WITCHCRAFT. There is probably no age or country in which there has not existed a belief iu the possibility of mortal beings acquiring the use of supernatural powers for the purpose of accom plishing some object of their desire, good or evil. In this, as in other species of superstition, there will be more or less resemblance in the manifestations, wherever or whenever they are exemplified ; but that peculiar class of examples which comes under the denomination of witchcraft admits of certain lines of demarcation, which may be service able in keeping the subject distinct from others, The proper field of this superstition was among the Christian nations of Europe—those of the north more particularly. It is to be found iu full maturity about the middle of the 15th century, and flourished with tolerably equal vigour through Catholicism and Protestantism, till it gradually decayed before the progress of experimental science. In its doctrinal priuciples it was a mischievous application of the doctrines of Christianity, being held to be a manifestation of the powers of evil operating as antago nists to the authority of the Deity. It was not necessarily used to accomplish evil ends, because many of the accusations of witchcraft relate to acts which as ends are condemned by no known moral code, but which became crimes from the means made use of. The powers of evil thus employed by human beings had their personal embodiment either in the Prince of Darkness individually, or in certain sublunary agents called imps or familiars, the messengers between the contracting parties. who bore in this agency of evil the same position as that occu pied by the angels in the holy hierarchy. The return given by the human being for the use of the miraculous powers thus obtained was generally his own eternal soul, which, according to a superstition enter tained by the ignorant iu all countries where the immortality of the _soul is a standard doctrine, it was held to be in the power of the corporeal possessor to convey in remainder, for value given in wealth, luxury, power, or any other object of ordinary human desire. Besides the bargain in which the parties are supposed to covenant openly with each other, each party was usually presumed to have iu view the secondary object of cheating the other. German romance, and, since the days of 13alzac, French romance, have dealt largely in the horrors attending these mutual efforts of imposition, where the one party is struggling to recover his chances of eternal salvation—the other to abridge the promised rewards, or to shorten the duration of their enjoyment. In its most simple aspect, the struggles of the evil one to cheat his victim are exemplified in the ordinary Scottish superstition that he gives them money which, when they come to use it, is turned into slates or other rubbish ; and the same instance is given, by way of example, by Biensfeldius, a German author, who in 1591 published • Tmctatua de Confessionibus Maleficonim.' This author, who is one
of the most systematic of the numerous writers ou this subject, and is one who, instead of venting the indignation of an excited and terrified mind against the lost agents of infernal power, treats all the horrors of sorcery with the gravity of an analytical philosopher, tells us that there are three elements necessary to the accomplishment of witch craft : the divine will permitting it ; the power of the devil instigating and assisting the operation ; and man's corrupt will consenting to be the instrument. It hi a further general characteristic of witchcraft, that from the commencement of its history the agents or victims have, in the majority of cases, been females : and that in later times, when the character of the superstition had degenerated both in the magni tude of the objects accomplished and the rank of the actors, witchcraft came to be considered a power exclusively possessed by old women. It is probable that a propensity to attribute the faculty of divination and the art of perpetrating supernatural mischief to females may have legitimately descended from the Pythia of the more early -classical times, and the venefica or poisoner of the later periods of Roman history ; and that the account of the witch of Ender may have tended to strengthen the opinion. In the superstitions, however. of nations which have had no means of acquiring knowledge from these sources— the African negroes, the North American Indians, and the Scandinavians anterior to their adoption of Christianity—females seem to have always been the prominent agents in the application of the minor supernatural influences. In the practice of witchcraft within the limits assigned to it in this article, it might be possible to find, in the nature of the con nection between the supernatural being and the earthly agent, a tolerably sufficient reason why the influence of a female must generally be greater in the infernal court than that of a male. Whoever has perused the full records of the trials for witchcraft, or the books in which the subject is most minutely investigated, will observe bow necessarily it must follow that the power of evil being endowed with the masculine gender, and communicating his sex to those spiritual emanations of his power which sometimes in his stead do his bidding upon earth, the mortal recipients of his malign influence must neces sarily be of a different sex. The institutional writers on the subject, however, are not found to allude to such a cause, though they lay it down as a general principle that women are more liable to be the agents of Satan than men, a circumstance which Sprenger, in his Mallens 31ale ficarum,' traces to what he calls their inferiority in mental strength, and the natural wickedness of their hearts.