Part 10

Upham detected the significant fact in the case, that her simple remedies were so efficacious as to make her a successful practitioner; yes;--but was simply successful medical practice the chief reason why her neighbors charged diabolism? What amount of success in alleviating the sufferings that flesh is heir to would invoke public vengeance? How much beneficence did one then need to perform before public sentiment, would reprobate its author? Could such faculties and agents alone as are normally and ordinarily used, enable a woman to achieve such success in curing diseases, healing wounds, and alleviating pains, as to arouse an intelligent and religious community to arrest and try her for a capital offense against the well-being of society? Never. Did the historian notice his own back-handed imputation of atrocious diabolism upon the population of Charlestown when he led his readers to infer that they persecuted one of their number unto an ignominious death, solely because "she was a successful practitioner using only simple remedies"? Whether he saw it or not, his explanation made her neighbors take the life of this woman because of the good works she had done among them. Some theory of explanation which will exempt us from the necessity of assenting to gratuitous aspersions of the sagacity and sentiments of justice pertaining to our ancestry in the mass, is very desirable. Margaret Jones was a very successful healing medium, and therefore her works were mysteries.

Having noticed the only two allegations in this case which the historians have deemed worthy of specification or had courage to adduce, and having seen that Hutchinson ascribed her persecution to her own anger flowing out through her hands, while Upham ascribed it to her great success as a healer, we will just note the fact that the former historian generally indicated an abiding apprehension that those who were persecuted for the crime in question, were the parties most to be blamed; while the latter, oftener than otherwise, throws the chief blame upon the persecutors. In this instance the earlier historian makes her anger,--a trait which is blamable,--while the latter makes her beneficence,--a commendable characteristic,--the chief exciting cause to her condemnation and execution.

We proceed to examine other original charges more difficult to solve plausibly on the hypotheses of Hutchinson and Upham than were anger and successful medical practice; charges not amenable to any philosophy entertained by those expounders.

3. "She used to tell such as would not make use of her physic that they would never be healed; and, accordingly, their diseases and hurts continued; with relapses against the ordinary course," &c. It is very common in our day for clairvoyance to see, or--more broadly and instructively--it is common for mediumistic faculties to sense and feel sure, that the existing tendency of a patient's disease will soon terminate in death, if not checked by some peculiar medicinal agent, often a spiritual one, or one medicated by spirits, which ordinary physicians are ignorant of, will not prescribe, and cannot obtain. The evidence which Judge Winthrop reports, shows that "the diseases and hurts" of recusants to take her prescriptions, not only continued to remain unhealed, but underwent such changes and relapses as physicians and surgeons could not understand. Since such things occurred in accordance with her predictions, we here perceive strong evidence that the woman possessed uncommon susceptibilities for sensing coming results. It is just as clearly proved that she foretold specific events, as it is that her touch was malignant, and her practice successful. Her marvelous prescience, which was one of her conspicuous powers, the historians failed to set forth. Their philosophy, founded only on such materials as are recognized in man's physical sciences, was too narrow to embrace occult natural agents and forces by which such prescient powers could be drawn or put forth through some human organisms and produce marvelous results. Therefore those expounders let such facts remain undisturbed in the rarely visited closets where they have long reposed.

4. Things which she foretold came to pass accordingly. That is, events verified her predictions, and thus proved her exercise of marvelously prophetic powers. Should one assume that her verified predictions were only skillful or lucky guesses, would such assumption be fair and just toward the people who, as living witnesses on the spot, could know what the things were which she foretold, and know also with what accuracy they were fulfilled, and yet deemed them genuine prophecies? Her accusers could know the facts, while we, in the main, must be ignorant of them. We cannot reasonably deny that the direct observers actually discerned the exercise of genuinely prophetic powers by her. Some mortals at times can prophesy; for both in ancient prophetic and apostolic times, and in our own age, many people have been and are known to do it. Eternal laws or forces lead some mortals to sure knowledge of coming events. History and returning spirits both so teach.

