We children roamed over the fields and meadows and sometimes discovered little rabbits in hollows, where they would duck down and remain completely still. Our mother had forbidden us to touch, let alone to pick them up, because then the rabbits’ parents would abandon them.
That spring was wonderful, especially for us children, as the weather at the end of March was dry and continuously sunny.
Then it rained no more. From the middle of April it remained dry, the sun already burned hotly, and we could notice concern beginning to show in the grown-ups’ faces. Still the crops grew, as there was enough water in the ground.
In May, as it had still not rained, the fresh leaves began to hang limply, and less water flowed in the streams of Wittenberg, which turned into stinking rivulets, and in June one could already see the bottom of some of the wells in the city, so little water had they. It had now been three months without rain, and the roads were dusty. Wearily, because the horses could get barely any fresh feed on the way, the carters brought their wares to the city.
The grass and the feed withered throughout the entire empire, travelers told us, and the wells and fountains dried up. The people whispered that in Schönebeck near Magdeburg, the hunger stone protruded far out of the water. Tradition has it that whenever the hunger stone, a rock in the middle of the Elbe, begins to appear, hard times threaten.
The council ordered that the fire barrels be kept full with water from the Elbe, since through the heat all kinds of fires flared up. Some believed that Hans Kohlhase had returned and was responsible, although the council confirmed and had it published on posters that in Berlin in March he had been broken on the wheel and slowly but reliably put to death.
In August it was clear to all people that there would be a terrible crop failure. The farmers slaughtered their animals, also the milk cows, because there was no more feed. The first hay cut was soon used up so that one knew that by winter there would be little or no feed remaining.
The number of beggars multiplied while the community chests emptied.
The people prayed more and more urgently, beat their breasts, ran to the churches, and cried to God, and many believed, secretly, the Rain Goddess had fallen asleep and must be awakened by a pure virgin. Johannes Bugenhagen, who had recently returned from Denmark, Magister Melanchthon, and my father raged against such superstition.
Many old people seemed to wither and die. We children no longer ran free during the day but rather stayed in the cellar of the monastery, where it was still cool.
Our mother had had the foresight to have the well in the monastery dug very deep so that we suffered no shortage of water. The Wittenbergers came daily to us, the maids with the wooden buckets, to fetch water. But this was just a drop on a hot stone, and the people despaired and began to accuse the weathermakers and demand their punishment so that Satan would lose his servants. I’ll record more about that later.
Now, as we children also started to despair, although in the early morning cool we splashed in the Elbe and could even walk through it, our elector had to threaten the traders with punishment if they continued to keep back field crops in order to raise prices. And just as people began to believe God had completely abandoned them, He repented and let it rain, as He had with Job.
There were meanwhile many deaths, mainly old people and children who could not bear the heat as the others, and for them God’s repentance came too late. Today I wonder that He had no pity for them, also not His Son together with the Holy Ghost, when even the people felt sorrow as under the eyes of the mother a child was buried in a grave or in the pestpit, which was used for all kinds of dead, pest dead, English sweat dead, and hunger dead.
I have never forgotten the day as dark clouds rose up in the sky and the first drops fell. It is raining, said the people. It is raining, shouted the children, and ran out into the streets, where soon the first muddy puddles began to form.
It rained without interruption for fourteen days, the water in the fountains rose, the streams in Wittenberg filled up, the Elbe flowed full again, and the hunger stone at Schönebeck disappeared in the water. There grew once more grass for feed, and the winter grain could be sowed and would be fruitful, so that all hoped that the shortages in winter and the coming year would not be too great.
The people were cheerful now and believed that God Himself had tired of the plagues, because one can imagine that it also takes labor to be always thinking of new torments, which at the end are regretted.
Chapter 10
. . . will discuss the belief in witchcraft and sorcery, as I promised above, and how my father in a Christian manner damned the witches and sorcerers and what consequences this will perhaps have for him.
In AD 1540, as we and the entire empire were dominated by terrible heat and drought (which I have already described), the maids, the servants, and the students living with us in the Black Monastery whispered of a forthcoming public event on the 29th of June, which they under no circumstances wanted to miss. They begged Mother for a few hours off work so that with all Wittenberg they might enjoy the event. We children found out that on that day the weathermaker Prista Frühbottin together with her helpers, her son Dictus and the two knacker servants, Clemen Ziesigk and Caspar Schiele, would be smoked and roasted for two days and so be brought to death, which undoubtedly gave them enough time for prayers to obtain their peace of mind and the fire enough time to develop its purifying force.
We children were not supposed to watch, but I stole out of the house and followed the students to the marketplace, where I hid behind a cart. Later I learned the weathermaker and her helpers had been driven to their execution in this same cart.
They had already been fettered and forged to stakes, and so that they would not quickly die, they had been placed on wooden platforms. One could see they had spent a long time under the torturers’ hands, and apparently it was not worth the trouble to set their dislocated shoulder joints, which in other cases the torturers were very skilled in. Now they sat on their wooden seats, a small fire burning under them, and their legs were already covered with red and bursting bubbles. All four groaned and cried pitifully, which the people seemed to like, the louder the groaning, the more joyful the exclamations of the audience. One woman shouted especially loud: “The witch has poisoned our pasture!”
I discovered among those watching the son of our burgomaster, Lucas from Kronach, called Lucas Cranach the Younger, pen and sketchbook in hand.
As I write this, there lies before me a picture that brings back to me the horrific memories that haunt me at night like a succubus. It was carved in wood by Master Lucas the Younger and was at the time widely viewed by the people, who would tear it out of each other’s hands in order to greedily stare at it.
Under the picture Master Cranach had printed his observations and remarks, because picture and words together create a greater impact and deterrence. Perhaps he also wanted clear Christian justification for what drove his father and the Wittenberg town council, which his father presided over as burgomaster, to this cruel act.
The rulers or authorities are to be feared not by those who do good but rather those who do evil. Because they do not carry the sword in vain. They are God’s servants and avengers against those who do evil. They wanted these four people who are seen in this picture to be justified and purified by fire on the day of Peter and Paul in Wittenberg for many and varied misdeeds. It is so that an old widow, over fifty years old, and her son, who had succumbed to the Devil, but especially the woman, had courted the Devil and had committed sorcery for several years, created and halted storms, made poisonous powders to the damage of many poor people, taught her craft to others, poisoned pastures and thus killed uncounted numbers of livestock of oxen, cows, pigs, etc., which they afterwards flayed to sell the skins just to satisfy their black-hearted and desperate avarice with the little money they could expect. This drawing was done solely to create disgust among the people against all those who do as the witch did, among them beggars, h
angmen, knackers, also shepherds and others moving about the land. And any government should take diligent care to protect poor people from harm. May God the Almighty take care of all Christian hearts from the Devil’s wiles and temptations. Amen.
The people had fear and called on the authorities, placed there by God, to put an end to the evil doings of the witches. Christian charity, it seems to me, fled from the human hearts not only of the simple people but also from those highly spiritual persons like Father, Magister Melanchthon, the Cranachs, and many others, and natural God-given compassion was not to be found.
I saw how these people smoked and shriveled so wretchedly over the hot bricks and fire, how they cried to God and Jesus Christ and not to Satan for help, protesting their innocence, though under torture they had admitted their bond to Satan, and the old woman her amours and her fornication with the Devil. God—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—are omnipresent, but here their presence seems to have been very cloudy.
I suddenly felt very sick. Then I fell and only awoke at home as my mother rubbed me with water and vinegar. She scolded me mildly since I became feverish and lay abed day and night with dreams.
Father, because of his travel to Eisennach und his visit to Weimar on the 29th of June, Peter and Paul’s Day, could not take part in the justification of the witch and her disciples through torture and fire but admonished his church later in the following words:
With respect to the sorcerers, I urged you the other day that you say prayers against them, because they have not desisted from us. They have the power of Satan against us, with which to shame us, as befell Job. If he is allowed to spite us here in Wittenberg, we want to pray to spite him. In addition, I urge you not to think that all your misery and all your hardship originate from sorcery.
Often God Himself reprimands His people. But it is easy to recognize the sorcerer’s evil actions from those which are God-sent. The sorcerers let bones, hair, gadgets, and other items flow from the pus, as I have seen myself with the wife of the Baron von Mansfeld. These sicknesses cannot be healed through human medicines; the more they are treated, the more violently they rage. Therefore, pray against the sorcerers that they are discovered and have their reward from the torturer.
Father had without a doubt known about the special cruelty of the execution—the damned were not smothered in smoke nor mercifully strangled but rather burned very slowly—but said nothing of it, perhaps because his attention at the time was on more important things than the agonizing death of four children of God, namely, the problem that threatened the Reformation of the church, which was the bigamous marriage of the landgrave Philipp of Hesse, one of the strongest supporters of the Reformation.
As for Father’s observation concerning diseases, in which gadgets, etc., flow from the pus, I will not disagree with him but only say that in my medical activity over many years, when I oversaw the barber-surgeons in the puncturing of the boils, never did I see anything similar flow from the festering part of the body.
My father had never made a secret of his hostility to witches and sorcerers; however, sometimes, for a few, he had made a call for clemency or forgiveness. This was used against him by the zealous Papists and other enemies. They claimed he did not persistently enough fulminate against witches and therefore rendered them encouragement. At the same time, they claimed Dr. Luther had, with his usurped authority, all the more spread an excessive belief in witches among the people.
This the old believers led back to his own origin, in which they would have us believe that his mother had intercourse with the Devil, who as a beautiful youth in red clothes often came to the door and spoke to her in a seductive, dark voice, wanting to induce her, after Easter, to receive a wealthy merchant. Thereafter, the changeling Martin was born, and she then quickly married Hans Luder. (Have I mentioned in my memoir that this was the spelling of my father’s name when he was young? Only after AD 1512 did he spell his name “Luther,” which he derived from the Greek word eleutheros, meaning “free.”)
Father came to speak about the story and its illogic: “One calls me a changeling and a bath maid’s son. But a man cannot be these at the same time, because one is a changeling, the other is a natural child.”
