The History of Witchcraft and Demonology/Chapter 1
THE
HISTORY OF WITCHCRAFT
CHAPTER I
The Witch: Heretic and Anarchist
“Sorcier est celuy qui par moyens Diaboliques sciemment s’efforce de paruenir a quel que chose.” (“A sorcerer is one who by commerce with the Devil has a full intention of attaining his own ends.”) With these words the profoundly erudite jurisconsult Jean Bodin, one of the acutest and most strictly impartial minds of his age, opens his famous De la Demonomanie des Sorciers,[1] and it would be, I imagine, hardly possible to discover a more concise, exact, comprehensive, and intelligent definition of a Witch. The whole tremendous subject of Witchcraft, especially as revealed in its multifold and remarkable manifestations throughout every district of Southern and Western Europe from the middle of the thirteenth until the dawn of the eighteenth century,[2] has it would seem in recent times seldom, if ever, been candidly and fairly examined. The only sound sources of information are the contemporary records; the meticulously detailed legal reports of the actual trials; the vast mass of pamphlets which give eye-witnessed accounts of individual witches and reproduce evidence uerbatim as told in court; and, above all, the voluminous and highly technical works of the Inquisitors and demonologists, holy and reverend divines, doctors utriusque iuris, hard-headed, slow, and sober lawyers,—learned men, scholars of philosophic mind, the most honourable names in the universities of Europe, in the forefront of literature, science, politics, and culture; monks who kept the conscience of kings, pontiffs; whose word would set Europe aflame and bring an emperor to his knees at their gate.
It is true that Witchcraft has formed the subject of a not inconsiderable literature, but it will be found that inquirers have for the most part approached this eternal and terrible chapter in the history of humanity from biassed, although wholly divergent, points of view, and in consequence it is often necessary to sift more or less thoroughly their partial presentation of their theme, to discount their unwarranted commentaries and illogical conclusions, and to get down in time to the hard bed-rock of fact.
In the first place we have those writings and that interest which may be termed merely antiquarian. Witchcraft is treated as a curious by-lane of history, a superstition long since dead, having no existence among, nor bearing upon, the affairs of the present day. It is a field for folk-lore, where one may gather strange flowers and noxious weeds. Again, we often recognize the romantic treatment of Witchcraft. ’Tis the Eve of S. George, a dark wild night, the pale moon can but struggle thinly through the thick massing clouds. The witches are abroad, and hurtle swiftly aloft, a hideous covey, borne headlong on the skirling blast. In delirious tones they are yelling foul mysterious words as they go: “Har! Har! Har! Altri! Altri!” To some peak of the Brocken or lonely Cevennes they haste, to the orgies of the Sabbat, the infernal Sacraments, the dance of Acheron, the sweet and fearful fantasy of evil, “Vers les stupres impurs et les baisers immondes.”[3] Hell seems to vomit its foulest dregs upon the shrinking earth; a loathsome shape of obscene horror squats huge and monstrous upon the ebon throne; the stifling air reeks with filth and blasphemy; faster and faster whirls the witches’ lewd lavolta; shriller and shriller the cornemuse screams; and then a wan grey light flickers in the Eastern sky; a moment more and there sounds the loud clarion of some village chanticleer; swift as thought the vile phantasmagoria vanishes and is sped, all is quiet and still in the peaceful dawn.
But both the antiquarian and the romanticist reviews of Witchcraft may be deemed negligible and impertinent so far as the present research is concerned, however entertaining and picturesque such treatment proves to many readers, affording not a few pleasant hours, whence they are able to draw highly dramatic and brilliantly coloured pictures of old time sorceries, not to be taken too seriously, for these things never were and never could have been.[4]
The rationalist historian and the sceptic, when inevitably confronted with the subject of Witchcraft, chose a charmingly easy way to deal with these intensely complex and intricate problems, a flat denial of all statements which did not fit, or could not by some means be squared with, their own narrow prejudice. What matter the most irrefragable evidence, which in the instance of any other accusation would unhesitatingly have been regarded as final. What matter the logical and reasoned belief of centuries, of the most cultured peoples, the highest intelligences of Europe? Any appeal to authority is, of course, useless, as the sceptic repudiates all authority—save his own. Such things could not be. We must argue from that axiom, and therefore anything which it is impossible to explain away by hallucination, or hysteria, or auto-suggestion, or any other vague catch-word which may chance to be fashionable at the moment, must be uncompromisingly rejected, and a note of superior pity, to candy the so suave yet crushingly decisive judgement, has proved of great service upon more occasions than one. Why examine the evidence? It is really useless and a waste of time, because we know that the allegations are all idle and ridiculous; the “facts” sworn to by innumerable witnesses, which are repeated in changeless detail century after century in every country, in every town, simply did not take place. How so absolute and entire falsity of these facts can be demonstrated the sceptic omits to inform us, but we must unquestioningly accept his infallible authority in the face of reason, evidence, and truth.
Yet supposing that with clear and candid minds we proceed carefully to investigate this accumulated evidence, to inquire into the circumstances of a number of typical cases, to compare the trials of the fifteenth century in France with the trials of the seventeenth century in England, shall we not find that amid obvious accretions of fantastic and superfluous details certain very solid substratum of a permanent and invaried character is unmistakably to be traced throughout the whole? This cannot in reason be denied, and here we have the core and the enduring reality of Witcheraft and the witch-cult throughout the ages.
There were some gross superstitions; there were some unbridled imaginations; there was deception, there was legerdemain; there was phantasy; there was fraud; Henri Boguet seems, perhaps, a trifle credulous, a little eager to explain obscure practices by an instant appeal to the supernormal; Brother Jetzer, the Jacobin of Berne, can only have been either the tool of his superiors or a cunning impostor; Matthew Hopkins was an unmitigated scoundrel who preyed upon the fears of the Essex franklins whilst he emptied their pockets; Lord Torphichen’s son was an idle mischievous boy whose pranks not merely deluded both his father and the Rev. Mr. John Wilkins, but caused considerable mystification and amaze throughout the whole of Calder; Anne Robinson, Mrs. Golding’s maid, and the two servant lasses of Baldarroch were prestidigitators of no common sleight and skill; and all these examples of ignorance, gullibility, malice, trickery, and imposture sight easily be multiplied twenty times over and twenty times again, yet when every allowance has been made, every possible explanation exhausted, there persists a congeries of solid proven fact which cannot be ignored, save indeed by the purblind prejudice of the rationalist, and cannot be accounted for, save that we recognize there were and are individuals and organizations deliberately, nay, even enthusiastically, devoted to the service of evil, greedy of such emotions and experiences, rewards the thraldom of wickedness may bring.
The sceptic notoriously refuses to believe in Witchcraft, but a sanely critical examination of the evidence at the witch-trials will show that a vast amount of the modern vulgar incredulity is founded upon a complete misconception of the facts, and it may be well worth while quite briefly to view and correct some of the more common objections that are so loosely and so repeatedly maintained. There are many points which are urged as proving the fatuous absurdity and a demonstrable impossibility of the whole system, and yet there is not one of these phenomena which is not capable of a satisfactory, and often a simple, elucidation. Perhaps the first thought of a witch that will occur to the man in the street is that of a hag on a broomstick flying up the chimney through the air. This has often been pictorially impressed on his imagination, not merely by woodcuts and illustrations traditionally presented in books, but by the brush of great painters such as Queverdo’s Le Départ au Sabbat, Le Départ pour le Sabbat of David Teniers, and Goya’s midnight fantasies. The famous Australian artist, Norman Lindsay, has a picture To The Sabbat[5] where witches are depicted wildly rushing through the air on the backs of grotesque pigs and hideous goats. Shakespeare, too, elaborated the idea, and “Hover through the fog and filthy air” has impressed itself upon the English imagination. But to descend from the airy realms of painting and poetry to the hard ground of actuality. Throughout the whole of the records there are very few instances when a witness definitely asserted that he had seen a witch carried through the air mounted upon a broom or stick of any kind, and on every occasion there is patent and obvious exaggeration to secure an effect. Sometimes the witches themselves boasted of this means of transport to impress their hearers. Boguet records that Claudine Boban, a young girl whose head was turned with pathological vanity, obviously a monomaniac who must at all costs occupy the centre of the stage and be the cynosure of public attention, confessed that she had been to the Sabbat, and this was undoubtedly the case; but to walk or ride on horseback to the Sabbat were far too ordinary methods of locomotion, melodrama and the marvellous must find their place in her account and so she alleged: “that both she and her mother used to mount on a broom, and so making their exit by the chimney in this fashion they flew through the air to the Sabbat.”[6] Julian Cox (1664) said that one evening when she was in the fields about a mile away from the house “there came riding towards her three persons upon three Broom-staves, born up about a yard and a half from the ground.”[7] There is obvious exaggeration here; she saw two men and one woman bestriding brooms and leaping high a in the air. They were, in fact, performing a magic rite, a figure of a dance. So it is recorded of the Arab crones that “In the time of the Munkidh the witches rode about naked on a stick between the graves of the cemetery of Shaizar.”[8] Nobody can refuse to believe that the witches bestrode sticks and poles and in their ritual capered to and fro in this manner, a sufficiently grotesque, but by no means an impossible, action. And this bizarre ceremony, evidence of which—with no reference to flying through the air—is frequent, has been exaggerated and transformed into the popular superstition that sorcerers are carried aloft and so transported from place to place, a wonder they were all ready to exploit in proof of their magic powers. And yet it is not impossible that there should have been actual instances of levitation. For, outside the lives of the Saints, spiritistic séances afford us examples of this supernormal phenomenon, which, if human evidence is worth anything at all, are beyond all question proven.
As for the unguents wherewith the sorcerers anointed themselves we have the actual formulæ for this composition, and Professor A. J. Clark, who has examined these,[9] considers that it is possible a strong application of such liniments might produce unwonted excitement and even delirium. But long ago the great demonologists recognized and laid down that of themselves the unguents possessed no such properties as the witches supposed. “The ointment and lotion are just of no use at all to witches to aid their journey to the Sabbat,” is the well-considered opinion of Boguet who,[10] speaking with confident precision and finality, on this point is in entire agreement with the most sceptical of later rationalists.
The transformation of witches into animals and the extraordinary appearance at their orgies of “the Devil” under many a hideously unnatural shape, two points which have been repeatedly held up to scorn as self-evident impossibilities and proof conclusive of the untrustworthiness of the evidence and the incredibility of the whole system, can both be easily and fairly interpreted in a way which offers a complete and convincing explanation of these prodigies. The first metamorphosis, indeed, is mentioned and fully explained in the Liber Pœnitentialis[11] of S. Theodore, seventh Archbishop of Canterbury (668–690), capitulum xxvii, which code includes under the rubric De Idolatria et Sacrilegio “qui in Kalendas Ianuarii in ceruulo et in uitula uadit,” and prescribes: “If anyone at the Kalends of January goes about as a stag or a bull; that is, making himself into a wild animal and dressing in the skin of a herd animal, and putting on the heads of beasts; those who in such wise transform themselves into the appearance of a wild animal, penance for three years because this is devilish.” These ritual masks, furs, and hides, were, of course, exactly those the witches at certain ceremonies were wont to don for their Sabbats. There is ample proof that “the Devil” of the Sabbat was very frequently a human being, the Grand Master of the district, and since his officers and immediate attendants were also termed “Devils” by the witches some confusion has on occasion ensued. In a few cases where sufficient details are given it is possible actually to identify “the Devil” by name. Thus, among a list of suspected persons in the reign of Elizabeth we have “Ould Birtles, the great devil, Roger Birtles and his wife, and Anne Birtles.”[12] The evil William, Lord Soulis, of Hermitage Castle, often known as “Red Cap,” was “the Devil” of a coven of sorcerers. Very seldom “the Devil” was a woman. In May, 1569, the Regent of Scotland was present at S. Andrews “quhair a notabill sorceres callit Nicniven was condemnit to the death and burnt.” Now Nicniven is the Queen of Elphin, the Mistress of the Sabbat, and this office had evidently been filled by this witch whose real name is not recorded. On 8 November, 1576, Elizabeth or Bessy Dunlop, of Lyne, in the Barony of Dalry, Ayrshire, was tried for sorcery, and she confessed that a certain mysterious Thom Reid had met her and demanded that she should renounce Christianity and her baptism, and apparently worship him. There can be little doubt that he was “the Devil” of a coven, for the original details, which are very full, all point to this. He seems to have played his part with some forethought and skill, since when the accused stated that she often saw him in the churchyard of Dalry, as also in the streets of Edinburgh, where he walked to and fro among other people and handled goods that were exposed on bulks for sale without attracting any special notice, and was thereupon asked why she did not address him, she replied that he had forbidden her to recognize him on any such occasion unless he made a sign or first actually accosted her. She was “convict and burnt.”[13] In the case of Alison Peirson, tried 28 May, 1588, “the Devil” was actually her kinsman, William Sympson, and she “wes conuict of the vsing of Sorcerie and Witchcraft, with the Inuocatioun of the spreitis of the Deuill; speciallie in the visioune and forme of ane Mr. William Sympsoune, hir cousing and moder-brotheris-sone, quha sche affermit wes ane grit scoller and doctor of medicin.”[14] Conuicta et combusta is the terse record of the margin of the court-book.
