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Witchcraft in Early North America

An Introduction

What is a witch? Students of American history usually have a quick answer to that question: A witch was one of those poor accused women who were hanged at Salem, Massachusetts, in that town’s infamous outbreak of 1692, one such as Sarah Good, whose “wicked spitfull manner,” her “base and abusive words,” and her “muttering” may have condemned her in her neighbors’ eyes far more than her diabolical actions (see document 19).1 But it turns out that witches were everywhere in North America. And witches were not only terrified English colonists. Witches could be Huron shamans, Pueblo healers, enslaved conjurers, and Jesuit priests. As Europeans, Americans, and Africans converged in North America, so, too, did their ideas about witchcraft. Witches, everyone agreed, were people who performed harmful acts and threatened community order. But when societies and cultures collided on the North American continent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was an irrevocable shift in people’s assumptions about what harmful acts entailed, who was most likely to be committing them, and how one might preserve communities ravaged by disease and conquest or formed anew out of strangers.

Witchcraft might seem quaint and exotic to many readers, but to the people who are the subject of this book, it was a major preoccupation and concern. Witchcraft explained the unfathomable: prolonged drought, epidemics, deadly storms, earthquakes. Central Africans believed that witches (in the form of greedy and self-aggrandizing rulers) might even cause wars. The past was a time of far greater insecurity in meeting basic needs than most readers of this volume know today. Modern North Americans can alter their environment with ease, overcoming the constraints of the natural world. When it is cold, we can turn on heat, thanks to a massive infrastructure that delivers gas, oil, and electricity to homes in even the most rural regions. In sweltering summers, we reverse the action, chilling the air around us with fans or air conditioning. As night falls, we turn on lights, fending off scary creatures that dwell in the dark unknown and enjoying activities once reserved only for daylight—work, reading, recreation, and safe travel. We shrink distances with the telephone, the Internet, and the airplane, bringing the whole world within our reach with technology. We even traverse time, viewing planets, stars, and distant solar systems of the past through magnificent telescopes. We stave off sickness and delay death with a fantastic array of diagnostic tools, potent chemical cocktails, and palliative care. North Americans live amid unprecedented food security, with few people dependent on a single harvest to survive. In short, in the twenty-first century we have many tools and services at our disposal to challenge and circumvent the dictates of the natural world.

Yet it is in many ways too simple to assert that those who believed in witchcraft were people who, lacking our technology, could not explain or transform their world in any other way. The same people who believed that one drought was caused by witchcraft did not think that all droughts were. Although some mariners on a terribly rough and stormy passage across the Atlantic might find a witch in their midst, most voyages, even those plagued by hurricanes, shipwrecks, and death, did not produce witchcraft accusations. Christian parents might understand a child’s death as the punishing hand of God or the unfortunate quirk of fate or just one of the many cruel sicknesses that carried away as many as half of all children before they reached the age of five. The Puritan minister Cotton Mather (1663–1728), who lived in Massachusetts, watched in helpless agony as eight of his fifteen children died before they reached the age of two—and he inhabited what was believed to be a salubrious region.2 This was a lethal age, and people lived with death and chronic pains and aches in ways mercifully unknown to most of us. Magic might lift these pains and torments, and it might also cause them. People who could manipulate material objects and harness special powers in the supernatural world might effect good or evil. In other words, people believed in witchcraft not because there were so many inexplicable events in their world, but because they lived in a world that contained witches.

In Europe, as many as 90,000 people were prosecuted as witches between 1420 and 1780, and as many as 45,000 of those were likely executed.3 In this same period, Europeans crossed the Atlantic and claimed, occupied, invaded, settled, and exploited the Americas. Christopher Columbus’s successful transatlantic voyage in 1492 marked the inauguration of a new era. European states sought to project their power in the Americas, eager to extract wealth from American resources (natural and human) and to deploy that wealth in struggles for dominion in Europe.

North America figured prominently in this process. The Spanish moved north from the valley of Mexico (where they toppled the Aztec Empire in 1519) across the Rio Grande, establishing their first settlements in the region we know as New Mexico in 1598. The French approached the continent from across the North Atlantic; they followed short-lived experiments in the 1530s with a serious commitment to fur trading in the early seventeenth century, settling in the St. Lawrence valley after 1608. The English ran fisheries in Newfoundland and established numerous colonies to the south in the seventeenth century. By the late seventeenth century, tiny pockets of European settlement dotted the continent. These enterprises were accompanied by intermittent conflicts with indigenous inhabitants. Europeans, moreover, forcibly transported Africans to the Americas and appropriated their labor and their progeny. Witchcraft in North America emerged out of this crucible, one with multiple belief systems; with complex power dynamics; and with stunning social, economic, and demographic transformations. In this book, I invite readers to examine witch beliefs as a unique approach to how cultural beliefs and practices collided. Witchcraft was one important way in which people made sense of their turbulent and changing world.

Colonization and conquests changed witchcraft beliefs and their expression. Witchcraft always provided a mechanism for revenge: victims alleged that the accused had killed their cattle, sickened their child, hindered their sexual performance, or ruined their crops. Any community harbored infinite possibilities for such conflicts. But colonial societies introduced new elements of coercion and cruelty. North America became a place of expanded evil. Indians who linked sickness with malevolence lived in a transformed world, with far more witches in it than had been the case before the arrival of Europeans. (What else could explain the deadly epidemics that swept away entire villages?) Enslaved Africans found their ideas about evil power similarly altered by the expansion of malevolent forces in American slave societies. Christian Europeans believed in the Devil as surely as they believed in God, and the Devil had loyal helpers—witches—especially in North America, a land European theologians regarded as the last bastion of Satan. In a world so fraught with tension, epidemics, conflict, and exploitation, it is little surprise that the chronology of witchcraft in North America differed considerably from that of Europe, where witch hunts petered out by the end of the seventeenth century. In contrast, witchcraft continued to be a fundamental aspect of how Europeans and Africans (and their descendants), Indians, and people of mixed race made sense of each other and of their world into the early nineteenth century, and a major outbreak occurred in eighteenth-century New Mexico.

Preexisting notions about a witch’s gender and race and even economic status shifted in new colonial societies. In England, Spain, and France, women were more likely than men to face accusations of witchcraft. But in North America, witches were both men and women. The transition came in part because Europeans, especially Spaniards, linked witchcraft to Indians, to Africans, and to people of mixed race—and as this connection developed, witchcraft lost its special association with women and was attached more to race and caste.4 In 1626, the first formal allegations of witchcraft reached New Mexican authorities; they involved an Indian woman and her mestiza (or mixed race) daughter. In that same year, across the continent, troubled Virginians charged one of their neighbors with witchcraft in the first known case in the English colonies. She was an Englishwoman, and in this respect typical of witches who landed in English colonial courts. English colonists continued to associate women with witchcraft, but wealthier women were more likely to face allegations than had been true in Europe.

While witch beliefs traveled across the Atlantic with Africans and Europeans, the context in which witchcraft accusations and trials functioned often did not. The manifestation of witch beliefs and trials is thus intertwined with the specific context of migration and colonization in North America. European migrants brought, for the most part, only fragments of their home societies with them. The ecclesiastical structures that shaped understandings about the Devil, the trained witch-hunters, the libraries of legal tomes that informed jurists, the long-standing personal relationships: all of the complex systems that enveloped witch beliefs, accusations, and trials could not be reproduced in America. Migration strained and sometimes shattered belief systems. Some Europeans had ideas about magical practices that were connected to specific geographical features—caves, waterfalls, mountains, forests, swamps. So, too, did Africans. West-Central Africans, for example, believed the forest to be a sacred space, where they buried the dead and where spirits might inhabit rocks or trees. Forests were also a source of herbs for healing and magical charms.5 In new environments, key ingredients might be unattainable. Both Africans and Europeans were severed—by choice or by force—from the natural world that hosted supernatural spirits. For Americans, sacred places were sometimes deliberately assaulted by Spanish invaders, who placed cathedrals where temples had stood, in a time-honored strategy of conquerors. They did just that in Mexico City, where they built their great cathedral on the sacred grounds of the Aztecs’ Templo Mayor.

Witchcraft gives us a raw and unfiltered—indeed, sometimes excruciating—glimpse at the lives of real men, women, and children who lived centuries ago. When we read a transcript of a witch trial, we find ourselves flung into the midst of community life. We learn of old injuries, tangled relationships, broken hearts, political ambitions, terrifying assaults, children long deceased but mourned with as much anguish as if they had died just the day before, families in conflict over generations, petty disputes over baubles and trifles, and heart wrenching loss and betrayal. We meet, for example, husbands who defended their wives when they were accused of witchcraft (see documents 8, 10, and 20), husbands who suspected their wives were witches (see document 19), and one husband whose alleged infidelity drove his distraught wife to accuse three women of witchcraft (see document 12). As a subject of historical inquiry, witchcraft enables us to glimpse a distant and often alien culture with startling intensity and intimacy. This book pulls together documents from different parts of North America, by Spanish, French, and English settlers, about Indians, enslaved Africans, and European colonists. These documents touch on slavery and servitude, family and the individual, sickness and death, the law and the church, reflecting the ways that ideas about witchcraft permeated the entire fabric of society.

Beliefs: Europeans

To make sense of why some people looked like witches while others did not, and why some regions contained numerous trials and others virtually none, we need to understand the witch beliefs that Europeans, Africans, and Americans held at the time of contact and settlement. The discussion starts with European beliefs for two main reasons. First, most of what we know about African and American witch beliefs comes from records generated by Europeans, so it is essential to understand what Europeans believed in order to make sense of what they thought they saw. Second, Europeans created the legal systems in which witch beliefs and accusations found traction in North American courts and through which most evidence of witchcraft has survived.

Europeans believed that a witch was a person who committed a crime using harmful magic. For example, a witch might cause a person or animal to sicken or die by chanting a spell or by sticking pins in a figure. A spell might similarly incite a storm or ruin crops or cause a drought (see document 9). A witch might thwart the hunt, as two men claimed Goodwife Wright did in Virginia in 1626 (see document 8). Witches might also cause men to become impotent. The Latin term for such crimes was maleficium (the plural is maleficia), and jurisdictions everywhere had statutes that banned and punished them (see documents 6 and 7). Even if a witch was also guilty of blasphemy (showing disrespect for God), her or his case normally appeared in secular courts by the middle of the sixteenth century, not ecclesiastical ones. A witch did not always need to perform any specific action to cause harm; damage could ensue if a witch only wished harm on someone. While magic might also be performed for beneficial ends—to heal the sick, to comfort the afflicted, to bring about good fortune, to recover lost or stolen items—by the sixteenth century European laws had defined even this so-called “white” magic as a form of witchcraft and thus also illegal and punishable by death in some jurisdictions. Witchcraft activity surged in Europe in the 1560s and 1570s, with trials in Germany and the Low Countries and new statutes in England and Scotland. Trial activity intensified from 1580 to 1630, followed by a very protracted decline between 1630 and 1770.

A rich folklore developed around witchcraft. Accused witches in Europe might be accompanied by creatures called familiars, including cats, rats, and toads (see figure 1). The more unpleasant and offensive the animal, the more it was “loathed by all people, who generally have a Natural Antipathy against that sort of Vermin,” the more likely witches—with their unnatural sensibilities—were to find affinity with it.6 Some witches transformed themselves into animals. In Estonia, accused witches confessed to acts of maleficia while they were werewolves; one woman testified in 1623 that she had been a werewolf for four years. Other witches worked closely with their familiars, sometimes assuming their shape in order to carry out their crimes. Still others put creatures to work in their spells. Shepherds in Normandy were especially likely to be accused of performing maleficia with the assistance of toad venom. In Iceland, witches, mostly male, worked their magic with the aid of runes, characters from the old Germanic alphabet used in Scandinavia and believed to have magical properties.7

One essential component of European witch beliefs was inextricably linked to Christian theology, and that was the idea of a special relationship between witches and the Devil. The Christian religious system contains two arch rivals: a supreme deity of all power and knowledge whom Christians call God, and a competitive fallen angel, Lucifer, who is the main source of evil in the world. Lucifer reigns in Hell and is also known as Satan or the Devil. Christians believed then (and many still do) that God and Satan were consumed by an eternal struggle for power, one that manifested itself in part in Satan’s efforts to thwart God’s plans and to win away Christians to assist him in his diabolical machinations. These recruits were witches.

