The Enemy Within (42 page)

 
As events in the courts veered to and fro, the press, the wider legal community, and professional psychologists began a series of linked debates about what had really happened (or not happened) at Fells Acres (and elsewhere). Both major Boston newspapers, the
Boston Globe
and the
Boston Herald American
, supported the prosecution throughout—explicitly on their editorial pages, implicitly in their news coverage. Asked about this after her release, Cheryl answered simply, “What came out of the media lies was a jury that convicted me.” Eventually, to be sure, a counter-viewpoint appeared, first and foremost in the
Wall Street Journal
. There, a tenacious reporter named Dorothy Rabinowitz began a series of highly critical articles on Fells Acres. These would win her a Pulitzer Prize and lead to a powerfully written book entitled
No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times
.

Lawyers and legal scholars also entered the building controversy. Hallway discussion turned into op-eds and articles in the trade journals, and then into full-dress professional conferences. The focus was courtroom procedure—where, time after time, serious “error” had appeared. To begin with, the physical arrangements were flawed: special chairs, judges leaving the bench, and so on. The shielding of child witnesses, however solicitous of their tender years, violated the basic constitutional right of every defendant to face an accuser. Moreover, indictments were unusually broad. And hearsay testimony was freely admitted. Judges declined to intervene when prosecutors engaged in suggestive or downright coercive questioning. Then there was Justice Fried's extraordinary supreme court opinion, elevating “finality” over due process and the right to a fair trial. (In short: justice be damned?) One state official would subsequently call this “the most cold-blooded decision I have ever read.”

Psychologists and psychiatrists had been involved right from the start. Some who claimed that status were, indeed, among the lead interviewers of the Day School children. Their own use of suggestive questioning would seem, in retrospect, utterly transparent. At first, and for some considerable time, they helped validate the prosecutors' mantra that “children cannot lie” about abuse. But other psychologists worked hard to discredit this idea. The courts would eventually hear, from professionals describing carefully framed research, how “interviewer bias” might reshape a child's understanding of objectively innocent events and thus “induce” a particular result.

Finally, there was politics. Scott Harshbarger, the first of the hard-charging district attorneys, was a rising star in the Massachusetts Democratic Party. From his post in Middlesex County he would ascend to the office of state attorney general and then run a failed race for governor. Tom Reilly, his assistant and successor in Middlesex, would follow exactly the same path, from DA to AG to not-quite governor. Both used the Fells Acres case as a political stepping-stone. Both rose, then fell, along the changing curve of public attitudes toward it. And neither one ever expressed the slightest doubt, or regret, about participating in it. Three successive governors were pressed to intervene by offering pardons or paroles. All shied away, fearing the possible electoral consequences. Other careers were also affected—those of the key judges, for example. Fried remains a vaunted law school professor (Harvard), but his stature among jurists has been diminished. Barton and Borenstein, by contrast, have emerged as admired figures.

 
Malden to Salem is barely a dozen miles. A half-hour's drive today, or a morning's cart-ride in the 17th century, might end at Gallows Hill. The distance between the 1692 witch-hunt in the one place, and the 1980s abuse case in the other, is not so far, either. Consider:

Chelmsford, England, 1582. When Alice Glasscock was charged with practicing witchcraft, the indictment described her also as “a naughty woman.”

Marchtal, Germany, 1623. When Ursula Götz was warned away from the village festival by her neighbors because of her supposed status as a witch, they pointedly called her “shitty.”

New Haven, Connecticut, 1656. At the court where Elizabeth Godman was tried for bewitching her neighbor's chickens, witnesses assailed her as “a malicious one.”

Salem, Massachusetts, 1692. As Martha Carrier stood amidst a pack of howling girls, supposedly her victims, she heard herself denounced as “a very angry woman.”

Time after time, these and other witch-hunt targets were charged not just with “entertaining Satan,” and not simply with bringing maleficent harm down on their peers, but also with a broad array of characterological and social failings. Here is a further sampling of the traits attributed to one or another accused witch: “spiteful,” “maliciously bent,” “of turbulent spirit”; “discontented,” “impatient,” “very intemperate”; “vile,” “terrible,” “evil”; “light woman,” “common harlot,” “bad neighbor,” “wicked creature.” Again, these descriptors spoke less of the formal matter of witchcraft and Satanism than of everyday bits of human experience. Taken together, they set a kind of negative template for entire cultures or historical eras; as such they clearly, and powerfully, identified the enemy within the larger group. Moreover, a similar role and function could also be ascribed to the figurative witches of modern times—to the targets of political Red Scares and of day-care “abuse” investigations.

But this enemy
is
—present tense from here on—not only a social creature, a subversive element poised to ravage community life. He or she also resides within each of the countless persons who fear, and hunt, witches—is, in short, integral to the individual self, to ego, to “I.” Moreover, just as communities occasionally seek to excise unwanted persons from within their midst, so, too, does the self strive to extrude troublesome aspects of its own structure. The latter may include sexual impulse (as in much of Catholic Europe during the craze period); aggression and the urge to attack (as with Puritan groups in early modern Anglo-America); or envy, greed, and guilt (depending on the given historical situation). They may also involve, at a much more immediate and mundane level, whatever is meant by “naughty,” “shitty,” “malicious,” “angry,” and so on. This is what clinicians call “projection,” and it infuses witch-hunting in the deepest possible way. Always and everywhere, the witch is the designated recipient of projection, the carrier, the symbol. He or she stands for—and, in a sense, is made to absorb—an unacknowledged “dark side” from the inner life of the hunters.

