Most, if not all, such practices appeared on both sides of the Atlantic; in this, as in much else, the colonists were simply carrying on age-old Anglo-Saxon traditions. So-called witch bottlesâmost of them stoneware jugs embellished with the frightening image of a bearded manâhave been recovered from rivers and trash-pits in England. Typically they contain hair, fingernails, and other human traces; presumably these, like urine, served to effect counter-magic. (In one remarkable case the contents included a cloth heart pierced with pins.) No similar discoveries have as yet been made for the American colonies, but written evidence confirms the use of witch bottles there as well.
To these methods of magic and counter-magic were added many more. Palmistry, for one: much could be learned about “persons' . . . future condition by looking into their hands.” Indeed, this was something of a learned discipline (broaching high magic); New England palm-readers would occasionally claim to have consulted books in which “there were rules to know what should come to pass.” One diviner was skilled not only at reading hands but also in scrutinizing “veins about the eyes,” apparently as a way to predict length of life. Astrology was yet another such resource. A Connecticut fortune-teller boasted of “great familiarity” with the noted English astrologer William Lillyâperhaps from personal acquaintance, or else from having “read [his] book in England” (her listeners couldn't be sure which).
Palms, eyes, and the stars; crystal balls, and obscure manipulations of keys, nails, table silver, “sieve and scissors”: the accoutrements of folk magic went on and on. Indeed, everyday objects of various sorts might, under suitable circumstances, be associated with occult power, though many of the particulars are irrecoverable today. There were charms, too, involving the use of mysterious words and letter combinationsâsometimes in written, sometimes in spoken, form. For instance, a Boston man used a “secret” healing ritual, organized around “five letters, viz., x, a, etc . . . written successively on pieces of bread and given to the patient.” Conversely, there were curses, “ill words” designed to injure. Thus a Massachusetts woman, angered by a neighbor's charge of countenancing theft, wished that her accuser “might never
mingere
[urinate] or
carcare
[defecate]”; soon thereafter the neighbor was “taken with the distemper of the dry bellyache.”
Toward all thisâthe interest, the beliefs, the actual practices of magicâthe orthodox clergy of New England maintained a resolute, vehement opposition. For them it was nothing less than sacrilege, an affront to their own authority and, most of all, to God's. If layfolk needed protection against the slings and arrows of everyday life, this must come from the Almightyâand none other. If particular individuals experienced privation and suffering of a “remarkable” sort, redress should be sought through “solemn prayer”âand that alone. The difference between folk magic and “true religion” lay precisely here: the one was manipulative and human-based, the other supplicative and divinely ordained. And wherever magic had apparently succeeded in achieving some intended effect, its motive source could only be the Devil himself.
Christian clergy all across Europe had long held folk magic in dim repute; this was true for Protestants and Catholics alike. But to the extent that Protestants, more than Catholics, stressed the absolute sovereignty of God and the utter inability of manâto that same extent magic became an even greater, more blasphemous challenge. In fact, Protestantism may have unwittingly
invited
such challenge. For Protestants were, relative to Catholics, effectively disarmed, with traditional “intercessory” means denied them. No more saying of rosaries, no use of holy water or holy relics, no recourse to elaborate and enveloping church ritual; no potentially comforting doctrine of salvation by works. Instead, inherent sin and irrefutable weakness in the face of an all-powerful, largely inscrutable Deity: for Protestants, the human situation was as stark and as desperate as that. Individual men and women could only wait, only pray, only hope, only fear. Is it any wonder that some found this predicament too great to bear, and the temptation to magicâfor the same reasonâtoo hard to resist?
Within the full complex of Protestant belief, nothing evoked more anxiety, more agonized searching and speculation, than “predestination,” the idea that God had already ordained the salvation or damnation of every living being. One's destiny was certain, and beyond all possibility of change; yet one could never know its nature. Such belief seems to have fostered an attitude of particular concern with the future: first and foremost, with the afterlife, but also with more immediate matters of everyday, “earthly” existence. This, in turn, may help to explain the very unusual prominence of divining and fortune-telling in 17th-century New England.
Hear, now, a sampling of Puritan invective against folk magic.
