A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume III

by Henry Charles Lea

How great was the impression produced on the surrounding nations by the powers of the Egyptian Chakamim is shown by the later Jews, who, familiar as they were with the mysteries of the Magi and Chaldeans, yet declared that of the ten portions of magic bestowed upon the earth, nine had fallen to the lot of Egypt. That kingdom therefore furnishes naturally enough the oldest record of a trial for sorcery, occurring about 1300 B.C., showing that the use of magic was not regarded as criminal of itself, but only when employed by an unauthorized person for wrongful ends. The proceedings in the case recite that a certain Penhaiben, a farm superintendent of cattle, when passing by chance the Khen, or hall in the royal palace where the rolls of mystic lore were kept, was seized with a desire to obtain access to their secrets for his personal advantage. Procuring the assistance of a worker in stone named Atirma, he penetrated into the sacred recesses of the Khen and secured a book of dangerous formulas belonging to his master, Rameses III. Mastering their use, he soon was able to perform all the feats of the doctors of mysteries. He composed charms which, when carried into the royal palace, corrupted the concubines of the Pharaoh; he caused hatred between men, fascinated or tormented them, paralyzed their limbs, and in short, as the report of the tribunal states, “He sought and found the real way to execute all the abominations and all the wickedness that his heart conceived, and he performed them, with other great crimes, the horror of every god and goddess. Consequently he has endured the great punishment, even unto death, which the divine writings say that he merited.”[411]

Hebrew belief, which necessarily served as a standard for orthodox Christianity, drew from these various sources an ample store of magic practitioners. There was the At, or charmer; the Asshaph, Kasshaph, Mekassheph, the enchanter or sorcerer; the Kosem, or diviner; the Ob, Shoel Ob, Baal Ob, the consulter with evil spirits, or necromancer (the Witch of Endor was a Baalath Ob); the Chober Chaber, or worker with spells and ligatures; the Doresh el Hammathim, or consulter with the dead; the Meonen, or augur, divining by the drift of clouds or voices of birds—the “observer of times” of the A. V.; the Menachesh, or augur by enchantments; the Jiddoni, or wizard; the Chakam, or sage; the Chartom, or hierogrammatist; the Mahgim, or mutterers of spells; and in later times there were the Istaginen, or astrologer; the Charori, or soothsayer; the Magush, Amgosh, or enchanter; the Raten, or magus; the Negida, or necromancer; and the Pithom, inspired by evil spirits. There was here an ample field in which Christian superstition could go astray.

Greece contributed her share, although of strictly Goetic magic—the invocation of malignant spirits or the use of illicit means for wrongful ends—there was little need, in a religion of which the deities, great and small, were subject to all the weaknesses of humanity, were ready at any moment to inflict on man the direst calamities to gratify their love or their spleen or their caprice, and could be purchased by a prayer or a sacrifice to exercise their omnipotence irrespective of justice or morality. In such a religion the priest exercises the functions which in purer faiths are relegated to the sorcerer. Yet it is only necessary to mention the names of Zetheus and Amphion, of Orpheus and Pythagoras, of Epimenides, Empedocles, and Apollonius of Tyana to show that both tradition and history taught the existence and power of thaumaturgy and theurgy.[412] This theurgy was developed to its fullest extent in the marvels related of the Neo-Platonists, thus directly influencing Christian thought, which necessarily ascribed its miracles to the invocations of demons.[413] Yet by the side of all this there was no lack of Goetic magic, such as the legends attribute to the Cretan Dactyls or Curetes, to the Telchines, to Medea, and to Circe.[414] This is said to have received a powerful impetus in the Medic wars, when the Magian Osthanes, who accompanied Xerxes, scattered the seeds of his unholy lore throughout Greece. Plato speaks with the strongest reprobation of the venal sorcerers who hire themselves at slender wages to those desirous of destroying enemies with magic arts and incantations, ligatures, and the figurines, or waxen images, which have always been one of the favorite resources of malignant magic, and which in Greece wrought their evil work by being set up in the cross-roads, or affixed to the door of the victim or to the tomb of his ancestors. Philtres, or love-potions, which would excite or arrest love at will were among their ordinary resources. Even the triform Hecate was subject to their spells; they could arrest the course of nature and bring the moon to earth. The fearful rites which superstition attributed to these sorcerers are indicated in one of the charges brought against Apollonius of Tyana when tried before Domitian—that of sacrificing a child.[415]

