The Penguin Book of Witches

by Katherine Howe

  Phi. But will God permit these wicked instruments by the power of the Devil their master, to trouble by any of these means, any that believes in him?

  Epi. No doubt, for there are three kind of folks whom God will permit so to be tempted or troubled: the wicked for their horrible sins to punish them in the like measure; the godly that are sleeping in any great sins or infirmities and weakness in faith, to waken them up the faster by such an uncouth form; and even some of the best, that their patience may be tried before the world, as Job’s was.35 For why may not God use any kind of extraordinary punishment, when it pleases him; as well as the ordinary rods of sickness or other adversities.

  Phi. Who then may be free from these devilish practices?

  Epi. No man ought to presume so far as to promise any impunity to himself. For God hath before all beginnings preordained as well the particular sorts of plagues as of benefits for every man, which in the own time he ordains them to be visited with,36 and yet ought we not to be the more afraid for that, of anything that the Devil and his wicked instruments can do against us? For we daily fight against the Devil in a hundred other ways. And therefore as a valiant captain, afraid no more being at the combat, not stays from his purpose for the rummishing37 shot of a cannon nor the small clack of a pistolet. Suppose he be not certain what may light upon him. Even so ought we boldly to go forward in fighting against the Devil without any greater terror, for these his rarest weapons, nor for the ordinary whereof we have daily the proof.

  Phi. Is it not lawful then by the help of some other witch to cure the disease that is casted on by that craft?

  Epi. No ways lawful. For I gave you the reason thereof in that axiom of theology, which was the last words I spake of magic.

  Phi. How then may these diseases be lawfully cured?38

  Epi. Only by earnest prayer to God, by amendment of their lives, and by sharp pursuing every one, according to his calling of these instruments of Satan, whose punishment to the death will be a salutary sacrifice for the patient. And this is not only the lawful way, but likewise the most sure. For the Devil’s means can never the Devil be casted out, as Christ saith.39 And when such a cure is used, it may well serve for a short time, but at the last, it will doubtlessly tend to the utter perdition of the patient, both in body and soul.

  WILLIAM PERKINS, A DISCOURSE OF THE DAMNED ART OF WITCHCRAFT 1608

  Concern about witches was not limited to the Catholic mind nor was it restricted to the doctrinaire branches of the Church of England. Puritan theologians had much to say on the subject of witchcraft, and Cambridge Puritan William Perkins was no exception.

  A moderate in his religious positions, Perkins received an unusually high level of renown during his lifetime, which almost exactly corresponded with the length of Elizabeth I’s reign. He can be credited with importing widespread Continental beliefs about witchcraft to England.1 Perkins’s thoughts on witchcraft, and specifically on the means of prosecuting witches, were widely read among religious Puritans in the North American colonies. Historian Larry Gragg, in his biography of Salem minister Samuel Parris, alludes to a footnote in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1892, which suggests that a copy of Perkins’s Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft had been inscribed to Samuel Parris on March 1, 1692, the day before Parris’s slave Tituba confessed.2 In the selection excerpted below, Perkins suggests that the word of a confessed witch holds particular weight when she then goes on to accuse someone else. Tituba confessed and went on to name other witches in her community, laying the groundwork in Salem for a conspiracy among an unknown number of people, thus contributing to the unprecedented spread of accusations into the surrounding towns.

  Though Parris’s timely ownership of Perkins’s witch-hunting manual is impossible to verify with complete accuracy, the wide reach of Perkins’s scholarship is not in question. Perkins argued for the necessity of taking legal recourse to combat witchcraft, moving it from the purely religious or cultural domain to the official.3 Perkins’s thinking would have profound impact on witch-hunting not only in England but in North America as well.4

  [TO THE READER]

  Exodus 22. 18. Thou shalt not suffer a Witch to live.

