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                          CHAPTER XXII

                     New Light on Witchcraft

           The Witch of Tradition -- The Real Witch --
          The Catholic Massacres -- The Secret Cult --
                    The Protestant Massacres

                     THE WITCH OF TRADITION

     FOURTEEN years ago a very distinguished literary colleague of
George Bernard Shaw said to me: "Shaw is in senile decay." Ten
years later I went to see Shaw's "Joan"; and I concluded that if
the dramatic feeling, the mastery of stage-craft, the agility and
sureness of insight into human nature, of that remarkable play were
symptoms of advanced senility I would reconsider my design to avoid
that normal period of existence.

     And the play just as plainly indicates the strength or
stubbornness of its author in its chief defect; it is an historical
play and it is entirely unhistorical. Many years ago Shaw decided
that historians do not know how to write history, and he would
teach them. Unfortunately, in order to grasp the truth of a single
personality of an earlier and different age one has laboriously to
learn a mass of detail about that age, and labor of that kind does
not fascinate men of febrile imagination. Shaw cannot write
history.

     Was Joan of Arc a witch? Shaw may have heard that there are a
few quite scholarly people who think it possible that she was.
Scholarly people, he would say, can believe anything. He robustly
excludes the very possibility. The charge of witchcraft against
"the Maid" was a mere pretext of priests and politicians; and Shaw,
in his scorn of science and Rationalism, so surprisingly exonerates
the priests and the Inquisition in his play that a Catholic weekly
actually announced that he was about to enter the Church.

     The murder of Joan was plotted by soldiers and statesmen --
English soldiers and statesmen, of course and the poor priests were
bullied and cajoled into a tragicomic trial for witchcraft.

     It was quite plain that Mr. Shaw does not know that our idea
of witchcraft has been radically altered. He does not even know
that one of the characters he introduced into his play, Gilles de
Rais, the original "Bluebeard," was, not the indolent court-fop and
trifler be makes him, but a very stern and earnest young man,
Joan's most intimate friend, and a witch. Probably Shaw does not
know that there were male witches as well as female, and that the
child in her mother's arms, the maid of fifteen or the winsome
young mother of twenty-two, might be a witch just as easily as the
old wrinkled dame who lived in a cottage on the edge of the wood
and gathered her herbs by the light of the moon.

     It is this new conception of witchcraft, which we will explain
in this chapter, and will apply to the trial of Joan of Arc, that
brings the subject within the program of religious controversy
which I am realizing. This horrid massacre of women age by age was
tragic enough even on the old conception of witches. Any old dame,
widow or spinster, who was wise enough to wish to avoid the cackle
of her empty-headed neighbors was apt to be suspected of

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witchcraft. The child who fell ill -- inoculated by the open drain
or cess-pool by the door -- had passed her in the street, and so
had clearly been bewitched. The mother who had a miscarriage, the
farmer whose pigs sickened. ... The witch! Drown her out of hand,
or, less humanely, let the priest see to it; and then the horrors
of trial and torture will be added to the injury of death.

     This thing occurring during many centuries all over
Christendom concerns us just as much as does the beauty of a
cathedral. I am not indicting the Church: not merely gathering all
the dishonoring facts which can be picked here and there out of the
history of medieval Europe. We are seriously studying the effect
upon civilization of the acceptance and world-establishment of
Christianity. It created a new frame of mind, a new outlook on
life, a new character; and this new spirit expressed itself in,
amongst other things, the torture and burning or drowning of some
hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of men and women on the
ground that they were witches. And the crime was directly inspired
by the new religion. The sole inspirations of the murderous
attitude were belief in the devil and the express statement of the
Bible that witches were in league with evil spirits and must be put
to death. In the fully developed law of the Church witchcraft was
heresy. It was a religious crime.

     This was dreadful enough even if we suppose, as is commonly
supposed, that the murdered women were yellow, soured, misanthropic
old dames from whom death was in any case not far distant. No doubt
a poor, brooding, solitary old woman would be more likely than any
other in the village to incur popular suspicion. Harenet, one of
the earliest English denouncers of the belief in witchcraft (though
no modern book ever mentions him), before the end of the
seventeenth century thus ironically reminded the witch-hunters of
one common type of their prey:

          An old woman with a wrinkled face, a furrowed brow, a
     hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or
     a scolding tongue, having a ragged coat on her back, a spindle
     in her hand, and a dog by her side -- a wretched, infirm and
     impotent creature, pelted and persecuted by all the neighbors
     because the farmer's cart had stuck in the gateway, or some
     idle boy had pretended to spit needles and pins for the sake
     of a holiday from school or work.

Life was hell to these old dames for near a thousand years after
the establishment of the religion which is said to have uplifted
woman.

     Yet Catholic literary men and priests and Protestant
preachers, who are rarely serious students of history, find this
old-hag theory of witchcraft convenient. Sorry for the old ladies,
of course, but ... You can understand it, can't you? The edge of
your resentment is dulled. The glib word-spinners remind you of the
vivid faith of those heroic days -- the greater sensitiveness to
the devil's work in the world -- the living fear of God, and so on.
In other works I tell enough about the real Middle Ages to spoil
this pretty argument.



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     But a worse error of these apologists, the popular fallacy
which is still all but universal in Christendom, is to suppose that
the witches were even for the greater part old women. Thousands of
reports of witch-trials have now been studied, and from the
hundreds that I have myself read at least in summary, I should say
that feeble old dames were a comparatively small minority. Maids in
their teens, like Joan of Arc, are appallingly common amongst the
victims. Young women in their twenties and thirties, strong and
defiant of the priests, seem to be almost in the majority. Men are
frequent amongst them; and the men include numbers of priests,
nobles, lawyers, etc. Let me quote the translation of a letter
written at Wiirzburg during the persecution there in 1629:

          There are still four hundred in the city, high and low,
     of every rank and sex -- nay, even clerics -- so strongly
     accused that they may be arrested any hour. Some out of all
     offices and faculties must be executed; clerics, counselors,
     doctors, city officials and court assessors. There are law
     students to be arrested. The prince-bishop has over forty
     students here who are to be pastors; thirteen or fourteen of
     these are said to be witches. A few days ago a dean was
     arrested; two others who were summoned have fled. The notary
     of our church consistory, a very learned man, was yesterday
     arrested and put to torture. In a word, a third part of the
     city is involved. A week ago a maiden of nineteen was put to
     death, of whom it is everywhere said that she was the fairest
     in the whole city and was held by everybody a girl of singular
     modesty and purity. She will be followed by seven or eight
     others of the fairest. There are three hundred children of
     three or four years of age who are said to have had
     intercourse with the devil. I have seen put to death children
     of ten, promising students of ten, twelve, fourteen, fifteen,
     etc.

This is not a page from some history of witchcraft in which the
writer is rhetorically embroidering a statement of a contemporary
chronicle. It is part of a letter written at the time, the year
1629, in the city of Wiirzburg itself, and by no less a person than
the bishop's chancellor. No more veracious document could be
imagined. And it is just by chance that in a single city out of
hundreds we get this contemporary and authoritative account of the
terror that for a time blanched the faces of the citizens.

