Witchcraft And Quakerism - Archive
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Witchcraft and Quakerism
GEORGE FOX AND THE WITCHESAfter the etching by Robert Spence, ownerof the original manuscript Journal of GeorgeFox, and by courtesy of the Artist.
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WITCHCRAFTand QUAKERISMA STUDY IN SOCIAL HISTORYBy AMELIA MOTT GUMMEREAuthor of“The Quaker: A Study in Costume.’*PHILADELPHIATHE BIDDLE PRESSLONDONHEADLEYBROS.
Copyright 1908byTHE BIDDLE PRESS
\AZ/ * MiPREFACE.It is a curious fact of history that periods occur inwhich thehumanracereturnsto somephase ofthought long since supposed to be outgrown.Thepresent extraordinary reappearance of belief in super stitions, mystic rites and occult phenomena of a moreor less scientific or dignified character, may well bidus halt and philosophize for a moment on the originof such beliefs.In this connection, the attitude of the Quakers ofthe seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries towardthe whole subject of superstitious belief is extremelyinteresting, and shows the Rationalist at his best.If the following pages serve to call attention to thesanity of an entire community on a subject upon whichmost people had fallen in with current thought to adangerous degree, the purpose of the writer will beaccomplished.Haverford, 1908.A. M. G.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.I.S Superstition in England and America in the Seven teenth Century.page5II.The Camisards—George Fox and Witchcraft, .page 15III.Anti-Quaker Publications in connection with Witch craft .page ry.page 36V.Minutes ofPennsylvaniaMeetingsagainstWitch craft .page 48VI.Whittier’s Attitude toward the Subject—Dreams andVisions.page 62
WITCHCRAFT AND QUAKERISM.I.“There in a gloomy hollow Glen she foundA little cottage built of Sticks and ReedsIn homely wise and walled with Sods aroundIn which a Witch did dwell, in loathly Weedes,And wilful Want, all careless of her NeedesSo choosing Solitarie to abide,Far from all Neighbours, that her devilish DeedesAnd hellish Arts from People she might hideAnd hurt far off unknown, whom ever she enviede.”Spenser: Faerie Queen.N many respects the Quakers standout conspicuously free from someof the current phases of thoughtprevalent at the time of their rise.Among these may be mentionedthe belief in witchcraft, which wasas common in the seventeenth century as is oursto-day in medicine or electricity.[5]Moreover, the
WITCHCRAFT AND QUAKERISMEnglish people were in a period of great spiritualturmoil, and were keyed up to a state of nervousirritability which responded to the first summons.Such conditions are familiar to all students of his ing of the Franciscan Friars in Italy, thatof Luther in Germany, and of John Cotton andthe Mathers in New England.The Quakers them selves, under certain conditions, were not free froma similar tendency, while a more aggravated formwas found among the disciples of John Wesley.The phenomenon is not unfamiliar to-day in ruralneighborhoods.The great mass of the yeoman andmiddle class from which the Quakers chiefly ainty, lent by their limited relations to theworld at large.Many of the men whose namesare familiar to us in the early history of Quaker ism were either by education or social position, orfrom other causes, superior to the class of peoplewho constituted the main body of Fox’s followers.With these latter, critical ignorance often made amedium, vague and distorted, through which, tothe Quaker mystic, men were as trees walking.Itwas a time when many lived upon the border-landof insanity.If it was possible for an intelligent[6]
THE UNFAMILIAR BIBLEand highly educated man like John Evelyn to seein the passage of a comet across the heavens some thing terrifying and portentous, it is little wonderthat the uneducated of his day spent their livesin superstition.There was neither politicalnorreligious peace, and education was not a pos The Baptists were healing by anointing withoil, and the King was “touching” for scrofula, or“King’s Evil.”Moreover, the Bible was so new that the splen did imagery of the Hebrew prophets and the fear fulpicturesoftheApocalypsewroughtmen’sminds to a superhuman pitch, wherein any extraor dinary happening might be accepted as possible.All the extravagance of which some of the earlyQuakerswereundoubtedly guilty,although offi cially discountenanced by the sect, were, as with thePuritans, the result of an over-literal interpreta tion of their Bibles; for, despite the Quaker claimto the superiority of the spirit to the word, as con tained in Scripture, the Quakers to a man werethoroughly versed in Bible phraseology.were the Puritans.So alsoWinthrop’s supreme venera tion for the Bible was a part of his reverent belief,not, certainly, any natural desire to seek vengeance.How many modern Quakers, indeed, realize that[7]
