Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [3]
SECTION I
O
WITCHCRAFT IN
EARLY NORTH AMERICA
An Introduction
O
Witchcraft in Early North America
An Introduction
What is a witch? Students of American history usually have a quick answer to that question: A witch was one of those poor accused women who were hanged at Salem, Massachusetts, in that town’s infamous outbreak of 1692, one such as Sarah Good, whose “wicked spitfull manner,” her “base and abusive words,” and her “muttering” may have condemned her in her neighbors’ eyes far more than her diabolical actions (see document 19).1 But it turns out that witches were everywhere in North America. And witches were not only terrified English colonists. Witches could be Huron shamans, Pueblo healers, enslaved conjurers, and Jesuit priests. As Europeans, Americans, and Africans converged in North America, so, too, did their ideas about witchcraft. Witches, everyone agreed, were people who performed harmful acts and threatened community order. But when societies and cultures collided on the North American continent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was an irrevocable shift in people’s assumptions about what harmful acts entailed, who was most likely to be committing them, and how one might preserve communities ravaged by disease and conquest or formed anew out of strangers.
Witchcraft might seem quaint and exotic to many readers, but to the people who are the subject of this book, it was a major preoccupation and concern. Witchcraft explained the unfathomable: prolonged drought, epidemics, deadly storms, earthquakes. Central Africans believed that witches (in the form of greedy and self-aggrandizing rulers) might even cause wars. The past was a time of far greater insecurity in meeting basic needs than most readers of this volume know today. Modern North Americans can alter their environment with ease, overcoming the constraints of the natural world. When it is cold, we can turn on heat, thanks to a massive infrastructure that delivers gas, oil, and electricity to homes in even the most rural regions. In sweltering summers, we reverse the action, chilling the air around us with fans or air conditioning. As night falls, we turn on lights, fending off scary creatures that dwell in the dark unknown and enjoying activities once reserved only for daylight—work, reading, recreation, and safe travel. We shrink distances with the telephone, the Internet, and the airplane, bringing the whole world within our reach with technology. We even traverse time, viewing planets, stars, and distant solar systems of the past through magnificent telescopes. We stave off sickness and delay death with a fantastic array of diagnostic tools, potent chemical cocktails, and palliative care. North Americans live amid unprecedented food security, with few people dependent on a single harvest to survive. In short, in the twenty-first century we have many tools and services at our disposal to challenge and circumvent the dictates of the natural world.
Yet it is in many ways too simple to assert that those who believed in witchcraft were people who, lacking our technology, could not explain or transform their world in any other way. The same people who believed that one drought was caused by witchcraft did not think that all droughts were. Although some mariners on a terribly rough and stormy passage across the Atlantic might find a witch in their midst, most voyages, even those plagued by hurricanes, shipwrecks, and death, did not produce witchcraft accusations. Christian parents might understand a child’s death as the punishing hand of God or the unfortunate quirk of fate or just one of the many cruel sicknesses that carried away as many as half of all children before they reached the age of five. The Puritan minister Cotton Mather (1663–1728), who lived in Massachusetts, watched in helpless agony