Malevolent Magic and "The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft"

In a recent post (link) it was shown that of the 876 Scottish Witchcraft cases for which there is data characterizing the accusations, at least 21% of these cases involved some kind of benevolent magic. (To look at this data directly for yourself, see the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft website, the complete citation for which appears at the bottom of this post.)

Now here's an interesting question: in how many of these same 876 cases were people explicitly accused of malevolent magic? Fortunately, maleficium is one of the main "characterizations" used by the researchers at the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft to categorize the cases in their database.

The answer to this particular $64K question is that a grand total of 414 cases involved accusations of maleficium. This means that of all the 3,413 (or so) documented Witchcraft trials in Scotland only 12% are known to have involved explicit accusations of harmful magic. Just to explain (especially for anyone who has been following these posts on Scottish Witchcraft trials closely) 12% is what you get using the same "logic" that the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft applied to their "analysis" of beneficial magic. That is, 12% is the percentage of all cases in the database, not just those cases where we actually have some information about the nature of the charges. (The "grand total" figure of 3,413 is the number of records returned for a search with all of the filters set to "any".)

But if instead of 3,414, we use the total of 876, based on the (much more reasonable, if I do say so myself) methodology that I suggeted in that previous post, to estimate the frequency with which any given "characterization" occurs (that is, only counting those cases for which sufficient information is present to say something meaningful about such "characterizations"), we still end up with the result that less than half, only 47% (about what Mitt Romney got in the last election), of all Witchcraft cases involved explicit accusations of using magic to cause harm.

Could it be that the folks at the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft are using the Latin term maleficium in some very special way that doesn't include all cases of accusations of harmful magic? I have to wonder, because it is widely assumed among scholars of historical Witchcraft that accusations of maleficium were the norm, even the defining feature, of Witchcraft accusations generally. But there is no entry for maleficium in their glossary, nor is there any explanation of the term in the paper "Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database Documentation and Description" (where one can find an explanation of their use of the term "white magic", which is also missing from the glossary). However, if we make a very quick and dirty search of the writings of lead researcher Julian Goodare, we immediately find two places where he defines maleficium as either "the use of magic to harm one's neighbors", or, more elaborately, as pertaining to cases in which "it was claimed that witches had inflicted harm by supernatural, i.e., diabolical, means." (See, The Scottish Witch-Hunts in Context, page 161 and 179.) So, no, it does not appear that there is any terminological anomaly here. So the 414 cases in the database that are characterized as involving "malefecium" are the only cases for which there is real evidence of an accused Witch who was explicitly accused of using magic to cause harm to others.

Why, then, do so many scholars not only implicitly assume but explicitly assert that maleficium is the essential defining feature of historical Witchcraft? The list of respected academics who have promoted this unfounded view includes some rather well known names in addition to Julian Goodare's, for example: Wolfgang Behringer, Owen Davies, Jacqueline Simpson, Steve Roud, and Ronald Hutton. Hutton has even gone so far as to concoct what he calls a "global definition of witchcraft", which elevates this false equation of Witchcraft with maleficium to the level of metaphysics. Clearly it is high time for scholars of historical Witchcraft to take a much closer look at the hard data concerning both malevolent and benevolent magic.

[Full citation for The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft: Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller and Louise Yeoman, 'The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft', http://www.shca.ed.ac.uk/witches/ (archived January 2003, accessed March 2013).]

Julian Goodare Contradicts His Own Data on Witches and Healers

The following is presented not because it is breaking news, but precisely because it is old news. Very old. And stale to boot. There is, sadly, nothing the least bit original or surprising about yet another pontificating academic spreading misinformation about Paganism and Witchcraft in the name of "debunking some myths".

Which brings us to a 2010 Guardian article, The truth about witches and witch-hunters, by the distinguished researcher Julian Goodare (Reader in History at Edinburgh University). In that article, Goodare posed the question: "So what about the 'wise women', the midwives and healers?" To which he provides the following answer:

In fact, midwives were hardly ever accused of witchcraft. Traditional, magical healers (men as often as women) were sometimes prosecuted, but only if they were seen to have misused their powers, harming instead of helping. Healers sometimes even encouraged witch-hunting, helping clients to identify the person who had bewitched them.

