The Enemy Within
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface
PART ONE - EUROPE
CHAPTER I - Martyrs of Lyons: A Story from the Beginning
CHAPTER II - Witch-hunting Panorama, 150-1750
CHAPTER III - The Malleus Maleficarum: A Book and Its Travels
PART TWO - EARLY AMERICA
CHAPTER IV - Windsor, Connecticut, 1654: A Town Entertaining Satan
CHAPTER V - Witch-hunting in the American Colonies, 1607-92
CHAPTER VI - Mary Parsons: A Life Under Suspicion
PART THREE - SALEM
CHAPTER VII - Rebecca Nurse: A “Witch” and Her Trials
CHAPTER VIII - The Most Famous Witch-hunt of All, 1692-93
CHAPTER IX - The Reverend Cotton Mather: A Minister and His Demons
PART FOUR - MODERN AMERICA
CHAPTER X - Anti-Masonry: A Politics of Panic
CHAPTER XI - Saga of Scares, 1700 -2000
CHAPTER XII - Fells Acres Day School: A Question of Abuse
Epilogue
Bibliographic Commentary
Index of Names
General Index
Also by John Demos
Circles and Lines:
The Shape of Experience in Early America
The Unredeemed Captive:
A Family Story from Early America
Past, Present, and Personal:
The Family and the Life Course in American History
Entertaining Satan:
Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England
A Little Commonwealth:
Family Life in Plymouth Colony
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First published in 2008 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © John Demos, 2008
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Demos, John.
The enemy within : 2,000 years of witch-hunting in the Western world / John Demos.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 297) and index.
eISBN : 978-0-670-01999-1
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To Pen and Tom
Preface
This book is the end product of an almost half-century engagement with witchcraft study.
Imagining such a lengthy prospect was impossible when, as a beginning graduate student in 1960, I was assigned the topic of witchcraft for a term paper. In due course, however, the paper became a published article. And the article spawned other articles, numerous conference presentations, and eventually the writing of a large scholarly book (Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England, Oxford University Press, 1982).
At that point I thought surely I had said my last word on witchcraft history. Yet the talk-show invitations kept coming each year at Halloween; there was still the occasional witchcraft conference to attend; there were even middle-of-the-night phone calls from people who thought themselves possessed by the Devil. To an extent, therefore, I kept my hand in.
Then, to my surprise, I was back in the thick of it—invited by the editors of Viking to attempt a broad-gauge summary and synthesis of the entire subject. The challenge was considerable, but I did feel a certain eagerness in response. It would be like returning to a house well-known from long before, but now grown through various additions into a mansion. There were old rooms to revisit, and new ones to reconnoiter for the first time. Indeed, many of the mansion’s contents—nothing less than a vast output of scholarship during the past two and a half decades—were unfamiliar. The study of European witchcraft has reached extraordinary levels of sophistication; reading and reflecting on that would prove especially rewarding. The American side of witchcraft study has also been reinvigorated; rewards would come from there as well. The range and variety of all such work did indeed invite synthesis.
But synthesis was itself an unfamiliar process for me. I have previously made my way as a historian of very specific times, places, and events. My aim in all my other projects has been depth more than breadth. Those priorities are reversed here; the coverage is nothing if not broad. The idea is to pull together histories as widely separated as the late Roman Empire, medieval Europe, colonial America, and modern-day Red scares (among others). Moreover, my synthesis seeks to bridge not only histories but also historiography—that is, the writings of literally hundreds of different scholars, each with his or her own style, presuppositions, research focus and strategy, and period of interest. Wide coverage seems an important, even necessary, goal with certain historical topics, but the risk of collapsing distinctions, oversimplifying, flattening, trivializing is formidable.
A second unfamiliar aspect of my current project involves audience. Although I have always hoped to interest general readers in the fruits of my research, my primary audience till now has been fellow scholars and students. But again, in this book the priorities are reversed. In fact, what some are calling popular history has of late achieved a remarkable growth. “History is hot,” I heard a publisher say last year, and bestseller lists would seem to bear him out. Interestingly, many history books on such lists come from the hands of “writers” with no claim to scholarly credentials (as if historians were not writers themselves!); the results, in my opinion, are decidedly mixed. The finest of these books are fine indeed, the worst so crude as to seem a kind of caricature. One can only be pleased that history should become popular, even hot; but professionals, too, must be persuaded to enter that mix.
