The Witches: Salem, 1692 (9 page)

A week after their arrest, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba were carted off to await trial in Boston’s prison, Good’s infant along with them. Even assuming no one jumped from her horse, that journey constituted a full-day affair. It could only have been tense, given the mutual accusations. As for their destination, with its fetid air, dirt floor, and armies of lice, the Boston jail constituted “a grave of the living.” John Arnold, the Boston jail keep, was notoriously cruel, said to be as obdurate as the shackles with which he fixed the suspects in place. The chains had no locks; a blacksmith alone could remove them. At the same time, Arnold opened accounts for the women’s charges, for which they would be billed. He was soon buying blankets for the prisoner-infant, settled in the dungeon. The chains were as much a testimony to the women’s preternatural force as the defects of the Massachusetts jails. It was understood that witches could control their victims with their every gesture; if they could not move, they could not enchant. Prison breaks however occurred with stunning regularity. An Ipswich prisoner blithely decamped by lifting the boards over his head. Salem inmates at one point dismantled not only the door but an entire wall of the facility. A year earlier, two had called for a pot of beer. They were in a canoe paddling to freedom by the time the jail keep’s wife delivered it.

Assuming Tituba was convinced by her own testimony, she must have been petrified. Not even a sturdy prison could prevent the tall man from decapitating her. The justices found her entirely credible. She suffered for her confession. She repented. Her details were precise; they tallied unerringly with the reports of the bewitched. Tituba had moreover been consistent from beginning to end. “And it was thought that if she had feigned her confession, she could not have remembered her answers so exactly,” Hale later explained. A liar, it was understood, needed a
better memory. Tituba had absorbed all of Parris’s teachings, even if her incandescent account was notably short on professions of piety; she mentioned God only once. Assured throughout, she held up remarkably well for someone caught between a merciless inquisitor and a ghastly decapitator. The irony was that all might have turned out very differently had she been less accommodating. Confessions to witchcraft were rare. Convincing, satisfying, and the most kaleidoscopically colorful of the century, Tituba’s changed everything. It assured the authorities they were on the right track. Doubling the number of suspects, hers stressed the urgency of the investigation. It introduced a dangerous recruiter into the proceedings. “And thus,” wrote Hale evenly of an affair that had seemed modest, local, and—Salem town’s senior minister implied—so ordinary as to be uninteresting, “was this matter driven on.”

WHAT EXACTLY WAS
a witch? Any seventeenth-century New Englander could have told you. Adversarial though the relationships were, Hathorne and Corwin, the court officials, the accused, and the accusers all envisioned the same figure, as real to them as had been the February floods, if infinitely more pernicious. Directly or indirectly they drew their definition from Joseph Glanvill, a distinguished English academician and naturalist. With unimpeachable authority, the Oxford-educated Glanvill had proved that witchcraft existed as plainly as heat or light. As he defined the term: “A witch is one who can do or seems to do strange things, beyond the known power of art and ordinary nature, by virtue of a confederacy with evil spirits.” From those pacts, witches assumed their power to transform themselves into cats, wolves, hare. They had a particular fondness for yellow birds. A witch could be male or female but was most often female. An English witch in particular maintained a kind of menagerie of imps or “familiars,” demonic mascots that did her bidding. Those companions could be hogs, turtles, weasels. Cats and dogs were prevalent, though toads were a universal favorite. The witchcraft literature is thick with toads: burned toads, exploding toads, dancing toads, groaning toads, pet toads, pots of toads, human-born toads, cats disguised
as toads. The sixteen-year-old servant who slipped a plump toad into the family milk pitcher delivered an explicit message, as she fully intended.

The witch bore a mark on her body indicating her unnatural compact with the spirits that engaged her. Those marks could be blue or red, raised or inverted. They might resemble a nipple or a fleabite. They came and went. Essentially any dark blemish qualified, though a mark in the genital area was particularly incriminating. As had Tituba, a witch signed an agreement in blood, binding her to her master, to whom she pledged her services. He recruited by means of customized bribes. Witchcraft tended to run in families, along matrilineal lines. While a witch’s power was supernatural, her crime was religious. She could be relied on to stumble over the Lord’s Prayer, anathema to the devil. She worked her magic with charms or ointments—incriminating news for Salem’s Elizabeth Procter, whose maid was about to reveal that her mistress kept a greenish, foul-smelling oil on hand. To work her magic at a distance, a witch resorted on occasion to poppets, the doll-like figures for which Constable Herrick had ransacked the Osborne and Parris cupboards. And the witch’s connection to the wildly convulsing Salem children? An Englishman had long known precisely what enchantment looked like. According to an early legal guide on several Salem desks in 1692, it manifested as senseless trances, paralyzed limbs, fits, jaws clapped shut or grotesquely deformed, frothing, gnashing, violent shaking. The author of that volume tendered as well some vital advice: in the presence of such symptoms, consult your physician before blaming your neighbor.

