Part 13

We charge our ancestors with infatuation. People in all ages and nations have, no doubt, been subject to its influence. Perhaps every individual man and woman is more or less swayed by it. Each one in respect to some things may act without his usual good judgment, and contrary to the dictates of reason. The people of Boston were obviously debarred, by their infatuation devil-ward, from perceiving that Mrs. Hibbins might have received extraordinary gifts from some other giver than the great evil devil. And is it impossible that infatuation influenced her recent historian first to reject the historic wit, and substitute for it fancied slander, as cause for the excitement against her, and then put his substitution forth as the truth; though both common sense and sound philosophy see at a glance, first, that it is only a conjecture, and secondly, that it is entirely inadequate to produce the effects which it was fabricated to account for? In doing this he seemingly acted without his usual good judgment, and contrary to the appropriate dictates of his enlightened reason--was infatuated.

Both of the two historians above quoted, virtually assumed that there never occurred here any phenomena, either mental or physical, which were not wrought out by agents, forces, and faculties purely mundane. Therefore the facts of history necessarily pushed them up to make implied, and often explicit, allegation that whole communities of resolute, wide-awake, energetic people, were possessors of external senses which were pitifully and superlatively deludible--possessors of enormous general credulity--of perceptions and judgments woefully warped and benighted in matters generally, excepting only a few of their girls and old women, who manifested cunning and deviltry supreme in making high sport out of the weaknesses of their elders and betters. Having driven stakes beyond which nature and natural forces must not go under forfeiture of historic recognition, anything not explainable by forces recognized within those stakes, is accounted for by the sage exclamation, "But that was a time of great credulity;" or "in the blind infatuation of the time," things were thus and so. We are willing to grant the existence of much credulity and infatuation both of old and now, but are not willing to allow that the facts of seeing what some other persons have not seen, and knowing the existence and partial operations of some forces in nature which some people have not paid attention to, are proof of either "great credulity" or "blind infatuation." Had the later historian been free from all infatuation, he could have learned from passing developments that Mrs. Hibbins probably, at times, was essentially a liberated spirit, hearing what Swedenborg calls "cogitatio loquens"--speaking thought--and that her repetition of what she thus learned took her life.

Hers was not a case of necessary spirit co-operation, was perhaps only one of uncommon liberation of the internal perceptive faculties. Because highly illumined, her brilliancy was judged to be diabolical, and therefore must be extinguished.

ANN COLE.

Manifestations differing widely from any noticed in the preceding cases, were observed in the presence of a Connecticut girl named Ann Cole. American witchcraft history has transmitted no distinct account of the use of human organs of speech by intellect that was foreign to the legitimate owner of the vocals used, prior to the instance described by Hutchinson in the following extract. The history of Ann Cole involves all that we know of the Greensmiths, husband and wife, mentioned therein, and who were executed for witchcraft.

"In 1662, at Hartford, Conn., one Ann Cole, a young woman who lived next door to a Dutch family, and, no doubt, had learned something of the language, was supposed to be possessed with demons, who sometimes spoke Dutch, and sometimes English, and sometimes a language which nobody understood, and who held a conference with one another. Several ministers, who were present, took down the conference in writing, and the names of several persons mentioned in the course of the conference as actors or bearing parts in it; particularly a woman, then in prison upon suspicion of witchcraft, one Greensmith, who, upon examination, confessed, and appeared to be surprised at the discovery. She owned that she and the others named had been familiar with a demon, who had carnal knowledge of her; and although she had not made a formal covenant, yet she had promised to be ready at his call, and was to have had a high frolic at Christmas, when an agreement was to have been signed. Upon this confession she was executed, and two more of the company were condemned at the same time." Hutchinson also credits to Goffe's diary the statement that "after one of the witches was hanged, the maid was well."

Another account of this Ann's case, furnished by an eye-witness and personal hearer when she was in her trances, has been transmitted. The writer of it promptly made, but afterward lost, minutes of what he heard from her lips, and about twenty years afterward wrote his remembrances of the manifestations, and forwarded the following account to Increase Mather:--