Unfortunately for Professor Goodare, his own data flatly contradicts what he has written. According to the information publicly available at the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft website (for which Goodare was the lead researcher), folk healers were actually quite a frequent target of Witchcraft accusations. In those cases where we have some information concerning the specifics of the charges and who the charges were against, almost 1/5 of the accused Witches were folk healers (and it is more than one out of five if we include midwives and practitioners of "white magic"). And half of the known cases involving folk healers did not involve any accusation of using magic to cause harm. Here are the numbers:

876 cases with information about the charges against the individual
141 cases of accusations against folk healers (21%)
74 of the cases against folk healers also involved maleficium (52 %)

For a little more background on where these numbers come from, along with some brief analysis, see this previous post: Benevolent Magic and "The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft."

Also par for the course is the fact that Goodare not only misrepresents the numbers themselves, but he fantastically oversells the quality of the existing data concerning historical Witchcraft. His own website makes it clear that in the large majority (nearly 3/4) of the Witchcraft trials for which we have any records at all there is no real information about what people were actually charged with. Obviously (or at least one would hope it should be obvious) when such basic information is missing one cannot determine, one way or the other, anything about whether such cases involved folk-healing, midwifery, or anything else. But Goodare ignores such concerns and defies the most basic principles of logical reasoning by assuming that cases in which there is no evidence of what Witches were accused of doing can be cited as positive evidence of what Witches were not accused of doing.

You see, simply being named in a Witchcraft accusation (and, as a matter of fact, in a great many cases even the names are missing!) could mean any of a dizzying variety of things. It could mean that one of your neighbors claimed to have seen you literally flying through the air riding on a broomstick. Or it could mean that you were implicated in a plot to poison the King. Or it could mean that you were suspected of using incantations to cure a sick child. Or it could mean that you were accused of helping a neighbor retrieve stolen goods, or of giving your neighbor's cow the evil eye, or of casting a horoscope, or of formally renouncing your Christian baptism. And so forth.

But, to repeat myself, when we do have information about what people were actually charged with, these cases frequently involved folk healing (and this frequency increases the more categories of benevolent magic we add in). And when folk healing, or some other form of benevolent magic, was involved in Witchcraft prosecutions, this did not automatically mean that there was also an accusation of maleficium, even though Goodare, who would know better if he looked more closely at his own data (but I assume that is what graduate students are for?) misrepresents that this was the case. 

Whatever criticisms I may have of Goodare, however, are to a great extent mitigated by the important work he has done in making so much data on the Scottish Witchcraft trials readily available to the public. But when Goodare goes out of his way to contradict that very data, well, he really should be called on it.

[Here is the complete citation of the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, taken from their "how to cite us" page: Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller and Louise Yeoman, 'The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft', http://www.shca.ed.ac.uk/witches/ (archived January 2003, accessed March 2013).]

Benevolent Magic and "The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft"

.

[This post discusses the extraordinarily informative website The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft. Here is how they like to be cited: Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller and Louise Yeoman, 'The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft', http://www.shca.ed.ac.uk/witches/ (archived January 2003, accessed March 2013).]

Over at the "The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft" website, one can read the following, on the page "Introduction to Scottish Witchcraft":

"Q. Were the witches midwives or healers?
A. Not usually. We have recorded 9 individuals whose occupation was recorded as being a midwife, and for 10 people midwifery practices were included as part of the accusations of witchcraft levelled against them. This is a tiny percentage of the overall total. Folk healing was more common and featured in the witchcraft accusations of 141 people—about 4%. Even so, it was not something that the typical witch seems to have engaged in—though the beliefs that underpinned folk healing were closely related to witchcraft beliefs. If magic could be used to heal, it could also be used to harm."

On the face of it this seems very straightforward. A simple matter of arithmetic. But if we drill down a little into the database itself, the picture quickly become more interesting.

