Witchcraft of New England Explained by Modern Spiritualism Part 17

The brilliancy, fervor, and literary finish of that description of the public enthusiasm and bewilderment are truly worthy of admiration, while the picture is not, and probably could not be, overwrought. Still we must doubt the competency of the alleged authors of the excitement to perform the bewildering and frenzying acts ascribed to them.

We have heard from of old, and could quasi believe, that mountains in labor brought forth mice. But it is only rarely one has earnestly and fervently sought and striven to entice the reading public to admit conviction that a dozen _enceinte_ mice could enwomb and give birth to a vast and terrific volcano.

One must needs look in wondering astonishment upon that keenness of vision which, at the middle of the nineteenth century, penetrating through mold and debris which have, through a century and three fourths, been gathering over momentous events, sees clearly that they were the genuine offspring of youthful "cunning and imposture," even while the owner of such vision himself perceived that neither the learned, talented, and keen Deodat Lawson, nor any other one of all the many able and sagacious men who were lookers-on at the amazing feats while they were transpiring, _dreamed_ that the actings and sufferings could have been the results of cunning and imposture. The day of Lawson and his companion observers was too near the facts for any dreams about them. It required a peculiarly plastic modern brain, and the intervening lapse of eightscore years, for the generation and birth of such a _dream_. The reason of its non-appearance in 1692 is very plain. Known facts then left no vacancy in the brains of that day for storage of the fictions of dreamland.

We return to little Dorcas Good. The creed devil-ward had hoodwinked all eyes. All things were in a terrific and bewildering whirl. Calm reflection and deliberate reasoning upon anything new were impossible. If perchance a mind asked itself whether an infant was competent to bargain with the devil and thence become a witch, it had no time to respond to its own inquiry. In open court, mysterious bitings were perpetrated by the teeth of this little girl, because the marks fitted her set and none other. The marks were made by the accused girl's teeth. Ocular demonstration, therefore, was proving her to be the devil's instrument; for otherwise she could not invisibly bite, nor could her teeth be made to bite, those who were off beyond her reach.

Standing upon what we said in the last chapter relating to the pa.s.sing of hurts through the spirit to its outer body, we hold that spirits may have so applied the spirit teeth of little Dorcas to the spirit limbs of the afflicted girls, as to have left the marks of her teeth upon their flesh.

Woefully did the creed of that time not only permit, but call for the arrest of that infantile girl, solely because, under the operation of natural laws of generation, she inherited properties or capabilities which rendered her, from the time when she was conceived, ever onward, very susceptible to psychological influences. The judges, observing what were but legitimate and necessary outworkings of her inborn properties, being ignorant of their true source and nature, deemed them such a crime that the court sent her to Boston jail a prisoner, there to keep company with the mother from whom her peculiar properties had been derived, by whose milk they had been nourished, and in whose magnetisms they had unfolded.

The present century is learning facts which teach that inborn properties and susceptibilities, and not compacts with the devil, const.i.tute _witches_--some of whom are very lovely. An infantile witch is no great marvel now. Such can be found in many a family, "through whose lips angels speak" to-day, as they did through Emanuel Swedenborg's when but a child, and who, born in January, 1688, was precisely a contemporary of Dorcas Good.

SARAH OSBURN

was companion prisoner of Sarah Good and t.i.tuba on the memorable first week in March, 1692. Thirty years before, she had been married to Thomas Prince, and at the time of her arrest was wife of Alexander Osburn; consequently she was well advanced in years. She also had long been an invalid, confined during long periods to her bed. Her worldly circ.u.mstances were comfortable--she and her family were neither poor nor rich--were neither very low nor very high on the social scale. _But she had heard words coming forth from unseen lips._ And on February 25, her apparition appeared to and annoyed Ann Putnam. Nothing has been noticed in the records which indicates that Ann ever spoke of any perceptions by her inner senses prior to that date, or that any member of the circle, excepting t.i.tuba, preceded Ann in having opened vision. The latter saw "the tall man, with white hair and serge coat," as early as January 15.