Sorcerers, in contrast, used magic, but did not rely on the assistance of evil spirits. That was the defining feature of the witch—that he or she joined with Satan and with his assistance performed evil acts in the world. In North America, however, this distinction eroded, and European observers used the terms witch and sorcerer and wizard and demon interchangeably to describe those (universally Native Americans) whom they saw as engaging in malevolent practices (see documents 1 and 2). Europeans also distinguished “high” magic from “low” magic, another blurred line that ensnared some unfortunate practitioners. High magic included alchemy (transforming metals) and divination (finding out secret or hidden information through astrology and other methods). Although witchcraft statutes banned divination (see document 6), practitioners of high magic were infrequently charged with witchcraft; however, those who had unnatural knowledge of the future or about the location of lost objects might well be accused of witchcraft. So Goodwife Wright’s
accusers claimed in court in Virginia in 1626. Rebecca Grey testified that Wright predicted the deaths of numerous people (see document 8).

This connection between witchcraft and the Devil emerged over centuries and was solidified in the middle of the fifteenth century, and then circulated in a range of published tracts, all more easily dispersed in the wake of Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in 1439. The most famous such tract, Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches), was written by two Dominican friars, James Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, both inquisitors in the Holy Roman Empire and the first men to be commissioned by the pope to hunt witches. It provided graphic accounts of witches’ behavior, describing their crimes, their sexual relations with the Devil, their demonic progeny, and their devious ways, and it helped elaborate a complex demonology for readers. Published in 1487, it was widely disseminated in Europe among educated elites, and during the Reformation was popular with Protestants, too.8

Witches made a pact with the Devil and agreed to serve him. Thus, witchcraft was also diabolism, or worship of the Devil. Europeans emphasized that witches had made a free choice in their service to the Devil. The particulars of this relationship varied by region, but there were some common features. Witches signaled their allegiance to the Devil by signing a book with their signature or, more typically in this era of pervasive female illiteracy, their mark. In the course of doing so, witches acquired a distinctive mark on their bodies. It was allegedly impervious to pain and unable to express blood, and it featured prominently in witch trials as bodies were examined, pricked, and prodded for evidence of the tell-tale sign (see documents 9 and 10). Witches often flew through the air, sometimes many thousands of miles, to meet with other witches at Sabbaths, as witches’ assemblies were called. Witches in the Labourd (on the French and Spanish border and the site of a major witch hunt in 1609–1610), a region whose inhabitants made their living from the sea and especially from the fisheries in Newfoundland, confessed to flying across the ocean to Newfoundland at night.9 Sometimes witches rode on beasts, and sometimes they rode on sticks, with the broom the most common form of nocturnal transport. The larger the gathering, the farther witches needed to fly to reach it. There, witches engaged in all sorts of unusual sexual and social practices. They had orgies, danced naked, and even killed and consumed unbaptized babies. Some Sabbaths included blasphemous practices, including reciting prayers backward, or performing a mock Eucharist (see figure 2). Tortured witches also confessed to having sex with the Devil and bearing his offspring.

Educated, elite men, often the lawyers, judges, and church officials who prosecuted witchcraft in court, expected to hear about diabolical practices, and often they could only get their suspicions confirmed under torture. (Torture
was an integral feature of the judicial system on the European continent, which was based on Roman law; in contrast, the English common law system used torture infrequently.) Accused witches, on the other hand, tended to confess more easily to core elements of popular beliefs about maleficia, animal familiars, and charms and potions. Anna Roleffes (known as Tempel Anneke), tried in Brunswick in the Holy Roman Empire in 1663, confessed to several practices that she clearly regarded as harmless white magic, including a divination ritual designed to help her find stolen goods, and making a concoction of berries, salt, leaves, hops, and sage to cure sick sheep. Rituals required words to give them power, as any Christian knew, and so Tempel Anneke called on God. Sometimes she needed a more elaborate prayer. If, for example, one was blessing a man, she explained to the court, one might say, “John and the Holy Evangelists, they pluck a branch in Paradise.”

Tempel Anneke was understandably confused about her ability to use words and actions together. Rituals and sacraments endorsed by the Catholic Church and performed by priests did, indeed, seem magical. Priests transformed wine into blood and bread into flesh. Clerics uttered prayers and suggested that their words could be heard and acted upon by a remote deity. In all these actions, human activity intersected with the divine. Is it any wonder worshipers might believe that their spells were nothing but prayers? Tempel Anneke’s potions sounded harmless, and her words Christian, but her interrogators knew better. When they consulted physicians about her herbal concoctions, the doctors denied that the medicines could cause any benefit, so any cure could only be achieved through magic and thus through the aid of the Devil. Tempel Anneke adamantly denied this charge. Under torture, however, when the torturer took her to a new interrogation chamber in the jail’s cellar, blindfolded her, and tightened a leg screw, Tempel Anneke confessed to apparitions from a “black man” who threatened to avenge Tempel Anneke on those who insulted her. With leg screws then fastened on both shins, eyes covered, encased in darkness, and with no advocate by her side, only the company of her torturer who exhorted her to acknowledge her crimes and end her ghastly misery, Tempel Anneke confessed to making a pact with the Devil to serve him twelve years, to having sex with him on her bed, to becoming pregnant with salamanders as a result of this intercourse, and to bewitching people and causing injury. She confessed on October 22; just over two months later, on December 30, she was beheaded, and then her body was burned.10

As a woman, Tempel Anneke was typical of most executed witches in Europe, where women represented 75 percent of executed witches in most regions.11 This sex ratio was especially pronounced in England, where some 93 percent of accused witches in the county of Essex were women. There was, however, considerable range within Europe. In Iceland, for example, only 10 percent of accused witches were women; in Poland, 96 percent were.12 There could also be great variation within a single nation. Take France. In the Department of the Nord, a territory in the far north of the country, 81 percent of accused witches were women. But in one part of Normandy, the Pays de Caux, men were especially likely to be accused of witchcraft, and the region was the “epicenter of male witchcraft in western Europe.”13 Of 381 people accused of witchcraft in Normandy between 1560 and 1660, 278 (73 percent) were men, and 103 (27 percent) were women.14 Seventeen men from this region—and one woman—were executed as witches. The occupations of the accused were male occupations: half of the accused were shepherds, and the next most frequent occupational category was clergy. Thus, in many places witchcraft might be commonly associated with women (a sex-linked crime) but not associated only with women (and thus not a sex-specific crime).

In England, so obvious was the connection between women and witchcraft that when the magistrates of Newcastle, having hired a witch-hunter from Scotland, sent their crier through town, he called on the people of Newcastle to bring forward their complaints “against any woman for a Witch.” In the wake of this roundup, fourteen women and one man were condemned and hanged. Moreover, the Newcastle authorities were more likely to believe that attractive women were innocent and elderly women guilty (see figure 3). The witch-hunter’s method involved sticking pins in alleged witches. When he proposed to do so to one woman, “personable and good like,” the magistrates objected. The witch-hunter persevered and found her guilty in a cruel and humiliating ritual in which he stripped her clothes to her waist and plunged pins in her thighs. The magistrates nonetheless intervened, and she was finally cleared.15

What was it about women? Attitudes toward women and especially about women’s bodies and sexuality persuaded people that women were predisposed toward witchcraft. Medical ideas, derived from Aristotle, regarded men and women as binary opposites; women were wet and cold, men were warm and dry. Women’s genitals were likewise the reverse of men’s. Aristotelian medical theories, moreover, held that the male body was the norm; the female body was a corrupt variant. Commentators universally discussed women’s sexuality in a negative fashion. Women were insatiable creatures, naturally prone to lust and deviance. Their carnality led them to witchcraft: witch-hunting manuals, most notably the Malleus, which drew on these ancient ideas about women, emphasized the sexual relationship between Satan and his human agents, and it was easy enough for believers to associate women’s lust with their attraction to the Devil, who could fulfill their sexual needs as no mortal man could.16 Thus, in those societies where people believed that a witch’s body contained telltale marks of her relationship with Satan, those marks were invariably found in woman’s genitals, her “very hidden places,” as one legal manual for English justices in the 1630s put it.17 Women’s bodily defects and their immoral natures were accompanied by their greater credulity. Women were frail and impressionable, more likely to be superstitious than men. And their weakness also encouraged them to resort to occult arts to seek revenge on those who wronged them.18 The Malleus codified these ideas, assembling a devastating critique of women’s natures and yoking women inextricably to witchcraft.19 The documents in Section II offer many opportunities to read trials of women and to examine the role that gender played in the charges against them (see especially documents 8, 9, 10, 12, 19, 20, 21, 23, and 24).

Because witchcraft was a crime, its detection and punishment were governed by the prevailing rules of evidence and procedure in different jurisdictions. But witchcraft was also an exceptional crime—crimen exceptum, one to which the normal practices did not apply. Because witchcraft was so difficult to prove using the normal rules of evidence, jurists applied different standards. Thus, for example, courts applied torture in places where it was otherwise not regularly employed as a key element of witchcraft trials in order to compel the accused to confess. Severe torture was essential because the Devil could help accused witches withstand pain. Courts even had a word for this assistance—taciturnitas (keeping silent). It referred to the ability of a witch to endure the agonies of torture without confession.20 People who were otherwise not normally allowed to give testimony in court, including children, women, and felons, were often able to do so in witchcraft trials. In Sweden, for example, thousands of children testified during a major witch hunt between 1668 and 1676, although in Swedish legal practice, children under the age of fifteen were not normally allowed to testify. During the outbreak, this principle was set aside and child witnesses were calculated as the equivalent of fractions of adults; in this reckoning, a five-year-old child equaled one-tenth of a witness, and thus by adding together many children, the courts met the legal obligation to have two witnesses for witchcraft convictions.21 Those whose testimony might otherwise be disregarded in English courts—excommunicated people, children, unreliable servants, runaways—could testify against witches.22 Some jurisdictions also allowed ordeals to serve as proof of guilt or innocence. Such “ordeals” were legacies of early medieval legal practices and rooted in Celtic and Germanic law, in which, for example, people could demonstrate their innocence by their ability to recover miraculously from carrying a hot iron in their bare hands. In the case of the water ordeal, featured in the trial of Grace Sherwood in Virginia in 1706 (see document 10), a guilty party floated, while the innocent sank.

In many respects, these deviations from normal legal procedures contradicted other prevailing trends in the legal culture of the era. In these centuries, law became transformed in ways that would seem familiar to Americans in the twenty-first century. Courts became more centralized, thus applying standard policies and punishments to guilty parties. Courts expected witnesses to see the crimes of which they spoke; juries were not supposed to have an active interest in the outcome of trials; confessions were not to be compelled by force; witnesses, likewise, should not endure pressure to provide testimony.23

Where courts banned torture, executions tended to be less frequent and accused witches rarely confessed to diabolical practices. The relative absence of torture in the Netherlands, where less than 150 people were executed out of a population of 1 million, for example, might explain the low number of executions there. In England, juries (not judges) tended to determine a witch’s guilt or innocence, and they tended to be lenient. The English also rarely employed torture: it was used once (illegally) during the English Civil War. In Scotland, torture was employed more frequently (but still illegally). There were some significant panics in Scotland in the sixteenth century, and a large witch hunt in England in the 1640s, but there was never anything like the massive hunts that occurred in central Europe. The kingdoms of England and Scotland experienced perhaps 5,000 prosecutions for witchcraft during the era of the witch hunt, and probably half of those were in Scotland, with perhaps 1,500 to 2,500 executions.24

Another key to acquittal was the rise of centralized states, as people with a greater distance from the personal conflicts that expressed themselves in witch accusations tended to bring greater skepticism not to witchcraft in general but rather to the particular features of any given case. The lack of centralization in the Holy Roman Empire, composed of a collection of individual political entities, is one explanation that historians have offered for the high number of accusations, trials, and especially executions there (20,000–25,000), in contrast, for example, to France, where the Parlement of Paris, the kingdom’s main judicial body, gradually gained control over reviews of regional jurisdictions’ decisions about guilt and overturned local sentences. Between 1588 and 1624, the Parlement ended up dismissing 36 percent of cases, and confirmed only 24 percent.25 By 1640, the Parlement no longer prosecuted witches, and this termination of prosecutions extended to the whole kingdom in an edict in 1682. There were perhaps only 1,000 executions in France. Likewise, although ecclesiastical courts employed torture in Spain and Italy, executions there were infrequent, largely because the Inquisition was a centralized institution. In the kingdoms of Spain and the Italian states, there were about 10,000 prosecutions altogether, many for minor offenses, with very few executions. Iberian and Italian authorities, for the most part, had little interest in allegations of Devil worship, the most serious offense witches committed. Most crimes there pertained to love magic (the use of spells and divination, for example, to attract a lover, or to seek revenge) and healing, behaviors that were believed to be heretical, but not capital crimes.

