The book of witches

by Oliver Madox Hueffer

The Diviners, or peerers into the future, form yet another sub-section of dabblers in the supernatural—and one which numbers very many practitioners even in our own day. Naturally enough, seeing that the desire to influence the future is the obvious corollary to that of knowing it, the part of diviner was more often than not doubled with that of witch or sorcerer. Divination is an art of the most complicated, boasting almost as many branches as medicine itself, each with its select band of practitioners. Different nations, again, favoured different methods of divining—thus the Hebrews placed most confidence in Urim and Thummim; the Greeks were famous for axinomancy, the machinery for which consisted of an axe poised upon a slate or otherwise handled. This method was as apt for present as for future needs, being especially potent in the discovery of criminals. Crime detection by divination has been—and remains—greatly favoured in the East. The Hindus, in particular, place greater reliance upon it than upon the more usual methods of our Occidental police, and many stories are told of the successes achieved by their practitioners. Nor is this surprising in cases where the diviner shows such shrewd knowledge of human nature as in that, oft-quoted, whereby all those under suspicion of a theft are ranged in a row and presented with mouthfuls of grain, with the assurance that the guilty man alone will be unable to swallow it—a phenomenon which nearly always does occur if the thief be among those present—and not infrequently when he is not! This and similar stories, though scarcely falling under the heading of divination proper, are so far pertinent to the subject that they suggest the explanation of many of its more remarkable successes. Tell a nervous man that he is destined to commit suicide upon a certain day, and, granted that he has any faith in your prophetic powers, the odds are that he will prove the correctness of your prophecy. We may compare with this the powerful influence of "tapu" upon the South Sea Island mind. Many natives have died—as has been vouched for by hundreds of credit-worthy witnesses—for no more tangible reason than fear at having incurred the curse of desecrating something placed under its protection. It may be added that the Islanders, observing that white men do not suffer the same fate, account for it by declaring that the White Man's Gods, being of a different persuasion from their own, protect their own votaries.

Divination proper takes almost innumerable forms. Without entering too closely upon a wide subject, a few examples may be profitably quoted. Among the best known are Belomancy, or divination by the flight of arrows, a form much favoured by the Arabs; Bibliomancy (of which the "Sortes Virgilianæ" is the most familiar example); Oneiromancy (or divination by dreams, honoured by Archbishop Laud and Lord Bacon among others); Rhabdomancy (by rods or wands. The "dowser," or water-finder, whose exploits have aroused so much attention of recent years, is obviously akin to the Rhabdomancist). Crystallomancy, or crystal-gazing, was first popularised in this country by the notorious Dr. Dee, and still finds many votaries in Bond Street and elsewhere. Hydromancy, or divination by water, is another variety much favoured by the Bond Street sybil, a pool of ink sometimes taking the place of the water. Cheiromancy, or Palmistry, most popular of any, may possess some claim to respect in its least ambitious form as a means towards character reading. Divination by playing-cards, another popular method, is, needless to say, of later, mediæval origin. The Roman augurs, who, as every schoolboy knows, deduced the future from the flight of birds, provide yet another example of this universal pastime, perhaps the least harmful sub-section of the Black Arts.

Among the most brilliant luminaries of the half-way worlds are those twin-stars inhabited by the Alchemist and the Astrologer. The pseudo-science of star-reading may be supposed to date from the first nightfall—and may thus claim a pedigree even older, if only by a few months or years, than that of Magic proper. Alchemy, despite its Moorish name, has a scarcely less extended history. It owes its birth—traditionally, at any rate—to the same Egyptian Man-God who first introduced witchcraft and magic in their regularised forms to an expectant world. Its principles having been by him engraved in Punic characters upon an emerald, were discovered in his tomb by no less a person than Alexander the Great. It should perhaps be added that doubts have been cast upon this resurrection. However that may be, it was much practised by the later Greeks in Constantinople from the fifth century A.D. until the Moslem conquest of the city. From them the Arabs adopted it, gave it the name by which it has ever since been known, and became the most successful of its practitioners.

To attempt any close study of the great alchemists were foreign to my present purpose, and would entail more space than is at my disposal. At the same time, so close was their connection, in the eyes of the vulgar, so intimate their actual relationship with witchcraft, that it is impossible altogether to ignore them. What is more, they lend to the witch a reflected respectability such as she can by no means afford to forgo. They held, in fact, in their own day, much the same position as do the great inventors and scientists of to-day. Mr. Edison and Mr. Marconi, had they been born ten centuries since, would certainly have taken exalted rank as alchemists or magicians. As it is, in ten centuries a whole world of magical romance will have been very likely woven about their names, even if they have not been actually exalted to divinity or inextricably confused with Lucifer and Prometheus. While some of their predecessors may have actually claimed power over the supernatural—either in self-deception or for self-aggrandisement—the great majority undoubtedly had such claims thrust upon them, either by their contemporaries or by posterity, and would have themselves claimed nothing higher than to be considered students of the unknown. The Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir Vitæ may have served indeed as the ideal goal of their researches, much as they do under their modern form of the Secret of Life in our own time; but their actual discoveries, accidental and incidental though they may have been, were none the less valuable. After such a lapse of time it is as difficult to draw the line between the alchemist-scientist and the charlatan as it will be a century hence to distinguish the false from the true among the "inventors" and "scientists" of to-day, so absolutely do the mists of tradition obscure the face of history. Leaving out of the question such purely legendary figures as Merlin, we may class them under three headings, and briefly consider one example under each. In the first may be placed the more or less mythical figures of Gebir and Albertus Magnus, both of whom, so far as it is now possible to judge, owe their ambiguous reputations entirely to the superstitions of their posterity.

