On Demonology And Witchcraft

by Sir Walter Scott


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