Witchcraf, Spirit Possession and Heresy

8/12/2019 Witchcraf, Spirit Possession and Heresy

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Witchcraft, Spirit Possession and Heresy

Author(s): Lucy MairReviewed work(s):Source: Folklore, Vol. 91, No. 2 (1980), pp. 228-238Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1260394 .Accessed: 28/02/2012 08:58

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228

Witchcraft, Spirit Possession and Heresy

LUCY MAIR

THE idea that some people have a sinister power by which they can doharm to others simply by wishing to has been held in the past in most partsof the world, and it still is today in many. These are the people thatanthropologists call witches; they may be either men or women. Of coursepeople seldom imagine that they have such power themselves. But if anythinggoes wrong with him, or his family or his possessions, someone who believes inwitchcraft will at once assume that one of his enemies is responsible, andtherefore this person must be a witch. Witches are people who quarrel with us,and use mystical powers to get their own back. Obviously, if they quarrel withus, we quarrel with them, but we forget that part of it. I put this statement n thepresent tense because, although very few people in what we call the West -though it s really the north - now think there is such a thing as mysticalaggression, a great many like to blame their own failures on others - on thejealousy of their rivals, or the hide-bound attitudes of their teachers, or just thesystem. This propensity is a very important reason why people believe inwitchcraft where they do. Another very important one is the imperfection ofmedical knowledge, or in many places its near-absence. People can t see whatcarries malaria or measles, as they can see the source of an attack by force, and itis not illogical to suppose that a disease has been sent by somebody who

couldn t or wouldn t attack directly.All over the world, people s ideas of what witches do, and what they are like,have a great deal in common. I think there are two main reasons for this. In thefirst place, all witches are supposed to be able to harm their victims withoutapparently coming near them. That might be left as a mystery, but in practice tisn t. Action at a distance has to be accounted for in some approach o everydayterms. Witches work at night like other criminals, but you can never watch themat it, as you can sometimes with thieves or murderers. Witches always have analibi; they were sound asleep in bed. So they must have some means of

escapingfrom their bodies and getting into their victims houses in an incorporeal orm.Some Africans believe that witches have a serpent in their entrails which theysend out at night to attack heir enemies. Early European ones were supposed tohave a magic ointment which enabled them to slip through a space as tiny as akeyhole.

A person who is ill feels his strength, or his life, being eaten away; so Africanwitches are believed actually to eat their victims flesh. Therefore, a generalcharacteristic ascribed to witches is that they are greedy for meat; and this is

elaborated n various ways. Often they are supposed to gather round a new graveto feast on the corpse. A more rationalistic view - shall we call it? - is that they


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WITCHCRAFT, SPIRIT POSSESSION AND HERESY 229

cause people to die so as to get a share of the funeral feast. Sometimes they aresaid to eat infants. There is a small shred of reasoning here. In countries withlittle medical knowledge, many infants die and their death is often ascribed towitchcraft; why should the witches kill them unless they want to eat them?Familiar spirits and werewolves may be the accomplices of witches in Africa asthey once were in Europe.

The second reason for the likeness in the imaginary picture of the witch inplaces far apart n space or time is that everywhere he witch is portrayed as theopposite of whatever s socially approved, and there are not so many differencesbetween cultures n the kind of behaviour hat they approve. In addition to beingthought of as curmudgeonly ypes who bear grudges and wreak their revenge in

secret instead of coming out into the open, witches are sometimes conceived asrepresenting he physical opposite of what is normal; they may be supposed towalk on their hands, for example. Also they are supposed to be guilty, in additionto their witchcraft, of all the most heinous offences, particulary ncest. Parallel othe African beliefs is the elaboration n Europe of the idea of the Black Mass, inwhich Christian ritual is reversed, and people dance naked in rings facingoutwards, eat food without salt, trample on sacred objects, and so on.

