Discover the Truth Behind Witchcraft Stories. William Godwin

Discover the Truth Behind Witchcraft Stories

may be enough (to dispel any such possible illusion) to transcribe a paragraph from an account in The Times newspaper of Sept. 24, 1863. 'It is a somewhat singular fact,' says the writer, describing a late notorious witch-persecution in the county of Essex, 'that nearly all the sixty or seventy persons concerned in the outrage which resulted in the death of the deceased were of the small tradesmen class, and that none of the agricultural labourers were mixed up in the affair. It is also stated that none of those engaged were in any way under the influence of liquor. The whole disgraceful transaction arose out of a deep belief in witchcraft, which possesses to a lamentable extent the tradespeople and the lower orders of the district.' Nor does it appear that the village of Hedingham (the scene of the witch-murder) claims a superiority in credulity over other villages in Essex or in England. The instigator and chief agent in the Hedingham case was the wife of an innkeeper, who was convinced that she had been bewitched by an old wizard of reputation in the neighbourhood: and the mode of punishment was the popular one of drowning or suffocating in the nearest pond. Scraps of written papers found in the hovel of the murdered wizard revealed the numerous applications by lovers, wives, and other anxious inquirers. Amongst other recent revivals of the 'Black Art' in Southern Europe already referred to, the inquisition at Rome upon a well-known English or American 'spiritualist,' when, as we learn from himself, he was compelled to make a solemn abjuration that he had not surrendered his soul to the devil, is significant.

165. A modern philosopher has well illustrated this obvious truth (Natural History of Religion, sect. xii.). 'The age of superstition,' says an essayist of some notoriety, with perfect truth, 'is not past; nor,' he adds, a more questionable thesis, 'ought we to wish it past.' Some of the most eminent writers (e.g. Plutarch, Francis Bacon, Bayle, Addison) have rightly or wrongly agreed to consider fanatical superstition more pernicious than atheism. When it is considered that the scientific philosophy of Aristotle, of more than 2,000 years ago, was revived at a comparatively recent date, it may be difficult not to believe in a cyclic rather than really progressive course of human ideas, at least in metaphysics. The fact, remarked by Macaulay, that the two principal sections of Christendom in Europe remain very nearly in the limits in which they were in the sixteenth, or in the middle of the seventeenth century, is incontestable. Nor, indeed, are present facts and symptoms so adverse, as is generally supposed, to the probability of an ultimate reaction in favour of Catholic doctrine and rule, even among the Teutonic peoples, in the revolutions to which human ideas are continually subject.

166. Among the numerous evidences of recent travellers may be specially mentioned that of the well-known traveller R. F. Burton (The Lake Regions of Central Africa) for the practices of the Eastern Africans. On the African continent and elsewhere, as was the case amongst the ancient Jews, the demons are propitiated by human sacrifices. To what extent witch-superstition obtains among the Hindus, the historian of British India bears witness. 'The belief of witchcraft and sorcery,' says Mr. Mill, 'continues universally prevalent, and is every day the cause of the greatest enormities. It not unfrequently happens that Brahmins tried for murder before the English judges assign as their motive to the crime that the murdered individual had enchanted them. No fewer than five unhappy persons in one district were tried and executed for witchcraft so late as the year 1792. The villagers themselves assume the right of sitting in judgment on this imaginary offence, and their sole instruments of proof are the most wretched of all incantations (History of British India, book ii. 7). A certain instinctive or traditional dread of evil spirits excites the terrors of those peoples who have no firm belief in the providence or existence of a benevolent Divinity. Even among the Chinese—the least religious nation in the world, and whose trite formula of scepticism, 'Religions are many: Reason is one,' expresses their indifferentism to every form of religion—there exists a sort of demoniacal fear (Huc's Chinese Empire, xix.). The diabolic and magic superstitions of the Moslem are displayed in Sale's Korân and Lane's Modern Egyptians.

167. Essay concerning the Human Understanding, book iv. 18.