In Rome black magic was punished as a capital offence by the Law of the Twelve Tables, which are to be assigned to the fifth century BC, and, as Livy9 records, from time to time Draconian statutes were directed against those who attempted to blight crops and vineyards or to spread rinderpest amongst flocks and cattle. None the less it is evident from many Latin authors and from the historians that Rome swarmed with occultists and diviners, many of whom in spite of the Lex Cornelia almost openly traded in poisons, and not infrequently in assassination to boot. Sometimes, as in the Middle Ages, a circumstance of which the Malleus Maleficarum most particularly complains, the sorcerers were protected by men of wealth and high estate. This was especially the case in the terrible days of Marius and of Catiline, and during the extreme decadence of the latest Caesars. Yet, paradoxical as it may appear, such emperors as Augustus, Tiberius, and Septimius Severus, whilst banishing from their realms all seers and necromancers, and putting them to death, in private entertained astrologers and wizards among their retinue, consulting their art upon each important occasion, and often even in the everyday and ordinary affairs of life.
Nevertheless it must be noted that all the while normal legislation utterly condemned witchcraft and its works, whilst the laws were not merely carried out to their very letter, but reinforced by such emperors as Claudius, Vitelius, and Vespasian.
These prosecutions are very significant, and I have insisted upon them in some detail, as I wish to emphasize that stern and constant official opposition to witchcraft, and the prohibition under severest penalties, the sentence of death itself, of any practice or pursuit of these dangerous and irreligious arts, was demonstrably not a product of Christianity, but had long and necessarily been employed in the heathen world and among pagan peoples and among polytheistic societies. Moreover, there are even yet savage communities who visit witchcraft with death.
Accordingly, if we cite the Vincentian canon, quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, we might surely say that from the earliest dawn of civilization witchcraft has been prohibited, hated, and feared.
At the time of the triumph of Christianity a decadent Empire in the last throes of paganism was corroded by every kind of superstition and occult art, from the use of petty and harmless sympathetic charms of healing to the darkest crimes of goetic ceremonial. Spells, scrying, conjurations, evokings of the dead were never more fashionable and never more keenly explored by every class and every order, from the divine Caesar in his palace to the losel peasant in his humble shed. If the disease is universal, the medicine must be sharp. It was very difficult, when the infection of crime was so general, to discriminate and draw the line, to take into consideration relative differences and nice gradations. So much that was heathen, so much that was bad, was mixed up with what might seem to be simple credulity, and the harmless folk-customs of some grandam tradition and immemorial usage, a song or a country dance mayhap, innocent enough on the surface, and even pleasing, so often were but the cloak and the mask for something devilish and obscene, that the Church deemed it necessary to forbid and proscribe the whole superstition even when it manifested itself in modest fashion and seemed guileless, innoxious, and of no account. Thus, for example, to make a wind blow or to drop is a worldwide fantasy which appears harmless enough. The Estonians when they wish to raise a wind strike a knife into a house-beam in the direction from which they desire the wind to blow, while at the same time they croon an old-time canzonet. The underlying idea is that the gentle wind will not let any innocent thing, not even a beam, suffer without coming swiftly and breathing softly thereon to assuage the pain. But at Constantinople, in the reign of Constantine, a warlock named Sopater was put to death on a charge of binding the winds by magic, which he had at any rate esssayed to do, whether or no the fact that the cornships of Egypt and Syria were detained on their voyage by calms and headwinds was actually due to his interference. The city was nearly starved, and the Byzantine mob, clamouring for bread, was ready to break out into the wildest excesses.10 In Scotland witches used to raise the wind by dipping the corner of a plaid in water and beating it thrice upon a stone, crooning the following words:
I knok this rag upone this stane
To raise the wind in the divellis name,
It sall not lye till I please againe.11
It will readily be remembered that one of the chief charges brought against the coven of North Berwick witches during the famous trial of 1590 was that they performed incantations to raise a tempest which might wreck the fleet that was escorting James VI when he brought his queen, Anne of Denmark, from her native country to Scotland. So we see that a superstition which in a little fishing village, when some mother was calling a fair wind for her son, or some lass whistled for a gentle breeze to fill the sails of her sweetheart’s trawler, was simple and kindly enough, might yet become dangerous and deadly at least in intent when launched by malevolent witches who had the will if not the power to destroy, and who if this means failed would hasten to