Another belief that still prevails over much of the world, even to some extentin supposedly rationalist Europe, is that certain kinds of mental disturbance arecaused by some alien spirit entering a person s body: what is called possession.Possessed persons go into trances, they utter unintelligible sounds, which areoften taken to be foreign languages hat they do not know, they may be able to dohorrendous hings such as walking on live coals; and when they return o normalthey cannot remember what has happened. The possessing spirits may be goodor evil; evil spirits have to be driven out, but a good spirit possesses someone inorder to make that person its mouthpiece. Such spirit mediums, as they arecalled, learn to go into trance at will, and in that condition they give guidance to

people who consult them about their troubles. And among these troubles the fearof witchcraft is prominent.Anyone will remember instances of both kinds of possession in the New

Testament. Christ cast out devils from people whom we would call mad, and theApostles on the day of Pentecost were possessed by the Holy Spirit, and spoke inso many languages hat everyone who was there could understand. Pentecostalistchurches seek this kind of possession today.

Both these types of belief have flourished in non-literate societies, or in theilliterate sections of populations among whom literacy was limited to a minority.Both became matters of acute controversy as literate Christian churchmen cameto formulate and reformulate he bases of their faith.

Outside Europe today, only the victims of individual misfortunes accuseothers of witchcraft. From time to time, an attempt may be made to get rid of allthe witches in a small community and so to speak give it a fresh start. Somepeople may have a reputation as witches which makes them likely suspects; orthey may trade on such a reputation o make people afraid of them. But they arenever arraigned or punished simply for being witches. The same was true in

classical and early medieval times. There was a recognised crime calledmaleficium which consisted in causing death or damage by occult means, and it


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230 LUCY MAIR

was punished in the same way as other attacks on life and property. And theaccusations that ordinary people made were all of this kind of injury; that is, if

youstretch a

pointand include causing hailstorms o ruin standing corn, which

was a common accusation n Germany.But from about the thirteenth century in Europe, the church began to take a

new line on witchcraft. Now it was no longer a sin among other sins, but anexplicit rejection of God and defection to his adversary he devil - a heresy thatmust be rooted out. Incidentally, this was why witches on the continent wereburned; it was not for the heinousness of their crime as such. England burnedheretics too, but we didn t treat witches as heretics, and so we didn t burn thembut hanged them. Paradoxically, he association of witches with the devil took

form just at the time when debate began about the boundary between the humanand superhuman, between events that had natural causes and those that must beexplained by supernatural ntervention. Some of those who took part in thiscontinuing debate denied that human witches could do any of the mischiefattributed o them, but very few thought it could not be supernaturally aused,and of course the suprenatural agent must be the devil. There was also a viewthat when bad weather was coming anyway, the devil let the witches think theywere producing it. But whether or not the witches were misguided, whether ornot they could do

genuineharm, whether or not

theyhad

expresslysold

themselves to the devil, the received opinion was that they must be in leaguewith him. And this defection to the enemy was far more serious than theparticular actions of which they were accused.

The church began to be seriously concerned about heresy at the time in thelate twelfth century when the Catharist religion flourished in southern France;this was a puritancial populist movement which in many ways anticipated heReformation. The Cathars were sometimes accused of having made a pact withthe devil and honouring him in ritual. A crusade was launched against them,

many of them were massacred, and the Dominican Order was given the task ofseeking out and extirpating those that were left. This was the origin of theInquisition. Their method was the one that is used against all secret subversives,to get people to betray their friends, or at least name persons who had been seenat their gatherings.

The Cathars, then, had been accused of compounding heresy by devil-worship. The next step was to treat devil-worship as a heresy in itself. This wasnever a matter of great moment to the simple folk who suspected theirneighbours of maleficia, and it was they who brought

complaintsto the courts.

But the judges, instructed by the theologians, worked a mixture of folk-beliefsinto an elaborate heory of the behaviour by which you could recognise a witch,and that was what the accusers had to prove. The witches sabbath was at thecentre of this mythology, and a large part of the interrogation f accused personsconsisted in putting pressure on them to name others whom they had seen atthose rites. This was not a feature of English witch-trials; an American writersays this shows how primitive our witchcraft was (H.C.E. Midelfort, Witch-Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1972, p. 234).

