Who soweth them sooner, he soweth too soone:
That they, with the planet, may rest and rise,
And flourish with bearing, most plentiful wise.’[[220]]
The notion that the weather changes with the moon’s quarterings is still held with great vigour in England. Yet the meteorologists, with all their eagerness to catch at any rule which at all answers to facts, quite repudiate this one, which indeed appears to be simply a maxim belonging to popular astrology. Just as the growth and dwindling of plants became associated with the moon’s wax and wane, so changes of weather became associated with changes of the moon, while, by astrologer’s logic, it did not matter whether the moon’s change were real, at new and full, or imaginary, at the intermediate quarters. That educated people to whom exact weather records are accessible should still find satisfaction in the fanciful lunar rule, is an interesting case of intellectual survival.
In such cases as these, the astrologer has at any rate a real analogy, deceptive though it be, to base his rule upon. But most of his pseudo-science seems to rest on even weaker and more arbitrary analogies, not of things, but of names. Names of stars and constellations, of signs denoting regions of the sky and periods of days and years, no matter how arbitrarily given, are materials which the astrologer can work upon, and bring into ideal connexion with mundane events. That astronomers should have divided the sun’s course into imaginary signs of the zodiac, was enough to originate astrological rules that these celestial signs have an actual effect on real earthly rams, bulls, crabs, lions, virgins. A child born under the sign of the Lion will be courageous; but one born under the Crab will not go forward well in life; one born under the Waterman is likely to be drowned, and so forth. Towards 1524, Europe was awaiting in an agony of prayerful terror a second deluge, prophesied for February in that year. As the fatal month drew nigh, dwellers by the waterside moved in crowds to the hills, some provided boats to save them, and the President Aurial, at Toulouse, built himself a Noah’s Ark. It was the great astrologer Stoefler (the originator, it is said, of the weather-prophecies in our almanacks) who foretold this cataclysm, and his argument has the advantage of being still perfectly intelligible—at the date in question, three planets would be together in the aqueous sign of Pisces. Again, simply because astronomers chose to distribute among the planets the names of certain deities, the planets thereby acquired the characters of their divine namesakes. Thus it was that the planet Mercury became connected with travel, trade, and theft, Venus with love and mirth, Mars with war, Jupiter with power and ‘joviality.’ Throughout the East, astrology even now remains a science in full esteem. The condition of mediæval Europe may still be perfectly realized by the traveller in Persia, where the Shah waits for days outside the walls of his capital till the constellations allow him to enter, and where on the days appointed by the stars for letting blood, it literally flows in streams from the barbers’ shops into the street. Professor Wuttke declares that there are many districts in Germany where the child’s horoscope is still regularly kept with the baptismal certificate in the family chest. We scarcely reach this pitch of conservatism in England, but I happen to myself live within a mile of an astrologer, and I lately saw a grave paper on nativities, offered in all good faith to the British Association. The piles of ‘Zadkiel’s Almanack’ in the bookseller’s windows in country towns about Christmas are a symptom how much yet remains to be done in popular education. As a specimen at once of the survival and of the meaning of astrologic reasoning, I cannot do better than quote a passage from a book published in London in 1861, and entitled ‘The Hand-Book of Astrology, by Zadkiel Tao-Sze.’ At page 72 of his first volume, the astrologer relates as follows: ‘The Map of the heavens given at page 45 was drawn on the occasion of a young lady having been arrested on a charge of the murder of her infant brother. Having read in a newspaper, at twenty-four minutes past noon on the 23rd July, 1860, that Miss C. K. had been arrested on a charge of the murder of her young brother, the author felt desirous to ascertain whether she were guilty or not, and drew the map accordingly. Finding the moon in the twelfth house, she clearly signifies the prisoner. The moon is in a moveable sign, and moves in the twenty-four hours, 14° 17´. She is, therefore, swift in motion. These things indicated that the prisoner would be very speedily released. Then we find a moveable sign in the cusp of the twelfth, and its ruler, ♀, in a moveable sign, a further indication of speedy release. Hence it was judged and declared to many friends that the prisoner would be immediately released, which was the fact. We looked to see whether the prisoner were guilty of the deed or not, and finding the Moon in Libra, a humane sign, and having just past the ⚹ aspect of the Sun and ♃, both being on the M. C. we felt assured that she was a humane, feeling, and honourable girl, and that it was quite impossible she could be guilty of any such atrocity. We declared her to be perfectly innocent, and as the Moon was so well aspected from the tenth house, we declared that her honour would be very soon perfectly established.’ Had the astrologer waited a few months longer, to have read the confession of the miserable Constance Kent, he would perhaps have put a different sense on his moveable signs, just balances, and sunny and jovial aspects. Nor would this be a difficult task, for these fancies lend themselves to endless variety of new interpretation. And on such fancies and such interpretations, the great science of the stars has from first to last been based.
