by Stacy Schiff
WHAT EXACTLY WAS a witch? Any seventeenth-century New Englander could have told you. Adversarial though the relationships were, Hathorne and Corwin, the court officials, the accused, and the accusers all envisioned the same figure, as real to them as had been the February floods, if infinitely more pernicious. Directly or indirectly they drew their definition from Joseph Glanvill, a distinguished English academician and naturalist. With unimpeachable authority, the Oxford-educated Glanvill had proved that witchcraft existed as plainly as heat or light. As he defined the term: “A witch is one who can do or seems to do strange things, beyond the known power of art and ordinary nature, by virtue of a confederacy with evil spirits.” From those pacts, witches assumed their power to transform themselves into cats, wolves, hare. They had a particular fondness for yellow birds. A witch could be male or female but was most often female. An English witch in particular maintained a kind of menagerie of imps or “familiars,” demonic mascots that did her bidding. Those companions could be hogs, turtles, weasels. Cats and dogs were prevalent, though toads were a universal favorite. The witchcraft literature is thick with toads: burned toads, exploding toads, dancing toads, groaning toads, pet toads, pots of toads, human-born toads, cats disguised as toads. The sixteen-year-old servant who slipped a plump toad into the family milk pitcher delivered an explicit message, as she fully intended.
The witch bore a mark on her body indicating her unnatural compact with the spirits that engaged her. Those marks could be blue or red, raised or inverted. They might resemble a nipple or a fleabite. They came and went. Essentially any dark blemish qualified, though a mark in the genital area was particularly incriminating. As had Tituba, a witch signed an agreement in blood, binding her to her master, to whom she pledged her services. He recruited by means of customized bribes. Witchcraft tended to run in families, along matrilineal lines. While a witch’s power was supernatural, her crime was religious. She could be relied on to stumble over the Lord’s Prayer, anathema to the devil. She worked her magic with charms or ointments—incriminating news for Salem’s Elizabeth Procter, whose maid was about to reveal that her mistress kept a greenish, foul-smelling oil on hand. To work her magic at a distance, a witch resorted on occasion to poppets, the doll-like figures for which Constable Herrick had ransacked the Osborne and Parris cupboards. And the witch’s connection to the wildly convulsing Salem children? An Englishman had long known precisely what enchantment looked like. According to an early legal guide on several Salem desks in 1692, it manifested as senseless trances, paralyzed limbs, fits, jaws clapped shut or grotesquely deformed, frothing, gnashing, violent shaking. The author of that volume tendered as well some vital advice: in the presence of such symptoms, consult your physician before blaming your neighbor.
Witches had troubled New England since its founding. They drowned oxen, caused cattle to leap four feet from the ground, tossed skillets into the fire, tipped hay from wagons, enchanted beer, sent pails crashing and kettles dancing. They launched apples, chairs, embers, candlesticks, dung through the air. They sent forth disembodied creatures, in one case a man’s head connected to a white cat tail by several feet of nothingness—a Cheshire cat centuries before Lewis Carroll. (It should be said that there were a fair number of taverns in the colony. Salem town was particularly well served, with fifteen taverns, or one establishment for every eighty men, women, and children.)* Witches alternately charmed and disabled. Out of the blue, Hathorne asked Tituba if she knew anything about Justice Corwin’s son. Most likely Hathorne wondered if she had crippled Corwin’s lame nine-year-old, although there were other candidates; in quick succession, Corwin had buried three boys. Witches managed to be two places at once or emerge dry from a wet road. They walked soundlessly over loose boards. They arrived too quickly, divined the contents of unopened letters, spun suspiciously fine linen, cultured uncommonly good cheese, knew secrets for bleaching cloth, smelled figs in someone else’s pocket, survived falls down stairs. Witches could be muttering, contentious malcontents or they could be inexplicably strong and unaccountably smart. Indeed they often committed the capital offense of having more wit than their neighbors, as her former minister had said of the third Massachusetts woman hanged for witchcraft, in 1656.
