Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Amongst the different kinds of devils he enumerates, using names which recall the humorous ones common in the old folk-lore of Germany, are not merely the stupid, the playful, the malicious and the murderous fiends, but also the more sightly ones, viz. the familiar and friendly demons; then again there are the childish little devils who allure to unchastity and so forth though not to unbelief or despair like the more dangerous ones. He is familiar with angelic, shining, white and holy devils, i.e. who pretend to be such, also with black devils and the “supreme majestic devil.” The majestic devil wants to be worshipped like God, and, in this, being “so quick-witted,” he actually succeeded in the ages before Luther’s day, for “the Pope worshipped him.” The devil repaid the Pope by bewitching the world in his favour; he brought him a large following and wrought much harm by means “of lies and magic,” doing on a vast scale what the “witches” do in a smaller way.

  There are further, as Luther jestingly explains, house-devils, Court-devils and church-devils; of these “the last are the worst.” “Boundless is the devils’ power,” he says elsewhere, “and countless their number; nor are they all childish little devils, but great national devils, devils of the sovereigns, devils of the Church, who, with their five thousand years’ experience, have grown very knowing ... in fact, far too cunning for us in these latter days.” “Satan knows his business and no one but Jesus Christ can cope with him.” Very dangerous indeed are the Court-devils, who “never rest,” but “busy themselves at Court, and work all the mischief in the councils of the kings and rulers, thwarting all that is good; for the devil has some fine rakehells at Court.” As for the noisy devils, they had troubled him even in his youth.

  The Papists have their own devils who work supposed miracles on their behalf, for the wonders which occur amongst them at the places of pilgrimage or elsewhere in answer to their prayers are not real miracles but devil’s make-believe. In fact, Satan frequently makes a person appear ill, and, then, by releasing him from the spell, cures him again.

  The above ideas Luther had to a large extent borrowed from the past, indeed we may say that the gist of his fancies concerning the devil was but part of the great legacy of credulity, folk-lore and the mistaken surmises of theologians handed down verbally and in writing from the Middle Ages. Only an age-long accumulation of prejudice, rife particularly among the Saxon people, can explain Luther’s rooted attachment to such a congeries of wild fancies.

  Assisted by the credulity of Melanchthon and other of his associates Luther not only added to the number of such ideas, but, thanks to his gift of vivid portraiture, made them far more strong and life-like than before. Through his widely-read works he introduced them into circles in which they were as yet scarcely known, and, in particular, established them firmly in the Lutheran world for many an age to come.

  The Devil and the Witches

  “It is quite certain,” says Paulus in his recent critical study of the history of witchcraft, “that Luther in his ideas on witchcraft was swayed by mediæval opinion.” “In many directions the innovators in the 16th century shook off the yoke of the Middle Ages; why then did they hold fast to the belief in witches? Why did Luther and many of his followers even outstrip the Middle Ages in the stress they laid on the work of the devil?”

  Paulus here touches upon a question which the Protestant historian, Walter Köhler, had already raised, viz.: “Is it possible to explain the Reformers’ attachment to the belief in witchcraft simply on the score that they received it from the Middle Ages? How did they treat mediæval tradition in other matters? Why then was their attitude different here?”

  G. Steinhausen, in his “Geschichte der deutschen Kultur,” writes: “No one ever insisted more strongly than Luther on his role [the devil’s]; he was simply carried away by the idea.... Though in his words and the stories he tells of the devil he speaks the language of the populace, yet the way in which he weaves diabolical combats and temptations into man’s whole life is both new and unfortunate. Every misfortune, war and tempest, every sickness, plague, crime and deformity emanates from the Evil One.”

  Some of what Luther borrowed from the beliefs of his own day goes back to pre-Christian times. The belief in witches comprised much heathen tradition too deeply rooted for the early missionaries to eradicate. Moreover, certain statements of olden ecclesiastical writers incautiously exploited enabled even the false notions of the ancient Græco-Roman world to become also current. Fear of hidden, dangerous forces, indiscriminating repetition of alleged incidents from the unseen, the ill-advised discussions of certain theologians and thoughtless sermons of popular orators, all these causes and others contributed to produce the crass belief in witches as it existed even before Luther’s day at the close of the Middle Ages, and such as we find it, for instance, in the sermons of Geiler von Kaysersberg.

