The Penguin Book of Witches

by Katherine Howe

  An old woman of about 60 years of age had long lain under an imputation of witchcraft, who, being willing (for her own sake and her children’s) to clear herself, consented to be ducked; and the parish officers promised her a guinea if she should sink. The place appointed for the operation was in the River Oust by a mill. There were, I believe, 500 spectators. About eleven o’clock in the forenoon, the woman came, and was tied up in a wet sheet, all but her face and hands. Her toes were tied close together, as were also her thumbs, and her hands tied to the small of her legs. They fastened a rope about her middle, and pulled off her cap to search for pins, for their notion is, if they have but one pin about them, they won’t sink.

  When all preliminaries were settled, she was thrown in; but unhappily for the poor creature, she floated, though her head was all the while under water. Upon this there was a confused cry. “A witch! A witch! Drown her! Hang her!” She was in the water about 1 minute and a half and was taken out, half drowned. When she had recovered breath, the experiment was repeated twice more, but with the same success, for she floated each time, which was a plain demonstration of guilt to the ignorant multitude. For notwithstanding the poor creature was laid down upon the grass speechless and almost dead, they were so far from showing her any pity or compassion, that they strove who should be the most forward in loading her with reproaches. Such is the dire effect of popular prejudice! As for my part, I stood against the torrent, and when I had cut the strings which tied her, had her carried back to the mill, and endeavored to convince the people of the uncertainty of the experiment, and offered to lay five to one, that any woman of her age, so tied up in a close sheet, would float, but all to no purpose, for I was near being mobbed. Sometime after, the woman came out, and one of the company happened to mention another experiment to try a witch, which was to weigh her against the church Bible, for a witch, it seems, could not outweigh it. I immediately seconded that motion (as thinking it might be of service to the poor woman) and made use of an argument which (though as weak as * King James for their not sinking) had some weight with the people. For I told them that if she was a witch, she certainly dealt with the Devil; and as the Bible was undoubtedly the word of God, it must weigh more than all the works of the Devil. This seemed reasonable to several. And those that did not think it so, could not answer it. At last, the question was carried, and she was weighed against the Bible; which weighed about twelve pound. She outweighed it. This convinced some and staggered others, but the P—n, who believed through thick and thin, went away fully assured that she was a witch, and endeavored to inculcate that belief into all others.

  I AM, SIR,

  YOUR VERY HUMBLE SERVANT.

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK 1741

  The phrase “witch hunt” appears frequently in American political and cultural discourse, perhaps frequently enough to be leached of much of its impact. However, well before Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee, the idea of the witch hunt, or the witch trial, had already begun to stalk North American political discourse. In New York City during the winter of 1741, several fires were set across Manhattan, which the white inhabitants of the city took as a sign of an imminent violent slave uprising. The rush to discover who was responsible led to over a hundred black New Yorkers being imprisoned, seventeen put to death on the gallows, and—most chillingly—thirteen burned at the stake.1

  The following newspaper editorial from a writer in New England draws an explicit parallel between the Salem trial—which the writer points out was the subject of much criticism from New York while it was under way—and the frenzy attendant on the slave revolt conspiracy trial in 1741. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the witch as a figure of fear, and the witch trial as an enterprise of unreason, had taken firm root in North American culture. Far from falling by the wayside under the purifying light of Enlightenment thought, the witch merely changed form, from a legal category to a cultural trope.2

  Province of the Massachusetts Bay, 1741.

  SIR,

  I am a stranger to you and to New York, and so must beg pardon for the mistakes I may be guilty of in the subsequent attempt, the design whereof is to put an end to the bloody tragedy that has been, and I suppose is still acting among you, in regard of the poor Negroes and the whites too.

  I observe in one of the Boston newsletters, dated July 13, that 5 Negroes were executed in one day at the gallows, a favor indeed! For one the next day was burned at the stake, where he impeached several others, and among them some whites, which, with the former terrible executions among you upon this occasion, puts me in mind of our New England witchcraft in the year 1692, which, if I don’t mistake, New York justly reproached us for and mocked at our credulity about. But may it not now be justly retorted, Mutato nomine, de te Fabula Narratur?3 What ground you proceed upon, I must acknowledge myself not sufficiently informed of. But finding that those five that were executed in July denied any guilt, it makes me suspect that your present case, and ours heretofore, are much the same, and that Negro and specter evidence will turn out alike. We had near 50 confessors who accused multitudes of others, alleging time and place and various other circumstances to render their confessions credible, that they had their meetings, formed confederacies, signed the Devil’s book, et cetera. And as long as confessions were received and encouraged, accusations multiplied and increased: But I am humbly of opinion that such confessions and the evidences founded thereon are not worth a straw, unless some certain overt act (that nobody else could perform) appear to confirm the fame. For many times they are obtained by foul means, by force or torture, by flattery or surprise, by over watch or distraction, by discontent with their circumstances, through envy or malice, or in hopes of a longer time to live, or to die an easier death, et cetera. For anybody would choose rather to be hanged than to be burned.

