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Witchcraft in Britain and the American colonies. Witch-hunting in Britain took a different form than that of the Inquisition in Europe, and bloomed much later. Through­out the witch hysteria, witchcraft was treated largely as a civil crime in Britain. The emphasis was not on a witch’s heresy by virtue of a pact with the Devil but upon her power to bring misery to others with her spells and curses. Prior to 1542 witchcraft was considered sorcery in England, punishable by various secular and ecclesiasti­cal laws as early as AD. 668. Witches usually were tried by the church and given moderate punishment by the state. If nobles were involved in charges of sorcery or witchcraft or if sorcery had been used against the throne or to divine the political future, the crime had the potential of becoming a charge of treason. In 1542 Henry VIII passed the first Witchcraft Act, which pro­vided for witches to be tried and punished by the state.

The statute of 1542 made a felony of the conjuring of spirits, divining and casting of false or malicious spells and enchantments. Such offenses were punishable by “death, loss and forfeiture of their lands, tenants, goods and chattels.” Records exist of only one case brought to trial under the law; the accused was pardoned. The law was repealed in 1547 by Edward VI. A second Witchcraft Act was passed in 1563 under Elizabeth I. This act was largely the result of ecclesiasti­cal pressure upon the state to address rising public fears of witchcraft. It increased penalties: death for murder by witchcraft; a year in jail and the pillory for less seri­ous witchcraft; and forfeiture of property for second convictions of divination, attempted murder and unlaw­ful love spells. A similar act was passed in Scotland the same year. During the reign of James VI (r. 1567—1625), brutal witch-hunts took place in Scotland, involving barbaric torture and burning at the stake. Though James feared witches and permitted the witch-hunts, he did act to cool the hysteria when it threatened to get out of hand. In 1603 he became JAMES I of England and ruled the united kingdoms of England and Scotland until his death in 1625. In 1604 the Elizabethan Witchcraft Act was repealed, and a third and tougher act was passed for England and Scotland. It called for death by hanging for the first conviction of malefic witchcraft, regardless of whether or not a victim had died. The penalty for divining, destroying or damag­ing property and concocting love philtres remained a year in jail plus the pillory. The act also made it a felony to conjure, consult, entertain, covenant with, employ, feed or reward any evil spirit for any purpose, thus introduc­ing Devil’s pacts into the law. The Act of 1604 remained in force until 1736. En­gland’s witch hysteria peaked under its force in the 1640s, also a time of political and social strife caused by the Civil War. Witch-hunting was a profitable profession, and witch finders such as MATTHEW HOPKINS made good fees by identifying witches by PRICKING them and discovering the DEVILS MARK. Convicted witches in England were hanged, not burned. Most of the witch trials in England and Scotland con­cerned accused black witches. The white witches—the cunning men and cunning women, wizards, diviners and healers—were not always prosecuted by the common-law courts, despite the fact that their sorceries were illegal. The church courts prosecuted them, for their magical mir­acles were in direct competition with the clergy, many of whom also practiced white witchcraft. Punishments usu­ally were light, in marked contrast to the European trials.

Powers of Witches.—In the eyes of the populace the powers of witches were numerous. The most peculiar of these were: The ability to blight by means of the evil eye the sale of winds to sailors, power over animals, and capacity to transform into animal shapes. Thus, says Gomme—” The most usual transformations are into cats and hares, and less frequently into red deer, and these have taken the place of wolves. Thus, cat-transformations are found in Yorkshire, hare-transforma­tions in Devonshire, Yorkshire and Wales, and Scotland, deer-transformations in Cumberland, raven-transformations in Scotland, cattle-transformations in Ireland. Indeed the connection between witches and the lower animals is a very close one, and hardly anywhere in Europe does it occur that this connection is relegated to a subordinate place. Story after story, custom after custom is recorded as appertaining to witchcraft, and animal transformation appears always.

Witches also possessed the power of making themselves invisible, by means of a magic ointment supplied to them by the devil, and of harming others by thrusting nails into a waxen image representing them.

Witchcraft among Savage People.~—Witchcraft among savage people is, of course, allied to the various cults of demonism in vogue among barbarian folk all over the world. These are indicated in the various articles dealing with uncultured races. The name witchcraft is merely a convenient English label for such savage demon-cults. as is “ witch-doctors” applied to those who “ smell out” these practitioners of evil.

Evidence for Witchcraft—The evidence for witchcraft, says Podmore (Modern Spiritualism) falls under four main heads : (a) the confessions of witches themselves ; (b) the corroborative evidence of lycanthropy, apparitions. etc. ; (c) the witch-marks; (d) the evidence of the evil effects produced upon the supposed victims.

