History of Satanism

McCabe, Joseph. A History of Satanism. Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius, 1948.

FOREWORD

The history of Satan, prince of the demonic world, is the story of one of the weirdest of man's illusions. He was born some time between a quarter and half million years ago, but for ages he was just one of the innumerable shades of the dead that had a grievance against the living and plagued them by day and night. In the course of time the human group grew larger and elected chiefs, first to lead them in battle, then to rule them, so the world of wicked shades also had its chiefs. The chiefs became kings and dreamed of empire; and in the shadow world also there were princes. In historic times, when man became a philosopher and speculated on the causes of larger evils than his toothaches and bellyaches, it was felt that one of these princes of the devils must have had magical power of such strength that he could turn the bright and beautiful world which the gods had made Into the world of light and shade, laughter and tears, roses and thorns which we know.

So Satan, as he came to be called, was now eternal, almost omnipotent, monarch over legions of devils as numerous as God's angels or as living mortals. Priests or devil- dodgers obtained great power and wealth by their skill in frustrating his evil designs. But when they intimated that the meretricious delights of the flesh, the delirium of the dance, the savor of wine, the rich odors of the bounteous table had been created by Satan, and that what the good God demanded was fasting, some concluded that Satan was the real friend of man, the Prince of Light not of darkness. During several centuries he was worshiped as such by millions of men and women in spite of torture and flames in the market-place. The cult was extinguished in blood and fire, and he became again the Prince of Darkness, the emperor of the legions of little devils who pricked men with invisible forks.

Then there came along that pernicious brood of men who call themselves Freethinkers, respecting neither God nor Satan, demanding proofs and evidences, and the devolution set in. It was like when the sun rises in a hilly region. The light flooded the summits, and there were no devils there. Perhaps, folk said, they were in the dark valleys, but the light crept down the slopes, and still there were no spirits, devils, gnomes, hobgoblins or fairies. Satan and his legions shrank into a few silly Poltergeists, making rude noises and scaring servant girls at night in dark old houses. Less than 100 years ago professors spent nervous nights in these haunted houses trusting to find some trace of the vanished legions. But at dawn the graybeards shook their heads. Emperor Satan and all his hosts had been just the deadly little microbes that for ages had gnawed the vitals of men with impunity. That is the story this little book tells.

I. THE BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS OF THE DEVIL

It is now usual to say in the science of religion that the primitive man of hundreds of thousands of years ago was led to believe in a shadow-world because he saw things moving in nature which neither man nor animal moved. At first, we are told, he looked out on these things with a vague feeling of wonder or awe; much as you may see a young dog roll its eyes in a shower of hail or a thunderstorm. Then, as his intelligence developed, he concluded that an invisible agency was at work In the rush of the flooded river, the sweep of the storm, or the roar of the forest-fire. But those travelers of the last century who closely studied our lowest savages, who are the lingering remnants of that ancient race, before missionaries disturbed their traditions, tell us that they were incapable of forming general or abstract ideas. So, as I have told elsewhere, I prefer to think that the concrete mind of primitive man began his ghost-making from concrete experiences: his mysterious shadow, his image on the surface of the lake—remember that he knew nothing about light and reflection—or the dream in which somehow he was hunting in the forest or fighting an enemy while his body lay inert in the camp or the cave.

We need not discuss that here. What we learn from the lowest peoples is that at least 100,000 years ago men believed that they had a double personality. One survived when the body died, but it was invisible. We say that they began to believe in spirits, but, naturally, nothing like our distinction between matter and spirit ever occurred to them. Most even of the Greek thinkers derided the idea of spirit as "an idea of nothingness," as Zeno said. However, all that concerns us here is that the shades of the dead differed in characters like the living men from whom they had been breathed out. The shade of the kindly old man slept peacefully wherever shades were supposed to sleep, or even helped the living. The shade of the quarrelsome man or the shrewish woman was malicious. Often a shade had a grievance. It was vaguely felt that shades must eat—even at the height of their civilization the Babylonians said that the dead lived on clay and dust—and it was a common custom, as it still is among many savages, to put food on the grave. Sometimes the dead man's friends neglected this, and the hungry shade came up and spoiled their aim in the hunt or tormented them at night. A woman who had died in childbirth was sour. But any man or woman who had died a violent or early death, especially by murder, angrily resented the premature close of his or her share of the sunlight.

In short, the devil was born. Invisible wicked shades multiplied in or about the village, underground, or wherever the primitive folk imagined that the spirits dwelt. Shades could not die, as they had no flesh to disintegrate, so they just lived on and grew numerous. And as man began in time to infer that there were also invisible beings behind the movements of nature, these were added to the disembodied "souls." And many of them were certainly malicious. The idea that the life of a savage is idyllic, as Rousseau thought, is far astray. His world, especially in the tropics, is full of poisons, sharp teeth and claws—devil-sent illnesses. There were evil spirits in the tiger and the crocodile, and especially in the serpent. His world was as full of devils as New York is to a good Catholic; for the idea seemed to be so natural an interpretation of his experiences that he passed it on to civilization, and today millions of folk even in America sprinkle themselves with water from which their medicine-man has chased the water-devils, so as to protect themselves from the proddings and wicked whispers of these creatures.

As most of these primitive folk buried their dead they generally imagined that the shade lived in the grave with his dust, and, in case the shade happened to turn sour, precautions were taken to keep it there. Why do folk raise little mounds of earth over the buried dead today? Like so many age-old customs it has now no meaning but it seems to have been one of the primitive precautions against the shade of the dead returning to torment the living. Ghosts are a nuisance, anyway, and frighten children and colored folk even when they are harmless. The grave-stone seems to be another relic of the load they used to put over the dead, even when there were no coyotes to dig up the corpse; and the more powerful the dead man, the heavier the monument or vault they raised above him. But it was natural to suppose, in the course of time, that the shades lived in community, and the caves or shafts which ran underground in so many places encouraged the idea. Here there was room for the devils as well as the disembodied humans.

In Babylonia and Assyria, in fact in the higher barbarism and early civilization generally, folk did not, even in the height of their civilization, make any fuss about their life after death. It was probably the same in Egypt at first, but here the priests made a profitable trade out of man's supposed post-mortem experiences and ideas are confused. In most cases-Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, etc.—even the priests did not concern themselves with life after death. Men believed still though doubtless skepticism set in with education—that a man had a dual personality, and the invisible part of him continued to live. But it just went quietly into the land of darkness down below somewhere and, if it were well-behaved, stayed there, sustaining itself on soil. As the shadow-world was always literally the shadow of this world it was improved and organized with the development of civilization. To the Babylonian it was a replica of his city: a city under the grim King Nergal and his even grimmer queen, with high walls and gates, shrouded in dust and never lit by the sun. We have the tablets of a poem called (by the translators) "Ishtar's Descent into Hell," one of the original sources of the myth of Christ's "descent into hell," though the Greeks and others had a similar legend, because it was a dramatization of the descent of the spirit of fertility in the fall and winter. The poem describes how the goddess Ishtar went down:

To the house of darkness, the

dwelling of Inkalla

To the house from which whoever

enters never returns,

To the path that has no return,

bereft of sight,

A place where much dust

is their nourishment, clay their food,

Where light they never behold,

where in twilight one dwells,

Where they are clad, like birds,

with a winged garment.

On the doors and their panels

dust is spread. . .

I will smite the door, I will shat-

ter the bolt

I will raise up the dead that they

may devour the living.

Either borrowing from the Babylonians or because it was a general Semitic belief, the Hebrews had the same idea of the after-death until, during the captivity in Babylon and contact with the Persians, they learned the new ideas of a "spiritual" immortality that were spreading from Persia. The Hebrew had as good a time as he could get while he lived, and his shade then went down into Sheol and did not interest anybody. The Greek, apart from secret religious societies or "mysteries" thought his shade went down to Hades, which was the same underworld of dust and darkness. The Romans called it Dis, the land of the manes (shades); and as one entrance to it was a cavern called Avernus, down Naples way, he often called it by that name. Volcanoes gave him a new idea, but he did not rise to the height of the ethical doctrine that it was a lake of fire in which the gods tormented the souls of men, for all eternity. He said that Pluto, the god of the underworld, had his forge down there.

Far away in the north the Teutons and Scandinavians called the underworld Hel; but it must not be supposed that these barbarians reached the height of the Christian doctrine of hell. The name originally meant merely "hollow place" or large underground cave. Particularly truculent fighters were taken up into Walhalla by the gods, who loved a good war, and the rest of the shades just slipped quietly down to the peace and darkness of Hel.

Among many peoples the shades had every encouragement to get there as quickly as possible, and to stay there. Right up to the last century there was, and in some places there still is, a custom of opening the doors and windows of a house when a man dies. As late as 1890 British papers told with astonishment how this was done at the death of a dignitary of the Church of England. It was an old British custom of providing an easy escape of the soul from the house. Often every mirror in the house was covered so that the soul would not be confused and lose its way. In France and Germany a tile was taken off the roof. The Chinese made a hole in the roof. The dirges, like the Irish keening at a wake, probably began as means of conciliating the shade and persuading it to depart peacefully. Many of the folk who smile at these superstitions entertain much more fantastic or repellent superstitions about devils and hell. But superstition always was the other fellow's religion.

All this is of interest here because the development of this underworld idea provided a habitation for the vagrant devils of the savage, but there had to be much further development before the world would reach what a Modernist bishop disdainfully calls "the three-storey idea of the universe" hell, earth and heaven. When some of the Greeks adopted the idea of spirit or "demon," which was at first a quite inoffensive word, they had begun to speculate on the structure of the universe and concluded that the earth was a flat, circular platform with seven heavens, or strata of the upper air, above it. The mystics could not tolerate the idea that their bright, resplendent spirits lived with the moles and worms, so they put them high up in the heavens. In this Second Heaven dwelt both good spirits and bad and, as there could be no such thing as walking on air, the spirits had wings and flew about. I quoted a Babylonian poem describing the shades underground as "clad, like the birds, in feathered garments." Now the spirits, fair and foul, definitely had wings, and you get one of the usual features of angels in statues or pictures. You would not expect these ancient folk to rise to the subtlety of Aquinas, who explained that when angels or demons want to change their locality, say, go from Paris to Constantinople, they just wish it and do not "travel" at all.

