[margin: a: Code, title/rubric On Malefactors and Mathematicians. (b) Extra, On Frigidity and Harmful Magic. (c) Remigius, Daemonolatria, book 1, chapter 8, and book 2, chapters 8 and 9]
I do not dispute whether it exists; I assume it. Those who deny it are condemned by Sacred Scripture, by the sanctions of both laws, by historians, by poets, by common consensus, and by the memory of all ages. No kind of magic pleases the evil demon more, because, as Synesius says, the calamities of mortals are the banquets of evil demons. But we take the name of harmful magic not for damage, or for any sin whatsoever, but for an effective magical and superstitious sign. The one who uses it is a worker of harmful magic; the one who is injured is one harmed by magic.
It can be described thus: harmful magic is a species of magic by which someone, with a demon’s aid, prepares harm for another. I said a species of magic so that I may confine the breadth of the word to harms of this sort. I added with a demon’s aid; for if pact and compact with a demon are absent, the matter has no relevance to this treatment, no more than homicide accomplished by the sword, the rape of a virgin, theft, or robbery.
Harmful magic can be divided with respect to its end, or with respect to its efficient cause. By efficient cause I do not here mean God permitting, nor the demon carrying it out, nor the wicked free will of the worker of harmful magic consenting and cooperating. For these three always concur in every act of harmful magic. Not even a hair can fall from the head without God’s permission; nor can a demon inflict more harm than God permits, nor does he wish to carry out what is permitted unless the worker of harmful magic consents to the harm. This the demon plainly does by a sacrilegious imitation of God Most Good and Great, who, in order to confer salvation through the ministry of the sacraments, requires the will of the minister.
That this intention of harmful magic is required is taught by the fact that we see the touch or powders of witches harm only those whom they wished to harm, as Nicolas Remigius has confirmed by many examples. And indeed it is certain that such compositions do not flow from natural poisons. But I call efficient causes the instruments and material of harming, which concur immediately in injury. Efficient means of this kind are various.
- First, they harm by certain tiny powders, infused into food or drink, rubbed on the naked body, or sprinkled on garments. Of these, those which kill are black; those which only bring disease are ash-colored, or sometimes reddish. Conversely, the powder by which they remove the evil and make medicine is for the most part white. Yet that force does not emanate from the color of the powder or its other qualities, but depends wholly on the pact entered into with the demon. The colors serve only to declare the good faith of the agreements, and so that the witches are not deceived about what, as they say, is to be given for what. This is gathered from the fact that sometimes the white color which makes medicine for one person is lethal in the possession of another witch, and the ash-colored powder with one woman brings diseases, with another death; indeed, with one and the same witch it at one time brings death and at another heals from disease, according as it pleases the demon to change the sign. I would think that Simon Magus infected foods with powders of this kind, according to Anastasius.
[margin: a: For examples of these, seek Nicolas Remigius, book 1, chapter 2, and book 2, chapters 7 and 8. (b) See Remigius, the cited work, chapter 8]
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They perpetrate harmful magic by herbs, straws, and other trifles of that sort thrown on the ground; when those persons pass over them whom the evil woman has wished to harm, they are a very certain cause of sickness or death.
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They use white or somewhat reddish ointments, like bitumen, in which mixed-in specks of metal shine, and at the same time yellowish and whitish drops. If you cast this ointment into fire, it produces a flash, crackling, and stench to which no other thing is similar. Some women always keep their hands smeared with this, lest any occasion of harming be lost. It is lethal if by stroking they touch even the outer garments.
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They infect by mere bodily presence or by breath. Thus they are wont to be the cause of women in childbirth miscarrying, with the greatest danger to life, as Nicolas Remigius, Sprenger, and Loyherius prove by examples; and Psellus long ago taught that demons can do this in his book on demons.
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They inflict very grave harms by words alone. Hence Lucan:
The mind, polluted by no corruption of swallowed poison, Perishes when enchanted.
[margin: a: See Remigius, book 1, chapter 3. (b) Book 2, chapter 7; Sprenger, in the Malleus; Loyherius, book 2, On Spectres, chapter 5. (c) Lucan, book 6; Virgil, Georgics 3; Naso, Metamorphoses 9; Seneca, Medea]
Virgil:
And they mixed herbs and words not harmless.
Clearly because the demon taught it. Hence Ovid calls them Hecatean:
At once the infamous ingredients with dreadful juices She crushes, and when they are ground she mixes Hecatean chants.