All of these beliefs and practices concerning witchcraft, finally, were entangled in the major religious transformation of the period, the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. In 1517, a monk named Martin Luther launched what became a major religious upheaval after he posted ninety-five critiques of the Catholic Church on the doors of the cathedral at Wittenburg. New churches emerged in the wake of this protest. Protestants (as the followers of Luther’s initiative came to be called) established new churches and defined codes of conduct for believers, and they were especially concerned with reforming personal behavior (whether banning card playing and other games or regulating sexual conduct) and ensuring orthodox beliefs (making sure, for example, that worshipers understood church doctrine).

The line between religion and superstition was a fuzzy and shifting one, especially in this period when all churches, Protestant and Catholic, were clamping down on behavior. Across and even within religious traditions, there was little agreement on what might be superstitious or even pagan practices. English Puritans, for example, rejected the celebration of Christmas or the many feast days and seasonal rituals that were practiced in the Protestant Church of England. They refused to use the months’ names, which they regarded as pagan, and instead used only the number. They sought to live by God’s laws as they strictly interpreted them, and this aspiration affected even their witchcraft statutes, which turned, as the Connecticut colony’s 1642 law did, to Leviticus, Exodus, and Deuteronomy for inspiration (see document 7).

Yet these were people whose own habits might strike modern readers as bizarre and laden with superstition. The Puritans believed that God’s will was unknowable, yet that his hand was everywhere. Their predestinarian theology convinced them that God had already consigned them to Heaven or Hell, regardless of their actions on this earth. They accompanied this uncompromising doctrine with a belief that God gave men and women clues to read so that they might make educated guesses about the likelihood of their salvation—although they always accepted the real possibility that they might well guess wrong. These two beliefs—that God was present in all aspects of life and that God might have left clues to the eager believer about salvation—made Puritans intensely aware of the world around them. No natural event, no odd coincidence, no accident, passed without some study of God’s hand. Thus, for example, a gathering of ministers paused during a meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1648 because a snake had slithered into the chamber. What did that mean? What was God trying to tell them? After some deliberation, the ministers concluded that the snake was Satan, and he sought to disturb their gathering, although they were also certain that God knew of Satan’s plan, since nothing happened without God’s knowledge.26 Natural events, such as storms or floods or late spring snows or prolonged drought might reveal God’s power as well. A people who believed just as firmly in Satan as they did in God could equally find Satan’s hand, vying with God for power.27

Enhanced regulation of personal conduct and religious expression was only one aspect of the reformations that accompanied church schism and creation in this era. A second important feature was the emergence of political rivalries that were expressed through religious opposition. Europeans divided into warring camps, Protestant and Catholic, even though the composition of those camps shifted continuously throughout the sixteenth century. By the end of the sixteenth century, England had emerged as a major Protestant kingdom, setting itself in opposition to Spain, a bastion of Catholicism. The struggles between these kingdoms for power in Europe leaked into North America, and part of this competition was the battle for souls to convert to their respective faiths. Zeal for conversion interacted with witchcraft beliefs in important ways, in both Europe and North America, emphasizing ideas about the Devil, heightening concerns about the failed orthodoxy of new converts (and thus tempering evangelical fervor), and producing impassioned converts who sometimes expressed their enthusiasm through possession.

These beliefs about what witches did, the importance of the Devil to witches’ powers, and the forensic strategies essential to discern and punish malefactors suggested a frame of reference within which Europeans could understand what they encountered in Africa and America. It is difficult to discern genuine indigenous ideas about witchcraft among non-European people in Africa and the Americas in the era of European expansion largely because our sources come from those Europeans—mostly priests—who described indigenous rituals and observed them in the context of their own clearly defined witch beliefs. These sources hinder efforts to move beyond hyperbole and to reveal what Africans and Indians were actually doing—let alone what they believed and what cultural logic lay behind their rituals. Europeans were predisposed to believe that Satan existed everywhere, that everywhere he had his followers, and that unfamiliar practices might well be diabolical. Historians can at best piece together non-Christian ideas about witchcraft. One crucial commonality, however, is that Native Americans and Africans did not tend to have an idea of Satan as a single, fixed entity, the focus of all evil in the world and forever doing battle with God. Thus one central feature of European witch beliefs—the concept of a pact between a witch with free will and the Devil—had no meaning for non-Christians. Like Europeans, however, Africans and Americans agreed that disease and misfortune might be caused by witches.

Beliefs: West and West-Central Africans

Africans who were captured and forcibly transported to North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came primarily from a few key regions of Africa: West Africa (especially Senegambia [where The Gambia and Senegal are today], Sierra Leone [modern day Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia, and Ivory Coast], the Gold Coast [modern day Ghana], and the Bight of Biafra [modern day Cameroon, Gabon, and southeastern Nigeria]) and West-Central Africa (especially Angola and Congo).28 What do we know about their beliefs, and how do we know it? Historians trying to understand African witch beliefs in previous centuries rely heavily on observations generated by Europeans, who found their way to West and West-Central Africa most commonly as traders. Merchants frequently recorded information on religious practices, although they were often mocking and derisive of these traditions. In some of those places, traders were accompanied by missionaries who also studied religious practices in order to enhance their ability to convert people. In the kingdom of Kongo (located in present-day western Congo and northern Angola), where the king converted to Christianity in 1491, priests played an important role in educating people about Catholicism, and they provide some of our best sources for religious beliefs there. Elsewhere, ministers and priests were banned from proselytizing.

Africans regarded sickness and death as misfortunes caused by spirits and supernatural powers who worked through human agents. Witchcraft, then, functioned as a common explanation for misfortune, just as it did for Europeans. Witchcraft was part of a collection of secret religious powers, including divining, conjuring, and healing, that could restore harmony to a community or to an individual. These rituals could also be used to punish offenders. In the kingdom of Kongo, witches—ndokis—were selfish and greedy people who used powers harnessed from the other world to achieve their goals (in European thinking, comparable to those witches who worked magic with the aid of the Devil). But the same powers could also be used for good ends. An individual might thus have the power both to cause harm and to uncover and counteract it. Witches, then, were not solely or inherently evil (as European authorities believed them to be by the seventeenth century) but rather had the ability to effect good or evil. And witches could be men or women.29

European men who worked at coastal trading posts were especially fascinated by fetishes and the use of poisons. The word fetish derives from a Portuguese term, feitiço, which traders used to describe the charms and amulets they saw in West Africa. The meaning of the term expanded to include a wide range of practices, not just the material charms themselves.30 Those like the trader Willem Bosman, who observed and commented on African religious practices, noted the pervasive use of poison in such rituals (see document 13). Robert Elwes, a merchant at the Royal African Company fort in Egya in 1687, and John Carter, at Whydah in 1686, related stories of others being poisoned and, in Carter’s case, of threats of poison against him. When a sergeant at Winneba fell ill “with vomiting and strange paines” in August 1697, the trader there was sure he had been poisoned.31

As these traders’ remarks suggest, charms were part of practices that ranged from punishing enemies to ferreting out the truth behind a crime. They were employed in two aspects of African religious practice that endured (often in altered form) in the Americas and that Europeans in some jurisdictions identified as witchcraft, most notably conjuring and divination. In the kingdom of Kongo, for example, specialized practitioners called ngangas worked with amulets, minkisis. The charms had important symbolic power. A nganga who put a stone inside a charm might intend the ritual to remove a tumor, in the same way that a feather could convey the flight required for a charm to look for and identify a criminal. One Capuchin missionary readily identified these practices as “magic” in 1643 and believed that in these rituals the ngangas “speak with the devil, as if they were insane and possessed.” At the same time, Catholic priests understood the power of these ritual specialists and their amulets, and tried to appropriate it for themselves: in Kongo priests adopted the title nganga and translated minkisi as “holy.”32

Rituals varied, of course, across Africa. Among the Igbo, who lived in the Bight of Biafra, within modern-day Nigeria, and who comprised the largest single contingent of slaves bound for the colony of Virginia in the eighteenth century, diviners (called obea) performed sacrifices (real and symbolic) in order to seek help from the many invisible spirits of the Igbo world.33 In the late seventeenth century, the French slave trader Jean Barbot described the gris-gris (charms) he saw in Senegal, and said that they contained words written in Arabic. A staunch Protestant, Barbot compared the gris-gris to the “supposed saints” worshipped by “Italian and Spanish bigots.”34

If the intellectual limitations and religious prejudices of European observers make it difficult to understand indigenous African ideas about witchcraft, so, too, does the specific context within which most Africans and Europeans encountered each other: through the slave trade. The historian James Sweet has explored this puzzle for the coasts of West-Central Africa (Kongo and Angola), where evidence of malevolence increased with the slave trade. West-Central Africans, for example, believed that when Europeans took Africans away on slave vessels, never to be seen again, they did so in order to eat them. These were not simply metaphorical concerns about being eaten, but a literal belief. Witches were cannibals. They sated themselves on enslaved bodies. If remedies against witchcraft conventionally kept evil in balance, the slave trade introduced a new form of evil, one that could not be combated through customary means. In that respect, the slave trade might have created witchcraft (as Europeans understood and used the term) in Africa and among Africans who lived within its orbit. Africans associated witchcraft with selfishness and greed, and thus linked it not only to harm inflicted on individuals (out of revenge or dislike) but also to political and social institutions, to rulers or traders who sought to enhance their own wealth, power, or prestige at the expense of other members of society. One Kongolese woman, an nganga named Dona Beatriz who was trained in rituals to reach the other world, started a movement in 1703 in which she sought to use her own special powers to combat the malevolence of rulers who permitted decades of civil war and whose wars fed the slave trade. The slave trade fit neatly into this conceptualization of greed as a sign of witchcraft, producing a world of enhanced evil, one in which European merchants and shippers acquired reputations as cannibals.35

Africans believed witches could be people with power—men of greed seeking to aggrandize their authority or wealth. Even a king might be feared as a witch. Europeans, in contrast, were far more likely to associate witches with the weak and marginal, people such as Indians, slaves, and elderly women who sought power through diabolical ends precisely because they were people without other avenues to power within their communities. Not until the witch hunts among the Shawnees in North America in the early nineteenth century do we see a similar association between witches and men with political power.

Beliefs: Native Americans

Among those who already lived in North America, there was a wide array of belief systems. Historians know most about the people who lived in areas where Europeans colonized, traveled, traded, and proselytized, along coasts and waterways and near other resources valued by Europeans. Our knowledge of Indian religious beliefs comes mostly from the recorded accounts of men who had their own religious agenda and their own demonology. Historians work hard to read these sources sensitively and creatively—and readers of these documents will have the same challenge—to try to recover and comprehend beliefs and cultures of non-Europeans. It is a difficult enterprise in which our understanding will only ever be partial, as if what we are seeing is a shadow cast on the ground, a clouded and imprecise image of something real and tangible but only that, an image. Spanish chroniclers ready to condemn all indigenous healing practices as witchcraft, for example, make it very difficult for historians to understand the cultural context in which these healing traditions existed.36

Europeans saw the Devil everywhere in North America.37 When Fray Alonso de Benavides described indigenous religious practices on his journey to New Mexico in 1625–1626 he labeled all spiritual leaders as wizards or sorcerers guided by demons (see document 1). Thomas Mayhew, a Puritan minister fluent in Wampanoag, derided the Indians he met on Martha’s Vineyard in 1652 as “zealous and earnest in the Worship of False gods and Devils.”38 The English also likened Indian shamans to witches. They were disturbed by Indian ideas of direct and personal connections to Indian deities, usually achieved through rituals that required fasting, trances, and the consumption of potent narcotics. The Englishman George Percy put the centrality of Satan succinctly: “They worship the Devill for their God, and have no other beliefe.”39

It was not just that the Devil was pervasive; Europeans believed that America was in fact his home. As the Jesuit José de Acosta explained in his Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590), directly linking religious reformation in Europe with Catholic endeavors in America, “once idolatry was rooted out of the best and noblest part of the world, the devil retired to the most remote places and reigned in that other part of the world, which, although it is very inferior in nobility, is not so in size and breadth.”40 Because of this certainty that the Americas were the Devil’s lair, it is hard to reconstruct with any certainty whether Indians had ideas of “witches” before European contact and what exactly these “witches” did. Europeans believed that evil was concentrated in a single entity (a witch or Satan), but it seems that Indians did not. There was no notion of concentrated evil among Andean people at the time of first contact with Spaniards, but rather a commitment to the idea of complementarity, of good and evil existing together. Thus, for example, early Spanish dictionaries reported the Andean word supay meaning both “good angel” and “bad angel,” but later dictionaries defined this word only as “Devil,” thereby erasing the earlier complexity of the concept.41

In the northeastern woodlands (where the French and English established themselves) at the moment of contact, Indians’ belief systems probably did include ideas about witches and sorcerers. Like Europeans, Indians debated the causes of misfortunes and tried to remedy them with natural cures. But when these cures did not work, they concluded, like Europeans, that witchcraft was present. Early Jesuit accounts—written, of course, by people predisposed to see a world of witches and demons—spoke of sorcerers, people who cast spells and who harmed others in doing so. These witches called on powers to do evil, not good, and were greatly feared by the Senecas (one of the tribes of the powerful Iroquois confederacy) as people distinct from the shamans and other religious practitioners (a distinction that normally eluded Europeans).42 The Iroquois killed witches if they detected them in their midst. A Jesuit, François-Joseph Le Mercier, told of one such execution in 1637 among the Hurons. A woman accused of witchcraft was sentenced to death and was first tortured with fire before the executioner split her skull with a hatchet and her body was burned to ashes.43 Other Indians, including the Algonquian-speaking people whom the English encountered at Roanoke (in modern-day North Carolina) in the 1580s, seem not to have believed that witches—at least witches within a tribe—should be executed for witchcraft, and instead reserved that penalty for outsiders.44

While Europeans tended to think that most witches were women, a gendered association of women with witchcraft appears not to have been the case among the Iroquois and other woodland people. The evidence, as always, is elusive and indirect. One clue comes from the best-known Iroquois witch, a man named Atotarho, who figures in the Iroquois creation myth and almost destroyed Hiawatha before Hiawatha neutralized him and turned him into a good leader.45 A second clue comes from the tendency of the Iroquois to accuse the Jesuits (all men) of doing the kinds of malevolent deeds that they associated with witches: spreading disease, for example (see document 2). Some Potawatomis killed a group of priests in the 1680s for precisely this reason.46 One Jesuit, Isaac Jogues, was killed by the Iroquois in 1646 because they believed him to be a sorcerer (see document 3).47 The connection between Europeans and disease was common, and because the first Europeans many Indians met were missionaries, they readily linked disease with the new faith and its clergy. Shamans and other leaders sometimes used this connection to thwart the efforts of Catholic missionaries (see document 2).48 Possibly the association of priests with witchcraft increased the gendered association among North American Indians of witchcraft with men, but there is simply not enough evidence to know with any certainty.

The connection of disease to witchcraft—since one thing witches did was to spread sickness—meant that evidence of witches’ activities was pervasive in the years during and after European encounters, which brought dreadful epidemic diseases in their wake (see documents 2 and 3). The spread of Eurasian diseases in the Americas accompanied and enabled European military conquest. Historians and epidemiologists talk about “virgin soil populations”—groups unaccustomed to certain diseases and who possess no immunities to them. Indeed, diseases often moved in advance of Europeans, sometimes spread inadvertently by traders. What this meant, for Americans, was sometimes a devastating destruction. Smallpox was perhaps the worst of the new invaders, but almost as deadly were influenza, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, mumps, and chicken pox. Amid the chaos of an epidemic, crops might not get planted or harvested; thus famine often followed epidemics, and the overall consequences could be catastrophic (see figure 4). The Huron population, for example, plunged from 20,000–35,000 in the early seventeenth century to 10,000 in 1640.49

Indians and Europeans sometimes interpreted epidemics differently. Europeans who benefited from these catastrophes might be inclined to attribute them to God. John Winthrop put this view succinctly in a letter in which he described the terrible toll taken by a smallpox epidemic that raged through southern New England in 1633 and 1634, eviscerating Indian communities. “God hathe hereby cleered our title to this place,” he explained to a friend in England.50 Indians, too, could appreciate the supernatural origins of disease, but they had another explanation that was just as logical and consistent with modern ideas about disease transmission: Europeans brought the diseases. Thus the exact same smallpox epidemic had dramatically opposed meanings for those who endured it: for Europeans covetous of land, it was a clear sign of God’s favor; for those who succumbed to the ravages of the terrible disease, it was just as clear an indication that European witches were at loose in the countryside.

Those launching evangelical missions in North America were optimistic that the Devil could be displaced. William Crashaw conveyed this expectation of Christian triumph in an exhortation to English clerics on their way to Jamestown. “And though Satan visibly and palpably raignes there, more then in any other knowne place of the world: yet be of courage (blessed brethren) God will treade Satan under your feet shortly, and the ages to come will eternize your names, as the Apostles of Virginia.”51 Moreover, there was strong evidence that the Devil should not hold sway in North America. Europeans believed that the Devil tempted followers with promises of riches, luxury, and goods beyond their economic or social status. Elizabeth Knapp, possessed by the Devil in the English colony of Massachusetts in 1671 (see document 17), reported that the Devil offered her “money, silkes, fine cloaths.”52 When witches testified about gatherings at their Sabbaths, they recounted witches adorned in fabulous garments that were forbidden by sumptuary laws that restricted certain fabrics and colors to people of noble birth. Tituba, an enslaved woman from Barbados but probably of Indian, not African, descent, attested in Salem in 1692 that she saw women wearing silk hoods at a Sabbath she attended.53 In contrast, French, English, and Dutch observers who recorded their impressions of the people of the northeastern woodlands of North America marveled at their modest economies and at their generosity. In such circumstances, where people had to carry their possessions in their semi-sedentary economies and any gathered surplus could prove a burden, what could the Devil tempt people with? Indeed, as one Jesuit reported in 1634, when people are free of want, “not one of them gives himself to the Devil to acquire wealth.”54

Colonization, Witchcraft, and Resistance

Europeans regarded the contest for religious dominion in North America as a competition between gods—between the strong Christian God and weaker Indian deities that served Satan and resisted God’s rule. If the Devil ruled America, then the colonization efforts that took place there could only be comprehended as an epic struggle between good and evil.55 The connection between resistance and diabolism is especially important in the colonial context. Europeans believed the Devil was characterized above all by his pride. It was that trait that led him to challenge God’s dominion, to prefer (as John Milton put it in Paradise Lost) “to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.”56 Second to his pride, however, was his obstinacy, and the two were deeply intertwined. Resistance thus confirmed European suspicions about Indians and witchcraft in two ways, since those who resisted likely used sorcery as one of their weapons, and since Europeans understood other forms of resistance in terms of the diabolical witchcraft they already expected to find.

The growing evidence of the failure of Christian conversion, especially after decades of apparent success in New Spain in the sixteenth century, encouraged despondent priests to look to the Devil as the cause. They blamed him for deceiving the Spanish with false conversions. Some priests worried that converts used their old rituals in a new Christian form, and had been instructed on how to do so by the Devil.57 Especially insidious, Acosta explained, was the Devil’s habit of creating rituals that mimicked Christian practice. Thus Acosta reported monasteries of virgins in Peru and women in Mexico who lived like nuns for the space of a year. The consecration of Indian priests with sweet-smelling oils was another trick of Satan—these oils were made of noxious animal excretions. It was a simple step to conclude, as Acosta did, that the gods of the Americans were identical to the Devil.58 And the Devil encouraged resistance to the Christian message. When the Jesuits encountered Tepehuan Indians in North America in the early seventeenth century who did not want to convert to Christianity, they readily blamed Tepehuan religious leaders whom they identified as witches.59

Even a priest who initially had doubts about the presence of the Devil found that his experience among the Indians of New France altered his views. The French Jesuit Paul Le Jeune (1591–1664) originally thought that the Devil was in South America but was not pervasive in New France. There were sorcerers there, he believed, but not the Devil himself. But knowledge, it turns out, can breed distrust as well as understanding. The more Le Jeune learned of the Indians among whom he lived and preached, the more he began to believe that the Devil was in their midst. His view was reinforced by Indian resistance to his Christian message.60 In the end, the Jesuits in New France came to rely on Satan as a way to explain Indian resistance to Christian conversion.

Europeans associated resistance of all sorts, both to conversion and to secular rule, with diabolism. One case from northern New Spain reveals the connection. In 1599, Spanish officials executed an Indian woman for witchcraft. She was a Guachichil Indian, and she was tried in the region of San Luis Potosí, a part of the northern frontier of New Spain that had only recently come under Spanish control. The Guachichiles were one of several hunter-gatherer tribes that resisted Spanish occupation and conquest between 1548 and 1590 in a protracted series of conflicts called the Chichimeca Wars. The Spanish, propelled by the discovery of silver in Zacatecas in 1546, were highly motivated to expand commerce and settlement into this region, and the result was regular conflict. The Spanish, and the sedentary Indians who accompanied them in their movement northward, feared the Guachichiles. “So frightening” were they, decorated with animal figures when they fought, “that they even scare mules.” But the Spanish moved from fear to irritation, irked by the “audacity” of the Indians who resisted their occupation.61

The link between witchcraft and resistance was not subtle in this case. Estimated at approximately sixty years old, the accused woman had endured the ravages of conquest. She lived in a neighborhood occupied by Tlaxcallan and Tarascan Indians who had been moved north with the Spanish. They were Christian converts. The alleged witch went into their churches, removed the sacred images, and broke the crosses. The Indians who reported the case to Spanish authorities were troubled by her powers as a witch. Indians were ready to follow her because she had threatened to destroy them if they did not—and they believed she had the ability to do so. She was alleged to have killed a Tarascan Indian with magic (by grazing his ear with a stick). She turned herself into animals (as Indian witches were believed to do, by both Indians and Spaniards), including a coyote, and transformed others into animals as well.62 She insisted that she had taken all of the Indian dead and made a pueblo for them—a village of the dead, a fitting symbol of the impact conquest had on Americans.

Witch beliefs were not simply religious; they had a political component, too, tangled as they were with resistance to properly constituted authorities. The Guachichil witch’s crime was not only her witchcraft; it was also her ability to persuade the Guachichiles to join her in her rejection of the symbols of Spanish rule. As one Guachichil attested (perhaps self-servingly), before the accused witch rebelled, all of the Indians were “quiet, peaceful, and calm, and because of the said Indian woman they have become stirred up and restless.”63 And so she was put to death. Spanish officials moved quickly, permitting no appeal, because the witch threatened Spanish security. The Spanish justice of the town whisked her to the gallows. There, she was executed in an especially cruel fashion, hanged by her feet until she died, a process that took several hours. A priest in the Andes similarly admitted that he had whipped three women not primarily because they were witches, but rather because their behavior encouraged others in their village to rise up against Spanish rule.64

The Spanish inclination to link resistance to their political dominion to witchcraft had the consequence of making witchcraft seem pervasive in the Americas where it had been of minor importance (in terms of executions and threats to community order) in Spain. In many respects, the same old notions of witchcraft continued in Spanish America, especially those centered on maleficia and love magic. These ideas played themselves out regularly in secular and ecclesiastical courts in New Mexico (see below). But a new element emerged in the context of colonization and resistance, and that was the association of witchcraft with armed resistance to Spanish authority. In this respect, witches were not only rebels against godly order (as they were throughout Europe), but also armed rebels bent on overthrowing established governments.

The Spanish confronted two major uprisings in North America in the seventeenth century, first between 1616 and 1620 at Tepehuan in the province of Nueva Vizcaya (established in 1563), and a second, the Pueblo Revolt, in New Mexico in 1680.65 Santa Fe de Nuevo México (New Mexico’s original and full name) was established in 1598. Both regions lay within the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The second revolt was so successful that it removed the Spanish from the region for some ten years. Missionaries, the Jesuits in the case of the first episode and the Franciscans in the case of the second, blamed both resistance movements on the Devil.66 Each revolt had been preceded by growing doubts of Indian converts, who were questioning both the Christian message and the entire colonial project. In both resistance movements, the indigenous leaders whom the Spanish defined as demons and witches organized millenarian movements, predicting a more perfect world and the restoration of indigenous society once pernicious outside influences were removed (see documents 4 and 5).

