Preface

THE LITERATURE OF WITCHCRAFT

BY

PROF. GEORGE L. BURR


CORNELL UNIVERSITY


[REPRINTED FROM THE PAPERS OF THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION]


G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

NEW YORK LONDON
27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD ST. 27 KING WILLIAM ST., STRAND
The Knickerbocker Press
1890




THE LITERATURE OF WITCHCRAFT.

By PROF. GEORGE L. BURR, Cornell University.


The literature of witchcraft is not the literature of magic. Magic
is world-wide. Wherever, from the first, men have found themselves
face to face with the awful powers of nature and of fate which shut
in their little lives, some have disdained either to bow to them in
reverent submission or to seek by bribes and wheedling to win them to
their side. They have tried to outwit mystery with speculation, and to
outmatch force with cunning. With spell and incantation they have dared
to face the grim demons of storm and fire and flood, to bid begone the
lurking fiends of disease, to dip into the dread secret of the future,
to call back from the shadows the loved figures of the dead, to make
the gods themselves their servants. And if, at last, they have been
fain to own to themselves that their lore is, after all, but vanity
and their powers a delusion, they have meanwhile found in the eager
credulity of their fellows, to whom they no longer dare to confess
their impotence, a treasure scarcely less tempting than the favor of
the gods. Over against what they deemed the hocus-pocus of worship they
have set up the hocus-pocus of magic; and, as the prophet is followed
by the priest, the magician is followed by the sorcerer. Under the
peaceful stars of Akkadian Chaldæa, centuries before Terah wandered
westward with his son, or in the tornado-torn jungles of the last-found
South Sea island, the impulse and its outcome have been ever the same.

Compared with the potent share of magic in human history, its
literature is indeed but scant. Its choicest secrets have always gone
by word of mouth. Yet it is a literature of all times and lands. From
the clay volumes of Assyrian kings and the papyrus rolls of Egypt to
the latest utterance of the spirits through Mr. Slade or of the mystic
sages of the Orient through Mr. Sinnett, it is as perennial as human
folly itself. Its faith may be feigned, its miracles sham; but magic
itself is actual and universal.

But witchcraft never was. It was but a shadow, a nightmare: the
nightmare of a religion, the shadow of a dogma. Less than five
centuries saw its birth, its vigor, its decay. And this birth,
this vigor, this decay, were--to a degree perhaps else unknown in
history--caused by and mirrored in a literature. Of that literature it
has during the last decade been mine, as librarian of the President
White Library at Cornell University, to aid in building up a
collection. In the last few months I have had in hand the making ready
of its catalogue for the press. My task is by no means finished, and I
have much to learn; but it has seemed to me that even such a hurried
survey of the literature of witchcraft as I may presume to attempt may
not be without interest to the American Historical Association. And
this the more, since no adequate bibliography of it has ever yet been
published, and no historian has thoroughly known and exploited it.

The literature of witchcraft, indeed, if under the name be included all
the books which touch upon that dark subject, is something enormous.
For at least four centuries no comprehensive work on theology, on
philosophy, on history, on law, on medicine, on natural science, could
wholly ignore it; and to lighter literature it afforded the most
telling illustrations for the pulpit, the most absorbing gossip for
the news-letter, the most edifying tales for the fireside. But the
works devoted wholly or mainly to witchcraft are much fewer. Roundly
and rudely estimated, this monographic literature includes perhaps a
thousand or fifteen hundred titles.[1]

The earliest of the books on witchcraft were written in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. Their writers were Dominicans of the
Inquisition. Not that Brother Nicolas Eymeric or Brother Nicolas
Jaquier or Brother John Vineti or Brother Jerome Visconti knew that he
was writing on a new theme. On the contrary, they wrote to prove that
this witchcraft whereof they spoke was as old as mankind. And they
cited not only Thomas Aquinas and Vincent of Beauvais, but Isidore and
Gregory and Cassian and Augustine, and, above all, the Bible,--nay,
even Josephus and the ancient poets, Horace and Virgil and Ovid.
Wherein, then, was it really new, and how did they come to write on it
at all? Bear with me while I try very briefly to answer.

