INTRODUCTION
SPRENGER said, before 1500: "We should speak of
the Heresy of the Sorceresses, not of the Sorcerers; the latter are
of small account." So another writer under Louis XIII.: "For one
Sorcerer, ten thousand Sorceresses."
"Nature makes them Sorceresses,"—the genius peculiar to woman
and her temperament. She is born a creature of Enchantment. In
virtue of regularly recurring periods of exaltation, she is a
Sibyl; in virtue of love, a Magician. By the fineness of her
intuitions, the cunning of her wiles—often fantastic, often
beneficent—she is a Witch, and casts spells, at least and lowest
lulls pain to sleep and softens the blow of calamity.
All primitive peoples start alike; this we see again and
again in the accounts given by travellers. Man hunts and fights.
Woman contrives and dreams; she is the mother of fancy, of the
gods. She possesses glimpses of the second sight, and has wings to
soar into the infinitude of longing and imagination. The better to
count the seasons, she scans the sky. But earth has her heart as
well. Her eyes stoop to the amorous flowers; a flower herself in
her young beauty, she learns to know them as playfellows and
intimates. A woman, she asks them to heal the men she loves.
Pathetic in their simplicity these first beginnings of
Religion and Science! Later on, each province will be separated, we
shall see mankind specialise—as medicine-man, astrologer or
prophet, necromancer, priest, physician. But in these earliest days
woman is all in all, and plays every part.
A strong and bright and vigorous religion, such as was Greek
Paganism, begins with the Sibyl, to end with the Sorceress. The
first, a virgin fair and beautiful, brilliant in the full blaze of
dawn, cradled it, gave it its charm and glamour. In later days,
when sick and fallen, in the gloom of the Dark Ages, on heaths and
in forests, it was concealed and protected by the Sorceress; her
dauntless pity fed its needs and kept it still alive. Thus for
religions it is woman is mother, tender protectress and faithful
nurse. Gods are like men; they are born and they die on a woman's
breast.
But what a price she paid for her fidelity! . . . Magian
queens of Persia, enchanting Circé, sublime Sibyl, alas! how are
you fallen, how barbarous the transformation you have suffered! . .
. She who, from the throne of the Orient, taught mankind the
virtues of plants and the motions of the stars, she who, seated on
the Delphic tripod and, illumined by the very god of light, gave
oracles to a kneeling world, is the same that, a thousand years
later, is hunted like a wild beast, chased from street to street,
reviled, buffeted, stoned, scorched with red-hot embers! . . .
The clergy has not stakes enough, the people insults, the
child stones, for the unhappy being. The poet, no less a child,
throws yet another stone at her, a crueller one still for a woman.
Gratuitously insulting, he makes her out always old and ugly. The
very word Sorceress or Witch calls up the image of the Weird
Sisters of Macbeth. Yet the cruel witch trials prove exactly the
opposite; many perished just because they were young and pretty.
The Sibyl foretold the future; but the Sorceress makes it.
Here is the great, the vital distinction. She evokes, conjures,
guides Destiny. She is not like Cassandra of old, who foresaw the
coming doom so clearly, and deplored it and awaited its approach;
she creates the future. Greater than Circé, greater than Medea, she
holds in her hand the magic wand of natural miracle, she has Nature
to aid and abet her like a sister. Foreshadowings of the modern
Prometheus are to be seen in her,—a beginning of industry, above
all of the sovereign industry that heals and revivifies men. Unlike
the Sibyl, who seemed ever gazing towards the dayspring, she fixes
her eyes on the setting sun; but it is just this sombre orb of the
declining luminary that shows long before the dawn (like the glow
on the peaks of the High Alps) a dawn anticipatory of the true day.
The Priest realises clearly where the danger lies, that an
enemy, a menacing rival, is to be feared in this High-priestess of
Nature he pretends to despise. Of the old gods she has invented new
ones. Beside the old Satan of the past, a new Satan is seen
burgeoning in her, a Satan of the future.
For a thousand years the people had one healer and one
only,—the Sorceress. Emperors and kings and popes, and the richest
barons, had sundry Doctors of Salerno, or Moorish and Jewish
physicians; but the main body of every State, the whole world we
may say, consulted no one but the Saga, the Wise Woman. If her cure
failed, they abused her and called her a Witch. But more generally,
through a combination of respect and terror, she was spoken of as
the Good Lady, or Beautiful Lady (Bella Donna), the same name as
that given to fairies.
