Supernatural (51 page)

The case may not be as simple as it looks.
Even Rossell Hope Robbins admits ‘motives are very elusive’.
Clearly, these children were not really ‘bewitched’.
But they behaved in some ways like the ‘possessed’ nuns of Loudun or Aix-en-Provence, or like some teenagers who are the ‘focus’ of poltergeist occurrences.

The Revd.
Samuel Parris was not a popular man, for he seems to have been an unpleasant character, mean and bad-tempered.
He had brought with him from Barbados a number of black servants, including a woman called Tituba, and her husband, ‘John Indian’.
During the long winter evenings, Tituba talked to the children about witches and spirits.
His daughter Elizabeth, aged 9, her cousin Abigail Williams, aged 11, and a friend called Ann Putnam, 12, soon began behaving very oddly, having convulsions, screaming and talking disconnected nonsense.
A doctor called in to ‘cure’ Elizabeth said he thought she was bewitched.
Other ministers were consulted, and decided that the Devil was involved.
Questioned—and beaten—by Parris, Tituba agreed that the Devil had inspired her to ‘work mischief’ against the children, and named a pipe-smoking beggar woman named Sarah Good as an accomplice.
The children also mentioned Sarah Good as well as a bedridden old woman, Sarah Osborne.
When a magistrate named Hathorne asked the girls about their convulsions, they began to moan with pain, and declared that the ‘spirit’ (or spectre) of Sarah Good was biting and pinching them.
Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne both denied in court that they knew anything about witchcraft, but Tituba admitted it all with a certain relish; she went on expanding her confessions for three days.
Tituba declared that Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne had been present at a witches’ Sabbat, and added that there were two more local women whom she did not know.
This caused widespread gossip and speculation.
12-year-old Ann Putnam put an end to this by declaring that one of the witches was a woman called Martha Cory—who had laughed unbelievingly when the girls threw their convulsions—and that the other was a saintly old lady named Rebecca Nurse.
A farmer named Proctor—another sceptic—was also accused.

The whole area was now in the grip of a witchcraft scare; people were afraid to go out after dark because witches were supposed to be able to turn themselves into animals or night-birds—a remnant of legends of werewolves and vampires.
Eight more local children became ‘afflicted’ and screamed out the names of ‘witches’ who were tormenting them.
A woman named Bridget Bishop—who had a reputation for being ‘fast’—was tried and executed in June 1692.
Sarah Osborne died in prison, but Sarah Good was tried and executed, together with four others, in July.
A minister named George Burroughs was denounced, and he was also tried and executed.

The more hysteria increased, the more the girls—now eleven of them—seemed to be tormented by devils.
By September, the death toll had increased to 20, and one unfortunate man—Giles Corey—was literally pressed to death under enormous weights in an effort to force him to confess.
He refused (although it would have saved his life) because his goods would have been forfeit to the state, and he had no intention of dying a pauper.
His wife was hanged as a witch.

The various girls were called to neighbouring towns to identify witches, and it looked as if the trials and executions would spread to Andover and Boston.
The Andover magistrate declined to sign more than 40 warrants and had to flee with his wife to escape being tried as a witch.
Then the girls began to overreach themselves.
They named the wife of the governor, Sir William Phips, as a witch, and the president of Harvard College; the magistrates told them sternly that they were mistaken, and this was the beginning of the end of the persecutions.
When Governor Phips returned from fighting Indians on the Canadian border, he dismissed the court and released many of the accused.
In further trials, ‘spectral evidence’—the notion that the disembodied spirits of witches could torment their victims—was disallowed, and only three people out of 52 were condemned.
Phips reprieved them, released all others from prison, and the Salem craze ended abruptly about a year after it began.
One of the girls, Ann Putnam, later confessed that she had been ‘deluded by Satan’ when she accused Rebecca Nurse and others.
The Reverend Parris, now attacked and denounced, left Salem with his family.
Abigail Williams, according to legend, became a prostitute.

Even Montague Summers agrees that the Salem trials were the result of hysteria and the ‘diseased imaginings of neurotic children’.
But he was convinced that there
is
positive evidence of involvement in witchcraft in a few of the cases.
It seems probable that George Burroughs, Bridget Bishop and Martha Carrier were members of a coven—although they had nothing to do with ‘bewitching’ the children.

