The Humbugs of the World, P. T. Barnum [suggested reading .txt] 📗

commonly unclean, homely, vulgar, coarse, and ignorant, and often rummy. Their fee is a quarter or half of a dollar. Sometimes a dollar. Their divination is worked by cutting and dealing cards or studying the palm of your hand. And the things which they tell you are the most silly and shallow babble in the world; a mess of phrases worn out over and over again. Here is a specimen, as gabbled to the customer over a pack of cards laid out on the table; anybody can do the like: “You face a misfortune. I think it will come upon you within three weeks, but it may not. A dark complexioned man faces your life-card. He is plotting against you, and you must beware of him. Your marriage-card faces two young women, one fair and the other dark. One you will have, and the other you will not. I think you will have the fair one. She favors the dark complexioned man, which means trouble. You face money, but you must earn it. There is a good deal, but you may not get much of it” etc., etc. These words are exactly the sort of stuff that is sold by the witches of today. But the greatest witch humbug of all the witchcraft of history, is that of Christendom for about three hundred years, beginning about the time of the discovery of America. To that period belonged the Salem witchcraft of New England, the witch-finding of Matthew Hopkins in Old England, the Scotch witch trials, and the Swedish and German and French witch mania.

The peculiar traits of the witchcraft of this period are among the most mysterious of all humbugs. The most usual points in a case of witchcraft were, that the witch had sold herself to the devil for all eternity, in order to get the power during a few years of earthly life, to inflict a few pains on the persons of those she disliked, or to cause them to lose part of their property. This was almost always the whole story, except the mere details of the witch baptism and witch sabbath, parodies on the ceremonies of the Christian religion. And the mystery is, how anybody could believe that to accomplish such very small results, seldom equal even to the death of an enemy, one would agree to accept eternal damnation in the next world, almost certain poverty, misery, persecution and torment in this, besides having for an amusement performances more dirty, obscene and vulgar than I can even hint at.

But such a belief was universal, and hundreds of the witches themselves confessed as much as I have described, and more, with numerous details, and they were burnt alive for their trouble. The extent of wholesale murdering perpetrated under forms of law, on charges of witchcraft, is astonishing. A magistrate named Remigius, published a book in which he told how much he thought of himself for having condemned and burned nine hundred witches in sixteen years, in Lorraine. And the one thing that he blamed himself for was this: that out of regard for the wishes of a colleague, he had only caused certain children to be whipped naked three times round the market place where their parents had been burned, instead of burning them. At Bamberg, six hundred persons were burned in five years, at Wurzburg nine hundred in two years. Sprenger, a German inquisitor-general, and author of a celebrated book on detecting and punishing witchcraft, called Malleus Maleficarum, or “The Mallet of Malefactors,” burned more than five hundred in one year. In Geneva, five hundred persons were burned during 1515 and 1516. In the district of Como in Italy, a thousand persons were burned as witches in the single year 1524, besides over a hundred a year for several years afterwards. Seventeen thousand persons were executed for witchcraft in Scotland during thirty-nine years, ending with 1603. Forty thousand were executed in England from 1600 to 1680. Bodinus, another of the witch killing judges, gravely announced that there were undoubtedly not less than three hundred thousand witches in France.

The way in which the witch murderers reasoned, and their modes of conducting trials and procuring confessions, were truly infernal. The chief rule was that witchcraft being an “exceptional crime,” no regard need be had to the ordinary forms of justice. All manner of tortures were freely applied to force confessions. In Scotland “the boot” was used, being an iron case in which the legs are locked up to the knees, and an iron wedge then driven in until sometimes the bones were crushed and the marrow spouted out. Pin sticking, drowning, starving, the rack, were too common to need details. Sometimes the prisoner was hung up by the thumbs, and whipped by one person, while another held lighted candles to the feet and other parts of the body. At Arras, while the prisoners were being torn on the rack, the executioner stood by, sword in hand, promising to cut off at once the heads of those who did not confess. At Offenburg, when the prisoners had been tortured until beyond the power of speaking aloud, they silently assented to abominable confessions read to them out of a book. Many were cheated into confession by the promise of pardon and release, and then burned. A poor woman in Germany was tricked by the hangman, who dressed himself up as a devil and went into her cell. Overpowered by pain, fear and superstition, she begged him to help her out; her beseeching was taken for confession, she was burned, and a ballad which treated the trick as a jolly and comical device, was long popular in the country. Several of the judges in witch cases tell us how victims, utterly weary of their tormented lives, confessed whatever was required, merely as the shortest way to death, and an escape out of their misery. All who dared to argue against the current of popular and judicial delusion were