Magic, in truth, the Christian Church had always known. Even the
ancient faiths of Greece and Rome had, like all faiths, fought
magic sternly; and, like all faiths, had counted magic much that
was not so. But their polytheistic tolerance had reckoned it more a
crime than a sin, and had not stigmatized as magical other faiths,
save when, as in the case of Christianity, their own exclusiveness
seemed to stamp their votaries as foes to the rest of mankind. Less
indifferent was Christianity itself. Whatever the conceptions of her
founder and of his immediate disciples, it was inevitable that, from
the associations of the words in which they must express themselves,
from the other preconceptions of the taught, from the influence of
the Jewish scriptures, from the daily contact with Hebrew or Greek or
Roman neighbors, there should early creep into the Church a touch of
the superstition about her. She had inherited, indeed, the monotheism
of the Jews. But, at the rise of Christianity, the day was long past
when the stern logic of that monotheism saw in Jehovah the sole
supernatural power, and in other worships only a fruitless idolatry.
From the Persian captivity the Jews had brought back an obstinate
belief in a horde of minor intelligences--the angels and demons of the
New Testament period; and their teachers, seeking to justify this by
one or two obscure passages in their sacred books, had built up out of
them a complete science of demonology.[2] To the ranks of the demons
the early Christians seem at once to have assigned the deities of their
heathen neighbors.[3] And the consciences of their Gentile converts,
who found it far easier to believe the new God supreme than the old
gods powerless, took most kindly to this solution. But, if the gods
were devils, their worship was not mere idolatry--it was magic; and the
two terms became for the Christian interchangeable.

Still stranger and darker grew the conception of magic under the
influence of another Christian idea--the new idea that religion and
ethics are one. Henceforth not only is there but one true God, there
is but one good God. All others are fiends, hating men because God
loves them, and winning their trust only to cheat and ruin them. He who
willingly becomes their accomplice or their victim is utterly evil--an
enemy to his kind, to be visited by the Church with her severest
penances, by the state with death itself. It matters no longer with
what spirit one seeks the aid of the gods, or for what ends: all but
Christian worship is devil-worship,--magic,--mortal sin.

Here were indeed the germs of the later idea of witchcraft. Yet only
the germs; for there was much to stay their growth. Though the world
swarmed with demons, though the majority of mankind were devoted
to their service, the Christian had little or nothing to fear from
them.[4] A prayer, an exorcism, the sign of the cross, the mere name
of Christ, could put legions of them to instant flight. It was the
Christian’s glory to baffle and set them at naught. Moreover, the
whole theory was aimed at paganism, and paganism was passing away.
Even the inundation of Christendom by the Germanic nations could
not long retard its disappearance. Their host of deities, great and
small--Asa and Jotun and troll and nix and kobold--swelled for a
moment almost to bursting the ranks of the devils. But these, too,
soon fell back into the ghostly twilight. Here and there some canny
old mother might still gather by stealth the mystic herbs with which
she trenched so vexatiously upon the monkish trade of healing,--might
still haunt sacred spring or tree or rock, muttering the meaningless
formulas of a forgotten faith. But such, though scholars were long
prone to count them so, were not the witches of the later day. The
Church grew wisely less stern toward them, rather than more so. As
the spirit of Christianity took a more exclusive hold upon the minds
of men, the grandeur of the monotheistic idea once more asserted
itself. Resort to the old heathen rites was magic indeed; but it
was magical superstition. Its marvels were not real marvels. Only
God had power over nature. In this, though with much wavering and
self-contradiction, the teachers of western Christendom in the ninth,
the tenth, and the eleventh centuries agree[5]; and the earliest
codes of the crystallizing Canon Law, from Regino of Prüm to Gratian,
punish as superstition alike the resort to the aid of demons and the
belief that such aid can be given. “Let it be publicly announced to
all,” ran the famous canon _Episcopi_, which formed the nucleus of the
Church’s teaching on this point, “that whoso believeth such fables [as
that women may ride through the air] and things like this, has lost
the faith; and whoso has not faith in God is none of his, but is his
in whom he believes, to wit, the Devil’s. Whoever, therefore, believes
it to be possible that any creature can be changed into a worse or a
better, or transformed into any other shape or likeness, except by
the Creator himself, who made all things and by whom all things were
made, is beyond doubt an infidel and worse than a pagan.”[6] Under such
handling the hold of the older faiths upon the popular imagination had,
by the close of the twelfth century, well nigh passed away. The magic
the Church had so long fought was virtually dead.