"Anno 1662. This Ann Cole (living in her father's family) was taken with strange fits wherein she (or rather the devil, as 'tis judged, making use of her lips) held a discourse for a considerable time. The general substance of it was to this purport, that a company of familiars of the evil one (who were named in the discourse that passed from her) were contriving how to carry on their mischievous designs against some, and especially against her; mentioning sundry ways they would take to that end, as that they would afflict her body, spoil her name, hinder her marriage, &c.... The conclusion was, 'Let us confound her language; she may tell no more tales.'... The discourse passed into a Dutch tone, ... and therein was given an account of some afflictions that had befallen divers, among the rest a young Dutch woman ... that could speak but very little, had met with great sorrow, as pinchings of her arms in the dark, &c.... Judicious Mr. Stone being by, when the latter discourse passed, declared it, in his thoughts, impossible that one not familiarly acquainted with the Dutch (which Ann Cole had not at all been) should so exactly imitate the Dutch tone in the pronunciation of English.... Extremely violent bodily motions she many times had, even to the hazard of her life, ... and very often great disturbance was given in the public worship of God by her and two other women who had also strange fits.... The consequence was, that one of the persons presented as active in the forementioned discourse (a lewd, ignorant, considerably aged woman), being a prisoner upon suspicion of witchcraft, the court sent for Mr. Haynes and myself to read what we had written.... She forthwith and freely confessed these things to be true: (that she and other persons named in the discourse) had familiarity with the devil. Being asked whether she had made an express covenant with him, she answered, she had not, only as she promised to go with him when he called (which she had accordingly done sundry times).... Amongst other things, she owned that the devil had frequent use of her body with much seeming (but indeed horrible, hellish) delight to her. This, with the concurrent evidence, brought the woman and her husband to their death as the devil's familiars.... After this execution ... the good woman had abatement of her sorrows, which had continued sundry years, and she yet remains maintaining her integrity.

"Ann Cole was daughter of John Cole, a godly man among us. She hath been a person esteemed pious, behaving herself with a pleasant mixture of humility and faith under very heavy sufferings, professing (as she did sundry times) that she knew nothing of those things that were spoken by her, but that her tongue was improved to express what never was in her mind."--John Whiting to Increase Mather. Feb. 1682.

The source of Hutchinson's information is not known. Rev. Mr. Whiting, of Hartford, was an eye and ear witness to what he relates, and therefore is the better authority. Some great discrepancies are obvious in the two accounts. One hundred years after her day the historian said Ann no doubt had learned something of the Dutch language. But the better authority, because it is that of one who both saw and beard the young woman when under control, and continued to obtain knowledge of her for twenty years subsequently, says she "had not at all been acquainted with" that language. The former says "the supposed demons" spoke through her sometimes in English and sometimes in Dutch; while the latter "judged" that the devil alone was speaker, and implies that the language always was English, though the tones sometimes were very exactly Dutch. The devil was "judged" to be there divulging the malicious purposes of "a company of his familiars" toward certain human beings. Here is manifested a propensity, common to all describers of witchcraft scenes, to impute to the great devil himself whatever was projected forth from the realm of mysteries.

A careful reading of the two accounts excites conjecture that Hutchinson may have drawn his facts mainly from Whiting's letter, and yet failed to regard and adhere to opinions therein presented as to the actual speaker through Ann Cole's lips. Whiting says, that "she, or rather the devil, as 'tis judged, making use of her lips, held a discourse" in which sundry living persons were named as being familiars of the Evil One, and plotters of mischief against some of their neighbors, and especially against this Ann herself. This personal observer says, that "she, or rather the devil," described Mrs. Greensmith and her associates, and disclosed their evil purposes toward Ann and some other mortals. But the historian greatly metamorphosed the matter; he writes, that she "was supposed to be possessed with demons, who sometimes spoke Dutch and sometimes English," and that the persons who took notes (Mr. Whiting, Mr. Haynes, and Mr. Stone) mentioned the names of several persons "as being actors or bearing parts in the conference, ... particularly one Greensmith." Wrong--entirely wrong: these mortals were the subjects of a discourse; were not speakers, but persons spoken of. Thus Hutchinson converted certain low-lived mortals into such demons as took possession of a human form, and through it, in varying languages, held a dialogue in which they openly told to mortal ears their own malicious purposes, and what mortals they were intending to injure. Stupid. Whiting makes the devil, in varied tones and assumed characters, speak out the names of the embodied culprits, and tell of harms they had done, and more that they intended to do. Sensible. The devil or his alias often acts well the part of a detective and informer; in this case he managed to bring Mrs. Greensmith to confession.

Possibly, and only possibly, that devil was only an influx of auras which found entrance to Ann's inner perceptives, put in abeyance her outer consciousness and outer senses, and let her inner ones sense and give expression to the thoughts and purposes of some low-lived and lewd mediumistic persons in her neighborhood, whose inner selves, she, as a relatively freed spirit, could thoroughly read. Occult intelligences sometimes actuate the physical organs, while yet the mortal's consciousness fails to perceive either the action or the will that prompts it.

The account of her life makes it apparent that Ann, as a woman, had no affinity with the base and lewd, but, being mediumistic, was caused, either by design or by the out-workings of unconscious natural forces, to disclose the baseness and lewdness of others. She apparently experienced entrancement to absolute unconsciousness, so that she became, for the time being, literally a tool--no more self-acting, and therefore no more responsible, than a pen, a pencil, or a speaking-trumpet. Condition like hers in that respect is experienced by many persons at the present day.

