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The mass of existing material on this subject is so great that I have notattempted to make a survey of the whole of European 'Witchcraft', but haveconfined myself to an intensive study of the cult in Great Britain. Inorder, however, to obtain a clearer understanding of the ritual and beliefsI have had recourse to French and Flemish sources, as the cult appears tohave been the same throughout Western Europe. The New England records areunfortunately not published in extenso; this is the more unfortunate asthe extracts already given to the public occasionally throw light on someof the English practices. It is more difficult to trace the Englishpractices than the Scotch or French, for in England the cult was already ina decadent condition when the records were made; therefore records in apurely English colony would probably contain much of interest.[6]

The sources from which the information is taken are the judicial recordsand contemporary chroniclers. In the case of the chroniclers I have studiedtheir facts and not their opinions. I have also had access to someunpublished trials among the Edinburgh Justiciary Records and also in theGuernsey Greffe.

The following articles have already appeared in various journals, to whoseeditors I am indebted for kind permission to republish: 'Organization ofWitch Societies' and 'Witches and the number Thirteen' in Folk Lore; 'TheGod of the Witches' in the Journal of the Manchester Oriental Society;'Child Sacrifice', 'Witches' Familiars', 'The Devil's Mark', 'The Devil'sOfficers', 'Witches' Fertility Rites', 'Witches Transformations', inMan; and 'The Devil of North Berwick' in the Scottish HistoricalReview.

The subject of Witches and Witchcraft has always suffered from the biassedopinions of the commentators, both contemporary and of later date. On theone hand are the writers who, having heard the evidence at first hand,believe implicitly in the facts and place upon them the unwarrantedconstruction that those facts were due to supernatural power; on the otherhand are the writers who, taking the evidence on hearsay and disbelievingthe conclusions drawn by their opponents, deny the facts in toto. Bothparties believed with equal firmness in a personal Devil, and bothsupported their arguments with quotations from the Bible. But as thebelievers were able to bring forward more texts than the unbelievers andhad in their hands an unanswerable argument in the Witch of Endor, theunbelievers, who dared not contradict the Word of God, were forced to fallback on the theory that the witches suffered from hallucination, hysteria,and, to use the modern word, 'auto-suggestion'. These two classes stillpersist, the sceptic predominating. Between the believer who believedeverything and the unbeliever who disbelieved everything there has been nocritical examination of the evidence, which presents a new and untouchedfield of research to the student of comparative religion.

Among the believers in witchcraft everything which could not be explainedby the knowledge at their disposal was laid to the credit of supernaturalpowers; and as everything incomprehensible is usually supposed to emanatefrom evil, the witches were believed to be possessed of devilish arts. Asalso every non-Christian God was, in the eyes of the Christian, theopponent of the Christian God, the witches were considered to worship theEnemy of Salvation, in other words, the Devil. The greater number of thesewriters, however, obtained the evidence at first hand, and it musttherefore be accepted although the statements do not bear the constructionput upon them. It is only by a careful comparison with the[10] evidence ofanthropology that the facts fall into their proper places and an organizedreligion stands revealed.

It is interesting to note the class of mind among those contemporarywriters who believed in the reality of the facts confessed at the trials ascompared with those who disbelieved. It will be seen that the mostbrilliant minds, the keenest intellects, the greatest investigators, wereamong the believers: Bodin, Lord Bacon, Raleigh, Boyle, Cudworth, Selden,Henry More, Sir Thomas Browne, Matthew Hale, Sir George Mackenzie, and manyothers, most of whom had heard the evidence at first hand. The scepticswere Weyer, pupil of the occultist Cornelius Agrippa; Reginald Scot, aKentish country squire;[11] Filmer, whose name was a byword for politicalbigotry; Wagstaffe, who went mad from drink; and Webster, a fanaticalpreacher.[2] The sceptics, with the exception of Weyer, appear to have hadlittle or no first-hand evidence; their only weapon was an appeal to commonsense and sentiment combined; their only method was a flat denial of everystatement which appeared to point to supernatural powers. They could notdisprove the statements; they could not explain them without opposing theaccepted religious beliefs of their time, and so weakening their cause byexposing themselves to the serious charge of atheism; therefore they deniedevidence which in the case of any other accusation would have been acceptedas proof.

