It is in his commentary on the 1st Commandment that he gives us a first glimpse into the world of witches which later was to engross his attention even more.
He is anxious to bring home to the “weaklings” how one can sin against the 1st Commandment.[1147] He therefore enumerates all the darkest deeds of human superstition; of their reality he was firmly convinced, and only seldom does he speak merely of their “possibility,” or say, “it is believed” that this or that took place. He also divides into groups the people who sin against the virtue of Divine love, doing so according to their age, and somewhat on the lines of a Catechism, in order that “the facts may be more easily borne in mind.”
“The third group,” he says, “is that of the old women, etc.” “By their magic they are able to bring on blindness, cause sickness, kill, etc.”[1148] “Some of them have their fireside devil who comes several times a day.” “There are incubi and succubi amongst the devils,” who commit lewdness with witches and others. Devil-strumpetry and ordinary harlotry are amongst the sins of these women. Luther also speaks of magic potions, desecration of the sacrament in the devil’s honour, and secret incantations productive of the most marvellous effects.
His opinion he sums up as follows: “What the devil himself is unable to do, that he does by means of old hags”;[1149] “he is a powerful god of this world”;[1150] “the devil has great power through the sorceresses.”[1151] He prefers thus to make use of the female sex because, “it comes natural to them ever since the time of Mother Eve to let themselves be duped and fooled.”[1152] “It is as a rule a woman’s way to be timid and afraid of everything, hence they practise so much magic and superstition, the one teaching the other.”[1153] Even in Paradise, so he says, the devil approached the woman rather than the man, she being the weaker.[1154]
It is worthy of note that he does not merely base his belief in witchcraft on the traditions of the past but preferably on Scripture directly, and the power of Satan to which it bears witness.
In 1519 he had attempted to prove on St. Paul’s authority against the many who refused to believe in such things, that sorcery can cause harm, omitting, however, to make the necessary distinctions.[1155] In 1538 he declares: “The devil is a great and powerful enemy. Verily I believe, that, unless children were baptised at an early age no congregations could be formed; for adults, who know the power of Satan, would not submit to be baptised so as to avoid undertaking the baptismal vows by which they renounce Satan.”[1156]
In the Commentary on Galatians he not merely appeals anew to the apostolic authority in support of his doctrine concerning the devil, but also directly bases his belief in witchcraft on the principle, that it is plain that Satan “rules and governs the whole world,” that we are but guests in the world, of which the devil is prince and god and controls everything by which we live: food, drink, clothing, air, etc.[1157] By means of sorcery he is able to strangle and slay us; through the agency of his whores and sorceresses, the witches, he is able to hurt the little children, with palpitations, blindness, etc. “Nay, he is able to steal a child and lay himself in the cradle in its stead, for I myself have heard of such a child in Saxony whom five women were not able to supply with sufficient milk to quiet it; and there are many such instances to be met with.”[1158]
The numerous other instances of harm wrought by witches with which he is acquainted, such as the raising of storms, thefts of milk, eggs and butter,[1159] the laying of snares to entrap men, tears of blood that flow from the eyes, lizards cast up from the stomach,[1160] etc., all recede into the background in comparison with the harlotry, substitution of children, etc., which the devil carries out with the witches’ help. “It is quite possible that, as the story goes, the Evil Spirit can carnally know the sorceresses, get them with child and cause all manner of mischief.”[1161] Changeling children of the sort are nothing but a “lump of flesh without a soul”; the devil is the soul, as Luther says elsewhere,[1162] for which reason he declared, in 1541, such children should simply be drowned; he recalls how he had already given this advice in one such case at Dessau, viz. that such a child, then twelve years of age, should be smothered.[1163]
It sometimes happens, so he says, that animals, cats for instance, intent on doing harm, are wounded and that afterwards the witches are found to have wounds in the same part of the body. In such case the animals were all sham.[1164] A mouse trying to steal milk is hurt somewhere, and the next day the witch comes and begs for oil for the wound which she has in the very same place.[1165] If milk and butter are placed on coals the devil, he says, will be obliged to call up the witches who did the mischief.[1166] “It is also said that people who eat butter that has been bewitched, eat nothing but mud.”[1167]
In such metamorphoses into animals it was not, however, the witches who underwent the change, nor were the animals really hurt, but it was “the devil who transformed himself into the animal” which was only apparently wounded; afterwards, however, “he imprints the marks of the wounds on the women so as to make them believe they had taken part in the occurrence.”[1168] At any rate this is the curiously involved explanation he once gives of the difficult problem.