I. SATAN, ATTIRED AS A BISHOP. SLAVS THE

PREACHER ZACHARIJAH WITH THE
ASSISTANCE OF THE COOK-
3. THE SON !S SLAIN.
2. satan appears in disguise at the 4. satan announces the death of the vintage. son at the mouth of hell.
Scenes from M. Jacob Ruff's Religious Drama " Von dess herren Wingarten EiN huipsch nuiw spil gezogen usz Matheo am 21, Marco am 12, Luca am 20 Capitel " (Performed at Zurich, 1539 A. D.. on May 26.)*
Almost all these treatises, poor though they may be as literary, theological, or pastoral exhortations, 3'et show the rationalistic tendency of discovering the Devil in the vices of man, and this method became more and more
* From Ki-innecke after contemporaneous illustrations.
THK AGE OK Tin-; RHl'ORilATlON.
349
Macbeth Consulting the Witches.
350 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
establislied until in these latter days Satan himself was boldly and directly by Protestant theologians declared to be a mere abstract idea and a personification of evil. Yet this step was not taken at once, and mankind had to pass first through a long period of wavering opinions, of con- flicting propositions, uncertainties, venomous controver- sies, and anxious research for the truth.
Shakespeare.
The Protestant Devil became somewhat more cul- tured than the Catholic Devil, for the advancement no- ticeable in the civilisation of Protestant countries ex- tended also to him. Says Mephistopheles in Faust:
"Culture which smooth the whole world licks Also unto the Devil sticks."
To note the progress, let us compare Wyntoun Avho wrote early in the fifteenth century and Shakespeare. Wyn- toun's witches are ugly, old hags ; Shakespeare's, al- though by no means beautiful, are 3^et interesting and poetical ; they are " so withered and so wild in their attire that look not like the inhabitants o' th' earth and yet are on it." It is a poetical fiction repi-esenting temptation. And in this same sense the very word Devil is fi'equently used by Shakespeare. We are told, "'tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted Devil," and one fiend, as we read in Shakespeare, is the invisible spirit of wine. "The Devil," we read in Hamlet, "hath ]jower to as- sume a pleasing shape." And the meaning of this sen- tence is plainly psychological, as we learn from another passage in which Pohmius says to his daughter :
THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 351
"With devotion's visage And pious action we do sugar o'er The Devil himself."
Milton.
The Protestant Devil, as a poetical figure, received his finishing touches from Milton. i\nd Milton's Devil acquires a nobility of soul, moral strength, independence, and manliness which none of his ancestors possessed, neither Satan, nor Azazel, nor his proud cousins the Egyptian Typhon and the Persian Ahriman. The best characterisation of Milton's Satan is given by Taine. He ridicules Milton's description of Adam and Eve, who talk like a married couple of the poet's days. "I listen, and hear an English household, two reasoners of the period — Colonel Hutchinson and his wife. Heavens ! Dress them ! Folk so cultivated should have invented first of all a pair of trousers." The picture of the Good Lord is still more severely criticised. He says : " What a contrast between God and Satan ! ' ' Taine continues :
"Milton's Jehovah is a grave king who maintains a suitable state, something like Charles I.
"Goethe's God, half abstraction, half legend, source of calm oracles, a vision just beheld after a pyramid of ecstatic strophes, greatly excels this Miltonic God, a business man, a schoolmaster, a man for show! I honor him too much in giving him these titles. He deserves a worse name.
"He also talks like a drill-sergeant. 'Vanguard to right and left the front unfold.' He makes quips as clumsy as those of Har- rison, the former butcher turned ofScer. What a heaven ! It is enough to disgust one with Paradise ; one would rather enter Charles the First's troop of lackeys, or Cromwell's Ironsides. We
352 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
have orders of the day, a hierarchy, exact submission, extra duties, disputes, regulated ceremonials, prostrations, etiquette, furbished arms, arsenals, depots of chariots and ammunition."
How different is the abode of Satan. Taine says:
"The finest thing in connexion with this Paradise is Hell. "Dante's hell is but a hall of tortures, whose cells, one below another, descend to the deepest wells."
Milton's hell is the asylum of independence ; it may be dreary but it is the home of liberty that scorns abject servility. Alilton describes the place as follows:
" 'Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,' Said then the last Archangel, 'this the seat That we must change for heaven? this mournful gloom For that celestial light? Be it so, since he, Who now is Sovran, can dispose and bid What shall be right : farthest from him is best, Whom reason has equal'd, force hath made supreme Above his equals. Farewell, happy fields. Where joy for ever dwells ! Hail, horrors . hail. Infernal world ! and thou, profoundest hell Receive thy new possessor ; one who brings A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be ; all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater ? Here at least We shall be free ; the Almighty hath not built Here for his envy ; will not drive us hence : Here we may reign secv.re ; and in my choice To reign is worth ambition, though in hell : Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.'"
It has been frecjuently remarked that Ivlilton's Satan
THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 353
is the hero of Paradise Lost., and, indeed, he appears as the most sympathetic figure in the greatest religions epic of English literature. His pride is not without self- respect which we cannot help admiring ; Satan exclaims :
" Is there no place Left for repentance, none for pardon left? None left but by submission : and That word disdain forbids me. ..."
And how noble appears Milton's Satan! Milton per- sonifies in Satan the spirit of the English Revolution ; Milton's Satan represents the honor and independence of the nation asserted in the face of an incapable govern- ment. Satan's appearance shows strength and dignity :
" He above the rest In shape and gesture proudly eminent Stood like a tower."
And his character is distinguished by love of liberty. Taine describes him as follows :
"The ridiculous Devil of the Middle Ages, a horned enchanter, a dirty jester, a petty and mischievous ape, band-leader to a rabble of old women, has become a giant and a hero.
"Though feebler in force, he remains superior in nobility, since he prefers suffering independence to happy servility, and wel- comes his defeat and his torments as a glory, a liberty, and a joy."
The Devil naturally acquires noble features which make him less diabolical and more divine in the measure that the God-conception of an age becomes the embodi- ment of the conservatism of the ruling classes. When the name and idea of God are misapplied to represent stagnation, Satan might change places with God. A new sect of Devil-worshippers who aspire for advancement
354
THE HISTO-RY OF THE DEVIL.
and progress in the name of Satan nii^jlit have arisen had not Protestantism, decried centuries ago as the work of the Devil, gained so much influence that in time it be- came itself a great conservative power in the world ; and that its noble aspirations were first attributed to the in- fluence of the Devil is only preserved in verse and fable.
The Natural State of Man.
The Holy Ghost Illumines the Heart.
Tlie Dez'il /;/ the Iltt/imu Heart.
The common people in Protestant countries knew nothing of the mighty hero of Paradise Lost; they knew Satan only through the New Testament, and, being little affected by the progress of the natural sciences, took him as seriously as did the earl}^ Christians and the Domini- cans of the Inquisition. But there is this difference ; the spirit of the Reformation rested upon them with both its
THK AGK OK THE REFORMATION.
355
moral earnestness and its subjectivism. The middle classes as a rule did not fall a prey to the aberrations of former times ; they practised no exorcisms and showed no inclination to prosecute, but confined their endeavors to the salvation of their own souls
The classical productions of the literature of this type are Pilffrim^s Progress and The Heart of Man., both
The Holy Ghost in Possession.
The Passion of Christ in the Heart
highly interesting from a pS3^chological standpoint, for both, exhibit the subjective methods of introspection in a high degree, and will, as instances of a naive but extra- ordinary self-observation and analysis, retain a lasting value.
While the author of Pilgrim^ s Progress., his name and the vicissitudes of his life, are well known, The Hear I
356
THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
of Man appeared anonymously, first in French and then in German. The French original seems to be lost and with it the date of its first appearance. The first German translation was published in Wiirzburg, in the year 1732, under the title Geistlicher Sittcnspiegel. It was reprinted once more in 1815 under the more appropriate title Das Herz des Menschen^ exhibiting a series of illustrations
The Holy Trinity Resides in the Heart.
New Temptations.
which represent the human heart as the battlefield of the powers of good and evil.
The first picture shows the human heart in its nat- ural perversity, but the sinner repents in the second pic- ture, and the Holy Ghost takes possession of his soul, in the third picture. The fourth picture shows us a con- templation of the sufferings of the Saviour and tlie Holy
THE AGE OF THE KI'KOKMATION.
357
Trinity resides in the sonl as is illustrated in the fifth picture. But worldly temptations and ])rosecutions, re]D- resented the former by a man M'ith a goblet and the latter by another man with a dagger, prevail upon the heart and shake its good resolutions, which is seen in the sixth picture ; until at last, in the seventh picture, Satan with seven other spirits more wicked than himself re-enters,
Satan's Return with Seven Other The Impious Man is Doomed when He Spirits More Wicked than Himself. Dies.
and the last state of that man is worse than the iirst. The practical application of this analysis of the human heart is given in two illustrations picturing the death of the pions and impious man. The former, w-hose heart is depicted in the ninth picture, is portrayed in the tenth picture, as being called by the Saviour to enjoy the eter-
358
THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
nal bliss of Heaven ; while the eighth picture exhibits the doom of the latter who is lost forever in Hell.
The interesting feature of these illustrations consists in the method of showing the elements of man's soul, his passions and aspirations as foreign powers which enter, pass out, and re-enter. The heart itself appears as an empty blank and its character is established by the tend-
A Heart Fortified in Christ.
The Pious Man is Saved at Death.
encies which dwell in it. The psychology which lies at the bottom of the author's belief, is not clearly pro- nounced ; it ma3^ be either the Brahmanical theory of the self, as a being in itself, or the Buddhist doctrine of the illusoriness of the self, but it appears that the self, as represented in the head above the heart, is a mere reflex of the process that takes place within the human soul,
THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 359
and should therefore be regarded merely as the principle of unity, the moral worth of which depends upon the na- ture of its elements. The author of these drawings has in his naive analysis of the human heart, approached a scientific conception of the soul more closely than pre- sumably he was aware of himself.
A Revival of Witch Prosecution.
At the time of the Reformation witch prosecution ceased for a while. It made room for another mania not less ugly and condemnable. Its place was filled by her- esy persecution. Not only did Roman Catholic govern- ments worry their Protestant subjects almost to death by confiscating their property, chasing them with hounds to mass, exiling entire districts, and ignominiously execut- ing their leaders ; but Protestants in their turn, too, re- garded it as their religious duty to do the same to all dis- senters. Luther himself, be it said to his everlasting honor, did not persecute ; and so long as he lived he suc- ceeded in preventing among his followers all persecu- tions. Calvin, however, ordered Servetus to be burned alive, because his belief in the trinity differed from his own; and King Henry VIII. of England resolutely sup- pressed with a high hand all opposition to the religious views he happened to hold at the time ; nor did he shrink from shedding blood, although we must grant that he exercised much judgment by confining his persecution to a comparatively few powerful opponents.
While the fear of witchcraft was thus set aside for a time, the dangerous belief in the power of Satan contin- ued and lay hidden like burning coals under ashes. The
360 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
religioiis superstitions remained practicalh' the same, and it is natural that the epidemic reappeared, although in a less virulent form. Even Protestant countries (North Germany, Sweden, England, Scotland, and the English colonies in North America) were visited by this spiritual plague, and a number of lay judges appeared who showed the same zeal as the Dominican inquisitors in Catholic countries.
