Part 17

Wiser heads and greater powers than those girls possessed were manifested by the acts they _seemed_ to perform. In a literary sense they were uncultured; but they, doubtless, had been subject to as good domestic, social, moral, and religious teachings and example as existed in any community. The literary deficiencies of the girls are indicated in the following extracts:--

Drake says, "They were generally very ignorant, for out of the eight but two could write their names. Such were the characters which set in motion that stupendous tragedy which ended in blood and ruin." In vol. i. p. 486, Upham says, "How those young country girls, some of them mere children, most of them wholly illiterate, could have become familiar with such fancies to such an extent, is truly surprising.... In the Salem witchcraft proceedings, the superstition of the middle ages was embodied in real

## action. All its extravagances, absurdities, and monstrosities appear in

their application to human experience."

Such, according to their own concessions, was the feebleness of the agents whom the historians credited with performances which seem superhuman, and required for their production intellect and forces above what any community has often witnessed. Notwithstanding the inherent and insuperable incompetency of such persons to voluntarily devise and perform what has been ascribed to them, those females have been earnestly set forth as the actual and almost impromptu devisers and enactors of as intricate and effective a scheme for inflicting tortures and misery upon a vast multitude of human beings as has rarely been found in the annals of the race. If it be admitted that they, through frequent meetings at the parsonage, became fitted to conjure up and control the devastating monster that had his lair and foraging-grounds at Salem Village, the presumption amounts closely to certainty that those gatherings were ostensibly held for some laudable object. Meetings for some purpose may possibly have been held when and where the historians assume them to have occurred. But if so, it is our privilege to assume the possibility that the meetings were availed of by unseen intelligences of some grade, for developing into facile mediums such members of the circle as were constitutionally impressible and controllable by spirits; and, if so, the meetings may have become productive of results widely different from any contemplated by either the members themselves or the master of the house in which they met.

In his general history of Salem Village, introductory to that of its witchcraft, Upham, giving us the geographical positions of their several residences, and also their relations and positions in domestic life, furnishes ample grounds for very strong presumption that frequent attendance upon sportive meetings at the parsonage must have been so inconvenient and onerous to several of those girls, that they would not have been present many times in the short space of two months. Ann Putnam, a sensitive girl only twelve years old, and Mercy Lewis, a servant girl, or "the maid," in the family of Ann's father, two of the most efficient pupils in that necromantic school, resided together in a home situated not less than two and a half miles distant, in a north-westerly direction from the specified place of the meetings. Elizabeth Hubbard, an important member, lived about the same distance off, on a different road at the east. On a still different road, and equally as far away at the south-east, resided Sarah Churchill; and quite as remote, at the south, was the home of Mary Warren; and the last two must take divergent roads when they had gone only a little more than half way home. Each one of these five was very conspicuous amid the ostensible accusers, and the genuinely "afflicted ones." Excepting Ann Putnam, each was old enough to be an efficient helper in household labors, and each, unless we except Elizabeth Hubbard,--and such exception is hardly needful, because, though a niece of his wife, she is mentioned as Dr. Griggs's "maid," which probably implies that she was compensated for services she rendered,--excepting Ann Putnam, each of them was "out at service."

What, therefore, is the probability that these five girls, with any great frequency or regularity, went to and returned home from avowedly sportive or necromantic meetings _at the parsonage_? Each of them would have to travel, in going and returning, not less than five or six miles, mostly along separate routes, in winter's shortest days, by lonely and crooked roads, through miles of dark forests, over winter's snows, and amid its freezing airs. What is the probability that such persons, so circumstanced, would either desire to go, or be permitted by parents and employers to go, frequently and regularly to such meetings? Slight--very slight--because both natural and domestic obstacles must have been great. Were horses, vehicles, and drivers, or were even saddle-horses, regularly at the command of such girls for conveyance to and from such meetings? Would such persons, if physically strong and courageous enough to go on foot, be often spared by their employers to spend long winter evenings, and two hours more for travel, in practicing "fortune-telling, necromancy, and magic"? Such questions of themselves put forth a negative answer. Frequent attendance by such members of the circle was next to an impossibility. If they learned much upon any subject at the very few meetings which circumstances would permit them to attend in the short space of two months, they were very apt pupils indeed. That they became very considerably modified and unfolded in certain directions in consequence of meeting together occasionally is very credible.

