Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (43 page)

Even in New England, although the ministers condemned magic as the work of the devil, many of them were inclined to regard it as the outcome of ignorance and `simplicity', rather than of premeditated sin.43 In the 1680s, however, the New England ministers became increasingly preoccupied by the prevalence of malefic magic, which had been the subject of sporadic indictments since the first witch trials and executions in the late 1640s and early 1650s. The northern colonies had been passing through difficult years. King Philip's War had brought massive destruction in 1675-6, and further tension and uncertainty had been created by the attempts of the crown to tighten its control by revoking the Massachusetts charter in 1684 and establishing the Dominion of New England. In the midst of these various trials and tribulations the ministers were deeply troubled about the `declension' they detected from the high spiritual standards set by the first generation of their ministerial predecessors. Their own authority was facing a growing challenge, both from within their congregations and from the rising strength of Anglicans, Quakers and Baptists. Increasingly beleaguered, they saw in the prevalence of magic further evidence of the machinations of the devil, who was visibly gaining ground in his attempts to overthrow the city on a hill.44 `Satan', declared the Reverend Deodat Lawson, preaching in Salem Village, Massachusetts, in 1692, `is the grand enemy of all mankind ... He is the original, the fountain of malice, the instigation of all contrariety, malignity and enmity '45 Prayer and repentance, not diabolically inspired magic, were the only effective answer to satanic wiles.

Lawson's bleak warning was indicative of the climate of anxiety and condemnation that had gripped Salem and the surrounding region since the launching of its famous witchcraft trials in February 1692. The crisis began in January when the niece and daughter of the Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village were seized by convulsive fits.46 Under questioning, it transpired that a woman neighbour had resorted to countermagic in an attempt to cure the girls, and had instructed Tituba, a household slave, to prepare a `witchcake' for them. There are strong indications that Tituba was an Indian, not an African slave, and a later account describes her as having been `brought into the country from New Spain', which may suggest that she originally came from Spanish Florida.47 The girls were not cured, and the reports of diabolical practices multiplied as more and more girls and young women in the community were similarly affected by convulsions, and identified their tormentors by name from among their neighbours. Once the process had begun, it became unstoppable. More and more unfortunates - men as well as women - were denounced and prosecuted as being in consort with the devil. The hysteria gripped not only Salem but also the neighbouring town of Andover, both in Essex County. By November, when the campaign had largely run its course, and fifty-four `confessions' had been forthcoming, at least 144 people (38 of them men) had been prosecuted, and fourteen women and five men had been hanged.48 Then, as doubts spread about the handling of the cases in the Salem courtroom, and scepticism grew about the credibility of the graphic testimony presented by the afflicted girls, the trials collapsed as swiftly and dramatically as they had begun. Belief in the existence of witches and witchcraft still remained strong, but after the turn of the century there would be no further witch trials in New England.

What remains unclear is why a generalized sense of anxiety about the activities of the devil should have come to a head in this particular area, Essex County, Massachusetts, and at this particular moment. The years 1690-2 seem to have been a time of particular stress and tension, even in relation to what had come before. A smallpox epidemic in 1690 had set nerves on edge.49 In 1691 the worst fears of Congregational ministers were confirmed when the new royal charter permitted freedom of worship to dissenters from Congregationalism, thus officially sanctioning the religious competition they had long struggled to contain. At the more local level, there were tensions between Salem Village and the nearby Salem Town. The strong Quaker community located between them was a visible threat to old-established ways.

Perhaps most potent of all was the sense of crisis generated by the outbreak of a second Indian War in 1688, only ten years after the ending of King Philip's War. Settler society suffered from a deep and persistent fear of the `redskins', those half-present, half-absent Indians who peopled the imaginations of the whites in the northern frontier regions even more than they peopled in reality its dark woods and forests. The Wabanakis were once more on the warpath, in collusion with the French Canadians, whose popery made them as threatening as the Indians. They raided the town of Andover in 1689, and when the colonial militia tried to stop the raids and launch a counter-attack on Montreal its efforts were rewarded with humiliating failure. Maine in particular suffered further devastation, and the inflow of refugees from the border areas was a stark reminder to Essex County of the constant menace of attack, although whether it received more refugees than other parts of Massachusetts is far from clear. But it is significant that some confessions of spectral sightings of the devil depicted him as being `tawny', like an Indian. Tituba and her witchcake had brought the devil out of the forest and into the home.

