298 f.

[3] C. Mirbt: _Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums_, 3, 1911, p. 390.

SECTION 2. WITCHCRAFT

Some analogy to the wave of persecution and confessional war that swept
over Europe at this time can be found in the witchcraft craze. Both were
examples of those manias to which mankind is periodically subject. They
run over the face of the earth like epidemics or as a great fire consumes
a city. Beginning in a few isolated cases, so obscure as to be hard to
trace, the mania gathers strength until it burns with its maximum
fierceness and then, having exhausted itself, as it were, dies away,
often quite suddenly. Such manias were the Children's Crusade and the
zeal of the flagellants in the Middle Ages. Such have been the mad
speculations as that of the South Sea Bubble and the panics that
repeatedly visit our markets. To the same category belong the religious
and superstitious delusions of the sixteenth century.

The history of these mental epidemics is easier to trace than their
causes. Certainly, reason does nothing to control them. In almost every
case there are a few sane men to point out, with perfect rationality, the
nature of the folly to their contemporaries, but in all cases their words
fall on deaf ears. They are mocked, imprisoned, sometimes put to death
for their pains, whereas any fanatical fool that adds fuel to the flame
of current passion is listened to, rewarded and followed.

[Sidenote: Ancient magic]

The original stuff from which the mania was wrought is a savage survival.
Hebrew and Roman law dealt with witchcraft. The Middle Ages saw the
survival of magic, still called in Italy, "the old religion," and new
superstitions added to it. Something of the ancient enchantment still
lies upon the {652} fairylands of Europe. In the Apennines one sometimes
comes upon a grove of olives or cypresses as gnarled and twisted as the
tortured souls that Dante imagined them to be. Who can wander through
the heaths and mountains of the Scotch Highlands, with their uncanny
harmonies of silver mist and grey cloud and glint of water and bare rock
and heather, and not see in the distance the Weird Sisters crooning over
their horrible cauldron? In Germany the forests are magic-mad. Walking
under the huge oaks of the Thuringian Forest or the Taunus, or in the
pine woods of Hesse, one can see the flutter of airy garments in the
chequered sunlight falling upon fern and moss; one can glimpse goblins