In summation, Father said of witches and sorcerers: “One should have no compassion for them: I would burn them myself. And one should not tarry but rather rush to the punishment. The lawyers want so many witnesses and evidence and despise what is completely obvious. I have had to deal with a marriage problem these days in which a woman wanted to kill her husband with poison; in the end he vomited lizards. Also, he saw lizards coming from her. And though she was interrogated under torture, she did not confess. For these sorceresses are completely mute and despise suffering, as the Devil does not allow them to talk. Such acts, however, are witness enough that one should harshly punish them as an example—which would deter others from such evil deeds.”
Here, reader, although only a doctor of medicine and not a lawyer, I must at least point out the following, should the words of my father be put into practice. The entire legal procedure in witch and sorcery matters would be set aside if the confession extracted through torture were sufficient to burn the accused. Where are the witnesses here, and the evidence and circumstances of the alleged deed and all the rest of an adequate trial? And if there was circumstantial evidence, it was of the following kind: the torture cannot be applied infinitely but for its continuation needed new evidence. So clever authorities had the idea that persistent silence in the face of the greatest pain was a sign of witchcraft or sorcery (Father had said that the Devil commanded the witches to silence). In the end, whatever the tortured did or did not do or say or not say, they were doomed.
And, finally, natural causes for the damage had to be excluded objectively before it could be recognized purely as the work of the Devil. That did not go as fast as Father wished, because he was mainly concerned with the spiritual welfare of the flock entrusted to him, the aim of which was to deter evil, not to follow the ordinary rules of justice. Considerations concerning the infliction of terrible, excruciating pain on the tortured played no role because in essence the whole trial with its deadly end was in principle an executio in effigie of the Devil, which, however, seemed not to have much effect because his evil doings did not end.
That the torturers and the unjust judges, the city and the rural authorities, the clergy and Father and his friends could by their words and actions damage their own souls, because they acted against Christ’s commandment of love and mercy, was not considered, because the godly fight against Satan was everything.
The sorcery and the witchcraft were not limited to herb women, weathermakers and knackers, skinners and executioners, although it was mainly spread among them. No, even in princely houses such as the House of Hohenzollern in Brandenburg, it was not uncommon to deal with Satan’s disciples. In this instance, my report does not come easily, because later I was closely connected with the elector of Brandenburg, about whom in due course it will be told.
Joachim I, Nestor, elector of the empire, archchamberlain, and a vexatious enemy of my father’s and the Reformation of the old church, had in person dealt with the Devil, as my father said at the table, and also employed sorcerers at his court. One of these had spoken to my father during a visit to Wittenberg in spring AD 1532: “Dr. Lucas Gauricus, the black magician, whom the elector had summoned from Italy, has made me publicly aware that the elector has himself had dealings with the Devil.” This black magician had, besides his profession as sorcerer, other qualifications, which were mathematician, astronomer, doctor, magus, and medicus. Lucas Gauricus was later to become a bishop and a friend of Pope Paul III. Once, because of a false prophecy, he was thoroughly tortured, the traces of which remained with him his entire life. Even that, however, did not diminish his cheerfulness when prophesying. He continued prophesying, falsely.
I am surprised today at what double standards my father and Magister Philippus and others applied in their dealings with the sorcerers. Dr. Gauricus was not arrested, and if he was spoken of during table conversation, he was held in general esteem. Perhaps this was due to the sorcerer setting up a nativity for Father in his tractus astrologicus for the year 1483; that is, he showed the position of the stars at the birth of my father. Also for Magister Philippus he was a scholar worthy of protection, and he praises him in two letters to a friend.
This happened although the black magician had mediated a pact for the elector with the Devil: that he should still live for fifteen years. In summa, the poor man had outwardly lived an impious and godless life, had had alliances with the Devil, and died amid his shameful whoring.
The Devil’s pact did not bear the desired fruit, because the elector died in AD 1535 at fifty-one years of age.
For good reasons, the elector was not spared by Dr. Martinus. One story in particular gave rise to unpleasant laughter at table. It was in the year 1525, when the court astrologer, Johann Carion, persuaded the elector to flee to the Tempelhof Hill because a deluge was coming. So the great man went, taking for his noble bodily needs much food and drink as well as his beloved mistress, and awaited the flood. That this deluge would swallow up his subjects was for him not so important, because they were only minor figures. God, however, sent no flood, although there had been adequate sinning at the electoral court; for example, in 1503, most members of God’s people, the Jews, had been driven from Brandenburg, and in 1510, thirty of them had been burned in Berlin.
That the elector was an opponent of the Reformation particularly embittered my father. And this prince had, at the election of the emperor, whom my Father in the beginning esteemed and from whom he promised much good would come for Germany, at first wanted to cast his vote for the French king Francis (who had promised him the post of vice-regent). But through the persuasive power of a considerable amount of guldens, he decided to give his vote to Charles. His wife, the Danish princess Elisabeth, a follower of Father’s, had to flee to Wittenberg—that was in the year 1528—which did not endear the elector to Father. Later, Elector John Frederick I, the Magnanimous, ensured that the now-widowed princess received living space in the former religious house of the Hospital Brothers of St. Anthony on the Lichtenburg in Prettin near Torgau.
