Page:The history of Witchcraft and demonology.djvu/54

to stifle the matter, but a minister “whom they esteemed more forward than wise” revealed the secret to the Lord Provost of the city, and an inquiry was instituted. The wretched old man, insistently declaring that “the terrors of God which were upon his soul urged him to confess and accuse himself,” was arrested, together with his crazy sister Jean, who was implicated in his abominations. “All the while he was in prison he lay under violent apprehension of the heavy wrath of God, which put him into that which is properly called despair,” and to various ministers who visited him he declared, “I know my sentence of damnation is already sealed in Heaven . . . for I find nothing within me but blackness, darkness, Brimstone, and burning to the bottom of Hell.”⁶⁹ The whole account gives a complete and perfectly comprehensible psychological study. So sudden a revulsion of feeling, the loathing of foul acts accompanied by the sheer inability to repent of them, is quite understandable in a septuagenarian, worn out in body by years of excess and enfeebled in mind owing to the heavy strain of hourly acting an artificial and difficult rôle. The intense emotionalism of the degenerate has not infrequently been observed eventually to give way to a state of frenzied anguish, for which the alienist Magnan coined the name “Anxiomania,” a species of mental derangement that soon drives the patient to hysterical confession and boundless despair. “I am convinced,” says one writer with regard to Major Weir, “of the prisoner having been delirious at the time of his trial.”⁷⁰ His sister frantically accused her brother of Witchcraft, but it is remarkable that in his case this charge was not taken up and examined. I do not say that Weir was not supposed to be a warlock; as a matter of fact he was notoriously reputed such, and strange stories were told of his magic staff and other enchantments, but Witchcraft was not the main accusation brought against him in the official courts. He was found guilty of adultery, fornication, incest, and bestiality, and on these several counts sentenced to be strangled at a stake betwixt Edinburgh and Leith, on Monday, 11 April, 1670, and his body to be burned to ashes. Jean Weir was condemned for incest and Witchcraft and hanged on 12 April in the Grassmarket at Edinburgh. To the last this miserable lunatic placed “a great