Witchcraft of New England Explained by Modern SpiritualismPutnam, Allen
Religion
Witchcraft of New England Explained by Modern Spiritualism
Putnam, Allen
Spiritualism; Witchcraft -- New England
Hutchinson, Upham, and Drake each sought to make it apparent that mundane
roguishness, trickery, and malice, operating amid public credulity and
infatuation, prompted and enabled frail girls and women to produce the
"amazing feats," marvelous convulsions, and all the many other woeful
outworkings of witchcraft. Having been either unobservant of, or having
ignored, the plain historic fact seen over and over again in Tituba's
testimony, that certain other intelligences than girls, that minds which
were freed more or less fully and permanently from the hamperings of
flesh, actually started the first display of witchcraft pinchings, fits,
and convulsions at Salem Village, those historians wrongfully charged
girls and women, whose bodies were then the subjects and tools of other
intelligences, with being the feigners of maladies and the producers of
acts which an eye-witness and reluctant participator distinctly declares
were manifested in obedience to a will or wills not their own. Such
oversight, or such discarding of facts, whichever it may have been, caused
those writers to so restrict their stores of intelligent agents having
more or less access to and power over man, as to put outside of their own
reach and vision the actual producers of witchcraft phenomena. This
self-imposed or self-retained restriction forced upon them necessity for
efforts to show that mere children possessed gigantic physical and mental
powers and brains which concocted and executed schemes that shook to their
very foundations the strong fabrics of church and state--yes, forced them
to ascribe mighty public agitations to insignificant operators.
Tituba, on the other hand, by a simple statement of what her own interior
self saw, heard, felt, and did,--by a statement of what she actually
_knew_,--designated the genuine and the obviously competent authors of
witchcraft marvels, and explained their advent rationally. She, therefore,
by far--very far--outranks each and all of those historians as a competent
and authoritative expounder of the authorship, origin, and nature of Salem
Witchcraft. Her "something like a man"--her _tall white-haired man in
serge coat_--was its author. That man was a spirit, and his works were
Spiritualism of some quality. Opposition revealed his possession of mighty
force. And, whatever his motive, the result of his scheme was the death of
witchcraft throughout Christendom, and consequent wide emancipation from
mental slavery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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