In the Tepehuan revolt, at least 200 Spaniards and their allies were killed, including 10 priests. Some 4,000 Tepehuanes died. The rebels destroyed numerous symbols of Spanish occupation, including mines, missions, and settlements, in Sierra Madre Occidental. They staged mock religious processions, and then desecrated the objects, flogging statues and shredding crucifixes. They deliberately humiliated priests, mocking them with Latin before clubbing them to death.67 The most elaborate account (see document 4) of the revolt came from the pen of a Jesuit, Andrés Pérez de Ribas, in his History of the Triumphs of the Holy Faith among the Most Barbarous and Fierce People of the New World (1645). Pérez de Ribas had a simple explanation for what had transpired in the Tepehuan revolt: the leader of the revolt, a man named Quautlatas, was the antichrist, and the other leaders were demons.68 This explanation was important to Pérez de Ribas—and to the Spaniards—
because, to them, the uprising was otherwise inexplicable, and with no logical material explanation, they turned to a logical supernatural one: The revolt was the work of the Devil.69 One reason the Tepehuan revolt was so hard for Spaniards to fathom was that it arose after many years of Spanish activity in the region. Missionary activity had commenced with two Franciscans in 1555, and the Jesuits began their own work in 1596.70 This interpretation of the uprising as diabolically inspired was useful not only in making sense of its unexpected nature and of the Tepehuanes’ assault on churches, missionaries, and religious symbols; it also helped to inspire and justify a counterattack, since those who punished the Tepehuanes were striking at Satan himself.71

This link between resistance and witchcraft was especially charged during the Pueblo revolt six decades later because of the character of Spanish expansion in New Mexico. The Spanish had started exploring the region in the early sixteenth century, soon after their conquest of the Mexica in the Valley of Mexico. But concerted settlement efforts did not get underway in New Mexico until the early seventeenth century. Even then, the Spanish presence—in numbers—was sparse. Important features distinguished New Mexico’s early decades and shaped the context in which the Pueblo Revolt emerged and was understood by priests and secular officials. The Franciscans who traveled to New Mexico experienced some rapid successes in their conversion efforts—at least as they measured success and as they understood the fragile faith of the neophytes. By 1608, ten years after the first mission was established, several thousand Indians had converted to Christianity. As had been the case with the rapid success of evangelical efforts in the Valley of Mexico in the sixteenth century, these new converts to Catholicism were useful weapons in Europeans’ religious conflicts, offering living symbols of the vitality and expansion of the Catholic Church at a time when it endured attacks and retrenchment in Europe.

Because of the missionaries’ apparent success, the Spanish crown was loath to abandon the territory despite the absence of any obvious sources of wealth. And also because of their missionary accomplishments, the priests gained a powerful sense of their importance to the fate of the colony. They challenged the authority of the state, and there was regular friction between the colony’s governors and the priests. The Indians often emerged as pawns in these struggles. Missionaries required access to Indians to justify their presence in New Mexico, but if there were to be any sort of viable and profitable colonial state in the region, colonial officials needed to find ways to benefit from Indian labor and resources. Thus, governors had to ensure the cooperation of Indians and were not always willing to enforce the Church’s decrees against concubinage or ceremonial dances. This latitude permitted many indigenous practices to endure, but only if they were tolerated by governors.72

The 1670s were a difficult time for the Pueblos, especially during the rule of Governor Juan Francisco Treviño (1675–1677), who prohibited many
important religious practices. He even ordered the unprecedented destruction of the kivas, which are sacred ceremonial underground chambers. Famine in 1670 was followed by death and pestilence and by Apache and Navajo raids in 1672. Sandwiched between raids by nomadic tribes, demands on their labor by Spanish officials and settlers, and violent assaults on their rituals by whip-wielding Franciscans, distraught and angry Pueblos turned to their ancient gods in time-honored ceremonies to ask for rain and fertility, while their religious practitioners used their magic to curse Christians and steal their hearts (a traditional form of Pueblo witchcraft).73 In response, the governor launched a massive witch hunt.74 In 1675, Treviño brought some forty-seven accused witches to Santa Fe for trial with allegations that they had bewitched a priest and other people and had even killed ten people, including seven friars. Three of the accused were hanged, and all the rest (except one man who hanged himself) were punished in various ways.75 The testimonies in the wake of the revolt (see document 5) speak directly to the hostility these actions generated among the Pueblos, and they played a crucial role in sparking the revolt. In 1680, some 17,000 Pueblos rose against a Spanish population numbering only several hundred, and in the wake of the revolt, 20 (out of 41) Franciscans were dead, as were 380 Spanish soldiers and colonists.76

The Spanish saw the Devil in the Pueblo Revolt. Spanish officials paid close attention to testimony given after the revolt by Indians who claimed that the revolt’s leader, Popé, had communicated with the Devil (see document 5). Witchcraft emerged as a crucial explanation for the revolt, not only in explaining its timing and personnel, but also in helping the Spanish make sense of the targets of Pueblo attack. One of the men whipped in the 1675 witch hunt was Popé. It was Popé who emerged to lead the revolt in 1680, and it was Popé who articulated a vision of a new society, one in which all Spanish influences were expunged and the old gods restored. The millenarian visions that were conveyed so fully in the Tepehuan and Pueblo uprisings, the expectation that the Spanish could be dislodged and old gods restored, were classic expressions of revolts that took place within the first two generations of conquest. In these first decades of occupation and invasion, indigenous people still adhered to precontact religious beliefs and worldviews, and these beliefs empowered shamans and soldiers alike to combat the upheavals caused by epidemic disease, forced labor, and disrupted ritual life.77 To Europeans, these uprisings and their religious goals looked like witchcraft.

One unusual feature of the historical scholarship on witchcraft in the Americas is the extent to which historians often agree with the interpretation of European colonizers that witchcraft was indeed a form of resistance. In this interpretation, Indians, mestizos, Africans, and others practiced witchcraft (as defined by both themselves and Europeans) and used these practices actively to strike at and to thwart Europeans and those who occupied their territory, claimed their labor, displaced them from their homes, assaulted them sexually, and transformed their world.78 Irene Silverblatt, for example, argues that Andean women who confessed to witchcraft likely believed themselves to be witches and that their pact with the Devil “was a symbol of their alienation from a society which offered them little more than despair. It was their attempt to gain power in a society in which they were powerless.”79 In their study of the Abiquiu outbreak (1756–1763), Malcolm Ebright and Rick Hendricks similarly argue that witchcraft was indeed being practiced in this major New Mexico episode, and that the Indians there “used witchcraft against the Franciscans as a form of resistance to Christianization.”80

Historians studying witchcraft in Europe or British America tend not to write frequently about witches as people expressing or seeking social or cultural power. Not least because so many European witches were women, people for the most part without equal legal status in their societies, witches tend to evoke historians’ sympathy for the terrible plight in which they found themselves. Mary Lee, an elderly woman traveling alone who was murdered as a witch by frightened sailors on their journey to Maryland, is a perfect case in point (see document 9). Other accused witches were entangled in legal systems in which it was sometimes very difficult to prove innocence, especially given the willingness of courts to apply different standards to witch trials and to allow apparitions to be evidence of guilt (see document 24). Many of these accused witches may well have been guilty of witchcraft as it had come to be defined under evolving European statutes—that is, the practice even of white magic was punishable by death.81 But their ordeals, the sheer number of executed women, the horrifying accounts of their torture, all combined with the conviction of most historians that these women could not have been guilty of the crimes they admitted (copulating with Satan, flying through the air, giving birth to salamanders, turning into werewolves) has tended to result in representations of these women as victims—of new legal cultures, of economic transformations, of state consolidation, of times of famine and drought and war and fear, of unexpected consequences of a fractured religious world. Witchcraft seems less a form of resistance than a terrible fate that befell marginal figures in a changing world.

The preoccupation by colonizers about witchcraft and resistance to European occupation and rule has the inadvertent consequence of turning indigenous witchcraft practices into actions whose main purpose was to react to external forces, and makes it harder for us to see how witchcraft functioned within indigenous communities to address concerns that were unconnected to European invasions. And of course it continues to be difficult to determine what the “witches” themselves might have thought they were doing. Were they resisting? Or were they simply engaging in customary practices to solve problems? It is hard to tell whether, by ascribing such power to witches, we are adopting their perspective, or that of their accusers, and thus in fact perpetuating their victimization. Readers are urged to draw their own conclusions about these matters in their analysis of the documents in section II.

New Mexico

For all the European conviction that Indians were linked by their very nature to the Devil, only in one part of North America did Indian “witches” appear regularly in colonial courts. This was in Spanish America, and it was an unexpected outcome of colonization, since the lack of Spanish interest in prosecuting witches in Europe hardly predicted the increased numbers of witches in New Spain. Witchcraft was a central feature of life in New Mexico, from the first Spanish forays into the region through the major outbreak in Abiquiu. The last witchcraft case handled by the Inquisition was in 1800. The Inquisition was a long-standing institution devoted to rooting out heresy, and witchcraft cases often fell within its purview. As Spaniards confronted Indians, and devised racial and cultural systems that placed Europeans, Africans, and Indians in relation to each other, they yoked feminine attributes to some of these non-Europeans. And, colonizers believed, just as weak European women attached themselves to Satan, so too did Indians.

Numerous cases found their way to colonial courts, both those operated by the Inquisition and those managed by civil officials. The first witchcraft allegations that caught the notice of Spanish officials in New Mexico were made in 1626 (the same year as the very first case in the English colonies, contained in document 8), when an Indian woman and her mestiza daughter were accused of sorcery and of using their powers on two Indian servants, both of whom sickened and died. Both women were also accused of love magic: the mother took revenge on a lover, who died, and the daughter, who was married, was accused of infidelity with a lover whom she allegedly poisoned and killed. Accusers alleged that the women were able to transport themselves at night, traveling abroad in an egg to spy on their lovers. After accusations in 1626 and 1628, the charges were investigated in 1631. Skeptical of these claims, officials declined to pursue the case.82

In the 1626 case, the accused witches targeted other Indians, but numerous cases from New Mexico reveal the intersecting lives of colonists, Indians, and enslaved Africans. Their entangled lives produced entangled practices, along with ample need for the remedies promised by witchcraft. As early as 1629, a Spanish cowboy named Luis de Rivera, who was denounced to the Inquisition for making a pact with the Devil, confessed that he had sought an herb from an Indian that he could use on a fast day to attract the attention of a woman. His consultation with an Indian expert suggests that he had absorbed the Spanish notion that Indians were likely witches. And in that same year, he continued, he met an African who introduced him to demonology. Rivera was born in Seville and went to Mexico when he was thirteen, and it is interesting that it was his journey out of Europe and to the New World that introduced him to not one but two new forms of magical and religious practice. The African sold Rivera a book with demons painted in it. The African’s belief (as reported by Rivera) that the Devil was powerful suggests that the man was a Christian (or possibly a skilled salesmen), and it is also possible that Rivera’s confession was designed to play into the cultural assumptions that Spanish officials had—that Indians and Africans were likely to be witches and to consort with the Devil.83 This recourse to indigenous practitioners was in fact commonplace in much of Latin America. Indians, Africans, and people of mixed race found careers as healers—curanderos, as they were called. In a witchcraft trial in New Mexico in 1708, two Indians, Juanchillo and Josepha, called as witnesses in the case, reported to the court that they worked as healers and had cured many Spaniards (see document 12). Widely accepted as legitimate and skilled healers, sometimes curanderos were reported to the Inquisition and accused of being witches or sorcerers by their own clients.84

A New Mexico case in 1733 hints at the intersection of healing, witchcraft, and the law. In that year, an Isleta Indian named Melchor Trujillo was accused of bewitching two Spaniards, who fell sick. If Trujillo touched them, he could either heal them or make them worse. Trial depositions revealed that the victims seemed to have had a prior relationship with the accused Indian since they testified that they had received peyote from him—perhaps seeking his expertise for cures or magic. Trujillo, who was a cacique (or leader) of the Isleta pueblo, confessed that he had practiced witchcraft with numerous other Indians. In their witchcraft, they used idols and he described other indigenous practices, including rubbing rocks and using the rocks’ dust in their magic. The accused gave the officials a variety of objects, including four dolls, rocks, and a string with beads. Trujillo also reported that there were several Spanish victims, although precisely because the victims had also sought the assistance of the alleged witches, and because of some difficulties with interpreters, officials had trouble sorting out who the witches and
victims were—a legal morass that resulted in part from Spanish expectations of magical and medical help from Indian curers (and witches).85