Her fate resembled that which still often befalls her
favourite herb, the belladonna, and other beneficent poisons she
made use of, and which were antidotes of the great scourges of the
Middle Ages. Children and ignorant passers-by cursed these sombre
flowers, without understanding their virtues, scared by their
suspicious colour. They shudder and fly the spot; yet these are the
Comforting plants (Solanaceæ), which, wisely administered, have
worked so many cures and soothed so much human agony.
They are found growing in the most sinister localities, in
lonely, ill-reputed spots, amid ruins and rubbish heaps,—yet
another resemblance with the Sorceress who utilises them. Where,
indeed, could she have taken up her habitation, except on savage
heaths, this child of calamity, so fiercely persecuted, so bitterly
cursed and proscribed? She gathered poisons to heal and save; she
was the Devil's bride, the mistress of the Incarnate Evil One, yet
how much good she effected, if we are to credit the great physician
of the Renaissance! Paracelsus, when in 1527, at Bâle, he burned
the whole pharmacopœia of his day, declared he had learned from the
Sorceresses all he knew.
Had they not earned some reward? Yes! and reward they had.
Their recompense was torture and the stake. New punishments were
devised for their especial benefit, new torments invented. They
were brought to trial en masse, condemned on the slightest pretext.
Never was such lavish waste of human life. To say nothing of Spain,
the classic land of the auto-da-fé, where Moor and Jew are always
associated with Witches, seven thousand were burned at Trèves, and
I know not how many at Toulouse; at Geneva five hundred in three
months (1513); eight hundred at Wurzburg, in one batch almost, and
fifteen hundred at Bamberg,—both of these quite small bishoprics!
Ferdinand II. himself, the bigot, the cruel Emperor of the Thirty
Years’ War, was forced to restrain these worthy bishops, else they
would have burned all their subjects. I find, in the Wurzburg list,
a wizard of eleven, a schoolboy, and a witch of fifteen, at
Bayonne, two sorceresses of seventeen, damnably pretty.
Mark this, at certain epochs the mere word of Sorceress or
Witch is an arm wherewith Hate can kill at discretion. Female
jealousy, masculine avarice, are only too ready to grasp so
convenient a weapon. Such and such a neighbour is rich? . . .
Witch! witch! Such and such is pretty? . . . Ah! witch! We shall
see Murgin, a little beggar-girl, casting this terrible stone at a
great lady, whose only crime was being too beautiful, the
Châtelaine de Lancinena, and marking her white forehead with the
death sign.
Accused of sorcery, women anticipate, if they can, the
torture that is inevitable by killing themselves. Remy, that worthy
judge of Lorraine who burned eight hundred of them, boasts of this
Reign of Terror: "So sure is my justice," he declared, "that
sixteen witches arrested the other day, never hesitated, but
strangled themselves incontinently."
In the long course of study for my history during the thirty
years I have devoted to it, this horrible literature of Sorcery, or
Witchcraft, has passed through my hands again and again. First I
exhausted the Manuals of the Inquisition, the asinine collections
of the Dominicans—the Whips, Hammers, Ant-Swarms, Fustigations,
Lanterns, etc., to give some of the absurd titles these books bear.
Next I read the men of the Law, the lay judges who take the place
of these monks, and who despise them without being much less
idiotic themselves. I say a word or two of these elsewhere; for the
present I have only one observation to make, viz. that from 1300
down to 1600, and even later, the administration of justice is
identically the same. With the exception of one small interlude in
the Parlement of Paris, we find always and everywhere the same
ferocity of folly. Ability and talent make no difference. The wise
and witty De Lancre, a magistrate of Bordeaux under Henri IV., a
man of enlightened ideas in politics, directly he has to deal with
witchcraft, falls back to the level of a Nider or a Sprenger, two
imbecile monks of the fifteenth century.
One is filled with amazement to see all these widely
different epochs, all these men of varying cultivation, unable to
make one step in advance. But the explanation is simple; they were
one and all arrested, let us rather say, blinded, hopelessly
intoxicated and made cruel savages of, by the poison of their first
principle, the doctrine of Original Sin. This is the fundamental
dogma of universal injustice: "All lost for one alone, not only
punished but deserving punishment, undone even before they were
born and desperately wicked, dead to God from the beginning. The
babe at its mother's breast is a damned soul already."
Who says so? All do, even Bossuet. A Roman theologian of
weight, Spina, Master of the Sacred Palace, formulates the doctrine
in precise words: "Why does God permit the death of the innocent?