Looking at the details here selected as fair samples of symbolic magic, we may well ask the question, is there in the whole monstrous farrago no truth or value whatever? It appears that there is practically none, and that the world has been enthralled for ages by a blind belief in processes wholly irrelevant to their supposed results, and which might as well have been taken just the opposite way. Pliny justly saw in magic a study worthy of his especial attention, ‘for the very reason that, being the most fraudulent of arts, it had prevailed throughout the world and through so many ages’ (eo ipso quod fraudulentissima artium plurimum in toto terrarum orbe plurimisque seculis valuit). If it be asked how such a system could have held its ground, not merely in independence but in defiance of its own facts, a fair answer does not seem hard to give. In the first place, it must be borne in mind that occult science has not existed entirely in its own strength. Futile as its arts may be, they are associated in practice with other proceedings by no means futile. What are passed off as sacred omens, are often really the cunning man’s shrewd guesses at the past and future. Divination serves to the sorcerer as a mask for real inquest, as when the ordeal gives him invaluable opportunity of examining the guilty, whose trembling hands and equivocating speech betray at once their secret and their utter belief in his power of discerning it. Prophecy tends to fulfil itself, as where the magician, by putting into a victim’s mind the belief that fatal arts have been practised against him, can slay him with this idea as with a material weapon. Often priest as well as magician, he has the whole power of religion at his back; often a man in power, always an unscrupulous intriguer, he can work witchcraft and statecraft together, and make his left hand help his right. Often a doctor, he can aid his omens of life or death with remedy or poison, while what we still call ‘conjurers’ tricks’ of sleight of hand have done much to keep up his supernatural prestige. From the earliest known stages of civilization, professional magicians have existed, who live by their craft, and keep it alive. It has been said, that if somebody had endowed lecturers to teach that two sides of a triangle are together equal to the third, the doctrine would have a respectable following among ourselves. At any rate, magic, with an influential profession interested in keeping it in credit and power, did not depend for its existence on mere evidence.
And in the second place, as to this evidence. Magic has not its origin in fraud, and seems seldom practised as an utter imposture. The sorcerer generally learns his time-honoured profession in good faith, and retains his belief in it more or less from first to last; at once dupe and cheat, he combines the energy of a believer with the cunning of a hypocrite. Had occult science been simply framed for purposes of deception, mere nonsense would have answered the purpose, whereas, what we find is an elaborate and systematic pseudo-science. It is, in fact, a sincere but fallacious system of philosophy, evolved by the human intellect by processes still in great measure intelligible to our own minds, and it had thus an original standing-ground in the world. And though the evidence of fact was dead against it, it was but lately and gradually that this evidence was brought fatally to bear. A general survey of the practical working of the system may be made somewhat thus. A large proportion of successful cases belong to natural means disguised as magic. Also, a certain proportion of cases must succeed by mere chance. By far the larger proportion, however, are what we should call failures; but it is a part of the magician’s profession to keep these from counting, and this he does with extraordinary resource of rhetorical shift and brazen impudence. He deals in ambiguous phrases, which give him three or four chances for one. He knows perfectly how to impose difficult conditions, and to lay the blame of failure on their neglect. If you wish to make gold, the alchemist in Central Asia has a recipe at your service, only, to use it, you must abstain three days from thinking of apes; just as our English folk-lore says, that if one of your eyelashes comes out, and you put it on your thumb, you will get anything you wish for, if you can only avoid thinking of foxes’ tails at the fatal moment. Again, if the wrong thing happens, the wizard has at least a reason why. Has a daughter been born when he promised a son, then it is some hostile practitioner who has turned the boy into a girl; does a tempest come just when he is making fine weather, then he calmly demands a larger fee for stronger ceremonies, assuring his clients that they may thank him as it is, for how much worse it would have been had he not done what he did. And even setting aside all this accessory trickery, if we look at honest but unscientific people practising occult science in good faith, and face to face with facts, we shall see that the failures which condemn it in our eyes carry comparatively little weight in theirs. Part escape under the elastic pretext of a ‘little more or less,’ as the loser in the lottery consoles himself that his lucky number came within two of a prize, or the moon-observer points out triumphantly that a change of