The Magic of the Middle Ages Part 5

In the demoniacal fauna of the Middle Ages the were-wolf plays too important a role to be pa.s.sed over in silence. He was the terror of rural districts. Were-wolves are men who change themselves for a time into wolves, and then rove about hunting for children. The belief in the were-wolf is very ancient. Antique authors speak of it as a superst.i.tion among the Scythians, and among shepherds and peasants in the eastern provinces.[54] Then the change was considered to result from certain herbs growing in Pontus; in the Middle Ages it was the devil who wrapped a wolf's hide around the witch or the enchanted person. Even this belief was embraced and proclaimed by Augustine. Augustine,--the same father who declared that he would not believe the gospel if the authority of the Church did not exhort him to do so,--found it worthy of a Sadducean or a pagan philosopher alone to deny the existence of so well-known a phenomenon as the were-wolf. The emperor Sigismund had the question investigated "scientifically" in his presence by theologians, and they came to the general agreement that the were-wolf is "a positive and constant fact"; for the existence of the devil being accepted, there is no reason to deny that of the were-wolf, sup-ported as it is by the authority of the fathers of the Church and by general experience.[55] This "general experience" finally became, like the belief in sorcery, a raging mental disease, an epidemic ("_insama zoanthropica_") infecting whole districts in various parts of Europe and sending many insane persons who had confessed before the courts their imagined sin, to the place of execution.[56]

Nearly related to this lycanthropy is the more horrible vampirism. The vampires, according to the belief of the Middle Ages, are disembodied souls which clothe themselves again in their buried bodies, steal at night into houses, and suck from the nipple of the sleeping all their blood. He who is thus bereft of the vital fluid is in his turn changed into a vampire and visits preferably his own relatives. If the corpse of a person suspected of vampirism is dug up, and its stomach pressed, an abundance of fresh blood flows from the mouth. The corpse is well preserved. The belief in vampires has likewise produced a kind of psychical pestilence which yet in the eighteenth century spread terror in the Austrian provinces.[57]

If sorcery was an imaginary people's magic, there existed also a real, and it consisted in an infinite variety of usages, observances and rules for all conditions of life. Not to speak of the astrologers' extensive hand-written calendars, which pointed out which constellations, seasons and days are auspicious for bathing, bleeding, hair-cutting, shaving, house-building, wooing, engaging servants, setting out on travels and so on, there existed among the people an incredibly large ma.s.s of rules for living which any body that would avoid the constant danger of bringing misfortune on himself and his family, must know.

From waking up in the morning to going asleep at night, such maxims were to be observed: putting the wrong foot first out of bed in the morning was as sure to be followed by annoyances in the course of the day as a neglect to place the shoes with the heels toward the bed at night was certain to cause the visit of ghosts or evil dreams. When children are born, no one must go out or in, or open the door without bringing fire with him, that the trolls may not find their way in and exchange the child; and no one entering must say a word before he has touched the fire. For the same reason the child, while unchristened, must be watched carefully every night, and a fire must be kept constantly burning on the hearth. Before the christening a child must not be moved from one room to another without putting steel beside it. If two boys are baptized on the same occasion, that one who obtains his name and blessing first will be best endowed both bodily and mentally. On the day of christening the mother should avoid handling an axe, knife or other cutting instruments, otherwise the child will some time be murdered. If the floor under a cradle is swept, the child will be bereft of its sleep. If the cradle is moved while the child is not in it, the child becomes peevish. When a child yawns, the sign of the cross must be made over its mouth, and the words "Jesus, G.o.d's son!"

added; otherwise the devil will then enter into it. If a child looks out through the window or looks in a mirror at night, it will fall sick.

Children punished on Sunday become disobedient; but a child whipped on Good Friday before sunset, will become obedient and well-behaved. If the child walks about in one shoe, the mother will have a sore back. If a child walks or runs backwards, it drives its parents so many steps into h.e.l.l. A child eating and reading at the same time gets a bad memory. If a suitor's first gift to his betrothed consists of shoes, she will be unfaithful, if of stockings, she will be jealous. Nuptials on Mondays, Wednesdays and Sat.u.r.days are unfortunate. If a bridal procession comes to a stop for any reason, the married pair will meet with dissensions. If the marriage-ring is too small, misfortune is in store. Of the bridal pair, that one dies first who first kneels down or rises from kneeling. Those who hold the canopy must not change hands or touch the bride's crown, for that prognosticates misfortune and ennui. If in going out an old woman or one carrying water is met, the room should be re-entered. When the table is set, the bread must be laid upon it immediately. Bread must never be placed with the upper crust down. Great care must be taken to remove all substances separated from the body, as hair, nails, blood; they must be buried in the soil so as not to come in contact with diseased persons, or fall into the hands of witches.

