The Witches: Salem, 1692 (10 page)

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.
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(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.
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To doubt its efficacy was, as Perkins had noted, Mather reiterated, and Massachusetts believed, to doubt the sun shining at noon.

Glanvill elaborated on Perkins’s contention that we should not deny the existence of something because one fails to understand it. We did not know how the soul operated either, observed Glanvill. Why did the Bible warn against witches if they did not exist? Every nation had a word for the phenomenon. How had they all managed to name a nonentity? There were moreover plenty of confessions. Here as elsewhere, consistency proved the point. “We have the attestation of thousands of eye and ear witnesses, and those not of the easily deceivable vulgar only, but of wise and grave discerners, and that, when no interest could oblige them to agree together in a common lie,” asserted Glanvill. It was inconceivable that “imagination, which is the most various thing in all the world, should infinitely repeat the same conceit in all times and places.” Proof was elusive but by no means impossible. By the same logic, argued the royal academician, among the keenest minds of his century, touching up against the nature of knowledge, how can we prove that Julius Caesar founded the Roman Empire? (In Mather’s version, this was tantamount to ranking the entire history of Great Britain among the tales of Don Quixote.) To disbelieve was to reduce history to fiction.
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Indeed the imagery was startlingly similar, as were the convulsions, trances, shrieks, and stranglings. A New Englander knew what a witch looked like as today we recognize a leprechaun or a vampire, although we have (presumably) never met one. Which was no proof of anything. Just because you did not see the robbers on the road, argued Mather, did not mean they failed to exist. The skeptic insisted witchcraft was absurd
and impossible, a fantasy, as one doubter would contend, propagated by “little imposters.” But that was precisely the point, countered Glanvill. Witchcraft was so far-fetched, so preposterous, so improbable, it had to be true. You couldn’t make this stuff up! To the impossibility of a shared delusion was added the most compelling reason to believe in witchcraft, one pinched from the title page of the
Malleus:
“Not to believe in witchcraft is the greatest of heresies.” The seventeenth-century skeptic was made to appear an appeaser. “Flashy people may burlesque these things,” sniped Mather in 1702, taking aim at the “learned witlings of the coffee-house,” the latte-sipping liberals of the day. But sober minds did not make sport of the invisible world, especially in light of the evidence. Mather was very close to a larger theme from his father’s 1684
Illustrious Providences,
stuffed with mind-boggling portents and prodigies, an occult
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
. Without mystery there was no faith. To deny witchcraft was to deny religion, a small step from a more provocative assertion: to deny witchcraft was to advocate it.

As for the wily figure who came to the job with six thousand years’ experience, the master of disguise who could cause things to appear and disappear, who knew your secrets and could make you believe things of yourself that were not true? Here matters grew murkier. Perkins assigned the devil a concrete form but did not describe him. No New Englander seemed particularly clear as to who he was or what he looked like. There were no bat wings or forked tails in sight, though in one Salem account, he stuck out a cloven foot, and in another he turned up as a hybrid monkey, man, and rooster. It was uncertain whether he was male or female. One accused witch wondered if he might be a mouse or a fast-moving turtle. If he had a physical existence, the devil the New Englander knew was a “little black man” or a “great black rogue” or a “black hog.” In the more or less official 1692 version, he was barely taller than a walking stick, tawny, with straight, dark hair and a high-crowned hat. While he was allergic to Scripture—the Swedish girl had fallen from the air because she uttered the Lord’s name in flight—it was unclear what language the devil spoke. Even Cotton Mather did not know. He was
however a pervasive presence. The air pulsed with his minions. There were more devils than men in the world, warned the Mathers. We inhaled them with every breath.

Not only were his infernal armies everywhere, but the devil was invoked regularly. Having beaten her and turned her out in the January snow, a Haverhill husband bellowed that his wife “was nothing to him but a devil in woman’s apparel.” The young woman discovered in the wrong bed when giggling erupted late one night was convicted as a “lying little devil.” An Ipswich man testified that his abusive neighbor “had so much of the devil in him that he was a great affliction to those who lived near him.” The fiend emerged often in the heat of argument—“the devil take you” served precisely as do two short, spiked syllables today—though that was not a necessary precondition. He took well to the uncongenial New England climate; naturally, the Indians worshipped Satan, as did the Quakers. (Which justified appropriating the Friends’ Salem land. On it stood the 1692 prison.) With their “spirit of contention,” the Salem villagers had, according to the 1675 court ruling, offered the devil a leg up. In the opinion of at least one Massachusetts cleric, religious tolerance qualified as a satanic idea. The starving of ministers, Cotton Mather warned, was a way for Satan to take over the land.
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The foreigner in an unusual hat was a devil. He figured as the codefendant in most criminal indictments and graced a fair number of sermons, the ravening wolf to the minister’s shepherd. Parris’s were no exception, reliably though not disproportionately Satan-heavy. On January 3, 1692, Parris noted that the village church seemed on stable footing. He also cautioned that “it is the main drift of the Devil to pull it all down.”

In a New England twist, a group of ministers observed that sometimes God sent devils expressly to silence the naysayers. That was the lesson Mather extracted from the Goodwin episode. He vowed to make ample use of that assault and, with
Memorable Providences,
to settle the
matter once and for all. With a gentle pat on its spine, he sent forth his little volume—a lackey to the great British works, as he saw it—to assure mankind that there were devils at large. Massachusetts knew of the little Swedish girl, her flying accident, the un-English, clandestine meeting in the meadow, the blood pact, and the man in the high-crowned hat, thanks to Mather, who plucked them from Glanvill. No wonder Massachusetts was troubled by witches, noted Mather, quoting a Glanvill disciple who, in a bit of transatlantic log-rolling, was quoting him. “Where will the Devil show most malice but where he is hated, and hateth most?” Mather demanded. The devil’s appearance was nearly a badge of honor, further proof that New Englanders were the chosen people. He touched down like spiritual lightning on the ministerial roof. He was not altogether unwelcome; if the devil was about, God could not be far behind. The book of Revelation predicted that he would descend accompanied by his “infernal fiends”; Mather had long been on the lookout for the Apocalypse, imminent in New England since the 1650s. And the devil earned a promotion in 1692. He became a megalomaniacal conspirator laboring to subvert God’s kingdom, a feat he had never before attempted in Massachusetts.

By the time the Massachusetts witches took flight, the European witch craze had exhausted itself. Holland had abolished prosecutions in 1610, Geneva in 1632. France’s Louis XIV dismissed all witchcraft cases fifty years later, although several shepherds burned in 1691. In the age of Boyle, Newton, and Locke (all of whom believed in witchcraft), prosecutions stuttered to a stop all over Europe. Any number of texts discrediting witchcraft existed, although you could not read a skeptical page on the subject printed in Boston before 1692. Faith and a tightly controlled press insulated the Massachusetts settler; by 1692 the New England witch differed from her English counterpart primarily in that she was more real. What you could read in Massachusetts were the tirades against witchcraft with which Cotton Mather throttled its doubters, few of them in evidence. It was like studying ecstatic creationist literature without knowing that Darwin had ever lived. To that end, Mather laid out the
Goodwin case in explicit detail. He included only those particulars he had personally observed or for which he could unequivocally vouch. They were conclusive; he defied anyone again to deny witchcraft. He would never trust another man who did.