WITCHCRAFT AND QUAKERISMat the time George Fox was born, in 1624, KingJames’ version of the English Bible had been inthe hands of the common people butthirteen years?During the height of the religious excitement amongthe sectaries of the Commonwealth, no hallucina tion was too far-fetched to be believed, or to beexplained upon religious grounds alone.Such a man as Blackstone wrote:“To deny thepossibility, nay, actual existence, of witchcraft andsorcery, is at once to flatly deny the revealed wordof God.”Sir Matthew Hale, in 1665, charging the juryin a famous witch trial at Bury St. Edmunds, said:“That there are such creatures as witches, I makeno doubt at all, for first, the Scriptures have af firmed so much; secondly, the wisdom of all na tions hath provided laws against such persons.”The verdict was “guilty,” and the witch executed.1Every mischance was spoken of by the Puritansas a “judgment of God”; so and so “was a pro fessed enemy to us, but he never prospered,” saysWinthrop; and the same note is sounded in thejournal of George Fox.A son of Samuel Shattuck,bearer of the King’s mandate of release for theQuakers imprisoned by Governor Endicott, appearsin the Salem trials (case of Bishop) as a prominent'Campbell.“Lives of the Chief Justices.”I, 565.[8]
WESLEY AND LUTHER ON WITCHCRAFTwitness against some of the unfortunates accusedof witchcraft soon after.Years later, when all thiswith its results had passed into history, John Wes ley bemoaned the decline of superstition, the ad vance of human thought and the more ing“It is true likewise, that the English ingeneral, and, indeed, most of the men of learningin Europe, have given up all accounts of witchesand apparitions as mere wives’ fables.for it.*****I am sorryThe giving up of witch craft is in effect giving up the Bible!”1It is com forting to know that his brother Charles kept aclearer judgment on this subject, upon which theywere never agreed.The more enlightened periodshave been the most active in persecuting for witch craft, and the Reformers were the strongest of thebelievers.Luther himself wrote:no compassion on these witches.of them.*proper work.”famous*“I should haveI would burn allWitchcraft is the Devil’s ownHe, therefore, threw after him hisink-bottle!King HenryVIIIseems tohave been the only person in all the long list proofagainst such delusions.Oxford heads of collegessought out heretics with the aid of astrology, and‘Journal of John Wesley, 1768.[9]
WITCHCRAFT AND d.A little later, Sir Thomas Browne’s well-knownwords express the public sentiment:“I have longbelieved and do now know, that there are witches;they that doubt them do not only deny them, butspirits, and are obliquely and upon consequence,a sort, not of infidels, but of atheists.”1RichardBaxter sustained Cotton Mather in his argumentsin favor of the existence of witches in a treatise“On the Certainty of a World of Spirits”; and inAmerica the height was reached in 1693.A year or two before, the Puritans at Salem hadturned upon their own people the persecutions theyhad inflicted upon the Quakers; and even the ex cesses of thoseQuakerswhosereligiousexcite ment had led them over the borders of sanity, donot furnish a parallel to those of the Salem peo ple themselves.But a clear line of demarcationmust be drawn between the Puritans of Salem andall others.In the Old Colony there were but twocases tried, witnesses cross-examined, the testimonyscanned and charges found “not proved.”In thisrespect they are nearly as clear as Pennsylvania,and the deeds of Salem must not be charged tothe entire community.’Religio Medici.Ed. 1672.In 1669 there was muchp. 24.[10]
