Of all the books in Signor Bernoni's valuable collection of the folk-lore, popular beliefs, and songs of the Venetian people, perhaps the most interesting is Le Strighe, The Witches, which contains the traditions of witchcraft and legends of witches which are still current in Venice. It is strange that in these days of students of folk-lore and comparative culture it should have escaped notice. The fact that it is written in dialect is not a sufficient explanation, for Venetian can be mastered without much difficulty by any one who has some small knowledge of Italian. However, no English writer has as yet given Signor Bernoni's little book the attention which it deserves. Therefore a short analysis of its contents may not be amiss.

Since the chief interest in the study of modern superstitions depends not so much upon their intrinsic qualities as upon their relation to earlier faiths, it will be better to begin here with a few general words about the European doctrine of witchcraft and a more careful examination of its Venetian development, of which these old women's tales and gossipings are the survivals.

There were two principal causes for the startling progress of the witch belief throughout Europe during the fourteenth century, and its supremacy during the next two hundred years. One was the weariness of the people of a temporal slavery, which they were not yet strong enough to defy openly, and which in consequence drove them to rebel in secret. By an occasional wild outburst, during which they broke all social and religious bonds, they hoped to relieve their pent-up feelings. The other and more important cause was the spiritual reign of terror inaugurated about the same period, when Satan, or

the chief power of evil, was made the central figure of religious thought, heretical as well as orthodox. As the stern, sorrowing Christ, instead of the gentle, merciful Good Shepherd, became the Christian's ideal of a divine Saviour, so a well-nigh omnipotent Satan, forever sowing seeds of temptation and reaping rich harvests of souls, succeeded the earlier weaker devil, who had been easily repelled with a few drops of holy water or the sign of the cross. It is true he could still be conquered by the use of proper weapons, but his defeats were now more than outbalanced by his victories. This change was brought about in a great measure by the increase of heresy, which led the church to look upon the independence and so-called blasphemies of heretics as the work of the devil, while heretics in their turn referred the corrupt doctrines and practices of the church to the same source. The new creed of fear was, moreover, strengthened by the physical misfortunes

greatest of which was the black death

which desolated Europe during the Middle Ages. When everything was ascribed to spiritual causes, it was but natural that plagues and pestilences were supposed to emanate either from God, in his indignation at man's new allegiance to Satan, or else from the arch-enemy himself.

Now both these causes of the evil were to be found in Venice, though the black art, with its attendant horrors, is not readily associated with the city whose very name, like that of her great painters, has come to be suggestive of color and sensuousness. Just as, when the sun or the moon shines on her palaces and waters, even the possibility of gray days or of black nights in Venice is forgotten, so the records of her feastings and follies make it seem as if the

ues, but those of saints, on the pillars carried home as trophies. It was a Doge who cared to chronicle the fact that, in the days when Venice still had her fields where sheep could graze and vines where birds could sing, Christ and his mother and angels and saints came to tell the bishop where to erect temples in their honor. The curious contrast between this piety and the Venetian spiritual independence was never more strikingly demonstrated than during the Fourth Crusade, when the Doge, Henry Dandolo, in direct opposition to papal decrees, made the capture and surrender to him of a Christian town the condition of his transporting the impecunious Crusaders across the sea to the Holy Land; and then, after having thus forced them to defy the Pope, inauguerated his expedition by elaborate ceremonial in St. Mark's. It was truly with the Venetians as they themselves said: "Siamo Veneziane, poi Christiani," We are first Venetians, and then Christians. But though they gave it this secondary rank, their religious belief was sound enough to keep them from heresy, even in ages when men were beginning to make public profession of infidelity and skepticism. Satau had not yet shaken their faith. But if they looked beyond their own territory, they saw him almost everywhere triumphant. The wolf had robbed near shepherds of their folds; was there not, therefore, daily danger of his coming down upon theirs? His success abroad made them doubly watchful at home, and thus, though they were firm in their resistance to him, the sense of his presence became greater, the fear of his power increased. The physical cause for this fear was as strong here as elsewhere: Venice lost three fourths of her inhabitants by the black death, and, probably because of her constant communication with the East, was ravaged by the plague again and again. This, be it remembered, was the evil declared by modern students of VOL. LVIII. NO. 348.

