La Sorcière, The Witch of the Middle Ages

Front matter

LA SORCIÈRE.

J. MICHELET.

LONDON: PRINTED BY WOODFALL AND KINDER, ANGEL COURT, SKINNER STREET.

BOOK I.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.

the death of the gods.

Certain authors have declared that, shortly before the triumph of Christianity, a voice mysterious ran along the shores of the Ægean Sea, crying, "Great Pan is dead!" The old universal god of nature was no more; and great was the joy thereat. Men fancied that with the death of nature temptation itself was dead. After the troublings of so long a storm the soul of man was at length to find rest. Was it merely a question touching the end of that old worship, its overthrow, and the eclipse of old religious rites?. By no means. Consult the earliest Christian records, and in every line you may read the hope, that nature is about to vanish, life to be extinguished; that the end of the world, in short, is very near. It is all over with the gods of life, who have spun out its mockeries to such a length, Every-

thing is falling, breaking up, rushing down headlong. The whole is becoming as nought:“Great Pan is dead!” It was nothing new that the gods must perish. Many an ancient worship was grounded in that very idea. Osiris, Adonis die indeed in order to rise again. On the stage itself, in plays which were only acted for the feast days of the gods, Æschylus expressly averred by the mouth of Prometheus, that some day they should suffer death: but how? As conquered and laid low by the Titans, the ancient powers of nature. Here, however, things are quite otherwise. Alike in generals and particulars, in the past and the future, would the early Christians have cursed Nature herself. So utterly did they condemn her, as to find the Devil incarnate in a flower. Swiftly may the angels come again, who erst overwhelmed the cities of the Dead Sea! Oh, that they may sweep off, may crumple up as a veil the hollow frame of this world; may at length deliver the saints from their long trial! The Evangelist said, “The day is coming:” the Fathers, “It is coming immediately.” From the breaking-up of the Empire and the invasion of the Barbarians, St. Augustin draws the hope that very soon no city would remain but the city of God. And yet, how hard of dying is the world; how stubbornly bent on living ! Like Hezekiah, it begs a respite, one turn more of the dial. Well, then, be it 80 until the year one thousand. But thereafter^ not one day.

Are we quite sure of what has been so often repeated, that the gods of old had come to an end, themselves wearied and sickened of living; that they were so disheartened as almost to send in their resignation; that Christianity had only to blow upon these empty shades? They point to the gods in Rome; they point out those in the Capitol, admitted there only by a kind of preliminary death, on the surrender, I might say, of all their local pith; as having disowned their country, as having ceased to be the representative spirits of the nations. In order to receive them, indeed, Rome had performed on them a cruel operation: they were enervated, bleached. Those great centralized deities became in their official life the mournful functionaries of the Roman Empire. But the decline of that Olympian aristocracy had in no wise drawn down the host of home-born gods, the mob of deities still keeping hold of the boundless country-sides, of the woods, the hills, the fountains; still intimately blended with the life of the country. These gods abiding in the heart of oaks, in waters deep and rushing, could not be driven therefrom. "Who says so? The Church. She rudely gainsays her own words. Having proclaimed their death, she is indignant because they live. Time after time, by the threatening voice of her councils she gives them notice of their death—and lo! they are living still. "They are devils."—Then they must be alive. Failing to make an end of them, men suffer the simple folk to clothe, to disguise them. By the help of legends they come to be baptized, even to be foisted upon the Church. But at least they are converted? Not yet. We catch them stealthily subsisting in their own heathen character. "Where are they? In the desert, on the moor, im the forest? Ay; but, above all, in the house. They are kept up by the most intimate household usages. The wife guards and hides them in her household things, even in her bed. With her they have the best place in the world, better than the temple,—the fireside.