     This single passage must, although it belongs to an
exceptionally ferocious period of witch-hunting, convince any
reader at once that the popular idea of witchcraft is entirely
false. I say "popular," but it is singular how slow even scholars,
historians and scientists, have been to grasp the remarkable
significance of the witch-movement. In the latest edition of the
"Encyclopedia Britannica," which is certainly the finest work of
general reference to which the public can turn for information, the
article on "Witchcraft" is totally inadequate. The author is a
competent ethnographer, yet he writes almost entirely from the
traditional point of view. Only in the last few lines he mentions
the very suggestive fact, without perceiving its significance, that
in Italy today witchcraft is still called la vecchia religione "the
old religion" -- and that in its historical phenomena we must
recognize a stratum of popular beliefs which are "derived in the
main from pagan sources.
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     The "New International Encyclopedia" is no better, and the
generally very able and informing "Dictionary of Religion and
Ethics" entirely omits the subject. Yet one point which is quite
fatal to the popular conception has been established in every
history of witchcraft. This is that witches were not merely, or
even usually, old women whose repulsive forms or isolated lives
drew popular suspicion upon them. The fairest maids of a town were
just as liable to be dragged before the Roman Inquisition or the
Protestant bishop as was the old dame who lived alone on the
outskirts of the village. Hundreds, if not thousands, of maids like
Joan of Arc were drowned or burned at the stake as witches. Women
of all ages, from the babe upward, were arraigned. Women of every
rank figure in the lists of victims. Men also of every rank and
degree of education or illiteracy enter the chronicle. Theologians,
lawyers, nobles, and leaders of armies are found as well as
peasants and artisans.

     And it will further transpire that even the young women met
the sentence of death in the same spirit as the girl-martyrs -- the
very few genuine girl-martyrs -- of the early Church. They spat at
the religion of their Christian persecutors. They had, they said,
a higher religion, and would die rather than abjure it. The Church,
it is true, in most cases left them no opinion. By a refinement of
brutality it enjoined that they should be fiendishly tortured to
extract confessions; then, in order to have a formal assurance of
their guilt, it held that confessions thus wrung from them in the
agony of torture were "voluntary confessions"; and finally it said
that, since conversions professed out of fear of torture were
unreliable, the witches might and ought to be put to death. Most of
them, therefore, suffered death in silence. But in numberless cases
they defied their tormentors and murderers, and boasted that they
died for a greater faith than the belief in Jesus.

     Hence there is an increasing tendency to regard witchcraft as
an organized religion. The best history of witchcraft is Dr. W.G.
Soldan's "Geschichte der Hexenprozesse," as edited by Max Bauer in
1911: a fine two-volume work superbly illustrated, which has
unfortunately not been translated. In the final chapter the authors
discuss all the views of witchcraft during the last hundred years,
and they fail to realize its full significance. They are disposed
to regard too many details as mere concessions under torture to the
queries of the judges or as hysterical illusions.

     Much sounder, though it is little more than an account of
trials in England, is Miss M.A. Murray's "The Witch-Cult in Western
Europe" (1921). Miss Murray, of London University, has written a
model work within her limits: candid and scholarly. The reader will
find it a revelation and, in spite of the tragedy, a most
entertaining work. Her conclusion is (p. 1 2):

          The evidence proves that underlying the Christian
     religion was a cult practiced by many classes of the
     community, chiefly however by the more ignorant or those in
     the less thickly inhabited parts of the country. It can be
     traced back to pre-christian times and appears to be the
     ancient religion of western Europe. The god, anthropomorphic
     or theriomorphic, was worshiped in well-defined rites; the


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     organization was highly developed; and the ritual is analogous
     to many other ancient rituals. The dates of the chief
     festivals suggest that the religion belonged to a race which
     had not reached the agricultural stage. ... It was a definite
     religion with beliefs, ritual, and organization as highly
     developed as that of any other cult in the world.

In saying that it was chiefly the religion of the more ignorant,
Miss Murray seems to have forgotten that at least ninety-five
percent of the people of Europe were then illiterate, and she,
perhaps gives a wrong impression as to the survival of the religion
from pre-christian times.

     While psychologists have been busy applying their formulae to
the mind of the witch -- and have generally come to wrong
conclusions -- historians have been collecting the scattered
evidence, analyzing the reports of trials, and constructing an
entirely new idea of the witch-movement. It was the strongest and
most widespread in the most enlightened, or least illiterate,
centuries of the Middle Ages. The solution is that the medieval
Church was right in its idea. Witchcraft was organized heresy, a
formidable revolt against Christianity.

                         THE REAL WITCH

     A complete account of the ingredients of the witch-idea or
even of the genuine witch-cult would fill a volume like this. We
should have to go back to the very dawn of religion or, if the
theory of Sir J.G. Frazer is correct, before its dawn. Frazer holds
that magic preceded religion. I contend that magic and the belief
in spirits developed separately. But they are blended in the early
idea of the witch: a man or woman who receives magical powers by a
league with evil spirits.

     Something corresponding to the witch is found, and is dreaded
and abhorred, in every stage of human evolution. The spirits of the
dead were very soon regarded as in very large part malignant and
malevolent, and certain persons were held to act in conjunction
with them and practice "black magic"; to raise destructive storms,
to blight crops or cattle, to cause disease, sterility, or death.
Sometimes this persisted quite apart from belief in spirits. The
Romans were not much more definite than the Babylonians in their
beliefs about a future life, yet they believed very emphatically in
magic and its evil powers. The magician was exposed to a sentence
of death in Roman law and was often executed. The ground of the law
was, of course, purely secular. The practicer of black magic was
dangerous to the community.

     The Babylonians and Assyrians (and Persians) believed that
myriads of evil spirits or devils hovered about the face of the
earth and caused all the evils of humanity; and that there was a
special class of these malignant beings who moved about at night,
inspired bad dreams, and even sucked the blood of sleepers. This
belief in legions of devils passed through the Jews, into
Christianity, and the particular belief in night-prowlers and
blood-suckers or entrail-suckers (vampires, harpies, etc.) obtained



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currency amongst the Greeks and Romans. The Greek and Latin word
strix, which properly means the screech-owl (so naturally
associated with the legend), was applied to these dreaded night-
birds.

     The Fathers of the Church, particularly St. Augustine, the
most influential of them all, denounced magic as "pagan" and as a
collusion with the devils. The synods of Elvira (306), Ancyra
(314), and Laodicea (375), and the sermons of St. Chrysostom and
the other great preachers, show that the new Christians brought
with them the magical practices as well as the vices of the pagan
world. It does not seem to have been enough to denounce these as
pagan, so St. Augustine worked out a more deadly theory: the
diviner or magician, in whose powers he firmly believed, was in
league with the devil. And the Bible was quite clear about such
people. It (Leviticus xx, 27 and Exodus xxii, 18) defined a witch
as one who "hath a familiar spirit" and condemned him or her to
death. Moreover, the Latin and Catholic Bible translates verse 5 of
Psalm xcvi (Psalm xcv in the Catholic Bible): "The gods of the
heathen are devils." Paganism and devilism coincided.

     The change was lamentable and is responsible for the ghastly
tragedy of later years. The Roman persecution of magicians was
based entirely on the belief that they had abnormal powers and the
progress of enlightenment might have undermined this belief. But if
magic meant collusion with the devil, belief in it was sure to be
magnified very considerably under a religion which taught that the
world swarmed with devils. It was precisely the elaboration of this
devil-doctrine by the great theologians of the Middle Ages which
caused the appalling witch-massacres of the fifteenth, sixteenth,
and seventeenth centuries. What surprises one at first is that
there was comparatively little persecution of witches before the
thirteenth century. It was this wonderful thirteenth century, of
which modern Catholics are so proud, that inaugurated the massacres
on a large scale. A famous philosopher has called it the most
stupid century in the whole of the Middle Ages, and certainly it
was the most tyrannical, most superstitious, and most sanguinary.

