Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [45]
Modern psychology might offer some answers to this question, however dangerous such a tool is in the hands of historians who have neither the necessary professional and medical training nor access to the people whom they seek to examine as subjects. Sigmund Freud himself took a crack at understanding possession in 1923, when he published a paper about a
seventeenth-century case from Germany involving a painter, Christoph Haizmann, who signed a pact with the Devil when he was despondent about his art. Freud presented the tale as a case history. In Freud’s hands, the case was one of neurosis: the subject’s bond with the Devil was a “neurotic phantasy,” one in which the Devil substituted for the painter’s father. The painter’s pact for nine years signaled, Freud argued, Haizmann’s fantasy to bear his father a child.189
Also drawing on the social and behavioral sciences, the historian Peter Charles Hoffer analyzes the behavior of the possessed accusers at Salem in light of what modern sociologists understand about adolescence and about gangs. Hoffer suggests that the group’s naming of witches derived not only from a desire to gain attention, but also from a need to keep the group itself intact—the group functioned cohesively, depicting possession in collective rituals of shrieking, twitching, writhing, and moaning.190 Hoffer also raises the possibility that some of the possessed might have suffered from abuse—not just physical abuse, which was probably not uncommon in Salem in this period, but sexual abuse.
Sexual abuse of children is virtually impossible to find in the court records of the period, although certainly, as in many societies, it existed wherever a predatory and powerful adult found a vulnerable child. Hoffer suggests that one way to read Mercy Lewis’s accusation against the minister George Burroughs is in light of this possibility. Lewis was an orphan whose parents had been murdered by Indians in 1689. The Burroughs family took her in when she was fourteen, although she soon ended up in the household of the witch-hunting Putnams. When Lewis launched accusations of witchcraft, she named George Burroughs. His specter had appeared to her, tempting her, trying to trick her to sign the Devil’s book, a “fashion book” as she called it. When Burroughs (or his specter) returned two days later, she explained, he “carried me up to an exceeding high mountain and showed me all the kingdoms of the earth and tould me that he would give them all to me if I would writ in his book.” This testimony, Hoffer suggests, was unlike that presented by all other witnesses, none of whom intimated that an apparition had transported them to a mountaintop. Although the debt to Matthew 4:8 is clear (the text reads “Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them”), Hoffer argues that Lewis selected this metaphor of the mountaintop, rather than other images commonly circulating about apparitions and what they did, because it had special resonance for her. Did Burroughs make sexual advances to her? Did she refuse? In her testimony, Lewis recalled that Burroughs (or his apparition) threatened her, telling her he would “brake my neck” if she did not sign the book.191
The challenge with such psychological interpretations and with the use of modern theories of child development is that while the biological