CRIME AND MYSTERY.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 43, 20 February 1926, Page 23

CRIME AND MYSTERY.

DREAD SECRETS OF THE BLACK ART 3

WITCHES DELAY *A KING'S WEDDING.

THE ENCHANTED CAT — TORTURED SORCERESS — VAMPIRES.

SATAN IN THE PULPIT.

' If the ladies who are occasionally hauled before the police on charges of fortune telling had been living in 1725 Instead of 1925, they would have run tne risk of being burnt as witches. It was not until ten years later that the death penalty for witchcraft was abolished in. England, though nobody had paid the full price since 1705 -when two women were hangeu until they were almost de,ad and then publicly burn; at Northamp, ton. Before that, "witchcraft" and the "black art" had been practised (and punished) for centuries in England, leaving their traces,in our literature, notably in "Macbeth," where the whole abracadabra of the craft is set forth, while it gtill makes your blood iun cold when you read Tarn o' Shanter's experiences at Alloway Kirk. Eye Magic. The ' idea lingers in the Germanic idea about "supermen," which, are a modern variation of the old witch doctor. Again, the masks the children will be wearing on Guy Fawkes Day are believed to be descendants of the black Beelzebub false faces of -witchcraft times, and the cabaliatie rhyme in the children's game of' "touch," beginning "Eener, deener, dyner, dust" is related to the witches' spells, such as you get around the cauldron in "Macbeth." Even the terminology of the black art is perpetuated, for the phrase "glad eye" has come to us, via America, from the cvi* eye, which still can create appreheßsion, Only a few years Lanarkshire farmer declared that "the eye" had caused mischief in his dairy, where a farm servant had been dismissed for misbehaviour. The jealous mother, in revenge, had "overlooked" the farmer's cows for a year, so that the churns could produce no cream. "The King's Evil." r Only about twenty years ago another Scot was attended by an old woman because he was supposed to have a ,f blink of an ill eye." The old woman was locked up with the . patient, a young boy, before a blazing fire. She filled a tablespoon of water, scooped into it with a sixpence as much salt as possible, and mixed it with her forefinger. With this concoction she anointed the spies of the boy'a feet and his palms three times, and, after each anointing, the patient had. to. taste the liquidi. The wet ■ forefinger was then drawn across the brow, and what was left of the liquid was thrown into the fire, with the phrase, "Guid preBerve us from all skaith I" »■'-". The medical efficacy of witchcraft lingered on in England as part of the "divine right" of kings almost to the days of the early Georges, for Dr. Johnson was taken to Queen Anne for the "royal touch" which was supposed! to cure tuberculous glands. This sort of business had been attached to kingship at least from the eleventh century, ■when Edward the Confessor, at the point of death, ordered his sick subjects to be brought to him to be touched. Henry VII. dispensed with issuing, instead, a email coin called a Golden Angel, to be worn round the neck to effect a cure. A King's Fears. One of King George's ancestors, James 1., was quite crazy on the gubject of witchCraft, and actμally wrote a book on "Daemonplogy," as he called it. His Majesty's curious diatribe, which was recently reprinted by. John iLane, was an answer, to another book by a Kentish gentleman, Reginald Scot, who had exposed; the belief in witches, for James could cite his own experience of their supposed ■ potency, which almost prevented King George and Queen Mary from sitting on the throne to-day. So etrong was his belief In the evil eye that, if Jie had lived till our time, he maybe could not have allowed the Prince of Wales to trust, himself to the Repulse. James, you may remember, like King •Edward long after, looked to Denmark for a bride, the Princess Anne, who set-out from Copenhagen to Scotland with a convoy of 12 snips, All wpuid have gone well hadi not ' the witches of her native land and the wjtches of Scotland objected) to the whole proceedings. They did so by rousing such a hurricane and l such terrific seas that her fleet could make no progress, and after battling with the elements fpr 52 mortal days, during which "the Sea King's Daughter from over the Seas" must have been very » ill indeed, her skipper turned back and landed her at Christiaula, or Oslo, as we now call it. '■) '.'■ '•- •• Ronna-up of Witches. Meantime James was. fretting his soul but on the Scots coast,. for there wa.s/ no telegraph or wireless;'and, even if; there had been, it would only have confirmed him in the conviction that witchcraft was at work, When hp could stand it no more,, he himself set out to see what had happened, arriving before the lady at Oslo, where the pair were duly married, An extraordinary sequel followed. There was a big round up of. witches at Oslo, several of them being, burnt. Then the angry bridegroom instituted. :a similar 'round up in Scotland in general and at Berwick in particular, where a schoolmaster, John Feaile, was put on trial,. One of the twenty indictments against him was that, with others, he. had/entered into a compact with Satan to wreck the King's Bhip on its way to Oslo. '. ~. It was further alleged, as they say in the police courts, that while James was on his voyage, Feane, with a whole-company of other witcTies, met by arrangement with .Satan on jthe high seas and-threw an enchanted gat, into the waves, with the in* tentipn of drowning the king In the terrific storm of wind which was caused thereby. It was also 'said that on the king's return Feane got Satan to promise to raise a mist to wrecfc the vessel on 4he English coast. There was still another charge; that Feane had gone to North Berwick church, and with a corpse-candle sprung the lock, so that the door opened Jp his magic. When he got inside, he and several other witches consorted with Satan, who was described as a "little black man with a black goatee beard, a rabbit nose, and a long tail." Satan, dressed in brownish gown, then entered the pulpit,- and from a big black book which he carried about with him, he delivered a sermon, in which he said:— "Fear not; though I am grim, % have many servants who shall not want so long as they spare not to do evil. Be -blithe, eat, drink and take ease, .Ton shall be raised up gloriously when you fly." Tortured , . At first Feane declined to confess, sayIng that the -whole charge had been tramped up by a white-washer against whom he had bad reason, to complain. So they drove two pins through the poor man's tongue, and he confessed, though, as soon as they were withdrawn, lie recanted. When other •witnesses were brought forward, Feane •was again tortured by. the iron boot;. his nails were torn off, and other shocking Cruelties were perpetrated.

