INTRODUCTION vii✦

CHAPTER✦

I. THE WITCH: HERETIC AND ANARCHIST 1

II. THE WORSHIP OF THE WITCH 51

III. DEMONS AND FAMILIARS 81

IV. THE SABBAT 110

V. THE WITCH IN HOLY WRIT 173

VI. DIABOLIC POSSESSION AND MODERN SPIRITISM 198

VII. THE WITCH IN DRAMATIC LITERATURE 276

BIBLIOGRAPHY 315

INDEX 347

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATE

I. THE DEPARTURE FOR THE SABBAT (David Teniers) Frontispiece

PAGE

II. THE WORLD TOST AT TENNIS. 4to., 1620 8 (Facsimile title-page.)

III. COMPENDIVM MALEFICARVM. MEDIOLANI, 1626 82 (Facsimile title-page of second edition.)

IV. OFF TO THE SABBAT (Queverdo) 120

V. THE SABBAT (Ziarnko) 144

VI. THE WITCH OF ENDOR (W. Faithorne) 178 (Frontispiece to Sadducismus Triumphatus, 1681)

VII. S. JAMES VISITS THE WARLOCK’S DEN (Pieter Breughel) 250

VIII. THE WITCH OF EDMONTON. 4to., 1658 290 (Facsimile title-page.)

INTRODUCTION✦

The history of Witchcraft, a subject as old as the world and as wide as the world,—since I understand for the present purpose by Witchcraft, Sorcery, Black Magic, Necromancy, secret Divination, Satanism, and every kind of malign occult art,—at once confronts the writer with a most difficult problem. He is called upon to exercise a choice, and his dilemma is by no means made the easier owing to the fact he is acutely conscious that whichever way he may decide he is laying himself open to damaging and not impertinent criticism. Since it is essential that his work should be comprised within a reasonable compass he may elect to attempt a bird’s-eye view of the whole range from China to Peru, from the half-articulate, rhythmic incantations of primitive man at the dawn of life to the last spiritistic fad and manifestation at yesterday’s séance or circle, in which case his pages will most certainly be thin and often superficial: or again he may rather concentrate upon one or two features in the history of Witchcraft, deal with these at some length, stress some few forgotten facts whose importance is now neglected and unrealized, utilize new material the result of laborious research, but all this at the expense of inevitable omissions, of hiatus, of self-denial, the avoidance of fascinating by-ways and valuable inquiry, of silence when he would fain be entering upon discussion and exposition. With a full sense of its drawbacks and danger I have selected the second method, since in dealing with a topic such as Witchcraft where there is no human hope of recording more than a tithe of the facts I believe it is better to give a documented account of certain aspects rather than to essay a somewhat huddled and confused conspectus of the whole, for such, indeed, even at best is itself bound to have no inconsiderable gaps and lacunæ, however carefully we endeavour to make it complete. I am conscious, then, that there is scarcely a paragraph in the present work which might not easily be expanded into a page, scarcely a page which might not to its great advantage become a chapter, and certainly not a chapter that would not be vastly improved were it elaborated to a volume.

Many omissions are, as I have said, a necessary consequence of the plan I have adopted; or, indeed, I venture to suppose, of any other plan which contemplates the treatment of so universal a subject as Witchcraft. I can but offer my apologies to these students who come to this History to find details of Finnish magic and the sorceries of Lapland, who wish to inform themselves concerning Tohungaism among the Maoris, Hindu devilry and enchantments, the Bersekir of Iceland, Siberian Shamanism, the blind Pan Sus and Mutangs of Korea, the Chinese Wu-po, Serbian lycanthropy, negro Voodoism, the dark lore of old Scandinavia and Islam. I trust my readers will believe that I regret as much as any the absence of these from my work, but after all in any human endeavour there are practical limitations of space.

