THE BOOK OF WITCHES THE BOOK OF WITCHES BY OLIVER MADOX HUEFFER _Author of "In Arcady and Out," &c._ With Frontispiece in Colours by W. Heath Robinson THE JOHN McBRIDE CO NEW YORK 1909 CONTENTS CHAPTER I. PAGE ON A POSSIBLE REVIVAL OF WITCHCRAFT 1 CHAPTER II. A SABBATH-GENERAL 19 CHAPTER III. THE ORIGINS OF THE WITCH 45 CHAPTER IV. THE HALF-WAY WORLDS 61 CHAPTER V. THE WITCH'S ATTRIBUTES 88 CHAPTER VI. SOME REPRESENTATIVE ENGLISH WITCHES 114 CHAPTER VII. THE WITCH OF ANTIQUITY 127 CHAPTER VIII. THE WITCH IN GREECE AND ROME 141 CHAPTER IX. FROM PAGANISM TO CHRISTIANITY 163 CHAPTER X. THE WITCH-BULL AND ITS EFFECTS 188 CHAPTER XI. THE LATER PERSECUTIONS IN ENGLAND 206 CHAPTER XII. PERSECUTIONS IN SCOTLAND 232 CHAPTER XIII. OTHER PERSECUTIONS 253 CHAPTER XIV. PHILTRES, CHARMS AND POTIONS 278 CHAPTER XV. THE WITCH IN FICTION 298 CHAPTER XVI. SOME WITCHES OF TO-DAY 315 FOREWORD Lest any reader should open this volume expecting to read an exhaustive treatise on witches and witchcraft, treated scientifically, historically, and so forth, let me disarm him beforehand by telling him that he will be disappointed. The witch occupies so large a place in the story of mankind that to include all the detail of her natural history within the limits of one volume would need the powers of a magician no less potent than was he who confined the Eastern Djinn in a bottle. I have attempted nothing so ambitious as a large-scale Ordnance Map of Witchland; rather I have endeavoured to produce a picture from which a general impression may be gained. I have chosen, that is to say, from the enormous mass of material only so much as seemed necessary for my immediate purpose, and on my lack of judgment be the blame for any undesirable hiatus. I have sought, again, to show whence the witch came and why, as well as what she was and is; to point out, further, how necessary she is and must be to the happiness of mankind, and how great the responsibility of those who, disbelieving in her themselves, seek to infect others with their scepticism. We have few picturesque excrescences left upon this age of smoothly-running machine-wheels, certainly we cannot spare one of the most time-honoured and romantic of any. And if anything I have written about her seem incompatible with sense or fact, I would plead in extenuation that neither is essential to the firm believer in witchcraft, and that to be able to enter thoroughly into the subject it is above all things necessary to cast aside such nineteenth-century shibboleths.