Even nowadays if such a shade presents itself, a couple of Masses are said for its repose.That the spirits of bad men appear in a dreadful shape, is a matter of course, but along with this we find the notion that the ghosts of the departed are universally malicious.The dead, says the priest in a novel of Bandello, kill the little children.It seems as if a certain shade was here thought of as separate from the soul, since the latter suffers in Purgatory, and when it appears, does nothing but wail and pray.At other times what appears is not the ghost of a man, but of an event - -of a past condition of things.So the neighbors explained the diabolical appearances in the old palace of the Visconti near San Giovanni in Conca, at Milan, since here it was that Bernab Visconti had caused countless victims of his tyranny to be tortured and strangled, and no wonder if there were strange things to be seen.One evening a swarm of poor people with candles in their hands appeared to a dishonest guardian of the poor at Perugia, and danced round about him; a great figure spoke in threatening tones on their behalf, it was St.Alo, the patron saint of the poorhouse.These modes of belief were so much a matter of course that the poets could make use of them as something which every reader would understand.The appearance of the slain Lodovico Pico under the walls of the besieged Mirandola is finely represented by Castiglione.It is true that poetry made the freest use of these conceptions when the poet himself had outgrown them.
Italy, too, shared the belief in demons with the other nations of the Middle Ages.Men were convinced that God sometimes allowed bad spirits of every class to exercise a destructive influence on parts of the world and of human life.The only reservation made was that the man to whom the Evil One came as tempter, could use his free will to resist.
In Italy the demonic influence, especially as shown in natural events, easily assumed a character of poetical greatness.In the night before the great inundation of the Val d'Arno in 1333, a pious hermit above Vallombrosa heard a diabolical tumult in his cell, crossed himself, stepped to the door, and saw a crowd of black and terrible knights gallop by in amour.When conjured to stand, one of them said: 'We go to drown the city of Florence on account of its sins, if God will let us.'
With this, the nearly contemporary vision at Venice (1340) may be compared, out of which a great master of the Venetian school, probably Giorgione, made the marvelous picture of a galley full of daemons, which speeds with the swiftness of a bird over the stormy lagoon to destroy the sinful island-city, till the three saintS, who have stepped unobserved into a poor boatman's skiff, exorcised the fiends and sent them and their vessel to the bottom of the waters.
To this belief the illusion was now added that by means of magical arts it was possible to enter into relations with the evil ones, and use their help to further the purposes of greed, ambition, and sensuality.
Many persons were probably accused of doing so before the time when it was actually attempted by many; but when the so-called magicians and witches began to be burned, the deliberate practice of the black art became more frequent.With the smoke of the fires in which the suspected victims were sacrificed, were spread the narcotic fumes by which numbers of ruined characters were drugged into magic; and with them many calculating impostors became associated.
The primitive and popular form in which the superstition had probably lived on uninterruptedly from the time of the Romans, was the art of the witch_(strege)._The witch, so long as she limited herself to mere divination, might be innocent enough.were it not that the transition from prophecy to active help could easily, though often imperceptibly, be a fatal downward step.She was credited in such a case not only with the power of exciting love or hatred between man and woman, but also with purely destructive and malignant arts, and was especially charged with the sickness of little children, even when the malady obviously came from the neglect and stupidity of the parents.It is still questionable how far she was supposed to act by mere magical ceremonies and formula, or by a conscious alliance with the fiends, apart from the poisons and drugs which she administered with a full knowledge of their effect.
The more innocent form of the superstition, in which the mendicant friar could venture to appear as the competitor of the witch, is shown in the case of the witch of Gaeta whom we read of in Pontano.His traveller Suppatius reaches her dwelling while she is giving audience to a girl and a servingmaid, who come to her with a black hen, nine eggs laid on a Friday, a duck, and some white thread, for it is the third day since the new moon.They are then sent away, and bidden to come again at twilight.It is to be hoped that nothing worse than divination is intended.The mistress of the servant-maid is pregnant by a monk; the girl's lover has proved untrue and has gone into a monastery.The witch complains: 'Since my husband's death I support myself in this way, and should make a good thing of it, since the Gaetan women have plenty of faith, were it not that the monks balk me of my gains by explaining dreams, appeasing the anger of the saints for money, promising husbands to the girls, men-children to the pregnant women, offspring to the barren, and besides all this visiting the women at night when their husbands are away fishing, in accordance with the assignations made in daytime at church.' Suppatius warns her against the envy of the monastery, but she has no fear, since the guardian of it is an old acquaintance of hers.
