The handed-down Crucible: an inheritance of witches
2018; Elsevier BV; Volume: 5; Issue: 11 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/s2215-0366(18)30393-6
ISSN2215-0374
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
Resumo“The world redeemed from Superstition's sway/Is breathing freer for thy sake today” reads the memorial in Salem, Massachusetts, USA, in remembrance of Rebecca Nurse. She and her sister Mary were two of 20 people executed for witchcraft in the now infamous craze of 1692. Rebecca, rather than Mary, is one of the best remembered figures of the Salem witch trials because she is also a central figure in Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible. First staged in 1953, it was Miller's way of writing about Senator McCarthy's hunt for so-called Reds. Just as Miller found that drawing parallels to witch hunts gave him a lens through which to interpret the volatile emotions of the 1950s, Spellbound helps us to consider so-called truths and superstitions of today. It is a 2 h drive to Salem from my hometown in Rhode Island, New England's smallest state. Every old-family New Englander is likely to be descended from either a witch or her accusers. Growing up, I was told that we were related to Rebecca Nurse on my maternal grandfather's side. My mother's take on Rebecca was to emphasise that she was almost certainly a herbalist, a wise-woman or healer, and that her knowledge of medicines probably sucked her into the witchcraft scare. In 1692, white, or sympathetic, magic was used quite freely in response to, or against, witches and devilry. Rebecca Nurse had five children and would certainly have used herbal remedies as medicine, because that was the only medicine to be had at the time. She was known to be very pious; her reputation was so good that 39 villagers appeared on her behalf as character references at her trial. Indeed, she was found not guilty initially, but subsequent repeals and changes in the verdict would lead to her death. When I was about 13 years old, a friend and I completed a school project about the Salem witch trials: we visited the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, creating a short film of the old New England barns and house, and wrapped ourselves against the orange and red-leafed autumn chill. We tried to understand what, at the time, felt like an impossible history. How could these cold wooden walls hold such volatile passion? How could one or two men decide the fates of innocent people? How could the outcries of upset girls—girls the ages we then were—cause people to be hanged? 20 years later, I understand better that everyone does not treat the truth as I might wish. We can look back to Salem to understand how people's words can be manipulated, how their beliefs and intentions can be shaped or ignored. Often it is the so-called leaders of society who demonstrate most vividly that people's words and actions can be unwieldy, cruel, or even defy logic entirely. Although the legacy of Rebecca Nurse has been long assured of her innocence, the world is not, in the words of John Greenleaf Whittier inscribed on Nurse's monument, “redeemed from Superstition's sway”. This is the starting point of the Ashmolean Museum's latest exhibition: Spellbound: Magic, Ritual & Witchcraft. As Ashmolean Director Xa Sturgis writes, it “challenges us to consider the extent to which, in our apparently rational age, we continue to think magically.” The exhibition opens with the Pitt Rivers Museum's famous witch in a bottle: a beautiful glass phial silvered inside and stoppered firmly with a wax seal. As a resident of Oxford, I've seen this many times, often going to visit the witch in a bottle, as it is evocative and provocative. If given the choice, I tell you, I would not open it. Would you? Next, visitors encounter a series of questions, accompanied by related displays: “Do you have a lucky object? Do you believe in mysterious forces in the world? Does performing rituals stop you feeling anxious? Could you stab the image of a loved one? Can an object bind love? Do you worry about tempting fate?” Visitors can walk around or under a ladder (which will you choose?) to view the first big room of the show, which focuses on medieval ideas of demons, angels, and the spirit. The medieval world was a psychically crowded place, with a cacophony of angels jostling wing-to-wing in the heavens, and demons ready to pop up in mirrors if you incanted the correct spell. Moving along the historical timeline, artefacts from the physician and mage of Elizabeth I, John Dee, are shown beside other scrying mirrors, one of which could call up a demon named Floron; a crystal ball was said to have been given to Dee by an angel, Uriel. A book of incantations for calling forth spirits has a page ripped out to censor it, but a savvy owner copied out the rest of the spell from a different book and stuck it in the back, like a cookbook, giving us a good idea of the conflicted nature of such ideas