cauldron was the common instrument, in which they cooked juices, herbs, worms, and entrails *.

The practice of these arts continued throughout the world, and came to light from time to time in a manner to alarm the civil government. The fact of execrable rites being ascribed to the Templars, as only showing that mankind was aware of what still existed, is remarkable.

John Trithemius relates how the Fratricelli were first discovered and condemned under Boniface VIII. They pretended always to be holy persons; they did not reveal their worst practices to all at first, but only in proportion to the capacity of their novices; they abolished all sacraments but baptism, said they were full of the Holy Ghost, and could not sin, that no Roman pontiff had any authority after they had been condemned by Boniface, that, excepting themselves, all men would perish for not believing and living as the apostles. Their rule was, omnia munda mundis; therefore, adultery or incest were no sins with them. They used to hold their meetings amidst mountains and woods, and in caves-men and women attending, and after invoking the Holy Ghost, would extinguish all lights, and practise every kind of horror. The last-born infant of the company was then passed from hand to hand till it expired, when all the company fell on their faces to adore the person in whose hands it died. The second-born was baked over a brazier and pulverized, and the dust was mixed with wine with horrid imprecations, and then given to their novices to drink as a sacrament; after which they were deemed impeccable within their sect. Boniface VIII. made inquiries all over Italy, where it chiefly prevailed; and by his orders Herman, author of the sect, who had been twenty years in his grave at Ferrara, was dug up and burnt. In Milan there was a rich woman of this sect, named Wilhelma, having a husband Andrea: she affected sanctity, retired to Clairvaux, and died there, and was buried as a holy person. This impious woman, with her husband, had a cave at the end of their house, in which the sacrilegious rites of the sect were celebrated, to which many men and women came by night. The

Olai Mag. Septent. Hist. lib. iii. c. 13.

women were tonsured like clerks, with imprecations against the clerical tonsure. Wilhelma acted as priestess for a long time, and used to pronounce the prayers. After her death, which was supposed holy, as I said, her husband Andrea persevered six years in the same course, and seduced many, till a merchant of Milan, by name Conrad, discovered all. This merchant's wife was of the sect, whom he discovered rising at midnight and going out of his court secretly. He followed her, traced her to the cave, and succeeded in passing in with others unchallenged, and thus made the discovery. Contriving, as soon as the lights were put out, to take from his wife's finger her sapphire ring, he escaped secretly, and returned home. The next day he said nothing, but some time after asked for the ring, when she replied that it was lost. Still dissembling, he gave a grand feast, and invited all whose wives he had seen in the cave, with their wives. After dinner, "Friends and guests," said he, "let each of you do to his wife what you shall see me do to mine." At which words he pulled off her head-dress, and lo! the tonsured crown appeared. The astonishment of the other men, when they found their wives similarly tonsured, may be conceived. Conrad then related to them what he had seen. The whole was referred to the tribunals. Andrea was burnt with the bones of his wife, and the women were dismissed by their husbands.

This heresy passed into Germany, where as many as four thousand are said to have caught it. These used to go forth at night, like wild animals, to mountains and woods, to hold their sabbath *.

It was in 1440 that the extent to which magical horrors were practised in France came to light, in the prosecution of the Marechal de Rais, of the illustrious family of Laval, who, on being convicted of all kinds of infamy, was brought to trial by the Duke of Brittany, and burnt at Nantes, having confessed the many murders and execrable impieties of which he had been guilty. The Pope's bull, shortly after addressed to the authorities of Languedoc, represented in detail all the operations of magical art, invocation of demons, profanations of holy things, pacts with hell, and the employment of the most

* Chronic. Hirsangiens. an. MCCXCVIII.

criminal human means to injure their enemies; on which latter account, as Berthier remarks, the tribunals of justice were bound to take cognizance of such matters, let their opinion respecting the superstition have been what it might *.

In the reign of Charles IX., Trois-Echelles, who was a famous sorcerer, said that thirty thousand persons in Paris were occupied in sorcery. Catherine de Medicis was said to have worn a talisman composed of a child's skin.

