WITCHCRAFT

is one of the most foolish, and has been one of the most injurious, of superstitions. It flourished amazingly from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, but then began to decay owing to the spread of scientific knowledge. into Christianity, and used in the popular ideas about the devil and as the knowledge of natural causes was very gue es—and^oaJ; slight and very inaccurate, gaps were filled up by hoc came to be translated as if it had been propter hoc. And, as it was very difficult to realize what was not concrete and obvious, all unknown causes were ma ed together under the one word ‘ witchcraft,' and were made concrete in some poor and unoffending ‘witch.’ times was, therefore, a combination of scientific ignorance and heathen magic, with Bible—‘the misinterpretation of incidents and phrases from the witch of Endor,’ the ‘Prince of the power of the air,’ the * po e ed pigs,’ etc. It was raised into a fine art of destruction by the fiends of the Inquisition and as the monkish system implied the inherent vilene ; of women, the victims were generally witches, though real discoverers Bacon—laid in the sphere of physical science like Roger themselves open to attack. The Archbishop of Tr6ves avenged the bad weather of the spring of 1586 upon 118 witches and 2 wizards. And the Inquisitors boasted at the end of their 150th year of existence that they had burned at least 30,000 witches. seems to have been that of Jane Wenham, who was convicted at Here ford in 1712, but she was not put to death. The superstition still lingers on, however, in a few country places and in the country at large its place is adequately filled; up by Theosophy q.v.).