Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/402

 386 SORCERY AND OCCULT ARTS. arts or by the services of a familiar demon subject to their orders. As the neophyte in receiving baptism renounced the devil, his pomps and his angels,"* it was necessary for the Christian who desired the aid of Satan to renounce God. Moreover, as Satan when he tempted Christ offered him the kingdoms of the earth in return for adoration — " If thou therefore wilt worship me all shall be thine " (Luke iv. 7) — there naturally arose the idea that to ob- tain this aid it was necessary to render allegiance to the princes of hell. Thence came the idea, so fruitful in the development of sorcery, of compacts with Satan by which sorcerers became his slaves, binding themselves to do all the evil they could encompass and to win over as many converts as they could to follow their example. Thus the sorcerer or witch was an enemy of all the human race as well as of God, the most efficient agent of hell in its sempiternal conflict with heaven. His destruction, by any ^method, was therefore the plainest duty of man. This was the perfected theory of sorcery and witchcraft by which the gentile superstitions inherited and adopted from all sides were fitted into the Christian dispensation and formed part of its accepted creed. From the earliest periods of which records have reached us there have been practitioners of magic who were credited with the ability of controlling the spirit world, of divin- ing the future, and of interfering with the ordinary operations of nature. "When this was accomplished by the ritual of an estab- lished religion it was praiseworthy, like the augural and oracular divination of classic times, or the exorcism of spirits, the excom- munication of caterpillars, and the miraculous cures wrought by relics or pilgrimages to noted shrines. AVhen it worked through the invocation of hostile deities, or of a religion which had been superseded, it was blameworthy and forbidden. The Yatudhana, or sorcerer of the Vedas, doubtless sought his ends through the invocation of the Eakshasas and other dethroned divinities of the conquered Dasyu. His powers were virtually the same as those of the mediaeval sorcerer : with his yatu, or magic, he could en- compass the death of his enemies or destroy their harvests and their herds ; his kritya, or charmed images and other objects, had an evil influence which could only be overcome by discovering
 * Tertull. de Corona c. iii.