weather has come within two or three days before or after a quarter, so that his convenient definition of near a moon’s quarter applies to four or six days out of every seven. Part escape through incapacity to appreciate negative evidence, which allows one success to outweigh half-a-dozen failures. How few there are even among the educated classes now, who have taken in the drift of that memorable passage in the beginning of the ‘Novum Organum:’—‘The human understanding, when any proposition has been once laid down (either from general admission and belief, or from the pleasure it affords), forces everything else to add fresh support and confirmation; and although most cogent and abundant instances may exist to the contrary, yet either does not observe or despises them, or gets rid of and rejects them by some distinction, with violent and injurious prejudice, rather than sacrifice the authority of its first conclusions. It was well answered by him who was shown in a temple the votive tablets suspended by such as had escaped the peril of shipwreck, and was pressed as to whether he would then recognize the power of the gods, by an inquiry, “But where are the portraits of those who have perished in spite of their vows?”’[[221]]
On the whole, the survival of symbolic magic through the middle ages and into our own times is an unsatisfactory, but not a mysterious fact. A once-established opinion, however delusive, can hold its own from age to age, for belief can propagate itself without reference to its reasonable origin, as plants are propagated from slips without fresh raising from the seed.
The history of survival in cases like those of the folk-lore and occult arts which we have been considering, has for the most part been a history of dwindling and decay. As men’s minds change in progressing culture, old customs and opinions fade gradually in a new and uncongenial atmosphere, or pass into states more congruous with the new life around them. But this is so far from being a law without exception, that a narrow view of history may often make it seem to be no law at all. For the stream of civilization winds and turns upon itself, and what seems the bright onward current of one age may in the next spin round in a whirling eddy, or spread into a dull and pestilential swamp. Studying with a wide view the course of human opinion, we may now and then trace on from the very turning-point the change from passive survival into active revival. Some well-known belief or custom has for centuries shown symptoms of decay, when we begin to see that the state of society, instead of stunting it, is favouring its new growth, and it bursts forth again with a vigour often as marvellous as it is unhealthy. And though the revival be not destined to hold on indefinitely, and though when opinion turns again its ruin may be more merciless than before, yet it may last for ages, make its way into the inmost constitution of society, and even become a very mark and characteristic of its time.
Writers who desire to show that, with all our faults, we are wiser and better than our ancestors, dwell willingly on the history of witchcraft between the middle and modern ages. They can quote Martin Luther, apropos of the witches who spoil the farmers’ butter and eggs, ‘I would have no pity on these witches; I would burn them all.’ They can show the good Sir Matthew Hale hanging witches in Suffolk, on the authority of scripture and the consenting wisdom of all nations; and King James presiding at the torture of Dr. Fian for bringing a storm against the king’s ship on its course from Denmark, by the aid of a fleet of witches in sieves, who carried out a christened cat to sea. In those dreadful days, to be a blear-eyed wizened cripple was to be worth twenty shillings to a witch-finder; for a woman to have what this witch-finder was pleased to call the devil’s mark on her body was presumption for judicial sentence of death; and not to bleed or shed tears or sink in a pond was torture first and then the stake. Reform of religion was no cure for the disease of men’s minds, for in such things the Puritan was no worse than the Inquisitor, and no better. Papist and Protestant fought with one another, but both turned against that enemy of the human race, the hag who had sold herself to Satan to ride upon a broomstick, and to suck children’s blood, and to be for life and death of all creatures the most wretched. But with new enlightenment there came in the very teeth of law and authority a change in European opinion. Toward the end of the seventeenth century the hideous superstition was breaking down among ourselves; Richard Baxter, of the ‘Saint’s Rest,’ strove with fanatic zeal to light again at home the witch-fires of New England, but he strove in vain. Year by year the persecution of witches became more hateful to the educated classes, and though it died hard, it died at last down to a vestige. In our days, when we read of a witch being burnt at Camargo in 1860, we point to Mexico as a country miserably in the rear of civilization. And if in England it still happens that village boors have to be tried at quarter-sessions for ill-using some poor old woman, who they fancy has dried a cow or spoiled a turnip crop, we comment on the tenacity with which the rustic mind clings to exploded follies, and cry out for more schoolmasters.