In Connecticut in 1692, God and the Devil were as real to the residents of Stamford as the air they breathed and the ground they walked on. Hardships like famine, scarcity, violence, or illness were often understood to be the result of supernatural forces intruding in everyday life. Richard Godbeer suggests that, for better or worse, Puritan colonists used the concepts of God and the Devil to explain anything, good or bad, that befell them throughout their lives. Even though the “practical threat[s]” of daily hardships such as illness, famine, and social discord had little to do with the “spiritual betrayal[s]” associated with evil and witchcraft, Puritan communities viewed even the smallest problems and threats through a spiritual lens and thus avoided actually reckoning with community issues. This tendency, Godbeer argues, often led to the unnecessary but debilitating spread of fear, distrust, and violence throughout these communities.
Throughout Escaping Salem, Godbeer argues that the Puritans’ use of religion to interpret earthly matters often did more harm than good. “The people of Stamford,” Godbeer writes, “believed that supernatural forces intruded constantly into their lives.” Godbeer introduces the case of Katherine Branch to demonstrate how even practical, everyday problems in Puritan societies became evidence of these “supernatural forces” at work on Earth. Katherine Branch, a servant girl in the household of a prominent family, the Wescots, began experiencing strange fits at the age of 17 in 1692. Branch’s screaming fits involved alternating bouts of convulsions and paralysis. She also claimed that she was being pinched, burned, and tormented by witches who transformed from cats into women and back again; indeed, Daniel and Abigail Wescot noticed strange bruises and marks appearing on Katherine’s body after these fits. Though the Wescots’ daughter, Joanna, had experienced similar fits in the past, Katherine’s naming of her tormentors directly tied the practical threat of her fits (which may or may not have been related to seizures or mental illness) to a spiritual betrayal and an intrusion of the occult into the realm of the everyday. By treating Katherine’s fits as evidence of dark magic or the Devil’s influence, Godbeer argues, her community did her a major disservice. As the Wescots and several other members of the Stamford community fretted over how to combat the occult forces they believed to be at work within Katherine, they overlooked the more pressing matter of her painful, disorienting fits—episodes that left her physically depleted, socially ostracized, and vulnerable to intrusive and ineffective medical practices such as bloodletting.
To Puritans, illness was not the only evidence of supernatural forces at work in the more practical spheres of human life—the cruelty of nature was often seen as the work of the Devil or his emissaries. When two sets of families—the Newmans and the Clawsons in Stamford and the Greys and the Disboroughs in the neighboring Compo—began quarrelling in the early 1690s, many strange occurrences began taking place in both households. After the Newmans’ daughter stole from the orchard of Goody Clawson, three of the Newmans’ sheep died suddenly. After a series of quarrels between Henry Grey and Mercy Disborough, Goodman Grey noticed that his cows and sheep began acting strangely: one lamb died suddenly, while a young calf ran in circles as if trying to escape something invisible. In the spring of 1692, two more of Grey’s cows died without warning. Grey blamed the losses of livestock on Goody Disborough, claiming that she was a witch who’d harnessed the powers of the Devil to seek vengeance upon him after some bad business deals. When Katherine Branch named Goody Disborough and Goody Clawson as witches after a series of fits, the evidence against the women seemed undeniable. Thus, a series of oddly coincidental but nonetheless natural occurrences—the illness and death of livestock—became “spiritual betrayals” enacted by vengeful women.
The devout Puritans who populated places like Stamford and Salem turned to their understanding of religion to explain things they couldn’t understand, like fits and famines. But this strict adherence to believing that God and the Devil were at the root of all human behavior and practical, earthly threats failed to repair distrust between neighbors, to safeguard the vulnerable or to confront the real nature of community problems. Godbeer suggests that by paying more attention to the intangible spiritual world than the pressing problems of the physical one, members of Puritan communities did themselves and their neighbors a great disservice.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Practical Threats vs. Spiritual Betrayals ThemeTracker
Practical Threats vs. Spiritual Betrayals Quotes in Escaping Salem
Kate, as she was known, had been in that tormented state since the end of April. Without warning and for no apparent reason she would suddenly collapse into agonized convulsions, crying out that she was pinched and pricked by invisible creatures, weeping and moaning in helpless terror. At other times she would sink into a paralyzed trance, stiff as a board and completely senseless. She told her master and mistress that during these fits she saw cats that sometimes transformed into women before her eyes and then changed back into animal form. It was these creatures that attacked her, she said.
Supernatural forces were constantly at work in the world. Sudden losses or mishaps might well be judgments from God, sent to chastise sinners and encourage moral reformation. But sometimes these misfortunes turned out to be the handiwork of someone closer to hand with much less exalted intentions, a malign neighbor using dark cunning to torment and even destroy—witchcraft might be to blame.
[Daniel Wescot] wanted the witches responsible for his household's afflictions punished and he wanted to be rid of them. “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” That was, after all, God's Word.