Other features of the familiar idea of the devil were supplied by the Greeks and Romans. Among the myths they inherited was the belief in Satyrs-called Fauns by the Romans, ogres or semi-divinities of the woods: creatures with the hind limbs and hair (and sexual craving) of goats, tails, and horns. Early Christians borrowed the idea from Greek and Roman statues and applied it to the devils. Even if the devil took on the form of a beautiful maid as he often did to lure holy men to destruction, you had only to look for the cloven hoof or feel for the tail.

Add the ethical note and you have the complete evolution of the common devil. To the Babylonians he had been a sort of policeman or public executioner. When mortals sinned the great god Marduk permitted one of the innumerable devils to give him gout or asthma, to ruin his business, or lame his ass. In Egypt they not only caused disease but mustered in legions to prevent the soul of a dead man from getting safely to a better land. Why these strange beings had such a grudge against mortals no one seems to have inquired until the learned doctors of the Middle Ages came along. But it was even more serious when the devils embarked on a new campaign: tempting men day and night all over the world to commit sin and so be compelled to join them in the bottomless pit; an act of really fiendish cruelty for, while the devils themselves seem to have been compacted of some kind of asbestos so that they lived comfortably in the flames, it was understood to be painful for the human souls that were condemned to join them for eternity. But before we take up these higher conceptions we must see how Satan became the Hitler of the world of demons.

II. SATAN BECOMES THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS

The world of shades is, as I said, a replica of the world of solid men and shares its evolution. When, therefore, man, as he grew more intelligent, began to rise above his primitive social equality and to have ornamental parasites like aristocracies and kings, the same development occurred in the spirit world. Some devils rose above their fellows in chivalry, and some continued to rise until they became monarchs.

We read in the New Testament (Luke XI, 26) that in one of his parables, Jesus said that an unclean spirit that was driven out of a man looked up "seven other spirits that were more wicked than himself" and they helped him to get back his apartment. I have no doubt that the learned commentators have dealt at length with this curious passage, which reads like a bit out of a Wild West story, but the real explanation is simple. It is a reference to the Babylonian myth of the "Seven Accursed Brothers." These were boss-gangsters, real terrors, much dreaded by the sinners of Babylon.

But a volume would be required to describe all the grades of devilism, and we are interested only in those who became dictators or emperors, as Satan did. One reason for this development was that gods and goddesses who lost their thrones were turned into evil spirits by the priests of the god who replaced them; just as the Fathers of the Church turned the pagan gods and goddesses into devils. These fallen monarchs might be stripped of their virtues and their usefulness, but they retained their magical faculty and they became powers of evil. In Egypt, for instance, Seth or Set was one of the leading deities of the valley before the days of civilization began. But when the various peoples and tribes which had poured into the valley were brought together in a Kingdom, each bringing its own god, there was a spirited struggle of the little gods for survival. The people would probably have welcomed them all as it would mean more holidays in a year, but priesthoods always work toward monotheism not because it is a spiritually or intellectually superior idea but because when there is only one or two or three outstanding gods their priests become more wealthy and powerful.

Sometimes there is, as in other rival businesses, an amalgamation or merger. Two big gods are married by the priests or three form a trinity of father mother, and son. In Egypt the priests of Osiris, Isis and Horus knocked out the Priests of Seth and composed, as usual, a holy scripture to explain what they did. Osiris and Seth were brothers, but Seth was wicked. He slew his divine brother, cut his body into pieces, and buried the pieces in different regions. Isis, sister and wife of Osiris, sought the pieces, but she had a tough job finding the divine phallus; for Seth had wanted to make sure that no more little Osirises would be engendered. She did find it, and the annual celebration of this was as picturesque as it was joyous. This is one of what our modern mystics reverently call the Mysteries of Isis. But that is another story. Isis and Horus overthrew Seth, and from that date he became in Egypt the lord of the powers of evil, often in conjunction with the wicked serpent Apopi.

There is evidence that Nergal, Lord of the Babylonian underworld, also had been the chief god of one of the Mesopotamian city-states before he was degraded. There was another myth of a monster with the body of a lion, Lubbi, who, in alliance with a fierce water-serpent, made war on the sons of men until one of the more benevolent gods knocked him on the head. But more likely to have contributed to the Satan legend is the story of Tiamat and Marduk.

In the Hebrew fairy-tale of the creation (Gen. I, 2) we read that "darkness was upon the face of the deep." In the Hebrew the deep is tehom, which is the Babylonian Tiamat, as the whole story is borrowed from the famous Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. Now Tiamat was the wife of the original great God of Mesopotamia. . . But I will be brief. The new gods that were born of them thought it time that the old couple handed over the reins of the universe, but Tiamat, a tough old divine hag, resisted until the shining young sun-god Marduk entered the lists and slew her. He cut her body in two and made the heavens of one half and the earth of the other; much as is described in Genesis. So Tiamat remained an evil power in the minds of the Babylonians. Many mythologies had similar myths. In the Hindu trinity Siva is the grim destroyer or antagonist and his wife Kali a bitch. The Greeks told of a serpent-god Typhon, who rose up wickedly against Zeus. But as Zeus buried him and heaped Mount Etna on his grave to keep him down we need not bother about him. In Scandinavian and Teutonic mythology Loki was "the father of the powers of evi1." Often you can trace a connection with the dragon or evil power that. kills the spirit of the flowers and fruits every year and nearly swallows the sun.

But in tracing the advancement of Satan in the spirit-world it is the Persian mythology that interests us most. In what is called the religion of the prophet Zarathustra we get the first close parallel to Satan: an evil spirit, Angra Mainyu (corrupted by the Greeks to Ahriman) , that is eternal, almost infinite in power, lord of monstrous regiments of lesser devils, and with the same insatiable and unintelligible thirst as Satan to make men sin, particularly by the flesh, and drag them with him into the everlasting fire that is prepared for the devil and all his angels. The story will be familiar to most readers and I need not go into detail. God—the real or good God or Ahura Mazda or Ormuzd—creates a world that is all bright and beautiful and enjoys perpetual sunshine. Angra Mainyu comes along and by his powerful magic makes it the miserable vale of tears in which we find ourselves today. Folk had not in those ancient days the clear-cut distinction between matter and spirit that we are supposed to have, but in effect this means that God created a spiritual world, as is suggested in Genesis, and the archdevil turned it into a material world. Magic in those days was as big as man's credulity. In fact some of our modern religious thinkers seem to regard this as a beautiful and profound explanation of the mixture of good and evil in the universe. Intellectually it is childish, and as it is the first imposition in a historic religion of the dogma that man will burn forever if they overlook the priestly license to marry it seems to me as beautiful as a gila monster.

In earlier works I have puzzled considerably over the question how such a theory could occur to some sheep-farmer on the Persian hills. Going more closely into the matter I find that, whether or no there ever was such a person as Zarathustra (which seems probable), and in whatever century he lived, the creed that bears his name was a slow growth, and the above statement of it is true only of its final form, after the Persians had taken Babylon and incorporated it in their empire. Persians then lived and learned in the great city just as Hebrew priests did. There was a strong ethical note in later Babylonia, and there are traces of savior-gods as well as great evil and tempting powers. In the earlier books of the Zoroastrian bible, the Avesta. There is no reference to two creations, and Angra Mainyu is barely mentioned. He seems to have been an evil spirit in the religion of the inhabitants of Persia before the Aryans conquered them.

However, we may ignore this mass of controversy. The Greek historian Herodotus, who gives us an account of the Persians in the 5th century B.C., evidently knew nothing about a prophet Zarathustra or this remarkable theory of angels and devils and a dual creation. It is enough for us here that the creed was fully developed two or three centuries before Christ.

Why theologians fail to find in it the origin of the Satan of later Judaism and Christianity is difficult to understand, for biblical students are agreed that Satan is not mentioned by any Hebrew writer before the Exile. The word is found a few times in what are regarded as preexilic writings, but it does not mean the personal devil Satan. It is used in its literal sense of "adversary" or opponent. Though the English translation conceals the fact, the word is used in the Hebrew in the story of Balaam and his ass (Numbers. XXII, 32), where an "angel of the Lord" is said to "withstand" the prophet for beating his ass. There is no outstanding devil in any document that the critics date earlier than about 500 B.C.; no leader of gangs of devils in the whole of the Old Testament.

Interesting in this connection is the book of Job. It is clear that this was originally a skeptical treatise. The contention of the priests both in Babylonia and Palestine was that if you obeyed the gods you were blessed with prosperity in this life, and if you sinned against them you were punished with sickness or adversity. Some skeptical writer put the real daily experience of life, which belies this priestly contention, in the form of a dramatic poem describing the heavy suffering of a holy man. Some experts think that the poet was a Babylonian, as there are phrases in it that seem to be borrowed from the Ishtar Hymn, and it is suggested that the name Job is a corruption of Eabani, a hero of the Gilgamesh Epic who was sorely tried by the gods. However that may be, the skeptical poem was taken up by a Hebrew writer and converted into a work of piety. What puzzles the religious reader is that Satan is (I, 6-12) so pally with Jahveh. On conference day he turns up among "the sons of God," and Jahveh says: "Hello S., where've you been?" "Oh here and there," says Satan, airily. In the end Jahveh gives him a free hand with Job. Critics put the work, as we have it, not much before 300 B.C., and it shows that while the Jews had adopted Satan by that date he was far from being the prince of fiends that he was soon to become.

