SOURCE : "Witchcraft," in The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns, University of California Press, 1972, pp. 60-107.

[In the following essay, Shumaker traces the course of the persecution of witches in Europe from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries.]

I. The human impact

Of all the varieties of occultism, witchcraft has the most depressing history. The expenditure of human energy and wealth in the alchemist's search for the Stone or the Elixir, although sobering, is trivial in comparison to the torture and execution of supposed witches. And this suffering reached its height not during the Dark Ages but in the High Renaissance.

The Renaissance persecutions of witches, conducted in Catholic Europe at first by the Inquisition and other ecclesiastical courts but later, as in England, by the secular authority, for the sake of convenience may be said to have been initiated by the promulgation on December 5, 1484, of Pope Innocent VIII's bull, Summis considerantes affectibus, which called upon both the Church and the secular power to aid the Inquisition in extirpating witch-craft. The same bull appointed Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer (or Institoris), subsequently to become famous as authors of the Malleus maleficarum, or "Hammer Against Witches," as "inquisitors of those heretical practices." The trials continued throughout the sixteenth century and most of the seventeenth, rising sometimes to horrifying crescendos. In Lorraine a single judge, Nicolas Remy, with his assistants sent no fewer than 800 persons to death in sixteen years; and Daemonolatreiae libri tres (1595), the treatise in which he explained his legal assumptions and procedures, for a while replaced the Malleus as the most authoritative textbook on the subject. In Westphalia, about 1630, another judge was responsible for nearly 500 executions. According to Henri Boguet, writing about 1590 concerning trials in Burgundy, Germany was "almost entirely occupied with building fires for [witches]. Switzerland has been compelled to wipe out many of her villages on their account. Travellers in Lorraine may see thousands and thousands of the stakes to which witches are bound."

Estimates of the total number of victims in Europe between 1484 and the gradual dying down of fanaticism toward 1700 run as high as 300,000. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, an authoritative work by Rossell Hope Robbins, suggests 200,000 as a conservative figure. The number of deaths in England is estimated at numbers running from 1,000—perhaps approximately accurate—to 70,000. Contrary to widespread opinion, trials appear to have been more numerous under Elizabeth than under James I, who expressed severe views in his Daemonologie (1597) but gradually became skeptical about specific accusations. The practical meaning of these figures for everyday life is suggested by a remark in George Gifford's A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes (1593) to the effect that a white witch at "R . H.," whose trade was the removal of charms by counter-magic, "by report hath some weeke fourtie come vnto her, and many of them not of the meaner sort." At a time when England was still thinly populated, enough persons in a country village might think they were bewitched to provide full-time work for a "wise-woman."

Witches, indeed, were suspected everywhere—on the next farm, in the village, within the family, among the clergy. Cardinal Wolsey was accused by Tyndale of having "bewitched the king's mind, and made the king dote upon him more than ever he did on any lady or gentleman." The Scottish Earl of Bothwell, who might have claimed the throne of Scotland if James VI had died without an heir, was implicated in an attempt to wreck James's ship by raising a storm as the King returned from his wedding to Anne of Denmark. An attempt of the Countess of Somerset to procure her husband's impotency by charms and drugs, made public by a sensational trial in 1616, clearly involved sorcery, often thought to depend on an implied and perhaps unconscious pact with the Devil, and suggests the prevalence of superstition in high places as well as in the populace. The history of witchcraft has, however, often been written, and I do not intend to repeat it here. My concern is rather with the intellectual habits which made the long frenzy possible.

Of course not everyone shared the common delusions. In the contemporary literature of the subject attacks are sometimes made on skeptics, and a number of treatises, although never, so far as they can be judged by explicit assertions, totally incredulous, show a healthy tough-mindedness. One of these, the Cautio criminalis (1631), by Friedrich von Spee, a Jesuit confessor of accused witches whose hair is said to have been turned prematurely white by his experiences, is worth looking at because it offers appalling insights into the unreliability of the evidence used to convict.

Who, von Spee asks, would not confess to witchcraft if put in the prisoner's place? Torture Capuchins, Jesuits, religious of all orders; if they refuse to acknowledge their crimes at once, exorcize them, shave all the hair from their bodies lest they protect themselves against pain by a hidden charm, and have at them again. In the end all will confess. Do the same to prelates, canonists, professors of theology, and the same thing will happen. Ultimately, we will all turn out to be witches. He himself is so unable to endure physical suffering that he would accuse himself of anything if tortured, all the more because theologians agree that in those conditions the sin is not mortal. It is said that many prisoners are insensible to torture and laugh at it, but this is nonsense. If the victim endures the pain with clenched teeth, contorted lips, and held breath, witnesses cry out that she feels nothing but amusement. When the apparent insensibility called "sleeping" under torture is not a faint it is, in fact, the result of a stiffening intended to assist endurance. "This is what the poets meant in their stories about Niobe, when they say that because of her suffering she hardened into stone." How terrible the agony was is suggested by the discovery that when a confession is said to have been obtained without torture the accused has sometimes been subjected "only" to a broad iron press with sharp teeth which crushed the shinbones to the point where blood spurted out on both sides and flesh was mangled. "And yet they call that 'Confessed without torture! …' What kind of insight can those have who lack all understanding of such pains? How can outstandingly learned men judge and discriminate when they cannot understand the language, the specialists' jargon, of the inquisitors?"

What made the situation hopeless for the accused was the lack of any means of proving innocence. A failure to confess was an indication of guilt, for without magic the witch would have been unable to stand the suffering. What purpose, von Spee inquires, does the torture serve if the prisoner is equally guilty no matter how she behaves under it? And why, if some of the accused may conceivably be innocent, may not God instead of the Devil have strengthened them? Anyhow, if no merely human resources could have availed her, the torture must have been illegally cruel; and that it was so the claim that she must have had supernatural help itself testifies. How, indeed, can the accused not be executed? Von Spee once heard the question put to a group of court officials: how can an innocent prisoner be released? After reflecting for some time, the officials said finally that they would think about the matter overnight. But in fact no answer was possible: "I f anybody thinks he has found a means, he reveals that he knows nothing about what goes on." Evidently judicial methods were especially tyrannical in Germany, for Remy says that nearly as many as the 800 he condemned "saved their lives by flight or by a stubborn endurance of the torture."

What actually happened in the proceedings which von Spee witnessed can be summarized as follows. The accused person, usually but not always a woman and often elderly, was called before the inquisitor and informed of the charges; she denied them, and was told to go back to her cell and consider for a couple of hours whether she wished to hold to her lie—all this "as if she had spoken to the wind or told stories to stones." Upon being brought back she was asked whether she still intended to be obstinate and tell falsehoods. If the answer was in effect "Yes," she was led off directly to the torture chamber. Once she was there her guilt continued to be taken for granted, and often the executioner's assistants informed her what she was expected to say, telling her things would go easily with her if she made the same admissions as others who had already been tortured. "Thus it comes about that in the end she makes known the same particulars that others have confessed earlier." Eventually it turned out that what the torturer wished to be true was true.

Even then the cruelty was not intermitted, for the desire of pious princes and churchmen to "root out" the terrible iniquity of witchcraft made them wish her to implicate others. "Don't you know Titia too? Haven't you seen her at your witches' Sabbats?" If the answer was "No," the examiner said to the hangman, "Tighten the ropes." When at last, by unbearable agony, a "Yes" was drawn from the victim, the next question was about Sempronia; and so on until three or four were implicated. "The reader may himself judge how it comes about that we have so many witches in Germany." In the same way the prisoner was told what crimes she had committed—what cows she had caused to run dry, what crops she had destroyed by hailstorms, what children she had killed and eaten. And so on in every detail, with the result that the testimony of various witches coincided to produce the irrefragable evidence of evildoing so triumphantly cited by the theorists whose writings we shall examine.

The admissions so extorted usually stuck. A confessor sent to the condemned heretic—for on the continent the basic charge included heresy as well as crime—would tell the witch that she could not be shriven preparatory to her burning until she had released from danger those against whom she had brought false charges. The reply was usually that she could not for fear of facing additional torture; and when the confessor urged that she would incur eternal damnation if she left innocent persons under suspicion, she might say that she would help the guiltless in any way except by risking more suffering—and this despite her realization that going to death with lies on her soul would mean endless Hell fire. To von Spee, who because of his noble compassion must have been confided in more than most priests who undertook this unhappy ministry, it seemed that out of fifty who went to the stake scarcely five—indeed, scarcely two—were guilty. At several points he appears to be on the verge of denying the very possibility of guilt, for he hints at the possession of a secret he dares not tell; but the official theory was too strong for him, and in his first quaestio he admits that witches exist.

Sometimes—apparently rather often—a confession evoked by torture would be denied when the ropes or screws were loosened, and the denial itself, perhaps, retracted when torture was renewed. This tendency did not, apparently, suggest to many theologians or legal philosophers the unreliability of statements wrung from prisoners under duress, although some show awareness of the problem. The most succinct comment is that of Johann Georg Godelmann, rather a fair-minded legal theorist than an extraordinarily empathetic person: "He lies who can endure much, and he who can endure nothing. The former does not want to confess what he has done, and the latter confesses he has performed more things than he ever dreamed of." The usual view was that the relaxation of torture had encouraged a resurgence of impudence; so the witch was again submitted to the engines. How many times this practice might be repeated was a subject of dispute, but in general it appears that after the third repetition of torture—which von Spee thought to become more exquisitely agonizing as the body was further broken—no further effort to renew the confession was proper. (A convenient fiction that the torture was being "continued" instead of "renewed" offered a way out of the difficulty.) Since conviction for heresy required an admission of guilt, judges not especially eager to condemn might then discharge the sometimes permanently maimed prisoner. More often the charge of criminal acts was thought to have been proved, and the accused was "relaxed" to the secular authority for execution. If, however, repeated torture evoked a second or perhaps a third confession and the witch once again professed innocence before she was led to the faggots, she was regarded as "relapsed" and was refused the preliminary strangling earned by acknowledging guilt. In general, although not always and everywhere, it was felt, as Parrinder has remarked, that "The confessions proved that the Church was right, and so exculpated her from charges of cruelty": exactly the motive for similar practices in certain Communist states in our own century.