THE SALEM WITCHCRAFT TRIALStendency to suicide in the neighborhood, due tothe hardness of the Calvinistic doctrine, precedingthe Salem outburst. It is not true, as has been re cently asserted, that suicide is an evidence of cul ture. The Dutch in Manhattan were free fromwitchcraft persecutions when the Quakers firstwent there, and the sensible Hollanders laughed atthe credulity. This was also the attitude of thePilgrims at Plymouth. The blight of 1665 thatextinguished all hope of wealth from the growthof wheat in Massachusetts, was attributed by thecommon people, not to witchcraft, but to the venge ance of God for the execution of the Quaker mar tyrs. These Quakers, however, were victims ofBoston, not Plymouth, and the accusations ofwitchcraft were made by the inhabitants of theformer town.It was impossible in a community of the intelli gence of New England for any witchcraft creedlong to survive. Many more persons were exe cuted in a single county in England than was thecase in the whole of America. English laws in fluenced all the executions in New England, wherebroader and generally superior standards of liv ing, and the application of higher moral aims, madesuch lapses as that of the witchcraft persecutionsin Salem the more conspicuous. Professor G. L.['I]
WITCHCRAFT AND QUAKERISMKittredge, in the Proceedings of the American An tiquarian Society (Vol. XVIII), ably and success fully defends the Puritan forefathers at Salem forsharing in the errors of their time, proving thattheir exceptional quality lay in the virtue of aprompt acknowledgment by judge and jury of theirmistaken course, rather than in the crime of con demning twenty-eight persons to death for a cause,which, in England and on the continent of Europe,was responsible for the death of thousands.1Mr. Lecky tells us that the most free from thespirit of persecution on this question at all timeshas been the Anglican Church. Continental Catholi cism and English Puritanism wielded so muchmore power than what is now the EstablishedChurch, that it may have simply lacked the oppor tunity to manifest its sentiments. However thismay be, there is a striking contrast in the modera tion of the higher clergy upon this point, althoughexceptions may be found. All the vast field of artalso shows the prevalence of superstitious beliefs,as in the ghastly pictures of the Dance of Death.The study of alchemy, the horoscope, and earlierforms of what later developed into scientific re search, show the first instances of men devoting‘In the original “Old South” Church,madepublicconfessionandrepentanceBoston, JudgeforthepartSewallhehadtaken in the Salem Witchcraft Trials.[12]
ALCHEMY AND THE HOROSCOPEthemselves voluntarily to the Devil. The multiply ing glass, the concave mirror and the camera obscura, were new in the seventeenth century; and asthe law against witchcraft remained in force, ex hibitors of these curiosities were in some dangerof sentence to Bridewell, the pillory or even theThomas Chatterton’s Horoscopehalter. Modern science demands of its votaries ahumble mind.No scientist has ever pronouncedthe final word as did those old astrologers and al chemists, who, to their admirers, were a sort ofdemigods or seers. Mammon, in “The Alchemist,”is made by Ben Jonson to say:“For which I’ll say unto my cook, ‘There’s gold;—Go forth and be a knight.’ ”113]
WITCHCRAFT AND QUAKERISMThe higher critics, however, had appeared. Solong before as 1392, one Walter Brute had de clared Popish exorcisms absurd; in 1577, JohnWeir, physician to the Duke of Cleves, challengedthe existence of witches, and declared the accusedunbalanced in mind and deserving of pity; in1585, Reginald Scott wrote his “Discoverie ofWitchcraft,” in reply to which the “Daemonologie”of King James was written in 1597. But Scottwas a century in advance of his age, and his bookwas publicly burned. Finally, Bekker, in his “Be witched World,” gave the death-blow to the super stition.[14]
II.T the period when the Quakers arose,alchemy and its allied arts were fall ing into the hands of quacks andmountebanks; and witchcraft, whichheld its own much later, was not nearlyso conspicuous as it had been, although it was stillsufficiently prevalent. Selden, who had little or nobelief in witchcraft himself, said, in justificationof some harsh proceedings against alleged witches,“that if a man thought that by turning his hatround and saying ‘bos’ he could kill a man, heought to be put to death for making the attempt.”So also Dryden: “Though he cannot strike a blowto hurt any, yet he ought to be punished for themalice of the action, as our witches are justlyhanged, because they think themselves to be such,and suffer deservedly for believing they did mis chief, because they meant it.”1’Essay on Dramatic Poetry.[15]
