[In the following excerpt, West discusses pneumatological writings that influenced seventeenth-century beliefs regarding witchcraft, demons, and magic.]

In The Year 1607, while Macbeth was perhaps on the stage in London, the Courts of Assizes of the adjacent county of Essex returned nine indictments for witchcraft, the celebrated occultist Dr. John Dee was still experimenting with his spirit stone, and a daemonologist sat on the throne of England. The learned Ben Jonson owned a manuscript of magical ceremonies, and the yet more learned Francis Bacon had gravely scribbled the margins of a work on how devils deluded old women. It was to be more than a hundred years yet before an academic history of witchcraft, as of a superstition whose time was out, would be written in England, and seventy before the bastions of the witch belief would begin to disintegrate under the pounding of John Webster. The good Sir Thomas Browne, a child of two in 1607, was mature and reputed a wise man when he wrote: "I have ever believed, and do now know, that there are witches. They that doubt of these do not only deny them, but spirits; and are obliquely, and upon consequence, a sort, not of infidels, but atheists."

That Ben Jonson ever seriously performed the rites his manuscript detailed, or that the pious if gullible Dee was guilty of black magic is improbable. That King James, for all his Daemonologie in Three Books, was a pedantic monster who stimulated persecution of witches in England has been disproved; and that Shakespeare believed in the spirits he wrote of has been denied. But it cannot be denied that in 1607 Englishmen—even cultivated Englishmen-were seriously aware in a way that we are not of an invisible world about them, and that they spent an appreciable share of their time thinking and writing on spirits and on those affairs of men in which spirits were believed to join. The courtier who in 1606 or 1607 saw Macbeth on the stage, or in the same years The Devil's Charter or Atheist's Tragedy or Bussy D'Ambois, had perhaps a rather detailed understanding of scenes that in themselves are as vague to us now as the sword play in Hamlet. It is not likely that King James' courtiers interpreted spirit scenes by childhood impressions from Grimm's fairy tales, as has many a critic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They knew rather more definitely than did editors two hundred years later what such things as spirits, witches, and magicians were conceived to be. These are terms that have nowadays only figurative or historical signification; but in 1607, as for centuries before and for generations to come, they or their equivalents were part of a universal faith that was, perhaps, as close to the people as technology is to us. There were those who knew little and those who knew much of it; there were those who rejoiced in it and those who fretted against it. But there were few or none whom it did not touch.

A later century was to characterize this faith as animistic, for its fundamental article was that behind or within sensible things existed certain supra-sensible living essences which, in the order of God's providence, sometimes wielded the materials of the physical world though distinct and separate from them all. These animating essences, called spirits, were of two kinds: souls, which were spirits vitalizing or withdrawn from bodies; and angels, otherwise daemons, which were spirits unattached, even by history, to vitalized bodies. All unbodied spirits—that is, daemons and souls of the dead—were conceived to inhabit non-spatial realms suitable to their natures, but to apply their powers sometimes also to the corporeal world and even occasionally to be represented by some temporary sensible form. As beings existing in a grade above the elementary, they were believed God's agents for the suspension and redirection or perhaps even the constant control of nature's normal courses, and to them man could address himself by means of magic.

Of magic dealing with spirits Shakespeare's contemporaries made two main divisions: ceremonial magic and witchcraft. Ceremonial magic was, roughly, the manipulation by a proper operator of certain occult and divine properties in things to attract, and perhaps to coerce, unbodied spirits. Of this magic there were—in the intention of the operator, at least—two sorts: white, which tried to identify itself with Christian worship; and black, which frankly made concessions to damned spirits. Distinct from both white and black magic was witchcraft, which was complete abandonment to damned spirits, a deliberate and unreserved worship by bargain of the devil and his demons for worldly ends.

Of these activities and of spirits there were many rationales in Elizabeth's day—some extravagant, some sober, some scoffing. Almost invariably they contained the proposition that to God all things are possible; but tacitly they recognized a qualified actualization in conformity with an eternal plan God had set for Himself to act by. There were no marvels that a priori could not occur; this was the ground of credulity. But there was an order to the world; and man's acquaintance with this order through revelation, experience, and reason restricted credulity to the confines of coherent surmise. As regarded unbodied spirits, such surmise touched three broad questions: do they act in the temporal world at all? What is the nature of those that do? What commerce can man have with them?