With the waning of the zeal for burning witches the defenders of witchcraft grew rather more numerous than before. Among them are Dr. "Thomas Erastus of Heidel- berg,* and Jean Bodin, a Frenchman. t The Suffragan Bishop Peter BinsfeldJ and Justice Nicolaus Remigius § defended in voluminous books with new arguments the policy of the Witch-Haniiner ^ and King James I. of Eng- land wrote a demonologj^l filled with all the superstition of the Middle Ages ; Martin Delrio,Ti a Jesuit, deems a revision of the laelief in Avitchcraft in order, but co:nes to the conclusion that the evil exists and that there is no remedy save the use of relics, holy water, exorcisms, the holy sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church.
The National Museum of Germanic Antiquities at Nuremberg possesses a large poster which contains an account of three women who were burned as witches at Dernburg in the year 1555. Although they were not
* De Lamiis ft stri^ibtis, 1577.
\Dc Magorum dcemonomania sen deleslatido lamiarmn et Afagortim cum Satana commcrcio, 1579.
\Tractatus lie confessionibus malcficorum ct sagarum, 15S9.
%i)cEmu>iolalria, which appeared in Latin and in German See Soldan, p. 351.
\Demonologie, 1597. See also the advice to suppress witchcraft, given to his son in the second bool« of his Basilicon Dor on, 1599.
*\Disquisitiones magiccE, 1599.
THK AGE OF THE REFORMATION.
361
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362 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
burned on the same day, the illustration represents them as standing on the fagots together and the statement is made that in one instance, when the fire was lit, Satan appeared and visibly carried away his paramour through the air.
The tragedy of Dernburg is one case only among many. Mayor Pheringer, of Nordlingen, swore to exter- minate the whole brood of sorcerers, and Judge Benedict Carpzov, Jr. (1595-1666) , of Leipsic, following in the footsteps of his father, condemned more than a hundred persons to die at the stake for witchcraft.
Sensible Prelates.
The Protestants of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were on the average perhaps more serious in their religious beliefs than the Roman Catholics of the same period, and thus it happened that some French prelates of the Roman Church, being more worldly wise and more deeply imbued with the advancing spirit of the age than many bigoted Protestants, displayed infinitely more common sense than their brethren of the Reformed Churches.
This became particularly patent in the famous case of Martha Brossier, a French peasant girl, who, in 1588, claimed to be possessed of a devil. The excitement was great, and the pulpits resounded with alarming denuncia- tions apt to renew all the terrors of former witch prosecu- tions. But Bishop Miron of Angers, and Cardinal De Gondi, Archbishop of Paris, retained their tranquillity, and had the case investigated not only according to a truly rational method, but even in a spirit of humor.
THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 363
When the never-failing tests with exorcisms through sa- cred books and holy water were administered, Bishop Miron so arranged matters that the possessed girl was in- duced to draw wrong conclusions, and lo! simple spring- water and the reading of a line from Virgil regularly brought on epileptic fits, while neither the old reliable exorcisms nor the holy water produced any effect when the girl did not apprehend the sacred texts.
Believers in Satanic possession were not satisfied with Bishop Miron's experiments, for they regarded them as a proof of the cunning of the Devil who thus slyly de- ceived his enemies. The case was brought before the Archbishop De Gondi, but he, too, proved sceptical and declared after some judicious experiments that the de- meanor of the possessed girl was a mixed result of insan- ity and simulation.
Urban G randier.
In spite of the sound judgment shown by these and other prelates, the prosecutions of witches continued. In the case of Urban Grandier, a priest, who was accused by the Ursuline nuns at Loudun in Western France of hav- ing exercised Satanic powers upon their minds, the Arch- bishops of Bordeaux recognised the malicious hostility and hysterical bitterness with which the nuns bore wit- ness against their preacher. Grandier was not innocent in other respects, but there were many priests Avhose morals were no better. Considering the innumerable con- tradictions in the statements of his enemies, the Arch- bishop dismissed the case and he was honorably rein- stalled in his position. But that was not the end of it.
364
THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
. (b:)
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Fac-similk of the Contract Which Urban Grandier Is Reported to Have
Made with the Devil, and Which Was Produced and
Accepted as Evidence in Court.
THE AGE OE THE REEORMATION. 365
It happened that M. de Laubordeuiont, a cousin of the prioress, while attending to some business of the French Government in Loudun, heard of the story and gave a highlj'-colored report to Cardinal Richelieu, at whose in- stance the investigation was renewed. In the second trial Grandier had no chance ; for Laubordemont was appointed judge. He accepted the most ridiculous evidence. The devils who spoke out of the mouths of the obsessed nuns were called upon as witnesses, and two documents were produced which purported to be the original pact of Gran- dier with Satan. One of them is signed by Grandier, the other bears the signature of six devils, the authenticity of which is vouched for by Baalbarith, the Secretary of his Satanic Majesty. The script is in mirror writing. Four expert Doctors of the Sorbonne, although they never doubted either the documents or the reality of the devils of the obsessed nuns, saw fit to caution the judges not to admit the testimony of Satan, because the slan- derer and liar could not be a trustworthy witness. But the exorcising fathers, all of whom were Carmelite monks, laid down the principle that a properly exorcised devil cannot help confessing the truth. Grandier was cruelly tortured and executed on August IS ; but Peter Lactantius, the chief exorcist whom the dying Grandier had challenged to appear before the tribunal of God, died a raving maniac exactly one month after the death of his victim, on September 18.
A Protestant Witch-Execution.
Much has been said and written about the cruelty of the Roman Catholic methods of witch-prosecution, but
366 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
the Protestants were not a whit better, except perhaps that they added to the proceedings a good deal more of pious cant and accompanied executions with a religious unction which made their conduct the more detestable. As a typical case we quote an abbreviated report of the execution of three witches, Susanna, Use, and their mother Catharine, which took place at Arendsee, 1687, August 5 : *
"The case was submitted for another revision, during which time six clergymen attended daily upon the three prisoners and ex- horted them to pray and sing and repent. Then they were cited before the court one after the other and the clergymen stood be- hind them. The president of the court asked them once more, first Susanna, whether she had received an incubus; (answer: Yes!) Secondly Use, whether her mother had given her an incubus ; (answer : Yes !) and thirdly Catharine, whether she had given an incubus to Use; (answer: Yes !) Thereupon the Notary, Mr. Anton Werneccius, read the judgment, and the executioner went to the court and asked for mercy in case he should not succeed at once in decapitating Susanna and Use. The question was asked whether there was any additional grievance. Then the rod was broken, table and chairs of the court upset, and the procession moved out to the Koppenberg, the place of execution.
"Part of the guards opened the way. Each one of the three witches was accompanied on either side by a clergyman and led with a rope by a hangman. At the same time six armed citizens surrounded her. Another part of the guard closed the procession.
"On the way prayers alternated with exhortations and singing of hymns.
"Before the Seehausen gate a circle was made and Susanna was led round until the public had finished singing the hymn 'God our father, dwell with us.'
* See Horst, Zauberbibliolhck, 2, pp. 411-413, quoted from Keichardt, Vol. I., pp. 100-126.
THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 367
"When her head was taken off, the people sang, 'To thee we pray, O Holy Ghost.'*
"Next came Use who was killed in the same way, accompa- nied by the singing of the same hymns.
"While the singing continued Catharine was placed upon the fagots and her neck fastened with an iron chain, which was drawn so tight that her face swelled and became suffused with a brown color. The fagots were lit and all present, clergy, school-children, and spectators sang until her body was consumed in the lire."
Witch- Prosecution in America.
Not less terrible fruit than in Europe did the belief in witchcraft bear on the free soil of Protestant America. Death-sentences for witchcraft occurred several times after the foundation of the New England colonies ; bitt the last and most terrible outbreak took place in Salem, Massachusetts, as recorded in Upham's History of Salem Witchcraft 1 and in Drake's Witchcraft Delusion in New England. Under the baneful influence of the religious teachings of Increase Mather and his son. Cotton Mather, t two Boston clergymen, the Rev. Samuel Par- ris, minister of the Church in Salem, began to have a case of witchcraft investigated, which, as says President Andrew Dickson White, J "would have been the richest
•Especially the latter song, Nuti bitlen luir den Heilgen Geist, was believed to afford protection against witchcraft. When a pious superintendent in the Univer- sity of Giessen was once surrounded by students dressed as devils he chanted in his anxiety this hymn in the hope of driving away thereby his tormentors.
•j- Compare Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World; being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches, lately Ex\e\cnted in h'eiu England (first London edition, 1693).
X See his ' ' New Chapters in the Warfare of Science, " Pofular Science Montltly, May, 1889, p. II. Compare also Konig, Ausgcburten des A/enschenicahns, pp. 488-494.
368 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
of farces had they not led to events so tragical." The possessed behaved like maniacs in court and charged a poor old Indian woman with having bewitched them. Her husband, an ignorant fool, was induced to testify against her. This easy success emboldened the believers in witchcraft, among whom the Putnam family played a prominent part. They began to prosecute some of the foremost people of New England ; several men and women were executed, many fled for their lives, and a reign of terror ensued. Any person once suspected and accused was doomed. As an instance we quote the case of Mr. Burroughs, a clergyman, who on account of petty parish quarrels with the Putnam family had been dis- missed from the ministry. President White sa3's:
" Mr. Burroughs had led a blameless life, the only thing ever charged against him by the Putnams being that he insisted strenu- ously that his wife should not go about the parish talking of her own family matters. He was charged with afflicting the children, convicted, and executed. At the last moment he repeated the Lord's Prayer solemnly and fully, which it was supposed no sorcerer could do, and this, together with his straightforward Christian utter- ances at the execution, shook the faith of manj' in the reality of diabolical possession."
President White continues :
"Ere long it was known that one of the girls had acknowl- edged that she had belied some persons who had been executed, and especially Mr. Burroughs, and that she had begged forgive- ness ; but this for a time availed nothing. Persons who would not confess "were tied up and put to a sort of torture which was effec- tive in securing new revelations.
" In the case of Giles Cory the horrors of the persecution cul- minated. Seeing that his doom was certain, and wishing to pre-
THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION. 369
serve his family from attainder and their property from confisca- tion, he refused to plead. He was therefore pressed to death, and, when in his last agonies his tongue was pressed out of his mouth, the sheriff with his walking-stick thrust it back again."
Increase and Cotton Mather were the last defenders of diabolical possession and witchcraft on American soil ; the latter saw in his later years a new era dawning upon his country. Vigorously and successfully censured by Robert Calef, a courageous Boston merchant, he be- moaned the decay of the religious spirit among the grow- ing generation, and even to his d3ang hour regarded the' mere unbelief in witchcraft as an attack upon the glory of the Lord.
The present generation may well smile at his mis- taken religious notions ; but granting him that the old conception of God as a miracle-worker and an individual ego-being after the fashion of pagan personifications be right, his idea of the importance of a belief in witchcraft is logically correct. If witchcraft is impossible, then there can be no wizard-god who changes sticks into ser- pents, who stops the sun in his course, reverses the shadow of the dial, is jealous of other gods and of the familiar spirits of witches. The abandonment of the be- lief in witchcraft tacitly implied the abandonment of a belief in God as a miracle-worker, and prepared the way for a nobler religious faith which surrendered the idea of seeking God in the suppositious possibility of breaking the laws of nature, and finally found him in the cosmic order itself, i. e., in the unity, the harmony, the right- ness of those eternal factors of existence which are the conditions of reason, of truth, and of justice.
THE ABOLITION OF WITCH-PROSECUTION.
Moll tor and Erasmus.