Never was revolution so violent as that of Theodosius. Antiquity shows no trace of such proscription of any worship. The Persian fire-worshipper might, in the purity of his heroism, have insulted the visible deities, but he let them stand nevertheless. He greatly favoured the Jews, protecting and employing them. Greece, daughter of the light, made merry with the gods of darkness, the tunbellied Cabiri; but yet she bore with them, adopted them as workmen, even to shaping out of them her own Vulcan. Rome in her majesty welcomed not only Eturia, but even the rural gods of the old Italian labourer. She persecuted the Druids, but only as the centre of a dangerous national resistance. Christianity conquering sought and thought to slay the foe. It demolished the schools, by proscribing logic and uprooting the philosophers, whom Valena slaughtered. It razed or emptied the temples, shivered to pieces the symbols. The new legend would have been propitious to the family^ had the father not been cancelled in Saint Joseph; had the mother been set up as an educatress, as having morally brought forth Jesus. A fruitful road there was, but abandoned at the very outset through the effort to attain a high but barren purity. So Christianity turned into that lonely path where the world was going of itself; the path of a celibacy in vain opposed by the laws of the emperors. Down this slope it was hurled headlong by the establishment of monkery. But in the desert was man alone? The Devil kept him company with all manner of temptations. He could not help himself, he was driven to create anew societies, nay whole cities of anchorites. We all know those dismal towns of monks which grew up in the Thebaid; how wild, unruly a spirit dwelt among them; how deadly were their descents on Alexandria. They talked of being troubled, beset by the Devil; and they told no lie. A huge gap was made in the world; and who w to fill it? The Christians said. The Devil, everywhere the Devil: ubique dæmon. Greece, like, all other nations, had her energumens, who were sore tried, possessed by spirits. The relation there is quite externa!; the seeming likeness is really none at all. Here we have no spirits of any kind: they are but black children of the Abyss, the ideal of waywardness. Thenceforth we see them everywhere, those poor melanchics, loathing, shuddering at their own selves. Think what it must be to fancy yourself double, to believe in that other, that cruel host who goes and comes and wanders within you, making you roam at his pleasure among deserts, over precipices! You waste and weaken more and more; and the weaker grows your wretched body, the more ia it worried by the devil. In woman especially these tyrants dwell, making her blown and swollen. They fill her with an infernal wind, they brew in her storms and tempests, play with her as the whim seizes them, drive her to wickedness, to despair. And not ourselves only, but all nature, alas! comes demoniac. If there is a devil in the flower, how much more in the gloomy forest! The light we think so pure teems with children of the night. The heavens themselves—blasphemy!—are full of hell. That divine morning star, whose glorious beams not seldom lightened a Socrates, an Archimedes, a Plato, what is it now become? A devil, the archfiend Lucifer. In the eventime again it is the devil Venus who draws me into temptation by her light so soft and mild. That such a society should wax wroth and terrible is not surprising. Indignant at feeling itself so weak against devils, it persecutes them everywhere, in the temples, at the altars once of the ancient worship, then of the heathen martyrs. Let there be more feasts?—they will likely be so many gatherings of idolaters. The Family itself becomes suspected: for custom might bring it together round the ancient Lares. And why should there be a family?—the empire is an empire of monks. But the individual man himself, thus dumb and isolated though he be, still watches the sky, still honours his ancient gods whom he finds anew in the stars. "This is he," said the Emperor Theodosius, "who causes famines and all the plagues of the empire." Those terrible words turned the blind rage of the people loose upon the harmless Pagan. Blindly the law unchained all its furies against the law. Ye gods of Eld, depart into your tombs! Get ye extinguished, gods of Love, of Life, of Light! Put on the monk's cowl. Maidens, become nuns. Wives,

forsake your husbands; or, if ye will look after the Louse, be unto them but cold sisters. But is all this possible? What man's breath shall be strong enough to put out at one effort the burning lamp of God? These rash endeavours of an impious piety may evoke miracles strange and monstrous. Tremble, guilty that ye are! Often in the Middle Ages will recur the mournful tale of the Bride of Corinth. Told at a happy moment by Phlegon, Adrian's freedman, it meets us again in the twelfth and yet again in the sixteenth century, as the deep reproof the invincible protest of nature herself.

