The Enemy Within (35 page)

The 18th century brought a gradual decline in the strength and salience of witchcraft belief. People of more than average wealth and education made up an advance guard of skeptics. For them, this was a period of “enlightenment” led by the steady growth of modern scientific ideas. The latter included: an orderly universe (with the deity reduced to the role of benevolent, but distant, “watchmaker”); the natural, and ultimately discoverable, causation of particular events; and what one historian has called “a new faith in the potentialities of human initiative.” The cumulative result was gradually to erode traditional worldviews, among which witchcraft had loomed so large.

Still, with plain folk of the same era, the old attitudes hung on for several generations longer; their traces are evident now chiefly through folklore and what scholars call “oral tradition.”

Littleton, Massachusetts; 1720.
Three young sisters in the Blanchard family fell “under affliction”; their “torments” included “wounds and pinches and prickings,” interspersed with “trances and visions.” Many “conjectures” were offered as to the source of their difficulties, but “the greater number [of townspeople] thought . . . they were under an evil hand, or possessed by Satan”—whereupon the sisters jointly accused “a certain woman . . . of afflicting them.” Presently the suspect “fell ill and died within a few weeks,” and the Blanchard children returned to a normal condition. Some saw this sequencing itself as proof of guilt. Yet discussion continued, and several “of the good neighbors . . . suspected . . . falsehood.” The children insisted they had offered “nothing but the truth throughout.” Eventually, however, “their consciences contradicted them”; the eldest, when grown to womanhood, confessed to having concocted the whole affair, led by “folly and pride” into a course of “deceit.” The parallels here to the earliest phase of the Salem witch-hunt were obvious—and may well have contributed to the neighbors' doubts. The outcome, however, proved very different.

Fayette, Maine; the summer of 1800.
A Massachusetts minister visited this town as part of a missionary tour and wrote about it in his diary: “Lodged with Dr. Hall. Here was witchcraft in plenty. A man had been troubled six months, and it was thought he must die. He is emaciated and often horribly distressed. . . . A Baptist teacher, soon to be ordained, has lost his milk for some time. The end of a cheese would come and go, and boil off from the fire, and finally come to nothing. Etc. Etc.”

Cape Cod, Massachusetts; 1793.
Another New England minister offered the following, more general observation: “There are but few towns, if any, but at one time or other have not had one or more [inhabitants] in suspicion of witchcraft, as if the place were not complete without some well-versed in that occupation.”

Long Island, New York; 1802.
A farmer composed a careful account of “strange occurrences . . . in the course of my life,” many of which he attributed to a local “gang of witches.” He admitted to doubts about the whole idea of witchcraft, which seemed “contrary to my senses and my reason.” Nonetheless, “what has happened to me and fallen in the way of my observation” forced the conclusion that “spirits” are indeed able “to act or operate on the minds or bodies of creatures.”

Bristol, Connecticut; about 1810.
According to a local historian, “witchcraft caused much excitement . . . and greatly frightened some of the good people.” A girl named Norton claimed to have been enchanted by one of her aunts, who “put a bridle on her and [drove] her through the air to Albany, where great witch-meetings were held.” A sympathetic neighbor took her into his house in an effort to “exorcise her,” and was immediately beset by “awful sights and sounds”; a friend who tried to assist was “frightened into convulsions.” Others “were tormented by unseen hands, pinching them, sticking red hot pins into their flesh, and bringing strange maladies upon them.”

New Hampton, New Hampshire; the early 19th century.
A certain “Granny Hicks” was suspected of using witchcraft to cause illness in a child of some neighbors with whom she had been recently at odds. Five young men of the town decided to retaliate by demolishing her house “with axes”; they then set its remains on fire. Hicks stood by and begged them “for mercy”—but to no avail. When the deed was done, she “pointed . . . to each one in turn, and . . . prophesied the manner in which death would come as judgment upon him.” Years later, her “prophecy of that fateful night . . . was wholly, and literally, fulfilled.”

Stories like these are studded through dozens of local histories, especially from New England. To be sure, they
are
stories, not trial records or government statutes or detailed parish transcripts; hence they lack the “official” status of witch-hunting evidence from an earlier time. Still, they are valuable for the light they throw on popular mentality; taken as a whole, they provide the clearest available view of witchcraft history in its post-trials phase. They show, for one thing, that women of middle and old age remained the most likely suspects. They show, too, that episodes of conflict—threats, neighborhood spats and squabbles, petty jealousies, the refusal of cooperation or charity—were, as before, the usual triggers for suspicion.

In other ways, however, they suggest change. Many stories shift the focus from harm caused
by
the witch to injury done
to
her. Put differently: they express a growing emphasis on counter-magic—on measures taken to ward off, or even to reverse, the effects of witchcraft.

New Salem, New Hampshire; the early 19th century.
On a summer day, a farmer went out to his barn and noticed one of his cows “looking strangely,” and immediately suspected its “bewitchment” by a local woman. Adopting a time-honored strategy, he took the unfortunate creature and cut off its ears and tail; shortly thereafter the woman in question was found dead in a house fire.

Exeter, Rhode Island; the early 19th century.
A woodcutter set out to cart a load of lumber to market. While he was en route, a cat scampered across the road, badly startling his team of horses. He immediately inferred “mischief” by one of his neighbors who might, through witchcraft, have assumed the shape of the offending cat. So he shot and killed the cat with a silver bullet (a well-known counter-magical tactic). At virtually the same moment, on the other side of town, the supposed witch took a bad fall and broke her hip.

The conceptual basis of witchcraft was changing, too. Alongside her 17th-century predecessor, the stereotypical witch of the 18th and 19th centuries seems a much diminished figure. From the enactment of invisible, life-altering, sometimes death-dealing
maleficium,
to occasional bits of local “mischief ”: this was the basic trend. (To be sure, killing was still theoretically within the witch's power; but very few of the later stories include this element, or anything close to it.) Crucially, the essential, enabling tie to Satan was broken—and, along with it, the idea of a cosmically scaled “conspiracy” against Almighty God and his forces of righteousness. Witchcraft had become a freelance activity performed by individual miscreants.

Even the stereotype of witches was different now. The post-trials period birthed the figure of the “hag-witch,” who remains with us in popular culture today. She appears in a thousand different variations—but with a core of central features found nearly everywhere. The hag-witch is
old,
and on that account
decrepit.
She walks with a stagger, leaning on a gnarled cane. She is physically
repulsive.
Her back is bent, her complexion a pallid gray; her face is grotesquely wrinkled, her eyes beady, her nose crooked, her mouth toothless—and so on. She is also
eccentric.
She seems disorganized, confused, a trifle “dotty.” Finally, she is
an isolate.
She lives alone, in a remote location, without regular, supportive human contact. In sum, she is pathetic rather than powerful—a victim more than a victimizer. She may still, under some circumstances, elicit fear; but contempt, disgust, even ridicule, are the more likely reactions to her.

How and why witches and witchcraft became weakened this way is a complex question touching many broad currents of historical change. One of these was surely the altered position of women in society at large, including a process of disempowerment through which the robust “goodwife” of the colonial era evolved into the spotless, but relatively constricted, “True Woman” of the 19th century. Now, even though the ancient and ubiquitous witch/woman equation remained intact, it lacked the punch it had packed in an earlier time.

Another closely-related element was the rise of a new cultural ethos, in which competition and conflict became approved routes to social betterment; this, in turn, was paralleled at the level of individual experience by a growing acceptance of personal assertiveness (even openly expressed aggression). In short, qualities which had once served as deeply negative referents—and which were directly linked to witchcraft—no longer felt so threatening.

A third important line of change was the loosening of community ties and a corresponding reduction in the social density of everyday life. As pre-modern villages grew into fully developed towns and cities, it made less and less sense to attribute misfortune to personal factors such as motives of attack in one's neighbor next door.