Some utterances made by her lips when she was entranced were successfully used in court, either as proofs, or as helps for obtaining proof, that certain other persons in her neighborhood were in league with Satan--were the devil's familiars. Presentation in court of accusations that had come forth from her vocal organs brought a woman, then on trial for witchcraft, to prompt confession that the allegations were true, and both she and her husband were condemned and executed.

Similar resorts for obtaining clews by which to trace crimes to their authors are extensively resorted to now, and frequently with success; but the statements of the entranced and the clairvoyant are not adduced in court, nor should they be, because our world has not yet attained to reliable skill for testing their accuracy; nor are high-minded and trustworthy spirits often willing to expose any guilty mortals to punishment by this world's tribunals and executioners.

How far the novel annunciation of their names and some of their practices contributed to the condemnation of the Greensmiths, husband and wife, or whether it did at all, is only matter for conjecture. But that either some influences went out from them and acted upon Ann, or that some went forth from Ann and acted upon them, or that there was reciprocal action back and forth, is only a fair inference from what is stated above, taken in connection with that foot-note of Hutchinson, which is credited to "Goffe the Regicide's Diary," and reads thus: "After one of the witches was hanged, the maid was well." No mention has been met with of any sickness about Ann, excepting the strangely induced fits in which she was used as the mouthpiece of the strange occupant or occupants of her form. Her becoming well may mean no more than a cessation of her fits, or obsessions. That these should cease after the execution of a person or persons with whom she had been in distressing and uncongenial rapport, was perhaps only a natural result from the action of universal laws. Drafts may have been made from her system by forces not her own, which helped invisible beings to act upon the condemned Greensmiths for good or for harm. Occasion for such use of her elements or properties may have ceased as soon as the gallows had finished its work. The fits ceased, perhaps, solely because drafts of special properties from her were discontinued. "After one of the witches was hanged, the maid was well." The execution of one person and the restoration of health to another were viewed by Goffe as cause and effect.

The Greensmith woman's confession of the use of her form by her familiar--revolting as the isolated fact would be to us, and will be to the reader--was the controlling reason which influenced us to adduce the case of Ann Cole. We get from the old woman Greensmith an ancient indication, which is paralleled by many unproclaimed modern ones, that astounding possibilities reside within the scope and sway of forces interacting between the realms of matter and of spirit, which possibly and probably may be availed of for elevation as well as for debasement of the human race. Many whispered facts of human experience are to-day indicating that the old woman may have made true statement of her personal experiences. If degradation and fatuity permit the leaking out of some momentous facts of human experience which conscious vessels of fair soundness and delicacy will retain within themselves, and hide from a profaning world's knowledge, that world, nevertheless, may be entitled to hints at the existence of occult, though only rarely perceptibly operative forces and permissions of nature, through the only channels which have let them flow forth for the world's free observation. The Greensmith woman's fact may be regarded as representative of very many others of a like nature.

I know a man who once visited a married couple, both of whom are intelligent and refined, both estimable in character, the husband being a highly respected member of one of the learned professions. This couple, at their own dining-table, where they and the visitor were the only occupants of the room, united in stating that once, when they had just finished taking their midday meal, and were sitting at the table opposite to each other, the lady's chair, with herself sitting in it, was moved back by some invisible power, and forthwith she, by palpable but invisible arms, was taken from her seat, laid upon the carpet, and there made to experience all the sensations of actual and pleasurable nuptial coition. While such were her positions and sensations, her husband remained on the other side of the table, and they two were the only flesh-clad persons in the room. One accomplished and truthful lady had such experience while her consciousness and all her mental faculties were fully alert. Nature enfolds astounding possibilities. The human race, in coming times, may possibly be improved rapidly and extensively, by designed infusions of supernal elements into fetal germs.

No evidence has come to us, and no apprehension is entertained, that such experiences ever eventuate in physical conception; yet there are seen, now and then, glimmerings of evidence that supernal beings can and do inflow some of their own properties into the very marrow of some susceptible mortals of either gender, or of both simultaneously and conjointly, so as to modify physical systems in such manner and to such extent, that their offspring receive, at the very moment of conception, such properties as will ever afterward render them either better or worse because of injections through the parents by intelligences whose presence and operations elude perception by our external senses. Possibly both the most beneficent and the most malignant of our race--both those whose moral hues most illumine, and those whose shades most blacken the pages of history--were conceived while supernal beings held the parents either under strong psychological control or in deep unconscious trance.

The mother of the rough, lustful, and murderous Samson was visited by a spirit being "very terrible."

