[Sidenote: Numbers executed]
No figures have been compiled for the total number {658} of victims of this insanity. In England, under Elizabeth, before the craze had more than well started on its career, 125 persons are known to have been tried for witchcraft and 47 are known to have been executed for the crime. In Venice the Inquisition punished 199 persons for sorcery during the sixteenth century. In the year 1510, 140 witches were burned at Brescia, in 1514, 300 at Como. In a single year the bishop of Geneva burned 500 witches, the bishop of Bamberg 600, the bishop of Würzburg 900. About 800 were condemned to death in a single batch by the Senate of Savoy. In the year 1586 the archbishop of Trèves burned 118 women and two men for this imaginary crime. Even these figures give but an imperfect notion of the extent of the midsummer madness. The number of victims must be reckoned by the tens of thousands.
Throughout the century there were not wanting some signs of a healthy skepticism. When, during an epidemic of St. Vitus's dance at Strassburg, [Sidenote: 1588] the citizens proposed a pilgrimage to stop it, the episcopal vicar replied that as it was a natural disease natural remedies should be used. Just as witches were becoming common in England, Gosson wrote in his School of Abuse: [Sidenote: 1578] "Do not imitate those foolish patients, who, having sought all means of recovery and are never the nearer, run into witchcraft." Leonardo da Vinci called belief in necromancy the most foolish of all human delusions.
As it was dangerous to oppose the popular mood at its height, the more honor must go to the few who wrote ex professo against it. The first of these, of any note, was the Protestant physician John Weyer. [Sidenote: Weyer] In his book De praestigiis daemonum [Sidenote: 1563] he sought very cautiously to show that the poor "old, feeble-minded, {659} stay-at-home women" sentenced for witchcraft were simply the victims of their own and other people's delusions. Satan has no commerce with them save to injure their minds and corrupt their imaginations. Quite different, he thought, were those infamous magicians who really used spells, charms, potions and the like, though even here Weyer did not admit that their effects were due to supernatural agency. This mild and cautious attempt to defend the innocent was placed on the Index and elicited the opinion from John Bodin that the author was a true servant of Satan.
[Sidenote: Scott]
A far more thorough and brilliant attack on the superstition was Reginald Scott's Discovery of Witchcraft, wherein the lewd dealings of Witches and Witchmongers is notably defected . . . whereunto is added a realise upon the Nature and Substance of Spirits and Devils. [Sidenote: 1584] Scott had read 212 Latin authors and 23 English, on his subject, and he was under considerable obligation to some of them, notably Weyer. But he endeavored to make first-hand observations, attended witch trials and traced gossip to its source. He showed, none better, the utter flimsiness and absurdity of the charges on which poor old women were done to death. He explained the performance of the witch of Endor as ventriloquism. Trying to prove that magic was rejected by reason and religion alike, he pointed out that all the phenomena might most easily be explained by wilful imposture or by illusion due to mental disturbance. As his purpose was the humanitarian one of staying the cruel persecution, with calculated partisanship he tried to lay the blame for it on the Catholic church. As the very existence of magic could not be disproved completely by empirical reasons he attacked it on a priori grounds, alleging that spirits and bodies are in two categories, unable to act directly upon each {660} other. Brilliant and convincing as the work was, it produced no corresponding effect. It was burned publicly by order of James I.
[Sidenote: Montaigne]
Montaigne, who was never roused to anger by anything, had the supreme art of rebutting others' opinions without seeming to do so. It was doubtless Bodin's abominable Demonology that called forth his celebrated essay on witchcraft, in which that subject is treated in the most modern spirit. The old presumption in favor of the miraculous has fallen completely from him; his cool, quizzical regard was too much for Satan, who, with all his knowledge of the world, is easily embarrassed, to endure. The delusion of witchcraft might be compared to a noxious bacillus. Scott tried to kill it by heat; he held it up to a fire of indignation, and fairly boiled it in his scorching flame of reason. Montaigne tried the opposite treatment: refrigeration. He attacked nothing; he only asked, with an icy smile, why anything should be believed. Certainly, as long as the mental passions could be kept at his own low temperature, there was no danger that the milk of human kindness should turn sour, no matter what vicious culture of germs it originally held. He begins by saying that he had seen various miracles in his own day, but, one reads between the lines, he doesn't believe any of them. One error, he says, begets another, and everything is exaggerated in the hope of making converts to the talker's opinion. One miracle bruited all over France turned out to be a prank of young people counterfeiting ghosts. When one hears a marvel, he should always say, "perhaps." Better be apprentices at sixty then doctors at ten. Now witches, he continues, are the subject of the wildest and most foolish accusations. Bodin had proposed that they should be killed on mere suspicion, but Montaigne observes, "To kill human beings there is required a bright-shining {661} and clear light." And what do the stories amount to?
How much more natural and more likely do I find it that two men should lie than that one in twelve hours should pass from east to west? How much more natural that our understanding may by the volubility of our loose-capring mind be transported from his place, than that one of us should by a strange spirit in flesh and bone be carried upon a broom through the tunnel of a chimney? . . . I deem it a matter pardonable not to believe a wonder, at least so far forth as one may explain away or break down the truth of the report in some way not miraculous. . . . Some years past I traveled through the country of a sovereign prince, who, in favor of me and to abate my incredulity, did me the grace in his own presence and in a particular place to make me see ten or twelve prisoners of that kind, and amongst others an old beldam witch, a true and perfect sorceress, both by her ugliness and deformity, and such a one as long before was most famous in that profession. I saw both proofs, witnesses, voluntary confessions, and some insensible marks about this miserable old woman; I enquired and talked with her a long time, with the greatest heed and attention I could, and I am not easily carried away by preconceived opinion. In the end and in my conscience I should rather have appointed them hellebore than hemlock. It was rather a disease than a crime.
Montaigne goes on to argue that even when we cannot get an explanation—and any explanation is more probable than magic—it is safe to disbelieve: "Fear sometimes representeth strange apparitions to the vulgar sort, as ghosts . . . larves, hobgoblins, Robbin-good-fellows and such other bugbears and chimaeras." For Montaigne the evil spell upon the mind of the race had been broken; alas! that it took so long for other men to throw it off!