In England, where except in cases involving treason torture was illegal, the proceedings were of course milder; and after the breach with Rome in the 1530s the Inquisition, which had never persecuted English witches, had no further opportunity to act. Also, the proportion of executions to indictments was lower: according to Parrinder, "the percentage of hangings to accusations never passed forty-two per cent in England, and was usually about half that figure." It should not, however, be assumed that from 58 to 79 per cent were cleared, for we often hear of reputed witches escaping before or during imprisonment; some died in their cells or committed suicide; others were given lesser punishments; and a released suspect might later be retaken and executed. Also, treatment just short of torture was not unusual. Matthew Hopkins, an infamous witch-finder of the 1640s, admitted having kept witches awake for two or three nights running. The cells were often freezingly cold, the food might be inadequate, and severe psychological pressures were exerted. The age was pre-humanitarian. Although a few persons might think that physical suffering was the worst of all evils, in general people were less tender-minded than now. Jean Bodin spoke for many when he said that although witches are burned, "the punishment is far lighter than that which Satan causes them in this world, not to speak of the eternal punishments which are prepared for them." The Italian Francesco Guazzo was able to say that a man who had often publicly blasphemed the Virgin Mary was "mercifully" punished when Mary touched him while he slept, so that when he awoke "he found himself without hands or feet, lying there wretched, maimed and useless.… He was thus mercifully punished for his blasphemy; for so do the Blessed Saints mete out gentle punishment."

The severity of the persecutions on the continent was justified by legal arguments to the effect that witches had to be treated more harshly than other evildoers because witchcraft was treason to God as well as to the state. The Malleus maleficarum of Sprenger and Institoris laid down the basic premises as early as 1484. Various deceits might be practised. The judge might promise that he would be merciful, "with the mental reservation that he means he will be merciful to himself or the State." He might arrange for some friend or patron to spend the night with the accused on the excuse that it was too late to go home, and hidden spies would take notes of the conversation. Again, the authors say, let her be put in a castle and told that the castellan is going on a journey, and then let the visitors promise her freedom if she will teach them some of her magical practices. More important, witnesses who were ordinarily barred by law from testifying might give evidence against a witch: excommunicated persons, accomplices, notorious evildoers and criminals, heretics, the wife, sons, and other kindred of the accused, her servants, and repentant perjurers. Although the usual requirement for proof was the concurring testimony of two or more witnesses to the same action or fact, in cases of witchcraft the evidence of six or eight or ten persons who concurred that the prisoner was a witch—one might say, "She bewitched my child," another "She bewitched my cow"—might be accepted as conclusive provided the witnesses were not mortal enemies of the accused, she was generally reported to be a witch, and there was some visible or tangible evidence. It was not required that the witnesses be identified to the accused. Counsel for the defense, if one was admitted, was not to use "pretentious oratory," introduce any "legal quirks or quibbles," bring any counter-accusations, or defend heresy. (Doing so would make him not merely himself a heretic but a heresiarch.) Much of this was regularly justified on the ground that since witch-craft is practised in secret or among other malefactors no condemnations could be obtained without a relaxation of the customary legal safeguards against injustice. The propriety of concealing the identity of witnesses, however, was defended, not altogether insincerely, by the principle that the names of accusers might be kept secret when a likelihood existed that the prisoner might take revenge on them. Witches were especially malicious and might be assumed to possess extraordinary means of retaliating.

Much subsequent writing about witchcraft was aimed at supporting, extending, or qualifying these principles. Only a few documents can be mentioned here, and those only as illustrative. Boguet's Examen of Witches (1590) described "the procedure necessary to a judge in trials for witchcraft" in seventy "Articles" which, according to Montague Summers, were "actually adopted in general practice by most local Parliaments and puisne (petty) courts." Imprisonment might follow upon a single accusation or upon common rumor, "for this is almost infallible in the matter of witchcraft" (Art. III). Stool pigeons might give false testimony or pretend also to lie under the same charge in order to induce confession (Articles XI I and XVIII) . A presumed witch might be tortured even on a holy day (Art. XXV) . Child-witches too should be executed, but more gently than adults, as by hanging (Art. LXIII). Jean Bodin, in other areas a rather advanced thinker, in Daemonomania, also a work which had considerable influence, asserted that every witch might be assumed to be a parricide, since witches do murder, and that the murders were all malicious, since it could be taken for granted that "sorcerers have done nothing by mistake, but always by malice and impiety." Indeed, it was to be supposed that every sorcerer had committed every possible kind of depravity. "When a woman is reported to be a witch (sagam), there is a most grave presumption that she is one"; hence she might be put to the torture if there was any corroborating evidence, although this was not to be allowed if the case was not one of witchcraft. Moreover, the special severity of the punishment meted out to witch es was not aimed primarily at castigating vice but at mollifying God's wrath, since the crime was against His majesty. It was further aimed at bringing God's benediction upon the whole land and at striking others with fear and terror, so that the number of the wicked would be diminished and good men might pass their lives in security. Indeed, no punishment could be great enough for witches, since they were guilty of many crimes which singly merited death: they denied religion, blasphemed, gave faith to the Devil, consecrated their children to Satan, sacrificed infants to the Devil, invoked the Devil and swore by him, committed incest and murder, ate human flesh, killed secretly by poison and fortune-telling (sortilegiis), and so on through a list of fifteen items. Yet Bodin takes some pains to be scrupulous and reminds his readers that the concurring testimony of fifty people that Peter was charmed to death could be refuted by the appearance of Peter alive and well.

Such principles of course met some resistance. In Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), which along with Jean Wier's De prestigiis daemonum et incantationibus ac veneficiis (1564; French translation, 1579) is an early retort from what seemed to the orthodox to be the Devil's party, Bodin's procedural advice is treated with contempt. Johann Godelmann, however, because although a Protestant he came nearer to sharing the legal pre-assumptions of Bodin, Boguet, and the Malleus, was more likely to effect reforms. He begins by acknowledging in a preface that crimes of lèse-majesté, among which blasphemy, heresy, magic, hurtful incantations, and divinatory predictions and consultations are to be reckoned, "offend eternal majesty far more gravely than temporal," and he agrees that the punishment for injury caused by enchantment is death. The purpose of his treatise, however, is to secure a more faithful observation of existing laws, and he proceeds to draw careful distinctions. Ordinary criminal procedures should be followed, not extraordinary. The accuser should be questioned and required to show evidence and give reasons for his suspicions. The proofs should be liquidissimae and luce, sicuti dicitur, meridiana clariores, quite transparent and clearer than noonday light. The significance of the Devil's mark, thought to have been made by his claw at the time the pact was entered into and strongly emphasized by Bodin, is denied: "These indications are empty, absurd, and frivolous and are to be rejected, not admitted, as contrary to our laws." Imprisonment ought to follow, not precede, the examination of witnesses. The accused should be allowed counsel (procurator). A confession of impossible actions proves nothing. The implication of others by confessions is not always to be believed, and the confessions extracted must be made seriously (serio, non autem iocose), circumstantial (specialis), and confirmed by two witnesses. Although a long road had yet to be trodden toward justice, a few preliminary steps had been taken.

The effectiveness of such tracts as Godelmann's is hard to estimate. Many later treatises which were frequently reprinted and accepted as authoritative—for instance, Remy's Demonolatry and Martin Delrio's Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex (Louvain, 1599)—continue to show horror at the enormity of witches' crimes. That procedures remained improper in some areas, at least, is clear from von Spee's Cautio (1631), at which we have glanced. No doubt individual judges on the continent too sometimes did their best to be scrupulously fair and pronounced adverse judgments sorrowfully, as in the famous Lancashire trials of 1612. Nevertheless the situation of any person accused by malicious neighbors was regularly desperate. As C. H. Lea has said, all too often the only real defense was to show that the witnesses were mortal enemies and therefore disqualified from giving testimony. Often, however, they were not identified; or, if they were to be named, the investigator might very early ask whether the prisoner knew them, and, if he did, whether they were friends or enemies. If the answer was "Friends" because as yet no ground for enmity was known, no later claim of mortal enmity was possible.

The courts seem usually to have had fixed ideas about incriminating indicia. In the trials at which Hopkins co-operated a special emphasis was placed on the witches' "teats," bodily abnormalities at which a devil was thought to have sucked blood, and on the Devil's mark, any peculiar area of skin which appeared to be insensible to pain. (We do not hear much of teats on the continent.) Boguet, in his Examen, regards as virtual proof of guilt an inability to weep and a tendency to keep the eyes on the ground. Almost anywhere the discovery in the witch's house of unguents, clay images, or other implements of sorcery told heavily against her, as did also, in England, the ownership of pets which might be thought familiar spirits. Although certainly many of the victims used charms and some thought themselves to be witches—what proportion it is impossible to estimate—von Spee's belief that their confessions were not to be trusted is confirmed by regional differences in expectations. The witches condemned by Remy almost all admitted that when they entered houses to spread poison they took the form of cats, a detail not common elsewhere; and whereas in England the rare witches' Sabbats were presided over by Satan himself, often in the form of a black goat, in certain parts of the continent the chief figure was regularly a woman, the Donna, identified as Diana or Herodias.

The modern reader of the treatises is further afflicted by their cool, reasonable tone and by clear implications that the authors were not abnormally evil men. In general, they reason cogently according to their lights and aim not at producing maximal human suffering but at the relief of mankind from a grievous plague. How their minds worked we shall attempt presently to see; but first it will be useful to suggest what kinds of persons were accused and the reasons why they were indicted. Here again there is a significant difference between England, where the typical witch was poor and illiterate—of 590 suspects in the home counties during one period all but four were laborers or tradesmen or, usually, their wives—and the continent, where the property of a condemned witch was confiscated by the court. The English witch, at whom we shall look shortly, was typically a woman, poor, uneducated, something of a social outcast, "queer" and perhaps partly demented, and usually old. The presumption that she was a sorceress was enormously strengthened if she was also physically repulsive, afflicted by some such evident abnormality as a drooping or crooked eye, and given to unintelligible but ominous muttering.

Exactly such a description is offered by Scot. "One sort of such as are said to bee witches, are women which be commonly old, lame, bleare-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles." Being ignorant and stupid and consequently unable to provide adequately for themselves, they go from house to house asking "for a pot full of milke, yest, drinke, pottage, or some such releefe; without the which they could hardlie live"; and when they are refused they may utter curses on "the maister of the house, his wife, children, cattell, &c. to the little pig that lieth in the stie.… Doubtlesse (at length) some of hir neighbors die, or fall sicke; or some of their children are visited with diseases." The mutterings are remembered, and an accusation follows. This is the basic situation, illustrated by hundreds or thousands of stories in the contemporary literature of witchcraft—for the neighbors too are often illiterate and suspicious, unaware of the nature of actual causality and ready enough to lay to the charge of an enemy any of the innumerable misfortunes to which people who live constantly on the verge of disaster are subject.

