Witchcraft and False Theocracies
By C. M. S.
The assertion was made in the previous article that had there been no New England theocracy, there would have been no execution of witches in New England. Having established their governments upon the theocratic basis, what more logical than that the colonists should make the code of the Israelitish theocracy their code? They did follow the logic of their hypothesis in that respect; and because God had said to the rulers of the theocracy which he established, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” the rulers of those colonies considered that to be Jehovah’s mandate to them also; and they acted accordingly. From their theocratic hypothesis, it became their bounden duty to root out witchcraft as soon as they were convinced that it existed among them.13 But they reckoned ill-advisedly. Jehovah had specifically ended the theocratic system, and had declared it should be no more until he himself should bestow the rulership of this world upon his Son. While the theocratic plan of government was in operation under Jehovah’s direction, there was no possibility of injustice being done in the matter of the detection and punishment of those who had given themselves to Lucifer to do his bidding. The One who made the law knew how to guard every individual from any unjust working of that law while it was in operation under his direction. He who gave his people the test by which to know a true prophet (see Num. 24:4) would not leave his prophets to the guidance of their own imaginations in detecting the necromancer, the wizard, and the witch. But the false theocracies of Europe and New England had no such guaranty against injustice and oppression. Their establishment as such was a defiance of the mandate of Jehovah, by which theocracy had been discontinued. When men attempt to operate a divine institution without divine sanction, and in opposition to divine pronouncement, there is sure to be disaster. When the agents of that false theocratic system known as the Papacy began the terrible business of extirpating witches, they opened up a field of operations in which a confederacy of human ingenuity, imagination, superstition, and spite, sharpened and abetted by the cunning malignity of Satan himself, was to run a merciless course in two hemispheres, but chiefly in the mother lands. Of this, James Russell Lowell says:— Toward no crime have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing difference of belief, and the first systematic persecutions for witchcraft began with the inquisitors in the thirteenth century. It was then and there that the charge of sexual uncleanness with demons was first devised. Persecuted heretics would naturally meet in darkness and secret, and it was easy to blacken such meetings with the accusation of deeds so foul as to shun the light of day and the eyes of men.—“Among My Books,” page 130. Thus does John M. Taylor, in his monograph on “The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut,” speak of the origin of witchcraft persecutions:— Modern scholarship holds that witchcraft . . . was first exploited by the Dominicans of the Inquisition.—Page 10. That it was exploited by them, there is no doubt, and the foregoing quotation from James Russell Lowell gives a very cogent reason for the exploitation; but that it did not originate with them is proved both by the testimony of Holy Writ and by the oldest human records extant. The code of Hammurabi (the Amraphel of the Old Testament, Gen. 14:1), which was dug out of the necropolis mound of ancient Susa in Elam in 1901, proves the existence of witchcraft in that early age, and gives the rule for determining the guilt or innocence of the accused as well as of the wizard who accused him. The bull of Pope Innocent VIII, issued in 1489, made a belief in witchcraft a fixed part of Catholic faith. On the title-page of that document is this significant legend: “Not to believe in witchcraft is the greatest of heresies.” With such a declaration from such an authoritative source, it is little wonder that a belief in witchcraft and in the necessity for its extirpation at the hands of those who were ruling over the bodies and souls of men, should have taken such strong possession of Christendom. And wherever a belief in prevalent witchcraft has been coupled with a belief in the baleful error that the civil power must look after religion, there has been just such trouble as that which harried New England in the witchcraft days, and polluted her annals with the blood of the innocent. Says Taylor, in “The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut,” pages 26, 28:— Hundreds of innocent men and women were imprisoned or fled into exile or hiding-places; their homes were broken up, their estates were ruined, and their families and friends were left in sorrow, anxiety, and desolation; and all this terrorism was wrought at the instance of the chief men in the communities, the magistrates and the ministers. The ministers stood with the magistrates in their delusion and intemperate zeal. As the New England colonies had brought their church and state ideas with them from the Old World, so brought they their ideas of witchcraft and the remedy for its extirpation. In the year 1541, by a statute of Henry VIII, witchcraft was made a felony. Canon Linden, an eye-witness of the dreadful deeds committed at Trier in 1589, says:— In Bamburg and Wurzburg, Geneva and Como, Toulouse and Lorraine, and in many other places in Italy, Germany, and France, thousands were sacrificed in the names of religion, justice, and law, with bigotry for their advocate, ignorance for their judge, and fanaticism for their executioner.—“The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut,” p. 10. From court to court throughout the towns and villages of all the diocese, scurried special accusers, inquisitors, notaries, jurors, judges, constables, dragging to trial and torture human beings of both sexes, and burning them in great numbers. Scarcely any of those who were accused escaped punishment. Nor were there spared even the leading men in the city of Trier. For the judge, with two burgomasters, several counselors and associate judges, canons of sundry collegiate churches, parish priests, rural deans, were swept away in this ruin. So far, at length, did the madness of the furious populace and of the courts go in this thirst for blood and booty, that there was scarcely anybody who was not smirched by some suspicion of this crime. Meanwhile notaries, copyists, and innkeepers grew rich. The executioner rode a blooded horse, like a noble of the court, and went clad in gold and silver. His wife vied with noble dames in the richness of her array. The children of those convicted and punished were sent into exile; their goods were confiscated; plowmen and vintner failed.—“The Witchcraft Persecutions,” Pages 13, 14. Cotton Mather, as if to justify the course of the Massachusetts theocracy in its dealings with witches, tells, in his “Wonders of the Invisible World” of “certain strange doings in Sweedland in the years 1669 and 1670.” He states that there were discovered no fewer than threescore and ten witches in one village, twenty-three of whom were condemned to death. “The rest were sent to Fahluma, where most of them were afterward executed.” Fifteen of this company who suffered death were children. Thirty-six other children, who were considered less guilty, “were forced to run the gauntlet, and be lashed on their hands once a week for a year together.”—“Wonders of the Invisible World,” pages 170, 171. James Howell, in his “Familiar Letters,” published in 1646, says:— We have multitudes of witches among us; for in Essex and Suffolk there are above two hundred indicted within these two years, and above the half of them executed. At this time it was declared that Scotland was swarming with witches, and that persons of good quality were executed daily. Scotland set its seal on witchcraft as a crime by an act of its parliament as early as 1563, amended in 1649. The ministers were the inquisitors and persecutors. They heard the confessions and inflicted the tortures, and their cruelties were commensurate with the hard-and-fast theology that froze the blood of mercy in their veins.—“The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut,” page 21. The New England persecutions for witchcraft were but an echo of what had occurred and was occurring in the Old World, and they were superinduced by the same conditions,—a union of church and state. The clergy of New England were as prominent in it as were the clergy of Old England and Scotland. Cotton Mather is pictured on horseback at the execution of the Rev. George Burroughs, who was hanged for alleged witchcraft. During Mr. Burroughs’s speech and prayer on the scaffold, the people were so affected by his words that it was feared some of those present might interfere with the execution. To forestall such action, some of Mr. Burroughs’s accusers declared “the black man stood and dictated to him.” In a14work entitled “Salem Witchcraft in Outline,” we read concerning this execution:— As soon as he was turned off [hanged], Mr. Cotton Mather, being mounted upon a horse, addressed himself to the people, partly to declare that he (Mr. Burroughs) was no ordained minister, and partly to possess the people of his guilt, saying that the devil had often been transformed into an angel of light; and this somewhat appeased the people, and the executions went on.—Page 132. There were others executed on the same scaffold with this minister of the church gospel. The prominence of Mr. Mather in these executions did not in the least add to his popularity among the common people. Says the historian Fiske:— One of the effects of the witchcraft episodes at Salem was to cast discredit upon the clergy, who still represented the old theocratic ideal which had founded the commonwealth of Massachusetts. . . . To some extent Cotton Mather was made the chief butt of popular resentment because he and his father especially typified the old theocratic state of things.—“New France and New England,” pages 197, 198. The same author makes the following interesting observations upon the connection between theocratic rule and witchcraft:— As literature and art have had their golden ages, so the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were especially the sulphurous age of the witchcraft delusion. It was the period when the Church of Rome was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with heresy, and obnoxious persons suspected of heresy could sometimes be destroyed by a charge of witchcraft, when there was no other method of reaching them. Thus the universal superstition was enlisted in the service of a militant and unscrupulous ecclesiastical organization with effects that were frightful. . . . It was already noted in Cromwell’s time that independency in ecclesiastical matters seemed to be attended by a diminution of activity in the world of witches.—Id., pages 141-144. The same observation fittingly applies to colonial days. The release from the bondage of the witchcraft delusion was synchronous with the growth of that spirit of revulsion from ecclesiastical control in civil things which resulted finally in the overthrow of the ecclesiastical establishments. The separation of church and state, the abandonment of the false-theocracy idea, cured the witchcraft delusion in New England; and that separation and that abandonment are the only certain preventive of a recurrence of that delusion. In view of that fact, the people of this nation should look with no little concern upon the declared purpose of certain powerful organizations to resurrect theocracy in this land. Any theocracy that men may establish will be a false theocracy, and the result of its establishment would be certain disaster.