Notes on witchcraft

We are all specialists now-a-days, I suppose. The good old times of the polymath and the Doctor Universalis are gone forever. Yet signs are not wanting that some of us are alive to the danger of building our party-walls too high. In one respect, at all events, there can be no doubt that the investigators of New England antiquities are aware of their peril, though they occasionally shut their eyes to it,--I mean, the tendency to consider the Colonists as a peculiar people, separated from the Mother Country not only geographically, but also with regard to those currents of thought and feeling which are the most significant facts of history. True, there is more or less justification for that kind of study which looks at the annals of America as ends-in-themselves; but such study is ticklish business, and it now and then distorts the perspective in a rather fantastic way. This is a rank truism. Still, commonplaces are occasionally steadying to the intellect, and Dr. Johnson--whose own truths have been characterized by a brilliant critic as “too true”--knew what he was about when he said that men usually need not so much to be informed as to be reminded.

The darkest page of New England history is, by common consent, that which is inscribed with the words Salem Witchcraft. The hand of the apologist trembles as it turns the leaf. The reactionary writer who prefers iconoclasm to hero-worship sharpens his pen and pours fresh gall into his inkpot when he comes to this sinister subject. Let us try to consider the matter, for a few minutes, unemotionally, and to that end let us pass in review a number of facts which may help us to look at the Witchcraft Delusion of 1692 in its due proportions,--not as an abnormal outbreak of fanaticism, not as an isolated tragedy, but as a mere incident, a brief and transitory episode in the biography of a terrible, but perfectly natural, superstition.

In the first place, we know that the New Englanders did not invent the belief in witchcraft.[1] It is a universally human belief. No race or nation is exempt from it. Formerly, it was an article in the creed of everybody in the world, and it is still held, in some form or other, and to a greater or less extent, by a large majority of mankind.[2]

Further, our own attitude of mind toward witchcraft is a very modern attitude indeed. To us, one who asserts the existence, or even the possibility, of the crime of witchcraft staggers under a burden of proof which he cannot conceivably support. His thesis seems to us unreasonable, abnormal, monstrous; it can scarcely be stated in intelligible terms; it savors of madness. Now, before we can do any kind of justice to our forefathers,--a matter, be it remembered, of no moment to them, for they have gone to their reward, but, I take it, of considerable importance to us,--we must empty our heads of all such rationalistic ideas. To the contemporaries of William Stoughton and Samuel Sewall the existence of this crime was not merely an historical phenomenon, it was a fact of contemporary experience. Whoever denied the occurrence of witchcraft in the past, was an atheist; whoever refused to admit its actual possibility in the present, was either stubbornly incredulous, or destitute of the ability to draw an inference. Throughout the seventeenth century, very few persons could be found--not merely in New England, but in the whole world--who would have ventured to take so radical a position. That there had been witches and sorcerers in antiquity was beyond cavil. That there were, or might be, witches and sorcerers in the present was almost equally certain. The crime was recognized by the Bible, by all branches of the Church, by philosophy, by natural science, by the medical faculty, by the law of England. I do not offer these postulates as novelties. They are commonplaces. They will not be attacked by anybody who has even a slight acquaintance with the mass of testimony that might be adduced to establish them.