Transcription
A core theme of the colonial agenda of New England was to create a kind of New Jerusalem in America. Here, a radical form of Puritanism could thrive, free from the sinful distractions of the Old World. Of the many sins the colonists hoped to leave behind was perhaps the most dangerous temptation of them all: what we would now call the occult.
Despite this, various esoteric practices thrived, and often the best evidence comes from the Puritan leaders themselves. Numerous published sermons decry esoteric practices in the colonies, and many of the earliest documents we have written by Puritan leaders directly deal with the evidence of the supernatural. And of course, we should not forget the witch trials, which began in Connecticut in 1647 and culminated in the most famous trial in Salem in 1692.
In this episode of Esoterica, we're going to explore some of the esoteric and occult practices of colonial North America, from magic, encounter magic, divination, astrology, and alchemy. Occult practices in colonial North America thrived, sometimes despite, and sometimes precisely because of, Puritanism. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane side of history, philosophy, and religion.
[Music]
The colonial project in New England was primarily led by the Puritans. For some Puritans, this meant total separation from the Church of England, eventual migration to the Netherlands, and finally, eventually, to the shores of North America. Here, they intended to create a kind of ideal Christian community.
Of course, occult practices, especially folk magic, had lived and thrived in England before the rise of Protestantism, much less the rise of Puritanism. While Catholicism had a bit of a laissez-faire relationship with many forms of folk magic, Puritanism could simply not abide the practice and strictly forbid it in their theology. Any attempt to work supernatural causation or supernatural causes outside of direct providential control was simply, by definition, satanic.
This presents a complex state of affairs in the colonies. Despite the fact that there is a widespread and clear condemnation of magic by Puritanism, the practice was widespread. Unsurprisingly, the forms of magic that were popular in New England are the very same forms that were popular back in, well, Old England. Cursing or hexing, along with various forms of counter-magic, including divination, were among the most popular.
As you probably know, Old England had a very long practice of folk magic practiced by cunning people, and much of this practice survives in New England. Much of the earliest evidence we have for occult practices in colonial North America is being practiced by cunning women in the form of fortune-telling. This would include a wide range of practices, everything from palm reading to suspending an egg white in a glass of water, turning it into a kind of scrying mirror. At one point, Cotton Mather, the great Puritan preacher, even decries the fact that so many palm-reading instruction manuals have made their way into the otherwise pure Puritan colonies.
A great deal of this very early strata of divinatory magic practiced by cunning women has to do with divining whether or not one's husband will have a good future or not. Specifically, this would have to do with the nature of the quote, husband's calling, and this would give some idea about the long-term prospects of any woman. Of course, a woman's prosperity in Puritan society directly relied on her husband's prosperity, so knowing exactly what her husband would do was a very important aspect of telling her future. So here, at the very earliest strata of colonial magic, we have primarily cunning women predicting the future for other women. This is a trade by women for women.
It also seems clear that various forms of divination were also employed to locate lost or stolen items. Of course, you have to remember that in the early colonies, there's no detective or police force to find stolen objects, and well, despite it being an ideal New Jerusalem, people had apparently read the commandment, "Thou shalt not steal." So it makes sense that if you have an object stolen and there's no one there to find it, you might turn to divination.
Another very popular form of divination, including balancing either a key, a sieve, or scissors in a certain kind of way. Sometimes this key was placed upon a book, not in the Bible, and one would announce a question, and depending on how the sieve fell, or how the scissors fell, or what happened with the key, one would be able to divine the future. Again, these forms of divination by the sieve, by the key, and by the scissors were so popular that Cotton Mather specifically had to condemn them in his works on the supernatural.
As I pointed out several times in the past on this channel, when something is forbidden, we can almost always conclude that it was practiced. Despite the fact that Jesus in the New Testament commands people not only to love their neighbors but also to love their enemies, hexing was quite popular because no matter how powerful your religion is, it's no more powerful than the desire to hate on people.
The primary form of hexing people or cursing them in colonial New England involved the use of puppets or babies. These are simply dolls made from various kinds of components, often with an object from the person undergoing the hex included inside them, and you would inflict various kinds of torture on this doll as a kind of magical effigy to torture that person that you have in mind. These puppets feature quite prominently, for instance, in the Salem witch trials, and we have pretty good evidence to believe that they were really used. In fact, there are a couple of cases where in an old house, a wall might be brought down, and several of these puppets or ritual effigy dolls might be found. So it's pretty clear from the historical evidence, and perhaps from the transcripts of the Salem witch trials, that this form of hexing was very widespread.
