The literature of witchcraft

The literature of witchcraft is not the literature of magic. Magic is world-wide. Wherever, from the first, men have found themselves face to face with the awful powers of nature and of fate which shut in their little lives, some have disdained either to bow to them in reverent submission or to seek by bribes and wheedling to win them to their side. They have tried to outwit mystery with speculation, and to outmatch force with cunning. With spell and incantation they have dared to face the grim demons of storm and fire and flood, to bid begone the lurking fiends of disease, to dip into the dread secret of the future, to call back from the shadows the loved figures of the dead, to make the gods themselves their servants. And if, at last, they have been fain to own to themselves that their lore is, after all, but vanity and their powers a delusion, they have meanwhile found in the eager credulity of their fellows, to whom they no longer dare to confess their impotence, a treasure scarcely less tempting than the favor of the gods. Over against what they deemed the hocus-pocus of worship they have set up the hocus-pocus of magic; and, as the prophet is followed by the priest, the magician is followed by the sorcerer. Under the peaceful stars of Akkadian Chaldæa, centuries before Terah wandered westward with his son, or in the tornado-torn jungles of the last-found South Sea island, the impulse and its outcome have been ever the same.

Compared with the potent share of magic in human history, its literature is indeed but scant. Its choicest secrets have always gone by word of mouth. Yet it is a literature of all times and lands. From the clay volumes of Assyrian kings and the papyrus rolls of Egypt to the latest utterance of the spirits through Mr. Slade or of the mystic sages of the Orient through Mr. Sinnett, it is as perennial as human folly itself. Its faith may be feigned, its miracles sham; but magic itself is actual and universal.

But witchcraft never was. It was but a shadow, a nightmare: the nightmare of a religion, the shadow of a dogma. Less than five centuries saw its birth, its vigor, its decay. And this birth, this vigor, this decay, were--to a degree perhaps else unknown in history--caused by and mirrored in a literature. Of that literature it has during the last decade been mine, as librarian of the President White Library at Cornell University, to aid in building up a collection. In the last few months I have had in hand the making ready of its catalogue for the press. My task is by no means finished, and I have much to learn; but it has seemed to me that even such a hurried survey of the literature of witchcraft as I may presume to attempt may not be without interest to the American Historical Association. And this the more, since no adequate bibliography of it has ever yet been published, and no historian has thoroughly known and exploited it.

The literature of witchcraft, indeed, if under the name be included all the books which touch upon that dark subject, is something enormous. For at least four centuries no comprehensive work on theology, on philosophy, on history, on law, on medicine, on natural science, could wholly ignore it; and to lighter literature it afforded the most telling illustrations for the pulpit, the most absorbing gossip for the news-letter, the most edifying tales for the fireside. But the works devoted wholly or mainly to witchcraft are much fewer. Roundly and rudely estimated, this monographic literature includes perhaps a thousand or fifteen hundred titles.[1]

The earliest of the books on witchcraft were written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Their writers were Dominicans of the Inquisition. Not that Brother Nicolas Eymeric or Brother Nicolas Jaquier or Brother John Vineti or Brother Jerome Visconti knew that he was writing on a new theme. On the contrary, they wrote to prove that this witchcraft whereof they spoke was as old as mankind. And they cited not only Thomas Aquinas and Vincent of Beauvais, but Isidore and Gregory and Cassian and Augustine, and, above all, the Bible,--nay, even Josephus and the ancient poets, Horace and Virgil and Ovid. Wherein, then, was it really new, and how did they come to write on it at all? Bear with me while I try very briefly to answer.