A case history or two may be useful, for I am attempting to describe the implications for real human beings of the theory of witchcraft soon to be examined. For example, the son of John Ferrali, vicar of Brenchlie in Kent, according to Scot passed one day by the house of a certain Margaret Simons, and by chance her little dog barked at him.

which thing the boie taking in evill part, drewe his knife, & pursued him therewith even to hir doore: whom she rebuked with some such words as the boie disdained, & yet neverthelesse would not be persuaded to depart in a long time. At the last he returned to his maisters house [he was apprenticed to a clothier], and within five or sixe daies fell sicke. Then was called to mind the fraie twixt the dog and the boie.

The boy's father, as it happened, already suspected the presence of a witch in the parish, because "when he desired to read most plainlie, his voice so failed him, as he could scant be heard at all. Which hee could impute, he said, to nothing else, but to hir enchantment." Actually, Mrs. Simons told the author whose report we are following, "at all times his voice was hoarse and lowe," so that he was suspected to have the French pox and "divers" parishioners refused to take communion from him until he produced a certificate from two physicians which said that he suffered from lung disease. Happily, the case was dismissed.

In some such way as this suspicion was aroused, and if at the time the magistrates were proceeding actively against witchcraft in the region an accusation might be made and the trial begun, with results of the kind already suggested. A sow might die, a promising crop come to nothing, two cows fall sick, the butter not come, and too often some reason was found to lay the blame on a neighbor. In George Gifford's Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes (1593, 1603), another skeptical document, a man called Samuel, when asked about his health, replies that he is pretty well but "me thinke my meate doth me no good of late." Having heard of the activities of witches in the neighborhood, he is afraid now and then when he sees a hare stare at him, or a weasel run across his yard; and "there is a foule great catte sometimes in my Barne, which I haue no liking unto." One old woman especially makes him uneasy. Moreover, an apparently well hog has died suddenly, and "M y wife hath had fiue or sixe hennes euen of late dead." He is thinking of seeking the help of counter-witchcraft. Later, when the discussion is continued in Sam's house, his wife says that another hen has died, the good woman R. last week couldn't make the butter come until she used charms, and this morning an old woman looked "sowerlie" on her and mumbled.

Thus it went. A peddler might be mumbled at because he refused to undo his pack to sell a few pins. A bored husband might find himself impotent. A boy coming home late with the cows might invent a story about having been delayed by witches in the form of animals. The image gradually produced in a modern mind is that of impoverished communities of jealous and surly countryfolk given to backbiting and predisposed by their ignorance—like savages—to believe that every natural misfortune was willed.

II. The theory of witchcraft

Innumerable stories could be cited to support this generalization. When the witchfever was on a community, every misfortune might be laid on a witch: "adversitie, greefe, sicknesse, losse of children, corne, cattell, or libertie.… a clap of thunder, or a gale of wind is no sooner heard, but either they run to ring bels, or crie out to burne witches; or else burne consecrated things, hoping by the smoke thereof, to drive the divell out of the aire." Suspicion generated suspicion, and shortly the whole area was in an uproar. Scot, who has just been quoted, is one of the atypical doubters: "But if all the divels in hell were dead, and all the witches in England burnt or hanged; I warrant you we should not faile to have raine, haile and tempests, as now we have.… I am also well assured, that if all the old women in the world were witches; and all the priests, conjurers: we should not have a drop of raine, nor a blast of wind the more or the lesse for them." Few contemporary writers even among the skeptics would have risked so sweeping a generalization, for there were—it seemed—all too many solid reasons for believing that witchcraft existed and was sometimes, however rarely, practised. We turn now to the intellectual processes by which the belief was established, attempting, as far as possible, not to let modern convictions interfere with an understanding of earlier thought-ways however detestable they may seem to us.

Especially, but not merely, in Protestant countries, total skepticism usually foundered on Scripture. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22:18): this most quoted of all Biblical texts left little ground for maneuvering. True, Scot attempted plausibly to show that the Septuagint's [pharmakous] for the Latin veneficos or maleficos, meant not "witches" but "poisoners"; and he quoted "Josephus an Hebrue borne" as having said that the word designated a person who possessed "any poison that is deadlie, or prepared to anie hurtfull use." Such a person should "suffer that which he meant to doo to them, for whom he prepared it." For the most part, however, even those most passionately opposed to the executions acknowledged the reality of witchcraft and confined their arguments to the thesis that many or most of those convicted were innocent and the legal practices unjust.

Many other Biblical texts contributed to the admission. The visit paid by Saul to the Witch of Endor, who raised or—as others thought—pretended to raise the spirit of Samuel is almost as frequently cited. And what could be urged against the many passages in the Gospels which described the casting out of devils by Christ? "And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils" (Mark 16:17). The long argument about "transvection," or the ability of demons to transport witches through the air to their Sabbats, was sometimes, as in the Malleus, decisively resolved by the question, "Did not the devil take up Our Saviour, and carry Him up to a high place, as the Gospel testifies?" Leviticus 20:6 declared that the Lord would set His face against "the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits" and would "cut him off from among his people"; and the twenty-seventh verse of the same chapter said flatly, "A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them." The prescription of means was ignored, the sentence of death honored.

Many other passages encouraged the popular superstition. Sorcerers are mentioned in Revelation 21:8 and 22:15 along with whoremongers, murderers, idolaters, and liars. The mention in Ephesians 2:2 of "the prince of the power of the air" might, with a little violence, be interpreted as meaning that power over the air is given to demons. Job 41:33, written of the Leviathan, could be cited as proof that efforts to make innocent use of demonic power were hopeless: "Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear." The Devil was certain to get the better of any mortal who tried to control him. Psalm 78:49, "He cast upon them the fierceness of his anger, wrath, and indignation, and trouble, by sending evil angels among them," supported a generally accepted doctrine that all the evil performed by devils was done either with God's permission or by his explicit order. Leviticus 18:3 (Leviticus was an especially rich source), "After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do: and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do," could be understood as referring to the magical operations to which those abominable peoples were addicted. But indeed any literalist reading of Scripture necessarily entailed a belief both in the unceasing evil machinations of devils and in sorcery. The miracles of Christ, so often described as involving the casting out of devils, alone would have sufficed to produce a conviction that demons often "possessed" human beings. From this incontrovertible truth to a belief that the Devil might bargain with mortals and promise them effective enchantments in exchange for their souls after death was so easy a step that theorists often seem not to have realized they took it.

For witchcraft, it is important to recognize, was everywhere and always understood to involve a pact with the Devil. The pact, indeed, was its defining characteristic. Conjuring without demonic assistance belonged in a different category which cannot be described more than roughly in the present context. On one level, white magic was no more than a primitive physics and chemistry which utilized real but occult forces hidden in nature itself. Much that appeared wonderful to the uninitiated might be performed by it. On another but overlapping level was a magic or science which appears superstitious to moderns but in the Renaissance might be indistinguishable from the former. This is described by Guazzo as "no more than a more exact knowledge of the secrets of Nature, which by observing the courses and influences of the stars in the heavens, and the sympathies and antipathies subsisting between separate things, compares one thing with another and so effects marvels which to the ignorant seem to be miracles or illusions." Between both these kinds of oper ations and witchcraft was something else which might either be condemned as witchcraft or exalted as the highest level of active wisdom. This involved the powers not of devils … but of daemons.… The existence of such spirits, intermediate between men and gods, had been vouched for by the newly recovered Hermetic corpus, but the spirits were in fact vestigial from paganism, which had sensed numina everywhere, and perhaps the Christian consciousness had never totally lost contact with them. Such daemons might be friendly, indifferent, or hostile, the hostile ones being no doubt identical with the fallen angels or devils, the friendly ones good angels (for example, the Intelligences or tutelary angels of the planets), and the indifferent ones quasi-automatic forces which differed from the natural energies known to modern science chiefly in being somewhat personalized. Whether attempts to constrain the help of good or indifferent daemons were licit was vigorously debated, but traffic with the unfriendly daemons was almost universally condemned as goëtia, or black magic. No matter what protestations of innocence might be made by the black magician, the consensus of informed opinion was that he entered into an implicit pact with the Devil, however unwittingly, just as the white witch or "wise-woman" did. If so, he too was a witch. Usually, however, the witch made an explicit pact, agreeing to yield his soul ultimately to the Devil in exchange for extraordinary powers during his lifetime.

The connection between witchcraft and the pact is, so far as I know, accepted by all modern students of the subject and is such a commonplace in the Renaissance treatises that no purpose would be served by massive documentation. "Magicians use superstitious and diabolical arts and add the evocation of demons to their practices, as Proclus has witnessed." Or, again, in an especially comprehensive and authoritative tract, prohibita Magia is defined as "a faculty or art by means of which, through the force of a pact entered into with demons, wonders are performed which surpass the common apprehension of men." And so everywhere. To be sure, complications are created by technicalities in the vocabulary. Such words as magi, lamiae, sagae, praestigiatores, fascinatores, striges, venefici, and malefici vary in significance from tract to tract, so that attention must be paid to the ways in which they are differentiated. The link between the witch and the Devil, or a devil, is, however, regularly taken for granted and was the chief basis for the savage attempts made to destroy the offenders against God and men.

No understanding of the way minds worked over the subject is possible without some realization of what scholarship was like in the Renaissance. The unexceptionable authority of the Scripture has been noticed; what remains to be considered is the nature of non-Scriptural "proof."

First, many of the authors of treatises on witchcraft are extremely learned men, but learned in a way that requires description. To the modern scholar it may at first appear that Renaissance savants had limited responsibilities which he may contrast enviously with his own. For them Latin did duty also for German, French, Italian, and English, or whichever of these languages were not native to them, and because they paid little attention to secular literature (except the classics) they felt no need to study such historical vernaculars as Old French, Middle High German, Anglo-Saxon, and Middle English. Further, whole areas of intensive modern research were unknown to them—for example, psychology in its modern forms, the exact sciences apart from a rather elementary mathematics, even history as that is now understood. Most important of all, they were necessarily unaware of whatever has happened since the Renaissance, to which modern students must devote an immense proportion of their schooling. We realize, of course, that their mastery of Latin was far greater than ours; we know that Greek had come in (though real competency in it was less widely diffused than is generally thought); and we are aware that theology and the scholastic philosophy were complex, if possibly not very rewarding, disciplines. Specialists have learned also that Hebrew and Rabbinical studies were beginning to be undertaken.

