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Witchcraft and the Suspicion of Witchery WITCHCRAFT AND THE SUSPICION OF WITCHERY “[I]t is not possible to understand the social fabric properly until one has studied three or four of its component threads in detail.” — Hippolyte Taine EXODUS 22:18. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. Concord ... was not a bewitched town; it never took a part in that horrible delusion. READ THE FULL TEXT HDT WHAT? INDEX WITCHCRAFT AND THE SUSPICION OF WITCHERY Right now in American academia we are experiencing another outbreak of the sort of “spectral evidence” that plagued the American witch trials of the 17th Century. What has happened is that in our colleges and research universities, anonymous untrained and unskilled administrative officials have been hired as “Title IX Compliance Officers” to set up quasi-judicial administrative courts, bodies that operate by a substandard of “50%-plus-a-feather” and rely on the testimony of self-described trauma survivors in order to reject freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry. Amazing it is, but this was initiated by the administration of President Barack Obama, and originated as a way to secure equality of treatment for female athletes! –But then someone waved a magic wand, and what had been a program to ensure that female college students could compete on the playing fields was transformed into a Star Chamber program to deny the very purposes of college education. Suddenly anyone who could imagine a past grievance has become able to drive every process, by producing imaginative descriptions of the manner in which they are being re- traumatized in the classroom. A student will come forward and demand that “trigger warnings” be provided whenever the professor is to lead a discussion into whatever it is that “might make them feel bad.” These administrative “Title IX Compliance Officers” step forward in order (allegedly) to ensure that their institution does not lose federal funding, and proceed to weigh the “he-said-she-said” evidence on the scale of “50%-plus-a-feather” — and remove said professor from the classroom for misconduct. This sort of hysteria has happened before, has happened repeatedly during my own lifetime. First there was the McCarthy loyalty scare of the 1950s, during which closet queers were persecuted in the US Department of State on the basis of the supposition that they were subject to Soviet blackmail. Then there was the McMartin childcare scare of the 1980s, during which investigators would tendentiously suggest sex abuse to little children, and entice them to play-act with “anatomically correct” dolls in order to discover secret underground chambers beneath playgrounds, in which innocent little children were allegedly being stripped and sexually abused and chopped up and eaten. If one restricts one’s horizon to the Danvers village near present- day Salem town, one can be led to the belief that what went wrong in the “Salem witchcraft” frenzy of 1692 had to do with traumatized little girls, acting out their traumas, or had to do with an ergot poisoning of the stomachs, and consequently the minds, of these villagers, or had to do with a sudden upsurge of foolish supernaturalism, or whatever positive and enabling factor. However, if one looks at the hanging- of-witches phenomenon across the scope of a century and across the breadth of New England –rather than focusing in myopically on this one year in this one village– one comes to appreciate the great generality of such a phenomenon, and these easy explanations in terms of mere enabling factors simply vanish.1 1. Professor Mary Beth Norton of Cornell University points out in her IN THE DEVIL’S SNARE: THE SALEM WITCHCRAFT CRISIS OF 1692 (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) that the girls who were initially affected in Salem, Massachusetts were refugees from the wars with the natives of Maine. She points out that two little-known wars were fought, one between 1675 and 1678, coincident with King Phillip’s War farther to the south, and the other between 1688 and 1699, known as “King William’s War,” with the English residents suffered greatly at the hands of the Wabanaki and their French allies. She avers that in 1676 and again in 1690, the English settlements of Maine were virtually abandoned, and that that area would not again be settled for decades. With that as the context, she suggests, we do not need to resort to hypotheses about poisoning by ergot to explain the behavior of these refugee children. HDT WHAT? INDEX WITCHCRAFT AND THE SUSPICION OF WITCHERY This is not a story of foolish superstition, this is a story of capital punishment — had these marginal types, after being found guilty of maliciousness and witchcraft, been treated with courtesy and attended to, there would have been no outrageous stories to be remembered in later years. Briefly, the controlling factor in the situation could not have been the foolish supernaturalism of the general population, because the evidence presented here is that there was always plenty of that among the uneducated white colonials everywhere in New England. Instead, the controlling factor in the situation was, in every year, every where, the sensibility of the educated colonials who were in charge of the processes of the courts — the privileged people, basically, who were the judges in these cases, the people who should have been exercising restraint. Everywhere always, if only these privileged educated people had used good common sense, the witchcraft frenzies would have been muted and contained and those accused of witchcraft simply would not have been hanged. For one fine example, Friend William Penn once sat as judge in a witchcraft trial. What did this Quaker do? He found the accused woman guilty of presenting the appearance of witchcraft — and then he sent her back to her own home in her own village with instructions to her neighbors and the local townspeople that her needs were to be attended to for so long as she lived. So, when we ask what “caused” the worst spike of this witchcraft frenzy, the spike that occurred in Salem village in 1692 in which so many marginal people were turned in by their neighbors to be offed by the authorities, we need to look not at any excess of positive or enabling factors, such as traumatized little girls and their fantasies, but instead at a deficit of negative or limiting factors — such as ministers and judges with good sense. The real question we need to ask about Salem in 1692 is, why were the people who had actual control of the situation, people like the Reverends Increase and Cotton Mather and the Reverend Samuel Parris and Judge Samuel Sewall and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ancestor Magistrate John Hathorne and Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth and Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton – who should have been on top of this situation– such blithering idiots completely lacking in any street smarts? HDT WHAT? INDEX WITCHCRAFT AND THE SUSPICION OF WITCHERY 906 CE Regino of Prüm’s EPISCOPI, according to which, although witchcraft was mere superstition without any real occult power or authority, “The Bishops and assistants [of the Roman Catholic church] must work with all their might to eradicate entirely from their dioceses the corrupting arts of soothsaying and sorcery invented by the devil.” “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” EXODUS 22:18. “And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits and after wizards ... I will even set my face against that soul and will cut him off from among his people.” DEUTERONOMY 18:10-11. “There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.” DEUTERONOMY 18:10-11. “Saul had put away those that had familiar spirits, and the wizards out of the land.” SAMUEL 1:3. “Now Saul the king of the Hebrews, had cast out of the country the fortune tellers, and the necromancers, and all such as exercised the like arts, excepting the prophets.... Yet did he bid his servants to inquire out for him some woman that was a necromancer, and called up the souls of the dead, that so he might know whether his affairs would succeed to his mind; for this sort of necromantic women that bring up the souls of the dead, do by them foretell future events.” JOSEPHUS, Book 6, Chapter 14. “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft.” SAMUEL 1:15-23. “And I will cut off witchcraft out of the land.” MICAH 5:12. “Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together and burned them.” ACTS 19:19. “But there was a certain man called Simon which beforetime in the same city used sorcery and bewitched the people of Samaria.” ACTS 8:9. “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered, and men gather them and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” JOHN 15:6. “Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft....” GALATIANS 5:19 HDT WHAT? INDEX WITCHCRAFT AND THE SUSPICION OF WITCHERY 1025 CE In about this year Bishop Burchard of Wörms wrote, on the basis of Regino of Prüm’s EPISCOPI of 906CE, a BEICHTSPIEGEL according to which each person suspected of witchcraft was to be asked the same list of questions. HDT WHAT? INDEX WITCHCRAFT AND THE SUSPICION OF WITCHERY 1330 The bull of Pope John XXII relating to witchcraft.
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