THE horrors of Devil worship, of the Inquisition, and of witch-prosecution were the natural consequences of a misconception of the nature of evil. They were the visitations that necessarily followed in the footsteps of a most abandoned ignorance. They oppressed mankind like a dreadful nightmare, like ghastly hallucinations of a feverish brain, and the disease passed away slowly, very slowly, only when the light of science, which is the divine revelation that is taking place now, gradually- be- gan to dispel the gloomy shadows of the night and re- vealed the superstitious character of the belief that Jiad \ begotten the crimes of the dark ages.
The first protests against witch-prosecution were raised at the time when the two inquisitors Sprenger and Institutoris, fortified with the unequivocal authority of his Holiness the Pope, carried on their criminal profes- sion in the boldest wa}'. The outrages of the Inquisition were pointed out in a pamphlet entitled Dialogiis de la- miis et pythoiiihus niitlioibiis^ written in 1489 b^- Dr. Ulricli Molitoris, an attorney of Constance. Two other
THE ABOLITION OK WITCH-PROSECUTION.
371
prominent men of the juridical profession, Alciatus and Ponzinibius, expressed themselves in the same spirit; they declared bodily excursions of witches and similar things to be pure imagination. But their arguments
Apparitions of the Cross. From Griinbeck's Eitie tieia'e auszlcg-ung der seltsamen luunderzaichcn (1507)
were of no avail, for Bartholomaeus de Spina, the master of the holy palace, declared that jurists could not under- stand the case of witchcraft.
372 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
The time was not yet ripe ; the people still clung to the belief in visions and miracles, dreams, apparitions and sorcery. Most insane productions (such as, e. g., Griinbeck's New Interpretation of Strang^e Miracles^ which appeared in the year 1507) attracted the attention of the world and passed for divine revelations. The more uncanny they were, the higher was the credit they re- ceived.*
There is a remarkable instance on record that the hangman of Vienna refused to perform his office on Oct. 21, 1498. The execution had to be delayed until another hangman could be procured. f Another case is mentioned by Soldan.J Katharine Hensel of Feckelberg was sen- tenced to die in June, 1576, but when at the place of exe- cution she pleaded her innocence, the hangman refused to execute her. The case was referred to the Palsgrave George John of Veldenz who after a careful examination of the trial ordered an acquittal and condemned the town- ship Feckelberg to bear the costs. §
The famous Erasmus of Rotterdam published a let- ter in the year 1500 in which he spoke of devil-contracts as an invention made b\' the witch-prosecutors ; but his satire had no effect ; for, in the meantime, fagots were constantly burning all over Europe.
* Crosses were seen everywhere ; in the dress of the people and in the sky ; also crowns of thorns, nails, scourges, etc., which caused the Bishop of Liege to order special fasts and call the emperor's attention to the dangers that threatened the world.
fSchlager, Wiener Skizzeii aiis dem Miltclalicr, XL, n. F., p 35; mentioned by Koskoff, II., p. 294; Konig and others.
\ Ucxenfroccsse, p. 255.
§ Quoted in Neue Zusiilzc of the Germ.in translation of Weier's De ^rcesligiis dcemonum
THE ABOLITION OF WITCH-PROSECUTION. 373
Weier^ Meyfart^ and Loos.
The first successful attempt — successful only tempo- rarily and in a limited degree — of stopping witch -prose- cution came from a Protestant physician, Johannes Weier (Latin "Wierus" or " Piscinarius") • He was born in Grave, 1515, had studied medicine in Paris, and travelled in Africa, where, as he tells us, he had had a good oppor- tunity of studying sorcery. Then he went to Crete, and on his return was elected body-physician to Duke Wil- liam of Cleves. His work of six books, De prcsstigiis Dcpmonnm el incantationibus ac Vctteficiis, appeared in 1563. He still believes in the Devil and in magic, but he rejects the possibility of witchcraft and compacts with the Devil. He boldly accuses monks and clergymen of being, under the pretext of serving religion, most zealous servants of Beelzebub. William, Duke of Cleves, Frede- ric, Count of Palatine, and the Count of Niurwenar fol- lowed Weier' s advice and suppressed all witch -prosecu- tion.
Twenty years after Weier another heroic man, a Protestant, named Meyfart, rector of the Latin school of Coburg, raised his voice of warning. His booklet was a sermon of "Admonitions to the powerful princes and the conscientious preachers," by which words he meant the Dominican fathers who were the official witch-prosecu- tors. He reminded them of the day of judgment, when they would be held to account for every torture and tear of their victims.
Weier and Meyfart made a deep impression. But a
374 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
reaction followed. How little, after all, Weier succeeded in conquering tlie belief in witchcraft, which he had tem- porarily shaken, can be learned from the fact that in the Protestant Electorate of Saxony a criminal ordinance was issued in the year 1572, which threatened all people mak- ing a compact with the Devil ' ' to be brought from life to death on the fagot."
Cornelius Loos, a canonicus and professor at the University of Treves and a devout Catholic Christian, was unfortunate enough to be more clear-headed than his bishop, Peter Binsfeld. Recognising the baseness of judges in the cases of witchcraft, he wrote a book De vera et falsa magia. The book was never published ; it was stopped in the press and its author sent to prison. In 1593 Loos was forced to recant on his knees before the assembled dignitaries of the Church. He died in 1595 of the plague, which probably saved him from an execu- tion at the stake. Loos's manuscript was supposed to be lost but was recently discovered by Prof. George Lincoln Burr of Cornell University.'''
Three Noble Jesuits.
Adam Tannerf (1572-1632) and Paul Laymann (1575-1635) , two Jesuits of South Germany, strongly advised the judges to be very careful in lawsuits against witches. When death overtook Tanner on a journey, in a little place called Unken, the parishioners refused to grant him a Christian burial, because a "hairy little
*See The New York E^icning Post, November 13, 1886. f Sometimes spelled "Thanner." See Konig, ib., II., p. 572, and Roskoff, II., p. 308,
THK ABOLITION OK WTrCU-PROSECUTION. 375
imp" on a glass plate was found among his things. It was an insect prepared for the microscope.* The curate of Unken, however, succeeded in convincing his congre- gation of the harmless nature of the '*imp," and they at last consented to the interment in their cemetery.
Most touching is the narrative of another Jesuit, a noble-minded man, who takes a prominent place among the strugglers against the dreary superstition of burning witches. This man is Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld (1591-1635), a poet and the author of a collection of songs called Trutznachtigall (spite-nightingale) , whose warnings remained unheeded, " as a voice crying in the wilderness." His Caiitio crtjuinalis (published anony- mouslyt in 1631) was an appeal, much needed at the time, to the German authorities anent their legal proceedings against witches.
Spee was engaged in Franconia as pastor, and had prepared for their death at the stake not fewer than two hundred persons accused of witchcraft. Scarcely thirty years of age, he was asked one day by Philip of Schoen- born. Bishop of Wiirzburg, why his hair had turned gray. " Through grief," he said. " Of the many witches whom I have prepared for death, not one was guilty." The reply must have burnt into the soul of the ques- tioner, for ever after Philip of Schoenborn remained un- der its influence. Spee confessed to the Bishop that he was the author of the Caiitio crhin'iialis, and the Bishop did not betray the confidence of the young Jesuit.
* Konig says it was a mosquito, and Roskoff a flea.
f That Spee von Langenfeld was the author of the Caiitio criminalis was dis- covered by Leibnitz.
376
THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
Says Spec in his Cautio criiuinalis:
"In these proceedings no one is allowed to have legal assist- ance or defence, however honestly it may be conducted. For it is claimed that the crime is a crimen exceptum, one not subject to the rules of ordinary legal proceedings. And even if an attorney were
Fkieukich von Sfkk. After a photograph of the oil picture in the Marzellen-Gymnasium at Cologne.
allowed to the prisoner, the former would from the outset be sus- pected himself, as a patron and protector of witches, so that all mouths are shut and all pens are blunted, and one can neither speak nor write. ... I swear solemnly that of the many persons whom I accompanied to the stake, there was not one who could be
THE ABOLITION OF WITCH-PROSECUTION. 377
said to have been duly convicted ; and two other pastors made me the same confession from their experience. Treat the heads of the Church, the judges, myself, in the same way as those unfortunate ones, make us undergo the same tortures, and you will convict us all as wizards."
Spee did not deny the possibility of witchcraft ; he was a faithful believer in the dogmas held by the Church of his age. He merely objected to the abuses of witch- craft and recommended clemency.
Philip of Schoenborn became Archbishop of Mayence and to his honor be it said that under his government no fagots were lit.
Abatement of J J^itch- Prosecution.
Horst (in his Zauberbib/iot/iek., Vi., 310) publishes a strange instance of the fanaticism of the seventeenth century which appeared anonymously under the title Dniten-Zeitnng^ in 1627, praising in poor verses the great deeds of the Inquisition. According to Horst's au- thority, they are written by a Protestant who expresses his joy and gratitude to God that in the adjoining Cath- olic countries the extirpation of witchcraft was carried on with unabating vigor. Thus it is apparent that in spite of Weier and Spee the idea of witchcraft and of the necessity of witch-prosecution was still deeply rooted in the minds of many people. Still, the authorities began to lose faith in the necessity of witch-prosecution, and the champions of the lost cause d«em it wiser to seek the shelter of anonymous publication.
In Holland witch-prosecution was abolished in 1610 ; in Geneva, Switzerland, it ceased in 1632.
THE ABOLITION OK WITCn-PROSECUTIOJST. J/:^
Christina, Queen of Sweden, as the first act after her accession to the throne, issued a proclamation on February 16, 1649, which applied also to all the Swedish possessions on German soil, to stop all proceedings of witch-prosecution. Gabriel Naude, a Frenchman (he died 16S0) wrote against witch-prosecution, and, although the Parliament of France which convened at Rouen insisted on the existence of witchcraft and on the necessity of the capital punishment of witches, Louis XIV. decreed in 1672 that all cases of witchcraft be dismissed. He was obliged to re -introduce the law of capital punishment of witches in 1683, but did not fail to limit the power of the judges.
Matthias Hopkins, commonly called " witchfinder general," took advantage of the disorders of the English civil wars of the seventeenth century and made a special business of the discovery of witches. He was quite suc- cessful, until his own methods were tried on his own per- son, and as he did not sink in the water ordeal, the peo- ple declared him to be a wizard and slew him (1647) ."* Butler describes Hopkins's career in Hudibras as fol- lows :
" Hath not this present Parliament A lieger to the devil sent, Fully empower'd to treat about Finding revolted witches out? And has he not within a year Hang'd threescore of them in one shire? Some only for not being drown'd, And some for sitting above ground Whole days and nights upon their breeches,
•For details see /.ctters on Demonology and Witchcraft, by Walter Scott.
380
THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
And feeling pain, were hang'd for witches. And some for putting knavish tricks Upon green geese or turkey chicks ; Or pigs that suddenly deceased Of griefs unnatural, as he guess'd, Who proved himself at length a witch And made a rod for his own breech."
Witch-prosecution was finally abolished in England in the year 1682. Glanville, a fanatic Englishman of Somerset, felt himself called upon to refute the writings
of Gabriel Naude and found many followers, but Dr. Webster , a physician , stood up against Glanville 's superstitious propositions. Glanville thereupon pro- ceeded to hunt witches, but the English government ordered Mr. Hunt, a justice of the peace of Somerset, to stop him.