Ritual charms also seem pretty popular in colonial North America as well, and these often featured Latin phrases taken from the Catholic Mass. Yeah, the Catholic Mass. Take that, Puritanism. Not that I really have a dog in the fight between Catholics and Puritans. Not uncommonly, people thought that their animals had been hexed, and it wasn't uncommon to cut a part of that animal off while they were still alive, such as an ear or a tail, burn that ear or tail to reveal the source of the hex. Poor animals.
Another popular way of revealing the hexer in a curse was to take the alleged victim of the hex or the curse and boil their urine with nails or pins. The logic here is once the hexed urine began to boil, it would actually cause the urine and the hexer, the person who caused the curse, to begin to boil as well. And there's something about the punishment of having your urine boil inside you that sounds positively nightmarish. That's what you get for hexing people.
As you probably know, archaeologists in England, Old England, have recovered about two dozen witch jars which contain traces of both urine and pins and nails, among other things, attesting to the very popularity of this practice in both Old and New England. To my knowledge, no witch jars have been recovered in New England, and in most of cases in which we have this urine being boiled, we have it actually being boiled in a kind of open pot, perhaps something like a Dutch oven. We don't see the urine being boiled and then put into something later. So this might be a slightly different variation on the type of magical technology that we find in the witch jars of England, here practiced in Puritan North America.
Further, we also have the attestation of urine cakes. This would be where one would take the urine of a person thought to be hexed or otherwise afflicted, mix that urine with rye flour, typically, and make a kind of cake out of it, and then feed that cake to a dog. If the dog betrayed the same kind of afflicted behavior as the person thought hexed, then you knew that they were both in fact hexed, and you then knew that they were in fact hexed. The hexing power transfers, apparently, through the urine into the cake, into the poor dog. And at this point, one could begin a stronger degree of counter-magic to reveal the hexer or otherwise seek them out, perhaps eventually to punish them.
As you may know, it was exactly this technology that was used by the slave of the Paris family to try to determine whether or not their daughters were in fact hexed. Of course, this is at the ground floor of the Salem witch trials.
So, if Puritanism was meant to be a radically magic-free type of utopian society, how exactly did magic get a foothold in New England? The first answer, it seems, is that some of the people coming to the Puritan colonies, in fact, weren't Puritans. They weren't even Protestants; they were Catholics. Dastardly Catholics. As early as Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford complains that many of the people coming across were "a mixed multitude" and contained a wide variety of people there in the colonies for all kinds of reasons, some religious, some not. In fact, many of the early, first-generation Pilgrim colonists thought that the later Puritans, the Puritans, weren't pure enough, that they were themselves not worthy of being in the New Jerusalem that was America. So this gives you some insight into just how extreme, in many ways, the Pilgrims were.
A second reason has to do with the fact that many Puritans themselves were just simply practical people. They were living on what was the equivalent of the moon at the time, and they simply had to make do with whatever kind of technology they had at their hand. So if they had to use magic or counter-magic in order to accomplish something living in this extremely new and foreign land, well, you bet they did it. So here, what we have is that many Puritans didn't think of what they were doing as sort of diabolical experimentations. Rather, they are simply trying to fix the fact that they were sick, or that their animals were sick, or they were trying to figure out what their future husbands would be like. They didn't think of themselves engaging in something like devil worship; they were simply trying to figure out how to live in this new and strange place.
Further, it's also ironically likely that Puritanism itself made these practices more likely. As you may know, Puritan religious practice was free or devoid of a great deal of religious rituals they could have inherited from Catholicism. In fact, separating themselves from Catholicism and from Anglicanism more generally meant leaving behind a lot of those religious practices. In their theology, if bad things happened to you, or your animals, or your crops, it was your fault, and God had predestined it from the beginning. You should simply pray that God would have mercy on you. Now, whether or not God would, because God had already figured out to curse your crops, is a different story. Well, desperate people turn to all kinds of things, and often when they don't have access to the psychological comfort that comes along with religious rituals, they turn to things like magic.
This might also go some other way of explaining why Puritan preachers have such a deep hatred for magic. Aside from their own theological convictions, here we might have a kind of religious jealousy, in which people were turning to magic or so-called popish practices precisely because of the fact that Puritanism was either devoid or free of such religious rituals. We should never discount just how powerful religious ritual, or ritual in general, is for human psychology.
And finally, perhaps another bug or feature of Puritan theology, depending on how you want to look at it. In Puritan theology, everything in the world was already predestined. That is to say, God had already decided how everything in the universe was going to work out. So if it's the case that God's will is already settled and the course of the future events is already known, it leads to God, but it might be possible for a human being to kind of peek behind the veil, so to speak, and figure out exactly what's about to happen. So in this ironic way, it actually makes more sense that one would practice divination, given the period and dedication to predestination.