And what about the children?
All writers on the affair assume that they were mischievous, ‘prankish’, and that the whole thing snowballed out of a harmless game.
But what was this game?
The answer, fairly certainly, is some form of ‘magic’.
Tituba was familiar with voodoo and obeah.
And the essence of voodoo rituals—as David St Clair emphasises in
Drum and Candle
and Guy Playfair in
The Flying Cow
—is the evocation of ‘low grade’ spirits to do the bidding of the magician.
The three children, bored with the long winter in the dreary New England village, undoubtedly ‘tried out’ what Tituba had taught them.
Their intentions were harmless enough—rather like a modern child playing with a ouija board or automatic writing.
But two of them at least were at the dangerous age when children become the focus of poltergeist phenomena—Ann Putnam was twelve and looked older.
We do not know very much about ‘possession’, and the usual theory is that it is pure hysteria; but again, anyone who takes the trouble to read T.K.
Oesterreich’s classic
Possession: Demoniacal and Other,
or Martin Ebon’s anthology
Exorcism: Fact not Fiction
will see that there is a very thin dividing line between ‘possession’ and being a focus of poltergeist activity.
This is a matter to which we shall return in the next chapter.

The storm that ended the witchcraft craze in France emphasises once again that witchcraft can have a genuinely sinister face.

In 1673, during the reign of Louis XIV, two priests informed the police in Paris that a number of penitents had asked absolution for murdering their spouses.
No names were mentioned, because of the secrecy of the confessional, but it alerted the Chief of Police, Nicholas de la Reynie.
What was happening, it seemed, was that a ring of fortunetellers and ‘sorcerers’ were supplying ‘succession powders’—a euphemism for poisons—to wealthy men and women who preferred lovers to matrimonial entanglements.

De la Reynie could only keep his ear to the ground.
It took him four years to fit together the clues that led him to the recognition that there was an international ‘poisons ring’—much as there are now drugs rings—headed by men of influence.
A remark of a fortuneteller, Marie Bosse, about being ready to retire when she had arranged three more poisonings, provided the lead he had been waiting for.
A disguised policewoman consulted Marie Bosse on how she could get rid of her husband, and made an arrest when she was sold poison.
Many poisons were found in Marie Bosse’s house.
She and her husband and two sons were arrested; also, another fortuneteller known as La Vigoreux, who shared a communal bed with the family.

Interrogations began to reveal the names of their customers, and the revelation shocked the King.
It seemed that half the aristocracy were trying to poison one another, and that two ladies had even approached another fortuneteller for means of getting rid of one of his own mistresses Louise de la Vallière.

But this was not simply a matter of murder or attempted murder.
The customers were also convinced that the fortunetellers could produce charms and magic potions to secure the affections of their admirers, and apparently had no objection if the Devil was involved.

Stern and decisive action was called for—after all, the king might be the next victim .
.
.
He created a special commission, a kind of Star Chamber, which sat in a room draped in black curtains and lit with candles—hence the
Chambre Ardente
—the lighted (or burning) chamber.

What made it so frightening was that the methods of poisoning were so subtle.
A Madame de Poulaillon, who wanted to kill her aged husband so she could marry her young lover, had been impregnating his shirts with arsenic, which would cause symptoms similar to those of syphilis; she would then rub the sores with a ‘healing ointment’ that would kill him in ten weeks—and there would be no suspicion.

The chief defendants were Marie Bosse, La Vigoreux, an abortionist known as La Lepère, and a well known fortuneteller called Catherine Deshayes, known as La Voisin.
La Vigoreux and Marie Bosse were quickly condemned—on May 6,1678—to be burnt alive and one son, Frangois Bosse, hanged.
La Voisin was horribly tortured, and, when she refused to confess to poisoning, burnt alive in an iron chair—Mme de Sevigné described in a letter how the old woman cursed violently and threw off the straw half a dozen times, until the flames became too strong and she disappeared in them.

