Letters on demonology and witchcraft / [Sir Walter Scott].

  • Walter Scott
Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Letters on demonology and witchcraft / [Sir Walter Scott]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    carrying them home to their own garners; annihi- lating or transferring to their own dairies the produce of herds; spreading pestilence among cattle, infecting and blighting children ; and, in a word, doing more evil than the heart of man might be supposed capable of conceiving, by means far beyond mere human power to accomplish. If it could be supposed that such unnatural leagues existed, and that there were wretches wicked enough, merely for the gratification of malignant spite or the enjoyment of some beastly revelry, to become the wretched slaves of infernal spirits, most just and equitable would be those laws which cut them off from the midst of eveiy Christian commonwealth. But it is still more just and equita- ble, before punishment be inflicted for any crime, to prove that there is a possibility of that crime being committed. We have, therefore, advanced an impor- tant step in our inquiry, when we have ascertained that the witch of the Old Testament was not capable of any thing beyond the administration of baleful drugs, or the practising of paltry imposture, in other words, that she did not hold the character ascribed to a modem sorceress. We have thus removed out of the argument the startling objection, that, in deny- ing the existence of witchcraft, we deny the possi- bility of a crime which was declared capital in the Mosaic law ; and are left at full liberty to adopt the opinion, that the more modern system of witchcraft was a part, and by no means the least gross, of that mass of errors which appeared among the members of the Christian Church, when their religion, becom- ing gradually corrupted by the devices of men, and the barbarism of those nations among whom it was spread, showed a light, indeed, but one deeply tinged with the remains of that very pagan ignorance which its divine Founder came to dispel. We will, in a future part of this inquiry, endea- vour to show that many of the particular articles of the popular belief respecting magic and witchcraft G