How did Europe eventually come to reject what nearly everyone today thinksis a farrago of nonsense? Of course this was not a matter of an instant


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enlightenment through recognition of the laws of physical causation. A fewwriters - Montaigne was one - ridiculed the whole belief system, but public

opinionin

generalmoved

only slowlyfrom

partialto total

scepticism.In France a very important influence was that of lawyers concerned withcriminal justice. Their argument ran like this: granted hat there are witches, andthat they are in league with the Devil; granted that their crime can never bedetected by normal means; all the same, judges should not be too ready to acceptdubious evidence, such as confessions made under torture, the ordeal by water,the devil s mark hat witches were supposed to show, or mere allegations of badreputation. As early as 1601 the Parlement of Paris, which at that time was thehighest court of justice in northern France, had ruled that anyone who was

convicted of witchcraft had the right to appeal directly to it. From 1603 itrefused to recognise the validity of the ordeal by water, in which a person wasproved guilty if he (or she) did not drown. In 1640 it gave up the prosecution ofpeople accused of making a pact with the Devil. The church too, in the personsof the theologians of the Sorbonne, asserted as far back as 1615 that nobodyshould be condemned on the word of the Father of Lies.

In this century there began to appear a difference between rural and urbanwitchcraft. Accusations of what might be called ordinary maleficia went on in the

country,but in the cities there

appeared omethingnew. This was the idea that

devils had entered convents and taken possession of nuns, sometimes many at atime; some priest was held responsible, and when he had been condemned todeath the devils usually departed.

There was nothing new in the exorcism of devils. What was new in thesedramatic cases was that the exorcisms were performed n public. For the churchauthorities they were a continuation by other means of the physical warfarebetween Catholics and Protestants hat had raged in the sixteenth century. TheDevil was in league with the Protestants - or they with him. Anyone who

doubted the guilt of the accused, let alone the genuiness of possessions, wassiding with the enemy. Of the crowds who came to watch the exorcisms, manyno doubt were edified at the spectacle of these spiritual combats and terrified atthe strength of the adversary s esistance, and some were persuaded o return tothe Catholic faith. But others took it like a fair-ground how.

The most famous case was that of the Ursuline sisters of Loudun. It hasinspired novels, a play, a film and an opera, all emphasising the sexualfrustrations of the nuns, which certainly played their part in the events. But this

aspectof the

storyis of minor

importancen the

context of the wider issues thatdivided France at that time. Most of these were illustrated at some point in thedrama of Loudun.

Loudun was a smaller city than Belfast, but it was as deeply divided betweenProtestants and Catholics. It was one of the strongholds which the Protestantswere allowed to keep at the end of the religious wars of the sixteenth century,where they had their own garrisons and governors of their own choice; and atfirst they didn t allow Catholics to live there. But this arrangement was onlymeant to be temporary, and it came to an end in 1624. After that Richelieu set

about demolishing the fortresses.


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232 LUCY MAIR

In Loudun Catholics had been steadily returning. Various religious orders hadestablished themselves in the town, and in 1626 there was founded a smallconvent of the Ursulines, a teaching order that was first created n the early daysof the Counter-Reformation. n 1631 Richelieu ordered the walls of Loudun tobe pulled down, and sent an emissary to see to it; his name was Martin deLaubardemont.

In the city there was a priest called Urbain Grandier, a handsome, ntellectualand arrogant man, who made enemies, as such men do. He was critical of themendicant orders, he wrote a tract against the celibacy of the clergy, and he hadProtestant riends, among them the Governor of the city. His sexual adventureswere widely known; they were unseemly in a priest, but far from unique in those

days. He joined in protests against the destruction of the walls of Loudon. Hewas asked to become the spiritual director of the Ursulines, but he refused. Theman who accepted the post was called Mignon, and he was already an enemy ofGrandier.

In 1632 first the prioress, Sister Jeanne des Anges, and then all the nuns,began to show signs of diabolical possession; as one of the most striking, theprioress was said to have been seen walking on the roof of the convent. FatherMignon tried to exorcise them. They insisted, through the mouths of theirdevils, that Grandier was responsible for their afflictions. Grandier s enemieshad already brought various charges against him, though not charges ofwitchcraft, and he had successfully defended himself to both civil andecclesiastical authorities. Now he appealed to the Archbishop of Bordeaux, andthe Archbishop sent a doctor to examine the nuns, and then ordered theexorcisms to cease.

The affair took on political significance when it came to the notice ofLaubardemont, who had clashed with Grandier at the time when the Loudunaiswere trying to preserve heir fortifications. Two of the high-born young ladies in

the convent were his cousins, and when he learned rom their families what wasgoing on, he got a special commission from Richelieu to make an investigation.

