Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [5]
Preexisting notions about a witch’s gender and race and even economic status shifted in new colonial societies. In England, Spain, and France, women were more likely than men to face accusations of witchcraft. But in North America, witches were both men and women. The transition came in part because Europeans, especially Spaniards, linked witchcraft to Indians, to Africans, and to people of mixed race—and as this connection developed, witchcraft lost its special association with women and was attached more to race and caste.4 In 1626, the first formal allegations of witchcraft reached New Mexican authorities; they involved an Indian woman and her mestiza (or mixed race) daughter. In that same year, across the continent, troubled Virginians charged one of their neighbors with witchcraft in the first known case in the English colonies. She was an Englishwoman, and in this respect typical of witches who landed in English colonial courts. English colonists continued to associate women with witchcraft, but wealthier women were more likely to face allegations than had been true in Europe.
While witch beliefs traveled across the Atlantic with Africans and Europeans, the context in which witchcraft accusations and trials functioned often did not. The manifestation of witch beliefs and trials is thus intertwined with the specific context of migration and colonization in North America. European migrants brought, for the most part, only fragments of their home societies with them. The ecclesiastical structures that shaped understandings about the Devil, the trained witch-hunters, the libraries of legal tomes that informed jurists, the long-standing personal relationships: all of the complex systems that enveloped witch beliefs, accusations, and trials could not be reproduced in America. Migration strained and sometimes shattered belief systems. Some Europeans had ideas about magical practices that were connected to specific geographical features—caves, waterfalls, mountains, forests, swamps. So, too, did Africans. West-Central Africans, for example, believed the forest to be a sacred space, where they buried the dead and where spirits might inhabit rocks or trees. Forests were also a source of herbs for healing and magical charms.5 In new environments, key ingredients might be unattainable. Both Africans and Europeans were severed—by choice or by force—from the natural world that hosted supernatural spirits. For Americans, sacred places were sometimes deliberately assaulted by Spanish invaders, who placed cathedrals where temples had stood, in a time-honored strategy of conquerors. They did just that in Mexico City, where they built their great cathedral on the sacred grounds of the Aztecs’ Templo Mayor.
Witchcraft gives us a raw and unfiltered—indeed, sometimes excruciating—glimpse at the lives of real men, women, and children who lived centuries ago. When we read a transcript of a witch trial, we find ourselves flung into the midst of community life. We learn of old injuries, tangled relationships, broken hearts, political ambitions, terrifying assaults, children long deceased but mourned with as much anguish as if they had died just the day before, families in conflict over generations, petty disputes over baubles and trifles, and heart wrenching loss and betrayal. We meet, for example, husbands who defended their wives when they were accused of witchcraft (see documents 8, 10, and 20), husbands who suspected their wives were witches (see document 19), and one husband whose alleged infidelity drove his distraught wife to accuse three women of witchcraft (see document 12). As a subject of historical inquiry, witchcraft enables us to glimpse a distant and often alien culture with startling intensity and intimacy. This book pulls together documents from different parts of North America, by Spanish, French, and English settlers, about Indians, enslaved Africans, and European colonists. These documents touch on slavery and servitude, family and the individual, sickness and death, the law and the church, reflecting the ways that ideas