Witchcraft

WITCHCRAFT

WITCHCRAFT. No general agreement seems to have been reached in the United States on what witchcraft is, or was, or might be.

When the Puritans arrived in New England in the early seventeenth century, they soon saw evidence of witchcraft. Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop discerned it in the behavior of Anne Hutchinson in the 1630s. Hutchinson was deeply spiritual, highly intellectual, and openly critical of some clergymen's interpretations of religious doctrine. Her outspokenness and her charismatic appeal to other early New England settlers so disconcerted Winthrop and some of the colony's most influential ministers that they tried her as a heretic and banished her from the colony. At the time neither Winthrop nor his clerical allies explicitly said that her crime was witchcraft, though they called one of her female followers, Jane Hawkins, a witch and insinuated that Hutchinson and another of her allies, Mary Dyer, gave birth to demons. Only later, when he wrote his history of New England in the 1640s, did Winthrop speak openly about Hutchinson's witchcraft. Some people thought her a witch, he said, because she was so successful in drawing support from her neighbors for her heretical religious beliefs.

When Winthrop talked further about Hawkins, he linked her heresies to her medical knowledge and also denounced Margaret Jones for her medical practice and divination skills. Not all healers or prescient women or challengers of official theology were labeled witches, nor were these the only recurrent themes in the suspicions voiced. Still, when we consider the hundreds of accusations lodged over the course of the seventeenth century, especially in light of ministerial writings on the topic, the meanings of witchcraft for New England's early colonists begin to emerge.

New Englanders defined witchcraft as the use of supernatural power, usually but not always to harm. They believed that some human beings possessed extraordinary abilities that were darkly unnatural. Ann Hibbens drew suspicion in 1656 because she possessed knowledge that ordinary people lacked, in her case an awareness that two neighbors some distance away were speaking of her. George Burroughs, one of the few men and the only minister to be executed as a witch in New England, was accused of unusual strength—he could carry a full barrel of molasses with just two fingers of one hand. More commonly, accused witches were said to abuse their power, to kill rather than heal an ailing child, to obstruct ordinary domestic processes such as the making of butter or beer, or to invisibly attack the cattle or crops upon which their neighbors' prosperity rested. Katherine Harrison was known to spin more yarn than any other woman, and that was used against her in court in the 1660s, but a man's tale of how she hindered him from completing a garment he was weaving probably carried more weight with the jury that declared her a witch. Indeed, the motive that underlay the supposed act of witchcraft was part of how the crime was defined. If the deployment of superhuman

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power itself was understood as witchcraft, more often accusers emphasized its angry, malicious, and vengeful use. Thus Eunice Cole stood accused of many acts, from unseemly speeches to consulting evil spirits, but the records that survive of her court appearances from 1656 to 1680 stress the viciousness of her character, motives, and personal attacks.

If witchcraft gained its everyday meanings through accusations and trials in local contexts, Puritans also understood witchcraft as a relationship between a human being and the devil. Because they insisted on finding clear evidence of a witch's alliance with Satan, ministers fleshed out this meaning in discussions of the nature, physical evidence, and purported benefits of the pact between the two, the danger of such a relationship to New England's spiritual mission, and the effects on those who resisted Satan's insatiable desire for more witches to serve him. Many young women lent invaluable support to Puritan definitions of witchcraft when they acknowledged the excruciating pain they felt (which the ministers told them they would feel) when they held out against Satan's attempts to lure them into witches' ranks.

To these two definitions of witchcraft must be added a third, New Englanders' implicit understanding of what kinds of people were likely to align themselves with Satan and do their neighbors harm. If historians of witchcraft at the turn of the twenty-first century generally accept that popular and elite conceptions of witchcraft coexisted in the seventeenth century and frequently overlapped, consensus falls apart over the more subtle meanings conveyed in the patterns visible in the lives of accusers and accused. For some, accused witches were the angry, malicious, and vengeful people their neighbors said they were, and they attempted to harm their neighbors through image magic, curses, and spells. For these scholars, witchcraft was a social reality, a set of practices that identified genuine witches. For other historians, the lack of evidence for such practices in most witchcraft records and widespread economic, religious, and social patterns linking accusers and the accused suggest that New England witch-craft is best understood as an expression of social and cultural anxieties among accusers rather than the malice of the accused. From this perspective, religion, psychology, and gender provide better analytical tools for deciphering the meanings of witchcraft than the biases of accusers.

However varied their interpretations, for the most part historians reject definitions of witchcraft as superstition, mental illness, and lies. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Salem outbreak of 1692 is recognized as merely one—if by far the most deadly—witchcraft event in the American colonies. Studies of New England are heavily influenced by recent attempts to understand Western witchcraft traditions in the contexts of early modern belief systems and world religions more generally. As scholars turn to anthropology, women's studies, and most recently, literary and visual culture studies for analytical tools and interdisciplinary frameworks, witchcraft history looks less like a narrative of the exceptional and more like a window into comparative social and cultural transformation.

American witchcraft history has also begun to incorporate the past three centuries. Although the trials came to an end in New England soon after the Salem outbreak and witchcraft was declared a superstition, belief persisted through the eighteenth century and, for a few, even longer. Mainstream Protestant ministers debated the existence of witches and witchcraft among themselves long after such discussion was no longer acceptable in public discourse; Christian fundamentalist churches continue to keep the fear of witchcraft alive in sermons and boycotts. Artists, poets, and writers of fiction picked up the threads where ministers and magistrates left off, creating children's stories and entertainment for adults that kept as much as it changed the image of the witch. Advertisers, too, found her useful in selling their wares, from lingerie to liqueurs to Halloween costumes. Witches drew followers as well as exploiters in the nineteenth century and, by the late twentieth century, in particular with the emergence of feminist neo-pagan movements, witches and witchcraft had been reclaimed as multifaceted symbols of resistance, emancipation, and social and spiritual rebirth.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Butler, Jon. "Magic, Astrology and the Early American Religious Heritage." American Historical Review 84 (1979): 317–346.

Demos, John Putnam. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Norton, 1987.

Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Knopf, 2002.

Salomonsen, Jone. Enchanted Feminism: Ritual, Gender and Divinity among the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

Carol F. Karlsen

See also Puritans and Puritanism ; Salem Witch Trials and vol. 9: Evidence Used Against Witches .