WOMAN AS WITCH 



telling facts in favour of my theory, i.e. that most of the 

 work of early civilisation was due to women. To have 

 done this, however, would not only have been to deprive 

 some of you of the pleasure of discovering these facts for 

 yourselves ; it would have failed also to indicate how 

 much of interest can be extracted from a more detailed 

 investigation of a comparatively narrow field a field 

 which we can all enter without either unlocking or 

 jumping over the five-barred gate of philology. I pur- 

 pose therefore to lay before you to-night no general 

 sketch, no mass of evidence, but simply to discuss a few 

 of the phases of mediaeval witchcraft which seem to me 

 fossils of the old mother-age. I shall have done more 

 than I can reasonably hope for if I shall succeed in con- 

 vincing you that witchcraft was not a mere fantastic 

 and brutal imagination of a superstitious age, that its 

 beliefs and practices were more or less perverted rites 

 and customs of a prehistoric civilisation, and that the 

 confessions wrung from poor old women in the torture 

 chambers of the Middle Ages have a real scientific value 

 for the historian of a much earlier social life. I hold 

 that the folk-habits and family customs of the mother- 

 age remained as obscure traditions in the women of the 

 folk ; that they were surrendered, in what at first sight 

 seems perfectly futile suffering, to form an apparently 

 worthless record of human stupidity and religious 

 cruelty. Yet from another standpoint this record, and 

 therefore the suffering, will not have been without avail, 

 if they can provide any facts which may assist us in 

 understanding the growth of human societies, and which 

 may at the same time help us to estimate more justly 



