The Enemy Within Read online

  And so to the New England Puritans. This most familiar group of settlers—actually two groups, the Mayflower “pilgrims” who arrived at Plymouth in December 1620 and a much larger contingent coming to Boston and its environs beginning a decade later—have long been accorded special pride of place as a source of American character. Some of their cultural DNA lies deep in our national core, whether for good or ill. Moral or simply moralistic, single-minded or narrow-minded, upright or uptight: such opposite yet complementary descriptors have served to frame a centuries-long process of soul-searching around Puritans. On one point, and perhaps one only, all sides seem to agree: these folk were important—they left their mark—we live with their legacy still.

  Defined from the outset as religious reformers of a radical and universalist bent, they nonetheless refracted the temper of their times. For they were social reformers as well. In both aspects, the social as well as the religious, they struck a fundamentally reactive—even backward-looking—pose. The English church as they knew it was “corrupt”; in response they would “purify” it by returning to the habits and principles of the early Christians. English society at large was no less compromised; they would restore it by recapturing the “brotherly” spirit of a previous and simpler age.

  Their social critique is of special importance here. They saw themselves, not without reason, as born to an epoch of unprecedented change. Rapid population growth, runaway inflation in prices and rents, the fitful development of trade and industry, the swelling sprawl of towns and cities (spectacularly so in the case of London), the disruption of ancient manorial and parochial systems in the countryside: these trends were felt in many quarters as unmooring the stays of traditional culture. To Puritans most especially, the accompanying social costs seemed enormous—with vagabonds roaming the highways, beggars infesting the urban marketplace, disease, fire, and crime in rampant display—all appearing to presage an ultimate breakdown. Their writings formed a litany of outrage and sorrow on the evils surrounding them. “Why meet we so many wandering ghosts in shape of men, so many spectacles of misery in all our streets?” asked Governor John Winthrop upon exiting England to lead the new colony of Massachusetts Bay. Pride and the inherent “baselessness” of human nature provided one part of the answer here; but “society” constituted another. Hence, wrote Robert Cushman, a thoughtful pamphleteer on behalf of New England colonization, “the most wise, sober, and discreet men” were often reduced to penury.

  Puritans lived, in short, with a pervasive fear of disorder—even, as one historian has put it, “on the brink of chaos.” Yet they found in their religious faith a vital measure of reassurance—strength, hope, the promise of “a new life”—centered in precisely those values that history seemed bent on destroying. Puritanism enshrined, above all, the principle of control, both inner control of the individual person and outward control among the community of “saints.” Intense and unrelenting discipline would be the appropriate answer to disorder.

  Having crossed the ocean and fetched up at various points along the New England shore, Puritan leaders seized a unique opportunity to begin anew—to found communities where the law of God and the law of man would become the same. That they expressed their goals in theological terms should not mislead us; there were, after all, no other terms available to them. In contrast to the selfish spirit characteristic of their motherland, they would strive to re-create an organic connection among God-fearing folk. In contrast to disorder, they would establish harmony, peaceableness, the subordination of individual interest to “commonwealth.” Countless New England sermons would later bear witness to the preeminence of these values; here, for Puritans, was the true meaning of Christian love. As Winthrop put it in a famous shipboard lecture en route to Massachusetts, “We must be knit together . . . as one man . . . and . . . must delight in each other, make others’ condition our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work.” This “commission” to be “knit together”—they also called it their “errand”—expressed the very heart of what they were about.

  The pursuit of these goals involved Puritans in strenuous measures of self- and collective improvement. Individual striving for holiness was one important element here; an attitude of unflinching “watchfulness” toward one’s family and neighbors was another; a community-wide commitment to consensual (not majoritarian) decision making yet another. But being and acting “knit together” proved to be a most difficult ideal, one they could never fully realize. Indeed, they often disappointed themselves as, all across their newly-created homeland, towns and villages fell into “controversy” and divided into “factions” around matters both large and small. To some extent Puritanism itself was to blame for this; for, in rejecting the established ecclesiastical hierarchy, it had also relinquished many traditional checks on the possibility that individuals might plot their own course (in religion and otherwise). Thus did various forms of sectarianism arise and flourish in early New England. Some of these were quite large-scale, with the potential to split entire communities. Others went right down to the level of lone believers moved by a personal “inner light.” Moreover, New England’s special brand of Puritanism was challenged from the outside as well: by regular Anglicans (members of the official “established church” of the realm), by Baptists, by Quakers.

  A final sort of challenge came from a different quarter altogether. Here was no competing sect or church institution—and not even a religious (in the strict sense) belief system—but rather, ancient traditions of “folk magic.” Interest and belief in magic had certainly crossed the ocean with the first cohort of New England settlers and had then taken firm root in the cultural soil of their nascent communities. Its traces are numerous and varied (if often somewhat sparse in detail). Ministers referred to it in their sermons and published writings; Cotton Mather, for instance, declared that “in some towns it has been a usual thing [emphasis added] for people to cure hurts with spells, or to use detestable conjurations, with sieves, keys, and peas, and nails, and horseshoes, and I know not what other implements.” Courts inquired into it, most often as part of witchcraft prosecutions. Ordinary “inhabitants” mentioned its use, and sometimes its efficacy, in their diaries and letters to one another. Its pervasiveness, even in this most religiously oriented of colonial regions, is beyond doubt.

