Oh, come to the tower where I’m sitting:
Bring cakes and bring cheese to me here in the cell,
Through the iron-barred window flitting.
Little black grandmother, feathered and wise,
Just give my aunt a warning,
Lest she should come flying and pick out my eyes
When I merrily swing in the morning.”
Horst in his “Dæmonomagie,” a History of the Belief in Magic, Demoniac marvels, Witchcraft, &c., gives the picture of a Witch-tower, at Lindheim in the Wetterau, with all its terrible history, extracted from the town archives. It is a horrible history of torturing and burning at the stake of innumerable women of all ages, the predominant feature being that any accusation by anybody whatever, or any rumour set afloat in any way, amply sufficed to bring an enemy to death, or to rob a person who had money. Hysterical women and perverse or eccentric children frequently originated these accusations merely to bring themselves into notice.
There was till within a few years a Witches’ Tower in Heidelberg. It was a very picturesque structure in an out-of-the-way part of the town, in nobody’s way, and was therefore of course pulled down by the good Philistine citizens, who have the same mania in Heidelberg as “their ignorant-like” in London, Philadelphia, or any other town, for removing all relics of the olden time.
In connection with sorcery and gypsies, it is worth observing that in 1834 the latter, in Swabia, or South Germany, frequently went about among the country-people, with puppet-shows, very much of the Punch kind, and that they had a rude drama of Faust, the great wizard, which had nothing to do with that of Goethe. It was derived from the early sources, and had been little by little gypsified into a melodrama peculiar to the performers. August Zoller, in his “Bilder aus Schwaben” (Stuttgard, 1834), gives the following description of it. The book has a place in all Faust libraries, and has been kept alive by this single passage:—