"A young man of Athens went to Corinth, to the house of one who had promised him his daughter. Himself being still a heathen, he knew not that the family which he thought to enter had just turned Christian. It is very late when he arrives. They are all gone to rest, except the mother, who serves up for him the hospitable repast and then leaves him to sleep. Dead tired, he drops down. Scarce was he fallen asleep, when a figure entered the room: 'tis a girl all clothed and veiled in white; on her forehead a fillet of black and gold. She s&es him. In amazement she lifts her white hand: 'Am I, then, such a stranger in the house already? Alas, poor recluse!...But I am ashamed, aud withdraw. Sleep on.' "'Stay, fair maiden I Here are Bacchus, Ceres, and with thee comes Love, Fear not, look not so pale!' "'Ah! Away from me, young man! I have nothing more to do with happiness. By a vow my mother made in her sickness my youth and my life are bound for ever. The gods have fled, and human victims now are our only sacrifices.' "'Ha I can it be thou, thou, my darling betrothed, who wast given me from my childhood ? The oath of our fathers bound us for evermore under the blessing of heaven. Maiden, be mine!' "'No, my friend, not I. Thou shalt have my younger sister. If I moan in my chilly dungeon, do thou in her arms think of me^ of me wasting away and thinking only of thee; of me whom the earth is about to cover again.' "'Nay, I swear by this flame, the torch of Hymen, thou shalt come home with me to my father. Rest thee, my own beloved.' "As a wedding-gift he offers her a cup of gold. She gives him her chain, but instead of the cup desires a curl of his hair. "It is the hour of spirits; her pale lip drinks up the dark blood-red wine. He too drinks greedily after her. He calls on the god of Love. She still resisted, though her poor heart was dying thereat. But he grows desperate, and falls weeping on the couch. Anon she throws herself by his side. "'Oh! how ill thy sorrow makes me! Yet, if thou wast to touch me—Oh, horror!—white as the snow, and cold as ice, such, ah me! is thy bride.' "'I will warm thee again: come to me, wert thou come from the very grave.' "Sighs and kisses many do they exchange. "'Dost thou feel how warm I am ?' "Love twines and holds them fast. Tears mingle with their joy. She changes with the fire she drinks from his mouth: her icy blood is aglow with passion; but the heart in her bosom will not beat. "But the mother was there listening. Soft vows, cries of wailing and of pleasure. "'Hush, the cock is crowing : to-morrow night! Then with kiss on kiss they say farewell.<br "In wrath the mother enters; sees what? Her daughter. He would have hidden her, covered her up. But freeing herself from him, she grew—from the couch up to the roof. "'O mother, other, mother, you grudge me a pleasant night; you would drive me from this cosy spot! Was it not enough to have wrapped me in my windingsheet and borne me to the grave? A greater power has lifted up the stone. In vain did your priests drone over the trench they dug for me. Of what use are salt and water, where bums the fire" of youth ? The earth cannot freeze up love. You made a promise; I have just reclaimed my own. "'Alas, dear friend, thou must die: thou wouldst but pine and dry up here. I have thy hair; it will be white to-morrow....Mother, one last prayer! Open my dark dungeon, set up a stake, and let the loving one find rest in the flames. Let the sparks fly upward and the ashes redden. We will go to our olden gods.'" Here I have suppressed a shocking phrase. Goethe, so noble in the form, is not so in the spirit of his poem. He spoils the marvel of the legend by sullying the Greek conception irith a horrible Slavish idea. As they are weeping, he turns the maiden into a vampire. She comes because she thirsts for blood, that she may suck the blood from his heart. And he makes her coldly say this impious and unclean thing: "When I have done with him, I will pass on to others: the young blood shall fall a prey to my fury." In the Middle Ages this story put on a grotesque garb, by way of frightening us with the Devil Venus. On the finger of her statue a young man imprudently places a ring, which she clasps tight, guarding it like a bride, and going in the night to his couch, to assert her rights. He cannot rid himself of his infernal spouse without an exorcism. The same tale, foolishly applied to the Virgin, is found in the Fabliaux. If my memory does not mislead me, Luther also, in his "Table Talk," takes up the old story in a very coarse way, till you quite smell the body. The Spanish Del Rio shifts the scene of it to Brabant. The bride dies shortly before her marriage; the death-bells are rung. The bridegroom rushed wildly over the country. He hears a wail. It is she herself wandering about the heath. "Seest thou not"—she says—"who leads me?" But he catches her up and bears her home. At this point the story threatened to become too moving; but the hard inquisitor, Del Rio, cuts the thread. "On lifting her veil," says he," they found only a log of wood covered with the skin of a corpse." The Judge le Loyer, silly though ho be, has restored the older version. Thenceforth these gloomy taletellers come to an end. The story is useless when our own age begins; for then the brido has triumphed. Nature comes back from the grave, not by stealth, but as mistress of the house.