"Folk healing" and "midwifery" are two of the sixteen different categories that the researchers at the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft call "characterizations". Here are all sixteen in descending order (according to how many cases were found to possess the particular "characterization" in question): 

1. Implicated by another Witch 948
2. Demonic 528
3. Maleficium 414
4. Folk Healing 141
5. Neighborhood dispute 120
6. Fairies 113
7. Unorthodox religious practice 85
8. Demonic Possession 79
9. White magic 70
10. Property Motive 62
11. Political motive 52
12. Consulting 46
13. Other/Unknown 23 
14. Treason  19
15. Refused charity to economic dependent 19
16. Midwifery 10

Right off the bat one can see a major problem, for there is no way that these numbers add up to 3,413, which (apparently) is the total number of cases that was used to arrive at the "about 4%" figure, which in turn was used to justify the claim that magical healing was not something that the "typical" Scottish Witch was involved with. The disparity is even greater when we realize that there is a great deal of overlap due to the fact that many trials involved two or more of the sixteen "characterizations".

Let me put that another way, before getting into the gruesome details: the percentage given ("about 4%") is artificially small because the total number of cases used to calculate the percentage is greatly exaggerated. The total is exaggerated because it is mostly (see below) made up of cases for which we have no idea what the accused Witches in question were actually accused of. It is highly misleading to include those cases in which we have no information of any kind about what the accused person actually did, as if these cases represented positive evidence of what accused Witches did not do.

In fact, it turns out that less than half (1,511) of all the surviving trial records in the database have any information that allows for assigning any of the sixteen categories to them. This is easily verified by going to the "Search the database" page, then selecting "Search for cases of witchcraft by date and characterisation" link. Once there you go to the "characterization" table and select everything except for "any" (that particular selection is fairly misleading, for it does not mean "any characterization" but, rather "any case, regardless of whether or not it has any characterization assigned to it"), and then over to the right be sure to select the "Any selected option (OR)" button. This means you are selecting every case for which at least one of the sixteen different "characterizations" has been assigned. Then you click the 'Search Cases" button and, voila, a list of all cases matching that search appears, with the total number of cases helpfully appearing at the top of the list.

But it gets even worse, because almost half of these 1,511 cases, in turn, have "implicated by another Witch" as the only "characterization" that has been applied to the case, and this obviously has no bearing on what the accused Witch was actually accused of doing (or wasn't accused of doing). And so if we now eliminate those trials for which the only characterization was that it involved "implication by another Witch", which, to repeat, tells us nothing about what the accused Witch was actually accused of, there are only 876 cases left. Here is a brief summary:

3,413 cases total (the number of cases returned with all filters set to "any")
1,511 cases with enough information for one or more "characterization"
876 cases with any "characterization" other than "implicated by another Witch"

This suddenly increases by fourfold (up to 16%) the percentage of Witches involved in folk healing, if we limit ourselves, as we should, to only those cases where we have some factual, documented basis for saying whether or not the accused were involved in such practices.

But there is also another category that demands our attention: "white magic," which is category #9 in the full list of all sixteen "characterizations" listed above. For some reason, the term "white magic" isn't included in the (otherwise) very helpful glossary at the site, but it is discussed in the paper "Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database Documentation and Description," where one reads that "white magic" encompasses a variety of activities including astrology, love magic, and finding lost goods. The grand total of cases involving either "folk healing", "midwifery", or "white magic" brings us up to 181 cases, which is 21% of all cases for which such information is available.

In other words, the answer to the question "were Witches midwives or healers?" is a simple "yes". This becomes even more the case if we further include other documented cases of beneficial magic ("white magic") along with "folk healing" and "midwifery". And on top of all that we must add the fact that Witches who practiced healing and other forms of beneficial magic tend to be systematically underrepresented in the trial records, because they were less likely to have charges brought against them .

The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft is an extraordinarily informative website. It is a shame that it is to some extent marred by such an egregious misrepresentation of the very data that it provides. The relationship between beneficial magic and Witchcraft is now a very "hot topic" in the scholarly study of historical Witchcraft. Unfortunately, a few scholars involved in this field appear to have an agenda that impels them to exaggerate the malefic characterizations of Witches and Witchcraft, while either denying outright, or systematically trying to diminish the clearly documented historical relationship between Witches and beneficial magic. Because certain widely respected scholars are now very aggressively promoting such an agenda, it is possible even for unbiased researchers, let alone the "lay" public at large, to unintentionally become convinced of (and even complicit in the spread of) crude misrepresentations of historical Witches.

