§ 136. DEMONOLOGY AND THE DARK ARTS. 885
stars and because the rays of the sun permeate it for a longer time. The lower zone, enveloping and touching the solid earth, is made bright by the powerful reflection of the sun's rays. The intermediate zone is exceedingly cold and dark. Here the tempests are bred and the hail and snows generated. This is the habitation of the evil spirits, and there they move the clouds, start the thunders, and set a-go ing other natural terrors to frighten and hurt men. The exact distance of that sphere from the earth the philosophers measure, but Albertus does not choose to determine the measurement.
In defining the mental power and the influence of evil spirits, Thomas Aquinas and the other Schoolmen follow Augustine closely, although in elaboration they go beyond him. The demons did not lose their intellectual keenness by their fall.1 This keenness and long experience give them power to foretell the future. If astronomers, said Albertus Magnus, foresee future events by the natal constellations, much more may demons through their shrewdness in observation and watching the stars. Their predictions, however, differ from the predictions of the prophets by being the product of the light of nature. The prophets received a divine revelation.
The miracles which the evil spirits perform are, for the most part, juggleries.2 Thomas Aquinas, however, asserts for these works a genuine supernatural quality. They are at times real works, as when the magicians, by the help of the devil, made frogs in Egypt ; or as in the case of Job's children upon whom fire came down from heaven. They are not able to create out of nothing, but they have the power to accelerate the development of germs and hidden potencies, to destroy harvests, influence the weather, and produce sickness and death.
The special influence which they exercise over human beings in sorcery and witchcraft they exercise by virtue of a compact entered into between them and men and women,
1 Aquinas' treatment is found in his Summa, I. 51 sqq., II. 94-96, Migne, I. 893 sqq., II. 718 sqq. ; P. Lombard, Sent., II. 7 sqq.
2 Prcestigia is the word used by Alb. Magnus, John of Salisbury, etc.
886 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
Isa. 28 : 18 : " We have made a covenant with death, and with sheol are we in agreement." The most fiendish and frequent of these operations is to disturb the harmony of the married relation. Men they make impotent ; women sterile. The earlier fiction of the succubus and the incubus, inherited from Pagan mythology and adopted by Augus tine, was fully accepted in the Middle Ages. This was the shocking belief that demons cohabit with men, the succubus, and lie with women, the incubus. The Schoolmen go so far as to affirm that, though the demons have no direct offspring, yet after lying with men they suddenly transform themselves and communicate the seed they have received to women.1
This view which the Schoolmen formulated was common belief. The story of Merlin, the son of an incubus and a nun, was a popular one in the Middle Ages.2 Guibert of Nogent states that his father and mother for three years were prevented from exercising the rights of wedlock until the incubus was driven off by a good angel. Matthew Paris reports the case of a child which went for the offspring of an incubus.3 The Huns were popularly believed to be the offspring of demons and offcast Gothic women.4 Eleanor, wife of Louis VII. and then of Henry II. of England, so re port went, was likewise the child of a demon.5 Csesar of
1 This is stated at length by Thomas Aquinas, Summa, I. 51, 3, idem dcemon qui est succubus ad virum Jit incubus ad mulierem. For other quo tations to the same effect from Bonaventura, Duns Scotus, etc., see Hansen, p. 186. Albertus Magnus, Borgnet's ed., XXVII. 175, speaks of immense cats appearing at these assignations, but the passage is too foul to be re peated. This Schoolman "went so far as to say that demons preserved human seed in vessels. As an instance of ultramontane honesty, Hoensbroech, D. Papstthum, I. 222, cites the Dominican Schneider who, in his German trans lation of Thomas Aquinas, omits altogether the passage, part of which has just been quoted, though he makes the introductory assertion that the trans lation contains the " entire text."
2 Merlin, the " prophet of Britain " as Caesar of Heisterbach calls him,DmZ., ' III. 12, Strange's ed., 1. 124. The nun was seduced on a night when she hap pened to retire without making the sign of the cross. It was thought by some that anti-christ would be engendered in this way.
3 an., 1249. The child in six months had a full set of teeth and was of the stature of a boy of 17, the mother wasted away and died. 4 Dial., V. 12.
5 See quotation in Kaufmann's Ccesar of Heisterbach, II. 80.