THE LITERATURE OF WITCHCRAFT. By Prof. George L. Burr, Cornell University. The literature of witchcraft is not the literature of magic. Magic is world-wide. Wherever, from the first, men have found themselves face to face with the awful powers of nature and of fate which shut in their little lives, some have disdained either to bow to them in reverent submission or to seek by bribes and wheedling to win them to their side. They have tried to outwit mystery with speculation, and to outmatch force with cunning. With spell and incantation they have dared to face the grim demons of storm and fire and flood, to bid begone the lurking fiends of disease, to dip into the dread secret of the future, to call back from the shadows the loved figures of the dead, to make the gods themselves their servants. And if, at last, they have been fain to own to themselves that their lore is, after all, but vanity and their powers a delusion, they have meanwhile found in the eager credulity of their fellows, to whom they no longer dare to confess their impotence, a treasure scarcely less tempting than the favor of the gods. Over against what they deemed the hocus-pocus of worship they have set up the hocus-pocus of magic; and, as the prophet is followed by the priest, the magician is followed by the sorcerer. Under the peaceful stars of Akkadian Chaldæa, centuries before Terah wandered westward with his son, or in the tornado-torn jungles of the last-found South Sea island, the impulse and its outcome have been ever the same. Compared with the potent share of magic in human history, its literature is indeed but scant. Its choicest secrets have always gone by word of mouth. Yet it is a literature of all times and lands. From the clay volumes of Assyrian kings and the papyrus rolls of Egypt to the latest utterance of the spirits through Mr. Slade or of the mystic sages of the Orient through Mr. Sinnett, it is as perennial as human folly itself. Its faith may be feigned, its miracles sham; but magic itself is actual and universal. But witchcraft never was. It was but a shadow, a nightmare: the nightmare of a religion, the shadow of a dogma. Less than five centuries saw its birth, its vigor, its decay. And this birth, this vigor, this decay, were—to a degree perhaps else unknown in history—caused by and mirrored in a literature. Of that literature it has during the last decade been mine, as librarian of the President White Library at Cornell University, to aid in building up a collection. In the last few months I have had in hand the making ready of its catalogue for the press. My task is by no means finished, and I have much to learn; but it has seemed to me that even such a hurried survey of the literature of witchcraft as I may presume to attempt may not be without interest to the American Historical Association. And this the more, since no adequate bibliography of it has ever yet been published, and no historian has thoroughly known and exploited it. The literature of witchcraft, indeed, if under the name be included all the books which touch upon that dark subject, is something enormous. For at least four centuries no comprehensive work on theology, on philosophy, on history, on law, on medicine, on natural science, could wholly ignore it; and to lighter literature it afforded the most telling illustrations for the pulpit, the most absorbing gossip for the news-letter, the most edifying tales for the fireside. But the works devoted wholly or mainly to witchcraft are much fewer. Roundly and rudely estimated, this monographic literature includes perhaps a thousand or fifteen hundred titles. [1] The earliest of the books on witchcraft were written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Their writers were Dominicans of the Inquisition. Not that Brother Nicolas Eymeric or Brother Nicolas Jaquier or Brother John Vineti or Brother Jerome Visconti knew that he was writing on a new theme. On the contrary, they wrote to prove that this witchcraft whereof they spoke was as old as mankind. And they cited not only Thomas Aquinas and Vincent of Beauvais, but Isidore and Gregory and Cassian and Augustine, and, above all, the Bible,—nay, even Josephus and the ancient poets, Horace and Virgil and Ovid. Wherein, then, was it really new, and how did they come to write on it at all? Bear with me while I try very briefly to answer. Magic, in truth, the Christian Church had always known. Even the ancient faiths of Greece and Rome had, like all faiths, fought magic sternly; and, like all faiths, had counted magic much that was not so. But their polytheistic tolerance had reckoned it more a crime than a sin, and had not stigmatized as magical other faiths, save when, as in the case of Christianity, their own exclusiveness seemed to stamp their votaries as foes to the rest of mankind. Less indifferent was Christianity itself. Whatever the conceptions of her founder and of his immediate disciples, it was inevitable that, from the associations of the words in which they must express themselves, from the other preconceptions of the taught, from the influence of the Jewish scriptures, from the daily contact with Hebrew or Greek or Roman neighbors, there should early creep into the Church a touch of the superstition about her. She had inherited, indeed, the monotheism of the Jews. But, at the rise of Christianity, the day was long past when the stern logic of that monotheism saw in Jehovah the sole supernatural power, and in other worships only a fruitless idolatry. From the Persian captivity the Jews had brought back an obstinate belief in a horde of minor intelligences—the angels and demons of the New Testament period; and their teachers, seeking to justify this by one or two obscure passages in their sacred books, had built up out of them a complete science of demonology.