in the medieval period. Some saw it as dangerous, others as necessary. Here, the focus is on love magic, from medieval poesy rings, with engravings such as “autre ne vueil”—desire no other—and an arresting display of a very modern interpretation of this love spell, the so-called love lock, a padlock attached by happy couples to bridges, the keys tossed into the water below. This collection of locks was removed from Leeds Centenary Bridge because of concerns that the weight of the locks would cause structural damage akin to the collapse of railings on a bridge in Paris: an intriguing metaphor for such an expression of binding two people together. The second room has the most striking display: a ghostly framework of house and chimney in sleek black-clad scaffolding provides structure for displaying various caches of objects discovered within walls and chimneys of actual houses. Remember to look up when you're viewing things in this room. As the room's curator, Owen Davies, explains, the house was seen in the 15th and 16th centuries as “a very leaky force-field, with the home as body, and hearth as heart”. The leaky areas were windows, doors, and chimneys, where literal and spiritual vermin could get in: rats, fleas, bad spirits, and witches. Davies describes “sticking iron in the thatch of a roof” as “protection against fairies”; a scythe up the chimney, meanwhile, would stop a witch—or a thief—quite abruptly. Because these objects have been discovered, usually by builders, with no explanation, it is up to us to interpret what we see, and, like an early modern Rorschach test, the imagination can run wild. Many of these objects, such as a cat bricked into a wall, were also considered white or sympathetic magic: the cat's spirit would serve to keep away vermin long after it had died. Not so sympathetic towards the cat. Last and perhaps most potent of all, is the room curated by Malcolm Gaskill, on witch trials. Gaskill emphasised, in his introduction to the room, that witches were largely symbolic of upheaval: they were “nightmarish demonstrations of a world turned not only upside-down, but inside out. Witches' bodies were unstable bodies—often with an excess of black bile, which may create melancholy, delusion—or depression…We can read [artworks of the time] in a much more modern, almost psychiatric sense, of how someone might feel.” This display includes press clippings from the trial of Helen Duncan, a woman who did séances and produced supposed ectoplasm, and was tried in 1944, the last person in England to be convicted under the British Witchcraft Act of 1735. It was treated by the press as a modern witch trial, despite the judge insisting that Duncan was on trial for fraud. She was imprisoned for 6 months and, to this day, her family objects to her treatment. Witch panics, Gaskill explained, were “highly unusual”. The weighing chair on display, weighed the witch against the Bible. Weighing more than the Bible meant that you were innocent—it was a “ritual way of demonstrating divided opinion, often in favour of the [so-called] witch… communities were often unsure. There was a lot of emotion [in witch trials]…Most of those flickering flames of suspicion just went out. But when they did go off, they really went off.” Although Spellbound does not directly address what happened in Salem, it gives viewers a marvellous quantity and quality of material to ponder. It echoes Miller's choice to turn to the historical psychology of witchcraft when he was faced with the challenge of interpreting feelings in the McCarthy-era inquisition. Spellbound, likewise, invites us to ask whether the world is truly “redeemed from Superstition's sway.” When our leaders make decisions affecting millions on the basis of hunches, anger, and wishful thinking, when #witchesofinstagram has 1·6 million posts, we can clearly affirm that the answer is no. Spellbound Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK, until Jan 6, 2019. https://www.ashmolean.org/spellboundFor more on Arthur Miller and The Crucible see https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/10/21/why-i-wrote-the-crucibleFor more on love locks see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-27758940/lovelocks-collapse-paris-bridge-railFor more on Helen Duncan see http://helenduncan.org/grandmas-no-witch/ Spellbound Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK, until Jan 6, 2019. https://www.ashmolean.org/spellbound For more on Arthur Miller and The Crucible see https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/10/21/why-i-wrote-the-crucible For more on love locks see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-27758940/lovelocks-collapse-paris-bridge-rail For more on Helen Duncan see http://helenduncan.org/grandmas-no-witch/ A strange land of chaosHow easily can you pronounce the following? Napatree. Weekapaug. Pawcatuck. Quonochontaug. Misquamicut. Narragansett. Watchaug. Full-Text PDF
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