It is a striking proof of the antiquity of this tradition
of Cain, as I have given it, that the witch or wizard sympathy for the first murderer is in it unmistakable. The sending Cain to the moon, instead of hell, is understood to be a mitigation of his sentence. In his work on magicians and witches, a.d. 1707, Goldschmidt devotes many pages to set forth what was believed by all the learned of his time, that Cain was the father of all the wizards, and his children, the Cainites, the creators of the Gaber, fire-idolators, Cabiri, magic soothsaying, and so forth. So the tradition lived on, utterly forgotten by all good people, and yet it is to me so quaint as to be almost touching to find it still existing, a fragment of an old creed outworn here among poor witches in Florence.
“Sacher Masoch,” a Galician novelist, informs us in a romance, “The Legacy of Cain,” that the Cainites still exist in Russia, and that their religion is represented by the following charming creed:
“Satan is the master of the world; therefore it is a sin to belong to Church or State, and marriage is also a capital sin. Six things constitute the legacy of Cain: Love, Property, Government, War, and Death. Such was the legacy of Cain, who was condemned to be a wanderer and a fugitive on earth.”
I have another apparently very ancient conjuration of a mirror, in two parts. It is of the blackest witchcraft, of the most secret kind, and is only intended to injure an enemy.
From an article in La Rivista delle Tradizione Popolare of July 1894, by F. Montuori, I learn that in a little work by San Prato on “Cain and the Thorns according to Dante and Popular Tradition,” Ancona, 1881, which I have not seen, the history of Cain is given much as told by Maddalena. What is chiefly interesting in the version of Maddalena is, however, wanting in all the folklore on the subject collected by others; it is the manifest trace of Cainism, of sympathy with the first murder, and in its heresy. This opens for us a far wider field of research
and valuable historical information than the rather trivial fact that Cain is simply the Man in the Moon.
Merk in Die Sitten und Gebräuche der Deutschen, gives (p. 644), from Wolf, a strange legend which is nearly allied to Moon worship by witches, and the mirror:
“There was a man in Kortryk who was called Klare Mone (bright moon), and he got his name from this. One night when sleeping on his balcony he heard many women’s voices sweetly singing. They held goblets [there is some confusion here with gläserne Pfannen or glass panes in the roof from which the man looked; I infer that the witches drank from “glass pans,” i.e., metallic mirrors], and as they drank they sang:
“‘We are drinking the sweetest of earthly wine,
For we drink of the clear and bright moonshine.’“But as the man approached them, ‘with a club to beat or kill them, all vanished.’”
“Which fable teaches,” as the wise Flaxius notes, “what indeed this whole book tends to show—that few people know or heed what witches ever really were. Now, that this boor wished to slay the sorceresses with a club, for drinking moonshine, is only what the whole world is doing to all who have different ideas from ours as to what constitutes enjoyment. So in all history, under all creeds, even unto this day, people have been clubbed, hung, tortured, and baked alive, or sent to Coventry for the crime of drinking moonshine!”