Seneca, after enumerating Medea’s many poisons:
[margin: a: Remigius teaches this, book 3, chapter 3. (b) See Remigius, the cited work, chapter 7]
She adds to the poisons words no less to be feared than those.
And what is astonishing, sometimes they harm by threats alone, or by rebuke; indeed even by praise. This was believed not only by the Gentiles, who used to bind baccar around the forehead to meet this evil, but it has also been proved by the experience of our own age. I too acknowledge this; but I add that all these things are accomplished not by the virtue of the words, but by the work of the devil concurring at the sign.
- Nor do they spare sacred things. For instance, one touched an aspergillum with powders, and, sprinkling another woman in this way with blessed water, destroyed the wretched woman, as Remigius reports.
Finally, certain women act more openly: they arrange for someone to be strangled or thrown headlong by a demon, or they suffocate little boys at night by throwing a cushion over them, or they kill by a needle fixed behind the ear, as that Helvetian midwife did in Sprenger; or they snatch infants from cradles and tear them apart, or use them for the making of ointments, as I taught elsewhere, or as food most pleasing to themselves. Hence the old glossary, under “strigae,” gives the gloss “Laestrygonians,” saying that the word is drawn from the Laestrygonians, the man-eaters in Homer’s Odyssey. So too we read that the Euchites and Gnostics, who used magic, were infamous for infanticides; from them the nations derived this calumny against Catholics. Sometimes they instill something violent or poisonous into little children, whence they die either at once or are consumed little by little. Sometimes also they suck out their blood. Hence arose the old opinion concerning Fresea or the little Strix bird, about which Q. Serenus says:
Moreover, if perchance the dark Strix presses little boys, Sucking poison-bearing breasts with protruding lips.
And another opinion is supported by Ovid in these words:
By night they fly, and seek boys lacking a nurse, And they injure bodies snatched from their cradles. They are said to tear nursing bodies with their beaks, And they have a throat full of drunk blood.
Festus Pompeius also mentions it. Such was that Gelo, if she was not a deceptive illusion, who tried in vain to bring death on Maurice in his swaddling-clothes; Nicephorus records this in book eighteen of the History, chapter 9. In Panama of Peru, many strigae were found who sucked the blood of little infants, Peter Ghieza reports in Description of India, part 2, chapter 196. This kind was not unknown to the Hebrews and the old Latins: to the former under the name Lilith, to the latter under the name Lamia. Besides what I have said, other things brought forward by Sebastian Michael in the Pneumalogy prove this. He observes that these are mostly Nashim, that is, women, as Helias says in Tisbi; that Lilith is derived from the word Lail, which signifies night, because they are accustomed to rage by night with that demon; likewise that such women are called by the Hebrews mothers of demons, because they worship, cherish, and have demons obedient to them. When the elders of the synagogue were once asked how it happened that very many boys not yet eight days old, that is, before circumcision, were found killed, they answered that they were killed by Lilith, that is, by Lamiae. Today they especially lie in wait for infants not yet baptized.
Helias likewise testifies that Hebrew women, since they are extremely superstitious and given to sorceries, use a certain superstition against this plague. They boast that they learned it from Lilith herself, that is, the foremost of certain strigae: they write certain characters and names in the corners of bedrooms. Nor were the Greeks ignorant of these women. For Duris, in the second book of Libyan Matters, testifies that the name of the Lamiae was derived from a certain woman whose name was Lamia. Driven mad with jealousy because her husband was devoted to a wicked adulteress, had even taken up an adulterine child, and pursued it with great care, she killed that little child herself, and thereafter as many others as she could seize.
The ancient Lamiae were usually seen to offer their breasts to little infants, as if about to nurse them, and thus to restrain their crying. For this is what Sacred Scripture alluded to when it said, “The Lamiae have uncovered their breasts”; and what Serenus said, “to put poison-bearing breasts to nursing children”; and what Ovid said, “to seek infants lacking a nurse.” Thus, then, they used to feign nourishment, and meanwhile truly suck out the wretched little infants. Today they do not so much pretend to be nurses as, in the appearance of wild beasts, invade the unguarded and sleeping, suck out life with the blood, or destroy them with wasting poison.
[margin: Unkeyed marginal note: Lamentations 4; Isaiah 34]
There remains the other division, taken from the end. According to this, all harmful magic is either sleep-inducing, love-producing, or hostile.