Of course, many of these practices are widely attested during the colonial witch trials, both in Connecticut in 1647, and also the trial in Bermuda, which for whatever reason doesn't get that much attention, but of course, also at the much larger Salem trials of 1692. Although it should be pointed out that just like in Europe, there's no evidence in the colonies of a kind of widespread diabolical magic pacts with the devil, or otherwise forms of anti-Christian heresy in the form of these alleged covens which were designed precisely to destroy Christendom. Indeed, I really want to drive this point home: the people practicing magic in colonial North America were intensely pious Christians. In fact, so pious that I think we would now understand them as something like extremists or fundamentalists. It seems that in no way did these magical practices invalidate their relationship to Christianity, despite the vehement condemnation by Puritan preachers.
While it seems clear that the practice of folk magic was widespread, to my knowledge, there's virtually no evidence of the practice of ceremonial magic in colonial New England or the colonies more generally. While New England may have been one of the most literate geographical regions in the world at this time, if we're going to turn to any evidence of something like ceremonial magic, we must turn to the colony of Virginia. In fact, one of the few references we have for the practice of necromancy in the colonies comes from the governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop's journal of 1644, where he remarked that a man from Virginia had come up professing his knowledge of various forms of astral magic and necromancy.
Indeed, it's in Virginia where we find Old World-style aristocratic libraries which boasted a healthy dose of occult texts. For instance, in a 1697 inventory of the 333 books which comprise the library of the Reverend Thomas Thel, we find a very strong adjunct of occult texts. Here we have texts on astrological medicine, Paracelsian alchemy, divination more generally, various texts on Hermetic philosophy, the natural magic of della Porta, along with a host of Rosicrucian texts, along with Kabbalistic texts by both Kircher and Reuchlin. Obviously, such a collection would be worthy of a 17th-century magus. Although I don't think that there's evidence that Thel, or a similarly outfitted library like that of Ralph Wormeley or Matthew Hubbard, actually reflected Hermetic ideas on the part of the owners of those libraries, much less the practice of ceremonial magic. Though it seems evident to me that if ceremonial magic were being practiced in colonial North America, it would likely be in the Virginia context rather than of New England, precisely because of libraries like these.
It's also worth pointing out here that Freemasonry also appears in colonial North America as early as the 1730s in Philadelphia, with the first proper lodge appearing, I think, around 1733 in Boston. Though my understanding of colonial Freemasonry was that they were much more likely to have a liberal, Lockean, Deistic attitude rather than a Hermetic one.
Astrology also was quite popular during the colonial period, although it was, as you might imagine, controversial. The Puritans generally took it that celestial objects did in fact express the will of the creator, although attempting to derive anything more than simply general ideas from these celestial objects was considered sinfully prideful. No one can know the will of the divine creator with such an attitude. Judicial astrology was strongly condemned by Puritan theologians. However, colonial attitudes would be a bit more forgiving when it came to what they referred to as meteorological phenomena, especially the appearance of comets. Although the theological message expressed in these various meteorological portraits was pretty consistent: doom and divine wrath.
Because Puritanism, although, two places where astrology does make something of a headway in Puritan thought is in one, medical manuals, and two, almanacs. Both of these are somewhat forgiven because of their practical applications. For instance, many medical manuals that were popular in the colonies included specific astrological times for engaging in things like bleedings. So this is a place where astrological lore and astrological calculation could be made, but again, in the interest of something practical like medicine. So here we have a place where theological ideas are somewhat loosened in the interest of pure pragmatism.
Another place where astrology proved extremely popular was in the ubiquitous array of almanacs. Until 1675, Harvard had the monopoly on printing in the colonies. It was the only place that had a printing press, and it was a strident bastion of Puritan orthodoxy. However, in the years following 1675, with the establishment of the first non-Harvard printing press in Boston, almanacs began to appear in spades, and one of the things that appeared in them were various types of astrological predictions and information, specifically about the future of the weather. Of course, weather predictions being hugely important in a larger agrarian society.
The almanacs of John Tully, which began to appear in 1687, were perhaps the most directly influenced by astrology and offered a wide range of advice. Of course, numerous other almanacs appeared too, often condemning each other, and some of which condemned the use of astrology more generally. The most famous of these almanacs was Poor Richard's Almanack, published by none other than Benjamin Franklin. Franklin published this incredibly popular almanac from 1732 to 1758, and it ran into nearly 10,000 copies a year. Incredibly, almanacs represented four-fifths of the secular literature published in the colonies, and in 1765, when the British passed a Stamp Act, it basically doubled the price of almanacs in a substantial way. This was the first domino to fall on route to the American Revolution. "Give me astrological almanacs or give me death!"