But t.i.tuba's voice, had she have spoken, would have been powerless. Ann's position in society was high; she belonged to a family of wealth, culture, influence, and high respectability. Her mystical words were potent. In four days subsequent to her first reported vision of apparitions, three women were under arrest for witchcraft, and Ann's father was one of the very efficient advocates of prosecutions for that crime. Feeble, "bed-ridden" Sarah Osburn, of whom Upham speaks as one whose "broken and disordered mind was essentially truthful and innocent," and whose residence was at least a mile and a half north from Mr. Parris's home, and quite distant east from Ann's, on a road not likely to be often traveled by her, was among the marked and blasted three. Why? None now, perhaps, can tell with certainty. Probabilities alone can be adduced. Our supposition is, that at the moment when Ann's keen and far-sweeping inner sight was opened, and spirit substance, instead of material light, became her medium of vision, the most brilliant objects to meet her gaze, in all the region far around, would be one or more of the mediumistically unfolded persons dwelling there. From those among that cla.s.s whose systems were fountains of emanations which at the time impinged upon her sensibilities, and did not harmoniously coalesce with her elements, and therefore acted as quasi acids upon her alkalies, or as alkalies upon her acids, produced painful effervescences which might ensue naturally, apart from the aid of any manipulating intelligence; or, if some intelligent being were observant of the currents and conditions of spirit magnetisms or forces then, and disposed to either intensify, abate, or modify their natural action, he might do so, and also could manipulate them to furtherance of his own ends, whether beneficent or malignant. Then and there, even high benevolence in one whose vision swept the far future, might take such primal steps as short-sighted mortals must look upon as necessarily altogether harmful in both immediate and remote results.

Such natural laws as reign supreme in spirit-realms may have led to the selection of secluded, inoffensive, "essentially truthful, and innocent"

Sarah Osburn, as one of the tormentors of the girls, who were either schooled in magic by their own elected study and practice of it, or were const.i.tutionally fitted for fitful enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of their inner perceptive organs while yet dwellers in their mortal forms, and whose bodies could become tools for other minds to use. If she was simply the voluntary actor out of her own "cunning or imposture," little Ann Putnam, twelve years old, brightest among the bright, and member of one of the most intelligent and religious families of the Village, she also must have been herself a _devil_, and so devilishly a devil, that even Cloven-foot might feel it a duty to pa.s.s his scepter into her hands. But grant that she was a medium through whose form other minds and wills could act, as she in fact was, and then we can regard her physical form as simply an instrument through which an intelligence other than herself manifested action to human senses; and thus we can deem _her_ guiltless, whatever shall be our judgment of the intruding performer upon her "harp of a thousand strings."

Parts of the testimony in the case of Mrs. Osburn reveal her possession of mediumistic susceptibilities. As with Joan of Arc and many others, so with this woman; the inner ear could hear voices from some source impalpable by external senses.

"(It was said by some in the meeting-house that she had said that she would never be tied to that lying spirit any more.)

"_Q._ 'What lying spirit is this? Hath the devil ever deceived you and been false to you?'

"_A._ 'I do not know the _devil_. I never did see him.'

"_Q._ 'What lying spirit was it, then?'

"_A._ 'It was a _voice_ that I thought I heard.'

"_Q._ 'What did it propound to you?'

"_A_. 'That I should go no more to meeting. But I said I would; and did go the next Sabbath day.'"--_Woodward's Hist. Series_, No. I. p. 37.

Although the timid prisoner said only that she _thought_ she heard a voice, the reader will notice that she made no denial that she had previously said "that she would never be tied to that _lying spirit_ any more;" therefore by fair implication she conceded that she had once, if not many times, heard a voice which she had openly spoken of as having been that of a _lying spirit_; and also that she had more or less been instructed by and followed his, her, or its advice. The fact that she was enjoined not to go to meeting any more, argues nothing either against the spiritual source of the advice, or the good intent of whoever gave it. She had long been a sickly, bed-ridden woman; therefore such advice might have been given by any wise Christian physician. We are not concerned with either the moral or religious states of invisible actors and speakers, but are looking specially for some of the more distinct evidences that invisible intelligences of some quality enacted Salem witchcraft, and, therefore, looking for the peculiar properties of both the embodied persons through and those upon whom they directly acted.

Sarah Osburn, though a secluded, respectable, inoffensive woman well advanced in years, was an early victim before the sweeping blast that rushed over the Village. Too feeble to endure the hards.h.i.+p of prison life, she died in jail before the day for her trial. She who heard voices from out the realm of silence, possessed inner faculties in fit condition to permit effluxes that reached and annoyed the mediumistic children, who traced them back to her, and made statements which brought her under suspicion of being a covenanter with the devil. Such capabilities const.i.tuted her crime--her witchcraft--and incited a devil-fighting people to persecution which hastened her exit to the realm from which the advisory voices had come upon her ears.

MARTHA COREY.

Soon after the commencement of prosecutions, suspicion alighted on one of more refinement, intelligence, efficiency, G.o.dliness, and respectability than the females first arrested. Martha, wife of Giles Corey,--aged, prayerful, but bright; disbelieving in any witchcraft; doubting the existence of any witches; discountenancing searches for any,--said that the eyes of the magistrates were blinded, and that she could open them.

She possessed spiritual and theological knowledge uncommon in her day and vicinity, and must have held beliefs and convictions derived from other sources than those at which her neighbors obtained their supplies. She was aloof from the prevalent delusion devil-ward.

