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Title: The Magic of the Middle Ages

Author: Viktor Rydberg

Translator: August Hjalmar Edgren

Release Date: May 4, 2012 [EBook #39608]

Language: English

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  THE MAGIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES


  BY VIKTOR RYDBERG


  _Translated from the Swedish_
  BY AUGUST HJALMAR EDGREN


  NEW YORK
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
  1879




  Copyright 1879,
  BY HENRY HOLT & CO




CONTENTS.


                                                 PAGE.

    I. THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY OF THE MIDDLE AGES,
       AND ITS HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT                1

   II. THE MAGIC OF THE CHURCH                      56

  III. THE MAGIC OF THE LEARNED                     95

   IV. THE MAGIC OF THE PEOPLE AND THE STRUGGLE
       OF THE CHURCH AGAINST IT                    158




I.

THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY OF THE MIDDLE AGES, AND ITS HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT.


INTRODUCTORY.

It was the belief of Europe during the Middle Ages, that our globe was the
centre of the universe.

The earth, itself fixed and immovable, was encompassed by ten heavens
successively encircling one another, and all of these except the highest
in constant rotation about their centre.

This highest and immovable heaven, enveloping all the others and
constituting the boundary between created things and the void, infinite
space beyond, is the Empyrean, the heaven of fire, named also by the
Platonizing philosophers the world of archetypes. Here "in a light which
no one can enter," God in triune majesty is sitting on his throne, while
the tones of harmony from the nine revolving heavens beneath ascend to
him, like a hymn of glory from the universe to its Creator.

Next in order below the Empyrean is the heaven of crystal, or the sphere
of the _first movable_ (_primum mobile_). Beneath this revolves the heaven
of fixed stars, which, formed from the most subtile elements in the
universe, are devoid of weight. If now an angel were imagined to descend
from this heaven straight to earth,--the centre, where the coarsest
particles of creation are collected,--he would still sink through seven
vaulted spaces, which form the planetary world. In the first of these
remaining heavens is found the planet Saturn, in the second Jupiter, in
the third Mars; to the fourth and middle heaven belongs the Sun, queen of
the planets, while in the remaining three are the paths of Venus, Mercury,
and finally the moon, measuring time with its waning and increasing disk.
Beneath this heaven of the moon is the enveloping atmosphere of the earth,
and earth itself with its lands and seas.

There are four prime elements in the structure of the universe: fire, air,
water and earth. Every thing existing in the material world is a peculiar
compound of these elements, and possesses as such an energy of its own;
but matter in itself is devoid of quality and force. All power is
spiritual, and flows from a spiritual source,--from God, and is
communicated to the earth and the heavens above the earth and all things
in them, by spiritual agents, personal but bodiless. These beings fill the
universe. Even the prime elements derive their energy from them. They are
called intelligences or angels; and the _primum mobile_ as well as the
heaven of fixed stars is held in motion by them. The planets are guided in
their orbits by angels. "All the energies of plants, metals, stones and
all other objects, are derived from those intelligences whom God has
ordained to be the guardians and leaders of his works."[1] "God, as the
source and end of all power, lends the seal of ideas to his ministering
spirits, who, faithfully executing his divine will, stamp with a vital
energy all things committed to their care."[2]

No inevitable causation is admitted. Every thing is produced by the will
of God, and upheld by it. The laws of nature are nothing but the precepts
in accordance with which the angels execute their charge. They obey from
love and fear; but should they in a refractory spirit transgress the given
commandments, or cease their activity, which they have the power to do,
then the order of nature would be changed, and the great mechanism of the
universe fall asunder, unless God saw fit to interpose. "Sometimes God
suspends their agency, and is himself the immediate actor everywhere; or
he gives unusual commandments to his angels, and then their operations are
called miracles."[3]

A knowledge of the nature of things is consequently in the main a
knowledge of the angels. Their innumerable hosts form nine choirs or
orders, divided into three hierarchies, corresponding to the three worlds:
the empyreal, that of the revolving heavens, and the terrestrial. The
orders of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones which constitute the first
hierarchy, are nearest God. They surround his throne like a train of
attendants, rejoice in the light of his countenance, feel the abundant
inspiration of his wisdom, love and power, and chant eternal praises to
his glory. The order of the Thrones, which is the lowest in this empyreal
hierarchy, proclaims God's will to the middle hierarchy, to which is given
the rule of the movable heavens. It is the order of Dominion which thus
receives the commands of God; that of Power, which guides the stars and
planets in their orbits, and brings to pass all other celestial phenomena,
carries them into execution, while a third of Empire wards off every thing
which could interfere with their accomplishment. The third and lowest
hierarchy, embracing the orders of Principalities, Archangels and Angels,
holds supremacy over terrestrial things. Principalities, as the name
implies, are the guardian spirits of nations and kingdoms; Archangels
protect religion, and bear the prayers of saints on high to the throne of
God; Angels, finally, have the care of every mortal, and impart to beasts,
plants, stones and metals their peculiar nature. Together these
hierarchies and orders form a continuous chain of intermingling
activities, and thus the structure of the universe resembles a Jacob's
ladder, upon which

  "Celestial powers, mounting and descending,
  Their golden buckets ceaseless interchange."

All terrestrial things are images of the celestial; and all celestial have
their archetypes in the Empyrean. Things on earth are composed of the
coarsest of all matter; things in the surrounding heavens of a finer
substance, accessible to the influence of intelligences. Archetypes are
immaterial; and as such may be filled without resistance with spiritual
forces, and give of their plenitude to their corresponding effigies in
the worlds of stars and planets. These again through their rays send forth
of the abundance of their power to those objects on earth by which they
are represented. Every thing on earth is consequently not only under the
guidance of its own angel, but also under the influence of stars, planets,
and archetypes. The universe is a vast lyre whose strings, struck no
matter where, are sure to vibrate throughout their length.

It was for man that God called forth the four elements from nothing by his
fiat, and it was for man that he fashioned this wonderful earth from those
elements in six days. Man is the crown of creation, its master-piece, and
within the narrow limits of his nature an epitome of all things
existing,--a microcosm, and the image of the supreme God himself.

But since man, as a microcosm, must partake also of the coarsest matter,
his dwelling-place could not be within the Empyrean, but must be fixed on
earth. In order that it might be worthy to receive him, it was adorned
with all the beauty of a paradise, and angels gazed from heaven with
delight upon its vales and mountains, its lakes and groves, which in
changing lights and shadows shone now with the purple of morning, now with
the gold of the sun, and again with the silver of the moon. And this place
of habitation explains symbolically by its very position the destiny of
man and his place in the kingdom of God; for wherever he wanders, the
zenith still lingers over his head, and all the revolving heavens have his
habitation for their centre. The dance of the stars is but a fête in honor
of him, the sun and moon exist but to shine upon his pathway and fill his
heart with gladness.

The first human beings lived in this their paradise in a state of highest
happiness. Their will was undepraved; their understanding filled with the
immediate light of intuition. Often when the angel of the sun sank with
his gleaming orb towards the horizon and "day was growing cool," God
himself descended from his Empyrean to wander under the lovely trees of
paradise, in the company of his favored ones.

The world was an unbroken harmony. There was, to be sure, a contrast
between spirit and matter, but as yet none between good and evil. It was
not long to remain thus.

Lucifer, that is the Light-bringer, or Morning Star, was the highest of
all angels, the prince of seraphim, the favorite of the Creator, and in
purity, majesty and power inferior only to the Holy Trinity. Pride and
envy took possession, it is not known how, of this mighty spirit. He
conceived the plan of overthrowing the power of God, and seating himself
upon the throne of Omnipotence. Angels of all orders were won over to his
treason. At the first beck of the reckless spirit numberless intelligences
from the lower heavens and from earth assailed the Empyrean and joined
themselves to the rebellious seraphim, cherubim and thrones who had
flocked to the standard of revolt. In heaven raged a mighty contest, the
vicissitudes of which are covered by the veil of mystery. St. John,
however, in his Book of Revelation, lifts a single fold of it, and shows
us Michael at the head of the legions of God battling against Lucifer. The
contest ended with the overthrow of the rebel and his followers. The
beautiful Morning Star fell from heaven.[4] Christ beheld the once
faithful seraph hurled from its ramparts like a thunder-bolt from the
clouds.[5]

The conquered was not annihilated. Calm in the consciousness of
omnipotence, God inscrutably determined that Lucifer, changed by his
rebellion into a spirit wholly evil, should enjoy liberty of action within
certain limits. The activity of the fallen spirit consists in desperate
and incessant warfare against God; and he gains in the beginning a victory
of immeasurable consequence. He tempts man, and brings him under his
dominion. Humanity, as well as the beautiful earth which is its abode, is
under the curse of God.

The world is no longer an unbroken harmony, a moral unity. It is divided
forever into two antagonistic kingdoms, those of Good and Evil. That God
so wills, and permits the inevitable consequences, is confirmed by an
immediate change in the structure of the universe. Death is sent forth
commissioned to destroy all life. Hell opens its jaws in the once peaceful
realms of earth's bosom, and is filled with a fire which burns every
thing, but consumes nothing.

The battle-field is the whole creation except the spaces of the Empyrean;
for into its pure domain nothing corrupt can enter. Lucifer still adheres
to his claims upon its throne, and in every thing seeks to imitate God.
The fallen seraphim, cherubim and thrones constitute his princely retinue
and his council of war. The rebel intelligences of the middle hierarchy,
now transformed into demons, still love to rove among the same stars and
planets which were once confided to their care, and war against the good
angels who now guide the movements of the heavens. Other demons float upon
the atmosphere, causing storm and thunder, hail and snow, drouth and awful
omens (whence it is said the devil is a prince who controls the weather).
Others again fill the earth; its seas, lakes, fountains and rivers; its
woods, groves, meadows and mountains. They pervade the elements; they are
everywhere.

Man, the chief occasion of the strife, is in a sad condition. The bodily
pains and sufferings which the earth since its curse heaps upon the path
that successive generations, all partakers of Adam's sin, must tread, are
as nothing compared with the perils which on all sides assail and threaten
their immortal souls. And how can these dangers be averted? Each mortal is
indeed followed from his birth by a guardian angel; but how can his
promptings be distinguished from those that issue from the thousand hidden
agents of the Evil. Lucifer can transform himself into an angel of light,
his demons can entice with a voice which counterfeits that of God and
conscience. Man's will has no power to resist these temptations; it is
depraved by the fall. Reason gives no guidance; darkened on account of
man's apostasy, it degenerates, if left to itself, into a Satanic
instrument of heresy and error. Feeling is in subjection to matter, which,
already from the beginning opposed to spirit, shares the curse. Is it then
to be wondered at that the career of man, beginning with conception in a
sinful womb, has for its end, behind the portals of death, the eternal
torments of a hell? All these myriads of souls created by God and clothed
in garments of clay,--all these microcosms, each of which is a
master-piece, the glory of creation, a being of infinite value, form, link
by link, a chain extending from that nothingness out of which God has
created them, to that abyss in which, after a brief life on earth, they
must be tormented through countless ages, despairing and cursing their
Creator.

Lucifer triumphs. His kingdom increases; but the poor mortal has no right
to complain. The vessel must not blame the potter. When man looks into his
own heart he discovers a sinfulness and depravity as infinite as are his
punishments. However severe the law of the universe appears, it still
bears the impress of divine justice.

It is, therefore, but an act of pure grace, when God determines the
salvation of mankind. The Church, prepared for by the election of the
Jewish people, and founded by Jesus Christ the Son of God, who offered
himself for crucifixion to atone for the sins of men, has grown up and
disseminated its influences throughout regions where once demons, the gods
of the heathen, possessed temples, idols and altars. The Church is the
magic circle within which alone is salvation possible (_Extra ecclesiam
nullus salus_). Within her walls the Son of God offers himself daily as a
sacrifice for the transgressions of humanity; the Communion wine is by a
miracle changed into his blood, and the bread into his flesh, which,
eaten by the members of the Church, promote their growth in holiness and
their power of resistance to the Tempter. The Church is one body, animated
by the Holy Spirit of God; and thus one member compensated by surplus of
virtue for the deficiencies of another. Holy men, resigning all sensual
delights, and devoting their lives to the practice of penance and
severities, the contemplation of spiritual things, and doing good,
accumulate thereby a wealth of supererogatory works, which, deposited in
the treasury of the Church, enables her to compound for the sins of less
self-denying members. With liberal hand she grants remission of sins not
to the living merely, but also to the dead. Thus the race of men may
breathe more freely, and the multitude attach themselves again to the
transient joys and pleasures of a wretched life on earth; and when a
mortal plucks the flowers of pleasure which bloom in this vale of sorrows,
he need not fear so much its hidden poison, for the remedy is near at
hand. The knight in the castle yonder on the summit of the crag, or the
burgher beneath him in the valley, may without scruple take a wife, rear
children and live in conviviality according to his means; the happy
student may sing and realize his "_Gaudeamus igitur_"; the undaunted
soldier may seek a recompense for the hardships of his campaign by a merry
life in taverns and in women's company; even the followers of Mary
Magdalene, sinning in expectation of grace, may obtain at the feet of the
Church the same absolution which was given to their model at the feet of
Jesus, provided only that, grateful for the mercy of Christ, who has made
them members of his Church, they venerate it as their mother, partake of
its sacraments, and seek its aid. The continually increasing number of
cloisters, the homes of rigorous self-denial, uninterrupted penance, and
mysterious contemplation, is a guarantee of the inexhaustibleness of those
works of supererogation which the Church possesses. In these cloisters
young maidens, who have consecrated themselves to Christ after a
spiritual embrace for which the most intense impulses of their nature
have been suppressed, yearn away their lives. Here in prayer and toil the
pious recluse spends his days and nights. Those men also who, going forth
barefooted, covered with coarse mantles, and wearing ropes about their
waists, devote themselves like the apostles to poverty and the preaching
of the gospel, who receive charity at the door of the layman, giving him
in exchange the food of the word of God,--these all issue from the same
cloisters.

Thus is the Church a mole against the tide of Sin. The Christian has some
reason to exclaim: "O hell, where is thy victory?" for although the place
of torment is continually filled with lost spirits, there are thousands
upon thousands of ransomed souls that wing their flight to the
Empyrean,--whether immediately or by the way of Purgatory. First among the
beatified who mingling with angels surround the throne of God, are those
called saints. Their intercession is more efficacious even than that of
seraphim, and their power in the contest against the demons surpasses
that of cherubim. Therefore kingdoms, communities, orders, corporations
and guilds, yea, even lawless and disreputable professions (so needing
grace and intercession more than others) have their patron saints. The
individual finally is protected by the saint in whose name he has been
baptized.

The Church is the kingdom of God on earth; her ecclesiastical hierarchy is
an image of the heavenly; her highest ruler, the Pope, is God's vicar. Her
destiny, which is extension over the whole earth so as to include all
lands and nations within her magic circle, could not be realized unless
she possessed the power to command the kings and armies of Christendom. It
is evident, moreover, that spiritual power is above secular: the former
protects the soul, the latter the body only. They stand related to one
another as spirit is related to matter. Therefore it must be the Pope who
shall invest with the highest secular dignity,--that of the Roman Cæsars.
He is the feudal lord of the emperors, as the emperor is, or should be,
of the kings, dukes and free cities. Were it not thus,--if the various
rulers were independent of the guardians of religion,--then woe to the
great mass of their subjects! To be sure these multitudes are placed on
earth to be disciplined by humanity and obedience; they have indeed no
rights upon which they may insist, since they stand outside the pale of
freedom; but, on the other hand, the oppression exercised upon them would
have no limit unless the Church, who is the common mother of all, reminded
those in authority of their duty to love and cherish the lowly: indeed,
all social order would crumble into dust, did not a higher power than that
dependent upon the sword compel the stronger to fulfil those vows to
protect the weaker which he made in the presence of the Holy Trinity. For
the only existing rights are those of privilege and investiture, founded
absolutely upon sealed stipulations.

According to the doctrines of the Church, which are the only key to
salvation, man has received as a gift what he never could have attained
by science,--a knowledge of the highest truths. Possessed of this
knowledge he must no longer allow himself to be tempted by the devil to
engage in efforts to penetrate the mysteries of the universe with nothing
to aid him but his darkened intellect; for such attempts generally end in
error and apostasy. Still the allurement is strong because the highest
truths, when clothed in the garb of human conceptions, sometimes appear
self-contradictory and absurd. They must therefore be submitted, not to
the decisions of reason, but the arbitration of faith. Faith alone is able
to penetrate and apprehend them. The doctrines which the Church, assisted
by the Holy Spirit, promulgates, since they alone are true, offer to the
believing investigator a mine of infinite treasures. There is consequently
possible within the Church a system of philosophy, provided that its
processes, always postulating the infallibility of the dogmas, be confined
to devout analysis and humble contemplation of religious tenets. For such
a purpose the adherent of the scholastic philosophy may employ the
Aristotelian dialectics as he chooses, and wield the lever of syllogism at
his pleasure. Even within the pale of orthodoxy there may arise many an
_if_ and _but_, many a _pro_ and _contra_. The scholastic reasoner has to
prove but the most probable; the infallible Pope and his synods sanction
the true deductions and refute the errors which, when recanted, are
forgiven. It is best for the inquirer to found his researches on the
propositions laid down by the early fathers of the Church; for thus
succeeding generations will build on foundations laid for them by their
predecessors long before. Inasmuch as they all follow the same dialectic
method of analysis and synthesis, so that the whole subject is pervaded
and its masses grouped into architectural order by these processes, there
is reared on the basis of the dogma a philosophical superstructure,
resembling those cupolas with which the skilful masters of masonry amaze
our eyes.

The world grows worse. The Church can pardon sin, but can not hinder its
increase. Every generation inherits from the preceding a burden of evil
dispositions, habits and examples, which it lays in its turn still heavier
on the shoulders of posterity. Every son has better reason for sighing
than his father. "Happy those who died ere beholding the light of day! who
tasted death ere the experience of life!"[6] The hosts of Satan assail the
Church on every side. From his tower the watchman of Zion looks out over
the world, and beholds the billows of history, now lashed fiercely by the
demons, roll against the rock upon which Christ has built his temple. With
great difficulty the cross-adorned hosts of Europe repel the invasion of
the Saracens, whose coming has been prefigured by pestilences and
portents. The emblem of the Church is an ark tossed about on a stormy sea
amid a tempest of rain and lightning. History is a spiritual comedy,
enacted on a stage of which the broad foreground, like that of the
mysteries, is a _theatrum diabolorum_; while in the narrow background the
Church of God, like a beleaguered citadel, points its pinnacles above the
turmoil towards the gloomy sky, from which its defenders expect Jesus and
his angels to come to their relief.

But before this relief arrives, iniquity shall have reached its height. It
is at work already within the sacred precincts of the Church itself. It is
with greater difficulty that God's vicar subdues the inner than the outer
enemies. On the one hand many a man believes that he has found in his own
reason and conscience leading truths, which he arrays, without any
authority outside of himself, against those commandments which have come
from above, and the divine origin of which is confirmed by the faith of a
hundred generations. He places himself in an attitude of opposition to the
common faith. Thus originate the heresies,--those cancers on the body of
the congregation which must be cured by the iron, when salves will not
restore, and by fire when the iron is ineffective. On the other hand men
are so overpowered by their passions that they abandon the God who rebukes
them, and become the bondsmen of another god who shows them favor. Pride,
fettered by obscure descent, and keen appetite for pleasure chained from
gratification by penury and privation, shake their shackles in despair,
and finally call the Morning Star of old to their assistance. The
archfiend promises pleasures without stint, and power without limitation.
The poor mortal for dread of the pains which afflict his body is urged on
to his destruction. His body formed from the dust of the accursed earth,
and always a centre of sensual desires, is abandoned by God a prey to the
assaults of the devil. "Here somebody loses an eye, somebody there a hand;
one falls into the fire and is burned to death, one into the water and is
drowned; another climbs a ladder and breaks his neck, another again
stumbles on the even ground and breaks a leg. All such unforeseen
accidents, occurring daily, are but the devil's thumps and strokes which
he inflicts upon us from sheerest malice."[7] Still more: the demon is
able to take possession so thoroughly of the human body that he becomes,
as it were, its second soul, moves its limbs, utters blasphemies with its
tongue at which even their fiendish author can not but tremble. But though
the God-fearing man, like pious Job, is benefited by such afflictions, and
although prayer is a powerful refuge, still there is a continually growing
number of those who, driven by cowardly dread of the might of the Prince
of Evil, seek their safety in a league with him; so much the more as he
lends them a partial control of the elements, and thus a means of
employment and of doing harm to others. Thus the dire pestilence of
sorcery multiplies its victims; and in the black hours of midnight
hundreds of thousands who bear the name of Christian, on mountains and
in deserts perform clandestine rites in honor of their Satanic master.
Time ripens for the advent of Antichrist, for the Day of Judgment and the
final conflagration.

In the flames of this last day the revolving heavens and the earth are
destroyed. Motion, activity, strife, history,--all are at an end. The
Empyrean and Hell alone remain, as the antipodal extremes of the former
universe. This conflagration is not a universal purifier, annihilating
what has no existence in itself.[8] It only separates forever the gold
from the dross. The kingdom of the devil continues to exist, and its prey
is its own for evermore. But it exists thus only because an eternal
existence means an eternal punishment for its ruler as well as for his
subjects. From the new heavens and the new earth which the fiat of God has
created to be the dwelling-place of those who have escaped destruction,
these ransomed spirits perceive the gnashing of teeth and lamentation of
their doomed brethren, and look down upon their tortures and misery, not
with compassion but with joy, because they recognize in their punishment
the vindication of divine justice; not with pain but delight, because the
sight of their wretchedness doubles their own felicity. From the depths of
that gulf of misery ascend without ceasing, to the Empyrean, cries of
despair, blasphemies of defiance, and curses of rage, yet do they not
disturb the hymns which saints and angels sing ever around the throne of
God and of the Lamb; they only intensify the solemnity of the worship.[9]

       *       *       *       *       *

Such in its chief features was the cosmic philosophy of the Middle Ages;
not abstractly considered, but such as existed in reality during many
centuries among Christian people, guiding their thoughts, imagination and
feelings, and governing their actions. Remains of it are still apparent in
the systems of existing sects, though incompatible with the new philosophy
which the human mind has been laboring to unfold. Ever since the
intellect of Christendom began to free itself in the sixteenth century
from faith by authority, the influence of the old views upon the various
forms which life takes on, has been gradually declining.

Many of those characteristics which so strangely contrast the state of
society in the Middle Ages with the preceding Hellenic and the subsequent
modern European civilizations, have their origin in different theories of
the universe. It is not mere chance that we encounter, on the one hand, in
the history of Greece, so many harmonious forms with repose and tranquil
joy depicted in every lineament of their countenance, and on the other, in
that of the Middle Ages, so many beings buried in deepest gloom or exalted
in frenzied rapture, dripping with blood from self-inflicted wounds, or
glowing with the fever of mystic emotion--not a mere chance that the
former age loves those serene forms and immortalizes them in its heroic
galleries, while the latter worships its eccentric figures and describes
them in its legends as saintly models. It is not a mere accident that the
art of Greece mirrors a beautiful humanity, while that of the Middle Ages
loves to dwell upon monstrosities and throws itself between the extremes
of awful earnestness and wild burlesque; not an accident only that the
science of the Greek is rational--that he discovers the categories in
Logic, and rears a most perfect structure of rigid demonstration in his
Geometry, while the science of the Middle Ages on the contrary is
_magic_,--is a doctrine of correspondencies, Astrology, Alchemy, and
Sorcery.

To the Greek the universe was a harmonious unity. The law of reason,
veiled under the name of fate, ruled the gods themselves. The variegated
events of the myth lay far away in the distance; they did not even warp
the imagination of the poet, when he occupied himself with them; still
less the faith of the multitude, and least of all the investigations of
the thinker. The uninterrupted sequence of events invited to
contemplation, which could be indulged in the more readily, as no one
pretended to have received as a gift a complete system of revealed truth,
and the more freely, as no authority forced the individual to choose
between such a system and perdition. In general no doubt was entertained
concerning the ability of Reason to penetrate to the inner essence of
things, since no knowledge of the fall of man, which annihilated this
ability, had reached the Greeks. In regard to knowledge the Greek
consequently built on evidence and inner authority. The same was the case
in regard to morality. They were convinced that those impulses which
promoted the happiness of domestic life, were good; and that those which
did not counteract it were at least justified; and thus they enjoyed with
moderation the gifts of nature, without suspicion that the bountiful giver
was accursed. The ideal of wisdom which they had framed, was based on
their inner experience, whether it had the joyous features of Epicurus,
the severer lineaments of Zeno, or the mild and resigned expression of
Epictetus; and when they exerted themselves to realize it in their lives,
they always proceeded upon the supposition that this would be possible by
a daily strengthening of the will. The exertion put forth by the Greeks to
attain to purity and virtue was, as it were, a system of gymnastics for
developing the muscles of the brain. The same power and self-confidence
were displayed in these endeavors as in the palaestra. Sighs and anguish
were strangers to this kind of reformatory effort. Yet was it not
altogether fruitless. The old adage that God helps those who help
themselves can be here applied. That it developed great, powerful, and
noble natures was so undeniable that even one of the Christian fathers,
upon considering their achievements, began to doubt if his way of
attaining perfection was really the only one, until he succeeded in
convincing himself that "The virtues of the Gentiles are shining vices."
The harmonious personality of the Greek and the rationality of Grecian
science depended on the unity, the harmony of their cosmic views--upon
this, that they conceived of the whole as a unity in its diversity, not as
an irreconcilable disunion of two absolutely antagonistic principles.

If, on the contrary, the highest ruling power in nature is an arbitrary
divine caprice, if the world which lies open before mankind is ruled by
another's purely fortuitous decrees, themselves interfered with
continually by hostile influences from an infernal kingdom; if, moreover,
this struggle rages not merely in the external world, but also in the very
core of human nature, vitiating her reason, feelings and will, so to
employ them without her agency as means to her exaltation or perdition,
then is there indeed no causality to be sought for, and consequently no
field anywhere for scientific investigation. Were there even any such
thing as science, it would lie far beyond the powers of man, since reason,
a mere plaything for demoniac powers, can not be trusted. Neither has his
personality any longer its centre of gravity within itself. Then is man in
excessive need of such an institution of deliverance as the Church, which
teaches him what the divine authority has arbitrarily decided to be good
or evil; while the supernatural means of grace, the sacraments, afford him
power of resisting evil, and absolve him from his failings. In this way
external authority supplants the inner, which is torn up by the roots.
That ideal of human perfection which is possible under such conditions,
and which actually arises because the native activity of the mind
constantly endeavors to bring all accepted notions into union, places
itself on the doctrine of authority as its foundation, and accepts its
supernatural character. That the ideal of the Middle Ages is ascetic and
its science magical, is directly consequent upon its dualistic conception
of the universe and of its peculiar nature.