Reverend Cotton Mather
(Boston): “Tis in the Devil's name that such things are done, and in God's name I do this day charge them as vile impieties.”
Reverend Increase Mather
(Boston): “God in his word doth with the highest severity condemn all such practices . . . declaring . . . that all who do such things are an abomination to him.”
Reverend John Hale
(Beverly, Massachusetts): “[Magic] serves the interest of those that have a vain curiosity to pry into things God has forbidden, and concealed from discovery by lawful means.”
A “consociation” of ministers
(Connecticut): “Those things, whether past, present, or to come, which . . . cannot be known by human skill in arts or strength of reason . . . nor are made known by divine revelation . . . must needs be known (if at all) by information from the Devil.”
Reverend Cotton Mather
(again): “They are a sort of witches who thus employ themselves.” Indeed, Puritan ministers particularly emphasized the matter of links to witchcraft and the Devil; thus counter-magic was also fatally compromised.
Reverend Deodat Lawson
(Salem, Massachusetts): “Unwarrantable projects . . . [such as] burning the afflicted person's hair, or stopping up and boiling the urine . . . [amount to] using the Devil's shield against the Devil's sword.”
As this controversyâfolk magic versus orthodox religionâsimmered along, ordinary New Englanders were frequently caught in the middle. And the middle is where at least some of them preferred to remain. Resisting the clergy's pressure to choose, these persons would remain Christians, remain churchgoers, remain adherents of Puritan doctrineâyet would also avail themselves of magical “remedies” when need and opportunity coincided. In the language of our own time, they were (perhaps unwittingly) eclectics and syncretists, inclined to move back and forth between rival systems despite strong pressures to the contrary. Sometimes, to be sure, they paid a price in local reputation or feelings of guilt. A case in point was Reverend John Hale's experience in dealing with a woman parishioner much given to fortune-telling. She admitted to consulting “a book of Palmistry,” and professed her sorrow and “great repentance.” Hale told her this was, most assuredly, “an evil book and an evil art,” after which she appeared “to renounce and reject all such practices.” But some years later she was found to have resumed her former interest, to the point of obtaining additional books on the same subject.
Moreover, certain forms of magical practice seemed in themselves to bridge the gap to religion. The charms used in healing rituals could include “Scripture words” alongside others; for example, “Nomine patris, Filii, et Spritus Sancti. Preserve thy servant, [and] such . . .” (The Latinate phrasings here may suggest a Catholic derivation, which for devout Puritans would create a special objection.) The Bible itself was subject to magical deployment, with its aura of sanctity harnessed to efforts of healing or divination or counter-magic. The touch of a Bible on the forehead of a sick child might serve to begin a cure. A key placed between its pages could help reveal the location of objects gone missing. In one extraordinary instance, a group of New Hampshire townsmen marched out to brawl with some local opponents, led by their minister, who carried a Bible raised aloft on a long pole. In another, a Rhode Island man sought to insure his personal safety by ostentatiously reading his Bible in the town square while an Indian attack raged fiercely around him. Such behaviors, amounting to a kind of totemism, came as much from the magical side of traditional culture as from the formally religious one.
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It was against this cultural backdrop that New England's notorious part in witch-hunting would begin to unfold. Of course, the
most
notorious partâand for many today the only known partâis everything that happened at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692-93. Thus it seems necessary to emphasize here the very considerable amount of thought, feeling, and motivated action that swirled around witchcraft during the four or five decades preceding the Salem trials.
There are intimations of witchcraft in the records of the important and intensely felt “Antinomian controversy,” in Massachusetts, as early as 1637. Anne Hutchinson, who led the movement at the center of this struggle and whose doctrinal claims seemed to challenge the very foundations of the Puritan establishment, was a unique presence: deeply thoughtful, eloquent, visionary, and charismatic, qualities that seemed somehow enhanced by her being also a woman. Her large following, composed of the many Boston folk who attended her special worship meetings, was another attention-getting element. Governor John Winthrop, her chief antagonist, referred to her as a “prophetess,” and the term does seem apt. But such a woman would invite suspicion as well as admiration; she was, in a sense, too strong, too “nimble” of wit, for her own good. Her prophesying, in particular, would be held against her; her gifts that way seemed to some “beyond Nature.” For example, a fellow passenger on the ship that had carried her to New England recalled her commenting as Boston came in sight, “if she had not a sure word that England should be destroyed, her heart would shake.”
