line drawing by Marilynne K. Roach

Salem’s witches (1)

little town…it’s a quiet village

What we’re reading

• Godbeer, “How Could They Believe That?” (Canvas)
• Karlsen, “The Economic Basis of Witchcraft” (Canvas)
• Willard, “Two Sermons on Women and the Devil” (Canvas)

Keywords

• Protestant
• faith / grace / scripture
• Puritan
• TULIP

To review

Great job live-tweeting, y’all! That was really fun. If you couldn’t join us during our scheduled meeting time, no worries — just live-tweet your own screening and check out the rest of the conversation on #NUwitches.

It seems like some folks might have been confused about Zwissler’s argument, so to clarify: Zwissler does NOT think The VVitch is a feminist film. Quite the opposite. She’s saying that while contemporary viewers (that’s us!) might be tempted to impose our own thinking about witches and feminism, in the context of the film’s worldview (Puritan New England), Thomasin has no choice but to become a witch. She’s trapped by her circumstances and targeted by the Witch of the Wood. And while she’s smiling at the end of the film, it’s not a happy smile. She’s just been given material proof that the Devil exists, which means her father and the other Puritans were right — and which also means she’s definitely, no bones about it, going to hell when she dies. Again: not a happy ending for anyone, with the possible exception of Caleb.

Puritans 101

Puritans get a bad rap, but honestly they were a lot cooler than most folks realize. A of all, they did not hate sex. They thought sex was great! As long as it happened between a married man and the woman he was married to. (They were, uh, less keen on all the other kinds of sex that happen in a village of ~500 people and lots of livestock.)

Also, because they believed you should have an unmediated relationship with the Divine, whose will you should learn through scripture, they had a NINETY-EIGHT PERCENT literacy rate. What’s now the United States averages just below 80% adult literacy. Puritan New England was also among the most gender egalitarian societies to ever exist on this continent. True story.

As you saw in The VVitch, they were also anxious as hell. All the time. Salem and its surrounding towns and villages were TENSE. And a lot of that tension had to do with their religious worldview. So here’s a quick intro to Puritan theology to help you see where the characters in the film were coming from.

For starters, Puritans were Protestants. (Protestants are a kind of Christian.) Protestantism involves a lot of things, but for the purposes of this class, you only need to know a few: faith, grace, and scripture.

Protestants believe that people can achieve a proper relationship with the Divine and go to a good place after they die through faith, grace, and scripture alone. (There’s a lot of historical context here, as you might imagine. You’re welcome to ask questions, if you want. But if not, don’t worry about it.)

• faith = you achieve Divine favor & approval only for believing in the Divine properly. There’s nothing you can say or do to earn Divine favor. As someone on Twitter once put it:

• grace = the Divine bestows favor and approval because the Divine is good. That’s it and that’s all. Humans are spiritual disgusting without the Divine; there’s nothing we can do to deserve Divine favor.
• scripture = the Divine helpfully passed along everything the Divine wants us to know and do about the Divine in the Christian bible (which also includes Jewish sacred texts). Because the Christian bible has all these answers, it’s important for folks to be able to read it and interpret it for themselves.

There are a LOT of different kinds of Protestants. Puritans, as you might guess from the name, tried to live an especially pure Christianity, adhering to a strict moral code and rejecting many comforts. We can shorthand Puritan theology with the acronym TULIP.

this is what passes for jokes among religious studies professors

• T = Total depravity: humans, as we’ve discussed, are spiritual garbage without literal Divine intervention. Nothing we say or do makes us worthy of Divine favor, grace, or love. The Divine shows us favor and sends us somewhere nice when we die because the Divine is good, not because we are. (We’re not. We’re trash, spiritually speaking.)
• U = Unconditional election: if the Divine thinks you’re worth saving, you get saved. Again, the Divine saves people because grace. The end.
• L = Limited atonement: not everybody gets saved. Why? None of your business. Because the Divine says so. That’s why. How do you know if you’re saved or not? You don’t. Good luck not spending your entire life worrying about whether you’re going to hell or not.

this, too, is what passes for jokes among religious studies professors.