We should concede its probable correctness, were an historian to make the supposition that the two Indian slaves in Mr. Parris's kitchen, John Indian and his wife Tituba, often amused themselves and any young folks or other visitors, who there basked in genial light and warmth from blazing logs in a huge New England fireplace on a cold winter's evening, by rehearsing ghost stories and magic lore, and performing any such feats in fortune-telling or other mystical doings as they might be able to exhibit, or as might transpire through them. That the little girls, Elizabeth, daughter of Mr. Parris, and Abigail Williams, his niece, were accustomed to spend many cold winter evenings in the warm kitchen of their own home is very credible. Mary Walcut and Susanna Sheldon, who lived in the near neighborhood, perhaps dropped in frequently. But the majority of those whose astonishing proficiency in performing what Drake said the circle met for, viz., "to do or produce superhuman acts," and for _learning_, as Upham would say, how to manifest "the superstition of the middle ages ... embodied in real action,"--the _majority_ of those girls obviously must have had only very restricted opportunities for study and practice at the parsonage. It is not at all improbable that each of them was present in that kitchen occasionally during two months of that winter; nor that each of them was impregnated by the auras of that place and of its occupants both visible and invisible; nor that the physical and psychic soils in each were there mellowed, and also sown with some seed which produced unlooked-for fruits during the following spring and summer.

Mediumistic capabilities are innate peculiarities, measurably hereditary, and nearly always amenable to special conditions and surroundings for conspicuous development. King Saul became a prophet, i. e., a medium, only when he met, mingled with, and imbibed emanations from prophets or mediums. Messengers whom he sent to the prophets succumbed to new and developing influences upon arriving at their destination, and became suddenly prophets themselves. Latent germs of spiritualistic capabilities, if permeated by quickening auras, which often emanate from positive mediums, frequently unfold into mediumship, as naturally as specific elements, reaching latent germs in many human systems, expand those germs into measles, or into whooping-cough; or as naturally as listening to soul-stirring music energizes latent capabilities in many who are acted upon by its strains, and helps such to become themselves better musicians than before.

The parsonage kitchen--that nestling-place of John Indian and his wife Tituba--may have been that winter a little Delphos, or a little Mount Horeb, that is, a spot where developing nourishments of mediumistic germs were collected in unusual abundance, and were unwontedly operative. We are not only ready to admit, but deem it probable, that any susceptible persons who came into the presence of John and Tituba, in their special room, may have there imbibed properties unsought and unperceived which fostered the development of such visitors into tools or instruments, by the use of which the genuine authors of Salem witchcraft brought out their work upon a public stage, and prosecuted its terrific enactment. Smothering our serious doubts whether any regular meetings at stated times were arranged for or held, we are entirely ready to let the supposition stand that gatherings, more or less extensive, occasionally occurred, at which fortune-telling, necromancy, magic, or Spiritualism, was made the subject of either sportive or serious attention, and we will let results indicate who managed the visible performers during the exercises or entertainments there.

Upham's beautifully rhetorical and eloquent efforts to show that because they, as he states, held a number of meetings for learning and practicing mystic arts, those rustic, illiterate girls thereby and thereat qualified themselves to concoct and accomplish of their own accord, and by their histrionic and malicious capabilities, all that mighty scheme or plan which his predecessor and himself lay to their charge, fail, entirely fail, to meet the fair demands of that common sense which rigidly requires forces and agents adequate in their nature and conditions to produce all effects which are ascribed to them.

Fowler seems to have inferred from some statements ascribed to Proctor, that the latter threatened to go and force Mary Warren to leave the _circle_. We do not so read the account.

The morning of March 25,--that is, the next morning after the examination of Rebecca Nurse,--John Proctor said "he was going to fetch home his jade" (Mary Warren); "he left her there" (at the village) "last night, and had rather given 40c than let her come up." That is, apparently, he had rather have given that sum than to have had her be present at the examination of Mrs. Nurse; for, continued he, "if they were let alone, Sr., we should all be devils and witches quickly; they should rather be had to the whipping post; but he would fetch his jade home and thrust the devil out of her, ... crying, hang them--hang them. And also added, that when she was first taken with fits he kept her close to the wheel, and threatened to thrash her, and then she had no more fits till the next day" (when) "he was gone forth, and then she must have her fits again forsooth," &c.--_Woodward's Series_, vol. i. p. 63.

