in Sweden, as the Brocken is in Germany; they ride thither on sticks, goats, men’s backs, and spits; they are baptized by a priest provided by the devil; they sup with him, very frugally it would appear, for the banquet commonly consists of broth made with colewort and bacon, oatmeal, bread and butter, milk and cheese; and the devil allows no wine. After supper they dance, and when the devil wishes to be particularly jolly he pulls the spits from under them, and beats them black and blue, after which he sits down and laughs outrageously. Sometimes he treats them to a musical exhibition on the harp, for he has a great turn for music, as his famous sonata to Tartini proves. All of them confess intercourse with him29, and most of them had sons and daughters by him. Occasionally he fell sick, and required to be bled and blistered; and once he seemed to be dead, on which occasion there was a general mourning for him on the Blocula, as the Syrian damsels used to bewail the annual wound of their idol Thammuz on Lebanon. Is it not frightful to think that in a trial held before a tribunal consisting of the élite of the province of Dalecarlia, assisted by the commissioners from the capital,—in a country where, until this time, the witch mania, already beginning to abate in Germany, had scarcely been heard of, and where it ceased earlier perhaps than in most other countries in Europe,—seventy-two women and fifteen children should have been condemned and executed at one time upon such confessions? Is it possible after this to read without shuddering the cool newspaper-like conclusion of Dr. Horneck—“On the 25th of August execution was done upon the notoriously guilty, the day being bright and glorious, and the sun shining, and some thousands of people being present at the spectacle!”
Thirty years before, a similar instance of the progress of the epidemic had taken place at Lille, in the hospital founded by the pious enthusiast Antoinette Bourignon. On entering the schoolroom one day, she imagined that she saw a number of little black children, with wings, flying about the heads of the girls; and not liking the colour or appearance of these visitors, she warned her pupils to be on their guard. Shortly before this, a girl who had run away from the institution in consequence of being confined for some misdemeanour of which she had been guilty, being interrogated how she had contrived to escape, and not liking probably to disclose the truth, had maintained that she had been liberated by the devil, to whose service she had devoted herself from a child. Nothing more was wanting in that age of diablerie to turn the heads of the poor children; in the course of six months almost all the girls in the hospital, amounting to more than fifty, had confessed themselves confirmed witches, and admitted the usual intercourse with the devil, the midnight meetings, dances, banquets, etc., which form the staple of the narrative of the time. Their ideal banquets seem to have been on a more liberal scale however than those of the poor Mora witches; probably because many of the pupils had been accustomed to better fare in a populous and wealthy town in Flanders, than the others in a poor village in Sweden. Exorcisms and prayers of all kinds followed this astounding disclosure. The Capuchins and Jesuits quarrelled, the Capuchins implicitly believing the reality of the possession, the Jesuits doubting it. The parents of the culprit now turned the tables upon poor Bourignon, by accusing her of having bewitched them; and at last the pious theosophist, after an examination before the Council, was glad to seek safety in flight; having thus obtained a clearer notion than she formerly possessed of the kingdom of Satan, with regard to which she had entertained and published as many strange fancies as the Bishop of Benevento; and having been taught by her own experience the danger of tampering with youthful minds, in which the train of superstition had been so long laid, that it only required a spark from her overheated brain to kindle it into a flame.
It would appear too that physical causes, and in particular nervous affections of a singular kind, had about this time mingled with and increased the delusion which had taken its rise in these superstitious conceptions of the devil and his influence. During the very year (1669) in which the children at Mora were suffering under convulsions and fainting fits, those in the Orphan Hospital at Hoorn, in Holland, were labouring under a malady exactly similar; but though the phenomena were attributed to diabolical agency, the suspicions of the public fortunately were not directed to any individual in particular. Another instance of the same kind had taken place about a century before in the Orphan Hospital at Amsterdam, of which a particular account is given in Dapper’s history of that city, where the number of children supposed to be bewitched amounted to about seventy, and where the evil was attributed to some unhappy old women, before whose houses the affected urchins, when led out into the streets, had been more than usually clamorous. Such also appears to have been the primary cause of the tragedies in New England in 1699; of the demoniac exhibitions at Loudon, which were made a pretext for the murder of the obnoxious Grandier; of the strange incidents which occurred so late as 1749 in the convent of Unterzell at Wurtzburg; and of most of the other more remarkable cases of supposed possession. The mysterious principle of sympathy, operating in weak minds, will in fact be found to be at the root of most of the singular phenomena in the history of witchcraft. No wonder then that after the experience of a century, the judges, and even the ignorant public themselves, came at last to suspect that, however the principle might apply to other crimes, the confession of the criminal was not, in cases of witchcraft, the best evidence of the fact. In the New England cases, says Mr. Calef (April 25, 1693), “one was tried that confessed; but they were now so well taught what weight to lay upon confessions, that the jury brought her in not guilty, although she confessed she was.”
But what a deluge of blood had been shed before even this principle came to be recognized, and still more before the judicial belief in the existence of the crime was fully eradicated! What a spectacle does Europe present from the date of Innocent’s Bull down to the commencement of the eighteenth century! Sprenger, Henry Institor, Geiss von Lindheim, and others in Germany; Cumanus in Italy; the Inquisition in Spain; Remigius, Bodinus, and De l’Ancre in France and Lorraine, flooring witches on all sides with the ‘Malleus Maleficarum,’ or flogging them to death with the ‘Flagellum’ and ‘Fustis Dæmonum;’ Holland, Geneva, Sweden, Denmark, England, and Scotland vying with each other in the number of trials and the depth of their infatuation and bigotry!
The Reformation, which uprooted other errors, only strengthened and fostered this. Every town and village on the continent was filled with spies, accusers, and wretches who made their living by pretending to detect the secret marks which indicated a compact with the devil30,—inquisitors, judges, advocates, executioners, every one connected with these frightful tribunals, on the watch for anything which might afford the semblance of suspicion. To ensure the death or ruin of an enemy, nothing more was necessary in most cases than to throw into this lion’s mouth an accusation of magic against him. “Vix aliquis eorum,” says Linden, the determined foe of these proceedings, “qui accusati sunt, supplicium evasit.” The fate of Edelin, of Urban Grandier, and of the Maréchale d’Ancre in France, of Doctor Flaet and Sidonia von Vork in Germany, and of Peter of Abano in Italy31, prove how often the accusation of sorcery was not even believed by the accusers themselves, but was resorted to merely as a certain means to get rid of an obnoxious enemy. Meanwhile the notaries’ clerks and officials, labouring in their vocation, grew rich from the enormous fees attendant on these trials; the executioner became a personage of first-rate consequence: “generoso equo instar aulici nobilis ferebatur, auro argentoque vestitus: uxor ejus vestium luxu certabat cum nobilioribus32.” Some partial diminution of this persecuting zeal took place in consequence of a Rescript of John VII. (18th December, 1591), addressed to the commission, by which the fees of court were restricted within more moderate bounds; but still the profits arising from this trade in human victims were sufficient to induce the members and dependants of court, like the Brahmins in India, to support with all their might this system of purification by fire.
At last however the horrors of Wurtzburg and Treves began to open the eyes even of the dullest to the progress of the danger, which, commencing like Elijah’s cloud, had gradually overshadowed the land. While the executions were confined to the lower classes, to crazed old women or unhappy foreigners, even those whose more vigorous intellect enabled them to resist the popular