Compared to their European counterparts, New England witches were a tame bunch, their powers more ordinary than occult. They specialized in disordering the barn and kitchen. When the New England witch suspended natural laws, those laws tended to be agricultural ones. She had no talent for storms or weather of any kind; she neither called down plague nor burned Boston.† Continental witches had more fun. They walked on their hands. They made pregnancies last three years. They turned their enemies’ faces upside down and backward. They flew internationally. They rode hyenas to bacchanals deep in the forest; they stole babies and penises. They employed hedgehog familiars. The Massachusetts witch’s familiars—which she suckled, in a maternal relationship—were unexotic by comparison. She did not venture very far afield. Even in her transgressions she was puritanical. She rarely enjoyed sexual congress with the devil.* When she visited men in the night she seemed interested mostly in wringing their necks. Prior to 1692, the New England witch seldom flew to illicit meetings, more common in Scandinavia and Scotland. While there was plenty of roistering in New England, little of it occurred at witches’ Sabbaths, which seldom featured depravity, dancing, or voluptuous cakes and took place in broad daylight. Revelers listened to sermons there! (The Salem menu consisted primarily of bread, wine, and boiled meat.) The witch’s ultimate target, the point of all those pricks and pinches, was the soul rather than the body. And despite her prodigious powers, she did not break out of jail, something many less advantaged New Englanders managed with ease.
Among the abundant proofs of her existence—where proofs were needed—was the biblical injunction against her. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” commands Exodus, although there was some debate about that term; in Hebrew it more accurately denotes “poisoner.” As workers of magic, as diviners, witches and wizards extend as far back as recorded history. They tend to flourish when their literature does. The first known prosecution took place in Egypt around 1300 BC, for a crime that would today constitute practicing medicine without a license. (That supernatural medic was male.) Descended from Celtic horned gods and Teutonic folklore, Pan’s distant ancestor the devil was not yet on the scene. He arrived with the New Testament, a volume notably free of witches. Nothing in the Bible connects the two, a job that fell, much later, to the church. It took religion as well for anyone to propose satanic pacts, more popular in Scotland than in England. You could not really bargain away your soul before it was established that you had one.
The witch as Salem conceived her materialized in the thirteenth century as sorcery and heresy moved closer together; she came wholly into her own as a popular myth yielded to a popular madness. In 1326 Pope John XXII charged his inquisitors with the task of clearing the land of devil worshippers; the next two centuries proved transformative. When she was not being burned alive, the witch adopted two practices under the Inquisition. In her Continental incarnation she attended lurid orgies, the elements of which coalesced early in the fifteenth century, in the western Alps. At the same time, probably in Germany, she began to fly, sometimes on a broom. Also as the magician molted into the witch, the witch—previously a unisex term—became a woman, understood to be more susceptible to satanic overtures, inherently more wicked. The most reckless volume on the subject, the Malleus Maleficarum, or Witch Hammer, summoned a shelf of classical authorities to prove its point: “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” As is often the case with questions of women and power, elucidations here verged on the paranormal. Weak as she was to devilish temptations, a woman could emerge dangerously, insatiably commanding. According to the indispensable Malleus, even in the absence of occult power, women constituted “a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic
danger, a delectable detriment.”
The fifteenth century—the century of Joan of Arc—introduced the great contest between Christ and the devil. The all-powerful Reformation God required an all-powerful enemy; the witch came along for the ride. For reasons that appeared self-evident, the devil could not accomplish what Lawson would term his “venomous operations” without her. Frenzied prosecutions began at the end of that century with the publication of the Malleus, the volume that turned women into “necessary evils”; witchcraft literature and prosecutions had a habit of going hand in hand. And while Satan worship was a useful charge to level at a rival religious sect—Catholics hurled it at Protestants as vigorously as Protestants hurled it back—all agreed on the prosecution of witches.* For their part, witches were perfectly ecumenical. They frequented Catholic and Protestant, Lutheran and Calvinist parishes. Exorcism alone remained a Roman Catholic monopoly. Nor had witches any preferred address. They were neither particularly English nor exclusively European.
