The displaying of supposed witchcraft

by John Webster

2. Their Confessions will be found null and false, if we consider the impulsive cause that moves them to make them, and the end wherefore they declare such false and lying matters, and that in these particulars. 1. The moving cause is not, nor can be the Spirit of God, which is a Spirit of truth and righteousness, nor any motion of true remorse for their sins, or any thing flowing from repentant hearts, because they are persons forsaken of God and his Grace, and given over to reprobate minds and senses, and therefore the truth of the Word of God is fulfilled in them: Because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved, therefore God shall send them strong delusion, that they might believe a lye. That they all might be damned, who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness. 2. Neither is the end for the glory of God, or their own Salvation, because they are the Vassals and Bond-slaves of Satan, being kept Captive at his will, and are Rebels and Traitors against God and Christ, his Church and Truth, having renounced the Faith, and become Apostata’s to the truth. 3. The impulsive cause and chief end wherefore they make these and such like confessions, is sometimes, and in some persons meerly to eschew torture and bodily pains, and sometimes the quite contrary solely to escape the present miseries of a poor, wretched, and troublesom life; and therefore these confessions not at all to be credited, as being vain and feigned. 4. Sometimes they are by force, waking, craft, and cunning, in hope of pardon and life, to make such confessions as the base ends and corrupt intentions of the Inquisitors themselves, or their Agents, have infused into them, for the advancement of false Doctrine, Superstition, and Idolatry: such were the most (if not all) recorded by Delrio Bodinus, and the rest of the Witchmongers, to which no credit can be given at all. 5. But the chief end that Satan hath (who is the Forger, Contriver, and Deviser of these Confessions, if voluntarily and freely made, the principal Agent in all these matters) is to set forth the power and glory of his own Kingdom, thereby to lead men into, and continue them in lyes and errors; for when he speaketh a lye, he speaketh of his own, for he is a lyar, and the father of it, and the Witches are his Children, and the works of their Father the Devil they will do, and he was, and is a Murtherer and Lyar from the beginning. And thus far we acknowledge a spiritual and mental League betwixt the Witch and the Devil, by virtue of which they confess these horrible and abominable lyes, of the glory of him and his Kingdom; but other League or Covenant there is none, neither is there any the least spark of truth in all that they say or confess, because their sole end in making of these confessions, is to advance the credit and power of Satan. 6. The impulsive cause that often makes them to utter such confessions of strange and impossible things, is the strong passive delusion, that they lye under, contracted by ignorant, unchristian, and superstitious education, which they have suckt in with their milk, heightned with an atrabilarious temper and constitution, and confirmed by the wicked lyes, and teaching of others, which makes them confess these execrable things, which they in their depraved and vitiated imaginations, do think and believe they have done and suffered, when there was never truly acted any such matter ad extrà, but only in their mad and deluded Phantasies: and so no more credit to be given to them, than to the maddest Melancholist that ever was read or heard of.

Reas. 3.

Lib. 1. of Prognost.

Hist. meditat. lib. 4. cap. 13. pag. 280.

History 1.

Hist. nat. l. 7. c. 52. pag. 103.

Doctor. Epist. pag. 641.

History 2.

Histor. Animal. lib. 8. cap. 24.

