The demon has his earthly partners in evil members of the firm of Devil and Company. Certain persons that have made a pact with him are given a share in his power, and a portion of his dark mantle falls upon them. The sorcerer and the witch are ancient figures in literature, and like others of the supernatural kingdom, notably the devil, they have their origin in the East, the cuneiform writings of the Chaldeans showing belief in witchcraft. And the Witch of Endor, summoning the spirit of Samuel to confront Saul, is a very real figure in the Old Testament. The Greeks believed in witches, as did the Romans. Meroe, a witch, is described in the Metamorphoses of Lucius Appuleius, from whom perhaps the witch Meroe in Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale gets her name and character. In classical times witches were thought to have power to turn men into beasts, tigers, monkeys, or asses—some persons still believe that women have that power and might give authenticated instances.
The sorcerer, or wizard, or warlock, or magician, as he is variously called, was a more common figure in early literature than in later, perhaps because, as in so many other cases, his profession has suffered a feminine invasion. The Anglo-Saxon word wicca, meaning “witch,” is masculine, which may or may not mean that witchcraft was a manly art in those days, and the most famous medieval enchanter, Merlin, was a man, it should be noted. The sorcerer of primitive times has been gradually reduced in power, changing through the astrologer and alchemist of medieval and Gothic romance into the bacteriologist and biologist of recent fiction, where he works other wonders. In general, warlocks and wizards, while frequent enough in early literature and in modern folk-tales, have become less numerous in later fiction. Scott[148] has a medical magician with supernatural power of healing by means of an amulet, which, put to the nostrils of a person practically dead, revives him at once, but which loses its efficacy if given in exchange for money. Hawthorne has an old Indian sachem with wizard power,[149] who has concocted the elixir of life. We see the passing of the ancient sorcerer into the scientific wonder-worker in such fiction as Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu stories that depict a Chinese terror, or in H. G. Wells’s supernatural investigators in his various stories of science. The magician is not really dead in fiction but has passed over into another form, for the most part.
We still have the hoodoo man of colored persuasion, and the redskin medicine-man, together with Oriental sorcerers from Kipling and others. Examples are: In the House of Suddoo, by Kipling, where the wonder-worker unites a canny knowledge of the telephone and telegraph along with his unholy art; Red Debts, by Lumley Deakin, where the Indian magician exacts a terrible penalty for the wrong done him, and where his diabolic appearance to claim his victim leaves one in doubt as to whether he has not sent his chief in his place; The Monkey’s Paw, by W. W. Jacobs, a curdling story of a magic curse given by an Oriental sorcerer, by which the paw of a dead monkey grants three wishes that have a dreadful boomerang power; Black Magic, by Jessie Adelaide Weston,—who claims that all her supernatural stories are strictly true—the narrative of an old Indian sorcerer that changes himself into a hair mat and is shot for his pains. He has obtained power over the house by being given a hair from the mat by the uninitiated mistress. Hair, you must know, has great power of evil in the hands of witches and sorcerers, as in the case of the evil ones in The Talisman, who received their thrall over the maidens by one hair from each head. F. Marion Crawford’s Khaled is a story of magic art. Khaled is one of the genii converted by reading the Koran, who wishes to be a mortal man with a soul. He is given the right to do so if he can win the love of a certain woman. Hence he is born into the world, like Adam, a full-grown man, to be magically clothed and equipped, by the transformation of leaves and twigs into garments and armor, and the changing of a locust into an Arabian steed. After many supernatural adventures, he receives his soul from an angel. The soul, at first a crescent flame,
immediately took shape and became the brighter image of Khaled himself. And when he had looked at it fixedly for a few minutes—the vision of himself had disappeared and before he was aware it had entered his own body and taken up its life with him.
This is a parallel to the cases of ghostly doubles discussed in the previous chapter.
The magician shows a disposition to adapt himself to contemporary conditions and to change his personality with the times. Not so the witch. She is a permanent figure. She has appeared in the various forms of literature, in Elizabethan drama, in Gothic romance, in modern poetry, the novel and the short story, and is very much alive to-day. We have witches young and old. We have the fake witch, like the hoax ghost; the imputed witch and the genuine article. We have witch stories melodramatic, romantic, tragic, comic, and satiric, showing the influence of the great creations of past literature with modern adaptations and additions. English poetry is full of witchery, perhaps largely the result of the Celtic influence on our literature. The poetic type of witchcraft is brought out in such poems as Coleridge’s Christabel, where the beauty and suggestiveness veil the sense of unearthly evil; or in Shelley’s Witch of Atlas, where the woman appears as a symbol of alluring loveliness possessing none of the hideous aspects seen in other weird women. The water enchantress in Shelley’s fragment of an unfinished drama might be mentioned as another example while Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci has a magical charm all her own. Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market shows a peculiar aspect of magic, as also Mrs. Browning’s The Lay of the Brown Rosary. On the contrary, Milton’s Comus, Robert Herrick’s The Hag, and James Hogg’s The Witch of Fife illustrate the uglier aspects of enchantment.
There are two definite types of witches seen in English fiction, the first being merely the reputed witch, the woman who is falsely accused or suspected of black arts, and who either is persecuted, or else gains what she wishes by hints of her traffic in evil, like the Old Granny Young in Mine Host and the Witch, by James Blythe, who chants as a charm-rune,
“A curse shall lay on water and land
For the thing denied the witch’s hand,”
so that everybody is afraid to refuse her whatever she demands. This is a highly conventionalized type of the motif and, though it is found in great numbers in modern fiction, is not particularly important. The principal complications of the plot are usually the same, the character known as the witch being either an appealing figure winning sympathy because of her beauty and youth, or else touching to pity because of her age and infirmities. No person of average age or pulchritude is ever accused of witchcraft in English fiction. She is always very old and poor or young and lovely. Item also, she invariably has two lovers, in the latter case. She is merely a romantic peg on which to hang a story, not always real as a human being and not a real witch. In these stories the only magic used is love, the fair maid having unintentionally charmed the heart of a villain, who, failing to win her, accuses her of witchcraft in order to frighten her into love. In some of the novels and stories the victim is actually executed, while in others she is rescued by her noble lover at the fifty-ninth second. We have the pursuing villain, the distressed innocence, the chivalric lover disporting themselves in late Gothic fashion over many romances. Even Mary Johnston with her knowledge of Colonial times and her power to give atmosphere to the past does not succeed in imparting the breath of life to her late novel of witchcraft, The Witch. These pink-and-white beauties who speak in Euphuistic sentences, who show a lamblike defiance toward the dark tempters, who breathe prayers to heaven for protection and forgiveness to their enemies in one breath, who die or are rescued with equal grace and propriety,—one is carried away from the scaffold by Kidd, the pirate, thus delaying for several chapters her rescue by her faithful lover—do not really touch the heart any more than they interest the intellect. Yet there are occasional instances of the imputed witch who seems real despite her handicap of beauty and youth, as Iseult le Desireuse, in Maurice Hewlett’s Forest Lovers, whom Prosper le Gai weds to save from the hangman. The young woman in F. Marion Crawford’s Witch of Prague might be called a problematic witch, for while she does undoubtedly work magic, it is for the most part attributed to her powers of hypnotism rather than to the black art itself. We find an excellent example of the reputed witch who is a woman of real charm and individuality, in D’Annunzio’s The Daughter of Jorio, where the young girl is beset by cruel dangers because of her charm and her lonely condition, and who rises to tragic heights of sacrifice to save her lover from death, choosing to be burned to death as a witch to save him from paying the penalty of murder. She actually convinces him, as well as the others, that she has bewitched him by unholy powers, that she has slain his father and made him believe that he himself did it to save her honor, and she goes to her death with a white fervor of courage, with no word of complaint, save one gentle rebuke to him that he should not revile her.
The aged pseudo-witch is in the main more appealing than the young one, because more realistic. Yet there is no modern instance that is so touching as the poor old crone in The Witch of Edmonton, who is persecuted for being a witch and who turns upon her tormentors with a speech that reminds us of Shylock’s famous outcry, showing clearly how their suspicion and accusation have made her what she is. We see here a witch in the making, an innocent old woman who is harried by human beings till she makes a compact with the devil. Meg Merrilies[150] is a problematic witch, a majestic, sibylline figure, very individual and human, yet with more than a suggestion of superhuman wisdom and power. Scott limned her with a loving hand, and Keats was so impressed with her personality that he wrote a poem concerning her. Elizabeth Enderfield, in Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree, is a reputed witch and witch-pricking is also tried in his Return of the Native. Various experiments with magic are used in Hardy’s work, as the instance of the woman’s touching her withered arm to the neck of a man that had been hanged, consulting the conjurer concerning butter that won’t come, and so forth. Old Aunt Keziah in Hawthorne’s Septimius Felton might be called a problematic witch, as the woman in The Witch by Eden Phillpotts. She has a great number of cats, and something dreadful happens to anyone who injures one of them; she calls the three black toads her servants and goes through incantations over a snake skeleton, the carcass of a toad, and the mummy of a cat. Mother Tab may or may not be a bona fide witch, but she causes much trouble to those associated with her.