COMPACTS WITH THE DEVIL.
The power of these witches as we find in their earliest records originated in their intercourse with “familiar spirits,” invisible beings who must be supposed to be enlisted in the armies of the prince of darkness. We do not read in these ancient memorials of any league of mutual benefit entered into between the merely human party, and his or her supernatural assistant. But modern times have amply supplied this defect. The witch or sorcerer could not secure the assistance of the demon but by a sure and faithful compact, by which the human party obtained the industrious and vigilant service of his familiar for a certain term of years, only on condition that, when the term was expired, the demon of undoubted right was to obtain possession of the indentured party, and to convey him irremissibly and forever to the regions of the damned. The contract was drawn out in authentic form, signed by the sorcerer, and attested with his blood, and was then carried away by the demon, to be produced again at the appointed time.
“To deny the possibility, nay actual exsitence of Witchcraft and Sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed Word of God, in various passages both of the Old and New Testament; and the thing itself is a truth to which every Nation in the World hath in its turn borne testimony, either by examples seemingly well attested, or by prohibitory laws, which at least suppose the possibility of commerce with evil spirits.”—Blackstone’s “Commentaries,” book iv. chapter 4, p. 61.
An anonymous seventeenth-century writer reasons as follows:—“To know things aright and perfectly is to know the causes thereof. A definition doth consist of those causes which give the whole essence, and contain the perfect nature of the thing defined; where that is therefore found out, there appears the very clear light. If it be perfect, it is much the greater; though if it be not fully perfect, yet it giveth some good light. For which respect, though I dare not say I can give a perfect definition in this matter, which is hard to do even in known things, because the essential form is hard to be found, yet I do give a definition which may at the least give notice and make known what manner of persons they be of whom I am to speak:—A witch is one that worketh by the the Devil, or by some devilish or curious art, either hurting or healing, revealing things secret, or foretelling things to come, which the Devil hath devised to entangle and snare men’s souls withal unto damnation. The Conjuror, the Enchanter, the Sorcerer, the Diviner, and whatsoever other sort there is, are indeed encompassed within this circle. The Devil doth (no doubt) after divers forms, deal in these. But no man is able to show an essential difference in each of them from the rest. I hold it no wisdom or labor well spent to travel much therein. One artificer had devised them all.”
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”—Exodus xxii. 18. “Neither shall ye use enchantment.”—Levit. xix. 26. “Regard not them which have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them.”—Ibid. ver. 31. “When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord: and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.”—Deut. xviii. 9-12. Of Manasseh is recorded, that “He caused his children to pass through the fire in the valley of the son of Himon: also he observed times, and used enchantments, and used witchcraft, and dealt with a familiar spirit, and with wizards.”—2 Chron. xxxiii. 6. Lastly, St. Paul mentions “witchcraft” amongst such “works of the flesh” as “adultery, fornication, heresies, drunkenness, and murders.”—Galat. v. 19-21.
Many of the heathens cordially defended magic and necromancy. For example, Asclepiades, who lived in the time of Pompey the Great, cured diseases by magic, enjoining upon his patient, in the case of falling sickness, to bind upon his arm a Cross with a Nail driven into it. Julianus, the magician, is reported to have driven the plague out of Rome by magical power. Apuleius, a deciple of Plato, wrote at length on magic. To him may be added Marcellus and Alexander Trallian. Pliny asserts in very plain language that necromancy was so prevalent in his day, but was condemned by the wisest, that it was classed with treason and poisoning. And it is notorious that magic was long used as a convenient though inefficient weapon against Christianity.—Vide, likewise, Livy i. 20, and Strabo, lib. vi.
It is impossible to point to any period when the belief in witchcraft and necromancy was perfectly obliterated, or to any nation which altogether repudiated it. If one particular phase was removed, or discountenanced, some other form, substantially and inherently similar, eventually took its place.
Touching the antiquity of Witchcraft, we must needs confess that it hath been of very ancient time, because the Scriptures do testify so much, for in the time of Moses it was very rife in Egypt. Neither was it then newly sprung up, being common, and grown into such ripeness among the nations, that the Lord, reckoning by divers kinds, saith that the Gentiles did commit such abominations, for which He would cast them out before the children of Israel.—“What a Witch is, and the Antiquities of Witchcraft,” A. D. 1612.
