But though unquestionably great part of these confessions, which at first tended so much to prolong this delusion, were obtained by torture, or contrary to the real conviction and belief of the accused, it is impossible to deny that in many cases the confessions were voluntary, and proceeded from actual belief. Nor was it to be wondered at that persons of a weak and melancholy temperament should, more particularly at a time when the phenomena of nature and of the human body were so little understood, be disposed to set down every occurrence which they could not explain, and every wild phantasm which crossed their minds, to the direct and immediate agency of an evil power. At that period even the most natural events were ascribed to witchcraft. If a child, after being touched by a suspected individual, died or became ill, the convulsions were ascribed to diabolical interference, as in Wenham’s case, so late as 1712[20]. If, on the contrary, she cured instead of killing, the conclusion was the same, although the only charm employed might be a prayer to the Almighty[21]. If an old woman’s cat, coming to the door at night, took part in a concert with other cats, this was nothing but a witch herself in disguise[22]. In the case of Robert Erskine of Dun[23], tried for the murder of his nephews, he is indicted for making away with them by poisoning and witchcraft, as if the poisoning was not of itself amply sufficient to account for their death.
It was still less wonderful that those mysterious phenomena which sometimes occur in the human frame, such as spontaneous combustion, delusions arising from the state of the brain and nerves, and optical deceptions, should appear to the sufferer to be the work of the devil, whose good offices they might very probably have invoked under some fit of despondency or misanthropy, little expecting, like the poor man in the fable who called on Death, to be taken at their word. What a “Thesaurus of Horror” would the spectres of Nicolai have afforded in the sixteenth century or the commencement of the seventeenth, if embodied in the pages of the ‘Malleus’ or the ‘Flagellum Dæmonum,’ instead of being quietly published by the patients as optical and medical phenomena in the ‘Berlinische Monatschrift’ for 1799, and the 15th volume of the ‘Philosophical Journal!’ What a fearful glimpse into the infernal world would have been afforded by the still more frightful illusions which haunted poor Backzko of Königsberg[24] during his political labours in 1806; the grinning negro who seated himself opposite to him, the owl-headed tormentor that used to stare at him every night through his curtains, the snakes twisting and turning about his knees as he turned his periods! If we go back to 1651, we find our English Jacob Böhme, Pordage[25], giving an account of visions which must have been exactly of the same kind, arising from an excited state of the brain, with the most thorough conviction of their reality. His Philadelphian disciples, Jane Leade, Thomas Bromley, Hooker, Sapperton, and others, were indulged, on the first meeting of their society, with a vision of unparalleled splendour. The princes and powers of the infernal world passed in review before them, sitting in coaches, surrounded with dark clouds and drawn by a cortége of lions, dragons, tigers, and bears; then followed the lower spirits arranged in squadrons with cats’ ears, claws, twisted limbs, etc.; whether they shut their eyes or kept them open, the appearances were equally distinct; “for we saw,” says the master-spirit Pordage, “with the eyes of the mind, not with those of the body.”
“And shapes that come not at a mortal call
Will not depart when mortal voices bid.
Lords of the visionary eye, whose lid
Once raised remains aghast, and will not fall[26].”
Thus, while phenomena which experience has since shown to be perfectly natural were universally attributed to supernatural causes, men had come to be on the most familiar footing with spiritual beings of all kinds. In the close of the sixteenth century, Dr. Dee was, according to his own account, and we verily believe his own conviction, on terms of intimacy with most of the angels. His brother physician, Dr. Richard Napier, a relation of the inventor of the logarithms, got almost all his medical prescriptions from the angel Raphael. Elias Ashmole had a MS. volume of these receipts, filling about a quire and a half of paper[27]. In fact, one would almost suppose that few persons at that time condescended to perform a cure by natural means. Witness the sympathetic nostrums of Valentine Greatrakes and Sir Kenelm Digby; or the case of Arise Evans, reported by Aubrey, who “had a fungous nose, and to whom it was revealed that the king’s hand would cure him; and at the first coming of King Charles II. into St. James’s Park he kissed the king’s hand and rubbed his nose with it, which troubled the king, but cured him.” In Aubrey’s time, too, the visits of ghosts had become so frequent, that they had their exits and their entrances without exciting the least sensation. Aubrey makes an entry in his journal of the appearance of a ghost as coolly as a merchant now-a-days makes an entry in his ledger. “Anno 1670. Not far from Cirencester was an apparition. Being demanded whether good spirit or bad, returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious perfume and a melodious twang.”