At the end of the seven- teenth century the polemics against the belief in the Devil began to grow bolder and ever bolder. A Dutch physician, Anton van Dale, no longer attributes the pagan oracles to the influence of the Devil, but to priestly fraud {^Dc oraciilis Ethnicorinn^ Amsterdam, 1685) , and set the people to thinking on witch-prosecution (see his work Disserlationrs de origine ac proeressti Idolalricc^ etc., 1696). He thus prepared
* Reproduced from the portrait on tlie title page of Die In-nutbi-rtf Wt-lt (the first German translation of De belm'erile W'eereld).
Balthasar Bekker.*
THE ABOLITION OF WITCH-PROSECUTIOX.
381
the way for tlie two j^reat reformers Bekker and Tlioma- sius, who openly and squarely denounced witchcraft as a superstition and at last succeeded in abolishing the official prosecutions of witches by the authorities of State and Church.
Balthasar Bekker, a Dutch clergyman of German
B E R r G H T.
AXfoboo? bcnectflcn tJjuftbctttoce cccflcbocltm befe^tuetft^ in8». B|i Hero Nauta tot EceUutrbcncfitactc ban p?iUilfgic (laat/ oybmnaam ban Barend Beek, 25ochbcchoprc in Den J^atjc / cnDc Daac fn gc? meIi>tDO?0/ dat hy bciigwasmetdatBffey(^tedrukken: fo bCCftlaact bcn '3fll»
teut I Ijffcmct fijne tigcneljanb / bat bp Barend Beck niet en ftcnt / cnbe fjcmbiccctelift noci) inbircctclih nooit iet|^ te b?uhhcn gegcbrnbceft,- maac Uefen b?u6 toan allc be bier bocften in 4°- aan nicmant anbec^ \ynxi aaii D A « I E L van den D a l e n toegefiaan. 3Decf)alben Sent Ijp boojtaan Been cFcniplawn \mi be (i jnc / ban bie op befc tojjfe b«n Bern fcif onbfpfcJjj^
Bekker's AuTOGKAI'H.
Reproduced from his original hand%vriting in the first Dutch edition of
De bctoverde Weereld.
descent, published in 1691-1693 a work entitled "The Enchanted World " i^De betoverde Weereld) ^ which was a thorough and careful examination of the belief in devils, witches, and the legal suits conducted against witches. Bekker is a faithful Christian who undertakes to prove that the existence of a personal Devil is a superfluous as-
382
THE HISTORY OK THE DEVIL.
sumption. His book is a formidable attack upon the In- quisition and its habits of ensnaring its innocent victims.
Christian Thomasius. Reduced from a copper engraving by M Bernigroth.
And the success of the l)()ok was as great as it was de- served. Within two months four thousand copies were
THE AUOI.TTION OV WITCII-PROSECtlTION. 383
sold. And yd did Bckker fail to convince his contem- poraries. A flood ol refutations appeared, and the synod to whom he presented his work, a Protestant bod}-, con- demned his views and discharged him from the ministry. The seeds sown by Bekker were reaped by Christian Thomasius (1656-1718) , professor at the University of Halle, who waged a relentless war against witcb-prosecu- tion. In the year 1698 a case of witchcraft was submitted to him and against the advice of one of his colleagues he condemned a poor woman to death. However, when the judgment had been executed, the arguments of his op- ponent gained on him until he became convinced of his own error; and now he deemed it his duty to devote the
Signature of Christian Thomasius.
whole influence of his authoritj^ to the abolition of witch- prosecution. He came out boldly and squarely m con- demnation of the practice and denied the bodil3^ corpo- reality of the Devil, which served him as an argument to disprove the possibility of making a compact with him. His main writings are Dissertatio de crimine viagicr and De origine ct progressu processus ■inquisitorii contra sagas. Thomasius was more successful than his predeces- sors. All official witch-prosecutions ceased, and the Devil was no longer an object of universal awe..
TJie Last Traces.
The Inquisition was still in existence during the first quarter of the nineteenth century in Spain, a country dis-
384 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
tinguished lay its ultra-Roman conception of Christian- ity. When in 1808, after the battle of Ramosiera, the French troops under General La Salle conquered Toledo, they opened the dungeons of the Inquisition. The cells were dark and unclean holes, scarcely large enough to allow a man to stand upright, and most of the prisoners that were brought up to daylight had become stiff and crippled by the maltreatment of their torturers. Unhap- pily they and their liberators, a detached troop of lancers, were cut off by a furious mob of Spaniards from the main body of the French army. General La Salle hurried to their rescue but came too late ; he found only the man- gled bodies of the slaughtered.
In a subterranean vault General La Salle found a wooden statue of the holy virgin dressed in silk, her head surrounded with a golden halo, her right hand holding the standard of the Inquisition. She was fair to look at, but her breast was covered with spiked armor ; and her arms and hands were movable by machinery concealed behind the statue. The servants of the Inquisition ex- plained to General La Salle that it was used for bringing heretics to confession. The delinquent received the sac- rament at the altar in the presence of the dimly illumined statue, and was once more requested to confess. Then two priests led him to the statue of the Madre dolorosa which miraculously seemed to welcome him by extending her arms. " She beckons you to her bosom," they said ; "in her arms the most obdurate sinner will confess," whereupon the arms closed, pressing their victim upon the spikes and knives.
Napoleon I. suppressed the Inquisition (in Spain
THE ABOLITION OF WITCH-PKOSRCUTION.
385
December 4, 180S, and in Rome one 3'car later), but it was revived by Ferdinand VII., Kinsj; of Spain, June 21, 1813. Its last victims were a Jew who was burned, and a Quaker school-master wlio was hanged in 1826.
Descriptions of He//.
The Jesuit Father, Caussin, the father confessor of King Louis XIII. writes on hell in his book. La Cour SatJitc, — a w^ork which attained considerable fame in his days, as follows :
"What is hell? A silence ; for all that which is said of hell is less than hell itself. No just man can think of it without shed- ding thousands of tears. But do you want to know what hell is? Ask Tertullian. He will tell you that hell is a deep, dark pit of stench in which all the offa! of the whole world flows to- gether. Ask Hugo of St. Victor. He will answer : ' Hell is an abyss without a bottom, which opens the gates of despair, and where all hope is abandoned.' ■It is an eternal pool of fire,' says St. John the divine (Rev. xiv. 20) ; ' its air comes from glowing coals, its light from flickering flames. The nights of hell are darkness ; the places of rest of the damned are serpents and vipers ; their hope is despair. O, eternal death ! O, life without life ! O, miser}' without end ! ' "
Justus Georg Schottel,* whilom member of the Con- sistory of Brunswick-Liineburg, and councillor to the
*This as well as the quotations following are taken from J. Scheible, Vol. I., pages 196 ft.
Schottel's Wheel of Hell.
386 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
duke, doctor of jurisprudence, and a learned man who was not without merit in German poetry and literature, took special interest in the mysteries of the infernal re- gions, and published his views in a book of 328 pages, in which he explained the tortures of the iron wheel of eternal hell torture :
"Dear reader," he says, "look at this wheel all round and read carefully what is written on it. How much time and suffer- ing, how much anxiety and torture of despair, must be gone through in hell, must be endured, borne, experienced and realised, by hun- dreds, by thousands, by hundreds of thousands, by millions of years in burning pitch, in flaming sulphur, in red hot iron, in poignant blow-pipe flames, with weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth infinite ; with hunger and thirst miraculous ; in stench and dark- ness cruelly ; before this wheel be turned around only once. But now this wheel of eternity is made of purely everlasting iron, and must turn round many hundred, yea million, and millions of mil- lions of times, and can never wax old, never perish, never be worn out, and can never stand still in all eternity. Whereas you can con- clude and find out by reflexion this all-discomforting, all-terrible, and all-cruelest infinity of hell-torture. One might grow mad and insane when considering this fiery eternity and these iron eternal years, etc., etc."
Dr. Schottel's Wheel of Life is of special interest as it reminds one of the Buddhist Wheel of Life which the Evil Spirit holds in his clutches.*
Similar ideas as to the awfulness of the sufferings in hell are offered in the sermons of Abraham a Sancta- Clara who was the most influential preacher in Vienna in the beginning of the eighteenth century.
The eighteenth century is the age of an intellectual
*Conipare the illustrations on pages 119, 121, and 123.
THE ABOLITION OF WITCH-PROSECUTION. 387
dawn, but while the rays of li.iiht betjin to spi^ead the shadows of the uight linger and their darkness seems rather more intense than before.
The Rev. Father Gilbert Baur, writes in the year 1785 as follows :
"You know what happens when meat is salted. The salt en- ters all parts, every nerve and every bone, and communicates to all parts its acrid qualities ; and yet the meat is not dissolved nor annihilated by the salt, but on the contrary preserved from decay. In the same way the hellish fire will enter into the innermost mar- row, and be distributed throughout the entrails. It will take hold of all the arteries and nerves and make the brain boil with furious pains, without causing death or annihilation."
Some theological geographers have placed hell in the sun, others in the moon, still others in the center of the earth. But the question as to which of the three opinions is right has not yet been decided.
A Slavonian folk song sings of hell as follows:*
"Look at the terrible maw ! How fiery and deep is the place of torture ! No eye can discover its bottom.
"A spark alone causes immense pain, but against the fury of this fire it is but a dewdrop.
"Reason cannot comprehend and tongue cannot utter what it may be to be in the fires of Hell.
"Devils transform themselves into dogs, into wild animals, into snakes and dragons ; they howl, and they bellow, and they bawl ; what terrors they cause !
"Every poor sinner must pay tribute here to the justice of God; and for every vicious deed he must suffer special pain."
After an enumeration of the sufferings for various sins and vices, the poem continues:
* Quoted in a German translation by Scheible. Vol I , p. 208 ff.
388
THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
THE ABOLITION OF WITCH-rROSECUTION. 389
"Can there be worse misery? Indeed, there is not; for from this place of darkness the eye of the damned will never see the face of God.
" 'Woe, woe!' thus they howl; 'Whither have we gone, we miserable creatures? Oh ! that men would believe us; they would never fall into sin. '
"'Death, where art thou? O. thunder-bolts, slay us! O, God, we want to die, for we cannot endure these pains !'
"Alas! In vain you wish for death, )'e souls lost in eternity. You are damned to live, eternally dyinf;.
"Even a toothache you could not endure forever. How much more terrible must be the fire everlasting '
"Consider then, O sinner, the misery that awaits you. Who knows whether yon may not reach your destiny to-morrow?
"To-night you go to bed in your sin, and to-morrow you may wake up burning in the fires of Hell."
These descriptious of hell are, in all their essential features, still current in "darkest Europe" and also in "darkest America." The picture of hell, here repro- duced, surpasses in drastic beauty- and grandeur of stage- effect the paintings of the famous Hell Breughel. It pos- sesses the additional interest of being still in the market, being even now advertised and sold among other reli- gious pictures.
No wonder that there are good Christians who would gladly change places with brute animals. A young Jesuit who afterwards turned Prostestant said in his memoirs that he used to env}- the watch dog in the courtyard to whom death meant annihilation without the terrors of hell.
There is a good deal of moral courage in the comfort which, as the story goes, an old infidel farmer gave to
390 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
his dying son, saying: "We do not go to church, and the parson hates us ; now, when you die you will go to hell; but don't shame our family by howling and gnash- ing of teeth. What others can stand we can stand too." Must not the Lord have been better pleased with infidel grit than with the submissiveness of the slavish believer?
Schwenter and Kircher.