Exorcisms began again, and now they were held in public. Platforms were setup in the churches, and the possessed women lay and writhed on them while twoor three exorcists together might try to compel the devils to leave their victim,and members of the public climbed up to get a good view. The news spread allover France, and people came in crowds, one or two even from England, to seethe battles with the powers of darkness. The visitors gave alms to the convent,which considerably ncreased its revenues. Richelieu paid the expenses of theofficial exorcists, but others offered their help; friars of different orderscompeted. Laubardemont set up a tribunal of his own to examine Grandier,disregarding the local court of justice; most of the members were Grandier senemies. In what was a speedy process for those days, they found him guilty,tortured him to make him name people supposed to have joined him in the BlackMass, which he refused to do, and couldn t have done anyhow, and had himburnt at the stake before a crowd of six thousand people.

But the possessions went on, and now anyone who had spoken up for Grandier

was liable to be accused. But by this time Richelieu had had enough. Peoplebegan to think the nuns had acquired a sort of addiction to exorcism; and it was


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noticed that at other times than the exorcism sessions they conducted their livesin a perfectly normal way. Richelieu transferred he responsibility or exorcismfrom the

CapuchinFriars to the Jesuits, and the new confessor whom

theyappointed dealt with his penitents in private. Then the Cardinal ordered he endof exorcism, and with that possession too came to an end for most of the nuns.The political destruction of Protestant Loudun had been achieved; Grandier sfriend the governor, who had always stood up for him, had been assassinated. fRichelieu had also cared about the destruction of Grandier, as some thought hedid, that too had been accomplished. Of course I am not trying to make out thatRichelieu gave Laubardemont his mission simply for that purpose; Richelieuwas committed to the restoration f the Roman religion and Laubardemont was a

fiercely orthodox Catholic. I am just offering posssible reasons why Richelieulost interest in the case at the point when he did.

The story shows very well how, in a case where guilt or innocence can never bereally proved, people are influenced by their interests on extraneous ssues. It isnot that anyone necessarily made accusations hat he knew to be false, but ratherthat their judgement was affected by their preconceptions. It is always easy toassume the moral obliquity of people who disagree with you, and this is theeasier when right views are held to be inseparable rom adherence to religiousdoctrine. Liberal humanism suggests that these issues should be kept separate;the political creeds that seem to be taking ts place are closer to those of the devil-hunters. In this case some Protestants questioned the genuineness of thepossessions because they really doubted it, others because Catholics accepted it.People who stood for local autonomy against royal absolutism resented he over-ruling of the local judiciary by the king; naturally many of them wereProtestants. Catholics thought it was evidence of an alliance with the Devil todoubt that he was responsible for the afflictions of the nuns; naturally theythought the Protestants were his chief allies. Laubardemont, or his part, was so

deeply committed to the king s cause that he saw opposition to royal authority asitself a kind of heresy.

These events have their place in history because of the discussions they raisedabout the way to treat accusations of witchcraft. Of course the question whetherthere was such a thing had been debated for a very long time. But withoutentering on dangerous religious ground, people could consider two questionsmore carefully than they had in the past. One was what evidence should beregarded as enough to condemn a man to death; that preoccupied the lawyers.The other was the possibility that the women who were

supposedlypossessed

were simply suffering from hysteria. This was a subject that had preoccupiedmedical men for a long time too, though the explanations hat they offered forhysteria might seem to us bizarre. But they very sensibly asked in this casewhether any of the nuns contortions were really more than could be donewithout supernatural orce. Both they and the judges asked whether possessionwas sometimes faked. The devils were supposed to speak in languages hat theirvictims didn t know; this was one of the recognised marks of possession. Thedoctors noticed that the devils themselves didn t seem to know much Latin, and

one said it was odd that they had such a strong provincial accent.For those who accepted the reality of possession, there was yet another