  The famous Strasburg preacher not only accepted it as an undoubted fact, that witches were able with the devil’s help to do all kinds of astounding deeds, but he also takes for granted the possibility of their making occasional aerial trips, though it is true he dismisses the nocturnal excursions of the women with Diana, Venus and Herodias as mere diabolical delusion. He himself never formally demanded the death-penalty for witches, but it may be inferred that he quite countenanced the severe treatment advocated in the “Witches’ Hammer.” In his remarks on witches he follows partly Martin Plantsch, the Tübingen priest and University professor, partly, and still more closely, the “Formicarius” of the learned Dominican Johannes Nider (1380-1438).

  Concerning the witches and their ways Luther’s works contain an extraordinary wealth of information.

  In the sermons he delivered on the Ten Commandments as early as 1516 and 1517, and which, in 1518, he published in book form, he took over an abundance of superstition from the beliefs current amongst the people, and from such writers as Geiler. In 1518 and 1519 were published no less than five editions in Latin of the sermons on the Decalogue; the book was frequently reprinted separately and soon made its appearance in Latin in some collections of Luther’s writings; later on it figures in the complete Latin editions of his works; six German editions of it had appeared up to 1520 and it is also comprised in the German collections of his works. In his old age, when the “evils of sorcery seemed to be gaining ground anew,” he deemed it “necessary,” as he said, “to bring out the book once more with his own hand”; certain tales, amongst which he instances one concerning the devil’s cats and a young man, might serve to demonstrate “the power and malice of Satan” to all the world. One cannot but regard it as a mistake on Luther’s part, when, in his sermons on the Ten Commandments, he takes his hearers and readers into the details of the magic and work of the witches, though at the same time emphasising very strongly the unlawfulness of holding any communication with Satan. This stricture tells, however, as much against many a Catholic writer of that day.

  It is in his commentary on the 1st Commandment that he gives us a first glimpse into the world of witches which later was to engross his attention even more.

  He is anxious to bring home to the “weaklings” how one can sin against the 1st Commandment. He therefore enumerates all the darkest deeds of human superstition; of their reality he was firmly convinced, and only seldom does he speak merely of their “possibility,” or say, “it is believed” that this or that took place. He also divides into groups the people who sin against the virtue of Divine love, doing so according to their age, and somewhat on the lines of a Catechism, in order that “the facts may be more easily borne in mind.”

  “The third group,” he says, “is that of the old women, etc.” “By their magic they are able to bring on blindness, cause sickness, kill, etc.” “Some of them have their fireside devil who comes several times a day.” “There are incubi and succubi amongst the devils,” who commit lewdness with witches and others. Devil-strumpetry and ordinary harlotry are amongst the sins of these women. Luther also speaks of magic potions, desecration of the sacrament i
n the devil’s honour, and secret incantations productive of the most marvellous effects.

  His opinion he sums up as follows: “What the devil himself is unable to do, that he does by means of old hags”; “he is a powerful god of this world”; “the devil has great power through the sorceresses.” He prefers thus to make use of the female sex because, “it comes natural to them ever since the time of Mother Eve to let themselves be duped and fooled.” “It is as a rule a woman’s way to be timid and afraid of everything, hence they practise so much magic and superstition, the one teaching the other.” Even in Paradise, so he says, the devil approached the woman rather than the man, she being the weaker.

  It is worthy of note that he does not merely base his belief in witchcraft on the traditions of the past but preferably on Scripture directly, and the power of Satan to which it bears witness.

  In 1519 he had attempted to prove on St. Paul’s authority against the many who refused to believe in such things, that sorcery can cause harm, omitting, however, to make the necessary distinctions. In 1538 he declares: “The devil is a great and powerful enemy. Verily I believe, that, unless children were baptised at an early age no congregations could be formed; for adults, who know the power of Satan, would not submit to be baptised so as to avoid undertaking the baptismal vows by which they renounce Satan.”