Some time after that date, the Zarathustrian Persians worked out the full story of good and evil principles, and, while the canon of the Old Testament was now closed, Jewish writers borrowed the Persian idea and concocted the elaborate and repulsive myth of hell, devils, and the prince of devils which they passed on to Christianity. Some of the Alexandrian Greeks also contributed. Calling themselves Neo-Platonists they developed Plato's idea of spirit into a fantastic hierarchy of both good and evil spirits and charms and incantations for dealing with them. The blame for the whole extravagant development falls on the ascetic ideas which, as I have explained elsewhere and will

examine in a later book, spread from Persia over the Near East at that time. The central idea was that Angra Mainyu, the first complete Satan, had created the human body as a means by which he could corrupt the spirit. No orthodox Jew could admit this literally, as Jahveh alone could create, but the early rabbis worked out the theory that Jahveh had put these sordid sexual impulses in man only after Satan had tempted Adam and Eve and they had fallen. It came to the same thing. Sex was unclean, unless it was properly licensed, and the unclean spirits, under the direction of Satan were particularly keen to use it to ensure that men should be condemned to hell. Naturally, the practical influence of these ideas was limited. An inquiring sociologist in each century from that age to this would have given much the same report as Professor Kinsey has given for America today.

Satan was now on the throne as the prince of the world of sin and darkness, and some began to speculate on the psychology of these unclean spirits and their extraordinary zeal to corrupt men; in fact, in the words of the French saying, to wonder "what the devil they

were doing in that galley (in Jahveh's creation) at all." Some of the early rabbis, brooding as they did over every syllable of the Hebrew text, got an ingenious idea. When Adam and Eve came to "know good and evil" after eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they had baby Cain immediately; which shows that it must have been a pomegranate tree. Baby Abel came soon afterwards, but Seth came along a long time—about 100 years, the Bible says—later. Now what had happened, the rabbis say, is that Eve had run away and did not come back for 100 years. So poor Adam, seeking solace and finding no other woman on the planet, picked up with Lilith and a few other lady spirits and begot legions of devils; and Eve picked up with a bunch of male spirits and gave birth to more devils. And that was the beginning of the incubus (a word which means "lying on") and succubae ("lying underneath") in the world of spirits. We shall find them numerous in the Middle Ages.

There was another version of this profound speculation, and it has the merit of really explaining why devils spend the whole day and night trying to get men and women, who otherwise would have no such inclination, to commit sin. I do not know if some Hollywood scriptwriter has been reading the apocryphal Book of Enoch, but if you saw that film, "The Bishop's Wife," recently, you get the idea. Cary Grant is an angel—though, good fellow as he is, he is less like an angel in face than I am—sent on earth to help, among other people, the Bishop's wife, and he falls in love with her and has to scurry back to his cold home in the sky. But perhaps the writer got the idea from Sir William Watson's charming poem, "The Eloping Angels." However that may be, the Book of Enoch, one of the biblical apocrypha that gives us all sorts of speculations of that transition period from Judaism to Christianity, tells us the real origin of Satan and the devils.

You remember that In Genesis (VI, 2) it is said that the young women of those days, when paint and powder were unknown and there were no cocktails, were so comely that "the sons of God" fell in love with them, Your religious neighbors do not seem to like the idea that the angels found girls more attractive than the delights of heaven and blush when they try to work out how. . . But never mind that. The wrath of the Lord and the misbirths that followed make it perfectly clear that the writer means angels when he says "sons of God." Their progeny were a race of giants; 3,000 feet high, one rabbi estimated. But the interest of Enoch is that the author describes what happened to the angels. Heaven was barred against them, and they became the "fallen angels," the devils led by Satan.

There are alternative theories. One, in the Talmud, is that God allowed Satan to persuade the serpent to seduce Eve in Eden and damn the whole human race, but when Satan heard that God meant to redeem the race by sacrificing his son, he complained bitterly that he had been double-crossed by Jahveh and his legions have been trying to corrupt us ever since. The Miltonian version is that when Jahveh in heaven announced to the angels that he proposed to send his son on earth in human form and command them to do him homage, Satan and his clique revolted and, after a gorgeous battle with the loyal angels under the Archangel Michael, were thrown over the battlements and started their crusade of vengeance when men appeared. How many there were under Satan's flag of revolt is not certain. Holy men in the Middle Ages learned that there were 6,666 - legions of angels, each composed of 6,666 privates and officers. Satan drew off a third of them or 133,306,668. But others said that only 44,435,566 angels became devils, so the point is uncertain. But after all this let no man say that this whole theory of devils thirsting for the souls of men is unintelligible and makes it impossible for him to accept, the Christian faith.

III. HE SHARES THE BARBARISM OF THE DARK AGE

So the new and higher era of civilization opened with Satan in a secure position as Prince of the 133,000,000 Dark Angels. He had such preternatural power that he could take Jesus up a mountain in Judea and give him a telescopic vision of the earth from Roman Britain to China; and he could see that the conversation should be heard by disciples, although they were on top of a mountain in a desert, and written down for millions of Americans to read with awe and admiration today. Dead were all the Greek philosophers and their Materialism. The cities were full of invincible agents of Satan. Paul ordered women to keep their heads covered in church so that a devil should not get into them by their ears; or since it would be unjust to the men to leave them open to this sort of invasion women were veiled so that, as others say, their glossy black hair should not catch the roving eye of some incubus devil. A great light had dawned on the world.

Of the Fathers of the Church it is enough to say that they did not dream of disputing Satan's rank and position. Can you be surprised? Less than 100 years ago the greatest British statesman of the 19th century. W. E. Gladstone, one of the ablest of any country at that time and a distinguished classical scholar fiercely contended against Prof. T. H. Huxley that there was nothing incredible about the story of Jesus expelling a devil from a man and ordering it to enter a herd of swine which promptly committed suicide in disgust. The Fathers of the Church were for the most part simple-minded and imperfectly educated men, and they lived in a world in which practically everybody believed in magic. So I will not trouble to quote their words about Satan. H. C. Lea in his posthumous "Material toward a History of Witchcraft. 3 vols. 1939) which is a work of terrific erudition (half of which is not of the least use to most of us) chaotically put together, has about 100 pages on Satan in the Bible and the Fathers, if anybody wants to know mare than that, they accepted Satan and his ubiquitous agents as early and fully as we now swallow stories about the wickedness of Bolsheviks. St. Augustine, it is true, hesitated in his sober middle age. The devils, he said, do not physically do all the wonderful things a scribed to them. Even when an incubus is performing his indelicate function it is only in a "phantasmal" not a real body. But. in his old age Augustine published a "Retraction" of all the liberal ideas he had ever expressed and handed on the whole new demonology, including incubi and succubae, to the Middle Ages, of which he became the supreme oracle.

About this time the Christian idea was strongly confirmed by the experiences of the Fathers of the Desert. During the persecution in Egypt a number of pious Christians who did not care to earn the crown of martyrdom yet would not be traitors had fled into the desert, and in time thousands of hermits and monks lived an ascetic and unwashed life there. Strange to say, the devils pursued them in large numbers from the cities of Egypt. In the desert conditions the campaign of the devils had, naturally, only one form to take, an assault on the sexual virtue of the monks, and the war seems to have been spirited and picturesque. The common trick of the devils was to assume the form of a beautiful woman, not always becomingly clad. A monk-blacksmith, for instance, was at work one day when one of these temptresses strolled along. With his bare hands the hero of virtue seized a bar of white-hot iron and branded the synthetic lady. Sometimes, it is true, the temptress proved to be of real flesh and blood.

The pious writers of the lives of these fathers of the desert tell us that it was found repeatedly that good Egyptian women disguised as men penetrated into the holy circle; and the climate of the Egyptian desert is warm. We can imagine the life of these sex-starved colonies far removed from even the normal sight of women. Some of them were taken to Rome in the 4th century, and a rage for Monasticism spread over Europe. St. Augustine in Africa, St. Benedict in Italy, and St. Isidore in Spain give them such a character that there can have been little need any longer for the wiles of the diabolical army.

Contemporary with Augustine as a Christian leader, and in some respects more learned—he was a fine classical scholar and knew Greek and Hebrew well—was St. Jerome, but he insisted even more strongly than Augustine on the reality of Satan and his devils. His writings abound in such stories as this, for which' he vouches. In a certain Greek city in which the archbishop chanced to be a man of great virtue there dwelt a noble lady who also was of unassailable virtue. The devil one night assumed the form of the archbishop and joined her in her bed. She shrieked and he hid under the bed, but the servants who rushed to the chamber dragged him out and with blows and curses drove him from the house. There were other stories of bishops who were detected in amorous adventures; hut doubtless these also were devils in disguise. And the third oracle of the Dark Age, Pope Gregory "the Great," was worse than Jerome. His huge works were one long tissue of miracles, angels, and devils. There was not a superstition of his time that he did not endorse. With the fall of the "Roman Empire and the lapse of almost the entire population into illiteracy and dense ignorance, ideas about Satan and his angels grow like weeds in a rank tropical garden. The superstitions of the more backward Greek and Roman villages now passed to the towns and became part of the general "culture" of Europe. The idea of Satan as a Prince of Darkness was vulgarized. He became again just one of a vast family of devils as concrete as the fauns and satyrs of the pagans and more repulsive. In Greek mythology there had been a story of a certain "queen of Libya" named Lamia who was beautiful but so cruel that she used to steal children and torture and kill them. A belief in the existence of hordes of lamiae (plural) spread, and the name was used, like bogey, by mothers to bring unruly children to order. These lamiae were added to the general family of devils. So also was the Balkan peasants' superstition of the Astriga. "Strix" is the Greek for screech-owl, but it was popularly believed that this owl sucked the blood of children. From this folk passed on to believe in the existence of preternatural strigae or vampires, often dead men or women who emerged from the grave at night in search of blood or living men and women who fought off old age by draining the blood of maids while they slept. Of course, all Americans merely laughed when this stuff was put on the screen in "Dracula." Modern education has raised us high above the level of such beliefs.

Then there was the brood of Lilith (whom you will remember as the locum tenens for Eve during the short interval of 100 years when she left Adam), the succubae, who took the form of beautiful women, and the incubi, of male devils of great potency—one woman confessed to a saintly man that their semen was equal to that of a thousand men. Medieval writers always say succubi in the masculine) and explain that. the same devil commonly. . . But in a gross materialistic age like ours one cannot write of these things with the same freedom and elaborate attention to detail which the holiest and most learned of men enjoyed in the Ages of Faith and Virtue. There were were-wolves, or men turned into ravening wolves by the devil. There were sorcerers and soothsayers and magic healers of disease (which was so abundant that not one in two of the babies born ever saw the age of 20). A story much enjoyed in the Middle Ages was that a woman with sore eyes pestered one of these magical healers until at last he wrote out a charm for her.