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possibility; it could be interpreted as a mark of divine grace. Satan could notafflict anyone in this way unless God allowed it; so God had honoured theUrsulines

by submittingtheir faith to such a

rigorousest. In another case of this

kind, a nun who was asked whether she had been possessed said that God had notdone her that honour. Sister Jeanne de Anges began to be visited by good as wellas evil spirits. She had visions of her guardian angel, a beautiful youth. On oneoccasion when she was at the point of death Saint Joseph appeared to her andrestored her with a sweet-smelling ointment. The shirt on which the ointmenthad been dropped effected miraculous cures, and even assisted he birth of LouisXIV. Her angel told her to make a pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Franqois deSales, and this became a triumphal progress, in the course of which she was

received by Richelieu and by the king and queen. Later the guardian angelinspired her with secular as well as spiritual wisdom, and people all over Franceconsulted her on their problems with lawsuits and marriage plans, just as todayin the third world people take comparable problems to spirit mediums andshamans. Her emotional interests were directed towards her new confessor andtowards Laubardemont.

Just because this case was so notorious, it stimulated debate on the generalquestion of the judicial treatment of this kind of accusation. As I mentionedbefore, the Parlement of Paris

gave up prosecutionsfor witchcraft as

earlyas

1640, though it still had to decide on cases sent up to it from lower courts; inthose cases it usually reduced the sentence. As the century wore on, theauthorities came to treat the supposed victims of possession simply as disorderlycharacters. Their accusations against others were not taken seriously, and theywere turned out of cities or locked up in madhouses. This is certainly anindication of increasing scepticism. But another reason for a change in attitudeswas not directly connected with arguments about natural causes. This was theextension of central authority under Louis XIV. In the field of law this broughtmany local courts under the jurisdiction of superior ones, and enabled theParlement of Paris in particular to enforce its ruling that convictions forwitchcraft must be referred to it. Their ruling was resisted for some time bymany lower courts where judges often shared the popular beliefs; also, taking astrong line on witchcraft was entangled with standing up for autonomy. In thereverse direction there was one occasion when a royal official insisted on thecondemnation of a witch simply because the local court opposed it. The issuehere was a purely political one; but as it happens, in most cases the centralauthorities took the more

sophisticatedview.

In England t was the Protestants who took the offensive against he enemies ofGod. They rejected exorcism, but they still believed in demoniac possession, andthat human malice could cause it. Their remedy was prayer and fasting, whichno doubt was equally effective with exorcism. But they too sometimesexperienced relief at the moment when an accused person died; and some peoplereverted o the Catholic church when it seemed to offer a stronger defence. Thedeath penalty in England was imposed in these cases not for heresy but formaleficia.

The most famous case in a Protestant country, and the last famous case inhistory, is that of the witches of Salem in Massachusetts. The divines of New


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England were indeed greatly concerned with the extirpation of heresy, but thatwas not the issue in this case. Nevertheless, Satan was involved. The colonists ofMassachusetts believed that New

Englandwas an

outpostin the War with the

Devil, and this metaphor regularly coloured their preaching.Salem was a tiny village, with a population of some 200 adults. It had been

first settled about 1639 in the hinterland of Salem Town, and it was attacked bythe Devil in 1692. The afflicted persons there were mainly little girls, andnobody supposed that God was honouring them by allowing the Devil to assaultthem. But it was supposed that the New Englanders as a body, a peopleespecially chosen by God, were for that reason subjected o particular rials, andthe activity of witches was one such trial. Again, none of the afflicted girls of

Salem turned out later to be a saint. But all the same there is a point in commonhere between my two stories. Nobody thought the Salem girls had been divinelyinspired. But some forty years later, more young people in Massachusetts, histime in Northampton, began to manifest just the same kind of symptoms, andthis time nobody thought the Devil was at work. Their fits, as they were calledin America, were interpreted as an outpouring of the spirit repeating what hadhappened at the original Pentecost, and pointing the way to the millennium, thekingdom of God on earth. In this case the inspiration in the strict sense of thatword - was the

precursorof a

major religiousmovement in American

history,what is called the Great Awakening. Its followers claimed to be returning o justthat austerity of life that Salem Village stood for, as we shall see. Of courseauthority was against them, but this time the lines were not drawn on theanalogy of a holy war. In the context of my present theme, the contrast between1692 and 1735 shows that in America as in France, and as earlier n Judaea, hesame kinds of disturbance could equally be ascribed o the powers of light and ofdarkness.