     As far as magic is concerned, the Church never wavered, and
the practice of its children never relaxed. The situation is
analogous to that of the virtue of chastity. The law was clear: the
practice almost universally ignored it. On the other hand, there
was no consistent attitude in the Church in regard to the striga
(as the strix was now called), the blood-sucking nocturnal
creature. The Salic Law in south Germany sentenced the atriga to
death. The Lombard Law treated the idea as a superstition. Under
Charlemagne a synod held at Paderborn in 785 enacted (canon 6):
"Whosoever, deceived by the devil, believes, as the pagans did,
that any person is a witch and can devour men, and therefore burns
that person, and gives her flesh to others to eat, shall be put to
death." individual churchmen were just as much at variance. Some
believed in the striga: others did not.

     Characteristically, what the Church was concerned about most
was magic of an erotic nature. In 860 the great archbishop of
Rheims, Hincmar, held a solemn inquiry into this, as the king's
concubine was supposed to have used such magic on the queen, and he


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concluded that it was genuine deviltry. On the whole, there were
few executions of witches until the eleventh century, when we begin
to find isolated executions more frequently in the chronicles.

     I am, however, more concerned with the other aspects of
witchcraft: the suggestion of an organization contained in the
belief that witches flew in the air at night in droves or to an
appointed gathering place. It is usually said that there was no
organization of witches until the thirteenth century, which would
be quite inconsistent with the view that witchcraft was the ancient
pagan religion of Europe. The historical truth is not so simple,
and it is interesting.

     At the end of the tenth century Abbot Regino made a large
collection of Church laws and canons, and one of these is concerned
with witches. Where and when this canon was passed we do not know.
Some scholars trace it to the Synod of Ancyra, in 314, which is
impossible, for the Roman world was then almost entirely pagan. It
seems to come from some synod of the sixth century. It says:

          And we must not overlook this, that certain wicked women,
     who have turned aside to Satan, seduced by the illusions and
     phantasms of the demons, believe and profess that during the
     night they ride with Diana the goddess of the pagans [another
     version says, or with Herodias] and an innumerable crowd of
     women on certain beasts, and pass over great spaces of the
     earth during the night, obeying her commands as their
     mistress, and on certain nights are summoned to her service.
     Would that these had perished in their perfidy and had not
     dragged many with them to destruction! For an innumerable
     multitude, deceived by this false opinion, believe that these
     things are true and so depart from the faith and fall into the
     error of the pagans, believing that there is some divinity
     apart from the one God, (Migne edition.)

     The abbot goes on to say that all this is the work of the
devil who assumes various forms to tempt silly women. The law is
reproduced again a few years later in the collection of Bishop
Burkhard of Worms (Decreta, bk. ix, chap. 5), who adds the vampire-
idea: that women claim that they can, even while they lie in bed
with their husbands, fly out in the air and suck the heart and
entrails out of other men who are abed.

     A life of Pope Damasus (of the fourth century) pretends that
as early as 367 a Roman synod took cognizance of these women who
rode on beasts at night with Herodias. This life is probably
spurious, but it is clear that by the sixth century (to which the
canon seems to belong) there was something very like organized
witchcraft in Europe. We will not press the words "innumerable
multitude," but clearly numbers of women met by night to honor
Diana, the goddess of the moon and of fertility.

     This does not surprise us. Europe never voluntarily accepted
Christianity. Paganism was driven into dark corners, but age by age
the Church had to thunder against it. The women in particular clung
to their Diana, if not to the still older mother-earth goddess.
Sterility was a curse in those days, however convenient it may seem


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to moderns. Everything that could counteract it and beat the blood-
magic, the aid of a goddess, or even the mutual inspiration of a
human orgy -- was treasured. The cold advice of Christianity to
pray to Mary, was found less effective in practice and less
congenial than the nocturnal adventure, But it had to be conducted
with secrecy and cunning, and it seemed as if the women must fly
through the air to the point of assembly.

     Where I venture to differ from Miss Murray is when she
supposes that these more or less organized gatherings persisted and
reappeared as the witches of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The Dianists disappear, and for centuries the Church deals only
with individual magicians, male or female. But a new element was
meantime entering European life, and the reader will find that it
throws a fascinating light upon witchcraft. It is usual to say that
Thomas Aquinas with his absurd demonology, and the Inquisition with
its terrible scent for heresy, created witchcraft. Let us try
another line.

     The true religious history of Europe has never yet been
written. Possibly the full truth will never be known, as there has
been so much suppression and distortion of facts; but we do know
that the accepted version is false. Christianity was imposed by
force upon a reluctant world. The current idea of a "conversion" of
the Roman world to it is not more false than the almost universal
belief that it was meekly accepted, if not profoundly cherished,
until modern times. Although our forefathers were robbed of their
schools and detained for ages in the densest ignorance, it is to
their credit that age after age they, in immense multitudes,
rebelled against the corrupt priestcraft and the absurd legend of
the Christian religion. It is only by the bloody use of force on a
colossal scale that the Church maintained its dominion for so many
centuries.

     Witchcraft was one expression of the constant effort of the
race to rid itself of the religion imposed on it. One of the chief
rival religions to Christianity in the fourth century had been
Manichaeism, and the writings of St. Augustine, who was at first a
Manichaean, but later one of the worst slanderers of the religion,
show us how heroically its adherents fought for their creed even
long after imperial decrees had declared, under pain of
confiscation and death, that Christianity was to be the sole
religion of the empire.

     I need say of it here only that it was an ascetic religion,
and that it was based essentially on the ancient Persian belief in
two supreme principles, one of light and goodness, the other of
darkness and evil. Manichaeism was crushed by the aid of the
imperial troops but Manichaean ideas were destined still to play a
great part in Europe. And one aspect of the religion deserves
special notice. It has been, I suppose, the custom of religious
bodies from time immemorial to slander and vilify rival bodies. The
Romans themselves put the darkest interpretations on the secret
gatherings of the Christians; they were said to indulge in sensual
orgies, to worship a god with an ass's head and to kill babies for
sacramental purposes. So in time the Christians vilified the



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Manichees; though St. Jerome candidly admits that they were men and
women of far stricter virtue than the Christians themselves.
Augustine, however, was chiefly instrumental in defaming them.

     In writing his life, I discovered a carefully overlooked
passage in which, posing as the first Inquisitor, he made a public
examination of two Manichees. The first was a girl of twelve, and
from the lips of this child the pious elderly bishop drew the
confession, by leading questions, that the Manichees made their
sacrament of human semen and flour. The second victim was a sacred
virgin of the sect, and Augustine at once charged her with what he
had put into the mouth of the little girl. To make the sacrament,
he said, she had lain nude on the ground, a little heap of flour
beside her, and the priests had ... She protested that she was a
virgin, but Augustine's midwives examined her and declared that she
was not. Then, Augustine says, she confessed the whole "abominable
crime"; in other words, she escaped the drastic punishment of her
heresy by letting the bishop have his way and feigning conversion.
Later we hear of similar examinations on Manichaean women and
confessions of intercourse with "the devil" (probably meaning his
representative, the Manichaean priest).

     Here, I am convinced, is the origin of one of the ingredients
of the early myth of the witch; though in the fully developed
witch-cult there was unquestionably a large amount of "intercourse
with the devil." However that may be, the Manichaean ideas were
merely thrust out of sight, and they broke out again from time to
time. One of the most famous heretics of the Greek Church, Paul of
Samosata, was the son of a Manichaean mother and his heresy
combined the Manichaean principle of two supreme powers with an
early form of Protestantism or evangelical Christianity. The Greek
Church and Empire -- which, let us remember, had never been tainted
by barbarian invasions -- were now, in the eighth century,
appallingly corrupt, and this purer religion, as it was, spread
widely, especially among the Armenians. Emperor after emperor tried
to suppress it. The Empress Theodora put to death no less than one
hundred thousand members of the sect; or, in a few years, made
fifty times as many martyrs as the pagans had in three centuries.
Finally, in the tenth century, no less than two hundred thousand
members of the sect were transplanted from Armenia to Thrace, to
form a living bulwark against the encroachments of the Bulgars.