Europeans linked products unique to the Americas and important to indigenous ritual life, such as peyote and tobacco, to diabolical practice as well. Peyote is a small, spineless cactus; the name comes from the Nahuatl word, peyotl. Inquisition records from 1631 and 1632 suggest some of peyote’s uses in New Mexico: it could help a person suffering from bewitchment to identify the witch, and once the witch was revealed, the possessed person would be able to recover. Peyote could also enable a person to have visions that would show who was traveling through New Spain en route to Santa Fe, just the type of unnatural knowledge that Europeans associated with witchcraft. Peyote might help one recover lost objects, and it had medicinal powers, too, since one man of mixed Spanish and African descent reported that he had been told it was a good palliative for a broken arm.86 The Inquisition tended to be hostile to hallucinogenic drugs offered by indigenous healers, especially those drugs that caused users to fall into trances or that helped users to gain contact with the sacred world.87

Tobacco proved similarly puzzling to Europeans, who were not sure if the plant was diabolical. Europeans learned how to consume tobacco first from Americans, and then from experienced Europeans who brought new habits of consumption across the Atlantic with them. But tobacco also featured in theological discussions. Was it a suitable food for Christians? Could it be consumed during Lent? If America was the home of the Devil, what about the plants that were unique to the Devil’s lair? The first chroniclers of the New World latched on to Native American beliefs that tobacco was a sacred substance and transformed them, ultimately perceiving tobacco as supernatural and demonic.88 And so it is no surprise that tobacco crops up in Europe in the context of witch accusations and trials. The women of the Labourd grew tobacco plants in their gardens and smoked the substance, according to the Jesuit witch-hunter Pierre de Lancre, both to clear their heads and to stave off hunger. The tobacco made them smell so bad that it inured the women to its terrible stench and made them more accepting of the still more dreadful smells of the Devil.89 The road to hell, it seems, was strewn with tobacco leaves. And in the same way that Europeans saw the Americas as Satan’s bastion, they supposed American people and American plants might be diabolical.

New Mexico witchcraft cases reveal a variety of features of colonial life in New Mexico that did not exist in other colonized areas of North America. For example, they show the physical proximity in which Indians and Europeans lived and the increasingly intertwined beliefs they shared—about power, about magic, about healing, and about witches. These characteristics of New Mexico society were especially pronounced after the Spanish returned to the colony in 1706. Witchcraft was so much a part of New Mexico in the eighteenth century that Ramón A. Gutiérrez has suggested that it was one of three main issues that affected life there (the other two being Indian attacks and the important economic and governmental reforms of the 1770s).90 Document 12 contains extensive excerpts from a trial in 1708 concerning a Spanish woman who believed that she had been bewitched by three Indian women. As the trial testimony unfolds, we learn of a tangled web of relationships, a cheating husband, a young and possibly exploited Indian woman, and a betrayed Spaniard.

Nothing comparable exists among the surviving records in British or French North America, at least as far as indigenous people are concerned. (Readers will have the opportunity to decide for themselves if witchcraft played a similar role in interactions between enslaved Africans and their owners in British America.) It was proximity in New Mexico that enabled Europeans to seek out Indian curers—and it was both the exploitation and new kinds of human relationships that prompted people to need solutions available from witches. Many Indians lived in Spanish households, and because the colony was constantly at war, there were always new Indian captives joining households, and so the number of Indians in Spanish settlements increased. These Indians lived in proximity to Spanish men—who often preyed on Indian women—and also had easy access to food, enabling them to poison those who hurt them. It was this proximity, and the fear Spaniards had of Indians in their midst, that produced so many accusations of witchcraft against Indian and mestiza women. Stories of sex and sexual power, of the sexual freedom of Spanish men, the hurt and humiliation of Spanish women, and the exploitation of and sometimes opportunities for Indian and mestiza women, emerge in these trials. It is no surprise that many of these eighteenth-century cases revolved around love magic.91 And Indians and Spaniards shared ideas about witchcraft, which is most fully illustrated during the big outbreak at Abiquiu in 1756–1763, when 38 percent of 176 accused witches were of European descent, and 62 percent were Indian.92

Spanish witch beliefs flourished and expanded in the New World. The “love magic” that Spaniards resorted to in Spain was of greater importance in the demographic and racial configurations of colonial society, as women sought to retain a husband’s loyalty, to repel unwanted attention, to retaliate against those who exploited them, or to get revenge. Amid shifting Spanish belief systems in the Americas, which linked Indians with witchcraft, and amid the disruptions Spanish occupation posed to indigenous lives, Spaniards and Indians found plausible witches everywhere.

New France

If witchcraft was everywhere in New Mexico, its presence was more episodic in other parts of North America. For many other Europeans—especially the French and Germans—settlement in North America offered fewer opportunities or venues for bringing charges of witchcraft. New France illustrates this shift. France lay in the heartland of Europe’s witch craze, and perhaps 1,000 people were executed there as witches. Canada was settled by the French precisely in the period of prosecutions. There were, for example, major outbreaks of possession in France in 1611 and 1634. In Normandy between 1600 and 1629, 119 people were condemned to death for witchcraft (although given the French system of appeal, only 59 people were executed).93 In 1608, during this period of intense witch activity, Samuel de Champlain launched a modest French settlement at Quebec, one dependent on Indian allies for its survival and commercial success. Missionaries joined French traders and soldiers in 1626, and the colony limped along, sustained by the fur trade and crucial diplomatic alliances with Hurons and Algonquian-speaking nations, and reaching a population of 356 (240 men and 116 women) in 1640.94

The French possessed an array of witch beliefs, but these beliefs found little traction in the altered circumstances in New France. Although those who migrated to New France seem to have carried their witch beliefs with them, there is no surviving evidence of any witch trials in New France. There was a reported case of demonic possession in Quebec around 1661, which allegedly resulted in an execution. Marie Catherine of Saint Augustine, a member of a religious order, was apparently quite preoccupied by demons.95 Her concern reveals important continuity with French cases of mass possession, which typically took place in convents, most famously at an Ursuline convent in Loudun in 1632–1634. Yet in New France there is no surviving documentary evidence that accusations there led to trials.

Why? There are a number of possible explanations. One centers on the status and position of the clergy. In France, priests played an especially important role in fostering witch beliefs. Parish priests were often poorly educated, and they relied in part on magic to sustain their status within the community. Their emphasis on magic occasionally led to priests themselves being accused of witchcraft. In the Normandy outbreak, for example, priests were accused of possessing books with diabolical incantations. Convicted priests endured especially gruesome torments. One defendant was ordered to make a public apology at Rouen’s cathedral, after which his tongue was pierced with a hot iron and he was hanged.96 If poorly trained priests could stimulate witch beliefs in France, such was not the case in New France, where there were not many priests; those who lived in the colony tended to have excellent educations; and they worked instead to combat beliefs in magic (as they identified it) among Indians, not to foster them. Also, the European inhabitants of New France proved not to be diligent attenders of mass. It was, in fact, Native Americans who were most likely to identify priests as witches (see documents 2 and 3).

Moreover, it is not clear how much the Jesuits of New France (who comprised the majority of priests there) worried about the Devil. Their attitude toward the Devil differed somewhat from that of their missionary counterparts in New Spain, where missionaries sought a spiritual conquest to accompany Spanish occupation. In New France, the church was weak, with priests few in number. Early missionary efforts (to Acadia from 1610 to 1616 and later Quebec) were aborted, and the Jesuits did not return in force until 1632. The total number of French—secular or religious—in the colony was small as well. Canada was not a place that the French could take over and occupy. Instead, the French sought to establish alliances among local populations. The success of such alliances was evident as early as 1609, when Champlain joined with Algonquian-speaking allies to fend off attacking soldiers of the Iroquois confederation. The French relied on harmonious relationships to secure access to furs, which were central to the colony’s economic success. Individual trappers became deeply involved in Indian communities, for example. So the priests who journeyed to New France, while eager to convert souls and always ready for the martyrdom that might await, did not have the expectations that shaped the aspirations—and angry disappointments—of priests in Central and South America. And these different aspirations affected their demonology, as, indeed, did the different indigenous groups they encountered, who did not have the complex and hierarchical religious institutions that fascinated and dismayed European observers in New Spain.

The language Jesuits in New France used to describe Satan and his minions was mocking, derisive, contemptuous—not language conveying the specter of a terrifying enemy. François-Joseph Le Mercier (see document 2), for example, referred to a sorcerer’s “pranks.”97 Jesuits described indigenous demons as fraudulent and marginal, not powerful and central. Jesuits believed that there was little doubt that Indian shamans worked with the assistance of the Devil, but the Jesuits also thought that they would be able to control these shamans, and perhaps even find ways to expose shamans as frauds.98 Unlike other places and times (such as Salem in 1692 or Abiquiu in 1756), where ardent religious leaders played crucial roles in sparking witch outbreaks, the Jesuits in New France do not seem to have engendered such events.

Other factors played a role as well in preventing the expression of witch beliefs in trials in New France, at least as far as surviving evidence indicates. As any study of witchcraft trial records suggests, witch accusations often depended on familiarity. Testimonies suggest the intimacy of communal life: witnesses peered through windows, listened over hedges, barged in uninvited, slept in the next room, or shared a bed or a pallet on the floor. For the most part, victims knew their accusers personally, and those accusations lodged against strangers tended to be discounted by investigating officials. So witch beliefs and accusations were embedded in the particular fabric of a given society. The depositions in documents 8, 10, and 12 all hint at just such relationships. Accusers presented a litany of grievances, some stemming from disputes over twenty years in the past. People who lived in dispersed family units, not in clustered villages, tended to have fewer opportunities to develop these relationships.

In New France, the basic residential unit was the family farm, not the village, even though French officials endeavored to get people to settle in villages. Moreover, these New France settlements were, just like the colony, new, without the long-standing relationships, family conflicts, and webs of obligation that sustained witch accusations in Europe. New France also had fewer of the marginal, economically impoverished, elderly women who were perceived as burdensome and became targets of accusation in some regions of France. New France, like most newly settled colonies in the Americas, contained more men than women, and those women who survived to old age often had children to care for them.99 Finally, the inhabitants of New France came from all regions of France. The two most dominant were Normandy (14.5 percent of immigrants) and Ile-de-France (14.3 percent), with every other part of the kingdom represented. Beliefs about magic, sorcery, and witchcraft had pronounced regional peculiarities in France, and so the beliefs immigrants transferred represented this same heterogeneity. The dominance of migrants from Normandy might have predicted that this region’s beliefs (about male witches, shepherds, toads, and magical priests) would prevail, but the key ingredients—the poorly trained priests and the shepherds—were missing.100 Thus the religious, economic, demographic, and geographic context that shaped the legal expression of witch beliefs in France did not exist in New France. Witchcraft beliefs, however, were abundant in the region, and the Indians who comprised the majority of the population continued to identify and punish witches, French and Indian alike, according to their own processes (see documents 2 and 3).

British North America

In the English colonies in North America, in contrast, witch beliefs did plant themselves, and very firmly, too, in some regions. Most witchcraft trials took place in New England (the region containing the colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Rhode Island, New Haven, and Connecticut), where approximately 355 people were accused of witchcraft and of those, 103 (29 percent) were brought to trial between 1620 and 1725.101 In New England, witches were punished more severely than in England; while conviction rates were comparable, punishments were harsher.102 Bermuda, a colony with as much puritanical zeal as the colonies of Massachusetts, New Haven, and Connecticut, experienced a witch hunt in the 1650s and 6 witches were executed between 1651 and 1655.103

Only a handful of cases went to court in other colonies. Just one person, for example, is known to have been executed in Maryland as a witch: Rebecca Fowler, who was put to death in October 1685 for hurting people in Calvert County.104 Virginia had only one guilty verdict for a witch in the seventeenth century, and that for a man, who was whipped and banished in 1656. Both colonies experienced the same kind of demographic circumstances as New France. The colonies’ sex ratios, with their acute shortages of women, may have dissuaded European inhabitants of the Chesapeake from turning on the few who were there with charges of witchcraft.105

Yet despite the scarcity of women and the absence of witchcraft executions, there were certainly witch beliefs and accusations in Virginia. Archaeological evidence is suggestive. A “witch bottle” found in Virginia Beach, at the site of a seventeenth-century house, provides evidence of witch beliefs in the area. This bottle contained pins and nails and was buried in an inverted position. In keeping with English beliefs, the burial of such a bottle was intended to lift a curse and to turn the pain back on the witch.106 The location of the bottle suggests that it might have been deployed against the region’s well-known witch, Grace Sherwood, who appeared in court numerous times to face her accusers over the span of eight years from 1698 to 1706 (see document 10).