He does so justly. For if they do not die by reason of the sins
they have committed, yet they are guilty of death by reason of
original sin" 1
From this monstrous theory two consequences follow, in
justice and in logic. The judge is always sure of doing justice;
anyone brought before him is inevitably guilty, and if he defends
himself, doubly guilty. No call for Justice to sweat, and rack its
brains in order to distinguish true and false; in every case the
decision is a foregone conclusion. The logician likewise and the
schoolman may spare themselves the trouble of analysing the soul of
man, of examining the phases through which it passes, of
considering its complexity, its internal disparities and
self-contradictions. No need, as we feel ourselves bound to do, to
explain how, by slow and subtle degrees, the soul may grow vicious
instead of virtuous. These refinements, these doubts and
difficulties and scruples, if they understood them at all, how they
would laugh at them, and shake their heads in scorn, and how
gracefully would the fine long ears that ornament their empty pates
waggle to and fro!
Particularly when the Compact with the Devil comes into
question, that ghastly covenant where, for some small ephemeral
gain, the soul sells itself into everlasting torment, we
philosophers should endeavour to trace out the accursed path, the
appalling ladder of calamities and crimes, capable of having
brought it so low. But our theologian can ignore all such
considerations! For him Soul and Devil were created for each other;
so that at the first temptation, for a caprice, a sudden longing, a
passing fancy, the soul flies headlong to this dreadful extremity.
Nor can I see any traces of modern writers having made much
inquiry into the moral chronology of Sorcery. They confine
themselves far too much to the connections between the Middle Ages
and Classical Antiquity. The connection is real enough, but slight
and of quite minor importance. Neither the ancient Enchantress, nor
yet the Celtic and Germanic Seeress, are yet the true Sorceress.
The harmless Sabasia (festivals of Bacchus Sabasius), a miniature
rustic "Sabbath" which survived down to Mediæval times, are far
from identical with the Black Mass of the fourteenth century, that
deliberate and deadly defiance of Jesus. These gloomy conceptions
were not passed on down the long thread of tradition; they sprang
ready made from the horrors of the time.
From when does the Sorceress date? I answer unhesitatingly,
"From the ages of despair."
From the profound despair the World owed to the Church. I say
again unhesitatingly, "The Sorceress is the Church's crime."
I pass over the string of plausible explanations by which the
priests attempt to mitigate her guilt: "Weak and frivolous by
nature, open to every temptation, women were led astray by
concupiscence." Alas! in the wretchedness and famine of those
dreadful times, this was no force sufficient to rouse to demoniac
frenzy. Loving women, jealous and forsaken, children driven out of
doors by a cruel stepmother, mothers beaten by their sons (all
hackneyed subjects of legendary tales), may indeed have been
tempted to invoke the Evil Spirit; but all this does not constitute
the Sorceress, the Witch. Because the unhappy creatures call upon
Satan, it does not follow that he accepts their service. They are
still far, very far, from being ripe for him. They have yet to
learn to hate God.
To understand this better, read the accursed Registers still
extant of the Inquisition, not in the extracts compiled by
Llorente, Lamotte-Langon, etc., but in what is extant of the
original Registers of Toulouse. Read them in their vapid sameness,
their dismal aridity, their shocking unconscious savagery. A few
pages, and you are cold at heart, a cruel chill strikes home to the
vitals. Death, death, always death, you feel it in every page. You
are already in the tomb, or immured in a little chamber of stone
with damp-stained walls. The happiest gate is death. The dreadful
thing is the in pace. One word recurs continually, like a bell of
horror tolled, and tolled again, to drive the dead in life into
despair,—always the same word, Immured.
Dread apparatus for crushing and annihilating souls, cruel
press for breaking hearts. The screw turns, and turns, till breath
fails and the very bones crack, and she springs from the horrid
engine a mystery in an unknown world!
The Sorceress has neither father nor mother, neither son, nor
mate, nor kindred. She appears none knows from whence, a monster,
an aërolite from the skies. Who so bold, great God! as to come nigh
her?
Where is her lurking-place? In untracked wilds, in
impenetrable forests of bramble, on blasted heaths, where entangled
thistles suffer no foot to pass. She must be sought by night,
cowering beneath some old-world dolmen. If you find her, she is
isolated still by the common horror of the countryside; she has, as
it were, a ring of fire round her haunts.
’Tis hard to credit it, but she is a woman still. Even this
fearful life has its spring of womanhood, its feminine electricity,
in virtue of which she is dowered with two gifts
The half-sane, half-insane madness, illuminism, of the seer,
which according to its degree is poetry, second sight,
preternatural vision, a faculty of speech at once simple and
astute, above all else the power of believing in her own
falsehoods. This gift is unknown to the male Sorcerer; the Wizard
fails to comprehend its very elements.