CHAPTER II.

WHY THE MIDDLE AGES FELL INTO DESPAIR.

"Be ye as newborn babes (quasi moth geniti infantes); be thoroughly childlike in the innocence of your hearts; peaceful, forgetting all disputes, calmly resting under the hand of Christ." Such is the kindly counsel, tendered by the Church to this stormy world on the morning after the great fall. In other words: "Volcanoes, ruins, ashes, and lava, become green. Ye parched plains, get covered with flowers." One thing indeed gave promise of the peace that reneweth: the schools were all shut up, the way of logic forsaken. A method infinitely simple for thiK doing away with argument, offered all men a gentle slope, down which they had nothing to do hut go. the creed was doubtful, the life was all traced ont iS the pathway of the legend. From first to last but the one word Imitation. "Imitate, and all will go well. Rehearse and copy." But is this the way to that true childhood which quicknes the heart of man, which leads back to its fresh and fruitful springs? In this world that is to make us young and childlike, I see at first nothing but thB tokens of age; only cunning, slavishness?, want of power.

What kind of literature is this, confronted with the glorious monuments of Greeks and Jews? We have just the same literary fall as happened in India from Brahminism to Buddhism; a twaddling flow of words aftor a noble inspiration. Books copy from books, churches from churches, until they cannot so much as copy. They pillage from each other: Aix-la-Ghapelle is adorned with the marbles torn from Ravenna. It is the tame with all the social life of those days. The bishop-king of a city, the savage king of a tribe, alike copy the Boman magistrates. Original as one might deem them, our monks in their monasteries simply restored their ancient Villa, as Chateaubriand well said. They had no notion either of forming a new society or of fertilizing the old. Copying from the monks of the East, they wanted their servants at first to be themselves a barren race of monkling workmen. It was in spite of them that the family in renewing itself renewed thp world. Seeing how fast these oldsters keep on oldening; how in one age we fall from the wise monk St. Benedict down to the pedantic Benedict of Aniane; we feel that such gentry were wholly guiltless of that grqat popular creation which bloomed amidst ruins; namely, the Lives of the Saints. If the monks wrote, it was the people made them. This young growth might throw out some leaves and flowers from the crannies of an old Roman ruin turned into a convent: but most' assuredly not thence did it first arise. Its roots gO' deep into the ground: sown by the people and cultivated by the family, it takes help from every hand, from men, from women, from children. The precarious, troubled life of those days of violence, made these poor. folk imaginative, prone to believe in their own dreamy, as being to them full of comfort: strange dream» withal, rich ia marvels, in fooleries; absurd, but charming. These families, isolated in forests and mountains, ai Tie still see them in the Tyrol or the Higher Alps, and coming down thence but once a week, never wanted for illusions in the desert. One child bad seen this, some woman had dreamed that. A new saint began to rise. The story went abroad iu the shape of a ballad with doggrel rhymes. They sang and danced to it of an evening at the oak by the fountain. The priest, when he came on Sunday to perform service in the woodland chapel, found the legendary chant already in every mouth. He said to himself, "After all, history ia good, is edifying. ... It does honour to the Church. Vox populi, vox Dei!—But how did they light upon it?" He could be shown the true, the irrefragable proofs of it in some tree or stone which had witnessed' the apparition, had marked the miracle. What can he say to that? Brought back to the abbey, the tale will find a monk good for nothing, who can only write; who is curious, believes everything, no matter how marvellous. It is written out, broidered with his dull rhetoric, and spoilt a little. But now it has come forth, confirmed and consecrated, to be read in the refectory, ere long in the church. Copied, loaded and overloaded with ornaments chiefly grotesque, it will go on from age to age until at last it comes to take high rank in the Golden Legend.