The following passage, from a sermon by the late Canon Melville, is interesting: “It is unnecessary for us to inquire what those arts may have been in which the Ephesians are said to have greatly excelled. There seems no reason for doubting that, as we have already stated, they were of the nature of magic, sorcery, or witchcraft; though we cannot profess accurately to define what such terms might import. The Ephesians, as some in all ages have done, probably laid claim to the intercourse with invisible beings, and professed to derive from that intercourse acquaintance with, and power over, future events. And though the very name of witchcraft be now held in contempt, and the supposition of communion with evil spirits scouted as a fable of what are called the dark ages, we own that we have difficulty in believing that all which has passed by the names of magic and sorcery may be resolved into sleight of hand, deception, and trick. The visible world and the invisible are in very close contact: there is, indeed, a veil on our eyes, preventing our gazing on spiritual beings and things, but we doubt not that whatever passes upon the earth is open to the view of higher and immaterial creatures. And as we are sure that a man of piety and prayer enlists good angels on his side and engages them to perform towards him the ministrations of kindness, we know not why there cannot be such a thing as a man whose wickedness has caused his being abandoned by the Spirit of God, and who, in this his desertion, has thrown open to evil angels the chambers of his soul, and made himself so completely their instrument, that they may use him in the uttering or working strange things, which shall have all the air of prophecy or miracle.”
The oldest and most authentic record from which we can derive our ideas on the subject of witchcraft, unquestionably is the Bible. The Egyptians and Chaldeans were early distinguished for their supposed proficiency in magic, in the production of supernatural phenomena, and in penetrating into the secrets of future time. The first appearance of men thus extraordinarily gifted, or advancing pretensions of this sort, recorded in Scripture, is on occasion of Pharoah’s dream of the seven years of plenty, and seven years of famine. At that period the king “sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt and all the wise men; but they could not interpret the dream,” which Joseph afterwards expounded.
Their second appearance was upon a most memorable occasion, when Moses and Aaron, armed with miraculous powers, came to a subsequent king of Egypt, to demand from him that their countrymen might be permitted to depart to another tract of the world. They produced a miracle as the evidence of their divine mission: and the king, who was also named Pharoah, “called before him the wise men and the sorcerers of Egypt, who with their enchantments did in like manner” as Moses had done; till, after some experiments in which they were apparently successful, they at length were compelled to allow themselves overcome, and fairly to confess to their master, “This is the finger of God”!
The spirit of the Jewish history loudly affirms, that the Creator of heaven and earth had adopted this nation for his chosen people, and therefore demanded their exclusive homage, and that they should acknowledge no other God. It is on this principle that it is made one of his early commands to them, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” And elsewhere the meaning of this prohibition is more fully explained: “There shall not be found among you any one that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer; these shall surely be put to death; they shall stone them with stones.”
As a matter of fact, it is computed that in the year 1515, no less than five hundred witches were burnt in Geneva alone, and the same was the case in other parts of Christendom,—a proof at once of the craft and power of Satan, and of the demorilization of those who had deliberately elected to become his servants and slaves. The earliest statute against witchcraft enacted in England, was passed in the reign of King Henry VI.; and additional laws of great stringency and severity, sorely needed, were enacted under the Tudors, by Henry VIII., Queen Elizabeth, and James I. In the year 1604, the great Act of Parliament against witchcraft, drawn up by Coke and Bacon, was passed; and it is asserted that no less than twelve bishops attended the committee of the House of Lords when the bill was under discussion. Sir Matthew Hale and Sir Thomas Browne, men of high legal and literary rank and mark, each gave evidence at the trials which speedily followed. In this particular, as in some others, England followed Geneva. Between the years 1565 and 1700, eleven wizards or sorcerers were burnt at the stake in the Carrefour du Bordage, in Guernsey, the square devoted by the city authorities of that island to this kind of punishment. The last case of death for Witchcraft there took place in 1747.
It may here be put on record that at the period of the Reformation, and during the succeeding century, the power of casting out devils was claimed exclusively by those who remained in visible communion with the See of Rome, and many Roman Catholic writers of those periods maintained that no such power belonged either to any teacher of heresy or to schismatics.
HOPKINS, THE WITCH-FINDER, AND
HIS VICTIMS.
FROM AN OLD RECORD.
