In England the best of the older books must be recommended with necessary reservations. Thomas Wright’s Narratives of Sorcery and Magic, 2 vols., 1851, is to be commended as the work of a learned antiquarian who often referred to original sources, but it is withal sketchy and can hardly satisfy the careful scholar. Some exceptionally good writing and sound, clear, thinking are to be met with in Dr. F. G. Lee’s The Other World, 2 vols., 1875; More Glimpses of the World Unseen, 1878; Glimpses in the Twilight, 1885; and Sight and Shadows, 1894, all of which deserve to be far more widely known, since they well repay an unhurried and repeated perusal.

Quite recent work is represented by Professor Wallace Notestein’s History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718, published in 1911. This intimate study of a century and a half concentrates, as its title tells, upon England alone. It is supplied with ample and useful appendixes. In respect of the orderly marshalling of his facts, garnered from the trials and other sources—no small labour—Professor Notestein deserves a generous meed of praise; his interpretation of the facts and his deductions may not unfairly be criticized. Although his incredulity must surely now and again be shaken by the cumulative force of reiterated and corroborative evidence, nevertheless he refuses to admit even the possibility that persons who at any rate affected supernatural powers held clandestine meetings after nightfall in obscure and lonely places for purposes and plots of their own. If human testimony is worth anything at all, unless we are to be more Pyrrhonian than the famous Dr. Marphurius himself who would never say, “Je suis venu; mais; Il me semble que je suis venu,” when in 1612 Roger Nowell had swooped down on the Lancashire coven and carried off Elizabeth Demdike with three other beldames to durance vile in Lancaster Castle, Elizabeth Device summoned the whole Pendle gang to her home at Malking Tower, in order that they might discuss the situation and contrive the delivery of the prisoners. As soon as they had forgathered, they all sat down to dinner, and had a good north country spread of beef, bacon, and roast mutton. Surely there is nothing very remarkable in this; and the evidence as given in Thomas Potts’ famous narrative, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the countie of Lancaster (London, 1613), bears the very hall-mark and impress of truth: “The persons aforesaid had to their dinners Beefe, Bacon, and roasted Mutton; which Mutton (as this Examinates said brother said) was of a Wether of Christopher Swyers of Barley: which Wether was brought in the night before into this Examinates mothers house by the said Iames Deuice, the Examinates said brother: and in this Examinates sight killed and eaten.” But Professor Notestein will none of it. He writes: “The concurring evidence in the Malking Tower story is of no more compelling character than that to be found in a multitude of Continental stories of witch gatherings which have been shown to be the outcome of physical or mental pressure and of leading questions. It seems unnecessary to accept even a substratum of fact” (p. 124). In the face of such sweeping and dogmatic assertion mere evidence is no use at all. For we know that the Continental stories of witch gatherings are with very few exceptions the chronicle of actual fact. It must be confessed that such feeble scepticism, which repeatedly mars his summary of the witch-trials, is a serious blemish in Professor Notestein’s work, and in view of his industry much to be regretted.

Miss M. A. Murray does not for a moment countenance any such summary dismissal and uncritical rejection of evidence. Her careful reading of the writers upon Witchcraft has justly convinced her that their statements must be accepted. Keen intelligences and shrewd investigators such as Gregory XV, Bodin, Guazzo, De Lancre, D’Espagnet, La Reynie, Boyle, Sir Matthew Hale, Glanvill, were neither deceivers nor deceived. The evidence must stand, but as Miss Murray finds herself unable to admit the logical consequence of this, she hurriedly starts away with an arbitrary, “the statements do not bear the construction put upon them,” and in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) proceeds to develop a most ingenious, but, as I show, a wholly untenable hypothesis. Accordingly we are not surprised to find that many of the details Miss Murray has collected in her painstaking pages are (no doubt unconsciously) made to square with her preconceived theory. However much I may differ from Miss Murray in my outlook, and our disagreement is, I consider, neither slight nor superficial, I am none the less bound to commend her frank and courageous treatment of many essential particulars which are all too often suppressed, and in consequence a false and counterfeit picture has not unseldom been drawn.