What we cannot know until we actually immerse ourselves in the Neo-Latin writings of the period is how enormous the literature was and how thoroughly, in course of time, ancient and medieval texts were combed for citations bearing upon special interests. A typical list of "authorities"—many, no doubt, second or thirdhand—may help to suggest both the gradual accumulation of scholarly resources and the impact upon modern readers. Leonardo Vairo, in an interesting and ultimately rather skeptical document about enchantments (including the evil eye) called De fascino libri tres (1583), supports his assertions that "nearly all authors, not merely Latins and Arabs but also Greeks," accepted the reality of fascinum by citing Aristotle, Alexander Aphrodisiensis, Plutarch, Heliodorus, Isigonus, Pliny, Nymphodorus, Apollonides, Philarchus, Algazel, Avicenna, Pomponatius, Solinus, Philostratus, Virgil, Ioannes Franciscus Ponzinibius, and Petrus de Tarantasia at one burst before slowing down in order to bring in others more at leisure. The list is in no way unusual. According to H. C. Lea, Guazzo's Compendium, already several times quoted here, cites 322 sources. Scot cites 224 "forren authors" and 23 English. Jean Wier's De prestigiis cites 342 authors. In reading a treatise by Delrio or Bodin or Lavater or Remy one has the impression of following the processes of a mind which is not only (usually; Remy is perhaps an exception) highly intelligent and responsible but also impressively well-read.

What marks a critical difference from modern scholarship is a set of distinct presumptions about evidence. In part the Renaissance scholar used his sources exactly as his modern counterpart does, balancing one set against another or supporting his own views by multiple citations of writers who agreed with him. Again as in modern scholarship, references might be given in the text (secundum Isidor. 8 Ety. c. 9) or put into the margin (Aug. Civ. Dei XIV cap. iij); or they might be general—for instance, "I f you read Artemidorus," or uti Peripatetici asseruerunt, or the remark that although the origin of magic is often ascribed to Zoroaster there were several men of that name—four (Arnobius), five (Suidas), or six (Pliny). Nothing of this causes the modern student acute intellectual distress despite the fact that he would often appreciate a more exact reference, is unable to expand the abbreviations, or feels a galling sense that he is expected to be far more learned than he is. The real differences lie elsewhere.

One simple, although inadequate, explanation would be that the modern historical scholar tends rather to use the assertions of remote authors as source materials for an understanding of their periods than to think of basing his own serious opinions on them. In the search for objective truth his ultimate commitment is not to distinguished minds but to the empirical evidence on which they have based their conclusions. In the Renaissance too some weight was given to "experience." Indeed, many of the tracts on witchcraft put primary emphasis on what someone claimed to have witnessed directly. What is lacking is the concept of controlled experiment; and, for the rest, statements were taken seriously that the twentieth-century mind would not dream either of believing or of finding it necessary to refute. The two halves of this sentence may be developed briefly, the latter half being considered first.

The taking of an opinion seriously does not, of course, require agreement with it. When Delrio denies to rings, seals, "characters," and images a magical power attributed to them by Ptolemy, Porphyry, and others he does nothing in the least unusual. After all, views were often contradictory, and it was impossible then, as now, to credit all of them. In the same way the assertions of more recent men are often denied, as when the same writer advises us to be wary of Cornelius Agrippa, the unknown author of the Picatrix, Paracelsus, Roger Bacon, the Arabian alchemist Geber, Raymond Lull, Arnold of Villanova, Thomas Bungey (sic.), and George Ripley. And yet the faith given to mere statement is not merely astonishing but sometimes shocking. Although the Renaissance intelligence might be sharply critical, its grounds of belief were not those accepted today.

How this worked can be seen, for example, in Gian-Francesco Pico's La Strega, ovvero Degli Inganni de' Demone, a work written in Latin but now hardly accessible except in translation, where a discussion of the possibility that a witch might copulate with a demon is settled by a reminder that Anchises, Semele, Tiresias, and others were punished for having had sexual union with pagan gods. Similarly, Ulric Molitor, in De lamiis et phitonicis mulieribus, gives as evidence for the power of witches to transform men into animals the turning of Ulysses' men into beasts by Circe and the metamorphosis recorded in The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius. If the treatises were self-consciously belletristic one might imagine such citations to be intended as mere showmanship or perhaps as wit or irony, but they often stand side by side with equally incredible evidence drawn from popular rumor or the lives of the saints and appear to be similarly credited. Sometimes the use of an authority is curious in a different way, as when Boguet, in a passage about the lenient treatment of a young witch, says, "This is in agreement with the words of Lucan: 'But we forgive him for his tender age.'" Is this no more than a rhetorical flourish? Apparently not; the consideration that Lucan was a pagan, a poet, and no "authority," for any reason that can readily be imagined, in matters pertaining to ethics or the law is apparently thought to be irrelevant.

It does not, I think, follow that for Renaissance scholars poetry was indistinguishable from factual history or that because they accepted the reality of witchcraft they must have had literal faith in everything Apuleius and Homer and Virgil had written. The epistemological situation was a good deal more complex. A hint of the contemporary attitude toward such citations is given us by Pico when, toward the end of his dialogue, he causes his skeptical disputant, Apistio or Faithless, to come round to a better conviction with these words: "D o you think that I believe to be mere jests what is agreed on by all the ancients and moderns, to which assent is given by poets, rhetoricians, stoics, jurists, philosophers, theologians, prudent men, soldiers, and peasants, and taken also from experience?" Although by themselves such pagan fictions might have proved little, they corroborated other evidence and hence in some degree contributed to persuasion. Even in this diminished role, however, they had an importance which would be denied them by modern thought. And authors like these are quoted often enough without external parallels to qualify somewhat the degree of skepticism toward them which has just been implied.

The other difference from modern scholarship, that having to do with the weight accorded first-hand observation, is also complex. As has been said, the importance of experience is granted, especially by Sprenger and Kramer, Boguet, Remy, and others who drew on a rich fund of testimony given at actual trials. Guazzo is particularly full of stories—so much so that for the student of literature his treatise is likely to be the most interesting of all, partly but not merely because it contains parallels for incidents encountered elsewhere—for example, in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Like the citations of "authorities," however, the arguments from experience would carry little or no conviction in a modern court of law.

The reason is that the evidence is seldom critically evaluated, or not carefully enough questioned to satisfy the modern intelligence. So far as I can recall, the only attempts at a real experimental corroboration involved the observation of sleeping witches to see whether they actually left their beds at times when they reported having attended nocturnal Sabbats. (It was regularly discovered that they did not.) For the rest, when it was not limited to seeing—for example—whether a prisoner really had an odd patch on her skin or the patch really was insensitive to pain, "proof" often consisted in accumulating additional stories of a similar kind, the assumption being that where there was a great deal of smoke there must necessarily have been fire.

One explanation of the tendency to avoid tests no doubt is to be found in the illicit and horrible nature of the witch's magical practices. It was unthinkable that an inquisitor should smear himself with a salve which was said to permit flying through the air, sometimes in the form of an animal, or perhaps even that he should try out on a cat the effect of an allegedly magical powder made from the body of a murdered child. But, indeed, the Baconian method had not yet been distinctly formulated during much of the period, and when it was clearly stated it had to wait a long time for acceptance. So the accusations of hysterical or malicious or superstitious neighbors were allowed to pile up until they created a presumption of guilt encouraged by the whole tenor of theological and scholarly thought and sealed finally by a confession wrung from the prisoner by torture or other pressures. "Experience" thus consisted largely of old wives' tales, the marvels connected with the immediate situation being accepted as probable because they resembled others reported by the "authorities" from different times and places.

An extreme illustration appears in the relatively early Malleus, where we read that "as William of Paris says in his De Uniuerso, it is proved by experience that if a harlot tries to plant an olive it does not become fruitful, whereas if it is planted by a chaste woman it is fruitful." Here, surely, experimentation could have done no harm; but no disposition appears to test the belief by watching, let us say, twenty trees set out by known harlots and twenty others set out by women in whose virtue trust was felt. Reiterated report is enough. The same author offers as proof that devils can produce visual illusions a commonplace story originally told by St. Gregory of a woman who thought she was eating lettuce but instead ate a devil in the form of a lettuce or, possibly, invisible within it. Here a generalization is corroborated by a case history, reassurance being supplied to the incredulous by an acknowledgment of the source (St. Gregory's first dialogue). The doubter could check the story for himself. He was not expected to ask "How do you know it was the lettuce?" or "May she not merely have been crazy?" If one such story was thought insufficient, a second and third and fourth were added, until at last acceptance could no longer be withheld. When the emphasis was on modern instances the scholarly method was similar. Guazzo illustrates the Devil's habit of giving his votaries money which changes into coal, or charred clay, or pig's dung, or a rusty pebble by four stories dated 1586, one dated 1585, and one dated 1587, all six being vouched for, he says, in the courts of justice. For the rest, "experience" is sometimes claimed as the basis for a truism: "It is also a matter of common experience that the tongue of one prudent man can subdue the wrangling of a multitude." No wonder the Archduke Sigismund of Austria, one of the speakers in Molitor's De lamiis, preferred argument to evidence: "I myself do not believe in public rumors, for common people easily credit whatever is said." He asked that the existence of witches be "demonstrated by authorities and by the force of reason, since a well-handled discussion ought to lead to a rational conclusion." Alas, "authorities" and "proofs from experience" were all too often ultimately indistinguishable because the latter included stories borrowed trustingly from the former.

What has been said should not be understood to imply that no skepticism can be found in the documents. On the contrary, there is a great deal: so much, in fact, that one realizes only a sound investigative method was needed to initiate an era of brilliant intellectual progress. And that was to come, but not quickly. In the meantime, the writers on witchcraft might be placed fairly accurately on a scale ranging from very credulous to hard-headed. At one end we find, for example, Guazzo, who was capable of writing, "We often find lying about the shrines of the Saints fragments of thunderbolts which are believed to have been wielded and hurled by some demon." In the same half of the spectrum appear Sprenger and Kramer, Boguet, Remy, Bodin—despite his distinction in other intellectual areas—Gian-Francesco Pico, who nevertheless wrote a slashing attack on astrology, and Hopkins. In the other and more honorable half are von Spee, Vairo, Johann (or John, or Jean) Wier, George Gifford, and Reginald Scot. Somewhere between come James I of England, Giovanni Anania, Delrio, Thomas Erastus, Joseph Glanville, Godelmann, Lavater, and Molitor. Not-withstanding what now seem to have been lapses into fideism, the members of the intermediate group often show intellectual power, and some of them are attractive writers. The tonality of many, as has been said, is cool and reasonable. Attention must be paid to the intellectual milieu when rendering moral and intellectual judgments. Not even the most bloodthirsty—the authors of the Malleus, Remy, Boguet, Bodin—appear to me, at least, as benighted as the Rev. Montague Summers, who although a modern was ready to credit almost any story, no matter how absurd, which tended to justify his spiritualistic preassumptions. The worst is Matthew Hopkins, the notorious witch-finder; but since his interest was financial, his intellect hardly comes into question. How the skepticism operated will become clear as we proceed.

