age of Simonides or Euripides, or at least in the Ionic States, women are an inferior order of beings, not only on account of their weaker natural faculties and social position, but also in respect of their natural inclination to every sort of wickedness. And if they did not act the part of a Christian witch, they were skilled in the practice of toxicology. With the Latin race and many European peoples, the female sex held a better position; and it may appear inconsistent that in Christendom, where the Goddess-Mother was almost the highest object of veneration, woman should be degraded into a slave of Satan. By the northern nations they were supposed to be gifted with supernatural power; and the universal powers of the Italian hag have been already noticed. But the Church, which allowed no miracle to be legitimate out of the pale, and yet could not deny the fact of the miraculous without, was obliged to assert it to be of diabolic origin. Thus the priestess of antiquity became a witch. This is the historical account. Physically, the cause seems discoverable in the fact that the natural constitution of women renders their imaginative organs more excitable for the ecstatic conditions of the prophetic or necromantic arts. On all occasions of religious or other cerebral excitement, women (it is a matter of experience) are generally most easily reduced to the requisite state for the expected supernatural visitation. Their hysterical (hystera) natures are sufficiently indicative of the origin of such hallucinations. Their magical or pharmaceutical attributes might be derived from savage life, where the men are almost exclusively occupied either in war or in the chase: everything unconnected with these active or necessary pursuits is despised as unbecoming the superior nature of the male sex. To the female portion of the community are abandoned domestic employments, preparation of food, the selection and mixture of medicinal herbs, and all the mysteries of the medical art. How important occupations like these, by ignorance and interest, might be raised into something more than natural skill, is easy to be conjectured. That so extraordinary an attribute would often be abused is agreeable to experience.41
According to the earlier Christian writers, the frailer sex is addicted to infernal practices by reason of their innate wickedness: and in the opinion of the 'old Fathers' they are fitted by a corrupt disposition to be the recipients and agents of the devil's will upon earth. The authors of the Witch-Hammer have supported their assertions of the proneness of women to evil in general, and to sorcery in particular, by the respectable names and authority of St. Chrysostom, Augustin, Dionysius Areopagiticus, Hilary, &c. &c.42 The Golden-mouthed is adduced as especially hostile in his judgment of the sex; and his 'Homily on Herodias' takes its proper place with the satires of Aristophanes and Juvenal, of Boccaccio and Boileau.43
Reginald Scot gives the reasons alleged by the apologists of witchcraft. 'This gift and natural influence of fascination may be increased in man according to his affections and perturbations, as through anger, fear, love, hate, &c. For by hate, saith Varius, entereth a fiery inflammation into the eye of man, which being violently sent out by beams and streams infect and bewitch those bodies against whom they are opposed. And therefore (he saith) that is the cause that women are oftener found to be witches than men. For they have such an unbridled force of fury and concupiscence naturally, that by no means is it possible for them to temper or moderate the same. So as upon every trifling occasion they, like unto the beasts, fix their furious eyes upon the party whom they bewitch.... Women also (saith he) are oftenlie filled full of superfluous humours, and with them the melancholike blood boileth, whereof spring vapours, and are carried up and conveyed through the nostrils and mouth, to the bewitching of whatsoever it meeteth. For they belch up a certain breath wherewith they bewitch whomsoever they list. And of all other women lean, hollow-eyed, old, beetle-browed women (saith he) are the most infectious.'44 Why old women are selected as the most proper means of doing the devil's will may be discovered in their peculiar characteristics. The repulsive features, moroseness, avarice, malice, garrulity of his hags are said to be appropriate instruments. Scot informs us, 'One sort of such as are said to be witches are women which be commonly old, lame, blear-eyed, pale, foul, and full of wrinkles, poor, sullen, superstitious, and papists, or such as know no religion, in whose drowsy minds the devil hath got a fine seat. They are lean and deformed, showing melancholy in their faces, to the horror of all that see them. They are doting, scolds, mad, devilish ... neither obtaining for their service and pains, nor yet by their art, nor yet at the devil's hands, with whom they are said to make a perfect visible bargain, either beauty, money, promotion, wealth, worship, pleasure, honour, knowledge, or any other benefit whatsoever.' As to the preternatural gifts of these hags, he sensibly argues: 'Alas! what an unapt instrument is a toothless, old, impotent, unwieldy woman to fly in the air; truly, the devil little needs such instruments to bring his purposes to pass.'45
Dr. Glanvil, who wrote in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and is bitterly opposed to the 'Witch-Advocate' and his followers, defends the capabilities of hags and the like for serving the demons. He conjectures, 'Peradventure 'tis one of the great designs, as 'tis certainly the interest, of those wicked agents and machinators industriously to hide from us their influences and ways of acting, and to work as near as 'tis possible incognito; upon which supposal it is easy to conceive a reason why they most commonly work by and upon the weak and the ignorant, who can make no cunning observations or tell credible tales to detect their artifice.'46 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
