The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) | Page 6

(Institor) in 1489, buttressed on the bull of Pope Innocent VIII; (this was the celebrated Witch Hammer, bearing on its title page the significant legend, "_Not to believe in witchcraft is the greatest of heresies_"); the Canon Episcopi; the bulls of Popes John XXII, 1330, Innocent VIII, 1484, Alexander VI, 1494, Leo X, 1521, and Adrian VI, 1522; the Decretals of the canon law; the exorcisms of the Roman and Greek churches, all hinged on scriptural precedents; the Roman law, the Twelve Tables, and the Justinian Code, the last three imposing upon the crimes of conjuring, exorcising, magical arts, offering sacrifices to the injury of one's neighbors, sorcery, and witchcraft, the penalties of death by torture, fire, or crucifixion.
Add to these classics some of the later authorities: the _D?monologie_ of the royal inquisitor James I of England and Scotland, 1597; Mores' _Antidote to Atheism_; Fuller's _Holy and Profane State_; Granvil's Sadducismus Triumphatus, 1681; _Tryal of Witches at the Assizes for the County of Suffolk before Sir Matthew Hale, March, 1664_ (London, 1682); Baxter's Certainty of the World of Spirits, 1691; Cotton Mather's A Discourse on Witchcraft, 1689, his Late Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions, 1684, and his Wonders of the Invisible World, 1692; and enough references have been made to this literature of delusion, to the precedents that seared the consciences of courts and juries in their sentences of men, women, and children to death by the rack, the wheel, the stake, and the gallows.
Where in history are the horrors of the curse more graphically told than in the words of Canon Linden, an eye witness of the demonic deeds at Trier (Treves) in 1589?
"And so, from court to court throughout the towns and villages of all the diocese, scurried special accusers, inquisitors, notaries, jurors, judges, constables, dragging to trial and torture human beings of both sexes and burning them in great numbers. Scarcely any of those who were accused escaped punishment. Nor were there spared even the leading men in the city of Trier. For the Judge, with two Burgomasters, several Councilors and Associate Judges, canons of sundry collegiate churches, parish-priests, rural deans, were swept away in this ruin. So far, at length, did the madness of the furious populace and of the courts go in this thirst for blood and booty that there was scarcely anybody who was not smirched by some suspicion of this crime.
"Meanwhile notaries, copyists, and innkeepers grew rich. The executioner rode a blooded horse, like a noble of the court, and went clad in gold and silver; his wife vied with noble dames in the richness of her array. The children of those convicted and punished were sent into exile; their goods were confiscated; plowman and vintner failed." (The Witch Persecutions, pp. 13-14, BURR.)
Fanaticism did not rule and ruin without hindrance and remonstrance. Men of great learning and exalted position struck mighty blows at the root of the evil. They could not turn the tide but they stemmed it, and their attacks upon the whole theory of Satanic power and the methods of persecution were potent in the reaction to humanity and a reign of reason.
Always to be remembered among these men of power are Johann Wier, Friedrich Spee, and notably Reginald Scot, who in his Discovery of Witchcraft, in 1584, undertook to prove that "the contracts and compacts of witches with devils and all infernal spirits and familiars, are but erroneous novelties and erroneous conceptions."
"After all it is setting a high value on our conjectures to roast a man alive on account of them." (MONTAIGNE.)
Who may measure in romance and the drama the presence, the cogent and undeniable power of those same abiding elements of mysticism and mystery, which underlie all human experience, and repeated in myriad forms find their classic expression in the queries of the "Weird Sisters," "_those elemental avengers without sex or kin_"?
"When shall we three meet again, In thunder, lightning or in rain? When the hurly burly's done, When the battle's lost and won."
Are not the mummeries of the witches about the cauldron in Macbeth, and Talbot's threat pour la Pucelle,
"Blood will I draw on thee, thou art a witch,"
uttered so long ago, echoed in the wailing cry of La Meffraye in the forests of Machecoul, in the maledictions of Grio, and of the Saga of the Burning Fields?
Their vitality is also clearly shown in their constant use and exemplification by the romance and novel writers who appeal with certainty and success to the popular taste in the tales of spectral terrors. Witness: Farjeon's _The Turn of the Screw_; Bierce's _The Damned Thing_; Bulwer's _A Strange Story_; Cranford's _Witch of Prague_; Howells' _The Shadow of a Dream_; Winthrop's _Cecil Dreeme_; Grusot's _Night Side of Nature_; Crockett's Black Douglas; and The Red Axe, Francis' _Lychgate Hall_; Caine's _The