Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/508

 CHAPTER VII. WITCHCRAFT. While, as we have seen, princes and warriors were toying with the dangerous mysteries of the occult sciences, influencing the destinies of states, there had been for half a century a gradually increasing deyelopment of sorcery in a different direction among the despised peasantry, which, before it ran its course, worked far greater evils than any which had thus far sprung from the same source, and left an ineffaceable stain upon the civilization and intel- ligence of Europe. There is no very precise line of demarcation to be drawn between the more pretentious magic and the vulgar details of witchcraft ; they find their origin in the same beliefs and fade into each other by imperceptible gradations, and yet. histori- cally speaking, the witchcraft with which we now have to deal is a manifestation of which the commencement cannot be distinctly traced backward much beyond the fifteenth century. Its prac- titioners were not learned clerks or shrewd swindlers, but ignorant peasants, for the most part women, who professed to have skill to help or to ban, or who were credited by their neighbors with such power, and were feared and hated accordingly. Of such we hear little during the darkest portion of the Middle Ages, but with the dawn of modern culture they confront us as a strange phenome- non, of which the proximate cause is exceedingly obscure. Prob- ably it may be traced to the effort of the theologians to prove that all superstitious practices were heretical in implying a tacit pact with Satan, as declared by the University of Paris. Thus the in- nocent devices of the wise-women in culling simples, or in mut- tering charms, came to be regarded as implying demon- worship. When this conception once came to be firmly implanted in the minds of judges and inquisitors, it was inevitable that with the rack they should extort from their victims confessions in accord- ance with their expectations. Every new trial would add fresh