Note 1 — Chapter XV · GYPSY AMULETS.

It is remarkable that nowhere, not even in England, do the gypsies regard the witch as utterly horrible, diabolical, and damnable. She is with them simply a woman who has gained supernatural power, which she uses for good or misuses for evil according to her disposition. The witch of the Church—Catholic or Protestant—when closely examined is a very childish conception. She sets forth personal annoyance without any regard whatever as to whether it is really good in disguise or a natural result of our own follies. Thus witches caused thunder-storms, which, because they were terrifying and more or less destructive, were seriously treated by the Church as unmitigated evils, therefore as phenomena directly due to the devil and his servants. Theology the omniscient did not know that storms cleared the air. Witches were responsible for all pestilences, and very often for all disorders of any kind—as it was very convenient for the ignorant leech to attribute to sorcery or moral delinquency or to God, a disease which he could not cure. For “Theology, the science of sciences,” had not as yet ascertained that plagues and black deaths, and most of the ills of man are the results of neglect of cleanliness, temperance, and other sanitary laws. It is only a few years since a very eminent clergyman and president of a college in America attributed to “Divine dispensation” the deaths of a number of students, which were directly due to palpable neglect of proper sanitary arrangements by the reverend gentleman himself, and his colleagues. But, admitting the “divine dispensation,” according to the mediæval theory, the president, as the agent, must have been a “wizard”—or conjuror—a delusion which the most superficial examination of his works would at once dissipate. But to return—there can be no denial whatever that according to what is admitted to be absolutely true to-day by everybody, be he orthodox or liberal, witches, had they existed, must have been agents of God, busied in preventing plagues instead of causing them—by raising storms which cleared the air. Even the Algonkin Indians knew more than the Church in this respect, for they have a strange old legend to the effect that when the god of Storms, Wuch-ow-sen, the giant eagle, was hindered by a magician from his accustomed work, the sea and air grew stagnant, and people died.1 The witch was simply another form of the Hebrew Azrael, God’s Angel of Death.