3. That there is not any jot of truth in these Confessions, is manifest, if we consider the subjective matter of them, as is plain by these ensuing grounds. 1. For the most of them are not credible, by reason of their obscenity and filthiness; for chast ears would tingle to hear such bawdy and immodest lyes; and what pure and sober minds would not nauseate and startle to understand such unclean stories, as of the carnal Copulation of the Devil with a Witch, or of his sucking the Teat or Wart of an old stinking and rotten Carkass? surely even the impurity of it may be sufficient to overthrow the credibility of it, especially amongst Christians. 2. There are many things that have no verity in them at all, that notwithstanding have verisimilitude; but these are not only void of truth, but also of truth-likeliness: for it is neither truth, nor hath any likelihood of it, to believe it for a truth, that the Devil should carry an old Witch in the Air into foraign Regions, that can hardly crawl with a staff, to dancing and banqueting, and yet to return with an empty belly, and the next day to be forced, like old Dembdike or Elizabeth Sothernes, and Alizon Denice, to go a begging with the sowr-milk Can: is this either probable or likely? would it not much more have advantaged the Devils interest and his Kingdom, to have furnished them with good and true meat and drink, and not with such imaginary Cates, which would neither fill the stomach, nor satisfie the appetite? Had it not been more for the Devils benefit to have furnished them with plenty of gold and silver, than to let them go ragged and tattered, begging their bread from door to door? 3. As these confessions have no truth-likeliness in them, so they are things that are simply impossible to be performed by any created power, and therefore must needs be false and fictitious relations; for no Creature can perform any thing but that for which by Creation it was ordered and designed to; but the Devils by Creation have no generative power given them, nor members or organs to perform the act of copulation withal; and therefore their having carnal copulation with the Witches, is a most monstrous fiction, and an absolute impossibility, and can have nothing in it more than the stirring up of the imaginative faculty, and thereby to move titillation in the members fitted for the act of generation, which is a thing that happens to many both men and women, that are of hot constitutions, and abound with seed, which we call nocturnæ prolutiones, of which the Divines and Casuists make that great question, An nocturnæ prolutiones sint peccatum? And it is as simply impossible for either the Devil or Witches to change or alter the course that God hath set in Nature, as to transubstantiate a man or woman into a Cat, a Dog, or a Wolf; and therefore are these confessions meer impossibilities and monstrous lyes. 4. There can in sound and right reason no credit at all be given to these confessions, because divers of them have been proved to be utterly false, as is plain in the man that did confidently affirm, that he was a true Wolf, and that he had hair under his skin, the woful tryal of which was his death, though a pregnant and undeniable proof, that the delusion was in the Phantasie, and that there was no real change of the mans body into a Wolf; and therefore doth flatly overthrow the credibility of these vain and lying confessions. To the same purpose is the story related by Camerarius from Johannes Baptista Porta, a great Naturalist, and a person of competent veracity, which is this. “Once (saith he) I met an old Witch, one of those that are said to enter houses in the night time, and there to suck the blood of little children lying in their Cradles. Having asked her a question of something, she promised forthwith, that within a while she would give me answer. She puts forth of her Chamber all those that went in with me to be witnesses of that which should pass. Having shut us out, she strips her self stark naked, and rubs over all her body with a certain Oyntment, which we saw through the chinks of the door. The operation of the soporiferous juyces, whereof this Oyntment was compounded, made her fall to the ground, and brought her into a deep sleep. Upon this we open the door, and some of us begin to strike and knock her well-favour’dly; but she was so soundly asleep, that to strike her body and a stone, it was all one. Forth we go again, in the mean time the Oyntment had ended his working, and the old Trot being awaked, and having put on her cloaths, begins to tell tales of Robin Hood, saying, That she had passed over Seas and Mountains, and then gives us false answers. We tell her, that her body had never stir’d out of the Chamber; she maintains the contrary: we shew her the blows we had given her, she persisteth the more stifly in her opinion.” By the testimony of this Author, who was an ear and eye-witness of this passage, and other persons with him, which manifests it to be good and sufficient evidence, it appeareth, that the Witches are under a melancholy and passive delusion, promoted by the help of soporiforous Oyntments, whereby they fancy and think they are carried into far remote places, where they hear and see strange things, and do and suffer that which is not at all performed, but only as in a dream, their bodies in the mean time lying immoveable, and so do but relate falsities and lyes, which is an unanswerable proof of the absolute falsity of their confessions, the thing that here we undertook to make good. And some late Learned men (with Mr. Glanvil himself) giving too much credit to the things related by the Witches in their confessions, to be true stories of things really performed at a great distance, have been forced to revive that old Platonical Whimsie, of the Souls real egression forth of the body into far distant places, and its return again, with the certain knowledge of things there done or said, according to the relation that Pliny gives us in these words: Reperimus (inquit) interempla, Hermotimi Clazomenii animam relicto corpore errare solitam, vagámq; è longinquo multa annuntiare, quæ nisi à præsenti nosci non possent, corpore interim semianimi: donec cremato eo inimici (qui Cantharidæ vocabantur) remeanti animæ velut vaginam ademerint. To which notwithstanding he doth not seem to give credence. But these Relations of the Witches are meer lyes and forgeries, and are but taught them by the spiritual craft of the Devil, thereby to pretend to imitate the true Visions that the Prophets had from God. And though there may be some peculiar persons that have the way to fall into ecstasies, (as Helmont witnesseth of himself) and may thereby understand many mystical matters, yet in it there is no real egression of the Soul forth of the body, but a freeing or withdrawing of it from the Phantasie and Senses, and then (as the Cabbalists and mystical Authors say) it is joyned to the intelligible World, and beholds things as present, and though there may be something of truth in it, yet few Authors of credit and veracity, have attested it upon their own experience, and there may be much fallacy and danger in it, and therefore we leave it to further search and inquiry. Another apparent ground of the nullity of the truth or credit of these confessions, is that which a learned Divine in his Letter to Dr. Wierus gives us, the substance of which we shall give in English, which is this: “I have known (he saith) the year foregoing (he writ his Epistle Anno 1565.) many foolish things from the private confession of a certain old Woman, an Inchanter, who when she had heard in my Sermon the place in the 19. Chapter of the Acts explained, That many of the Ephesians, being of those who had exercised curious Arts, had brought their Books, and burned them openly, &c. She forthwith (he saith) came unto me with a mind plainly troubled; and with tears pouring forth into my bosom the secrets of her breast, did receive Christian instruction; and when she had understood, by the blessing of God, the vanity of Diabolical Impostures, and perceived them with opened eyes, she was easily converted to the light of truth, the smoak of lyes being laid aside. She, truth being once received, hath most constantly confessed, that it did appear to her more clear than the light at noon day, that Satan did only deceive and blind the eyes of his Vassals, and that there was nothing done in verity, and this she declared with a detestation of her Diabolical Art.” And so concludes it in these words: Vno verbo dicam, me satis experientiâ didicisse, bonam partem incantationum mera esse insomnia. And whosoever shall read, and seriously consider the Epistle of that excellent and learned Divine, will find the most of those vain illusions laid open and confuted: so that in all (or the most) of the things attributed unto Witches, we shall find no more of Diabolical operation in them, than an internal, mental, and spiritual delusion, in making the Witches to believe, and to draw on others to the same opinion that the Devil hath a kind omnipotent Power and Soveraignty. Therefore did Aristotle well conclude: Incantamenta esse muliercularum figmenta.