The Witch Mania

By Charles Mackay

Excerpt from Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. The essay begins: "The belief that disembodied spirits may be permitted to revisitthis world, has its foundation upon that sublime hope of immortality,which is at once the chief solace and greatest triumph of our reason.Even if revelation did not teach us, we feel that we have that withinus which shall never die; and all our experience of this life butmakes us cling the more fondly to that one repaying hope. Butin the early days of "little knowledge," this grand belief became thesource of a whole train of superstitions, which, in their turn, becamethe fount from whence flowed a deluge of blood and horror. Europe, fora period of two centuries and a half, brooded upon the idea, not onlythat parted spirits walked the earth to meddle in the affairs of men,but that men had power to summon evil spirits to their aid to work woeupon their fellows. An epidemic terror seized upon the nations; no manthought himself secure, either in his person or possessions, from themachinations of the devil and his agents. Every calamity that befellhim, he attributed to a witch."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Seltzer Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781455447695

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THE WITCH MANIA BY CHARLES MACKAY

from MEMOIRS OF EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS BY CHARLES MACKAY

published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT, USA

established in 1974, offering over 14,000 books

Books on Witches and Witchcraft:

The Witch Mania by Charles Mackay

History of the Devil by Daniel Defoe

Wonders of the Invisible World by Cotton Mather

The Witch of the Middle Ages by Michelet

Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft by Sir Walter Scott

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What wrath of gods, or wicked influence  Of tears, conspiring wretched men t' afflict,  Hath pour'd on earth this noyous pestilence,  That mortal minds doth inwardly infect  With love of blindness and of ignorance ?

Spencer's Tears of the Muses.

Countrymen: Hang her! -- beat her! -- kill her!  Justice: How now? Forbear this violence!  Mother Sawyer: A crew of villains -- a knot of bloody hangmen! set to torment me! -- I know not why.  Justice: Alas! neighbour Banks, are you a ringleader in mischief? Fie I to abuse an aged woman!  Banks: Woman! -- a she hell-cat, a witch! To prove her one, we no sooner set fire on the thatch of her house, but in she came running, as if the Devil had sent her in a barrel of gunpowder.

Ford's Witch of Edmonton.

The belief that disembodied spirits may be permitted to revisit  this world, has its foundation upon that sublime hope of immortality,  which is at once the chief solace and greatest triumph of our reason.  Even if revelation did not teach us, we feel that we have that within  us which shall never die; and all our experience of this life but  makes us cling the more fondly to that one repaying hope. But  in the early days of little knowledge, this grand belief became the  source of a whole train of superstitions, which, in their turn, became  the fount from whence flowed a deluge of blood and horror. Europe, for  a period of two centuries and a half, brooded upon the idea, not only  that parted spirits walked the earth to meddle in the affairs of men,  but that men had power to summon evil spirits to their aid to work woe  upon their fellows. An epidemic terror seized upon the nations; no man  thought himself secure, either in his person or possessions, from the  machinations of the devil and his agents. Every calamity that befell  him, he attributed to a witch. If a storm arose and blew down his  barn, it was witchcraft; if his cattle died of a murrain-if disease  fastened upon his limbs, or death entered suddenly, and snatched a  beloved face from his hearth -- they were not visitations of  Providence, but the works of some neighbouring hag, whose wretchedness  or insanity caused the ignorant to raise their finger, and point at  her as a witch. The word was upon everybody's tongue -- France, ItaLy,  Germany, England, Scotland, and the far North, successively ran mad  upon this subject, and for a long series of years, furnished their  tribunals with so many trials for witchcraft that other crimes were  seldom or never spoken of. Thousands upon thousands of unhappy persons  fell victims to this cruel and absurd delusion. In many cities of  Germany, as will be shown more fully in its due place hereafter, the  average number of executions for this pretended crime, was six hundred  annually, or two every day, if we leave out the Sundays, when, it is  to be supposed, that even this madness refrained from its work.

A misunderstanding of the famous text of the Mosaic law, Thou  shalt not suffer a witch to live, no doubt led many conscientious men  astray, whose superstition, warm enough before, wanted but a little  corroboration to blaze out with desolating fury. In all ages of the  world men have tried to hold converse with superior beings; and to  pierce, by their means, the secrets of futurity. In the time of Moses,  it is evident that there were impostors, who trafficked upon the  credulity of mankind, and insulted the supreme majesty of the true God  by pretending to the power of divination. Hence the law which Moses,  by Divine command, promulgated against these criminals; but it did not  follow, as the superstitious monomaniacs of the middle ages imagined,  that the Bible established the existence of the power of divination by  its edicts against those who pretended to it. From the best  authorities, it appears that the Hebrew word, which has been rendered,  venefica, and witch, means a poisoner and divineress -- a dabbler in  spells, or fortune-teller. The modern witch was a very different  character, and joined to her pretended power of foretelling future  events that of working evil upon the life, limbs, and possessions of  mankind. This power was only to be acquired by an express compact,  signed in blood, with the devil himself, by which the wizard or witch  renounced baptism, and sold his or her immortal soul to the evil one,  without any saving clause of redemption.