Is it to be wondered at then, that, surrounded on all hands with such superstitious fancies, the weak and depraved were early brought to believe that all the wild chimeras of the demonologists were true, and that they had really concluded that covenant with Satan, the possibility of which was universally inculcated as an article of faith, and the idea of which was constantly present to their minds? or that, under the influence of this frightful delusion, they should voluntarily come forward to confess their imaginary crime, as in the Amsterdam case of the poor girl who accused herself of bewitching cattle by the words Shurius, Turius, Tirius[28], or in another still more remarkable case in 1687, mentioned in Reichard’s ‘Beyträge,’ where a young woman accused herself, her friend, and the mother of her friend, of a long course of witchcraft, with all the usual traditional and impossible horrors of Sprenger and his brethren?
Neither, we are afraid, is there much reason to doubt that some of the most horrible of their conceptions were founded on facts which were but too real; that the cunning and the depraved contrived to turn the ecstasies and the fears of these poor wretches to their own purposes; in short, that frauds similar to those which Boccaccio has painted in his novel of the angel Gabriel, were occasionally played off upon the deluded victims. Without entering further on a topic which is rather of a delicate kind, the reader will have an idea of our meaning who recollects the disclosures that took place in the noted French case of Father Girard and La Cadière.
Much has been said as to the wonderful coincidences to be found in the evidence of the accused when examined separately, the minuteness of their details, and the general harmony of the infernal narratives, as collected from the witch trials of different countries. But the truth is that this assertion must in the first place be received with great limitations; for in many cases, where, accepting the assertions of Sprenger and the rest as true, we should suppose the coincidence to be complete, the original confessions which still exist prove that the resemblance was merely general, and that there were radical and irreconcileable differences in the details of the evidence. Inasfar as the assertion is really true, one simple explanation goes far to account for the phenomenon;—“Insanire parent certâ ratione modoque.” The general notions of the devil and his demeanour, the rites of the infernal sabbath, etc. being once fixed, the visions which crossed the minds of the unfortunate wretches accused soon assumed a pretty determinate and invariable form; so that, even if left to tell their own story, there would have been the closest resemblance between the narratives of different persons. But this was not all. In almost every case the confessions were merely the echo of questions put by the inquisitors, all of which again were founded on the demonological creed of the ‘Malleus.’ One set of questions is put to all the witches, and the answers, being almost always simple affirmatives, necessarily correspond. Hence it is amusing enough to observe how different were the results, when the process of investigation fell into the hands of persons to whom Sprenger’s manual was unknown. In the Lindheim trials in 1633, to which we have already alluded, the inquisitor happened to be an old soldier, who had witnessed several campaigns in the Thirty Years War, and who, instead of troubling his head about Incubi, Succubi, and the other favourite subjects of inquiry with the disciples of the Hammer, was only anxious to ascertain who was the queen of the infernal spirits, the general, officers, corporals, etc., to all of which he received answers as distinct and satisfactory as any that are recorded for our instruction in the chronicles of Bodinus or Delrio.
In the seventeenth century, the manner in which the delusion was communicated seems exactly to resemble those remarkable instances of sympathy which occur in the cases of the Scottish Cambuslang Conversions and the American Forest Preachings. No sooner has one hypochondriac published his symptoms, than fifty others feel themselves at once affected with the same disorder. In the celebrated Mora case in 1669, with which of course all the readers of Glanvil (and who has not occasionally peeped into his horrors?) are familiar, the disease spreads first through the children, who believed themselves the victims of diabolical agency, and who ascribed the convulsions, faintings, etc., with which they were attacked, to that cause; and next through the unfortunate witches themselves, for as soon as one or two of them, bursting into tears, confessed that the accusation of the children was true, all the rest joined in the confession. And what is the nature of their confession? Of all impossible absurdities that ever entered the brain of man, this trial is the epitome. They meet the devil nightly on the Blocula, which is the devil’s ball-room in Sweden, as the Brocken is in Germany; they ride thither on sticks, goats, men’s backs, and spits; they are baptized by a priest provided by the devil; they sup with him, very frugally it would appear, for the banquet commonly consists of broth made with colewort and bacon, oatmeal, bread and butter, milk and cheese; and the devil allows no wine. After supper they dance, and when the devil wishes to be particularly jolly he pulls the spits from under them, and beats them black and blue, after which he sits down and laughs outrageously. Sometimes he treats them to a musical exhibition on the harp, for he has a great turn for music, as his famous sonata to Tartini proves. All of them confess intercourse with him[29], and most of them had sons and daughters by him. Occasionally he fell sick, and required to be bled and blistered; and once he seemed to be dead, on which occasion there was a general mourning for him on the Blocula, as the Syrian damsels used to bewail the annual wound of their idol Thammuz on Lebanon. Is it not frightful to think that in a trial held before a tribunal consisting of the élite of the province of Dalecarlia, assisted by the commissioners from the capital,—in a country where, until this time, the witch mania, already beginning to abate in Germany, had scarcely been heard of, and where it ceased earlier perhaps than in most other countries in Europe,—seventy-two women and fifteen children should have been condemned and executed at one time upon such confessions? Is it possible after this to read without shuddering the cool newspaper-like conclusion of Dr. Horneck—“On the 25th of August execution was done upon the notoriously guilty, the day being bright and glorious, and the sun shining, and some thousands of people being present at the spectacle!”