In Rome the gods of the nether world furnished a link between the sacred ceremonies of the priest and the incantations of the sorcerer, for while they were objects of worship to the pious, they were also the customary sources of the magician’s power. Lucan’s terrible witch, Erichtho, is a favorite with Erebus; she wanders among tombs from which she draws their shades; she works her spells with funeral-torches and with the bones and ashes of the dead; her incantations are Stygian; gluing her lips to those of a dying man, she sends her dire messages to the under-world. Horace’s Canidia and Sagana seek their power at the same source, and the description of their hideous doings bears a curious resemblance to much that sixteen centuries later occupied the attention of half the courts in Christendom. It is the same throughout all the allusions to Latin sorcery—the deities invoked are infernal, and the rites are celebrated at night,[416] The identity of the means employed with those of modern sorcery is perfect. When Germanicus Cæsar, the idol of the empire, was doomed by the secret jealousy of Tiberius; when his subordinate in command of the East, Cneius Piso, was commissioned to make way with him, and Germanicus was stricken with mortal illness, it reads like a passage in Grillandus or Delrio to see that his friends, suspecting Piso’s enmity, dug from the ground and the walls of his house the objects placed there to effect his destruction—fragments of human bodies, half-burned ashes smeared with corruption, leaden plates inscribed with his name, charms, and other accursed things, by which, says Tacitus, it is believed that souls may be dedicated to the infernal gods. The ordinary feats of the witch could be more easily performed. A simple incantation would blight the harvest or dry the running fountain, would destroy the acorn on the oak and the ripening fruit on the bough. The figurine, or waxen image, of the person to be assailed, familiar to Hindu, Egyptian, and Greek sorcery, assumes in Rome the shape in which we find it in the Middle Ages. Sometimes the name of the victim was traced on it in letters of red wax. If a mortal disease was to be induced in any organ, a needle was thrust in the corresponding part of the image; or if he was to waste away in an incurable malady, it was melted with incantations at a fire. The victim could moreover be transformed into a beast—a feat which St. Augustin endeavors to explain by dæmonic delusion.[417] It is observable that the terrible magician is almost always an old woman—the saga, strix, or volatica—the wise-woman or nocturnal bird or night-flyer—corresponding precisely with the hag who in mediæval Europe almost monopolized sorcery. But the male sorcerer, like his modern descendant, had the power of transforming himself into a wolf, and was thus the prototype of the wer-wolves, or loups-garoux, who form so picturesque a feature in the history of witchcraft.[418]

The philtres, charms, and ligatures for exciting desire or preventing its fruition, or for arousing hatred, which meet us at every step in modern sorcery, were equally prevalent in that of Rome. The virtual insanity of Caligula was attributed to powerful drugs administered to him in a love-potion by Cæsonia, whom he married after the death of his sister and concubine Drusilla, and so firm was the conviction of this that when he was assassinated she was likewise put to death for having thus brought the greatest calamities on the republic. That such a man as Marcus Aurelius could be supposed to have caused his wife Faustina to bathe in the blood of the luckless gladiator who was the object of her affections before seeking his own embraces, while doubtless invented to account for the character of his son Commodus, shows the profound belief accorded to such arts. Appuleius found this to his cost when he was tried for his life on the charge of having by incantations and sorcery secured the affections of his bride Pudentilla, a woman of mature age who had been fourteen years a widow. Had the court, like those of the Middle Ages, enjoyed the infallible resource of torture, he would readily have been forced to confession, with the attendant death-penalty; but as there was no charge of treason involved, he was free to disculpate himself by evidence and argument, and he escaped.[419]