  This text containeth one of the judicial laws of Moses touching the punishment of witchcraft, which argument I have chosen to entreat of, for these causes:

  First, because witchcraft is a rife and common sin in these our days, and very many are entangled with it, being either practitioners thereof in their own persons, or at the least, yielding to seek for help and counsel of such as practice it.5

  Again, there be sundry men who receive it for a truth that witchcraft is nothing else but a mere illusion, and witches nothing but persons deluded by the Devil. And this opinion takes place not only with the ignorant, but is holden and maintained by such as are learned, who do avouch it by word and writing that there be no witches but as I said before.6

  Upon these and such like considerations, I have been moved to undertake the interpretation of this judicial law, as a sufficient ground of the doctrine which shall be delivered. In handling whereof, two things are distinctly to be considered. The first, what is a witch. The second, what is her due and deserved punishment.7 And both these being opened and handled, the whole meaning of the law will the better appear.

  For the first. To give the true description of a witch is a matter of great difficulty because there be many differences and diversities of opinions touching this point; and therefore that we may properly and truly define a witch, we must first pause a while in opening the nature of witchcraft, so far forth as it is delivered in the books of the Old and New Testament, and may be gathered out of the true experience of learned and godly men.

  Touching witchcraft, therefore, I will consider three points:

  What witchcraft is.

  What is the ground of the whole practice thereof?

  How many kinds and differences there be of it?

  Chapter 1

  Of the Nature of Witchcraft.

  To begin with the first. According to the true meaning of all the places of holy scripture which treat of this point, it may be thus described:

  Witchcraft is a wicked art, serving for the working of wonders, by the assistance of the Devil, so far forth as God shall in justice permit.

  Section 1

  I say it is an art, because it is commonly so called and esteemed among men, and there is reason why it should be thus termed. For as in all good and lawful arts, the whole practice thereof is performed by certain rules and precepts, and without them nothing can be done; so witchcraft hath certain superstitious grounds and principles whereupon it standeth, and by which alone the feats and practices thereof are commonly performed.8

  If it be demanded what these rules be and whence they had their beginning, considering that every art hath reference to some author by whom it was originally taught and delivered, I answer that they were devised first by Satan and by him revealed to wicked and ungodly persons of ancient times, as occasion served, who, receiving them from him, became afterward, in the just judgment of God, his instruments to report and convey them to others from hand to hand.9

  For manifestation whereof, it is to be considered that God is not only in general a sovereign Lord and king over all his creatures, whether in heaven or earth, none excepted, no, not the devils themselves; but that he exerciseth also a special kingdom, partly of grace in the church militant upon earth, and partly of glory over the saints and angels, members of the church triumphant in heaven. Now in like manner the Devil hath a kingdom, called in scripture the kingdom of darkness, whereof himself is the head and governor, for which cause he is termed the prince of darkness,10 the God of this world,11 ruling and effectually working in the hearts of the children of disobedience.

  Again, as God hath enacted laws whereby his kingdom is governed, so hath the Devil his ordinances whereby he kee
peth his subjects in awe and obedience, which generally and for substance, are nothing else but transgressions of the very law of God. And amongst them all, the precepts of witchcraft are the very chief and most notorious. For by them especially he holds up his kingdom, and therefore more esteemeth the obedience of them than of other. Neither doth he deliver them indifferently to every man, but to his own subjects, the wicked; and not to them all, but to some special and tried ones, whom he most betrusteth with his secrets, as being the fittest to serve his turn, both in respect of their willingness to learn and practice, as also for their ability to become instruments of the mischief which he intendeth to others.12

  If it be here asked whence the Devil did fetch and conceive his rules, I answer, out of the corruption and depravation of that great measure of knowledge he once had of God, and of all the duties of his service. For that being quite depraved by his fall, he turned the same to the inventing and devising of what he is possibly able, against God and his honor. Hereupon, well perceiving that God hath expressly commanded to renounce and abhor all practices of witchcraft, he hath set abroach this art in the world, as a main pillar of his kingdom, which notwithstanding is flatly and directly opposed to one of the main principal laws of the kingdom of God, touching the service of himself in spirit and truth.

  Again, the reason why he conveys these ungodly principles and practices from man to man is because he finds in experience that things are far more welcome and agreeable to the common nature of mankind which are taught by man like unto themselves than if the Devil should personally deliver the same to each man in special. Hereupon, he takes the course at first to instruct some few only, who being taught by him, are apt to convey that which they know to others. And hence in probabilities this devilish trade had his first original and continuance.