To these questions Elizabethans made answers of three general kinds: occult, which elaborated the arbitrary powers of spirits in the world and secret means of man's access to them; orthodox, which accepted on authority all spirit wonders not subversive of doctrine; and rationalistic, which tended to find sufficient explanation of every earthly event in a cause of its own category, confined the unbodied spirit to its own sphere.

These interpretations comprised clusters of general ideas that existed in varying focus in the consciousness of men, and which medieval and Renaissance thinkers systematized into bodies of theory which the late seventeenth century was to call pneumatology. Ideally, the literature of pneumatology was deliberate rationalization that by checking one datum against another, and all against the more general findings of theology and philosophy, acquired and applied a set of concepts for explaining, testing, and provoking spirit marvels. Actually, of course, the literature of pneumatology was rarely so cool and judicial as the ideal required. Its verdicts, nevertheless, were reasoned and inclusive; it is in their light, perhaps, that the terms and figures of Elizabethan animism take on the full intellectual meaning they could have had for Elizabethans.

It is safe, perhaps, to assume that the Elizabethan plays that use the terms and present the figures of animism draw from common sources with pneumatology—if not from pneumatology itself—and that consequently implicit in the action of such plays, though perhaps not single and consistent, is a pneumatological rationale of one sort or another. Ben Jonson and Francis Bacon, and the judge who sentenced witches, and the courtier who resorted to Dr. Dee or read the Daemonologie, and many hundreds besides them, knew the theory of spirits. That they applied it to the action of Faustus and Macbeth The Tempest there can be hardly a doubt. Nor can there be much doubt that, within degrees proper to works of art, and each in its own way, these plays and others accommodate it.

A critic of Professor Dover Wilson's exposition of the ghost scenes in Hamlet has expressed doubt as to whether Shakespeare and his contemporaries were sharply aware of the distinctions Professor Wilson makes between the Protestant dogma on ghosts and the Catholic dogma, and between them both and a rationalistic stand. It may be as well questioned, of course, whether these same Englishmen knew any clear difference between occult, orthodox, and rationalistic views on daemons and on magic. The only affirmative answer possible is that whether the average educated Englishman of the sixteenth century did know the difference or not, he might have, for the distinctions between the three schools of thought were clear in many books available to him and in not a few explicit.

It is true that the sixteenth century was in possession of pneumatological doctrines bewilderingly diverse, and many vague and contradictory; it is true, too, as Professor Wilson's critic asserts, that to the Elizabethan audience of Hamlet conflicting hypotheses might be simultaneously present and the play action force no choice. But there is little in the literature of pneumatology to foster doubt that Elizabethans understood not only specific differences in doctrine, but the significance of those differences for a rationale of the whole. That the pneumatological rationale in Hamlet is less positive than that in a witch tract affords no certainty that Elizabethans missed it, or that Professor Wilson is straining the text to suit an analysis unimagined by Elizabethans.

The evidence for their clear awareness of the distinctions between occult, orthodox, and rationalistic views on spirits lies chiefly in the special pneumatological treatises of their day. The sixteenth century was flood time of this literature whose particular business it was, in part, to make such distinctions, to label according to sect and trend the myriad doctrines of pneumatology.

Needless to say, the authoritative labels were those applied by the established churches. It is in the orthodox treatises that dogmas, both ancient and contemporary, are explicitly stamped as acceptable, or as superstitious or atheistic. The last two appellations occultists and rationalists were, of course, reluctant to apply to their own beliefs. They preferred to herd with the orthodox in name at least. But of the three general orders of spirit doctrine, however called, few could be ignorant who read such works as Le Loyer's Treatise of Specters.