     But within a short time the worthy Paulicians had spread their
gospel peacefully among the Bulgars, and Europe was confronted with
a new heresy, the Bogomiles. You have probably never heard of the
Bogomiles, but you will surely have heard of those famous heretics
of the south of France, the Albigensians, who were drowned by the
greatest of the Popes, Innocent III, in their own blood. They (and
the Waldensians, the Cathari, the Patarenes, and other obscure
bodies of the time) were inspired by the Bogomiles and had the same
tincture of Manichaean ideas. The orthodox Catholics of France
called them bougres (Bulgars) and it was thus that the innocent
name of a people became the worst swear-word of French and English
tongues. They were reproached with having a pope in Bulgaria. In
short, from the tenth century onward this revolt against orthodox
Christianity and its corrupt priests and monks spread over Europe
like a prairie fire.


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     The reader will already have perceived that here we have the
clue to the appearance of witchcraft as a secret and organized
cult. The Dianists of the sixth and seventh centuries had gone, and
until the twelfth century we find only a few isolated executions of
witches for practicing black magic. In the twelfth century these
become more frequent. In the thirteenth century the swords of the
troops and the fires of the Inquisition suppress heresy; and from
that time on witchcraft is recognized by the Church as a secret
heresy and a widespread organization.

     The Paulicians, Bogomiles, Albigensians, etc., were, as usual,
slandered by the orthodox. Psellus, one of the leading Greek
orthodox writers of the tenth century, wrote a book "On the
Operations of the Devils," in which he included almost as many
fables as in his lives of the martyrs. The heretics, he says, used
to meet at night by candle light and invoke the devils. When these
appeared in the shape of animals, the lights were extinguished and
the worshipers indulged in an orgy of sexuality with the devils and
with each other. This amiable story passed all over Europe and was
applied to the heretics everywhere. It will be enough to quote a
letter of Pope Gregory IX to show the connection with witchcraft.
In 1233 Gregory wrote to the bishops of Germany, urging them to
seek out and persecute the heretics. The letter (given in the Latin
in the "Annales" of Ravnaldus, year 1233, p. 89) is one of those
weird compositions which bring a smile to the lips when one hears
Catholics claim some special divine interest in their church and
its popes, but it is too long to be quoted here in full.

     The Pope says that amongst these heretics "when a neophyte is
received there appears to him a kind of frog," though some say it
is a toad. Some kiss it shamelessly on the buttocks, others on the
mouth, drawing the tongue and spittle of the animal into their
mouths. Sometimes this toad is "as big as a goose or a duck." The
neophyte next encounters a "man of extraordinary paleness, with
deep black eyes, and so thin that his skin seems to be stretched
over his bones." The neophyte kisses him and finds that he is "as
cold as ice." The worshipers then sit to table, and a large black
cat comes out of a statue, and all of them in the order of their
dignity, kiss its buttocks. After a time the lights are
extinguished and there is the usual orgy of sexual intercourse. If,
the Pope gravely explains, there are more men than women, or women
than men, they resort to sodomy. The candles are relit, and they
sit again at table, when from a dark corner of the room comes a man
"shining like the sun from the loins upward, but rough as a cat
below." To this devil the neophyte is presented, and the faithful
also give consecrated hosts which they have stolen from the
churches where they have communicated.

     This is almost exactly an account of a witch meeting, and the
Pope adds another significant detail. These heretics, he says,
declare that God is a tyrant, and that he unjustly condemned
Lucifer to hell. Lucifer is the real creator of the world and
prince of men, and in the end he will regain his place.

     In point of fact, the Paulicians and Bogomiles and their kin
had quaintly mixed the old Persian belief with some of the
speculations of the Gnostics. The ancient Persians had believed


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that the evil principle had created matter which was evil. To
Christians the evil principle was Lucifer, and the new heretics
contended that Lucifer was one of the two sons of God, unjustly
cast off by an overbearing father. He became their "prince" and
"lord," and (unlike the Persians) they believed that he would
ultimately triumph. This belief either led to or was due to -- the
details are necessarily obscure, as we know the tenets only from
bitter enemies -- another departure from Manichaeism. The
Manichaeans had been very ascetic, deeming the flesh (as part of
the creation of the evil principle) an evil thing; and it is clear
that the Albigensians and other European heretics also led strict
lives. But the glorification of Lucifer meant that matter and the
flesh could scarcely be regarded as evil, and a reaction into
orgies was inevitable. The witches, at least, had such orgies.

     Here we have almost the whole of the ingredients of the witch-
cult before our eyes. John of Salisbury, bishop of Chartres in the
twelfth century, and others refused to believe in the striga. Pope
Silvester II (Gerbert) was himself accused of magic. Moorish
influence was beginning to teach Europe the elements of wisdom.
And, curiously enough, it was the crown of this new development,
the Scholastic movement, which completed the evolution of the witch
and let loose the murderous forces of the Church.

                     THE CATHOLIC MASSACRES

     I have several times noted a change of attitude on the part of
apologists. In days of general ignorance and of poor historical
scholarship it was possible to represent that a beneficent
transformation was wrought in Europe when it passed from paganism
to Christianity. Most believers still have a vague idea that this
is "history," but the mass of facts I have already given shows how
ludicrous it is. Europe passed into an age of dense ignorance,
appalling brutality, and more sexual license than ever. The
apologist therefore turns round and says that these things were
inevitable on account of the barbaric invasions. We must allow
time, he says, for the uplifting and beneficent action of the
Christian religion.

     The new apology is no better than the old. I have already
shown that Europe got steadily worse for centuries after the
triumph of Christianity. Now, in dealing with witchcraft and the
Inquisition, we shall find that what is called the best part of the
Middle Ages created new and appalling evils; and it was precisely
the most religious and most treasured part of the thirteenth
century that wrought the evil.

     The Scholastic movement, the rise of the great theologians of
the Middle Ages, was one of the effects of the civilizing influence
of the Moors. But the religion of Europe was so essentially
mischievous that these great scholars spent most of their time in
arid and sterile speculation which the modern world finds
repellent, and they, instead of discovering the utterly fraudulent
bases of the power of the Church, enlarged its power and caused it
to exploit and torture humanity worse than ever. The greatest of
them all was Thomas Aquinas (who died in 1274), and Thomas, an
obese Dominican monk, so narcotized by his religion that be could,


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if necessary, have proved to demonstration that it was possible for
Jonah to swallow the whale, came in time to deal with devils. He
endorsed every fable that had entered Christianity from other
religions. The world was full of devils and they were just as busy
as even Gregory the Great had imagined. With their aid witches
could certainly fly through the air by night. They copulated with
human beings frequently, and had children. The pious monk even goes
into details:

          When children are born of the intercourse of devils with
human beings, they do not come from the seed of the devil or of the
human body he has assumed, but of seed which he has extracted from
another human being. The same devil, who as a woman, has
intercourse with a man can also, in the form of a man, have
intercourse with a woman.

Thus the case for the witches was completed by the highest
authority in Christendom. The succubi (underlying or female) and
incubi (overlying or male devils), based upon an ancient Babylonian
myth about evil spirits, and the nocturnal wanderings, also based
upon Babylonian and Roman ideas, were fully vindicated.

