Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/371



F all the dark chapters in the history of the world none is more terrible than that which deals with sorcery and demoniacal possession. To-day this belief has almost entirely disappeared in civilized lands: it lingers only in some remote hamlet in "lucky and unlucky days," good and bad signs, and similar harmless idiosyncrasies; although most grown persons can remember that in their childhood certain uncanny individuals were regarded as "witches," just as certain houses were said to be "haunted." But, after all, the belief was only vague and nebulous; while now among even the children ghosts and fairies and witches are regarded with profound skepticism. It is extremely difficult, then, for us to grasp the idea that "for fifteen hundred years it was universally believed that the Bible established in the clearest manner the reality of witchcraft, and that an amount or evidence so varied and so ample as to preclude every possibility of doubt attested its continuance and prevalence. The clergy denounced it with all the emphasis of authority. The legislators of almost every land enacted laws for its punishment. Acute judges, whose lives were spent in sifting evidence, investigated the question on countless occasions, and (as a result) condemned the accused. Nations that were completely separated by position, by interest, by character, were united on this question." More than this. In the city of Trèves alone seven thousand witches were burned. At Toulouse, the seat of the Inquisition, four hundred persons perished in one single execution. Rémy, the judge of Nancy, in France, boasted that he had put to death eight hundred witches. In the little Italian district of Como one thousand perished in one year. The Judge Voss of Fulda burned seven hundred, and said that he hoped to make it one thousand. Benedict Karpzow boasted that he had signed twenty thousand death-warrants for witchcraft. In Sweden in 1690 seventy persons were condemned, and most of them burned. In Great Britain, chiefly in Scotland, in twenty years alone between three and four thousand were put to death. The executions in Paris in a few months were, a contemporary writer says, "almost infinite." Indeed, not to mention imprisonment and torture—torture beyond the wildest flight of modern fancy—the number of persons who perished, chiefly by fire, in Christian Europe and America has been calculated as from one million to nine million. Probably four million is a correct estimate. The annals of the world may be I searched through and through, and nothing can be found, I believe, to compare in tragic interest with the chapter on