Finally, while alchemy never proved to be as popular in the colonies as it was in the Old World, the colonies did produce a couple of notable alchemists. The largest alchemical library in the colonies probably belonged to John Winthrop Jr., an early governor of Connecticut. His library featured such occult authors as Cornelius Agrippa, Robert Fludd, Michael Maier, Paracelsus, and Basil Valentine. Indeed, some of the volumes in his library formerly belonged to Dr. John Dee, that Dr. John Dee, and still had notations in his hand. Winthrop would go on to use his alchemical and metallic knowledge to establish one of the earliest ironworks in North America and even imagine a kind of pan-sophic research program in New England that would hasten the return of Jesus, because of course it would.
Another pretty famous alchemist to emerge from the colonies, of course, was George Starkey, who came originally from Bermuda, which, as I mentioned earlier, had its own witch trial, which for whatever reason doesn't get as much attention as even the Connecticut trial that began in 1647. At any rate, Starkey was originally from Bermuda and graduated from Harvard in 1646. The Philosopher of Fire, as he referred to himself, because you should always give yourself a really metal name like the Philosopher of Fire, would eventually move to London and publish alchemical tracts anonymously or pseudo-anonymously, rather, under the name Irenaeus Philalethes, because that's exactly the kind of name an alchemist would give themselves, aside from, you know, the Philosopher of Fire.
At any rate, aside from amazing titles and pseudonyms, Starkey is really known primarily for his incredibly clear style and his emphasis on laboratory experimentation, especially as he was attempting to find the famous Alkahest, or the universal solvent. He thus becomes one of these sort of transition characters between medieval alchemy and the rise of modern chemistry, someone like Newton and Boyle. In fact, he had a direct influence on both Newton and Boyle, and his works remained popular. They were reprinted several times, and in fact, continue to be reprinted to this day. In fact, if you want to pick up a volume of his works as Philalethes, you can get them in relatively inexpensive volumes. For instance, the Hermetic Museum.
While intense Puritan spirituality and the witch trials dominate our view of early American spirituality, I hope that this general survey also shows that there was a huge interest in what we would now term occult or esoteric practices. It appears that alongside the Puritan preacher, we could also find the cunning person, the diviner, the astrologer, and the alchemist, and perhaps even a stray necromancer from Virginia.
If you're interested in the history of magic, occult philosophy, or alchemy, make sure to subscribe here to Esoterica. And also, if you want to support my work of making free, scholarly, and accessible content on topics in Western other esotericism available here on YouTube, please consider supporting my work on Patreon or with a one-time donation. Your support makes this channel possible, from the research I have to do, to the books I have to buy, to the time it takes to make these episodes. Your support of Esoterica completely makes it possible. So I just want to thank everyone out there who supports by liking, subscribing, or supporting us on Patreon.
If you're interested in a deeper dive into the occult practices of colonial North America, you'll want to check out Richard Godbeer. Yep, Godbeer again. Metal names. This episode, Richard Godbeer's incredible book, The Devil's Dominion, which is an excellent overview of the kind of occult practices that were performed in colonial North America. I'll say that the chapter on astrology and almanacs is especially interesting, considering that there are so many almanacs published during this time period that getting a kind of survey of the kind of astrological practices which did thrive in Puritan North America is really difficult, and so Godbeer really does provide an excellent overview of the kind of astrological practices that appeared in these almanacs. So that chapter is especially good, especially if you're interested in the history of astrology, especially here in North America.
I'll also say that the third chapter of John Butler's text, Awash in a Sea of Faith, also covers magic and occultism in colonial North America with a bit more emphasis on what we might call learned or ceremonial magic down there, perhaps in Virginia. Newman and Woodward have both written book-length monographs on both Starkey and Winthrop Jr. specifically. So if you're interested in the history of magic in the colonial period, you'll definitely want to check out one or both of those volumes. Both texts are really interesting for a variety of reasons, although I will say what primarily strikes me as fascinating about the Starkey text is his position in the transition from alchemy to chemistry. Although in the Winthrop text, what's really fascinating is his vision of a kind of utopian scientific chemical lab research facility in North America, which again, is really fascinating given the scientific and technological developments in North America.
Again, as I mentioned earlier, the works of Starkey, published under the pseudonym Philalethes, are widely republished, and I'll include a link in the description to some of those if you want to check those out. Until next time, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and you've been watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane side of history, philosophy, and religion.