(a)—The confessions, as is notorious, were for the most part extracted by torture, or by lying promises of release. In England, where torture was not countenanced by the law, the ingenuity of Matthew Hopkins and other pro­fessional witch-finders could generally devise some equally efficient substitute, such as gradual starvation, enforced sleeplessness, or the maintenance for hours of a constrained and painful posture. But apart from these extorted con­fessions, there is evidence that in some cases the accused persons were actually driven by the accumulation of testimony against them, by the pressure of public opinion, and the singular circumstances in which they were placed, to believe and confess that they were witches indeed. Some of the women in Salem who had pleaded guilty to witchcraft explained afterwards, when the persecution had died down and they were released, that they had been “consternated and aifrighted even out of their reason” to confess that of which they were innocent. And there were not a few persons who voluntarily confessed to the practice of witchcraft, nocturnal rides, compacts with the devil, and all the rest of it.” The most striking instances of this voluntary confession are afforded by children. For even among the earlier writers on witchcraft the opinion was not uncommonly held that the nocturnal rides and banquets with the devil were merely delusions, thought the guilt of the witch was not lessened thereby. And in the sixteenth centuries, at least in English-speaking countries this belief seems to have been generally alike by believers in witchcraft and their opponents. Thus Gaule: “ But the mote prodigious or stupendous (of the things narrated by witches in their confessions) are effected merely by the devil ; the witches all the while either in a rapt ecstasie, a charmed sleep, or a melancholy dreame; and the witches imagination, phantasie, common sense, only deluded with what is now done, or pretended. Even Antoinette Bourig­non, observing her scholars eat “ great pieces of bread and butter” at breakfast, pointed out to them that they could not have such good appetites if they had really fed on dainty meats at the devil’s Sabbath the night before.

(b)—But if the witch’s own account of her marvellous feats may be explained as, at best, the vague remembrance of a nightmare, it is hardly necessary to go beyond this explanation to account for the prodigies reported by others. In most cases there is no need to suppose even so much foundation for the marvels, since the evidence (e.g., for lycanthropy) is purely traditional. And when we get accounts at first hand, they are commonly concerned, not with such matters as levitation, or transformation of hares into old women, but merely with vague shapes seen in the dusk, or the unexplained appearance of a black dog. Even so the evidence comes almost exclusively from ignorant peasants, and is given years after the events.”

“ (c)—The evidence for” witch-marks” does not greatly concern us. The insensible patches on which Matthew Hopkins and other witch-finders relied may well have been genuine in some cases. Such insensible areas are known to occur in hysterical subjects, and the production of insen­sibility by means of suggestion is a commonplace in modern times. The supposed witches’ teats, which the imps sucked, appear to have been found almost exclusively, like the imps themselves, in the English-speaking countries. Any wart, boil, or swelling would probably form a sufficient warrant for the accusation; we read in Cotton Mather of a jury of women finding * j5reter-natural teat upon a witch’s body, which could not be discovered when a second search was made three or four hours later, and of a witch’s mark upon the finger of a small child, which took the form of “ a deep red spot, about the bigness of a flea-bite.” And the witch-mark which brought conviction to the mind of Increase Mather in the case of George Burroughs was his ability to hold a heavy gun at arm’s length, and to carry a barrel of cider from the canoe to the shore.”

(d)—Of most of the evidence based upon the injuries suffered by the witches’ supposed victims, it is difficult to speak seriously. If a man’s cow ran dry, if his horse stumbled, his cart stuck in a gate, his pigs or fowls sickened, if his child had a fit, his wife or himself an unaccustomed pain, it was evidence acceptable in a court of law against any old woman who might be supposed within the last twelve months—or twelve years—to have conceived some cause of offence against him and his. Follies of this kind are too well known to need repetition.

But there is another feature of witchcraft, at any rate of the cases occurring in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England and America, which is not so well recognised, and which has a more direct bearing upon our present inquiry—the predominant part played jn the initial stages of witch persecution by malevolent or merely hysterical children and young women.”

Difference between British and Continental Witchcraft.— The salient difference between British and Continental witchcraft systems seems to have been that whereas the former was an almost exclusively female system, the Continental one favoured the inclusion in the ranks of sorcerers (as foreign witches were called) of the male element; this at least was the case in France and Germany, but there is evidence that in Hungary and the Slavonic countries, the female element was the more numerous. In Ireland we find women also pre-eminent; this is prob­ably to be accounted for by the circumstance before noted that the non-alien priesthoods in their decline became almost entirely dependent upon the offices of women. But the various forms of witchcraft are duly entered in the several articles dealing with European countries.

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