  As in the Old World, the term magic covered a broad spectrum of belief and practice. So-called high magic, including alchemy, natural astrology, numerology, and other such arcane disciplines (with a pedigree stretching back to classical Greece and Rome) was the province of learned men; as such, it remained a respected, even admired, branch of “humane” knowledge. Some of New England’s foremost magistrates and ministers were among its devotees and practitioners: for example, John Winthrop Jr., midcentury governor of Connecticut and New England’s most sought-after “physician,” and Reverend Gershom Bulkeley, a leader of the Connecticut clergy.

  Folk magic, however, was a different and far more controversial matter. For this there were specialized adepts, “cunning men” (and women) prepared to assist those who came to them in times of need. The largest group of recorded cases involved divining, the use of occult methods to foretell the future, to find lost or stolen objects, to access private information. In fact, fortune-telling represented the single most prominent category here, much larger in New than in Old England; examples can be piled up very fast. In Connecticut, a diviner working as a servant in a merchant’s household forecast to a fellow “maid” that she would not marry her current sweetheart but rather “one named Simon” (which proved to be exactly the case). In Maine, the white mother of an illegitimate, mixed-race child had once been told by a fortune-teller “that she should mix seed with another nation, and that was true.” In Massachusetts, yet another woman received a prediction “that she should meet with great trouble, if she escaped with her life”; transfixed with “horror,” she then flung
out of her house and was found dead the following day. Moreover, the famous Salem witch-hunt was thought to have begun when a group of young girls gathered around a glass with an egg white suspended inside—in effect, a primitive crystal ball and thus a traditional method of divining.

  In the Salem case, there seems to have been no intermediary, no specialist, involved: the girls were acting on their own. And so it was in many other cases as well, for “folk magic” was truly a matter of the folk—ordinary individuals who knew something of the traditional lore (the procedures, the prescriptions) and sought to apply it as best they could. Besides divining, their efforts would frequently embrace healing, in response to illness and injury. One man had “an effectual remedy against the toothache,” another “a cure for the ague”(fever, perhaps malaria), still another a quick fix for a broken leg. Two elderly brothers quarreled over a medicinally powerful “piece of gold” inherited from their mother; she had said “it might be of some benefit if any of us got a bad sore.”

  A detailed picture of these ideas and practices in actual operation can be drawn from the testimonies given in a court case against a “doctor woman” named Ann Burt of Lynn, Massachusetts, by several of her erstwhile patients. According to one, Burt had prescribed potions from a certain “glass bottle . . . and when I had drunk of it I was worse.” The same man would go on to experience frightening encounters with “familiar” animals, and then with Burt herself “upon a gray horse . . . or one in her shape.” A second witness reported that on being “taken . . . to be cured of her sore throat,” Burt had proffered a pipe “and said ‘Sarah, will you smoke it?’ . . . [And] she smoked it, and . . . fell into fits . . . and said that Goodwife Burt brought the Devil to torment her.” Still others described the woman invoking a force they called “her god,” apparently as part of a treatment procedure. For example: “She said that her husband did not believe in her god and could not be cured, and that her maid did believe in her god and was cured.” This suggestion of a distinct supernatural being—apart from the orthodox Christian pantheon—is rare, if not unique, in the annals of New England folk magic. It may have appeared in other cases as well; but if so, the traces have long since been lost.

  Another example of folk magic gone wrong comes from a New Hampshire witchcraft case in 1680. A little boy had been taken ill, and a neighbor, thought to be adept at healing, offered to try a cure. Coming to the child’s bedside in strange garb, “her face daubed with molasses,” she proceeded to enact the following ritual: “She . . . smote the back of her hands together sundry times, and spat in the fire. Then . . . having herbs in her hands, [she] stood and rubbed them . . . and strewed them about the hearth. . . . Then she sat down and said ‘Woman, the child will be well,’ and then went out of the door.” Even outside her actions continued; according to the parents’ later remembrance, she turned back to face the house and stood “beating herself with her arms, as men do in winter to heat their hands, and this she did three times . . . [while also] stooping down and gathering something off the ground in the interim.” As events turned out, the child did not get well, but died within a few days. And the would-be healer was held responsible, with her supposed “remedy” construed now as witchcraft.

  In fact, the lines between beneficent magic (including healing) and maleficium were tenuous at best. And their strategies might directly intersect. Image magic was considered especially potent and dangerous—for example, the use of “poppets” (another name for witch dolls) to represent particular human targets. Pinch or prick or twist the poppet, and the intended victim would fall ill, break into fits, or (in extreme cases) suffer mortal injury. As noted above, local courts might order that a suspect’s house be searched for such paraphernalia, and, at least occasionally, would claim to have found what they were seeking. In a Boston case, this procedure yielded “several small images . . . made of rags, and stuffed with goat’s hair and other such ingredients.” The same results attended similar efforts made in the course of the Salem trials.

