Part 19

Mediumistic capabilities are innate peculiarities, measurably hereditary, and nearly always amenable to special conditions and surroundings for conspicuous development. King Saul became a prophet, i. e., a medium, only when he met, mingled with, and imbibed emanations from prophets or mediums. Messengers whom he sent to the prophets succumbed to new and developing influences upon arriving at their destination, and became suddenly prophets themselves. Latent germs of spiritualistic capabilities, if permeated by quickening auras, which often emanate from positive mediums, frequently unfold into mediumship, as naturally as specific elements, reaching latent germs in many human systems, expand those germs into measles, or into whooping-cough; or as naturally as listening to soul-stirring music energizes latent capabilities in many who are acted upon by its strains, and helps such to become themselves better musicians than before.

The parsonage kitchen--that nestling-place of John Indian and his wife Tituba--may have been that winter a little Delphos, or a little Mount Horeb, that is, a spot where developing nourishments of mediumistic germs were collected in unusual abundance, and were unwontedly operative. We are not only ready to admit, but deem it probable, that any susceptible persons who came into the presence of John and Tituba, in their special room, may have there imbibed properties unsought and unperceived which fostered the development of such visitors into tools or instruments, by the use of which the genuine authors of Salem witchcraft brought out their work upon a public stage, and prosecuted its terrific enactment. Smothering our serious doubts whether any regular meetings at stated times were arranged for or held, we are entirely ready to let the supposition stand that gatherings, more or less extensive, occasionally occurred, at which fortune-telling, necromancy, magic, or Spiritualism, was made the subject of either sportive or serious attention, and we will let results indicate who managed the visible performers during the exercises or entertainments there.

Upham's beautifully rhetorical and eloquent efforts to show that because they, as he states, held a number of meetings for learning and practicing mystic arts, those rustic, illiterate girls thereby and thereat qualified themselves to concoct and accomplish of their own accord, and by their histrionic and malicious capabilities, all that mighty scheme or plan which his predecessor and himself lay to their charge, fail, entirely fail, to meet the fair demands of that common sense which rigidly requires forces and agents adequate in their nature and conditions to produce all effects which are ascribed to them.

Fowler seems to have inferred from some statements ascribed to Proctor, that the latter threatened to go and force Mary Warren to leave the circle. We do not so read the account.

The morning of March 25,--that is, the next morning after the examination of Rebecca Nurse,--John Proctor said "he was going to fetch home his jade" (Mary Warren); "he left her there" (at the village) "last night, and had rather given 40c than let her come up." That is, apparently, he had rather have given that sum than to have had her be present at the examination of Mrs. Nurse; for, continued he, "if they were let alone, Sr., we should all be devils and witches quickly; they should rather be had to the whipping post; but he would fetch his jade home and thrust the devil out of her, ... crying, hang them--hang them. And also added, that when she was first taken with fits he kept her close to the wheel, and threatened to thrash her, and then she had no more fits till the next day" (when) "he was gone forth, and then she must have her fits again forsooth," &c.--Woodward's Series, vol. i. p. 63.

It is obvious from the above that Proctor's objection was to his jade's attendance upon the examination of the accused--to her attendance at court--and not at the circle, which, according to Upham, should have closed its meetings a month at least before the 25th of March. And yet S. P. Fowler says (Woodward's Series, vol. iii. p. 204), that "Proctor, out of all patience with the meetings of the girls composing this circle, one day said he was going to the village to bring Mary Warren, the jade, home." Most readers will infer from such a statement that Proctor proposed to take the girl away from the "circle;" but the statement from which the annotator drew his information, when taken in connection with its date, clearly shows that the threats to bring home the jade and thrash her were subsequent to the assemblages of the circle, and were made at a time when the girls were being used as witnesses before the examining magistrates. That which tried the resolute man's patience, was not the meetings of the circle, but the testimony of the girls in court, which threatened to make all the people "devils and witches quickly."

