[5]
In the letter which he wrote after a visit to Loudon in 1635, Thomas Killigrew describes the treatment meted out to that ravishing Sister Agnes, whose good looks and startlingly immodest behavior had earned her, among the habitués of the exorcism, the affectionate nickname of le beau petit diable. “She was very young and handsome, of a more tender look and slender shape than any of the rest. . . . The loveliness of her face was clothed in a sad sable look which, upon my coming into the chapel, she hid, but presently unveiled again.” (Killigrew was only twenty at the time, and uncommonly handsome.) “And though she stood now, bound like a slave in the friar’s hand, you might see through all her misfortunes, in her black eyes, the unruined arches of many triumphs.” Like a slave in the friar’s hand—the words are painfully apt. A little later, as Killigrew records, the wretched girl was a slave under the friar’s feet. For after having thrown her into convulsions and made her roll on the floor, the good father triumphantly stood on his recumbent victim. “I confess it was so sad a sight,” says Killigrew, “I had no power to see the miracle wrought of her recovery, but went from thence to the inn.”
[6]
“. . . Urbain. . . . Tell his rank. . . . Priest. . . . Of what church? . . . Saint Peter’s. . . .”
CHAPTER FIVE
And so Grandier was accused of sorcery and the Ursulines were possessed by devils. We read these statements and smile; but before the smile can expand into a grin or explode in a guffaw, let us try to discover what precisely was the meaning attached to these words during the first half of the seventeenth century. And since, at this period, sorcery was everywhere a crime, let us begin with the legal aspects of the problem.
Sir Edward Coke, the greatest English lawyer of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean age, defined a witch as “a person who hath conference with the Devil, to consult with him or to do some act.” Under the Statute of 1563 witchcraft was punished by death only when it could be proved that the witch had made an attempt on someone’s life. But in the first year of James’s reign this statute was replaced by a new and harsher law. After 1603 the capital offense was no longer murder by supernatural means, but the simple fact of being proved a witch. The act performed by the accused might be harmless, as in the case of divination, or even beneficent, as in the case of healing by means of spells and charms. If there were proof that it had been performed through “conference with the Devil,” or by the intrinsically diabolical methods of magic, the act was criminal and the performer of it was to be condemned to death.
This was an English and a Protestant ruling; but it was fully in accord with Canon Law and Catholic practice. Kramer and Sprenger, the learned Dominican authors of the Malleus Maleficarum (for almost two centuries the textbook and vade mecum of all witch-hunters, Lutheran and Calvinist no less than Catholic) cite many authorities to prove that the proper penalty for witchcraft, fortune-telling, the practice of any kind of magic art, is death. “For witchcraft is high treason against God’s majesty. And so they (the accused) are to be put to the torture to make them confess. Any person, whatever his rank or position, upon such an accusation may be put to the torture. And he who is found guilty, even if he confess his crime, let him be racked, let him suffer all other tortures prescribed by law in order that he may be punished in proportion to his offence.”[1]
Behind these laws stood an immemorial tradition of demonic intervention in human affairs and, more specifically, the revealed truths that the devil is the Prince of this World and the sworn enemy of God and God’s children. Sometimes the devil works on his own account; sometimes he does his mischiefs through the instrumentality of human beings. “And if it be asked whether the Devil is more apt to injure men and creatures by himself than through a witch, it can be said that there is no comparison between the two cases. For he is infinitely more apt to do harm through the agency of witches. First, because he thus gives greater offence to God by usurping to himself a creature dedicated to Him. Secondly, because, when God is the more offended, He allows him the more power of injuring men. And thirdly, for his own gain, which he places in the perdition of souls.”[2]
In medieval and early modern Christendom the situation of sorcerers and their clients was almost precisely analogous to that of Jews under Hitler, capitalists under Stalin, Communists and fellow travelers in the United States. They were regarded as the agents of a Foreign Power, unpatriotic at the best and, at the worst, traitors, heretics, enemies of the people. Death was the penalty meted out to these metaphysical Quislings of the past and, in most parts of the contemporary world, death is the penalty which awaits the political and secular devil-worshipers known here as Reds, there as Reactionaries. In the briefly liberal nineteenth century men like Michelet found it difficult not merely to forgive, but even to understand the savagery with which sorcerers had once been treated. Too hard on the past, they were at the same time too complacent about their present and far too optimistic in regard to the future—to us!
They were rationalists who fondly imagined that the decay of traditional religion would put an end to such deviltries as the persecution of heretics, the torture and burning of witches. Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.[3] But looking back and up, from our vantage point on the descending road of modern history, we now see that all the evils of religion can flourish without any belief in the supernatural, that convinced materialists are ready to worship their own jerry-built creations as though they were the Absolute, and that self-styled humanists will persecute their adversaries with all the zeal of Inquisitors exterminating the devotees of a personal and transcendent Satan. Such behavior-patterns antedate and outlive the beliefs which, at any given moment, seem to motivate them. Few people now believe in the Devil; but very many enjoy behaving as their ancestors behaved when the Fiend was a reality as unquestionable as his Opposite Number.
In order to justify their behavior, they turn their theories into dogmas, their bylaws into First Principles, their political bosses into Gods and all those who disagree with them into incarnate devils. This idolatrous transformation of the relative into the Absolute and the all too human into the Divine, makes it possible for them to indulge their ugliest passions with a clear conscience and in the certainty that they are working for the Highest Good. And when the current beliefs come, in their turn, to look silly, a new set will be invented, so that the immemorial madness may continue to wear its customary mask of legality, idealism and true religion.
In principle, as we have seen, the law relating to witchcraft was exceedingly simple. Anyone who deliberately had dealings with the devil was guilty of a capital crime. To describe how this law was administered in practice would require much more space than can here be given. Suffice it to say that, while some judges were manifestly prejudiced, many did their best to give the accused a fair trial. But even a fair trial was, by our present Western standards, a monstrous caricature of justice. “The laws,” we read in Malleus Maleficarum, “allow that any witness whatever is to be admitted in evidence against them.” And not only were all and sundry, including children, and the mortal enemies of the accused, admitted as witnesses; all kinds of evidence were also admitted—gossip, hearsay, inferences, remembered dreams, statements made by demoniacs.
Always in order, torture was frequently (though by no means invariably) employed to extort confessions. And along with torture went false promises in regard to the final sentence. In the Malleus[4] this matter of false promises is discussed with all the authors’ customary acumen and thoroughness. There are three possible alternatives. If he chooses the first, the judge may promise the witch her life (on condition, of course, that she reveal the names of other witches) and may intend to keep the promise. The only deception he practices is to let it be understood by the accused that the death penalty is to be commuted to some mild punishment, such as exile, whereas in petto he has decided to condemn her to perpetual solitary confinement on bread and water.
A second alternative is preferred by those who think that, “after she has been consigned to prison in this way, the promise to spare her life should be kept for a time, but that after a certain period she should be burned.”
“A third opinion is that the judge may safely promise the accused her life, but in such a way that he