If one may judge from this literature, the theory by means of which the Elizabethan Englishman explained animistic phenomena to himself had its evolutionary source in the doctrines of the ancient and medieval world, and was, further, conspicuously supplied by the very substance of those doctrines. Constant appeal to the past for authority of scripture or of the early church or of classical or scholastic authors is characteristic of the period's polemical and expository writings on spirits. An Elizabethan Englishman might have acquaintance with animistic doctrine in any of its historical stages, and he viewed it not historically as a thing evolutionary and conditioned, but flatly—as a thing whose value was absolute, either index to truth or monument to error. Says Orthodoxus gravely in an English dialogue on demonic possession: "Antiquity (how gray-headed soeuer) hath no privilege to errour" [John Deacon and John Walker, Dialogicall Discourses of Spirits and Devils, 1601].

It is generally true, perhaps, that despite the importunity of the pagan past almost every serious pneumatological theory in Renaissance Europe had a Christian stamp. But it is equally true that a great body of opinion was so colored by the past as to be highly unorthodox in a time when Christian orthodoxy was both various and rigid. The courtier who dabbled in the occult, or the philosopher who was half scientist and half magician, might derive his convictions as directly from Neo-Platonic theurgists as from Scholastics or their Protestant successors. Such men as Cornelius Agrippa in the sixteenth century and Robert Fludd early in the next were seldom hesitant about diluting the doctrines of Christianity with those of antiquity.

Most ancient writers on whom such occultists relied for theory (as distinct from examples) of spirits' work in the world were Platonists. Plato's doctrine of separable form and his hints in the Timaeus at a hierarchy of spiritual forces, were philosophic ground to most of those ideas of daemonic mediators between the Supreme and man which were rife in the Mediterranean world and became dazzlingly attractive to the Renaissance scholar. It is true that in Renaissance literature of spirits, references to Plato himself are comparatively rare; but on his easier and more sensational followers, and on mythical seers like Trismegistus who were one with them in manner and general doctrine, there is no end of reliance. Ficino had translated the Hermetic Books and the Orphic Hymns and the somewhat more reliably attributed works of the NeoPlatonic hierophants, Iamblichus and Proclus, and their tenth century Byzantine commentator Michael Psellus. To them Renaissance daemonologists were indebted for the doctrines of theurgy and for the much assailed but persistent classification of daemons according to the elements. Less fanciful Neo-Platonists, such as Plotinus and Porphyry, contributed much, of course, to that general conception of the universe as organic which made sympathetic magic plausible.

Earlier and somewhat less formidable Platonists than the Alexandreans, but also important to daemonology in the sixteenth century, were Plutarch and Apuleius. Plutarch's Essays, translated into English in 1603, included much theorizing which Alexandrean Neo-Platonists and after them Christians were to borrow. Particularly important were the essays De defectu oraculorum and De genio Socratis. Apuleius, also, has a short work on the daemon of Socrates, in which he sets forth "that doctrine of daemonic beings which lies at the heart of ancient religion … from Plutarch onwards." Often cited, too, in the Renaissance were passages from Apuleius' Apology, in which he says he thinks with Plato that there are between gods and men powers that preside over the miracles of magicians.

Excepting, however, men like Robert Fludd, to whom the esoteric had a special attraction, it is probably true that English animists were more directly supplied by classical literature's fund of illustrations than by its express doctrines. The orthodox cite Apuleius' famous definition of spirits more often to refute him than to use him. But Apuleius and Plutarch had written not only works on the daemon of Socrates, but also the Lives and The Golden Ass—narrative stored with tales of magic and of spirits. These stories pneumatologists of all persuasions retailed constantly, twisting interpretation to meet their own needs. Equally levied upon, of course, were Hesiod, Lucan, Pliny, Suetonius, Virgil, and a dozen other literary men of Greece and Rome.

But of course for the sixteenth century the truly universal and irreproachable source of such material was the Bible. Pharoah's magicians, the Witch of Endor, the daemonic possessions in the New Testament—these things, and many like them if less famous, were instances which there was no gainsaying of magic and spirits. The Bible indicated, too—if certain assumptions were made—their explanation: the kingdom of evil whose father was that Adversary that afflicted Job, tempted Adam and Eve as the Serpent, had once been Lucifer, the morning star, flung from heaven. And the Bible gave the law which the sixteenth century so dreadfully interpreted: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

From the accepted books it was but a step to the Apocrypha and the story of the demon, Asmodeus, and that of the sons of God who defiled themselves with the daughters of men and begat giants and demons. And beyond this doubtfully scriptural material lay all the marvels of the legend and history of Christianity—Simon Magus, who bargained for the power of the Apostles and was damned; Cyprian, the necromancer who repented and suffered a martyr's death; Theophilus, whom the Virgin released from covenant with Satan….