     Fitly enough, it was in the very year after the death of
Thomas Aquinas that a woman was for the first time burned as a
witch in the sense that she had had intercourse with the devil; and
it was the Dominican monk and Inquisitor Hugo de Boniols who
condemned her.

     He was trying a large batch of heretics at Toulouse, and
amongst them was a noble lady, Angela de la Barthe, fifty-six years
old, who was thus accused. Refined and wealthy, she nevertheless
"confessed" under torture that she spent the nights in
lasciviousness with the devil, and that she had given birth to a
child with a wolf's head and a serpent's tail, which had to be fed
on the flesh of babies. She used, she said, to go out nightly and
steal babies for the purpose. This "monster" often occurs in
confessions, and I imagine it means that some poor woman under
torture had a miscarriage, and the embryo would look to the
priests, who were presumably unfamiliar with such things, like a
monstrosity, a lizard, a thing with an animal head and a long tail.

     A beautiful monument this poor noble dame's grave would be to
the learning of Thomas Aquinas and his Dominican order and the God-
inspired wisdom of his Church! It would be horrible enough if it
were the only monument, but it was the first of certainly hundreds
of thousands. The learned Sprenger in his "Leben und Lebre des
Mobammed" (i, 264) quotes the estimate that nine million witches
were put to death, and observes that it is "certainly not an
exaggeration." It is generally regarded as a large exaggeration,
but we have not the material to give even an approximate estimate.
The Inquisition alone is said to have put thirty thousand to death.
One judge, Remy, boasted that he sentenced nine hundred in fifteen
years in Lorraine. In the diocese of Como a thousand were executed
in a year. In three months in 1515 there were six hundred witches
burned in the bishopric of Bamberg and nine hundred in the
bishopric of Wiirzburg. In five years one hundred and twenty of the



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six hundred inhabitants of the small town of Lindheim were burned
as witches. Some historians estimate that Henri III of France alone
accounted for thirty thousand. Then there were the Protestant
massacres.

     Whatever the number, these Christian Popes and scholars
perpetrated a crime in comparison with which the execution of one
or two thousand early Christians by the Roman authorities is a mere
trifle. Books about witches and devils began to appear. In 1211 one
was written by a marshal of the imperial army. In 1220 a Cistercian
monk wrote a treatise. In 1233 Pope Gregory IX, as we saw, endorsed
the whole story. But it was the founding of the Inquisition and the
suppression of open heresy which created the great witch-cult and
inaugurated the terrible massacres. It was the greatest of the
Popes, Innocent III, who bears the heaviest responsibility.

     As the secular rulers and their bishops were considered slow
in their struggle against the heresy that was spreading in every
country, Gregory IX had, in 1232, taken the "inquiry" (inquisitio)
out of the hands of the bishops and given it in charge of the
Dominican monks, acting directly under Rome. This was the founding
of the Inquisition as a Papal institution, but it was Innocent III,
earlier in the century, who had given it a bloody example to
follow. When the heretics of the south of France had laughed at the
arguments of his legates, he had stooped to the device of appealing
to the greed and lust of all the available military adventurers,
and had declared the "crusade" which is known in history as the
massacre of the Albigensians.

     Pope Gregory, we saw, particularly directed the Inquisitors to
seek heretics who were in league with the devil. Thomas Aquinas
gave the Church a finished manual of deviltry, and before the end
of the century the Inquisitors in the south of France were
condemning women for compacts or cohabitation with the devil. Such
trials were still few, when another Pope, John XXII, gave a
feverish impulse to the campaign.

     The Papal court was then at Avignon. The hundred years of
comparative virtue (since Hildebrand) which had followed the
hundred and fifty years of vice were now over, and the Papacy was
almost as corrupt as ever. Petrarch, who lived not far away at the
time, called the "sacred palace" at Avignon "the sink of all
vices"; and there were certainly not many vices that were not
richly represented by the cardinals. One, however, was black magic,
and when, in 1320, a bishop and archbishop or several cardinals
sought to bring about the death of the Pope by magical means, John
began to take a peculiar interest in the black art.

     In every part of Europe the tribunals of the Inquisition now
became busy with witches. Between 1320 and 1350 the tribunal at
Carcassonne tried more than four hundred cases of magic, and of
these one-half were executed. At Toulouse six hundred were charged,
and two-thirds of them were handed over to "the secular arm" for
execution; lest, of course, the spotless robes and white hands of
the Church should be stained with blood. There was a terrible




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massacre at Berne, and large numbers were burned in Italy. Even an
English bishop was accused at Rome of paying homage to the devil;
and from Ireland came one of the most definite early cases of
alleged witchcraft.

     It was again a noble and refined dame, Lady Alice Kyteler (or
Kettle): probably one of those high-spirited Irish dames,
disdainful of clerical orders, who are happily multiplying in the
country today. Lady Alice and her son and daughter and others were
arrested and tried. The clergy found a pot of ointment in her room,
so, clearly, it was the famous witch-ointment (partly composed of
the blood and fat of murdered children) which gave witches the
power of flying through the air on a broomstick. The Inquisitor
found that she had had criminal intercourse with the devil, whose
name is given as Robin Artison, and she was condemned. Lady Alice
was smuggled away to England by her noble friends, but a young
woman associated with her was executed.

     The bishop of Kilkenny, in reporting the event, spoke of "this
new pestilential set," and other clerics of the time make it begin
fairly definitely with the fourteenth century or the second half of
the thirteenth. When the persecutors were active at Berne in 1337,
they complained that the pest had haunted the city "about sixty
years." The Dominican Inquisitor Jaquier spoke in 1458 of this
recent" sect which held "synods of the devil," and ended its
meetings with orgies. The Inquisitor Bernard of Como wrote that the
secta strigarum (the witch sect) arose in the first half of the
fourteenth century.

     The meaning of this is clear enough. By the end of the
thirteenth century the semi-Manichaean heresy which had spread from
Armenia and Bulgaria to France was driven underground by the
Inquisition or annihilated by troops. Witchcraft is its next form,
as we see clearly in cases which presently occurred in the north of
France. In 1390 the Paris Parliament had checked the persecution by
transferring trials to the civil tribunals, but some decades later
the clerics, who complained much of lay skeptics, returned to their
work. A professor of Paris University, W. Adeline, was in 1453
brought before the bishop for denying the reality of witchcraft. In
face of the terror the scholar fell on his knees, weeping, and
confessed (as they wanted) that he was himself in league with the
devil and had trampled on the crucifix. He was leniently dismissed
with a sentence of imprisonment for life.

     The clerics had regained power, and they made a fearful use of
it. At Douai a woman was brought before the Inquisition on the
ground that she was a Waldensian. She was forced to accuse others,
who in turn denounced others, until a large number of victims
confronted the Inquisitor. Under a promise of light sentences if
they confessed, they all glibly agreed that they had gone to witch-
meetings on oiled broomsticks, had met the devil in the form of a
goat or ape, and had concluded with a general orgy. The savage
Inquisitor then handed them over to the secular arm, and they,
protesting that they had been deceived into making the statements,
said that it was all false. Six of them were executed.




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     The Inquisitor next year sought to repeat his triumph at
Amiens. but the good bishop, who seems to have been a sinner, pooh-
poohed the story and discharged the accused. The Inquisitor went on
to Arras, where the bishop was more pious or more greedy, and the
charges spread from house to house until there was a reign of
terror in the city. Under torture -- one woman was tortured fifteen
times -- they recklessly denounced any acquaintance to get relief.
A large number of victims were condemned, and men and women fled in
panic from the city, which actually lost its commercial prestige.
In 1491 the lawyers of the Paris Parliament took up the cases,
analyzed the records, and found that the whole of them had been
wrongly condemned; and one is pleased to learn that, by royal
order, this finding of the Parliament was nailed on the door of the
bishop's palace.

