the Author's Defense, (which says a lot about the perception of the role he saw for himself!), and we will read one of the trials he describes, that of the Reverend George Burroughs (note what he is saying about Indians!)...he's also getting back to the Indians in his first Curiositie (aka, observation)....
The Context
Last week we read selected passages from Michael Wigglesworth’s apocalyptic mega-bestseller The Day of Doom, which describes, basically, a day of doom for absolutely everyone, and no exceptions. Of course, people did not even want to be an exception – the coming apocalypse would be a judgment for everyone, and therefore people wanted to be on the right side – God’s side – once the judging would begin.
Wigglesworth’s long poem is all about guilt – he’s looking for guilt inside himself and inside his audience.
In vain do they to Mountains say,
Fall on us, and us hide
From Judges ire, more hot than fire,
for who may it abide?
No hiding place can from his Face,
sinners at all conceal,
Whose flaming Eyes hid things doth 'spy,
and darkest things reveal.
Guilt, to him, is a Puritan thing – he does not take it and project it on some external forces (such as "barbaric heathens", "Barbaric Indian heathens", "Atheists" [who he nevertheless thinks are stupid]. Hence, the remedy for guilt is self-reflection – people were to take something from the poem and use it to look into their, supposedly, wrong ways and then to change them and themselves.
All that changed pretty soon – evil had always been sort of around for the Puritan settlers. It took them only a few years after their arrival to clash violently with the Pequot Indians, who were, to them, no more than a bunch of heathens.
Then in came witchcraft and gave evil a whole new face.
The Witch Trials
The American colonies were, fortunately, hesitant to adopt that feature of the early modern life: the witch hunt. Europe had had its first share of witch hunts back in the 15th century, and the witch craze lasted well into the 18th century. In America, on the other side, the phenomenon was restricted to a rather short period of time around the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, and it is closely linked with the name of Salem, Massachusetts. As in the old world, the fear of witches was not primarily a populist thing – rather, it was expressed most explicitly by the leading intellectuals of the day. One of these, in fact: by far the most important one in late 17th century America, was Cotton Mather (1663-1728), the son of Puritan minister and writer Increase Mather and, of course, the grandson of Reverend John Cotton, who had been the leading intellectual force of the first-generation Puritans. Increase Mather, the elder Mather had somewhat preceded his son and had written
An Essay For the Recording of
Illustrious Providences
which was published in 1684. The essay is a sort of supernatural best-of, recording strange and supernatural incidents, not only related to witches and witchcraft, in the New England area.
In 1688, Cotton Mather, the son, continued the family tradition and saw the publication of
Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions
where he describes his personal experience with Goody Glover, a woman who had been prosecuted and finally hanged for supposedly bewitching the 13 year old Martha Goodwin and her siblings. Mather had talked to her before her death and insisted that she confess and repent her deals with the devil. Naturally, she didn’t do that. Unlike his father, the younger Mather focused his attention on witchcraft as the most prominent sign of evil and decay.
Now, some of the points I wanted to stress in our lecture of the text, were -
Sin/Sinfulness: what role does sin play for Mather? Who are the sinners?
Decay: how does Mather see the New England site? When he published the book, some 70 years had passed since the arrival of the first Puritan settlers - is he optimistic about the state of the Puritan colonies, or pessimistic?
Mather's Role: what role does he see for himself in the development of New England as the site of an apocalyptic hope for salvation? What is his role?
In the Memorable Providences, Mather is recording a singular and unique case, that of the Goodwin family.
The witch craze was bigger when it returned in Salem, Ma., four years later, in 1692 - and for a short time, people in the colony were whipped into a witch frenzy, with all the dire consequences.
What happened?
The daughter of the Reverend Parris, Elizabeth Parris, and her cousin Abigail Williams showed symptoms similar to those of the Goodwin children four years before - talking in tongues, moving in a strange fashion, hallucinating, and so on. Pressured by their parents and the community, they finally accused three women of bewitching them. One of these was Tituba (once again, the picture we had in class: she has the weeds and herbs dangling from her basket, supposedly to brew some witches' brew. And note how stylish and snazzy Cotton Mather looks in the picture: where did that extravagant haircut go all out of a sudden?), who lived captured as a slave in the Parris household.
Between March and November 1692, more than 20 people were charged and executed in the Salem trials, until the Salem community finally came to its senses and stopped the witch hunt. The final trials were held in the spring of 1693, and noone was convicted there. Cotton Mather published The Wonders of the Invisible World in 1693 – the book chronicles parts of the Salem witch hunt, but it also defends, above all, the belief in witchcraft. Next time, we'll go deeper into the text - especially into Mather's notion of evil (and good), and how it relates to the history of New England!
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