One of the most interesting identifications of “the Devil” occurs in the course of the notorious trials of Dr. Fian and his associates in 1590–1. As is well known, the whole crew "Was in league with Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell, and even at the time well-founded gossip, and something more a than gossip, freely connected his name with the spells, Sabbats, and orgies of the witches. He was vehemently suspected of the black art; he was an undoubted client of warlocks and poisoners; his restless ambition almost overtly aimed at the throne, and the witch covens were one and all frantically attempting the life of King James. There can be no sort of doubt that Bothwell was the moving force who energized and directed the very elaborate and numerous organization of demonolaters, which was almost accidentally brought to light, to be fiercely crushed by the draconian vengeance of a monarch justly frightened for his crown and his life.
In the nineteenth century both Albert Pike of Charleston and his successor Adriano Lemmi have been identified upon abundant authority as being Grand Masters of societies practising Satanism, and as performing the hierarchical functions of “the Devil” at the modern Sabbat.
God, so far as His ordinary presence and action in Nature are concerned, is hidden behind the veil of secondary causes, and when God’s ape, the Demon, can work so successfully and obtain not merely devoted adherents but fervent worshippers by human agency, there is plainly no need for him to manifest himself in person either to particular individuals or at the Sabbats, but none the less, that he can do so and has done so is certain, since such is the sense of the Church, and there are many striking cases in the records and trials which are to be explained in no other way.
That, as Burns Begg pointed out, the witches not unseldom “seem to have been undoubtedly the victims of unscrupulous and designing knaves, who personated Satan”[15] is no palliation of their crimes, and therefore they are not one PLATE II
THE WORLD TOST AT TENNIS
The First Quarto
We have seen that the witches were upon occasion wont to array themselves in skins and ritual masks and there is complete evidence that the hierophant at the Sabbat, when a human being played that rôle, generally wore a corresponsive, if somewhat more elaborate, disguise. Nay more, as regards the British Isles at least—and it seems clear that in other countries the habit was very similar—we possess a pictorial representation of “the Devil” as he appeared to the witches. During the famous Fian trials Agnes Sampson confessed: “The deuell wes cled in ane blak goun with ane blak hat vpon his head. . . . His faice was terrible, his noise lyk the bek of ane egle, greet bournyng eyn; his handis and leggis wer herry, with clawes vpon his handis, and feit lyk the griffon.”[16] In the pamphlet Newes from Scotland, Declaring the Damnable life and death of Doctor Fian[17] we have a rough woodcut, repeated twice, which shows “the Devil” preaching from the North Berwick pulpit to the whole coven of witches, and allowing for the crudity of the draughtsman and a few unimportant differences of detail—the black gown and hat are not portrayed—the demon in the picture is exactly like the description Agnes Sampson gave. It must be remembered, too, that at the Sabbat she was obviously in a state of morbid excitation, in part due to deep cups of heady wine, the time was midnight, the place a haunted old church, the only light a few flickering candles that burned with a ghastly blue flame.
Now “the Devil” as he is shown in the Newes from Scotland illustration is precisely the Devil who appears upon the title-page of Middleton and Rowley’s Masque, The World tost at Tennis, 4to, 1620. This woodcut presents an episode towards the end of the masque, and here the Devil in traditional disguise, a grim black hairy shape with huge beaked nose, monstrous claws, and the cloven hoofs of a griffin, in every particular fits the details so closely observed by Agnes Sampson, I have no doubt that the drawing for the masque was actually made in the theatre, for although this kind of costly and decorative entertainment was almost always designed for court or some great nobleman’s house we know that The World tost at Tennis was produced with considerable success on the public stage “By the Prince his Seruants.” The dress, then, of “the Devil” at the Sabbats seems frequently to have been an elaborate theatrical costume, such as might have been found in the stock wardrobe of a rich playhouse at London, but which would have had no such associations for provincial folk and even simpler rustics.
From time to time the sceptics have pointed to the many eases upon record of a victim’s sickness or death following the witch’s curse, and have incredulously inquired if it be possible that a malediction should have such consequences. Whilst candidly remarking that personally I believe there is power for evil and even for destruction in such a bane, that a deadly anathema launched with concentrated hate and all the energy of volition may bring unhappiness and fatality in its train, I would—since they will not allow this—answer their objections upon other lines. When some person who had in any way annoyed the witch was to be harmed or killed, it was obviously convenient, when practicable, to follow up the symbolism of the solemn imprecation, or it might be of the melted wax image riddled with pins, by a dose of subtly administered poison, which would bring about the desired result, whether sickness or death; and from the evidence concerning the witches’ victims, who so frequently pined owing to a wasting disease, it seems more than probable that lethal drugs were continually employed, for as Professor A. J. Clark records “the society of witches had a very creditable knowledge of the art of poisoning,”[18] and they are known to have freely used aconite, deadly nightshade (belladonna), and hemlock.
So far then from the confessions of the witches being mere hysteria and hallucination they are proved, even upon the most material interpretation, to be in the main hideous and horrible fact.
In choosing examples to demonstrate this I have as yet referred almost entirely to the witchcraft which raged from the middle of the thirteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth century, inasmuch as that was the period when the diabolic cult reached its height, when it spread as a blight and a scourge throughout Europe and flaunted its most terrific proportions. But it must not for a moment be supposed, as has often been superficially believed, that Witchcraft was a product of the Middle Ages, and that only then did authority adopt measures of repression and legislate against the warlock and the sorceress. If attention has been concentrated upon that period it is because during those and the succeeding centuries Witchcraft blazed forth with unexampled virulence and ferocity, that it threatened the peace, nay in some degree, the salvation of mankind. But even pagan emperors had issued edicts absolutely forbidding goetic theurgy, confiscating grimoires (fatidici libri), and visiting necromancers with death. In A.U.C. 721 during the triumvirate of Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus, all astrologers and charmers were banished.[19] Maecenas called upon Augustus to punish sorcerers, and plainly stated that those who devote themselves to magic are despisers of the gods.[20] More than two thousand popular books of spells, both in Greek and Latin, were discovered in Rome and publicly burned.[21] In the reign of Tiberius a decree of the Senate exiled all traffickers in occult arts; Lucius Pituanius, a notorious wizard, they threw from the Tarpeian rock, and another, Publius Martius, was executed more prisco outside the Esquiline gate.[22]
Under Claudius the Senate reiterated the sentence of banishment: “De mathematicis Italia pellendis factum Senatus consultum, atrox et irritum,” says Tacitus.[23] During the few months he was emperor Vitellius proceeded with implacable severity against all soothsayers and diviners; many of whom, when accused, he ordered for instant execution, not even affording them the tritest formality of a trial.[24] Vespasian, again, his successor, refused to permit scryers and enchanters to set foot in Italy, strictly enforcing the existent statutes.[25] It is clear from all these stringent laws, and the list of examples might be greatly extended, that although under the Cæsars omens were respected, oracles were consulted, the augurs honoured, and haruspices revered, the dark influences and foul criminality of the reverse of that dangerous science were recognized and its professors punished with the full force of repeated legislation.
M. de Cauzons has expressed himself somewhat vigorously when speaking of writers who trace the origins of Witchcraft to the Middle Ages: “C’est une mauvaise plaisanterie,” he remarks,[26] “ou une contrevérité flagrante, d’affirmer que la sorcellerie naquit au Moyen-Age, et d’attribuer son existence à l’influence ou aux croyances de l’Eglise.” (It is either a silly jest or inept irony to pretend that Witchcraft arose in the Middle Ages, to attribute its existence to the influence or the beliefs of the Catholic Church.)
An even more erroneous assertion is the charge which has been not infrequently but over-emphatically brought forward by partial ill-documented historians to the effect that the European crusade against witches, the stern and searching prosecutions with the ultimate penalty of death at the stake, as are entirely due to the Bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, 5 December, 1484, of Pope Innocent VIII; or that at any rate this famous document, if it did not actually initiate the campaign, blew to blasts of flame and fury the smouldering and half-cold embers. This is most preposterously affirmed by Mackay, who does not hesitate to write[27]: “There happened at that time to be a pontiff at the head of the Church who had given much of his attention to the subject of Witchcraft, and who, with the intention of rooting out the supposed crime, did more to increase it than any other man that ever lived. John Baptist Cibo, elected to the papacy in 1485,[28] under the designation of Innocent VIII, was sincerely alarmed at the number of witches, and launched forth his terrible manifesto against them. In his celebrated bull of 1488, he called the nations of Europe to the rescue of the Church of Christ upon earth, ‘imperilled by the arts of Satan’ ” which last sentence seems to be a very fair statement of fact. Lecky notes the Bull of Innocent which, he extravagantly declares, “gave a fearful impetus to the Persecution.”[29] Dr. Davidson, in a brief but slanderous account of this great pontiff, gives angry prominence to his severity “against sorcerers, magicians, and witches.”[30] It is useless to cite more of these superficial and crooked judgements; but since even authorities of weight and value have been deluded and fallen into the snare it is worth while labouring the point a little and stressing the fact that the Bull of Innocent VIII was only one of a long series of Papal ordinances dealing with the suppression of a monstrous and almost universal evil.[31]
The first Papal Bull directly launched against the black art and its professors was that of Alexander IV, 13 December, 1258, addressed to the Franciscan inquisitors. And it is worth while here to examine precisely what was the earlier connotation of the terms “inquisitor” and “inquisition,” so often misunderstood, as our research, though brief, will throw a flood of light upon the subject of Witchcraft, and, moreover, incidentally will serve to explain how that those writers who assign the beginnings of Witchcraft to the Middle Ages, although most certainly and even demonstrably in error, have at any rate been very subtilely and easily led wrong, since sorcery in the Middle Ages was violently unmasked and the whole horrid craft then first authoritatively exposed in its darkest colours and most abominable manifestations, as had indeed existed from the first, but had been carefully hidden and scrupulously concealed.
By the term Inquisition (inquirere = to look into) is now generally understood a special ecclesiastical institution for combating or suppressing heresy, and the Inquisitors are the officials attached to the said institution, more particularly judges who are appointed to investigate the charges of heresy and to try the persons brought before them on those charges. During the first twelve centuries the Church was loath to deal with heretics save by argument and persuasion; obstinate and avowed heretics were, of course, excluded from her communion, a defection which in the ages of faith, naturally involved them in many and great difficulties. S. Augustine,[32] S. John Chrysostom,[33] S. Isidore of Seville[34] in the seventh century, and a number of other Doctors and Fathers held that for no cause whatsoever should the Church shed blood; but, on the other hand, the imperial successors of Constantine justly considered that they were obliged to have a care for the material welfare of the Church here on earth, and that heresy is always inevitably and inextricably entangled with attempts on the social order, always anarchical, always political. Even the pagan persecutor Diocletian recognized this fact, which heretics, until they obtain the upper hand, have throughout the ages consistently denied and endeavoured to disguise. For in 287, less than two years after his accession, he sent to the stake the leaders of the Manichees; the majority of their followers were beheaded, and a few less culpable sent to perpetual forced labour in the government mines. Again in 296 he orders their extermination (stirpitus amputari) as a sordid, vile, and impure sect. So the Christian Cæsars, persuaded that the protection of orthodoxy was their sacred duty, began to issue edicts for the suppression of heretics as being traitors and anti-social revolutionaries.[35] But the Church protested, and when Priscillian, Bishop of Avila, being found guilty of heresy and sorcery,[36] was condemned to death by Maximus at Trier in 384, S. Martin of Tours addressed the Emperor in such plain terms that it was solemnly promised the sentence should not be carried into effect. However, the pledge was broken, and S. Martin’s indignation was such that for a long while he refused to hold communion with those who had been in any way responsible for the execution, which S. Ambrose roundly stigmatized as a heinous crime.[37] Even more crushing were the words of Pope S. Siricius, before whom Maximus was fain to humble himself in lowliest penitence, and the supreme pontiff actually excommunicated Bishop Felix of Trier for his part in the deed.
From time to time heretics were put to death under the civil law to which they were amenable, as in 556 when a band of Manichees were executed at Ravenna. Pope Pelagius I, who was consecrated that very year, when Paulinus of Fossombrone, rejecting his authority, openly stirred up schism and revolt, merely relegated the recalcitrant bishop to a monastery. Saint Cæsarius of Arles, who died in 547, speaking[38] of the punishment to be meted out to those who obstinately persevere in overt paganism, recommends that they should first be remonstrated with and reprimanded, that they should if possible be thus persuaded of their errors; but if they persist certain corporal chastisement is to be given; and in extreme cases a course of domestic discipline, the cutting of the hair close as a mark of indignity and confinement within doors under restraint, may be adopted. There is no hint of anything more than private measures, no calling in of any ecclesiastical authority, far less an appeal to any punitive tribunal.