Witchcraft and Benevolent Magic in Finland

Below are three excerpts from the writings of Raisa Maria Toivo on Witchcraft in Finland. The first two are from her book Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society: Finland and the Wider European Experience (Ashgate 2008), and the third is from her article Marking (dis)order: witchcraft and the symbolics of hierarchy in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century Finland, which is the first chapter of the anthology Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe, edited by Owen Davies and Willem De Blécourt (Manchester, 2004).

excerpt 1

Benevolence or malevolence was a relative quality, begging the definition of good and bad and from whose side is that determined. Rather a lot of benevolent magic consisted of ensuring healthier and more productive cattle, better fishing luck, more butter and beer and so on, but the rest of the villagers present this magic as theft; 'milk thieves' were commonly spoken of. Curing illnesses was often seen as transferring it to someone--or something--else. Exposing thieves and so forth might well be less than righteous and good when a petty thief--as despised and dishonest as they were--was uncovered through deadly accidents. Most often maleficium and vikdskepelse were confused in courts. Moreover, there is not, in the Finnish material, any way to distinguish between witches who performed malevolent witchcraft and those who performed different kinds of benevolent magic: they are the same people, even when semi-professional, and charges were often mixed in the same trials.
[pp. 41-2 in Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society: Finland and the Wider European Experience]

excerpt 2
The question of witchcraft and power must not be asked on the basis of a benevolent/malevolent distinction. In most cases of good magic, one could ask whom it was good for: if a thief was caught by making him mad, was it good? Moreover, most witches in the Finnish material as well as elsewhere seem to have performed both kinds of magic; good and bad, causing and curing illness, procruring cattle luck and stealing it, as all Agata's trials [referring to multiple legal proceedings involving Agata Pekantyär during the 1670s and 1680s] show. The witnesses in all Agata's witchcraft trials recounted both benevolent and harmful magic, and the same is true of Risto Olavinpoinka, the semi-professional witch who was the Sawo household's favorite son-in-law's father. It is also true of many other witches from the 1660s onwards--before that, benevolent magic was rarely prosecuted in secular courts.

The tasks of good and bad witches were not clearly defined, and, like most Europeans, Finns, too, believed that witches, saints and in general people who could make bad things good, cure illnesses or improve bad luck could also cause the same things. The line between good and bad magic seems an arbitrary one, imposed from outside by contemporary elites and later historians. Moreover, harmful as well as benevolent magic may command a certain amount of respect, if it is thought of as an ability to influence things which others cannot, a knowledge which others do not have.
[p. 131 in Witchcraft and Gender in Early Modern Society: Finland and the Wider European Experience]

excerpt 3
[T]he story of a widow called Agata Pekantyär is very instructive. Agata worked a sizeable farm in Ulvila. Like most of those accused of witchcraft and vidskepelse [benevolent magic], but contrary to some modern popular beliefs, she was neihter old nor poor. She was linked to some of the cases already described. She appeared as a witness in the aforementioned case of defamation, for example, and the aunt of the man supposedly killed by Heikki Yrjönpoika Janckari and Risto Olavipoinka had previously accused Agata of vidskepelse. The web of accusations and counter-accusations at this period obviously trapped a significant portion of the parish. Agata found herself prosecuted for 'benevolent' magic in 1675 and 1676, and on both occasions she was merely sentenced to pay fines. Ten years later she was accused of flying to Blåkulla, a famous witches' meeting place where extraordinary sabbaths occurred, and also charged once again for benevolent magic. The jury considered the accusation concerning Agata's flight to Blåkulla less than reliable, and it was remarked that the witness who made the allegation was prone to drinking too much. Some of the other accusations took a little longer to refute, but refuted they were and she was finally acquitted. At the end of the 1690s a fourth accusation about her activities was aired but never came to court, although the rumour was mentioned in a separate trial to clear the reputation of another alleged witch.
[p. 11 in Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe]