She put it in some sort of locket, which she wore, and her eyes greatly improved. A priest read it one day, and it ran: "May the devil scoop your eyes out and shit in the sockets." There were the women who could cause storms to ruin a farmer's crops, or turn a woman's milk sour or her womb barren, or daub themselves with a magic ointment and fly through the air (or on a broomstick or a goat) to the secret meeting with the devil or Diana.

If a hen turned cock and began to crow—as often happens from some disorder of the ovaries—it was possessed by a devil. There were courts in which animals that thus changed their sex were solemnly tried and condemned to be burned. A woman who changed her sex was a clear ease of diabolical possession. So was the lunatic. The devil had to be driven out; and when the official exorcism, helped out with a lot of sonorous nonsense and Hebrew gibberish, failed, the poor victim was soundly thrashed or made to swallow human excrements. Life was a phantasmagoria of magic, miracles and devilry. You were apt—there are cases in the medieval chronicles—to catch a devil when you were fishing in the river. They lurked in water everywhere; and the "holy water" with which Catholics sprinkle themselves at the doors of their churches in Boston today is just water from which the priest has driven out the devils with salt and curses. If a maid met a handsome stranger or a young man met a beautiful strange maid in the lane they had to cross themselves. It was probably a devil.

This was, for a thousand years, the state of Europe—that is to say, Christian Europe, for there was a brilliant and largely skeptical civilization in Arab-Spain—after the fall of the Greek-Roman civilization; which Professor Toynbee blandly represents as a spiritual advance. To the ordinary unsanctified historian it is the disintegration of a religion that leads to an advance of civilization not a spiritual advance that emerges from the wreck of a civilization.

As I have said, lots of these ugly things (lamiae, vampires, etc.) had been known in pagan days. Horace even describes a witch prowling about at night in a suburban Roman cemetery. But in historic times these crude superstitions had been almost confined to the rustics of Greece and Rome. Although peasants were now four-fifths, possibly in the Dark Age nine-tenths, of the population of Europe, these ugly things were not at all restricted to them. The new historians tell us that we must not talk about a Dark Age because there were men of great learning who preserved all the cream of Greek-Roman culture and blended it. with the new religion.

Chief among these they name Isidore, archbishop of Seville in the 7th century; and if they ever read Isidore instead of taking their account of him from the Catholic Encyclopedia, they would find that he accepted every gross superstition of his time (lamiae, strigas, incubi, etc.). Hinemar, the famous archbishop of Rheims in the 9th century, is another bright light of the Dark Age. He too accepted these superstitions. He personally knew of cases of incubi and succubi, he says; and if these reforming historians of our time would get someone to translate for them Hinemar's outrageous treatise "On the Divorce of Lothar" they might get some real idea of the character of the age. Bishop John of Salisbury is sometimes said to have risen above these popular superstitions, but it is false.

It is, in fact, of the very essence of the case to understand that these were not "popular superstitions" at all. They were Christian beliefs, accepted by all the great Christian scholars in East as well as West. Psellos, who is reputed the best philosopher who appeared in the Greek world after it became Christian, fully endorsed them. The only scholars who did not were heretics like Abelard, twice condemned by the Church. The great St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who got him condemned, was as credulous as a peasant. A woman confessed to him, he says, that she had slept with a devil for some years. She was now repentant but no pious charms or curses would drive him away. Bernard gave her his staff to take to bed, and the devil gave her no further trouble. Peter Lombard, the first of the "great Schoolmen," implicitly believed these things.

It takes me beyond the limits of this chapter to deal with these Schoolmen but it will show the continuity of these rank beliefs about the devil in the brilliant years of the Renaissance—prove that, as I have said elsewhere, if the Dark Age was "Savagery in Buckram" the later Middle Age was "Savagery in Silk"—if I tell here how all of them believed in these crass superstitions of the Dark Age. Maritain, who so strongly recommends Thomas Aquinas to modern America, dupes his readers by concealing his gross blunders, which no genius could have made however much he believed in the devil. Thomas was particularly fascinated by cases of humans having sexual intercourse with devils, He personally knew of such cases, he said, and in his treatise "On Power," which no one would now dare to translate, he discourses at great length on the physiology of the business. Lea gives many passages from this treatise in his "Materials Towards a History of Witchcraft," but leaves them all in Latin: and I shall have to do the same: The devils, Aquinas says, may live in hell or in "darkened air." They can't create bodies for themselves, as God alone can create, but they assume or borrow human bodies and have a particular delight in becoming succubi or incubi; though in some cases the body of the diabolical Don Juan may be merely phantasmal (an idea which he borrows from St. Augustine).

The question of the semen thus becomes an absorbing problem, and the saintly Dominican monk writes page after page about it. As I find that I translated a specimen of his devout speculations in my "New Light on Witchcraft," I may reproduce it here:

"'When children are born of the intercourse of devils with human beings, they do not come from the seed of the devil or of the human body he has assumed but of seed which he has extracted from another human being (as a succubus). The same devil who, as a woman, has intercourse with a man, can also, in the form of a man, have intercourse with a woman . . .

I translate as politely as I can but I dare not go on to translate how the holy man describes the routine. Being a saint has its advantages as well as its disadvantages.

Thomas's fellow-monk and rival in fame, Albert the Great, believes as strongly as he does in this clotted nonsense. He himself knew lots of cases of incubi and succubi. If you put together all such declarations of pious medieval writers you feel that every medieval spinster and every monk who did not seek comfort as was the monastic custom was visited by these erotic demons. The Franciscan rivals of the Dominicans (Duns Scotus, etc.) agreed with them in this. They all know of cases and of some bedrooms where the devil inevitably looks in. Some get over the physiological difficulty with the help of the fiction that in Asia mares are often fertilized by the wind. Perhaps the devil incubus blows. . . It is hard to be scientifically adequate in our degenerate age. Curiously none of these learned and inspired men explain this heat of the devils. The theories of their fall which they generally follow is that pride betrayed them. But there seems to have been a popular story—it was told by an Albigensian heretic to an Inquisitor—that throws some light on this obscure question. Satan, it ran, hung about the gates of heaven for 33 years trying to steal in, and at last he succeeded in bribing an angelic janitor. He mixed in the crowd of angels and talked to them about women. He could not make them understand what he meant so they made a hole in the wall, and he crept out and brought up a woman from earth. The angels made off "thick as raindrops" through the hole until heaven was so empty that Jahveh noticed it and inquired into the matter. So he covered the hole in the wall. with his foot, and the angels could not get back into heaven. At all events the fallen angels had an amazing erotic appetite. in the Middle Ages. Lea gives 20 pages—and could have made them 100—of quotations from devout writers on the incubi and succubae.

But, you will ask, what were the Popes doing? When they were not enjoying themselves they were busy building up the power and wealth of the Papacy. Seriously, the characteristic of this period, as distinct from the later cult of Satan, was individual dealing with the devil, which was a sin but not heresy.

Hence the comparative rareness of executions before the 11^th century, the Popes and bishops would hardly be more enlightened than Thomas Aquinas, Scotus, Albert, and Bonaventure. Pope John XII, one of the wildest roysterers who ever wore the sacred tiara, is said by Bishop Liutprand, the best writer of the age, to have drunk the health of the devil in his carouses with some of his cardinals and invoked their aid; so that it surprises us when Liutprand adds later that John was slain by the devil one night when he was philandering with a pretty married woman in her home. I have always wondered whether in this case the husband had not assumed the form of the devil. You may ask whether the learned Pope Silvester II (Gerbert), who mounted the throne a few years later, did not repudiate all this rubbish. He never said so, and some odd stories were told about him. One was that in his youth, as a student in Arab Cordova, his girlfriend was a succuba named Meridiana, and that she occasionally visited him in the papal palace before the Romans poisoned him off. But in the light of a more authentic Arab story I believe that this is a slander: that his mistress was the beautiful daughter of the Jewish scholar of whom he was a guest in Cordova. Presently the papacy was purified by the Germans, and, as they could not find a cleric in Rome who could pass the four tests then used—whether he had been guilty of sodomy, adultery, bestiality, or fornication—they brought German Popes; of whom the Romans ushered six into the tomb in 13 years. Leo IX, the one who lasted longest and was learned and pious, tells in an extant letter that he had an aunt who was a nun in a convent of monks. She had a dwarf in her cell, and this turned out to be a devil. Then came stern Popes like Gregory VII, and they believed in devils as firmly as in cats. In fact, it would be a waste of time to look for bishops or popes who resisted this bilge, when, as I showed, the most learned scholars of Christendom drank it in like beer.

Only one writer is named by Lea, whose search in the history of those centuries has been prodigious, who rejected this poisonous refuse. He was Jean le Meung, French poet of the 13^th and 14^th centuries, the greatest poet of France until Villon, prince of the troubadours. He wrote most of the lengthy and famous poem, "The Romance of the Rose," and in it he scouts these superstitions and explains that devils are only, as we should now say, personifications of natural forces. But no one except a professor of French literature ever hears of Jean le Meung. He was dubious in faith and not at all dubious in morals; for the "Rose" means sex. About the same date Dante, about whom you hear almost every day, wrote his "Inferno." In the last Canto he introduces us to Satan: a monstrous three-headed giant, eternally champing three of the earth's greatest sinners in his three pairs of jaws, with three pairs of gigantic bats' wings above him. And two of the three greatest sinners are Brutus and .Cassius, who had thought that they were defending Roman democracy and freedom against a dictator. But Dante—whom Goethe loathed—is a great poet in modern American literature, while Jean le Meung is rarely mentioned.

