In the spring of 1623 the following strange proclamation was placarded through the streets of Paris: “We who are the authorised messengers of the Brothers of the Rosy Cross, making visible and invisible sojourn in this town, by the grace of the Most High, towards Whom the hearts of sages turn, do give instruction, without external means, in speaking the language of the countries wherein we dwell,[274] and do rescue men who are our fellow-workers from terror and from death. If anyone shall seek us out of mere curiosity, he will never communicate with us; but if he be actuated by an earnest desire to be inscribed on the register of our fraternity, we, who are discerners of thoughts, will make manifest to such an one the truth of our promises, so only that we do not disclose the place of our abode, since thought in its union with the firm will of the reader shall be sufficient to make us known to him and him likewise to us.”
Public opinion took hold of this mysterious manifesto, and if anyone asked openly who were those Brothers of the Rosy Cross, an unknown personage would perchance take the inquirer apart, and say to him gravely[275]: “Predestined to the reformation which must take place speedily in the whole universe, the Rosicrucians are depositaries of supreme wisdom, and as undisturbed possessors of all gifts of Nature, they can dispense these at pleasure. In whatsoever place they may be, they know all things which are going on in the rest of the world better than if they were present amongst them; they are superior to hunger and thirst and have neither age nor disease to fear. They can command the most powerful spirits and genii. God has covered them with a cloud to protect them from their enemies, and they cannot be seen except by their own consent—had anyone eyes more piercing than those of the eagle. Their general assemblies are held in the pyramids of Egypt; but, even as the rock whence issued the spring of Moses, these pyramids proceed with them into the desert and will follow them until they enter the Promised Land.”
CHAPTER VI
SOME MAGICAL PROSECUTIONS
The Greek author of the allegorical Tablet of Cebes gives expression to this admirable conclusion: “There is one only real good to be desired, and this is wisdom; there is but one evil to fear, and it is madness.” Moral evil, wickedness and crime are indeed and literally mania. Father Hilarion Tissot has therefore our heartfelt sympathy when he proclaims without ceasing in his extravagantly daring pamphlets that in place of punishing criminals we must take them under our charge and cure them. But, sympathy notwithstanding reason rises in protest against excessively charitable interpretations of crime, the consequence of which would be to destroy the sanction of morality by disarming law. We liken mania to intoxication, and seeing that the latter is nearly always voluntary, we applaud the wisdom of judges who punish the misdemeanours and crimes committed in the state of drunkenness, not regarding the voluntary loss of reason as an excuse. There may come even a day when the self-induced condition will be counted as an aggravating circumstance and when the intelligent being who by his own act sets himself outside reason will find that he is also outside the pale of law. Is not law the reason of humanity? Woe to him who gets drunk, whether with wine, pride, hatred, or even love. He becomes blind, unjust, the sport of circumstance; he is a walking scourge and living fatality; he may slay or violate; he is an unchained fool, and let him be denounced as such. Society has the right of self-defence; it is more than a right, it is duty, for society has children.
These reflections are prompted by the magical prosecutions of which we have to give some account. The Church and Society have been too often charged with the judicial murder of fools. We admit that the sorcerers were fools, but theirs was the folly of perversity. If some innocent but diseased persons have perished among them, these things are misfortunes for which neither Society nor the Church can be held responsible. Every man who is condemned according to the laws of his country and the judicial forms of his time is condemned justly, his possible innocence being henceforth in the hands of God: before men he is and must remain guilty.
In a remarkable romance, called The Sorceresses’ Sabbath,[276] Ludwig Tieck depicts a holy woman, a poor old creature outworn by macerations, mentally enfeebled by fasts and prayers, who, being full of horror at sorcerers, yet disposed by excess of humility to accuse herself of all crimes, ends in believing that she is a witch, confesses it, is convicted by error and prejudgment, and finally is burnt alive. What would such a history prove, supposing that it were true? Neither more nor less than the possibility of a judicial blunder. But if such mistakes are possible in fact they cannot be so in equity, or what would become of human justice? Socrates condemned to death might have had recourse to flight and his own judges would have furnished the means, but he respected the laws and resolved therefore to die.