In Loudun the devils had attacked he house of a religious order. In Salem theyfirst attacked he house of a minister of religion. In Salem the minister was not inleague with them, he was the champion n the fight against hem. But he too wasat the centre of a conflict that had more than a religious significance. Thedivision of the people of Salem Village was between those who wanted to share nthe prosperity of Salem Town and those who wanted to cut themselves off fromit; between those who held to the Puritan values of austerity and those whopursued that acquisitiveness hat we have been taught to call the Protestant ethic.

In the New England theocracy he autonomous political unit was a parish withits own minister. So the division of views in Salem was

crystallisedn

opposingattitudes towards the appointment and maintenance of a minister. The ministerin question was the Reverend Samuel Parris. He was in the uncomfortableposition that one faction of the villagers had duly appointed him, but the otherwas refusing to maintain him. It was his small daughter and her cousin who firstbegan to suffer from what their elders called distempers and fits, troubles beyondthe resources of the village doctor. The children were badgered o say who wasamicting them, and eventually they came up with the names of three women.These women were duly examined and sent to prison, but this didn t end the

afflictions. More and more girls were possessed, and more and more names weregiven. Naturally these must have been the names of people whom their elders


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236 LUCY MAIR

disliked; as time went on, they began to name people in other towns whom theycannot even have known by sight. The accused persons in Salem Village, not allof them women, were questioned in public; the girls were present, and theyshrieked and generally made disturbances when people appeared who they saidwere their tormentors. In all, nineteen men and women were found guilty andhanged. Then the trials came to an end, though the opposition to Parris went onfor another five years, until he gave up and left Salem.

If there were any people in New England who doubted the reality of witchcraftand possession by devils, none of them said so at that time. Nobody questionedthe existence of the Devil. But the ministers of religion who were the leaders ofthought in that society did ask whether all reports of possession were genuine,

and they did ask whether people might not sometimes be condemned o death oninsufficient evidence. The famous Increase Mather, one of the first Presidents ofHarvard, and his son Cotton Mather, both spoke and wrote on this subject.Cotton Mather s discussion of an earlier case of possession shows that he wasvery credulous by modern standards. But he did argue that the victims mighthave brought their troubles on themselves by deliberately rying to get in touchwith infernal forces, as the first Salem victims did. During the Salem crisis hewrote a letter to the Governor of Massachusetts which urged both he vigorousprosecution of proven witches and a very critical and exquisite caution injudging the evidence. It was a sermon preached by Increase Mather that finallyled the Governor o end the trials and forbid further prosecutions. As the doctorshad done earlier in France, Mather argued that the contortions of the victimscould, as he put it, proceed from nature and the power of imagination. Herecalled a notorious case of fraud hat had recently been detected n England. Butin particular he criticised the appeal to what was called spectral evidence, thebelief that the Devil might appear o one of the victims in the form of the personresponsible for his possession. Of course this idea opens up unlimited

possibilities of accusation. For some strange reason, the people of Salem thoughtthe testimony of children to such visions was particularly reliable because oftheir innocence. Increase Mather argued, on the same lines as Grandier had inhis own defence, that it was utterly inadmissible to take as reliable evidencecommunications rom the other world which might have been sent with intent todeceive. He asked whether it is not possible for the Devil to impose on theImaginations of Persons Bewitched, and to cause them to believe that anInnocent, yea that a Pious person does torment them, when the Devil himselfdoth it. And he concluded with an uncompromising statement of his position:This then I declare and testifie, that to take away the life of any one, merely

because a Spectre or Devil, in a bewitched or possessed person, does accusethem, will bring the Guilt of Innocent Blood on the Land where such a thingshall be done.

Hardly were the trials over when the people of Salem became appalled at whatthey had done - not least because a girl whose own grandfather ad been hangedconfessed that she had wantonly accused him. There were no more witch trials- but not because New England had rejected its belief in the devil and all his

works. That was as strong as ever.In this case we know how accusers and defenders were aligned because both


