Bewitchment

“ Before leaving the subject of mediums I must allude again to witchcraft. To those who believe in spirits, good or evil, which can take possession of us and make us do their will, and can throw about bricks and sand and furniture in our material world, there is nothing remarkable in epidemics of bewitchery, especially as the witch-finders were more fortunate than our spiritualists in having the unanimous support of the most eminent authorities of their day. ”

“ There are also divers kinds of sportive and delusive Transformations, performed by those that use the Art of Leger-de-main or Juggling, wherein they pretend and seem to transubstantiate one thing into another, when by the agility of their hands, and the gesture of their face and body, they do but draw your eyes and attention another way, while they do but nimbly convey another thing in its place. And he that taketh these for Conjurers or Witches, and their Tricks for diabolical or Witchcraft, are surely under a devilish delusion, and are most strangely bewitched. ”

“ It will be time enough to-morrow, judges, a week hence or a whole year to shed the blood of a miserable woman for witchcraft. For witchcraft! alas for the credulity of man! alas for the very nature of man! ”

“ What is still more strange, I, too, regard the word of this snow-blown witch—whoever the hag may be—and can no more eject her prophecies from my head than can the scared victim of them.
This business of superstition—a weakness for the supernatural—belongs with our bone and blood. Reason is no shield from its assaults. ”

“ The making of anything out of the ordinary has brought on the maker a charge of witchcraft that again and again has resulted in death by the ordeal. To know more than others, to be more skilful than others, more energetic, more acute in business, more smart in dress, has often caused a charge of witchcraft and death. ”

“ They stretched the man out on the rack. They did not stretch the rack out, as we are doing. When men went witch-burning they may have seen witches everywhere—because their minds were fixed on witchcraft. ”

“ The reformation and revolution broke the enchanter's wand; and, when the cloud passed from the bloody stage, instead of seeing before us a magician full of the glories of his art and almost deceived himself, by the splendor of his incantations, we beheld a meagre and pitiful creature, who though blind and palsied, still retained for a while, the power of witch-like mischief. ”

“ But saddest and darkest and unholiest of all was the belief in witchcraft, which infested society for centuries like a sore eating through to the very heart of humanity, and which was nowhere more bitter and destructive than among the godly children of our Northern sister. ”

“ While I had, indeed, been preparing my reason and my fortitude to meet such perils, weird and marvellous, as those by which tales round the winter fireside scare the credulous child, a contrivance—so vulgar and hackneyed that not a day passes but what some hearth is vexed by an anonymous libel—had wrought a calamity more dread than aught which my dark guess into the Shadow-Land unpierced by Philosophy could trace to the prompting of malignant witchcraft. ”

“ Be the witchcrafts for the witchcraft-maker, the curse for him that curses; like an easy chariot let the witchcraft roll back to the witchcraft-maker.
6. If woman, or if man, hath made witchcraft in order to evil, it we conduct unto him, like a horse by a horse-halter. ”

“ She said, "There must be witchcraft in it; look out to morrow morning early, and see if anything stirs about in the room; if it does, throw a white cloth at once over it, and then the witchcraft will be stopped." ”

“ If the human character of the witchery does not betray itself by a pretty anachronism!—some intermingling of the costumes of the sixteenth century with those of the seventeenth, a sacrifice of history to the beauty of woman,—the illusion remains unbroken. ”

“ WITCHES, AND OTHER NIGHT-FEARS We are too hasty when we set down our ancestors in the gross for fools, for the monstrous inconsistencies (as they seem to us) involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. ”

“ If it is objected that the young and lovely are seldom accused of any witchcraft except that of bewitching hearts, we answer, that of those who were actually accused, many were young; and those who maintained a firm integrity against the overwhelming power of the delusion of the period must have possessed an intellectual beauty which it would be vain to endeavor to portray. ”

“ Even this horrible scene does not seem to have had any effect in humanizing men’s hearts, or opening their eyes to the infamy into which their superstition dragged them; for still the witch trials went on, and the young and the old, and the beautiful and the unlovely, and the loved and the loveless, were equally victims, cast without pity or remorse to their frightful doom. ”

“ The dark superstitions which once held sway over every part of rural England still haunt these wild wastes. The people yet believe in witchcraft, and think that the person bewitched has the right and the power to kill the witch by certain enchantments. ”

“ Some men were tied neck and heels until they would confess and accuse others.99 It was a period of the most pitiful mental and spiritual cowardice, and those that were most directly responsible for the shameful condition of affairs were men who, from98 their learning and their position, should have been the leaders and sustainers of the popular conscience in soberness of mind and charity. But the ministers of New England had emphasized the necessity of a belief in witchcraft as a part of the Divine revelation. ”

“ And that many strange things that are vomited up by such as are supposed to be bewitched do proceed from natural causes, and that the Devil worketh no more in them but by instigation, to move wicked persons (such as are commonly those that are accounted Witches) to give and administer strange things, Philters, or secret poisons, to such as they would kill, torment, make mad, or draw to unlawful love, or rather lust, as may be made manifest from the testimonies of persons of unquestionable veracity and judgment, some few of which we shall here relate. ”

“ The whole history of witchcraft and early medicine is a commentary on the facility with which anything which chances to be conceived is believed the moment the belief chimes in with an emotional mood. 'The cause of sickness?' When a savage asks the cause of anything he means to ask exclusively 'What is to blame?' The theoretic curiosity starts from the practical life's demands. ”

“ It would be difficult to see what has been changed here but the mere drapery of circumstance, if it were not for this prominent difference between our own days and the days of witchcraft, that instead of torturing, drowning, or burning the innocent we give hospitality and large pay to—the highly distinguished medium. At least we are safely rid of certain horrors ”

