Note 2 — GEORGE LYMAN KITTREDGE

A masterly short account of the various elements which made up the fully developed doctrine of witchcraft as it was held during the three centuries of especial prosecution (1400-1700), and of the sources from which these elements were derived, may be found in the first chapter of Joseph Hansen’s Zauberwahn, Inquisition und Hexenprozess im Mittelalter (Munich and Leipzig, 1900). A learned and able essay by Professor George L. Burr, The Literature of Witchcraft, reprinted from the Papers of the American Historical Association, New York, 1890, should also be consulted. Professor Burr emphasises the sound and necessary distinction between witchcraft and magic. But he seems to go too far in his insistence on this distinction as vital in the history of witchcraft: “Magic itself is actual and universal. But witchcraft never was. It was but a shadow, a nightmare: the nightmare of a religion, the shadow of a dogma. Less than five centuries saw its birth, its vigor, its decay” (p. 238; p. 38 of reprint). This statement is true if by witchcraft is meant (and this is Professor Burr’s sense) the fully developed and highly complicated system set forth in the Malleus Maleficarum and in Del Rio’s Disquisitiones Magicae—what Hansen (p. 35) calls “der verhängnisvolle Sammelbegriff des Hexenwesens,”—which was not possible until scholasticism had schematised the diversified elements of belief in magic and demonology and sorcery and devil-worship which Christian theology and Christian superstition had derived from the most various sources—from Judaism, classical antiquity, Neo-Platonism, and the thousand-and-one beliefs of pagan converts. But, important as this fully developed system was—and true though it may be that without the schematising influence of scholastic philosophy the witch-prosecution which was epidemic in Europe from 1400 to 1700 could hardly have taken place—we should never forget that the essential element in witchcraft is maleficium—the working of harm to the bodies and goods of one’s fellow-men by means of evil spirits or of strange powers derived from intercourse with such spirits. This belief in maleficium was once universal; it was rooted and grounded in the minds of the people before they became Christians; it is still the creed of most savages and of millions of so-called civilised men. Throughout the history of witchcraft (in whatever sense we understand that word), it remained the ineradicable thing,—the solid foundation, unshakably established in popular belief, for whatever superstructure might be reared by the ingenuity of jurisconsults, philosophers, theologians, or inquisitors. Without this popular belief in maleficium, the initial suspicions and complaints which form the basis and starting-point of all prosecutions would have been impossible and inconceivable. With this popular belief, the rest was easy. The error into which Professor Burr has fallen is due, no doubt, to his keeping his eye too exclusively on the Continent, where the prosecutions were most extensive, where, in truth, the fully developed system was most prevalent, and where the inquisitorial methods of procedure give to the witch-trials a peculiar air of uniformity and theological schematism. Thus he has been led, like many other historians, to over-emphasise the learned or literary side of the question. For us, however, as the descendants of Englishmen and as students of the history of English colonies in America, it is necessary to fix our attention primarily on the Mother Country. And, if we do this, we cannot fail to perceive that the obstinate belief of the common people in maleficium—a belief which, it cannot be too often repeated, is not the work of theologians but the universal and quasi-primitive creed of the human race—is the root of the whole matter. (On savage witchcraft see the anthropologists passim. Good examples may be found in Karl von den Steinen, Unter den Naturvölkern Brasiliens, 1894, pp. 339 ff.)

On maleficium see especially Hansen, pp. 9 ff. Nothing could be truer than his words:—“Wie viel auch immer im Laufe der Zeit in den Begriff der Zauberei und Hexerei hineingetragen worden ist, so ist doch sein Kern stets das Maleficium geblieben. Aus dieser Vorstellung erwächst die angstvolle Furcht der Menschen und das Verlangen nach gesetzlichem Schutze und blutig strenger Strafe; von ihr hat die strafrechtliche Behandlung dieses Wahns ihren Ausgang genommen” (p. 9). “Das Maleficium, mit Ausnahme des Wettermachens, ist ohne alle Unterbrechung von der kirchlichen und bis in das 17. Jahrhundert auch von der staatlichen Autorität als Realität angenommen, seine Kraft ist nie ernstlich in Abrede gestellt worden; es bildet den roten Faden auch durch die Geschichte der strafrechtlichen Verfolgung” (p. 13). Everybody knows that the most convincing evidence of witchcraft—short of confession or of denunciation by a confederate—was held to be the damnum minatum and the malum secutum.

The difference between England and the Continent in the development of the witchcraft idea and in the history of prosecution is recognised by Hansen (p. 34, note 1). President White, like Professor Burr, has his eye primarily on the Continent (Warfare of Science with Theology, 1896, I, 350 ff.). His treatment of demoniacal possession, however, is much to our purpose (II, 97 ff., 135 ff.).