The dualism of the Middle Ages was derived from Persia. It is the
essential idea of the Zoroastrian doctrine, which finally, after a long
struggle against the unitarian notions of the Greeks, penetrates the
Occident and completely conquers it. This victorious combat of the Orient
against Europe is the sum of history between Cyrus and Constantine. The
external events which fill those centuries obtain their true significance
when within and behind them one perceives the struggle between the two
conflicting systems of ideas. Like concealed chess-players they move their
unconscious champions against each other on the board of history.

When Cyrus sends home the Jewish prisoners from the rivers of Babylon to
the mountains of Jerusalem, he gains for dualism that important
flank-position on the Mediterranean the significance of which is shown
centuries after in the progress of the battle. The "Adversary" (Satan) who
sometimes appears in the most recent portions of the Old Testament,
written under Persian influence, and plays a continually widening role in
the Rabbinical literature, is the Judaized Ahriman; the demoniacs who in
the time of Christ abounded in Palestine testify that the demon-belief of
Persian dualism had penetrated into the imagination and feeling of the
Jews, and there borne fruit. By the side of this peaceful conquest the
great war-drama between Greece and Persia is enacted. Although this is not
recognizedly a religious war, it is nevertheless Ormuzd and Ahriman who
are repelled at Marathon, Salamis and Platæa, it is the Grecian
unitarianism which is saved in these battles to develop itself, for a
season undisturbed, into a radiant and beautiful culture. As has been
shown already, magic, and belief upon authority, are the necessary
consequences of a dualistic religion; the restriction and annihilation of
free personality are equally necessary consequences of belief by
authority. Can any one regarding the conflict which raged on the field of
Marathon, fail to recognize the clash of two spiritual opposites, two
different systems of ideas, when he sees the bands of Greeks, drawn from
their agorai (places for political discussion) and gymnasiums, advance
cheerfully and garlanded, but without depreciating the danger, to meet the
innumerable hosts of the Orient driven on by the scourge of their
leaders? On the one side, a fully developed free personality, which has
its origin in a harmonious conception of nature, on the other, blind
submission to external force. On the one side, liberty, on the other,
despotism. One may add by the help of a logical conclusion, though this
may seem more removed,--on the one side rationality, on the other magic.

Strengthened thus by victory Europe goes to seek the enemy in his own
country. Alexander conquers Asia. But the new Achilles is fettered in the
chains of his own slave. For while Greek culture is spreading over the
surface of the conquered countries, the Oriental spirit advances beneath
it in a contrary direction. The waves of the two ideal currents are partly
mingled. In the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamus the literatures of
the Orient and of the Occident flow together; in their halls meet the
sages of the East and West; in their doctrinal systems Zoroaster and
Plato, fancy and speculation, magic and rationalism are blended in the
most extraordinary way. The victory of Alexander was that of the warrior,
and not that of sober Aristotle's pupil. The Judaico-Alexandrian
philosophy blooms, and gnosticism,--that monstrous bastard of specifically
different cosmical systems, is already begotten, when Christianity springs
up in Palestine, and unites itself with the Jewish dualism derived from
Zoroaster, and thus proceeds to conquer the world by the weapons of
belief.

In the mean time Rome has extended and established its empire. The
nationalities included in it have been mingled together; their various
gods have been carried into the same Pantheon; and their ideas have been
brought face to face. The universal empire, to maintain its existence, has
been forced to centralize itself into a despotism of the Oriental type,
the free forms of state have perished, philosophical skepticism and
eudemonism have abolished among the cultured classes the inherited notions
of religion. All this, with its accompaniments of moral depravity and
material necessity, have prepared the soil of the Occident for receiving
the seed of the new religion. Emptiness and misery make the difference
between ideality and reality, between good and evil, all the more
perceptible even to unitarian nations. Dualism thus prepared for in the
realms of thought and feeling, spreads in Christian form with irresistible
force over the Roman provinces. Innumerable masses of the poor and
oppressed devote themselves to the "philosophy of the Barbarians and the
Orient" (as a Greek thinker called Christianity) because they recognize in
it their own experience of life, and have full assurance in their hope of
relief.

The Hellenico-Roman paganism offers a fruitless resistance. The
persecutions on the part of the state only hasten the spread of
Christianity. What the state can not do, perhaps the Hellenic culture and
philosophy may do. These, once mutually hostile, are reconciled in the
face of common danger. The dying lamp of antiquity flares and brightens
when pure hearts and profound minds, otherwise despising the myths as
superstition, now grasp them as symbols of higher truths. Philosophy goes
forth, in the form of Neoplatonism.

But Neoplatonism has itself apostatized from the rational and unitarian.
Plotinus and Ammonius Saccas try in vain to restore it. It only
unwittingly helps its adversary, especially when, to gain the masses, it
consents to compete with him in miracles. Jamblichus and others practice
secret arts in order to outrival the Christian magi, and they glorify
Pythagoras and Appollonius of Tyana as fit to rank with Jesus of Nazareth
in miraculous gifts. By this they only contribute to the spread of magic
and the principles of dualism. The current of Oriental notions proceeds
all the more rapidly on its course of triumph.

Christian dualism already feels itself strong enough to battle not only
against its declared enemies, but also those Occidental elements of
culture which in its beginnings it had received into its bosom and which
had procured its entrance among the more intelligent classes. It feels
instinctively that even the school of thought which has sprung up within
the Church is far too unitarian and rationalistic to be tolerated in the
long run. Such men as Clemens of Alexandria and Origen, who are struck by
what is external and imperishable in Christianity, and know how to
separate this from its dualistic form, fight a tragical battle for the
union of belief and thought. Admitting that Christ is all in all, the
immediate power and wisdom of God, they nevertheless wish to save the
Hellenic philosophy from the destruction which a fanaticism, revelling in
the certainty and all-sufficiency of revelation, directs against every
expression of an occidental culture, whether in national life, or art, or
science. They point out that philosophy, if it can do nothing else that is
good, can furnish rational weapons against those who assail faith, and
that it can and ought to be the "real wall of defence about the vineyard."
Their argument is without effect. Philosophy is of the devil: yea,
everything true and good in life and doctrine which heathendom has
possessed, is declared by one of the fathers to be the imposture of Satan
(_ingenia diaboli quædam de divinis affectandis_); and faith is so far
independent of thought that it is better to say "I believe _because_ it is
improbable, absurd, impossible."[10] In vain the dying Clemens exclaims:
"Even if philosophy were of the devil, Satan could deceive men only in the
garb of an angel of light: he must allure men by the appearance of truth,
by the intermixture of truth and falsehood; we ought therefore to seek and
recognize the truth from whatever source it come.... And even this gift to
the pagans can have been theirs only by the will of God, and must
consequently be included in the divine plan of educating humanity.... If
sin and disorder are attributable to the devil, how absurd to make him the
author and giver of so good a thing as philosophy!... God gave the Law to
the Jews, and philosophy to the Gentiles, only to prepare for the coming
of Christ." Such are the words that ring out the last dying echo of
Hellenic culture and humanity! It is not a mere accident that with
philosophy Clemens and Origen also sought to save the unitarian principles
in so far as to reject the doctrine of eternal punishment in hell, and
maintain that the devil will finally become good, and God be all in all.
But such a view could not command attention at a time when Christianity,
only because it was not sharply and consistently dualistic, felt itself
endangered by that wholly consistent and thorough-going dualism which
under the name of Manicheism once more advanced against Europe from the
Persian border. Although Manicheism seemed to incur defeat, nevertheless
one of its former adherents, Augustine, infused its spirit into the
Church. During the century which followed him the Germanic migration
destroyed, along with the last schools, the last vestiges of Græco-Romaic
culture. The Barbarians were persuaded to receive baptism, often by means
of pomp and deceit; their divinities, as formerly the denizens of Olympus,
were degraded to evil demons. Every thing antecedent to their union with
the Church or disconnected with it,--the old experiences and traditions of
these converted nations,--all was condemned and referred to the world of
evil. The dominion of Oriental dualism in Europe was absolutely
established, and the long night of the Dark Ages had set in. Six centuries
separate Proclus, the last Neoplatonican of any note, and Augustine the
last of the Fathers educated in philosophy, from Anselm the founder of
scholasticism! Between them lies an expanse in which Gregory the Great and
Scotus Erigena are almost the only stars, and these by no means of the
first magnitude. "There are deserts in time, as well as space," says
Bacon.

When again a feeble attempt at scientific activity was possible, the
monkish scholar was happy enough to possess a few maculated leaves of
Aristotle, obtained, but not directly, from the Arabs. Upon these leaves
he read with amazement and admiration the method for a logical
investigation. It was, for the rest, Hermes Trismegistus, Dionysius
Areopagita (the translation of Scotus Erigena), and other such mystical
works from unknown hands, with here and there touches of Neoplatonism
which had been inserted by the dreamy scholiast when in need of material
for rounding out the cosmology, the principles of which he had found in
the dogmas of the Church.

As a matter of course the Dark Ages could not perceive, still less admit,
the intimate relation existing between its cosmic views and those of
Zoroaster; but still a dim suspicion of it can be detected. The learned
men of the Middle Ages ascribed to Zoroaster the founding of the magical
sciences. Sprenger (author of Malleus Malificarum, of which fatal work
hereafter), Remigius, Jean Bodin, Delrio, and several other jurists and
theologians, who have acquired a sad notoriety as judges of witch-trials,
in their writings ascribe the origin of witchcraft to Zoroaster.

The dualistic notion was not modified after entering Christianity, but
intensified. The religion of Zoroaster, which presupposes a good first
principle,[11] allows the evil which has in time arisen, in the course of
time to disappear; and it ends with the doctrine which shines out faintly
even in the New Testament, of the final "restoration of all things"
([Greek: apokatastasis pantôn]), and in consequence reduces evil to
something merely phenomenal. In the doctrines of the Church, however, as
they were established through the influence of Augustine, the Manicheian,
evil, though arisen in time, is made eternal. This difference is of great
practical significance and explains why dualism did not bear the same
terrible fruits in its home in the Orient as in the Occident. The awful
separation and contrast with which the divina comedia of the Middle Ages
ends,--the wails and curses that arise from hell to intensify the bliss
of the redeemed,--form a conception so revolting that it could not be
incorporated with thought and feeling without rendering them savage.
Compassion, benevolence, love,--those qualities through which man feels a
kinship with the divine, lose their significance and are despoiled of
their eternal seal, when they are found no longer in his Maker except as
limited or rather suspended by the action of another quality which the
pious man will force himself to call justice, but which an irrepressible
voice from the innermost recesses of his soul calls cruelty. To this must
be added a further important consideration. The servant of Ormuzd is no
more the property of the devil than the earth he treads upon. To be sure
he is surrounded on every side by the treachery of Ahriman and all the
demons, but this only because he is called and already endowed with power
to be the champion of the Good upon the earth. It is as such that he is
placed in the tumult of the battle. The power for good once imparted to
him, and constantly renewed through prayer, is withal also his own; he
may use it without losing himself in the perplexing question where liberty
ceases and grace begins. Every one adhering to the doctrine of light
stands on his own feet. This is true of every servant of Ormuzd; Zoroaster
has made in this respect no distinction between priest and layman. Even
belief upon authority, in itself an encroachment upon free personality,
preserves for it in this form of religion a free and inviolable arena.

In the Church of the Middle Ages the case is different, and it cannot be
presented better than in the following words of the Neo-Lutheran Vilmar,
when he would preserve absolutely to the clergy "the power to keep the
congregation together by the word, the sacraments and ecclesiastical
authority, the power to cleave the head of sin with a single word, the
power to descend into a soul in which the enemy has spread the gloom of
insanity and force the defiant knees of the maniac to bend and his
frenzied fists to fold in prayer, yea, the power [here we have the
climax, which is rather tame after the foregoing] to descend into a soul
in which the ancient enemy has established his abode, and there fight the
insolent giant from the realms of darkness face to face and eye to eye.
All this"--continues Vilmar, himself not unlike a frantic conjurer wishing
to summon the ghost of the Dark Ages from its grave--"all this is not in
the power of the congregation nor of the ministry, who are not endowed
with the requisite authority, commission, mandate and power. The
congregation (_i. e._, the laymen) is not able to look into the furious
eyes of the devil; for what is prophesied of the last days, that even the
elect, were it possible, should be seduced, applies with greater force to
the especial apparition of Satan in this world: before it the congregation
is scattered like flakes of snow, not seduced but terrified to death. Only
we (the clergy) are unterrified and fearless; for he who has rejected the
prince of this world has placed us before the awful serpent-eye of the
arch-fiend, before his blasphemous and scornful mouth, before his
infernally distorted face."[12] These words from the pen of a fanatical
dualist of our own time well represent, as indicated above, the commonly
received views of the Middle Ages; and it is not therefore to be wondered
at that the mediæval generations, surrendering personality, threw
themselves precipitately, in order to be saved, into the arms of the
magical institution of deliverance. The phenomena which are delineated in
the following pages will not seem so arbitrary and strange after this
introductory glance at the middle-age philosophy, as they might otherwise
at first sight. Even they are a product of an inner necessity. Were it
possible--and deplorable attempts are not wanting--to revive in the
thoughts, feelings and imagination of humanity the dogmas of mediæval
times, we should then witness a partial re-enactment of their terrible
scenes. To depict them has not only a purely historic interest, but a
cautionary and practical as well.




II.

THE MAGIC OF THE CHURCH.


Magic is the harbinger of Science. In the history of human development,
the dim perception precedes the clear, and the dominion of imagination
that of reason. Before the latter could take upon itself the laborious
task of connecting together by its own laws the facts of external and
internal experience,--before there was any philosophy or natural science,
imagination was bestirring itself in the creation of magic.

Like science, magic in its original form is based upon the principle that
all things existing are concatenated. Science searches for the links of
union both deductively and inductively; magic, seeking its support in the
external resemblances between existing things,[13] and in a vague
assurance of the power of the will and of words, establishes this
connection freely by means of arbitrary associations between incongruous
objects. Man engaged in a struggle for physical existence, aims in it less
at theoretical _knowing_ than at practical _being able_. The knowledge of
mysteries will furnish means of becoming acceptable to his God,
inaccessible to injurious influences, and master of his present and future
existence and destiny.

The magical usages which exist among every people, present an almost
infinite variety of forms. In the end, however, they can all be reduced to
a single type.

Daily experience has taught that there exists between every cause and its
effect a certain proportionate amount of force. Now since the effect aimed
at in resorting to magic is of an extraordinary nature, the means which
the magical art prescribes must possess extraordinary efficacy, such as
reason can predict for it neither _a priori_ nor by inductive reasoning.
Furthermore, experience teaches us that will, as a mere inert desire, not
yet expressed in action, does not attain its goal. Magical power therefore
can not be sought for in the mere will as such, but action, that working
of the senses which the will employs as a means, in which it reveals
itself, must be added, whether the force of this sense-means, as the
original magic supposes, depends on its mystical but necessary connection
with its corresponding object in a higher sphere (for example, the
connection between the metals and the planets), or as in the Church-magic,
on an arbitrary decision of God, ordaining that a given means, employed as
prescribed by him, shall produce an effect inconceivable by reason. In all
employment of magic enter consequently, first, the subjective spiritual
factor,--the will (in the language of the Church, faith); secondly, the
sensuous means,--the fetich, the amulet, the holy water, the host, the
formula of exorcism, the ceremony, etc.; and thirdly, the
incomprehensible ("supernatural") power which this means, appropriated by
the will (or faith), possesses in the magical act.

A belief in magic is found among all nations. With those of unitarian
views it was destined to be forced more and more into the background by
the growth of speculation and natural science. With them there was also
but one form of magic, although those in possession of its secret were
considered able to exercise it for a useful or an injurious purpose alike.
Only among nations holding dualistic views do we meet with magic in two
forms: with the priests a _white_ and a _black_,--the former as the good
gift of Ormuzd, the latter as the evil gift of Ahriman; with the
Christians of the Middle Ages a _celestial_ magic and a _diabolical_,--the
former a privilege of the Church and conferred by God as a weapon to aid
in the conquest of Satan; the latter an infernal art to further unbelief
and wickedness. Under a unitarian theory magic is only a preparation for
natural philosophy and gradually gives place to it, until it is confined
to the lowest classes as a relic of a past stage of development. The
dualistic religious systems, on the contrary, blend in an intimate union
with magic, give to it the same universally and eternally valid power
which they ascribe to themselves, and place it on their own throne in the
form of a divine and sacramental secret. Only thus can faith in magic
stamp whole ages and periods of culture with its peculiar seal; only
thus--after its separation into celestial and diabolical, and in that
causal relation to the temporal or eternal weal or woe of man in which it
is placed--does it become possessed of an absolute sovereignty over the
imagination and emotions of a people.

Our consideration of the middle-age magic may commence with a description
of the celestial or privileged magic, that is to say, _that of the
Church_; in order that we may proceed in natural order to the ill-reputed
magic of the _learned_ (astrology, alchemy, sorcery), and the persecuted
_popular_ magic (in which the Church saw the really diabolical form); and
end with an account of the terrible catastrophe which was caused by the
contest which raged between them.

It is not the fault of the writer if the reader finds in the magic of the
Church a caricature of what is holy, in which the comical element is
overbalanced by the repulsive. The more objective the representation is to
be made, the more unpleasant its features become. We will, then, be brief.

       *       *       *       *       *

Like a thoughtful mother the Church cherishes and cares for man, and
surrounds him from the cradle to the grave with its safeguards of magic.
Shortly after the birth of a child the priest must be ready to sprinkle it
with holy water, which by prayer and conjuration has been purified from
the pollution of the demons inhabiting even this element. For the feeble
being begotten in sin and by nature Lucifer's property, without the grace
of baptism, would be eternally lost to heaven, and eternally doomed to the
torments of hell.[14]

Therefore more than one conscientious servant of the Church essayed to
devise some means by which the saving water might be brought in contact
with the child before it saw the light. Still this precautionary measure
never became officially adopted. The efficacy of the baptismal water
exceeds that of the pool Bethesda, which removed only bodily infirmities.
Baptism saves millions of souls from hell. Foreseeing this the devil,
filled with evil devices, had determined, already before the rise of
Christianity, to debase and scorn this sacrament by making, in
anticipation, a copy of it in the Mithras mysteries instituted by him,
which insolently imitate in other respects the mysteries of the Church.

In baptism other means, consecrated by the priest, co-operate with the
water: viz., the oil, the spittle (which the priest after baptism lets
fall upon the child, and the efficacy of which is derived from Mark vii.
33), the salt, the milk and the honey.[15] Besides, there are the sign of
the cross and the conjuration, which drive the tempter out of the child
and prepare room for the Holy Ghost. With these magic ceremonies the child
is received into the Church and from thenceforth becomes a sharer in the
protection which it gives against the evil.

Baptismal, or holy water, when drunk by the sick and infirm, heals and
strengthens; if sprinkled upon the fields promotes fertility, or given to
the domestic animals, affords them protection against witchcraft.

As baptism is the first saving and sanctifying sacrament offered to man,
so the unction with holy oil which is administered to the dying, is the
last. Between them the eucharist is a perennial source of power and
sanctification,--the eucharist in which "Bread and wine, placed upon the
altar, after performed consecration, are God's true flesh and blood, which
flesh perceptibly to the senses (_sensualiter_) is touched by the hands of
the priest and masticated by the teeth of the believer."[16] When the
priest has pronounced the formula of transformation, he elevates the
host,[17] now no longer bread but the body of Christ, the congregation
kneels and the ringing of bells proclaims to the neighborhood that the
greatest of all the works of magic is accomplished. Eaten by the faithful,
the flesh of Christ enters into their own flesh and blood and wonderfully
strengthens both soul and body.[18] Heretics in Arras who believed that
righteousness was necessary to salvation and doubted the doctrine of
transubstantiation, were converted as soon as Bishop Gerhard told them
that, in the time of Gregory the Great, the consecrated bread had taken,
before a doubting woman, the shape of Christ's bleeding finger. A pious
hermit who began to be afflicted by the same doubt, regained his faith
when at the Communion he saw an angel apply the knife to an infant Jesus,
at the very moment the priest broke the bread. There is much in the
legends and chronicles about Jews who having secretly procured the host,
and, to be revenged upon Christ, proceeding to pierce it with a knife, saw
the blood stream forth in abundance; sometimes, indeed, a beautiful
bleeding boy suddenly revealing himself. Such stories being freely
circulated, led to severe persecutions (as in Namur, 1320).[19]

If the eucharist is a partaking of food which strengthens the faithful in
their struggle against sin, the sign of the cross is to be considered as
his sword, and the sacred amulet as his armor. The cross is the sign in
which the Christian shall conquer. ["_In hoc signo vinces._"] With it he
must commence every act; with it he repels every attack of the demons. "He
who wishes to be convinced concerning this," says St. Athanasius, "needs
only to make the sign of the cross, which has become so ridiculous to the
pagans, before the mocking delusions of the demons, the deceits of the
oracles and the magi; and immediately he shall see the devil flee, the
oracles confounded and all magic and sorcery revenged." The amulets
employed by the Church are various: medals bearing the image of Mary,
consecrated images, especially the so-called lambs of God[20] (agnus
Dei), the manufacture and sale of which a papal bull of 1471 reserves for
the head of the Roman Church. If these bring the clergy immense sums of
money, they also possess great power. They protect against dangers from
fire or water, against storm and hail, sickness and witchcraft.[21] Along
with the amulets the so-called conception-billets, which the Carmelite
monks sell for a small sum, are of manifold use. These billets are made of
consecrated paper, and heal, if swallowed, diseases natural and
supernatural; laid in a cradle guard the child against witchcraft; buried
in the corner of a field protect it against bad weather and destructive
insects. Conception-billets are put under the thresholds of houses and
barns, are attached to beer casks and butter dishes to avert sorcery. They
are fabricated by the monks according to an authenticated formulary
which, as characteristic and comparatively brief, deserves citation:--

="I conjure thee, paper (or parchment), thou which servest the needs of
humanity, servest as the depository of God's wonderful deeds and holy
laws, as also according to divine command the marriage contract between
Tobias and Sarah was written upon thee, the Scriptures saying: They took
paper and signed their marriage covenant. Through thee, O paper, hath also
the devil been conquered by the angel. I adjure thee by God, the Lord of
the universe (sign of the cross!), the Son (sign of the cross!), and the
Holy Ghost (sign of the cross!), who spreads out the heavens as a
parchment on which he describes as with divine characters his
magnificence. Bless (sign of the cross!), O God, sanctify (sign of the
cross!) this paper that so it may frustrate the work of the Devil!=

="He who upon his person carries this paper written with holy words, or
affixes it to a house, shall be freed from the visitations of Satan
through him who cometh to judge the quick and dead.=

="Let us pray.=

="Mighty and resistless God, the God of vengeance, God of our fathers, who
hast revealed through Moses and the prophets the books of thy ancient
covenant and many secrets of thy kindness, and didst cause the Gospel of
thy Son to be written by the evangelists and apostles, bless (sign of the
cross!) and sanctify (sign of the cross!) this paper that thy mercy may be
made known unto whatsoever soul shall bear with him this sacred thing and
these holy letters; and that all persecutions against him from the devil
and by the storms of Satanic witchcraft may be frustrated through Christ
our Lord. Amen.=

="(The paper to be sprinkled with holy water.)"=

With the amulets and these conception-billets belong also in the armory of
the Church, the wonder-working relics, and images of the saints. God has
ordained graciously that the Church shall not give up its battle against
the powers of sin for want of weapons. Its offensive and defensive
appliances are manifold. Its warriors, the priests, are like knights
encased in mail from head to foot, and armed with lance, sword, dagger and
morning star. Almost every district has its treasure of relics, which,
preserved in shrines and exhibited on solemn occasions to the pious
people, constitutes its palladium, impedes or prevents the attack of
hostile forces, and assuages or averts the ravages of plagues. Not only
corporeal relics of saints and martyrs, but also every thing they may have
touched during their lifetime, yea, even the very dew-drops upon their
graves, are a terror to the fiends and a means of spiritual and bodily
strength unto the faithful. The miraculous properties of the images are
recounted in a hundred legends. By the direct agency of divine power,
there exists uninterruptedly between them and the persons they represent a
mystical relation. Upon this St. Hieronymus throws some light when he
exclaims against Vigilantius, who had blindly opposed the worship of
images: "You dare prescribe laws to God! You presume to put the apostles
in chains so that they are kept even to the Day of Judgment in their
prison, and are denied the privilege of being with their Lord, although it
is written that they shall be with Him wherever they go! If the Lamb is
omnipresent, we must believe that those who are with the Lamb are
omnipresent also. If the devils and the demons rove through the world and
by their inconceivable rapidity of motion are present everywhere, should
then the martyrs, after shedding their blood, remain confined in their
coffins and never be able to leave them!"

As old age and death are consequences of Adam's fall, so are almost all
ailments produced by that power over man's corporeal nature conceded to
Satan, when God pronounced his curse upon the race. So also are the
remaining diseases and infirmities of man, called either rightly or
wrongly natural, cured with greatest certainty by invoking the help of
God. Therefore the mediator between God and men, the Church, through its
servants is the only sure and only legitimate physician. ["_Operatio
sanandi est in ecclesia per verba, ritus, exorcismos, aquam, salem,
herbas, idque nedum contra diabolos et effectus magicos, sed et morbos
omnes._"] The priest effects cures in behalf of the Church and in the name
of God by means of prayer, the laying on of hands, exorcism, relics and
consecrated natural means, especially water, salt and oil. In doing this
he acts as the visible delegate of an unseen higher physician, the saint
ordained of God to be the healer of the sickness. For every affliction has
its physician among the ranks of the saints. St. Valentine cures epilepsy,
St. Gervasius rheumatic pains, St. Michael de Sanatis cancer and tumors,
St. Judas coughs, St. Ovidius deafness, St. Sebastian contagious fevers
and poisonous bites, St. Apollonia toothache, St. Clara and St. Lucia
rheum in the eyes, and so on. The legends relate wonderful effects of the
healing powers possessed by St. Damianus, St. Patrick and St. Hubert. The
terrible disease of hydrophobia was cured by the last named. In the
cloisters in Luxembourg named after this saint, hydrophobia was cured many
years after his death by bringing the afflicted into the church during the
progress of the service, and pressing a hair from the saint's mantle into
a slight incision made for the occasion in his forehead. For the benefit
of those who lived far from the cloister, the so-called "Hubertus-bands"
and "Hubertus-keys" were consecrated; these were applied, heated
white-hot, to the wound.[22] Similar curative agencies might be mentioned
by hundreds.