The means to the acquisition of magical powers, as has been said, was the making of a pact with the Devil, who might appear, in theory, because he was invoked, as in the Faust legend, but who in the documents himself almost always initiated the conversation. What the pact involved is explained with special fullness by Guazzo. The witches (1) deny Christ, (2) undergo a mock baptism, (3) receive a new name, (4) deny their godparents and are given new ones, (5) give the Devil a piece of their clothing, (6) swear allegiance to him, (7) pray to be struck out of the book of life and inscribed in the book of death, (8) promise sacrifices to the Devil, (9) make yearly gifts to him, (10) receive his mark—at least many do—and (11) vow not to honor the Eucharist, to blaspheme, to abstain from holy water and blessed salt, and to attend the Sabbats. All this is prepared for by "some sympathy in wickedness between the witches and the devil."

Other descriptions, when not briefer, vary in detail but agree in essentials. According to Godelmann, for instance, magicians (a common synonym for "witches") "knowingly turn to daemons, enter into a pact with them, worship them as GOD, beg their help and counsel, and evoke and attract them by magical ceremonies and the recitation of words, whether barbarous and meaningless to them or understood by them, together with monstrous figures (characteribus), images, prayers, and execrations." In making the pact the witch must "First, horrible though it is to say, renounce GOD his Creator and rescind the treaty made with Him in holy baptism, deny the Son of God, curse His good deeds (beneficia), attack His name with blasphemies, reproaches, and contumely, adore the Devil alone, place all faith and hope in him, follow his commands zealously, and use things created by GOD only for the injury and destruction of men. Afterwards, having died at the appointed time, he must grant his body and soul to the Devil: some swearing all this by the name of a familiar demon, whereas others are driven to make the promise in handwriting, using their own blood." The Devil, in return, agrees to come when called, give counsel, offer help in wrongdoing, answer questions, free his follower from dangers and prisons, give him riches, satisfy his desires, and, finally, serve his will like a slave, doing diligently whatever is required. Once the ceremonies are completed the Devil instructs his new convert either himself or through practised magicians and books, revealing to him how he should perform his operations, draw monstrous figures, carve seals (sigilla), fashion images of wax and metal, and make evil uses of roots, stones, metals, earths (terras), bones, hairs, and the like. As was said earlier, the pact might be implicit instead of explicit. A magician who thought he had used the Devil might find in the end that the Devil had used him, that in accepting help he had unknowingly made a commitment of his soul. In one form or another, however, the pact was an—indeed, the—essential part of witchcraft.

Curiously—the discovery may be quite unexpected—the greater the theorist's skepticism the more emphasis he is likely to put on the Devil's part in all the mischief. Thus Vairo, who makes a sudden change of direction in Book II after seeming almost inimitably credulous in Book I ("I would have fallen into the reader's hate and ill will if on the threshold of this work I had wished to call into doubt an opinion of enchantment accepted by men, including common people"), affirms that everything is done by demons and nothing at all by any other power. What makes this possible is the demons' exceptional knowledge: "They have very great understanding of all things, for they are acquainted with the virtues of the heavens, the stars, birds, fish, trees, plants, metals, stones, and especially the elements and are aware what can help or injure man.… Thus the demons do by means of natural poisons what the enchanters think they accomplish by means of their eyes or other instruments." Similar explanations appear in other treatises. Such skills, we are assured, result from the devils' former status as angels and from their studies of the universe during the long ages since their fall. In this way magic becomes a kind of natural science which produces its effects not by mumbo-jumbo but by expert manipulation of the hidden properties of objects.

The appearance of the Devil, whether invoked or voluntary, might be in the form of a speaking animal—a dog, a goat, a cat, or some other—but more usually was that of an imperfect man. According to Remy, his features were dark and shapeless, his eyes deep-set and flashing, his mouth wide and smelling of sulphur, his hands and feet deformed: "for Demons can never so completely ape the human shape but that the deception is apparent to even the most stupid." The hands may be claw-like, the feet hoofs. Their voices, we are told by the same expert, are thin and indistinct. A witch's testimony taken on March 28, 1588, was that they spoke "as if their mouths were in a jar or cracked pitcher." One reason is that they must manipulate air without the use of lungs, throats, palates, or "sides"; but they always speak idiomatic vernacular. We are sometimes informed that the indistinctness is deliberate, its purpose being the same as the ambiguity of oracular pronouncements. The stench is said by Remy to be invariable, and he adds that witches are instructed to avoid cleanliness and not to wash their hands lest the efficacy of their incantations be obstructed. Indeed, handwashing is often an effective protection for an intended victim.

The existence of demons and their motives for tampering with men are usually taken for granted in the treatises but occasionally explained. Anania, in Natura daemonum, gives in some detail particulars which were too well known to need constant repetition. In the beginning all the angels were created on the first day along with the heavens (sub caeli nomine), as is shown by the text quando facta sunt sydera, laudauerent me angeli. All the angels were perfect and all were content; but they differed among themselves in qualities without any of them suffering from insufficiency of a kind to induce a fall. Of the three classes, none was so inferior to the others in excellence, wisdom, or freedom of the will that it was unable to stand. The fall therefore was voluntary. Moved by instability of mind and swollen with pride, Lucifer said, "I will place my seat in the north, and I will be like the highest." His sin was the most execrable of all possible sins because it was committed wholly without occasion. A battle ensued, Michael acting as leader of the good angels, though where it was fought, or how long, is uncertain. The event was the expulsion of the demons from heaven. Some fell to Tartarus, but others of greater strength (pars uero altera eaque potior) to "this dark and icy air which surrounds us." Hence the Devil's temptation of Eve and Adam in the form of a serpent and the constant interference of demons in human affairs ever since. The story is familiar to students of English literature from Milton's Paradise Lost and would not require even a quick summary if in this age of secular education and a dying, "existentialist" Christianity knowledge of it was not rapidly disappearing—even, one fears, among the clergy.

In a longer discussion it would be interesting to follow with some care theories of the beginnings of human magic—magic, it will be remembered, being often synonymous with witchcraft. Here space allows only the offering of a few hints. Wier attributes the earliest practice of sorcery to Mizraim, son of Ham, whom Noah had cursed after having been seen naked in his drunkenness. Mizraim was "the first who discovered the impiety, full of blasphemies, of an execrable magic," and from him the black art descended to the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Persians. The Malleus quotes Vincent de Beauvais as having reported in his Speculum historiale that Zoroaster, "who is said to have been Cham, the son of Noe," was the first magician and astrologer. Other authorities emphasized the importance of Moses, who according to the Cabala had been given esoteric knowledge as well as the Law on Mt. Sinai, or, in another version, learned magic of the Egyptians, known from the story of their competition with Moses before Pharaoh to have been able to perform marvels. In either account it was assumed that Moses's magic was white and that the perversion of it came later. King James, who in his Daemonologie often reasons shrewdly, rejects vigorously the opinion that the mature Moses practised forbidden magic.

For first, that that generali proposition; affirming Moyses to be taught in all the sciences of the Ægyptians, should conclude that he was taught in Magie, I see no necessity. For we must vnderstand that the spirit of God there, speaking of sciences, vnderstandes them that are lawfull.… Secondlie, giuing that he had bene taught in it, there is great difference, betwixt knowledge and practising of a thing (as I said before). For God knoweth all thinges, being alwaies good.… Thirdlie, giuing that he had both studied and practised the same (which is more nor monstruous to be beleeued by any Christian) yet we know well inough … that suppose he had beene the wickeddest man in the worlde before, he … became a changed and regenerat man.

In one way or another the beginning of magic is, however, regularly pushed back to a remote antiquity. The presence of Satan in the Garden of Eden implied the activity of devils among men from the time of the first parents.

Since discussions of the origin of magic never, so far as I am aware, speak explicitly of the appearance of the Devil and the swearing of a pact with him, further discussion of them would be digressive. It may be added, however, that the fall of the bad angels was sometimes said to be corroborated by pagan stories: "Not only do our theologians and those of the Hebrews show us this fall, but the Assyrians, the Arabs, the Egyptians, and the Greeks confirm it in their writings.… Trismegistus describes the same fall in his Pimander" Non-Christian literature thus corroborated Christian truth and threw additional light on it. Guazzo probably drew from Hermetism when he listed six distinct kinds of daemons—fiery, aerial, terrestrial, aquatic, subterranean, and lucifugous or light-fleeing.

III. Witches' activities

Once the pact had been entered upon, what kinds of sorcery did the witches perform? The Malleus gives a convenient list:

They raise hailstorms and hurtful tempests and lightnings; cause sterility in men and animals; offer to devils, or otherwise kill, the children whom they do not devour. But these are only the children who have not been reborn by baptism at the font, for they cannot devour those who have been baptized, nor any without God's permission. They can also, before the eyes of their parents, but without being seen, throw into the water children walking by the water side; they make horses go mad under their riders; they can transport themselves from place to place through the air, either in body or in imagination; they can affect Judges and Magistrates so that they cannot hurt them; they can cause themselves and others to keep silence under torture; they can bring about a great trembling in the hands and horror in the minds of those who would arrest them; they can show to others occult things and certain future events… ; they can see absent things as if they were present; they can turn the minds of men to inordinate love or hatred; they can at times strike whom they will with lightning, and even kill some men and animals; they can make of no effect the generative desires, and even the power of copulation, cause abortion, kill infants in the mother's womb by a mere exterior touch; they can at times bewitch men and animals with a mere look, without touching them, and cause death; they dedicate their own children to devils.

Of such actions as these one reads constantly in the treatises.