As to what country engaged in the greatest hunts, the competition is fierce. Germany was slow to prosecute, afterward fanatical. A Lorrain inquisitor boasted that he had cleared the land of nine hundred witches in fifteen years. An Italian bested him with a thousand deaths in a year. One German town managed four hundred in a single day. Between 1580 and 1680, Great Britain dispensed with no fewer than four thousand witches. Several years after Salem, at least five accused witches perished in Scotland on the testimony of an eleven-year-old girl. Essex County, England, from which many Massachusetts Bay settlers hailed, proved especially prosecution-happy, though it convicted at a steady rate rather than in the flash-flood manner of Salem. A diabolical rooster figured among the many hunt victims, as did the mayor of a German city and several British clergymen. For the most part, English witches were hanged while French ones were burned. This posed a riddle for the Channel island of Guernsey when three witches turned up there in 1617. Ultimately, they were hanged according to British law, then burned, according to French.
The witch made the trip from England to North America largely intact. With her came her Anglo-Saxon imps. Similarly, the contractual aspects—the devil’s mark, the book, the pact—represented Protestant preoccupations. The Sabbaths, like the flights, derived from the Continent; English witches evinced no interest in broomsticks. The little Swedish girl who had plummeted from her stick had also been on her way to a riotous, open-air meeting to enter her name in a satanic book. The devil swooped in after her crash to minister to the injury that caused the “exceeding great pain in her side.”* (He proved less obliging in New England; Ann Foster would benefit from no such rescue in 1692.) When he was not proffering pacts or practicing medicine, the devil was very busy. He baited deviously and worked stealthily, specializing in the perverse. He assured the skeptic that witchcraft did not exist. He knew his Bible, from which he quoted strategically, to odious ends. He interfered with the ministerial message by lulling men to sleep during sermons. He impeded scientific progress. A gifted medic, he understood more of healing than any man. He was the best scholar around. He too had a serious work ethic; agile and labile, he was always present, always recruiting. He knew everyone’s secrets. And he came to the job with six thousand years’ experience! As William Perkins, the early Puritan theologian, noted, he could cause you to believe things of yourself that were untrue. (A number of distressed Massachusetts residents asked themselves a related question in 1692, one that assumed greater urgency as spring turned to summer: Could I be a witch and not know it?) These ideas the New England settlers imported wholesale, derived primarily from the work of Glanvill, with whom Increase Mather corresponded, and Perkins, from whom Cotton Mather cribbed. When the colonists established a legal code, the first capital crime was idolatry. The second was witchcraft. “If any man or woman be a witch, that is, hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death,” read the 1641 body of laws, citing Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. Blasphemy came next, followed by murder, poisoning, and bestiality.
While he was not cited in that statute by name, the devil was soon up to his usual tricks in New England. The first person to confess to entering into a pact with Satan had prayed for his help with chores. An assistant materialized to clear the ashes from the hearth and the hogs from the fields. That case turned on heresy rather than harm; the Connecticut servant was indicted in 1648 for “familiarity with the devil.” Cotton Mather—who could not resist a calamity, preternatural or otherwise—disseminated an instructive account of her compact. Early New England witchcraft cases included no broomsticks, satanic gatherings, or convulsing girls. Rather they featured bewitched pigs and roving livestock, proprieties trampled, properties trespassed. They centered on the overly attentive acquaintance or the supplicant who, like Sarah Good, was turned away. Most involved some stubborn, calcified knot of vexed, small-town relations. Many charges had a fairy-tale aspect to them: spinning more wool than was possible without supernatural assistance, completing housework in record time, enchanting animals, inquiring too solicitously about a neighbor’s illness, proffering poisoned treats.
