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From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries we find the conception of witchcraft and demonology greatly furthered and assisted by the writings of scholars and the institu­tion of the Inquisition to deal with the rise of unbelief. A vast amount of literature was circulated dealing with questions relating to magic and sorcery, and regarding the habits and customs of witches, magicians and practitioners in” black magic,” and many hairs were split. The Church gladly joined in this campaign against what it regarded as the forces of darkness, and indeed both accused and accusers seem to have lingered under the most dreadful delusions— delusions which were to cost society dear as a whole. The scholastic conception of demonology was that the witch was not a woman but a demon. Rationalism was at a

discount and the ingenuity of medinval scholars disposed of all objections to the phenomena of witchcraft. The deities of pagan times were cited as practitioners of sorcery, and erudition, especially in~ ecclesiastical circles, ran riot on the subject. There also arose a class of judges or inquisitors like Bodin in France and Sprenger in Germany. who composed lengthy treatises upon the manner of discovering witches, of putting them to the test, and generally of presiding in witchcraft trials. The cold-blooded cruelty of these textbooks on current demonology can only be accounted for by the likelihood that their authors felt themselves justified in their composition through motives of fidelity to their church and religion. The awful terror disseminated especially among the intelligent by the possibility of a charge of witchcraft being brought against them at any moment brought about an intolerable con­dition of things. The intellectual might be arraigned at any time on a charge of witchcraft by any rascal who cared to make it. Position or learning were no safeguard against such a charge, and it is peculiar that the more thoughtful and serious part of the population should not have made some attempt to put a period to the dreadful condition of affairs brought about by ignorance and superstition. Of course the principal reason against their being able to do so was the fact that the whole system was countenanced by the Church, in whose hands the entire procedure of trials for witchcraft lay.

Strangely enough convents and monasteries were often the centers of demoniac possession. The conception of the incubi and succubi undoubtedly arose from the ascetic tortures of the monk and the nun. Wholesale trials, too, of wretched people who were alleged to attend Sabbatic orgies of the enemy of mankind on dreary heaths were gone through with an elaborateness which spread terror in the public mind. The tortures inflicted on those un­fortunates were generally of the most fiendish des­cription, but they were supposed to be for the good of the souls of those who bore them. In France the majority of these trials took place in the fifteenth century; whereas in England we find that most of them were current in the seventeenth century. Full details regarding these will be found in the articles France and England. The famous outburst of fanaticism in New England under Cotton Mather in 1691 to 1692 was by no means the last in an English-speaking country, for in 1712 a woman was convicted of witchcraft in England, and in Scotland the last trial and execution for sorcery topk place in 1722. In Spain we find burnings by the Inquisition in 1781; in Germany as late as 1793, and as regards Latin South America a woman was burned in Peru so recently as i888. The death of the belief in witchcraft was brought about by a more sane spirit of criticism than had before obtained. Even the dull wits of the inquisitorial and other courts began to see that the wretched creatures upon whom they passed sentence either confessed because of th,e extremity of torture they had to suffer, or else were under hallucination regarding the nature of their connection with the satanic power. Reginald Scot in his Discovery of Witchcraft (1584) proved that the belief on the part of the witch that she was a servant of the Devil was purely imaginary, and in consequence drew upon his work the wrath of the British Solomon, James I., who warmly replied to him in his Deinonologie. But Friedrich von Spee’s Cautio Criniinalis, 1631, advanced considerations of still greater weight from the rationalistic point of view— considerations of such weight indeed that Bodin, the arch­demonologist, denounced him and demanded that he should be added to the long list of his victims.

Psychology of Witchcraft.—No doubt exists nowadays when the conditions of savage witchcraft have been closely examined and commented upon, that the witch and the sorcerer of the Middle Ages, like their prototypes among the native races of Africa, America, Asia and elsewhere, have a firmly-rooted belief in their own magical powers, and in their connection with unseen and generally diabolic agencies. It is a strange circumstance that in many instances the confessions wrung from two or more witches, when a number of them have been concerned in the same case, have tallied with one another in almost every detail. This would imply that these women suffered from collective hallucination, and actually believed that they had seen the supernatural beings with whom they confessed fellow­ship, and had gone through the rites and acts for which they suffered. A period arrived in the medieval campaign against witchcraff when it was admitted that the whole sys­tem was one of hallucination; yet, said the demonologists, this was no palliation of the offence, for it was equally as evil to imagine such diabolic acts as actually to take part in them.

