1648 American Puritan settlers in Massachusetts saw the hand of God behind everything from droughts and tempests to a snake in the meeting house. Since devout Puritans were either saved or damned from before birth, no amount of good works could save their souls. Good and evil were abstractions to which the most momentous or trivial events could be key.
This one is recorded in the journal of John Winthrop, twelve times governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony that settled the area around Boston in 1630. At first it looked like an ordinary snake that came in through an open door during the sermon and slithered onto one of the elders’ seats, causing ‘diverse of the elders’ to get up and move pretty smartish, until Mr Thomson stood on the intruder’s head and held its body ‘with a small pair of grains [barbed prongs], until it was killed’.
Only afterwards, ‘nothing falling out but by divine providence’, did they assign the true meaning of the occurrence: ‘The serpent is the devil; the synod, the representative of the churches of Christ in New England.’
Why should everything remind these worthies that the Devil was out to get them? Because the churches of New England, as Winthrop wrote in an earlier entry, were ‘such as come together into a wilderness, where are nothing but wild beasts and beastlike men, and there confederate together in civil and church estate’. To this exposed position the threats were not just the wild animals and savages of the New World, but the dissolution of the colony itself – discouraged people leaving for the West Indies, or to join the Dutch on Long Island, or even to return to England.
Throughout most of the 1640s it was this fear that the great Massachusetts experiment would fail through depopulation that fed the governor’s paranoia, which anxiety was displaced, in turn, onto fantasies of diabolical snakes.