lp--and those of the very darkest
kind--to the works of darkness; and there never were wanting--there are
not wanting, even now, in remote parts of these isles--wicked old women
who would, by help of the old superstitions, do for her what she wished.
Soon would follow mysterious deaths of rivals, of husbands, of babes;
then rumours of dark rites connected with the sacred tree, with poison,
with the wasp and his sting, with human sacrifices; lies mingled with
truth, more and more confused and frantic, the more they were
misinvestigated by men mad with fear: till there would arise one of those
witch-manias, which are too common still among the African Negros, which
were too common of old among the men of our race.

I say, among the men. To comprehend a witch-mania, you must look at it
as--what the witch-literature confesses it unblushingly to be--man's
dread of Nature excited to its highest form, as dread of woman.

She is to the barbarous man--she should be more and more to the civilised
man--not only the most beautiful and precious, but the most wonderful and
mysterious of all natural objects, if it be only as the author of his
physical being. She is to the savage a miracle to be alternately adored
and dreaded. He dreads her more delicate nervous organisation, which
often takes shapes to him demoniacal and miraculous; her quicker
instincts, her readier wit, which seem to him to have in them somewhat
prophetic and superhuman, which entangle him as in an invisible net, and
rule him against his will. He dreads her very tongue, more crushing than
his heaviest club, more keen than his poisoned arrows. He dreads those
habits of secresy and falsehood, the weapons of the weak, to which savage
and degraded woman always has recourse. He dreads the very medicinal
skill which she has learnt to exercise, as nurse, comforter, and slave.
He dreads those secret ceremonies, those mysterious initiations which no
man may witness, which he has permitted to her in all ages, in so many--if
not all--barbarous and semi-barbarous races, whether Negro, American,
Syrian, Greek, or Roman, as a homage to the mysterious importance of her
who brings him into the world. If she turn against him--she, with all
her unknown powers, she who is the sharer of his deepest secrets, who
prepares his very food day by day--what harm can she not, may she not do?
And that she has good reason to turn against him, he knows too well. What
deliverance is there