The Jesuit order carries the principle of Romanism and obedience to church-authorities to extremes. It was founded for the purpose of creating and sustaining a counter- reformation to Protestantism, and to Protestants therefore it is the most objectionable Roman Catholic order. But whatever may be said against the Jesuits, their methods and narrow principles, we must acknowl- edge that some of their members have been very promi- nent and scholarly men ; and Athanasius Kircher is one of the greatest scientists they have produced. Born at Geisa, near Fulda, Germany, in 1601, he was professor of philosophy and mathematics at the University of Wiirzburg, which he left during the Thirty Years' War, for Avignon, in France. He journeyed with Cardinal Frederick of Saxony to Malta, and ended his life as pro- fessor of mathematics and Hebrew at Rome. His inves- tigations have no direct, but only an indirect, bearing on witchcraft-prosecutions. He made some curious experi- ments with hens and pigeons, which remained a problem to psychologists, and are still repeated by them to-day. He placed a hen on the floor, and made a stroke of chalk along its bill, whereupon the hen lay ciuiet as if ]iara- lyscd, remaining in lliis awkward position until she was
THE ABOLITION OK WITClI-l'ROSECUTION.
391
released by some motion of the bands of tbe experi- menter.
We ougbt to add bere tbat altbougb Kircber is gen- erally credited witb tbe invention of tbis experiment be- cause it became known mainly tbrougb bim,* Professor Preyer bas proved tbat be simply reproduced the experi- ment made by Daniel Scbwenter,t who published bis dis-
Schwenter's Hen Experiment. Reproduced by Father Athanasius Kircher.
covery ten 3'ears before tbe appearance of Kircber's Ars Magna Liicis ct Unibrcp.
Tbe attitude of the hen, which Kircber ascribes to her imagination, was later, in the eighteenth ceutur}^, called a phenomenon of magnetism or mesmerism, and in the nineteenth century, hypnotism. Whatever scientific
* See the chapter "A Marvellous Experiment with the Imagination of a Hen (Experimenliim Mirabile de Jmaifinationc Ga/liuu), in Kircher's Ars Magna Lucis et Umbric, Rome, 1646.
■f See Daniel Schwenter, Dc/ia're Physico-Maihcmah'cic, eic. Nurnberg, 1636
392
THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
value this isolated fact may possess, its discoveiy marked the beginning of a scientific treatment of psychical phe- nomena which naturall}' tended to a better comprehension of the abnormal conditions of the human mind, and thus could not but exercise a wholesome influence.
Diabolism Developing Into Pathology.
In the middle of the eighteenth centur}- Pater John Joseph Gassner, vicar of Klosterle in Chur, a Roman
Catholic clergyman, acted
on the theory that the ma- jority of diseases arose from demoniacal possession and he cured himself and his parishioners by exorcism. The success of his cures made a great stir in the world aud threatened a dangerous reaction. Some declared he was a charla- tan, while others believed in him.
Mesmer, at the request of the Elector of Bavaria, made investigations and said that he explained his miracles as spiritualistic magnetic influences, while
Etching by Daniel Chodowieclii.
Lavater maintained that the curative element consisted solely in the glorious name of Jesus. Gassner lived some tiuie in Constance, afterwards in Ratisbon, partly pro-
THE ABOLITION OF WITCH-PROSECUTION. 393
tected, partly distrusted by his ecclesiastical superiors. In 1775 He went to Amberg, then to Sulzbach, where the halo of his miraculous cures waned. The Prince-Bishop of Ratisbon declared in his favor, but Emperor Joseph II. forbade his exorcisms in the whole Roman empire. The Archbishops of Prague and Salzburg rejected him, and even Pope Pius VI. disappi-oved of him.
Gassner's exorcisms renewed the interest taken in the problem of the existence of the Devil. The question was discussed in several publications, among which we mention ' ' a humble petition for information to the great men who do no longer believe in a Devil," written anonymously from the orthodox standpoint by Professor Koster, of Giessen, editor of a religious periodical. It was answered in another pamphlet : ' ' Humble reply of a country-clergyman," whose author claims that the bib- lical Satan is an allegory, idols are called " nothings " in Hebrew, and the Devil is one of these nothings. He offers rationalistic explanations of the Bible, represent- ing, for instance, the tempter of Christ as "a sly mes- senger and spy of the synagogue," and declaring the theory of a Devil to be idolatry disguised in orthodoxy, and a sublimated Manicheeism. The author concludes: "I had rather that the people fear God than the Devil. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, but the fear of the Devil, whatever be its results, is no Christian adornment."
The number of anti-diabolists increased rapidly, even among the clergy ; yet the belief in a personal Devil re- mained the orthodox view, and if we are not mistaken it is still regarded as an essential dogma of the Christian
394 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
faith by many theologians, especially among those who display a contempt for worldly culture and secular science.
The worst superstitions had grown harmless, but the hankering after miracles had not yet ceased. Diabolism had lost its hold on mankind, but mysticism reappeared in new forms ; and the contrasts that prevailed in the eighteenth century cannot be better characterised than by the visions of Swedenborg as against the refutation of the dreams of visionaries by Kant.
The belief in mysticism begets frauds ; and the bold- est, wiliest, and most successful imposter of the eigh- teenth century was Giuseppe Balsamo of Sicily, who travelled under the assumed name of Count Cagliostro, finding easy victims among the credulous of all descrip- tions, especially the Free Masons. His tricks, however, were exposed by Countess Elizabeth von der Recke, and being thereafter exiled from every country which he en- tered, he fell at last into the hands of the Inquisition, as whose prisoner he died in the year 1795.
Dcnionology of the Nineteenth Century.
The free-thought movement of the eighteenth cen- tury and a better scientific conception of nature relieved mankind of the unnecessary fear of the Devil, and the nineteenth century could begin to study the question im- partially in its historical and philosophical foundations.
Kant found the principle of evil in the reversal of the moral world-order. "The Scriptures lay down," he says, "man's moral relation in the form of a history, representing the opposite principles in man as eternal facts, as heaven and hell. The significance of this ])opu-
THE ABOLITION OK WITCH-PROSKCUTION. 395
lar conception, dropping all mysticism, is that there is bnt one salvation for man, which lies in his embracing in his heart the moral maxims."
Following the example of Kant, theologians began to give a rational explanation of the Devil. Daub, a dis- ciple of Schelling, attempted to construct a philosophical devil, in his book Judas Iscariot., or Evil in its Relation to Goodness^ defining Satan, the Antichrist and enemy of God, as the hatred of all that is good.
Schenkel regards the Evil One as a manifestation that appears in the totality of things, and characterises him as that which is collectively bad. "Satan, accord- ingly, is a 'juridical person,' " and this explains his ex- traordinary and superindividual power; but he has not as yet succeeded in becoming a single, concrete personal- ity, and let us hope that he probably never will. Hase does not deny the possibility of an influence of spiritual powers, good as well as evil, upon man, "but," says he, "the Devil appears only when he is believed to exist; and the effects of his influence being explicable only in the light of man's nature, the reality of such beings re- mains problematic . ' '
Reinhard, although inclined to supernaturalism, doubts whether the Scriptural Devil is to be taken seri- ously ; and De Wette speaks of the Devil as a popular conception {]^olksvorstelliing) . Schleiermacher in his fa- mous work The Christian Faith According to the Doc- trines of the Evangelical Church (1821; fourth edition, 1842) declares the idea of the Devil, as historically de- veloped, to be " untenable " and " unessential to a Chris- tian's belief in God."
396 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
Martensen believes in the Devil not as an idea, Ijut as an " historical person." He is in the beginning only the pi'inciple of temptation ; as such he is a cosniical principle. He is not yet bad, but the potentiality of bad- ness. He does not really become the Devil until man has allowed him to enter his consciousness. Man, accord- ingly, gives existence to the Devil. Liicke opposes Mar- tensen: " The Devil as a s^'mbol is absolutely bad, but as a fallen creature he cannot be absolutely bad. We have no other conception of the Devil than as the repre- sentative of sin." This is an attempt to reconcile the theological conception with the philosophy of his time.
David Friedrich Strauss did not consider it necessary to refute the doctrine of Satan's personality, which he re- garded as utterly overthrown. Modern mysticism, on the other hand, shows an inclination to emphasise the importance of the traditional Satanology.
Dogmatic theologians in the ranks of English and American Protestants endeavor to preserve the traditional views of hell and the Devil, without, however, making much practical use of these doctrines. They no longer discuss the problem at length but still uphold the belief in the personality of the Evil One. For instance. Pro- fessor Schaff scarcely enters into a detailed exposition of the subject, and Dr. William G. T. Shedd, who devotes in his great work Dogmatic Theology one or several chap- ters to every Christian dogma, omits a particular discus- sion of Satan. Passages in the chapter on hell neverthe- less prove that he believes in both a personal Satan and an eternal personal punishment on the ground of scrip- tural evidence.
THE ABOLITION OF WITCH-PROSECUTION. 397
The liberal theoloj^y of to-day urges tliat Jesus makes thirst for justice, love of God and man, the condi- tions for entering into the Kingdom of God. A belief in the Devil, it is claimed, is nowhere demanded and can, to say the least, not be regarded as essential; it is not so much Christian and Jewish, as pagan; it is a survival 'of polytheistic nature-worship and of pagan dualism, quite natural at a time when the sciences were still in their infancy, characterised by astrology and alchemy, and when the irrefragability of nature's laws was not as yet understood. The belief in a personal Devil, accordingly, and all the practices resulting therefrom, were rather due to ignorance than to religion.
There are still plenty of believers in a personal Devil among those who call themselves orthodox, but their influence has ceased to be of any consequence. Vilmar regards the belief in an individual devilish per- sonality as an indispensable qualification of a real theo- logian, saying: "In order rightly to teach and take charge of souls, one must have seen the Devil gnashing his teeth, and I mean it bodily, not figuratively; he must have felt his power over poor souls, his blasphemy, especially his sneer." Similarly, another German theo- logian, Superintendent Sanders, shows great zeal in de- fence of the Biblical Devil in his pamphlet The Doc- trine of the Scriptures Coiiceriring the Devil (1S58) , and Dr. Sartorius, following Hengstenberg's orthodoxy, sa.ys that, "he who denies Satan cannot truly confess Christ." Twesten, however, although accepting the belief in a per- sonal Devil, concedes that the necessity of his existence cannot be deduced from the contents of our religious con-
398 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
sciousness. Fr. Reiff ( in Zeitfragen dcs christlichen Volkslebensi VI., 1, 1880) declares that there is a King- dom of Evil as much as there is a Kingdom of God. The belief in a personal Prince of Darkness is the coun- terpart of a personal God. And Erhard wrote an apol- ogy of the Devil, not so much for the sake of the Devil as for the traditional idea that evil and sin are actualities.
Present Conditions.
The Roman Catholic Church of to-day still holds in theory the same views as in the IMiddle Ages ; but the secular authorities will never again allow themselves to be influenced in their legal proceedings by the opinions of inquisitors.
Gorres,''' one of the ablest and most modern defend- ers of the Roman Church, complains about " the purely medical view ' ' of historians who regard witch-prosecu- tion as a mere epidemic. He finds the ultimate cause of witchcraft and sorcery in apostacy from the Church, which had become fashionable in those days. Dr. Haas, another Roman Catholic, takes the same view in his in- quiry into witch-prosecution. t He concedes that witch- craft is a revival of pagan notions mixed with a false con- ception of Christianity (p. 68) , but he still shares with the inquisitors of yore and with Pope Innocent III. the belief in the actuality of witchcraft. Like Gorres, Haas regards "witchcraft as the product of heresy," and calls the former ' ' a cousin ' ' and ' ' a daughter ' ' of the latter. Both to him result from "unbelief, unclearness, pride,
* Die Hcxenprocesse, ein culturhistori'schcr I'ersuc/t. Tiil>ingen. 1865. f Quoted from Roskoff, p 239, from Chyistliche Mystik, III., 66.