Proctor's stopping the fits, by threats to thrash the girl, intimates that the fits were measurably controllable by the will of some one. That much may be true in relation to almost all diseases and maladies of the body, but probably not as much so in most other kinds as in those which are imposed by a will that has no natural alliance with the agitated body. Under the influence of threats, the girl would naturally struggle to get full possession of all her own powers and faculties, and the effort would put her own elements in such commotion that for a time no foreign will could get control over her form. Threats, medicines of certain kinds, and many other applications, may temporally render almost any medium's system uncontrollable by spirits. Calmness, both of mind and body, and darkness, too, which is less positive and disintegrating than light, in action upon instruments made and used by spirits, are very helpful to control of borrowed forms.

In some of his comments (vol. ii. p. 434) Upham wrote more wisely than himself seems to have known. Words from his pen state that "one of the sources of the delusion of 1692, was ignorance of many natural laws that have been revealed by modern science. A vast amount of knowledge on these subjects has been attained since that time." True, true indeed. And had the author of that statement been familiar with important portions of that "vast amount of" new "knowledge," he himself, as readily as those who are better versed in a certain class of modern revealments, would have seen and felt the perfect childishness of his attempt to make those rustic girls the conscious contrivers and perverse and malignant actors of the whole of the vast, complicated, and terrific tragedy of Salem witchcraft.

He might have known when he wrote, he ought to have known then, that Dr. Robert Hare, of Philadelphia, who was eminent, distinctly and broadly eminent, as a scientist, had in 1855 published to the world a rigidly scientific demonstration that some unseen agent, intelligent enough to understand and comply with verbal requests, repeatedly moved the arms of scale-beams contrary to the normal action of gravitation. Science, there and then, revealed the existence of some natural law or laws which permit unseen and impalpable intelligences, under some conditions, to put forth action upon matter, with force and to extent, which man can measure in pounds avoirdupois. That single achievement of modern science teaches the wisdom of exempting seemingly diabolized and mischievous children from charge of being devils incarnate, until we have determined whether some beings of greater powers and different dispositions may not have usurped control of youthful and pliant human forms, and through them manifested schemes and pranks that originated in supernal brains, and were enacted by use of such forces as can be manipulated by none below disembodied intelligences.

Obviously he who was cognizant that science had made recent discoveries, suffered himself to remain in ignorance of what to him, as witchcraft historian, were the most pertinent and important parts of the knowledge recently gained; ignorant of those parts which were most closely connected with philosophical solution of the mysteries which pervaded the history he was elaborating. His blindness to what science--yes, to what exact physical science--by her rigid processes of weighing and measuring had positively demonstrated, bespeaks his short-comings, and would bespeak the unphilosophical stand-point of any historian of, or critic upon, the world's marvels, who, since the day of Hare, ignores the light radiating from his demonstration, and continues to grope on in darkness which use of that light would dispel. Take into the catalogue of natural agents and forces all those whose existence and action, science, as applied by Dr. Hare twenty years ago, and again by Mr. Crookes and others in England more recently, backed, too, by the observations and tests of thousands less erudite, has demonstrated, and then all occasion to look upon our fathers as numskulls, and their daughters as proficient devils, at once disappears. New England soil, two centuries ago, was not populated mainly by jack-asses; and even had it been, their offspring would have been neither monkeys nor hyenas.

Since the work by Dr. Hare, entitled "Spiritualism Scientifically Demonstrated," may not be readily accessible by many readers, his description of one demonstrative process is quoted from page 49, as follows:--

"A board, being about four feet in length, is supported by a rod, as a fulcrum, at about one foot from one end, and, of course, three feet from the other, which is suspended on a spring balance. A glass vase, about nine inches in diameter and five inches in hight, having a knob to hold it by, when inverted had this knob inserted in a hole made in the board six inches, nearly, from the fulcrum. Thus the vase rested on the board mouth upward. A wire-gauze cage, such as is used to keep flies from sugar, was so arranged by a well-known means as to slide up or down on two iron rods, one on each side of the trestle supporting the fulcrum. By these arrangements it was so adjusted as to descend into the vase until within an inch and a half of the bottom, while the inferiority of its dimensions prevented it from coming elsewhere within an inch of the parietes of the vase. Water was poured into the vase so as to rise into the cage till within about an inch and an half of the brim. A well-known medium (Gordon) was induced to plunge his hands, clasped together, to the bottom of the cage, holding them perfectly still. As soon as those conditions were attained, the apparatus being untouched by any one excepting the medium as described, I invoked the aid of my spirit friends. A downward force was repeatedly exerted upon the end of the board appended to the balance, equal to three pounds' weight nearly;... the distance of the hook of the balance from the fulcrum on which the board turned was six times as great as the cage in which the hands were situated. Consequently a force of 3×6=18 pounds must have been exerted."