     Except in England torture was habitually used in the
examination of witnesses, and the tortures were fiendish. There was
one especially used for women accused of witchcraft. This was a
chair the seat of which was either studded with point-upward nails
-- one chair had two thousand nails -- or a meial plate under which
a fire was lit. There the poor creatures sat until they either
accused themselves (or a neighbor) of consorting with the devil --
or died. At Lindheim, where the most fearful persecution occurred,
six women were executed because they confessed, under torture, that
they had stolen the body of a child for witch-purposes. After the
execution the husband of one of the women opened the grave and
found the child's body there uninjured; and the monk Inquisitor
declared the body to be a counterfeit made by the devil and ordered
it to be burned!

     The Inquisition imposed heavy fines and confiscated the goods
of its victims. The clergy, the Inquisitors, and the informers (who
were never named in court) shared these funds. Such procedure would
disgrace savages. Thousands of victims of the Inquisition had only
one heresy: a good bank account.

     Moreover, in the frenzy for witch-hunting that now set in even
honest judges lost their heads and committed monstrosities of
judgment. A case is on record of a little girl of eight years who
was solemnly tried for witchcraft because playmates said that she
could make mice. The poor child had made "mice" by folding and
knotting her handkerchief into some fancied resemblance to mice.

     And it was again the Popes who were responsible for the new
epidemic. Engenius IV had in 1437 urged the Inquisitors to look out
for witches. They found plenty in France, Italy, and Switzerland,
but in Germany their zeal was checked by comparatively humane
rulers and bishops. The spirit that begot the Reformation was
growing. But the German Inquisitors, Institor and Sprengel,
reported to Rome that Germany was full of witches. of both sexes,
and that they formed a well organized sect. A book had been
published in German so describing them. The Pope, Innocent VIII,
thereupon issued his famous Bull, "Summis Desiderantes," in 1484,
lashing the clergy everywhere to the attack on witches. The
Inquisitors themselves two years later compiled a manual for the
use of judges -- the notorious "Hammer of Witches" (Malleus
maleficarum) -- and Europe again stank with burning flesh and
echoed with the groans of tortured women.

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     We cannot quit this section of the subject without a word
about Joan of Arc: the remarkable girl burned as a witch by the
Church in 1431 and (for political reasons) declared a saint by the
same Church in our time. A full discussion would require an entire
volume, and I will here merely summarize the reflections of Miss
Murray in her book, "The Witch-Cult in Western Europe."

     Miss Murray, the ablest writer on witchcraft in our time, is
of the opinion that Joan was a witch. We have already seen enough
to consider that proposition impartially. Maids of Joan's age were
frequently witches. Moreover, Joan's greatest friend in the French
army, Gilles de Rais (or Retz), was an acknowledged witch. Shaw's
representation of Gilles in his play is very misleading. He was at
the time, though in his early twenties, a very earnest and able
soldier. He became a Marshal, at the age of twenty-five, and he is
described in the "Grande Encyclopidie" as "one of the finest
intelligences of the time." Unfortunately he had not a balanced
mind, and when he left the army to pursue his magical studies in
his princely chateau, he fell into the most scandalous excesses,
even killing children for his experiments. He is the original of
the Bluebeard story. There is much probability in Miss Murray's
contention that he vacillated between the two religions, but he
frankly confessed that he had been a witch and he was executed as
such. Joan chose him as her special protector in the army, and he
was devoted to her.

     Another courtier of the time, the king's favorite noble,
Pierre de Giac, was a witch. Before execution -- he also was a
sorry scoundrel -- he said that he had given one of his hands to
the devil, and he asked that that hand should be cut off before he
died. Miss Murray believes that the Duc d'Alengon himself was a
witch, if not the Grand Master.

     The evidence in regard to Joan is puzzling and contradictory.
Time after time when she was asked a question, and an emphatic
negative answer would be expected from any orthodox Christian, she
refused to reply or replied evasively. She would not say if she
believed fairies to be, as the Church certainly held, evil spirits.
She would not explicitly reply when it was said that she had been
taught witchcraft and magic. She would not swear on the Gospels,
and would not repeat the Paternoster except in confession. She had
seen "St. Michael" with her bodily eyes, in the shape of a "good
man." Her "St. Catherine" was physically present somehow in her
castle-prison. She had seen "God," in a scarlet cap and long white
robe. She spoke throughout of "those of my party" -- she had a
secret sign on her letters for them -- and she sometimes saw her
saints, or the sources of her voices, "among Christians."

     All this is counterbalanced by assurances that she is a good
Christian, so that it is very difficult to reach a confident
decision. There is certainly serious ground to reopen the question
and analyze minutely the whole record of her trial. That is a task
that could not be done here, and we must leave the question open.
In view of our present knowledge of witchcraft there would be
nothing in the least surprising if we found that Joan was a witch.
But she was evidently neither a perfectly orthodox witch nor a
perfectly orthodox Christian.


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                         THE SECRET CULT

     It is now time that we formally considered the question, what
witchcraft really was. The prevailing, almost universal, opinion of
those who at length rose against the persecution, and of the
nineteenth-century writers on witchcraft, was that the cult or
organization and all the details alleged about it were a creation
of popular credulity and monkish imagination. The secret meetings
or Sabbaths were thought to have been as fictitious as the ride
through the air on a greased broomstick. The "devil" who is put as
the central object of the cult was declared a fiction. The witches'
mark, the orgies, the homage, and all the rest were regarded as
wholly imaginary. Inquisitors wrote their manuals of these things,
and the unfortunate men and women confessed whatever they willed in
order to put an end to the diabolical tortures. Death for
witchcraft was preferable to a life thus prolonged; indeed very few
in any case were ever acquitted by the Inquisition. Bernard Shaw's
dramatic version of its procedure looks rather like a meeting of a
committee of the Fabian Society to judge a member for, say, reading
H.G. Wells. The Inquisitors had bowels of brass.

     It is quite certain -- we have already seen instances -- that
thousands of victims of the witch-hunters were good Christians,
driven by torture to confess anything that the torturer wanted.
Suicide was common amongst them. Remy, the French witch-judge, says
that he knew fifteen cases of suicide in one year. But it is
clearly a mistake to ascribe the whole of the details to
imagination, fear, hysteria, or sex-obsession.

     In the first place, torture was not used in England. A
fiendish witch-finder like Hopkins had his own irregular way of
torturing the women he suspected, but after arrest and during trial
they were questioned without torture; and they tell the same story
as the tortured witches of the continent. Miss Murray deals
especially with English witches, and she makes this clear. What I
am about to describe of their organization and ritual could be
based entirely upon the testimony of English witches. They often
gloried in their "religion." At Northampton a mother and daughter
were led together to the scaffold. A priest exhorted them to pray,
and "they both set up a very loud laughter," says an eye-witness,
"calling for the devil to come and help them," and deriding
Christianity.

     Nor are all the testimonies to witchcraft merely the
statements of prisoners. There was a remarkable case at Lille in
1661. A home for poor and ignorant girls was presided over by a
Mme. Bourignon, a pious Christian, and she was horrified to
discover that thirty-two of the girls were witches. There was no
crowd-psychology or suggestion. In friendly conversation with her
they explained that they had been dedicated in the religion as
children and would not abandon it and become Christians.

     "No," said a young woman of twenty-two whom she tried to
convert, "I will not be other than I am: I find too much content in
my condition."