Though a church member, a woman of prayer, of reputed, and doubtless of genuine, piety, Martha Corey was very early _sensed_ by the Anns Putnam, mother and daughter, as the source of emanations which tortured them.

Therefore she must be a witch. Grounds for such conclusion were not necessarily fanciful and fallacious. When and where natural outworkings from mediumistic properties and conditions were mistaken for symptoms of witchcraft, Martha Corey might easily be convicted of diabolism. We credit the allegation of Ann Putnam the younger that she was annoyed and afflicted by Mrs. Corey even while the two were miles apart. But we decline to admit that Mrs. Corey necessarily or probably had any voluntary connection with the girl's sufferings. Either unintelligent natural forces attracted the woman's effluvia to Ann, or else t.i.tuba's "tall man," or some other hidden intelligent being, formed connections and applied processes which brought elements of these two persons into conjunction, and thus produced in the girl intense physical disturbances and sufferings, and attendant liberation of her inner perceptive faculties.

Ann's uncle, Edward Putnam, together with Ezekiel Cheever, because of the girl's repeated outcries upon Mrs. Corey, only just one week after the sending of t.i.tuba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osburn to jail, concluded to make a call upon sister Corey, who was "in church covenant" with them, and learn from her own lips what she would say relative to the suspicions that had been raised concerning her.

These just and considerate men,--for they were such,--probably seeing the possibility that the child might be mistaken as to the person who was causing her to suffer, very properly called upon Ann when they were about to start on their way to the woman's residence, and asked the suffering girl to describe the dress Mrs. Corey was then wearing. Their obvious design was to test the accuracy of the child's perceptions. But that purpose was not accomplished. The child pleaded inability to see, and stated that blindness was put upon her just then _by the accused woman herself_. The sequel indicates that Mrs. Corey foresensed the visit she was about to receive, imbibed knowledge of the intended test, and of action to thwart its success. Though dwelling and being miles apart as physical persons, those two females may have then been practically together as spirits, and have mutually sensed the thoughts, acts, and conditions of each other as far as each avoided intentional concealment.

All of Ann's statements may have been in strict accordance with facts actually witnessed and experienced by her inner self. There is no need to a.s.sume that she feigned or falsified at all, even if no invisible personal operators were concerned in what then transpired; and certainly not, if t.i.tuba's "tall man" and his a.s.sociates were then present and acting, as they may have been. Perhaps invisible actors, holding both of these impressible subjects under psychological control, either imparted to, or withheld from either of them, just such knowledge and perceptions as would further the purposes of the operators--which may have been either simply a manifestation of their own powers, or an intimation to the adroit men that they were undertaking to deal with something which it would not be easy to outwit or thwart. Also other and very different purposes may have actuated them.

Some spirits, at some times, have ability, through some mortal lips, to express their thoughts to the embodied, and to wreathe their own emotions over faces they borrow, even while the spirit, the selfhood, of the mortal form usurped is conscious of what is being done through it. Remember that the form of the conscious Aga.s.siz was, against his own will, made to obey Townshend's mind. Perhaps Madam Corey's expressions of thoughts and emotions were sometimes prompted, and at other times modified by an unseen intelligence temporarily cohabiting with her own.

When the two brethren of the church, going forth on their solemn, self-imposed mission, had arrived at her home, Madam Corey welcomed them _with a smile_; notwithstanding she possessed and expressed very exact knowledge of the ominous nature and the purpose of their call. Her saluting words were, "I know what you are come for. You are come to talk with me about being a witch; but I am none. I cannot help other people's talking of me." This probably had reference to Ann Putnam's saying that she was afflicted by this speaker. She soon asked the men whether Ann, whose accusations had prompted their call, "had described the clothes she then wore." Learning that her dress had not been described, "a smile came over her face." Somebody's consciousness of power, issuing from her form, to obscure the child's vision, probably expressed itself in that smile; and the reflection that the child was operated upon by forces within or action through Mrs. Corey's own form, and therefore not necessarily by the devil, and inference thence that the girl was not necessarily bewitched, was followed by her saying, "she did not think there were any witches."

She knew enough of spiritual things to enable her to observe the broad distinction, overlooked by her cotemporaries, that may exist between some spirits and the devil; and also between persons whose inner senses were cognizant of spirit presence and action as naturally as the outer eye was of the sunlight, between these and such other human beings, could there be any such, and she thought there could not, who made a covenant with the devil, which covenant was a necessary preliminary to being a witch. "She,"

very reasonably, "did not think there were any" such "witches;" and only _such_ were sought for by her visitors and the startled public.

This woman was intelligent, courteous, and devout--was capable of understanding that _witch_, as then defined, necessarily meant a person who had voluntarily entered into a distinct compact with a fact.i.tious devil. Her _sensings_ in spirit spheres found no native-born monstrosity there, and she could say in good conscience that she did not believe there existed any such witches as her visitors and fellow church members were on the hunt for. At the same time she may have known, probably did know, that her own spirit and the spirit of little Ann Putnam could come into such communings as would give them accurate and conscious mutual perception of many unspoken thoughts and experiences in each other.