WITCHCRAFT AND QUAKERISMThe first penal statute against witchcraft wasenacted in 1541, when Cranmer enjoined the clergy“to seek for any that use charms, sorcery, enchant ments, witchcraft, soothsaying, or any like craftinvented by the Devil.” Under King James, Parlia ment made witchcraft punishable by death. Thelast judicial condemnation for witchcraft in Eng land was in 1712, in Hertfordshire, when a womanwas sentenced to death for selling her soul to theDevil.A royal pardon saved her. The capitalsentence against witchcraft was only abolished byGeorge II, in 1736.1 In those seventeenth centurydays, it was necessary to believe in witches to beconsidered orthodox. The man who did not to acertain extent believe in witchcraft, was lookedupon very much as the more advanced advocatesof scientific, or the “higher” criticism, are now re garded by the old-line conservatives.In 1707, the Camisards, or Cevennois, who cameover to England in that year, were supposed tobe prophets and work miracles.stirred up by Cavalier.They were firstThese people were sub ject to epileptiform disorders.They were sup posed to be inspired, had great vogue, were dis persed from France, and some of them came to*Act 9, Cap. 5, Geo. II.Queen Anne.”Ashton, “Social Life in the Reign ofVol. I, p. 122.[16]
THE CAMISARDSEngland. They were commonly known as “TheFrench Prophets.” They chiefly preached the ap proach of the millennium. Sir Isaac Newton him self had a strong attraction to go and hear these“prophets,” and was with difficulty restrained byhis friends, who feared that he might be affectedby them as Fatio, the mathematician, had been.1The famous George Keith, who was disowned forheresy by the Quakers, published, in 1707, a pamph let with the following title: “The Magic of Quak erism ; or the Chief Mysteries of Quakerism LaidOpen. To which are added a preface and post script relating to the Camisards, in answer to Mr.Lacy’s preface to The Cry from the Desart.”2 In1708, the Quakers of Westminster Monthly Meet ing (Third month 5th) mention in their recordsthe attendance at the Camisards’ meetings of oneof their own women preachers.“A paper wasbrought in from one Mary Willis and read, where in she condemned herself for going and joining withthose they call the French Protestants, and suffer ing the agitation spirit to come upon her. She isadvised to forbear imposing her preaching uponour public meetings for worship until Friends arebetter satisfied.”3’Spence’s “Anecdotes.”p. 56.3By “George Keith, M. A., Rector of Edburton, in Sussex.”’Beckp. gs.”
WITCHCRAFT AND QUAKERISMThe tests were very arbitrary as applied towitches. Thoresby (quoted by Ashton) says hewent to see a witch who could not repeat the Lord’sPrayer—“a fit instrument for Satan!”An account of the trembling and excitement ofsome of the Quakers is given in an early tract,“Brief Relation of the Irreligion of the NorthernQuakers” (London, 1653). The writer adds: “Iheartily believe these quakings to be diabolical rap tures.” In reference to these manifestations of ex citement, Barclay says:1 “The Friends seem tohave treated them among themselves very rationally,and occasionally administered a cordial or medi cine of some kind, and this is commented upon inthe tracts of the times as a circumstance of theutmost mystery and a proof of sorcery!”Ofcourse the Friends naturally quoted as a uaked,” David “roared,” and Jeremiah “trem bled.”ratherThe peculiar feature of early Methodist, orWesleyan, excitement, was quaking andtrembling.2Many manifestations of this sort weregiven in the Independent churches also, and in one,1R. Barclay.wealth.”“Inner Life of Religious Societies of Common 312.2See Southey’s “Life of Wesley,” I, chap. VII; and Wesley’sJournal, passim.[18]