And although witchcraft trials may have been rare in Virginia, the first known witch accusations in the English colonies to find their way to court appeared there in 1626, after almost twenty years of English settlement in the Chesapeake. Some thirteen neighbors and acquaintances of Goodwife Wright, of Kickotan, accused her of a range of offenses, especially foretelling deaths and hindering hunting (document 8). The accusations against Wright and her response before the Virginia Council illustrate one of the important features of English beliefs—the relative insignificance of the Devil and the Devil’s pact. Both elements would emerge as characteristics in outbreaks (see Salem documents 19–24), but for the most part witchcraft accusations in English colonies centered not on diabolism but rather on maleficia.

Wright’s case was early in the history of English settlement in North America. New Englanders did not execute a witch until 1647 (Alice Young in Connecticut, followed by the execution of Margaret Jones in Massachusetts in 1648), after almost twenty years of settlement. In this respect, the pattern of accusations and, more critically, of interest by authorities in pursuing these matters emerged with the same timing we see in Virginia, almost twenty years after first settlement in each case, although the regions of the Chesapeake and New England otherwise followed very different patterns. Virginia was characterized by high mortality and male-dominated migration for most of the seventeenth century. New England was settled between 1630 and 1642 in a big wave called the Great Migration, and families predominated. The colonists tended to be Puritans.107 In New England, moreover, witchcraft emerged as a permanent fixture of colonial life, unlike Virginia. In New England, the accused witch was likely to be a woman (79 percent of accused witches between 1620 and 1725 were female, and women represented 80 percent of all executed witches), but she was no longer certain to be poor, as was still the case in England. Poor and elderly women were still overrepresented among New England’s accused witches, but they were joined by wealthier neighbors, in a pattern distinctive to the region.108 The execution of Ann Hibbens in 1656 was a case in point.

Ann Hibbens lived in Boston and was the widow of a prominent New England merchant named William Hibbens. William had only recently died, and Ann Hibbens found herself called before the magistrates in May to face accusations of witchcraft. She was alleged to have unnatural knowledge, a sure clue that someone was a witch. In Hibbens’s case, she had the misfortune to guess—correctly—that two neighbors she spied talking in the street were talking about her. Although a search of her body revealed no telltale witches’ marks, and her home yielded no poppets (or dolls) with which she might work her magic, Hibbens went to trial. She was a woman of considerable wealth. She was not the type of woman who often found herself accused of the crime of witchcraft in England—poor, alone, on the margins of society, perhaps with a reputation as a healer. She was, however, like other accused women, perceived as prone to discontent. She had been embroiled in a case before the Boston church in 1640 over disagreements with some carpenters about their charges for some home repairs. Unable to come to a harmonious agreement with the tradesmen or to satisfy church elders who required her to submit to their authority, Hibbens was expelled from the church. Still, her high status should have protected her in 1656. Her husband had been a magistrate of the colony, a position awarded to very few men. The magistrates afforded her the respect due her station, giving her the honorific of “Mrs.” Indeed, they recoiled at the first verdict, and sent the case back for retrial, but to no avail. The second verdict came back guilty as well, and Hibbens was hanged in Boston in June.109

Why were wealthy, prominent women in New England accused of witchcraft, in stark contrast to the poor, marginal women who were usually the targets of such accusations in England (and Europe generally)? The historian Carol F. Karlsen examined New England inheritance practices and detected an intriguing pattern. Women who were accused of witchcraft were often women who had inherited land from husbands, fathers, or brothers in the absence of male heirs. The normal English pattern was for male heirs to receive and control property. But 61 percent of accused female witches had no brothers or sons to inherit their property, and such women were more likely to be prosecuted (64 percent), found guilty (76 percent) and executed (89 percent).110 It is an interesting correlation, and Karlsen does not suggest that the accusations were conscious or deliberate, but it is difficult to know what to make of it. Men, after all, wrote wills, and they could leave land to whomever they wished. If women’s inheritance was so disruptive, why did so many men leave land to women?

Karlsen links these fears of propertied women to larger issues in seventeenth-century New England about power and control over resources. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the imbalanced sex ratios of the first decades had evened out. New England’s large families, a departure from typical English family size, put great pressure on parental resources, and children competed with each other and with fathers who were reluctant to pass on their property as they sought land and dowries for themselves.111 The conflict was especially intense between fathers and sons, but Karlsen suggests that sons were unable to make direct accusations against their fathers. Nor, indeed, could they accuse their mothers, although in some cases long-lived mothers and the widow’s legal claim on one-third of her deceased husband’s property delayed a son’s access to family resources. These resentments manifested themselves not as actions against the actual source of the problem, but rather as witchcraft accusations expressed against older women—especially those who held property.112

These findings of internal family tension echoed conclusions drawn by John Demos, one of the most active proponents of the value of psychology in the study of witchcraft. He focuses on the “innerlife” dimension, those
interior emotions, derived from personal—normally familial—experiences, that shaped how individuals interacted with the world beyond the family. Demos’s analysis of New England witchcraft statistics persuaded him to examine the issues facing middle-aged women and young men (who together comprised 49 percent of victims of witchcraft).113 Demos focuses on the sexuality of the women—menopausal, he characterizes them—and he points to the difficult transition women might experience during these years. The young men were wrestling with their own internal demons—in their case, the desire for personal autonomy in an economy in which fathers held on to land often until their death.

Demos also examines the content of trial testimony for what it reveals about New England fantasies about witches. What did witches do? They attacked, making people and animals sick, in some cases causing dramatic physical collapses. They coveted, demanding assistance, food, lodging, and comfort. They intruded, pushing themselves in where they were not wanted, poking about, appearing in bedrooms. Trial testimonies, moreover, demonstrate that witches had a special interest in infants. The search of an accused witch’s body for hidden marks—especially teats—points to the centrality of the association between witches and maternity.114 His psychological approach thus agrees with some of Karlsen’s findings about family tensions across generations and sons’ concerns about inheritance.

Numerous studies of witchcraft in New England have revealed some of the peculiarities of colonial life and how these affected witchcraft beliefs in this region. But there is one further oddity about English witch beliefs and their connection to overseas migration: the English killed women as witches even on their initial voyages to the colonies. These cases expose the framework migrants and travelers carried with them. They knew who witches were likely to be and the kinds of behavior that witches engaged in, and when they saw people conforming to these images, they launched accusations. These shipboard executions challenge some of the long-standing conventions in the study of witchcraft, such as that accusations emerged out of familiarity and proximity.

When Europeans boarded ships to travel across the Atlantic, they undertook what was always a risky and often a terrifying voyage. Those who owned enough property to want to safeguard its disposition took care to write wills before they traveled; others must have clung to relatives and friends as they prepared for what was almost always a permanent parting. On board ship, people were flung into each other’s company. The practices that people pursued to help ensure good fortune came with them. One indentured servant named Judith Catchpole allegedly performed magic on board ship during her crossing to Maryland in the winter of 1655–1656.115 Although we do not know what prompted the rituals, it is easy enough to imagine the circumstances that would encourage a traveler to seek extra assistance, through magical means, for a safe and healthy passage.

On other voyages, women were identified as witches, and in some cases executed. Three women were hanged on board ships on their way to the English colonies in the Chesapeake, Mary Lee on her way to Maryland in 1654 (see document 9), Elizabeth Richardson, bound for Maryland in 1658 or 1659, and Katherine Grady on her way to Virginia in 1658.116 And one vessel reached Bermuda in that same troubled decade with two women on board who were soon identified by their fellow travelers as witches. Court records characterized all three of the Chesapeake travelers as old. Possibly there was something about these women’s behavior—either physical manifestations, maladies, odd spasms, muttered prayers, superstitious acts, or unpleasant dispositions—that marked them as witches. Certainly their rapid identification by their fellow travelers points to the tenacity of English expectations about witches: that they were likely to be elderly women and that they could be a particular menace at sea.

Another explanation for their murders comes from the dreadful storms that plagued Grady’s and Lee’s Atlantic journeys. That witches could conjure storms was a long-standing element of English and Scottish witch beliefs. One of the earliest cases from Scotland featured just such a fear. James VI of Scotland and his new wife, Anne of Denmark, were caught in a terrible storm on their return from Denmark to Scotland. At least seventy, and possibly as many as a hundred, accused witches were rounded up at Berwick in 1590. Under torture many confessed to, among other things, conjuring a storm to sink the ship and murder the king and queen, a crime that was considered, because of the alleged targets, to be treason using sorcery. A large—but unfortunately unknown—number of the accused were executed for their crimes (see figure 5).117

Two examples from English popular culture in the seventeenth century hint at the pervasiveness of these ideas. William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, first performed by 1611 and probably written between 1603 and 1607, famously opens with three witches conjuring in the midst of thunder and lightning. The witches in Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689), an English opera based on Virgil’s Aeneid, conjure two such storms, one on land to drive Dido away from a grove and another at sea to destroy the Trojan fleet. Virgil’s version contained no witches; the addition of the characters in Purcell’s opera (probably by the librettist Nahum Tate, who based his libretto on his own witch-laden 1678 play, Brutus of Alba, or The Enchanted Lovers) reflects the importance of such figures in English culture and the dramatic value of their actions for the opera.118

One other context might explain the concentration of cases in the 1650s. Two historians, Christine Leigh Heyrman and Elaine Forman Crane, have suggested that women accused of witchcraft in this decade about whom we otherwise know little may have been Quakers.119 The Quakers were part of a new religious movement that emerged in England in the 1640s. They adhered to what was then regarded as a radical doctrine: that the spirit of God (what they referred to as the inner light) lay within each person. They were aggressively egalitarian in an era of hierarchy. They rejected trained clergy, organized churches, and formal, written doctrine. Because the spirit of God lay within all, anyone could preach the word, which shocked observers in an era when women, children, and untrained men were barred from public professions of faith. Quakers dispersed throughout the world to preach their leveling message, and almost everywhere met hostility from orthodox religious structures and governments. The first Quakers sailed to the colonies in 1655, and in the next few years they visited all the mainland colonies in addition to Bermuda, Barbados, and Jamaica. Banished from Massachusetts, four brave Quakers returned and were hanged between 1659 and 1661 for their pains, the only instances in British America of Protestants dying because of their religious beliefs.120

In their opposition to the new movement, Puritans and mainstream Anglicans readily linked Quakers and witchcraft, and the association was especially acute for Quaker women. In 1656, the magistrates of Massachusetts suspected two Quaker missionaries of witchcraft and had their bodies searched for the tell-tale witches’ marks. The Salem minister John Higginson, dismayed that members of his congregation joined the Friends, compared the Quaker idea of the “inner light” to “the Devil’s Sacrifice.” Another cleric, the distinguished minister Increase Mather, wrote in a 1684 publication that Quakers practiced black magic and were likely to experience demonic possession. It is possible that Quakers may have been singled out as witches in Salem in 1692.121 Witchcraft accusations, however, could intersect with Quakerism in another way, encouraging disaffected people, whether those accused of witchcraft or those repelled by the whole enterprise, to join the Friends. Such was the case for Sarah Hood Bassett, who languished in prison for nine months during the Salem outbreak as an accused witch. After her release, her extended family joined the Salem Quaker meeting.122

While the oceanic murders of accused witches and depositions at colonial trials reveal the transmission of many elements of English witch beliefs to North America, the English were not the only Europeans to inhabit English colonies. One distinctive feature of English colonial settlements was authorities’ willingness to integrate continental Europeans, particularly Protestants from the Holy Roman Empire (mostly from the region we today call Germany), the Netherlands, and France. Many of these continental Europeans came from lands immersed in witch-hunting, especially those from the Holy Roman Empire, where about half of all prosecutions for witchcraft—perhaps as many as 45,000—took place. There was no territory in the Americas claimed or administered by German-speaking people, but many Germans did immigrate to the British colonies of North America. The migration started small—maybe only 300 migrated to Pennsylvania before 1709—but then the numbers picked up, and by 1775, as many as 84,500 German-speaking people had made the trip.123 The main German migration transpired well after the peak of the European witch hunts (in contrast to the migrations of the English and French to the Americas in the seventeenth century, which occurred during ongoing waves of witch hunts), but certainly the memory of the trials endured and so did the belief system and magical practices. Indeed, the tenacity of these beliefs is striking. But we do not find evidence of witch trials in Pennsylvania, where the vast majority of Germans settled (others went to North Carolina and, later, Georgia). A variety of factors explain this relative silence.