Finally, the old “providential” view of history—the readiness to see all events as tightly linked in a grand design controlled by the Almighty—was, with the passage of time, steadily scaled back. Insofar as witchcraft had been part of that design, it became displaced, disorganized, unmoored.

Vestiges of old-style witchcraft belief could be found well into the 20th century—and perhaps, here and there, even in the 21st. They have survived in the play of children, in folklore, and (rarely now) in the lives and attitudes of people little touched by modernizing forces. To be sure, a new style of witchcraft has emerged in just the past few decades. But this is an altogether different thing—call it witchcraft with a smiling face. Its shape and substance must be outlined here, if only to separate it from the main lines of the present inquiry.

“Wicca” is its currently popular name, though some adherents prefer to be called “witches” plain and simple. It appears in many versions, all of which can be broadly grouped under the rubric of “neo-Paganism.” Because it is highly decentralized, and also because it has until recently followed a code of secrecy, its dimensions—its total of supporters and sympathizers—are hard to come by; some estimates push toward a million worldwide. Its rapid expansion, since a modest beginning in the 1950s, is not in doubt. But its geographical range is limited, for the most part, to the United States and the United Kingdom (with offshoots in some parts of northern and central Europe).

Devotees of Wicca are loosely organized in “covens.” Typically these have a local base and small scale, so as to permit a maximum of close, personal interaction. Despite their structural looseness, and an implicit commitment to autonomy and difference, they do share a core of underlying beliefs. One is the efficacy of magic, including charms, chants, spells, image making, and, more generally, the invocation of supernatural power to direct the course of experience. A second is the centrality of a female deity: the Great Goddess, as she is often called. Some Wiccans also embrace a male God, and make much of the pairing, while others espouse a pantheon of many gods. But the Goddess ranks highest overall. A third core belief—in fact, a cluster of beliefs—involves a reverence for the earth and all its life-giving powers; put differently, Wicca, in most of its forms, is Nature worship. Other important elements here—though they are less matters of belief than intrinsic tendency—include a sense of divine immanence (the presence of the Goddess permeates all being) and a feeling of existential community (distinctions between self and other fade into an all-encompassing Oneness).

But in any case, practice matters more than belief. Ritual enactments, performances, and celebrations are truly the heart of Wicca. The most important of these are tightly linked to the seasons: for example, a sequence of eight festivals tracing “the wheel of the year.” They include familiar calendrical moments such as “Yule” (Christmas) and Halloween, mixed with others that are more obscure. Gatherings of the coven take place accordingly; its members dance, sing, and invoke a variety of “figures” (circles, pentagrams, elaborate body charts) with sacred significance—all within a frame of joyful self-expression.

Until recently, the entire system has been thought to rest on deep historical tradition. In particular, Wiccans claimed direct descent from traditional witches of pre-modern times. Witchcraft, they believed, was actually an “old religion,” indeed,
the
old religion: pre-Christian, not to say prehistoric, and “pagan” in the fullest sense. Its adherents had been forced to endure centuries of terrible persecution, especially during the witch-craze of 1550-1700. Then they had gone underground and had reemerged essentially intact in our own time.

This claim, if valid, would have given Wicca an important place in the larger history of witchcraft. But the surviving evidence will not sustain it. There is nothing to establish a direct chain of connection—between one person, or group, or decade, or generation, and the next—across the several centuries that separate traditional witchcraft from Wicca. The strongest possibilities here would seem to involve the “white witches” of pre-modern times, those “cunning” men and women who cast spells, bestowed charms, told fortunes, and otherwise sought to assist their village neighbors. Their “magic” was widely acknowledged—of that we have solid proof—and occasionally it did seem to turn from “white” to “black,” thus creating targets for witch-hunters. Yet, magic aside, their lives and work differed profoundly from the practice of Wicca. First and foremost, theirs was never a system of
devotion,
of
worship,
embracing high purpose and overarching worldview. To the contrary, it was entirely about
utility
—that is, small and specific gains at the level of everyday circumstance (curing an illness, finding a lost object, helping with some important decision). There is no sign that cunning folk engaged together, as a group, in any context whatsoever.