CHAPTER XI.
Another Chat about Witches and Witchcraft—Late Period of the Existence of Belief in Witches—Queen Semiramis—Elfin Armorers—The Sword of the Scandinavian King—Mystical Meaning of Tales of Magic—Anglo-Saxon Enigmas—Celestinus and the Miller’s Horse—The Emperor Conrad and the Count’s Son—Legend of “The Giant with the Golden Hairs.”
“Your stories about sorcerers and sorcery, Lathom,” said Herbert, “have made me consider a little as to the amount of truth on which such fictions may have been founded.”
“Perhaps you believe in witches, magicians, and all that tribe, that gather deadly herbs by moonlight, and ride through the air on broomsticks,” said Thompson, with a smile.
“May not Herbert fairly ask you,” said Lathom, “whether there is any antecedent improbability in mortal beings obtaining, from the spirit of evil, a temporary superhuman power; or in the idea of Satan awarding the riches and honors of this world to those who will fall down and worship him?”
“Selden’s apology for the law against witches in his time shows a lurking belief,” remarked Herbert. “‘If,’ says that sour old lawyer, ‘one man believes that byturning his hat thrice and crying “buz,” he could take away a fellow-creature’s life, this were a just law made by the state, that whosoever should do so, should forfeit his life.’”
“He must have believed, or his logical mind would have seen, that a law waging war with intentions which are incapable of fulfilment, is both wrong and mischievous.”
“Well,” said Herbert, “as good a lawyer as Selden and a better man, did not fear to profess his belief in witchcraft, and to give his judicial countenance to trials for sorcery:—Sir Matthew Hale was ever ready to admit his belief in witches and witchcraft.”
“To the lawyers you may add the learned antiquary and physician, Sir Thomas Brown, the author of the ‘Religio Medici.’”
“But surely, Lathom, all this belief, as well as the practice of witch-tormenting, ceased about 1682,” said Thompson.
“The belief in witchcraft has never yet been extinct, and the practice of witch-burning lasted forty years after that, at least in Scotland. The act of James, so minutely describing witches and their acts, and so strenuously inciting the people to burn them, remained on the statute-book until the ninth year of George the Second; and as late as 1722 the hereditary sheriff of Sutherlandshire condemned a poor woman to death as a witch.”
“I believe I can carry down the belief at least a few years later than the date even of the last witch execution,” remarked Herbert.
“Among the poor and uneducated, undoubtedly?”
“Nay, Thompson, with them it remains even now; I speak not only of the educated, but of that class of men which is most conversant with evidence, and most addicted to discredit fictitious stories.”
“What, the lawyers?”
“Even so,” replied Lathom; “in 1730, William Forbes, in his ‘Institutes of the Law of Scotland,’ published in that year, makes this remark: ‘Nothing seems plainer to me, than that there have been witches, and that, perhaps, such are now actually existing; which I intend, God willing, to clear in a larger work concerning the criminal law.’”
“Did this large work appear?” said Thompson.
“I should think not; at least, it is not known.”
“The old Jesuit from whom you got your version of The Ungrateful Man, has a story illustrative of a kind of witchcraft that all will admit to have been very prevalent in every age,” said Thompson.
“What, will you believe in witchcraft in any form?”
“At all events, in one form—the witchcraft of love; my instance is the story of Semiramis and Ninus. I will read it you from the same version that Lathom used for his tale of Vitalis and Massaccio.”