In the days of Charlemagne the aged Elipandus, Archbishop of Toledo, taught an offshoot on Nestorian heresy, Adoptionism, a crafty but deadly error, to which he won the slippery dialectician Felix of Urgel. Felix, as a Frankish prelate, was summoned to Aix-la-Chapelle. A synod condemned his doctrine and he recanted, only to retract his words and to reiterate his blasphemies. He was again condemned, and again he recanted. But he proved shifty and tricksome to the last. For after his death Agobar of Lyons found amongst his papers a scroll asserting that of this heresy he was fully persuaded, in spite of any contradictions to which he might hypocritically subscribe. Yet Felix only suffered a short detention at Rome, whilst no measures seem to have been taken against Elipandus, who died in his errors. It was presumably considered that orthodoxy could be sufficiently served and vindicated by the zeal of such great names as Beatus, Abbot of Libana; Etherius, Bishop of Osma; S. Benedict of Aniane; and the glorious Alcuin.[39]
Some forty years later, about the middle of the ninth century, Gothescalch, a monk of Fulda, caused great scandal by obstinately and impudently maintaining that Christ had not died for all mankind, a foretaste of the Calvinistic heresy. He was condemned at the Synods of Mainz in 848, and of Kiersey-sur-Oise in 849, being sentenced to flogging and imprisonment, punishments then common in monasteries for various infractions of the rule. In this case, as particularly flagrant, it was Hinemar, Archbishop of Rheims, a prelate notorious for his severity, who sentenced the culprit to incarceration. But Gothescalch had by his pernicious doctrines been the cause of serious disturbances; and his inflammatory harangues had excited tumults, sedition, and unrest, bringing odium upon the sacred habit. The sentence of the Kiersey Synod ran: “Frater Goteschale . . . quia et ecclesiastica et ciuilia negotia contra propositum et nomen monachi conturbare iura ecclesiastica præsumpsisti, durissimis uerberibus te cagistari et secundum ecclesiasticas regulas ergastulo retrudi, auctoritate episcopali decernimus.” (Brother Gothescalch, . . . because thou hast dared—contrary to thy monastic calling and vows—to concern thyself in worldly as well as spiritual businesses and hast violated all ecclesiastical law and order, by our episcopal authority we condemn thee to be severely scourged and according to the provision of the Church to be closely imprisoned.)
From these instances it will be seen that the Church throughout all those centuries of violence, rapine, invasion, and war, when often primitive savagery reigned supreme and the most hideous cruelty was the general order of the day, dealt very gently with the rebel and the heretic, whom she might have executed wholesale with the greatest ease; no voice would have been raised in protest save that of her own pontiffs, doctors, and Saints; nay, rather, such repression would have been universally applauded as eminently proper and just. But it was the civil power who arraigned the anarch and the misbeliever, who sentenced him to death.
About the year 1000, however, the venom of Manichæism obtained a new footing in the West, where it had died out early in the sixth century. Between 1030–40 an important Manichæan community was discovered at the Castle of Monteforte, near Asti, in Piedmont. Some of the members were arrested by the Bishop of Asti and a number of noblemen in the neighbourhood, and upon their refusal to retract the civil arm burned them. Others, by order of the Archbishop of Milan, Ariberto, were brought to that city since he hoped to convert them. They answered his efforts by attempts to make proselytes; whereupon Lanzano, a prominent noble and leader of the popular party, caused the magistrates to intervene and when they had been taken into the custody of the State they were executed without further respite. For the next two hundred years Manichæism spread its infernal teaching in secret until, towards the year 1200, the plague had infected all Italy and Southern Europe, had reached northwards to Germany, where it was completely organized, and was not unknown in England, since as early as 1159 thirty foreign Manichees had privily settled here. They were discovered in 1166, and handed over to the secular authorities by the Bishops of the Council of Oxford. In high wrath Henry II ordered them them to be scourged, branded in the forehead, and cast adrift in the cold of winter, straightly forbidding any to succour such vile criminals, so all perished from cold and exposure. Manichæism furthermore split up into an almost infinite number of sects and systems, prominent amongst which were the Cathari, the Aldonistæ and Speronistæ, the Concorrezenses of Lombardy, the Bagnolenses, the Albigenses, Pauliciani, Patarini, Bogomiles, the Waldenses, Tartarins, Beghards, Pauvres de Lyon.
It must be clearly borne in mind that these heretical bodies with their endless ramifications were not merely exponents of erroneous religious and intellectual beliefs by which they morally corrupted all who came under their influence, but they were the avowed enemies of law and order, red-hot anarchists who would stop at nothing to gain their ends. Terrorism and secret murder were their most frequent weapons. In 1199 the Patarini followers of Ermanno of Parma and Gottardo of Marsi, two firebrands of revolt, foully assassinated S. Peter Parenzo, the governor of Orvieto. On 6 April, 1252, whilst returning from Como to Milan, as he passed through a lonely wood S. Peter of Verona was struck down by the axe of a certain Carino, a Manichæan bravo, who had been hired to the deed.[40] By such acts they sought to intimidate whole districts, and to compel men’s allegiance with blood and violence. The Manichæan system was in truth a simultaneous attack upon the Church and the State, a desperate but well-planned organization to destroy the whole fabric of society, to reduce civilization to chaos. In the first instance, as the Popes began to perceive the momentousness of the struggle they engaged the bishops to stem the tide. At the Council of Tours, 1163, Alexander III called upon the bishops of Gascony to take active measures for the suppression of these revolutionaries, but at the Lateran Council of 1179 it was found these disturbers of public order had sown such sedition in Languedoc that an appeal was made to the secular power to check the evil. In 1184 Lucius III issued from Verona his Bull Ad Abolendam which expressly mentions many of the heretics by name, Cathari, Patarini, Humiliati, Pauvres de Lyon, Pasagians, Josephins, Aldonistæ. The situation had fast developed and becomes serious. Heretics were to be sought out and suitably punished, by which, however, capital punishment is not is intended. Innocent III, although adding nothing essential to these regulations yet gave them fuller scope and clearer definition. In his Decretals he precisely speaks of accusation, denunciation, and inquisition, and it is obvious that these measures were necessary in the face of a great secret society aiming at nothing less than the destruction of the established order, for all the sectaries were engaged upon the most zealous propaganda, and their adherents had spread like a network over the greater part of Europe. The members bore the title of “brother” and “sister,” and had words and signs by which the initiate could recognize one another without betraying themselves to others.[41] Ivan de Narbonne, who was converted from this heresy, in a letter to Giraldus, Archbishop of Bordeaux, as quoted by Matthew of Paris, says that in every city where he travelled he was always able to make himself known by signs.[42]
It was necessary that the diocesan bishops should be assisted in their heavy task of tracking down heretics, and accordingly the Holy See had resource to legates who were furnished with extraordinary powers to cope with so perplexing a situation. In 1177 as legate of Alexander III, Peter, Cardinal of San Crisogono, at the particular request of Count Raymond V, visited the Toulouse district to check the rising tide of Catharist doctrine.[43] In 1181, Henry, Abbot of Clairvaux, who had been in his suite, now Cardinal of Albano, as legate of the same Pope, received the submission of various heretical leaders, and, so extensive were his powers, solemnly deposed the Archbishops of Lyons and Narbonne. In 1203 Peter of Castelnau and Raoul were acting at Toulouse on behalf of Innocent III, seemingly with plenipotentiary authority. The next year Arnauld Amaury, Abbot of Citeaux, was joined to them to form a triple tribunal with absolute power to judge heretics in the provinces of Aix, Arles, Narbonne, and the adjoining dioceses. At the death of Innocent III (1216) there existed an organization to search out heretics; episcopal tribunals at which often sat an assessor (the future inquisitor) to watch the conduct of the case; and above all the legate to whom he might report. The legate, from his position, was naturally a prelate occupied with a vast number of urgent affairs—Arnauld Amaury, for example, was absent for a considerable time to take part in the General Chapter at Cluny—and gradually more and more authority was delegated to the assessor, who insensibly developed into the Inquisitor, a special but permanent judge acting in the name of the Pope, by whom he was invested with the right and the duty to deal legally with offences against the Faith. And as just at this time there came into being two new Orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans, whose members by their theological training and the very nature of their vows seemed eminently fitted to perform the inquisitorial task with complete success, absolutely uninfluenced by any worldly motive, it is natural that the new officials should have been selected from these Orders, and, owing to the importance attached by the Dominicans to the study of divinity, especially from their learned ranks.
It is very obvious why the Holy See so sagaciously preferred to assign the prosecution of heretics, a matter of the first importance, to an extraordinary tribunal rather than leave the trials in the hands of the bishops. Without taking into consideration the fact that these new duties would have seriously encroached upon, if not wholly absorbed, the time and activities of a bishop, the prelates who ruled most dioceses were the subject of some monarch with whom they might have come in conflict on many a delicate point which could easily be conceived to arise, and the result of such disagreement would have been fraught with endless political difficulties and internal embarrassments. A court of religious, responsible to the Pope alone, would act more fairly, more freely, without fear or favour. The profligate Philip I of France, for example, during his long, worthless, and dishonoured reign (1060–1108), by his evil courses drew upon himself the censure of the Church, whereupon he banished the Bishop of Beauvais and revoked the decisions of the episcopal courts.[44] In a letter[45] to William, Count of Poitiers, Pope S. Gregory VII energetically declares that if the King does not cease from molesting the bishops and interfering with their judicature a sentence of excommunication will be launched. In another letter the same pontiff complains of the disrespect shown to the ecclesiastical tribunals, and addressing the French bishops he cries: “Your king, who sooth to say should be termed not a king but a cruel tyrant, inspired by Satan, is the head and cause of these evils. For he has notoriously passed all his days in foulest crimes, in seeking to do wickedness and to ensue it.”[46] The conflict of the bishops of a realm with an unworthy and evil monarch is a commonplace of history. These troubles could scarcely arise in the case of courts forane.
The words “inquisition” and “inquisitors” began definitely to acquire their accepted signification in the earlier half of the thirteenth century. Thus in 1235 Gregory IX writes to the Archbishop of Sens: “Know then that we have charged the Provincial of the Order of Preachers in this same realm to nominate certain of his brethren, who are best fitted for so weighty a business, as Inquisitors that they may proceed against all notorious evildoers in the aforesaid realm . . . and we also charge thee, dear Brother, that thou shouldest be instant and zealous in this matter of establishing an Inquisition by the appointment of those who seem to be best fitted for such a work, and let thy loins be girded, Brother, to fight boldly the battles of the Lord.”[47] In 1246 Innocent IV wrote to the Superiors of the Franciscans giving them leave to recall at will: “those brethren who have been sent abroad to preach the Mystery of the Cross of Christ, or to seek out and take measure against the plague sore of heresy.”[48]
All the heresies, and the Secret Societies of heretics, which infested Europe during the Middle Ages were Gnostic, and even more narrowly, Manichæan in character. The Gnostics arose almost with the advent of Christianity as a School or Schools who explained the teachings of Christ by blending them with the doctrines of pagan fantasts, and thus they claimed to have a Higher and a Wider Knowledge, the Γνῶσις, the first exponent of which was unquestionably Simon Magus. “Two problems borrowed from heathen philosophy,” says Mansel,[49] “were intruded by Gnosticism on the Christian revelation, the problem of absolute existence, and the problem of the Origin of Evil.” The Gnostics denied the existence of Free-will, and therefore Evil was not the result of Man’s voluntary transgression, but must in some way have emanated from the Creator Himself. Arguing on these lines the majority asserted that the Creator must have been a malignant power, Lord of the Kingdom of Darkness, opposed to the Supreme and Ineffable God. This doctrine was taught by the Gnostic sects of Persia, which became deeply imbued with the religion of Zoroaster, who assumed the existence of two original and independent Powers of Good and of Evil. Each of these Powers is of equal strength, and supreme in his own dominions, whilst constant war is waged between the two. This doctrine was particularly held by the Syrian Gnostics, the Ophites, the Naasseni, the Peratæ, the Sethians, amongst whom the serpent was the principal symbol. As the Creator of the world was evil, the Tempter, the Serpent, was the benefactor of man. In fact, in some creeds he was identified with the Logos. The Cainites carried out the Ophite doctrines to their fullest logical conclusion. Since the Creator, the God of the Old Testament, is evil all that is commended by the Scripture must be evil, and conversely all that is condemned therein is good. Cain, Korah, the rebels, are to be imitated and admired. The one true Apostle was Judas Iscariot. This cult is very plainly marked in the Middle Ages among the Luciferians; and Cainite ceremonies have their place in the witches’ Sabbat.[50]
All this Gnostic teaching was summed up in the gospel of the Persian Mani, who, when but a young man of twenty-six, seems first to have proclaimed in the streets and bazaars of Seleucia-Ctesiphon his supposed message on Sunday, 20 March, 242, the coronation festival of Shapur I. He did not meet with immediate success in his own country, but here and there his ideas took deep root. In 276–277, however, he was seized and crucified by the grandson of Shapur, Bahram I, his disciples being relentlessly pursued. Whenever Manichees were discovered they were brought to swift justice, executed, held up to universal hatred and contempt. They were considered by Moslems as not merely Unbelievers, the followers of a false impostor, but unnatural and unsocial, a menace to the State. It was for no light cause that the Manichee was loathed and abhorred both by faithful Christian and by those who proclaimed Mohammed as the true prophet of Allah. But later Manichæism spread in every direction to an extraordinary degree, which may perhaps be accounted for by the fact that it is in some sense a synthesis of the Gnostic philosophies, the theory of two eternal principles, good and evil, being especially emphasized. Moreover, the historical Jesus, “the Jewish Messias, whom the Jews crucified,” was “a devil, who was justly punished for interfering in the work of the Æon Jesus,” who was neither born nor suffered death. As time went on, the elaborate cosmogony of Mani disappeared, but the idea that the Christ must be repudiated remained. And logically, then, worship is due to the enemy of Christ, and a sub-sect, the Messalians or Euchites, taught that divine honours must be paid to Satan, who is further to be propitiated by means of every possible outrage done to Christ. This, of course, is plain and simple Satanism openly avowed. Carpocrates even went so far as to aggravate the teaching of the Cainites, for he made the performance of every species of sin forbidden in the Old Testament a solemn duty, since this was the completest mode of showing defiance to the Evil Creator and Ruler of the World. This doctrine was wholly that of mediæval witches, and is flaunted by modern Satanists. Although the Manichees affected the greatest purity, it is quite certain that not unchastity but the act of generation alone was opposed to their views, secretly they practised the most hideous obscenities.[51] The Messalians in particular, vaunted a treatise Asceticus, which was condemned by the Third General Council of Ephesus (431) as “that filthy book of this heresy,” and in Armenia, in the fifth century, special edicts were passed to restrain their immoralities, so that their very name became the equivalent for “lewdness.” The Messalians survived unto the Middle Ages as Bogomiles.
