Seeing yourself as evil can be empowering. Credit: JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images

When a society is transitioning from enchantment to disenchantment, when its population is paradoxically both godly and capitalist, it is not uncommon to hear accusations of witchcraft. In 1651, in Boston, Massachusetts, Hugh Parsons and his wife Mary were charged with making a covenant with the devil; 30 years later, in Bideford, Devon, Temperance Lloyd, Susanna Edwards, and Mary Trembles were similarly accused. Both cases are unusual: the Parsons case — in which a confessed witch accused her husband of the same crime — was one of the first witchcraft trials in New England; Lloyd, Edwards, and Trembles — the so-called “Bideford witches” — were the last witches to be executed in Old England.
Given that New England’s ideas about witches had been imported from the old country, the trials shared characteristics: illnesses that could not be explained, except by magic; familiars — demons in animal form — sucking on witches’ bodies; victims being tormented from afar, via apparitions or dreams (this “spectral evidence” would later dominate at the famous Salem witch trials). Both trials, too, have much to teach us about rationality and its limits, the power of collective opinion, and the psychology that leads people to identify others — and themselves — as evil.
The story of the Parsons is told in Malcolm Gaskill’s magnificent new book, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World (out 4th November). Hugh and Mary were among the 25,000 Puritans who fled to New England in the seventeenth century to build a Promised Land. Both settled in Springfield, a town unusual in Massachusetts because it had at its heart not only a godly enterprise, but also a commercial one: its founder William Pynchon ran a trade in furs, buying them from the Native Americans they called Indians and sending them on to London.
Gaskill vividly evokes the reality of early colonial life, from the voyage in the crammed, low-ceilinged hold of a pitching ship — the reek of unwashed bodies, the snoring and bickering of other passengers — through to the sheer hard labour that made up their lives on land — the unremitting work of felling timber, breaking rocks, digging drains, mowing grass, tending cattle, chopping firewood, slaughtering pigs, clearing chimneys, sweeping floors, and on and on.
Their external struggle with nature was matched by internal wrestling: Puritan theology required its adherents to be gravely introspective. Gaskill describes it as a “strained, oppositional way of seeing oneself and the world, poised between flesh and spirit, self-loathing and elation.” As frontier neighbours, they were completely dependent on each other (and literally indentured to Pynchon), yet the contemplation of their own sins led quickly to the censure of others. And if the melancholy, constant toil and endless self-doubt were not enough, this was a society facing the constant, terrible death of beloved young children.
In this fraught environment, the accusations of 1651 settled on Parsons — an ambitious man whose eyes seemed full of sullen envy — and his wife — who talked too much of witches. The evidence of their witchcraft could be seen in many incidents — trivial in themselves but creating a cumulative, attritional effect: trowels and knives went missing and mysteriously reappeared; the making of a pudding repeatedly failed; people received night-time visitations from snakes or a small boy with a face as red as fire, while others suffered fits and convulsions; a two-year-old saw a spectral dog; and, above all, children were bewitched to death. All these incidents occurred after the victims had crossed the Parsons.
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