On all counts, then, witch-hunting involves process more than any specific content. And it is, finally, this double sense of “within” that invests process with such extraordinary force:
the individual and the group—the I as well as the we—on the hunt, in lethal combination.

 
These last reflections may serve to underscore the ubiquity, the near universality of witch-hunting. Each and every one of the witch-hunts described here had a very particular location in time and space. No two were exactly alike; all must be approached as individually distinct events. Yet they bear as well a shared relation to the general, Euro-American, Judeo-Christian, “Western” tradition; none can be fully understood apart from that broadly influential baseline. Finally, they do embody tendencies that cross every frontier of time, place, and culture; hence they qualify, in effect, as part of the “human condition.”

But, surely, theirs is a tragic and uniquely destructive part—and witch-hunting, considered whole, is nothing less than a scourge. Which leaves an author, and perhaps his readers too, pondering this question: Is a world without witch-hunts achievable, or even imaginable? In trying to answer, we might consider an ironic distinction. The “witches” we discover around us are molded by extraordinary pressures of distortion, exaggeration, reification; often enough, they are fabricated wholesale. Hence, as a
social
presence they are much more fictive than actual. However, the corresponding psychological element—the fantasy of witchcraft, the concomitant affects, the impulse to projection—is all too real. More than anything else, this constitutes the enemy which has through the centuries exacted such a terrible toll. To reduce its power is no easy task. Yet by deepening knowledge of both self and society, we create at least an opening for change. To that most important process “history” offers its own hopeful, if uncertain, contribution.

Because this book is aimed more toward a general than a professional audience, it does not include footnoting or other scholarly apparatus. The commentary below is meant simply to identify its main foundations in research and secondary literature, and to offer suggestions for readers interested in pursuing a specific topical area.

 
CHAPTER ONE

This account of the Lyon “martyrdom” is based on W. H. C. Frend,
Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Christian Church
(Oxford, U.K., 1965); see especially chapter 1. Valuable material can also be found in the essays for a 1977 conference (Lyon, France) on the same subject, published under the title
Les Martyrs de Lyon
(Paris, 1978). The most important period source for these events is the Roman author Eusebius; see Eusebius,
The Ecclesiastical History
, Kirsopp Lake, trans. (London, 1926), book 5. For discussion of religion, economy, and other aspects of community life in 2nd-century Lyon, see
Les Martyrs de Lyon
, passim.

 
CHAPTER TWO

During the past 40 years, the study of European witchcraft has reached levels of sophistication without parallel for any other topical area in the early modern period. By now there are literally dozens of first-rate works, covering many different regions and centuries, and written by historians of uncommon distinction. The following list is necessarily limited to the most valuable (and only to those published in English-language editions). The first of the major contributions was H. R. Trevor-Roper, “The European Witch-Craze in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in
The European
Witch-craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, and Other Essays
(New York, 1967). This was soon followed by Keith Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic
(New York, 1971), a truly magisterial work that set the agenda for a host of subsequent projects. Other early, broad-gauge accounts include Norman Cohn,
Europe's Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt
(London, 1975), and Brian P. Levack,
The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe
(New York, 1985). A somewhat later, summative book of much depth and power is Robin Briggs,
Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft
(London, 1996). And perhaps the finest single work in this entire array is Stuart Clark,
Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe
(Oxford, U.K., 1997), a remarkably compendious joining of social, intellectual, and cultural perspectives. Other studies of more limited focus are as follows. On witchcraft in the medieval period: Geoffrey Burton Russell,
Witchcraft in the Middle Ages
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1972); Edward Peters,
The Magician, the Witch, and the Law
(Philadelphia, 1978); and Richard Kieckhefer,
European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Cultures, 1300-1500
(London, 1976). On witchcraft in the British Isles: Alan Macfarlane,
Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England
(New York, 1970); James Sharpe,
Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England, 1550-1750
(London, 1996); Malcolm Gaskill,
Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy
(London, 2005); Christina Larner,
Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland
(London, 1981); and Christina Larner,
Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief
, ed. Alan Macfarlane (New York, 1984). On witchcraft in continental Europe, especially during the period of the great witch-hunt: H. C. Erik Midelfort,
Witch-Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562-1684: The Social and Intellectual Foundations
(Stanford, Calif., 1972); E. William Monter,
Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands During the Reformation
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1976); Carlo Ginzburg,
The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
(Baltimore, Md., 1983); Ginzburg,
Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath
(London, 1990); and Lyndal Roper,
Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany
(New Haven, Conn., 2005). Finally, on witchcraft history after the 17th century: Ronald Hutton,
Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft
(New York, 1999), and Owen Davies,
Witchcraft, Magic, and Culture, 1736-1951
(Manchester, U.K., 1999).