"The spirit of prophecy has its source in infinite truth, and is as much a part of infinite law as any other manifestation of life; therefore it has a wise and powerful protection; and they who avail themselves of this spirit of prophecy, by virtue of the way and manner in which they are physically and spiritually compounded, if they are fortunate enough to place themselves in harmonious relations to the law, fail not in prophesying. But if, as is often the case, they unfortunately place themselves in inharmonious relations to the law, they must, of necessity, fail in part, if not entirely. It is a truthful saying, that 'coming events cast their shadows before.' These shadows (?) are, in reality, portions of the events; these shadows take precedence of the material birth of all events as they are understood by mortals; they are the basis of that which you receive, and outlast that which you receive; they are the infinite part. Now, then, there are some persons so constituted that they perceive these shadows (?) and can judge as accurately concerning what they predict, as the learned astronomer can concerning an eclipse."--Spirit, Prof. Alexander M. Fisher, of Yale. BANNER OF LIGHT, Jan. 30, 1875.

5. "She could tell of secret speeches which she had no ordinary means to come to knowledge of." At times, then, she was clairaudient, or was one of those sensitives whose spiritual organs of sensation are at times so disentangled from their material ones, that she experienced a practical annihilation of space and gross matter, which let her, as all unclogged spirits may, be practically present with and listeners to any person anywhere, to whom she was for any reason attracted, and with whom she came into rapport. Conditions admitting cognizance of the thoughts and words of the absent in body are now of daily occurrence with men, women, and children not a few, and therefore were possible with Margaret Jones in 1648 and years preceding. A letter from Captain Densmore, on a future page of this work, will show recent possession of power to bear the voices of living persons whose bodies were very far distant from the hearer.

6. "While in the prison in the clear daylight there was seen in her arms ... a little child ... which, at the officer's approach, ran and vanished." Vanished; that word intimates that it was a spectral or spirit child--perhaps her own departed one. By whom was it seen? By an officer of the prison, and therefore by one not likely to be her confederate in attempt at imposture. Not by him only; for a chambermaid also saw the little one, and was made sick by the sight; which effect argues against her having had any complicity in a trick. That testimony to such occurrences was given in court, is vouched for by Winthrop, and must have been, or surely should have been, read by subsequent historians. Their adroitness at leaving certain classes of facts in undisturbed obscurity, nearly rivals the cunning of agents to whom they impute the origin and production of witchcraft manifestations.

The visible presence of that evanescent child shows very clearly that Mrs. Jones was endowed with some of the rarer and exceptional properties of mediumship--that she possessed those special elements in the midst of which spirits could be robed in such materialized encasements, that material eyes could discern them. Angels looking and acting like men (Gen. xviii.) were seen by Abraham and Lot. One was seen (Judg. xiii.) by Manoah and his wife. Another by Tobias, son of Tobit (Apoc.); another by disciples who were walking toward Emmaus (John xx.); others also by thousands of individuals in various ages and nations, sporadically. To-day, distinct perception of materialized spirits in the presence of Mrs. Andrews at Moravia, N. Y., around Dr. Slade of New York city, and many others are reported almost weekly, and are well attested. In these modern instances, generally, some special, though simple, pre-arrangements are made to facilitate such manifestations; but we may very reasonably doubt whether anything of the kind was resorted to by Mrs. Jones, because, being in prison charged with the awful crime of witchcraft, the presumption is imperative that she must have lacked both means and opportunity to command tangible apparatus either for helping on a genuine spirit manifestation, or producing an optical illusion upon her keepers.

Mortal. "How do spirits materialize?"

Spirit. "You must know the atmosphere is full of particles of matter. Everything that is in the human body is also in the atmosphere in fine particles. Darkness renders these particles more quiescent, and hence more easily managed by spirits. The spirit has a will point or center which is a spark of the Divine Nature. When the condition of the atmosphere, of the medium, and of the circle is proper, the spirit exerts that will power, and, in accordance with natural law, attracts to its spirit form the floating particles in the air, and they condense upon and interpenetrate the spirit form or body so as to materialize it, making bone, muscle, skin, hair--every part, and making the spirit body, for the time being, a solid, palpable one. The air contains an immense amount of matter which can be used by spirits for materializing. We do not, however, usually materialize the blood.... We have to draw a portion of the substance for materialization from the medium, he being a kind of reservoir where we concentrate our supplies, and it is much more difficult to draw from him when at a distance, therefore we keep near him."--Spirit. Disc., as reported by H A. Buddington. BANNER OF LIGHT, Feb. 6, 1875.