Each of these tales of magic and spirits required, of course, interpretation in the light of general doctrine. To them all the occultist applied, so far as he dared, the same semipagan explanations he put upon similar ethnic fables. The rationalist, on his part, denied what he could, attributed the rest to a special miraculous order of things which God had terminated with Apostolic times. For the orthodox there remained the Patristic and Scholastic close-knit, dogmatic articulation of spirit tales with fundamental doctrine. In the sixteenth century St. Augustine was a basic authority for both Protestants and Catholics, and Aquinas perhaps the most nearly final authority for Catholics. Protestant doctrine varied from Aquinas' only in some special points, not at all on the fundamentals of the reason and method of daemonic action in the world.

Probably the most inclusive, and, at the same time, perhaps the most generally known special expositions of pneumatology in the sixteenth century were the polemics on witchcraft and ghosts. In them are collected for confirmation or refutation, sometimes in quotation, more often in simplified restatement and hasty reference, almost all the pertinent tenets of philosophy and religion, illustrated by the tales and fables of literature and folklore. Frequently enough these treatises, even more contentious than compendious, serve hostile authorities poorly in exposition of their views—and often friendly authorities, especially if abstruse, little better. Many of the polemics, on the other hand, were written by men of great learning and ability. If they seem often to over-simplify their doctrine, it is because their primary aim is to make converts, so that they speak in the most direct terms possible.

Related to the polemical works in subject matter, but severed from them in compositional point of view and not so openly disseminated, were treatises and manuals on magic. These were scholarly or professional in tone rather than argumentative. Suspect as to intention and select in audience, they frequently, for the uninitiate, obscure rather than clarify their matter. They render complex what the polemics simplify, are esoteric as the polemics are democratic.

Most of the special sixteenth century literature on pneumatology falls into three general classes: polemic on spectres; theoretical and practical treatments of ceremonial magic; polemic on witchcraft. Of these the last was the most considerable in bulk and the most inclusive in subject.

The witchcraft controversy, so far as it was a thing peculiar to the sixteenth century, may be said to have opened in 1563 with the publication of De Praestigiis Daemonum et incantationibus ac veneficiis by the German physician, Johannes Wier. The book was inspired, apparently, by humanitarian motives, but grounded its argument against persecution of witches upon the theological plea that there were no genuine witches. Devils, it contended, performed of their own wills the crimes attributed to witches and contrived to lay the blame upon friendless women and weak persons and even to induce them to believe and confess themselves guilty. Wier's book had considerable currency. Three editions were published before 1564, and there was a French translation in 1569 that included a sixth book added to the previous five.

The principal work in the field when Wier published was the Malleus Maleficarum of the Inquisitors, Sprenger and Institor, which had appeared late in the preceding century and heralded the opening of the witch mania. It was the primary authority of the time on witches and their wickedness and apprehension. To its assistance against Wier and his allies came before the end of the sixteenth century dozens of treatises of varying size and importance written by churchmen and doctors and magistrates, some of whom, as they said, had tried and heard confess hundreds of witches. Nicholas Remy and Henri Boguet were prominent French judges who had been on the bench in scores of witch cases. In the last decade of the century they published works exposing witchcraft; their fellow, Pierre de Lancre, did the same in 1610.

Peter Binsfield, suffragan bishop of Treves, was a churchman who had used plenary powers against witches to half depopulate his diocese. His De Confessionibus maleficorum is cited by a later English writer as the work on witchcraft most pleasing to Catholics. A continental Protestant authority was Lambert Daneau, whose Les Sorcières was translated into English as A Dialogue of Witches in 1575, a year after its French publication.