Attention has already been drawn to the striking fact that even Diocletian legislated with no small vigour against the Manichees, and when we find Valentinian I and his son Gratian, although tolerant of other bodies, passing laws of equal severity in this regard (372), we feel that such interdiction is especially significant. Theodosius I, by a statute of 381, declared Manichees to be without civil rights, and incapable of inheriting; in the following year he condemned them to death, and in 389 he sternly directed the rigorous enforcement to the letter of these penalties.
Valentinian II confiscated their goods, annulled their wills, and sent them into exile. Honorius in 399 renewed the draconian measures of his predecessors; in 405 he heavily fined all governors of provinces or civil magistrates who were slack in carrying out his orders; in 407 he pronounced the sect outlaws and public criminals having no legal status whatsoever, and in 408 he reiterated the former enactments in meticulous detail to afford no loophole of escape. Theodosius II (423), again, repeated this legislation, whilst Valentinian III passed fresh laws in 425 and 445. Anastasius once more decreed the penalty of death, which was even extended by Justin and Justinian to converts from Manichæism who did not at once denounce their former co-religionists to the authorities. This catena of laws which aims at nothing less than extermination is of singular moment.
About 660 arose the Paulicians, a Manichæan sect, who rejected the Old Testament, the Sacraments, and the Priesthood. In 835 it was realized that the government of this body was political and aimed at revolution and red anarchy. In 970 John Zimisces fixed their headquarters in Thrace. In 1115 Alexis Comnenus established himself during the winter at Philippopolis, and avowed his intention of converting them, the only result being that the heretics were driven westward and spread rapidly in France and Italy.
The Bogomiles were also Manichees. They openly worshipped Satan, repudiating Holy Mass and the Passion, rejecting Holy Baptism for some foul ceremony of their own, and possessing a peculiar version of the Gospel of S. John. As Cathari these wretches had their centre for France at Toulouse; for Germany at Cologne; whilst in Italy, Milan, Florence, Orvieto, and Viterbo were their rallying-points. Their meetings were often held in the open air, on mountains, or in the depths of some lone valley; the ritual was very secret, but we know that at night they celebrated their Eucharist or Consolamentum, when all stood in a circle round a table covered with a white cloth and numerous torches were kindled, the service being closed by the reading of the first seventeen verses of their transfigured gospel. Bread was broken, but there is a tradition that the words of consecration were not pronounced according to the Christian formula; in some instances they were altogether omitted.
During the eleventh century, then, there began to spread throughout Europe a number of mysterious organizations whose adherents, in a secrecy that was all but absolute, practised obscure rites embodying their beliefs, the central feature of which was the adoration of the evil principle, the demon. But what is this save Satanism, or in other words Witchcraft? It is true that when these heresies came into sharp conflict with the Catholic Church they developed on lines which lost various non-essential accretions and Eastern subtleties of extravagant thought, but the motive of the Manichæan doctrines and of Witchcraft is one and the same, and the punishment of Manichees and of witches was the same death at the stake. The fact that these heretics were recognized as sorcerers will explain, as nothing else can, the severity of the statutes against them, evidence of no ordinary depravity, and early in the eleventh century Manichee and warlock are recognized as synonymous.
The sorcery of the Middle Ages, says Carl Haas, a learned and impartial authority, was born from the heresies of earlier epochs, and just as Christian authority had dealt with heresy, so did it deal with the spawn witchcraft. Both alike are the result of doubts, of faithlessness, a disordered imagination, pride and presumption, intellectual arrogance; sick phantasy both, they grow and flourish apace in shadow and sin, until right reasoning, and sometimes salutary force, are definitely opposed to them. The authors of the Malleus Maleficarum clearly identify heresy and Witchcraft. When the Prince Bishop of Bamberg, John George II Fuchs von Dornheim, (1623–33), built a strong prison especially for sorcerers, the Drudenhaus, he set over the great door a figure of Justice, and inscribed above Vergil’s words: Discite iustitiam moniti et non temnere Diuos (Æneid, VI, 620),
(Behold, and learn to practise right,
Nor do the blessed Gods despite).
To the right and the left were engraved upon two panels, the one Latin, the other German, two verses from the Bible, 3 Kings ix. 8, 9; which are Englished as follows: “This house shall be made an example of: every one that shall pass by it shall be astonished, and shall hiss, and say: Why hath the Lord done thus to this land, and to this house? And they shall answer: Because they forsook the Lord their God, who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and followed strange gods, and adored them, and worshipped them: therefore hath the Lord brought upon them all this evil.” This is a concise summary of the basic reason for the prosecution of witches, the standpoint of Christian authority, whose professors justly and logically regarded sorcery as being in essence heresy, to be suppressed by the same measures, to be punished with the same penalties.
In connexion with the close correlation between Witchcraft and heresy there is a very remarkable fact, the significance of which has—so far as I am aware—never been noted. The full fury of prosecution burst over England during the first half of the seventeenth century, that is to say, shortly after the era of a great religious upheaval, when the work of rehabilitation and recovery so nobly initiated by Queen Mary I had been wrecked owing to the pride, lust, and baseness of her sister. In Scotland, envenomed to the core with the poison of Calvin and Knox, fire and cord were seldom at rest. It is clear that heresy had brought Witchcraft swiftly in its train. Ireland has ever been singularly free from Witchcraft prosecutions, and with the rarest exceptions—chiefly, if not solely, the famous Dame Alice Kyteler case of 1324—the few trials recorded are of the seventeenth century and engineered by the Protestant party. The reason for this exemption is plain. Until the stranger forced his way into Ireland, heresy had no foothold there. That the Irish firmly believed in witches, we know, but the Devil’s claws were finely clipped.
In 1022 a number of Manichees were burned alive by order of Robert I. They had been condemned by a Synod at Orleans and refused to recant their errors.[52] A contemporary document clearly identifies them with witches, worshippers of the Demon, who appeared to them under the form of an animal. Other abominable rites are fully set forth, comparable to the pages of Sprenger, Bodin, Boguet, De Lancre, Guazzo, and the rest. The account runs as follows: “Before we proceed to other details I will at some length inform those who are as yet ignorant of these matters, how that food which they call Food from Heaven is made and provided. On certain nights of the year they all meet together in an appointed house, each one of them carrying a lantern in his hand. They then begin to sing the names of various demons, as though they were chanting a litany, until suddenly they perceive that the Devil has appeared in the midst of them in the shape of some animal or other. As he would seem to be visible to them all in some mysterious way they immediately extinguish the lights, and each one of them as quickly as he can seizes upon the woman, who chances to be nearest at hand. . . . When a child happens to be born . . . on the eighth day they all meet together and light a large fire in their midst, and then the child is passed through the fire, ceremonially, according to the sacrifices of the old heathen, and finally is burnt in the flames. The ashes are collected and reserved, with the same veneration as Christians are wont to reserve the Blessed Sacrament, and they give those who are on the point of death a portion of these ashes as if it were the Viaticum. There appears to be such power infused by the Devil into the said ashes that a man who belongs to these heretics and happens to have tasted even the smallest quantity of these ashes can scarcely ever be persuaded to abandon his heresies and to turn his thoughts towards the true path. It must suffice to give only these details, as a warning to all Christians to take no part in these abominations, and God forbid that curiosity should lead anybody to explore them.”[53]
At Forfar, in 1661, Helen Guthrie and four other witches exhumed the body of an unbaptised infant, which was buried in the churchyard near the south-east door of the church, “and took severall peices thereof, as the feet, hands, a pairt of the head, and a pairt of the buttock, and they made a py thereof, that they might eat of it, that by this meanes they might never make a confession (as they thought) of their witehcraftis.”[54]
The belief of 1022 and 1661 is the same, because it is the same organization. The very name of the Vaudois, stout heretics, survives in Voodoo worship, which is, in effect, African fetishism or Witchcraft transplanted to America soil.
In 1028 Count Alduin burned a number of Manichees at Angoulême, and the chronicle runs: “Interea iussu Alduini flammis exustæ sunt mulieres maleficæ extra urbem.”[55] (About this time certain evil women, heretics, were burned without the city by the command of Alduin.) The Templars, whose Order was suppressed and the members thereof executed on account of their sorceries, were clearly a Society of Gnostic heretics, active propagandists, closely connected with the Bogomiles and the Mandæans or Johannites.[56]
It is true that in his recent study The Religion of the Manichees,[57] Dr. F. G. Buskitt, with a wealth of interesting detail and research, has endeavoured to show that the Bogomiles, the Cathari, the Albigenses, and other unclean bodies only derived fragments of their teaching from Manichæan sources, and he definitely states “I think it misleading to call these sects, even the Albigensians, by the name of Manichees.” But in spite of his adroit special pleading the historical fact remains; although we may concede that the abominable beliefs of these various Gnostics were perhaps a deduction from, or a development of, the actual teaching of Mani. Yet none the less their evil was contained in his heresy and a logical consequence of it.
In the early years of this century important discoveries of Manichæan MSS. have been made. Three or four scientific expeditions to Chinese Turkestan brought back some thousands of fragments, especially from the neighbourhood of a town called Turfan. Many of these screeds are written in the peculiar script of the Manichees, some of which can be deciphered, although unfortunately the newly found documents are mere scraps, bits of torn books and rolls, and written in languages as yet imperfectly known. Much of the new doctrine is of the wildest and most fantastic theosophy, and the initiate were, as we know, sufficiently cunning not to commit the esoteric and true teachings to writing, but preferred that there should be an oral tradition. One important piece, the Khuastuanift, i.e. “Confession,” has been recovered almost in its entirety. It is in the old Turkestan Turkish language, and seems full of the most astounding contradictions or paradoxes, a consensus of double meanings and subtleties.
The question is asked whether we ought to consider Manichæism as an independent religion or a Christian heresy? Eznih of Kolb, the Armenian writer of the fifth century, when attacking Zoroastrianism, obviously treats Manichæism as a variety of Persian religion. The orthodox documents, however, from Mark the Deacon onwards treat Manichæism as in the main a Christian heresy and this is assuredly the correct view. There is in existence a polemical fragment, a single ill-preserved pair of leaves, in which the Manichæan writer pours forth horrid blasphemies and vilely attacks those who call Mary’s Son (Bar Maryam) the Son of Adonay.
It may be worth while here to say just a word correcting a curious old-fashioned misapprehension which once prevailed in certain quarters concerning the Albigenses, an error of which we occasionally yet catch the echoes, as when Mrs. Grenside wrote that the Albigenses were “a sect of the 14th century which, owing to their secret doctrine, endured much ecclesiastical persecution.”[58] The impression left, and it is one which was not altogether uncommon some seventy years ago, is that the Albigensian was a stern old Protestant father, Bible and sword in hand, who defended his hearth and home against the lawless brigands spurred on to attack him by priestly machinations. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. The Albigensian was a Satanist, a worshipper of the powers of evil, and he would have found short shrift indeed, fire and the stake, in Puritan England under Cromwell, or in Calvinistic Scotland had his practices been even dimly guessed at by the Kirk. As Dr. Arendzen well says[59]: “Albigensianism was not really a heresy against Christianity and the Catholic Church, it was a revolt against nature, a pestilential perversion of human instinct.”