It is obvious from the above that Proctor's objection was to his jade's attendance upon the examination of the accused--to her attendance at court--and not at the circle, which, according to Upham, should have closed its meetings a month at least before the 25th of March. And yet S. P. Fowler says (Woodward's Series, vol. iii. p. 204), that "Proctor, out of all patience with the _meetings of the girls composing this circle_, one day said he was going to the village to bring Mary Warren, the jade, home." Most readers will infer from such a statement that Proctor proposed to take the girl away from the "circle;" but the statement from which the annotator drew his information, when taken in connection with its date, clearly shows that the threats to bring home the jade and thrash her were subsequent to the assemblages of the circle, and were made at a time when the girls were being used as witnesses before the examining magistrates. That which tried the resolute man's patience, was not the meetings of the _circle_, but the testimony of the girls in court, which threatened to make all the people "devils and witches quickly."

Proctor's stopping the _fits_, by threats to thrash the girl, intimates that the fits were measurably controllable by the will of some one. That much may be true in relation to almost all diseases and maladies of the body, but probably not as much so in most other kinds as in those which are imposed by a will that has no natural alliance with the agitated body. Under the influence of threats, the girl would naturally struggle to get full possession of all her own powers and faculties, and the effort would put her own elements in such commotion that for a time no foreign will could get control over her form. Threats, medicines of certain kinds, and many other applications, may temporally render almost any medium's system uncontrollable by spirits. Calmness, both of mind and body, and darkness, too, which is less positive and disintegrating than light, in action upon instruments made and used by spirits, are very helpful to control of borrowed forms.

In some of his comments (vol. ii. p. 434) Upham wrote more wisely than himself seems to have known. Words from his pen state that "one of the sources of the delusion of 1692, was ignorance of many natural laws that have been revealed by modern science. A vast amount of knowledge on these subjects has been attained since that time." True, true indeed. And had the author of that statement been familiar with important portions of that "vast amount of" new "knowledge," he himself, as readily as those who are better versed in a certain class of modern revealments, would have seen and felt the perfect childishness of his attempt to make those rustic girls the conscious contrivers and perverse and malignant actors of the whole of the vast, complicated, and terrific tragedy of Salem witchcraft.

He might have known when he wrote, he ought to have known then, that Dr. Robert Hare, of Philadelphia, who was eminent, distinctly and broadly eminent, as a scientist, had in 1855 published to the world a rigidly scientific _demonstration_ that some unseen agent, intelligent enough to understand and comply with verbal requests, repeatedly moved the arms of scale-beams contrary to the normal action of gravitation. Science, there and then, revealed the existence of some natural law or laws which permit unseen and impalpable intelligences, under some conditions, to put forth

## action upon matter, with force and to extent, which man can measure in

pounds avoirdupois. That single achievement of modern science teaches the wisdom of exempting seemingly diabolized and mischievous children from charge of being devils incarnate, until we have determined whether some beings of greater powers and different dispositions may not have usurped control of youthful and pliant human forms, and through them manifested schemes and pranks that originated in supernal brains, and were enacted by use of such forces as can be manipulated by none below disembodied intelligences.

Obviously he who was cognizant that science had made recent discoveries, suffered himself to remain in ignorance of what to him, as witchcraft historian, were the most pertinent and important parts of the knowledge recently gained; ignorant of those parts which were most closely connected with philosophical solution of the mysteries which pervaded the history he was elaborating. His blindness to what science--yes, to what exact physical science--by her rigid processes of weighing and measuring had positively _demonstrated_, bespeaks his short-comings, and would bespeak the unphilosophical stand-point of any historian of, or critic upon, the world's marvels, who, since the day of Hare, ignores the light radiating from his demonstration, and continues to grope on in darkness which use of that light would dispel. Take into the catalogue of natural agents and forces all those whose existence and action, science, as applied by Dr. Hare twenty years ago, and again by Mr. Crookes and others in England more recently, backed, too, by the observations and tests of thousands less erudite, has _demonstrated_, and then all occasion to look upon our fathers as numskulls, and their daughters as proficient devils, at once disappears. New England soil, two centuries ago, was not populated mainly by jack-asses; and even had it been, their offspring would have been neither monkeys nor hyenas.

Since the work by Dr. Hare, entitled "Spiritualism Scientifically Demonstrated," may not be readily accessible by many readers, his description of one demonstrative process is quoted from page 49, as follows:--

