The Enemy Within (18 page)

She was
of lowly social and economic position.
Most New England witches were the wives and daughters of farmers or craftsmen whose wealth and standing were distinctly below average. But there were also important exceptions. A few of the accused, like Boston's Ann Hibbens, belonged to the local elite. A few more were notable for having experienced extreme change in their social rank, in either an upward or a downward direction. A considerably larger number held some degree of independent control over family property—an unusual and perhaps suspicion-arousing situation for a woman.

There was a significant chance that she
professed and practiced a healing vocation.
To be sure, a considerable majority of accused witches could not have been characterized that way; like all colonial goodwives, they knew and used the rudiments of folk medicine (herbs, plasters, and a variety of age-old household nostrums), but nothing more. However, perhaps a quarter to a third of the suspect group
did
know—and do—more: making and administering special “remedies,” providing expert forms of nursing, or serving in some regular way as midwives. A few were specifically described as “doctor women.” (“Physicians” was a term reserved for men. There remains, of course, the more sinister category of “cunning women” whose expertise would also include healing.) The underlying linkage here is obvious enough; the ability to heal and the ability to harm seemed intimately related. A shift from one to the other might require no more than a change of motive.

She was also much more likely than New England women at large to have been
previously prosecuted on criminal charges
(separate from witchcraft). The crimes involved were, most especially, theft and various forms of verbal assault—slander, “cursing,” “filthy speeches.” (“Lying” and sexual misconduct also figured into this array, but at somewhat lower levels.) Theft was not, for criminals in general, a major category; so its prominence here seems significant. Assaultive speech was often experienced as a kind of theft; slanderous words, for example, might take away a good reputation. And something similar could be said of witchcraft, a perennial threat to the secure possession of property, health, and life itself.

She was, finally,
contentious in character and abrasive in personal style.
An unusually sympathetic contemporary put it this way: “Many times persons of hard favor and turbulent passions are apt to be condemned by the common people for witches, upon very slight grounds.” To decode such terminology now is difficult. Quite likely, some portion of the accused were deeply troubled—even psychotic, in the language of modern psychiatry. But others come across as impressively strong and self-determined women. To most of their peers, no doubt, they seemed rather
too
strong and self-determined,
especially
for a woman. And witchcraft charges provided the means to draw a firm line of disapproval.

It was, of course, the accusers who supplied the motive power—the energy—to fuel witch-hunting. And as with witch-accusers everywhere, their own internal energy
source,
on which their actions invariably drew, was nothing more or less than strong emotion: anger, fear, excitement, distress, usually in close combination. All of this was manifest in the details of the trial testimonies given by, or about, them: “She . . . said [with] tears running down her cheeks.” “She . . . cried out with great violence.” “He . . . was so affrighted [and] in such a sweat that one might have washed hands on his hair.” “She said she was . . . in agony of spirit.” “She trembled and shook like a leaf.” Additional examples could be accumulated literally by the hundreds.

Individual accusers and victims spanned a broad range, young and old, male and female. Yet certain demographic categories were disproportionately represented among them. One major subgroup comprised middle-aged women—from the same cohort, in fact, that produced a majority of the accused. Linked by age and sex, such persons were likely to be closely acquainted through all kinds of shared experience: shared work, shared domesticity, shared participation in local trade; shared companionship, shared confidences; shared attitude, opinion, and inner preoccupation. To read the records of village-level witchcraft is to sense the power of female “gossip groups,” in which enmity as well as support circulated freely back and forth.

If life-stage circumstance made certain women targets of witchcraft suspicion, life-stage anxieties prompted others to feel and to voice such suspicion. On both sides of this intramural divide, menopausal change appears to have been key. The charges leveled by accusing women expressed, most of all, their feelings of loss and deprivation—loss of health, of status, of productive (and reproductive) capacity, of personal well-being. Thus:
I have such pains in my bowels as never I felt before, and know not how to be free of them.
Or:
My child was always well, till one day he complained of cats, and lay sick; I gave him physick [medicine] , and watched with him many a night, but he died a fortnight after.
Or:
I spun my wool as best I could, yet from that day forward it would never be strong.
To this category of accusers the figure of the witch stood as a kind of thief, snatching away prized elements of life and self.

