The book of witches

by Oliver Madox Hueffer

The Bamberg persecution was succeeded by one at Wurzburg in the following year. Fortunately the noble Jesuit priest and poet, Friedrich von Spee, was appointed confessor of those sentenced to death, and was inspired to write, in 1631, his "Cautio Criminalis," which, published anonymously, did much to stem the tide of persecution. "Incredible among us Germans," he begins, "and especially (I blush to say it) among Catholics, are the popular superstitions, envy, calumnies, backbitings, insinuations and the like, which being neither punished by the magistrates nor refuted by the pulpit, first stir up suspicion of witchcraft. All the Divine judgments which God has threatened in Holy Writ are now ascribed to witches. No longer do God or Nature aught, but witches everything."

It was a long time, however, before such enlightened views could obtain universal credence, and it was in Germany that the last European execution for witchcraft took place, so lately as 1793.

The international epidemic did not spread to Sweden till the end of the century, when it broke out, in more than usually eccentric form, in the village of Mohra. It was chiefly remarkable for the number of children concerned. "Four score and five persons, fifteen of them children, were condemned, and most, if not all of them, were burnt and executed. There were besides six-and-thirty children that ran the gauntlet and twenty were whipt on the hands at the Church-door every Sunday for three weeks together." The whole proceedings were, indeed, almost a children's drama and no emanation of childish imagination but was eagerly swallowed by a normally sober and sensible community. Most probably, indeed, the whole affair had its foundation in some myth or folk-story more or less popular in all the local nurseries. Indeed, were we of the present generation to return to the earlier belief in lycanthropy and the ceaseless malignancy of ubiquitous were-wolves, it is easily within the bounds of possibility that "Red Riding Hood," a story which quite conceivably owes its origin to the same superstition, might bring about some similar panic. An imaginative child might easily mix up the grandmother in the story with the wolf who devours her: might thus come to the conclusion that his own grandmother occasionally masqueraded in the form of a wolf: might in time convince himself that he had actually seen her thus transmogrified, and might thus in time bring not only his own venerable relative but those of half the other children in the school that he attended under unpleasant suspicion and not improbably to a more unpleasant death.

The mainstay of the Mohra panic was the sudden belief—propagated by the children themselves—that some hundreds of them had been brought under the power of the Devil by local witches. The whole community took the alarm, the Government was appealed to, and a Royal Commission embodied to investigate the charges—with sanguinary results. It was declared that the witches instructed the children to go to the cross-ways, and there to invoke the Devil, begging him to carry them to the Blockula, the favourite local mountain meeting-place for Sabbaths. Satan, in answering their prayers, appeared in many forms, the most original being that of a man with a red beard, wearing a grey coat, red and blue stockings, a high-crowned hat adorned with ribbons of many colours, and preposterous garters. So attired he must have wanted only a magic pipe to serve as double to the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the Teutonic legend most nearly recalled by the whole circumstance. He provided the children with mounts and anointed them with unguent composed of the scrapings of altars and the filings of church-clocks. Another account says that the witches accompanied the children, riding with them to the Blockula on men's backs—the said men, upon arriving there, being propped against the wall, fast asleep. Now and again they preferred to ride upon posts, or goats transfixed upon spits, and they flew through walls, chimneys, and windows without either injuring themselves or breaking the glass and bricks.

The actual transportation of the children gave rise to many weighty arguments. All the time they asserted they were at the Blockula, their parents declared that they had held them asleep in their arms. It was finally concluded that their nocturnal travels might be either in the flesh or the spirit, according to circumstances. So firmly did many parents credit their children's assertions that a local clergyman determined to watch his little son throughout the night, holding him tightly in his arms; but even this ocular demonstration did not serve to convince the mother.

Upon the Blockula was declared to be a fine house, having a gate painted in very gay colours. Within it were a large banqueting-hall and other rooms. The food served at the banquets consisted of such nourishing fare as coleworts, bacon, and bread, butter, milk and cheese—all of them, be it noted, familiar to childish palates, as was the feast of the Lancashire witches—quoted elsewhere—to the "Informer." Those who attended the Blockula gave birth to sons and daughters, who were married in their turn to each other, their children being toads and serpents. They built houses, but so badly that the walls fell upon them, making them black and blue; they were beaten, abused, and laughed at—yet when on one occasion they thought the Devil was dead, the place was filled with wailings and lamentations. As usually happened in such persecutions, the bloodshed at last brought people to their senses—perhaps the execution of fifteen children gave their parents pause. At all events, the Commission was in due course dissolved, and the persecution came to a sudden end, though prayers continued to be offered weekly in the church against any other such horrible visitation—as indeed they well might!

It is not my intention to give more than a general idea of the most outstanding historic persecutions—for, as I have said, they differ only in minor degrees in different times and places. There are, however, yet one other group too striking to be ignored—those which raged in the New England Colonies. It might have been supposed, by one unconversant with human nature, that the memory of their own sufferings would have softened the hearts of the colonists when they themselves were in power. The reverse was the case; their enmity against their former oppressors was diverted towards this new channel, gaining force in the process. There is indeed some excuse to be found for their mental attitude. Springing in the most cases from the humbler class, they had many privations and sufferings to endure before they could gain any respite in their newly-settled country to think of progressive education. Their warfare against the Indians might well have given both sides reason to think that the Devil was indeed arrayed upon the side of their enemies—and in time the gloomy superstitions of the natives served to buttress the imported beliefs of Europe.

From the beginning of the seventeenth century to the end the settlers had been forced to devote most of their thoughts to means of subsistence alone, and there had been no opportunity for speculative thought to modify ideas which, standing still, became more and more stereotyped. The precarious existence of the infant State also gave its leaders every ground for taking the severest measures towards anything considered to be dangerous to its welfare. As early as 1648, Margaret Jones of Charlestone was accused of practising witchcraft. The charge was "that she was found to have such a malignant touch as many persons, men, women and children whom she stroked or touched in any affliction or displeasure, were taken with deafness or vomiting, or other violent pains or sickness." Governor Winthrop, in whose Journals the account is found, also adds that "in prison there was seen in her arms a little child which ran from her into another room, the officer following it, it vanished."