Towards the end of the nineteenth century a Neo-Gnostic Church was formed by Fabre des Essarts, but that great pontiff Leo XIII promptly condemned it with fitting severity as a recrudescence of the old Albigensian heresy, complicated by the addition of new false and impious doctrines. It is said still to have a number of unhappy adherents. These Neo-Gnostics believe that the world is created by Satan, who is a powerful rival to the omnipotence of God. They also preach a dangerous communism, speciously masqued under some such titles as the “Brotherhood of Man” or the “Brotherhood of Nations.”
In 1900, after a letter from Joanny Bricaud,[60] the patriarch of universal Gnosticism at Lyons, where, in 1913, he was residing at 8, rue Bugeaud, the Neo-Gnostics joined with the Valentinians, a union approved by their pseudo-Council of Toulouse in 1903. But some years later Dr. Fugairon of Lyons, who adopted the name of Sophronius, amalgamated all the branches, with the exception of the Valentinians, under the name of the Gnostic Church of Lyons. These, however, although excluded, continued to follow their own way of salvation, and in 1906 formally addressed a legal declaration to the Republican Government defending their religious rights of association. Truly might Huysmans tell us that Satanism flourished at Lyons, “où toutes les hérésies survivent,” “where every heresy pullulates and is green.” These Gnostic assemblies are composed of “perfected ones,” male and female. The modern Valentinians, it is said, have a form of spiritual marriage, bestowing the name of Helen upon the mystic bride. The original founder of this sect, Valentinus, was, according to S. Epiphanius (Hœresis XXXI) born in Egypt, and educated at Alexandria. His errors led to excommunication and he died in Cyprus, about A.D. 160–161. His heresy is a fantastic medley of Greek and Oriental speculation, tinged with some vague colouring of Christianity. The Christology of Valentinus is especially confused. He seems to have supposed the existence of three redeemers, but Christ, the Son of Mary, did not have a real body and did not suffer. Even his more prominent disciples, Heracleon, Ptolemy, Marcos, and Bardesanes, widely differed from their master, as from one another. Many of the writings of these Gnostics, and a large number of excerpts from Valentinus’s own works yet survive.
One or two writers of the nineteenth century remarked that there seemed to be some connexion between certain points of the Sabbat ceremonial and the rites of various pagan deities, which is, of course, a perfectly correct observation. For we have seen that Witchcraft as it existed in Europe from the eleventh century was mainly the spawn of Gnostic heresy, and heresy by its very nature embraced and absorbed much of heathendom. In some sense Witchcraft was a descendant of the old pre-Christian magic, but it soon assumed a slightly different form, or rather at the advent of Christianity it was exposed and shown in its real foul essence as the worship of the Evil Principle, the Enemy of Mankind, Satan.
It may freely be acknowledged that there are certain symbols common to Christianity itself and to ancient religions. It would in truth be very surprising if, when seeking to propagate her doctrines in the midst of Græco-Roman civilization, the Church had adopted for her intercourse with the people a wholly unknown language, and had systematically repudiated everything that until then had served to give expression to religious feeling.
Within the limits imposed by the conventions of race and culture, the method of interpreting the emotions of the heart cannot be indefinitely varied, and it was natural that the new religion should appropriate and incorporate all that was good in a ritual much of which only required to be rightly interpreted and directed to become the language of the Christian soul aspiring to the one True God. Certain attitudes of prayer and reverence, the use of incense and of lamps burning day and night in the sanctuary, the offering of ex-votos as a testimony to benefits received, all these are man’s natural expressions of piety and gratitude towards a divine power, and it would be strange indeed if their equivalents were not met with in all religions.
Cicero tells us that at Agrigentum there was a much-venerated statue of Hercules, of which the mouth and chin were worn away by the many worshippers who pressed their lips to it.[61] The bronze foot of the statue of the first Pope, S. Peter, in Rome has not withstood any better the pious kisses of the faithful. Yet he were a very fool who imagined that modern Christians have learned anything from the Sicilian contemporaries of Verres. What is true is that the same thought in analogous circumstances has found natural expression after an interval of centuries in identical actions and attitudes.
Among the Greeks, heroes, reputed to be the mortal sons of some divinity, were specially honoured in the city with which they were connected by birth and through the benefits they had conferred upon it. After death they became the patrons and protectors of these towns. Every country, nay, almost every village, had such local divinities to whom monuments were raised and whom the people invoked in their prayers. The centre of devotion was generally the hero’s tomb, which was often erected in the middle of the agora, the nave of public life. In most cases it was sheltered by a building, a sort of chapel known as ἡρῷον. The celebrated temples, too, were not infrequently adorned with a great number of cenotaphs of heroes, just as the shrines of Saints are honoured in Christian churches.[62] More, the translations of the bones or ashes of heroes were common in Greece. Thus in the archonship of Apsephion, 469 B.C., the remains of Theseus were brought from Scyros to Athens, and carried into the city amid sacrifices and every demonstration of triumphal joy.[63] Thebes recovered from Ilion the bones of Hector, and presented to Athens those of Œdipus, to Lebadea those of Arcesilaus, and to Megara those of Aigialeus.[64]
The analogy between these ancient practices and Christianity may be pushed further yet. Just as, in our own churches, objects that have belonged to the Saints are exposed for the veneration of the faithful, so in the old temples visitors were shown divers curiosities whose connexion with a god or a hero would command their respect. At Minihi Tréguier we may reverence a fragment of the Breviary of S. Yves, at Sens the stole of S. Thomas of Canterbury, at Bayeux the chasuble of S. Regnobert, in S. Maria Maggiore the cincture and veil of S. Scholastica; so in various localities of Greece were exhibited the cittara of Paris, the lyre of Orpheus, portions of the ships of Agamemnon and Æneas. Can anything further be needed to prove that the veneration of Holy Relics is merely a pagan survival?
Superficially the theory seems plausible enough, and yet it will not stand a moment before the judgement of history. The cultus of the Saints and their Relics is not an outcome of ancient hero-worship, but of reverence for the Martyrs, and this can be demonstrated without any possibility of question. So here we have two very striking parallels, each of which has an analogous starting-point, two cults which naturally develop upon logical and similar lines, but without any interdependence whatsoever. Needless to say, the unbalanced folklorist, who is in general far too insufficiently equipped for any such inquiry, has rushed in with his theories—to his own utter undoing. And so, with regard to Witchcraft, there appear in the rites of the Sabbat and other hellish superstitions to be ceremonies which are directly derived from heathendom, but this, as a matter of fact, is far from the case. Accordingly we recognize that the thesis of Miss M. A. Murray in her anthropological study The Witch-Cult in Western Europe,[65] although worked out with nice ingenuity and no little documentation, is radically and wholly erroneous. Miss Murray actually postulates that “underlying the Christian religion was a cult practised by many classes of the community” which “can be traced back to pre-Christian times, and appears to be the ancient religion of Western Europe.” We are given a full account of the chief festivals of this imaginary cult, of its hierarchy, its organization, and many other details. The feasts and dances—the obscene horrors of the Sabbat—“show that it was a joyous religion”! It is impossible to conceive a more amazing assertion. Miss Murray continues to say that “as such it must have been quite incomprehensible to the gloomy Inquisitors and Reformers who suppressed it.” The Reformers, for all their dour severity, perfectly well appreciated with what they were dealing, and the Inquisitors, the sons of S. Dominic who was boundless in his charity and of S. Francis, whose very name breathes Christ-like love to all creation, were men of the profoundest knowledge and deepest sympathies, whose first duty it was to stamp out the infection lest the whole of Society be corrupted and damned. Miss Murray does not seem to suspect that Witchcraft was in truth a foul and noisome heresy, the poison of the Manichees. Her “Dianic cult,” which name she gives to this “ancient religion” supposed to have survived until the Middle Ages and even later and to have been a formidable rival to Christianity, is none other than black heresy and the worship of Satan, no primitive belief with pre-agricultural rites, in latter days persecuted, misinterpreted, and misunderstood. It is true that in the Middle Ages Christianity had—not a rival but a foe, the eternal enemy of the Church Militant against whom she yet contends to-day, the dark Lord of that city which is set contrariwise to the City of God, the Terrible Shadow of destruction and despair.
Miss Murray with tireless industry has accumulated a vast number of details by the help of which seeks to build up and support her imaginative thesis. Even those that show the appropriation by the cult of evil of the more hideous heathen practices, both of lust and cruelty, which prevailed among savage or decadent peoples, afford no evidence whatsoever of any continuity of an earlier religion, whilst by far the greater number of the facts she quotes are deflected, although no doubt unconsciously, and sharply wrested so as to be patent of the signification it is endeavoured to read on into them. Miss Murray speaks, for example, of witches “who, like the early Christian martyrs, rushed headlong on their fate, determined to die for their faith and their God.”[66] And later, discussing the “Sacrifice of the God,” a theme which it is interesting and by no means impertinent to note, folklorists have elaborated in the most fanciful manner, basing upon the scantiest and quite contradictory evidence an abundant sheaf of wildly extravagant theories and fables, she tells us that the burning of witches at the hands of the public executioner was a “sacrifice of the incarnate deity.”[67] One might almost suppose that the condemned went cheerfully and voluntarily to the cruellest and most torturing punishment, for the phrase “Self-devotion to death” is used in this connexion. On the contrary, we continually find in the witch-trials that the guilty, as was natural, sought to escape from their doom by any and every means; by flight, as in the case of Gilles de Sillé and Roger de Bricqueville, companions of Gilles de Rais; by long and protracted defences, such as was that of Agnes Fynnie, executed in Edinburgh in 1644; by threats and blackmail of influential patrons owing to which old Bettie Laing of Pittenween escaped scot-free in 1718; by pleading pregnancy at the trial as did Mother Samuel, the Warbois witch, who perished on the gallows 7 April, 1593; by suicide as the notorious warlock John Reid, who hanged himself in prison at Paisley, in 1697.
Of the theoretical “Sacrifice of the incarnate deity” Miss Murray writes: “This explanation accounts for the fact that the bodies of witches, male or female, were always burnt and the ashes scattered; for the strong prejudice which existed, as late as the eighteenth century, against any other mode of disposing of their bodies; and for some of the otherwise inexplicable occurrences in connexion with the deaths of certain of the victims.”[68] Three instances are cited to prove these three statements, but it will be seen upon examination that not one of these affords the slightest evidence in support of the triple contention. In the first place we are informed that “in the light of this theory much of the mystery which surrounds the fate of Joan of Arc is explained.” How is not divulged, but this is capped by the astounding and indecorous assertion that S. Joan of Arc “belonged to the ancient religion, not to the Christian.” It is superfluous to say that there is not a tittle of evidence for such an amazing hypothesis in reference to the Saint.
Gilles de Rais, whose execution is next quoted by Miss Murray in support of her postulate, proves a singularly unfortunate example. We are told that “like Joan he was willing to be tried for his faith,” by which is meant the imaginary “Dianic cult.” This is a purely gratuitous assertion, not borne out in any way by his behaviour at his trial, nor by the details of any authoritative account or report of the proceedings. Gilles de Rais was hanged on a gibbet above a pyre, but when the heat had burned through the rope the body was quickly taken up from the blazing wood, and afterwards buried in the neighbouring Carmelite church. One may compare the execution of Savonarola and his two fellow friars on 25 May, 1498. They were strangled at the gallows, their bodies committed to the flames, and their ashes carefully gathered and thrown into the Arno. Gilles de Rais was condemned by three distinct courts; by the Holy Inquisition, the presidents being Jean de Malestroit, Bishop of Nantes, and Jean Blouyn, vice-inquisitor, O.P., S.T.M., on charges of heresy and sorcery; by the episcopal court on charges of sacrilege and the violation of ecclesiastical rights; by the civil court of John V, Duke of Brittany, on multiplied charges of murder.
