A Halloween Happenstance Post

[Writer’s Note: This piece and the follow-up were written for my history class on September 11, 2022. Enjoy!]

The Salem Witch Trials founded this country. This event is a historical benchmark that paved the way for this nation’s own contentious relationship it has always had with those the majority labels as “other.” The Puritan’s highlight this nation’s shadow: misogyny, religious guilt, and even an (alleged) accidental exposure to a consciousness-altering substance. The theories that have been espoused through the centuries following the Salem Witch Trials have varying degrees of truth in them, but the through line in them all regards the Puritans as a relic of the past therefore their level of thinking is, by default, lower than the modern man. This misses a vital factor in the Puritan’s worldview: the reality of witchcraft.

It would be easy enough to assume that the “witchcraft” of the hysteria coming out of the Puritan society has little to do with reality, however laws banning individuals from taking part in the practice of something do not usually come out of a vacuum. When someone says not to do something, chances are they’ve had to tell someone else to stop doing the very thing. The Puritans did not bring over their own contrived view of how the world works and myths and monsters of a select few while the world turned past them coming into the Enlightenment Age without these stuck-in-the-mud Puritans whose views has no bearing on true history, past or present. This is, of course, utter fantasy and–like–most of our modern-day beliefs rely heavily on the fact that progress has pushed us forward instead of the more realistic view that we have been going forward in terms of time and that says nothing about beliefs. We may have developed technology that can go to space and yet it was still afterwards we endeavored to initiate the “Satanic Panic” of the nineteen-eighties into the nineties. The Puritan imagination, like their own “Old World” beliefs, have taken root and so to better understand ourselves we must take a more sympathetic approach to the Puritans. 

Witchcraft has been around since before recorded history. This witchcraft is not to be misrepresented as something an individual buys at “Spencer’s Gifts,” unfortunately the commodification of such tradition evokes certain images in the contemporary mind. Witchcraft, sorcery, and magic can be understood as the ability to consciously cause change in the environment according to the will of the practitioner by linking the conscious mind with the subconscious mind. Whether the 17th century Puritans were aware of the internal mechanisms of effective “spellcasting” is probably not the case, due to their persecution anyone they thought was guilty of witchcraft, but this uncanny ability to accuse individuals of such sorcery did not bloom from the Puritan mind of the Americas. 

In recent years the term “elaborated theory of witchcraft” has circulated among scholars that states the contemporary understanding of witchcraft from the medieval age up to the settling of the Americans has become more elaborated since the fifteenth century onwards. This theory puts forth that what we think of as witchcraft is a combination of what all we know as being practiced, be it real or imaginary, by “witches” in the mid-centuries leading up this millennium. The point of this essay is not to address the legitimacy of this theory, nor its invalidity, but simply to impress the point that witchcraft as Puritans knew it was probably not what is conjured in the modern thinkers mind when someone says “witch.” 

The Puritans had quite a bit of information at their disposal to use in the removal of witches from their community, if we are to believe Parliament member Reginald Scot’s skeptical work, “The Discoverie of Witchcraft,” then we can assume that the blueprint of the witch in a Puritan’s mind looked “commonly old, lame, bleare-eied [sic], pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles; poore, sullen, superstitious, and papists” (Scot 5). Scot’s motivation for writing the book was to bestow the blame for witch hunts on the people’s suspicion of the Catholic Church and their general lack of faith in God, Scot himself–like the Puritans–held a Calvinist theological view. How one makes sense of witches through the lens of predestination is anyone’s guess. Ironically, the book that was foundational in the Englishman’s fear and burning zeal to destroy witches, “Malleus Maleficarum,” or the Hammer of Witches, was written by a Catholic clergyman and Inquisitor, Heinrich Kramer and Dominican friar, Johann Sprenger. The book itself is under a special focus of scorn by the writer Scot whose purpose was to invalidate the belief of witchcraft altogether. Side note, his work became notable as one of the first extensive pieces of writing done on the art of magick.

Scot’s formidable presence in the annals of magick and alchemy notwithstanding both pieces of literature, his own and that of Kramer saw much success attributed to the invention of the printing press during the mid-1400’s. Arguably the hysteria of witch hunts was in no small part due to Gutenberg’s own deal with the devil seeing an unprecedented proliferation of texts throughout Europe contributing directly to the Reformation movement’s threat to the Catholic Church’s power. This age of mass communication would go on to permanently alter society and the structures therein, giving far more power to small collectives rather than unified tents such as the Church. 

The alteration of society was, in even the worldliest terms, magic. The word “magician” comes from an old Hebrew word, pronounced “chartom” meaning engraver or writer. This is the true art of magic, sometimes written as “magick.” This magick is similar to witchcraft; its efficiency is determined by the alignment of the conscious and subconscious mind. Now, magick is the art of self-transformation as its primary goal, however using the same tools “cast” outward there is opportunity for change in others, as well. The practitioner knows how to change themselves thus they know how to change the world around them. The magician is a “writer” in that what is written can alter the consciousness of many people, long after the magician is gone. The introduction of the printing press meant the generative logos broke the bounds of its former parameters caused by laborious book-making processes as well as the far easier oral tradition of stories. This is a small example of the possibility, but a law–in this sense–is a “spell” that causes change in the world. 

Gutenberg’s invention meant that the people were no longer constrained to the mass indoctrination of the power structures of the time who withheld information and “cast their spell” over society to keep them in line. The printing press unleashed a pandora’s box of certain particular spell craft that exposed the population to new ideas and principles. And with newfound knowledge came newfound enemies. Or better-defined enemies. 

The printing press is not evil; however, it is more than fair to point out that with knowledge comes responsibility, and if we look at ourselves with the phone in our hand maybe we can appreciate how much responsibility it takes to stay sane in a world overrun by information… and witches. If we consider how much confusion is going on within our own mental and collective spheres based on the ability to simply do a google search and come up with an assortment of information of varying degrees of expertise and honesty then how much more confusion might we assume on the parts of the Puritan, or layman in general for that matter, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? 

There are a lot of differing opinions swirling around with an unprecedented ability to circulate at much higher rates than previously ever known. Not only does the typical European have the Witch Hunter General as a feature of society, not a bug, but they are also having to sift through a swell of information such as Scot’s disownment of witchcraft being answered by King James (yes, that one) who wrote a book entitled, “Daemonologie,” as a direct rejection of Scot’s notion that witchcraft were bogus. This is a different time than current society, the world was not tripping over itself to reject a king or ridicule his work; his writings and the book he sponsors (yes, that one) were widely circulated and taken very seriously by the people. The magic of a king, it can be appreciated, is far greater than the magic of a member of Parliament.