ABSTRACT
Wizards and witches, spirits good and evil, incantations and forecasts, curses and spells, have been known in all ages and in almost all lands. They are not peculiar to any race or civilization or religious system. Not only were they as familiar to classic antiquity as to the Middle Ages, but the explorers of the sixteenth century found them well established among the Black Men of Africa and the Red Men of America. To deal with the Occult by one method or another is a common human impulse, as familiar to the lowest as to the highest type of intelligence. Folklore is full of it in every region of the world. If I have ventured to make a special note of the working of this tendency in the sixteenth century, it is because there was a specially complicated development of its phenomena in the century when the old ideas clashed with the new, when the most primitive conceptions of the preternatural survived alongside with the appearance of the most modern scepticisms, when the boundary between magic and science had not yet been drawn, when psychology could not be disentangled from religion, nor astrology from astronomy, nor chemistry from alchemy. Few disbelieved in witches, but it required a clever inquisitor to distinguish a ‘white witch’, who might be tolerated, from a ‘black witch’ who ought to be burnt. And how could one certainly differentiate between a prophesying mystic, who might be inspired, and another utterer of strange sayings who might be suffering from diabolical possession ? Charlatans there certainly were, who deceived from malice aforethought, but self-deceivers were probably still more numerous. And many, no doubt, like the typical modern medium, started with a genuine belief in their own revelations, but when 213the phenomena refused to materialize, replaced them with conscious trickery to save their reputation, or earn their patron’s gold. The net result of a study of the theories and practice of the men of the sixteenth century is very puzzling. The most diverse general conclusions might be drawn from a study of details—probably all general conclusions would be inaccurate, and (as I have already said in another place) we can only catalogue individual happenings, and must not pontificate in any cut-and-dried conclusions.