There is a third kind of unfamiliarity here which may be most compelling of all. My focus, through a long academic career, has been on people who lived and died two, three, or more centuries ago. Though I’ve tried to understand them, to empathize with them, and (in a way) to connect with them as fellow humans, their experience has the unavoidable feel of remoteness. In direct contrast, the current book brings
its subject virtually to the present; hence the sense of connection grows far more immediate and personal. Many of the individual people described in my concluding section are still living; some are the entirely innocent targets of recent witch-hunts (in the figurative sense). For example, an unknown number of those prosecuted in the day-care “abuse” investigations of the 1980s and ’90s remain in prison years later; to write about them is a new and different experience. If this book were somehow to shorten their “trials” at least a bit, or if it proved at all instrumental in forestalling similar injustice in the future, I would feel extremely gratified. Furthermore, connection with the targets of modern-day witch-hunts brings a renewed and deepened feeling for their counterparts in the old-style witch-hunts of pre-modern times. Targets then, targets now: the struggles and sufferings of them all are painfully clear.
I wish, finally, to express appreciation to various colleagues and friends who have helped move my project along. First comes the legion of previous witchcraft historians whose spadework in the many corners of this large landscape underlies my synthesis throughout; their names will be found in the Bibliographic Commentary that stands at the book’s end. The names of others whose assistance was more direct and personal can be set down here. Jane Kamensky, Aaron Sachs, and Virginia Demos gave the entire manuscript a careful reading and offered many critical and constructive suggestions. James R. Green, Alexander Keyssar, and Paul Freedman read and commented on one or another section that fell within their own special areas of expertise. Numerous others responded to my requests for advice about readings or specific points of fact and interpretation: among these Robert Johnston, Beverly Gage, and Michelle Nickerson were particularly helpful. I benefited greatly from the work of three undergraduate research assistants: Jeremiah Quinlan, Adrian Finucane, and Christine Matthias. Finally, two skilled editors at Viking, Wendy Wolf and Ellen Garrison, provided invaluable late-stage counsel, and thereby improved things in ways both large and small.
And now I believe that I truly have said my last word on witchcraft history . . .
J. D.
Tyringham, Massachusetts
February 2008
Prologue
June 1582. In the English town of Chelmsford, half a dozen elderly matrons carefully undress a sawyer’s wife named Alice Glasscock and begin a search of her body for “the marks of a witch.” In due course they discover several “spots . . . well sucked”—so they presume—by Satan’s imps. This is part of a formal investigation that will lead to Glasscock’s trial, conviction, and execution.
September 1623. In the small south German village of Marchtal, a group of farmers and their families interrupt their harvest dance to forbid the approach of a woman named Ursula Götz. “Begone! Begone,” they shout together, “you shitty witch!” Branded thus, and under threat of torture, Götz will eventually confess to all sorts of “devilish” designs against persons, cattle, crops.
Autumn 1656. In New Haven, in the British colony of Connecticut, a woman named Elizabeth Godman knocks at the door of her neighbor Goodwife Thorp and asks to buy some chickens. Thorp replies curtly, “We have none to sell,” whereupon Godman turns away muttering what sounds like a threat. The next day, when several of Thorp’s chickens are found dead, she will charge Godman with using “evil means” against them.
May 1692. In Salem, Massachusetts (also a British colony), seven mostly teenage girls thrash wildly about on a courtroom floor, alongside a bewildered witch suspect named Martha Carrier. “There is a black man whispering in her ear!” shrieks one of the girls. A second wails, “She bites me, and tells me she would cut my throat!” while others in the group endure “most intolerable outcries and agonies . . . of affliction.” Carrier’s will be one of twenty lives lost to America’s most famous witch-hunt.
Alice Glasscock. Ursula Götz. Elizabeth Godman. Martha Carrier. All were caught in the snare of real events; all were players in a vast drama spanning key centuries in the history of what we now call “Western civilization.” The idea of witchcraft has been part of that history as far back as the records allow us to see. Thousands of people like Götz, Glasscock, Godman, and Carrier have been pursued, harassed, injured, and killed because of it.
The reality behind the idea is another matter. That some attempts were made to practice witchcraft, and that certain individuals (at least a few) were willing to cast themselves as witches, seems beyond doubt. Where the idea was so prevalent and powerful, a portion of those it touched would, almost inevitably, decide to embrace it. There is great difficulty, however, in identifying such “actual” witches and their specific doings now. For the evidence we have is heavily filtered, coming (as it invariably does) from those who sought to oppose and suppress witchcraft: judges, inquisitors of various types, clergymen and theologians, or simply the countless ordinary folk who feared its use against them.
