WITCH STORIES.

Southland Times, Volume I, Issue 50, 1 May 1863, Page 2 (Supplement)

WITCH STORIES.

(From the Times. 7 ) A book of witch stories will commend itself to those, and they are not few, who have a taste for the horrible or a love of the marvellous. Though 'the spirit of credulity grows fainter and weaker, the sacrifices it once excited of mankind are not orily part of the history of human nature, but a fascinating portion of the tragedy of the past. Yet the publisher of such stories should have something to plead in his or her behalf beyond till mere inclination to minister to the natural appetite for horrors. It is not enough to edit a series of narratives on the principle of the Fat Boy in Pickwick, " I wants to make your flesh creep/ without, at the same time, pointing the lessons, such as they are, which, in a general sense, these narratives convey. We make this remark in the present case not as reflecting on Mrs Linton, who has, at least, a strong sense of the meaning of this witch persecution, but because she stops short, for want -of a fuller survey, of conveying it clearly and distinctlyto the reader. She needs no admonition as to the spirit of her researches, but she has much to learn yet as to the materials for their illustration,

Had Mrs Linton, for example, pursued her witch quest to the other side of the Atlantic, and studied the manifestations of this delusion in New England, she would appreciate better the sense of our remark, There, as here, it was the habit to make accusation of witchcraft a means of gratifying animosity, but the pulpit machinery which prompted the accusers was more uniformly and clearly to be seen in motion. Let those who wish to trace the connection of witchcraft and priest craft read the story of the New England trials as explained in recent investigations. The ministers of New England originated and fostered this cruel infatuation for the maintainence of -their influence when it was tending to its decline and overthrow. Some of the circumstances mentioned preclude the belief that they were altogether nuconscious of professional motives, v» hile in this instance they exerted themselves directly, and in concert, to foster the delusion and conduct the process. In this instance therefore, they stand convicted, having beeti caught, as it were, red-hantded, witK their victims at their feet. In other countries, including our own, though they were the authors -and prompters of the witch persecution, they were not so prominent in directing it from first to last. It is ascribable to them only as a part of that mach f nery of terror by which, in the name o religion, they degraded human nature, and made it the slave of their ambition or the instrument of their convenience.

It is nevertheless a desideratum that the murders for -witchcraft should be brought home to their principal authors and abbetors, and it was instructive to ascertain the very large share of them which was due especially to the Puritan clergy. It was their religious theory that there was a covenant between the Devil and certain -unhappy persons, which was a species of parody on the covenant between God and his elect, and when the public mind was impressed with this monstrous theological fancy, denunciations and tortures followed as its natural fruits. It is suggestive to observe what a large proportion of these shocking cases belong to Scotland, where the influence of the Puritan clergy was supreme, and their teaching such as it is has been described by Mr. Buckle. The ministers themselves, as ]y[rs. Linton re-' marks, were on such occasions able to make a display of their power, "and, either made^or married at their pleasure. 1 ' If they chose to accept a case ! as " possession," they prayed and ex- j orcised ; but it seemed good to them to call it. witchcraft, then the poo^-j wretch's life was doomed, and no man,! might hope to save. "It was very seldom," she adds, -" they eared so much for . humanity as -to choose the more merciful of the two absurdities; nor did they, we ma|y adtiV distinguish between malicious and benevolent acts

when their object was to impute^pmplicity.with Satan. JPor the impartial persecution of witches, white and black, they were prepared with the theologicalpretext, that while the - black witch hurt only the body and estate, the white witch hurt the soul when she healed the body, the healed part never being able to say, " God healed me;'* wherefore it was severed from the salvation of the rest and the wholeness of the redemption destroyed. With this, excuse for capital punishment in any event, all that was requisite was the poor wretch's confession, which, by the help of torture, was invariably procuruble.

