One may say boldly that Europe was half Pagan in the Middle Ages; all the old superstitions lived, but under a new disguise. The religions of Gaul, of Germany, of Great Britain, of the Scandinavian and the Slavonic lands, the mythologies of Greece and of Rome, lived on in a crowd of legends, which modern erudition delights in collecting and tracing back to their sources. These legends, more numerous in the lands occupied by Teutonic peoples, are almost always of Pagan stuff, embroidered over with Christian ideas. Not only so, but the very names of the old gods remain; they no longer remain as the names of gods held high in heaven, but of devils cast down to earth. With us the Deuce signifies Satan, and is in common usage in the mouth as an oath, but he takes his name from the Dusii, the night genii of the Kelts. Old Nick again is Hnikr, an honourable designation of Wuotan, the supreme god of the Anglo-Saxons, who gives his name to Wednesday.
So, also, we use the word Bogie, Bogart, as a designation of an evil spirit, and Bug is the name of a night-tormenting insect. It is well-known that in an old English Bible the verse in Ps. xci. runs, “He shall deliver thee from the Bug that walketh in darkness,” that is, from the Hobgoblin. The Norsemen and Danes brought this name with them to England. Bog is in Slavonic God. Biel-bog is the White God, Czerni-bog is the Black God of the Slavs.
The Northmen had formerly come across Slavs on the Continent, and they, the worshippers of Odin, scorned the gods of the Slavs as devils, and called all unclean spirits—Bogs or Bogies. And now, also, the Supreme God of the Norsemen, Hnikr, has become our Old Nick.
This being so, it will be seen at once how the votaries of the dethroned god came to be regarded as devil-worshippers, and how that in time, when the old religion with its myths and theogony was long dead, those who still clung to an hysterical religion, with love-feasts, dances, and ecstasies, came to believe themselves to be devil-worshippers.
The Reformation caused such a disturbance of religious ideas, incited to such revolt against all that had been held sacred in the past, that it is only natural that those whose religion had been one of pure spiritualism, of ecstasy and hysteric raving, should believe that their day had come. But after the first explosion, the Reformers set to work to consolidate their several systems into dogmatic shape; they drew up Institutes, Confessions, Articles, and agreed only in this, to put down Mysticism as severely as they had dealt with Catholicism. And they had good cause to come to this resolution, for on all sides the Mystics were breaking forth into the wildest excesses. In Münster they had set up a Kingdom of Salem, from which every element of common decency was expelled, and which knew no law save the revelations accorded to the prophets.
The “spiritually minded,” that is to say, the unintelligent, hysterically disposed, did not at all relish the form given to belief, and the discipline of Divine service framed by the Reformers. They founded sects on all sides following the old lines of the Markosites and Cathari.
Bishop Barlow, one of those who helped to draw up the English Prayer-book, was himself an eye-witness of the proceedings of some of these sects, and he describes them in words we do not care to quote.[30]
England, Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, were overrun with these sectaries, with their love-feasts, raptures, and license. It was the old story again of the revolt of the spiritual faculty against the reason, a story that will be told over and over again as long as man lives on the earth, and religion is dogmatic and exercises moral restraint.
One essential condition was always present in order to produce its effect in these sectarian meetings. The intellect must remain inactive, the emotions must be excited, and the sentiment of vague fear must be specially appealed to and powerfully wrought upon. It was this condition which determined the success alike of the revivalist meetings of the Mystics, and the revelries of the witches. This condition it was that provoked the orgies at Corinth among St. Paul’s converts, and the scenes in the assemblies of the Carpocratites. It was this condition which roused the attendants on the assemblies of the Goeti, of the Dionysian revellers, and of the Schamans and the medicine men.