Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/43

 feature of which was the adoration of the evil principle, the demon. But what is this save Satanism, or in other words Witchcraft? It is true that when these heresies came into sharp conflict with the Catholic Church they developed on lines which lost various non-essential accretions and Eastern subtleties of extravagant thought, but the motive of the Manichæan doctrines and of Witchcraft is one and the same, and the punishment of Manichees and of witches was the same death at the stake. The fact that these heretics were recognized as sorcerers will explain, as nothing else can, the severity of the statutes against them, evidence of no ordinary depravity, and early in the eleventh century Manichee and warlock are recognized as synonymous.

The sorcery of the Middle Ages, says Carl Haas, a learned and impartial authority, was born from the heresies of earlier epochs, and just as Christian authority had dealt with heresy, so did it deal with the spawn witchcraft. Both alike are the result of doubts, of faithlessness, a disordered imagination, pride and presumption, intellectual arrogance; sick phantasy both, they grow and flourish apace in shadow and sin, until right reasoning, and sometimes salutary force, are definitely opposed to them. The authors of the Malleus Maleficarum clearly identify heresy and Witchcraft. When the Prince Bishop of Bamberg, John George II Fuchs von Dornheim, (1623–33), built a strong prison especially for sorcerers, the Drudenhaus, he set over the great door a figure of Justice, and inscribed above Vergil’s words: Discite iustitiam moniti et non temnere Diuos (Æneid, VI, 620),

(Behold, and learn to practise right, Nor do the blessed Gods despite).

To the right and the left were engraved upon two panels, the one Latin, the other German, two verses from the Bible, 3 Kings ix. 8, 9; which are Englished as follows: “This house shall be made an example of: every one that shall pass by it shall be astonished, and shall hiss, and say: Why hath the Lord done thus to this land, and to this house? And they shall answer: Because they forsook the Lord their God, who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and followed strange gods, and adored them, and worshipped them: therefore hath the Lord brought upon them all this evil.” This is a concise summary of the basic reason for the