The above experiment was performed in Dr. Hare's own laboratory, in the presence and under the watchful scrutiny of John M. Kennedy, Esq., and was made with extraordinary care, because Professor Henry had just treated a similar result formerly obtained as incredible. Plate III. in the book furnishes a diagram illustrating Dr. Hare's apparatus. This experimenter, whom Alfred R. Wallace calls America's foremost chemist, had spent very many years in both constructing and in using, as a scientist, varied kinds of apparatus for testing the presence and action of subtile forces in nature, and he was competent to know, and did know as well as any other man whatsoever in the world's great body of scientists, when results were obtained to positive certainty. He proved that some invisible and intelligent power moved his scale-beam contrary to the action of gravitation. The above demonstration, accompanied by many other evidences of spirit-action upon matter through mediums, had been published twelve years when Upham put forth his work. Therefore he was either ignorant of or he ignored late discoveries of science which had revolutionizing applicability to the very theories which he was putting forth.

After having eloquently depicted the sad results of witchcraft, that author says (vol. ii. p. 427), "Let those results for ever stand conspicuous, beacon-monuments, warning us and coming generations against superstition in every form, and all credulous and vain attempts to penetrate beyond the legitimate boundaries of human knowledge." If there ever was "a credulous and vain attempt to penetrate beyond the legitimate boundaries of human knowledge," one was made by him who sought to find that the keen-eyed, energetic, common-sense, virtuous, religious men of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century lacked common sagacity, and that their little girls rivaled Satan himself in malignity. Most seriously we ask whether forces which can be and have been measured by palpable scales, are "beyond the legitimate boundaries of human knowledge?" We ask whether, anywhere in the universe, there exist boundaries beyond which it is, or can be, illegitimate for man to go in search after agents and forces which either habitually or occasionally act legitimately upon him in this mortal life?

Another question is suggested by the foregoing quotation. Would not positive knowledge that there are unseen agents and forces within the realms of nature that can legitimately exhibit the phenomena once deemed witchcrafts, transfer such phenomena from the domain of either superstition or crime into that of science or that of beneficence? Surely it would. And, therefore, how can one possibly work more efficiently for depopulating the domain of superstition, than by bringing its inhabitants forth and colonizing them on the lands of knowledge and science? Shall we comply with the historian's advice, and still continue to leave what ignorance denominates hobgoblins and ghosts to remain shrouded in appalling mists, and thus aid them to continue to be to coming generations the same awful beings they were to the generations past? Or shall we, on the other hand, now, while experience and science are showing that such work is practicable, push discovery onward till we both find laws and learn conditions which permit closer access of disembodied beings to us, and which also permit most beneficent reciprocal action between them and us, just as soon as familiarity, confidence, calmness, and mutual trust make their access easy? Which shall we do? Which is most scientific? Which is most dutiful to God and friendly to man? Which? Is ignorance of, or is knowledge of, nature's forces and inhabitants the greater blessing? Which? Away with ignorance where knowledge is attainable.

We choose to learn as much concerning the universe and its inhabitants as God gives us power and opportunities to acquire; not fearing his censure, but trusting to win his approbation, by so doing. When one learns that issuers from the vailed realms of spirit-land are only earth's emancipated children revisiting their former homes, the cry that devils are coming lacks any startling power. Faith, and even knowledge, sometimes says, "It is my friends and loved ones and those who love me, who are in the circumambient hosts, and I will do what I may to facilitate their more sensible approach; will extend toward them a friendly and helping hand."

Only superstition and ignorance quail and skulk before visitants that come from unseen realms; knowledge stands fast and meets them with welcome and joy.

The "legitimate boundaries of knowledge"! Where are they? Surely not within any domain where knowledge can supersede ignorance and its consequent superstitions.

