The Mystery of Witchcraft - History, Mythology & Art. William Godwin

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The Mystery of Witchcraft - History, Mythology & Art - William Godwin

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frame, such as spontaneous combustion, delusions arising from the state of the brain and nerves, and optical deceptions, should appear to the sufferer to be the work of the devil, whose good offices they might very probably have invoked under some fit of despondency or misanthropy, little expecting, like the poor man in the fable who called on Death, to be taken at their word. What a “Thesaurus of Horror” would the spectres of Nicolai have afforded in the sixteenth century or the commencement of the seventeenth, if embodied in the pages of the ‘Malleus’ or the ‘Flagellum Dæmonum,’ instead of being quietly published by the patients as optical and medical phenomena in the ‘Berlinische Monatschrift’ for 1799, and the 15th volume of the ‘Philosophical Journal!’ What a fearful glimpse into the infernal world would have been afforded by the still more frightful illusions which haunted poor Backzko of Königsberg24 during his political labours in 1806; the grinning negro who seated himself opposite to him, the owl-headed tormentor that used to stare at him every night through his curtains, the snakes twisting and turning about his knees as he turned his periods! If we go back to 1651, we find our English Jacob Böhme, Pordage25, giving an account of visions which must have been exactly of the same kind, arising from an excited state of the brain, with the most thorough conviction of their reality. His Philadelphian disciples, Jane Leade, Thomas Bromley, Hooker, Sapperton, and others, were indulged, on the first meeting of their society, with a vision of unparalleled splendour. The princes and powers of the infernal world passed in review before them, sitting in coaches, surrounded with dark clouds and drawn by a cortége of lions, dragons, tigers, and bears; then followed the lower spirits arranged in squadrons with cats’ ears, claws, twisted limbs, etc.; whether they shut their eyes or kept them open, the appearances were equally distinct; “for we saw,” says the master-spirit Pordage, “with the eyes of the mind, not with those of the body.”

      “And shapes that come not at a mortal call

       Will not depart when mortal voices bid.

       Lords of the visionary eye, whose lid

      Neither, we are afraid, is there much reason to doubt that some of the most horrible of their conceptions were founded on facts which were but too real; that the cunning and the depraved contrived to turn the ecstasies and the fears of these poor wretches to their own purposes; in short, that frauds similar to those which Boccaccio has painted in his novel of the angel Gabriel, were occasionally played off upon the deluded victims. Without entering further on a topic which is rather of a delicate kind, the reader will have an idea of our meaning who recollects the disclosures that took place in the noted French case of Father Girard and La Cadière.

      Much has been said as to the wonderful coincidences to be found in the evidence of the accused when examined separately, the minuteness of their details, and the general harmony of the infernal narratives, as collected from the witch trials of different countries. But the truth is that this assertion must in the first place be received with great limitations; for in many cases, where, accepting the assertions of Sprenger and the rest as true, we should suppose the coincidence to be complete, the original confessions which still exist prove that the resemblance was merely general, and that there were radical and irreconcileable differences in the details of the evidence. Inasfar as the assertion is really true, one simple explanation goes far to account for the phenomenon;—“Insanire parent certâ ratione modoque.” The general notions of the devil and his demeanour, the rites of the infernal sabbath, etc. being once fixed, the visions which crossed the minds of the unfortunate wretches accused soon assumed a pretty determinate and invariable form; so that, even if left to tell their own story, there would have been the closest resemblance between the narratives of different persons. But this was not all. In almost every case the confessions were merely the echo of questions put by the inquisitors, all of which again were founded on the demonological creed of the ‘Malleus.’ One set of questions is put to all the witches, and the answers, being almost always simple affirmatives, necessarily correspond. Hence it is amusing enough to observe how different were the results, when the process of investigation fell into the hands of persons to whom Sprenger’s manual was unknown. In the Lindheim trials in 1633, to which we have already alluded, the inquisitor happened to be an old soldier, who had witnessed several campaigns in the Thirty Years War, and who, instead of troubling his head about Incubi, Succubi, and the other favourite subjects of inquiry with the disciples of the Hammer, was only anxious to ascertain who was the queen of the infernal spirits, the general, officers, corporals, etc., to all of which he received answers as distinct and satisfactory as any that are recorded for our instruction in the chronicles of Bodinus or Delrio.

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