THE ABOLITION OF WITCH-PROSECUTION. 399
eccentricity." Both are manias or illusions {JFahn- geschopfc) ; "they maltreat and are maltreated, and thus they increase until they are opposed with reason and vigor." The only trouble was that the remedy of in- quisitorial "reason and vigor" was worse than the dis- ease. Haas continues: "For the minds of many were not yet free from error (i. e., heresy), and when the house was swept and cleaned worse spirits entered, and matters were worse than ever."
The Inquisition, the natural result of a belief in the Devil, is now powerless; "still," says the Rev. G. W. Kitchin, in the Encyclopcrdia Britannica:
"Its voice is sometimes heard ; in 1856 Pius IX. issued an en- cyclical against somnambulism and clairvoyance, calling on all bishops to inquire into and suppress the scandal, and in 1865 he uttered an anathema against freemasons, the secular foes of the Inquisition."
The Rev. Mr. Kitchin sums up the present state of things as follows :
"The occupation of Rome in 1870 drove the papacy and the Inquisition into the Vatican, and there at last John Bunyan's vision seems to have found fulfilment. Yet, though powerless, the insti- tution is not hopeless; the Catholic writers on the subject, after long silence or uneasy apology, now acknowledge the facts and seek to justify them. In the early times of the 'Holy Office' its friends gave it high honor; Paramo, the inquisitor, declares that it began with Adam and Eve ere they left Paradise ; Paul IV. an- nounced that the Spanish Inquisition was founded by the inspira- tion of the Holy Spirit ; Muzarelli calls it 'an indispensable sub- stitute to the Church for the original gift of miracles exercised by the apostles.' And now again, from 1875 to this day, a crowd of defenders has risen up : Father Wieser and the Insbruck Jesuits in
400 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
their journal (1877) yearn for its re-establishment; Orti y Lara in Spain, the Benedictine Gams in Germa'ny, and C. Poullet in Bel- gium take the same tone ; it is a remarkable phenomenon, due partly to despair at the progress of society, partly to the fanaticism of the late pope, Pius IX. It is hardly credible that any one can really hope and expect to see in the future the irresponsible judg- ments of clerical intolerance again humbly carried out, even to the death, by the secular arm."
Roman Catholic authors are, as a rule, too worldly wise to precipitate or provoke a discussion of the history of either the Inquisition or the doctrine of the Devil, but whenever they cannot avoid a discussion of the subject they claim that the Inquisition was a secular institution (so Gams of Ratisbon and Bishop Hefele) , or defend the measures taken by the Inquisition. They have not as yet acquired sufficient insight, or, if they have the in- sight, they do not possess the moral courage to condemn the whole institution, and with it the policy of the Popes Innocent III., Gregory IX., Urban IV., John XXII., and others whose names are compromised in matters of witch-prosecution.
Devil-exorcism is not yet extinct in Roman Catholic countries. The exorcism performed in Germany by Father Aurelian on Michael Zilk, the son of a Catholic Father and Protestant mother, with the especial permis- sion of the Bishop Leopold von Eichstadt, is a sufficient evidence of the Egyptian darkness that still penetrates the minds of a great mass of our Christian bi'ethren, among them members of the higher clergy.*
*Dic Tciifclsaustreibiniff in lVc7-iiclii'e. Nach den Berichten des P. Aurelian fUr das VolU critisch beleuchtet von Richard Treufels. Munich, Schuh & Co. 1892. This curious treatise can no longer be obtained in the book-market.
THE ABOLITION OF WITCH-PROSECUTION. 401
Mr. E. P. Evans, who quotes the curious occur- rence,* furnishes another interesting fact. He says:
"Pope Leo XIII. is justly regarded as a man of more than ordinary intelligence and more thoroughly imbued with the modern spirit than any of his predecessors, yet he composed and issued, November ig, i8go, a formula of an 'Exorcismus i?t Satanam et An- gelas Apostatas.' His Holiness never fails to repeat this exorcism in his daily prayers, and commends it to the bishops and other clergy as a potent means of warding off the attacks of Satan and casting out devils. "
The holy coat of Treves is still exercising its power over the minds of many credulous people and works mir- acles that are seriously believed, while the dancing-pro- cession of Echternach is not only not abolished but en- couraged by the Church. Pope Leo XIII. has granted a six years' absolution to all those who take part in the performance. There are on an average about ten thou- sand persons who annually join in this stupid survival of the Middle Ages.
The personal Devil is dead in science, but he is still alive even in Protestant countries among the uneducated, and the number of those who belong to this category is legion. The Salvation Army is still in our midst sing- ing:
"Come join our army, the foe must be driven ;
To Jesus, our captain, the world shall be given.
If hell should surround us we'll press through the throng.
The Salvation Army is marching along."
The following vigorous verse reminds one of Par- seeism :
*Populay Science Afonthly, December, 1892. p. 161.
402 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
"Christian, rouse thee, war is raging, God and fiends are battle waging, Every ransomed power engaging,
Break the Tempter's spell. Dare ye still lie fondly dreaming. Wrapt in ease and worldly scheming, While the multitudes are streaming
Downwards into hell?"
A good illustration of tlieir personal attitude towards tlie Evil One appears in these lines :
" The Devil and me, we can't agree, I hate him and he hates me. He had me once, but he let me go, He wants me again, but I will not go."
The Devil of the Salvation Army proves that there is still a need of representing spiritual ideas in drastic allegories ; but though Satan is still painted in glaring colors, he has become harmless and will inaugurate no more witch-prosecutions. He is curbed and caged, so that he can do no more mischief. We smile at him as we do at a tiger behind the bars in a zoological garden.
Tlic Religious Import of Science.
The inquisitors and witch-prosecutors were by no means scoundrels pure and simple. Most assuredlj^ there were scoundrels among them ; but there is no doubt that the movement of the Inquisition and witch-prosecution took its origin from purer motives. It was to the popes and grand inquisitors and to many princes and other people who promoted the policy, a matter of conscience; they simply attended to it as a religious duty, sometimes even with a heavy heart and not without great pain.
THK ABOLITION OF WITCH-PROSECUTION. 403
Torquemada, the grand inquisitor of Spain, was in his private life one of the purest and most conscientious of men, and he was so tender-hearted that he was obliged to leave the inquisitorial tribunal and quit the room as soon as the torture of a heretic began. He would cry about the obstinacy of those who had given themselves over to Satan ; but though his heart was bleeding, he condemned thousands and thousands to the crudest tor- tures and the most dreadful death for the sake of salva- tion and the glory of God — of that monster-god in whom he believed, that abominable idol which was worse than the Moloch of ancient Phcenicia.
When complaints reached Pope Innocent III. about the cruelty of Conrad of Marburg, the first Inquisitor General of Germany, he said, " the Germans were always furious and therefore needed furious judges." Pope Leo X., referring to cases of witchcraft that happened in Brixen and Bergamo, grieves in a brief of 1521 at "the obstinacy of the culprits, who would rather die than con- fess their crimes." In the same document the Holy Fa- ther complains about the impiety of the Venetian Senate who prevented the inquisitors from performing their du- ties. And similar expressions are not infrequent in later papal bulls and briefs, all of which prove that the horrors of the Inquisition are ultimately due, not to ill will or even to the desire for power, but to error which had as- sumed the shape of a deep-seated religious conviction.
Among the Protestants, the Calvinists come nearest in zeal to the Roman Catholic inquisitors. In Geneva, Switzerland, the home of Calvin, five hundred persons were, within three months, executed for heresv and witch-
404 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
craft. The protocols of the city in the year 1545 declare that the labor of tortiire and execution exceeded the strength of the hangman ; and the complaint is made that, "whatever torture be applied, the malefactors still refuse to confess."
The facts of witch-prosecution with its kindred su- perstitions are an object lesson. How mistaken are those who believe that religion has nothing to do with ethics, and that a religious conviction exercises no influence upon a man's conduct! There are ethicists, professors of ethics, and ethical preachers, who imagine that ethics may be taught without teaching religion, and that the morality of the people can be improved without an inter- ference with their convictions as to the nature of the world and the import of life. But a wrong world-concep- tion will beget a wrong morality ; a false religion will unfailingly produce bad and injurious ethics ; and the grossest errors will, if they have their way, find expres- sion in the grossest abominations of misguided conduct. A radical cure on the other hand must go to the root of the evil. It is not sufficient to remove the symptoms of the disease, you must replace false religion by true reli- gion.
It would not do to say with our agnostic friends that religion is concerned with matters unknowable ; and that therefore we must leave it alone ! Religion is the most important problem of life, and we can ignore it as little as a reckless storage of dynamite in crowded parts of great cities. We must investigate the religious problem and replace the old errors with their dualistic supersti- tions by sound and scientifically correct views. At the
THE ABOLITION OF WITCH-PROSECUTION. 405
bottom of all tlie terrors of the Inquisition and witch- prosecution lies a serious endeavor to do what is right ; and this power can be utilised as well for the progress and elevation of mankind as for the suppression of reason and sound judgment.
Religion is the strongest motive power in the world ; nothing therefore is more injurious than false religious convictions, and nothing more desirable than truth.
Let us make the love of truth our religion. Beware of mysticism and endeavor to be clear and exact. There is as little truth in mysticism as there is light in fog. Nor should we rely on tradition, for tradition is uncer- tain, but the truth (i. e., generalised statements of facts or laws of nature) can be made unequivocally certain and will remain verifiable to every competent inquirer. It is man's duty, in all departments of life, to seek the truth with the best and most scientific methods at his disposal, and the adherence to this principle is ' ' the Religion of Science."
It is a fact that the confidence in science has al- ready become a religious conviction with most of us. The faith in scientifically provable truth has slowly, very slowly, and by almost imperceptible degrees, but steadily and surely, taken root in the hearts of men. To-daj^ it is the most powerful factor of our civilisation, in spite of various church-dogmas which are declared to be above scientific critique and argument ; for these dogmas are becoming a dead letter. There are several conservative and prominent churchmen who publicly confess that the dogmas of the Church must be regarded as historical doc- uments and not as eternal verities.
406 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVII..
Those who doubt the religious import of science need only consider what science has done for mankind by the radical abolition of witch-proseci:tion, and they will be convinced that science is not religiously indifferent, but that it is the most powerful factor in the purification of the I'eligions of mankind.
The world-conception of our industrial and social life, of international intercourse, and all serious move- ments on the lines of human progress, has even now to a great extent practically become the Religion of Science, although the fact is not as yet definitely and openl}^ acknowledged ; and any sectarian faith that endeavors to set forth its claim of recognition does it and can do it only on the ground that it is one with scientific truth. For there is nothing universally true, nothing catholic, nothing genuinely orthodox, except those truths that are positively demonstrated by science.
-*>■
IN VERSE AND FABLE.
THE DEVIL in folklore is entitled to our ungrudg- ing admiration for his indefatigable energy. There are innumerable devil-stones thrown at churches, there are devil-walls, devil-bridges, cathedrals, monasteries, castles, dikes, and mills, built by him for the purpose of seducing and gaining souls. He has had his finger in the pie everywhere and appears to be all but omnipresent and omniscient.