These distinctions frame a book—any book—on witchcraft history. The focus in what follows is the idea of witchcraft, as it melded with emotions about witchcraft, to prompt actions against witchcraft. Again: it is the idea, the emotions, the actions—not the actual practice—that we, from several centuries later on, can directly scrutinize. As a result, this is—first and last—a history of witch-hunting.
But witch-hunting is itself a large subject, hardly confined to any single part of the world. In fact, it rises virtually to the level of a cross-cultural universal; witches of one sort or another are, or previously have been, “hunted” just about everywhere—in Asia, in Africa, in Australia, and among native peoples all across the Americas. This book cannot, and does not, reach so far; its boundaries are those of the pre-modern, and modern, West.
There are other boundaries to flag, and additional subject areas that lie beyond reach. Witch-hunting, large as it is, belongs to a still more capacious terrain that also includes racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism, as well as pogroms, lynchings, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. To such patently downside matters, witch-hunting bears an obvious similarity—and even perhaps some dynamic connection. But one crucial element divides them. While the goal for all is separation from a despised “other,” witch-hunting alone finds the other within its own ranks. The Jew, the black, and the ethnic opposite exist, in some fundamental sense, “on the outside”; the point of actions against them is to enforce difference and distance, and sometimes to eliminate them altogether. The witch, by contrast, is discovered (and “discovery” is key to the process) inside the host community; typically he or she is a former member in good standing of that community who has chosen not only to reject but also to subvert it. Thus, the idea of witchcraft holds at its center the theme of betrayal. Thus, too, witch-hunting has an intensely countersubversive, anti-conspiratorial tone. Always and everywhere, its goal is to root out the hidden enemy within.
Most of this book addresses witch-hunting in a quite straightforward sense: through a wide array of experience pertaining to witchcraft, as an explicit presence in Western society during the medieval and early modern eras (roughly A.D. 500-1700). However, its concluding section moves to the modern period, and broaches something more: what might be called witch-hunts without witches. This design reflects the widespread usage nowadays of the term—as a metaphor, a figure, for events that, while lacking witchcraft in the literal sense, seem in other respects remarkably similar to the old pattern. Presumably, the key link between literal and figurative witch-hunts is the search for enemies within. But that proposition needs testing against specific cases. In short, how fully is the witch-hunt metaphor justified? Can the modern, figurative witch-hunts be understood as “functional equivalents” of the pre-modern ones?
A final note: the book follows a kind of zoom-lens principle, combining long, broadly topographical views with others that are sharp and close-up. Its four major parts move roughly in chronological order, from European witch-hunting, especially during the “craze” years of the 16th and 17th centuries (Part One), to witch-hunting in the early “colonial period” of American h
istory (Part Two), to the notorious Salem trials of the late 17th century (Part Three), to the figurative witch-hunts of modern times (Part Four). Each part includes a lengthy central chapter presenting the topic, from start to finish, in summary form. And each is bordered, fore and aft, by “vignettes” keyed to some particular episode, person, artifact, or career. The aim is to balance the general against the particular, to juxtapose structure and texture, to mix interpretation and analysis with narrative flow and human detail. History, all history, requires no less.
PART ONE
EUROPE
Though witchcraft is a very old presence in Europe, its origins were diffuse and scattered. Throughout the first millennium there were no witch-hunts as such. Still, the suffering of the early Christian martyrs can be seen as prefiguring the persecutions that would come later on; thus the vignette presented in chapter I.
With the passage of time, conditions would ripen for a full-blown “witch-craze” at the end of the Middle Ages. The ripening process, and the craze itself—a sequence without parallel in the history of the Western world—are the focus of chapter II.
As anxiety over witchcraft rose, and large-scale persecution began, a single book—the notorious Malleus Maleficarum—served to orient, and galvanize, those most directly involved. For more than two centuries it served as a virtual bible of witch-hunting; witness the tale of its “travels” recounted in chapter III.
CHAPTER I
Martyrs of Lyons: A Story from the Beginning
A.D. 177; Lyons, France. (Its Roman name is Lugdunum, its province Gaul.) Alarm spreads throughout this bustling city on the margins of the empire. The Christians, it is rumored, are once again engaged in their infamous rituals, and the entire community is thereby imperiled.