Among all afflictions, the state of being possessed by devils occupies the
most remarkable place in the annals of the Church, and is seen to have
required the most powerful exorcisms for its cure. The ecclesiastical
pathology declares that in this disease the devil is unhidden, while in
all others he is concealed. The exorciser who is to expel the fiend
appears in full priestly vesture; incense and consecrated wax tapers are
lighted, all the objects surrounding the demoniac are sprinkled with holy
water, the air around is purified by the pronunciation of certain
formulas; then follow fervent prayers and finally the desperate and awful
struggle between the demon, now convulsively distorting the limbs of his
victim and uttering by his lips the most harrowing blasphemies, and the
priest, who employs more and more powerful adjurations until the victory
finally is his.

The secular medical art--that relying upon natural means--as either
superfluous, or as strongly tainted with heresy, must be despised.
Dissection, in order to investigate the structure of the human body, is
presumption; it can even be asked with reason if it does not argue
contempt for the doctrine of the final resurrection. The secular art of
healing was consequently for a long time confined to the infidel Jews. But
when princes and the opulent, weakly apprehending the insufficiency of the
word, the relics and the consecrated remedies, had begun to keep
physicians, the profane art of medicine became a lucrative profession, and
schools for its cultivation were established under royal protection. Such
is that of Salerno, which the warders of Zion can not regard without
suspicion. It is a school which prescribes pedantic rules for diet, as if
one's diet could protect against the attacks of the devil! The Greek pagan
Hippocrates, who for a long time wandered about with Jews and Arabs, thus
finds at last a settled abode within its walls,--Hippocrates who had to
assert of demonianism (_morbus sacer_) itself that it is "nowise more
divine, nowise more infernal, than any other disease!" When the teacher is
such, what must the disciples be? The Church will not forbid absolutely
the practice of medicine, since it may do some good in the case of
external injury, or in time of pestilence; but she must keep strict watch
over the orthodoxy of those who cultivate this art. At several councils
(as at Rheims in 1131, the second Lateran in 1139, and at Tours, 1163) she
has strenuously prohibited her servants from having any thing to do with
this suspected profession. Experience has taught, however, not to
exaggerate the dangers attending it. The secular physicians must
frequently concede that such and such a sickness is caused by witchcraft,
and consequently is of supernatural origin. Slanderers might allege that
such a declaration is more convenient than an investigation into the
causes of the disease in the natural way, and less unpleasant than
acknowledging one's ignorance. But be this as it may: the concession
implies a recognition of the supernaturalism of the Church, and may
therefore be rather recommended than reprehended.

"It is," says Thomas Aquinas, "a dogma of faith that the demons can
produce wind, storms, and rain of fire from heaven. The atmosphere is a
battle-field between angels and devils. The latter work the constant
injury of man, the former his melioration; and the consequence is that
changeableness of weather which threatens to frustrate the hopes of
husbandry. And when Lucifer is able to bestow even upon man--on sorcerers
and wizards--the power to destroy the fields, the vineyards and dwellings
of man by rain, hail and lightning, is it to be wondered at if the Church,
which is man's protection against the devil, and whose especial calling it
is to fight him, should in this sphere also be his counterpoise, and
should seek from the treasury of its divine power, means adequate to
frustrate his atmospheric mischiefs? To these means belong the church
bells, provided they have been duly consecrated and baptized. The aspiring
steeples around which cluster the low dwellings of men, are to be likened,
when the bells in them are ringing, to the hen spreading its protecting
wings over its chickens; for the tones of the consecrated metal repel the
demons and avert storm and lightning" ("_Vivos voco, mortuos plango_,
SULPHURA FRANGO," a common inscription on church bells). Tillers of the
soil who desire especial protection from the Church for their harvests,
pay it tithes for a blessing. During protracted drought the priests make
intercession and inaugurate rain-processions, in which images of the
Virgin are borne into the fields, which are sprinkled with holy water
while the weather-collect is chanted.[23] If the fields are visited by
hurtful insects, the Church has remedies against them also. It commands
them in the name of God to depart, and if they do not obey, a regular
process is instituted against them, which ends in their exemplary
punishment; for they are excommunicated by the Church. Such processes were
very frequently resorted to in the Middle Ages, and a couple of such
instances will be cited.

In the year 1474, the may-bug committed great depredations in the
neighborhood of Berne. When the authorities of the city had sought relief
from the bishop of Lausanne, Benoit de Montferrand, against this scourge,
he determined to issue a letter of excommunication, which was solemnly
read by a priest in the churchyard of Berne. "Thou irrational, imperfect
creature, thou may-bug," thus the letter commenced, "thou whose kind was
never enclosed in Noah's ark! in the name of my gracious lord, the bishop
of Lausanne, by the power of the glorified Trinity through the merits of
Jesus Christ, and by the obedience you owe the Holy Church, I command you
may-bugs, all in common and each one in particular, to depart from all
places where nourishment for men and cattle germinates and grows." The
letter ends with a summons to the insects, to present themselves on the
sixth day thereafter, if they do not disappear before that time, at one
o'clock, P. M., at Wivelsburg, and assume the responsibility before the
court of the gracious lord of Lausanne. This letter was likewise read from
the pulpit while the congregation, kneeling, repeated "three Paternosters
and three Ave Marias." Arrangements were made beforehand for a legal trial
with strict attention to all professional forms. Among these was of course
that the accused should have a lawyer. But when no advocate in Berne would
consent to appear in behalf of the insects, the bishop devised the plan of
summoning from hell the shade of an infamous lawyer named Perrodet, who
had died a few years previously, and of directing him to plead the cause
of the may-bugs with the same diligence he had so often displayed in his
lifetime in defence of vile clients. But in spite of many summons, neither
Perrodet nor his clients deigned to appear. After the expiration of the
time fixed for beginning the defence, and when certain doubts concerning
the proper form of procedure had been removed, the episcopal tribunal
finally gave its verdict, which was excommunication in the name of the
Holy Trinity, "to you, accursed vermin, that are called may-bugs, and
which can not even be counted among the animals." The government ordered
the authorities of the afflicted district to report concerning the good
effects of the excommunication; "But," a chronicle of the time complains,
"no effect was observed, because of our sins."

Since any neglect of legal forms was thought to deprive a judgment of its
magical as well as legal power, the most scrupulous care was exercised in
the conduct of these frequently recurring processes against may-bugs,
grasshoppers, cabbage-worms, field-rats and other noxious vermin. There is
yet extant a detailed and luminous document by the learned Bartholomeus
Chassanæus (born 1480), in which the question if, and how, such pests
should be proceeded against in the courts is carefully considered: whether
they should appear personally or by deputy; whether they are subject to a
spiritual or a secular tribunal, and if the penalty of excommunication can
be applied to them. He proves on many grounds that the jurisdiction to
which they are accountable is the spiritual, and that they may properly be
excommunicated. Still the question of jurisdiction remained unsettled, and
a civil prosecution of the field-rats in Tyrol, 1519-20, proves among
other things that a secular tribunal sometimes considered itself justified
in deciding such suits. The peasant Simon Fliss appeared before William of
Hasslingen, judge in Glurns and Mals (Ober-In-valley), as plaintiff
against the field-rats which were committing great depredations in his
parish. The court then appointed Hans Grinebner, a citizen of Glurns, to
be the advocate of the accused, and furnished him, before witnesses, with
the requisite commission. Thereupon the plaintiff chose as his advocate
Schwarz Minig, and obtained from the tribunal upon demand a warrant of
authority for him likewise. On the day of trial, the Wednesday after St.
Philip's and St. James's day, many witnesses were examined, establishing
that the rats had caused great destruction. Schwarz Minig then made his
final plea that the noxious animals should be charged to withdraw from
mischief, as otherwise the people of Stilf could not pay the annual tithes
to their high patron. Grinebner, counsel for the defence, could not and
would not make exception to the testimony, but tried to convince the court
that his clients "enjoyed a certain right of usufruct which could hardly
be denied them." If the court were of another opinion and considered it
best to eject them, he yet hoped they would first be granted another
place where they could support themselves. Besides there should be given
them at their departure a sufficient escort to protect them against their
enemies, whether cat, dog, or other adversaries; and he also hoped that,
if any of the rats were pregnant, time might be allowed them to be
delivered and afterwards depart in safety with their progeny. The decision
was rendered in the following terms: "After accusation and defence, after
statement and contradiction, and after due consideration of all that
pertains to justice, it is by this sentence determined that those noxious
animals which are called field-rats must, within two weeks after the
promulgation of this judgment, depart and forever remain far aloof from
the fields and the meadows of Stilf. But if one or several of the animals
are pregnant, or unable on account of their youth to follow, then shall
they enjoy during further two weeks safety and protection from every body,
and after these two weeks depart."

We can form some impression of the immense power of prayer and exorcism
when we consider that the influence of the will and the idea expressed in
the word co-operate in them with the power of the word itself as a mere
form. For the material word, the sound caught by the ear, the formula, as
such, exercises a magical effect without one's knowing its meaning. The
mass of the people with their ignorance of the official language of the
Church and of learning, would be badly off if those "Paternosters" and
"Ave Marias," committed to memory without understanding them, should be
spiritually ineffectual,--if the Latin mass to which the congregation
listens should be wanting in edifying and sanctifying power because it is
not comprehended. The formularies of the Church established at different
times and for various purposes are for this reason of high importance and
must be followed conscientiously.[24] A single proof of their
extraordinary power may be instanced here. In the year 1532 the devil
brought into the heavens a huge comet, which threatened earth and man
with drought and pestilence; but the pope solemnly banished the forbidding
omen,--and behold! in a short time it disappeared, having day by day
diminished through the power of the papal anathema. What a holy word may
avail by virtue of its sound (_flatus vocis_) alone, is indicated in the
legend of the tame starling, which was saved from the claws of the hawk
just at the moment its death-agony had forced from it the words it had
learned to repeat "Ave Maria."

Upon the power of the word as its foundation, rests the papal custom of
consecrating bread, wine, oil, salt, tapers, water, bells, fields,
meadows, houses, standards and weapons. "With such abuses, such
superstition, and diabolical arts was the priesthood filled during papal
ascendency"--thus complains an old Protestant theologian who had an eye to
that surplus of magic which the Catholic Church possessed over and above
that of the Lutheran, but who was blind to the common welfare--"and
therefore such things are in vogue even among common men. What was the
chief thing in the mass if not the wonder-working words of blessing, when
the priest pronounced the four words or the six syllables '_Hoc est corpus
meum_' (this is my body) over the bread, breathed upon it, and made the
sign of the cross three times over it, pretending that the bread was
thereby converted into the flesh of Christ? In the same way he transformed
the wine in the chalice into the blood of Christ, though no such power is
given to syllables and words. He bound the Holy Ghost in the water, the
salt, the oil, the tapers, the spices, the stone, wood or earth, when he
consecrated churches, altars, churchyards, when he blessed the meat, the
eggs, and the like, and when on Easter Eve he consecrated the fire that it
should do no damage (though I, God save me, have found out that our
village was utterly consumed four days after such consecration), when he
baptized and sanctified bells that their ringing might dispel evil
influences, quiet tempests, and the like."

The organization of monasteries is to be regarded as the defensive system
of the Church, guarding and protecting the territory it has conquered from
the devil. As the Mongolian on his irruption into Europe found innumerable
steeps crowned with strongly fortified castles, the very number of which
deterred from any attempt at siege, so Satan and his hosts find the
Christian world strewn with spiritual strongholds, each of which encloses
an arsenal filled with mighty weapons for offensive as well as defensive
warfare. Every monastery has its master magician, who sells _agni Dei_,
conception-billets, magic incense, salt and tapers which have been
consecrated on Candlemas Day, palms consecrated on Palm Sunday, flowers
besprinkled with holy water on Ascension Day, and many other appliances
belonging to the great magical apparatus of the Church.

This consecrated enginery being so various and complete, it might have
been expected that the people would be content, and seek no further
expedients than these constantly at hand. But, alas! a people's magic of
infernal origin is abroad, and rampant by the side of the holy magic of
the Church; and by it Satan tempts the careless, the curious and the
irresolute. Even many priests are tainted with it. The holy Boniface, and
many popes and monkish chroniclers after him, bitterly lament that the
lower clergy compound love-potions and practice divinatory arts, using
even the holy appurtenances of the Church, as the host, to fortify the
efficacy of their diabolical charms.

Since the Church tries to reduce all conditions of life to harmony with
itself, it naturally follows that it sets its seal also to human
jurisprudence. The ordeals which it has found employed by some of the
nations it has converted, exactly suit its system. It receives them,
consequently, as resting on a right idea,[25] makes them what they were
not before, a common practice, and gives detailed rules concerning the
chants, prayers, conjurations and masses with which they should be
accompanied. When a person under accusation or suspicion is to undergo the
ordeal by water, for example, the priest is to lead him to the church, and
cause him kneeling to pronounce three formulas in which God is implored
for protection. Then follow mass and the holy communion. When the accused
receives the wafer the priest says: "Be this flesh of our Lord thy test
to-day." Then in solemn procession the throng of witnesses repair to the
spot where the test is to take place. The priest conjures the water,
expelling the demons common to this element, and commands it to be an
obedient instrument of God for revealing innocence or crime. The accused
is dressed in clean garments, kisses the cross and the gospel, recites a
Paternoster and makes the sign of the cross. Then (in the ordeal by hot
water) his hand is held in a boiling cauldron: or he is thrown with his
hands pinioned and a rope about his waist, into a river. If he does not
then sink, his guilt is proved. The ordeal by fire consists in walking
over glowing coals, or carrying red-hot iron, or in being dragged through
flames clad in a shirt saturated with wax. By the test of fire the
genuineness of relics is also sometimes tested. When in A. D. 1010 some
monks who had returned from Jerusalem exhibited the towel with which the
disciples had wiped the feet of Christ, some doubts of its genuine
character were raised, but were all removed by this test. One of the most
common of all ordeals is the duel.

God, invoked by the servants of the Church, keeps his protecting hand over
innocence. Every doubt of this truth argues faint-heartedness bordering on
atheism. This thought lies at the foundation not only of the different
kinds of ordeals, but also of the torture, which, constantly extended and
intensified under the auspices of the Church, was a form of trial sparing
the judge much labor, and leading to the goal more surely than the
collation of testimony, which, besides being irksome, hardly ever brings
full assurance. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego felt no pain in the fiery
furnace. God gives to innocence upon the rack, if not insensibility to
pain, at least strength to endure it. But even the arch-fiend, to a
certain extent, can protect his subjects. In the case of heretics and
witches it is therefore needful to resort to the intensest torture; to
exhaust, so to speak, to the last drop, the springs of pain in human
nerves, under the hand of skilled tormentors. If then the instruments of
torture are previously conjured and sanctified by the priest, and if he
stands at the side of the accused ready to interrupt with constant
question the diabolic formulas of alleviation which undoubtedly the
sufferer murmurs inwardly, then a candid and reliable confession may
reasonably be expected, in spite of all efforts to the contrary by the
devil. In the "Witch-hammer" (Malleus Malificarum) the ecclesiastical and
magical plan of justice celebrates its triumph. This work, bearing the
sanction of the pope, contains full directions for the judge presiding in
witch-trials. It is, in fact, a hammer which crushes whatever it falls
upon. The judge who carefully follows these directions may be confident
that Satan himself can not save any one who is under accusation; only God
and his holy angels can rescue him, by direct miracle, from death in the
flames.[26]

He who finds a judicial system which appeals constantly to the
intercession of God of questionable value, may consider that the history
of the Church, the experiences of its saints and servants are a succession
of divine miracles. God is not chary of his miracles when recognized, and
the servants of the Church are in possession of the apostolic power and
mandate to perform them.

Another question is, how are the divine miracles to be distinguished from
the infernal? All attempts of the acutest scholastics to establish a rule
of definite separation for these two kinds of miracles have failed. They
are revealed under identical forms, and even the moral perceptions can
detect no difference, since Satan is able to transform himself into an
angel of light. Reason must also acknowledge its incapacity even in this
respect, and rely on the Holy Ghost ever active in the Church and
especially in its head. The power of divine truth and inspiration which
was poured out upon the apostles on the day of Pentecost, has been
transmitted like a magnetic stream from Peter, the first bishop of Rome,
to his successors by the laying on of hands, and is in a certain measure
imparted, by the sacrament of ordination, to every member of the clerical
hierarchy.

       *       *       *       *       *

The survey of the magic of the Church which has been presented above,
ought perhaps to be completed, not by pursuing the tedious path which lies
before us through continued description of ecclesiastical customs and
opinion, but by simply formulating the general truth: _Every symbol, every
external token, to which is attributed an independent power for
sanctification and an immediate moral influence, is Magic._ May the
Protestant reader, for whom we are here writing, examine with this maxim
in how far the Reformation, which aims to restore to internal
authority--the reason and free-will of the individual--its rights, has
succeeded in its task. Luther and Calvin assailed many magical usages, and
pruned many branches from the tree of dualism, but still allowed its
vigorous trunk to remain unscathed. But a dualistic religious system must,
on account of the unreasonable cosmical theory on which it rests, sooner
or later attack again the inner authority and make itself the sole and
absolute external one. It must of necessity degenerate to a statuary
fetichism or fall before a complete unitarian reformation. Our day
witnesses the conflict between these opposite ideas. On the one side, the
belief in a personal spiritual adversary of mankind, preached to the
masses from a thousand pulpits, hangs suspended like a sword of Damocles
over the head of civilization; on the other side, philosophy and the
science of nature diffuse a rational and unitarian theory of the universe
and human existence through a constantly enlarging circle. To him who
wishes to take part in this all-important struggle, we would commend these
words of the noble Bunsen:[27] "Wherever in religion, or state, or
civilization, in art or science, the inner is developed more strenuously,
and the spiritual earnestly sought after, be it with more or less
transformation of what is existing, there progress is at hand; for from
the inner, life comes to the external, from the centre to the
circumference. There is also the way which leads to life. There new paths
are opened to the soul, and genius lifts its wings with divine assurance.
If this is true, the contrary must take place wherever the external life
is more and more exalted, where the token supersedes more and more the
essence, the symbol and the external work the inner act and conscience,
where the superficies is taken for the content, the outer monotony for
life's uniformity, and appearances for truth. There a luckless future is
in waiting, whatever be the aspect of the present."




III.

THE MAGIC OF THE LEARNED.


We find ourselves in a dismal labyrinth of narrow, winding streets, now
and then issuing into some open space before a guild-hall or a church. The
objects which meet our gaze in this strange city do not solicit pause or
reflection; for we have seen essentially the same type of homes and
humanity in many another city which we have wandered through in our search
for the stone of wisdom. We therefore continue on our way. The buildings
of the university are said to be in the neighborhood, and we turn the
corner to the right, and again to the left, until we come upon it. The
lecture-hour approaches. Professors draped in stiff mantles and wearing
the scholastic cap on their supremely wise foreheads, wend their way to
the temples of knowledge at the portals of which flocks of students wait.
We recognize their various and familiar types: the new-matriculated look
as usual, their cheeks still retaining the glow of early youth, their
hearts still humble, perhaps still held captive by the sweet delusion that
the walls by which they wait are the propylæa to all the secrets of earth
and heaven. Just as readily recognized are the parchment-worms, destined
one day to shine as lights in the Church and in the domain of science,
whether they now toil themselves pale and melancholic over their _catenæ_,
their _summæ_ and _sententiæ_, or bear with unfeigned self-satisfaction
the precious weight of _terms_ which lifts them so conspicuously above the
ignorant mass of mortals. And among the throng of the first named still
fresh with youth, and these already dried pedants, we find also the
far-famed third class of students, adventurers assembled from all quarters
under the protection of university-privileges,--those gentlemen with
bearded cheek, and faces swelled by drinking and scarred by combat, with
terribly long and broad swords dangling at their side,--the heroes of
that never ending Iliad which the apprentices of learning and the guilds
enact nightly in the darkness of the lanes, who may yet turn out some day
the most pious of conventical priors, the gravest doctors and the very
severest burgomasters in Christendom, unless before that time they meet
their fate upon the gallows, or on the field of battle, or as _scholares
vagantes_ in the ditch or by the roadside.

Shall we enter and listen to some of these lectures which are about to be
delivered? Our letter of academic membership will open the doors to us, if
we desire. To the left in the vaulted hall the professor of medicine has
commenced his lecture. With astonishing subtlety and penetration he
discusses the highly important question, before propounded by Petrus de
Abano, but not as yet fully solved,--"_an caput sit factum propter
cerebrum vel oculos_" (whether the head was formed for the sake of the
brain or the eyes). To the right the professor of theology leads us into
one of the dim mysteries of the Church by ventilating the question what
Peter would have done with the bread and wine, had he distributed the
elements while the body of Christ in unchanged reality was yet hanging on
the cross.[28] A little farther on in this mouldy vault we find the
workshop of philosophy, where a master in the art of abstract reasoning
deduces the distinction between _universalia ante rem_ and _universalia in
re_. In yonder furthest room a jurisconsult expounds a passage in the
pandects.--Or perhaps you would rather not choose at all? You smile sadly.
Alas! like myself you have good reason for complaining with Faust:--

  I have, alas! Philosophy,
    Med'cine, and Jurisprudence too,
  And to my cost Theology,
    With ardent labor studied through.
  And here I stand, with all my lore,
  Poor fool, no wiser than before.

and if you add like him,

  Hence have I now applied myself to magic,

we shall bring back to our minds the object of our burning desires, the
hope which cheers us that finally the veil will be torn from the face of
the Isis-image, and that we shall behold the unspeakable face to face,
even though her looks burn us to ashes. Let us turn our back upon this
tragi-comic seat of learning, where, as everywhere else, hoary-headed
fools are teaching young chicken-heads to admire nonsense, and young
eagle-souls to despair of knowledge. It is not far hence direct--as direct
as the winding lanes permit--to that great magician who has taken up his
abode in this city. At the feet of that master let us seat ourselves. We
shall there slake our burning thirst with at least a few drops of that
knowledge which through by-gone ages has been flowing in a subterranean
channel, though from the same sources as the streams of Paradise. And if
we are disappointed there,--well, then _you_, if you so choose, can quench
your longing for truth in the whirlpool of pleasure and adventure. _I_
shall go into a monastery, seek the narrowest of its cells, watch, pray,
scourge forth my blood in streams; or I shall go to India, sit down upon
the ground and stare at the tip of my nose,--stare at it and never cease,
year out and year in, until all consciousness is extinguished. Agreed,
then, is it not?....

We are arrived in the very loneliest quarter of the town, and the most
dreary limits of the quarter, where old crumbling houses group themselves
in inextricable confusion along the city wall, and from their gable
windows fix their vacant, hypochondriacal looks upon the open fields
beyond. A tower, crowning the wall of the fort upon this side, now serves
the great scientist as an observatory and dwelling, given him by the
burgomaster and the council of the city. He was for a long time private
physician to the Queen of France, but has now retired to this lonely place
from the pleasures, the distinctions, and the dangers of life at court, in
order to devote himself quietly to research and study. He has a protector
in the prince-archbishop resident in the city; and as the professor of
theology has certified at the request of this same prince-bishop to his
strict orthodoxy, the city authorities thought to persuade him to receive
the honorable and lucrative position of town-astrologer, not heeding the
assertion of the monks that he was a wizard, and that his black spaniel
was in reality none other than the devil himself.

A magician never suffers himself to be interrupted in his labors, whether
engaged in contemplating the nature of spirits, in watching the heavens,
or in the elaboration of the _quinta essentia_, the final essence, with
his crucibles. Oh! what world-wide hopes, what solemn emotions, what
inexpressible tension of soul must accompany these investigations! Gold,
which rules the world, here falls from the tree of knowledge as a fruit
over-ripe into the bosom of the master. And what is gold with all the
power it possesses, and all the enjoyment it commands, compared with the
ability to control heaven and earth and the spirits of hell, compared
with the capacity to summon by the means of lustrations, seals, characters
and exorcisms the angels hovering in the higher spheres, or tame to
obedience the demons which fill the immensity of space? And what again is
this power compared with the pure celestial knowledge to which magic
delivers the key? a knowledge as much transcending the wisdom of angels as
the son's place in his father's house is superior to a servant's!
Perchance the magician at this very moment is deeply absorbed in some
investigation, and within a hair's breadth of the revelation of some new
and dazzling truth. Let us consider before we venture to ask admittance.
Let us pause a moment before this iron-bound door, and recover our breath.

Ye men of science in this nineteenth century, how miserable you would be
had you not once for all determined to limit your hopes to a minimum! To
die when you have gleaned and contributed but a single straw to the
harvest of science, is the fate to which you subject yourselves. The one
among you who has brought to notice a hitherto unknown snail or flower,
deems himself not to have lived in vain. To have discovered a formula
under which a group of phenomena can be arranged, is already a triumph.
This resignation which makes each one among you, even the greatest, only
an insignificant detail-worker upon the immense labor whose completion you
contemplate at an infinite remove, and the very outlines of which you
ignore,--this resignation is sublime, though supremely painful to the
aspiring soul. The individual laborer for his part abstains from all hope
of seeing the whole truth, and works for his generation and futurity. Even
the philosopher who undertakes to explain the framework of the macrocosm,
does not see in his system a final solution of the "problem of cosmical
explanation," but only a link in the long chain of development. He
foresees the fall of his theories, satisfied, perhaps, if the traces of
his error keep his successor on a straighter path. It is the race and not
the individual which works in your work; which continues it when you have
grown weary and been forgotten. It is a collective activity like that of
ants and bees. But the magician stands alone! To be sure he receives what
the past may offer,--but only to enclose himself with this treasure, and
improve it by the immense wealth of his own mind. He believes in this
immensity. He believes that the powers of all the generations are stored
up in the bosom of the individual, and he hopes to accomplish alone what
you faint-heartedly leave to the multitude of incalculable centuries!

