The Penguin Book of Witches (27 page)

25
.
James estimates that for every man who is a practicing witch, one is likely to find twenty women.

26
.
James explains the particular appeal of witchcraft to women by considering the gender’s inherent moral weakness, as signified both by their physical inferiority, as well as by the example of Eve, who was tempted by the serpent in the garden in Genesis 2, bringing Adam down with her. The assumption of women’s innate sinfulness might at first appear surprising to a contemporary reader more familiar with the Victorian conception of womanhood as the guardian of the home and the center of moral worth for both men and family. However, that conception of gendered morality is of relatively recent vintage. As late as the eighteenth century women in the English world were held to be morally weaker, naturally wanton, and in need of spiritual and moral guidance from men. As such, in both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, women were assumed to be at greater risk for temptation into sin, and therefore more likely to be enticed into witchcraft by the Devil.

27
.
The use of images for inflicting harm remotely appears in North American accounts of witchcraft as well, specifically the “poppets” referenced in trial testimony during the Salem panic.

28
.
The phrase “God’s ape” refers to Satan’s imitation and perversion of Christian and godly practice.

29
.
James cites John 9:1–12, in which Christ comes upon a man who was born blind and cures him by anointing the man’s eyes with a poultice made of mud and Christ’s spittle. Like other writers on witchcraft and demonology, James must grapple with explaining the magic and miracles that take place in the Bible as something other than the witchcraft that he is railing against.

30
.
Note the dismissive tone that James uses to discuss the mischief wrought by witches. It is both intensely gendered—women’s trifles, such as making or breaking love ties, or engaging with questions of everyday health—and also not far from the way that witchcraft was represented in the English legal system at that time.

31
.
James argues that the Devil knows more about medicine than humans do and is able to see which humor dominates the body of a given individual, and thereby is able to tweak that individual to make him ill. Satan holds the blame for sickness in James’s conception of the natural world.

32
.
“Roasting of the pictures” in this case means burning or destroying wax figurines to bring harm on living people. The alchemical worldview that predominated at this time rested on a complex pattern of correspondences between systems both large and small. Like was thought to affect like, and the structure of the universe was thought to be mirrored by the structure of the human body, which could itself be mirrored by external objects.

33
.
Greek and Roman physicians believed that health derived from the proper balance of four bodily fluids: blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. Humorism informed the science of medicine until well into the nineteenth century.

34
.
Ephesians 2:2, “Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.” James is explaining that the Devil’s ability to move into different forms, changing shape and entering into people’s bodies, derives from this scriptural description of the Devil’s constitution.

35
.
James addresses the question of why God would permit witches to exist, and concludes that they exist for three reasons. First, to punish the wicked for their sins (presumably of greed and pride); second, to stimulate believers who have become weak in their faith to renew their efforts; and third, because he has the will to punish even the good if he so chooses, as he did with Job. In James’s conception, witches have very clear theological purposes.

36
.
No one, according to James, can assume that he will be free of the Devil’s torments, since God has preordained all suffering that every individual will undergo in his life.

37
.
Archaic word meaning “rumbling.” See OED, 2011.

38
.
James shares Gifford’s condemnation of the folk cures offered by cunning folk, not because he doesn’t believe they work, but because to appeal to them would be “unlawful.” This position can be attributed to the need James has of consolidating his power. He doesn’t wish to grant any layperson special authority or dispensation when it comes to God.

39
.
Mark 3:22–23, “And the scribes which came down from Jerusalem said, He hath Beelzebub, and by the prince of the devils casteth he out devils. And he called them unto him, and said unto them in parables, How can Satan cast out Satan?”

WILLIAM PERKINS,
A DISCOURSE OF THE DAMNED ART OF WITCHCRAFT
, 1608

1
.
Brian P. Levack, ed.,
The Witchcraft Sourcebook
(New York: Routledge, 2004), 94.

2
.
Professor Benjamin Ray, University of Virginia, electronic communication, May 14, 2011.

3
.
Malcolm Gaskill, “Witchcraft and Evidence in Early Modern England,”
Past and Present
198:1 (2008): 40.

4
.
Excerpted from William Perkins,
A discourse of the damned art of witchcraft so farre forth as it is reuealed in the Scriptures, and manifest by true experience.
Originally published in Cambridge. Printed by Cantrel Legge, 1608. Images of the original document held at the Huntington Library may be viewed on Early English Books Online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res _id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:14917. The physical document is located at Huntington Library, San Marino, California, call number 62889.

5
.
Perkins also condemns the use of cunning folk to guard against witchcraft. The continual reference to the problem of cunning folk in demonological writing from this time period suggests either that the practice was widespread or that early modern theologians at least feared that it was.

6
.
Perkins is calling out Reginald Scot in this instance. Like James, he regards disbelief in witchcraft as an ignorant and irreligious position, and worries that learned men such as Scot are publishing tracts that pose a substantial spiritual hazard.

7
.
Notice also that Perkins, like James, assumes witches to have female gender.

