Even when the Devil
tells the truth, he must not be believed.
One
of the interesting Latin phrases my father taught me was Daemoni, etiam vera dicenti, non est credendum. The idea that the
Devil is so deceitful that even his use of the truth is tainted by association
has always interested me. This was an idea the witchfinder Matthew Hopkins
seems to have agreed with, arguing that the Devil used facts over which he had
no power (the truth) to deceive witches into believing they had actually harmed
their victims with his help.
In 2014 I attended the Early Modern Women,
Religion, and the Body conference at Loughborough University. At that
conference I presented a paper which focused on how on Matthew Hopkins used
ideas found in earlier demonological works to underpin his arguments on the
Devil’s deceit of witches in The discovery of vvitches (1647).
I argued that a key passage in Hopkins text
described how when witches, the Devil’s ‘deare and nearest children’,[i]
believed that the Devil was granting their desire to harm their enemies, he was
actually tricking them into worshipping him in return for the deaths of people
who were already ill and going to die in the near future:
‘[The Devil] is of a long standing, above 6000.
yeers, then he must needs be the best Scholar in all knowledges of arts and
tongues, & so have the best skill in Physicke, judgment in Physiognomie,
and knowledge of what disease is reigning or predominant in this or that mans
body, (and so for cattell too) by reason
of his long experience. This subtile tempter knowing such a man lyable to
some sudden disease, (as by experience I have found) as Plurisie,
Imposthume, &c. he resorts to divers Witches; if they know the man, and
seek to make a difference between the Witches and the party[.]’[ii]
This
recourse to the idea that the Devil understands human beings and their natures,
and has studied then for his work also appears in the earlier text of George
Gifford. However for Gifford, his learning is not just about the Witch’s
victim, but about the witch herself:
‘WHen
Satan at the first enterprised the ruine and destruction of man, he did not vnaduisedly
set vp on the worke, but in great subtilty chose him a fit instrument for the
purpose, euen the serpent who was more subtill then any beast of the field. He is now an old serpent, & long
practised, and hath increased his subtilty by much approoued experience. He
doth not nowe attempt his wicked worke, but [...] all y^[...] fittest waies
& meanes that hée can: hée doth obserue time & place, with all other
circumstances: and looke of what sort soeuer his worke shalbe, he séeketh
co~uenient persons as matter to work vpon; he chuseth out fit instruments to
worke withall·when he raiseth vp some heresie to destroy y^[...] true faith,
which is with subtill shew to be defended: he suggesteth not the same into the
minde of a blunt vnlearned foole which is able to say litle: but if it be
possible, he espieth out a subtil minde, which is also proud, vaine glorious,
& stiffe to maintain any purpose[.]’[iii]
The idea that the Devil tailors his temptation to
the victim was a common theme, and my own favourite discussion on who the Devil
chooses, and how he them fits his temptation to them, comes from King James VI
& I’s Daemonologie. For King James there were witches who did not
need to be deceived, as they were of the “grosser sorte, [who]runnes
directlie to the Deuill for ambition or desire of gaine”.[iv]
In my thesis I argue that:
King James did not
see this plain and knowing contract as the only way in which people came into
the Devil’s service, also citing two other forms. In some cases ignorant people
could be deceived by the Devil into magical practices, without understanding
that doing so was apostasy and diabolism.[v] And
some learned men were tempted by knowledge into attempting sorcery, believing
that they could control the Devil. In both cases King James emphasised the
Devil’s use of deceit, and his desire to entice both the learned and the
ignorant into the same grave error as the wilful, sinful witch: making a
contract with the Devil that damned their soul.[vi] So
for King James, witches could be divided into the sinfully greedy, the woefully
ignorant, and the learned who, through pride, were deceived by the Devil.