But the wording of the canon _Episcopi_ itself suggests that a new
cloud was already fast overspreading the horizon of Christianity--the
fear, not of devils, but of the Devil. By a tendency natural to
monotheism, the intenser the conception of the oneness and the goodness
of God, the stronger the impulse to conceive of that which is opposed
to him and to his purposes as also one and as absolutely evil. Even
the earliest of the Christians seem to have understood their master
to speak of such a principle as of a personal being. And, as the
westward-moving faith waxed in literalness and in sternness,--as,
beneath the flood of Roman ideas and ideals, the figure of God grew
more majestic and imperious,--his awful shadow loomed ever more awful
in the darkening background. The rise of asceticism lent a finishing
touch, and metaphysics became mythology. To the tortured brain and
sense of the hermit-monk the Devil was the most real being in the
universe--his personal antagonist at every turn, seen and felt and
grappled with. And no Christian doubted. Athanasius, the father
of orthodoxy, himself gave to the world, in his life of Antony, a
household book of diabolism--the “Robinson Crusoe” of the Middle Ages,
with Satan (an odd man-Friday) its most vivid figure.[7] And Augustine,
the great theologian of Latin Christianity--a Manichæan in spite of
himself--in his “City of God,” that first Christian philosophy of
history, which lorded the field for a thousand years (if, indeed, it
does not lord it still), raised him to colleagueship with God himself
by setting over against the _civitas Dei_, the kingdom of Heaven, a
_civitas Diaboli_, the kingdom of this world, whose prince was Satan.
Christianity grew ever more a dualism.[8]

His place in theology thus made sure, the literature of the Devil seems
to have taken a long pause.[9] In the Lives of the Saints he still
played a large and favorite part--the villain of the plot in these
lesser comedies, as in the grand historical drama of the Gospels.[10]
But it was probably not until the ninth century that there began
to find their way into the West certain Byzantine traditions which
seemed to throw a fresh light upon the methods of his dealing with
men: legends of written compacts through which men had won the aid of
Satan in this world by making over to him their souls for the next.
Versified and dramatized by bishop and nun, these legends became widely
popular and stirred to a fever European curiosity.[11] And when, a
little later, the Crusades threw open wide the door to the fables of
the East, and kindled that love of anecdote which made every friar a
newsmonger and every preacher a story-teller, there was scarce another
domain in which the monkish imagination proved so fertile as in that of
diabolism. Stephen of Bourbon gave the subject a section,[12] Caesarius
of Heisterbach a whole book,[13] Thomas of Cantimpré dwelt on it in his
latest and longest chapters,[14] the Abbot Richalmus found it enough
for a monograph.[15] Hardly less prolific in such stories than the
moralizers were the gossiping chroniclers.[16] And the encyclopedists,
like Vincent of Beauvais, whatever else they might fail to glean,
overlooked no interference of the Devil in the affairs of men.[17]

It was, perhaps, through the channel of the Crusades that there
became known to Western theologians certain abstruser speculations of
Byzantine thinkers: a treatise “On flying demons of the night,”[18]
which gained much vogue from its ascription to the formulator of
Eastern orthodoxy, John of Damascus, and a dialogue “On the doings
of demons,”[19] by Michael Psellus, the most prolific author of the
mediæval Greek Church. Both of these discussed in minute and unblushing
detail the relations of devils with mortals.

They came opportunely. The great structure of the scholastic
philosophy, which, resting on the sure basis of Scripture and
compassing all knowledge, was to put an end forever to the restless
speculations of the human mind, was just in the making. Already the
dualism of Augustine had been made its corner-stone. And now, resting
perhaps on these Greek suggestions, as on the earlier Byzantine
vagaries of the pseudo-Dionysius, with that relentless logic which made
their system (possibly excepting the harder Protestant scholasticism
of Calvin) the baldest rationalism the world has known, its builders
wrought out, in this atmosphere of the thirteenth century, and
buttressed on every side with text and canon, the scheme of diabolism
of which the whole literature of witchcraft is but a broken reflection.
Into the details of that scheme I need not go. The Devil and his demons
become in all points the conscious parody of God and his angels.[20]

As fallen angels, they still have power over storm, and lightning, and
pestilence, and “whatsoever”--to use the schoolmen’s phrase--“has local
motion alone.” And just as God has his human servants, his church, on
earth, so also the Devil has his--men and women sworn to his service
and true to his bidding. To win such followers he can appear to men in
any form he pleases, can deceive them, seduce them, enter into compact
with them, initiate them into his worship, make them his allies for
the ruin of their fellows. Now, it is these human allies and servants
of Satan, thus postulated into existence by the brain of a monkish
logician,[21] whom history knows as “witches.”

At first, indeed, the dictum of the schoolmen seemed little to affect
the current of popular thought. The Devil played only an ever merrier