It was, however, during the religious revolution, in the sixteenth century, that the practice of magic prevailed to the greatest extent in every part of Europe, as is admitted by the author of Letters on Demonology. Hall's testimony is curious :-" Satan's prevalency," saith he, "in this age is most clear, in the marvellous number of witches abounding in all places. Now hundreds are discovered in one shire; and, if fame deceive us not, in a village of fourteen houses in the north are found so many of this damned brood. Heretofore only barbarous deserts had them, but now the civilest and religious parts are frequently pestered with them." Contemporary writers remark that every sort of horror marked the epoch of the reformers-earthquakes such as were hardly recorded in history, pestilence, famine, sterility of all things, inundations, tempests-troops of wolves, emboldened by eating those slain in the religious war, and having contracted a relish for human blood, prowling over the country, leaving embowelled or half-eaten the bodies of women and children, so that, as Paradin says, God seemed to arm every creature to fight against man in vengeance of his sins-signs in the air, and on the earth, and in the waters, filling all hearts with terror-dire meteors and fearful fires seen in the sky-births abominable in human eyes, seeming to denote the fire of heresy and the monsters of diabolic origin which were desolating the church and drawing down upon sinners the deluge of the wrath of God ↑.

Above all, the predominance of superstition in countries that had abjured the Catholic faith was truly fearful. The terror which it inspired may be estimated from the

Hist. de l'Eglise Gal. tom. xvi. 358.

Hist. de Lyons, lib. iii. c. 42.

brief records of the court books relative to executed witches, comprised in the words "Convicta et combusta." Nevertheless the evil existed elsewhere, and it caused far less alarm with consequences much more dreadful; for the ancient diabolic traditions seemed to have more vigour wherever the antagonist faith was rescuing men from their influence.

In 1751 a law was passed in France which condemned shepherds to nine years of the galleys for a simple threat of throwing a sortilege. This was in consequence of the terror inspired by the shepherds of Brie, the account of which forms by far the most interesting portion of Le Brun's History *. To such rustic traditions Shakspeare makes allusion:- "This boy is forest-born, ard hath been tutored in the rudiments of many desperate studies." The horrible sacrilegious rites which came to light in the dungeons of the Bastile, at the epoch of the poisoning society, are further evidence of the same continued tradition t. The confessions of the old priest, Stephen Guabourg, chaplain of the Count of Montgomery, and of Gilles Davot, revealed the nature of the sacrilegious masses of indescribable horror, which were celebrated in a house of the street of St. Denis, for each of which two hundred francs used to be paid; in which the demon was invoked to aid the designs of the poisoners and other wretches. Of these, Mirabeau said, "You cannot believe what nevertheless will be proved to you."

The existence of secret societies in England, bearing horrible names, at whose assemblies the most sacred rites were blasphemously mimicked, gave also further evidence of the same kind. Without remaining, however, any longer to multiply testimonies which all lead to the same conclusion respecting the singular perpetuity and uniformity of diabolic superstition, let us proceed to examine more minutely into the real character of these arts, the history of which we have briefly and imperfectly traced.

Many learned and ingenious writers in modern times have undertaken to explain this dark page of history without any assistance from a belief in supernatural causes; but to the schoolmen their notions would have appeared unphilosophical, and the mere substitution of

* Tom. i. + Mem. Hist. sur la Bastille. Londres, 1789.

unknown words for unknown things. A late author has had the malice to accuse the clergy of having favoured the progress of such a belief, as contributing to extend their own authority: but, not to remark the many absurdities into which such a theory betrays him, the assertions of writers, who always suppose that selfinterest, grossly understood, is the motive of every one, merit in truth no attention. The holy Scriptures attest the corporeal appearance and visible operations of evil spirits, as well as the practice of magic and divination. The divine law expressly denounces its penalties against all that use divination, or witches, or charmers, or consulters with familiar spirits, or wizards, or necromancers: and the philosophers of the middle ages could never suppose that these laws were ordained to repress imaginary crimes, nor could they have foreseen that they would incur a charge of craft or ignorance for holding a contrary opinion. The actual exercise of these diabolic arts is ascribed to Menasseh, and to many of the Jews in the time of our Saviour. Among the Gentiles, the most attentive observers of nature did not reject the possibility of reading the future. Hippocrates believed in divination by dreams, of which Aristotle doubted, saying, "it is not easy either to despise or credit them *;" but, as Melchior Canus observes," by so doing, the Stagyrite erred against the truth of the Scriptures."

However unwilling we may be to incur a charge of credulity, we must, I think, conclude that it is not by the inventions of a philosophy which contradicts revelation, that any rational explanation can be given of the phenomena which the schoolmen ascribed to the action of those damnable powers spoken of by the great Apostle of the nations, when he tells us that we have to contend against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against spiritual wickedness in high places. That these invisible agents had a school on earth, no one doubted in former ages. "There is a wisdom of the past," says Cardan, a wisdom of the present, a wisdom of the future-there is a divine, a human, and a demoniacal wisdom +."

66

All the eminent English metaphysicians of the seven

* De Anima.

† De Sapientia, lib. i.