Witches had troubled New England since its founding. They drowned oxen, caused cattle to leap four feet from the ground, tossed skillets into the fire, tipped hay from wagons, enchanted beer, sent pails crashing and kettles dancing. They launched apples, chairs, embers, candlesticks, dung through the air. They sent forth disembodied creatures, in one case a man’s head connected to a white cat tail by several feet of nothingness—a Cheshire cat centuries before Lewis Carroll. (It should be said that there were a fair number of taverns in the colony. Salem town was particularly well served, with fifteen taverns, or one establishment for
every eighty men, women, and children.)
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Witches alternately charmed and disabled. Out of the blue, Hathorne asked Tituba if she knew anything about Justice Corwin’s son. Most likely Hathorne wondered if she had crippled Corwin’s lame nine-year-old, although there were other candidates; in quick succession, Corwin had buried three boys. Witches managed to be two places at once or emerge dry from a wet road. They walked soundlessly over loose boards. They arrived too quickly, divined the contents of unopened letters, spun suspiciously fine linen, cultured uncommonly good cheese, knew secrets for bleaching cloth, smelled figs in someone else’s pocket, survived falls down stairs. Witches could be muttering, contentious malcontents or they could be inexplicably strong and unaccountably smart. Indeed they often committed the capital offense of having more wit than their neighbors, as her former minister had said of the third Massachusetts woman hanged for witchcraft, in 1656.

Compared to their European counterparts, New England witches were a tame bunch, their powers more ordinary than occult. They specialized in disordering the barn and kitchen. When the New England witch suspended natural laws, those laws tended to be agricultural ones. She had no talent for storms or weather of any kind; she neither called down plague nor burned Boston.
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Continental witches had more fun. They walked on their hands. They made pregnancies last three years. They turned their enemies’ faces upside down and backward. They flew
internationally. They rode hyenas to bacchanals deep in the forest; they stole babies and penises. They employed hedgehog familiars. The Massachusetts witch’s familiars—which she suckled, in a maternal relationship—were unexotic by comparison. She did not venture very far afield. Even in her transgressions she was puritanical. She rarely enjoyed sexual congress with the devil.
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When she visited men in the night she seemed interested mostly in wringing their necks. Prior to 1692, the New England witch seldom flew to illicit meetings, more common in Scandinavia and Scotland. While there was plenty of roistering in New England, little of it occurred at witches’ Sabbaths, which seldom featured depravity, dancing, or voluptuous cakes and took place in broad daylight. Revelers listened to sermons there! (The Salem menu consisted primarily of bread, wine, and boiled meat.) The witch’s ultimate target, the point of all those pricks and pinches, was the soul rather than the body. And despite her prodigious powers, she did not break out of jail, something many less advantaged New Englanders managed with ease.

Among the abundant proofs of her existence—where proofs were needed—was the biblical injunction against her. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” commands Exodus, although there was some debate about that term; in Hebrew it more accurately denotes “poisoner.” As workers of magic, as diviners, witches and wizards extend as far back as recorded history. They tend to flourish when their literature does. The first known prosecution took place in Egypt around 1300
BC
, for a crime that would today constitute practicing medicine without a license. (That supernatural medic was male.) Descended from Celtic horned gods and Teutonic folklore, Pan’s distant ancestor the devil was not yet on the scene. He arrived with the New Testament, a volume notably free of witches. Nothing in the Bible connects the two, a job that fell, much later, to the church. It took religion as well for anyone to propose satanic pacts, more
popular in Scotland than in England. You could not really bargain away your soul before it was established that you had one.