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witchcraft to have given the chief impetus to its rapid progress in the fourteenth century.

The knowledge of these facts in the history of Venice, together with some small understanding of the raison d'être of the witch belief in Europe during the period already mentioned, would make the existence of so-called witches in the Venetian dominions in the past a certainty, were there no records to prove it. But there are such records. Even before the Ecclesiastical Inquisition was introduced in Venice, and long before there was mention of heresy as a crime, the Doge Tiepolo, in 1232, in a proclamation providing punishment for various offenses, included sorcery in the number. This shows that already in the thirteenth century, when hitherto free Venetians were slowly realizing their new position, as ciphers in the state, an outlet was needed for silenced discontent. More definite laws were passed when the Inquisition was finally set up in Venice, and a special clause set forth the power of the religious tribunal over sorcerers and witches. There were executions, too, in the days when Inquisitors were so afraid lest the devil should lay waste the whole earth that in Germany and Italy alone thirty thousand men and women, whom he had seduced to sorcery, were burnt, thus purifying the world. One of the liveliest battlegrounds between the followers of Satan and the clergy was not very far from Venice. When the witch mania was at its height in Northern Italy, about the beginning of the sixteenth century, it was against Verona especially that the Pope found it necessary to direct his spiritual thunderbolts. The fever, raging on every side, made its way to the Venetian dominions; and about the same time, in 1518, the renewed zeal of the judges of the Holy Office was rewarded by the discovery of such a formidable number of witches that the people who were not yet accused,

but who did not know when their hour might come, rebelled and appealed to the supreme power of State. Indeed, so indignant were they that the Council could scarcely pacify them with a decree forbidding the sentences of the Inquisitors to be carried out. They could not forget that they were Venetians first, and then Christians; and this was the reason there were never any Torquemadas or Boguets in Venice. Though the Inquisition obtained a foothold in the republic, its power there from the first was weakened by the Venetian doctrine of state and church. Side by side with its own judges sat the secular judges appointed by the Council. It could try prisoners before its tribunal for heresy, but for nothing else. Not even the richest or the lowest Jew from the Ghetto could be claimed as its prey. The witch who had abused the sacraments and holy things of the church could be brought before it; but for her other evil deeds for the murder and illness and madness wrought by her cursed charms—she was responsible only to the secular powers. Even when she was found guilty of the one crime it was allowed to condemn, the sacred court, in passing sentence upon her, could not touch her worldly possessions. According to the treaty made with the Pope, the wealth or property of the condemned fell to lawful temporal heirs. Venetians concluded, not unreasonably, that the latter ran no more risk from the taint of witchcraft attached to their inheritance than did the clergy or the church. There was consequently less fear of unprincipled Inquisitors in the republic than there was in France or Spain. When their profits were all spiritual, their ardor cooled. Thus it happened, as the inevitable result of the people's attitude in religious matters, that while in Venice there were representatives of the vast sisterhood which extended from the Blockula of Sweden to the walnuttree of Benevento, sorcery there never

became the terrible scourge that it was in other lands, where its victims at times threatened to outnumber those of the black death.

