The Superstitions of Witchcraft | Page 9

two, of the execution of Socrates.
[20] St. Augustin, in denouncing the Platonic theories of Apuleius, of the mediation and intercession of demons between gods and men, and exposing his magic heresies, takes occasion to taunt him with having evaded his just fate by not professing, like the Christian martyrs, his real faith when delivering his 'very copious and eloquent' apology (De Civitate Dei, lib. viii. 19). In the Golden Ass of the Greek romancist of the second century, who, in common with his cotemporary the great rationalist Lucian, deserves the praise of having exposed (with more wit perhaps than success) some of the most absurd prejudices of the day, his readers are entertained with stories that might pretty nearly represent the sentiments of the seventeenth century.
Gibbon observes of the Roman superstition on the authority of Petronius, that it may be inferred that it was of Italian rather than barbaric extraction. Etruria furnished the people of Romulus with the science of divination. Early in the history of the Republic the law is very explicit on the subject of witchcraft. In the decemviral code the extreme penalty is attached to the crime of witchcraft or conjuration: 'Let him be capitally punished who shall have bewitched the fruits of the earth, or by either kind of conjuration (excantando neque incantando) shall have conjured away his neighbour's corn into his own field,' &c., an enactment sneered at in Justinian's Institutes in Seneca's words. A rude and ignorant antiquity, repeat the lawyers of Justinian, had believed that rain and storms might be attracted or repelled by means of spells or charms, the impossibility of which has no need to be explained by any school of philosophy. A hundred and fifty years later than the legislation of the decemvirs was passed the Lex Cornelia, usually cited as directed against sorcery: but while involving possibly the more shadowy crime, it seems to have been levelled against the more 'substantial poison.' The conviction and condemnation of 170 Roman ladies for poisoning, under pretence of incantation, was the occasion and cause. Sulla, when dictator, revived this act de veneficiis et malis sacrificiis, for breach of which the penalty was 'interdiction of fire and water.' Senatorial anathemas, or even those of the prince, were ineffective to check the continually increasing abuses, which towards the end of the first century of the empire had reached an alarming height.[21]
[21] It will be observed that veneficus and maleficus are the significant terms among the Italians for the criminals.
A general degradation of morals is often accompanied, it has been justly remarked, by a corresponding increase of the wildest credulity, and by an abject subservience to external religious rites in propitiation of an incensed deity. It was thus at Rome when the eloquence of Cicero, and afterwards the indignant satire of Juvenal or the calm ridicule of the philosophic Lucian,[22] attempted to assert the 'proper authority of reason.' To speak the truth, says Cicero, superstition has spread like a torrent over the entire globe, oppressing the minds and intellects of almost all men and seizing upon the weakness of human nature.[23] The historian of 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' justifies and illustrates this lament of the philosopher of the Republic in the particular case of witchcraft. 'The nations and the sects of the Roman world admitted with equal credulity and similar abhorrence the reality of that infernal art which was able to control the eternal order of the planets, and the voluntary operations of the human mind. They dreaded the mysterious power of spells and incantations, of potent herbs and execrable rites, which could extinguish or recall life, influence the passions of the soul, blast the works of creation, and extort from the reluctant demons the secrets of Futurity. They believed with the wildest inconsistency that the preternatural dominion of the air, of earth, and of hell, was exercised from the vilest motives of malice or gain by some wrinkled hags or itinerant sorcerers who passed their obscure lives in penury and contempt. Such vain terrors disturbed the peace of society and the happiness of individuals; and the harmless flame which insensibly melted a waxen image might derive a powerful and pernicious energy from the affrighted fancy of the person whom it was maliciously designed to represent. From the infusion of those herbs which were supposed to possess a supernatural influence, it was an easy step to the case of more substantial poison; and the folly of mankind sometimes became the instrument and the mask of the most atrocious crimes.'[24]
[22] If the philosophical arguments of Menippus (Nekrikoi Dialogoi) could have satisfied the interest of the priests or the ignorance of the people of after times, the infernal fires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries might not have burned.
[23] De Divinatione, lib. ii.
[24]