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America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/preternature.3.1.0222

2161-2196

Alison Games,

Modern inhabitants of the United States are a people of belief—they believe, or so pollsters report, in a supreme being (90 percent), the Devil (70 percent), and angels (77 percent).1 Some 31 percent also believe in witches.2 General readers curious about the historical variety of witchcraft beliefs in the United States will find Owen Davies's book an interesting and useful starting point. In researching America Bewitched, Davies found hundreds of cases of witch beliefs over the past three centuries. His evidence speaks authoritatively to the deep-rooted nature of magical beliefs and practices. The witchcraft of Davies's book is primarily non-diabolic, comprising mostly the practices of maleficium that are pervasive in so many societies. America Bewitched is chock-full of interesting cases, involving an admirably wide range of participants—newly arrived immigrants, longtime inhabitants of European, African, and Amerindian descent, neighbors, strangers, men, and women. His cases also encompass the entire United States, from Appalachia to Alaska.Davies provides an encyclopedic look at the range of witch beliefs in the territory that became the United States in the period after 1692, and the strengths and weaknesses of his work lie in this approach. Davies has pulled together an extraordinary array of reports about and cases of witchcraft, witch accusations, and witch beliefs. Drawing almost exclusively on published sources, Davies has made especially fruitful use of newspapers—deploying, I hope, good search engines to find this material, located in scores of local periodicals—and has also drawn effectively on folkloric sources. He organizes his material into seven thematic chapters: “Magic of a New Land,” “The Law,” “Witches,” “Dealing with Witches,” “Dealing with Witch Believers,” “Insanity,” and “Witch Killings Up Close.” He concludes with an interesting chapter that reflects on witchcraft in the second half of the twentieth century, with the emergence of the Wicca movement and what we might call the taming or domestication of witchcraft, as seen, for example, in such U.S. television programs as Bewitched.His extensive compilation of cases offers a salutary corrective to those who might flatter themselves that such beliefs and practices subsided by the nineteenth century. This, indeed, is his purpose: to demonstrate that witchcraft persisted after 1692. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings about Salem suggested, Davies argues, that witchcraft ended there. “This book,” Davies writes, “tears open the veil and reveals a very different story” (3). He tackles some interesting problems, including, for example, why some English colonies adopted the English 1604 Act Against Witchcraft and Conjuration in 1712 (South Carolina) and 1718 (Pennsylvania), dates that seem relatively late in terms of the actual prosecution of witches in British America. Davies does an especially good job recovering the fear and horror with which some U.S. inhabitants regarded witches and witchcraft in the past two centuries, sentiments that might seem alien to many in the era of Harry Potter; Sabrina, the Teenage Witch; or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.Davies's study demonstrates why the United States is useful to examine through the perspective of witchcraft: his evidence illustrates how the diverse inhabitants of North America adapted and adopted the beliefs of others. Similar histories of interwoven belief systems have been written for other jurisdictions, but Davies's is the first such study for the modern United States.3 Chapter 2, “Magic of a New Land,” highlights this process of creative adaptation. Davies examines, for example, “witch balls,” which were hairballs that witches could allegedly shoot or throw into animals and which had no precedent in Europe (32). Another interesting example concerns “plugging,” which involved drilling a hole and inserting a plug to seal in sympathetic magic. Davies suspects that this practice reached the United States with German migrants, and that African Americans adopted the practice from them (111). Other beliefs, such as those in fairies, failed to cross the Atlantic as successfully (37). Davies also draws our attention to moments when ethnic differences produced misunderstandings which sometimes expressed themselves as witchcraft, and when immigrants' different legal practices sometimes resulted in cultural clashes (60). So many of Davies's cases involve recent immigrants that America Bewitched suggests that each wave of new arrivals replenished the United States with fresh and changing witch beliefs.For all the myriad advantages offered by both the breadth of Davies's approach and the fascinating cases he describes, the work suffers from some weaknesses in presentation and conceptualization. Context occasionally is sacrificed for breadth of coverage. It would have been helpful to have a clearer understanding, for example, of the religious beliefs and practices, social and economic circumstances, disease environments, or subsistence practices of the people involved in the cases described here. More analysis would have helped, too. At times Davies devotes several pages to a single case (187–94), but his approach is largely descriptive. Some discussions end abruptly, with insufficient space devoted to drawing out larger conclusions (49–51). Davies does not always take the time at the end of his chapters to analyze what has come before (see, for example, the abrupt end of chapter 2). This approach makes it difficult to discern larger patterns.Chronology and periodization are also effaced in this study in favor of a topical approach, making it hard to see if there might be larger patterns in the nature of accusations, or the types of counter magic people deployed, or in the degree of cultural adaptation over time (see, for example, his unchronological discussion of the colony and state of Delaware, 51–55). It may well be that there was little change in U.S. beliefs and practices between 1692 and 2013, but that seems highly unlikely. Tables, and some effort to quantify this material, would also help us find Davies's conclusion persuasive that “thousands of Americans, Native, European, and African, were persecuted, abused, and murdered as witches after 1692” (226). The closest we get to hard numbers is a helpful calculation of forty-four incidents of witch murders (179). More effort to quantify his material throughout the book would also help readers understand the relationship between the accounts Davies includes in his work and the larger world of witch beliefs. Are these accounts the entirety of all stories about witch belief? Are they merely illustrative? It is difficult to get purchase on this question of perspective. Davies may well be correct that the subject of witchcraft helps us explore “what it meant to be American” (21), but without a clearer sense of the relative importance of these cases it is hard to know for sure how the persistence of beliefs in magic shaped (and perhaps continues to shape) American identity.Davies certainly demonstrates the persistence of witch beliefs in the United States. Unfortunately, he caters to popular misconceptions in making his case. General readers might well think of Salem as the only witchcraft case of any significance in North American history, and Davies might well have captured their view that the events that took place in Salem in 1692 closed “a chapter in the annals of the country's development” (2). But that popular conviction of Salem's anomaly does not mean that a specialist in the history of witchcraft should base a new interpretation on that ill-informed perspective. It is hard to tell exactly against whom Davies is arguing. As Davies's book makes clear, there was a lot of witchcraft activity in North America, after Salem and before the United States was established, as well as in the early republic, and these episodes are known to specialists. They include, for example, the large outbreak in Abiquiú, New Mexico (1756–63), when 176 people were accused of witchcraft; and the Indian witch hunts of the early nineteenth century.4Specialists, especially those who study North American history, might also chafe at Davies's conceptualization of “America,” by which he means the United States. Davies replicates the fortunately waning tendency of U.S. historians to seek the origins of the nation only in the history of the thirteen English colonies clinging to the eastern coast of the continent. He seems to conflate the history of colony of Massachusetts and that of the later nation. “The Salem nineteen were the last to be legally executed for witchcraft in the colony,” he explains, “yet we now know of more people killed as witches in America after 1692 than before it” (3, italics added). This conflation leads Davies to contradict himself. He observes in his conclusion that a 1942 film, I Married a Witch, perpetuated the “mistaken belief that witches were burned in America” (223). In fact, he must mean the popular “mistaken belief” that witches were burned in Salem (where they were hanged, as was generally the case in English jurisdictions), because he provides evidence in his own book of witch burnings in the United States (109), and so it would not be a mistake to believe such executions took place. In sum, Davies's compilation of cases will certainly provide a helpful starting point for those interested in witch beliefs in the United States, but his overall interpretation will not alter or challenge specialists' understanding of witchcraft in North America after 1692.