1 - Witchcraft Among the Ancients

Witchcraft has been classed properly as the world's oldest profession. Among the Australian aborigines, who are the earth's most primitive people, the only professional class is the witch doctor, who reputedly can kill victims at a distance or bring back a victim from the brink of death by counteracting the evil efforts of a fellow member of the craft.

Similar powers have been claimed by witches and their kind in every land in every period, and the scope and complexity of the powers of witches have increased as man has attained higher levels of civilization. But the basic pattern is the same and the potential — often solely for evil — is as great whether the practitioner is an ignorant native squatting in the Australian bush or the "god" of a modern witch coven disporting in a luxurious "temple" laden with the smoke of exotic incense and buoyed up by LSD.

Among the services performed by the primitive Australian wizard is that of placing a stone in the fork of a tree to hold up the setting sun long enough for hunters to return home before dark. African witch doctors do exactly the same for a traveler starting out in the morning, prolonging his day, at least in his imagination. Australian witch doctors, working in concert, are said to make or break storms, either bringing rain or diverting damaging winds, as the situation may demand; and the same power was long attributed to English witches, though always with ill intent.

Australian bushmen have even sworn that they have seen those same witch doctors riding the clouds they have summoned, which is not surprising, since European peasants long insisted that they often spotted local witches skimming along the crests of hailstorms and even claimed to have brought some down with gunfire.

While witchcraft was well-known throughout the ancient world, it really hit its stride among the Romans, and it is from their period that much of modern witchery is derived. There are three outstanding reasons for this: First, the Romans inherited a strong brand of witchcraft from the Etruscans, who inhabited Italy before them. Next, the Romans were great borrowers from other religions; whenever they conquered a nation, they felt free to take over its gods as well as its government, and that included witch lore. Finally, as the empire spread, the Romans superimposed their traditions upon those of other lands.

Peculiar to the Romans were the Lares and Penates, household gods that protected hearth and home; though there were Lares and Penates that belonged to the state as well. In addition, the Romans worshipped the Manes, spirits of their ancestors, who supposedly dwelt deep below the earth and emerged through sacred pits on special days. Through witchcraft, the Manes could be raised as ghosts, but they could also appear in dreams to give warnings of their own accord.

Sibyl, the witch of legend who lived to an age of a thousand years, guided the Trojan hero Aeneas to Avernus, as the realm below was called, through a volcanic fissure in the area of Mt. Vesuvius. There Aeneas met heroes of the past and saw those of the future, as yet unborn. It is said that some centuries later that same Sibyl offered nine books of prophecy to King Tarquin at a price that he thought was far too high. So she burned three and offered the remaining six at the same price. When Tarquin again refused, she burned three more and still asked the original price for the last three. Then the king, realizing his mistake, bought the three books, which thereafter were kept in the Temple of Jupiter in Rome and consulted as oracles in times of national emergency. Whenever the Sibylline Books failed to yield an answer, the blame was placed on King Tarquin, for the assumption was that one of the lost books could have provided it. But the Sibyl still ranked high in Roman estimation, even though the books that she allegedly burned could very well have been blanks.

This legend shows how witchcraft was acknowledged and esteemed in ancient Rome. It has been linked with the worship of Diana, the goddess of the moon, but it really belongs to Hecate, who was Diana's antithesis. Whereas Diana danced in the moonlight, Hecate skulked in the dark of the moon. What happened there in the darkness was dastardly, indeed. The Roman poet Horace gives a graphic description of two haggard crones stalking the Esquiline cemetery, gathering ingredients for a witch's brew. That done, they wailed a wild chant to Hecate, followed by the slaughter of a black lamb, whose blood was poured into a pit to invoke departed spirits. As snakes and hell-hounds appeared, one of the witches threw a wax image representing a victim into a blazing fire. As it melted to the accompaniment of hideous howls from fleeting ghosts, so did the life of the intended victim wane.