The importance of the Devil’s understanding of
human desires and the human body are central to Hopkins’ work. Therefore I have
always argued that Hopkins’ The discovery of vvitches presents a complex
demonological argument about the corporeality of the Devil, and his interaction
with witches and the bewitched. And though he only cites James VI & I, it
is easy to trace many of his ideas in George Gifford, William Perkins and
Richard Bernard’s seminal demonological texts. Hopkins brief (comparatively it
was extremely short for a treatise on demonology or the account of a
witchfinder) work presents its reader with a mixture of popular beliefs around
familiars, and elite demonology.[vii]
There are several signs in both Hopkins’ and Stearne’s pamphlets that they
consulted with demonological texts, magistrates and others in formulating their
method of finding witches, for example at one point Hopkins claims his methods
in one case were ‘upon
command from the Justice’. [viii]
These links to others place Hopkins and Stearne
firmly within English demonology – not without as claimed by Wallace Notestein.[ix]
At Loughborough I pointed out that Hopkins himself
opened his pamphlet with the injunction from Exodus 22:18 cited by both Gifford
and Richard Bernard: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’, and
likewise follows the paths laid down by earlier demonologists in ascribing to
the Devil only a limited role in God’s work:
‘God
suffers the Devill many times to doe much hurt, and the devill doth play many
times the deluder and impostor with these Witches, in perswading them that they
are the cause of such and such a murder wrought by him with their consents,
when and indeed neither he nor they had any hand in it[.]’
Unlike
John Gaule’s assessment that the witchfinders and those who employed them had
no respect for God’s providence, Hopkins was demonstrating an understanding of
how the world was supposed to work, with the Devil’s ‘power’, such as it was,
primarily lying in deception and illusion. When Hopkins argues that “God
suffers the Devill many times to doe much hurt”, he does not mean physical
hurt, in terms of acts of maleficium or harmful magic, rather he means that the
Devil is allowed to do much hurt to the
witch.
This
idea came to mind when I recently read Verena Thiele’s “Demonising Macbeth” in
Magical Transformations on the Early Modern English Stage (2014), which argues
that the demonic, tangible, transferable evil of the witches is contrasted with
the temporary, localised evil of the human Macbeth who is a ‘bad man’ made
worse by the influence of the witches. As I was reading her work I was struck
by the way in which the three witches seem to do more than represent evil, they
seem to embody the Devil (an inversion of the Holy Trinity?). While Macbeth
himself stands in the place of the early modern witch. Macbeth is a bad man
whose faults are manipulated. But the witches use truths (and half-truths) to
deceive Macbeth, and to engender his ‘fall’.
This
is an idea I am just wandering around the edges of – and I wager there may well
be someone in the vast wealth of Shakespearian literature who has thought of it
before me! Yet it seems to be playing on my mind, and I keep returning to
Macbeth’s terrible declaration in Act V, that nothing can harm him because he
has been told it cannot.
‘Bring
me no more reports; let them fly all:
Till
Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane,
I
cannot taint with fear. What's the boy Malcolm?
Was
he not born of woman? The spirits that
know
All mortal consequences
have pronounced me thus:
'Fear
not, Macbeth; no man that's born of woman
Shall
e'er have power upon thee.'[x]
But
Birnam did come to Dunsinane, and Malcolm was not ‘born of woman’. The witches
(as the Devil) knew how to manipulate Macbeth, knew how he would interpret
their prophecies, and so they used they used truth to deceive him.
For
Hopkins, the Devil used ‘the truth’ of a person’s illness to deceive a witch
into believing she was able to cause physical harm to another human being
through him. Hopkins representation of the Devil’s knowledge and ability to
deceive, and its interaction with the witch’s malice, vanity, and pride, has
become one of the key points I keep in mind when I think about witchcraft in
early modern England.
[iii] George
Gifford, A discourse of the subtill practises of deuilles by vvitches and
sorcerers (1587): p. 32.
[vii] See
Richard Bernard, A guide to grand-iury men, (1627); George Gifford, A discourse of the subtill
practises of deuilles by vvitches and sorcerers; William Perkins, A
Discourse of the damned art of witchcraft, (1610).
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