This personal bias of Miss Murray's lends an interesting touch to what would otherwise be dull and somewhat Rabelaisian material. Unfortunately, however, this opinion of the author is altogether lacking in scientific foundation or caution. The basis of the writer's persuasion on this subject must be sought in a naïve desire for originality combined with an over-facile intuition. Perhaps something of her frame of mind in composing the book may be gleaned from the statement in which she decries "the unfortunate belief of modern writers in the capacity of women for hysteria." Surely, the present volume presents ample proofs of hysteria both in the past and in the present.
The belief in witchcraft was not confined to the civilized people of mediaeval times, as the present writer would lead us to suppose. It is rather a superstition often found among primitive peoples and intimately bound up with the life of the savage. Miss Kingsley writes that more deaths were caused by the persecution of witches in West Africa than by the entire slave trade. In this region, as elsewhere, most of the mortality, as well as plagues and blighted crops, were thought to be caused by witches. Hence, the accusation and the execution of witches were well-nigh simultaneous. It is hardly conceivable that Miss Murray would care to argue that certain West African Negroes belonged to a witch cult which was drawn up in opposition to the organized fetish religion of the locality.
If now we consider the practices of which the unfortunate victims of fanaticism in Western Europe were falsely accused, it can readily be ascertained that certain of these were of early origin, and had in fact been in vogue among primitive people, while others were entirely drawn from the realms of a popular distorted imagination. A third class were merely inversions of orthodox Christian ceremonials. Miss Murray has displayed the most fantastic lack of discrimination in her evaluation of the validity of the court testimony given at the witch trials. She has attached equal significance to the accusations that the accused rode on broomsticks, ate children, had sexual intercourse with the devil, turned away from Christianity, kept "fetish" animals, and similar misdemeanors.
Sumner has clearly pointed out that no importance whatsoever should be attached to the fact that the accused people freely confessed their complicity in these crimes, for the belief in witchcraft was the popular philosophy of the times. Certain women evidently desired to be witches. Hysterical women,[1] for example, courted the
- ↑ The frequent presence of local anaesthesia and supernumerary nipples on the witches gives some light as to their mental instability.