The mother of Jesus was visited by the bright and glorious Gabriel, and enwrapped in an abnormally sound, helpful, or holy aura.

Far away from Charlestown and Boston, where the two women noticed in the preceding pages had their homes and met their fate, Ann Cole was the unconscious mouthpiece through which invisible beings carried on dialogues, partly in languages, or, at least, in tones, which she had never learned. The manifestations through her were no imitations of anything before known on this continent, so far as history shows. Her reputed doings were unlike any for which Massachusetts had hanged two of her daughters.

From whom came the tones, if not the words, of languages which this possessed girl had never learned? From whom came the things put forth through her which "she knew nothing of"? And especially who "improved her tongue to express what was never in her mind"? Any satisfactory explanation of witchcraft must point out distinctly, and must admit the action of some force competent to all such performances; a force controllable and controlled by intelligence. The facts in the case were set forth by a personal witness of many of them, who wrote at a time when he was not under any excitement or hallucination which their novelty might at first produce, but twenty years subsequent to their occurrence, when their recorder should have been, and no doubt was, calm and cautious, and when, too, the girl's own good character had been confirmed by good Christian deportment through twenty years succeeding the marvels manifested through her organs. If any history is worth reading, Ann Cole's lips were used by intelligences not her own "to express what never was in her mind." Either embodied intelligences--the Greensmiths and their associates whose bodies were not present with her--used her vocal organs, as Hutchinson's account implies that they did, or demons--spirits, as Whiting supposed--spoke through her form.

ELIZABETH KNAP.

At Groton, Mass., in 1671, Elizabeth Knap was more singularly beset than most others of that century who were deemed bewitched. The authority transmitting an account of her is exceptionally good, having been written by Rev. Samuel Willard, minister then at Groton, in the prime and vigor of life. He had graduated at Harvard College twelve years before, afterward became minister at the Old South Church in Boston, and was for several years at the head of Harvard College. The girl in question was his pupil, residing in his family during the earlier portion of her affliction, and was under his watch till its close. His opportunities for observing the case in its rise and progress were certainly very good, and he made a journalistic account of its phases and progress under many specific dates from October 30, 1671, to January 15, 1672, a space of eleven weeks or more. He was an attentive observer and close questioner of the girl, and also a cautious and intelligent chronicler.

She was at first subjected to extraordinary mental moods and violent physical actions, which came on rather gradually, showing themselves in marked singularities of conduct, for which she, when questioned, would give little if any account. Strange, sudden shrieks, strange changes of countenance, appeared first. These were soon followed by the exclamations, "O, my leg!" which she would rub; "O, my breast!" and she would rub that, it seeming to be in pain. Her breath would be stopped. She saw a strange person in the cellar, when her companions there were unable to see any such. She cried out to him, "What cheer, old man?" Afterward came fits, in which she would cry out sometimes, "Money, money!" offered her as inducements to yield obedience; and sometimes, "Sin and misery!" as threats of punishment for refusal to obey the wishes of her strange visitant. She said the devil appeared to her, and that she had seen him at times for three years. He often talked with her, and urged her to make a covenant with him, which she refused to do. November 26, six persons could hardly hold her. The physician, who for about four weeks had considered and treated the malady as a natural one, now pronounced it diabolical. She barked like a dog, bleated like a calf, and seemed at times to be strangled. At length distinct utterances came out. "A grum, low, audible voice" said to Mr. Willard himself, "You are a great rogue--a great rogue;" and yet "her vocal organs did not move." The voice was replied to as being that of Satan himself, and its author responded, "I am not Satan; I am a pretty black boy; this is my pretty girl; I have been here a great while." "When he said to me" (Mr. Willard), "O, you black rogue, I do not love you," I replied, "Through God's grace I hate thee." He rejoined, "You had better love me." The strength shown through the girl, the writer and witness says, "is beyond the force of dissimulation, and the actings of convulsions are quite contrary to these actings." Through all her sufferings "she did not waste in body or strength." Speech came from her without motion of the organs of speech. Also "we observed, when the voice spoke, her throat was swelled formidably, at least as big as one's fist." She said she "saw more devils than any one there ever saw men in the world."

No attendant sacrifice of life gave intensification of interest to this Groton case, and it failed to become prominently conspicuous among witchcraft events. Still it is more instructive on some points than almost any other one of them. Here first have we found in colonial history any statement that an intelligence speaking through a borrowed or usurped form disclosed who he was.

Mr. Willard, to whose care this girl was intrusted, and in whose family she had been a resident, was convinced that some other being than the girl herself was giving utterance through her lips, and in harmony with a necessary inference from the general faith of his times, addressed the unknown one under supposition that he was veritably The Devil. The being thus accosted promptly said, "I am not Satan; I am a pretty black boy."