But there are others too; comprehensive as it may appear, the description is incomplete. I add details from an account given by Scot in his Discoverie. Witches can

pull downe the moone and the starres.… send needles into the livers of their enimies.… transferre corne in the blade from one place to another.… cure diseases supernaturallie, flie in the aire, and danse with divels.… plaie the part of Succubus, and contract themselves to Incubus.… transsubstantiate themselves and others, and take the forms and shapes of asses, woolves, ferrets, cowes, apes, horsses, dogs, &c.… keep divels and spirits in the likenesse of todes and cats … raise spirits (as others affirme) drie up springs, turne the course of running waters, inhibit the sunne, and staie both day and night, changing the one into the other.… go in and out at awger holes, & saile in an egge shell, a cockle or muscle shell.… bring soules out of the graves.… teare snakes in peeces with words, and with looks kill lambes.… bring to passe, that chearne as long as you list, your butter will not come.

With these supplementations the explanation is reasonably full.

The actual ceremonies by which malicious intentions were carried out need not be dwelt on. The reports of trials give us vivid, if untrustworthy, glimpses of witches, in nine cases out of ten women (because of the widely asserted weakness and special ignorance of their sex), muttering curses, fashioning and then mutilating images, planting charms beneath doorsills, causing rainstorms by beating water in a bowl or stream or their own urine evacuated into a hole dug in the ground, spreading powders, boiling the bodies of children preparatory to drinking the broth and making an unguent out of the "more solid parts," mixing poisons, injuring by touch, fascinating by the evil eye, murdering infants with needles, sending toads or cats or other small animals on evil errands, or, very frequently, merely assenting to a demon's offer to bring trouble upon an enemy, or his family, or his cattle. The formal invocation of the Devil by the drawing of a magic circle, the inscribing within it of triangles whose corners are filled with cabalistic figures and the names of demons, and the uttering of Latin formulas, as in Marlowe's and Goethe's versions of the Faust story, is rarely heard of and never, I think, confessed. Evidently the learned tradition of black magic existed quite separately from the practice of vulgar witches, whose illiteracy in any case would have made it inaccessible to them. In this respect modern stories of witchcraft—for example, Charles Williams's in All Hallows' Eve—are quite unfaithful to the records of actual prosecutions, which in England involved almost without exception, and on the continent very often, persons whose social status was low. In the same way modern Satanist cults, as in San Francisco, draw upon late and imaginative, rather than historical, sources. But in one respect there is contact: the treatises have much to say about the witches' Sabbats, which with elegant additions like the use of a naked girl's belly as an altar appear to be imitated by modern covens. These deserve separate consideration.

For two reasons at least, a prurient interest and a desire to implicate additional persons (together, on the continent, with greed to seize more property), the inquisitors or examining magistrates seem to have inquired into their prisoners' attendance at the Sabbats with special eagerness. Although witches may occasionally have met to trade secrets and boast about their achievements—some kind of actual conference is strongly implied by Thomas Potts' report of the testimony at the Lancashire trials in 1612—most of the accounts are purely imaginary, the details having been suggested to the accused women in the way von Spee has described. The fact, already once mentioned, that in Latin countries, and particularly in Italy, the central figure was Diana or Herodias, the donna or signora, whereas in other places it was the Devil or a devil, is significant. The witches confessed what their judges expected to hear because doing so promised an end to their sufferings. It is in fact precisely such agreements on matters now regarded as impossible that bring the findings at the trials most strongly into doubt. Of the 800 or 900 witches sent to the stake by Remy, "some two hundred persons, more or less," admitted meeting with other witches at some pool or stream, raising clouds from it by which they were borne aloft and carried wherever they would, and at last causing the clouds to fall as hail. Elsewhere the raising of storms was separate from transvection. However obtained, the descriptions of the Sabbat all have a family resemblance.

The Sabbats seem not to have been very enjoyable. Having arrived at the meeting place by flying through the air on sticks, or on the back of a devil transformed into an animal, or by changing themselves into animals, the witches performed obscene rites of worship, often kissing the Devil's buttocks beneath his tail. They reported on the evil they had accomplished and were praised or scolded in proportion as it was great or small. They danced, usually naked, back to back, and moving to the left, no one being excused because of age or infirmity. They ate a disgusting meal which gave them no sustenance. Finally, they engaged in promiscuous sexual intercourse.

Details are provided richly. Remy says of the banquet, in a typical description, that the food is loathsome and nauseating and fails to satisfy hunger. Sometimes it is mere illusion; again it is real but is made from animals which have died or are otherwise unclean. But bread (used in the Eucharist) and salt (used in Old Testament sacrifices and apparently also in baptism and in holy water) are always lacking. The dances were terribly fatiguing, and we sometimes learn that after the Sabbats witches spent several days in bed recuperating. A popular modern belief that the number of witches in every group or coven was twelve or thirteen is quite unsubstantiated by the documents. On the continent we hear of very large numbers; Pico, for example, affirms that as many as 2,000 might be present, and nowhere, to my knowledge, is a standard number distinctly mentioned.

An issue raised into prominence by Margaret Murray's The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921) is commented on by Pico: is Christian magic continuous with pagan (in England, perhaps, with Druidic)? Dicaste, an inquisitor, is asked whether the "games" of Diana or of the Herodiades were the same as those heard of in the sixteenth century. The reply is, "Some people say yes, and others prefer the view that they are a new heresy." The questioner then gives his own opinion, that some of the games are ancient and some the result of a new superstition, so that one might say that on the whole they are "antique in essence and new by accident (to speak in the modern idiom)." So far as it goes, the judgment is commonsensical: sorcery has certainly been practised in all societies, and no doubt because at bottom the human psyche is always the same its forms tend to be similar. But to argue that in detail Renaissance witchcraft was identical with pre-Christian, or even that, in any very meaningful sense, pagan sorcery—which did not know the Christian Devil—was its source, is to assert as fact what in the absence of sufficient evidence can, at most, be no more than hypothesis.

These, then, are the essentials of witchcraft: a meeting with the Devil (or a devil; the lack of an article in Latin, together with different conventions of capitalization, makes the distinction often impossible), a pact to deny God, the performing of evil deeds, and occasional or regular attendance at the Sabbat. From the reports of trials one gathers that most of the witches really acted in secret, muttering their charms, mutilating their clay images, and dispensing their powders or potions without the knowledge of anyone except, perhaps, their own children, who could be forced by orders or threats to help. (Hence it was concluded by the inquisitors that every child of a witch was almost certainly also a witch.) Occasionally two or more witches might co-operate to bring harm upon a common enemy, and more rarely still a larger number might congregate to cackle together, but as social outcasts—"loners"—no doubt they usually hated and feared their rivals as well as their victims. In the main, they were probably poor old women with foggy minds who felt themselves abused and tried to strike back at oppressors by hexing them. Nevertheless the Sabbats were firmly established in the official theory and receive much attention in the documents.

IV . Steps toward the denial of witchcraft

Instead of dwelling longer on the practices, which unless poisons were used or the victim suffered psychological damage must have had no influence on the results thought to have been achieved, I turn to elements of the official theory which by implying skepticism were finally to lead to a denial of witchcraft itself.

First, it was essential that the charms themselves be thought ineffectual, that doubts arise about a universe so structured as to make enchantments operative. This step was taken with the emergence of a conviction that devils were the real agents of all the mischief. The demon was not constrained by the witch's rigamaroles but seized upon her ill will as an excuse to do injuries by which, because she had assented to them, his claim to her soul would be established. At the same time, of course, he would gain satisfaction from the exercise of his malevolence upon the immediate victims.

The conviction was shared even by so credulous a writer as Remy. That there is efficacy in the mere words of a curse or charm, he declared, "seems to me just as ridiculous and absurd as the similar belief in the virtue of written characters and letters.… How can it be possible for a mere vocal noise to act so powerfully?" The power's true source was the demon. Similarly, in the medicines and bewitched objects which apparently cause hurt or healing there is "no inherent or natural power either of hurting or of healing." However prodigious the result may seem, "it is all done by the Demons through some power of which the source and explanation is not known."

The same belief appears in James I, whose insistence that witches exist and must be punished was qualified by a Scottish toughness of mind.

… it is no power inherent in the circles, or in the holines of the names of God blasphemouslie vsed: nor in whatsoeuer rites or ceremonies at that time vsed, that either can raise any infernali spirit, or yet limitat him perforce within or without these circles. For it is he onelie, the father of all lyes, who hauing first of all prescribed that forme of doing, feining himself to be commanded & restreined thereby, wil be loath to passe the bounds of these injunctiones; aswell [sic] thereby to make them glory in the impiring ouer him (as I saide before:) As likewise to make himselfe so to be trusted in these little thinges, that he may haue the better commoditie thereafter, to decieue them in the end with a tricke once for all; I meane the euerlasting perdition of their soul & body.

"The father of all lyes": the phrase was useful, since it encouraged the belief that, like nearly everything else the Devil said, his explanations of charms were deceptive. The causal result of enchanting was merely damage to the witch's soul. The rest of the evil was done not magically but quasi-naturally, by means known to devils though seeming marvelous to the more limited human intelligence.

The same explanation appears in other writers whose minds were even less critical. Guazzo, whose Compendium in long stretches is a compilation of the mostly wildly impossible stories, nevertheless affirms that demons are never constrained by rites or incantations but pretend to be in order to deceive and catch men. The less gullible Gifford, whose Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes throws gentle scorn on many current beliefs, says of the Devil that

God giueth him power sometimes to afflict both men and beastes with bodily harmes: If he can, he will doe it, as intreated and sent by Witches, but for Vs to imagin either that their sending doth giue him power, or that he would not doe that which God hath giuen him leaue to doe, vnlesse they should request and send him, is most absurd.

Boguet, although convinced like Remy and Guazzo that witch trials must be prosecuted vigorously, asserts that "For the most part the witch has only the intent to harm, whilst Satan actually performs that which he would have done." Although witches' poisons are sometimes really harmful, Satan "only works by secondary and natural causes." The beating of water or the throwing of powder either does not produce hail or does so naturally, as a mixture of saltpeter with alum produces clouds and causes thunder and lightning. Ointments and unguents do not cause transformations into the forms of beasts or permit flight through the air but merely stupefy. The words of a conjuration "are no more than a symbol of the pact between the witch and Satan." No injury can be caused merely by "looking," by touching, or by maltreating an image. Among the relatively fideist authors, once more, Thomas Erastus concurs. Although the sorcerers are wrong in believing that conjurations have intrinsic power to constrain and in thinking that devils can give potency to materials and actions which by nature have no malevolent force, nevertheless they deserve to be punished because they furnish occasions to real devils to do ill. The comparatively measured and sensible Delrio, who belongs to the middle group of limited believers in witchcraft, is also in accord. Thaumaturgy can "do nothing which is repugnant to the nature of things." If a bronze head of Albertus Magnus spoke, as rumor reported, "he spoke in the head who established oracles in the statues of idols: who was only an evil spirit." The authors were, indeed, virtually unanimous on the point. Gian-Francesco Pico, who read thoroughly before writing his attack on astrology but had not done his homework on witchcraft, is one of the few exceptions. And when so much was granted, the whole elaborate mythology was undermined at the base and would topple as soon as belief in the Devil ceased.