"A board, being about four feet in length, is supported by a rod, as a fulcrum, at about one foot from one end, and, of course, three feet from the other, which is suspended on a spring balance. A glass vase, about nine inches in diameter and five inches in hight, having a knob to hold it by, when inverted had this knob inserted in a hole made in the board six inches, nearly, from the fulcrum. Thus the vase rested on the board mouth upward. A wire-gauze cage, such as is used to keep flies from sugar, was so arranged by a well-known means as to slide up or down on two iron rods, one on each side of the trestle supporting the fulcrum. By these arrangements it was so adjusted as to descend into the vase until within an inch and a half of the bottom, while the inferiority of its dimensions prevented it from coming elsewhere within an inch of the parietes of the vase. Water was poured into the vase so as to rise into the cage till within about an inch and an half of the brim. A well-known medium (Gordon) was induced to plunge his hands, clasped together, to the bottom of the cage, holding them perfectly still. As soon as those conditions were attained, the apparatus being untouched by any one excepting the medium as described, I invoked the aid of my spirit friends. A downward force was repeatedly exerted upon the end of the board appended to the balance, equal to three pounds' weight nearly;... the distance of the hook of the balance from the fulcrum on which the board turned was six times as great as the cage in which the hands were situated. Consequently a force of 3x6=18 pounds must have been exerted."

The above experiment was performed in Dr. Hare's own laboratory, in the presence and under the watchful scrutiny of John M. Kennedy, Esq., and was made with extraordinary care, because Professor Henry had just treated a similar result formerly obtained as incredible. Plate III. in the book furnishes a diagram illustrating Dr. Hare's apparatus. This experimenter, whom Alfred R. Wallace calls America's foremost chemist, had spent very many years in both constructing and in using, as a scientist, varied kinds of apparatus for testing the presence and action of subtile forces in nature, and he was competent to know, and did know as well as any other man whatsoever in the world's great body of scientists, when results were obtained to positive certainty. He _proved_ that some invisible and intelligent power moved his scale-beam contrary to the action of gravitation. The above demonstration, accompanied by many other evidences of spirit-action upon matter through mediums, had been published twelve years when Upham put forth his work. Therefore he was either ignorant of or he ignored late discoveries of science which had revolutionizing applicability to the very theories which he was putting forth.

After having eloquently depicted the sad results of witchcraft, that author says (vol. ii. p. 427), "Let those results for ever stand conspicuous, beacon-monuments, warning us and coming generations against superstition in every form, and all credulous and vain attempts to penetrate beyond the legitimate boundaries of human knowledge." If there ever was "a _credulous and vain attempt_ to penetrate beyond the legitimate boundaries of human knowledge," one was made by him who sought to find that the keen-eyed, energetic, common-sense, virtuous, religious men of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century lacked common sagacity, and that their little girls rivaled Satan himself in malignity. Most seriously we ask whether forces which can be and have been measured by palpable scales, are "beyond the legitimate boundaries of human knowledge?" We ask whether, anywhere in the universe, there exist boundaries beyond which it is, or can be, illegitimate for man to go in search after agents and forces which either habitually or occasionally act legitimately upon him in this mortal life?

Another question is suggested by the foregoing quotation. Would not positive knowledge that there are unseen agents and forces within the realms of nature that can legitimately exhibit the phenomena once deemed witchcrafts, transfer such phenomena from the domain of either superstition or crime into that of science or that of beneficence? Surely it would. And, therefore, how can one possibly work more efficiently for depopulating the domain of superstition, than by bringing its inhabitants forth and colonizing them on the lands of knowledge and science? Shall we comply with the historian's advice, and still continue to leave what ignorance denominates hobgoblins and ghosts to remain shrouded in appalling mists, and thus aid them to continue to be to coming generations the same awful beings they were to the generations past? Or shall we, on the other hand, now, while experience and science are showing that such work is practicable, push discovery onward till we both find laws and learn conditions which permit closer access of disembodied beings to us, and which also permit most beneficent reciprocal action between them and us, just as soon as familiarity, confidence, calmness, and mutual trust make their access easy? Which shall we do? Which is most scientific? Which is most dutiful to God and friendly to man? Which? Is ignorance of, or is knowledge of, nature's forces and inhabitants the greater blessing? Which? Away with ignorance where knowledge is attainable.

We choose to learn as much concerning the universe and its inhabitants as God gives us power and opportunities to acquire; not fearing his censure, but trusting to win his approbation, by so doing. When one learns that issuers from the vailed realms of spirit-land are only earth's emancipated children revisiting their former homes, the cry that devils are coming lacks any startling power. Faith, and even knowledge, sometimes says, "It is my friends and loved ones and those who love me, who are in the circumambient hosts, and I will do what I may to facilitate their more sensible approach; will extend toward them a friendly and helping hand."

Only superstition and ignorance quail and skulk before visitants that come from unseen realms; knowledge stands fast and meets them with welcome and joy.

The "legitimate boundaries of knowledge"! Where are they? Surely not within any domain where knowledge can supersede ignorance and its consequent superstitions.