• I = Irresistible grace: there is no turning down an invitation to Heaven. If the Divine wants you, you’re going.
• P = Perseverance of the saints: once the Divine picks you, you stay picked. How do you know you’re picked? Again, you don’t. But again, don’t worry about it (except that you’re going to spend literally your whole life worrying about it).

There are no exams in this class, so don’t feel like you have to memorize all this. The short version is that Puritan culture is composed of folks who are VERY concerned about whether or not they’re going to hell and have NO way of knowing whether they will or not. In the colonies, they’re also scraping together a meager existence off land they stole from Natives (who are still raiding them, as you might imagine) and that they weren’t, for the most part, trained to cultivate. Like I said: TENSE.

Godbeer, “How Could They Believe That?”

As I said on Tuesday:

Godbeer gives us a peek into what village life was like in Salem. Hint: it was CRAMPED. Salem had fewer people in it than most of Northeastern’s dorms.

People living in such close quarters are bound to get on one another’s nerves. Indeed, as Godbeer tells us, close acquaintances “with history of personal antagonism” were the most likely to accuse or face accusations of witchcraft; “witchcraft explained personal problems in terms of personal interaction,” (2003, 29).

So as you’re reading this, you should be looking for…

• The answer to the title question. How could the residents of Salem believe there were witches living among them? Hint:

“People who assumed the supernatural to be just as real as the natural world would not have thought it odd to suspect that mysterious ailments or problems had a supernatural cause.” (Godbeer 2003, 29)

As Godbeer points out — and as we discussed above — colonial Puritans inhabited a largely “incomprehensible and uncontrollable” world (ibid., 28). And colonial Puritans’ primary lens for understanding the world was religious. In the context of that worldview, witches make perfect sense.

• Godbeer’s argument. Why does he say that blaming witchcraft for their misfortunes made rational sense to the residents of Salem? Hint:

“accusations of witchcraft brought together…three crucial strands…the inability to control or explain illness and other forms of misfortune, a deeply embedded belief in supernatural forces that could be used to inflict harm, and a densely personal nature of human interactions.” (Godbeer 2003, 30)

Note, too, that Puritans had methodical, scientific ways of determining witchcraft. We saw that meticulous scientific/theological approach modeled by Thomasin’s father, William, in The VVitch. Salem is an aberration in the history of American colonial witch trials; in most cases, only ~25% of those accused were actually convicted of witchcraft.

We’ll get more into why and how Salem came to be an aberration next week.

Karlsen, “The Economic Basis of Witchcraft”

As you might guess from the title, Karlsen wants us to look to economics to explain witchcraft accusations. Specifically, Karlsen argues that those most likely to be convicted of witchcraft were women (or their potential heirs) who “stood in the way of the orderly transmission of property from one generation of males to another,” (1987, 346). As she notes, it was “not unusual for women in families without male heirs to be accused of witchcraft shortly after the deaths of fathers, husbands, brothers, or sons,” (ibid., 341). Thus “the women who stood to benefit from [absence of male heirs] account for most of New England’s female witches,” (ibid., 346).

Three things to look for:

• How does Karlsen define “witch” for the purposes of this piece?
• What does Karlsen say about religion?
• What do we learn about the relationship between religion and gender in Puritan New England from this essay?

spoilers: Karlsen doesn’t say anything about religion. Not a blessed thing. Which, as you might imagine, makes me VERY frustrated with this otherwise outstanding analysis. As I said on twitter,

Luckily, we’re reading Reis next week. She does a great job of taking religion seriously in her analyses.

Willard, “Two Sermons on Women and the Devil”

I told you the Devil’s Book was a whole thing.

Today’s primary source is important for two reasons.

1. It sure does give you a sense of how Puritan theology described women. Hey, how do you think women responded to hearing themselves described like this all the time? Good thing this never happens anymore…
   LOLSOB, just kidding, did anyone else watch “Framing Britney Spears” last weekend?
2. Please note the precise and exhaustive engagement with scripture in this sermon. This preacher is going IN on a single line of text. This was not at all unusual. Like we said: Puritans get saved by scripture alone. These sermons were more than life and death — they were eternal salvation or damnation.

Happy lunar new year to anyone who’s celebrating, btw! See y’all back here next week for more talk about the Devil and women’s bodies. Do we know how to have fun or what?