A second denial which formed part of the sophisticated theory had to do with delusions. Tricksters (praestigiatores), said Godelmann, "charm and deceive the eyes of men, by Satan's help, with incantations and illusions, so that they do not see things as they really are but think they see what is not there. These are properly called enchanters (Zauberer.)" Once achieved, this insight too spread through the whole area of inquiry and threatened to convert all the occult phenomena into sleight-of-hand or a kind of hypnosis.

How this worked can be seen in the discussions of physical transformation and of transvection. The two subjects will be considered separately.

The popular belief was that witches often turned themselves into cats, wolves, and other animals, sometimes in order to enter houses undetected, sometimes to make aerial voyages to the Sabbats, and sometimes for the purpose of killing or injuring their enemies' livestock. The theologians and jurists mostly agreed that the changes were only apparent. According to Guazzo, "no animal's soul can inform the human body, and no human soul an animal's body." The transformation of Diomede's companions into birds was really a rapid substitution, as when a hind was made to replace Iphigenia. Scot quotes in the margin "Hermes Trismeg. in suo Periandro" (for Pimandro) and writes in the text: "And yet Hermes Trismegistus thinketh he hath good authoritie and reason to saie: Aliud corpus quàm humanum non capere animam humanam; nec fas esse in corpus animae ratione carentis animam rationalem corruere." Molitor demonstrates by means of authorities and a wild story that transformations of people into animals are mere appearance; and he gives as an instance the deluding of our senses in dreams and delirium. Boguet gives a long series of tales about transformations and then reverses his field to say, "Nevertheless it has always been my opinion that Lycanthropy is an illusion, and that the metamorphosis of a man into a beast is impossible." The reasoning soul given to man by God cannot enter an animal, and it is impossible to believe that the soul is restored when human shape is resumed because in the interval the soul would have no residence. What really happens is either that Satan "leaves the witch asleep behind a bush, and himself goes and performs that which the witch has in mind to do," causing her afterwards to think that she has done it, or, more frequently, "it is the witch himself who runs about slaying: not that he is metamorphosed into a wolf, but that it appears to him that he is so." Hence the fatigue which the witch feels afterwards. Nevertheless the witch is guilty, for he either has committed the crime or has wished to; and he never would have had the wish if he had not first renounced God and heaven.

The same arguments appear in other treatises. Remy affirms that "it is not in the power of the Demon to effect any such matter.… For what madness it is to believe that anything which has been formed and created can destroy and overturn as it pleases the most excellent work of Him who created it." The man can believe himself changed, and so will act as if he were the animal; or the demon can deceive the observer. At most Remy will admit that a witch can have the swiftness, strength, and ravenous appetite of, say, a wolf, so that the appearance may "differ but little from actuality." Yet even this admission comes hard. The opinion of Joannes Althusius is the same: "I ask whether we shall think the deeds done by themselves or by the Devil when they confess that they have transformed themselves into wolves or other savage beasts?" The answer is that only God can change forms and essential properties. Even Pico sides with the majority here. His Fronimo, who can swallow a great deal, at last gets round to admitting that such transformations as those described by Homer and Apuleius are devilish deceptions and not actual.

Skepticism about transvection, or the power of witches to fly to distant places through the air, was less common. Remy says that witches sometimes really travel to the meetings either on foot or supernaturally, but sometimes they only dream or imagine they have been present. What is impossible is that the witch's soul should attend while her body remains in bed. (That this could be done was an article of the popular faith—a product, no doubt, of the fact that husbands rarely found themselves sleeping alone.) Whether the soul could leave the body, or the witch, by some "glamor" or illusion, could make a pillow or an armful of straw impersonate her during her absence, is frequently discussed in the treatises. On the whole, Remy concludes, "The commonest practice of all witches is to fly up the chimney," notwithstanding the smallness of the aperture, and to proceed in a basket, or on a reed, or broom, or pig, or bull, or dog, or forked stick, to the rendezvous. The authors of the Malleus have no doubts at all. In a passage already quoted they ask, "Did not the devil take up Our Saviour, and carry Him up to a high place, as the Gospel testifies?" They counter the argument that a spirit is unable to move a physical body by reminding readers that "the highest bodies, that is, the stars, are moved by spiritual essences" (the Intelligences). Boguet also cites the incident of the pinnacle and mentions transvections of "St. Philip, Ezekiel, Habakkuk, Elijah, Enoch, St. Antide Archbishop of Besançon, St. Ambrose, Pythagoras, the Philosopher of Tyana, and countless others." Guazzo too is on the side of faith. The witch transports herself "on a cowl-staff, or a broom, or a reed, a cleft stick or a distaff, or even a shovel" after she has anointed herself with an ointment made "chiefly from murdered children"; or she may ride on an ox, a goat, or a dog. He also believes in the simulacra. Those who doubt all this, he remarks severely, "certainly sin in lack of reverence to our Mother the Church." Yet some did doubt, and by doing so contributed further to the final breakup of the entire conceptual syndrome.

Molitor, with Sprenger and Kramer one of the earliest writers, is already skeptical: quick journeys over great distances to the Sabbats are illusions even if shared by the witches. Godelmann's view is the same: he thinks that stories of flights through the air are fables, and the unguents which are said to make transvection possible merely put the magicians to sleep. Further, witches cannot pass through cracks and crevices. The best summary of attitudes is perhaps that although confessions drawn from accused persons by torture or heavy psychological pressure inhibited disbelief in the Sabbats themselves, and the Sabbats, being large assemblies, could not be held near every witch's home, so that some means had to be accepted of rapid transportation over distances, doubt of transvection had begun and was to spread along with disbelief in the rest of the alleged phenomena.

Another subject often discussed in the treatises is copulation between enchanters and demons. As succubus—the term succubo is rarely used, presumably because devils were thought actually to be sexless—the devil might receive a warlock's semen. Afterwards he became an incubus and discharged the semen into the body of a witch. Few theorists believed that devils themselves produced semen. They were disembodied spirits without corporeal substance. (Hence the generation of a true devil's child in a recent film, Rosemary's Baby, runs quite counter to informed Renaissance opinion.) At most, accordingly, the devils helped in the generation of illegitimate children. Even so much as this is frequently denied, for reflection tended to raise serious questions.

Sprenger and Kramer, writing at the beginning of the witchcraft scare, credit the popular belief. Guazzo proves the reality of succubus in his usual way by citing Plato's Cratylus, Philo, Josephus and "the Old Synagogue," St. Cyprian, St. Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and others. "But a more substantial proof," he adds, "is to be found in S. Jerome on Ephesians vi, and S. Augustine (Civ. Dei. xv, 23), who is followed by the consensus of all Theologians, and especially by S. Isidore, chap. 8. The same belief is championed in the Bull of Pope Innocent VII I against witches." How could a good Christian doubt? The Devil, however, cannot produce semen but can only carry it, keeping it warm during transportation. Other authorities accept the reality of copulation but deny the power even of secondhand generation. According to Boguet, the icy coldness of the Devil's semen prevents conception. Remy cites the coldness of the Devil's penis and the witch's fear and pain as preventing fertility. Moreover, the mind derives not from the semen but from God, whose co-operation would be necessary to the generation of a human being. The birth of monsters, often thought to result from such unholy unions, he believes a consequence of "some excessive activity" of the mother's imagination, as in the case of the spotted sheep produced by ewes which had had Jacob's wands before their eyes. As for the body used by the demon in coitus, Remy thought it was probably "either the corpse of a dead man, or else some concretion and condensation of vapours." Boguet opts for the second possibility, which, he explains, should "not seem strange, if it is considered that the vapours which rise from the earth very often seem to us to take the form of men or animals."

Although a few writers, among them Godelmann, thought that the intercourse with demons was imaginary, opinions like these dominate in the treatises. The witches admitted intercourse with demons, in the later documents often professing it to be acutely painful; popular opinion supported it, the Fathers affirmed it. And yet there were problems. The notion that a dead body was resucitated for the purpose apparently was not found attractive, and the alternative hypothesis involving the "concretion and condensation of vapours" may have led to or corroborated the notion that the Devil's penis and his semen were icy cold and therefore unsuitable for generation. In any event, most of the theorists agree that demons are infertile. Molitor urged this view as early as 1489. The magician Merlin, often thought to have been a devil's child, was, he says, an ordinary infant who was stolen from his parents and made to appear as the child of a woman in whom a false pregnancy had been induced. Had not Galen said that semen is unproductive if it is not accompanied by "an emanation from the heart" which "measures the fire of love"? The English dramatist Thomas Heywood, in his Life of Merlin, makes the same suggestion but qualifies it in a way he might not have found necessary if he had been better read in witchcraft. Merlin's father is doubtful, his mother certain; probably he was conceived normally, his mother concealing the father's identity in order not to endanger him. But some believe that Merlin "was conceived by the compression of a fantastical spiritual creature, without a body," and this is not impossible. Plato's mother is said by Speusippus, Elearchus, and Amaxilides to have conceived after "congression with the imaginary shadow of Apollo," and in the De Socratis Daemone it is affirmed that spirits inhabit the moist air between the earth and the moon and sometimes, in envy of men, take human shape as incubi and generate children called by the Romans Fauni and Sicarii, as Augustine has remarked in his De Civitate. On the whole, however, the tendency was to preserve faith in demonic intercourse while denying the possibility of issue. And this again marks a stage in the development of incredulity.