Naturally, my grandfather on my father’s side had to be sullied by the evil rumor. We know that my grandfather moved from Möhra in Thuringia to Eisleben because of the flourishing copper mining there, which was no longer economical in Möhra. Our enemies contend that he moved there because of an outrage committed on Satan’s behalf. Still in Father’s lifetime, the defected theologian Georg Witzel, who to his own benefit had been attempting a reconciliation of the religious opponents, reproached Justus Jonas in a violent dispute: “I could call the father of your Luther a killer or a murderer.”
And recently I read—lies have short wings—in a paper that appeared in Paris that my father was the son of a murderer from Möhra. My grandfather, it said, had killed a devout farmer who was grazing horses with the farmer’s own bridle. He could have succeeded with that only because he had been given the strength by the Devil, as the farmer was a powerful man and my grandfather was only of medium height and strength.
It should be noted that the flight of such a sinner out of the Electoral-Saxon town of Möhra to the likewise Saxon town of Mansfeld contradicts plain simple logic. Surely the elector’s police would have tracked him here. He would hardly have come to his respected position in the local council in Mansfeld if he had been under this suspicion.
Father was of the opinion that behind all the slander stood his archenemy, Duke George of Saxony, who with the denigration of his person wanted to denigrate his teaching.
As a child, my father was naturally more surrounded by belief in witchcraft than we are today, after a hundred years. Still, this belief will continue to persist for a long time.
At table, my father spoke of sorcery during his childhood: “My mother was very much tormented by a neighbor, a witch, whom she attempted to appease with all she had, with friendship and goodwill, because the witch could charm her children so that they would cry themselves to death. And when a preacher publicly rebuked her with words, she bewitched him so that he would die and no earthly medicine could help. She had taken up the earth where he had walked and thrown it into the water, thereby bewitching him, for without this earth he could never again become healthy.”
In another table conversation, Dr. Martin told the story of the old woman who sowed the seeds of discord between a wife and a husband: “When I was a young boy, a story went around that Satan, with all his cunning, could not separate two married people who lived together in great harmony and passion. So he brought it about through an old woman. That woman secretly laid a shearing knife under the pillow of each and persuaded each that the other one had wanted to kill them and that each could see the truth in the knife under their pillows. The man found the shearing knife first and with it cut the woman’s throat. After that came the Devil and gave the widow on a long pole a pair of shoes. Then she asked, ‘Why are you not coming closer to me?’ And he answered, ‘You are more evil than I, the Devil, because what I was unable to bring about with the married couple, you have accomplished.’ So you see what the Devil does with his tools and disciples, making them more wicked than himself.”
From my occupation with my father’s life, I know that his childhood memories, even though one should not ignore them, were of no great significance in regard to his attitude toward sorcery and witchcraft. Much more had the abundance of examples from theological books, and his later experience with related stories (not his own personal, direct experiences, I must remark here; rather, almost all secondhand). He viewed these through the lens of theology, from which he developed his convictions, sometimes new, sometimes merely a strengthening of old ideas.
He ascribed his physical ills or challenges such as the weather and sickness to the Devil or the Devil’s earthly helpers, and consequently, in providing evidence, as we demand it in the study of nature and all i
ts phenomena, he and all theologians were somewhat lacking, being satisfied with the simple assertions as long as they were believed or found in the Scriptures. And what he felt about the law and its enforcers, the lawyers, one sees in the lecture he bestowed on my brother Johannes: “Should I learn that you want to become a jurist, I would plunge you from the bridge into the Elbe and let you drown, and also have no doubt that I would rather justify this sin against God than allow you to become a jurist and rogue against my will.”
His parish and his friends but, most of all, our mother he admonished to pray and not be tempted to apply counterspells. Counterspells, too, are sorcery and therefore godless. Therefore he admonished Mother most severely for bringing a healing herbalist into the house, when one of my siblings lay sick to death and the doctor’s medicine did not seem to help.
One time he told how Bugenhagen successfully fought against the Devil’s milk and butter theft: “The Devil came to the house of Pomeranus so that the woman and the maids worked hard until tired to make butter but did not succeed. Then came Pomeranus, mocked the Devil, and crapped in the butter churn, whereupon the Devil did not steal any more butter.”
Now this is indeed a good example of contempt for the Devil, but it also comes near to the forbidden counterspell, where the stolen butter now takes on the taste of Bugenhagen’s addition and should spoil the Devil’s desire for further thefts. That in addition the butter became unusable for the Bugenhagens, which meant the Devil had in fact reached his goal, Father did not mention.
Father proceeded more strictly in the case of a citizen of Brandenburg who was brought to him.
A man from Brandenburg, charmed by witches, lost all of his worldly goods. He went to a Berlin exorcist, seeking advice. Finally his conscience plagued him, and he begged for comfort. Dr. Martinus answered: He had acted evilly and heinously. Why had he not, for example like Job, persevered and prayed for God’s blessing? He said he should repent and flee to Satan no more but rather with serene soul do God’s will.
Shadows of My Father Page 10