       *       *       *       *       *

We knocked upon the door ponderous with its bolts of iron. It opened as by
an unseen hand. No servant interposed either welcome or remonstrance as we
mounted the dark spiral stairs. Unannounced we entered the hall of the
great magician. Along the arched ceiling of the rooms whose green
lead-fastened window panes admitted but a scanty light, floated a fragrant
vapor from the cell in the extreme background, where we could see the
magician himself clad in a snow-white mantle reaching to his feet, and
standing solemnly beside an incense-altar. Upon his head he wore a diadem
on which was engraved the unspeakable name, _Tetragrammaton_, and in his
hand he held a metallic plate which, as we soon learned, was made of
electrum and signed with the signatures of coming centuries.

We paused and stammered a word of excuse for the interruption we had
caused him. A smile of satisfaction broke upon his face when he had
momentarily surveyed us, and he bade us welcome.

"You are the very persons whose arrival I have been expecting, and whom it
has cost me much trouble to summon," he said. "You are the spirits of the
nineteenth century, conjured to appear before a man of the fifteenth. You
are called from the ante-chambers where the souls of the unborn await
their entrance upon earth. But the images of the century to which your
future mortal life belongs dwell in the depths of your consciousness.
These images you shall show me. It is for this that I have summoned you,
for I wish to cast a glance into the future."

I was seized with a strange, almost horrid feeling. I now remembered that
I and my companions had transported ourselves, by the use of means which
stirs up the entire reproductive forces of the imagination, from the
actual nineteenth century, back to the long-past fifteenth, that we might
see it live before our eyes, not in dissevered traits as a past age is
wont to be preserved in books, but in the completeness of its own
multi-formity. Who was right, the magician or myself? Which was the one
only seemingly living, he or I? At what hour did the hand on the clock of
time point at that moment? Granted that time is absolutely nothing but a
conceptual form without independent reality; as long as I live in time I
believe in its ordered course, and do not wish to see its golden thread
entangled. I did not wish that the spirit which I had summoned should be
my master and degrade me to a product of his own imagination. I summoned
courage and exclaimed:--

"We have wandered through many cities, great magician, to find you. We
finally stand in this your sanctuary. We see these gloomy Gothic arches
over our heads; we see your venerable figure before us; we behold these
folios and strange instruments which surround you; we look out through
these windows and behold on one side towers and house-tops, on the other
fields, meadows and the huts of serfs, and yonder in the distance the
castle of a knight who is suspected of night-attacks upon the trains of
the merchants as they approach the city. All these things stand real and
present before our eyes: but, nevertheless, great magician, it is all,
yourself included, a product of _our_ magic, of the power of our own
imagination, not of _your_ magic. It is in order to make some acquaintance
with the latter that we are come. It is not we who are to answer your
questions, but you ours."

The magician smiled. He persisted in his view, and I in mine. The
contested question could not be decided, and it was laid aside. But along
with my consciousness of belonging to a period of critical activity, my
doubts had awakened--my vivid hope a moment ago of finding in magic the
key of all secrets, was fast fading away.

I looked around in this home of the magician. On his writing-desk lay a
parchment on which he had commenced to write down the horoscope of the
following year. Beside the desk was a celestial globe with figures painted
in various colors. In a window looking towards the south hung an
astrolabe, to whose alidade a long telescope (of course without lenses)
was attached. The book-case contained a not inconsiderable number of
folios: Versio Vulgata, some volumes of the fathers, Virgil, Dionysius
Areopagita, Ptolemy, the hymns of Orpheus, Hermes Trismegistus,
Jamblichus, Pliny's Natural History, a large number of works partly in
Arabic upon astrology and alchemy, also a few Hebrew manuscripts, and so
on. These and other such things were to be found in his observatory,
which was also his studio and sleeping-room. Next to the observatory was
the alchemical laboratory with a strangely appointed oven filled with
singular instruments reminding me again of Faust's complaint:--

    =Ihr Instrumente freilich spottet mein,
  Mit Rad und Kämmen, Walz und Bügel.
  Ich stand am Thor, ihr solltet Schlüssel sein;
  Zwar euer Bart ist kraus, doch hebt Ihr nicht die Riegel.=

While we lingered here our host informed us that for the present he had
suspended his experiments in alchemy. He hoped to find his _quinta
essentia_ by a shorter process than the combination of substances and
distillation, which had exhausted already so many investigators and led so
few to success. He acknowledged that he had himself advanced no farther in
the art of the adepts than the extraction from "philosophic earth" mixed
with "philosophic water" of just so much, and no more, gold than he had
employed at the beginning of the experiment.[29] In spite of this,
however, he worked daily before his oven, melting and purifying such
metals as he needed for his planet-medallions, amulets and magical rings,
and above all in preparing that effective alloy which is called electrum.

From his laboratory our host conducted us into two other apartments with
arched ceilings, forming a sort of museum of most extraordinary
curiosities,--skeletons and dried limbs of various animals: fishes, birds,
lizards, frogs, snakes, etc.; herbs and differently colored stones; whole
and broken swords; nails extracted from coffins and gallows; flasks
containing I know not what,--all arranged in groups under the signs of the
different planets. We beheld before us the wonderful and rich apparatus of
practical magic arranged according to rules of which we were entirely
ignorant,--rules which we had vainly sought in all the treatises of
modern times upon the occult sciences of the Middle Ages, rules which
might perhaps contain the simple principles underlying their confusion.

Evening was drawing on. The sun was sinking behind the western hills. It
was beginning to grow dark among the arches where the great magician had
imprisoned himself among dead and withered relics,--fragments broken from
the great and living world without. We returned to his observatory. He
opened a window and contemplated with dreamy glances the stars which were
kindling one after another in the heavens. The twilight is a favorable
time for conversation of the kind for which we had been preparing
ourselves. We were soon settled in comfortable, roomy arm-chairs and
discoursing earnestly,--we, the man of the fifteenth century, and the
unborn souls of the nineteenth, whom he had summoned that he might look
into the future, and who now used him to look back into the past. He spoke
to us of his science....

"My knowledge is not of myself. Far, far away behind these hills, behind
the snowy summits of the Alps, behind the mountains of the
'farthest-dwelling Garamantes,' on nameless heights which disappear among
the clouds, the temple of truth was built long ago over the fountain from
which life flows. That this temple is demolished we well know; only the
first human pair has wandered through its sacred halls. But he who
desires, who yearns and has patience, can sit down by the margin of the
stream of Time and grasp and draw ashore some of the cedar-beams from the
ruined temple drifting upon the billows, and from the form of the
fragments may determine the structure of the whole. All wisdom has its
roots in the past, and the farther we penetrate antiquity, the richer the
remains we find of a highest human wisdom. What is Albertus Magnus with
his profound knowledge in comparison with the angelic wisdom of Dionysius
Areopagita, and what is the latter compared with that of the prophet who
denounced his woes over Nineveh and Babylon? And yet these divinely
commissioned men would gladly have been taught by the seventy elders who
were allowed with Moses to approach the mountain where God chose to reveal
himself, there receiving the mystic knowledge of the Cabala. On Sinai,
however, God's secret was veiled in clouds, lightnings and terror; Moses
himself was permitted to see him only 'from behind'--did not obtain a
morning-knowledge (a knowledge _a priori_, an analogy-seeking pupil of
Schelling would have called it), but an evening-knowledge (knowledge _a
posteriori_, he would have added). The morning-knowledge was shown only to
the man of the dawn of time and was extinguished at the first sin. From
that time every successive generation has deteriorated from its
predecessor:

  "'_Aetas parentum, pejor avis, tulit
  Nos nequiores, mox daturos
  Progeniem vitiosiorem_,'

and with the darkness of sin reason is plunged into constantly blacker
depths. The individual seeker after truth may gain enlightenment, but for
himself alone, not for humanity. Therefore a magician confines the wisdom
he acquires to his own bosom, or imparts it to a single pupil, or buries
it under obscure expressions which he commits to parchment; but he neither
can nor will impart it without reserve to humanity whose path appears to
lead downward into a constantly deeper night.

"Even the theologians speak of the pristine wisdom,--the theologians with
whom we, who practice the occult science, agree far more than the simple
and suspicious among them think. What remained, in the time of Noah, of
pristine wisdom was saved with him in the ark. His first-born obtained as
his portion the fairest wisdom. Prophecy, the Cabala, and the Gospel
belong to the sons of Shem, the Jews. But even Ham and Japhet were not
left destitute. It was the priest of the sons of Ham that guarded the
secrets of Isis,--secrets before which even we Christians must bow in the
dust; for the Old Testament does not hesitate to exalt the wisdom of the
Egyptians and recognize Moses as a pupil from their school. Hermes
Trismegistus was an Egyptian, and we magicians who know that he transmuted
whatever he chose into gold and precious stones, are not astonished when
the apostle Paul speaks of the treasures of Egypt, or at what travellers
relate of its pyramids and other giant works, or when Pliny estimates the
number of its cities at twenty thousand, or when Marcellinus is amazed at
the immense treasures which Cambyses carried away from it, for all this
was a creation of the art of Hermes Trismegistus.[30] Even the portion of
the children of Japhet was not insignificant. It was divided between the
treasury of Zoroaster and that of the Eleusinian mysteries. Some coins of
this treasure fell into the hands of Plato and Aristotle and have from
them come into the possession of Porphyrius, Jamblichus, and the
theosophists and scholastics. It is this diffused illumination--that of
the Bible (its inner, secret meaning) the Cabala and fragments of
Egyptian, Persian and Grecian wisdom--which are collected and united in
the magic of learning. These are the ancestors of my science. Has it not a
pedigree more noble than that of any royal family?

"I heard you mention something about the necessity for a science of
investigation without presupposition. Would you then really presume to be
the judge of all that past generations have thought, believed and
transmitted as a sacred inheritance to those that follow? Do you not
shrink before the idea that human hunger for truth must have been
satisfied from Adam to our own days by nothing but illusions? that you are
the children and children's children of mere idiots who have fixed their
hopes, their faith, and their convictions on baseless falsehoods? Put
your godless plan of investigation to the test! Do it openly, and the
theologians will burn you! Do it in secret, and you will finally crave the
stake as a liberator from the terrible void such a science would leave in
your own soul! No, the magician believes just as devoutly as the
theologian. Only in the mellow twilight of faith can he undertake those
operations whose success is a confirmation of the truth of his faith. Or
do you require stronger corroboration of the genuineness of his tenets
than what I find when I read in these stars which wander silently past my
window, the fates of men, and see these fates accomplished; when, with the
potency of magical means, I summon angels, and demons, and the souls of
dead and unborn men to reveal themselves before my eyes, and they appear?

"I confess that our science, if it is looked at only on the surface,
resembles a variegated carpet with artfully interwoven threads; but as
only a limited number of manipulations is required to produce the most
remarkable texture, so it is also but a few simple thoughts which
support all the doctrines and products of magic.

"That the universe is a triple harmony, as the Godhead is a Trinity, you
are aware. We live in the elemental world; over our head the celestial
space, with its various spheres, revolves; and above this, finally, God is
enthroned in the purely spiritual world of ideas. The unhappy scientists
of your century have in their narrow prejudice separated these worlds from
one another (but by crowding together the celestial and the elementary).
Your so-called students of nature investigate only the elementary world,
and your so-called philosophers only the ideal; but the former with all
their delving in the various forms of matter, never reach the realm of the
spiritual, but are rather led to disavow its existence; and the latter can
never from the dim world of ideas summon up the concrete wealth of nature.
In vain your students of nature imagine that in physiology, or your
philosophers that in anthropology, they shall find the transition from
one world to the other. We magicians, on the contrary, study these worlds
as a unit. We find them combined by two mighty bonds: those of
correspondence and causality. All things in the elementary world have
their antitype in the celestial, and all celestial things have their
corresponding ideas. These correspondences are strung from above downwards
as strings on the harp of the universe, and on that harp the causalities
move up and down like the fingers of a player. While your students of
nature seek the chains of causality in only one direction, the horizontal,
that which runs through things on the same level, that which connects
things in one and the same elementary world; we, the students of magic,
search with still greater diligence those perpendicular chains of
causality which run through and combine corresponding objects in the three
worlds. Our manner of investigating this perpendicular series resembles
your method of examining the horizontal but slightly, if at all. What
unnecessary trouble your induction causes you! You wish to investigate the
nature of some manifestation of force, for instance; you analyze it with
great painstaking into different factors, you strive to isolate each of
these factors and to cause them to act each its own part, to find out what
each has contributed to the common expression of force. We meet with no
such hindrances. A secret tradition has presented to us our perpendicular
lines of causality almost entire, and we are able to fill up the lacunæ of
this tradition by an investigation which is not impeded with any great
difficulties. This investigation relies on the resemblances of things, for
this similarity is derived from a correspondence, and causality is
interwoven with correspondence. Thus, for instance, we judge from the
resemblance between the splendor of gold and that of the sun that gold has
its celestial correspondence in that luminary, and sustains to it a causal
relation. Another example: the two-horned beetle bears a causal relation
to the moon, which at its increase and wane is also two-horned; and if
there were any doubt of this intimate relation between them, it must
vanish when we learn that the beetle hides its eggs in the earth for the
space of twenty-eight days, or just so long time as is required for the
moon to pass through the Zodiac, but digs them up again on the
twenty-ninth, when the moon is in conjunction with the Sun.[31] Do not
smile at this method of investigation! Beware of repeating the mistake
which 'common sense' is so prone to make in seeing absurdities in truths
which happen to be beyond its horizon? Our method is founded on the idea
that there is nothing casual in nature. To be sure we accept a divine
arbitrament, but by no means a natural fortuity. Not even the slightest
similarity between existing objects is a meaningless accident! Not even
the slightest stroke in the figures by which we fix our words and thoughts
in writing is without deep significance. Every thing in the work of
nature and of man has its cause and its effect. We can not make a gesture,
nor say a word, without imparting vibrations to the whole universe, upward
and downward,--vibrations which may be strong or feeble, perceptible or
imperceptible. This principle runs through the whole of our cosmical
system, and this thought must be true even for you analyzers.

"Before explaining more fully the magical use of our series of
correspondence and causality, I wish to show you a couple of them. I shall
choose the simplest, but at the same time the most important. I commence
with

THE SCALE OF THE HOLY TETRAD. (Table I.)

_From which is found the Correspondences to the Four Elements._

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------
             |                                             | God's name
             |                 [Hebrew]                    |(Jehovah) in
             |                                             |four letters.
             |------------------------------------------------------------
     THE     |Seraphim,|Dominions,|Principali- |Saints,    |The four
    WORLD    |Cherubim,| Powers,  | ties,      | Martyrs,  |triplicities
     OF      | Thrones | Empires  | Archangels,| Confessors|of the
  ARCHETYPES |         |          | Angels     |           |celestial
     AND     |         |          |            |           |hierarchy.
    BLISS    |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------
             |Michael  |Raphael   |Gabriel     |Uriel      |Four angels,
             |         |          |            |           |guardians of
             |         |          |            |           |the four card.
             |         |          |            |           |points.
             |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------
             |Seraph   |Cherub    |Tharsis     |Ariel      |Angels
             |         |          |            |           |presiding over
             |         |          |            |           |the elements.
  ========================================================================
             |Aries,   |Gemini,   |Cancer,     |Taurus,    |The four
             | Leo,    | Libra,   | Scorpio,   | Virgo,    |triplicities
             | Sagit-  | Aquarius | Pisces     | Capra     |of the Zodiac.
      THE    |  tarius |          |            |           |
   CELESTIAL |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------
     WORLD   |Mars,    |Jupiter,  |Saturn,     |Fixed      |The stars and
             | Sun     | Venus    | Mercury    | Stars,    |planets as
             |         |          |            | Moon      |related to the
             |         |          |            |           |elements.
             |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------
             |Light    |Transpar- |Activity    |Firmness   |Four qualities
             |         | ency     |            |           |of the
             |         |          |            |           |celestial
             |         |          |            |           |elements.
  ========================================================================
             |Fire     |Air       |Water       |Earth      |The four
             |         |          |            |           |elements.
             |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------
             |Warmth   |Humidity  |Coldness    |Aridity    |The four
             |         |          |            |           |qualities of
             |         |          |            |           |the elements.
             |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------
             |Summer   |Spring    |Winter      |Autumn     |The four
             |         |          |            |           |seasons.
             |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------
             |East     |West      |North       |South      |The four card.
             |         |          |            |           |points.
     THE     |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------
  ELEMENTARY |Animals  |Herbs     |Metals      |Stones     |Four kinds of
             |         |          |            |           |mixed bodies.
    WORLD    |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------
             |Walking  |Flying    |Swimming    |Crawling   |Four kinds of
             |         |          |            |           |animals.
             |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------
             |Germ     |Flower    |Leaves      |Root       |The parts of
             |         |          |            |           |the plants as
             |         |          |            |           |related to the
             |         |          |            |           |elements.
             |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------
             |Gold,    |Copper,   |Quicksilver |Lead,      |Metals
             | Iron    | Tin      |            | Silver    |corresponding
             |         |          |            |           |to the
             |         |          |            |           |elements.
             |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------
             |Shining  |Light and |Clear and   |Heavy and  |Stones
             | and     | Trans-   | Hard       | Opaque    |corresponding
             |Burning  | parent   |            |           |to the
             |         |          |            |           |elements.
  ========================================================================
             |Faith    |Science   |Opinion     |Experience |Four
             |         |          |            |           |principles of
  MICROCOSMOS|         |          |            |           |judging.
             |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------
             |Choleric |Sanguinic |Phlegmatic  |Melancholic|Temperaments.
  ========================================================================
             |Samael   |Azazael   |Azael       |Mehazael   |Princes of the
             |         |          |            |           |evil spirits
             |         |          |            |           |raging in the
             |         |          |            |           |elements.
     HELL    |---------+----------+------------+-----------+--------------
             |Oriens   |Paymon    |Egyn        |Amaimon    |The demons
             |         |          |            |           |presiding over
             |         |          |            |           |the four card.
             |         |          |            |           |points.

"Here you see one of the nets which magic has stretched from the Empyrean
down into the abyss. For each of the sacred numbers there is a separate
scale of the same kind: 'The universe,' says Pythagoras, 'is founded upon
numbers,' and Boethius asserts that 'Every thing created in the beginning
of time was formed according to the relations of certain numbers, which
were lying as types in the mind of the Creator.' It is consequently a
settled fact with us that numbers contain greater and more effective
forces than material things; for the former are not a mixture of
substances, but may, as purely formal entities, stand in immediate
connection with the ideas of divine reason. This is recognized also by the
fathers: by Hieronymus, Augustine, Ambrosius, Athanasius, Bede, and
others, and underlies these words in the book of Revelation: 'Let him who
hath understanding count the number of the beast.' Those varied and
relatively discordant objects which form a unity in the same world, are
arranged side by side in the scale; whereas those things which in
different groups or different worlds correspond to one another, form the
ascending and descending series.

"Do not forget that correspondence also implies reciprocal activity! Thus,
for instance, the letter [Hebrew] in the holy name of God indicates a
power which is infused into the successive orders of Seraphim, Cherubim
and Thrones, and which is imparted through them to the constellations Leo
and Sagittarius, and to the two wandering luminaries Mars and the Sun.
These angels and stars all pour down into the elementary world the
abundance of their power, which produces there fire and heat, and the
germs of animal organisms, and kindles in man reason and faith, in order
to meet finally in the lowest region, its opposites: cold, destruction,
irrationality, unbelief, represented by the names of fallen angel-princes.
I will now show you another table which is an introduction to the study of
Astrology and treats more in detail of certain parts of the preceding,
showing how things in the elementary world and microcosm are subject to
the planets. In showing this to you I will remind you of the verse:

  '_Astra regunt hominem; sed regit astra Deus._'
  (_The stars guide man; but God guides the stars._)


(TABLE II.)

           +--------------------------------------------------------------
           |   MOON.    |  MERCURY.  |  VENUS.  |    SUN.    |   MARS.   |
  ---------+------------+------------+----------+------------+-----------+
  ELEMENTS.|Earth,      |Water.      |Air,      |Fire.       |Fire.      |
           | Water.     |            | Water.   |            |           |
  ---------+------------+------------+----------+------------+-----------+
  MICRO-   |White       |Mixed       |Slimy     |Blood and   |Acid       |
   COSMOS. | juices.    | juices.    | juices.  | vital      | juices.   |
           |            |            |          | power.     |           |
  ---------+------------+------------+----------+------------+-----------+
  ANIMALS. |Sociable    |Cunning     |Beautiful |Bold and    |Beasts of  |
           | and        | and        | with     | courageous.| prey.     |
           | changeable.| rapid.     | strong   |            |           |
           |            |            | sexual   |            |           |
           |            |            | instinct.|            |           |
  ---------+------------+------------+----------+------------+-----------+
  PLANTS.  |Selenotrope,|Little      |Spices and|Pine,       |Burning,   |
           | Palm,      | short      | fruit-   | Laurel,    | poisonous,|
           | Hyssop,    | leaves and | trees.   | Vine,      | and       |
           | Rosemary,  | many       |          | Heliotrope,| stinging. |
           | etc.       | colored    |          | Lotus, etc.|           |
           |            | flowers.   |          |            |           |
  ---------+------------+------------+----------+------------+-----------+
  METALS.  |Silver.     |Quicksilver,|Silver.   |Gold.       |Iron and   |
           |            | Tin,       |          |            | sulphuric |
           |            | Bismuth.   |          |            | metals.   |
  ---------+------------+------------+----------+------------+-----------+
  STONES.  |All white   |Many        |Carnelian,|Topaz, Ruby,|Diamond,   |
           | stones     |  colored.  | Lazuli,  | Carbuncle, | Jasper,   |
           | and pearls.|            | etc.     | etc.       | Amethyst, |
           |            |            |          |            |  Magnet.  |


  -----------------------
  | JUPITER. | SATURN.
  +----------+-----------
  |Air.      |Earth,
  |          | Water.
  +----------+-----------
  |Vegetative|Gall.
  | juices.  |
  |          |
  +----------+-----------
  |Sagacious |Crawling
  | and      | and
  | gentle.  | nocturnal.
  |          |
  |          |
  +----------+-----------
  |Oak,      |Cypress and
  | Beech,   | those of a
  | Poplar,  | gloomy
  | Cereals, | aspect or
  | etc.     | foul odor.
  |          |
  +----------+-----------
  |Gold,     |Lead.
  | Silver,  |
  | Tin.     |
  +----------+-----------
  |Green and |Onyx and
  | air-     | all brown
  | colored. | clays.
  |          |

"The value of these, as of many other tables, will be clear to you when I
now pronounce the first practical principle of magic:--

"_As the Creator of the universe diffuses upon us, by angels, stars,
elements, animals, plants, metals and stones, the powers of his
omnipotence, so also the magician, by collecting those objects in the
elemental world which bear a relation of mutual activity to the same
entity (an angel or a planet) in the higher worlds, and by combining their
powers according to scientific rules, and intensifying them by means of
sacred and religious ceremonies, is able to influence this higher being
and attract to himself its powers._

"This principle sufficiently explains why I have collected around me all
the strange things you here see. Here, for instance, is a plate of lead on
which is engraved the symbol of a planet; and beside it a leaden flask
containing gall. If I now take a piece of fine onyx marked with the same
planet-symbol, and this dried cypress-branch, and add to them the skin of
a snake and the feather of an owl, you will need but to look into one of
the tables given you to find that I have only collected various things in
the elementary world which bear a relation of mutual activity to Saturn;
and, if rightly combined, can attract both the powers of that planet, and
of the angels with which it is connected.

"The greatest effect of magic--at the same time its triumph, and the
criterion of its truth--is a successful incantation. Shall we perform one?
If we go through all the necessary preparations, we shall have a
bird's-eye view of the whole secret science. Only certain alchemists have
a still greater end in view; they aspire to produce in the retort man
himself,--nay, the whole world. You men of the nineteenth century know
only by reputation of our attempts to produce an _homunculus_, and _a
perpetuum mobile naturæ_. Could you only count the drops of perspiration
these efforts have wrung from us! There is something enchanting, something
overpowering, in alchemy. It is gigantic in its aims, and in its depths
dwells a thought which is terrible, because it threatens to crush that
very cosmic philosophy on which our faith is founded. We occupy ourselves
with the elements, until the idea steals upon us that every thing is
dependent on them; that every thing, Creator and created, is included in
them; that every thing arises by necessity and passes away by necessity.
If you can only collect in the crucible those elements and life-germs
which were stirring in chaos, then you can also produce, in the crucible,
the six days of creation, and find the spirit which formed the universe. I
have abandoned alchemy only to escape this thought; but a parchment will,
sealed with seven seals, and hidden in the most secret corner of my
vaults, contains the remarkable experiences I have had when experimenting
for the _perpetuum mobile_ and _homunculus_.[32]

"But to the preparations for our conjuration! First we are met with the
question: Is the hour favorable? Do the aspects oppose? Aspect is the
relative position of two planets to each other. Every calendar from the
centuries which lie between you and me speaks of these aspects: of the
conjunction of the planets (when they are on the same meridian, and
consequently separated by no angular distance); their opposition (when in
a directly opposite part of the heavens); their quadrature (distance of
90°), trigon (120°), and hexagon (60°). If the blood-red Mars, or the pale
Saturn stand in quadrature or in opposition to one another, or to any of
the other wandering stars, this portends destruction. But to-day both
these planets are harmless; the aspects are good, and Mars itself being
in the first 'face' of its own house,[33] is consequently even kindly
disposed. Even the moon, whose assistance is needed, is in the house of a
friendly star, and in a favorable quadrature to Jupiter. Here we meet
consequently with no hindrances. It remains, however, on the side of
Astrology to find out what planets are the regents of the present year. In
other words, what planets form the first aspect of the year. Look here in
my calendarium. Mars was one of them. This suits us all the better as
to-day is Tuesday, Mars' own day, and as the hour will soon be here which,
on this day, he presides over absolutely.[34] It is therefore of
importance that we use in our incantation the martial part of my magical
apparatus. Among the elements fire is martial. We shall therefore kindle
a fire upon this altar. Among the planets, the thorny, poisonous and
nettle-like are martial. We shall therefore feed this fire with dry twigs
and rose-bushes. Among the animals the ferocious and bold are connected
with the blood-red star. Here you see three belts of lion's hide fringed
with the teeth of tigers, leopards and bears, and provided with clasps of
iron, because iron is the martial metal. Let us fasten those belts, when
the time has arrived, about our waists. Among the stones the diamond,
amethyst, jasper and magnet are martial. I show you here three diadems
which, though of pure iron, sparkle with these stones, and are furnished
with the signs and signatures of our planet. Here you have three iron
staves marked with the same signs: we must bear them in our hands. These
breast-plates studded with amethysts, whose Hebrew inscriptions and
characters refer to the same stars, we must wear over our hearts on the
outside of the white clothing which we shall put on before our incantation
begins. Here again you will notice three diamond rings: we shall wear them
on our middle finger during the solemn and awful moment for which we are
preparing. These two bells we place on the table; one of a reddish alloy
and furnished with iron rings, summons the martial spirit hither, the
other made of _electrum magicum_ (_i. e._, a proportional alloy of all
metals with some astral tincture added), serves to call celestial
reserve-forces of all kinds, if needed. Further, we require these
breast-plates and these rings of electrum, which do not bear the name of
any planet, but the glorious and blessed name of God himself, as a
protection for the conjurers against the conjured spirit. Who he is we
shall soon find. Observe here, further, a terrible arsenal which is also
necessary for our purpose. Mars is the star of war, murder and passion.
The demons of Mars have a corresponding nature, and there exists between
them and the tools by which their work on earth is accomplished, a power
of attraction. Therefore we have here this heavy sword with which the
magic circle is to be drawn; we therefore place in rows these skulls and
bones which have been collected in places of execution, these nails,
extracted from gallows, these daggers, knives and axes rusty with stains
of blood. We must not forget the incense which was kindled on the altar
shortly before the first citation. There is a different kind of incense
for every planet and its demons. That appropriate for Mars is composed of
euphorbia, bdellium, ammoniac, magnet, sulphur, brains of a raven, human
blood and the blood of a _black_ cat.[35] It is highly important that the
quality of this incense should be genuine. I might quote what Porphyrius
says upon this point; but confine myself to pointing out that it has an
influence on the conjurer as well as upon surrounding objects. It
saturates both the air and the breast of the conjurer with substances that
are connected with the planet and its demons. It draws down the conjured
being and intoxicates him, as it were, with divine influences, which act
on his mind and imagination. As a matter of course we must prepare
besides, such implements as are needed in every incantation without
bearing any relation to any certain planet. To them belong amulets
inscribed with the names of seraphs, cherubs and thrones, and with
sentences from the Bible and the sacred books of Zoroaster. To them belong
further the magical candlestick of electrum with seven branches, every
branch bearing the sign of a planet; and above all the pentagrams, those
figures with fine points which no demon can overstep. We shall place the
latter as a line of fortification around the magic circle, and we must be
sure that no one of the points is broken. Inside the circle between the
table, the seven-armed candlestick and the incense-altar there is room for
the tripod with the bowl of holy water and the sprinkler.