There are so many wondrous appearances in nature, for which  science and philosophy cannot, even now, account, that it is not  surprising that, when natural laws were still less understood, men  should have attributed to supernatural agency every appearance which  they could not otherwise explain. The merest tyro now understands  various phenomena which the wisest of old could not fathom. The  schoolboy knows why, upon high mountains, there should, on certain  occasions, appear three or four suns in the firmament at once; and why  the figure of a traveller upon one eminence should be reproduced,  inverted, and of a gigantic stature, upon another. We all know the  strange pranks which imagination can play in certain diseases -- that  the hypochondriac can see visions and spectres, and that there have  been cases in which men were perfectly persuaded that they were  teapots. Science has lifted up the veil, and rolled away all the  fantastic horrors in which our forefathers shrouded these and similar  cases. The man who now imagines himself a wolf, is sent to the  hospital, instead of to the stake, as in the days of the witch mania;  and earth, air, and sea are unpeopled of the grotesque spirits that  were once believed to haunt them.

Before entering further into the history of Witchcraft, it may be  as well if we consider the absurd impersonation of the evil principle  formed by the monks in their legends. We must make acquaintance with  the primum mobile, and understand what sort of a personage it was, who  gave the witches, in exchange for their souls, the power to torment  their fellow-creatures. The popular notion of the devil was, that he  was a large, ill-formed, hairy sprite, with horns, a long tail, cloven  feet, and dragon's wings. In this shape he was constantly brought on  the stage by the monks in their early miracles and mysteries. In  these representations he was an important personage, and answered the  purpose of the clown in the modern pantomime. The great fun for the  people was to see him well belaboured by the saints with clubs or  cudgels, and to hear him howl with pain as he limped off, maimed by  the blow of some vigorous anchorite. St. Dunstan generally served him  the glorious trick for which he is renowned -- catching hold of his  nose with a pair of red-hot pincers, till

Rocks and distant dells resounded with his cries.

Some of the saints spat in his face, to his very great annoyance; and  others chopped pieces off his tail, which, however, always grew on  again. This was paying him in his own coin, and amused the populace  mightily; for they all remembered the scurvy tricks he had played them  and their forefathers. It was believed that he endeavoured to trip  people up, by laying his long invisible tail in their way, and giving  it a sudden whisk when their legs were over it; -- that he used to get  drunk, and swear like a trooper, and be so mischievous in his cups as  to raise tempests and earthquakes, to destroy the fruits of the earth  and the barns and homesteads of true believers; -- that he used to run  invisible spits into people by way of amusing himself in the long  winter evenings, and to proceed to taverns and regale himself with the  best, offering in payment pieces of gold which, on the dawn of the  following morning, invariably turned into slates. Sometimes, disguised  as a large drake, he used to lurk among the bulrushes, and frighten  the weary traveller out of his wits by his awful quack. The reader  will remember the lines of Burns in his address to the De'il, which  so well express the popular notion on this point --

"Ae dreary, windy, winter night, 

The stars shot down wi' sklentin light, 

Wi' you, mysel, I got a fright        

Ayont the lough; 

Ye, like a rash-bush, stood in sight        

Wi' waving sough.

 "The cudgel in my nieve did shake, 

Each bristled hair stood like a stake, 

When wi' an eldritch stour, 'quaick! quaick!'        

Among the springs 

Awa ye squatter'd, like a drake,        

On whistling wings."

In all the stories circulated and believed about him, he was  represented as an ugly, petty, mischievous spirit, who rejoiced in  playing off all manner of fantastic tricks upon poor humanity. Milton  seems to have been the first who succeeded in giving any but a  ludicrous description of him. The sublime pride which is the  quintessence of evil, was unconceived before his time. All other  limners made him merely grotesque, but Milton made him awful. In this  the monks showed themselves but miserable romancers; for their object  undoubtedly was to represent the fiend as terrible as possible: but  there was nothing grand about their Satan; on the contrary, he was a  low mean devil, whom it was easy to circumvent and fine fun to play  tricks with. But, as is well and eloquently remarked by a modern  writer, [See article on Demonology, in the sixth volume of the  Foreign Quarterly Review.] the subject has also its serious side.  An Indian deity, with its wild distorted shape and grotesque attitude,  appears merely ridiculous when separated from its accessories and  viewed by daylight in a museum; but restore it to the darkness of its  own hideous temple, bring back to our recollection the victims that  have bled upon its altar, or been crushed beneath its ear, and our  sense of the ridiculous subsides into aversion and horror. So, while  the superstitious dreams of former times are regarded as mere  speculative insanities, we may be for a moment amused with the wild  incoherences of the patients; but, when we reflect, that out of these  hideous misconceptions of the principle of evil arose the belief in  witchcraft -- that this was no dead faith, but one operating on the  whole being of society, urging on the wisest and the mildest to deeds  of murder, or cruelties scarcely less than murder -- that the learned  and the beautiful, young and old, male and female, were devoted by its  influence to the stake and the scaffold -- every feeling disappears,  except that of astonishment that such things could be, and humiliation  at the thought that the delusion was as lasting as it was universal.

Besides this chief personage, there was an infinite number of  inferior demons, who played conspicuous parts in the creed of  witchcraft. The pages of Bekker, Leloyer, Bodin, Delrio, and De Lancre  abound with descriptions of the qualities of these imps and the  functions which were assigned them.