Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [14]
Africans believed witches could be people with power—men of greed seeking to aggrandize their authority or wealth. Even a king might be feared as a witch. Europeans, in contrast, were far more likely to associate witches with the weak and marginal, people such as Indians, slaves, and elderly women who sought power through diabolical ends precisely because they were people without other avenues to power within their communities. Not until the witch hunts among the Shawnees in North America in the early nineteenth century do we see a similar association between witches and men with political power.
Beliefs: Native Americans
Among those who already lived in North America, there was a wide array of belief systems. Historians know most about the people who lived in areas where Europeans colonized, traveled, traded, and proselytized, along coasts and waterways and near other resources valued by Europeans. Our knowledge of Indian religious beliefs comes mostly from the recorded accounts of men who had their own religious agenda and their own demonology. Historians work hard to read these sources sensitively and creatively—and readers of these documents will have the same challenge—to try to recover and comprehend beliefs and cultures of non-Europeans. It is a difficult enterprise in which our understanding will only ever be partial, as if what we are seeing is a shadow cast on the ground, a clouded and imprecise image of something real and tangible but only that, an image. Spanish chroniclers ready to condemn all indigenous healing practices as witchcraft, for example, make it very difficult for historians to understand the cultural context in which these healing traditions existed.36
Europeans saw the Devil everywhere in North America.37 When Fray Alonso de Benavides described indigenous religious practices on his journey to New Mexico in 1625–1626 he labeled all spiritual leaders as wizards or sorcerers guided by demons (see document 1). Thomas Mayhew, a Puritan minister fluent in Wampanoag, derided the Indians he met on Martha’s Vineyard in 1652 as “zealous and earnest in the Worship of False gods and Devils.”38 The English also likened Indian shamans to witches. They were disturbed by Indian ideas of direct and personal connections to Indian deities, usually achieved through rituals that required fasting, trances, and the consumption of potent narcotics. The Englishman George Percy put the centrality of Satan succinctly: “They worship the Devill for their God, and have no other beliefe.”39
It was not just that the Devil was pervasive; Europeans believed that America was in fact his home. As the Jesuit José de Acosta explained in his Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590), directly linking religious reformation in Europe with Catholic endeavors in America, “once idolatry was rooted out of the best and noblest part of the world, the devil retired to the most remote places and reigned in that other part of the world, which, although it is very inferior in nobility, is not so in size and breadth.”40 Because of this certainty that the Americas were the Devil’s lair, it is hard to reconstruct with any certainty whether Indians had ideas of “witches” before European contact and what exactly these “witches” did. Europeans