La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages Part 16

"By no means," says Sprenger.

"I mark a difference. He who cuts wood does not cause it to burn: he only does so indirectly. The woodcutter is Love; see Denis the Areopagite, Origen, John of Damascus. Therefore, love is but the indirect cause of love."

What a thing, you see, to have studied! No weak school could have turned out such a man. Only Paris, Louvain, or Cologne, had machinery fit to mould the human brain. The school of Paris was mighty: for dog-Latin who can be matched with the _Janotus_ of Gargantua?[73] But mightier yet was Cologne, glorious queen of darkness, whence Hutten drew the type of his _Obscuri viri_, that thriving and fruitful race of obscurantists and ignoramuses.[74]

[73] A character in Rabelais. "Date n.o.bis clochas nostras, &c."--_Gargantua_, ch. 19.--TRANS.

[74] Ulrich von Hutten, friend of Luther, and author of the witty _Epistolae obscurorum virorum_.--TRANS.

This ma.s.sive logician, so full of words, so devoid of meaning, sworn foe of nature as well as reason, takes his seat with a proud reliance on his books and gown, on his dirt and dust. On one side of his judgement-table lies the _Sum_, on the other the _Directory_. Beyond these he never goes: at all else he only smiles. On such a man as he there is no imposing: he is not the man to utter anent astrology or alchemy nonsense not so foolish but that others might be led thereby to observe truly. And yet Sprenger is a freethinker: he is sceptical about old receipts! Albert the Great may aver, that some sage in a spring of water will suffice to raise a storm, but Sprenger only shakes his head. Sage indeed! Tell that to others, I beg. For all my little experience, I see herein the craft of One who would put us on the wrong scent, that cunning Prince of the Air; but he will fare ill, for he has to deal with a doctor more subtle than the Subtle One himself.

I should have liked to see face to face this wonderful specimen of a judge, and the people who were brought before him. The creatures that G.o.d might bring together from two different worlds would not be more unlike, more strange to each other, more utterly wanting in a common language. The old hag, a skeleton in tatters, with an eye flashing forth evil things, a being thrice cooked in h.e.l.l-fire; and the ill-looking hermit shepherd of the Black Forest or the upper Alpine wastes--such are the savages offered to the leaden gaze of a scholarling, to the judgement of a schoolman.

Not long will they let him toil in his judgment-seat. They will tell all without being tortured. Come the torture will indeed, but afterwards, by way of complement and crown to the law-procedure. They explain and relate to order whatever they have done. The Devil is the Witch's bedfellow, the shepherd's intimate friend. She, for her part, smiles triumphantly, feels a manifest joy in the horror of those around.

Truly, the old woman is very mad, and equally so the shepherd. Are they foolish? Not at all, but far otherwise. They are refined, subtle, skilled in growing herbs, and seeing through walls. Still more clearly do they see those monumental a.s.s's ears that overshadow the doctor's cap. Clearest of all is the fear he has of them, for in vain does he try to bear him boldly; he does nought but tremble. He himself owns that, if the priest who adjures the demon does not take care, the Devil will change his lodging only to pa.s.s into the priest himself, feeling all the more proud of dwelling in a body dedicated to G.o.d. Who knows but these simple Devils of Witches and shepherds might even aspire to inhabit an inquisitor? He is far from easy in mind when in his loudest voice he says to the old woman, "If your master is so mighty, why do I not feel his blows?"

"And, indeed I felt them but too strongly," says the poor man in his book. "When I was in Ratisbon, how often he would come knocking at my windowpanes! How often he stuck pins in my cap! A hundred visions too did I have of dogs, monkeys," &c.

The dearest delight of that great logician, the Devil, is, by the mouth of the seeming old woman, to push the doctor with awkward arguments, with crafty questions, from which he can only escape by acting like the fish who saves himself by troubling the water and turning it black as ink. For instance, "The Devil does no more than G.o.d allows him: why, then, punish his tools?" Or again, "We are not free. As in the case of Job, the Devil is allowed by G.o.d to tempt and beset us, to urge us on by blows. Should we, then, punish him who is not free?" Sprenger gets out of that by saying, "We are free beings."

Here come plenty of texts. "You are made serfs only by covenant with the Evil One." The answer to this would be but too ready: "If G.o.d allows the Evil One to tempt us into making covenants, he renders covenants possible," &c.

