Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [50]
The Inquisition’s investigations produced a disturbing confession from Doña Juana, who reported that her brother had impregnated her, and she had gone to La Chuparratones to seek help aborting the fetus. The curer’s efforts failed, and Doña Juana asked her to kill her with potions. The medicines produced some of the signs of possession, most notably the objects the curer inserted in Doña Juana’s body to end the pregnancy. Instead, these items were expelled from Doña Juana’s womb in one of the classic signs of possession. The Inquisition sentenced Doña Juana to a year of seclusion and severely admonished the Franciscans. The curer suffered a greater punishment: she was required to appear at an auto-da-fé wearing the symbol of a witch on her clothes, after which she was paraded half-naked through the streets and whipped with 200 lashes.204 The Inquisition adhered to a policy of skepticism after this episode, worrying in part that the actions of the possessed were so peculiar that they had the effect of making the Devil look weak and ridiculous.
A similar confession in England in 1606 by a woman named Anne Gunter explained another mystery of possession: how the possessed seemed impervious to pain. In Gunter’s case, she was able to withstand the pins people plunged in her breasts without discomfort. Her father, she claimed, had compelled her to consume potions that made her ill and, along with a neighbor, Alice Kirfoote, had forced her to cooperate with his hoax. Kirfoote stuck needles in a drugged Anne and mopped up the blood with handkerchiefs after the ordeal. Kirfoote also trained Gunter to hide pins in her mouth and to vomit them up at the appropriate moment.205
Although there were clear behaviors that contemporaries regarded as part of the package of traits associated with possession, not every person who exhibited such traits was immediately believed to be possessed. Concerned family members summoned medical experts to see if there might be a natural cause for the symptoms. When doctors failed, or when they concluded that the causes were unnatural—and thus possession—families then turned to ministers or priests. But people could still be skeptical of possession. Experts debated how to understand what they saw. The possessed might be ill (diagnosed in the terminology of the time as melancholia, hysteria, or epilepsy) or crazy. They might be possessed by the Devil (and thus demoniacs)—or possibly by a good spirit. They might fake their possession. And, sometimes, the possession was voluntary, and if that were true, then the possessed was actually a witch, because one hallmark of a witch was her free choice to ally herself with Satan.206 Samuel Willard weighed the evidence carefully in Groton in 1671–1672 when Elizabeth Knapp started to behave oddly (document 17), and Fray Toledo did the same at Abiquiu (document 18). At Salem in 1692, some observers—and some accused witches—believed that, like Doña Juana in Querétaro, the possessed were faking their plight. Readers will have ample opportunity in their analysis of documents 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, and 24 to reach their own conclusions about whether they think possessions were real or fake.
Prophets and Witch Hunts in the New United States
In the end, Salem, once removed from an English colonial context, begins to share a lot of features with trials and outbreaks of possession in other parts of North America. As the Abiquiu