• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 612 0

about the existence of witches and demons, witchcraft and numerous associated beliefs about charms, shape-shifting, potions, and animal familiars nonetheless intrude in modern American life, saturating television and movie screens. Apart from these forms of popular culture, witchcraft also endures in historical tourism. The most popular witch site is modern Salem (which is, ironically, the original Salem Town, not Salem Village, now Danvers, where most witches and possessed victims lived). The tourist experience in Salem is fun, a well-oiled machine intended to part willing tourists from their money with whimsical treats, fortune telling (the alleged divination that sent many people to the gallows), grim reminders of confinement (a fake copy of Salem’s jail), self-proclaimed witches, and multimedia museum experiences (at Salem’s dazzling Witch Museum).245 In rural Pennsylvania magnificent barns adorned with hex signs offer another tourist attraction that exploits a history of witch beliefs, in the same way that New Orleans has shops where curious tourists can buy goofer dust or a gris-gris (see figure 13). The competition for tourist dollars has replaced the old contest of cultures within which these varied North American witch beliefs slowly emerged over the centuries of the long colonial period, when Europeans, Africans, Indians, and their descendants collided in the most daunting and uncertain circumstances. In so doing, they reshaped their ideas about power, magic, and evil in light of the world that changed around them.

Notes

1. “The Examination of Sarah Good,” in Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, eds., The Salem Witchcraft Papers (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977), 2:357.

2. Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 76, 173, 272, 274.

3. Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 3rd ed. (Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2006), 22–23.

4. Laura A. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 38.

5. Ras Michael Brown, “‘Walk in the Feenda’;: West-Central Africans and the Forest in the South Carolina-Georgia Lowcountry,” in Linda M. Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 289–317.

6. Richard Bovet, Pandaemonium, or the Devil’s Cloyster (London, 1684), 221.

7. Maia Madar, “Estonia I: Werewolves and Poisoners,” in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds., Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 270–72; R. C. Ellison, “The Kirkjubol Case: A Seventeenth-Century Icelandic Witchcraft Case Analyzed,” Seventeenth Century 8 (1993): 217–43; Levack, Witch-Hunt, 52; William Monter, “Toads and Eucharists: The Male Witches of Normandy, 1564–1660,” French Historical Studies 20, no. 4 (Autumn 1997), 575.

8. This discussion of European witch beliefs draws heavily on Levack, Witch-Hunt, 4–8, 11.

9. Pierre de Lancre, On the Inconstancy of Witches: Pierre de Lancre’s Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (1612), ed. Gerhild Scholz Williams; trans. Harriet Stone and Gerhild Scholz Williams (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), 118–19.

10. Peter Morton, ed., The Trial of Tempel Anneke: Records of a Witchcraft Trial in Brunswick, Germany, 1663, trans. Barbara Dähms (Buffalo, NY: Broadview Press, 2006), 60–61, 80–81; 98–105; quotations from 61, 98, 100.

11. On women as witches in the Holy Roman Empire, where Tempel Anneke lived, see Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

12. See Levack, Witch-Hunt, table 2, 142.

13. Monter, “Toads,” 581.

14. Monter, “Toads,” 584.

15. Ralph Gardiner, Englands Grievance Discovered (London, Printed for R. Ibbitson, and P. Stent, 1655), 108. Italics added.

16. Marianne Hester, “Patriarchal Reconstruction and Witch Hunting,” in Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts, eds., Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies