A Forest of Superstition
The two centuries whose history has been sketched in the preceding chapters are still part of the period traditionally called the Middle Ages, which may be loosely taken as the life of Europe from Constantine to Columbus (325–1492). As we now set out to survey briefly the state of science, education and philosophy in western Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we should remember that in this age the rational sciences had to struggle to win soil and air in a dense forest of superstition, prejudice and fear.
Amid famine, plague and war, in the disorder of the unstable and disintegrating government of the popes, men and women sought the answer and cause of humanity's irrational misfortunes in hidden and mysterious forces. Through them they hoped to find a magical power to control events and a mysterious refuge from bitter reality. Among sorcery and witchcraft, the calling up of the dead and palm-reading, divination by skulls and numbers, omens and prophecies, dream interpretation and the fateful conjunctions of the stars, chemical transmutations and miraculous cures, and the hidden powers of animals, minerals and plants, the intellectual life of society advanced doubtfully and at risk. All these strange practices have lasted to our own time; each of us secretly clings to one of those beliefs. Their hold on Europe today, however, falls short of their rule in the Middle Ages.
The Stars
The stars were studied not only for navigation or to fix the dates of religious feasts but to foretell earthly events and individual fates. The pervasive influence of climate and seasons, the connection between the tides and the moon, the lunar rhythm of women's cycles, and the dependence of farming on the state of the sky made the claim of astrology, that tomorrow's events can be foreseen from the condition of today's heavens, seem reasonable. Such predictions were printed regularly (as now) and found many eager readers.
Kings and princes would not undertake a campaign, war, journey or building unless astrologers assured them that the stars were favorable. Henry V of England always carried an astrolabe to learn the state of the sky, and when the queen gave birth he cast the child's horoscope with it. At the enlightened court of Matthias Corvinus, astrologers were as esteemed as humanists.
Demons and the Unseen World
People believed that angels guided the stars and that the air was full of invisible spirits, some heavenly and some infernal. Demons lurked everywhere, especially in bedchambers; some men blamed them for their nocturnal emissions and some women for their unexplained pregnancies, and theologians accepted the reality of such infernal unions. Simple and credulous people could at every step cross from the world of the senses into the world of magical beings and forces. Every natural thing had supernatural properties. Books of magic were among the best sellers of the day.
The bishop of Cahors was tortured and flogged on a charge of sorcery and, after he confessed that he had burned a wax image of Pope John XXII so that the pope would burn as his figure burned, as magic's rule required, was himself burned alive (1317). People believed that if the consecrated wafer of the Eucharist, blessed by the priest, were cut, the blood of Christ would drip from it.
Alchemists and Doctors
The reputation of alchemists had fallen into decline, but their costly researches and glittering frauds went on. While the decrees of kings and popes branded them false, they won some princes to their side with the promise that alchemy would refill their emptied treasuries, and ordinary people swallowed their "drinkable gold," guaranteed to cure everything except gullibility. (Gold is still used by patients and doctors to treat joint pain.)
Medicine was at every step in dispute with astrology, theology and the trickery of quacks. Nearly all physicians linked the cause of an illness to the constellation under which the patient was born or fell ill. It is no surprise, then, that Guy de Chauliac, the great surgeon of his day, wrote (1363): "If someone receives a wound in the neck region while the moon is in Taurus, his injury is dangerous." One of the oldest printed documents on this subject is a calendar printed at Mainz in 1462 that fixes the astrologically lucky hours for bloodletting. Epidemic diseases were mostly thought to be the result of an ill-omened conjunction of the stars.
Faith Healing
Millions of Christians, perhaps because they saw no good from medicine, turned to faith cures. Thousands of sufferers from scrofula went to the king of France or England to be healed by his touch. The custom apparently began with Louis XI (as the book says), whose holiness and piety led people to believe he could work miracles, and it was thought that this power passed to his heirs and successors and, through Isabella of Valois, mother of Edward III, extended to the kings of England too.