In a complementary and companion volume I am intending to treat the epidemic of Witchcraft in particular localities, the British Isles, France, Germany, Italy, New England, and other countries. Many famous cases, the Lancashire witch-trials, the activities of Matthew Hopkins, Gilles de Rais, Gaufridi, Urbain Grandier, Cotton Mather and the Salem sorceries, will then be dealt with and discussed in some detail.

It is a surprising fact that amongst English writers Witchcraft in Europe has not of recent years received anything like adequate attention from serious students of history, who strangely fail to recognize the importance of this tragic belief both as a political and a social factor. Magic, the genesis of magical cults and ceremonies, the ritual of primitive peoples, traditional superstitions, and their ancillary lore, have been made the subject of vast and erudite studies, mostly from an anthropological and folk-loristic point of view, but the darker side of the subject, the history of Satanism, seems hardly to have been attempted.

Possibly one reason for this neglect and ignorance lies in the fact that the heavy and crass materialism, which was so prominent a feature during the greater part of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England, intellectually disavowed the supernatural, and attempted not without some success to substitute for religion a stolid system of respectable morality. Since Witchcraft was entirely exploded it would, at best, possess merely an antiquarian interest, and even so, the exhumation of a disgusting and contemptible superstition was not to be encouraged. It were more seemly to forget the uglier side of the past. This was the attitude which prevailed for more than a hundred and fifty years, and when Witchcraft came under discussion by such narrowly prejudiced and inefficient writers as Lecky or Charles Mackay they are not even concerned to discuss the possibility of the accounts given by the earlier authorities, who, as they premise, were all mistaken, extravagant, purblind, and misled. The cycle of time has had its revenge, and this rationalistic superstition is dying fast. The extraordinary vogue of and immense adherence to Spiritism would alone prove that, whilst the widespread interest that is taken in mysticism is a yet healthier sign that the world will no longer be content to be fed on dry husks and the chaff of straw. And these are only just two indications, and by no means the most significant, out of many.

It is quite impossible to appreciate and understand the true lives of men and women in Elizabethan and Stuart England, in the France of Louis XIII and his son, in the Italy of the Renaissance and the Catholic Reaction—to name but three countries and a few definite periods—unless we have some realization of the part that Witchcraft played in those ages amid the affairs of these kingdoms. All classes were concerned from Pope to peasant, from Queen to cottage gill.

Accordingly as actors are “the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time” I have given a concluding chapter which deals with Witchcraft as seen upon the stage, mainly concentrating upon the English theatre. This review has not before been attempted, and since Witchcraft was so formidable a social evil and so intermixed with all stations of life it is obvious that we can find few better contemporary illustrations of it than in the drama, for the playwright ever had his finger upon the public pulse. Until the development of the novel it was the theatre alone that mirrored manners and history.

There are many general French studies of Witchcraft of the greatest value, amongst which we may name such standard works as Antoine-Louis Daugis, Traité sur la magie, le sortilège, les possessions, obsessions et maléfices, 1732; Jules Garinet, Histoire de la Magie en France depuis le commencement de la monarchie jusqu’à nos jours, 1818; Michelet’s famous La Sorcière; Alfred Maury, La Magie et l’Astrologie, 3rd edition, 1868; L’Abbé Lecanu, Histoire de Satan; Jules Baissac, Les grands Jours de la Sorcellerie, 1890; Theodore de Cauzons, La Magie et la Sorcellerie en France, 4 vols., 1910, etc.

In German we have Eberhard Hauber’s Bibliotheca Magica; Roskoff’s Geschichte des Teufels, 1869; Soldan’s Geschichte der Hexenprozesse (neu bearbeitet von Dr. Heinrich Heppe), 1880; Friedrich Leitschuch’s Beitræge zur Geschichte des Hexenwesens in Franken, 1883; Johan Dieffenbach’s Der Hexenwahn vor und nach der Glaubensspaltung in Deutschland, 1886; Schreiber’s Die Hexenprozesse im Breisgau; Ludwig Rapp’s Die Hexenprozesse und ihre Gegner aus Tirol; Joseph Hansen’s Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns, 1901; and very many more admirably documented studies.