There is also evidence which would lead to the belief that the witch possessed certain minor powers of hypnotism and telepathy, which would give her real confidence in her belief that she wielded magical terrors. Again the phen­omena of spiritualism and the large possibilities it offers for fraud suggest that some kindred system might have been in use amongst the more shrewd or the leaders in these Sabbatic meetings, which would thoroughly con­vince the ignorant among the sisterhood of the existence in their midst of diabolic powers. Trance and hysteria, drugs and salves, there is good reason to believe, were also used unsparingly, but the great source of witch-belief undoubtedly exists in auto-suggestion, fostered and fomented from ecclesiastical and scholastic sources, and by no means lessened by popular belief.

Since the above article was written an exhaustive examination of the phenomena of wiichcraff has been made by Miss M. A. Murray, lecturer on Egyptology at University College, London. Basing her conclusions upon the sug­gestions of C. G. Leland, in his “Aradia, or the Witches of Italy,” and those of other modern writers, she inclines to the hypothesis that witchcraft was in reality the modern and degraded descendant of an ancient nature-religion, the rites of which were actually carried out in deserted places and included child-sacrifice and other barbarous customs. In the Satanic presence at such gatherings she sees the attendance of a priest of the cult. In brief, her hypothesis tends to prove the actual reality of the witch-religion as against that of hallucination which, until recently, was the explanation accepted by students of the subject. Her remarks, too, upon the familiar, go to show that a large body of proof exists for the belief that this conception also rested upon actual occurrences.

Recent researches on the part of the writer have con­vinced him of the soundness of these views, but have added the conviction that witchcraft religion was, in some manner, possessed of an equestrian connection, the precise nature of which is still dark to him. The broomstick appears to be the magical equivalent of a horse, the witches occasionally rode to the Sabbath on horseback, and one of the tests for a witch was to see if her eye held the refiectionor like­ness of a horse. May it not be that the witch-religion was the remnant of a prehistoric horse-totem cult ? But this is, after all, merely of the nature of surmise. The writer has also found good evidence for the existence of a witch-cult precisely similar to that of Europe in pre-Columbian Mexico, and has even encountered a picture of a naked witch with peaked cap riding on a broomstick in the native Mexican painting known as the Codex Fejervàry-­Mayer, which seems to show that the witch-religion was in no sense limited to Europe, and was of most ancient origin.