Mrs. Corey, as we view her, was very mediumistic, and was also a woman whose habitual aspirations were after things true, pure, and excellent.

But no amount of good or bad moral and religious qualities either const.i.tutes or nullifies ability for mutual visibility and rapport between mediumistic persons. All such are impressible more by virtue of their organisms and native properties, external and internal, than by any intellectual and moral acquisitions, whether good or _bad_.

Properties issuing from Mrs. Corey's system probably pinched and otherwise tortured Ann Putnam; the girl knew their special mundane issuance, and innocently gave utterance to the knowledge. She did so innocently and in good faith. But the divulgence of facts often brings fearful sequences.

When clear-headed logicians, being also conscientious and true men, as well as holders of undoubting faith that none but covenanted devotees to a wily devil could obtain knowledge and work harm by mysterious processes,--when such men took this case into careful consideration, the facts stated by the girl were to them proof that Mrs. Corey was the devil's minion, and therefore must be consigned to a witch's doom--death.

Edward Putnam and one other complained of her.

The warrant for her arrest was dated March 19, just one week after the visit of Putnam and Cheever. She was examined on the 21st; sentenced, September 9; executed, September 22. The questioning at the examination was discursive and protracted, spreading beyond inquiries as to who hurt the children, and how they were tormented, because of the prisoner's alleged disbelief in witchcraft; disapprobation of efforts to detect it; declarations that the magistrates, ministers, and others were blinded, and that she could open their eyes. She denied all knowledge as to who hurt the children, all knowledge of the devil, and repeatedly asked permission to go to prayer; but this privilege was denied her. She behaved like one conscious of innocence of the things laid to her charge, and manifested much intelligence, self-possession, and tact.

While on trial, one feature in her demeanor, already indicated on a previous occasion, strongly attracts notice. Notwithstanding the terrible fate that was standing before her, and the unflagging persistency of the magistrates and all others present in a.s.suming her guilt, she was several times accused of _laughing_. Those laughs may have been simply hysterical, but possibly they were widely different from such.

"Why did you say the magistrates' and ministers' eyes were blinded," and "you would open them? She laughed, and denied it."

"Were you to serve the devil ten years? She laughed."

"Why did you say you would show us? She laughed again."

As previously stated, when Edward Putnam and Ezekiel Cheever made their call, although she knew the solemn object of the visit, they report that "in a _smiling manner_ she said, 'I know what you are come for.' With 'eagerness of mind' she asked them, 'Does she tell you what clothes I have on?' And when they replied that Ann had said, 'You came and blinded her, and told her that she should see you no more before it was night, that so she might not tell us what clothes you had on,' she seemed to _smile at it as if she had showed us a pretty trick_." These men obviously were prettily tricked. But who was genuine author of playful proceedings at a time when the business was so grave and solemn? And whose emotions mantled her face with smiles in the stern and frowning presence of "authority"?

Her calm and pleasant deportment, while others were agitated or solemnly stern, was very like what is often manifested through some human forms by intelligences whose condition places them beyond the reach of man's frowns, laws, prisons, and scaffolds, and who, dwelling aloof from storms of human pa.s.sion, can smile amid scenes that make humanity shudder.

Calef states, that "Martha Corey, wife to Giles Corey, protesting her innocency, concluded her life with an eminent prayer upon the ladder."

Upham (vol. ii. 458) sums up her character thus: "Martha Corey was an aged Christian professor of eminently devout habits and principles. It is indeed a _strange fact_, that, in her humble home, surrounded, as it then was, by a wilderness, this husbandman's wife should have reached a height so above and beyond her age." The strangeness of the fact argues strongly in favor of our position, that she was so unfolded as to receive instruction directly from supernal teachers, or sense it in amid supernal auras. "But," continues the historian, "it is proved conclusively by the depositions adduced against her, that her mind was wholly disinthralled from the errors of that period. She utterly repudiated the doctrines of witchcraft, and expressed herself strongly and fearlessly against them.

The prayer which this woman made 'upon the ladder,' and which produced such an impression upon those who heard it, was undoubtedly expressive of enlightened piety, worthy of being characterized as 'eminent' in its sentiments, and in its demonstration of an innocent, heart and life."

All her history suggests that this worthy woman, whose ways and powers were somewhat peculiar, was one of those rare individuals whose interior perceptives become so unfolded while in the body as to sense in knowledge by processes, and in some directions to extent, beyond the possible reach of man's outward intellect. Because of such blissful unfoldings her age condemned her, hastened her exit from among a creed-bound people, and her entrance to the home of freed spirits.