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By Root 634 0

had power over life and death. In the trials at Salem, the possessed erupted at crucial moments. During the trial of Sarah Good, the justice asked the possessed if Sarah Good hurt them, “and so they all did looke upon her and said this was one of the persons that did torment them,” and soon they were all writhing in a fit (see document 19). Abigail Faulkner’s shift from denying her guilt to confessing to witchcraft may have been affected by the conduct of the possessed (see document 24). Ann Putnam’s contrition for causing the death of her neighbors with her accusations in 1692 produced a pained admission of responsibility fourteen years later (see document 26).

But if possession might reveal reversals of power, letting us see Indian women insult and slap a priest, or a Puritan teenager roar at her pastor, possession might also have enabled the possessed to find an opportunity for religious expression that was otherwise denied them.195 There were limited spheres of religious expression for young women, especially Protestants. In Europe, some ardent Catholics sealed themselves up next to churches as anchoresses, dependent on the community for their maintenance. Catholic women with dowries in New France and New Spain could enter convents. But the possessed, too, could find a niche. In this respect, possession was closely linked to expressions of religious zeal, and indeed the symptoms, especially the bodily afflictions and mortifications, are strikingly similar.

Because evangelical enterprise was so important to French and Spanish colonization efforts in North America, priests targeted indigenous people with ardor, exhorting them to convert to Catholicism. Religious fervor among new converts sometimes manifested itself in excesses that looked like possession. Catholic priests in the Americas were often impressed—and sometimes overwhelmed—by the rituals that new converts embraced. These rituals might be a consequence of converts trying to demonstrate their commitment to a new faith, but they also corresponded in parts of the Americas with indigenous practices. Take, for example, the story of Catherine Tekakwitha (1656?–1680), a Mohawk woman who converted to Christianity and moved to the Jesuit mission at Kahnawake in 1677. Like other women converts in New France, Tekakwitha distinguished herself with her ascetic self-denial and her punitive bodily mortifications. These women engaged in self-flagellation. Having heard of the hair shirts and iron girdles (a belt with sharp points to scour the wearer’s skin) sometimes donned by the devout, they emulated the practice. One woman stood naked and exposed during a snowstorm as penance, she explained, for her sins. Others broke the ice to immerse themselves in the heart-stopping cold waters, submerging themselves until they had completed the rosary. Some burned themselves, deliberately grasping hot coals or placing them on their bodies. Tekakwitha excelled at such discipline, enduring 1,000–1,200 blows of a switch from an equally devout companion in a single session of flagellation, and participating in such occasions several times a week for a period of almost eighteen months. She walked barefoot through the snow. She fasted twice a week, and when friends begged her to eat, she denied herself the pleasant taste such nutrition might bring by mixing ashes with her food. One day she burned her body up to her knees with brands from a fire. When a friend and sister penitent proposed leaving a coal between her toes—a familiar torture for Iroquois war captives—for as long as it took to recite an Ave Maria, Tekakwitha was inspired by the challenge and did just that. The Jesuits at the mission worried about what they regarded as excessive rituals; they were both impressed by the women’s actions and troubled that they went too far. While the bodily mortifications of these converts were embedded in Iroquois practices, including the ability to withstand pain and the use of pain in sacred quests, and were connected to common practices among European Christian ascetics, they also echo the physical