Perhaps only few persons who give credence to the substantial accuracy of the transmitted statements of witchcraft facts, will dissent from Hutchinson's obvious meaning when he said that "some of them seem to be more than natural;" that is, as we suppose him to have meant, they seem to have required for their production something beyond the recognized powers of embodied human beings. He, however, in spite of such seeming, sought to lead other minds to fancy that fraud and malice acting upon credulity--in other words, that cunning and malicious embodied human beings, and none other--were concerned in their manifestation. Upham and Drake have not only followed Hutchinson's lead in excluding invisible agents, but have omitted to admit that some of the facts seem to be more than natural. They blindly fancy that they find resident in human minds and hearts of seeming brilliancy and goodness, capabilities of artfulness, malice, and might which wrest from Satan's brow all laurels which the world has meeded to him for his imputed prowess on witchcraft's battlefields. As one of the human race, we protest against such slander of our kindred humans while embodied, none of whom, while dwellers here below, were ever smelted in fires hot enough to elicit from their own interiors some forces which were put in action through their forms--forces which, in common parlance, though not in absolute fact, were "more than natural." Events fearfully mysterious have long been, and now often are, spoken of as the productions of beings, or at least of One Special being, lurking somewhere away off beyond the outmost limits of nature. But each and every hiding-place of even Old Nick is somewhere within those limits, and even he can never and nowhere act otherwise than in obedience to nature's laws. How far up, down, around, do natural forces and agents extend and operate? If there be a fixed limit to nature's domain, where is it? When life departs from man's body, are the forces which continue to act upon his invisible spirit, whether that continues to be or ceases to be a conscious individuality,--are the forces which then act upon it and which bear it to its appropriate position in spirit spheres, natural forces, or are they other?

When man escapes from his gross and sluggish encasement, and becomes--as the reappearance of many of the race teaches that he does--a freed spirit, he does not escape from within the realm of nature, nor pass to where natural substances and forces cease to sustain and act upon him. The word "supernatural" as well as its equivalent phrase, "more than natural," is often misleading; it tends to generate supposition that nature terminates where man's external senses cease to take cognizance. Absolutely, however, as we believe, all beings, including even God, and all things whatsoever, are parts of nature; so that the word "supernatural" can scarcely find place for rigid, unqualified application. No objection to its usual application is here intended, provided it is not used to convey the idea that things to which it is applied are the work of intelligence above and beyond the control and restrictions of universal laws or forces; provided it does not intimate that the works are what theology has called miracles, i. e., acts "contrary to the established course of things." Such works probably never did and never can occur. Higher and unrecognized laws are availed of whenever known laws are thwarted in their results, as when the magnet takes the steel upward in spite of gravitation: gravitation works on with as much steadiness and force as over, while the magnet overpoweringly pulls against it. The overbalancing magnetic force does not act "contrary to the established course of things," but simply performs its own functions in full harmony with that course; so of all mysterious events in the vast universe. All move on in obedience to law; all events are outworkings of universal forces, none of which are ever broken or suspended, though sometimes some of them are restrained by other and counteracting forces from manifesting their usual results.

All the marvelous works of both ancient and modern Spiritualism may have occurred, and yet none of them have been, in fact, "more than natural," however much so some minds may be accustomed to deem them. Take psychic forces as natural instrumentalities, take both embodied and disembodied intelligences who had skill and power for the control of such forces, and with these take also others who had special susceptibilities for yielding to psychic action, and you will then have in your conceptions ample natural means for the production of each and every marvel that was ever described in human history, and all such may have been produced without any more help or hindrance in kind from either God or the devil, than we all receive in the ordinary acts of daily life. Bring in what is meant by either magnetism, or mesmerism, or psychology, or psychism, or by any other term expressive of that action upon and within a human being, which lets either his own spirit-senses or the forces of some outside intelligence get play therein independent of and superior to the owner's outer or physical senses, and we then may have fitting and adequate instrumentality through which finite intelligence can legitimately produce all the marvels that human eyes have ever witnessed. Professor Cromwell F. Varley, one of England's most eminent electricians, said, when addressing a committee of the London Dialectical Society, "I believe the mesmeric trance and the spiritual trance are produced by similar means, and I believe the mesmeric and the spiritual forces are the same. They are both the action of a spirit, and the difference between the spiritual trance and the mesmeric trance I believe is this: in the mesmeric trance, the will that overpowers or entrances the patient is in a human body; in the spiritual trance, that will which overpowers the patient is not in a human body."