We have selected the preceding observances and rules as examples of those thousands of precepts for all conditions of life which have been collected by investigations in this field from the mouths of the people. A full collection would require a large volume. In all of them is seen a servile fear of mysterious evil influences, lurking on all sides, and whose power or impotency as regards man nowise depends on his morality, but only on the way in which he observes certain ethically indifferent acts. Many of them seem to have arisen only by faulty application of the theory of causality; others depend on a symbolical method of contemplating nature.

What a difference between this popular wisdom and that stored up in the gnomes of the Greeks or in the heathen Havamal! Part of the former may be likewise an heirloom, but how exuberantly these superst.i.tions grew during the centuries of ripe and glaring belief in personified evil; how deeply they struck root among the people, while Havamal has been saved from the flood of time only by the hand of the student!

Among the superst.i.tions are to be counted the magical prognosis of diseases and death. Many were the tokens of the approaching skeleton-figure with his scythe and gla.s.s. They were heard in the cawing of crows and ravens, in the howling of dogs, in the chirping of the cricket, and the regular ticking of the wood-worm concealed in the wall.

If the horse of a priest riding to visit a sick person in his parish lowered its head upon arriving at a house, if a gnat was caught gnawing any clothing, if a light suddenly went out, if an image fell down, if a gla.s.s or a mirror was broken, it indicated an approaching death in the house. To determine the fate of a sick person, a piece of bread of which he had eaten was laid in a dark corner, and its change of color was observed; or a piece of fat with which the soles of the sick had been smeared was offered to a dog, or a stone was lifted to see if any thing was concealed beneath it. If the bread became dark, or if the dog refused to eat what was offered him, or if there was no living thing under the stone, then the sick person was considered incurable, and nothing could be hoped even from the inherited medical skill of the wise old men and women.

The exercise of this skill consisted in the use, along with "reading" and conjurations, partly of herbs of more or less known efficiency, and partly also, as it appears, of magnetic forces, resorted to mechanically without reflection.

The medical art inherited among the people from generation to generation is a subject which none but a clear-sighted and unprejudiced scientist of the medical profession can treat, and which has been left hitherto without that investigation which the subject undoubtedly deserves, at least from a historical point of view. There was, at the end of the Middle Ages, among the devotees of the Galenic art a man of genius who, despairing to find in the folios of the medical scholastics any traces of truth, abandoned the lecture-room and went forth into the world without in order, as he himself said, to read the book of nature and learn something of that medical instinct with which G.o.d, as he believed, must have endowed men as well as animals, and which must find a true expression only in the people living in immediate reciprocity with nature. This man was Paracelsus. He who despised and overwhelmed with mockery the coryphei of his days in the medical faculties, did not disdain to listen to "the experience of peasants, old women, night-wanderers, and vagabonds," and the magnetical system which he constructed "by the illumination of nature's light, and not by the lamp-flare of an apothecary's shop," rest in all probability on the general principles which he found in the plurality of sympathetic cures practiced among the people. In the "reading" by which these cures were accompanied, Paracelsus saw rightly nothing but a subjective moment, and means of making faith and imagination the allies of the physician. A ma.s.s of these conjuration-formulae in different diseases have been collected and published in various countries of Europe. They offer the reader little or nothing of interest.[58]

A very common usage during the Middle Ages was to measure the sick person, at one time to cure him, at another to find out if the disease was decreasing or increasing. Another means was to drag him through a hole.

Sick children were pulled through holes dug in the earth or through a cleft cherry-tree. Sick sheep were forced to creep through the cleft of an oak, and so on. Another remedy against many kinds of sufferings was the binding of a thread or a band which had been read over, around the neck or some limb of the sick. Connected with this is the tying of witch-knots, used only with evil intent. Bands of different colors and material[59]

were required for these. They were buried near the dwelling of the person to be injured. It was thought that by this means any limb or bodily power of an enemy could be impaired. A French jurist and witch-judge, Pierre Delancre, complains that in his days there were few married couples in France whose happiness had not been marred by this means; young men hardly dared to marry from fear of it. Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, advised, as a remedy against this influence, a diligent use of the sacraments. In French rituals church-prayers against the effects of witch-knots are prescribed. Hardly less universally was it the custom to make dolls of rags, dough, wax or clay, baptize them with the name of the hated person, put them in the fire or pierce them with needles, and bury them under the threshold of that individual, all in order to inflict sufferings on him.[60] Diseases could also be transferred to dolls by reading certain formulae, and placing them in some inaccessible place, or in running water.

Not only against diseases, but also against the dangers of fire and war, against ill-luck in love or chase, on voyages and the like, magical remedies were freely resorted to by the people. The "Witch-hammer"

complains bitterly against the criminal practice of the soldiers in mutilating crucifixes in order to harden themselves against the sword and bullets. The executioner in Pa.s.sau gained, during the Thirty Years' War, a wide reputation for his skill in hardening the human frame, which he did by means of sc.r.a.ps of paper with cabalistic figures (Pa.s.sauer Henkers-Zettel), which were eaten. The belief that hunters procured, by means of conjurations, "free-arrows" and "free-bullets" was very common.

