In the Devil's Snare by Mary Beth Norton Page B
Authors: Mary Beth Norton
Tags: nonfiction
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and sometimes voicing “horrible Blasphemies against the Name of Christ.” Elizabeth Knapp’s body (but not her soul, Samuel Willard decided) was likewise taken over by Satan, who attacked Willard as a liar and “a great black rogue.” He announced to Willard and others, “I am a pretty black boy, this is my pretty girl; I have been here a great while.” Unlike the Tocutt boy, the obsessed Knapp accused a neighbor woman of bewitching her and also admitted that she had signed the devil’s covenant. Satan cut her finger with a knife and “then took a little sharpened stick, and dipped in the blood and put it into her hand, and guided it, and she wrote her name with his help,” she recounted. 54
The tormented young people of Tocutt and Groton in the 1660s and 1670s present an alternate model of seventeenth-century afflictions—of a road not followed in Salem Village. In both cases, the devil actually inhabited and spoke through the body of a possessed or obsessed person, which never happened in 1692. Furthermore, one of the young people did not accuse anyone of bewitching him. Although the other did, Samuel Willard, unlike Samuel Parris and his colleagues, did not immediately embrace the accusation. Instead, even though Elizabeth Knapp, whose eyes were “sealed up” in her fits, “knew her [the suspect witch’s] very touch from any other, though no voice were uttered,” Willard acted with careful deliberation, encouraging Knapp to pray with the suspect. Eventually, Knapp decided that “Satan had deluded her,” and her complaints of bewitchment ceased, although the fits continued. Willard also took a skeptical approach to his servant’s confession, remarking that he was not convinced she had actually agreed to a diabolic compact. Because her responses to his questions were contradictory, he regarded Elizabeth Knapp primarily as “an object of pity” and “a subject of hope” rather than as a soul lost forever to the devil. 55
Samuel Willard in 1671 thus displayed a willingness to question the sorts of statements and behaviors that many Bay Colony magistrates and ministers failed to challenge twenty-one years later. His skepticism indicates that their later credulity need not be seen as the only possible contemporary response to the affliction of young people, and that some explanation of that credulity is required. As the introduction suggested, the impact of the ongoing conflict with the Wabanakis provides much of the necessary explanation, as will become evident in this book’s later chapters.
In 1692 those wishing to combat the afflictions in Essex County were well aware of the Groton and Tocutt incidents, but they saw two other reports of afflictions published in the 1680s as constituting the most appropriate precedents for their actions. In Groton and Tocutt, ministers concluded that Satan was attacking his targets directly, without human intervention. Accordingly, the clergymen themselves dealt with the victims, and legal actions were never pursued (mere mortals, after all, could not arrest the devil and charge him with a crime). In Salem Village, by contrast, residents rapidly concluded that human agents—one or more witches, and not Satan’s direct operations—had caused the afflictions. First Dr. William Griggs diagnosed bewitchment rather than a natural ailment, and then the sufferers named suspects who credibly fit known profiles of witches. When the case thereafter moved quickly into the hands of the magistrates, the relevant precedents became those involving legal rather than spiritual methods of combating afflictions.
Cotton Mather wrote about both earlier incidents. In 1688, he helped to treat the Goodwin children of Boston, the following year describing their torments at length in
Memorable Providences.
Later, when the first phase of the Salem proceedings ended, he included a substantial summary of the other case in
Wonders of the Invisible World,
his defense of the trials. As Mather
The tormented young people of Tocutt and Groton in the 1660s and 1670s present an alternate model of seventeenth-century afflictions—of a road not followed in Salem Village. In both cases, the devil actually inhabited and spoke through the body of a possessed or obsessed person, which never happened in 1692. Furthermore, one of the young people did not accuse anyone of bewitching him. Although the other did, Samuel Willard, unlike Samuel Parris and his colleagues, did not immediately embrace the accusation. Instead, even though Elizabeth Knapp, whose eyes were “sealed up” in her fits, “knew her [the suspect witch’s] very touch from any other, though no voice were uttered,” Willard acted with careful deliberation, encouraging Knapp to pray with the suspect. Eventually, Knapp decided that “Satan had deluded her,” and her complaints of bewitchment ceased, although the fits continued. Willard also took a skeptical approach to his servant’s confession, remarking that he was not convinced she had actually agreed to a diabolic compact. Because her responses to his questions were contradictory, he regarded Elizabeth Knapp primarily as “an object of pity” and “a subject of hope” rather than as a soul lost forever to the devil. 55
Samuel Willard in 1671 thus displayed a willingness to question the sorts of statements and behaviors that many Bay Colony magistrates and ministers failed to challenge twenty-one years later. His skepticism indicates that their later credulity need not be seen as the only possible contemporary response to the affliction of young people, and that some explanation of that credulity is required. As the introduction suggested, the impact of the ongoing conflict with the Wabanakis provides much of the necessary explanation, as will become evident in this book’s later chapters.
In 1692 those wishing to combat the afflictions in Essex County were well aware of the Groton and Tocutt incidents, but they saw two other reports of afflictions published in the 1680s as constituting the most appropriate precedents for their actions. In Groton and Tocutt, ministers concluded that Satan was attacking his targets directly, without human intervention. Accordingly, the clergymen themselves dealt with the victims, and legal actions were never pursued (mere mortals, after all, could not arrest the devil and charge him with a crime). In Salem Village, by contrast, residents rapidly concluded that human agents—one or more witches, and not Satan’s direct operations—had caused the afflictions. First Dr. William Griggs diagnosed bewitchment rather than a natural ailment, and then the sufferers named suspects who credibly fit known profiles of witches. When the case thereafter moved quickly into the hands of the magistrates, the relevant precedents became those involving legal rather than spiritual methods of combating afflictions.
Cotton Mather wrote about both earlier incidents. In 1688, he helped to treat the Goodwin children of Boston, the following year describing their torments at length in
Memorable Providences.
Later, when the first phase of the Salem proceedings ended, he included a substantial summary of the other case in
Wonders of the Invisible World,
his defense of the trials. As Mather
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