"Having thus made the necessary preparations for our feast, let us think
of the guest who is to be invited.

"The air of the evening is cool. I close the window, move my study lamp to
this table, and ask you to be seated around it. We must consult concerning
the invitation, in which we must follow the directions given in this
cabalistic manuscript.

"You have found from the table I first showed you that it is the orders of
Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones which are related by a reciprocal activity
to Mars. But these three orders constitute the highest celestial
hierarchy, which remain constantly in the presence of God and must not be
summoned hither even if we were able to do so. We may only implore their
assistance. The orders of Dominions, Powers and Empires are the only
intelligences connected with the stars. Among them we must address
ourselves to the spirits of Mars, since Mars is the regent of this year,
this day and of the intended incantation. The choice between the _good_
and the _evil_ spirits ruled by Mars is still open; but since it is not
our purpose to invoke by supplication but to compel by conjuration, we
must choose the wicked. This is no sin: it is only danger. It gives joy to
the good angels to see the power of God's image over their adversaries.
But we can not force the whole host of Mars' demons to appear in our
circle. We must select _one only_ among their legion and this one must be
well chosen. It is therefore necessary to know his name, for with spirits,
far more than men and terrestrial things, the name implies the essence and
the qualities of the named. The Cabala teaches us the infinite
significance of words and names. It proclaims and demonstrates the
mysteries which dwell in all the holy names of God; it reveals to us the
mysteries in the appellations of angels; it shows us that even the names
of men are intimately related to the place in creation and the temporal
destiny of those who bear them. Even names of material things show, though
less distinctly, a connection between the sound and the thing itself or
its nature. Who can hear, for instance, the words _wind_, or _swing_,
without perceiving in the very sound something airy or oscillating? Who
can hear _stand_, and _strong_, without perception of something stable and
firm?

"Let us hasten to find the name of the demon who is to be summoned.
Astrology as well as the Cabala gives various methods for this
purpose.[36] Let us choose the simplest, which is perhaps also the most
efficient.

"I must commence our work by pointing out the significance of number 72.
To this number correspond the seventy-two languages, the seventy-two
elders of the synagogue, the seventy-two interpreters of the Old
Testament and the seventy-two disciples of our Lord. This number is also
closely connected with the sacred number twelve. If the twelve signs of
the Zodiac are divided into six parts, we obtain the seventy-two so-called
celestial quinaries, into which the seventy-two mystical names of God, his
'_schemhamphoras_,' infuse their power and which are each of them presided
over by an angel-prince. The same number also corresponds to the joints of
the human frame; and there are many other correspondences.

"Well, while the Cabalists were searching out the sacred inner meaning of
the Bible; while they proceeded slowly, starting with the 'In the
beginning,' and stopping at every word, every letter, and found in every
word and every letter a mine of secrets,[37] they finally, after the
lapse of centuries, came as far as to the 19th verse in the 14th chapter
of Exodus, commencing: 'And the angel of God, which went before the camp
of Israel arose.' The cabalistical rule which says wherever, in the Bible,
an angel is spoken of, there is also the name of an angel hidden among the
Hebrew letters of the verse, admonished them to pause and consider. They
had at first no idea of the extraordinary discovery they were now on the
point of making. But their attention was attracted by the fact that there
were seventy-two letters in the verse (in the Hebrew text). Still more
surprised were they when they found that even the following verse, the
20th, contained exactly seventy-two letters; and then surprise grew into
awe when even the 21st verse showed the same number. In the Bible there is
no fortuity: a great secret was hidden here. Finally, by placing the three
verses, letter by letter (the middle verse written from left to right, the
others conversely), above one another, God's seventy-two mystical names
'_schemhamphoras_' each consisting of three letters, from the three
verses, was discovered. These names, provided with the suffix _el_ or
_jah_, are also the names of the seventy-two quinary angels, of which God
has said that his name is in them.

"Here in this cabalistic manuscript these names are preserved. Let us
select one of them at random. My eye happens to fall upon _Mizrael_ first.
We will take that. This high name of an angel which we may not invoke,
will give us the key to the name of the demon which is to appear
presently. Here is the table that will help us. The three root-consonants
of the word _Mizra(el)_ correspond to three others in the planet Mars,
which contain the name--let us pronounce it silently, let us merely
whisper it, for it is the name of the desired demon--_Tekfael_![38]

"The sum of the numerical value of the letters in this name is 488. A
remarkable number, every figure reminding us of the mystical _four_, of
the elements and of their correspondences! We shall commune with one of
the mightiest and most terrible among the demons. On the waxen tablet with
an iron frame, I now inscribe the name of the demon, adding the number
488, and these peculiar strokes which make up his signature. Time does not
allow me to tell you now the rules by which the signature is formed from
the name.[39]

"The preparations are now completed, it only remains to order the
apparatus, and to array ourselves. When we have put our implements in
order, consecrated the room, cleansed ourselves by a bath, put on the
white robe, wrapped a red mantle around (for red is the color of Mars),
buckled the girdle of Mars about our waists, assumed the diadem, the
breast-plates and the rings, I kindle on the altar my magical light, and
the fire for incense, and draw the magical circle. Then an intense prayer
for the protection of God, then the incantation.

"Here is the conjuration-book, the so-called Conjurer of Hell. I open at
the page on which the martial incantations begin. The book is placed
within the circle. When needed, I grasp it with the left hand; I hold the
staff with my right."...

The Gothic room in which the incantation was to take place, presented a
strange and at the same time solemn and awful aspect. The magician had
arranged with practiced hand the things before mentioned. The skulls, the
bones of men and beasts, the murderous weapons and the martial
essence-flasks, the various and indescribable fragments from all the
kingdoms of nature formed, nearest to the walls, different figures,
triangles, squares and pentagons. Red drapery was hung over the naked
walls. In the midst of the room and inside the circularly arranged
pentagram were the fire and incense-altar with holy water. On a table in
the rear, but partly within the circle, the magical lights were burning,
and diffused an uncertain whitish-yellow light over the objects. Near the
candlestick were the two bells. We were arrayed in our garments. The face
of my companion was pale as death: probably mine also.

"Courage, fortitude! ... or you are lost!" whispered the magician, whose
eye beamed with a dark, solemn determination, and whose every feature
expressed at this moment a terrible resolution.

These were his last words before the incantation. We were allowed to
answer nothing. I tried to be courageous, but my soul was shaken by a
dreadful expectation. The prayer and religious ceremonies which we had
performed after the bath and change of dress, had not diminished but only
intensified this feeling.

The night wind shook the windows hidden behind the heavy draperies. It
seemed as if ghosts from another world had been lurking behind the gently
waving curtains.

Even the skulls appeared to me to bode from their sunken, vacant eyes, the
arrival of something appalling. One of them attracted my attention for a
long time, or rather exercised on me the same influence which the eye of
the rattle-snake is said to have upon the bird which he approaches to
devour. I noticed in the eye a metallic lustre. It was the gleam of the
light reflected from a martial stone fastened in the skull.

In the mean time the magician had seized the blood-stained sword, and
drew, murmuring a prayer the while, a threefold magical circle around the
pentagram. Between the circumferences he wrote the names of the angels of
the year, the season, the day and the hour. Towards the east he made the
sign of _Alpha_, towards the west of _Omega_. Then he divided the circle
by a cross into four fields. He assigned two of them, those behind him, to
me and my companions. They were large enough to kneel upon. We were
strictly enjoined not to leave them, not to allow even a fold of our
mantles to wave outside the circle. Forgetfulness in this respect would
cost us our lives. The magician put aside his sword in a triangle outside
of the circle. He sprinkled himself and us with holy water, read
formularies over the incense and the thorn twigs, and kindled them. This
was the sign for us to give ourselves to prayer. We must not cease praying
until we had heard the first word of the incantation. The incense spread,
as it were, a dim transparent veil over the room. Here and there it was
condensed into strange figures: now human, now fantastic animal shapes
arose against the vaulted wall and sank again.

There must have been something narcotical in those vapory clouds. I looked
at them in a half dreaming state while my lips repeated inaudibly the
enjoined prayers.

I was aroused from this condition by the first word of the incantation
which struck my soul like a thunder-bolt, and awakened me to full
consciousness of my position and of the significance of the hour. The
blood in my veins seemed changed to ice.

The magician stood before me, tall, erect and commanding. He had taken the
incantation-book and now read from it with a hollow voice the first
citation, which begins with a long formulary invoking the different
mystical names of God.

I can not repeat the quotation. The highest and the lowest, the divine and
the infernal, that for whose sacredness we feel an irrepressible reverence
and that for whose impiety we experience the deepest horror, were united
here in the most solemn and the most terrible words that human tongue has
ever stammered. Now first I began to form an idea of the power of words.

The name of the demon was not yet uttered. The nearer the moment for its
pronunciation approached, the deeper became the voice of the magician. Now
came the formula of invocation, and now--resounded the name _Tekfael_.

It appeared as if a thousand-fold but whispering echo from the vault
above, from the corners of the room, from all the skulls and from the very
incantation-book itself, repeated that name.

The magician became silent, the incense was condensed and assumed a
reddish tint which gradually became more and more diffused. We seemed to
hear the thunder rolling, at first from a distance, then nearer, finally
over our heads. It was as if the tower had been shaken and the vault over
our heads been rent. My knees trembled. Suddenly a flash of lightning shot
through the red mass. The magician extended his staff, as if he had
wished to stop it. He raised his voice anew, strong and powerful amidst
the continued peals of thunder. The smoke grew thin again; from its
wreaths there appeared before the magician in the immediate vicinity of
the circle, and at the opposite end of his staff, a dim apparition, a
figure whose first aspect bereft me of my reason. I felt as if I had
fallen to the floor,--as if I had been lost....

I awakened with the perspiration of agony on my forehead, but fortunately
in my own bed and in the nineteenth century. The view from my window is
cheerful and enlivening. I see a river which bears proud ships, quays
swarming with men, and broad streets with houses in a graceful and light
_renaissance_ style. I lived again in the present which pleased me the
best, next to dreaming of the future....

They strove for something great, however, those learned magicians of the
Middle Ages. Theirs was a mighty imaginative creation. It lies in ruins
never to arise again; but the crumbled _debris_ testify to the belief in
an all-embracing human power and knowledge.

These learned magicians were likewise restless Faust-natures, as distinct
from the usual type of the learned of their time as Faust from the
pedantic _gloss_-proud, unaspiring milk-sop Wagner. While they paid their
tribute of weakness to tradition, and formed their system on received
dicta, it was among them that presentiments of the future began to stir,
and a longing for a clearer light than that with which the scholastics and
doctors _angelici et seraphici_ felt themselves well contented. When the
study of ancient Greece was recommencing, when the dawn of the
_renaissance_ appeared, it was these enthusiastic natures, still groping
among the dreams of magic art, that first began to awake and think. It was
a feeling of the insufficiency of the ruling theology and scholasticism
which had driven them into the temple of "secret philosophy." Since its
pillars were brought from diverse spheres of culture, distrust and fear of
magic had become more universal than directly ecclesiastical; they had
drunk as deeply from profane tradition as from Christian, considering them
both to flow from the same divine source: their writers quote Porphyrius
by the side of John, and the pretender Hermes by the side of Paul. The
courage with which they tried to burst open the portals of the
spirit-world served them afterwards when from the shores of their
childhood's belief they were to venture out on the ocean of thought.
Campanella, Vanini, Giordano Bruno, and Cardanus stand on the dividing
line between dogmatico-fantastical magic and a philosophy in the sense of
the old Greeks and of modern times. If already previously some magicians
of the old type had died from persecution, it was not to be wondered at
that such "atheists" as Vanini and Bruno must now ascend the pile.

The occult sciences of the Middle Ages with their origin not from paradise
and Noah's ark, as believed by their adherents, but from an ancient
Oriental culture and with their power over even the strongest and most
independent souls that could arise under the influence of a Church which
levels all thought, may properly remind those who are willing to forget
it, of a sad but incontestable truth: That humanity may embrace during the
course of many and long centuries with the most candid faith, and
construct with immense labor into a system, dogmas which have been
received without questioning, and which contain more of the false than of
the true, the great antiquity of which does not give them more claim for
validity than is possessed by the error which arose yesterday and vanished
to-day. No special divine influence has saved or will save the generations
from inheriting the errors less than the acquired truths of their
predecessors--no other divine influence, I should say, than the impulse we
feel to think for ourselves in order to attain to clearness.




IV.

THE MAGIC OF THE PEOPLE AND THE STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH AGAINST IT.


Wherever religious thought divides the empire of the world and humanity
into two absolutely opposed powers, a good and an evil, there it also
distinguishes two kinds of magic: the divine and the infernal. So with the
Persians who knew a white and a black magic. So also in the Middle Ages of
Christianity. The Greeks, on the contrary, knew nothing of this
distinction. The world being to them a harmonious whole, both in moral and
physical respects, magic was with them only a means of finding out and
using the secret powers in the harmonious cosmos; and the wonder-worker
who could not be thought of as deriving his powers from an evil source,
was undoubtedly a favorite of the gods and an equal with the heroes, not
unworthy of statues and temples, if he used his art for the benefit of
humanity. For the rest, magical speculation was with the Greeks more and
more pushed aside by philosophy,--by scepticism and rational
investigation, until on account of the nearer contact between Europe and
Asia, after the death of Alexander, it began again to exercise its
influence, and finally celebrated its triumph in that dualistic form of
religion which by the name of Christianity took possession of the
Occident.

The struggle which the spirit of orientalism waged on its march through
Europe, first against the Hellenic paganism, and then against the
Christian paganism which had penetrated into the Church itself, has been
briefly sketched above. When Christianity had spread later among the
Germanic and Slavic nations, there arose a new process of attraction and
repulsion between it and the natural religions of the barbarians, the
elements of which were partly blended with it and partly repelled by it.
The gods were transformed into devils, but their attributes and the
festivities in their honor were transferred to the saints. Pope Gregory
the Great ordained that the pagan festivities should be changed only
gradually to Christian, and that they were to be imitated in many
respects.[40]

In the time of Boniface there were many Christian priests in Germany who
sacrificed to Thor and baptized in the name of Jesus at the same time. Of
especial influence on the rapid spread of Christianity was the maxim of
Gregory not to be particular in the choice of proselytes, because hope was
to be placed in the better generations of the future. To be allowed to
attend divine service, and to be buried in the churchyard, it was only
necessary to have the benediction of the priest. Gifts to the Church,
pilgrimages, self-scourgings, repeating of prayers in Latin, opened the
gates of heaven to the proselytes easier than virtue and bravery those of
Valhall to the heathen. For the rest the pagan could enter the community
of the Church while retaining his whole circle of ideas. The Church did
not deny, but it confirmed, the real existence of every thing which had
been the object of his faith, but it treated these objects in accordance
with its dualistic scheme, sometimes elevating them to the plane of
sanctity, and again degrading them to something diabolical. Thus, for
instance, it changed the elementary spirits--which the Celts and Germans
believed in--from good or morally indifferent natural beings into fallen
angels, envying man his heavenly inheritance; and if a thinking heathen
could before accept or reject the existence of such beings at his
pleasure, it now, when he had become a proselyte, became a matter of
eternal bliss to believe in them. There was no superstitious idea gross
enough not to receive the signet of the Church; nay, the grosser it was,
the more likely was it to be appropriated. Even so cultured an intellect
as Augustine, the most prominent of the fathers and authors of his time,
declared it to be "insolent" to doubt the existence of fauns, satyrs and
other demoniac beings which lie in wait for women, have intercourse with
them and children by them.[41] Thus was laid the foundation of that
immense labyrinth of superstition in the darkness of which humanity has
groped during the thousand years of the Middle Ages.

In the rupture between the Church and the natural religion of the northern
peoples we find, in a certain sense, the same spectacle repeated which we
have seen in the struggle between the Christian and the Greco-Roman
culture. If the Neoplatonicians held up their Appolonius of Tyana as a
type of the Christian sorcerers, Celts, Germans and Northmen had also
their soothsayers endowed with supernatural powers whom the Christian
missionaries must excel in the power of working miracles, if they would
gain consideration for the new religion. There are many accounts of
bishops and priests who have worn gloves of fire, walked on white-hot
iron, and so forth, before the eyes of the astonished heathen. If the
miracles worked by the apostles of Christianity had their source in divine
agencies, then those performed by its opponents must have their origin in
the assistance of the devil. Already here the white magic stood opposed to
the black magic, the immediate and supernatural power of God in His agents
to the devil: and if the chief significance of the Church was to be an
institution for deliverance from the devil; if all her magical usages from
the sacrament to the amulet were so many weapons against his attacks; if
the pagan religions which had succumbed to Christianity were nothing but
varied kinds of the same _devil-worship_, and their priests, seers and
physicians but tools of Satan; then it was natural for all traditions from
the pagan time which the Church had not transformed and appropriated
should be banished within the pale of devil-worship, and partly also that
every act to which supernatural effects were ascribed, but which was not
performed by a Christian priest, or in the name of Jesus, should be
referred to a black magic, partly in fine that the possibility of an
immediate co-operation, a conscious league between the devil and men
should be elevated to a dogma.

A struggle between good and evil, between God and Satan, between church
and paganism, which is carried on with the weapons of miracles by two
directly opposed human representatives of these principles, was a theme
which must by necessity urge the power of creative imagination into
activity, and we find also in one of the oldest monuments of Christian
literature[42] a tale of this character. It is Simon Peter, the rock on
which the Church is built, who fights there against Simon the magician of
Samaria, mentioned in the Acts. When the cities of Asia Minor had
witnessed their emulation in miracle-working, the decisive battle was
fought out to the end in Rome. In the presence of the assembled people,
Simon the magician attempts an ascension into heaven, but falls and breaks
his legs because Simon Peter had commanded the evil spirits who were
carrying the magician towards the sky to let him drop. This fable appears
still further embellished in later ecclesiastical authors. It is soon
accompanied by others, such as that of Cyprianus, Theophilus, Militaris,
Heliodorus, and many others, who from love of earthly glory abjure Christ
and enter into solemn covenants with the devil. In the biography of the
holy Basilius, archbishop of Cæsarea and Cappadocia (he was a contemporary
of the apostate emperor Julian), there is a story of a young man who had
obtained from a heathen sorcerer a letter of recommendation to Satan. When
the young man, according to the precept of the magician, had gone to a
heathen grave and there taken out the letter, he was suddenly taken up and
borne to the place where Satan, surrounded by his angels, sat on a throne.
The youth abjured in writing his baptism and swore allegiance to his new
master. But after some time the apostate repented and confessed to the
holy Basilius what he had done. The bishop prayed for him forty days. When
at length the day had come that Satan according to the compact should bear
away his victim, the bishop had the young man placed in the midst of his
congregation. Satan arrived: a battle between him and the bishop
followed--a battle which was carried on with the people stretching forth
their hands imploring God for assistance, and was ended when the compact
fell from the claws of the fiend, and was torn by the bishop. The
before-mentioned Theophilus had likewise pawned his soul to the devil, but
the contract was restored to him after urgent supplication, by the holy
Virgin, after which, warned by his experience, he led a holy life, and
became Saint Theophilus before he closed his eyes. These early legends of
compacts between the devil and men end, as we see, with the sinner's
salvation; not so the later. If we now remember that it was one of the
dogmas proclaimed by the Church that all magical and miraculous arts not
performed by the priests in the name of Jesus were wrought by the devil;
that he gives his adherents power over nature and that the demons as
"_incubi_" and "_succubi_" seek and obtain carnal intercourse with human
beings,[43] we discover already in the ideas of the first Christian
centuries the elements of the sorcery of the Middle Ages. And when we read
further the accusations which the first Christian sects hurled against one
another,--when we learn that the party which was raised by the Council of
Nice to the orthodox position accused the Gnostics, Marcionites and Arians
of devil-worship, confederacy with Satan and sorcery, we meet already here
that union of heresy and sorcery by which the Church of the Middle Ages
acquired such a fearful weapon against dissenters,--a union which must not
be looked upon as a mere casual invention of wickedness and theological
hatred, but as the necessary consequence of the whole dualistic theory of
morals, as the necessary fruit of the belief in devils.

A long time must have been required for the festivals common to the
natural religions of Europe to become extinct or be remodelled into
Christian form. The external practices by which religious ideas obtain a
sensuous expression, possess generally more tenacious power of existence
than the ideas themselves, and continue in existence when these have
disappeared, as the shell after the death of the nautilus. In certain
religions of natural development adoration of the sun and the moon are the
most important. Among the Celtic, Germanic and Slavic tribes, as before
among Hebrews and Phoenicians, these divinities of the light were adored
by kindling fires, by sacrifices and banquets on mountains and in groves,
especially at the time of the vernal equinox (Easter), at the beginning of
May (Valpurge's night), and on the night of the summer solstice. From the
fact that traces of the custom still exist in our own day, though its
original significance is lost, we can all the more safely assume that it
continued to exist without interruption, openly at first, then in secret,
retaining its significance, in spite of the efforts of spiritual and
profane authorities to extirpate it, and assuming more and more in the
popular mind that character of devil-worship with which the Church has
branded these reminiscences, from heathen times. And when finally it
ceased entirely, or was changed into seasons of popular festivity which
had no dangerous suggestiveness even in the eyes of the Church, still the
remembrance of the demoniacal festivals of mountain and grove must have
been inherited from generation to generation, and then it was but another
step to believe that they still continued and were participated in by
persons who practiced magical arts, and had been invested with the
suspicious wisdom of the ancient valas and druids--the female seers and
physicians of the pagans. That the notion of the Witches' Sabbath, which
was celebrated on the night before the first of May, and of the paschal
journey of the witches to Blokulla have this historical origin is very
probable. The ecclesiastical literature from the first half of the Middle
Ages does not leave us without significant hints apparently corroborating
this opinion. St. Egidius, who died in 659 A. D., speaks frequently
against the _fire-worship_, practiced during midsummer nights, which as
inherited from pagan forefathers was accompanied with dancing, and against
the invocation of the sun and moon (which he calls "the demons Hercules
and Diana"), and against worshipping in groves and by trees, springs and
crossroads. The apostle of the Allemans, St. Firminus, who died in 754 A.
D., preaches against the same customs, and especially dwells on the
pertinacity with which old women adhere to the infernal festivals with
their magical songs and dances. Modern authors on the subject in question
speak of a _synodal decree_ which is said to date back to the council of
Ancyra in 314 A. D., and which enjoins the bishops especially to watch the
godless women who, deceived by the delusions of the demons, imagine that
they traverse in the night, in the company of Diana and Herodias and
riding on certain animals, wide tracts of country, and are required to
assemble for a certain number of nights by the command of their mistress.
But although this synodal decree is spurious and belongs to a far later
period and a different locality (it is referred to for the first time in
the ninth century, in a work composed by the Abbot Regino[44]), it is old
enough to deserve our attention here. To the decree is appended a number
of questions which the bishops must put to such women in confession. Among
them are the following, which connect immediately the witch-journey with
heathen traditions:--

"Have you followed the practice inherited from the heathen of considering
the course of the stars, the moon and the eclipses of the new moon? And
have you imagined that by the exclamation 'Conquer, moon' (_vince, Luna_),
you could reproduce its light? When you wished to pray, have you resorted
to other places than the church, as, for instance, to springs, stones,
trees or crossroads? Have you there kindled fires and sacrificed bread or
aught else?"

John of Salisbury, who died A. D. 1182, writes of women who, led by a
"night-queen," assemble and celebrate banquets at which they most relish
children stolen from their cradles. He still supposed that this may not
really be a fact, but only demoniacal illusions, phantasmagorial tricks
played by the devil, and empty dreams, especially as such things happen
among women, and not among men, who possess a stronger reason. The same
view of the case is held by William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris (died A.
D. 1248). But already during the life of this prelate the belief in the
reality of witch-feasts was sanctioned by the authority of Pope Gregory
IX., and every doubt in regard to it was declared to be heresy.

At the same time the connection between heresy and witchcraft was revived
and confirmed by the Church, so that all heretics were to be considered as
the sworn subjects of the devil, and initiated into sorcery, even though
not all sorcerers and witches were necessarily heretics. The Church at
this time threatened by several newly arisen sects, had recourse to every
expedient to uphold its hierarchy and the unity of confession. In the year
1223 Gregory IX. promulgated a letter which exhorted to a crusade against
the Stedinghs, a sect which had spread themselves in Friesland and Lower
Saxony. He accused them of worshipping and having secret communion with
the prince of darkness. According to the papal edict the Stedinghs
considered the devil as the real and the good deity, expelled by the other
and the evil from heaven, but returning thither in the fulness of time,
when the usurper on account of his extreme tyranny, cruelty and injustice
had made himself hated by the race of men and had finally become convinced
of his own incapability and powerlessness. In truth if such a belief had
sprung up it would not have been strange. Everywhere the power and the
influence of the devil was seen, but nowhere God's, if not in the bloody
and terrible laws and oppressive social system which were declared by
spiritual and profane authorities to be divine. The very theory by which
the Church sought to save for God his attribute of omnipotence--the theory
of consent, according to which the devil exercises such power only by
God's permission--this very theory was suited to augment the confusion and
the terror. "Never," says Bunsen,[45] "has there been a time when a divine
and universal government was so much despaired of as in the Middle Ages."
Bunsen inclines to the view of the French historian Michelet, that from
the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, after the Waldenses and
Albigenses in France had been exterminated by Romish persecution, and the
lower classes had been reduced to serfs, a religion of despair, a real
Satanic _cultus_ sprang up, and that the Witches' Sabbath was in fact
founded upon nightly congregations, in which thousands of brutalized men
driven by misery and oppression gathered themselves together in order to
worship the devil and invoke his aid. But there exists no absolutely
certain historical fact to prove that such meetings have really taken
place. We consider it more probable, as pointed out above, that the
Witches' Sabbath was as it were the lingering twilight, constantly
deepening, and constantly painted in more monstrous colors, after the day
of the degraded festivals in the religion of nature,--an incubus of
imagination which oppressed the bosom of humanity buried in a world of
dreams; and that nothing more than the belief in its reality, which the
Church sanctioned, was necessary to produce the phenomena we describe. The
Waldenses and the Albigenses were treated like the Stedinghs. "Let the
judges know," writes an inquisitor, "that the sorcerers, the witches and
the devil-workers are almost all Waldenses. The Waldenses are by
profession, essentially and formally, devil-workers; and though not all
conjurers, still conjuration and Waldenseism have much in common." The
highest authorities of the Church constantly nourished that awe of the
devil and his tools which filled the mind, and they could do it without
scruple, being themselves seized by the same terror. Thus John XXII.
promulgated, A. D. 1303, two letters, in which he complains that he
himself, not less than countless numbers of his sheep, was in danger of
his life by the arts of sorcerers who could send devils into mirrors and
rings, and make away with men by their words alone. He mentions especially
that his enemies have sought to kill him by piercing dolls which they had
baptized with his name by needles, invoking the aid of the devil. It is
needless to point out what influence such proclamations from Christ's
vicar, the infallible head of the Church, would exercise over the common
mind. The dualistic philosophy ripened more and more until that terrible
crisis which broke out in the fifteenth century. That crisis was preceded
by the trial of the Templars and by several great but local
witch-processes, with subsequent executions, until finally, Dec. 5th,
1484, the bull of Pope Innocent VIII., "Ad forturan rei memoriam,"
appeared. This bull with its companion, the "Witch-hammer" (Malleus
Malificarum), composed by the monk and inquisitor Sprenger, brought the
evil to its climax. Hell was no longer a mere product of the imagination:
we see it established on earth in dread reality and stretching its
dominion over all Christendom.

Our space does not allow us to reproduce in a literal translation this
bull of Pope Innocent, written in barbarous Latin worthy of its
subject.[46] We must, however, give some account of its contents. "The
serf of God's serfs" begins by testifying the care which as the guardian
of souls he must exercise in promoting the growth of the Catholic faith
and driving the infamy of heresy far from the proximity of the faithful.
"But," he continues, "it is not without profound grief that I have learned
recently that persons of both sexes, forgetting their own eternal welfare
and erring from the Catholic faith, mix with devils, with _incubi_ and
_succubi_, and injure by witch songs, conjurations and other shameful
practices, revelries, and crimes, the unborn children of women, the young
of animals, the harvests of the fields, the grapes of the vineyards and
the fruit of the trees; that they also destroy, suffocate and annihilate
men, women, sheep and cattle, vineyards, orchards, meadows, and the like;
visit men, women, cattle and other animals with internal and external
pains and sickness; prevent men from procreation and women from
conception, and render them entirely unfit for their mutual duties, and
cause them to recant, besides, with sacrilegious lips, the very faith
which they have received in baptism."... The pope therefore appoints his
beloved sons, the professors of theology Henry Institor and Jacob
Sprenger, to be prime inquisitors with absolute power over all districts
which are contaminated with those diseases; and since he knows that there
are persons who are not ashamed to insist upon their perverse assertion
that such crimes are only imaginary, and should not be punished, he
threatens them, whatever be their position or dignity, with the severest
punishments, in case they dare to counteract in any way the inquisitors,
or interfere in behalf of the accused. Finally, he proclaims that no
appeal from the tribunals of the inquisitors to other courts, not even to
the pope himself, will be allowed. The inquisitors and their assistants
are invested with unlimited power over life and death, and are exhorted to
fulfil their commission with zeal and severity.

The bull contains no further indications as to how the judges should
proceed in the trial of witches. The "Witch-hammer" was allowed to
establish its own norm of procedure. It is of importance here to give a
résumé of the contents of this book, since it became a juridical authority
which was followed in all countries, even in the Protestant, until after
the beginning of the eighteenth century. The spirit of the time can not be
better characterized than by this book; in no clearer or more tangible
way can it be shown whither supernatural ideas in cosmic philosophy will
lead, and how they finally will destroy reason, morality, human feeling,
and change the world into a mad-house.

The book to which the bull of Pope Innocent and a diploma from the emperor
Maximilian serve as a commendatory introduction, begins with an apology
intended to show that its author does not introduce any thing novel and
untried, but that its theories are entirely founded upon the Scriptures.
To prove this he quotes passages from the Old and New Testaments, from the
fathers, the decrees of the councils, the canonical letters, from the
writings of Thomas Aquinas, Damianus and others. The devil, says the
"Witch-hammer," has no power indeed to suspend natural laws, but the Bible
shows incontestably that God has vouchsafed him a wide dominion over the
natural powers of corporeal things. Witness only the history of Job, and
the temptation of Jesus in the desert. Further, the existence of the many
demoniacs spoken of in the New Testament proves that Satan can dwell in
man and use the human body as his implement. "But," says the
"Witch-hammer," constantly aiming to deduce all its conclusions ostensibly
according to logic, "there must be no confusion between demoniacs and
witches. The existence of the former does not prove the existence of the
latter; this must be demonstrated in a different way. And this is the
proof: The devil as a spiritual being is not capable of a real corporeal
contact. He must therefore make use of an instrument to which he imparts
his power; for every bodily effect is produced by contact. These
instruments are the sorcerers and the witches. It being then incontestable
on the one side that the power of the devil is great, and on the other
that he can accomplish nothing without the aid of sorcerers and witches,
the necessary conclusion is that these must exist. This conclusion is for
the rest most decisively confirmed by the Bible. Moses ordains that
witches should be put to death, a command which would be entirely
superfluous if witches had not existed. He who asserts that there are no
witches must therefore rightly be accounted a heretic."

The "Witch-hammer" then broaches the question, why it is that women are
especially addicted to sorcery, and answers it as follows: The holy
fathers have often said that there are three things which have no
moderation in good or evil: _the tongue_, a _priest_, and a _woman_.
Concerning woman this is evident. All ages have made complaints against
her. The wise Solomon, who was himself tempted to idolatry by women, has
often in his writings given the feminine sex a sad, but true, testimonial;
and the holy Chrysostom says: "What is woman but an enemy of friendship,
an unavoidable punishment, a necessary coil, a natural temptation, a
desirable affliction, a constantly flowing source of tears, a wicked work
of nature covered with a shining varnish?" Already had the first woman
entered into a sort of compact with the devil; should not then her
daughters do it also? The very word _femina_ (woman) means _one wanting in
faith_; for _fe_ means "faith," and _minus_ "less."[47] Since she was
formed of a crooked rib, her entire spiritual nature has been distorted
and inclined more towards sin than virtue. If we here compare the words of
Seneca, "Woman either loves or hates; there is no third possibility," it
is easy to see that when she does not love God she must resort to the
opposite extreme and hate him. It is thus clear why women especially are
addicted to the practice of sorcery.[48]

It might now be asked: How is it possible that God permits sorcery? The
"Witch-hammer" answers that God has allowed, without any detriment to his
perfections, the fall of angels and of our first parents; and as he
formerly sanctioned persecutions against the Christians, that the glory of
the martyr might be increased, so he also now permits sorcery that the
faith of the just may be the more manifest.

The crime of the witches exceeds all other. They unite in one person the
heretic, the apostate, and the murderer. The "Witch-hammer" proves that
they are worse than the devil himself, for he has fallen once for all, and
Christ has not suffered for him. The devil sins therefore only against the
Creator, but the witch both against the Creator and the Redeemer.

It is with these and similar questions that the first part of the
"Witch-hammer" is occupied. The second part, describing the various kinds
and effects of witchcraft and the celebration of the Witches' Sabbath is
prefaced with an account of the power of witches. They produce hail,
thunder and storms whenever they wish; they fly through the air from one
place to another; they can make themselves insensible on the rack; they
often subdue the judge's mind by charms, and _confuse him through
compassion_; they deprive men and animals of reproductive power; they can
see the absent, and predict coming events; they can fill, at their
pleasure, human hearts with relentless hatred and passionate love; they
destroy the foetus in the womb, cause miscarriages, change themselves
and others into cats and were-wolfs; nay, they are able to enchant and
kill men and beasts by their very looks. Their strongest passion is to eat
the flesh of children; still they eat only unchristened children: if at
any time a baptized child is taken by them, it happens by special divine
concession.

Their compact with the devil is of two kinds: either a solemn one entered
into with all formalities, or a mere private contract. The former is
concluded as follows: The witches assemble upon a day set apart by the
devil. He appears in the assembly, exhorts them to faithfulness, and
promises them glory, happiness and long life, and orders the older
witches to introduce the novices whom he puts to the test and causes to
take the oath of allegiance; whereupon he teaches them to prepare from the
limbs of new-born babes witch-potions and witch-salves, and presents them
with a powder, instructing them how it is to be used to the injury of men
and beasts.[49] When then the novice has renewed the ceremony of
allegiance on the next Witch Sabbath she is a genuine witch. The children
needed for the witches' kettles and the sabbath banquets are obtained as
follows: The victims are killed by looks or by the above-mentioned powder,
when they lie in their cradle or in bed with their mothers. Simple people
will then believe that they have died from some natural cause,--from
sickness or suffocation. Then when buried the witches steal them from the
grave. It has happened that judges have opened, after similar confessions,
the grave and found the child in it; but in such cases the judge must
consider that the devil is a great taskmaster who may have cheated the
eyes of the servants of justice, in order to protect his servants, and in
such a case the confession of the witch (forced from her by torture)
should prove more than the easily deluded vision of the judge. [What a
triumph of supernaturalistic argumentation!]

The witch accomplishes her aerial voyages, says the "Witch-hammer," by
smearing a vessel, a broom and a rake, a broomstick and a piece of linen,
with the witch-salve; then rising she moves forth through the air, visible
or invisible, according to her choice. The "Witch-hammer" reminds those
who doubt these air-voyages, of Matt. iv. 5, where it is related how the
devil carried Jesus up through the air to the pinnacle of the temple.

We now proceed to the third part of the "Witch-hammer," the criminal law
of the witch-courts, which gives instructions how "sorcerers, witches and
heretics are to be tried before spiritual as well as civil tribunals."

In regard to preliminary forms of procedure, the "Witch-hammer" lays down
first, "That the trial may commence without any previous accusation, and
on the strength of a simple report that witches are found somewhere; for
it is the duty of the judge in a case fraught with many dangers to the
soul, not to wait for an informer or accuser, but, _ex officio_, to
institute immediate inquiry." When an inquisitor comes to a city or a
village, he must exhort every body by means of proclamations nailed to the
doors of churches and town-halls, and by threats of excommunication and
punishment, to give information of all persons in any way suspected of
the least connection with the practice of witchcraft, or otherwise of bad
repute. The informers may be rewarded if the inquisitor thinks it well, by
the blessing of the Church, and with money. A box to receive the
statements of such informers as wish to be unknown should be placed in the
Church.

Two or three witnesses are sufficient to prove guilt. In case so many do
not present themselves, then the judge may take means to find and summon
them, and force them to tell the truth under oath. He has also the right
to examine witnesses previous to the actual trial. As for the
qualifications necessary to appear as witnesses, the "Witch-hammer"
declares that the excommunicate, accomplices, outlawed, runaway and
dissolute women are irreproachable witnesses in cases where the faith is
involved. A witch is allowed to testify against a witch, wife against
husband, husband against wife, children against parents and so on, but if
the testimonies of accomplices or relatives are to the advantage of the
accused, then they are of no validity; _for blood is of course thicker
than water_, and one raven does not willingly pick out the eyes of
another.

The "Witch-hammer" allows an accused to have an advocate, but adds: "If
the counsellor defends his suspected client too warmly, it is right and
reasonable that he should be considered as far more criminal than the
sorcerer or the witch herself; that is to say, as the protector of witches
and heretics, he is more dangerous than the sorcerer. He should be looked
upon with suspicion in the same degree as he makes a zealous defence." But
a trial may be difficult enough without being clogged and hampered by a
cunning advocate. In order to confuse such a one and ensnare the accused,
it is necessary, says the "Witch-hammer," that a judge should remember the
words of the apostle, "_Being crafty I caught you with guile_," and show
himself crafty. The "Witch-hammer" informs the judge of five "honest and
apostolical tricks" (these are the very words of the book); one of them
consists in embodying in the copy of the proceedings which is given to the
defending lawyer, a number of facts that have not occurred in the trial,
and in mixing the names of the witnesses. "By that means the accused and
their lawyer may be so confused that they nowise know who has said any
thing, or what has been said."

Among the questions to be put to a person under accusation, the
"Witch-hammer" recommends a number, the quality of which may be
appreciated by reading the following examples: "Do you know that people
hold you to be a witch? Why have you been observed upon the precincts of
N. N.? Why have you touched N. N.'s child (or cow)? How did it happen that
the child (or the cow) soon after fell sick? What was your business
outside of your house when the storm broke forth? How can you explain that
your cow yields three times as much milk as the cows of others?"

Sprenger's work gives a detailed account of the treatment to which a
person who is accused of sorcery and handed over to the judge must be
subjected. Before the trial the accused must be put on the rack in order
that his mind may be inclined to confession. Some, rather than confess
their guilt, allow themselves to be torn asunder limb by limb; they are
"the worst witches," and their endurance is explained by the supposition
"that the devil hardens them against their tortures." Others who have been
less faithful to him he abandons, and are thus easily induced to confess.
"If no confession has been wrung from the witch during the first day"--we
quote the "Witch-hammer" literally--"the torture is to be continued the
second and the third day. The civil law forbids, to be sure, to _repeat_
the torture, when no proof has been adduced, but it may be _continued_."

The judge should therefore use the following formula: "We ordain that the
torture shall be _continued_ (not _repeated_) to-morrow."

The second day the instruments of torture are to be exhibited to the
accused, and an attending priest shall read the following adjuration: "I
adjure thee, N. N., in the name of the Holy Trinity, by the bitter tears
of Jesus Christ which he shed upon the cross ... by the tears of God's
saints and elect which they have shed over the world ... that, if thou art
innocent, thou pour forth immediately abundant tears; but, if thou art
guilty, no tears at all. In the name of God our Father, the Son and the
Holy Ghost. Amen."

The person thus adjured seldom weeps. But if this should occur, the judge
should see that it be not saliva or some other fluid that moistens the eye
of the witch. The witch must be led into the court-room backwards, that
the judge may see her before she sees him. Otherwise she may enchant him
and move him to criminal compassion.

Before the examination of witnesses, the accused must be stripped of all
her clothing and have all the hair on her body shaved off, and her limbs
must be carefully examined to ascertain if they bear marks, for the
devil marks his own. It must be further ascertained by pricking with a
needle if any part of the body is devoid of feeling, for that is a sure
sign of a witch. Still the absence of such a sign nowise proves innocence.

If the witch can not be made to confess by any means, then the judge must
send her to a distant prison. The janitor, some friend and chaste women
are to be persuaded to visit the prisoner, and promise to help her to
escape, if she will only inform them of some of her arts. In this way,
remarks the author of the "Witch-hammer," many a one has been ensnared by
us.

We conclude here our account of Sprenger's dreadful book. The reader has
contemplated sufficiently this fruit on the tree of the devil.--It may
fill us with loathing to consider it, but its teachings are instructive.
May we know the tree from the fruit, and may we tear it up with its
roots--with those roots yet so abundantly watered by men who know not what
they are doing. The fires which the bull of Pope Innocent kindled all
over Europe, threw their weird light far into the times which have been
called the modern,--far in the eighteenth century. To count these victims
of the stake would be impossible. It is, however, sometimes attempted in
our days; archives are searched through and discoveries are made which
surpass every anticipation. The victims amount to millions.

No age was spared. Children were brought to the stake with their mothers.
A silent, gloomy presentiment seized every community when the proclamation
on the church doors announced that the inquisitor had arrived. All work in
the shops and fields ceased, and all the evil passions flared up into
greater activity. He who had an open enemy, or suspected secret envy, knew
beforehand that he was lost. It was considered better to anticipate than
to be anticipated in denouncing; and the tribunal had hardly commenced its
activity, ere it was overcrowded with informers. "When they had commenced
in one place to burn witches," says an author of the seventeenth century,
"more were found in proportion as they were burned." In various
communities in Germany and France _all_ the women were sent to the stake.
In many instances it went so far that princes and potentates were forced,
from fear of seeing their subjects exterminated, to stay by _authoritative
command_ the madness of the inquisitors. Greed brought fuel to the flames
which superstition and hatred kindled. We will quote but one example from
the history of the Scotch witch-processes. A man named Hopkins who was
sent to the gallows, convicted of murder, confessed there that he had
brought two hundred women to the stake, and for a recompense of twenty
shillings each,--a sum with which the judge rewarded him.

And there was heard in all Europe for many centuries not a single voice
raised in the effort to stay the murder with weapons of reason or
religion! If there was any who did not share the madness of his time, fear
paralyzed his tongue, and learning and religion, far from impeding the
evil, had yoked themselves to its triumphal ear. With the Bible in their
hands, the theologians sanctioned these barbarous proceedings, and the
learned defended them with reasons drawn from the fathers and with subtle
argumentation. The Protestant theologians vied with the Catholic in
learning. Even Luther and the first reformers did not check, but promoted,
the belief in devils. If paganism had been described by the fathers as
Satan's work and empire, Luther referred the preceding life of the Church
from the beginning of papacy to the same sphere, and changed the whole
history of humankind to a diabolical drama. The struggle between the
Reformation and Catholicism contributed in still another way to intensify
the faith in devils. The religious contest stirred the mind of the age in
its innermost depths. Many who occupied middle ground between the
reforming preacher on the one hand and the Catholic priest on the other,
were hesitating between the old and the new, and many consciences which
had already embraced the new were agitated by uneasiness and doubt. The
Catholic divine saw in these doubts the beginning of the victory over
Satanic error; the Protestant theologian declared the same doubts to be
inspired by the originator of papacy, the devil. We can appreciate this
state of things by reading Luther's "Tischreden." Men terrified, for
instance, by a dream or a strange noise in the night (nothing more than
this was required for such an effect) hurried to their pastor to lay their
troubles before him. They were then informed, on the one hand, that the
dream or the voice was caused by the devil, to whom their apostacy had
bound them over, or, on the other, that Satan was trying to frighten them
back into the errors which they had abandoned. In both cases the archfiend
was the agent. "He was in the castle of the knight, the palaces of the
mighty, the libraries of the learned, on every page of the Bible, in the
churches, in the halls of justice, in the lawyer's chambers, in the
laboratories of physicians and naturalists, in cottages, farmyards,
stalls,--everywhere."[50]

He was indeed everywhere, and Christendom had become a hell. "The belief
in the devil," says a British author,[51] speaking upon this subject, "had
had the effect, that all rational knowledge had disappeared, that all
sound philosophy was denounced, that the morality of the people was
poisoned and humanity sunk in a whirlpool of folly, godlessness and
brutality. All classes were carried away by this whirlpool. The God of
nature and Revelation had no longer the reins of the world in his hand.
The powers of hell and darkness, born of a diseased imagination, reigned
upon the earth."

       *       *       *       *       *

Throwing its gloomy shadow even into the eighteenth century, it was,
however, during the Middle Ages that the belief in sorcery sent down its
deep and mighty roots. This is not to be wondered at. The men of the
Middle Ages lived less in the real than in a world of magic, in a world
resembling more the paintings of "Helvetes-Breughels" than the
descriptions of Armidas isle. The air was saturated with demoniacal
vapors. The popular literature consisted of legends of saints and stories
about the devil. The Church, the general asylum against the devil, saw and
taught the people to see everywhere the play of evil powers which must be
conquered by magical practices, and amidst Ahriman and his hosts who had
now established themselves in the Occident, and as heirs to the horns and
tails of Pans and fauns, a crowd of native spirits moved; imps, giants,
trolls, forest-spirits, elves and hobgoblins in and on the earth; nicks,
river-sprites in the water, fiends in the air, and salamanders in the
fire. And to these elementary spirits were added a whole fauna of
monsters, such as dragons, griffins, were-wolves, witch-kine,
Thor's-swine, and so on. But this does not conclude the review: spectres,
ghosts, vampires, spirits causing the nightmare, and so on,--supernatural
beings derived from the human world, but of dimmer outlines than the
preceding,--conclude the motley procession. The mandrake has a place in
it also. This being deserves a few lines here, inasmuch as it has now
faded from the popular superstitions.

The mandragora or alrun[52] is originally a very rare herb which can
hardly be found except below the gallows where a pure youth has been
hanged.[53] He who seeks the herb should know that its lower part has the
shape of a human being, and that its upper part consists of broad leaves
and yellow flowers. When it is torn from the soil it sighs, shrieks and
moans so piteously, that he who hears it must die. To find it one should
go out before sunrise on a Friday morning, after having filled his ears
carefully with cotton, wax or pitch, and bring with him a black dog
without one white hair. The sign of the cross must be made three times
over the mandrake, and the soil dug up carefully all around it, so that it
be attached only by the fine rootlets. It is then tied by a string to the
tail of the dog and he is attracted forward by a piece of bread. The dog
pulls the plant out of the earth, but falls dead, struck by the terrible
shriek of the mandragora. It is then brought home, washed in red wine,
wrapped in red and white silk, laid in a shrine, washed again every
Friday, and dressed in a white frock. The mandragora reveals hidden things
and future events, and procures for the owner the friendship of all men. A
silver coin deposited with it in the evening is doubled in the morning.
Still the coin must not be too large in size. If you buy the mandragora it
remains with you, throw it wherever you will, until you sell it again.
If you keep it till your death you must depart with it to hell. But it can
be sold only for a lower price than it was bought. Therefore is he who has
bought it with the smallest existing coin, irretrievably lost.

The being called mandragora was, as we see, a kind of "_Spiritus
familiaris_." But it appeared in still another form. It happened that
adventurers represented themselves as mandragoras, and on account of this
mystical origin had gained success at court, having first been spiritually
made human by Christian baptism. But they lost by baptism their
wonder-working power, greatly to their own and others' pecuniary
disadvantage. Still greater was the number of those adventurers during the
Middle Ages who asserted themselves or others to be the bastards of devils
and human beings. But if they led a blameless life, evincing a firm belief
in the dogmas of the Church, the danger of such a pedigree was not greater
than the honor. The son of a fallen angel did not need to bend his head
before a man of noble birth.

In the demoniacal fauna of the Middle Ages the were-wolf plays too
important a role to be passed over in silence. He was the terror of rural
districts. Were-wolves are men who change themselves for a time into
wolves, and then rove about hunting for children. The belief in the
were-wolf is very ancient. Antique authors speak of it as a superstition
among the Scythians, and among shepherds and peasants in the eastern
provinces.[54] Then the change was considered to result from certain herbs
growing in Pontus; in the Middle Ages it was the devil who wrapped a
wolf's hide around the witch or the enchanted person. Even this belief was
embraced and proclaimed by Augustine. Augustine,--the same father who
declared that he would not believe the gospel if the authority of the
Church did not exhort him to do so,--found it worthy of a Sadducean or a
pagan philosopher alone to deny the existence of so well-known a
phenomenon as the were-wolf. The emperor Sigismund had the question
investigated "scientifically" in his presence by theologians, and they
came to the general agreement that the were-wolf is "a positive and
constant fact"; for the existence of the devil being accepted, there is no
reason to deny that of the were-wolf, sup-ported as it is by the authority
of the fathers of the Church and by general experience.[55] This "general
experience" finally became, like the belief in sorcery, a raging mental
disease, an epidemic ("_insama zoanthropica_") infecting whole districts
in various parts of Europe and sending many insane persons who had
confessed before the courts their imagined sin, to the place of
execution.[56]

Nearly related to this lycanthropy is the more horrible vampirism. The
vampires, according to the belief of the Middle Ages, are disembodied
souls which clothe themselves again in their buried bodies, steal at night
into houses, and suck from the nipple of the sleeping all their blood. He
who is thus bereft of the vital fluid is in his turn changed into a
vampire and visits preferably his own relatives. If the corpse of a person
suspected of vampirism is dug up, and its stomach pressed, an abundance of
fresh blood flows from the mouth. The corpse is well preserved. The belief
in vampires has likewise produced a kind of psychical pestilence which yet
in the eighteenth century spread terror in the Austrian provinces.[57]

If sorcery was an imaginary people's magic, there existed also a real,
and it consisted in an infinite variety of usages, observances and rules
for all conditions of life. Not to speak of the astrologers' extensive
hand-written calendars, which pointed out which constellations, seasons
and days are auspicious for bathing, bleeding, hair-cutting, shaving,
house-building, wooing, engaging servants, setting out on travels and so
on, there existed among the people an incredibly large mass of rules for
living which any body that would avoid the constant danger of bringing
misfortune on himself and his family, must know.

From waking up in the morning to going asleep at night, such maxims were
to be observed: putting the wrong foot first out of bed in the morning was
as sure to be followed by annoyances in the course of the day as a neglect
to place the shoes with the heels toward the bed at night was certain to
cause the visit of ghosts or evil dreams. When children are born, no one
must go out or in, or open the door without bringing fire with him, that
the trolls may not find their way in and exchange the child; and no one
entering must say a word before he has touched the fire. For the same
reason the child, while unchristened, must be watched carefully every
night, and a fire must be kept constantly burning on the hearth. Before
the christening a child must not be moved from one room to another without
putting steel beside it. If two boys are baptized on the same occasion,
that one who obtains his name and blessing first will be best endowed both
bodily and mentally. On the day of christening the mother should avoid
handling an axe, knife or other cutting instruments, otherwise the child
will some time be murdered. If the floor under a cradle is swept, the
child will be bereft of its sleep. If the cradle is moved while the child
is not in it, the child becomes peevish. When a child yawns, the sign of
the cross must be made over its mouth, and the words "Jesus, God's son!"
added; otherwise the devil will then enter into it. If a child looks out
through the window or looks in a mirror at night, it will fall sick.
Children punished on Sunday become disobedient; but a child whipped on
Good Friday before sunset, will become obedient and well-behaved. If the
child walks about in one shoe, the mother will have a sore back. If a
child walks or runs backwards, it drives its parents so many steps into
hell. A child eating and reading at the same time gets a bad memory. If a
suitor's first gift to his betrothed consists of shoes, she will be
unfaithful, if of stockings, she will be jealous. Nuptials on Mondays,
Wednesdays and Saturdays are unfortunate. If a bridal procession comes to
a stop for any reason, the married pair will meet with dissensions. If the
marriage-ring is too small, misfortune is in store. Of the bridal pair,
that one dies first who first kneels down or rises from kneeling. Those
who hold the canopy must not change hands or touch the bride's crown, for
that prognosticates misfortune and ennui. If in going out an old woman or
one carrying water is met, the room should be re-entered. When the table
is set, the bread must be laid upon it immediately. Bread must never be
placed with the upper crust down. Great care must be taken to remove all
substances separated from the body, as hair, nails, blood; they must be
buried in the soil so as not to come in contact with diseased persons, or
fall into the hands of witches.

We have selected the preceding observances and rules as examples of those
thousands of precepts for all conditions of life which have been collected
by investigations in this field from the mouths of the people. A full
collection would require a large volume. In all of them is seen a servile
fear of mysterious evil influences, lurking on all sides, and whose power
or impotency as regards man nowise depends on his morality, but only on
the way in which he observes certain ethically indifferent acts. Many of
them seem to have arisen only by faulty application of the theory of
causality; others depend on a symbolical method of contemplating nature.
What a difference between this popular wisdom and that stored up in the
gnomes of the Greeks or in the heathen Havamal! Part of the former may be
likewise an heirloom, but how exuberantly these superstitions grew during
the centuries of ripe and glaring belief in personified evil; how deeply
they struck root among the people, while Havamal has been saved from the
flood of time only by the hand of the student!

Among the superstitions are to be counted the magical prognosis of
diseases and death. Many were the tokens of the approaching
skeleton-figure with his scythe and glass. They were heard in the cawing
of crows and ravens, in the howling of dogs, in the chirping of the
cricket, and the regular ticking of the wood-worm concealed in the wall.
If the horse of a priest riding to visit a sick person in his parish
lowered its head upon arriving at a house, if a gnat was caught gnawing
any clothing, if a light suddenly went out, if an image fell down, if a
glass or a mirror was broken, it indicated an approaching death in the
house. To determine the fate of a sick person, a piece of bread of which
he had eaten was laid in a dark corner, and its change of color was
observed; or a piece of fat with which the soles of the sick had been
smeared was offered to a dog, or a stone was lifted to see if any thing
was concealed beneath it. If the bread became dark, or if the dog refused
to eat what was offered him, or if there was no living thing under the
stone, then the sick person was considered incurable, and nothing could be
hoped even from the inherited medical skill of the wise old men and women.
The exercise of this skill consisted in the use, along with "reading" and
conjurations, partly of herbs of more or less known efficiency, and partly
also, as it appears, of magnetic forces, resorted to mechanically without
reflection.

The medical art inherited among the people from generation to generation
is a subject which none but a clear-sighted and unprejudiced scientist of
the medical profession can treat, and which has been left hitherto without
that investigation which the subject undoubtedly deserves, at least from
a historical point of view. There was, at the end of the Middle Ages,
among the devotees of the Galenic art a man of genius who, despairing to
find in the folios of the medical scholastics any traces of truth,
abandoned the lecture-room and went forth into the world without in order,
as he himself said, to read the book of nature and learn something of that
medical instinct with which God, as he believed, must have endowed men as
well as animals, and which must find a true expression only in the people
living in immediate reciprocity with nature. This man was Paracelsus. He
who despised and overwhelmed with mockery the coryphei of his days in the
medical faculties, did not disdain to listen to "the experience of
peasants, old women, night-wanderers, and vagabonds," and the magnetical
system which he constructed "by the illumination of nature's light, and
not by the lamp-flare of an apothecary's shop," rest in all probability on
the general principles which he found in the plurality of sympathetic
cures practiced among the people. In the "reading" by which these cures
were accompanied, Paracelsus saw rightly nothing but a subjective moment,
and means of making faith and imagination the allies of the physician. A
mass of these conjuration-formulæ in different diseases have been
collected and published in various countries of Europe. They offer the
reader little or nothing of interest.[58]

A very common usage during the Middle Ages was to measure the sick person,
at one time to cure him, at another to find out if the disease was
decreasing or increasing. Another means was to drag him through a hole.
Sick children were pulled through holes dug in the earth or through a
cleft cherry-tree. Sick sheep were forced to creep through the cleft of an
oak, and so on. Another remedy against many kinds of sufferings was the
binding of a thread or a band which had been read over, around the neck or
some limb of the sick. Connected with this is the tying of witch-knots,
used only with evil intent. Bands of different colors and material[59]
were required for these. They were buried near the dwelling of the person
to be injured. It was thought that by this means any limb or bodily power
of an enemy could be impaired. A French jurist and witch-judge, Pierre
Delancre, complains that in his days there were few married couples in
France whose happiness had not been marred by this means; young men hardly
dared to marry from fear of it. Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, advised, as
a remedy against this influence, a diligent use of the sacraments. In
French rituals church-prayers against the effects of witch-knots are
prescribed. Hardly less universally was it the custom to make dolls of
rags, dough, wax or clay, baptize them with the name of the hated person,
put them in the fire or pierce them with needles, and bury them under the
threshold of that individual, all in order to inflict sufferings on
him.[60] Diseases could also be transferred to dolls by reading certain
formulæ, and placing them in some inaccessible place, or in running water.

Not only against diseases, but also against the dangers of fire and war,
against ill-luck in love or chase, on voyages and the like, magical
remedies were freely resorted to by the people. The "Witch-hammer"
complains bitterly against the criminal practice of the soldiers in
mutilating crucifixes in order to harden themselves against the sword and
bullets. The executioner in Passau gained, during the Thirty Years' War, a
wide reputation for his skill in hardening the human frame, which he did
by means of scraps of paper with cabalistic figures (Passauer
Henkers-Zettel), which were eaten. The belief that hunters procured, by
means of conjurations, "free-arrows" and "free-bullets" was very common.
The "Witch-hammer" accuses various potentates of having in their pay
"diabolical archers" who hit their mark from a long distance without
aiming. It was customary at fires to throw into the flames so-called
shields of David,--plates with two intersecting triangles and the motto
"Agla" (the initials of four Hebrew words meaning: "Thou art strong
eternally, O Lord!") and "_consummatum est_." As late as in the middle of
the last century the magistrate of Leipzig ordered that such plates
should be laid up in the rathhaus to be used in case of fires. In Catholic
countries the clergy took the employment of magical appliances against
fires into their own hands; processions singing and bearing relics went
around the burning house three times, and if this had no salutary effect,
it was a sure sign that God had allowed the devil to wield the consuming
element unto destruction.

The extent of this treatise does not allow a detailed exposition of the
many divinatory arts which had their adepts among the people. The Church
preaching mightily against those arts and representing them as devices of
the devil, the father of lies and founder of oracles, did not, however,
deny, but could confirm by biblical quotation, their power to unveil
futurity.

Every thing that we have here described was to the Church black magic: all
mystical practices among the people, whether resorted to for good or evil
purposes, to heal or cure, were looked upon as implying contempt for the
divine magic of the Church itself, and also a league with the devil, if
not a formal one, at any rate a "_pactum implicitum_." It was therefore
the possessors of the traditional popular art of healing who were first
sent to the stake wherever the inquisition commenced its trials. But no
terrorism could eradicate the popular magic so long as the persecutors
themselves believed in its efficiency, and fought only for a consecrated
superstition against its outlawed counterfeit. The struggle against the
superstition of the Church as well as of the people, was reserved for
another time and for another theory of the universe and of morals.

The so-called wandering scholastics (_scholastici vagantes_, _scholares
erratici_) formed a kind of connecting link between the magic of the
learned and that of the common people. They were ruined and adventurous
students, priests and monks who wandered about in the rural districts of
most of the European states, especially Germany, representing themselves
as treasure-diggers, selling "_spiritus familiares_," amulets,
love-potions, and life-elixirs, conjuring spirits, divining by the stars,
and healing men and cattle. These adventurers were associated in a regular
guild, and had like other vagrant tradesmen, their lodgings and hospitals
in the cities. They were dreaded competitors of the witch-fathers of the
cloisters, were several times excommunicated by the Church, and seem to
have nearly disappeared when the witch-trials commenced in earnest. It is
to a person of that kind that the Faust-legend is attached. It reflects
the popular opinions concerning the power of learned magicians.[61]

The same period which saw the bull of Innocentius promulgated, and the
belief in devils culminate in the witch-processes, gave birth to the
_renaissance_. This saviour came to the world in the hour of its
intensest need. The Hellenic spirit, born again from the study of classic
literature and classic art, was a new Messias putting his heel on the head
of the old serpent and saving humanity from the power of death and of the
devil. The people sitting in darkness illumined only by the lurid flames
kindled by the inquisition saw a great light and stretched their hands
towards the new dawn. The study of the ancients had an immense influence,
all the more as the actual world was so different from the antique world.
The exhumed monuments of Hellas revealed other state systems than the
feudal of the Middle Ages,--states which were organizations, not mere
mechanical conglomerates of conquerors and conquered, and were founded
upon a nobler basis than given or assumed privileges. These monuments
revealed an independent search for truth which had placed itself above
tradition--a novel spectacle to the people of the Middle Ages! They
revealed an art in which harmony reigned between spirit and nature,
between the higher life and sensuousness, between the relative opposites
which the Middle Ages had conceived as absolute, placing them against one
another in a struggle which wrecked beauty and morality. They revealed
large symmetrical characters as free from the asceticism of the Middle
Ages as from the wild sensuality of that time. All these ideas, hailed
with enthusiasm, could not but transform the appearance of the world. They
overthrew the darkness of the Middle Ages, put the devil and hell to
flight, and drove them into that lumber-corner of the spiritual kingdom
where they are at present, but from which, at any political reaction, they
peer out eagerly watching whether they may not once more bring the great
wide world into their power. But they shall scarcely succeed in this, as
long as freedom of thought and scientific independence are guarded as the
foremost conditions of the spiritual health of mankind; and they shall
utterly fail when an all-extended intelligence has taught the people that
the premises of the devil-dogma, if they could be again inoculated into
the popular mind, would show anew the same results which have been
depicted above, and lead us back to the terrible times of the inquisition
and the burning of witches. This, no doubt, even the orthodox defenders of
belief in an impersonated evil principle do not desire; but they do not
observe that history acts more consistently than they, and cures general
errors only by making long generations draw from them the last
consequences and suffer their full effect.


THE END.




INDEX.


  Adam's sin, brings countless woes on man, 12.

  Agnus Dei, 63;
    its power, 64.

  Ahriman, affirmed to have been Judaized in "Satan," 35;
    repelled at Marathon, 36;
    his power over man limited, 47;
    author of _black_ magic, 54.

  Alexander, conquers Asia, but helps the triumph of dualism, 37.

  Ammonius Sacca, tries to restore Neoplatonism, 40.

  Amulets employed in Church-magic, 62, 63.

  Angels, belong to the lowest hierarchy, 5;
    have the care of mortals, 6.

  Appolonius of Tyana, deemed the peer of Christ in gift of miracles, 40,
      163.

  Archangels, part of the lowest hierarchy, 5;
    protect religion, 6.

  Archetypes, world of, _i. e._, the Empyrean, 1;
    all celestial things are in the Empyrean; are immaterial, 6.

  Aristotle's method revives science, 44.

  Astrology, introduction to (Table II. of correspondences), 127.

  Atmosphere of earth situate next below space of the moon, 2.

  Augustine, a Manicheian, 43;
    last of the fathers educated in philosophy, 44;
    quoted on baptism, 57;
    quoted on the existence of fauns, satyrs, etc., 162;
    believes in the existence of were-wolves, 206.


  Baptism, copied, in anticipation, in the Mithras mysteries, 57.

  Baptismal water, its various efficacy, 58.

  Bartholomeus Chassaneus, instructs how to proceed in the courts against
      common pests, 78.

  Benoit de Montferrand, bishop of Lausanne, excommunicates may-bugs, 75,
      76.

  _Bereshit_, its mystic meaning, 144.

  Bethesda, the efficacy of the water in its pool inferior to that of
      baptism, 57.

  Bishop Gerhard, converts the heretics of Arras, 60.

  Boethius, on the basis of creation, 124.

  Borrichius (Olaf Borch) cited, 115.

  Bunsen's Gott in der Geschichte, quoted, 93, 94, 175.


  Cabalists' method of searching out the inner meaning of the Bible, 144;
    discover the seventy-two mystical names of God, 146.

  Christian fathers, one of, doubts if his way of attaining perfection is
      the only one, 32;
    one of, declares every thing in heathen thought to be of the devil,
      42.

  Church the, prepared for by election of the Jews, and founded by Christ,
      14;
    is one body; accumulates a wealth of supererogatory works, and grants
      remission of guilt also to dead, 15;
    a mole against the tide of sin, 16;
    the kingdom of God on earth; her destiny universal extension, 18;
    can not check the growth of sin; her emblem an ark, 22;
    the only legitimate bodily physician, 68;
    forbids at several councils the secular practice of medicine, 72.

  Church bells, their power against the demons, 74.

  Clemens of Alexandria, fights for the union of belief and thought, 41;
    quoted on the mission of philosophy, 42;
    rejects the doctrine of eternal punishment, 43.

  Colquhoun quoted, 200.

  Conception-billets described, 64-66.

  "Conjurer of Hell," 148.

  Contrast between state of Society in Middle Ages and Hellenic and later
      European civilizations due to different theories of the universe,
      29.

  Cosmic Philosophy of Middle Ages, 1-28.

  Cyprianus and others enter into league with Satan, 165.


  Delrio, ascribes the origin of witchcraft to Zoroaster, 45.

  Demonianism, cured by the Church, 70.

  Demons, fallen intelligences of the middle hierarchy, 11;
    war against the good angels; cause storms and drouth; pervade the
      elements, 12;
    entice man, 13;
    able to take full possession of men, 25.

  Deutsche Theologie, quoted on the nature of evil, 26.

  Differences between the dualism of Zoroaster and the Christian, 46-48.

  Dissection prohibited, 71.

  Dominion, order of angels, receives the commands of God, 5.

  Dualism, of the Middle Ages affirmed to have been derived from Persia,
      34;
    its conflict with the unitarian notions of Greece the sum of history
      between Cyrus and Constantine; wins a flank-position on the
      Mediterranean upon the return of the Jews from captivity; its
      demon-belief testified to by the many demoniacs in the time of
      Christ, 35;
    magic and belief upon authority its necessary consequences, 36;
    derived from Zoroaster, 38;
    spreads over the Roman provinces, 39;
    advances against Europe, as Manicheism, 43;
    is finally absolute and brings on the Dark Ages, 44;
    is intensified after entering Christianity, 46,
      and undergoes changes, 47, 48;
    attacks the inner authority, 92.


  Earth, encompassed by ten heavens, 1;
    made a paradise for man; explains symbolically man's destiny, 8.

  Egidius, opposes fire-worship, 171.

  _Electrum magicum_, 138.

  Elements, four prime in the constitution of all things, 3.

  Eleusinian mysteries, fragments of, preserved in magic of the learned,
      117.

  Empire, third order of angels, ward off all hindrances, 5.

  Empyrean, the heaven of fire; world of archetypes, 1;
    remains after the final conflagration, 26.

  Europe, belief, of in Middle Ages, 1;
    defeats dualism, 36;
    goes into the enemy's country, 37.

  Eucharist, perennial source of power and sanctification, 59.


  Faust, quoted, 98, 109.

  Faust-legend, at first proposed to employ H. C. Agrippa as its chief
      character, 221.

  Field-rats prosecuted, 78-80.

  Formula against bloody-flux, 215;
    against epilepsy, 215.

  Formulary of malediction used by priests, 81, 82.


  Gnosticism springs up, 38.

  God, enthroned in the Empyrean, 1;
    associates with man, 8-9.

  Gregory IX. exhorts to a crusade against the Stedinghs, 174.

  Gregory the Great, mentioned, 44, 60;
    forbade the abrogation of pagan festivities, 160.


  Heaven of crystal, next beneath Empyrean,--_primum mobile_; of fixed
      stars, devoid of weight, 2.

  Hell, becomes a place of punishment, 11;
    remains after final conflagration, 26.

  Henricus Cornelius Agrippa ab Nettesheim, on God as the source of all
      power, 3, 4;
    is not chosen to represent the magician in the Faust-legend, 221.

  Heretics of Arras, their belief, 60.

  Hermes Trismegistus, transmuted whatever he chose to gold, 115.

  Hincmar, archb. of Rheims, propounds a remedy against witch-knots, 216.

  Hippocrates, mentioned, 71, 72.

  Historical development of Middle-age Cosmic Philosophy, 28-51.

  History, a spiritual comedy, 23.

  _Homunculus philosophicus_, how produced, 132, 133.

  Horst's Demonomagie quoted, 199.

  Houses of the planets, 134.

  "Hubertus-bands" and "Hubertus-keys," 69.


  Images, their miraculous properties, 67, 68.

  Incense appropriate for Mars, 139.

  "_Incubi_" and "_succubi_," 167.

  Inevitable causation, not admitted in the Middle Age Cosmic philosophy,
      4.

  Isis, secrets of entrusted to the sons of Ham, 114.


  Jacob's ladder, structure of the universe likened to, 6.

  Jamblichus, practices secret arts, to outrival Christian magi, 40.

  Jean Bodin, ascribes witchcraft to Zoroaster, 45.

  John of Salisbury upon witch-festivals, 173.

  Judaico-Alexandrian philosophy blooms, 38.

  Jupiter belonging to the second of the planetary spaces, 2.


  Knowledge of highest truths revealed to man, 20.


  Lucifer, prince of Seraphim, 9;
    revolts, and wars with Michael, 10;
    is conquered, is permitted to tempt man, 10;
    transformed into an angel of light, 12;
    triumphs, 14.

  Luther, on Satanic malice as the cause of accidents, 24, 25;
    esteems highly "Deutsche Theologie," 26;
    Tischreden quoted, 168;
    referred to, 199.

  Lycanthropy of the Middle Ages, 205-207.


  "Magia Divina," quoted 130-133.

  Magic, of the Church, 51-94;
    what enters into all employment of it, 53, 54;
    white and black magic, celestial and diabolical, 54;
    of the Church defined, 92.
    --Magic of the Learned, 95-158;
    is derived from various sources, 116;
    first principle of, 128.
    --Magic of the People, 158-224;
    black magic and devil worship, 164.

  Magician, the learned of the 15th century, 100;
    his apartments described, 105, 108, 110;
    explains his science, 112-129;
    performs an incantation, 129-155.

  Malice of the devil, causes unforeseen accidents, 24, 25.

  Man, a microcosm; must dwell on earth, 7;
    at first happy, 8.

  Mandrake, superstitions concerning, 201.

  Manicheism, new form of dualism; advances against Europe; finds a
      follower in Augustine, 43.

  Marathon, Salamis and Platæa really battle-fields of a religious war,
      35.

  Mars, situate in the third of the planetary spaces, 2.

  Matter, devoid of force and all quality, 3.

  May-bugs excommunicated, 75.

  Men are often terrified into an alliance with the devil, 25.

  Mercury, path of in planetary world, 2.

  Middle Ages, Cosmic Philosophy of, 1-28;
    historical origin of, 28-55, 94.

  Miracles, defined, 4.

  Mithras mysteries, contain a copy, by anticipation, of the sacrament of
      baptism, 57;
    imitate other mysteries of the Church, 58, 60.

  Moon, path of, 2.

  "_Mus exenteratus_," etc., quoted, 60.


  Native spirits popularly believed to inhabit land, air and water, 202.

  Nature, knowledge of, same as a knowledge of the angels, 5.

  Neoplatonism arises, 40.

  Nine revolving heavens, 1.

  Nork's "Sitten und Gebräuche der Deutschen," etc., quoted, 202.

  Number 72, its significance, 143, 144;
    number 488, 147.


  Origen, attempts to unite belief and thought, 41;
    rejects the doctrine of eternal punishment, 43.

  Origin of the names of the days of the week, 135, 136.

  Ormuzd and Ahriman, are the real adversaries repelled at Marathon, 36;
    author of _white_ magic, 54.


  Pentecost, its gifts transmitted, 91.

  Peter de Abano, author of an important question, 97.

  _Perpetuum mobile naturæ_, method of producing, 130, 131.

  Pierre Delancre complains against witch-knots, 216.

  Philosophy, system of possible within the Church, 20;
    adherents of the scholastic may use Aristotle's dialectics, 21.

  Planetary world, next beneath that of fixed stars, 2;
    consisting of seven heavens, 2.

  Planets guided by angels, 3;
    influence the elements and man, 134, 135.

  Plotinus, tries to restore Neoplatonism, 40.

  Pope, feudal lord of emperors, 18;
    determines the true inductions of philosophy, 21;
    Sergius III., 63;
    Urban Vitus, 65.

  Pope John XXII., complains that his life is endangered by sorcerers,
      177.

  Pope Innocent VIII., puts forth a bull against the spread of sorcery,
      178.

  Popular maxims of superstition, 208-211.

  Power, from a spiritual source only, 3;
    communicated to the heavens and the earth by angels, 3.

  Power, order of angels, guide the stars and planets, 5.

  Principalities, Archangels, and Angels, the third and lowest hierarchy,
      hold supremacy over terrestrial things, 5, 6.

  Principalities, part of the lowest hierarchy of angels, guardian spirits
      of nations, 6.

  Proclus, last Neoplatonician, 44.

  Pythagoras, glorified as fit to rank with Christ in miraculous gifts,
      40;
    believed the universe founded on numbers, 124.


  Rain-processions in the Middle Ages, 74.

  Reason, darkened by apostacy, 13.

  "Recognitiones divi Clementis ad Jacob.," quoted, 165.

  Reformation, retains somewhat of the Church-magic, 92.

  Relics, their magical use, 66.

  Remigius, ascribes witchcraft to Zoroaster, 45.

  Renaissance, overthrew the darkness and superstition of the Middle Ages,
      222-223.


  Saints, intercession of, more effective than that of Seraphim, 17;
    not disturbed by misery of the damned, 27;
    have control over various diseases, 69.

  Satan, the Judaized Ahriman, 35.

  Saturn, belonging to the first of the planetary spaces, 2.

  Scale of the Holy Tetrad (Table I.), 123.

  _Schemhamphoras_, or God's mystical names, 144, 146.

  _Scholastici errantes_, 220.

  Science the, of the Greeks is rational, originates logic and geometry;
      of the Middle Ages is _magic_, 30.

  Scotus Erigena, mentioned, 44.

  Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, the first hierarchy, and nearest God, 5.

  Simon Magus, legend of his discomfiture by St. Peter, 165.

  Sprenger, author of Malleus Malificarum, ascribes the origin of
      witchcraft to Zoroaster, 45.

  Stedinghs persecuted, 174.

  _Summa Theologica_, quoted on the delectation of the redeemed upon
      seeing the misery of the damned, 28.

  Sun, belonging to the middle space of planetary world, 2.

  Superstitious prognostics of disease and death, 212-216.

  Synodal decree of Ancyra, 171.


  Table of correspondences between microcosmos and things on earth, and
      the planets, 127.

  Tekfael, name of the demon summoned, 147, 153.

  Terrestrial things, images of the celestial, 6;
    are composed of the coarsest matter, 6;
    are all under the control of special angels, 7;
    are also influenced by stars, planets and archetypes, 7.

  Theologie der Thatsachen wider die Theologie der Rhetorik (A. F. C. H.
      Vilmar, 1857) quoted, 48-50.

  Thomas Aquinas, on the acquiescence of the saints in the punishment of
      the lost, 28;
    on the power of demons, 73.


  Universe, a vast lyre, 7;
    an unbroken harmony, 9;
    divided between Good and Evil, 11.

  University of 15th century described, 96-98.


  Vampirism, 207.

  Venus, path of in planetary world, 2.

  Vilmar, Neo-Lutheran, would restore to the clergy their mediæval
      prerogatives, 48-50.

  Virgil quoted, 205, 216.

  Von Görres, attempts to restore the belief in vampirism, 207.


  Witch-hammer, contains directions for the judge in witch-trials, 90,
      178-195.

  Witches' Sabbath, supposed origin of, 170.

  Witch-knots, 216.


  Zoroaster, the reputed founder of magic science; and by some believed
      the author of witchcraft, 45;
    his religion allows evil to disappear in course of time, and promises
      a final restoration of all things, 46.

  Zoroaster and Plato's systems blended, 37.




FOOTNOTES:

[1] Henricus Cornelius Agrippa ab Nettesheim: "De occulta
Philosophia."--I., XIII.

[2] Henricus Cornelius Agrippa ab Nettesheim: "De occulta
Philosophia."--I., XIII.

[3] _Ibidem._

[4] This passage, directed against the ruler of Assyria, was already
interpreted by the early fathers as having reference to Satan. Thus
Lucifer, the Latin translation for Morning Star, came to be a name for the
prince of darkness.

[5] Luke x. 18.

[6] "De Contemptu Mundi sive de Miseria Humanæ Conditionis," a little book
written about 1200, by the afterwards Pope Innocent III.

[7] The words of Luther, who, in addition to his dualistic belief, was a
genuine son of this same Middle Age, though the destroyer of its
autocratic faith.

