LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter I.

       Table of Contents

      Compromise between the New and the Old Faiths—Witchcraft under the Early Church—The Sentiments of the Fathers and the Decrees of Councils—Platonic Influences—Historical, Physiological, and Accidental Causes of the Attribution of Witchcraft to the Female Sex—Opinions of the Fathers and other Writers—The Witch-Compact.

It might appear, in a casual or careless observation, surprising that Christianity, whose original spirit, if not universal practice, was to enlighten; whose professed mission was 'to destroy the works of the devil,' failed to disprove as well as to dispel some of the most pernicious beliefs of the pagan world: that its final triumph within the limits of the Roman empire, or as far as it extended without, was not attended by the extinction of at least the most revolting practices of superstition. Experience, and a more extended view of the progress of human ideas, will teach that the growth of religious perception is fitful and gradual: that the education of collective mankind proceeds in the same way as that of the individual man. And thus, in the expression of the biographer of Charles V., the barbarous nations when converted to Christianity changed the object, not the spirit, of their religious worship. Many of the ideas of the old religion were consciously tolerated by the first propagators of Christianity, who justly deemed that the new dogmas would be more readily insinuated into the rude and simple minds of their neophytes, if not too strictly uncompromising. Both past and present facts testify to this compromise. It was a maxim with some of the early promoters of the Christian cause, to do as little violence as possible to existing prejudices33—a judicious method still pursued by the Catholic, though condemned by the Protestant, missionaries of the present day.34 It was not seldom that an entire nation was converted and christianised by baptism almost in a single day: the mass of the people accepting, or rather acquiescing in, the arguments of the missionaries in submission to the will or example of their prince, whose conduct they followed as they would have followed him into the field. Such was the case at the conversion of the Frankish chief Clovis, and of the Saxon Ethelbert. But if St. Augustin or St. Boniface, and the earlier missionaries, had more success in persuading the simple faith of the Germans, without a written revelation and miracles, than the modern emissaries have in inducing the Hindus to abandon their Vedas, it was easier to convince them of the facts, than of the reason, of their faith. Nor was it to be expected that such raw recruits (if the expression may be allowed) should lay aside altogether prejudices with which they were imbued from infancy.

The extent of the credit and practice of witchcraft under the Church triumphant is evident from the numerous decrees and anathemas of the Church in council, which, while oftener treating it as a dread reality, has sometimes ventured to contemn or to affect to contemn it as imposture and delusion. Both the civil and ecclesiastical laws were exceptionally severe towards goetic practices. 'In all those laws of the Christian emperors,' says Bingham, 'which granted indulgences to criminals at the Easter festival, the venefici and the malefici, that is, magical practices against the lives of men, are always excepted as guilty of too heinous a crime to be comprised within the general pardon granted to other offenders.'35 In earlier ecclesiastical history, successive councils or synods are much concerned in fulminating against them. The council of Ancyra (314) prohibits the art under the name of pharmacy: a few years' penance being appointed for anyone receiving a magician into his house. St. Basil's canons, more severe, appoint thirty years as the necessary atonement. Divination by lots or by consulting their sacred scriptures, just as afterwards they consulted Virgil, seems to have been a very favourite mode of discovering

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