As the epic approaches its conclusion, Baldus discovers his true father, Guido, under the form of a holy hermit, and learns that it is reserved for him by destiny, first to extirpate the sect of witches under their queen Smirna Gulfora, and afterwards to penetrate the realms of death and hell. The last five books of the Maccaronea are devoted to these crowning exploits. Merlin appears, and undertakes the guidance of the Barons on their journey to Avernus.[436] But first he requires full confession of their sins from each; and this humorous act of penitence forms one of the absurdest episodes, as may be easily imagined, in the poem. Absolved and furnished with heroic armor, the Barons march to the conquest of Gulfora and the destruction of her magic palace. Folengo has placed it appropriately on the road to hell; for under Gulfora he allegorizes witchcraft. The space allotted to Smirna Gulfora and the importance attached to her overthrow by Baldus and his Barons, call attention to the prevalence of magic in Italy at this epoch.[437] It may not, therefore, be out of place, before engaging in this portion of the analysis, to give some account of Italian witchcraft drawn from other sources, in order to estimate the truth of the satire upon which Folengo expended his force.
"Beautiful and humane Italy," as Bandello calls his country in the preface to one of his most horrible Novelle, was, in spite of her enlightenment, but little in advance of Europe on the common points of medieval superstition. The teaching of the Church encouraged a belief in demons; and the common people saw on every chapel wall the fresco of some saint expelling devils from the bodies of possessed persons, or exorcising domestic utensils which had been bewitched.[438] Thus the laity grew up in the confirmed opinion that earth, air, and ocean swarmed with supernatural beings, whom they distinguished as fiends from hell or inferior sprites of the elements, called spiriti folletti.[439] While the evil spirits of both degrees were supposed to lie beneath the ban of ecclesiastical malediction, they lent their aid to necromancers, witches and wizards, who, defying the interdictions of the Church, had the audacity to use them as their slaves by the employment of powerful spells and rites of conjurations. There was a way, it was believed, of taming both the demons and the elves, of making them the instruments of human avarice, ambition, jealousy and passion. Since all forms of superstition in Italy lent themselves to utilitarian purposes, the necromancer and the witch, having acquired this power over supernatural agents, became the servants of popular lusts. They sold their authority to the highest bidders, undertaking to blast the vines or to poison the flocks of an enemy; to force young men and maidens to become the victims of inordinate appetites; to ruin inconvenient husbands by slowly-wasting diseases; to procure abortion by spells and potions; to confer wealth and power upon aspirants after luxury; to sow the seeds of discord in families—in a word, to open a free path for the indulgence of the vain desires that plague ill-regulated egotisms. A class of impostors, half dupes of their own pretensions, half rogues relying on the folly of their employers, sprang into existence, who combined the Locusta of ancient Rome with the witch of medieval Germany. Such was the Italian strega—a loathsome creature, who studied the chemistry of poisons, philtres, and abortion-hastening drugs, and while she pretended to work her miracles by the help of devils, played upon the common passions and credulities of human kind.[440] By her side stood her masculine counterpart, the stregone, negromante or alchimista, who plays so prominent a part in the Italian comedies and novels.
Witchcraft was localized in two chief centers—the mountains of Norcia, and the Lombard valleys of the Alps.[441] In the former we find a remnant of antique superstition. The witches of this district, whether male or female, had something of the classical Sibyl in their composition and played upon the terrors of their clients. Like their Roman predecessors, they plied the trades of poisoner, quack-doctor and bawd. In Lombardy witchcraft assumed a more Teutonic complexion. The witch was less the instrument of fashionable vices, trading in them as a lucrative branch of industry, than the hysterical subject of a spiritual disease. Lust itself inflamed the victims of this superstition, who were burned by hundreds in the towns, and who were supposed to hold their revels in the villages of Val Camonica. Like the hags of northern Europe, these Lombard streghe had recourse to the black art in the delirious hope of satisfying their own inordinate ambitions, their own indescribable desires. The disease spread so wildly at the close of the fifteenth century that Innocent VIII., by his Bull of 1484, issued special injunctions to the Dominican monks of Brescia, Bergamo and Cremona, authorizing them to stamp it out with fire and torture.[442] The result was a crusade against witchcraft, which seems to have increased the evil by fascinating the imagination of the people. They believed all the more blindly in the supernatural powers to be obtained by magic arts, inasmuch as this traffic had become the object of a bloody persecution. When the Church recognized that men and women might command the fiends of hell, it followed as a logical consequence that wretches, maddened by misery and intoxicated with ungovernable lusts, were tempted to tamper with the forbidden thing at the risk of life and honor in this world and with the certainty of damnation in the other. After this fashion the confused conscience of illiterate people bred a formidable extension of this spiritual malady throughout the northern provinces of Italy. Some were led by morbid curiosity; others by a vain desire to satisfy their appetites, or to escape the consequences of their crimes. A more dangerous class used the superstition to acquire power over their neighbors and to make money out of popular credulity.
Born and bred in Lombardy at the epoch when witchcraft had attained the height of popular insanity, Folengo was keenly alive to the hideousness of a superstition which, rightly or wrongly, he regarded as a widespread plague embracing all classes of society. It may be questioned whether he did not exaggerate its importance. But there is no mistaking the verisimilitude of the picture he drew. All the uncleanliness of a diseased imagination, all the extravagances of wanton desire, all the consequences of domestic unchastity—incest, infanticide, secret assassination, concealment of births—are traced to this one cause and identified by him with witchcraft. The palace of the queen Gulfora is a pandemonium of lawless vice:
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Quales hic reperit strepitus, qualemque tumultum, Quales mollities turpes, actusque salaces, Utile nil scribi posset, si scribere vellem. |
Her courts are crowded with devils who have taken human shape to gratify the lusts of her votaries:
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Leggiadros juvenes, bellos, facieque venustos, Stringatos, agiles, quos judicat esse diablos, Humanum piliasse caput moresque decentes, Conspicit, innumeras circum scherzare puellas, Quæ gestant vestes auri brettasque veluti. |
The multitude is made up of all nations, sexes, ages, classes:
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Obstupet innumeros illic retrovare striones, Innumerasque strias vecchias, modicasque puellas. Non ea medesimo generatur schiatta paeso; At sunt Italici, Græci, Gallique, Spagnoles, Magnates, poveri, laici, fratresque, pretesque, Matronæ, monighæ per forzam claustra colentes. |
Some of them are engaged in preparing love-potions and poisonous draughts from the most disgusting and noxious ingredients. Others compound unguents to be used in the metamorphosis of themselves on their nocturnal jaunts. Among these are found poets, orators, physicians, lawyers, governors, for whose sins a handful of poor old women play the part of scapegoats before the public: