Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft by Sir Walter Scott

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LETTERS ON DEMONOLOGY

AND WITCHCRAFT

BY

SIR WALTER SCOTT, BART.

With An Introduction By Henry Morley Ll.d., Professor Of English
Literature At University College, London

London George Routledge And Sons

Broadway, Ludgate Hill

New York: 9 Lafayette Place

1884

INTRODUCTION.

Sir Walter Scott's "Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft" were his
contribution to a series of books, published by John Murray, which
appeared between the years 1829 and 1847, and formed a collection of
eighty volumes known as "Murray's Family Library." The series was
planned to secure a wide diffusion of good literature in cheap
five-shilling volumes, and Scott's "Letters," written and published in
1830, formed one of the earlier books in the collection.

The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge had been founded in
the autumn of 1826, and Charles Knight, who had then conceived a plan of
a National Library, was entrusted, in July, 1827, with the
superintendence of its publications. Its first treatises appeared in
sixpenny numbers, once a fortnight. Its "British Almanac" and "Companion
to the Almanac" first appeared at the beginning of 1829. Charles Knight
started also in that year his own "Library of Entertaining Knowledge."
John Murray's "Family Library" was then begun, and in the spring of
1832--the year of the Reform Bill--the advance of civilization by the
diffusion of good literature, through cheap journals as well as cheap
books, was sought by the establishment of "Chambers's Edinburgh Journal"
in the North, and in London of "The Penny Magazine."

In the autumn of that year, 1832, on the 21st of September, Sir Walter
Scott died. The first warning of death had come to him in February,
1830, with a stroke of apoplexy. He had been visited by an old friend
who brought him memoirs of her father, which he had promised to revise
for the press. He seemed for half an hour to be bending over the papers
at his desk, and reading them; then he rose, staggered into the
drawing-room, and fell, remaining speechless until he had been bled.
Dieted for weeks on pulse and water, he so far recovered that to friends
outside his family but little change in him was visible. In that
condition, in the month after his seizure, he was writing these Letters,
and also a fourth series of the "Tales of a Grandfather." The slight
softening of the brain found after death had then begun. But the old
delight in anecdote and skill in story-telling that, at the beginning of
his career, had caused a critic of his "Border Minstrelsy" to say that
it contained the germs of a hundred romances, yet survived. It gave to
Scott's "Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft" what is for us now a
pathetic charm. Here and there some slight confusion of thought or style
represents the flickering of a light that flashes yet with its old
brilliancy. There is not yet the manifest suggestion of the loss of
power that we find presently afterwards in "Count Robert of Paris" and
"Castle Dangerous," published in 1831 as the Fourth Series of "Tales of
My Landlord," with which he closed his life's work at the age of sixty.

Milton has said that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write
well in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem. Scott's life
was a true poem, of which the music entered into all he wrote. If in his
earlier days the consciousness of an unlimited productive power tempted
him to make haste to be rich, that he might work out, as founder of a
family, an ideal of life touched by his own genius of romance, there was
not in his desire for gain one touch of sordid greed, and his ideal of
life only brought him closer home to all its duties. Sir Walter Scott's
good sense, as Lord Cockburn said, was a more wonderful gift than his
genius. When the mistake of a trade connection with James Ballantyne
brought ruin to him in 1826, he repudiated bankruptcy, took on himself
the burden of a debt of L130,000, and sacrificed his life to the
successful endeavour to pay off all. What was left unpaid at his death
was cleared afterwards by the success of his annotated edition of his
novels. No tale of physical strife in the battlefield could be as heroic
as the story of the close of Scott's life, with five years of a
death-struggle against adversity, animated by the truest sense of
honour. When the ruin was impending he wrote in his diary, "If things go
badly in London, the magic wand of the Unknown will be shivered in his
grasp. The feast of fancy will be over with the feeling of independence.
He shall no longer have the delight of waking in the morning with bright
ideas in his mind, hasten to commit them to paper, and count them
monthly, as the means of planting such scaurs and purchasing such
wastes; replacing dreams of fiction by other prospective visions of
walks by

'Fountain-heads, and pathless groves;
Places which pale passion loves.'

This cannot be; but I may work substantial husbandry--_i.e._ write
history, and such concerns." It was under pressure of calamity like this
that Sir Walter Scott was compelled to make himself known as the author
of "Waverley." Closely upon this followed the death of his wife, his
thirty years' companion. "I have been to her room," he wrote in May,
1826; "there was no voice in it--no stirring; the pressure of the coffin
was visible on the bed, but it had been removed elsewhere; all was neat
as she loved it, but all was calm--calm as death. I remembered the last
sight of her: she raised herself in bed, and tried to turn her eyes
after me, and said with a sort of smile, 'You have all such melancholy
faces.' These were the last words I ever heard her utter, and I hurried
away, for she did not seem quite conscious of what she said; when I
returned, immediately departing, she was in a deep sleep. It is deeper
now. This was but seven days since. They are arranging the chamber of
death--that which was long the apartment of connubial happiness, and of
whose arrangement (better than in richer houses) she was so proud. They
are treading fast and thick. For weeks you could have heard a footfall.
Oh, my God!"

A few years yet of his own battle, while the shadows of night and death
were gathering about him, and they were re-united. In these "Letters
upon Demonology and Witchcraft," addressed to his son-in-law, written
under the first grasp of death, the old kindliness and good sense,
joined to the old charm in story-telling, stand firm yet against every
assault; and even in the decay that followed, when the powers were
broken of the mind that had breathed, and is still breathing, its own
health into the minds of tens of thousands of his countrymen, nothing
could break the fine spirit of love and honour that was in him. When the
end was very near, and the son-in-law to whom these Letters were
addressed found him one morning entirely himself, though in the last
extreme of feebleness: his eye was clear and calm--every trace of the
wild fire of delirium was extinguished: "Lockhart," he said, "I may have
but a minute to speak to you. My dear, be a good man--be virtuous, be
religious--be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when
you come to lie here."

Another volume of this Library may give occasion to recall Scott in the
noontide of his strength, companion of

"The blameless Muse who trains her sons
For hope and calm enjoyment."

Here we remember only how from among dark clouds the last light of his
genius shone on the path of those who were endeavouring to make the
daily bread of intellectual life--good books--common to all.

H.M.
_February, 1884._

LETTERS

ON

DEMONOLOGY AND WITCHCRAFT

To J.G. LOCKHART, ESQ.

LETTER I.

Origin of the general Opinions respecting Demonology among
Mankind--The Belief in the Immortality of the Soul is the main
inducement to credit its occasional re-appearance--The Philosophical
Objections to the Apparition of an Abstract Spirit little understood
by the Vulgar and Ignorant--The situations of excited Passion
incident to Humanity, which teach Men to wish or apprehend
Supernatural Apparitions--They are often presented by the Sleeping
Sense--Story of Somnambulism--The Influence of Credulity contagious,
so that Individuals will trust the Evidence of others in despite of
their own Senses--Examples from the "Historia Verdadera" of Bernal
Dias del Castillo, and from the Works of Patrick Walker--The
apparent Evidence of Intercourse with the Supernatural World is
sometimes owing to a depraved State of the bodily Organs--Difference
between this Disorder and Insanity, in which the Organs retain their
tone, though that of the Mind is lost--Rebellion of the Senses of a
Lunatic against the current of his Reveries--Narratives of a
contrary Nature, in which the Evidence of the Eyes overbore the
Conviction of the Understanding--Example of a London Man of
Pleasure--Of Nicolai, the German Bookseller and Philosopher--Of a
Patient of Dr. Gregory--Of an Eminent Scottish Lawyer, deceased--Of
this same fallacious Disorder are other instances, which have but
sudden and momentary endurance--Apparition of Maupertuis--Of a late
illustrious modern Poet--The Cases quoted chiefly relating to false
Impressions on the Visual Nerve, those upon the Ear next
considered--Delusions of the Touch chiefly experienced in
Sleep--Delusions of the Taste--And of the Smelling--Sum of the
Argument.

You have asked of me, my dear friend, that I should assist the "Family
Library" with the history of a dark chapter in human nature, which the
increasing civilization of all well-instructed countries has now almost
blotted out, though the subject attracted no ordinary degree of
consideration in the older times of their history.

Among much reading of my earlier days, it is no doubt true that I
travelled a good deal in the twilight regions of superstitious
disquisitions. Many hours have I lost--"I would their debt were
less!"--in examining old as well as more recent narratives of this
character, and even in looking into some of the criminal trials so
frequent in early days, upon a subject which our fathers considered as a
matter of the last importance. And, of late years, the very curious
extracts published by Mr. Pitcairn, from the Criminal Records of
Scotland, are, besides their historical value, of a nature so much
calculated to illustrate the credulity of our ancestors on such
subjects, that, by perusing them, I have been induced more recently to
recall what I had read and thought upon the subject at a former period.

As, however, my information is only miscellaneous, and I make no
pretensions, either to combat the systems of those by whom I am
anticipated in consideration of the subject, or to erect any new one of
my own, my purpose is, after a general account of Demonology and
Witchcraft, to confine myself to narratives of remarkable cases, and to
the observations which naturally and easily arise out of them;--in the
confidence that such a plan is, at the present time of day, more likely
to suit the pages of a popular miscellany, than an attempt to reduce the
contents of many hundred tomes, from the largest to the smallest size,
into an abridgement, which, however compressed, must remain greatly too
large for the reader's powers of patience.

A few general remarks on the nature of Demonology, and the original
cause of the almost universal belief in communication betwixt mortals
and beings of a power superior to themselves, and of a nature not to be
comprehended by human organs, are a necessary introduction to the
subject.

The general, or, it may be termed, the universal belief of the
inhabitants of the earth, in the existence of spirits separated from the
encumbrance and incapacities of the body, is grounded on the
consciousness of the divinity that speaks in our bosoms, and
demonstrates to all men, except the few who are hardened to the
celestial voice, that there is within us a portion of the divine
substance, which is not subject to the law of death and dissolution, but
which, when the body is no longer fit for its abode, shall seek its own
place, as a sentinel dismissed from his post. Unaided by revelation, it
cannot be hoped that mere earthly reason should be able to form any
rational or precise conjecture concerning the destination of the soul
when parted from the body; but the conviction that such an
indestructible essence exists, the belief expressed by the poet in a
different sense, _Non omnis moriar_ must infer the existence of many
millions of spirits who have not been annihilated, though they have
become invisible to mortals who still see, hear, and perceive, only by
means of the imperfect organs of humanity. Probability may lead some of
the most reflecting to anticipate a state of future rewards and
punishments; as those experienced in the education of the deaf and dumb
find that their pupils, even while cut off from all instruction by
ordinary means, have been able to form, out of their own unassisted
conjectures, some ideas of the existence of a Deity, and of the
distinction between the soul and body--a circumstance which proves how
naturally these truths arise in the human mind. The principle that they
do so arise, being taught or communicated, leads to further conclusions.

These spirits, in a state of separate existence, being admitted to
exist, are not, it may be supposed, indifferent to the affairs of
mortality, perhaps not incapable of influencing them. It is true that,
in a more advanced state of society, the philosopher may challenge the
possibility of a separate appearance of a disembodied spirit, unless in
the case of a direct miracle, to which, being a suspension of the laws
of nature, directly wrought by the Maker of these laws, for some express
purpose, no bound or restraint can possibly be assigned. But under this
necessary limitation and exception, philosophers might plausibly argue
that, when the soul is divorced from the body, it loses all those
qualities which made it, when clothed with a mortal shape, obvious to
the organs of its fellow-men. The abstract idea of a spirit certainly
implies that it has neither substance, form, shape, voice, or anything
which can render its presence visible or sensible to human faculties.
But these sceptic doubts of philosophers on the possibility of the
appearance of such separated spirits, do not arise till a certain degree
of information has dawned upon a country, and even then only reach a
very small proportion of reflecting and better-informed members of
society. To the multitude, the indubitable fact, that so many millions
of spirits exist around and even amongst us, seems sufficient to support
the belief that they are, in certain instances at least, by some means
or other, able to communicate with the world of humanity. The more
numerous part of mankind cannot form in their mind the idea of the
spirit of the deceased existing, without possessing or having the power
to assume the appearance which their acquaintance bore during his life,
and do not push their researches beyond this point.

Enthusiastic feelings of an impressive and solemn nature occur both in
private and public life, which seem to add ocular testimony to an
intercourse betwixt earth and the world beyond it. For example, the son
who has been lately deprived of his father feels a sudden crisis
approach, in which he is anxious to have recourse to his sagacious
advice--or a bereaved husband earnestly desires again to behold the form
of which the grave has deprived him for ever--or, to use a darker yet
very common instance, the wretched man who has dipped his hand in his
fellow-creature's blood, is haunted by the apprehension that the phantom
of the slain stands by the bedside of his murderer. In all or any of
these cases, who shall doubt that imagination, favoured by
circumstances, has power to summon up to the organ of sight, spectres
which only exist in the mind of those by whom their apparition seems to
be witnessed?

If we add, that such a vision may take place in the course of one of
those lively dreams in which the patient, except in respect to the
single subject of one strong impression, is, or seems, sensible of the
real particulars of the scene around him, a state of slumber which often
occurs; if he is so far conscious, for example, as to know that he is
lying on his own bed, and surrounded by his own familiar furniture at
the time when the supposed apparition is manifested, it becomes almost
in vain to argue with the visionary against the reality of his dream,
since the spectre, though itself purely fanciful, is inserted amidst so
many circumstances which he feels must be true beyond the reach of doubt
or question. That which is undeniably certain becomes, in a manner, a
warrant for the reality of the appearance to which doubt would have been
otherwise attached. And if any event, such as the death of the person
dreamt of, chances to take place, so as to correspond with the nature
and the time of the apparition, the coincidence, though one which must
be frequent, since our dreams usually refer to the accomplishment of
that which haunts our minds when awake, and often presage the most
probable events, seems perfect, and the chain of circumstances touching
the evidence may not unreasonably be considered as complete. Such a
concatenation, we repeat, must frequently take place, when it is
considered of what stuff dreams are made--how naturally they turn upon
those who occupy our mind while awake, and, when a soldier is exposed to
death in battle, when a sailor is incurring the dangers of the sea, when
a beloved wife or relative is attacked by disease, how readily our
sleeping imagination rushes to the very point of alarm, which when
waking it had shuddered to anticipate. The number of instances in which
such lively dreams have been quoted, and both asserted and received as
spiritual communications, is very great at all periods; in ignorant
times, where the natural cause of dreaming is misapprehended and
confused with an idea of mysticism, it is much greater. Yet, perhaps,
considering the many thousands of dreams which must, night after night,
pass through the imagination of individuals, the number of coincidences
between the vision and real event are fewer and less remarkable than a
fair calculation of chances would warrant us to expect. But in countries
where such presaging dreams are subjects of attention, the number of
those which seemed to be coupled with the corresponding issue, is large
enough to spread a very general belief of a positive communication
betwixt the living and the dead.

Somnambulism and other nocturnal deceptions frequently lend their aid to
the formation of such _phantasmata_ as are formed in this middle state,
betwixt sleeping and waking. A most respectable person, whose active
life had been spent as master and part owner of a large merchant vessel
in the Lisbon trade, gave the writer an account of such an instance
which came under his observation. He was lying in the Tagus, when he was
put to great anxiety and alarm by the following incident and its
consequences. One of his crew was murdered by a Portuguese assassin, and
a report arose that the ghost of the slain man haunted the vessel.
Sailors are generally superstitious, and those of my friend's vessel
became unwilling to remain on board the ship; and it was probable they
might desert rather then return to England with the ghost for a
passenger. To prevent so great a calamity, the captain determined to
examine the story to the bottom. He soon found that, though all
pretended to have seen lights and heard noises, and so forth, the weight
of the evidence lay upon the statement of one of his own mates, an
Irishman and a Catholic, which might increase his tendency to
superstition, but in other respects a veracious, honest, and sensible
person, whom Captain ----had no reason to suspect would wilfully deceive
him. He affirmed to Captain S---- with the deepest obtestations, that
the spectre of the murdered man appeared to him almost nightly, took him
from his place in the vessel, and, according to his own expression,
worried his life out. He made these communications with a degree of
horror which intimated the reality of his distress and apprehensions.
The captain, without any argument at the time, privately resolved to
watch the motions of the ghost-seer in the night; whether alone, or with
a witness, I have forgotten. As the ship bell struck twelve, the sleeper
started up, with a ghastly and disturbed countenance, and lighting a
candle, proceeded to the galley or cook-room of the vessel. He sate down
with his eyes open, staring before him as on some terrible object which
he beheld with horror, yet from which he could not withhold his eyes.
After a short space he arose, took up a tin can or decanter, filled it
with water, muttering to himself all the while--mixed salt in the water,
and sprinkled it about the galley. Finally, he sighed deeply, like one
relieved from a heavy burden, and, returning to his hammock, slept
soundly. In the next morning the haunted man told the usual precise
story of his apparition, with the additional circumstances, that the
ghost had led him to the galley, but that he had fortunately, he knew
not how, obtained possession of some holy water, and succeeded in
getting rid of his unwelcome visitor. The visionary was then informed of
the real transactions of the night, with so many particulars as to
satisfy him he had been the dupe of his imagination; he acquiesced in
his commander's reasoning, and the dream, as often happens in these
cases, returned no more after its imposture had been detected. In this
case, we find the excited imagination acting upon the half-waking
senses, which were intelligent enough for the purpose of making him
sensible where he was, but not sufficiently so to judge truly of the
objects before him.