A sure word?
From where? In what sense? It seemed “very strange and witchlike that she should say so.” Two years later, when the authorities brought her to account in a full-dress ecclesiastical trial, Winthrop would write more pointedly that her doings “gave cause of suspicion of witchcraft.”
In fact, she was never formally accused as a witch; her trial, conviction, and subsequent banishment focused instead on her “heretical opinions” and “traducing authority.” But she was charged with having been, at the very least, “deluded by the Devil.” Moreover, two of her “confederates,” Jane Hawkins and Mary Dyer, were similarly accused. Hawkins, like Hutchinson, was a midwife, whose practice allegedly included the use of traditional fertility potions; as a result, according to Winthrop, she became “notorious for familiarity with the Devil.” Dyer and Hutchinson both experienced problematic childbirthâin Dyer's case, a stillborn and obviously deformed infant (perhaps the condition known to modern medicine as anencephaly); in Hutchinson's, a more extreme anomaly (probably what is today called a hydatidiform mole). Such “monstrous” outcomesâfor so they struck her contemporariesâseemed a clear sign of diabolical connection.
That these suspicions did not lead straight to witchcraft prosecution was probably owing to a pair of convergent factors. First, heresy was itself an enormously compelling, and damning, charge (especially in New England). Second, the usual prelude to witchcraft casesâthe gradual, piece-by-piece buildup of worry and doubt, over many years, fostered always by a vigorous climate of local gossipâwas lacking here. Hutchinson, Hawkins, and Dyer were relatively recent arrivals in Boston; so, too, were their adversaries. In a sense, neither side knew the other sufficiently well to support a full measure of witchcraft accusation. Indeed, there would be no actual witch trials in New England during the entire decade and a half following the initial settlement in 1630. This pot needed a lengthy period of brewing and stirring before it would boil. But eventually its time would come, and trials would begin. And, once begun, they would go on almost to the end of the century.
The earliest firm documentation of a formal proceeding against witchcraft comes from the town of Windsor, Connecticut, in 1647. Sometime that spring a local diarist recorded the following: “One ______ of Windsor arraigned and executed for a witch.” The blank is filled in the notes of the town clerk: “May 26, '47 Alse Young was hanged.” Thus it was Alice Young's unfortunate distinction to have been New England's first legally certified witchâand the first to have suffered the prescribed punishment. About this woman only a very few, very bare facts can now be discovered. She was apparently the wife of a certain John Young (or Youngs, as the name is sometimes written) and the mother of at least one daughter. She was probably middle-aged, in her 40s, when charged and convicted. John Young was a man of limited means, perhaps a carpenter. He, and presumably his wife, had settled in Windsor by or before 1640. He sold his land there, and moved away, soon after his wife's death. And that is the extent of her, and his, known story.
Within barely a year of Alice Young's execution at Windsor, the nearby town of Wethersfield began its own involvement with witch-hunting. Again, the official record is sparse, saying only: “The jury finds the bill of indictment against Mary Johnson, that by her own confession she is guilty of familiarity with the Devil.” Fortunately, a later writing by Cotton Mather offers more. Johnson was evidently a domestic servant; Mather refers to the Devil's readiness to play tricks on “her master” in her behalf. Indeed, “she said that her first familiarity with the Devil came through
discontent,
and wishing the Devil . . . to do that and t'other thing, whereupon a Devil appeared unto her, tendering what services might best content her.” From this she progressed to “uncleanness [sexual contact] both with men and with devils”; somewhere along the way, she also “murdered a child.” Such confessions, rare enough in the record of witch trials, left no room for doubt; a sentence of death was assured. Her minister preached at her execution, “taking great pains to promote her conversion from the Devil to God.” She seemed in her last moments “very penitent. . . . And she died in a frame extremely to the satisfaction of them that were spectators of it.”