“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.