The severest penalties of the law, in fact, were traditionally directed against all practitioners of magic. The surviving fragments of the Decemviral legislation show that this dated from an early period of the republic. With the spread of the Roman conquests, the introduction of Orientalized Hellenism was followed by the magic of the East, more imposing than the homelier native practices, arousing the liveliest fear and indignation. In 184 B.C. the praetor L. Nævius was detained for four months from proceeding to his province of Sardinia, by the duty assigned to him of prosecuting cases of sorcery. A large portion of these were scattered through the suburbicarian regions; the culprits had a short shrift, and he manifested a diligence which Pierre Cella or Bernard de Caux might envy, if the account be true that he condemned no less than two thousand sorcerers. Under the empire decrees against magicians, astrologers, and diviners were frequent, and from the manner in which accusations of sorcery were brought against prominent personages the charge would seem to have been then, as it proved in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, one of those convenient ones, easy to make and hard to disprove, which are welcome in personal and political intrigue. Nero persecuted magic with such severity that he included philosophers among magicians, and the cloak or distinctive garment of the philosopher was sufficient to bring its wearer before the tribunals. Musonius the Babylonian, who ranked next to Apollonius of Tyana in wisdom and power, was incarcerated, and would have perished as intended but for the exceptional robustness which enabled him to endure the rigors of his prison. Caracalla went even further and punished those who merely wore on their necks amulets for the cure of tertian and quartan fevers. The darker practices of magic were repressed with relentless rigor. To perform or procure the performance of impious nocturnal rites with the object of bewitching any one was punished with the severest penalties known to the Roman law—crucifixion or the beasts. For immolating a man or offering human blood in sacrifices the penalty was simple death or the beasts, according to the station of the offender. Accomplices in magic practices were subjected to crucifixion or the beasts, while magicians themselves were burned alive. The knowledge of the art was forbidden as well as its exercise; all books of magic were to be burned, and their owners subjected to deportation or capital punishment, according to their rank. When the cross became the emblem of salvation, it of course passed out of use as an instrument of punishment; with the abolition of the arena the beasts were no longer available; but the fagot and stake remained, and for long centuries continued to be the punishment for more or less harmless impostors.[420]

With the triumph of Christianity the circle of forbidden practices was enormously enlarged. A new sacred magic was introduced which superseded and condemned as sorcery and demon-worship a vast array of observances and beliefs, which had become an integral and almost ineradicable part of popular life. The struggle between the rival thaumaturgies is indicated already in Tertullian’s complaint, that when in droughts the Christians by prayers and mortifications had extorted rain from God, the credit was given to the sacrifices offered to Jove; he challenges the pagans to bring before their own tribunals a demoniac, when a Christian will force the possessing spirit to confess himself a demon. The triumph of the new system was typified in the encounter between St. Peter and Simon Magus, when the flight through the air of the heathen theurgist was arrested by the prayers of the Christian, and he fell with a disastrous crash, breaking a hip-bone and both heels. If, as conjectured by some modern critics, Simon Magus is the Petrine designation of St. Paul, the partisans of the latter were not behindhand in recounting the triumph of their leader over the older thaumaturgists, for when he wrought wonders at Ephesus and the Jewish conjurers were put to shame, then “many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together and burned them before all men; and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.”[421]

Still more convincing was the incident which occurred to Marcus Aurelius in the Marcomannic war when, in the territory of the Quadi, he was cut off from water, so that his army was perishing from thirst. Though he had persecuted the Christians, he had recourse to the intervention of Christ, when a sudden tempest supplied the Romans abundantly with water, while the lightning slew the Teutons and dispersed them, so that they were readily slaughtered. When, finally, the new faith and the old met in their death-grapple, Eusebius describes Constantine as preparing for the struggle by calling around him his most holy priests and marching under the shade of the sacred Labarum. Licinius on his side collected diviners and Egyptian prophets and magicians. They offered sacrifices and endeavored to learn the result from their deities. Oracles everywhere promised victory; the sacrificial auguries were favorable; the interpreters of dreams announced success. On the eve of the first battle Licinius assembled his chief captains in a sacred grove where there were many idols, and explained to them that this was to be the decisive test between the gods of their ancestors and the unknown deity of the barbarians—if they were vanquished it would show that their gods were dethroned. In the ensuing combat the cross bore down everything before it; the enemy fled when it appeared, and Constantine seeing this sent the Labarum as an amulet of victory, wherever his troops were sore bestead, and at once the battle would be restored. Defeat only hardened the heart of Licinius, and again he had recourse to his magicians. Constantine, on the other hand, arranged an oratory in his camp, to which before battle he would retire to pray with the men of God, and then sallying forth would give the signal for attack, when his troops would slay all who dared to stand before them. So complete became the trust enjoined in the efficacy of the invocation of God, that enthusiasts denounced it as unworthy a Christian to rely upon human prudence and sagacity in trouble. St. Nilus tells us that in cases of sickness recourse is to be had to prayer, rather than to physicians and physic; and St. Augustin, in his recital of miraculous cures beyond the reach of science to effect, evidently regards the appeal to God and the saints as far more trustworthy than all the resources of the medical art.[422]

