In the first of these three periods we find (1) the conception of the malefica, who, in common with her male counterpart, uses poison, spells and waxen images, produces tempests, works by means of the Evil Eye and is regarded as the cause of impotence, a feature which continually called the attention of theologians and jurists to the question of magic by the problems raised by suits for divorce or nullity of marriage. (2) Side by side with her, we find, this time without a male counterpart, the striga, frequently embodying also the ideas of the lamia and larva; originally she is a female demon, in bird form (and in many parts of the world female demons are specially malignant), who flies by night, kills children or even handsome young men, in order to eat them, assumes animal form, sometimes by means of an ointment, or has an animal familiar, rides on a besom, a piece of wood or an animal, and is sometimes brought into connexion with the souls of the dead. This latter feature arises from the gradual fusion of the belief in the striga, the Unholde, with the kindly suite of Frau Holde, the souls for whom the tabulae fortunae were spread. The flight through the air is so common a feature in the savage creed that the demon-idea of the striga in Europe can hardly be a genuine folk-belief; or, if it is, it must have existed side by side with a similar witch-belief, of which no traces seem to exist in the earlier literature. The same remark applies to belief in transformation. Although the development of the sexual element is mainly of later date and contemporaneous with the evolution of the Sabbath idea, the concubitus daemonum was certainly not unknown to the period before 800. This intrusion of the incubus in the domain of witchcraft was probably due to the attitude of the church towards magic.
Ecclesiastical and Civil Law.—For the attitude of the church to witchcraft there are three factors to be considered: (1) the Biblical recognition of its reality; (2) the universal belief in demons and magic; and (3) the identification of these demons with heathen deities. The orthodox view fluctuates between the theory that witchcraft is idolatry, a recognition of real powers, and that it is disobedience, a superstitious following of nonexistent gods. The Biblical conception of a witch is a person who deals with familiar spirits (Lev. xx. 20), and the express provision that a witch should not be suffered to live (Ex. xxii. 18) could have left no doubt that the crime was a real one in the Mosaic law. Although the familiar plays but a small part in this early period, we find that the church early came to the conclusion that witchcraft depended on a compact with demons; in the synod of Elvira (A.D. 306) it was pronounced to be one of the three canonical sins—apostasy—and punished by the refusal of communion, even on the death-bed. Augustine lays down (De doct. chr. 11. xx.) that witchcraft depends on a pact with the devil; at Worms in A.D. 829 the Frankish bishops declared that the devil aided both sexes to prepare love potions, to cause storms and to abstract milk, fruits of the field, &c.
It must not, however, be supposed that all kinds of witchcraft were equally recognized. The inmissores tempestatum and the poisoners by magical means were commonly recognized as real; but the striga was usually regarded as a pure superstition. An Irish synod (c. A.D. 800) pronounces a Christian to be anathema, who ventures to believe in the possibility of flight through the air and blood-sucking; Stephen of Hungary (997—1038) likewise distinguishes the malefica from the striga; Regino of Prüm (c. 906) concludes that the flight by night with the devil and the goddess Diana is a delusion, the work of the devil. Burchard of Worms (d. 1025) prescribes two years’ penance for the belief that the Unholde kill Christians, cook them and eat their hearts, which they replace by a piece of wood, and then wake them. Agobard and others even express doubts as to the reality of weather-making. For those who took this view, and even for others who, like John of Damascus, accepted the striga, a mild attitude, in strong contrast to the later persecutions, was the accepted policy. The Synod of Reisbach (799) demands penance for witchcraft, but no punishment in this life. John of Damascus, Agobard, John of Salisbury and Burchard are equally mild.
For the church witchcraft was a canonical sin, or superstition; for the civil law it was a violation of the civil rights of others, so far as real results were produced. Consequently we find the legal distinction between the malefica and the striga is equally marked. The Frankish and Alemannish laws of A.D. 500-600 accept the former but regard the latter as mere superstition. The Lex Salica indeed punished the striga as a murderess, but only exacted wergeld. Rothar forbade judges to kill the striga, and Charlemagne even punished the belief in them. The Alemanni (A.D. 600) forbade private torture of women suspected of witchcraft or strigism. But although witchcraft was criminal, and we find occasional laws against sortiariae (Westfranks, A.D. 873), or expulsions (from Pomerania, 1124, &c.), in this period the crime is unimportant save where maleficium is combined with treason and the person of the king is aimed at.
Further Development.—In the second period (1230-1430) we have to deal with two factors of fundamental importance: (1) the elaboration of demonology and allied ideas by the scholastics, and (2) the institution of the Inquisition to deal with the rising flood of heresy. At the beginning of this era the prevalent view of the striga seems to have been that she really existed; Caesar of Heisterbach (c. 1225) recognizes the female monster who kills children; William of Paris (c. 1230) agrees that lamiae and strigae eat children, but they are allied to the dominae nocturnae; that they are real women is a foolish belief. Scholastic ingenuity, however, soon disposed of rationalistic objections to human flights through the air; the ride of disembodied spirits, led by the devil, Diana, Herodias (the Aradia of modern Italy), &c., became the assemblies of witches to do homage to the devil. But this fusion was not the work of the scholastics alone; for the church, witchcraft had long consisted in the recognition of demons. The new sects, especially the Cathars, who held that the influence of the devil had perverted the teachings of Christianity, were, like the early Christians, the object of unfounded charges, in this case of worship of the devil; this naturally led to the belief that they were given to witchcraft.
From the 7th century onwards women and priests figure largely in the accusations of witchcraft, the latter because their office made the canonical offence more serious, the former because love potions, and especially impotentia ex maleficio, are the weapons of the female sex. With the rise and development of the belief in the heretics’ Sabbath, which first appears early in the 11th century, another sexual element—the concubitus daemonum—began to play its part, and soon the predominance of woman in magic was assured. In 1250 certain bishops gave to the Dominican Etienne de Bourbon (Stephanus de Borbone, d. c. 1261) a description of the Sabbath; and twenty-five years later the Inquisition took cognisance of the first case of this kind; from the 14th century onwards the idea was indissolubly connected with witchcraft.
In the first half of this second period, witchcraft was still superstition for the canon law, a civil wrong for the secular law; later, although these ideas still persisted, all magic was held to be heresy; its reality and heretical nature was expressly maintained by Thomas Aquinas. Already in 1258 the inquisitors took cognisance of magic as heresy, and from 1320 onwards there was a great increase in the number of cases. At first the witch was handed over to the secular arm for execution, either as an obstinate heretic or as the worker of evil magic; later it was found necessary to make provision for the numerous cases in which the offender abjured; it was decided that repentance due to fear did not release the witch from the consequences of her heresy.
Towards the end of the second period the jurisdiction passed in France from the spiritual to the secular courts by a decision of the parlement of Paris in 1391. The inquisitors did not, however, resign their work, but extended their sphere of operations; the great European persecution from 1434 to 1447 was ecclesiastical as well as secular. In the third period (1430 onwards) the opening of which is marked by this attempt to root out witchcraft, we find that the work of the scholastics and inquisitors has resulted in the complete fusion of originally