The position taken by Mr. Varley, whose observations were made mostly within his own domestic circle, and whose professional pursuits led him to be a constant and careful observer of the nature, properties, and actions of delicate forces, is worthy of much regard. His view is probably in harmony with the conclusion of most minds which have studied carefully the outworkings of mesmerism and Spiritualism. The two isms, in some views of them, are essentially one in nature, the latter being the butterfly or moth that came from out the former. The grub and its moth are the same being in different stages of development. Multitudes of human beings raised, and to be raised, from lower to higher development have their habitats along the line where the material and spiritual interblend, and some are measurably amphibious there--can move and act in either of two auras. The younger, or less advanced, flesh-clad mesmerists, prevailingly abide in the material, while spirits have their most congenial residence generally beyond where the palpably material extends; but either class can at times bring under their control the physical systems of many human beings.

By means of this psychism, or this outworking of soul power, there may be kept up reciprocal action or intercommunion between what are usually called the material and spiritual worlds, both of which absolutely are natural, and are pervaded by interacting natural forces which are at the service of peculiarly endowed, or constituted, or unfolded persons, who are, or may become, competent and disposed to use them. A disembodied spirit no more needs special permission or aid from Omnipotence for acting upon men and matter, than the diver needs such for deep descents beneath the water's surface. Natural permission for spirits to reincase themselves in, or to act upon, palpable matter, is as free and full as man's is to put on submarine armor.

This much we have said for the purpose of disclosing our stand-points of observations and reasonings pertaining to Salem witchcraft, and now come to more direct consideration of that special topic.

At Salem Village about a dozen people, mostly the girls previously named, were strangely and grievously tormented, at short intervals, during several months. They often endured contortions, convulsions, and very acute sufferings. At times many of them became deaf, dumb, blind, &c. Seemingly to beholders they personally performed most strange and incredible feats of strength and simulations, and made astounding utterances. Because of these doings and sufferings they were, after some weeks of observation, deemed to be "under an evil hand"--were pronounced bewitched, and were termed, in the parlance of that day, "the afflicted."

According to the faith of those times, no person could be bewitched in any other way than through some other embodied person who had entered into a covenant with the Devil, and voluntarily become his instrument or his agent. It was then assumed, also, that the afflicted ones could perceive who the person or persons were through whom the devil tormented them. Consequently the sufferers were teased, coaxed, or driven to name some one or more who was causing their sufferings. Those named by the sufferers as producers of their maladies were called the accused, or were said to be "cried out upon."

Belief in the ability of the afflicted to designate accurately their afflicters, was then prevalent; but though probably born of facts in human experience, and in itself fundamentally correct, it was indiscreetly and harmfully applied. The mediumistic or psychologized condition often renders its subjects practically independent of time, space, and gross matter, and makes them possessors of ability to feel, or rather to sense, contact with the properties of some peculiarly constituted mortals, even though such persons at the time be physically many miles away. The persons from whom such agitating emanations would proceed would generally themselves be highly mediumistic.

If the inner or spiritual perceptive organs of Mr. Parris, Dr. Griggs, Thomas Putnam, and their consulting associates, of whom we shall speak hereafter, were inextricably interblended with their outer bodies, so that they were, par excellence, non-mediumistic, their presence near the bodies of persons infilled with abnormal properties by spirits might be imperceptible by the entranced, while either the poor, "melancholy, distracted" (?) Sarah Good, or "bed-rid" Mrs. Osburn (who will come into notice on a future page), if highly mediumistic, might, though being then in their distant homes bodily, be present as spirits, and their emanations might be distinctly felt by the suffering girls, and be by them visibly traced to their sources. Mediumistic states or entrancements, however induced, often bring their subjects into rapport with other mediumistic persons afar off, while they as often shut off sensibility to the presence of the physically imprisoned or very slightly impressible ones who are near by. The saying that "birds of a feather flock together" apparently has more constant application outside of gravitation's dominating reach than within it--more among relatively freed spirits than among rigidly body-hampered ones.