"All agreed that it was Witchcraft." (A case of beneficent Witchcraft in Sweden)

The following passage is from Magic, Body and the Self in Eighteenth-Century Sweden by Jaqueline Van Gent (Brill, 2009), chapter five, "The Ambiguity of Magic."
http://books.google.com/books?id=xqAcJ3KiRv4C

In 1709, when Anna Thoresdotter and her daughter, Kierstin, had to defend themselves against the accusation of theft and the use of superstition, they stated very clearly their ideas about the meaning of their special powers:

the widow Anna Thoresdottir [said that she] had neither learned nor used any superstition at any time, but admitted that all she could do was to bless pain [Signa Wred] which she does not regard as a damned or sinful, but rather as a useful art, in which she uses the following word or blessing over folk and animals: 'Jesus stroked over a joint, so badly did his horse hurt its foot that Jesus dismounted [from the horse]." In this way she blessed the painful [wredna] blood in Jesus' blessed name.

This blessing Anna Thorseottir occasionally used, with success, and she did not believe that she had committed any sin, for goo and pious words were used.

In contrast, the local court regarded Anna's magical healing practices as sinful. For her misuse of Jesus' name, her Christian faith was further questioned in subsequent interrogations. To Anna, however, there was no contradiction between her blessing of people and animals, and her Christianity. Instead, she represented herself as being in the succession of Christ, emphasizing repeatedly that Jesus himself, 'when he was in flesh on earth', had sued these words.

In the course of Anna Thoresdottir's trial, other witnesses from her local community accused her directly and indirectly of witchcraft. Although nobody interpreted her magical practices as sin or blashpemy, all agreed that it was witchcraft.
[p. 159]

.

"England is indeed the one country outside Italy to display the most obvious similarities with Venice as far as witchcraft practices are concerned." (from Ruth Martin)

Below are some selected passages from Ruth Martin's book, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice, 1550-1650, (Blackwell, 1989). These quotes from Ruth Martin's book all appeared in an earlier post in this blog: "A Different World"? (Ronald Hutton's Recantations, Part Deux) :
 

"[t]here is clear evidence of a great deal of interpenetration of 'popular' and 'learned' beliefs throughout this period ... but the actual mingling of these two strands, if they ever were entirely separate, seems to have taken place earlier [that is, prior to 1550] ...."
[p. 225]

"Until more work is done on Venetian social history as a whole it will be hard to draw ... conclusions .... Even so, it seems that witchcraft of one type or another held an interest for people from all levels of society .... Womens' social standing ranged from the gentildonne who would often consult witches or even try the experiments themselves, through wives of retailers and craftsmen, to washerwomen, arsenal workers (making sails or ropes), the wives of boatmen, prostitutes, to some with no visible means of income at all. Witchcraft had in fact become the main craft of many, hence their titles: la Pirotta, la Caballada, l'Astrologo and la medegha."
[p. 234]

"There was also a close degree of contact between the different classes of Venetian society. The rich and poor lived side by side and the flow of ideas and beliefs between them must have been considerable. As we have seen, the distinction between the 'learned' and the 'popular' elements of witchcraft beliefs in Venice was not always easy to define. This distinction has perhaps been overemphasized in the past in any case. Christina Larner's recent work on Scottish witchcraft, for instance, has revealed a considerable degree of interpenetration between the so-called learned and popular beliefs. In Venice this sharing of beliefs by popular and learned elements of society was even closer."
[p. 243]

"It is clear that Venetian witchcraft was by no means unique. Each category of witchcraft in Venice ... paralleled what is known to have existed elsewhere in Europe during the period and, no doubt, outside this period as well ....