In the end, the unhappy man was found guilty, strangled, , and'then burnt. It is a horrible story, almost Incredible; yet a contemporary assures us that the shocking sentence "did give' the king a great and pleasurable' satisfaction of mind." Nor tras Feane the only victim, for Agnes Sampson, a matron of Haddington, was tried in connection with the same affair. When she denied the charge, her accusers shaved her head and tied a cord round it, tightening the rope until it cut into her flesh. ' -' The Devil's Tattoo. Then they encased her head in a "witch's bridle," a barbarous contrivance made of iron, and so fashioned that a spike with four prongs, shaped like a quadruple fish-hook, could be forcibly thrust into the poor soul's mouth. > Under this treatment, - the unhappy woman confessed to going to. sea in a sieve. with two hundred other witches. She also said that, before the enchanted cat had been thrown into the sea, the witches had tied to its paws the .knucklebones of dead men in order to beat the devil's tattoo. The cat was also, baptised before it was cast overboard—with a curse upon it. In the end, Agnes Sampson shared the same terrible fate as John Feane in Edinburgh. ' . The obsession of King James about witches" led, not only to his writing his "Booke" about them in 1597, and trying to suppress Reginald Scot's plea for sanity, but also to getting an Act passed six years later, when he came to the English ithrone. Previously the English law had imposed the death penalty only where actual injury by means of witchcraft had been proved. But James' notorious Act made the mere belief in witches or consulting with evil spirits a capital offence; and the death penalty remained on the statute book till 1735, when James' Act was repealed. Even then, though witchcraft ceased to be a punishable offence, the Act stipulated that any person who prete: Jed to exercise any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment, or conjuration, should be imprisoned for a year, besides standing in the pillory four times. Small wonder that Scotland lagged behind England, for, while the last English witch burning occurred in 1705, Scotland did not give up the barbaric practice . till 1722, while the last conviction was in 1727. But long after that, .illegal popular reprisals continued to be made. Since .'the advent of the film, we have become very familiar with vampires, though the word was unknown to our language until 1734. The term Is and Russia to this day Is greatly awed by all sorts of magic and interested in Beelzebubs like Rasputin. The "vamp," which-was' simply a head with entrails attached, was supposed to leave its grave every night and to 'suck the blood from the necks of the living. Having had its fill, it quietly returned to its coffin. It was also believed that, if a person died of a vampire bite, would probably also become a vampire, though not all at once. . Cross Road Burial. As the vampires were mere ghosts, they could-not be arrested. The next best thing to do was to visit the graveyards, find out where the vampire bodies lay, and then, stake them to the earth, or fire a pistol at their head, presumably to kill the spirit. A curious echo of this belief was the custom prevalent in England until the twenties of last century of burying suicides , at cross roads, with a stake driven through the chest. If the stake did , not keep the ghost in, then the fact of its coming* to the surface at the cross roads — presuming it wanted to come to the surface—would fill it with dismay, for it did not know which road to take. . • A vampire's body was detected by Its appearance in the coffin. If it had rosy cheeks and blood on its lips and had its limbs drawn up, then it was a vampire, or it may be that, since it was buried, its. finger nails bad lengthend an I it had grown a beard. . Some observers believe that this hunched-up condition of so-called vampire bodies was due to the. fact of premature ■ burial, when the person, wakening up, had made frightful efforts to get out. There is, indeed, no end to the forms that Witches took and that witchcraft pursued. They; all look ridiculous enough to-day t% but -there are many aspects of modern quackery and modern fiction quite as ridiculous, and not so easy to account for on the folk lore basis adopted by Mr. J. W. Wdckwar,