The Evening Star SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1930. WITCHES AND WITCHCRAFT.

Evening Star, Issue 20636, 8 November 1930, Page 14

The Evening Star SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1930. WITCHES AND WITCHCRAFT.

Charles Lamb lias warned us that "wo aro too hasty when wo set down our ancestors in the gross for fools for tlio monstrous inconsistencies, as they seem to us, involved in their creed of witchcraft. In the relations of this visible world wo find them to have been as rational and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly as ourselves. But when once the invisible world was supposed to be opened and the lawless agency of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fitness, or proportion—of that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absurd — could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission of any particular testimony?” There is another reason why we should hesitate to condemn our ancestors. The crazy beliefs which they entertained are not yet extinct among ourselves. It is not only among the ignorant peasants of Franco and Eastern Europe that the fear of witches still lingers, as trials within tho last few years have witnessed, but even in England such superstitions survive still. A letter of 1821, quoted, recently in the London ‘Times’ by a correspondent, stated that there had been no witches in tho neighbourhood of Plymouth "since about five years ago.” The statement brought many letters, of which some were printed in ‘The Times,’ to assure its readers that there had been plenty of witches—or at any rate plenty of belief in tho existence of witches—since ISI6, and even since 1916. As to the earlier time, just before Lamb was writing his essays, it is only necessary to read Mary Webb’s ‘Precious Banc,’ with its stories of sorcery and sin-eating, as well ns witchcraft, all implicitly believed in in Shropshire, to know that if the immunity attributed to it was true of the neighbourhood of Plymouth it was very far from- being characteristic of rural England as a whole. Wo have heard of one reader who, when this book was lent to his wife, was so shocked that she should receive such a picture of her ancestors, of the things they could do as well as believe, that, before more than his own mind could bo contaminated with it, ho indignantly returned it to tho lender. The evidence of the present survival of such beliefs, as given by Professor Gwynn Jones, in a paper road two year's ago, for North Wales, and also in tho letters to ‘The Times,’ is sufficiently surprising. Tho credulity is not even entirely confined to tho illiterate. Professor Jones told how a university graduate in science had asked a witch doctor for a euro for her father’s cow, which had been bewitched; and an intelligent and wellread man of forty attributed his depression to witchcraft and went twenty miles to a witch doctor for a remedy. Witchcraft had caused, and witchcraft could cure, a disease of the heart or tho liver; witchcraft could find lost hens; and, by means of a “letter of protection” couched in tho proper terms, witchcraft could protect a man and his beasts from being bewitched. The letters in ‘ The Times ’ leave no room for Englishmen to poke tho finger of scorn at tho Welsh. One correspondent tells tho account which was given her of a witch, then recently dead, in Essex. The woman who recounted her black arts described how she used to lay. spells across tho road to prevent horses from passing, and make tho tools ,of poor men break in their hands if they offended her, and how she had been seen feeding her “ niggots,” tho description of which answered to familiars. When the questioner asked, with all gravity, if her informant had seen the witch riding on her broomstick, the reply was given as solemnly: “No, I never saw her; but then, yon see, she lived right at the other end of tho green.” "Belief in witches is as strong as ever it was,” thinks this correspondent, "only it requires very careful handling to bring it out.” Another writer states: “The belief in witches in Somerset still holds good. . . . I met a woman only a few years ago .who had offended a witch and had been told she would always see a woman in a red cloak floating in the air near her. I put this down ns the law of suggestion myself, but tho poor woman’s nerves had quite gone, and sho constantly saw the floating figure near her. Other people who took a house in that district found a big black velvet heart with piiis • stuck in it up tho chimney. The house had belonged to a witch. . : . I discovered in a

London street, close to the British Museum, a shop with ‘ witches’ balls' hanging in the window. On asking about them I found they had a good salo and were useful to keep off tho harm done by a witch.”' A witch’s property in Kent was supposed to have kept her qualities after her death only a few years ago. Two chairs which had belonged to her were believed to havo risen of their own volition into the air, turned over, and descended gently to earth. Wo do not burn or drown witches nowadays—or only rarely and non-judicially in Europe. In three centuries—from tho fifteenth to tho eighteenth—as was stated in an address given in Dunedin a fortnight ago, 300,000 women, including young girls, arc estimated to have been'so put to death, most of them after legal trials which seem amazing to-day—an average of a thousand a year. Tho greatest of tho Reformers and some of tho wisest judges wero at ono in their approval of these atrocities. Lamb wonders at tho boldness or obtuseness of our ancestors in waging their war against witches notwithstanding tho more than human powers that they ascribed to them. “Amidst tho universal belief that these wretches were in leaguo with the author of all evil, holding hell tributary to their muttering, no simple justice of tho peace seems to have scrupled issuing, or silly Headborough serving, a warrant upon them—as if they should subpoena Satan!” They had their own elaborate reasoning for what they did. A belief in witchcraft now is only confessed shyly, when tho questioner has won the confidence of tho credulous

one ; but the people who dally with beliefs in “Tutankhamen’s curse” and need mascots for every adventure have no cause whatever to pride themselves on greater rationality than their forefathers;