Then, as heretofore, in the early Church, in heathen Rome and Greece, there were those unable to receive a religion so perfect or so defined. They must have something vague and rudimentary, something that did not require too much of them, that did not lay upon them too many restrictions. These men sought what suited them in various forms of heresy, or in the secret performance of Pagan rites, the heresies all forms of negation, the Paganism altogether gross and elementary. All these forms of revolt were reversions to the earliest protoplasmic type. It is not my purpose to trace the history of these relapses throughout the Middle Ages, for I am not writing a history of heresy; my object is simply to note the fact that Spiritualism or Schamanism constantly appears in the history of religion, varying its name but few of its characteristics; sometimes becoming grossly immoral, sometimes decent, but always whilst professing almost ascetic virtue with a tendency to licentiousness.
As soon as Christianity became established, at once all the gods of the heathen became devils, and their worship the worship of devils. “Idolatry,” said Eusebius, in the Præparatio Evangelica, “does not consist in the adoration of good spirits, but in that of those which are evil and perverse.”[28] The Christian emperors forbade the sacrifices to the gods, as sacrifices to devils. In 426, Theodosius II. ordered every temple to be destroyed. Those who clung to the old religion were driven to worship on mountains and in the depths of forests. In 423, he had issued an injunction against the sacrifices, on this very ground, that they were made to devils.
What took place in Italy or Greece, took place elsewhere in later days, when the barbarians became Christians, or, at least, were made nominal Christians, under Christian Frank emperors. The Indiculus superstitionum et Paganiarum of the Council of Leptines in Hainault, in the eighth century, shows us Paganism completely converted into witchcraft. Those who were addicted to it went to retired huts (casulæ) in places formerly held sacred (fana); there they offered sacrifices to Jupiter, Mercury, or some other god; they took auguries, drew lots, called up spirits, made little images of linen and flour, and carried them about the country, precisely as Sulpicius Severus says was done by the Gauls in the time of St. Martin. Pope Gregory III. condemned those who made sacrifices to fountains and trees, used divinations, exercised magical rites, in honour of Belus and Janus, “according to the customs of the Pagans,” and he anathematised all those who took part in diabolical rites, and gave worship to devils. Finally the Capitularies of Charles the Great and his successors armed the secular power against all these remnants of idolatry.
At about the same period, the seventh century, Camin the Wise, Abbot of Hy (Iona), tells us that the like superstitions prevailed in Ireland.
But, before this, the Council of Ancyra, in 341, had issued a decree, which has, indeed, been called in question, but which was embodied in the “Canon Episcopi,” by which the bishops were required to exercise vigilant supervision over magical practices, and especially to excommunicate certain impious females, who, blinded by the devil, imagined themselves riding through the air in company with Hecate and Herodias—Herodias is no other than Hruoda, a Lombard goddess, the same as the Saxon Ostara.[29] The injunction was repeated by the Synod of Agde, in 506, which, with other decrees of the sixth and seventh centuries, represents witchcraft as a Pagan delusion. Magic and heresy were one. Heresy was a turning away from the truth, and magic was its ritual. Enmity to orthodoxy implied enmity to God, and enmity to God alliance with the devil.
The charges which had been brought by heathens against early Christians were now, under altered circumstances, launched by Christians against heretics and witches. The hideous description of Christianity given by Cœcilius, in Minutius Felix, as a secret and desperate faction leagued against God and man, and celebrating the foulest nocturnal rites, became the type of accusations levelled by orthodox Christians against their dissenting brethren; and, as the charge of Cœcilius was justified by the conduct of a portion of the Christian converts, so was the charge of the orthodox against the schismatics in mediæval times justified by the conduct of some of them. The Cathari, Manichæans, Paulicians, Patarines, Albigenses, were all heretics so far that they reverted to heathenism, and to its most simple form of Schamanism, and some of the congregations sank into the grossest immorality.
The writers on witchcraft who theoretically worked out its criminal details—Eumericus, Nider, Bernhard of Como, and Jacquier—spoke of it as “Secta et hæresis maleficorum,” it was a heresy, one of the several forms in which lapse from the faith took. Balduinus identified Waldenses with witches.
In 1484, James Sprenger and Henry Justitor, appointed inquisitors for Upper Germany, obtained the celebrated bull of Innocent VIII., which, though far from being the origin of witch prosecutions, acted with signal effect in promoting their subsequent activity. Sprenger followed it up with his well-known treatise called “Malleus Maleficarum,” as a guide to judicial theory and practice.
No object is gained by dwelling on the details of an epidemic which, for three centuries, devastated Europe, destroying so many lives. Yet two particulars challenge inquiry and remark: one, the strange uniformity of the offence as elicited by confession; the other, the curious analogy which is found to exist between the rites practised by the witches at their gatherings and those of the heretics of earlier times, Pagan and semi-Christian. The uniformity in the confession of the witches has excited surprise, and has been variously accounted for—some supposing that there must have been an external reality in the way of profane imposture, a remnant of heathen practice; others referring it to morbid subjectivity in the accused, caused by melancholy and hypochondria.
That there was some objective reality, I can hardly doubt; not only are the confessions of those accused curiously alike in their account of the ceremonies of the Sabbath, when they assembled, but we know that human nature is always the same, and it is inconceivable that there should have been a cessation at any period of those gatherings of men and women who found the only satisfaction for their religious cravings in vague spiritualism.