"I am very good," says he, "to listen to yonder folk. He is a fool who argues with the Devil." So say all the rest likewise. They all cheer the progress of the trial: all are strongly moved, and show in murmurs their eagerness for the execution. They have seen enough of men hanged. As for the Wizard and the Witch, 'twill be a curious treat to see those two f.a.ggots crackling merrily in the flames.

The judge has the people on his side, so he is not embarra.s.sed.

According to his _Directory_ three witnesses would be enough. Are not three witnesses readily found, especially to witness a falsehood? In every slanderous town, in every envious village teeming with the mutual hate of neighbours, witnesses abound. Besides, the _Directory_ is a superannuated book, a century old. In that century of light, the fifteenth, all is brought to perfection. If witnesses are wanting, we are content with the _public voice_, the general clamour.[75]

[75] Faustin Helie, in his learned and luminous _Traite de l'Instruction Criminelle_ (vol. i. p. 398), has clearly explained the manner in which Pope Innocent III., about 1200, suppressed the safeguards theretofore required in any prosecution, especially the risk incurred by prosecutors of being punished for slander. Instead of these were established the dismal processes of _Denunciation and Inquisition_. The frightful levity of these latter methods is shown by Soldan.

Blood was shed like water.

A genuine outcry, born of fear; the piteous cry of victims, of the poor bewitched. Sprenger is greatly moved thereat. Do not fancy him one of those unfeeling schoolmen, the lovers of a dry abstraction. He has a heart: for which very reason he is so ready to kill. He is compa.s.sionate, full of lovingkindness. He feels pity for yon weeping woman, but lately pregnant, whose babe the witch had smothered by a look. He feels pity for the poor man whose land she wasted with hail.

He pities the husband, who though himself no wizard, clearly sees his wife to be a witch, and drags her with a rope round her neck before Sprenger, who has her burnt.

From a cruel judge escape was sometimes possible; but from our worthy Sprenger it was hopeless. His humanity is too strong: it needs great management, a very large amount of ready wit, to avoid a burning at his hands. One day there was brought before him the plaint of three good ladies of Strasburg who, at one same hour of the same day, had been struck by an arm unseen. Ah, indeed! They are fain to accuse a man of evil aspect, of having laid them under a spell. On being brought before the inquisitor, the man vows and swears by all the saints that he knows nothing about these ladies, has never so much as seen them. The judge is hard of believing: nor tears nor oaths avail aught with him. His great compa.s.sion for the ladies made him inexorable, indignant at the man's denials. Already he was rising from his seat. The man would have been tortured into confessing his guilt, as the most innocent often did. He got leave to speak, and said: "I remember, indeed, having struck some one yesterday at the hour named; but whom? No Christian beings, but only three cats which came furiously biting at my legs." The judge, like a shrewd fellow, saw the whole truth of the matter; the poor man was innocent; the ladies were doubtless turned on certain days into cats, and the Evil One amused himself by sending them at the legs of Christian folk, in order to bring about the ruin of these latter by making them pa.s.s for wizards.

A judge of less ability would never have hit upon this. But such a man was not always to be had. It was needful to have always handy on the table of the Inquisition a good fool's guide, to reveal to simple and inexperienced judges the tricks of the Old Enemy, the best way of baffling him, the clever and deep-laid tactics employed with such happy effect by the great Sprenger in his campaigns on the Rhine. To that end the _Malleus_, which a man was required to carry in his pocket, was commonly printed in small 18mo, a form at that time scarce. It would not have been seemly for a judge in difficulties to open a folio on the table before his audience. But his handbook of folly he might easily squint at from the corner of his eye, or turn over its leaves as he held it under the table.

This _Malleus_ (or Mallet), like all books of the same cla.s.s, contains a singular avowal, namely, that the Devil is gaining ground; in other words, that G.o.d is losing it; that mankind, after being saved by Christ, is becoming the Devil's prey. Too clearly indeed does he step forward from legend to legend. What a way he has made between the time of the Gospels, when he was only too glad to get into the swine, and the days of Dante, when, as lawyer and divine, he argues with the saints, pleads his cause, and by way of closing a successful syllogism, bears away the soul he was fighting for, saying, with a triumphant laugh, "You didn't know that I was a logician!"