“ We have seen that all the opponents of witchcraft so far examined struggle to maintain a position that is strategically indefensible, either because they admit too much, or because they ignore certain difficulties, or because they are frankly eccentric. ”

“ Witches were not the feeble-minded, but the strong-minded --- the evil mesmerists, the rulers of the elements. Many a raid on a witch, right or wrong, seemed to the villagers who did it a righteous popular rising against a vast spiritual tyranny, a papacy of sin. ”

“ The older idea of a law of degeneracy, of a “fatal drift towards the worse,” is as obsolete as astrology or the belief in witchcraft. The human race has become hopeful, sanguine.—Seeley, Rede Lecture, 1887. ”

“ One lady, whom the editor of the Every-Day Book conversed with several times on the subject, firmly believed in the witchcraft, because she had been eye-witness to the animation of the inanimate crockery and furniture, which she said could not have been effected by human means—it was impossible. ”

“ The practice of witchcraft and magic involved the absolute and voluntary barter of body and soul to the Evil One, for the purpose of obtaining a few short years of superhuman power, to be employed for the gratification of the culprit's avarice, ambition, or desire for revenge. ”

“ Others, ceaselessly meditating and brooding over charms and demoniac influences, finally came to believe in their own powers of enchantment, and confessed their guilt, although they had sinned only by volition, without ever being able really to call forth and command magic powers. Still others labored under a regular panic and saw witchcraft in the simplest events as well as in all more unusual phenomena in nature. ”

“ But all these sources of slaves for shipment were [Pg 61] but a fraction of the number supplied by their belief in witchcraft. Witchcraft is their principal, or only belief; every thing that happens has been brought about by it; all cases of drought, sickness, death, blight, accident, and even the most trivial circumstances are ascribed to the evil influence of witchery or “fetish.” ”

“ No sacred days or seasons are observed.
A corollary to the belief in malevolent spirits is the belief in witchcraft. Certain persons obtain from the demons power to bewitch others, and thus sickness and death are caused. ”

“ For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry - This is no translation of those difficult words, כי חטאת קסם מרי ואון ותרפים הפצר ki chattath kesem meri veaven utheraphim haphtsar. It appears to me that the three nouns which occur first in the text refer each to the three last in order. Thus, חטאת chattath, Transgression, refers to און aven, Iniquity, which is the principle whence transgression springs. קסם kesem, Divination, refers to תרפים teraphim, consecrated images or telesms, vulgarly talismans, used in incantations. ”

“ It was sometime before the conviction began to spread, that even men of sense, education, and fervent piety could entertain the madness and infatuation of the weak, illiterate, and unprincipled. A disbeliever in witchcraft was an 'obdurate sadducee.' That conviction did at last possess men. ”

“ As far back as the first man with brains in his head, there was an ache to know why the sun shone, the stars twinkled, the winds blew, why harvests here were plentiful and there scant. The whole burden of witchcraft, of fetichism, of beliefs in voodoo, is a pathetic proof of this human longing to explain. ”

“ As in days gone by, the poor "witch"—if she be young and comely—must face her accusers naked, the sworn torturer at her elbow, so I have no standing in law or decency before the Powers over social life or death in our sphere of society. ”

“ This sort of witchcraft, which the Indians call eating the heart, and which is what we call bewitching, as sorcerers do by their venomous and deadly looks, is not a new thing, nor unheard of elsewhere ”

“ By these every sort of magic, enchantment, and witchcraft was forbidden, and the punishment of death decreed against those who in any way evoked the devil, compounded love-philters, afflicted either man or woman with barrenness, troubled the atmosphere, excited tempests, destroyed the fruits of the earth, dried up the milk of cows, or tormented their fellow-creatures with sores and diseases. ”

“ For there are individuals, commonly called “désorceleurs” or “white-witches,” who pretend to be able to declare whether a person is bewitched or not, and to have it in their power, by charms and incantations, to counteract the evil influence. ”

“ And if any cursed witch or enchanter should bewitch him, all that sorrow and mischance shall turn to himself through virtue of that stone. And no wild beast dare assail the man that beareth it on him. ”

“ After all, the old beliefs in witchcraft that were so common in Europe and in America until well into the eighteenth century represent the conviction of mankind that at least certain people might, from a distance, seriously influence them for evil. ”

“ Then, too, all the apparatus of pretended investigation and trial which the Inquisition had developed was transferred to the witch-trials. As women chiefly were charged with witchcraft, the result was that all this accumulation of superstition, folly, and cruelty was turned against them. If we try to form an idea of the amount of suffering which resulted, our hearts stand still with horror. ”

“ Hence, they were found constantly deprecating the wrath of departed spirits, in the belief that if they could appease them, only one cause of death, witchcraft, could remain, and that they could avert by charms. ”

“ Nor will it be doubted that a moral code which presses too severely upon the natural affections is calculated in all circumstances to have the consequences here adverted to. Of the cases of witchcraft, we can only deplore, with humiliation, that such delusions should have formed a part of the religious convictions of the age. ”

“ Should anyone think himself witched, all that he has got to do is to procure “witch’s butter,” and then thrust a pin into it. It was thought that this pin penetrated the wicked witch, and every pin thrust into the fungus went into her body, and thus she was forced to appear, and undo her mischief, and be herself relieved from bodily pain by relieving others.
13. A conjuror’s charm could master a witch’s spell.
It was thought that when a person was under a witch’s spell he could get relief and punish the witch by procuring a charm from a conjuror. ”