In the years since its laws had been codified, New England indicted over a hundred witches, about a quarter of them men. The flying, roaring, religion-resisting Goodwin children accounted for the most recent Massachusetts trial. The culprit in their case turned out to be the mother of a neighborhood laundress, whom the eldest Goodwin girl accused of theft. The older woman erupted in fury, upbraiding Martha Goodwin; the teenager’s fits began immediately. Within the week, three of her siblings heaved and screamed. On the stand, the accused was unable to recite the Lord’s Prayer in English, having learned it in Gaelic, the only language she spoke. A search of her house turned up poppets; through an interpreter, she offered a full confession, if one foggy on the devil.* (Years earlier the woman’s husband had accused her of witchcraft, establishing a role that would be reprised at Salem.) The Irish Catholic witch was hanged on November 16, 1688, warning as she rode to the gallows that the children’s fits would not abate with her death. She proved right; they grew more severe. Martha continued to kick ministers and ride her aerial steed for some time.
Of late-seventeenth-century Boston, a Dutch visitor remarked that he had “never been in a place where more was said about witchcraft and witches.” Indeed the word “witch” got batted around a good deal there. So did witchcraft diagnoses. The first settlers had emigrated from England when that country’s witch craze was at its height; they came in large part from the most enchanted counties. Newly arrived in town, a stranger might take one look at a convulsing child and—all goodwill and sympathy—inform his family that a witch lived nearby. They might beg to differ, reassuring him that their neighbors were models of piety, but he knew better: “You have a neighbor that is a witch and she has had a falling out with your wife and said in her heart your wife is a proud woman, and she would bring down her pride in this child.” When Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba were fitted with chains in March, they joined another accused witch, languishing in prison since the previous October. Sorcery adapted well to New England—a howling wilderness haunted by devilish Frenchmen and satanic Indians—as it did to Puritanism, an immersive, insecure-making creed that anticipated conflict if not downright cataclysm, having nearly been persecuted into existence. New England trials were nonetheless on the wane in 1692, as they were in the mother country. Connecticut had been more troubled by witches than Massachusetts. That colony had executed a series of them in the early 1660s then relented, never to hang another. Other cases erupted sporadically rather than in frenzied outbursts.
Nor did New England demonstrate any particular eagerness to convict. “We inclined to the more charitable side,” noted John Hale following a controversial 1680 reprieve, when the court had refused to convict a woman for injuries caused by a demon in her guise. Justices proceeded cautiously; magistrates dismissed cases and overturned jury convictions. One accused witch was fined for lying, another whipped for
chatting with the devil. The Plymouth woman who swore that a neighbor had appeared to her in the shape of a spectral bear was interrogated closely. What kind of tail did the bear have? asked a shrewd magistrate. The woman could not tell; the animal had faced her straight on. Bears, she was reminded, did not have tails. For her fiction she was offered the choice between a whipping and a public apology. Of the 103 pre-Salem cases in New England, the conviction rate hovered around 25 percent. In all, Massachusetts hanged only six witches before 1692. On the initial day of hearings, when a deacon from Parris’s Boston congregation placed a copy of William Perkins’s famed book into the village minister’s hands, no one, with the exception of the Goodwins’ tormentor—the three women jailed in Ipswich would be reassured to remember—had been executed for witchcraft in well over a quarter century.
In the decades prior to 1692, a great debate over the reality of witchcraft had raged in Britain, where prosecutions essentially halted. That discussion fell to the elite; the witch was a subject for the academician and the educated clergyman. Skeptics argued their case a full century before Salem, though to Joseph Glanvill—writing late in the 1670s—it was still just possible to believe that all intelligent men were on your side. The existence of witches, it was understood, was something on which men of all ages, wise and unwise, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and heathen, could agree. It remained as obvious that a spirit could convey men and women through the air as it was that the wind could flatten a house. The first steps away from the belief were tentative ones. The rationalist came up always against Perkins, than whom no one defended witchcraft more cogently. Of course there were all manner of frauds, cheats, and counterfeits, he conceded, sounding a variation on the paranoiac’s anthem. Just because there were impostures did not mean the genuine article did not exist! The cheats rather proved the case; there would be no counterfeits were there not things to be counterfeited. Cotton Mather echoed that argument, as he would a great deal of Perkins. Sorcery did not account for all dubious accidents. But some things could be explained no other way.* To doubt its efficacy was, as Perkins had noted, Mather reiterated, and Massachusetts believed, to doubt the sun shining at noon.