In the earlier days of the Middle Ages he waits till the last pangs to seize the soul and bear it off. Saint Hildegarde, about 1100, thinks that "_he cannot enter the body of a living man_, for else his limbs would fly off in all directions: it is but the shadow and the smoke of the Devil which pa.s.s therein." That last gleam of good sense vanishes in the twelfth century. In the thirteenth we find a suppliant so afraid of being caught alive that he has himself watched day and night by two hundred armed men.

Then begins a period of increasing terror, in which men trust themselves less and ever less to G.o.d's protection. The Demon is no longer a stealthy sprite, no longer a thief by night, gliding through the gloom. He becomes the fearless adversary, the daring ape of Heaven, who in broad daylight mimics G.o.d's creation under G.o.d's own sun. Is it the legends tell us this? Nay, it is the greatest of the doctors. "The Devil," says Albert the Great, "transforms all living things." St. Thomas goes yet further. "All changes that may occur naturally by means of seeds, can be copied by the Devil." What an astounding concession, which coming from the mouth of so grave a personage, means nothing short of setting up one Creator face to face with another! "But in things done without the germinal process," he adds, "such as the changing of men into beasts or the resurrection of the dead, there the Devil can do nothing." Thus to G.o.d is left the smaller part of His work! He may only perform miracles, a kind of action alike singular and infrequent. But the daily miracle of life is not for Him alone: His copyist, the Devil, shares with Him the world of nature!

For man himself, whose weak eyes see no difference between nature as sprung from G.o.d and nature as made by the Devil, here is a world split in twain! A dreadful uncertainty hangs over everything. Nature's innocence is gone. The clear spring, the pale flower, the little bird, are these indeed of G.o.d, or only treacherous counterfeits, snares laid out for man? Back! all things look doubtful! The better of the two creations, being suspiciously like the other, becomes eclipsed and conquered. The shadow of the Devil covers up the day, spreads over all life. To judge by appearances and the fears of men, he has ceased to share the world; he has taken it all to himself.

So matters stand in the days of Sprenger. His book teems with saddest avowals of G.o.d's weakness. "These things," he says, "are done with G.o.d's leave." To permit an illusion so entire, to let people believe that G.o.d is nought and the Devil everything, is more than mere _permission_; is tantamount to decreeing the d.a.m.nation of countless souls whom nothing can save from such an error. No prayers, no penances, no pilgrimages, are of any avail; nor even, so it is said, the sacrament of the altar. Strange and mortifying avowal! The very nuns who have just confessed themselves, declare _while the host is yet in their mouths_, that even then they feel the infernal lover troubling them without fear or shame, troubling and refusing to leave his hold. And being pressed with further questions, they add, through their tears, that he has a body _because he has a soul_.

The Manichees of old, and the more modern Albigenses, were charged with believing in the Power of Evil struggling side by side with Good, with making the Devil equal to G.o.d. Here, however, he is more than equal; for if G.o.d through His holy sacrament has still no power for good, the Devil certainly seems superior.

I am not surprised at the wondrous sight then offered by the world.

Spain with a darksome fury, Germany with the frightened pedantic rage certified in the _Malleus_, a.s.sail the insolent conqueror through the wretches in whom he chooses to dwell. They burn, they destroy the dwellings in which he has taken up his abode. Finding him too strong for men's souls, they try to hunt him out of their bodies. But what is the good of it all? You burn one old woman and he settles himself in her neighbour. Nay, more; if Sprenger may be trusted, he fastens sometimes on the exorcising priest, and triumphs over his very judge.

Among other expedients, the Dominicans advised recourse to the intercession of the Virgin, by a continual repeating of the _Ave Maria_. Sprenger, for his part, always averred that such a remedy was but a momentary one. You might be caught between two prayers. Hence came the invention of the rosary, the chaplet of beads, by means of which any number of aves might be mumbled through, whilst the mind was busied elsewhere. Whole populations adopted this first essay of an art thereafter to be used by Loyola in his attempt to govern the world, an art of which his _Exercises_ furnish the ingenious groundwork.

All this seems opposed to what was said in the foregoing chapter as to the decline of Witchcraft. The Devil is now popular and everywhere present. He seems to have come off conqueror: but has he gained by his victory? What substantial profit has he reaped therefrom?

Much, as beheld in his new phase of a scientific rebellion which is about to bring forth the bright Renaissance. None, if beheld under his old aspect, as the gloomy Spirit of Witchcraft. The stories told of him in the sixteenth century, if more numerous, more widespread than ever, readily swing towards the grotesque. People tremble, but they laugh withal.[76]

[76] See my _Memoirs of Luther_, concerning the Kilcrops, &c.