More people went to saints' tombs for healing, and some saints were turned into specialists in cures: the chapel of St. Vitus, for example, was the resort of sufferers from St. Vitus's dance, since he was held a specialist in that disease. The tomb of Pierre de Luxembourg, a cardinal who died at eighteen from austerities, became a goal of pilgrimage, and within fifteen months of his death 1,964 sick people were reported healed by his bones' miraculous power. Quacks flourished, but the law stood in their way: in 1382 Roger Clerk, who claimed to cure diseases by spells, was sentenced to ride around London with flasks of urine hung around his neck.
Witchcraft and the Church
Most Europeans believed in magic, that is, in the power of persons to command evil spirits and obtain their help. In this respect the Dark Ages were relatively enlightened: St. Boniface and St. Agobard held belief in sorcery and magic sinful and false; Charlemagne set death as the penalty for those accused of sorcery; and Pope Gregory VII forbade the investigation and questioning of witches on the pretext that they caused storms or plague. But the stress preachers and clergy laid on the reality of hell and the tricks of Satan strengthened people's belief in the immediate, malicious and universal presence of the Devil or one of his companions.
The accusation of sorcery touched people of every class and group, including Pope Boniface VIII. In 1315 Enguerrand de Marigny, a nobleman, was hanged for sorcery, and in 1317 Pope John XXII ordered the punishment of various unnamed persons accused of seeking his life with the help of demons. John repeatedly rejected the invocation of demons and ordered the punishment of offenders, but people read his decrees as confirmation of their own belief in the existence and attainability of satanic power.
After 1320 the number of accused witches rose, and many were crucified or burned alive. In France it was commonly believed that Charles VI had been driven mad by magic. Two sorcerers were caught and undertook to restore his reason; when they failed, both were beheaded (1397). In 1398 the theological faculty of the University of Paris issued a treatise of twenty-eight articles that condemned magic and sorcery but took its incidental effects as certain. Gerson declared debate over the existence or actions of the Devil heresy.
The Witch and Her Sabbath
Witchcraft was the art of using magic by persons who, in the popular imagination, worshipped Satan at night gatherings or on sabbaths as the king of the demons they wished to command. In the view of the common people witches were usually women. In return for this worship they gained power over natural forces and then violated natural laws to bring misfortune on anyone they pleased. Scholars such as Erasmus and Thomas More accepted the reality of witchcraft; some priests of Cologne doubted it; the University of Cologne confirmed it. Churchmen often claimed (and popular historians partly agree) that the secret night meetings were a pretext for illicit relations and sexual license and for drawing youths into vice.
Many accused witches confessed to the satanic acts charged against them, either from crazed fantasies or to escape torment. It is also possible that these "witches' sabbaths" gave a chance for relief to an oppressed and persecuted population, or were a half playful, half revolutionary worship of Satan against a pitiless God who had limited many pleasures and condemned many souls to the depths of hell, or that these secret rites recalled and confirmed the pagan rites and festivals of the gods of earth, field and forest, of fertility and birth, or of Bacchus, Priapus, Ceres and Flora.
The Hammer of Witches
Civil and church courts joined to suppress what seemed to them the most blasphemous of crimes. Several popes, in 1374, 1409, 1437 and 1451, and especially Innocent VIII in 1484, ordered inquisitors to treat witches as unbridled heretics, since their crimes and plots dried up the fruits of the fields and the wombs of women, and their claims and boasts might draw all society into devil worship. The popes cited word for word a sentence in Exodus: "You shall not permit a sorceress to live." Yet before 1446 church courts were not very harsh and were content with minor penalties unless a pardoned offender offended again.
In 1446 the Inquisition burned several witches at Heidelberg; in 1460 it sent a dozen men and women to the flames at Arras. The name "Vaudois," given to them and to heretics (Waldensians) and witches of France generally, persisted so long that, after crossing the Atlantic, it gave rise to the word "voodoo" for the black magic of Black people in French colonies in America (the book's etymology).
