Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [11]
All of these beliefs and practices concerning witchcraft, finally, were entangled in the major religious transformation of the period, the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. In 1517, a monk named Martin Luther launched what became a major religious upheaval after he posted ninety-five critiques of the Catholic Church on the doors of the cathedral at Wittenburg. New churches emerged in the wake of this protest. Protestants (as the followers of Luther’s initiative came to be called) established new churches and defined codes of conduct for believers, and they were especially concerned with reforming personal behavior (whether banning card playing and other games or regulating sexual conduct) and ensuring orthodox beliefs (making sure, for example, that worshipers understood church doctrine).
The line between religion and superstition was a fuzzy and shifting one, especially in this period when all churches, Protestant and Catholic, were clamping down on behavior. Across and even within religious traditions, there was little agreement on what might be superstitious or even pagan practices. English Puritans, for example, rejected the celebration of Christmas or the many feast days and seasonal rituals that were practiced in the Protestant Church of England. They refused to use the months’ names, which they regarded as pagan, and instead used only the number. They sought to live by God’s laws as they strictly interpreted them, and this aspiration affected even their witchcraft statutes, which turned, as the Connecticut colony’s 1642 law did, to Leviticus, Exodus, and Deuteronomy for inspiration (see document 7).
Yet these were people whose own habits might strike modern readers as bizarre and laden with superstition. The Puritans believed that God’s will was unknowable, yet that his hand was everywhere. Their predestinarian theology convinced them that God had already consigned them to Heaven or Hell, regardless of their actions on this earth. They accompanied this uncompromising doctrine with a belief that God gave men and women clues to read so that they might make educated guesses about the likelihood of their salvation—although they always accepted the real possibility that they might well guess wrong. These two beliefs—that God was present in all aspects of life and that God might have left clues to the eager believer about salvation—made Puritans intensely aware of the world around them. No natural event, no odd coincidence, no accident, passed without some study of God’s hand. Thus, for example, a gathering of ministers paused during a meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1648 because a snake had slithered into the chamber. What did that mean? What was God trying to tell them? After some deliberation, the ministers concluded that the snake was Satan, and he sought to disturb their gathering, although they were also certain that God knew of Satan’s plan, since nothing happened without God’s knowledge.26 Natural events, such as storms or floods or late spring snows or prolonged drought might reveal God’s power as well. A people who believed just as firmly in Satan as they did in God could equally find Satan’s hand, vying with God for power.27
Enhanced regulation of personal conduct and religious expression was only one aspect of the reformations that accompanied church schism and creation in this era. A second important feature was the emergence of political rivalries that were expressed through religious opposition. Europeans divided into warring camps, Protestant and Catholic, even though the composition of those camps shifted continuously throughout the sixteenth century. By the end of the sixteenth century, England had emerged as a major Protestant kingdom, setting itself in opposition to Spain, a bastion of Catholicism. The struggles between these kingdoms for power in Europe leaked into North America, and part