Similarly quasi-rationalistic explanations were evolved for fortune-telling in all its permutations. Predictions of the future do not depend on instruments or cabalistic rites but on demons. Vairo stated the principle succinctly: "Certain hidden and future things are foreknown not through the power of keen imagination but with the help of daemons." As Remy pointed out, only God knows the future. Demonic predictions are presentiments or conjectures, or foretell events the demons themselves will produce, or are early pronouncements of happenings which have occurred at a distance. The demon sees the event, rushes at superhuman speed to another locality, and announces it as about to happen. Gifford extends the explanation to weathermagic: this is performed not in order to produce a tempest but when a tempest is known to be impending. Oddly, I have run across no extended discussion of predictions in relation to free will. One would have supposed that this problem, so painfully argued out in connection with God's foreknowledge, would have been relevant also to fortune-telling. The reason it was not thought so may have been the limited credence granted by scholars to all the varieties of predictions. Because devils had possessed extraordinary knowledge as angels and had not forfeited all of it by their fall, and because also they had been able, individually, to watch human beings and observe the universe from the beginning, they were better able than men to guess what might occur in the future. Further, they had shrewd insights into human intentions, they could announce as impending some action they had themselves determined to perform, and by reason of their swift motion they could pretend to foretell events that had already happened, just as by scouting about invisibly they could discover the whereabouts of a lost object and enable a witch to predict where it would be found. They did not, however, really foreknow. Hence the riddling nature of many of their pronouncements.

Much the same line was followed in discussions of apparitions of the dead. Guazzo, as usual less doubting than most of the theorists, insisted that "the souls of the departed can and do at times appear to the living." He instances the appearance of Christ to Peter when that disciple was fleeing persecution and adduces the authority of Ambrose, Dionysius the Areopagite, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Cyprian, Surius, Pope Adrian I, St. Gregory of Tours, St. Gregory of Neocaesarea, Nicephor, St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nazianus, and St. Augustine. "To conclude shortly," he adds, "there is unlimited authority on this matter"; and he ends by citing theologians like Richard de Middleton, Peter of Palude, Scotus, Denys the Carthusian, Dominic Soto, Peltanus, St. Peter Canisius, and Gregory of Valencia. But we need not believe that the appearances are frequent. None the less his opinion was not that of the majority.

The more usual view was stated by Remy when he affirmed that except by the special permission of God devils do not really raise the dead but impersonate them or make their corpses move as if alive. Godelmann agrees that Satan is incapable of performing resuscitations, an act of which only God is capable. Even Guazzo advises his readers that apparent spirits are often phantoms: "In S. Clement of Rome we also read much concerning Simon Magus: that he made a new man out of air, whom he could render invisible at will." An English reader may think of such Spenserian spirits as the false Una contrived by Archimago. In Protestant countries an indisposition to believe in the return of dead souls was strengthened by a promulgation of the London convocation in 1562, that "The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory … is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture but rather repugnant to the word of God." If the souls of the dead were at once received into Paradise or Hell their return to earth was unlikely.

The longest and most heavily documented treatment of apparitions is by Ludwig Lavater, a German Lutheran who first wrote in the vernacular and then produced an expanded version in Latin. An English translation by "R.H." to which I have not had access was published in 1572. The book is learned, intelligent, but, on the basis of innumerable authorities, affirmative, only insisting that the spirits, although sometimes real, are not usually those of dead men but are "good or evil angels, or other arcane and occult operations of God." The reason they appear is that by means of them God exercises the faithful and punishes the faithless. Yet they are often illusions—the fantasies of melancholics or madmen, misapprehensions of imperfect senses, the result of a fright induced by other men, or impersonations by priests or monks undertaken for some such ulterior purpose as access to a desirable woman. Common people, again, often mistake natural objects for specters. Since the work is rather about apparitions than about witchcraft it cannot detain us longer. Yet it connects with tractates on witchcraft and in its skepticism as well as in its credulity is a typical product of its time.

V. Conclusion

It must be understood that, like the appearance of bad angels as specters, all the activities of demons are "permissive." This thesis runs through virtually all the treatises. Molitor insists that devils can do nothing without God's will. Godelmann tells us that the imprecations, charms, and poisons used to injure or destroy cattle and men are sometimes effective through God's permission. Remy explains the turning to worthless objects of gold given to witches by demons as resulting from God's denial to devils of the power actually to enrich. Guazzo, in a passage more than usually difficult for a modern reader to follow, gives this as the last of seven reasons why God allows the Devil to "Busy Himself with witchcraft": "It shows His power. For although He allows the demon to effect the greater marvels, such as turning water into blood (Guazzo is thinking of the competition between Moses and Pharaoh's magicians), He does not permit him to accomplish smaller things, such as the generation of gnats." One gathers, rather uncertainly, that the greater feats are allowed for special purposes but that, contemptuously, the devils are frustrated in trivial undertakings that might give them pleasure. The general lines of speculation about infernal power are nevertheless clear. Admission that the devils performed evil against God's will would have implied a Manichaean dualism, a heresy which had long been refuted. Although I do not recall that they were often cited, the Bible also contained a number of texts about how God had hardened the hearts of bad men in order to drive them further into iniquity. Divine rulership over the universe had to be maintained at all costs.

Much else in the treatises might form part of a longer analysis. Was it, for example, or was it not, legitimate to obtain the help of white witches or "wise men" in resisting charms and curses? Opinion was divided. Godelmann urged, against Paracelsus and others, that magical cures were also of the Devil and therefore illicit. Delrio believed that all magical effects required a pact with the Devil, either explicit or implicit, and hence were forbidden. On the other side, Remy argued that countermagic used by a witch against her own charms was licit if instead of being cajoled or bribed she was forced by threats or violence to help. The Devil would not then be honored but forced to work against his own ends. Boguet agreed with the majority: "It was therefore well said by St. John Chrysostom that it is better to die than to seek the help of the Devil or witches to be cured." There is also protracted discussion of the efficacy of the sign of the Cross, naming Christ, sprinkling holy water, and using other rites of exorcism. In general, the Protestants thought such practices "Popish" and superstitious; but among the Catholics too there were many who believed them to be rather aids to faith than magically efficacious. Again, a separate section might be written on the disputed question whether a witch's powers ceased upon her arrest. Their disappearance would of course have encouraged justices and torturers and was often affirmed, but many instances are reported of visitations to the prisoner by demons and even of cohabitation with them in the cells. The present summary of the official theory is, therefore, very far from exhaustive. My intention has been partly to offer a general overview of what witchcraft was thought to be like but more centrally to illustrate the mental processes em-bodied in the scholarly documents.

The basic weakness of the reasoning, obviously, is the reliance placed upon "authorities," which made the rooting out of misconceptions a slow and difficult undertaking. The oftener the traditional stories were repeated the stronger the "proof" became. If Sprenger and Kramer, for example, picked up a tale from the life of one of the early saints and Guazzo borrowed it from them, it acquired the support of a fourth author. The next user became a fifth, a still later writer a sixth, and so on indefinitely, until the list acquired an apparent solidity that made disbelief next to impossible. The essential step of doubting the initial witness, of asking "How did he know?" and "Didn't he perhaps misinterpret the evidence?" began gradually to be taken—we have noticed honorable instances—but could not quickly become widespread and almost instinctive. In the typical treatise a belief in the theoretical possibility, if not the next-door actuality, of witchraft was forced both by the theological premises and by the feeling, still far from uncommon, that what has been repeated throughout all history and over the whole of the known world could not be wholly false. So the long delusion not only continued but, as the prosecutions multiplied, grew in intensity and practical consequences. Yet the beginnings of a healthier attitude are clearly visible in the treatises, superstitious as many of them are, and in the long run was to lead to the abandonment of stupidities which only now, in the backwash of an anti-rationalist rebellion against hard factual knowledge, are once again beginning to be credited by people who should know better.

In the meantime writers whose minds we continue to find attractive shared the deplorable errors. Sir Thomas Browne's acceptance of the existence of witches is well known: and this despite his Pseudodoxia epidemica, a long work directed against popular beliefs. Martin Luther's credulity about witches was unbounded: it cannot be denied, he said, that the Devil lives and reigns in the whole world. According to K. M. Briggs [in Pale Hecate's Team, 1962], Thomas Fuller was a believer, and Sir Walter Raleigh distinguished between theurgy and witchcraft by asserting that whereas the theurgist or nec-romancer commanded the Devil, witches obeyed him. Joseph Glanville's A Blow at Modern Sadducism in Some Philosophical Considerations about Witchcraft (4th ed. 1668) is "concerned for the justification of the belief of witches, it suggesting palpable, and current evidence of our Immortality." Richard Baxter's Certainty of the World of Spirits (1691) shows that at the end of the seventeenth century a reasonable and charitable man could persevere in the delusion. As late as July 11, 1711, Joseph Addison was able to write, "I believe in general that there is, and has been such a thing as Witch-craft; but at the same time, can give no Credit to any particular Instance of it." We are reminded of Dr. Johnson's attitude toward ghosts. As for popular interest in witches during the High Renaissance in England, its extent is suggested by Robert Reed's discovery [in The Occult on the Tudor and Stuart Stage, 1965] that more than seventy Elizabethan and Jacobean plays have to do with the supernatural. Although the occult of course includes more than witchcraft, the role of witch-craft in the plays is important enough to justify Reed's inclusion of a chapter on "Origins of English Witchcraft and Demonology."

Other men of course took a different view. Jerome Cardan, who believed in demons and was an enthusiastic astrologer, nonetheless was essentially skeptical about witchcraft. John Selden refused faith. So too did Gabriel Harvey. Montaigne objected to the prosecutions: "How much more naturali and more likely doe I finde it, that two men should lie, then one in twelve houres, passe with the windes, from East to West? … When all is done, it is an over-valuing of ones conjectures, by them to cause a man to be burned alive." Less well-known men also refused assent to the prevailing opinion. Arthur Wilson, steward to the Earl of Warwick, says of eighteen witches condemned in Essex in 1645, "I was at Chensford at the trial and execution of eighteene women. But could see nothing in the evidence which did perswade me to thinke them other than poore, mellencollie, envious, mischevous, ill-disposed, atrabilus constitutions."

Such disavowals, when public, no doubt did something to help sway opinion. No real substitute existed, however, for hard intellectual argument. This was begun and carried on, all over Europe, in treatises like those we have looked at; and ultimately, except in cultural backwaters, the battle for sanity was won. For a very long time, however, a faith in witchcraft remained possible for wise, learned, and well-intentioned men. It disappeared only when the skepticism which pushed back the responsibility for magical results from formulas and operations to the Devil himself left to be denied only a single pre-assumption. "Gut responses," where the delusion had its ultimate source, then began to be distrusted, if not by everyone, at least by the fashioners of a modern world which, for all its imperfections, is free at least from the blood-chilling cruelties sketched at the beginning of this discussion.