The third case quoted by Miss Murray is that of Major Weir, who “offered himself up and was executed as a witch in Edinburgh.” Thomas Weir, who was a hypocritical Puritan, a leader “among the Presbyterian strict sect,” and regarded as a Saint throughout Edinburgh, had all the while secretly led a life of hideous debauchery and was stained with the most odious and unnatural crimes. In 1670, which was the seventieth year of his age, he appears to have been stricken with terrible fits of remorse and despair; the pangs of his guilty conscience drove him to the verge of madness and his agony could only be eased by a full, ample, and public confession of his misdeeds. For a few months his party, in order to avoid the scandal and disgrace, contrived to stifle the matter, but a minister “whom they esteemed more forward than wise” revealed the secret to the Lord Provost of the city, and an inquiry was instituted. The wretched old man, insistently declaring that “the terrors of God which were upon his soul urged him to confess and accuse himself,” was arrested, together with his crazy sister Jean, who was implicated in his abominations. “All the while he was in prison he lay under violent apprehension of the heavy wrath of God, which put him into that which is properly called despair,” and to various ministers who visited him he declared, “I know my sentence of damnation is already sealed in Heaven . . . for I find nothing within me but blackness, darkness, Brimstone, and burning to the bottom of Hell.”[69] The whole account gives a complete and perfectly comprehensible psychological study. So sudden a revulsion of feeling, the loathing of foul acts accompanied by the sheer inability to repent of them, is quite understandable in a septuagenarian, worn out in body by years of excess and enfeebled in mind owing to the heavy strain of hourly acting an artificial and difficult rôle. The intense emotionalism of the degenerate has not infrequently been observed eventually to give way to a state of frenzied anguish, for which the alienist Magnan coined the name “Anxiomania,” a species of mental derangement that soon drives the patient to hysterical confession and boundless despair. “I am convinced,” says one writer with regard to Major Weir, “of the prisoner having been delirious at the time of his trial.”[70] His sister frantically accused her brother of Witchcraft, but it is remarkable that in his case this charge was not taken up and examined. I do not say that Weir was not supposed to be a warlock; as a matter of fact he was notoriously reputed such, and strange stories were told of his magic staff and other enchantments, but Witchcraft was not the main accusation brought against him in the official courts. He was found guilty of adultery, fornication, incest, and bestiality, and on these several counts sentenced to be strangled at a stake betwixt Edinburgh and Leith, on Monday, 11 April, 1670, and his body to be burned to ashes. Jean Weir was condemned for incest and Witchcraft and hanged on 12 April in the Grassmarket at Edinburgh. To the last this miserable lunatic placed “a great deal of confidence in her constant adherence to the Covenant, which she called the cause and interest of Christ.”[71]
It will be seen that Miss Murray’s citation is incorrect and therefore impertinent. Major Weir was not executed “as a witch.” Moreover, both he and Gilles de Rais were actually strangled, and such examples must entirely fail to account “for the fact that the bodies of witches, male or female, were always burnt and the ashes scattered,” especially since in the latter case, as we have noticed, the body was honourably buried in the church of the Whitefriars. In fine, to endeavour to connect, however ingeniously, the fate of S. Joan of Arc, the execution of Gilles de Rais and Major Weir, with the folklorists’ theory of “the sacrifice of the incarnate deity” is merest fantasy.
The gist of the whole matter lies elsewhere. Death at the stake was the punishment reserved for heretics. As we have already noticed, Diocletian ruthlessly burned the Manichees: “We order then that the professors and teachers be punished with the utmost penalties, which is to say they are to be burned with fire together with all their execrable books and writings.”[72] The Visigoth code condemned pagans or heretics who had committed sacrilege to the flames, and together with them it grouped all Manichees: “It is known that many Proconsuls have thrown blasphemers to the beasts, ray, have even burned some alive.”[73] The Visigoth code of Rekeswinth (652–672) punishes Judaizers with death, “aut lapide puniatur, aut igne cremetur.” (Let them be stoned or burned with fire.) But it was actually in the eleventh century that the civil power first generally ordained the penalty of the stake for the heretics, who were, it must always be remembered, mad anarchists endeavouring to destroy all social order, authority, and decency. “In Italy even many adherents of this pestilential belief were found, and these wretches were slain with the sword or burned at the stake,”[74] writes Adhémar de Chabannes, a monk of Angoulême, about the middle of the eleventh century. In a letter of Wazon, Bishop of Liège, there is an allusion to similar punishments which were being inflicted in Flanders.
A striking example of the heretical anarchists who troubled Europe about the beginning of the twelfth century may be seen in Tanchelin[75] and his followers. This fanatic, who was originally a native of Zealand, journeyed throughout Flanders preaching his monstrous doctrines everywhere he could find listeners and especially concentrating upon the city of Antwerp. In 1108 and 1109 he appeared at Arras and Cambrai, persuading many evil and ignorant persons to accept his abominable tenets. The tares were thickly sown, and it is terribly significant that some three centuries later, about 1469, there was a fearful epidemic of sorcery throughout the whole district of the Artois, in reference to which the anonymous author—probably an Inquisitor—of a contemporary work entitled Erreurs des Gazariens ou de ceux que l’on prouve chevaucher sur un balai ou un bâton expressly identified such heretics as the Gazariens, who are Cathari, and the Vaudois (Poor Lombards) with warlocks and sorcerers. In 1112 Tanchelin, who had actually visited Rome itself, was upon his return arrested and thrown into prison at Cologne, whence, however, he managed to escape, and accompanied by an apostate priest Everwacher and a Jew Manasses, who had formerly been a blacksmith, at the head of a formidable band of three thousand ruffians, outlaws, cast gamesters, brigands, murderers, beggars and thieves, the parbreak of every slum and stew, he terrorized the whole countryside, the people being afraid, the bishops and secular princes seemingly unable to resist him.
The teaching of Tanchelin was, as might be expected, largely incoherent and illogical, the ravings of a frantic brain, but none the less dangerous and wholly abominable. The Church was, of course, directly attacked and blasphemed. With abuse and foul language, extraordinarily like the language of the so-called Reformers in the sixteenth century, the hierarchy and all ecclesiastical order were repudiated and contemned, priests and religious in particular were to be persecuted and exterminated since the priesthood was a fiction and a snare; the Sacrifice of Holy Mass was a mockery, all Sacraments were void and empty forms, useless for salvation[76]; the churches themselves were to be accounted as brothels and markets of shame. “This very spawn of Satan and black angel of woe declared that the churches, dedicated to God’s worship, were bawdy-houses. That, at Holy Mass there was no Sacrifice at the hands of the priest; the Service of the Altar was filth, not a Sacrament.”[77] Tanchelin declared himself to be the Messiah, God, the Son of God, the Perfect Man, the sum of all the divine emanations in one system, upon whom had descended and in whom abode the pleroma of the Holy Spirit. “This miserable wretch advanced from evil to evil and at length proceeded to such an extremity of unheard-of wickedness that he gave himself out to be God, asserting that if Christ be God because the Holy Ghost dwelt in Him, he himself was not less than and of the same nature as God, seeing that he enjoyed the plenitude of the Holy Ghost.”[78] Here the Gnostic character of his teaching is very apparent. He even caused a temple to be erected in his honour where he was worshipped with sacrifice and hymns. His followers, indeed, regarded this lunatic wretch with such an excess of veneration that the dirty water from his bath was actually collected in phials and solemnly distributed among them, whereof they partook as of a sacrament.
It must be borne in mind that Tanchelin’s programme did not solely comprise a negation of Christian dogma; this we find in most of the innovators at the time of the so-called Reformation, but his ultimate aim was to effect a social revolution, to overturn the existing order of things and produce communistic chaos with himself as overlord and dictator. The way for anarchy could only have been paved by the destruction of the Church, the supreme representative of authority and order throughout the world, and it was accordingly against the Church that this superman launched his fiercest diatribes. To further his ends he encouraged, nay, commanded, the open practice of the foulest vices; incest, adultery, fornication were declared to be works of spiritual efficacy; unmentionable abominations flaunted themselves in the face of day; virtue became an offence; men were driven to vice and crime, and anon they gradually sank in a stupor of infamy and sheer boneless degradation.
The unfortunate town of Antwerp came directly under Tanchelin’s influence. Here he reigned as king, surrounded by vile and obsequious satellites who ground the miserable citizens to the dust and filled each street and corner with orgies of lust and blood. There is a strange and striking parallel between the details of his foul career and the Russian tyranny to-day. Little wonder that in 1116 a priest, maddened by the outrages and profanities of this hellish crew, scattered the heretic’s brains upon the deck of his royal barge as one afternoon he was sailing in pompous state down the river Schelde: “After a life of infamy, bloodshed, and heresy, whilst he was sailing on the river he was struck on the head by a certain priest and falling down died there.”[78] All unfortunately, however, the pernicious errors of Tanchelin did not expire with their author. Antwerp remained plunged in dissipation and riot, and although strenuous efforts were made to restore decency and order, at first these seemed to be entirely nugatory and fruitless. Burchard, the Bishop of Cambrai, at once sent twelve of his most revered and learned canons under the conduct of Hidolphe, a priest of acknowledged sagacity and experience, to endeavour to reform the town by word and example, but it seemed as though their efforts were doomed to failure and ill-success. At length, almost in despair, the good prelate begged S. Norbert,[79] who some three years before had founded his Order at Prémontré, to essay the thankless and wellnigh impossible task. Without demur or hesitation the Saint cheerfully undertook so difficult a mission and accompanied only by S. Evermonde,[80] and Blessed Waltman, together with a few more of his most fervent followers he arrived at Antwerp without delay to begin his work there towards the end of 1123. Success at once crowned his efforts; in an incredibly short space of time the people confessed their errors, abuses were reformed, the leprous town cleansed of its foulness, public safety, order, and decorum once again established, and, what is extremely striking to notice, the old chroniclers draw attention to the fact that a large number both of men and women in deepest penitence brought to S. Norbert quantities of consecrated Hosts which they had purloined from the tabernacles and kept concealed in boxes and other hiding-places to utilize for charms and evil invocations, to profane in devil-worship and at the Sabbat. So marvellous was the change from darkness to light that year by year the Premonstratensian Order upon the Saturday[81] after the Octave of Corpus Christi solemnly observes a fitting memorial thereof in the glad Feast of the Triumph of Holy Father Norbert.
In this incident of the stolen Hosts the connexion between Gnostic heresy and Satanism is clearly seen. It was in such soil as the antinomianism of Tanchelin that the poisoned weeds of sorcery would thrive apace. The authorities recognized that drastic measures must be employed, and at Bonn a company of impure fanatics who attempted to disseminate his ideas were incontinently sent to the stake.
The other arguments brought forward by Miss Murray to support her thesis of the continuity of a primitive religion are mainly “the persistence of the number thirteen in the Covens, the narrow geographical range of the domestic familiar, the avoidance of certain forms in the animal transformations, the limited number of personal names among the women-witches, and the survival of the names of some of the early gods.”[82] Even if these details could be proved up to the hilt and shown to be pertinent the evidence were not convincing; it would at best point to some odd survivals, such as are familiar in an hundred ways to every student of hagiography, history, myths and legends, old religions, geography, iconography, topography, etymology, anthropology, and antiquarian lore in a myriad branches. If we examine the matter broadly we shall find that these circumstances are for the most part local, not general, that in many instances they cannot be clearly substantiated, for the evidence is conflicting and obscure.
“The ‘fixed number’ among the witches of Great Britain,” Miss Murray notes, “seems to have been thirteen,”[83] and certainly in many cases amongst the English trials the coven appears to have consisted of thirteen members, although it may be borne in mind that very probably there were often other associates who were not traced and involved and so escaped justice. Yet Miss Murray does not explain why the number thirteen should form any link with an earlier ritual and worship. On the other hand, the demonologists are never tired of insisting that Satan is the ape of God in all things, and that the worshippers of evil delight to parody every divine ordinance and institution. The explanation is simple. The number thirteen was adopted by the witches for their covens in mockery of Our Lord and His Apostles.
“The narrow geographical range of the domestic familiar” is not at all apparent, and it were futile to base any presumption upon so slender a line of argument. “The avoidance of certain forms in the animal transformation” is upon a a general view of Witchcraft found to be nothing other than the non-occurrence of the lamb and the dove, and these two were abhorred by sorcerers, seeing that Christ is the Lamb of God, Agnus Dei, whilst the Dove is the manifestation of the Holy Ghost.[84] There is one instance, the trail of Agnes Wobster at Aberdeen in 1597, when the Devil is said to have appeared to the witch “in the liknes of a lamb, quhom thou callis thy God, and bletit on the, and thaireftir spak to the.”[85] But this rare exception must be understood to be a black and deformed lamb, not the snow-white Agnus Dei. In pictures of the Doctors of the Church, particularly perhaps S. Gregory the Great and S. Alphonsus de Liguori, the Dove is seen breathing divine inspiration into the ear of the Saint who writes the heavenly message, thus directly given by God the Holy Ghost. So in a Franco-German miniature of the eleventh century in the Hortus Deliciarum we see a black hideous bird breathing into the ear of a magician thoughts evil and dark. This cloudy and sombre spirit, violent in its attitude and lean in body stretches its meagre throat towards the ear of the wicked man, who, seated at a desk, transcribes upon a parchment the malevolent and baleful charms which it dictates. It is in fact the Devil.[86]
With reference to the argument based upon “the limited number of personal names among the women-witches” this simply resolves itself into the fact that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were in general use (particularly amongst the peasantry) far fewer personal names than have been employed of more recent years. To assert “that the name Christian clearly indicates the presence of another religion”[87] is simple nonsense. It may be noticed, too, how many of the names which Miss Murray has catalogued in such conscientious and alas! impertinent detail are those of well-known Saints whose cult was universal throughout Europe: Agnes, Alice, Anne, Barbara, Christopher, Collette, Elizabeth, Giles, Isabel, James, John, Katherine, Lawrence, Margaret, Mary, Michael, Patrick, Thomas, Ursula—and the list might be almost indefinitely prolonged.