The witch's brew itself served various purposes, and the more unsavory its contents, the better the results. One such concoction, used for rejuvenation, was attributed to a legendary witch named Medea. It included the dried skin of a water snake, hoar frost gathered by moonlight, the head and wings of an owl, the entrails of a wolf, chunks of tortoise shell, the head and beak of an ancient crow, the liver from a living stag, and other items too unpalatable to mention. Medea stirred the mixture with a dried branch of an olive tree, which promptly bloomed, proving that the potion could restore youth to a human being as well, which it did when properly administered.

Tales of this kind have been cited as evidence that witchcraft cannot be all bad; but more to the point, it cannot be all good, either. From the time of Medea, ancient witches had a way of tricking people into quaffing what they thought was something pleasant, like a love potion, when in fact they had gulped a deadly poison, the slower acting the better, as it gave the witch more time to taunt the dying victim.

A noted authority on Etruscan lore, Charles G. Leland, aptly summed up the subject of witchcraft with the comment, "The farther back we go, the darker and more vindictive it becomes." It is quite easy to trace many seemingly innocent practices of today back to roots of a truly insidious sort. Always, too, there is the prospect of some almost forgotten ancient rite erupting into some modern madness, just as Medea's dried tree branch burst into fruitful bloom.

One striking phase of witchcraft that has been recurrent since antiquity is that of turning human beings into animals or vice versa. The legendary pioneer in that practice was a princess named Circe. Banished to a lonely island for murdering her husband, she sought revenge by transforming visiting navigators into lions, tigers, wolves, and eventually pigs. Some have questioned whether these transformations were actual, or whether they took place only in the minds of the victims or persons who saw them; either way, this could have indicated the use of hypnotic suggestion or the effect of drugs, both of which figured in Roman witchcraft of a later era.

Belief in witchcraft had reached large proportions by the year A.D. 160, when a Roman author named Lucius Apuleius wrapped it all up in a story called The Golden Ass, which was related as a series of personal adventures and readily accepted as fact by the superstitious readers of that period. In the course of his adventures, Apuleius traveled into a region of Greece where witchcraft was notoriously rampant. Stopping at the home of a wealthy man named Milo, he became enamored of Fotis, a serving maid, who confidentially informed him that Milo's wife, Pamphile, was a witch and frequently turned herself into a bird and took off on nocturnal flights to meet with others of her ilk. All agog, Lucius persuaded Fotis to provide him with a hiding place from which he could watch her mistress undergo such a transformation.

Fotis agreed and Lucius watched Pamphile disrobe and cover her body with a special ointment that she took from a jar. As she shook herself, she began to sprout feathers; her nose became a beak, her toes turned into claws, and her arms took on the shape of wings. As she uttered a loud screech, Lucius saw to his amazement that she had changed completely into a huge owl. Moments later, she had flown out the window.

Here the narrator interpolated the touch that made his story seem valid. He felt that either his senses had completely left him, or that he himself was the one who was bewitched — a line of reasoning that was to persist through later centuries, when persons like Pamphile were accused of witchcraft. Whether such transformations were real, or whether they took place only in the minds of the onlookers, the accused would be blamed and forced to take the consequences.

When Lucius "came back to himself," as he aptly put it, he decided to make the only sure test. He persuaded Fotis to bring him the ointment so that he, too, could become an owl and go flying off to learn what was happening in the world of witches. Naturally, he wanted to be sure that he could be transformed back into himself when he returned, and Fotis assured him that such a process would be simple — she would give him a drink of water flavored with laurel leaves, which she always had ready for her mistress when she returned. That was the sure antidote for the charm.

So Lucius shed his clothes and anointed himself lavishly, but when he flapped his arms, hoping to fly, he found that his hands, instead of sprouting feathers from their fingertips, were hardening into a solid mass. His feet and toes were doing the same, his face and jaws were becoming wide and monstrous and his ears long and hairy. When he tried to utter an impressive screech, he brayed instead. Fotis had brought the wrong jar. Lucius had become a donkey.

Though tempted to kick Fotis into oblivion, Lucius restrained himself, since she was his only hope. He listened patiently while she told him that if he ate some rose petals, he would become himself again. Unfortunately, Fotis had neglected to pluck any roses during the day, but she promised to bring some in the morning. So Lucius went to the stable and picked himself a stall for the night, thinking his problems would soon be over.