8
.
Witchcraft is an “art,” which is to say a practice governed by certain rules that can be mastered by study and practice. In defining witchcraft in affirmative terms, rather than negative terms (i.e., witchcraft as that which is not doctrinaire), Perkins grants witches a higher degree of agency than we saw in James. James represents witches as tools or dupes of Satan, who has appealed to their base desires. Perkins, on the other hand, recognizes that witchcraft is a system of mastery. Perkins’s witches are skilled. They are not dupes. Also worth noting is Perkins’s allusion to “certaine superstitious grounds and principles.” Perkins is naming and clarifying the heretofore uneasy relationship between Christianity and folk practice. Witchcraft in a sense represents cultural knowledge and beliefs that are at odds with the church, be it purified or not.

9
.
Perkins locates the original author of magic as Satan himself.

10
.
Ephesians 6:12, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

11
.
2 Corinthians 4:4, “In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.”

12
.
Perkins’s witches take on a more powerful and frightening cast than in accounts by earlier writers. Witchcraft, he suggests, is the supreme law of the Devil’s dominion, and witches have been specially trained in that law. Witches, in Perkins’s conception, begin to appear as handmaidens of the Devil, skilled, trained, and powerful. Gone are the pitiful, weak creatures that Gifford suggests are dupes, and that Scot suggests are merely deluded.

13
.
1 Samuel 15:23, “For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the LORD, he hath also rejected thee from being king.”

14
.
Perkins is a Puritan, and so his disdain for the sin of discontentment should come as no surprise. In his emphasis on such an easy risk we can see the influence that his thought would have on North American witch trials, a high proportion of which took place within Puritan communities. Eve’s disobedience was a large part of her sin, but so was her thirst for knowledge; in effect, Perkins is critical of Eve’s grasp for authority.

15
.
Perkins’s choice of “scholar” as the designation of a person drawn to the study of witchcraft out of a desire to better him or herself, or out of hunger for material wealth, or desire for renown and respect, is a telling one. He builds a picture of a witch as capable, in possession of both will and skill, in stark contrast to the representations of deluded victim witches found in Gifford, James, and Scot.

16
.
Perkins takes it as given that his reader will know the stories of popes as sorcerers that he is referencing here, though as a Puritan writer, he would associate much Catholic ritual and popery with diabolism and nondoctrinaire thinking. But to speak to one of his examples, Sylvester II, the first French pope, who reigned from 999 to 1003
CE
, often appears in medieval illustrations in conversation with the Devil. Legend holds that Sylvester traveled at one time to Spain, where he studied magic and sorcery. This legend grew increasingly elaborate over time, finally suggesting that he had used magical technique to advance to the papacy. Perkins and other Puritan thinkers would have taken Sylvester for a perfect example of the moral depravity that had infected the Catholic Church, and as justification for its necessary purification. See Oscar G. Darlington, “Gerbert, the Teacher,”
The American Historical Review
, 52 (1947): 462, note 28.

17
.
In effect, Perkins is arguing that his readers should be content with their lots in life. Overarching ambition and thirst for knowledge might drive one to know more than God sees fit to share with mankind, which can only be achieved by striking a diabolical bargain. Perkins’s relationship with knowledge and expertise is shaky; on the one hand, he has admitted from the beginning that his argument will be built on other arguments and experiences of knowledgeable men, and yet he seems to suggest that curiosity, if left ungoverned, is a path to witchcraft.

JOAN WRIGHT, CHESAPEAKE REGION, VIRGINIA,
1626

1
.
Jon Butler, Grant Wacker, and Randall Daimler,
Religion in American Life: A Short History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 67.

2
.
Excerpted from John Bennett Boddie,
Colonial Surry
(Richmond, Virginia: Clearfield, 1948), 76–78. Asterisks appear in Boddie and signify gaps in the transcribed historical sources. Colonial records from the Southern colonies are not as complete as the records found in New England. In many cases early Southern colonial accounts persist only in the form of transcriptions made by historical societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from primary source documents that have since been lost.

3
.
The joint stock company chartered by James I for the settlement of North America, which led to the founding of the Jamestown settlement.

4
.
Probably near modern-day Hampton, Virginia, on the coast south of Williamsburg.

5
.
Giles Allington wanted Joan Wright to help his wife while she was in labor.

6
.
By a sign or symbol that Goody Wright could read on Rebecca’s forehead. “Goody” was a common diminutive form of “Goodwife,” as later “Mrs.” becomes short for “Missus” or “Mistress.”

7
.
The gossip around Goody Wright touches upon many themes that have already emerged in the English witch cases preceding it. First is the uncertain reputation of Goody Wright, and specifically her potentially useful, yet potentially suspect, status as a cunning woman. She is skilled enough to be summoned to a laboring woman, but her left-handedness, which might be a literal or a figurative impugning of her character, causes another woman to be a better choice as a midwife. Further, her reading of impending death of a spouse in a young woman’s face suggests that even if Goody Wright were referring to the girl’s expression—perhaps Rebecca looked worried when speaking of her husband’s health, and Goody Wright could tell she was worried—something about Goody Wright’s character, or Rebecca’s mentality, suggested that Goody Wright had unnatural knowledge of the future. Finally, the undercurrent of sexual licentiousness that emerges in theological accounts of witches appears in the odd threat that Goody Wright made against the servant, that if she stole wood again, she would make her dance stark naked.