Witchcraft Myths in American Culture

302 Pages·2007·3.12 MB·English

by  Marion Gibson

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Routledge Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group
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New York, NY 10016 Milton Park, Abingdon
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© 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
Printed in the United States of America on acid‑free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
International Standard Book Number‑10: 0‑415‑97977‑3 (Softcover) 0‑415‑97978‑1 (Hardcover)
International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑415‑97977‑1 (Softcover) 978‑0‑415‑97978‑8 (Hardcover)
No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming,
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the
publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data
Gibson, Marion, 1970‑
Witchcraft myths in American culture / Marion Gibson.
p. cm.
ISBN 0‑415‑97977‑3 (hardback : alk. paper) ‑‑ ISBN 0‑415‑97978‑1 (pbk. : alk.
paper)
1. Witchcraft‑‑United States. I. Title.
BF1573.G53 2007
133.4’30973‑‑dc22 2006037153
Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at
http://www.taylorandfrancis.com
and the Routledge Web site at
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C o n t e n t s
Introduction 1
1. E pluribus unum? Mythic and Missing Histories and the
Politics of American Witchcraft 11
2. “Our Witch”: Local Histories of America’s Witches 57
3. “There’s a Little Witch in Every Woman”: Psychology
and the Social History of Witches 103
4. “We Will Not Fly Silently Into the Night”: Wicca and
American Witchcraft 141
5. Witches in the Family: Comedy, Drama, and the
Acceptance of American Witches 183
Notes 225
Bibliography 263
Index 285
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I n t r o d u C t I o n
This is a book about the writing of the history and literature of witchcraft
in the United States of America, from the first prosecution for the crime
in the 1620s to the present day. In some ways the history of witchcraft in
the English colonies in the “New World” is a well-worn theme. In 1970 the
great American historian John Demos apologized to his audience for call-
ing them together yet again for a paper on a favorite topic:
it is faintly embarrassing for a historian to summon his colleagues to
still another consideration of early New England witchcraft. Here, surely,
is a topic that previous generations of writers have sufficiently worked,
indeed overworked.1
Yet Demos went on not only to deliver a thoughtful paper, but to write
the five-hundred-page study Entertaining Satan, the best book of its gen-
eration on just this topic. And scholars, journalists, genealogists, and stu-
dents have continued to write and read about the witchcraft events of early
New England with undimmed enthusiasm ever since. Yet there are very
few books and articles written about writing about witchcraft in America.
Bernard Rosenthal’s illuminating Salem Story (1993) is the only major
example, and it deals — as its title suggests — solely with the most famous
of American witch prosecutions.
Was Demos right, then, in his self-deprecating remarks in 1970? Have
scholars scraped the barrel clean? If so, why does witchcraft continue to
occupy the American mind? Demos was certainly right to suggest that
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 Witchcraf t Myths in American Culture
there was limited scope for new discoveries of fact to be made about the
participants in the better-known witchcraft trials — but what about those
less well known? And, as his own new readings of his material showed,
it was also a different matter when it came to interpretation. Here there
was ample room for new thought and research. Records of witchcraft have
been read as demonstrating both the probity and the viciousness of Puri-
tanism; the superstition and the enlightenment of the clergy; the frailty
and the strength of American women; the merits of theocracy, democ-
racy, and aristocracy; the dangers of governmental power; the dangers of
devolved power; the triumph of the human spirit; and the corruption of
humanity in general. It is, then, the interpretation of texts about American
witchcraft that is the subject of this book. It is a literary historiography
rather than another retelling of the story of Salem or any other American
community afflicted by accusations of witchcraft. And by “literature,” I
mean everything written about witchcraft, from the tiniest scraps of sev-
enteenth-century notation in the Essex Institute at Salem through the
fat histories of the nineteenth century to the poems of modern Wiccans
and the recent filmic adventures of Nicole Kidman as Isabel Bigelow and
Samantha Stevens in Bewitched (2005).
The basic question that motivated the writing of the book was, “What
does witchcraft mean to Americans?” But this is, of course, a hopelessly
ill-defined question, and the book comes out of the realization that it is
also the wrong question to be asking. Witchcraft may mean something
very different, and an interest in it may be sustained for completely dif-
ferent reasons, depending on one’s cultural heritage, politics, age, ethnic-
ity, sexual orientation, and gender, or simply on whether — like L. Frank
Baum’s witches in The Wizard of Oz — one is from North, South, East, or
West. America’s diversity means that it might be hard even to agree on a
working definition of “witchcraft” with a Bostonian descendant of Lowells
and Mathers, a Pennsylvanian Wiccan influenced by “Dutch” hexenmeis-
ters, a parent challenging the inclusion of a Harry Potter book on a school
syllabus, a practitioner of African-American “hoodoo” in Alabama, a Har-
vard historian, a lesbian Dianic Witch from San Francisco, a Jewish New
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Introduction 
Yorker playwright, and a teenage Floridian goth. So I have limited myself,
initially, to a consideration of the English colonies of the northeastern
and central eastern United States, where witchcraft was defined by legal
codes based on English law and biblical quotation and was prosecuted
as a crime in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Even here,
there are many problems of definition and differences of emphasis, and
one of the aims of the book is to tease these out. The first two chapters,
therefore, examine the records of witchcraft from Virginia in the south
to Maine in the north, in the period of circa 1620 to 1730, and discuss the
interpretation of them by historians, politicians, and interested communi-
ties internationally, nationally, and at local levels, from state down to town
or village.2
Just as definitions of witchcraft differ greatly among modern Ameri-
cans, so they have greatly altered over time. As a war of liberation was
fought and won, and expansion westward drew in new Americans of all
kinds, what “witchcraft” meant changed and was contested. Decriminal-
ization in English law in 1736 and the widely held opinion that witchcraft
prosecution had simply been persecution gave it a new life in romance.
Witchcraft was psychologized, pathologized, and sociologized, often with
a focus on gender and race — categories of American experience largely
ignored by the political theoreticians and historians of Chapter 1 and 2.
Chapter 3 examines this process of reimagining. While a focus on the east
is maintained — as is to some extent inevitable because of the dispropor-
tionate and iconic prominence afforded by historians to the witch trials at
Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 — attention is also given to interventions
from across America and from the wider world. Witchcraft is not, how-
ever, conflated with the African- and Caribbean-American religions that
came to America with slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
While white colonists and planters often thought they recognized their
own demonic paradigms in what Native Americans, slaves, and freed black
Americans were doing when they performed rituals or chanted songs, this
was always a misreading, and usually a racially discriminatory one. The
misreadings of scholars and politicians will therefore be examined, but
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