But perhaps most compendious and influential of orthodox works was La Demonomanie des Sorciers by the famous jurist, Jean Bodin. Though his work did not appear until 1580, it replied directly to Wier. It iterates learnedly the orthodox views of dozens of authorities, pagan and Christian, and adds for good measure a few views of Bodin's own which the Sorbonne did not swallow with the best grace. It accuses Wier of being himself a witch.

Bodin was answered from England in 1584 by the Kentish squire, Reginald Scot, in his famous Discoverie of Witchcraft. The discovery that Scot proffered of witchcraft was that it was imposture. Skillfully using his and England's Protestantism—he says that he writes against the massmonger as well as the witchmonger—to shield himself and his doctrine, he attacks belief in witchcraft and magic at its root by denying altogether the participation of unbodied spirits in the sensible world. To his sixteen books and an appended Discourse of Devils and Spirits, King James of Scotland replied briefly in 1597, calling Scot a Sadducee and Wier a witch and setting forth a severely simplified doctrine of demons.

Besides James and Scot there were many less celebrated British writers on witchcraft. Their works, like that of James, are, on the whole, marked by a certain insularity. Though within the general European tradition and expounding a demonology closely related and often indebted to that of the continent, they seem soberer, more homely, than the contemporary French, Teutonic, and Italian authors. Most of them were ministers. George Gifford, an Essex preacher, issued two works, in 1587 and 1593, in which he assumed Wier's position with some modifications. In general opposed was the eminent Cambridge theologian and preacher, William Perkins, whose sermon, A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft, was published posthumously in 1608. It is, perhaps, the clearest and most cogently reasoned of all the English treatises. John Cotta, a physician, also of Cambridge, exerted himself in his Tryall of Witchcraft published in 1616, to improve the methods for the identification of witches in order that diseased persons might not be mistakenly prosecuted.

It was impossible to write extensively on witchcraft without touching on the kindred subject of ceremonial magic, and almost all the eristics did treat of it. The most considerable work on magic of every sort was the Disquisitionum Magicarum of the Jesuit, Martin Delrio. It pushes with a creeping dialectical treatment through a multitudinous array of questions on all kinds of spirit dealing. Delrio and his allies had reason to treat ceremonial magic the more fully because such magic—unlike witchcraft, which was an occupation of the ignorant and the destitute—had a literature of its own, advancing claims and contentions that required answer. This literature was of two not very clearly distinguished sorts: treatises more or less academic, expounding the theory of magic; manuals, not at all academic, detailing the modus operandi of magic.

Of the first sort the most celebrated written within the sixteenth century and the most excoriated by the witchmongers was the De Occulta Philosophia of the German savant, Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. It was written about 1510, but the second and third of its three books were not published until 1533, although pirated and distorted versions had apparently circulated for some years before this date. It treated of Natural, Mathematical, and Ceremonial magic, of which it made out the last to be the highest and, in its operations, inclusive of the other two. Agrippa recanted and late in life wrote De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum et Artium, published 1532 at Cologne, in which he anathematized magic in a fairly orthodox fashion.

Not so odious as Agrippa to the witchmongers—Bodin refers to him as the greatest philosopher of his age—was Agrippa's stormy contemporary, Paracelsus, who devised and in many treatises expounded, original theories of magic and of spirits. Sometimes accepted, more often denounced, was Agrippa's preceptor, the Abbott Trithemius of Spanheim, who dabbled in all sorts of occult matters and wrote a work on magic called the Steganographie. Another preceptor of Agrippa, the great German humanist, Reuchlin, presented an elevated theory of magic as connected with the mystical system of the Jewish Cabala.

All the works on magic of these celebrated men were produced in the early part of the sixteenth century, but persisted as authoritative throughout the century and well into the next. With them belong some of the even earlier works of the Italian mystic, Pico della Mirandola.