In the spring of 1645 several witches were seized at Manningtree in England and were subsequently condemned and hanged. One of these was an old woman named Elizabeth Clarke, and the most important witness against her was “Matthew Hopkins, of Manningtree, gent.” It appears that Hopkins had watched with her several nights in a room in the house of a Mr. Edwards in which she was confined, to keep her from sleeping until she made a confession, and to see if she was visited by her familiars. He declared, among other things, that on the night of the 24th of March, which appears to have been the third night of watching, after he had refused to let her call one of her imps or familiars, she confessed that six or seven years before, she had surrendered herself to the devil, who came to her in the form of “a proper gentleman, with a laced band.” Soon after this a little dog appeared, fat and short in the legs, in color white, with sandy spots, which when he hindered it from approaching her, vanished from his sight. She confessed that it was one of her imps named Janiara. Immediately after this had disappeared, another came in the form of a greyhound, which she called Vinegar Tom; and it was followed by another in the form of a polecat. “And this informant further saith, that going from the house of the said Mr. Edwards to his own house, about nine or ten o’clock of the night with his greyhound with him, he saw the greyhound suddenly give a jump, and run as if she had been in full course after a hare; and that when the informant made haste to see what his greyhound so eagerly pursued, he espied a white thing about the size of a kitten, and the greyhound standing aloof from it; and that, by-and-by, the said white imp or kitten danced about the said greyhound and by all likelihood bit a piece of the flesh of her shoulder, for the greyhound came shrieking and crying to this informant with a piece of the flesh torn from her shoulder. And this informant further saith that coming into his own yard that night, he espied a black thing porportioned like a cat, only it was thrice as big, sitting on a strawberry bed, and fixing its eyes on this informant; and when he went toward it, it leaped over the pale toward this informant, as he thought, but ran quite through the yard with his greyhound after it to a great gate which was underset with a pair of turnbull-strings, and did throw the said gate wide open, and then vanished; and the said greyhound returned again to this informant shaking and trembling exceedingly.” Hopkins had not ventured to remain alone with the witch, but had with him John Stern, who also added “gentleman” to his name, and who confirmed all that Hopkins had said, deposed to the coming of imps and added that the third imp was called Sack-and-Sugar. They watched at night with another woman, named Rebecca West, and saw her imps in the same manner. She stated that the first time she saw Satan he came to her at night, and told her he must be her husband, and married her. The severe treatment to which the accused were exposed, forced confessions from them all, and they avowed being guilty of every species of mischief, from the taking away of human life to the spoiling of milk. The names and forms of their imps were equally fantastic. Rebecca Jones, a witch from St. Osythe’s, said that she had met a man in a ragged suit with great eyes, that terrified her exceedingly, and that he gave her three things like moles but without tails, which she fed with milk. Another had an imp in the form of a white dog, which she called Elimanzer, and which she fed on milk pottage. One had three imps, which she called Prick-ear, Jack and Frog. Several witnesses, poor and ignorant people, were brought to testify to the mischief which had been done by these means. A countryman gravely related how, passing at day by the house of one of the women, named Anne West, he was surprised to find her door open at that early hour, and looking in he saw three or four things like black rabbits, one of which ran after him. He seized upon it, and tried to kill it, but it seemed in his hands like a piece of wool, and stretched out in length as he pulled it without any apparent injury. Then recollecting that there was a spring near at hand, he hurried thither and attempted to drown it, but it vanished from his sight as soon as he put it in the water. He then returned toward the house and seeing Anne West standing outside the door in her smock, he asked why she sent her imps to torment him. This seems to have been the first appearance of Matthew Hopkins as a witch-finder, for which he afterwards became notorious, and which he now assumed as a legal profession. He proceeded in a regular circuit through Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambrigeshire, and Huntingdon, accompanied by John Sterne and a woman whose business it was to examine the bodies of the females in search of their marks. In August 1645, we find them at Bury, in Suffolk, where, on the 27th of that month, no less than eighteen witches were executed at once, and a hundred and twenty more were to have been tried, but a sudden movement of the king’s troops in that direction obliged the judges to adjourn the session. Some of the imps here appeared in the shape of snakes, wasps and hornets, and even of snails. They were mostly employed in petty offences; one man and his wife were guilty only of having bewitched the beer in a brewhouse and making it stink. Others however, confessed to have caused mischief of a more serious character.
The most remarkable victim of this inquisition, was an aged clergyman named Lowes, who had been vicar of Brandeston, near Framlingham, in that county fifty years, a well known opponent of the new church government. This man, we are told by Sterne, one of the inquisitors, had been indicted for a common imbanatator, and for witchcraft above thirty years before, and the grand jury found the bill for a common imbanator, who now, after he was found with the marks, confessed that in pride of heart to be equal with, or rather above God, the devil took advantage of him, and he covenanted with the devil and sealed it with his blood, and had those familiars or spirits, which sucked on the marks found on his body, and did much harm both by sea and land, especially by sea, for he confessed he being at Lungarfort, in Suffolk, where he preached, as he walked upon the wall there, he saw a great sail of ships pass by, and that, as they were sailing by, one of the three imps, namely, his yellow one, forthwith appeared to him and asked him what he should do, and he bade it go and sink such a ship, one that belonged to Ipswich, so he confessed that the imp went forthwith away, and he stood still and viewed the ships, and perceived that the ship to be immediately in more trouble and danger than the rest; for he said the water was more boisterous near that than the rest, tumbling up and down with waves, and soon after it sunk directly down into the sea, when all the rest sailed on in safety; then he confessed, he made fourteen widows in one quarter of an hour. When asked if it did not grieve him to see so many men cast away in a short time, he swore by his Maker, “No; he was joyful to see what power his imps had.” He was hanged, in 1645, at Bury St. Edmund’s.