IV. HIS GOLDEN AGE: WITCHCRAFT

I have explained that this long and sordid chapter of “dealing with the devil” (any devil) is not witchcraft in the proper sense of the word. The Prince of Darkness is vulgarized. He becomes one of the common crowd of devils that spend laborious days seducing monks and nuns, souring the milk or blighting the corn at the request of old women, being chased form one possessed body to another by priests, and so on. all th time as we shall see, there were currents underground that tended to lift Satan once more to his old mythological position. In the 10^th century, for instance, there appears, in the collection of Abbot Regino, a canon of some church council which he calls a resolution of the Synod of Ancyra of the year 314. That is impossible and experts generally, on feeble evidence attribute it to some council of the 6^th century. It says:

“Certain, wicked women, who have turned aside to Satan , seduced by the illusions and phantasms of the demons, believe and profess that during the night they ride with Diana, the goddess of the pagans, and an innumerable crowd of women, on certain beasts, pass over great spaces of the earth during the night obeying her commands as their mistress, and on certain nights are summoned to her service . . . . An innumerable multitude, deceived by this false opinion, believe that these things are true and so depart from the faith, and fall into the error of the pagans, believing that there is some divinity apart from the one God.”

Here there is definite trace of a cult and, setting aside all talk about “innumerable multitudes,” we may assume that at the triumph of the new religion village women, in the confusion of all countries after the fall of Rome, continued to worship the old mother-earth or fertility goddess under the name of Diana (goddess of the forests), believing that their fertility depends on this. In the period we have covered there are few traces of such a cult, while the chief characteristic of the next period, the 13^th to the 17^th century, the age of witchcraft, is that there is an organized cult of Satan as the real master of life and friend of man.

This statement has been harshly challenged, if not derided, by Professor Burr, of the University of Pennsylvania, whose verdict, as he edits Lea’s valuable posthumous work, “Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft,” is widely accepted. This work is a collection of notes for a book that Lea did not live to write, and it passes no opinion on the subject. But Lea deals extensively with it in his “History of the Inquisition” and expressly says, with all the abhorrence of a good Protestant, that the witches worshipped Satan in nocturnal meetings which they called Sabbaths. By what right Professor Burr comments on this that Lea did not regard the Sabbath as “real” he does not explain, but two short tests of the value of his opinion will suffice here.

The Little Blue Book which I called “New Views on Witchcraft” is based on a work by Dr. Margaret Murray, “The Witch Cult in Western Europe” (1921). While Professor Burr tosses this disdainfully aside, he recommends to the reader as “scholarly” the small “Histoire du diable,” of Joseph Turmel.” Writing in 1938 Burr does not even know that an English translation (“The Life of the Devil”) of this book had been published nine years earlier, and that it bears the correct name of the author, a French priest, Father Louis Coulange. The book is just a compilation of texts from the Bible and Christian writers and of little value to the student.

Dr. Murray's work—to which she has since added another book, "The God of the Witches" (1932) –is, in comparison, a remarkable piece of research, showing a command of the literature of the subject and the sources in a number of languages. Dr. Murray, now an elderly lady, is a retired professor of anthropology of London University, a distinguished Egyptologist, and the author of the article on Witchcraft in the last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is the best in all available encyclopedias.

What is worse, Burr accuses Dr. Murray, whom he seems to imagine as a bold young lady ("Miss Murray" he calls her fresh from college, of basing her case entirely on statements which witches made in the delirium of torture in the vaults of the Inquisition. If he has read the book at all he must know that Dr. Murray's thesis—that there was an organized cult of Satan—is fully established by the English cases which she examines, and that there was no Inquisition in England and witchcraft was not a felony in English law until the Reformation, so there was practically no torture. He accuses Dr. Murray of failing to take torture into account whereas in her introduction she expressly says that, "in most of the English and many of the Scottish cases legal torture was not applied" and "there were many voluntary confessions given by those who, like the early Christian martyrs, rushed headlong in their fate, determined to die for their faith and their god." She gives, with full references, many such cases. In short, Professor Burr's inaccuracy and misrepresentations are as painful as the arrogance of his language. Even the summary of the evidence which is all that I can give here will leave no room for doubt in the mind of the reader that witchcraft was an organized cult with priests and services at both fixed and occasional meetings or Sabbaths. Instead of the freak here and there who had had dealings with the devil in the Dark Ages we now have, even, in small towns, many hundreds of citizens at a time charged, and they are of all ages from infants to the middle-aged, all ranks (lawyers, priests, nobles, etc.) and both sexes.

I will give here one quotation, of the highest authority, that makes the situation clear at a glance. It is part of a letter written in 1629 in the city of Wurtzburg by the bishop's chancellor, an ecclesiastical lawyer, about events which were then taking place, not in torture-chambers, but under his eyes in that city. In that and other German cities witchcraft had spread amazingly and the hunt was on: "There are still 400 in the city, high and low, of every rank—even clerics—and sex, so strongly accused that they may be arrested any hour. Some out of all offices and faculties must be executed; clerics, counsellors, doctors, city officials, and court assessors. There are law students to be arrested. The prince-bishop has over 40 students here, who are to be pastors; 13 or 14 of these are said to be witches. A few days ago a dean was arrested; two others who were summoned have fled. The notary of our church consistory, a very learned man, was yesterday arrested and put to torture. In a word a third part of the entire city is involved. A week ago a maiden of 19 was put to death, of whom it is everywhere said that she was the fairest in the whole city and was held by everybody a girl of singular modesty and purity. She will be followed by seven or eight others of the fairest. There are 300 children of three or four years of age who are said to have had intercourse with the devil. I have seen put to death children of 10, promising students of 10, 12, 14, 15, etc."

This happened in hundreds of German, Swiss, French, and North Italian towns and cities at the time; and note carefully the number of children, though you may smile at their "intercourse with the devil," It is obvious that there was now an organized cult with meetings and baptisms of children.

You will see that these professors occasionally get my goat—and see why—but let us return to the more agreeable subject of Satan. Various explanations have been given of this extraordinary development of dealing with the devil just when Europe was rising again to the level of civilization. Some say that it was due to the great doctors of the 13^th century (Aquinas, etc.) so emphatically endorsing the phenomena. Others suggest that the activity of the Church about it helped to advertise the ideas. It seems rather that a new bitterly anti-Christian cult had reached Europe, and the general line of development is clear. The Persians had credited Angra Mainyu, their Satan, with the creation of the flesh and all the good things of earth, and a power only just short of that of God. Out of this was developed in the early centuries of the Christian Era the sect of the Manicheans; a body of ascetics with the same horror of the evil principle. The sect spread as far as Italy and France and was in the 5^th century still a serious rival of Christianity. St. Augustine in his blear-eyed later period professes to have compelled a girl of 12 in a public examination to admit that the Manichean priests made their sacrament of their semen and flour and used girls like her in the preparation of it, while Jerome testifies to the strict virtue of the sect.

However, the Popes wiped out the sect by a free use of the death sentence, and only sporadic cases occurred after that. But a new and similar sect arose in the Greek world, and it spread so rapidly in the 8^th century that, while the Empress Theodora put to death 100,000 members of it, a successor of hers in the 10th century had to exile 200,000 of them, and they mainly settled in Bulgaria. Here they called themselves bogomils ("Friends of God") and sent missionaries as far as France. Here Bulgar became:

"bougre," which I need not translate. In the southern provinces of France, which had been intellectually awakened by the Spanish-Arab civilization, they captured entire regions and cities, in which the orthodox Christians were reduced to a small minority. The strict members of this Albigensian sect, as it was called from the city of Albi, adhered to the Zoroastrian principle and the asceticism that it demanded, but I find rather that in the mass of the gay and free-living people of Province the idea arose that this Angra Mainyu, in Christian language Satan, was man's real friend and the only deity worth cultivating. They were rebels against Rome—they fought an immense army of the Pope’s crusaders (200,000 murderous, looting ruffians) for several years; and from that date the witches multiplied in Europe.

The massacre of the Albigensians and founding of the Inquisition at this time (the first quarter of the 13^th century) are another story, but from the middle of this 13^th to the middle of the 17^th century is what I have called Satan's Golden Age, the period when he became the God of millions, if not tens of millions, of Europeans. The German historian Sprenger quotes in his "Life of Mohammed" an estimate of some scholar that during those four centuries the Church, or Church-guided state, put to death 9,000,000 witches, and he thinks this is "an exaggeration." It is impossible to say. Lea's list of persecutions is most incomplete, but in it appear such items as that in one Swiss locality 700 were found and 200 burned; that 5,003 were found in one Italian valley; that in the South of France the Sabbath attracted—a papal Secretary says—3,000 to 10,000 witches; that 500 were burned in one German city; that 600 were prosecuted at Toulouse; that 503 were burned at Geneva in 1515; that a lay judge at Nancy boasted that he burned 800 in 16 years. Other writers add that in the diocese of Como 1,000 were executed in a year; that in three months (in 1515) 600 were burned in the bishopric of Wurzburg and 800 in the bishopric of Bamberg: that in five years one-fifth of the inhabitants of the small town of Lindheim were burned, and so on. And in many places these were just selections. Judge de L'Ancre found that a whole region in the south of France, including the priests, as I will tell in the next chapter, had gone over to the cult of Satan - "I'd rather kiss Satan's arse than my husband's lips," women told him—and he had to get papal permission to restrict his inquiry and be lenient.

There is no doubt that under the ghastly tortures that were generally used on the continent the witches repeatedly made false confessions in answer to questions, in order to escape torture. The crude monks who did the work of the Inquisition had their heads full of stories of lamiae, strigae, incubi, succubi, etc., from the religious literature of the Dark Age. In the persecution at Toulouse, for instance, a lady of 56, of noble and refined family, "admitted" that she slept for years with an incubus and had given birth to a baby with a wolf's head and a serpent's tail that had to be fed on the flesh of babies, which she stole. At Lindheim one of the women admitted that she had stolen a child's body from the grave. After she had been burned her husband opened the grave and found the child's body there; but the sagacious Inquisitor declared it to be a substitute manufactured by the devil and ordered that it be burned. There is no serious ground to believe that children were sacrificed at the Sabbaths. These were essentially gay festivals, and the entire cult was a glorification of joy.