Instead, they had only begun. During the night, a band of robbers broke into the house, found Milo's treasure chest, and looted it. Their plunder was far more than they could carry, so they loaded the bulk of it on Lucius and another donkey that they found in the stable. Then they headed for the hills. Lucius, the donkey who could do everything but talk, was embarked on a series of frustrating adventures that ended only when he resorted to silent prayer and was fed some roses by a kindly priest of Isis.

The Golden Ass, while replete with satire and ribaldry, still stands as a monumental landmark in the history of witchcraft, because Lucius Apuleius personally learned it the hard way. Born in Africa, he studied law in Rome and religion in Greece, and returned to Libya, where he married a rich widow. Soon her relatives were accusing Apuleius of having used witchcraft to win her love, and of poisoning her son in order to take over her estate.

Apuleius was charged with applying that ancient whammy, the Evil Eye, to several Libyan youths, and brought to trial. But his accusers were able to produce only one victim. Apuleius, acting in his own defence, calmly presented evidence to prove that the boy had been addicted to fits before he had met him. He was also accused of possessing a special image of the sort used in witchcraft, but when he offered it as an exhibit, close examination showed it to be a miniature statue of the god Mercury, whom Apuleius had every right to worship.

In short, the case was virtually laughed out of court, but nobody laughed off witchcraft itself, especially Apuleius. His acquittal was the one-in-a-thousand that pointed to the guilt of the nine hundred and ninety-nine who were not smart enough to keep a jump ahead of their accusers.

One reason why the witches of antiquity frequented cemeteries was because there they could obtain parts of newly buried bodies to use in mixing brews and ointments. It was much better, of course, to get at the bodies before they were buried, but that could be very difficult if close watch was kept over a corpse until the time of its interment. Still, the wily witches found ways to accomplish their gruesome aim.

According to an authoritative account by Apuleius, a young man was once hired to watch over a body during the night. Warned that any witches seeking to dismember it might come and go in the form of animals, birds, or even insects, he was particularly on the lookout for dogs or mice, as they were creatures that would cause the least suspicion, but all he spotted was a small weasel, which he chased away whenever it appeared. Between times, he noted that the corpse was undisturbed, so when people arrived in the morning, he proudly boasted that his vigil had succeeded. But close scrutiny in the daylight showed that the nose, lips and ears had been skillfully severed from the dead face and replaced with replicas made from wax. One or more witches, playing the part of a weasel, had done the ghoulish job piecemeal, covering each step before taking the next.

Such hideous practices are associated with a special breed of ancient witches known as Lamias. Lamia, a legendary queen of Libya, had had her children stolen by the goddess Juno. Thereupon Lamia began to kill other children and so gained the power of perpetual rejuvenation by feasting on human blood. A "Lamia" thus came to mean any witch or demon with similar proclivities, and therefore is generally recognized as the forerunner of the modern vampire.

Whether demon or human, a Lamia used witchcraft to assume a seductive beauty that would lure susceptible youths into her power. Apollonius of Tyana, a philosophical mystic who slightly antedated Lucius Apuleius, was credited with breaking up the wedding of a young man named Menippus and a beautiful woman from Corinth by denouncing the bride-to-be as the Lamia she really was.

That was easy then, and still is, provided you can apply a whammy of your own. Apollonius had the formula. All he had to do was prove that beauty was only skin deep by snatching away the Lamia's mask and revealing either the leering visage of a hellish demon or the haggard countenance of a superannuated witch. Either way, Apollonius could not lose. But still, the Lamia beat him to the punch. She gave a shriek and disappeared intact, along with the sumptuous surroundings of the wedding party that she had provided, including a host of servants as nebulous as herself.

If all these tales read like a flashback to an age of myth and fable, it is. But every item so far mentioned had a deep significance for the future. Some of these ancient practices have continued through until today and may carry over to tomorrow, perhaps even more strongly than before.