But it is not only private life alone, or that tenor of thought which
has been depressed into melancholy by gloomy anticipations respecting
the future, which disposes the mind to mid-day fantasies, or to nightly
apparitions--a state of eager anxiety, or excited exertion, is equally
favourable to the indulgence of such supernatural communications. The
anticipation of a dubious battle, with all the doubt and uncertainty of
its event, and the conviction that it must involve his own fate and that
of his country, was powerful enough to conjure up to the anxious eye of
Brutus the spectre of his murdered friend Caesar, respecting whose death
he perhaps thought himself less justified than at the Ides of March,
since, instead of having achieved the freedom of Rome, the event had
only been the renewal of civil wars, and the issue might appear most
likely to conclude in the total subjection of liberty. It is not
miraculous that the masculine spirit of Marcus Brutus, surrounded by
darkness and solitude, distracted probably by recollection of the
kindness and favour of the great individual whom he had put to death to
avenge the wrongs of his country, though by the slaughter of his own
friend, should at length place before his eyes in person the appearance
which termed itself his evil genius, and promised again to meet him at
Philippi. Brutus' own intentions, and his knowledge of the military art,
had probably long since assured him that the decision of the civil war
must take place at or near that place; and, allowing that his own
imagination supplied that part of his dialogue with the spectre, there
is nothing else which might not be fashioned in a vivid dream or a
waking reverie, approaching, in absorbing and engrossing character, the
usual matter of which dreams consist. That Brutus, well acquainted with
the opinions of the Platonists, should be disposed to receive without
doubt the idea that he had seen a real apparition, and was not likely to
scrutinize very minutely the supposed vision, may be naturally
conceived; and it is also natural to think, that although no one saw the
figure but himself, his contemporaries were little disposed to examine
the testimony of a man so eminent, by the strict rules of
cross-examination and conflicting evidence, which they might have
thought applicable to another person, and a less dignified occasion.

Even in the field of death, and amid the mortal tug of combat itself,
strong belief has wrought the same wonder, which we have hitherto
mentioned as occurring in solitude and amid darkness; and those who were
themselves on the verge of the world of spirits, or employed in
dispatching others to these gloomy regions, conceived they beheld the
apparitions of those beings whom their national mythology associated
with such scenes. In such moments of undecided battle, amid the
violence, hurry, and confusion of ideas incident to the situation, the
ancients supposed that they saw their deities, Castor and Pollux,
fighting in the van for their encouragement; the heathen Scandinavian
beheld the Choosers of the slain; and the Catholics were no less easily
led to recognize the warlike Saint George or Saint James in the very
front of the strife, showing them the way to conquest. Such apparitions
being generally visible to a multitude, have in all times been supported
by the greatest strength of testimony. When the common feeling of
danger, and the animating burst of enthusiasm, act on the feelings of
many men at once, their minds hold a natural correspondence with each
other, as it is said is the case with stringed instruments tuned to the
same pitch, of which, when one is played, the chords of the others are
supposed to vibrate in unison with the tones produced. If an artful or
enthusiastic individual exclaims, in the heat of action, that he
perceives an apparition of the romantic kind which has been intimated,
his companions catch at the idea with emulation, and most are willing to
sacrifice the conviction of their own senses, rather than allow that
they did not witness the same favourable emblem, from which all draw
confidence and hope. One warrior catches the idea from another; all are
alike eager to acknowledge the present miracle, and the battle is won
before the mistake is discovered. In such cases, the number of persons
present, which would otherwise lead to detection of the fallacy, becomes
the means of strengthening it.

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