On the other hand, we have large numbers of voluntary confessions and of inquiries and; admissions, even on the continent, in which there was no question of torture. At Lille in 1661 a devout lady, Mme. Bourignon, who kept a charitable home for poor girls, found that 32 of them were witches. They explained, in conversation with her, that they had been. dedicated to the cult in early years and would not abandon it. A young woman of 22 said: "I will not be other than I am: I find too much contentment in my. condition"; in 1670 an educated and generally respected Scot, Major Weir, approached the authorities with a declaration that he was a witch and was ready to die for his faith. From many such cases, from the English and Scottish trials in which no torture was used, and from the more consistent statements of others we get some idea of the organization and services of the cult.

One point that stands out above all others is that it was a worship of Satan, generally called the Spirit, as the benefactor of mankind. The members formed local groups of 12 (a coven) with a furtive teacher (or sort of priest) who secretly gave them notice of the occasional meetings. In some places they had "bishops" of a region. L'Ancre found that in one place the leading noble of the district, who opened the dance (arm in arm with "the devil"—or his local representative) was called the Bishop of the Sabbath. This meeting, which Lea and others call the Sabbath, was fixed for four dates in the calendar, and each of these points back to the ancient cult of the Mother-Earth Goddess: February 2^nd, April 30^th (the German Walpurgis Night), August 1^st, and October 31st (All Hallows Eve) There were also Sabbaths on irregular dates, of which notice was given. To the appointed place in the forest or on a hill (doubtless in halls or basements in cities) the witches made their way on foot or horse or in carts.

The monk Inquisitors were armed with a manual, the "Malleus Maleficarum" ("Hammer of Witches"), composed by two Dominicans, containing all the dregs of the superstitions of the Dark Age. The word for witches in the title of the book is feminine, and it is suggested that this insinuation that the witches were generally women was due to the anti-feminism of the monks, who considered that woman was so poor a creature that the devils found her an easy victim. This was not quite so crude an error as the idea that a witch was a broody old dame who rode on a broom-stick and kept a tame devil in the form of a cat, which was so generally received in Europe after the destruction of the cult that it is solemnly put forward in the article in Chambers Encyclopedia—one of the best of the time—as late as 1876 and is still widely held. As the Sabbath included a sexual orgy as one of its chief and most popular features—the witches were at least in some cases nude. These old crones would hardly be welcome. But there is no evidence that women were even in the majority; though their medieval status was so low, both state and church allowing the husband to beat them mercilessly and appropriate whatever they earned, that we should expect this. However that may be, the cult made no more distinction of sex than any other religion.

In the Wurzburg letter I quoted lawyers, priests, professors, civic officials, and young men students are included. Men of the highest social rank mingled with the crowd at the Sabbath. Marshal Gilles de Rais, one of the chief French commanders in the time of Joan of Arc, a high noble and intimate friend of Joan, was certainly a witch; probably also a sadist, so that his crimes must not be regarded as normal witchcraft. Dr. Murray gives substantial evidence from the records of the trial that Joan herself was a witch. I fancy this is one of her chief offenses in the eyes of our professors. Another French noble of the time, Pierre de Glac, was executed as a witch; and Dr. Murray believes that even the Duc d'Alencon was a witch and possibly the Grand Master.

Riding on broomsticks—a Catholic novelist has recently dared to represent a modern girl who had "sold herself to the devil" as doing this—or goats to the Sabbath, or using a magic ointment which enabled them to fly, are just stupidities of the Dark Age, We know that in some regions like the South of France there was no secrecy whatever about the meeting and practically everybody went. We saw that the witches numbered hundreds even in small towns, and in some cases a third of the population; and that a papal secretary speaks of Sabbaths attended by from 3,000 to 10,000. The Great Sabbath (quarter day) must have been like a fair that began after dusk (still the most popular time at such shows and lit by the moon or torches, People took food and wine; and many took their young children to be initiated, though there is evidence that they were then sent home, Whether it is true that they were marked (the Witches Mark) it is difficult to say. The devout monk Inquisitors had women and girls entirely shaved (head, armpits, etc.) in their search for this mark. It cannot have been more than a prick with a bodkin, and probably it is a myth. The mothers foreswore Christianity for their children and dedicated them to the worship of the Spirit. Then there seems to have been a religious service with an improvised altar. When these were priest-witches they seem to have performed Black Masses, with yellow or black candles and black bread, but this seems to have been one of the variations. That the sacrifice of a child or maid followed is said on the flimsiest of torture-evidence, and the very idea is dead against the whole joyous spirit of the celebration. This and the laying of nude women on the altar belong to the Black Mass stage which we will consider in the next chapter. Of the hymns that were sung we have no specimen. One would be priceless today. The rest of the night, probably in most cases almost the whole of the time, was spent in an orgy of dancing, feeding, drinking, and promiscuity: a sort of harvest-thanksgiving to Satan for the fruits and pleasures of the earth. Once, 2,000 years earlier, men and women had held just such services in the blaze of the eastern sun. Now they chose the night, and they cursed the religion that brought about the change. But doubtless night had its compensations.

A persistent note in the "confessions" is that the devil, generally in animal form (goat, bull, etc.), appeared and had commerce with the women. Even a supernatural Satan would be limited in his capabilities, and the women must refer to his local representatives, the priests of the cult, who wore goat skins. The women on trial so persistently say that the devil's phallus was cold that Dr. Murray suggests that the priests used models of it in stone or bone, A persistent statement also is made that they kissed his behind, which does not seem improbable. The dominant note was just defiance of the Christian ethic. And this moves us to wonder whether there was not something more than a crude superstition in the movement.

Any man who is well acquainted with the general, indeed blatant, freedom of sexual morals during this period, of the appalling hypocrisy of the life of the great majority of the clergy, higher and lower, and the monks, will smile at the idea that these witches resented the Christian restrictions on sex and joined the witches in order to evade the restrictions.

Protestants who recognize the earlier freedom fancy that the Reformation effected a change, but in his "History of the German People," (vol XVI) Jansen gives 100 pages of quotations which show that there was no change in Germany. Neither was there in France or England; and Rome and the papal court itself continued to be corrupt, with a few short intervals of repression, for a century and a quarter after Luther's revolt. Just this flourishing period of witchcraft is one of the freest, sexually, in civilized history, and on festival days there was no public restraint. Then why the psychological or physiological urge for these occasional nocturnal orgies? I do not know any writer who considers the problem, and I suggest that it was mainly a revolt against the Christian religion for preaching asceticism and against the church for the general and cynical hypocrisy in practice. To what extent the body of the witches really believed in a personal devil and to what extent they were just rebels against the existing state of things we shall never know, but the extraordinary extent of the revolt and its pertinacity in face of a persecution that was hundreds of times more deadly than the pagan persecutions of the early Christians had been deserve far more serious attention than they have had. When it was found that the Reformers maintained the old code of rules witchcraft, flourished as luxuriantly as ever. It was one type of humanist revolt. But skepticism of a sane type was now spreading, and in a way it was fortunate that humane skeptics like Montaigne held the view that the Whole thing was a fantastic jumble of fact and fiction and the persecution was inhuman. But before I close this development let me show how in Montaigne's own country and time we find some of the strangest extravagances of the movement.

V. ARSENIC AND BLACK MASSES

One development apart from the main body of the witches must first be described; with a warning that it is so repulsive and discreditable to the claims of the Catholic apologist that the new historians dismiss it as a libel. In the year 1310 the Knights of the Temple of Jerusalem were put on trial in France. It is true that the King was eager to grasp their enormous wealth, that he made a corrupt bargain with the Pope to secure the trial, and that the monk-knights were subjected to excruciating tortures. From the middle of the 12^th century there had been rumors all over Europe that their houses, or palaces, were comprehensively addicted to sodomy and blasphemy. They, who had been founded as a monastic order with vows of poverty and chastity in protest against the corruption of the overwhelming majority of the crusaders in Palestine, had become the richest corporation in the world: the most luxurious, arrogant, and secretive of knights. Initiations to the order and chapters or Conferences of the authorities were veiled in secrecy, and apostates spread dark stories about what lay beyond the Iron Curtain. The chief charges were contempt of Christianity, worship of Satan, and organized if not compulsory practice of sodomy.

The kings, already deeply covetous of the enormous wealth of these sheer parasites on their kingdoms, heard the stories, and the King of France sold the papacy to Pope Clement V for a promise that, among other things, he would authorize a trial. About 700 knights were arrested and were at once put to horrible torture, during which most of them, including the Grand Master and other high officials. admitted the charges. Three cardinals were at the head of the commission of inquiry. When the time came for the formal trial in the archbishop's palace at Paris, they were taken from the jails and put in charge of the clergy, and, having now recovered, most of them repudiated their confessions. However, the tribunal, consisting of the finest jurists as well as the leading prelates of France, found them guilty and most of them were executed. Catholics, of course, contend that they were innocent, but even the article in the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is initialled by the Catholics' reviser, admits that it is an open question among historians. Of French jurists the great majority hold that they were guilty. After the exposure of whole provinces of monks (for sodomy) in Germany in 1936-8 which was admitted by the great majority of the monks in open Catholic courts—and, naturally, there was no question of torture it is quite absurd to say that a similar corruption of a rich and luxurious order of monks in the Middle Ages is incredible. A consistent note in the hundreds of confessions of the Templars was that at initiation every novice kissed the rear of the officiating prior and was similarly kissed by him, and he was instructed that sodomy was to be his sole form of sexual relief. After this it is not difficult to believe the charge of spitting on the crucifix and worshiping Satan.

We can imagine that the general diffusion of knowledge of these facts helped in the renewed spread of witchcraft in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, and as I have shown, the Protestant insistence on the theoretical ascetic code led to an at least equal spread in the 16^th and early 17^th centuries. Attacks on the prosecutions by German theologians and Reginald Scott in England did little more than sharpen the zeal of the witch-hunters. The American mania, the insane campaign of Cotton Mather in New England, was in 1691-2.

There were executions in England in the early part of the 18th century, and there were thousands of executions in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Spain kept the fires burning until the end of the 18th century, when the spirit of the French Revolution spread to that country; and in Latin America they were maintained until the revolt against the church and Spain in the 19th century.

