[1] The witch-cult in Europe seems to me to have a connexion with the horse. Occasionally witches proceed to the sabbat on flying horses. One of the tests of a witch was to look in her eyes for the reflection of a horse. In Scotland even to-day a ‘Horseman’s Society’ exists which has a semi-occult initiation and strange rites.
Chapter XII: Tales of Spanish Magic and Sorcery
Spain seems to have been regarded by the other countries of Western Europe as the special abode of superstition, sorcery, and magic, probably because of the notoriety given to the discoveries of the Moorish alchemists, the first scientists in Europe. But with the coming of the Inquisition a marked and natural falling off is noticeable in the prevalence of occult belief, for anything which in the least tended to heresy was repressed in the most rigid manner by that illiberal institution. In this way much of the folk-lore and peasant belief of Spain, many fascinating legends, and many a curious custom have been lost, never to be recovered. The Brothers, in their zeal for the purity of their Church, banished not only the witch, the sorcerer, and the demon from Spain, but also the innocent fairy, the spirits of wood and wold, and those household familiars which harm no one, but assist the housewife and the dairymaid.
The first information we receive that the authorities intended a campaign against the whole demonhood, good and evil, of Spain is contained in a work by Alfonso de Speria, a Castilian Franciscan, who wrote, about 1458 or 1460, a work specially directed against heretics and unbelievers, in which he gives a chapter on those popular beliefs which were derived from ancient pagan practices. The belief in witches, whom he calls xurguine (jurguia) or bruxe, seems to have been imported from Dauphiné or Gascony, where, he tells us, they abounded. They were, he says, wont to assemble at night in great numbers on a high tableland, carrying candles with them, for the purpose of worshipping Satan, who appeared to them in the form of a boar, rather than in that of the he-goat in which he so frequently manifested himself in other localities.
Llorente, in his History of the Inquisition in Spain, states that the first auto-de-fé against sorcery was held at Calabarra in 1507, when thirty women charged with witchcraft by the Inquisition were burnt. In the first treatise on Spanish sorcery, that of Martin de Castanaga, a Franciscan monk (1529), we learn that Navarre was regarded as the motherland of Spanish witchcraft, and that that province sent many ‘missionaries’ to Aragon to convert its women to sorcery. But we find that the Spanish theologians of the sixteenth century were so much more enlightened than those of other countries that they admitted that witchcraft was merely a delusion, and the punishment they meted out to those who believed in it was inflicted in respect that the belief, erroneous though it was, was contrary to the tenets of the Church. Pedro de Valentin, in a treatise on the subject (1610), entirely adopts the opinion that the acts confessed to by the witches were imaginary. He attributed them partly to the manner in which the examinations were carried out, and to the desire of the ignorant people examined to escape by saying what seemed to please their persecutors, and partly to the effect of the ointments and draughts which they had been taught to use, which were composed of ingredients that produced sleep and acted upon the imagination and the mental faculties.
The Religion of Witchcraft
This view is very generally held at the present time as accounting for the phenomena of witchcraft. But the researches of Charles Godfrey Leland, Miss M. A. Murray, and others, seem to indicate that the cult of witchcraft is by no means a thing of the imagination. The last-named writer, indeed, claims that it is the detritus of an ancient pagan faith surviving into modern times, having a priesthood and well-defined ritual of its own, and in a measure conserving the practice of child-sacrifice.