Witchcraft in America. Charles Wentworth Upham

The act of bewitching is defined to be 'a supernatural work contrived between a corporal old woman and a spiritual devil' ('Discoverie,' vi. 2). The method of initiation is, according to a writer on the subject, as follows: A decrepit, superannuated, old woman is tempted by a man in black to sign a contract to become his, both soul and body. On the conclusion of the agreement (about which there was much cheating and haggling), he gives her a piece of money, and causes her to write her name and make her mark on a slip of parchment with her own blood. Sometimes on this occasion also the witch uses the ceremony of putting one hand to the sole of her foot and the other to the crown of her head. On departing he delivers to her an imp or familiar. The familiar, in shape of a cat, a mole, miller-fly, or some other insect or animal, at stated times of the day sucks her blood through teats in different parts of her body.47 If, however, the proper vulgar witch is an old woman, the younger and fairer of the sex were not by any means exempt from the crime. Young and beautiful women, children of tender years, have been committed to the rack and to the stake on the same accusation which condemned the old and the ugly.

33. The remark of a late Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. 'The heathen temples,' says Professor Blunt, 'became Christian churches; the altars of the gods altars of the saints; the curtains, incense, tapers, and votive-tablets remained the same; the aquaminarium was still the vessel for holy water; St. Peter stood at the gate instead of Cardea; St. Rocque or St. Sebastian in the bedroom instead of the Phrygian Penates; St. Nicholas was the sign of the vessel instead of Castor and Pollux; the Mater Deûm became the Madonna; alms pro Matre Deûm became alms for the Madonna; the festival of the Mater Deûm the festival of the Madonna, or Lady Day; the Hostia or victim was now the Host; the "Lugentes Campi," or dismal regions, Purgatory; the offerings to the Manes were masses for the dead.' The parallel, he ventures to assert, might be drawn out to a far greater extent, &c.

34. Conformably to this plan, the first proselytisers in Germany and the North were often reduced (we are told) to substituting the name of Christ and the saints for those of Odin and the gods in the toasts drunk at their bacchanalian festivals.

35. Bingham's Origines Ecclesiasticæ, xvi.

36. Origines Ecclesiasticæ, xvi. The exorcists were a recognised and respectable order in the Church. See id. iii. for an account of the Energumenoi or demoniacs. The lawyer Ulpian, in the time of Tertullian, mentions the Order of Exorcists as well known. St. Augustin (De Civit. Dei, xxii. 8) records some extraordinary cures on his own testimony within his diocess of Hippo.

37. The art of expelling demons, indeed, has been preserved in the Protestant section of the Christian Church until a recent age. The exorcising power, it is remarkable, is the sole claim to miraculous privilege of the Protestants. The formula de Strumosis Attrectandis, or the form of touching for the king's evil (a similar claim), was one of the recognised offices of the English Established Church in the time of Queen Anne, or of George I.

38. 'The knowledge that is suited to our situation and powers, the whole compass of moral, natural, and mathematical science, was neglected by the new Platonists; whilst they exhausted their strength in the verbal disputes of metaphysics, they attempted to explore the secrets of the invisible world, and studied to reconcile Aristotle with Plato on subjects of which both these philosophers were as ignorant as the rest of mankind. Consuming their reason in those deep but unsubstantial meditations, their minds were exposed to illusions of fancy. They flattered themselves that they possessed the secret of disengaging the soul from its corporeal prison; claimed a familiar intercourse with demons and spirits; and by a very singular revolution, converted the study of philosophy into that of magic.'—The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. xiii.

39. The Egyptians, almost the only exception to polytheistic tolerance, seem to have been rendered intolerant by the number of antagonistic animal-gods worshipped in different parts of the country, enumerated by Juvenal, who describes the effects of religious animosity displayed in a faction fight between Ombi or Coptos and Tentyra.—Sat. xv.

40. Life of Goethe, by G. H. Lewes.

41. Quintilian declared, 'Latrocinium facilius in viro, veneficium in feminâ credam.' To the same effect is an observation of Pliny: 'Scientiam feminarum in veneficiis prævalere.'

42. 'They style a wife The dear-bought curse and lawful plague of life, A bosom-serpent and a domestic evil.'

43. The royal author of the Demonologie finds no difficulty in accounting for the vastly larger proportion of the female sex devoted to the devil's service. 'The reason is easy,' he declares; 'for as that sex is frailer than man is, so is it easier to be entrapped in the gross snares of the devil, as was over-well proved to be true by the serpent's deceiving of Eva at the beginning, which makes him the homelier with that sex sensine:' and it is profoundly observed that witches cannot even shed tears, though women in general are, like the crocodile, ready to weep on every light occasion.

44. Discoverie of Witchcraft, book xii. 21.—We shall have occasion hereafter to notice this great opponent of the devil's regime in the sixteenth century. We may be inclined to consider a more probable reason—that spirits, being in the general belief (so Adam infers that God had 'peopled highest heaven with spirits masculine') of the masculine gender, the recipients of their inspiration are naturally of the other sex: evil spirits could propagate their human or half-human agents with least suspicion and in the most natural way.

45. Discoverie, i. 3, 6.—Old women, however, may be negatively useful. One of the writers on the subject (John Nider) recommends them to young men since 'Vetularum aspectus et colloquia amorem excutiunt.'

46. Sadducismus Triumphatus, part i. sect. 8.

47. Grose's Antiquities, in Brand's Popular Antiquities of Great Britain.

      Chapter II.

       Table of Contents

      Charlemagne's Severity—Anglo-Saxon Superstition—Norman and Arabic Magic—Influence of Arabic Science—Mohammedan Belief in Magic—Rabbinical Learning—Roger Bacon—The Persecution of the Templars—Alice Kyteler.

Tremendous as was the power of the witch in earlier Christendom, it was not yet degraded into the thoroughly diabolistic character of her more recent successors. Diabolism advanced in the same proportion with the authority of the Church and the ignorant submission of the people. In the civil law, the Emperor Leo, in the sixth century, abrogated the Constantinian edict as too indulgent or too credulous: from that time all sorts of charms, all use of them, beneficial or injurious, were declared worthy of punishment. The different states of Europe, founded on the ruins of the