This Halloween season found us in a small lakeside town in Northern Michigan for a warm October “Witches Night Out” festivity, where costumed revelers, four out of five of them women, commandeered its main street.
Shops decorated for the occasion rewarded visitors with Jell-O shots and squirting syringes filled generously with spiced rum. Gloom is glitz at Halloween. A bright red-headed witch in a sparkling green dress recalling the Bette Midler character in The Witches of Eastwick patrolled the sidewalk. Then there was a Maleficent; a Cat-Woman; a Wicked Witch of the West, a blue-eyed Celtic Princess or two, and an assortment of Goths done up in peaked hats, special-effects contact lenses, black eye-shadow, spider-web stockings, and sequined high-heeled boots.
Fear as Fun
Was the evening ghastly and macabre? A night for roaming, mournful, unrequited souls? No. On Halloween, fear is fun. The vibe that night was “witchy,” “funny,” “creepy-cute,” and “spooky,” so said the participants.
Or to put it another way, Halloween is playful. Safe, too, it should be noted, because of all the 365 nights of the year, Halloween is the safest. Parents are out on the sidewalk supervising.
Halloween is popular. In the United States and Canada, Halloween falls only behind Christmas in holiday sales revenue. Celebrants spend billions on decorative outdoor ghosts and skeletons, costume horror-pop culture parties, and candy and wine.
If there was a spirit on the loose this gleeful night in small-town Michigan, it was a community spirit: bipartisan, commercialized, frisky, secular, boozy, performative, and modern.
A Demon-Haunted Colony
We tend to think of our nation’s history as an ascending achievement pushing onward: colonists striving for freedom established a beachhead where opportunity stretched ahead and wherein democracy, a radical, modern notion, could take root and flourish. This was the “new world.” America was the future. Society would be reinvented.
Those Founding Fathers that we know best now two hundred fifty years later were thinkers of the European Enlightenment installed here in the American outpost. For Benjamin Franklin a scientist and a tinkerer, the world could be known and explained. For Thomas Jefferson, a political thinker and a visionary, a government free from ancient constraints could aspire to perfection. James Madison believed that governmental authority arose from the will of the people. Thomas Paine and Ethan Allen inveighed against superstition.
Three generations before in Puritan New England, three-and-a-third centuries ago, however, colonists, religious dissenters, and still very much medieval people, could never have sanitized the scary as we do today.
Puritan theologians took “the supernatural” with dead, medieval seriousness. Halloween was “All Hallows Eve,” the night before “All Saints Day,” both somber observances, remembrances of the dead. Local ministries condemned folk-celebrations of the days as “abominable shame” and forbade them because they risked summoning demonic influences.
For Cotton Mather, the most powerful Puritan theologian and a zealous booster of witch trials, the “heart-breaking exercises,” remnants of Catholic paganism and near witchcraft, comprised a grievous threat to the Puritan errand into the “wilderness.” And by “wilderness,” Puritan colonists meant not just the forest yet to be cleared, but a haunted place that lay dangerously nearby, a “howling demonized space” as one historian described it.
Colonists in Massachusetts Bay would build a shining “city upon a hill,” an example for all the world to behold. Their errand was not only aspirational. “There is no land in the Universe,” Mather declared grandiosely in his defense of Salem’s deadly witch trials, “more free from the debauching and debasing Vices of Ungodliness.” In this righteous, driven society, “Swearing, Sabbath-breaking, Whoring, Drunkenness, and the like,” he proclaimed, “do not make a Gentleman, but a Monster, and a Goblin.” Virtue tempted Satan. “Where [else] would the Devil show most malice?” Cotton Mather asked, if not in the place of “serious piety,” that most challenged his evil sway.
A Society Deeply Stressed
It may be hard to imagine that the eventual twentieth-century superpower would have held on so tenuously in the seventeenth. But the American colonies faced several real compounding threats. Settlers quarreled over grazing rights. Epidemics periodically ravaged the colonies. Low level territorial strife with native populations burst into two fierce wars, one of which destroyed half of New England’s colonial villages. Crop failures brought near starvation. Harsh winters nearly froze the venture out. And the wet springs that followed likely poisoned stored rye with the fungus that produces the hallucinogen, ergot. (Among other symptoms more severe, ergot poisoning causes convulsions and delirium.)
It is unsurprising that a culture so beset, traumatized, tightly wound, and eager to indulge its religious fanaticism would turn paranoid. A fearful mood comprises the psychological background of the infamous witch-hunt that accused 200 Salem colonists. Most of them were women.
Accusation and Public Execution
I will elaborate more in a follow-up “Play in Mind” piece, but for now, here is the story. In January 1692, two girls ages 9 and 11 began to suffer seizures and fits of screaming. Three more soon joined in. Within a month, a local doctor had diagnosed demonic possession. Shortly after, religious authorities with legal authority began to finger culprits, alleging witchcraft. Panic spread as local magistrates examined suspects, convicting 30. By early summer, Bridget Bishop became the first to be hanged on the strength of “spectral evidence.” (Say her name…) Eighteen more, again mostly women, followed her to the gallows. At least five more died in filthy prison cells. One more man died under torture.
Before long, regret began to settle in. Accusers recanted their testimonies. Judges begged forgiveness. Robert Calef, who had corresponded with Cotton Mather and other ministers during the trials, denounced the “Biggotted Zeal, stirring up a Blind and most Bloody rage.”
The Tide Turns
By 1700, the era that came to be called the “Age of Enlightenment” was well underway. Science began to advance where superstition retreated. History is complicated and nuanced. And sometimes deeply ironic. In his later years, Cotton Mather, also a naturalist, patiently gathered evidence and became an advocate for vaccination against recurrent smallpox plagues. We may rightly see him as a transitional figure between the medieval and the modern.
Now not incidentally, three-and-a-century later, party witches are free to paint their faces green to join celebrations that tame the scary and poke fun at the demonic.