It was inevitable that the triumphant theurgy should set to work with remorseless vigor to extirpate its fallen rival, as soon as it could fully control the powers of the State. It was not so much the worship and propitiation of the pagan gods that was first attacked, as the thousand methods of divination and devices to avert evil which had become ingrained in daily life—oracles and auguries and portents and omens and soothsaying. Their efficacy was the work of Satan to deceive and seduce mankind, and their use was the direct or indirect invocation of demons. To attempt to foretell the future in any way was sorcery, and all sorcery was the work of the devil; and it was the same with the amulets and charms, the observance of lucky and unlucky days, and the innumerable trivial superstitions which amused the popular imagination. Zeal for the repression of every species of magic was not only stimulated by the conviction that it was an essential part of the conflict with a personal Satan, but by obedience to the commands of God in the Mosaic law. The awful words, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch (Mekasshepha) to live” have rung through the centuries, and have served as a justification for probably more judicial slaughter than any other sentence in the history of human jurisprudence. Rabbinical Judaism enforced this relentlessly in spite of the kindliness of the rabbis and their extreme indisposition to shed human blood. One of the first reforms of the Pharisees on coming into power after the persecution of Alexander Jannai was the abrogation of the Mosaic penal code in favor of milder laws. The leader in the revolution was Simon ben Shetach, who in organizing the Sanhedrin refused the presidency and conferred it on Judah ben Tabbai. The latter chanced to condemn a man for false witness on the testimony of a single person, though the law required two, when Simon reproached him as blood-guilty, and he resigned. Yet this man, so scrupulous about taking life, had no hesitation in hanging at Ascalon eighty witches in a single day. According to the Mishna, the Pithom and the Jiddoni are to be stoned, and false diviners and those who read the future in the name of idols are to be hanged, while the Talmud adds that he who learns a single word from a Magus is to be put to death. Christianity thus derived from Judaism the complete assurance that in ruthlessly exterminating all thaumaturgy save that of its own priesthood it was obeying the unquestioned command of God.[423]

The machinery of the Church was therefore early set to work to exhort and persuade the faithful against a sin so unpardonable and apparently so ineradicable; and as soon as it gathered its prelates together in councils it commenced to legislate for the suppression of such practices.[424] When it grew powerful enough to influence the head of the State it procured a series of cruel edicts which doubtless were effective in destroying the remains of tolerated paganism as well as in suppressing the special practices so offensive in the eyes of the orthodox. It was not difficult to commence with the time-honored practices of divination, for, although these had formed part of the machinery of State, yet when the State was centred in the person of its master, any inquiry into the future of public affairs was an inquiry into the fortune and fate of the monarch, and no crime was more jealously repressed and more promptly punished than this. Even so warm an admirer of ancestral institutions as Cato the Elder had long before warned his paterfamilias to forbid his villicus, or farm-steward, to consult any haruspex or augur. These gentry had a way of breeding trouble, and it boded no good to the master when the slaves were over-curious and too well-informed. In the same spirit Tiberius prohibited the secret consultation of haruspices. Constantine was thus serving a double purpose when, as early as 319, he threatened with burning the haruspex who ventured to cross another’s threshold, even on pretext of friendship; the man who called him in was punished with confiscation and deportation, and the informer was rewarded. Priest and augur were only to celebrate their rites in public. Even this was withdrawn by Constantius in 357; any consultation with diviners was punishable with death, and the practitioners themselves, whether of magic or augury, or the expounding of dreams, when on trial were deprived of exemption from torture and could be subjected to the rack or the hooks to extort confession.[425] Under this Constantius organized an active persecution throughout the East, in which numbers were put to death upon the slightest pretext; passing among the tombs at night was evidence of necromancy, and hanging a charm around the neck for the cure of a quartan was proof of forbidden arts. The witch-trials of modern times were prefigured and anticipated. Under Julian there was a reaction, and in 364 Valentinian and Valens proclaimed freedom of belief; in 371 they included in this the old religious divination, while capital punishment was restricted to magic arts, but the persecution in the East under Valens in 374, following the conspiracy of Theodore, obliterated all distinction. Commencing with those accused of magic, it extended to all who were noted for letters or philosophy. Terror reigned throughout the East; all who had libraries burned them. The prisons were insufficient to contain the prisoners, and in some towns it was said that fewer were left than were taken. Many were put to death, and the rest were stripped of their property. In the West, under Valentinian, persecution was not so sweeping, but the laws were enforced, at least in Rome, with sufficient energy to reduce greatly the number of sorcerers; and a law of Honorius, in 409, by its reference to the bishops, shows that the Church was beginning to participate with the State in the supervision over such offenders.[426] Yet that even the faithful could not be restrained from indulging in these forbidden practices is seen in the earnest exhortations addressed to them by their teachers, and the elaborate repetition of proofs that all such exhibitions of supernatural power were the work of demons.[427]