Witchcraft in Old and New England
by . Cambridge: Harvard Universily Press. 1929. 8vo. x + 641 pp. $6.00.
IT is hard to imagine a more authoritative history of the long generations of English witches and their sad New England sisters, or a scholar of more equitable temper, patience, and knowledge, than this book and its author. Although evidently designed primarily for the student of folk ways and black arts, it proves good reading for the layman of somewhat serious intent.
No historian of witchcraft could begin at the beginning of his subject, for that is lost in the clouds that will always hang over the morning of the human race, and the end is not yet. ‘The belief in witchcraft is a common heritage of humanity. It is not chargeable to any particular time, or race, or form of religion.’ ' Witchcraft in some shape or other is still credited by a majority of the human race.’ It has been claimed that the European witches kept alive organizations, pagan rituals, and mysteries that had descended to them from pre-Christian times. Professor Kittredge completely scouts this theory. Of religious intent, of organization, he finds the English witch completely innocent. Even the ‘Sabbath’ is proved to be a late importation from the Continent, never really accepted by the common people.
One meets in this book no wild witch-riders of the sky, no frenzied worshipers of Priapus and Diana meet ing together in the last degraded remnants of fertility worship, but sour old women, village scolds, idiots and gossips, human oddities, misfits, the queer and the malignant. The author points out that many of these people actually believed themselves capable of working magic. Often they were guilty in intent if not in deed. On the whole, the author seems to sympathize more with the victim and the persecutor than with the witch herself. Belief in witchcraft in the seventeenth century was no more to a man’s discredit than ignorance of germs.
A large part of this fascinating book is taken up with different methods of witchcraft procedure and detection, ably’ illustrated by examples from contemporary sources. The magic image whose torture brings agony and death to the being for whom it is named: the power of the witch over love and hate, storms, plagues, cattle; her ability to change form at will, to discover thieves, treasure, and the future; how through her and her servants a house or a man may become haunted — all are carefully studied.
There was evidently little change in the practices and beliefs of witchcraft from the earliest days down through Elizabeth’s and James’s reign and the Puritan régime, nor was it a different thing when practised by Englishmen in the Colonies. The famous Salem outbreak is included in the final chapter, ’Witchcraft and the Puritans.’ As it takes its place in a complete history of the subject, it does not seem so grisly and monstrous a thing as when looked at in isolation. Compared to what was going on in Europe at the same time and later, it was trifling. The Mother Country was trying its witches and giving the death sentence some y ears after such things had ceased in Massachusetts, and similar trials were going on over a hundred years later on the Continent. Instead of shaking the finger of scorn at Massachusetts, Professor Kittredge holds her up as a pioneer in doing away with such beliefs, showing that the judge’s and jury’s public admission of fault was one of the heaviest blows ever struck against wizardry.
ESTHER FORBES