"Necromancy, or the practice of the learned tradition of magic, was current throughout a great part of Europe, and certainly throughout Italy during this period. Some records still survive for the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition which contain copies of certain processi, usually just the sentence and/or abjuration, which were forwarded to Rome from all over Italy. Necromantic exploits feature prominently in these records. The sentence of the 1580 Vicentine trial against Antonio de Franci, for instance, refers to the work of Pietro d'Abbano and to the Clavicula Salomonis being used used in the celebration of a mass as part of a love magic ceremony. There is little doubt that these and other books of magic like them circulated widely in Europe during this period as did the corrupted versions of traditions evident in many of the conjurations and divinatory experiments seen in Venice.

"At a different level of society other forms of witchcraft also were all part of what was presumably a Europen-wide system of popular beliefs. Mary O'Neil describes the same experiments, with some local modifications, being practiced in Modena. The Udine records, and those in Trinity College, Dublin, covering the whole of Italy contain references to similar practices. Indeed, whenever the available records provide us with a glimpse into traditional beliefs and activities, for instance those of the so-called 'cunning folk' in England, we see time and time again what were basically the same types of witchcraft as those observed in Venice.

"England is indeed the one country outside Italy to display the most obvious similarities with Venice as far as witchcraft practices are concerned .... [T]he nature of the records in each area enables us to see beyond the large trails, the epidemics of witch-hunting, to the day-to-day beliefs and attitudes of the population as a whole .... The Venetian records provide us ... with a detailed picture of a way of life ... [W]hat Venice shows us was, broadly speaking, the picture throughout most of Europe."
[pp. 239-241]

How to Distinguish "Witchcraft" From "Maleficium" (with a little help from Jonathan Seitz)

From: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, by Jonathan Seitz (Cambridge, 2011)
http://books.google.com/books?id=zWSx4FVsYxUC

"In practice, most of the terms and categories the historical actors used when discussing crimes of magic were remarkably unstable, elastic, and imprecise. Just as the Venetian Inquisition's charge of 'Lutheranism' embraced all manner of Protestantism, so the tribunal's (Latin) charge of sortilegium usually signified magical divination, but it also applied to other categories of misconduct, such as the practicing of harmful magic, otherwise termed maleficium. In Italian, magical acts could be termed variously as magia (magic generally), fatture (usually malevolent magic), erbere (literally herbal magic, but also used to denote divination or witchcraft more broadly), stregheria (witchcraft generally), maleficio (harmful magic), or divinazione or sortilegio (divination). Someone who engaged in any of these activities could be called a strega (female) or stregone (male) or an erbera, a term that was sometimes applied to female healers as well. A Venetian suffering from a magical attack might be called guasto (literally 'broken' or 'spoiled'), ammaliato, fatturato, maleficiato, or stregato.

"To impose some order on these overlapping, shifting terms, I will use the term maleficio to mean harmful magic causing illness or injury, and "witchcraft" to encompass practices--performed predominantly by women in the lower orders of Venetian society--of divination, maleficio, love magic, and the like. Such activities were usually free of the theoretical underpinnings of natural magic practiced predominantly by high-class males. The term 'magic' will stand in as an umbrella for all of these practices, while 'bewitched' and 'sickened' will be used to translate the various terms describing the victims of a magical attack."
[p. 12]

To summarize: "Witchcraft" (or, in Italian, Stregheria or Erbere) can refer to any number of beneficial magical practices, including herbal medicine (and other healing arts), divination, and love magic. Those who are expert in these arts can be called many things, including Witch (or in Italian Strega or Erbera). Those who claim that Witches are hated, malevolent workers of malefic magic are either unfamiliar with the truth, or knowingly distort it.

And now for a few links:

• A review of Seitz' book by Thomas Deutscher at H-Net:
  http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=35798
• Raven Grimassi on Italian Folk Magic and Witchcraft:
  http://www.ravengrimassi.net/FolkView.htm
• Max Dashu on "The Politics of Witchcraft Studies":
  http://www.suppressedhistories.net/secrethistory/witchpolitics.html
• Sally Scully on "Marriage or a career? Witchcraft as an alternative in seventeenth-century Venice":
  http://www.stregheria.com/Witchcraft-Venice.htm

Of White Witches, Rattlesnakes, David Hume, and Jean Jacques Rousseau (1807)

And now for something completely different, here's an excerpt from An account of the life and writings of David Hume, by Thomas Edward Ritchie, first published in 1807 (http://books.google.com/books/about/An_account_of_the_life_and_writings_of_D.html?id=fjQIAAAAQAAJ). (The backstory on this is long, and deep, and totally fascinating, btw.):

The following jeu-d'esprit, which was printed in some of the periodicals of the day, is really a pretty accurate abridgment of Rousseau's paper. It has the appearance of having been written by a Scottish lawyer : —

Heads of an Indictment laid by J. J. Rousseau, philosopher, against D. Hume, Esq.