When those fair stories are read again to us in these days, even as we listen to the simple, grave, artless airs into which those rural peoples threw all their young heart, we cannot help marking a great inspiration; and we are moved to pity as we reflect upon their fate. They had taken literally the touching advice of the Church: "Be ye as new-born babes." But they gave to it a meaning, the very last that one would dream of finding in the original thought. As much as Christianity feared and hated Nature, even so much did these others cherish her, deeming her all guileless, hallowing her even in the legends wherewith they mingled her up. Those hairy animals, as the Bible sharply calls them, animals mistrusted by the monks who fear to find devils among them, enter in the most touching way into these beautiful stories; as the hind, for instance, who refreshes and comforts Genevieve of Brabant. Even outside the life of legends, in the common everyday world,the humble friends of his hearth, the

bold helpmates of bis work, rise again in man's esteem. They have their own laws, their own feativals. If in God's unbounded goodness there is room for the smallest creatures, if He seems to show them a pitying preference, "Wherefore," says the countryman, "should my ass not have entered the church? Doubtless, hs lias his faults, wherein he only resembles me the more. He is a rough worker, but has a hard head; is intractable, stubborn, headstrong; in short, just like myself."

Thence come those wonderful feasts, the fairest oE the Middle Ages; feasts of Innocents, of Fools, of the Ass. It is the people itself, moreover, which, in the shape of an ass, draws shout its own image, presents itself before the altar, ugly, comical, abased. Verily, I touching sight! Led by Balaam, he enters solemnly between Virgil and the Sibyl;† enters that he may' tear witness. If he kicked of yore against Balaam, it was that before him he beheld the sword of the ancient law. Bot here the law is ended, and the world of grace seems opening its two-leaved gate to the mesa and to the simple. The people innocently believes it

all. Thereon comes that lofty hymn, in which it says to the ass what it might have said to itself:— ppoem|{fine} “Down on knee and say Amen!, Grass and hay enough hast eaten, Leave the bad old ways, and go!

For the new expels the old: Shadows fly before the noon : Light hath hunted out the night.”

How bold and coarse ye are! Was it this we asked of you, children rash and wayward, when we told yot to be as children? We offered you milk; you arc drinking wine. We led you softly, bridle in hand, along the narrow path. Mild and fearful, ye hesitated to go forward: and now, all at once, the bridle is broken; the course is cleared at a single bound. Ah! how foolish we were to let you make your own saints; to dress out the altar; to deck, to burden, to cover it up with flowers! Why, it is hardly distinguishable! And what we do see is the old heresy condemned of the Church, the innocence of nature: what am I saying?—a new heresy, not like to end to-morrow, independence of man. Listen and obey!—You are forbidden to invent, to create. No more legends, no more new saints: we have had enough of them. You are forbidden to introduce new chants in your worship: inspiration is not allowed. The martyrs you would bring to light should stay modestly within their tombs, waiting to be recognised by the Church. The clergy, the monks are forbidden to grant the tonsure of civil freedom to husbandmen and serfs. Such is the narrow fearful spirit that fills the Church of the Carlovingian days. She unsays her words, she gives herself the lie, she says to the children, "Be old!"