Such a personage as the great Arabian physician Gebir, otherwise Abou Moussah Djafar, surnamed Al Sofi, or the Wise, living in the eighth century, was certain to gain the reputation of possessing supernatural power, even had he not busied himself in the discovery of the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir. Though he found neither, he yet in seeking them made other discoveries little less valuable, and it is scarcely too much to say, made their discovery possible in later centuries. Thus, in default of the means of making gold, he gave us such useful chemicals as nitric acid, nitrate of silver, and oxide of copper. Incidentally he wrote several hundred treatises on his two "subjects," an English translation of one, the "Summæ Perfectionis," having been published in 1686 by Richard Russell, himself an alchemist of respectable attainments.

Albertus Magnus, again, gave every excuse to the vulgar for regarding him as infernally inspired. That is to say, he was a scholar of great attainments in a day when scholars were chiefly remarkable for their dense ignorance, and fully deserved some less ambiguous sobriquet than that bestowed upon him by some writers of "Founder of the Schoolmen." A Dominican, he held the chair of Theology at Padua in 1222 while still a young man. Grown weary of a sedentary life, he resigned his professorship and taught in many of the chief European cities, and more particularly in Paris, where he lived for three years in company with his illustrious pupil, Thomas Aquinas. He was at one time appointed Bishop of Regensburg, but very soon resigned, finding his episcopal duties interfere with his studies. Of the twenty-five folios from his pen, one is devoted to alchemy, and he was a magician of the first class—so, at least, succeeding generations averred, though he himself very likely had no suspicions thereof. Among other of his possessions was a brazen statue with the gift of speech, a gift exercised with such assiduity as to exhaust the patience even of the saintly Thomas Aquinas himself, so that he was constrained to shatter it to pieces.

Roger Bacon, inventor and owner of an even more famous brazen head, was no less illustrious a scholar, and as fully deserved his admiring nickname "The Admirable Doctor," even though he were not in actual fact the inventor of gunpowder and the telescope, as asserted by his admirers. A native of Somerset, and born, traditionally, the year before the signing of Magna Charta, he might have ranked among the greatest Englishmen had not his reputation as a magician given him the suggestion of being a myth altogether. Something of a heretic he was, although in orders, and his writings brought down upon him the suspicions of the General of the Franciscan Order, to which he belonged. Pope Clement IV. extended protection to him for a time, even to the extent of studying his works, and more particularly his "Magnum Opus," but later the Franciscan General condemned his writings, and he spent fourteen years in prison, being released only two years before his death. But his historical achievements were as nothing to his legendary possession, in partnership with Friar Bungay, of the Talking Head. Less garrulous than Albertus' statue, it emitted only three sentences: "Time is. Time was. Time is past." Its last dictum, having unfortunately for all audience a foolish servant, and being by him held up to ridicule, it fell to the ground and was smashed to pieces, thus depriving its inventor of his cherished scheme—by its help to surround England with a brazen rampart no whit less efficacious against the assaults of the King's enemies than are our present-day ironclads.

Friar Bacon was not undeserving of the posthumous popularity he achieved in song and story, for he it was who made magic and alchemy really popular pursuits in this country. So numerous were his imitators that rather more than a century after his death—in 1434—the alchemical manufacture of gold and silver was declared a felony. Twenty-one years later Henry VI., being, as he usually was, in urgent need of ready money, saw reason to modify the Governmental attitude, and granted a number of patents—to ecclesiastics as well as laymen—for seeking after the Philosopher's Stone, with the declared purpose of paying the Royal debts out of the proceeds. In which design he was, it is to be feared, disappointed.

Dr. Dee, the friend and gossip of Queen Elizabeth, may be taken as marking the point at which the alchemist ceases to be an inhabitant of any half-way world and becomes altogether human. A Londoner by birth, he was born in 1527, became a B.A. of Cambridge University and Rector of Upton-upon-Severn. His ecclesiastical duties could not contain his energies, and so well versed did he become in arts magical that, upon a waxen effigy of Queen Elizabeth being found in Lincoln's Inn Fields—and a waxen effigy had only one meaning in Elizabeth's time—he was employed to counteract the evil spells contained in it, which he did with such conspicuous success that the Royal Person suffered no ill-effects whatever. Unfortunately for himself, Dr. Dee acquired in course of time a disciple, one Edward Kelly. Kelly proved an apt daunter of demons, but he was totally lacking in the innocent credulity so noticeable in the character of his reverend mentor. At his prompting Dr. Dee undertook a Continental tour, which resulted in disaster of the most overwhelming and the total loss of Dr. Dee's good name. It is true that he may be considered to have deserved his fate, for so absolute was his belief in his disciple that when that _chevalier d'industrie_ received a message from a demoniacal familiar that it was essential for the success of their alchemical enterprises that they should exchange wives—Mrs. Dee being as well-favoured as Mrs. Kelly was the reverse—the doctor accepted the situation with implicit faith, and agreed to all that the spirits desired.