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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    themselves intimate the connexion of modern demon- ology with the mythology of the ancients. The cloven foot is the attribute of Pan, to whose talents for inspiringterror we owe the word panic—the snaky tresses are borrowed from the shield of Minerva, and the dragon train alone seems to be connected with the Scriptural history.* Other heathen nations, whose creeds could not have directly contributed to the system of demonology, because their manners and even their very existence was unknown when it was adopted, were nevertheless involved, so soon as Europeans became acquainted with them, in the same charge of witchcraft, and worship of demons, brought by the Christians of the middle ages against the heathens of Northern Europe and the Mahommedans of the East. We learn from the information of a Portuguese voyager, that even the native Christians (called those of St. Thomas), whom the discoverers found in India when they first arrived there, fell under suspicion of diabolical prac tices. It was almost in vain that the priests of one of their chapels produced to the Portuguese officers and soldiers a holy image, and called on them, as good Christians, to adore the blessed Virgin. The sculp- tor had been so little acquainted with his art, and the hideous form which he had produced resembled an inhabitant of the infernal regions so much more than Our Lady of Grace, that one of the European offi- cers, while, like his companions, he dropped on his knees, added the loud protest, that if the image re- presented the Devil, he paid his homage to the Holy Virgin. In South America the Spaniards justified the unre- lenting cruelties exercised on the unhappy natives, by reiterating in all their accounts of the countries * The chart alluded to is one of the fac-similes of an ancient plani- sphere, engraved in bronze, about the end of the 15th century, and called the Borgian Table, from its possessor. Cardinal Stephen Borgia, and preserved in his Museum at Veletri. G 2