Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [4]
In Europe, as many as 90,000 people were prosecuted as witches between 1420 and 1780, and as many as 45,000 of those were likely executed.3 In this same period, Europeans crossed the Atlantic and claimed, occupied, invaded, settled, and exploited the Americas. Christopher Columbus’s successful transatlantic voyage in 1492 marked the inauguration of a new era. European states sought to project their power in the Americas, eager to extract wealth from American resources (natural and human) and to deploy that wealth in struggles for dominion in Europe.
North America figured prominently in this process. The Spanish moved north from the valley of Mexico (where they toppled the Aztec Empire in 1519) across the Rio Grande, establishing their first settlements in the region we know as New Mexico in 1598. The French approached the continent from across the North Atlantic; they followed short-lived experiments in the 1530s with a serious commitment to fur trading in the early seventeenth century, settling in the St. Lawrence valley after 1608. The English ran fisheries in Newfoundland and established numerous colonies to the south in the seventeenth century. By the late seventeenth century, tiny pockets of European settlement dotted the continent. These enterprises were accompanied by intermittent conflicts with indigenous inhabitants. Europeans, moreover, forcibly transported Africans to the Americas and appropriated their labor and their progeny. Witchcraft in North America emerged out of this crucible, one with multiple belief systems; with complex power dynamics; and with stunning social, economic, and demographic transformations. In this book, I invite readers to examine witch beliefs as a unique approach to how cultural beliefs and practices collided. Witchcraft was one important way in which people made sense of their turbulent and changing world.
Colonization and conquests changed witchcraft beliefs and their expression. Witchcraft always provided a mechanism for revenge: victims alleged that the accused had killed their cattle, sickened their child, hindered their sexual performance, or ruined their crops. Any community harbored infinite possibilities for such conflicts. But colonial societies introduced new elements of coercion and cruelty. North America became a place of expanded evil. Indians who linked sickness with malevolence lived in a transformed world, with far more witches in it than had been the case before the arrival of Europeans. (What else could explain the deadly epidemics that swept away entire villages?) Enslaved Africans found their ideas about evil power similarly altered by the expansion of malevolent forces in American slave societies. Christian Europeans believed in the Devil as surely as they believed in God, and the Devil had loyal helpers—witches—especially in North America, a land European theologians regarded as the last bastion of Satan. In a world so fraught with tension, epidemics, conflict, and exploitation, it is little surprise that the chronology of witchcraft in North America differed considerably from that of Europe, where witch hunts petered out by the end of the seventeenth century. In contrast, witchcraft continued to be a fundamental aspect of how Europeans and Africans (and their descendants), Indians, and people of mixed race made sense of each other and of their world into the early nineteenth century, and a major outbreak occurred in eighteenth-century New Mexico.