Our wise legislators maintained that old women were generally selected by the evil ones for their malicious purposes, and they usually appeared to them in the form of a man wearing a black coat or gown; and sometimes, especially in the north, with a bluish band and turned-up linen cuffs: hard bargains were sometimes driven between the parties for the value of the harridan’s soul. This was also the case according to Echard, in the negotiation between Oliver Cromwell and the Devil before the battle of Worcester. There were black, white, and gray witches: some of them fond of junketing and merry-making, and often would Satan play on a pipe or a cittern to make them dance; and not unfrequently would he become enamoured with their withered charms, when toads and horrible serpents were the hated progeny of this unhallowed union. Sinclair tells us, in his “Invisible World,” of one Mr. Barton, who was burnt with his wife for witchcraft, and who confessed, before he was tied to the stake, that he had intrigued with the Devil in the shape of a comely lady, who had given him 15l. for his trouble. His wife confessed at the same time, that the Devil in the shape of a poodle dog used to dance before her, playing upon the pipes with a candle under his tail. The Devil, particularly in Scotland would ever and anon get up into a pulpit, and preach a sermon in a voice “hough and gustie.”
Burton gives us some curious traditions of these devilish amours, and quotes Philostratus’s account of one Menippus Lycius, a young man twenty-five years of age, who going between Cenchreas and Corinth, met a phantom in the shape of a fair gentlewoman, which, taking him by the hand, carried him to her house in the suburbs of Corinth; and told him she was a Phœnician by birth, and, if he would tarry with her he should hear her sing and play, and drink such wine as never was drunk, and no man should molest him, but she, being fair and lovely, would live and die with him. The young man tarried with her awhile to his great content, and at last married her; to whose wedding, amongst other guests, came Apollonius; who by some probable conjecture, found her out to be a serpent—a lamia. When she saw herself discovered, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent; but he would not be moved, and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it vanished in an instant.
Florigerus also mentions the case of a young gentleman of Rome, “who on his wedding day went out walking with his bride and some friends after dinner; and towards the evening went to a tennis-court, and while he played he took off his ring, and placed it upon the finger of a brass Venus statua. The game finished, he went to fetch his ring; but Venus had bent her finger upon it, and he could not get it off. Whereupon, loth to make his companions tarry, he there left it, intending to fetch it the next day, went thence to supper, and so to bed; but in the night Venus had slipped between him and his wife, and thus troubled him for several successive nights. Not knowing how to help himself, he made his moan to one Palumbus, a learned magician; who gave him a letter, and bade him at such a time of the night, in such a cross way, where old Saturn would pass by with his associates, to deliver to him the script: the young man, of a bold spirit, accordingly did it; and when the old fiend had read it, he called Venus to him, who was riding before him, and commanded her to deliver the ring, which forthwith she did.”
Burton further quotes St. Augustine, Bodin, Paracelsus, and various other learned men, who firmly maintain that the Devil is particularly fond of a little flirtation with the ladies; and a Bavarian widower, who was sadly grieving for his beloved wife, was visited by Old Nick, who had assumed the form of the departed lady, and promised to live with him and comfort him on the condition that he would leave off swearing and blaspheming; he vowed it, married her, and she brought him several children; till one day, in an uxorious quarrel, he began to swear like a Pandour, whereupon she vanished, and never more was seen.
The preservatives against witchcraft were as absurd as the fear it inspired: some hair, parings of nails, or any part of a person bewitched, were put into a stone bottle, with crooked nails, then corked close, and hung up the chimney; this expedient occasioned most horrible tortures to the witch, until the bottle was uncorked. Witches, moreover, cannot pursue their victims beyond the middle of a running stream, provided the fugitives had been baptized. I have now a patient under my care who fancies himself bewitched, and asserts that the only way to guard against the evil is by driving a nail in the impress left by a witch’s foot on the threshold, when she will discontinue her visits.
By an act of George II. these offences were considered as misdemeanors, and punished with a year’s imprisonment, and standing four times in the pillory. There is no doubt that, notwithstanding the absurdity of such delusions and impostures, legislators must endeavour to secure the ignorant against these impositions, which are frequently of a perilous nature, and have been often known to occasion serious accidents, and even death. Many of the substances thus administered are of a most dangerous description, and these enchantments are not unfrequently resorted to with sinister intentions. It is related of the Asiatic women, that, under the pretext of giving these philters, they sometimes times prepare a beverage from the seeds of the Datura Metel, which produces a lethargic stupefaction of a convenient nature. The mischief that has frequently arisen from the exhibition of the Lytta vesicatoria has been observed and recorded by every medical practitioner. The Diablotini, a kind of incentive sugar-plums of the Italians, have been known to occasion the most serious accidents; and the celebrated French actor Molé lost his life in one of these experiments. Yet penal enactments, in such cases, must be resorted to with much circumspection; for prohibition too frequently promotes the evils which it is designed to check.
Montesquieu observes, that the ridiculous stories that are generally told, and the many impositions that have been discovered in all ages, are enough to demolish all faith in such a dubious crime, if the contrary evidence were not also extremely strong. Unquestionably, we have too many instances of criminal acts of superstition in which supernatural agency is believed; but did this philosophic writer mean to say that we have evidence of actual witchcraft and sorcery? It is with some degree of regret that we find our learned Blackstone avow his belief in these matters, and we borrow his own words on the subject: “To deny the possibility, nay, the actual existence of witchcraft and sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed Word of God, in various passages both of the New and Old Testament; and the thing itself is a truth to which every nation in the world hath in its turn borne testimony, either by examples seemingly well attested, or by prohibitory laws which at least suppose the possibility of a commerce with evil spirits. The civil law punishes with death not only the sorcerers themselves, but also those who consult them; imitating in the former the express law of God, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!’” Without calling into doubt the records of supernatural agency in Holy Writ, evident manifestations of the power and the will of the Divinity at that period, it may fairly be asked—Can we promulgate such opinions in the present times, when miraculous events do not seem to be permitted by our Creator in His inscrutable wisdom, without incurring the risk of plunging the ignorant in all the dark horrors of the early ages? Montesquieu himself has justly remarked, “that the most unexceptionable conduct, the purest morals, and the constant practice of every duty in life, are not a sufficient security against the suspicion of crimes like these.” And yet, because, forsooth, there may be made to appear examples seemingly attested, and that on the faith of such an attestation the most absurd and cruel prohibitory laws have been enacted by every nation in the world, on the supposition of the possibility of such a crime, however ignorant and brutalized by superstition these nations are or may have been, man is not only authorized by the Scriptures to persecute some poor miserable fool or vagrant impostor unto death, but he is sanctioned in founding this barbarous persecution on the laws of God! The mind sickens at such doctrines. It is grievous to find a man like our Addison sharing in such preposterous notions; notions which would induce a doubtful by-stander not to interfere with a mob of miscreants who were drowning some unfortunate old woman “for a witch.”
“There are,” says Addison, “some opinions in which a man should stand neuter, without engaging his assent to one side or the other. It is with this temper of mind that I consider the subject of witchcraft. When I consider whether there are such persons in the world as those we call witches, my mind is divided between the two opposite opinions; or rather, to speak my thoughts freely, I believe in general that there is, and has been, such a thing as witchcraft, but, at the same time, can give no credit to any particular instance of it.”
Are we then still to believe that there may exist some supernatural hag, that can
————Untie the winds, and let them fight
Against the churches————
Control the moon, make ebbs and flows,
And deal in her command without her power?