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who have been accused of sorcery without being questioned. All this has been done before the public, since there has been no shortage of people to help. They lie about whom they desire. It is not my motivation or intention to place the blame on them because I know, through the practice of exorcism, that it is not licit for me to discover this crime, when it is only to the exorcist that the devil will reveal it. It has not been revealed only to me, nor questioned by me alone. Rather, other people have voluntarily given this information. Nevertheless, I do not ignore that the devil, the father of lies, has attemped to excuse all of this information. But I am not ashamed, nor afraid to use all the means necessary to remove all obstacles and give adoration to the Highest. This is advised for the alcalde mayor, the Indian discoverer, and myself. As I told the alcalde mayor, so I say to the Governor vocally: May the majesty of all powerful God illuminate our senses and hearts. May your Lordship be granted much health and may God protect you many years. From this Pueblo of Abiquiu, 22 of January 1764

Your assured servant and chaplain kisses the hand of Your Lordship

fray Juan José Toledo

Notes

1. How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, who did rise in the morning? From the Manual of Exorcism.

2. The word made flesh

Source: Robert D. Martínez, “Fray Juan José Toledo and the Devil in Spanish New Mexico: A Story of Witchcraft and Cultural Conflict in Eighteenth-Century Abiquiu” (M.A. thesis, University of New Mexico, 1997), 56–59, 60–64, 66–71, 72–73.

Outbreaks

This section focuses on two major outbreaks, the first at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, and the second a series of witch hunts launched by Tenskwatawa, also known as the Shawnee Prophet, in the early nineteenth century in the Ohio River valley. The Salem documents, selected from a massive archive of available material, illustrate the range of people (English, Indian, and African) ensnared in the witch hunts, and also suggest the fears people around Salem had about witch attacks. Several of the documents contain confessions, one of the unusual features of Salem’s outbreak, and the documents also permit us to see how the possessed accusers shaped court proceedings.

The second outbreak is the series of witch hunts that took place in the early nineteenth century, when Tenskwatawa put witches—and their extirpation—at the center of his campaign for Indian revitalization. One document articulates the Prophet’s code, a second contains short excerpts from a similar code by the Seneca leader Handsome Lake, and the third is an account from a pair of Moravian missionaries about the executions of several witches among the Delaware Indians along the White River in the U.S. territory of Indiana. This final document takes us full circle, back to the first documents in this book, also generated by religious observers of indigenous society, and back to the theme of witchcraft as a way of looking at intersections and transformations as cultures met and clashed, both for the first time and over centuries of contact.

19. The Examinations of Tituba

and Sarah Good, Salem, March 1, 1692

Sarah Good, Tituba, and Sarah Osborne were the first three people in Salem, Massachusetts, to be accused of witchcraft. Tituba was a slave owned by Samuel Parris, the minister of Salem Village, whose daughter and niece were the first possessed victims. Sarah Good, aged thirty-eight when she was named, was a woman whose neighbors harbored long-time suspicions of witchcraft. She was a marginal member of the community, in some respects the prototypical English witch.

Tituba soon confessed, naming both Good and Osborne as witches in her testimony, and both Good and Osborne denied the charges, although Good implicated Osborne. Tituba provided confessions on two different days; the first confession is included here. All three women were found guilty. Sarah Osborne died in prison on May 10. Sarah Good was executed on July 19, 1692. Tituba recanted in the fall of 1692, as enthusiasm for trials and executions