In popular literature the Devil plays a most impor- tant role. While he is still regarded as the incarnation of all physical and moral evil, his main oiBce has become that of a general mischief-worker in the universe ; with- out him there would be no plot, and the story of the world would lose its interest. He appeal's as the critic of the good Lord, as the representative of discontent with existing conditions, he inspires men with the desire for an increase of wealth, power, and knowledge; he is the mouth-piece of all who are anxious for a change in mat- ters political, social, and ecclesiastical. He is identified with the spirit of progress so inconvenient to those who are satisfied with the existing state of things, and thus
408 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL. '
he is credited with innovations of all kinds, the aspiration for improvement as well as the desire for the overthrow of law and order. In a word, he is characterised as the patron of both reform and evolution.
Devil- Stories .
The literature of devil-stories is very extensive. We select from them a number of the most representative tales.
Several legends indicate an origin by hallucination : For instance, St. Hilarion when hungry, saw a number of exquisite dishes. St. Pelagia, who had been an actress in Antioch, lived the life of a religious recluse in a cave on the Mount of Olives. Once the Devil offered her a num- ber of rings, bracelets, and precious stones, which dis- appeared as quickly as they came. Rufinus of Aquileja relates the story of a monk, a man of great abstinence, living in a desert. One evening a beautiful woman ap- peai^ed at his hermitage asking for a night's shelter. She conducts herself with modesty at first, but soon begins to smile, to stroke his beard, and to caress him. The monk grows excited and embraces her fervently, when, lo! the whole apparition vanishes, leaving him lonely in his cell. He hears the laughter of devils in the air, and, despair- ing of salvation, he goes back into the world and falls an easy prey to the temptations of Satan.
While Christianity was still under the influence of orientalised Gnosticism, the Cliurch believed in the per- versity of bodily existence, and therefore clung to the notion that all nature was the work of the Devil. Thus
IN VERSE AND FABLE. 409
the monk retired from the world, but he took with him into his solitude the memory-pictures of his life. Mem- ory-pictures are part of our soul, and a man who sud- denly cuts off all new impressions so that his present life becomes a blank, will have hallucinations as naturally as a man who falls asleep will have dreams. The darkness of the present throws into strong relief the most vivid recollections of the past ; the emptiness of a solitary mode of existence causes the slumbering memory-images to appear almost in bodily reality.
A verj' interesting letter of vSt. Jerome to the virgin Eustochia, which exemplifies the truth of this explana- tion, is still extant. St. Jerome writes:
"Alas! how often, when living in the desert, in that dreary, sunburnt loneliness, which serves as an habitation to the monks, did I believe myself revelling in the pleasures of Rome. I sat lonel)', my soul filled with affliction, clothed in wretched rags, my skin sunburnt like an Ethiopian's. No day passed without tears and sighs, and when sleep overcame me I had to lie on the naked ground. I do not mention eating and drinking, for the monks drink, even if sick, only water, and regard cooking as a luxury. And if I, who had condemned myself from fear of hell to such a life, without any other society than scorpions and wild beasts, often imagined myself surrounded by dancing girls, my face was pale from fasting, but in the cold body the soul was burning with desires, and in a man whose flesh was dead the flames of lust were kindled. Then I threw myself helpless at the feet of Jesus, wetted them with tears, dried them again with my hair, and subdued the rebellious flesh by fasts of a whole week. I am not ashamed to confess my misery; I am rather sorry for no longer being such as I was. I remember still how often, when fasting and weeping, the night followed the day, and how I did not cease to beat my breast until at the command of God peace had returned."
410 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
The legend of Merlin, as told by Bela in tlie old chronicles, characterises a whole class of stories.
The defeated Satan proposes to regain his power by the same means by which God has vanquished him. He decides to have a son who shall undo Christ's work of redemption. All the intrigues of hell are used to ruin a noble family until only two daughters are left. The one falls into shame, while the other remains chaste and resists all temptations. One night, however, she forgot to cross herself, and thus the Devil could approach her, — even against her will. The pious girl underwent the severest penance, and when her time came she had a son whose hairy appearance betrayed his diabolical parent- age. The child, however, was baptised and received the name Merlin. The excitement in heaven was great. What a triumph would it be to win the Devil's own son over to the cause of Christ. The Devil gave to his son all the knowledge of the past and the present ; God added the knowledge of the future, and this proved the best weapon against the evil attempts of his wicked father. When Merlin grew up, he slighted his father and per- formed many marvellous things. He was full of wisdom, and his prophecies were reliable. It is generally as- sumed that after his death he did not descend into hell but went to heaven.
Similar is the story of Robert the Devil, the hero of a modern opera. The Duchess of Normandy, the old legend tells us, had no children. Having implored the help of God in vain, she addressed herself to the Devil who satisfied her wish at once. She had a son who was a rogue from babyhood. Reing very courageous and
IN VERSE AND FABLE. 411
strong, he became the chief of a baud of robbers. He was knighted, to temper his malignity, but this appeal to his feeling of honor failed to have any effect. In a tourna- ment he slew thirty knights ; then he went out into the world to seek adventures. On his return he became a robber again. One day, when he had just strangled all the nuns of a cloi.ster, he remembered that he had a mother and decided to visit her. But when he made his appearance, her servants dispersed in wild fear. For the first time in his life he was impressed with the idea that he had become odious to his fellow-men, and becoming conscious of his evil nature, he wanted to know why he was worse than others. With his swoi'd drawn, he forced his mother to confess the secret of his birth. He was horror-struck, but did not despair. He went to Rome, confessed to a pious hermit, submitted willingly to the severest penance and combated the Saracens who hap- pened to be laying siege to Rome. The emperor offered him his daughter as a reward. And now the two records of Robert's fate become contradictory. Not knowing the truth, we state both impartially. Some saj' that Robert married the emperor's daughter who was in love with him ; others declare that he refused the match and crown, and returned to his hermit confessor, into the wilderness where he died blessed by God and mankind.
Not all the sons of the Devil, however, join the cause of the good Lord. Eggelino, the t3?rant of Padua, forces his mother to confess the secret, that he and his brother Alberico were sons of Satan. Eggelino boasts that he will live as befits the son of the Evil One. He succeeds with the assistance of his brother in becoming the t3'rant
412
THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
of Padua, commits terrible crimes and dies at last in misery and despair. The story is dramatised by Alber- tino Mussato in liis Ecccrins.
On the right side of the high altar of the church of St. Denys, near Paris, a bas-relief illustrates the legend of St. Dagobert's death, which proves the soul-saving power of Christian saints. We are told that " a hermit on an island in the Mediterranean was warned in a vision to pray for the Prankish King's soul. He then saw Dagobert in chains, hurried along by a troop of fiends.
Demons on the Tomb of Dagobert. (On the right of the high altar in the church of St. Denys, near Paris.)
who were about to cast him into a volcano. At last his cries to St. Den3's, St. Michael, and St. Martin, brought to his assistance those three venerable and glorious per- sons, who drove off the devils, and with songs of triumph conveyed the rescued soul to Abraham's bosom." "^
Among the romances which represent the struggle of man with temptation and the powers of evil Spenser's Faerie Queene and Bunyan's Pilffri}>i''s Progress are well
* Gcsla Dairob, (cc. 23, 44). Baronius (647. 5) D. ]?ouqnet A'cc. dts /lis- toircx de France, t. ii. p. 593. Didron, C/irisfiaii /io>ioi;ra/'/iy, ii. p. 132.
IN VERSE AND FABLE.
413
known and need no further comment. Tlie underlying idea, however, is not original with these authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but dates back to the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries. A manuscript-copy of Le Roinant dcs Irois Pclerinages hy Guillaume de Guil- lauille describes the adventures of man in his pilgrimage through life. In a deep val- ley the pilgrim meets cov- etousness, which Didron* describes as follows :
"The idol worn upon her head is 'the peny of gold or of silver whereon is emprinted the figure of the hye Lord of tlie countree.' The false God that blindeth him that tiirneth his eyes towards him and maketh fools to bend their eyes down- wards. This God by whom she hath been disfigured and de- famed is Avarice. The hands behind like griffin's claws are to symbolise 'Rapine, Coutteburse, and Latrosynie. '
"In the next pair of hands she holds a bowl for alms, or for the money she extorts through beggary, and a hook, with which she enters the house of Christ and seizes his servants. Taking their croziers and shepherds' crooks, she furnishes them with this devil's prong instead, fished up by her out of the darkness of Hell, and this hand is named Simony. In the next hands she holds a yard-measure, purse, and scales. With the measure she deals out false lengths, with the balances she weighs false measure, and into
*A manuscript copy of an old English translation exists in the University Library o£ Cambridge, England.
COVETOUSNESS.
(From the manuscript-copy in the Li- brary of St. Genevieve, Paris.)
414
THE HISTORY OF. THE DEVIL.
the purse she puts the ill-won gains of her treachery, gambling, and dishonesty. Round her neck hangs a bag, and nothing that is put therein can ever come out again ; all things remain there to rot."
Devil- Co)//rac/s. The Devil, fighting with God for the possession of mankind, was supposed to have a special passion for
Faust Signing the Contract with thk Devil in Blood. (By Franz Simm )
catching souls. Being the prince of the world he could easily grant even the most extravagant wishes, and was sometimes willing to pay a high price when a man prom- ised to be his for time and eternity. Thus originated the idea of making compacts with the Devil ; and it is worthy of note that in these compacts the Devil is vcr}^ careful
IN VERSE AND FABLE. 415
to establish his title to the soul oi man by a faultless legal document. He has, as we shall learn, sufficient reason to distrust all promises made him by men and saints. Folio-wing the authority of the old legends, we find that even the good Lord frequently lends his assist- ance to cheating the Devil out of his own. He is always duped and the vilest tricks are I'esorted to to cheat him. While thus the Devil, having profited by experience, always insists upon having his rights insured by an un- equivocal instrument (which in later centuries is signed with blood) ; he, in his turn, is fearlessly trusted to keep his promise, and this is a fact which must be mentioned to his honor, for although he is said to be a liar from the beginning, not one case is known in all devil-lore in which the Devil attempts to cheat his stipulators. Thus he appears as the most unfaiidy maligned person, and as a martyr of simple-minded honesty.
The oldest story of a devil-contract is the legend of Theophilus, first told by Eutychian, who declares he had witnessed the whole affair with his own e3'es.
Theophilus, an officer of the church and a pious man, living in Adana, a town of Cilicia, was unani- mously elected by the clergy and by the laymen as their bishop, but he refused the honor from sheer modesty. So another man became bishop in his stead. The new- bishop unjustly deprived Theophilus of his office, who now regretted his former humility. But in his humilia- tion Theophilus went to a famous wizard and made with his assistance a compact with Satan, renouncing Christ and the Holy Virgin. Satan at once causes the bishop to restore Theophilus to his position, but now Theoph-
416
THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
o^j^jT-
The IjF.gknd of Theohhii.us.
From Monk Conrad's illumined MS. (Thirteenth Century ; Monastery Scheiern
Now in the Royal Library of Munich )
IN VRRSE AND FABLE. 417
ilus repents and prays to the Holy Virgin for forgive- ness. After forty days of fasting and praying he is re- buked for his crime but not comforted ; so he fasts and prays thirty days more, and receives at last absolution. Satan, however, refuses to give up his claim on Theoph- ilus, and the Holy Virgin then actually castigates the enemy of God and men so severely that he at last sur- renders the fatal document. Now Theophilus relates the whole stor}' in the presence of the bishop to the assem- bled congregation in church ; and after having divided all his possessions among the poor dies peacefully and enters into the glories of Paradise.