I have a table talk of Father’s lying before me that shows us how he personally dealt with the sorcerers. The talk is about the widely traveled sorcerer and black magician D. Johann Faust, who also practiced his art in Wittenberg.
Anton Lauterbach recorded it in summer 1537 and immediately allowed it to be printed:
Someone brought up the subject of illusionists and sorcery as the means by which the Devil blinds people. Much talk was of Faust, who called the Devil his brother-in-law, and Luther was heard: “If I, Martin Luther, had reached only my hand to him, he would have wanted to pervert me: but I would not have shied away, I would have reached for him on behalf of the Lord God, the Protector. The Devil uses the service of the sorcerers not against me; could he have gotten me and been able to do damage, he would have done it long ago.
The Herr Father always stressed that God is the Lord over the world and the Devil, and whatever the Devil would cause to happen must be approved by God. Therefore, he had no fear of witches, the servants of Satan, because he believed that God, who allowed the witches’ work to exist, also held His protective hand over him.
How Father struggled for the souls in his charge or for those who lived in his town without shrinking before the drastic pastoral threats of penalty is shown, for example, by the student Valerius Glockner, son of the mayor of Naumburg, Viet Glockner.
This young rascal whistled daily a little song, lived in a rich and disorderly way, did expensive whoring throughout the land, and was furthermore also disobedient and not open to corrective persuasion. Consequently, he was severely examined on the 13th of February, 1538, by Georg Major, the preacher at the castle church, and my father, who asked him: Why did he live so, fearing neither God nor man? Thereupon the boy answered impudently that five years ago he had given himself over to the Devil with the words, “I say to you, Christ, I give up my faith in you and want to accept another lord.” Dr. Martinus insisted and wanted to know if he had tal
ked more with the Devil and concluded a pact. The student wriggled back and forth, and it was clear that Satan under an assumed name had made him all kinds of promises and had also enabled his loose lifestyle. The examiners showed disgust so that Glockner appeared to regret the pact, and he eagerly and diligently asked for forgiveness. Then Dr. Martinus laid his hand on him, knelt down with the others, prayed the Lord’s Prayer, and said, “Lord God, Heavenly Father, Thou hast commanded us through Your Son to pray and have so ordered and employed the Ministry of the Holy Christian Church that we may instruct the brothers who have failed and lead them back with a gentle hand on to the right path. Lord God, we beg You for this Your servant, to forgive him his sins and accept him back into the lap of Your Holy Church, for Your dear Son’s sake, Our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.”
Dr. Martin was not convinced of Glockner’s expressed repentance and did not believe in such a swift change of heart nor that the Devil would so quickly let his victim out of his hands. Therefore, he pressed him strongly and demanded strict abjuration of the Devil, and when the student seemed hesitant or appeared even a little exhausted and wanted a pause, he was made aware of the consequences if he did not renounce: “You know, Glockner, if we have to report you to the authorities, you easily could be threatened with prosecution because of blasphemy, which is the renouncing of Christ, and with sorcery or heresy, which is the way a pact with the Devil is interpreted. Do you believe you are equal to the torturers when they stretch and impale you and put you to the stake and ensure a fiery death?” There the lad quickly changed his mind and said to Father, “I, Valerius, confess before God and all His angels and before the assembly of this church that I have renounced faith in God and given myself up to the Devil. I am sorry from my heart, will henceforth be Satan’s enemy, and will follow God, my Lord, to my betterment. Amen.”
One can see here that the participants in no way shared the obsessive and blind belief in witches and sorcery of the frightened people but rather that they subjected the guilty one to church discipline in which they used encouragement and the recognition of contrition before they presented excommunication and punishment. If that is indicative of a Christian approach, I will not risk saying.
But if an alliance with the Devil led to crime, then was Father quite furious and offered to have the witches arrested himself and to burn them if, for example, on order of the Devil they stole milk by having the milk flow into a broomstick, which they then milked at home.
While Dr. Martinus did not doubt the reality of maleficium, or malevolent sorcery, he denied the possibility of witches’ flights or witches’ sabbaths, which Mathesius reported, who talked about these issues with Father. But the Devil at least could make people believe in witches’ flights, meetings, and dances; he had particular success in this with women and children.
In general, one should be careful and not believe that all the Devil’s work was genuine; much is just illusion, which the Master of Evil is well capable of. He can in no way interfere in God’s work against His will and cannot arrogate divine power. To awaken a man from death back to life is for him as impossible as it is to make a barren woman fertile.
Witchcraft is a crimen laesae Majestatis divinae, a crime against God’s majesty, and therefore is to be punished with torture and death even without the commitment of maleficium. This judgment of my father’s is, in the opinion that I have now formed after a long life, dangerous because if alone the witches or sorcerers are punished without visible signs of damage done, then their alleged crime can be detected only through the worst tortures.