The Malleus Maleficarum made little impact in En­gland. It was not translated into English until 1584, 98 years after it had been written. England had its own Protestant demonologists in the 17th century who wrote treatises on identifying and punishing witches, including WILLIAM PERKINS, John Cotta, Thomas Potts, Richard Bald­win and other learned men. These opinion shapers held that white witches were far more dangerous than black witches and deserved to be prosecuted all the more. Ireland remained free of much of the witch hysteria. Only about eight trials are recorded between 1324 and 1711 . Except for the Kyteler trial, they all involved Protestants against Protestants. A law against witchcraft was passed in 1587 and was repealed in 1821. Witch problems in the American colonies did not begin until the 1640s, just as the hysteria was peaking in England, and they never reached the magnitude of the witch-hunts elsewhere. The first hanging of a convicted witch occurred in 1647 in Connecticut. INCREASE MATHER and COTTON MATHER, leaders in Massachusetts, were influ­enced by the demonologists of England—Cotton Mather cited Perkins in his own treatises on witchcraft—and believed that a conspiracy of witches who were in league with Satan threatened the survival of New England. The mass trials in Salem in 1692, the most spectacular witch case in America, were tried under the 1604 statute . Elsewhere in the colonies, trials were scattered. Besides the Salem victims (31 condemned and 150 accused), there are records of only a dozen or so exe­cutions of witches in New England, plus a number of lighter punishments of whippings and banishment. No witches in America were burned. Pennsylvania law under William Penn was tolerant, thus making it possible later for the German immigrant powwowers (wizards or cun­ning folk) to establish their culture. The end of the witch hysteria. Church and state perse­cutions of witches largely came to a halt in Europe, Britain and America by the 173 Os, though scattered cases occurred for several more decades. The last trial occurred in 1711 in Ireland, resulting in sentences of jail and the pillory. In England, Jane Clarke and her son and daughter were the last to be indicted as witches, in 1717; despite the willingness of 25 persons to testify against them, the case was thrown out of court. In Scotland, Janet Home was the last to be tried and burned, in 1727. In the American colonies, Grace Sherwood of Virginia was accused of witchcraft in 1706 and was swum, but the case may have been dropped. In Jura, the border area between France and Switzerland, a beggar woman was burned as a witch in 1731. Persecutions lingered in France and Germany, where the greatest witch-hunting had taken place during the height of the Inquisition. In France, the last executions took place in 1745. In Bavaria, Anna Maria Schwagel was the last accused witch to be executed in 1775 by beheading. Political and social changes, and backlash reactions to the persecutions, made witch-hunting both undesir­able and unnecessary. In Germany, the threatened destruction of entire populations necessitated a cooling of accusations and trials. Throughout Europe, the evolu­tion from feudalism to capitalism during the 17th and 18th centuries changed attitudes toward the instability created by the threat of heresy and the subsequent con­fiscations of property.

In England, the Civil War drastically changed society by establishing a republican commonwealth, paving the way for a middle class and improving religious tolerance. In the American colonies, public disgust was so great after the Salem debacle that leaders criticized the methods of the court. Salem colony repented, and in 1711 the General Court restored the civil rights of 22 of the 31 persons convicted in 1692 (the rights of the remaining victims were not restored until 1957). The industrial revolution and Age of Science brought shifts to urban population centers, changes in livelihood and more education. Among the learned men, the skepti­cism of science took hold, and it became unfashionable to believe in witchcraft and magic. One influential critic was Francis Hutchinson, an English clergyman who wrote his sharply critical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718), which exposed the false accusations, evidence and politi­cal motivations of many trials. In 1736, under George II of England, the Witchcraft Act of 1604 was repealed and replaced with a new statute that removed penalties for witchcraft, sorcery, enchant­ment and conjuration. However, the new law punished those who pretended to use witchcraft, sorcery, enchant­ment and conjuration in fraudulent fortune-telling and divining. Punishment was a year in jail with quarterly appearances in the pillory. Witchcraft receded as heresy and returned to sorcery and folk magic. The public still perceived a “witch” as a malevolent person in league with the Devil but contin­ued to rely heavily upon cunning folk, powwowers, witch doctors, sorcerers, white witches and the like for healing, fertility, luck and prosperity charms and divina­tion. White witchcraft flourished during the 18th cen­tury and most of the 19th century. Among rural, uneducated populations, antiwitch sentiment contin­ued. In England, Europe and even America, there were outbreaks of violence against suspected witches all through the 19th century, and into the early 20th cen­tury. The violence sometimes was turned on white witches whose magic failed to work. Stories in the press appeared periodically about witches, magical charms and rumors of nocturnal meetings in forests. In the latter half of the 19th century, Spiritualism spread quickly on both sides of the Atlantic. In England, the Witchcraft Act of 1736 and the Vagrancy Act of 1824 were used to prosecute mediums on charges of conjuring spirits and fraudulent fortune-telling. A campaign to rescind the 1736 statute was mounted by Spiritualists in 1950, after the law had been used against a medium who defrauded a widow. In 1951 the Witchcraft Act of 1736, and a section of the Vagrancy Act of 1824, were replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act. For the first time in more than 300 years in Britain, witchcraft was no longer a crime.

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Last modified: 06/27/08