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. † 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 flewinternationally. 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. * 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, morepopular 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
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. † 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 flewinternationally. 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. * 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, morepopular 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
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