GEORGE FOX AND WITCHCRAFTMr. Davies, the pastor, was charged by some ofhis brethren of dealing in “the Black Art!”1John Bunyan and his contemporary, GeorgeFox, were not entirely superior to the supersti tions of their age. The bare and narrow lives ofthe earlier Friends, excepting the few of rank andstation, were compensated for in the early days ofpersecution by a spiritual exaltation that bore themsafely over danger-points always open in a systemwhere the graces of society and its intellectualneeds are ignored. When the tinker and the cob bler had become the two great preachers of differ ing creeds, they still kept unquestioned their beliefin the existence of occult powers, although they,with most educated people, held to it with lessearnestness than before. Fox has always been rep resented by his followers with too little of the hu man side, while his critics have treated him un fairly, from the beginning.His own journal,which is the authority for every statement heremade, has never been given to the public unabridgedand complete, with all its innocent errors upon itshead.2 Fox’s character has nothing to lose in theopen glare of sharpest criticism. The human touch'Hist.85-87.IndependentChurchat Rothwell.ByN.Glass,pp.’Since the above was written, notice has been received of theforthcoming authorizedand annotated.119]editionofFox’sJournal,unabridged
WITCHCRAFT AND QUAKERISMwhich our picture of him lacks is given by theknowledge of his few frailties, not one of them tohis discredit.After visiting Brigham, in 1653, when hispreaching so affected the people at “John Wilkin son’s steeple-house,” he tells us in his journal, “AsI was sitting in an house full of people, declaringthe word of life unto them, I cast my eye upon awoman and discovered an evil spirit in her. I wasmoved of the Lord to speak sharply unto her, andtold her she was under the influence of an uncleanspirit, whereupon the woman went out of the room.I, being a stranger there, and knowing nothing ofthe woman outwardly, the people wondered andtold me afterward I had discovered a great thing,for all the country looked upon her to be a wickedperson. The Lord had given me a spirit of dis cerning, by which I many times saw the statesand conditions of people, and would try their spirits.Not long before, as I was going to a meeting, Isaw some women
witchcraft persecutions when the Quakers first went there, and the sensible Hollanders laughed at the credulity. This was also the attitude of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. The blight of 1665 that extinguished all hope of wealth from the growth of wheat in Massachusetts, was attributed by the common people, not to witchcraft, but to the venge
[423] WITCHCRAFT AND ANTI-WITCHCRAFT IN NUPE SOCIETY S. F. NADEL i MY investigations into witchcraft among the Nupe were carried out under extremely adverse conditions. In February 1932 Bida, the ca
A Practical Guide to Witchcraft and Magic Spells By Cassandra Eason Contents: Book Cover (Front) Scan / Edit Notes Introduction - The Power of White Witchcraft 1 - The Origins and Practice of Witchcraft 2 - Creating Spells and Rituals 3 - Beginning Magick 4 - Gods and Goddesses 5 - Candles, Colours and the Zodiac 6 - Herbs in Magick
women healers faced accusations of witchcraft because they had it within their power to cure or to hurt. Women healers were involved in early American witchcraft trials as character witnesses and inspectors for witches' marks. However, their abilities to recognize witchcraft-induced illness, injuries, and deaths contributed to the fears of
1 - Living Witchcraft There have been many books written on witchcraft. The early ones were mostly propaganda written by the various Churches to discourage and frighten people from having any connections with what was to them a hated rival - for witchcraft is a religion. Later there were books setting out to prove that this craft had never existed.
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favorite target of witchcraft which is hunting (catching or snaring) our souls (mind, will, emotions). Through witchcraft God's people can be brought into bondage, thus becoming captives, having their souls entrapped. Norman Parish, a missionary in Guatemala, relates the story of a recent raid on a witchcraft center by authorities in Guatemala .
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Session 10 – Black Holes. Brief Description. Students learn about black holes, the densest objects in the Universe. They learn that the collapsing . core of a star forms a black hole and do an activity that shows how the density of a stellar core increases as the core collapses even though the mass remains the same. They then engage in a kinesthetic activity to model how a black hole affects .