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sides were constantly signing petitions and manifestoes on the subject of Parris sposition as minister. And we know the characteristics f the two sides from thebrilliant work of two American historians, Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum(Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft, 974). They have combed therecords of this tiny community in a way that no one has done with the data fromLoudun, and they know the actors in the drama as if they had grown up withthem. The most obvious division was geographical. Parris s supporters, whowere the accusers, ived on the landward ide of the village, his opponents on theside that looked towards Salem Town. But what was significant was not a matterof being near the town but of attitudes towards it. Salem Town had grown infifty years to be the second commercial port of Massachusetts, and the growth in

its prosperity had brought with it great differences n wealth, as it always does.The leading men, those who were elected to political office, were not farmers anymore; they were merchants, and they were better off than any farmer. Membersof the faction opposed to Parris, who defended the accused and opposed thetrials, were markedly richer than his supporters. And while they got richer, thefarmers got poorer as there was no more land to open up. Several of the anti-Parris faction lived along the road that led to Boston. Along this road came newsboth from Boston and Salem Town; along it were taverns where news circulated.Salem Village

disapprovedof

strongdrink; ministers said that

youngmen who

went to the taverns were seldom away before Drunk or well tippled. One of theinns was licensed to sell drink only to what we call bona fide travellers. Two inn-keepers were hanged as witches.

This is a description of the types of person who supported and opposed theseparation of Salem Village from Salem Town, a separation hat was epitomisedin the presence of Samuel Parris as minister. It is not quite so easy to findcommon characteristics mong the people who were accused of witchcraft. Onethat is mentioned by Boyer and Nissenbaum would not surprise an anthro-

pologist. They were all outsiders to the village; that is, they had not been bornthere. A more unexpected finding is that they were all socially mobile, thoughnot all in the same direction. Some had come up in the world; they had incurredthe unpopularity hat is often the price of that kind of success. Others had fallen,and did not accept their lower status in the deferential manner of people who hadbeen born to it.

I said there was no express question of heresy in the Salem prosecutions. But ifyou assume that the established order is the right one, and if you believe thatthere is a Devil, you can easily believe that those who subvert the establishedorder are in league with him. He can lead people astray n matters of morals asmuch as doctrine. The order that Parris and his friends were fighting for wasthat of a closely-knit community in which every member put the commands ofGod and the good of the whole before his private nterests. They were fighting alosing battle against the attraction of new opportunities. The opposition couldnot be readily formulated in the way that arguments about the validity ofexorcism could. It is Boyer and Nissenbaum who have formulated for us thetroubles of a community where the New England clergy could see only a spirit

full of contentions and animosities.When I spoke of Loudun I emphasised the conflict of material and political


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238 LUCY MAIR

interests that surrounded he question of heresy, and of the agency of the Devilin the afflictions of the nuns. I have argued that there was such a conflict inSalem too. I am not

tryingto see moral ideas as a mere reflection of the

infrastructure. I only think it is reasonable to suppose that nobody espousesviews that are plainly contrary to his interests. It is the sense of the moralobliquity of your opponents that leads you to believe that the Devil has inspiredthem. But there is more to it than a pure certainty of being on the Lord s side.Boyer and Nissenbaum, here following Perry Miller, argue that it was theinternal conflicts of the Salem villagers that inspired their conviction thatwitchcraft was destroying their community. The trouble was that, in Miller swords, the wrong thing was also the right thing. If the saints pursued their

calling with the diligence that God commanded, some of them were bound tomake a commercial success, and with this would come the enjoyment of thethings of this world that their doctrine condemned. The argument resemblesthat of Dr. Norman Cohn when he writes of Europe s inner Demons. To himthe ascription to heretics of an alliance with the Devil, and the outrageousfantasies that go with it, express an unconscious resentment of the very religionthat is ostensibly being defended, a Christianity whose precepts are too hard tofollow.

I would like to concludeby mentioning again

thelight

that these stories throwon the ending of trials for witchcraft. In both stories it is clear that this did nothappen because the idea was rejected as impossible. The people who were mostinfluential in both cases were concerned with fair trial; it was the value of theevidence that was used that gave them doubts, and in France, rather more thanin New England, they also considered he possibility of other causes in particularinstances. Judges dismissed cases, and eventually the public, after grumbling agood deal, gave up bringing them. In France it was made illegal to claim todetect witches, as it has regularly been in British colonial law. In England the

law making witchcraft a crime was repealed in 1736, but judges had beenrejecting ndictments for some time before that. If it is a mark of enlightenmentto abandon the prosecution of witches, and indeed it is, historically theenlightenment has been that of a concern with justice rather than of anacceptance of natural science.

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Witchcraf, Spirit Possession and Heresy

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