  It is true I have heard something of your forts being burned, but that might be by lightning from heaven, by accident, by some malicious person or persons of our own color. What other facts have been performed to petrify your hearts against the poor blacks, and some of your neighbors, the whites, I can’t tell. Possibly there have been some murmurings among the Negroes, and a few mad fellows may have threatened and designed revenge for the cruelty and inhumanity they have met with, which is too rife in the English plantations, and not long since occasioned such another tremendous and unreasonable a massacre at Antigua. But two things seem to me almost as impossible as for witches to fly in the air, or change themselves into cats, namely, that the whites should join with blacks; or that the blacks (among whom there are no doubt some rational persons) should attempt the destruction of a city,4 when it is impossible they should escape the just and direful vengeance of the countries round about, which would immediately pour in upon, and swallow them up quick. And therefore if nothing will put an end to this doleful tragedy till some of higher degree and better circumstances and characters are accused (which finished our Salem witchcraft), the sooner the better, lest all the poor people of your government perish in the merciless flames of an imaginary plot.

  In the meantime don’t be offended if out of friendship to my poor countrymen, and compassion to the Negroes (who are partakers of the same nature with us and ought to be treated with humanity), I entreat you not to go on to destroy your own estates by making bonfires of your Negroes, and thereby perhaps loading yourselves with greater guilt than theirs. For we have too much reason to fear that the divine vengeance does and will pursue us for our ill treatment to the bodies and souls of our poor slaves, and the meaner sort of people. And therefore let justice be done whenever you sit in judicature about their affairs.

  All which is humbly submitted by a well-wisher to all human beings, and one that ever desires to be of the merciful side, et cetera.

  PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA 1787

  By the end of the eighteenth century, witchcraft had largely become a fading memory to which the present may in general be favorably c
ompared, dwelling only in folklore and in the isolated superstitions of uneducated people. Or so it would seem. The following anecdote, preserved in an anti-Federalist pamphlet as a point of evidence in support of the importance of legally securing the liberty of conscience in the Bill of Rights during the Constitutional Convention, suggests that belief in witches at the end of the eighteenth century instead was very much alive and well, and living in the hands of the mob. Belief in witches had not disappeared at all. It was not an obscure footnote to history. It was still real and it was still present and it was still threatening enough to warrant stoning a woman in the street to her death.1

  Mr. Printer, In order that people may be sufficiently impressed with the necessity of establishing a bill of rights in the forming of a new constitution, it is very proper to take a short view of some of those liberties, which it is of the greatest importance for freemen to retain to themselves, when they surrender up a part of their natural rights for the good of society.

  The first of these, which it is of the utmost importance for the people to retain to themselves, which indeed they have not even the right to surrender, and which at the same time it is of no kind of advantages to government to strip them of, is the liberty of conscience. I know that a ready answer is at hand to any objections upon this head. We shall be told that in this enlightened age, the rights of conscience are perfectly secure: There is no necessity of guarding them, for no man has the remotest thoughts of invading them. If this be the case, I beg leave to reply that now is the very time to secure them. Wise and prudent men always take care to guard against danger beforehand and to make themselves safe while it is yet in their power to do it without inconvenience or risk. Who shall answer for the ebbings and flowings of opinion or be able to say what will be the fashionable frenzy of the next generation? It would have been treated as a very ridiculous supposition, a year ago, that the charge of witchcraft would cost a person her life in the city of Philadelphia, yet the fate of the unhappy old woman called Corbmaker, who was beaten, repeatedly wounded with knives, mangled, and at last killed in our streets in obedience to the commandment which requires “that we shall not suffer a witch to live,”2 without possibility of punishment or even of detecting the authors of this inhuman folly, should be an example to warn us how little we ought to trust to the unrestrained discretion of human nature.

  MOLL PITCHER, LYNN, MASSACHUSETTS 1738–1813

  Moll Pitcher, born in Marblehead (immediately east of Salem), who resided much of her life in Lynn (immediately south of Salem), embodies the shift of the witch in North American consciousness from a figure of fear to a figure of folklore. She made her living as a fortune-teller and was immortalized in a poem that bears her name by John Greenleaf Whittier. She was consulted on affairs of love and money by the educated and the uneducated alike, and her particular specialty concerned the outcomes of sea voyages. Whittier’s representation of Pitcher is hardly complimentary, however: he writes that she was “A wasted, gray, and meagre hag / In features evil as her lot / She had the crooked nose of a witch.”

  In some respects, Moll Pitcher represents a consistency of Anglophone North Atlantic witch belief: in her function as a cunning woman in the early modern English sense, as an individual with particular occult skills available for a fee, and one able to stir both respect and fear in her community, Pitcher could just as easily have been born in 1538 as in 1738. However, her proximity to Salem, living among—and surely patronized by—people who felt the shadow of the Salem trials at their backs, renders Pitcher a curious character.