The colonial legal culture where continental Europeans settled did not support witch accusations. Although most English people, Puritan, Quaker, or orthodox Anglican, believed in witchcraft, the laws of England against witchcraft did not always make the trip across the Atlantic. Pennsylvania is a good case in point. The detailed laws devised by William Penn and the colony’s first settlers said nothing about witchcraft. Not until 1717 was the English witchcraft statute of James I added to the existing laws by the Pennsylvania assembly.124

Even when accusations made it to court, juries and judges were skeptical. One case that did end up in court involved English, Dutch, and Swedes, all meeting around maleficia. The colony of New Sweden (south of Pennsylvania, in what is now Delaware) was established by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1638. Inhabited mostly by Swedes and Finns and a motley assortment of Northern Europeans, the colony endured until 1654. When the English settled in Pennsylvania, there were still many inhabitants of the defunct colony living in the Delaware Valley. Two colonists, Margaret Mattson and Yeshro Hendrickson, were charged with witchcraft and brought before the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania in February 1684. A Swede acted as their interpreter in the trial, during which they were accused by English and Dutch witnesses of maleficia. The testimony revealed some of the long-standing community connections that shaped witch accusations in this period. One witness, for example, asserted that he had been told twenty years earlier that Mattson was a witch. Others spoke of injuries Mattson brought to their cows. The jury determined that Mattson was guilty of having the reputation of a witch, “but not guilty in manner and forme,” and released her to her husband and son; Hendrickson was released to her husband.125

Whether or not laws existed, however, or whether accusations found their way into a courtroom, people undoubtedly carried a wide range of beliefs with them, and these beliefs manifested themselves in practices that have come down to us as quaint folkloric customs. The hex sign, for example, adorns barns in Pennsylvania (see figure 6). But the first documented use of a hex sign, a pentagram or “witch’s foot” whose purpose is to ward off evil, was only in 1850, so we do not know if it was something that was part of the folkloric practices of the first German migrants.126 There is, however, extensive evidence of folkloric transmission of witch beliefs and practices in the eighteenth century. German migrants, particularly pietists who believed in an intensely personal and internal spiritual life, brought a range of mystical and magical religious practices with them. One such figure, Johannes Kelpius, even cast horoscopes for visitors from his cave outside Philadelphia along the banks of the Wissahickon in the late seventeenth century.127 In Pennsylvania, these mystical figures joined British Quakers, who also had occult beliefs, to the dismay of their leaders. Other Germans brought a host of curing and healing rituals that required special words and potions. German healers in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, for example, invoked the Trinity when healing wounds.128 Tempel Anneke, too, had healed with the words of the Trinity to assist her, calling out “in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” over a potion of brook weed blood and chick blood: she was executed as a witch in Germany in 1663.129

These practices dispersed as Germans made their way west and then south along the old wagon road, into Appalachia, where their geographic isolation enabled some of these traditions, including divination, charms, conjuring, and healing, to thrive.130 In Pennsylvania, these magical practices were called “powwow,” or Brauche (or Braucherie) in Pennsylvania Dutch. There is evidence of its practice by the middle of the eighteenth century in Pennsylvania. Charm books, including Albertus Magnus: Egyptian Secrets, existed to guide practitioners. Allegedly authored by a Dominican friar and natural philosopher called Albertus Magnus (1200–1280), named a Catholic saint in 1931, this work contains a variety of spells and recipes. The book first appeared in German in Pennsylvania in 1842; an English edition appeared thirty-three years later.131 Powwowers (who exist to this day, according to folklorists) seem to function as good witches: they can lift hexes, for example, and heal physical maladies with the appropriate use of charms and ritual incantations. In the Holy Roman Empire in the seventeenth century, all of this activity would have been defined as witchcraft. But in Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, these rituals became folkloric practice.

Africans and Their Descendants in North America

The largest non-British migrant population to travel to North America was Africans. As many as 481,000 Africans were forcibly transported to North America between 1619 and 1807 (the legal end of the slave trade).132 Most went to the British colonies of South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia, but a small number—about 28,300—went to Louisiana, the French-controlled territory at the mouth of the Mississippi that was claimed by Spain from 1763–1783 and later purchased by the United States in 1803. Only a small number lived in New Mexico.133

As seems to have been true for Germans, Africans, too, continued to believe and practice important elements of their old religions, and, like Germans, Africans often arrived in large concentrations of people of the same ethnicity and settled together. These conditions might ordinarily permit the endurance of Old World customs, rituals, and beliefs, but Africans, of course, lived in the violent and adverse conditions imposed by slavery, which hindered the transmission of culture. It is difficult to find good evidence of their witchcraft practices in colonies governed by the British.

The best evidence for African religious beliefs in the Americas comes from those places where Africans settled in sufficient numbers to be able to transmit and practice elements of the cultures they left behind—and where good sources, most notably Inquisition records, with their detailed depositions and close attention to religious beliefs, exist to uncover these practices. Brazil meets both requirements, and evidence from Inquisition records there from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggests what kinds of linkages might have endured. Witchcraft was not prosecuted frequently in Portugal. In Portuguese Brazil, however, it was a crime that Inquisitors pursued, that Portuguese and Africans alike feared, and that seems to have been an important meeting ground for both Africans and Europeans, as Europeans sought remedies from enslaved practitioners and accused slaves of bewitching them. In 1686, one slaveholder who believed his wife had been bewitched by one of his slaves then called on another enslaved woman to lift the curse with an herbal remedy. These beliefs proved to be long-lived. In the 1780s, for example, a Recife slaveholder called on an exorcist to release him from an inexplicable illness that had left him paralyzed for three years. The priest performed the exorcism to drive out the demons. The slaveholder expelled the requisite assortment of objects—a fish skeleton, some pieces of coal, a few cockroaches—and then looked to his human property for the culprits. Two witches were detected. One was sold at auction and the other was turned over to the Inquisition in Lisbon.134

For the British colonies, such evidence of witchcraft activity is much harder to come by. In order to discern African ideas about witchcraft in British colonies, for example, we need to have good sources, whether criminal records or other kinds of accounts provided by observers. Such evidence could have been generated by a European, but most areas of British settlement where Africans were abundant were also regions characterized by skepticism of witchcraft accusations. There is no evidence whatsoever, for example, of witchcraft trials in the places that received the majority of Africans (Barbados and Jamaica). Seventeenth-century Virginia and Maryland contained small African populations, both free and enslaved, but the few records of witchcraft activity there center on Europeans. By the eighteenth century, there were virtually no witchcraft trials at all. And those Europeans who bothered to record their observations needed to be familiar with slaves’ practices, to live in proximity, to be close observers, and to understand them. We do not, for example, find sources comparable to the Inquisition records available for New Spain or other parts of the Iberian world, with detailed and personal depositions that give us access to what people believed. Indeed, historians used to wonder whether it was even possible for any African practices to survive the ordeal of the Middle Passage. The historian Jon Butler called this shattering of African religious systems a “spiritual holocaust” in 1990. Most historians, however, argue that core features of West and Central African societies were reconstituted—often in new forms—in the Western Atlantic (see figure 7).135

Africans, like Europeans, found that the familiar context in which ideas about magic and witchcraft made sense changed across the Atlantic. In some places, Africans lived in such close proximity to Europeans and their
descendants that they ended up absorbing their beliefs, or understanding them sufficiently to echo them back to interrogators during trials. Such was the case in Salem, where a handful of enslaved people of African descent were accused of witchcraft and testified about their witch beliefs. An enslaved woman named Candy did just that, arguing that she was not a witch but that her white mistress was. The court did not indict her (see document 21). In other instances, African beliefs and European beliefs converged. When the ex-slave William Grimes, born in Virginia in 1784, recalled an encounter in 1811 with a witch in Savannah, he gave details of a hag attack—a nocturnal ordeal in which victims feel suffocated by a weight they believe to be a witch. He also suspected that the witch could change her shape. Hag attacks were an element of West-Central African witch beliefs, but these were also beliefs that people of European descent shared: Grace Sherwood’s neighbors in Virginia made just such accusations in 1698 (see document 10).136

Elsewhere, however, there is suggestive evidence that some African witchcraft beliefs may have survived—altered in their expression, perhaps, by the challenging dynamics of living in slavery, and not as intact belief systems, but present nonetheless. Archaeological evidence points to the endurance of a range of beliefs about magical practices and powers. Objects with possible ritual significance, including glass beads, amulets, and cowrie shells, found in excavations of slave quarters, might have been charms used for magical purposes.137 The anthropologist Jerome Handler examined an excavated grave in Barbados in one effort to discern the possible tenacity of West African ideas about witchcraft. A lone burial contained in a mound in a cemetery demonstrated anomalies with other burials. She was the only prone burial, for example; all others were supine. Dating from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, the burial occurred at a time when most enslaved workers on Barbados were African born and thus likely to adhere to African practices. The features of the burial, Handler argues, are inconsistent with other burials and in fact resemble mortuary practices used by West Africans (where most Barbados slaves came from in this period) to bury witches. Dangerous people were buried apart and sometimes covered with a mound. They were buried prone, like the excavated Barbados skeleton.138

Indeed, there is evidence that witch beliefs might even have increased in the Americas, which would be entirely consistent both with African notions that equated witches with greed and the abuse of power and with the new circumstances of violence and coercion in which enslaved Africans found themselves. In North America, for example, benevolent African deities receded in favor of the more frequent practice of sorcery. In this respect, we catch a glimpse of a slave’s perception that he lived in a world of enhanced evil. The parallel with Native Americans, who found evil to have increased in their world, too, with the onslaught of deadly epidemics, is pronounced. The heightened importance of malevolent practices and powers can be seen in the shifting meanings of words in Gullah, a language that emerged in the eighteenth-century South Carolina lowcountry as Africans from different regions who spoke multiple languages created a common tongue. It was created out of several African languages. The Ewe word fufu, meaning “dust,” survived in Gullah, but it acquired a more specific connotation of malevolence, transformed from benign dust into “a fine dust used with the intention of bewitching one or causing harm.” A Mende word, gafa, meaning “spirit” or “soul,” denoted an “evil spirit or devil” in Gullah.139 These shifts in words reveal the many ways in which beliefs mingled in the American context. Africans did not have—in Africa—an idea of the Devil. Europeans certainly did, and the transformed Mende word gafa from “spirit” into “evil spirit”—or Devil—suggests the transformations that were underway as slaves absorbed aspects of Christian doctrine and confronted the horrors of enslavement.

Figure 1. English witches calling to their familiars.

Source: Matthew Hopkins, The discovery of witches (London, 1647). By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Figure 2. This image of a witches’ Sabbath features multiple aspects of European witch beliefs; witches fishing for toads, cooking up spells on a fire of human skulls, feasting on the hearts of unbaptized infants, riding brooms through the sky, and performing a variety of other nefarious deeds.

Source: From Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (Paris, 1612). By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Figure 3. The depiction of this woman conveys many elements of English ideas about witches; she is old, impoverished (or so her bare feet suggest), unattractive (signaled by the hooked nose), and accompanied by bird familiars. She travels on a board on a river, not by broom through the air.

Source: A most certain, strange, and true discovery of a witch (London, 1643). Houghton Library, Harvard University. 24246.62

Figure 4. An Iroquois healing ritual. Images of ritual life in the northeastern woodlands typically depict Indians in circles, just as European witches formed circles at their Sabbaths. Such healing ceremonies likely increased in frequency in the wake of Indian contact with unfamiliar and deadly Eurasian diseases.

Source: Joseph-François Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages ameriquains (Paris, 1724). Courtesy of Georgetown University Library Special Collections.

Figure 5. Scottish witches conjure a storm.

Source: James Carmichael, Newes from Scotland (1592). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Figure 6. A barn adorned with hex signs, located in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.

Source: Charles H. Dornsbusch, 1941. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, HABS PA,39-NESMI, 1A-1.

Figure 7. A healer conjuring on behalf of a sick man in Suriname, a place where enslaved Africans retained a closer connection to African culture and practices than they did on the North American mainland. Compare this depiction of healing with figure 4.

Source: “La Mama-Snekie,” from Pierre Jacques Benoit, Voyage à Suriname (Bruxelles, 1839). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.