Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [6]
Beliefs: Europeans
To make sense of why some people looked like witches while others did not, and why some regions contained numerous trials and others virtually none, we need to understand the witch beliefs that Europeans, Africans, and Americans held at the time of contact and settlement. The discussion starts with European beliefs for two main reasons. First, most of what we know about African and American witch beliefs comes from records generated by Europeans, so it is essential to understand what Europeans believed in order to make sense of what they thought they saw. Second, Europeans created the legal systems in which witch beliefs and accusations found traction in North American courts and through which most evidence of witchcraft has survived.
Europeans believed that a witch was a person who committed a crime using harmful magic. For example, a witch might cause a person or animal to sicken or die by chanting a spell or by sticking pins in a figure. A spell might similarly incite a storm or ruin crops or cause a drought (see document 9). A witch might thwart the hunt, as two men claimed Goodwife Wright did in Virginia in 1626 (see document 8). Witches might also cause men to become impotent. The Latin term for such crimes was maleficium (the plural is maleficia), and jurisdictions everywhere had statutes that banned and punished them (see documents 6 and 7). Even if a witch was also guilty of blasphemy (showing disrespect for God), her or his case normally appeared in secular courts by the middle of the sixteenth century, not ecclesiastical ones. A witch did not always need to perform any specific action to cause harm; damage could ensue if a witch only wished harm on someone. While magic might also be performed for beneficial ends—to heal the sick, to comfort the afflicted, to bring about good fortune, to recover lost or stolen items—by the sixteenth century European laws had defined even this so-called “white” magic as a form of witchcraft and thus also illegal and punishable by death in some jurisdictions. Witchcraft activity surged in Europe in the 1560s and 1570s, with trials in Germany and the Low Countries and new statutes in England and Scotland. Trial activity intensified from 1580 to 1630, followed by a very protracted decline between 1630 and 1770.
A rich folklore developed around witchcraft. Accused witches in Europe might be accompanied by creatures called familiars, including cats, rats, and toads (see figure 1). The more unpleasant and offensive the animal, the more it was “loathed by all people, who generally have a Natural Antipathy against that sort of Vermin,” the more likely witches—with their unnatural sensibilities—were to find affinity with it.6 Some witches transformed themselves into animals. In Estonia, accused witches confessed to acts of maleficia while they were werewolves; one woman testified in 1623 that she had been a werewolf for four years. Other witches worked closely with their familiars, sometimes assuming their shape in order to carry out their crimes. Still others put creatures to work in their spells. Shepherds in Normandy were especially likely to be accused of performing maleficia with the assistance of toad venom. In Iceland, witches, mostly male, worked their magic with the aid of runes, characters from the old Germanic alphabet used in Scandinavia and believed to have magical properties.7
One essential component of European witch beliefs was inextricably linked to Christian theology, and that was the idea of a special relationship between witches and the Devil. The Christian religious system contains two arch rivals: a supreme deity of all power and knowledge whom Christians call God, and a competitive fallen angel, Lucifer, who is the main source of evil in the world. Lucifer reigns in Hell and is also known as Satan or the Devil. Christians believed then (and many still do) that God and Satan were consumed by an eternal struggle for power, one that manifested itself in part in Satan’s efforts to thwart