Witchcraft and Quaker Convincements: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1692

Witchcraft and Quaker Convincements: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1692 Sue Friday* In 1792, Dr. William Bentley of Salem, Massachusetts added these queries regarding the neighboring community ofLynn to his diary: "How happened it that so many Quakers settled on this spot? Did they come over Quakers? . . . Were there Quakers converted in the country?" (273). The Quaker minority was set apart by more than their drab garb and archaic speech. The Friends in this once sleepy agricultural village were thriving, benefiting from the larger Quaker economic network to become the foremost capitalists in the shoe industry for which Lynn would soon become famous (Faler 13-14, 66-71). Lynn's history might have been far different without the Quaker presence.' And to answer Bentley's query of 1792, the early growth ofthis community within acommunity canbe traced back to the dramatic events ofexactly one hundred years earlier in nearby Salem Village. Quakers began with Puritanpremises and concerns, and radical Puritans shared the Quakers' emphasis on the Holy Spirit. There were a variety of Puritan interpretations on cosmological and theological issues. Quakers exhibited some diversity, though their distaste for theological speculation and argument allowed for greater unity. This paper emphasizes the differences between Puritan and Quaker, particularly those differences bearing on their relationships to "witchcraft." The lay conception of magic and the occult in the 17th century was typically pragmatic. It was concerned with the ends achieved by ritual rather than the source ofthe power and ignored the potential conflicts with religion. Their conception of witchcraft was ambiguous since they were likely aware ofan association with the Devil. But only when it was believed that magic was used to hurt, rather than divine the future or heal, did people demand that the perpetrators be punished for their malevolent actions (Godbeer 64-65). Keith Thomas, in his important work Religion and the Decline ofMagic, wrote about the way that the medieval Catholic Church had been able to incorporate earlier traditions of popular magic, for example, blurring the distinctions betweenprayers and spells. The church's use ofritual and the priesthood to harness supernatural power was denied by the Reformation, and especially by Puritanism (41-68, 469-72). But Puritans maintained many rituals, including Baptism, fasting, public confession and punishment. The rituals served to allay the fears and insecurities promoted by their ministry, of God's judgments upon sinners and the Sue Friday attends Berkeley Friends Meeting in California. 90Quaker History threat of eternal damnation (Hall 166-212). The Puritans also turned to their rituals to alleviate the affliction of witchcraft. The Quakers attempted to eliminate all rituals. They could afford to do so because they were not burdened to such a degree with worldly or spiritual fears and insecurities. Theirtheology emphasizedvictory over sin, the dominance of the spiritual over the temporal, and provided far easier access to a comforting connection to God. Early Quakerism, unlike Puritanism, shared with Catholicism a mystical tradition, visionary and ecstatic. The similarity of symptoms ofreligious ecstasy and those attributed to diabolical possession led English Puritans to write many tracts connecting witchcraft and the Devil to Quakerism (Thomas 486). The theme was echoed in New England in Increase Mather's An Essayfor the Recording of Illustrious Providences of 1684 (345, 347), and Cotton Mather's Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcraft and Possessions of 1689 (67). Cotton Mather, confusing Quakers with Ranters, believed that their reported "quaking" and other non-rational acts were an obvious sign of satanic rather than divine possession. Keith Thomas also wrote about the dilemma created when the Protestant Reformation strengthened the concept ofan immanent Satan, while at the same time reducing the church's ritual means for defusing popular fears of his power (469-77). Gone was the complex spiritual hierarchy of the Catholic church, replaced by the simple polarity ofgood and evil, God and the Devil. In Puritan New England an uncomfortable alliance was created when witchcraft was defined as necessarily involving both the popular version of witchcraft or magic and a pact with the Devil. According to Richard Weisman (53-57, 59, 113), the difference between the pre-1692 witchcraft cases and the "judicial zeal" evidenced in the Salem episode, was that in the latter, the...