“The survival of the names of some of the early gods” is also asserted. In connexion with Witchcraft, however, very few examples of this can be traced even by the most careful research. An old charm or two, a nonsense rhyme, may now and again repeat some forgotten meaningless word or refrain. Thus in a spell used by the witches of the Basses-Pyrénées, cited by De Lancre (1609), we find mention of the old Basque deity Janicot: “In nomine patrica, Aragueaco Petrica, Gastellaco Ianicot, Equidæ ipordian pot.” Bodin gives a dance-jingle, “Har, har, diable, diable, saute icy, saute là, ioüe icy, ioüe là,” to which the chorus was “sabath sabath.” Miss Murray tells us that the Guernsey version “which is currently reported to be used at the present day,” runs: “Har, har, Hon, Hon, danse ici.”[88] Hon was an old Breton god, and there are still remote districts whose local names recall and may be compounded with that of this ancient deity. It is significant that in one case we have a Basque deity, in the other a Breton; for Basque and Breton are nearly, if obscurely, correlated. Such traces are interesting enough, but by no means unique, hardly singular indeed, since they can be so widely paralleled, and it were idle to base any elaborate argument concerning the continuity of a fully organized cult upon slight and unrelated survivals in dialect place-names and the mere doggerel lilt of a peasant-song.
There is in particular one statement advanced by Miss Murray which goes far to show how in complete unconsciousness she is fitting her material to her theory. She writes: “There is at present nothing to show how much of the Witches’ Mass (in which the bread, the wine, and the candles were black) derived from the Christian ritual and how much belonged to the Dianic cult [the name given to this hypothetical but universal ancient religion]; it is, however, possible that the witches’ service was the earlier form and influenced the Christian.”[89] This last sentence is in truth an amazing assertion. A more flagrant case of hysteron-proteron is hardly imaginable. So self-evident is the absurdity that it refutes itself, and one can only suppose that the words were allowed to remain owing to their having been overlooked in the revision of a long and difficult study, a venial negligence. Every prayer and every gesture of Holy Mass, since the first Mass was celebrated upon the first Maundy Thursday, has been studied in minutest detail by generations of liturgiologists and ceremonialists, whose library is almost infinite in its vastness and extent from the humblest pamphlets to the hugest folios. We can trace each inspired development, when such an early phrase was added, when such a hallowed sign was first made at such words in such an orison. The witches’ service is a hideous burlesque of Holy Mass, and, briefly, what Miss Murray suggests is that the parody may have existed before the thing parodied. It is true that some topsy-turvy writers have actually proclaimed that magic preceded religion, but this view is generally discredited by the authorities of all schools. Sir James Frazer, Sir A. L. Lyall, and Mr. F. B. Jevons, for example, recognize “a fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle between magic and religion.”[90]
In fine, upon a candid examination of this theory of the continuity of some primitive religion, which existed as an underlying organization manifested in Witchcraft and sorcery, a serious rival feared and hated by the Church, we find that nothing of the sort ever survived, that there was no connexion between sorcery and an imaginary “Dianic cult.” To write that “in the fifteenth century open war was declared against the last remains of heathenism in the famous Bull of Innocent VIII”[91] is to ignore history. As has been emphasized above, the Bull Summis desiderantes affectibus of 1484 was only one of a long series of Papal ordinances directed against an intolerable evil not heathenism indeed, but heresy. For heresy, sorcery, and anarchy were almost interchangeable words, and the first Bull launched directly against the black art was that of Alexander IV, 1258, two hundred and twenty-six years before.
That here and there lingered various old harmless customs and festivities which had come down from pre-Christian times and which the Church had allowed, nay, had even sanctified by directing them to their right source, the Maypole dances, for example, and the Midsummer fires which now honour S. John Baptist, is a matter of common knowledge. But this is no continuance of a pagan cult.
From the first centuries of the Christian era, throughout the Middle Ages, and continuously to the present day there has invariably been an open avowal of intentional evil-doing on the part of the devotees of the witch-cult, and the more mischief they did the more they pleased their lord and master. Their revels were loathy, lecherous, and abominable, a Sabbat where every circumstance of horror and iniquity found expression. This in itself is an argument against Miss Murray’s theory, as none of the earlier religions existed for the express purpose of perpetrating evil for evil’s sake. We have but to read the eloquent and exquisite description of the Eleusinian Mysteries by that accomplished Greek scholar Father Cyril Martindale, S.J.,[92] to catch no mean nor mistaken glimpse of the ineffable yearning for beauty, for purity, for holiness, which filled the hearts of the worshippers of the goddess Persephoneia, whose stately and impressive ritual prescribing fasts, bathing in the waters of the sea, self-discipline, self-denial, self-restraint, culminated in the Hall of Initiation, hallowed by the Earth-Mother, Demeter, where the symbolic drama of life, death, and resurrection was shown by the Hierophant to those who had wrestled, and endured, and were adjudged worthy. How fair a shadow was this, albeit always and ever a shadow, of the imperishable and eternal realities to come! How different these Mysteries from the foul orgies of witches, the Sabbat, the black mass, the adoration of hell.
In truth it was not against heathenism that Innocent VIII sounded the note of war, but against heresy. There was a clandestine organization hated by the Church, and this was not sorcery nor any cult of witches renewing and keeping green some ancient rites and pagan creed, but a witch-cult that identified itself with and was continually manifested in closest connexion with Gnosticism in its most degraded and vilest shapes.
There is a curious little piece of symbolism, as it may be, which has passed into the patois of the Pyrenees. Wizards are commonly known as poudouès and witches poudouèros, both words being derived from putere, which signifies to have an evil smell. The demonologists report, and it was commonly believed, that sorcerers could often be detected by their foul and fetid odour. Hagiographers tell that S. Philip Neri could distinguish heretics by their smell, and often he was obliged to turn away his head when meeting them in the street. The same is recorded of many other Saints, and this tradition is interesting as it serves to show the close connexion there was held to be between magic and heresy.[93] Saint Pachomius, the cenobite, could distinguish heretics by their insupportable stench; the abbot Eugendis could tell the virtues and vices of those whom he met by the perfume or the stink. Saint Hilarion, as S. Jerome relates, could even distinguish a man’s sins by the smell of a warm garment or cloak. Blessed Dominica of Paradise, passing a soldier in the street, knew by the foul smell that he had abandoned the faith, to which, however, her fervid exhortations and prayers eventually restored him. Saint Bridget of Sweden was wellnigh suffocated by the fetor of a notorious sinner who addressed her. Saint Catherine of Siena experienced the same sensations; whilst Saint Lutgarde, a Cistercian nun, on meeting a vicious reprobate perceived a decaying smell of leprosy and disease.
On the other hand, the Saints themselves have diffused sweetest fragrances, and actually “the odour of sanctity” is more than a mere phrase. One day in 1566, when he had entered the church at Somascha, a secluded hamlet between Milan and Bergamo, S. Charles Borromeo exclaimed: “I know by the heavenly fragrance in this sanctuary that a great Servant of God lies buried here!” The church, in fact, contained the body of S. Jerome Emiliani, who died in 1587. S. Herman Joseph could be traced through the corridors of Steinfeld by the rare perfumes he scattered as he walked. The same was the case with that marvellous mystic S. Joseph of Cupertino. S. Thomas Aquinas smelt of male frankincense. I myself have known a priest of fervent faith who at times diffused the odour of incense. Maria-Vittoria of Genoa, Ida of Louvain, S. Colette, S. Humiliana, were fragrant as sweet flowers. S. Francis of Paul and Venturini of Bergamo scattered heavenly aromas when they offered the Holy Sacrifice. The pus of S. John of the Cross gave forth a strong scent of lilies.
Miss Murray has worked out her thesis with no inconsiderable ingenuity, but when details are considered, historically examined, and set in their due proportions, it must be concluded that the theory of the continuity of an ancient religion is baseless. Her book is called A Study in Anthropology, and here we can, I think, at once put our finger upon the fundamental mistake. Anthropology alone offers no explanation of Witchcraft. Only the trained theologian can adequately treat the subject. An amount of interesting material has been collected, but the key to the dark mystery could not be found.
Yet, as our investigations have shown, it was not so far to seek. In the succinct phrase of that profound and prolific scholar Thomas Stapleton[94]: Crescit cum magia hæresis, cum hæresi magia.” (The weed heresy grows alongside the weed witchcraft, the weed witchcraft alongside the weed heresy.)
NOTES TO CHAPTER I.
- ↑ Paris. Jacques du Puys. 4to. 1580. The preface, addressed to De Thou, is signed: “De Laon, ce xx iour de Decembre, M.D.LXXIX.” There were nine editions before 1604. The most complete is Paris, 4to. 1587. In addition to the text it contains ten extra pages only found here giving the trial of a sorcerer, Abel de la Rue, executed in 1582.
- ↑ The first Papal bull dealing with sorcery was issued by Alexander IV, 13 December, 1258. The last Papal Constitution concerned with this crime is that of Urban VIII, Inscrutabilis iudiciorum Dei altitudo, 1 April, 1631. The last regular English trial seems to have been that of an old woman and her son, acquitted at Leicester in 1717. In 1722 the last execution of a Scottish witch took place at Loth; both English and Scottish statutes were repealed in 1735. The Irish Statute was not repealed until 1821. At Kempten in Bavaria, a mad heretic, a woman, was executed for sorcery in 1775. In the Swiss canton of Glaris, a wench named Anna Goeldi, was hanged as a witch, 17 June, 1782. Two hags were burned in Poland on the same charge as late as 1793.
- ↑ Roland Brévannes. Les Messes Noires, Iier tableau, scène vii.
- ↑ I have actually heard it categorically laid down by a speaker in Shakespearean debate, a litterateur of professed culture, that the Elizabethans could not, of course, really have believed in witchcraft.
- ↑ In the Exhibition of this artist’s work at the Leicester Galleries, London, in March, 1925.
- ↑ . . . qu’elle, & sa mère montoient sur vne ramasse, & que sortans le contremont de la cheminée elles alloient par l’air en ceste façon au Sabbat. Boguet, Discours, p. 104.
- ↑ Glanvill, Part II. p. 194.
- ↑ Julius Wellhausen. Reste arabischen Heidenthums, p. 159. Berlin, 1897.
- ↑ Apud Miss Murray’s The Witch-Cult. (1921). Appendix V. pp. 279–80.
- ↑ Boguet, Discours, XVI. 4.
- ↑ Benjamin Thorpe, Monumenta Ecclesiastica, II. p. 34. London, 1840. The Liber Poenitentialis was first published complete by Wasserschleben in 1851; a convenient edition is Migne, P.L. XCIX.
- ↑ Calendar of State Papers. Domestic, 1584.
- ↑ Sir Walter Scott, Demonology and Witchcraft, Letter V, gives the narrative of this case, but in the light of later research his version must be slightly corrected.
- ↑ Pitcairn. I. pt. ii. p. 162.
- ↑ Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, New Series, vol. X. Edinburgh.
- ↑ Sir James Melville, Memoirs. Bannatyne Club, Edinburgh. pp. 395–6.
- ↑ London. “for William Wright.” N.D. [1591]. The woodcut is on the title-page verso, and signatures [c.ij.] verso. The pages are not numbered.
- ↑ Flying Ointments. Apud Miss Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe, p. 279. It may be noted that the scandals of the Black Mass under Louis XIV were closely concerned with wholesale accusations of poisoning. La Voisin was a notorious vendor of toxic philtres. The possibility of poisoning the King, the Dauphin, Colbert and others was frequently debated.
- ↑ Dio Cassius. XLIX. 43. p. 756. ed. Sturz.
- ↑ Idem. LII. 36. p. 149.
- ↑ Suetonius. Augustus. 31.
- ↑ Tacitus. Annales. II. 32. More prisco. “Ut eum infelici arbori alligatum uirgis cædi, et postremo securi percuti iuberent.” Muret.
- ↑ XII. 32.
- ↑ Suetonius. Vitellius. 14.
- ↑ Dio Cassius. LXVI. 10.
- ↑ La Magie et la Sorcellerie. Paris. (1912.) I. p. 33.
- ↑ Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, II. p. 117.
- ↑ The dates are as inaccurate as the statements. Giovanni Battista Cibò was elected Pope 29 August, 1484; and the Bull was issued in the December of that year, not in 1488.
- ↑ Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe, c. 1.
- ↑ Dictionary of Universal Biography. VIII. (1890).
- ↑ A more detailed treatment will be found in the present writer’s The Geography of Witchcraft, where the Bull is given in extenso.
- ↑ Epist., c.n. 1.
- ↑ Hom., XLVI. c. 1.
- ↑ Sententianum, III. iv. nn. 4–6.
- ↑ Theodosius II. Nouellæ, tit. III. A.D. 438.
- ↑ Uanissimus [Priscillianus] et plus iusto inflatior profanarum rerum scientia: quin et magicas artes ab adolescentia cum exercuisse creditum est. Sulpicius Severus. II. 47.
- ↑ H. C. Lea in his History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, (1888) I. 215, asserts that Leo I justified the act, and that successive edicts against heresy were due to ecclesiastical influence. This is the exact opposite of historical truth, and the writer has not hesitated to transfer words of the Emperor to the Pope.
- ↑ In a sermon published in 1896 by Dom Morin Revue benédictine, c. xiii. p. 205.
