THE WITCHCRAFT DELUSION IN COLONIAL CONNECTICUT; 1647-1697
BY JOHN M. TAYLOR; 1908
Hammurabi and Witchcraft
Witchcraft in its generic sense is as old as human history. It has written its name in the oldest of human
records. In all ages and among all peoples it has taken firm hold on the fears, convictions and consciences of
men. Anchored in credulity and superstition, in the dread and love of mystery, in the hard and fast theologic
doctrines and teachings of diabolism, and under the ban of the law from its beginning, it has borne a baleful
fruitage in the lives of the learned and the unlearned, the wise and the simple.
King and prophet, prelate and priest, jurist and lawmaker, prince and peasant, scholars and men of affairs
have felt and dreaded its subtle power, and sought relief in code and commandment, bull and anathema,
decree and statute—entailing even the penalty of death—and all in vain until in the march of the races to a
higher civilization, the centuries enthroned faith in the place of fear, wisdom in the place of ignorance, and
sanity in the seat of delusion.
In its earlier historic conception witchcraft and its demonstrations centered in the claim of power to
produce certain effects, 'things beyond the course of nature,' from supernatural causes, and under this general
term all its occult manifestations were classified with magic and sorcery, until the time came when the Devil
was identified and acknowledged both in church and state as the originator and sponsor of the mystery, sin
and crime—the sole father of the Satanic compacts with men and women, and the law both canonical and civil
took cognizance of his malevolent activities.
In the Acropolis mound at Susa in ancient Elam, in the winter of 1901-2, there was brought to light by the
French expedition in charge of the eminent savant, M. de Morgan, one of the most remarkable memorials of
early civilization ever recovered from the buried cities of the Orient.
It is a monolith—a stele of black diorite—bearing in bas-relief a likeness of Hammurabi (the Amrephel of
the Old Testament; Genesis xiv, 1), and the sixth king of the first Babylonian dynasty, who reigned about
2250 B.C.; and there is also carved upon it, in archaic script in black letter cuneiform—used long after the
cursive writing was invented—the longest Babylonian record discovered to this day,—the oldest body of laws
in existence and the basis of historical jurisprudence.
It is a remarkable code, quickly made available through translation and transliteration by the Assyrian
scholars, and justly named, from its royal compiler, Hammurabi's code. He was an imperialist in purpose and
action, and in the last of his reign of fifty-five years he annexed or assimilated the suzerainty of Elam, or
Southern Persia, with Assyria to the north, and also Syria and Palestine, to the Mediterranean Sea.
This record in stone originally contained nineteen columns of inscriptions of four thousand three hundred
and fourteen lines, arranged in two hundred and eighty sections, covering about two hundred separate
decisions or edicts. There is substantial evidence that many of the laws were of greater antiquity than the code
itself, which is a thousand years older than the Mosaic code, and there are many striking resemblances and
parallels between its provisions, and the law of the covenant, and the deuteronomy laws of the Hebrews.
The code was based on personal responsibility. It protects the sanctity of an oath before God, provides
among many other things for written evidence in legal matters, and is wonderfully comprehensive and rich in
rules for the conduct of commercial, civic, financial, social, economic, and domestic affairs.
These sections are notably illustrative:
'If a man, in a case (pending judgment), utters threats against the witnesses (or), does not establish the
testimony that he has given, if that case be a case involving life, that man shall be put to death.
'If a judge pronounces a judgment, renders a decision, delivers a verdict duly signed and sealed and
afterwards alters his judgment, they shall call that judge to account for the alteration of the judgment which he
had pronounced, and he shall pay twelvefold the penalty which was in the said judgment, and, in the
assembly, they shall expel him from his seat of judgment, and he shall not return, and with the judges in a
case he shall not take his seat.
'If a man practices brigandage and is captured, that man shall be put to death.
'If a woman hates her husband, and says: 'thou shalt not have me,' they shall inquire into her antecedents
for her defects; and if she has been a careful mistress and is without reproach and her husband has been going
about and greatly belittling her, that woman has no blame. She shall receive her presents and shall go to her
father's house.
v'If she has not been a careful mistress, has gadded about, has neglected her house and has belittled her
husband, they shall throw that woman into the water.
v'If a physician operates on a man for a severe wound with a bronze lancet and causes the man's death, or
opens an abscess (in the eye) of a man with a bronze lancet and destroys the man's eye, they shall cut off his
fingers.
'If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction firm and the house, which he has
built, collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death.'
vIt is, however, with only one of King Hammurabi's wise laws that this inquiry has to do, and it is this:
'If a man has placed an enchantment upon a man, and has not justified himself, he upon whom the
enchantment is placed to the Holy River (Euphrates) shall go; into the Holy River he shall plunge. If the Holy
River holds (drowns) him he who enchanted him shall take his house. If on the contrary, the man is safe and
thus is innocent, the wizard loses his life, and his house.'
Or, as another translation has it:
'If a man ban a man and cast a spell on him—if he cannot justify it he who has banned shall be killed.'
'If a man has cast a spell on a man and has not justified it, he on whom the spell has been thrown shall go
to the River God, and plunge into the river. If the River God takes him he who has banned him shall be saved.
If the River God show him to be innocent, and he be saved, he who banned him shall be killed, and he who
plunged into the river shall take the house of him who banned him.'
There can be no more convincing evidence of the presence and power of the great witchcraft superstition
among the primitive races than this earliest law; and it is to be especially noted that it prescribes one of the
very tests of guilt—the proof by water—which was used in another form centuries later, on the continent, in
England and New England, at Wurzburg and Bonn, at Rouen, in Suffolk, Essex and Devon, and at Salem and
Hartford and Fairfield, when 'the Devil starteth himself up in the pulpit, like a meikle black man, and calling
the row (roll) everyone answered, Here!'
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