Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/50

38 he obtained from the sovereign permission to visit this witch and the promise that her life should be spared if she would teach how these meteorological phenomena could be effected, but the process involved such denial of God, the Virgin Mary, and the saints, repudiation of the holy sacraments and dedication of soul and body to sundry devils, that Hartlieb declined to become her pupil, and broke off the interview in horror at what he heard. The poor woman, who appears to have imagined that such things were possible, was given over to the executioner and burned.

It is hardly necessary to describe in detail the epidemic of witch persecution, which raged in Bavaria especially from 1589 to 1631. It ran its fatal course and was characterized by the same exhibition of credulity, cruelty, and gross perversions of justice as in other European countries. How any person possessing the least common sense or the most superficial knowledge of human nature, to say nothing of legal training, could expect to extort a confession of the truth by physical torture is to us an insoluble psychological problem. No sooner did the zeal of the authorities begin to relax than it was stimulated anew by the religious orders and the secular clergy, and especially by the chaplains and confessors of the rulers. One of the most bigoted and brutal of these ghostly functionaries was Mathias von Kemnat, court preacher of Friedrich I of the Palatinate. His chronicle of the reign of this monarch is an important but hitherto scarcely heeded contribution to the witchcraft literature of the fifteenth century, and anticipates many of the absurdities and atrocities of the Malleus Maleficarum. He witnessed with extreme satisfaction the burning of many witches in Heidelberg and other places, and records the most disgusting mass of drivel concerning the orgies of Satan and his female worshipers in what he calls the "synagogue of the sorcerers" Each novice, he says, as she joins this diabolical congregation, is instructed how to invest her staff with necromantic qualities by smearing it with a salve prepared from the fat of roasted children, venomous serpents, lizards, toads, and spiders. The witches kill people by rubbing them with this ointment, and with a powder made from entrails they produce epidemics and cause great mortality. "This is the reason" adds the learned divine, "why pestilence prevails in certain villages, while the inhabitants of other villages in the neighborhood remain strong and healthy" In view of these facts he urges that many fires be kindled and kept burning. Meanwhile he advises people to "carry with them quicksilver in a tube or quill as a good preservative against sorcery"