Even a brave and conscientious person such as Margaret Barclay was, in the agony of torture test, induced not only to confess her own guilt, but to accuse Isabel Crawford, though afterwards, at the stake, she declared her to be innocent. It was to little purpose, however, that a charge such as this was ever recanted "• —

" Isabel Crawford was now tried : ' After the assistant minister, Mr David Dickson, had made earnest prayer to God for opening her obdurate and closed heart, she was subjected to the iron bars laid upon her bare shins, her feet being in the stocks, as in the case of Margaret Barclay.' She endured this torture ' admirably,' without any kind of din or exclamation, suffering above thirty stone of iron to be laid on her legs, never shrinking thereat in any sort, but remaining. steady and constant. But when they shifted the iron bars, and removed them to another part of her less, her constancy gave way, as Margaret's had done, and she too broke out into horrible cries of ' take off! take off ! ' She then confessed — anything — everything — and was sentenced; but on the way to her execution she denied all that she had admitted, interrupted the minister in his prayer, and refused to pardon the executioner, according to form. Her brain had given way, and they fastened to stake a bewildered, raving, maniac/

The incidents of some of these Scotch cases are pre-eminently brutal_ and revolting. <3reillis Duncan excited the suspicions of her master, Deputy Baillie Seaton of Trament, by her readiness to take " in hand to help all such as were troubled or grieved with anie kinde of sicknes or infirnaitie : ' and to make sure, he to^rured her, without trial or warrant— first by the " pilliewinks," or thumb- screws, and then by " thrawing/' wrenching or binding her head with a rope— an intensely agonising process, which generally came in as an efficacious incitement to confession. Having been thrawed and pilliewinked, Geillis Duncan, among others, accused of complicity in her witchcraft one Agnes Sampson, a^ro-yc, matron-like woman, "of a ranke and comprehension aDOve tne vulgar, grave and settled in her answers, which were to some purpose ; " and the superior reputation of this victim procured her the honor of being carried to Holyrood, there to be examined by the cruel pedant James himself. At first she quietly and firmly denied all she was charged with, but after having been fastened -to the " witch's bridle/ a truly infernal instrument, kept without sleep, her head shaved, and thrawn with a rope, scratched and pricked, she too confessed whatever blasphemous nonsense her accusers chose to charge her with, to the wondrous edification of her kingly inquisitor. The case of Alysoun Balfour was still more inhuman. After being kept forty -eight hours in the " cashiclawis," which is supposed to be Scotch for a certain iron framework, heated to a pitch of bare endurance — her husband, an old man of eighty-one, her son, and her young daughter, all being in ward beside her and tortured — she was induced to confess. " She conld not see the old man with his lang irons of fifty s ton e~ weight laid upon ; and her little daughter, aged seven, with the thumbscrews upon her tender hands, and not seek to gain their remission by any confession that could be made. When the torture was removed from them and her, she recanted in one of the most pathetic speeches on record, and yet she was burnt on Castle-hill. Thomas Palpla, a servant, inculpated in the same charge, was kept eleven days and nights in the cashiclawis, twice in day "eallit in the buitis/' stripped naked and scourged with " ropes in sic a soirt that they left neither hyde nor flesh upon him/ and thus compelled to a confession, which he also recanted as soon as the torure was removed. Nor was the final issue of these witch processes less horrible, though more merciful. In 160? some women taken at Broughton or Breichin, were accused of witchcraft, and being put to "an assize and convict, albeit they persevered constant in their denial to the end, yet they was burnt quick, after sick and ere well manner that some of them deit in dispair, renunceand and blasphemand, and utteris, half burnt, brak out of the fyre and was cassin quick into it aghaine, quhill the war burnt to the deid."