All this was kept secret; one reason being that the king’s mistress
Mme.
de Montespan was deeply involved.
And more investigation revealed that various priests had performed Black Masses and even sacrificed babies to the Devil.
A hunchback, the Abbé Guibourg used as an altar the naked body of a woman, placing the chalice on her belly;
Mme.
de Montespan had often served as the altar.
A baby would then be sacrificed by having its throat cut, and the body thrown into an oven.
La Voisin confessed at her trial that she had disposed of 2,500 babies like this.
On another occasion,
Mme.
des Oillets came to make a charm for the king, accompanied by a man.
The priest said that sperm from both was necessary, but since
Mme.
des Oillets was menstruating, he accepted a few drops of menstrual blood from her, while the man masturbated into the chalice.

Many other priests proved to be involved, and it became clear that an alarming number of churchmen had no objections to dealings with the Devil.
One had consecrated a stone altar in a brothel, another strangled a baby after baptising it with oil reserved for Extreme Unction, another copulated with the girl who was serving as an altar in full view of his audience; another fortune teller described how she had sacrificed her own new-born baby at a Black Mass.

By 1680, it had struck the king that a full-scale scandal could lead to unforeseen results, since so many nobles were involved.
He decided to suspend the Chambre Ardente.
No noblemen—or women—were sentenced, but de la Reynie continued to arrest and torture fortunetellers.
104 people were sentenced: 36 to death, others to slavery in the galleys or banishment.
The chief result of the case was that fortunetellers were banned by law, and witchcraft was declared to be a superstition.
After that, people accused of witchcraft were sent to a madhouse, the Salpêtrière.
In fact, a man was executed in Bordeaux in 1718 for causing a man to become impotent and his wife barren; but then, working ‘fancied acts of magic’ was still a hanging offence.

Louis attempted to suppress all the evidence for the affair in 1709 by ordering all papers to be destroyed; but the official transcripts were overlooked.

It seems incredible that, at the time Isaac Newton was writing the
Principia,
priests and ‘witches’ should be sacrificing babies at Black Masses.
If we take the rational view of witchcraft—as a mediaeval superstition—it is virtually impossible to understand what they thought they were doing.
Was it all, perhaps, a kind of escapism, a desire to indulge in ‘wickedness’ for the sake of excitement, like some of the modern witchcraft covens?
The French aristocracy was decadent, but surely not decadent enough to indulge in the 17th century equivalent of ‘snuff movies’?
The truth is obviously simpler: that Marie Bosse, Catherine Deshayes and La Voisin had learned witchcraft from their aunts or grandmothers—like Jehanne de Brigue—and were simply practising a traditional craft that had been handed down for centuries.
And the aristocrats who patronised them did so because they knew that their ‘magic’ often worked.
The witches themselves were sure it worked.

That view offends modern commonsense.
It offended
my
commonsense at the time I wrote
The Occult.
Yet in retrospect, I can see that I was not being quite entirely logical.
For as early
as 1964, in a book called
Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs,
I had cited a number of cases that seemed to show that African witchcraft really works.
The travel writer Negley Farson, whom I knew well during the last ten years of his life, told me that on several occasions he had seen a Liberian witchdoctor conjure rain out of a clear sky.
And a neighbour, Martin Delany, who had been the Managing Director of a large company in Nigeria, and himself possessed slight thaumaturgical gifts, had described to me how the local witchdoctor had promised that the heavy rain which had been falling for days would stop for two hours to allow a garden party to take place; the rain had stopped a few minutes before the party was due to start, and begun again a minute after it finished.
The stoppage was confined to an area of approximately 10,000 sq.
yds.

This, of course, could have been some natural ability akin to ‘psychokinesis’—I have a book called
The Power of the Mind
by Rolf Alexander which has four photographs claiming to show how a large cloud was disintegrated by psychokinesis in eight minutes at Orillia, Ontario, on September 12, 1954.
But the same explanation cannot be applied to another strange event described by Martin Delany, which I quote from his own account:

‘Having just returned from leave in Europe, I was informed by my European sawmill manager that an extraordinary incident had taken place in the sawmill a few days prior to my return.
A hen, from a nearby compound, had flown straight into the large Brenta band-saw and was instantly cut to pieces by the blade of the saw, which revolves at about 10,000 revolutions per minute.
The Nigerian mill-workers were very perturbed by this—they knew now that the ‘Iron God’ was angry and seeking blood and, unless blood was offered by the witch doctor to appease the ‘God’, then he would demand other victims.
They therefore requested that the band-saw should be stopped until the necessary sacrifice had been made by the witch doctor.