The Witch, the Hand and the Demon Eckerken October 5, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Beach previously tried to bring honour to the name of Johann Weyer who combined a skeptical attitude to witchcraft with and a believing attitude to the supernatural. His books, which are not unfortunately easily accessible in English, are full of gems. Here is a good one which combines a nasty solitary fairy and a witchcraft accusation.
About forty-two years ago, near the village of Elten, a half mile from Emmerich in the Duchy of Cleves, in a heath of the royal road, a demon used to beset travellers in various and wondrous ways, striking them and casting them down from their horses and overturning their chariots; nothing more was ever seen than the image of a hand. The people named this demon Eckerken.
Has anyone else come across a ghost/demon that is a hand alone? drbeachcoming AT yahoo DOT com Weyer had no problem in believing in a witch, his problem is the idea that a local woman was in league with Eckerken.
The unbelieving villagers, not realizing that this was the mocking activity of a demon, attributed the crimes to maleficium. They therefore laid hands upon a woman named Beel [Sibylla] Duiscops, who was bound in service to the count of Berg. When she was finally burned to death the assaults ceased, but not because she had been responsible for the deceptions, although to promote cruel torture or unbelief she might have been induced by the demon’s illusions to confess to the deed.
The (over) sophistication of Weyer’s argument here is fascinating. He will have been the mother of all pub bores.
In fact, the Devil ceased voluntarily and even gladly from the harassment which he alone had brought on, so that by this cessation he might plunge men deeper into the abyss of unbelief, and so that he might render them guilty of a bloodthirsty sentence, which is what he eagerly desires, especially in the case of the innocent, since he is a murderer from the beginning. If, in fact, a diligent investigation and skillful inquiry had been made at the very times at which this illusory image of a hand was seen, Sibylla would not doubt have been discovered sleeping at home on most of these occasions, or doing something else. If you insist upon the point that she confessed, I answer that the confession was extorted by the torturer or came from the poor woman’s depraved imagination. How that imagination might be corrupted by the Devil I have described so often that further repetition would be tedious.
Loes M writes, 25 Oct 2016: You are asking for ‘hands alone’ in your latest blogpost. In the most recent Psychic News, October, there’s a story of the haunting of Elm Vicarage, Cambridgeshire, where a woman struggles with detached hands around her throat, which turn out to belong to a man who is murdered in that room. Peter Underwood investigated this case from the Fifties (I think, there’s no date given).
Loes wrote in Nov but I was slow (sorry Loes) to give the actual article. Here it is with apologies to all, 8 Dec 2016.