- ↑ Epistola Elipandi ad Alcuinum, Migne. Pat. Lat. CXCVI. p. 872. Alcuin. Opera Omnia. Migne Pat. Lat. C–CI., especially Liber Albini contra hæresim Felicis; Libri VII aduersus Felicem; Aduersus Elipandum Libri IV. Florez, España sagrada. V. p. 562. Menendez y Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, Madrid, 1880, I. p. 274.
- ↑ The martyrdom of S. Peter is a well-known subject in art. Titian’s masterpiece in the Dominican church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo at Venice was destroyed by a fire on 16 August, 1867. But there are exquisite paintings of the scene by Lorenzo Lotto and Bellini. S. Peter, whose shrine is in San Eustorgio, Milan, was canonized 25 March, 1253, by Innocent IV. Major Feast, 29 April.
- ↑ Muratori. Antiquitates italicæ medii æui, Milan, 1738–42.
- ↑ Gabriel Rossetti, Disquisitions, vol. I. p. 27.
- ↑ Gervasius Dorobernensis, Chronicon.
- ↑ Vita S. Romanæ. n. 10; Acta SS. die, 3 Oct. p. 138. S. Gregorii VII. Lib. I. Epistola 75, ad Philippum.
- ↑ Labbe. Sacrosancta concilia. 18 vols. folio. 1671. Vol. X. col. 84.
- ↑ Quarum rerum rex uester, qui non rex sed tyrannus dicendus est, suadente diabolo, caput et causa est, qui omnem aetatem suam flagitiis et facinoribus polluit. Idem, vol. X. col. 72.
- ↑ Sane . . . prouinciali ordinis prædicatorum in eodem regno dedimus in mandatis, ut aliquibus fratribus suis aptis ad hoc, inquisitionem contra illos committeret in regno præfato . . . fraternitati tuæ . . . mandamus quatenus . . . per alios qui ad hoc idonei uidebuntur, festines . . . procedere in inquisitionis negotio et ad dominicum certamen accingi. Ripoll et Brémond, Bullarium ordinis S. Dominici, I. p. 80. (8 vols. Romæ. 1737, sqq.).
- ↑ Fratres . . . qui ad prædicandum crucem uel inquirendum contra prauitatem hæreticam . . . sunt deputati. Wadding. Annales Minorum. ed. secunda. 24 vols. Romæ, 1732, sqq. III. 144.
- ↑ Gnostic Heresies.
- ↑ Jules Bois. Le Satanisme et la Magie, c. 6.
- ↑ It is true that S. Augustine does not bring a charge of depravity against the Manichæans, but they veiled their vices with the greatest caution, and S. Augustine was simply a catechumen, one of the Auditors, who would have known nothing of these esoteric abominations.
- ↑ Extra ciuitatis educti muros in quodam tuguriolo copioso igne accenso . . . cremati sunt. Gesta synodi Aurelianensis. Arnould. L’Inquisition. (Paris, 1869). VI. p. 46.
- ↑ Sed antequam ad conflictum ueniamus, de cibo illo, qui cœlestis ab illis dicebatur, quali arte conficiebatur, nescientibus demonstrare curabo. Congregabantur si quidem certis noctibus in domo denominata, singuli lucernas tenentes in manibus, ad instar letaniæ demonum nomina declamabant, donec subito Dæmonem in similitudine cuiuslibet bestiolæ inter eos uiderent descendere. Qui statim, ut uisibilis ille uidebatur uisio, omnibus extinctis luminaribus, quamprimum quisque poterat, mulierem, quæ ad manum sibi ueniebat, ad abutendum arripiebat, sine peccati respectu, et utrum mater, aut soror, aut monacha haberetur, pro sanctitate et religione eius concubitus ab illis æstimabatur; ex quo spurcissimo concubitu infans generatus, octaua die in medio eorum copioso igne accenso probabatur per ignem more antiquorum Paganorum; et sic in igne cremabatur. Cuius cinis tanta ueneratione colligebatur atque custodiebatur, ut Christiana religiositas Corpus Christi custodire solet, ægris dandum de hoc sæculo exituris ad uiaticum. Inerat enim tanta uis diabolicæ fraudis in ipso cinere ut quicumque de præfata hæresi imbutus fuisset, et de eodem cinere quamuis sumendo parum prælibauisset, uix unquam postea de eodem heresi gressum mentis ad uiam ueritatis dirigere ualeret. De qua re parum dixisse sufficiat, ut Christicolæ caueant se ab hoc nefario opere, non ut studeant sectando imitari. Schmidt. Histoire et doctrine des Cathares ou Albigeois. Paris. 1849. I. p. 31.
- ↑ G. R. Kinloch. Reliquiæ Antiquæ Scoticæ. Edinburgh, 1848.
- ↑ Adhémar de Chabannes. (A monk of Angoulême.) Chronicon, Recueil des historicus, vol. X. p. 163.
- ↑ Fabré Palaprat. Recherches Historiques sur les Templiers, Paris, 1835.
- ↑ Cambridge University Press, 1925.
- ↑ The Philosopher, July–August, 1924.
- ↑ The Philosopher, January–March, 1925. The Albigenses, pp. 20–25. The whole article, which is written with extraordinary restraint, should be read.
- ↑ He is the author of Éléments d’Astrologie; Un disciple de Cl. de Saint-Martin, Dutoit-Membrini; Premiers Éléments d’Occultisme; La petite Église anticoncordataire, son histoire, son état actuel; J. K. Huysmans et le Satanisme; Huysmans, Occultiste et Magicien.
- ↑ In Uerrem. IV. 43.
- ↑ H. Th. Pyl, Die griechischen Rundbauten, 1861, pp. 67, sqq.
- ↑ Plutarch, Theseus 36; Cimon 8.
- ↑ Pausanias is the chief authority on this point. See Rohde Psyche, I. p. 161.
- ↑ Clarendon Press, 1921.
- ↑ The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, p. 16. It is true that the Brethren of the Free Spirit, anarchists, who vaunted the Adamite heresy, in the Thirteenth century, went to the stake with pæans of joy. But they were probably drugged. J. L. Mosheim, Ecclesiastical History. London. 1819. III. p. 278. sqq. The Adamites were a licentious sect who called their church Paradise and worshipped in a state of stark nudity. They were Gnostics and claimed complete emancipation from the moral law. They lived in shameful communism. Bohemian Adamites existed as late as 1849. In Russia the teleschi, a branch of the sect known as the “Divine Men,” performed their religious rites in a state of nature, following the example, as they asserted, of Adam and Eve in Paradise. These assemblies were wont to end in promiscuous debauchery.
- ↑ Idem. p. 161.
- ↑ Witch-Cult in Western Europe, p. 161.
- ↑ Additional Notices of Major Weir and his Sister; Sinclar’s Satan’⟨s⟩ Invisible World. (Reprint. 1875)
- ↑ Criminal Trials, 1536–1784; Hugo Arnot, 4to, 1785.
- ↑ Ravillac Rediuius, Dr. George Hickes, 4to, 1678.
- ↑ Iubemus namque, auctores quidem et principes, una cum abominandis scripturis eorum seueriori pœnæ subiici, ita ut flammeis ignibus exurantur. Baronius, 287,4.
- ↑ Scio multos [Proconsu[esl et ad bestias damnasse sacrilegos, nonnullos etiam uiuos exussisse. Lex Romana Visigothorum nouella, XLVIII. tit. xiii. c. 6–7.
- ↑ Plures etiam per Italiam tunc huius pestiferi dogmatis sunt reperti, qui aut gladiis, aut incendiis perierunt.
- ↑ Tanchelinus, Tandemus, Tanchelmus. The history of this important revolutionary movement has been carefully studied. The following authoritative books are a few from many of great value and learning. Corpus documentorum Inquisitionis hereticæ prauitatis neerlandicæ, ed. Dr. Paul Frédéricq, vol. I, p. 15 et sqq. Ghent. 1889; Tanchelijn by Janssen in the Annales de l’académie Royale d’archéologie de Belgique, vol. XXIII, p. 448 et sqq. 1867; Foppens, Historia Episcopatus Antuerpiensis, p. 8 and p. 146, Brussells, 1717; Dierxsens, Antuerpia Christo nascens et crescens, vol. I, p. 88, Antwerp, 1773; Poncelet, Saint Norbert et Tanchelin in the Analecta bollandiniana, vol. XIII, p. 441, 1893; Schools, Saint Norbert et Tanchelin à Anvers in the Bibliothèque norbertine, vol. II, p. 97, 1900; De Schapper, Réponse à la question: Faites connaître l’hérésiarque Tanchelin et les erreurs qu’il répandit au commencement du XIIIc siècle [an error for XIIc siècle] in the Collationes Brugenses, vol. XVII, p. 107, 1912. L. Vander Essen, De Katterij van Tanchelm in de XIIc eeuw in Ons Geloof, vol. II, p. 354, 1912; Antwerpen en de H. Norbertus in the Bode van Onze Lieve Vrouw van het H. Hert van Averbode, Nos. 18 and 19, pp. 207–211 and 217–220, 1914.
- ↑ “That most vile and abandoned scoundrel had become so open and utterly depraved an enemy to the Christian faith and all religious observance that he denied any respect was due to Bishops and priests; moreover, he affirmed that the reception of the most holy Body and Blood of Our Lord availed nothing to eternal life and man’s salvation.” “Erat quidem ille sceleratissimus et christianæ fidei et totius religionis inimicus in tantum ut obsequium episcoporum et sacerdotum nihil esse diceret, et corporiset sanguinis Domini J. C. perceptionem ad salutem perpetuam prodesse denegeret.” Vita Noberti archiepiscopi Magdeburgensis, Vita A. Monument. Germ. Scriptores, vol. XII. p. 690, ed. G. A. Pertz, Hanover, Berlin.
- ↑ “Immo uere ipse angelus Sathanæ declamabat eccelsias Dei lupinaria esse reputanda. Nihil esse, quod sacerdotum officio in mensa dominica conficeretur; pollutiones, non sacramenta nominanda.” Lettre des chanoines d’Utrecht au nom de leur diocèse à Frédéric, archevêque de Cologne. Apud Frédéricq, vol. I. n. 11.
- ↑ 78.0 78.1 Qui tandem post multos errores et cædes, dum nauigaret, a quodam presbytero percussus in cerebro occubuit. Sigiberti continuatio. Apud Monument. Germ. Scriptores, vol. VI, p. 449. See also, Johannes Trithemius, Annales Hirsaugienses, vol. I, p. 387, Saint-Gall, 1690; Du Plessis d’Argentré, Collectio iudiciorum, vol. I, p. 11 sqq. Paris, 1728; Schmidt, Histoire et doctrine des Cathares ou Albigeois, vol. I, p. 49, Paris, 1849.
- ↑ There is a contemporary Uita Norberti of which two recensions have been published: Uita A. by R. Wilmans in the Mon. Germ. Hag., SS., vol. XIII, pp. 663–706, Hanover, 1853; Uita B. by Surius, De probatis Sanctorum historiis, vol. III, pp. 517–547, Cologne, 1572. Other authoritative works are: J. Van der Sterse, Uita S. Norberti, Antwerp, 1622; Du Pré, La Vie du bienhereux saint Norbert, Paris, 1627; Ch. Hugo, La Vie de St. Norbert, Luxembourg, 1704; G. Madelaine, Histoire de St. Norbert, Lille, 1886; B. Wazasek, Der Hl. Norbert, Vienna, 1914. An excellent brief but scholarly account is The Life of S. Norbert, London, 1886, by my late revered friend Abbot Geudens, C.R.P.
- ↑ Feast, 17 February.
- ↑ Formerly kept upon the Sunday.
- ↑ Op. cit., pp. 16, 17.
- ↑ Op. cit., p. 191.
- ↑ For a and detailed statement see Didron’s great work, Iconographie chrétienne, Paris, 1843.
- ↑ Spalding Club Miscellany, I, p. 129. Aberdeen, 1841.
- ↑ At their black mass the witches of the Basses-Pyrénées (1609) when the host was elevated said “Corbeau noir, corbeau noir.” De Lancre, Tableau de l’Inconstance des mauvais Anges, Paris, 1613.
- ↑ Op. cit., p. 255.
- ↑ Op. cit., p. 165. It is not at all evident that “the word diable is clearly Bodin’s own interpellation for the name of the god,” indeed this assumption is purely gratuitous to support the argument, and cannot be admitted.
- ↑ Op. cit., pp. 14, 15. I would not dwell upon the offensiveness of this suggestion, since it is, I am sure, unintentional.
- ↑ Golden Bough, Part I. vol. I. p. xx. Third Edition. 1911.
- ↑ Op. cit., p. 19.
- ↑ The Goddess of Ghosts, pp. 137–158.
- ↑ Cassiodorus, Hist. Eccl., VII, 11. fin. speaks of the fetidissimus fons of heresy.
- ↑ 1535–1598. His works were collected in four folio volumes, Paris, 1620, prefaced by Henry Holland’s Uita Thomæ Stapletoni. An original portrait is preserved at Douai Abbey, Woolhampton.