A case of much interest and significance was reported to the Boston Post, a daily newspaper, by a correspondent under date of Newburyport, Jan. 13, 1873. Therein is furnished an account of a spirit boy showing himself in broad daylight, several times, on different occasions, at a window between an entry and a school-room, to a band of children and their teacher; also of his making a disturbing racket in an unfinished attic over them occasionally for many successive months. Miss Perkins, the teacher, says, "He is a little fellow, about eleven years old, with a pale face, and the saddest, sweetest mouth that she ever saw in her life, looking fearlessly up into her face out of a pair of blue eyes. He retreated into a corner. She followed him, and just as she was about to lay her hand upon him he vanished. No door had been opened, and yet he was gone." The account states that Miss Perkins, "though no spiritualist, is convinced that it" (the racket) "is all produced by supernatural agency, and believes that the apparition she saw was a veritable ghost."

The editor of the Springfield Republican probably consulted the teacher of that school, Miss Lucy A. Perkins, as to the correctness of the foregoing, and perhaps other accounts, which had become public, for she wrote to him, and he published as follows:--

"The account you sent me is true, with a few exceptions. When I first saw the boy, he was neatly attired in a brown suit of clothes, trimmed with braid and buttons of the same color. When I reached forward to grasp him, he seemed not like the boy, but vapory, or, as I can only describe it, like a thin cloud scudding across the room; still he seemed to have the boy form. Reports from some of the Boston papers say I fainted; such is not the case. I knew where I was and what I was about just as well as I know I am writing.

"One day I sent a boy out to hang up the brushes, &c.... He was out about five minutes. After he had taken his seat, three raps came on the door of the room where the brushes were hung. He said, 'Miss Perkins, can I go out and see who's there?' I told him, 'Yes, and leave the school-room door open.' He did so, and when he opened the brush-room door (I sat where I could see all) every one of the brushes, both long and short handled, came falling off the nails where they were hung; some struck him on the shoulders, and the broom directly on the top of his head. The dust-pan, hanging on a nail at some distance above the brushes, came tumbling to the floor with a vengeance. It then stood on its handle, then on the bottom edge, and continued on so till it entered the school-room, and then it was placed as nicely against the partition as if I had done it myself. Just as soon as I'd raise the ventilator, a black ball, like a cannon ball, would begin to roll around the attic, and make such a noise I would be obliged to lower the ventilator. One day the room was quiet as it possibly could be, and all at once some one in the attic called out, 'Dadie Pike!' Dadie thought I spoke, and said, 'What'm?' I said to him, 'Can you say your lesson?'

"Since the boy affair took place, the attic has been fastened up; locks and keys are of no use, however, for there is as much walking up stairs, and sometimes the hammering and nailing. Once in a while, sounds as of some one walking will come down the attic way, go across the entry, and open the outside door, and be gone perhaps ten minutes; after it is quiet again, the door will open, and he, she, or it will go up stairs.... I am not a spiritualist; never attended a sitting, in fact, never had anything to do with a person of that belief, and never saw any manifestations. Why anything of the sort should take place where I am, is more than I can account for."

This case, wherein a teacher and her two score pupils simultaneously saw a spirit in broad daylight, day after day and week after week, argues very forcibly that "the nature of things" permits admission that the testimony relating to the spirit child in the jail may be literally true. Laws and forces are now frequently indicating their existence, which permit the observable presence of spirits.

Intense yearnings for comfortings, sympathy, and support in her dark and trying hour, as well as other causes, may have drawn an angel child--her own or some other--to the arms of Margaret Jones, whose history reveals her possession of peculiar susceptibilities and mediumistic properties; and with her as a reservoir, materialization of the spirit may have been accomplished.