The severity of certain sentences must be blamed to the laws and not the tribunals of the middle ages. Was Gilles de Laval, whose crimes and their punishment have been narrated, condemned unjustly, and must he be absolved as a fool? Were those horrible imbeciles innocent who composed philtres from the fat of little children? Moreover, Black Magic was the general mania of this unfortunate epoch. By their incessant application to questions of sorcery, the very judges occasionally ended by thinking that they also had committed the same crimes. The plague became epidemic in many localities and executions seemed to multiply the guilty.
Demonographers like Delancre, Delrio, Sprenger, Bodin, and Torreblanca give reports of many prosecutions, the details of which are equally tedious and revolting. The condemned creatures were mostly hallucinated and idiotic, but they were wicked in their idiocy and dangerous in their hallucination. Erotic passion, greed and hatred were the chief causes which brought about disorder in their reason: they were indeed capable of anything. Sprenger says that sorceresses were in league with midwives to secure dead bodies of new-born children. The midwives killed these innocents at the very moment of their birth, driving long needles into the brain. The babe was said to have been still-born and was buried as such; on the night following, the stryges dug up the ground and removed the corpse, which they stewed in a pan with narcotic and poisonous herbs, afterwards distilling this human gelatine. The liquor did duty as an elixir of long life, and the solid part—pounded and incorporated with soot and the grease of a black cat—was used for magical rubbing. The stomach turns with loathing at such abominable revelations, and pity is silenced by anger; but when one refers to the trials themselves, sees the credulity and cruelty of judges, the lying promises of mercy employed to extract admissions, the atrocious tortures, obscene examinations, shameful and ridiculous precautions, and finally the public execution, with the derisive ministrations of a priesthood which surrendered to the secular arm and asked mercy on those whom it had just condemned to death, amidst all this chaos one is forced to conclude that religion alone rests holy, but that human beings are all and equally either idiots or scoundrels.
In the year 1598 a priest of Limousin, named Pierre Aupetit, was burned alive for ridiculous confessions extracted from him by torture.[277] In 1599 a woman named Antide Collas was burned at Dôle because there was something abnormal in her sexual conformation, and it was regarded as explicable only by a shameful intercourse with Satan. Repeatedly put to the torture, stripped, scrutinised by doctors and judges, overwhelmed with shame and suffering, the unfortunate being confessed everything that she might somehow end it all.[278] Henri Boguet, judge of Saint-Claude, relates how he caused a woman to be tortured as a sorceress because there was a piece missing from the cross of her rosary, and it was a certain sign of witchcraft in the view of this ferocious maniac. A child of twelve years, brought up by the inquisitors, accused his own father of taking him to the Sabbath. The father died in prison as the result of his sufferings, and it was proposed to burn the boy, which was opposed by Boguet—who made a virtue of the clemency. Rollande de Vernois, thirty-five years old, was imprisoned in such a freezing dungeon that she promised to admit herself guilty of Magic if she might be allowed to go near a fire. As soon as she felt its warmth she fell into frightful convulsions, accompanied by fever and delirium. In this condition she was put to the torture, made every required statement, and was dragged in a dying condition to the stake. A storm broke out, extinguished the fire, and thereupon Boguet gloated over the sentence which he had pronounced, since she who in appearance was thus protected by heaven must really and incontestably be aided by the devil. This same judge burnt Pierre Gaudillon and Pierre le Gros for travelling by night, the one in the form of a hare and the other in that of a wolf.
But the prosecution which caused the greatest stir at the beginning of the seventeenth century was that of Messire Louis Gaufridi, curé of the parish of Accoules, at Marseilles. The scandal of this affair created a fatal precedent, which was only followed too faithfully. It was a case of priests accusing a priest, of a minister dragged before a tribunal of his associates in the ministry. Constantine had said that if he found a priest dishonouring his calling by some shameful sin he would cover him with his own purple, which was a beautiful and royal saying, for the priesthood ought to be stainless, even as justice is infallible in the presence of public morality.[279]