A fall indeed I But is this earnest?They hod bidden ns all be young.—Ah! but priest and people are no longer one, A divorce without end begins, a gulf unpassable divides them for ever. The priest himself, a lord and prince, will come out in his golden cope, and chant in the royal speech of that great empire which is no more. For ourselves, a mournful company, bereft of human speech, of the only speech that God would care to hear, what else can we do but low and bleat with the guileless friends who never scorn us, who, in winter-time will keep us warm in their stable, or cover us with their fleeces? We will live with dumb beasts, and be dumb ourselves. In sooth there is less need than before for our going to church. But the church will not hold us free: she insists on our returning to hear what we no longer understand. Thenceforth a mighty fog, a fog heavy and dun as lead, enwraps the world. For how long? For a whole millennium of horror. Throughout ten centuries, a languor unknown to all former times seizes upon the Middle Ages, even in part on those latter days that come midway betwixt sleep and waking, and holds them under the sway of a visitation most irksome, most unbearable; that convulsion, namely, of mental weariness, which men call a fit of yawning. When the tireless bell rings at the wonted hours, they yawn; while the nasal chant is singing in the old Latin words, they yawn. It is all foreseen, there is nothing to hope for in the world, everything will come round just the same as before. The certainty of being bored to-morrow sets one yawning from to-day; and the long vista of wearisome days, of wearisome years to come, weighs men down, sickens them from the first with living. From brain to stomach, from stomach to mouth, the fatal fit spreads of its own accord, and keeps on distending the jaws without end or remedy. An actual disease the pious Bretons call it, ascribing it, however, to the malice of the Devil. He keeps crouching in the woods, the peasants say: if anyone passes by tending his cattle, he sings to him vespers and other rites, until he is dead with yawning.

To be old is to be weak. When the Saracens, when the Norsemen threaten us, what will come to us if the people remain old? Charlemagne weeps, and the Church weeps too. She owns that her relics fail to

guard her altars from these Barbarian devils. Had she not better call upon tbe arm of that wayward child whom she was going to bind fast, the arm of that young giant whom she wanted to paralyse? This movement in two opposite ways fills the whole ninth century. Tbe people are held back, anon they are hurled forward: we fear them and we call on them for aid. With them and by means of them we throw up hasty barriers, defences that may check the Barbarians, while sheltering the priests and their saints escaped thither from their churches. In spite of the Bald Emperor's† command not to build, there grows up a tower on the mountain. Thither comes the fugitive, crying, "In God's name, take me in, at least my wife and children! Myself with my cattle will encamp in your outer enclosure." The tower emboldens him and he feels himself a man. It gives him shade, and he in his turn defends, protects his protector. Formerly in their hunger the small folk yielded themselves to the great as serfs; but here how great the difference I He offers himself as a vassal, one who would be called brave and valiant. He gives himself up, and keeps himself, and reserves to himself the right of going elsewhere. "I will go further: the earth is large: I, too, like the rest, can rear my tower yonder. If I have defended the outworks, I can surely look after myself within." Thus nobly, thus grandly arose the feudal world. The master of the tower received his vassals with some such words as these: "Thou shalt go when thou wiliest, and if need be with my help; at least, if thou shouldst sink in the mire, I myself will dismount to succour thee." These are the very words of the old formula.

But, one day, what do I see? Can my sight be grown dim? The lord of the valley, as he rides about, sets up bounds that none may overleap; ay, and limits that you cannot see. "What is that? I don't understand." That means that the manor is shut in. "The lord keeps it all fast under gate and hinge, between heaven and earth." Most horrible! By virtue of what law is this vassus (or valiant one) held to his power? People will thereon have it, that vassus may also mean slave. In like manner the word servus, meaning a servant, often indeed a proud one, even a Count or Prince of the Empire, comes in the case of the weak to signify a serf, a wretch whose life is hardly worth a halfpenny. In this damnable net are they caught. But down yonder, on his ground, is a man who avers that his land is free, a freehold, a fief of the sun. Seated on his