  In the Commentary on Galatians he not merely appeals anew to the apostolic authority in support of his doctrine concerning the devil, but also directly bases his belief in witchcraft on the principle, that it is plain that Satan “rules and governs the whole world,” that we are but guests in the world, of which the devil is prince and god and controls everything by which we live: food, drink, clothing, air, etc. By means of sorcery he is able to strangle and slay us; through the agency of his whores and sorceresses, the witches, he is able to hurt the little children, with palpitations, blindness, etc. “Nay, he is able to steal a child and lay himself in the cradle in its stead, for I myself have heard of such a child in Saxony whom five women were not able to supply with sufficient milk to quiet it; and there are many such instances to be met with.”

  The numerous other instances of harm wrought by witches with which he is acquainted, such as the raising of storms, thefts of milk, eggs and butter, the laying of snares to entrap men, tears of blood that flow from the eyes, lizards cast up from the stomach, etc., all recede into the background in comparison with the harlotry, substitution of children, etc., which the devil carries out with the witches’ help. “It is quite possible that, as the story goes, the Evil Spirit can carnally know the sorceresses, get them with child and cause all manner of mischief.” Changeling children of the sort are nothing but a “lump of flesh without a soul”; the devil is the soul, as Luther says elsewhere, for which reason he declared, in 1541, such children should simply be drowned; he recalls how he had already given this advice in one such case at Dessau, viz. that such a child, then twelve years of age, should be smothered.

  It sometimes happens, so he says, that animals, cats for instance, intent on doing harm, are wounded and that afterwards the witches are found to have wounds in the same part of the body. In such case the animals were all sham. A mouse trying to steal milk is hurt somewhere, and the next day the witch comes and begs for oil for the wound which she has in the very same place. If milk and butter are placed on coals the devil, he says, will be obliged to call up the witches who did the mischief. “It is also said that people who eat butter that has been bewitched, eat nothing but mud.”

  In such metamorphoses into animals it was not, however, the witches who underwent the change, nor were the animals really hurt, but it was “the devil who transformed himself into the animal” which was only apparently wounded; afterwards, however, “he imprints the marks of the wounds on the women so as to make them believe they had taken part in the occurrence.” At any rate this is the curiously involved explanation he once gives of the difficult problem.

  In some passages he, like others too, is reluctant to accept the theory that afterwards grew so prevalent, particularly during the witch persecutions in the 17th century, viz. that the witches were in the habit of flying through the air. In 1540 he says that this, like the changes mentioned above, was merely conjured up before the mind by the devil, and was thus a delusion of the senses and a Satanic deception. Yet in 1538 he assumes that it was in Satan’s power to carry those who had surrendered themselves to him bodily through the air; he had heard of one instance where even repentance and confession could not save such a man, when at the point of death, from being carried off by the devil. At an earlier date he had spoken without any hesitation of the witches who ride “on goats and broom-sticks and travel on mantles.”

  The witches are the most credulous and docile tools of the devil; they are his hand and foot for the harm of mankind. They are “devil’s own whores who give themselves up to Satan and with whom he holds fleshly intercourse.”

  “Such persons ought to be hurried to justice (‘supplicia’). The lawyers want too much evidence, they despise these open and flagrant proofs.” When questioned on the rack they answer nothing, “they are dumb, they despise punishment, the devil will not let them speak. Such deeds are, however, evidence enough, and for the sake of frightening others they ought to be made an example.”

  “Show them no mercy!” so he has it on another occasion. “I would burn them myself, as we read in the Law [of Moses] that the priests led the way in stoning the evildoer.” And yet here all the ado was simply about ... a theft of milk! But sorcery as such was regarded by him as “lèse majesté” [against God], as a rebellion, a crime whereby the Divine Majesty is insulted in the worst possible of ways. “Hence it is rightly punished by bodily pains and death.” He first expresses himself in favour of the death-penalty in a sermon in 1526, and to this point of view he adhered to the end.

