Allen Putnam - Witchcraft of New England Explained by Modern Spiritualism

"The nobler tendency of cultureand, above all, of scientific cultureis to honor the dead without groveling before them; to profit by the past without sacrificing it to the present."EDWARD B. TYLOR, Primitive Culture.

Most history of New England witchcraft written since 1760 has dishonoredthe dead by lavish imputations of imposture, fraud, malice, credulity, andinfatuation; has been sacrificing past acts, motives, and character toskepticism regarding the sagacity and manliness of the fathers, theguilelessness of their daughters, and the truth of ancient records.Transmitted accounts of certain phenomena have been disparaged, seeminglybecause facts alleged therein baffle solution by to-day's prevalentphilosophy, which discards some agents and forces that were active of old.The legitimate tendency of culture has been reversed; what it should haveavailed itself of and honored, it has busied itself in hiding andtraducing.

An exception among writers alluded to is the author of the followingextract, who, simply as an historian, and not as an advocate of anyparticular theory for the solution of witchcraft, seems ready to let itsworks be ascribed to competent agents.

"So far as a presentation of facts is concerned, no account of thedreadful tragedy has appeared which is more accurate and truthful thanGovernor Hutchinson's narrative. His theory on the subjectthat it waswholly the result of fraud and deception on the part of the afflictedchildrenwill not be generally accepted at the present day, and hisreasoning on that point will not be deemed conclusive.... There is atendency to trace an analogy between the phenomena then exhibited andmodern spiritual manifestations."W. F. POOLE, Geneal. and Antiq.Register, October, 1870.

While composing the following work, its writer was borne onward by thetendency which Poole named. Survey of the field of marvels has been farshort of exhaustivehis purpose made no demand for very extendedresearches. Selected cases, representative of the general manifestationsand subject treated of were enough. The aim has been to find in ancientrecords, and thence adduce, statements and meanings long restingunobserved beneath the gathered dust of more than a hundred years, andtherefore practically lost.

The course of search led attention beyond overt acts, to inspection ofsome natural germs and their legitimately resultant development intocreeds, which impelled good men on to the enactment of direful tragedy.

Examination of the basement wallsthe foundationsof prevalent popularexplanation of ancient wonders, forces conviction that they lack both thebreadth and the materials needful to stability. Modern builders ofwitchcraft history have either failed to find, or have deemed unmanageableby any appliances at their command, and therefore would not attempt tohandle, a vast amount of sound historic stones which are accessible andcan be used. Lacking them, these moderns have let fancy manufacture forthem, and they have builded upon blocks of her fragile stuff which arefast disintegrating under the chemical action of the world's common sense.

We proposed here an incipient step towards refutation of the sufficiencyand justness of a main theory, now long prevalent, for explainingsatisfactorily very many well-proved marvelous facts. Some such have beenpresented on the pages of Hutchinson, Upham, and their followers; and yetthese have been either not at all, or vaguely or ludicrously, commentedupon, or reasoned from. Very many others, and the most important of all asbases and aids to an acceptable and true solution of the whole, are notvisible where they ought to have conspicuous position. Presentation andproper use of them might have caused public cognizance to topple over theedifices which it has pleased modern builders to erect.

It is not our purpose to write history, but to give new explanation of oldevents. The long and widely tolerated theory that New England witchcraftwas exclusively but out-workings of mundane fraud, imposture, cunning,trickery, malice, and the like, has never adequately met the reasonabledemand of common sense, which always asks that specified agents and forcesshall be probably competent to produce all such effects as are distinctlyascribed to them.

Persons who of old were afflicted in manner that was then calledbewitchment, and others through or from whom the afflictions were allegedto proceed, are now extensively supposed to have possessed organizations,temperaments, and properties which rendered them exceptionally pliantunder subtile forces, either magnetic, mesmeric, or psychological, andwho, consequently, at times, could be, and were, made ostensible utterersof knowledge whose marvelousness indicated mysterious source, andostensible performers of acts deemed more than natural, and which, infact, were the productions of wills not native in the manifesting forms.The special forces that produced bewitchment and are put in applicationnow, do not become sensibly operative upon any other mortals than peculiarsensitives; and their action upon such is often most easily andeffectively manifested through aid obtained from other similar sensitives.Selections of both subjects and instrumentalities were of old, and arenow, controlled by general law. Steel needles and iron-filings are notselected by the magnet's free will when it forces them to leap up fromtheir resting-places and cleave to itself. Seeming levitation possessesthem, and an invisible force takes them whither gravitation, their usualholder, would not let them go. It is upon steel, not leadupon iron, notstonethat the magnet can execute its marvelous liftings. Nature'sconditions fix selections. The organizations, temperaments, fluids,solids, and all the various properties, are, to some extent, unlike in anytwo human bodies whatsoever, and the range of the differings andconsequent susceptibilities is very wide. A psychological magnet in eitherthe seen or unseen may have power to draw certain human forms to contactwith itself, and to use them as its tools, and yet lack force to producesensible effects upon but few in the mass of living men. Where its actionis most efficient, it controls the movements of what it holds in itsembracetakes a human form out from control by the spirit which usuallygoverns it, and through that form manifests its own powers and purposes.Both the reputed bewitched and bewitching may severally have had butlittle, if any, voluntary part in manifesting the remarkable phenomenathat were imputed to them. Where physical organs are used, the public isprone to deem the performances intentional acts by those whose forms areoperated, while yet the wills of those whose forms are visibly concernedin marvelous works may have been formerly, as they often now are, littleelse than unwilling, and in many cases unconscious tools.

The afflictedin other words, the bewitched onesmay have actuallyperceived,they no doubt often did,and also knew, that the annoyancesand tortures they endured were augmented, if not generated, by emanationsproceeding forth from the particular persons whom they named as beingtheir afflicters; and these afflicters may have been all unconscious thattheir own auras were going forth and acting upon the sufferers.