In 1487 Jacob Sprenger, a Dominican inquisitor who feared the public spread of witchcraft, published an official guide to pursuing and finding witches, the Malleus Maleficarum ("The Hammer of Witches"). Maximilian I, then King of the Romans, wrote a letter of recommendation in the preface to this "greatest and strangest monument of the world's superstition." Sprenger writes that these wicked women, by stirring a devilish brew in a cauldron or by other means, can summon armies of locusts and fruit worms to eat and destroy a harvest; can make men impotent and women barren; can dry up women's milk or cause an abortion; with a single look can produce love or hate, and death or disease. Some of them steal children, roast and eat them. They can see things at a distance and foretell the weather; they can change themselves or others into wild animals.
Sprenger wonders why more women than men practice witchcraft, and the answer he finds is that women are lighter-minded and more impressionable than men, and he adds that, besides, women have been instruments of Satan. Over some years (the book's wording is garbled) he burned forty-eight such women. From his time on, the attack of clergy and Church on witchcraft intensified, and in the sixteenth century, under Catholics and Protestants alike, reached its peak. In such fearful brutalities the modern age outdid the Middle Ages. In 1554 an inquisitor boasted that the holy Inquisition had burned at least 30,000 witches in 150 years, otherwise they would have destroyed the whole world (the book's report).
Skeptics and Contradictions
In this age many books were written to refute superstitions that themselves contained superstitions. Agostino Trionfo wrote a treatise addressed to Pope Clement V warning him of the illegality of hidden practices, yet Trionfo himself holds it unforgivable for a doctor to let blood at a certain phase of the moon. Pope John XXII made vigorous attacks on alchemy (1317) and sorcery (1327). He was bitterly distressed at the growing spread of what he regarded as sacrifice to demons, pacts with the Devil, and the making of images, rings and potions for magic purposes, and excommunicated all who engaged in them; yet even he believed in the probable effect of such acts.
The greatest enemy of astrology in this age was Nicole Oresme, who died in 1382 while bishop of Lisieux. He laughed at astrologers who could not tell the sex of an unborn child but, after birth, predicted its fate on earth. Oresme said such horoscopes were old wives' tales. After fourteen centuries he repeated Cicero's efforts and wrote a book on divination against fortune-tellers, dream interpreters and the like. In the midst of his doubts about the occult sciences he admits that some events can be explained as the work of demons or angels. He accepted belief in the evil eye, and thought that if a murderer looked into a mirror the mirror would grow dim, and that the glance of a "sharp-eyed" man could pierce a wall. He accepted the miracles recounted in the Bible, but wherever adequate natural causes exist for an event he rejects explanation by supernatural causes.
Oresme says that many people, because they do not know natural causes and processes, at once believe in magic. They accept, merely by hearing, what they have not seen, and in this way a tale like that of the magician who climbed a rope hanging in the air becomes a general belief (the earliest known mention of the rope-trick story). Oresme argues and concludes that the common currency of a belief cannot prove its reality. Even if many people claim to have witnessed an event contrary to our natural experience, we should doubt it, for the human senses are highly fallible. Color, shape and sound vary with distance, light and the position of the sense organ. A thing at rest may seem to move and a moving thing to be at rest; a coin at the bottom of a vessel full of water looks farther away than the same coin in an empty vessel. Besides, we interpret our perceptions by assent and judgment, which can also cause error. Oresme says these errors of senses and judgment can explain many strange things attributed to supernatural or magical powers.
Old Beliefs Persist
Despite such bold advances toward a scientific spirit, the old superstitions remained or merely changed form. Belief in them was not confined to the common people: Edward III of England paid a large sum to obtain a cup they assured him had belonged to the apostle Peter. Charles V of France was shown in the Sainte-Chapelle a vessel said to hold some of the blood of Christ; Charles asked scholars and theologians whether this was true, and they cautiously answered yes. In such an environment education, science, medicine and philosophy struggled to grow.