  Luther’s words and his views on witches generally became immensely popular. The invitation to persecute the witches was read in the German Table-Talk compiled by Aurifaber and published at Eisleben in 1566. It reappeared, together with the rest of the contents, in the two reprints published at Frankfurt in 1567, also in the new edition which Aurifaber himself undertook in 1568, as well as in the Frankfurt and Eisleben editions of 1569. Not only were the people exhorted to persecute the witches, but, intermixed with the other matter, we find all sorts of queer witch-stories just of the type to call up innumerable imitations. He relates, for instance, the experiences of his own mother with a neighbour who was a “sorceress,” who used to “shoot at her children so that they screamed themselves to death”; also the tale told him by Spalatin, in 1538, of a little maid at Altenburg over whom a spell had been cast by a witch and who “shed tears of blood.”

  The demonological literature which soon assumed huge proportions and of which by far the greater part emanated from the pen of Protestant writers, appealed constantly to Luther, and reproduced his theories and stories, and likewise his demands that measures should be taken for the punishment of the witches. It may suffice to draw attention to the curious book entitled “Pythonissa, i.e. twenty-eight sermons on witches and ghosts,” by the preacher Bernard Waldschmidt of Frankfurt. He demonstrates from Luther’s Table-Talk that the devil was able to assume all kinds of shapes, for instance, of “cats, goats, foxes, hares, etc.,” just as he had appeared at Wittenberg in Luther’s presence, first as Christ, and then as a serpent.

  Many Lutheran preachers and religious writers were accustomed to remind the people not only of the tales in the Table-Talk, but also of what was contained in the early exposition of the Ten Commandments, in the Prayer-book of 1522 and in the Church-postils, Commentary on Galatians, etc. Books of instances such as those of Andreas Hondorf in 1568 and Wolfgang Büttner in 1576 made these things widely known. David Meder, Lutheran preacher at Nebra in Thuringia, in his “Eight witch-sermons” (1605), referred in the first sermon to the Table-Talk, also to Luther’s exposition of the Decalogue, to his Commentary on Genesis and his work �
�Von den Conciliis und Kirchen.” Bernard Albrecht, the Augsburg preacher, in his work on witches, 1628, G. A. Scribonius, J. C. Gödelmann and N. Gryse all did the same.

  In what esteem Luther’s sayings were held by the Protestant lawyers is plain from certain memoranda of the eminent Frankfurt man of law, Johann Fischart, dating from 1564 and 1567. Fischart was against the “Witches’ Hammer” and the other Catholic productions of an earlier day, such as Nider’s “Formicarius,” yet he expresses himself in favour of the burning of witches and appeals on this point to Luther and his interpretation of Holy Scripture.

  Holy Scripture and Luther were as a rule appealed to by the witch-zealots on the Protestant side, as is proved by the writings of Abraham Saur (1582) and Jakob Gräter (1589), of the preacher Nicholas Lotichius and Nicholas Krug (1567), of Frederick Balduin of Wittenberg (1628) — whose statements were accepted by the famous Saxon criminalogist Benedict Carpzov, who signed countless death sentences against witches — and by J. Volkmar Bechmann, the opponent of the Jesuit Frederick von Spee. We may pass over the many other names cited by N. Paulus with careful references to the writings in question.

  It must be pointed out, however, that an increase in the severity of the penal laws against witches is first noticeable in the Saxon Electorate in 1572, when it was decreed that they should be burnt at the stake, even though they had done no harm to anyone, on account of their wicked compact with the devil. As early as 1540, at a time when elsewhere in Germany the execution of witches was of rare occurrence, four persons were burnt at Wittenberg on June 29 as witches or wizards. Shortly before this Luther had lamented that the plague of witches was again on the increase.

  Even the Catholic clergy occasionally quoted Luther’s statements on witches, as given in his widely read Table-Talk; thus, for instance, Reinhard Lutz in his “True Tidings of the godless Witches” (1571). This writing, at the very beginning and again at the end, contains a passage from the Table-Talk dealing with witches, devils’ children, incubi and succubi; on the other hand, it fails to refer either to the “Witches’ Hammer” of 1487 or to the Bull, “Summis desiderantes,” of Innocent VIII (1484).