It is startling to see how trivial, the most part, were the crimes of which such poor unfortunates were accused. The process of making a wax effigy of your enemy and tormenting him vicariously was the highest stretch of the alleged effort of their malignity. It I was more commonly a spell put upon your neighbour's cow, or a charm employed for the subtraction of its milk, or a charm to make butter come easily in the 'churn, or a charm to ease the pains of childbirth, which entailed these penalties. Keoch, of Orkney, for example, was " fylit '' for witchera|t, j for holding the herb millfoil betflfgeia -her finger and thumb and, iConju*ing| away various simple diseases "in nomine Patris, Filii, et Spiritus Sahcti," thus curing men's distempers in a devliish and' unwholesome manner. Even in the

case of the' blacker species of witchcraft, it was often admitted by the prosecutors'that the spells were inocuous and the Satanic ministrants incompetent. Clorjtie, the Scotch Deil, whose craft according to Mr Buckle, was so extolled from the Presbyterian pulpit, was a bundling performer of the feeblest description. When he enticed these poor creatures but of* their warm beds to mount broomsticks and what not, he could rarely offer them a decent entertainment for their pains, and with all his culinary resources, no dishes which they could not obtain much better at home. In the case of John Fian, called " the Devil's secretary," he was unable to help him to an effectual gale of wind ; in trasporting an old woman through the air he sometimes let her fall, and in one case he called a warlock by his Chritian name, to the complete oblivion of Satanic etiquette. JSTot only did his memory fail on the most important occasions, but he proved that he was a very inferior player on the Scotch bag- 1 pipes, an instrument which 'for its abominable qualities, he ought to be a 1 recognized. /s proficient. This incompe- | tence of^ne reverend fiend was re- , vealed to his Scotch persecutors on the trial of a certain^ Violet Cockie, against I whom it was charged that at one of the Sabbats, "because the devil played not j so melodiously and well as thou carv'st, thou took his instrument out of his j mouth, then tuik him- on the chapts (chops) therewith, and play'st thyself theireon to the haill company." Such was the feeble imposter against whom the Presbyterian Church put forth its whole apparatus of fervent exorcisms, pillie-winks, and cashiclaws, and whose wiles were an excuse for murders innumerable, with absurd and grotesque, though terrible accompaniments.

South of the Tweed Satan exhibited himself somewhat more respectably, and in one of the cases in which Hopkins, the witchfinder, was engaged, Elizabeth Clark deposed that Satan, whom she knew much too well, was a proper gentleman with a laced band, having the whole proportion of man.'' In fact she added, when asked, what the Devil was like as a man, that he was a "proper man," a deal "properer" than Matthew Hopkins. His greater cultivation and refinement ment when foe reached our southern latitudes entitled his covenantees to the ingenious plea of Sir Robert Filmer, who distinguished between the witches of his own country and those of the Hebrews, in the former ease the Devil being the principal and the witch only an accessory before the fact. Sir Robert humanely contended, with good iaw and logic, that an accessory cannot be convicted before the principal is tried or outlawed, and therefore a witch qoul<l :r»ot be tried a i all.

When Filmer combated the witchcraft imposture by hho; o logal acumen, the close of the witch persecution in England was principally due to Chief Justice Holt, who, among Other blows to this delusion, convicted the imposter, Richard Hathaway. Previous to his time the theologians had so warped the mind of society that witchcraft was accepted as proven by men of the greatest worth aad eminence. Sach names as Hale, and Hobbes, and Sir Thomas Browne, the scouter of " vulgar ] errors" par excellence, are to be cited j among the latter, that the honorable victory belongs to their less known opponents — such as Scott arid Giffard, Adyr, Filmer, Wagstaffe, and others, who combated this delusion in the interests of humanity and common sense. It is by no means unimportant to our further enlightenment that these evidences of the difficulties they had to surmount should be collected here, and Mrs. Linton is working thus far to excellent purpose. But, in the second edition which her book may be expected to reach, she will point its moral more satisfactorily if she marks more dis- | tinctiy the responsibility of the theologians who were the authors of the whole theory of modern witchcraft, and who employed it not unfrequently as their ultima ratio with the "Sadducees," whose penetration they dreaded and denounced.