In the enlightened sixteenth century, any one who professed his disbelief that witches could ride through the air, change themselves into cats, or make caterpillars and thunder-storms, would have had an excellent chance of being burnt as a heretic or concealed sorcerer. St. Boniface (680–755) classed belief in witches and were-wolves among the works of the devil, and St. Agobard of Lyons (779–840) declared the idea that witches caused hail and thunder-storms to be impious and absurd.[267] The laws of Charlemagne made it murder to put any one to death on charge of witchcraft, and in the eleventh century King Coloman of Hungary asserted briefly, ‘Let no one speak of witches, seeing there are none’.[268] Few, indeed, were quite so sceptical as this; still witchcraft was in the Middle Ages looked upon by the educated in a half-contemptuous fashion, and even those who openly professed sorcery frequently escaped with no worse punishment than penance, banishment, or an ecclesiastical scourging.
This may be well illustrated by a story told in the life of the learned Dominican, St. Vincent of Beauvais. An old woman once (1190–1264) came to a priest in his church and demanded money from him, saying she had done him a great service, for that, when she and her companions, who were witches, had entered his bedroom the previous night, she had prevented them from injuring him. ‘But how’, asked the priest, ‘could you enter my chamber, seeing that the door was locked?’ ‘Oh,’ said the witch, ‘that matters naught to us, for we go through keyholes as easily as through open doors.’ ‘If what you say is true,’ replied the holy man, ‘you shall not lack a reward, but I must first have proof of it.’ With these words, he locked the church door, and began vigorously to beat the old woman with the handle of the crucifix he carried, asking her, when she complained, why she did not escape through the keyhole.[269]
The great Pope Nicholas I (died 867) strongly condemned the use of torture to induce confessions, and Gregory VII (died 1085) forbade inquisition to be made for witches and sorcerers on occasions of plague or bad weather.[270] Later, the inquisitorial process, combined with torture to enforce denunciations, became the chief agent in spreading and maintaining the witch mania.
The Eastern Church remained in this mediaeval stage, and never developed a witch mania. In the West the change seems to have been brought about mainly by two causes, the development of heresies and the increasing prominence of the devil.
There is no doubt that the Albigensian and other heresies of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries contained Manichean elements. It was taught that there were two divinities—one perfectly good, the creator of the invisible spiritual world, the other the creator of the material world, the Demiurgus, a being capable of evil passions, wrath, jealousy, &c., who was identified with the Jehovah of the Old Testament.[271] It required very little to confound this Demiurgus with Satan, the Prince of this world; after which it was easy to look upon Satan as a being not entirely evil, as Lucifer, son of the morning, the disinherited son or brother of God, a natural object of worship for the oppressed and discontented.[272]
The serfs, equally tyrannized over by bishop and noble, the relics of the persecuted sects Waldenses and Cathari,[273] sought refuge, like Saul of old, in forbidden arts, and thus sects of Luciferans, or devil-worshippers, arose (especially in Germany and France) whose numbers were exaggerated by the fear and horror of the orthodox.[274]
At the same time the devil acquired more importance in other ways. That fearful calamity, the Black Death, seemed to display his power over both the just and the unjust; while the Great Schism in which each pope excommunicated the other, handing him and his adherents over to Satan, put every one not absolutely certain of being on the right side in reasonable fear of the powers of darkness.
The belief in the great activity and power of the devil and his servants the sorcerers was further supported by the vast authority of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), whose ingenuity enabled him to explain away those ancient canons which seemed opposed to the more extreme views. Thus the synod of Bracara (A.D. 563) had declared the doctrine that the devil can produce drought or thunder-storms to be heresy; to which the Doctor Angelicus replied that though it is doubtless heresy to believe the devil can make natural thunder-storms, it is by no means contrary to the Catholic faith to hold that he may, by the permission of God, make artificial ones.[275]
For these and other reasons, the devil assumed greater prominence during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries than ever before. Men believed that he might appear to them from behind every hedge or ruin, that his action was to be seen in almost all pains and diseases, but that he was to be dreaded most of all when he entered into a league with some man or woman. Thus everything was ready for the outbreak of witch mania when, in 1484, Pope Innocent VIII by his bull Summis desiderantes gave the sanction of the Church to the popular beliefs concerning witches, such as sexual intercourse with devils, destruction of crops, and infliction of sterility and disease on man and beast.