The "Witch-hammer" accuses various potentates of having in their pay "diabolical archers" who hit their mark from a long distance without aiming. It was customary at fires to throw into the flames so-called s.h.i.+elds of David,--plates with two intersecting triangles and the motto "Agla" (the initials of four Hebrew words meaning: "Thou art strong eternally, O Lord!") and "_consummatum est_." As late as in the middle of the last century the magistrate of Leipzig ordered that such plates should be laid up in the rathhaus to be used in case of fires. In Catholic countries the clergy took the employment of magical appliances against fires into their own hands; processions singing and bearing relics went around the burning house three times, and if this had no salutary effect, it was a sure sign that G.o.d had allowed the devil to wield the consuming element unto destruction.

The extent of this treatise does not allow a detailed exposition of the many divinatory arts which had their adepts among the people. The Church preaching mightily against those arts and representing them as devices of the devil, the father of lies and founder of oracles, did not, however, deny, but could confirm by biblical quotation, their power to unveil futurity.

Every thing that we have here described was to the Church black magic: all mystical practices among the people, whether resorted to for good or evil purposes, to heal or cure, were looked upon as implying contempt for the divine magic of the Church itself, and also a league with the devil, if not a formal one, at any rate a "_pactum implicitum_." It was therefore the possessors of the traditional popular art of healing who were first sent to the stake wherever the inquisition commenced its trials. But no terrorism could eradicate the popular magic so long as the persecutors themselves believed in its efficiency, and fought only for a consecrated superst.i.tion against its outlawed counterfeit. The struggle against the superst.i.tion of the Church as well as of the people, was reserved for another time and for another theory of the universe and of morals.

The so-called wandering scholastics (_scholastici vagantes_, _scholares erratici_) formed a kind of connecting link between the magic of the learned and that of the common people. They were ruined and adventurous students, priests and monks who wandered about in the rural districts of most of the European states, especially Germany, representing themselves as treasure-diggers, selling "_spiritus familiares_," amulets, love-potions, and life-elixirs, conjuring spirits, divining by the stars, and healing men and cattle. These adventurers were a.s.sociated in a regular guild, and had like other vagrant tradesmen, their lodgings and hospitals in the cities. They were dreaded compet.i.tors of the witch-fathers of the cloisters, were several times excommunicated by the Church, and seem to have nearly disappeared when the witch-trials commenced in earnest. It is to a person of that kind that the Faust-legend is attached. It reflects the popular opinions concerning the power of learned magicians.[61]

The same period which saw the bull of Innocentius promulgated, and the belief in devils culminate in the witch-processes, gave birth to the _renaissance_. This saviour came to the world in the hour of its intensest need. The h.e.l.lenic spirit, born again from the study of cla.s.sic literature and cla.s.sic art, was a new Messias putting his heel on the head of the old serpent and saving humanity from the power of death and of the devil. The people sitting in darkness illumined only by the lurid flames kindled by the inquisition saw a great light and stretched their hands towards the new dawn. The study of the ancients had an immense influence, all the more as the actual world was so different from the antique world.

The exhumed monuments of h.e.l.las revealed other state systems than the feudal of the Middle Ages,--states which were organizations, not mere mechanical conglomerates of conquerors and conquered, and were founded upon a n.o.bler basis than given or a.s.sumed privileges. These monuments revealed an independent search for truth which had placed itself above tradition--a novel spectacle to the people of the Middle Ages! They revealed an art in which harmony reigned between spirit and nature, between the higher life and sensuousness, between the relative opposites which the Middle Ages had conceived as absolute, placing them against one another in a struggle which wrecked beauty and morality. They revealed large symmetrical characters as free from the asceticism of the Middle Ages as from the wild sensuality of that time. All these ideas, hailed with enthusiasm, could not but transform the appearance of the world. They overthrew the darkness of the Middle Ages, put the devil and h.e.l.l to flight, and drove them into that lumber-corner of the spiritual kingdom where they are at present, but from which, at any political reaction, they peer out eagerly watching whether they may not once more bring the great wide world into their power. But they shall scarcely succeed in this, as long as freedom of thought and scientific independence are guarded as the foremost conditions of the spiritual health of mankind; and they shall utterly fail when an all-extended intelligence has taught the people that the premises of the devil-dogma, if they could be again inoculated into the popular mind, would show anew the same results which have been depicted above, and lead us back to the terrible times of the inquisition and the burning of witches. This, no doubt, even the orthodox defenders of belief in an impersonated evil principle do not desire; but they do not observe that history acts more consistently than they, and cures general errors only by making long generations draw from them the last consequences and suffer their full effect.

THE END.