Well, enough of these frightful deviations from the true Imitation of Christ as a way to salvation.
In any case, after watching the shocking execution of the Frühbottin woman, I lay long and feverishly ill, with terrible dreams. In fact, all my life I have had nightmares, and one of them often recurred to me even as an adult and a professor of medicine.
I dreamed I was in heaven before the judgment seat of God, where He sat in a bright, almost unpleasantly blinding light. Next to Him on the right sat Christ, His Son. An entire row of angels stood ready to guide the accused to the appropriate location according to their sins or virtues; one could also see how some sinners were led away while others, dressed in white and provided with wings, fluttered around behind the judgment chair and exulted and shouted, which disturbed the proceedings. God had to call for order several times.
I noticed that some angels served more zealously than others. One group stayed in the background, staring guiltily down in front of them. I learned they were the angels who had forced themselves on beautiful daughters of men, as one reads in the book of Genesis 1 in chapter 6. God had created the women too seductive, it seems to me, and the female angels in heaven had gotten very celestially translucent and no adequate competition for daughters of men. Anyway, those angels leaped upon the daughters of men, and they bore children, from whom powerful and famous men came into the world. It must have been willed by God, or it would not have happened. At the same time, it did not free them from punishment, as we know. Anyway, God has endowed the woman with great power even over the angels.
I mention this, because I myself have been exposed my entire life to the seductions of women, which for me was an infinite delight but also introduced tangible difficulties. About that perhaps later; now I’ll return to my dream.
My time had not yet come, but God had sent an angel messenger who brought me to heaven for a short time to witness the process. It was the trial of God-Father-Son-Holy Spirit versus Dr. Martinus Luther, professor in Wittenberg and reformer.
There stood Herr Father, stripped of all academic and spiritual insignia, naked, pale, and rather fat before God’s judgment seat. The angel-prosecutor charged him with two main points. The first was his hostility toward the Jews and all his vicious words against God’s chosen people. The second was his cruel and destructive work directed at the witches and sorcerers, who were, after all, also God’s children. Charges of similar actions against peasants, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and other opponents had been dropped in order not to protract the process, God truly having other things to do rather than just to bother with Luther. There was, for example, the difficult question to answer whether the siblings of Jesus came from Joseph or were begotten by the Holy Spirit. If the former was the case, one would have to deny Mary’s perpetual virginity, which was inadvisable for the Mother of God because then the act of sexual intercourse would have to be assumed, probably even its enjoyment. If the latter was the case, then Jesus’s siblings were the direct offspring of God, like Jesus, which would bring confusion to the concept of Holy Trinity.
An English defender had been assigned to Luther, who seemed to approach his assignment with displeasure, which generated a bad feeling in me. I recognized in him the angel who had brought me here as a witness.
His defense consisted mainly of the following. He claimed that Luther’s translation of the Bible had brought the Word of God nearer to the people and that he had attempted to purify the church of its evil ways and so make it more pleasing to God. Ergo, his intentions had been good, and he had sought to do the will of God. Also, this had given the German language a form and richness, which God himself had praised for its intimacy and warmth and sometimes preferred to the Latin and Aramaic when conversing with the angels or with his people on earth, which occurred less frequently. When the latter happened, his Son, whose mother tongue is Aramaic, had started to learn German, having already made good progress, especially in the syntax with the difficult sentence structure.
Here God interrupted the counsel for the defense and was really loud: “It carries no weight here what the accused wanted or meant or did for the good of the German language but rather exclusively what consequences his words and deeds had. And here Dr. Martinus”—I was relieved that God at least allowed my father his academic status—“it does not look good for you.”
The Lord signaled to an angel standing ready on a small cloud. The angel flew to a door beh
ind which the saved were having themselves a good time, as one could hear by their singing hosanna. He opened the door, and Prista Frühbottin, together with her fellow condemned, her son Dictus and both knacker servants, Clemen Ziesigk and Caspar Schiele, entered the court.
Actually, they had already been clothed in heavenly garments and put back to the state before they were tortured and burnt, but for the purpose of the court proceedings, God had once more placed them in the condition in which they found themselves at death. That seemed to me questionable and had the appearance of an attempt to influence the court, and I wondered if the defense counsel was going to object to this. Still, I knew that the defense angel as God’s servant was ultimately dependent upon Him, and I began to think the proceedings against my father might not be fair and neutral.
Dr. Martinus got a terrible fright when he saw those people, but it was not clear whether he was more shocked that they were in heaven or about the condition in which they appeared.
“Look, Dr. Martinus”—now Christ began to speak—“how badly my Father’s creatures have been treated, and executed—with your support, I might add. Have you through the study of my Father’s words not understood that my Father and I with the New Covenant established the Gospel of Love, to which all actions of my followers, all institutions, all new churches, and all preaching must be subordinated? That the belief in witches and the persecution of Jews have no place within it because they are not based on love? How does it go in your beautiful translation of the letter from Paul to the Corinthians: ‘Though I speak with the tongue of men and angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or tinkling cymbal.’
Shadows of My Father Page 11
