Devil's Disciples

WITCHCRAFT IN ENGLAND (163 pp.)--Christina Hole--Scribner ($3).

"Before Candlemas we went be-east Kinloss, and there we yoked a plough of toads. The Devil held the plough, and John Young, our Officer, did drive the plough. Toads did draw the plough as oxen, couchgrass was the harness and trace-chains, a gelded animal's horn was the coulter, and a piece of a gelded animal's horn was the sock [ploughshare]."

Thus spake the 17th Century's Isobel Gowdie, a Scots peasant who confessed her practices as a witch in language as fanciful as one of her great contemporaries, Poet Robert Herrick. Isobel (whom the authorities first hanged, then burned for safe measure) is one of the highlights of Christina Hole's scholarly, sober history of English witchcraft.* Her familiarity with it began when her old nurse destroyed her milk teeth as fast as they fell out, to keep them from evil hands.

Prominent witches such as Isobel Gowdie were often members of an organized "coven" of sorcerers--men & women who assembled regularly in barren places under the direction of a "Grand Master," who was usually masked and garbed in animal skins and satanic horns. When the gang had reported on their success or failure as satanic agents since the last meeting and had finished feasting (usually on a sheep stolen from a farmer), the Master took up his reed pipe and led them in a riotous dance, which ended in a sexual orgy lasting "until the first light of dawn broke up the meeting."

Such covens, Author Hole explains, were in essence Christian England's last, fading traces of pagan religion, stemming from the same roots as the animal sacrifices of the Greeks and the fertility rites of the Egyptians. When King Saul found himself out of favor with his Maker, he turned to the Witch of Endor for advice and succor--and for centuries after King Saul, kings, scholars and peasants alike turned the same way for the same reason. Witches might be good or bad (i.e., they might practice white or black magic, or a mixture of both), but it never occurred even to intelligent Europeans as late as Shakespeare's day to question their existence. The great Elizabethan savant, Dr. Dee, was as much on the alert for phony witchery as the Roman Catholic Church is for phony miracles, but Dr. Dee used "magic" (by royal request) to divine the most propitious day for Queen Elizabeth's coronation, and spent most of his life peering into a crystal ball and trying to induce the archangels to join him in intellectual disputations.

A Witch in Time. Sharp practices, thefts, murders were often promptly confessed by the evildoer when he heard that the local white witch was on his trail. It was this popular, pagan confidence in witchcraft that caused the Church to fear it like the Devil himself. On the European continent, a steady procession of harmless men, women and children went to terrible deaths as witches. In England, where religious problems were less acute, and the authorities considered witchcraft more a criminal offense than a heresy, the record was not so dark. Torture, to extract confessions, was rarely employed, and Author Hole estimates that between the time of Queen Elizabeth and 1736 (when witchcraft trials became illegal), not more than 1,000 witches lost their lives by official decree.

"To Get Myself a Glory." Relatively few witches practiced under "satanic" guidance. Many of them carried on mild witchery during weekdays and attended church on Sundays. It was the hysterical accusers and the insincere practitioners who caused most of the harm. Many a "bewitched" person, confronted by skeptical judges, broke down and confessed, like Thomas Darling in 1599, that his hair-raising charges were fabrications "either of ignorance, or to get myself a glory thereby." Or precocious, abnormal children would describe how they had seen their mother or father sticking pins into a wax image, nursing a spotted cat at a secret teat (usually a mole or wart), flying through the air on a broomstick.

Few accusers would swear to having seen a witch in actual aerial motion. The average witch, says Author Hole, was quite content to keep her feet on the ground--like Dame Alice Kyteler, an aristocratic Irish witch who bestrode an anointed staff on which she "ambled and gallopped through thick and thin."

Right Man, Wrong Tower. One of the chief troubles with witches was that a man could never be dead certain of following their instructions. One of the Dukes of Suffolk, for instance, was warned by his pet necromancer "to beware of the Tower." So when the Duke was arrested for high treason in 1450, he hastily escaped from London and embarked on a ship bound for France--only to find that the name of the ship was Nicolas of the Towre. "And then," says the chronicler,

". . . his heart failed him, for he thought he was deceived, and in the sight of all his men he was drawn out of the great ship into [a] boat; and there was an axe and a block, and one of the lewdest of the ship bade him lay down his head, and he should be fair dealt with and die on a sword; and took a rusty sword and smote off his head within half a dozen strokes, and took away his gown of russett and his doublet of velvet mailed, and laid his body on the sands of Dover."

* Unlike the scholarly, but by no means sober work of the Rev. Alphonsus Joseph-Mary Augustus Montague Summers, English priest and authority on Restoration literature, who in 1927 startled the British public with his best-selling History of Witchcraft and Demonology--"written from what people are pleased to call a 'medieval' standpoint, an absolute and complete belief in the supernatural, and hence in witchcraft."

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