From it flows a second, the sublime faculty of solitary
conception, that parthenogenesis our physiologists of to-day
recognise as existing among the females of numerous species. The
same fecundity of body is no less procreative where conceptions of
the spirit are involved.
All alone, she conceived and brought forth. Whom or what?
Another of her own kind, so like the original as to cheat the eyes.
Child of hate, conceived of love; for without love nothing
can be created. The Sorceress, terror-struck as she is at her
strange offspring, yet sees herself so faithfully reproduced, finds
such content in contemplating this new idol, that instantly she
sets it on the altar, worships it, immolates herself to it, giving
her own body as victim and living sacrifice.
We shall often and often find her telling the judge: "There
is only one thing I am afraid of,—not to suffer enough for him." 2
Do you know how the newborn infant salutes the new world he
enters? With a horrid scream of laughter. And has he not good cause
to be glad, there on the free and open plains, far from the
dungeons of Spain, and the immured victims of Toulouse? His in pace
is wide as the world itself. He comes and goes, roaming where he
will. His the boundless forest! his the vast heath that stretches
away to the farthest horizon! his the round world and the riches
thereof! The Sorceress calls him tenderly, "Robin, Robin mine!
"—from the name of that gallant outlaw, the gay Robin Hood, that
lived under the greenwood tree. Another pet name she loves to give
him is Verdelet, Joli-Bois, Vert-Bois. The green woods, indeed, are
the frolicsome scamp's favourite haunts; one glimpse of bush and
briar, and he is off, a wild truant of Nature.
The astounding thing is that at the first essay the Sorceress
really and truly made a living being. He has every mark of
actuality. He has been seen and heard, and everybody can describe
him.
The saints, those children of affection, the sons of the
house, pay little heed, only watch and dream; they wait in patient
waiting, confident of getting their share of the Elect in God's
good time. The small degree of activity they possess is
concentrated within the narrow circle of Imitation—the word sums up
the Middle Ages. But for him, the bastard all curse, whose share is
only the lash, he has no thought of waiting. He is for ever prying
and searching, never an instant still, trying all things in heaven
and earth. He is to the last degree curious and inquisitive,
scrutinising, rummaging, sounding, poking his nose everywhere. At
the solemn Consummatum est he grins, and makes a derisive mow. His
word is always "Not yet!" and "Forward still!"
All the same, he is not hard to please. Nothing rebuffs him;
what Heaven throws in his way, he picks up with alacrity. For
instance the Church has rejected Nature as something impure and
suspect. Satan seizes on it, and makes it his pride and ornament.
Better still, he utilises it, turns it to profit, originates the
arts from it, accepting gladly the great name they would fain cast
at him as a stigma and a disgrace, that of Prince of this World.
"Alas for them that laugh!"—they had declared with startling
unwisdom; for what was this but giving Satan a fine initial
advantage to start with, the monopoly of laughter, and proclaiming
him amusing? Let us say necessary at once; for laughter is an
essential function of human nature. How support life at all, if we
cannot laugh,—at any rate when we are in sorrow?
The Church, which sees in our life below only a test and
trial for one to come, takes care not to prolong it needlessly. Her
medicine is resignation, a waiting and a hoping for death. Here is
a great field opened to Satan; he becomes physician, healer of
living men. Nay more! consoler as well; he has the compassion to
show us our dead, to evoke the shades of the dear ones we have
loved and lost.
Another trifle the Church has cast away and condemned—Logic,
the free exercise of Reason. Here again is an appetising dainty the
Enemy snaps up greedily.
The Church had built of solid stone and tempered mortar a
narrow in pace, vaulted, low-browed and confined, lighted by the
merest glimmer of day through a tiny slit. This they called the
schools. A few shavelings were let loose in it, and told "to be
free"; they one and all grew halting cripples. Three hundred, four
hundred years, only made them more helplessly paralysed. Between
Abelard and Occam the progress made is—nil!
A pretty tale, to say we must look there for the origin of
the Renaissance! The Renaissance came about, no doubt of that; but
how? by the satanic effort of men who broke through the vault, the
struggles of condemned criminals who would see the light of heaven.
It came about in the main far away from schools and scholastics, in
that school of wild nature where Satan lectured a truant band of
Sorceresses and shepherd lads.