A second category of accusers, at least as large as the first, included men between the ages of 20 and 40. These were, in many individual lives, years of chronic worry and stress. Every young man was obliged to negotiate a series of crucial transitional steps: leaving the parental household and starting a family of his own, inheriting property and establishing an independent stake in the local community, beginning to move toward positions of public trust and responsibility. His concerns ran, necessarily, to competence, skills, managerial oversight. And these were what chiefly appeared when he, or one of his age-mates, came forward to testify against suspected witches.
Why does my cow, as lusty a beast as ever we knew, now lie a-wasting in the yard afflicted with vomit and griping?
Or:
By whose means did my reaping hooks bend and break, just as harvest-time began?
Or:
Whence came the two snakes that bit my horse, as I rode to court last Michaelmas?
Here the witch was cast as a spoiler—an evil force that made even the best-laid plans go awry.

A third group of accusers involved girls in their teen years. This contingent did not always appear in witchcraft cases, but if present, its impact could be decisive. Famous, most of all, for their role in the panic outbreak at Salem, girls “in their fits” pointed (sometimes literally) toward the Devil and his witch-filled legions. Fits were, most assuredly, their major symptom: wild, intense, altogether grotesque outbursts of physical and emotional distress. The words of the trial testimonies strain to convey the full measure.
Insufferable tortures and impertinent frolics . . . Intolerable ravings . . . Preposterous courses and mischievous designs . . . Nasty and ludicrous foolish tricks . . . Roaring and shrieking and hallooing . . . Pinching, scratching, biting, and cutting . . . Leaping, running, flailing about . . . Swooning and fainting away . . . Amazing postures: head twisted round, and tongue drawn out; legs and arms stiffened, back doubled over . . . Bitter tears, sobbing and complaining . . . Sweating and panting . . . Deadly, heartbreaking sighs . . . Noisome smells . . . Saucy discourse . . . Threatening speeches . . . Barking like a dog, bleating like a calf, purring like cats, clucking like hens . . . Eyes sealed up . . . Teeth clenched . . . Mouth locked shut.
The effect on those who stood by was huge, “representing a dark resemblance of hellish torments.” In this way more than any other did “the Devil make a full discovery of himself.” And it was the witch who used her malign influence to set off fits; she would serve as instigator, and carrier, of the Devil's will.

Fits constituted a highly ritualized performance; typically, they followed a virtual script, well-known from much previous experience throughout the Anglo-American world. (Variants of the same element appeared in European witchcraft cases as well.) As such, they expressed a kind of cultural idiom, part of an evolving New England heritage. Yet, however tightly rooted in a given historical situation—this time, that place—the fits scenario also reflected universal themes in adolescent development. For one thing, the underlying dynamic, with teenage girls accusing middle-aged women, effectively relocated commonplace mother-daughter struggles. For another, fits included a large quotient of sheer personal display. In most pre-modern settings, young girls commanded less public attention than any other demographic subgroup; in witch trials that imbalance could be directly, and dramatically, reversed. Additional motivating forces came from further down in the psychological depths. Too complex for easy summary here, these fundamentally embraced the reorganization of personality that is central to adolescence everywhere (sexual maturation, identity, individuation). Of course, most young people, then as now, would manage to contain such growth challenges within socially approved limits; the witchcraft record spotlights a small but conspicuous fringe of extreme and emotionally fraught cases.

Three different source points, then, of especially potent accusation: women in midlife, young-adult men, adolescent girls. But a great many other folk, not themselves direct participants, were at least vicariously pulled in. For witch-hunting operated, always and everywhere, as a matter of collective fantasy. Indeed, the image of the witch helped shape both moral standards and cognitive understanding. Almost anyone might have sketched its leading elements. First and definitely foremost came postures of attack; witches were thought to be consumed by rage and the wish to inflict harm. (In this regard the Puritan witch stereotype contrasted markedly with its counterpart in the Catholic regions of Europe. There, the emphasis went heavily toward sexuality, with the Devil as lecher supreme, and witches as unfailingly “carnal.”) Another central aspect here was blatant, and insistent, intrusiveness; witches would routinely violate conventional boundaries, so as to invade their victims' personal space. Yet another was envy, a wheedling, grasping covetousness that knew no rest. Taken together, this triad formed the very epitome of “evil” character (as the Puritans saw such things). The effect was to draw crucial markers between the bad and the good, the sinful and the sanctified—with the figure of the witch on one side, and that of virtuous, God-fearing folk on the other.

