Witchcraft of New England Explained by Modern SpiritualismPutnam, Allen
Religion
Witchcraft of New England Explained by Modern Spiritualism
Putnam, Allen
Spiritualism; Witchcraft -- New England
2. The testimony indicates that her _very simple medicines, such as
anise-seed and liquors, produced extraordinary violent effects_. This is
credible. Extraordinary effects were produced by magnetized handkerchiefs
in the days of Paul, and to-day, even pure water, placed beneath the hands
of some peculiar mediums, or beneath the tips of their fingers, sometimes
absorbs or is made to manifest the medicinal properties of wine, ipecac,
or of other substances desired; and such mediums are often very
"successful practitioners using only simple remedies." The action of what
they administer need not be psychological in any proper sense of that
term: that is, the patient need not be informed, nor have suspicion, that
the water is medicated thus; though any persons upon whom the action is
very perceptible, probably, must be constitutionally mediumistic. By
personal observation we have learned that water may be so medicated by
unseen infusion from unseen source, as to taste like, and operate like,
either ipecac or wine, according to the properties which some unseen
intelligence to whom needs are transparent, and who can sicken or refresh
at pleasure, has gathered from the atmosphere or elsewhere and infused
into that water. When public vigilance had been roused to suspicion around
this woman, it is not improbable that many persons, belligerent
devil-ward, sought a test of her powers, and that some of them
(susceptible ones) felt or drank in what caused "deafness, or vomiting, or
other pains or sickness"--not improbable that on some of them her simples
had "_violent_ effects." Persons thus affected would make up nearly the
whole class from whom witnesses at her trial would be selected. If she had
been generally a producer of only pains and sickness, her practice would
soon have dwindled to nothing, and she would have lived on without
molestation. "A successful practitioner," simply as such, would never have
been arraigned.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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