Even popes are said to have made compacts with the Devil. An English Benedictine monk, William of Malmesbury, says of Pope Sylvester II., who was born in France, his secular name being Gerbert, that he en- tered the cloister when still a boy. Full of ambition, he flew to Spain where he studied astrology and magic among the Saracens. There he stole a magic -book from a Saracen philosopher, and returned flying through the air to France. Now he opened a school and acquired great fame, so that the king himself became one of his disciples. Then he became Bishop of Rheims, where he had a magnificent clock and an organ constructed. Hav- ing raised the treasure of Emperor Octavian which lay hidden in a subterranean vault at Rome, he became Pope. As Pope he manufactured a magic head which replied to all his questions. This head told him that he would not die until he had read Mass in Jerusalem. So the Pope decided never to visit the Holy Land. But once he fell sick, and, asking his magic head, was informed that the
418 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
church's name in which he had read Mass the other day- was "The Holy Cross ol Jerusalem." The Pope knew at once that he had to die. He gathered all the cardinals around his hed, confessed his crime, and, as a penance, ordered his body to be cut up alive and the pieces to be thrown out of the church as unclean.
Sigabert tells the story of the Pope's death in a different way. There is no penance on the part of the Pope, and the Devil takes his soul to hell. Others tell us that the Devil constantly accompanied the Pope in the shape of a black dog, and this dog gave him the equiv- ocal prophecy.
The historical truth of the story is that Gerbert was tini:sually gifted and well educated. He was familiar with the wisdom of the Saracens, for Borrell, Duke of Hither Spain, carried him as a youth to his country where he studied mathematics and astronomy. He came early in contact with the most influential men of his time, and became Pope in 999. He was liberal enough to denounce some of his unworthy predecessors as "monsters of more than human iniquit^^" and as "Antichrist, sitting in the temple of God and playing the part of God;" but at the same time he pursued an independent and vigorous papal policy, foreshadowing in his aims both the preten- sions of Gregory the Great and the Crusades.
The most famous, most significant, and the pro- foundest story among the legends of devil-contracts is the saga of Dr. Jolianucs Faustus. Whether the hero of the Faust legend derives his name from the Latin faustuSi i. e., the favored one, or from the well-known Maj'ence goldsmith Fust, the companion of Gensflcisch
IN VERSE AND FABLE.
419
voni Gutenberg, the inventor of printing, or whether he was no historical personality at all, is an open question. Certain it is that all the stories of the great naturalists and thinkers whom the people at the time regarded as wizards were by and b3' attributed to him, and the figure of Dr. Faustus became the centre of an extensive circle of traditions. The tales about Albertus Magnus, Johannes
Mephistopheles Making His Appear- ance IN Faust's Study.
(After Schnorr von Carolsteld.)
Faust Beholding the Emblem of THE Macrocosm.
(After P. Rembrandt.)
Teutonicus (Deutscli) , Trithemius, Abbot of Sjxmheim, Agrippa of Nettesheim, Theophrastus, and Paracelsus, were retold of Faust, and Faust became a poetical per- sonification of the great revolutionary aspirations in the time immediately preceding and following the Reforma- tion.
The original form of the Faust-legend represents the Roman Catholic standpoint. Faust allies himself with
420
THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
the Devil, works his miracles In- the black art, and pays for its practice with his soul. He begins his career in Wittenberg, the university at which Luther taught, and
JocliU' 3iiu(Vu»yi JitfifrjJi-uK^iifriiuiiijSafSiitUMlciu.pirfdiioxiiJ.SoMiPsburliftnffitlihliif-Siinji ^uii'2int'rbafti!5MrIli'ri(friUfnift.^l^eli-he3grt«'l)eutiifl^riuttfr^uui>.=^i(ji^df^'5ritfct^JLol)rtrli!(»faiigfufl^
Faust Riding on a Barrel Out of Auerbach's Cellar. Fresco.
but- 05-5
The Sknse-Ii.lusions of the Riotous Students and Faust's Escape. (.\fter P. Cornelius.)
is the enibodinieut of natural science, of historical inves- tigation, of the Renaissance, and of modern discoveries and inventions. As such he subdues nature, restores to
IN VERSE AXD FABLE.
421
life the heroes of ancient Greece, gathers knowledge about distant lands, and revives Helen, the ideal of classic beauty.
1513
^a %i^ ^%M ^\
VIVE.BIBE.OnORA!,OARE . MEMOR TAVSTI irvIV.S . ETH T I VS „ TOITN^ ;AnERAT CLATDOll A^.C ASTER AT AMPLA.OKAUV 1525.
Faust Enjoying Himself In Auerbach's Cellar. Fresco.
^ ' Vv /
\^*')''r
■-■iiin^
^->^^
Mephistopheles Having Faust Buried by Devils. (After Retzsch.)
As the fall of the Devil is, according to Biblical authority, attributed to pride and ambition, so progress and the spirit of investigation were denounced as Satan's
422 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
work, and all inquiry into the mysteries of nature was regarded as magic. Think only of Roger Bacon, that studious, noble monk, and a greater scientist than his more famous namesake, Lord Bacon ! In the thirties of the thirteenth century, at the University of Paris, when Roger Bacon, making some experiments with light, made the rainbow-colors appear on a screen, the audience ran away from him terrified, and his life was endangered be- cause he was suspected of practising the black art.
The Faust Legettd.
Faust is the representative of scientific manliness. He investigates, even though it may cost him the Chris- tian's title to heavenly bliss ; he boldly studies nature, although he will be damned for it in hell ; he seeks the truth at the risk of forfeiting his soul, x^ccording to the mediaeval theology Satan fell simply on account of his manly ambition and high aspiration, and 3'et Faust dares to break and eat of the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. According to Marlowe's Faustus, Lucifer fell, not only by insolence, but first of all " bj^ aspiring pride." Mephistopheles seems to regret, but Faustus comforts him , saying :
"What is great Mephistopheles so passionate, For being deprived of the joys of heaven? Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude, And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess."
The oldest Faust book, dated 1587 (called the I'^olks- buch) exists in one single copy only whicli is now care- fully preserved in Ulm, and Scheible has re-])ul)Hslied it
IN Vl'iRSE AND FAliLE. 423
in his work Dr. Joluuines Faust (3 Volumes, Stuttgart, 1846) .
The preface of the Volksbuch states that the inib- lisher had received the manuscript from a good friend in Speyer, and that the original story had been written in Latin. The contents of this oldest version of the Faust legend are as follows :
Faust, the son of a farmer in Rod, near Weimar, studied theology at Wittenberg. Ambitious to be om- niscient and omnipotent like God, he dived into the secret lore of magic, but unable to make much progress, he conjured the Devil in a thick forest near Wittenberg. Not in the least intimidated by the Devil's noisy be- havior, he forced him to become his servant. Faust, having gained mastery over demons, did not regard his salvation endangered, and when the Devil told him that he should nevertheless receive his full punishment after death, he grew extremely angry with him and bade him quit his presence, saying: " For 3'our sake I do not want to be damned." When the Devil had left, Faust felt an uneasiness not experienced befoi-e, for he had become accustomed to his services. Accordingly, he ordered the Devil to return, who now introduced himself as Mephis- topheles. The name is derived from the Greek ///; ro q>a)i q)i\rjs, " not-the-light-loviug," and was afterwards changed to Mephistopheles. He now made a compact with the Devil who consented to serve him for twenty- four years, Faust to allow him afterwards to deal with him as he pleased. The contract was signed by Faust with his blood, which he drew with a penknife from his left arm. The blood, running out of the wound, formed
424 THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL.
the words : Hodw fitge {wl3j.\^ ^y\) . This startles Faust, but he remains resolute.
Mephistopheles entertained his master with all kinds of merry illusions, with music and visions. He brought him dainty dishes and costly clothes stolen from royal households. Faust became luxurious and desired to marry. The Devil refused, because marriage is a sacra- ment. Faust insisted. Then the Devil appeared in his real shape which was so terrific that Faust was fright- ened. He gave up the idea of marriage, but Mephistoph- eles sent him devils who assumed the shape of beautiful women, and made him dissolute.
Faust conversed with his servant about eschatolo- gical subjects, and heard man}' things which greatly dis- pleased his vanity. Mephistopheles said, " I am a devil and act according to my nature. But if I were a man, I would rather humiliate myself before God than before Satan."
Faust became sick of his empty pleasures. His am- bition was to be recognised in the world as a man who could explain nature, presage future events, and so excite admiration. Having received sufficient information con- cerning the other world, he wanted to come into direct contact with it, and Mephistopheles introduced to him a number of distinguished devils. When the visitors left, the house was so full of vermin that Faust had to with- draw. However, he did not neglect his new acquaint- ances on that account, but paid them a visit in their own home. Riding ui)on a chair built of human bones, he visited hell and contemplated with leisure the flames of its furnaces and the torments of the damned.
IN VERSE AND FABLE. 425
Having safely returned from the infernal region, he was carried in a carriage drawn by dragons up to heaven. He took a ride high in the air, first eastwards over the whole of Asia, then upwards to the stars, until they grew before his eyes on his approach into big worlds, while the earth became as small as the yolk of an egg.
His curiosity being satisfied in that direction, he concentrated his attention upon the earth. Mephistoph- eles assumed the shape of a winged horse upon which he visited all the countries of our planet. He visited Rome and regretted not having become Pope, seeing the lux- uries of the latter's life. He sat down invisible at the Pope's table and took away his daintiest morsels, and the wine from his very lips. The Pope, believing himself beset by a ghost, exorcised its poor soul, but Faust laughed at him. In Turkey he visited the Sultan's harem, and introduced himself as the prophet Moham- med, which gave him full liberty to act as he pleased. Beyond India he saw at a distance the blest gardens of Paradise.
Faust, being invited in his capacity of magician to visit the Emperor Charles the Fifth, made Alexander the Great, the beautiful Helen, and other noted persons of antiquity appear before the whole court. Faust fell in love with Helen, so that he could no longer live without her. He kept her in his company and had a child by her, a marvellous boy who could reveal the future.
When the twenty-four ^ears had almost elapsed, Faust grew melancholy, but the Devil mocked him. At midnight, on the very last day, some students who had been in his company heard a frightful noise, but did not
STUDYING BLACK MAGIC.
CONJURING THE DEVIL.
WM^".
SOME PLEASANTRTFS OF BLACK MAGIC.
MIRACLES AND CONJURATIONS.
Widman's Faust. (Reduced from Scheible's Reproductions)
IN vp:rse and fable.
427
dare to enter his room. The next morning they found him torn to pieces. Helen and her child had disappeared, and his famulus Wagner inherited his books on magic art.
This briefly is the contents of the Volkslmch on Faust.
,j»j")i»'
Last Hours and Death, (Widman's Faust )*
A transcription of the Faust-legend in rhymes was published as early as 1587 in Tubingen. Another version by Widman appeared in Hamburg in 1599. It is less complete than the first Faust-book and lacks depth of conception while it abounds rather more in coarse inci-
*Most of these illustrations need no further comments. The last three repre- sent the storm that was raging during Faust's funeral, the inheritance of Wagner, consisting of Faust's books and instruments, and also Helen and her son. The last picture shows Faust's ghost haunting his old residence at Wittenberg.
WAGNER CONJURING THE DEVIL AUERHAN.
AUERHAN S SERVICES.
WAGNF.K S JOKES.