Witchcraft of New England Explained by Modern SpiritualismPutnam, Allen
Religion
Witchcraft of New England Explained by Modern Spiritualism
Putnam, Allen
Spiritualism; Witchcraft -- New England
We have met with no indication that she was physically weak or mentally
despondent. She seems to have borne up well under long, tedious horseback
rides daily to and from Ipswich jail, nine or ten miles distant, whither
she was nightly sent ever after the time of her becoming invisible to her
guards. Her keeper on the way says, "she leaped off her horse three times,
railed at the magistrates, and endeavored to kill herself." That attempt,
if she made one, to take her own life, was scarcely less likely to spring
from the angry mental mood then prompting her to rail against the
magistrates, than from despondency or forlornness.
When under examination, her answers were about as direct, explicit, and to
the point, as most other suspected ones were able to give to the
perplexing questions which were put; and some of hers have more snap than
we usually find in words from lips of the "forlorn and broken down."
It is not probable that her previous life had won much public favor; yet
no evidence has been met with that her neighbors generally cherished
hostile feelings towards her, or possessed sentiments which would prompt
them to rejoice at her prosecution. We, as has already been made apparent,
ascribe her arrest to other causes than the lowness of her character and
condition. That was not the primal incentive to her being "cried out
upon." Her organization, and the then existing condition of her faculties,
made her either a convenient channel through which to transmit, or a
fountain from which to draw, forces into the systems of certain other
sensitives, which forces might act therein for either the annoyance and
suffering, or the pleasure and relief of the recipients, according to
either inherent properties of the forces themselves, or to the purpose of
some intelligence who should inflow and manipulate them. The sensitive
girls might, and, if well unfolded mediumistically, would unerringly trace
back such forces as acted upon themselves to their mundane point of
emanation, and in good conscience and good faith accuse the person from
whom the forces issued of being their tormentor; if clairvoyant they could
see, if clairaudient could hear, and, if not specially unfolded for seeing
with the inner eye and hearing with the inner ear, could _sense_ the
person from whom the foreign and disturbing influences came forth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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