A dangerous curriculum, if ever there was one! But its very
risks stimulated the love of knowledge, the frantic longing to see
and know. It was there began the black sciences, the forbidden
Chemistry of poisons, and the accursed thing, Anatomy. The
shepherd, first to scan the stars, along with his discoveries in
Astronomy, brought to the common stock his sinister recipes and his
experiments on animals. Then the Sorceress would contribute a
corpse filched from the nearest graveyard; and for the first
time—at the risk of the stake—men could contemplate that miracle of
God's handicraft "which" (as M. Serres so well said) "we hide in
silly prudishness instead of trying to understand."
The only Doctor admitted to these classes, Paracelsus, noted
a third as well, who now and again would glide in to join the
sinister conclave, bringing Surgery with him as his contribution.
This was the surgeon of those gentle times,—the Public Executioner,
the man of unflinching hand, whose plaything was the branding-iron,
who broke men's bones and could set them again, who could slay and
make alive, and hang a felon up to a certain point and no further.
This criminal University of the Sorceress, the Shepherd, and
the Hangman, by means of its experiments—a sacrilege every
one—emboldened the other and rival seat of learning and forced its
scholars to study. For each was fain to live; and otherwise the
Witch would have monopolised all, and the Schoolmen turned their
backs for good and all on Medicine. The Church had to submit, and
wink at these crimes. She allowed there were good poisons
(Grillandus); she permitted dissection in public, though
reluctantly and under dire constraint. In 1306 the Italian Mondino
opened and dissected a woman, and another in 1315. It was a solemn
and beneficent revelation, the veritable discovery of a new
world,—far more so than Christopher Columbus's. Fools shuddered,
and howled in protest; wise men dropped on their knees.
With victories like these to his credit, Satan could not but
live. Alone the Church would never have had strength to crush him.
Fire and stake were of no avail, but a certain line of policy was
more successful.
With no little astuteness the kingdom of Satan was divided
against itself. In opposition to his daughter and bride, the
Sorceress, was set her son, the Healer.
The Church, deeply and from the bottom of her heart as she
hated the latter, none the less established his monopoly, to secure
the Sorceress's ruin. She declares, in the fourteenth century, that
if a woman dare to cure without having studied, she is a Witch and
must die.
But how should she study publicly? Imagine the scene, at once
ludicrous and terrible, that would have occurred if the poor savage
creature had ventured to enter the schools! What merriment and wild
gaiety! In the bale-fires of St. John's day, cats chained together
were burned to death. But think of the Sorceress bound to this
caterwauling rout of hell, the Witch screaming and roasting in the
flames, what a treat for the gentle band of young shavelings and
sucking pedants!
We shall see Satan's decadence all in good time,—a sorry
tale. We shall see him pacified, grown a good old sort. He is
robbed and pillaged, till at last, of the two masks he wore at the
Witches’ Sabbath, the foulest is adopted by Tartuffe.
His spirit is everywhere. But for himself, for his own
personality, in losing the Witch, he lost all. The Wizards were
bores, and nothing more.
Now that his fall has been so far consummated, do his foes
quite realise what they have done? Was he not a necessary actor, an
indispensable factor in the great engine of religious
faith,—something out of gear nowadays? Every organism that works
well is double, has two sides; life is hardly possible otherwise. A
certain balance between two forces is necessary, forces mutually
opposed and symmetrical, but unequal. The inferior acts as
counterpoise, corresponding to the other. The superior grows
impatient at the check, and is for abolishing it altogether. But
the wish is a mistaken one.
When Colbert, in 1672, shelved Satan with so little ceremony,
forbidding the Judges of the Realm to hear cases of Witchcraft, the
Norman Parlement, in its obstinate conservatism, its sound Norman
logicality, demonstrated the dangers attending such a decision. The
Devil is nothing less than a dogma closely bound up with all the
rest. Touch the vanquished of the ages—are you not touching the
victor too? Doubt the acts of the one—is not this paving the way to
doubt those of the other, those very miracles he did to fight the
Devil? The pillars of heaven are based in the abyss. The rash man
who shakes this infernal foundation may well crack the walls of
paradise.
Colbert paid no heed; he had so many other things to do. But
it may be the Devil heard. And his wounded spirit is greatly
consoled. In the petty trades where he now gains his
living—Spiritualism, Table-turning, and the like—he resigns himself
to insignificance, and thinks, at any rate, he is not the only
time-hallowed institution that is a-dying.
Footnotes
xiii:1 De Strigibus, ch. 9.
xvi:2 Lancre.