The evidence which I now bring forward is taken entirely from contemporarysources, i.e. the legal records of the trials, pamphlets giving accounts ofindividual witches, and the works of Inquisitors and other writers. I haveomitted the opinions of the authors, and have examined only the recordedfacts, without however including the stories of ghosts and other 'occult'phenomena with which all the commentators confuse the subject. I have also,for the reason given below, omitted all reference to charms and spells whenperformed by one witch alone, and have confined myself to those statementsonly which show the beliefs, organization, and ritual of a hithertounrecognized cult.

In order to clear the ground I make a sharp distinction between OperativeWitchcraft and Ritual Witchcraft. Under Operative Witchcraft I class allcharms and spells, whether used by a professed witch or by a professedChristian, whether intended for good or for evil, for killing or forcuring. Such charms and spells are common to every nation and country, andare practised by the priests and people of every religion. They are part ofthe common heritage of the human race and are therefore of no practicalvalue in the study of any one particular cult.

The deity of this cult was incarnate in a man, a woman, or an animal; theanimal form being apparently earlier than the human, for the god was oftenspoken of as wearing the skin or attributes of an animal. At the same time,however, there was another form of the god in the shape of a man with twofaces. Such a god is found in Italy (where he was called Janus or Dianus),in Southern France (see pp. 62, 129), and in the English Midlands. Thefeminine form of the name, Diana, is found throughout Western Europe as thename of the female deity or leader of the so-called Witches, and it is forthis reason that I have called this ancient religion the Dianic cult. Thegeographical distribution of the two-faced god suggests that the race orraces, who carried the cult, either did not remain in every country whichthey entered, or that in many places they and their religion wereoverwhelmed by subsequent invaders.

The dates of the two chief festivals, May Eve and November Eve, indicatethe use of a calendar which is generally acknowledged to bepre-agricultural and earlier than the solstitial division of the year. Thefertility rites of the cult bear out this indication, as they were forpromoting the increase of[13] animals and only rarely for the benefit of thecrops. The cross-quarter-days, February 2 and August 1, which were alsokept as festivals, were probably of later date, as, though classed amongthe great festivals, they were not of so high an importance as the May andNovember Eves. To February 2, Candlemas Day, probably belongs the sun-charmof the burning wheel, formed by the whirling dancers, each carrying ablazing torch; but no special ceremony seems to be assigned to August 1,Lammas Day, a fact suggestive of a later introduction of this festival.

The position of the chief woman in the cult is still somewhat obscure.Professor Pearson sees in her the Mother-Goddess worshipped chiefly bywomen. This is very probable, but at the time when the cult is recorded theworship of the male deity appears to have superseded that of the female,and it is only on rare occasions that the God appears in female form toreceive the homage of the worshippers. As a general rule the woman'sposition, when divine, is that of[14] the familiar or substitute for the malegod. There remains, however, the curious fact that the chief woman wasoften identified with the Queen of Faerie, or the Elfin Queen as she issometimes called.

This connexion of the witches and fairies opens up a very wide field; atpresent it is little more than speculation that the two are identical, butthere is promise that the theory may be proved at some later date when thesubject is more fully worked out. It is now a commonplace of anthropologythat the tales of fairies and elves preserve the tradition of a dwarf racewhich once inhabited Northern and Western Europe. Successive invasionsdrove them to the less fertile parts of each country which they inhabited,some betook themselves to the inhospitable north or the equallyinhospitable mountains; some, however, remained in the open heaths andmoors, living as mound-dwellers, venturing out chiefly at night and comingin contact with the ruling races only on rare occasions. As the conqueroralways regards the religion of the conquered as superior to his own in thearts of evil magic, the dwarf race obtained the reputation of wizards andmagicians, and their god was identified by the conquerors with thePrinciple of Evil. The identification of the witches with the dwarf orfairy race would give us a clear insight into much of the civilization ofthe early European peoples, especially as regards their religious ideas.

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