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     It is, in fact, one of the most common and most distressed
observations of the less fanatical Inquisitors that a very large
proportion of the witches "blasphemed" to the end, as they say, and
took pride in their religion. Cases are not unknown in which they
sought death.

     De Lancre, the famous French lawyer and witch-judge of the
seventeenth century, made a close study of the witches he tried and
he wrote one or two books about them. Instead of finding the women
terrorized by torture into confessing anything that the examiners
wanted them to admit, he notes with great surprise and perplexity
that they tell a consistent story, deliberately and even joyfully
adhere to it, and unquestionably have a very real religion. From
the long quotation from his works which Miss Murray reproduces, in
old French, in her book I translate the following passages:

          A very distinguished witch tells us that she has always
     believed that witchcraft is the best religion. Jeanne
     Dibasson, twenty-nine years old, tells us that the Sabbath is
     the true Paradise where there is more pleasure than one can
     express. Marie de la Ralde, twenty-eight years old, a very
     beautiful young woman, deposes that she takes special pleasure
     in going to the Sabbath ... as to a wedding, not so much for
     the liberty and license they have together (which, from
     modesty, she says she has never done or seen done) but because
     the devil kept their hearts and will so attached that it was
     hardly possible for any other desire to enter. ... She went
     there with much more pleasure than to Mass, for the devil gave
     them to understand that he was the real God. ... There are, in
     fine, witches so devoted to his diabolical service that no
     torture or torment can surprise them, and they say that they
     go to a real martyrdom and to death for love of him as gaily
     as they would go to a festival or a public rejoicing. When
     they are arrested, they do not weep or shed a single tear,
     either over their false martyrdom or the torture; and the
     scaffold is to them so pleasant that some of them are in a
     hurry to be executed, and they joyously endure the trial, they
     are in such a hurry to be with the devil.

     In short, we have such a mass of testimony that is obviously
not wrung from terrorized witnesses, we have such an abundance of
cases in which the witch defiantly meets her end with the witch-
creed on her lips, whereas a Christian tortured into momentary
"confessions" would at least end in prayer and repentance, that
there is no room for doubt about the reality of witchcraft. It was
an organized anti-Christian religion. And there is, in every
country, consistent testimony as to the main features of the cult.
Local variations are given, but there is agreement on broad lines,
and we have a fair knowledge of the secret religion.

     In substance it has nothing to do with ancient paganism. It is
monotheistic. All our accounts of it are written down by Christian
clerks or judges, so that the central object of the cult is always
spoken of as "the devil." The writers invariably state, however,
that the witches insist that this being is "the true god." He is
their lord, master and prince.



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     At times it seems as if the witches must themselves have used
the word devil, saying that the devil was the real God. Lucifer,
the brilliant son of the Old Testament God, and therefore a god,
was the object of the cult. An early Christian legend says that
Lucifer's only sin was pride -- which is not a sin -- and even
Milton comes very near to making a god of Satan in his "Paradise
Lost." It is the Gnostic-Manichaean idea, or confusion of ideas,
which I have previously described. The principle of darkness and
matter is Lucifer; he is no longer evil, and he will eventually
triumph. It is to reunion with him that the dying witches look
forward.

     At all events, the witches everywhere and unanimously speak of
some living person who is to them "the devil" -- their master or
his representative in the flesh. Lady Kyteler of Kilkenny had her
"Robin Artison." "Robin" seems to have been a common name for this
mysterious chief. He visits the witches in their houses or in quiet
places. He is incessantly approaching women and pressing them to
join the secret religion. As a rule he is dressed in black or other
sober ordinary clothes, though he has a special mark on his boot.
But his movements are mysterious, and he impresses the women more
or less with awe. None of them whose words are recorded give us a
clear idea of how they conceived the relation of this chief to
Lucifer. The better educated witches, as a rule, tell us nothing of
their creed, and the ignorant women who talk most were possibly not
fully initiated. To most of them the chief seems a semi-
supernatural person, though in some cases they frankly speak of him
as a quite well-known man of their own district, the secret
organizer of the sect.

     The chief had an assistant who helped to give notice of
meetings, and so on. This man seems to have succeeded to the
mastership when the chief died. There were no elections, so that
the succession must have been by nomination. Heads of the local
groups or "covens" also were appointed. The local unit of the cult
was a group of thirteen men and women (or twelve and a leader)
called a "coven," which seems to be a corruption of "convene."
Possibly the idea was founded on the story of Christ and his twelve
disciples.

     The great assemblies or Sabbaths were, naturally, at the
primitive festival times of the race, spring and autumn. The first,
the Walpurgis Night of the German witches, was held on the eve of
May 1st, and the second on the eve of November 1st. Later a
midsummer Sabbath and one at Christmas were added, and in places
there were other festivals on the Christian feast-days. There were
lesser meetings, called Esbats, for business purposes and to report
and deliberate on their magical practices, and in the end these
seem generally to have been held on Fridays: possibly in derision
of the Christian veneration of Friday, the supposed day of Christ's
death.

     The ritual of the Sabbath is so consistently given by the
witches everywhere that we can confidently describe it, A few women
under torture might "confess" that they had ridden on broomsticks
and made ointment of babies' fat, but the reliable witnesses tell
a quite plausible story. Some quiet spot in the neighborhood, a


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hill, a wood, or (if available) an ancient stone monument, was
appointed for the meeting, and in the dead of night the witches
found their way to it; generally on foot, as it was not usually far
away, but often on horse or ass. The hour of assembly was midnight,
and the festival usually lasted until near dawn.

     Paying homage to the chief was the first item. The living
representative of Lucifer was on these occasions always disguised,
and the women vaguely imagined that they were in the presence of
their "god." They speak of him as having the form of a bull, a
goat, an ape, a cat, a dog, or some other animal, and it seems
clear that at least the lower part of his body was clad in the skin
of a sheep or goat, the tail hanging behind. In some cases he seems
to have worn a mask at the back of his head or above his tail.

     Homage meant kissing some part of his anatomy, and there
cannot be the slightest doubt, so numerous and consistent are the
testimonies of the reliable witnesses, that kissing his buttocks
was practically a universal custom. Old members might kiss his
face, and even neophytes might be directed to kiss his cheek, arm,
or thigh. Curiously enough, in the case of a phallic religion, as
witchcraft certainly was, we very rarely hear of witches being
directed to kiss the part which one would expect; though there may
have been a special reason for this. But nearly every single
witness speaks of kissing his buttocks, though they never use so
polite a word as that.

     And an important part of this ceremony was that mothers
presented their children, particularly baby girls, to the "devil."
The formula given by several witnesses is: "Great Lord, whom I
worship, I bring you this new servant who desires to be your slave
forever." The girls, it seems, returned at about the age of nine
and repeated the homage in their own names, and the "grand mistress
or "queen of the Sabbath" -- some lady who was closely allied with
the chief -- then directed them to renounce the Christian God,
Jesus, the Church, the sacraments, the clergy and monks, and
everything connected with the prevailing religion. In places, at
least, they had to trample or spit on a cross marked in the ground.
They then kissed the usual sacred part and received what was known
throughout the Middle Ages as "the witch's mark." In England,
especially, much stress was laid on this mark. The witch-finders,
knowing that no torture could be used in the trial, as on the
continent, concentrated on searching for the witch's mark in a
suspect, and Hopkins used quite effective torture in finding it.

