Witchcraft in America. Charles Wentworth Upham
found one of the proscribed books, gave himself up for lost.'28
The similarity of this to the horrible catastrophe of Arras, recorded by the chroniclers of the fifteenth century, excepting the grosser absurdities of the latter, is almost perfect. Valentinian and Valens, who seem to have emulated the atrocious fame of the Cæsarean family, with their ministers, concealed, it is probable, under the disguise of a simulated credulity the real motives of revenge and cupidity.
The Roman world, Christian and pagan, was subject to the prevailing fear. That portion of the globe, however, comprehended but a small part of the human race. The records of history are incomplete and imperfect; nor are they more confined in point of time than of extent. History is little more at any period than an imperfect account of the life of a few particular peoples. Necessarily limited almost entirely to an acquaintance with the history of that portion of the globe included in the 'Roman Empire,' we almost forget our profound ignorance of that vastly larger proportion of the earth's surface, the extra-Roman world, embracing then, as now, civilised as well as barbarous nations. The Chinese empire (the most extraordinary, perhaps, and whose antiquity far surpasses that of any known), comprehending within its limits two-thirds of the population of the globe; the refined and ingenious people of Hindustan, an immense population, in the East: in the Western hemisphere nations in existence whose remains excited the admiration of the Spanish invaders; the various savage tribes of the African continent; the nomad populations of Northern Asia and Europe; nearly all these more or less, on the testimony of past and present observation, experienced the tremendous fears of the vulgar demonism.29
With the tribes who, in the time of Cæsar or Tacitus, inhabited the forests of Germany, and, perhaps, amongst the Scandinavians, some more elevated ideas obtained, the germ, however, of a degenerated popular prejudice. By all the German tribes, on the testimony of cotemporary writers, women were held in high respect, and were believed to have something even divine in their mental or spiritual faculties. 'Very many of their women they regard in the light of prophetesses, and when superstitious fear is in the ascendant, even of goddesses.' History has preserved the names of some of these Teutonic deities. Veleda, by prophetic inspiration, or by superior genius, directed the councils of her nation, and for some years successfully resisted the progress of the imperial arms.30 Momentous questions of state or religion were submitted to their divine judgment, and it is not wonderful if, endowed with supernatural attributes, they, like other prophets, helped to fulfil their own predictions. The Britons and Gauls, of the Keltic race, seem to have resembled the Orientals, rather than the Teutons or Italians, in their religious systems. Long before the Romans came in contact with them the magic science is said to have been developed, and the priests, like those of India or Egypt, communicated the mysteries only to a privileged few, with circumstances of profound secrecy. Such was the excellence of the magic science of the British Druids, that Pliny (Hist. Nat. xxx.) was induced to suppose that the Magi of Persia must have derived their system from Britain. For the most part the Kelts then, as in the present day, were peculiarly tenacious of a creed which it was the interest of a priestly caste to preserve. On the other hand, the looser religion of the Teuton nations, of the Scandinavians and Germans, could not find much difficulty in accepting the particular conceptions of the Southern conquerors; and the sorceric mythology of the Northern barbarians readily recognised the power of an Erichtho to control the operations of nature, to prevent or confound the course of the elements, interrupt the influence of the sun, avert or induce tempests, to affect the passions of the soul, to fascinate or charm a cruel mistress, &c., with all the usual necromantic rites. But if they could acknowledge the characteristics of the Italian Striga, those nations at the same time retained a proper respect for the venerated Saga—the German Hexe.
Of all the historic peoples of ancient Europe, the Scandinavians were perhaps most imbued with a persuasion of the efficacy of magic; a fact which their home and their habits sufficiently explain. In the Eddas, Odin, the leader of the immigration in the first century, and the great national lawgiver, is represented as well versed in the knowledge of that preternatural art; and the heroes of the Scandinavian legends of the tenth or twelfth century are especially ambitious of initiation. The Scalds, like the Brahmins or Druids, were possessed of tremendous secrets; their runic characters were all powerful charms, whether against enemies, the injurious effects of an evil eye, or to soften the resentment of a lover.31 The Northmen, with the exception of some nations of Central Europe, like the Lithuanians, who were not christianised until the thirteenth or fourteenth century, from their roving habits as well perhaps as from their remoteness, were among the last peoples of Europe to abandon their old creed. Urged by poverty and the hopes of plunder, the pirates of the Baltic long continued to be the terror of the European coasts; but, without a political status, they were the common outlaws of Christendom. They were the relics of a savage life now giving way in Europe to the somewhat more civilised forms of society, continuing their indiscriminate depredations with impunity only because of the want of union and organisation among their neighbours. But they were in a transitional state: the coasts and countries they had formerly been content to ravage, they were beginning to find it their interest to colonise and cultivate. In the new interests and pursuits of civilisation and commerce, a natural disgust might have been experienced for the savage traditions of a religion whose gods and heroes were mostly personifications of war and rapine, under whose banners they had suffered the hardships, if they had enjoyed the plunder, of a piratic life. The national deities from being disregarded, must have come soon to be treated with undisguised contempt at least by the leaders: while the common people, serfs, or slaves were still immersed (as much as in Christian Europe) in a stupid superstition.
When men's minds are thus universally unsettled and in want—a want both universal and necessary in states—of some new divine objects of worship more suited to advanced ideas and requirements, a system of religion more civilising and rational than the antiquated one, will be adopted without much difficulty, especially if it is not too exclusive. Yet the Scandinavians were unusually tenacious of the forms of their ancestral worship; for while the Icelanders are said to have received Christianity about the beginning of the eleventh century, the people of Norway were not wholly converted until somewhat later. The halls of Valhalla must have been relinquished with a sigh in exchange for the less intelligible joys of a tranquil and insensuous paradise. An ancient Norsk law enjoins that the king and bishop, with all possible care, make inquiry after those who exercise pagan practices, employ magic arts, adore the genii of particular places, of tombs or rivers, who transport themselves by a diabolical mode of travelling through the air from place to place. In the extremity of the northern peninsula (amongst the Laplanders), where the light of science, or indeed of civilisation, has scarcely yet penetrated, witchcraft remains as flourishing as in the days of Odin; and the Laplanders at present are possibly as credulous in this respect as the old Northmen or the present tribes of Africa and the South Pacific. Before the introduction of the new religion (it is a curious fact), the Germans and Scandinavians, as well as the Jews, were acquainted with the efficacy of the rite of infant baptism. A Norsk chronicle of the twelfth century, speaking of a Norwegian nobleman who lived in the reign of Harald Harfraga, relates that he poured water on the head of his new-born son, and called him Hakon, after the name of his father. Harald himself had been baptized in the same way; and it is noted of the infant pagan St. Olaf that his mother had him baptized as soon as he was born. The Livonians observed the same ceremony; and a letter sent expressly by Pope Gregory III. to St. Boniface, the great apostle of the Germans, directs him how to act in such cases. It is probable, Mallet conjectures, that all these people might intend by such a rite to preserve their children from the sorceries and evil charms which wicked spirits might employ against them at the instant of their birth. Several nations of Asia and America have attributed such a power to ablutions of this kind; nor were the Romans without the custom, though they did not wholly confine it to new-born infants. A curious magical use of an initiatory and sacramental rite, ignorantly anticipated, it seems, by the unilluminated faith of the pagan world.
In reviewing the characteristics of sorcery which prevailed in the ancient world,