  Most important, Moll Pitcher was born at the beginning of the consumer revolution in colonial North America. Though part of her skill, like the traditional cunning person, lay in conjuring to find lost property, scarcity was less of a grinding problem for average people by the 1730s than it had been a generation earlier. Pitcher’s services could be seen as a boon, without the risk of being as threatening as they would have been a generation previously.1 Moll Pitcher simultaneously embodies folk magical belief, which had its roots in early modern practices in Europe and the British Isles, while also ushering in the figure of the witch in colonial North America, from the confused waning category in the early part of the eighteenth century to the fantastical fairy tale figure that she would assume in the nineteenth century. That’s a tall order for one elderly New England woman to fill with only some tea leaves to help her.2

  The reader should now be informed that the poetical extract foregoing is from a poem commemorative of as great and notorious a witch as any that can be found described in the annals of witchcraft, and that we are indebted to the bard of Lynn for a graphic outline of her real history. But the reader should be reminded that the amiable and excellent author of that work was himself a poet, and that it is possible that his account may have a tinge of poetry or be a little bordering on romance. With this premonition it shall follow in his own words.

  The celebrated Mary Pitcher, a professed fortune-teller, died April 9th, 1813, aged 75. Her grandfather John Dimond lived at Marblehead and for many years exercised the same pretentions. Her father, Captain John Dimond, was master of a vessel from that place and was living in 1770. Mary Dimond was born in the year 1738. She was connected with some of the best families in Essex County, and with the exception of her extraordinary pretentions, there was nothing disreputable in her life or character. She was of the medium height and size for a woman, with a good form and agreeable manners. Her head, phrenologically considered, was somewhat capacious, her forehead broad and full, her hair dark brown, her nose inclining to long, and her face pale and thin. There was nothing gross or sensual in her appearance. Her countenance was rather intellectual and she had that contour of face and expression which, without being positively beautiful is nevertheless decidedly interesting: a thoughtful, pensive, and sometimes downcast look, almost approaching to melancholy, an eye, when it looked at you, of calm and keen penetration, and an expression of intelligent discernment half mingled with a glance of shrewdness. She took a poor man for a husband and then adopted what she doubtless thought the harmless employment of fortune-telling in order to support her children. In this she was probably more successful than she herself had anticipated and she became celebrated, not only throughout America but throughout the world for her skill. There was no port on either continent, where floated the flag of an American ship that had not heard of the fame of Moll Pitcher. To her came the rich and the poor, the wife and the ignorant, the accomplished and the vulgar, the timid and the brave. The ignorant sailor, who believed in the omens and dreams of superstition, and the intelligent merchant, whose ships were freighted for distant lands, alike sought her dwelling, and many a vessel has been deserted by its crew, and waited idly at the wharves for weeks in consequence of her unlucky predictions. Many persons came from places far removed to consult her on affairs of love or loss of property or to obtain her surmises respecting the vicissitudes of their future fortune. Every youth who was not assured of the reciprocal affection of his fair one and every maid who was desirous of anticipating the hour of her highest felicity repaired at evening to her humble dwelling, which stood on what was then a lonely road, near the foot of High Rock,3 with the single dwelling of Dr. Henry Burchard nearly opposite, over whose gateway were the two bones of a great whale, disposed in the form of a Gothic arch. There for more than fifty years, in her unpretending mansion, did she answer the inquiries of the simple rustic from the wilds of New Hampshire, and the wealthy noble from Europe; and doubtless her predictions have had an influence in shaping the fortunes of thousands.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1.Of course, to say that witchcraft has not persisted into our own time is not exactly true. Wicca as an organized religion began in the middle decades of the twentieth century and has only continued to grow. The ablest history of the establishment of this religion, and of the relationship that it has with early modern witchcraft, is elucidated in Ronald Hutton’s
The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  WITCHES IN THE BIBLE

  1.The Valley of the Son of Hinnom is both a literal place, located in Gehenna, outside of ancient Jerusalem, which was associated with apostate human sacrifice, and a figurative reference to hell. The blending of the figurative and the literal in this biblical account of the location of witchcraft, or in the idea of wickedness as having a concrete reality outside the body or the soul of the wicked person, will come to play a substantial role in the anxiety about witches in the North American landscape. The “observation of times” here alludes to the practice of astrology.

  TRIAL OF URSULA KEMP, ST. OSYTH, ENGLAND, 1582

  1.Gregory Durston, Witchcraft and Witch Trials: A History of English Witchcraft and Its Legal Perspectives (Chichester, England: Barry Rose Law, 2000), iv. Witchcraft in this period was both a legal and an ecclesiastic offense, and could be tried on both a civil and a religious basis. We will limit our inquiry to the treatment of witchcraft within the legal system, which nevertheless turned to theological writing for its legitimacy.

  2.Durston, Witchcraft and Witch Trials, v. The problematic traits of Kemp’s personality, together with the long-standing complaints she has engendered in her neighbors, place her on a continuum of women who garner suspicion as a result of socially deviant behavior.

  3.Durston, Witchcraft and Witch Trials, vi. The nature of the evidence entered against Kemp, which mainly consists of unsubstantiated gossip, suggests the fragility of social relationships in the early modern village, when networks of acquaintanceship could mean the difference between prosperity and ruin.