7. The sickened maid "was cured by the said Margaret, who used means to be employed to that end." Kindness and skill successfully put forth to heal the sick, even while the public was keeping her in a felon's cell, hang as a luminous cloud over her head, and betoken something good in her--betoken the possible source of something different from a malignant touch--yes, of "genuinely successful medical practice."

We know little of her character; there is no impeachment of it in the recorded testimony. Her peculiar powers resulted, no doubt, from peculiar innate formations of and connections between her outer and inner organisms, and had little dependence upon intellectual or moral qualities. Not her own holiness, nor any other common power of hers, enabled her to either intensify or abate painful sensations. Whether sinner or saint was the more prominent in her character, our course and views have no occasion to inquire.

Winthrop's comments say that "her behavior at her trial was very intemperate; lying notoriously and railing upon the jury and witnesses;... in the like distemper she died." He gives no particulars, and therefore furnishes no grounds on which we may judge whether any of her statements which seemed to him false, might not seem to us, at our different stand-point of observation, to have been true. Very many perfectly true utterances made by mediums to-day relative to their involuntary and even unconscious putting forth of acts and words imputed to them, would be deemed lies by all common interpreters who are ignorant of the part often performed by or through that higher set of mental powers which our leading scientists have lately discovered are at the service of intellect not our own. Perhaps she lied; perhaps, too, she was truthful, but misunderstood. Intemperance in her behavior, no doubt, was manifest. But that might spring from various motives. Any spirited person, consciously innocent of a charged offense, and possessing only moderate power of self-control and moderate intellectual stamina, would be very likely to pour forth warm language, and flat and forceful denials of allegations of wrong-doing. Persecuted innocence was only a very little less likely--if at all less--than ill temper or "distemper," to call forth what might seem to be "railing upon the jury and witnesses." Neither severe language nor "intemperate behavior" is necessarily derogatory to any one's prevailing temper or character, when rushing forth from the lips and limbs of one whose deeds are being so misinterpreted that beneficence is looked upon as diabolism, and whose beneficent works are being made to draw down upon their author an ignominious death.

Possibly words from her lips, and behavior seemingly prompted by her emotions, were manifestations of the thoughts and impulses of some other intelligence than herself. If so, most scathing rebukes for her persecution, and for thirstings for her blood, might fall thick and heavy upon the ears of benighted jurors and blinded witnesses. Observation has often noticed most terrific outflowings of denunciations upon blind guides, through organs of speech not controlled by their reputed owner. Felix is not the last person who has trembled under the lashings of inspiration. An acting out through her form, by another intelligence, a deep sense of wrong she had received, may have made her seem as mad in the eyes of Winthrop, as the learning and forceful utterances of Paul did him in those of Festus.

Evidence produced at her trial shows that Margaret Jones correctly foretold the course of diseases in the systems of those who declined her prescriptions--that she foretold other "things which came to pass accordingly"--that she learned the purport of conversations by the absent or secluded--that a spirit child became visible in her auras--and that the sickened maid was cured by her appliances. Each and all of these very marvelous manifestations were just as distinctly and authentically recorded on paper still extant, as were those less rare ones which have been put forth as fair indices of the case. Such blinking out of sight the most important things pertaining to the person who, as far as is now known, was first on this side the Atlantic to be executed for witchcraft, is unjust to culture and philosophy, which should be furnished with all known facts; is unjust to the fathers, whose full basis for her prosecution and execution should be set forth ere just judgment of their doings can be formed; and is unjust to her whose transcendent powers and effective labors for healing the sick may have been the main cause why minds deluded by a false and frenzying creed devil-ward, were impelled on to barbarously destroy one who had been and might have continued to be their benefactress.

She was a natural conduit from the inner to the outer world, through which perhaps impersonal force at times might cause supernal knowledge and power to come into her outer being; through which again, her own will might suction such, while at other times unseen persons might inject them through from their abodes, and even come themselves to aid her in their application. Nothing harmful was charged against her, excepting what seemed to be, and were believed to be, superhuman abilities.

