceforth,” Vacandard remarks, “all uncertainty was at an end. The legal punishment for heresy throughout the empire was death at the stake.” It must be borne in mind that witchcraft and heresy were almost inextricably commingled. It is quite plain that such a man as Frederick, whose whole philosophy was entirely Oriental; who was always accompanied by a retinue of Arabian ministers, courtiers, and officers; who was perhaps not without reason suspected of being a complete agnostic, recked little whether heresy and witchcraft might be offences against the Church or not, but he was sufficiently shrewd to see that they gravely threatened the well-being of the State, imperilling the maintenance of civilization and the foundations of society.

  This brief summary of early laws and ancient ordinances has been given in order to show that th
e punishment of witchcraft certainly did not originate in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and most assuredly was not primarily the concern of the Inquisition. In fact, curiously enough, Bernard Gui, the famous Inquisitor of Toulouse, laid down in his Practica Inquisitionis that sorcery itself did not fall within the cognizance of the Holy Office, and in every case, unless there were other circumstances of which his tribunal was bound to take notice when witches came before him, he simply passed them on to the episcopal courts.

  It may be well here very briefly to consider the somewhat complicated history of the establishment of the Inquisition, which was, it must be remembered, the result of the tendencies and growth of many years, by no mens a judicial curia with cut-and-dried laws and a compete procedure suddenly called into being by one stroke of a Papal pen. In the first place, S. Dominic was in no sense the founder of the Inquisition. Certainly during the crusade in Languedoc he was present, reviving religion and reconciling the lapsed, but he was doing no more than S. Paul or any of the Apostles would have done. The work of S. Dominic was preaching and the organization of his new Order, which received Papal confirmation from Honorius III, and was approved in the Bull Religiosam uitam, 22 December, 1216. S. Dominic died 6 August, 1221, and even if we take the word in a very broad sense, the first Dominican Inquisitor seems to have been Alberic, who in November, 1232, was travelling through Lombardy with the official title of “Inquisitor hereticae prauitatis.” The whole question of the episcopal Inquisitors, who were really the local bishop, his archdeacons, and his diocesan court, and their exact relationship with the travelling Inquisitors, who were mainly drawn from the two Orders of friars, the Franciscan and the Dominican, is extremely nice and complicated; whilst the gradual effacement of the episcopal courts with regard to certain matters and the consequent prominence of the Holy Office were circumstances and conditions which realized themselves slowly enough in all countries, and almost imperceptibly in some districts, as necessity required, without any sudden break or sweeping changes. In fact we find that the Franciscan or Dominican Inquisitor simply sat as an assessor in the episcopal court so that he could be consulted upon certain technicalities and deliver sentence conjointly with the Bishop if these matters were involved. Thus at the trial of Gilles de Rais in October, 1440, at Nantes, the Bishop of Nantes presided over the court with the bishops of Le Mans, Saint-Brieuc, and Saint-Lo as his coadjutors, whilst Pierre de l’Hospital, Chencellor of Brittany, watched the case on behalf of the civil authorities, and Frère Jean Blouin was present as the delegate of the Holy Inquisition for the city and district of Nantes. Owing to the multiplicity of the crimes, which were proven and clearly confessed in accordance with legal requirements, it was necessary to pronounce two sentences. The first sentence was passed by the Bishop of Nantes conjointly with the Inquisitor. By them Gilles de Rais was declared guilty of Satanism, sorcery, and apostasy, and there and then handed over to the civil arm to receive the punishment due to such offences. The second sentence, pronounced by the Bishop alone, declared the prisoner convicted of sodomy, sacrilege, and violation of ecclesiastical rights. The ban of excommunication was lifted since the accused had made a clean breast of his crimes and desired to be reconciled, but he was handed over to the secular court, who sentenced him to death, on multiplied charges of murder as well as on account of the aforesaid offences.