Private grudges, manipulation, mass hysteria all played their part in the terrible collective drama which, as it developed in these fear-stricken communities, showed increasing signs of sparing not even the ministers themselves. Even the judges of Salem's Court of Oyer and Terminer, a class of men who in the past had tended to be sceptical when presented with cases involving witchcraft, succumbed to the hysteria, perhaps out of genuine conviction that only the machinations of the devil could explain the failure of the military operations led by their friends and relatives against the Indians and the French.so

Mass hysteria, however, was not confined to this small corner of the American continent. By an odd coincidence a not dissimilar, if less tragic, drama was being played out at almost exactly the same moment thousands of miles away, in the Mexican City of Queretaro." In 1683, at a time when the New England ministers were agonizing over the backsliding of their flocks, a new branch of the Franciscan Order, known as Propaganda Fide, set up a college in Queretaro. The aim of these ascetic Franciscans, many of them new arrivals from Spain, was to bring the gospel to unevangelized rural areas, while also conducting a spiritual ministry in the towns - a ministry which would bring about a `universal reformation of customs'." Like the ministers in New England, the Franciscans had found themselves faced with growing competition - in this instance from rival religious orders, the Dominicans, the Augustinians and the Jesuits, whose activities had subverted traditional Franciscan primacy in the evangelization of New Spain.53 Like the ministers in New England, they needed to recover the initiative with a powerful message, and they found it in their cause of ascetic reform. Whipping up popular enthusiasm through preaching and processions they imposed a puritanical regime on the city, putting a stop to public games, dances and other unsuitable festivities. Both sexes were affected by their preaching, but women proved to be especially susceptible, and by the end of 1691 disturbing reports were reaching the tribunal of the Inquisition in Mexico City that women who had taken the Franciscan habit and frequented the missions in Queretaro were showing signs of diabolical possession. They screamed, insulted the Virgin Mary, spat on crucifixes and holy relics, and went into convulsions. On receiving these reports, the Inquisition moved swiftly into action, formally accusing the demoniacs of pretending to be possessed, simply as a pretext for blaspheming and uttering heresies. Some of the Franciscans most closely involved in the affair were reprimanded, and the episode ended almost as soon as it had begun.

Queretaro and Salem were very different worlds, but there were certain obvious similarities in the dramas that engulfed them, like the apparent susceptibility of women to messages of warning and redemption, and allegations of diabolical possession of children, who played such an important part in the Salem trials. One of the cases adduced by the Franciscans was that of a ten-year-old girl, alleged to have been whisked through the air to a distant hill. Here the witches sought to persuade her to make a compact with Satan, that would enable her to visit Spain and Rome at will. This, after all, was a devil operating under Catholic, not Protestant, auspices. More significantly, the allegations of diabolical possession, both in New England and Queretaro, coincided with campaigns to raise the level of religion and morality. In both instances, the effect of these campaigns seems to have been to fill congregations with a deep sense of spiritual inadequacy. Commenting on the Franciscan mission in Queretaro, a Carmelite wrote: `Men are disconsolate, women are afflicted and souls are everywhere riddled with doubt.' The over-zealous Franciscans, by attempting to turn their followers into saints overnight, had generated strains which had led them to indulge in bizarre behaviour and develop `strange illnesses'.54 In Roman Catholic New Spain, as in Puritan Massachusetts, religious professionals proved to be prime purveyors of anxiety.