  Section 2

  In the second place, I call it a wicked art to distinguish it from all good and lawful arts taught in schools of learning, which as they are warrantable by the word of God, so are they no less profitable and necessary in the church. Again, to show the nature and quality of it, that it is a most ungracious and wicked art, as appeareth by the scriptures. For when Saul had broken the express commandment of God in sparing Agag and the best things, Samuel tells him that rebellion and disobedience is as the sin of witchcraft, that is, a most horrible and grievous crime, like unto that wicked, capital, and mother sin.13

  Section 3

  Thirdly, I add, tending to the working or producing of wonders, wherein is noted the proper end of this art, whereby I put a further difference between it and others that are godly and lawful.

  Now if question be moved, why man should desire by witchcraft to work wonders, I answer, the true and proper cause is this: the first temptation, whereby the Devil prevailed against our first parents, had enclosed within it many sins. For the eating of the forbidden fruit was no final or single offence, but as some have taught, contained in it the breach of every commandment of the moral law. Among the rest, Satan labored to bring them to the sin of discontentment, whereby they sought to become as gods, that is, better than God had made them, not resting content with the condition of men.14 This sin was then learned, and could never since be forgotten, but continually is derived from them to all their posterity, and now is become so common a corruption in the whole nature of flesh and blood, that there is scarce a man to be found who is not originally tainted therewith as he is a man.

  This corruption shows itself principally in two things, both of which are the main causes of the practices of witchcraft.

  First, in man’s outward estate, for he being naturally possessed with a love of himself and an high conceit of his own deserving, when he lives in base and low estate, whether in regard of poverty, or want of honor and reputation, which he thinks by right is due unto him, he then grows to some measure of grief and sorrow within himself. Hereupon, he is moved to yield himself to the Devil to be his vassal and scholar in this wicked art,15 supporting that by the working of some wonders, he may be able in time to relieve his poverty and to purchase to himself credit and countenance amongst men.

  It were easy to show the truth of this by examples of some persons, who by these means have risen from nothing to great places and preferments in the world. Instead of all, it appeareth in certain popes of Rome, as Sylvester the second, Benedict the eighth, Alexander the sixth, John the twentieth, and twenty-first, et cetera, who for the attaining of the popedom (as histories record) gave themselves to the Devil in the practice of witchcraft, that by the working of wonders, they might rise from one step of honor to another, until they had seated themselves in the chair of the papacy.16 So great was their desire of eminency in the church that it caused them to dislike meaner conditions of life and never to cease aspiring, though they incurred thereby the hazard of good conscience and the loss of their souls.

  The second degree of discontentment is in the mind and inward man, and that is curiosity, when a man resteth not satisfied with the measure of inward gifts received, as of knowledge, wit, understanding, memory, and such like, but aspires to search out such things as God would have kept secret and hence he is moved to attempt the cursed art of magic and witchcraft as a way to get further knowledge in matters secret and not revealed, that by working of wonders, he may purchase fame in the world and consequently reap more benefit by such unlawful courses than in likelihood he could have done by ordinary and lawful means.17

  THE EARLY COLONIES

  Though witch trials continued to take place in England,Though witch trials continued to take place in England,, our attention turns now to the first appearance of witchcraft in North America. While most witch trials occurred within the general boundaries of Puritan Massachusetts and Connecticut, isolated examples elsewhere pop up throughout the first few generations of English settlement. For the most part, early North American witchcraft incidents were narrow in scope, limited to one or two suspects. However, witch trials in North America proved to be more widespread than might have been previously thought. The prevalent and codified belief in the threat of witches took on a marked role in a wilderness of uncertain safety and within fragile communities. The need to identify who within the community did not belong manifested itself very quickly as part of the community-building project of colonization.

  Another aspect worth noting is that witch trials in colonial North America tended to turn on questions of economics and family life. At the center of every pound of butter that would not churn or barrel of beer gone bad was the omnipresent question of scarcity. Many historians have pointed to the gender politics inherent in witch trials, which posed a greater threat to women than they did to men. But connected to the gendered form of the witch’s body, which is reinforced by the oftentimes sexual content of the accusations levied against her, was the question of gendered labor. Witchcraft was perceived as harming families and household goods, the two primary engines under women’s control for their economic security.