CHAPTER III.

CENTURY OF TOLERATION IN FRANCE: REACTION.

The Church forfeited the wizard's property to the judge and the prosecutor. Wherever the Canon Law was enforced the trials for witchcraft waxed numerous, and brought much wealth to the clergy.

Wherever the lay tribunals claimed the management of these trials they grew scarce and disappeared, at least for a hundred years in France, from 1450 to 1550.

The first gleam of light shot forth from France in the middle of the fifteenth century. The inquiry made by Parliament into the trial of Joan of Arc, and her after reinstalment, set people thinking on the intercourse of spirits, good and bad; on the errors, also, of the spiritual courts. She whom the English, whom the greatest doctors of the Council of Basil p.r.o.nounced a Witch, appeared to Frenchmen a saint and sibyl. Her reinstalment proclaimed to France the beginning of an age of toleration. The Parliament of Paris likewise reinstalled the alleged Waldenses of Arras. In 1498 it discharged as mad one who was brought before it as a wizard. None such were condemned in the reigns of Charles VIII., Louis XII., and Francis I.

On the contrary, Spain, under the pious Isabella (1506) and the Cardinal Ximenes, began burning witches. In 1515, Geneva, being then under a Bishop, burned five hundred in three months. The Emperor Charles V., in his German Const.i.tutions, vainly sought to rule, that "Witchcraft, as causing damage to goods and persons, is a question for _civil_, not ecclesiastic law." In vain did he do away the right of confiscation, except in cases of treason. The small prince-bishops, whose revenues were largely swelled by trials for witchcraft, kept on burning at a furious rate. In one moment, as it were, six hundred persons were burnt in the infinitesimal bishopric of Bamberg, and nine hundred in that of Wurtzburg. The way of going to work was very simple. Begin by using torture against the witnesses; create witnesses for the prosecution by means of pain and terror; then, by dint of excessive kindliness, draw from the accused a certain avowal, and believe that avowal in the teeth of proven facts. A witch, for instance, owns to having taken from the graveyard the body of an infant lately dead, that she might use it in her magical compounds.

Her husband bids them go the graveyard, for the child is there still.

On being disinterred, the child is found all right in his coffin. But against the witness of his own eyes the judge p.r.o.nounces it _an appearance_, a cheat of the Devil. He prefers the wife's confession to the fact itself; and she is burnt forthwith.[77]

[77] For this and other facts regarding Germany, see Soldan.

So far did matters go among these worthy prince-bishops, that after a while, Ferdinand II., the most bigoted of all emperors, the emperor of the Thirty Years' War, was fain to interfere, to set up at Bamberg an imperial commissary, who should maintain the law of the empire, and see that the episcopal judge did not begin the trial with tortures which settled it beforehand, which led straight to the stake.

Witches were easily caught by their confessions, sometimes without the torture. Many of them were half mad. They would own to turning themselves into beasts. The Italian women often became cats, and gliding under the doors, sucked, they said, the blood of children. In the land of mighty forests, in Lorraine and on the Jura, the women, of their own accord, became wolves, and, if you could believe them, devoured the pa.s.sers by, even when n.o.body had pa.s.sed by. They were burnt. Some girls, who swore they had given themselves to the Devil, were found to be maidens still. They, too, were burnt. Several seemed in a great hurry, as if they wanted to be burnt. Sometimes it happened from raging madness, sometimes from despair. An Englishwoman being led to the stake, said to the people, "Do not blame my judges. I wanted to put an end to my own self. My parents kept aloof from me in their dread. My husband had disowned me. I could not have lived on without disgrace. I longed for death, and so I told a lie."

The first words of open toleration against silly Sprenger, his frightful Handbook, and his Inquisitors, were spoken by Molitor, a lawyer of Constance. He made this sensible remark, that the confessions of witches should not be taken seriously, because it was the very Father of Lies who spoke by their mouths. He laughed at the miracles of Satan, affirming them to be all illusory. In an indirect way, such jesters as Hutten and Erasmus dealt violent blows at the Inquisition, through their satires on the Dominican idiots. Cardan[78]

said, straightforwardly, "In order to obtain forfeit property, the same persons acted as accusers and judges, and invented a thousand stories in proof."