Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [34]
Source: Matthew Hopkins, The discovery of witches (London, 1647). By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Figure 2. This image of a witches’ Sabbath features multiple aspects of European witch beliefs; witches fishing for toads, cooking up spells on a fire of human skulls, feasting on the hearts of unbaptized infants, riding brooms through the sky, and performing a variety of other nefarious deeds.
Source: From Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (Paris, 1612). By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Figure 3. The depiction of this woman conveys many elements of English ideas about witches; she is old, impoverished (or so her bare feet suggest), unattractive (signaled by the hooked nose), and accompanied by bird familiars. She travels on a board on a river, not by broom through the air.
Source: A most certain, strange, and true discovery of a witch (London, 1643). Houghton Library, Harvard University. 24246.62
Figure 4. An Iroquois healing ritual. Images of ritual life in the northeastern woodlands typically depict Indians in circles, just as European witches formed circles at their Sabbaths. Such healing ceremonies likely increased in frequency in the wake of Indian contact with unfamiliar and deadly Eurasian diseases.
Source: Joseph-François Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages ameriquains (Paris, 1724). Courtesy of Georgetown University Library Special Collections.
Figure 5. Scottish witches conjure a storm.
Source: James Carmichael, Newes from Scotland (1592). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Figure 6. A barn adorned with hex signs, located in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
Source: Charles H. Dornsbusch, 1941. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, HABS PA,39-NESMI, 1A-1.
Figure 7. A healer conjuring on behalf of a sick man in Suriname, a place where enslaved Africans retained a closer connection to African culture and practices than they did on the North American mainland. Compare this depiction of healing with figure 4.
Source: “La Mama-Snekie,” from Pierre Jacques Benoit, Voyage à Suriname (Bruxelles, 1839). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.
Linguistic and archeological evidence, then, points us toward both the possible survival of African witchcraft beliefs in British America and some likely transformations. The extant colonial records are equally opaque, although it is possible that African witchcraft beliefs endured in the form of the crime of poisoning. This crime existed in abundance in British colonies, where slaveholders fretted regularly about the likelihood of being poisoned by their slaves. Like arson, poisoning did not require any special strength. It did, however, require proximity, and the enslaved workers who toiled and lived in closest proximity to masters—domestic slaves, including cooks, attendants, or butlers—had the best opportunity to kill their owners with poison. In Virginia between 1706 and 1784, 179 slaves were charged with poisoning, many with targeting masters or overseers. Of these, 66 percent were found guilty, and 30 percent of the guilty were executed. The same crime appeared in other slaveholding jurisdictions, from South Carolina to the West Indies, and slaves who were found guilty often endured terrible deaths, burned alive or hanged alive in cages to die slowly, punished so harshly because the English common law regarded poison of a master by a slave as petit treason.140
If poison in British America was petit treason, victims in other jurisdictions often understood it to be witchcraft. In Louisiana, colonial authorities revealed mixed feelings about what practices lay behind poisoning. Africans forcibly transported to colonial Louisiana were settled in large concentrations in the colony, many among people from the same ethnic group. This practice facilitated the preservation of many religious and ritual practices, including the creation of charms for poisoning enemies.141 A case