Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [100]
with most sincere affection
Th. M. Randolph
Source: Barbara Oberg, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), v. 31, 347-48, 472–73, 522–23.
Figure 14. An Iroquois lacrosse game.
Source: Joseph-François Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages ameriquains (Paris, 1724). Courtesy of Georgetown University Library Special Collections.
Figure 15. The Execution of Isaac Jogues.
Source: Detail from a plate depicting Jesuit martyrdoms in Canada in François Ducreux, Historiae Canadensis (Paris, 1664), The Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-49877.
Figure 16. The title page of Richard Bovet’s Pandaemonium, or the Devil’s Cloyster depicts a wide variety of activities and characters associated with the occult arts, including an elderly witch with a hooked nose (figure A) and a witch riding the Devil (figure E).
Source: From Richard Bovet, Pandaemonium, or the Devil’s Cloyster (London, 1684). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Figure 17. Graman (which means great man) Quacy was highly regarded in the Dutch colony of Suriname because of his healing abilities. Born in Guinea circa 1690 and transported to Suriname when he was a child, he eventually gained his freedom from slavery. He is pictured here in the 1770s in the garb he wore on his return to Suriname from a trip to Europe.
Source: John Stedman, Narrative of a five years’ expedition (London, 1796). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Two Cases of Possession
The two documents in this section offer examples of possession in North America. The first comes from the English colony of Massachusetts, where a teenager named Elizabeth Knapp suffered afflictions that were diagnosed as possession by the Puritan minister Samuel Willard. The second document is a letter by a Franciscan priest in Abiquiu, New Mexico, who described the collective possession of women in that community during the large outbreak of 1756–1763. In both cases, we have accounts generated by religious men, and in both cases the possessed were women. What kind of power did the possessed gain during their possession?
17. The Possession of Elizabeth Knapp,
Massachusetts, 1671–1672
Elizabeth Knapp lived in Groton, Massachusetts, where she was a servant in the household of a minister named Samuel Willard (1640–1707), who later became the president of Harvard College and who criticized the use of spectral evidence during the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. In October, 1671, when she was sixteen years old, Elizabeth suffered a series of maladies that were ultimately diagnosed as possession. In his account of Knapp’s possession, Willard speculated “Whither her distemper be reale or counterfeit.” Why do you think that Willard ultimately concluded that Knapp was possessed? What do you think?
THIS poore & miserable object, about a fortnight before shee was taken, wee observed to carry herselfe in a strange & unwonted manner, sometimes shee would give sudden shriekes, & if wee enquired a Reason, would alwayes put it off with some excuse, & then would burst forth into immoderate & extravagant laughter, in such wise, as some times shee fell onto the ground with it: I my selfe observed oftentimes a strange change in here countenance, but could not suspect the true reason, but conceived shee might bee ill, & therefore divers times enquired how shee did, & shee alwayes answered well; which made mee wonder: but the tragedye began to unfold itselfe upon Munday, Octob. 30. 71, after this manner (as I received by credible information, being