For all the differences between Protestantism and Tridentine Catholicism, their shared theological inheritance inevitably led to many points of convergence, and not least on questions relating to magic and diabolism. This was particularly true of their common reliance on the teachings of Saint Augustine, which, by sharply separating the natural from the supernatural, could easily lead on both sides of the confessional divide to perceptions of a God so omnipotent as to be a capricious tyrant, using the devil for His own providential purposes. In playing down the Queretaro episode the inquisitors, while no doubt motivated, as the New England ministers belatedly came to be motivated, by an awareness of the role of malice and deceit in witchcraft accusations, seem to have been as anxious to preserve the credibility of a malign devil as of a just God.55 In New England it was the credibility of spectral evidence, rather than of the devil himself, that came to trouble the ministers and the magistrates.56 The winds of the new sceptical philosophy may have been blowing in America as well as Europe by the late seventeenth century - both the Mexican savant, Siguenza y Gongora and, with considerably more hesitation, Cotton Mather, opted for natural rather than supernatural explanations of the comet they observed passing through the skies in 168057 - but down on earth the devil, even if not necessarily each and every spectral sighting, remained unnervingly believable.

Religious teaching that stressed, in New Spain and New England alike, the divine intention to test and increase the merits of the faithful through satanic trials and temptations while also emphasizing the relationship between personal responsibility and personal misfortune, helped to intensify the sense of vulnerability in a world where so much seemed to be beyond individual control. But where the sense of vulnerability among the faithful in Counter-Reformation societies may have been alleviated by belief in the countervailing power of ritual, this recourse, although by no means absent, was less obviously available for Protestants standing in an unmediated relationship to an all-powerful God.58 Fasting, public confession and penitential rites, however, played a major part in the life of New England congregations, providing collective reinforcement against the temptations of the devil. Yet the very practice of public confession in the Congregational churches must also have encouraged members to make the confessions of demonic possession that unleashed the witchcraft trials.59

While the conjunction of mentality and circumstance may have contrived to give greater prominence to malefic magic among the settler population of later seventeenth-century New England than of New Spain, Spanish American churchmen, had they known of it, would have had no cause to quarrel with John Foxe's assertion that `the elder the world waxeth, the longer it continueth, the nearer it hasteneth to its end, the more Satan rageth.'60 But those same churchmen could call on powerful allies in their battle to defend American space from the hosts of Satan. There were, to begin with, the angels and archangels, who were seen as the soldiers and guardians of the new Catholic empire of the Indies. An ancient and doctrinally suspect tradition, transmitted by way of the spiritual Franciscans to the Jesuits, endowed the archangels Michael and Gabriel with five archangelic companions, each with a name and a specific heavenly assignment. Corresponding to the seven virtues, these were pitted against seven named devils, who corresponded to the vices. Nowhere was this struggle between the forces of good and evil fought out more fiercely than in Peru, where, in representations from the later seventeenth century onwards, artists took to depicting the seven archangels like members of a heavenly corps de ballet, dressed in elaborate lace-trimmed uniforms, and with muskets in hand (fig. 18).61

While the archangels were fighting on their side, the clergy and the faithful also had recourse to intercession by the Virgin and a battery of saints. The `local religion' of sixteenth-century Spain, with its proliferation of chapels, shrines and images for which a local community felt a particular devotion'62 transferred itself to the Indies, where towns and villages acquired their own special patron as space was Christianized.63 Some images were brought over from Spain, allegedly in the saddle-bags of the conquistadores, like the Virgin of Los Remedios, who was named the patron of Mexico City in 1574.64 Some were crudely carved by local Indians, and subsequently acquired an unearthly beauty, like the Virgin of Copacabana, a Christianized Indian sanctuary on the shores of Lake Titicaca - an image which, beginning as an object of local devotion, came to be specially venerated throughout the viceroyalty.65 Others were discovered hidden in some cave, or were miraculously revealed by an apparition.

The most famous of all such apparitions of the Virgin Mary was that to a poor Mexican Indian, Juan Diego, in 1531. The story went that, on receiving her instructions to gather up flowers, he carried them in his cape to the bishop, who was astonished to find her likeness painted on the cloth. The veneration of this image, first established as a local cult after a shrine was built for it at Guadalupe, near Mexico City, began to spread as miracles were reported. But it was a veneration largely confined to Indians. It was only during the seventeenth century, at a time when the creole population of New Spain was struggling to establish a sense of its own place in the world, that the cult was also taken up by creoles, and the Virgin of Guadalupe was effectively launched on the spectacular career that would eventually transform her into the symbol of `Mexican' aspirations and a `Mexican' identity.66