"Goody Miller, hold up your arm higher that the black dog may suck you better. Now I'm sure you are a witch for you've got a long teat under your arm." Both David and Abraham had heard that witches fed demonic spirits in the form of animals—just as mothers fed their infant children, except that witches used a third nipple hidden somewhere on their bodies and nourished the familiars with blood, not milk.
Yet how best to protect the town? Mister Selleck was well aware that allegations of witchcraft could multiply rapidly and plunge entire communities into crisis. […] Selleck also knew that trying to prove an invisible crime in court was not easy. […] Religious doctrine and the legal code invited accusations of witchcraft, yet court officials were often much less impressed by the evidence presented in such cases than were the accusers and their supporters. Ministers, magistrates, and ordinary townsfolk agreed that witches posed a real and serious threat, but agreeing on how to prove witchcraft in a court of law was quite another matter.
Other neighbors, however, portrayed Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough as argumentative and vindictive. Following the arrest of the two women, a wave of Stamford and Compo residents came forward to relate quarrels with one or the other which had been followed by mysterious illness or misfortune. […] Both women reacted to the allegations against them in ways that seemed to incriminate them further.
"About two years past," confided Goody Newman, "I also had a difference with Goody Clawson and angry words passed between us. The next day we had three sheep die suddenly. When we opened them up we couldn't find anything amiss to explain their deaths. Some of our neighbors told us then they thought the creatures were bewitched.”
That emphasis on community support created intense pressure. When requests for help were denied and when neighbors argued, resentments and recriminations often lingered. People knew that conflict threatened to undermine the values on which their community was built: discord was, as the Reverend Bishop often reminded them, an opening to the Devil, who was always looking for ways to poison the well of God's vineyard.
As officials gathered evidence, […] there emerged a long history of suspicion and resentment surrounding the two women. Katherine Branch's allegations against Mercy Disborough and Elizabeth Clawson were clearly part of a larger story. But how would the special court react to such testimony? Would these magistrates prove any more reliable than those who presided over witchcraft cases in the past? Surely the overwhelming volume of evidence against the two women would force the court to act decisively. […] Such, at least, were the hopes of those who believed the accused to be guilty as charged.
Even as most trials ended in acquittal, ordinary folk continued to focus on witchcraft as a practical menace, not as a spiritual betrayal. They may have been motivated partly by stubborn resistance to pressure from the courts, or they may not have understood fully why so many trials were failing to result in conviction. But whatever the reasons, when New Englanders talked about witchcraft, most of them did so in terms of the practical threat that it posed: it seemed at such times that ordinary folk cared not a whit about the Devil, only about their dead sheep.
The sticking point was the need for clear proof of the Devil's involvement since hardly any of the depositions mentioned dealings between Elizabeth Clawson or Mercy Disborough and "the grand enemy of God." The witnesses focused on who had a motive to inflict occult harm on the victims, not how the harm was inflicted or whether the Devil was involved. That made for a perplexing situation.
Mercy Disborough was alive and free, but were her troubles over? A decade earlier a woman in Massachusetts had been acquitted of witchcraft. But a year or so later neighbors suspected her of striking again when an elderly man in the town fell ill. One night a group of young men visited the woman: they dragged her outside, hanged her from a tree until she seemed to be gasping her last breath, then cut her down, rolled her in the snow, and buried her in it, leaving her for dead. Amazingly, she survived, though barely. The law was only one way of dealing with a witch...
To settle on a particular interpretation of Kate's behavior strikes me as problematic, not only because of the lack of evidence but also because people at the time were clearly uncertain and divided as to whether Kate was bewitched and if her allegations against specific women could be trusted. That uncertainty was a key component of the situation and has to be retained if we are going to understand just how perplexing Kate's ordeal was for those around her.
The supernatural realm, [The Puritans] believed, could intrude upon their lives at any time. Any extraordinary event that seemed to interrupt the natural order—comets and eclipses, dramatic fires and epidemics, deformed births and inexplicable crop failures, dreams and visions—carried supernatural significance. Some were sent by God, others by Satan. According to the world view embraced by most New Englanders, God and the Devil were constantly at work in their day-to-day lives, testing and tempting, rewarding and punishing as each son and daughter of Adam and Eve deserved.
Personal interactions and influence were central to the experience of early New Englanders. It therefore made good sense to account for misfortune or suffering in personal terms (just as it should not surprise us that modern Americans inhabiting an often anonymous world, seemingly captive to faceless institutions, should sometimes blame impersonal forces like "the federal government" for their problems). Witchcraft explained personal problems in terms of personal interactions. A particular neighbor had quarreled with you and was now taking revenge for a perceived injury by bewitching you.
The impulse to find a scapegoat in times of trouble and to demonize those whom we dislike and fear remains very much alive. Jews and other ethnoreligious groups, communists and capitalists, feminists and homosexuals, liberals and conservatives, religious fundamentalists—each group has figured in the minds of its enemies as an evil and alien force that threatens to corrode and destroy. A periodic need for witch hunts would appear to be one of the more resilient as well as one of the least admirable human instincts.