But before I tell how the glory of Satan as Prince of This World was finally dissipated I have to notice certain curious developments in France, especially of the Black Mass. Witchcraft struck deep roots among the Basque population of the Pyrennean district, and for the French side we have a weighty testimony. Pierre de L'Ancre, a refined and highly cultivated secular judge of the Bordeaux Court, a Royal Councillor and accomplished classical scholar, was sent south to investigate the rumors in 1609, and in two books which he has left us he gives us a solid and interesting account of what he saw; and remember that by this time the cult had borne 500 years of ferocious persecution. Another French judge, Henri Boguet, had recently (1602) written:

"Germany is almost entirely occupied with building fires for them. Switzerland has been compelled to wipe out many of her villages on their account. Travellers in Lorraine may see thousands and thousands of the stakes to which witches are bound. We in Burgundy are no more exempt than other lands . . . there are witches by the thousands everywhere, multiplying on the earth even as worms In a garden."

Yet these fires had been burning from the 8^th century. What are we to think of our history-writers who find it marvelous that the early church grew in spite of two persecutions in 250 years—two in which only a few hundred were executed and little if any torture used—yet have not a word to say on this extraordinary pertinacity and growth of Satanism through five centuries of continuous and far more cruel persecution?

Boguet condemned the use of torture, and L'Ancre and his colleague, another eminent judge and royal counsellor, used it only in two or three out of many hundreds of cases. At first they encountered a baffling silence. The priests, who wore swords and picturesque costumes and drank and danced with the villagers and townsfolk, were—it transpired—in the movement and instructed folk to say nothing. Large numbers of the women took to the sea in their husbands' boats or went on pilgrimage to Spain; where the cult was even stronger. At last, by torture or more amiable means, the judges won the confidence of a 17-year-old and fiery beggar girl—she danced the witch-dances for them—and they broke the conspiracy of silence. Here we have a competent lay judge reporting, without using torture, just the same chief phenomena as the Inquisitors. Some of the highest nobles and most of the priests attended the Sabbaths, and the priests said Black Masses. At one place there was a gathering of 12,000 witches. Educated women in their later 20's told how Satanism was the best religion, and they would rather go to the Sabbath, the "real Paradise," than to the Mass. It was a foretaste of their joy in the next life. This referred to the usual orgy of promiscuity. The Sabbaths, to which they took about 2,000 children to be initiated, were held nearly every night and sometimes during the day. As the trials proceeded the large fleets of fishing boats came in from the Atlantic, and the anger of the men at the prosecution seems to have forced the judges to close it prematurely. But, says L'Ancre, "an infinite number (really about 500, including several priests) were burned at Bordeaux and in Brittany"—which suggests that the cult spread along the coast. In fact, there were almost simultaneous persecutions on a large scale all over France. At Macon the jails were full, and there were trials at Orleans and other places.

More interesting is a different type of development that was now announced every few years. Whole communities of nuns were said to have been surrendered to the Devil. From Marseilles in 1611, the year after L'Ancre's inquiry, it was announced that the Ursuline nuns in one of the most respectable convents were dealing with the devil, and a number of them were "possessed."

At the close of the inquiry the chaplain, Gauffridi, a handsome and popular preacher, was burned as "Prince of the Magicians for all the world." Among other things he had, It was said, "married' one of the pupils, a 12-year-old girl of noble family, before an altar of Satan. It is probable that in this case the Satanism was a pretence. Gauffridi and his charges were intensely erotic, and some of the older nuns became furiously jealous. There was a similar case a few years later at London in Picardy, where the amorous chaplain of the chief nunnery was burned for witchcraft after the town had been agitated for months over the antics of the nuns. The French historian Michelet believes that in these and similar cases the priests used drugs, possibly hashish, which (and tobacco) French sailors were now bringing into the country.

During all this time genuine Satanism was still strong. The case of Mme. Bourignon and her home for girls at Lille, to which I have referred, was as late as 1661. There were heavy batches of executions in Germany and Switzerland. The famous British witch-finder Hopkins was busy in 1644-7. Cotton Mather in New England in 1691. The mother of the famous astronomer Kepler was prosecuted for witchcraft. But the genuine cult was, generally speaking, bludgeoned out of existence in Europe in the second half of the 17th century, and the idea was being used as a cover for amorous adventures of priests and for worse crimes. The most extraordinary development of this sort was in the "brilliant" reign of Louis XIV, the royal charlatan who still in our time gets a stupidly laudatory new biography every few years.

Most of these biographies refer darkly to a sinister "ex-priest" named Guiborg and other ex-priests who had sold their souls to the devil and said Black Masses, with obscure details which the writers dare not describe for aristocratic ladies; and the whole is mixed up with an epidemic of arsenic-poisoning that startled Paris at the time. Some years ago I wrote a novel (which no publisher would accept) on these events and I studied them closely in the police-records of the time, which fill three large volumes of the untranslated) "Archives of the Bastile." The able Guiborg, the chief villain, an ugly pockmarked little priest, never left the church; he was in charge of the parish of Saint Denis in his worst days. A dozen other actively functioning priests—one a fashionable Paris preacher—are involved in the police-records, but no ex-priest is. Lesage, who is often described as such, had no orders and was just a clever conjuror. The poisoners, who were mostly women, were in league with these priests, and they helped each other to dupe the ladies of the court. Catherine Voison, a vile hag who worked with Guiborg, used to put on, when she received clients, a mantle on which were sewn $15,000 worth of gold coins. The fees for a poisoning ran to thousands of dollars: for a Black Mass they were probably higher.

It was the appalling frequency of death from poison that led to the opening of the Inquiry in 1679, but arsenic does not interest us here. Louis XIV's nobles were as corrupt a lot as ever adorned a royal court, and the King's passion for mistresses sharpened ambitions. The job was worth a million a year. Dukes, Duchesses, Countesses, etc., hastened to consult the devil as to their chances and to induce him to use his influence to promote these. From Lesage's conjuring they went on to the Black Masses of Guiborg and other priests. Although brilliant ladies like the Countess de Soissons consulted the devil through Lesage it was chiefly the Countess de Montespan, the greatest lady of the court, who went to extremes. She began in 1667 to invoke the devil's aid to get for her the place of chief royal mistress, and whenever Louis showed a sign of cooling she had him drenched with aphrodisiacs compacted, often from her menstrual blood and other effusions—perhaps it was she who persuaded him to eat the mounds of salad he did—and got Guiborg to do his dirty work. Although Witnesses were tortured—

even Paris still used the horrible water-torture and the boot, and other French cities used (literally) boiling oil and burning the soles of the feet—historians consider it proved, chiefly by the evidence of her personal maid, that she lay nude on the altar while Guiborg and other priests said mass on her belly to Satan with black candles and the usual accessories. Guiborg was credited with so many of these Black Masses that one witness ventured to affirm that the bones of a thousand babies sacrificed in his masses were found in Voison’s den. It seems clear that sometimes women in the last stage of pregnancy lay nude on his altar during his mass and sacrificed the baby. And when this failed to remove a husband and make way for a lover a pinch of arsenic was tried.

The authors who write our eulogistic biographies of Louis XIV conceal this appalling corruption of the court and Paris and pretend that these were just statements made under torture by rude types of women and taken seriously by stupid and credulous magistrates. On the contrary the trials, which lasted two years, were held in secret by a body of his most judicious counsellors appointed by the King. The records, which I have read from beginning to end, make up as sordid a picture of life in a civilized city as I have ever read; and as they were submitted to the King and he burned many pages, we do not know the worst about the leading ladies of the court. It is hardly likely that these priests believed any more than Lesage that they were communicating with Satan. Antics like these are not found In the annals of real witchcraft. The aristocracy were rich—the people starving—and gold-digging was the chief industry of Paris. But the men and women who consulted them and lay on their altars certainly did believe that they were getting the aid of Satan, so that in these dark corners he was still Prince of the Powers of Darkness. These, from about 1667 to 1679, were among the last flickers of the black candle on his altars.

VI. THE IMPOSTURE OF MODERN SATANISM

For the Satanism of the last quarter of the 19^th century, which was discussed all over Europe and in America, was although Pope Leo XIII solemnly received and blessed the man who later confessed that he created the myth, the most blatant imposture of modern times. The older Satan was dead or lingered only in the murky minds of the ignorant—‘witches’ were (unofficially) burned in Ireland in my lifetime—and in the minds of Fundamentalists and Catholics who hardly ventured to tell their commonsense neighbors what they believed about him. Experts name a number of theologians who attacked the belief in witchcraft in the 17^th century, and of great lawyers like Bodin who opposed them, strictly speaking Weier and the critics were wrong and Bodin right, for witchcraft was a tremendous reality. In any case the attacks had little influence, but by the, end of the 17^th century the appalling butchery of members of the Satanist cult during nearly 500 years had at last succeeded, I do not even quote the influence of the great skeptics of the 18^th century (Montesquieu, Voltaire, Beccaria, etc.). By the middle of the 18th century the cult was dead in the leading countries. I repeat that it is extraordinary that so savage and protracted a persecution—surely without parallel in the history of religion—had not killed it long before, and that what we may attribute to the great growth of skepticism in the 18^th century is that it made a revival of the cult impossible.

Imagine, therefore, the astonishment of our fathers when in the last quarter of the last century the cry was raised, and echoed from Rome to Boston, that Black Masses and other Satanist practices were still performed in innumerable centers all over Europe and in America: that is to say, in the Masonic lodges. The secrecy of their initiations and conferences had first drawn suspicion on the Templars. The same secrecy, now gave some color to the charge against the Freemasons. It may be, necessary to explain to

many American readers that British and American Masonry differs in one important respect from Masonry in France and the Latin countries generally. In the latter there is no recognition of a Grand Architect of the Universe. The organization is, in effect, atheistic. This had two consequences in the last century. After the fall of Napoleon the Catholic Church was intimately associated with the kings in the bloody reaction against radicalism, and therefore the secret lodges of the Masons were, the refuge of rebels against both church and state and were effective centers of plotting against both. The Popes, especially Pius IX and Leo XIII, retorted with the heaviest denunciations of the Masonic lodges as "Synagogues of Satan." In my clerical days I met many priests who believed that Satan appeared in the lodges and advised the officials in the war on the church. The second consequence was that the British and American Masons disowned the French and made no effort to defend them when the grand attack began.