1. That the said David Hume, to the great scandal of philosophy, and not having the fitness of things before his eyes, did concert a plan with Mess. Tronchin, Voltaire, and D'Alembert, to ruin the said J. J. Rousseau for ever, by bringing him over to England, and there settling him to his heart's content.

2. That the said David Hume did, with a malicious and traitor- ous intent, procure, or cause to be procured, by himself, or somebody else, one pension of the yearly value of £100 or thereabouts, to be paid to the said J. J. Rousseau, on account of his being a philoso- pher, either privately or publicly, as to him the said J. J. Rousseau should seem meet.

3. That the said David Hume did, one night after he left Paris, put the said J. J. Rousseau in bodily fear, by talking in his sleep ; although the said J. J. Rousseau doth not know whether the said David Hume was really asleep, or whether he shammed Abraham, or what he meant.

4. That, at another time, as the said David Hume and the said J.J. Rousseau were sitting opposite each other by the fire-side in London, he the said David Hume did look at him, the said J.J. Rousseau, in a manner of which it is difficult to give any idea; that he the said J.J. Rousseau, to get rid of the embarrassment he was under, endeavored to look full at him, the said David Hume, in return, to try if he could not stare him out of countenance; but in fixing his eyes against his, the said David Hume's, he felt the most inexpressible terror, and was obliged to turn them away, insomuch that the said J.J. Rousseau doth in his heart think and believe, as much as he believes anything, that he the said David Hume is a certain composition of a white-witch and a rattle-snake.

5. That the said David Hume on the same evening, after politely returning the embraces of him, the said J. J. Rousseau, and gently tapping him on the back, did repeat several times, in a good-natured easy tone, the words, Why what my dear Sir ! Nay my dear Sir! Oh my dear Sir!— From whence the said J. J. Rousseau doth conclude, as he thinks upon solid and sufficient grounds, that he the said David Hume is a traitor ; albeit he, the said J. J. Rousseau, doth acknowledge, that the physiognomy of the good David is that of an honest man, all but those terrible eyes of his, which he must have borrowed ; but he the said J. J. Rousseau vows to God he cannot conceive from whom or what.

6. That the said David Hume hath more inquisitiveness about him than becometh a philosopher, and did never let flip an opportunity of being alone with the govemante of him the said J. J. Rousseau......

.

"The White-Witch is presently sent for to bless.": John Brinley on White Witches (1680)

Here are two quotes from John Brinley's relatively minor and reputedly unoriginal book on Witchcraft, first published in 1680: The Discovery of the Impostures of Witches and Astrologers:


1. Quoted in The Lancashire Witches, Robert Poole, chapter seven: "Beyond Pendle".
(http://books.google.com/books?id=YOCioQDsM3oC)

"These are such as we usually call White Witches, a sort of Sots who being Gull'd and having their understanding Dabauch'd by Superstition, do evil that good may come of it, that is use Charms, Spells and Incantations (all of which are of no force without the Cooperation of the Devil) to remove Distempters, and do certain Feats in some measure useful to mankind yet of pernicious consequences to themselves."

2. Quoted in Notes and Queries, November 2, 1878, p. 342
(http://books.google.com/books?id=zsrfAAAAMAA)

"The ignorant multitude in all Misfortunes, Crosses and Afflictions, forthwith make their Applications to them as most readily help. If a man be sick, where shall he have his Physick but from one that fetches it from behind the Curtain? If he lie under any Misfortune he presently betakes himself to some Fortune-teller or Conjurer. If the Cattel be sick, the White-Witch is presently sent for to bless."