Thirty years before, a similar instance of the progress of the epidemic had taken place at Lille, in the hospital founded by the pious enthusiast Antoinette Bourignon. On entering the schoolroom one day, she imagined that she saw a number of little black children, with wings, flying about the heads of the girls; and not liking the colour or appearance of these visitors, she warned her pupils to be on their guard. Shortly before this, a girl who had run away from the institution in consequence of being confined for some misdemeanour of which she had been guilty, being interrogated how she had contrived to escape, and not liking probably to disclose the truth, had maintained that she had been liberated by the devil, to whose service she had devoted herself from a child. Nothing more was wanting in that age of diablerie to turn the heads of the poor children; in the course of six months almost all the girls in the hospital, amounting to more than fifty, had confessed themselves confirmed witches, and admitted the usual intercourse with the devil, the midnight meetings, dances, banquets, etc., which form the staple of the narrative of the time. Their ideal banquets seem to have been on a more liberal scale however than those of the poor Mora witches; probably because many of the pupils had been accustomed to better fare in a populous and wealthy town in Flanders, than the others in a poor village in Sweden. Exorcisms and prayers of all kinds followed this astounding disclosure. The Capuchins and Jesuits quarrelled, the Capuchins implicitly believing the reality of the possession, the Jesuits doubting it. The parents of the culprit now turned the tables upon poor Bourignon, by accusing her of having bewitched them; and at last the pious theosophist, after an examination before the Council, was glad to seek safety in flight; having thus obtained a clearer notion than she formerly possessed of the kingdom of Satan, with regard to which she had entertained and published as many strange fancies as the Bishop of Benevento; and having been taught by her own experience the danger of tampering with youthful minds, in which the train of superstition had been so long laid, that it only required a spark from her overheated brain to kindle it into a flame.
It would appear too that physical causes, and in particular nervous affections of a singular kind, had about this time mingled with and increased the delusion which had taken its rise in these superstitious conceptions of the devil and his influence. During the very year (1669) in which the children at Mora were suffering under convulsions and fainting fits, those in the Orphan Hospital at Hoorn, in Holland, were labouring under a malady exactly similar; but though the phenomena were attributed to diabolical agency, the suspicions of the public fortunately were not directed to any individual in particular. Another instance of the same kind had taken place about a century before in the Orphan Hospital at Amsterdam, of which a particular account is given in Dapper’s history of that city, where the number of children supposed to be bewitched amounted to about seventy, and where the evil was attributed to some unhappy old women, before whose houses the affected urchins, when led out into the streets, had been more than usually clamorous. Such also appears to have been the primary cause of the tragedies in New England in 1699; of the demoniac exhibitions at Loudon, which were made a pretext for the murder of the obnoxious Grandier; of the strange incidents which occurred so late as 1749 in the convent of Unterzell at Wurtzburg; and of most of the other more remarkable cases of supposed possession. The mysterious principle of sympathy, operating in weak minds, will in fact be found to be at the root of most of the singular phenomena in the history of witchcraft. No wonder then that after the experience of a century, the judges, and even the ignorant public themselves, came at last to suspect that, however the principle might apply to other crimes, the confession of the criminal was not, in cases of witchcraft, the best evidence of the fact. In the New England cases, says Mr. Calef (April 25, 1693), “one was tried that confessed; but they were now so well taught what weight to lay upon confessions, that the jury brought her in not guilty, although she confessed she was.”