Leo XIII, who is now represented as an ideal moral oracle in the United States, seeing how French Masonry had completely triumphed over the church, and how in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America the lodges were the strongest centers of anti-Romanism; issued an encyclical Humanum Genus, in 1884, in which he distilled the Vatican's hatred of the organization and warned Catholics that it was Satan's chief weapon in his war against the innocent church. At this time there was a third rate free thinking journalist named Jogand-Pages of lively pen and thoroughly unscrupulous character.

He had joined the Masons and been driven out within a year. He edited a periodical called, The Anti-Clerical and wrote books like "The Private Morals of Pius IX" under the pseudonym of Leo Taxil. But it was not profitable. In 1885, in the full height of the fight over the Pope's encyclical, he announced that he had returned to the Catholic Church, and within another year he began to publish lurid "exposures" of the Satanist activities of the Freemasons. His reward in the church was golden. Bishops and archbishops enthusiastically took up the cry and, using his "revelations," wrote books like "The Secrets of Hell," "The Synagogues of Satan," and so on. The circulation among Catholics, especially in France and Belgium; was enormous.

Pope Leo XIII, who had by no means the calm intellectual sanity that is ascribed to him, gave the adventurers a special reception and blessing in 1887. The Papal organ, the Moniteur de Rome, was fined 2,500 francs for publishing gross libels.

Others of the same kind joined Taxil in the golden harvest. One, writing as Dr. Bataille, claimed that all Protestants were in the Satanic plot with the Masons—it was, and is, the Catholic contention, that the whole brood of Skeptics, Masons, Anarchists, etc., are the result of the Reformation—and caused a new sensation with "The Devil in the 19^th Century." He got 50,000 francs ($10,000) for the German translation alone of this fantastic book. and the Pope gave him a Papal decoration. A well known and rather hysterical Parisian novelist, Huysmans, published a novel, "La Vas" ("Down Under," 1891) in which he made the blood of his coreligionists run cold. The book was mainly an account of Gilles de Rais, Guibert, and other earlier Satanists, more or less in the form of fiction, but he makes his hero attend a Black Mass held by an apostate priest in Paris. It is the most absurd imagination of such a ceremony that I have ever read, yet, although all Huysmans' novels except this were translated when they were written, and this one was obviously considered too fantastic for the British or American stomach, in our age of lying and credulity it has found a translator and a publisher (1943). Huysmans does not connect this Satanism with the Freemasons and does not suggest more than that there are Black Masses in obscure corners of Paris; if anything in a novel is to be taken as a statement of fact. It was chiefly Taxil and Bataille (Hacks) who raised the Catholic world to a point of insanity. They vied with each other in the extravagance of the adventures they described and the obscenity—when you ascribe these to skeptics, devils, or Reds, the police will let you run, to any length—with which they spiced them. Bataille claimed that he had been a ship's doctor on the oriental route and had attended secret meetings all over Europe and Asia. At a meeting in a Presbyterian chapel in Singapore, for instance, he witnessed the obscene initiation of a Mistress of the Templars. In the caves under Gibraltar he found that the British had hundreds of slaves making statues of Baphomet (medieval corruption of Mahomet, supposed to be the phallic idol of the Knights Templars) and other obscene paraphernalia of Masonic Satan-worship.

Nothing was too fantastic or too audacious for these tens of millions of Catholics, encouraged by the Pope and the French hierarchy. In America Bataille said he met an important lady-Mason named Diana Vaughan, Grand-Priestess of Lucifer. A 17^th-century ancestor of hers had settled among the Indians in America with Venus-Astarte (a double dose of the ancient goddess of love) as his mistress. Diana descended from this pair and was destined to be the grandmother of Antichrist who would appear in 1962 and be joined by the Pope of the time (a secret Jew). Diana herself was, at the order of Lucifer, betrothed to Asmodeus, now his chief lieutenant, in the Masonic temple at Charleston, which was (they said) the Rome of the Satanic organization under the Grand Master, Albert Pike.

But there was a rival lady in the higher circle of the Satanist world, one Sophia Walder, daughter of Lucifer and the mistress of a Protestant pastor, and presently it was announced in Paris that Diana had formed a purer type of Satanism, called Palladism, and was about to publish in Paris the organ of that movement. It ran three weeks. The Masons were pressing hard for the production of the gifted lady, and, naturally, the Catholics were eager to see her.

There was a new sensation when it was announced that Diana was converted to the Catholic Church, and the hierarchy positively melted into tears of joy. Her autobiography soon appeared and was more audacious than ever. The Masons had suspected her soundness, she said, when she refused to spit on the crucifix, and she was brought before a court at Louisville. The chief treasure at this center was the tail of the lion of St. Mark, which the devil had cut off and given to the Masons. This tail sprang from its box and wrapped itself around her neck, and the tuft at the end of it turned into the face of Asmodeus, who declared that Diana was under his protection and carried her off to the planet Mars, from which she returned to Paris and conversion. Catholics now begged for a sight of the saintly convert, their new Joan of Arc as one of the bishops called her, and Bataille explained that the Masons sought her life and her address must be a profound secret. But she wrote letters—or Bataille's secretary did—to the bishops and the Pope, and the grand crusade continued. In 1896 an international anti-Masonic Congress was held at Trent, attended by 36 bishops and the representatives of another 50. Skepticism was beginning even in the sanctuary and some demanded the production of Diana. Taxil rebuked their lack of faith in a triumphant speech and assured the gathering that he knew her personally but dare not endanger her life by producing her; and again the Vatican supported him. A fortnight later Hacks (Bataille) wrote articles in German and French papers confessing that it was a fake from beginning to end and pouring cynical scorn on the Catholic body. He contended that the bishops and the Vatican knew all along that it was a hoax, but I do not believe this as regards the more active of the bishops. As to the Vatican, he said that the Bishop of Charleston had sent word to the Pope that everything they had said about Charleston was false, and he had been ordered to hold his tongue. Taxil held out for another six months. He then blandly explained at a Catholic meeting that it was all "just a mystification," and he cordially thanked the Pope and the bishops for their cooperation. He retired to live on the comfortable fortune his little joke had brought him.

There is a good account of this amazing development in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics ("Satanism"). H. C. Lea also wrote a good account in French, but he never translated it as far as I can discover. There are plenty of small works on it in French but doubtless they are not available in America. I doubt if any citizen of Charleston is aware today of the singular distinction that his city enjoyed only 50 years ago as the citadel of Satanism and the destined headquarters of Antichrist from 1962 onward. To what extent American Catholic writers of the last century endorsed this babbling, which often borders on the insane, I cannot ascertain, but the vast crowds that flocked to the Bronx a few years ago to see the Virgin appear to a lying little Italian boyar who have as smoothly swallowed the miracles of the saintly Chicago nun as they now swallow the devilries of the Bolsheviks would hardly jibe at these Munchausenisms. It is, in any case, indisputably recorded that the Catholics of Europe as a body were completely convinced by this monstrous lying, that the leading archbishops and nearly the whole of the French bishops encouraged them, and that Pope Leo XIII, that serene and preternaturally wise oracle, proved to be—unless you prefer to think him guilty of a colossal fraud—as credulous as any Breton peasant. Such is the Catholic atmosphere.

This was not quite the end of the career of Satan. Some Catholics now professed to find proof of his existence, not in the works of Taxil and Bataille but precisely in their wickedness in repudiating the books. Large numbers who had licked their lips over the rich pictures of "obscenity" did not particularly care whether they were true or not.

Probably the most common attitude was to declare that, though these Masonic orgies might be fictitious, you can find the devils still active whenever you want in the Spiritualist seance. The Prince of This World has sunk to the level of beating tamburines, shifting chairs, and pinching the bottoms of sitters for a $5-a-night medium. So it was at least the other day. Now, of course, Satan Is again at work on the heroic scale. For Charleston read Moscow: For Lucifer and Asmodeus read Stalin and Molotov. He has at last really got the race by its most delicate organs. Ask our critical, hard-headed, discriminating Catholics, all trained to think with the inexorable logic of Maritain and steeped in the simple honesty of the Vatican.

Publisher's Note

During its day, the original publisher of this pamphlet, the Haldeman-Julius Company of Girard, Kansas, was the most important publisher of radical materials in the United States. From the founding of his company in 1919 until his early death in 1951possibly induced by IRS harassment—I. Haldeman-Julius published more than 2500 books and pamphlets, many of which were written by anarchists, atheists, and socialists. According to some reports, sales of Haldeman-Julius's cheaply priced books and pamphlets reached the hundreds of millions. That seems a bit optimistic, but it's virtually certain that sales were at least in the tens of millions.

One of Haldeman-Julius's most important and most prolific writers was Joseph McCabe, the author of this pamphlet. In regard to Christianity and, especially, Catholicism, McCabe was perhaps the most learned atheist writer who ever lived. This was a result of his native gifts and his background: he was a former Catholic priest, fluent in Latin and several other languages, who had taught philosophy and ecclesiastical history in a Catholic college. During his lifetime (1867-1956) he translated dozens of books and wrote hundreds of his own books and pamphlets, all on various aspects of history, and a great many on religious topics. Perhaps his most important work was A Rationalist Encyclopedia, published in the World War II era, and of which he was editor.

The original edition of this work, A History of Satanism, appeared in 1948, a time when McCabe was already in his 80s. I'm very happy to bring it to light again, and thus introduce McCabe to a new generation of readers.

-Chaz Bufe, August 1997

See Sharp Press has published books, pamphlets, and bumper stickers since 1984. Our primary publishing areas are anarchism, atheism, music, sex, "how-tos", and alcoholism. For a free copy of our current catalog, write to See Sharp Press, P.O. Box 1731, Tucson, AZ 85702-1731.