The witch as Salem conceived her materialized in the thirteenth century as sorcery and heresy moved closer together; she came wholly into her own as a popular myth yielded to a popular madness. In 1326 Pope John XXII charged his inquisitors with the task of clearing the land of devil worshippers; the next two centuries proved transformative. When she was not being burned alive, the witch adopted two practices under the Inquisition. In her Continental incarnation she attended lurid orgies, the elements of which coalesced early in the fifteenth century, in the western Alps. At the same time, probably in Germany, she began to fly, sometimes on a broom. Also as the magician molted into the witch, the witch—previously a unisex term—became a woman, understood to be more susceptible to satanic overtures, inherently more wicked. The most reckless volume on the subject, the
Malleus Maleficarum,
or
Witch Hammer,
summoned a shelf of classical authorities to prove its point: “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” As is often the case with questions of women and power, elucidations here verged on the paranormal. Weak as she was to devilish temptations, a woman could emerge dangerously, insatiably commanding. According to the indispensable
Malleus,
even in the absence of occult power, women constituted “a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment.”

The fifteenth century—the century of Joan of Arc—introduced the great contest between Christ and the devil. The all-powerful Reformation God required an all-powerful enemy; the witch came along for the ride. For reasons that appeared self-evident, the devil could not accomplish what Lawson would term his “venomous operations” without her. Frenzied prosecutions began at the end of that century with the publication of the
Malleus,
the volume that turned women into “necessary evils”; witchcraft literature and prosecutions had a habit of going hand in hand. And while Satan worship was a useful charge to level at a rival religious
sect—Catholics hurled it at Protestants as vigorously as Protestants hurled it back—all agreed on the prosecution of witches.
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For their part, witches were perfectly ecumenical. They frequented Catholic and Protestant, Lutheran and Calvinist parishes. Exorcism alone remained a Roman Catholic monopoly. Nor had witches any preferred address. They were neither particularly English nor exclusively European.

As to what country engaged in the greatest hunts, the competition is fierce. Germany was slow to prosecute, afterward fanatical. A Lorrain inquisitor boasted that he had cleared the land of nine hundred witches in fifteen years. An Italian bested him with a thousand deaths in a year. One German town managed four hundred in a single day. Between 1580 and 1680, Great Britain dispensed with no fewer than four thousand witches. Several years after Salem, at least five accused witches perished in Scotland on the testimony of an eleven-year-old girl. Essex County, England, from which many Massachusetts Bay settlers hailed, proved especially prosecution-happy, though it convicted at a steady rate rather than in the flash-flood manner of Salem. A diabolical rooster figured among the many hunt victims, as did the mayor of a German city and several British clergymen. For the most part, English witches were hanged while French ones were burned. This posed a riddle for the Channel island of Guernsey when three witches turned up there in 1617. Ultimately, they were hanged according to British law, then burned, according to French.

The witch made the trip from England to North America largely intact. With her came her Anglo-Saxon imps. Similarly, the contractual aspects—the devil’s mark, the book, the pact—represented Protestant preoccupations. The Sabbaths, like the flights, derived from the Continent; English witches evinced no interest in broomsticks. The little
Swedish girl who had plummeted from her stick had also been on her way to a riotous, open-air meeting to enter her name in a satanic book. The devil swooped in after her crash to minister to the injury that caused the “exceeding great pain in her side.”
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(He proved less obliging in New England; Ann Foster would benefit from no such rescue in 1692.) When he was not proffering pacts or practicing medicine, the devil was very busy. He baited deviously and worked stealthily, specializing in the perverse. He assured the skeptic that witchcraft did not exist. He knew his Bible, from which he quoted strategically, to odious ends. He interfered with the ministerial message by lulling men to sleep during sermons. He impeded scientific progress. A gifted medic, he understood more of healing than any man. He was the best scholar around. He too had a serious work ethic; agile and labile, he was always present, always recruiting. He knew everyone’s secrets. And he came to the job with six thousand years’ experience! As William Perkins, the early Puritan theologian, noted, he could cause you to believe things of yourself that were untrue. (A number of distressed Massachusetts residents asked themselves a related question in 1692, one that assumed greater urgency as spring turned to summer: Could I be a witch and not know it?) These ideas the New England settlers imported wholesale, derived primarily from the work of Glanvill, with whom Increase Mather corresponded, and Perkins, from whom Cotton Mather cribbed. When the colonists established a legal code, the first capital crime was idolatry. The second was witchcraft. “If any man or woman be a witch, that is, hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death,” read the 1641 body of laws, citing Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. Blasphemy came next, followed by murder, poisoning, and bestiality.