Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/395

 CHAPTER VI. SORCERY AND OCCULT ARTS. Few things are so indestructible as a superstitious belief once fairly implanted in human credulity. It passes from one race to another and is handed down through countless generations ; it adapts itself successively to every form of religious faith ; perse- cution may stifle its outward manifestation, but it continues to be cherished in secret, perhaps the more earnestly that it is unlawful. Religion may succeed religion, but the change only multiplies the methods by which man seeks to supplement his impotence by ob- taining control over supernatural powers, and to guard his weak- ness by lifting the veil of the future. The sacred rites of the su- perseded faith become the forbidden magic of its successor. Its gods become evil spirits, as the Devas or deities of the Veda be- came the Daevas or demons of the Avesta ; as the bull- worship of the early Hebrews became idolatry under the prophets, and as the gods of Greece and Rome were malignant devils to the Christian Fathers. Europe thus was the unhappy inheritor of an accumulated mass of superstitions which colored the life and controlled the actions of every man. They were vivified with a peculiar intensity by the powerful conception of the Mazdean Ahriman — the embodi- ment of the destructive forces of nature and the evil passions of man — which, transfused through Judaism and adorned with the imaginings of the Haggadah, became a fixed article of the creed as the fallen prince of angels, Satan, who drew with him in rebel- lion half of the infinite angelic hosts, and thenceforth devoted powers inferior only to those of God himself to the spiritual and material perdition of mankind. Omnipresent, and well-nigh om- nipotent and omniscient, Satan and his demons were ever and everywhere at work to obtain, by cunning arts, control over the souls of men, to cross their purposes, and to vex their bodies. The