Falsely attributed to Agrippa and to others of his notable stamp were the handbooks of practical magic of which many, some new, some survivals, were abroad in the sixteenth century. After Agrippa's death appeared a Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy fathered on him despite the objection of his pupil, Wier. It gave instructions for the commanding of good and evil spirits. Like it, but much more circumstantial in its treatment, was the Heptameron or Magical Elements ascribed to the fourteenth century pedant, Peter of Abano. Probably forged early in the sixteenth century, it was translated into English in 1600. Also forged, frankly black magic—that is, devil art—was the Grimoire of Honorius, "the Constitution of Pope Honorius the Great wherein may be found the Arcane conjurations which must be used against the spirits of darkness." Related to these works were those of the cycle of Solomon, collections of enchantments which, it was claimed, were translated from the Hebrew form in which the wise Solomon had found them efficacious. Chief monuments of this cycle were Clavicula Salomonis, the Key of Solomon the King, probably collected in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the Lemegeton or Lesser Key of Solomon. The Solomonic cycle was held to be a part of the "practical" Cabala, wonder working receipts deducible from the esoteric theory of the Cabala.

None of these works on magic directly gainsaid Christian doctrine; most tried to appeal to it as the foundation of their efficacy; yet there was hardly a one but was implicitly inimical to Christianity in its fundamental assumptions.

Not so extensive as the special literature on witchcraft and magic was that on ghosts. It was comprised chiefly in two books: the De Spectris, lemuribus et magnis atque insolitis fragoribus of Ludvig Lavater, Protestant minister of Tigurine in Switzerland; and the four Livres des Spectres of Pierre Le Loyer, a French advocate. Lavater's work appeared in 1570 and an Englishman, R. H., translated it in 1572. Le Loyer published his work in 1586 and the first book was translated into English in 1605 at which time there was also a revised edition of the French. An ally and perhaps a collaborator of Le Loyer's was the Capuchin, Noel Taillepied, who published in 1588 a relatively brief treatise: Psichologie ou traité de l'apparition des esprits.

The works on ghosts were more severely denominational than those on witchcraft; for Protestant and Catholic theologians were largely in agreement on witchcraft, but definitely divided on ghosts. Lavater, asserting the Protestant position, denied that the souls of the dead ever returned to the world; they were gone, he said, to either eternal bliss or eternal punishment. Le Loyer and Taillepied reaffirmed the Catholic position that ghosts were sometimes sent to warn or to plead with men or otherwise to minister God's will.

Although the special polemic on this subject was comparatively slight—its slightness was perhaps owing in part to the fact that ghost doctrine was not the occasion of a persecution mania—the question was extensively argued as an incidental point in dogma concerning purgatory and other major tenets. Calvin, and Lavater's father-in-law, Bullinger, and many other Protestant theologians made pronouncements on the ghost question. Most of the witchmongers, both Protestant and Catholic, have digressions on it.

A minor and subsidiary pneumatological controversy which, particularly in England, had a literature of its own was on demonic possession and exorcism. The English church inclined to deny the reality of possession since Biblical times and to condemn ministers who undertook to exorcise persons apparently possessed. In this it joined issue with both Catholics and Puritans. The position of the English church was a most uncertain one, however, for the activity of devils against men it did not deny; therefore some ministers—notably one John Darrel, a Puritan—were undertaking with seeming success to cast out devils. Darrel's pretensions were officially attacked for the Church of England by two preachers, John Deacon and John Walker, who collaborated on two long and weighty works of ten dialogues each, intended to prove Darrel an impostor and to present a proper conception of demonic assaults. Deacon and Walker entered the controversy to the assistance of Samuel Harsnett, who had written in a lighter vein than theirs against Darrel. Harsnett later took part in a similar quarrel against the Jesuit exorcist, Weston.

It is impossible now, of course, to estimate accurately the acquaintance of the populace of Elizabethan England with the special literature of pneumatology, nor does it matter particularly for purposes of this study whether such acquaintance was widespread and thorough or local and slight. That the more general tenets of spirit doctrine were common property is certain; that at least a few educated persons knew some or all of the controversial and esoteric works that refined and integrated the general ideas is equally certain. To such persons the terms and figures of animistic material in the drama might suggest concepts more complete than those of the groundling. To reestablish such concepts now is to relate the spirit episodes of the plays to a definite, if special, phase of that world to which they most naturally refer, the Elizabethan world.