  Closely related to image magic as practiced by the witch were various forms of counter-magic directed against her. For example, urine might be taken from the victim, poured into a special container, infused with pins and nails, and heated over a fire; this was supposed to bring an immediate reaction—scalding, burning, or other painful sensation—in the suspected perpetrator, wherever she was. The same maneuver might also compel her to approach the scene of her crime. In one such case, a suspect was observed “walking to and fro” beside her victim’s house; she did not leave for some hours, until after a certain urine-filled bottle had been “unstopped.” Thus might revenge and identification be achieved in a single stroke. The key element in every instance was a powerful line of influence believed to connect the witch and her victim—a kind of invisible, magical tether—with effects that could travel in either direction.

  Most, if not all, such practices appeared on both sides of the Atlantic; in this, as in much else, the colonists were simply carrying on age-old Anglo-Saxon traditions. So-called witch bottles—most of them stoneware jugs embellished with the frightening image of a bearded man—have been recovered from rivers and trash-pits in England. Typically they contain hair, fingernails, and other human traces; presumably these, like urine, served to effect counter-magic. (In one remarkable case the contents included a cloth heart pierced with pins.) No similar discoveries have as yet been made for the American colonies, but written evidence confirms the use of witch bottles there as well.

  To these methods of magic and counter-magic were added many more. Palmistry, for one: much could be learned about “persons’ . . . future condition by looking into their hands.” Indeed, this was something of a learned discipline (broaching high magic); New England palm-readers would occasionally claim to have consulted books in which “there were rules to know what should come to pass.” One diviner was skilled not only at reading hands but also in scrutinizing “veins about the eyes,” apparently as a way to predict length of life. Astrology was yet another such resource. A Connecticut fortune-teller boasted of “great familiarity” with the noted English astrologer William Lilly—perhaps from personal acquaintance, or else from having “read [his] book in England” (her listeners couldn’t be sure which).

  Palms, eyes, and the stars; crystal balls, and obscure manipulations of keys, nails, table silver, “sieve and scissors”: the accoutrements of folk magic went on and on. Indeed, everyday objects of various sorts might, under suitable circumstances, be associated with occult power, though many of the particulars are irrecoverable today. There were charms, too, involving the use of mysterious words and letter combinations—sometimes in written, sometimes in spoken, form. For instance, a Boston man used a “secret” healing ritual, organized around “five letters, viz., x, a, etc . . . written successively on pieces of bread and given to the patient.” Conversely, there were curses, “ill words” designed to injure. Thus a Massachusetts woman, angered by a neighbor’s charge of countenancing theft, wished that her accuser “might never mingere [urinate] or carcare [defecate]”; soon thereafter the neighbor was “taken with the distemper of the dry bellyache.”

  Toward all this—the interest, the beliefs, the actual practices of magic—the orthodox clergy of New England maintained a resolute, vehement opposition. For them it was nothing less than sacrilege, an affront to their own authority and, most of all, to God’s. If layfolk needed protection against the slings and arrows of everyday life, this must come from the Almighty—and none other. If particular individuals experienced privation and suffering of a “remarkable” sort, redress should be sought through “solemn prayer”—and that alone. The difference between folk magic and “true religion” lay precisely here: the one was manipulative and human-based, the other supplicative and divinely ordained. And wherever magic had apparently succeeded in achieving some intended effect, its motive source could only be the Devil himself.

  Christian clergy all across Europe had long held folk magic in dim repute;
this was true for Protestants and Catholics alike. But to the extent that Protestants, more than Catholics, stressed the absolute sovereignty of God and the utter inability of man—to that same extent magic became an even greater, more blasphemous challenge. In fact, Protestantism may have unwittingly invited such challenge. For Protestants were, relative to Catholics, effectively disarmed, with traditional “intercessory” means denied them. No more saying of rosaries, no use of holy water or holy relics, no recourse to elaborate and enveloping church ritual; no potentially comforting doctrine of salvation by works. Instead, inherent sin and irrefutable weakness in the face of an all-powerful, largely inscrutable Deity: for Protestants, the human situation was as stark and as desperate as that. Individual men and women could only wait, only pray, only hope, only fear. Is it any wonder that some found this predicament too great to bear, and the temptation to magic—for the same reason—too hard to resist?

  Within the full complex of Protestant belief, nothing evoked more anxiety, more agonized searching and speculation, than “predestination,” the idea that God had already ordained the salvation or damnation of every living being. One’s destiny was certain, and beyond all possibility of change; yet one could never know its nature. Such belief seems to have fostered an attitude of particular concern with the future: first and foremost, with the afterlife, but also with more immediate matters of everyday, “earthly” existence. This, in turn, may help to explain the very unusual prominence of divining and fortune-telling in 17th-century New England.