The power that formed her originally, implanted and developed within her organism unusual capabilities for curing physical disease, for reading the future, and hearing the distant. There is neither evidence nor foundation for a conjecture that she was ever pupil of teachers of medical science, or of jugglery, nor that she belonged to any mesmerically developing circle. Her acts cannot well have been mere imitations of what she had seen others do, or had read or heard of having been done. She had no teachers, no confederates that were visible and tangible. Indeed, who among men could possibly have taught or helped her to prophesy correctly, to hear the far distant, or to embody a spirit child? Not one--not one. Such performances were only natural evolutions from her inborn faculties, when acted upon by spirit forces or agents, or both. The reader is asked how these manifestations, through our first martyr to it, can possibly be explained on the hypothesis that witchcraft was nothing else than the histrionic tricks of sprightly and cunning children, either singly or in combination with the ingenuities and malignities of old women. Such agents, unaided from out the unseen, were most clearly incompetent to project into human view some phenomena which attended upon this consternating seer, hearer, healer, and holder of properties for materializing a spirit form so as to render it visible.

What possible facts or considerations could have induced the humane, intelligent, virtuous, and religious community in which she lived, to seek the life of such a woman, moving, probably, in humble sphere, but, in the main, a doer of good works? The question brings up a complex and difficult problem, viz., How can the seeming stupidity and inhumanity of our fathers be reconciled with their obvious intelligence and humaneness?

Assuming the record of testimony given in court to be correct--and why should we not?--the manifestations through and around Margaret Jones clearly indicated the outworking there of some abilities which the bodies and ordinary mental powers of embodied human beings do not possess. What then? Some unseen power must have helped her. What unseen power? Yes, what unseen power? Experience as then interpreted--religious creeds as then understood--science and philosophy as they then existed--all conspired to give one and the same answer, viz., The Devil. That conclusion from the witnessed facts was then inevitable. The devil helped her. What next? The devil could help no one who had not previously entered into a covenant with him, and he surely helped this woman. Therefore she had made a covenant with him, and in making that she became a witch. The law of God which binds Christians says, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Thus our forefathers saw and reasoned. Steps from facts to the conclusion were few, short, and plain. Feeble intellects could take them, and strong ones must do so, or reject their life-long creeds. Then a crucial hour was upon them. To distrust and disregard their credal faith or stifle their humanity, one or the other, was the hard alternative presented to strong, good men. Their cherished creed or Margaret Jones, one or the other, must be sacrificed. Which? Clear heads and life-long affections grasped the creed firmly, and resolved to save it. They let Logic draw her rigid conclusions, and put them forth as rules for individual and public action. Sympathy went down before dominant faith, and man stifled every rebellious emotion. God's call and law, Christian men then felt, were paramount to sympathy. In submission to what they deemed Heaven's will and call they said, "Down, humaneness--down! Up, God-derived Faith--up, in your majesty and might! Heart must follow whither you lead." Their awful and cramping Creed devil-ward was the chief fountain of bewildering and brutalizing force that dragged intelligent and kind men on to redden our soil with innocent blood, and that too "in all good conscience."

Look closely at their position. The faith of all ages and nations had held that occurrences which seemed to result from supermundane force were produced by disembodied intelligences. Protestant Christendom was extensively holding that no invisible beings, excepting their Great Monstrous Monk-made Devil (see Appendix) and his obedient servants, could by any possibility work upon the bodies and possessions of men. And none such could work upon the external world in any other way than through, or by the aid of, such mortals as had voluntarily made a covenant with him. Such covenant once formed, the person making it would be an open door through which his fearful Majesty, or any imp of his, could freely enter the outer world and vent his malignity upon all the region far and wide around his entrance-place. Her works proved to the intellect of that day that this Margaret had covenanted to let him enter and co-operate with her. What, therefore, must be done? It was manifest to the people of Charlestown that through her the great invisible cloven-foot had found entrance, and was prowling among them. What was their duty? They must bar his entrance promptly. To do it, they arrested, tried, condemned, and executed the Christian traitor who had furnished their great enemy entrance to the Christian fortress. Could firm, true men, holding then prevalent beliefs, have done less?