That popular outcry in 1518 was the last heard. Not because Venetians now grew submissive, but because even the limited power of the Inquisitors was gradually lessening. The reaction that was to result in removing witchcraft from the sphere of philosophy to that of old women's gossip set in here a little earlier than in other parts of Europe; indeed, long before the fever reached its crisis in England. This change in the Christian world, as has been explained by Mr. Lecky, was due, not to laxity on the part of the church, or to powerful proofs of the innocence of the accused, but to the development of the spirit of rationalism, which made the wisdom of one generation seem folly to the next. If in France, where witchcraft attained its strongest ascendency, the denunciations of a Boguet and the arguments of a Bodin could be succeeded by the skepticism of a Montaigne, it does not appear strange that in the more liberal Venetian republic belief in sorcery, after having been held by grave dignitaries of state, should have speedily degenerated into a mere superstition of the people. A few traditions and legends are the only traces of the old witch-faith of Venice, just as her crumbling palaces, with their dishonored halls and faded tapestries, and the catalogued and ticketed curiosities in museums are all that remain of her glory.

This is why these stories collected by Signor Bernoni are of great interest. Childish as they are, they can still show what were the essential elements of Venetian witchcraft in the days when the power of a witch seemed no less a reality than that of the Ten. In all important characteristics it does not appear to have differed from the witchcraft of other Christian lands. There is more than a little truth in the Italian say

ing, Tutto il mondo e paese, - all the world is one country. Uniform action must be the outcome of uniform causes. The same leading factors which had produced the witches of Lothian and Warboys in Great Britain, and those of Labourd in France, had been at work in Venice. Hence much the same results had ensued. The Venetian witch would have been quite at home in the little church of North Berwick or in the old ruined castle of Saint Pré, just as Mephistopheles was at the classical classical Walpurgis night. For, like Agnes Sampsonn and her honest women, and Gratiane and her followers, she had sold herself to the devil, body and soul, and in return had received certain favors. Like them, and indeed like all her sisters from north to south, it was, and if these legends are to be believed still is, her habit to fly by night to uncanny revels, to brew magic potions and work subtle spells, to send storms and rule the winds, to strike men and beasts with noxious diseases and with death. She too had her Hecate or dame, the mistress of her charms, and her bad days and her seasons set apart for evil.

"Pióva e sol

Le Strighe va in amor,
Pióva e vento

Le Strighe va in spavento,"

is a little rhyme which means, according to Signor Bernoni's informers, that when it rains and the sun shines witches are friendly; but when it rains and the wind blows, then are they in a great fright and very violent, and to be avoided. While all the year round Wednesdays and Fridays are most propitious for their evil purposes, there is one month, October, in which every day is of equal value to them, so that it is called el mese de le strighe, the month of witches. But Christmas Eve is the night for general meetings, when, by those three magic words known only to the sisterhood, new witches are made, just as the four principal festivals of the

year were for the witches of Labourd. By consecrating the sacred days of the church to their witchcraft, almost all witches have shown their contempt for the Lord. On the whole, there has not been more originality in the wickedness of the worshipers of Satan than in the holiness of the saints.

But though this similarity exists in general characteristics, in minor details there is contrast enough between the witches of different countries. A creed which is radically the same in two places will in each be influenced in its form or expression by immediate surroundings. Mephistopheles, be it remembered, for a little while felt himself strange and disconcerted on the Pharsalian Fields. While these minor differences are less important in studying witchcraft as a whole, they are the most noteworthy in considering its manifestations in any one province or among any one people. Therefore the most interesting of the Venetian witch stories are those which have received so much local color that they are recognized at once to belong necessarily to Venice. The very source of witch-life may be said to have been the Sabbat. It was in attending it that witches always paid allegiance to their master, held their unholy rites, and derived power for future mischiefs. As participation in its ceremonies was their chief duty, or, in the eyes of Inquisitors, crime, so accounts of it were made the leading theme in witch records, until the places where it was held and the manner of traveling to it became as generally known as the shrines of the church and the mode of pilgrimage to them. Indeed, to-day the Brocken and the walnut-tree of Benevento are as famous as the house of Loretto or the tomb of St. Thomas; the broomstick and the sieve, as the pilgrim's cockle, hat, and shoon. Fortunately, it is upon this very point that the Venetian stories manifest decided individuality. The witches of Venice have a Brocken of