[2] To the ranks of the demons the early Christians seem at once to have assigned the deities of their heathen neighbors.[3] And the consciences of their Gentile converts, who found it far easier to believe the new God supreme than the old gods powerless, took most kindly to this solution. But, if the gods were devils, their worship was not mere idolatry—it was magic; and the two terms became for the Christian interchangeable. Still stranger and darker grew the conception of magic under the influence of another Christian idea—the new idea that religion and ethics are one. Henceforth not only is there but one true God, there is but one good God. All others are fiends, hating men because God loves them, and winning their trust only to cheat and ruin them. He who willingly becomes their accomplice or their victim is utterly evil—an enemy to his kind, to be visited by the Church with her severest penances, by the state with death itself. It matters no longer with what spirit one seeks the aid of the gods, or for what ends: all but Christian worship is devil-worship,—magic,—mortal sin. Here were indeed the germs of the later idea of witchcraft. Yet only the germs; for there was much to stay their growth. Though the world swarmed with demons, though the majority of mankind were devoted to their service, the Christian had little or nothing to fear from them.[4] A prayer, an exorcism, the sign of the cross, the mere name of Christ, could put legions of them to instant flight. It was the Christian’s glory to baffle and set them at naught. Moreover, the whole theory was aimed at paganism, and paganism was passing away. Even the inundation of Christendom by the Germanic nations could not long retard its disappearance. Their host of deities, great and small—Asa and Jotun and troll and nix and kobold—swelled for a moment almost to bursting the ranks of the devils. But these, too, soon fell back into the ghostly twilight. Here and there some canny old mother might still gather by stealth the mystic herbs with which she trenched so vexatiously upon the monkish trade of healing,—might still haunt sacred spring or tree or rock, muttering the meaningless formulas of a forgotten faith. But such, though scholars were long prone to count them so, were not the witches of the later day. The Church grew wisely less stern toward them, rather than more so. As the spirit of Christianity took a more exclusive hold upon the minds of men, the grandeur of the monotheistic idea once more asserted itself. Resort to the old heathen rites was magic indeed; but it was magical superstition. Its marvels were not real marvels. Only God had power over nature. In this, though with much wavering and self-contradiction, the teachers of western Christendom in the ninth, the tenth, and the eleventh centuries agree[5]; and the earliest codes of the crystallizing Canon Law, from Regino of Prüm to Gratian, punish as superstition alike the resort to the aid of demons and the belief that such aid can be given. “Let it be publicly announced to all,” ran the famous canon Episcopi, which formed the nucleus of the Church’s teaching on this point, “that whoso believeth such fables [as that women may ride through the air] and things like this, has lost the faith; and whoso has not faith in God is none of his, but is his in whom he believes, to wit, the Devil’s. Whoever, therefore, believes it to be possible that any creature can be changed into a worse or a better, or transformed into any other shape or likeness, except by the Creator himself, who made all things and by whom all things were made, is beyond doubt an infidel and worse than a pagan.”[6] Under such handling the hold of the older faiths upon the popular imagination had, by the close of the twelfth century, well nigh passed away. The magic the Church had so long fought was virtually dead. But the wording of the canon Episcopi itself suggests that a new cloud was already fast overspreading the horizon of Christianity—the fear, not of devils, but of the Devil. By a tendency natural to monotheism, the intenser the conception of the oneness and the goodness of God, the stronger the impulse to conceive of that which is opposed to him and to his purposes as also one and as absolutely evil. Even the earliest of the Christians seem to have understood their master to speak of such a principle as of a personal being. And, as the westward-moving faith waxed in literalness and in sternness,—as, beneath the flood of Roman ideas and ideals, the figure of God grew more majestic and imperious,—his awful shadow loomed ever more awful in the darkening background. The rise of asceticism lent a finishing touch, and metaphysics became mythology. To the tortured brain and sense of the hermit-monk the Devil was the most real being in the universe—his personal antagonist at every turn, seen and felt and grappled with. And no Christian doubted. Athanasius, the father of orthodoxy, himself gave to the world, in his life of Antony, a household book of diabolism—the “Robinson Crusoe” of the Middle Ages, with Satan (an odd man-Friday) its most vivid figure.[7] And Augustine, the great theologian of Latin Christianity—a Manichæan in spite of himself—in his “City of God,” that first Christian philosophy of history, which lorded the field for a thousand years (if, indeed, it does not lord it still), raised him to colleagueship with God himself by setting over against the civitas Dei, the kingdom of Heaven, a civitas Diaboli, the kingdom of this world, whose prince was Satan. Christianity grew ever more a dualism

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