[8] As such,--as perishable and unreal, are all evil things regarded by an
unknown author in the Middle Ages. In his beautiful opuscule "Deutsche
Theologie," he says among other things: "Now some one may ask, 'Since we
must love every thing, must we also love sin?' The answer is, no; for when
we say every thing, we only mean every thing that is good. Every thing
that exists is good by virtue of its existence. The devil is good in so
far as he exists. In this sense, there is nothing evil in existence. But
it is a sin to wish, desire or love any thing else than God. Now all
things are essentially in God, and more essentially in God than in
themselves; therefore are they all good in their real essence."--The
little work from which the above is quoted, is the expression of a deep
and pious soul, struggling to master the dualism which fettered his age.
It is remarkable that Luther was not more strongly influenced by its
spirit, although he confesses that "Next to the Bible and St. Augustine I
have found no book from which I have learned more."

[9] See the work "Summa Theologica" (supplementum ad tertiam partem,
quæst. 94) by the most prominent and most influential among the
theologians of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas. It is there said: "Ut
beatitudo sanctorum eis magis complaceat et de ea uberiores gratias Deo
agant, datur eis ut poenam impiorum perfecte videant.... Beati, qui
erunt in gloria, nullam compassionem ad damnatos habebunt.... Sancti de
poenis impiorum gaudebunt, considerando in eis divinæ justitiæ ordinem
et suam liberationem de qua gaudebunt."--With this may be compared the
following execrable effusion of another theologian: "Beati coelites non
tantum non cognatorum sed nec parentum sempiternis suppliciis ad ullam
miserationem flectentur. Imo vero lætabuntur justi, cum viderint
vindictam; manus lavabunt in sanguine peccatorum."

[10] Tertullian.

[11] This has been denied in so far as the original teachings of Zoroaster
are concerned, but is confirmed by a passage in Aristotle (Metaphys., I.,
XIV., c. 4).

[12] A. F. Ch. Vilmar: "Theologie der Thatsachen wider die Theologie der
Rhetorik" (Marburg, 1857).

[13] Thus, for instance, the red lustre of copper was supposed to indicate
that it was connected with Mars, which shines with a reddish light.

[14] "Non baptisatis parvulis nemo promittat inter damnationem regnumque
coelorum quietis vel felicitatis cujuslibet atque ubilibet quasi medium
locum; hoc enim eis etiam hæresis Pelagiana promisit" (Augustinus: De
Anima et Ejus Origine, 1. I., c. IX). In one of his letters Augustine
declares that even if the parents hurry to the priest, and he likewise
hasten to baptize the child, but find it dead before it has obtained the
sacrament, it is nevertheless then doomed to be eternally tormented with
the damned, and to blaspheme the name of God.

[15] All these are found, in connection with baptism, in heathen
mysteries.

[16] Extract from the formula given at the council of Rome, A. D. 1059, to
Berengar of Tours, to which he was forced to swear under penalty of death.

[17] The wafer substituted in the twelfth century for bread was called the
host.

[18] The discovery made in our days by the Danish theologian Martensens
that the food obtained in the Supper of our Lord is not for the soul only,
but also for the body,--for the nourishment of our ascension-body, is not
really new; the pagan initiated into the Mithras mysteries was taught that
the consecrated bread and wine, being assimilated into his flesh and
blood, gave immortality to his corporeal being. Like presuppositions
produce in different times like ideas.

An important question in the Middle Ages and one which had been already
argued with great heat from the time of Petrus Lombardus until the
seventeenth century, is propounded as follows: Has a rat which has eaten
of the host thereby partaken of Christ's body? In connection with this it
was further asked: How is a rat which has eaten of Christ's body to be
treated,--ought it to be killed or honored? Ought the sacrament to be
venerated even in the stomach of the rat? If some of the consecrated bread
is found in the stomach of a rat, is it a duty to eat it? What must be
done if immediately after partaking of the sacrament one is attacked by
vomiting? When a rat can eat the host, can not the devil also do it?--One
of the last products of these important investigations is a book published
in Tübingen in 1593, entitled: "_Mus exenteratus, hoc est tractatus valde
magistralis super quæstione quadam theologica spinosa et multum subtili_,"
_etc._

[19] During the period of political reaction in 1815, when Schlegel and de
Maistre praised the Middle Ages as man's era of bliss, and Görres sought
to restore to credence during the "state period of enlightenment" all the
forgotten ghost and vampire stories, the clergy of Brussels were
celebrating with processions and other solemnities the anniversary of this
persecution of the Jews in Namur.

At the synod in A. D. 1099 a proclamation was issued forbidding priests to
enter into any servile relations with laymen, because it were shameful if
the most holy hands which prepared the flesh and blood of Almighty God
should serve the unconsecrated laity. The famous orator Bourdaloue
requested that greater homage should be paid to the priest than to the
holy Virgin, because God had been incarnated in her bosom only once, but
was in the hands of the priest daily, as often as the mass was read.

[20] The oldest Christian art in which the dying spirit of antiquity yet
reveals itself, represented Jesus as a shepherd youth carrying a lamb upon
his bosom. Many a one could only turn away sadly from the beaming world of
Olympus to the new Christian ideal, and when they must needs so do, they
would fain transfer to the new "_puer redemptor_" the mild beauty of the
former youthful mediator, Dionysus Zagreus. In the hymns, still preserved
to us, of Synesius, who combined in one person the bishop and the Greek
who still longs for wisdom and beauty (doubtless known to many of our
readers by Kingsley's novel of Hypatia), this sadness is in wonderful
harmony with Christian devotion. With the ruin of the antique world, this
longing as well as the capability of satisfying it ceased. The material
symbol obtained thereafter a more prominent place. If the Phoenicians
and Canaanites represented their god corporeally as the powerful steer,
the Christians chose the patient and inoffensive lamb as the type of
theirs. The Council of Constantinople in A. D. 692 confirmed this
lamb-symbol. As Aaron had made a golden calf, Pope Sergius III. procured a
lamb to be made of gold and ivory. All who rebelled against its worship
were treated as disorderly and heretical. In the time of Charlemagne one
of them, Bishop Claudius of Turin, from whom the Waldenses derive their
origin, complained: "_Isti perversorum dogmatum auctores agnos vivos
volunt vorare et in pariete pictos adorare._"

[21] Pope Urban Vitus presented an _agnus Dei_ to the Byzantine Emperor.
An accompanying note described its wonderful powers in the following
monkish-Latin hexameters:--

  _Balsamus et munda cera cum chrismatis unda
  Conficiunt agnum, quod munus do tibi magnum
  Fonte velut natum per mystica sanctificatum.
  Fulgura desursum depellit, et omne malignum
  Peccatum frangit, ut Christi sanguis et angit.
  Prægnans servatur, simul et partus liberatur.
  Dona refert dignis, virtutem destruit ignis.
  Portatus munde de fluctibus eripit undæ._

[22] As late as 1784 a statute was issued by Carl Theodor, Elector of
Pfalz, referring to the magic power of St. Hubert-relics, and forbidding
the employment of "worldly" remedies against the bite of mad dogs.

[23] In the year 1240 a large rain-procession was held in Lüttich. Three
times repeated it failed of all effect, "because in the supplication of
all saints God's mother had been forgotten." In a new procession "_Salve
regina_" was therefore sung, and the rain immediately came down with such
violence that the devout procession was dispersed.--The clergy sometimes,
in order to produce rain, would lead a donkey before the gate of the
church, hang the litany about his neck, put a wafer in his mouth, and then
bury the animal alive.

[24] Especially was the Church of the Middle Ages rich in awful
formularies of malediction, testifying to an enormous brutalization of
thought and feeling. A single specimen of these formularies will be more
than sufficient to illustrate:--

"By the might, power and authority of God, the Almighty Father, of the Son
and of the Holy Ghost and in the name of the Holy Virgin the mother of our
Lord Jesus Christ, by the holy angels, archangels, St. Michael and St.
John the Baptist, in the name of the holy apostle Peter and all the
apostles, in the name of the holy Stephen and all the holy martyrs, and
St. Adelgunda and all the holy virgins, and of all the saints in heaven
and on earth to whom power is given to bind and loose,--we curse, execrate
and exclude from the mother Church through the bond of malediction (here
follows the name of the persons). May their children be orphaned; may they
be cursed upon the field, cursed in the city, in the forest, in their
houses and barns, in their chamber and their bed, in the town-hall, in the
village, on land and sea; may they be cursed in the church, in the
churchyard, in the court-room, on the public square and in war; whether
they be talking, sleeping, waking, eating or drinking, whether they be
going or resting, or doing any other thing, let them be accursed in soul
and body, reason and all their senses: cursed be their progeny, cursed be
the fruit of their land, cursed be all their limbs, head, nose, mouth,
teeth, throat, eyes, and eyelashes, brain, larynx, tongue, breast, lungs,
liver, legs, and arms, skin and hair; cursed be every thing living and
moving in them from head to foot, etc. I conjure thee, Lucifer, and all
your crew, by the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, by the incarnation
and birth of Christ; I conjure thee by the power and the virtue of all
saints, that thou never leave them in quiet, night or day, until thou have
brought them to ruin, destroyed them by water, or led them to the gallows,
or caused them to be torn by wild beasts, or their throat to be cut by
enemies, or their bodies to be destroyed by fire," etc., etc.

[25] A biblical ground for ordeals was found in Numbers v. 12-28.

[26] The "Witch-hammer" will be more fully described hereafter. The
student of history should not neglect this volume, which is the ripest
fruit of Catholic dualism, and clearly shows the results to which it
tends.

[27] "Gott in der Geschichte," III.

[28] Yet in the days of Erasmus of Rotterdam the theologians were making
great ado over this knotty problem.

[29] This confession Cornelius Agrippa makes in his "Occult Philosophy."
Theophrastus Paracelsus and others were less modest.

[30] Thus reasoned, as late as the middle of the sixteenth century,
Borrichius (Olaf Borch), who was professor in chemistry at the University
of Copenhagen and wrote a book upon the wisdom of the Egyptian Hermes.

[31] Agrippa: "De Occulta Philosophia," 1. I., c. 24.

[32] We have found in a "_Magia Divina_" the following directions for
accomplishing a _perpetuum mobile naturæ_, the efficacy of which we leave
for the reader to decide.

"During the twelve nights after Christmas 1-1/2 measures of dew are
collected from fruit-trees, and preserved well enclosed. In the month of
March dew is again collected from both fruit-trees and meadows and is
preserved in another phial. Dew collected in May is poured in a third and
rain of a thunderstorm during the summer in a fourth. Thereupon the
contents of the four phials are mixed and one measure of it is poured into
a great transparent glass retort where, well covered, it must remain a
month until it becomes foul. Put it then over fire and subject to heat of
the second degree. When sufficiently distilled a substance thick as honey
is left. In this residue are poured four grains of astral tincture. The
mixture is exposed to a heat of the first degree, by which it is converted
into a thick, jet-black lump which again is dissolved, forming below an
ink-like fluid, and above a vapor, in which many colors and figures are
seen. These soon disappear, and every thing is changed into water, which
begins to turn green, and green palaces, constantly enlarging, and
mountains and lovely pastures appear, while the water is diminished more
and more. When now you find that no more dew rises from the earth within
the glass, take the water which you received from the distillation, mix
with it a drachm of astral tincture and pour an ounce of this mixture into
the glass bulb. Then every thing begins again to live and grow. Add every
month an ounce of this mixture. If then the glass ball is well closed, and
is not stirred, a vapor gradually arises, and is condensed into two
shining stars, like the sun and the moon, and like the latter, one of
these stars waxes and wanes; and all the phenomena of nature, thunder,
lightning, hail, rain, snow and dew, will appear in your glass ball as in
the real world around you. All this will happen if you keep the great
Creator before your eyes and in your heart, and if you conceal from the
wicked world this great secret."

From the second part of Goethe's Faust the reader may remember Doctor
Wagner, Faust's former _famulus_, busily engaged at the alchemic furnace
in preparing a _homunculus_, an artificial man. The same "_Magia Divina_"
from which we have quoted the preceding directions, allows us also to
trace the secret of the learned Wagner: the art of producing "homunculos
philosophicos." In a retort of the most beautiful crystal glass is poured
one measure of the purest May-dew, collected when the moon is crescent,
and two measures of blood from a youth, or three measures from a girl.
Both the boy and the girl must be hale and, "if possible," chaste. When
this mixture has fomented during a month, and been transformed into a
reddish clay, the _menstruum_ which is formed on the top is drawn off by
means of tubes hermetically attached to the retort, gathered into a clean
glass vessel, mixed with one drachm animal tincture, and the mixture is
again poured into the retort where it is kept during a month in gentle
heat. A sort of bladder will have then formed which is soon gradually
covered with an organic net of little veins and nerves. Sprinkled every
fourth week with the _menstruum_ above quoted, the bladder grows during
four months. When now you notice a peeping sound and movements of vitality
in the glass, look into it and you will discover to your joy and amazement
a most beautiful pair, a boy and a girl, which you can contemplate with
heart-felt admiration for this lovely work of nature, though their height
is but six inches. They move and walk about in the glass, where in the
midst there is a tree growing with all kinds of pleasant fruits. If now
you pour into the retort every month, two grains of animal tincture, you
can keep them alive six whole years. When one year old they can inform you
of many secrets of nature. They are benevolent in their disposition, and
obey you in every thing. But at the end of the sixth year you will find
that this beautiful pair who have eaten hitherto of all kinds of fruit,
except those growing on the tree which sprang up in the midst of the
retort, now begin to eat also the fruit of that. Then a vapor is found in
the retort, which grows denser, assumes a blood-red color and emits
flashes. The two _homunculi_ are terrified, and try to hide themselves.
Finally every thing around them is parched, they die, and the whole is
changed into a fuming mass. If the glass is not very large and strong it
explodes, causing great damage.

[33] Every planet had among the twelve signs of the Zodiac its own house,
and it was especially propitious when in any of those abodes. The
following table shows the order:--

  Saturn    dwells in Capricornus.
  Jupiter     "    "  Pisces and Sagittarius.
  Mars        "    "  Aries and Scorpio.
  The Sun     "    "  Leo.
  Venus       "    "  Taurus and Ursa Major.
  Mercurius   "    "  Virgo and Gemini.
  The Moon    "    "  Cancer.

Each of the twelve signs (thirty degrees on the arc of the heavens) was
divided into three "faces" (ten degrees). The position of the planet was
most auspicious when in the first face of the house; if in the third its
favorable influence was doubtful.

As the reader will see from the first table given above, the signs of the
Zodiac were supposed to sustain a relation to the elements and to
temperaments. Aries, Leo and Sagittarius were warm, dry, fiery and
choleric. Mars entering these signs--excepting that of Aries which was his
own house, in which he was auspicious--must therefore bode draught,
conflagration and pestilence. Taurus, Virgo and Capricornus, were cold,
dry, earthy, melancholic. Saturn in the second sign of Taurus might
consequently betoken a severe winter. The signs of Cancer, Scorpio and
Pisces were cold, damp, watery and sanguine. The dominion of the Zodiacal
constellations over the human body was divided as follows: Aries presided
over the head and face, Taurus over the neck and throat, Gemini over the
shoulders, arms and hands, Cancer over the breast, ribs, lungs and spleen,
Leo over the upper part of the stomach, back and side, Virgo over the
lower part of the stomach and intestines, Scorpio over the generative
organs, Sagittarius over the anus, Capricornus over the knees, Aquarius
over the thighs, Pisces over the feet. The planets exercised the same
influence as their houses, and all elementary things subordinated to a
planet were considered to be, during auspicious aspects, excellent
remedies for affections in the limbs presided over by that planet. The
series of analogies, of which we have given an example above, were
therefore inexhaustible mines even for the physicians of the Middle Ages.
Since, for instance, Capricornus which presided over the knees, is the
house of Saturn, and all crawling animals are connected with this planet,
the fat of snakes is an effective remedy against gout in the knees,
especially on Saturday, the day of Saturn.

[34] The days bear yet, in many languages, the names of the planets which
were assigned to them in gray antiquity by Astrology.

  Sunday, dies Solis, is the day of the Sun.
  Monday, dies Lunæ, is the day of the Moon.
  Tuesday, dies Martis, is the day of Mars, _i. e._, Tiw.
  Wednesday, dies Mercurii, is the day of Mercury.
  Thursday, dies Jovis, is the day of Jupiter, _i. e._, Thor.
  Friday, dies Veneris, is the day of Venus, _i. e._, Freja.
  Saturday, dies Saturni, is the day of Saturn.

The original names seem to have been introduced by the Romans during the
later period of the republic. That the idea is derived from Egypt is shown
by a passage in Dion Cassius [l. XLIII., c. 26; compare E. Roth,
"Geschichte userer abendländischer Philosophie," I., pag. 211]. The
question when and how they were introduced by our forefathers will perhaps
remain forever a matter only of conjecture. It has caused astonishment
that the order in which the days were named after the planets, though the
same with all nations, is not the order in which they were supposed to be
placed in the universe (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and
the Moon). This riddle is solved by the passage in Dion Cassius referred
to, in a manner such that the astrological origin of this nomenclature
must be undoubted. He relates, namely, that the Egyptians devoted every
one of the twenty-four hours to a certain planet. The first hour of the
first week-day (Saturday) was given to the uppermost planet, Saturn, the
second to Jupiter, the third to Mars and so on, according to the order of
the planets. The 24th hour of Saturday consequently fell also to Mars, and
the first hour of the succeeding day to the Sun, by which that day was
therefore named Sunday. The 24th hour of Sunday falls according to the
same calculation to Mercury, and the first hour of Monday to the Moon; and
so on. The astrological distribution of the hours between the planets
according to their successive order in the heavens thus explains the
apparent disorder which occurs in the week. In the magical works by
Cornelius Agrippa, Peter de Albano and others, of which the author has
availed himself, tables concerning the distribution of the hours are
found. These writers have collected from all quarters, and not least from
Ptolemy and the Alexandrians, materials for their magical apparatus.

[35] The prescriptions for these perfumes are found in Cornelius Agrippa's
"Occulta Philosophia," l. I., c. 44.

[36] They are found in Agrippa's "Occulta Philosophia," l. III. cc. 25,
26, 27, 28.

[37] Many pages could be filled with subtle speculations over the word
_Bereshit_, the first word in the Old Testament. That the sensual world is
only a secondary world, a reflex of the ideal world, the Cabalists proved
by showing that Holy Writ commences not with the first but with the second
letter of the Alphabet, namely [Hebrew] (b), which in its form is half a
square [found in the number of the world], and therefore signifies an
accomplished separation between spirit and matter, between good and evil.
By a transposition of the letters in _Bereshit_, in accordance with the
method of the Cabala, two other words are obtained which mean "in the
first Tishri," showing that the world had been created in the month of
Tishri (September). The sum of the numerical value of the letters in the
word _Bereshit_ equals the sum of the numerical value of the letters in
two words which mean "He created by the law,"--a proof that the law is the
instrumental cause of the world. Further, _Bereshit_ can be divided so as
to form two words meaning "He created six" (six days, six millenniums, the
six extensions of universal space, etc.); or, "He created a ram," which
was, according to the Hebrew Cabalists, the same ram that was sacrificed
instead of Isaac, and the Christians add, the same "Lamb of God" which
gave itself a sacrifice for man.

[38] The table from which the author has amused himself in extracting,
according to the rules, this name, is found in "Occulta Philosophia," 1.
III. c. 26.

[39] Agrippa's book gives the subtle rules for finding the "signs" or the
signatures of the demons.--The reader must remember the part played by the
"signs" of microcosmos and the earth-spirit in Goethe's Faust.

[40] Since they (the newly converted Anglo-Saxons) are accustomed to
slaughter many oxen and horses in their feasts to the honor of the devils
(their ancient gods) it is necessary to allow this custom to remain, but
based upon another principle. Thus there must likewise be celebrated on
the feast days of the Church and of the Holy Martyrs whose relics are kept
in the churches built in heathen sacrificial groves, a perfectly similar
festival, by enclosing a place with green trees and preparing a religious
banquet. Still the animals must not be sacrificed to Satan's honor, but
slaughtered to the praise of God and for the sake of food, for which the
Giver of all good gifts must be thanked.

[41] "_Creberrima fama est multique se expertos vel ab eis qui experti
essent, de quorum fide dubitandum non est, audisse confirmant, silvanos et
faunos, quos incubos vocant, improbos sæpe exstitisse mulieribus et earum
appetisse ac peregisse concubitum, et quosdam dæmones, quos Dusios Galli
nuncupant, hanc assidue immunditiam et tentare et efficere plures talesque
asseverant, ut hoc negare impudentiæ videatur._" (De civitate Dei. lib.
15, cap. 23).

[42] "Recognitiones divi Clementis ad Jacob," lib. II.

[43] This view is expressed already in Henoch's book and in the writings
of the Rabbi. Like them even the fathers interpreted the "Sons of God"
mentioned in Genesis who "were fascinated by the daughters of men" as
fallen angels. Thus Cyrillus, Anthenagoras, Irenæus, Lactantius,
Turtullianus, and others. We have just instanced above a quotation from
Augustine. The Greek mythology with its amours between gods and men was
destined to give support to this superstition.--Luther, who could not free
himself from the superstition of his time, tells us often in his
"Tischreden" that the devil can beget children by connection with human
beings. "Es ist wahrlich ein graülich, schrecklich Exempel," he says in
one place, "dass der Teufel kann die Leute plagen, dass er auch kinder
zeuget."

[44] Reginonis libri duo de synodalibus causis et disciplinis
ecclesiasticis. The work was republished in Leipzig in the year 1840.

[45] "Gott in der Geschichte," III.

[46] It is found complete in its original form in Horst's "Demonomagie,"
II.

[47] Many etymologies as profound occur in the "Witch-hammer." The word
_diabolus_ (devil) is derived from _duo_, "two," and _bolus_, "morsel,"
which is thus explained, that the devil fishes at the same time after two
morsels, the soul and the body.

[48] This deduction, replete with indecencies which can not be handled,
occupies thirty-three pages of the "Witch-hammer." It pretends to be very
convincing. It has also sent women by hundreds of thousands to death.

[49] To give the reader a clearer idea of the really diabolical blindness
and brutality which characterizes the terrible book we are giving an
account of, we quote the following statement from the "Witch-hammer," p.
223: "We (the inquisitors Sprenger and his colleagues) find that of all
women that we have condemned to the flames very few have voluntarily done
harm by sorcery. They have generally been forced by the devil to do it.
After having confessed every thing (on the rack) they generally attempt
suicide before being taken to the stake. It is the devil who tempts them
thus, for he is afraid that by repentance and confession they will receive
the pardon of God. If this wily trick is not successful, and if they are
prevented from destroying themselves, he knows how to rob them of the
chance of grace by other means, namely, by smiting them with fury, madness
or sudden death!"--Behold a sample of how theological arguments founded on
superior natural influences can be used!

[50] Horst: "Demonomagie," I.

[51] Colquhoun.

[52] [Greek: Mêla Mandragorou] (in Hebrew _dudaim_) is in the Septuagint a
name for the love-apples with which Leah regaled her husband (Gen. xxx.
14). Pliny speaks of the mandragora as a poisonous herb, dangerous to dig;
now already Columella knows the mandragora as a half-human
being--"_semihomo mandragoras_."

[53] Man sagt: wenn ein Erbdieb, dem, wie den Ziguenern das Stehlen
angeboren ist, oder dessen Mutter, als sie mit ihm schwanger ging,
gestohlen, oder doch gross Gelüsten dazu gehabt--nach Einigen; auch ein
Unschuldiger, welcher in der Tortur sich für einen Dieb bekennt--und der
ein reiner Junggeselle ist, gehänkt wird, und das Wasser lässt, oder sein
Same auf die Erde fällt, so wächst an solchem Ort der Alraun.--"Nork:
Sitten und Gebräuche der Deutschen und ihrer Nachbarvölker."

[54] So Propertius and Plinius. Virgil (eclog. VIII.) makes a shepherd
sing:

  Has herbas, atque hæc Ponto mihi lecta venena,
  Ipse dedit Moeris: nascuntur plurima Ponto.
  _His ego sæpe lupum fieri, et se condere selvis
  Moerim_ ... vidi.

[55] Melancthon, who firmly believed in the were-wolf, reasoned in the
same way.

[56] As late as 1804 a vagabond named Maréchal was accused by the peasants
in Longueville as a sorcerer and were-wolf. At his trial the mysterious
were-wolf excursions were resolved into thieving rambles, and Maréchal was
condemned for burglary to the galleys.

[57] During the restauration in 1815, when all the dead rose in their
sepulchres, the famous _von Görres_ sought to revive the belief in
vampirism. He has written about it a work of mighty learning, wherein he
discourses profusely of the "vegetative" sources of the body, which he
asserts continue their activity after death, and thus enable the soul of
the deceased to reoccupy and for a while reoperate its old machinery.

[58] Some of the popular forms of conjuration are in Latin, though
corrupted so as to be almost beyond recognition. A couple of restored
examples may be given. This is the formula against bloody-flux:

  Sanguis mane in venis
  Sicut Christus in poenis,
  Sanguis mane fixus
  Sicut Christus fuit crucifixus.

Against fever:

Deus vos solvet sambuco, panem et sal ego vobis adduco, febrem tertianam
et quotidianam accipite vos, qui nolo eam.

Against epilepsy:

  Melchior, Balthaser, portans hæc nomina Caspar,
  Solvitur e morbo Domini pietate caduco.
  Perpetret et ternas defunctis psallere missas.
  Barachun. Barachagim. Destrue. Subalgat.

[59] Compare Virgil, Ecl. VIII:

  Terna tibi hæc primum triplici diversa colore
  Licia circumdo....
  Necte tribus nodis ternos, Amarylli, colores:
  Necte, Amarylli, modo: et Veneris, dic, vincula necto.

[60] Compare same eclogue:

  Limus ut hic durescit, et hæc ut cera liquescit
  Uno eodemque igni: sic nostro Daphnis amore.

[61] The Faust-legend, formed during the time of the Reformation, sought
at first to employ one of the heroes of the learned magic, Henricus
Cornelius Agrippa, as its chief character; but a biography of him,
published by his pupil, Wierus, having dispelled the fantastical halo
enveloping his personality, the creative desire sought a more obscure
object which it could transform according to its bizarre imaginations.




Transcriber's Notes:

Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.

Passages in fraktur font are indicated by =fraktur=.

The original text includes Greek characters. For this text version these
letters have been replaced with transliterations.

The original text includes Hebrew characters. For this text version these
letters have been replaced with [Hebrew].






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