So vast a literature surrounds modern Witchcraft, for frankly such is Spiritism in effect, that it were no easy task to mention even a quota of those works which seem to throw some real light upon a complex and difficult subject. Among many which I have found useful are Surbled, Spiritualisme et spiritisme and Spirites et médiums; Gutberlet, Der Kampf um die Seele; Dr. Marcel Viollet, Le spiritisme dans ses rapports avec la folie; J. Godfrey Raupert, Modern Spiritism and Dangers of Spiritualism; the Very Rev. Alexis Lépicier, O.S.M., The Unseen World; the Rev. A. V. Miller, Sermons on Modern Spiritualism; Lapponi, Hypnotism and Spiritism; the late Monsignor Hugh Benson’s Spiritualism (The History of Religions); Elliot O’Donnell’s The Menace of Spiritualism; and Father Simon Blackmore’s Spiritism: Facts and Frauds, 1925. My own opinion of this movement has been formed not only from reading studies and monographs which treat of every phase of the question from all points of view, but also by correspondence and discussion with ardent devotees of the cult, and, not least, owing to the admissions and warnings of those who have abandoned these dangerous practices, revelations made in such circumstances, however, as altogether to preclude even a hint as to their definite import and scope.

The History of Witchcraft is full of interest to the theologian, the psychologist, the historian, and cannot be ignored. But it presents a very dark and terrible aspect, the details of which in the few English studies that claim serious attention have almost universally been unrecorded, and, indeed, deliberately burked and shunned. Such treatment is unworthy and unscholarly to a degree, reprehensible and dishonest.

The work of Professor Notestein, for example, is gravely vitiated, owing to the fact that he has completely ignored the immodesty of the witch-cult and thus extenuated its evil. He is, indeed, so uncritical, I would even venture to say so unscholarly, as naïvely to remark (p. 300): “No one who has not read for himself can have any notion of the vile character of the charges and confessions embodied in the witch pamphlets. It is an aspect of the question which has not been discussed in these pages.” Such a confession is amazing. One cannot write in dainty phrase of Satanists and the Sabbat. However loathly the disease the doctor must not hesitate to diagnose and to probe. This ostrich-like policy is moral cowardice. None of the Fathers and great writers of the Church were thus culpably prudish. When S. Epiphanius has to discuss the Gnostics, he describes in detail their abominations, and pertinently remarks: “Why should I shrink from speaking of the things you do not fear to do? By speaking thus, I hope to fill you with horror of the turpitudes you commit.” And S. Clement of Alexandria says: “I am not ashamed to name the parts of the body wherein the fœtus is formed and nourished; and why, indeed, should I be, since God was not ashamed to create them?”

A few authors have painted the mediæval witch in pretty colours on satin. She has become a somewhat eccentric but kindly old lady, shrewd and perspicacious, with a knowledge of healing herbs and simples, ready to advise and aid her neighbours who are duller-witted than she; not disdaining in return a rustic present of a flitch, meal, a poult or eggs from the farm-yard. And so for no very definite reason she fell an easy prey to fanatic judges and ravening inquisitors, notoriously the most ignorant and stupid of mortals, who caught her, swum her in a river, tried her, tortured her, and finally burned her at the stake. Many modern writers, more sceptical still, frankly relegate the witch to the land of nursery tales and Christmas pantomime; she never had any real existence other than as Cinderella’s fairy godmother or the Countess D’Aulnoy’s Madame Merluche.

I have even heard it publicly asserted from the lecture platform by a professed student of the Elizabethan period that the Elizabethans did not, of course, as a matter of fact believe in Witchcraft. It were impossible to imagine that men of the intellectual standard of Shakespeare, Ford, Jonson, Fletcher, could have held so idle a chimæra, born of sick fancies and hysteria. And his audience acquiesced with no little complacency, pleased to think that the great names of the past had been cleared from the stigma of so degrading and gross a superstition. A few uneducated peasants here and there may have been morbid and ignorant enough to dream of witches, and the poets used these crones and hags with effect in ballad and play. But as for giving any actual credence to such fantasies, most assuredly our great Elizabethans were more enlightened than that! And, indeed, Witchcraft is a phase of and a factor in the manners of the seventeenth century, which in some quarters there seems a tacit agreement almost to ignore.