The same stereotype was, moreover, profoundly shaped by inner-life experience among many (most? all?) members of this particular population, with roots stretching far back into their formative years. Among the various human emotions, Puritans came down hardest on anger—and did so most insistently with the very young. A New England child learned virtually in the cradle that “meekness” and “forbearance” were cardinal virtues and the open expression of anger their direct, abhorred opposite. Moreover, the wilfulness that almost invariably appears during the second and third years of life (any life) was construed by Puritan parents as a sign of “original sin”; thus it must be stifled, fought back, punished at all costs. In the child's world this pressure could only be felt as a shattering breach of personal boundaries, an encroachment so strong as to leave a lasting impress on subsequent development. Not coincidentally, the same themes would continually reinvest the traditional stereotype of the witch.

Individuals might invoke the stereotype at times of acute personal need—or, better still, might invoke its nearest, most palpable incarnation, the witch in their own community. Unwanted feelings could be projected onto her:
I am not angry, or envious, or intrusive; she is.
Embarrassing failures could be laid at her door:
Last summer's poor crop wasn't my fault; she made it happen.
Unexpected and unsettling misfortune could be explained as the result of her malefic intent:
She brought the lightning that set our meetinghouse afire.
In a world where so much of experience was immediately, and intensely, personal—and where nothing was considered random, or attributed to mere chance—such ways of thinking made eminently good sense.

Indeed, whole communities, no less than individuals, derived important gains from their encounters with witchcraft. When a troublesome person had been removed, following conviction as a witch, a village or neighborhood would experience a fresh surge of unity; moreover, the process of removal might itself seem restorative:
The evil that was formerly among us is no more; we are stronger, purer, better now.
Simply to join in cosmically important struggle—God versus Satan, with their bitterly opposed followers—was a major route to self-enhancement:
We have faced down the mighty enemy, and our lives are the larger for it.

So much for the psychological and social vectors of witch-hunting; one additional aspect has yet to be considered—nothing less, in fact, than history. Concern with witchcraft was never entirely constant; to the contrary, it rose and fell over time. Trial proceedings would represent a peak moment. And there were troughs, periods without trials, as well. Seen in retrospect, the details of this oscillating line are admittedly complex and often obscure, but the question posed is simple. What forms of community distress—anxiety, doubt, fear—proved most likely to generate concerted action against witches? Conversely, what factors served to inhibit such action?

Careful study of particular sites and regions over time does suggest a degree of patterning. Distress would be elevated, first of all, by certain obviously harmful events (epidemic disease, for example) and weather extremes (hurricanes, floods, droughts) and widespread crop failures, and also more localized happenings, like a cluster of house fires or of shipwrecks at sea. Any or all of these would be felt not only as a matter of physical loss but also as a form of “chastening” sent by the Almighty to punish sin and prompt repentance. Another, roughly parallel category involved “remarkable” events in nature, such as the sudden appearance of comets, eclipses, meteors, rainbows, and
aurora borealis.
These were not ordinarily destructive in and of themselves, but their rare and highly visible occurrence identified them as “signs” of providential intent. (Not surprisingly, the “celestial firmament” was their most likely source point.) Most often they were construed as divine warning: human, “earthly” conduct must improve,
or else.
Thus they, too, might substantially raise prevalent levels of anxiety. A third such category lay more fully within the province of human affairs; its defining element was social conflict, or “controversy,” in the language of the time. Perhaps there was persistent factional struggle within a community divided around issues of religious belief, or local governance, or the division of property. Perhaps, instead, the trouble came from outside: an Indian war, or an outbreak of intercolonial violence (between the British settlers and their opposite numbers in French Canada, for instance). Since Puritans placed a high premium on “peace” and cooperative human relationships, episodes of conflict directly undermined them; the consequences were liable to include deep emotional stress, especially guilt, and a need to find some external cause.