     A weird chapter could be written on the marks that were
reported in court. The thighs, buttocks and pubic parts of the
suspects were minutely examined by the agents of the Holy Church,
and every mark or pimple that nature had produced was described in
grossly exaggerated language. Supernumerary nipples, which we now
know to be fairly common in women, and are even found in men, were
selected as indubitable proofs of diabolic action. They seem to
have been examined with clerical magnifying glasses, as we read of
immense teats in the most surprising parts of the witch's anatomy.
In point of fact, there seems to have been a general practice of
marking those who were initiated to witchcraft at the Sabbaths. The
mark was, however, a simple puncture made with an awl or sharpened


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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

bone. Whether anything was smeared on the instrument we cannot say,
but the "insensible area" for which the witch-finders looked is
simply a figment.

     After the entire assembly had paid homage the chief received
reports from local officers, and the dance, which seems to have
been the most important part of the solemnity, took place. Dancing
and feasting, in fact, occupied the remaining hours of the night.
The witches brought food with them, and we may confidently suppose
that the dance and the feast alternated. Ring dances, especially if
there was a sacred stone, were common, but a kind of follow-the-
leader dance, across country, was very popular. The women often
visibly light up with joy as they describe to the judge the wild
dance across the country, the "devil" often playing pipes, leading
the way, his tail wagging before the crowd, and the long stream of
witches, at the highest pitch of excitement, following in a line.
The flute, drum, and other instruments also were used.

     We have here a somewhat confused experience. Miss Murray calls
this part of the solemnity "the fertility rites," and no doubt it
was in a sense a continuation of the genuine fertility rites of the
old religions. But one may conjecture that frank human joy in the
sensual abandonment of the hour was the chief motive and one of the
chief attractions of the cult. As we saw on an earlier page, there
were virtuous witches who denied that they had ever seen any
impropriety at the Sabbaths, and we must suppose that there were
groups of a purely religious character or groups which did not
invite their most ascetic member to the nocturnal orgies. That
there was quite generally a sexual orgy is put beyond question by
the almost unanimous testimony of the witches. On these four
quarter days the Dionysiac urge which was in every healthy woman
was given an entire freedom, and for several hours of the night the
quiet woods of France, Germany, or England witnessed such scenes as
had long ago been enacted in the scented groves of Antioch or
Paphos.

     The orgy as such was not the chief rock of offense to the
Church. In practice the Church had never insisted on the quixotic
counsels of Christ. What the Inquisitors fastened on was the charge
of carnal intercourse with the devil; and it now seems clear that
this was a reality. Quite commonly the witches, the untortured
English witches as well as the continental, confess that they
copulated with the devil, at any period after the age of twelve. It
may seem strange that one man could be so generally charged, but
there is a great deal to be said for Miss Murray's suggestion that
an artificial means was used. Such things are known in older
phallic religions, where women came to the priests to be
deflowered.

     In some places, either at the Sabbath or elsewhere, the
"devil" celebrated a black mass. Animals were commonly sacrificed,
and there is only too good ground to believe that children were
occasionally sacrificed, especially to provide the blood at the
black mass. The wafer was generally stolen from the Church, the man
or woman going to communion and keeping the wafer dry in his mouth
until he was out of sight. The most notorious case is that of the
famous Mme. de Montespan in 1679. In her frenzy to regain the love


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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

of Louis XIV she got the Abbi Guiborg, who was clearly a witch, if
not a chief, to say mass, with a child's blood in the chalice. The
child was bought for "a crown." We have plenty of corroboratory
evidence; and it is curious to find that Christian babies were
never so used. Christian mothers of the time notoriously guarded
their unbaptized children from the witches.

                    THE PROTESTANT MASSACRES

     The Reformers brought no relief to the witches of Europe.
Indeed it is of the essence of my view that witchcraft was a
bitterly anti-Christian religion, and the Reformers were not
likely, on their own principles, to be less hostile to it than the
Catholics. Luther's sturdy common sense did, it is true, make him
hesitate. He and Melanchthon are enumerated by the Jesuits (who now
succeeded the Dominican and Franciscan monks as Inquisitors)
amongst the heterodox as regards witchcraft. He did not believe in
witches flying to the Sabbath; but he did believe in magical powers
and he most particularly believed in the devil. It was the
Protestant emphasis on the devil and on the Bible (which explicitly
condemns the witch to death) that caused as great massacres in
Reformed countries as in Roman Catholic lands.

     There is nothing to choose between them. Far more witches were
burned in Britain after the Reformation than before it. The stupid
frenzy of James I -- originating in one of the wildest legends,
that witches had caused the terrible storms that kept his bride in
Denmark -- has scarcely a parallel in royal history. The loathsome
activity of Hopkins and other witch-finders is in one sense as bad
as the activity of the Inquisition; though British Protestant Law
never permitted the diabolical tortures which disgraced Catholic
countries and drove tens of thousands of innocent men and women to
false self-accusations, insanity, suicide, and the scaffold. The
bloody panic in Massachusetts, under Cotton Mather, in 1691-92 is
almost as horrid a page as one can read in the history of medieval
Europe.

     Writers on the subject commonly describe the series of early
critics who first wielded the pen against the witch-massacres. A
Lutheran, Johann Weier, seems to have been one of the first
critics, though his work "De Praestigus Daemonum" regards the women
as possessed by the devil and merely questions the less plausible
phenomena. Several other Protestant doctors and professors (Ewick,
Gddelmann, etc.), not generally mentioned in history, repeated the
arguments of Weier in 1584 and 1585, long before any Catholic
writer attacked witchcraft. At the same time an English squire of
some learning, Reginald Scott, wrote a "Discoverie of Witchcraft"
(1584) in which he denied the whole of the alleged phenomena. King
James and various Anglican scholars replied to the book, and it is
not paradoxical to say, while doing all honor to the critics, that
the orthodox writers were right. Witchcraft, we have now seen, was,
when it was quite sincere, a religion in deadly hostility to
Christianity. When it was not deeply religious, it was a revolt
against the Christian ethic.





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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     It was half a century later when the first Catholic writers,
the Jesuits Tanner (1626) and Spee (1631) criticized the witch-
persecutions. What is more worthy of attention is that all the
scholars of Christendom united for centuries approving the outrage.
Now that we discover that witchcraft was an anti-Christian
religion, the apologists will probably turn round and ask us to
think it quite natural that it should be persecuted; forgetting
that the discovery puts the witches on a level with the Christian
martyrs, and that, while the Roman authorities put only a few
hundred people to death, and in virtue of their secular laws, the
Christian clergy made martyrs by the hundred thousand, if not the
million, and on purely religious grounds. It is part of the general
question of persecution or toleration; and any Church which now
defends the use of bloody arms in self-defense at any period of
history must refrain from complaint if it ever itself encounters
persecution.

     All the Weiers and Flades and Scotts and Spees of the
sixteenth and seventeenth century had little influence on the
persecution of witches; that is to say, on religious persecution in
general. The massacres almost extinguished the sect. The growing
spirit of liberty removed the occasion for it. Deists and
Rationalists, who could strike at the very root of the principle of
religious persecution, killed the witch-hunters. Montaigne, Bayle,
Beccaria, Voltaire -- such men brought the world gradually back to
sanity and humanity. As the light increased in the eighteenth
century even clerics looked in each other's faces and blushed for
the traditions of their Churches. The Inquisition might ply its
bloody trade in Spain until 1782, when Voltaireans came along, and
in Spanish America until the middle of the nineteenth century. In
rural districts the people might still hunt the witch. I found a
case of witch-swimming in the London newspapers of 1825. There was
a witch burned in a cottage in Ireland not twenty years ago. But
the light increases, and the whole world now looks back with horror
upon the ghastly and prolonged nightmare of the race in the ages of
faith.

                          ****     ****


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