Chapter IX: Witchcraft

The Witch-Caldron at Salem.—How its Bubbling raised Teapot Lids and has
kept open other Lids ever since.—The Young Female Witches at Salem
condemned to the Ties of Matrimony; the Old Ones to harder Knots.—The
Sin of being Old considered.—The Scarlet Letter.—Examples of
Witchcraft cited.—The Delusion of Adam and Eve at the first
Pomological Convention in Eden.—Woman as Man’s Familiar Spirit; and
her Conjuries.—Cases of David, Samson, and Herod.—Antony dissolved in
that Egyptian Drink, Pearl Water.—The Maid of Orleans and what an Arc
she subtended.—The Philters of Love, Ambition, Heroism, etc.,
administered to Men and Nations.—Their Effects.—Delusions, like
Measles, catching.—The Frenzies of Fashion fully described.—The Stock
Exchange.—Private Witchcrafts at Quiltings, Apple-Parings, etc.—Red
Corn and other Red Ears.—Sweet Witches.—A Jury of Gushing
Girls.—Punishment of Men incapable of being bewitched.

Just as the last sands were dropping at once out of the hour-glasses of the seventeenth century and of a few old women at Salem, a strange trouble bubbled up in that little teapot of a place, which not only raised its lid at the time, but has kept a great many wide-open eyes fixed on it ever since, to see how it happened, and whether it would not, perhaps, do it again. Do it again! of course not; and very sorry that it ever did it at all. Let us distill from it first-proof historical stimulation, while we wait for the colts to cool off.

Young women had often at Salem, as elsewhere, troubled men, and for the misdemeanor had been condemned to the stocks—of marriage. But what to do with the ill-favored, old ladies who, in 1692, were accused of breaking the rest of both old and young,—of disturbing two organs, the spleen and gall, lying near that excitable old offender, the heart, and of stopping judicial digestion,—puzzled the brain of the wisest, yea, even the solid, well-set cerebrum of Cotton Mather. Much pondering was there, much exorcising, much studying of the twenty-eighth chapter of 1 Samuel, and diligent rummaging of chronicles, Jewish, Egyptian, French, and English, to find descriptions of the vice, and the punishments therefor. The sin of being old is, in a new country where young activities are alone valuable, always great. At quaint, gable-ended Salem it became a swinging crime.

How the knot was eventually not cut, but tied, all the world knows. Everybody remembers how those aged agitators were taken around the neck, not by future spouses, as the young Salemites were, but by cords most unsilken. The delusion of course soon vanished with the twenty victims; but the Scarlet Letter, written at the time, which tells the affecting story, is still handed around unsealed, and will ever be read with witching interest.

THE PENALTIES OF WITCHCRAFT.

’Tis the old tale, with new characters and scenery to adapt it to the time and place. The Bible opens with it. In that earliest recorded pomological convention, attended by only three delegates, Adam, Eve, and Satan, the deception by one of them—a model trickster, whose plan has since been often followed in other conventions—of the female delegate, who then brought over the third, led to a very wicked delusion, which has got a great many people in a very sad scrape. If woman was a witch in Paradise, what has she not been out? She has been “man’s familiar spirit” ever since, conjuring up visions before the eyes of young men, as stately as the sheeted form at Endor, or as pleasing as the walking figure of Bathsheba to the enamored eye of the Chief Singer. Samson could pull down the pillars of Gaza, but could not muster strength enough to open his eyes to Delilah’s illusions, or to raise his shorn head from her delightful pillow. Then there was that very fast woman, Herodias, who got a-head of John the Baptist on a charger. How she bewitched Herod by a pair of nimble heels!—a feat by which so many dancers have whirled reason from her throne, and men from theirs.

What a splendid necromancer was Cleopatra, dissolving poor Antony, rich pearls, and the Roman Empire in the drugged cup of her beauty. We see the Duumvir now in that Alexandrian palace, under her wildering magic. The air without twinkles with the clash of impatient Roman shields, and the earnest gleamings of battle-axes, hungry to hew for him a way through living Romans up to the Capitoline hill; but he, at the feet of the sorceress, swearing oaths falser than Abigail Williams’s, in Salem court-house, tosses away from him the round globe of empire as carelessly as the ragged Egyptian harlequin in the next square flings up his cup and balls for the passing amusement of the idle crowd.

Then, too, the Maid of Orleans, who subtends such a brilliant Arc in the annals of France;—but why iterate history, which is but a biographical dictionary of characters who, by the impact of enthusiasms, genius, delusive heroism, or passion-working frenzies, have given to others, individuals, communities, armies, or nations, philters of delirious patriotism, love-potions, noble discontents under real or fancied wrongs, which have whirled them on to glory, to sudden graves, to state coronations, or have lifted them up to Calvaries of glorious self-sacrifices higher than themselves, and loftier than the ages which have grown upwards as they gazed?

Delusions, whether in Salem, Chicago, New York, or any other place afflicted with common councils and their accompanying symptoms, municipal debts, are as catching as measles, and lead often to eruptions just as disagreeable. The semiannual frenzies which, year after year, seize whole communities, men, women, and children, persons tall or short, fat or lean, blond or brunette, making them rush simultaneously and with hot celerity to throw away or alter their last six months’ garments, bonnets, hats, or foot-clothings, because Madame Folie in Good-for-nothing Street, Paris, thinks it for her interest that they should, and to betake themselves all to other garments, bonnets, hats, and foot-clothing of another cut and color,—cuts and colors uniform for all ages, sizes, and complexions,—are quite as unaccountable to people at a distance, and even to themselves a year after, as the Salem delusion now, when we take it up in our long historic fingers, and measure it by the rule of good, cool, common sense. The panics of the stock exchange, starting out of a rumor in some obscure corner, and swelling into tense statements and positive beliefs, which grasp even cool business brains and well-filled purses, and shake both empty on the winds, find their strange echoes back from the study of wise but momentarily deluded Cotton Mathers and the disordered judgment-seats of Salem magistrates.

But the public and published examples of witchcraft are few compared with countless cases always going on in every community, urban or rural, unrecognized by any tribunals judicial or historic. At every apple-paring in New England,—in the husking-parties throughout the West, where the finding of the red ear of corn suddenly makes every kissful girl the personal owner of two redder ears,—in the quilting frolics at the South, where the young gentlemen of the place come in, after the sewing is done, and sow roses on cheeks white before,—by story-telling brooks that keep sacred the secrets of lovers, while babbling their own,—along the roadside, in quiet nooks, in village parlors, in crowded cities where mammon tries in vain to cheat the sweet witches out of their devotees,—everywhere, in fine, where hearts are not utterly trade-mailed, office-clad, or ossified, the tender delirium which early entered our great, glorious mad-house of a world, produces effects which are never understood by some, which confound the wise unwisdom of old judicial heads, and sometimes get inwrought into fine tragedies, before which even those of New England, although told by a good fellow or transfigured by a Longfellow, pale away faded and colorless.

The man who is incapable of being bewitched by somebody or something, may make a good bargain, and live on unlovingly a long time,—like an air-plant, never touching his mother earth, or feeling its inspiriting magics; but he will never get much out of life except meat, drink, and cold-sheeted sleeps, nor add much to the happiness or greatness of his kind. He who lives in the United States beyond a fair age, without getting inextricably tangled in the witching meshes of some good mate, should be tried by a jury of gushing girls, and condemned for life to the pillow-ry with some of the modern witches of New England or the sorceresses of the South.

Whosoever, then, accuses the witchcrafts of other times and ages, let him, ere he casts the first stone, look into his own heart, or around among his own household or community, and, borrowing a charity from his thoughts, say, if he can, “Go in—pieces.”

COTTON MATHER EXORCISING A WITCH.
(p. 176)
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